"Do this until you FAIL!"
This was seriously what my personal trainer yelled at me (ok, encouragingly retorted) when I whined and asked: "I'm too tired. Can I stop now?"
So, because she yelled at me, I kept going, all the while using "colorful language" and saying how much "I hated this $h!T" and "F*(< this $h!T, I can't do it". But that's the thing...oddly enough, I did NOT give up. I kept going. And then this PERFECTIONIST failed.
Boy do I really loathe failure. On this particular day, I was flat out tired. My PT caught this early on and said, "Oh good! Maybe we can call this a REAL training session." We've been training together now for over a month!!!
This weight lifting thing that I've been doing is totally an anomaly to me. I have to let go and fail. WTF? All my life, I've been taught to hold on tight, never give up, and make sure it's perfect or I won't succeed in life, and, because of this thinking, every time I have failed I've never known how to handle failure. I held it inside, I went to the bar and drowned my sorrows in beverage and karaoke, and/or sometimes I even worked harder to the point of exhaustion due to no sleep.
But here I am, in the throes of failure, with someone reassuring me that this is the way to SUCCESS. That to fail means PROGRESS. To fail means strength and surpassing all expectations and, most importantly, to learn how to handle failure in a healthy way outside of the small gym walls. Failure can mean learning something new, excelling in a new tasks, reinforcing what you've learned, and so much more.
Usually, I give up when when I can't get a lunge or squat down perfectly, but this time, I'm letting this ideal go and I'm GIVING IN to FAILURE. I'm not sure where it'll take me, but I'm TRUSTING that I have only have a strong will to gain (and a bad azz bod to go along with it!).
Does failure bother you too? What do you do to handle it?
