“I vowed I wouldn't ever let anyone destroy me again. I was going to work at it every day, so hard that I would be the toughest guy in the world. By the end of practice, I wanted to be physically tired, to know that I'd been through a workout. If I wasn't tired, I must have cheated somehow, so I stayed a little longer.”

Dan Gable, Olympic Champion Wrestler

Dan Gable is a former American freestyle wrestler and coach. From 1967 to 1970, Gable attended Iowa State University where he won two NCAA championships. He compiled a collegiate record of 117-1 with his only loss coming at the NCAA championship in his last match as a collegiate wrestler. At Northwestern University on March 28, 1970, an unknown sophomore, Larry Owings stepped onto the mat against Dan Gable, the best wrestler in the nation. Owings had dropped two weight classes so he could wrestle the best. At stake was the NCAA championship. Nine minutes later, Owings won 13-11.

Losing to Owings could have derailed Gable. It was the first time he had lost in eight years on the wrestling mat. Instead, he bounced back and used the loss to focus his intensity on being the best at international wrestling. As an elite athlete he was dialed in on his sleep, nutrition, and physical fitness. But he focused on building his mindset and his mindfulness. To develop both he would not only visualize the matches with his opponent, but also his opponent’s workouts so he could be sure he was working out more than the competition. Gable grew his already legendary grit and resilience to an even higher level. 

Even Gable admits that “it would take me years to realize this, but I wouldn’t have become a great wrestler and a great coach -- a legend in the sport -- without that match.” He won the Gold Medal in the 68-kilogram weight class at the 1972 Olympic games in Munich without giving up a point in six straight matches against the world’s best wrestlers. Dan Gable’s story is an example of someone with strong resilience and an enormous amount of grit.

As you set off to accomplish a gritty goal you will, inevitably, experience setbacks. The question you must ask yourself is, are you prepared to deal with them or are they going to derail you? How are you going to overcome them? Resilience is the capacity to recover from difficulties or setbacks. It is like the boxer who gets knocked down but gets back on his feet to fight another round. More importantly, it is a mindset. The resilience mindset comes from living your personal purpose, as well as making sure you are getting the proper sleep, nutrition, physical fitness, social interaction, and practice mindfulness.

Personal Purpose, Goals, and Resilience 

It is helpful to pause and think about your personal purpose or your why. Your why should inspire you. Your why should inspire others. Your why should be displayed prominently in your home or office as a constant reminder. By clearly outlining, understanding and living your purpose, you are better equipped to be resilient when facing obstacles. If you haven’t gone through the steps of identifying your why or your why doesn’t inspire you, I encourage you to return to Post #96 and go through the personal purpose exercise.

Once your personal purpose is in focus, the next step is to make sure your goals are helping you move closer to achieving your purpose. As discussed earlier, it is critical to block time in your busy schedule to make progress towards achieving them. And having a goal connected to your personal purpose improves your resiliency when you face the inevitable setback. Goals connected to your purpose increase alignment. If your goal is lacking in some aspect, go back to Post # and use the ideas to improve your goal setting.

Resiliency is more than a mental mindset, however. There are five key physiological aspects to improving resiliency and growing grit – sleep, nutrition, physical fitness, social interaction, and mindfulness. Dial them all in, like Dan Gable, and you will be well on your way to being to bounce back from any delay.

Sleep

The American football coach Vince Lombardi supposedly said, “fatigue makes cowards of us all.” And he is right. Everyone has made bad decisions or abandoned tough challenges when they were tired. 

The U.S. Army has a culture of performing on limited sleep. I know from my experience the last 10 years in the Army the need to do physical fitness early in the morning and the responsibilities of being a leader meant that I lived on six hours of sleep a night and lots of coffee. I now realize that my insufficient sleep inhibited my performance, hindered my recovery from my physical fitness, and made me irritable.  

The average person needs at least seven hours of sleep a night. But a recent study revealed that 35 percent of men and 34 percent of women report getting less than 7 hours of sleep at least one night a week. I just checked my sleep app and this week I had one night where I got 6 hours and 9 minutes of sleep. I looked at my daily schedule for the day afterwards and could see the impact – I only wrote 500 words in a blog post and made one business call all day; not the most productive day for me.

Sleep effects every aspect of your overall health and performance. Quality sleep helps improve your memory, tissue repair, immune system, and grit. There are two processes involved in sleep regulation – sleep drive and the circadian rhythm. Sleep drive is the need for your body to go to sleep to remove the sleep-promoting metabolites that build up in the brain while you are awake. The circadian rhythm is the internal clock for sleep and wake cycles which is based on daylight and darkness.

Now it’s not always possible to get seven hours of sleep but optimizing the quality of your sleep can make whatever you are getting the best possible. No matter how much sleep you are getting, there are several proven ways to improve the quality of your sleep:

• Eliminate all light sources in the bedroom

•  Eliminate screen time 30 minutes before bedtime

• No food after 7:00 PM

• No caffeine after 3:30 PM

• Set the temperature in the bedroom to 68’

• Try to go to bed at the same time every night

If you can’t fall asleep, I have found 5 mg of melatonin helpful as opposed to the prescription sleep aides that make me feel groggy the following morning.

Sleep is critical for your health and performance. If you can’t get the seven hours of sleep your body needs, try to improve the quality of your sleep. Improving your sleep builds your resilience, improves your energy, enhances your decision making and thinking, and helps grow your grit. Commit to making a change and improving the quality and quantity of your sleep.

Nutrition

There are a million diets out there. Keto, paleo, Atkins, the grapefruit, Weight Watchers, and gluten-free all have their devotees. However, it is difficult to maintain restrictive eating patterns for long periods of time. In addition, almost 31 percent of Americans are overweight. Eating healthy helps you maintain your energy, optimize your daily mental and physical performance, and build your resilience.

At its essence, healthy eating is preparing to and making good food choices on a daily and weekly basis. Healthy eating is a habit. For me eating healthy starts at the grocery store – if I don’t have it in the pantry or refrigerator, I won’t eat it.

The average person consumes about 20 different foods per week. Not a believer?  Track your food for a week and you will see the patterns emerge. Real foods, like vegetables, meat, fruit, and grains are so much better for you than processed foods. If, after your week of tracking your food, your diet already consists of tuna, salmon, apples, vegetables, eggs, chicken, almonds, oatmeal, and blueberries you are well on your way to eating healthy.

Here are seven proven tips to eat healthier:

• Track your food intake for a week in a journal or on an app

• Drink 2.5 liters (2.6 quarts) of water per day

• Don’t shop hungry. Eat something before you go to the grocery

• Use a shopping list

• Shop the perimeter of the grocery (where the real food – vegetables, fruit, meat, etc. is) before you hit the aisles (where the processed food is)

• Prepare your food for the week on Sunday. Many people fix their breakfast and lunch for the week, so they are more efficient and make good food choices

• Snack on fruits or almonds

At the end of the day, focus on eating real foods and making good food choices that make you feel and perform your best. The food you eat fuels your performance, resilience, and grit, and in order to perform your best, particularly under challenging circumstances that require resiliency, you want to feel and perform your best.

Eating better fuels enhanced performance, helps your recovery from tough workouts, builds your resilience, and grows your grit. accomplish your gritty goals. Whether you use these ideas or others, eating healthier will pay dividends on your waistline and for your resilience.

Physical fitness

Proper exercise increases performance, improves stamina, enhances your metabolism, improves sleep, increases physical resiliency, and decreases injuries. People gain huge health benefits when they exercise. In fact, according to recent research, executives who are physically fit are considered to be more effective leaders than those who are out of shape.

I have been an athlete all my life. One of my favorite things about the Army was that we got paid to work out for 90 minutes a day. Heck, I was almost a professional athlete! Over the past 30 years my athletic pursuits went beyond the Army too. I’ve competed in running races, bicycle races, swimming competitions, and triathlons.

The single biggest obstacle to better physical fitness is time. Everyone is busy with life, work, family, and friends. For the last five years I have used a philosophy that no matter how busy I am I can always find 10 minutes to do some sort of physical activity each day. This could be walking up and down a set of stairs 5 times. Or doing three sets of push-ups, sit-ups, and air squats in my hotel room. If I get the 10 minutes of exercise completed, I am content. But, committing to the ten minutes a day helps me overcome the mental hurdle of the huge time commitment of driving to the gym, working out, and driving home or doing the two-hour bike ride. With the ten minutes a day commitment, while I often get more than 10 minutes, it has made physical fitness a consistent, daily habit no matter how busy I am or what setbacks I face.

In the grand scheme of things, it really doesn’t matter what way you pursue better physical fitness. Running, biking, swimming, rowing, cross-country skiing, tennis, and hiking all improve your aerobic and anerobic fitness. Weightlifting, plyometrics, yoga, and body weight exercises improve your strength and flexibility. CrossFit, obstacle courses, P90X, and Orange Theory Fitness combine both. The most important thing is that you do something.

There are hundreds of great books and websites on physical fitness. If you don’t have a favorite author, a great workout should be comprised of either aerobic or anerobic activity, as well as exercises from the six movements:

•  Aerobic activity – jogging, walking, bicycle riding, swimming

• Anerobic activity – short, intense activity like sprints, sled drag or sled push, rowing sprints, Jacob’s ladder, assault bike, etc.

Plus

• Squat Movement – think air squats, front squats, rear squats, lunge, box jump

• Deadlift movement – think deadlift or kettlebell swing

• Press Movement – think bench press, push-up, or overhead press

• Pull Movement – pull-up, chin-up, or lateral pull down

• Weighted Carry – farmer’s carry (heavy object in both hands), suitcase carry (heavy object in one hand), or overheard carry (heavy object in one hand overhead)

• Abdominal Movement – plank, crunch, leg lift, Turkish getup, etc.

A simple workout that I like to do when I am traveling is 3-5 rounds of:

• 10 Push-Ups

• 10 Sit-Ups or Crunches

• 10 Air Squats

• 30 Seconds of Plank

• Run in place for 3 minutes or run up and down a flight of stairs for 3 minutes

Do what physical fitness excites you and keeps you interested. When you get bored, mix it up or try something new. But do some physical fitness every day. Improving your fitness will build your stamina, your decision making, your resilience, and your grit. Committing to doing 10-minutes a day is a great place to start. Whether you use these concepts or others it is more important to do something than nothing.

Social interaction

Building and maintaining relationships with friends and family has incredible benefits for your mental health, resilience, and grit. Conventional wisdom says that you are shaped by the five people you spend the most time together with. These relationships enable us to share ideas, grow mentally, destress, and decrease depression. Although face-to-face relationships are the most powerful, today’s technology – Zoom, Microsoft Teams, e-mail, texts, and phone calls – can still help nurture the relationships and increase social interaction.

Once again, the obstacle to having social interaction and building relationships is time. Budget time each week to interact and build your relationships. Make it part of your habits. Social interaction builds your performance, resilience, and grit. 

Improving your social interactions can help you to bounce back and accomplish your gritty goals. ability to remain present and focused will enable you to thrive in the chaos of life, build your resilience, and accomplish your gritty goals. Whether you use these techniques or others, the time spent building connections with co-workers, friends, and family is always well spent.

Mindfulness

Mindfulness or meditation plays an important role in building resilience. Mindfulness means paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, nonjudgmentally. Throughout the ages samurai, medieval knights, and monks have practiced forms of mindfulness to increase their focus, decision-making, and resilience. The actor and martial arts expert Bruce Lee was a big proponent of mindfulness. As Dan Harris says, “it can give you a 10 percent mental advantage.” In today’s distracted environment with computers, TVs, email, texts, Microsoft Teams, Slack, and WhatsApp all demanding our attention, it is even more important to practice mindfulness.

 Although simple in concept, practicing mindfulness is challenging. Mindfulness is emptying your mind from everything distracting and being fully present for a short amount of time. There are dozens of tools and techniques to do this, but, personally, I like this one best:

• Sit in a chair or lie down. Get comfortable. Set your watch or phone alarm for 5 minutes.

• Close your eyes

• Focus on the sensation of your breath as it goes in and out.

• Here is the big secret. Your mind is going to wander. When it does, just forgive yourself, mentally note these external thoughts, and return to focusing on your breathing. Like doing repetitions at the gym, the work and the benefit happens when you catch your mind wandering and bring it back. The more you practice the better you will get and the longer you can go. 

Improving your ability to remain present and focused will enable you to thrive in the chaos of life, build your resilience, and accomplish your gritty goals. Whether you use this technique or another, it is worth sharpening your mind for five minutes per day.

Obstacle

You have heard develop a resilient mindset, sleep better, eat healthier, workout, develop social connections, and practice mindfulness from hundreds of sources but the people that put it all together are few and far between. It isn’t easy. Many people take an all or nothing approach to these ideas. Instead, I ask you to consider the small, incremental approach. Find one little thing you can do better, make it easy to do, and then consistently do it over-and-over until it is a habit. Then use the momentum from one small win to build another small win. And then build another and another. Over time you can make some significant changes by working small problems.

Conclusion

Inevitably, when you strive to accomplish a gritty goal there are going to be setbacks. Building your resilience, both mentally and physically, is one way to make sure you are ready to handle whatever is thrown at you. Bounce back and keep putting one foot in front of the other, stronger than you were before.

Dan Gable rebounded from his defeat by Larry Owings to take his wrestling skills to the next level. Although you aren’t training for the Olympics, go on the offensive and enhance your resilience by understanding and living your personal purpose, as well as ensuring you are getting the proper sleep, nutrition, physical fitness, social interaction, and mindfulness. Grow your grit.