Quotes About Resilience

A girl need not necessarily have the perfect start in life to fulfill such a dream.

The less we choose to need, and the less we rely on comfortable, favorable circumstances for peace of mind, the more control we have over our thoughts, emotions, and behavior. "Pain is the purifier," he taught. "Walk towards suffering. Love suffering. Embrace it.

I'm scared shitless." Knowing and accepting that a few things were bound to go wrong.

That it's possible. You just have to fight. It will not be easy. But you can manage. Because life is giving you as much pain as you are capable [of living] with. And on the end of that path, the goal will be reachable. You will have suffered to do [it], but it doesn't matter.

That desperate tug-of-war between the desire to persevere and the overwhelming temptation to quit. And he loved it.

It was a very hard race from the word go with a combination of great runners and a tough course," he wrote. "I had my problems winning. I felt several times like giving into the pain and letting Gary [sic] win but I just couldn't. I just kept driving myself harder and harder, longer and longer.

Achieve complete mastery of his mind by pushing back the limits of his capacity to suffer until those limits disappeared.

Exercising mental fitness was a daily battle for him, but a battle he chose.

Frankl focused his psychologist's eye on ultrarealists he encountered in these awful places, writing that "the way they bore their suffering was a genuine inner achievement," which proved that "any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him—mentally and spiritually.

How interesting it is that the attitude that ultrarealists choose to adopt in situations where their attitude is the only thing they can control is one of finding meaning in their suffering.

Your physical capacities are only part of the big picture," he told the gathering. "If your spirit is happy and strong, then you're stable under pressure.

I call these lifelines: little mantras that come to me spontaneously in the crisis moments of races -- attempts by The Person I Want to Be to gain my weaker side's acceptance of the pain I am inflicting on myself.

Because the only way to become really good at coping with the discomforts and stresses of endurance sports is to experience them.

Who is ultimately stronger? The answer is undetermined.

Athletes who have been gifted with exceptional talent and other blessings that enable them to sail to the top of their sport—athletes like Cadel Evans—may therefore be doubly disadvantaged where resilience is concerned.

At the risk of sounding like Uncle Rico from Napoleon Dynamite who can't let go of the past

Endurance sports are largely about discomfort and stress; hence they are largely about coping.

Self-awareness plays a key role in stopping fear and laziness from standing in the way of accepting a reality that must be accepted in order to make the best of a bad situation.

Even most training errors, such as overtraining, originate in the fear of suffering.

In a race, the job of the muscles is to perform. The job of the mind is to cope.

The muscles can only perform to the degree that the mind is able to cope. Endurance sports are therefore a game of "mind over muscle.

To become the best athlete you can be, you need to become really good at coping with the characteristic forms of discomfort and stress that the endurance sports experience dishes out, beginning with perceived effort and extending to the many challenges that are secondary to it, such as fear of failure.

My own term for a highly developed overall coping capacity in endurance sports is mental fitness.

If you ever fall for a woman, make sure she's got balls.