“When your mind knows it won’t quit, the body will adapt.  Don’t stop when you’re tired, stop when you’re done,” David Goggins.  I believe I’ve spoken about something similar to this before because there is an innate difference between stopping when the task is finished and stopping when we tell ourselves we need to.  Now, I am not encouraging ignoring the body’s limits in any way—this is where I slightly disagree with Mr. Goggins because there are in fact times when pushing forward is detrimental to both mental and physical health–but I am encouraging an honest evaluation of those limits and whether or not it is the mind telling us to stop or if we reached the point of fatigue/failure on the action.  Being this fresh into the new year we need to learn the key: it isn’t to dive right into new actions that we aren’t adapted to and then giving up because it’s too hard to maintain.  We need to work no honestly meeting ourselves where we are and setting the goal to incrementally move forward without stopping.

In the game of growth and change, development and improvement, the key is to keep moving.  Rest, yes, stopping, no.  The limits we set are internal and can just as easily help us fly or cement us in place if we aren’t honest about what we are doing and where we want to go.  I spent a lot of time offering advice that I didn’t live myself.  I was scared and thought my job was to maintain the life I had until I was able to transition fully into the life I wanted.  Looking at it now I see that I truly didn’t feel worthy of being the person I wanted to be.  I wanted to help people get there but I didn’t know how to follow the steps myself so I stopped working on it.  I see now that I missed out on growing sooner because of the limits I set.  We cut ourselves short when we do things like that.  The truth is we can’t live with one foot on either side of the equation.  We need to fully commit and that is the type of not quitting that ultimately underlies what Goggins is talking about.

We are capable of so much more than we think we are and if we consistently eliminate the negative discussion and question about when we need to stop and about our ability to adopt and adapt the behavior we want, the sooner we are able to fully embrace the life and behaviors we DO want.  Stepping into the energy we want and matching that flow opens up an endless source of movement and effort.  We become unstoppable and tireless when we accept the flow of who we are.  We will always feel tired, like it’s an uphill battle when it comes to doing things not aligned with who we are.  Remember, the effort we put toward tending what we think we should do versus what we want to do is the same but the results are different.  Choose which side needs to be cultivated and put all of our effort toward that.  That’s how we don’t quit, that is how we sustain and maintain the energy to get the results we want.  Adapt to flow and it all gets done.