Welcome the Struggle
I remember vividly a 5-year-old version of me sitting outside on the front steps of my childhood home staring down my untied shoes. With teeth clenched, I declared that I would not go inside my house until I figured out how to tie those laces. Tongue between teeth, I worked the loop, swoop, and pull over and over again. Palpable frustration built in my chest. Why wouldn’t it work? Why couldn’t I do it? The sun was setting, and it was starting to get darker outside. I decided I needed a change of scenery so to the back steps I went. More looping, swooping, and pulling… Until finally, there it was, a bow. I untied it and did it again – another bow! I entered the house triumphant choosing to celebrate with a frosty glass of milk.
While we have all faced much more consequential struggles in our lives than learning to tie our laces, this memory is one I draw on again and again as a reminder that struggling is how I learn and where the growth happens.
Life constantly presents us with the opportunity for struggles and it is up to us: 1) whether we choose to engage in the struggle at all, and 2) how we approach the struggle. Whether the struggle is working on developing a new skill, handling a challenging assignment at work, figuring out how to scale your business, dealing with a difficult colleague, or one of the many other challenges we are presented with in our lives, choosing to engage in the struggle and being open to the lessons that comes from failing is crucial to learning.
Through struggle we learn to accept that we have opportunity for growth. Struggle shows us that we are not yet a finished product. Carol Dweck in her book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, wrote about growth mindset versus fixed mindset. Much has been written about growth versus fixed mindset, but to summarize, if you have a growth mindset, you view intelligence, abilities, and talents as something that can be changed with effort (i.e. struggle leads to learning and growth). Those with a fixed mindset view those same traits as something that are fixed and cannot be changed over time (avoid the struggle because it is useless, and you will never get better).
Neuroscientists determined that how your brain reacts to mistakes depends on your mindset. Meaning if you embrace struggle as an opportunity for growth, it will become an opportunity for growth. In The Talent Code, Daniel Coyle explains that in order to become a top performer, you need to struggle at the edges of your ability and fail in order to breakthrough to better performance. In sum, struggling is necessary to get really good at something. Sitting in struggle and knowing that it is OK to be uncertain opens the mind to be curious and to try new ways of achieving an outcome. And maybe the next time, the next attempt, will be the right one. Channel Thomas Edison, who said: “I have not failed 10,000 times—I’ve successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work.”
So, welcome the struggle. In fact, look for more ways to invite struggle into your life to facilitate growth. And if you have been struggling with something and can’t seem to think of one more approach to try, look for a new point of view. Ask a friend, family member, or colleague. Ask someone with no domain expertise how they would approach the issue. Turning to a coach as a resource to help you with your struggle is also a great way to get fresh insight and perspective. It’s also OK to take a break and rest for a while. Sometimes a breakthrough can only come after some rest and a change of scenery.
“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” - Thomas Edison