Episode #10:

Sustainability Part Two: Tenacity

Rocky Balboa said, “It’s not about how hard you hit; it’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.” These words resonate with our current circumstances and remind us that winning is not just about strength, but also about the ability to endure and persist.

People with tenacity choose to stick with the problem instead of folding or giving up. They see the value of holding on and can manage their mindset well. So this week, I want to talk about the ways you can build your tenacity, mentally and physically, because many of you have probably shown tenacity but aren’t even aware of it!

Join me this week as we explore the definition of tenacity, its practical implications, and how we can manage our minds to develop this invaluable quality. I share some valuable exercises to help you build tenacity and share some valuable tools to help you navigate these challenging times.

WHAT YOU’LL DISCOVER

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The true meaning of tenacity and its significance in our lives.

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Real-life examples of individuals who have demonstrated remarkable tenacity.

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How to develop your mental and physical resilience.

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The power of tenacity in navigating the challenges of the Coronavirus pandemic.

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The importance of celebrating challenges and moving forward with unwavering determination.

FEATURED ON THE SHOW

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Check out more episodes of the podcast here!

TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to Becoming Virtuosa, the podcast with Dr, Susan Crockett. You are listening to episode number 10: Sustainability Part Two, Tenacity. This episode is dedicated to my Benjamin, the most tenacious person I know.

Welcome to Becoming Virtuosa, where women learn to love their lives. Do you find yourself frustrated by society’s expectations? Looking for practice advice on how to discover your talents and level up your life? You’ve found the right place. Here’s your host, US News top doctor, robotic surgeon and certified life coach, Dr. Susan Crockett.

Hello, my virtuosas. I am your host, Dr. Susan Crockett, and you can call me Sue. I'm so happy to be here today. We are on day three in San Antonio of our stay at home orders for the Coronavirus. I am homebound today because our surgeries have been canceled, all except elective cases.

My kids are all at home, and so I'm working on doing normal mommy things like figuring out what we're eating for dinner tonight, taking out the trash. We just barely missed the trash man this morning, or we barely caught him. Brady happened to see him drive by, and we ran out there and took the trash cans out.

We have an AC that's out, and so the air conditioning man was out this morning, and just life. It's life. It's kind of a new world though. I'm doing things with my kids because they're at home, and Brady is my 21-year-old son. He met me downstairs for breakfast, and he's like, “Hey mom, you want to play beats?” I'm like, “What?” He's like, “Yeah, do you want to play this virtual reality computer game that I told you about? Do you remember? I told you about it.” I'm like, “Oh, yeah.”

It's called Beat Saber, and my son is very interested in developing virtual reality platforms for online video games. So, he actually showed me how to play this virtual reality game, and it is really fun. It was pretty cool. You wear your visor, the headpiece. It's hooked in with the computer, and it's a music game.

He used the joysticks like drumsticks, and I played to Imagine Dragons. Imagine that. Yeah, it's pretty fun. It's really great for eye-hand coordination. I'm thinking maybe it'll help me stay sharp while I'm not on the robot for the next couple of weeks as we go through all of this.

So, I was talking with my son Brady about what I got to do today, that I have to do this podcast. Oh, that I get to do this podcast. That's what he told me. I’m like, “Yeah, it's on tenacity,” which is a good topic because I don't necessarily feel like doing this today. He's like, “Tenacity? You mean like that Rocky quote?” I said, “Yeah, like holding on no matter what.”

I thought that was kind of interesting. I thought I would start the segment with Brady's Rocky quote. This is from Rocky Balboa who said, “You, me, or nobody is going to hit as hard as life, but it ain't about how hard you hit. It's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward, how much you can take and keep moving forward. That's how winning is done.”

I just thought that quote was great for our circumstances and times that we're going through with the Coronavirus because life is hitting us hard. Not only is life hitting people hard with the virus itself, but just in us figuring out how to manage our minds about the rest of what's going on with the economy, and social isolation, and life. Life is getting hard.

So, I think this talk today is super important. It's on tenacity. It's the second in a series I'm doing on sustainability to get through difficult times. For today's show, I'm going to do our second wireless earbud giveaway. They're really cute. They've got the Virtuosa logo on them, so you can listen every week. Last week, we gave away a pair to Amy and Mary Kay, and I'm going to have two more winners this week that I'll announce at the end of the show. How fun is that?

So, let's dig into tenacity. The definition of tenacity. Well, if you look at the Hebrew word, which is the origin, it means to grip. It makes me think of that kitty cat poster that I had in my room in the ‘70s, which was that kitty that was holding on until Friday. Just hang on. The definition, according to Webster, is the quality or fact of being able to grip something firmly, or to be very determined, or have determination, or the quality or fact of continuing to exist. Persistence.

Tenacity, in practical terms, is the ability to hang on when letting go appears much more attractive. It's the ability to hang on when letting go appears more attractive. When we have impulses or urges to let go, and we decide not to anyway. That is what tenacity is. We're going to talk about managing our minds around this topic today. This has everything to do with our thoughts, and how we choose them, and how we manage our minds.

Last week, we talked about resilience, and resilience is the bouncing back up after you get knocked down. I believe very much in the resilience of humanity, but I also believe and I’ve witnessed myself in the tenacity, amazing tenacity of the human existence. So, if resilience is bouncing back up after you get knocked down, tenacity is the ability to keep moving forward or continuing to hang on after you get back up.

One of my favorite TV shows of all time is the Survivor series. I absolutely love Survivor. I watch it all the time. I wouldn't consider myself a super fan. I don't really understand all of the strategies, and I couldn't tell you the name of every person, and the nuances of everything that's ever been played on it, but I do love watching people, and the social interactions, and how people think and make decisions.

I really love watching the challenges. It really teaches me a lot about people, and they have lots of different challenges on this show. Some are physical, some are mental. They have puzzles and all kinds of stuff, strength, but the one that I'm thinking about regarding to tenacity are the series of physical challenges that they have that require the players to hang on, and it's usually done when there's 12 or fewer players left.

The idea is that you have to hang on in some way, and the last one standing, the last man hanging on or woman hanging on, is the one who wins the challenge. It takes some strength, some physical strength to do that, but more often than not, what I see is the people that win aren't necessarily the bulkiest, strongest people.

They usually are the people that have the most focus. Their brain, and their bodies, and their minds have been focused to be able to handle hanging on through hard times and long times. They can get a good grasp of the situation, and they find a way to relax and to manage their mind through the challenge with some determination and stubbornness, but also practiced strength at tenacity.

The idea that this brings up is that tenacity is like a muscle. It's something that we can build and we can get stronger at by practicing. So, we're going to give you a couple of exercises for that to do with your kids and yourself towards the end of the podcast today.

There's a great quote by Teddy Roosevelt that says, “Courage is not having the strength to go on. It is going on when you don't have the strength,” and it takes tremendous courage for us to be going through times like we're going through right now. I want to encourage you all to think about your own tenacity and where you've had demonstrations of it in your own life.

We all have examples of tenacity. If you're a mom, and you were in labor for 40 hours or however many hours it was, that was tenacity. You kept going. You kept hanging on. May not have had much of a choice about it, but you kept hanging on and going. You persevered.

Musicians have a lot of tenacity. They keep practicing and practicing, and creating, and developing, and practicing, and most of the success of the music industry doesn't come from the stage. It comes from the years of tenacity, and diligence, and practicing over, and over, and over again until they get good at their craft.

If you've completed a degree, whether it's a high school degree, or an advanced education, or a vocational degree, if you've completed some course or education, then you've shown tenacity in your own life. If you're a runner, if you've run a marathon or participated in sports, a marathon is a great example of having tenacity.

I love triathlon. I love watching the iron man triathlons. When I was younger, I used to do the sprint distance triathlons and some of the distance bike rides, but the tenacity that's required to finish the race when you're worn out, and exhausted, and your whole body is screaming at you to quit. That tenacity is a valuable thing. That's what we're talking about today.

Running a business, especially in these times and these days and ages, whether you're running a business as a CEO, or a president, or a manager, or an employee of a corporation, or whether you're an entrepreneur and own your own business, running a business and guiding it through this time of uncertainty requires a tremendous amount of tenacity.

I see a lot of people who are folding. They're either closing their doors and folding their businesses, or they're firing employees, letting go employees. I would suggest that if you are in a position of leadership, that I'd like for you to consider the creativity of tenacity, and the creativity of innovation, and see what you can do to change the direction or the course of your business instead of letting people go.

I had one of my employees come to me last week, one of my medical assistants, and she said, “I can't come into work anymore because I don't have anybody to watch my son,” and he was in a daycare, and the daycare was closing.

I said, “Well, you know what? We all have to adjust. We’re all making adjustments, and I understand that.” I said, “But in a week, there are going to be a lot of people looking for jobs. There are going to be a whole lot of people, schoolteachers, and daycare people looking for work, and if you have a job, and you have income coming in, I'm sure you're going to be able to find somebody to help you take care of your son.”

What I was demonstrating there was the ability to have a bigger picture of mind of the situation and to look for the opportunities. Not only would she be able to continue her own work with me and have somebody to take care of her son, but she also would be able to employ somebody else, which is a huge gift.

I love this quote by Albert Einstein. He says, “Genius is 1% talent and 99% hard work,” which is cool, but I have a corollary. This is the Crockett corollary to that about entrepreneurship. That it's 1% idea and 99% tenacity. It's not that successful people are smarter than everybody else. It's just that successful people stay with the problems longer.

They sit with the problems. They work through the failures and the solutions, and they have the tenacity to keep going. If you are in a situation where you feel like you don't have much tenacity or not much strength to hold on, we're going to work at helping you develop that today. We all need a little bit more of this in the upcoming weeks.

One of the things about being able to build tenacity is to have a reason why. You have to know your why in order to be able to lean into the discomfort of tenacity because like those Survivors hanging on a sustained challenge, it gets painful. They lose circulation in their limbs, they get sore, they get cramps. It's uncomfortable to have that tenacity.

So, they have to have a really big why as to why they're still hanging on and not choosing to let go. There's always a time and there's always the option to let go. The trick is in knowing when you want to let go and being happy with your reasons for either hanging on or not.

When we're looking at the why or the hanging on because you know your reasons ahead of time, some examples that I thought of are faith. Throughout all of our very varied spiritual practices and faith scriptures, there's a woven thread in all of them about having faith and tenacity, and holding on, and the faithfulness of not only believers, but also of God.

Some people hang on or have tenacity because they've given their word, and they're practicing their character and their integrity because they said they would, because I said I so, so I will. Some people are hanging on, like in the case of Survivor, because they're getting a reward like money or fame.

Others hang on and have tenacity because they're in the service of helping others. and this would be a great time to give the example of the nurses, and the doctors, and all the other health care workers on the front lines right now in our hospitals as we're starting to see the Coronavirus surge in our country. The tenacity of those workers, and the courage that they have to show up on the front lines every day, and to risk their own health is incredible tenacity.

So, where is their underlying why? What do you think their underlying why is? When we think about managing our minds around this, when I think about those workers, I'm thinking, “What are they thinking? What is in their mind or in their thoughts that allows them to go in, and keep doing their work, and have the tenacity to keep going and taking care of people?”

Thinking about it, I break it down according to the principles that we've learned in life coaching, which are basically the principles of managing our mind. That's what the whole purpose of this podcast is, is to learn how to manage our minds so that we can live happier, healthier lives with intention and on purpose.

In the principles of life coaching, we think about our circumstances or what’s happening around us in life. Right now, it's the Coronavirus. We take that circumstance, and what we notice is that people have very different thoughts about it.

We have people in the healthcare industry who are doing the frontline work who have thoughts about, “I need to help people, and take care of them, and have tenacity,” and their feelings that result from those thoughts are feelings of courage, and they just keep going. The action is that they keep going, and the result is that they help lots and lots of people.

There are others, and lots of us out there, that look at the circumstance of the Coronavirus, and our thoughts are those of fear or dread. We may be bounce back and forth between different thoughts and different ways of thinking about this virus, but my point is we have control over our thoughts, and we have the ability to choose our thoughts.

By looking at how different people are looking at their brains and their thoughts, it can help you choose the thoughts to move forward with tenacity and determination also instead of in fear and discouragement or anxiety. So, there's certainly lots of people who have thoughts about fear or anxiety surrounding the coronavirus, whether it be the virus itself or the fallout from the economy.

Those thoughts that are creating the fear lead us into actions that are not really serving us very well. The result is that we don't always step up to be our best selves or to take care of ourselves or our families the way we need to. So, I think more than ever now, it's important for us to practice managing our minds and managing our thoughts.

Since this week's talk is about tenacity, then I'm going to give you some examples about how to strengthen your thoughts about tenacity and how to practice it in your own life. I'm going to give you two different exercises this week. One is physical and one is mental.

The physical exercise I want you to do is a pretty simple one. You can do it without any equipment. You can do it with your kids if you want. My doggies like to do it with me. I just want you to do a plank. I want you to plank on the floor, which means you've lay face down on the floor.

You can either do it on your elbows or your palms, like in pushup position. You can either do it on your feet, raised up on your feet, or if you're not that strong and you want to plank on your knees, you can do that ,and I want you to just practice holding your plank as long as you can. I want you to practice this every day for the next week. What I want you to notice over the days is that each day, you will be able to hold this plank a little bit longer, even if it's just five seconds longer.

By the end of this week, by the time you can listen to my podcast next week, you'll be able to hold that plank longer than you could today, and that is tenacity. That is strengthening your tenacity. It is learning the muscle memory physically to develop it, but it's also helping you develop it in your mind.

The second exercise I'm going to give you today is a mental exercise. I want you to think about a time in your own life when you demonstrated tenacity in your own life. Whether it was a degree, or love, and marriage, and relationship, or a marathon, or music, or whatever it is in your life where you know that you demonstrated hanging on through something that would have been easier to let go.

I want you to write down some of your thoughts about that and your why's as to why you hung on. Then I want you to pay really close attention to your thoughts as we go through the next few days and weeks, and I want you to purposely pay attention to catching the thoughts that are not serving you and not helping you think tenacious thoughts.

Then I want you to purposely insert either scriptural versus or thoughts that you choose to think that will strengthen your tenacity on purpose. I want you to do this very intentionally. As you practice your new awareness of tenacity, I know that a bunch of you all are binge watching Netflix. So, one of the things I want you to do is look in your movies in the binge watching and see if you can identify themes of tenacity, themes of where the hero hung on when it would have been easier to let go.

What I've shown you today, I've taught you about the second tool in sustainability. It's the tool of tenacity. This is something that hopefully is going to be useful for you over and over in your life as you go forward. It's to help you set your mind straight, and to move forward in the direction that you choose regardless of our circumstances.

Now, we come to the part of the show, it's one of my favorite things, and I've heard from you guys that it’s one of your favorite parts too, where we talk about what we’re listening and reading to, and I'm going to add what we're watching. This week, I actually have two songs that I've been listening to and getting ready for this podcast.

The first one is “Never Let Go” by the David Crowder Band. The second is the theme from Rocky, “Gonna Fly High”. If you just feel like being mellow and need a little hug of encouragement, the “Never Let Go” song is really lovely, and beautiful, and it's part of an album that David Crowder Band put together a couple of years ago called “The Remedy”.

If you need a song to get you motivated and up and going for whatever you've got to go forward to today to hang on, then you can put on the theme from Rocky. That's always a great one for me. The book that I'm going to suggest this week is a really old book. It comes from the 1930s. You all are going to laugh.

For the book this week, I chose The Little Engine Who Could. Do you remember that book that we read to our kids when they were little, or maybe you had it read to you when you were little? It's a children's book about the little engine that had a bunch tenacity. That's our book for this week.

Then what I'm watching, I was going to suggest that since we're all at home doing stay-at-home orders, that binge watching the Rocky movies on Netflix is a great choice for us this week, and I still think the original is the best one. I'd love for you to email me at virtuosa@virtuosacoaching.com and let me know what you think.

All right. So, we get to do the AirPod giveaway. I'm so excited. This week, we have two new winners, and they are Anya and Mackenzie. Congratulations, you'll be receiving your free pair of wireless AirPods. Thanks for listening, and thanks for writing your reviews.

If you're interested in getting a set of AirPods for yourself, we draw two names every week. We've drawn four. We're going to do a total of eight, so we're doing this for two more weeks. If you want to be entered in the drawing, you just need to write a podcast review on Apple podcasts for me, and then drop me an virtuosa@virtuosacoaching.com. That's virtuosa - with an A - because we’re women. Let me know that you wrote the review, so I can identify you.

Next week, we're going to talk about Sustainability Part Three, Sustainability Through Difficult Times. Part three is going to be on diligence, and I can't wait to meet with you then. It's going to be a really wonderful podcast. Okay, my virtuosas, that's all I've got for today. Have a wonderful week. Be safe. Stay inside. Love always, Sue. I will see you next week in episode 11.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Becoming Virtuosa. If you want to find out more, come check out virtuosacoaching.com. That’s virtuosa - with an A - coaching.com. See you next week.

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