by Charles Barnard
Perseverance is born from hope, which is conceived from faith, which is deeply connected to love. Mankind cannot live without love and without it perseverance flitters away like a sand castle under an ocean wave. Society needs people who persevere. It needs people who have hope. It needs people with faith. It needs love to reign. Societies need a significant number of people to exhibit a mindset of a champion. Training your mindset requires the acquisition of sets of beliefs, specific skills, and the development of habits. The habits are crucial in training the management of emotions and attitudes. It is the attitudes, or the outward expression of our beliefs and values, that people recognize as our mindset. People only know you are perseverant by being perseverant, which entails, in part, believing or identifying yourself as a perseverant person. Perseverance is invaluable because life brings trials and tribulations to everyone. Some are more severe than others, but without perseverance a society wouldn’t survive because people wouldn’t survive. Imagine a society full of people who had given up on themselves and others. What would that be like? Would it be a functioning society? Of course it wouldn’t.
Because love drives faith, hope, and perseverance, it is a foundational emotion to cultivate. It is, however, more than just an emotion. Someone who demonstrates this agape, or self-sacrificing love, shows a number of character traits. These traits are fed by beliefs and values you have adopted in your life. On a simplistic level, you can probably understand that the only way your brain can understand that you believe something to be true or false versus doubting that idea to be true or false is it must represent that belief in a specific way. How does my brain represent the belief that if I drop a glass on a cement floor it is likely to break versus I am not sure it will break if I drop it on a thickly carpeted wood floor. For you to know a doubt versus a belief your brain must code it differently.
Since your brain codes beliefs and doubts differently, if we understand how your brain codes doubt versus beliefs we can train ourselves to change beliefs fairly quickly. There are strategies anyone can learn to apply on themselves to change beliefs. Now imagine if you could undo that original decision to believe something that doesn’t support you. That could be quite profound don’t you think? Let’s look at two case studies taken from the field of athletics.
Mark was a very talented pitcher coming out of a small high school. He actually had enough talent to play division 1 baseball but chose a small division 3 school that had a good baseball program. The coach was excited to have him. For two years, frustration built up in both the player and coach as Mark would be pitching great and in close games, late in the game he would implode. In doing a detailed personal history, a powerful limiting belief was discovered. At a very young age, Mark had developed the belief that he was not as good as guys from bigger cities and towns. That belief was the major obstacle to his success in college. It was a major contributor to undo stress – feelings of sadness, anxiety, and frustration. Using special techniques, that original belief was changed and that was the key for him to unlock his success and improve his mental health. He became the premier pitcher in the league and won pitcher of the year honors two years running.
Jill was one of the top high school sprinters entering her senior year. During the course of the regular season, frustration began to build as her times were stagnant from the previous year. She wasn’t any better. She began to become anxious and worried. Just prior to the last regular season meet we met and dealt with a couple of limiting decisions she had as well as the negative emotions of worry and fear among others. The last regular season meet Jill tied her personal record and building record. In the league championship meet the following week, she set her personal record and league record. In the regional meet, she broke her PR and set the regional meet record. Then in the state meet, she set another new PR and the state record while beating an opponent she had never beaten going back to youth track meets. She earned a division 1 scholarship and competed for four years in college.
Each of those case studies is related to perseverance because perseverance is a character trait of love. We humans often believe we love ourselves, and in most regards we do, yet we seem to be overly susceptible to negative rumination and external influences – even well-meaning ones – to create beliefs that limit us and emotions that drag us down. When we do that, we are not exhibiting the kind of self-love we need to exhibit. How does this happen?
Imagine a father and or mother who doesn’t want their child to think people are better than them. From their earliest introduction to sports, the child hears, “don’t let them think they are better than you. They aren’t better than you. You can’t let them get the better of you,” or anything similar. The problem with that communication is it embeds the suggestion that the other person or team is better than them. That unconscious belief can then playout similarly to the first case study.
Our perseverance then is directly related to what we believe. Beliefs will also influence our why. If you think about those who push their mind and bodies to the limit and persevere through incredible hardships, they have a big enough why, but that why is centered around a powerful belief or beliefs. The ultra-marathoners would be just one example of those who persevere through physical or mental “pain”. Navy Seals would be another.
If you think of persecuted Christians who live in fear of torture and death but continue to live out their faith, their perseverance is built from a deeply held belief about the rewards that await them for living by their faith and the love of God. The same could be said for members of other religions as well. Again, their beliefs influence their ability to persevere in the face of setbacks. The love they have associated to those beliefs are the driving force.
When a person allows negativity and self-doubt to reign supreme in their life, they are crippling their very spirit. Learning to love yourself by over-riding, managing, and taking control of your emotions and attitude, will cause you to develop tremendous faith, an abundance of hope, and to persevere through all the trials and tribulations that life dishes out. If all of us received the proper training and the help in building key character traits such as those associated with love, faith, hope, and perseverance, and help in creating the habits necessary to sustain and reinforce those traits, the overall mental health of our society would be much greater and our physical health would be too. The larger the population base that has a healthy human spirit and exhibits love, faith, hope, and perseverance among other traits, the less a society will deal with the social ills that will destroy that society like a sand castle under an ocean wave and inevitably lead to despotism or tyranny.
