Do hard things. I say it to my son all of the time. “In this family, we do hard things.” He is 7 years old, and I see so much of myself in him. He is already starting to develop the fixed mindset that plagued me for so long. He has a deep-seated need/desire to be the best or to perform perfectly. If it can’t be done perfectly, he’ll often want to give up (if he even starts). That’s when I jump in. “Do hard things.”

Last night, we were in the living room, and he was really upset about a robot he was making (he’s nerdy like me too). Something didn’t go quite right, and he just obsessed about it. It was bedtime, and he was so upset that he didn’t get it right the first time. I gave him my best “Thomas Edison failed at making the light bulb 10,000 times” speech, but I am not sure if it helped very much.

One of my goals for my son is for him to leave my house some day as a determined and empowered young man with a growth mindset. I want him to eventually be able to look at obstacles as challenges that are meant to be overcome. I want him to think in terms of “get to” instead of “have to.” I want him to understand that failure is just part of the process sometimes. In order to facilitate that, we will have lots of “we do hard things” conversations over the next 10-15 years, but there has to be more to it than that.

He has to see it in me. I can’t just tell him that we do hard things in our family. He actually has to see people in our family doing hard things. He has to see hard work and perseverance. He has to see Dad choosing the hard road because it’s the right thing to do even when there might be an easier road that would lead to a result that might be “good enough.” He has to see someone who is “comfortable being uncomfortable.”

Our ability to do hard things is like a muscle. The more often we choose to do the harder thing, the easier it gets to make that same decision the next time the opportunity presents itself. Conversely, if we tend to avoid hard things, it gets harder and harder to pull the trigger when the time comes. How do we strengthen this muscle? Well… by doing hard things.

In the last week, I have started a new regimen in order to strengthen my “do hard things” muscle. Over the last year, I have heard or read about several people that I admire that wake up and take a cold shower every day. I thought it was crazy, so I ignored it. However, it was something that seemed to keep coming up, so I decided to do a little bit of research. There definitely appears to be some physical benefits to the practice, but the thing that got me to try it was the potential mental benefit.

One of the books I am reading right now is Own the Day, Own Your Life by Marcus Aubrey (Founder and CEO of Onnit). Marcus is colorful to say the least, and we certainly do not share the same beliefs on a number of things. Nonetheless, when he explained some of his reasoning for (and more importantly, the research behind) cold exposure, it made a lot of sense to me. He basically said that by turning that knob to cold in the mornings, we are getting a small win each day and strengthening our “mental override.” Mental override, as he calls it, is our “ability to push ourselves into the ‘yes.'” There are times when there are things that need to be done, but we’d much rather do something else. Mental override is our ability to choose to do the thing that needs to be done over the thing we want to do.

How has my cold shower experiment gone so far?

Well, the first morning was ridiculous. I stood there in my shower just staring at the shower head, unable to turn the water on for what seemed like an hour. I just couldn’t pull the trigger. I was terrified because I knew it was going to suck. I was trying to psych myself up. I was bouncing up and down. I gave myself little pep talks. I tried a countdown…. 10…9…8…7…6…5…4…3…2…1…nothing. Still couldn’t pull the trigger. I don’t really know why I eventually turned the water on or how I mustered up the strength, but I did it. It was terrible. Despite my best attempt at staying quiet, wife heard me, and she said I sounded like I was in labor with the breathing I was doing.

The good news is that after about a minute, the water doesn’t feel cold anymore. I knocked out the 3 minutes that I had planned to stay in there, and I got on with me day. Once I got out of the shower, I grabbed my morning cup of coffee, and I got some good reading time in. I was wide awake. The rest of the day I felt awesome.

The next morning was almost an exact repeat. Lots of standing in a dry shower, staring at a dry shower head and trying to muster up the courage to turn the knob. Once again, after I did it, I was really glad that I did.

The next morning, I overslept, but I didn’t want to break the streak. I didn’t have time to stand and contemplate whether or not I was going to do it. I just jumped in and pulled the trigger. That was one of those “Ah-Hah!” moments for me, and it changed the next 3 mornings. For the last 4 days, I have walked right in, gotten directly under the shower head, and turned the cold water on with very little debate… steadily strengthening that “do hard things” muscle. There are several other disciplines that have improved in my life over the last 7 days (writing this post is one), and I’d like to say that the cold shower is what made it all happen. However, there are two problems with that: 1) Seven days isn’t much of a sample size, and 2) correlation doesn’t equal causation. Let me stick with it for a while, and maybe we’ll see a “How Cold Showers Have Changed My Life” post or something along those lines later this year.

How does this go back to helping my son do hard things? Well, I am certainly not going to throw him into an ice cold shower in the name of “we do hard things,” but I am hopeful that by strengthening my own resolve, he will grow stronger because he will get the opportunity to see Dad do other hard things along the way.

I am not going to tell you that you have to wake up and take cold showers each morning, but I am going to challenge you to do something that you don’t want to do each day. You pick it. Those small wins will add up over time, and when the big things show up in your life, you’ll be much more ready to lean into them.

Thanks for reading. I really do appreciate it, and I hope you got something out of it. It’s been almost 4 months since I’ve written anything here. As life got a little crazy for us, this blog was a “hard thing” that I didn’t say yes to. Now, three months later, I regret all of those “no’s.” Here’s to a lot more yes’s for the rest of 2018!

See you next time!