Invisible Progress

This episode is the pep talk you didn't even know you needed. 

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Transcript

0:21

Hey my friends. So some of y'all know I came back to options trading a little while ago. I'm like one month or so back in and just trying to learn and relearn some things. And while I'm learning, I'm using the paper money simulation so that I don't use my own money for learning on which is a really great feature I think because you make a lot of mistakes when you're learning. And it's hard. And I'm not getting the timings quite right. And I'm kind of sucking. I've lost $1,000 of the simulated money, and it feels like I'm never gonna get it. It feels like it's just too hard. I'm not getting it. It's just never gonna happen. Towards the tail end of December, I also started doing Krav Maga. So I've been doing that like a few times a week for a little over a month now. And I suck at it. I watched the instructors give the demonstration and then it looks so easy when they're doing it. So I watch it. I'm like, okay, I can totally do that. That makes sense. And then I go to do it and it's like, I've never used my limbs before. It's awkward. It's wrong and it feels like I'm never gonna get it. It feels like I'll never be good at it. And that's exactly how it's supposed to feel. That is what learning feels like. To get good at something, you must first suck at it. You must tolerate sucking at it and not give up even when it feels like you aren't making progress. Because progress rarely ever feels like progress. Progress happens slowly over time. Is it fast. It isn't flashy. We don't even normally notice it until enough time has gone by and suddenly we're like, hey, wait a minute this used to be hard. And this happens with healing too. Progress doesn't always feel like progress. It feels like you're gonna be wounded forever. It feels like you're always gonna be hurting or getting triggered by something. Sometimes it even feels worse than you did before you started trying to heal. I find with healing that a lot of the times you feel worse before you feel better. And it's times like that when you're making invisible progress that it feels like you should just give up. There'll be so many times when you know how you want to handle a certain situation. But every time it comes up, you handle it in your default way. And you'll feel frustrated and like it just isn't possible for you to handle things differently and you'll want to throw up your hands and just quit. It reminds me a little bit of hiking the Grand Canyon. I live in Arizona so I've had the privilege to have hiked the Grand Canyon several times. One of the absolute best hikes I've ever done over there was Havasupai Falls. You hike down the canyon to these waterfalls of just the most absolutely beautiful turquoise water. If you've never seen it, Google it for real, it's incredible. And it is 16 miles down the canyon. When you're starting out and looking down this enormous Canyon, it looks like it just keeps going down forever. And when you're going down, you're not going down fast, especially over the steeper parts because if you do, you'll end up with dirt and rocks and bruising on your ass. So it feels like you're gonna be hiking forever. So you're plodding down the canyon at work feels like a snail's pace and you're getting tired and your knees start to hate it. And it's either way too hot or way too cold depending on what time of year you go. But the only way that you don't make it down the canyon is if you stop. If you give up. And it's the same with healing. The only way that you don't heal is if you stop working on it. If you give up. As long as you are working on it, you are going to find healing. It will feel way too slow for your liking. You'll wonder what the hell you're even doing. But then one day something that used to trigger the hell out of you won't. One day you'll respond to your toxic ex in your desired way instead of your default way. And you won't even realize until later and your mind will be blown. One day, I'll be trading options like I was born to it. And one day I'll be a decent fighter. But it won't be overnight. And it probably won't even be noticeable to me. I'll just keep at it and one day realize that I was able to do something that I didn't used to be able to do. Because that's how it works. The mistake people make is that they quit when things get hard. They quit when they don't see the progress that they thought they would. Their expectations were different from the reality. So they make the mistake of thinking that this means it isn't possible and they should give up. The only way you guarantee failure is giving up. The only way you don't make it down the canyon is when you give up. You might need to stop and take trail mix breaks. But as long as you keep going, you'll get there. My instructor says that the definition of a black belt is a white belt that didn't quit. Don't quit my friends. Whatever you're working towards, don't quit. Giving up is the only surefire way to make sure you don't get what you're after. So don't quit. Have a cry when you need to, when things get difficult. Take a trail mix break. But don't quit. You got this. You can do it. I promise. All right, my friends. This is your pep talk for the week. Go get it and until next time, be well.