Do Hard Things (why We Get Resilience Wrong And The Surprising Science Of Real Toughness)

By (author) Magness, Steve
Short description/annotation:
He offers four core pillars to cultivate such resilience:

• Pillar 1- Ditch the Façade, Embrace Reality
• Pillar 2- Listen to Your Body
• Pillar 3- Respond, Instead of React
• Pillar 4- Transcend Discomfort

Smart and wise all at once, Magness flips the script on what it means to be resilient.

Description:

A NATIONAL BESTSELLER

"In Do Hard Things, Steve Magness beautifully and persuasively reimagines our understanding of toughness. This is a must-read for parents and coaches and anyone else looking to prepare for life''s biggest challenges."—Malcolm Gladwell, author of Outliers and Talking to Strangers and host of the Revisionist History podcast

From beloved performance expert, executive coach, and coauthor of Peak Performance Steve Magness comes a radical rethinking of mental toughness and what it means to achieve our high ambitions in the face of hard things.

Toughness has long been held as the key to overcoming a challenge and achieving greatness, whether it is on the sports field, at a boardroom, or at the dining room table. Yet, the prevailing model has promoted a mentality based on fear, false bravado, and hiding any sign of weakness. In other words, the old model of toughness has failed us.

Steve Magness, a performance scientist who coaches Olympic athletes, rebuilds our broken model of resilience with a new definition of inner strength grounded in the latest science and psychology. In Do Hard Things, Magness teaches us how we can work with our body – how experiencing discomfort, leaning in, paying attention, and creating space to take thoughtful action can be the true indications of cultivating such resilience. He offers four core pillars to cultivate such resilience:

• Pillar 1: Ditch the Façade, Embrace Reality
• Pillar 2: Listen to Your Body
• Pillar 3: Respond, Instead of React
• Pillar 4: Transcend Discomfort

Smart and wise all at once, this life-changing self-help book flips the script on what it means to be resilient. Drawing from mindfulness, military case studies, sports psychology, neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy, he provides a roadmap for navigating life’s challenges, overcoming performance anxiety, and achieving the kind of high performance that makes us happier, more successful, and, ultimately, better people.

Review quote:
“Steve Magness is one of the giants of modern thinking about high performance across domains, blending a broad knowledge of cutting-edge psychology with hard-earned practical experience from the world-class athletes and other experts he coaches. In his new book, he takes on an age-old question—who triumphs, and why, when the going gets tough?—and reveals that many of our cherished instincts and assumptions are wrong. A crucial read for anyone who cares about delivering their best when the stakes are highest.” — Alex Hutchinson, New York Times bestselling author of Endure “For too long, we have lauded stories of coaches and leaders who practice the ‘weed-out’ school of toughness—subject a bunch of people to something unpleasant, and those who survive must have become high performers because of it. While those stories have grown in prominence, the body of scientific research has grown in a different direction, indicating that fortitude is not a trait that magically grows under extreme duress, but rather a skill that can slowly but surely be cultivated. It is time to bring the stories in line with the research, and I think Steve Magness is perfectly positioned to do just that.” — David Epstein, New York Times bestselling author of Range and The Sports Gene "Steve Magness has established himself as a leading voice in performance optimization and achieving one''s personal bestness, arete as the Greek''s say. In Do Hard Thing