Hard Ready® Phase One Basic Principle

Hard Ready® Phase One Basic Principle: Everyone’s Fighting Something 

“Our environment, the world in which we live and work, is a mirror of our attitudes and expectations.” — Earl Nightingale 

Ok, so let’s get this out of the way promptly:  the world is not conspiring against you (or us or anyone else).  Life’s daily adversities are not anomalies, and there is nothing peculiar about these struggles.  In fact, these struggles, these conflicts, ARE life. 

Daily, daily, you will be faced with new provocations.

Sometimes our challenge is simply rising to take on the day, never mind the inevitable tests of the day.  The important thing to realize and embrace is that everyone is going to face adversity.  Everyone is going to be provoked, prodded, questioned, fatigued, stressed, and pushed.  These challenges could be as simple as a long line at the DMV or a teacher’s conference or a work deadline or unseemly gossip or something “heavier”, like a death or illness in the family or job loss or marital pressures…sometimes it may even be a cumulative effect of such challenges.  That said, quite often, it is not the “challenge(s) of the day” that bests us, but rather our unrealistic expectations of the day.  Once we let go of the notion that struggles/challenges/conflicts/confrontations are demon entities waiting to pounce on us, and we understand that these obstacles are as normal and predictable as the sun rising, then and only then can we begin to control our days, instead of our days controlling us.  

What makes someone “cool under pressure”?

A bite from a radioactive spider?  Exposure to gamma rays?  Perhaps serum injections from a government experiment?  First, being “cool under pressure” is our perception of how someone has behaved in seeming adversity, but for the purposes of this program, whether that moniker was warranted or not is irrelevant.  What is relevant though, is to understand there is nothing superhuman about such attributes.  There is nothing in your DNA that prepares you to handle difficult circumstances…it is your “filters”, your expectations, your experiences, and your understanding that, sometimes, things suck.  Those that fare well in such times appreciate the inevitably and approach it with the attitude of ”I can handle this”…they focus on the solutions, if solutions exist, not the problems.  That’s what allows someone to be cool under pressure; the expectation of assured obstacles and the understanding that the only power such challenges have are those granted by the challenged.

In Hard Ready® Phase One, participants will be given exercises to better understand their own filters, expectations, challenges, and strengths.