By Craig Weller, CPT, US Navy SWCC
Special operations courses are designed to weed people out. In the Navy, the screening test just to qualify for these courses has about a 90 percent failure rate. From there, anywhere between 60 to 90 percent of candidates don’t make it through the course itself. Those who do make it, more than anything else, display the ability to just keep goingthrough a painfully discouraging process. They face a daily onslaught of being pushed to their limits: hypothermia, hypoxia, hypoglycemia, and sand-in-your-everything. Yet some persevere and ultimately graduate.
How do you stay motivated through something that’s designed to make you feel terrible, day after day? The answer is more complex than you might imagine. Contrary to what most people think, accomplishing big-picture dreams has very little to do with feeling motivated from moment to moment. It has even less to do with being good at something from the start. This is true whether you’re trying to get through a grueling selection course, a fat loss journey, a career change, or a marathon training plan. My story is a prime example.
Right after graduating high school in small town North Dakota, I joined the Navy. I volunteered for a Special Operations unit. When I left for boot camp, I didn’t know how to swim. As you can imagine, swimming is a pretty important skill in Naval Special Operations. My odds of success were near zero.
I learned to swim by taking the screening test, failing it, and going to an hour of stroke development to practice. I passed that test by 7 seconds on my third and final attempt. Then began two and half years of suffering. I spent 16 months in preparatory training and was 2 weeks from graduating my first Special Warfare Combatant Crewmember (SWCC) selection course when I failed a timed swim. Because I was so far along, I was given the option of repeating the entire course.
Before starting over, I spent four months in a BUD/S (Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL) development program. Then I went through SWCC selection again. This time, I graduated. Along the way, I watched thousands of people—nearly all better swimmers than me—fail out or quit. During this process, I learned the characteristics that help someone succeed. (I also learned the factors that lead to failure.) What I discovered surprised me: Initial talent was only a small piece of the picture, and physical fitness? It was only one of many factors. The best athletes often quit early and reliably.
As it turns out, where you start out is far less important than where you’re willing to go. One of the main differences between those who succeeded and those who didn’t was the word “yet”.
“I’m not strong enough. Yet.”
“I don’t know how to do this. Yet.”
“I can’t handle this. Yet.”
Like everyone else in the program, the people who graduated struggled plenty, suffered setbacks, and had bad days. But the difference maker? They were also the ones who managed to consistently do a difficult, discouraging thing for a long time in order to finally reach a long-term goal. Which then leads us to ask, How?
Here’s the secret: IT WASN’T MOTIVATION THAT GOT THEM THERE. Motivation might be what gets you started, but almost everything after that is just doing what needs to be done in the moment… until you eventually get where you want to be. Motivation may return at some point, but it’s never guaranteed. Given that, here’s 7 ways to keep moving forward even when you don’t feel motivated.
Doing the right thing when the right thing is hard isn’t limited to the tiny, bizarre world of special operations. It’s a universal concept. A new parent getting out of bed at 3 a.m. to soothe a screaming baby for the fifth night in a row isn’t enthusiastic about it. The entrepreneur spending their Friday night combing through bank statements and receipts isn’t madly in love with do-it-yourself accounting. The athlete putting in 5 a.m. workouts doesn’t hate warm blankets and sleep. But if not motivation, then what helps people do the hard stuff? People who consistently do the hard thing have several core ideals and practices in common. Here’s how you can adopt them yourself.
1). View life as a series of learnable skills, learn the skills you need to accomplish your aims, and practice those skills, again, and again, and again…: Refer back to the power of the word “yet.” Resilient, effective people don’t just “try harder.” Rather, they see any process as a skill that can be developed. Perhaps your self-talk turns toxic when you’re having a terrible day. Don’t just tell yourself to self-talk better. Identify the specific components of that process you can improve upon—and the contextual cues that will trigger you to do so.
Here’s how it might work: Identify a past experience when your self-talk became self-sabotage. Take that apart. What exactly was happening in your mind, and what were you doing? Decide on a specific practice that could be instituted in a similar situation in the future.
Perhaps when you were trying to get up for a 5 a.m. workout, you began mentally complaining and negotiating with yourself about getting out of bed. Your future practice: Instead of complaining about how tired you are, you replace that dialogue with a different narrative. You tell yourself that you’re supposed to feel tired when you’re waking up, and that this early morning is the path you chose as a necessary step toward doing the thing that you truly want to do. Or maybe you just replace the negative self-talk with a mantra or meaningful song lyric.
Whatever it is, be specific about what you’ll practice. Then, in the same way that a runner times their splits on the track, time your ability to maintain this new practice. If you can replace or alter your negative self-talk for five minutes before breaking down, that’s your split. Reset your timer and start over next time.
The starting point doesn’t matter nearly as much as your willingness to improve, little by little.
2). Prioritize systems over willpower: If motivation isn’t the answer, willpower must be what we need, right? Not quite. Here’s an example: When I was a student in the early portion of the Naval Special Warfare pipeline, I had to get up at 3 a.m. for workouts. Being late or missing a workout could mean being dropped from the program. I made it to the workouts on time, but not by making myself promises or being super-duper disciplined every day. I simply put my alarm clock on the other side of my room. I slept in a top bunk and had roommates, so when the alarm clock went off, I had to literally jump out of bed to shut it off. I removed the possibility of failure from the path. It didn’t matter if I felt like getting out of bed. I had to. Essentially, I created a system to help make getting out of bed feel like the obvious path forward—rather than an uphill slog. Setting the alarm clock across the room was my system.
Systems help us prioritize what to do and when to do it. Systems also remove a lot of the effort and willpower we think are required to get things done. This approach of shaping your environment to help yourself succeed works with any type of habit you’re struggling to stick to.
3). Separate your feelings from your identity: In BUD/S, I was once in a support role keeping an eye on other students in the middle of Hell Week. The students were about 3 days into the week and were given a brief nap in tents on the beach. I was assigned to watch them for medical issues and get them to walk the 100 yards or so to the bathroom—rather than peeing in the same sand we’d be doing pushups in the next day. One of those students stepped out of the tent and trudged past me toward the bathroom. His uniform was still wet with saltwater, and he shuffled along as if trying to shrink inward to avoid touching cold, wet cotton. He paused briefly in front of me, staring off into the distance, then burst into a full-body shudder.
With his eyes still affixed on the horizon, he said: “S**t I’m cold.” With that, he resumed his slow, steady walk to the gate. He was probably as miserably cold as he’d ever be in his life. He was hitting bottom, and he didn’t hide from it. He acknowledged what he was feeling and set it aside. Being cold was a passing, unpleasant thing, like bad weather. It wasn’t his identity, and it didn’t shape who he was or what he chose to do. Eventually, he graduated: A newly minted SEAL.
We often assume that our feelings should drive our behavior. That if we feel tired or sad or discouraged, we should do tired, sad, and discouraged things. Expressing your feeling is one thing, but allowing them to control your every action can lead you down some destructive paths. It doesn’t have to be that way. We can recognize and accept those feelings in the same way that we grab a jacket when we see storm clouds passing over. Our moment-to-moment feelings don’t have to determine who we are or what we choose to do. Simply knowing this can make it easier to carry on when we don’t feel like it.
Next week for part 2.
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