Understanding the mental process behind wanting to quit is the first and most important step into helping your children persevere and making the best choices.
Below, Read 2 different views on quitting and their suggestions on handling the situation.
Part 1: by Alex Lickerman, M.D.
At the start of my runs I’d manage to get into a good rhythm, a good stride, and send my mind off to the places it tends to go, managing the discomfort pretty well—-until I rounded the last corner of the large loop I take around downtown Chicago. Then I’d notice something curious: my mind would return from wherever it had gone and begin to think about finishing the run, projecting itself forward several city blocks to where my route ended. And then I’d abruptly find myself wanting desperately to stop. And usually, I would.
Once I’d begun to think about the end of my run, reaching the end of my run—and therefore the end of my pain—was all I could think about. The idea that my pain was about to end became so enticing that my ability to withstand it dramatically declined.
Of course, the amount of pain I was feeling at that moment was no worse than the amount I’d felt the moment before. What changed was my ability to handle it. Why? Because when my mind started to visualize the end of the run, it shifted from managing the pain my body was feeling to preparing for it to end. And in preparing for it to end, its ability to resist the influence of that pain rapidly fell apart.
I think this sequence occurs often in other areas of life as well. From the moment we embark on any endeavor numerous reasons immediately present themselves that push us to quit (e.g., fear of failure, fear of success, laziness, failing to believe in ourselves, etc.). One way of thinking about why we don’t quit is that other, more powerful motivations to keep going command our attention more (e.g., the desire to improve our level of fitness or reduce our level of fatness). The idea to quit remains present in our minds as long as reasons to quit exist, but the likelihood that we will quit only increases when we start to pay attention to them.
We don’t end up quitting because we find ourselves facing too many obstacles or obstacles that are too strong. We end up quitting because we’re too weak. I firmly believe, however, the inflection point at which we can no longer avoid paying attention to the idea of quitting—that is, the point at which our strength fails us—can be changed. We can become stronger by challenging our weakness even if at first we don’t succeed. Increasing resilience, both mental and physical, is an arduous process that’s rarely linear. That is, it’s a process filled with stops and starts, periods of progress and periods of regression.
I quit running before I finished my route many mornings at first. But the benefit of the effort I made in running up to the point I quit weren’t nullified by my quitting. Those efforts strengthened me enough over time that eventually I became capable of meeting my goal consistently, i.e., reached my previous level of fitness. But only because I didn’t allow my quitting on any one day to stop me from going back out the next.
This same principle applies any time we make an effort to break new ground in any arena. The key to success is simply to keep coming back for more—even if you quit short of your goal several times over—until you find yourself strong enough not to give in when your body or your mind are telling you to. Just because you do quit—even a hundred times in a row—the experiences you have up until the various points at which you do are the very things that develop the resilience you need to win in the end. What if you need to fail a hundred times to gain the ability to succeed on the 101st?
The risk of becoming grounded in self-defeating thoughts when you’re defeated by yourself (i.e., you choose to give up), we should note, is far greater than when you’re defeated by something else . It may very well be psychologically easier to get yourself to try again in the latter case than in the former because in the former you’re far more likely to buy into a narrative that defines you as a quitter and therefore undeserving of success.
But this is a false narrative. Even if you failed because you chose to give up, you can still try again. You must constantly remind yourself that having tried at all has increased your chances of ignoring the voices in your head urging you to quit the next time. Always remember, the key to victory is strength, and the key to developing strength is trying again, no matter what the reason you failed before.
-Alex Lickerman, M.D., author of The Undefeated Mind: On the Science of Constructing an Indestructible Self.
Part 2: by Aaron Hoos
We should also spend some time thinking about how not to quit. Have you ever quit something? I have.
I’ve quit jobs and clients and projects and workout routines and business goals and personal goals. Sometimes quitting is the right thing to do (i.e. an unhealthy business relationship) but most of the time, quitting is the wrong thing to do.
We know that focusing on something to completion is good, quitting before we’re done is bad and we know that we’ll probably feel regret from quitting…
… So why do we quit anyway??
When I’ve quit things that I shouldn’t have quit, there’s a lot that goes on in my mind prior to the quitting, and I’m sharing my thought process because I suspect that maybe you’ve thought this way, too:
I never start out thinking that I want to quit. I usually start out thinking that I want to succeed. Before long, I start to hit the hard part of whatever it is I’m doing. My thinking goes like this:
- “Wow, this is hard.”
- “This is really hard”.
- “This is harder than I imagined it to be.”
- “Is the cost worth it?”
- “I still have a long way to go before I’m done.”
- “I’m not sure I have what is needed to finish.”
… and as soon as I think that, I’ve basically quit and am just going through the motions for a little longer before I finally give up.
What seems to be happening here is: We’re on a journey from start to finish but because the task is difficult, our minds want to make our lives easier. (Sort of a survival instinct, I guess). So it builds a bridge of logic toward the easiest, fastest, safest, most pain-free ending. It seems like our minds chain together logical statements toward the inevitable conclusion of quitting.
So here are some mental tools to help me (and you) overcome that problem:
- I’m pretty sure that our tolerance for pain/discomfort/hardship is a sort of muscle that we can strengthen by facing and embracing pain/discomfort/hardship. With physical exercise, we tear apart the muscle so that it rebuilds itself to be stronger. I wonder if it’s similar with our resolve not to quit. If that is true (and I think it is) then we need to gain exposure to activities that deliver a little bit of discomfort and then increase the level of discomfort until we can tolerate a lot.
- Being aware of the bridge of logic that our minds are building will also help. By being conscious about what we are thinking, and then making sure that we are “forcing” our minds to keep thinking positively through the challenging activity should help us redirect that bridge of logic.
- One reason I’ve given up some things is because I haven’t spent enough time at the beginning envisioning success and burning with a passion to achieve it. A few minutes before the project or task or activity can help shape our vision.
- You need an end goal in mind before you start. If you don’t have a firmly-established goal, you won’t know when to stop and you’ll be tempted to stop sooner than if you have a goal.
- One of my most frequently-used tools is some kind of countdown. So when I’m working out, and I have a minute to do a difficult, repetitive task, I watch the clock and countdown with it toward 0. Or, when I’m writing a project that I don’t want to write, I set a word goal and every word “counts down” toward 0. Creating these “mini goals” help to make seemingly insurmountable challenges to be a lot easier.
- This is something I do when I’m working on a business-related project I want to quit: It’s easy to get distracted with other things — new ideas, stuff you have to check on the internet, etc. So I keep a piece of paper handy and list those things as I go. This gets them off of my mind and even though I want to do them right now, I end up building up a nice a little list of rewarding activities to do after I’ve completed my project.
– Aaron Hoos