Are you fed up? Are you fed up with your results not matching your efforts? Fed up with plateaus or nagging injuries you can’t escape? Fed up with conflicting health information? Fed up with not having time to workout or not knowing what to do? Fed up with social pressures to look a certain way? Fed up with falling off track yet again?

It’s easy to get fed up with your fitness and just give up completely. As coaches, we know the path of frustration all too well. We are not immune to it as we have just as many frustrations as you do. 

It would be great if we could rid our world of frustrations, but then we’d also be ridding ourselves of growth and transformation. It’s our obstacles that by definition, get in our way, and cause us to grow and learn when we get frustrated.

This is a lesson my wife and I are constantly trying to teach our kids in their homeschool environment. Recently, my daughter was working on an art assignment for school. She was frustrated once again and was about to toss yet another draft into the trash.

Shannon told her to stop, and gave her this golden advice. Shannon said, “Arielle, there is a point in every artist’s painting where they think it looks awful and they want to throw it away. I do this with almost every painting I do, even now. You will think it’s so bad that you start to wonder why you even started painting it in the first place. Even the most successful artists go through this point. But that’s the point, you have to work past that point and keep going. The best artists know how to work through that point to make something they’re proud of.”

I know Shannon was talking to Arielle at that moment, but I felt like she was speaking right to me. I had so many rough drafts that have never made it to the publish button. Many sit in Google drive, completely abandoned, wondering if they’ll ever get the call to the big leagues.

In the gym, I’ve seen too many people throw their rough drafts of their transformations away because they couldn’t get past a point of frustration. An injury knocks them back from a ton of progress, or an InBody scan doesn’t give them the results they had hoped for. 

It’s truly sad when you know someone is on a path of changing their life and possibly changing their kids’ lives, and they throw it away like that balled up scrap paper into the wastebasket. Or to use my more modern analogy, letting it die on Google drive.

We let frustration win and keep us from the growth we were supposed to have. I’ve talked openly about the frustrations we’ve gone through as we learned our son was on the autism spectrum. If I had not met that obstacle, I wouldn’t have worked so hard to become a better parent for my kids.

I read so many books to try and become a better parent to Dylan and Arielle. One of those books gave me some great advice on frustration. That book is called, “Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be” by Dr. Becky Kennedy.

Dr. Becky writes about how important it is to normalize difficulty for our kids and help build their frustration tolerance. If we can improve frustration tolerance we’ll work harder to solve problems, not give up as easily, and pursue our personal goals.

If you don’t have kids, keep reading because this is incredibly relevant to the way you were raised as a kid. So many of our habits as adults were formed when we were kids. We picked up the habits of our parents and/or whoever we were around most.

One of the ways we built frustration tolerance as kids was by witnessing it in our parents. 

This brings to light a very funny paradox with frustration tolerance. We want our kids to have it, but our reactions often display the opposite. 

We want our kids to be better with failing and learning to overcome obstacles. We want them to have patience through their problems and make the right choices after they think through them. But in this process we’ll use wording, like “why can’t you just get this?!” “what don’t you understand?!” “stop complaining!” “just answer the question!” “how is this that hard?!”

I know I’ve used ALL of the above phrases in homeschooling and in coaching them in sports.

Dr. Becky says it like this in her book, “If we want our kids to develop frustration tolerance, we have to develop tolerance for their frustration. It’s an inconvenient truth, I know. Sometimes, when my child is really struggling with something, I remind myself that she’s looking at me and absorbing my relationship with her frustration, and this forms the foundation for her own relationship with her frustration.”

So you may not have kids yourself, but who helped you develop your relationship with frustration when you were younger? 

You may not be saying those above phrases to your kids, but are you saying them to yourself? 

“Why can’t you just get this?” you say to yourself. You wonder how you could possibly plateau once again or mess up that bad. Even in the absence of an impatient onlooker, you’ll create your own within you.

Dr. Becky gives this advice to parents and I think it’s helpful when dealing with ourselves as well. She says, “Beyond any strategy or script I offer in this chapter, the most impactful thing we can do with our kids is to show up in a calm, regulated, non-rushed, non-blaming, non-outcome-focused way—both when they are performing difficult tasks and when they are witnessing us perform difficult tasks.” She adds that if we want our kids to slow down and take a deep breath, those words are most effective when we’re first taking that deep breath ourselves.

No matter what obstacle you or your kids are going through, show up for them, and for yourself, with calmness and compassion. It’s not an easy task and takes a renewed commitment each time. It’s a commitment I make each morning through peaceful time and prayer.

Your frustration tolerance can get better and can get you through the rough drafts of life you just want to throw away or abandon. 

Next time you’re fed up, get fired up, for the change that awaits on the other side of another big obstacle.

It’s never easy, but it’s always worth it.

-Coach Tony