The Difference Between Perseverance & Stubbornness (and why it matters...)

Perseverance is defined as “…persistence in doing something despite difficulty or delay in achieving success” – a great quality to have, we’d all agree.

In fact, Dr Angela Duckworth’s early research – and the basis for her book, Grit – identifies perseverance as being the key determinant in how successful people go on to be, more important even than talent or intelligence.

It was also Michael Jordan’s core philosophy – sure, he had talent & skill, but it wasn’t always a smooth road for him. As those who’ve watched The Last Dance will know, his philosophy was definitely that talent alone isn’t enough & that success had to be earned through determined, consistent practice. Perseverance.

Perseverance in Business

Translating it into business terms, perseverance means not letting setbacks or failures, well, set us back or stop us in our tracks. It means working out how to do it – whether that’s by honing our skill until we get it right or by finding creative solutions to seemingly unsurmountable problems.

Dr Carol Dweck’s work on the Growth Mindset is helpful here and is a good parallel to the Grit concept. Her work found that learners who saw wrong answers as part of the learning process were more successful in the long term than those who saw them as failures. As she neatly sums it up, the difference between Not & Not Yet.

It’s easy to see how this applies to children & students on their learning journeys. Saying that a wrong answer should be countered by further study seems commonsense – who wouldn’t do that? Yet too often we shy away from the same philosophy as adults. I know I (almost) did in the early days of running my own business, when things weren’t going well & nothing seemed to work.

In those early days, when I’d just made the transition from being employed in a senior leadership position, with all the status & credibility that comes with it, to running my own business where I was literally learning everything from scratch, without the safety net of a team around me and in completely uncharted waters, there was a lot I found hard.

Sales conversations & converting interest into signed contracts were things I’d never had to worry about before – and as I found out, to begin with, I wasn’t very good at them either. Opportunities seemed to just slip through my fingers, prospects went elsewhere. Everything that could go wrong, did. And I felt like a failure. I started telling myself I was no good at being an entrepreneur & I couldn’t do it. I was firmly stuck in Not.

Fortunately for me, a well focused coaching session pointed out that my mindset was the main problem. Sure, I still had lots to learn but that wasn’t the real problem. Until I converted Not to Not Yet, I wasn’t going to make any progress.

Once I got to Not Yet, I was able to analyse the situation – to work out what I still needed to learn, to understand what was working (so I could do more of it) and what wasn’t (so I could change it), and to put my effort into learning, growing & developing instead of just beating up on myself.

I was able to practice perseverance – to stick with it & not give up, even when it was hard (and it was in those early months, so hard!), to pull myself through to the other side & slowly but surely climb up that hill to a successful business.

And the two companions that kept me going were Humility & Self Compassion. Humility that as accomplished as I was in my old role, I was a novice in my new one and needed to put myself back in learning mode, and Self Compassion that we all have to start somewhere, that no one is perfect, that getting it right first time isn’t expected!

So, yes, perseverance is a great quality to have. But is it always our friend? Like all great qualities, taken to extreme it can risk tripping us up. And that’s where stubbornness comes in – the tipping point between sticking with it and getting stuck.

Stubbornness is variously defined as “…refusing to change one’s mind or course of action despite legitimate pressure to do so; unyielding; unreasonably obstinate or unmoving”

The Harvard Business Review describes stubbornness as ‘the ugly side of perseverance’, the space we occupy when we stick to things that no longer make any sense, when we remain unmoved when everyone else has seen a different, better way. It’s a sign that we are at risk of being inflexible, dogmatic – and sometimes just plain wrong!

The key here is the reasonableness of our position. There’s nothing wrong per se with standing our ground, but if we’re doing it for the wrong reasons (pride or jealousy, for example), that’s when it starts to become harmful. If we fail to be curious about other perspectives and become closed to even considering other possibilities, or we refuse to examine the evidence we risk allowing our persistence to flip over into stubbornness and ultimately harm us.

Sure, if we aren’t persistent enough, if we don’t persevere long enough, we risk stopping short & missing our goals. But equally if become stubborn, if we don’t know when to flex & change tack, at best we risk wasting our time & energy on trying to make the wrong things work, heading in the wrong direction and we risk blinding ourselves to better solutions. At worst, we risk alienating others who are trying to help us, leaving us on our own at a time when we need support the most.

From experience, I’ve found two simple things can help us stay on the right side of the line:

1.??????Exercising curiosity – allowing our minds to explore the questions of ‘what if’ and ‘I wonder how’

2.??????Cultivating flexibility – remembering that it’s the destination we’re aiming for and that the journey is how we get there, not an end in itself. In other words, being adaptable to changing the ‘how’ whilst staying focused on achieving the ‘what’.

I’ve been considering this question – when does persistence become stubbornness – quite a bit recently.

As I’ve written elsewhere, I’m on a Run Every Day (RED) challenge at the moment. I’m now over halfway through the year and haven’t missed a day yet. The last month has been difficult. I pulled my quad muscle at the start of June and it’s been really bothering. Eventually I made an appointment with a physio and – as expected – he told me to stop running while it recovered.

And that’s what had stopped me making the appointment sooner, when my leg first started hurting. I didn’t want to stop running & lose my hard-earned 168 day running streak. I was being stubborn, thinking that if I just ignored it, it would go away. I knew the first line of treatment would be rest and that wasn’t on my agenda.

By the time I finally got to the appointment, I was resigned that it might be necessary – but I hadn’t given up quite yet. I told him about my running challenge and asked if there was another way to fix things. We debated and he came up with an alternate recovery option – shorter distances, no downhills & leg strengthening & stretching exercises coupled with regular massage, manipulation & acupuncture torture from him. With the proviso that if it wasn’t better in 2 weeks, I had to stop running and rest.

Long story short, I followed my physio’s advice – his alternate negotiated advice that is! – shortened my runs, found flat routes (no mean feat when you live halfway up a mountain) & diligently did my exercises. It wasn’t as much fun as my normal running routine and it took a bit of getting used to but I’m pleased to say it has worked. I’ve managed to keep running throughout & my leg is (almost) fully recovered. I’ve had to skip a few of my intermediate running targets – weekly & monthly mileage has been off target and my times have definitely slowed up – but I haven’t missed a day of running and my RED streak is now 190 days plus.

Being persistent gave me the courage to ask for alternate solutions. Being flexible allowed me to keep the real goal in focus (Run Every Day, not mileage or speed), humility meant I was willing to learn again how to keep myself healthy & run safely with my body in mind, and self-compassion allowed me to know that if necessary giving up the grand idea wasn’t the end of the world and didn’t make any less courageous.

And I’m still running every day…