Be Gritty and Ye Shall Receive

My forthcoming book is called When Grit’s Not Enough.?It’s about what to do when that combination of passion and perseverance stops serving you – something I have noticed with some elite athletes, coaches, and is becoming more prevalent during the rampant uncertainty brought on by COVID.

Yet...I wondered if that was really true - was I correct in thinking there was such a thing as overusing grit???And are there things we can do about it if we are?

So I asked an expert.?Angela Duckworth, author of the book Grit.

I found her on the internet, posed my questions, and what do you know??She not only answered my email but agreed to an interview.

Holy guacamole, batman!

The good news–for my book, anyway--is that there are no already-evident answers to the question about how much is too much grit, and no guaranteed ways not to turn your grit superpower into your kryptonite.

Nevertheless, Angela was kind enough to think that I was onto something – that there are ways I can help people get smarter with how to work with their grit.?I will be unpacking some of these ideas over the next few weeks.

In the meantime, here are a couple of snippets from my chat with Angela (yep, I think I can call her that now :))

?Grit is Not Mental Toughness.?I think that there is a confusion that's easy to make between being gritty and being insensitive to what's going on in yourself, like your body, your mind, what you're enjoying, what you're not.? Because I do think that grit becomes equated for a lot of people with mental toughness, which is not on the grit scale or what I set out to study.?But I understand there's a kind of [an assumption] like, "oh grit, that means ignoring all the signals that are coming in, that are saying, like, quit, quit, quit, stop, stop, stop, or let up a little bit on the gas."?So I think it's an important clarification to make.

There Is Such a Thing as Smart Quitting and it Involves Reflection, not Myopia.??I think smart quitting, it’s like, "upon reflection, this is not what I want to do.?I don't want to be training eight hours a day to do this." As opposed to if I woke up one day, and I was like, “I don't want to be a psychologist. I would rather be a pediatrician.”?I think that if it's really reflective, then that's smart, right??I think that unwise quitting is when it's myopic, "I lost twice so I'm gonna quit” or “I can't do it because it's hard.”

?I will share more from this chat with Angela Duckworth, but am also very interested in your thoughts about all things grit—when it works...and when it doesn’t.?Hearing from people about how they experience grit makes it real, helps my thinking, and will make my book better!!

Do you have a story about grit you’d like to share?? I would love to talk to you about it! Just signal your interest in the comments section - I will get in touch.

Also, if you would like to receive my newsletter focusing on how we can achieve high performance without hurting ourselves or our people, please let me know in the comments section and I will follow it up with you.

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