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57. Every Time You Surprise Yourself…You Inspire Yourself
SAS selection is designed to test you.
Any mental flaw, any physical failing will be exposed by the relentless series of challenges aimed at finding your breaking point. Lung-bursting cross-mountain marches through the snow, uphill sprints, carrying another recruit in a fireman’s lift up and down steep hills, often in driving rain, sometimes in sub-zero temperatures.
As selection goes on, these ‘beasting’ sessions get harder and harder.
And yet I also found that the more of them I came through in one piece (albeit exhausted and battered), the more easily I could cope with them. It was the SAS way of testing our mental resolve through physical battering.
Selection is all about realizing that the pain never lasts for ever. And every time I was tested and I hung on in there, the better I understood that it was just a question of doing it again - one more time - until someone eventually said it was the end, and I had passed.
I now know that unless you really, truly test yourself, you’ll never have any idea just how capable you can be. And with each small achievement, your confidence will grow.
Most people never reach their limit because they are never sufficiently tested.
This means I’ve got two good pieces of news for you.
The first is that whenever you do something beyond your ‘comfort zone’ and realize you are still standing, the more you will
believe
that the impossible is actually possible. And on the road to success, belief is everything.
And the second piece of news is that we all have much further to push ourselves than we might initially imagine. Inside us all, just waiting to be tested, is a better, bolder, braver version of who we think we are.
All you have to do is give it an opportunity to be unleashed.
So pick big targets and surprise yourself with how capable you really are deep down.
Remember David and Goliath? Rather than David, the young shepherd boy, looking at this giant of a warrior and thinking, ‘Yikes, he’s huge, I’m beat’ - he thought, ‘With a target that big, how can I possibly miss!’
Success, in life and adventure, is dependent on the retraining of our mind.
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Bear Grylls (A Survival Guide for Life: How to Achieve Your Goals, Thrive in Adversity, and Grow in Character)