Cultivate Self-Compassion and Resilience by Doing Hard Things

As we all know, building resilience is crucial to overcoming hardships and thriving when faced with challenges. Resilient people are aware of situations, their emotional reactions, and the behavior of those around them. As a result, resilient people can work through hard times, learn from them, and grow stronger and more capable of overcoming hard things in the future. However, it always seems quite mysterious to me how one can cultivate resilience.

According to Psychology Today, resilience goes hand-in-hand with self-compassion.

"Self-compassion involves wanting health and well-being for oneself and leads to proactive behavior to better one's situation rather than passivity. And self-compassion doesn't mean that I think my problems are more important than yours. It just means I think my problems are also important and worthy of attention."

If resilience goes hand-in-hand with self-compassion, how can one foster self-compassion? A published study on Springer.com explains the relationship between physical activities and self-compassion.

The study concludes that “the relationship between physical activities and self-compassion was significant while investigating the effect of non-mind-and-body interventions and constructing a mechanism of physical activities and self-compassion can be done as future implications.”

I am a living example of how physical activities can help cultivate self-compassion and resilience.

I have been a marathon and ultra-marathon runner since 2012. But, looking back on the days before 2012, I was living a pretty plain life. After obtaining a master's degree from NYU in 2007, I had a 9-to-5 job on Wall Street; no hobbies, and no ambitions. I had worked for the same company and received an okay salary for seven years. It was all fine.

Something hit me on that marathon day that I NEEDED a change in my life.

In Nov 2011, I started running because I was inspired by runners in the 2011 NYC marathon while cheering for the race. Something hit me on that marathon day that I NEEDED a change in my life. You can watch the TEDx Talk about my journey to qualifying for the Boston marathon. Before Nov 2011, I rarely engaged in physical activities, let alone running. I was never a fan of running.

Truth be told, I once passed out during a running assessment in high school. The whole school knew about it, and I felt deeply humiliated and embarrassed. Running brought back that traumatic experience.

After the 2011 NYC marathon, I started running for 5 minutes daily because that was all I could do then. After that, I slowly built up to marathon-level fitness and completed a 60 km race in Nov 2012.

It is interesting to note that the change in my career came in 2013 when I realized I had stopped learning and growing for nearly five years. So, I went on studying and passing all the certificates from Google. I interviewed with over 30 agencies. They turned me down because I speak with an accent and had no prior experience. Finally, one agency took a chance on me. The rest is history.

Working at an early-stage startup requires mental strength, optimism, and resilience.

By 2016, I had completed six marathons, one 60 km race, one 50-mile race on Appalachian Trail, and one 100 km race. 2016 was critical for me because it was the first time I had a startup job in the United States. Working at an early-stage startup requires mental strength, optimism, and resilience. I remember I felt like throwing up every day for about a month after starting and told my friends that I was about to quit.

But, magically, I persevered, worked for two years, and grew the company to 20x before I left. All I could think of was the running and physical activities I did built resilience in me and carried me through all the stress and anxiety at work. My personal and career growth has been excelling since then.

Running is great, but it's not fulfilling to me anymore. So I want to engage in different and more challenging sport - triathlon, which means I have to face my fear, another trauma from childhood - swimming in deep water.

As a kid, I learned to swim by going to the pool daily and observing others. The swimming pool had a shallow side and a deep (8 feet) side. I had always been on the shallow side. When I finally picked up swimming, a kid challenged me to swim across the entire pool. Out of self-esteem and ego, I agreed to it without assessing my strength, skill, and risk.

At halfway, I was already exhausted, but I could not stop because the pool was so deep. I almost drowned but did not want to get laughed at afterward, so I persisted. Magically, I did swim across the other side, but I had no strength at all to get out, so the guard pulled me out of the pool. That traumatic feeling never leaves me. Even nowadays, I still need to withhold some level of control not to panic when I am swimming in the middle of a deep pool.

With the triathlon event that I am about to partake in Oct 2022, I have to swim in the ocean for 1.2 miles. Therefore, I need to learn how to navigate wind and current in the open water and keep calm while swimming. It's scary, but I am ready to conquer more challenging and hard things.

In my leadership role at my current startup, I have a lot of responsibilities to grow the company at an exponential pace while being a role model at the workplace to help the team cultivate resilience. I admitted to the team that the triathlon event scares the shit out of me, and I am showing the team how I break down a daunting task into smaller pieces and tackle them one by one. Eventually, I will achieve my goal.