In our previous post ‘How Courage Is a Skill and How It Can Be Developed‘ we explained that courage can be developed through exercise; and one of these is to expose oneself progressively to harder and tougher situations.
As a health reminder it is important to know how to stretch oneself without over-stretching to the point of rupture or to the point of becoming hurt.
Christopher Penn says it well in this post about his experience in the field of martial arts:
“That’s the danger of a lot of the “self-actualization” advice being given. It’s conceptually reasonable advice – shoot for your dreams – but the uncomfortable truth is that many of us, myself included, don’t always have a realistic perception of where we actually are with our skills, with our capabilities, with our resources. We can believe we have abilities or resources we don’t actually have, and when we try to make our leap, we fall far short of where we believe we should be.”
“So how do you benchmark yourself? You put yourself in adverse conditions that are reasonably safe and you work on breaking your delusions until you know where you are. The easiest way to do that is to try with a reasonably low risk project that forces you to put all your skills to the test.”
It is important to stretch oneself outside one’s comfort zone, and it is also important not to over-stretch so as to avoid to get hurt. The only way is to test the limits and know where to pause for a while. It is only possible to identify this limit by trial and error – and most importantly, by staying conscious of your own reactions, of being aware of your own self.
