What "adaptability" means when your life is falling apart

You're in it.

You felt good to start with, but now your breathing has gone. You're at the part where you're negotiating with yourself about whether to stop and take just one break. You're daydreaming about the moment you get to stop. You'd love to just do 5 instead of another 10, but you don't.

The negotiation. You're not deciding whether to continue or not.

You're deciding whether to believe the voice that says "I should stop."

Every second is a decision.

The buzzer goes. You take a big breath. The voices leave your head, and you feel accomplished. You walk around the room and say, "Great job," to everyone in it.

"That was so fun."

"I needed that."

"That was hard, but good."

Lines that are circling the room.

You get in the car, wind the windows down, put your favourite song on and let the endorphins run. You often have your best ideas here, because your mind is the clearest it's been all day. You're excited to do it again.

You have completely forgotten about the voices.

You don't notice you've learned anything until a year later, when something is falling apart. You're in something so deep that all you can think about is the other side, and you recognise the feeling. Not because the gym prepared you deliberately, but because you've had that argument with yourself a few hundred times and you know how it ends.

You're so familiar with the voice inside your head that you know you have a choice about whether to listen to it. You've done this so many times, hard things, that you have real control over these thoughts. They don't control you. You know what to listen to and what not to. You know the difference between head and gut. Thinking and feeling.

Your life feels like it's falling apart.

But you know how to navigate your thoughts. You know you'll get through it and come out the other side. You know that although we don't want things to fall apart, this is going to shape the way you look at life. And you have complete control over that.

You're adaptable.

You've had to adapt before. You have the choice to choose the thoughts you want to believe.

Your adaptability transfers. The discomfort passes. The urge to quit peaks and diminishes. You can show up and be resilient when everything feels broken.

The gym doesn't teach you how to have the hard conversation. It doesn't fix grief. It doesn't give you the answers you need when life feels like it's falling apart.

But it lets you get to know your own thoughts. It hands you everyday opportunities to choose which ones you believe. It shows you that hard things let you see differently on the other side.

In a world where so much is decided for you- your work, your daily tasks, timing you can't influence, things that happen outside your control- training is the one place where effort and outcome still connect. An hour that's yours. Something you feel in control of.

The honest truth.

There's a version of this that's avoidance. Escape.

It's the one moment of the day where you're totally present. For some, they would say it's their version of meditation. That's not a bad thing.

But the tell is what happens after you leave.

Do you walk out more capable of dealing with the things outside training, or did you just buy yourself an hour away from them?

Nobody enjoys the hard thing in the moment. The value shows up in small moments during or afterwards, when you're glad you did it. Hard years and hard months have the same shape. You don't get the meaning in real time. You get it later. You become someone through the process, and you only find out who afterwards.

In that moment when you want to stop, and everything hurts, you learn the urge to stop is not the same as being unable to continue.

This practice compounds. Your ability to adapt when life feels like it's falling apart will show up. You get to choose which thoughts you believe and which you don't, and stay adaptable to whatever life asks of you.

Abs 🖤