Joe De Sena - 10 Rules for Resilience: Mental Toughness for Families

For our parents and friends and people who have helped raise us and who have encouraged and supported our family over the years. We couldnt have done anything without you.

You know what makes me sick to my stomach? When I hear grown people say that kids have changed. Kids havent changed. Kids dont know anything about anything. Were the ones that have changed.

FRANK MARTIN , head basketball coach
at the University of South Carolina

M y name is Joe De Sena. I am a father of four and the founder of Spartan, an extreme endurance brand with events in forty-four countries. I like to call us the Tesla of tough stuffinnovative, life-changing industry disruptors who put on events that range from obstacle course races to three-mile sprints in elite stadiums to the Spartan Death Race, days and miles of unexpected physical challenges that test participants character and resilience. Lets be clear: my company is not about building biceps; its about building better humans. Training, racing, and routine are all a Trojan horse for being ready for anything, including lifes inevitable challenges.

I am in the business of transformation. My goal is to rip one hundred million people off the couch. Ive worked on Wall Street, so trust me when I say there are easier ways to make money. But I discovered through Spartan that I could make an immediate impact on people. I was amazed to see that so many competitors are capable of stepping up and doing the difficult work of preparing mentally and physically for extreme challengeseven those who had seemingly given up on themselves. When given the choice to quit or keep going, many kept going. I was hooked, and Spartan has become a thriving business.

At the start of 2020, the Spartan team and I looked at the year ahead and thought, This will be the most extraordinary year in the history of the company. We had just acquired Tough Mudder, a successful obstacle course race company and our competitor for many years. We had booked our Spartan World Championship in Abu Dhabi and had an entire schedule of events slated for every corner of the globe. We had invested in bringing on talented employees in every division of the company. We were primed and ready for a tremendous year of transforming lives and helping our community get stronger, tougher, and more resilient. All the hard work, sacrifices, and time spent away from my family working like an animal were finally paying off.

A kick in the ass wasnt on the agenda. But we most certainly got one. In March 2020, we were forced to cancel every Spartan race planned for that month. Okay, I thought, well be back up and running by the summer. We can weather this pandemic storm. When July rolled around, we canceled the rest of our events for the entire year. This meant not hundreds but thousands of races around the world: thousands of events that Spartan athletes had spent months training for. How could my companywhich trains people to not social distance or isolate, to come together, get dirty, and get physically and emotionally toughsurvive this?

Life doesnt always give you what you want or even what you need. Sometimes it just gives you obstacles to see if you are ready for them. You have two options when you face an unexpected obstacle. You can put your head down and shut out the world, pretend that difficult roadblock isnt there, or you can rise, look up, and take those obstacles head-on.

We did the latter at Spartan, and it has us better positioned and more ready for the future than I could have ever imagined. We made technological innovation changes to our business in only a couple of months in 2020 that I thought would take us years, if they could even happen at all. We held firmly to our mission and sought to reach people with the messages of accountability, change, and discomfort, even if we couldnt bring them together to race. We were forced to simplify, take a long look in the mirror, and do what we do best: persevere. Dont get me wrong. It was hard. We had to rethink how we would do every part of our business in the future, from racing to training to telecommuting.

You might think I hated having all of those hard conversations and facing all of those hard realities as I mapped out an uncertain future for a company Id given the last two decades of my life to. The truth is, at fifty-two years old, I really enjoy hard stuff. It makes me more resilient, more capable. I know the truth: Everything is hard. Life is hard. Health is hard. Burpees are hard. Eating right is hard. Honesty is hard. Integrity is hard. Changing habits is hard. Parenting is hard.

Because my job puts me in such close contact with people who are desperate to transform their lives, I also have the unique privilege of seeing what else is hard: Obesity is hard. Depression and anxiety are hard. Complacency is hard. Mediocrity is hard.

I tell everyone, Choose your hard.

Perhaps the most important lesson that I learned in 2020 is that lessons are everywhere, and if you want to learn, you have to open your eyes and your ears and pay attention.

I believe the reason more people visited the Spartan website in 2020 than ever beforea year when I worried we would go under because no one would seek out the content of a brutal obstacle course company in the middle of a pandemicis because we teach everyday people how to build a warriors resilience and to persevere in the face of lifes challenges.

But Ill be honest: the word resilience has become tough for me. It feels meaningless nowadays because its been co-opted by every marketing team in every industry to draw customers in. Frankly, so have the words grit, toughness, and strength. Marketing companies would like you to believe that purchasing a T-shirt or product that says RESILIENCE grants you the gift. They want you to think that you can stare at your computer screen, study your way into resilience, and workshop your way into grit. Business blogs want you to think resilience is about productivity and optimization.

No.

Im here to tell you that resilience is as pure a character trait as they comeyou cant buy it, and you dont stumble on it. It takes work. You know it when youve got it. Im talking about immediately accessible, survival-of-the-fittest, endure-the-pain-and-power-through, adapt-and-respond resilience, the kind you need to protect your health and your family and to stay calm when the world goes to shit. I call it true resilience.

Resilience is the ability to respond to some kind of adversity as if the adversity didnt happen. Its the ability to press on. Picture an athlete running one hundred miles on dirt trails. At mile 50, the trail is suddenly covered in fresh snow. The resilient runner runs directly into the snowy path and keeps running as if nothing has changed, head down, arms swinging, stride never missing a beat. Despite this new element, this adversity, the runner presses on. What Im proposing to you in this book is the concept of true resilience, which is the ability to not only walk through adversity but to use it to grow. True resilience looks similar to resilienceour runner is still running directly into the snowy path without missing a beat. But with true resilience, the snow is a welcome sight. The runner sees the snow as an opportunity for growth and uses this new challenge as training for mental toughness and fortitude. The runner stomps through, at full speed, and emerges stronger and tougher than before.

True resilience develops from a body and mind that have been carved out of challenge and failure. True resilience allows you to persevere with confidence and calmness through circumstances most people would consider overwhelming or downright impossible. Yes, youll use true resilience in the workplace, but also with your family. And it will help you get through health problems, fitness challenges, anxiety, a shifting economy,