I think it goes without saying that we are inevitably going to come across obstacles and challenges which make the road ahead of us a little bumpy. This is why learning how to persevere through those rough patches is so incredibly crucial as we go about trying to achieve our goals!

Hey Everyone! Let’s Learn How to Persevere

I thought that today would be a good day to discuss the topic of perseverance. In my opinion, learning how to persevere is essential if we want to achieve our goals and personal success.

Basically, perseverance is a skill that helps us to persist towards our goals despite being faced with obstacles and challenges. Though perseverance doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be successful in life, it definitely helps. And better yet, this is not a difficult skill to learn and develop, you just have to put in the effort.

So take the time you need to invest in this skill. Learning how to persevere ensures that we still with our biggest life goals a continue progressing towards them. I believe that this is a crucial skill for a happy life.

Before we jump into today’s article, watch this TED talk I found for you by Angela Duckworth. I’ve read her book “Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance” and loved it. Here she discusses a few ideas from her book and how qualities such as grit and perseverance might help predict your academic and professional success.

Angela’s Book “Grit” on How to Persevere

If you enjoyed the talk, you may enjoy Angela’s book as well. I certainly did. I think it’ll be good for people seeking to develop perseverance. It’ll also be interesting to those of you who are interested in mindset-related topics.

I’ve posted the link for the book below so if you’re interested, go ahead and read some of the reviews.

How to Develop Perseverance

Achieving success on any level, or any goal is always going to require us to make plans, follow through and execute that plan, and persevere through the obstacles. As Angela Duckworth outlined in the video above, developing this grit and a growth mindset is one of the most important predictors of our success.

This is because sure, a good plan helps you take action, learning how to persevere with that plan and overcome the associated obstacles is key. That famous quote, “hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard”, seems to suit this situation extremely well. Only those who stick with their goals are the ones who eventually achieve them!

Lucky for you, perseverance can be taught, and it can be learned. You’ll gain the information you need throughout the remainder of the post. Below, I’m going to walk through the steps that I took to help me learn how to persevere towards academic and personal success:

1)    Clarify Your Goals

Make sure you’re setting SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound) goals for yourself. Also, it’s so important for you to know and understand exactly what this goal is important to you, how achieving it will benefit you or others, and what the consequences of failing to achieve this goal would be. The path to meeting your goals will be more clear if you take the time to clarify them this way, and this will make it easier for you to persevere.

Take the time to outline your plan and the steps that you will take along your way to achieving this goal. Maybe even consider creating a timeline for yourself to keep you accountable and on track. Or, try creating a mental roadmap of where you want your actions to take you to guide you along your journey.

Through all of this, remember that there are not many overnight successes. Most people took the time to make these types of plans and learned hot to persevere through the challenges they faced on their path to achieving them. Believe that if you persevere you will achieve it.

2)    Determine How You Will Combat Uncertainty & Obstacles

I hinted to this above, you will inevitable faced bumps in the road on your path to success. This is just something that you won’t be able to avoid. So take my advice and learn how to plan for those obstacles that will complicate your journey.

Again, the mental map can help you here. If you plan for the obstacles that you’re likely to come across as you attempt to achieve your goals, you can mentally prepare for them. This can help you to develop an action plan to remind yourself how to persevere in these difficult situations. If you do this, these obstacles will not catch you off guard and.

For example, I have to do a lot of writing in my profession. There are a lot of challenges that I expect to face throughout this process, such as writers’ block. Because I know that I will likely be facing this obstacle from time to time I developed an action plan for overcoming it. You can do this with your goals also!

If you create this mental action plan, the majority of the obstacles and challenges you face will be ones you expected and are prepared to overcome. This will go a long way the helping you persevere towards your goals. And the more you practice this skill, the easier it will get for you.

3)    Celebrate the Small Steps Towards Your Goals

Sometimes looking at your goal from strictly a big picture perspective can be overwhelming. Doing this makes it feel like all your small victories aren’t getting you any closer to your overall goal. Most of our goals tend to be long-term, so trying to judge them through short-term efforts is the wrong approach.

Try to keep in mind that these small efforts and achievements set the foundation for your future success. So celebrate these small steps and victories, congratulate yourself and reward your progress. This might just make learning how to persevere a fun thing for you!

If you hired a construction team to build you a new house, and then you judged their success based on how the house looked after the first week, you’d be pretty disappointed. The ‘house’ wouldn’t look like much at that point because it would mostly just be a foundation. But of course, the foundation would eventually make the rest of the house possible. By the same token, it would be silly to judge your short-term progress based on long-term measurements.

Set milestones for yourself. For example, if your goal was to be able to do 20 consecutive pull-ups in the gym you could set milestones to reward yourself after you were able to do 10, 15, and then 20 consecutively.

This should go a long way to either improving or maintaining your moral and enthusiasm through difficult and challenging times. Celebrating your small victories and accomplishments can go

4)    Be Mindful of Your Negative Thoughts

Seems like given doesn’t it?

If you’re thinking about yourself in a negative way you’re much less likely to persevere. Learning how to become mindful of your negative thoughts will go a long way towards showing you how to persevere. So stop telling yourself that “you can’t do this”, “you’re not good enough to achieve this goal”, or “this person is so much better than you”.

Replace those negative thoughts with positive ones. Start telling yourself that “you can achieve the goals you’ve set out for yourself”, “you’re just as capable as anybody else”, and that “you have what it takes to become successful”.

The time that this small habit will be most crucial is when you fail. It might just be a small set-back, but failure is when we begin to question ourselves. At least this has been the case in the past for me. It’s these moments that you’ll be tested. Be aware, and be ready to combat your negative thoughts and replace them with positive ones.

5)    Learn from Your Mistakes

How many times have you heard this? Learn from your mistakes!

I’ll say it one final time here, there will be setbacks as you strive towards your goals in life. That’s inevitable. But utilize those setbacks and make them work to your advantage.

If you confront an unexpected challenge along the way, take note of it so that you can develop a mental action plan you can use if this obstacle comes up again in the future. Your mistakes can teach you how to persevere in this sense, so don’t waste them.

Don’t be ashamed of your mistakes. I truly believe that those of us who end up becoming the most successful in life often tend to also have persevered through the most failures.

In fact, you can even turn your mistakes into victories of learning. Be unashamedly proud of your mistakes and tell your friends about them and laugh together. So take the time to examine your mistakes and your failures. Use them to help you improve for the future so that you are able to continue persevering with ease.

6)    Don’t Get Distracted by the Noise

There’s a lot of things that are going to distract you on your path to success. Things are going to change and people are going to question you and try to pull you down, and you’re going to have to learn how to persevere and cope with those challenges.

The modern world is fast-paced, that’s just the reality of our situation. We are exposed to more distractions than ever, heck, most of us walk around with the internet literally in our pockets all day every day. Remaining focused on your goals takes real discipline.

The hardest part about this I find is that the majority of the noise we’re exposed to is negative. I’m not too sure why people are so upset nowadays, but I’ve definitely noticed a shift. Either that or I’ve just become more aware and mindful of it as I’ve matured.

The fact that people take time out of their day to criticize and spread negative comments towards you really is sad. And remember that when it happens. Try to take the high road over the negative noise that, don’t waste your energy trying to combat it. That’s energy you could dedicate towards your own goals.

Moral of the story, learning how to persevere often also means learning how to effectively handle all the negative noise you’ll be exposed to on your path to success. Remember that you’re a strong and capable individual, that noise has nothing on you.

7)    Take Care of Your Balanced Lifestyle

This is a big one. People still constantly underestimate the importance of a well-balanced lifestyle. If you’re unbalanced, you’re going to feel as though you’re spending your entire life in one area. This could be too much work, to much focus on money, too much time socializing, or really anything.

If you lack balance, you will eventually lose patience with your lifestyle. Think about it, you can probably put up with something that annoys you if you were only having to cope with it every so often right? That’s no problem I think a lot of us feel that way. However, think about having to deal with the exact same problems on a continual basis. Now, this is where people begin to get really frustrated.

If we’re constantly coping with the same challenges, eventually we’ll get fed up with them and lose motivation. So make sure you’re taking care of your balanced lifestyle. This action will definitely help you learn how to persevere

8)    Focus More On Things You Can Influence

This is a tip that I’ve found has really helped me on my journey of learning how to persevere. The more you try to control things that you just can’t, or the more you get upset about them, the less energy you’ll have to dedicate to persevering.

So focus in on what you can control, such as your actions and your responses. Don’t waste your time and energy on things you can’t control. I’ve even got a post on this topic, “Let go of what you cannot “Let go of what you cannot change” Check it out if you’re interested.

9)    Keep Yourself Healthy

When you’re healthy, you’re able to operate at your peak performance. Fewer obstacles will hold you back and keep you down. You’ll have the energy to overcome these challenges you face! Pretty straightforward right?

Healthy living = more energy = more ability to persevere. It’s a really simple formula haha.

And this goes for more than just your physical health also. It certainly includes your mental health. Never forget about your mental health! Take breaks from whatever it is that you’re doing if you need to in order to let your mental health recover fully. Your mental health is just as important as your physical health.

So work towards combining this healthy lifestyle with plans to overcome predicted challenges and obstacles and you’ll make persevering your second nature! 

10)    Surround Yourself with the Right People

This is another important one. If you’re surrounded by people that support you and encourage you to keep working towards your goals, you’re more likely to achieve them. Makes sense right?

You could even try to surround yourself with people that already know how to persevere. They could likely provide you with many useful tips and tricks that have helped them.

Surrounding yourself with the right people is important. I believe we are the average of our surroundings naturally. Obviously, we can work towards changing and improving. But the better your surrounding are the better you are likely to be as well. So hopefully surrounding yourself with others we persevere will help you learn how to persevere as well.

Don’t be afraid to ask your network for help also. Talk with them, get ideas from them, and provide them with the same support they provide you with in return. It’s a great resource that you need to work to build, but pays you back way more than you could ever put a value on once you’ve developed a strong and supportive social circle.

Key Benefits of Learning How to Persevere

There are many benefits of perseverance, and some of these will probably be things you’ve never thought of. So I’m hoping that they encourage you to begin developing this skill!

• Challenges make you stronger and overcoming them will help you to become more confident from overcoming future difficulties.
• Learning how to persevere through adversity helps you appreciate the good times. If there were never any challenges, there would be no need for perseverance. However, that’s just not how our world works. So appreciate the good times while they last!
• Through your perseverance, you will gain both new skills and experiences. You’ll begin learning what works in what situations and what doesn’t. These lessons will help you to identify new ways that you can go about taking on similar challenges in the future!
• Learning how to persevere with help you to more focused and get more done. Essentially, you’ll be fast-tracking your road to success as you strive towards achieving your goals.
• And finally, and probably the most obvious benefit, you’ll grow as a person. Learning how to persevere will help you develop your resilience, willpower, and grit. Remember how important these all were from the talk above with Angela Duckworth? Yea, don’t underestimate their importance.

So what have we covered today…

Well, we learned that learning how to persevere is an incredibly important skill in life. It helps us to face adversity as well as overcome the obstacles and barriers that life tries to confront us with. It’s our drive and will to succeed and the grit we have to continue on when all we want to do is give up.

We learned a ton of strategies that you can use to develop your perseverance. From planning ahead proactively to overcome challenges all the way to setting up a supportive social network, they all have value. Pick the ones you feel will work best for you and begin trying to implement them.

Finally, we took in some of the common benefits and how learning to persevere helps us to grow into individuals who are able to make effective leaps towards their goals.

I hope that leaves you thoroughly satisfied, but if you want a few more articles to read about perseverance, check some of these out. I found a few that you might enjoy:

1. 7 Ways to Persist When Everything in You Wants to Give Up
2. 10 Things the Most Persevering People Do

Today’s Send Off

I really hope that was an interesting article for you about how to persevere!

Though it might seem like a difficult skill to develop, have faith in yourself. I know you can do it because you have what it takes! If you truly dedicate yourself to this goal I have no doubt that you’ll achieve it.

Also, If you enjoyed this article I would highly recommend that you go check out my post on procrastination, “Overcoming Procrastination”. It could be a good post to build off of following the one you just read above!

So go out and start tackling this habit! But most importantly have fun and stay excellent!

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