Endure

14 - Endurance

You have the inner strength to withstand stress and still perform at a high level. Endurance is the grit and stamina from within, allowing you to go the distance with persistence despite resistance. You can overcome adversity and achieve great success. Consider exercise endurance. This entails hard work, sweat, sacrifice, lots of pain, time and effort, and consistently showing up and following through with the workouts to achieve maximum fitness. This is how the top athletes perform at their finest and achieve their goals. The same concepts hold true in any venue, including business and leadership. Using the same combination of skills and attributes, you can endure all obstructions or deterrents in your path and persist in successfully achieving your goals.

Attributes of Endurance:

• Motivation.  It takes intentional motivation to persist in whatever endeavor you are undertaking. Your motivation may come from your family, friends, or an inner desire you are impassioned by. Muster up many sources of motivation for the greatest impact. What motivates you the most? The more incentive you have, the more intensity of motivation you will encompass to create an even higher degree of determination and focus for successful achievement.
• Goal-oriented.  Goals are paramount to a leader in both a business and personal venue. You must have clearly defined goals in order to achieve any degree of success, all aligned with your values. You will never get to your destination if you haven’t yet defined where you are going. There is no need for endurance without an object of desire to strive towards. Once impassioned with goals and dreams, a blossoming of desire and motivation will follow, all building strength to endure any possible hurdles in your lane.
• Tenacity.  With established goals, you can firmly grip your destination and have the determination and persistence never to give up until accomplished. Tenacity is your mental strength to resist opposition or hardship and continue your pursuit.
• Intensity.  It takes great power to endure. The ability to endure is not for the fainthearted. Vigor and strength are associated with motivation, which is needed to sustain momentum while encountering challenges and difficulties. This immense force allows endurance to continue as you strive for goal achievement.
• Efficiency.  There is an efficiency that develops in conjunction with endurance, whether in time management or energy expenditure. Processes become more streamlined as momentum and desire to propel you forward in pursuing goal attainment.
• Willpower.  There is self-control exerted from within that fuels the desire to continue, often restraining impulses for the betterment of the effort. While enduring, there may be a need to control or suppress your actions, emotions, or desires to support the successful attainment of the goal.
• Determination.  As with every successful pursuit, determination is the glue and driving factor necessary to undertake a process in the first place. You must have a strong and passionate desire, to begin with, in order to have the ability to endure a painstaking journey.
• Success.  Having endurance is a key element of success. To achieve success, you must be willing to endure numerous obstacles and hardships, including time, resources, opposition from others, etc. Success is a worthwhile goal and worthy of intentional effort in which to achieve it. You cannot have success without endurance.

What example comes to mind of a time when you chose to endure hardships in order to reach a goal? What sacrifices or restraints did it involve? What was the outcome? How did you feel about the results? What changes would you make in your approach?

“Endurance is not just the ability to bear a hard thing, but to turn it into glory.” William Barclay

“The first virtue in a soldier is endurance of fatigue; courage is only the second virtue.” 

Napoleon Bonaparte

“Endurance is patience concentrated.” Thomas Carlyle

“Come what may, all bad fortune is to be conquered by endurance.” Virgil

“It’s hard to beat a person who never gives up.” Babe Ruth

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