Grit and Resilience are buzzwords these days. I call it hustle.
Even I have times when I feel my hustle is low and I have to go into what I call the hustler’s repair shop.
Stay tuned—I am going to unpack my top 3 techniques to overcome adversity.
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Hi everyone, I’m Fia Fasbinder and welcome to the Moxie Talk blog where we help you find your voice, share your message, and lead with confidence.
Today we are talking about how to overcome hard things in your life and maintain your hustle.
So hustle is in my DNA and hustle is definitely something that I both practice and preach.
However, even I have times when things feel too scary, too overwhelming, too difficult (if not impossible) or I just got knocked down so many times that I don’t feel like I can get up again.
If you’re feeling this way, believe me—I get it. Sometimes all hustlers have to go into what I call:
The hustler’s repair shop.
Here are my top 3 techniques that I use to pick myself up and dust myself off when I feel like I’ve lost my shine.
Now I know there are a lot of people out there who talk about overcoming adversity. Therefore, I thought I would approach this blog in a different way.
Instead of talking about what you the audience should do, I’m going to talk about what I do.
These are the 3 steps that work for me without fail and hopefully, you can find some value in what I do and how I approach being gritty and overcoming adversity, and those times when it’s tempting to just throw the towel in.
This is because I’m human, I’m a working mom, I’m a business founder and CEO who built a company from the ground up and even I have my moments when quitting would be the easiest solution to take.
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Technique 1: Move Your Body
First on my hustler repair shop list is to move my body. When I do that there is an intuition or a knowing that comes to the surface.
Answers appear when I sweat and I move. Additionally, after a good sweat session, at least for me, I feel ready to tackle anything, to boss up and handle challenges.
Movement makes you motivated
Now I know for some of you your choice of movement may not be sweat-inducing, but any form of movements like walking and yoga can do this too, and that’s totally cool.
The point is to move your body—and I don’t want to get too high level or too philosophical here, but if you think about it, life is really movement and energy.
When we stop moving we stagnate “a rolling stone gathers no moss,” right? We all grew up hearing that saying.
When I move, I can literally feel my body filling with energy and joy, and heating up, and starting to circulate. I get all my systems moving.
It’s almost like if you’ve ever made a smoothie in a blender and you know that time when it’s starting to blend—I feel that in my body.
Even with all of that movement and that energy, for me, there’s a stillness in my mind.
It is almost like a coming to the present moment and a knowing — answers come to me, solutions come to me. The ability to solve problems and conquer challenging situations come to me and there’s actually neuroscience behind that.
When we are under stress, our cortisol levels spike and we begin to go into fight, flight, or freeze.
The freeze is what I’m really concerned about here because modern-day freezing is what we call stagnation.
It’s procrastination. It’s the putting off of something that means something to us because it’s scary. It’s not doing something, just standing still out of fear.
The antidote to that is really movement.
Movement Changes Your State
When I’m in that low level, or high level of anxiety, at least for me, I overthink and over worry and overanalyze everything. I definitely suffer from analysis paralysis.
Nonetheless, when I move my body, I stop thinking and start doing.
So one caveat to moving—and I think it’s important, at least for me—is to push myself to uncomfortable places and not quit.
This is because change, strength, growth, plus all of the dreams and goals that I have—the things that I want to achieve require discomfort.
If I don’t quit in these physically uncomfortable situations, I know that I don’t have to quit outside of running, biking, or dancing.
Movement Builds Mental Resilience
I can handle adversity both physical and mental, on the bike, on the running trail, and also outside of that. I know and I trust that I will be stronger afterward.
There is truly a knowing that I can do hard things and this might not be for everyone.
All I’m saying is while you’re moving your body, don’t quit. Don’t have a heart attack, don’t push yourself that hard.
Go slower if you need to but don’t quit.
Prove to yourself that you are not going to let the mind that craves safety and comfort take the easy way out and talk you out of doing that thing you showed up to do.
Don’t let the couch potato in your head, as I like to call it, win because when you quit…
Quitting is the Worst Feeling
When you quit, when you give up on yourself, there’s really no worse feeling.
I want to end my first technique for the hustler’s repair shop telling you about a time where life was very uncomfortable for me and everything in my body wanted to quit and it would have been so much easier to throw the towel in.
And yet I kept going.
That was really when Covid hit. Moxie, which was still a growing company, hit rock-bottom in the world of public speaking and presentation skills. Nobody needed that right now.
People were guarding their wallets. People weren’t investing in themselves, people weren’t doing training anymore and the faucet just completely dried up.
There were no clients, there were no one-on-one coaching clients, there was no group training going on, and everything that I had worked towards creating this company, that was my north star, and really, I know, one of my purposes on this planet—it was gone.
It would have been so much easier to say “Well I gave it a shot, it didn’t work out I’m going to take my life in another direction and maybe not start another company,” because that’s difficult and that’s scary and it requires a lot of financial risks.
Everything would have been so much easier if I just took a corporate job or went back to education or something where I got a paycheck and insurance.
Yet I knew in my bones that would be the easy route but not the right route.
So I kept going, we kept going, my team kept going, and we built Moxie from the ground up and it’s now doing better than ever.
Things are not easy; things are still difficult. They’re always difficult when you have your own company, when you’re an entrepreneur, but I know that just hanging in there and not quitting in the face of adversity and discomfort for me was the right decision.
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Technique 2: Keep Showing Up
The second thing I do in the hustler’s repair shop—and this is kind of in the same lines of not quitting and moving your body—is to keep showing up.
Show up! Do the work! Every. Damn. Day.
Do The Work Daily
When I want to quit or give up, and the problem or the goal or the task at hand seems unsurmountable, I remind myself that “Rome was not built in a day.”
Nevertheless, if I keep showing up and I keep chipping away at it, I’ll get there eventually.
There really is no race to that goal except the race that I’m pushing myself to finish at some ungodly speed. Therefore, I have to just slow down and keep going.
Take the tortoise and the hare approach—the tortoise that just keeps chugging along until he or she finally makes it to the finish line. I do this and I don’t back down; I don’t give up. I preach this all the time to my clients.
Showing up is truly the hardest part. We’re going to get knocked down and you got to get back up. You can’t tap out because tapping out is seriously the easy way out.
Like I said, there’s the neuroscience behind that. Our brain craves safety. Our brain will do anything in its power to keep you from showing up.
It will try to talk you out of anything by making you procrastinate, catastrophize, imposter syndrome, that you’re not the right person to do it.
It’s really up to you to say, “No, I’m good, brain! Thanks for trying to protect me, I totally appreciate it, but I got this.”
This is because something happens when I continue to show up after a setback or a failure or when I encounter an embarrassing moment—I start to have this confidence and this trust that I can handle adversity.
Confidence really is the side effect of hustle.
Do you remember those “Would you rather” games that we used to play as kids?
Choice A or choice B?
I sometimes have to play the adult version of that game in my head and it looks something like this, “Fia
Would you rather not show up to this high-stakes workshop with the C-suite of a fortune 500 entertainment company so that you don’t possibly fail in some way?
OR
Would you rather face your fears and your imposter syndrome and walk away knowing that at least you coached literally some of the most important people in the entertainment industry?”
Choose fear and risk failure. This is where success is.
When I put it that way to myself, I almost always choose possible failure in the name of moving towards achieving something that is important to me instead of playing it safe.
Hence, I always choose that “Yeah! I might fail but you know I am also still moving towards this thing.” I would rather fail than stagnate.
I recently heard an interview with a really well-known comedian and she was talking about failure and comedian’s failure. She was saying that for a comedian and this is very true for me as well as a trainer, that “You really can’t practice without an audience”.
You need that audience to practice because the audience is so much a part of the act and it’s really the same when you are a trainer or a coach. Half of your success is really the person you’re coaching or the audience you’re training.
Thus, you have to practice in front of an audience and you have to accept that you are gonna bomb. It’s not always gonna work—you’re gonna have some test pancakes out there that just fall flat and never rise.
Failing is Part of Getting Good
This particular comedian said that the only way to get funny is to bomb. Like no comedian ever gets funny by, you know, successful acts. They don’t walk off the stage and like “Oh that went so well now I’m instantly funny.” You’ve gotta bomb and bomb hard in order to get funny.
It is the same with workshops and creating training and being a coach to some very high-stakes people. You have to accept that you might fail in order to get better and so that requires you to show up. If you are so afraid of failure that you just don’t show up because you might possibly fail, then you never get better.
This “would you rather” game that I play with myself so that I just show up, which I know is the hardest part, is really my go-to second technique in my hustler’s repair shop.
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Technique 3: Lean On Your Tribe
The third thing I do to find my shine again is leaning on my tribe. We often feel that we have to handle challenges by ourselves. There are times when we’re trying to achieve a goal or handle a challenge that we do have to go at it alone. For example, when I’m speaking, I’m the only one on that stage.
However, we don’t have to do the whole thing by ourselves. Building a community of like-minded people and leaning on them for support, encouragement, gentle nudging, advice, passing the torch on is worth its weight in gold.
Stress makes us feel like we’re alone
You’re not alone and I know it can feel that way when we’re in the middle of something hard and we just want to give up. I see this a lot with my clients and their fear of public speaking. They always think that they are the only one that feels this way, that they are the only one that’s nervous, that they are the only one that gets nervous.
They think that they exist in isolation in this feeling but as soon as they say something aloud like, “I’m really nervous or I have a huge fear of public speaking,” people in the room inevitably say “Yeah, me too!” and then there’s this built-in support and resonance that comes from that.
For me personally, I find my support from my team at Moxie, my husband who’s also our President, a few friends that share the same mindset as me and same professional goals, and honestly, the workout trainers that help me prove to myself that I can do hard things if I just get out of my own way.
Tribe is everything and it’s the quality, not the quantity of the tribe. You just need one or two ride-or-dies that you know you can lean on no matter what.
Additionally, think about what kind of support you want from your tribe. For me personally, I need my tribe members that are not going to let me talk myself out of doing hard things or scary things. Maybe that’s not what you need but communicate with your tribe how you would like them to support you.
Okay that’s it.
As a recap when you need to go into the hustler’s repair shop, here’s what I recommend for you—this is what I do when I need to heal or mend and then get back at it,
- Move your body
- Keep showing up—force yourself to keep going
- Lean on your tribe
That’s it! I hope you enjoyed this blog.
If you know somebody that would benefit from a little bit of hustle advice, please pass this blog on, share it, and like it. Have them subscribe to our newsletters and YouTube channel.
If you want to know more about Moxie Institute, my baby, my company, check out moxieinstitute.com. We’ve got lots of good classes going on that will definitely help your hustle and until next time, continue to live boldly, lead brilliantly, and Speak with Moxie.
