You overcome adversity by creating with it. Treat the hard moment as material for your growth and take action while it is still inconvenient. I call it Turning Inconvenience Into a Superpower. It runs on three moves: flip the story you tell yourself, meet hard with harder, and audit your inputs.
- Adversity attacks three things: your mind, your energy and your routines.
- Overcoming inconvenience is a skill, and you build it by acting in the inconvenient moment.
- Start from one belief: "I am open to the possibility that I can make this good."
- Let "I don't feel like it" become your trigger to take one action.
What is Turning Inconvenience Into a Superpower?
Turning Inconvenience Into a Superpower is my name for treating the ability to overcome inconvenience as a skill you practice. You take action in the inconvenient moment, and the thing that limits most of the world becomes your strength.
It came out of doing 75 Hard with a 16 month old son and multiple businesses to run. The program is designed to be inconvenient. My second 45 minute workout usually landed between 2 and 4 in the afternoon, right when a voice in my head said, "Come on, Rob, you should be working." So I flipped the story and paid my dues at an inconvenient time every single day. It taught me that I am somebody who specializes in overcoming inconvenience.
The key to living in flow is creating with the inconvenient moments in your life.
What does adversity do to you?
Adversity attacks three things, and each one can become a domino for the others.
| What it attacks | What it looks like |
|---|---|
| Your mind | Your self talk gets poor or very limiting. |
| Your energy | You say "I don't feel like it" and you fall out of flow. |
| Your routines | Your consistency slips, and you know this is far from your best self. |
When your mind is the loudest of the three, start with how to stop negative self talk.
What does it mean to create with pain?
Creating with pain is my distinction for using a painful situation as an opportunity to build something good. You drop the victim story and ask two questions: what can I learn from this, and what can I create?
I learned it when an injury took away my workouts and my training runs for a half marathon. Working out five days a week is a way of being for me. For about a week to 10 days my negative voice made a lot of noise. Then I said, "This is a thing that I get to create with." That injury gave me my Misogi for the year, the one hard thing that defines the year: touching my toes, something I had never been able to do.
I call the speed of that turn shrinking my dispersion, which means shortening how long I allow negativity to stay with me.
How do you overcome adversity step by step?
- Open to the possibility. Start with "I am open to the possibility that I can make this good."
- Flip the story. Catch the self talk that says "why is this messing up my day?" Smile and say, "I am creating with this moment."
- Meet hard with harder. Do something hard on purpose. On a day when my energy and consistency were way off, I went for a three mile run in 88 degree Florida heat.
- Do one more. Halfway through that run I went past the sign where I had planned to stop. I finished at 3.7 miles with my champion voice alive.
- Share the arc. Tell it in three parts: what is wrong, how you are overcoming it, and what it looks like at the end.
The mastery level is when "I don't feel like it" becomes a trigger for one question: what is that one action? Step by step, you earn your confidence.
You teach yourself who you are by the actions you take when you most do not want to take them.
Rob Cressy
What should you read when you are going through a tough time?
A client once asked me how I get through tough times. My answer was simple: audit your inputs. Notice how much fear and judgment the news and social media throw at you, then get intentional about what you feed yourself. In challenging times I go back to the books I know have served me.
- A business challenge Who Not How by Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy. It gives me a daily drip of "who can I reach out to?"
- Emotionally tough times Living Untethered by Michael Singer. It helps me take back control of the story I tell myself.
- A challenging time in life Relentless by Tim Grover or Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink.
- Mental toughness The Obstacle Is the Way by Ryan Holiday. My inner fortress of mental toughness starts with this book.
Read early in the day so it plants seeds for a more positive story.
How do you build resilience before adversity hits?
Everybody is good when things are good. The work you do on yourself today prepares you for the inevitable hurricane. I see it as building an internal fortress while the world shoots arrows at you. Your routines build that armor, which is why high performers are so fanatical about them.
You also choose the meaning you attach to anything that happens. Years ago I had a near-death experience running a marathon, and I choose to see it as a gift. I love the subtext of a Nick Saban line: "Never waste a failure." For the everyday version, read how to stay positive when things go wrong.
Do this today
- Name the inconvenience. Pick one thing that is throwing off your day and say out loud, "I am creating with this moment."
- Take one hard action. The next time you hear "I don't feel like it," ask what that one action is. Then do it.
Listen to the episode
Turning Inconvenience Into a Superpower
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Read the full transcript
How good are you at dealing with inconvenience? What's up? It's Rob Cressy. And one of the challenges of 75 Hard is it is designed to be inconvenient. Because that's how you learn and grow. And one of the biggest areas where it is very inconvenient is with the two workouts. 45 minute indoor, 45 minute outdoor. And they're spaced apart so you can't be doing them back to back.
So right now, I am doing my first workout at 6am every single day. And then after that, I've got the next 12 to 15 hours to create the time to get in this second workout. But here's the thing. I live a full life like many of you. I run multiple businesses. I've got a wife. I've got a 16 month old son. I also have a lot of things that I like to do.
So finding, not finding, creating the time for my second workout. That 45 minute workout, it can be challenging. Because here's the thing. My son goes to bed or we start the evening routine process right around 5:30. So between 5:30 and 7 is off limits. And typically for me, I'm done with work between 4 and 5 so that I can spend time with him. So in a regular day for me, once 4 o'clock hits, between 4 and 7, I'm with my family.
And one of the principles of success for me in 75 Hard, and I also did this through the entire Live Hard program, which I did flawlessly the first time that I did it, is put myself in a position of strength to succeed. The people who fail at 75 Hard are the ones who leave things for the end of the day. I never related to having to work out at 11 p.m. at night or 9:15 at night. For me, that tells me that my process is not as dialed in as it could be.
Because one of the things that Andy Frisella says is, when you go all in on this program, it will change your life and you will be the best version of yourself. So what does all in mean for you? Well, for me, it means it's the most important thing in my life. And that includes it's more important than my business. Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a second, Rob. Are you telling me that you're not going to work and you're going to do 75 Hard instead? And the answer is, yes, that is true. Because of what 75 Hard creates in me.
And so often we create a scarcity mindset or we put ourselves in a box of what we can or can't do. So one of the things that 75 Hard teaches you around inconvenience is creating the time to fit in the various workouts and the things that are a part of the program. So I'm finding that typically between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m., I'm getting in my second workout.
But here's the thing. I've got a lot of exciting things that I'm working on in my business. I just launched a ChatGPT and AI coaching and education company. And we are building this from scratch. And there's so much that we're creating on top of me as the podcast coach and the personal growth coach and running a marketing company. All these things, boom, every single day, I'm just filled to the brim. Here comes time for the 45-minute workout.
And I prioritize this in my life. And I've allowed myself to say, you know what? I'm putting that self-limiting voice that says, come on, Rob, you should be working instead. And I throw that in the back. Because I know that 75 days is a small price to pay for me to be the best version of myself.
And I am replacing, air quotes, working with actually working on myself, being the best version of myself. And in doing so, I'm not taking a zero for that time. Instead, I'm flipping the story that I'm telling myself. And I'm paying my dues at an inconvenient time. And I'm doing so every single day for 75 straight days.
Because it's teaching me something about myself. And it will for you too. That I am somebody who specializes in overcoming inconvenience. Think about that as a skill for yourself. How good are you at overcoming inconvenience? And welcome to life. Just when you think you've got plans, life is like, nah, dog. I got something else that's going to come your way.
This is actually why I did 75 Hard in the first place. Because life threw me a ton of curveballs. And I didn't like the way the first two months of the year went. So boom, I'm going to change that. And I'm going to do something about this. So I encourage you to think about how you can cultivate the skill of overcoming inconvenience. And instead, take action in the face of inconvenience. Be aware of that self-talk that you're telling yourself about things.
Oh my God, why is this messing up my day? Nah, one of my declarations. I am in flow. And I see myself just surfing the wave of life, the ups and the downs. Because life is going to have both convenient and inconvenient moments. But the key to living in flow is creating with the inconvenient moments in your life.
Because when you do, you become more powerful. Because the majority of the world is limited by the inconvenient moments in your life. Instead, you can be your best. You can smile and say, I am creating with this moment. Because I am always in flow.
Transcript cleaned up for reading.