The SHIT that Keeps You on Defense
Uncover and overcome life's biggest obstacles
Life has a ton of offensive plays it uses against us to stuff us into a box we’re afraid to leave. As we were growing up and going to school, most of us were told to sit down and shut up. “You can’t do that, you can’t do this.” “Sit up straight.” “You don’t want to stand out from the crowd.” We end up not wanting to say what is on our mind or share our true feelings. These ideas lead us to doing ridiculous stuff like people-pleasing, procrastinating, overanalyzing, and creating disempowering beliefs. These beliefs can keep us living in fear and squarely put us in our place: a cramped little box deep in our comfort zone, playing life on defense.
How do you avoid the things that keep you on defense? The first step is to identify the SHIT holding you back:
Scarcity
Habits that suck
Internal conflict
Toxic relationships
If there were four horsemen for a life on defense, SHIT would be what their horses left behind after they trampled over you. Now that you know what not to step in, let’s dig a little deeper into this SHIT.
Scarcity
Not having what you need for success or not even knowing where to start is a huge problem. Scarcity holds you back from making offensive plays. It is often just a mindset that keeps you feeling like you are continuously fighting for survival, as if there is never enough of anything. For example, tons of studies have shown that the stress of debt and financial worries can lead directly to mental health problems like depression and anxiety. Stressing and worrying over scarcity, real or imagined, can affect your relationships because you feel like you can’t afford to do the things you want to. So you isolate yourself, which leads to loneliness and worse depression.
Another big resource problem is the inability to gain new skills and knowledge. Let’s break this down mathematically:
Ability x Effort x Time = Results
Without the ability to climb out of a hole you fell into, you'll stay stuck down there on defense no matter how much or how hard you try to get out. Your ability is the raw potential that helps you to accomplish your goals and move on to your next milestone. Lucky children have great parents who guide and teach them how to live successfully. As an adult, you have your support group, plenty of content available online, and access to coaches who can help you achieve your goals. If you forget about these resources or are afraid to sort through them, you can get stuck in struggle mode thinking you have no ability. You can end up just reacting to life as it happens, instead of creating systems that improve your life and help those around you.
Habits that Suck
We all have bad habits that hold us back. Many of these habits are avenues to avoid the pain we feel in our day to day life and offer an escape. Alcohol, substance abuse, sex, pornography, poor time management, unhealthy relationship management, the inability to delegate, not planning ahead, procrastination, not prioritizing, the inability to say no, etc. There are too many to list; you have to identify your own bad habits.
Internal Conflict
Internal conflict comes in a variety of different flavors: negative self-talk, pessimism, lack of confidence, mental barriers, insecurity, unresolved past trauma, overwhelm, perfectionism, etc. These feelings and emotions can strike your mind at the most inopportune moment. These little ankle biters grow over time to become bullshit beliefs that further push you into a corner and keep you on defense.
Toxic Relationships
The obvious things that keep you playing on defense are external. Your support network or lack thereof is the most powerful influence. When people give you advice or feedback, it sticks in your head. The values, expectations, and commonly held beliefs of those around you can keep your mind in that box that is hard to come out of. Closed minded people, who influence you to live in ways that do not allow you to maximize your potential, can be toxic. Bad habits from those around you can also rub off and put you into a defensive mode where you’re trying to fight addictions or bad behavior that eventually become a part of who you are.
Your family, friends, people you see on a regular basis, and your society or culture all have a huge impact on how you think and act. We all grow up around people who expect us to behave a certain way and some people who believe we have limitations. These societal expectations and pressures evolve to keep us working together, but they don’t work for everyone. The bottom line is that the people you choose to be around will profoundly shape your life.
The Solution to SHIT: Do HARD Things
To create and maintain the life that you want, you have to do HARD things.
My best friend from the Army, Jay Tiegs, and I created a framework to help organize your life and overcome the SHIT that holds you back. HARD stands for:
Health
Affluence
Relationships
Development
These four concepts form the foundation of a book we are writing. Our manuscript is titled Life on Offense: Do HARD Things. The book’s purpose is to empower others to live intentionally and dominate the challenges they face. Jay and I have seen too many people who think that they are stuck in a monotonous, hard life and that they are victims of their own circumstance. Sadly, the people we listen to are right.
It can be hard to just get out of bed in the morning, day after day. It’s also hard to build a physique you’re proud of. You’re sore after a good workout session. Your joints hurt.
It’s also hard:
Being overweight and unable to fit into your clothes
Not having money and scraping by paycheck to paycheck
Just surviving in a broken, sexless marriage
Lacking education or not having an employable skill
Yet we can easily get comfortable staying overweight or living paycheck to paycheck. We forget what it’s like to feel as energetic as we were as a child. We would often rather suffer and embrace misery than change our condition. We will live in bad circumstances that we get comfortable with, and we get used to living in difficult situations that we could fix. Sadly we forget, or don’t believe, that we CAN improve all aspects of our life when we choose to.
You get to choose your hard.