“Weakness.” What is that? A word in English? The noun form of the word weak? The opposite word of strength?
Weakness is a word which appears in a question called “What are your weaknesses?” in most of the interviews. LOL.
You can give a number of meanings of weakness either from the dictionary or right clicking on the word and click “Search Google for weakness” and there you go. You have lots of results.
Fair enough. Everybody knows the meaning. How many of you have tried to relate weakness? Who among you have really known your weakness for real? And finally, how many of you have tried to overcome it?
Not everybody, right? You know what? Your weakness is a temporary inability to do something, where your determination is imprisoned by fear of pain. If your determination attempts to escape from the prison, it will have to face the pain.
Your determination has to be strong enough to beat the pain down. Your determination is as strong as your burning desire. Your strength is nothing but your former weakness. It is a weakness, you have overcome with determination and courage over the time.
Now that we have a good idea about it, our curious mind will wonder where exactly our weaknesses come from. The answer is fear and pain.
There is always a time in your life when you do something for the first time. Right from learning alphabets to driving a car. What is the process here? You learn from the learned and experienced person, right? Now let us take a real life situational story to understand things better.
It’s your first day at the gym. You have been assigned a trainer who will look after your work out as a beginner. The trainer will introduce you to every equipment and explain how it’s done. You will begin with warm up exercises like squats and push ups.
Once done, the trainer will take you to the simple equipment and put up light weights, slowly increasing weights, little by little in the next sets. Likewise, you have finished doing the exercises for the day and you are home.
That day you will not feel anything. The next day when you wake up, you feel intense pain in your muscles. You just don’t have the energy to even walk from your bed to the bathroom for a shower. For a while, you wonder, you made a mistake by joining the gym.
You decide to skip the gym for a few days and resume when you feel no pain.
The story you read so far is totally relatable to you. Now that the new joinee is having a pain in the muscles, he just doesn’t wish to continue even though he has paid for that.
Same applies to our lives. One incident or failure is prohibiting you from doing the same thing again. Why? Because we don’t want to go through the same nightmare again. How do you know that your experience will be the same again without even trying? No answer for that, right?
We will continue with the situational story for a complete understanding.
In deep pain and a slight rise in body temperature you somehow managed to have a shower, tea-breakfast done and you are again in bed. Thinking about the evening gym, counting the number of hours left, praying for a quick recovery, applying some body ointments for quick relief are your only activities.
You know that missing one day at the gym will be wasting so much money as you have already paid for monthly or quarterly basis. Damn it! You can’t even have excuses.
The clock keeps ticking. Every second, minute, and hour you counted has passed. “I seriously can’t workout today with this pain, so I will skip the exercises which involve leg muscles. The rest, I can manage.”
You show up at the gym on time. You are about to utter your first word to tell the trainer about your pain. He asks you to do the same exercises you did the previous day.
You wait for a minute or so and when your trainer gets back to you asks you “Are you done?”. Gathering some courage you say, “Sir, actually, there is lot of pain in my leg muscles.” “So what” replies the trainer, seemingly not giving a damn about it.
You request him politely, “Due to pain, I can’t strain the muscles.” Your trainer is not affected by your request at all and says “I know. For the first time, you will definitely feel pain. Now come on, do what I said.” And he leaves showing no leniency. The trainers are not for namesake. They completely know about the human body and muscles.
You now realize that you will not be let to go home unless you perform the exercises. You will have to endure the pain and do your job. That’s only your way out. Feeling the pain, completely exhausted, clothes wet with sweat is the condition in which you reach home. You have never imagined that you will see such a harsh day where you have to exercise with pain in the body.
You doze off. The next day when you wake up, you notice the pain is a bit more bearable than the previous day. This comes as a slight pleasant surprise for you after two days of pain. You are not pain-free, but now you feel you can go and perform the exercises.
This goes on, day by day until a day arrives you realize the pain is completely gone and you didn’t even notice it. You continue with the gym for weeks, months. You build muscles and there is a body transformation you have achieved.
Back to our discussion, we will now know the lessons the simple story taught us.
Endurance comes from pain.
The pain is nothing but the impact of any difficulty or any incident. The more you tolerate it, the bigger will be endurance and that will eventually be your strength.
Step out of your comfort zone.
You need to give the comfort you have if you have to overcome your weakness and turn them into your strengths. You can find complete ways for that in the article Six subtle ways to step out of your comfort zone.
Stop overthinking.
You need to stop thinking about things which are in past and the future. You think of excuses, you plan your failure. You can know more about ways to stop overthinking from Ways to overcome overthinking.
That was with the weakness of strength thing. What are your views regarding this? Share them in the comment section.
