IS BEING STRONG A GOOD THING?

Like a pregnancy it took me about 9 months to come from barely being able to hang with my full body weight on a bar for more than 3 seconds to managing my first unassisted pull-ups this week as you can see in the video. And I am f**ing proud of that.

Inquiring further into the topic of strength and weakness, I am astonished that I get a lot of praise when I portray myself as being strong, while being weak is something to be accepted, but nothing to be praised. There seems a weird connotation that being strong is a positive thing and being weak is rather negative or something to ignore or get over.

I’d like to reframe that. Practicing pull-ups for the past 9 months several times a week, each practice moment was in a fact a moment of weakness, being confronted with my inability to do that one simple exercise and all the thoughts and feelings that like to accompany these moments of failing.

And this is not only something that occurs in a rather non-consequential practice like that, but it appears to be part of pretty much every learning of a skill: trying, failing, getting up and trying again - over and over again until mastery or giving up entirely to be never spoken of again.

What, if we look at strength simply as the result, and these precious moments of weakness and dealing with them as the process to get there? What if we would start to honour weakness itself instead of reframing it as a different kind of strength?

Or as James Smith said “ Fall in love with the process, not with the result"