3 Reasons to Build Emotional Endurance

The world is constantly changing, and our lives are too. Who could’ve predicted the last few years?! For as much as we experience fun, joy, and meaning day to day, there are many things we simply need to survive and endure each day. Life is hard! We are complex, and so is our world.

Between natural disasters, war, aging, illness, recessions, work, holidays, and our family and personal lives, we need the ability to bounce back from a range of experiences. But we also need to endure them as they’re happening! 

We hear a lot about resilience, which is the ability to bounce back from adversity. But we never hear about emotional endurance, which is the ability to endure adversity AS it’s happening; to manage, and to cope with the ups and downs AS we’re experiencing them. That is very different but equally important. Emotional endurance might look like coping with negative feelings, having constructive reactions/actions to situations, or the ability to focus, and stay grounded in your day-to-day as they happen.

I’ve become an expert at emotional endurance, and not really because I wanted to live through tragedy, crises, or major periods of stress…but because they were just my reality. Most of the major experiences were out of my control, and if I wanted to survive them, I had to manage my way through them somehow. Emotional endurance has served me well in my work, and in every other part of my life. 

I’ll cover how to build emotional endurance another time, but here are a few reasons why it’s important to work on:

You can’t control life's “downs”

Bad things, distressing things, and stressful events simply will happen because you’re alive. Have you ever met someone who never managed a loss, a tragedy, or a hardship of some kind in their lives? A full life; a life well lived is full of ups and downs outside of your control. I’ve been thinking about this a lot, as so many of my clients manage the stress of lay off’s at the companies that just several months ago seemed on top of the world. Job loss, divorce, elections, climate change, relationships, kid stress…all of this happens when it does, and often we can’t predict them. To experience tragedy is to be human. To face negative emotions, and challenging experiences is human. What you can control is how you manage those downturns, and there are tools that help you do that both before, and as they come up.

You have increased distress tolerance

Said simply, you develop a greater capacity for pain and stress. As you develop a toolset, and ability to endure sustained challenges and the “downs”, you become more tolerant to what is happening around you. This leads to resilience, and more internal stability, even as your environment and external circumstances shift and are unstable. Think less snapping at others around you, and lower intensity or shorter duration of unhelpful thoughts when crap happens. I remember thinking COVID wasn’t so bad relative to what I’d recently experienced, and based on what my own clients were experiencing. No person is better or worse than the other for their reaction to experiences; this isn’t a pain competition. My point is I had a lot of perspective, lots of experience with adversity, and tools that made the intensity of feelings, and my capacity for them, much greater. The more you’re able to constructively manage, the more you can handle, which is important now more than ever when we’re living in unprecedented times.

You do bigger, harder things (and you don’t quit)

Your increased capacity enables you to take on more difficult, and new things. What’s more, you don’t run, or give up as easily as you did in the past. You can take on more complexity at work, and at home. You can support, and be there for others in their times of need. Things like “confrontation”, or hard conversations become easier. This isn’t the case to push through suffering. You simply are on a whole new spectrum of capability. Walking away may have been a coping mechanism for intense pain before, but now you see these experiences as new opportunities to feel things and learn from the experiences. It makes you understand yourself and others better, which leads to more connection, more compassion, and higher EQ overall. It also rubs off on others! You’re a better leader, better parent, and better person for it.

Are you ready to start proactively working on your emotional endurance? Click the link below to setup your free discovery call to learn how I can help!