ReWild Through Discomfort

"Suffering is inevitable, you can suffer and lose, or you can suffer and win"

Imagine waking up every morning with unshakeable confidence, because you’ve learned to turn every ounce of discomfort into fuel. Most people numb their pain, but here’s how you convert it into real strength...

Too many chase comfort, and numb the pain with short lived dopamine hits. Takeaways, alcohol, doom scrolling reels, soft workouts.

They miss the fire power of their own resilience.

Everyone has real resilience inside, it is just whether we choose to access it, or numb it.

This post will show you how choosing to embrace the discomfort will drive growth. I'm covering two core truths that always ground me when I'm pushing into the next level.

One.. The paradox of value

Two... Stop rushing and embrace the discomfort

Before I really dive in, this blog takes me back to a time where I lived a simpler harder life, not through choice per say, but through the situation I was thrust into.

It is on these times that I often reflect and draw values and lessons. Because it was in those times that my thoughts, my fitness and my lifestyle was the least tainted by outside influences.

Those outside influences that offer you shortcuts.

They offer hacks.

They offer us the promise of never having to suffer.

In truth, they offer weakness disguised as comfort.

And what I have worked on understanding, is that suffering is inevitable. You can suffer and lose, or you can suffer and win.

You can suffer and bitch, or you can suffer and grow.

They are your options.

I codified these battlefield and business lessons into the EverWild Operating System, so you don’t have to spend hours every day reinventing the wheel.

The Paradox of Value

When we complain and say that something should be easy to obtain... what we are really saying is, I don't want this thing to be valuable.

For something to be valuable, it has to be rare.

For something to be rare, then by default, not many people may have it.

For not many people to have it, then it must be hard to obtain. Not easy.

The problem here, I believe - is we are living in this increasingly molly coddled world.

Where we are told time and time again, that any form of suffering is bad.

That we shouldn’t be tired.

We shouldn’t be hungry.

We shouldn’t be sore.

That we deserve to have XYZ.

And that message is destroying our capability.

In our pursuit of improvement, we are looking to make everything easier.

The gym that is air conditioned. With machines that control the movement for you. A TV you can watch whilst on the treadmill. Meal prep companies that do it all for us, and just deliver to the door...

When EverWild Members start looking at training through this lens, we see an 80% uptake in training sessions within one week.

Yet in the midst of all this comfort and convenience, we are getting weaker. Softer. Comfort creep is pulling us away from embracing the discomfort and really connecting with who we are, and how much we can achieve.

It is a real epidemic.

"We have forgotten how to endure discomfort to learn and develop ourselves."

Nothing could be truer here, than in the pursuit of earning the infamous green beret. Commando Training Centre Royal Marines is where I learnt to endure discomfort, pain and hardship in pursuit of something valuable.

But it was in the killing fields of Afghanistan, in 2010 - that I learnt to embrace it.

Stop Rushing and Embrace the Discomfort

If we have agreed that to suffer is to be human, then I want to remind myself to not rush that process.

You see, I was at my most fulfilled when I had very little. I was deployed to Helmand province for 6 months, in the summer of 2010.

It was an uncomfortable place.

There were times when I genuinely thought my number had been called, and I was not going to come home alive.

Hitting the deck with rounds bouncing around me. Snipers having me pinned on a rooftop. IED's ripping the ground to pieces. I may get into this in some more detail one day - but that day isn't today.

The point though, is this: It really allowed me to connect with what mattered. I could not rush through that discomfort.

I was there for 6 months, like it or not.

I was hungry, sleep deprived, boiling hot.

It didn't matter what I did - it was hot. It didn't matter what I did - there was no amount of "grinding" that would get me more sleep, more food, or cooler.

The heat got to a point (50 degrees), that we stopped sleeping inside the mud huts of the compound, and instead slept outside.

This was great, as it bough some slight relief to the night time heat - that is, until one night when I was rudely awakened by a grenade being thrown over the wall. I remember being ripped from my 4 hour sleep window with a ringing in my ears, and that all too familiar taste of adrenaline in my mouth.

The enemy, knowing we would be seeking respite during the hotter months - took the opportunity to have a pop.

Back inside for us.

That grenade over the wall pushed us back into the stifling heat and discomfort of the mud huts.

But over time, we completely adapted to sleeping in that heat, instead of trying to sidestep it.

This way of living, of embracing the suffering and the discomfort with a smile, allowed us to really adapt to the conditions and the environment we were in. I had to learn to stop rushing and forcing my way out of that discomfort.

To live with it, and to be ok with living slowly with it.

Where this led me today...

When I left the marines, truth be told I forget to live life like that.

I forgot that doing exceptional things, due to the paradox of value.. HAS to be hard.

Because otherwise everyone would do it, and then it would not be exceptional.

I forgot that we have to stop trying to sidestep hard, and that it is absolutely okay to sit in the suffering.

Because that is where we build our real foundations of excellence.

There were times as I built Commando Conditioned Fitness, and The EverWild Membership, that I wanted to destroy everything I had worked so hard to build, because it was hard.

Because it left me sitting in real discomfort. Real struggle. Nights without sleep. Weeks of stress as I looked at the next move.

I had to take myself back.

I had to remind myself to slow down and embrace the discomfort.

The suffering is all part of the plan, it’s your rite of passage.

But it is up to me how I choose to see that. This is just that reminder to myself, building something valuable is meant to be hard, and if it is a useful reminder for me, to keep me on track before things get on top of me, then I'm sure as hell it will be for someone else reading this too.

Embrace the hardship, don't rush it.

Living slowly allows you to take what you need from the suffering in order to grow.

Living quickly and trying to move out of the suffering, gives you a very temporary release until you need to learn the same lessons all over again.

Your life is travelling on two adjacent lifelines. One sees you staying comfortable. Your potential continues to shrink, routine stagnates and motivation dies. The other sees you stepping into discomfort, embracing it. You evolve daily, confidence compounds and performance skyrockets. Which line do you want to step into?

If you are looking to be exceptional - then The EverWild System is the best place to start. Enroll today and unlock one of our coaching Pathways - Warrior, Reclaimer, Philosopher, Pathfinder, or Explorer for free.

PS…

A lot of the guys that came into the program confided to me that they believed they were not sticking with their training or nutrition because they were lazy or ill-disciplined...

The truth? They were uninspired.

The EverWild System gives you the frameworks, training plans and community you need to execute.