You can, but will you do it?

I was about 20 minutes into a 30 minute run on Friday when things started to get a little uncomfortable. I started wondering if I should slow down, but then I remembered that I've run this far at this pace before. There is no physical reason why I should stop. My body can handle the stress. Can my mind? I realized at that moment finishing the run wasn't a matter of whether or not I could do it. It was a question of whether or not I wanted to do it. Was I willing to put in the effort? That choice was up to me.

It was easy to keep going when I recognized that the only thing preventing me from finishing my run was my ability to tolerate the discomfort. It's so easy to build all kinds of excuses and rationalizations around why we can't do something. All too often, the only barrier between success and failure is the willingness to put in the effort. It's just a matter of facing whatever excuse we've developed and realizing that it's nothing more than our of fear of change trying to keep things the way they've always been.

I was terrified of talking to girls when I was in high school. I managed to ask one girl to the homecoming dance when I was a senior. That was the extent of my high school dating life. Fear held me back. What was I afraid of? The obvious answer would be rejection, but I think I was really afraid of what would happen if I talked to a girl and she was interested. What would I do then? I would have to do all kinds of new and different things. Those new and different things was what I was really afraid of. It was easier to just stay who I was and invent all kinds of excuses for why I was happier by myself.

Those excuses were all external of course. There was no way I was going to recognize that I was simply making the choice to stay a lonely loser. I had bad acne until Accutane finally cleared me up during my junior year. All those years of hating the way I looked were a convenient excuse for why I was unable to approach a girl. I'm an introvert. That made it easy to convince myself that it's against my nature to talk to people I don't know well. Anything to spare me from the recognition that the only thing standing between me and a date was the choice to talk to a girl.

Sure, we all face legitimate limits on what we can accomplish, but how many of us are actually held back by issue of can not? Most of us are held back by issues of will not. We choose to take the easy route rather than make the decision to change. Sticking with what we know is easy. Sure, we may hate being fat or lonely or being stuck in a crappy job, but it's what we know. Recognizing that making the decision to change is ultimately the only thing preventing us from overcoming whatever barrier we've put in our way is much more difficult.