From beloved performance expert, executive coach, and coauthor of Peak Performance Steve Magness comes a radical rethinking of how we perceive toughness and what it means to achieve our high ambitions in the face of hard things.
Toughness has long been held as the key to overcoming a challenge and achieving greatness, whether it is on the sports field, at a boardroom, or at the dining room table. Yet, the prevailing model has promoted a mentality based on fear, false bravado, and hiding any sign of weakness. In other words, the old model of toughness has failed us.
Steve Magness, a performance scientist who coaches Olympic athletes, rebuilds our broken model of resilience with one grounded in the latest science and psychology. In
Do Hard Things, Magness teaches us how we can work with our body – how experiencing discomfort, leaning in, paying attention, and creating space to take thoughtful action can be the true indications of cultivating inner strength. He offers four core pillars to cultivate such resilience:
- Pillar 1- Ditch the Façade, Embrace Reality
- Pillar 2- Listen to Your Body
- Pillar 3- Respond, Instead of React
- Pillar 4- Transcend Discomfort
Smart and wise all at once, Magness flips the script on what it means to be resilient. Drawing from mindfulness, military case studies, sports psychology, neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy, he provides a roadmap for navigating life’s challenges and achieving high performance that makes us happier, more successful, and, ultimately, better people.
About the Author
Steve Magness is a world-renowned expert on performance, coauthor of
Peak Performance and The Passion Paradox, and the author of
The Science of Running. He is the co-host of two podcasts:
The Growth Equation podcast, with Brad Stulberg, and
On Coaching with Magness and Marcus , with Jon Marcus. He has written for
Runner’s World and
Sports Illustrated , and he has been featured in
The New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, the
New York Times, Men’s Health, The Guardian, Business Insider, and
ESPN The Magazine, and he has been featured on
NPR and
CNN International.
Magness has served as a consultant and speaker for NASA, the Houston Rockets, Murphy Oil, the Brooklyn Nets, the Cleveland Guardians, the Seattle Sounders, the New Orleans Pelicans, Athletics New Zealand, Canadian Athletics, New Zealand High Performance, and more. He lives in Houston, Texas.