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Persevering in Hard Things
61 Plays7 years ago
They say that "when the going gets tough, the tough get going"! It sounds easy, but living through some of those hard times is no picnic. From the ordinary, daily grind to setting challenging goals for yourself to enduring some of life's more tenuous struggles, Michelle and Lindsay discuss why it's important for us to practice perseverance and look at some strategies that can help see us through!
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Transcript
Introduction and Episode 23 Overview
00:00:00
Speaker
Hi, I'm Michelle. Hi, and I'm Lindsay. Are you laughing? Oh, I thought I heard laughing. I'm so sorry. No, it's okay. Welcome back to the... Wow. Outtakes. Hi, yes. I'm Michelle. And I'm Lindsay. And today we're talking about preserving... not preserving. Oh, no.
00:00:37
Speaker
Welcome back to the Modern Lady podcast. You're listening to episode 23. I'm Michelle. And I'm Lindsay. And today we're talking about persevering in the hard things. You know, this is such a broad topic and we have so many different points and perspectives we want to cover, like discouragement and fortitude and having a strong willpower.
Listener Appreciation and Engagement
00:00:59
Speaker
So we're really excited to get into this topic today.
00:01:02
Speaker
But first, Michelle and I just want to take a minute and ask if you are a fan of the show and if you're loving it, if you could just give us a rating or a review on iTunes. It only takes a couple of minutes, but it makes a huge difference. We are thrilled to share that we have seen our little podcast show up on iTunes in their top 200, so it's quite a vast list, but we've debuted the last couple episodes and making that top 200 list.
00:01:28
Speaker
And that's truly because of your ratings and reviews, and it really does help our show get ahead. So if you have a minute, if you don't know how you can message us, but it really helps us if you could just give us a star rating or take out the time to type out a little review, we would be so thankful.
00:01:44
Speaker
Yeah, we really want to thank listener Karen Schott for her comment this week. And she said, you know, good morning, Lindsay. She was running to you. I have to tell you, I love listening to your podcasts. I was driving yesterday listening to you and Michelle. Your voices are so lovely to listen to.
00:02:01
Speaker
You know what, thank you so much for your comment, Karen. I really love that, especially because I have had a cold the last few episodes. So this is a real bolster for me, especially. But if you want to join in the conversation too, you can chat with us via our website, www.themodernlady1950.wordpress.com. Or you can find us on our Facebook page or our Instagram account, both at the Modern Lady podcast.
Eyebrow Trends and Historical Humor
00:02:33
Speaker
Before we get into the topic of the show though, Lindsay does have our Modern Lady tip of the week. Well, Michelle, this is a good one, okay? So what do you do?
00:02:44
Speaker
If you've shaved off all of your eyebrows and you have a rodent problem, well, there's a solution. Oh, yeah. Mouse brows. So let me let me talk to you about mouse brows. Currently, the trend is right now in 2019 to have Instagram brows.
00:03:01
Speaker
Very luscious, thick, very sculpted, drawn in. But those of us who were teenagers in the 1990s plucked away all of our eyebrows and we've had to grow them back in. But this isn't the first time this has happened. If we go back to the 1400s and then again in the 1700s, it was very much in fashion to shave off your eyebrows.
00:03:21
Speaker
especially in the 1400s the ideal look if you'll recall from some art pieces of art at that time was a very egg-shaped face for a lady and a very high forehead so they would actually remove all of the hair I know their hairline on their forehead and push it back quite a bit and then no eyebrows and no eyelashes as well so very egg-shaped but then
00:03:46
Speaker
When that fell out of fashion, what do you do? And then the same thing happened again in the 1700s. Well, they caught mice and they would construct
00:03:57
Speaker
eyebrows from mouse hair. So they would either take individual hairs and kind of glue them in to just fill in some sparse spots, or they would actually use mouse skin cut into the shape of eyebrows and just glue them to your face. Now, there are some people that have said that perhaps this didn't actually happen, but there is enough written online that indicates that perhaps it was actually a trend.
00:04:23
Speaker
Now, one of these writings is a satirical poem that I just have to share two little verses of. So this is written by Matthew Pryor in 1718. And he says, Helen was just dipped into bed, her eyebrows on the toilet lay, away the kitten with them fled as fees belonging to her prey. On little things as sages write depends our human joy or sorrows.
00:04:52
Speaker
If we don't catch a mouse tonight, alas, no eyebrows for tomorrow." Oh my goodness. When you first started this whole tip, which maybe we should call it fact, right? We don't condone any of this. This is not a tip. I kept thinking, I'm like, I don't like where this is going. Oh, I really don't like where this is going.
00:05:14
Speaker
And do you like it now or no? It's still horrifying, right? Yeah, any verse that includes mouse hairs and a toilet in the first verse cannot be good. So, you know, I have very grayish blonde eyebrows and always have, I have regrown a lot of mine back in, but they're still, they don't match my hair color. So I spend countless
00:05:37
Speaker
countless minutes, 20 minutes, 25 minutes, trying to draw on the perfect brow. But if I just had some mouse eyebrows, it could certainly help. Yes, well, if we start seeing them pop up on Amazon and on Instagram. Etsy. It sounds like an Etsy thing where somebody starts crafting these and selling them. Side hustle, anybody? Yes. Oh, very good. OK, mouse brows. We laugh now, but in 10 years we'll talk again and we'll see just how funny it is. Yes.
Virtues of Perseverance and Self-Care
00:06:09
Speaker
So we've been batting around this idea of wanting to do an episode on persevering, doing hard things for quite a while now. And, you know, we did the fasting episode and we're still in the middle of Lent, so we thought this would be a good time, but we thought we should maybe open with some qualifiers. Right, Lindsay? That's right.
00:06:31
Speaker
So we were kind of looking into, gosh, because like Michelle was saying, it's such a broad topic, some words to explain what we mean by the hard things. And we both automatically jump to the word fortitude. And it's something, it's one of the virtues that we talk about in Catholicism. But I learned that fortitude is actually
00:06:50
Speaker
much older than, you know, our Catholic catechism. And that Aristotle, the Greek, talked a lot about these same virtues and looked into fortitude. And one of the things that he talked about is looking at these virtues kind of on a scale and that fortitude would sit in the middle. And then to the far left of that would be cowardice, but then to the far right would be being foolhardy. What are some of the other qualifiers that we were considering, Michelle?
00:07:18
Speaker
Yeah, so we were kind of laughing because it was only maybe a month or so ago that we did an episode on self-care. And now we're just kind of flipping the dial and saying, you know, but push yourself and persevere in the hard things. And we want to acknowledge that we acknowledge this, you know, and that really what it comes down to is you have to know yourself first.
00:07:43
Speaker
And you have to know where you are, what you're dealing with at a particular point in your own life. And when we pick these topics, we don't want to seem kind of all over the place and scattered, but these are kind of hitting a lot of different people in a lot of different places in their life. So that would be the first thing is know thyself, know when to practice self-care, know when to push yourself, and we're going to take that latter part, the push yourself part into focus today.
00:08:10
Speaker
And then we were also saying, you know, there is also a difference between things, hard things that you can control versus the hard things that you can't control. Right. Absolutely. Yeah. And I think that, again, is being self-aware and it's being aware of your situation. And that takes a lot of time and reflection. And I think that that's another
00:08:30
Speaker
that we should try to work into our days at the end of the day. We've talked before about an examination of conscience, which is something that we're supposed to do in the evening, where you examine your faults. And I know we've said before, too, that that's so contrary to what the world says. The world tells us to look at all the things we're doing well and cheer ourselves on. And while that's good, it's also very important that we step back and think about what we're not doing well and what our faults are. And you had said something really good when we were out for coffee and talking about this, about how sometimes knowing our faults
00:09:01
Speaker
and having to push through them. It can hurt, but it shouldn't damage us, right? But this examination of conscience, this idea of being self-aware, it can hurt to push ourselves beyond that. Yeah, that was a point I heard on another podcast. It's called Parenting Great Kids, and it's a podcast with Dr. Meg Meeker.
00:09:21
Speaker
She had a guest on to talk about setting boundaries for your kids and more on discipline, but this interviewee was saying, you know, that pain is not the same thing as causing harm and that just because, and again, this is in a different context, but just because something is causing a little bit of discomfort, it doesn't necessarily mean that it needs to cease.
00:09:44
Speaker
Right. So this is so true. I thought of this in the context of our topic today. It's so true, especially when forming new habits, because that always hurts to form new habits.
Forming Habits and Daily Challenges
00:09:56
Speaker
Exercise when it's a physical pain. Decluttering can be an emotional pain. Lenten practices or adding prayers or adding mortifications, that can be spiritually painful until it kind of becomes a new habit.
00:10:12
Speaker
So I loved that illustration and just that visualization of, you know, you can acknowledge that you're feeling pain. We talked a little bit about that during fasting as well, I think, that you can feel those things. But again, it's up to you to know just how far you fall on the scale.
00:10:31
Speaker
And I think that that's a good point because one of the quotes we were talking about is, you can't judge your beginning by somebody else's middle or end. And so some of us have been kind of working through this over the years. And maybe I'll just address, I had shared on the social media my own goals to kind of do a reboot for my health.
00:10:53
Speaker
And while that was incredibly motivating for most people, I can understand how some people would look at that and be jarred by how severe some of it is. But I've been living like that and on this journey of fortitude and perseverance and doing the hard things for many, many years now in my life. And that's something I've worked with a priest on over the years. You know, I'm not just jumping into this. And so
00:11:19
Speaker
We are all at different spaces and like we're saying being self aware of what we are actually capable of and what we just can't do right now is a critically important part of this. I know what I can do and I know the areas that I will slack often so I know then where to push harder in those areas and so we are all at different points and so.
00:11:42
Speaker
sitting back and making a list for yourself is really critically important. And like we were saying that there are some things you cannot control. But what we try to do in our own lives is it's about approaching those and enduring those things sometimes with more patience than we ever have in the past. And knowing when, you know, just to be there for other people and just
00:12:07
Speaker
taking care, making sacrifices to help them because they're at a spot on their journey that you maybe just need to support them. And it's not about you at that time. To your point, actually, I found that an important distinction to consider too. There's a very slight difference between, you know, persevering and enduring too, right? So, you know, we're maybe going to talk a bit more today about persevering.
00:12:33
Speaker
in hard things. Persevering is more about the continual effort, the continually going after something, doing something in spite of difficulty or obstacles, whereas endurance is more to suffer patiently or to remain or to last.
00:12:50
Speaker
to wait it out. Right. And, you know, one is not better than the other one does not indicate more strength needed than the other one does. It's just two completely different places of life two different stages of life.
00:13:05
Speaker
So you can do both joyfully. You can joyfully endure something. Joy, again, being different from happy all the time, different from perkiness. And you can persevere through hard things too. So, you know, you think of endurance when you are undergoing a difficult life, a life change or a life transition.
00:13:30
Speaker
versus maybe perseverance, someone who is on that weight loss journey and really has to actively go after it, even though it's hard. You're so right, Michelle.
00:13:43
Speaker
illustrated this beautifully while we were out for coffee again, where you compared it really to being a mother, right? And how we push our kids to get back up when they fall down or when they get off their bike. And because we can see within them the potential to keep going and we see within them growth that they might not see.
00:14:03
Speaker
And I thought that was such a great way of looking at it. And then, but are we asking the same of ourselves? So we're really good at seeing when other people should persevere and push through. You know, we see that in our husbands and in our children and everybody else and our coworkers, we're really good at managing that and other people. But are we good at stepping outside ourselves and thinking, man, I've come so far, I shouldn't stop right now. I need to persevere through this myself.
00:14:30
Speaker
And so, yeah, we see that in our children. We want to help them grow. But what about ourselves? Yeah, because on the one hand, you're right. Sometimes we give ourselves a little bit too many excuses. We don't give ourselves enough credit. So it's not even a negative thing in terms of we're lazy. It's more like we don't have the confidence in ourselves and in our strength to go forward, whereas
00:14:57
Speaker
we think everyone else is so much more capable than us and so much stronger than we are. And then on the other side of the coin too, when other people fall and have to get back up, we are like super positive and such cheerleaders like, oh, you get back up and don't shake it off and just keep going. I'm so proud of you. And when we fall, it's like, well,
00:15:23
Speaker
that happened. Throw in the towel. I guess I give up. We're not, we're not very kind to ourselves. And actually St. Francis de Sales has a quote on that too, right? He says, to be patient with everybody, but most of all, be patient with yourself. Right.
00:15:40
Speaker
And I think that what we've been saying about how, you know, if you know yourself and you're treating it like this step by step journey and process, then it will allow for a little bit of tough love and a little bit of prudence.
00:15:55
Speaker
When to back off and when to move forward Because it does come down to the big picture and we see that for the others in our life But we can't always step outside and see the big picture in our own life You can sometimes but you can't always and that's why it's so important to constantly reevaluate where you're at in that journey and and to set the checkpoints along the way so you can check in and
00:16:17
Speaker
and give yourself those little motivational talks. But there are a lot of things in our day-to-day life that we can do better, that we can set the bar a little bit higher and push through. And when we look at fortitude,
00:16:33
Speaker
The word fort like a military fort comes from that it's all the same type of thing and it is military a bit and standing your ground and building a fortress of protection around yourself so that you can push through
00:16:49
Speaker
And there's that, I think it's so cliched, but it's cliched because it's true that saying of sometimes you don't know how strong you are until you're forced to be, right? And we don't have to wait until the big things happen in our lives to grow with a determined will so that when we exercise that will, and this is exactly what we're talking about with fasting, when you exercise that will, when the big things do happen, you've grown in the virtue of fortitude so you can handle it better.
00:17:17
Speaker
That's right. It comes in handy practically in daily lives.
Growth Through Daily Difficulties
00:17:22
Speaker
And then even one step further prepares you for those big moments too. Yep. And as we always go back to balance, but there should be a balance between really knowing who you are and where you're at right now, but also with who you want to be.
00:17:37
Speaker
setting those goals and being realistic a realistic optimist we kept talking about being a realistic optimist right and yeah so yeah understanding that this is where you're at today you have you know a newborn and three or four other kids at home and that's it for right now like that's all you can do but yeah that is a hard thing and
00:17:57
Speaker
It is a very hard thing and you have to endure that and you have to persevere through that every day. But I think at the same time, if you are that mom right now on the couch that you and I have both been, setting a goal for yourself and saying, okay, well, where do I see myself in six months and a year from now and setting those little goals? And it's where do I see myself in two hours from now? Is it having the dishes done?
00:18:22
Speaker
then get up and do the dishes and when we do those little things it does really empower us to feel like we can handle the big things. I've talked before about being overwhelmed by clutter in our house and I'll be honest with you watching you do your cleaning and your before and afters on social media really was one of the things to get the ball rolling in my head like I need to do something similar.
00:18:49
Speaker
But by that point, it was like five years of not doing that. It was so overwhelming and it seemed too hard. And I wouldn't start. But what you're saying too, the goal was that same evening.
00:19:06
Speaker
right? It's like if I do this now, then I can sit in three hours and it will be nice to sit in, right?
Setting Ambitious Goals and Community Support
00:19:14
Speaker
Like the goals don't have to be big and lofty. The end, the finish line doesn't have to be so far off. You can barely see it. It can be so attainable. Right, right. It's so true. And if we look at those difficulties, like a messy house, it can be a difficulty, but it should be an opportunity to grow.
00:19:33
Speaker
yourself that day it isn't just about cleaning the house it's about growing within yourself the idea of persevering through doing your 50th load of laundry and every time that we do that it the the great the clean laundry yep the kids having clean clothes that's great that's a great reward
00:19:49
Speaker
But there is a bigger reward there in learning how to push through and get that stuff done and try to do so with a deep rooted joy, like you're saying. Not a temporary happiness that ebbs and flows, but a deep rooted joy. And so if we look at all of those daily difficulties as chances to grow and as opportunities to better ourselves, it just changes it. It provides a whole new framework.
00:20:16
Speaker
we should always be ready to learn and to solve new problems in a new way. And I feel like if we look at our daily life as a chance to do that, to learn constantly and to grow as a person, we're persevering, but it's only benefiting us. Oh, for sure. So for those of us who are in the midst of hard things or would like to begin these strengthening habits,
00:20:43
Speaker
What are some tips? Like, what are some of the things that we can do to get us in the mind frame, like get us in the game? Well, my priest said to me during spiritual direction, and then I've heard it many times since, not only from religious people, but from like military trainers. I like to listen to like hardcore military stuff myself, because that's just kind of where I'm at. So I do like hardcore Russian kettlebell with a guy yelling gomerang at you and stuff. So that's just, again, that's where I'm at in my journey. But the idea of aiming high
00:21:13
Speaker
Is very very important in a spiritual sense and every part of our life because and this is just The reality of it when you aim high at a target for target shooting or archery You're going to shoot low you're going to it's going to hit lower than that
00:21:29
Speaker
And so it's very important that we do set our goals and that we do aim high, fully realizing that we're not going to hit it at that point, but that that's okay. At least we don't want to hit lower, too low, right? So aim high is that you hit at a good point. So that's one of the tips. What about you? Do you have one?
00:21:48
Speaker
Yeah, my thing would be to find some sort of community to support you, if you can. And this can be in real life. I mean, that would be ideal, but sometimes not always doable, right, with time schedules and locations and where you live.
00:22:05
Speaker
So online communities, I find very helpful for that. And, you know, sometimes people can be afraid of living in an echo chamber, right? There's too many people who are telling you the same things or, you know, just making it seem like everything's great and everything. But on the other side of that, to find a community, especially who's working towards a similar goal as you.
00:22:27
Speaker
I find vastly encouraging and motivating and surprising. And you see that with all of these, you know, with minimalism groups popping up to help people with that emotional tie to things if they're having trouble getting through and breaking through that barrier of clutter or weight loss groups or mothering groups or homeschooling groups. These are great tools because, you know, we were not created to go it alone.
00:22:56
Speaker
right? So if you can, if you have the resources in front of you, I would definitely look into finding that support. You may bring up a great point. I was listening to a podcast interview yesterday with somebody who's doing the history of psychology and he broke down psychological treatments kind of into two categories. And so right now, to be clear, I'm not talking about
00:23:18
Speaker
severe neurological disorders that require very hands-on psychiatric care and medications. We're not talking about that. This man explained that one of the most effective cures to help us heal from your regular depression or anxiety, those types of things that he said all of us feel at all different points in our lives is, like you just said, the talking cure. It's called the talking cure. And so this is something I believe he said Freud really developed
00:23:46
Speaker
But it's not a new thing. He said in the past, when we had large families surrounding us, we talked to them. And in the past, we talked to our religious leaders and the priests and the nuns, or you'd go spend time at a convent or an abbey and talk to these people.
00:24:01
Speaker
We did that naturally and now we haven't set up lives that allow us to have that closeness with people, but the talking cure is very, very effective at making us feel better when we have to persevere and endure some of these things in our lives.
00:24:18
Speaker
Yeah, and I've actually used that so many times, but didn't realize that was an actual recommended form of... Therapy. Therapy, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. There's something else that we do that Jason and I talk a lot about because it's something I fail in all the time, and you and I were just talking about this.
00:24:35
Speaker
I don't know if there's an official name for it, but Jason always calls it the last 10% or the last 10 minutes. And so it's like, as I've said before with our cleaning routine, we don't get our kids to bed until 10 30, sometimes closer to 11, our older kids are almost teenagers and so they're up late. And so we have to actually persevere and go down and get our evening cleanup done because it's very important
00:25:00
Speaker
in our marriage to have a clean house especially like you were saying to relax at night and to come down in the morning and start the day in a clean house and so but I'm really good at doing the first 90% of that clean and then I just slowly make my way over to the couch and put my feet up and there's only like a
00:25:17
Speaker
a few minutes left of work, right? Like taking the things out to the recycling bin in the garage or just the last few minutes hanging up the last coats that maybe are laid at the front door that I think, oh, forget it. But Jason always says, no, it's the last 10%. Push through, get that done. Because it's that last 10% that if you can push through, it helps you grow in that willpower and helps exercise that perseverance muscle.
00:25:43
Speaker
Yeah. Oh my goodness. I love that. And do you know what? Phil would say the same thing about me. I can't tell you how many house projects I've started and then it ends up, he's like finishing painting the room or something like that. But yeah, that last 10%, when you put it like that, it does put things into a better perspective.
00:26:07
Speaker
OK, it's time for our What I'm Loving This Week segment of the show.
Literary Loves: Mark Twain and The Night Circus
00:26:11
Speaker
So, Lindsay, what have you been loving this week? I have fallen head over heels in love with Mark Twain, the author. I'm just finishing The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as I work through my now year two of Lindsay reading the classics. I read Tom Sawyer last year and loved it so much. And so I don't usually revisit an author during this period, but I just had to go back to Mark Twain and he is
00:26:36
Speaker
Oh, I'm absolutely in love with him. And then I just watched a documentary on his life that we can put in the show notes. It's on YouTube. And it's just about an hour. I was sobbing by the end and his house is a museum that we can go to. It's not that far actually from where we are. And so, yeah, I mean, by not far, it's probably a good three hour drive, but really not that far. It could totally be a weekend trip. Yeah. And so I believe he was in Connecticut. I have to double check that. But I remember it being like either New York state or Connecticut, like
00:27:05
Speaker
you know, very reasonable for us. But always a Southern gentleman, he grew up in Missouri, and just his writings, I highly recommend it. Now, he is a controversial writer in this day and age because of the language he uses that was very appropriate to the 1850s. It is hard as somebody in 2019 reading some of the language he uses,
00:27:26
Speaker
That's a whole other discussion, but as somebody who is, you know, I studied English literature in university, I'm very passionate about maintaining literature to be what it was at that time as a study of that time. But yeah, I want to do both Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn as read-alouds with my kids, and I'm still deciding on, I'm not going to use the language out loud when I read some of it with them. But aside from that, he is
00:27:52
Speaker
Fantastic. It's like you were sitting and drinking an iced tea with Mark Twain on a southern porch and he's talking right to you and telling you these stories. So if you haven't yet read Huckleberry Finn, it is totally a page turner. I've been staying up until 1 30 in the morning reading Mark Twain. So that's what I'm loving.
00:28:10
Speaker
Yeah, I'm going to add that to the list. And actually, this is so interesting because my love for this week is also a book that I finished reading. And it's one you have read too, I think, The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern.
00:28:26
Speaker
Oh my goodness, I think that is probably one of my top books I've ever read. I really loved it. And like what you were saying with Huckleberry Finn and Mark Twain, I just felt so immersed in that world. The way that she wrote about that circus, I felt like it's a real place. It's immersive, right? It's totally immersive and evocative.
00:28:52
Speaker
Which was curious for me because normally I'm not super into descriptive books, right? Like I love Tolkien. I love the storylines of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. I find it very challenging to read sometimes his books because it's so descriptive. The Night Circus though, I was fascinated by it.
00:29:15
Speaker
I didn't know that she actually wrote it for a writing competition and that she actually installed this novel in three different years. And as with all novels that I love to read, if I'm liking it, I hop on to imdb.com to see if it's in the works for a movie.
00:29:33
Speaker
I know and this one sadly there's nothing yet so I talked about that for years though because I read that maybe four or five years ago and they it's been tossed around and optioned a few times for films but it would be almost it would be there's a top ten list of like books that everybody wants to be movies but it's almost impossible to imagine how they could make it a movie and that's one of them right like yeah you picture so many of the images in your head it is fantastical it would be quite the screenplay to have to work out but it would be
00:30:03
Speaker
So incredible to see that, a Night Circus in black and white, like, oh my goodness, on the screen, yeah. Yeah, so if you're looking for something that's part romance, part setting, part magic and challenging gameplay, then the Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern will be a great bet for you.
00:30:30
Speaker
Okay, that's going to do it for us this week. You can leave us a comment on the show's topic on Facebook or Instagram, both at the Modern Lady Podcast. I'm Michelle Sachs, and you can find me on Instagram at mmsax. And I'm Lindsay Murray, and you can find me on Instagram at Lenny Autumn. Thank you so much for joining us. We hope you have a great week and we'll see you next time.