Perseverance

Firstly and most importantly, I have absolutely no idea why this post is titled ‘whales and dolphins, yeah’. Does everyone else get this but me?

It’s got me thinking about perseverance, though. Perseverance is a character strength, and as such, Peterson & Seligman would have one believe that it’s an inherent trait. Maybe it can be improved a bit, but not much.

Personally, I think that’s bollocks.

I’m also someone who’s never had to work hard. I either aced all my classes in school or ignored them. I have a truckload of A grades and a non-trivial handful of Fs (ask me what mark I got on my first year undergrad paper in Fluid Mechanics), but very little in between. And then, of course, I left college and started in the world of work and had to learn how to work from scratch at twenty.

I do not recommend this, let me tell you. I pulled a lot of entirely unnecessary all-nighters because I had no idea how to work. I was great at displacement activity of all kinds – my filing systems were always perfect. Actually getting stuff done, not so much. And I never really nailed it. Fifteen years in the workplace and only a looming deadline could shift me off my arse.

This has been pernicious for me in quite a few ways.

On the surface, it’s stopped me doing a lot of stuff I’d love to do, professionally and in my personal life, because I’ve been so scared of the learning process. I’ve become convinced that I can’t do new things. I’ve turned down jobs because I’d have had to learn new things – things that I would now love to be able to do. I paid my builders a lot more than I needed to because I refused to engage with them and therefore they obviously ended up doing a lot more than they had to do. Et cetera.

But it’s also had a deeper effect. It’s stopped me from acting like a grown up. I’ve used ‘I can’t learn new stuff’ as an excuse to let me stay a victim. And then I found countless opportunities to prove myself correct. I made myself and my then boyfriend miserable because I ‘couldn’t’ learn skiing. Yeah, right.

About seven months ago, I started writing an inventory at the end of the day. Very boring stuff – what I’ve eaten, what I’ve spent, what I’m grateful for, how I’ve behaved, what I need to fix, and so on. It takes me ten minutes on a good day, fifteen if I’m not concentrating. And I’ve done it almost every day. There are now over two hundred entries.

And it’s changed my life.

It’s changed my life because I’ve learned that I can change myself. I can persevere.

I spent thirty years believing that I would never change. There are things I do really well (mathematical logic, talking, buying clothes) and things I do really badly (relationships, physical activity, computers) and this is fixed in time for ever and ever. And one of the things I did really badly was doing what I said I would do, sticking to things, perseverance. I would never have believed that I could decide to write an inventory and do it, and keep doing it. But I have.

So I don’t believe I’m fixed in time any more. And because of this, I’m changing other things too. I’m changing things I thought I was stuck with for ever and ever, like talking and eating too fast, like being anxious and stressed all the time, like relying on other people to fill the holes in my self-esteem. I’m becoming happier than I ever thought possible.

Roy Baumeister’s research on self-regulation shows that it’s like a muscle. If we flex it regularly, it grows and we become stronger. Self-regulation in one area of our lives overflows into all the other areas. People who stick to an exercise regime can become more punctual. People who cut an unhealthy habit or substance out of their lives can become more disciplined in their work life. Et cetera. My inventory has led me to change in every aspect of my life.

We can learn to persevere. It’s never too late.