Stephen Pierce on How To Never Give Up

Stephen Pierce on How To Never Give Up 1 | P a g e

Stephen Pierce on How To Never Give Up How To Never Give Up Hope Doesn’t Abandon Us, We Abandon Hope –Here’s How To Never Never Never Give Up By Stephen Pierce © Copyright ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited except as permitted by the author. 2 | P a g e

Stephen Pierce on How To Never Give Up Table of Contents Endurance is Everything ..................................... 4 Internal and External Processes ......................... 8 The Proper Perspective ..................................... 12 Realistic Expectations ........................................ 14 Have a Contingency Plan ................................. 18 Summary ............................................................. 25 3 | P a g e

Stephen Pierce on How To Never Give Up Welcome to this edition of TheSuccess Sculpting Coach featuring “How To Never Give Up: Hope Doesn’t Abandon Us, We Abandon Hope,” and how to build levels of persistence and perseverance to stay in a winning game. Endurance is Everything You can have all kinds of skills, a world of opportunities and great potential, but if you can’t endure and stay in the game long enough to give yourself the opportunity to win, then winning is unlikely. There is no success without perseverance and persistence. But how do you tap into that level of intestinal fortitude, that stick-to-itiveness, when it seems that life is sticking it to you? How do you maintain that unstoppable level of resilience, that perpetual bounce-back, no matter how many times you fall down? 4 | P a g e

Stephen Pierce on How To Never Give Up Successful people don’t count how many times they fall down; they count how many times they actually get back up. That’s what perseverance and persistence is all about. It’s not just participating in the game, but about persisting in the game. It’s not just starting the task, but continuing and completing the task and seeing it all the way through. Success isn’t about having a wishbone – it’s about having a backbone. That backbone allows you to persevere and persist even when you’re standing alone; when everyone who started with you is gone; when all the plans you carefully laid out basically fall apart and all you have left is that burning flame of hope, knowing that you can achieve what you want to achieve and that you just need to endure. 5 | P a g e

Stephen Pierce on How To Never Give Up You need to hold on. You need to persist. You need to never give up. How often have you been tired of endless “preparing” and thought of quitting? You go through the process of doing this, that and the other based on what you’re told, and certain things are supposed to show up in your life. “These certain things are supposed to happen and they’re not happening. I’m tired of this. I’m tired of practicing.” How many times have you taken your eye off the ball or the objective to get better because you felt disoriented and wanted to quit, that what you were doing didn’t really matter in the big picture? There’s nothing wrong with feeling like quitting, thinking or even talking about quitting, “That’s it, 6 | P a g e

Stephen Pierce on How To Never Give Up I’m done, I quit!” as long as you don’t actually do it. The big error is when you allow those feelings to override your commitment. Endurance, perseverance and persistence qualify you for the reward. You're able to endure, persevere and persist when you have a picture of what you want to create. When everything gets blurry, you get distracted, become depressed, disoriented and dismayed. You just get dis’d. The final dis is when you want to dismiss yourself from the entire process, because it seems like an endless recurrence of the same negative situations over and over. 7 | P a g e

Stephen Pierce on How To Never Give Up Internal and External Processes There is a tendency to think about performance and processes as external, but internal (mental) processes precede and even trump external performances. How people perform from an internal (mental) perspective impacts how they actually perform externally (physically). The question is, “How are you performing from a mental standpoint?” You can physically see when someone is being persistent. You can’t touch or smell persistence, but you can recognize what intestinal fortitude looks like. It shows in a person’s performance; it drives them to action. 8 | P a g e

Stephen Pierce on How To Never Give Up It’s hard, however, to persist and persevere in the face of great obstacles if there is a lack of alignment among the spirit, body, and soul. Consider the mindset behind Special Opporation Forces, like Navy Seals, Army Rangers, and Sniper teams. The process to become a Special Forces member is designed to disqualify members, not qualify them. It is training engineered to make them quit. Why? These groups need people to be in dark, obscure places where, no matter what comes their way, they will never give up. So, everything is thrown at these candidates to make them quit. 9 | P a g e

Stephen Pierce on How To Never Give Up Think about it; 250 guys enter training saying, “I’m going to be a Navy Seal.” And at the end of the day, about 20 or 30 are left when the others start ringing the bell that indicates, “I quit.” The difference is not physical. Training information indicates that the soldier’s physical body is the first to succumb to training challenges. Those who become part of any Special Ops Team are the ones with the mental toughness to overcome the physical pain. Like an old warrior, his spirit is fearless, yet the body trembles when it experiences levels of anxiety and pain. Fearlessness occurs at the spiritual level, where there’s an unwavering commitment to do whatever 10 | P a g e

Stephen Pierce on How To Never Give Up is necessary to succeed, regardless of physical pain or anxiety. The process of becoming successful is about snatching what you want from obstacles in your path. It’s like trying to figure a way to disarm a bear trap without tripping the trap on your hand. Life is an obstacle course, and how well you do is based on how successfully you can navigate obstacles. If your perspective is that they shouldn’t exist, then you will be in shock when they appear. Obstacles aren’t necessarily the problem. It’s how you negotiate around or through them that matters. 11 | P a g e

Stephen Pierce on How To Never Give Up The Proper Perspective Professional athletes enter training camps to prepare to overcome and win games versus teams that also prepare to win. They know that winning is only found by beating someone else who is equally prepared to beat them. What happens when you use that same strategy? What if you think winning will not be easy, convenient or affordable in time, energy or money, but you want it to be worth it? Are you prepared to persevere and persist, or does your lack of preparation set you up to be pounced on the moment something doesn’t go your way? Often, your plans fail to work because resistance is all around you. There’s nothing you can do to 12 | P a g e

Stephen Pierce on How To Never Give Up control resistance, but you can prepare to overcome it. That’s known as simply personal responsibility. Your response to resistance must be according to the situation and not according to how you feel. It may be emotionally gratifying in the short term, but it doesn’t last in the long term. It’s like eating a chocolate cake in the moment, but later paying for it with love handles or bad health. Do you respond to situations emotionally, or from a more intellectual and thoughtful standpoint? Do you think before you actually respond, as opposed to emotional rapid reactions? Most quick reactions are based on what you feel in the moment. 13 | P a g e

Stephen Pierce on How To Never Give Up Many people are slaves to what they feel, and then find themselves trying to clean up a mess because they allowed their feelings “in the moment” to deceive them. You don’t have to be a victim of deception, either your own or someone else’s. You can shake off negative feelings with positive reactions. Instead of thinking in hindsight, “I would have done it differently,” imagine, “What would happen if I do this?” There is no question that emotions are extremely powerful, which is why you need to tame them (active approach) and not be tamed by them (passive approach). Realistic Expectations Winning positions are built over time, not overnight. It’s about your expectations. 14 | P a g e

Stephen Pierce on How To Never Give Up Suppose you like gardening and see other people’s beautiful fields of vegetables and fruits, and think, “I’m going to do that!” So you get more involved in gardening. Then you hear some people complain that they don’t have a garden, but they neglect to tell you that they planted nothing. They expect to reap the rewards for something when they made no investment in anything. Then there are gardeners who complain about what they do have. “Why in the world do I have these strawberries?” They wanted watermelons but got strawberries. The obvious question is, “What did you put into the ground? Did you plant watermelon seeds or strawberry seeds?” And then there are those who plant seeds 15 | P a g e

Stephen Pierce on How To Never Give Up in the garden today and ask tomorrow, “Where’s my garden?” Even a Chia Pet takes time! What are your expectations? Are you disoriented about them? Do you expect that what you want to happen can happen faster than the natural process dictates? Proper orientation is a prelude to perseverance and persistence. For example, the human pregnancy process is generally nine months; it’s a fact of nature. No one would ever think that a woman can be pregnant and deliver a healthy, full-term baby in three months. It’s just not feasible. You can apply this same principle to weight loss programs or to building that business you’ve always wanted. 16 | P a g e

Stephen Pierce on How To Never Give Up Whatever your goals may be, your expectations of what it will take in terms of time, energy and money might be mismatched with reality. Every sports team knows it takes X number of games over X number of months to get to (and win!) the championship round. They won’t bail out in mid-season, thinking, “Man, this is taking too long!” No way. They know how long it will take and what they must do to get there. Remember, the quantity, quality and focus of behaviors depends on expectations and timelines, and it all can come crumbling down if you rely on improper orientations of how long parts of the process will take. 17 | P a g e

Stephen Pierce on How To Never Give Up If you want to succeed at something you’ve never done before and put unrealistic timelines on your goals, then if those goals don’t happen within those timelines, you’re likely to give up at this point. Have a Contingency Plan Most people have an original plan, but not a contingency plan. A contingency plan kicks into gear when something goes wrong. Some people fail to develop a contingency plan because they see it as too negative. “Well, what if this doesn’t work?” Sometimes the positive and negative aspects of truth about a situation collide. But truth has no bias as being negative or positive. It’s simply the truth. 18 | P a g e

Stephen Pierce on How To Never Give Up You can color it, dress it up, spray it with perfume and still call it negative or positive. It’s simply the truth, the facts. Guess what my friend. Ignoring the facts doesn’t change the facts. That's your biased attitude. Sometimes you are blind to a truth that might help you, because it’s packaged as something you perceive as negative. The truth is that your original plan has a high probability of not working. That’s not a negative. That’s truth. So have a contingency plan. It’s like a quarterback at the line of scrimmage changing a play from what he called in the huddle (an audible) because he sees a better play option. 19 | P a g e

Stephen Pierce on How To Never Give Up In life and in business, if you fail to give yourself options to change as the environment changes, you become extinct. Blockbusters suffered at the hands of Redbox and Netflix because it didn’t adapt. Why is the music industry a servant to iTunes, Napster, Rhapsody, and all those other companies? It was so fixated on what was that it was blind to what could be. And it didn’t change. Amazon didn’t create book buying; it wasn’t even the first online bookstore. But it did have the best model and recently represents over 80% of all online book buying. In the 2000’s decade, when many tech companies had outrageous valuations and went bust, Amazon lost millions of dollars every year for over five years. 20 | P a g e

Stephen Pierce on How To Never Give Up But it understood that success happens over time, not overnight. It endured, knowing that it takes intestinal fortitude, perseverance and persistence to bounce back. Plenty of critics wrote them off, but Amazon didn’t buy into that option. Instead, they mastered their processes and excelled at them. Who is writing you off. Go ahead and let them waste their ink, paper and time. I tell people, listen, “if you want to write me off, go ahead, but you better write it in pencil and have your eraser ready.” 21 | P a g e

Stephen Pierce on How To Never Give Up At the end of the day, if you don’t write yourself off, then it doesn’t matter what is coming out at the end of other people’s pens, pencils and tongues. When someone wants to write you off, ask yourself, “where did they learn to write you or anyone off?” Chances are it started with them writing themselves off, and like all socialites, they are looking for company. Don’t join them. If they want to bet against you winning and succeed. It’s their money to lose. I’ll take a bet against me any day, because no one’s money is longer than my lion like attitude and relentless determination and willingness to screw everything up to figure out how to get it right. 22 | P a g e

Stephen Pierce on How To Never Give Up Never bet against a hungry determined person with nothing to lose. Now, on the subject of what you “think” you have to lose, I’ll save that for another time. ? At some point in life, most people think about what they would like to enjoy, but very few talk about what they must endure to enjoy it. Persistence has its price and success comes with a price. Some people become so fixated about it all that they quit. The price gets too high in time, money, energy, or whatever sacrifice they imagine. What are you willing to endure to enjoy what you want? How often do you take time to think about the cost of success? 23 | P a g e

Stephen Pierce on How To Never Give Up It has a price, and persistence and perseverance are parts of that price. Quitting also has a cost. What will it cost you if you quit? What will it cost your family, and the people you say you love? What will it cost those people who will be negatively impacted because you decided to quit, because you decided to allow life’s resistance to outlast your personal persistence? What will it cost your destiny, your legacy, your future? Will you pay the cost of quitting or the price of winning? Persistence has benefits, quitting has consequences. 24 | P a g e

Stephen Pierce on How To Never Give Up Since you will pay for something, you might as well pay for the positive, for winning, no matter what that price is, if it’s legal, ethical, and morally correct. There are no limits to your commitment when you truly want a specific goal. There will be temptations to give up. But being tempted is not an error. The error is when you yield to temptation and allow those moments of pressure to get the best of you, and then just fold. Summary Keep your destiny front and center in your mind, because that becomes your beacon of hope. When you feel like packing it all in and abandoning your hopes and dreams, remain persistent and 25 | P a g e

Stephen Pierce on How To Never Give Up persevere toward your goals, understanding that: “This is a price I must pay, and the reward far outweighs the cost of quitting. I will never give up.” May The Most High Bless YOU and YOURS, Stephen Pierce www.SuccessSculpting.com 26 | P a g e

Stephen Pierce on How To Never Give Up