You’ve worked hard to get here and this is so important to you. But things aren’t going to plan. How do you know if it’s time to show your grit and determination and push through to the bitter end - or decide to play the long game, pull out now and come back stronger?

This is another blog post following on from the webinar with Mark Gillett, ‘Big Adventures on Average Talent: Ultramarathons, river rescues and YOU’ – also see the last blog post taken from the webinar: ‘5 ways to find ease & resilience in the big challenges’ and the recording of the webinar.

Earlier in October, Mark undertook an epic challenge to raise funds and awareness for efforts to protect and restore River Wye: to run the Wye Valley Walk as a 136 mile ultramarathon, aiming to complete it faster than the Fastest Known Time, and finishing the route in time to join a community event with speakers, stalls and activities about adventure, running, ecology and wildlife – all for the River Wye. We’ll be talking about how he got on, ups and downs and lessons learned out on the trail in our next webinar on 6th November (and in the meantime keep an eye out for updates on Instagram or sign up to the email list).

When you take on a big challenge, going beyond your ordinary, perhaps as an adventurer or a changemaker, there may be times when you have to decide whether to go on or pull the plug. Sometimes it’s our motivation that is lacking and we have to decide whether it’s ‘worth’ pushing on; sometimes it’s trying to decide whether carrying on could actually be harmful in the long-run and whether slowing down might be the sensible choice. Either way it can be a really difficult decision to make in the heat of things.

During the webinar, Mark told us about a challenging training block preparing for an overnight jungle ultramarathon in Thailand, when he had Covid, and then pushed himself too hard trying to make up lost time, and ended up injured. The apparently ‘cursed’ training block got hit by more incidents after that, and there were several points where he had to decide whether or not to continue. Somehow he made it to the ultramarathon, which (as an ultramarathon should) had its share of challenges, and again he faced the decision of whether to continue or not. You can watch the recording here to hear more about that particular adventure. We talked about how in hindsight, he probably needed more time to recover after Covid, and that he learnt from this experience about taking time to strengthen himself, taking time to rest, and being more able to acknowledge and prioritise these now. For Mark this involved literally learning about, and implementing strength training to reduce the risk of injury and become a better runner – but this lesson can be applied to all sorts of ways that you can take time to strengthen yourself mentally or physically and resource yourself better for achieving the goal. Mark learned that even though it can feel counter-intuitive to stop or slow down when you have a big goal to achieve, sometimes you need to stop, slow down or even go backward to go further and maybe even faster too. The subsequent decision-points Mark faced during the event itself were about whether there was reason enough to go on and whether he could motivate himself to carry on against the odds, but perhaps an even trickier question is how do you know if you SHOULD push on? These big challenges that changemakers and adventurers take on are, by nature, going to include tough times, obstacles, ups and downs. You have to have some level of grit or resilience to keep going and achieve these big goals. A certain degree of suffering is expected. And perhaps it feels worth it if the goal is really important. You might have already come a long way and feel invested in it. But sometimes you could actually go further in the long run if you take some time out to skill-up or strengthen up. Sometimes pushing on puts you at risk of injury - and for changemakers there is often a fear of burnout. In fact, for some people, the fear of burning out stops them from taking action in the first place. So having confidence in your ability to make that decision: ‘push through or step back?’ is important.

The first thing to say, now that I’ve got you this far, is that you can’t really know. Unless you have a crystal ball. You can only make a decision with the best available information that you have. You can’t know at that point what is the RIGHT decision. And you may never know, because if you stop and don’t get burnt out or injured, you can’t know for sure that you would have done if you had carried on. And if you carry on and get injured or burnt out, there is still the chance that it would have happened even if you had stopped at that point.

But there are certain things that can help your decision-making, and increase your confidence that you’re making a good choice.

Here are 3 that we talked about in the webinar:

1. Experience

As you gain experience of challenging yourself, you gain the opportunity to learn your indicators and limitations – if you pay attention. What is normal for you? Which type of pain (emotional or physical) tends to pass without coming back to bite you, which is the satisfying kind of pain, which type of pain tells you there is a problem? I learnt that I always feel terrible in all sorts of ways at the start of a run and that it doesn’t predict how the run is going to go, so I stopped worrying about it. I became more tolerant of that discomfort, knowing it was normal and would pass. Funnily enough once I stopped worrying about it, the ‘start of run struggle’ passed quicker or didn’t come at all. Of course, experience can also come from getting it wrong, otherwise how else would you learn whether it’s the kind of pain that gets worse or comes back to bite you the next day?

2. Managing stress

When we are stressed our interoceptive abilities suffer. This is our ability to read information from our body. And given that the sort of situation in which you need to decide whether to push on or not, is likely to be challenging and stressful, it can be really difficult to work out what you need. The more that you are able to calm and regulate yourself in the moment, the more likely you are to get a better reading of your internal temperature. The more experience you have with your personal repertoire of calming, regulatory practices, outside of the stressful times, the easier and more effective any attempts to calm yourself in a stressful situation will be - and it might even kick in automatically.

3. Removing the fog

It can be really hard to understand what you actually want and need when your head is so full of other things. Things like other people’s expectations (or your perception of other people’s expectations), perfectionism, people-pleasing, beliefs like ‘I’m only as good as what I achieve’, ‘if I stop I will have failed’, ‘if I stop I am weak’, or ‘I have to earn the right to rest’. Those narratives and beliefs can show up and affect all sorts of different parts of your life, and can sometimes be part of what drives you, but they can also be those things that trip you up or cloud your judgement when you need it most. And of course these lines of thought tend to be stressful so that’s going to affect interoception and decision-making as per the point above. So, identifying the narratives or beliefs, and working through them outside of that crucial decision moment so that you understand how they might be influencing you, will help you have a clearer view in the heat of the moment, tune into what’s happening in the here and now, and make the best possible decision with the current available knowledge.

Here are some other ideas:

1. Mentally prepare for the dark times

Visualising your success is a great, science-backed strategy that Mark uses and it’s something that I will go into more detail elsewhere. Similarly, another strategy he uses is visualising and mentally preparing himself for problems. He’s absolutely not a pessimist! Without the mental preparation, when you hit a hurdle, you can lose a lot of energy being shocked, and tipping into catastrophising or panicking etc. If you have a pre-prepared mental image you can draw on of yourself meeting an issue, regulating yourself and calmly taking the next steps, you save that energy and give yourself something to do, buying time. You might include a specific action of ‘If this happens… then I’ll do this…’ You’ll probably find yourself calmer and with more mental space to process the situation and decide what to do – whether that involves carrying on or stopping. (But just make sure you stick to the ‘if… then…’ rather than the ‘what ifs’ which can lead to over-thinking that can spiral into anxiety).

2. Value strength building

Truly believe that sometimes you need to slow down, stop or even go backwards to go further and faster in the long-run. If you are less afraid of slowing down or stopping it is easier for you to think clearly about whether or not it is needed. Value the strength-building, rest and recovery, and building your resources as being as much a part of the journey as the actual steps forward.

3. Make the goal / end-point less overwhelming

Sometimes the overwhelm from the magnitude of the goal can be exhausting and sap motivation and make you feel like you can’t go on. But it’s so big and important that you feel like you have to. And now you don’t know what to do and you feel so overwhelmed by the decision that you want to give up. But you don’t want to feel like a failure. And so on. So start by making the goal less overwhelming. Create mini-goals and focus on the next step. Detach your sense of self-worth from the final outcome. Acknowledge that not everything is in your control. Draw out what you are gaining from the journey so it’s not all riding on the destination. Dialling things down a bit here there’s more space to make a decision about what you actually want or need to do.

What do you think? Do you do any of these? Will you try any? What experiences have you got of making the ‘push on or stop’ decision?

If working out how to apply any of these to yourself is challenging try these:

• Dedicate some time and effort to working things out (rather than just expecting yourself to have the answers straight away). If it helps, spend time with a piece of paper and a pen and write, journal, doodle, draw

• Get a buddy or a coach to help you work things out (you’re very welcome to get in touch with me for help: christina.transformational@gmail.com)

How do you know when to push through & when to give up?

6 ways to cope with failure (and fear of failure)

5 ways to find ease & resilience in the big challenges