The Seven Crucibles: An Inspirational Game Plan for Overcoming Adversity in Your Life

By Alec Ingold

Live up to your definition of greatness and inspire the best in the people around you.

In The Seven Crucibles: An Inspirational Game Plan for Overcoming Adversity in Your Life, NFL fullback and motivational speaker Alec Ingold delivers a hands-on playbook for conquering every obstacle that stands between you and success, on the playing field and in life. You'll learn to utilize your own story of trials and tribulations to help embrace the changes to create future success. These lessons will help you face your biggest fears and sustain motivation on your path to personal and professional growth.

In the book, you'll find:

• A set of practical tools the author used to climb to the top of one of the most punishing arenas in global athletics and lessons for applying them to your everyday life
• Strategies for creating a mindset that rewards resilience and perseverance, and leaves unrealistic perfectionism behind
• Ways to reflect on your own accomplishments and shortcomings to help you learn from the past and build the future you want

An essential resource for students and professional athletes, The Seven Crucibles will also earn a place on the bookshelves of business, military, academic, government, and educational leaders hoping to coax the best out of themselves and the people they lead.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Jan 31, 2023
• ISBN: 9781394171408

Book preview

THE 7 CRUCIBLES

AN INSPIRATIONAL GAME PLAN FOR OVERCOMING ADVERSITY IN YOUR LIFE

ALEC INGOLD

Logo: Wiley

Copyright © 2023 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data:

Names: Ingold, Alec, author.

Title: The 7 crucibles : an inspirational game plan for overcoming adversity in your life / Alec Ingold.

Description: Hoboken, New Jersey : Wiley, [2023] | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022041522 (print) | LCCN 2022041523 (ebook) | ISBN 9781394171385 (cloth) | ISBN 9781394171392 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781394171408 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Resilience (Personality trait) | Success.

Classification: LCC BF698.35.R47 I54 2023 (print) | LCC BF698.35.R47 (ebook) | DDC 155.2/4—dc23/eng/20220914

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022041522

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022041523

Cover Design: Paul McCarthy

Dedicated to all of the kids who are worried about being perfect. Chase greatness, not perfection. I pray you find purpose in this book and use it to bring that life to reality.

Preface

If you want to dare to be great, this book is for you. You're just like me.

If you've accepted a challenge in your life and made it a priority, you're on a journey full of ups and downs, wins and losses, peaks, valleys, and plateaus. You are chasing dreams that seem impossible to so many and inevitable to just a few friends and family. You want to be the 1% of the 1%, but you may not fully understand what it takes to get there.

I want to help you understand what it takes. I've been blessed beyond my wildest expectations in my journey to the National Football League. That journey was not easy, and as you'll read, it continues to challenge me on so many levels to this day.

The Seven Crucibles will take you inside how I combined my mental, physical, and most important, spiritual gifts to help me achieve my dream.

Whatever your dream is, I want you to live it, too. That's why I'm going to give you the answers to the tests of adversity I've faced along the way, especially when times seem the toughest. I hope you'll use what I'm going to tell you to chase those dreams, something every one of us needs to do. But the best part of The Seven Crucibles is it doesn't stop there. I want you to learn why adversity is essential to success. Chasing dreams without adversity attached diminishes those dreams because it means you're capable of chasing something even bigger!

Think of it this way. Chasing dreams without adversity is like winning a video game on the easiest setting. Dream BIG! Turn that difficulty meter up as high as it goes! Push yourself to your absolute limit, fall, get back up, and keep grinding.

I also want you to understand what happens on the other side of that dream. Have you ever asked yourself that question? Your life doesn't stop just because you accomplished what you want to. Life is a constant blur of motion, time, people and circumstances, and all of them can change in a matter of moments, like when you tear an anterior cruciate ligament, and you're faced with the possibility that you may never play another game in the NFL again.

How do you handle something like that? What do you do next?

When you chase your dreams and achieve them, of course you take some time to enjoy that your hard work paid off. But soon, you go through a necessary reality check.

In your dreams you only focus on the good, the light, the white. Nobody tells you that your dreams may come with nightmares. The failures, the fears, the dark. You have to respond to this realization with uncomfortable honesty. The longer you deny the dark, the harder it becomes to overcome that other side. That's part of the test of adversity that the crucibles in your life bring you. Ironically, it's also the part of life that nobody wants to face.

Nobody can choose how you respond or how quickly. This is an internal decision that I want to help you with. Understand that unless you face adversity, you'll never get to the other side of it and find all the gifts and rewards that were meant for you.

People often think they must confront the darkness on their own. That's absolutely not true. It's a process that nobody should do alone. Nor should you want to, especially if you have people and tools in your corner to help you.

That's why I wrote The Seven Crucibles. You will have few problems in the light, but it's the darkness that you must overcome to lead a happy and full life.

How you approach adversity in your life is a choice. I've been there and that's why I know I can help you. I want you to understand that adversity is inevitable, especially if you've set the bar high for your life. I want you to challenge yourself, and as odd as it may seem, I want you to fail from time to time.

That's because you'll learn resiliency from your failures. Failure will teach you how to adjust, and while it may not seem like it, put you one step closer to succeeding in whatever you decide you want to do with your life.

The Seven Crucibles is a journey for you, just like it has been for me to write it. But you aren't traveling toward a physical destination. As you read, I want you to think that you're traveling