10 Rules for Resilience: Mental Toughness for Families

By Joe De Sena and Lara Pence

10 principles for leading your family to True Resilience, from the bestselling author of Spartan Up and the CEO/founder of Spartan

Joe De Sena has spent his life running toward challenge and discomfort. Why? Because how we react to challenging situations defines us and our families. The only tools we have as humans to survive the many peaks and valleys of a full life are preparedness, health, leadership, and most importantly, resilience. Why do so many parents struggle to finish things we start, delay gratification, and protect our health—and why do our kids continue to struggle in every facet of life? Because we haven’t showed them a path to resilience, and we haven’t fought for it ourselves.  

In 10 Rules for Resilience Joe De Sena outlines his 10 principles for leading your family to True Resilience, a term he uses for a body and mind that have been carved out of hard work, challenge, and failure. It takes True Resilience to approach overwhelming situations with calm and confidence, to not get rattled, anxious, or angry, and even to embrace failure, setbacks, and redirections.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 19, 2021
• ISBN: 9780063063389

Joe De Sena

Joe D Sena is the CEO and founder of Spartan and the Death Race and the New York Times bestselling author of Spartan Up and Spartan Fit. He lives in Vermont.

Book preview

Rule 1

You Can’t, Until You Can

Build a Better Belief System

If there is no struggle, there is no progress. . . . This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle.

—Frederick Douglass

One day a few years ago, I was in New York City preparing for an epic bike trip that I had been planning for months. I was going to ride over three hundred miles on busy streets and back roads from New York City to my farm in Vermont. The route wasn’t going to be easy. It was full of steep uphill climbs and a few dangerous curves and downhills, but it would have stunning views all around, and it was the kind of crazy challenge that got me excited. It was going to be a grueling couple of days on the bike, and I was looking forward to the struggle.

The day before I was set to take off, I ran into a friend and his teenage son at a restaurant in NYC. We said our hellos, and I got to talking about my upcoming bike ride. With every tiny description of the hardship ahead, I noticed that the teenager’s eyes became wider and wider. They lit up like lightning. His body language shifted from disinterested teenager to curious and energetic young man. He leaned in and made eye contact. There was that undeniable craving in his body for tough stuff—a natural human desire for challenge that I’ve devoted my life to nurturing within, and sometimes dragging out of, the people I meet. He peppered me with questions: Where will you sleep? Wherever seems easiest. What will you do on roads without bike lanes? Ride on the edge and hope cars are paying attention. What will you do if you can’t make it up a hill? Keep going. What if you blow out a tire? What if your bike breaks down? What if you get hurt? What if you don’t have cell phone service? What kind of bike do you have? What are you bringing to eat? Where will you stop for rest? The questions went on and on.

I was surprised to see this kind of enthusiasm from a kid who not even ten seconds ago barely acknowledged my presence before turning his full attention back to the cell phone in his hand. Even his dad was surprised to see his son’s attention redirect. It was as if even the thought of the adventure was breathing life into him.

So I did what I do at Spartan every single day: I leaned in and pushed. Hey, I said to the kid. Do you want to come with me? I can get you a bike and gear, no problem.

Silence. A nervous exchange of looks. I stood there, smiling. I watched the familiar dynamic unfold in front of me between parent and child. Hesitation and uncertainty, but, perhaps more important, doubt and fear—all emanating from his dad.

I pushed again. What do you say? Do you want to bike three hundred miles with me? It’s gonna be really fun.

Suddenly my friend jumped in: Oh, I don’t think so, Joe. He’s never done anything like this before. It’s way too long of a ride for him. I don’t know about him sleeping somewhere in the middle of nowhere at night, and we have plans tonight and tomorrow. Besides, I can’t even remember the last time he rode a bike. He would slow you down. Maybe next time.

Why kick off the first chapter of a book on resilience with this story? If you want to be resilient and if you want to build resilience in your family or any of the people around you, which you must because you picked up a book called 10 Rules for Resilience, you have to start noticing. I don’t mean passive noticing. I mean intense awareness of the thoughts running through your brain, your patterns of thought, and how those thoughts eventually come out of your mouth and convert into action. You are your thoughts. Every great athlete, entrepreneur, leader, or parent that I’ve ever encountered begins by looking at how they think and at the limitations those thoughts are placing on themselves and others. Thoughts are your first obstacle.

You know that feeling you get before you head into a big meeting or presentation? The minutes leading up to the meeting, which were barely noticeable to you an hour ago, now feel electric—two minutes until go time, one minute until go time, a few seconds, okay, ready, aim, fire. You are suddenly aware of every ping-ponging thought because suddenly every one of them matters. That’s how aware you need to be as you begin to train yourself for resilience. Notice the thoughts running through your head, the words coming out of your mouth, the work you’re putting in, and where you are on the road to where you want to be. Is the narrative in your head one of constant fear? Are you entering every room and every conversation thinking you’re an impostor? Are you defensive, jumpy, and unreliable? Do you think more about what you’re doing wrong instead of what you’re doing right? What are you thinking right now?

Be aware that your thoughts affect your family. Notice the limitations you place on yourself, because what you tell yourself is what your family, kids, and spouse will start to tell themselves, too. I’m not strong enough. I don’t have enough money. I’m unprepared. I can’t.

Do you want your family to have the same thoughts running through their heads that you do? If not, it’s time to change. Now that you’re noticing what’s happening in your mind, it’s time to put that unhelpful voice on mute.

Difficult Versus Desperate

One of the fundamental obstacles to resilience is mistaking what is difficult for what is desperate. A difficult situation is a growth opportunity. If you want true resilience, you need to put yourself in difficult situations every single day. That means striving for more items off that to-do list at work, more burpees today than you did yesterday, more presence in the here and now by dedicating to longer meditations or committing to whatever that thing is that you want to do better.

A desperate situation is different. It’s a survival situation, a life-or-death situation.

I see the push and pull between difficult and desperate in action at Spartan when new racers, both adults and kids, come to the farm to train for the first time. Most of these new athletes genuinely have no idea what they are capable of, so at some point in the middle of a training session, their brain starts telling them things that aren’t true. They give up at the point of difficult—way, way, way before they get to the point of desperate. I have no doubt that they think their situation is desperate. Their brains are saying, It’s impossible. I can’t do this. But the truth is, it’s only difficult.

How can you tell the difference?

When that struggle begins between brain and body, the newbie I’m working with tends to walk sort of timidly over to me. I’ve seen it a hundred times, and I know exactly how this conversation is going to go. They will say, I quit. I can’t. I’m done.

I’ll say, Okay, you can go. But try this first. Turn off that voice in your brain and for the next five minutes just put your head down and put one foot in front of the other. Do that, and if you want to quit afterward, fine.

It sounds simple, and we’ve all heard it a thousand times. But many miss the key takeaway: separating what’s difficult from what’s desperate—telling yourself, This isn’t desperate. I’m not dying. I’m just doing something difficult with my body. That’s how you start to determine the difference—if you can put one foot in front of the other and maintain that separation, then believe me, you can keep going.

So what is going on in our brains? What the heck is the matter with them if they tell us to stop before we even get started? That is a topic that we’ll revisit in future chapters. My experience is that whenever we do something we’ve never done before, when we cross a threshold into unknown territory, our brains jump in with well-intentioned concern. Many Spartans who run our races are climbing a rope for the first time or running their fourth mile when they’ve never run more than three. So the brain is telling the body, Wait, wait, wait! I don’t like this. I don’t know what’s going to happen if I keep going. This feels like a threat. And when our brain interprets something as threatening, it sends signals for us to stop. It’s then that the task at hand starts to look humungous because as the difficulty of the next step intensifies, the difficulty of step 10 or 20 feels impossible. So it’s important to remember that big tasks are accomplished with small movements. This reminds me of a piece of wisdom I like to tell others when they are starting something new and