As a coach, a business owner, and a founder of a new nonprofit, I’ve experienced all kinds of setbacks and obstacles that required me to have a whole lot of grit.

Life isn’t perfect. Things will never go 100% smoothly. So when we face difficulty while trying to reach our coaching, athletic, and other work goals, we need to remind ourselves that this is another opportunity to grow and persevere.

What Is Grit?
Dr. Angela Duckworth, psychologist and writer of Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, defines grit as a combination of “passion and perseverance for achieving long-term goals.” She has researched grit in military cadets at West Point, top performers at the National Spelling Bee, and teachers in inner-city schools, and has determined that grit, not IQ or skills, divides the successful from the unsuccessful. As an entrepreneur, grit is vital to the success of your work. But what does grit look like in actuality, and how can you increase your grittiness? 

Find What Motivates You
Passion is an important component of grit, but not the only component. Finding what motivates you and moving towards that will propel you forward when there isn’t a clear path, or when you have failed or taken a wrong turn. By knowing what motivates you, you can work late into the night if you need to, which is sometimes what it takes to get the job done. Passion allows marathon runners to keep running, even when they can’t feel their legs and the finish line is 20 miles away.

Practice
You’ve heard the saying “practice makes perfect.” While it doesn’t always make perfect, practice does help you have a learning mindset, which is a key to developing more grit. If you are starting a business, practice your pitch until you get it right, or practice creating the product until it is perfect. This also means practicing when you are tired or would rather do something else. In her book, Duckworth writes, “Our potential is one thing. What we do with it is quite another.” Practice is the act of putting our potential to good use, and not stopping.  

Don’t Stop When You Fail
Perseverance, persistence despite difficulty, is likely something you’ve heard is essential when you are an entrepreneur. Persistence helps you keep moving even when you fail. How can you increase your perseverance and your overall grittiness? When something goes wrong, like your funding request falls through, or a product fails, take a deep breath, analyze what went wrong, and decide to keep going. Make sure to incorporate what you learned so you can do better next time. This is key to having to grit because there will be times when you will fail. Failure, of course, isn’t a good thing, but it gives you information. Take that information and wake up the next morning ready to conquer the problem all over again.

Believe You Can Learn and Grow
To increase your grit, you need to remind yourself of where you’ve come from and what you’ve learned along the way. Keep a list of ways you’ve learned from your mistakes. Then when something goes wrong, you can remind yourself that you have the ability to grow and change. Having hope that you can do better, and that you will do better, if often all the motivation you need to try again. A part of this is also seeing frustrations and failures as part of the process, even though no one wants to fail. Having this kind of growth mindset allows you to look past the bumps in the road so you can see the finish line. When you are at the beginning of a new business venture, it can be helpful to think ahead to where you might get frustrated, and determine ahead of time how you will respond to it. If there is a possibility your product might take a while to sell, decide to look at the numbers each morning, and then carry on with the day’s agenda no matter what. Having a growth mindset helps you overcome whatever reactions you might have to things going wrong, so you can keep moving. 

Grit is an essential trait of a successful entrepreneur, coach, athlete, (and everyone else!). But grit is a learned trait. If you think you are lacking in the grit department, try focusing on some of these areas above. It may take time to develop more grit, but you won’t regret it.  

*Image from Unsplash

Coach DJ Taylor is a strength and conditioning coach, the founder and director of Athletic Foundations Inc, and the co-owner of Blockout Strength and Conditioning. He also instructs “Weight Training” at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and is a National Strength and Conditioning Association - Certified Strength and Conditioning Coach , with Distinction (CSCS, *D).