Unlocking Perseverance, with Andy Puddicombe

Headspace Studios. (intro music) Hi, it's Andy here, and welcome to Radio Headspace, and to Thursday morning. So a few days back I was chatting with a friend. I think he'd recently been reading a thread on, I don't know Slack or LinkedIn or one of those things, and he was talking about a particular person he'd come across who was receiving a lot of congratulations from their friends, from their work colleagues, for having landed their dream job. And he said he couldn't quite understand at first sort of, he was of course, people would be happy for this person, but when he started looking into it, he started to understand why there was so much sort of feedback and not even from sort of strangers not just people that they knew. And it was because this person had been after this job for a really, really long time. They'd applied and hadn't got the job on multiple occasions, but had continued and had this sort of sense of perseverance, a sense of, okay, is this something I really wanna do? It's not about whether I get a yes or a no, or whether it works straight away, it's about how do I create the conditions and how do I persevere to the point where eventually it starts to work for me. (soft music) And it was interesting as we were chatting through this and I was thinking, when I was learning meditation at first, I was told I'd need two things. I'd need commitment and I'd need flexibility. In fact, I remember saying to the teacher, actually I'm still pretty young. I was in my early twenties at the time and I was thinking maybe there's still a bit more life to live before I shut myself away in a monastery. And he said, "Trust me, the older you get, the harder it'll be to commit." He said, "Not just sort of energetically, "mentally, emotionally." He said, "You're probably gonna have a partner, "you can have a family. "It's gonna be hard to find the time." But he said, "just generally, when we're younger, "we tend to have a lot of enthusiasm, a lot of passion "and sort of channeled in the right way, "that can be a really sort of positive thing." But he said, "Equally it needs to be balanced "with flexibility, because if we are too rigid, "then that tends to cause some problems as well." When we think about sort of training the mind or actually any aspect in life, whether it's in our meditation practice, whether it's in sort of a direction in our personal life, in our work life, whatever it might be, having that balance of commitment and flexibility is really important. The commitment is simply what is our direction and how can we show up moment to moment, day to day, to continue toward that point. That doesn't mean that we've so fixated on that point in the future that...