Do Hard Things: Why We Get Resilience Wrong and the Surprising Science of Real Toughness

From beloved performance expert, executive coach, and coauthor of Peak Performance Steve Magness comes a radical rethinking of mental toughness and what it means to achieve our high ambitions in the face of hard things.

Toughness has long been held as the key to overcoming a challenge and achieving greatness, whether it is on the sports field, at a boardroom, or at the dining room table. Yet, the prevailing model has promoted a mentality based on fear, false bravado, and hiding any sign of weakness. In other words, the old model of toughness has failed us.

Steve Magness, a performance scientist who coaches Olympic athletes, rebuilds our broken model of resilience with a new definition of inner strength grounded in the latest science and psychology. In Do Hard Things, Magness teaches us how we can work with our body - how experiencing discomfort, leaning in, paying attention, and creating space to take thoughtful action can be the true indications of cultivating such resilience. He offers four core pillars to cultivate such resilience:

• Pillar 1: Ditch the Façade, Embrace Reality
• Pillar 2: Listen to Your Body
• Pillar 3: Respond, Instead of React
• Pillar 4: Transcend Discomfort

Smart and wise all at once, this life-changing self-help book flips the script on what it means to be resilient. Drawing from mindfulness, military case studies, sports psychology, neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy, he provides a roadmap for navigating life's challenges, overcoming performance anxiety, and achieving the kind of high performance that makes us happier, more successful, and, ultimately, better people.