It stalls the jump from difficulty to complete despair, from fear and anxiety to full-blown freak out. As I wrote for another review this year, I try to pick up at least one self-help guidance book every year and try to incorporate at least one key take away from it in my life. From beloved performance expert, executive coach, and coauthor of Peak Performance Steve Magness comes a radical rethinking of how we perceive toughness and what it means to achieve our high ambitions in the face of hard things.

Magness has served as a consultant on mental skills development for professional sports teams, including some of the top teams in the NBA. Steve received his undergraduate degree from the University of Houston and a graduate degree from George Mason University.When you’re all about image, you set goals designed to impress other people: I’m going to run a marathon or I’m going to marry the most attractive partner I can find. In Do Hard Things, Magness not only argues why the old model is broken, but also presents us with a new roadmap; a guide to develop real resiliency, real confidence, and to live a healthier, happier life. Magness’s book helps us to see that by leaning into discomfort, anxiety and all the stressors that coming from trying to achieve difficult things we can learn to respond to things in ways that work successfully rather than instantly reacting and causing ourselves further stresses.

He has real skill in bringing his concepts to life with a mixture of lovely language, peer-reviewed studies and fascinating anecdotes and stories. In his bestselling titles Peak Performance and The Passion Paradox as well as his latest, Do Hard Things, Magness shares the secrets behind achieving sustainable success while operating at the peak of your capabilities. Even in terms of discipline, the area that you would think a demanding style would be successful, it falls short. This book would be great for coaches or parents looking to find ways to foster toughness and grit in their players/kids.To illustrate this idea, he uses stories of Bobby Knight the tough coach from Indiana who was famous for the way he berated his players, to stories of Pete Carroll who has made a name for himself as a coach who refuses to use intimidation to motivate his players. The best critique I've come across of why "self-esteem culture"/empty praise doesn't produce results.