Stage Six: Reclaiming Tenacity

It always seems impossible until it’s done.
- Nelson Mandela

The tenacious are masters of surrender. Stress, chaos, despair; they handle it all. Otherwise, they surrender some more, until the pain and pressure forge them into a higher state of being. The tenacious know above all that they can expand their capacity to contain more.

The ingredients for tenacity are presence, faith and courage. A person needs to remain conscious through tense times while trusting their capacity to evolve through the challenge. Otherwise, they become easily overwhelmed by stressful situations, to which they might respond in the following ways:

Dissociation: The person will be ‘not all there’. They have difficulty remaining focussed, are slow to respond to pressure, or overthink as a form of distraction from uncomfortable feelings.
Ceding control: The person looks to others for solutions or to take the lead. They cannot conceive of being the one to assume responsibility, since even the thought of it fills them with dread.
Erratic behaviour: Intensity lifts through the body and becomes trapped in the head, while the muscles tighten up. The person loses access to their intuition and grows reactive, and they begin babbling and acting abrasively. With their heart closed off, emotional intelligence is inaccessible. It is all mind.

The above are coping mechanisms we all use when overwhelmed. It takes determination to rise to a state of tenacity,...