What is STRONG?

Now that I’m in my 40s my view of STRONG is different than when I was younger. I probably would have thought about that in the context of the Olympics…people who were just genetically lucky and built to win in competitions.

Now I see that strength comes in many, many forms. Of course there’s the obvious – physical, athletes, Olympic competitions, etc. Not to dismiss that at all; it takes years of dedication to get to that level. I can’t even imagine being a pro (or close to pro) athlete.

But I think that strength is something that you “wear” – it’s in the way you carry yourself, the way you expect yourself to rise to the standards that you judge others by, your ability to admit you’re wrong, your ability to learn from things that didn’t go well, and a lack of feeling threatened by every little thing. I think this type of strength is a product of resilience and the understanding that solutions to most problems are rarely (probably never) black & white – there’s a whole lot of gray out there. Confidence is sexy; arrogance is not.

In writing this it made me think of images of myself as “strong”. Where and when do I feel strong? So I go digging through my phone & put together this image above. A theme in most of these pics is that I feel strong from working out, sweating, taking a risk, and taking time to care for myself. Every pic, with the exception of the middle one, was taken when I was by myself. Who knows why we even take selfies, but for whatever reason I did it on these days and now it tells a story I wasn’t really expecting.

Even though I’ve only been an official brand ambassador for Velocity Sportswear for a few days now, learning about others in the group and their stories has been very interesting and exemplifies STRONG – lots of elite athletes, lots of beginners, and lots of people with inspiring stories of learning, resilience, and risk taking. That’s MY kind of strong!