Jayne forwarded me an email from some Pilates professionals about how Pilates teaches more than stronger muscles, better posture, improved flexibility, or less pain.
From the email:
…while all of those things matter, I’ve been asking myself a different question lately:
What are we really teaching when we teach movement?
Recently, we taught a workshop… exploring the science behind resilience, confidence, and the way we respond when things become difficult. It reminded me that every challenging exercise is about so much more than physical strength.
Think about holding a plank.
Your muscles are working, of course. But so is your mind.
What happens when it starts to feel uncomfortable? Do you hold your breath? Do you tell yourself you can’t do it? Do you compare yourself to the person next to you?
Or do you stay curious, take another breath, and make a thoughtful decision?
Whether you’re a Pilates teacher or someone who simply loves taking class, these moments matter. Every challenge is an opportunity to practice something much bigger than movement.
They continued this discussion in their podcast, digging into the science behind those moments: why challenge helps us grow, how confidence gets built through experience, and why repetition changes both our bodies and our brains. It’s the brain-body connection I love talking about — endlessly fascinating, with infinite layers and angles.
So when I read this, a new word piqued my interest: resilience. It caught my attention because I’d recently had a conversation with a friend who hates that word. In fact, she asked her therapist to stop using it, it bothered her so much. Why? Because in order to be resilient (which she is), she had to go through a lot of trauma, and hearing the word just reminds her of the trauma, not her strength.
Instead, she prefers the word capacity. She has a lot of capacity, enough to handle whatever comes at her, even when it doesn’t feel that way. It’s a small language switch, but for her it changes everything about how she sees herself: capacious instead of traumatized.
And that has me thinking about where I find capacity in my own life.
I started a new job back in November that has tested my capacity on a regular basis. A while back, I wrote down my feelings about it to bring to my therapist:
This is the hardest job I’ve ever had. The work challenges me to do things outside my normal skill set. The work I do is often invisible and I don’t feel like I get acknowledged. But I actually have been thanked and acknowledged, I just feel numb to it. Why? I also can’t do the things I’m good at because they’re not my job, they’re someone else’s. It is sometimes frustrating and often puts me off balance. I want to make a positive impact on the people and community around me. I feel like I’m failing because I can’t see positive changes.
Today I’d add that the job stretches me both professionally and emotionally. I’ve complained to friends and family about it plenty, and some of them are confused about why I keep doing it. After all, if something’s that hard, maybe it’s time to move on. I have that choice.
But reading the email Jayne forwarded helped me understand why I’ve stayed: things have to be uncomfortable for growth. Doses of challenge create adaptation. That’s how muscles get stronger, how bone density and lung capacity increase. I’m stretching my capacity. (And if you don’t think I complain about being uncomfortable in the studio too, you haven’t been in class with me. 😉)
For the last few years, I have spent a LOT of time and energy healing old wounds and reacquainting myself with myself. I got to the point where I felt genuinely confident for the first time in a long while. And I was ready for a new challenge. This job came along, and I was so excited! I perhaps (definitely) wasn’t prepared for just how much of a challenge it would be. But today I realize I am actually capable of handling it. That is a huge realization. Just a few years ago, I could not have done this job. Today, I CAN. Call it resilience if you want, but I’m so proud of my increased capacity to do hard things and stick with them.
Angela Duckworth, a psychologist and MacArthur Genius Award-winning professor, calls this trait grit: a mix of passion and perseverance. She and her collaborators have found a real connection between grittiness and life satisfaction — the two tend to move together, not apart.
Duckworth’s research points to something else worth naming: grit isn’t just about gritting your teeth through misery. She’s careful to point out that it’s not just about working hard or being conscientious. In one interview, she explains the perseverance half of grit has to be paired with passion — without a goal that’s meaningful to you, sheer doggedness is just drudgery, not grit. It has to be a direction you actually care about.
And I do. I really care about this job, at this place.
I’m sure I’ve probably made this job sound terrible. It isn’t! I work with good people, in a place that does real good for its community. It’s just hard — and hard things aren’t always bad. The same question applies to planks and to life, the way the email put it:
What happens when it starts to feel uncomfortable? Do you hold your breath? Do you tell yourself you can’t do it? Do you compare yourself to the person next to you?
Or do you stay curious, take another breath, and make a thoughtful decision?
And I want to be careful here that I don’t sound full of myself. I would never have called this grit until I read that email and listened to the podcast. But I don’t think it’s an inaccurate description. I’ve had lots of practice with this in small doses throughout life, including in the studio. Small doses of discomfort teach us how to respond to it.
There’s actually a name for this: hormesis. It’s the principle that small, manageable doses of stress build the capacity to handle bigger ones, first studied in cells and physiology. Psychology researchers studying resilience have started borrowing the concept, proposing that people build psychological strength the same way tissue does: through controlled, recoverable stress, not despite it. It’s similar to eustress that I’ve written about before. One caveat, however, is that hormesis only works within a range. The benefit is dose-dependent, and past a certain point, more stress doesn’t mean more growth — it just means harm.
It’s a helpful reframe. I’m thinking of challenging ourselves to get Straight C’s in class instead of breezing through with straight A’s. It’s choosing the growth zone over the comfort zone, putting yourself in a growth or mastery mindset. The plank isn’t just building core strength — it’s practice at tolerating discomfort in a contained, safe dose, which is exactly the skill I needed for this job.
So I didn’t say this lightly before: I’m proud of myself. My therapist sometimes says I’m growing up. I need to tell her I hate that phrase.
I’m growing in my capacity.
