Find Your Fiero

If you type the word "fiero" into Google translate (Italian to English), it'll give you "pride." But the true meaning of fiero is so much more than that.

Fiero is what we feel after we triumph over adversity. You know it when you feel it – and when you see it. That’s because we almost all express fiero in exactly the same way: we throw our arms over our head and yell.

- Jane McGonigal, Reality is Broken

This is fiero. 

It's the thing that keeps me coming back to these endurance events (half Ironman in this case), even though I spend the middle third of the run questioning my sanity...wondering why the hell I torture myself with this stuff every summer. 

Blame it on the fiero.

There's nothing like that endorphin rush of crossing the finish line after not just the several hours of effort spent on the event itself, but the weeks and months of training that came before it. It's the rush of completing something you weren't 100% sure you'd finish when you started it.

The harder it is, the bigger the feeling of fiero. It is addictive.

The thing is, you don't have to put yourself through the agony of an extreme endurance event to feel fiero (THANK GOODNESS). There are so many fiero moments out there, just waiting for you to find them. I've felt fiero after ripping a stump out of the ground, or finally uncovering the last of that stubborn chain link fence with a jackhammer (see past "Home Adventures" posts). Fiero is getting a college acceptance letter in the mail, reaching the top of the hike, doing your first unassisted pull up, finishing a truly stunning performance, crossing any and every finish line, doing any little (or big) thing that scares you and living to tell the tale, taking on more than you think you can handle...and then handling it.

There's only one place you'll never find fiero. You will NEVER find fiero in your comfort zone.

This is important, so I'll say it again...in bold...

YOU WILL NEVER FIND FIERO IN YOUR COMFORT ZONE.

If you want to feel fiero...and you DO...you've got to get outside of your comfort zone and challenge yourself in some way...any way. It's all those little finish lines that you cross when you push your limits just a little farther. Could you fail to achieve what you set out to do? Yes. The potential for failure is one of the things that qualifies it as being outside of your comfort zone. Oh, but the possibility of finding your fiero is SO worth it. It's worth ALL of it.

Get out of your comfort zone. Push your limits. Find your fiero.