When You Push Through Discomfort, You’ll Level Up in Every Area of Your Life

Sometimes, you must do things in life you don’t want to do to get to where you want to be. Whether that’s at the gym, in business, or in relationships, it’s important to push through to reach your goals. Marcel Dinkins knows all about the grit required to keep going. As a Peloton instructor, she inspires subscribers to push themselves on the tread. She’s also the host of Take the Hill, an athlete and your new motivator to keep moving through discomfort.

If you’re looking for motivation to push through plateaus, Dinkins is your girl. She recently joined Les Alfred, host of She’s so Lucky, to share inspiration on how to take the best route, which isn’t always the easy one, and how to reinvent yourself along the way. Keep reading to learn how to level up and possess the grit it takes to push through discomfort. 

Pivot, don’t quit, in moments of discomfort

While a lot of people are afraid to make pivots in life, Dinkins is the exception. She has had an interesting career, pivoting from being a D1 athlete, to the Army, to fashion, and to fitness. “Every four to five years, you can potentially live an entirely new life,” she says.

Dinkins looks to Maya Angelou for inspiration. The acclaimed writer and poet lived a number of professional lives—as a cook, a shake dancer, a cocktail waitress, a mechanic shop worker, a touring performer, an editor, a screenwriter, and a calypso singer. “If you have ever sat down and dissected her story, you’d know how insane it is how accomplished this woman was. It’s just because, anytime she had an interest, she’d pursue it. And when she didn’t need it anymore, she decided to be something else,” Dinkins explains. 

When it comes to making a pivot in her career and in life, Dinkins says she follows her interests. When her interests change, she changes with them. “What my life has taught me is that I am strongest in my pivot. I am strongest when my back is against the wall,” Dinkins says. “When I no longer want something or need something, I am just going to go be something else. I feel like my soul is just like ‘I can’t do it anymore.’”

Pivoting as an act of intuition 

Dinkins believes that pivoting is an intuitive process. It’s about assessing your likes, your dislikes, what you want more of, and what you want less of. After working as a personal trainer for many years, she realized she loved certain aspects of it—wellness, fitness, and not getting dressed up for work. But Dinkins also knew that she didn’t enjoy the one-on-one dynamic of being a personal trainer. 

“It was suffocating to me. A client can come in and have a really bad day and then it translates over to your day,” Dinkins recalls about the discomfort of that season. “What I like is making other people feel good and having my mood dictate the room. I just started looking for that.”

Dinkins recalls personal training often turning into counseling sessions. “There were days where I had to sit clients down and say, ‘You can’t come in here this way. If you want to have this type of attitude, I need you to leave and come back tomorrow.’ It was crazy, and I realized I didn’t want to do this,” she reveals.

Dinkins manifested her dream job as a Peloton instructor 

After reaching a place of burnout as a personal trainer, Dinkins put “Peloton” on her vision board, but it took two or three years before she landed the gig. “I asked myself ‘What is out there in the world that includes all the things that I love to do?’ Peloton was it,” Dinkins says. “So I put it on my vision board, and I started doing all these things that I thought were in alignment with that.”

Then the COVID-19 pandemic happened, and gyms shut down, so her dreams were seemingly on hold. But as luck would have it, Peloton started recruiting through Instagram, and someone from their team slid into Dinkins’ DMs.

When Dinkins taught her premier class at Peloton, everything seemingly went wrong. Her music wouldn’t play; she got her period—but Dinkins didn’t freak out. Life has taught her that she’s good in a tough spot. 

“You just figure it out. Life has taught me that it’s okay to suck at things, to be a beginner at things, and to start new,” Dinkins says. “Social media has created this idea that you have to be perfect, but no one shows up perfect. You can be in a corner and suck at stuff—it’s okay.”

What it means to take the hill and why you should

Take the Hill is not only the name of Dinkins’ podcast, but it is also a life motto she lives by. As an athlete, Dinkins learned early on that you have to take pride in what you do. 

Dinkins recalls being a cross country runner in high school but not being so great early on. She’d complain a lot during her practice runs, especially during hill running. One day, her coach simply told her, if she was going to complain, to quit. It was the wake-up call Dinkins needed to push through her discomfort. 

“Either you do it or you don’t do it. It’s a privilege to be challenged. It’s a privilege to go through hard things and learn from them,” Dinkins says. “If something is in front of you and it’s hard and challenging, it sucks, but it’s a privilege to go through that.” 

No one had high hopes for Dinkins’ improvement on the track team, but she improved to the point that she was on the traveling team. Now, as an adult, she applies the “taking the hill” mentality to her life and with her clients at Peloton. “I think you can get trapped in your stuff and wallow. But we all have hard stuff, and everyone is taking the hill,” Dinkins says. “I’ve learned to model that behavior.”

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