Alyssa Ages

The year she turned 40, Alyssa Ages pulled a 50-ton truck with just her body and a rope. On her journey to become a competitive strongwoman, she lifted boulders, thrust sandbags overhead, and shouldered nearly three times her bodyweight. But 30 years earlier, she was just a scared kid who worried so deeply about messing up that she wouldn’t even swing the bat in a little league baseball game.

Through childhood and adulthood, there are no gold medals for failure. We don’t reward missteps with accolades. But maybe we should, because growth is only possible when it follows a setback. Doing harder things on purpose makes every challenge you face feel a little easier, but taking the easy route will make even the smallest obstacles seem daunting. Until you falter, you have no idea where the edge of your limit really lies; when you find it, that’s when you can start charting a way through it.

In this talk, Alyssa shares her experience becoming a late-in-life strength athlete who has made a career out of trying, failing, and succeeding to move what was once immovable. She shares insight from the elite athletes, coaches, scientists, and psychologists she met while writing her book, Secrets of Giants: A Journey to Uncover the True Meaning of Strength, on how seeing missteps as an opportunity for growth can make us braver, stronger, and more successful.

Key Takeaways:

Rethinking Failure: How to safely and smartly look for opportunities to fail or get close to failure to build resilience and minimize your fear of taking risks.

Pushing Your Limits: How choosing the harder path can help you learn what you’re really capable of achieving.

Planning for a Breakthrough: You can’t pull a 50-ton truck without a training plan. The same goes for any big, audacious goal. We’ll talk about how to create a plan that progressively builds towards your goal.

This talk is perfect for organizations who want to inspire their teams to make bolder moves and bigger decisions and give the courage and tools to think bigger.