One repeated mantra I use for myself, our children, and those I help with memory issues is to do hard things. It’s not that I desire life to be difficult, but I do want my and the lives of those I love and serve to not be about taking the easy path. Let’s not shy away from a challenge, but step up and do hard things, especially when it benefits us, our wellness, and others.
Life is a series of choices made once, repeatedly, or even on a moment by moment basis. Our choices also create ripple effects to all those around us. So, what and how we choose to start, manage, and even end some choices matters. But that’s not always easy, especially if a choice is hard or outside our comfort zone. My experience doing hard things is that they often result in my most memorable moments. While not always easy, they are almost always worth giving a try.
How to do Hard Things
Motivating ourselves to do hard things is often more difficult than doing the actual thing. Through trial and error, I’ve developed a few tips to get motivated and do hard things:
- Identify your Why. Understanding WHY a hard thing is worth doing is the key to getting motivated and then actually doing it. If the reason or the why behind a hard thing or choice is especially meaningful to us or others, we can often convince ourselves to do it. But sometimes we just need to identify the why and keep it in the forefront as we go do it!
- Just Start. As a planner, I can plan endlessly if I’m not careful. But then I delay the start, especially if it’s hard. When I simply start with a loose plan, I then figure it out as I go. The biggest hurdle is sometimes that first jump into starting. If we feel strongly the hard thing is worth doing, we’ve researched, planned, and know how to start, then just beginning builds momentum to keep doing that hard thing.
- Adjust as you Go. It’s rare when something hard to do goes entirely as planned. Knowing ahead of time we’ll need to adjust often makes it easier to begin and continue to the end. Adjusting as we do hard things allows us the grace to realize we won’t always get it perfect and the ability to do the best we can in each moment.
Whether it’s for mind and body wellness, job or career path, relationships, or simply to challenge ourselves, doing hard things is a good thing. It helps us to build brain reserve, achieve goals, strengthen relationships, and make memorable moments. So don’t delay, go do hard things!