What Is Hard?

When I tell you something will be hard, what do you think I mean?

Hard is subjective. What I am imagining may be very different from what you are imagining. If we do not define it, you can sign up for a goal and feel blindsided by the experience.

I have watched students start businesses with excitement, then give up when the difficulty was not what they expected. I want you to understand the process before you decide that early failure means you cannot do it.

This comes from love and belief in your capacity.

Hard changes as your strength grows

If you have never lifted a weight, picking it up may feel difficult. After twenty years of lifting, that same weight is a different experience.

I think about entrepreneurial challenges similarly. My definition of hard has changed because I have practiced facing more of them.

Your experience and starting point will be different from mine. Life is not fair. Some people have more privilege, resources, or experience. I know I have advantages others do not.

The question is what you need to work through in your own lane. You do not need someone else's exact obstacles to develop your strength.

Phase one: Become aware of possibility

The first phase begins with unawareness.

Many people, especially women, have never considered the opportunities available to them. They may know something exists in the world without believing it could be part of their own lives.

When I offered a CEO position to someone I wanted to hire, she told me she had never thought of that possibility for herself. Of course she knew women could be CEOs. She had not considered herself in that role.

Part of my work is showing what is possible and helping people consider options they have not put on their radar.

A lack of awareness can come from never hearing about an opportunity. It can also come from not believing enough in yourself to explore it.

Phase two: Believe enough to decide to try

The next phase is not only having an interesting belief. It is believing strongly enough to make a decision.

You apply for the job, sign up for training, set up your website, or tell people you are in business.

This can be an exhilarating stage. You are thinking about your capacity and what you might create. There is no evidence against the new possibility yet because you have not started trying it.

There may not be evidence for it either. Your belief carries you forward.

I see many students enjoy this energy through training and the beginning of their work. Then the experience changes.

Phase three: Take action and encounter evidence against

You start showing up. You create content, seek clients, apply for positions, or try to grow the business.

Your action creates evidence. In the beginning, much of that evidence may look like failure.

You are new. You are not good at the thing yet. You are learning.

I teach being willing to suck at something. That applies to showing up at the gym without knowing how to lift, and it applies to building a business.

You may apply for CEO jobs and not get hired. You may put content online and receive negative comments. The promise of possibility now has a challenge against it.

This is what I mean by hard. You are acting while the results seem to argue that it will not work.

Phase four: Quit or double down

This is the decision point.

You can quit, complain, and blame. Or you can double down.

Doubling down includes external work: showing up, trying again, and taking action. It also includes internal work: processing frustration and pain, working through doubt, and maintaining belief.

Your brain wants comfort. It makes sense that criticism or failure can create an impulse to hide. But you also know why you started. If your purpose is to reach people you can help, you can decide that dealing with criticism is part of the work.

I see people conclude that trying was a waste of time. I disagree. Even if you stop, you have learned things you did not know before. You have experience and data that no one can take away.

And if you continue, those experiences can help develop the resilience that long-term success requires.

Phase five: Create evidence for

After working through unsuccessful attempts, you may finally create the result that gives you evidence for your belief.

You tried a hundred times, and the next attempt worked.

Now you have something extraordinary: the experience of inspiring yourself with your own achievement. You know you faced the obstacle and kept going.

That success includes more than the external outcome. You have become someone with more capacity to do hard things.

I love talking with people who achieved something they once doubted was possible for them. They believed in themselves while the evidence was still against them.

Expect the difficult phase instead of treating it as a surprise

I do not want you to hear “hard” and imagine only a little extra effort.

It can mean trying something and failing. Feeling embarrassed. Being criticized. Wanting to run away. Questioning why you believed in yourself in the first place.

If you expect that stage, you can recognize it as part of developing strength rather than immediate proof that your dream is impossible.

Different people may need different numbers of attempts. There is no fair, identical schedule.

Ask what level of difficulty you are willing to experience and why. Are you willing to let life be harder in this way so you can work toward what you want?

Let chosen challenges prepare you

Life also brings hard experiences you did not choose.

I believe deliberately setting big goals and practicing difficult things can develop skills you can draw on when those unwanted challenges arrive.

You learn to process emotion, keep taking action, and believe you can face what is in front of you.

Look at where you are in these phases. If action is creating evidence against your goal, do not automatically make that the end of the story. Decide what hard means for you, and give yourself a chance to develop the strength to do it.