Remaining Soft While Doing Hard Things

Sometimes I have ideas for a post and they sit in draft form for awhile.  Either I can't find the words to properly expand on what I was thinking, or the timing just doesn't seem right. Today's post is a perfect  example of that. 

I started reading The High Five Habit by Mel Robbins after listening to her on Rich Roll's podcast a few weeks back.  One passage really stood out for me as it posed the idea of being gentle with ourselves while we are pursing goals and trying new things.  I wanted to write about that, as it is something that I have often struggled with.  As I sat down to write I decided to take a peek at my drafts, and this was the first one that I saw.  Apparently I was not wrong in saying that this whole pursuit is something that I have been working on or noodling for awhile now.

The original inspiration for this post came from a Glennon Doyle podcast that I listened to months ago.  Glennon recalled being in a yoga class and having her instructor say "we can do hard things, we don't need to be hard while doing them".  Wait, what?  We can?

So, how do we show up in the face of adversity or when faced with something that we deem to be hard?  I can share that I often have faced a difficult situation by armouring up, bracing myself, awfulizing the outcome, and basically preparing myself for the worst.  It may sound like a lot of steps, but it is actually scary how quickly all of those switches can be flipped and how automatic these reactions can become. 

Despite how easily we may slip into this negative mindset, just how much energy is taken by these actions?  What if we leaned into the hardness?  If we allowed ourselves to feel the feelings and accepted that whatever this hard thing is, we are facing it and will come out the other side perhaps better for having gone through the work?

Hard things are hard and there is no amount of memes or woo woo out there that will change that fact.  We can't control the hard things in our lives but we can control how we show up and work through them.  We can also remember that what looks like success for one person doesn't need to be what we experience.  Sometimes we get more out of not reaching the outcome we were hoping for, and if we can embrace the learning that we experience along the way we end up better off in the long run.