The Choice Between Easy and Hard in Business

In the wild, wild web there are two contrasting messages that get a lot of attention. The first is the guru telling you that by following their steps, “business will be easy.” The second is an attempt to motivate you through a bit of negativity, that says “it’s not easy, but it’s worth it.”

Then there’s me, that put a lot of eggs into the “effortless” word basket and truly I feel nervous from time to time that this idea will get misconstrued or taken in a way that ultimately isn’t helpful or serving.

Thus, this blog post was born.

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Okay, here’s the tea: I think everything is a choice and a belief and that we are shaping our reality constantly. Our perceptions of events as “hard” or “easy” is what makes something actually hard or easy. I think it’s hard to put on pants and DRIVE to Chipotle, Will thinks it’s easy. Will think it’s HARD to have a stranger come to your front door after being alone with your food for an hour, and I think it’s easy. It’s a perception. 

Now, disclaimer: YES, there are really big circumstances like illness, mental health, etc. that are important to remember and include into this conversation but I’m zooming WAY out here and saying that I ultimately think our perceptions are what dictates how hard or easy something is. And I’m not saying one perception is wrong or right or good or bad. I just want to say that it IS a perception that you can control.

A quick example to that that’s impacted my entire life: I never got sick as a kid. It just wasn’t… a thing. It’s not that I didn’t get colds here and there or whatever, but my mom was always operating under the perception that this wasn’t going to be a big thing, right? It’s just a small cold, it will pass quickly, and I would be fine. And I was. Always. I literally can’t tell you a single time I was super sick growing up. 

As an adult, the first time that Will got sick when we started living together, he was like *out*. Like, laying on the couch, very needy, etc. And I was like “uhm. What is this?” because in MY reality colds were not a big deal. They didn’t require stopping everything to BE sick. Now you could make a lot of arguments that my attitude was right or wrong or good or bad, but none of those matter, truly. It just is an example of MY perception of a cold versus HIS. And neither of us truly decided those. They were just adopted from our parents (who probably adopted it from their parents, and so on).

But I digress. Anyway, here’s a business-y example. Let’s say for the sake of an argument we see anything “techy” as hard. So you decide to learn a new email marketing software and you’re like “welp, techy shit is hard!” before you even dive in. Well, I operate under the pretense that you will create a reality in which learning that new software IS hard.

I don’t mean you’ll suddenly, like, “get dumb” or something. I mean you’ll put up all this resistance. You’ll put it off until it’s crunch time and you’re in a panic and you’ve already built it up to be this big THING in your head and it’ll be a frustrating experience. But that came from a series of decisions, right? You decided it was going to be hard, so you decided to put it off until the last second, and then you decided to feel angry the whole time, and so on.

And all of this is OKAY. There’s not a right or wrong, it just IS. You’re not flawed, or imperfect, or wrong for any of this. It’s just a thing that happened and now it’s data and information.

Now in another reality you could’ve also decided this would be easy and take about 30 minutes to set up so you’ll just crank through it real quick right now. You might even decide to instead outsource it, or watch a video about it, or something to make the whole thing flow easier. There might end up still being bumps (because, hey, maybe tech really isn’t your thing), but it won’t derail you. And that’s because you made a decision that it would be fine and simple. The thing is: many of us… MOST of us never make that decision.

Our default programming at this point is that “things are hard” (like, as humanity) and so when we don’t make a choice for them to be easy, or effortless, or fun, or exciting…. It defaults back to being hard. This comes from generations on generations of believing “you gotta work hard.” This shit runs deep. But you can choose differently.

Now, at first, when we start to dabble in this idea of letting things BE easy and effortless… it might not be so automatic. We haven’t adjusted the deeper programming. At a certain level, deep down, we don’t believe it’s going to truly work and we are looking to prove the idea WRONG and that it is in fact hard. Sounds crazy, right?! Why would we DO that?! Well… think about it this way:

Your brain is like a freaking… it’s the jungle. And for your entire life (and past lives or generations if you believe that) there’s been this one path hacked through the jungle. The path of hard. So like… it kinda sucks because it’s still the jungle and there’s a lot of bugs and shit, but it’s a path. That you can navigate. And survive on (mostly). It’s not GREAT, but you’re alive, so you stick to it.

But then you start to recognize other paths. And you notice one that is like… “hey I’m alternative path #2 — path of ease and fun. You can’t really tell right now but it’ll be WAY better. There’s no bugs. There’s a tour guide. We have snacks.”

But like… it’s not totally carved yet. It’s possible, but right now, standing there looking at the two paths… well the shittier path actually looks easier because at least it’s been traveled before. So you keep to that path because you can’t really like… deal with carving the other one right now. Then you repeat that forever and nothing ever changes or improves, the end.

(Note: This is one of the issues with this whole “just be positive” mantra because just being positive is like putting a bandaid on a stab wound. You have to heal all that other deeper ish before you can “just be positive.” AKA you can’t just *CHOOSE THE OTHER PATH* randomly one day without doing any sort of inner work, because, spoiler alert: we’re actually super resistant to change.)

(While we’re on parenthetical notes, I’ll also mention this: the people who say “business can be easy” but don’t actually do anything to help you change your views on easy versus hard — aka business can be easy just follow my 3 step plan to being a millionaire in 2 weeks — are, as my grandma says, full of bean soup and this conversation is NOT that.) 

EHN-KNEE-WAY… I’m talking about rewiring your entire subconscious programming. I’m asking you to evolve a bit here, to raise your consciousness. And a lot of people (most people) will say that’s too hard and stay on the well-worn-but-buggy-and-scary-path. They’ll DECIDE to do that. They won’t DECIDE to take the significantly better path that is way more fun and exciting, but just takes a bit of carving. 

Because they DECIDE the carving is too hard.

BUT THAT IS ALSO A DECISION.

Do you see what’s happening here!? It’s ALL A DECISION.

Yes — changing years and years of beliefs is not necessarily as easy as snapping your fingers if you just sit down one day and decide to do it. I’ll give you that. It requires some inner-work. But the thought that the inner-work will be too hard, or take too long (I legit don’t get that because wtf is too long compared to living the rest of your life barely scraping by…?)... that’s some BS decision making skills.

In my experience: doing the work starts yielding results immediately. Doing the work is fun and interesting and eye-opening. Doing the work leads to results you can only barely dream about right now. OH AND ALSO, doing the work CAN be simple…

NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) allows it to be simple. Transformations, rewiring, rewriting old beliefs… done within minutes. It’s incredible. And it’s easy. If you LET it be easy. 

There are a loooot of things I love about my coaching and NLP in particular, but the one main thing is that it eliminates right or wrong or good or bad. It instead offers OPTIONS. What I get to do as a coach is to help you to see those options when right now you are operating in a world that you think is fact-fact-fact-fact. Want to hear something mind-blowing? There aren’t a ton of facts in your reality. Here’s an example: you might think, “fact: sky is blue.”

But is it? What color is it at night? Or when it’s overcast? Furthermore what is blue, even? How do you know if you understand blue the same that I do? And I get that that is going really far down a rabbit hole, but it’s just to show you that the facts you are operating under actually don’t exist. It’s not a fact that business is hard, it’s not a fact that making money is hard, it’s not a fact that you’re going to be broke for 5 years before you turn a profit. None of those are facts. You can prove them wrong easily. It’s not 100% true 100% of the time.

And, my gooooodness, I find that SO FLIPPING exciting. Because that means you can abandon ALL of these ideas that things are hard. If business was truly SO hard, we would all just be in a competition to see who could work the hardest. And guess what? Someone can always work harder than you, so you might as well give up now. Do you want to operate like that? I sure as hell don’t.

I’ll wrap this up by saying this: if you want to disagree and believe that business is hard, that’s totally your choice. It’s not my job to force change onto you. But I want to extend an invitation to you to explore if and how that idea is serving you (or not serving you). Decide if that is a choice that truly helps you and improves your life. If it is serving you, cool. Great! If it’s not… then things are about to change for you and open up in ways you never expected!

Share with me in a comment or on Instagram what these ideas open up for you! It's a mindblowing and exciting way to live your life and run your business, right?!

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