"This is going to be hard.”

“This is going to be complicated.”

“This is going to be a lot of work.”

These used to be some of my go-to thoughts about anything new, especially anything new at work. 

Notice the future tense. My brain decided things were going to be hard before I even tried them, started them, or began to plan for them.

So what? Why was that a problem for me? 

Because if things were hard, I might not be good at them. I might be less than perfect. (THE. HORROR.)

Plus, let’s get real. Brains do not actually like to expend energy. Their ultimate job is to keep you alive. A big part of that involves trying to conserve energy.

For me, those thoughts - “this is going to be hard” and its variants - led to feelings like dread, overwhelm, or anxiousness. 

And you know what those feelings lead to? 

Avoidance. 

Procrastination. 

Spinning my wheels. 

Overthinking. 

Failing to plan. 

Catastrophizing. 

Finding additional evidence of how hard it is going to be or how much work it is going to be so that I didn’t have to do the thing. In a nutshell, because of that thought, *I* made things harder. And I set myself up for inevitable failure - the one thing I was trying to avoid. 

If this sounds familiar for you, give these questions a try: 

“How could this be easy?” 

“What if this were simple?”

Or even “What if this isn’t hard?”

Then answer it.

Don’t allow yourself to say “I don’t know.” 

Once you present your brain with that question and require it to come up with an answer, things will start to shift. Even if just a little bit. 

Instead of looking for evidence proving why the thing is hard, your brain will start to look for evidence of how it could be less hard - maybe even easy. 

It will start coming up with a plan. 

And “This is going to be hard” starts to become “this is manageable.”

“This is manageable” might even start to become “This is easy.”

At least in part. Maybe there are still parts that aren’t easy. But the whole thing doesn’t feel so hard.

Think about that thing you are dreading doing. That you are avoiding.

What if it were easy? 

How could it be easy?  

A love note to you: Our brains are amazing. But they can have a tendency to make things harder on us unnecessarily. They can make it more difficult to do the things we want. Often because they are trying to protect us. But you can retrain your brain and learn tools that will add more ease into your life. I can help. Send me an email or sign up for a free consult at jenndealcoaching.as.me/consult. It’s a free hour, in a judgment-free zone, to talk about what’s hard in your life, how your brain is contributing, and come up with a plan to make things easier.