CHAPTER 9

DO THE HARD THINGS FIRST

YOU HAVE NEVER RECEIVED a winner’s trophy before playing in the championship game. You have never been offered a promotion before you excelled in your job. Your parents never instructed you to make sure you ate your dessert first and not worry about the vegetables, since they would take care of themselves.

Why did none of these things happen? Because that’s not how successful lives work. It makes no sense to earn trophies before you win games, get a promotion before you perform well, or eat sweets before you consume your dinner. An attitude of entitlement, though, tells us that it can and should be this way: “You can have it all. Do what is easy and comfortable first, and you’ll be rewarded with a lot of amazing things.”

It’s a lie.

The entitlement disease’s insistence that you leave the hard stuff till later (or never) results in disaster. Let’s find out why.

The Next Hard Thing

Let’s say you asked me to coach you in how to find your dream career. You are forty-two years old and a pleasant person, and while your current position has paid the bills, it’s not exciting, it is not you, you have no passion for it. You want something that engages your strengths and skills, means something to you, and still provides for you and your family. This is a common scenario and an important one.

We’ll begin our search for this new career track through a process of discovering your strengths, looking at the opportunities out there, and evaluating what has worked for you and what has not. With every single client I coach through this lengthy and challenging process, we will get to one particular place. That place might be that your time is taken up with work or family issues. Or that you aren’t as passionate about this career-search process as when you started — the honeymoon is over. Or that you have other responsibilities — such as a friend who needs a lot of your time to help him through a divorce — that are taking your energy. That place is an important stage in your growth process. It can stall you, divert you, or derail you.

When we come to that place, I know that you’re about to find what I call your Next Hard Thing (NHT). Your NHT is the choice you need to make that will get you past the difficulty. I call it hard because it almost always is. It might be simple, it might be clear, but it won’t be easy. Most of the time, you’ll say, “I’ve been here before.” And yes, you have. But this time you need to do something about it — something challenging that will help you finally resolve it.

Identifying your NHT is a large part of the win. Once you know you need to say no to someone, or eliminate something good to make room for something great, or confront another person, you’re almost there. But to move beyond that, there are attitudes that you must deal with to keep you moving. The entitlement mantra concerning your NHT says: The next hard thing is too difficult, so I’ll just do something else now.

Most people succeed not by waiting, but by making a difficult choice. The better path is the Hard Way mantra, which says: Today I will choose to do something that helps resolve my obstacle, and I’ll feel better.

The NHT can take many different forms. Maybe you’ll find yours in the next few examples.

Carving Out Structured, Committed Calendar Time

A major NHT is simply sitting down with a calendar and committing sixty days’ worth of time for what you want to see happen. It seems simple, doesn’t it? And it actually is. But simple doesn’t always mean easy.

And here’s the most common reason this NHT isn’t easy: It is much harder to delete calendar items than it is to add them. We are hoarders by nature, especially of things that seem good and positive. We’re usually okay with adding items, but not so good at removing them.

Suppose you want to get your research going for that new career-search project we talked about. You’re motivated, ready to go. It will probably take you about four hours a week for a couple of months before you start to see some measurable results. That sounds like a commitment, yes? Doable, but still a commitment.

Then you go to your calendar to find that time. What do you see?

• Kids’ sporting events

• A job (or two) that feels all-consuming

• Church involvement

• Social activities

• An elderly parent to care for

• School engagements for the kids

• Working out

• Doctor visits

Many people don’t get any further. Their mind feels overwhelmed, and the NHT never gets done. Oh, well, I’ll get to it when the dust settles, you think. Wrong answer — that’s just not how life works. The dust will settle only when you turn to dust.

Going against the Flow of Life

Your NHT might be a choice to get out of your comfort zone, a harder proposition than you might think. It’s great to dream big dreams and have glorious visions, but a stable and “okay” life with few big hassles is a strong magnet. It tugs and tugs, saying, “Keep it chill. Take life as it comes. Don’t be anal-retentive . . . like your parents.”

This is the NHT of inertia. Inertia is a powerful force because it takes little energy to remain as you are, and you can still be reasonably happy that way. But putting energy into not being like your friends, and not hanging out, and doing something that matters, require a lot more of you.

Going against Other’s Expectations for You

A key NHT for you might be having to let someone down who has a different future in mind for you than you do for yourself. You don’t want them to feel bad; you want them to feel proud of you. But this is a trap.

A friend of mine in his twenties told me recently that he fears he will end up like his dad. And what’s wrong with his dad? “He’s a really nice guy and a great father,” he replied. “But he never did what he wanted to do in his career, and now he’s in his sixties and he doesn’t have a lot of options.”

I asked him to explain.

“My dad wanted to be in the architecture business. He was good at it, and he loved the creative process of putting structures together. But his dad, my grandfather, told him he needed something more stable, like being an accountant. So that’s what he did — and he never liked it. Plus, he wasn’t especially good at it. I don’t want to end up like that.”

My friend’s dad never went against his own father, and now he’s living a sad story. Fortunately, my friend will not make that mistake. He’s already seen that path, and he feels determined not to follow it. He is already making moves, even at an early stage of life, to find out what he needs to do to follow his dreams.

The late Howard Hendricks used to say, “You are able to do many things. But be sure you find the one thing you must do.”

You may not have a dad to disappoint. Instead, maybe you have a spouse, someone you’re dating, or another person who is important to you. God made all of us relational beings, and people should and do matter to us. But the prospect of a tough conversation with someone important — someone who may disapprove of your dream — can be a challenging NHT.

Starting at the Bottom

Especially in a work environment, you may need to begin on a lower rung than you’d like. Who doesn’t want the corner office? It’s humbling to work in the mail room. Entitlement becomes especially powerful in the workplace. It makes you think, I don’t deserve this. Is my boss really that much better than me? or This is just too embarrassing. I think I’m better off playing the lottery. And so your NHT stops the entire process.

I had to tell a friend that his son was unhireable at anything but an entry-level position until he developed a work ethic and gained some experience. My friend felt upset by the news, but he supported my recommendation. He helped his son find something basic. The young man wasn’t happy about it, and his friends called him foolish. But he found other friends, and after a year, he was on his way to management.

Crafting Your Own Next Hard Thing

I’ve just given you a sampling of the most common NHTs. You may face something else. Maybe you’ve been avoiding a difficult conversation. Maybe you haven’t yet resigned from a committee that does good work, but that takes too much time away from your dream. Or maybe you need to start saving money for a project that matters to you. Or you have to tell someone that you lack the time to have lunch with them every week to mentor them. Fill in the blank.

Here are a few questions to help you identify your own NHT:

• What is the pattern that gets you stuck? Stand back from the details and look at the big themes of your life and activities. It might be kid problems, money issues, or boredom.

• What might you be afraid of? Fear can paralyze you. Maybe you’re afraid of letting someone down or making them angry, or maybe you fear failure.

• What do you do with your time when you’re avoiding the issue? Take a look at your “busy” behaviors: too much time online, doing Facebook or Fantasy Football, or obsessively checking email. Learn to see these as self-medications that are keeping you from your desire to move forward

• How would I feel after I did something difficult and it worked? You would feel hope, energy, and self-respect. Keep that image of yourself in mind to help you remember that Next Hard Things are worth it.

Pushing Past Your NHT

NHTs are true obstacles. But they’re not insurmountable, and you can see some dramatically swift gains if you take up the principles that follow. If you have rammed your head against your current NHT time after time after time and have still not defeated it (or if you’ve avoided it time after time instead), then most likely you have let discouragement win. Time passes, and you become habituated to the same old same old. So as you try the techniques below, you may have a bit of concrete to break through. But it will be worth it.

Think and Talk about What It Will Do for You

Entitlement thinking resists the idea that something difficult will pay off. Hard Way thinking is the opposite; in fact, it’s based on that very idea. You gird up your loins to tackle a behavior or a conversation that will bring you closer to something you desire. So think about it, talk about it, let yourself feel it. Any time a company wants to launch a new direction or product, it spends time and resources casting a vision. It doesn’t simply tell its employees, “Here is the new plan.” Corporate executives know that the plan will be unfamiliar, and people need to buy into the vision in order to accept it and persevere with it. People truly perish without a vision (Proverbs 29:18 KJV).

This is why people put photos of slimmer clothes on their refrigerators when they want to lose weight and why they visit open houses on Sundays even though they know they can’t afford the down payment for another year or two. There has to be an image in mind, a vision, for what you want.

Don’t Sugarcoat the Negative

Even if you’re loaded up with vision, you need to face the truth that your NHT will involve difficulty and struggle. That’s why the “H” is in the middle. The worst thing you can do to yourself is to think, It won’t be that bad— I may even enjoy it. That doesn’t work, because if you have that expectation when you hit the obstacle, you will also hit disappointment, a huge energy killer. The disappointment comes from the gap between your expectation and reality. You thought it would be a 4 out of 10 on the difficulty scale, and in reality it was a 7. That may bring your progress to a complete stop.

Instead, face reality. Don’t sugarcoat what’s going to happen and what it may feel like. If you’ve prepared yourself for what’s coming, then you’ll actually feel hope and energy when you encounter it. This is the kind of hope and energy that athletes experience in the locker room when the coach tells them that the next half of the game will take everything they have inside. We were born to push through things that require effort; it’s in our DNA and in our essence from the beginning. We were destined to “subdue and rule” the earth (Genesis 1:28). The word for “subdue” implies imposing order on chaos. No matter how scary your NHT is, overcoming it requires bringing something that helps your steps be ordered to get out of some unproductive chaos and onto a path of achievement.

In the middle of a difficult divorce, a friend of mine heard something unexpected but extremely helpful from her therapist. “This process of growth will sometimes be painful and confusing,” the therapist said. “You may feel like you’re hitting bottom. But if you stick with this and are honest with yourself, you’ll be okay and your life will be much better.”

Not much sugarcoating there. But my friend said that, ironically, the therapist’s words encouraged her because she trusted and believed him. She felt that he had given her a reliable vision of the future. She could trust that vision. And after the dark times, she did get emotionally stronger, healthier, and happier.

Realize That There Is an End to the NHT

Your NHT is a temporary thing, not an eternity. In fact, it is a beginning thing, a starting thing, a breaking-out-of-inertia thing. It won’t last forever.

Tell yourself, The sooner I do this hard thing, the sooner I get my life where I want it. The way our minds work, the more we avoid the NHT, the longer it seems it will take. It increases and expands in time. Remember that a tough phone call won’t last forever. People need to get off and eat dinner at some point.

I have found it helpful to deliberately limit the amount of time you devote to the NHT. There’s nothing wrong with deciding, “I’ll make some calls about job interviews for an hour, then I’ll go shoot hoops for ten minutes.” Or “I’ll call the guy to tell him our one date didn’t work, and I’ll talk to him on the phone for no more than fifteen minutes.” My experience is that, especially in NHTs that are conversations, we hand control of our schedule to the person with whom we’re speaking. It’s a guilt mechanism that says, “I’ll stay on the phone with you until you either feel better, or agree with my decision, or at least feel heard.” That doesn’t do anyone any good. Be kind and set a reasonable limit on tough calls.

Own Your Strength

An NHT has a force to it, a power to make you feel small, helpless, and weak. The longer you put it off, the larger it becomes and the smaller you become. It helps to remember that you are an adult. Adults do hard stuff all the time. They get up and go to work, they care about others when they don’t feel like it, they obey God when it feels counterintuitive. Realize your own strength as a grown-up.

I have found four good ways to own your strength. Each of them will help you get moving into your NHT.

Recall your history. You have done tough things before. Bring them to mind. Think about when you asked out that dream girl in high school, when you confronted someone who was being controlling or judgmental, when you joined the gym and felt better about yourself. God gives us memory banks meant to encourage us that we have done good things, and we are capable of doing them again.

Ask God to strengthen you. All through the Bible, God encourages us to be confident in our success when we follow his paths. Read over a passage like Isaiah 41:10: “I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.” Go over it several times and imagine God standing behind you, supporting you in the NHT. As a good friend of mine says, “He hasn’t fallen off his throne,” even in regard to your NHT.

Ask a friend for his input. This is a smart thing to do, not a dumb thing. It takes five minutes. I have done it. I have coached executives to do it. Call someone you trust and say, “I am facing a mountain. Do you think I am capable of this?” It matters so much to hear the other person say, “Sure. I know you, I know what you’re capable of — and I believe in you.” The core of encouragement is someone believing in you when you no longer believe in yourself.

Say the words. Self-talk, or simply stating to yourself realities you need to hear, can be helpful. Research backs this up. For example, saying, “I can work out tomorrow, and afterward I’ll feel better,” assists your brain in girding for action and positivity. When you listen to yourself, you hear an adult and have confidence in that adult.

Take a Step

Your NHT is about some specific behavior, and it may be behavior you have been avoiding: a phone call, setting a boundary with a friend, a conversation, cancelling a subscription to a magazine you don’t need, turning off Facebook after thirty minutes. Behavior is measurable. It is not fuzzy. It is just behavior.

And behavior always begins with a step. Even a little step. It might be something that takes you just ten minutes today. That’s okay. A step begins the process and puts you in a better place.

I knew I needed to work on this book today, but I was having a hard time finding the right words, as writers often do. When my wife came home and asked how it was going, I felt embarrassed but told her the truth: “I wrote five words.” She said, “Great! Five more than you had before. What’s next?” She had a different perspective, and hers was the right one.

Sometimes I tell a coaching client who feels overwhelmed and is therefore avoiding something to break down her NHT into substeps, tinier pieces that don’t feel so daunting, like my five words. Suppose, for example, it’s a phone call you need to make to tell someone you can’t meet with him as often as he wants, but you can meet with him bimonthly instead of weekly.

If you’re a people pleaser, your mind rushes toward how disappointed and devastated the other individual will feel. Feeling like that, you could end up postponing the phone call forever. So instead, simply calendar it: “Call Laura Thursday at 2 p.m.” or “Talk to Laura at our next lunch about changing our frequency of meetings.” Just calendarizing yourself gets you halfway there. Substeps work.

Accept That Hard Things Mean Making Mistakes

The perfectionist’s nightmare is waiting until you do it “right.” There are thousands of blank canvases where a drawing should be, an empty file folder on the cloud where a book should be, and great jobs getting taken by others because you wanted to wait until things were perfect. The first few times we do anything is generally when we make the most mistakes, whether it be a tough conversation, redoing the calendar in new ways, or disappointing someone’s expectations for you. But take that step.

My wife and I took a trip to spend some time at the ocean, and as we walked on the beach, we saw a young boy skimboarding. He wasn’t very good. He fell off the board a lot, and his board got stuck in the sand. I felt bad for him — until I realized that he didn’t care. His expression wasn’t discouraged, but determined.

We walked past him on our way down the beach. On our way back thirty minutes later, he was skimming much better. I heard him yell to his dad, “I’m a lot better now!” He’d started poorly, like 99 percent of us do, unless we’re specially gifted. But he got better.

Within twenty-four hours of reading this chapter, do a messy step in your NHT. Maybe you’ll do a bad job in the conversation — the person you called might even hang up on you. You know what? The world won’t end. The perfectionist in you will start getting healthier. Take an imperfect step.

Your NHT is a lot like that stopped-up drain in your sink. It was such a pain. But when you poured in the Drano and used the plunger, the gunk broke up and you got movement. The water began to flow.

Aren’t you tired of not getting past the NHT and moving on to the next step after? Break up the gunk and do the NHT.

There will be others (and lots of them!), but the first one is always the hardest. We’re talking about establishing a new habit — the habit of fearlessly engaging in your NHT. It is a generalizable habit that will transfer from work to personal life to relationships and back.

Here’s a silly example: When I’m at the ocean, I hate my first run into the waves. I dread the cold water; it shocks my system. But years ago, I would enter the water using the “thousand razor cuts” method: going in one slow step at a time, then gathering your courage before taking the next slow step. That felt much, much more agonizing to me. Not even close. So since then I’ve opted for plunging all the way into the cold surf as soon as possible. This has worked for me. I more quickly adapt to the cold, it feels refreshing, and the day is good.

Remember when I said that this habit is generalizable? I recently had to have a confrontational conversation with a client whom I liked a lot. He had a disconnected attitude with his key direct reports, which was hurting his company. He simply wouldn’t listen to their legitimate concerns. I had put off the conversation for a month or so, thinking he would get better. But things were quickly deteriorating in the company culture.

During our regular phone call, as we went over our normal agenda, I knew the time had come to confront his attitude problem. When I detected a jumping-off place in the conversation, I remember thinking, It’s time to dive into the surf. I said, “I need to talk to you about a problem that needs resolution, and it’s about your own attitude.” And away we went. It didn’t end up being that bad. He was open to change.

Just plunge in.

Skills

1. Identify your own NHT. It may be in your professional life; it may be in your personal life. Write down the specific behavior you need to do.

2. Write down what it has cost you to avoid the NHT: Time? Money? Opportunity? Peace of mind? Freedom? Energy? Seeing the cost will help you get started. You don’t want it to keep happening.

3. Tell three friends that within one week you want to take that specific step. Ask them to text you, give you support calls, and hold you accountable for that one-week window.