Why do things that we hate?

Welcome to the mid-week edition of The Resilience Brief, designed to help us all finish the week off strong. These are preventative ideas to help us when challenges come our way and today we’re tackling a hard subject - our ability (and requirement) to do hard things.

I found my son had written the words “I hate this” on his math homework last night. He’d been really struggling with the exercise and this was his way of venting his frustration. I’ll admit that he doesn’t love math, but this was purely because he couldn’t find the solution which caused him to become extremely upset. After a bit of breathing, we sat down together to tackled it as a team, but I couldn’t begin to help him work through the task without first explaining why we have to do things that we don’t like doing.

We do hard things.

Doing hard things is a mentality that we try and uphold in our family. We talk about it often, and we insist on it whenever we need. I wish we had it up on the wall somewhere but my wife is not the kind of person who likes inspirational quotes on the wall.

But challenges are a part of life and they never stop coming. That means that hard things will always be there waiting for us, guaranteed as one of life’s consistencies.

So we can either resist these hard things for as long as possible, or we can look for them as opportunities for growth.

I tried to explain this to my distraught 7-year-old son, Matteo, through the metaphor of push-ups.

“Is it easy to do 5 push-ups?”

“Yep,” he responded.

“What about 30 push-ups? Is that just as easy?”

“Yep,” he responded.

“Ok, show me.”

He got on the floor and he did the 5 push-ups no problem. It was pretty good form and he was done in about 10 seconds.

“Ok then. Keep going to 30.”

He kept going, the form got worse, and he ended with 12. He put his knees down and the challenge was over. But I had to try and make my point.

“So here’s the way I see it,” I said. “If you only ever do 5 push-ups, you’ll never be able to do more than 12. But if you aim for 30, you’ll eventually do 13, and then eventually you’ll do 30! So it’s hard now, but it will get easier later. And if you don’t do the hard thing now, it’ll be hard forever.”

Math is hard now, but it won’t be forever, so long as we work at it.

Matteo got back up and we sat down and did the homework together. There were a few more errors, but we eventually got it all done.

“I judge you unfortunate because you have never lived through misfortune. You have passed through life without an opponent - no one can ever know what you are capable of, not even you.” - Seneca.

Resisting hard things doesn’t just happen with kids. It happens with adults too. We tend to avoid the things that scare us because we’re programmed to avoid failure. Our brains perceive any potential failure as a threat, activating the area in our brain responsible for assessing fear (our amygdala) which can create anxiety and a strong aversion to trying difficult tasks.

So we have to fight against that urge to take the easy road, and build a natural resistance to it. Because when we’ve built natural resistance, it works in a similar way to a vaccine. Little doses of pain and discomfort add up to strength to handle big doses of pain and discomfort.

In Michael Easter’s book, The Comfort Crisis, the author goes on a personal exploration to understand how modern life’s conveniences and comforts have created a range of physical and mental health issues. It’s a fantastic read and includes personal anecdotes, scientific research, and a ton of expert interviews to argue that, when we intentionally embrace discomfort, it can lead to a life of increased fulfillment, resilience (my fave word!), and health.

A couple of super quick ways to do it in our professional lives.

1. Invite small moments of pain. Avoid that cup of coffee when we really want one. Get up at 430am one morning. Take a cold shower after the gym. Invite that disgruntled colleague out for a coffee. When we purposely put ourselves through things we don’t want to do, we get that rep of adversity done. It’s one rep - mark it up and it’ll add up to help us when thing get really painful.

2. Try new difficult things. We can take a course for something we’ve never done, talk to a stranger at the coffee shop, attempt a super-challenging new recipe at home. Trying new things that are likely not going to go well at the first attempt will train our mind to reframe failure so that we can get comfortable failing….and then we just naturally keep going until we get it right.

They say that nothing is certain but death and taxes…but I believe challenges are also inevitable. It’s all about how we deal with them. We got this!

Until next time friends, stay resilient!

Carre @ Resilient Marketing Minds.

PS - the real-life story of how Canva was created includes plenty of examples of how the founder took the difficult road every single time. Check it out!