A few weeks ago, I began to notice a pattern in my coaching calls. Client after client would describe situations the same way: “It's so hard.” 

Conversations with co-founders, hiring decisions, pivots they knew they needed to make but hadn't. 

It’s hard.

Eventually I got curious enough to start asking: What do you actually mean when you say this is hard?

That was where things got interesting. Because as it turns out, "hard" can serve a lot of different purposes — but we rarely stop to check which one it's serving in the moment. 

When I’ve asked clients what they mean by “hard,” their responses can usually be grouped into one of four different categories: physical, emotional, mental, and social. You can see in the graphic ideas of what more specifically might be showing up.

To be clear, none of these meanings are wrong. But they're all saying something different. 

That’s what most of us never stop to untangle. And because a challenge often falls into more than one of these categories at once, it’s easy to use “hard” as a catch-all. To reach for it as an all-purpose descriptor instead of doing the more useful work of naming what's actually going on, what the challenge actually is. 

That work is more important than you might think, because for a lot of high performers, “hard” isn’t a description at all. 

It’s a rescue.

When I say rescue, I mean it literally: the word “hard” rescues you before you’ve even started. If you define something as “hard” and leave it at that, it becomes easier to let yourself off the hook for the outcome ahead of time. Easier to quit the moment it gets uncomfortable, because you already warned yourself — and everyone else — this was going to be difficult.

That's not a character flaw. It's such a normal, human move that most of us don't even notice we're making it. But it's worth noticing all the same, because it can subtly limit how much you actually try. 

I've experienced this plenty in endurance sports. During my first few Ironmans, I began to notice that the thought This is so hard tended to show up right around the point in the race where I was tempted to slow down and call it a day. I knew exactly what I needed to do — keep going — so in those moments, the thought wasn’t giving me anything useful. It might have sounded like a simple description of the situation, but what it was really doing was giving me an out: the permission to quit that my mind was desperately searching for.

And it was only by not trusting the statement at face value that I was able to keep moving, instead of negotiating myself out of what I really wanted.

To be clear, I don't think the goal should be to white-knuckle it through every challenge or convince ourselves that difficult things aren’t difficult. I think the goal is to stop letting that value judgment — This is hard — do the thinking for you. Because the moment when you have that thought is usually the moment to get more specific, not less — to see if you can replace the word with something that better reflects what you’re actually experiencing.

So the next time you notice yourself thinking about how “hard” something is, ask yourself: What, exactly, is hard about this? Is it going to hurt? Is it going to take a lot of effort? Are you genuinely struggling to figure out the path forward? 

Or could it be that you’re using it to buy yourself permission to put it off — or even to stop altogether? 

That’s a tougher question to think through, but it can change everything about what you do next.

— Tony

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