When presented with the choice of doing something hard or doing something easy, most people choose to do something easy.
It’s human.
And this tendency shows up everywhere in our lives, including things we aren’t complete with, and still need to deal with.
If you want to cause a breakthrough, you can’t keep chipping away at the easy. You can’t be satisfied with incremental improvement. You must confront the monster you’ve tried to keep behind closed doors.
Today, I was talking with a friend who wasn’t moving forward powerfully in her life.
So, I offered some coaching. It was difficult for her to dig where she didn’t want to dig. She’d been stuck in the same pattern for a long time.
When I could see plainly that she was capable of so much more, as someone who’s up to something in the world.
I knew that she didn’t really want to look at what I was pointing to. But I poked around a little anyway, knowing that it would hurt a little. Because the pain of not moving forward would surely be greater than dealing with whatever was there for her.
As she kept looking, she started to see what was there for her. Unsurprisingly, it had a lot to do with her childhood and upbringing.
Eventually, she saw why she wasn’t doing anything with the projects that were supposed to be so important to her.
That would not have happened if we had dealt with the surface. It happened because I kept digging, and ultimately, because she kept digging where she didn’t want to dig. I can’t take credit for the breakthrough. Only for the stand I’d made for her.
Stop looking for gold on the surface. It’s time to go deeper. That’s where the hard stuff is. And the hard stuff is where we have breakthroughs.
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