How to Make Hard Things Easier || “Lower the Hurdles”

Overcome obstacles with these tips for lowering the hurdles in your life.

Do you ever find yourself “stuck” behind insurmountable obstacles in your life? These obstacles may come externally from other people or life circumstances. Obstacles may also come from internal emotions—self-doubt or anxiety. 

These factors stretch your current abilities, and this “stretching” feeling is uncomfortable. Stretching means you feel resistance.

When you feel that resistance arise, don’t fall into the trap of blaming or shaming yourself. I want to help you focus on what you can do to make hard things easier. 

(Yep! Even though you may not always be able to change or remove obstacles in your life, you can make changes to improve your situation.)

What can you do when you’re battling obstacles?

Here is the main tip I want you to memorize: Lower the hurdles!

You can lower the hurdles by making something easier or by making something harder. (Don’t worry. . . I’ll explain how that works in the episode!)

Join me in learning how + how this tool can apply to real-life scenarios of how you can lower the hurdles in your life, including: gift giving, exercising, attending events, achieving goals, and more!

About a few other things...

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TRANSCRIPT

When was the last time you wanted to do something, but all you could see were the obstacles in your way. What was that? Yesterday? Today? Five minutes ago? You are not alone today, you will learn how to make hard things easier.

 For years and years, I either worked out early in the morning while Brad and the little kids were still asleep, or I ran with my kids right after breakfast in my huge running stroller.

I couldn't run a lot though because my bum knees. So that gym time was really important to me. It helped me have the mental stability I needed to be a mom of very young kids. But a few years ago, Brad got a new job that required him to be in San Francisco by 6:00 AM at latest. And that made his wake up call 5:00 AM.

And I knew there was no way I was going to wake up at 4:00 AM to go to the gym. I also knew that I wanted to keep up with my new swimming habit and I couldn't run every day. And so for the first time, in our young married with kids life, we decided to find a gym with good childcare. It took a while, but we found a local YMCA that many women swore by, and that it had wonderful, but affordable childcare.

And it took a few months for my kids to finally adjust to that childcare. But just after they got adjusted, I had a baby and he was decidedly not a fan. It felt like there was just one dumb obstacle after the next with me just trying to exercise. The only time that I really had for myself was that exercise time and everything kept getting in the way, from my bum knees not letting me run ev ery day to not being able to have childcare anymore so I can just do a short workout at the gym. All I could see where those obstacles.

Does this happen to you? To me, that's an obvious yes, because you're human. This happens when you are committed to a new habit, a new goal, a new way to care for yourself, or to connect with others, or even just a well-intentioned plan to finally clean that freaking closet that has been bothering you for the last year plus.

But each time you stretch yourself and you make steps forward to doing those new things, there seem to be obstacles in your way. And sometimes those obstacles just keep on coming today.

I'm going to teach you my favorite tool to make hard things easier, but first let me acknowledge something for you.

You are not making this hard up. This resistance that you are facing, it's not in your head. It's real. And it's part of the path to progress. Resistance means that every step you take to stretch yourself, to push yourself into the discomfort zone, to try even a little harder for the very best of things, you're going to have obstacles ,the resistance.

And it can come in many forms. It can come internally with self doubt or anxiety or stress, or that resistance can come externally with obstacles presented by people in your life or circumstances that seem to just keep getting in your way. Again, this resistance is obstacles you are facing.

They are not your fault. And they do not mean you are cursed or that you are uniquely broken. One of the worst things we can do when we are facing these obstacles to the ways we are trying to stretch ourselves and grow, one of the worst things we can do is to blame and shame ourselves. So before we dig into the rest of this episode, I want you to break away from the shame.

To stop blaming yourself for the issues that you continue to face for. The hard that keeps rising up when you're just trying to do good things. And if you want a little silver lining here, the best news about these obstacles is that resistance shows you you are actually on the right path. Because that's what happens when you're doing something good. You are doing it right.

So even though we know resistance means we're on the right path, we also want to be able to deal with his hard better. We want to make it easier. So after you've anchored into what I just told you of not going down that shame and blame cycle, that will do nothing to help you face the resistance.

Here is the tool that I want you to remember to help make this hard, easier. The tool is: lower the hurdles.

 That's a phrase, and I want you to remember it. This is the tool, lower the hurdles. You may not be able to do away with the obstacles that are rising up for you altogether, and you definitely will not be able to push that resistance away overnight.

But what you can do is lower the hurdles.

Now, what does that look like? For me, it kind of takes on two different forms, but in order to figure out which of those forms you want to follow, you need to do the Zoom Out. You've heard this in a couple episodes ago when I talked about deprioritizing, I talked about zooming out and zooming in.

So let's just zoom out when you are facing resistance. When you keep getting obstacles right and left getting in the way of you doing the good things you want to do... When it's just hard to do good things, zoom out, take an objective look at the obstacles that are acting as hurdles to your change and to your growth.

Zoom out. And take stock. Because once you can see those obstacles objectively, once you can track them, then you'll be able to better know what to do to lower the hurdles, to those obstacles, to make them easier to do.

So, this is what lowering the hurdles looks like with those obstacles of mind. The two ways that you can lower the hurdles are to either one, make something easier or to make something harder.

And that might seem a little confusing, but both of what these do is lower the hurdles to make it easier for you to still move forward. So in order to lower the hurdles again to your obstacles, you can either make something easier or make something harder.

And I'm going to briefly explain these. Okay. So when you make something easier, you are not removing the hurdle altogether. You're simply lowering it. And that's what I did with my working out story that I was telling you at the beginning of this.

I could not remove the hurdle that Brad had to leave early enough for me to not have time to go to the gym. And, you know, being up half a night with little kids too. I could not remove the hurdle that the gym childcare was not working out for us. I couldn't remove the hurdle that I couldn't run for my exercise every day, thanks to my knee. But I could still lower the hurdle by making something easier to do. So for me, that meant I was going to make it easier to work out from home to not have to go to the gym every day to have other things to do besides running with my kids.

Although I could still alternate with that so that I didn't ruin my. knee, and I could still keep the gym pass I had to still go swimming on the weekends when Brad was around. So how did I make it easier to work out for me? Just a few things. I got an old treadmill for free, or my friend who didn't need it anymore. And I put it in my already cramped garage, but we got it to squeeze in. I got a couple of new weights from target, just a 10 pound set and a five pound set. I ordered an affordable stationary bike eventually from Amazon and I got the best home workout app. And this is a total free plug. I have to tell you it's a Wilma.

 Meg miles is the creator of it and it's incredible. I've done it, I'm like now going on a tangent, I have done it for three and a half years without skipping it. Actually three years without skipping a single workout. Anyway, so I got supplies. I made it easier to have things at home that helped me work out because it was already around.

And about waking up early and like having long spaces of time, I couldn't lower that hurdle either. So I just made it easier to work out because I could get up even 20 minutes before my kids and go walking on the treadmill. Cause I never ran on that, the treadmill is just for walking or go on the bike or do part of my strength training workout.

And then I could do the second half with the kids, fter the big kids were dropped off at school. So whether I took them on a walk or they did a strength training session with me with my free weights that I had while my baby napped. And by the way, my favorite way to work out at this time was to put on the British Baking show the TV and I'd have the app doing the workout. And my two-year-old would sit on the couch and watch it with me. And we talked about baking all the time. So that was another way we made it easier to do the workout. He could watch that little show with me. My baby was napping and it lowered all the hurdles that I had.

It didn't remove the obstacles I faced. It didn't fix them all overnight. But lowering the hurdles helped me re-potentialize my options. They helped me see that I did have ways to work out and to exercise because I've made it easier to do that in different ways. That word for you, re-potentialize, might sound familiar.

This is something that we talked about in episode 347, early September, about how to leave martyrdom behind. So if you want to learn more about, go back to that episode, but here's what I want you to do. I want you to, to remember this question, how can you lower the hurdles by making something easier?

Now sometimes in order to make something easier, you have to make something else harder. I'm going to go back to an episode we did a few weeks ago on making over your morning routine. And we talked about how an often an obstacle to a good morning routine is the phone because you are turning off the phone for your alarm in the morning and then get sucked in, whether it's productivity or social media or whatever it might be. And before you know it, your morning routine time is totally gone. Even if it's five minutes that you have before the start of the morning. And that's an obstacle.

One of the ways we tried to lower the hurdle to your morning with this example was to make something harder. And that was your phone. So in order for you to make it easier to go through your morning routine, we made getting your phone harder, putting it across room or charging outside the room, getting an alarm clock. The list goes on just little ways to make it harder to face an obstacle that was getting in your way, making it easier to do other things.

Oh, that was a lot to explain, but I think we're getting her.

So you track your obstacles by zooming out, you take stock of them. And then with those obstacles in mind, you can better decide which of these you need to do, or a combination of.

How can you lower the hurdles by making something easier? And how can you lower the hurdles by making something else harder?

Let's do a quick recap before I give you more scenarios on how you can apply my tips to lowering their hurdles. Again, you're going to zoom out, take stock of your obstacles. And from there lower the hurdles by either making something easier or making something else harder. Now I'm going to give you the first scenario, and this is our first call in from a real progressor. Her name was Rachel, and I'm so thrilled to share this with you.

"Hi Monica. This is Rachel from Provo, Utah. And I was just calling with a little question. I know a lot of us as women tend to suffer from procrastination and also perfectionism. And I was just thinking as we approach the holidays, how I feel like I can be a procrastinator and also a perfectionist when it comes to giving gifts around the holidays.

"I really want to work on this and become better at this so that I don't keep putting off gift giving and end up doing something that I feel isn't true to who I, who I want to be as a gift giver if that even makes any sense. So if you could please share some simple ways to get over the anxiety of giving gifts around the holidays and birthdays and anniversaries and all of that. I would really appreciate it."

Oh, Rachel, thank you so much for sending this in. And all of my close friends and family will be laughing when we hear this episode, because I am literally the worst gift giver. There's just this chip missing in my brain. That it's really hard for me to remember dates and who belongs on what date. And I'm also not great at thinking about personalized gifts.

So I relate to the struggle because I also feel the anxiety of wanting to show my loved ones that I do care for them, and that I love them. And I want to show that to them. So I get the struggle and luckily I've, I've been able to lower some of the hurdles that are in the way for me, and I can recommend them.

But I just want to honor that this is something that matters to you and it's good that it matters to you. It's okay that it matters to you. So before we lower the hurdles, zoom out and objectively take stock, what are the obstacles that are making this hard for you?

Is it maybe time because it takes time to go to stores. Is it money? Is it having a good calendar system that reminds you of whose birthday is on what date? Is it having too high of expectations from those in your life? Like maybe, you know, people that are hard to please. Is it not knowing what your left ones would like, like as you're approaching the holidays right now, you're thinking I have no clue what this person would like. Even though I love them. I don't know what they, like.

Maybe your obstacles are deeper. Like, maybe you have this fear of not showing someone that you love them because you're not nailing this gift giving. So there could be many obstacles here and it's best that you look at your own obstacles so that you can then know how to lower the hurdle.

And with that, I have just a few ideas on possible ways you could lower the hurdles by making gift giving easier to do. And these are going to be a little bit more blanket because again, I don't know what your obstacles are, but I tried to cover a bunch of them here and ways that you can make it easier.

So here's some ways that you can lower the hurdles by making it easy. Maybe you could keep a running list of what the most important people are in your life are and what they like and have that be an ongoing thing you can reference. Like if they just mentioned something, you have a note in your phone for that.

 Maybe you can have a gift closet in your home that's full of things that a lot of people typically like or different groups of people, whether that's kids or girlfriends or family members. For the holidays, especially and upcoming birthdays. What if you were just to ask your loved ones to straight up tell you what they want to have a list to for them to give you the ideas?

What if, instead of doing gifts altogether, if that's a real anxiety written thing for you, and it's, it's just something that you are struggling with, maybe you can forego gifts and instead create experiences together. If some people are on board, like that works really well with kids, I find in our family.

And finally, one more big, maybe you can use an online birthday reminder system that links with your calendar. Like I did this years ago, I sent out an email to all my friends and family and they just submitted their birthday to it. And then it just linked to my calendar, but that was so long ago that it's pretty outdated, but I'm pretty sure there was going to be other birthday reminder systems online.

So there's a few examples on how you can make gift giving a little easier.

And I told you I'd share my example. Mine was to have a birthday basket for my girlfriends, because for me that was the thing that kept coming up. Oh, it's so-and-so birthday today or so-and-so's birthday was yesterday. And that might be like my best friend. And I'm like, "Holy crap!" Or Brad might tell me, oh, my mom's birthday is tonight and it's 5:30 already. Like, we're going to go celebrate her cake. I'm like, "What?!" So for me, it was mostly about women around my age or a little older. And so what I did is I just have a basket of things that I get in bulk.

So when I see a sale at JCrew or at JCrew outlet or loft, I get a ton of awesome earrings for like $7 each. I get bath bombs online that I from Amazon, that I can then divvy up into different, um, gifts, a makeup remover,towels that I can separate, face masks that I can separate into different gifts, journals, notebooks, cute pens, candles.

The list goes on, just things that I see. And when I see something that could go in the gift basket, I get a bunch of them. And from that gift basket, I have a few gift bags too, that I just pull out one of those and put in a different collection of those different items and they love it. And it makes me feel better because I am honoring them. Even if it's a day later, it's lowered the hurdles so much for me and made it easier for me to remember my friend's birthdays and my family members. So that was my idea.

And I just want to pass this over to you now, Rachel, like how can you lower the hurdles and make things easier? Make those obstacles easier. Whether it's the upcoming holidays you're facing or girlfriend's birthdays or kid birthdays. What are the obstacles and how can you lower the hurdles by making it easier? And I'm sure there's a lot of Progressors listening who have really good ideas. So I think we're going to do a post on Instagram the week that this airs, where you can share your ideas on this specific scenario.

Okay. We've shared one specifically about lowering the hurdles. Next, what I'm going to do is instead of giving one scenario, I'm going to give a couple rapid-fire scenarios on how you can lower the hurdles by making things harder. So here are a couple for you.

Do you really want to get better at attending social events, but you keep making excuses and backing out. And that's totally me. This one's for me. You can make it harder to back out by carpooling with a friend who is counting on you. That's one example.

Next one. Do you have an upcoming deadline? Whether it's work or a church related thing, something where someone is relying on you to get something done, but you keep getting distracted by social media while you work on your computer, you can make it harder by turning off the wifi on your computer or putting your phone on a shelf or in another room.

Next one. Are your kids driving you crazy by the endless messes they are making make it harder to make those messages by purging a ton of their toys or belongings. Another way you can make it harder is to rotate your toys. So only a few baskets of different types of toys are out of the time and others go in boxes in the garage and you keep rotating them out. So it's harder to make huge messes because there's fewer items.

Maybe you can have really messy toys that are kind of like, I don't know, tons of Legos or like those little craft elastics that we were making those bracelets that can explode all over a room. Maybe can make those kinds of messy toys in a special cabinet under lock and key. So the kids need permission to pull them out or like get that Lego bag thingy. I've been meaning to get that for my boys. Okay. There's a few examples on messes, how to make it harder.

Before I let you go, I'm going to give you one more scenario that combines both tips to lowering the hurdles. Let's say that you really want to get back into reading again, and you want to settle down at night with a book, but you find yourself getting caught in loops of productivity or numbing behavior around that time.

You can make it easier to get back into reading by starting with a book that you actually want to read. Not that you feel like you should read. You can make it easier by placing a couple books that you want to read in places around the house where you tend to get lost in cycles of productivity. Like maybe next to the kitchen sink.

Um, that's just an example. You can make it easier by putting an alarm on your phone at a certain time at night, that reminds you it's time to put things down, hetherw that productivity or numbing behavior. And to start to wind down with that really amazing book. Okay. Those are examples on how to make it easier to read.

Here's how you can make it harder. And I'm thinking more about the numbing behavior first. So to make the numbing behavior harder, you can put time limits on the ways you numb .On your phone there, settings that you can put limits on your phone use after a certain time. And on your TV, make it harder with time limits.

You can make productivity harder by having a family member or a friend that you're accountable to. Someone that you check in with when you are checking out a productivity for the night and have some reward systems with that. So that way you are really motivated to not continue down productivity or the numbing path, because if you do so-and-so, you owe them $5 or they you owe you $5 when they get caught in the pro productivity or numbing loop.

Just know that none of these are prescriptions. I can't give you those, but I do hope that all the examples we went through can give you a path on how to do this for yourself, lowering the hurdles on the obstacles that you were facing will never be perfect. And you can expect a mess. But you can also expect to still create traction in the ways that you want to improve by lowering the hurdles that are in your path. And bit by bit, those small wins you are building will continue to build over time to incredible progress that is within your reach.

I hope this episode gave you the hug and kick in the pants that you need to grow. I'm going to give you the cliff notes of this episode, which I call the Progress Pointers. And if you want this and a cute graphic each week, every Tuesday, we send that graphic out in our Go Getter newsletter.

Number one, whenever we stretch ourselves, we will face obstacles that resist that stretching.

Two, don't blame yourself for the resistance you face instead, lower the hurdles.

Three ,first zoom out to track your obstacles and

Four, then lower the hurdles by making something easier and, or making something harder

Your Do Something Challenge for this week is to lower a hurdle you are facing and make something easier to do.

I really can't wait to see what examples you come up with and how you apply this in your life. And I hope that you will share it on Instagram. I'm @ aboutprogress. You can do your own post, or you can just tag me. I can't wait to see what you are doing. And as you do that, You can use the hashtag #dosomethingchallenge.

If you like, you don't have to, either you can just DM me and I get to spotlight. Many of you who are sending these things in, on an ongoing basis. So this week for the progressor spotlight, I want to spotlight some new friends from the Frugal Friends Podcast. And we were talking about moments, focusing on moments instead of big blocks of time with our responsibilities and our relationships and how to balance the two last week on the episode.

And they told me. "We named our son Kairos. And basically that means seize the moment in Greek. So we always have it as a reminder." I love that. I love that they named their son Kairo so that they can be reminded to seize the moment.

It was so fun to have our first call in! if you have a question or a scenario you need help with call in to the show, go to about progress.com/callin to learn how.

 We're going to say goodbye now, before we go, be sure to join our big five giveaway. It's so easy. Just leave a review if you haven't or share the show on IG and tag me if that's. That's it, my friends.

I want to thank you so much for listening to the show and for sharing it. And for being here .Now, go and do something with what you learned today.