Choosing Hard

How the stories we tell ourselves—and the ones we inherit—shape the difficulty of our lives.

Choosing Hard

Before the needle ever touched my skin, I was already in pain.

Not from the procedure. It hadn't started yet. The pain I was feeling was borrowed, handed to me in an exam room by my doctor.

"This is very painful. This isn't a fun one."

That's what she said when she ordered the arthrogram. I've been battling constant back and hip pain that keeps getting worse, and after an MRI on my lower back, the trail led to my hips. The next step was a procedure in which fluid would be injected directly into my hip joint before another MRI. And the person with the credentials and experience told me it was going to hurt.

So I did what most of us do. I picked up her story and carried it around until the procedure, as though it were mine.

By the time I was lying on that table, the story was already running at full speed: Oh my gosh. It's going to be so painful. It's going to hurt so bad.

Then the radiologist walked in and said something that stopped me cold.

"My goal isn't to make this painful. You might feel a little sting. I'm going to numb the area, and then we'll inject the fluid."

Same procedure. Same needle. Completely different story.

So I breathed. Okay. You're going to be fine. A little tiny pinch.

And that's all it was. A pinch. A little pressure. I could feel movement, but it was numb. It didn't hurt.

Secondhand Fear

The fear of pain I experienced before the procedure wasn't mine. It was secondhand.

You know how secondhand smoke works. You never lit the cigarette. You never took a drag. But you breathed the same air, and now it's in your lungs.

Fear can work the same way. Someone else's experience, their worry, or a horror story gets exhaled into the room, and we inhale it as though it belongs to us.

"Marriage is hard."

"Just wait until they're teenagers."

"Starting a business will eat you alive."

"Your first year in sales is brutal."

"The economy is down; expect a hard year."

"That procedure? Worst thing I've ever been through."

That may have been their truth. That was their hard.

It doesn't have to be ours.

Should we be informed? Absolutely. Walk in with your eyes open. Understand the risks. Prepare yourself for what may happen. But there's a difference between being informed and being infected. Information prepares us. Fear can precondition us to suffer before anything has even happened.

Leaders, This One's Yours

If you lead people, here's the part you don't get to skip: You're not just breathing secondhand fear in. You're breathing it out.

"This quarter is going to be brutal."
"Good luck with that client."
"This change is going to be painful."
"The industry as a whole is down; we need to tighten our spending."

Every one of those sentences sets the emotional pain level for your team before anything has even happened. Your people walk into the room already braced. Already anxious. Already hurting. Already living inside your version of hard.

You were their doctor when you could have been their radiologist: same facts, same procedure, a completely different story:

"Here's what to expect. Here's how we'll handle it. You might feel a sting."

This does not mean minimizing reality, withholding information, or pretending difficult things will be easy. It means communicating the truth without giving people unnecessary fear.

Your words shape the reality your team prepares to enter. Choose them carefully because it matters. Because it does.

The Pain We Manufacture

Then there's the part that's harder to admit. Sometimes nobody hands us the fear. Sometimes we manufacture it ourselves.

We expect it to be hard, and that expectation begins shaping what we notice, how our bodies respond, and the decisions we make. We stop choosing intentionally. We begin reacting to a story we wrote before anything happened.

When COVID hit, the horror stories were everywhere. My experience with it was difficult, but I noticed something familiar creeping in: the feeling that something was wrong with me if I didn't feel as bad as everyone else. Like my experience didn't count unless it matched theirs.

When I was younger, I made myself sick. I would think about getting sick, picture it, feel it, and my body would sometimes create very real migraines and headaches when I needed to escape something. I was not pretending. The pain was real.

But now I recognize that those symptoms sometimes became a form of self-protection. A way out. A way to prove something. A way to receive attention when I didn't know how to ask for what I needed.

Have you ever created a situation to protect yourself without realizing you were doing so?

Making yourself sick so you don't have to show up.
Picking a fight so someone leaves before they can leave you.
Creating tension so trust breaks down because, if trust breaks down, no one gets close enough to hurt you.
Quitting before you can be fired.
Holding back your full effort so that if you fail, you can tell yourself it didn't really count.
Staying "too busy" to pursue the dream that scares you.

We can manufacture pain. And the cruelest part? We usually build it as protection. But it doesn't protect us. It simply guarantees that the hurt arrives early, wearing our own handwriting.

Your Turn

Where in your life are you making something harder than it needs to be? Where are you creating pain before the pain has arrived? Whose fear are you carrying around as though it were a fact?

And if you lead people, what emotional pain level are you setting in the rooms you walk into?

Hard things will come.

We do not always get to choose the procedure, the circumstance, the economy, the diagnosis, or the challenge in front of us.

But we can choose the story we carry into it: