While most of us would love things to be easy, we don’t believe it’s possible. Instead, we believe everything is hard or has to be difficult.

Relationships are hard.

Earning money is hard.

Staying healthy is hard.

Losing weight is hard.

Finding work is hard.

Marriage is hard.

Many of us also believe we have to work hard, and we perceive that effort as admirable. However, working hard is not just about a career or job either. It’s about everything.

But what if things could be easy?

It Gets to be Easy!

My coaches continually tell me, “It gets to be easy! You can choose for it to be easy.” In other words, I don’t have to struggle, work hard, or feel challenged—if I choose easy.

I can change my belief and make a different choice. Then, I can push the Staple’s Easy Button and hear, “That was easy.”

Easy sure would be nice. And it’s a powerful choice to make, is it not? But when you’ve been stuck in “hard” for so long, believing in “easy” feels…well…hard.

The Result of Believing in Hard

Believing everything has to be hard has serious ramifications. It creates:

• worry
• anxiety
• overwhelm
• stress
• anger
• frustration
• resentment

And, that one belief keeps you stuck in hard. Your thoughts are creative; therefore, the more you think, “It’s so hard,” or “I have to work hard,” or even, “Being a hardworking person is a good thing,” the more difficult stuff you create in your life.

And you create more hard things not only with your thoughts but your energy, too. You see, each one of the so-called negative emotions listed above have their own associated energies. However, negative thoughts and emotions only can generate negative and unhelpful energies. On the other hand, positive, helpful thoughts and emotions generate positive energies.

The more you think, feel, and vibrate with the energy of hard or struggle, the more you attract situations that feel hard or require you to work hard at them. Therefore, it behooves you to give up the belief that anything has to be hard.

Find Opportunities for It to be Easy

So, what if my coaches are right? What if things can be easy? What if you can choose and allow anything to be easy?

Imagine that…

I decided last week to take their advice and find opportunities to allow things to be easy. (Notice that I didn’t say I was “working” on letting things be easy!) So, I consciously chose to allow a specific situation to be easy.

We had a large storm in Northern California that knocked out our WiFi for two days. When the service was not restored by the evening of day one—and our cell phone carrier’s towers went down, I became anxious. I had a live coaching session to deliver to the members of my Transform NOW! Facebook group that required enough bandwidth to stream virtually on Zoom and Facebook simultaneously.

Cell service was restored just before I went to bed that first night. However, I doubted I’d have a strong enough Internet signal to run the meeting the next day.

That left me with two choices:

• Go into town and try conducting the meeting from my car outside the local library or Starbucks—both about 25 minutes from home. This option felt hard—stressful and time-consuming.
• Try to run the meeting from home with my hotspot; if this didn’t work, I’d just let the members know what had happened and reschedule. This option felt easy—freeing even.

Yet, I went to bed thinking I had to choose the first option. Doing so would involve getting up early, rushing, and driving into town super early. First, I would try the library. If I couldn’t get logged into the library’s Internet service or the signal wasn’t strong enough, I’d pack up and drive to Starbucks. Then, I’d find an outside table, brave the weather, and hope the music and chatter wouldn’t be too loud and their Internet was working well.

When I woke up the following day, I lay in bed thinking, “Going into town to run this meeting feels too hard. I don’t want to do it.” So, I made a different choice. “I want to let running this meeting be easy.” That meant I would try to conduct the meeting from home using my hotspot. “If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. People will understand.” I assured myself. “Life happens.”

And, guess what! Everything went off without a hitch. It was easy!

Making Easy a Habit

I have to admit, though, that just because I was able to let it be easy once doesn’t mean I had created a habit of choosing easy. Oh, no. I still had to break the hard habit.

This fact became painfully apparent to me later that same day when I decided to record a video and upload it to Instagram stories—still with no WiFi. I’d not had any trouble accessing social media while using my hotspot, so I wasn’t too worried. Actually, I figured it would be easy.

I managed to get the first part of the video loaded, and then the rest of the upload failed. I tried many, many times to reload it without success. So, I deleted the entire thing and tried again. When that again failed, I heard myself say aloud, “Why the hell does this have to be so f*cking hard!” (Yes…I curse.)

That’s when I realized I was stuck in hard again. So, I decided to wait until the next day to finish the upload to Instagram. By then, I reasoned, I might have Internet service. This seemed an easier option.

However, when the Internet service came back on at about 9:30 p.m., I made a new decision: I would get the job done before going to sleep. After all, it would be easy now. Again…not.

An hour and a half later, I went to bed. All in all, I had spent about four hours trying to load an Instagram live series. Sheesh.

I had not chosen to let that be easy. Had I chosen easy, I probably would have ditched the entire Instagram story and gone on my way.

The Easy Challenge

After that, I challenged myself to let things be easy…to choose easy over hard every time. And I want to challenge you to allow things to be easy—or easier, too.

You can complete this challenge in the following five ways.

1. Identify one task, situation, or conversation each day that feels hard. Then, consciously choose to handle it in a way that feels easy.
2. Affirm that whatever feels difficult gets to be easy. Tell yourself over and over again, “It gets to be easy. I allow this to be easy. I choose for this to be easy.” Or say, “I choose easy. I allow ease.”
3. Visualize easy. Allow yourself to imagine whatever seems hard being easy instead. Or, even better, visualize easily flowing through every day.
4. Be conscious of your words. Begin to notice when you use words like hard, difficult, challenging, struggle, or tough. While thoughts are, indeed, creative, speaking them aloud makes them super powerful. Each time you say one of these words, you create more of that experience.
5. Do easy! Consider what easy would be or look like for you. Then be a person who does easy, and you will have more easy in your life.

I’m taking this challenge, too. That means I’ll be using these five strategies every single day.

I want a life of ease—one experienced as easy. I’m sure you realize that you want that as well. And you can have it…as long as you choose easy every day.

Are you choosing easy or hard? Tell me in a comment below. And please share this post with a friend who finds life hard.

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Photo courtesy of boygointer.