Letting It Be Easy: How to Replace Hustle and Struggle with Alignment and Ease

Easy:
achieved without great effort; presenting few difficulties
a period of time free from worries or problems

Ease:
absence of difficulty or effort.
make (something unpleasant, painful, or intense) less serious or severe

One of the things I wanted more than anything else when I was in the heart of my Massive Action - Hustle Harder - 10x Your Efforts strategy days was EASE. I just wanted life to feel bit less…HARD. All. The. TIME. 😰

We’re conditioned from a young age to believe that good things are hard to come by. It stands to reason that if we want to create a life filled with our goals and desires, a life of freedom and our ideal lifestyle, that we’re going to have to work really hard to get that, right?

It makes perfect sense to us to buy into a Just Work HARDER mantra, because we’re conditioned to believe in that from our earliest days. Having children of my own now, I see why. We want our kids to be able to rise up and meet the inevitable challenges life will throw their way. We want them to know that they’re going to have to get up and take action to create the life they desire, not just wish and hope for it. We want them to learn about and show gratitude for the life we’ve provided for them; We want them to appreciate their blessings, and understand that they didn’t come free.

The problem is, that’s not the whole story or lesson.

Hard work alone doesn’t guarantee results. Do you know anyone who has worked incredibly hard their entire life, and still doesn’t have the freedom, income, or results they desire? Hard work is part of the recipe, but it’s not the whole recipe, and most of us never got the rest of it. All we ever learned was that if we want something, we need to work really hard to get it. That’s where I got my story about what it would take to create the success, freedom, and lifestyle I craved. That’s also the root of the belief that began to form within me that if hard was good, really hard – SUFFERING – was even better.

If hard will 10x my results, suffering will 20x them, right? And in this belief system, the opposite was also true.

Hard = good

Suffering = great; the 20x path to freedom

Ease = bad

Easy = lazy; the 20x path to a life of lack, never reaching your goals/dreams

As crazy as the implications are, it’s not crazy logic. It stands to reason. If a little hard helps, a lot of hard must help more. So I created as much hard as possible. No excuses were allowed or accepted. Neither was any fun, relaxation, or recharging. There was no space for joy or delight, because that would offer me less time to work myself into suffering, which would slow down my progress. My Inner Critic was given the biggest microphone available, to judge, criticize, and drive me, lest I start getting lazy and do things the easy way.

Easy was for lazy people. Easy was for people who wanted things they were never going to have, because they were too lazy to work hard for them. And easy was for people who weren’t willing to suffer, to have the things even sooner.

Life is the ultimate teacher, and we all get the lessons that we need. If I hadn’t committed so fully to suffering, I wouldn’t have reached the point of pure exhaustion and utter deflation when I did. If I hadn’t believed so strongly in hard, I never would have gotten so broken down that I was willing to consider another way for the sake of health and survival.

Here’s the truth about why I abandoned the Massive Action, Hustle Harder strategy

I believe that we lost my mom because of her commitment to hard and struggle (stress). I believe our physical bodies can’t survive under constant and prolonged duress. And I’d worked hard enough for long enough to see that the results weren’t coming in correlation to the effort I was putting in. The suffering wasn’t speeding up my results, and I believed that continuing to suffer like that for year after painful year would kill me, literally.

The only reason I journeyed into life coaching with an open mind and heart is because I didn't want to abandon my goals and dreams, but I didn’t want to literally kill myself trying to create them, and that's where I believed my current path would take me. I'd reached a point where I was no longer willing to make suffering a necessary part of creating the freedom, lifestyle, and results I desired. The Massive Action, Hustle Harder strategy had to go. I needed more than a new strategy, I needed a whole new way of being, and coaching is the path I took to create that new way. 

When do you do the internal work to clear the path (of fears, doubts, and limiting beliefs) and create alignment, EASE gets to be part of your success recipe. Not because you start floating through life without effort, but because you create a life so on purpose, that what you’re working on feels fun, exciting, and fulfilling. Your work begins to feel like how you’d like to be spending your time. And when you’re working hard at spending your time in the ways and places you want to spend it, it doesn’t feel so damn hard anymore.

You expand, and begin living at the level of your desires, rather than constantly trying to jump high enough to grab your desires out of the sky and drag them down to you.

Some days feel effortless now. Some days feel easy or easeful now. Not all of them; You can't (and wouldn't want to) opt out of the human experience, but a whole lot more of them. When you let go of the “reality” that hard = good, and easy = bad, easy can begin to find you. But not when you’re living in fear that easy days mean stagnation and regression. 

If you want life to be easy, you’ve got to allow that experience, instead of fearing it or avoiding it. You can’t hold the belief that life is hard, and success comes from struggle, if you want a different reality.

The ability to shift into letting it be easy is within YOU, and the best way I know to access it is to do the internal work, on the fears, doubts, and limiting programming and beliefs that live within you, holding you in the hard. The answers you're looking for aren't out there in the world, they're in you. You create transformation from the inside out. 

Hustling, griding, and forced suffering are available options.

So are expansion, alignment, and ease.

You get to choose the path you’ll travel. You get to choose which recipe you’ll use. Both paths require work. Both paths require you to show up. But the experience of them is drastically different, and YOU get to choose.

You are the creator of your reality. If easy sounds nice, choose it.