I’ll always be honest with you.
Personally, I’m going through something challenging right now. Not going to dress it up or silverline it. I’m doing things I’ve never done and it’s requiring ALL of me. Some seasons of life and leadership are simply…
HARD.
And I know I’m not alone.
But here’s how I’ve been training my body and brain in the middle of it: “This is hard” is only part of the story. The problem is when we let it become the whole story.
Because when we make hardship the only truth, we lose everything else that is also true at the exact same time.
It’s like holding a magnifying glass up to a cut on your hand. That’s all you can see. But pull back… and there are fingers and freckles, hair and veins there, too.
Flip the script: Hard is not the whole story.
So I ask myself another question: What else is also true?
This season for me is hard AND it is…
- growing my capacity
- revealing my character
- inviting me into the next layer of my spiritual development
- reminding me that I need people who will speak truth into my life
- an opportunity to shift the future I’m building
None of that minimizes the hard. It simply refuses to let the hard be the only narrator.
Viktor Frankl survived the Holocaust and wrote about it in Man’s Search for Meaning. He spent the rest of his life studying what allows human beings to endure profound suffering. His conclusion: meaning is what sustains us. The capacity to find a why inside the hard is not a coping trick. It is what keeps you moving when nothing else can.
What else is also true about your hard right now?
When you can hold the whole picture, something deep shifts. You remember that you have agency. You have options. You have the capacity to choose your response to what you cannot control.
That is not a small thing. That is everything.
You are not just surviving this. You are becoming someone different because of it. Choose wisely.
