Hard and Awesome. This is one of my favourite sayings and concepts that I like to teach my clients. It is the concept that EVERYTHING is hard AND awesome.
Hard means you’re doing it wrong…. or so I thought
It was a notion I learned the long and messy way, the martyr way. I couldn’t accept that my life and my parenting and my day would be hard. I thought if it was hard I was doing it ‘wrong’. I thought if I was doing it ‘right’ then it would feel easy and everyone would be happy.
The intolerance of hard things
This is a conversation I have with a lot of clients, especially moms. We are sold the idea that when if we are good parents then our kids will be happy and easy. It is one of the more destructive ideas of our modern parenting culture. It is a myth that crushes us with its accusations against our morality and worthiness as moms, moms who are told that motherhood is our calling and the most important thing in our lives.
This myth makes us think that we should not experience hard things. It creates an intolerance, an unwillingness, and an incapability to handle hard things.
[View the Hard Things Lessons]
Making hard things harder
But back to the hard and awesome of it all.
When I could accept that some of my day and some of my life and some of my kids (who take turns with this part) will present hardships, then I can let go of the resistance of it.
When we can’t accept the hard of things, we stay in denial, suffering and desperation. When we are acting from these emotions, we tend to act in ways that actually make our lives harder. We control, we become victims, we feel helpless, we fight it, we fight others. We tend to make the hard things harder when we are in this state.
The Hard and Awesome Game
Years ago, when our kids were smaller*, we started a dinner game called ‘Hard and Awesome’. We each go around and share what was hard in our day and what was awesome. We would talk about each point the kids brought up, and do the hard work of simply validating them and not talking the out of their feelings or experiences.
(*of course, as the kids get older, this game includes more eye rolls and “I don’t know”, but we keep asking)
Hard and Awesome offers us two things
One,it give us permission to voice what is hard. To make it acceptable to talk about and experience. And in this, feel what it is like to be acknowledged and validated in that.
You may have heard me say,“If it is hard it doesn’t always mean you are doing it wrong, it often simply means you are doing it”
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When I realized this, it gave me so much more freedom. I didn’t have to resist the hard and beat myself up with it. I could allow it as part of the human experience. It lowers my sense of entitlement that somehow, out of all the people in all of the world over all of the times in humanity, that I should be the one who has it all easy and awesome
Making more space for the awesome
The other thing about the hard and awesome is that it is making space for what is awesome.
So many of us will be so fixated on the ‘hard’ that we can’t make any space for the awesome.
I hear so many women ‘disqualifying the positive’ and brushing off anything good about themselves or their lives. It is a stance that already feels defeated and scarce, and leaves no presence or enjoyment of what is good.
An outcome of this is that rather than allowing things to be both hard and awesome, it reduces the amount of positive available and turns into more negative. It makes the awesome feel elusive and fleeting. However, truly being in and savouring the moments or qualities that are awesome allows us to find meaning and hope to endure the hard.
Hard and awesome is about allowing for two (maybe opposing) realities (two things can be true). Motherhood is hard AND it is awesome. This day is hard but there are awesome parts too. I am sometimes hard and I am sometimes awesome.
But even more, it reduces a lot of the heaviness of feeling this obligation to reduce/ignore/avoid the hard parts of life.
I hope you find some freedom with this notion of accepting hard things and, likewise, appreciating the awesome things. I hope you can think of ways to approach people and events and even yourself with the permission to allow things to be both hard and awesome.
Here are some episodes and posts that expand more on the topics mentioned in this blog post:
- The Handling Hard Things Lessons – moving towards more empowering mindsets to help you handle hard things
- 162. Think the best of me, or not. Allowing the hard and awesome in ourselves and in our lives. – unpacks how this shows up in our marriages, especially
- Should ‘Happy Kids’ Be Our Parenting Goal?
- 138. Is momlife UNFUN? How to be a more FUN MOM, stop withholding fun from yourself
- 67. Making motherhood harder than it needs to be (Mom Martyr)
