“Choose Your Hard” Is Making You Worse at Hard Things

I used to live by this phrase. I was right there with the “choose your hard” crowd — nodding along, sharing the posts, feeling genuinely pumped up. I get why it resonates. It sounds like accountability. It sounds like ownership. It sounds like control.

But here’s where it fell apart for me.

I’ve been coaching freelancers and small business owners for over 10 years, helping them improve their productivity and businesses. In that time, I’ve coached people going through family trauma, serious illness, mental health crises, chronic insomnia — some of the hardest seasons a person can go through. I could never bring myself to look someone in those circumstances in the eye and tell them to just choose their hard. It never felt right. It never felt true.

And honestly, before any of that, I had my own hard season that left me with truly no choice but to figure out a completely different way to work. One that didn’t rely on just pushing through — because pushing through simply wasn’t available to me anymore. That’s a story for another time.

But I went looking for the science. I wanted to know: was my gut reaction right, or just a gut reaction? Was this advice missing something important?

What I found changed how I think about behavior change entirely.

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I hope you found this valuable!

Wishing you much productivity!

- Jenae :)