Working hard doesn’t mean you’re doing hard work. It doesn’t even mean you’re doing good or smart work. It just means you’re extending a lot of energy and a lot of time towards the completion of some task. Sometimes productive. Sometimes not. But often lacking in intention.
So what is hard work and how do you know if you’re doing it?
Hard work is the work that challenges you to see beyond the moment. To focus on the bigger objectives. And to set a strategic plan in motion that you THINK will get you there but knowing that you can’t be certain it will. You’ll know you’re doing hard work if, as Seth Godin writes in Linchpin, the lizard part of your brain starts to deploy some good old-fashioned fear based resistance tactics that distract you from doing the work in the first place. We can NEVER be sure our plans will get us where we need to be and it is precisely this uncertainty that feeds the lizard brain, if we let it.
Seth has an interesting way of looking at to be sure, but I think about a little bit differently. For me, knowing I’m doing or about to do hard work doesn’t get signaled in the brain. It’s in the kishkes – that part of your stomach that you don’t know exists until some thing is really bothering you. When your kishkes start turning, you know you’re onto something important. Like the lizard brain, our kishkes are also pretty good at preventing us from doing the hard work we need to do, if we let them.
So here’s how you get past the kishkes: take a deep breath, reassure yourself that you can handle whatever outcome is coming your way, throw up if you need to, and then do just do it. Yup… at the end of the day it all comes back to Nike and that’s really all there is to it. Just do it.
When we resist doing things out of fear we only focus on what that failure might look like. We forget that we have infinite resources and ways to cope with the many puzzles, problems and challenges life throws our way. Did I fall apart when I didn’t get the job I wanted? Probably not. Did my life end when the project I was working on didn’t come in on time or budget? Nope. Did I land myself in a drunken stupor for six months when my last relationship ended? Doubtful. But am I still paralyzed by fear when confronted with any of those scenarios? You bet.
Bad things happen to us all the time. And if we’re doing hard work we’ll probably fail a lot. But we’ve all been through rough times and if we do the hard work of really thinking about those bad times we can learn much, chiefly that we coped and moved on. Reminding ourselves of that helps us to set a different expectation – that we will continue to cope with whatever life has in store for us just as we have in the past. That’s what we do. We are resilient creatures in a constant state of change and continually adapting to meet new challenges.
So don’t let the irrational musings of your kishkes or lizard brain prevent you from doing hard work. Pay attention to their resistance-inducing rumblings and then remind yourself that you’ve been here before and that whatever the outcome you’ll be just fine. If you can do that, you’ll be doing intentional, productive and rewarding hard work.
Good luck keeping the kishkes at bay.
Scott
