We’ve all done it. Standing at the base of a new challenge, we announce to ourselves or anyone who’ll listen: “This is going to be so hard.” We say it before learning a new skill, starting a difficult project, or facing an uncomfortable conversation. It feels like we’re being realistic, maybe even preparing ourselves mentally. But here’s the thing: this habit serves absolutely no purpose.
Think about what happens when you tell yourself something is hard. Your brain doesn’t spring into action with renewed determination. Instead, it starts looking for evidence to confirm what you’ve just declared. You begin noticing every small obstacle, every moment of confusion, every setback. You’ve essentially given yourself permission to struggle, and your mind obliges by making sure you do.
The declaration creates a kind of psychological contract. You’ve said it’s hard, so now it must be hard, and if it starts feeling manageable, you almost feel compelled to find the difficulty you promised yourself. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy that generates exactly the resistance you claimed to expect.
Consider the alternative: approaching the same challenge without the commentary. You simply begin. You encounter obstacles and solve them. You get confused and work through it. You make mistakes and adjust. None of this requires you to have first announced that it would be difficult. The challenge presents whatever difficulty it naturally contains, regardless of your prediction.
Some people argue that calling something hard is just being honest or realistic. But there’s a difference between acknowledging reality and creating it through declaration. When you haven’t started yet, you don’t actually know how hard something will be for you specifically, at this moment in your life, with your current resources and mindset. You’re not being realistic; you’re making an assumption and then treating it as fact.
The real issue is that framing things as hard before you begin drains your mental energy before you’ve even taken a step. It’s like running a race while carrying a backpack full of rocks you packed yourself. You’re adding weight that doesn’t need to be there. The task itself will demand enough from you without the added burden of your own negative framing.
When you stop telling yourself things are hard, something interesting happens. Challenges become more neutral. They’re simply things to be done, problems to be solved, processes to move through. Some parts might require more effort than others. Some days might feel easier than others. But you’re no longer fighting against your own narrative about how difficult everything is supposed to be.
This doesn’t mean pretending challenges don’t exist or that everything should feel effortless. It means dropping the unhelpful habit of editorializing before you’ve even engaged with the work. Your energy is better spent actually doing the thing than commenting on how hard it’s going to be to do the thing.
Notice how children approach learning before we teach them to complain about difficulty. A toddler learning to walk doesn’t stand there thinking about how hard walking is. They just keep trying. They fall, get up, fall again, adjust, and eventually walk. The difficulty is inherent in the learning process, but they’re not adding an extra layer of difficulty by telling themselves a story about it.
The next time you’re about to tackle something challenging, try simply starting without the announcement. Don’t tell yourself it’s hard. Don’t tell others it’s hard. Just begin, and deal with whatever actually arises as you go. You might be surprised to find that without your own voice in your head insisting on the difficulty, the task itself becomes more approachable.
What you’re really giving up is a form of emotional insurance. By declaring something hard in advance, you’re protecting yourself from the judgment of failure. If you struggle, well, you called it. You knew it would be hard. But this protection comes at the cost of making the struggle more likely. It’s a bad trade.The work you need to do doesn’t care about your commentary on it. It simply exists, waiting to be engaged with. Your thoughts about its difficulty are separate from the work itself, and they’re optional. You can choose to drop them and approach what’s in front of you with a quieter mind.
This isn’t about positive thinking or affirmations. You don’t need to replace “this is hard” with “this is easy.” You don’t need to replace it with anything. Just stop making the declaration altogether and see what happens. You might find that difficulty is something you experience in the moment when it actually occurs, rather than something you carry around with you as a prediction and a burden.
