155. What Part of You Doesn’t Want This to Be Easy? (Let’s Talk About It.)

Ever notice how you can see an easier way, yet still choose the hard way? 

In this episode, I’m digging into the uncomfortable question: what part of you doesn’t want things to be easy? When it comes to work, motherhood, and productivity, why are subconsciously making it harder than it needs to be? 

I'm sharing five hidden patterns that keep high-achieving women (especially SLPs and private practice owners) stuck in hard mode. 

If you’ve been trying to solve a mindset problem with a new planner, a tighter system, or a 5 am wake-up call, this one is for you. 

You’ll Learn: 

• Why “hard” can feel like proof you’re doing it right (and why that’s a trap) 
• The identity patterns that make "easy" feel unsafe or unfamiliar
• How complexity can masquerade as control (and quietly drain your energy)
• The difference between sustainable success vs. survival mode
• A simple question to ask yourself when you’re overcomplicating something

Related Episodes:

• Episode 73: Why You Don’t Want Work-Life Balance
• Episode 97: This Is What They Didn’t Teach Us About Being an SLP 
• Episode 102: Your Job Is Not Your Identity (Even If You're Damn Good At It) 

Want Support?
If this hit a little too close to home, book a free consult so we can uncover what’s driving your hard mode and what it would look like to create sustainable success you actually enjoy.

To find out how I can help you improve your work-life balance, click here.

Come join Work-Life Balance for Speech Pathologists on Facebook for more tips and tricks!

Learn more about Theresa Harp Coaching here.

Transcript

All right. Hello, podcast listeners. Welcome back to the show. This is episode 155. It is a continuation of last week's episode.

So if you didn't listen to last week's episode, that's episode 154. Stop making everything harder than it needs to be.

You can definitely go listen to it. You don't necessarily need to listen to it before listening to this one.

But as you are tuning into today to today's episode, at the end, you may decide that you want to go back and listen to what was covered in last week's show.

Okay, last week's episode. And last week, I was talking about this trap that we get stuck in as SLPs, as moms, as sort of ambitious, high performing or overachievers, right?

Well, however, You kind of think of yourself, whatever words resonate. And I was talking about this trap of the hard mode and how so many of us get to, we get to a place where we make things harder than they need to be.

And I was talking about how hard doesn't necessarily mean good or better or valuable and how we can sort of misperceive our stress and our busyness and our prep, our preparation as success, as progress.

And this is something that I do. I've done forever in my life. Like this, this has been a pattern of mine.

And it is something that when I noticed it once, like. Once I finally started to not just notice it because I always noticed it, but once I started to realize that it was a choice, that I was influencing how stressful situations were feeling, that I was the one who was influencing my experience of the things on my to-do list, the goals that I had set both personally and professionally and explored why I was doing that.

And that is when I started to realize that it was a choice and that I could choose a different way.

And so some of you might relate to this. And what I want to talk about today is something that might make you a little bit uncomfortable.

And I remember the time that one of my coaches Like a coach that I'd worked with in the past had asked me this question because we coached on this, on success and stress.

And I will ask you a version of the question that she asked me, which is what part of you doesn't want this to be easy?

What part of you doesn't want this to be easy? What part of you is holding on to the hard mode, right?

Because if finding simpler solutions was just about having the right strategies, we would have figured this out by now, right?

We sometimes we know the easier path or we know that there could be an easier path, but we don't take it.

And that is what we're exploring today, okay? The reason why I'm talking about this is because, I mean, there are multiple reasons, right?

But one of the big. One misconceptions about productivity, in my opinion, and work-life balance is the belief, and it's a thought error here, okay, but it is a misconception.

It is this belief that there is not enough time, that that is the problem. If there were more time, then everything would be easy, right?

Because then I would have all the time I need to know, you know, to do what I have to do and to do what I want to do, right?

But it's not about having more time. And even if it were about having more time, I would encourage you to explore why that's not helpful because time is finite.

There is only so much of it. We cannot create more of it. We can certainly shift how we spend it, absolutely.

But we can't create more time. Okay, so this is actually good news because I'm telling you that what you think is the problem is not actually the problem, right?

The challenge is the deeper thinking, the deeper beliefs that are driving the way that you spend your time. Beliefs about success and what it means and what it looks like, beliefs about responsibility, beliefs about self-worth, beliefs about what it means to be a good SLP, a good private practice owner, a good mom, a good spouse, right?

And if we don't address those beliefs, we are going to continue creating these elaborate routines and systems and new planners to solve what's actually a mindset problem.

This is why self-awareness is such an important part of sustainable work-life balance. Because once you start to understand what is driving the behavior, you can finally start to change it, okay?

So let me walk you through some of the hidden reasons why you might be resisting easy, okay? And before I do that, I want to say one thing that's coming up right now in my mind.

And I am realizing as I'm listening to myself talk about this, that for those of you who struggle with all or nothing thinking, you might use what I say today to keep yourself stuck or to, you know, feel like it's not working for you or you're doing something wrong.

And I might be talking about. this today in ways that sound black and white, all or nothing. But just notice that if you're hearing that from me or if your mind starts going there, because that is not my intention.

I do not want to send the message that we all are treating life and work-life balance like it's hard and it's actually easy.

That's not the message. The message is, that we often make things harder than they need to be. And as a result, we start to feel burnt out and feel like we are always behind and failing, right?

But what if things could be easier than we see them? All right. But what I'm going to talk about, so I just wanted to make sure that I said that as like a disclaimer, but what I'm going to talk about are some of the

Most common reasons why you might be holding on to hard and stress, whether you realize it or not. I don't think that this is necessarily intentional, okay?

But I want you to ask yourself what parts of this might be true. All right, so the first common reason why we make things harder than they need to be and we resist the option of easy is because our identity is tied to being the one who handles it all.

Now, fill in whatever words resonate for you. But many high-achieving women have spent years being the responsible one, the reliable one, the problem solver, the early rise.

The hard worker, the one who always figures it out, the one who always makes it work, right? The one who just does it all.

And these are messages that we receive both explicitly and implicitly by the people and the world around us. It can be often, often it is without any intention of, you know, creating, of like fostering this identity of, yes, you have to do it all.

You have to do it all. You have to do it all. Although I could go on and on and on about this because I see it in social media all the time about moms and working moms and moms who stay at home and how we do all the things and, you know, everybody, you know, we sacrifice sleep and we sacrifice this and we sacrifice that, right?

So like these messages come at us in many different shapes and forms. And while I'm not arguing that we work hard, like I'm with you here, right?

That's kind of the problem, right? But while those qualities might often be complimented or admired even as like strengths, signs of strength and character, they become part of your identity.

And so then you start to unconsciously believe that being a mom means working hard. Being a small business owner, private practice owner, or an SLP means working hard and giving it your all.

And if we aren't giving it our all, is that still success? Right. If I'm not carrying this heavy mental load and carrying all this responsibility on my shoulders, am I still contributing enough?

Right. So sometimes we hold on to this hard mode because it reinforces who we believe we are and who we've always been.

So one of the coaching questions or one coaching question that I will ask you today, and I coach on this so often with the clients that I work with one-on-one, is who would you be if you weren't constantly proving how capable you are?

Who would you be if you weren't constantly over-performing? What would that look like? What would that feel like? Explore that.

Sit with that. and explore that. I'm curious what will come up. For some clients, possibility. For other clients, discomfort, right?

And resistance, tension, friction. Wait, you're telling me that like, I'm not supposed to, what? Wait, wait, wait, what? So like, I'm not doing it all, right?

Like, we get all stuck on this. Like, wait, right? And so we start to sort of resist it. Others are like, oh my gosh, that would be amazing, but it's not possible.

Right? And I'm here to tell you, it is possible. And what would it be like if you started to believe that it was possible?

Okay. The second common reason that I see so many of us holding on to heart To wanting the stress, hanging on to the stress and to the hard mode is because hard and complexity feels like control, right?

This one shows up all the time. So this looks like you double-checking, triple-checking, redoing, rescoring the evaluation results. And listening again and again to the responses that you recorded of your clients' Arctic productions.

And, you know, looking at your reports and overthinking every single word, right? And it is this underlying belief that sounds something like, if I do enough, if I work hard enough, I can prevent mistakes.

I can avoid failure. And while there are many... Problems with this underlying belief. One of those problems is that certainty is impossible.

And failure is, quite frankly, unavoidable. No amount of planning removes all the risk. No amount of checking guarantees perfection.

Because perfection doesn't exist, by the way. And yet, we keep adding layers and layers to this because complexity gives us this illusion of control.

It gives us this sense of safety. But in the process, we are draining our time and our energy. We are busting our , burning the candles at both ends, and suffering in the process for something, quite frankly, that does not exist.

So sometimes... sometimes... The simplest path feels really uncomfortable. It feels scary because it's unfamiliar and it requires you to trust.

It requires you to trust in yourself. It requires you to trust in your skills. It requires you to trust that good enough is actually enough.

And if this is resonating with you, this is the type of stuff that I work with my coaching clients on all the time.

So absolutely book a consult to talk with me and I can talk you through how I would help you.

I also want to mention I've got a few other podcast episodes that are relevant to this conversation. I have linked to them in the show notes, but just to throw them out there for my auditory learners, you know who you are.

ACTION ITEM: Verify Ep 97 download rank; update show notes if needed - WATCH

Episode 73, Why You Don't Want. Episode 97. This is what they didn't teach us about being an SLP. That, by the way, I got to check, but I think that might be the most downloaded episode.

It's up there. And then number 102. Your job is not your identity, even if you are damn good at it.

So those are three other resources for you to check out if what I'm talking about today is really resonating with you.

All right. Next point that I want to make about why we do this, why we hang on to hard, similar to wanting that sense of control for safety, is this desire and tendency for perfectionism.

And when we are operating from a perfectionist mindset, easy. Feels suspicious. Right. So and here's one of the ways that this shows up.

This is something I hear my clients say all the time. Well, I did it. I did the thing and I got it done.

But I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop. Like nothing happened. But I'm just kind of like bracing myself because I'm pretty sure like something's coming.

Everything's kind of going well this week. Things are like pretty manageable. So you know what that means. Next week is going to be a doozy.

Right. It's this tendency to wonder that you're missing something anytime something feels easy or doable because we've internalized this concept that valuable work should be hard.

So when a simple solution appears, we question it and we doubt it. Or when things are feeling simple and manageable.

We might add in some complexity. We might add in some things to make it hard. We add more steps or we do more research or more planning or more editing of the emails or the reports.

Not because it's necessary, but because easy feels unfamiliar and unfamiliar feels unsafe. So a question that you can ask yourself if you find yourself engaging in this type of behavior is, am I trying to improve this or am I trying to quiet my anxiety?

Am I trying to improve with intention or am I trying to calm my nervous system? Okay. Because think about the impact of this kind of behavior.

When we do this, not only are we wasting our time, but we are wasting our energy. And if we do this for the big things and the small things, imagine how quickly and easy it is to burn out.

And speaking of burnout, I've got another common reason why we resist easy and hold on to the hard. And this is the one that I think everyone is going to relate to on some level, okay?

Myself included. Sometimes, many times, dare I say, we use productivity to earn rest. This is the one that really resonates.

We have this mindset, this belief that when everything is finished, I will rest. The problem, though, is that everything is never finished.

There will always be more. It's like laundry. The laundry is never done. Unless you live in a nudist colony and you're not wearing any clothes, right?

It just doesn't happen because you're wearing clothes while you're doing laundry. It will never be done. There will always be another thing on the to-do list.

There will always be another note to write, another report to write, another email to answer, another phone call to make, another responsibility.

And so if we operate from this place that... time. Bye. ... Rest comes after the work and rest is a reward.

We start treating it as if it's this elusive thing that we are not worthy of. And that is 100% how you wind up feeling burnt out.

You do not need to earn your rest. You do not need to earn your humanity. You are worthy of rest.

Now, slight detour here, but I promise I'm going to bring it back to my fifth and final point. Really quickly, for those of you who have ADHD, I have noticed that part of the challenge with using rest as a reward for people with ADHD.

Part of the problem for us is not just that we use rest as a reward, but that we get, we go.

We down rabbit holes. We get sidetracked, right? We lose our sense of time. We struggle with a sense of time and we lose track of time.

And we often don't notice the physical signs that we are growing tired because those physical signs, those physical cues are initially very subtle until they get stronger and stronger that they're just, you know, slappy in the face.

You can't ignore them, but by then it's too late. So these are some of the unique challenges that affect rest for the neurodivergent brain.

And I want to mention that because it's not just necessarily about as simple as telling yourself like rest is a reward, right?

It's also about like you might have intentions of resting, but these things that I just rattled off might get in the way.

Or you might have learned that, you know, task initiation. is a big challenge for you as someone with ADHD or a neurodivergent brain.

so you might have learned not to trust yourself to rest because if you stop, it will be really hard for you to get going again, right?

So these are kind of like the unique flavors of how this will show up for a neurodivergent brain. Now, I'm not saying it could also happen for people who are neurotypical as well, but this is why I think it's so important for people with ADHD to work with a coach who knows and understands ADHD.

Because these are sort of like those little nuances that require and really benefit from very customized neurodivergent informed strategies and approaches.

Okay, so that's just my little, my little detour. But I told you, I'm coming back to my fifth and final point.

And here I am. Well, I'm Although I could say many, many, oops, sorry, if you just got that mic, if you just heard a little boom in the microphone, I talked with my hands and slapped the microphone by accident.

Okay, focus, Theresa. So the fifth point about why we hang on to hard, and like I was about to say, there are lots of reasons why we hang on to hard, but I, of course, needed to narrow it down to something manageable for one podcast episode.

So this is the fifth and final one for today. The goal, okay, this is for those of you who might be resisting this a little bit, and I really want you to hear this.

The goal is not about never working hard. The goal is not about lowering your standards, okay? The goal isn't to eliminate a...

Achievement and to be anti-productivity. Those are not the goals. So if you were kind of like going there and thinking, well, Theresa, like, I don't want to go there.

So what's left? Spoiler alert, you are an all or nothing thinker, if that is you. I told you, watch out for the all or nothing thinking today, right?

So let me give you this middle ground. The goal is about shifting the question. So instead of asking yourself, how much can I get done today?

Try asking yourself, how can I create results in a way that is sustainable? Because if we're go, go, go, go, go, do, do, do, do, do, the burnout will happen.

You cannot operate at that level long term. You absolutely. Absolutely cannot. And if you do, like there is a tipping point where then the crash comes and then you're stuck recovering and falling behind because you're recovering, but life isn't stopping.

Well, you are, right? And then the cycle continues because you feel this urge to catch up. And so then you're like, go, go, go, go, go, right?

So instead of asking yourself, how much can I get done in a day? Or how do I get more done in a day?

No. It's how can I create results that move the needle, meaning they move me closer towards my goals in a way that feels sustainable?

Because success that requires constant exhaustion is not success. That is survival. And eventually that catches up with you. So.

This week, whenever you catch yourself making something more complicated than it needs to be, want you to pause and ask yourself, what part of me benefits from making this harder?

What part of me wants to make this harder right now? Don't judge the answers. Don't judge yourself. Just get curious, right?

Maybe it's your perfectionism. Maybe it's your need for control. Maybe it's your desire to feel successful and your underlying belief that success equals hard.

Maybe it's your identity as the person who can do it all and handle everything. Maybe it's the thought error that you haven't earned rest yet.

What part of you benefits from making this harder? you want want want Whatever Whatever Whatever Whatever comes up, just notice it because awareness is the first step toward change.

And if I am talking and you are listening and you're like, okay, awareness is great, but I actually want to create the change, I can help.

Book a call. The link for free consults is always in the show notes because this is exactly what we do in coaching.

I will help you identify your unique flavor of what is creating this overwhelm and what patterns are keeping you stuck and help you build neurodivergent systems that actually support the work-life balance that you want so that you're not in survival mode, right?

You're out of survival mode. You're creating success that is sustainable and that you enjoy because It feels really freaking good.

So that is what is available to you. Book a free consult in the show notes and I'll talk you through how I can help.

All right. I hope that this episode was helpful and I will talk with you all next week.