The better you get at your job or the work you do, the harder it gets because you are capable of more. You have advanced to a higher level. People see that increase in your capabilities and may give you more responsibility. You get better, but your work gets harder.
The world starts to expect more from you. With that advancement in your personal growth comes more responsibility, more expectations, more time commitment and the never-ending process of continuing to educate yourself. Not to mention all the thought management work that comes with it.
It’s meant to get harder because doing harder things makes you stronger. As you increase your strength, you make yourself ready for the next level. And so, the process repeats, on and on, and on again.
It’s meant to be this way because we are meant to grow by design. From birth we are created to learn, grow, adapt, get out of our comfort zone, keep trying new things we haven’t figured out how to succeed at yet, master things we are just starting to feel like we can pull off; and it never stops.
We will get better, but it will get harder. Instead of longing for the day when life gets easier, we should embrace the hard work that comes with growth. We need to regularly remind ourselves that these hard times are happening on purpose. They are happening for us, not to us.
People can go through some really hard crap. But they can also get through it. On the other side, if they grow from the experience, it strengthens them. When we feel resistance to the hard work, it doesn’t grow us. It weakens us.
The resistance is the fear circuitry in our brains that has been developing since humans walked the earth. The part of us that sees hard times as a development exercise is still in kindergarten. That part of our brain is nowhere near as developed as the fear circuitry.
We shouldn’t complain about hard work. We shouldn’t even tolerate it. We should embrace it and be thankful for it. Maybe we are still in the middle of dealing with it, but we need to remind ourselves often that hard times are to our benefit. If we learn to process the emotion that comes with it, we grow stronger.
One way this has shown up for me is in the form of criticism.
People seem to be less respectful than years past. Not everyone, but there does seem to be an increasing amount of disrespectful behavior in the classroom setting. I’m sure it’s attributed to a multitude of things. Some are mine to take ownership of. Some are outside stimuli.
We live in a world where anyone can post their criticisms online. Phrases such as “think before you speak” and “sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never harm me” are kind of lacking in today’s zeitgeist. People can be easily offended, the world tends to say you shouldn’t offend people, but rarely do people talk about the fact that no one can really offend you without you giving them permission first.
This, behavior of vocally criticizing anything you disagree with sometimes shows up in the classroom. Just like in the internet world, these vocal disagreements tend to be based on a small sound bite. They are not based on a thorough understanding of the subject matter.
They often seem to appear in the form of interruption. It’s rare that these strong criticisms come from someone raising their hand and asking if they could make a comment or ask a question. It’s most often mid-sentence, when I’m explaining a deep concept, that someone strongly interrupts and says, “you’re wrong” in some combination of words. Usually, I am trying to help these people gain a greater understanding to human performance. Still, many respond with “you are wrong” about what you are teaching.
It’s happening for me though. It’s not happening to me. It’s happening for me, serving me, teaching me new ways to deal with the experience. The more people tell me I am wrong, the more I learn methods to calm their emotions and point them to their prefrontal context in the moment. I’ve learned that allowing their resistance to be is one of the greatest forms of influence. If I resist their resistance, it strengthens their resolve.
Recently someone told me I was wrong about a human performance concept I was teaching. I responded with, “that’s ok if you disagree, I’m just going to let it go and move on to another topic”. Later at the break, the gentleman came up to me, calmly, wanting to learn more about the subject.
It’s hard to let go when a room full of people are staring at you, watching someone tell you that you’re wrong about what you are teaching, watching how you respond. There’s a part of you that wants to prove to the entire class you are right. But learning to let go in different ways, to influence people to walk toward you instead of resisting you, has made me so much stronger. These loud disagreements I have dealt with have made me stronger.
Another example: Years ago, there was a certain class I would teach twice a year to a tough audience. I remember back then, telling my wife that it was the hardest job I would do every year. Now it’s one of the easiest classes I teach. Not giving up on doing a job I thought was so hard has strengthened me and become one of the easiest jobs I do.
These are just a few examples of this concept. Dealing with burnout, disrespectful behavior, working longer hours, doing jobs you aren’t paid to do, all things that come with getting better at your work. Getting better is harder but the fruit is the strength you develop in the process.
Ed Mylett says he doesn’t pray for things to get better. He prays, “God make me stronger”. He knows the depth of this concept, that life gets richer because we get stronger by experiencing and growing from hard things. We shouldn’t pray for things to get easier. We should pray for life experiences to make us stronger.
There’s a 50/50 with that. You will grow, but you will experience hard things.
As I grow, I see that my role with the disrespectful behavior in the world is mostly about me and not the world. It’s on me to not let it trigger my dog-like, limbic brain. It’s on me to not feel disrespected because someone else is being disrespectful. It’s on me to be the example of how we can manage our thoughts and emotions.
If I can move toward understanding, and away from judging, I can always get better at managing hard experiences. Most often, when I experience disrespectful behavior going on the classroom, it is due to one of two things.
Either A, they are struggling with something personal that I know nothing about, or B, they are unfamiliar with the subject matter and it is stirring up emotions in them that they vent out with words.
Knowing that is becoming stronger. Judging their behavior is weakness. Understanding it is strength.
You never know what personal crap people are dealing with in their lives. But you do know that every one of your students, coworkers and peers are dealing with something that the rest of us know nothing about. Sometimes we learn these things or get a little window into them, but more often than not, we don’t know the half of it.
A friend of mine gave me a window into this recently. He brought up a class he was in, years ago, and mentioned how one of the students was being disrespectful to me. He said the guy asked him to lunch one day and, although hesitant to go, he went anyway.
During that lunch, he learned the guy was recently turned down for a promotion and he was dealing with a family issue. My friend wanted to share that it may...
