You’re Not Avoiding Hard. You’re Choosing a Different Version of It.

Giving up on goals can feel like relief. But is it?

I was at a cafe the other day when I overheard a woman at the next table declare that she doesn't set goals anymore. After years of failed attempts, she had decided there was no point.

She didn't appear upset. If anything, she seemed quite at ease about it, like a decision had been made and she'd moved on.

But it stayed with me. Because while the initial relief of letting something go can feel like freedom, I found myself wondering what that decision actually feels like over time. What is the inner soundtrack every time desire shows up, every time she wants something, and she reminds herself that she's not someone who achieves her goals?

Because here's what I believe: Whether you achieve the goal isn’t actually the point. Who you become in going after it is. The willingness to take action, to feel discomfort, to fail, pick yourself back up and go again. The ability to trust yourself to honour the commitments you make to yourself.

I don't think she had stopped wanting things. I just wonder if she had stopped believing she could.

It wasn't always this way for me either

I set goals now because of how they challenge me to grow, to evolve, to step into discomfort. But it wasn't always that way.

I remember years ago wanting to lose weight, and every time I felt the pull to eat something off-plan or skip a workout, I'd rationalise: you're not that fat anyway. And that was enough for me to abandon the plan entirely. I spent a long time searching for the perfect meal plan, the perfect supplement, the perfect workout that would somehow make it easier, that would give me the result without the discomfort.

But what I eventually understood about weight loss, and about any goal, is that the thing that determines the outcome isn't the plan. It's your willingness to take action even when you don't want to. To feel the discomfort of doing something new, and do it anyway.

The conversation that changed everything

I was talking to a coach one day when she said something that stopped me in my tracks, and completely changed how I approached my goals from that point on.

You need to choose your hard.

What she meant was this: taking action towards something you want will feel hard at first. Uncomfortable. Unfamiliar. But that discomfort is acute and short-lived. The more you take the action, the more it becomes your new normal.

Avoiding the action has a cost too. It's just a different kind of hard, one that’s quieter, slower, and easier to ignore in the moment.

With weight loss, I can choose the hard of sticking to my plan, knowing the discomfort is temporary and the result is real. Or I can eat the cake and skip the workout, and deal with the hard of not achieving the goal. The disappointment. The quiet resignation. The story I tell myself about what I'm capable of.

Both are hard. But only one of them moves me forward.

The same has been true in building my business. Right now, I am choosing the hard of relying on myself to create an income, stepping away from the security of a salary to build something I actually want. The hard I’m choosing is the uncertainty, the commitment, and the mindset required to try, fail, and try again, without any guarantee of outcome.

The alternative was staying in a career I no longer wanted. Easier in the short term. But the long-term hard of that choice, the resignation, the slow erosion of the life I actually wanted, was a harder hard than the one I'm in now.

Which hard are you choosing?

The people I see living lives they genuinely love are not people who found a way to avoid difficulty. They're people who got deliberate about which difficulty they were willing to take on.

They chose the immediate hard, the discomfort of taking action, of failing, of doing it again, because they understood that the alternative carried its own cost. Just one that arrives later, more quietly, and is much harder to trace back to the choice that created it.

I think about the woman at the cafe. She wasn't wrong that setting goals is hard. That's true. But not setting goals isn't the absence of hard. It's just a different version of it, one that doesn't come with the possibility of becoming someone who trusts herself to go after what she wants.

And that, to me, is the harder hard.

So if you're sitting with a goal you've been avoiding, or a version of yourself you've quietly given up on, I'd ask you this: which hard are you actually choosing right now? And is it the one you want?

You don't have to have it figured out. You just have to be honest about the choice you're making.

If this is something you’re navigating right now, this is exactly the work we do inside The Reset Method.

Having support while I choose the hard that moved me forward is what has allowed me to achieve so many of my goals and now I love supporting my clients do the same.