There are a lot of reasons why you should do the hard things.
For one, it’s good for your mental health.
It can make you stronger and more resilient.
There are also plenty of tangible benefits to doing the hard things, like gaining new skills and making new friends.
Whatever your reason for wanting to do the hard thing, be sure to congratulate yourself for taking on the challenge!
You’re definitely setting yourself up for success by doing so.
Here’s a great mentor message (with a challenge):
The message and challenge are to do hard things.
I know when the kids were growing up and they would come to something hard, they wouldn’t want to do it.
Guess what?
As an adult, when things are hard, I don’t want to do it either, but the challenge is to do difficult things because beautiful things come when you do hard things.
The analogy of the caterpillar and the butterflies
If you take a cocoon and you open up the cocoon so that the butterfly doesn’t have to struggle and fight its way out, the butterfly can’t fly.
But if you leave that butterfly in there to struggle and fight and work and open up that cocoon by itself, it turns into a beautiful butterfly and it flies around.
That’s doing hard things.
The dry creek challenge
There is a dry Creek on our property that has a deep message of learning and accomplishment.
Why did I choose this spot?
This spot on our property was the worst spot.
It was stinky.
It was a swamp, and it was ugly.
We didn’t want to spend any time here at all, but we decided to do something difficult and that was to completely clean it out.
Here’s the thing, we thought it would take us a few days and it ended up taking us a few weeks to clean it out.
Then we decided to put this dry Creek in and carry these heavy rocks to surround it.
It was hard work!
Yet, we felt so good when it was done.
And guess what?
This ugly swampy, stinky place on our property is now one of our favorites.
It’s one of the most beautiful places on the property.
That’s what happens when you do hard things.
When you do hard things you grow, maybe it’s a life lesson.
Maybe it’s repairing a relationship.
Find out one of the biggest lessons learned from a successful mentor.
Inspiring your kids to do hard things
One of my kiddos is doing something very hard right now and she didn’t want to do it.
As her parents, we realized that she’s going to have to do this kind of thing in the profession that she’s going into later in life.
In fact, what a better time to do it than now, where she can have the help and support of us along her side.
So she can grow.
She’s now risen to the challenge and she sees the benefit of doing this hard thing.
We see her confidence increasing.
We see her clarity increasing about what she wants to do later in life because she has faced the fact that she needs to do hard things.
My challenge to all of you listening and reading this out there… go do hard things!
The hard things have a way of turning something ugly into something beautiful.
If you’re listening out there and you’ve got someone in your life that needs to do hard things, maybe it’s a child, maybe it’s a spouse, or maybe it’s a relative.
Go ahead and challenge them to come alongside and pick up “the rocks” with them and say, let’s do this together.
In the end, you’ll look back and see something truly beautiful that came from doing those hard things.