Making yourself “do hard things” is prerequisite for every cool thing you want in life. But humans are weird, and making ourselves do things is often unreasonably difficult.
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The writer knows she needs to write, but finds herself procrastinating exactly when it matters.
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The business owner knows this sales call could make cash flow for the month, but his attitude is all wrong.
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The teenager knows he’s supposed to take out the garbage, but sullenly refuses today.
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The toddler loses his ever-loving mind over eating the sandwich that he asked for 5 minutes ago.
We behave in strange ways. We’re scared of things that are safe, avoid things we need, and freak out about things that make no sense.
But meaningful projects – like doing creative work, building a business, growing into a decent human – all require us to manage our own behaviors and do things that we don’t want to do.
Sometimes we can.
Sometimes, some invisible thing seems to be in the way.
What?
Emotions in the Bucket
I did not come up with this example, but it’s one of the best I’ve heard.
Think of your emotional capacity as a gallon ( or roughly 4-liter) bucket. Suppose you have a rolled-up sock, and every time something goes wrong, you put a sock in your bucket.
On a good day, you wake up, and your bucket is empty.
Maybe you spill your coffee, your boss yells at you, and someone cuts you off in traffic. Those are three socks that you’ve thrown in your bucket. But you still have plenty of room in there. You can take the hits.
On the other hand, suppose it’s a bad day.
You wake up, and you’re feeling depressed, or you’re grieving, or you’re angry about something important in your life. It’s like there’s a thick sweater in your bucket. It’s taking up most of the space. There’s not much room left.
When you take your three hits – you spill your coffee, your boss yells at you, someone cuts you off in traffic – all of a sudden you’re out of space. You’ve got socks falling out because the bucket was full to begin with.
That’s when you start crying randomly, or you start yelling at people, or you shut down.
You might procrastinate, or avoid everything difficult, sensing the bucket is close to full.
The visible problem seems small.
But the real problem is still in the bucket. It’s the big thing that’s taking up all of the space.
The Behavior Is A Decoy
So we see the behavior – and it doesn’t make sense for the scope of the actual problem.
The child is suddenly upset about a sandwich. The teenager is sullen and won’t do their normal chore. The business owner is freaking out about the sales call. The writer is suddenly procrastinating.
Why?
It’s because of the things in the bucket.
So managing the behavior really means figuring out what is in the bucket.
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That can be an unmet need, like a need for safety or attention or feedback.
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It can be something you haven’t fully understood well enough to process.
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It can be an emotion that just needs to be lived with for a while, like grief.
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It can even be a physical issue, like chronic pain or a nutrient deficiency.
Detective Work: Tracing the History
How do we figure out what’s in there?
It’s a detective job.
It’s a bit like trying to find your keys. You have to go back and ask, “OK, well, what room was I in, and what was I doing the last time I saw them?”
Except for feelings, we are asking things like, “What happened today that upset me? What was I doing when I got stuck? What is about that situation that makes it bother me when it wouldn’t annoy someone else?”
You can consider deeper history like, “When was the last time I felt comfortable asking for attention? Or what experiences have I had around this thing that could be tugging on me?”
Consider physical situations too like, “Did I get enough sleep? Could I be hungry? Am I missing something in my diet that’s making me feel off? Am I getting sick? Am I just tired?”
Building a history of what led to the feeling lets you figure out what’s a sock, what’s a sweater, and when you just need a nap.
Refusal As Information
One of the most useful ideas I got from Occupational Therapy is that, when a child refuses to do something – rather than just pushing harder like we’re all tempted to do – the trick is to treat it as information.
There’s a real reason little Timmy is saying “NO.”
Our default needs to be to assume that it is too hard, too scary, or the emotional or mental load is too high – for a reason.
Our job is to figure out why.
And then take steps to lighten the load. Find ways to make the task smaller, safer, easier, faster, simpler, or more fun.
The combo is unique for everyone.
But that’s what helps us get movement towards the hard thing. We hypothesize about why we can’t move, find spaces and strategies that make movement possible anyway, and gently sustain taking smaller steps that matter.
You can increase the difficulty over time, reduce supports, try it in different situations. But keep moving. Because rather than building no muscles towards hard things, this lets us start where we are.
For grown-up problems – this means that if you can’t write today or stomach the call, you need to look for what is taking up your emotional capacity and address it.
If you still can’t do the thing, make it smaller, safer, funner. Write worse. Use voice notes and tell AI to clean them up but not edit. Tell your best friend about your sales idea.
Just keep moving.
Understand First, Fix Second
So when you find yourself bumping into a block – whether it’s your own procrastination, a feeling that feels out of proportion to the problem, or a toddler who is unreasonably offended by sandwiches – the challenge is often to figure out WHY before you try to fix it.
The same is true of any relationship. Often the first task is to hold space for, and be genuinely curious about, figuring out what has led them to act a certain way.
First.
Before we try to come up with a plan to fix it (if, indeed, they want us to fix it at all.)
Often, the most obvious behavior is just an aftereffect of something on the inside that needs to be addressed.
Tracing the history of a feeling is one way to identify what’s in there – checking for physical, emotional, mental, or relationship situations that could be causing problems.
But humans are also complex – seeing and identifying inner issues that have possibly been sitting in our buckets for our whole lives – is a bigger project.
Sometimes it just helps to know what you’re looking for.
And that’s what helps shift it just a little, to sustain movement towards the hard things we want most.
You might also like this one for more ideas on making big problems smaller:
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