Trapped By the Hard/Easy Paradox?

So often when I’m working with a client I find myself saying the exact things I need to hear myself.

Yesterday I was coaching a woman who applied for my Powerful Feminine Leader Mastermind (just two spaces left!) and what came up was the exact reason I began the mastermind … the hard/easy paradox that has so many of us trapped in the masculine way of doing business that can be oh so painful.

I hope that this post helps you see where you’ve been choosing hard because you believe it’s easier when you can choose ease, even though it seems so hard.

This paradox has left so many of us totally lost when it comes to making the right choices for ourselves in business.

In this case, my client was at a crossroads.  A crossroads I’ve faced more than once and you probably have as well.

Like many of us, she has always subconsciously associated business with fight, struggle, challenge and competition.  While doing business, she has often felt stressed and tense.  She thought that was  how it was supposed to be.

She’s a fighter and a winner.

And now, she’s beginning to realize she has a choice.

She is confronted with a clear choice – continue with a business that she has invested resources in, but that clearly traps her in at least three more years of push, struggle, fight, conflict, and disharmony or make a different choice.

A choice to let go of the old way of doing things.

Do what she has always done or open up to a completely different possibility – the choice to build a life and business on the principles of ease, grace, harmony and joy.

And yet it feels so hard to make that choice because it’s so incongruent with what she has always known.

It awed me to watch in her (and to recognize in myself) how hard it feels to choose to walk the path of the unknown, even when the known is so clearly a path of discontent and pain.

The old ways of doing things feel safe and comfortable.  We know they lead us to stress, fear, and pain and yet because we know that world and that we can and have survived it, it’s what draws us.

Choosing the unknown path feels so hard.

Can it really be possible to build a business based on grace and ease?  Can it really be possible to make a great living doing what comes naturally and doesn’t have to be fought for?  Can it really be possible to say no to a business that we know will and does and is causing stress in favor of a business of ease?

Yes.

But, we have to make the choice to stop doing what we’ve always done.

And making that choice is not easy.

The mind wants to suck us back into safety.  It tells us it is not possible.  It says we must struggle.  It says we must fight.  It says we must stay the course, dig in, don’t let go, fight, compete.

Yes, this is what feels safe.

But, it’s not really.  It’s simply what we’ve always known.

Here’s the paradox.

In order to choose ease, we must be willing to choose what’s hard.  We have to be willing to make decisions that look insane to the outside world because they are so free from the conditioned reality.  We have to be willing to make the choice to stop doing what we’ve always done.

In the short term, it will be incredibly difficult and frightening – not externally, but internally. Our mind will do everything possible to stop us from choosing the unknown.

But, it’s the only way to get to the ease and grace we truly want and in our heart of hearts know is possible.

What it takes is to stop choosing the challenge, the struggle, the hard … now.  See it and choose something different.

It takes trusting we really can build a business and a life around what comes naturally and easily without struggle or fight.

It takes believing we can be well paid for that which we love to do and that just because it’s easy, it doesn’t mean it’s not valuable (it is in fact the most valuable gift you have to offer).

It takes believing we deserve to have a life and to stop telling ourselves it’s only good if it’s a challenge.

The hard/easy paradox has had me trapped most of my life.

I chose to suffer through the hardest tax classes in law school even though my math background and training was limited; to go for the job at the firm that was known to be the most difficult to get a job at; to build not one, but two million dollar businesses (that were in many ways incongruent with the life I wanted to have); to stay in my first business longer than I should have because I was scared to let go, to end romantic relationships because there was not enough of a challenge;  to follow role models who kept me constantly focused on more, more, more … the list goes on and on.

From this day forward, I take a stand for ease.  Not easy, but ease.  Can you feel the difference?

You coming with me?

What hard choices do you have to make in your own life and business to choose ease?  What do you have to let go of to make room for a life and business of ease?

Imagine what the world would look like if we each chose to build our businesses around ease and grace and love and harmony and joy and let go of everything that was incongruent with that reality …. what would your life look like?

Let’s take a stand for ease and create a new paradigm of reality.