Making It Look Easy
“Practice is the hardest part of learning,
and training is the essence of transformation.”
~Ann Voskamp
I love the Olympics. Winter, Summer – doesn’t matter. I love the Olympics because I love to see people make exceedingly difficult things look extraordinarily easy to do.
Downhill skiers top eighty miles per hour. I get scared going seventy on the freeway. Snowboarders flip four times in the air. I couldn’t roll over on the ground four times without getting winded. Speed skaters wear 17-inch blades (a foot and a half!) and then skate within millimeters of their competitors. I’m nervous when my wife pulls out a paring knife.
And they make it look so dang easy.
Know why it looks easy? Because we don’t see the hard part. We don’t see the gritty, dirty, practice-until-you-bleed hard work that takes place when no one is around.
At the request of my speaking coach, I recently spent ninety minutes (!) working on a five-minute story in front of a mirror. Ninety minutes; one story. What was that like? It was massively uncomfortable. It made a root canal seem like a more appealing way to spend ninety minutes. The phrase “self loathing” comes to mind. I’m not saying that I now avoid all mirrors everywhere, but I’m not saying that I don’t. It wasn’t easy.
And it was awesome.
That’s the great truth about doing hard things. The satisfaction you experience from accomplishing something particularly difficult is unparalleled. Thomas Paine once said, “That which we obtain too easily, we esteem too lightly.” The converse is also true. When we put in the hard, grueling work of practice in order to make the difficult seem easy, completing that hard work becomes its own reward.
Stop right now for a gut check. How hard are you willing to work? What price are you willing to pay? How can you get started? I mean right now.
I call the path to making it look easy embracing discomfort. Do it, and you’ll change the world.
If you change your mindset, you will change your world. Equip yourself with timely, powerful tools to conquer your inner discomfort, win more sales and create amazing results for your customers and yourself: sign up for my weekly, FREE, instructional/motivational video, The Shore Thing, here.
About the Author:
Jeff Shore is a highly sought-after sales expert, speaker, author and executive coach. His latest book, Be Bold and Win the Sale: Get Out of Your Comfort Zone and Boost Your Performance, (published by McGraw-Hill in January 2014) illustrates Jeff’s innovative BE BOLD methodology and teaches you how to change your mindset and change your world. Learn more at jeffshore.com and follow Jeff on Twitter.
