GNT #170: Hard that builds

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It's Wednesday, February 9, 2022. Noon. My first day at CrossFit. Death by thruster.

If you don't know the workout: one rep on minute one, two on minute two, three on minute three, and so on, until you can't keep up.

Somewhere around minute thirteen, I had a complete sentence arrive in my head: "I am in hell."

I could have walked out. I would have, if I hadn't had a reason bigger than the workout.

My mom died of cancer when she was 49 after a five-year battle. I was approaching the age she'd been at her stage-4 diagnosis. I wanted to be as strong as I could be, for as long as I could be, for my family.

So I went back.

Four years later, another thruster workout. Same kind of work, the kind that takes everything from your legs and your lungs and still asks you to keep going. Somewhere in the middle of it I noticed this:

It still hurt. It didn't feel like punishment.

The work was just as hard. But I had gotten stronger underneath it.

Today I want to talk about how to tell the difference between the hard that's building you and the hard that's just wearing you down. They can feel and look the same from the inside. But only one of them compounds.

Let's get to it. 

The wrong sort

Most of us have our own version of thrusters. Work that comes at us over and over. The conversation we keep having. The call we keep taking. The thing we sat down to build last year and are still building.

When that work is hard, we try to figure out what to do with it. Push through. Cut it. Renegotiate it. Live with it.

The way most of us decide is by feel. The hard things that feel meaningful must be building us. The hard things that feel awful must be wearing us down.

That doesn't hold up. Plenty of meaningful work is quietly draining us. Plenty of awful work makes us stronger.

The feelings are real. They tell you the work is taking something from you. They don't tell you whether it's being built back somewhere underneath, or just gone.

The test

A more honest test: is something underneath getting built, or is something underneath getting spent?

Where I've run it

I've gotten three answers I trust. Two of them were work I dreaded. One was work I thought I was supposed to want.

The newsletter

I've sat down to write this thing every week since January 2023. There are weeks I don't want to. The calendar discipline is hard. Slowing my brain down to focus is hard. Shipping imperfect every single week, because that's the only way it goes out at all, is hard. It has felt awful at moments.

What was getting built underneath it: my voice, my audience, the body of work, fluency at the page that compounds. And, in a place I didn't expect, my speaking. I articulate better when I talk now than I did three years ago. (I still have a lot of work to do there, those umms and ahhs.) 160-plus issues in, the trendline is obvious.

Challenging what clients have always done

Telling a client there's a better way than the way they've been doing it for years is hard. Telling someone their baby isn't the prettiest baby in the world is difficult for them to hear, and difficult for me to do.

It feels confrontational in the moment. What's getting built underneath it: my pattern recognition across engagements, my ability to walk a client through change and into the real-life application of a different strategy, collaboration with the subject matter experts in the room, and trust. Big trust. The kind that compounds when you do this work well, over and over. The trendline on that one is sharper judgment and deeper relationships, not the discomfort of the conversation that produced them.

Filling my calendar with networking

For a long stretch, I pushed myself to fill (more like max out) my calendar with events and networking. Visibility. Connection-building. The things I enjoyed and thought a successful person was supposed to do.

It always felt meaningful. However, beneath it all, I was expending most of my real extroverted introvert energy. This meant that I wasn’t showing up to the things I cared about with anything left, and my time with my family was often neglected.

The trendline on that one was depletion. Not building toward what mattered. Spending too much against it.

Two felt awful and built me. One felt meaningful and spent too much of me. The feel didn't decide which was which.

How to tell which one you're in

Any single hard day can look like either one. The difference shows up over a month, or a quarter, or a year. You can see which way the line is going if you stop and look.

Takeaway

The bar weighed the same. The lifter underneath it, that's me, had grown.

It's the test I keep coming back to in my work. Not whether a hard thing feels meaningful or awful in the moment. Whether something underneath is getting built or getting spent.

You won't see it in any single day. You'll see it on the trendline. That's the thing worth tracking. Once you start tracking it, you stop sorting your hard things by how they feel and start sorting them by what they're making of you.

I'm always rooting for you. See you next week.

-Colleen

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