What If It Were Easy? A Simple Tool To Keep Moving Forward

Isn’t it frustrating when you spend hours (or more) trying to come up with a solution to something, only for someone else to come along and share a simple solution right off the bat?

As a dad of a 9-year-old, I know this all too well.

My wife and I were trying to coordinate how to be in two different places at the same time today, while still making sure the little man got back to our house on time so I could take him to his weekly sports practice. My mother-in-law was also going to be in the area, so my son suggested that she just drop him off.

Duh! 

Yet as simple and light-hearted as this example may be, how often do we do something similar in our lives; make things harder than they need to be?

Yesterday I shared a 4-step process from Byron Katie for turning around your limiting beliefs. This came as the result of my sharing about how I often create a story that I need to struggle through something first in order to experience success.

The article hit home with a lot of you, and one of my readers had this to say:

“Bryan this was awesome. I truly believe limiting beliefs are the reason for all our struggles in life but are you sure it’s possible to change a belief rooted in your subconscious just by answering these 4 questions. I think it’s a bit too easy to be true, please let me know if there’s anything else we can do.”

Here’s what I told him:

“What if your question was another example of thinking things need to be harder than they actually do?”

Again, we have a tendency to make things harder or think they need to be harder than they really need to be.

Apart from the 4 questions I shared yesterday, another useful tool I’ve found is to meditate on a question I first heard from Tim Ferriss:

“What would this look like if it were easy?”

Often times, especially once we’ve developed some degree of mastery in a certain area, it becomes so easy to overlook the solutions that are right in front of us. This is one of the reasons why working with a coach can be helpful.

Try to remove yourself as an expert from the situation and look at it from an objective point of view. Then, come back to that question: How would this look if it was simple? If things didn’t need to be hard, what would they look like?

Finally, remember that once you get to a certain point, what gets you to the next level is not adding more in, but stripping more away.