How to Embrace Change When It Gets Hard
It’s day three of twenty-eight miles around the Maroon Bells ⛰️ and I’m gasping.
Four passes in four days, about 8,000 feet of climbing. This particular ascent tops out somewhere past 12,000. It’s long, steep, and I live basically at sea level, so my lungs are feeling the S-T-R-E-T-C-H. 😅
My girls asked what music I was bringing. No music. Four days of you and your thoughts, which two of them said sounds awful.
So it’s me, the switchbacks, and one sentence I keep saying out loud to myself:
This is just too easy.
It’s not too easy. It’s not even a little easy. That’s exactly why it makes me laugh, and I stole it from Rad Lopez, a Peloton instructor who repeats it during his workouts to play with his own mind.
At the top I pass a guy coming the other direction and try it on him. This is just too easy. His eyes go enormous. I said I’m kidding! It’s brutal! I only say it to myself! And he goes, oh. You have a great mindset. 🤣
Maybe you’re on a long steep climb of your own right now. Chances are you are, if you’re living life over 40. Something with work. Your physical health, or your mental and emotional health. A relationship you’ve been in for a very long time. You, like me, have lived a lot of years.
And maybe the climb isn’t even the hardest part. Maybe the hardest part is what you’ve quietly decided it means about you, that you’re still in it, that it’s taking too long, that everybody else seems to be floating up the trail while you’re the one out of breath.
Being in the hard middle is not evidence that you’re doing it wrong.
✦ Type B Fun: It’s Fun After It’s Done
I learned about “Type B Fun” in the mountains in my twenties, in a considerably worse mood. 😩
I’d just broken up with my college boyfriend right after first year of med school, which vaporized the trip out west we were supposed to take together. So I built my own and went into the Sierra Nevadas with Outward Bound. Base camp above 12,000 feet, climbing toward 14,000, snow still on the ground in the middle of summer.
Here’s what sunshine does to summer snow. It melts little bowl-shaped depressions, packed together like a honeycomb, called sun cups. They’re not soft. You don’t walk through them, you balance on the narrow ridges between them. 😳
My instructor crossed that field like she was dancing. Floating. Not one wobble. Not me. I was a mess with a lot of ankle rolls.
We reach camp well past dark because nobody planned on it being that hard, and by then I have worked through every emotion available to a human being and I am crying.
There’s no crying in mountains.
Yes there is. 😭
And my instructor looks at me and says:
That’s Type B fun. It’s fun after it’s done.
I had never heard it in my life. But she was right, because within the hour I was elated, the same way I was elated at the top of that pass this summer, thirty years later. You finish something hard, you turn around, and you go, that was amazing.
You cannot manufacture elated. There’s no shortcut to the view.
Before this recent trip, I warned my husband that I might cry, fair warning, based on prior evidence. Day three came, the longest and steepest day, and I never did. Didn’t need to. Same mountains, same sea-level lungs, and a completely different woman climbing them. That’s what thirty years of doing the work looks like from the inside, and I say that as a physician who’s spent her whole career hunting root causes. The work works. 💛
✦ What If the Hard Middle Means It’s Working?
Because the difference between me on those sun cups and me on that pass isn’t fitness.
On the pass I’m saying this is just too easy. On the sun cups I was saying this sucks. Why can’t I get this? She looks like that and I look like this. Why is this so hard?
Similar struggle. Different story.
And the story is the part you have your hands on. I’ve heard a lot of versions of it over the years, and they mostly sort into four flavors.
⟡ There’s self-blame, which sounds like what’s wrong with me, I should be past this by now, everyone else handles this fine, (and hi, that one’s my favorite.) 🙋♀️
⟡ There’s the victim flavor, why is this happening to me, it’s always something, of course this would happen now.
⟡ There’s straight dread, this is too hard, this will never end, it’s all uphill from here, which makes me laugh every time because on a mountain it is occasionally just factual.
⟡ And then there’s the quiet quit, the softest and maybe meanest of the four, I’m not built for this, it’s too late for me, what’s the point.
One woman in Friday’s chat named perfectionism as her personal Mount Everest and then checked off three flavors in a row. Yep, that’s a mind doing its job, keeping you safe by talking you out of things.
Ask yourself:
What am I saying to myself on this climb?
Would I say that to a friend in my exact situation?
What’s one sentence I’d rather carry up the hill instead?
Nobody gets to the pass without the steep middle. Not the twenty-somethings, not the guys on their dude trips, not the dogs, who I was frankly amazed to find up there (maybe it feels different with four feet). 🐾
What would change if the hard part were part of the success?
✦ How to Embrace Change One Step at a Time
Most of that climb I almost never looked up.
You can’t. On that kind of trail, looking up to catch the view means you stop walking or you trip. So I watched my feet, one step in front of the other, for hours. 👣
Which is the exact reverse of what I do with my life. I tend to stare straight up at the gap, the distance still left, the summit I haven’t reached, the thing I haven’t fixed yet. I’m learning to turn around and take in how far up the mountain I’ve already climbed. Breathtaking.
You’re right here with me I bet. And you’ve walked this whole way too. One step, then another.
So steal the mantra: this is too easy. It’s free, it works, and mostly it works because it makes you laugh. Tony Robbins, one of my teachers, says the fastest way to change your state is through your physiology, and laughing drops your cortisol by roughly a third, which makes a joke on a steep trail real medicine. 💗
At Soulfull Medicine we say healing gets to be fun. Not every second of every hard part. But enough of it to laugh on the way up. ✨
xo,
Dr. Sue
P.S. Mark your calendar: Friday, September 18 at 2pm Eastern, I’m hosting a free live experience, walking you through something I’ve walked through myself. No breathlessness, I promise. Watch your inbox for the invite, and if you’re not getting my emails yet, subscribe so I can find you. 🤗
P.P.S. I go live on Substack every Friday at 11:30am Eastern. This week: Unlock the Hidden Order of the Healing Process. Come hang out. 💛
