5 Things That Are Easy To Hear But Hard To Do

We often come across maxims or principles which sound simple, but are difficult or even impossible to put into practice. “Choose happiness”, “accept what is”, “be the best you can be” — these are supposed to be inspiring but are often so unachievable that they end up being meaningless at best and depressing at worst.

Most of these precepts make a lot of sense, which is why they are so appealing to us. When we read or hear about them, we can understand why it would make us happier if we could put them into practice. However, understanding something at a conceptual level is very different to applying it in our own lives. Understanding only requires our intellect, whereas action requires us to contend with our emotions.

In this article I will look at some of the most common maxims we hear and consider why they are so easy to understand and so hard to apply.

Forgive and forget

I recently heard the expression “holding on to anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.” It is true that feeling angry hurts nobody but ourselves. Forgiveness is not about letting the person who has wronged us “off the hook”, but about feeling better ourselves. We are all much happier and more peaceful without angry thoughts consuming us.

Of course, this makes perfect sense when we are feeling calm, but seems impossible when someone has hurt or betrayed us. How can we just stop feeling angry towards someone who has treated us badly? The dictionary definition of “forgive” is “to cease to feel resentment against (an offender).” So what if we haven’t ceased feeling resentment? Asking someone to forgive is therefore asking them to stop feeling a certain way, and most of us do not have that kind of control over our emotions.

Instead, I think that resentment and anger, like all other emotions, fade with time. We generally feel much less angry about something after a period of time has lapsed. The period of time generally correlates to the perceived harm — we are likely to stop feeling angry about road rage, long before we stop feeling angry about a cheating partner. It is unlikely that we will ever forget a very serious harm, but the passage of time will probably allow it to drop into the back of our minds.

“Forgive and forget” might make perfect sense, but it is not something that most of us can choose to do, even if we want to. Instead, we can take comfort in the fact that, even if we cannot find a way to forgive, time will eventually do most of the work for us.

Just do it

We are all guilty of putting off things that we find difficult or scary. Whether it’s dodging an awkward conversation, avoiding a difficult work task, or persistently failing to start something, there are things that we ought to do, or even want to do, but find it very hard to actually do.

“Just do it” sounds so simple. Or “do what you’d do if you weren’t afraid.” We all know that, when we actually overcome our fears or procrastination, it is generally easier than we anticipated and we feel so much better about ourselves.

It may be simple but it certainly isn’t easy. Human beings generally follow the principle of inertia — a body at rest stays at rest, a body in motion stays in motion. Once we are going, it is easy to keep going, but the hardest part is to get going. We are also victims of our own fear. Fear is an incredibly powerful emotion and, if we are afraid of something, our instinct is to avoid it.

Inertia and fear are huge obstacles to overcome and, from what I can see, there is no shortcut to overcoming these obstacles. To beat inertia, we need to create habits. Once something is a habit, we do it without thinking and we don’t need to summon up the activation energy to get started. The problem is that the only way to create a habit is to do something over and over again until it becomes a habit. Similarly with fear, the only way to stop being scared of something is to do it enough times that it no longer seems scary.

So unfortunately it seems that the only way to just do it, is to just do it…

Savour the moment

We are told to enjoy the present. To stop dwelling on the past or worrying about the future. We are warned that we will never have this time again, that life is short and we must be sure to enjoy every moment.

The problem is that it is incredibly hard to simply “be” in the present moment and banish all thoughts of the past or future. It’s simply not how the human brain operates. Our minds are programmed to evaluate the past and, more importantly, imagine the future. Our lives are not simply a collection of “here-and-now” moments, but a continuous process of looking backwards and forwards. So we are doomed to failure if we interpret “savour the moment” to mean that we must think only of the present and not allow our minds to wander to the past or the future.

There is also the risk that forcing ourselves to try and savour the moment actually makes the moment less enjoyable. We start wondering whether we ought to be enjoying it more, or feeling sad that the moment is so fleeting, or guilty that we can’t seem to fully immerse ourselves in it. Trying too hard to savour the moment leads us to overthink things in a way that totally defeats the purpose.

It is impossible to only think about the present, and may even be detrimental to keep trying. However, I do think that a nudge (from ourselves or someone else) to savour the moment can help to jolt us out of our thoughts, even for a short while. The past and the future will never completely leave us, but we can train ourselves to push them away, in order to focus more fully on what’s happening today.

Accept that everyone sees things differently

Most of us can intellectually understand the concept that everyone sees the world in a different way. It makes sense that people are strongly influenced by their family, their culture and their experiences, and that these influences mean people can have very different opinions or interpretations.

It is fairly easy to apply this principle when we are impartial observers. We could watch two people having a conversation and appreciate how each one interprets the situation in a different way. If the first person is quite brash, we can see how they think they are being funny, but the second person feels offended.

However, it is difficult to apply this understanding when we are directly involved in the situation. For the second person in the example above, it is incredibly difficult to consider that the first person is not purposely trying to offend them, but simply making a joke. They are offended, so they conclude that the joke is offensive, rather than that they think it is offensive. Of course, the other person believes the opposite — that the joke is harmless, rather than that they think it is harmless. Two people believing that their own perspective is not just their perspective, but an indisputable fact. Those two people might understand, as an abstract concept, that everyone has different opinions, but in that particular moment, they struggle to conceive how the other person has interpreted the situation differently to them.

It is easy to understand that everyone sees things differently. It is harder to accept that the way you see things is not the right way, or the only way. And it takes a huge amount of emotional maturity to force your metaphorical feet into someone else’s shoes and see the world from their perspective.

Don’t worry about what other people think

The difficulty is that, for most of us, it matters deeply what other people think. The need for social approval is hard-wired into our brains. Thousands of years ago, our survival depended on the other members of our group liking us and being willing to protect us. Even these days, many more opportunities are available to those who conform to society’s expectations.

So it does matter what people think of us and it should matter. However, it shouldn’t matter more than what we think of ourselves. I recently heard someone talk about having “sovereignty over yourself.” I think many of us are so influenced by other people’s opinions of us that we allow those opinions to become more important than our own. However, each of us knows better than anyone else the true state of our family and relationships, our heads and our hearts. Someone else saying or thinking something about us doesn’t make it true.

It can be deeply hurtful when people criticize us or those close to us. I think criticism can sometimes be helpful, as it can give us an opportunity to question certain aspects of our lives that perhaps we hadn’t considered before. However, if we consider the criticism and decide that we don’t agree, then we need to put the other person’s opinion aside. We cannot give others more power over our lives than we give ourselves.

To Sum Up….

These things are easy to hear but hard to do:

1. Forgive and forget — we can’t force ourselves to forgive and forget but, over time, we probably will.
2. Just do it — we are fighting a constant battle against inertia and fear. The only solution is to just do it, and keep doing it.
3. Savour the moment — we can’t stop thinking about the past and the future, we can just remind ourselves every now and again to notice the present.
4. Accept that everyone sees things differently — one of the most difficult things to do. We can only try to stand back from a situation and think about how someone else might be seeing it differently.
5. Don’t worry about what people think — practically impossible, and probably not helpful anyway. Instead, we should make sure we worry more about what we think of ourselves.