The Illusion of Difficulty

There’s no such thing as a difficult thing. There’s only the belief in difficulty.

Describing something as difficult defines the experience before it happens. That belief sets the tone—and everything around you begins to validate it. You limit yourself, the people around you, and the creative energy needed to move forward with imagination, ease, and confidence.

But what if difficulty is only a lens—a limiting belief?

Here are four ways to move beyond the illusion of difficulty:

(1) Stay grounded in gratitude
(2) Live in the positive
(3) Hold a clear vision
(4) Prioritize play

Stay grounded in gratitude.
Gratitude anchors you in abundance and keeps you in the present. It shifts your focus from what’s missing to what’s possible. You notice more, resist less, and experience each moment as part of a lifelong journey of growth. It’s also the precursor to living in the positive. When you begin with gratitude, you open yourself to what each experience is here to teach you. You move from fear-based reactions to receiving information—creating alignment. And that alignment literally delivers you IN‑FORMATION.

Live in the positive.
Living in the positive brings clarity. It sharpens discernment. Negativity creates fuzziness and resistance, but positivity helps you recognize signals, silencing the noise. As Matthew McConaughey said—red lights signal pause, green lights signal flow. Both are guidance. There’s always a benefit to living in the positive. Any interruption becomes a messenger—revealing the lesson, the timing, or the shift needed to move forward with more awareness.

Hold a clear vision.
Vision allows the journey to be the destination. A clear vision brings confidence, calmness, curiosity, and creativity. When your vision is clear, challenges shift from obstacles to sources of inspiration. The Latin root of inspiration means “to breathe into”—each obstacle then invites you to breathe in the challenge and breathe out the solution. In that process, disorder reveals itself as a lack of information, and order emerges as conscious information.

Prioritize play.
Play keeps us creative. It gives us permission to experiment, explore, and get messy in sandboxes. It brings us back to awe and wonder—anchoring us in a beginner’s mindset. When we play, we think more clearly, connect more deeply, and lead with imagination. GoPro’s Year in Review reminds of this. Their video shows us how fun, expressive, and playful adults are at their core. Yet somewhere along the way, we start believing we must be serious, rigid, and overly rational. We start labeling things as difficult—limiting what is possible.

So the next time you find yourself calling something difficult, pause and ask:
Is it truly difficult—or am I choosing to believe that it is?