This month’s theme inside The Long Game is I Can Do Hard Things.
Which, if you’ve been around me for more than five minutes, sounds like a contradiction. My whole thing is Disgustingly Easy. Don’t push. Don’t grind. Don’t white-knuckle. And now the theme of the month is I Can Do Hard Things?
Stay with me. Because this is the whole thesis.
You cannot do hard things if you don’t start disgustingly easy.
That’s it. That’s the sentence I want you to leave with.
A woman comes into my world - usually an ND mum, usually thirties or forties, usually tired in a way that goes bone deep. She says some version of:
“I’m so done. I’m so over starting and stopping. This time I’m going to do it properly. I’m going to do hard things. I’m ready.”
The energy is gorgeous. The intention is fire. I love it.
But if I let her run with that energy, I know exactly what happens.
She designs a week that would humble an Olympian. She lasts six, maybe nine days. Sick kid. Bad night’s sleep. PMS. Sensory overload. Husband travelling. One thing tips and the whole stack collapses.
And then she lands somewhere worse than where she started - because now she has more evidence that she’s the problem.
That’s not hard things. That’s the restart cycle in a trench coat pretending to be hard things.
Hard things isn’t day one. Hard things is week thirty.
And the only way you get to week thirty is by starting in a way you can survive week one.
Here’s the framework I use with every single client inside The Long Game.
Habits first. Then Confidence. Then capacity. Then intensity.
In that order. Always.
Mainstream fitness gets you to chase intensity on day one. The 12-week shred. 75 Fucking HARD. The new program with the cool name and the aesthetic PDF and the reason it doesn’t work - for most women, and definitely not for an ND nervous system - is because they’re trying to give you intensity before you’ve built any capacity. And capacity before you’ve built any confidence.
It’s backwards.
You cannot lift heavy if you’ve never lifted light.
You cannot train four times a week if you can’t get yourself to train once.
You cannot do hard things if you haven’t done easy things consistently enough to know you’re someone who follows through.
That last one is the kicker.
Most of the women I work with don’t have a discipline problem. They have a self-trust problem. Years of starting and not finishing has taught their brain we don’t do what we say we’re going to do. That’s the loop. No amount of pushing harder fixes it.
You have to do the small thing you said you’d do, and then do it again, and then do it again - until your brain goes oh wait. We DO follow through. Look at that.
Disgustingly Easy is a self-trust factory.
For an ND brain, and especially an ND mum running on broken sleep, sensory overload, and the cognitive load of remembering whose library book is due; the reward system is wired differently.
Dopamine doesn’t release the same way. The future-you-will-be-so-proud carrot doesn’t pull as hard for us. We need the win to be immediate. We need the feedback to be close to the action. We need to feel the hit now, not eight weeks from now when the photos look different.
Here’s the equation I want you to remember:
Perceived discomfort vs. perceived reward.
If the discomfort is higher than the reward, you will quit. Every single time. It doesn’t matter how aesthetic the planner is or how inspiring the coach is or how much you “want” it. If the cost outweighs the reward, you will abandon the plan.
When the plan is too big, the cost is right now and the payoff is far away. Your nervous system does the math and goes yeah, no thanks. That’s not laziness. That’s a nervous system protecting you from over-spend.
But when the plan is disgustingly easy, the math flips. The cost is tiny. The action is over so fast you almost didn’t have time to dread it. The reward - the I did the thing hit - comes within minutes.
Tiny cost. Immediate reward. Repeat.
That’s how you build momentum in an ND nervous system. Not through willpower. Through engineered wins.
And this matters double if you’re an ND millennial mum - because most of you aren’t starting from zero. You’re starting from a deficit. From burnout. From a postpartum body. From a nervous system that’s been doing too much, for too long, with not enough support.
You don’t get to skip that. The bar has to be set low - not because you’re weak, but because depleted bodies need to be re-resourced before they can be pushed.
In NLP we talk about evidence procedures. Your brain is constantly gathering evidence about who you are. Am I someone who follows through? Am I consistent? Am I flaky? And it uses recent behaviour to decide.
The problem is, most of us are walking around with a giant pile of evidence that says I quit. Every abandoned program. Every uncompleted challenge. Every gym membership that became a direct debit to shame. It’s all in the file.
To change the identity, you have to change the evidence.
You can’t change the evidence by doing something huge once - your brain writes that off as a fluke. You change the evidence by doing something small, repeatedly, until the file fills up with a new story:
I’m someone who walks after dinner.
I’m someone who does her three sets, even on the bad days.
I’m someone who shows up.
That’s identity-level change. It’s quiet. It’s not dramatic. It doesn’t look like a before-and-after. But it’s the only kind of change that lasts. And it can only happen on a foundation of DE.
This is where most people get it wrong. Moderately easy is not the same thing as DE.
“I’ll just do three workouts instead of four” — not DE. That’s still negotiating.
“I’ll just walk for 20 minutes instead of running” — not DE. That’s still you trying to sneak in the version of the plan your nervous system already told you it can’t sustain.
Run it through these three tests instead.
Test 1: You’re embarrassed to tell anyone how small it is. If your sister-in-law knowing the size of your starting point would make you cringe — you’re in the right zone.
Test 2: You scoff when you think about doing it. You roll your eyes a little. That’s it? That’s the plan? Yes. That’s the plan.
Test 3: Not completing it is laughable. It would honestly be more effortful to skip it than to do it. That’s the bar.
What does that actually look like?
DE is walk to the letterbox and back. DE is two squats while the kettle boils. DE is one set of one exercise, three times this week.
I am being serious. That is how small.
And here’s the magic part. Once you’ve been doing the laughably small thing for a couple of weeks, something happens. You get chompy. You start wanting more. You start adding without me having to make you.
That’s when you expand. From overflow. Not from pressure.
Pick ONE area. One. Not three. Not “fitness and food and sleep and water and morning routine.” One.
Define the disgustingly easy version of it. Run it through the three tests. Are you embarrassed? Do you scoff? Is not doing it laughable? Yes? Good. That’s the one.
Do it. Then do it again. Then do it again. Don’t add. Don’t optimise. Don’t get clever. Just keep doing the tiny thing.
Notice the evidence accumulating. Pay attention to what your brain starts saying about you. Notice the wanting-more energy when it shows up.
Only expand from overflow. Not when the calendar says week three. When your nervous system is asking for it.
That’s the strategy. That’s the long game. That’s how you actually do hard things.
I’m running a free live workshop: Easy On Purpose — how ND mums show up for their health without white-knuckling it.
60 minutes. Live. Free.
It’s for you if you’ve started five different plans this year and each one died around week two. It’s for you if you’ve started thinking the problem is you — your discipline, your willpower, your motivation. It’s for you if you’re ready to stop bending your nervous system into a model that was never built for it.
Inside the workshop I’ll walk you through the three patterns keeping you stuck, the full framework (not just the DE piece - the whole thing), and we’ll start sketching your own 4-week focus plan together.
And at the end, I’m opening 5 free planning calls.
Five people - not five calls each. Five spots total.
It’s a one-on-one conversation where we look at where you actually are, map your ND-friendly fitness strategy together, and decide whether you’ve got what you need to run with it on your own - or whether The Long Game is the right structure to hold it.
You walk away with a plan either way. No pressure to join anything.
After the 5 spots are gone, it’s a waitlist.
If you’ve spent this article nodding - that’s your sign.
👉 [Register for Easy On Purpose here →]
This is the article version of Season 2, Episode 1 of Disgustingly Easy — the podcast for the long game. If you’d rather have it in your ears on the school run:
When nothing is certain, anything is possible. You’ve got this. And I’ve got you.
Bec x
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