Ease Requires Effort

The clothes had been an issue for months. Longer than I care to admit, honestly.

Life has been full lately— summer, kiddo, work, business, all of it — and somewhere along the way my husband and I fell into a pattern that I’m a bit embarrassed to admit publicly.

The dirty clothes would pile up. Eventually we’d wash everything in one heroic marathon. And then the clean clothes would get dumped on the bed in the guest bedroom, to be folded... later. Later never came. Mornings became a ritual of sifting through the pile, increasingly frustrated, trying to find something to wear.

It was easy to dump the laundry on the bed. It was easy to let it slide. But it did not give us ease. In fact, it made our lives harder — a little, every single day.

It happened right before the holiday weekend when we had family in town. And because of the holiday, the new one took over a week to arrive. Which meant the laundry insanity only got worse.

When the new washer and dryer showed up, my husband and I made a commitment to each other: when the clothes come out of the dryer, they get folded and put away. Right then. Not later.

Is that a little more effort in the moment? Yes. And that’s exactly the point.

Ease requires effort.

We use these words interchangeably, but they are not the same thing.

Easy is the path of least resistance. Dump the clothes on the bed. Say yes because no feels confrontational. Take the task back because it’s faster to do it yourself. Stay quiet in the meeting. Keep the client who drains you.

Easy avoids friction at all costs — and quietly collects interest on everything you avoided.

Ease is something else entirely. Ease has direction. Ease has clarity. Ease is what you feel on the other side of the hard conversation, the tough decision, the boundary you finally held — or the five minutes of folding that saves you weeks of morning chaos. Easy avoids effort. Ease is built by it.

There’s a line, often shared by the weightlifting coach Jerzy Gregorek, that captures it perfectly: “Hard choices, easy life. Easy choices, hard life.”

But here’s where this conversation gets interesting. Because for many high-achievers, you might be reading this thinking to yourself, “but Laura… I’ve been doing the hard things for years. When is the ‘ease’ actually going to show up?”

And that’s what I want to talk about today.

I work with women moving from doer roles into leadership roles, and I hear the same thing constantly: I have so much on my plate. I’m so busy. (Busy — a word that could be its own essay. In my family, if you weren’t busy, you weren’t doing enough.)

Here’s what I’ve come to believe: for high-achieving women who have performed their way to success — whose worthiness has been wired to their doing — the hard part is not taking more on. Taking it on is easy. Doing it yourself is easy. We’re good at that.

👉The hard part is setting it down.

It’s having the conversation that actually moves the needle.
It’s setting the boundary and then holding it when someone pushes.
It’s voicing your needs and not settling.
It’s delegating the thing you could do better and faster yourself — and letting it be done differently.

The data backs up how urgent this is. McKinsey and LeanIn.org’s Women in the Workplace research has found that women leaders consistently report higher burnout than their male peers, with roughly six in ten senior-level women reporting they frequently feel burned out — in part because they take on so much invisible, unrewarded work supporting everyone around them. We are stepping up everywhere, and it’s costing us.

The ease these women crave in life, business, career and leadership isn’t a lighter to-do list. It’s a different skill set. A different practice.

The past couple of years, I’ve been in it. Becoming a mother. Navigating an autism diagnosis and getting my son the support he needs. Running a business that expanded massively during COVID — and then, quietly, started to feel less and less aligned.

For a while, I chose easy. Keep doing what you’re doing. Keep working the way you’re working. Keep putting out the same marketing message. And just like the laundry, the more I chose easy, the heavier everything became.

This past year, I chose differently. I sat with the discomfort instead of numbing it with more doing. I asked the hard questions. I had the hard conversations. I made honest decisions that carried real financial risk. I lived in the liminal space — that uncomfortable in-between where the old way no longer fits and the new way hasn’t fully formed.

And recently, something clicked into place at a soul level. I feel more aligned, more in my power, more clear on what I’m here to do and how I’m here to show up than I have in years. The ease I feel now didn’t come from doing what was easy. It came from doing what was hard.

I was in the middle of writing this piece when I interviewed Tasha Chen for the podcast (episode coming soon), and I shared this idea with her. She offered a word that reframed the whole thing for me: leverage.

“When I talk about ease, it’s understanding leverage,” she told me. “Continuous effort is the least efficient way to create a result — and the hardest.”

The effort she’s naming — the grinding, the pushing, the ten hours in front of the computer trying to force a result — is unleveraged effort. It’s the doing-more that keeps us busy and depleted.

The effort I’m inviting you to consider is the energy put into creating leverage. That hard conversation you have once will save you fifty frustrating ones that go nowhere. The boundary you set and hold, while hard in the moment, saves so much energy down the road. That’s effort applied at the point of leverage — and it’s exactly what Tasha describes when she talks about shifting your identity so deeply that instead of pushing to get what you want, you become a magnet that attracts it.

Doers spend effort. Leaders leverage it.

There’s real research behind this.

Psychologists Kennon Sheldon and Andrew Elliot developed the self-concordance model, and their findings are striking: when our goals align with our core values and genuine interests, we sustain effort more easily, we’re more likely to actually achieve those goals, and achieving them makes us measurably happier. When we pursue goals out of obligation, guilt, or external pressure, we can hit every milestone and still feel hollow.

In other words: misaligned effort is heavy no matter how capable you are. Aligned effort generates energy instead of draining it.

The leadership research points the same direction. Studies on authentic leadership — leading from self-awareness, transparency, and your actual values — consistently link it to higher trust, engagement, and wellbeing, for both the leader and the people around her. Greg McKeown captures this visually in Essentialism: energy scattered in a dozen directions produces almost no forward movement, while the same energy channeled into one clear direction creates momentum that looks, from the outside, effortless.

But here’s what the diagram doesn’t show you: choosing the one direction is the hard part. Discernment is effort. Values clarity is effort. Saying no to the eleven other arrows is effort.

When you’ve done the work of alignment, something shifts in how you show up. You’re no longer trying to prove, carry, control, force, or manipulate anything. You’re just showing up authentically.

And I want to be honest: that has been the hardest thing for me.

For those of us who built our success on performance — on anticipating, over-delivering, being everything to everyone — showing up as simply ourselves can feel terrifyingly exposed. Performing is the easy path. Authenticity is the effortful one.

But it’s the only path that leads to ease. Not the collapse-on-the-couch, numb-out kind of ease. The deep kind. The folded-laundry, clear-morning kind. The kind where your work, your leadership, and your life stop pulling against each other and start moving in the same direction.

Hard choices, easy life. Easy choices, hard life.

The choice is yours.

Always,
Laura

Before you close this tab and get back to your very full plate, I’d love for you to sit with a few questions. Don’t rush them. Maybe journal on one.