Sara Sweat, MA – Founder, Monarch
I want to challenge something you’ve probably believed your whole life.
That hard is better than easy.
That if something comes naturally to you, it’s not worth much. Because you probably think that struggle is proof of effort. And effort is proof of worth. And worth…well, that’s basically the whole point.
So many Monarchs believe that the degree of difficulty, the hustle, the hardship is what gives achievement its value.
I understand why you believe this. I believed it too. For most of my life, hard was the only currency I trusted — because knowing how to do hard things basically saved my life.
But as I’ve been on this journey to actually live my life, here’s what I’ve learned.
Ease isn’t the absence of effort. Ease is what happens when your effort is finally aligned with who you actually are.
And for most of us — the ones who built everything on survival skills and spent decades doing hard things…in hard circumstances…for hard reasons — we have no clue what it feels like to take it easy.
The Cost of Hard Things
Maya Angelou said that words are things. That they get into the walls and the carpet and the furniture and eventually into you. That what surrounds you becomes part of you, whether you intend it or not.
I think the same is true of effort.
When you spend enough years doing things the hard way — grinding, forcing, white-knuckling your way through — that becomes the texture of your life. The default assumption. The thing you reach for automatically, before you’ve even assessed if its needed.
You walk right past the easy path because it doesn’t feel like enough. Or it feels like a trick. Because your nervous system has learned to equate ease with danger, and challenge with safety.
You think if nothing is hard right now, then something must be wrong.
In a lot of ways, it makes sense, right?
I’m willing to bet you’ve got scars from the times you let your guard down only to get clobbered by a challenge you didn’t see coming. Your nervous system wants to protect you from that ever happening again, so it works overtime to assess risk and keep you alert.
But now that your safety isn’t in constant danger anymore, instead of protecting you, that mechanism is costing you the life you’re trying to build.
Your Zone of Brilliance
Early in my leadership career, I was given a role that should have been straightforward. It turned out to be anything but.
My company had acquired a smaller firm — a tight-knit team that had built something special and knew it. My job was to sell their product alongside our broader suite of solutions and manage the overarching client relationships like a GM. I owned the P&L, but I didn’t have complete control.
The existing team retained much of the client facing functions and relationships. And these people saw me as a threat.
They left me out of meetings. Delayed introductions. Kept me out of the loop. Everything I needed to do my job, they were quietly, systematically withholding.
My instinct — the survival skill instinct that had served me well in dozens of high-stakes situations — was to get defensive. To assert my role. To explain how important it was that I be included and make them understand that their resistance was blocking our mutual success.
But fighting fire with fire usually just burns the whole thing down.
So instead, I stole a tactic from my grad school training. Don’t get furious – get curious.
What incentive did they actually have to let me in? They didn’t know me. They didn’t know if I was any good at my job or at selling new things.
This was their business; years of blood and sweat and sacrifice. I was just a stranger with a title and access to everything they had built who had zero historical perspective and a whole lot of opinions.
Of course they didn’t trust me. I hadn’t earned it yet.
So I flew to their headquarters and parked myself there for weeks. I sat in on meetings. I asked questions instead of giving answers. I joined client calls and read reports and took everyone who would have me out to lunch. I showed up consistently, without agenda, with the honest intention to learn.
And something remarkable happened.
They opened up. Not because I was paying the bar tab most nights — though that probably didn’t hurt. But because I took the time to understand what made them special. Because I invested in them before I asked anything of them.
I showed up with genuine interest and respect – instead of a carrot or a stick.
Within a month, I was the only person in my role with real access to the team. My travel budget was third highest in the company that year, but we opened entirely new markets, created dozens of opportunities, and absolutely crushed our sales goals.
And, best of all, we did it together. I leaned into the ABC’s of my particular zone of brilliance and it made all the difference.
Actually caring.
Being willing to invest.
Connecting genuinely.
There’s nothing magical in this approach. But, it was authentically me.
What we accomplished wasn’t easy in the sense of being effortless. I flew across the country. I spent weeks away from home. I invested time and money and attention into learning this new product and how it worked.
But it felt easy like “monarching” does — because I was doing something I was good at that completely aligned with who I actually am.
I am someone who leads with curiosity. Who builds trust…because people deserve their trust to earned. I’m someone who genuinely wants to understand what matters to the people around me.
And, I believe, at a cellular level, that life is a team sport and that the smartest thing you can do is get as many brilliant, talented, generous people on your team as you can.
When I’m operating from that place — from that core of who I actually am — effort stops feeling like effort.
The wind is at my back. Things that should be hard become easy, because I’m not wasting my energy in survival mode, fighting myself to do them.
That is the kind of ease we’re after.
Ease is what happens when you stop using survival skills to do the things that your authentic self could do even better.
When you stop white-knuckling your way through a life that was designed for your old coping mechanisms and start moving through the one designed for who you really are.
Infrastructure > Ambition
Most of my clients don’t have an ambition problem, they have an infrastructure problem
They want their life to matter. They want to do things well.
But, they’ve had so much experience “achieving” by doing hard things that the idea of doing anything easy feels like terror.
They’re usually on the verge of burnout, while pouring gasoline on the fire. And, when I bring up the idea of ease – they instinctively push back. It feels like I’m asking them to fail.
But, the goal of ease is not to do less. The goal is to build a life where what you’re doing, how you’re doing it, and who you’re doing it with are so aligned that the effort required to do it costs you nothing.
It actually fuels you. Doing ease the Monarch way…feels like flying.
This kind of flight requires three things. And, we’ve been talking about them for the last few weeks.
It requires knowing who you actually are — claiming your real identity – not the survival personality you developed over time. It’s about finding your Golden Thread and leaning into the truth that your best results are tied to who you truly are.
It requires you to Find Your People. Your team. Your crew. The community of humans who see you clearly, who know what you’re capable of, and will call you forward instead of keeping you small.
And it requires giving yourself permission to actually enjoy what you’ve built. The practice of inhabiting your existence instead of managing it. Of celebrating your success instead of surviving it.
Maya Angelou was right. What surrounds you gets inside you.
The good news is – you get to choose what surrounds you now.
You don’t have to live with only your survival skills in tow. You don’t have to grind it out because hard is all you know.
You get to do this next chapter with the people who see you. The work that lights you up. And, moments you’re fully inside and enjoying while they’re still happening.
You just need the infrastructure to support the life you’re finally ready to lead.
What I’m finding as I do this work myself is that when I get it right, there’s this resonance that shows up.
People send me texts saying “I feel seen by what you wrote in the craziest way”. I have conversations that go somewhere real and unexpected and joyful. And, events I would have ordinarily stressed about for days, just kind of come and go relatively unnoticed.
When I get this right, even the hard things don’t feel like work. Because effort isn’t required when I’m living and leading from my authentic identity.
When I get this right, everything is in alignment. And, that alignment is the closest thing I have ever found to ease.
Ease like you are no longer fighting your own life.
Ease like the wind is finally at your back.
Ease that takes you higher and farther than you’ve ever been before.
If you’d like to take step toward an easier life this week, think about the last time something felt easy in the way I described. A time when things weren’t effortless, but aligned.
What were you doing? Who were you with? What made it feel that way?
That answer is your blueprint.
Build on that. And, let me know how it goes.
You’ve already built so much the hard way. Imagine what you can accomplish with ease.
Monarch is coaching and community for the people no one checks on — who are done surviving their lives and ready to actually live them. If this landed, share it with someone who deserves something easy in their life.
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