Confronting Hardship: What You Can Control vs. What You Cannot
Hardship is an inescapable part of the human condition. It is also one of the simplest reasons to treat people with compassion—we rarely know the weight they are carrying. Every facet of life from relationships, to family, to work will, at some point, confront us with difficulty. And as women, we know there are certain struggles that are uniquely bound to our experiences.
That’s why this month’s word, resilience, is one of my favourites. This is a necessary skill that you must carry in your toolkit as you navigate the inevitable turbulence of life, and I feel The Ed Mylett Show episode How to Endure the Hardest Moments of Your Life touches on the subject with precision and heart.
Mylett explores how resilience can be cultivated in two aspects of life: first, in the way we respond to hardship, whether it is in our control or beyond it, and second, in how we confront doubt.
Let’s get into it.
Looking Inward at Our Responses to Hardship
“Honour the struggle,” Mylett says,“but very quickly identify where it comes from.”
Sometimes hardship is born from our own patterns—an attitude, a reaction, a repeated choice. That requires us to turn inward and confront ourselves. To self-regulate. Maybe friendships keep falling apart; we can all agree that the easy thing is to blame others. However, the harder, more transformative thing is to pause and recognize the pattern in yourself.
As Ed Mylett admits,“It’s a really difficult thing to be honest with yourself and self-critical in that way.” But accountability is a form of empowerment. It means you’re not just at the mercy of any hardship or circumstance—you have the capacity to intervene on your own behalf.
Then there are the hardships that exist entirely outside your control: grief, loss, tragedy, fate. Here, the demand isn’t self-regulation—it’s endurance. You cannot negotiate with loss. You cannot out-think grief. What you can do is endure with dignity, and eventually, learn to look for the gift inside the devastation. In war, in death, in heartbreak, there is still evidence of humanity—people donating, loving, and showing up.
Three years ago, I lost my aunt to cancer. She was the woman who taught me English as a little girl, and her absence was a loss I could not negotiate with or fix. For a time, all I could do was sit in the grief. But as Mylett reminds us: “On the other side of pain, there is a gift. The gift may not be greater than the tragedy, but it will be there.” For me, the gift was twofold: my family drew closer together, and I acquired a novel motivation to pursue my goals in her honour. Something about the promise of a gift, despite any arduous circumstance, lightens the weight of that burden. I hope this inspires you to look for the gift in your hardships, too.
Action in Spite of Doubt
If hardship challenges our endurance, doubt challenges our self-belief. And here, Mylett is blunt:“Doubt is the killer of more dreams than anything.” Doubt whispers before we speak, before we apply, before we even try. It convinces us to sit out the opportunities we’re qualified for, to play small in rooms we earned a seat in.
I know this firsthand. Early in my undergraduate years, I failed my first Political Science midterm. It was an elective, and the failure left me questioning whether I should even bother taking more Political Science classes at all. That’s what doubt does—it convinces you that one failure defines your capacity. But resilience in the face of doubt means refusing to let it dictate your next move. I chose not to abandon the subject. Instead, I recalibrated and readjusted my studying techniques and eventually went on to earn 100% in another course in the same subject. That moment taught me a lesson far bigger than the grade: [Resilience] is not built on the absence of doubt, but on the decision to act in its presence.
As women, our doubt is often magnified—by expectations, by scrutiny, by the pressure to perform flawlessly. But waiting for doubt to disappear before we act is a luxury we cannot afford. To lead, to create, to evolve—we must learn to move with doubt in the room and still claim our space.
Mylett describes doubt as noise, not directive: “Doubt is the thought, it is not the directive…Directive wins over thought.” This is the discipline: act anyway. Not when doubt is gone, but while it’s loudest. You must understand that “behind the curtain, the most accomplished people in the world still suffer with doubt. What distinguishes them from you and me is not the absence of it, but their ability to move through it.”
And here’s the crucial point: doubt becomes habitual if you surrender to it, just as courage becomes habitual if you act despite it.
Mylett stresses that every time you take action while doubt is present,“you deposit evidence into your psyche”: proof that you are capable, proof that you can be trusted by yourself. Over time, that proof compounds into confidence—fragile at times, but functional and real.
For women, this practice is more than personal—it’s cultural. Each time we act despite doubt, we’re not just breaking our own ceiling; we’re weakening the one above the next woman, too.
🌱 Your Challenge for the Month 🌱
This month, I invite you to examine how you can cultivate resilience in your life:
✨ Is the problem I’m facing within my control, or beyond it? Do I need to self-regulate, or simply endure with love?
✨ Where is doubt holding me back right now? And what action can I take anyway, even while it lingers?
✨ Where can I search for the gift in my current hardships?
With love,
Jasmine 🌸
#jasminescorner
