The advice to "shift your mindset" during difficulty is often given in a way that implies you simply need to think better thoughts — that the hard feeling is a thinking problem, solvable by replacing the thought with a more positive one.
This is not how it works, and the instruction delivered this way is not only unhelpful but can feel like a dismissal of the genuine difficulty of the circumstances.
Real thinking shifts during hard times are not about bypassing the reality of what is hard. They are specific cognitive moves that change your relationship to the difficulty — not by denying it, but by expanding the context in which you are holding it.
Before any genuine shift is available, the reality of the difficulty needs to be acknowledged. The attempt to leap to positive reframing before the hard thing has been genuinely named and sat with tends to produce the appearance of coping without the substance of it.
Name, at least to yourself: this is hard. This is genuinely difficult. This is not what I wanted or planned. This is a real loss, a real challenge, a real season of struggle.
That naming does not make the difficulty permanent. It makes the shift that follows genuine rather than bypassing.
From permanence to transience. The hardest moments are most distorted when they feel permanent — when "this is hard" becomes "this will always be hard." The cognitive shift to transience: this is hard now. This season will change. It has not always been this way and it will not always be this way.
From meaning to neutrality. Difficult circumstances are not evidence of your worth, your lovability, or what you deserve. The hardship happened — it does not mean something about you. Separating the event from the self-judgment it triggers is one of the most useful and most difficult thinking shifts available.
From overview to next step. When the whole of a difficult situation is held in view, it can be paralyzing. The shift from "how do I get through all of this" to "what is the one next thing available to me" often unlocks the action that the overwhelm prevents.
From isolation to perspective. Difficulty creates a quality of aloneness — the sense that no one else has experienced what you are experiencing, that your specific situation is uniquely impossible. Remembering that difficulty is part of a shared human experience — and that women before you have navigated comparable seasons — can produce the companionship that isolation denies.
These shifts are easier in the presence of support — a person who can reflect back a perspective you cannot access alone. The cognitive distortions that hard times produce are most persistent when you are the only one examining them.
This is one of the specific values of coaching, therapy, or trusted community: another set of eyes on the story you are telling about what is happening.
Related: How to Process Your Emotions · Self-Compassion vs Self-Criticism · The Mindset Shifts That Change Your Life
Nancy GLO
Reflective storyteller & style curator for women becoming
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