The Hardest Moment

Finding the hardest moment, identifying it, and growing through it.

When I was 27 years old, I had just finished my orthopedic residency program and was working full-time as a PT at a clinic in Houston. I had just gotten married and my wife and I moved into our first home together. I was also working on my PhD, working through the weed-out classes known as “advanced statistics.”

I was driving to work that morning and was feeling sorry for myself. I had 12 clinic hours ahead of me, paperwork, and I had to prepare for my first statistics test. They would give us a 24-hour window to take the exam, but once you started it — you had 4 hours to finish it. That meant I would need to work a full day of patient care, finish all my charting, head home and begin my exam — likely finishing just before midnight. To make matters worse, I was going to have to take that exam in an empty apartment, because we hadn’t gotten internet set up at the house yet.

On the way to work, all I could think about were the 10,000 things I needed to do, how tired I was, and how impossible it was going to be to think more than 12 hours later. I was going to fail my test. I was going to have to drop the PhD program. My wife was going to hate me for making her move into our newlywed home, alone, without me.

Luckily, I happened to be listening to a book titled Resilience by Eric Greitens. In the book, he tells a story about his Navy SEAL training. Hell Week — five and a half days, almost no sleep, the whole thing built to break you. He goes through the list of what they’d already survived: swimming 50 meters underwater on one breath, diving 50 feet to tie a knot, getting thrown in a pool with their hands and feet bound.

And then he says the hardest moment of the hardest week of the hardest military training in the world came during an evolution where all they had to do was stand on the beach and watch the sunset.

That’s when guys quit. Not during the pool. Not under the log. Standing still.

Because standing still is when your mind gets room to run. And what makes people quit is almost never the thing they’re doing right now — it’s the thing they’re picturing. How much longer. How much worse. How cold it’s going to be at 3 a.m. on Wednesday when it’s only Monday.

His mentor, a master chief named Will Guild, taught them a technique he called segmenting: take the thing that’s huge and terrifying and break it into pieces small enough to actually attack. Don’t do Hell Week. Do this hour. Then the next one.

That story made me realize that I was experiencing my “hardest moment” of this phase of life right now. As I was sitting comfortably in my car, before anything even remotely difficult had happened. I remember sitting in the parking lot, rewinding the audiobook, and listening to it again. And I smiled. I identified my hardest moment, focused on only the next hour ahead, and walked into the clinic with a smile on my face.

I think about that a lot, because I’ve watched the same thing play out in the clinic for almost two decades. Here’s the pattern I see constantly.

A patient does great in the clinic. Moves well, hits their numbers, tolerates load. Then they go home and stall out for three weeks. When I ask what happened, it’s almost never “I did something and it hurt.” It’s some version of: I thought about how long this was going to take. Or: I looked at the stairs. Or: I remembered what the MRI said.

That’s the drive to work. That’s the beach at sunset.

The hardest moment in a rehab plan is rarely the hardest exercise. It’s the Tuesday six weeks in when nothing dramatic is happening, you’re 60% better instead of 100%, and your brain starts negotiating. It’s the first session back after a flare-up. It’s the drive to the gym, not the set.

If you know that in advance, you can plan for it. If you don’t, you’ll interpret the moment as evidence that you can’t do this, when it’s actually just the predictable spot where everyone gets wobbly.

Name it, then shrink it

Two things I’d ask you to do.

First, name the hardest moment before you get there. Not the hardest task — the hardest moment. Where in this process is your mind most likely to get out ahead of you? For a lot of my patients, it’s the first 10 minutes of the day, or the moment they have to load a bar again after being told not to. For clinicians I mentor, it’s usually not the hard patient — it’s the drive home afterward, second-guessing. For business owners it’s not the bad month. It’s the quiet Sunday night when you start doing math you don’t have enough information to do.

Write it down. A moment you’ve named in advance loses most of its ability to convince you it means something. If you can’t predict it, open your eyes and pay attention. Often, you’ll know the hardest moment when it hits. And when it does, smile. You’ve put a name to it. You’ve got its number.

Second, shrink the frame until it’s something you can win. Not the 6 month recovery, this set. Not the quarter, this call. Not the diagnosis, this rep, with good form, right now. You don’t have to feel confident about the whole thing. You just have to master the moment you’re standing in.

That’s the part I want to be clear about, because it gets mistaken for positive thinking, and it isn’t. Nobody’s telling you it’s going to be easy and I’m not promoting blind optimism. The instructors weren’t asking those guys to enjoy the sunset. The instruction is narrower and harder than optimism: stop simulating a future you haven’t been handed yet and handle the piece in front of you.

The part nobody tells you

Once you push through a hardest moment, it stops being the hardest moment. It gets replaced by a new one, further down the road, at a level you couldn’t have reached before. You get better, learn to handle bigger things, and focus on what actually needs to be done here and now.

It’s the same as training. The load that wrecked you in January is your warm-up in June, and the only way that happened is you kept showing up while it still felt heavy.

Whatever you’re carrying right now — an injury, a practice you’re trying to build, a decision you’ve been circling for months — the hardest part probably isn’t the work. It’s the moment right before it, when nothing is happening and your mind is loud.

Take ownership of that “hardest” moment. It’s yours. Then go do the next small thing.

P.S. I finished my day in a good mood, drove home, ate some food, and absolutely crushed that exam before heading home to sleep in my bed with my wife (who hugged me at the door and told me she was proud of me, by the way).

-Sean