Lisa MurphyFounder and Luminaria at Limited to Limitless Transformational Consultants

The Power of Doing Small Hard Things

14 Mar 2026 · 2 min

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1:38

In this coaching‑style group discussion, Lisa Murphy guides participants toward building lasting habits by introducing "small hard things"—minor, challenging actions such as getting up or putting feet on the floor half an hour earlier. She explains that these modest adjustments create structure without dramatically disrupting daily life and can be offset by going to bed earlier. Murphy emphasizes that forming a ritualized habit typically takes about 100 days because the brain actively resists change. She likens this resistance to the withdrawal symptoms (DTs) experienced by drug addicts, where the brain nostalgically recalls the ease of past behaviors. Participants share mixed results: Speaker B reports little change, while Speaker C describes a 50/50 experience, feeling fuzzy‑brained and fatigued, suggesting the brain’s push‑back. The conversation highlights the tension between intention and physiological resistance, underscoring the need for consistent, incremental effort to rewire habits.

Chapters

and keep you on that schedule. Keep, keep giving yourself small hard things like get up a half an hour earlier, get your feet on the floor a half an hour earlier, because that's a small hard thing that doesn't impact your day all that much. Because if you're still tired in the morning, you could go to bed a half an hour earlier the night before, right? So the truth is there's an easy fix to that one, but the challenge was to create structure. And did you find in those few weeks that you had overall more energy and more productivity?
Not really.
I mean, it was maybe 50/50 because I felt a lot of, like, quite a few days where I was just like, like, struggling.
Struggling because you just didn't want to, or struggling because your body was actually shutting down on you?
My, my— it felt like my brain was like not on board. I was either, either too tired or like fuzzy-brained. And, and it could have just been a coincidence, like it's not like that was the cause of it, but it's actually not a coincidence.
That was the cause of it, and that is why it takes 100 days to create a ritualized habit, because that's your brain fighting back and going, oh, but this is—
remember how it used to be and how this is the nice area? And remember when you didn't have to do these things?
So that is—
and that's like, um, you know, drug addicts have to go through the DTs and their brain is like, remember when you did the drugs and you felt Everything was easier and you weren't puking and having tremors, right?
That was your DTs fighting with you. And, and what happens is we have a tendency to be like, oh, I don't feel good.