My wife and I have been remodeling our kitchen. It’s not a complete overhaul, but we’re replacing the floor and painting the cabinets. This week, we focused on painting the cabinets, and while this is not my first kitchen remodel, it was such a lesson in patience and perseverance.

To spray the cabinets, there is a bunch of prep work. It took hours upon hours to prep every surface, taking the doors and drawers off, getting them clean and laid out, setting up the spray station, and so on! Hours upon hours upon hours.

Then spraying the paint took a max of 25 minutes. For me, the spraying is the fun part. Prep work is awful. It’s my least favorite part of the entire process.

Spraying the paint is where I get to see the results, but when you look at the percentage of time that takes versus all the prep work, it’s such a tiny percentage of the project.

You do the bulk of the work before getting to the enjoyable parts. I was thinking about that in the context of doing the work of personal growth, embracing change, awareness, letting life flow through you – all the work of personal evolution. It’s a lot of work!

Sometimes you hear people say, “You just gotta show up and you gotta do the work.” As if we all know what “do the work” actually means. We don’t. It’s not because of ignorance, but because we don’t talk about what doing the work looks like day in and day out.

Let’s talk about doing the work.

First, doing the work is not a complicated concept that only gurus can understand. Doing the work happens every day of your life as you become more aware and get to know yourself deeply.

When you become aware of something you like or don’t like, that’s doing the work! When you notice things you want to change, that’s doing the work. When you take small, incremental steps towards those things, that’s doing the work.

The work is these tiny small bite-size doses of life that happen to you over time. It’s when you face a familiar situation, and you make a conscious effort to respond differently than how you would have before. Of course, it doesn’t happen every time, but when it does, you’re doing the work.

When we think about growth, we get overwhelmed at the thought of “doing the work” because it seems hard and complicated, and we want formulas and five-step programs and checklists.

But when you step back and see that the work happens over a lifetime, as you’re ready, it’s less intimidating. You’re never done doing the work. When you decide to evolve as a human, that evolution doesn’t stop, which means the work doesn’t stop.

For some reason, we believe that we should recognize every little moment of change, and if we don’t, then we aren’t changing. I’m raising my BS flag on that one. You won’t always notice the change or when you’re doing the work.

But as you respond and behave differently over time, it compounds, and one day you will wake up and notice a shift in who you have become.

It will feel like that shift happened overnight to many of us, but that’s because you forgot the years of work that led to that shift within you.

We wake up and feel different. We feel more evolved. So we think about what happened yesterday that led me to feel this way today? In reality, it wasn’t just yesterday. It’s been a long journey of doing the work incrementally over time. (That’s worth stopping to celebrate, by the way.)

Recognize that you feel different because of things you have been doing, how you’ve shifted behavior, and the new thoughts you’ve been accepting. That is what doing the work is all about.

You’re not trapped if you’re constantly changing.

Here’s an important thought to remember about doing the work. You are not stuck! Your circumstances do not trap you. You are not limited by what you believe were weaknesses, failures, or shortcomings. Your past does not have a say in your future.

You are not stuck. When something isn’t working, you get to change it. You get to evolve. You arrived at where you are in this moment by making small, incremental changes over time. Where you felt stuck ten years ago, you probably don’t feel stuck anymore.

This goes hand in hand with the idea that you don’t know how to change. Are you the same person you were ten years ago, 15 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago? Are you the same person you were last week? My instinct tells me that you have probably evolved a bit.

If you’ve evolved, you’ve changed. So, if you’ve changed previously, you can change again. The real challenge isn’t that you don’t know how to change but that you haven’t stopped long enough to observe how you’ve already changed. If you begin to pay attention and catalog your change experiences, you’ll see the data proves your ability to change.

Feelings are not in control of your experience.

Another common reason you feel stuck is that your feelings are in charge of your experience. I’m a firm believer in feeling your feelings. There is no benefit in ignoring or shoving feelings away. However, Your feelings are not in charge of you, and they do not get to dictate the path that you walk.

It would help if you allowed that feeling to exist within you and work through your body. A feeling is a physical sensation in our body that will pass through in time when allowed. When we ignore emotions or try to suppress them, we experience the physical sensation for longer periods. So let your feelings be, recognize them, allow them, but know that ultimately you determine what your response will be.

If you’re making personal growth decisions about who you want to become based on feelings, then you’ve handed control over. If we allowed our feelings to determine who we become, our lives would be in constant flux because feelings are erratic and unpredictable. Both good and bad feelings come and go, so learning to allow all of them will serve your personal evolution.

As you start to pay attention to how you change over time, you’ll see these tiny little moments of doing the work. Then, you’ll wake up and feel different, as if it was instantaneous.

My wife had a situation recently, and she shared about something in her life that she felt she had conquered. She almost seemed surprised by it (as we often are.) However, her change resulted from months and months of doing the work in this particular area. We stopped and celebrated her at this moment because she understood it was her hard work that brought about this change.

Doing the work doesn’t have to feel overwhelming. It doesn’t have to feel like an insurmountable obstacle to being the person you want to be. We have to recognize the small doses of change over time to see that the work is constant but achievable.

Doing the work is hard and requires effort, but you’ll begin to see how possible it is when you spread that effort out over a lifetime. As we pay attention and gather data on ourselves, we will know that we can change, and if we can change, we are never stuck.