Glennon Doyle's We Can Do Hard Things and Vulnerability (N6)

Glennon Doyle, with Abby Wambach and Amanda Doyle, turned their podcast into a book of answers to the questions people kept bringing them, and the whole thing hangs off a four-word phrase Doyle has repeated for years, collected on a page of her lines: "We can do hard things." It is a mantra for the moment pressure hits, and how hard that pressure actually knocks you sideways is, in the Big Five, one facet.

How hard pressure lands is Vulnerability

That facet is Vulnerability (N6), under Neuroticism, how much stress, crisis, and emotional overload swamp your ability to cope. Doyle writes from and for the high-N6 experience, the sort where a hard thing does not stay a task but becomes a flood, and the phrase is a rope thrown into that water. A high scorer needs the mantra most, because their nervous system tends to read hard as unsurvivable until proven otherwise. A lower scorer meets the same difficulty with more buffer, so hard registers as merely hard rather than as drowning.

What keeps the slogan from being a fridge magnet is the company it keeps in the book, which is honest about panic, divorce, illness, and the ugly middle of things falling apart. The claim is not that you will feel strong, but that people who feel exactly this shaky have done the hard thing anyway, so the feeling of being overwhelmed is not a reliable forecast of the outcome. For a high-N6 reader the usable part is uncoupling the flood from the verdict, letting the overwhelm be loud while you do the next small survivable thing. The mantra does not lower the water. It reminds you that you have been this deep before and climbed out.

Read your N6 to know whether the phrase is a rescue line or a nice reminder. If it runs low, you likely already assume hard things are doable and the mantra just names your default. If it runs high, it is closer to equipment, a short sentence you can hold when the pressure tells you this one will finally be the thing that breaks you. It rarely is. Doyle's four words are a way of remembering that while the flood is still rising.

Read the book: We Can Do Hard Things: Answers to Life's 20 Questions by Glennon Doyle.

See Where You Fall

Where do you actually fall? The 30-facet OCEAN personality test takes about 15 minutes and scores all five domains and the facets underneath them. Take the test

Research Citations