We Can Do Hard Things

It was a typical Monday morning, and I was checking my email to make sure the latest edition of my newsletter had been sent out. To my surprise, I didn’t see my newsletter in my inbox. I logged into my website to double check the scheduled date, and the newsletter was set to go out that day and had a status of sent and published. Upon returning to my email a thought came into my mind: check your spam folder. Sure enough, my newsletter had been sent to my spam, and a little bit of panic rose up inside me. I had recently changed some settings regarding my email address, and now my newsletter had ended up in my spam folder. What if it had ended up in all of my subscribers’ spam folders?

I reached out to a few of my subscribers, who were able to confirm my suspicions: the newsletter had been delivered to their spam folders as well. The panic really started to engulf me now as more and more reported the newsletter was in their spam. When messing with my email settings I had accidentally blacklisted all emails being sent from my website!

I attempted to reset what I had changed, but no matter what I did the emails sent from my site went straight to spam. I spent a lot of time over the next few days fiddling with the settings, going back and forth with support, and contacting my subscribers in alternative ways to let them know where they could find the newsletter. I was depressed and discouraged because I had worked hard to build up my mailing list, and now it seemed all that work was falling apart.

Then my wonderful wife stepped in and reassured me that this was just a temporary setback, and that things were going to work out. That reassurance gave me the strength and motivation to pick myself up and start figuring out solutions. I temporarily set up my email with another domain I own, and I continued working with support to get the issue resolved. Continuing to communicate and push the issue with support eventually led to us figuring out the issue, and my emails no longer were getting dumped into spam.

Getting a website going and getting people reading your content is tough, and I’m sure this isn’t the last hurdle I’ll have to jump. What this experience showed me, though, is that I have the power within me to tackle the issues that arise. In the face of discouragement, I have the strength within me to overcome them. And I’m not the only one. We all have the strength within us to do hard things. And it’s overcoming the hard things that make us even stronger to then tackle the next challenge that comes along.