Jennifer Nettles Highlights Strength in ‘I Can Do Hard Things’ Video

Jennifer Nettles premiered her latest video, the emotionally profound and powerful “I Can Do Hard Things” on Friday’s episode of Today, during which she served as guest co-host alongside Today regular Hoda Kotb. In addition to Nettles delivering the song’s message of perseverance in the face of overwhelming adversity, she is joined in the clip — which Katie Kauss directed — by a series of women sharing the real stories behind their particular challenges and personal triumphs.

Among the women featured are transgender advocate Jaime Combs, a former business owner who is now a wife, mother and grandmother; Kate Davis, a photographer who is also employed as Chief of Staff for an actress/activist and is adopting a baby as a single woman; Holly Gleason, an author, journalist, former Rolling Stone contributor and survivor of sexual assault navigating her journey in the wake of the MeToo movement; and Caroline Randall Williams, an award-winning poet, performance artist and food writer, whose poetry, Lucy Negro, Redux, inspired a ballet with a score by Americana musician Rhiannon Giddens.

Others in the clip include Danielle Randolph, a firefighter who’s also in the National Guard; Morgan Leigh Garner, an Army wife pursuing a music career and raising her family while her husband serves in U.S. Special Forces; Audrey Ynigez-Gutierrez, a graduate research assistant also serving as caregiver to her disabled mother, and Ali Harnell, a high-powered executive in the field of concert and event promotion.

In a recent essay for Medium, to accompany the track and video, Nettles wrote: “This song for me is a truth telling, a blood letting, a real-life heart opening to what it means to be a grown woman. It is my offering to honor the reality that, as I like to say, ‘everything is everything.’”