That Thing You Keep Not Doing
The Cost of Avoidance
You know what it is.
You don’t need to think about it. It came to mind the moment you read that sentence.
Maybe it’s a difficult conversation you’ve been meaning to have for months or a big decision you’ve been circling without landing. It could be a fear you’ve been managing around instead of moving through.
Whatever it is, you know.
And you also know that just knowing hasn’t been enough to make it happen. You are actively avoiding dealing with something that feels very uncomfortable.
The Comfortable Avoidance
Here’s what makes chronic avoidance so effective and so ruinous.
It doesn’t feel like avoidance while it’s happening.
It feels like wisdom, as if the responsible choice is to patiently wait until the conditions are right, until you have more information, until the timing makes more sense, until you feel more ready.
That feels comfortable.
That’s the seductive nature of avoidance. It simply makes the uncomfortable thing seem to be slightly less urgent than whatever else is available.
And there is always something else available. Something productive-Something necessary-Something that generates forward motion without requiring you to look directly at the thing you’ve been not doing.
And the thing you keep not doing waits, taking up more and more space in your nonconscious mind that might be put to better use. It weighs on you, costing more than you’re admitting.
What Avoidance Actually Costs
We tend to think of avoidance as neutral. As simply not doing something. As the absence of action rather than an action in itself.
But avoidance is never neutral.
Every time you don’t have the conversation, you have it anyway- in your head, at two in the morning, in the shower, on the commute. Every time you don’t make the decision, you carry the weight of the unmade decision into everything else you do. Every time you don’t face the fear, you reorganize your life slightly around it shrinking the territory you’re willing to occupy, narrowing the roads you’re willing to travel.
The cost doesn’t seem dramatic.
The real costs are, in fact, substantial. The mental energy you can’t apply to something meaningful. The years you weren’t developing new skills that may have led you somewhere you wouldn’t have once imagined. The less-than-optimal transparency in your communications with your most important relationships.
How I learned about the true cost
I received a crash course in the cost of avoidance many years ago. I spent six years past the point where I knew I needed to leave the career I’d spent twenty years successfully building. Six years of knowing but not acting. Six years of telling myself the timing wasn’t right, the income wasn’t replaceable, the next thing wasn’t clear enough yet.
The hardest part of my day during those years was getting out of my car in the office parking lot and going inside. The second hardest was staying in my office.
Every time I didn’t act, I told myself I was being responsible.
What I was actually doing was crushing my spirit a little bit every day. My conscious mind was begging me to move on. My unconscious mind, the inner operating system I was clearly not in touch with, was choosing avoidance. It was winning the argument but losing out on the possibilities that were out there, waiting for me to find them.
The Thing About Fear
Most chronic avoidance is based on some sort of fear.
Not always dramatic fear. Often something more subtle-the fear of getting it wrong, of being judged, of discovering that the thing you’ve been avoiding is harder than you imagined, of finding out something about yourself that you’d rather not know.
The brain isn’t trying to sabotage you when it steers you away from the thing you keep not doing. It’s trying to protect you. Discomfort registers as threat, and avoidance is the fastest way to make the threat disappear.
At least temporarily.
The problem is that it seems to work. Every time you step back from something uncomfortable and the anxiety eases, the brain logs that as a successful strategy. Do it enough times and it stops feeling like a choice. It just feels like who you are.
But it isn’t who you are. It’s a habit. And habits, unlike character, can be changed.
The question isn’t whether you’re capable of facing the thing you keep not doing.
You are.
The question is what it costs you not to.
The cost was more than I knew.
We do everything the same way. In avoiding acting on the realization that I needed to move on, I also was not talking about it with friends and family. I liked the fact that everyone saw me as a success.
But at some point well into my career, I had become disenchanted with the financial services industry and my role in it. My business began to plateau. Rather than being realistic about it and moving on, I worked even harder and when that wasn’t enough. I somehow tried even harder.
The thing is—I was avoiding having a tough and honest conversation with myself.
Every day I stayed was a day that cost me a lot, especially my self-respect. I became more cynically critical of the industry in a way that should have been embarrassing. Over the years that followed, avoidance changed how I saw myself.
The sincere enthusiasm for my work began to be missing in how I was communicating with others. Over the six years, the pile of lost moments became immense.
Something eventually had to give.
The birth of The Traction Method
There finally came the moment I could avoid no longer. I had that honest conversation with myself about what was going on.
But this time, I did something new. I asked myself a series of questions which took me to a much deeper and more honest conversation than I’d perhaps never had with myself before.
I’d ask a question and then followed up my answer by asking what else? I answered again, much deeper than the first time.
Then I asked myself again-In addition to that, what else-and it was then that the truth came out.
In my case, what I was avoiding was feeling like I’d failed on myself. For decades, I had been comparing what successes I had to the extremely high goals I had set for myself early in my career.
My business was doing really well, especially in comparison to most of my colleagues, near and far. I had every reason to be proud of that due to the nature of the business. I especially really enjoyed being recognized as being successful in a challenging industry.
I felt that quitting was a sign of having failed to come close to what I had once aspired for, a promise I’d made to a much younger me.
What I realized through my new questioning process was that goal was no longer really that important to me. The life I had was what I really wanted.
When I thought about all the steps I had taken to get to that point, I realized I had done something I had not come across in any of the self-help books and courses and workshops. It worked and over the years I refined it.
It’s what I now call The Traction Method.
The Next Step
Here’s what I’ve learned about breaking chronic avoidance, both from my own experience and from watching others move through it.
As we journey through life, we do everything the same way. If we are avoiding thinking about one uncomfortable thought, it becomes easier to avoid others. We naturally develop short cuts whenever we can, including making decisions. That can come at a high cost-we can miss the clarity we need to make good decisions, to find alternatives and to determine the level of risk that may be easily missed.
So, if we are unhappy with something, we ask ourselves a question, get an answer and move on, based on that answer. That answer is probably not the whole truth. But it sounded good and that is usually good enough. When we make big decisions, we do it the same way, because that’s become our habitual decision-making process.
That may not lead to optimal results.
By adding a number of steps to my decision-making process that first time, my life changed dramatically.
The following morning, I resigned, effective immediately. I had no big plan for what was next but quickly had one. Within a few weeks, I joined a local digital media company and really enjoyed doing something interesting and very different.
The real lesson of avoidance
We only get so many years to fully enjoy our lives. The ingrained habits we fully develop like avoidance are challenges that can easily distract us from being fully engaged in what matters most.
Avoidance is what prevented me from not taking action much sooner than I did. I can’t help but wonder what other opportunities I missed.
Having a process in place that helps us turn those challenges into opportunities is something I wish I had at an earlier time in life.
But then I wouldn’t have realized how important it was to not assume there was plenty of time ahead of me.
The thing you keep not doing shows up in every corner of life.
Sometimes it’s the career you’re not leaving. The conversation you’re not having. The decision you’re not making. The life chapter you’re not beginning.
Sometimes it’s something more specific like a fear so particular and so persistent that it has quietly reorganized the geography of your daily life around it. The places you don’t go. The routes you don’t take. The freedom you’ve given up so gradually you’ve stopped noticing it’s gone.
The Traction Method is for the person for whom avoidance has them drifting as they navigate the natural transitions of midlife, the disruptions that change everything, the drift that sets in when momentum has nowhere to go.
It’s a framework for finding clarity about your next steps in life.
One honest step. Taken before you’re ready.
What’s the Thing?
You still know what it is.
You knew before you started reading this article and you know now. The reading may have made it slightly harder to look away from, which is the point.
The thing you keep not doing isn’t waiting for the right moment. It isn’t waiting for you to feel ready. It isn’t waiting for the conditions to improve or the fear to disappear or the path to become clearer.
It’s just waiting.
And the longer it waits, the more it costs.
The Traction Method: Turning Life’s Challenges into Resilient Momentum is available now on Amazon https://a.co/d/0eV2UORB