When you hesitate, dial in your willingness to feel...

You know you have to start that project, but you keep procrastinating… 

You decided to make a change and stop doing (insert habit here: over-eating, drinking, buying vintage stamps) but the pull of old habits keeps drawing you back in… 

You yearn for a healthier body, but the thought of starting to exercise feels too daunting, stressful, anxiety provoking… 

And so you keep saying, “maybe tomorrow.” 

For me, the feeling is like standing at the edge of cold water. I want to jump in, I know it will be exhilarating, refreshing, and I can even list the physiological reasons why it is good for my health. But I stand there and do battle with my mind. 

Even when you know the outcome will be positive: you’ll feel healthier with more energy, you’ll feel proud of your accomplishment, you’ll realize a dream you’ve had for a long, long time… 

There’s something about changing our state (whether it’s mental, emotional, or our literal physical posture) that can be so hard. 

It’s not even that the activity itself is difficult. You know once you get going, it’ll be easy… or at least manageable…

There’s something about changing our state: from doing - to not doing or from not doing - to doing. From being out of the water to in the water and vice versa… crossing that boundary seems so hard. 

This is Experiential Avoidance in psychological terms. And it’s totally normal - the amygdala in our brains fears the change because it’s unpredictable and therefore could be dangerous to our sense of self - even when we are yearning for that exact change! 

You keep telling yourself, I’ll do it when I feel “insert desired emotion” or I can’t do it IF I’m feeling “insert uncomfortable emotion”. But unfortunately, this is part of the brain’s resistance to change - it’ll find a way to manufacture or repress those emotions in any way possible to keep you “safe” by stopping you from changing. 

One way out of this pattern is to get some coaching and to practice exposure with something you have an element of control over. You cannot control the intensity of the feelings and thoughts around your goal, but you can determine how much and for how long you would be 100% willing to dive in… 

Let me explain: 

If you want to learn to jump from a height, but it scares you. Find the height at which you would be 100% willing to try. If it’s an inch? That’s great! It takes you a bit closer and starts the journey. 

If creating a healthier body is daunting, and you’re experiencing resistance to exercise, what’s the smallest intentional movement you could do with exercise in mind? A walk around the block? Stand up from the chair? Wiggle your toes? Putting the experience of intention together with action helps to jump start your journey and creates positive reinforcement which makes the next step easier. 

If speaking in front of a crowd sends you into a panic, maybe find ways to change the variables: Is it the topic? The size of the crowd? The length of time speaking? Find ways to turn the dials until it feels like you could commit. And let that be your entry point to larger and larger patterns of living. 

The reason this is important for our lives is because the pattern of avoidance also functions to make our lives smaller and less fulfilling. So, if you learn the skills and processes of gaining power over your tendencies of avoidance, you’ll be able to engage in larger and better patterns for living a full life. 

It’s not about the one thing you’re avoiding, it’s about how you deal with change. 

This is why I like to use cold immersion as a template for learning to cross that bridge between avoidance to immersion in the experience. It’s something we all can relate to, and it brings with it an almost universal, instinctual avoidance reaction. And once we learn the process that takes us from fearing the cold to actually feeling eager to jump in, we can transfer that process to any desired area of growth in our lives. 

I’m teaching an introductory workshop on the principles of cold immersion online… 

It’s also serves as a template for what we do on a larger scale in my Foundations of Moving Freely program…. 

To find more details about the workshop starting March 1st, go here. 

To learn more about what we do in my program, read about it here.

Here’s to the willingness to having those experiences we yearn for! 

Patrick