Do you ever catch yourself avoiding things you need to do? Sure you, do: we all do it. In episode 9 of Traction Heroes, Harry and I discuss what to do about it.
The conversation took off when Harry read a fragment from Oliver Burkeman’s book, Meditations for Mortals. I won’t cite the entire passage here, but this gives you a taste:
It can be alarming to realize just how much of life gets shaped by what we’re actively trying to avoid. We talk about not getting around to things as if it were merely a failure of organization or a will. But often the truth is that we invest plenty of energy in making sure that we never get around to them.
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The more you organize your life around not addressing things that make you anxious, the more likely they are to develop into serious problems. And even if they don’t, the longer you fail to confront them, the more unhappy time you spend being scared of what might be lurking in the places you don’t want to go.
The irony, of course, is that we put off uncomfortable tasks because they make us anxious. But putting them off ultimately makes us more anxious. As Harry reminded us, “bad news doesn’t get better over time.”
He also proposed a helpful framing: that facts are friendly. That is, even though knowing the truth might make us uncomfortable, knowing is better than not knowing.
We discussed practical steps to gain traction:
- Ask yourself, what am I pretending not to know? Deep down, you know there’s more to the situation than you’ve let on; acknowledging the elephant in the room to move forward.
- Plan around the last responsible moment. Some events have fixed time windows; understand by when you must decide.
- Rewrite the narrative using the non-violent communication lens: separate your observations from interpretations, feelings, and needs.
As always, I got lots of value from this conversation with Harry. But this one you can’t think about; it’s about doing. And doing is hard when the mind doesn’t want to face facts.