My mom is dying.

My father-in-law died in October 2020. I remember his last days well.

Love. Gratitude. “What did I do to deserve such a wonderful life?”

My mom is having a different experience.

As her heart fails, as she comes in and out of consciousness, she has been saying some revealing things.

“I wish I had more courage.”

“Why am I so afraid all the time?”

“I wish I knew how young I still was when your father died.”

She was 52. She’s now 90.

My mom lived a small, fearful life, which I observed mostly from afar. She has told me stories, while we sit together in a darkened hospital room for hours at a time, that remind me how deep her fear goes.

Her mother never taught her to clean her room. She always cleaned up after her, because my mom could never clean to suit her. Same for cooking. Everyone thought my grandmother was a wonderful cook.

My mom told me her mother paid her one compliment in her entire life. She remembered exactly what it was.

She was able to turn a cape into a skirt.

What she learned is that nothing she did was ever good enough. She passed parts of that on to me, though I somehow learned to try harder rather than give up.

She was afraid to learn to drive. My grandfather, and later my father, drove her everywhere.

She has lived alone, with very few friends, since my father died in 1988.

She lost her hearing years ago and was afraid to spend money on hearing aids. She moved into a retirement community in late 2022. It’s hard to make friends when you can’t hear them.

She has gradually lost her sight and is afraid of the cataract surgery. She can’t do the things she once loved. Reading, crossword puzzles, board games.

Therapy was not to be discussed. Medication, only very recently.

She lived a life full of anxiety and handled it by making her life smaller and smaller.

Yesterday she told me how much she wished she’d had a relationship with my children.

The ones whose visits she refused for years.

My father-in-law was afraid, too. But he threw himself into his fears.

From Navy pilot in his youth to Alaska Harley tours in his seventies.

I know which path I want. She never thought she was choosing.

The owner wasn’t sitting with me by himself.

His father was there, too.

Or at least everything his father had taught him.

“Stay in control. Do everything yourself. Keep the team small.”

He’d bought the business from his dad a few years back and had already grown it well past anything his father built. He was making more money than he ever thought he would.

He was also still doing all of it himself, and he was at his limit.

There was a partnership on the table. The kind that could substantially expand the business. He’d been turning it over for months.

I asked him what he was afraid of.

He was afraid of working even harder. He was afraid of losing control. He was afraid of all the things that his dad taught him to be afraid of.

And he was holding it. In his gut. In his tight shoulders.

“I got a good thing going. Why would I want to risk it?”

I hear that a lot. It sounds perfectly reasonable. Until the owner collapses from a combination of firefighting stress and soul-sucking boredom.

“I watched my dad do the same thing every day until it wore him down. He retired at 60 absolutely exhausted. I don’t want to be him.”

He was afraid of being like his father. But to be different went against everything that he had absorbed from him.

The decision was simple. Partner or not? Give it a try, or not?

But the weight went back decades.

Take a look at your to dos.

What’s the one where you just can’t quite move? The one that’s been sitting there for months?

What are you making that decision mean?

Not just to you. About you.

I’ll go into more detail on how to think about it in this week’s Substack. Subscribe here:

https://jeffmunn.substack.com

As you read this I’ve just started another two-day retreat. A client and me. Offsite. No structure. No agenda. No phones. Just being with whatever arises.

I learn as much from these as my clients do.

Mostly I learn what I instinctively do to make myself more comfortable.

Speaking to fill the silence.

Teaching to justify the fee.

Believing my client’s story that there’s a right path and a wrong one.

I’m writing this the day before we start, as a reminder that I don’t have to do any of it. I can just be in the space and enjoy it — and notice what shows up when either of us falls out of it.

Trying to predict a future we obviously can’t predict.

Defending an identity that nobody else is attacking.

Feeling a weight that, when you actually look at it, turns out to be made of the same stuff as the identity it’s attached to.

What we walk out with isn’t a plan. It’s the felt sense that this whole thing gets lighter the moment we stop believing we can grind, work, and think our way to certainty before taking a single step.

How boring would that be?

I’ll be writing more about the actual retreat later this week on Substack—

https://substack.com/@jeffmunn

There’s a task you’ve been avoiding.

You know the one. It’s been on the list for weeks. Maybe months. It isn’t complicated. You could probably knock it out in an afternoon. And yet every day you look at it, feel something tighten, and quietly slide it to tomorrow.

Here’s what I’ve learned — from thirty years inside high-performance rooms, and ten more coaching the people who run them:

The task isn’t hard.

I know it feels hard. But look closely. Sending an email isn’t hard. Making a call isn’t hard. Raising your price, writing the post, having the conversation — none of it is actually difficult.

What’s hard is what you’re making it mean.

Because underneath the task, there’s a story. If I send this and they say no, it means I was never as good as I let people believe. If I charge that, who do I think I am. If this fails, they’ll laugh. If this actually works, I can’t hide anymore — I’ll have to keep performing.

That’s the weight. Not the task. The meaning.

We’ve got a lot of names for that weight. Fear. Procrastination. Resistance. And the advice is always the same: push through it. Grind. Be more disciplined. Eat the frog.

I think that’s exactly wrong.

You can’t push through these, because there’s nothing there to push. It’s not a wall. It’s a story — a meaning you invented about what doing this would say about you. And you cannot out-discipline a story. You can only see it.

The moment you actually see that the weight is something you’re adding — that the task itself is weightless, and the heaviness is a meaning you’re generating — it loosens. You don’t have to fight it. You just have to see it’s not real.

And then the thing you’ve circled for six months takes twenty minutes.

I watch this happen with founders constantly. Two come to mind in just the last week. Someone sits across from me carrying a decision like it’s a boulder they’ve been pushing for months. Sometimes years. We don’t talk about the decision. We look at what they’re making it mean. And somewhere in that looking, the boulder turns to papier-mâché. They laugh. They’re a little embarrassed. And then they just… do it.

Nothing about the task changed. They just stopped adding the weight.

So here’s the invitation this week. Take the thing you’ve been avoiding. Before you try to force yourself, to push through and do it anyway, ask a different question:

What am I making this mean?

Not “how do I get myself to do this” — that keeps you in the fight. Just this:

What am I afraid this says about me?

See the meaning clearly. Notice you made it up. And watch how much lighter the task gets once you stop carrying a story that was never true.

It’s not hard.

What’s hard is what you’re making it mean.

But what about the “do hard things” crowd? Do the marathon, the powerlifting, the mixed martial arts? Those things are actually hard…aren’t they?

To a point. And the question is to what extent one type of hard helps with another. This is deeper than it looks, and I’ll be digging into it in Substack later this week.

https://substack.com/@jeffmunn

#PickNow