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