Hello Reader!​

The busier we get, the easier it is to say, "I don't have time for that!" But what are we really giving up?

MEET THE AVOIDER

I added a sixth protective pattern this month.

For a long time Feel Change Build had five: the Over-Achiever, the People Pleaser, the Controller, the Invisible, and the Hyper-Independent. I liked five. Five is tidy. Five fits on a graphic.

But I kept running into people the five did not describe. Smart, capable people who were not burning out, not over-functioning, not people pleasing. They were just not in the room. They had not applied. They had not started. They had been going to for a while now.

And then I realized I was describing myself about four separate things currently sitting in my notes app.

So say hello to the Avoider.

Who She Actually Is

The Avoider protects herself by not entering. She withholds effort, participation, or commitment, so that nothing she does can be judged and nothing she wants can be taken away.

The belief underneath is simple and almost invisible: if I never fully try, I never have to find out I was not enough.

This one gets misread constantly, including by the person living it. From the outside it looks like laziness. From the inside it feels like waiting for the right time. It is neither. It is a genuinely sophisticated piece of self-protection, and it works. And that is exactly the problem.

In 1978, researchers Steven Berglas and Edward Jones documented what they called self-handicapping: people creating obstacles to their own success so that failure would have an explanation that did not threaten their sense of themselves. "I did not really try" is one of the most protective sentences in the English language. It keeps the possibility alive. Actually trying and falling short takes that possibility away for good.

A quick note on a pattern that sits close to this one. The Invisible and the Avoider are cousins, and they are not the same. The Invisible is in the room. She does the work, she just does not claim it. The Avoider never enters the room. One of them contributes and hides. The other hides instead of contributing. Plenty of us are both, which is its own conversation.

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Feel

Notice that the tell is relief, not dread.

This is the one that surprised me most. We assume avoidance feels bad, and eventually it does, but in the moment, avoiding feels wonderful. Deciding not to send the email, not to make the call, not to start the thing, produces an immediate physical drop in tension. That relief is the whole engine. It is why the pattern is so hard to interrupt. It rewards us every single time, instantly. When we feel that particular loosening in our chest right after we decide not to do something and that is worth paying attention to.

Find the sentence underneath.

Avoidance is fluent in reasonable language. I am waiting until things settle down. I want to do it properly. I am still researching. Underneath the reasonable language there is almost always a much plainer sentence, and it sounds something like: I am afraid I will try and find out I am not good at this. Saying the plain version out loud, even just to ourselves, takes most of the power out of it. The pattern survives on disguise.

Sit in the ninety seconds without obeying them.

When we decide not to do the thing, the wave of relief runs its ninety seconds like any other feeling. Most of us act inside that window, close the laptop, open a different app, and move on. Staying in it instead, hand on chest, just noticing, is where it gets interesting. Relief is not the same as a decision. It is just chemistry telling us we successfully dodged something, and chemistry does not know the difference between a real threat and a job application.

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Change

Stop calling it "not yet" when it is a decision.

Not now is fine. Not now for eleven months is a choice we have made without admitting we made it. The shift here is not forcing ourselves into action. It is honesty about what has already happened. Either this is something we are doing, or it is something we have decided against, and both of those are allowed. What costs us is the third thing, the permanent almost, which takes up as much room in our heads as an actual commitment and gives nothing back.

Recognize preparation that has stopped preparing us for anything.

Real preparation has an endpoint. It changes what we know or what we can do, and then it is finished. Avoidance in a work costume never feels finished, because finished was never the goal. A useful question: has the last month of getting ready actually changed anything, or has it just kept me in the safest part of this, which is the part before it counts?

Treat it as a rehearsal, not a test.

Carol Dweck's work separates goals aimed at proving we are capable from goals aimed at becoming capable. This does not mean we have to stop wanting the job, or the money, or for people to think we are good at something. Those are normal things to want. What has to change is what a bad result means. So a question worth asking before we start: what will I know at the end of this that I do not know now? That one has an answer either way. Tests hand down verdicts. Rehearsals just give notes.

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Build

Shrink it until the fear cannot find it.

The pattern activates around real attempts. It does not activate around things too small to count. Not "apply for jobs," but "open the resume file." Not "write the book," but "one paragraph, badly." I do this with all my big projects! This is not a trick to sneak past ourselves. It is a genuine recognition that the protective response is calibrated to stakes, and we control the stakes.

Make one small promise and keep it.

Every time we say we will do something and do not, the internal evidence that we are someone who follows through gets a little thinner. That erosion is the real cost of this pattern, more than any single missed opportunity. Self-trust does not rebuild through intention. It rebuilds through evidence. Ten minutes, done, counts for more than a plan we abandon.

Put one person on it.

Not a whole accountability system. One person who knows what we said we would do. The Avoider's pattern depends on the attempt staying private, because private means it never officially happened. Telling one human being makes it real in a way that no amount of self-talk manages.

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If we recognized ourselves in any of this, I want to be clear about something. This pattern is not laziness, and it is not a character problem. It is a highly effective strategy for protecting our sense of our own potential. It worked. It has been working this whole time.

It is also the reason we have not found out what we can actually do.

The free protective pattern quiz is at feelchangebuild.com. It takes five minutes and it gives personalized information on what protective patterns could be holding you back.

Hit reply and tell me what you have been almost doing. I have about a million! One that I'm working on right now, is teaching a playwriting class! What about you?

Have a lovely day! - Kate