The Handbrake of Hesitation: Why We Talk Instead of Act

We explore the disconnect between what we say we want and the actions we actually take, examining how our subconscious beliefs and emotions often sabotage our stated intentions.

• Reflecting on your goals from the start of the year and whether your actions align with them
• Noticing when something gets a lot of "airtime" in your thoughts but little real action
• Understanding how our nervous system creates emotional responses that don't match the logical situation
• Identifying the hidden stories and meanings we attach to potential changes
• Recognizing our tendency to feel excessive responsibility for how others might be impacted by our choices
• Building nervous system agility by witnessing emotional responses without being controlled by them
• Moving forward despite discomfort rather than waiting for discomfort to disappear
• Expanding your capacity by keeping promises to yourself and allowing yourself to want what you truly want

If there's an area in your life where you keep setting goals but not taking action, I invite you to explore the beliefs and stories underneath. Let me know how you get on by DMing me at thecompletioncoach on Instagram.

If you've enjoyed this episode, please leave me a review and subscribe! And if you want to learn more from me, come and say hello on Instagram @thecompletioncoach or via email at wendy@thecompletioncoach.co.uk or find out more about working with me on my website, thecompletioncoach.co.uk.

Chapters

• 0:00 Reflecting on Your Year's Direction
• 1:23 More Talk Than Action
• 2:45 Understanding Your Resistance
• 4:15 Building Nervous System Agility
• 9:07 Finding Gold in Your Resistance

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

Welcome to and what Else, the podcast with me, wendy O'Byrne, also known as the Completion Coach. And as we're at the end of July, when this recording will be out live, I really want you to start to look at where you are in comparison to the direction you set for yourself at the beginning of this year and based on that trajectory. Now, where does that look like it's taking you? And I'm asking those questions not as a call to hustle or as a call to do more, but as a call to really reflect on what has actually happened. What has derailed you, what has caused you to take the most action? Are you anywhere near the direction you started with, and what are your thoughts and beliefs about where you want to go? You see, if I could see your life, but with the volume turned down, I couldn't hear what you were saying. I could only see what you were doing. Would I know what you're looking to do, to create, to be, or would it be really unobvious? Because there's more talk than action, and I mean that with the greatest compassion, because I've called myself out on this In my own scenario. There's something I've spoken on so much in my private life, about changing where we live for years. It's the most air that comes out of my mouth. It's the biggest declaration I was making, on repeat and quite wildly and without much direction, just from frustration. Just from frustration, constantly looking for the reasons, why, not who to blame, what the problem was, all kinds of things and in reality I hadn't taken any action whatsoever and I wasn't unpicking why. I was just busy talking about the frustration of it not happening. And the interesting part about this that I can only talk about from this angle, because I have now taken action, is the spiral it sent me into. So when we did decide to take some action, we took it very quickly and in that, the house being marketed, being sold very quickly.

Speaker 1: 2:39

Once that was done and a spiral kicked in, it released all of the beliefs and stories I had attached, which made perfect sense as to why I hadn't taken that action earlier and what I was actually avoiding. Now. That spiral was met with compassion. It was settled within a couple of hours, but when it came through and out, there were emotions tied to it that made no sense. There were thoughts and beliefs attached to it which were highly catastrophizing, highly catastrophizing, and it created so much panic in that catastrophizing thought process that it was easy for me to spot that this wasn't about the situation. This was about so much more than I was making it. It was tied to so much meaning that I was creating and responsibility for things that were far outside of my desire, my happiness, my wants. And that responsibility edge for other people, for people impacted, for people receiving the news, was creating this emotional response which, with hindsight now I can see we're leading my lack of behavior previously, my lack of action and the amount of talk.

Speaker 1: 4:05

So I'm bringing this to your ears because I'd love you to consider right now something that you're talking about, something that you want to change, something that you want to create, something that you want to try do be, and it's something that's getting a lot of airtime, maybe a lot of journal time, maybe a lot of overthinking time, but something that isn't getting any action over thinking time, but something that isn't getting any action, isn't getting any movement and there is no progress. And I want you to really reflect on what you might be creating meaning of there, who else may be impacted and what you feel about responsibility to other people, and from there I want you to really start to give yourself, the nurturing that you need to start to take action, the nurturing that you need to start to just give yourself permission to start. And if you slowly release that handbrake and start to move forwards. And if you slowly release that handbrake and start to move forwards, can you meet what bubbles up inside of you, emotionally thought-wise, catastrophe-wise, responsibility-wise, impact-wise and just witness it. And then, once you've witnessed it and let it come through, how can you then nurture yourself to move forwards with that? Because as you do that, what you're actually doing is you are helping your nervous system. You are helping it to understand what it's been suppressing, what it's been afraid of, what its normal reactionary response is and how that impacts your thoughts and your behaviours.

Speaker 1: 5:53

And in doing so, you begin to nurture that, you begin to give it more capacity and you begin to understand that it's not logical steps that you are baffled with, it's not necessarily desires that you can't put your finger on, it's not that it's too hard or too far away for you, it's that you've attached a lot of stories, a lot of meaning, a lot of emotions and a lot of patterned responses to those stories, those emotions, those responses. And in doing that, your behavior has become conditioned and patterned and so expecting to move through it and none of those things to come up, that's asking too much of yourself. But moving through it, witnessing those things come up, sitting with them and then moving with them, allowing yourself to not just meet those things as they come in, but then to keep moving forwards, doing things that you said you would, keeping promises to yourself, allowing yourself to want more for yourself the way that you want it, beyond your conditioning, beyond your responsibilities to other people that may or may not be real, beyond the roles that you have played previously, and just allowing yourself the space to figure out, in the areas where you have been setting goals and intentions and doing nothing with them, the things that are holding you back will not be logical. The things that are holding you back will not be equal to the response they're causing inside of you. So when we work out that this is built up old stuff that we're also just allowing to bubble up and clear, when we take away the seriousness of what can be the beliefs and the stories that we have programmed into the body, that's where we are expanding our nervous system. That's where we are building my favorite thing agility, because we're not just working in the old patterns, the old space, the old capacity. We're creating new. And in creating new you're creating nervous system agility, emotional agility, mental agility, and therefore there's more movement in your life in the direction that you want.

Speaker 1: 8:35

And in building that agility, in building that capacity, you don't just have more available for your own life, but you have more available for everybody that can include the places that we work, the people in our lives, the people not in our lives, but in society and in structures and in all of the things that need us to have more energy to deal with them.

Speaker 1: 9:05

But that magic is in you, building that agility, and that can't be built through logic, it can't be built through doing what you've always done and it can't be built by staying where you've always stayed. And so if there is an area in your life that you keep setting goals for constantly finding yourself in, then coming back out, starting, stopping doing all of the above, then I really want you to sit and work out what the beliefs and stories are, the emotions that are tied to what you believe will happen if you do this thing. It's not even if you do this thing successfully, it's just if you do this thing and I want you to really sit with that, dig in and get honest and under that I promise you you will find some gold. Let me know how you get on. As always, you can DM me at thecompletioncoach on Instagram.