Preparing To Prepare

You can read every book, make the perfect plan, and still feel like nothing changes. The missing piece is often smaller and sharper than you expect: a real decision, the kind that ends negotiation and turns “someday” into “how do I take one step today?” Mark Walker unpacks why so many of us live in the soft zone of almost deciding, and how that one internal shift changes everything from boundaries to confidence to follow-through. 

We dig into a coaching truth that can feel uncomfortable but is wildly freeing: the coach is not the hero, you are. When you decide, excuses stop being interesting, your energy changes under the surface, and action becomes possible even without a big dramatic breakthrough. We also challenge the motivation myth and flip it around, because readiness is not a prerequisite for progress. Action comes first, and motivation tends to show up after you start moving. 

To make it practical, Mark shares a simple decision support tool you can use right away: FATE (Focus, Accountability, Tribe, Emotion), plus a quick look at how your reticular activating system shapes what you notice and reinforce each day. We close with one question to journal on: what have you been circling that you have not decided on yet? 

If this sparks something in you, subscribe for more Fierce Encouragement, share the episode with a friend who needs a push, and leave a review so more people can find the show.

If you’re tired of doing this work alone, I offer a free conversation to help you get clear on your next steps. Apply Here when you’re ready.

Transcript

Why Deciding Changes Everything

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Hey, welcome back to Fierce Encouragement. My name is Mark Walker. I am a certified life coach and an executive coach, a contemplative practitioner, a creator, a dad, and a recovering overthinker. This podcast was created to help people start to encourage themselves and stop hiding from that better part of themselves and actually start living. So I really appreciate you spending your time with me today. I wanted to start with something that went down yesterday morning. And I was on a call with a good friend of mine, a fellow coach and business owner, a great speaker, a really good guy, good man. And he was telling me about one of the relationships he's had with a newer client. And they were working together for about a month, and the guy came in to his men's group, really beaten up, down and out. And honestly, his relationships were just crumbling apart. And he really couldn't hold a boundary to save his life. He'd been to therapists and had tried many different things, you know, read all the books, but nothing was really sticking. And in about a month's work with my friend, the guy said at the end of one of their sessions, you know, this is the best thing that's ever happened to me. I've never made this kind of progress before. Thank you. And you know what my friend uh slowed down and said back to him? He told him, Hey, I really appreciate that, but it's you. That's you. The biggest difference here isn't me. It's that you've finally decided. You decided to do the work, you decided to stop excusing the things that you've been using to make excuses, and you're doing it. I'm just here. You're the one doing the hard work. And honestly, I've been kind of chewing on that for the last couple days. Decided. Now, the idea here that I wanted to just tap into is well, I think we all use that word and we throw it around and write about it or put things on our calendar, but we don't look deeply at the word. Or at least I'm inviting us to in this moment. I think there's a whole spectrum of almost deciding. There's those words we tell ourselves, um, I should try to do something about this. There's also the I've been thinking about XYZ. There's the other one, one of my favorites. I've tried some things. And there's also the one we kind of say to ourselves, I'm working on it. But then there's deciding. Real deciding is different. It doesn't always come with those big dramatic moments either, right? Those flashbang moments. Sometimes deciding is really quiet. And oftentimes that deciding will shift the energy kind of underneath. Because the excuses that we normally make stop being interesting in a sense. The question stops being if and starts to become how? How do I take one step? How do I get one thing done on that? In a sense, we stop auditioning the idea and we just start living in it. William James, the father of American psychology, he said it like this. Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does. Now that sounds really simple in theory, but I think what he's really kind of pointing out here is something that's maybe one layer deeper. Stop waiting to feel ready. Start moving. That feeling or that sensation of progress or that excitement, I guess, well, that follows action. That follows us getting out there and doing one thing, not the other way around. Most of us have it backwards, and it's a progress on all this. You know, I suffer from it too, but we're all waiting to kind of feel motivated before we start. In fact, that's sold now as a product. But I think motivation, in a sense, is a liar. That shows up after we begin, when we decide first, and then we feel the results later. Now, I also have a client I've been working with for about two months now. And before he came to me, he'd done a crap ton of work on himself. Therapy, um, retreats, books, spiritual practices. He had all the ingredients, really, but something wasn't clicking deeply in the way he was living day-to-day. And one day he just showed up fully. And really, inside of the first few sessions we had together, he stopped and reflected towards the end of one of our sessions and said, I didn't think it was possible to feel this way this quick. I've never made this kind of progress before. And it was the same guy, uh, same face, same life, new challenges, some of the same challenges. But there's something beyond it all that kind of changed. And it was this, it was he decided. He didn't kind of halfway decide, or maybe decide, or I'll think about it. He decided, decided. And he stopped waiting or negotiating with himself, and he literally went all in on what was what needed to be done. I think a deeper part of this is what made it real for him was that he put skin in the game when he committed, actually deeply committed, focusing on the positive, showing up and being willing to talk about talk about something new. But when we actually commit, we focus our time, our energy, our resources, and we show up differently. That decision is the thing that kind of gets the work done and makes our learning sessions matter. Jim Rohn said it best, and he said it this way. Quote, if you really want to do something, you'll find a way. If you don't, you'll find an excuse, unquote. So my client really leaned into it. He stopped defending his excuses, and he's found his way through a tough season in his life, and is making lemon, lemonade out of lemons. And I'll be really honest with you at this point in the session and in the recording, because I'm not above any of this. I really am not. I have a coach, I invest my own real money to work with her, and she calls me out regularly, left and right. And there are moments when I forget to show up or when I sit in the session and think, you know, man, I know better than this. I teach this stuff, I help others with this stuff. And I think that's exactly the point. Knowing and deciding are not the same thing. I can know how a contemplative practice works. I've been doing some of them for over 15 years, and I can know that showing up for my business and as an entrepreneur every day really, really matters. I can know that being vulnerable also opens doors. But knowing doesn't always mean doing, at least for me. And maybe doing hasn't always meant deciding in a sense. I mean like really, really deciding with your whole heart and your whole chest that I'm all in. And there was a line from um the 12-step tradition that my friend talked about the other morning that I love and I wanted to bring in here too. And it's step six for all you recovery people out there. And it just says this that we became willing, not 100% fixed, not 100% healed, not all figured out, just willing. And really that's kind of the tie to all of this. That's the whole move, the judo, the mental judo. When we become willing, that's the decision right there. And sometimes that's the biggest and hardest decision to make in the world, just to become willing to let something different come forth. I think in that spirit, I'd just love to share a quick practical tool, something that you can actually use this week if you're interested. And this is the tool called FATE. And my buddy talked about this at the beginning of the episode that we used when I talked about him. But it sets a framework that him and his clients use, and it also comes or was created by a behavioral expert, uh, some guy named Chase Hughes. So check him out and check out this tool called FATE. So it stands for F for focus, A for accountability, T for tribe, and E for emotion. But for our focus, what's one thing we can do? We can just sit down and write down three simple things that are going to get done that day. Not a to-do list, not more goals, but something to focus your attention and where it's going. And what are you pointing your mind at today? There's a thing in neuroscience that they call the reticular activation system, and it's called RAS or the RAS, RAS. So it's basically a filter in your brain. There's so much data coming into your brain, we have to filter it, but that's what we focus on. Our brain starts finding evidence for it in our day-to-day. So if our focus is on maybe being a victim or uh being down and out, well, we'll find more proof of that everywhere. If we focus on growth and learning what we're capable of, our brain will literally start to build a case for that instead. But yeah, try that. Three things every morning. Point your RAS system. The A is accountability. So this is kind of simple. At the end of your day, check in. Did you do those things? No punishment, just honesty. Accountability shouldn't be a hammer. It should be a mirror where you can get clear and say how you showed up and maybe where you didn't. Just get a little bit better, no drama. The T is tribe. So this is sharing it with someone who knows you decided. When we make decisions in private, they have a way of kind of going away after a while. When we tell someone, we get a witness, we get an accountant, and we don't really need their approval, but we use it for anchoring ourselves. When there's another person in your tribe, they know you committed. It takes a little bit more from us to put into that. We need each other in this sense of work and connection. And the last part of the fate is emotion E. So why does this matter to you deeply? Not just in your head, but in your gut, in your chest, down in your belly. Reconnect to that every day. I think a deeper purpose is so important when that motivation naturally dips. And it will, right? A deeper connection, emotional connection to your purpose and that felt sense of why you're doing this carries us through those difficult days. Not just some plan or mission statement, not a system even, but the meaning. So yeah, focus, accountability, tribe, and emotion. Try this for 20 days and watch what opens up for you. So here's where I wanted to land today. I'm not going to give you another should. You got enough of those, enough of those to carry you through. I just wanted to ask you one final question and I wanted you to sit with it or write with it, and or really just be with it, not just to scroll past or listen past this. What have you been circling that you haven't decided on yet? What have you been circling that you haven't decided on yet? Consider that for a moment. You've known about this for a while. You uh might always get really close to almost doing this thing. It's the conversation that you might keep almost having with somebody that that you need to. Or maybe it's a commitment that you almost keep making to yourself. Or maybe there's even that better version of yourself where you almost kind of hesitate on becoming. That's honestly, that's where I struggle sometimes, is trusting myself on who I'm becoming and stepping one step forward. Because sometimes we don't need more information, we don't need another tool, we don't need to feel ready, right? And we really need to give up that fight to create the perfect conditions or the right season around what we want to do with our time and our life. Epictetus said this don't explain your philosophy, embody it. So stop explaining, stop over-explaining, stop overthinking it, stop preparing to prepare. Just become willing, just willing. And that's again, that's the whole mental judo move. And I promise you, the moment you actually start deciding, instead of just thinking about it, there's something on the other side of that decision that has been waiting for you. Again, this is Mark Walker. This has been Fierce Encouragement. And this is a show, a podcast for folks like you who are, in a sense, done with hiding and ready to start actually living and putting some tools into their life and getting some encouragement. If you felt this episode encouraged you in a fierce way and got you excited about taking action on something in your life, well, share it with one person who might need to hear that today. That is how this show grows and really does, one conversation at a time. And if you're ready to stop circling and kind of struggling to make a move, I work with a small number of people one-on-one. So check out the link in the show notes to apply. Let's have a real conversation. I'd love to hear what you're working on. But until next time, thank you. Have a good day, a good evening, wherever you're at. Keep encouraging yourself fiercely and know that I'm out here rooting for you. Okay, take care of yourself. Bye bye.