Ep. 253: Why You Keep Calling Yourself Lazy (And Why You're Wrong)

Have you ever said any of these things to yourself?

"I just need more discipline."

"I can't seem to follow through."

"I always start things and never finish them."

"I know what I need to do. I just don't do it."

And then…after enough failed attempts, enough Monday restarts, enough half-filled planners sitting on the shelf you land on the only conclusion that seems to make sense.

"I must just be lazy."

Friend, I want to lovingly challenge that today.

Because I don't think you're lazy.

I think you've been calling yourself lazy for so long that you've completely stopped questioning whether it's even true.

And that matters more than you might realize.

Because if you're solving for laziness when laziness isn't actually the problem, you will stay stuck. Permanently. Trying to fix the wrong thing.

So that's what we're doing today.

We're going to talk about why so many women believe they're lazy, undisciplined, or just fundamentally incapable…and why that label might be the very thing keeping them from moving forward.

By the end of this episode, you're going to understand what's actually happening beneath the struggle. And you're going to walk away with a completely different way of looking at yourself.

Let's get into it.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

https://www.jenniferroskamp.com/1-this-is-why-midlife-feels-so-much-harder-than-you-expected

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Transcript

Well, all right. So, welcome, friend. I am Jennifer Roskamp. I am a s certified strategist, a life coach, a midlife mom, and someone who spent way too many years believing the wrong story about herself. So today's conversation is one that I care deeply about because I think the I'm just lazy label is one of the most damaging things that women, especially in midlife, tell themselves.

It sounds like self-awareness. It feels like honesty, but most of the time it's just self-attack dressed up as insight. And it keeps women stuck in a loop that never actually leads anywhere useful. And so today we're gonna break that loop. We're gonna talk about why lazy people don't actually spend their lives feeling guilty the way that you do. We're gonna talk about what happens when a motivation problem becomes an identity problem.

And why that shift is so dangerous. We're also gonna talk about why motivation is actually a terrible strategy. We're gonna dig into what's underneath most of our struggles, and we're gonna talk about what it looks like to stop building a case against yourself and start building evidence for yourself instead. This is a good one. I'm glad you're here, and it is a full conversation. Okay.

So before we get into the thick of it, I want to share something personal with you because I spent years, years in a cycle that I now recognize very clearly. But at the time, I couldn't see it at all. So I tried to lose weight more times than I can count. I started programs, I made plans, I committed to new habits, and I'd do well for a while. Sometimes a few days, sometimes a few weeks, and then I'd fall off.

And I'd feel frustrated with myself and I'd wonder why I couldn't just do what I knew I was supposed to do. Because here's the thing I did know what to do. That was never the issue. I knew what foods to eat. I knew what I needed. I knew that I needed to move my body. I had the information. I had the plan. And I still couldn't stick to it. So I did what most women do. I blamed myself. I beat myself up. I decided the problem was discipline.

That if I could just get serious enough or committed enough or motivated enough, it would finally stick. And every time I fell short, I added it to this pile of evidence that I was quietly collecting against myself. See, you can't follow through. You don't have what it takes. You're lazy. But here's what I eventually realized, and this changed everything for me. The breakthrough didn't come when I found the right program.

It didn't come from when I found the right routine. It came when I finally understood that the weight was never actually the problem. The real issue was how I felt in my own life. I wasn't failing to lose weight because I was lazy. I was struggling because I was essentially disconnected from myself, from my body, from what I actually wanted. I was using food and the cycle of starting and stopping.

As a way to avoid sitting with things that were uncomfortable. The frustration, the disappointment, the gap between who I was and who I wanted to be. I wasn't lazy. I was trying to solve the wrong problem. And the moment that I understood that, the moment that I stopped attacking my discipline and started getting honest about what was really going on underneath, then things began to shift. I went on to lose over 40 pounds.

Not because I finally got more willpower, but because I finally started asking better questions. And I think a lot of women are in exactly the same place that I was in a thousand different contexts, trying to fix the symptom, blaming the character flaw, missing the real thing entirely. So let's talk about what's actually going on. So here's the thing.

Lazy people don't spend their lives feeling guilty. And we need to start here because I think this is actually the first clue that the lazy label doesn't fit you. Think about what your life actually looks like. You listen to podcasts about getting better, you buy the books, you save the Instagram posts, you make the plans, you restart every Monday with genuine intention. You sit with the planner and the highlighters and

The fresh goals, and you mean it. You truly mean it every single time. You care deeply. In fact, I would argue that you care so much that you exhaust yourself just thinking about changing. You're not indifferent to your life. You're not checked out. You are paying close attention, close enough attention to feel that gap between where you are and where you want to be every single day.

Well, that is not what lazy looks like. Lazy looks like not caring, like not trying, like not even noticing. But that's not you. What you're actually dealing with is something much more specific. You care deeply and you still struggle to act consistently. And at some point, you made that gap mean something about your character. That's the move that gets women into trouble.

So here's a question that I want you to sit with. If you were truly lazy, would you spend this much mental energy beating yourself up for not doing enough? Lazy people aren't up at night running through their to-do list. They're not replaying their failures or making new plans or downloading the next thing that might finally make everything click. They're not torturing themselves over the gap between who they are and who they wanna be. But you are, you're doing all of those things.

Which tells me and you something important. The issue isn't a lack of desire. The issue isn't that you don't care. The issue is that caring and acting consistently are actually two different skills. And the fact that you have one doesn't automatically give you the other. And that's not a character flaw. That's just how humans work. And understanding that distinction is the first step toward actually solving.

The right problem. So here is where things really go sideways for most women. It usually starts with a motivation problem, right? You don't feel like doing the thing. You start and you stop. You miss a week or a month or you quit entirely. Completely normal human experience, right there. But then something shifts. Instead of saying, I struggled to follow through on that.

You start saying, I'm someone who doesn't follow through. Do you hear that difference? The first one describes behavior. The second one becomes an identity. And identity is so much harder to challenge because once something becomes part of how you see yourself, your brain starts working to confirm it. You're no longer fighting a habit, you're fighting who you believe you are. So let me give you an example.

A woman misses three workouts in a row. Option one is that she would say, I missed three workouts. Life got busy. I need to figure out what got in the way and I need to make a plan for next week that will turn out better. Option two is she says, I never stick with anything. It's the same situation, but it is a completely different meaning that is attached to it. Option one keeps the door open. It's a problem to solve. Option two closes the door.

This is just who I am. And so she's gonna live in that space. And here's the thing about identity. Once we assign it, we live into it. We start unconsciously making decisions that confirm or prove the story. We skip the workout because of course we do. We never stick with things. We abandon the goal because why bother? We always quit. We stop even trying because the outcome feels predetermined. It's predestined.

That none of that, none of that is laziness. This is a self-fulfilling belief that has never been properly examined. And it likely started with one too many moments of struggle that you turned into a verdict about your character. It became a moral judgment. And I want to ask you, I want you to ask yourself something this week. When did you stop saying, I'm struggling with this, and start saying, this is just who I am?

Because there's a moment, and it's usually quiet and unremarkable, but there's this moment when a behavior shifts into becoming an identity, and most women don't even notice that it happened. And noticing is how you can begin to unravel it. So let's talk about motivation and why it's a terrible strategy. Because I think this is where a lot of the frustration lives.

Most women are waiting for a feeling before they'll take action. They're waiting to feel ready. They're waiting to feel confident enough. They're waiting to feel inspired. They're waiting to feel motivated. And they keep waiting. And the feeling doesn't show up. At least it doesn't show up reliably, or it shows up for a few days and then it disappears. And they take that as evidence that they're just not built for consistency. But here's the truth.

Motivation is a terrible strategy. It is not a character trait. It's not something that some people have and some people don't. It is a feeling, and feelings are unreliable. They fluctuate based on a whole bunch of things like your sleep and your stress level and your hormones and your circumstances and how the day went and whether someone said something that got under your skin. Feelings are not a solid foundation to build a life on. Let me say that again.

Feelings are not a solid foundation to build a life on. And yet, so many women are trying to do exactly that. I want to tell you about a night that changed how I think about this. I was doing the 75 Hard Challenge. And if you're not familiar with that, it's a mental toughness challenge that involves, among other things, two 45 minute workouts a day. And one of those had to be outside, regardless of the weather. And I live in Michigan.

Where we get all four seasons. In fact, we get nine months of winter and about three months of all the other ones together. But on this particular night, it was late. Things had gone totally sideways during the day. Of course, life happened, and I had not done my walk that day. By the time I got to the place where I could do my walk, it was 12 30 in the morning. Of course, I did not want to go. I was tired. It was dark.

Nobody would have known if I skipped it. There was no scoreboard. There was nobody checking up on me. The next day, my mom actually said, Why in the world would you do that? No one would know. But the truth is, I would know. And that was enough. And so I went. Not because I felt motivated, not because I was inspired or energized or enthusiastic. I went because I had made a decision. And I had decided that the decision mattered more.

Than whatever the feeling was I was having. That walk, it was not about fitness. It was about integrity. It was about keeping a promise to myself when nobody else was watching and proving to myself that I meant what I said. And here's what I've learned from doing the 75 Hard five times and from all those experiences with it. And also from years of working with women through the same motivation problem.

Action almost always. I I would actually say action always has to come before motivation, not after. You cannot be waiting until you feel like it and then act. In almost all the cases, you have to act, even when you don't feel like it.

And then motivation usually shows up in the doing process. The women who build consistency aren't the ones who feel more motivated than everyone else. They're just the ones who stopped waiting for that feeling and started making decisions instead. So here's the question that I have for you. How much of your life is currently on hold, waiting for a feeling that

that may not reliably show up ever. Because if the answer is a lot, that's not a laziness problem. That's a strategy problem. And the cool thing is that strategy can be changed.

So this is the part of today's conversation that I really want you to focus on because most struggles aren't actually about the struggle. The clutter isn't usually about the clutter. The procrastination isn't usually about procrastination. The scrolling isn't about social media. The glass of wine at the end of every night isn't actually about wine. The overeating isn't about food. Those are often symptoms. They're the surface.

And when we only address the surface, when we try to fix the behavior without understanding what it's doing for us, why we're choosing that behavior, we wonder why nothing sticks. Because we're treating symptoms instead of the root. I learned this in my own life through my relationship with wine. There was a season where I poured a glass of wine every single night at the end of my day, not because I needed it.

Not because I was drinking too much by most definitions, but because it had become my signal that I had made it through the day. My it was my release valve. It was the thing that kind of softened the sharp edges and slowed my racing thoughts down. And at the time, I thought I just liked wine at the end of the day. But that was just the surface. But then

I could get honest, really honest. And I realized I I wasn't chasing the wine. I was chasing relief. I was using it to avoid sitting with the things I didn't want to feel, like the stress and the loneliness and the frustration and the disappointment, the fear that things weren't working the way that I wanted them to. It was never about the wine. It was about what the wine helped me avoid. And when I finally understood that, I stopped fighting the behavior.

And started addressing the actual need underneath it. That's the work. That's where real change lives. And so I want to ask you something, and I want you to actually just sit with it. What is your behavior helping you avoid? Maybe it's procrastination that protects you from the risk of actually trying and failing. Because if you never fully try, you never fully fail. And that feels safer, even if it also means you never move forward.

Maybe it's the clutter that stays because going through it means feeling the grief or the guilt that's attached to it. Every pile isn't just stuff. Sometimes it's a season that you're not ready to close out. Sometimes it's a version of yourself or your family you're not ready to let go of. And so the clutter stays because dealing with it means feeling something you've been successfully avoiding. Maybe it's the goal that you keep starting and abandoning because.

Part of you is genuinely afraid of what happens if you actually succeed. Because success raises the bar. Success changes expectations, other people's and your own. And that's terrifying in a way that's hard to admit out loud. Maybe it's the late night scrolling because silence means being alone with your thoughts. And your thoughts right now are not comfortable company. And so the scrolling helps deflect those thoughts.

Now, I want to be really clear about something here because I think this is where women can get into a shame spiral if we're not careful. Understanding what your behavior is protecting you from is not about excusing the behavior. It's not a pass. It's not a permission slip to keep doing the thing indefinitely. But it is a diagnosis. And just like when a doctor can effectively diagnose you.

But he can't understand what prescription to give you unless he does that. He can't, he can't fix what's wrong with you without knowing what's actually going on underneath. Just like that. You cannot change a behavior effectively without understanding what it's actually doing for you. When I finally understood that my nightly glass of wine was about relief, about not wanting to sit with the discomfort of disappointment that I was carrying, I didn't beat myself up about it. I got curious and I asked.

Okay, what is it then that I actually need? What would genuinely help me feel the relief I'm chasing? And that question, it led somewhere useful. That question opened a door. I'm lazy saying that to yourself. I can promise you, it never opened a door. It just keeps you locked in a room, blaming yourself for not being able to find the exit. Fear of failure, fear of success, perfectionism, overwhelm, shame, grief.

These are the things that actually drive most of our avoidance. And none of them are laziness. And so here's a question that can be genuinely insightful. If your behavior could talk, what would it say it's protecting you from? Because that answer, that honest, sometimes uncomfortable answer is where the real work begins. But that's also where the real relief is.

So one last point I want to share here, and this one is important as well. Many women have become the prosecutor in their own trial and they don't even realize they're doing it. Every day they're quietly collecting evidence. C, I didn't do it again. C, I quit. C, I knew I couldn't trust myself. C, I started over for the hundredth time. They're building a relentless case proving that they are broken or incapable or beyond help.

And their brain, which is always looking for patterns, is more than happy to confirm whatever story they hand it. But here's what I want to point out: the same woman who is collecting all of that evidence about herself, she's completely ignoring the evidence that also tells a different story. The times that she showed up when she didn't want to, the times that she kept the household running through seasons that nearly broke her, the times she solved problems that no one else could solve.

The times she took care of everyone around her, sometimes beautifully, even when she was running on empty. The times that she survived things she wasn't sure she could survive. The times that she started again and the fact that she kept starting again, keep kept trying, kept caring. That is not the behavior of someone who has given up. That is the behavior of someone who hasn't quit on herself, even when she thought she had. That evidence exists, it is real.

And you're not counting it. And so I'm not asking you to pretend that everything is fine or that you haven't struggled. That would be toxic posity, and you know that's not how I operate. But what I am asking you to do is count all the evidence, not just the evidence for the prosecution. Because here's the reframe that I want to offer you. What if you were capable? Not perfect, but genuinely capable, and you just

haven't had the right understanding of what's actually been getting in your way. What if lazy was never the right diagnosis? What if fear was? What if overwhelm was? What if perfectionism or shame or avoidance or grief was? Because all of those things are addressable. Laziness as a fixed identity trait, it offers you nothing. There is nowhere to go from there. But I've been afraid, now that can open a door. Or

I've been avoiding something painful, that opens a door. Or I've been waiting for a feeling that wasn't reliable. That opens a door. And doors can be walked through. So here's what I want you to actually do with this conversation this week. Four things, not ten, there's just four. The first one is to catch the label. Start noticing every time you call yourself lazy or unmotivated or undisciplined or a failure.

Don't try to argue yourself out of it in the moment. Just notice. Notice it. Write it down if that helps. You cannot challenge a thought that you aren't even aware that you're having. So that's the first thing. The second thing is to challenge the evidence. When that label shows up, ask yourself, what evidence do I have that this isn't completely true? Not to gaslight yourself into feeling better, but to make sure that you are seeing the whole picture.

Because the case against you is not the only case. The third thing, take one tiny action. Not an overhaul, not a restart, not a brand new 30-day challenge. One action. Something that takes less than a minute. Something small enough that your brain doesn't resist it. Because the goal right now isn't momentum, it's proof. Proof to yourself that you can make a decision and follow through on it.

The fourth thing is to focus on trust, not perfection. Your goal this week is not to become a different woman. Your goal is to keep one small promise to yourself. That is how self-trust is rebuilt. Not in big dramatic moments, but in quiet ones where you do what you said you would do. That's it. Four things. Pick one to start with if you need to. Do that first one first. So

Here are some takeaways that I want to make sure that you take with you. Number one, caring deeply and still struggling doesn't make you lazy. It makes you human. Lazy people don't spend their lives feeling guilty about not doing enough. The guilt, the restarting, the constant trying, that is not the behavior of someone who doesn't care. It's the behavior of someone who cares so much that she's been beating herself up about that gap for years. Takeaway number two.

A motivation problem becomes dangerous when it turns into an identity. Missing workouts is a behavior. I never stick with anything. Now that is an identity. One is a problem to solve, and the other is a story that closes the door before you even try. Notice when you have made that shift and start questioning the verdict. The third takeaway: most struggles aren't about what they appear to be about.

The procrastination, the clutter, the avoidance. These are almost always protecting you from something uncomfortable underneath. Fear, shame, grief, perfectionism. When you address the root, the behavior often shifts on its own. And the fourth takeaway is this self-trust is rebuilt in small, quiet moments, not dramatic overhauls. You don't rebuild trust with yourself through a perfect 30-day streak. You rebuild it by keeping

One small promise today and then another and you start there.

So, friend, I don't know exactly where you are today. Maybe you've quit on yourself more times than you can count. Maybe you are staring at goals that have sat untouched for months. Maybe you're frustrated. Maybe you're just tired of starting over. But before you call yourself lazy one more time, I I want you to consider this. What if you've simply been trying to solve the wrong problem? Because in my experience, both personally and in years of working with women through this, lazy is almost always, never the actual

Issue. Fear is overwhelm, is perfectionism, is avoidance, is shame, is waiting for a feeling that doesn't come reliably is. And every single one of those things can be addressed. None of them are permanent. None of them are who you are. They're just what's been happening. And what's been happening can change. You are not doomed to stay here. You are not broken. You are not beyond change.

But change starts when you stop attacking yourself long enough to get honest about what's actually going on. This isn't gonna be fixed with a new planner. This isn't gonna be fixed with a new routine, but with honesty and with curiosity instead of judgment, with the willingness to ask better questions. Because awareness changes everything. It always has. And you can start again right now from exactly where you are.

Now, if today's conversation stirred something up in you and you're sitting there thinking, I've been believing the wrong story about myself for a long time, I want you to know that's actually a really good sign. That awareness is the beginning of something. And if you want to go deeper on this work, if you're ready to stop diagnosing yourself as broken and start building real structure and sustainable momentum in your actual life, well, that's exactly what I help women do.

Just shoot me an email to jenniferroscamp at the intentional mom.com. Let me know that you need some help diagnosing what's actually going on, and I'll see if I can help you. Friend, until we talk again, I want you to take what we talked about today, take the act the four action steps that I gave you, and just start looking at yourself with truth instead of a false narrative that you've been buying into for probably longer.

Than you would even care to admit to yourself. So, friend, make it an amazing day.