What to Do When You’re Avoiding the Work That Matters

There’s a decision, a conversation, or a task you’ve been avoiding — and the longer you wait, the heavier it gets.

It’s the quiet, invisible drag on your clarity, your confidence, and your business. 

And most entrepreneurs think the solution is to wait for motivation or energy to hit. But that’s the trap. 

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• The 3 Hidden Forces Behind Avoidance: How motivation delay, perfection fog, and lack of constraints silently shape your behavior — and why they make even meaningful work feel heavier than it is.

• The Action-First Flow Protocol: A method to flip your brain from hesitation to motion using the smallest possible step to ignite focus, chemistry, and momentum.

• The Structure-Over-Feelings Strategy: Why constraints, boundaries, and commitments make it easier to start (and finish) the work — especially when your mind is trying to stall.

Listen to this episode if you’re tired of avoiding the work that matters.
You’ll walk away with a simple, science-backed way to start, move, and build momentum on command — no motivation required.

🧠 Want profits that grow stronger as AI gets smarter? Every Friday morning, FlowCode delivers you a GPT-powered profit prompt rooted in flow science — the same edge Navy SEALs, elite althletes, and top founders use to outperform. Subscribe for free: FlowCode.news

Transcript

It's 7pm on a Monday night, I'm in my home office staring at a blank sheet of paper like it's trying to pick a fight with me. My Wednesday episode is due. It's been the same rhythm for over a decade. I've recorded hundreds of episodes. I've built a body of work that I'm proud of. But last night, nothing, no curiosity pulling me into a rabbit hole, no creative spark, no sense of purpose humming in my chest, which is strange, because podcasting has always been the sweet spot for me, the place where three powerful flow triggers line up perfectly, curiosity, passion, purpose. That alignment is how I've done this for 12 years. It's how I tap into the mission that God gave me, to unleash genius in myself and anyone willing to grow. When those three triggers fire, I'm unstoppable. Ideas come faster than I can capture them. Time bends. Work becomes play, but this last week, that Trifecta didn't show up, just resistance, just hesitation, just me realizing that after 12 years of showing up, I still hit moments where I don't feel like doing the thing I'm most called to do. And it led me to this question this entire episode will be built around. What do you do when you don't feel like doing the thing you're committed to? Because every entrepreneur hits this wall and what you do in this exact moment determines whether you'll build momentum or lose it quietly when no one's watching. That's what we're talking about today. Let's get started. Welcome to flow driven. The number one problem in business today is flow deficit disorder. You see the symptoms everywhere, burned out teams, high turnover, employees, sleepwalking through their work and profits that never rise to match the effort, proof the old way of work isn't working at all. For a century, business ran on industrial age rules, efficiency, consistency, compliance. Then came the information age, where knowledge processes and titles defined value. But those rules no longer apply, because we've entered the transformation age, an era of relentless change fueled by AI, and if you're still using the old playbook, you're experiencing a very bumpy ride. The Cure, of course, is flow. Flow is the state where high performance and deep enjoyment collide, where human flourishing meets business excellence, and it's the only way to keep up in the transformation age. Your host and coach is Dr Dave Maloley, former Army officer, retired dentist and now a flow obsessed performance coach. And let's be clear, if you're an entrepreneur who's okay wasting your team's potential, this show isn't for you. But if you're committed to unleashing genius and building a business that wins in the transformation age, you're in the right place. Each week, Dr Dave shares strategies, stories and science to help you beat flow deficit disorder, grow profits and reclaim your time freedom. Want to go deeper. Go to flow code, dot news and subscribe to flow code, your weekly prescription for flow deficit disorder, one sharp idea, one strategy and one GPT prompt to help you build a high profit business that makes people better, all at no charge. The link is also in the episode description. Now, the majority of entrepreneurs make the same mistake when they hit the moment that I described earlier, they wait, they wait for motivation, they wait for inspiration, they wait for clarity, to magically show up and pull them into the action. But here's what I want you to consider, if you only take action when you feel like it Your dreams are already on a leash. Motivation is not the engine. Motivation is the exhaust. It doesn't lead, it follows. And this is where most people misunderstand flow. Flow isn't I feel amazing, so I take action. Flow is I take action and my brain rewards me with chemistry that fuels deeper action. This is why 12 years in and hundreds of episodes later, I still hit resistance and I still do it anyway, because in a flow driven world, consistency isn't so much about discipline, it's more about identity. You don't take action because you're motivated. You take action because you're the type of business owner who honors the work even when the feeling doesn't show up. So think about it this way, flow is built through aligned action, not emotional readiness. Now let's go a level deeper. There are three enemies that stop entrepreneurs from taking action when they don't feel like it, and if you don't call them out, they'll quietly run your business. So let's name them. The first enemy is the motivation delay. This is the quiet belief that you need to feel ready before you act. Most entrepreneurs don't say it out loud, but they live by this, and the research backs it up. Dr Timothy Pychyl found that procrastination is rarely about time. It's about avoiding the feeling you don't want to face. So you wait, and the longer you wait, the heavier the task becomes. The second enemy is the perfection fog. You know exactly what to do here, but you hesitate because you want it to be good, really good. And this is where perfectionism gets sneaky. It doesn't show up as fear. It shows up as not yet. It needs a little bit more something I'll start once everything is clear. It feels responsible, but it quietly blocks the doorway to momentum. And the third enemy is the absence of constraints. Humans just don't do well in open space. If you give us too much time, if you give us too many options, too much flexibility, we drift. MIT researchers found that productive people don't simply have more willpower. They use deadlines and structure to pull themselves forward without constraints, even meaningful work loses its shape. So now that we've named the enemies, let's introduce you to a few heroes. The first hero is action. First activation. When a business owner tells me that they're waiting to feel ready, I never judge them. I just know they're running an outdated playbook. Most people believe motivation comes first and action comes second, but the neuroscience in the real world data says the opposite. This is where Dr Timothy Pychyl's work is so important. He wrote a book called solving the procrastination puzzle, and the core insight is this, we don't avoid tasks. We avoid emotions. We avoid the discomfort of starting, the uncertainty, the feeling that this might be hard or messy or imperfect, and because we're avoiding emotions, not activities, we wait and wait and wait. But something fascinating happens the moment you initiate a task, when you simply begin, even with a tiny first step, your brain releases dopamine and norepinephrine, the chemicals that sharpen focus, elevate curiosity and pull you into deeper engagement. In other words, action is what ignites the chemistry of motivation. It's not usually the other way around. This is why flow researchers like Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi talk a lot about the autotelic personality, the person that finds meaning in the doing, not before the doing. And this is also why James Clear's line hit so hard. He said, You don't rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. A system is a pre decided commitment, a rule that you don't renegotiate with your feelings. And this is why, when I found myself at 7pm last night staring at a blank piece of paper, I still moved, not because I was inspired, not because I felt ready, but because I've spent 12 years becoming the kind of person who takes action regardless of how he feels. That's identity, that is self respect. That's how you build confidence. Confidence is honoring the promises you made to yourself. So if you want flow to find you, don't wait for inspiration. Just start moving and let your brain catch up. Now we're ready for Hero number two. Hero number two is ship the work. Perfectionism doesn't just show up when you're creating content, like it just did for me. For most entrepreneurs, it usually sneaks into leadership. It's this quiet, polite, not trying to cause trouble, not trying to make a bigger mess for yourself. It might be the moment you know you need to talk to a team member who's drifting, but you keep rehearsing the conversation in your head like it's some sort. Keynote speech, or maybe it's when you know the business needs a decision, but you keep collecting just one more piece of information so that you can feel perfectly certain. I've been there many times myself, and I know that it feels responsible. But here's the academic truth, and it's not soft. The most authoritative research on perfectionism comes from Hewitt Flett and Mikhail. They wrote a book called perfectionism, a rational approach to conceptualization, assessment and treatment, and they demonstrate that perfectionism reliably Predicts Increased rumination, avoidant coping, delayed communication, strained relationships, lower task follow through, and one more higher stress in plain language, the more you try to perfect, the less you actually move and in business that delay compounds into lost clarity, slow culture and weak profits. Now here's why it matters for flow. Flow requires engagement with reality, not this meticulously edited version of the thing you've been perfecting in your head. So when you ship the work as a business owner, it can mean a lot of things. It can mean you say the thing that needs to be said. It can mean you make the call that needs to be made, or you address the friction instead of tiptoeing around it. You choose presence over perfect phrasing, and most importantly, the one that I really want to land is you let courage outrank comfort, because this is what your team will feel instantly. Trust isn't built when leaders find the perfect words. Trust is built when leaders are willing to be real, when they're willing to look reality straight in the eye. And here's the fun little twist that research doesn't mention, but life certainly does. Every time you ship the slightly awkward, slightly imperfect version of whatever you're working on, it becomes easier. The next time your nervous system learns, Oh, we didn't die. We can do this again, and suddenly you've gone from the overthinking entrepreneur to a clear, courageous leader your team actually wants to follow. Last but not least, we have the third hero, design constraints, and I think this one is pretty easy for entrepreneurs to ignore, because every entrepreneur that I know speaks a lot about freedom, and they take that desire for freedom and they push it into no deadlines, no pressure, infinite time, and think what could go wrong. Well, according to the research, a lot goes wrong with that strategy. One of the most famous studies on this comes from Dan Ariely and Klaus Wertenbach, they found that people who set specific, self-imposed deadlines, not vague ones, real ones, actually performed better, finished faster, and wait for it, felt less stress. The translation is constraints don't limit performance. They create it. When your calendar is wide open, your brain wanders like a toddler in a toy store. But when you set a boundary, a real one, one you're committed to, your attention snaps into place. Three things happen almost instantly. When you do this right, your focus will tighten because you're not scanning for 47 alternate tasks anymore. Your emotional resistance drops because you stop asking, Do I feel like this? And you start declaring, it's time. And third, flow becomes possible. Flow loves clarity. It loves challenge, urgency and edges. This is why well trained athletes perform better when the shot clock is ticking. It's why creators magically come alive the night before a deadline, and it's why I've published lots of these podcast episodes because Wednesday didn't care how I felt. For you, constraints can look like a lot of things. It might mean scheduling the difficult conversation instead of soon. It might be giving your team real deadlines instead of whenever. Perhaps it's limiting a decision to 24 hours, instead of giving it a two week spiral, or using 20 minute sprints to get moving, instead of waiting for inspiration. Infinite time makes cowards of us all. Structure is what makes heroes out of order. Nary days. Constraints won't shrink your potential. They'll actually concentrate it before we close. Here's what really happened last night, nothing. The work didn't open, the ideas didn't land. I literally felt like I was pushing against a locked door, so I walked away, and this morning I came back, because this episode drops tomorrow. Whether I'm inspired or not, I recommitted fully, and that's when the shift happened. I had a clear goal, a real deadline, deep focus, curiosity started to wake back up, and then I fell into flow. I lost all track of time. The inner critic stepped aside, and the clarity landed not as a lightning strike, but as a steady knowing. The words and ideas started to come together, and here's why I'm telling you this, because this story isn't about me. It's really meant to be a mirror for you. There's something that you've been avoiding. Do you know what it is? Is it a decision? Is it a conversation, a task, maybe a piece of work, and part of you is waiting for the perfect moment, the perfect mindset, the perfect energy. But here's what I want you to remember, flow doesn't start with the right feeling. It starts with the right action. The feeling comes later. The chemistry comes later. The momentum comes later. Action is what opens the door. So here's my coaching challenge for you, pick the thing you've been avoiding and give it just 10 minutes today, 10 minutes of real presence, no multitasking, no negotiating with your emotions, just you and the work. Do not wait for motivation. Do not wait for more clarity. Do not wait to feel ready start. Just start. Because once you move everything else that you're looking for, the focus, the confidence, the creativity, the flow, even profits have a chance to catch up. That's how real momentum is built, one honest return to the work at a time. Thank you for being a part of flow driven the movement to build high profit businesses that make people better. If this episode brought you value, share it. It's an act of generosity helping other ambitious entrepreneurs navigate AI disruption and thrive in the transformation age. If you want the upgraded experience, make sure you're subscribed to flow code at flow code, dot news. Until next time, stay focused and flow driven.