The Cheapest Way to Change What You Attempt

A couple of weeks back, one of the coaches in my group mentioned he'd started recording content from his car on the commute. Two hours a day of dead time he'd been staring at for years, now going toward long-form video. He wasn't presenting it as a breakthrough. He was just describing what he'd been doing.

Another coach on that same call heard it, said nothing about it at the time, and went and recorded his first talking-head video that week. First one ever.

He didn't need more information. Everything you could possibly need to know about recording a video of yourself talking is free and has been for a decade. He'd watched a hundred people do it.

What he needed was to watch someone with his exact constraints do it and not die.

That's the part worth sitting with, because it's not what any of us think is holding us back. We think we're waiting on the right approach, better equipment, a clearer sense of what to say. What we're actually waiting on, most of the time, is evidence that someone like us has already survived the thing we're scared of.

And the "someone like us" part is doing all the work.

When you watch a coach with half a million followers post something, nothing transfers. There's too much distance. Their situation looks nothing like yours, so their behaviour doesn't feel available to you. You admire it, and you scroll.

When you watch someone one step ahead of you, with a similar client load, similar time constraints, similar levels of not-knowing, the distance collapses. Their action becomes an option. That's the whole mechanism, and it moves people in a week that self-talk hasn't moved in a year.

Which brings me to the thing I'd actually like you to consider.

If you've been stuck on something for months, and you've read about it, and you've told yourself you're going to start on Monday roughly eleven times, you probably don't have a discipline problem. You have a proximity problem. You are not close enough to anyone who is currently doing the thing.

Discipline is expensive, and it runs out. Environment is free, and it never stops working. You will always, always drift toward the standard of the people you're around most, and there is no amount of willpower that outperforms that over a year. Put yourself in a room where the thing you're avoiding is just normal, where people talk about it like it's Tuesday, and watch how fast your definition of hard changes.

Most coaches never do this. They work alone, consume content from people ten levels above them, compare their unedited process to everyone else's finished product, and then conclude they're just not built for it. It isn't a character flaw. It's an input problem.

Now the other side of it, and this is the part I want you to hold onto.

The guy who recorded from his car has no idea he caused anything. He wasn't teaching. He wasn't performing. He mentioned what he'd been doing on a Wednesday call and moved on with his life, and somewhere else, a coach who'd been stuck for months decided he could do it too.

You are that guy to someone. Right now. You don't get to know who, and you'll almost never find out.

That is why sharing unfinished stuff matters more than sharing polished stuff. A finished, edited, well-lit result makes people admire you. A rough, imperfect, in-progress attempt makes people think maybe they could. Only one of those changes anyone's behaviour, and it isn't the one we all want to post.

So there's an obvious question here, and it's not the one about your content.

Look at the last thing you actually started. Not thought about. Started.

Who did you see do it first?

And if you can't answer that, the fix probably isn't another book or another course. It's getting closer to people who are already doing the thing you keep saying you want to do.

P.S. The coach in the car had a two-hour commute he'd written off entirely. Worth asking what you've written off that's sitting right there.

Keep Raising the Bar,

Paul Oneid MS, MS, CSCS