Why You Aren't Taking Action

Understand what’s keeping you stuck—and where to start.

By Brooke Hicks

You know what you want to do. You’ve made the plan. You might even have it on your calendar.

And you’re still not doing it.

So you decide you need more discipline. A better schedule. Someone to hold you accountable. You start making your lack of action mean something about you.

Before you do any of that, I want you to get curious.

What is happening right before you don’t take action?

Why a better plan doesn’t always help

When clients come to me, they often have something they want to do that they aren’t doing. Or something they keep doing that they want to stop.

They want help changing the action. That makes sense. The action is what they can see.

But in the Self Coaching Model, we look at what comes before it: our thoughts and feelings.

Circumstances are the facts of a situation. Thoughts are the sentences in our minds about those facts. Those thoughts create feelings, and those feelings drive what we do—or don’t do. Our actions then create our results.

If you only work on the action, you can end up fighting the thinking that’s driving it.

You might force yourself to follow through for a while. But you haven’t understood why following through feels so difficult.

What’s underneath your inaction?

I coached a client who wanted to exercise. She had tried scheduling it. She had tried reminders. She still wasn’t doing it.

When we looked at how she felt about exercising, the feeling was apathy.

The thought behind that feeling was, “It wouldn’t matter anyway.”

Think about that. If you believe the effort won’t matter, how motivated are you going to feel?

She had exercised before without getting the results she wanted. She had also made exercise painful and punishing. When we understood her thinking and her experience, her lack of action made sense.

That is a very different place to start than telling yourself you’re lazy.

It also gives you something useful to work with. Another reminder on your phone isn’t going to address the belief that your effort won’t matter.

Understand yourself before you try to change yourself

As soon as you find a thought you don’t like, you may want to get rid of it.

Slow down.

First, practice observing it. You can notice a sentence in your mind without deciding it’s the truth or criticizing yourself for thinking it.

Your mind needs supervision. I sometimes compare an unsupervised mind to an unsupervised toddler. You don’t have to hate the toddler. You do have to pay attention.

The same is true here. Curiosity helps you see the pattern. Beating yourself up adds another layer of thinking and feeling to a problem you’re already struggling with.

Once you understand the thought, you can begin deciding whether you want to keep practicing it.

Try this before you make another plan

Choose one thing you want to do that you aren’t doing. Keep it specific.

1. Write down what you do instead.
2. Name the feeling you experience before you avoid the action.
3. Ask, “What am I thinking that creates this feeling?”
4. Write the thought down without arguing with it.
5. Ask yourself why that thought makes sense to you.

You’re learning how your mind works. Give yourself a chance to understand the answer before you demand a different one.

You don’t have to turn this discovery into another reason to judge yourself. You can use it as the beginning of change.

Start there. What are you thinking right before you don’t take action?