There is a moment, usually a few weeks in, when a client looks at me with something between disappointment and frustration and says: “I made the decision. Why is it still this hard?”
It is a fair question. And the honest answer isn’t always what they want to hear:
The decision - the real one, the one that you think counts for something - is rarely the hard part. What comes after is. What really counts is the commitment to acting on the decision time and time again.We have a mental story about decisions, we see it in movies. It goes something like this: the hero reaches a crossroads, makes the call, and from that moment forward everything flows from the choice.
For most of us, it does not work like that.
You make the decision. You mean it. And then the consequences arrive – not all at once, but in a series of moments where you get to choose again and again. But these are moments when you can also go back – where the old version of things looks, briefly, more manageable than the new one.
Every one of those moments is an invitation to retreat.
Their frustration is understandable, and comes from realising that this is the actual work.
Think About Exercise
When someone starts to exercise more, they generally don’t encounter a physical problem. They encounter themselves. They encounter the pattern that kept them from exercising before.
Unfortunately, that does not disappear the moment they set a new intention. It shows up, reliably, in every situation where the old choice used to be made. Tuesday morning, one look out of the window, it is cold and blowy, and the warm alternative is immediately there to settle for. That is not a new challenge. That is the pattern – recognisable and still strong inside you.
I often suggest clients start with small changes, and this is why. Small changes might seem like they produce small results, but that’s not so, because the pattern you are dealing with reveals itself at the same scale regardless of the size of the commitment.So whether you decide to train for a marathon or do five sit-ups each morning, the same internal resistance will appear. The same voice. The same inner negotiation.
When you start small and you meet the pattern with less at stake. You can observe it. You can work with it. It’s easier to drag yourself to do 5 situps than tackle the next step in a fourteen-mile training plan.
Because it’s not really the plan or the situps that’s the problem, it’s the old pattern that stopped your exercising before.
Why I Don’t Offer Short Programmes
This is also why the eight or twelve week programmes so often fails to deliver what they promise.
The content is fine, the coach is competent. Eight or twelve weeks of structured accountability can absolutely get you doing things differently. But when the programme ends, the accountability lifts, and the pattern, which was never addressed, simply reasserts itself.
You did the sit-ups every morning for 2 months. And then you didn’t. And the voice that said you wouldn’t manage it, that said you weren’t really that kind of person, that had been quietly waiting – it is still right there, as reliable as ever.
This is not a failure of willpower. It is a predictable outcome when the work addresses behaviour without touching the pattern underneath it. The behaviour was never the problem. The pattern was.A programme can change what you do for as long as the programme runs. Actual pattern work changes who you are, but the timeline is longer – think 6 months, not 6 weeks. The payoff is that the results do not reverse when the accountability ends, because the accountability was never doing the work – you were, in breaking the old pattern.
It’s Not About Discipline
What most people call discipline problems are really pattern problems. What they call motivation problems are pattern problems. What they call procrastination, or inconsistency, or self-sabotage – almost always, underneath the surface, a pattern.
And patterns do not live where strategy can reach them.
This is the thing that coaching so often misses. You can build the perfect plan, the right framework, the accountability structure – and the pattern will simply work around it. Because the pattern is not located in your calendar or your to-do list. It lives at the level of identity. Of who you believe yourself to be. Of what you have decided, at some level below conscious thought, that you deserve or are capable of.
Deborah came to me having tried multiple coaches before. She was a business owner who had doubled her business in twenty-four months and was still, somehow, overwhelmed and carrying it entirely alone. Her summary of her own situation, before we started working together: “I could only see sell-up, give-up or crack-up.”
She had tried the frameworks. She had done the programmes. Nothing had touched the real problem – because nobody had been willing to go looking for it at the level it actually lived.
Within a few weeks of starting work together, she was identifying the real problems clearly for what she described as the first time. The problems weren’t new, she was finally looking in the right place.
Why The Pattern Approach Is Different
When you understand this, you stop fighting the pattern as if it were an enemy to be defeated and you start approaching it as information.
Because the pattern was always trying to do something, usually to protect you. It keep you safe from something that once felt dangerous – even if that danger no longer exists. Perhaps you were hurt in the past, so the pattern grew to avoid what hurts. But exercise often hurts, so … the pattern stops you exercising.
And what was the protection has become the prison.
When Barry started working with me, he had twenty to thirty things on his to-do list every day, and a persistent, grinding sense that he was failing himself despite working constantly. The issue was not capacity. It was the pattern underneath the productivity – the belief that being enough required exhausting himself. He believed that if he was enough, everything would get done. His own words, after we started to address it: “The biggest thing is that I’ve learned to approach myself with care and love. I feel like I’ve got more time in the day, I am much more productive, and I have more patience with others and myself.”
He did not get a new system. He created a different relationship with himself. The sit-ups-sized change revealed the marathon-sized pattern. And once you can see the pattern, you can do five sit-ups whenever you choose. You can run the marathon. Because it was never the thing that was the issue.
The issue was the pattern.
I Help You Keep Choosing
So when a new client starts with me, they ask what we’ll work on first. It almost doesn’t matter. If you want to tackle the pattern, virtually any different choice you make is a good starting point.
The decision itself is the door. What is on the other side is a series of moments – some easy, some not – in which the pattern emerges and you get to choose again. And again. And again. And where I support you, help you see what’s happening and gradually we chip away at the old pattern together.
Not in the dramatic, heroic, one-and-done way. In the quiet, daily, sometimes tedious way that actual change requires.
The good news – and there is real good news here – is that each time you choose differently, the pattern loses a little of its hold. Not all at once, but choice by choice, until suddenly, one day you realise you did not have the old argument with yourself this morning. You just got up and did the thing.
That is what pattern-breaking actually looks like. It’s a relearning. Slow at first, then faster than you expect. And it lasts a lifetime when it becomes a new pattern that actually works for you.
What Will You Choose?
Having said that the decision doesn’t matter so much, most clients choose something in their business. Some want to raise their rates, some want to “be better at selling”, some want to be less busy, some to grow their business revenue or launch a new service.
Once made, that decision throws the spotlight on the pattern that was the real reason you haven’t been able to do it yourself yet.
So together we make the decision. Then just keep making it, daily and without drama, until the pattern no longer fights you over it.
Most people who work with me say the same thing after the first call: I did not expect it to go there. If you are curious what that means for you, let’s find out.
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