The Decision You're Postponing

Not the strategic one. The one only you can make, and only you keep avoiding.

For almost two years, I had back pain bad enough to require injections.

I want to tell you a small thing about those two years. Not the pain, the pain is just background. The thing I want to tell you is what I told myself, during those two years, every time the question of going to the gym came up.

I said “I’ll start next month.” Sometimes “next week.” Once I remember saying, with full sincerity, “as soon as things calm down at work.”

I would say these things and then I would carry on. I was not, in any meaningful sense, lying to myself. I genuinely believed I would start next month. Each time. And each time, when next month arrived, I would say the same thing again.

What I have come to understand, looking back, is that I was not making a choice. I was not choosing to skip the gym. I was in something simpler and more powerful than a choice. I was in inertia. The category, in my head, was “I’m still thinking about it.” The truth, in my body, was that I had not started.

Inertia is not a decision. You don’t choose it. You find yourself in it.

But,and this is the part that took me two years and a few injections to understand, inertia ends in only one way. It ends the moment you notice you’re in it.

The end of inertia is not the gym. The end of inertia is the moment you stop saying “I’ll start next month” and start saying, quietly, just to yourself, “I have not been going.”

That moment is not the action. It is the precondition for the action. It is the only thing you can actually choose. Everything after it, including the choice not to act, which is also legitimate, becomes available because of it.

This month, we have spent four weeks looking at how a leader’s posture toward change shows up. In the verbs you use. In the data. In the calendar. The last and quietest move is this one: the moment of noticing.

So this weekend, before I see you again in July, I have a question for you. Not “what are you going to decide”, that’s too big. Not “what should you do”, that’s not mine to say.

Just this: is there something you have not been doing?

You don’t have to answer me. You don’t even have to answer yourself in any complete way. You just have to notice. Once.

That noticing is the only choice June has been about.