Both Sides of Yes

The Edge You Keep Stepping Back From

Why "I don't want to" is the worst data you will ever act on

Dr. Greg Moody, Ph.D. · Both Sides of Yes

Most schools quit on a lead somewhere around attempt three. Call, text, call… and the name goes into the dead pile. Attempt three is roughly where I've watched things start to work, so this is expensive. And nobody decided on three. No owner ever sat down and worked out that three was the correct number of tries. Three is where following up stops feeling productive and starts feeling like begging, and the feeling is what ended it.

I've watched that same stop happen in a lot of different rooms. Martial arts schools, obviously. Also engineering, managing inside large corporations, consulting, graduate school, and the therapy office. Different work, same moment: somebody arrives at the part that's hard, notices they don't want to do it, and treats not wanting to do it as evidence about whether to continue.

It isn't evidence. Not wanting to do something tells you what your body thinks about the next hour, and close to nothing about whether the thing is worth doing.

What the feeling actually tells you

The feeling doesn't announce itself as a feeling. It arrives wearing a business case. This channel isn't working. They're clearly not interested. We should put the money somewhere with better numbers. You get a memo instead of a flinch, and the memo is usually well written.

Bjork and Bjork have a name for what's underneath it. They call them desirable difficulties – conditions that slow you down and feel worse while you're in them, and generally produce better retention and transfer afterward (Bjork & Bjork, 2020). Spacing the work out. Mixing problems instead of blocking them. Testing yourself before you feel ready. What do those have in common? Every one of them feels like you're doing worse at the time.

What people BELIEVE about it is worse. Kornell and Bjork had participants learn to identify painters, some by studying one artist at a time, some by mixing them up (Kornell & Bjork, 2008). Mixing produced better identification of new paintings. Most participants still rated the blocked version as the better method – after taking the test that proved otherwise. Their own results were sitting right there and the feeling of smooth, easy progress won anyway!

Ericsson's expertise work puts it more bluntly. In the 1993 paper that defined the term, he and his colleagues wrote that deliberate practice "requires effort and is not inherently enjoyable" (Ericsson et al., 1993, p. 368). That's the definition, not a pep talk about it.

There's a real counter-argument here. A later meta-analysis across 88 samples found deliberate practice accounted for about 12% of the variance in performance, and far less in unpredictable domains like professions (Macnamara et al., 2014). Hours are not the whole story and anyone who tells you they are is probably selling something. Does that sink the argument? I don't think it does. Twelve percent of a very large thing is still a lot, and the finding I'm leaning on has almost nothing to do with hours. What I'm leaning on is how reliable that signal is at the moment you decide to stop.

On that, the read is consistent. People are usually poor forecasters of their own feelings, and tend to overestimate how intensely and how long a future state will land on them (Wilson & Gilbert, 2005). Levine and colleagues push back on part of it, arguing some of the intensity effect comes from how forecasters and experiencers get asked the question in the first place (Levine et al., 2012). Fine. Even the conservative version gets you where you need to go. Whatever the next call feels like from here, that feeling isn't telling you how the call will actually go.

The original version of this idea, which has been on my office wall for years, says these moments happen 100 percent of the time on the way to anything significant. I'd soften that now (100 percent is a poster number, and posters don't get audited). What I'll defend is narrower: it happens often enough that when it shows up it should not surprise you, and it should NOT be treated as new input.

What stepping back buys you

Why does stepping back feel so reasonable? Because it WORKS. Immediately. The discomfort ends the second you decide not to make the fourth call, and it ends completely.

That's the same loop that keeps a phobia running. Avoid the feared thing and the prediction you're carrying about it never gets tested, so it stays intact and may even grow. Craske and colleagues argue exposure works through that violated expectation rather than through calming down (Craske et al., 2014), and the avoidance half of it goes back to Mowrer's two-factor account (Mowrer, 1960).

Which is exactly what I tell owners about sales conversations. Nobody talks themselves into being comfortable selling. You dose it. Two intros a week and you stay scared forever, because each one is a big event and your body never gets a chance to file it as ordinary. Take enough of them, close together, and it stops registering as a threat.

One of our salespeople enrolled everybody they sat down with for a full month, which is a personal first, so I asked what felt different. They didn't credit a script. They credited getting comfortable inside the objections rather than flinching at them.

And the cost of the flinch is usually a number on a P&L. I once spent a while working out why a coach of mine kept handing back refunds, and it turned out to have nothing to do with policy. They were afraid of a customer being upset with them, so they were buying their own comfort and paying for it with the sale. A customer's disappointment is information. You handle it on a call.

The first ninety days

A new school either makes a hard run at ninety or a hundred students in the first three months, or it drifts and stalls somewhere under fifty and stays there.

Is that plateau a market ceiling? Usually not. It's a momentum problem, and it's mostly built out of a hundred small retreats in the first quarter – the event that felt awkward, the follow-up that felt like begging, the price that got softened before anybody had objected to it. Slow growth teaches everybody, including the owner, that this is simply what the business is. And you only get one first ninety days.

Same arithmetic in a services business. The first three months either produce ten paying clients or they produce four, and four becomes the number everybody plans around – the hiring, the pipeline targets, what a good month looks like.

That's the compounding version of a single edge. One retreat costs you one lead. A season of them may cost you the ceiling, and by then nobody in the building remembers it was a decision. Everybody just calls it the market. More on how that hardens, in my article on the plateau lifecycle.

What this looks like at your table

A manager and a direct report. Your report is on their second stretch assignment and it's going badly enough that they've started routing questions back to you. You've got three doors here. Take it back yourself and you get a clean deliverable this week and the same conversation again in six months. Move them off it and you've settled what they're capable of, permanently, on no evidence. Or leave it with them, cut the scope to something they can finish, and stay close while they finish it. Which one do you want to be holding six months from now? Everything about the first door looks like good management, and that's what makes it so hard to see.

A founder in year one. The edge here is almost always a conversation, and the conversation is almost always about money. You'll find an enormous amount of legitimate work to do instead… the site, the deck, the systems, the brand. All of it real. Most of it you'll need eventually. None of it is the thing you're standing next to right now!

An agency and the month-three retainer. Nobody picks a fight with their agency. They just don't renew, and you find out in a two-line email. The retreat that produced it probably happened weeks earlier, when something wasn't landing and the account lead chose the comfortable status call over the uncomfortable one where you say the results aren't where they should be and here's what I want to change. That call feels like admitting failure. Skipping it is what actually produces the failure, and it shows up sixty days later as churn.

Three different tables. SAME move every time. It gets uncomfortable and somebody finds a defensible reason to be somewhere else.

Two ways to get this wrong

The version of this I wrote for parents says your job is not to push your child but to teach them to push themselves, and I still believe that completely. The trouble is that "don't push them" gets heard as "back off," and backing off is its own failure. When somebody in your care hits an edge you have three options, and two of them cost you the person.

Doing the obstacle for them. You take the assignment back. You make the call yourself. You rewrite the deck at eleven at night and tell yourself it was faster this way. You get one clean crossing out of it, and you've taught them that getting across takes you. Next edge, they come to you sooner.

Letting them quit. You move them off the account. You agree that the market is just soft right now. You tell the parent that maybe karate isn't their kid's thing. This is the more comfortable of the two failures, because it looks like understanding, and what it teaches is that when something gets hard that's the end of it.

Helping them through it. Harder than either one, and it's the job. You keep the standard exactly where it was. You cut the work down to a rep they can actually take this week. You stay in the room while they're uncomfortable and you don't fix it for them. Then they do the crossing, and it belongs to them.

Most of us default to one of the two failures depending on temperament. If you're the person who fixes things, you'll do it for them. If you can't stand watching somebody struggle, you'll let them out. Which one are you? Ask somebody who works for you, because they'll know before you do!

That's true of a nine-year-old at a belt test and it's true of a regional manager. Where I'd change the original: that article also says if they don't learn it as a child they won't gain the ability as an adult. I've said that from a stage. I'm not comfortable defending it now, because the evidence doesn't support it as stated. A review of 207 intervention studies found measured personality traits moving about a third of a standard deviation over roughly six months, and holding after the intervention ended (Roberts et al., 2017). That change concentrated in emotional stability rather than conscientiousness, so I won't stretch it further than it goes. Does it mean a 44-year-old sales manager who has ducked every hard conversation for two decades is a lost cause? No. It means they'll generally need more reps than the nine-year-old, and their reps will cost more.

One caveat, because this principle gets misused as a reason to abandon people. When you're the bottleneck and forty families are stacked up waiting, that is not the week to hand your best skill to somebody who hasn't learned it yet. Do the work yourself and get the backlog cleared. Then teach, because teaching somebody to push themselves takes a real program and you'll need room to run it!

Your move

Pick ONE edge you stepped back from this quarter. One. Not the list – the list is another way of not doing it.

Then answer this: what did the retreat actually cost? Not "we deprioritized that channel." A number. Leads that went into the dead pile at attempt three, the renewal nobody asked for, the report who is still routing questions back to you. Put a figure on it, even a rough one, and write it down where you'll see it.

Then take one rep against it this week. One call, one conversation, one thing handed back to the person who should be holding it. Not a plan for the quarter. One rep, in the next seven days.

And if the edge belongs to somebody who works for you, pick the third door on purpose. Don't do it for them and don't let them out of it. Cut it down to a size they can finish, keep the standard where it is, and stay close enough that they know you're there.

If you want to think out loud about which edge you're standing on, reply to this or come talk to me. The version I wrote for parents and school owners, which is where all of this started, is here. And if the edge you're avoiding is a decision rather than a task, that one has its own article.

References

Bjork, R. A., & Bjork, E. L. (2020). Desirable difficulties in theory and practice. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 9(4), 475–479. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jarmac.2020.09.003

Craske, M. G., Treanor, M., Conway, C. C., Zbozinek, T., & Vervliet, B. (2014). Maximizing exposure therapy: An inhibitory learning approach. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 58, 10–23. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2014.04.006

Ericsson, K. A., Krampe, R. T., & Tesch-Römer, C. (1993). The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychological Review, 100(3), 363–406. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.100.3.363

Kornell, N., & Bjork, R. A. (2008). Learning concepts and categories: Is spacing the "enemy of induction"? Psychological Science, 19(6), 585–592. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02127.x

Levine, L. J., Lench, H. C., Kaplan, R. L., & Safer, M. A. (2012). Accuracy and artifact: Reexamining the intensity bias in affective forecasting. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 103(4), 584–605. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0029544

Macnamara, B. N., Hambrick, D. Z., & Oswald, F. L. (2014). Deliberate practice and performance in music, games, sports, education, and professions: A meta-analysis. Psychological Science, 25(8), 1608–1618. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614535810

Mowrer, O. H. (1960). Learning theory and behavior. John Wiley & Sons. https://doi.org/10.1037/10802-000

Roberts, B. W., Luo, J., Briley, D. A., Chow, P. I., Su, R., & Hill, P. L. (2017). A systematic review of personality trait change through intervention. Psychological Bulletin, 143(2), 117–141. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000088

Wilson, T. D., & Gilbert, D. T. (2005). Affective forecasting: Knowing what to want. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 14(3), 131–134. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0963-7214.2005.00355.x

Dr. Greg Moody, Ph.D. writes Both Sides of Yes on decision psychology, leadership under pressure, and business strategy. He is a licensed psychotherapist, a Chief Master 8th Degree Black Belt, owner of KarateBuilt Martial Arts, and a four-time #1 Amazon bestselling author.