Soundcloud:
Spotify:
Apple:
The following is a real live coaching session hosted by Dan Munro, and featuring Brojo veteran Andy. Watch/listen above, and/or read through the transcript below:
Transcript
Dan Munro 0:00
If you’re a nice guy or people pleaser who’s working actively on becoming more confident, I have no doubt that recently, or soon, you’re going to have an experience where you completely relapse, usually due to some sort of setback from the outside world, getting sick, maybe a parent says something really nasty to you, you go through a big breakup, some stressful event at work, something will knock you off your course, and it makes you feel like you’ve completely reset to zero.
You’d probably be quite shocked and disappointed at how quickly the old, nice guy version of you regains power over you. It’s like you’ve completely gone back to the old way of doing things. You have a victim mindset. You’re indulging in the old addictive or self destructive behavior patterns, the coping mechanisms, and the things that were once easy or getting easier as you grew your confidence now feel really difficult again, like you’ve never done them before. All the old fears have come back, like you’re pushing through mud.
Now this is actually a very common dilemma. In fact, it’s an almost necessary part of the nice guy recovery process. Relapse is built into the model of recovery. So the problem is in reaction to a big, unexpected setback, or even a small but significant one, while we’re in the transition phase of building our confidence, we can easily get completely set back to zero, because that’s still the strongest programming we have.
In this episode you will witness me coaching a guy named Andy who’s just gone through a massive relapse like this, and is trying to get back on his feet. Last year, during our work together Andy made some really massive gains. A particularly confident move he made was to quit his comfortable but unsatisfying nine to five job and to back himself boldly and responsibly into create a career in art.
And for months, things were working. He was getting workshops up and running. He was teaching people. He was doing his art, going to galleries and so on, to present his art to people, even overcoming his fear of their judgments and criticisms.
Then he got simultaneously smashed by both influenza and covid, and it completely knocked him out. And he got long covid, which fatigued him. Everything stopped.
But here’s the thing, months later, when his body had actually recovered, he found it still incredibly difficult to get things going again. He felt like his mindset was a guy who’s fatigued, and that this interfered with any attempt he made. The things he was doing before that he was enjoying the challenges now just felt nearly impossible, very, very difficult to do, and no real reward or joy in doing them.
During the session you’re about to witness, you’re going to see me point out something that’s quite harsh, but is designed to help him, and that is, he has slipped into a victim mindset, and this is the reason – not the covid, not the flu – this is the reason everything’s so hard. This is often what happens to nice guys when they get a big, unexpected setback, they slip back into being a victim. And it’s only a responsible person who can enjoy challenges. For a victim, it just feels like punishment.
So if you’re a recovering, nice guy who knows you’re capable of more, but you’ve had a big setback, or you have a history of kind of relapsing whenever something goes wrong and you’re wondering why it’s so hard to get back on your feet, this episode is for you. You’re going to witness my coaching one to one in action. This is basically an unedited, normal coaching session like I’d have with any of my clients.
In this coaching conversation, we’re going to break down three main things,
- why your brain relapses to an old identity when things go really wrong,
- how fatigue and the combination with imposter syndrome reinforce that victim identity and make it so difficult to take responsibility for your life again, and
- how to rebuild your momentum, your confidence and your responsibility when everything suddenly feels very heavy and uncomfortable and difficult.
Sit back and relax and enjoy the episode, and let’s go meet Andy..
So welcome back to another discussion offline. You just updated me, but let’s let’s get clear again on what we’re talking about today and why we’re talking about it.
Andy W 4:27
Yeah, sure. Thanks a lot Dan. Last year was my first year where I wasn’t working full time for a long period of time, which is something that I found a very scary prospect to do, because I’d been sort of in a nine to five job for a long period of time. And I started off the year really, really well. I sort of got an art residency. I was in big exhibitions, running clay workshops here, and studying, and everything was going really, really well.
And then just after halfway through the year, I got influenza, really bad. Badly, and then straight out of that, got covid. And basically I had a really long tail end to those two viruses, which sort of made me suffer from fatigue, where I had no energy, was sleeping long periods of time. And even though I feel physically better now, I’m finding it really, really hard to get the initial momentum going that I had this time last year, because a lot of the opportunities I was working towards have actually gone and to re connect with the people and the things that were going on there. It’s like they’ve already moved on, and that sort of timing has actually passed.
So what I’m trying to do today, hopefully, is to regroup and then to get moving again. Because I find at the moment I’m doing a lot, but it sort of doesn’t seem to be leading me in a direction that I really want to be going. I’m sort of treading water, as it were.
Dan Munro 6:06
Okay, first off, I just want to kind of just validate the situation you’re in. It’s a very common setback that people go through, where they get a physical, fatiguing thing, even chronic fatigue syndrome the kind of worst version of this. And as the physical illness recovers, it takes so long that the brain actually maintains the fatigue behavior pattern as well.
So while the body might be better, the brain is used to behaving this way, and as we’ve talked about a million times, the brain tries to repeat itself and keep what’s familiar familiar, so fatigue becomes familiar, and then it’s hard to know actually when you’re better, because the brain constantly behaves like it’s fatigued. And it’s one of those things nobody really talks about that much, but the various fatigue like situations that people get into recovering from long tail illnesses and so on, long term injuries. It’s a devastating setback. It’s like pushing zero on life.
I think of it as equivalent of like writing a huge assignment for your class, and then you realize you haven’t saved just as the computer crashed, and looking at starting that over again, that sort of devastating effect of restarting everything that you spent so long building and couldn’t save. So you feel whether this is completely real or somewhat imagined, you feel that you’ve lost opportunities, that they’ve moved on without you, yeah, and that you’re now kind of spinning your wheels, you’re busy, you’re doing a lot, but you’re not actually making progress. Yeah?
Andy W 7:54
Because last year there was lots of things that were planned, and so I had things to do with my art, my study and my sort of workshops and things like that. But also I’m in a relationship, and my partner and me have decided that we don’t want to live in this area anymore. We want to go and live somewhere different, which is a bigger population, a bit more of a creative community than is out here. So I was going through all these things, and she was getting a house on the market ready to sell, and I was supposed to be doing the same thing myself, and obviously we were talking about this.
But then her house sold, and that was fine, so she moved in, but then, like, I needed to do some structural work here, which was far bigger than I anticipated and we anticipated. So that’s another hold up as well.
So I feel like I’ve got a bit of a holding pattern going on as well with that one where really the ideal scenario for me would be able to sell this place and then move on to a place where we’ve got connections and contacts already, but I can’t do that until the building works been finished, which is sort of holding up the process as well.
But the fatigue thing definitely, it’s almost if I do some exercise, because I can exercise, and I sort of can go for sort of jogs. I can do weights and things like that, which I’m doing every day again now. But if I get tired, I get a similar sort of feeling when I’m tired to I used to when I was fatigued. So it’s sort of a normal everyday tiredness that you would expect after being in the gym sometimes can actually take me back to a feeling of fatigue, and the sort of things that go on when you’re fatigued as well.
So to me, this seems like a lot of going on, a lot of swimming around at the moment. And definitely feels like at the moment I’m in a survival mode, as opposed to creating something okay.
Dan Munro 9:59
Yeah, so let’s try and tackle that today. I think first we need to get really clear on what the solution would actually look like. So if we have a discussion about your fatigue and about the kind of setbacks in life today, and that discussion was really helpful, what would happen during the discussion, what’s the kind of result you’re hoping will come from this?
Andy W 10:26
I think what happened is, is, when I was feeling fatigued, then I identified very, very strongly with someone who was suffering from fatigue, and it almost became my identity. And I think what’s happening is I’m finding it quite difficult to get rid of that identity to do with fatigue.
So with my clay practice, I didn’t do anything for four and a half five months, because every time I thought of doing it, it was almost like that mental sort of trigger would happen, and I’d feel fatigued. So it took me, and I’m still working on it, but it just took me going into the studio and even just touching the clay for five minutes and then leaving it. And then eventually I’ve started to do it again, but it’s almost like everything that I’m doing. It requires me to look at all these different things, almost individually, because I can’t make sense of it myself, and pull myself out of this sort of identification with that fatigue. If that makes sense,
Dan Munro 11:32
Yeah, and look, I’ll say something. It’ll sound kind of blunt, but it’s to help you. As you’ve been talking, there’s been what I can only describe as like a victim vibe coming through.
Yeah, you know, even when you’re describing something that seems very objectively a barrier, like needing to fix the house before you can sell it, well, I don’t doubt that what you’re saying is factually correct and accurate. The vibe is like I am being held back by an external force. Yeah, that I am out of options. I am trapped.
And I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. And you know, this isn’t the first time we’ve talked, or by any means, some part of you is attached to being the fatigued guy. I don’t mean this as a conscious thing. It happens almost to you. You receive it. You even think about touching the clay, and you get tired. Now, it doesn’t mean you’re actually physically tired, but it’s more like you’re going back to being the guy who was.
Anybody who says this, they say, I’m exhausted. I’ll say, Well, go and do a workout. They find out they can do a full workout. Yeah. So were they exhausted? Or did it just have an identity of being exhausted? So if I’m hearing you right, the most helpful thing we could do today is to try and get you to detach from the fatigued guy identity, and hopefully attach you to something more helpful,
Andy W 13:06
It didn’t align with my values and I had a life that didn’t align with my values, and then started to take responsibility for my own life and my own actions. And I’d say, for the first seven or eight months of last year, things were going incredibly well, and the braver I was, or the more risk I took, not as much, not a reckless risk, but just sort of showed a bit of courage, the more connections I made.
And it actually didn’t feel like work. It didn’t really feel like, you know, the laborious work, the laborious work like doing a nine to five. It was nothing like that. I could finish a day and feel sort of quite tired, but there’d also be an incredible satisfaction on the connections I’d made, all the things I’d made, or the workshops I’d run, or, you know, the sort of study I did in that particular period of time.
So I know I can actually do it. And aspects of what I did last year I’ve done, even though I did a nine to five job and also looked after kids as well, you know, so things to do with the ceramics and the music and other things like that, I’d work nine to five, look after two kids, and still manage to do these things. So I know I’m capable of doing it.
And I do know from the past, I another type of victim. I did suffer quite badly from the imposter syndrome where I didn’t think I was capable of doing this, or, you know, I wasn’t actually capable of doing it, or shouldn’t be in this actual place, especially with the music, but over a sort of period of time, I don’t have those feelings anymore.
And I was doing so well at the beginning of the year, I did some quite sort of experimental structures for a really big exhibition, and I sat next to them on the opening night, and the first two people who came along just thought it was one of the worst things they’d ever seen in their life, and they absolutely hated it. And I thought to myself, Wow, if this happened to me five years ago, I’d probably run away and go home.
But it’s almost like I took some real pleasure in sitting there and actually getting a reaction. Then other people came and they loved it. But there was a huge dichotomy of opinion about what I’d made, but the initial opinions about people were, they actually said it’s one of the worst things. I can’t believe it’s here. And instead of sort of running away, I just sat there and listened to it and listened to the people, because they were so challenged.
I thought, yeah, this is what I really love doing. I really love doing things that are sort of challenging, and it sort of made me feel alive. You know, I didn’t want to upset people. But also, the worst thing as an artist that could happen is someone looked at a piece of work of mine and said, Oh, that’s really nice, isn’t it? You know what I mean? So it caused a reaction, and it caused discussions. And my work does that, so I know I can do it. I haven’t felt like that about my art. Thank you very much. For a long period of time, actually, I sort of blacked that out. I’ve blocked that out of those experiences from last year and before. I’ve actually quite skillfully, sort of eradicated them until now from a memory. So I can remove that feeling, hey, that I had when I did that work.
Dan Munro 16:22
I can pull out a couple of things out of what you’ve said there.
So one is that there’s hard evidence that you’ve been able to make a fairly dramatic shift from a very long term pattern of victimhood into responsibility. And you know what that looks like on the ground. You know what it looks like in terms of the decisions and actions you took, and the kind of risk taking, moderated risk taking, and so on. All of them sound like quite repeatable things. You could do it again.
But there’s a couple of things coming up. One is the default is what we’ll call imposter syndrome. So there’s an idea that you are not really up to this, which is kind of how you started this conversation, the sense that, like, it’s all an illusion. You can’t really do this. And that’s what the fatigue tells you, is, like, why bother? You’re wasting your time. So that’s the default, that’s the thing. That’s the old way that your brain is attracted to, because it’s the well worn, reinforced pathway.
And what it’s done is it’s using the fatigue as kind of confirmation bias. Can you see you couldn’t do it? It all fell down. I knew it would. As if you getting sick was somehow your fault, somehow a representation of your capabilities, rather than just everyone gets sick, it’s bad luck.
But I think the more important thing, even bigger than the imposture syndrome, is the last time you were responsible, it didn’t feel so hard. The word you use was laborious. And I think that’s the really off putting part.
Here’s how I’d frame this. You are right now in the transition phase, and this is your first really big test. You were doing it easily with momentum and it feels good, and it has been taken away, and what you felt like you could do easily before now feels very hard, and so some part of you is going well, I must be doing something wrong, because it doesn’t feel as easy and good as it did last time.
I can hear self doubt coming up there where, you know, yes, I’ve done this before, but I felt kind of like on top of things, crushing it momentum, and now it feels like whatever, like walking through mud, something’s different this time, something’s off, and it creates a doubt that maybe you’re doing things wrong, which is exacerbated by a previous attachment to imposter syndrome, if it’s like see, if it was real, wouldn’t be so hard that kind of argument, right?
So that’s what stands out to me, I think, is that there is a failure or an unwillingness in your subconscious to accept that if you want to keep being this responsible guy, this next round is going to be laborious, that you’re not doing anything wrong and it’s just the easy options gone. What are your thoughts on that idea?
Andy W 19:57
Not until now have I noticed the connection between the imposter syndrome and the fatigue sort of complementing each other and working together. And that’s taking me back into not comfort zone, but a familiar zone, which is the zone I’m actually used to inhabiting in my life.
I think I used the word laborious in a different way, maybe, but I’ll sort of talk about that now. And I realized once you take responsibility, it comes with a huge responsibility, and also you have to work incredibly hard.
But what it wasn’t like is my old job where I’d go there, and really part of the nine to five existence with me was to try and survive the day, because what I was doing was completely opposing to my values and stuff like that. I think that was the thing that was laborious, as opposed to working really hard. I don’t mind putting in long hours and stuff for things that I sort of believe in.
And I think what I was trying to intimate was when you’re doing things which align with your values, that hard work and the hours and the time and effort and energy is not the same as doing something which doesn’t align with your values. So when I was thrown into that sort of quite a messed up sort of environment, work environment that, to me, was really challenging, and really, I’d call it laborious, because I was trying to survive the day I wasn’t I was working really, really hard, but none of that was going towards something that I actually truly believed in. So I guess that’s why I use the word laborious there. Does that make sense?
Dan Munro 22:13
Yeah, that clarifies things a bit. So what that tells me then, if, because I think clarifying this issue is the main thing that needs to be solved is kind of like, Why is this hard for you?
One thing that sort of stands out to me, now that we cleared up the kind of laborious thinkg, is the fact that you kind of have to restart.
Let’s say we’ll use clay as an example. Before you got fatigued, going and working on clay was like, like being pushed by a strong wind behind your back. It’s almost like you can’t not do it. It’s so easy. It’s not that there isn’t an effort, but there isn’t that kind of laborious effort. There isn’t that drag mentally or emotionally. It’s more just a kind of physical push through the hours or the hard work.
What I feel coming through after your fatigue episode is that wind is gone. It’s almost like you have to drag yourself there now. And I think that’s your brain latches onto this as some sort of proof of the imposter syndrome, like, if you’re really good at this, this wouldn’t be so hard right now, kind of argument.
There’s a lot of metaphors that popped in my mind. It’s like a great athlete who blows out their Achilles or something, and they have to learn to walk again. Now they know they’re capable of like running a 100 meter hurdles, but now they can’t even get up a flight of stairs, and their mind starts going to work like it was all an illusion. You were never good at anything. See, this is this is the real you, the struggling, pathetic beginner is the real you. And it makes you feel like there’s a kind of no choice but to bow out.
It’s like you’re dragging yourself through something that’s only going to end in heartache yet again, that even if you were going to build up, it’s just going to be another reset to zero, because that’s your true nature.
This is this almost reeks of toxic shame, this idea there’s something fundamentally wrong with me. So no matter what I do, it’ll always reset to zero. And it’s not really bad luck, it’s me. I’m the problem. It makes it very discouraging to get up and try again, because you think it’s going to be Groundhog Day. This is going to go the same way. Is any of that resonating? Or am I off track?
Andy W 27:04
No that does actually resonate, and it’s like my brain was on sort of overdrive making up stories and lies about my existence and who I am. I know it’s only a sort of feeling, but I was talking to a friend who was an artist who’d been sick and got over it, and he talked about how he couldn’t go back to his practice for quite a period of time. And he said, You can’t do it Andy, because you’re so much in your head. And I think for that, like the stories and the hard wired of my brain was actually keeping me away from doing the clay.
But as soon as I went and started doing five minutes and touching it and playing with it, and I use the word playing, I got the feeling back for it. So it’s almost like I took myself a wonderful expression out of my head, and it was that sort of hard wired, sort of the hard wired, sort of latching onto the victim of the imposter syndrome and stuff that was keeping me trapped.
So it was nothing to do with anything other than me telling myself stories. And sort of my stories, I feel are very, very hard wired, you know, sort of we talk about different pathways in your brain. And I think the pathway for me to go along that track is incredibly a well worn track, if you like.
Dan Munro 28:33
Now I think we’re getting somewhere really productive, and I want to put a pin in the word playing, because I think in that word, you have given the headline to the solution the formula here: play.
You may have heard this. I’ll give you a little test now, just for my own amusement, in previous content or anything, when I talk about manipulation, I’ve talked about there’s one type of manipulation, an effect you can have that is more powerful than any other. It’s more powerful than guilt, more powerful than intimidation. There’s a way to move people. Do you have you ever heard me talk about this?
Andy W 29:19
I probably have Dan, but I’m gonna have to apologize on this one.
Dan Munro 29:25
No, I’m doing a stupid school teacher thing, asking hypothetical question.
Hassle.
Okay, if you want to move a human being make all the other options a hassle. There’s option A, B and C, and I want you to choose C, I need to make A and B a bigger hassle than C, and you will almost always choose C as a result.
So it’s one of the most subtle and powerful forms of manipulation ever. In fact, all the other forms of manipulation essentially a form of creating an emotional hassle.
For example, guilt tripping: guilt is a hassle emotion to have. It’s a lot of energy burned, it’s a lot of pain, a lot of suffering, a lot of work. If I create an outlet where it’s like happiness and easy going, I’ve essentially reduced the hassle, and you’ll run towards that outlet. So if you want to understand human beings, understand that hassle is the thing we most want to avoid. Even psychopaths try to avoid hassle.
Now, the brother of hassle is pressure, and what I hear is there’s a manipulation happening inside your brain where this thing that’s attached to being the imposter, to being the fatigue guy, to being what I call the loser identity, some form of loser, the not good enough identity you might call it, whatever part of you is attached to that hard-wiring has figured out that if it makes you taking responsibility feel like a hassle, feel like high pressure, low reward emotionally, then it can reinforce its own identity.
Because the more I make it a hassle, not only are you very unlikely to do it, if you do finally push yourself to do it, you won’t enjoy it. And I’ll create a sense that this was all an illusion all along, that you could never do this stuff.
We can see there’s a little spark that came through there when you approached it like play, you short circuited that whole backward system. It’s like a hack back door out of that world. And for a minute there, the the illusion lifted.
Yeah, look how easy this is. I can do this. I can do this every day.
And then probably within a short period of time, the illusion crashed back down. The same old thoughts and feelings came up again, but that brief little glimpse.
So if I was to kind of summarize everything you’ve told me so far, what it sounds like is, over the course of your life what you call hard wiring, I just call reinforced neural pathways, you created an identity that changes its name. Sometimes the fatigue guy, sometimes the imposter. Probably had 1000 different names. It’s the same guy, just like a fraudster, changing his identities to escape the police.
You might even have three different identities in a single day. But all it’s this guy who can’t, and shouldn’t because he can’t, right? If anything, this identity is trying to protect you from inevitable failure and the heartbreak that comes from that failure and loss.
And then over the last couple of years, this new guy emerged. Takes actions. He makes bold choices, follows through on it, steps off the cliff and sees if there’s another step hidden in the fog there, like this, new guy, very unfamiliar behavior, different and immediately different ways of thinking, like, fuck it. I can do this, and who cares what they think. And all these new thoughts and new ways of looking at things.
And the old version of you went, I don’t like this new guy. Ironically, the old version didn’t like the hassle that the new guy was creating. You probably had a lot stronger emotions, lot higher stakes decision making. You had to think more rather than just go autopilot. Being responsible is fucking hard. It’s like, cognitively difficult. It burns a lot of fuel. You actually get quite hungry when you’re more responsible, because your brain is just on overdrive compared to just cruising on autopilot.
And so that old version of you was like, okay, he’s going pretty strong. Now I’m just going to lie and wait. I’m going to look for my opportunity. There are some people argue that it might have been the reason you got sick. There’s a book called The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks, and he says that sometimes the coincidence of somebody making progress and suddenly getting sick is just too coincidental, that it is quite possible, physiologically and neurologically, that you can make yourself sick, especially fatigue, which doctors really struggle to figure out. Fatigue, it’s like back pain, they can’t find where it is, exactly what’s causing
There’s some potential theories coming through that it essentially are sort of psychosomatic, somatic illness that we make ourselves feel this way, but it’s the same difference as getting it from the outside world anyway, so your brain either created or took an opportunity of something external happening to you. You fatigued, you crash. And it caused all the kinds of behaviors it needs to reinforce the old way.
And then, as you start to emerge from that fog, start trying to, like, reintroduce yourself to that new thing that you were doing, it poisoned that with pressure and hassle, made it look harder than it was, made it less rewarding than it was, made that comparison very obvious to you, like, look how much harder it is this time. And it’s like it’s trying to trick you out of going back to the new way that was actually working for you. That’s the picture you’ve painted for me.
Andy W 35:44
Yeah, that really resonates with me. But I guess the only thing I would say, I have been offered like jobs in my old profession, and I did go in and have a look, and I just thought, There’s no way I’m going to do this as a job again. So to go back in that direction is just not going to happen. So basically, I’ve discounted that.
And I think what you just said does resonate with me, and it was, it was for me today, getting that momentum going, and actually realizing that I am attaching with this sort of old me is invaluable, because when I have those feelings, I can now see them for what they are, is these stories I’ve told myself, you know, and just by witnessing it and feeling it a lot of the time I feel that’s going to be enough, because I’m actually seeing what’s going on now for what it actually is. It’s a story that I’ve made up, which is a convenient story if I feel tired or something doesn’t work in the moment. So making that connection with me today at the moment is pretty invaluable, to be honest.
Dan Munro 37:04
There is a brutal downside to transitioning into responsibility, which is you can’t unsee what you’ve seen, and I think it’s the hardest place to be, actually.
So when you’re ignorant, you might be suffering, but you believe in all the reasons that you’re suffering, so at least you don’t feel incongruent. That’s why being a victim so appealing. So it’s not my fault. Can’t do anything about this. There’s actually some relief in that, some sense of almost justice, and that like, I’m a good person that’s unfairly targeted.
But once you’ve opened the doors to see I did this to myself, there are no perpetrators out there. It’s all me, and you’ve created that evidence by doing things another way with that same body you know, going like, look at what I’m actually capable of. I could have done this all along, had I known. Then it’s very fucking hard to go back. It’s actually impossible to go back. All you can do is go back to the old way and suffer even more. Because, you know, it’s false.
It’s like if you’ve been dishonest your whole life. That was my thing. But I was lying to myself about my dishonesty. I actually felt honest all the time. It was great. You know, I mean, the results of my life were terrible, but I felt like I was a good person who just had bad luck. Once I knew that I was dishonest, I could keep lying, but I couldn’t lie to myself about it anymore. So I had to witness myself lying. It was fucking awful. So I’m in a horrible place where I’m not honest but I’m not able to lie to myself about it either. Do I watch myself committing these crimes? It’s my fault all the results that I’m having all my fault.
And so this is the kind of transition period. And basically what I want to put in your head is you becoming a responsible person and maintaining it is inevitable because it’s too painful to go back now you can’t trick yourself anymore. You went and had a look, and you just can’t do it.
So you getting back to being that responsible person that you enjoyed being is inevitable. The only question is, how long it’s going to take to get back there?
And that is a decision for you. There’s nothing external causing that delay. It’s not about your house or anything like that. Responsibility is how you react to life. It doesn’t matter what life is. So what I think is going to happen is your old insecurities are just going to try and delay the inevitable. One more day of being a victim, one more hour, one more minute of feeling too tired, as often as possible to drag this out.
But you’re going towards being responsible, there’s nowhere else for you to go. There’s no other options now. So what I’d frame this as is, this is you versus a manipulator inside your head trying to trick you into delaying responsibility one more period of time.
Andy W 40:23
There is no reason to delay anything at this moment in time. There is just no reason at all, because by delaying it, I feel like when you learn to surf and you’re actually you can’t get out properly, so you’re in that place where the waves are breaking all the time. So it’s really frigging hard work, but as soon as you get a little bit better and have a bit more drive and a bit more confidence in yourself, you then get out into the unbroken waves, and all of a sudden you’re thinking, I should have done this months and weeks ago, you know. And I feel like I’m in that position now, where I’m in that zone where the great waves are breaking down, and there’s no reason to be here at all. I might as well just go further out and sort of keep moving.
Dan Munro 41:11
That’s funny, because I was thinking of surfing metaphors earlier as well. I couldn’t get all my metaphors out. But, this is a great example. We don’t control the waves. Sickness, bad luck with the house, whatever, the fuck – these are waves. A lot of them are out of our control, but there’s fighting them, and then there’s surfing them.
We’re going to get to what playing looks like in a minute.
What I first want to do is the easiest way to deal with any form of manipulation, including self manipulation, is to have the whole thing transparent, to see all the tactics as tactics. It’s very hard to manipulate someone if they know that you’re using a tactic.
So right now, you’re using tactics on yourself, or, I think, a better way to frame it is your subconscious brain is using tactics on your conscious awareness, tricking it into delaying the inevitable responsibility, one more day, one more hour, even one more second. It has endless energy to delay. It can delay all day.
What I want you to do now is kind of take a helicopter view of yourself. Notice those times recently where you delayed or put off, distracted and so on, and ask yourself, how did it trick me? So off the top of your head, and I’ll help you with this as we go through, what are some of the tricks your brain uses to put you off from being responsible and doing what you need to do?
Andy W 42:48
What I sort of semi discovered, is the fatigue. Feeling tired, a normal tiredness, and transposing that into the feelings of fatigue. Therefore I haven’t got the energy to do this, and it stops me doing things. So that could be me doing a gig, music, or sort of going and doing a clay workshop somewhere else, which this is more before Christmas, but actually saying I haven’t got the energy to do that.
So I stopped myself doing things and connecting with people because I thought I was too tired. The reality is that when I actually just go and do these things, when I return, even if I do have less sleep or I’m on the road for a long period of time, when I do get back home, I have more energy than before I left. So what I found is that by listening to the my mind telling me I’m too tired to do it, I then don’t do this thing, which I really wanted to do, and I actually just feel more tired, telling me this was like when I was feeling at my worst.
I was offered to do some workshops at this sort of heartbeat festival, but at that moment in time, I told myself I couldn’t do it. I’m too tired. I’m no good at play anymore. I haven’t got the capacity to stand outside for five or six hours and do something so I let that opportunity go.
Delaying things. I think it sort of makes me delay things as well and put things off, and I think that’s part of when you’re taking control for yourself, you are very, very proactive. If there’s something that needs to be resolved, you will make sure you resolve it and sort of be engaged with it. And I think especially before Christmas, it shoved me into a sort of sense of procrastinating and putting things off and saying, Oh yeah, I’ve done enough today. I’ll just leave it, so I became quite sort of lethargic before Christmas
That has changed quite a lot, I would say, over the last couple of months, though, but I’ve not seen things as clearly as this before so.
I think that victim thing, hey, you know, I could say the things going wrong with a house, it always happens to me. You know, I’m a victim there. This is out of my control. And I have to even say, with the fatigue, something happened which did help me a lot, is the health center put me in contact with people who suffered from fatigue, and said, you might find these people very, very useful to talk to.
And I actually contacted the group and started talking to them, and I said, So how long have you been like this for then? And like, the shortest anyone had been like, it was a year and a half. I said, so what is your life like? What do you do? And this sounds really judgmental, but it’s not meant in that way. All of these people identified themselves with someone who’s suffering from fatigue, and that really scared the shit out of me, and I thought, This isn’t going to work.
So what I did is I went away and thought, I need to identify myself with something different. So what I did is every moment of the day where I felt all right, I’d acknowledge it and be grateful for what I had, and what I found is the more grateful and more gratitude I had for what I actually had in those moments of the day, like could be sitting outside in the morning with a nice cup of tea or coffee. Things changed very, very rapidly after that, because I identified with what I had as opposed to with what I didn’t have. And that did make a massive difference. And going to that group and talking to those people scared me senseless, a that did scare me quite a lot, thinking, wow, these people, Hey, this is really awful. But some people have been like it for 12, 13 years.
Dan Munro 47:07
We can see an entire strategy from your mind coming through here. I’ll reflect back what I’ve heard, because now, when you see it, it’s going to be harder to believe that it’s the truth. I see five main tactics being used on you.
First is what we’ll call the too tired label. It might even use the word fatigued. Might use a word like lethargic. There’s maybe some genuine sense of tiredness in the body, some kind of like baseline lack or perceived lack of energy, or slowness or fuzziness. But then your brain calls it something more dramatic, fatigue, too tired. And what your brain is suggesting is that if you were to continue moving, it wouldn’t work. There’s not enough energy. And yet, saying this prior to you collapsing or fainting or literally running out of juice.
It’s like there’s a fuel tank in your car, and like the needle is right on empty. You don’t know if the needle is accurate. You’re trusting the needle rather than going, let’s keep driving until the car stops. So it’s trying to paint a picture that it’s already happened, this crash, this stopping, has already happened. You know, it’s a forecast. I’m too tired, not: I’m tired, and could do it anyway, maybe just a bit slower, a bit clumsier. I can’t do it at all. Is what those labels are really.
They don’t say that directly because that claim’s too bold. You’d challenge it. If they said it is impossible for you to pick up even a single piece of clay, you’d respond with, no I can do that. So it’s more a vague thing, you’re too tired, you’re fatigued, there’s some inevitable crash coming up. Can’t say specifically when or where, but trust me, don’t even bother starting. So that’s technique number one. Over-labeling a sensation.
Now a lot of people say that, like, I’m too tired. I’m like, so if someone broke in here with a gun right now and said run or I’m gonna shoot you, are you like, I guess I’m done then! I’ll bet you got something in the tank, right?
Then there’s this one where I’d say it’s kind of the imposter syndrome. This like I’m not good anymore threat, this idea that you’re going to be incompetent if you try to do this thing. You’re specifically talking like I can’t do clay work anymore. You said something like that. So I guess quite often it comes up as this kind of vague sense that your skills have deteriorated to the point where there’d be some vague catastrophe if you were to try it now, some humiliation or some other failure.
It doesn’t specifically say what, doesn’t need to. It just goes, Oh no, around the corner, don’t look, and you go, okay, as if you somehow lost it. It says again, another thing to just put another weight around your shoulders to go, oh, walking forwards. Gotten so much harder.
So you got too tired. We got you’re not good anymore. You’re an imposter. Now all the best manipulators use a carrot and a stick. So those are the sticks. This is going to go badly.
Then you’ve got the later promise, procrastination. I’ll do this someday. I’ll do this soon, which actually feels good. So look how productive I’m going to be. That’s brilliant of me… in the future. So now it actually feels like you’ve done it because a promise feels as good as doing it. This is actually another tactic to stop you doing it, because all of these things have the same result: you don’t do it now.
Whether it’s a good feeling promise or a terrifying sense of possible rejection, same result is you don’t move. But sometimes it’s important to make you feel like you have moved. Otherwise you’ll get too frustrated and you actually will move. So it has to kind of keep you fluctuating in this range beween too bad or too good.
Another positive one it uses is the kind of that will do, that’s enough button. Now you’ve done enough for today. And there’ll be times where this is actually a reasonable like, yep, you know, 3X Model. It’s time to go into the Release phase. You’ve finished this task.
But what I get a sense more is this is the manipulation of relief. Of like, you’ve earned a nice, big, massive, long break, as in, you’ve earned the right to delay further action for a significant period of time. It’s not the same as you really have earned a rest, you’ve done your good amount today. It feels like it’s coming in earlier than that, and making it like the rest is going to be very long and significant compared to the amount of action you’ve taken. Again, more of a carrot than a stick.
And then there’s another kind of overarching one. The fifth one is just blame, the sense that the locus of control is outside of you.
It’s the house, it’s that guy, it’s the weather, it’s my sickness, it’s these things that I can’t touch. So I’m off the hook. It’s actually kind of a carrot, blame. It’s like it’s not my fault, it’s somebody else’s job.
I read a quote the other day: The eternal cry of the loser is, why me?
So as soon as you say, Why me? Why does this happen to me? Unfairness? Soon as you hear that kind of language in your head, your brain is shifted into the loser identity, which is just to say that in a completely non judgmental way, is it shifted the locus of control to outside of yourself.
What you’ve kind of demonstrated reflecting on what you were saying is it you’ve got a kind of battle between fact and fiction here.
The victim side is very much in fiction. You’re too tired, not true. You’re tired, but not too tired. You know, I’m no good at this anymore. You’re good enough to do something. There’s a lot of lying going on, or not quite lying, but fudging of the data happening in the victim narratives, right? I’ll do it later. No, you won’t, right. That’s enough. No, it’s not. Actually, that’s an incomplete job. Like there’s a lot of dishonesty, a lot of illusion, a lot of imagination. When you say like I’m too tired, it’s imagining that some vague collapse will happen, even though there’s no proof of that.
And then you’ve got this more responsible identity that’s all about facts. I can do this. I have done this before. I could do a little bit right now, there’s nothing stopping me. If I look at my current situation, there’s no reason why I can’t. These are just calling out what is very present, not making anything up, not adding labels, not exaggerating or catastrophizing. Just this is what it is, and this is the right move to make in this situation.
I think it kind of goes without saying that if one is based completely in fiction, one’s based completely in fact, it’s pretty obvious which one is probably the healthiest. The word that I came up with as I was listening to you was unstoppable.
I don’t know if I heard this from someone else or made it up. Think I made it up, but I don’t want to take credit, which is phrase I call let life stop you. Let’s say your brain says you’re too tired. Okay, then go until you collapse. Prove it. Anytime my brain says something, I’m like, prove it. Let’s see.
And this is where we can add a bit of spine to the concept of playing. So rather than playing being this kind of like childlike, free thing, we can put a bit of like balls into it, like competitive, challenging. You said you like to be challenged. You said you kind of like to sit there in the face of a big, you know, polarized reaction to your art. You enjoy being on the forefront of the war. There’s a soldier in all of us wants to be right there in the thick of the combat, right?
Well, this is a way to kind of combine assertiveness and fun. There’s a kind of rebellious, make me, kind of attitude to our own manipulation internally. Your brain says, Too tired. We’ll fucking see about that. Bring it on. You know, they’re like American GI thing going, Oh yeah, dude. Somebody says, later, you’ll do it later. Say, No, you fucking won’t you fucking liar. Do it right now. Do a little bit right now, or I’ll beat your ass.
A bit of aggression, not to the point where actually pressuring yourself to have a big result, but more like you’d be embarrassed not to do a little bit. See, pressure and hassle is you must do this massive thing. You must be back to where you were 12 months ago immediately. And you’re just like, I can’t do it, which is true, right? That’s not competitive aggression, that’s just hassle and pressure, that’s stress, that’s unpleasantness.
It should be more like when you got a personal trainer yelling at you to do one more push up, it’s that kind of internal voice of, come on, get your shit together. You’re going to be proud of this later, doing what’s best for you, dragging you kicking and screaming if I have to. And there’s actually a kind of fun element to that. What are your thoughts as you hear me talk about it like that?
Andy W 57:26
I think that’s really useful. As you were talking, I was thinking of all the different ways in which you could use it. Hey, you could be out somewhere and think, Oh, I could do with talking to that person. I’ll do it later. You just say you’re being a bit of a scaredy cat there. Prove me wrong, and you go and talk to them and make that connection.
Or the delaying one, the procrastinating thing, is like, yeah, you’re telling a lie. You know, you’re lying to yourself there for goodness sake. Do it now.
And I think that sort of way of identifying what’s going on in your head and turning it into an action, because for me, I always want the action. It’s one thing to say, Oh, this is going on in my head now, and if I just sit there, there’s no I’ll just sit there. But if I actually push myself along, and it’s like, almost a humorous aggressiveness, isn’t it? It’s like taking the piss, but in a very, very gentle sort of manner, isn’t it? You know, which is really cool, because that really resonates with the way I am. So I can see that being really, really useful.
Dan Munro 58:35
Yeah, look what the what the victim story wants you to believe is that your sickness and fatigue was a knockout, but the fight’s still going. That’s the bit it’s trying to hide from you, because that was not the final chapter. This thing is still being written, yeah, like you’re only stopped if you stop. I was thinking that Rocky scene, like, I don’t hear no bell. You know that fucking thing?
It’s like being stopped. Being unable, being incapable, being a failure – that can only be validated if you stop going for it. As soon as you keep going for it, the game’s still on. The conclusion is inconclusive. I see this all the time in sports and chess. You’re three quarters in, and it looks like it’s over. And you can see this in very high level sports, the teams or the players who feel that way will then make it come true, you will see they give up. You’ll see they start giving away penalties. They’re not as quick to the ball. They don’t bother with that final tackle. They just kind of back down and let this thing conclude the way they thought it was already over, even though there’s 20 minutes left, and a lot of games have been turned around the last 20 minutes.
I get this all the time playing chess. I think I’m on top of things, and then I blunder my queen, which is, like, my specialty in chess. So give my queen away to anybody who wants it, fucking ridiculous. And I do it. I’m just like, holy shit. I am down now, like this is done, and in my head is like, this is over. And then I’m like, I mean, the game’s still going. Yeah, it’s not over, it just looked bad.
Andy W 1:00:30
And it’s probably only you saying it’s over as well. Hey, other guys not saying it’s over? Are they? It’s just you, which is really interesting.
Dan Munro 1:00:41
In fact, I hope he thinks it’s over, because then he’ll get complacent.
Then I’ve done it the other way too. I think I’ve won the game. And they talk about this in chess all the time, right to the top level, is there’s no such thing as a won chess game. You never think that. As soon as you think that against a good player, you are completely fucked. You have to act like you’re losing the whole time and trying to get your way back up. It’s the same.
You can see this, even in MMA fights, they’ll knock the guy down, turn around, start crowing. It’s like, has he tapped yet? You ain’t done your job. It ain’t finished, mate. Right?
I think about your new identity. You can reframe this, rename it as you see fit later. But the word that just comes up is unstoppable.
There is so much evidence. We can see it with other human beings, with what they’ve achieved with relatively the same bodies, relatively the same brains, is that most of our kind of limitations are self imposed. I mean, this is pop psychology 101, yeah. But what we’re seeing today is what that looks like, fully unpacked, that internal manipulation system that makes you believe you are less capable, far less capable than you’ve already proven you are right, and even that would have been limited.
I first figured this out going to the gym is like, there’s a point when you’re lifting weights. Let’s say you do something you can do a lot of, say, push ups. There’s a point where you think, I’ve done enough push ups. There’s always so many more push ups left in the tank, even if it’s just 20%, before you literally, like lactic acid, can’t make your arms straighten up again. There’s so many more after your brain first says, I’m done.
In fact, if someone had a gun to your daughter’s head, and said she dies if you don’t get another push up done, you’d be amazed how much push ups you’ve got left in you. That capacity, that untapped potential.
So I want you to come up with some kind of banter-ish, challenging phrase that tickles your fancy, which is like a gentle teasing provocation. One of my favorites for myself is, what you can’t do at least [insert tiny amount of work[? So, like, I don’t feel like exercising, what you can’t do one push up? It puts me in this awkward, like, backed into a corner position where I can’t lie to myself and say, No, not even one. I can even do one when I’ve got covid. I mean, it won’t be a good one, and I’ll regret doing it, but I can do one.
It says, like, Oh no, I can’t fucking do clay today. What? You can’t pick up a piece of clay, really, just a little pickup? You know that little teasing, like a big brother wind up type tone, like, basically, Who’s a big boy?
I want you to come up with something like that for yourself. There’s no pressure, no hassle. The only obligation you have is whenever you hear one of these delay tactics being used, you must counter at least once with this provocation. That’s your only obligation. You don’t even have to follow through on what it says afterwards.
The key, the masterful stroke, is learning how to make that thing so small that if you say no to it and walk away, it’ll eat you alive. So small that there is no rational, objective or even subjective fiction you can come up with to justify saying no to that, that no matter how wrecked and exhausted and how bad and unlucky life is and whatever, there’s no way you can genuinely say I couldn’t do that.
If you can make it that small, understanding that that small thing is the gateway to doing more. Once you pick up the clay and it’s in your hands. You’re like, Well, I’m here now, right? So that’s only that’s the size it needs to be. It doesn’t need to be any bigger than that. In fact, if it’s bigger than that, you’re less likely to do it. Yeah. How do you feel about that?
Andy W 1:05:15
I feel good. I can feel like you, poor thing, in a sort of very condescending way that someone would talk to a child who was feeling sorry for themselves, type of thing. So it would hit but it also made me smile as well, if you know what I mean. So it’s sort of telling me, are you a poor thing? So you’re not going to do that now, and then I move. Yeah. I could feel like I couldn’t sit with myself without a voice in my head for very long day. So a slightly condescending tone to the voice, I think, yeah, that sounds good.
Dan Munro 1:05:56
Yeah, we’re gonna find the thing that tickles us. You know, some people would hate that, and they would rebel against it.
The key is, I want you, at least for the next five days in a row, and as often as you feel like afterwards, to review those five manipulative strategies that you’re being subjected to, to remind yourself of them, to keep them front of mind once in the morning.
There’ll be the too tired narrative. There will be the I’m not good enough for that anymore lie. There’ll be the later promise. There’ll be the that’s enough relief kind of reward. And there’ll be the blame game.
One or all of those is going to be used against me today, and when it comes up, I need to respond with this teasing provocation. What really, you can’t do that? You can’t do a little bit whatever it is that you come up with? That’s all you’ve got to remember. That is the gateway to everything that you already have inside you.
You don’t need any more skills. You don’t need more information. You’ve already proven this last year, you’re using all this stuff. It hasn’t gone anywhere, right? It’s just dormant. Just needs to be woken up. So let’s play, play with that, tease yourself, bully yourself a little bit, you know, in a fun way, and see how it plays out.
Andy W 1:07:22
Brilliant. Thanks a lot. Dan.
Dan Munro 1:07:25
Well, thank you for exposing yourself in the best kind of way to all of us, and sharing an issue that not everybody might necessarily relate to fatigue or anything like that, but falling off the horse, struggling to get back up again, believing the old imposter syndrome identity, the loser identity. This is all very, very common, very familiar, and hopefully a lot of people felt quite uncomfortable hearing us talk about it today, for all the right reasons.
Andy W 1:07:58
Cool. Appreciate that a lot. Thank you.
Dan Munro 1:08:01
Cheers, mate.
A Serious Invitation to Coaching
If this post resonated with you, there’s a reason.
Most men who end up working with me aren’t looking for motivation, hacks, or surface-level confidence. They’re tired of circling the same problems with information overwhelm but not implementing successful changes.
They know what they should do. They’re just not consistently doing it.
Coaching is not for everyone. It’s not therapy, it’s not cheerleading, and it’s not about “fixing” you.
It’s a structured, honest working relationship focused on behaviour change, taking responsibility for yourself, and improving the way you make decisions—especially the ones you keep avoiding.
This work is for you if:
- You’re functional and capable, but something fundamental still isn’t working.
- You’re done with intellectualizing your patterns and want them to actually change.
- You’re willing to be challenged, not reassured.
- You’re prepared to take responsibility for your choices instead of waiting to feel ready.
I’ve spent years making these mistakes myself and over a decade helping others stop repeating them. The difference coaching makes is not insight—it’s traction.
What working together looks like
- Clear diagnosis of where you’re self-sabotaging (not just why)
- Practical, uncomfortable actions that build real confidence
- Direct feedback when you drift back into old patterns
- A focus on integrity, not image or performance
If we work together, it will be because it makes sense—not because you were persuaded.
A no-pressure first session
I offer a free initial trial coaching session with no obligation to continue.
You can use it to see how I work, ask hard questions, and decide whether this is something you want to commit to.
If it’s not a fit, that’s fine. If it is, we’ll be clear about what comes next.
👉 Apply for an initial coaching session here
I only work with 8 clients at a time, and only with those prepared to take this seriously. I have 5 intro session spaces available each month – you may need to go onto a waitlist.
Dan Munro
If you’re looking for reassurance of your victim-story, this isn’t it. If you’re ready to change how you actually live, let’s stop messing around.