Note: This piece draws from my original ideas, research, hooks, and metaphors. For editing and some wording, I’ve used AI tools trained on my own books and style, always blending technology with my hands-on curation and oversight. Thank you for being here—Jade.
The word I am waiting for
I have been doing first visits for close to thirty years now, and somewhere in the first fifteen minutes there is a word I am listening for. Not because I am clever. When it shows up I already have a rough sense of how the next month is going to go. And I have been right about it often enough that it stopped being interesting years ago and turned into something closer to sad.
They sit down and tell me about the wedding, or the physical where the doctor got quiet, or the photo somebody tagged them in. People get these folks completely backwards. Nobody is sitting in my office because they are confused about food. No one has ever needed me to explain protein.
Then it comes out, usually as a throwaway, usually with a small laugh attached so it lands softer. “I know what to do. I just... I should be doing it.”
Should.
I would bet you have said it three times already today and did not hear yourself say it. I should train today. I should eat better. I should call my mom back. I should do better. I should be better.
Read that list again and watch where it travels. It starts out as a task and four rungs later it has become a verdict on you as a person.
I am not above any of this. I said “I should be writing” about a book for roughly two years. I said it in conversations, at dinners, to anyone who asked me how it was going. For those two years the book did not exist. Every time I said it I was doing damage I could not see.
One foot on the gas, one foot on the brake
Trying to change yourself through motivation is like driving down a street with one foot on the gas and the other one resting on the brake.
Sit in that car with me for a minute, because I want to work this all the way through with you.
Start with the engine, because your engine is fine. It is the same engine everybody else got, and it is making power right now, and you are genuinely pressing the accelerator. Some days you are standing on it with everything you have.
And the entire time, the other foot is down on the brake at maybe fifteen percent. That is nowhere near enough pressure to stop the car and far more than enough to ruin it. The problem is that you cannot feel it. The pedal has been under that foot so long that its weight is just what driving feels like to you now.
So you move. You do actually move. You get somewhere for a few weeks, and it costs you three times what it costs the guy in the next lane. So you quietly conclude that he was built better than you.
Then comes the smell. Then the heat coming up through the floor. Then the pedal goes soft and the car stops answering the way it did on Monday, and by week three you are sitting at the curb telling yourself the same thing everybody at that curb tells themselves. You need more discipline, and you need to want it more.
Translated, that means press the gas harder. With your foot still on the brake. On a car that is already smoking.
I have watched thousands of people do exactly that, and I can count on one hand the ones who ever looked down at the other foot.
The brake pedal is real, and it is about the size of a grain of rice
Here is where the picture stops being a picture.
There is a piece of tissue sitting deep in your head whose actual day job is to cut power to your motivation. That is wiring rather than mood, and it is roughly the size of a grain of rice.
To see what it does you need one fact about the brain first, which is that the brain is a prediction machine. It spends most of its time guessing what happens next, constantly, about everything, and then checking its guess against what actually arrives. Almost everything you feel in a day is the result of one of those checks coming back matched or unmatched.
When you expect something good and it arrives, a cluster of dopamine cells fires in a place called the ventral tegmental area. You feel clear and ready and like yourself.
When you expect something good and it does not show up, that little grain of rice lights up instead. It is called the lateral habenula and most people have never heard of it. What it does is reach over and suppress those dopamine cells directly. Motivation drops. Mood darkens, and the brain files the entire episode away as a direction to steer away from next time. Masayuki Matsumoto and Okihide Hikosaka mapped this in primates back in 2009, and the work has held up.
The habenula is your brake pedal. It sits in your skull and its one job is to take your foot off the gas. It fires on exactly one condition….. a promise that did not come true.
Why “should” pulls the pedal
“I should train today” is a prediction. Your brain does not receive it as a wish or a value or a nice thing you said in the car. It hears a claim about the future. Something is going to happen in the next several hours, and the machinery is now holding that claim and waiting to check it.
Then it is nine at night, you are on the couch, and the thing did not happen. Your brain logs that as a negative prediction error and puts the foot down on the pedal.
Do it once and nothing measurable happens. Do it twice a day for eleven years and you have trained one of the most reliable circuits you own, because your brain has quietly worked out that your announcements about yourself no longer carry information. And something that predicts nothing eventually stops getting funded.
I tell clients their brain has started calling bullshit on them. That usually gets a laugh, and about four seconds later it stops being funny.
And notice where the punishment lands, because this part is genuinely cruel and almost nobody sees it. It does not hit you at the moment you fail. It hits you the next time you go to want something. You reach for that old feeling of let’s go, the one you had at nineteen and could summon on a bad night, and the account is empty. You did not lose your motivation because you are lazy. You lost it because you have been writing checks in your own name for a decade and the bank stopped clearing them.
The circuit is not gentle about this either. When it gets chronically sensitized it produces a state of continuous disappointment that feels, from the inside, exactly like hopelessness. Christophe Proulx and colleagues have done serious work connecting that same structure to depression. Which points at something I find genuinely hard to sit with. Some of what a person experiences as having no motivation, as caring about nothing at all, may have less to do with their character and more to do with the brains stuck brake pedal.
The research on the habenula is about reward prediction in general. Nobody has ever run a study on the word should. Connecting the two is mine. It comes out of thirty years of watching who quits and who does not.
The swap
The fix is one sentence, and probably not the one you would guess. Let me clear the three wrong ones out of the way first.
It is not “I want to,” which is softer but still a prediction, still checkable, still a promise waiting to be broken by a Tuesday.
It is not “I could,” which your brain ignores completely. You did not commit to anything, so there is nothing for the checking machinery to hold.
And it is definitely not “I am,” which is where the entire affirmation industry parks its car and where I think real damage gets done. Say “I am a person who trains” when you have not trained since March. You have just handed your nervous system a claim it can disprove before lunch. Every single day becomes evidence against you in your own voice. You have made the error even bigger and arranged for it to repeat daily.
The swap is this: I am learning.
I am learning to train consistently. I am learning to eat in a way that actually works for my body. I am learning to be someone who follows through on what they say.
Sit with why that works, because the reason is mechanical rather than inspirational. “I am learning to train consistently” makes no claim about today, contains no outcome, and offers Thursday nothing it can falsify.
Miss a workout inside “I should train” and you have broken a promise. Miss the exact same workout inside “I am learning to train consistently” and you have produced a data point in a process that is still true. You said you were learning. You are. The prediction held, so the pedal stays up.
One of those sentences generates a prediction error in the brain every day of your life. The other one aligns with exactly what is happening. No failure, no habenula gets triggered.
No, this is not a lowered bar
The objection comes back every time, usually from the most driven person in the room. It is always some version of the same question. Doesn’t that let me off the hook?
Watch what actually happens instead.
Somebody running on “should” perceives failure and drops straight into shame. Shame does not motivate anybody, it is just the brake with a brick sitting on it. They spend Wednesday recovering from Tuesday. By Friday the whole project has become a referendum on their character, and by the following Wednesday they are finished. They will tell you they lost their motivation. They are describing the symptom and missing the cause entirely.
Somebody running on “I am learning” misses the identical Tuesday and gets curious about it instead, which is a completely different afternoon than the one the other guy is having. Why that day. What was different about it. What time did I get to bed, what happened at four in the afternoon, who called. There is no wound that needs tending, so all of the energy goes into the information, which is the thing that actually changes the following week.
The learner is not trying less hard than the should-er. The learner has both hands free for the problem instead of keeping one hand pressed against a wound.
Where the grip actually comes from
Now I want to take this out one level, because “should” is the symptom rather than the disease. Swap the sentence and leave everything underneath it alone and you will drift back inside of a month.
I grew up watching my parents grip money like it was the last oxygen on the planet.
Not because they were greedy. Because they were scared. Money in our house was a tension running underneath almost every conversation, and there was never quite enough of it. The not-enoughness shaped what got decided and what never got risked. I absorbed all of it the way you absorb everything in childhood. Without choosing it, and without knowing it was happening to me.
Decades later I had made millions in business, and then could not seem to keep it. Then I made a lot again. Then I lost a lot.
In the years of rebuilding that followed, something came clear that I have not been able to un-see since. The stretches when I had released my grip were the ones when things flowed. I was absorbed in the work itself, honestly curious about it, and unattached to any particular number. Opportunities showed up. Decisions came out better and the energy was clean.
The stretches when I was white-knuckling for a result were the ones where everything stalled. My parents’ fear had reactivated inside my own nervous system and I was chasing and forcing and checking. I still have to be reminded of this pattern regularly, sometimes by people who work for me, which is not a comfortable sentence to write.
Same shape in romance. When I knew what I wanted and said it plainly and genuinely did not need it to land a particular way, things came together easily. When I gripped, when I needed another person to confirm something about my worth, I either pushed them away or stayed far too long. Years too long, inside something that was wrong from the first month.
In health the physiology makes the whole thing even cleaner. Stressing over every calorie, weighing daily, turning every meal into a referendum on your discipline. None of it has ever worked, for me or for anybody I have put my hands on professionally in three decades.
The opposite is not the answer either, because not caring is just the other ditch on the same road. What works is a thing in the middle that is more alive than discipline and more grounded than surrender. In You Grow Me I gave it a name. Confident detachment is the conviction to know who you are and the wisdom to understand you are not in full control. Plus the humility to let things unfold without interfering with them.
“I am learning to” is confident detachment compressed down into four words, which is exactly why it works. You stay completely attached to the process and you let go of the verdict.
The story underneath the grip
You cannot logic your way into this, which is the part that frustrates smart people most. Confident detachment grows out of who you already believe you are, so applying it as a technique will feel like acting until the underlying belief actually changes.
In the Next Level Human framework I call the subconscious decisions you made before you had the equipment to evaluate them MUD, for Misguided Unconscious Decisions. They are early survival strategies that hardened into identity. Not character flaws. Old operating systems still running in the background, still quietly deciding how tightly your hands close around things.
Somebody whose MUD says money is scarce and dangerous will grip financial outcomes with a fear that lives in tissue rather than in argument. That is precisely what I inherited. That fear was accurate and adaptive on the day it formed. It was also about thirty years out of date by the time I was running companies with it still installed.
Somebody whose MUD says you are lovable when you perform will grip relationship outcomes like each one is a hearing on whether they get to exist. The person who does not text back becomes evidence for a story that was written before they could read.
And somebody whose MUD says your body is the proof of your worth will say “I should be better” about a missed workout. They mean something much older and much worse than a workout.
You get out the same way every time. Rewrite the story at the level where it was originally written, rewire the emotional charge it still carries in the body, and retrain the nervous system into a new baseline. Until all three of those happen, detachment is just suppression wearing a nicer shirt.
What the research says, and what the Stoics said first
None of this is fringe, which tends to surprise people.
Starting in the 1980s, Edward Deci and Richard Ryan at Rochester built out what became Self Determination Theory, now one of the most replicated frameworks in motivational science. Their consistent finding is that people who pursue a goal for intrinsic reasons outperform the people chasing the reward or the approval or the outcome. By intrinsic they mean the work itself matters to you and the process fits who you are. Not marginally. Meaningfully, across populations and domains.
The finding that should bother you more came when they took people who were already intrinsically motivated. Then they layered strong external pressure and reward on top of it. Motivation went down. The grip did not help anybody. It got in the way.
Newer work by Inbar Katz-Vago and Moti Benita on mastery goals versus performance goals says the same thing from another direction. People oriented toward getting better at the thing itself report more sustained motivation and better results over time. People locked onto the outcome, the number, the win, the proof, report more anxiety. And a paradoxical drop in the very drive they were trying to manufacture.
Two thousand years before any of that, the Stoics had already drawn the map, and they drew it in three columns. What you control completely is a short list: how you think, how you choose, how you act, the quality of your attention. What you influence partially is longer, and it holds your income, your relationships, your health outcomes, your reputation, and what other people end up making of you. What you do not control at all is everything else, including timing and markets and other people’s choices and the biology you were handed at birth.
Most of the chronic low-grade suffering I see in people comes from filing items out of the second and third columns into the first one. It is the kind of suffering they have normalized so completely that they no longer report it. From living as though outcomes are yours to command instead of yours to influence.
Which sounds obvious sitting there on the page. It reads like something you already knew. And I have met almost nobody who actually lives inside of it for more than a few weeks at a stretch, myself included.
The same pattern in three places
Start with money. The decades when I was least focused on the financial outcome and most absorbed in building something worth building were consistently my strongest financial decades. The years I chased money directly, with my parents’ scarcity at the controls, were the hardest ones. There is cognitive science underneath that. Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir showed that financial anxiety eats working memory and bandwidth. It degrades your decisions in precisely the domain you are most anxious about. The grip costs you the exact capacity you need to get the thing you are gripping for.
Then relationships. Years ago I met a woman named Annmarie. We clicked immediately and I was genuinely attracted to her, so I told her so, clearly and directly. That is an easy thing to do when you are not attached to a particular answer coming back. She told me honestly that she did not feel the same way about me. I did not make it mean anything about me and I let it be exactly what it was. Annmarie is now one of the closest friends I have. I sometimes sit with everything that would have been lost if I had gripped for the other outcome. If I had pushed or sulked or gone cold and turned her honest answer into a report card on me.
And then training and food, which is where I have the most data and where the pattern is almost embarrassing in how consistent it is. The people in my practice who stress hardest about changing their bodies are almost never the ones whose bodies change the most. Chronic psychological stress raises cortisol, wrecks sleep architecture, pushes cravings toward sugar and fat, and promotes storage of the exact tissue they are trying to lose. So the obsession over the outcome is biochemically working against the outcome, which is a genuinely mean joke for the universe to play on somebody who is honestly trying. And the mirror image, not caring at all, does not work either. What works is being absorbed in the practice of eating and training well, for the quality of your day and the function of your body. Your worth stops hanging on what the scale said this morning.
Six steps, and none of them are affirmations
These are operational. You can start today.
1. Decide what you actually want. Not what the culture script says you should want, and not the thing you inherited at somebody else’s kitchen table. What is genuinely true for you, examined and owned by you. Write it down somewhere you will see it.
2. Check that it lines up with who you actually are. If it does not, the confidence half of confident detachment will be hollow and you will feel that hollowness every time you try to use it. You cannot practice this around a goal your MUD has already turned into a hearing on your worth, so rewrite that story first and then make the move.
3. State it clearly, without performance. In training that means committing to the process plainly rather than to a number by a date. In food it means naming the actual standard instead of vaguely hoping to do better this week. In relationships it means saying what you mean with no agenda underneath it. No hedging, no vague hoping, clean declaration.
4. Then watch what happens, without interpreting it. Does the response match what you put out? Is there movement toward you or away from you? Did the training actually happen this week or did it not happen? Let the data come in before you decide what any of it means about you, because deciding early is the doorway the should walks back through.
5. If it moves away from you, let it go confidently. Not bitterly, and not as a performance of letting go, which everybody around you can see through anyway. Let it go because what genuinely fits who you are does not require chasing, and what requires chasing turns out to be a poor fit almost every time.
6. Only ever chase your best self. Never chase a result, a person, a number, or an outcome. Chase who you are becoming, which happens to be the single item on that list you actually control. It also tends to deliver most of what you were chasing in the first place.
Run all six through your standards, your boundaries, and your daily consistency, and you have the entire recipe. The daily patterns are what make your identity legible to your nervous system. Which is another way of saying your body believes what you repeatedly do and ignores what you repeatedly announce.
Back in the room
So we are back on the first visit. Somebody has just told me they know what to do and they should be doing it. Now they are waiting for me to hand them a plan.
I do not give them one that day. I take a single word off them and hand them three back, which is not what anybody drives across town for.
Some of them think it is soft, and a few are visibly annoyed with me, because they came in for macros and left with grammar. Then about a month later the message arrives, and it is almost always a version of the same thing. They did not get more disciplined. They stopped fighting themselves, and the fighting turned out to have been most of the work all along.
You are not failing. You are in process, you are learning and growing, and the day you actually believe that sentence is the day the pedal comes up.
You never needed more gas.
PS: If you want the whole method, the rewrite, the rewire, and the retrain, that is what I built the Next Level Human coaching program to do. It is the difference between knowing this and living inside of it. You can look at it here: https://www.nextlevelhuman.com/human-coaching
References
Katz-Vago, I., & Benita, M. (2024). Mastery-approach and performance-approach goals predict distinct outcomes during personal academic goal pursuit. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 94(2), 309-327.
Matsumoto, M., & Hikosaka, O. (2009). Representation of negative motivational value in the primate lateral habenula. Nature Neuroscience, 12(1), 77-84.
Mullainathan, S., & Shafir, E. (2013). Scarcity: Why having too little means so much. Times Books/Henry Holt.
Proulx, C. D., Hikosaka, O., & Malinow, R. (2014). Reward processing by the lateral habenula in normal and depressive behaviors. Nature Neuroscience, 17(9), 1146-1152.
Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68-78.
Teta, J., & Gough, E. (2023). You Grow Me. Chapter 5: The Ultimate Relationship Superpower.