Why Do I Hold Myself Back When I'm So Close?

On the almost-there state, and the value quietly choosing it

Recently, I hit a wall with my own content. I had a plan, a whole series mapped out week by week and built from my own journal entries. And I had zero motivation to write any of it.

Being pissed there was no motivation wasn't helping. So before I could spiral into the "I suck at this" dialogue, I stopped trying to make the plan work and went looking for what was actually alive in me right now.

What I found was a voice memo I had forgotten I recorded.

How a forgotten voice memo showed me I was holding myself back

Three weeks earlier I had sat down to journal about what I wanted to bring into existence that month. These weren't just things like extra money. They were projects I have been working on that can't seem to generate the momentum that cultivates the community or the connection I think I should have at this point in my career.

Almost immediately after I wrote them down, I realized how I was keeping myself safe. In the memo I said I was navigating certainty to keep myself in an almost-there kind of state. I was holding back.

I titled it "Keeping me safe" and forgot about it until I went looking for a different recording of a conversation with some colleagues.

Almost there. That stopped me. Like, who says that? I guess me, I do!

Is staying almost there self-sabotage?

If you've ever gotten close to something you really want and somehow stalled right before it, here's what I've come to understand. Staying almost there is often a choice being made by a value you haven't noticed yet. For me, that value was safety.

Almost there is comfortable. You know what to expect. You stay busy, and busy feels like movement. Some people call this self-sabotage. I'm not sure that's what it is. It looks more like a value doing exactly what it was built to do.

I have always said, "Anything worth doing should be fun." Maybe hard, but for me also fun. So when it isn't fun, my motivation completely walks out of the room. That's become my signal. When the fun disappears, something else is doing the choosing.

What happens in the moment before you decide?

These days I find myself in the middle much more often, the moment between something asking me to choose and the choice itself. That moment is where you can see the value that's actually guiding the decision.

There was a time when I couldn't find language for it. After years of studying it, I finally gave it a name, and here is how I define it:

Creative Adaptive Intelligence is the human capacity to make a decision, in real time, from the priority or value that is active in that moment, under uncertain conditions. It is active when a value or priority is shaping the choice, not the state a person is in while choosing.

You can read more about it here.

It's a capacity we all use, whether we notice it or not. Safety was shaping my choices. I just hadn't noticed what it was choosing for me. Safety is a real value, and it has protected me plenty of times. Yet this time it was keeping me from the very things I was trying to accomplish.

What is implicatory denial?

The sociologist Stanley Cohen described three kinds of denial in his 2001 book States of Denial. The one that stopped me is implicatory denial. The facts stay intact. What gets quietly set aside is what those facts are asking of you.

That's exactly what I was doing. I wasn't arguing with the facts. I wrote the list and knew exactly what it was asking of me. I just quietly avoided what it would ask me to feel and change, and staying almost there let me do that. Once it had a name, it lost some of its grip.

Naming it doesn't make me wrong for doing it. It gives me information I can actually use.

How do you notice what you're quietly avoiding?

For me, it took hearing my own voice say "almost there." The Implicatory Denial Check-In inside the Creative Return Toolkit gives you that moment on purpose, with a few yes-or-no questions that help you see what you've been keeping yourself safe from.

Once I could see it, the priority shifted. I just sat with noticing what I was silently choosing, allowing myself to unpack what I was doing without noticing, underneath what I was actively asking for. And what happened next felt more hopeful than the angst I had been feeling. What I wanted to bring into the world started to matter more than staying comfortable.

In the memo, I asked myself this: "What is it I hold that is valuable that needs to come along as I reach for the momentum?"

Can being productive keep you stuck?

Hearing that memo again, I realized the weekly content system I'd been trying to perfect for the past year had become its own comfort zone. I was using a productivity model that kept an uninspiring content arc going while keeping me distracted with busyness. That busyness felt like movement, but nothing was really manifesting as a result. And it was taking the place of the joy and inspiration I like to feel when I'm writing.

So I'm experimenting. I'm setting aside the weekly arc, even though I crafted a beautiful one that would have lasted seven weeks. I'm keeping the Sunday Cup of Joy newsletter, because I love the little community cultivated over there. And when life catches me off guard, or a reflection leads to a celebration, I'm going to say it, without organizing it or packaging it into "content."

Honestly, I don't think I have a writing problem. I think I might be trying to write from a place I've already left.

What does choosing scared over comfortable look like?

The decision that showed up, the one I had to make before any of the actions, was this: I want to scare myself with the chances I want to take. I feel like if I am more scared than comfortable, I might be getting close to what I actually want.

Around the same time, an opportunity showed up that wasn't even on my radar. A big, nervous-adrenaline kind of yes to something completely in my wheelhouse: I was asked to emcee KINETICS, Baton Rouge Gallery's premier live art auction. If I had known it was even an option, it would have been on that manifestation list. If I am being honest with myself, in so many words it actually was.

I was honored to be asked to basically be the hype girl for one of my favorite organizations in my community. And the nerves were exactly the kind of competitive vibe that made me want to knock it out of the park, both for my manifestation list and for the gallery team that trusted me with such a big ask.

Is choosing safety ever the right choice?

I say all of this also knowing that maybe safety is exactly what you need to be choosing from right now. That's allowed. Choosing from safety as a value isn't a bad thing. It just feels different when you can see it's the thing doing the choosing, and that it might also be holding you back.

What I'm sitting with, and you're invited to sit with it too:
Where am I almost there? What is keeping me safe? What am I noticing about the middle?

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Time to return before you reach.