123. You Know Why You Do It. So Why Can’t You Stop?

Holly Toscanini: Have you ever had a moment of complete clarity about yourself? Not the kind where you hear somebody else's story and think, that sounds familiar. I mean the kind where you suddenly see your own pattern for exactly what it is. You realize you keep asking other people what they think because getting their approval feels so much safer than trusting your own intuition. You realize the reason you keep preparing and researching and refining isn't because you need more information, but because getting started is going to make the possibility of failure. Real. Maybe you've known for months or years that you need to have a conversation about something that's no longer working. And for a moment, that insight actually feels like change. You think, there it is, I finally understand why I do this. Now that I can see it, of course it's going to stop. And then the situation comes around again. Someone asks you for something, and you say yes before checking whether you actually want to do it. Or you open the application, look at the deadline, and decide you need to think about it for one more week. You begin to have the conversation, and you feel the other person's discomfort, and you immediately soften what you were trying to say. And suddenly you're doing the exact thing you now understand perfectly well. Now that experience can be especially discouraging for a self-aware woman because you do know better. You've read the books, you've listened to the podcasts, you might have gone to therapy, hired coaches, filled Journals and taken courses and even underlined enough meaningful sentences to qualify for some kind of honorary degree in personal self-growth. You can explain the pattern. You might even know where it came from. So why on earth can't you stop doing it? That's what we're talking about today: the gap between understanding a pattern and responding differently when the pattern is actually activated. Because insight can show you the pattern, but practice is what changes your response to it. Welcome back to How to Lose the Weight. I'm Holly Toscanini. Over the last 12 weeks, we have talked about recognizing your waiting patterns, reconnecting with yourself, moving before you feel completely ready, and building self-trust through evidence. And that is important work. But there's a moment that comes after the insight, after the podcast episode, after the journal entry, and after the very sincere promise that next time is going to be different. Real life happens. And real life has a way of making everything you understood while sitting peacefully on your couch considerably more complicated when another human being is standing in front of you waiting for an answer. Today, I want to talk about what's happening in that moment, not why you developed the pattern, not what the pattern says about your childhood, your personality, your attachment style, or even your astrological chart. I want to talk about the moment when you have a chance to repeat that familiar response or practice a different one. Let's begin by giving insight the credit it deserved, because insight matters. You can't interrupt a pattern you can't see. But before you recognize the pattern, you may have believed you were simply indecisive. Now you can see that you keep reopening these decisions because you're waiting for certainty. You might have believed you were unusually accommodating, and now you can see that you automatically agree because somebody else's disappointment feels so much more painful than your own resentment. And you may have believed you were being responsible by continuing to research, but now you see that preparation has become a socially acceptable hiding place. And that awareness is real progress. It gives you language and it can help you stop treating every repeated pattern as proof that there's something fundamentally wrong with you. But Insight has a specific job, and its job is to make the pattern visible. Its job is not to automatically replace the pattern with a new response. And that's where a lot of us get frustrated. We assume that once we understand why we do something, we're not going to do it anymore. But knowing and doing are not the same skill. You can watch a documentary about strength training without becoming any physically stronger from learning about it. And you can understand the whole mechanics of playing a piano without being able to sit down and actually play anything. You can definitely understand that you're allowed to disappoint somebody and then still find yourself explaining a perfectly reasonable no, like you're presenting evidence to a jury. That new response requires a lot of practice. And the old response has already had a lot of practice. You have practiced keeping the peace and looking for reassurance. You've practiced waiting for the ideal moment and thinking through every possible outcome. You might have even practiced some of these responses for decades. So of course they're automatic. Of course, they feel comfortable and familiar. And of course, they show up before that wiser, more intentional response has even found its way to your lips. That doesn't mean the old pattern is permanent. It means recognizing it is only the beginning. Remember, insight matters, right? Most of your insight happens when you're in a relatively calm place, like listening to this podcast during a walk or talking through something with a really good friend. Maybe even when you're writing in your journal on a Sunday morning, feeling clear and committed to becoming a woman with excellent boundaries. That pattern, however, tends to show up under pressure. It shows up when someone's not exactly happy with your answer. It shows up when the outcome isn't guaranteed, and when you're tired, rushed, afraid of being judged, or aware that taking action is going to make that situation real. That's why you can understand something completely in one situation and still struggle to act in another. Understanding that you tend to avoid difficult conversations is different from sitting across someone whose feelings might be hurt. Understanding that you need to make a decision is different from making one when you can't guarantee that it's going to be the right decision. The pattern becomes powerful in that moment when discomfort shows up. And this is the part I really want you to hear. The goal isn't to eliminate the discomfort before you respond differently. The goal is to practice a different response while some discomfort is still present. You can say no and still feel a little guilty. You can make a decision and still wonder whether another choice might have been a better one. And you can get started without feeling 100% confident. You can definitely take a first step without getting unanimous approval from your internal board of directors. The presence of discomfort doesn't mean you're making the wrong move. It means you've reached a place where the old pattern normally takes over. When we try to change a pattern, we often make the target just way too big. We might say something like, I just need to become more confident. I just need to stop people pleasing. I need to trust myself and my intuition. And those all may be meaningful goals, but they're difficult to practice because they don't tell you what to do in real time. Instead, I want you to find one specific moment. Where does your understanding break down in real life? Maybe you know you need to set a boundary, but the pattern takes over whenever a specific person questions it, right? Maybe you've already made a decision, but that pattern takes over when that doubt sneaks in and you start asking everybody you know whether you've made the right choice. The useful question isn't simply what pattern do I have? The more useful question is at what exact moment does the pattern usually win? Is it when somebody's pushing back? When you imagine you're being judged, when you can't control the outcome, maybe when you have to choose without complete information, or when you realize that moving forward means letting go of another possibility. That specific moment is where the practice belongs, not across your whole life and not across your entire personality. In that specific moment. Because there's a condition hiding under that delay. And once you identify the moment, you ask yourself, What condition are you waiting to meet? What patterns are built around an unspoken condition? Maybe I'll start when I have enough time to do it perfectly, or I'm 100% positive it's gonna work out. Or when the condition sounds reasonable. That's why it works so well. The problem is that many of these conditions can't be met before you take action. You feel confident after you get started, not before. Clarity becomes so much sharper when you interact with reality. And a decision can be thoughtful without being 100% risk-free. Another person's approval can't be guaranteed. And doubt is going to continue to creep in after you've made the right choice for you. It happens. And if you wait for those conditions to disappear, waiting becomes the new plan. So instead of asking, how do I make myself feel completely ready? Try asking, what am I requiring myself to feel or know or guarantee before I allow myself to move? Then ask, Can that condition be met before I act? And yeah, sometimes the answer is going to be yes. Maybe you truly do need more information, or the timing is genuinely wrong, or you do need some rest. But sometimes the honest answer is no. You can't know exactly how the conversation's gonna go before you have it, or whether the project is gonna be successful before you begin. You can't guarantee that nobody's gonna be disappointed by your decision. At that point, more waiting isn't giving you better information. It's just postponing your encounter with that uncertainty. This is where the micro pivot becomes especially useful. A micro pivot isn't a smaller version of your entire life transformation. It's one manageable opportunity to respond differently at the point where your old pattern usually takes over. Let's suppose you've been postponing an important conversation. The micro pivot may not be having the entire conversation today. It may be Sending the message that gets that conversation scheduled. Suppose you keep researching a project instead of getting started. A micro pivot could be spending just 20 minutes making the actual thing without opening another tab to investigate the best possible way to make it. Or suppose you've already made a decision, but you keep going back to it and rethinking it. The micro pivot may be deciding that you're not going to ask another opinion for the next seven days. You'll allow the decision to stand long enough to learn from it. The action should be small enough to do and meaningful enough to produce some information. And that last part really matters because the purpose of the micro pivot isn't to prove that you can complete something. It's to prove or really help you discover what actually happens when you don't obey the old pattern. You say no, somebody's disappointed, but the relationship survives. You submit the application and feel exposed and vulnerable, but that feeling goes away. You stop reopening that same decision and your mind keeps generating questions. But you don't always have to find the answers. That's the evidence. And evidence has a different weight than encouragement does. You can tell yourself for years that you're capable of handling somebody's disappointment, but one experience of actually handling it teaches you something that encouragement can't. Repeating that action creates confidence. Beginning before you feel confident gives you proof. You can write trust yourself on a pink sticky note. One decision you allow yourself to make and live with is Begins building the capacity, the sticky note was just politely suggesting. There's another part of practice we need to talk about. You won't respond differently every single time. You might recognize the pattern and still repeat it. You may agree to something you didn't actually want to do, and it's possible that you're gonna spend the afternoon researching something instead of just getting started. The old response might take over before you catch it. And when that happens, your next move Isn't to turn that lapse into some kind of verdict about yourself. It's to become more specific. What happened? At what moment did the pattern take over? What were you feeling? What condition were you waiting to meet? Was the step too big? Were you exhausted? Did somebody push back? Did you interpret discomfort as evidence that you should stop? This isn't an opportunity to build a case against yourself. It's just information. So the practice here is what did I intend to do? What actually happened? And what did I learn? What is the next honest move? That cycle, awareness, action, evidence, adjustment is how an insight becomes something you can actually use, not something you merely understand. So here is the question I want you to sit with this week. What do you understand about yourself that you're still struggling to act on? Don't search for the most impressive answer here. Just choose the one that came to your mind first. What is the decision you know you need to make? What's the conversation you know you need to have? What's the step you keep saying you're going to take when you feel more certain or calm or ready or confident or clear or whatever? Then answer these three questions. First. Where does my understanding break down in real life? Second, what am I requiring myself to feel or know or guarantee before I move? And third, what's one small but honest action I can take without waiting for that condition to be met? Then take the action and pay attention. Not just to whether it went well, but pay attention to what you learned from this experience. What were you afraid would happen? Happened. What actually happened? What did you discover you could tolerate? What information became available only after you made the move? That's how practice begins. Because remember, insight matters. It gives you a way to see what's been happening. But insight isn't the finish line. At some point, that lesson needs somewhere to land. One decision. One conversation. Setting just one boundary, making a new beginning. Maybe it's a small promise you keep, even though part of you is still pretty unsure. You don't necessarily need another explanation of why you wait. You may need one opportunity to notice the moment when waiting takes over and practice a different response. Now, before we finish, I'd like to hear from you. What is one thing you already understand you need to do, but you're still not doing it? You don't need to give me the whole backstory, just one sentence is enough. I know I need to fill in the blank. But I keep waiting because fill in the blank. Leave me a comment or send me a DM on Instagram at Holly Toscanini. I read every single response. Now I won't share your name or personal details, but the patterns you tell me about are going to help shape the conversations we have here over the next several episodes. Because I don't want to spend the next few months giving you more sophisticated explanations of problems you already understand. I want us to talk about where the waiting is happening in your actual life and what might help you make the next honest move. Next week we're talking about the difference between working on yourself and working with yourself, because you can spend years treating yourself as an ongoing improvement project and still struggle to trust yourself when a real decision needs to be made. We'll talk about what changes when the goal is no longer managing yourself into becoming somebody better, but to understand how to work with the woman who's already here. I'll see you next time. Bye for now.