Why Execution Feels Harder Than Planning and How to Overcome It

Why is it easier to come up with ideas than it is to actually work on them? Why does goal planning motivate you but

execution overwhelm you? And why is researching your idea so enjoyable and fun yet it's impossible to start? And

why despite being so intelligent and smart, you can't figure out how to get yourself moving. So, in this video,

you're going to discover how your intelligence is actually working against you. A vital skill set needed for

success you've completely missed. And it's something that schools have trained you to ignore. And this skill is

something that every professional athlete focuses on. And it's something they've trained for their entire career.

And we can steal it. But first, let's rewind. What happened as you became more intelligent over the years? Well, it

probably looks something like this. So, let's look at the screen. Your ability to analyze and strategize became your

superpower. research, reading, and planning. All very enjoyable, and you probably

progressed pretty quickly. You unconsciously allocated more energy to it because you got because you got

better at it. And it's it's kind of fun when you're when you're seeing improvement. And so what happens is

you're putting in lots of time and effort into this thing. Study environments are really fertile ground

for you to actually get better at this, which you're exposed to at school, college, and even at work.

And as time went on, you double down, not realizing all of this came at a significant cost. And when it comes time

to executing, when you actually have to do the hard thing, emotions flood your system,

risks, the danger, the the fear of failure, judgment, and it's hard to think clearly because you've got this

going on in your head, some kind of failure. Why? Because in this state, you're actually performing. You're not

studying. And it's not just athletes, musicians, and professionals who experience this. This fear, the sweaty

palms, nervous, anxiousness, and this stressful state is something you'll experience whenever you need to do

something that's of significant importance to you. And this is where I always got stuck.

So, have you ever spent years planning something that never shipped? Well, I actually started my YouTube channel in

2006. You'll see the date here and you can see you can actually check that live if you want. I didn't start posting

videos until 2019. So, I had all of this time planning, researching, thinking about

things and I didn't find a way to make progress. And it's and hopefully in this video you

you'll totally see why this happened. And it's something that I've tried to work through. And what I noticed it was

like having two versions of yourself. This version called I called a strategist over here and the performer

over here. The strategist is highly skilled at planning. An intelligent deep thinker, great at strategy and

complexity. The performer executes the plan. Well, at least tries to experiences performance nerves and feels

the risks of actually doing the thing. What happens over time? The difference in skill set is quite is

quite apparent. What h if you follow the green line, you see the strategist over time gets better and better at a faster

rate. It is like you're at a level 9 or above. Meanwhile, your performer side of you is is around

has a very very low capability. And I actually show that it starts higher because when you're when you're a baby,

you you generally just do because you don't have the ability to think. So what actually happens is you uh you you you

get worse. You know, you get worse over time and especially as your strategist gets stronger. Now, I'm going to put

these little coaching insights. It's a bit of a reminder for me and also something I can share. I had a client,

Katie. She was really successful at launching company products but couldn't even make her own website

which was really interesting and she spent a long time designing and developing her her website but but

couldn't actually click publish. The result is a combination of both of them. Progress depends on the strategist and

the performer and there's no point extending the strategist because they're already extremely good or because

they're already really really competent. The focus should be improving the performer. This is this is vital because

without a performer, you won't get any results. From a coaching perspective, I've rarely ever seen a an overdeveloped

performer. I just see hundreds of people who've completely maxed out their strategist.

This is completely unacceptable because you won't get any results. So, what you want is you want a strategist and

performer to be improving over time. And you want to try and get both of them to a level 9 or above. Now, obviously, this

is an arbitrary scale, but you can you should be able to feel it. The clients I work with, they struggle with this all

the time. And in fact, the more intelligent they are, the harder this is. I actually had a client Helen who

was who was trying to publish her work online and she was completely paralyzed at the thought of posting on social

media to the point where she'd make so many excuses to figure um to get around it. And what we did was use this process

that I'm going to go through in this v in this video to to unlock her capability and to train this performer

side of her so that she could do it. So, we'll go over this. We'll go over her story a bit later in the video. And it

actually resulted in her getting into the local news, which was crazy considering how terrified she was. And

it shows up absolutely everywhere. So, that was one example, but I tend to see this with all my clients, and I've

worked with loads of them. Now, this is all part of a system I like to follow called the dark system. We're in stage

two, and it's all about initiating and taking action. You want to know how severe this problem is for you? Uh, I've

got an assessment that scores you. There'll be more on this later, but you can check it out in the description.

Just remember that. We'll come back to it later. What is interesting about this guy? You

should be familiar. Roger Federer. Well, he is a champion and he's won many, many titles. He also has this strategist and

performer inside him. Now we can think about the strategist in the preparation stage and the performer in the execution

stage. So we can divide them into two. So in the strategist side, this is where he will be doing lots of his practice

and training drills to iron out all of his weaknesses and to develop a strong ability to perform on stage later on

when he has to compete. And this is him playing in a tournament. This is the performer stage. So we really want to

divide these two sides of you like completely. The strategist develops plans for the

performer. Now I really want to emphasize this. This is not developing plans for someone else. This is

developing plans for the other part of you. Right? We'll come on to why this is so important in a bit. They're extremely

skilled at thinking. And a good job is an effective plan. So a a plan that will actually that will get executed. The

performer is a doer and that and their their focus must be around managing their emotions on the stage. They're

affected by what's around them, the environment, and you can imagine the weather in this case. A good job is

taking that plan that the strategist develops and executing it. The tendencies here is the strategist likes

to create complex plans that look amazing on paper. Think flowcharts, mind maps, complex, articulate pages and

pages of planning. Now they're also planning while while fairly relaxed. Now this is a blind spot

which we'll come on to later. And they often get frustrated when the plan is not executed how they imagine it to be

executed. Now the performer on the other hand they get overwhelmed by complex plans. They get frustrated with

unnecessary detail and they procrastinate when they get that frustration. Right? So that's when

they'll be going on YouTube scrolling on Tik Tok and everything like that. If they can't work together, there won't be

any success. So, we can imagine your output or your kind of usefulness or effectiveness. This is what you think

you're going to be. This is the reality. And what we want to do is we want to imagine you are this person here. This

is the performer. You want to help this person out, right? Otherwise, this will just happen forever

and you'll be stuck here. And you've probably lived there, so you know what I'm talking about. You're already

familiar with this setup. When you get to the, you know, when you get to this point, when you're trying to do

something, posting on social media, going for a job interview, applying for jobs, building a product, selling a

service, anything like this, all you can imagine is this. The, you know, the metaphor is here falling falling off

this little rope bridge. You experience fear, uncertainty, self-doubt, lack of confidence, imposter syndrome, and

overwhelm. And these are really, really powerful emotions. Like, we don't want to experience that unnecessarily.

So, we will tend to avoid at this point. Now, I'll just introduce you to a mental trap you probably fall into. It's the

fake action trap. What tends to happen is when you're avoiding, you don't want to just leave it in a vacuum. You will

do other things to make yourself look busy. So, you've got a viable excuse. You'll be on YouTube. You'll be reading

books. You'll be looking at self-help. Um, you know, self-development content, Tik Tok and planning.

This is something I observe with lots of clients and it's it gets quite creative what people get up to. They often get

stuck in knowledge acquisition cycles. So, buying more courses, reading more books, watching more YouTube videos. I

mean, even things like this video. So, just be mindful about this. Make this your last one. Shiny object syndrome. So

when you see a new project come online and you think right I want to do that one it looks more funing

your planning forever building portfolio projects are trying to increase uh the number of times I've seen this people

who are trying to build a portfolio and they keep working these projects I mean they could go on indefinitely right you

can always polish up a project it could always be better um and that's before they actually apply for jobs look for

perfect job descriptions but not reaching out. So these are examples of this perfecting their work but never

shipping it. So if you've built a product, you've built an MVP or something like that. Now a coaching

insight I tend to um now here's another coaching insight I often hear. I need to take one more course before I do the

thing. Strategist never knows when to actually stop. This is a really big problem. You end up in this what I call

the infinite strategist loop. you plan something, you'll research it. You'll find some flaws in what you uh in your

plan and you'll tweak it and then you'll plan again, you do more research and so on and it just ends up going on and

you'll end up in that situation which was very similar to me with YouTube. And that's why I got stuck there for over 10

years. It's crazy. So, how do you break your patterns and start taking action? And what is the

actual problem? And why can't I just do it? Why is it so much harder than it should be? Well, what happens is at this

point we feel this this kind of spotlight effect. It's like everyone's watching us. So, it makes all of these

things 10 times worse. Now, projects are often 95% ready and totally good to go. That's what I see

when people come to me. But the performer side of you is terrified of judgment. But this just won't change.

You'll always you'll always have some version of this. At this point, what we often see is what

I call emotional saturation. It's where when you're trying to do a thing, you've got the task, but the amount of energy

that's being consumed is this much. The rest of it is all of this fear, all of these emotions, and it causes you to

lose clarity of thought, which is a really big problem. So on the surface a simple straightforward action just step

forward becomes extremely difficult. So this is what it feels like at the edge. Now if you've ever tried to do a

cliff jump or jump into a deep water or a bungee jump, this is what you'll feel like. Walking suddenly becomes

impossible. Remember who this is. It's the performer. It's not the strategist doing

this. It's the performer. At this point where you're emotionally saturated, your brain has reduced

capacity to think. Emotions will flood your system and you'll feel overwhelmed. You'll get mental fog, anxiety, and

stress all at this moment. You will you will be much much less effective. And this is really important to remember.

The performer never feels ready. It's not a bug. It's a feature of performance. That's why these

professional athletes and performers they do so much training to ready themselves for performance because they

know that there is this drop. They train the brain under emotional load and not avoid it. Remember that. So what are the

conditions for success? Well, when it well let's look at when it works. What we really want is we want most of your

energy on the task, the green bit, and a healthy amount of fear, emotions,

but not overwhelming. So, how to deal with it? We need to first accept you are in this performance

state, this new mental state. Now, the the crazy thing is what what I notice is with a physical thing like a

sport or a bungee jump, it kind of makes sense. We have a good intuition around this. We understand we're performing.

But when we want to write a video or write a script or write a blog article or send an email to someone or apply for

a job, we don't realize that we're doing the same thing. We're actually performing. And that's why we feel in

the same way. So, we should treat it that way. We want to go from performance sorry want to go from preparation to

performance. Think about shifting from strategist to performer. So the preparation stage this is when

you can leverage your intellectual capabilities and you can think and strategize but you should be thinking

and strategizing to help the performer perform not just for the sake of planning performance. This is going to

be extremely emotional and you'll be you and you will be at the mercy to the experience. Be careful. Knowing the

state you're in will help with the solutions. What to do here. Don't fight. Work with it. Remember, you are

performing. There's no way around this. Assume your emotions will flood your system. There's no way to get around

that. Assume you will be much less effective at the jump point. create a system that moves you in this

reality. So, we're not going to remain in this delusion where you're, you know, you're in this classroom like this

proverbial classroom where the strategist is really comfortable and safe. No, that's not a reality. The

reality is you are on that cliff face and you have to walk over that rope bridge. So, we have to create a good

plan that will prepare you for that situation. Remember who you're working with here.

So, think about upgrading the performer. So we'll think about this like a performer upgrade framework. What we're

trying to do is your poor performer here is a level zero or one and you've just left them there, right? So first we want

to map the performer. We want to figure out where they are because if we can understand where they are, we can figure

out what they need to improve them. Now you may have seen some kind of version of this graph, right? But we can

actually use this. Now you got your performer here. Where are they? Right, let me just quickly talk you through

this over time as we there's a line somewhere here where if you are perfectly on it, it's the right balance

of being progressive, challenging and engaging. And this this is exposure over time. Yeah. So at the beginning you want

small exposure and as you get better you stretch yourself and you can be exposed to more and more more and more of the

activity, more and more difficult things. But if you give too much too soon, you'll feel overwhelmed and

anxious. If it's not enough, you'll probably felt this too. It's not motivating. And if you're fairly

ambitious, you won't like being here. I don't like being here, right? But I also hate being here, too. When you create

these really big plans done by the strategist, they often because they're in this relaxed state while they're in

the classroom designing their plans, uh, making it look really pretty, your big plans just go up this scale

here. you are forgetting that it's going to be really difficult for the performer.

Now, we know this happens in real life. I've just taken example of a firefighter. The strategist side is

coming up with all of the training drills, the training plans, giving them exposure at appropriate

levels and giving them clear and precise instructions to allow them to be pre to allow them to be um prepared for when

they have to perform. and they don't have all of that time, it's going to be under due stress.

It's going to be all about what the plan says and provides feedback to the strategist. It identifies blind spots

and weaknesses too so that you can go back and train and you want to go through this kind of cycle here.

We have to internalize these two characters and build a strong and healthy relationship with them.

But what is the mistake we usually make? What normally happens is the complex plans looks good on paper, no empathy

for the performer, and they plan with these really big goals in mind because they just imagine if they their part of

the job is to make a really fast easy plan to get to the end goal, not helping the performer.

They get annoyed at the performer when they don't finish the thing. And they will punish the performer by making them

feel really guilty. The performer side gets really overwhelmed by the complex plans, tries

but gets stressed because they can't execute the plan. They make errors due to how difficult it is and that all

mixed with the emotions they're experiencing and they get frustrated and they'll just avoid the plan. So that's

actually what happens. They'll end up back on YouTube scrolling and then they'll the guilt cycle will will

clearly spiral downwards. This is a recipe if you imagine these two people as having a relationship in a way. Well,

you've got a recipe for a toxic one there. There will be no learning, no progress, and no no growth. And just

think about this. We're talking about your internal state. So, that's what's going to happen.

Hopefully, you can start to see that this is really an opportunity to show genuine and and a practical way of

self-compassion. Everyone talks about self-compassion. Well, not everyone, but some people do. And but this is a this

is a practical way of doing it. one where you can you know you won't be going through such heavy guilt cycles

and you can actually work together right now I know this is an internal state so you have to imagine this but you can

work together and you can get the outcomes you want think about it like this when they're working together the

strategist is saying I've got your back performer I'll make a plan that will be good I've ad I've added tweaks based on

your feedback the last time so I could clearly see you were nervous so I've made it even simpler for you try this

version. Let me know how it is. There's this internal feedback loop. The performer is thanks for making it

easier. Let me have a go. I'll try again. I'll think those update uh sorry, I think those updates will probably

help. I'll let you know what works and what doesn't. Now, I don't know what you might be thinking. I'm crazy at this

point imagining these two characters in your imagining these two characters in my head. This has been extremely helpful

to me. This allowed me to break a lot of my personal barriers and it is a framework I use with lots of clients

because it works if you do it right. It takes a bit of work to set this up though. Now we got to think about the

performer needs. What are they? Well, usually they need some simple rules. They need repetitions under pressure.

They need very very clear cues here. And they need to have emotional anchors to keep them grounded. Now, I'll go over

these and more on this in the next few videos. It's going to be really important, but it goes beyond this

video. I will start though. So, to get you started, we're going to talk over the first one. How a plan, how to create

a plan that actually works. So, remember this graph here and remember this person here planning.

It is easy to make elaborate and big grand plans, but we don't want to do that. It overlooks the reality of

implementing the plan. Remember complexity increases overwhelm. So we want to stay away from complexity.

We need to do the opposite of what you want to do. We need to simplify to reduce overwhelm. You can think your new

scope as a strategist is to design plans that are perfect for your performer with where your performer is right now. Now

there is a full training. Hopefully, I'll link it somewhere here and I'll be doing some more videos on this uh coming

up in the next few weeks. It must be designed for the person executing. So, this is the performance

part of you. It must be easy to execute and there should be no ambiguity because you don't want the performer saying,

"Wait, did they say left foot or right foot first?" Right? No distractions, nothing around you. You want them

totally focused on the, you know, on the mission. Here we're going to talk about simple rules very quickly. How do you

create simple rules? Like what what are simple rules? They need to be clear and precise actions. Extremely high clarity.

I'll give you an example in a minute. Low mental effort. So make it easy. They must solve a bottleneck in your plan.

Keep you really really focused here. And it should move you in the direction of your goals. So it's like a critical

action. It's something that is is it's not just a random action. It's going to get you in that direction. So actually

requires a lot of design and thought here. It should act as a catalyst for a series of behaviors. I will explain what

that means in a minute. So some guidance, think about like literally writing this

out. Your rule wording should be fairly concise. It shouldn't be more than 12 words or so. It should not describe or

explain a problem. It is just an instruction. That's how simple it should be.

Um, the rule results in the desired behavior. So, I've actually written, it's just behind my head here, critical

action. Example, you want to start writing more. Now, this could be um, you know, for a

story or it could be for an article online or for social media. The critical action is to see words on the page.

Yeah. Because that will mean that you're moving towards your goal. The bottleneck is you probably have too many ideas

floating in your head like how what I should write, will people like it? and it'll make you get overwhelmed. So the

simple rule in this case may well be open a blank word document and press keys. That's what it says behind here.

So I'll give you a quick line example. So we go back to Helen earlier. She wanted to start writing and putting

herself out there. She wanted to put it on a blog and social media. The original plans totally overwhelmed her. Setting

up a blog, website, Instagram, Tik Tok. I mean, I don't know if it overwhelms you now if you're in this category. It

was horrendous for her. What we did is we focused on opening a Google doc and typing and and during our coaching

sessions we actually I got in a session we shared screen and I helped her actually write the words out just to get

going. That's how much handholding the performer sometimes needs to get them

started. uh you know the crazy thing for her was we started this way and I even uh I hadn't actually created a like a a

quick blog to publish and I I searched on Google during the session and we we uh we opened a Google blog account while

she was writing this and then we we actually went to publish it. We copy and pasted it in and published it. It was a

really really big deal for her and it was like wow oh I've actually got a published blog that that can be seen and

I was like yeah totally and then we were able to uh scale this up really slowly going up that curve of exposure versus

time eventually onto Tik Tok and then onto Instagram and we did voice changes and was it kind of cartoon avatars and

then she eventually got into the news. She built a following up and it was it was kind of crazy, but we we had to

really we had to be really delicate with working that performer up to that point, never triggering the overwhelm and

always doing something that was progressive toward her goal. It required quite a lot of creative thought and

figuring out how to do this, like for example, the the voice changes and um the uh the a you know, the cartoony

avatars. We had to kind of come up with ways to do that to make her feel safe. So, if you're wondering how bad you're

stuck here, I've got this assessment. You can go and check it out afterwards. It shows it. It will help show you

exactly where you're stuck. Not just about initiating action, but maybe in the direction like where you're trying

to go. It will also help you understand what you need to start making progress. Okay, hope that was useful and I'll see

you in the next video. Lots more to come.