The bargain we make with staying the same

There’s a specific kind of stuck that happens for a lot of people, myself included.

You know exactly what needs to change and you even agree with the reasons to do so.

But for the life of you, you can’t seem to make yourself do it.

You might be told that this is a matter of lacking discipline, or that you need to muster up the courage to get out of your comfort zone. But I’m not sure that’s accurate.

The problem is that knowing and wanting don’t always move together. You can reason your way to a conclusion about who you need to become. And you may fully understand the consequences of staying the same. I’d bet that you can even give someone else great advice about the exact change you’re struggling to make. Yet you might still find yourself stuck, unable to execute consistently, on the days that matter.

As I’ve been coaching leaders and working through this myself I’ve found there is another distinction at play. Sometimes we want the outcome of change long before we want the experience that change requires.

For instance, we want to be more strategic and visionary, but don’t want to give up being the person controlling the daily operations.

We want our teams to become more independent, but we don’t want to watch them do something less optimally than we would.

Sometimes we want a different life, but don’t want to disappoint the people who were comfortable with the old one.

Intellectually I’ve understood this for years. But it took seeing who was paying for my own resistance, to understand why knowing what to change mattered much less than doing something about it.

The sociologist Allison Daminger has spent years studying who does the invisible thinking in a household: who notices what needs attention, works out the options, makes the call, and follows up to see it through. Across the couples she’s studied, that thinking tends to fall disproportionately on one partner.

And in recent months, my wife surfaced to me that this has been her burden for far too long.

For years, I’d shown up fully as a father and husband in every way that involved presence and affection. But she carried nearly all of the thinking: the noticing, the planning, the remembering, the follow-through.

She said, “I need a true partner in the parenting, not just someone who fills the gaps after I can’t get to them.” For the 13 years we were married before having our daughter, we were great teammates but able to accommodate each other’s quirks and preferences without having to think and plan ahead in the service of anyone but ourselves.

Reflecting on the past 7 years of raising our daughter, I realized that being there for them emotionally and financially wasn’t the same as bearing the cognitive load of co-parenting in a household. So when she said that, I absolutely agreed with her. And the irony wasn’t lost on me; I’d helped clients through versions of this exact gap. Indeed, I wanted to be the kind of husband who carried more of that weight. And so I promised I would.

But often I fell back into my old patterns of being available for help when needed, rather than as a teammate thinking ahead about what we all needed to keep evolving as a family.

And I failed not because I stopped agreeing with the need to change, nor out of a lack of caring. It was simply because what I wanted in theory was different from what the change required of me in practice. It meant now noticing things I’d previously blocked out. It required assuming responsibility without being asked, and carrying mental weight that someone else had become very good at doing.

Because my wife handled so much, and because I rarely disagreed with her decisions, I had convinced myself our arrangement worked. But not creating friction isn’t the same as sharing the load.

Agreement is easy when you’re not the one holding the weight of the outcome. And now as much as I thought I had it all covered, doting on my daughter and being an attentive husband for 20 years, I had to become a beginner again to see what true co-parenting while in a marriage was like. That meant doing things I had been leaving to someone much more competent at it than me.

When any of us challenge ourselves to change, we often look for some profound insight that will finally unlock the secret to doing it. But we often already have the knowledge, we just haven’t examined the bargain that comes with staying the same.

So, we need to ask ourselves, “what does this version of me still provide?” And “what discomfort does it allow me to avoid?”

And perhaps most importantly, “who is paying the price for the gap between what I say I want and what I’m actually willing to do?”

Then when you do decide to change, don’t be surprised if the motivation comes after the action, not before.

For my part, that means taking responsibility for household and activity planning before it feels natural. For people at work, an example might be to delegate before you’re completely comfortable. Or to speak up at that meeting before you’ve found the perfect words. Just don’t wait for the wanting to catch up with the knowing.

We often become comfortable with a new way of being, by accumulating evidence that we can survive being that person. And sometimes the motivation we’ve been waiting for becomes clearer when we stop asking: “Why don’t I want to change?” and start asking a harder question: “Who is paying the cost for me to stay the same?”

Nihar Chhaya coaches senior leaders on navigating transitions that come with business, leadership and personal success. 

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