The Goal You Keep Saving for After the Holidays
Q4 is the Sunday Scaries for the entire year.
You can feel it the minute October hits. The holidays are coming, the calendar is already full, and last January’s list is still open in a tab on your desktop. Some of it got done. Some of it quietly died. And one thing on there has been sliding forward for months, getting its own little “after the holidays” sticky note every time it comes up.
Here’s the high-achiever twist: you probably won’t call that fear. You’ll call it a busy season.
Busy is the most respectable hiding place there is
Nobody questions busy. Busy gets sympathy. Busy gets “oh my god, of course, how are you even functioning.” If you’re the one running the holiday logistics, closing out the quarter at work, and remembering every teacher gift, busy isn’t a lie. It’s just not the whole truth.
Because notice which goal keeps moving. It’s almost never the hardest one on the list. The hard-but-boring things get done, because you are very good at hard-but-boring. You can white-knuckle a spreadsheet. You can push through a project you don’t care about. You’ve been doing that since you were twelve.
The goal that keeps sliding is the one you actually want. Starting the thing. Pitching the idea. Asking for the raise. Signing up for the class where you’d be a beginner in front of strangers.
That’s the one you could actually lose. If you try and it doesn’t work, it doesn’t just fail. It says something about you. So it stays in the tab, safe and untested, “after the holidays.”
What the delay is protecting
Inside the Haus we call this the Ask step: what is this pattern protecting you from, and is it still doing its job?
Usually the delay is protecting a version of you who hasn’t failed at the thing yet. As long as it’s on the list, you’re still someone who is going to do it. The minute you start, you’re someone doing it badly, at first, the way everyone does anything at first.
That’s a real cost. I’m not going to pretend it isn’t. But look at what you’re paying to avoid it: another year of the tab staying open, and another January where the same line gets copied onto the new list.
Name the fear in one sentence
Here’s the whole assignment, and it’s small on purpose. Open the list. Find the goal that has been “after the holidays” more than once. Then finish this sentence, out loud or on paper:
“If I really go for this and it doesn’t work, it would mean ___.”
Don’t edit it. Don’t make it sound smart. The first thing that comes out is usually the true thing, and it’s usually a little embarrassing. That I’m not as talented as people think. That my dad was right. That I spent years on the wrong path.
Naming it doesn’t make it disappear. It does make it smaller. A fear in one sentence is a lot easier to look at than a fear dressed up as a calendar.
Then take the smallest real version
You don’t need to launch anything before Thanksgiving. You need one move small enough that it happens this week. Email the one person. Book the one call. Write the first ugly paragraph. Put twenty dollars down on the class.
Small, real, and slightly uncomfortable. That’s the Act step. You’ll know you picked the right one if your stomach drops a little and you also kind of want to do it.
The holidays will be busy either way. The question is whether you walk into January with the same tab open.
Send this to the friend whose January list is still open on her desktop. And if you want help catching your pattern while it’s happening instead of three months later, take the free Pattern Read. Six questions, about three minutes.
Liz
