Episode #449 – The All-Or-Nothing Trap

This is episode 449 of the Brilliant Balance Podcast: “The All-or-Nothing Trap.” I’m going to tell you a little story today to start this episode.

I’m sitting here at my desk kind of late on a Wednesday afternoon as I’m recording, and I have been procrastinating starting this episode like there’s no tomorrow because I’m not sure I want to tell this story. But I’m going to do it.

It’s so embarrassing to me to think that this is still something I’m talking about as not yet done. I really consider myself to be somebody who, when I have an idea, has a lot of initiative and a lot of follow-through. I have grit and stamina. I get things done, okay?

And this thing is a block. There’s just no way around it. It is a block for me. It’s not a block for everyone, but it’s a block for me.

That is: I have wanted to write a book for, let’s say, most of my adult life. I know lots of people harbor this dream as kind of a wispy idea, like, “Wouldn’t it be great to write a book one day?” But I’m not talking about that kind of thing. I have seriously wanted this for so long—in the way where you’ve thought about what it would be called, what it would be about, and who it would help.

I’ve had tons of ideas—candidly, too many ideas. I think that’s part of the problem. I’ve had material. I have 15 years of material that I’ve written or recorded that I could draw from. By every measure, everybody who has a business like mine has a book. This book should exist.

And it doesn’t.

For a long time, I told myself the reason was that I didn’t have time. That was a pretty easy excuse. But I know that’s not true because I spend a lot of my coaching efforts helping people find time for the things they really care about.

I’ve told myself the idea wasn’t ready, or that the market had changed and people aren’t buying books anymore—which isn’t true—or that the timing was off. Any number of things sounded reasonable enough that I could buy myself more time not to do it and still feel just okay enough about it that I didn’t feel compelled forward.

But here’s what’s actually true.

As I’ve thought about this and really tried to diagnose what’s going on, I realized I haven’t written it because I couldn’t figure out how to write it the way I wanted to write it.

I had a vision in my head that was clear and compelling and exactly right. I knew how it would land in the market. It felt so specific and so demanding that I couldn’t figure out how to start without already knowing exactly how I would get to the finish.

And not being able to guarantee that I could get to that place—to the sort of photo finish I’d imagined in my mind, where the book launches and it’s successful and well-received and well-reviewed—if I couldn’t guarantee that, then that was enough to keep me from starting at all.

No guarantee of perfect? Great. Then we just won’t do it. Nothing.

That’s the trap I want to talk about today.

I thought for a long time about what story I wanted to tell. I had lots of little sanitized stories I could have told, but that’s the real one for me. The real place where this pattern is showing up in my own life is the book.

And before you tell yourself this doesn’t apply to you—before you say, “Oh, I don’t fall into the all-or-nothing trap”—let me paint another picture or two of how I see this show up, and then you can decide whether this is something that’s in your way.

Maybe you had a workout routine that you loved before you had kids. It worked, you felt good, and you did it regularly. Then life happened. Maybe you had kids, maybe you traveled a lot for work, maybe work got really busy, maybe you had an injury, or maybe you had a child who wasn’t sleeping through the night. Your routine broke somehow.

And when you tried to get back into it, the version you came back to looked different from the version you’d left.

That gap was troublesome. You couldn’t get to the gym as often. The class was at a time you couldn’t make work anymore. The hour you used to set aside just evaporated.

So rather than doing some modified or abbreviated version of it, you just didn’t do it at all.

By the way, remember the modifiers in workout videos? Before everything went online, there was always a modifier. I never wanted to be the modifier. I think that’s telling.

People who don’t want to be the modifier are probably especially prone to all-or-nothing thinking. Like, “If I’m going to do it, I’m going to do it all the way.”

Another place I see this show up a lot is meal planning. I’ve talked to so many women—both back when I had Nourish as my first business and now in Brilliant Balance—who feel full-out shame over meal planning.

You have a vision of what feeding your family well is supposed to look like. Meals are planned on the weekend, there are fresh ingredients, you’re having something different every night, everyone’s nutritional needs are met, and everyone’s taste preferences are met.

And when you run the numbers on what it takes to do that in any given week—the planning, the shopping, the executing—you think, “I can’t do it.”

So you just don’t do it.

There’s no modified version. It’s like, “If I can’t do it right, why bother?”

That’s the all-or-nothing trap.

And I think this has a really high cost for so many of us. There are a lot of dreams dying on the floor because we couldn’t get all the way to the level we wanted, so we’re just not doing them.

The technical term for this is dichotomous thinking. Psychologists have a name for this pattern because it’s that common.

I think it was first identified by Aaron Beck, the father of cognitive behavioral therapy. When he was looking at cognitive distortions, this idea of black-and-white thinking—all or nothing, no middle ground—was one of the primary distortions he identified.

And I think the uncomfortable truth is that this isn’t even a flaw in our system. It’s a feature. It’s part of how our brains were designed.

So we’re fighting a bit of an uphill battle when we try to get ourselves to the other side of all-or-nothing thinking.

I want to talk about a few causes of this pattern so you can maybe have some self-compassion for how you got here in the first place. Once we understand how we got here, we stand a better chance of figuring out what to do about it.

The first cause is evolutionary.

Our brains are wired for binary thinking because it’s fast. We make decisions like A or B, good or bad, safe or dangerous, all or nothing.

In the context of actual survival—when the question was whether that shadow in the trees was a predator—nuance wasn’t helpful. We didn’t want to second-guess ourselves. We needed a quick binary call. Those were the people who survived.

The brains that started looking for the full spectrum of possibilities probably became dinner for whatever predator was lurking in the trees.

So we’re walking around with this ancient survival hardware in our brains, trying to navigate the complexities of modern life. That hardwiring keeps defaulting to all or nothing, A or B, black or white, this or that.

If you really look around at how often you establish what I’d call a false binary—where it’s not actually a binary decision, but you’re treating it as one—you’ll start to see the roots of this pattern.

The second cause has less to do with evolution and more to do with how you grew up.

This is the classic nature-versus-nurture idea. The nature part is biology. But the standards you internalized growing up matter too.

Some of us were taught—sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly—that excellence mattered. Effort without excellence? Who cares? Maybe you heard things like, “If something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well.”

Maybe it came from a parent who praised results over effort. Maybe your teachers only noticed the A’s. Maybe you had a coach who only cared whether you won.

That can lead us to absorb the message that if we can’t do something exactly the way we want to do it, maybe we just shouldn’t do it at all.

Maybe you see this pattern in one of your children: “If I can’t be great at it, I’m not even going to try.”

It can keep us from trying new things, building skills, or learning. It’s deeply rooted in a fixed mindset, where anything short of perfect feels like failure.

High achievers are especially vulnerable here.

Research shows that about 70% of high-achieving professionals use achievement to get the validation they didn’t receive growing up.

When you ask high achievers why they drive themselves so hard, many say it’s because achievement gives them the validation they lacked.

So the standard we chase starts out external, but eventually becomes internal. It becomes how we measure our worth.

We begin seeking only the things we know we can do really well because we want that shiny gold star of approval.

And we avoid the things where we’re not sure we’ll get it.

The third cause is something called socially prescribed perfectionism.

This one is especially insidious, and it’s the one I see most often in the women I work with inside Brilliant Balance.

It’s not just holding yourself to an impossible standard. It’s believing other people expect that standard from you too.

You project your own expectations onto other people.

“What will people think if I only go for a 20-minute walk instead of a 90-minute workout?”

“What will my family think if I serve something simple for dinner instead of an elaborate meal?”

The imagined audience in your head is holding you to a standard that your actual audience almost certainly does not have.

I see this over and over again. Women take their own internalized perfectionism, project it onto other people, and then blame those people for expectations they may not even hold.

That imagined audience has enormous power over us. We’ll do a lot to win the affection of the crowd.

But it can also keep us doing nothing if we think we risk doing something imperfectly in front of them.

All three of these causes—our biological wiring, the standards we internalized growing up, and socially prescribed perfectionism—lead us to the same trap: all-or-nothing behavior.

So let’s go back to the book.

What do you do to get some freedom from this? Is it possible?

When I looked honestly at what was happening, I had to admit it wasn’t about time. It just wasn’t. I have time for the things I truly want to do, or I make time.

It wasn’t about having the right idea either. I think I was waiting for a guarantee that it was exactly the right idea, and I wanted to know before I started that what I produced would live up to my vision.

You can hear all those patterns in that, right?

And of course, that guarantee doesn’t exist.

Anything worth doing requires taking a chance without knowing for sure. It requires tolerating uncertainty.

You can’t know what a book will be until it’s written.

And the only way to find out if you can do it well is to do it imperfectly first.

I’ve talked about imperfect action in my coaching programs for a long time, and it’s often a mind-opening idea for people who are prone to this pattern.

So here’s what I started doing.

I started taking my own advice.

I don’t have a published book, and I’m not announcing one today. The “all” version would be a published, well-received book that lands on a bestseller list and makes me proud.

That’s the version I’ve been holding out for.

But I’ve started.

I’m no longer paralyzed, doing nothing, and telling myself it’s not the right time for another decade.

Now I have an outline. I have chapters scoped out. I have a direction. I have a voice and a tone for how I want to write this thing.

I’ve written a few things that are actually fleshed out. I started a Substack, which got me back into the practice of writing.

I had drifted away from writing because podcasting had taken over. Podcasting is easy for me. I can talk all day.

Writing is different. Writing is crafting. It’s choosing words carefully and precisely.

I was really out of practice, and honestly, a little scared to get back into it.

But the Substack was like dipping a toe back into the water: “Do I still know how to do this? Can I write something I’m proud of?”

And a couple of those essays made me think, “Yeah, I’m proud of that.”

So there’s something in between having nothing and having a published book that I’m proud of and people are buying.

And having something in the middle has its own gravitational pull. I feel magnetized toward it.

Action begets action.

Starting—even imperfectly—creates momentum that doing nothing never will.

When we do nothing, we’re dealing with inertia. An object at rest stays at rest.

But as soon as you start doing something—anything—in the direction of the dream, momentum starts kicking in behind you.

And that is a very powerful force.

So the question I want you to sit with is: What is your book?

Not your literal book, but your version of this. What is the thing you haven’t done because you couldn’t figure out how to do it exactly right?

Maybe it’s the exercise routine. Maybe it’s meal planning or figuring out how to get good food on the table.

What’s the project, practice, or goal you’ve been putting off until you could show up perfectly?

And what exists between that perfect version in your head and nothing?

How could you take a few steps in the direction you want to go?

That middle ground is real. It’s holy ground.

It’s not settling. It’s not giving up on excellence. You’re just moving toward it.

And it’s actually the only path that gets you anywhere.

The perfect version, if it ever arrives, is refined from the imperfect version you were willing to start with.

I don’t need a published book today. I need the practice of writing back in my life. I need a direction.

I’m happy that I have an outline and some chapters scoped out so that when I sit down to write, I know what I’m writing toward.

That’s a lot better than staring at a blank page and a blinking cursor—which honestly makes me shudder.

So if you’re thinking about one of these projects or practices—maybe it’s cleaning out your closet, maybe it’s the garage—I know there’s something where you’ve said, “Because I can’t do this perfectly, I’m not going to do it at all.”

I want you to find something between all and nothing and take a step in that direction.

Very powerful forces rise up to meet you when you do.

If this episode resonated with you, great. I’m delighted. And I want you to go take action.

And if someone came to mind while you were listening—someone who needs to hear this—forward the episode to them. Send them a text and drop them the link.

Sometimes hearing it from someone other than you is what gets the process into motion.

So many of us get stuck. If this is the reason you see yourself—or someone you care about—getting stuck, put the resource in their hands.

Let’s see if we can help each other find middle ground and build some momentum.

All right, that’s all for today, my friends. Until next time, let’s be brilliant.