You Already Know What To Do. So What’s Getting In The Way?
By Liz Schehl and David L. Zimmerman, MSc, CPC
The calendar has your outreach call block on it — it has been on the calendar for the past 6 months when you decided you needed to block that time to commit. And when Tuesday morning arrives and the reminder pops up on your screen, something happens. In fact, lots of things start to happen…. but it is not your first prospecting call of the day.
First you check email (because you want to make sure that prospect didn’t reach out). You get a notification of something that needs to be addressed today and decide to knock that out before you don’t have time. You refill your coffee so you can focus when you start to make your calls. You do a quick glance on social media…
Next thing you know, the morning has reorganized itself around everything except what was supposed to happen at the top of it. Now, the time block has passed, the day has moved on, and the internal accounting begins. Tomorrow will be different. Earlier in the week. A better structure, a different system, a cleaner run at it next time.
The people this happens to are, almost without exception, among the most driven in the business — and it shows up regardless of tenure, regardless of production, regardless of how many times someone has already resolved to change it. Which is exactly what makes it worth understanding, because if this were a motivation problem or a knowledge problem, the commitment would have held by now. Most people in this business know exactly what they need to do. The question that tends to get skipped over — in training programs, in coaching conversations, in the planning sessions where everyone agrees on the right priorities and then watches them dissolve — is why doing it keeps feeling so hard.
What the Science Is Starting to Tell Us
Dr. Anna Lembke, a psychiatrist at Stanford and one of the leading researchers on dopamine and addiction, describes the brain as operating on a pleasure-pain balance — a seesaw perpetually seeking equilibrium.[1] When we experience something pleasurable, the seesaw tips one direction. The brain, wired to protect homeostasis, responds by tipping it back, and the result isn’t a return to neutral but a brief dip below it, a moment of discomfort that follows every high. This mechanism was designed for survival. In a world without smartphones and an endless supply of frictionless distraction, it worked exactly as intended. The environment has changed faster than the brain has, and the average professional today is exposed to more dopamine triggers before 9am than previous generations encountered in a week — every notification, every scroll, every small hit of digital acknowledgment tipping that seesaw, every tip recalibrating the baseline a little further. Over time what once felt neutral begins to feel uncomfortable, and the hard things — the calls, the process changes, the difficult conversations, the bold moves — carry a weight that has nothing to do with their actual difficulty and everything to do with a nervous system that has been slowly recalibrated away from them.
There is a second mechanism worth understanding here. Research by social psychologist Roy Baumeister on what he called ego depletion showed that the capacity for self-regulation draws from a limited reserve, one that gets progressively drawn down as the day goes on.[2] The more decisions and acts of resistance we encounter throughout a day, the less capacity we have to choose the harder option by the time it matters most — which is why the prospecting block scheduled for late afternoon rarely happens, not because commitment has faded but because the brain has been making choices all day and defaults to the path of least resistance when that reserve runs low. Willpower applied at the moment of resistance is the least reliable strategy available, and yet it is the one most people are implicitly relying on.
This is not a character flaw. It is biology operating exactly as designed in an environment it was never designed for.
The Reset Is Real — And It’s Within Reach
The same science that explains why the hard things feel so hard also points toward a way through, and it doesn’t require a personality transplant or an extraordinary amount of willpower — in fact, willpower is largely beside the point. What Dr. Lembke’s research suggests is that the brain is far more adaptable than we tend to give it credit for, and that the seesaw can be recalibrated. A consistent three-to-four-week period of resisting the easy dopamine — the reflexive phone check, the avoidance of the hard conversation, the default to familiar and comfortable activity — is enough to begin returning the brain to homeostasis, to reset the baseline, to make the hard things feel progressively less like what they feel like now.
There is a related concept in biology called hormesis — the finding that small, repeated doses of stress don’t just tax the system but strengthen it.[3] The body and the brain, when exposed to manageable discomfort consistently over time, don’t just recover but adapt upward, building a higher threshold for what registers as threatening or overwhelming. This is the science behind the runner’s high and the mechanism underneath every discipline that requires showing up before it feels good, and it is directly applicable to the behaviors that drive growth in this business, because the calls and the asks and the difficult conversations that feel disproportionately hard right now are not inherently harder than they should be — they feel that way because the brain hasn’t been asked to do them consistently enough to treat them as normal.
The more effective approach is what behavioral scientists call a commitment device — a decision made in advance, before the moment of resistance arrives. The prospecting block scheduled the night before. The call list built before the inbox gets opened. The structure put in place when the brain is fresh and the path of least resistance hasn’t yet presented itself. It isn’t about forcing yourself to do hard things — it’s about designing an environment where the hard thing becomes the default and avoidance becomes the path that requires more effort.
How It Shows Up — And What to Do About It
Understanding the science is one thing. Recognizing where it lives in your own practice is another, because default behavior doesn’t look the same at every stage of this business, and the first step toward changing it is being honest about which version of it belongs to you.
The New Advisor
Everything is uncomfortable at this stage — that’s not a perception problem, it’s accurate. The skills are still developing, the relationships aren’t built yet, and almost every high-value activity requires doing something that hasn’t been done enough times to feel natural. The brain will find every available alternative, and there is always something that feels productive — emails to organize, materials to review, systems to set up, training to complete — all of it legitimate, and none of it aligned with the work that actually drives results. What makes this stage particularly critical is that the patterns forming now are not just habits but the beginning of a neurological baseline, and the advisor who learns early to sit with the discomfort of the cold call, the ask, the rejection, and returns to it anyway, is not just building activity but building a brain that will eventually treat those activities as normal. That window is open right now, and the commitment device matters enormously here — structure the hardest activities first, before the day creates its own gravity.
The Mid-Career Producer
This is the stage where default behavior becomes the most invisible — and the most expensive. There is real success here, a book of business that validates the approach, relationships cultivated over years, a solid operational and client engagement process that works. And that is precisely what makes it so difficult to see, because the same behaviors that built the practice are now becoming the ceiling of it. The calls getting made are largely to people already in the book, the conversations follow a familiar pattern — the annual review, the check-in, how things are going — and the energy goes toward managing what exists rather than building what’s next. It doesn’t feel like avoidance because it is stewardship, and it is genuinely important work. But underneath it, the dopamine baseline has organized itself around the familiar, and the activities required to break through to the next level — the larger prospect, the more complex conversation, the segment that requires a different approach, the elevated service model you want to create, the integration of new technology — carry a weight that has nothing to do with their difficulty and everything to do with accumulated avoidance. The reset here isn’t starting over. It’s carving out a protected commitment — a consistent block of time and energy dedicated specifically to the uncomfortable next, separate from the management of the comfortable now.
The Experienced Advisor
This is where the stakes are highest and the resistance is strongest, and where the science becomes most important to understand — because at this level, the default behavior isn’t just a habit but an identity. The practice has been built around a specific way of doing things, and the relationships, the reputation, the results have all been constructed on a foundation the brain now treats as self-defining. Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck’s decades of research on fixed versus growth mindset documented exactly this dynamic: when success has been built on a particular method or approach, the brain begins to experience any challenge to that method not as feedback but as a threat to the self.[4] This is why the experienced advisor who knows they need to move upmarket keeps working their existing book, why the one who knows they need to have the fee conversation keeps postponing it, why the practice restructuring that has been on the list for three years hasn’t happened. The path through is the same as it is at every other stage — deliberate and sustained exposure to the discomfort of the new — but at this level it requires something additional: separating identity from methodology and understanding that evolving the practice is not a repudiation of what built it but a recognition of what the next chapter requires.
This Was Never About Willpower
The gap between knowing and doing — the one that shows up in every conversation about growth, every planning session, every moment of honest self-reflection — has been largely misdiagnosed. We’ve treated it as a motivation problem, a discipline problem, a character problem, and we’ve built training programs around it and hired coaches to address it and had the same internal conversation about it more times than anyone would like to count. But motivation and discipline are outputs of a system, and if the system is miscalibrated, no amount of willpower applied to the surface will change what’s happening underneath.
What the science tells us is both humbling and genuinely hopeful — humbling because the forces at work here are real, the brain’s pull toward comfort and familiarity is not weakness but biology, and the environment we are all operating in has made that pull stronger than at any previous point in history — and hopeful because the baseline is not permanent and the threshold for what feels hard is not fixed. With consistent, deliberate, structured exposure to the discomfort of the hard things, over weeks rather than years, the nervous system adapts. Those calls start happening. The changes to the service model or the onboarding process start moving forward. The brain has been shown that it can handle hard, and what once felt like too much begins to feel like the work.
When we understand what’s actually getting in the way, we can design deliberately around it. That is where growth lives.
About the Authors
Liz Schehl is a co-founder of The Advisor Project and founder of ESC Strategy, with more than 20 years of experience in financial services as a former financial advisor and wealth management executive. She has designed and led firm-wide strategic initiatives across training and development, practice management, business optimization, and executive coaching. Liz advises advisors and leadership teams navigating growth, change, and succession, and is the author of The Courage to Be Curious: Transforming Leadership from Within.
David L. Zimmerman, MSc, CPC, is a co-founder of The Advisor Project and founder of AMAXXA with over 40 years of experience in financial services spanning roles from financial advisor to CEO of major broker-dealer and then head of wealth for a regional bank. Along the way, David was head of advanced financial advisor development for two different Wall Street wirehouses. He is the author of The Juncture Code: A Leader’s Playbook for Navigating Change and Growth.
[1]Lembke, A. (2021). Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence. Dutton.
[2]Baumeister, R.F., Bratslavsky, E., Muraven, M., & Tice, D.M. (1998). Ego depletion: Is the active self a limited resource? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(5), 1252–1265.
[3]Mattson, M.P. (2008). Hormesis defined. Ageing Research Reviews, 7(1), 1–7. See also: Oshri, A., et al. (2022). Is perceived stress linked to enhanced cognitive functioning and reduced risk for psychopathology? Psychiatry Research, 314, 114644.
[4]Dweck, C.S. (2006). Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Random House.
