Coaching people on their relationship with their bodies, their habits, and their avoidance would be misrepresented if it sounded like that work was already finished on this end. It isn't. Some of what's understood about avoidance here comes from watching it happen firsthand, repeatedly, in ways that took a long time to notice.
As an athlete, training was never something questioned. More sessions, more discipline, more output, all read as unambiguously good. It took years after competing to notice that some of that discipline had been doing double duty, keeping the body fit and also keeping the mind too occupied to sit with things it didn't want to look at directly.
That's the pattern that shows up most often now, in clients and elsewhere. Not laziness, not lack of discipline, the opposite. A fitness practice, a work schedule, a habit of constant self-improvement, all genuinely good things, arranged in a way that leaves no room for a harder question to surface. Busy enough that you never quite have to ask how you're actually doing.
None of this comes from having solved it. A workout or a task list still gets reached for, more often than would be ideal, on days when what's actually needed is to sit still with something uncomfortable. The habits that make for good coaching are sometimes the same habits used to avoid being coached.
What's helped, slowly, isn't willpower. It's getting more precise about naming what's happening in the moment. Not "I'm avoiding my feelings," which is too vague to act on, but something closer to "I'm choosing this task right now because sitting with that conversation feels harder." That level of specificity doesn't make the avoidance go away, but it makes it visible, and visible avoidance is at least a choice rather than a reflex.
This is part of why presenting as an authority who has arrived at some settled place with his own body and habits doesn't happen here. This is fellow-traveler work, further along on some parts of the path than others, with plenty of getting caught mid-avoidance still happening more often than comfortable to admit publicly.
Avoidance isn't a moral failing, here or in clients. It usually made sense once, as a way of coping with something that felt too big to face directly at the time. The work isn't to shame it out of existence. It's to notice it earlier, name it more specifically, and every so often, choose the harder, quieter thing instead of the busy, familiar one.
It doesn't always get chosen. Some weeks the busyness still wins. But the noticing comes sooner than it used to, and that noticing, imperfect as it is, has been the most honest progress worth reporting.
