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You're Not Avoiding the Task - You're Avoiding the Feeling

With Byron McCaughey · 17 November 2025

In this episode of In Session with Byron, psychologist Byron McCaughey unpacks a question a founder raised in session: why do we avoid actions we know are good for the business - like making sales calls? On the surface it looks like avoidance of an outcome, such as rejection. But a layer deeper, it's usually the emotion that outcome creates - unworthiness, doubt, uncertainty - that we're really avoiding. Learn a simple three-step way to spot the actions you're putting off, name the outcome you're avoiding, and identify the emotion underneath it, so you can act from your values rather than from avoidance.

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Transcript

The other day in session, a founder asked, "Why do I sometimes avoid actions that I know are good for the business?" In this case, it was making sales calls.

Now, on the surface, it might seem like the avoidance is about an undesirable outcome - for example, the potential of rejection. But if we go a layer deeper, we find that the avoidance is usually about the emotion that the outcome creates. So if it was rejection, it's a feeling of unworthiness, of doubt, of uncertainty. This is what the avoidance is of - the emotion, not the outcome.

So in our own lives: one, recognise the actions that we're not taking that we think we should. Two, what's the outcome that we're avoiding? But three, most importantly, what's the potential emotion that the outcome elicits that we're trying to avoid?

In doing this, we're much more likely to take actions in our lives that are driven by our values and what's important to us, rather than being driven by avoidance of a potential emotional response or outcome.

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