There’s a specific second, every single time, before deciding to get in and actually submerging myself. Nothing about the water has changed: not the temperature, not the discomfort – everything is exactly as certain as it was thirty seconds earlier. Only my nerve has moved, when it comes to getting into my cold plunge pod.
It’s the same with cold showers. I stopped having warm ones a while back, using the cold instead to reinvigorate myself and clear my head before the day starts. Some mornings it’s a cold bath instead. A steaming bubble bath would be the easy choice, obviously. I pick the cold water because I know exactly how I’ll feel afterwards – refreshed, invigorated, glad I did it – and that feeling doesn’t arrive any other way.
On the worst days, I’ll still stand in the pod up to my thighs for a moment, negotiating with myself, before I remember there’s only one way through: get in properly, sit down, shoulders under, and it’s fine.
I’ve been doing this long enough now to know the second always resolves the same way. I get in anyway. It’s briefly awful. Thirty seconds later I can’t remember why I hesitated at all, and I’m faintly annoyed at myself for treating it like a decision every single time, when it’s really just a threshold I already know how to cross.
That gap – between knowing something’s good for you and actually doing it – is where most business decisions die too, and it happens in the second right before, not in the decision itself, when it would be so easy to find one more reason to wait.
I see it constantly, in myself as much as anyone I coach. The email that’s ready to send and doesn’t get sent. The price rise that’s overdue by a year and still hasn’t happened, because raising it means somebody might say no, and saying no out loud is never as bad as it sounds in your head. The offer that’s been “nearly finished” for months even though it doesn’t need more work – finishing it just removes the last excuse for not putting it in front of anyone.
The email is fine. The offer is ready. What’s doing all the damage is the second right before you hit send, and whether you let it win.
Something to sit with this week:
What’s the cold water you’ve been standing at the edge of? What would happen, specifically, if you stopped negotiating with the second before and just got in?
Thirty seconds later, you’ll wonder what took you so long.
#UnleashYourAwesome