One Size Does Not Fit All
I've just shifted from indoor workouts back to outdoor ones. Where I live, as the cold begins to recede from winter months, the desire to get outside is strong, but the real obstacle to training outdoors is the sudden increase in heat and bugs. For months, the black flies, horse flies, and deer flies own the trail and running turns into something closer to being chased than an enjoyable run in nature. By the time mid to late August rolls around, mornings turn cooler, and the bugs have finished whatever business brought them here in the first place. I can go for a run again without feeling hunted.
Every year I forget how different running outside is from running on a treadmill. The treadmill is easier, and because it's easier, I can tell myself I’m pushing myself harder. Outside, the ground itself is uneven, the pace I could hold indoors (because the machine is doing it) suddenly feels ambitious, and my breathing gets harder much faster. What I forget, every single year, is that there's an adjustment period when I make that switch. It's easy to read that adjustment as no progress at all, as though the fitness I built indoors has gone missing, when it's really a different workout on different terrain asking me to engage a different set of muscles. The capacity didn't disappear; it's being asked to show up in a different form that I haven't practiced in months.
There's a whole school of thought in fitness that says override what you're feeling and push through the discomfort. I believe in that, to a point. Discipline matters, and plenty of what feels like a limit is actually just resistance worth moving through so you can “get those gainz-yo”. But pushing through can slide into overriding what your body is telling you it needs. The truth is what the discomfort is telling you, and that takes more attention.
I see the same thing in business, and in life more broadly. Learning to tell the difference between discipline and your own nervous system's rhythms gets confusing, especially inside a system that insists that this is the way from A to B and there's no room to deviate. Follow the launch calendar, post on this schedule, scale this way, in this order, on this timeline. That kind of system can leave people who run differently feeling like something is wrong with them: following every instruction to the letter and still not landing where the results were promised, then ultimately concluding the problem must be their own discipline, because that's the only variable the system ever offered them.
I lived a version of this for most of my adolescence and well into my forties, trying to manage my weight. I'd tell a doctor I couldn't lose weight no matter what I did, and I'd hear the same answer every time: eat less, move more. I followed that instruction as closely as anyone could, tracking, restricting, pushing harder when the number on the scale didn't move. My discipline was on point, even when it hurt, and the results never matched the promise. Most often, I wasn't believed, and that I must not actually be following “the protocol”. It's only in recent years that a medical professional finally listened long enough to say maybe there's a metabolic issue underneath this. There was no immediate fix waiting on the other side of finally being heard, but for the first time, I was being cared for by someone willing to look past the surface instruction and ask what was actually running beneath it, instead of handing me the same protocol again and quietly filing my results under noncompliance.
That's how I work with clients. I ask what's worked and what hasn't, about the nitty-gritty, the real daily mechanics of the business or what’s been happening in life, because the specifics matter more than the general story someone tells about themselves. Underneath all that, I'm listening for something else: whether what's blocking someone is actually a discipline problem; whether more effort or a better system resolves this, or whether something is running beneath the ordinary business and personal scenarios that we're looking at. Those two things call for different approaches. One asks for more consistency, and the other asks for someone to stop applying more pressure to a scenario that was never going to shift under pressure in the first place.
A one-size-fits-all approach never fit; it didn't fit my body when the only prescription on offer was calories in and calories out, and it doesn't fit a business either, no matter how solid the framework looks on paper.
If you've been following every instruction and still not arriving where it promised to take you, that's rarely a discipline problem you can just push through. A Professional Master Clearing™ or a journey in the Illuminated Path is where we start looking at what's really going on.
