How to Deal with Avoidance

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We all avoid things from time to time.

We avoid a difficult conversation or an interpersonal interaction we know will be awkward. We avoid saying no to something we don’t want to do because we don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings. Sometimes we avoid making changes to the status quo even though we crave better balance, because we anticipate the change will be difficult or uncomfortable.

The kind of avoiding I want to talk about today is avoiding yourself.

What is Avoiding Yourself?

Avoiding yourself is avoiding the difficult or uncomfortable feelings that might come with sitting by yourself, being by yourself, or feeling something deeper beyond a surface reactionary level of living on autopilot. I love personal development work, self-improvement and reflection, but it recently occurred to me that not everyone does. And for some people, it may even be painful.

How Does This Affect High Achievers?

For high-octane professionals like doctors, lawyers, and those in finance or tech, avoidance often comes in the form of busyness. We bury ourselves in our to-do list, staying in “survival mode” even though we don’t have to, in order to avoid doing the deep work.

I was inspired to write about this after giving a talk to high achieving professionals just like this. The topic of the talk was shedding impostor syndrome and igniting inner confidence. After my presentation, I tasked the audience with a few reflection questions about their own confidence journeys.

The reflection questions were: which of the Four Elements of Confidence is hardest for you, and why; what is one area or skill where you could be a beginner again and embark on a 30-day challenge; and identify one thing you can start doing today to increase your confidence. If you aren’t sure what I’m referring to when I talk about the Four Elements of Confidence, check out what I wrote about it here, or take a look at the Lean Out Confidence Course.

After the period of reflection, one woman in the audience asked a question… and that question that gave me pause. Have you ever given a presentation and someone asks a question, and for a minute you’re just stumped, but you don’t want to act like you’re stumped so you babble on about something while you’re trying to organize a bunch of things in your head to give a coherent answer? Or is that just me? 😊

Her question was something like, “What do you do when you’re so deep into your endless to-do list that you can’t even think of starting to work on these elements of confidence?” My initial response was about constantly being in survival mode and doing a time audit to see where she could find even just a few minutes each day to sit by herself in silence as a starting point.

And to this she replied, “Oh… finding time is not my problem. It’s that I don’t want to get out of that top-level mode of just doing all the time.”

What she was implying was that it feels better for her to stay at the superficial level. To stay in survival mode.

Why We Avoid

We naturally want to avoid discomfort. It’s hardwired into our brains, an evolutionary holdover from the days when we needed to avoid perceived threats, difficulties, and rejection for our survival. We’re inclined to take the path of least resistance. When we avoid difficult situations, it then provides temporary relief, reinforcing our desire to avoid the in the future.

This is not a weakness or personality flaw. It’s something we all have a tendency to do. Only now, in modern society, the stakes aren’t as high, and the avoiding can actually be detrimental to our health and happiness.

The Negative Consequences of Avoidance

Avoiding hard things provides short-term relief but long-term problems. It might manifest as distracting yourself with work, saying no to opportunities and blaming it on your to-do list, or procrastinating. Avoidance keeps you disconnected – from people you care about, and from yourself. One of the largest predictors of happiness is our degree of connection – with other people and also with ourselves.

In the case of the woman who asked me the question during my talk recently, the hard thing is just spending time by yourself, doing inner work, or attempting to embark on a self-improvement journey of some sort.

And I have to admit that I avoided saying the hard, uncomfortable things in the moment to her. My brain just didn’t want to go there because I’m naturally an avoider of conflict, gravitating instead towards harmony and relating to others.

How to Break Out of a Cycle of Avoiding Yourself

I still maintain that the answer lies first in carving out time to spend by yourself, starting with just a few minutes a day. Because in my mind, the only solution is exposure therapy. Most people know it in terms of phobias, anxiety, or PTSD, but it works here too. You expose yourself to the fear at hand little bits at a time and gradually increase.

If you’re avoidance is yourself, start by spending just a few minutes alone – without your phone, without other inputs, without a book or a podcast or any other escape. Find a quiet, distraction-free place, or take a walk. The only thing I’d recommend having with you is a journal. Feel free to start the alone time without writing, but eventually you may want to write some things down. Journaling is a powerful tool to get things out of your emotional, subconscious mind and place them in your logical, problem-solving mind.

Shift your mindset to embrace emotional agility, because we live in a culture of toxic positivity and quick fixes. Everyone wants to just make it better with the snap of fingers, but the reality is that you can experience any emotion – whether positive or negative – and you can experience them on your own timetable.

If this process takes a long time for you, so be it. But if you’ve been avoiding yourself, the benefits will far outweigh the downsides.

Start small. Look at it as a journey. You’ll be more connected to yourself and to the other people in your life you care about – both at home and at work. And then you’ll have some tools to progress to your own personal development journey, whether that be leaning out at work or developing confidence or whatever else you want to change about your life!

What do you think? Did this resonate with you? We all avoid difficult things at times, so the question is, what have you been avoiding? Share with us by leaving a comment below!