Work in Progress 2/x

Good news and bad news.

Here’s a “dad joke” quality insight that I’ve used in many podcast interviews.

“I’ve got good news and I’ve got bad news. The good news is that this advice will work. The bad news is that you’re going to have to get off your sofa.”

The Coach.me origin story is that I was listening to a game designer talk about gamifying the world (Jesse Schell) at the exact moment that I was gamifying my dog’s world to try to get him to “behave.”

At that moment I had an epiphany based on raw jealousy of my dog: If only someone would take this much time to gamify my life I could finally make something of myself.

Why do dogs get reward-based clicker training and I have to do everything through white-knuckled will power?

Thats’ what sent me into the world of using psychology to make myself and other people for the better. That’s essentially what therapy and coaching are: you are opting in to psychological manipulation for your own benefit.

There’s a limit to that manipulation though and change never becomes trivial, no matter how many promises you’ve heard in sales pitches. The book How to Quit Smoking the Easy Way turns out to be a lot of work.

And so now I tell that sofa joke a little differently.

“Change is more work than you’d like and less than you fear.”