Less than 12 weeks left in the year. Your strategies to hit your goals could make them harder to reach.

I woke up this morning with a pit in my stomach. I set a goal of holding two more workshops last month and I have set up only one so far. It seems like time is running out and I must get over my mental blocks and get shit done.

But what I realized after facing the same pit in my stomach over multiple years is that A) it could be the pizza from last night and/or B) my best strategies to hit my goals were the very thing slowing me down.

After 8 years of looking deeply at why I do what I do and coaching some very smart people over 5 years to do the same, I started seeing the thinking patterns that keep us solving the wrong problems like "shit I need to move, wait I know, let's go ask an expert and that should solve everything!"

Strategies like asking an expert for advice, driven by urgency and pressure, slow me down more than anything else.

I can especially see this when I feel the clock ticking before school drop-off: the lunch is yet to be packed, but the curry is still cooking, my daughter's hair looks like a tangly mess of knots, she's refusing to fill her own water bottle, and we need to get to the bus in 1 minute 49 seconds... I recite in my head 'calm down' 5 times and then say 'no pausing on breakfast' under the delusion that she'll eat faster.

But I actually miss that her tooth is hurting, that I'm out of the very breath I tried to force in through the positive mantras, and that we could skip all this urgency, try again tomorrow, and ask her to get school lunch today.

I can't remember the number of times I've missed the real problems and the simple solutions glaring right at me. Like the school lunch option. Like the tooth-hurting issue. Like the fact that our morning routines leave me exhausted. Instead, I resort to strategies like asking other people how they do it or going down Reddit rabbit holes.

It's because of the ever-so-slight pressure from the old thought "I must get this done properly!" This thought runs my urgency and also tears me apart, because I can't 'properly' get the kid out of the door on time and also 'properly' calm myself down at the same time.

In my experience, old thoughts like this are usually formed in childhood to deal with the stress of fitting in with our family and peers.

The stuckness of the legacy code

When I was looking to switch teams at Microsoft, people warned me against joining teams with legacy codebases (the old ones written in the 90s and early 2000s). If you fix one part of the system, another part breaks and you have to quickly revert or patch to avoid a cascade of breakdowns. Legacy codebases are hard to innovate with.

Our thinking runs on legacy code too. Underneath every strategy is a thinking pattern. I call it a legacy loop: an old thought and the strategies it keeps producing. And a legacy loop is just as hard to innovate with. This thought of 'I must get this done properly!' haunts me and makes it hard to think of new options.

Your old thought might not be 'properly'. It might be:

• 'I need to be sure.'
• 'I can't let anyone down.'
• 'I need to organize myself.'
• 'I'm not good at this.'

But we rarely stop to look at them, because we have strategies to solve them. "OK, got it, I'll do better, get over this limiting belief and reframe to the positive!" This is a humanly correct response. We want to change.

The reframe is one more strategy. It brings back the old thought in new clothes.

Say your old thought is "I need to do things properly." You reframe it to "I need to get over this perfectionism. It's okay to be imperfect and just practice." A week later you catch yourself practicing and being imperfect... properly.

The part of you doing the reframe is the legacy loop underneath the old thought. The loop slips into every new thought you try on, like a snake swallowing its own tail.

'I can't let anyone down' becomes "I don't need to keep everyone happy. I'll set boundaries and own who I am." You go around saying 'no.' A week later you feel lonely, wonder whether you set the boundaries wrong... and you're googling the kindest way to say no, so nobody feels let down.

'If I rest, I'll fall behind' becomes "Rest is productive." A week later you're tracking your sleep, you enter the health-Reddit world, worry that there's a lot to look into... and end up feeling like you're falling behind on resting.

The reframe doesn't change the foundation, the legacy loop. This is why other strategies like changing habits don't give you the full satisfaction. Even if I read Atomic Habits, got disciplined, set an earlier alarm, stacked lunch packing onto my morning coffee (habit stacking) and woke the daughter up earlier, I'd still be in the loop of 'let's do this properly today!'

The danger of a legacy loop is not that it makes you feel restless, sad, angry or whatever. The danger is that it turns into a smart, logical strategy you buy at every moment. It doesn't sound like something you need to let go of.

It sounds like:

• 'Let's do this better and plan properly.'
• 'Think through it again.'
• 'I need to get the backup plan B, C and D in place first.'

We usually can't tell a smart next step from the loop apart from a smart next step from wisdom. Both sound logical and obvious.

It's important to tell the difference though. Otherwise, we miss simple, amazing opportunities right in front of us.

In the next 12 weeks, you have opportunities to reach your goals. You might not be seeing them, the way I didn't see school lunch as a viable option. Your legacy loop hides them.

Do something radical in the next 12 weeks

If you're looking to hit your goals before the end of this year, I'd recommend not following your usual strategies for doing better.

Instead, open up to the possibility that there's a legacy loop limiting the changes you want to make. Reread the examples above and see if any sound like what you say to yourself.

That second workshop? It's coming soon 🤞. I've been working on my legacy loop every day, and the planning feels completely different. I'm full of creative ideas, and the pit in my stomach shows up a lot less. Our school mornings are slightly less chaotic, and I've decided to involve my daughter in the planning, so she learns to stay on task.