Motion Is a Great Place to Hide

I can spend a whole day being incredibly busy and produce absolutely nothing. And I never feel lazy doing it, because it is work. Real work, even.. just the wrong work. The cart-before-the-horse kind.

I’ve been building a coaching practice. Ask me how it’s going and I’ll have plenty to report. I’ve refined the brand voice. I’ve mapped out content pillars. I’ve researched website platforms, drafted an ideal-client profile, and reorganized the same folder roughly nine times. I even built the whole coaching framework the practice runs on (Compound Coaching), and I’m genuinely proud of it. I have been a hive of activity.

What I hadn’t done, for an embarrassingly long stretch, was the actual thing that grows a coaching practice: open the doors. Tell people I’m taking clients. Post about it. Ask friends for referrals. All the unglamorous stuff you do to actually open a business.

James Clear put a name to it, this distance between staying busy and doing the thing that actually matters:

Motion vs. action

Clear draws a line between two things that feel identical from the inside but aren’t:

When you’re in motion, you’re planning, strategizing, and learning. Those are all good things, but they don’t produce a result. Action, on the other hand, is the type of behavior that will deliver an outcome.

Some everyday versions:

Here’s the trap, in Clear’s words: “Motion makes you feel like you’re getting things done. But really, you’re just preparing to get something done. When preparation becomes a form of procrastination, you need to change something. You don’t want to merely be planning. You want to be practicing.”

(If any of this is landing, go read his book, Atomic Habits. This is just one thread in it, and the whole thing’s worth your time — I highly recommend it.)

Why this one bites high achievers hardest

I watched this play out just last week. I’m part of a collective of coaches (some seasoned, some just starting out) who meet to sharpen each other. One of the newer coaches brought the group a good problem: a warm lead (someone they’d been talking to, even got to take the Primal Question assessment, already raised their hand) and the question of what to do next. It’s the kind of question some of the veterans could answer in their sleep.

The ideas came fast, mine included. An email drip series. A sequence tailored to each person’s result. A library of resources to send over. Maybe wire up some software so the whole thing runs itself. Smart, capable people doing what smart, capable people do: building the machine.

My advice came easy: the person’s already warm. Just send them a personal email (“Loved that you took the quiz. Want to grab a free call and talk through your results?”) and ask for the conversation. All that machinery is for managing leads you don’t have yet. It’s cart before the horse.

Good advice. I was proud of it. And of course, the second it left my mouth, I felt the twinge of conviction.. because I’d spent months building my own version of that exact machine (that’s the Compound Coaching I mentioned — a good one I genuinely use and believe in), all while delaying the single move I’d been so good at avoiding: actually inviting someone to work with me.

You’d think the people most prone to spinning their wheels would be the unmotivated ones. Most often, it’s the opposite.. it’s the high performers. The capable, driven, get-it-done types who would never describe themselves as procrastinators.

Because motion is the sophisticated procrastination. Anybody can recognize lying-on-the-couch procrastination. The kind that comes with a color-coded spreadsheet and a strategy doc, though? Nobody flags that as a problem. It looks just like progress. You end the day tired. You’ve got something to show for it. It scratches the exact itch a driven person needs scratched.

Clear is blunt about the real reason smart, capable people pick motion, and it isn’t laziness: it “allows us to feel like we’re making progress without running the risk of failure.” Or, more pointedly — “you want to delay failure.” That’s what’s actually driving it.

Every primal question has its own version of this. For instance, if your Primal Question is Am I successful, the trap is knocking tasks off the list, which pays out a steady drip of little success-hits, and motion keeps the scoreboard ticking. Kid Logic: satisfied. The real adult-wisdom move — the one that risks actual failure — is the one you never quite get around to.

When you finally take the action (send the pitch, publish the thing, make the offer), you put yourself in front of reality, and it gets a vote. It can come back a yes or a no. For the high performers subconsciously asking Am I good enough? or Am I wanted?, that vote can be paralyzing, or even… terrifying. (We named 3, but every Primal Question has its own version of this.) As long as you stay in motion, the verdict never comes in. You can’t get rejected on an email you haven’t sent.

So motion becomes a hiding place. A very productive, very respectable one.

For me, the fear was even more specific. I’ve written before about my approval addiction — the part of me whose core question is “Am I wanted?” The scariest version of putting myself out there isn’t getting criticized.. it’s the crickets. Nobody responding. Nobody caring at all. So I’d stay in motion, polishing and preparing, because preparation can’t reject you — only action can. Motion let me look like I was building a business, a system, while protecting me from the thing I was actually afraid of.

For months I treated it like a logistics puzzle.. which platform, which words, which funnel to build. Every bit of it was easier than just making the offer and risking the no.

If you’re a fan of “The Stick” – you’ll understand that this is, of course, yet another stick… the good side – getting this site built, a coaching system defined, practicing it and refining it on others – all good! The bad side of the stick? Well, that’s why we’re here.

The Bible beat James Clear to it

None of this is new.. just newly branded.

But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves.
— James 1:22

I like that he names the cost: deceiving yourselves. That’s the part motion does so well. Hearing the sermon, taking the notes, nodding along, parroting the good lines back to somebody else like you’ve already lived them.. all of it can feel like spiritual progress while nothing in your actual life changes. (The parroting is the sneakiest part — say it out loud enough times and you start to believe you’ve done the work.) James says the hearing-without-doing isn’t neutral. It’s self-deception. You walk away convinced you’ve grown because the hearing felt like growth. Unintuitively, yet maybe ironically, that’s not “walking the walk”.

A few verses later he drives it home: “faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead” (James 2:17). Faith that never moves into action is a dead one.

I’ve seen the recovery version of this up close. You can sit in Celebrate Recovery meetings for years (show up every Friday, know all the language, even comfort the new person) and never once admit the thing you actually walked in carrying. That’s motion. The room is full of good things that, by themselves, change nothing. But recovery comes with a catch the business version doesn’t.. here, the action that breaks the cycle isn’t trying harder. White-knuckling is just a more exhausting motion. The real action is surrender. Picking up the pen and writing the inventory you’ve been circling for a decade. Saying the true thing out loud to another person. Admitting you can’t do it alone. That’s where God actually gets to work — because you finally stopped pretending (or believing!) you could muscle through alone.

Am I doing something, or just preparing to do it?

Clear ends his own essay with that gut-check question, and I’ve stolen it shamelessly. It’s the one I’ll ask my clients, and the one I ask myself.

That’s the whole test. Preparing to do something feels almost exactly like doing it, which is precisely why you have to ask out loud. Most people, asked honestly, know the answer immediately. They’ve known for a while. They just hadn’t said it where they could hear it.

Not all motion is hiding, to be fair. Sometimes you really do need to plan/learn first. And sometimes you just need to… get in motion… and Clear says as much. The tell is whether the preparing is producing reps or just producing more preparing. Is there a date on it? Is it turning into something with an outcome.. or is it the kind of “research” that mostly produces the need for more research..? Real prep has a deadline and an outcome.

A good coach doesn’t just hand a high performer another framework to admire. Lord knows we’ve got enough of those.. I’ve organized mine into folders. A good coach “puts weight on the bar.” The harder, more useful move is to stop being impressed by all the motion and ask the question that turns it into action: What’s the smallest real thing you could do today that has an outcome attached? Not plan, not research.. just do something.

For me, it was making the offer. Which brings me back to my very busy, very unproductive coaching practice.

It ran on pure motion.. the brand voice, the content pillars, the folder I reorganized nine times. Real work, even useful work. Just not the work. So I took Clear’s other way out (picked a date, made it public) and did the thing I’d been avoiding.

Open for business

My coaching practice is open. This site is the evidence: welcome to the freshly migrated coaching.jtsternberg.com (the old personal blog grew up and got a job). Every page now has a “Book a Call” button, and it’s ready for action.

Where it goes is a free 30-minute discovery call: thirty minutes, no pitch, and if it’s not a fit, a “no” costs you nothing. About the most reversible thing you could do.

But you don’t have to book a call to take action today… You can go to primalquestion.com and take the assessment — it’s the smallest real thing with an outcome attached: you walk away knowing your Primal Question, the thing underneath the thing, the one question your whole system is quietly trying to answer. It’s free, and it’s yours whether we ever talk or not. (If you do want to book a call, take it first and forward me the results email — it gives us a running start, and we skip the small talk.)

But here’s the catch — the one this whole post has been circling: taking the assessment is the action. Stopping at what it tells you flips right back to motion. Knowing your Primal Question is just insight.. one more thing to nod at, file away, feel like growth, while nothing in your actual life changes. The action is doing something with it: seeing how it’s quietly run your hiding for years, and working out what it looks like to live with it in the open instead. That’s the work.

(That action → learning → action loop has a name: growth – a post for another day.. in the near future.)

I’m not tentative about what’s on the other side of that call, either. The system underneath the practice (Compound Coaching) isn’t something I’m trying out on you. I’ve been running it with clients for months, the feedback has been better than I’d hoped, and I’m done calling it an experiment. It was ready before I was. I’ll be writing a lot more about all of it right here — what Compound Coaching actually is, how the Primal Questions work, the whole thing. For now, poke around the rest of the site and see what I’m building.

And if this isn’t for you, but a name came to mind while you were reading? Send them this post. Point them at the assessment. If they want a coach and I’m not the right fit (it happens, and it’s fine), the Primal Question coach directory is full of good ones. (I’m on it too, if that helps with credibility!)

A fair heads-up if it is for you: I only work with a handful of people at a time. The work goes deep, and depth doesn’t survive a packed calendar — so when those spots are full, the next opening can be a couple months out. And yes, I know how “limited availability” reads on a coaching site. But it’s just the math. Right now, there’s room.

So that’s me, off the treadmill.. at least on this one thing, for today. And whatever you’ve been in motion about (you know the one), the real move is almost always smaller than all the work you’re doing to avoid it. Probably it’s just reaching out. Maybe even right now.