How Can I Change My Life? The High-Agency Path to Getting Unstuck
with Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby and Cate Hall
You Change Your Life By Acting, Not By Waiting to Feel Ready
Agency is a skill, not a personality. It’s built one small, before-you-feel-ready action at a time.
You know what you want. Or at least you know what you are supposed to do. You have known for a while. And still, at the moment where you could actually start, something in you does not move. You are not lazy and you are not confused about the plan. You are living in the gap between knowing and doing, and it is exhausting in a way that is hard to explain to people who are not in it.
My guest is Cate Hall, a former Supreme Court lawyer and a former top-ranked poker player who became a biotech founder and a foundation leader, and the author of You Can Just Do Things. Her whole message is agency. And the reason I wanted her on the show is that she did not start out agentic. She built it. Which means you can too.
We talk through what personal agency actually is, why knowing does not equal doing, the invisible “somebody should” to “I could” flip, why confidence follows action instead of preceding it, how habituation shrinks the fear of rejection, and the small, believable practices that get the flywheel of change turning.
Quick answers up front
Less than you think and more than you think. Less, because you do not need a total reinvention overnight. More, because it starts with a genuine shift in how you see your own power to act.
Because you are waiting to feel ready, and readiness is not how it works. I will show you why the action has to come first.
No. Confidence is the result of action, not the price of admission. You build it by doing, then noticing that you did.
Good news, that fear is trainable. There is a specific, almost playful way to shrink it, and we get into it below.
“Thinking your way into acting better, and acting your way into thinking better.” — Cate Hall (crediting her husband), Love, Happiness and Success Podcast
Moments from this episode
Episode transcript
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: I’m Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby, this is Love, Happiness and Success. And here’s the deal. If I were to ask you, friend — what do you really need to do in order to move the needle and get where you want to go? You would probably be able to tell me at least part of it, because you know what you need to do. The harder part oftentimes is doing the thing, and figuring out not what to do, but why haven’t I done it already? That is the question we’re going to be tackling today about how to do the things. And my guest has the answer. You’re going to love her.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Cate Hall — she is a former Supreme Court lawyer and the number one female poker player in the world, and a biotech founder, and the author of You Can Just Do Things. So I think she knows a little bit about how to make stuff happen. Her whole message is agency — personal agency, and the things that happen to us are not luck. We can make things happen in our lives. And that’s what she’s going to be teaching us today. So excited to talk to you.
Cate Hall: Thanks. I’m so excited to be here, really looking forward to this conversation.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: On a personal level — when I read your autobiography, at first I thought it was a joke. I was like, am I getting pranked right now? You have so many different layers of accomplishment in your own life. So this girl must practice what you preach. Take us into this. You’ve been applying this principle.
Cate Hall: A lot of what I think about and write about in the book is how to approach personal agency, and developing personal agency from the perspective of somebody who wasn’t born with it naturally. That might be surprising if you go through my biography and see, well, I’ve had success in a bunch of different things. But I think that’s one of the really interesting things about agency. I was always sort of wired for success. And until I was in my 30s, I was really just kind of ascending up this corporate ladder. I went to law school because I got into a good law school. I did the clerkships, I did the practice at an elite firm in D.C., and I was very successful — but I was very low agency. I wasn’t really thinking about why I was doing the things I was doing with my life. I was just on autopilot.
Cate Hall: The ten-plus years since then has really been about stepping off that ladder, stepping back, and figuring out what do I want out of life, and then going and getting it. And the answer to what do I want has changed a lot over time. It’s been poker and biotech, then philanthropy, then writing. But I have cultivated this responsiveness to the answer to that question, and then a willingness to go out and figure out how to get that thing.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Just for our friends who might not be familiar with it — the term we’re talking about, agency — let’s define it. How do you see agency? What does it mean?
Cate Hall: Great. I love it, because it’s kind of having a moment in the discourse right now, but everybody has a slightly different definition. The one that I prefer is the capacity to both see and act on degrees of freedom that other people overlook. So it’s noticing that you actually have optionality in life where you might otherwise not, and then having the courage to act on that realization.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Amazing. So nerdy psychologists like me call that the locus of control — this belief that your action will have impact on the world. You’re taking this a step further, though. You’re saying not just that you have the ability to change, but this seeing the opportunities is also part of it.
Cate Hall: That’s a huge part of it. Coming to see the world in terms of a thing that you have responsibility for — your life, and the rest of the world — is sort of the fundamental shift I’m talking about. And you can think about that as shifting the locus of control from something external to something internal. It’s really a matter of changing the orientation you have to problems.
Cate Hall: Instead of thinking somebody should do something about this, you think — oh, maybe I could do something about this. And you change the world around you as a result of that flip.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: This is so good. You’re saying the shift here — and this is the big one — is that we can get into this headspace when we look outside of ourselves and see a wall and think, I can’t because of this mountain, this obstacle, this whatever. Somebody should do something because otherwise, I’m just going to have to stay here. And the real shift is this energetic one. It’s like, I could do something. This is actually my problem.
Cate Hall: Absolutely. And it’s a wall that lives on a completely unconscious level. So it’s not like we consciously consider, am I the person to do that? No, it’s somebody else. It’s inherent in the structure of our relationship with the world — if there’s a problem, say, with the quality of water in my town, I think, man, the city council should get on that, somebody should fix that, instead of thinking, what can I do to change it? And it’s so subtle that it’s almost like the structure of reality itself.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: The structure of reality itself. Man, I’ve known you for four minutes and we’re already going so deep. I love this. It’s really good, though, because it’s this energetic perspective. I’ve tried to have this conversation with clients, who I will now be recommending your book to, by the way.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: The metaphor is like a bubble screen. You’re underwater and there’s this wall of bubbles floating up and it looks solid. You get up to it, it looks solid, but actually it’s just bubbles. You can pass right through it. When you talk about the nature of reality, that’s what I just thought of. Take us more deeply into how the way you perceive something actually creates your reality.
Cate Hall: I love this idea. There are so many different ways I could go with this, because it’s a concept I think about a lot — how does the structure of your own psychology influence your understanding of the world? The more I think about it, the more committed to this view of reality I get. People have a default shape that they approach the world with, and that influences the way we see everything. Somebody will have a default shape that implies one thing about their personal relationships and something about their professional domains too.
Cate Hall: To give a concrete example — I am a worrier by nature, and I worry about things blowing up. So I approach my personal relationships with a perspective where I want to make sure there’s no friction. I approach world problems from a perspective where I’m constantly worried about what are the tail risks that could go wrong. My husband is the absolute opposite. There are different ways of thinking about this structure — attachment theory is one, the Enneagram is another.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Before we started talking, I was like, you’ve done all these things in your life — are you an Enneagram three? And you said no, I’m a one. Which is kind of like, do it, and it’s got to be the right way. I’m an Enneagram seven, which is the opposite — which is why people like us are the best of friends with each other.
Cate Hall: And so you’re seeing that in your dynamic with your husband. There are a lot of different ways to explain those differences. Some are hardwired personality traits, some are life experiences, attachment as you brought up.
Cate Hall: It’s a really interesting way of viewing the world in terms of these default shapes. And it’s especially interesting from the perspective of somebody who is attempting to write personal development or self-help, because the different default shapes people bring to the process of self-examination really affect the types of strategies that are going to be useful for them. So the self-improvement strategies for a seven that are intuitive and comfortable are different from the ones for a one. And the things that are unintuitive and uncomfortable — but also very potentially fertile ground for self-improvement — are also different. So you need to bring this awareness of the default shape into whatever journey of self-improvement you’re on.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: It starts with knowing yourself, really, is what you’re saying. Maybe we can unpack that further so our friends can get visibility into strategies that would work for them. As a doorway into this — I’m wondering if you could share more about your own journey, because I find it so fascinating that even in the beginning of our conversation, you said there was a long period in your life where you were just kind of doing the next thing without a perception of personal control. And then you had this shift, and it led to all this magic happening in your life.
Cate Hall: I always had the sense that I was in control of my destiny in a narrow sense — I was able to succeed at whatever life path I was on, and I picked law because it was an obvious thing and just kept doing it because it was there. I didn’t have this larger sense of what is my purpose in the world, and why am I choosing this as opposed to medicine or consulting or something completely different, like poker. Poker is really like the equivalent of running away to join the circus a little bit — which is also a good idea.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: I actually know somebody who literally ran away to join the circus. Let’s do the very seven thing and say, okay, that’ll be the next book, you guys stay tuned — Lisa and Cate joined the circus.
Cate Hall: I was practicing law in DC, and I was getting to a point where I was pretty close to making partner at the firm I was at, and I think I was just looking around and noticing — I’m not sure I really want to be doing this. I’m not sure that I envy the lives of the people I see succeeding at this.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Your book is chock full of different ideas and strategies to help people reclaim a sense of agency. What types of mindsets or strategies or even shifts of perspective have you found to be helpful? I think in this day and age, so many of us are looking around, and aside from wanting to make change in our own lives, there’s so much just crazy big stuff happening — it can be easy to feel victimized. I would argue that’s the opposite of agency — a sense of I am a helpless victim, things are being done to me that I have no control over. And certainly that’s a lived experience for some people at certain chapters. But how do we come back into finding our power, and finding the moments where we do have some control?
Cate Hall: It’s a really good question. Not everybody is starting from the same baseline, and cultivating agency is not equally easy depending on your life circumstances. I focused on what are the incremental improvements that are available to me. There is this flywheel effect, where if you are able to prove to yourself that you have a bit of control over your life, that proof point can become additional motivation. You get this virtuous cycle going — you realize you have control over your life, you exercise that control to improve your life, and your ambitions grow and grow. That has been my experience. I have yet to meet a person who is not able to benefit from thinking more seriously about agency and where they can exert it.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: What I’m hearing is almost a retraining yourself on who you are and what you’re capable of. When you take these little actions and you do this thing, other stuff begins to feel possible. Just even starting has power.
Cate Hall: Yeah, just getting started is actually a lot of the problem — I’m not going to say most of the solution, but definitely a huge part of it. Because then identity and self-concept can get recruited in a useful way, as opposed to a self-defeating way. You’re the kind of person who is overcoming your problems, and that becomes self.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: What’s the opposite of self-defeating? Empowering. And there’s actually a lot of science to back this up. I’m a psychologist, I offer therapy, and I think self-awareness is so key — just to have a space to talk through things can be very helpful. And there’s a lot of research that suggests that taking action and having an experience like the one you’re talking about can oftentimes get you further faster than talking about change. What I have to talk about with my clients quite a bit is that there can be this belief that I need to feel a certain way before I could take action, or I need to be different before I could take action. What you’re saying — and what the research supports — is that the taking of the action is what will eventually help you feel a different way.
Cate Hall: That’s been my experience, and it’s the thing I’ve had to learn over and over again as I get to more subtle layers of self-limitations. My husband, who is a coach, has this way of describing it.
Cate Hall: I’m not sure if he came up with it, actually — but it’s the contrast between thinking your way into acting better and acting your way into thinking better. I really like that, because I think there can be a temptation with people who intellectualize their problems, the way I do, to think, oh, if I just am able to think the right set of thoughts in the right order, I will see the wisdom of the solution that is out there for me. And then I will naturally feel like taking the right steps to change my situation.
Cate Hall: For many of us, the opposite approach is actually the right one, and the one that is going to bear fruit. Which is, regardless of how you feel about it, just do the thing that you know is correlated with feeling better, and see how it goes, and start developing that body of evidence about yourself.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: I love that. That’s a sign on the door — you can just do the thing. Is that one of the main messages from your book? Stop thinking about it and just go do some things.
Cate Hall: A lot of it. Also this idea of —
Cate Hall: A species of this is overcoming your fear of rejection and fear of failure. You can really understand on an intellectual level that rejection and failure are not that bad. They don’t mean you are worthless as a person, and maybe even, part of getting what I really deserve in life is asking for big things and allowing myself to fail. But the thing that actually works for getting over those fears is experiencing failure and experiencing rejection. You can get used to that feeling pretty quickly, and it’s not that bad once you’re habituated to it. Believing that rejection and failure are going to not hurt if you figure out the right way to think about them is a mistake, and it will keep you stuck. Instead, you just need to go out there and fall flat on your face a little bit.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Fail fast. So what you’re saying is that a lot of what keeps people stuck in inaction is actually this anticipatory fear of how much things are going to hurt, or what’s going to happen, catastrophizing all these things. And what you’re saying is — is it actually more painful than being stuck here?
Cate Hall: Yeah, exactly.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: This is such good stuff. The other thing I’ll share — and I’m sure you came across this research in your book as well — is that when we think about how we’re going to feel in any given situation, either how happy or how devastating and upset we’re going to be, that is actually more significant in our minds than it is when we live it. There’s a lot of research that shows that anticipatory feelings are stronger. So what you’re saying is, let yourself have the experience and find out — because in that, there’s this opportunity to develop and grow and restore agency.
Cate Hall: I agree. And it may not be possible to ever completely overcome the feeling of being rejected and feeling that in your heart. But with habituation to that feeling, and experiencing how bad it is and how bad it isn’t, you can learn to overcome the anticipatory dread that you feel about failure — which is so much of the total aggregate suffering you experience with failure. It’s just the anticipation before it happens. I think you can address that form of suffering much more easily than the form that comes from feeling temporary pain when you actually fail, or the pain that comes from being stuck in something that is not good.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Cate, we’ve been talking about a lot of dimensions of this. Now that we’re on our final stretch, I wonder if you could share some of the most powerful ideas — the strategies you’ve employed to help yourself get from here to there, and some of the things you’ve seen be like rocket fuel in the lives of others.
Cate Hall: To tie together some of the stuff we’ve been talking about and to leave people some concrete things they can work on — the habituation to rejection is a great example. You can engineer circumstances such that you are getting exposure to the feeling of rejection in ways that are pretty low stakes, and that will help you address and overcome the anticipatory anxiety and pain of the fear of rejection. A practice I like and recommend in the book is basically just creating circumstances for getting rejected a lot. Asking for relatively audacious things in circumstances where the consequences of not having them granted are pretty low, and the overall psychological cost is low. I’ll reference another person’s book here — Rejection Proof by Jia Jiang.
Cate Hall: He had this experiment where he set a goal of being rejected 100 times in 100 days. The idea is you have to go out in the world and do something — make some request such that you are experiencing rejection at least once a day. The examples he uses are asking to announce something over an airplane loudspeaker, asking the guy at Krispy Kreme to arrange the donuts in a particular shape. It can be kind of silly, but the goal is to get used to asking for things that you know are probably not going to be granted, and just experience the slight social disapproval that comes from asking for things people don’t want to give you.
Cate Hall: Another one that ties pretty cleanly to this is the concept of increasing your surface area for luck. A lot of what distinguishes people who are super successful in the world is that they are creating a lot of opportunities to get really lucky. They’re taking a lot of shots on goal in life. There are things you can do to increase the amount of contact you’re making with the world in a way that allows you to get really lucky. Finding opportunities to meet people is really the big one — going to events, hosting events, writing on the internet in a way that allows people to interact with the contents of your mind. Anything that is giving you touch points with reality in a way that increases the number of people you’re coming into contact with.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: So it’s kind of like networking — and I think networking really has negative connotations. This is putting yourself out there, meeting people, making friends, saying things.
Cate Hall: Right. Taking risks socially, but also making contact while you do it. It’s incredible how much of my professional life, how much of my personal life, has just come from taking meetings where the value of it was not immediately apparent at the time I agreed to do it, and just having an exploratory attitude toward interacting with other people. There is a Steve Jobs quote I really like — you can’t plan to meet the people who will change your life. That’s exactly right. You cannot develop an orderly approach to developing the connections that are going to be meaningful for you and end up steering your life, but you can give yourself a lot of opportunities to make those connections.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: And you have control over that. Not what happens necessarily, but being available for something to happen. There’s so much here. I feel like in talking with you for this short period of time, we’ve talked about so many important things and big ideas and useful strategies. But I also feel like we’ve only just scratched the surface. Tell us a little more about the book and what else people will find in there.
Cate Hall: The idea behind the book was trying to put together a menu of practical strategies for developing personal agency from the perspective of somebody who wasn’t born with a lot of it, and who also experienced some periods of super low agency later in life in my mid 30s. Those experiences convinced me that agency is something basically anybody can learn at any stage of their life. The idea is really to come up with a set of strategies that people can apply and get results from.
Cate Hall: It goes into a lot of the topics we’ve been talking about — the barriers to agency, overcoming the loss of identity that can happen when you move into a new domain in life, overcoming fear of failure and fear of rejection and fear of embarrassment. There’s this whole host of concerns that keep people from noticing the degrees of freedom they have, and building the muscle for noticing that is really the first set of strategies I talk about. And then there’s a lot that is just getting a more accurate view of yourself, getting a more accurate view of the world, and figuring out the tactics that let you make progress on your goals in life.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: I have one last question for you, if it’s okay. There’s so much power and agency and control that can come from these ideas. So the last question: what would you say to someone who has lost trust in themselves, who doesn’t feel like they have a lot of power or control over their own life — kind of taking a more passive approach to the world, hoping something could be different, but waiting? What would you say to them that might be the one idea that could help them?
Cate Hall: I think it’s a little bit trite, but it’s just that I have been there. I’ve been in a position in my life where I’ve been completely stuck and felt totally hopeless that things would ever be different — that I would have a good job, that I’d have a good relationship, that I would ever have money in the bank account. I think that things can get better a lot faster than you realize, once you start accumulating evidence that that is the case. I would just encourage people to have hope, to know that there are many people who have been through it before, and there really is the capacity for change, even if it doesn’t feel like it.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: I love that. Especially coming from you, with everything you’ve done and everything you’ve lived through — that idea that I’m not the only person who’s felt this way before, and looking to you as an example of someone who was able to start taking action again. And what you just said — it goes faster than you think it will. Just start. Cate Hall, congratulations so much on your new book, You Can Just Do Things. And thank you so much for sharing your perspective and your wisdom with us on Love, Happiness and Success today.
Cate Hall: This was awesome. Thank you.
What to take with you
Agency is a skill, not a personality.
It is the capacity to both see and act on the options other people overlook, and Cate is living proof you can build it later in life.
The core flip is ‘somebody should’ to ‘I could.’
Moving the locus of control from outside you to inside you is the shift that changes everything downstream.
You act your way into feeling better, not the other way around.
Waiting to feel ready keeps you stuck. The action comes first and the feeling follows.
Confidence is built, one proof point at a time.
Small actions accumulate into evidence that you can influence your life, and that evidence becomes a self-concept and momentum.
You get over the fear of rejection by experiencing it, not analyzing it.
Low-stakes rejection on purpose teaches your nervous system that the dread was worse than the event.
You control your surface area for luck.
You cannot plan the lucky break, but you can take more shots on goal so it has more ways to find you.
How Can I Change My Life? The High-Agency Path to Getting Unstuck
If you are wondering how you can change your life, I want to start by naming where you probably are right now, because I think it is more specific than “stuck.” You know what you want. Or at least you know what you are supposed to do. You have known for a while. And still, at the moment where you could actually start, something in you does not move. You are not lazy and you are not confused about the plan. You are living in the gap between knowing and doing, and it is exhausting in a way that is hard to explain to people who are not in it.
So let me answer the question directly before we go anywhere else. You change your life by taking small actions before you feel ready, and letting the evidence from those actions rebuild what you believe you are capable of. That is the whole thing in one sentence. Not a personality transplant. Not a burst of motivation you are waiting to feel. Action first, feeling second.
Here is the part I want to be honest about up front. Most people who come to our therapy and coaching for personal growth have already read the books and listened to the podcasts. They know the concepts. The problem was never information. The problem is that your nervous system has been running the same pattern for years, and a paragraph in an article, even a good one, is not going to override that on a random Tuesday night. What I am going to give you here is real, and it will give you language for what is happening. But the actual work, the part where you do it differently with the actual thing in front of you, is the work my team does with people every single day. Keep that frame as you read. This article is here to help you, in service of doing this for real.
My guest for this one is Cate Hall, and if you have not met her work yet, you are in for it. She is a former Supreme Court lawyer and a former top-ranked poker player who became a biotech founder and a foundation leader, and her book is called You Can Just Do Things. Her whole message is agency. And the reason I wanted her on the show is that she did not start out agentic. She built it. Which means you can too.
What is personal agency, and can you actually learn it?
Personal agency is the capacity to both see and act on the degrees of freedom that other people overlook. That is Cate’s definition, and I love it because it has two moving parts. First you notice that you actually have options where it felt like you had none. Then you find the courage to act on what you noticed. Most conversations about changing your life only cover the second part. The first part, the noticing, is where a lot of us get quietly stuck.
And yes, it is learnable. This is not a trait you were handed at birth. Cate spent years on autopilot, climbing a ladder she had never really chosen, before she developed the muscle of asking what she actually wanted and going after it. Psychologists have been circling this idea for decades. It maps closely to what Julian Rotter called locus of control, the belief that what happens to you is contingent on your own behavior rather than on luck or other people (Rotter, 1966). People who lean toward an internal locus of control tend to seek out more information, make more autonomous decisions, and report higher well-being. The encouraging part is that this orientation can shift.
If you read that and thought, that is exactly the part I am missing, that is worth paying attention to. Learning to see your own options is genuinely hard to do from inside your own life, which is most of what the first few sessions of life coaching are actually for. Our coaches are, in a real sense, professional noticers of the doors you have stopped seeing.
Why do I know what to do but can’t make myself start?
The short answer: there is a wall in the way, and it is invisible. Cate describes it as something that exists on an unconscious level. You do not consciously decide “someone else should handle my life.” It is more subtle than that. It is baked into the structure of how you relate to your own problems, so quietly that it feels like the structure of reality itself. When something is wrong, the reflex is “somebody should do something about this” rather than “maybe I could do something about this.”
I have tried to describe this wall to clients for years, and the picture I keep coming back to is a screen of bubbles rising up in front of you. It looks solid. You walk up to it fully expecting it to stop you. And then you find out you can pass right through, because it was never a wall at all. Part of why you cannot make yourself start is that you are standing in front of a bubble screen you have mistaken for concrete.
There is also a self-knowledge piece here that matters. Cate talks about everyone having a “default shape,” a temperament that colors how you see everything, and she is right that the strategies that work for one shape backfire for another. A worrier and an optimist do not get unstuck the same way. This is exactly why generic advice bounces off. Figuring out your specific shape, and the specific move that fits it, is the difference between reinventing yourself on purpose and just reading about it. That tailoring is what a real person in your corner does that an article cannot.
Can taking action really change how I feel?
Yes, and this is the reframe I most want you to take from this episode. There is a deep temptation, especially for thoughtful people, to believe that if you just think the right thoughts in the right order, clarity will arrive and then you will feel like acting. Cate’s husband, who is a coach, describes the contrast perfectly as thinking your way into acting better versus acting your way into thinking better. For most of us, the second one is the one that actually works.
The research backs this up in a way I find genuinely reassuring. Albert Bandura’s work on self-efficacy, one of the most influential ideas in modern psychology, found that our belief in our own ability to do something is built primarily through mastery experiences — that is, through doing the thing, not through contemplating it (Bandura, 1977). Performing a task, rather than watching or thinking about it, is what raises self-efficacy. In plain language: confidence is downstream of action. You do not wait for it. You earn it in small installments, and each installment makes the next action a little easier.
So if you have been holding off on a change until you feel more confident or more ready, I want to gently point out that the order is backward, and that overthinking is often just the sophisticated way we avoid the first small step. The people I work with who make real change are almost never the ones who felt ready. They are the ones who took one action while still scared, and let it teach them. Coaching is largely about designing that first doable action with you and being there when you take it.
How do I stop letting fear of rejection hold me back?
You get over the fear of rejection the same way you get over any fear that lives in the body: through experience, not analysis. Cate is blunt about this. You can understand intellectually that rejection is survivable and does not make you worthless, and that understanding will do almost nothing for you in the moment. What works is habituation. You go out and, in her words, fall flat on your face a little bit, on purpose, in situations where the stakes are low.
There is a beautiful reason this works, and it connects to one of my favorite bodies of research. When we imagine how bad a future event will feel, we systematically overestimate both how intense and how long-lasting the pain will be. Psychologists Timothy Wilson and Daniel Gilbert call this the impact bias, part of how badly we forecast our own emotions (Wilson and Gilbert, 2005). In other words, the dread is almost always worse than the thing itself. Most of your suffering around rejection is the anticipation, not the event. Habituation shrinks the anticipation by giving you data: I asked, they said no, and I am completely fine.
This is tender territory, and I do not want to hand it to you like a dare. For a lot of people, the fear of rejection is wound around older stories about worth and belonging, and overcoming rejection means untangling those stories, not just white-knuckling through a hundred no’s. That untangling is delicate, and it goes faster and kinder with someone alongside you. It is one of the most common things our coaches and therapists help people with.
How can I change my life when I feel completely stuck?
Start smaller than feels worth it. When you are truly stuck, the mistake is aiming at the life you want, which looks so far away it feels ludicrous, instead of aiming at the next incremental improvement, which is the only thing actually available to you. Cate calls the payoff a flywheel. You prove to yourself that you have a little control, that proof becomes motivation, your ambitions grow, and the whole thing starts to turn faster. But it only ever starts with a turn small enough to be believable.
A practical move Cate offers here is what she calls the crisis-manager mindset, and it works for anyone regardless of what got them stuck. You play-act as if you have just been dropped into your own life as a neutral outside consultant, a hired gun with no history and no shame about the mess, whose only job is to ask: what is the challenge right in front of me, and what is the next step that makes progress on it? That little bit of theater detaches you from the weight of the past and points you at the next best action. It is almost silly. It is also remarkably effective.
Two more concrete practices worth stealing. First, court rejection on purpose, the way the writer Jia Jiang did in his 100-days-of-rejection experiment, asking for audacious, low-stakes things just to get comfortable hearing no. Second, increase what Cate calls your surface area for luck. You cannot plan the meeting or the break that changes your life, but you can take a lot more shots on goal: go to the thing, host the thing, put your ideas where people can find them. As Cate put it, quoting Steve Jobs, you cannot plan to meet the people who will change your life. You can only make yourself available for it.
If you are sitting in the stuck place right now, here is the honest thing. Deciding what to do with your life or how to get unstuck is brutally hard to do alone, precisely because you are inside the fog you are trying to see through. That is not a character flaw. It is the nature of being stuck. A free consultation with someone on my team exists for exactly this moment, and there is a coaching option at every price point, including our lower-cost practicum coaches, so cost is not the wall that keeps you here.
Our free What’s Holding You Back quiz gives you a personalized read on where you’re stuck — thinking, emotions, behaviors, relationships — and what to work on first.
Take the Free Quiz →Why reading this article probably isn’t enough
I want to be honest with you about something, because it would be a disservice not to. Everything I just walked you through is real and it works. People use these ideas and their lives change. But if I let you close this article believing that reading it was the work, I would be setting you up.
Here is what almost always happens. You read something like this. Something clicks. You feel a flicker of hope and you make a quiet promise to try the new approach next time. And then next time arrives, and your nervous system does the thing it has done for years, and you are right back in the familiar pattern, wondering why nothing changed. The reason is not that you are unmotivated or broken. It is that you are trying to override a lifelong pattern by yourself, in the exact moment that pattern is loudest. That is the hardest possible time to do a new thing, and it is nearly impossible to do alone.
What actually works is having a real person in your corner who knows your specific patterns, who you can check in with after a hard week, who helps you debrief and recalibrate before the next attempt. That is what self-empowerment work with a coach or therapist on our team looks like in practice. Not lectures. Not generic advice. An ongoing relationship with someone paying close attention to your actual life. If something here landed somewhere specific for you, that is the signal. Come schedule a free consultation, no pressure and no commitment, just a real conversation about what is going on and whether what we do is a good fit. You do not have to hit a low point first. This is exactly what the first conversation is for.
xoxo,
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby
About this episode’s experts
Cate Hall
Cate Hall’s resume reads like four different lives stacked on top of each other — a Supreme Court lawyer at an elite firm on the partner track who stepped off the ladder to play poker professionally and became one of the top-ranked players in the game, then moved into biotech as a founder and into leading a major philanthropic foundation. Her new book, You Can Just Do Things, is her attempt to hand the rest of us the operating system she built along the way. What makes her the right voice for this topic is that she is upfront about not having been born agentic — she spent years on autopilot before she learned to ask what she actually wanted and to go get it.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby
Licensed psychologist, marriage and family therapist, and Board Certified Coach. Founder of Growing Self Counseling & Coaching. Host of the Love, Happiness & Success podcast (15M+ downloads). 25+ years of clinical practice. Creator of the Growing Self Institute, where she trains licensed mental health professionals in evidence-based coaching psychology.
Common questions about changing your life
Start with the next incremental improvement rather than the whole vision. Take one action small enough to feel believable, collect the proof that you can influence your life, and let that evidence build motivation. Change tends to accelerate once the flywheel starts turning.
Personal agency is the capacity to both see and act on the options other people overlook. It has two parts: noticing that you have choices, and finding the courage to act on them. It is a learnable skill, not a fixed personality trait.
No. Confidence is a result of action, not a prerequisite. Research on self-efficacy shows that belief in your ability grows mainly through doing the thing, so you build confidence in small installments by acting before you feel ready.
Because an invisible, mostly unconscious barrier reframes your problems as someone else’s to solve, and because you are likely waiting to feel ready. The fix is to shift from “somebody should” to “I could,” and to take a small action first rather than waiting for motivation.
Through habituation, not analysis. Deliberately seek low-stakes rejection so your nervous system learns that the dread is worse than the event. We tend to overestimate how bad rejection will feel and how long it will last.
It means the action comes first and the new feeling or belief follows, rather than the other way around. Instead of waiting to think or feel your way into readiness, you do the thing you know is correlated with feeling better and let the experience change you.
It is the idea that while you cannot control lucky outcomes, you can control how available you are for them. Meeting people, attending and hosting events, and putting your ideas into the world all increase the number of chances for good things to find you.
No. Cate Hall developed agency in her thirties after years on autopilot, which is evidence that this is learnable at any stage. The capacity for change is usually far greater than it feels from inside a stuck moment.
Resources Dr. Lisa talked about in this episode
Sources cited in this episode
- Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological Review, 84(2), 191–215. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.84.2.191
- Rotter, J. B. (1966). Generalized expectancies for internal versus external control of reinforcement. Psychological Monographs: General and Applied, 80(1), 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0092976
- Wilson, T. D., & Gilbert, D. T. (2005). Affective forecasting: Knowing what to want. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 14(3), 131–134. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0963-7214.2005.00355.x
- Hall, C. (2026). You Can Just Do Things. Harper Edge.
- Jiang, J. (2015). Rejection Proof: How I Beat Fear and Became Invincible Through 100 Days of Rejection. Harmony.
