I help people change for a living, but couldn't change myself

Hey heroes! A quick one for all of you today, sharing a bit of my background and what brought me here.

For the longest time, my life was a ridiculously hypocritical. What some of you may not know is I'm an executive coach, and have been one for nearly ten years. Companies literally hire me to help their C-suite leadership create meaningful, measurable, and lasting change. And, at the risk of sounding full of myself, I think I'm pretty good at what I do.

And yet: And every night after work, I was on the couch until 3 or 4am, playing whatever was new, doing just enough at my job to pretend. I tried everything you've tried. White-knuckling. The uninstall/reinstall cycle, more times than I can count. Deleting the game feels amazing for about four days. You know how it ends.

What finally worked wasn't willpower. I got sick and tired of being sick and tired, and I did the thing I should have done years earlier: I took the exact principles I use on executives (environment design, accountability, identity work) and ran them on my own gaming.

It worked. Eventually. Not overnight, and not without slip-ups. And I think I made it a lot harder on myself than I needed to because I did it alone.

And ultimately that's why I wanted to create Respec: I looked for a program or community like this when I was going through it, and I was disappointed with what I found. I wanted to make sure that the next time someone like me is desperately searching for an answer at 3:00 AM on a Tuesday, they find something that works.

The program's not perfect. It's very much still a work in progress (and I'm grateful for the ways all of you will help shape it). But I think it's powerful, and I know it works.

Alright, enough about me. Your turn: what's something you tried, only to see it fail? And what did you learn from it (or could you learn from it, in retrospect?).

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I help people change for a living, but couldn't change myself