What pushes and what holds back

Today: why a change you really want can stay stuck for months, and a way to see, on one page, what is holding it in place.

The situation

A mother of two decided, months ago, to stop answering work messages during dinner. It's a small decision, and she means it completely. Dinner is the only time of the day when the whole family is at the same table. Her children have complained about it. Her younger daughter once put a napkin over the phone and said, "Mom, we're here." She laughed, and felt terrible.

And yet, almost every night, the phone is next to her plate. It buzzes, she glances at it, and a minute later she's typing an answer, half listening to a story about school. Afterwards, she promises herself that tomorrow will be different. And tomorrow, it isn't.

If you asked her why, she'd say: "I just don't have the discipline." Or: "Work is crazy right now. When things calm down, it'll be easier." Both answers are partly true. And both of them miss the more useful half of the truth.

Because a decision that stays stuck for months is not stuck by accident. It's stuck because something is holding it in place. And that something is almost never the reason we say out loud. "I didn't have time" is usually true, and usually the smaller half of the truth. The other half is harder to say: tiredness, the fear of missing something important, the comfort of leaving things as they are, the conversation that the change would force us to have with someone else.

As long as that other half stays unnamed, every new promise is fighting against a force nobody can see. And that's exhausting, and it looks, from the inside, exactly like a lack of willpower.

This episode is about naming both halves, on paper, and then choosing where to act.

What the research says

The tool we'll look at comes from Kurt Lewin, a German psychologist who emigrated to the United States in the nineteen-thirties and is considered one of the founders of social psychology. In the nineteen-forties, he described a way of looking at any situation that doesn't change: not as something frozen, but as a balance. On one side, forces pushing toward change. On the other, forces holding it back. As long as they balance each other, everything stays where it is, even if it looks as though nothing is happening. He wrote about it in an article published in 1947, and in a collection of his papers published in 1951, and the method became known as force field analysis.

It's worth being clear about what this is and isn't. Lewin's work was theoretical and grew out of research on groups and organizations. The sources we check describe the model, not a modern trial of the personal version we'll use here. So this episode won't promise that drawing two columns will change your evenings.

But Lewin noticed something that is genuinely useful, and that almost everyone recognizes once they hear it. To move out of a balance, you can either increase what pushes, or reduce what holds back. And those two things don't cost the same. Increasing what pushes, more discipline, more pressure, more guilt, tends to increase the tension in the whole situation. Reducing what holds back shifts the balance with much less of a fight, and the change tends to last.

That is exactly the opposite of what most of us do when we're stuck. We push harder. We promise again, with more conviction. We feel more guilty. And the balance barely moves, because the forces holding it back are still all there, untouched.

The tool

The tool is simple, and it fits on one page.

First, name the change in one sentence. "Stop answering work messages at dinner." "Call my father every week." "Stop saying yes to every favor my sister asks." One sentence, as concrete as possible.

Then draw two columns. On the left, write what pushes you in this direction: reasons, people, feelings, the cost of things staying as they are. On the right, write what holds you back: fears, habits, other people's expectations, practical obstacles, and comfort. Especially comfort.

Here's the most important instruction: the right column doesn't have to be noble, and it doesn't have to be fair. It has to be true. "I'm afraid my boss will think I'm not committed." "Honestly, sometimes I prefer the phone to the conversation about school." "If I stop saying yes to my sister, she'll be upset, and I hate when she's upset." These are the forces that actually hold decisions in place, and they're the ones we almost never write down.

Next, give each force a weight, from one to five. It's not math. It's just to see, at a glance, which side is heavier, and which individual forces are carrying most of the weight.

Then choose one force only. Looking at both sides, is it easier to strengthen something that pushes, or to weaken something that holds back? When in doubt, start with what holds back. That's Lewin's lesson.

And finally, say what you'll do about that force this week. One action, with a day.

Why it helps

It helps, first, because it takes the stalled decision out of the territory of guilt. If the change isn't happening, it's not because you're weak. It's because, today, what holds back weighs more than what pushes. That's a description, not a judgment, and a description is something you can work with.

It also helps you choose where to act. Almost always, on the side that holds back, there is at least one force that is small, practical and easy to remove. Nobody removed it because nobody had looked at it. It was hidden behind the big, vague reason: "I don't have the discipline."

And it helps because it makes the other half of the truth sayable, at least to yourself. Many of us have never actually written down "I'm afraid of what my boss thinks," or "I'm tired, and the phone is easier than my kids at the end of the day." Written down, those sentences lose some of their power. They stop being a secret and become a force on a page, with a weight you assigned.

How to do it

Take twenty minutes and a piece of paper.

Write the change at the top, in one sentence.

Draw a line down the middle. On the left, what pushes. On the right, what holds back. Try to write at least three forces on each side. If the right column only says "lack of time," look again. Ask yourself: what would I lose if this change happened? What am I afraid of? What's comfortable about the way things are?

Give each force a weight from one to five.

Circle the force you'll work on this week. Prefer one on the right side, and prefer one that's practical.

Write, next to it, what you'll do, and on which day.

The example

Let's go back to the mother and the phone at dinner.

She writes the change: "Stop answering work messages during dinner."

On the left, what pushes: "The kids ask me to." Weight: four. "I want to really be there." Five. "Dinner is the only time we're all together." Four. "I get to the end of the day exhausted, and the messages make it worse." Three.

On the right, what holds back: "Fear of missing something urgent." Five. "My boss sends messages at night." Four. "Habit: I pick up the phone without noticing." Four. "The phone is on the table." Three.

She looks at the two columns, and two things jump out at her.

The first is that everything she had been trying, for months, was on the left side. She had been increasing what pushes: promising again, feeling guilty, apologizing to her kids. And the balance hadn't moved.

The second is that two of the forces on the right are small and practical. The phone is on the table: that's a matter of where it sits. And the fear of missing something urgent: that's a conversation of two minutes with her boss.

So she chooses those two. On Monday, she tells her boss: "In the evenings, I'm with my family from seven to eight. If something is truly urgent, please call me, and I'll answer." Her boss says, "Of course," and seems surprised she even asked. And that evening, she leaves the phone charging in the kitchen, on the other side of the room from the dinner table.

The first night, she gets up once to check it. The second night, she doesn't. By the end of the week, her daughter tells a long story about a friend at school, and she hears all of it.

Neither of those two actions took willpower at dinnertime. It took a two-minute conversation, and an outlet in another room.

Another example, between friends

The same page works for changes that have nothing to do with phones. A woman in her thirties has been the one who organizes everything in her group of friends for years: the dinners, the birthdays, the weekend trips. She's tired of it. She has decided, more than once, to stop, and to let someone else take the initiative for a change. And every time, a month goes by without anyone suggesting anything, and she ends up sending the message again.

Her two columns look like this. On the left, what pushes: "I'm tired." Four. "Sometimes I feel like the friendship is only kept alive by me." Five. "I want to be invited, not only to invite." Four.

On the right, what holds back: "If I stop, maybe nobody will organize anything, and the group will fade." Five. "I'd feel guilty if someone's birthday went by without anything." Four. "Honestly, I like being the one who knows what's going on." Three.

That last line surprised her when she wrote it, and it's the kind of line the method is for. It isn't a flaw. It's a real force, and it explains part of why the change never stuck.

Looking at the columns, she decides that the heaviest force, the fear that the group will fade, isn't something she can remove by herself. But she can weaken it. She talks to one friend, the one she's closest to, and says: "I've been organizing everything for a long time, and I'm tired. Could you take the next dinner?" Her friend is surprised, and a little embarrassed. She hadn't noticed. She organizes the next dinner, and the one after that is organized by someone else. The group didn't fade. It just needed someone to say the thing out loud.

When what holds back is another person

Sometimes, one of the heaviest forces on the right side has a first and last name. "My boss sends messages at night." "My husband thinks it's silly." "My sister always turns lunch into a fight."

You can't remove a person from the column, and that's not the point. What you can do is look at the part of that force that runs through you. The boss still sends messages, but agreeing that urgent things come by phone call changes their weight. The sister is still who she is, but arriving at lunch with a good topic ready, and with a time you'll leave, changes what the fight can do.

When the force is another person, the useful question is not "how do I change this person?" It's "what, on my side, makes this force so heavy?" And very often, the answer is a conversation that hasn't happened yet, which is where the earlier episodes of this series come in.

What the page looks like when it's done

A finished page is not pretty. It usually has crossed-out words, forces that moved from one column to the other, a weight that changed from three to five halfway through. That's fine. The point is not a neat diagram. The point is that the two halves of the truth are finally on the same page, where you can see them side by side, and where you can choose one small thing to do, instead of promising, once again, to try harder.

When a force is holding back for a good reason

Here's something the method teaches that people don't expect. Sometimes, when you look closely at a force on the right side, you discover that it's holding back for a good reason.

A man wants to stop visiting his parents every Sunday, because the visits exhaust him. On the right side, he writes: "Mom would be alone." He gives it a weight of five. And when he looks at it, he realizes that this force isn't an obstacle to be removed. It's something he cares about. The change he wrote at the top was too blunt. Maybe the real change is not "stop visiting," but "visit every other Sunday, and call on the other ones." Or "visit, but leave at four."

The two columns don't only show you what to remove. Sometimes they show you that the change itself needs to be rewritten, into something that respects the forces that matter to you. That's not failure. That's the method working.

Doing it together

Some changes belong to more than one person. A family that wants to eat dinner without screens. A couple that wants to stop arguing about money at the end of the month. For changes like these, the two columns work very well as something you fill in together.

Each person writes their own columns first, alone, without looking at the other's. Then you put the pages side by side. Very often, the forces on the right side are completely different for each person. For one, screens at dinner are about work. For the other, they're about boredom, or about avoiding a conversation. Seeing that on paper tends to lower the temperature: it's no longer one person accusing the other of being addicted to their phone. It's two people looking at two lists of real reasons, and choosing, together, which force to work on first.

The other person's columns

There's one more way to use the page, and it helps before you ask someone else for a change. Draw the two columns again, but this time for the other person, as honestly as you can.

Say you want your partner to take over the school pickups two days a week. On the left, what might push him toward it: he misses time with the kids, and he knows you're overwhelmed. On the right, what might hold him back: a meeting that always runs late on Tuesdays, the fear of getting the routine wrong, and the feeling that he's being told he hasn't done enough.

Now look at your request. It's easy to make a request that only pushes: the same reasons, a little louder each time. A request that weakens something on the other person's right side follows Lewin's lesson. "Could you take Wednesdays and Thursdays, since Tuesday is your long meeting? I'll write down the routine for the first week."

These columns are your guesses, not facts, the same way the other chair was a guess in the fourth episode. So bring them as questions: "Is there something that makes this hard for you?" Sometimes the other person names a force you would never have written, and that may be the force to work on first.

Making the new balance stick

Once a force is weakened, the new balance needs a little protection, at least at the beginning. The phone that moved to the kitchen can quietly move back to the table. The friend who organized one dinner may not think of organizing the next one.

A small, fixed arrangement helps: the charger that permanently lives in the kitchen, a shared calendar where the next organizer's name is written, a sentence you agree on for when the old habit comes back. These are not rules imposed on anyone. They are ways of keeping a force you already weakened from growing back while nobody is looking.

The traps

The first trap is listing only the nice reasons. If the right column only has "lack of time," look again. Comfort, fear and laziness are forces too, and they are usually the heaviest ones, precisely because nobody writes them down.

The second trap is fighting everything at once. The method is for choosing one force, not for defeating all of them in a week. One force fewer is often enough to shift the whole balance.

The third trap is turning the list into a verdict about yourself. The right column is not a list of your flaws. It's a list of what, today, makes sense for you not to change. Treat it with the same respect you'd give a friend's reasons.

And the fourth trap is forgetting to check. A force you removed can come back: the phone creeps back to the table, the boss starts texting again. Look at the two columns again in two weeks. The balance changes, and so do the forces.

How this connects to the rest of the season

If you've listened to the whole season, you may notice that this tool sits at a crossroads. The first episodes were about conversations: separating facts from conclusions, saying things without blaming, talking about behaviors, rehearsing both sides, choosing the moment, and looking back from zero to ten. The last two have been about decisions: turning a direction into a place, and now understanding why a decision stays stuck.

The two halves meet here, on the right side of the page. Very often, the heaviest force holding a decision in place is a conversation that hasn't happened. The fear of what the boss will think. The sister who will be upset. The partner who doesn't see the problem. When you find a force like that, you already have the tools to work on it. You can climb down the ladder, build the first sentence, rehearse the other side, and set the day.

That's the whole idea of this season, really. Relationships don't change through one big decision or one perfect conversation. They change through small, concrete steps, taken on ordinary days, with a little method and a lot of patience with yourself and with the other person.

Your exercise this week

Choose a change you've wanted for a while, one that keeps not happening. Then write five things.

The change, in one sentence.

The two columns, with at least three forces on each side.

A weight, from one to five, for each force.

The force you chose to work on this week, and why.

And what you'll do about it, and on which day.

What to do with what you find

If one force on the right side was obviously small and practical, you're in luck. Deal with it this week, and see how much the balance moves.

If all the forces on the right side were heavy and emotional, fear, guilt, the reactions of people you love, that's important to know. It means this change is not really about habits. It's about relationships, and it probably needs a conversation, or several. Go back to the episodes about saying things without blaming, and about rehearsing both sides. They were made for exactly this.

And if, looking at the columns, you realized that you don't really want the change you wrote at the top, or that you want it for someone else's reasons, that's perhaps the most valuable thing the exercise can show. A decision that isn't really yours will stay stuck no matter how many forces you remove. It may be time to ask what you actually want, which is a question about values, and a good place to start the next chapter.

Before you go

If you'd like company for this, Confidey has an exercise called What pushes and what holds back, which puts both sides on the same screen, because the comparison is the exercise, and ends with one question: what will you do about one of these forces this week. You can find it at confidey dot com.

This was the eighth episode of the first season of One Conversation a Week. Thank you for being here for all of them. Take care of the conversations that matter.