“What do you do when you know what to do, but you still don’t do it?”
This question came up during a private event Q&A while I was discussing the Lack of Clarity Overwhelm Culprit™ — and it hit close to home.
For years people asked me to write a book. In keynote Q&As. In my DMs. My therapist even brought it up. I knew it was my next logical step. I tried — courses, a proposal, sample chapters, querying agents. And then I stopped.
I knew what I needed to do. I just couldn’t follow through.
If you’ve ever been stuck in that same pattern — knowing exactly what you need to do and still not doing it — this post is going to explain why. And more importantly, how to break out of it.
How to Follow Through With Your Goals: It’s Not About Knowing More
The reason you can’t follow through has nothing to do with what you know. It has everything to do with a bottleneck that’s in the way.
Most people assume bottlenecks are strategy-based — meaning you’re doing something wrong and that’s what’s stopping you. But what I’ve found, for myself and consistently with my coaching clients, is that the real bottleneck is often fear-based. Or a combination of both.
Let me break down both.
The Two Bottlenecks Stopping You From Following Through With Your Goals
Bottleneck Type 1: Strategy-Based
A strategy-based bottleneck means the way you’re approaching something isn’t working. Here are the signs:
- You don’t know what you don’t know — so you can’t move forward because you’re missing information or skills that would tell you what to do next
- You keep trying the same thing and getting the same result — which means the approach itself needs to change, not just your effort
The danger of an unaddressed strategy bottleneck is that it can eventually turn into a fear-based one. You try, you fail, you try again, you fail again — and eventually you start fearing the action itself because you’re afraid of another failure.
That’s exactly what happened to me with querying agents. I kept sending queries with gaps in my proposal I didn’t know were there. Nothing worked. Eventually I wasn’t just stuck — I was scared to keep going because I feared burning out all my opportunities.
My solution: I hired an author mentor. She helped me identify the gaps in my proposal and query process I couldn’t see myself. I also put money on the line — which gave me a very real financial incentive to follow through. And it worked. I eventually landed an agent.
Bottleneck Type 2: Fear-Based
If the strategy is solid and you’re still not moving, chances are you have a fear-based bottleneck.
The easiest way to identify it: ask yourself what the worst possible outcome is if you actually do the thing. What is the negative consequence you’re most afraid of?
Here were my real fears about writing and publishing my book — and they were very real:
- My friends and family would judge my story. A big part of my book is sharing my experience navigating traumatic life events — and many people didn’t know the full picture.
- My kids would find out about my trauma history. I was not ready for them to read those parts of my life at their age.
- My story would be permanently published — with no way to take it back once it was in print.
- My book would be bad and not actually help anyone.
- People would realize I was a fraud. Even though people were literally asking me to write it, I had significant imposter syndrome about whether I was a real thought leader.
- I would burn out all my agent opportunities and never have a shot at traditional publishing.
Every single one of those fears was keeping me from moving. And until I addressed them directly, no amount of strategy was going to help me follow through.
3 Tools to Help You Follow Through With Your Goals Despite Fear
Tool 1: Affirmations
Take each fear and reverse it. Then say the opposite every single day — ideally in the morning as part of your routine.
For my imposter syndrome, the affirmation I used regularly was: “I belong among the famous thought leaders that inspire me.” I said it until I believed it. And eventually, I did.
The practice isn’t complicated. It’s just consistent.
Tool 2: EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique)
EFT is a tapping technique where you tap on specific meridian points on your body while voicing both the fear and its opposite. The goal is to show your body it’s safe — to literally rewire the fear response at a physical level.
I use this regularly. It’s one of the most effective tools I’ve found for working through resistance that lives in your body, not just your head. If you want me to do a full episode on this, drop a comment below.
Tool 3: Mini Actions
Small, manageable steps toward the thing you’re afraid of build momentum in a way that big leaps often don’t. Each small action proves to your brain that the thing is survivable.
For me, hiring the mentor was a meaningful action — not a mini one. But it was a step I could actually take. It addressed the fear of wasting my agent opportunities, put skin in the game, and got me moving again.
Your mini action doesn’t need to be big. It just needs to be forward.
The Bottom Line on How to Follow Through With Your Goals
If you know what you need to do but still can’t bring yourself to do it, you have a bottleneck. It’s either strategy-based, fear-based, or both.
The work is identifying which type is in your way — and then addressing that specific one. Not pushing harder. Not learning more. Removing what’s actually blocking you.
That’s how to follow through with your goals. Not by knowing more. By getting out of your own way.
Find Out If Lack of Clarity Is Your Overwhelm Culprit
If this resonated and you’re wondering whether Lack of Clarity is what’s keeping you stuck, the free Overwhelm Culprit Quiz will tell you in three minutes — and give you a clear next step to address it.
Take the free Overwhelm Culprit Quiz here.
Go Deeper With the Book
I cover the Lack of Clarity Overwhelm Culprit™ in full detail in my book — including more strategies for identifying and breaking through the bottlenecks keeping you from taking action on the things that matter most.
The Five Overwhelm Culprits™: Strategies to Save Your Sanity Without Sacrificing Your Success is available now everywhere books are sold.
This is the book for the high-performing woman who is done knowing what she needs to do — and ready to actually do it.
CLICK FOR TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:00] What do you do when you know what to do, but you still don’t do it? This is a question I received during a recent private event Q&A while discussing the lack of clarity overwhelm culprit, and I realized this is a really great topic to cover here since the reason why this happens isn’t always obvious. It’s not about knowing what you know you need to do.
It’s about having clarity on what type of bottlenecks you’re encountering that’s preventing you from moving forward. The real one may actually surprise you.
If you’re a high achiever who knows what you need to do to take the next step but find yourself not doing whatever that is, then you’re gonna wanna stick around because by the end of this episode, you’ll know why you’re in this pattern and how to break yourself out of it.
Speaker 2: If you’re new here, my name is Corrie LoGiudice, otherwise known as Corrie Lo, and I’m a professional keynote speaker, facilitator, leadership expert, and author who helps high achievers transform overwhelm into confident leadership [00:01:00] action, even in times of crisis. Now, I understand the situation knowing what to do but still can’t bring yourself to do it, because this was me four years ago.
I consistently on a regular basis had people asking me for a book. It was part of every keynote Q&A I did. It was constantly being asked in my DMs. Even my therapist during a session had asked me, “Hey Corrie, when are you gonna write a book?” So I knew that writing a book was my next logical step, especially in terms of my business, but I dragged my feet on getting one started for years.
Though I did try to start. I did things like I signed up for courses and I drafted a book proposal and I wrote some sample chapters and I even queried some agents with no results. And I found myself at this impasse that I just couldn’t bring myself to keep [00:02:00] querying more agents and so I was just at this standstill.
I knew I needed to write a book, I knew I had to publish something, but I just wasn’t moving forward from there. I was stuck. And add to this, I was also full-time running a coaching and speaking business. I was also managing a household with four kids, in two different school districts, mind you, and I’m also at this time doing everything myself. Everything.
So I’d love to know, if there was a task or a goal that you knew that you wanted to do but you just can’t bring yourself to taking action on it, share it below in the comments. I’d love to help you get to the root of the issue.
So when you know what you need to do, but you can’t bring yourself to follow through, it’s because you have some sort of a bottleneck. And most folks think that bottlenecks are strictly strategy-based, meaning that it’s action-based. There’s something that you’re doing wrong and that’s the bottleneck.
Speaker 2: But a lot of times, this is actually far more common, I found for [00:03:00] both myself as well as my coaching clients, is it’s fear-based. That or it could even be a combo. So let me explain.
So when you have a strategy-based bottleneck, these are some signs. You don’t know what you don’t know. So as a result, you don’t move forward on it ’cause you don’t know what you should be moving forward on ’cause you don’t know enough about whatever it is that you should be doing it.
The next one is you keep trying the same thing, and you get the same exact result. And if you keep doing that and getting the same result, you might actually need a different strategy than what you’re doing ’cause what you’re doing isn’t working. Catch my gist?
The problem with all this is when you don’t address the strategy, you also run the risk of burning out on whatever it is you’re doing and then later fearing that action because it doesn’t work, because you’re afraid you’re just gonna show up with another failure. So my situation with querying agents, that’s what this became.
So my solution to this issue was I enlisted help. I chose to hire an author [00:04:00] mentor, and through doing this, she helped me uncover that there are obviously some gaps in my book proposal, as well as the query process that I didn’t know what I didn’t know, so it wasn’t working for me.
And in hiring her, it also gave me a financial incentive to make sure that I was following through because obviously, I put money on the line, so I was going to wanna see it through. So that helped me do the thing that I wanted to do, but I just couldn’t follow through by actually spending money, helped me.
And this also helps too, if you’re trying to take action through something despite fear. So for me, I had this fear that I was gonna get more no’s in the query process, which leads me to talking about fear-based bottlenecks.
So when you get to this point, if it’s not strategy-based and you’re doing the strategy stuff and it’s still not working, chances are you have a fear-based bottleneck.
When you address the fear, then you get back in action again. So the easiest way to identify your fears is by [00:05:00] breaking down what is the worst thing that can happen. What is the negative consequence of me doing the thing that I know I need to do? Sometimes this could be the result of a strategy-based bottleneck that was never addressed and it turned into a fear like my book with querying the agents.
So some fears that I had surrounding the book, and these were very real fears. So first one was that my friends and family would judge my story because a big part of my book is sharing my journey navigating these traumatic life events and a lot of people didn’t know the whole story.
So I really feared that people were gonna judge me for it. I also feared, this was probably a larger fear than the friends and family. I feared that my kids would know my trauma history. I really did not want my kids to see that especially at this age. I also feared that my story would be permanently published forever, and there’s no going back after it’s in print.
I feared that my book would suck and not be [00:06:00] valuable to people. Very real fear. I also feared that people would know that I’m a fraud. I very much was dealing with imposter syndrome when it came to writing a book. Even though I had people literally asking me to write the book, I was so afraid that I was not a thought leader in the way that I should be and that people would know.
And then I was also, and this is circling back to that fear that I had surrounding the querying with the agents. I had this legitimate fear that if I kept querying, that I would burn out any opportunities I would have of getting an agent and being traditionally published because I would have queried all of them and failed.
So in order for me to get past this, I had to rewire the fears. Mentally rewire them. My favorite strategies for this are three specific tools. First one is affirmations. So I would say things like my friends and family won’t judge my story. Basically, the reverse of whatever my fear was, I would say on a regular basis, usually in the mornings as [00:07:00] part of my morning routine, what the opposite of that was.
So those are my affirmations. One in particular that really stands out to me that I said for a long time was, “I belong among the famous thought leaders that inspire me,” to rewire that imposter syndrome that I was having. Another great tool for rewiring fears is, emotional freedom technique or EFT.
And I’m not gonna dive deep into how you do it on this video. That’s a topic for another video. If you’re interested in it, comment below, let me know. But it’s where you tap on different meridian points on your body while citing your fears and the opposite of it to basically show your body it’s safe, to help literally rewire it.
So I love EFT for it, and I also love the idea of taking mini actions. So for me, hiring the coach wasn’t necessarily a mini action, but it was an action I was taking towards, dealing with my fear of burning out all the query agents. At least I know by having somebody else’s eyes on it [00:08:00] that I was putting the best possible product in front of the agents, and then sure enough, I ended up landing an agent.
But that said, affirmations, EFT and taking action, some of them can be mini actions. Small, little manageable steps towards that fear can be really helpful.
So to recap, if you know what you need to do, but you still can’t bring yourself to follow through, know that there are two different types of bottlenecks that could be affecting your scenario.
It could either be strategy-based or it could be fear-based. And a lot of times too if you’re doing the strategy and you get to a certain point, the strategy bottleneck can turn into a fear-based bottleneck, or it could be a combination of both, like my example. To be able to remove the bottleneck, you’re gonna have to identify which to apply to your situation and then address that specific bottleneck to get yourself in action again.
So hopefully you found my sharing this today valuable. If you have a question that you would like for me to cover, either on this topic of clarity or maybe something else, [00:09:00] feel free to leave a comment below and I just may feature it on a future episode. And if what I shared today really resonated and you wanna know for sure if the lack of clarity overwhelm culprit is what’s holding back your actions and your results, I invite you to take my free quiz. I’m gonna link to it in the show notes below.
And you can also learn more ways to work with me, whether that be one-on-one through coaching and advisory, on managing your fears, or through organizations and teams through my speaking offers. You can find that information in the show notes as well. So thank you so much for being here, and I will see you on the next episode.
I’ll see you then.
Thanks for checking out the Next Step with Corrie Lo. If this episode resonated with you, share it with a friend, subscribe, and leave a review. Together, we’ll transform overwhelm into action, and we’ll keep taking the next step towards confident leadership. See you next time