After sitting down with nearly 90 people over the last two years, certain patterns keep repeating.

In this solo episode of The Lonely Chapter, I reflect on four observations that sit beneath many of the stories shared on the podcast - not as advice, but as orientation.

We explore:

→ Why insight alone rarely leads to change

→ Why confidence usually follows responsibility, not the other way around

→ Why people regret staying too long more than trying

→ Why struggle is relative, and comparison often keeps us stuck

This podcast is for anyone who feels like they’re doing okay on the surface, but quietly unsure how to live well.

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Hello, and welcome to the Lonely Chapter, a podcast for people who are doing okay on the surface, but quietly unsure how to live.

Well, over the last almost two years, I've put out now about 90 episodes on this podcast.

So I've sat down with a lot of different people and heard people from different walks of life, different lives, lived different experiences, but the same patterns keep coming up and a lot of the same talking points keep coming out of these conversations, regardless of who they are, which I find really interesting.

So today, what I wanted to do is just reflect on some of those observations, some of those patterns.

I've pulled four patterns out that I think encapsulate a lot of the conversations that I've had on this podcast.

Um, they're not advice, they're not me telling you what to do, but they're just observations from these conversations.

And hopefully through hearing them, you will resonate with some of them.

And I'd love to find out which ones you do resonate with.

So let me know before we get into the episode.

Very quickly, I just want to ask that wherever you are watching or listening to this podcast, please do follow or subscribe as it really helps the show get thrown into the algorithm and shown to more people.

Let's get into the conversation.

Pattern 1.

Most change comes from pressure, not insight.

So I think in self development and self improvement, a lot of people are waiting for the magical book or podcast episode or hearing the right idea on social media that's gonna snap them into the room and make that major change in their life that they're looking for now.

Whilst there are small things that as you read a book, you're going to pick up and maybe try and implement sometimes more successfully than others, it's very rarely the pivotal moment.

The pivotal moment normally comes from a big life moment, something that has gone wrong or something that you can learn from.

So insight alone rarely ever gives us this thing that reorganizes our behavior.

It doesn't change how we work day to day.

So simply, these large events, serious burnout.

When you're at the bottom of the barrel of energy, you're fatigued every day.

You know something has to change, major injury, maybe that changes what you can and can't do in life and it causes you to really take stock and look at it again.

Loss.

So I've spoken to people about grief on this podcast before and loss is a massive one.

If you're going through that.

Grief is a really, really difficult and long road for a lot of people and it never leaves you.

So That's a big change in itself, let alone the behaviors that you form off the back end of it.

Some of these lessons you cannot learn secondhand, so you cannot just learn in a book.

You have to sort of go through them.

And that's the difficult thing.

It reminds me of Chris Williamson's unteachable lessons.

So he has this idea that there are certain lessons that you can only learn through going through them.

You can't just read about them or hear someone speak about them, because we often do.

We often hear people say these things and we know they're true, we know they're right, but we sort of shrug them off and don't believe them.

Some of these things would be that money won't make you happy, that fame won't fix your self worth, and that you regret working too much.

How many people on their deathbed will be glad that they worked the amount they did and they missed out on those social occasions and seeing their grandchildren because they were working.

Pressure forces recalibration.

So it forces us to take that step back that we need to and it shakes our reality.

It questions, it makes us question what we believed up to that point and the changes that come the other side.

Whilst it can be a very difficult period to go through and it can be really, really tough, these are where the biggest lessons come out of.

And that is something that I've seen a across so many of the episodes that I've done.

It all comes from this pivotal moment and it removes the shame around why did it take this, we may think, why did it take this thing to happen before I actually changed my behavior?

And again, it's easy to get caught in that self hating cycle of if only I'd listened to all those people that told me this thing, maybe I could have changed it years ago.

But the reality is that we very, very rarely do.

And it's a very normal thing to have that feeling.

So it often took that thing to happen because it had to.

Pattern number two, responsibility comes before confidence.

So we will often talk ourselves out of doing things because we don't feel confident enough yet to do them.

And again, this is a very common feeling.

But the reality is that you can't expect to be confident at a thing that you've never done.

So if I took this podcast, for example, if I never started because I didn't feel confident doing podcast or speaking to strangers on the Internet, the other side of the world and asking them questions and trying to learn from them, then I would never have started the podcast.

Because the only way you can build that confidence is by doing the thing, repeating the thing, and learning from what you can do better.

So we often hope that we're just going to get this confidence out of thin air.

And it's.

It's strange when you really think about it, because you can't just do that.

And I've spoken about this before, the idea of doing hard things in life, doing things that test you to build a evidence trail.

So if you picture it like pieces of paper, every difficult thing you do in life goes down on a piece of paper.

Now, one piece of paper for each thing.

As you put those pieces of paper down in a pile, each one is obviously paper thin.

So it's very thin.

As you start to put them on top of each other, they stack up and up and up and up before you've got this very thick pile of evidence.

And it's this thing that you can look back at as you come up against tough things in life and things that you feel uncomfortable doing.

And maybe you're waiting for confidence to do them, but you look at that pile and you go, well, I was pretty scared to do those things because I didn't feel confident, but I did them, and I learned this from them.

And in hindsight, I'm really glad that I did that.

So it's that reminder that actually the other side isn't as scary as you think.

Confidence is usually something that lags behind.

It's something that comes later, and it's something that has to be the other side of building evidence.

The people that win in life are the people who act before they feel ready.

They're the ones who just start something, try something.

And whether you succeed or fail, whatever that those words mean, depending on how you're defining them, you will still learn lessons regardless from that experience.

So if you're waiting now to start something because not everything's lined up and not everything's quite right, just take that first step and do it.

And then force yourself to learn from it and to.

Once you've started, that's the conveyor belt going.

You have to then move forward.

There's no way back.

So, yeah, take that first step.

Waiting to feel ready delays momentum, and it wastes time.

You could waste a whole year just trying to wait for the right moment to launch your substack or to write that book, start writing the book that you've always wanted to write, or to start a podcast, whatever it is.

But maybe a better question than, am I ready for this?

Is what am I Willing to take responsibility for what can I actually do today that starts me on that journey?

Pattern number three, people rarely regret trying.

They regret staying too long.

So it sort of links into pattern number two in a way, because it comes down to that starting something, having the confidence and just trying something.

But this one's a bit more about the alternative.

So if you don't try, what happens then?

And it reminds me again, I've spoken about this on the podcast before.

The region beta paradox is this idea that as things get worse, you're more likely to make a change in your life.

If you're in that middle section, which is region beta, things aren't quite bad enough yet for you to make that big decision and that big change, and they're not good enough for you to be satisfied and happy.

They're just okay, so it becomes good enough.

People on their deathbeds don't regret the things that they tried.

They regret the things they didn't do, the time they didn't spend with people, the adventures that they never got to do because they kept putting it off.

So these good enough situations really trap people.

And it might be a work situation, it might be a relationship.

So with work, if your colleagues were okay, you got on all right with them, but you.

It's quite boring small talk.

You never really had deeper conversations.

The work itself wasn't super stimulating, but it paid the wages and you were getting by in life.

It's good enough.

But is it where you want to be?

Do you want to be looking forward to going into work?

Do you want to be excited to go to work?

What if the alternative was your boss was horrible?

Your boss demands the work of two people out of you.

They ask you to work super late when you're not meant to be working and you get no extra money for it.

What if all the people you work for are snakes and they don't get on with you and they really try and throw you under the bus?

I reckon you try and leave pretty quickly.

So it's that aspect of things have to get really bad before you make a decision to change.

So if there is no clear breaking point, then you're just prolonging that staying.

You stay in that comfort.

And we sometimes mistake no action being taken as just a way of avoiding it and avoiding decisions.

Because decisions are hard, right?

But taking no action is a decision in itself.

You've taken the decision to delay something and to prolong your misery for another year.

So if you want to try something, if there's something in your Mind if there's some itch that you need to scratch, try it.

You won't regret it.

And like I said in the previous pattern, it's, you won't regret trying because whether you succeed or fail, you will learn from it.

Pattern number four is no one avoids struggle, they just choose how to meet it.

When we look at the struggles in our lives, our struggles are personal to us.

Everyone struggles.

Everyone struggles on different levels.

So that's the first thing to think about is one of the things we get caught in quite a lot is comparison.

And social media has made that worse.

As I said before, we look at people's highlight reels on these platforms and we don't see the worst of their life.

If I'm having a really bad day, but I go on a. I go on a long walk in the sun and I take some photos of it and I put on a fake smile.

To you watching that on my Instagram story, say, you think I'm having a great time, you think everything's going well.

Insider might be really hurting.

So never take what you see online as the actual truth.

Always.

That's the first thing to mention.

But also, we compare negatively.

We compare struggles.

So if I'm struggling with something, I can choose to compare to someone who struggles more than me or someone who struggles less than me.

And it's a weird one because you can go both ways with it, right?

So some people will delay action because they're comparing downwards.

They might look at other people and say, they've got it worse than me.

Like, why?

Why should I be here complaining about my problems when they've been through this?

This isn't serious enough for me to actually change or do anything about.

This is just life.

Well, actually, it's all relative.

So you cannot compare what you're going through to someone else because your lived experience is different.

If your lived experience has made you a lot more resilient because you've had to live through hard things, then you'll be able to put up with a lot more.

And other people's struggles might seem like nothing.

So you would be comparing upwards potentially.

And that's the other way you can compare.

You can look at other people and go, everyone is doing better than me.

Why am I struggling this much?

You can turn it the other way around.

You, why am I behind in life?

And again, this is the one that we commonly fall into.

We look at other people's lives and we start to think that we've got problems with ours when we really don't.

Our lives are pretty normal on the grand scheme of things, but we also need to be kind to ourselves.

We need to be kind to ourselves when we're talking about ourselves in here, in our minds.

It's if we said some of the things that we say in our minds to ourselves out loud to someone who we don't like, it would probably be awful.

They'd probably hate it, and you'd probably hate saying it to them.

So why do we say it to ourselves?

Isn't that a strange thing as well?

But comparison distorts this perception in both directions.

And minimizing your own struggles because you're comparing with others doesn't remove your struggle.

It just makes it harder to acknowledge.

So never minimize what you're going through and think about what other people have been through and how yours isn't worth it.

Everyone's struggles are personal to them.

And be a little bit kinder to yourself when and realize that, and don't just put yourself down.

Something can be survivable and still misaligned.

And struggle is not a competition.

That's the thing to remember.

The useful question in this, when you're asking it, is not is this worse than what others face, or do I have it better than them?

It's what is this costing me to stay in?

If I actually just look at me and what I know from my life experience, what's the likely outcome of this if I stay in it longer than I need to?

Or can I make a change today that starts to move me out of it?

And with that, those four patterns are some of the patterns that I've learned from all of the conversations I've had.

So, as I said, this is 90 episodes, so we're very, very fast approaching 100, which is crazy.

That's almost a year of.

Sorry, almost two years of podcasting.

Oh, poor maths.

But again, none of it's possible without you, the listener, or the viewer.

So thank you from me for being here and for being an ear to these reflections as well.

When I do a solo episode, I try and reflect on things that I. I found interesting or I would want to talk about and I'd want to hear about potentially.

So hopefully you guys enjoy listening to that.

Let me know which ones you resonated with.

Maybe it's just one.

Maybe it's more than one.

Maybe it's all of them.

But yeah, let me know in the comments, wherever you're listening or watching, which one you resonate with the most.

Other than that, thank you for listening, stay curious, and I will see you in the next one.