Laziness Is A Fucking Myth
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again.
When you’re struggling to move forward on something.
When you find yourself falling short, or back at square one, time after time…
It can be so easy to decide that something isn't meant for you.
That you're just not the type of person who can stick to things.
That your personality is too ‘all or nothing’ for incremental changes to be worth your time.
That your ADHD or neurodivergence means certain things are just harder for you, if not off the table entirely.
That the goal you've been circling for years is just a fantasy and not a real possibility.
And somewhere along the way, the not moving forward (or the perceived ‘giving up’) gets labeled as laziness.
As lack of dedication.
As not wanting it badly enough.
And I am here to tell you: that’s not what is happening.
There is a deeper reason you aren’t moving forward — even when your conscious thoughts seem ‘lazy’ or like a general lack of ambition. Especially when the thing you're not moving toward is something you genuinely want.
The not moving is a signal, not a character flaw.
We’ve all come across that one person in our life.
The type of person who seems to just have a ‘knack’ for getting what they want.
That could accidentally trip and fall into their dreams on a random Tuesday.
The one for whom things just seem to always fall into place — or at least that's how it looks from where you're standing.
And it's easy to look at that and think something is wrong with you.
That they have something you don't.
That it's easier for them because they are somehow built differently.
And while I’d bet it’s not actually as easy for them as it seems, it goes deeper than that.
Here's what's actually true: their patterns, programming, and nervous system regulation, around that thing are different than yours.
Two kids can grow up in the same household and come out of it with completely different relationships to effort, to money, to success, to risk, to themselves. The general environment is the same, but what each of them takes away from it — the stories, the beliefs, the ways of moving through the world — that's what differs.
And that difference is what shapes everything that comes after.
It has nothing to do with who deserves it or wants it more.
It has everything to do with what got wired in — and whether or not that wiring has been updated.
The big shift in my own understanding of this, happened along my own journey of healing my relationship with money.
When I realized that nothing I changed was really about the money itself — it was all about what was happening underneath it.
I was someone who genuinely wanted to improve my financial situation, who understood logically what needed to happen, and even well and truly ‘got there’ a few times.
But I would eventually find myself back in the same place: having to fight and scrap my way back out of debt, making more money with nothing to show for it (like, how the hell am I still paycheck to paycheck?) and struggling to get the business I was building on the side to bring in any significant money, consistently.
I had been telling myself and believing things like:
“I’m just bad with money.”
“Money isn’t meant for me.”
“I can never catch a break.”
“I’m just a procrastinator.”
“It’s always something.”
“I am such a smart person, why am I so dumb when it comes to money?”
“I’m just not the type of person who can stick to something long-term.”
“I am all in, or I’m out – there’s no in between with me.”
My inner critic was always going off about how lazy, stupid, and broken I was.
But what I found when I started looking underneath, wasn't laziness, or a lack of ambition or discipline. It was a set of patterns and beliefs about myself and money: about what was safe, what was possible, what someone like me was allowed to have, that had been running unconsciously on autopilot since long before I was old enough to question them.
As someone who is neurodivergent, understanding the mechanism behind the thing is not optional for me. It's the whole game.
I mean, the history of me being labeled argumentative, insubordinate, and as the ‘squeaky wheel’ in my corporate life for asking “why?” is lengthy and well documented, because I never functioned well in a “that’s just how it is,” “just do what your told,” “just follow these steps” environment, when most of the time the steps were inefficient, unnecessary, and likely to cause issues down the line (because most of the corporate world is run by mediocre white men, but lets save that rant for another time.)
And while this didn’t serve me very well in a corporate setting, it has served me very well both as a student and a coach.
So when it all finally clicked, when I understood what my system had decided was safe around money, where those decisions had come from, and how they were showing up in my choices without me even realizing it — I didn't just get traction with money, I had a framework I could apply to everything.
Every goal I had ever struggled to move forward on suddenly made a different kind of sense. I could see where I was getting stuck and why. And more importantly, I could see what to do about it. (That's a big part of why I teach and coach the way that I do.)
I'm not interested in giving my clients a 5 step plan and sending them on their way. I want them to understand what's actually happening — at the level of their patterns, their programming, their nervous system, the stories their system has been running since childhood. Because when you understand it, you can work with it instead of against it. And when you can work with it, you stop needing to white-knuckle your way through every attempt at change.
Here's what's actually happening when you can't move forward on something you want:
Your system — your nervous system, your unconscious programming, the identity you've been operating in since childhood — equates safety with your childhood environment. The experiences you had, shaped how you learned to function, and that is what gets locked in as what is safe.
That’s why people who grew up in chaos and neglect have a hard time in relationship with calm, consistent, devoted partners, that’s why people who learned to live without, struggle with having (or being given) things, why people who grew up with abuse find themselves in abusive dynamics with friends, partners, jobs, and bosses as adults.
This isn’t only happening for those of us who had shit childhoods, but I’m using these examples to show you how we unconsciously seek and move towards what is familiar because our system learned that the known (however horrible) is safe, because that is what we have built ourselves around handling.
You’re not struggling to move forward, or to get what you want because you're broken or weak or lazy. You’re system is flagging the change as unknown, and anything unknown is unsafe – whether there is a real, viable threat or not is irrelevant, you stepping outside of your system’s baseline experience is what it is responding to.
That's not laziness. That's survival programming doing exactly what it was designed to do.
The problem is that most of us never get taught this. So when we can't move forward, we reach for the most available explanation — I'm lazy, I'm undisciplined, I don't want it enough — and we internalize it as a character flaw; which makes moving forward even harder, because now we're not just fighting the pattern, we're fighting the shame of believing we're the problem.
You're not the problem.
The wiring is the problem.
And wiring can be updated.
That's the thing about understanding this at the root — once you see it, you can't unsee it. It stops being about any one goal, and starts being about every area of your life where the same patterns are behind the wheel.
The goal you can't stick to, the habit you keep breaking, the relationship dynamic that keeps repeating, the money situation that never quite resolves — they're not separate problems. They're the same pattern showing up in different rooms.
Laziness would mean you don't care. But you do care.
You might be lying to yourself about it, but you care deeply.
That's what makes it so exhausting and so confusing when you can't make yourself move.
The struggle isn’t failure, it is a signal worth paying attention to.
If this is resonating — if you've been in that place of knowing you want something and not being able to make yourself move toward it, or you keep finding yourself back at square one — my free teaching Desire to Done might help shed some further light. Click here for access.
With love & fire,
Shannon
