#213: It's Not the Task, It's the Timing

Hey, this is Melissa Parsons, and you are listening to the Your Favorite You Podcast. I'm a certified life coach with an advanced certification in deep dive coaching. The purpose of this podcast is to help brilliant women like you with beautiful brains create the life you've been dreaming of with intentions. My goal is to help you find your favorite version of you by teaching you how to treat yourself as your own best friend.

If this sounds incredible to you and you want practical tips on changing up how you treat yourself, then you're in the right place. Just so you know, I'm a huge fan of using all of the words available to me in the English language, so please proceed with caution if young ears are around.

Hello again, beautiful humans. Welcome back to Your Favorite You. I am still Melissa Parsons, your favorite podcast host and your favorite life coach.

​

Today, I wanted to tell you about something I've noticed in myself, and it's about something as unglamorous as abdominal exercises because I think it's actually about something much bigger.

​

So about 20 years ago, when I first started exercising in groups, I did strength training, HIIT classes, boot camps. I've done them all.

​

But I noticed a pattern across pretty much every single class.

​

The instructors would always save the ab work for the very end of the workout, which meant by the time we got to it, I was already tired.

​

And having to push through multiple ab exercises back to back right when I had the least left in the tank made me absolutely hate doing ab exercises. Not dislike, hate.

​

Fast-forward to now, I've gotten more fit over the years. I've also had the benefit of an abdominoplasty back in 2019. But all of that aside, here's the thing that actually changed everything.

​

My current trainer, the amazing Cassie Jacobs, structures our sessions completely differently.

​

We'll do a set of three or four exercises, arms, legs, chest, back, whatever we're doing, and then she'll slip in one ab exercise.

​

Then we'll do another set of something else, and then a different ab exercise.

​

By the end of the hour, we've done at least six different ab exercises scattered throughout, never all crammed into one exhausted final stretch, and always a different ab exercise, which is kinda fun 'cause as I'm doing the one, I'm like, "I only have to do this once." And here's what's wild.

​

The exercises that I genuinely used to hate, I now don't just tolerate, I actually look forward to them.

​

They're pretty much the same exercises more or less, but I have a completely different relationship to them.

​

And the only thing that changed was when in the hour I was encountering them and having to do them. So today I want you to think about where else this might be true in your life.

​

Where are you cramming something that might actually be good for you, that you might actually enjoy into a tight window at the end when you're already exhausted and telling yourself you hate it or you can't do it when really you've just never experienced it any other way?

​

Here's what I think was actually happening all those years. I hated ab work. The difficulty of doing anything while completely depleted got misattributed to that task itself.

​

I hated doing anything at all while I was running on empty, and ab work was no exception. It just happened to be the thing that always got scheduled into that exhausted window every single class.

​

So over the years, it built up an identity in my mind. Again, I hate ab work. That sentence felt true. It felt like a fact about me and about this particular category of exercise.

​

But the truer sentence underneath it was, "I hate being asked to perform right when I have nothing left." This is such an easy mistake to make because the task and the timing are so tangled together in the actual experience, it's hard to tease them apart afterward.

​

You don't get a clean, separate readout that says 40% of this misery is the exercise itself, 60% is your blood sugar being low and your level of exhaustion.

​

You just get one blended feeling, "I hate this," and you attribute the whole thing to the task because the task is the part you can name.

​

What sweet Cassie does, whether or not she'd ever describe it in these terms, is make sure I never face the hard thing at my most depleted.

​

Every time I hit an ab exercise in one of our sessions, I still have something left. Not full energy, mind you. This is a real workout.

​

I often have to take breaks to breathe and to take a drink and to, you know, let the blood travel back up to my brain.

​

But it's never the scrape-the-bottom-of-the-barrel version of me that used to show up for ab work 20 years ago.

​

And because of that, each individual encounter with the exercise is just manageable, sometimes, dare I say, enjoyable, if you can believe that.

​

And here's what I think happens over enough repetitions of that.

​

Your actual relationship to the task gets rewritten, not through willpower, not through gritting your teeth and powering through the thing you hate until you convince yourself you don't hate it anymore.

​

Just through enough encounters with it under conditions where it was genuinely doable.

​

Until your nervous system quietly updates its prediction, it stops bracing for misery every time the ab exercises come up because misery stopped being the reliable outcome.

​

So let's talk about where this shows up outside the gym because I think it's kinda everywhere once you start looking.

​

The most common version I see in my own life and pretty reliably with clients is trying to journal or trying to meditate or even trying to read a book that you genuinely are looking forward to reading right at the end of the day when you're exhausted and what your body actually needs in that moment is sleep.

​

You pick up the journal at ten thirty at night and stare at the page and nothing comes.

​

You sit down to meditate after a full day and immediately start fighting to keep your eyes open, which is its own kind of failure to feel bad about.

​

You open the book you've been excited about all week and read the same paragraph four times before you finally give up.

​

And then the conclusion you draw isn't, "I was too tired for this tonight." It's, "I'm not a journaler," or, "I can't meditate because my mind won't quiet down, or if it does quiet down, I fall asleep," or, "I don't even have time to read anymore." None of those conclusions are really about the practice.

​

They're about the timing you've only ever tried the practice in. I want you to notice how identical this is to my ab work story.

​

A perfectly good practice, meditation, journaling, reading, movement, maybe it's a hard conversation or a creative project, gets exclusively scheduled into the one window where you have the least capacity available.

​

And because that's the only version of the practice you ever experience, you draw a permanent conclusion about yourself and the practice instead of a temporary conclusion about the timing.

​

Think about your own life for a minute.

​

What have you written off as something you hate or something you're just not capable of, that you're actually only ever attempting in your most depleted window?

​

The difficult conversation you keep putting off until the end of an already draining day, so you walk into it with nothing left to bring to it.

​

The workout you only ever attempt after work when you're exhausted instead of trying it when you're fresh.

​

The creative hobby you've decided you don't have the energy for anymore because the only time you ever get to do it is the one hour before bed when you have the least energy of your entire day.

​

And let me make sure I say this. I'm not saying that every single thing you dislike is secretly a timing problem. Some things you just genuinely don't enjoy, and that's allowed too.

​

You're allowed to say, "Fuck this. I don't wanna do this." But before you file something away permanently as, quote, unquote, "not for me," I want you to ask one honest question.

​

Have I tried this when I have something left, or have I only ever met this version of myself, the depleted one, every single time? Here's what I'd love to leave you with. Before you decide you hate something or you're simply not capable of it, check the timing first. Try it on a Saturday morning instead of a Tuesday night.

​

Try the journal before your day starts instead of after it's already rung you out a bit. Try the hard conversation on a day you're not already running on fumes.

​

You might find out that you still don't like it, and that's genuinely useful information too.

​

But you might also find out the way that I did with ab work, that the thing you were so sure you hated was never really the problem.

​

The problem was that you had only ever met it when you had nothing left to give it.

​

So this week, pick one thing you've written off, just one, and try it at a different hour than you've always tried it. See who shows up differently.

​

And if you're somebody who keeps crowding all the good for you things into the one exhausted hour at the end of every day and you're not sure how to actually redesign that, that's exactly the type of work I love to do with my clients.

​

So I would love to help. Reach out to me, melissaparsonscoaching.com, DM me, whatever you need to do. All right. I love you all so much. Thanks again for listening to the podcast. I'll see you next week.

Hey there. Before you go, I'm doing something different for this launch, and I want you in the room with me. If you're listening to this in the fall of twenty twenty-six, you're in luck. If you're listening from the future, sorry about your luck. Starting Monday, November sixteenth through Thursday, November nineteenth, I'm opening up my coaching Zoom room to any woman who wants to join. I'm calling it Coach Week. Here's how it works:

Each day from eleven thirty AM to one PM Eastern, I'll teach for the first ten to fifteen minutes, and then the rest of the time is yours. Open complimentary coaching live with me. You can come all four days or just the one day you actually need. There's no right way to do Coach Week. The right way is whatever works for you. At the end of each session, I'll tell you a little bit more about what's coming in twenty twenty-seven for my Your Favorite You coaching group because this one's different from anything I've done before. For the first time ever, it includes a five-night retreat in Tulum, Mexico. Yes, Tulum. Yes, you get to come.

​

The new group kicks off in January 2027, and I cannot wait to share all of it with you. If you want in on Coach Week, and I really hope you do, head to melissaparsonscoaching.com/coachweek to get signed up.