Negotiating with My Alter Ego
Fourteen days into a 21-day experiment in Thailand, I’m learning that most of us don’t abandon our goals dramatically. We negotiate our way out of them, one perfectly reasonable excuse at a time.
There is a swimming pool outside my hotel. The beach is only a short walk away. The food is excellent, the sunsets are extraordinary, and I am in Phuket, a place where doing absolutely nothing for an afternoon could quite reasonably be described as enjoying life.
Nobody is standing outside my room checking whether I go to training.
Nobody will punish me if I miss a session. Nobody will know if I decide not to record tonight’s vlog. I could skip an interview, sleep for another hour, order another coffee, and tell myself that after two weeks of training, I have earned it.
And the uncomfortable truth is that I probably have.
That is what makes the temptation so dangerous.
Fourteen days ago, I arrived in Thailand with a question rather than an answer.
At 53, I wanted to investigate what I was still capable of physically and mentally if I deliberately removed some of the comforts and excuses of normal life.
I came here to train. I focused on boxing, Muay Thai, fitness, conditioning, and recovery. Some days, multiple sessions. I wanted to document the experience every day, talk to the people training around me, and, importantly, pay attention to what happened inside my head.
The first week tested my body.
The second week has been testing something considerably more complicated.
My ability to continue after the excitement of starting has disappeared.
Because starting, I am discovering again, is often the easy part.
We usually quit gradually
We tend to imagine giving up as some dramatic declaration.
I quit.
Life rarely works that way.
Most of the time, there is no announcement. Instead, we begin negotiating.
You’ve worked hard. Take today off.
You can do it tomorrow.
One missed session won’t matter.
Nobody is watching.
You’re tired.
You deserve a break.
You’ve already done enough.
Every one of those arguments can be completely reasonable.
I think this phenomenon is why so many goals disappear.
We don’t necessarily abandon them. We slowly renegotiate the conditions until the original commitment no longer exists.
One missed morning becomes two. The project that was supposed to start this month is postponed and pushed to next month. The business idea remains in a notebook. The gym membership continues to debit the bank account while the person paying for it waits for motivation to return.
Nothing catastrophic happens.
We simply drift.
I have spent much of my professional life investigating behaviour, people, and information, and there is something fascinating about this process. A sequence of insignificant decisions often produces significant outcomes.
The same principle applies to discipline.
It usually fades gradually rather than disappearing all at once. More often, we relinquish it away through small permissions that seem harmless at the time.
And Thailand has given me plenty of opportunities to negotiate.
Fear still comes with me
One of the subjects I have reflected on this week is fear.
My relationship with fear began long before Thailand.
I experienced fear during war. I have experienced it professionally, in boxing, in business, while walking 321 kilometres on the Camino Primitivo, and in situations where the consequences were considerably more serious than whether I completed another training session.
For years, we have been sold a strange idea about courage: that courageous people somehow eliminate fear.
I don’t believe that.
Fear can be useful. It can sharpen your senses, warn you about danger, and sometimes protect you from making a terrible decision.
The problem isn’t experiencing fear.
The problem is allowing fear to make every decision.
Now I have no interest in convincing myself that I am fearless. I’m not. I simply don’t want fear to have the deciding vote.
That applies whether you’re entering a boxing ring or considering a career change at 50.
Courage doesn’t always roar.
Occasionally it is simply making the phone call you’ve been avoiding.
It can also mean starting over after a setback.
Walking into a gym can be daunting, especially when you’re self-conscious about your body.
Applying for the job.
Leaving something that is destroying you.
Or admitting that you’re frightened and moving anyway.
There is another opponent I don't talk about enough
Loneliness.
I struggle with it sometimes.
There. I said it.
That might sound strange when surrounded by people every day, I train in a busy environment. I speak with coaches and athletes. I conduct interviews. I film. I answer messages. There is constant activity around me.
Then I return to my hotel room.
And sometimes the silence is loud.
There are moments when I miss home. There are moments when I’d rather have someone sitting opposite me while I eat. There are days when doing this experiment alongside somebody else would unquestionably make it easier.
But these two weeks have reminded me that being alone and loneliness are not quite the same thing.
Being alone can sometimes teach you things that company allows you to avoid.
We live in a world where almost every uncomfortable silence can be instantly eliminated.
In our world, we can instantly eliminate almost every uncomfortable silence. instantly. Pick up the phone. Scroll. Watch. Message. Consume. Distract yourself until you’re worn out enough to sleep.
But when those distractions fade away, you eventually face someone you cannot unfollow.
Yourself.
And perhaps one of life’s more uncomfortable questions is this:
Are you comfortable with the person you're left alone with?
I don’t pretend I always have the answer.
I’m still working on it.
Maybe you are too.
At 53, my body keeps its own balance sheet.
This week has also taught me more about nutrition, injury, and recovery.
At 23, you can sometimes treat your body like an unlimited credit facility.
Today, the repayment terms become considerably clearer.
You can borrow from sleep. You can ignore nutrition. You can train harder than you recover. You can pretend an injury isn’t there. You can keep withdrawing from the account.
Eventually, the invoice arrives.
My body has a history.
Some injuries came from training and boxing. Others came from walking hundreds of kilometres. Some belong to a much earlier chapter of my life and my experiences during war.
Those injuries have changed how I understand toughness.
There was a time when toughness meant continuing regardless.
Today I think differently.
There is discomfort, and there is injury. There is laziness, and there is genuine exhaustion. There is quitting, and there is intelligently changing the plan so you can continue.
Knowing the difference requires something that doesn’t look particularly impressive on Instagram:
Maturity.
Being injured doesn’t mean being defeated.
And recovery isn’t weakness.
Today is my day off.
Ironically, after conditioning myself to train day after day, part of my mind is now telling me that I should be doing something.
Go train.
Don’t waste the day.
Keep pushing.
But if training requires discipline, so does recovery.
Sometimes discipline means getting out of bed when you don’t want to.
Sometimes it means staying out of the gym when your ego wants to go.
The difficult part is knowing which voice deserves your attention.
Nutrition has become part of the same equation. When you’re asking your body to perform repeatedly, food, hydration, sleep, and recovery stop being background details. They become part of the work.
There is nothing revolutionary about that.
And perhaps that’s another lesson.
Most things that genuinely work aren’t revolutionary.
Mindset has become an industry
I hear the word “mindset” everywhere.
Winning mindset. Millionaire mindset. Warrior mindset. Abundance mindset.
Apparently, we are one affirmation away from becoming unstoppable.
I have a problem with that.
I am not unstoppable.
Neither are you.
We’re human beings.
We get tired. We become frightened. We get injured. We lose confidence. We feel lonely. We make mistakes. We occasionally want to give up.
For me, mindset means acknowledging those things.
Mindset is what happens next.
Mindset involves keeping a promise even after the emotions that led to that promise have faded away.
It’s about working even when no one would know if you chose not to.
It’s admitting that you’re lonely without allowing loneliness to dictate your direction.
It’s accepting that recovery is necessary when your ego calls it weakness.
It involves entering a room where someone possesses greater knowledge than you and demonstrating the humility to listen.
That last one has been particularly valuable here.
I have lived a lot of life. My experiences include war, investigations, business, boxing, fatherhood, successes, failures, and plenty of mistakes.
None of that makes me the smartest person in a Muay Thai class.
Sometimes the person standing in front of me knows something I don’t.
The moment I become too important to learn from them is probably the moment I should stop calling myself experienced.
Fourteen days later
Two weeks of this experiment are now behind me.
I haven’t discovered a secret.
I haven’t found the ten-step formula for discipline.
I haven’t unlocked some extraordinary mindset unavailable to everyone else.
Quite the opposite.
I’m beginning to think we’ve made personal change unnecessarily complicated.
This week reminded me that fear doesn’t have to disappear before we act. Loneliness doesn’t automatically mean we’re on the wrong path. Nutrition matters. Injuries deserve respect. Recovery is part of performance. Humility keeps us learning. And mindset has considerably less to do with motivational slogans than with the small decisions we make when nobody is watching.
Most importantly, I’ve learned how simple it would be to stop.
And perhaps that’s relevant to you.
You don’t need to come to Thailand.
You don’t need to train three times a day.
You don’t need to box, practice Muay Thai, or walk 321 kilometres.
Your battlefield may look entirely different.
Maybe there is a business you’ve been talking about starting.
Maybe your health has been waiting for your attention.
Maybe there is a book sitting unfinished on your computer.
Maybe you’ve spent years telling yourself you’re too old to begin again.
Maybe you’re lonely.
Maybe you’re frightened.
Maybe you’ve failed before and don’t particularly want to experience that feeling again.
Or perhaps you made a promise to yourself months ago and have been quietly negotiating your way out of it ever since.
I’m not going to tell you to conquer everything tomorrow morning.
Life doesn’t work like that.
But I will ask you something.
What are you negotiating away?
Your health?
Your dream?
Your time?
Your relationships?
Your potential?
Your remaining years?
The gap between the person you intended to become and the person you eventually become may not result from a single, monumental decision; instead, it may be created by thousands of tiny negotiations. by thousands of tiny negotiations.
I won’t win every one of mine.
Neither will you.
But tomorrow gives us another opportunity to choose the direction.
Fourteen days down.
Seven remain.
I still don’t know exactly what I’ll discover by the end of this experiment.
But I know one thing.
You don’t need my life. You don’t need my journey. You don’t need Thailand.
Just don’t abandon yours.