How to Finish What You Start, with Chris Bailey

**Dave Stachowiak** (0:00)
Starting is often a lot easier than finishing. Our mindsets and our tactics can make a big difference in how far we really go.
In this episode, the best ways to finish what we begin. This is Coaching for Leaders, Episode 793

**SPEAKER_2** (0:18)
Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

**Dave Stachowiak** (0:27)
Greetings to you from Orange County, California. This is Coaching for Leaders, and I'm your host, Dave Stachowiak. Leaders aren't born, they're made. And this weekly show helps leaders thrive at key inflection points. The reality of leadership is that it is broad. What that means is, for a lot of us, is there's always things we're working on, there's always things we're trying to get better at, there are always things we're trying to move on.
Some of those things, we get started on, and we're super excited about, and we keep going indefinitely. And there's also a lot of things that even though we know it's good for us, even though we see the benefits, even though we've got the plan intellectually, once we start, it's sometimes hard to keep going. Today, a conversation on how we can finish what we start by being a bit more intentional, and using some really helpful tactics that are practical in a way that keep us moving, not only for ourselves, but for our teams. I'm super excited to welcome Chris Bailey to the show. Chris is an author and lecturer who explores the science behind living a more productive and intentional life. He has written hundreds of articles on the subject, and is the bestselling author of The Productivity Project, Hyperfocus, and How to Calm Your Mind. His newest book is Intentional, How to Finish What You Start. Chris, a pleasure, welcome to the show.

**Chris Bailey** (1:46)
Dave, my Polish friend, how are you?

**Dave Stachowiak** (1:49)
I am lovely, I am lovely.

**Chris Bailey** (1:51)
Fellow Polish, my fellow Polish friend. Nice to chat with you.

**Dave Stachowiak** (1:55)
Here we are, yeah, nice to chat with you.
I loved the book and thinking about this, finishing what we start, because we are so good at starting things, aren't we, most of us? And yet it's the finishing thing that we get in trouble with a lot, isn't it?

**Chris Bailey** (2:12)
It's kind of like that saying that, and I find intentionality, honestly, one of the most beautiful topics in the world. I think it's what makes us human on a lot of different levels. But then we have these sayings that the road to hell is paved with good intentions and stuff like that.
And so it makes you question really what gives? We have these intentions that, like you're saying, we follow through with, and then we have the others that just, they get swept away because we're in the fray of our daily life or they're ugly things that we just have to do, that we kind of kick down the street, get the tin can to another day. And so that becomes the art of productivity, it's easy to accomplish things that we have a deadline for. Deadlines are an incredible way to add structure and a framework to the things that we want to accomplish. It's easy to accomplish the things that we care about. There's a lot of books on habits too. People don't need help making habits like eating a chocolate bar every day or something, or watching more TV, but they need habits for the ugly stuff, and intentionality can help us get there too. So it's really this fascinating topic because intention is always what's behind what we follow through with, but we don't always follow through with every intention.

**Dave Stachowiak** (3:35)
You write on this, the strength of an intention is a function of our desire minus our aversion. Every single task has an amount of both.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:46)
Tell me more about that.

**Chris Bailey** (3:47)
Well, they fluctuate over time too, don't they? And it is an interesting thing with every task, every project, every commitment that we have. There are these two ingredients that attract us to something and repel us away from that same thing, desire and aversion. So you think about any in the book, I call it our timeline of goal attainment. So across our timeline of goal attainment for any goal that we want to achieve, our desire is often way higher at the beginning than it is closer to the end of us.
If you are going on a trip to Spain and one of your life long ambitions has been to learn Spanish and you have kicked it down the street to a later day constantly throughout your life, probably right after you book the tickets, your desire is going to be through the roof, right? When you set that goal again, when you set that resolution again. But then, it fades, it tapers down into this aversion, which is just this ugly feeling that we have when it comes to doing certain tasks in our work based on attributes that they can have. So it's this interesting kind of calculus where it's desire minus aversion that creates our overall will to want to do something at any moment over that timeline of a goal. But the desire is usually high right at the beginning and then it just often plummets like with the Spanish example.