You Already Know What You Should Do. So Why Are You Still Not Moving?

You have a goal. Maybe it's refreshing your resume. Maybe it's sending one email to someone in your old network. Maybe it's signing up for that certification course you bookmarked six months ago.

You know exactly what the next step is. And yet, you do nothing. The tab stays open. The week passes. You tell yourself you'll do it when things settle down, when the kids are less busy, when you feel more ready.

Somehow, "more ready" never quite arrives.

If you've felt this way recently, you are not alone.  This is normal. 

The Gap Between Knowing and Doing  

There's a psychological concept called the "intention-action gap" which is the space between deciding to do something and actually doing it.

Researchers have studied this for decades, and what they keep finding is that intention alone is a terrible predictor of behavior.  You can mean to do something with your whole heart and still not do it.  Meaning to and doing it are different things, and that difference says nothing about your willpower or how much you care. 

For mothers re-entering the workforce (or just thinking about it), this gap tends to be extra wide. The stakes feel high. The situation is personal. The outcome is wrapped up in identity, self-worth, financial anxiety, and how you see yourself as a mother and as a person. When something means that much, the brain does something interesting: it protects you from it.

Protection That Doesn't Actually Feel Like Protection

When something feels risky--and putting yourself out there after years away absolutely feels risky--your nervous system can see it as a threat.

The brain doesn't distinguish between a real threat and an imagined one. A scary email and a charging bear produce the same biological response. So you wait. You reorganize your desk instead. You scroll. You convince yourself you need to do more research before you're ready to act.

This isn't laziness. It's your brain doing exactly what it was built to do: keep you from walking toward danger. The problem is, it can't tell the difference between danger and growth.

This shows up in a specific way for moms who've been out of the workforce for a year, or five, or more. The conversation inside your head sounds like: Who am I to apply for that? or I've been out too long.  Things have changed too much.

Those thoughts feel like reality. They're usually not. They're protective stories your brain creates to keep you in a situation it already knows how to manage. The familiar feels safer than the unknown, even when the unknown is something you actually want.

When "I'm Not Ready" Is Doing A Lot of Work

One of the most common ways the intention-action gap disguises itself is through the feeling of not being ready. Readiness sounds so reasonable. Of course you should feel prepared before you act. But readiness for big, uncertain things (like starting a new job) doesn't usually come from more preparation. It comes from action.

You don't feel ready, so you take a small step, and then you feel a little more ready. Then you take another. That's how it actually works, even though it rarely feels that way from the outside.

The Weight of Everything Else

Here's what research on intention-action gaps often doesn't talk about: many women who want to return to work are also carrying a lot of other people's needs at the same time.

When your mental energy is consumed by managing a household, tracking appointments, helping with homework, and anticipating everyone else's needs before your own, there is genuinely less head space left for the kind of focused, slightly uncomfortable thinking that going after a new goal requires. 

Fatigue plays a direct role, too. Studies on decision-making consistently show that people make worse decisions and take fewer actions when they're tired. If you're chronically low on sleep, the part of your brain that handles long-term planning and initiating new behaviors is running on reduced capacity. 

Two Things That Actually Help You Take Action: 

1. Make the action smaller--a lot smaller than you think it needs to be. Not "update my resume" but "open a blank document and write my most recent job title." Not "reach out to my network" but "write one text to one person who might be able to help."
2. Name what you're actually afraid of. The inaction usually has a specific fear underneath it. Rejection? Being seen as behind? Discovering that you don't love the work as much as you remember? Succeeding and then having to figure out the logistics?

Fear doesn't mean you shouldn't move forward. But unnamed fears tend to be bigger than named ones. When you can say, I'm not updating my resume because I'm afraid the gap will disqualify me, you can work with that. The fog becomes something specific.  And specific things can be dealt with. 

These fears are exactly why I started the Elavare Podcast: How She Did It. 

In this week's episode, we talk with one mother about the journey of building the confidence and pushing through the fear.  Listen to this week's episode  

Read additional blog posts  here.