Reduce the Friction Before You Fight the Resistance

You don't need more willpower. You need fewer steps between "done" and "posted."

You finished the newsletter at 8:40 PM on a Wednesday.

It was good. You knew it was good. That quiet, settled certainty that shows up when the thing actually landed on the page the way it sounded in your head.

Then you went to post it.

Opened Substack. Needed a header image. Went to Canva. Spent eleven minutes looking for something that “felt right.”

Came back. Reread the opening. Changed a word. Changed it back.

Previewed on mobile. Fixed the spacing. Previewed again.

9:17 PM. The energy was gone.

You saved the draft and told yourself you would come back to it in the morning.

You did not come back to it in the morning.

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This is not a willpower failure.

You had the motivation. You had the work.

What you did not have was a clean path from done to posted.

Every extra step between finishing and releasing is a decision point and every decision point is an opportunity for your brain to start negotiating.

• The header image.

• The formatting.

• The mobile preview.

• The one-more-read.

None of those are about quality. They are friction and friction is the silent system killer that most women who write, teach, and speak do not even know is running in the background.

You think you lost the energy. You didn’t. Your process bled it out.

BJ Fogg, the behavioral scientist behind the Fogg Behavior Model at Stanford, built his entire framework around one design rule:

when in doubt, make the behavior easier before trying to make the person more motivated.

Stop trying to push harder. Remove the obstacles.

His model says behavior happens when motivation, ability, and a prompt converge at the same moment. If any one is missing, the behavior does not happen and the one most people ignore is ability.

Not:

• Skill

• Ease.

• How many steps.

• How many micro-decisions.

• How much mental energy the process demands before you even get to the publish button.

Women who write, teach, and speak almost never have a motivation problem at the finish line. They just spent two hours writing something real.

The motivation was there.

What happened between done and posted was a series of small friction points that drained the activation energy until there was nothing left to push with.

I know this because I lived it. I once spent forty-five minutes formatting a post that took me thirty minutes to write.

By the time the formatting was “right,” I had reread the piece so many times it no longer felt true. I published it four days later. The original version was better.

That was not a discipline failure. That was a design failure.

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3 ways friction shows up at the finish line:

• The tool spiral. You finish writing, then switch platforms to format, design, or schedule. Every switch pulls your brain out of the creative space and into the administrative space. By the time you are back, the thread is broken.

• The preview loop. You check mobile, desktop, email version. Find something small. Fix it. Preview again. Find something else. This loop can run for twenty minutes before you notice.

• The decision stack. What category? What tags? What subtitle? Schedule now or later? Each one is small. Together, they are a wall. Not because any single decision is hard, but because the cumulative load is too high when your nervous system is already activated.

You don’t need more discipline at the finish line.
You need fewer decisions at the finish line.

Friction does not announce itself the way fear does. It just quietly adds steps and exits between you and the publish button until the energy that was available is gone.

The fix is not pushing harder. The fix is a shorter path from done to posted.

The paid section below walks you through how to find and remove the friction in your release process, and how to use the Ready to Be Seen™ tool to close the gap before your brain starts bargaining.