Why I Keep Avoiding the Truth About Identity Shifts and Rebranding

The avoidance isn’t random. It has a specific target — the simplest, most direct truth about what the pattern is and what it requires — and it has a specific function: keeping that truth at a comfortable distance where it can be understood without requiring the full cost of acting on it.

Understanding the function of the avoidance is different from solving it. But it’s the accurate starting place.

What the Avoidance Is Actually Doing

The avoidance of the simplest truth in rebrand identity work is protection. The protection operates through complexity: keeping the understanding one level of nuance removed from the direct behavioral implication.

“My worth-confidence is calibrated to the old rate” is close but still abstract enough to not require the specific next step.

“In Tuesday’s discovery call, I’m going to state the new rate and not offer the discount if they pause” is the simplest truth, and it requires something concrete.

The avoidance operates in the space between these two levels — maintaining enough understanding to feel engaged with the work while keeping enough distance from the specific action that the behavioral encounter remains hypothetical.

The Three Forms of Avoidance in This Territory

Additional understanding instead of action: The next step is clear; instead of taking it, a new resource is found that illuminates the pattern more fully. The new understanding is real. It’s also a postponement of the behavioral contact.

The “not the right moment” calibration: Genuine recognition of timing considerations — I’m in a particularly depleted period, this isn’t the right client relationship to experiment in, this isn’t the right context — combined with an indefinite delay that extends beyond any genuine timing concern.

The complexity escalation: Each time the simple truth approaches, it’s nested in additional nuance: “But of course my situation is specific in these ways…” “And of course this particular context has factors that…” The complexity is often partially valid; it also functions to keep the simple next step at a remove.

What the Simple Truth Actually Is

For most people in rebrand identity work, the simple truth takes one of these forms:

• “I need to hold the rate in the next real conversation, and I’ve been finding reasons not to do this specific conversation.”
• “I need to post this specific piece of content without the softening preamble, and I keep rewriting the preamble.”
• “I need to address the scope creep in this specific client relationship, and I keep deferring.”

The specific version — the one that makes the avoidance actually avoidance rather than genuine consideration — is identifiable. Usually the person knows exactly what it is.

Working With the Avoidance Without Fighting It

Fighting avoidance often entrenches it. The approach that works is acknowledgment and invitation rather than override.

Acknowledgment: “I notice I’ve been approaching the understanding of this pattern instead of the next behavioral step. This is the avoidance running. The avoidance is protecting against [specific feared outcome].”

Examination: “What is the specific feared consequence that the avoidance is protecting against? What does the avoidance believe will happen if I take this specific step?”

Invitation: “Given that this is the protection pattern, what would the smallest possible step look like that would provide evidence about whether the feared consequence actually occurs?”

Commitment with accountability: A specific commitment — what, when, with whom for accountability — that removes the open-ended deferral the avoidance requires.

The nervous system can encounter the feared thing and survive it. The self-concept update that identity shifts for conscious entrepreneurs require happens through the behavioral contact, not through its continued avoidance.

The Abundance GPS community on Skool provides the accountability structure that gently holds practitioners to the specific next steps the avoidance keeps deferring. Join free for the first week.