I’ve lost count of how many notebooks I have filled with amazing workshop insights that have never seen the light of day. Forty-three, if you’re asking for an exact number, which I know because they’re stacked in a neat tower in my home office – a physical monument to my eternal optimism and spectacular follow-through failure.
You know how it goes. You see an ad for a workshop that promises to teach you exactly what you need to finally launch that podcast/write that book/start that business/become that person who meal preps on Sundays. “This is it!” your brain screams. “This is the missing piece!” And before your more rational self can intervene, you’ve dropped $497 on a seat at the table of transformation.
I’m basically a black belt in this particular form of self-delusion. Last month, I attended a three-day virtual summit on “Building Your Author Platform” despite having written exactly 1.7 chapters of my supposedly forthcoming novel. The month before that, it was a masterclass on “Advanced Instagram Growth Strategies” even though my last post was a blurry photo of my cat from 2021 with the caption “Caturday vibes” (three likes, one from my mum).
“But this time it’s different,” I always tell myself. “This time I’ll actually implement what I learn.”
Narrator: It was not different. She did not implement anything.
My friends have started making jokes about it. When I mentioned signing up for a productivity workshop last week, my friend Jess didn’t even look up from her coffee. “Have you implemented anything from the last five productivity workshops you attended?” she asked.
Well, when she puts it like that…
I tried explaining to her that the workshops themselves give me a sort of contact high – that buzzy feeling of possibility, of imagining the version of myself who actually does the things. For those few hours, surrounded by other hopeful souls, I genuinely believe transformation is imminent. I’m practically levitating with potential.
“So it’s basically personal development entertainment,” Jess said, reaching for her third biscuit. “You’re not actually planning to do anything with the information.”
I wanted to argue, but the evidence was stacked against me. Literally. Forty-three notebooks’ worth.
This peculiar habit has cost me thousands of pounds over the years. At this point, I could’ve funded an actual degree instead of my impressive collection of PDFs and certificates that I keep in a folder labelled “Growth” (the irony is not lost on me).
The thing is, I’m not alone in this weird little behavioral quirk. There’s a whole economy built around people like me – the eternally hopeful, perpetually planning, never quite executing crowd. We’re the ones keeping the personal development industry afloat, signing up again and again, convinced that this next workshop contains the magic bullet we’ve been missing.
I once sat next to a woman at a business workshop who confessed she’d been to the exact same workshop the previous year. “I took amazing notes,” she whispered, “but then never looked at them again.” We shared a knowing look – the workshop junkie equivalent of recognising a fellow addict at a meeting.
My ex used to call it my “self-help hobby.” Not self-help as in I was helping myself become better – self-help as in I was helping myself to another serving of workshops while my actual goals remained untouched. Bit harsh, but not entirely inaccurate.
I’ve gotten pretty good at justifying it to myself. “Learning is never wasted,” I’ll say nobly, as if I’m some dedicated scholar rather than someone who gets distracted halfway through implementing step one of a ten-step process. Or, “I’m just gathering all the information before I begin,” as if I’m planning a heist rather than, you know, starting a newsletter.
Last year, I attended a workshop on decluttering your home. The irony of adding more notes to my already cluttered collection of notebooks about how to declutter was not lost on me. The presenter talked about how we often hold onto things because of what they represent rather than their actual utility in our lives.
I had one of those uncomfortable moments of clarity. Was I collecting workshops the way some people collect shoes or vintage teacups? Was it about the acquisition rather than the application?
To test my theory, I decided to do a little experiment. I pulled out the notebook from a course I’d taken six months earlier on “Establishing a Consistent Writing Practice.” I’d paid £350 for this workshop and had filled 27 pages with insights, exercises, and action steps. I remembered feeling absolutely electrified during the session, convinced I was about to become someone who wrote 1,000 words before breakfast without so much as a struggle.
I opened to a random page and read my enthusiastic scribbles: “KEY INSIGHT: Consistency matters more than quantity. Even 15 minutes daily builds the habit!”
Had I implemented this very reasonable, very doable advice? Had I written for 15 minutes daily, or even weekly, since taking this expensive workshop?
I think we all know the answer.
What I had done, however, was sign up for two more writing workshops in the intervening months, each promising to be the one that would finally unlock my writing practice.
It’s embarrassingly similar to my relationship with diet books back in my twenties. I’d buy one, get extremely excited about this new approach that was definitely going to work because it addressed all the reasons the previous approaches had failed, follow it for approximately 2.5 days, then abandon it until the next compelling diet book came along. At one point, I had an entire bookshelf dedicated to different eating philosophies, none of which had changed my actual eating habits in any meaningful way.
When I mentioned this pattern to my therapist (yes, I have one of those too – apparently even therapy insights aren’t immune from my implementation issues), she suggested I might be getting my dopamine hit from the anticipation and planning stages rather than the execution.
“Planning to make changes feels good,” she explained. “You get all the emotional rewards of imagining your improved future self without having to do the uncomfortable work of changing your actual habits.”
Well, that was uncomfortably accurate.
“Plus,” she continued, apparently not done exposing me to myself, “as long as you’re in the learning phase, you can’t fail. Once you start implementing, you risk discovering that even with all this knowledge, change is still hard.”
I’d like to say this revelation completely transformed my approach, but that would be a bridge too far. I did, however, institute a new rule for myself: For every workshop I attend, I have to implement at least one concrete action before I’m allowed to sign up for another.
This has led to some hilariously small but technically compliant actions. After a workshop on networking, I connected with exactly one person on LinkedIn before considering my implementation complete. Following a session on email marketing, I went so far as to set up an account with a provider before promptly abandoning it. Baby steps, I suppose.
The funny thing is, on the rare occasions when I have pushed past my resistance and actually implemented something properly, the results have been pretty decent. Not life-changing in the way the workshop promised, mind you, but solidly positive. Which makes my chronic non-implementation even more puzzling.
I think part of the problem is that workshops tend to present their strategies as complete systems. “Follow these 7 steps exactly and success will be yours!” But real life is messier, and implementing usually means adapting the system to your specific circumstances – something that requires a kind of critical thinking and creativity that isn’t necessary when you’re just absorbing information.
Plus, implementation is lonely. During a workshop, you’re surrounded by other enthusiastic learners, all nodding along to how this approach makes perfect sense. But when you’re alone in your living room at 7 AM trying to follow through on your commitment to morning pages, there’s no one there to maintain that energy.
My friend Marcus, who somehow manages to actually implement the things he learns (show-off), says the key is to immediately schedule implementation time after a workshop. “Before the glow wears off,” he told me, “block out specific hours in your calendar for doing the work. Not planning to do the work – actually doing it.”
I nodded enthusiastically when he told me this, wrote it down in my notebook, and then… well, you can guess.
Last week, I found myself hovering over the “Register Now” button for yet another writing workshop. My finger was itching to click, already anticipating that lovely rush of possibility. But then I glanced over at my tower of notebooks, each one containing perfectly good advice I’d already paid for but never used.
With what felt like heroic restraint, I closed the tab. Instead, I picked up the notebook from the top of the stack, opened to a random page, and decided to actually do one of the exercises it suggested. Just one. It took about 20 minutes, felt uncomfortable in places, and didn’t immediately change my life.
But it was 20 minutes more implementation than I’d done in months. And strangely, it felt better than the workshop signup high – a quieter satisfaction, but somehow more substantial.
Will this become a habit? Will I transform overnight into someone who values implementation over acquisition? I’m not making any grand proclamations. But I did put a Post-it on my computer that says “USE WHAT YOU ALREADY HAVE” as a reminder to check my existing notes before signing up for new inputs.
Maybe there’s hope for me yet. Or maybe next week I’ll be writing about the amazing new implementation workshop I just signed up for that’s definitely going to solve this problem once and for all.
Old habits die hard. But at least now I’m aware of the pattern, which is the first step toward… oh god, I’m doing it again, aren’t I?
