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Death of a salesman: how to move past nagging

Death of a salesman: how to move past nagging

Plus: Candy corn teeth!

Geoff Girvitz
January 30, 2025

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Today on Dad Strength

Death of a Salesman
Don’t fight the light
Eliminate energetic barriers to action
A book, a quote, a dad joke

Death of a Salesman

How do we deal with kids (any humans, really) who resist change that is in their own best interests? Let’s say that your kid refuses to brush their teeth. Or maybe it’s a colleague—who knows? They say they are into it and they understand the reasons. But… at the end of the day, they are on-track for a future where they will look like they’ve got a mouth full of candy corn. Not even Ryan Reynolds can pull that off.

What do you say? Trying to convince people to do something (regardless of personal benefit) often creates resistance. And the harder you try to sell them, the more they push back. So, what’s the alternative? Health experts have a powerful tool for exploring change—called Motivational Interviewing—but it’s not about persuasion.

When you ask someone about what they want to do—and why it’s important to them, conversations tend to me much more open-ended and approachable. Less so when this is led by an agenda and more (much, much more) so when it’s led by genuine curiosity.

If there is no clear motivation to take on the behaviour, you’re largely out of luck. Do what you need to do as a parent who needs to keep their kid healthy. Be as cool as you can be with everybody else. However, when there is a genuine motivation for change, you have an option for a completely different approach.

You get to ask what’s bad about changing. You get put obstacles in their way. This is not intuitive at all but amazing things happen when motivation is already in place. The other person will start to solve these problems—reinforcing to their readiness to change. You’re not convincing them. You’re not selling them. But you’re also not playing the role of leader or expert—and that can be the hardest part of all.

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Don’t fight the light

I don’t remember much about the 1997 movie Cop Land beyond Ray Liotta’s character offering this advice about staying in motion: “Leave yourself an out… move diagonal.” The advice stuck. In fact, I remembered it incorrectly as, “Don’t fight the light, go right.” Here’s how that wisdom applies to progress in fitness.

You choose a new skill to work on. Something where progress comes early if you uphold basic standards of consistency, technical practice, and effort. At some point, progress will slow because that’s how things work. The hill gets stepper over time. You can crawl OR you can move diagonally. Find an adjacent skill that compliments the first one. Work on that for a while. Pick up speed. Then come back to the first objective with added momentum… Until it’s once again time to move diagonally.

This is a still from Cop Land, not a Renaissance painting

Eliminate energetic barriers to action

If you need to increase your exercise frequency (or anything that takes effort), scan for places where you turn down opportunities because you don’t have enough energy—physical, mental, you name it. And then make things easier. Reduce the level of challenge until you can show up.

Optimization and high standards are for consistent practices, not new ones.