Outreach kills me. I absolutely hate it.

I could go on and on about why I hate it so much, but I’ll spare you the details for now. Just take my word for it – I handle it very badly. And, TLDR, my inner shame ABOUT my outreach struggle is what’s really hurting me.

I was talking a buddy today about why I’m not doing more podcast episodes, and it almost completely comes down to lack of outreach.

My hit rate of people being interested in being on the podcast is actually pretty high (>25% of the people I cold outreach to). The problem is, I’ve only sent 7 total messages so far, because of how much outreach barbecues me.

So anyways, when talking to my buddy, I’m realizing that the steps for doing outreach really aren’t that bad. I’ll again spare you the details for now, but suffice to say it’s really not objectively that much work.

So why am I getting barbecued by outreach? It’s not the outreach tasks themselves that kill me, it’s me beating myself up over how much I hate outreach.

This is absolutely the concept I was talking about a couple weeks ago, that I’m well aware of. It’s not the objective hassle/activity that’s killing me, it’s not the dread of the hassle that’s killing me. It’s me being upset at myself BECAUSE I’m dreading the activity (outreach).

Specifically, here is the thought process that I think is frying me:

Why are you being such a pansy (loosely translated)?

You used to be so hardcore with tasks much harder than this, and yet here you are, not able to even send an email? You were supposed to be getting mentally stronger – what happened? You must be wrong about all sorts of things!

In other words, probably 90% of my issue with outreach (both in terms of my lack of outreach, and my hatred for it) has essentially nothing to do with outreach. It would be any activity I don’t like doing. The issue is overwhelmingly being caused by me not accepting when I have imperfect thought patterns,

I can’t emphasize this enough (at least to myself). This is by far the most simple explanation of why I’m getting pwnd so much by the concept of outreach, given that it’s not objectively not that hard. I’m just spending boatloads of energy fighting myself about how I hate outreach, but I shouldn’t hate it, but I do hate it, but I thought I was making mental capacity progress, why am I even having this internal strife, why did I just allow myself to effectively procrastinate the last half hour BECAUSE I was busy BBQing, why am I even working on this podcast at all if I hate it so much.

In that above thought pattern, the majority of energy burn/pain is coming from me being fundamentally not happy with how I’m handling a negative thought.

I’m putting so much pressure on myself to not hate outreach – that I can’t help but hate outreach. Even when outreach is objectively not that big of a hassle for me.