Being Unable to Move Towards Independence Is Not About Resolve but About Having Nowhere to Return From

How many years since you first thought about going independent is no longer exactly remembered. What had to be looked up has been looked up. The procedures are understood. Savings are there to a degree. And still, the day of handing in notice gets deferred another year.

And with each deferral, one more explanation is added inside you. It is not yet the time. After a little more of a record. Conditions are poor this year.

The explanations change every year and the result does not. When the result does not change while only the reason changes, the reason is likely not the cause.

The cause, placed first. You are not failing to move because resolve is short. A force that returns you inside applies the moment you try to leave the present way of working. And what that force looks at is not whether the present state is good or bad. It is whether it is familiar.

Several things follow from that single point at once. Being unable to move although it is painful. Declining an approach from somewhere better. Thinking this is beyond what I can take any number of times and being in the same place the next morning. Pain becomes a motive for leaving the range and does not itself widen the range. Motive and range are separate variables.

Words from outside have little effect on this state. Told just take the plunge, the person already knows that being unable to take it is the problem. Told there is nothing wrong with being careful, nothing moves, because carefulness is not the issue. Both sentences are alike in treating the inability to move as a property of the person.

The advice has the same bias. Material answering what is needed to go independent exists in quantity, and much of it is accurate. What is short is not the accuracy. The question it answers is one step off.

And this state continues in units of years. A question that yields no verdict in one year is unlikely to yield one in ten. It is not that the conditions for a verdict fail to gather; the conditions are shaped so that they cannot be judged to have gathered. So the number of years elapsed is not itself information. How long you have agonised settles nothing about what to do next.

What is handled here is the stage before preparation. The list of what is needed is already to hand. Where satisfying that list to the end still produces no start, what to look at next is outside the list. The substance of the preparation itself is not handled. What is stalled is neither the preparation nor the resolve. Without a place to return to, the comparison table tilts to the current side on its own. The tilt cannot be cancelled by will, so moving it means changing how the table is built. What is left after the change is the record of what you actually carried out in the last three months.

The Guides Are Accurate, and the Question Is a Different One

Search for want to go independent and procedures come up. They generally run to five or seven steps and the content is much the same everywhere.

Do a self-analysis. Draw up a business plan. Get your family’s understanding. Draw up a funding plan. Set a target date. Complete the registration and other formalities. Resign once a view of revenue is in place.

They are written by accountancy practices, accounting software companies, and publications supporting new businesses. The content is accurate and there is almost nothing missing. Follow it and procedural failure becomes unlikely.

Look precisely, though, at which question these procedures answer. The question is what is needed in order to go independent. As a list of what is needed, this suffices.

The question you hold, meanwhile, is generally different. What is needed is already known. Knowing it, you are not moving. The question is why, knowing what is needed, you do not start.

These two questions take different kinds of answer. The former can be answered with a list. The latter cannot.

And the guides do not address the difference. So after reading, the state has hardly changed. It can even worsen, because the clearer the procedure, the more the explanation for not moving is left on your own side.

If the method were unknown, the explanation I do not know how is available. If the method is clearly written and you are not moving, the explanation most likely left is a shortage of resolve.

And a diagnosis of insufficient resolve has no prescription, because resolve is not an object with a procedure for increasing it. So whoever settles on this diagnosis stops there.

One further point: who these guides are written for. The writers are businesses whose work is tax and start-up support. So the range they handle extends as far as the formalities being correctly completed. How to file the registration, the requirements for blue-form filing, the switch in social insurance, are all accurately written.

Whether income will arise after independence, meanwhile, lies outside that range. Not writing about what lies outside it is not dishonest. Not making assertions outside one’s specialism is, if anything, the correct posture.

From the reader’s side, though, the guide looks like the complete process of going independent. Seven items are set out, written so that nothing appears missing. That there are steps not written cannot be known, because they are not written. And the cause of not moving is generally outside them.

There Is a State in Which All the Steps Are Done and Nothing Moves

Start from the checklist itself.

Of the seven items in the guide, how many can actually be judged as done?

Self-analysis. There is no completion test for this, because there is no criterion for how far counts as done. The business plan. The same. Nobody has settled what has to be written for a plan to be sufficient. The funding plan. How much is enough is settled by the income after independence, so it cannot be fixed in advance.

What can be judged is only the item of formalities. Whether the registration was filed is settled by whether it was filed.

So of the seven items, few can be clearly judged complete. Most of the rest take a form in which not yet enough can be said indefinitely.

This structure becomes the vessel for deferral. It is not designed that way out of ill will. Set out items with no completion test and this follows naturally.

And the criterion people use against an item with no completion test is generally one: whether the anxiety has gone. The business plan still feels weak. A little more saving feels necessary. The substance of this feels is not the precision of the plan but the residue of anxiety.

Anxiety, however, is hard to remove by preparation. If anything, the further preparation goes, the more matters there are to consider, so the visible uncertainty increases. The premise that preparation reduces anxiety does not hold in the first place.

The shape of the situation is this: an item with no completion test is being judged by the residue of anxiety. And anxiety is not reduced by preparation. In this combination, the day the condition is met is unlikely to arrive.

This shape has a feature hard to see from outside: from outside, the person looks to be preparing steadily.

What is being done is in fact preparation. Research is being done, the plan is being updated, savings are growing. To those around, progress is steady, and the person feels it too. Nothing is moving and there is a sense of movement.

This sense prolongs the state. Had nothing at all been touched, at some point the fact of not doing it would register. With something being touched, and with progress in it, the occasion to register never arrives. At most, once a year, comes the noticing of being in the same place as last year.

There is a way of telling. Look at whether what increased over the past year is only knowledge and savings. If nothing among the increases was put outside, what was progressing was only the preparation side. Preparation is a premise of independence and a different piece of work from independence itself.

What Prevents Moving Is Not Resolve but the Place You Return To

When a returning force operates, it returns you towards somewhere. That destination is what is called here the place to return to.

First, the function itself, briefly. Human behaviour has a commonly described property. Inside a certain range movement is natural, and on trying to go outside it, a force applies that returns you inside. This range is called the comfort zone.

Because the phrase circulates as a place where you feel at ease, it tends to be received as a matter of comfort. The function the phrase refers to, however, has little to do with comfort. What serves as the criterion is familiarity, and whether something is familiar is settled independently of whether it is good or bad. So familiarity forms around bad states too.

This fits everyday observation well. Someone long in a workplace of plainly poor conditions may not move when the chance to go somewhere better appears. From outside it looks irrational; if the criterion is familiarity it is not. The destination is better and unfamiliar.

So the state of thinking this is beyond what I can take any number of times and still not moving holds. Thinking it is beyond you and going outside the range are separate operations.

What this returning force is, and why attempts to remove it come up empty, are handled in A mental block is not a defect. What is needed here is one point only: what that function is comparing in the particular case of independence.

What it compares is not better or worse. It is how readily prediction can be made.

However painful the present way of working, the shape of the pain is well grasped. What happens at what hour, who reacts how, how long a bad stretch lasts. In being predictable, that pain is stable. The state after independence may be better, and it is not predictable. So the comparison tilts towards staying. The judgement is not wrong; the criterion being used in the judgement is a different one.

And here is where the phrase the place you return to gets its meaning. For a returning force to operate, a place to return to has to exist. The present job, pain included, satisfies the condition of such a place on the single count of being predictable.

So someone who has gone outside the range and come back has not necessarily come back because outside was bad. It is because a predictable place remained on the inside. While that place exists, movement outwards stays temporary.

From here the direction of response splits in two. One is to cut off the place you return to — the form of burning the boats and jumping. The other is to leave that place intact and make the outside predictable instead. The former erases the destination itself; the latter draws the outside towards the familiar side. Even under the same phrase leaving the range, what is being moved differs.

The Comfort Zone Has Four Faces

The single phrase comfort zone in fact gathers four different functions. Separating them shows where you are stopped.

The first is the range you can stay in. The territory inside which the state is stable. Deviate from it and the deviation itself becomes a load.

The second is the valley you return to. Even having deviated, left alone you come back. A day of deliberately going outside, and within a few days life is back as it was — this experience belongs to this face.

The third is the range you can see. This is the face most easily overlooked. What lies outside the range is not recognised as an option. It is not that you do not do it; it does not rise as a candidate at all. So what you are not seeing cannot be known by you (this face on its own is handled in Not acting is not a failure of will).

The fourth is the frame that feels like you. The sense of I am not that type. This is not an evaluation of ability but a sense of identity. It judges not whether it can be done but whether it is inside your image of yourself.

Which of these the resistance to independence comes from changes the meaning of the situation.

Coming from the first and second, the resistance may weaken with time, because the range moves. Go outside and spend longer there and the range itself shifts that way.

Coming from the third, it is not experienced as resistance at all, because what is not seen cannot be an object of resistance. Here the symptom appears not as independence frightens me but as nothing comes to mind about what to do once independent.

Coming from the fourth, it is the most stubborn. Knowing all the procedures and holding sufficient savings, if no image of yourself doing it appears, no start occurs. And this frame hardly moves through preparation. Preparation is the work of satisfying requirements, not the work of building an image.

Which of the four you are stopped at can be told by how the symptom appears.

Stopped at the first and second, the symptom appears as fatigue. A day of moving outwards costs a great deal, and within days it is back as it was.

Stopped at the third, the symptom appears as blankness. You want to go independent and cannot say concretely what you would do. Attempting to think, thought stops short of it.

Stopped at the fourth, the symptom appears as incongruity. Imagining yourself independent, it looks like someone who is not you. Natural enough while another person is doing it, and the image blurs the moment it is transposed onto you.

None of the three is the sensation of fear. Putting it into words, though, the vocabulary is missing, so it compresses into the single phrase somehow I cannot take the step. At the point of compression, the information about which of them stopped you is lost.

And with the information lost, the response returns to the most general one — adding more preparation. A response that works poorly on three of the four.

What “Frightening” Points At Comes to Three

The single word frightens is also worth dividing. It has three contents, each with a different response.

The first is fear of the money stopping. A month of zero income may come. There is no view on rent and living costs. This is a substantial concern and can be handled with figures.

The second is fear of failure becoming public. Having told everyone you are leaving, how will it look if it does not work and you go back? This has nothing to do with the amount and does not fall however much is saved.

The third is fear of losing belonging. The organisation’s name on the card, the place you go every morning, the words that explain who you are. This is fear of losing these simultaneously, and it is frequently not recognised by the person.

The three are handled while mixed, under the one word frightens. And the response is generally made only to the first. Build savings, make a record with side work, secure a contract before resigning.

As a response to the first these are correct. The second and third, however, barely move with monetary responses. So even when savings reach the target figure, still frightening remains.

And the remaining still frightening is generally spoken in the vocabulary of the first. In the form I feel the savings are still not enough. What actually remains is the second or the third, and the only vocabulary available is the first’s.

So the target figure is revised upwards. Three million, then five; five, then a year’s worth. A continuing upward revision is a sign that the response is not hitting its object.

For the second there is also a direction of response. Fear of failure becoming public changes greatly with the design of the leaving. Leave in a form that cuts the way back and failure becomes public. Build another line of income while still employed and leave once it stands, and the unit of failure becomes small. It becomes that project did not land rather than I failed at independence.

What this difference sets is the number of attempts available. In a form settled in one go, there is one attempt. In a form with a small unit, it can be tried any number of times. And in a territory where whether something lands cannot be known in advance, the number of attempts weighs heavily on the result.

For the third the direction is different again. Belonging can be held in another form before it is lost. A place with people in the same state, a relation in which you are called by name, words that explain who you are. These can be built while still employed, and whether they are built changes the size of the resistance plainly.

The words that explain who you are in particular get overlooked. While at a company, the organisation’s name and the job title suffice for an introduction. The moment of leaving, those two become unusable. Without replacement words, a blank appears at every introduction. This looks trivial and is the scene in which the loss of belonging is felt most concretely.

The Status Quo Gets Chosen Because the Comparison Is Asymmetric

There is also an observed bias on the side of judgement.

Samuelson and Zeckhauser reported in a 1988 study the tendency for the present state to be treated unduly favourably when people compare options (Samuelson & Zeckhauser, 1988, Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 1(1), 7–59). With options identical in content, the proportion choosing them changes depending on whether they are presented as the current state or as the state after a change.

There is a well-known backing for this bias. As Kahneman and Tversky showed in a 1979 study, what you give up and what you take on are not weighted the same even at the same size (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979, Econometrica, 47(2), 263–291). The side that comes out heavier is what you give up.

The judgement about independence takes a shape in which this bias tends to appear strongly, because what is lost is concrete and what is gained is abstract.

What is lost — the fixed monthly amount, health insurance, paid leave, the title on the card — can all be counted as amounts or as entitlements. What is gained — discretion, the right to decide, income without a ceiling — is uncertain as to whether it will be realised, and its size if realised is not knowable in advance.

Set something concrete beside something abstract and the concrete looks heavier. This is less an error of judgement than a property of the operation of comparing.

A second asymmetry is laid over this: the cost of staying is unlikely to be entered in the accounts.

The loss from going independent and failing is entered clearly. What would be lost by working another five years in the present form, however, is not entered, because what is lost is what could have been built in those five years — and was not. What did not exist is not recorded as a loss.

So only one column of the comparison table is filled in. However many times that table is reviewed, the answer comes out the same way. The same conclusion appearing for years is not caution; it is how the table is built.

There is one way of correcting how the table is built. Put concrete figures into the staying column as well.

The total income from five years in the present form, for instance, can be calculated. Set the rate of increase from the past three years’ actuals and an approximate value comes out. Write that value beside the assets your five-years-hence self holds — what remains when your hands stop. If that is zero, write zero.

Do this and the staying column fills in. Looking at the filled column, the result of the comparison can change. What changed is not that staying became disadvantageous but that the cost of staying got onto the table for the first time.

There is a secondary effect too. Put figures down and the judgement moves away from frightening or not. Fear is a sensation and cannot be compared; amounts can. Putting it into a comparable form itself moves the judgement forward.

This calculation does not predict income on the independent side, because it cannot be predicted. What gets filled in here is only the staying column, and the independent side remains uncertain. That filling in even one side narrows the asymmetry is as far as the effect of this exercise goes.

There Is a Way to Move the Range Other Than Jumping

A question comes up often here. If the resistance is a normal function and the comparison is structurally biased, is there nothing for it but to take the plunge?

There is. Two places a leap fails to reach.

First. Jumping is not an operation that widens the range. Go outside the range all at once and the returning force applies strongly. So cases of someone jumping and being back in the old shape within months are not rare. The experience of having gone back makes the next attempt harder still.

Second. Jumping works poorly on the third and fourth of the four faces. What is not seen does not become visible by jumping alone. The state of finding, after going independent, that you do not know what to do, arises from moving in this order.

What, then, is to be done? There is the operation of widening the range from the outside a little at a time. In which situations starting small works, and in which it comes up empty, is handled in Not acting is not a failure of will. What is placed here is only the concrete form it takes in the case of independence.

Concretely, keeping the present form, actually do a part of what would be done after independence. Make something and put it where people see it. Set a figure yourself, however small, and hand something to someone for it. Create an occasion for explaining yourself without the title on the card.

All of these can be done while employed. And each time, the third and fourth of the four faces tend to move. What has been done enters the range you can see. And the self who has done it enters your image of yourself.

The reason this works is that what has once been done stops being an object of imagination. Resistance operates against imagination; it operates weakly against memory. The question could I do it hardly holds in the same form after having done it once, because the record of having done it comes first.

So the scale hardly matters. The experience of selling a three-thousand-yen item to one person carries no meaning as an amount, and in making the operation of setting a figure and handing something over an experienced one, it does the same work as a three-million-yen deal.

In sequence, a smaller amount is the advantage. The smaller, the sooner it can be carried out, and a miss loses little. And since records of execution accumulate by count, small and fast widens the range faster.

Unlike jumping, this method allows going back. Try it, and if it does not fit, life simply returns as it was. Being able to go back is not weakness but a condition for securing the number of attempts.

This method carries a plain price: it takes time. It is slower than jumping. And there are situations in which being slow is a disadvantage. Where there are reasons that leave no time — health, or a workplace plainly deteriorating — the judgement changes. What can be said here goes only as far as this: where there is time, the order can be chosen.

Judge by the Record of Execution, Not by Whether a Decision Was Made

Whether you are in a state of being able to move does not show in whether a decision was made. It shows in what has been done over the past three months.

What is looked at is the past three months. Did you put anything under your own name in a place where people’s eyes would fall on it? Even one, and the third face — the range you can see — has begun to move. Zero, and the consideration of independence is being conducted only inside your head.

In those same three months, was there anything you set a figure for and handed to someone? The size does not matter. It is whether the operation of setting a figure was performed even once. If not, the operation first needed after independence has not been experienced once.

Who you said it to counts as well. In the past three months, did you tell anyone that you want to go independent? Not the number of times but the kinds of people told. Where it has only been said to people in the same state, it is not yet a move towards building a replacement for belonging.

Resolve is not what any of the three asks about. What they ask about is what actually happened on the boundary of the range.

And if even one of the three has moved, the state has already begun to change. If all three are zero, what is short is not resolve. It is only that not one event has yet occurred on the boundary.

Carrying out the three does not bring down a decision about independence. The decision is not brought directly closer.

Could I manage independence is a question with no answer, since it requires knowing the future. Three people responded to what I put out is a fact. A fact can settle what to check next.

And this difference is not a difference of resolve. It is a difference in the kind of material to hand.

With each deferral, one more explanation was added. The explanations kept multiplying because what was being explained was yourself. Not yet the time, not enough of a record, not enough resolve — each is a description of a person, and descriptions of a person can be produced as often as they are needed. So a different explanation was available every year, and the same place could be occupied every year.

What the three questions ask about is not yourself. It is what happened on the boundary over three months. Put out, or not put out. Set a figure, or not set a figure. Here there are no explanations to add.

What was looked up and what was saved both remain. What was short on the preparation side was not quantity. The work of preparing simply has no line drawn across it to mark the end. Events on the boundary have that line drawn. One is one, neither more nor less.

Whether to resign is not settled here. What is settled is only what to check next.

What is first short after independence, and which parts can only be built while still employed, are handled in Preparing to go independent. What the choice of independence actually changes and does not change is handled, divided into four items, in Not being cut out for employment; for the whole picture of how income arises after independence, start at Getting out of the labour-intensive form; and for the substance of the operation of setting your own figure, start at Before you negotiate a higher rate, look at who is setting the figure. To see first whether the fear felt now lies on a continuum with the anxiety after independence, see What the anxiety of freelancing actually is.