Idling in Neutral
Why doing the work inside the session isn't enough (what changed when I finally understood that).
For five months, I showed up to a program called the Belief Transformation Intensive with Harry Pickens. Fifteen to twenty people on a call. Four days on, ten days off. A circle of strangers becoming, slowly, a co-regulating group of friends.
And every single time we were asked to share - to share our biggest insight on a call, to say what had shifted, what we’d noticed, what we observed during the ten days between sessions - I felt it. Pressure. Then anger.
Not at anyone in the room. At being seen.
I want to tell you what was actually happening underneath that, because I think you might recognize it.
Hiding in plain sight
Here’s something most people who know my work don’t know about me: I hide in plain sight.
I sign up for things. I show up. But I don’t always raise my hand. I don’t always let it all hang out. There’s a line from a movie I love - let your freak flag fly - and I only do that with people who already know me, who’ve already proven it’s safe.
With strangers? I become a body and probably not much more.
I teach people it’s safe to be seen - an entire methodology around identity-level change and showing up as your future self. And yet in that circle, with people I didn’t yet know, my nervous system had a standing prediction running in the background: you are outside the circle. You hide in plain sight. It is not safe to be part of, to be seen and heard.
Being called on to share violated that prediction. And my system responded the way protection responses do - with pressure, then anger, then the urge to go hide.
What I didn’t know yet was that showing up anyway was exactly the medicine.
The spark and the ten days
In the beginning, the ten days between sessions looked like this: I went back to being me.
That’s the most honest way I can say it. I went back to my life, my patterns, my familiar self. We were asked to comment in the course portal. I didn’t. We were asked to do daily self-work. I was inconsistent. I wasn’t consciously focused on what wasn’t changing, but I certainly wasn’t focused on where I was going either.
My GPS wasn’t pointed the wrong direction. It wasn’t pointed anywhere. I was idling in neutral.
Here’s the analogy that finally made sense of all of it: when you’re building a fire and you get that first spark, that’s when the real work begins. You don’t walk away. You blow on it gently. You add kindling, then fuel, then more fuel - tending it until it can hold itself.
In the beginning, I was letting the spark die. Not out of resistance. Not out of laziness. Out of something more fundamental: I didn’t yet understand that noticing the change was the work. I thought the sessions were the work. The ten days were just… life.
This is what memory reconsolidation research tells us about behavioral change: new experiences create the conditions for old predictions to update, but the brain needs repetition and attention to consolidate what’s new.
A spark of insight in a session is a necessary beginning. It is not the destination. Without tending, the nervous system simply returns to its least action pathway - the well-worn grooves of who it already knows how to be.
I was returning to my least action pathway every ten days without even noticing.
The method actor and the fractals
The shift came when I finally understood the difference between a performative actor and a method actor.
A performative actor shows up, delivers the lines, and goes home. A method actor becomes the character - on set, off set, in the grocery store, in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday. They don’t perform the role. They inhabit it.
I was a performative actor in my own transformation. I showed up to sessions and did the work. Then I walked offstage and back into my old identity.
The turning point - and I can date it to roughly three or four weeks ago - was when I finally committed to an exercise Harry had assigned early one called creating fractals. Sensory, vivid, present-tense scenes of my future self in specific moments.
The future self stopped being a concept I visited and started being someone I was practicing being.
Not affirmations. Not goals. Felt experiences of who I’m becoming, written in enough detail that my nervous system could begin to recognize them as real.
I had the fractals. I hadn’t been reading them.
When I started reading them every single day - settling into them, letting them land in my body - something shifted that I can only describe as the method actor arriving.
The future self stopped being a concept I visited and started being someone I was practicing being.
And then something happened that stopped me mid-conversation.
Someone asked me what I do.
This question has always made me feel uncomfortable. My hands would flap - a tell I’ve had for years, a signal of discomfort my body couldn’t hide. I would fumble through an answer that never quite landed.
This time, there was none of that. There was just a simple, clear, comfortable answer. Grounded. Mine.
I recognized it immediately: that was one of my fractals. That exact moment! I had read it so many times that my nervous system had begun to expect it - and when it arrived in real life, there was no mismatch, no alarm, no hands flapping. Just a woman who knew what she did and said it without apology.
That is prediction error working in your favor. That is reconsolidation happening outside the session.
That is the method actor who forgot she was acting.
How I knew it was working
There’s a teaching I’ve carried from my mentor Dr. Jade Teta that I come back to again and again: when we’re operating from our old patterns - our M.U.D. (misguided unconscious decisions) - we run into repeating problems, recurring obstacles, stuck states.
The same walls. The same loops.
Real change often doesn’t feel like a breakthrough. It feels like one day you notice you’re no longer doing the thing you used to do. The old prediction just quietly lost its charge.
But when we’re moving into our future self, when we’re operating from something more aligned and awake, we start to experience serendipity. Synchronicities. Opportunities that seem to arrive from nowhere.
That’s been my experience these past weeks. Not just the clean answer about what I do. Comfort around my pricing. Ease in conversations that used to make me shrink inside. Small moments of recognizing myself in ways I hadn’t before.
The GPS isn’t pointed at what I don’t want anymore. It finally has a destination.
And back in the circle? The sharing got easier. I don’t know exactly when the resistance dissolved - these things rarely announce themselves. But at some point, I stopped performing participation and started actually being there.
Authentic. Open.
A part of the group rather than orbiting it.
That invisibility of the shift is important. Real change often doesn’t feel like a breakthrough. It feels like one day you notice you’re no longer doing the thing you used to do.
The old prediction just quietly lost its charge.
What this has to do with you
If you’re on my list, chances are you’re doing some version of change work. You’re reading, learning, attending, trying.
And I want to ask you something: are you tending the spark?
Not just showing up to the sessions. Not just consuming the information. Are you inhabiting your future self in between? In the ordinary Tuesdays? In the moment someone asks you what you do?
Because the work isn’t only in the room. It’s in what you do when you leave it.
What’s possible in twelve weeks
This is exactly what we do inside The Permission Experiment.
The story circles aren’t just a place to share. They’re the place where people discover - often for the first time - that it’s safe to be seen by strangers. That the circle doesn’t have to be earned before you can belong to it.
One woman in Cohort 1 told me she hadn’t spoken her truth out loud in a group setting in years. By week six she was the one holding space for others.
Sherry came in knowing something needed to change, but felt unable to name it. By the end of week eleven, she could. And more than that - she was acting from it.
The compound coaching does two things simultaneously: it changes the meaning you’ve been giving your struggles, and it builds a concrete plan to retrain your nervous system through new actions and new behaviors. Perception shift and pattern retraining, working together, not one without the other.
It’s not a program where you learn about identity change.
It’s one where you live it - for twelve weeks, inside a container built specifically for that.
Cohort 2 begins April 10th. Join the waitlist to learn more.
If something in this piece resonated with you, that’s worth paying attention to.
Join the waitlist → The Permission Experiment
I used to think if I believed that I want to be better, I will be better. I thought that only my intentions mattered.
As important as the intentions are, I used them as some sort of perverse satisfaction—a tool to assure myself that I'm going in the right direction, without ever making a single step.
I did this by hoarding courses, books. I was subconsciously waiting for someone or something else to do the work for me, act the right way for me.
I won't lie and say that I never do that anymore. I'm still tempted to escape from responsibilities that way.
But I do return to reality a lot faster than I used to. I guess, that's progress.
Thanks for this, Nicola.