Avoidance With Better Branding
Even as a coach, you can still be coached. This isn’t about accreditation requirements, but it’s about honoring the International Coaching Federation’s (ICF) Code of Ethics: pursuing ongoing learning, self-awareness, and improvement to remain professionally competent.
If this were a coaching conversation, and my coach asked what I want to work on, I’d answer with a Latin phrase: premeditatio malorum. This practice, as the Stoics used it, means rehearsing potential misfortunes so their impact is lessened. But that raises a core question: does this rehearsal build resilience, or simply increase anxiety?
The next step a skilled coach would take is to ask why this matters now and what I want to gain from it. That’s where things get uncomfortable.
Here’s what I’d say. There is an email in my inbox that I have not opened. I know what it may be about. Such an email could be about a proposal or a paper having been rejected or, even worse, accepted. An email from someone who would only contact me to complain or to tell me I messed something up. With each new email, the unread message gets pushed further down in the inbox. I’m almost ready to send myself several emails so that one specific email stops looking at me judgmentally. At some point, it’s “gone.” Not from my inbox, but from my sight and for a moment out of my mind. Hours pass, sometimes even a day or two. Sometimes I get a follow-up email and cannot delay any longer. Regardless of what the email says, I’m always puzzled by that mechanism. The outcome already exists. Someone made a decision, wrote it down, and pressed send. Whatever it says has been true for hours. And I am sitting there, cursor near it, not clicking, jaw tight, running through what it might say as though any of that could still change anything.
A coach worth their salt would not let that go unaddressed. They would sit with what I just said for a beat, then ask: you described what you do with the email, and I can see that clearly. What I don’t hear yet is what you would like to be different. Not about the email specifically. About the mechanism, as you called it. What would it look like if this conversation actually helped?
As a coachee, I was never a fan of that question. Not because it’s bad, but because it very often led to a thought: if I had known, I wouldn’t be here.
What I can say is that the desired outcome, stated honestly, is this: I want to understand whether what I do is a version of the practice, something I could work with and sharpen, or just avoidance with better branding. And underneath that, though I wouldn’t say this in the first ten minutes of a session, I want to know if the thing I am most afraid of finding in that email is the rejection, or the part where it says yes.
A coach working from the ICF competency framework would call what comes next “creating awareness.” In practice, it means the coach asks a question that makes you see what you were looking at the whole time without even noticing.
In this conversation, the question would probably come from the thing I buried at the end of my last answer. The coach would not move past it. They would sit with it, reflect it back without adding anything, and wait. You said the part you wouldn’t mention in the first ten minutes is whether you’re more afraid of the rejection or the yes. So let’s stay there. What are you actually rehearsing when you sit with that email?
That question does what good coaching questions do: it makes the answer feel obvious the moment you hear it. I am not rehearsing what I will do. I am rehearsing what might happen. The rejection landing in my chest, the particular flavor of that specific disappointment. Or the yes arriving and everything it would immediately require of me, the timeline, the deliverables, the people I would have to tell, the version of myself I would have to become to make good on it. I am running the disaster, or the demand, in vivid detail, and calling it preparation.
That distinction is where the Latin phrase starts cracking.
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The Stoics were precise about what the practice was for. Seneca did not sit with the image of exile and feel the exile. He sat with it long enough to find his response to it, what he would do, how he would carry himself through it, what would remain intact. The rehearsal had a purpose and an exit ramp. You ran it until the fear loosened, then returned to the day. The object of the exercise was never the disaster. It was your own agency inside the disaster.
What I have been doing has no ramp. I run the email as a rejection and feel the rejection. I run it as an acceptance and feel the weight of the acceptance. Then I run both again. The brain is not good at distinguishing between a vividly imagined threat and a real one. The research on this comes mostly from affective forecasting, the work Gilbert and Wilson have done on how poorly we predict our own emotional responses to future events, and from the neuropsychological literature on how the amygdala responds to imagined threat. The body treats the rehearsal as the event. Cortisol, the elevated state, the low-grade exhaustion of having lived through something that has not happened yet. Run it enough times, and you arrive at the actual event already depleted, which is the opposite of what preparation is supposed to do.
There is a name for this in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT): catastrophizing. It sounds dramatic, but it describes something quite common: overestimating how likely the bad outcome is, overestimating how devastating it would be, and underestimating your own capacity to handle it. The brain does not build resilience this way. It practices feeling crushed.
I came in with a Latin phrase that describes a Stoic discipline, and what I actually brought to the session is its clinical opposite. The difference between the two is not the content of what you imagine. It is where the rehearsal points. Premeditatio malorum, done correctly, ends with you: what you will do, how you will respond, and what remains yours regardless of the outcome.
What I have been doing ends with the outcome, sitting with it, turning it over, feeling its weight, then starting again.
The email is still in my inbox. The outcome is still undecided. Schrödinger would appreciate the setup: the cat is alive and dead until I open the box. I have been rehearsing both funerals.
In a real coaching session, a coach would sit with what just landed and ask what you want to do with it. Since this is writing, not a session, I can offer something a coach wouldn’t: not answers but direction.
The shift the Stoics and CBT converge on is the same one. Stop rehearsing the outcome. Rehearse the response. Not what happens, but what you do when it happens. Instead of running the rejection and feeling it, you run: the rejection arrives, I read it, I sit with it for a day, then I decide what the next version looks like. Instead of running the acceptance and feeling its weight, you run: it arrives, I accept it, and the first thing I do is block two hours to map what it actually requires. The disaster is the same in both versions. What changes is where the rehearsal ends. It ends with you doing something, which is the only part that was ever yours to practice.
The last competency in the ICF session arc is “facilitating growth.” It is the part where awareness becomes something more than a mirror you look into and walk away from. The coach asks what you are going to do differently, and the honest answer is almost never a resolution. It is something small enough to be real.
So here is my commitment, made in the presence of a coach who just watched me rebrand avoidance as philosophy. The next time an email sits in my inbox, and I feel the urge to bury it, I will ask one question before I start playing digital whack-a-mole: Am I rehearsing the outcome, or my response to it? That is the entire commitment. Not to stop the loop, because it will come back, probably before the week is out. The growth is not in eliminating the mechanism. It is in relating to it differently when it returns.
True premeditatio malorum ends with you: what you will do, how you will respond, what remains yours. I have been rehearsing the disaster. The practice is to rehearse what comes after.
The email is still there. The outcome exists, it is decided, and whatever it says has been true for hours. The only thing left that is actually mine is what I do when I open it.
So I’m going to open it.
