The Implementation Gap

The Divide Between Knowing and Living

Most of us know more about wellness than we give ourselves credit for. We understand the value of eating well, moving our bodies, getting enough sleep, managing stress, connecting with the people we love and caring for ourselves in ways that support our health.

Having that knowledge, however, doesn't mean it will translate easily into the way we live.

Somewhere between what we understand and what we actually do, that knowledge encounters the reality of our lives. Busy mornings and tired evenings, changing schedules, health challenges, responsibilities, habits, resources and other circumstances influence how easily something we intend to do becomes something we actually live.

That space is what I think of as the Implementation Gap—the divide between knowing what would support us and understanding how to make that knowledge livable in our own lives.

The Space Isn't Empty

Sometimes the points of friction in our lives scream louder than what we know would support us.

The difficulty is that we don't always recognize them as friction. We are much more likely to notice the behavior that isn't happening. We didn't make the meal we intended to make, get to the gym, go to bed when we planned or follow through with whatever commitment we had made to ourselves. The outcome is easy to see, while everything that influenced it can be much less obvious.

There are times when the obstacle is clear. We may not have enough time, access or resources, or a physical limitation may change what is possible for us. In other situations, the friction is woven more quietly into the way we live. Perhaps the behavior requires more planning than we have accounted for, repeatedly falls at the most exhausting part of our day, competes with something that offers a more immediate reward, or simply doesn't fit our circumstances as well as we thought it would.

This is one of the reasons I think we can know exactly what we want to do and still struggle to do it consistently. What we know doesn't disappear in those moments, but it has to exist alongside everything else influencing how we live.

Even effort plays a role. Behavioral research suggests that we take effort into account when making choices and that people have a tendency to minimize unnecessary physical effort. That doesn't mean we are naturally destined to choose whatever is easiest, or that difficulty gives us a reason not to do something. It simply means that effort is part of the equation, even when the benefit of a behavior is already understood.

The Implementation Gap isn't empty space between knowledge and behavior. It is where what we know encounters the reality of our lives—and where understanding ourselves becomes as important as understanding what to do.

When Friction Begins to Look Like Failure

One of the words that makes me most curious when I hear it is lazy.

People often use it as though it explains why something isn't happening. They know what they intended to do, they haven't done it consistently, and somewhere along the way the difficulty becomes evidence that they simply aren't trying hard enough.

I don't hear an explanation when someone tells me they are lazy. I hear a reason to become curious.

What does “lazy” actually mean in this situation? Someone may be exhausted, overwhelmed or trying to make a change that doesn't fit particularly well into their current circumstances. They may be afraid of failing at something they have attempted many times before, or the behavior itself may carry so much friction that avoiding it has become easier than repeatedly trying to overcome it.

The word tells us very little about what is actually happening. Once we accept it as the explanation, however, we stop looking for one.

I understand why we do this. Many of us were taught to place tremendous value on perseverance. I grew up with some version of life is hard, do it anyway and figure it out. A good outcome was evidence of hard work, and when the outcome wasn't good, the natural conclusion was often that more effort was required.

There is value in learning how to persevere. There will always be moments when honoring a commitment requires us to do something we don't particularly feel like doing.

The problem comes when perseverance becomes the only tool we know how to use.

If something isn't working, we push harder. When pushing harder doesn't work, we assume we aren't trying hard enough. Eventually a problem with the process can begin to feel like a problem with the person.

I think parts of the wellness industry have reinforced that way of thinking. We are surrounded by people telling us to follow what worked for them, routines presented as easy to replicate, and products or programs positioned as though they are the answer.

Social media makes those messages particularly convincing because we usually see the successful behavior without seeing everything that makes it possible. We don't necessarily know someone's responsibilities, experience, available time and resources, or what the rest of their life looks like outside the frame.

We also don't know their health history. A behavior that is appropriate and supportive for one person cannot automatically be assumed to be appropriate for someone else whose body, health conditions or current capabilities may be very different.

What appears effortless from the outside may have very little resemblance to what it would require from us.

So we try the routine, diet, program or habit that seemed so straightforward when someone else was doing it. When it doesn't fit as easily into our own life, it is tempting to conclude that the difference must be us.

When we're taught to value the result without becoming curious about the process, friction begins to look like failure.

Curiosity Before Correction

If friction can be difficult to recognize, then one of the most useful places to begin when a wellness behavior isn't happening is with a simple question:

What do I think is getting in the way?

It is a question I often begin with when working with someone because I don't want to assume that I understand their life better than they do. The first answer may be time, exhaustion, motivation or even that familiar word lazy. Whatever the answer is, it gives us somewhere to begin looking more closely.

Curiosity in this context isn't an attempt to excuse ourselves from responsibility. It is a way of gathering enough information to take responsibility for something more useful than our own self-criticism.

If preparing a supportive dinner repeatedly falls apart at the end of an exhausting day, there may be too many decisions left to make at the point when we have the least energy to make them. If movement consistently requires a block of time that our schedule cannot support, knowing that exercise is beneficial doesn't create more hours in the day. If a behavior we genuinely want to establish is repeatedly forgotten, perhaps we need to look at the environment and cues surrounding it rather than assuming we don't care enough.

Research on habit formation gives us good reason to pay attention to those surroundings. As behaviors are repeated within consistent contexts, they can become associated with particular cues, allowing parts of our environment to help prompt what we do. Our surroundings don't determine our behavior, but neither are they irrelevant to it.

Looking for friction also doesn't mean that every difficult behavior needs to become easy. Sometimes we will understand what is getting in the way and discover that the behavior still requires effort, discomfort or a decision to follow through despite not particularly wanting to in that moment.

That is where honesty becomes as important as curiosity.

The purpose of understanding ourselves isn't to build a convincing explanation for why we can't change. It is to distinguish between the barriers that need our attention and the discomfort that sometimes comes with doing something we have decided matters to us.

Before asking ourselves to try harder, we can first ask what is making the behavior harder. The answer may tell us where our effort would be better spent.

When the Reason for Change Becomes Your Own

Understanding what is getting in the way doesn't necessarily mean we are ready to change it.

We can recognize that a behavior would support our health, understand the friction surrounding it and still feel uncertain about whether we are willing to do something differently. This is where the reason for change becomes important, because knowing why something is generally considered good for us is different from understanding why it matters to us personally.

That distinction is easy to lose when so much wellness advice arrives in the form of should. We should eat this way, exercise this often, follow this routine or stop doing that thing. Some of those recommendations may be well supported and important for our health, while others may be little more than someone else's idea of what wellness should look like. Either way, being told that we should change doesn't automatically give us a reason that feels meaningful enough to act on.

When I work with someone, I am not trying to convince them to want what I want for them. I want to understand what they want for themselves and help them discover the reasons that make change meaningful in their own life. That doesn't mean every situation carries the same weight. Someone exploring a general wellness suggestion they encountered online is in a very different position from someone whose healthcare provider has recommended a change because of an existing or emerging health concern.

In the first situation, the conversation may begin with whether that is even the change the person wants to make. In the second, the health concern remains important even if the person isn't ready to act on the recommendation yet. My role is not to replace the advice of their healthcare provider or force readiness that isn't there. I can help them explore their hesitation, uncover their own reasons for wanting change and identify what they are willing to try from where they are starting.

Sometimes what looks like a lack of motivation is connected to how large the change feels. Someone may want the outcome and still feel overwhelmed by what they believe will be required to reach it. They may have tried before and be afraid of failing again, or have so little confidence in their ability to change that even beginning feels daunting.

In those situations, I often become less interested in asking, Are you ready to do all of this? and more interested in asking:

What are you willing to try?

Perhaps there is a smaller step or an experiment that still supports their health and feels possible from where they are starting.

Readiness can change.

A behavior that feels impossible from one starting point may look different after someone has had an opportunity to experience success, learn more about themselves and see that change does not necessarily require the complete overhaul they originally imagined.

Behavioral science gives us language for some of what is happening here. Motivational Interviewing emphasizes evoking a person's own reasons for change rather than trying to impose motivation from the outside, while Self-Determination Theory distinguishes between behavior driven primarily by pressure and motivation that has become more personally meaningful and self-endorsed.

For me, the practical meaning is much simpler: the reason for change eventually has to become theirs.

Someone can give us information. A healthcare professional can explain why a change may be important. The people who love us can tell us why they are concerned. A coach can ask questions that help us see something differently.

But none of them can create our commitment for us.

At some point, the reason to move toward something different has to become meaningful enough that we are willing to leave at least some of the familiarity and comfort of the way things are now.

That doesn't mean we will suddenly feel motivated every day. It means that when change becomes difficult, the effort required is fueled by something that is personally meaningful.

Make It Possible

Once we understand what matters to us and begin identifying the friction surrounding it, we can ask a different question:

What would make this easier to live?

Consider something as familiar as eating well. Most people don't need another reminder that nutritious food supports their health. The difficulty often comes when that knowledge has to become dinner on a Wednesday evening after a long day, when everyone is hungry and whatever we intended to make still requires more time, preparation or energy than we have available.

In that moment, the gap isn't necessarily nutritional knowledge. We may understand perfectly well what we intended to eat. The problem is that the way we planned to implement that knowledge doesn't fit particularly well into the moment when we need to use it.

This is where understanding the point of friction gives us something useful to work with. If dinner repeatedly becomes difficult because preparation happens when our energy is lowest, perhaps some of that preparation can happen at another time. If the meals we plan require more time than our evenings consistently allow, we may need different meals rather than greater determination. What makes eating well easier for one household may create more work for another, which is why the solution has to begin with the life in which the behavior needs to exist.

Wellness behaviors have to become possible before they can become sustainable.

Possible may look different from what we originally had in mind.

Strength and movement are important to me, and under different circumstances I would probably spend more of my mornings at the gym. Right now, though, going to the gym can consume a significant part of my morning, and time is something I am particularly protective of while building LECW.

So I adapted.

I continue to take my walks, and when my watch reminds me to stand after I've been working at my desk, I use that interruption as an opportunity to do squats, abdominal work or pick up the free weights I keep in my office.

It isn't the movement routine I imagine for myself forever, but I also don't consider it an Implementation Gap. I know what I want to support, and I have found a way to continue supporting it within the circumstances I am living right now.

It is an implementation adaptation.

The distinction matters because sometimes we become so attached to a particular method that we begin treating the method as though it were the goal. Going to the gym is one way to support strength and movement. Preparing every meal from scratch is one way to support how we eat. A specific morning routine may be one way to create time for reflection or stress management.

When the method becomes difficult to maintain, we can easily interpret changing it as lowering the standard or abandoning the commitment. But if the purpose remains intact and the adaptation continues to meaningfully support the outcome we are working toward, changing the implementation may be exactly what allows the behavior to continue.

An adaptation is not an abandonment of the commitment. It is what allows us to honor it within the life we are actually living.

Starting Where You Actually Are

Knowing whether an adaptation meaningfully supports us requires something else: an honest understanding of where we are starting.

The same behavior can represent very different things for two different people.

Imagine someone who is largely sedentary and wants to become more physically active. Parking farther from the entrance, taking the stairs when they are able or adding a short walk to part of their day may represent a meaningful change from what they are currently doing. Those actions may not resemble the exercise routine they eventually hope to have, but they are asking their body and their life to begin doing something differently.

Now imagine someone who already walks five miles most days and wants to improve their strength. Parking farther away and taking the stairs are still forms of movement, but they aren't addressing the same need. If strength is the desired outcome, simply accumulating a few more steps isn't necessarily an adaptation of the intended behavior. The person would need to consider what they can realistically do from their current starting point that actually begins to challenge and develop strength.

This is why I don't think a wellness behavior can be evaluated entirely by looking at the behavior itself. We also have to understand the person doing it, where they are beginning and what they are hoping to accomplish.

Preparing one meal at home each week could represent an important shift for someone who currently prepares none, while it would mean something entirely different for someone who already cooks most of their meals. The behavior hasn't changed. Its significance has.

This matters because we can easily dismiss a starting point for looking too small when we compare it to where we think someone should be. We can also convince ourselves that any action related to the goal must be moving us toward it simply because it sounds healthy.

Neither tells us very much without context.

The better question is whether the behavior meaningfully moves the dial from where we are now toward the reasonable outcome we are trying to support.

Starting there can also give us something that ambitious plans sometimes don't: the opportunity to experience ourselves successfully participating in change.

Psychologist Albert Bandura described mastery experiences as an important source of self-efficacy—our belief in our ability to carry out the actions needed in a particular situation. This matters enormously when we consider how often people approach wellness carrying memories of all the things they have tried and struggled to sustain.

If the first step we choose is too ambitious or unrealistic for our current circumstances, we lose more than the opportunity to successfully implement the behavior. We also lose the opportunity to experience ourselves succeeding at change.

That is one reason I don't see starting small as lowering the bar.

The starting point isn't the standard we have set for the rest of our lives. It is the place from which change begins.

Sometimes You Have to Change the Implementation

I learned something about adaptation long before I had language for the Implementation Gap.

There was a period in our lives when Brandon was recovering from a stroke while I was recovering from a broken back. For several months, much of our life happened from bed. Our bodies had placed very real limits on what life could look like at that time.

For a while, I filled a lot of those hours with games and television. There wasn't anything inherently wrong with either of those things. We were going through something extraordinarily difficult, and sometimes distraction was exactly what I needed.

Eventually, though, I began to recognize that I didn't want distraction to become the primary way I moved through that period of my life.

I couldn't change the circumstances we were in, and I couldn't simply will my body into being capable of things it wasn't yet capable of doing. But I could begin thinking about how I wanted to live within those circumstances.

Around that time, I came across The Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod. The structure interested me, but much of what we typically imagine when we think about a morning routine wasn't particularly relevant to my reality. I wasn't going to get up, head to the gym, sit somewhere peaceful with a journal and then move through a carefully organized day.

My starting point was a bed.

So that was where I began.

I adapted the ideas to what I could actually do. I spent time in meditation, prayer and stillness. I used specific affirmations and visualized a future beyond the circumstances we were living in. I read nonfiction or something inspirational for about twenty minutes and journaled for five.

And then there was exercise.

I had resistance bands that I could use from bed, so for about ten minutes I worked my arms without ever getting up. I jokingly called it “lay and slay.”

I did that routine every morning.

None of it changed what was happening around me. Brandon was still recovering from a stroke. I still had a broken back. Our lives were still difficult, and the physical limitations shaping our days were still very real.

What changed was the way I was participating in my own life.

The routine gave some intention to mornings that had begun to feel shapeless. More importantly, it showed me that my circumstances did not have to look the way I wanted them to before I could begin living in a way that supported me.

Had I decided that a meaningful morning routine required getting out of bed, going to a gym, having uninterrupted time or recreating someone else's version of the practice, I would have been waiting for a life I wasn't living yet.

Instead, I changed the implementation.

I didn't wait for my life to become capable of supporting the behavior. I adapted the behavior until my life could support it.

I wasn't pretending the limitations didn't exist. I was paying attention to them and considering what those practices were meant to support within what was genuinely possible for me.

That experience changed the way I think about wellness.

Sometimes the version of a behavior we imagined for ourselves belongs to circumstances we don't currently have. Understanding what we were hoping that behavior would support gives us more room to consider what might be possible from where we are.

The life I was living couldn't support the version I might have chosen under different circumstances. But it could support something. Learning to recognize the difference changed what I understood to be possible.

Adaptation Still Requires Honesty

Learning to adapt a behavior doesn't mean that every alternative we choose is equally supportive of what we are trying to accomplish.

That is why the purpose and intended outcome matter.

If I know that strength is important to me, changing how I incorporate strength-building movement into my life can be an adaptation. Removing it altogether while continuing to tell myself that my daily walks accomplish the same thing would be something different. Walking supports me in many ways, but that doesn't make it interchangeable with every other form of movement or capable of producing every outcome I might want.

This is where curiosity has to be accompanied by honesty.

Sometimes we may discover that we simply don't want to do the thing.

That is useful information too.

There are behaviors that support our health that will still be inconvenient, uncomfortable, boring or difficult. Understanding ourselves doesn't eliminate that reality. If the behavior matters to us and the outcome requires something that cannot be adapted away, there will be times when the work is learning how to tolerate some of that discomfort rather than trying to remove it.

There are also times when we become so focused on a goal we've set for ourselves that we haven't stopped to consider whether it still supports the outcome we actually want.

Honesty allows us to distinguish between those situations.

Are we changing the implementation while preserving the purpose? Are we discovering that the outcome itself needs to be reconsidered? Or are we calling something an adaptation because it allows us to avoid a part of the process that is necessary for the result we still say we want?

Those are different questions, and the answer won't always be comfortable.

The purpose of curiosity is to understand enough about ourselves and our circumstances to make more intentional decisions.

I think this is one of the places where wellness becomes much more personal than simply following a set of recommendations. We have to understand what genuinely supports us, what we are trying to accomplish, what our current circumstances allow and what the outcome reasonably requires from us.

Adaptation gives us flexibility in how we move toward something. Honesty keeps us connected to whether we are still moving toward it.

Treat It Like Research

Once we begin approaching behavior with curiosity, the things that don't work start to have a different purpose.

They give us information.

That doesn't mean an unsuccessful attempt won't be disappointing. We may have invested time, money, energy or hope into something we genuinely believed would help us. Discovering that it doesn't work the way we expected can be frustrating, particularly when it isn't the first thing we have tried.

But an attempt that doesn't produce the result we hoped for is not the same thing as an attempt from which nothing was learned.

The meal plan may have been too complicated for our schedule. Perhaps the exercise routine required more time than we could consistently give it. We may discover that we dislike a food everyone told us we should love, that mornings aren't the best time for us to exercise, or that a strategy worked beautifully until something in our circumstances changed.

Each of those experiences tells us something we didn't know before.

The same is true when something works. Preparing a few ingredients ahead of time may make dinner easier during the week. A walk may happen more consistently after lunch than at the end of the day. Ten minutes of movement may be enough to establish a behavior we can build upon. Those experiences give us information too.

We can begin treating our attempts less like verdicts and more like research.

What happened? What helped? What got in the way? What would I keep? What would I change the next time?

Those questions allow us to learn from an experience without requiring the experience to say something definitive about who we are.

I think this matters because many of us arrive at a new attempt carrying the weight of the ones that came before it. We remember the diet we couldn't maintain, the gym membership we stopped using, the routine that lasted three weeks or the promise we made ourselves and didn't keep.

After enough of those experiences, it becomes easy to stop describing what happened and start describing ourselves.

I never stick with anything.

I'm not disciplined.

I've failed at this too many times.

But those are identities built from interpretations of experiences.

The experience itself contains more useful information. Perhaps the plan asked too much of us too quickly, the method didn't fit our life, or our circumstances changed and we didn't know how to adapt with them. We may realize that the outcome wasn't actually important enough to us to support what the process required. There may also be times when we look honestly at what happened and recognize that we knew what needed to happen and simply didn't follow through.

The point isn't to reinterpret every unsuccessful attempt until we can make ourselves feel good about it. Being curious about what happened also requires us to be honest about the part we played in it. The goal is to understand the experience accurately enough that it can inform what we do next.

That process requires patience. We may try something that doesn't work, make an adjustment that only solves part of the problem, or discover that what we thought was getting in the way wasn't the whole story. Learning how to implement change in our own lives can take time, and what we learn along the way is part of the work.

That changes the question from:

Why can't I make myself do this?

to:

What would make this easier to live?

The first turns the difficulty into a judgment about ourselves. The second gives us something to investigate.

And every time we investigate, try, observe and adjust, we understand a little more about ourselves and what it takes to make change livable in our own lives.

The Other Side of the Gap

Closing an Implementation Gap can change more than the behavior we were trying to establish.

When we learn how to understand what is getting in the way, make adjustments that genuinely support what we are trying to accomplish and learn from what happens along the way, we begin developing something that extends beyond the original change.

We begin learning how to work with ourselves, which is important because even the behavior that fits beautifully into our lives today may not fit in the same way forever.

Our health changes. Our responsibilities change. The people we love need us in different ways. Work becomes more or less demanding. We move, age, experience loss, recover from things we never expected to happen and enter periods of life that ask something entirely different from us.

When a behavior that once worked for us no longer fits our circumstances, what we learned about ourselves in the process still has value.

That is where I think self-understanding becomes one of the most valuable forms of wellness literacy we can develop. If I understand something about what helps me follow through, where friction tends to appear, what matters enough to motivate me and how I respond when something isn't working, I have more to work with when my circumstances change.

I don't have to begin from zero every time life changes the conditions.

That doesn't mean understanding ourselves makes life easier or protects us from difficult things. I know too well that it doesn't.

For a long time, I have thought about this as learning how to weather-proof myself. I don't mean becoming unaffected by the storm. Some storms change us. They alter the landscape of our lives, ask things of us we never expected to give and leave us different from the people we were before them.

Understanding ourselves well doesn't make those storms stop.

It helps us learn how to set our course while we are in them—and how to understand the person we are when the weather clears.

That, to me, is very different from learning how to perfectly follow a wellness plan.

Each time we navigate change, we learn more about how we respond to it. We begin to recognize where we tend to struggle, what helps us move forward and how to adjust when our circumstances require something different from us. Over time, those experiences can give us greater confidence that when life changes, we can learn what we need, make adjustments and find our way forward from wherever we are starting.

We are not the sum of our failures or our successes.

Just because something worked for someone else and didn't work for us doesn't mean we failed. We bring different bodies, genetics, cultures, histories, responsibilities, resources, preferences and desires into the lives we are trying to support. There was never going to be one implementation that fit all of us equally well.

The things we have tried were not wasted simply because they didn't become permanent. What worked taught us something, and what didn't work taught us something too.

Perhaps that is where the Implementation Gap becomes something more than the distance between knowing and doing.

It becomes an invitation to understand ourselves well enough to build a bridge between the two.

Failures are information. Success is information. They do not create an identity without your permission.

Research & Further Reading

This essay draws in part on research in behavior change, habit formation, motivation and self-efficacy. For readers interested in exploring some of the research behind these ideas:

Cheval, B., & Boisgontier, M. P. (2021). The Theory of Effort Minimization in Physical Activity. Exercise and Sport Sciences Reviews, 49(3), 168–178. Read the research

Gardner, B. (2015). A review and analysis of the use of ‘habit’ in understanding, predicting and influencing health-related behaviour. Health Psychology Review, 9(3), 277–295. Read the research

Miller, W. R., & Rose, G. S. (2009). Toward a Theory of Motivational Interviewing. American Psychologist, 64(6), 527–537. Read the research

Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2008). Self-determination theory: A macrotheory of human motivation, development, and health. Canadian Psychology, 49(3), 182–185. View the publication record

Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological Review, 84(2), 191–215. The APA's current overview also provides useful context for Bandura's original theory and the four sources of self-efficacy. APA overview of Bandura's self-efficacy research