Don't rehearse the win. Rehearse the moment it goes wrong.

How it works

It starts with a call where we find the moment. I'll get you to replay the last time it happened, pretty much second by second, where you were, what was going on right before, what you felt in your body and what you did next. Most people can't really describe their pattern in general, but almost everyone can describe last Tuesday.

Then I build your rehearsal, by hand. It's a guided session made for you, with your name, your room, that exact moment and the new response we picked together, which is usually just a phrase and a breath you can take with you. It sits over music I wrote and a slow 6 Hz audio bed that's there to help you settle into a calm, open state.

After that it's on you to do the reps, which is about ten to fifteen minutes a day with headphones on. You walk into the moment, you feel the old pattern start up, and you practise going through it differently, and you keep doing that until the new version starts to feel like the familiar one.

I didn't come up with the idea behind this. Gabriele Oettingen at NYU has spent decades studying something she calls mental contrasting, and the short version is that picturing the win on its own does very little, while picturing the obstacle and yourself getting through it is what actually changes what you do. The rehearsal is built on that.

How the free month starts

It's 45 minutes on Google Meet, just the two of us. We work out what you're actually stuck on and find the moment underneath it, and you don't need to know what that moment is before we talk, because finding it is kind of what the call is for. Afterwards I build your rehearsal in the app, and you get a month of the app on me.

Two honest things. I'm early with the coaching side of this, so I can't promise you an outcome, what I can promise is my full attention and a rehearsal that's built for you. And at the end of the call, if it was useful, I'll tell you what carrying on with me looks like and what it costs, and if that's not for you it's really no problem, the rehearsal and the month are yours either way.

One more thing worth saying plainly. This is rehearsal and not therapy, and I'm not a clinician, so if what comes up on the call is heavier than a pattern you want to change, I'll tell you and point you somewhere better.

And anything you tell me stays with me. I only add the one piece we build to your profile, I don't go through your journal or anything else in your account, and you can ask me to change it or delete it whenever you want.

Who you'd be working with

I'm Peter. On the side I run lighting for live events, Canucks games included, so I've spent a lot of hours in rooms where something breaks and a whole crew is waiting on you to fix it. I'm also an amateur triathlete, and I'm the person who built UpSpiral.

I was diagnosed with ADHD 27 years ago, so I'm no stranger to procrastination. But over the years I've learned that a lot of the time it actually has nothing to do with my ADHD. It's more that there's a part of me trying to protect me, and it overrides the part that wants to do better, because doing better usually means being uncomfortable and a bit vulnerable.

That battle tends to happen in one exact moment, and I think that moment is where most of the gap comes from, between what we say we're going to do and what we actually do. And that's the moment you can target with mental rehearsal to start to see real behaviour change.

That moment where work gets hard and my thumb goes looking for social media used to run me every time. So I used the app to rehearse walking into that exact moment, catching myself right as the urge hit, and doing the next hard thing instead. After a few weeks of daily reps it just stopped being the default. I've used it for plenty of other things since, that's just one example, and what I've noticed for myself is that with the smaller stuff it often only takes a few days before the new version sticks and I can move on to the next one.

I should say I don't have a psychology degree. What I've got is an absolute fascination with behaviour change, and honestly it comes from needing it, because I spent years stuck in patterns I knew I should break and didn't. Standard meditation never really did much for me, and what finally did was active rehearsal, done daily.

That's really the whole process, find the moment, rehearse it, do the reps. It's why I spent 18 months building an app to do it properly, and the coaching is that same process with me in it.

The longer story of why I built UpSpiral