The “Dark Night of the Soul Rodeo”

BD3 Solutions
May 18
5 min read

By Andrea Spyros & Nancy DeFina | BD3 Solutions

When Andrea closed her gift shop after eighteen successful years, her 10-year-old asked her why she was crying if she'd chosen to close it.

It was a reasonable question. Andrea had made the decision. It had taken about six months (which she describes as "quick" for someone who is, by her own reckoning, an agonizer prone to lingering and overthinking decisions). She'd known for a while it was time. The store had run its course. Eighteen years, a thousand artists launched, a landmark built. It was a complete thing.

And still she cried.

The grief, she says, wasn't about the decision. It was about what the decision meant. When you close something you built, you're not just ending a chapter of your life. You're stepping out of a story of who you are. The store wasn't just a place she'd worked—it was an identity she'd inhabited, a role that had organized her days and her relationships and her sense of herself for nearly two decades. Letting it go meant not yet knowing what came next. And that not-knowing is a particular kind of hard.

What followed was a Dark Night of the Soul. It lasted about two years. It wasn't the first one. She'd done this enough times that she named the pattern: the “Dark Night of the Soul Rodeo.”

Nancy's Version

Nancy's story looks different on the surface, but lands in the same place.

She left a museum career in Manhattan to move across the country for love. She turned down a full-time position that paid $19,500 a year because it couldn't support one person, let alone two people, and spent years rebuilding from scratch in California. She ran a dance school for preschoolers. She designed furniture displays at IKEA. She tried her hand at selling and ultimately found a career in sales leadership.

She says she's never had what you'd call a good career trajectory. She's just kind of fallen into things. And somehow, through every fall and pivot and sideways move, has managed to land exactly where she needed to be.

Looking back, it took her a while to see the thread running through it all. Every transition used the same skill: the willingness to look clearly at what was in front of her, decide it was no longer hers, and let it go quietly, even without knowing yet what would replace it. She didn't storm out of things. She stepped away. And then she found out what was next.

The Season Nobody Has a Playbook For

We're writing this issue because we think a lot of you might be somewhere in this territory right now.

Not in a crisis, exactly. In a transition. The quiet kind, the kind that doesn't make headlines but takes up enormous amounts of interior space. You may be leaving something—a job, a career, a relationship, a version of yourself that used to fit and doesn't anymore. Or you're thinking about leaving it, which is its own particular kind of stuck. Or you've already left and you're in the middle of the not-knowing, that disorienting in-between time when the old thing is gone, and the new thing hasn't shown up yet.

The productivity world doesn't have a framework for this. Eat That Frog doesn't help when the frog is your whole identity. The Pomodoro technique doesn't apply when what you're sitting with is grief. Time-blocking is useless when what you actually need is time to not-know.

What we've found in our own lives and in the lives of the people we work with, is that the tools that work for tasks fail almost completely when the real question is identity. And the behaviors that look like procrastination during these seasons often aren't. They're the pauses, the detours, the Star Trek marathons and the long walks and the conversations that seem to go nowhere. They're the incubation, the mourning, the slow formation of what comes next.

They're part of the process. Not an obstacle to it.

Like this? We'll send one of these to your inbox each week.

SEND IT TO ME!

What We've Actually Found Useful

Here's what doesn't help: self-criticism. The voice that says you should be further along, you should know what you're doing by now, you should have figured this out before everything fell apart. That voice sounds like it's trying to motivate you. It isn't. It's feeding the Procrastination Cycle. It makes the task of figuring out what's next heavier and harder to approach, not lighter and easier.

Dr. BJ Fogg's research, which underpins what we teach, is clear on this: you change best by feeling good, not by feeling bad. Shame doesn't create forward motion. It creates avoidance. And in the middle of a genuine life transition, this is the last thing you need.

What actually helps is the same thing that helps with the smaller knots, just applied at a bigger scale: awareness without judgment, small actions taken with compassion, and the willingness to celebrate the tiniest evidence of forward movement—even when forward movement may mean just getting out of bed, or making one call, or sitting down with a piece of paper and writing down one thing you know.

And time. Real time. Not wasted time, not avoidance—time that the transition actually needs to complete itself.

Andrea is on her third or fourth “Dark Night of the Soul Rodeo,” depending on how you count. She's gotten better at recognizing the terrain. Nancy has made enough sideways moves to know that "no clear trajectory" and "exactly where I need to be" can be the same thing.

You're Not Falling Behind

If you're in this season right now—putting something down that used to be yours, not sure yet what comes next, wondering if the fact that you don't have a plan means something is wrong with you—we want to say this as clearly as we can:

You're not falling behind. You're untangling. That's not a failure; it’s actually a foundation. And, it’s the beginning of something better.

The work we do together, the tools in our framework, the conversations we have in this newsletter: all of it is designed for the person in exactly this place. Not the person who has it figured out and thinks they just need better systems. The person who is in the middle of figuring it out, and needs a different kind of support than the productivity world typically offers.

That's exactly who we built Untangling Procrastination™ for.

Next week: the language of what we call the “Productivity Industrial Complex” and why the words you use to talk about being stuck might be making it worse.

Andrea Spyros and Nancy DeFina are the founders of BD3 Solutions and creators of Untangle Procrastination™, a science-based program built on methods from the Stanford Behavior Design Lab.

ICYMI→Download the Procrastination Cycle map here

ICYMI→Download our Celebration Guide here

Andrea Spyros and Nancy DeFina are the founders of BD3 Solutions and creators of Untangle Procrastination™, a science-based program built on models and methods from the Stanford Behavior Design Lab.