The Knowing–Doing Gap: Why Smart Women Stay Stuck (and How to Finally Change)

You know what to do. You’ve read the books, journaled the insights, maybe even coached others through the same thing. But when it comes to your own life, something still isn’t shifting.

We’re diving into the psychology of the knowing–doing gap, that frustrating space between insight and action, and unpacking why even the most emotionally intelligent among us get stuck.

Rooted in behavioural theory, trauma-informed coaching, and real-life experience, we explore the invisible forces blocking change, even when we’re desperate. You’ll hear about internal conditioning, emotional safety, nervous system responses, and the quiet ways our culture rewards burnout and self-abandonment.

This isn’t about pushing harder.
It’s about creating inner and outer infrastructure that finally supports the life you already know you want.

We'll cover:

• The surprising origins of the knowing–doing gap (and why it’s not your fault)
• Why self-awareness is necessary – but not enough – for behaviour change
• The role of emotional resistance, cognitive dissonance, and nervous system protection in keeping you stuck
• Four powerful barriers that block action and how to gently dissolve them
• Why change disrupts social dynamics, and how to hold your ground when others push back
• Somatic and practical tools to help you pause, realign, and take brave, value-aligned action
• Why midlife (or any life crossroads) is often the beginning of true freedom

This episode is for you if:

• You’re deeply self-aware but still repeating patterns that exhaust or resent you
• You crave rest, clarity, boundaries—or visibility—but can’t seem to follow through
• You’ve been told you’re “so strong” for too long, and you’re ready to be real
• You want to understand not just why you’re stuck, but how to move forward

👥 Desire support?
This is the exact work I do with clients in 1:1 coaching. We build safety, structure, and clarity around your inner resistance so you can actually live what you know.

→ Learn more or book a call

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Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to The Scenic Route
• 1:40 The Mind the Gap Model
• 6:13 Internal Barriers to Change
• 9:38 External Factors Influencing Behavior
• 13:05 Breaking Through Your Behavioral Barriers
• 22:27 Finding Your Path Forward

Transcript

Jennifer Walter: 0:00

You know what to do because I know you have read the books and you have underlined sentences in those books that felt like someone finally got you. You've done the masterclasses. You've filled journals upon journals with insights and whispered yes, yes, yes, while you're watching webinars and going over your notes. And yet you still say yes when you mean no. You still haven't set the boundary. You still freeze when it's time to hit publish. You haven't met that monetary milestone. You're still waiting for permission from a world that doesn't know what to do with women like you and me. But what's really going on here and why is it so unbelievably hard to live what we already know? There's a different way to think about mental health, and it starts with slowing down. Sometimes, the longest way around is the shortest way home, and that's exactly where we're taking the scenic route. Hi, I'm Jennifer Walter, host of the Scenic Route podcast. Think of me as your sociologist, sister in arms and rebel with many causes. Together, we're blending critical thinking with compassion, mental health with a dash of rebellion, and personal healing with collective change. We're trading perfectionism for possibility and toxic positivity for messy growth. Each week, we're exploring the path to better mental health and social transformation. And yes, by the way, pretty crystals are totally optional. You ready to take the scenic route? Let's walk this path together. So let me introduce you to a concept from environmental psychology. Yes, Environmental psychology, yes, environmental psychology. Stay with me. Okay, stay with me.

Jennifer Walter: 1:47

So in 2002, two researchers, francisco Comas and Julian Agumon, asked a very deceptively simple question, one that we all ask ourselves from time to time why do people who care about the environment, who say that they care about the environment, still act in ways that harm it? And they weren't really the first to notice this pattern. And this goes back years and years and years, because behavioral science has been circling this contradiction for decades. And it's not just behavioral psychology, also sociology has always been like oh, very fascinating. Why do people like do what they do or not do what they don't do? So back in 1957, psychologists leon festinger, introduced the cognitive distance theory, the idea that holding two conflicting beliefs causes psychological discomfort. So when people know smoking is harmful, but still light a cigarette, the tension between belief and behavior creates dissonance and discomfort. But we are smart little beings, right. So what do we do? We rationalize the shit out of everything to kind of like, find excuses, we delay or we just numb out out, so that didn't really help at all. Like um, when we look at behavioral change later, um in the 1977 albert bandura has offered another key insight.

Jennifer Walter: 3:19

In his paper. He said even if people know what to do and want to do it, you have no idea if know and want, they won't do it unless they believe they're capable in doing so. He called this self-efficiency your belief in your own ability to influence outcomes, and I feel that really strikes a chord yet again in 2025 where we're like what is our ability to influence outcomes? It feels abysmal, so low self. I think she doesn't mean you're lazy. It simply means you don't trust you yourself to follow true or your resilience if things get really hard, and that is also something. Sometimes you want to do two bigger things. We've had this on the Sydney ground a lot of times that you have to go really, really small if you start training that muscle of trusting yourself in any regard.

Jennifer Walter: 4:25

But so back to like, how does environmental psychology fit into this? Well, um, by the time commas and argument published our paper mind the gap in 2002, they were kind of like building on all of this right on, decades on, of behavioral, behavioral science, from psychology, sociology and all the different fields, and they distilled it into one powerful model, while at the same time and this is why a lot of discipline, questioning if that is even purposeful and a smart thing to do um, love us. But so, basically, they show that behavior isn't just a result of knowledge and good intentions, is shaped by a dense web of internal factors like emotion, identity, habits, past experiences. External factors like social norms, culture, institutions and access and, most importantly, barriers, those quiet, invisible forces that block you from taking action even when we really really want to. Okay, so they applied this model to environmental choices, but when I read the paper, I was like damn, I saw Oz, I saw me and Oz I know.

Jennifer Walter: 5:49

Like I saw Oz, like Oz, women who are insightful, smart, have a degree, are capable, awake, are like, conscious and want to be in integrity and still are stuck in habits and roles and lives that don't really feel like Homer, like us, because knowing isn't the problem, it's what stands in the way of doing that we need to talk about. So let's, let's bring this closer to home. What come as an argument mapped out for environmental action, the gap between values, knowledge and real world choices is something I see daily in myself and my clients and my friends and all smart, highly functioning women, right? Women who can name the problem, trace the pattern, explain the conditioning, but still wake up on Groundhog Day, stuck in the same loop over and over, again and again. I there is, then, where we're really gullible. To instagram or and social media in general, of like, oh, you just need like more willpower, to kind of like shove it to your inner like lazy dog and just kind of like move on. Yeah, but again, this is not just about willpower. If you need willpower to sustain you for decades, it's not gonna work. You will run out of willpower, right, and how to not run out of willpower until you have like habitualized behavior.

Jennifer Walter: 7:33

So, again, I really think it's crucial to see that we're not lacking willpower. It's about how we've been conditioned to survive. We have been rewarded for certain values and beliefs more so than others, like men, for example. So if we look at the internal world that commas and agamon refer to in their model your values, your beliefs, your body's memory of safety it isn't separate from your behavior. It is your behavior, right? You've likely spent years shaping an identity built around competence, control, caretaking, being the smart one, being the oldest, oldest sister being the responsible one, yada, y oldest sister being the responsible one, yada, yada, yada. Right, it's endless. These roles might have once been adaptive. They protected you, they kept you safe, but they often come at a cost of authenticity and rest, and this is also something we looked at last week's episode. If you want to know more about this after this episode, go back to last week's episode 100.

Jennifer Walter: 8:39

So when you try to shift or try to invite change or change anything, it's something new to your system and your whole body nervous system is kind of like oh well, no, we're not having that. It creates discomfort or even panic, not because you're broken or you're too scared or whatever, but it's just the reaction of what familiar feels safe and even if it's painful and it's keeping you back. So resistance isn't laziness, right, it's, it's loyalty to the identity that kept you alive. We have to look at how it might be kind of like this place, but it's not lazy or wrong. So we need to know complete, we need to be completely honest if where we're at, with what kind of machinery we're working with, if we want to do any kind of change, and then when we know what machine we're working with, it's time to learn how we, how to assemble it gently from the inside out. I don't believe in brute force if it comes to change, like if, if that's you and you can just rip off the band-aid and then you're done, you do, you like I. That's amazing, but I know it doesn't work for me and I know it doesn't work for other people too.

Jennifer Walter: 10:03

So let's look at, let's take a closer look at, these internal factors, because this is where knowing or that knowing doing gap often starts. First, the self-aware. Right, you have it. You probably have way too much of it. You maybe even have a degree in it. Right, you understand your patterns, your trauma. You have, you like, your relational dynamics. You probably have written a dissertation on your inner child. You have done all, you have tested all the modalities to kind of like help yourself. Life coaching, sound healing, you fucking name it.

Jennifer Walter: 10:44

But knowing doesn't guarantee movement. Why? Because we don't act from intellect. We act from our felt sense of safety, and safety is stored not in the brain but in a body. Next, we have emotional conditioning. Beliefs like my worth depends on my productivity, on my output. If I, or if I set a boundary, I'll be abandoned, like if I stand my ground, no one will love me. If I, or if I stop fixing, something will fall apart. If I'm not the one who's going to save this relationship, it will die.

Jennifer Walter: 11:21

And all of these non-random thoughts they're somatic truths, right? Things you hold, store, meaning that you store deep in your body and that you think, you think of as real. And if you think of something as real, it's real also in its consequences, regardless of what your intellect might know. And then what could also creep in is what we had at the beginning the cognitive dissonance, right, that awful gap between you know who you know yourself to be and how you. You keep showing up the tension between your ideals and your reality, the where you're at. And it's painful to really look honestly where you're at. It's incredibly fucking painful and I speak from experience, but I want you to see that it's also data, it's your system telling you this thing doesn't fit you anymore. And when the old identity starts to crack, that's when you know you're getting closer.

Jennifer Walter: 12:26

Okay, so let's look at what we now we have like internal factors that we have to deal with when we're looking at change or lasting change. And now let's like switch over to external factors. Right, because your context matters more than you think. And this is where, sometimes, like I clash with psychologists, where I'm like certain psychology, like psychology, like so blah, blah, brain fart, certain psychological measures are just kind of like symptom treating while not looking at root causes. Like this system we're in anyway. So if we zoom out, go back to the model, and we zoom out from internal to external behavior factors, we see that our behavior isn't just shaped from the inside, it is deeply, deeply influenced by what surrounds us.

Jennifer Walter: 13:20

Right, we can start with culture. We all currently live in a very harmful culture we live in, we live in systems that praise busyness, reward burnout and really, really hate drastic. Right, it's also a system, um, who tells women that they can be anything you can be anything, barbie but then push them for being too ambitious, too visible, too soft or too clear. Right, it's a culture that is dependent on our free care work. It's a culture that is has very harmful stereotypes for men and women. So we're in this culture. Of course it it shifts, it means different things for different people, but so we adapt, we contort, we stay pleasing, productive, palatable, sweet, even when it's causing the death of us.

Jennifer Walter: 14:15

Right then we have social expectations, and this is always a really, really personal one, because the moment you start to invite change, you set a boundary, you stop over-functioning, you let yourself rest, and people around you most people around you, in fact might not like that, because it means they will have to pick up the slack. They need to be more involved, they need to do more, will have to pick up the slack. They need to be more involved. They need to do more, they need to keep up. They need to suddenly do the dishes or cook or whatever it fucking is right and it's not. They don't also don't like it because not because they don't love you, right, but they, they've relied on the old version of you to stay comfortable, to stay productive, and they haven't met the. You have not introduced the new you, the you that says this is how it's going to happen now and forever, or until I change, until I say there is a new direction we take.

Jennifer Walter: 15:21

Change threatens the emotional economy of our relationship. That's often why even the kindest, most good-hearted people resist growth. We resist your growth because it challenges them, and I mean, look at it right. It's also why many rehab centers, for example, are intentionally built far away from people's daily lives, or why you go on like business retreats somewhere completely different. Because when we're breaking a pattern, distance from the system that trained, that very pattern can be a really helpful value, valuable, can be very helpful in it, dear lord, brain farts today can be really helpful. So it's not about escape, it's about clarity, it's about beginning being able to hear yourself again without the noise, the distractions, right.

Jennifer Walter: 16:17

So we've talked about some like internal factors, some external factors. Now it's kind of like to look at the barriers. That's kind of like the heart of it. I feel, um, the barriers that live between insight and action, right, what is actually like going into the way, in into our way, and say, nope, you're not coming in. I mean, if this is a sentence I have said a thousand times and I've heard it in my coaching clients again and again, it's the I know what I need to do, I just can't seem to do it. And again, it's not a failure of discipline, it's just data, it's a signal that you're up against more than just mindset, right. So let's break it down.

Jennifer Walter: 17:02

Of course, barriers are all behavioral patterns. I mean, if you're used to doing something for the past 10, 20, 30, 40 years. It's not just going to stop overnight or after one fine day of not doing something. Your old behavioral patterns are your autopilot, autopilot, your default, the overworking, the rescuing, the numbing, the proving. They're not bad habits. Bad habits, they're protective routines and they kept you safe for years. But now they're keeping you stuck. Though, and here is kind of like the shift, the shift tips head Start with micro interruption.

Jennifer Walter: 17:40

It's really. Don't try to overhaul your entire behavioral system. Interrupt it gently and often. Let's look at this from a very practical perspective. Let's say you're at work and you receive an email that I don't know suddenly, or not so suddenly, pressures you into taking on extra work. Your reflex might be to reply immediately, saying yes, to be helpful, right, that's kind of like the default. That's playing. The micro interruption would be instead of responding right away, you pause, you close your eyes and take a deep breath in and a deep breath out, and this is really micro. It takes you like 10 seconds, but this small act will interrupt your autopilot pattern. It buys you space to respond, not from your values, from the values you hold now, and not your reflex, your past autopilot, and that's how rewiring begins.

Jennifer Walter: 18:38

When we look at barriers, we also have emotional blocks. This is when your desire for change meets your fear of what it will cost. You want to slow down, but if? What if you lose your momentum? You want to speak up, but what if you're too much or then become unlovable for speaking your mind? You want to rest, but what if no one needs me anymore you anymore? Again, here is a little shift tip for you start by creating emotional safety and not behavioral pressure. Use self-inquiry or somatic practices to ask what part of me is afraid and what does it need.

Jennifer Walter: 19:21

Another barrier, um, that colmos and admin have found in their model, or visualized in their model, are structural and situational constraints. Right, because, let's be honest, sometimes and I feel this has been a lot of times recently we're not resisting per se. We're just hanging in there, fucking surviving. Right time, money, child care, chronic illness, caretaking, oppression these aren't excuses, they're real limits and they deserve respect. Right, it helps no one if we pretend that they aren't limits. It just speaks of your fucking privilege. It's not helping anyone if you do that. So, instead of saying oh, no, like, instead of being blind to your limits, actually be again. Do a really honest assessment of them and work with them.

Jennifer Walter: 20:20

Not everything has to change today, but every one of us holds a small bit of agency and even if it might be just really small, but what bit of agency do you have right now? In which area do you hold agency? Can you build on that? It might not be time, you might not have really much say about your time, but maybe you have more say about your money. You don't have really much say on your chronic illness I mean, it's just there or your oppression, but how are other different ways where you can say where you see, oh, I actually I do have agency there and how can I build that?

Jennifer Walter: 20:58

Another barrier is the lack of feedback or reinforcements. For example, you finally you did the thing you wanted to do, you set a boundary, or you go quiet, you rest, and the world doesn't notice, there is no reaction to it, or, worse, it pushes back, which often happens right, with angry spouses or angry bosses being like, hey, what's up? Um and and again. Here it's really to about redefining your win. You really track your internal shifts, track the moments you stood your ground and said no, celebrate, notice that you're feeling calm when you were used to feel stressed and ask.

Jennifer Walter: 21:47

Another thing is that it's really crucial ask for witnessing um. This can be in in free spaces or in paid spaces. Let someone reflect your change back to you. This is also really, really crucial in my coaching work that often people need a mirror that reflects their change back to them, because if you're in the trenches, you don't really you have a hard time seeing it and that's totally it, right, like, and that's okay. So this can be really helpful. It can also be a dear friend or maybe you're in a co-working group, so you can do this work together.

Jennifer Walter: 22:29

So let's again have one thing very clear the goal isn't to change who you are or the behaviors you deem a problem. Again, that's crucial. You think are a problem. Um, don't, don't think you're going to change them overnight. That's just going to set you up for failure. Um, and it's also not the goal to become perfect um at doing right there, there would be no metal like. You can implement this model and do it perfectly. You will not get a gold medal right it.

Jennifer Walter: 22:59

It's really about building a life where your inside can live in your body, your schedule, your relationships, a life that doesn't just know, but acts, expresses and feels aligned. And that really starts by honoring the gap. And honoring the gap means being absolutely brutally honest with where you are right now, because a lot of, because I see a lot of people doing like the vision boards and that's great, great work for seeing the other part of the gap, where you want to be. But you also need to know where you're at so you see the path, the work ahead of you, not just the vision board glossy, fancy part, but the messy, raw, brutal part of actually meeting yourself where you're at and dishonoring the gap. It it's not seeing it not as a failure, as a opportunity to crap on yourself, but as an invitation right, as an invitation to pause, to revire, to change what you believe for decades and to walk the scenic route right, not because it's slow and the views are nice there they are nicer but because it's true, it's the only way home. You don't't need more potential, more vision boards. You need to give your becoming a structure that can hold it, that can sustain it over a long period of time. Because you already know right, you know you've done the work, you intellectually have done all the work. Now it's really time to move.

Jennifer Walter: 24:41

So okay, hey, if this episode landed, please share it. Send it to your friend who keeps saying I know what to do, but and if you're ready to stop circling your insight and start building a life that matches what you already know? This is part of exactly the work I do with clients, one-on-one. Together, we bridge the gap between knowing and doing in the scenic route fashion, with compassion, with feeling safe in a body and the structure that fits your life. You don't have to push through this alone. You can be held and challenged. Those things can work together and you can change and achieve lasting change without burning out. So if this resonates with you, I invite you to head over to jenniferwalterme to learn more and book, or book a free connection call to see what would work best for you. So until next time on the scenic route, stay soft, stay sharp and take the scenic route. Love us and just like that, we've reached the end of another journey together on the scenic route podcast.

Jennifer Walter: 25:52

Thank you for spending time with us. Curious for more stories or in search of the resources mentioned in today's episode, visit us at scenigroupodcastcom for everything you need and if you're ready to embrace your scenigroup, I've got something special for you. Step off the beaten path with my scenigroup affirmation card deck. It's crafted for those moments when you're seeking courage, yearning to trust your inner voice and eager to carve out a path authentically, unmistakably yours. Pick your scenic route affirmation today and let it support you. Excited about where your journey might lead? I certainly am. Remember, the scenic route is not just about the destination, but the experiences, learnings and joy we discover along the way. Thank you for being here and I look forward to seeing you on the scenic route again.