written by Coach JoyGenea testing Claude Code AI. Image from ChatGPT
A client sent me a video this week. The title grabbed my attention: “Why The Smartest People I Know Set Constraints, Not Goals.”
He connected with it. Said it named something about how he works when he gets the best results. He performs better inside limits. He also really pushes back if they are not the right limits. The wide open “anything is possible” approach most productivity advice pushes has never worked for him, and he has spent years wondering what the heck.
It is brain science.
So we did what we do. We took the idea and tried to apply it to something real. He has been struggling to get project details ready before his meetings. The prep work keeps getting skipped, and he arrives underprepared, which frustrates him and his team. We decided to test constraint as the solution. Put the prep inside a tight box. Give it a limit. See what happens.
And then the theory started to fall apart.
Not because the idea of constraint was wrong. Because of where the constraints were coming from.
If you are an unconventional leader, you probably already know what it feels like to work well under pressure. A hard deadline. A client waiting. A presentation in two hours. Something external that does not care how you feel or what else is on your list. That kind of pressure activates something in you that open-ended to-do lists never do.
If you are older than ten, it is neurological.
For brains wired the way yours is, urgency is fuel. The frontal lobe, where executive function and working memory live, responds to external signals in a way it often does not respond to internal ones. When the constraint comes from outside you, something clicks. When it comes from inside you, a rule you made up about yourself, the same brain that can solve complex problems in real time will quietly find ten reasons to delay.
Your brain is doing exactly what it was built to do. It is just waiting for the right kind of signal, and I promise you some of that signaling you have trained it.
That is the distinction that applies to unconventional leaders in a different way when we talk about constraint.
Constraint and Rigidity
There is a difference between constraint and rigidity, and it matters more than most people realize.
Rigidity is a wall. It is inflexible, punishing, and usually shame-based. Rigidity sounds like: “I should have done this already. I have to stick to the schedule. If I don’t finish this, I am failing.” Rigidity comes from fear. It tightens around you, and when you inevitably bump into it, you either break through it or collapse against it. Neither outcome builds momentum.
Constraint is a container. In this context it is chosen, purposeful, and designed to create focus rather than enforce compliance. Constraint sounds like: “I have until the meeting starts. That is the box. What can I actually do inside it?” Constraint comes from strategy. It holds space for the work without bullying the person doing it.
It is common for leaders to often confuse the two, and it costs them.
They try to add structure to their days and what they actually build is rigidity. Rules about when they should start, how long things should take, what done looks like, all self-imposed, all intrinsic, all completely ignoring the fact that no one is going to enforce those rules on their own behalf.
Then they miss the deadline they set for themselves and decide the problem is their discipline.
It is not. The problem is the source of the constraint.
Personal Test
Here is what I tested on myself this morning.
I had a meeting. I had project details that needed to be ready before it. I have given myself versions of this task many times and handled it with varying degrees of success.
This morning I picked the word constraint deliberately. Not deadline. Not goal. Constraint.
I told myself: the meeting is the wall. Everything before it is the box. Work inside the box.
That is it. That was the whole experiment.
It worked. The details got done. Not perfectly. Good enough, which is the right standard for prep work that was previously not happening at all. The meeting went better. The box held.
What changed was not the task. What changed was the frame.
Constraint as a tool, not a punishment. How much of the project could I get done before the meeting? I made it a game. This is all part of gamifying your actions. External anchor, not internal pressure. The meeting was always going to start. That is not something I control. And that reality, that external fact that did not care about my mood or my morning, was more effective than any rule I could have made up about myself.
Back to My Client
When we looked at the constraints he named for getting his project prep done, most of them were intrinsic. He was going to decide when to start. He was going to hold himself to the standard. He was going to create the urgency from scratch, inside his own head, using willpower.
For many unconventional leaders, this is exactly where the breakdown happens.
Willpower is not the tool for this job. Willpower is a finite resource. It depletes. And for a brain that already works twice as hard as the average brain just to maintain what looks like normal output from the outside, asking willpower to also enforce self-imposed constraints is asking too much.
The question is not: “How do I get myself to follow through on the constraints I set?”
The question is: “How do I build constraints that do not require me to enforce them?”
Test It Yourself
External constraints do not have to be accidental. You can build them deliberately. The meeting that creates the deadline does not have to be a client meeting. It can be a standing call with your assistant. A check-in with your business partner. A commitment to a colleague that you will have something ready by a specific time. Something outside yourself that holds the edge of the box, so you do not have to.
Pick one project or task on your list and frame it with new constraints.
How much can I get done in 30 minutes?
I bet I can get this blog done before my call?
This doesn’t need to be perfect, started would be amazing. I will just do that.
What your brain needs is not more self-discipline. It needs the right architecture. Constraint that comes from the outside, that is real and specific and time-bound, gives you something to work with instead of something to generate from scratch.
The unconventional leaders I work with who figure this out stop fighting themselves. They start designing their days around the reality of how they work, not the fantasy of how they think they should work. Or who they think they should be as a leader. It is amazing how small shifts can create such large results.
The result is not a perfectly structured life. That is not the goal and it is not what constraint promises.
The result is momentum where there was none. Projects completed before meetings. Decisions made faster because the box makes the choices clearer. Energy freed up from the daily battle of trying to make yourself do things you were never going to do the way you were trying to do them.
One of my clients, a founder and president of a multi-million dollar company, said it this way: “I didn’t know how broken my system was until I had a system that worked with my brain and processing style.”
He wasn’t the biggest issue with the problem. His system was wrong for him. Once that changed, everything else followed.
That is what constraint, the right kind, from the right source, used as a tool rather than a weapon, can do.
If you are reading this and something is clicking, the next step is a conversation.
A No-BS Discovery Call. One hour. We look at what is actually happening in your business and your leadership, name it clearly, and figure out what changes first.
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Coach JoyGenea
Video transcript:
Constraint is not a cage. It is also not a perfect answer. It is 100% an option when it comes to accomplishing more tasks and not feeling so pushed into things or so much rigidity. This week, what I really wanna talk about that I know is so important is productivity. It’s been coming up a lot with my clients, and what was great is a client actually sent me a video about, um, constriction and about constraints.
And at first when I watched the video, let’s just say I didn’t mesh with it entirely, and I’m still not like, “This is the one way.” Um, obviously this person that’s writing this, and there’s a link below, you can check it out, um, they’re totally feeling like this is the thing right now. And, you know, I think it is an option we need to explore.
So constraints, not rigidity, and in particular, this client that brought it up this week recognized that without any external constraints, they We’re only having internal constraints, and accomplishing anything thereby falls on willpower, which is not a useful tool at all, especially for unconventional leaders.
That’s just a pain in the butt. It just doesn’t work and it drains all your battery. So blah, throw that one out the window most of the time. Um, finding appropriate external constrictions that do not cause major resistance can lead to great success when it comes to your productivity. And that was the fun, challenging question that we were doing since he brought the video and he’s like, “I think this is the answer.”
And so I’m like, “Great, let’s explore.” And we took some of the things on his plate that he was working on. One was in particular, um, getting projects outlined and prepared and ready for meetings to be delegated out. Just really boring. It’s a tedious type of thing, and sitting down and trying… What, what we figured out was his typical way of doing that was to wait until however many hours before and then cram and lose sleep and like just, ugh, it’s gonna happen.
Well, ugh, it happens, but ugh, it’s also messes up everything else in the system. Instead, we took a project in particular he was working on that was going… that had a meeting coming up in a week, and we gave it freedom. We scheduled it at a particular time with no… The constraint was just it would be worked on from here to here every day at 1:00 to 2:00.
That was it. We found that in his calendar and we’re like, “Block it off.” Every day, 1:00 to 2:00. What happened and how much he got done with the project, we did not put rigid rules on. We said, “Just show up at this time, sit down, pull up the project, do project.” And it took us a while to get there ’cause at, yeah, at first it, it took a little while.
Once we got there, now he’s testing it. I, I’ve gotten a couple of feedbacks from him, and so far it’s been really good. Again, we put some constraint on it. It has a time now that is not all at once It’s spread out. Awesome. And we moved some of the rigidity of so much of this will get done at this time.
When we smart goaled it down too far, too rigid, then it got put off. So we’re testing that out for new constraints and a little less rigidity on that. I personally, after we had the conversation, I thought, “Okay, I wanna explore this a little bit for myself.” And the next day I actually was in a workshop in a class, and I had an opportunity to see, to get all of my work done, but I put, I put 10-minute constraints on it.
I had 100 questions to answer, and they were, some of them were quick yes/no types of answers. Some of them I definitely had to go out and explore some more details. But I said, it, I made it a game, and I said, “Okay.” The constraints I put on it were how many of these q- 10 questions, they were 10-minute blocks, or 10 question blocks.
How many of these questions can I get done in 10 minutes? Go. And then when I was done with that, I’m like, “There’s probably about five minutes worth of I gotta go find some additional things to support some of what I answered.” And so I would set another timer. Okay, get as much as you can done. And I would.
I’d cut, at, at the five minutes I’m like, “Oh, I gotta move on to the next set of questions or I won’t have this done within the constraints of having this done in an hour so that I have some time prior to my class.” I gotta say, it was fun to implement some external um, constraints on it, and to allo– and to remind myself this does not have to be perfect.
That thought kept coming into my head, “Oh, this isn’t that great. I could do this so much better if I just had a little more time.” And then I thought, you know what? That is what gets in the way of getting this done and being on time with this and not delaying other people. I’m like, “That excuse really doesn’t fly anymore.”
And it felt really good to push back to my own internal dialogue and really start to recognize what’s the win in this? Is it everything’s at a 10, or is the win on this that it’s at a five and done? It was at a five and done, for sure, with this project. S- so constraints can be valuable, and I hope in talking about this, I’m getting you to think about how you might have some things in your life that you wanna move forward and how you might put just some fun and friendly constraints on them.
Like I said, I kinda gamed it. I used the timer, and I chunked it differently than I normally would and just went, “Let’s play a game. How much of this can I get done in this timeframe if I set it up like th…” I took away the other rules, and I made new rules, and that quite often can be so much more rewarding and can create a lot better results.
I’m JoyGenea. I’m conventional leadership coach, international neurodiversity coach, and a champion for you thinking outside the box, inside the box and creating results that amaze you and make your life incredible. Thank you so much.