Nicole HollarIntegrative Life Coach | Behavior Change Expert | Author | Speaker - Helping high-functioning people and organizations uncover blind spots so they can get out of their own way.

The Real Reasons You Say, "I Can't"

24 Sept 2026 · 20 min

Open source

The OWN IT Podcast with Nicole Hollar

24 Sept 2026 · 20 min

0:00

In this episode, two hosts dissect Nicole Hollar’s article on why adults habitually say “I don’t know how” and default to outsourcing minor problems. They trace the phenomenon from childhood experimentation—symbolized by a leaky popsicle‑stick bowl and a wobbly shop‑class lamp—to adult identity protection, where the phrase becomes a self‑fulfilling narrative of helplessness. The conversation introduces several core concepts: the “power bucket” (a reservoir of confidence filled in youth and later capped by ego), “social gravity” (the pull of peer comparison that suppresses beginner confidence), and the distinction between genuine disinterest and fabricated inability. They argue that while delegating tasks can be efficient, repeated outsourcing erodes neural pathways that signal agency, leading to learned helplessness. The remedy, according to Hollar, is not grand self‑help gestures but deliberately choosing tiny, low‑stakes tasks (e.g., descaling a coffee maker) to generate evidence of action, treating outcomes as neutral data rather than moral judgments. By repeatedly taking these micro‑reps, listeners can lift the lid on their power bucket, rebuild confidence separate from competence, and reclaim the child‑like permission to try and be imperfect. The hosts close with reflective prompts encouraging listeners to identify personal “I can’t” statements and consider the larger life choices those may be masking.

Chapters

Let's, um, let's just be completely honest for a second here.
Always a good policy.
Right. So think about your living space right now. I mean, is there a leaky faucet or maybe a weird buzzing sound coming from the fridge?
Oh, or a Wi-Fi router that drops out every Tuesday at like 3:00 PM without fail.
Yes, exactly. And you haven't Googled the solution. You haven't watched a single tutorial video.
No, you've just accepted this minor misery into your life.
You've completely accepted it, or you've quietly decided that you just— you aren't the kind of person who can fix it. So you're just waiting for someone else to handle it.
Yeah. And it's a remarkably common default state. We hit this small point of friction, and we instantly label it as outside our jurisdiction.
Right. And we just move on with our day.
Exactly. Completely unaware of what that little surrender is actually doing to our psychology over time.
And unpacking that specific psychological surrender is, Well, it's our mission for today's deep dive.
That's such an interesting topic.
It really is. We are looking at a truly fascinating article by Nicole Hollar. She's a behavior change expert, a keynote speaker, and an integrative life coach.
Right. And a huge part of her core coaching involves helping clients overcome limiting beliefs.
Exactly. And what she has noticed through her time working with clients is this wild, just pervasive pattern.
Yeah, it's everywhere.
You have these incredibly capable, intelligent adults who just default to the phrase, I don't know how, before they have even made a single attempt to figure a problem out.
Which is such an interesting angle because she doesn't treat I don't know how as a literal lack of mechanical skill.
Right. It's not about the skill.
No, she looks at it as an identity shift. It's a protective mechanism.
Oh, a protective mechanism. How so?
Well, adults use it to shield themselves from the vulnerability of just you know, not knowing something instantly.
That makes so much sense. And to get to the root of this, Nicole starts her article with this hilarious but honestly really telling story about her childhood crafts.
Yes, the artifacts of trying.
The artifacts of trying. She still owns, like, a hand trowel, a letter rack, this ridiculously wobbly shop class lamp.
Oh, and the bowl. We can't forget the bowl.
The bowl made entirely out of popsicle sticks and what she assumes was just an entire bottle of Elmer's glue.
The visual of that, a bowl made of popsicle sticks that actually leaks light through the gaps, I mean, it's such a perfect representation of childhood output.
It really is. And she freely admits these things are just terribly constructed.
Oh, yeah, they're objectively bad.
But she keeps them as physical proof that she used to just, you know, try things without overthinking the outcome.
Right.
But here's where I want to push back a little on the premise, or at least, you know, play devil's advocate for a second.
Okay, go for it.
Isn't holding on to a leaky popsicle bowl just cute childhood nostalgia?
Well, sure, it is nostalgic.
Right. But why should a grown adult with a mortgage, a demanding job, and a packed schedule care that they no longer build messy crafts? I mean, we grow up, our responsibilities change.
That is the logical defense most adults would use for sure. Like, why care about a badly glued bowl when you have real-world problems to solve?
Exactly.
But the psychological contrast Nicole is drawing here, it goes much deeper than the physical objects. She isn't actually writing about popsicle sticks.
Right.
She is examining our fundamental willingness to engage with the unknown. Because as we age, we don't lose our actual cognitive capabilities.
If anything, we're smarter.
Right. Our brains are way more developed. What we actually lose is our willingness to be bad at something in public.
Or even, you know, in the privacy of our own home.
Precisely. The adult ego is just incredibly fragile.
Yeah.
When you're 7 years old making a bowl out of sticks, you aren't worried about the structural integrity.
No, you're just gluing stuff together.
Right. You're not wondering whether the final product reflects your innate value as a human being. You're just engaged in the act of doing.
Yeah.
But as adults, especially once we establish competence in our professional lives, we develop this intense aversion to being a beginner again.
We really do. We build our entire identities around being capable.
So stepping into a new arena where we aren't instantly capable, it feels like a threat to that identity.
It feels like a massive risk. I mean, we want to be instant experts.
Exactly. And if we suspect we might fumble, we just opt out entirely, you know, to preserve our self-image.
But this loss of willingness, it doesn't just happen overnight. It's not like you wake up on your 18th birthday and suddenly fear trying new things.
No, it's way more subtle than that.
It sneaks into our lives through very small, everyday choices we make, often completely undetected by our conscious minds.
It is an incremental erosion of confidence. And that brings us to the pattern Nicole highlights from her book, Grilled Cheese and Tasting Menus, and from her direct experience coaching clients.
Oh, the outsourcing habit.
Yes. She observes this habit of outsourcing specifically within domestic environments.
Let's talk about that 2-person household dynamic she outlines.
It's so common.
It really is. She notes that in many homes, one person often fields all the practical problems, like the coffee maker needs descaling, the dashboard light comes on in the car, or the smoke detector starts doing that agonizing chirp at 2 in the morning.
The worst sound in the world.
The absolute worst. And one partner just completely checks out, actively deciding they, quote, aren't good at that stuff.
The phrase, I don't know how, acts as a hard stop. It ends the conversation and totally absolves them of the responsibility to even investigate.
Okay, but I have to challenge this dynamic because I know people are listening right now to this deep dive thinking, wait a minute, isn't that just a smart division of labor?
Ah, the efficiency argument.
Right. Let's say my partner is an engineer. It takes them 2 seconds to fix the Wi-Fi or diagnose the car. It would take me 2 hours of frustrating research. So, on a pure spreadsheet level, prioritizing my time and outsourcing that task makes total sense. Why shouldn't I just be efficient?
On a pure spreadsheet level, you are absolutely right. Efficiency dictates that the person with the most skill should execute the task. But you're calculating time and completely ignoring the cognitive friction and the psychological cost of that repeated surrender.
The psychological cost— what is the cognitive friction there? Because from my perspective, I just saved an hour of my life and avoided a massive headache.
You saved an hour, yes. But you also reinforced a microscopic neural pathway that says, when faced with a technical problem, I freeze and hand it off.
Oh, wow.
Yeah. Over time, that neural pathway calcifies. Nicole's argument cuts right through the disguise of efficiency. The danger isn't that you asked your partner to check the car this one time.
Right. It's the pattern.
Exactly. The danger is that because you never had to find out how to fix it, you stopped believing you could fix it if you needed to.
But couldn't someone argue that this is just specialization? I mean, we specialize in our jobs. Why not in our homes?
Well, specialization implies a choice.
Okay.
It implies you could learn how to descale the coffee maker, but you are consciously choosing to focus your energy elsewhere. What Nicole sees in her coaching clients is different. The repeated outsourcing creates a cognitive distortion. I don't know how evolves from a temporary state of missing information into a permanent identity.
It shifts from, I am choosing not to do this, to, I am intrinsically incapable of doing this.
That is the exact mechanism. You internalize this idea that you are simply not the kind of person who can handle mechanical things or tech things or financial things.
Right.
And once incapable becomes your identity, you stop looking for solutions altogether. You become helpless by design.
Dependent on others for basic environmental friction.
Entirely dependent.
That makes a lot of sense, honestly. The danger isn't the unlearned skill, it's the learned helplessness.
Yes, learned helplessness.
Which brings us to the concept Nicole introduces to explain where our original fearless energy goes. She calls it the power bucket.
The power bucket is a brilliant way to conceptualize this psychological shift.
It really is.
As kids, this bucket is constantly being filled with independence, with trial, with error, and critically, with the societal permission to be bad at things.
Right. Society expects children to be terrible at things.
Obviously.
That is basically the definition of childhood. You are constantly encountering things you have never done before.
And because there is no expectation of mastery, there's no shame in the attempt.
Nicole illustrates this perfectly with a scenario I like to think of as the kindergarten drawing test.
Oh, I love this example.
It's so good. She points out that if you ask a room of kindergartners who can draw, every single hand shoots up into the air.
Yep.
They are practically falling out of their chairs to tell you they are artists.
Absolutely.
But if you ask a room of high schoolers that exact same question, you might get, like, 3 hands and a whole lot of nervous, self-conscious laughter.
It is a staggering drop-off in participation, and it really highlights how our relationship with our own capability changes as we enter environments governed by social comparison.
It feels like social gravity.
Oh, that's a great way to put it.
It's not that the high schoolers suddenly forgot the mechanics of holding a pencil. It's that the mass of other people's expectations and the awareness of differing skill levels, it pulls so hard on them that they can't even raise their hand.
Yes.
The kindergartner doesn't care if their stick figure has one leg shorter than the other. But the high schooler is looking around thinking, well, Sarah in the front row is basically a prodigy, so I'm not gonna embarrass myself by putting my mediocre doodle on display.
Social gravity is the Perfect analogy. As our egos solidify, that gravity increases.
Yeah.
Somewhere along the line, a heavy lid gets placed on our power bucket. We learn to constantly measure our competence against the perceived mastery of everyone else in the room.
Right, everyone else seems like an expert.
And suddenly, trying— and inevitably failing— doesn't just mean a messy drawing; it carries a massive social risk.
So, for adults, The fear of looking incompetent vastly outweighs the actual difficulty of the task itself.
Vastly.
We are more terrified of the vulnerability of being a beginner than we are of the broken coffee maker.
And here is where the psychology gets really tricky.
Okay. How so?
Because we don't like to admit that we are acting out of fear, we rebrand that avoidance. Nicole notes that we often mistake this silence and this opting out for humility.
Oh, wow. We tell ourselves, I know my limits. I'll leave the drawing to the real artists and the fixing to the real mechanics. We frame it as a virtue.
Exactly. We use humility as a shield to protect the ego.
Right.
But as Nicole argues, true humility is acknowledging you have a lot to learn and trying anyway. What we are doing is entirely different. It is a fear of exposure.
It's that lid on the power bucket.
It is a power bucket that someone, maybe a highly critical teacher, maybe societal pressure, or maybe just our own perfectionism, put a lid on.
Yeah.
to stay securely fastened for decades.
But, you know, before we spiral into thinking that every single time we avoid a task, it's some deep psychological failure or lack of confidence, Nicole draws a really crucial and honestly relieving boundary.
Yes, she does.
She distinguishes between being scared to try and simply liking what we like.
She actively defends the comfort of the known.
She specifically defends the grilled cheese sandwich, which I just appreciate so much.
It's a great sandwich.
She says it is one of the best things a human being can make. And she is fully prepared to defend that hill. She makes it incredibly clear that adults are absolutely allowed to like the familiar.
Right.
You don't have to spend every weekend learning to code or building your own furniture or constantly pushing yourself out of your comfort zone just to prove you are a capable person.
This is a vital nuance because the self-improvement space often demands constant, relentless optimization.
Exhausting. Really?
It is. Nicole pushes back against that. The problem isn't that adults enjoy simple, familiar things.
Let me ask for some clarification here, though, on behalf of you, the listener. How do we actually determine the difference internally?
That's the big question.
If I sit down on a Friday night and I genuinely do not want to learn to cook a complex 6-course tasting menu, am I limiting myself and keeping the lid on my power bucket because I'm afraid of failing? Or am I just exhausted and hungry for a sandwich?
It comes down to the difference between disinterest Nicole breaks it down into a very simple rule. You have to own the difference.
Own the difference.
Disinterest is a completely valid, conscious choice. You are allowed to say, I have no interest whatsoever in learning to cook a tasting menu. That is a preference based on your values and how you want to spend your energy.
So it is an active decision.
Right. But inability is a fictional narrative you construct. To avoid the discomfort of the attempt. It is the subtle shift from saying, I don't want to learn this, to saying, I am not someone who can learn this.
So the check is entirely internal. You have to ask yourself, am I choosing not to do this, or am I hiding behind the idea that I am incapable?
You have to be ruthlessly honest with yourself about why you are opting out. When I don't know how quietly morphs into I am incapable, well, that is the warning sign.
Yeah, that makes sense.
You have to interrogate that story. Is it an empirical truth that you lack the cognitive ability to read the coffee maker manual, or is it just a shield so you don't have to face the friction of being a beginner for 20 minutes?
That distinction between I choose not to and I am not the kind of person who can is incredibly powerful.
It changes everything.
So if you are listening to this right now and you just had a light bulb moment where you caught yourself telling that I can't story about a broken appliance or a software How do you actually rewrite that narrative?
Right.
Because according to Nicole, the solution is remarkably mundane.
It is aggressively boring, and that is entirely by design.
Yeah.
The way to overcome these limiting beliefs isn't through grand sweeping gestures.
No. She says rebuilding your capability doesn't come from an inspiring pep talk or watching a motivational video on social media.
Exactly.
You aren't going to stand in front of the bathroom mirror shouting affirmations until you suddenly comprehend How a carburetor works.
That would be nice, but no.
She says the fix comes from picking one incredibly small, low-stakes task you've been avoiding.
You have to manufacture a moment of friction.
You look up what that dashboard light actually means instead of just staring at it with anxiety on your morning commute.
Yes.
Or you descale the coffee maker yourself before you hand it to your partner, or before you just shrug and resign yourself to drinking bad coffee for the rest of the year.
And this brings up a critical psychological distinction she makes between competence and confidence. We often conflate the two, assuming we need one to have the other. Confidence is historical. It is having already done something well. You have the skill, you have the track record.
That's past tense proof.
Exactly. Past tense. But confidence is forward-looking. Confidence is trusting yourself enough to attempt something, Regardless of your starting skill level, you can be genuinely confident in your ability to figure a problem out long before you are actually competent at executing the solution.
I love that. It's like going to a confidence gym, but instead of trying to deadlift 300 pounds on your first day, you are only lifting 2-pound weights.
Right. You're just doing the tiniest reps.
Just tiny reps of attempting things. But let me ask you about the mechanics of this, because I am trying to wrap my head around how the brain processes failure here.
Okay.
Let's say I decide to finally descale the coffee maker. I read the manual, I try it, and I end up completely flooding the kitchen counter, and the machine still doesn't work. Doesn't that outcome just violently reinforce the I am incapable narrative I was trying to escape?
Well, that is precisely why Nicole insists the stakes must be incredibly low. If you try to rebuild your confidence by remodeling your bathroom and you flood the house, then yes, that will reinforce the negative narrative.
Right. Bad idea.
But with a coffee maker, the output is completely irrelevant.
Irrelevant?
Completely. The point of the exercise is not to become a master appliance repair technician. The point is learning to treat the outcome, whether it is a perfectly clean machine or a flooded counter, as neutral information rather than a verdict on your personal worth.
Oh wow, that shifts the whole paradigm. Information, not a verdict.
Yes. If you flood the counter, the information is simply I need to put a bigger bowl under the spout next time, or I used too high a ratio of vinegar to water.
Right. It's just data.
Exactly.
Yeah.
But the verdict, which is where our fragile adult egos usually jump, is I am an idiot. I ruin everything, and I should never try to fix anything again.
We attach moral weight to mechanical failures.
We really do. And we have to sever that connection. The entire goal of these small, boring tasks is to bypass the ego and simply prove to your brain that you are still an organism that tries.
Yeah.
You're generating evidence that you take action when faced with friction.
You are taking the lid off the power bucket one tiny mundane task at a time. And the beautiful part is nobody even needs to witness it. You don't have to announce to your household that you are embarking on a journey of self-discovery via the coffee maker. You just do it for yourself.
Right. Keep it to yourself.
As Nicole points out, that wobbly lamp from her childhood shop class, it has terrible wiring. It leans drastically to one side, but when she plugs it in, It still turns on.
It still functions.
Yeah.
The execution doesn't have to be flawless for the attempt to have value.
So let's bring all of these concepts full circle.
Yeah.
We started this discussion looking at a leaky popsicle stick bowl, and we've traced that thread all the way to how we construct and protect our adult identities.
It's quite a journey.
It is. We examine how the seemingly harmless habit of outsourcing small tasks isn't just a matter of household efficiency. It's a slow, quiet leak in our fundamental belief that we are capable of figuring the world out.
We unpacked the idea of the power bucket and how the social gravity of constant comparison puts a heavy lid on our willingness to be beginners.
Yeah.
We examined how we often disguise our fear of failure as humility, just to protect our egos.
And we learned that comfort is not the enemy. It is perfectly fine to love a grilled cheese sandwich and prefer a quiet Friday night.
Absolutely.
The danger is confusing our active disinterest with an inherent inability and letting the phrase, I don't know how, dictate the boundaries of our lives.
That's the real danger.
But the incredible news is the fix isn't some massive lifestyle overhaul. It is right in front of us, sitting on the kitchen counter or flashing yellow on the dashboard. It's boring, it's remarkably low stakes, and it is entirely within our control to attempt.
It is ultimately about Reclaiming the permission we all had as children to try and to be gloriously bad at something, just to prove to ourselves that we still have the capacity to learn.
I want to turn this directly to you listening right now. I want to leave you with a reflective question straight from Nicole's coaching methodology. Think about your own life, your own routines, your own living space. What is something you consistently tell yourself you can't do that you have honestly never even attempted?
And to take that reflection one step further into the bigger picture, if an unexamined fear of being a beginner is stopping us from doing something as small and inconsequential as descaling a coffee maker or resetting a router, well, what larger life decisions are we avoiding?
Oh, that's a huge question.
What career pivots, what creative passions, what bold necessary changes are we silently outsourcing to the phrase, I don't know how? What beautiful, wobbly, entirely functional life could you build if you finally gave yourself permission to be bad at something again?