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How to Not Become an Escape Artist

Andy Crossman · RizeX Monthly Mastermind · September 2019 · Eastern Idaho

Most business owners don’t have a knowledge problem — they have a behavior problem. Andy Crossman, a board-certified behavior analyst who works with over 500 individuals through his company Journeys, brought the science of applied behavior analysis (ABA) into the room and pointed it squarely at the habits holding entrepreneurs back. The uncomfortable truth he put on the table: the first three decisions most high performers make every morning are all about escape.

Business productivity strategies are everywhere. Books, podcasts, coaching programs — we’ve consumed them. And yet the gap between what we know we should do and what we actually do keeps showing up in the same places: the cold call we delay, the hard conversation we avoid, the focused work session we never quite start. Andy’s message wasn’t about adding more tactics. It was about understanding why we keep running.

What Andy covered

The four functions of behavior. Andy introduced the foundational framework from B.F. Skinner’s field of behaviorism: every behavior we engage in — from exercising to checking our phones to avoiding a difficult employee conversation — serves one of four functions. Attention (we want others to notice or respond), Access (we want to gain something), Automatic (it feels good and serves only us), or Avoidance/Escape (we’re getting away from something uncomfortable). Understanding which function is driving a behavior is the first step to changing it.

Escape is the function behind our most destructive habits. Of the four functions, Andy argued that escape and avoidance are the ones most quietly sabotaging entrepreneurs. It’s not just about procrastination — it’s the same underlying function driving addiction, disengagement, and burnout. Hitting snooze, scrolling social media, staying busy with low-priority tasks, over-scheduling yourself to avoid the one thing you actually need to do: it all falls under escape. The behavior looks different. The function is the same.

Behavior doesn’t lie. One of Andy’s sharper points: the field of applied behavior analysis doesn’t spend much time on intentions or feelings. It looks at what you actually did. You can say growth is your priority — your calendar and your daily choices will say whether that’s true. This reframe takes the emotion out of self-assessment and makes it harder to rationalize inaction.

Getting comfortable with discomfort. The antidote to escape isn’t willpower — it’s deliberate exposure. Andy cited Seth Godin’s observation that discomfort signals you’re doing something others won’t, and that the breakthroughs waiting for us are sitting just past the edge of what feels comfortable. Building tolerance for discomfort is a skill, and like any skill, it’s built incrementally.

What the room walked away with

Andy gave the group a practical toolkit for working through avoidance rather than around it:

  • Set up your environment for success. Remove the outs — notifications, open doors, devices set up for distraction. Your workspace either supports focus or undermines it.
  • Eat That Frog (Brian Tracy). Do the hardest, most avoided task first. Once the frog is eaten by 10 a.m., the rest of the day opens up.
  • Build tolerance with a timer. Start with 5 minutes of uninterrupted focus on the uncomfortable thing. Work up to 10, then 15. You don’t need motivation — you need reps.
  • The 5-Second Rule (Mel Robbins). When confronted with something you’re avoiding, count backward from 5 and move. The countdown interrupts the escape reflex before it takes over.
  • Schedule your discomfort. If you don’t put the important, hard things in your calendar, someone or something else will fill that time. Block it. Name it. Show up.
  • Commit to less and delegate the rest. Over-promising is its own form of escape — staying perpetually busy so the one hard thing never has to get done. If someone else can do it, hand it off.

Andy also made a case for intentional rest — not the kind where you swap your laptop for your phone on the couch, but actual mental downtime. He referenced the Stress + Rest = Growth formula from the book Peak Performance: growth requires both sides of the equation, and most entrepreneurs are running Stress + Stress indefinitely. He recommended 15 minutes of unstructured, screenless time each day to let the mind work, and a genuine 3-day weekend away from work on a regular basis.

A moment that landed

Andy asked the room a simple question: what was the first decision you made this morning? Then the second. Then the third. The answer, for nearly everyone, was snooze — snooze — phone. Thirty minutes of a high performer’s day, gone to escape before the day even started. He wasn’t pointing a finger; he was holding up a mirror. He’d just driven to McDonald’s that morning despite being eight days into a diet. “I labeled it,” he told the room. “Now you can too.” The power of the WTF framework — What’s The Function — is that once you can name it, you can’t unsee it.

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response.” — Andy Crossman (quoting Viktor Frankl)

“Behavior doesn’t lie.” — Andy Crossman

About Andy

Andy Crossman is a board-certified behavior analyst and the founder of Journeys, an Eastern Idaho organization that provides behavior treatment for approximately 500 individuals with significant disabilities. His day job is training parents, practitioners, and staff to understand and change behavior in some of the most challenging environments imaginable — which means when he talks about escape, avoidance, and what actually drives human behavior, he’s drawing from thousands of hours of direct, evidence-based work. He brought that same clinical clarity to a room full of entrepreneurs and made it immediately, uncomfortably applicable.

Connect with Andy – https://www.linkedin.com/in/andy-crossman-ba262277/

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The RizeX Monthly Mastermind meets every month in Eastern Idaho — an intimate gathering of local business owners, entrepreneurs, and professionals committed to real growth. Every event features a speaker who’s in the trenches alongside you, plus time for meaningful conversation and connection.

Reserve your seat at the next RizeX Mastermind ? https://www.rizex.io/events/category/eastern-idaho-events/