I Failed, And it Was Nothing Like I Thought it Would Be.
Failing as a food coach woke my curiosity into self-sabotage and landed me in exploring how change happens.
Here’s how it went down.
I’ll assume I’m not alone in feeling that the career path I chose when I was 18 is no longer the one I want to walk on a decade later.
At 27, when I announced I’d make my first 180-degree career shift after 7+ years of advertising, someone I deeply respected at the time gave me a sour bit of unsolicited advice: “I’m surprised at how someone as competent as you can make such a poor choice. You need consistency in your career. You can’t wobble around. You’re not 19 anymore.”
I wish I’d have owned my shit enough to reply, “Damn right, I’m not 19 anymore. At 19, I was terrified of failure, to such an extent that I barely took any chances. I’m brave enough to do this now, being quite sure I will fail. It’ll be worth it if only to have the experience of learning from it. Not that I asked for your input, thanks.”
I didn’t say that to him. No, I sat there, and part of me took his words in because I was convinced that a man I placed my trust in was utterly entitled to down-talk me. It felt natural; that’s how I was raised.
And yes, I did fail.
But not for the reasons he’d thought, or for the ones I’d have imagined.
Here’s the cool part: what happened before, during, and after failing was the onset of an invaluable chain of experiences. Looking back on the events, I can say they were nothing short of life-altering, and I’m still scratching my head as to why someone would attempt to shelter me from this learning process.
Before failing my then-goal to become a full-time nutrition consultant, I beat my own eating disorder and helped over 30 people eat better. Some lost weight, others gained it, depending on their goal. They all learned to cook and enjoyed food more. I got a palpable sense of what it feels like to do something valuable and support people on a transformative journey.
Then, some clients jumped out of the process because it wasn’t quite the kind of commitment they were ready to make yet. And that’s how it started to crumble.
I was swinging between moments of bliss, gut-punches, and ego kicks.
I learned that nobody could be pushed into healing, nor can anyone be talked out of self-sabotage without having a good look at the cause.
While failing, I learned that if you enter a support process with any other agenda than the client’s, you are setting yourself up for heartache, and the help you are providing is probably on the shallow end of your potential. Ultimately, if you tie your self-esteem to people’s ability to own their process and show up for themselves, you will end up crippled with self-doubt.
Here’s what the admission and aftermath of failure looked like, in three steps.
“The operation was successful, but the patient still died.”
That’s a terrible Dutch saying that an end-result can go horribly wrong despite every step's perfect execution. Say we were in a lab, in a neatly contained environment — then I was fully prepared to support people in their healing journey, as I was close to mastering the technicalities of nutritional balance. I was a total nerd, crunching the numbers and believing that the mathematics of weight loss (or gain, or balance) was just that: a numbers game. I got the food bit right, but there’s so much more than food to our eating habits — our memories, fears, inner battles, and tricksters join the table. I thought I could handle them.
It’s funny now, looking back, to see how wrong I was. Not so much at the time, though.
On the other side of my well-crafted nutrition plans, there’s the real world, and it’s messy. It’s hectic and unpredictable, and things tend to get in the way, and people enthusiastically set goals only to drop them in 2 weeks. And there I was, with my shiny new “fail-proof” tools and toys, stupefied at how my clients’ defense mechanisms, limiting beliefs, and saboteurs barged in, messing up their goals along with my perfectly mapped out road to success.
At that time, I only had one tiny, polished part of the picture. The other part, the source of my failure, is the real gift that keeps on giving—human emotions at play.
You’ve got to rumble with the rough edges and dance with the shadows.
It was dreadful to sit with clients’ discomfort (I wanted to help, and my idea of help at the time was all about shifting to the “bright side”). It was hard to control my urge to rescue them from tricky thought patterns, only to have them go back there. Healing, as it turns out, is not linear. It’s a spiral that goes deeper and deeper into the root causes of what happens at the surface. And it was impossible to explore those root causes, as long as my process and I were only focusing on delivering a neatly packaged solution. I was unprepared for the rough edges and the shadows that come to play when change is initiated.
I ended my one-year experiment of being a full-time nutrition consultant for three reasons: I was way too emotionally invested in each of my client’s processes. It was taking a heavy toll on my mental health. I felt like a fraud because something was missing, and I could not figure it out. And— this one’s circumstantial: I had just moved to another country and was exhausted, and lonely, and needed a break.
Failure can coexist with curiosity. They make a badass teaching duo.
I may have given up out of shame and exhaustion, but the experience in itself triggered my yearning to deep-dive into what makes and what breaks a change process. The first step was getting a sense of what coaching can do, and I got a real taste of it through this Coaching Program. From here, a learning path unravels. My fork-in-the-road moment was falling on my face and deciding to get curious about why I was there.
To summarize some of the lessons enabled by my failure —
It’s an illusion to think that processes and careful planning can shelter anyone from the discomfort of change. Change is messy because you awaken and try to move stuff that’s built into your very fabric, and they will fight for dear life.
New habits need a specific environment to “stick.” You don’t change your eating habits in complete isolation from all the other stuff going on in your life, and if anyone is selling that to you right now, they are full of it. This type of change is an integrated, foundation-shaking thing. You have to stabilize your foundation first, so you have some space to move things without wreaking havoc.
If you want to live with integrity, you can’t “fake it till you make it” with self-care. And you can’t do it with coaching, either. There’s a rite of passage, and failure can set things in motion once you’ve taken the time to acknowledge and deal with the loss.
It became clear to me that processes and plans are at the fragile surface of transformation. Presence, compassionate inquiry, sitting in discomfort, holding space through silence: that’s the stuff you want to cultivate if you're going to support real change.
That’s the stuff worth going back to school for.
