The Failure Pattern: When Your Greatest Gift Becomes the Pattern

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I remember sitting down to record, microphone in front of me, headphones on, a blinking cursor on a blink document.
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And within about four minutes, I was literally doing anything else.
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Answering emails I'd been ignoring for a week, reorganizing a client file that didn't need reorganizing, opening a course I'd pay for three months ago and never touched.
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All of it felt completely justified.
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All of it felt urgent.
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All of it felt like I it needed to happen right now, in this exact moment, before I could possibly speak into this microphone.
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Hours would pass.
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Weeks even.
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The episode wouldn't get recorded.
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And here's what I couldn't see for the longest time.
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It didn't feel like avoidance.
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It felt like flow.
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It felt like following what was alive in me in that moment.
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It felt, if I'm being honest with you, exactly like intuition.
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I didn't know then what I know now was not intuition.
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That was the pattern wearing intuition's face.
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Here's something I've noticed.
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Sitting with my own life and sitting with the people I work with, that almost nobody names directly in the healing space.
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Your biggest failure pattern will almost never feel like a failure pattern.
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It will feel like your greatest gift.
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It will have the same texture, the same energy, the same sense of rightness and aliveness and flow.
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And that's exactly what makes it so difficult to catch.
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Because you're not looking for something that feels bad or wrong or unlike you.
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You're looking for something that feels like the most authentic version of you.
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And when that pattern sounds like your own voice, that's when it can quietly take everything.
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I want to tell you about two other times this same pattern moved through my life wearing different clothes.
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The first was my business.
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There was a period where I stopped vetting the people I was bringing into my world.
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I spent years in corporate America teaching people how to hire, how to interview well, and how to hold analytical thinking and gut instinct at the same time, how to look at someone's track record alongside how they made you feel in a room.
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I knew how to do this.
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I taught it to hundreds of students looking for jobs.
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And then I stopped doing it for my own business entirely.
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Because my intuition was expanding in ways that felt extraordinary, genuinely beautifully expansive.
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And somewhere along the way, I decided that if someone came into my world, they must be meant to be there.
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That analysis was somehow less evolved than pure intuitive knowing.
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That the universe was curating my team, and my only job was to say yes to whoever flowed into my life.
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I brought in people who weren't right.
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I ignored red flags.
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My analytical brain was waving with both hands.
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I called it trust.
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I called it flow.
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I called it spiritual discernment.
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What it actually was was my intuitive brain running completely unchecked, with no analytical brain alongside it as a partner.
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And without that check and balance, things started to fracture.
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Difficult clients I had no framework for holding, practitioners who weren't delivering, projects that never got completed.
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My body was in a low-grade state of fear and chaos almost all of the time.
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Constant indecision, never knowing what to finish, the feeling of running hard in every direction and getting nowhere.
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Do you know that feeling?
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It almost feels like you're running on a hamster wheel, but someone has like a strap tight around you.
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So you're not only running in a circle, but you're also having a bunch of resistance.
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That was me.
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My greatest gift had become the weapon, the pattern used against me.
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The second time was in my love life, not you know, not a surprise.
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I was with someone who was completely wrong for me.
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Story of my life.
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My analytical brain registered it almost immediately.
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The evidence was everywhere, quiet and persistent and often loud.
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But what I believed was my intuition kept saying yes.
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It felt exciting, open, joyful, expansive.
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Isn't that what we're supposed to follow when we're in flow?
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Full of a particular aliveness that I have always associated with being on the right path.
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It was also emotionally unhinged.
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It was spectacularly distracting from my work, from my finances, from the things that genuinely needed my attention.
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And I stayed because it felt like flow.
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Here's what I eventually understood about the relationship and about my business and about that blinking cursor on an empty document.
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Distraction, disguised as intuition, feels exactly like intuition.
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Same warmth, same expansiveness, same sense of being guided towards something.
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The feeling is not the difference.
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The difference is what it does to the architecture of your life when you follow it.
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Real intuition makes your life more simple, the pattern makes your life more complicated.
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That's it.
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That's the whole distinction.
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Not the feeling, not the energy, not how alive or open or right it feels in the moment, but whether following it simplifies things or fragments them, whether it refocuses your life or scatters it.
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Every time I followed the pattern in the business, in the relationship at the microphone, things got more complicated, more chaotic.
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More of my energy going to more places with less and less to show for it.
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Real intuition says this, not that.
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And when you follow it, something in your life gets cleaner, clearer, easier.
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Now here's where it gets even more interesting, because this isn't just a me thing, this is a human thing.
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And it shows up differently depending on the particular genius you came in with.
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The Enneagram has been one of the most useful maps for me when it comes to understanding not just personality, but the specific shape of the pattern each type carries.
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And what I have found both in my own work and in working with my clients is that the most dangerous failure pattern for each type isn't the obvious one.
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It's the one that sounds exactly like their gift.
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Enneagram type one, the perfectionist, everyone knows the one as the perfectionist.
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The secret pattern is that the perfectionism isn't really about standards.
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It's a cage built around rage.
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If everything is controlled and correct, the anger never has to surface.
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Enneagram type two, everyone knows the two as generous, giving, always there.
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It's the helper.
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The secret pattern is that the helping is a preemptive strike against the terror of being unlovable.
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If I need nothing and give everything, you can never leave.
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Enneagram type three, everyone knows the three is driven and successful.
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This is the achiever.
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The secret pattern is that the achievement is a costume worn over an empty room.
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They've performed for so long, they've lost the thread back to who they are, actually are, underneath the applause.
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Type fours, everyone knows the four is deep, emotional, beautifully unique.
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The secret pattern is that the identity itself becomes the avoidance.
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If I am different enough, I never have to face the quiet terror of being ordinary or of simply belonging somewhere.
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Type 5.
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Everyone knows the five as the knowledgeable, private, the investigator.
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The secret pattern is that the knowledge is emote.
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The more they understand, the less anyone can get close enough to overwhelm them.
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Intimacy gets replaced with information.
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Type 6, my loyalists out there.
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Everyone knows the six as loyal, prepared, always anticipating what could go wrong.
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The secret pattern is that the anxiety has become load-bearing.
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Stillness feels more dangerous than the threat itself, because without the vigilance, the question becomes who am I if I'm not the one keeping watch?
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The worry isn't the problem.
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For a six, the worry is the solution.
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Type seven, I know this one well.
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Everyone knows the seven is joyful, visionary, innovative, always moving forward.
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The next expansive thing is the thing.
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Never commits, so you can never be rejected.
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The secret pattern is that the innovation and the distraction run on the exact same engine.
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They feel identical from the inside.
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The seventh genius is their most convincing camouflage.
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I know it because it's mine.
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Type 8.
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Everyone knows the eight as powerful, confrontational, in control.
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They are the reformers.
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The secret pattern is that the fighting is a stand-in for being held.
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Tenderness feels like exposure, and exposure has always felt like danger.
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It's easier to go to war than ask to be seen.
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Type 9.
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Everyone knows the nine as harmonious, easygoing, a keeper of peace.
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The secret pattern is that the merging into other people's worlds, their dreams, their needs, their priorities, is how the nine avoids the most terrifying question of all.
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What do I actually want?
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Other people's lives are simply safer to live in than their own.
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So what do we actually do about this?
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Because awareness alone, as clarifying as it is to finally name something, doesn't automatically change the pattern.
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The pattern has been running a long time.
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It knows your nervous system, it knows exactly which frequency to transmit, so you'll receive it as truth.
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And here's the invitation.
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Next time something feels like flow, before following it, just pause, one breath, one question.
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Does this make my life more simple or more complicated?
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Not eventually, not in theory, but right now, in this moment.
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Does following this make things cleaner or more fragmented?
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You don't have to override the feeling.
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You don't have to stop trusting yourself.
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This is just one layer of discernment between the feeling and the action.
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One question that your analytical and intuitive mind can answer together instead of one drowning out the other.
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Because here's the both and that changed everything for me.
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And this is the thing I wish someone had said to me years earlier.
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Intuition and analysis are not opposites.
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They are not even competitors.
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They are meant to be running simultaneously, in conversation with each other, each one checking and enriching the other.
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The magic lives in the integration, not in choosing a side.
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When intuition runs without my analytical mind, I nearly lost my business.
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I stay in relationships that cost me everything, and I sit at a microphone for hours doing anything except recording the episode.
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When my analytical mind runs without my intuition, the magic dies.
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The work becomes mechanical, the aliveness drains out of everything that I've felt, and I lose complete interest.
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The goal isn't to fix one or strengthen the other.
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The goal is to get them in the room together.
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If this is landing somewhere in your body right now, if you can feel your own version of this pattern starting to shake up, a soma rewire session is there for you.
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We'll find where the pattern lives in your nervous system and begin building a new response from the inside out.
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The link is in the show notes if you're curious.
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So back to the microphone.
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I still feel the pattern knock every single time I sit down to record, every time.
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In fact, when I went to go sit down and record this episode, I had to say, how many times did you rewrite it?
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How many times did you get distracted and write something else?
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How many times did you get up, go pay a bill, make more coffee, call a client, and do anything but just simply hit record.
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I don't even want to tell you the number.
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It's slightly embarrassing.
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The pull toward reading my email or starting to like write another course, or I don't know, log into the one that I forgot about.
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The file that doesn't need reorganizing, the sense that something else is more alive right now, more compelling, the feeling, convincing as ever, that following it would be the intuitive thing to do.
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And now I ask the question: does this make my life more simple or more complicated?
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And I already know the answer.
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I've always known the answer.
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Recording this episode, speaking into this void, trusting that the right person is somewhere on the other side of it, is the simplest thing available to me at this moment.
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One episode, one story, one thread.
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I've been following long enough to finally be able to hand to you.
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The distraction is always more complicated.
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It multiplies, it fragments, it feels like flow right up until the moment it doesn't.
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Real intuition brought me back to this microphone.
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Real intuition is what you're listening to right now.
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And if you've ever sat in front of your own version of a blinking cursor full of something we're saying, doing everything except saying it.
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Maybe the question isn't whether you're ready.
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Maybe the question is just does this make my life more simple or more complicated?
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You probably already know the answer.
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Trust that.