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The 95% pattern.

I don’t think I’m the only one who has lived this and once I saw it in myself, I started seeing it everywhere.

Here’s what it looked like for me.

I’d find something - a course, a program, a coach. I’d feel the pull of it. The hope of it. I’d invest money, time, energy and I’d start.

I’d show up. I’d do the work. I’d get close, and then somewhere around the 95% mark…

I’d stop.

Not dramatically. Not with a big decision. Gradually. The momentum would slow and then I would disappear. These days, you’d probably call it quiet quitting!

Then the meaning making would begin.

You didn’t finish. You never finish. This is proof.

Proof of what exactly?

• That I wasn’t good enough.

• That I couldn’t follow through.

• That I was someone who started things but never completed them.

Each incomplete thing added another brick to the wall, another reason to stay where I was and another reason not to try.

What I didn’t realise at the time was that the pattern wasn’t failure.

It was protection, because finishing was terrifying, because if I finished, if I completed the thing, got the qualification, did everything right and it still didn’t work…

Then what?

Then I’d have no excuse left. Then I’d have to face the real fear underneath all of it.

That maybe I just wasn’t capable of more.

Stopping at 95% protected me from that.

If I didn’t finish, I could always tell myself - well, I didn’t really give it a proper go.

Incompletion became a hiding place. Not a conscious one.

I didn’t know I was doing it, but the pattern was there, running underneath everything and it kept me stuck far longer than any external circumstance ever could have.

The prison wasn’t the job. The prison was the belief that finishing and still failing would be unsurvivable.

So I stayed in the in-between. Almost but not quite. Close but not there. Trying but not finishing.

Until I couldn’t anymore.

I’m curious - Where does this live for you?

• Is there something you’ve started and quietly abandoned just before the finish line?

• More than once?

• And if you’re honest - what were you afraid would happen if you actually completed it?

Not the practical answer. The real one.

Before you do anything with that question, just pause for a moment.

If a woman you loved came to you and said:

“I keep starting things and never finishing them. I’ve done it my whole life. I think it means I’m just not capable.”

What would you say to her?

• Would you use it as evidence against her?

• Or would you get curious about what she’s been carrying?

The answer you’d give her - that’s the one you deserve too.

A gentle place to start:

This week, think of one thing you started and stopped, whether it’s 10% or 95%.

Just one.

And instead of using it as evidence against yourself, ask a different question:

• What was I protecting myself from by not finishing?

You don’t have to have the answer immediately. Just sit with the question.

The pattern only has power when it stays invisible. Seeing it is enough to begin loosening its grip.

It was a little girl who still needed someone to hold her hand and a woman who’d never learned that she was allowed to ask.

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A few years ago my body stopped me completely. I couldn’t get out of bed. I couldn’t function. At the time I called it burnout and it was. But it was also something else. Something that would come to define a good chunk of my life and show up for years to come.

When I look back at that time, I don’t think about the diagnosis first. I think about the silence, the strange, uncomfortable silence of a life that had suddenly gone very still. Who was I without meetings, school drop off’s or pick ups, not sitting at the dinner table, not being able to play with the kids?

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