Course Corrections Aren’t Failures
Declaration of Intendependence™, Part 5: Course Corrections Aren’t Failures
Series hub:https://no2thequo.com/declaration-of-intendependence/
In case you missed it: Part 4: Be Tenacious
People want a checklist. Life gives you a theme.
People love a formula for this.
A checklist.
A spreadsheet.
A flowchart.
If these three things happen, pivot.
If these five things happen, push through.
Sometimes that works.
And sometimes there is no evidence.
No dramatic blow-up.
No final straw.
No big scene.
Just a feeling in your gut, head, heart, spirit, soul that says:
Something needs to change.
And that’s confusing.
It’s confusing because somewhere along the way, most of us stopped listening to ourselves.
We got trained to look outside for the answers.
Social media.
Other people.
The internet.
The “safe” choice.
The voice that sounds confident, even when it’s wrong.
That doesn’t mean you ignore the outside.
It means you stop letting the outside drown out your inside.
This might get a little woo. Stay with me.
You might call it the universe. life. mother nature. coincidence.
I call it God.
Either way, this is what I’ve learned:
Whatever you call it leaves hints.
I call them themes.
A theme is when the same message shows up in different forms.
Not once.
Repeatedly.
And if you are paying attention, you start to notice how life works.
Looking.
Listening.
Feeling.
Life will tap you first.
Then it will tap you again.
Then it will start knocking.
And if you keep ignoring it, eventually it will get louder.
Not because it’s mean.
Because it’s trying to save you from waking up ten years from now going:
Wait… how did I end up here?
Is this a theme… or did you just have a bad Tuesday?
Let’s use work as an example because most people live half their life there.
You’re in a job you no longer feel good about.
Is that a real feeling?
Absolutely.
But here’s the test.
If that feeling only shows up when something specific happens, you might be reacting to a circumstance.
Bad meeting.
Bad boss moment.
Bad day.
That’s not nothing.
But it’s not a theme yet.
A theme shows up when nothing big happened and the feeling still arrives.
You get home after a normal day and think:
I really don’t want to go back tomorrow.
That’s your inner voice trying to tell you something.
Then you look for other tellings.
Your spouse says later that night:
Honey, you don’t seem happy when you come home.
Then you scroll and see a job posting and you think:
I would be good at that. That would be fun.
Now you’re not dealing with one moment.
You’re seeing a theme.
And themes don’t always build in a day.
Sometimes they build over hours.
Days.
Weeks.
Months.
But once you see it, you can’t un-see it.
How to spot a theme without going full crystal ball
Here’s a grounded way to use themes without floating off into fantasy land.
Ask three questions:
- Is this showing up more than once?
- Is it showing up in more than one way?
- Is it getting louder over time?
If the answer is yes, yes, yes, that’s not random.
That’s information.
Example 1: Leaving the church was not a logical checklist decision
People love to assume we left the church because of one thing.
One event.
One conflict.
One moment.
Nope.
It was a theme.
A long one.
It was the feeling that we were doing what we were supposed to do while something inside kept whispering:
This is not it anymore.
And the theme showed up in layers.
In exhaustion.
In joy fading.
In the way our bodies reacted before our mouths admitted anything.
In the quiet question that would not go away.
There wasn’t a single day where a billboard appeared in the sky that said:
Congratulations. You now have enough evidence to make a change.
It was more like:
We stopped being able to pretend.
And once we admitted it, it got clear.
We are not doing this anymore.
That decision was a course correction.
Not a failure.
The failure would have been staying because it was familiar and looked good on the outside.
Tenacity protects the intention. Not your ego.
People hear “be tenacious” and picture someone clinging to a plan with white knuckles.
Refusing to quit.
Forcing it to work.
Grinding until the dream matches the vision board.
That is not tenacity.
That is stubbornness with a hashtag.
Real tenacity is protecting the intention while letting the method evolve.
Course corrections are what that looks like in real life.
Because the goal isn’t to worship a plan.
The goal is to build a life you love and the work that makes it possible.
Example 2: Work pivots, or “the method kept morphing”
After we left the church, our intention got simple.
Design a life we love.
Build the work that makes it possible.
But the method?
That thing has shape-shifted more times than we can count.
During our two-year preparation season, we moved our coaching clients to Zoom.
Not because we predicted a pandemic.
Because it made sense for the life we were building.
We were already on Zoom with our clients before anyone knew the word “lockdown.”
And then the pandemic hit.
Here’s what most people assume happened.
They assume the pandemic forced us online.
Nope.
We were already online.
It was like God had already set the table before we knew we were coming to dinner.
(You might call it the universe, life, coincidence, or whatever. I call it God.)
So when the world shut down, we didn’t miss a beat with existing clients.
Our Life Design coaching stayed steady for a while.
The hit came from the part we couldn’t control.
Career coaching took a punch because nobody was hiring or looking.
When the job market freezes, ‘let’s build the work’ becomes a harder sell.
So we did what you do when the bills do not pause for a global event.
We took out a pandemic relief loan.
Not because we wanted to.
Because rent does not care about your intention.
And then we kept course correcting.
Sometimes that looked like doubling down on clients we already had.
Sometimes that looked like taking whatever work was available.
Matt turned on the Uber Eats app.
There is no inspirational way to frame delivering Taco Bell to keep the dream alive.
So we won’t try.
It was not glamorous.
Not a résumé moment.
Just real.
And you know what?
It worked.
It kept the lights on.
It kept us moving.
It protected the intention while the method morphed.
Then Linda landed the remote job.
Stable income. Flexibility to travel. Exactly what we needed when we needed it.
And the speaking and corporate teaching piece?
That came later.
We didn’t even consider stages and corporate training until after the pandemic.
When the world started moving again, that door opened and we walked through it.
Same intention.
New method.
That whole stretch was one long course correction.
Not failure.
Navigation.
Hell yeah. We’re doing that.
So when do you pivot and when do you push?
Here’s the deal.
Sometimes life gives you data.
Sometimes life gives you a vibe.
Sometimes life gives you a two-by-four.
Most of us miss the vibe because we are trained to ignore ourselves until we are miserable enough to call it evidence.
So here’s a better way to think about it.
If the theme is telling you this isn’t yours anymore, pivot.
Not because you failed.
Because you grew.
Because you got honest.
Because you stopped trying to live a life that looks good on the outside and feels dead on the inside.
If the theme is telling you the intention is still yours but the method is wrong, course correct.
Same destination. Different route. Detour allowed.
If the theme is telling you you’re just scared, push through.
Not reckless. Not dramatic. Just the next plank.
And here’s the part we wish someone had told us earlier:
You don’t need a burning building to leave a job.
You don’t need a midlife crisis to make a change.
You don’t need permission to listen to yourself.
You just need to stop drowning out the inner voice with outside noise long enough to hear what it’s been saying the whole time.
Then you do the most unsexy thing on earth.
You move.
One decision.
One adjustment.
One “I’m not ignoring that anymore” moment at a time.
What this actually means
Course corrections aren’t failures.
They’re navigation.
They’re proof you’re not living by default anymore.
You’re steering.
And steering looks like this:
Looking.
Listening.
Feeling.
Verifying.
Then choosing.
Helmets optional. Detours allowed. Autopilot disengaged.
With love and laughter,
Matt & Linda
No 2 The Quo
Up Next – Part 6: Proof You’re Not Living by Default Anymore
10 Signs Intentional Living is Working
What life looks like on the other side, and how to know it worked.
Before We Had the Framework, We Had the Stories
We didn’t start No 2 The Quo with a tidy little life design model and a color-coded spreadsheet.
Shocking, I know.
We started with a few lived decisions. Big ones. Messy ones. The kind where you say, “This is probably fine,” while quietly wondering if you have lost your entire mind.
These three stories explain how we got here before we had the words Declaration of Intendependence™ to describe what we were doing.
These are the origin stories behind No 2 The Quo.
👉 Why We Said No 2 The Quo After the Kids Left Home
👉 It Took Two Years to “Suddenly” Change Our Lives
👉 Yes, We Really Did Pack Our Whole Life Into a Car and Leave
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