Most of us have had the experience of really wanting to take better care of ourselves, and then watching it not quite take flight. We can think of this as a False Start. But what if the problem is about the set-up and what can be overlooked?
Come explore why starting is harder than it looks. Through two client stories and an honest look at what getting started actually requires, you’ll come away with a different understanding of what a False Start is telling you.
Plus: a free guide to help you build the foundation before you begin.
What you’ll learn:
- Why false starts are not a sign of failure, and what they’re actually telling you
- The internal forces that make starting harder than it looks
- How understanding the complexity of starting can change everything about how you begin
Resources Mentioned:
SHOW NOTES
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🌱Â Â Â Herbalism practice
👥Â Â Therapy practice
Full Transcript:
Welcome in From Out of the Rain, I’m Quai and this is In Your Hands. Herbal Self-Care for Emotional Bodies, a podcast about the complexities of building your own wellness blueprint. I’m a psychotherapist and herbalist who brings a critical lens to the systems that both help and harm. I’ll hold that tension with you as we explore plant remedies, trauma work, nervous system support, and building self-care foundations.
And now for that awkward. Disclaimer, I’ve gotta give you. This shows for educational purposes only and is not a replacement for therapy or personalized herbal care. The herbal remedies and practices discussed are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Please consult your healthcare provider for medical advice.
Now, let’s begin.
 I cannot tell you how many times I’ve been in the flow of something that’s, like, good for taking care of myself, whether that is moving my body in the way that feels right or avoiding foods that don’t feel good for me. As I’m doing these things, I’m like, “This is so great. I’m gonna be doing this forevermore.
I’m gonna stick with it.” And then something happens and, you know, I fall out of it. It always reminds me when that happens, when I’m trying to get back to it, that starting is really hard. Starting anything, um, or reigniting anything where we have to do something to take care of ourselves is hard. It’s, it’s more complicated than it often sounds.
I see this in my work, too, sitting with people around very specific pieces of self-care that they want to start. It’s… It can seem like, okay, I’m gonna take on this thing and I’m just gonna do it, but then when you go to do it, it’s not that easy. I’ve also been having conversations with different people who are listening to the podcast and giving me some feedback, and this is one of the things that I’m hearing, is that, like, getting started with this stuff is not easy.
Let’s get into the why of that right now. Okay. There are things happening internally when you try to start. Competing voices, real concerns, parts of you that have good reasons for hesitating that we often overlook. And then there are external realities that might be structural, but also might just be practicalities about things that are gonna make certain aspects of starting either challenging or maybe easier if they’re configured in certain ways.
And we often don’t think about that. And until you actually look at those things honestly, you’re setting yourself up from the start for a shaky foundation.
Beginnings matter. Beginnings are where we can actually build a foundation. Otherwise, we have false starts when we’re trying to initiate something.
Sometimes we can see them as bloopers, part of being human. But sometimes they feel like failure, like discouragement, like evidence of something wrong with us. But what if there’s another way to understand them? It’s not laziness. It’s not a lack of discipline. It’s something that is more specific than that that tends to get in the way, and a lot of times this is overlooked.
What if we understand them as human and as information?
The false start tells us we need something more So with this in mind, and with permission from a few clients, it makes me think about people I’ve worked with w- in my herbalism practice, and I wanna tell you more about what this looks like when we don’t have that something more.
I wanna start off with thinking about a few folks that I worked with who were trying to quit smoking, and I think about that example because it brings up something important that I think a lot of us can relate to, which is that there can be a sense of urgency. In this case, it has been about health. And we can mistake our sense of urgency for our readiness.
And not to say that we shouldn’t move on something when it is really important to move on it, but there’s still something to build in there. That urgency kind of fills us with this sense of like, “I am definitely gonna do this. This is so important.” And sometimes that is, uh, enough to push somebody into something, and oftentimes it doesn’t work.
Something gets skipped over. There’s a foundation that needs to be built. And what I’ve noticed is that I work with someone, they talk about doing that, and then we have our next time that we’re gonna meet, and it’s like, “Oh, I d- like, I tried. I, like, you know, went through this a half day where I didn’t and I, I didn’t have my morning cigarette, and then I just, you know, by the end of that day I, I did,” and there’s such shame.
Um, and I am thinking about somebody in particular, and I asked them a lot of questions about their relationship to smoking, and so many more things came to light about this. And we really needed to go through a process of, um, building some more foundation. I also think about another person I worked with who wanted to become more present in her life, and she was listening to a lot of podcasts.