Listening Past the Plan
This is not a story about skipping a workout – it is a story about reclaiming authority over your own life. With warmth, humor, and honesty, the piece turns a “failed” training plan into a powerful reflection on perfectionism, self-trust, and listening to the body. It reminds us that discipline is not always about pushing harder; sometimes, the real victory is knowing when to pause, adapt, and choose compassion over autopilot.
7/27/20263 min read
We all carry an entire council of internal voices. As a coach, I name them according to their roles: I have my Inner Leader, my Appreciator, and many other Allies. And then, of course, there is my Saboteur – the spokesperson of my amygdala, standing in the shadows with a megaphone in hand, trying to protect me from any perceived danger or change. They all have their purpose, but our lifelong task is learning which one to actually listen to.
For most of my life, one of the loudest voices at the table has been my Perfectionist. She always wants more, better, faster, and – above all – strictly according to the plan.
For the last few years, I’ve been on a deliberate journey to listen to a different voice: my body. Historically, I treated my physical strength and endurance as a given. I simply took advantage of my body, driving it forward until something cracked.
That detachment wasn't an accident. Like many, I grew up under rules where showing emotion was forbidden, sometimes even punished. My performance was never quite enough because "100+% was the absolute minimum." Reaching that threshold wasn't cause for celebration or even a simple compliment; it was just the baseline expectation. Luckily, I was born with an extra dose of stubbornness and endurance. It helped me survive my childhood, but it made it extraordinarily difficult to hear my body when it started whispering that it needed rest, food, water, or sleep.
Re-establishing a broken line of communication takes time. But thanks to that same stubbornness – which I now use to refuse to give up on myself – I’ve finally started hearing what my body is saying over the last few months. I still have moments where I am completely deaf to it, but today was a victory.
My Perfectionist training plan – which uses "challenging" as its primary coaching technique – wanted me to run a 15-minute threshold interval during my lunch break. Threshold is the most demanding training type for me.
On top of a full-time engineering job, managing my coaching practice, and navigating a stressful meeting right before noon, my entire apartment is currently upside down because I am moving in a week. I am emotionally and psychologically exhausted, and the physical toll of packing and managing the move is real. Even though running is usually my anchor in times of uncertainty, as I started changing into my running gear, I felt horrible.
My mind exploded into a chaos of overlapping voices:
"That’s the plan." "You can do it." "You’ll find motivation in the first 300 meters." "But what if I don't?" "I just can't." "Are you really that weak?" "You should be packing boxes instead." "This is your last chance to run before the move..."
Instead of forcing myself out the door, I paused. I took off my running gear, changed back into my normal clothes, and decided to walk to the grocery store instead. It wasn't the planned threshold workout, but it was movement, fresh air, and a gentle step forward. That walk gave me the space I needed. After lunch and a coffee, my energy settled, I got some work done, and later in the afternoon, I decided to give the run a second attempt. This time, I set a firm boundary with myself: I would do the training, but I would choose the pace based on how I actually felt. I didn't care if Garmin – the ultimate Gordon Ramsay of fitness apps – was satisfied or not. (Side note: Garmin doesn't like overachievers either. Unlike my parents, it gets disappointed if you do better than its calculated plan. But that's a story for another day.)
I started carefully. I listened to my legs and my lungs, slowly picking up speed until I reached the target pace for the final third of the interval. When I finished, Garmin gave me a performance score of 17%, colored with red, and written “Low” to reinforce.
I just laughed.
Sometimes I enjoy chasing scores above 90%, but today, that 17% felt like a triumph. I replanned my own plan, adjusted Garmin's rigid expectations to match my real-world circumstances, and honors what my physical self actually needed.
Could I have pushed through at midday? Maybe. It might have gone fine. It might have helped me feel back on track. But in the practice of deep listening, there is no control group. You can't run a parallel experiment to see if the other path would have been better. All we can do is trust the present moment, act with self-compassion, and reflect on the outcome. Today, I don't know how the alternative path would have felt, but I know that right now, I am happy, healthy, and completely at peace.
When your internal Perfectionist demands that you stick to the plan at all costs, what is your body quietly trying to tell you underneath the noise? What would happen if you trusted its voice today?