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Send us Fan Mail The Failure Pattern: When Your Greatest Gift Becomes the Pattern There's a pattern that almost nobody talks about in the personal growth space — not because it's hidden, but because it's nearly impossible to see from the inside. Your biggest failure pattern won't feel like a failure pattern. It will feel like your greatest gift. In this episode, Tabitha shares the three areas of her own life where the same unconscious program quietly ran the show — her business, a relationshi...
The Failure Pattern: When Your Greatest Gift Becomes the Pattern
There's a pattern that almost nobody talks about in the personal growth space — not because it's hidden, but because it's nearly impossible to see from the inside.
Your biggest failure pattern won't feel like a failure pattern. It will feel like your greatest gift.
In this episode, Tabitha shares the three areas of her own life where the same unconscious program quietly ran the show — her business, a relationship, and right here at this microphone — and why it took her so long to catch it. Because it didn't feel like self-sabotage. It felt like flow.
She also breaks down the secret failure pattern hiding inside each Enneagram type — not the obvious one, but the one that sounds exactly like your gift.
In this episode:
The one question from this episode worth writing down: Does this make my life more simple, or more complicated?
Resources mentioned:
This is Soma Rising: Conversations for a Conscious Future —where health, wealth, love, and purpose flow together on the Golden Path of alignment. Learn more at somatribe.org
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If this episode touched your heart, please share it with someone you love and help awaken others to the Golden Path.
Website: soma-massage.net
Instagram: @somawellness.center or @tabitharmacdonald
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YouTube: @tabitharmacdonald
✨ Ready to take this work deeper?
If today’s episode spoke to your soul and you’re ready to rise into a life aligned with your truth, I’d love to invite you into Soma Tribe—my signature transformational journey for people who are done playing small and ready to reclaim their power, purpose, and intuitive knowing.
✨ Learn more and sign up online.
Tabitha MacDonald is an Intuitive Coach and Bodyworker committed to helping people overcome pain fast so they can experience the love, success, freedom, and fulfillment they deserve.
Additional Resources:
Soma Rising: Conversations for a Conscious Future
Welcome to Soma Rising, the podcast where science meets spirit and healing becomes the art of alignment.
Join Tabitha MacDonald, intuitive coach, bodyworker, and transformation expert, as we explore the path of the heart — the Golden Path — where health, wealth, love, and purpose flow together as one radiant field of creation.
Each episode invites you to release the ego’s grip and rise into the luminous potential of your soul — where love feels safe, intuition leads, freedom is your birthright, and peace is natural.
Through powerful conversations, personal stories, and Superconscious insights, we bridge the worlds of neuroscience, intuition, and energy healing to help you align your body, mind, and soul with your Higher Self.
Whether you’re healing from the past, awakening to your purpose, or learning to live intuitively, Soma Rising is your guide to embodied freedom and conscious evolution.
Because you are love.
You are the healer.
You are the miracle you’ve been waiting for.
✨ The future is the Golden Path — and it begins within you.
💖 #SomaRising #GoldenPath #Healing #Consciousness #Intuition #SelfDiscovery #SoulAlignment #Podcast
SPEAKER_00: I remember sitting
down to record, microphone in
front of me, headphones on, a
blinking cursor on a blink
document.
And within about four minutes, I
was literally doing anything
else.
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.
All of it felt completely
justified.
All of it felt urgent.
All of it felt like I it needed
to happen right now, in this
exact moment, before I could
possibly speak into this
microphone.
Hours would pass.
Weeks even.
The episode wouldn't get
recorded.
And here's what I couldn't see
for the longest time.
It didn't feel like avoidance.
It felt like flow.
It felt like following what was
alive in me in that moment.
It felt, if I'm being honest
with you, exactly like
intuition.
I didn't know then what I know
now was not intuition.
That was the pattern wearing
intuition's face.
Here's something I've noticed.
Sitting with my own life and
sitting with the people I work
with, that almost nobody names
directly in the healing space.
Your biggest failure pattern
will almost never feel like a
failure pattern.
It will feel like your greatest
gift.
It will have the same texture,
the same energy, the same sense
of rightness and aliveness and
flow.
And that's exactly what makes it
so difficult to catch.
Because you're not looking for
something that feels bad or
wrong or unlike you.
You're looking for something
that feels like the most
authentic version of you.
And when that pattern sounds
like your own voice, that's when
it can quietly take everything.
I want to tell you about two
other times this same pattern
moved through my life wearing
different clothes.
The first was my business.
There was a period where I
stopped vetting the people I was
bringing into my world.
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.
I knew how to do this.
I taught it to hundreds of
students looking for jobs.
And then I stopped doing it for
my own business entirely.
Because my intuition was
expanding in ways that felt
extraordinary, genuinely
beautifully expansive.
And somewhere along the way, I
decided that if someone came
into my world, they must be
meant to be there.
That analysis was somehow less
evolved than pure intuitive
knowing.
That the universe was curating
my team, and my only job was to
say yes to whoever flowed into
my life.
I brought in people who weren't
right.
I ignored red flags.
My analytical brain was waving
with both hands.
I called it trust.
I called it flow.
I called it spiritual
discernment.
What it actually was was my
intuitive brain running
completely unchecked, with no
analytical brain alongside it as
a partner.
And without that check and
balance, things started to
fracture.
Difficult clients I had no
framework for holding,
practitioners who weren't
delivering, projects that never
got completed.
My body was in a low-grade state
of fear and chaos almost all of
the time.
Constant indecision, never
knowing what to finish, the
feeling of running hard in every
direction and getting nowhere.
Do you know that feeling?
It almost feels like you're
running on a hamster wheel, but
someone has like a strap tight
around you.
So you're not only running in a
circle, but you're also having a
bunch of resistance.
That was me.
My greatest gift had become the
weapon, the pattern used against
me.
The second time was in my love
life, not you know, not a
surprise.
I was with someone who was
completely wrong for me.
Story of my life.
My analytical brain registered
it almost immediately.
The evidence was everywhere,
quiet and persistent and often
loud.
But what I believed was my
intuition kept saying yes.
It felt exciting, open, joyful,
expansive.
Isn't that what we're supposed
to follow when we're in flow?
Full of a particular aliveness
that I have always associated
with being on the right path.
It was also emotionally
unhinged.
It was spectacularly distracting
from my work, from my finances,
from the things that genuinely
needed my attention.
And I stayed because it felt
like flow.
Here's what I eventually
understood about the
relationship and about my
business and about that blinking
cursor on an empty document.
Distraction, disguised as
intuition, feels exactly like
intuition.
Same warmth, same expansiveness,
same sense of being guided
towards something.
The feeling is not the
difference.
The difference is what it does
to the architecture of your life
when you follow it.
Real intuition makes your life
more simple, the pattern makes
your life more complicated.
That's it.
That's the whole distinction.
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.
Every time I followed the
pattern in the business, in the
relationship at the microphone,
things got more complicated,
more chaotic.
More of my energy going to more
places with less and less to
show for it.
Real intuition says this, not
that.
And when you follow it,
something in your life gets
cleaner, clearer, easier.
Now here's where it gets even
more interesting, because this
isn't just a me thing, this is a
human thing.
And it shows up differently
depending on the particular
genius you came in with.
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.
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.
It's the one that sounds exactly
like their gift.
Enneagram type one, the
perfectionist, everyone knows
the one as the perfectionist.
The secret pattern is that the
perfectionism isn't really about
standards.
It's a cage built around rage.
If everything is controlled and
correct, the anger never has to
surface.
Enneagram type two, everyone
knows the two as generous,
giving, always there.
It's the helper.
The secret pattern is that the
helping is a preemptive strike
against the terror of being
unlovable.
If I need nothing and give
everything, you can never leave.
Enneagram type three, everyone
knows the three is driven and
successful.
This is the achiever.
The secret pattern is that the
achievement is a costume worn
over an empty room.
They've performed for so long,
they've lost the thread back to
who they are, actually are,
underneath the applause.
Type fours, everyone knows the
four is deep, emotional,
beautifully unique.
The secret pattern is that the
identity itself becomes the
avoidance.
If I am different enough, I
never have to face the quiet
terror of being ordinary or of
simply belonging somewhere.
Type 5.
Everyone knows the five as the
knowledgeable, private, the
investigator.
The secret pattern is that the
knowledge is emote.
The more they understand, the
less anyone can get close enough
to overwhelm them.
Intimacy gets replaced with
information.
Type 6, my loyalists out there.
Everyone knows the six as loyal,
prepared, always anticipating
what could go wrong.
The secret pattern is that the
anxiety has become load-bearing.
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?
The worry isn't the problem.
For a six, the worry is the
solution.
Type seven, I know this one
well.
Everyone knows the seven is
joyful, visionary, innovative,
always moving forward.
The next expansive thing is the
thing.
Never commits, so you can never
be rejected.
The secret pattern is that the
innovation and the distraction
run on the exact same engine.
They feel identical from the
inside.
The seventh genius is their most
convincing camouflage.
I know it because it's mine.
Type 8.
Everyone knows the eight as
powerful, confrontational, in
control.
They are the reformers.
The secret pattern is that the
fighting is a stand-in for being
held.
Tenderness feels like exposure,
and exposure has always felt
like danger.
It's easier to go to war than
ask to be seen.
Type 9.
Everyone knows the nine as
harmonious, easygoing, a keeper
of peace.
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.
What do I actually want?
Other people's lives are simply
safer to live in than their own.
So what do we actually do about
this?
Because awareness alone, as
clarifying as it is to finally
name something, doesn't
automatically change the
pattern.
The pattern has been running a
long time.
It knows your nervous system, it
knows exactly which frequency to
transmit, so you'll receive it
as truth.
And here's the invitation.
Next time something feels like
flow, before following it, just
pause, one breath, one question.
Does this make my life more
simple or more complicated?
Not eventually, not in theory,
but right now, in this moment.
Does following this make things
cleaner or more fragmented?
You don't have to override the
feeling.
You don't have to stop trusting
yourself.
This is just one layer of
discernment between the feeling
and the action.
One question that your
analytical and intuitive mind
can answer together instead of
one drowning out the other.
Because here's the both and that
changed everything for me.
And this is the thing I wish
someone had said to me years
earlier.
Intuition and analysis are not
opposites.
They are not even competitors.
They are meant to be running
simultaneously, in conversation
with each other, each one
checking and enriching the
other.
The magic lives in the
integration, not in choosing a
side.
When intuition runs without my
analytical mind, I nearly lost
my business.
I stay in relationships that
cost me everything, and I sit at
a microphone for hours doing
anything except recording the
episode.
When my analytical mind runs
without my intuition, the magic
dies.
The work becomes mechanical, the
aliveness drains out of
everything that I've felt, and I
lose complete interest.
The goal isn't to fix one or
strengthen the other.
The goal is to get them in the
room together.
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.
We'll find where the pattern
lives in your nervous system and
begin building a new response
from the inside out.
The link is in the show notes if
you're curious.
So back to the microphone.
I still feel the pattern knock
every single time I sit down to
record, every time.
In fact, when I went to go sit
down and record this episode, I
had to say, how many times did
you rewrite it?
How many times did you get
distracted and write something
else?
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.
I don't even want to tell you
the number.
It's slightly embarrassing.
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.
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.
And now I ask the question: does
this make my life more simple or
more complicated?
And I already know the answer.
I've always known the answer.
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.
One episode, one story, one
thread.
I've been following long enough
to finally be able to hand to
you.
The distraction is always more
complicated.
It multiplies, it fragments, it
feels like flow right up until
the moment it doesn't.
Real intuition brought me back
to this microphone.
Real intuition is what you're
listening to right now.
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.
Maybe the question isn't whether
you're ready.
Maybe the question is just does
this make my life more simple or
more complicated?
You probably already know the
answer.
Trust that.