115 Blind Spots, Failures & The Blessing of *NOT* Getting What You *WANT*

In this episode of Pretty Is As Pretty Does, Sami shares an unexpected lesson she learned while hanging mirrors in her condo—and how it revealed something much bigger about life, failure, and perspective.

Standing inches from the wall, she became convinced the mirrors weren’t aligned. She questioned the level, adjusted the screws, and trusted what she could see up close… until she stepped back and realized everything had been perfectly straight all along.

That moment sparked a conversation about blind spots.

Through stories of failing a Walmart assessment at 18, delaying her nursing school graduation because of missed paperwork, navigating years of frustration in her health journey, and ultimately finding freedom through coaching and understanding nutrition, Sami explores how often we mistake proximity for truth.

What if failure isn’t failure?

What if embarrassment isn’t evidence?

What if not getting what you wanted became the greatest redirection of your life?

This episode is for anyone who feels behind, discouraged, embarrassed, or tempted to make one hard moment mean something permanent about who they are.

Inside this conversation:
• Why being too close can distort your perspective
• The danger of making moments your identity
• How failure can expose blind spots instead of proving inadequacy
• Why not getting what you want may be the greatest gift
• How to zoom out and trust the bigger picture

Sometimes your life isn’t crooked.

Sometimes you’re just standing too close to see the alignment.

If today’s episode spoke to you, imagine what could happen if you had daily support, accountability and an entire sisterhood doing this with you. Our Pretty Consistent Membership is now hosted inside our brand new Skool community, and it is truly the most elevated space we’ve ever had.

If you’re ready to feel pretty again by treating yourself pretty, building consistency and creating a life that feels good in your body, come join us. This is BFF-style accountability, micro choices, and momentum all in one place.

Join the Pretty Consistent Membership on Skool!  Click the link to the left!

& if you haven’t yet, subscribe to Pretty Is as Pretty Does, leave a review, and share this episode with a friend who’s ready to grow with you. 💖✨

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Hello, pretty. Welcome back to another episode of Pretty Is as Pretty Does Podcast. I am so excited for today because we're gonna talk about blind spots, failures, and the blessing of not getting what you want. I'm excited for today's episode, and I wanna ask you: have you ever stood so close to something that you couldn't see it clearly? I am wanna share a story with you. Actually, a few stories about failure and about blind spots because I think they're so important and they're huge takeaways that you can start implementing into your life so that you can start living a very fulfilled life. You're gonna stop thinking about failure as a failure after today's episode. So I told you last week that I bought a new condo. I have been decorating this thing, has stressed me out to the core that I took eight weeks off the gym to reset my nervous system. But you know what? When I took a step back and looked at how incredible my life is, and I was able to romanticize my life again, things have started clicking, and it feels so good to take that step back. But I'm not even kidding when I tell you I have been on an interior decoration journey so far, and I've only been in my spot for a couple months, but I was hanging these mirrors on a very tight wall, and I'm on my ladder, and I have three mirrors, three screws in this level, and I am just so convinced when I am on this ladder. I'm like, there's no way this is level. Like I have I have the laser pointer thing, and it's like beaming across the wall and into the room, and I'm like, there's no way that this is not level, and I'm sitting here arguing with the wall on this level. I was just so convinced, like, this isn't straight. And I moved things, I adjusted things, I questioned it, and then I climbed down. I climbed down off the ladder, and almost immediately I just started laughing at myself because everything aligned. The level was not wrong, but I was too close. And then I realized like this is exactly what we do with failure. Sometimes we're so close and we're so desperate for the things that we want in life, and because of that, we don't take a step back and take the bird's eye view to understand really what's happening. So I want to share this story with you, and I honestly, every time that someone feels like a failure, I love telling this story because it's just it's just really good. I don't know another way to say that. So I was 18 years old and I needed a job. One of my girlfriends at the time, she had me connected at Walmart, and she calls me the next morning. She's like, hey, fill out this application, fill out you're gonna have to do this test. And I'm like, cool. I do all the things. And the next morning she calls me and she goes, Sammy, you you failed the Walmart assessment, you failed the test. And I am like, wait, what? I felt so humiliated because Walmart guys, we're talking like I failed a Walmart test, okay? And I just think that this is so freaking funny to me because I also felt like I wasn't smart enough to become a nurse at one point. At 18 years old, we're driving by, I'm in a car full of friends, we drive by the community college, and someone says, Oh, I'm going to nursing school. And I literally said out loud, I am not smart enough for that. So that happens at 18. At 19, I failed the Walmart assessment exam. And you know, it's just a blessing not getting what you want. But imagine if I had gotten everything. Like I passed the Walmart exam. Like maybe I climbed the ladder at Walmart, maybe I became management, and maybe I never became a nurse. Because I know myself, like I like to be one of the hardest working people, if not the hardest working person in the room. But if I never became a nurse, like imagine. I would have done well at Walmart, and that's the scary part because success is not proof that you're in the right place. Thank God I didn't get what I want. The reason I failed the exam, she goes, Well, were you honest? And I said, Yeah. And the questions were like, What would you do if you caught a coworker cheating? You know, and I'm like, I I was you guys, I was 18 and dumb, obviously, and naive because I should have given the answers that they were looking for, like, oh, you go and tell management, but somewhere along the lines, I was like, Well, I'm gonna mind my business. I'm not about to get involved in your shenanigans. So yeah, I failed that Walmart exam. And you know, just to reconnect that to success is not proof that you're in the right place. So, like, thank God that didn't work out for me. But another part of this of failure, another example I'm gonna share with you is that your blind spots, literally, my blind spots, they cost me years of my life because then there's weight loss, right? And a couple years ago, you guys saw me lose 50 pounds, and I genuinely thought I had it all figured out. I knew everything, I was finally an intuitive eater, I had balance, I had the body, I had structure, except I didn't, right? But I felt like I knew I knew everything I needed to know to be an intuitive eater. Move more, eat less, be disciplined, but I failed. Again, you guys saw me gain 50 pounds back, and I said, okay, enough is enough for my birthday. Um, I I made an investment into myself and I finally hired the coach, right? I've shared this story a lot, and I do believe in the power of coaching, and that is when I realized I didn't fail because I lacked discipline or that I didn't want it bad enough. I failed because I had blind spots. I had blind spots. I was moving my body, I was eating from home, and I was also just enjoying life. I was doing things that felt good for my body, like staying hydrated and going for walks and obviously going to the gym. I've been lifting since I was 18, but food, food is where I needed support. Because I had subscribed to diet culture for so long, I always felt like if I wanted to lose and maintain weight loss, that I needed to eat low carb. But now, since hiring my coach and working with her for over a year, I understand metabolism, I understand macros, I understand how to fuel my body, and now I get to teach women the same thing. So what if the thing that you're embarrassed about, like for me it was weight loss. I was so embarrassed coming online as a coach and saying, like, hey, follow me, and I had gained the 50 pounds back. But what if the one thing that you're embarrassed about becomes the thing you become known for? I think a lot of women associate me now with treating yourself pretty, with loving yourself where you're at today and developing the habits and learning how to fuel your body and understand macros. Like that is what I am here for. I am here to text or to teach the next generation. Like, please stop subscribing to diet culture. Start fueling your body, start moving your body and develop these habits because you don't want to diet for the rest of your life. That is not a life to live where you're always obsessing, but you do need to, and here I go on a tangent, but I am such a believer now in tracking your food and tracking your macros and understanding that data and understanding your habits and really having that self-awareness to make the changes that you need so that you can manipulate your metabolism and have very successful fat loss. But what if the thing you're embarrassed about becomes the things you become known for? I hope to inspire you to treat yourself pretty as you work towards the body of your dreams. And I do believe that you can have both, and I do believe you can do it from a balanced approach. Anyway, so moving on. I think I told you a little bit about my limiting beliefs earlier in this episode, about not even believing I was smart enough to go and become a nurse. But the next failure that I'm gonna share with you in my life, oh my gosh, this one, this one hurt you guys. Because here I am, I'm in nursing school. I overcome all these limiting beliefs, and I'm in nursing school. I am well over halfway into the program, and I missed a paperwork deadline that delayed my graduation. And when I tell you, I felt judged. I knew that people were judging me. I knew it because people would always compare their grade to the grade that I got on the test because nursing school is really freaking hard, but testing comes, I don't know, pretty, I don't want to say pretty easy because I have to work for it and I have to study as well, but I don't freak out when it comes to examinations and I am happy to take a test and test my own knowledge. So people who looked at me like the smart one suddenly started looking at me differently because I got held back and it had nothing to do with my sparts, it had nothing to do with how smart I was or wasn't, but I will tell you, I cared because I thought that this means something about me, that I am a failure, but it didn't. It was a paperwork mistake, okay? But it's so funny because today this thing is actually happening to my friend who did not get her paperwork submitted on time, and she's in nurse practitioner school, and I love her to death. She's one of my favorite people in the world, and I know that she's gonna be wildly successful, but she called me right away because she knows that this has happened to me. And I said to her, I said, Listen, in the grand scheme of things, you're still gonna get it done. You're still gonna become a nurse practitioner, but I understand that feeling of embarrassment when you start this program with your friends and you develop this bond, this almost trauma bond of nursing school, and they're going to graduate without you. And you're gonna be just a couple months behind that graduation, but it does feel like a failure. So I had to remind her and put things into perspective because, like, she is a nurse, she's an incredible nurse. She is going to finish her nurse practitioner degree, just like I finished my nursing degree, and years later, it's literally not even going to matter. So it's important to know that that moment didn't define me, as it will not define my friend who will complete her nurse practitioner degree. But I do want to say in the moment as these things were happening, and as I was so zoomed in and I was standing on the ladder arguing with the level itself, you let it get to you. But when you take a step back and you zoom out, you understand it's really not that big of a deal. Life will move on and you will still achieve your goals. So it's important that you recognize your blind spot might be thinking this means more than it does. So whether it's a failed relationship, a failed launch, a failed diet, a delayed goal, or just a bad month in general, your brain says, and sometimes our brains are bitches, okay? Like I said that, like your brain says, see, you're not her. But maybe you're six inches from the wall, and maybe it's time to climb down. Because maybe this isn't rejection, maybe this is redirection, maybe this isn't failure, maybe it's just information, right? When you step on the scale, it's information, it's data. You don't, as you learn to treat yourself pretty, you're not gonna get hung up on the day-to-day fluctuations that happen. So I want you to take a couple things away from today's episode. One, success is not proof that you're supposed to stay. I could have succeeded at Walmart, but sometimes it's a blessing not getting what you want, and I'm so grateful that I didn't. Two, failure does not mean stop. It means zoom out, see the bird's eye view of what's happening in your life and really appreciate that this is where you're at in your journey, and also acknowledge that you have a choice to make. You can change the trajectory of your journey, and a lot of times it only makes one choice to do that. When you make that decision and you move forward, appreciate that redirection. Three, your emotions, yeah, your emotions are not always accurate measurements, okay? Because sometimes you can there sometimes your brain plays tricks on you. I remember feeling like such a failure when I got held back from graduation, and literally it had nothing to do with how well I how smart I was or how well I did on test, and had everything to do with how I felt in the moment. I was being judged, I was allowing that external validation to get to me. And sometimes you just need to understand that your emotions will pass, they're not a measurement of how successful you are in life. Okay. Number four is your blind spots actually becomes your gift. The places that have humbled me the most are now the places that I teach women. Things that have really challenged me in my weight loss journey have taught me a lot of lessons of what I do not want to do to achieve a body that I am proud of. I think a lot of people look at me and they think, oh my god, how is she so confident? And I've talked about this on social media lately, and I think that this deserves an episode in and of itself. But I also think that people want to see me humbled. I think that people want to see me fail. You've probably felt that same way at some point in your life. You know that there's a group of girls and they would love to see nothing more than to see you fail. And I will just say, like, you can be the person to allow that to undertake you, or you can be the person who learns and then helps the next generation of women to not make that same mistake. Like, it is my passion to make sure that women are no longer subscribed to diet culture, which is extremely toxic to us and how we view ourselves and how we love our bodies. Like, diet culture has taught us a lot about hating ourselves, punishing ourselves into dieting, and then we get stuck in these years of yo-yo dieting and binging and restricting, and a lot of women don't even realize that they're binge eaters, but they are. It is my passion to teach from a place that I have been humbled. The places that have humbled me are becoming the places that I now teach women so that you can be confident and feel incredible in your body because you deserve to. And last but not least, I want you to stop asking, like, why is this happening to me? It is so easy. And even when I was going through a couple months of just feeling down and out, life felt chaotic. It felt like it was out of my control. A lot of things were happening, a lot of decisions had to be made. And I kept thinking, like, why is this happening to me? But instead, start asking yourself, like, what can I see from down here that I couldn't see from up there? And again, it's zooming out, it's getting off of the ladder and zooming out to say, like, oh my God, I am buying a condo, and that is an incredible journey. And yes, it might not look the way that I wanted it to, like, I wanted to do this with a partner, but what an incredible opportunity that I get to do this by myself. And what an incredible opportunity it is that I get to have everything that I want that I have worked so hard for become a tangible piece of success for me. So a lot of times we just need to get off the ladder, we need to zoom out and appreciate the part of the journey that we're have like that's happening in front of you right now. So I want to leave you with this. What if your life isn't like crooked? What if it's not messed up? But what if you're just too close to see that alignment? And it what if the thing that you're calling failure is the exact thing that your future self will thank you for? If this episode resonates with you, it would mean so much to me if you left a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify because I want women who need to hear these messages to hear them. I want them to be invited into the podcast, and I can only do that if you leave a review and help me get the word out there. I love you so much. I will see you in next week's episode. You have the best freaking week. And don't forget to treat yourself pretty.