In 2014, I spent around £10,000 on a coaching qualification.
Money wasn’t abundant. I had re-mortgaged the house and £10,000 was a significant amount for me to spend on anything.
I also didn’t particularly want to become a full-time coach.
Which makes signing up for the full, elite version of the programme slightly harder to explain.
I wanted the skills.
But that wasn’t all I wanted.
I Wanted The Best Version
There were several levels of the programme and I chose the top one.
Smaller groups. Seminars. Lunches. Direct mentoring.
The best-of-the-best version.
Looking back, there was definitely some ego in that decision.
Being part of the elite programme felt good. I think it shored up some of my confidence in my coaching skills. There was something reassuring about being able to say, at least to myself, that I hadn’t chosen the ordinary version.
I’d gone all in.
That doesn’t mean I didn’t genuinely want to learn.
I did.
It just means the decision contained more than one thing.
A practical interest in coaching.
Some ambition mixed with insecurity.
And the very human appeal of the VIP option.
It would be much tidier to look back and pretend I had signed up for entirely sensible reasons.
I hadn’t.
Then The Arrangement Started To Change
The programme was originally quite straightforward.
There were six courses spread across roughly a year, alongside home study and practice clients. The in-person training took place over weekends.
I could make one training weekend a month work.
That was the commitment I had organised the rest of my life around.
Then the dates began changing.
Sometimes at relatively short notice.
Occasionally the new timetable meant two training weekends in one month, with the additional travel and hotel costs that went with them.
When people struggled with the changes, the response from the organisation was often framed around flexibility and commitment.
If you were serious, you would find a way.
If you struggled to adapt, perhaps you needed to become more flexible.
For a while, that landed.
I wondered whether they were right.
Maybe the problem was me.
So for a couple of months, I tried to make twice monthly training weekends work.
But it was too much and it was also becoming too expensive.
However by then there was something else caught up in the decision:
I had spent £10,000.
I had chosen the elite programme.
I had committed to doing it.
Walking away from that was beginning to feel like saying something about me.
Why Was It So Hard To Stop?
Towards the end, one of the emails sent in response to concerns about the changing dates effectively said that everybody had been inconvenienced, but as coaches we should be able to manage ourselves and deal with it.
By then, I felt manipulated: There was an ick factor about the whole thing that I couldn’t really get past.
I was also reaching another rather important conclusion.
I didn’t actually want to be a traditional coach.
You might imagine that would have made the next decision obvious.
It didn’t.
Because stopping meant accepting quite a lot at once.
I had spent a huge amount of money on something I wasn’t going to complete.
I had been attracted by some of the status surrounding the elite programme.
I had allowed some of the organisation’s language about flexibility and commitment to make me question myself.
And I had made a decision that, with hindsight, I would not make again.
None of those things felt particularly comfortable.
So there wasn’t a grand confrontation.
I didn’t formally withdraw nor did I demand my money back.
I simply stopped booking courses and stopped attending.
Nobody Else Was Really Watching
I did expect the company to notice that I had disappeared.
They didn’t: No pastoral follow-up.
In fact there was no contact at all.
Silence.
In some ways, that confirmed what I had already begun to think about the organisation.
But something else became clearer too.
Almost nobody in my actual life cared whether I completed that qualification.
Very few people even knew I was doing it.
There wasn’t an audience waiting to judge whether I finished.
The person I was struggling to explain the decision to was me.
Because part of stopping still felt like my failure.
Not completing the qualification seemed to provide an answer to a question I hadn’t realised I was asking.
What sort of person spends £10,000 on something and then doesn’t even finish it?
That question made continuing attractive long after the course itself had stopped being of value to me.
Not because I still wanted what I had originally bought.
Because finishing could rescue something about the decision.
It could prove the money had not been wasted.
It could prove I had followed through.
Perhaps, most importantly, it could prove that I was still the sort of person I thought I was when I signed up.
Sometimes Continuing Acquires A Second Job
You don’t need to have spent £10,000 on a coaching qualification to recognise that feeling.
Sometimes something begins as a decision about one thing and gradually starts meaning a lot more. The qualification, role or commitment may still matter, but continuing can also protect you from questions about the choice you made in the first place.
Was I wrong? Did I give up too easily? What does stopping say about me?
That can make it difficult to tell whether you are still following through because the thing matters, or because following through has become evidence that the original decision was legitimate.
They can look exactly the same from the outside.
They don’t necessarily feel the same from the inside.
What I’m wondering now
I kept some of the useful material from that course.
Most of the hard-copy material eventually went in the bin.
Even that felt embarrassing.
£10,000 is a lot of money to reduce to a fairly small pile of things worth keeping.
But I don’t think the useful question now is whether I should have spotted the problem earlier.
Or whether I should have fought harder for a refund.
Or even whether signing up was a mistake.
The more interesting part is how long the original decision continued asking to be justified.
By the time I stopped, continuing wasn’t only about whether I still wanted the qualification.
Finishing could also make the money feel less wasted. It could mean I had followed through. It could protect something about the person I thought I was when I signed up.
That is the part I hadn’t really noticed at the time.
The course had stopped being only about the course.
Stopping seemed to say something about me.
Your Next Step
Think about something you have continued with longer than you really wanted to.
Not necessarily because it was difficult.
Because stopping seemed to mean something.
What were you actually reluctant to lose?
The thing itself?
Or what completing it would allow you to believe about the decision — and about yourself?
If that distinction feels familiar but you’re not quite sure what sits underneath it for you, What’s Really Getting in Your Way? is a free seven-day course designed to help you recognise the patterns that can quietly shape the way you respond.
What’s Coming Next?
Recognising that you’ve turned a decision into something you need to prove is one thing.
The more difficult question comes afterwards.
What happens when you stop trying to prove you meant it?
We’ll look at that next time.
If You Take One Thing From This
Sometimes continuing isn’t only about the thing you chose. It can also become a way of protecting what the original decision seems to say about you.
People Also Ask
Why is it so hard to stop something after I’ve invested a lot in it?
The practical loss can matter, particularly when you have invested significant money, time or effort. But there can also be a more personal layer. Stopping may start to feel like evidence that the original decision was wrong, that you failed to follow through or that you are not the person you believed yourself to be when you began.
Does stopping something mean I made the wrong decision?
Not necessarily. A decision can have been genuinely made for reasons that mattered at the time without requiring everything you do afterwards to prove that it was correct.
Why do I keep going with something I no longer really want?
Sometimes continuing is still about the thing itself. At other times, continuing may also protect you from what you fear stopping would mean about the money, effort or commitment already invested — or about you.
Is changing my mind the same as giving up?
No. They can sometimes look similar from the outside, but stopping or reconsidering something does not automatically tell you why you did it or what the original commitment meant.
How can I tell when commitment has become something I’m trying to prove?
One clue is where your attention has moved. If you are thinking less about what the thing itself now means to you and more about what stopping would say about your discipline, judgement or character, the commitment may have acquired a second job.
References
Khossousi et al. (2024), The relationship between perfectionism and self-esteem in adults: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapy.
Neff (2023), Self-Compassion: Theory, Method, Research, and Intervention. Annual Review of Psychology.
