27/04/2026
Korean Chicken Wings and Finding Worthiness
Eating fried chicken in a small Korean bar became the unexpected turning point for my self-doubt. It was the moment I finally realised that the kindness and grace I so freely offer to others, I desperately needed to offer to myself.
In May 2025, I travelled to Korea to train and prepare for my 8th Dan martial arts grading. For years, as I poured my heart and soul into training for this milestone, I carried a quiet belief: once I achieved my 8th Dan, I would finally reach a profound level of self-awareness and acceptance. I thought it would be like unlocking a secret code—the same code I assumed all the confident, worthy people I looked up to had already figured out. For so long, I believed there was a magical threshold of achievement we had to cross before we could truly be considered successful or “enough.” I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Fast forward to the final day of the international masters’ training and grading. I have to be honest—I had struggled deeply in the week leading up to it. I was battling a serious knee injury, and I was physically exhausted to my core. But that relentless voice in the back of my mind kept pushing me: Get up. Get on with it. You don’t have time to be weak. (Definitely not a kind way to treat myself. )
So, I pushed through. I completed the grading, and the moment I finished my presentation, a wave of relief washed over me. I thought, Wow, I think I might have just passed. I’ve finally cracked the code. To be fair, at that point, I was completely spent—exhausted beyond any state I had ever experienced in my life.
But as I was walking off the mats, my technical coach called me over and expressed his disappointment in my performance. It would be an understatement to say the world fell out from under my feet. In an instant, I felt like a failure. I felt like an imposter.
I left the grading pavilion at the Kukkiwon carrying a heavy heart full of utter disappointment. When I got back to my hotel room, I remember sitting on the floor, completely overwhelmed by the thought that I had wasted years of training and travelled all the way to Korea for nothing. To say I hit rock bottom in that moment would be an understatement.
But somehow, I found the strength to get up off that floor. I took a shower and decided to head out to a local Korean bar and restaurant, where I ordered some crispy Korean fried chicken and a cold beer.
I’m not entirely sure what shifted during that quiet dinner, but as I sat there eating, something inside me finally clicked. I found myself face-to-face with the limiting beliefs I had been carrying for years—and for the first time, I said no to them. I let go of the exhausting idea that we have to achieve great things, earn higher promotions, gain more education, make more money, or build more influence just to reach a baseline level of worthiness and self-assurance.
After that night, I stopped believing that our value is tied to achieving more. I realised that true self-assurance doesn’t come from external validation; it comes from simply being able to say, I am enough, right now, exactly as I am.
It makes me wonder—have you ever felt that self-worth and self-assurance come at such a high, exhausting price?
And to finish the story… three months later, I received my results from the Kukkiwon (World Taekwondo Headquarters, Seoul Korea). I had passed my 8th Dan. But by then, I already knew that my worth wasn’t tied to the certificate. I had already found it in myself.
