Who's Holding The Coconut?
- Jenny Fite
- Oct 31, 2025
- 3 min read
There’s a story I’ve been hearing a lot lately. It’s about trappers. One type of trapper figured out that if they cut a hole in a coconut, place food inside, and anchor the coconut to a tree, they can easily catch certain monkeys. When the monkey reaches in for the food, its hand gets stuck—the hole is big enough for an open hand to slip in, but too small for a closed fist to pull out. The monkey could easily free itself if it just let go, but it refuses to release the food… and so it stays trapped.
This might make you uncomfortable, but picture yourself as the monkey. What are you stuck holding onto?
In coaching I’ve seen this happen time and time again. Clients come to me with health and life goals, so we map out the path. But, along the way they stop progressing. They show up, work hard, and follow the path, but they’re stuck. Something they’re holding onto (often times for them it’s more than one thing) has them trapped and they can’t move forward until they let it go.
In life it’s not always easy to see what’s got us trapped, what we’re holding onto that’s keeping us from moving forward. It can be as simple as a daily treat we give ourselves on our tough days or it can be as complex as our own glass ceiling. The one we’re maintaining because we don’t believe we can go beyond it, so we subconsciously keep ourselves from breaking through it and succeeding.
When I work with clients I build a relationship that helps me see the coconuts they’re stuck in. We build a friendship that helps me guide them through the identification and releasing their hand so that they can get out of that coconut, they can get unstuck, and they can actually move forward.
In the next part of this newsletter I’ll share about my own journey with a coconut, but before I do I want you to remember that a conversation with me is always free. If you’re ready to escape your coconut and aren’t sure where to start- follow the link below and let’s start building our relationship and helping you get unstuck from where you are and moving forward to where you want to be.
My side of the story-
Typically, I use these writings to share information important in fitness, nutrition and often marrying lifestyle with health. As I share this next portion, I want to preface this with this writing. I feel inspired to go in a different direction.
Right now, I’m letting go of my own “food” and escaping my “coconut.”
I’ve spent a lot of years holding on to the idea that social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube were good for a lot of reasons. Even the internet news, how else are we supposed to get the news if not through it, right? I’ve thought that if I managed my time on them and controlled the content fed to me, then the good reasons to have them outweighed the potential harm. My good reasons were - they can be great for business, great to connect with my clients, they’re great for sharing education or gathering education, I can connect with new friends and stay connected with old friends. They provided everything- opportunity, entertainment, community, money. Yet, for years I’ve felt off about them even when I’m doing all the right things with them.
I’ve made money with them, connected with friends, built community, been entertained— but I’ve also found myself stuck in them. Drowning in the stories. Emotions skewed because of what I saw. Mentally unable to focus because I have too much content swimming in the background of my mind- or worse, I’m constantly thinking about the content I could create from ANY moment.
I’ve felt like I was stuck, doing the thing I “needed” to do to get what I “needed” from social media and the internet, yet somehow never quite feeling good about it.
Then it all clicked when I remembered that these platforms call their stream of content “your feed.”
So the stuck feeling, the ick feeling I’ve had, to me it’s because I’m stuck holding onto the feed in the social media and internet coconut, but I don’t know who’s holding the coconut– and I don’t think I want to be stuck in it anymore.
I’m doing my best to let it go- you’ll probably not see me on social media much anymore, but you’ll be able to reach me through the “old fashioned” ways- email, newsletters, website blogs, in person presentations and coaching, and 1-1 conversations. I genuinely invite you, if you ever just want to know what’s going on in my life, just reach out to me and connect- believe it or not, I actually love talking to people no matter how random the conversation may seem.
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