I have quit Diet Coke more times than I have quit anything else in my life. More than bad hires. More than a marketing automation system I swore I would never touch again. More than any diet, any dead-end strategy, any client relationship that had clearly run its course.

And before you assume I am being dramatic for effect, let me be specific, because specificity is the whole point of this story.

I quit when I was pregnant with each of my children. Both times, I put it down without a fight and did not touch it again until well after I stopped nursing. That is not a small stretch but rather years of walking straight past the fountain machine like it meant nothing to me.

I quit again for more than a year after a job change, back when I was counting macros and training harder than I ever had. I got disciplined and serious. I told myself the old habit belonged to an old version of me who did not exist anymore.

And every single time, I eventually came back.

Not because I lack willpower or because I failed. I came back because I am, and I say this with zero shame, a fountain Diet Coke snob. Not the can. Not the two liter sitting flat in someone’s fridge. I mean that specific, crackly, perfectly carbonated pour you only get from a fountain machine, ice to the top and straw included, the whole ritual of it. RaceTrac has been my supplier of choice here in Atlanta for years, and if you know, you know.

Here is the part I did not understand for years, and it turns out my brain was simply doing exactly what brains are built to do. Neuroscientists call it a habit loop. A cue shows up, the drive-thru menu, the office vending machine, that specific stretch of road with the RaceTrac sign glowing like a lighthouse, and a routine follows automatically, and a reward locks the whole thing into place. Do that enough times and your brain does not just remember the habit. It builds a well worn trail for it, deep in a part of the brain called the basal ganglia, the same region responsible for turning repeated behavior into automatic behavior. That is not a character flaw. That is just wiring.

Here Is What I Finally Understood

I do not fail at quitting Diet Coke. I break the relationship so I can rebuild it on better terms.

There is a Japanese art form called kintsugi, where broken pottery is repaired with gold. Not hidden. Not sanded down until you cannot tell it ever cracked. The gold sits right there in the seam, visible on purpose, because the break is part of the story now and the piece is considered more valuable because of it, not despite it.

I think about that a lot these days, mostly because my relationship with Diet Coke keeps mirroring my relationship with leadership.

You build a system and it works, so you trust it. Then something shifts underneath you. The market moves faster than you can plan for. A client changes direction overnight. The tools you relied on get replaced by tools nobody had heard of six months ago. And the system you built, the one you were so proud of, cracks right down the middle.

That is not failure. That is information. That is the moment asking you to rebuild with something stronger running through the seam.

The Reframe I Actually Live By Now

These days, my system looks different. I still love that fountain pour, and I am not pretending otherwise. But I have learned to hold it differently. Instead of drinking it all day long, I treat it as a morning ritual, and I have swapped my afternoons for sparkling flavored water instead. Same fizz, same little lift, none of the all-day dependency that used to run the show.

That is not me quitting. That is me repairing the crack with gold instead of pretending the crack never happened.

And here is the encouraging part of the neuroscience. That old habit loop does not have to be erased for a new one to take hold. The brain does not really delete a well worn trail. It simply lets it go quiet from disuse while a new trail gets built and strengthened right alongside it, through repetition, until the new one becomes the easier path to walk. That is why the sparkling water swap eventually stopped feeling like deprivation and started feeling like my actual afternoon routine. I did not fight my way out of the old trail. I built a better one next to it and kept walking that way instead.

Leadership works the same way. The leaders I trust most are not the ones who never break under pressure. Nobody is built like that, and I would be suspicious of anyone who claims to be. The leaders I trust are the ones who let the crack show, who tell the truth about what stopped working, and who rebuild the seam in plain sight instead of hiding it behind a shinier version of the old story.

You are allowed to change your system. and to do so more than once. You are allowed to be one hundred percent devoted to fountain Diet Coke and still decide that all day long is no longer the version of devotion that serves you.

The gold is not in pretending you never broke. The gold is in what you build back into the seam once you did.

Your Turn

So here is my question for you. What have you “quit” and gone back to more than once, not because you failed, but because you were still figuring out the real fix? Maybe it is a habit. Maybe it is a business model, a client type, a way of leading a team that finally cracked under pressure and needed to be rebuilt with something stronger.

Tell me about it. And if RaceTrac happens to be involved in your story too, I already know we would get along.