When Everything on the Menu Looks Like Sh*t

What’s unique about this blog is that I’m the author and photographer! This image caught my eye during an ultra-fun trip to London in early 2025. The Farm Shop, where said image is hung, is a dream world of curated local foods and other culinary delights, all anchored with a sweet little wine bar in the basement.

I took the photo through the lens of humor and good Instagram content, but a year later it feels like a poignant story to tell.

Because some days, it looks like shit is the only thing on the menu. Yes, we can be optimists and have a positive mindset, and we can bring our better selves to the challenges of life and work…yet at times we simply don’t like what’s being served on the fresh sheet on a given day.

This is a variation on a phrase I’ve often spoken about in my coaching and in my past as a team leader at Electronic Arts. “Sometimes you have to eat a crap sandwich, and nothing can make it taste better.” 

More often than not, a crap sandwich involves more than just the mechanics and details of a problem or predicament. Because if it was that simple, we’d simply smile and chow down that sandwich and move on.

But we often don’t chow down. We procrastinate. We leave the crap sandwich on the table for a long time. We transfer blame or responsibility to others. We look away and hope that when we look back, the crap sandwich has been whisked away or eaten by someone else. But when we glance back to the table, it’s usually still there staring at us.

Even moreso, a crap sandwich can be tinged with elements that impact us in a much deeper way, such as personal conflict, emotional exposure, and overwhelming uncertainty. 

I appreciate the words of many on the topic and attribute of resilience. We all need a healthy stock of resilience and grit saved up in our accounts for those more challenging moments of work and life.

But that element of resilience is not always the solution. Exerting force and fury against a challenge without knowing where to channel that force and fury can lead to frustration and irrational decisions. Pushing through doesn’t just solve the problem. You can’t always “fight through it” and hope you have the strength to do so. Because hope is never a strategy.

You need to know how and where to push, and where you are pushing towards. We need to diagnose with more curiosity and courage.

Like most problems, the best place to start is by asking questions rather than rushing to solutions. As Albert Einstein said, “If I had an hour to solve a problem I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.”

So the next time you are facing a crap sandwich that you know you need to eat, here are four questions you can ask yourself to build the right frame to move forward.

What’s the real challenge with this situation?

If there was one go-to question in the coaching toolbox, this is it. Any challenge or problem will have multiple layers. What you need to do is focus on what matters most. It goes beyond the stories we’ve told ourselves about a problem or the uninvited advice and opinions of others. It brings us to a place where we’ve gone a little deeper and slowed down enough to get some clarity on the problem to be solved.

What’s holding me back from taking action?

If it was easy to solve a big challenge or chow down a crap sandwich, we’d do it with ease and pace. But there’s usually something in our way, whether that be time, emotions, vulnerability, conflict, past trauma, or maybe even ourselves. While not universal, the most common thing that holds us back is the emotions. We see the logic in a set of steps and decisions to solve a challenge, but we simply don’t want to feel the emotions that go along with that route. We need the emotional courage to step into those situations, knowing that the pain and discomfort that comes with those emotions typically passes a lot faster than we predict. As the wise Peter Bregman said, “If you are willing to feel everything, you can do anything.”

How can I reframe this challenge?

To be clear, reframing doesn’t mean changing the challenge or just renaming it. It means taking the same challenge and looking at it in a fresh way. It gives a tired and exhausted problem a new lease on life with a new perspective. One of the best ways to do this is bring in a collaborator or colleague to give you their take on the challenge. Tell them your story and what you know and where you find yourself, and then ask them this simple yet profound question…”how do you see this?” That can be the shift you need to see a path forward.

What will be my reward for taking action?

Eating a crap sandwich and facing a daunting challenge is hard work. So for any hard work, we should have some form of reward that awaits us as we eat the last crumbs. As you begin to face a challenge, figure out your reward and self-recognition that excites you and gives you a little more juice in the tank. That could be as simple as the gift of time to go for a midday run, or planning a happy hour with a good friend. It could also be the relief and space that comes with knowing you’ve eaten your crap sandwich and you can put your time and energy into more positive and productive spaces and places.

So here’s hoping your menu looks better than the one in this blog on most days. But when it does read like this, have confidence you can take the thoughtful and courageous steps to get through it.