And you can't find it, because it's the thing doing the looking.
Aloha,
Ever do everything right and still wake up feeling the same? Heaviness in your chest? Putting on a smile when you feel anything but?
A client just sent me a voice memo yesterday that she wanted everyone to know about our work together:
“I found lots of things that fixed lots of different things. But it wasn’t the one thing I was looking to fix.”
Her name is Miranda. Before we worked together, she was putting effort into everything: being more accomplished at work, being a better wife, being healthier. In her words:
"Despite all the work and the effort and the time that I was putting in, it just felt like it never really did anything."
"I was doing all these things in the universe, but I was still moving about the day and feeling the same way."
"I was so disconnected from myself."
If you lead at work and carry everything at home, you may know this one.
You’re very good at solving problems you can see. So you solve them. (For everyone.)
The morning routine. The therapist. The leadership program. The book everyone recommended. Each one works, a little, on the thing it was built for. Layered on top of it, you’re playing the parent role, the partner role, the friend role.
The feeling underneath doesn’t move.
Here’s what I see in almost every high achiever I work with:
Every one of those fixes starts from the same premise: something about me needs improving before I can rest. So every fix, even the ones that work, confirms the premise. You get more capable and the feeling stays the same, because the feeling was never about capability.
You can’t find the one thing because it’s the thing doing the looking.
It lives in your unconscious mind, where all learning, behavior, and change occur. It was built a long time ago, for good reason, to keep you safe. And it’s been running your effort ever since.
I know it from the inside. For years I woke up with a heavy chest and put on a smile in public. I was not short on effort either.
So I don't work on the fixes. I go to the place they come from.
Years of effort hadn't moved roadblocks for Miranda. One breakthrough session and four calls did.
“I thought I was going to become someone new. It really was about providing the space to raise the version of me that had been existing all along.”
She didn’t add anything. She stopped spending energy on proving.
"All the roadblocks that I was facing, that I was implementing, and all the perception I had that was negative about where I was in the world just went away."
Her summary:
“Life-changing, which sounds so cliché, but it is so true. It pivoted how I operate, how I talk with myself, how I interact with others, how I have patience for myself.”
“And way more importantly, how I think about my past. Just allowing my past to be the past.”
Miranda isn’t an outlier.
I asked former clients to share their experience this month on Google, something I’d put off for years. This work impacted them deeply:
Jason, whose sales rep hired me after he did, and "had a breakout sales month just days after her first call." He even texted me a photo a few months later with the people he referred to me, saying that they were all talking about how much their lives have changed through our work.
Stacia, a fellow coach who already knew behavior change inside and out: "I experienced shifts almost immediately."
Hilary, a founder and CEO: “the patterns you didn’t even realize were holding you back.”
Janis, a founder: “patterns that I didn’t know I could ever release.”
Amanda was skeptical and took a while to say yes.
Not one of them could name it going in. You don’t have to either.
Try this today.
Write down everything you’ve done in the last two years to work on yourself.
Next to each one, write what it assumed was wrong with you.
Then look at the right-hand column and see if it’s the same sentence every time.
That sentence is your one thing.
Miranda did this work with me privately. For anyone on the fence, she said:
“I know the investment is significant, but the return on it was ridiculous.”
I take a limited number of private clients at a time. If you're doing all the things and still moving about your day feeling the same way, reply to this email with the word PRIVATE and we can hop on a call about what it takes to clear it.
What would you stop doing if you had nothing left to prove?
Mahalo,
Judy
P.S. Miranda, weeks after we finished: “I’m still learning things about me. Watching how I move about the world, and trying to understand if that’s something I want to continue doing.” She isn’t asking how to fix it anymore. She’s asking whether she wants it.
