The Invisible Barrier Keeping You From Loving What You're Doing

I was in a room full of women being celebrated.

Awards. Acknowledgements. Women standing up to talk about what they'd built. The revenue. The milestones. The years of doing everything right. The big house, the three cars in the garage, all of it.

And I sat there doing the quiet math we do without meaning to. Measuring the distance between them and me.

By the end of the night, I had decided something about myself, almost without noticing.

That the woman I wanted to become, the one waiting on the far side of every bridge I was trying to build, had to look like them.

That was the moment she became impossible to reach.

The Stranger on the Other Side

I should tell you about the bridge, because I'll come back to it the whole way through.

Picture a chasm. On the near side, you, as you are right now.

On the far side, the woman you long to be, loving what you're doing; the work you're meant to do.

The bridge between them gets built one plank at a time, and each plank is a single small step forward, taken before you feel ready.

Here's what I didn't understand yet.

If the woman across that chasm is made of someone else's life, she isn't you. She's a stranger. And nobody builds a bridge toward a stranger she's already decided she'll never measure up to.

So I tried, the way you do.

I laid a few planks. I took the first steps anyone would have told me to take.

But they didn't feel right under my feet. I wasn't sure of them, and I wasn't sure of me, and three or four planks in, I stopped.

I didn't trust myself to keep walking toward a woman I didn't even recognize.

So I turned around. I sat back down on the edge of the cavern. And I didn't move from there for a long time.

There's a voice that lives in that exact spot. I call him Fred, the voice of fear. He's the part of you that learned, somewhere back there, that reaching too high gets you hurt.

Maybe someone once looked at you over the top of their glasses, with that small wrinkle of the brow, and said something you interpreted as, "Who do you think you are?"

Maybe you stepped out once before, sure of yourself, and it didn't go the way you hoped, and you decided quietly never to be caught wanting that much again.

Your Fear-Fred remembers all of it. So he keeps you safe the only way he knows.

He tells you you're not ready yet.

He points across the chasm at everyone who arrived first and says, "Become her, and then you'll be enough."

Your fear isn't out to stop you because it's cruel. Fred is overly cautious, and he's working from what happened in the past, a verdict someone handed you years ago that you never thought to question.

But when you believe him here, you stay on the edge for years.

Who Tells You Who You Are?

I want to ask you the question that finally moved me. It's a quiet one, and everything underneath it shifts when you answer it honestly.

Who tells you who you are?

The room? The Zoom participants? The mastermind? The coaching circle? The million-dollar club?

The woman whose life looks like the one you were told to want?

For a long time, I let all of them write my story.

I've sat in enough of those rooms, thinking, "If I just do that, I'll be able to get where I want to be."

This isn't rare. We do this and call it "learning strategy."

The truth I finally had to face was that strategy is good but not when I must twist and shape myself to fit into it.

The strategy has to fit who I am. I don't twist myself to fit the strategy.

The woman on the other side of my bridge was never meant to be a clone. She was meant to be made of me.

Crossing as Yourself

So I started somewhere small, and honestly a little strange.

I thought that business coaching might be something that I could use to attract clients. But it didn't feel quite right. It wasn't working.

So, I began to slowly let the idea go. But what would replace it?

Sighing, I looked at the qualities in myself I'd always waved off as nothing. The ones that felt too ordinary, or too soft, to count for anything.

The way I notice people.

My heart for those who reach a certain point in life and then stop.

The mission around courage that only ever sounded like a pipedream - not a practical idea.

But then, I decided to let those be the planks.

First plank: I listened when someone advised, "Courage is no small thing. Most of us need to know how to get past the blocks fear throws up in our way so we can get to what we're meant to do."

That's when a feeling settled in my chest, like I had just come home. That was the woman on the other side. Not a stranger I had to become.

Second plank: I set my sights on her. Me, with my own traits and my own mission, carrying something only I was ever equipped to carry.

Find that same feeling in your chest. Shape it into your horizon. And you'll know it's what you want to do.

Here's Your Tiny Brave Step

Think of one quality or idea you've quietly dismissed in yourself as too small or too unremarkable to matter.

Now ask something different of it. Not, "Is this impressive?" Or, "Is this what's expected?"

Ask, "Does this feel like something I really want? Feel drawn to?"

Write it down somewhere only you can see. Imagine if I could...

That's the first plank that's truly shaped like you.

If you'd like help finding the next one, the Tiny Brave Steps Generator is good company for this. You can paste this straight in:

I've been measuring myself against women who built something different from mine. Help me find one small step this week that honours who I actually am and where I'm actually going.

And if you're tired of letting the room tell you who you are, that's the heart of what we do in Creative Spaces. A circle of women on Zoom every other Tuesday, learning to take the pen back and build bridges that lead to their stories.

You were never meant to become a stranger.

You were meant to become more fully who you already are.