In fact, hope is something we applaud, tell people to hold onto and admire people for having, especially in the face of adversity.

We’re repeatedly told: “hold onto hope!” or “don’t give up hope”. And to be honest, most of the time, that’s good advice — especially if you’re someone who tends to lean a little negative.

But I’ve been wondering lately what happens when hope becomes more exhausting than accepting what is actually happening in your life?

What happens when holding onto hope is actually delaying your future?

Most of the time, hope is what carries us through difficult times. It creates possibility and helps us endure uncertainty. Hope gives us something to look forward to beyond our present reality.

But other times, we are the ones carrying hope.

We’re actually feeding it by looking for evidence, interpreting signs, revisiting past conversations, moving deadlines or holding on for a bit longer — bargaining that what we want is just one day away.

Maybe in those circumstances we’re not just carrying hope, we’re clinging to it with all we’ve got.

That’s when hope becomes heavy because rather than buoy us up during a difficult period, it becomes a way of wishing for an outcome and denying our current reality.

Hope becomes our reality in many ways.

And as long as we are hoping for a particular outcome, we don’t really have to deal with our lives as they are.

I recently found myself thinking about this because I was living with a lot of maybe’s in my life right now. I found myself hoping for clarity in my professional life, waiting on certain events in my personal life and waiting on other things to resolve themselves so I could move forward with the next chapter of my life.

Instead of leaning on hope in my usual cheerful way, I found myself increasingly exhausted, anxious and frustrated. And I couldn’t pull myself out of it — I realized just how much energy it had taken just to live in possibility.

I kept seeking answers, tweaking actions, clinging to each possible lead or positive change. But also, finding myself crushed when things weren’t going in the direction that hope promised.

It was starting to feel like a neverending roller coaster ride.

And the thing is, I know it’s not just me.

Entrepreneurs who had no difficulty filling their courses or memberships full two years ago, can’t seem to fill spaces but they keep plodding forward waiting for the market to change. Friends living inside difficult relationships they hope will change — and not just their most intimate ones, but also their friendships. People dealing with situations where their old situations have died off, but their new ones have not yet arrived.

There are a lot of people living in a state of “not quite yet”.

So, naturally the answer to the question of how to deal with all that uncertainty is to continue to hold onto hope.

Hope makes uncertainty comforting. And it also postpones consequences.

We tell ourselves “If I keep hoping the job will come through, the business will rebound or the relationship will change, I don’t have to do anything yet.”

“I don’t have to decide what to do if it doesn’t work out. I don’t have to completely rethink what I’m doing and I don’t have to forge a new path.”

This is actually the trap people fall into when they describe themselves as feeling stuck. They are somewhere between hope and inaction.

And sometimes, what hope really does is give us permission to not respond to what is already true.

That the thing we’re waiting for isn’t really coming. And that can be REALLY hard to take.

And this is also where our greatest opportunity lies. This is where hope stops serving us because it’s no longer a vehicle of possibility, but an anchor to our past. So, instead of hope perhaps the greater challenges is to accept.

Accept our lives exactly as they are without story, deception or a sugar coating.

But most of us don’t reach for acceptance during hard times because acceptance feels too much like finality.

Acceptance makes this isn’t working sound like this will never work. It can spiral into feelings of failures, disappointment and yes, incredible pain. And it can make us assign meaning where perhaps none needs to be assigned.

Unlike hope, acceptance doesn’t provide predictions or aspirations about the future. It only talks about the present and asks you to see the truth or what is plainly in front of you.

And while it may be unpleasant to face the truth because it’s not as pretty as hope, chances are you already know what the truth sounds and looks like. You’ve seen it out of the corner of your eye all along.

So, why do I believe that acceptance is the answer when hope gets heavy?

Well, what you finally accept your situation as it is you’re no longer fighting reality. Something inside you changes.

It’s not that you don’t still want the thing…you do. And it’s not that you don’t feel disappointed or even completely release hope, but you stop structuring your life around waiting for it.

And that is important because it frees up energy to ask better questions and open yourself up to possibilities you didn’t imagine while you were clinging to hope for a certain imagined outcome.

It allows the return of agency which can be crucial when things feel a bit uncertain.

Hope when it focuses solely on an outcome can leave you outsourcing your power and constantly waiting on “something good to happen”. Whereas, acceptance allows you to take control of the things you have in front of you.

Seeing things as they are helps you see what may have been open in front of you all along…which, ironically, is when true hope can return.

Acceptance doesn’t mean you have to stop hoping for the thing you wanted.

You can still hope the relationship changes while accepting what the relationship is today. You can hope the business rebounds while acknowledging that what you’re doing right now isn’t working. You can hope the job comes through while making decisions about your life as though it might not.

The difference is that you’re no longer putting your life on hold waiting for one particular outcome.

Maybe that’s where we get hope wrong.

The problem isn’t that we hope, but that sometimes we put all of our hope in one place.

We become so focused on the future we’ve imagined that we stop seeing all the other futures that might be available to us.

I’m realizing that in my own life right now.

There are still things I very much want to happen, and I’m not ready to give up hope for them. But I also don’t know what happens next. And the more I can accept that — instead of trying to constantly predict, influence or control the outcome — the more I can start looking at what else is possible.

That feels like a different kind of hope to me.

Not the kind that asks me to wait for something good to happen, but the kind that lets me believe I’ll find my way even if what I’m waiting for never does.

Maybe acceptance isn’t the end of hope after all. Maybe it’s what allows hope to become bigger than one particular outcome.

Hope says, “Maybe this will still happen.”

Acceptance says, “Maybe. But I don’t need to wait here to find out.”

Linda

Where does this land for you? How have you been experiencing hope — is it something that carries you or weighs you down. Share with me your observations!

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Ten minutes earlier I had been certain. Now something inside me had taken over, and it arrived with the force of a verdict:

You will not find this again. You can’t make it on your own. He’s rare. You’re being reckless. You’re going to be alone. It isn’t as bad as you’re making it out to be. The panic attacks aren’t about him—they’re about you.

And just like that, I made a U-turn back into my first marriage.

I long understood that afternoon as a story about a fateful decision to stay in a relationship I knew wasn’t right for me.It isn’t that.

It’s the first time I watched my mind manufacture certainty because it could not tolerate having none.

It would not be my last.

For most of my life I assumed everyone was doing what I was doing, just more privately—that underneath the composure, everyone was trading their intuition for an ounce of just knowing.

It seemed perfectly reasonable to me. Why else would we ask a friend what they think when we already know what we think? Why consult psychics, experts, spreadsheets or bank balances before making a decision if not to quiet the part of us that can’t quite tolerate not knowing?

It turns out that isn’t how it goes for everyone.

Some people run while others wait when things get uncertain. And then there are the people who genuinely seem comfortable saying, “We’ll see,” and actually mean it. They sit inside uncertainty the way you’d sit in a waiting room, without feeling compelled to redecorate the furniture.

I’m envious of those people.

I once watched a friend describe a job offer she hadn’t received yet, a move she hadn’t committed to, and a lease ending in six weeks. Then she changed the subject to where we should go grab a bite to eat. I thought about that conversation for days.

She, presumably, did not.

There’s a Zen story I used to read to my children about a farmer whose luck keeps reversing—the horse runs off, the horse returns with seven more, the son breaks his leg on one of them, the broken leg keeps him out of the army. Each time the neighbors arrive with a verdict.

Fortunate. Unfortunate. Wonderful. Terrible.

The farmer only ever says, “Maybe.”

I read that story hoping my children would learn to see life’s turns as possibilities rather than evidence the sky was falling.

If I’m honest, I was hoping it would teach me too.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been what people call an overthinker.

I’ve never loved that description because it makes what happens sound ordinary. What I’m describing feels different. It’s replaying conversations, building theories, looking for missing clues, trying to solve a future that hasn’t arrived yet while searching for anything that feels certain.

My mind treats uncertainty as a solvable problem, and rumination is the strategy.

That can be great for the work I do, but it’s sometimes a terrible way to live because trying to solve all the outcomes doesn’t actually solve uncertainty.

It actually multiplies it.

Every theory creates another theory and every answer raises another question. Instead of trusting what I already know, I slowly lose confidence in my own judgment because there are now too many possibilities to sort through.

It can be quite challenging.

When I made that U-turn back into my marriage early in life, I set a pattern that would take me until now to learn to break,

I traded what my gut understood for a long list of fears. And although they sounded persuasive, but they weren’t facts. They were stories that convinced me that something must be wrong with me, that my instincts couldn’t be trusted, and that safety was more important than truth.

What I traded wasn’t the relationship. It was the chance to find out I could survive not knowing.

That’s the only thing that would have made the next period of uncertainty easier.

Certainty bought me temporary comfort. It cost me the information and confidence I needed.

I didn’t know back then that I was making that trade.

A mind like this doesn’t announce itself to the truth. Instead it feels like judgment, not fear. A mind trying to escape the discomfort of uncertainty sounds practica, responsible and even thoughtful.

Which is why I didn’t recognize it the next time, in a completely different situation over a question that had nothing to do with a man.

Completely different circumstances with the same outcome.

I often talk about how I didn’t leave a job because I was afraid I wouldn’t make it anywhere else. I was a rock star at my law firm and stayed put felt like the smarter route than risk living with the uncertainty of the future.

More than once, uncertainty disguised itself as wisdom and convinced me that waiting was the responsible choice.

But here’s the irony: the thing I was trying so hard to avoid by making that U-turn happened anyway.

My first marriage ended and the certainty I seeked disappeared anyway.

Life eventually has asked me to face every single uncertainty I’d spent years trying to outrun.

I bring this up because I’m standing at another crossroads with uncertainty, and I can finally see the pattern (what can I say…we all learn on our own timeline).

For years I thought I was wrestling with difficult decisions. Now I’m beginning to wonder if what I’ve really been wrestling with is uncertainty itself.

That realization is both clarifying and deeply uncomfortable.

I know enough to understand that certainty isn’t something life promises (what is the old saying — the only things that are certain are death and taxes?).

In the middle of uncertainty I’ve once again found myself trying to think my way through it. I’ve thought through all the possibilities and potential outcomes. And while I’ve come up with some great insights — nothing has actually helped ease my discomfort with the unknown.

In fact, I think it feels harder.

Maybe that’s because I’ve spent so much of my life trying to escape it that actually staying with it feels like learning a new language. Every instinct still wants to solve the problem, predict the outcome, and get to the part where I finally know.

But there isn’t a shortcut to knowing. There’s only the experience of living through not knowing.

I don’t have a conclusion for this essay or a way to solve this for others just like me because I haven’t reached the conclusion yet.

What I have is a growing suspicion that many of us spend years trying to eliminate uncertainty instead of learning how to live alongside it. I’m just late to that lesson.

So I’m genuinely curious.

How do you relate to uncertainty?

Do you sit with it more easily than I do? Do you act before you have all the answers? Or does your mind also start building theories, searching for clues, and trying to outrun the discomfort of not knowing?

I don’t know if there’s a right way.

I only know that uncertainty keeps arriving, whether I’m ready for it or not.

Maybe learning to live well has less to do with finally becoming certain and more to do with discovering who we are while we wait.

And maybe even the answer is not feeling so alone with our discomfort around uncertainty and just holding a space for it…together.

Linda

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“Welcome back, Dr. Babich.”

She smiled, handed over her fur coat, and walked inside as though she belonged there.

As a teenager, I was outwardly mortified by some of my mother’s swagger and equally disgusted by her fur coat. But inside the moment always stayed with me. My mother walking through the restaurant, greeting the friends she organized to join her for the evening and always (always) paying the bill — she was the image of modern female success.

And to be honest, she was an actual success.

Despite being an immigrant, my mom was a doctor who after my father left her for another woman, outpaced his earnings (he too was a doctor), owned an apartment on the lakefront in Chicago and a second home in Wisconsin. She put me through private school, traveled with me to Europe and ensured that my education was paid for…through law school.

In my mind, she was a badass.

In fact, much of what I thought about success came from watching my mother. I believed success meant having the important degrees, being respected by the people you helped, wearing chic clothes and living in an expansive apartment (or house) in the city. That’s what I saw for myself — except instead of the long fur coat, I imagined a Max Mara camel coat as my version of success and I was going to do what it took to get there.

Success meant that you held the power, the cards and people could see you matter. You could tell people to f-off and not compromise who you were.

But then a funny thing happened.

I am not sure if it was the byproduct of getting breast cancer in her 50’s, my sister gifting her with grandchildren or simple wisdom, but suddenly all that seemed to matter less to her.

She seemed to no longer be impressed by the version of herself that I so admired.

She moved to the suburbs, started shopping at bargain stores, traveling to places others chose and focused on serving her second husband in ways that felt a bit traditional — cooking meals in the slow cooker before she headed out to see her patients for rounds. She even traded her diesel Mercedes for a more practical Toyota.

This wasn’t the result of money challenges. She had actually been pretty savvy at investing and managing her business smartly.

I noticed the change and assumed it had something to do with marrying my sweet step-father.

And while she seemed to function within the new parameters, I’ll admit a part of me felt a bit disappointed. I missed the power house.

I would still get glimpses of her when my dentist would tell me how she watched my mom stand up in hospital board meetings and give it to the directors. I loved hearing about those moments.

But somehow I figured she had forfeited that person and gave way to a way of life that felt more safe or in alignment with what her husband wanted.

Maybe.

And maybe it was merely my own interpretation of what happened.

Either way, it didn’t matter because the conclusion I drew from these circumstances was that I wasn’t going to let that happen. I was going to live differently and live large.

And in some ways, I guess I have. In part, I can attribute my move to Europe with making sure I lived out the dreams I had instead of succumbing to a more standard life. My mom died fairly young (age 73) and by God, I wasn’t going to let a day go by where I didn’t remember to live large.

But, then I actually moved to Lisbon and something funny happened — to me.

I started to absorb European culture in a way I hadn’t when I was younger. Life simply moves at a different pace here than it does in the U.S. And the Portuguese actively reject brand culture.

When I walk around the U.S. it’s common to see Louis Vuitton bags, brand jeans and Golden Goose tennis shoes. These things all exist in Lisbon, but they are not prominent. There are nice cars, there are high-end brands, but they matter so much less than the people you meet.

Since moving here over three years ago, I have embraced the long lunch, deep conversations where no one asks what you do, and living with less. I don’t own a car, my refrigerator is ⅓ the size of the one I had in the United States and going out doesn’t feel like a designer fashion show — it feels like me finding my own style.

When I travel it’s not about staying in the most expensive, glamorous hotel I can post about on social media, but rather a place that can help me immerse myself in my host country for my stay.

Now, I’m not saying this is better. I’m not arguing that living this way is somehow superior. But, what I am saying is that the impact on me has been profound.

I — like so many other women and men my age — have spent decades trying to live an outwardly big life. I cared about what my house said about me. I cared about the car I drove, the job I had, the money we could claim to have and the things I accomplished.

While I’m still proud of the fact that I have done some big things in life, I’ve quietly fallen in love with a life that feels more deeply lived, even if it seems outwardly smaller.

And I know I’m not alone.

Like you, I live my life scrolling online and seeing what the world has to offer. I look at what hits on the socials and what people write about on Substack. What I’ve been realizing is that maybe this living outwardly smaller is on the rise.

In the last year, the landscape of Lisbon has changed. Certainly there are more Americans moving here because they are unhappy with the political culture, but there are an equal number of people looking to live simpler lives.

They are moving to smaller towns, buying books again, exploring community connections and prioritizing travel beyond the big named places. There is a move toward simpler things.

Now, I recognize some of this may be a bit of nostalgia and a trend in and of itself, but also — as a 50-something woman who no longer feels pulled by the shoulds of society and presentation — it might be a reframe what success really means.

Personally, I will always look back at my mom as magnificent and a pioneer, particularly as a woman of her time, but also…I have a greater understanding around the shift she experienced.

It was easy to blame my step-father for some of her decisions to live outwardly smaller, but maybe she was simply tired. And maybe she craved a little more meaning.

During those smaller years, my mother made a point of being with me and my kids weekly. She did the same for my sister and her kids. She influenced their interests, loved them and often provided food for me when I was tired from work.

What gave her meaning as a woman of power changed — instead of showing the world she could walk in and own a place, she could change the world through the people who meant most to her.

That’s not small.

And in fact, what I viewed as living a smaller life was entirely wrong. Perhaps they’re only small when measured from the outside.

The reality is that the richest lives don’t necessarily expand, they often deepen. They become more aligned and truthful. They become more technicolor in the best ways.

Today, the thing that thrills me is a table of six filled with people who laugh and tell me they’ve had the most fun they’ve had in years — simply because the people at the table were so kind and lively (that recently happened).

Don’t get me wrong. I still love beautiful hotels, meaningful work, ambitious goals, and the feeling that comes from building something worthwhile.

What has changed is what I hope all of those things are in service of.

Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s this:

A life can look enormous from the outside and feel painfully small on the inside.

And sometimes the life that appears smallest to everyone else turns out to be the one that’s been lived most fully.

Maybe that’s the question worth asking ourselves from time to time.

Not whether our lives look big enough.

But whether the things we’re working so hard to build are creating the kind of life we actually want to come home to.

Linda

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If this article has resonated, please share it with anyone you think might benefit from this simple perspective shift. This Human Journey is about sharing our lived experience of the journey - the messiness, the changes and the willingness to evolve in new ways.

I realize that might be surprising given that I’ve spent years reading the books, writing about personal development, getting coached, becoming a coach, studying mindset, understanding trauma, improving my communication and examining my beliefs.

You might think I would be able to definitively say that every bit of my efforts has been well worth it.

But this year has been hard — on multiple fronts.

So, the negative voices have crept back into my brain, my old friend fear has pulled up a chair at the table, and I’ve started to wake some old childhood wounds.

It hasn’t always been pretty.

There have been tears, down days and numbing out. And there have even been a few moments where I’ve thought, “Seriously?? After all this work, how am I dealing with this?”

The truth is, it’s easy to question the value of the work when life still feels messy. It’s even easier when some of your choices invite judgment from other people.

I’ve also made some choices this year that many people would point to as evidence that the personal development work didn’t work at all.

I get it. I’ve probably judged others the same way too.

The reality is that as humans, we tend to measure growth by conformity.

The assumption is if you’re growing, you should be making the “right” choices. You should be making acceptable choices that everyone understands and that neatly fit into society’s definition of wisdom, maturity or success.

But is that really what growth is about?

The older I get, the more I realize that growth and conformity are not the same thing. I’m not saying they’re mutually exclusive, but they are not always the same.

Sometimes growth means forgiveness and other times it means drawing the line. Sometimes it means giving up and other times it means pushing through. And sometimes growth means choosing the thing that makes absolutely no sense to anyone else, but it’s the most honest thing you can do.

Growth isn’t becoming someone other people approve of. It’s becoming more honest about who you are, what you value, what you need and what you will no longer tolerate.

And honestly, that doesn’t always look wise, in step, aligned or even sane from the outside.

It’s funny to me, but when we’re in our 20s, making choices based on what feels aligned is ok. Somehow it is in our 20s that we have the permission to experiment, figure out who we are and make mistakes.

There is space to figure things out. And many actually do figure things out in their 20s — career, relationships, friendships, health, likes, and self-trust

I’ve always envied those people.

They seem to know who they are, what matters to them and what they’re willing to fight for. More importantly, they trust themselves and they make decisions from that place.

I wasn’t one of those people.

For me, becoming more honest with myself has happened in stages. And maybe that’s because actual growth happens in stages — or maybe it’s because life does.

Every season asks different questions of us. What felt true at twenty isn’t necessarily what feels true at forty or fifty. What we tolerated in one chapter becomes impossible to ignore in the next.

Looking back, I can see that I wasn’t becoming a different person so much as uncovering parts of myself that had been buried for a very long time.

When I was younger I didn’t trust myself enough. If I’m being honest, it has taken me decades to truly trust myself.

It wasn’t so much that I didn’t think my needs mattered or that I couldn’t verbalize what I wanted — I just didn’t trust that others would deliver. And worse yet, I didn’t trust that I could deliver.

So instead of speaking up in a way that was clear and direct, I would rock the boat. I wouldn’t tip it over, but rock it enough so that it wouldn’t capsize.

What I mean by that is that my needs came out sideways. I would verbalize them only to shut down if they became too much. In personal relationships, when people threatened to abandon me, I would retreat.

In work, it meant showing up as a hero and never asking for too much.

The problem with that strategy is that it left my care to others. It left me not trusting myself enough to show up.

It also meant that my sense of peace rose and fell with other people’s responses.

If someone approved of me, I felt steadier. If they withdrew, misunderstood me, or questioned my choices, I questioned everything. My worth wasn’t really mine. It was something I was constantly handing over, hoping someone else would take care of it for me.

And I know I’m not alone in that.

Maybe your version doesn’t look like mine. You might not retreat when someone threatens to leave or make yourself indispensable at work so no one questions your value.

Your strategy might be perfectionism, people-pleasing, overachieving, avoiding conflict, numbing out, or convincing yourself that what you want isn’t really that important anyway.

It doesn’t really matter what form it takes. The reality is that we all find ways to hand someone else the keys to our worth.

The details change, but underneath all of this, the question is the same: Can I trust myself enough to ask for what I need, even if someone else doesn’t like the answer?

I think that’s what so much personal development work is really trying to teach us.

It’s not about becoming fearless, enlightened, endlessly positive people who never struggle again, but about slowly bringing our lives back into our own hands.

For me, that didn’t happen all at once.

It happened in moments that didn’t feel particularly profound at the time.

Sitting in a difficult conversation where every instinct told me to retreat or smooth things over, yet choosing to stay anyway. Saying what I wanted without apologizing for wanting it. Allowing someone to be disappointed without rushing in to fix it, and discovering, little by little, that conflict wasn’t the same thing as abandonment.

If anything, those moments often felt like failure.

They were uncomfortable, messy and full of second-guessing, which is probably why I didn’t recognize them for what they were.

When I look back now, I realize I was measuring personal development by the wrong standard.

If I’m honest, I think I believed there would eventually be a reward for all of the work.

It’s not that I expect to live a perfect life. I know enough about life to know that life isn’t about perfection.

But I did think there would come a day when the woman everyone else experienced and the woman I experienced when I was alone on hard days would be the same person.

The woman who stood on stages, coached leaders, wrote about mindset and encouraged other people to trust themselves would eventually come home, sit on the couch, and feel just as steady without an audience.

Instead, there have still been afternoons when I’d find myself sitting there wondering why the old stories still knew exactly where to find me. Those were hard moments where I wondered if I had even made any progress.

I think I expected life to knock me over less. Or maybe not even that.

I expected that when it did, I’d stand back up with a little more elegance than I sometimes have. I figured there would be fewer afternoons spent crying on the couch, wondering why the old voices had returned, or trying to untangle whether I was seeing something clearly or simply seeing it through old wounds.

Instead, I’ve learned that personal development doesn’t spare us from those afternoons. It simply changes what happens next.

The negative voice still finds me sometimes, fear still knows my address, and I still have days where I question everything and wonder whether I’ve completely lost the plot.

The difference is that I don’t stay there as long.

I don’t automatically assume that because I’m scared, I’m wrong or unreasonable. I recognize that I’m in the middle of something messy, and more often than not, after a night’s sleep, I can return to a place of trust and possibility.

It’s not that I force myself to be positive, but somewhere along the way I learned that possibility has a way of returning when you stop demanding certainty.

Maybe that’s the real gift of personal development.

Personal development doesn’t guarantee that you won’t struggle, but it does teach you how to find your way back to yourself after you do.

When I was younger, I needed everyone else to agree before I trusted my own instincts. Today, I still appreciate other people’s perspectives, but they no longer get the final vote (and sometimes they get no vote at all).

That’s a very different way to live.

So, has all this personal development work been worth it?

Without question, yes.

I still have hard days and I will continue to have hard days. But that’s ok.

If you’re asking yourself the same question I was asking myself—wondering whether any of this personal work is actually making a difference because you’re still struggling—I hope you’ll keep going.

I hope you’ll keep going even if there isn’t some magical finish line where you finally arrive as the healed version of yourself. I don’t think that’s how this works.

I hope you’ll keep going because, almost imperceptibly, your relationship with yourself begins to change. One day you realize you’re no longer looking to everyone else to tell you whether you’re okay. You still seek advice, you still question yourself, but your own voice has become part of the conversation instead of the one that’s always ignored.

You’ll also discover that your life begins to fit you differently.

Your relationships become more honest because you’re more honest. The work feels more meaningful because you’re no longer chasing what you think you’re supposed to want. Even the people who enter your life seem to fit differently—not because you’ve magically manifested them, but because you’ve stopped pretending to be someone you’re not.

None of this happens all at once, which is probably why we rarely notice it while we’re living it.

Life has a funny way of revealing the value of the work long after we’ve done it. The lesson you’re wrestling with today may not make sense until years from now, when another season asks something different of you and you realize you’re answering it in a way you never could have before.

One day you’ll look back and realize you no longer need everyone else’s permission to trust yourself.

And maybe that’s been the point all along.

Linda

P.S. If any of this resonated with you, please share with me what has impacted you. If you now anyone who needs a little encouragement to keep going, please share this article with them. We are not on this Human Journey alone.

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You would think that’s the fun part.

Imagining new possibilities, going beyond what they knew before, dreaming about the future.

You might think they would jump at the chance to start mapping that out.

But they don’t.

In fact, I’ve found visioning to be one of the most challenging parts of coaching. Not because people don’t want a better future, but because they’re often disconnected from what they truly want.

As a shadow coach we were trained to start with vision in the very first session, but after encountering the same pattern I eventually stopped. The visions people created at the beginning of our coaching engagement were usually crowded with fears, obligations, and expectations. And instead of describing a life they were drawn toward, they described a life they thought they were supposed to want.

It became a vision filtered through fear—which isn’t really a vision at all. It’s a compromise.

And compromises rarely inspire meaningful change.

What I realized is that people weren’t resisting vision because they lacked imagination. They were resisting it because vision has consequences.

The moment you get honest about what you want, you begin to see what would have to change. What conversations you’d need to have. What risks you’d need to take. What parts of yourself you’d have to outgrow.

That’s why visioning isn’t exciting for many people.

It’s confronting.

When you write down what you want — literally putting it on paper — the realiaties flood in. People often get overwhelmed by “how” they’re going to get what they want, but more accurately they begin to worry about the implications of having a different vision.

They immediately reflect on what they have to change, what they have to give up, conversations they have to have, comforts they might lose, risks they have to take and identities they have to outgrow.

So, instead of putting it on paper, the thoughts about a different future get shoved to the back of the mind, to be addressed in a different day…which is sometimes never.

The reality is that verbalizing your vision can be threatening to everything your subconscious brain has been working hard to protect since you were young. Many of us have been conditioned to prioritize safety. And while that might mean something different to me and you, as humans we’re wired to prioritizing belonging, safety and stability.

So, that may mean we stay in relationships that provide predictability even if they don’t meet our needs. It might mean staying in a well-paying career, even if every Sunday feels like we’re bracing ourselves for facing another week. We even get attached to the identities we create even is they don’t fully suit us.

I know that being an attorney was part of my identity for nearly 20 years. It was the armor that walked in the room before I did. It gave me credibility, assuredness and even a cool vibe because I could think of myself as a bit of a badass (I even had a friend who affectionately called me “Pitbull” and I loved it).

Stepping outside of that identity felt scary.

As did the identity of wife when I stepped outside of my marriage to my first husband.

It felt scary not because I felt I was afraid that stepping outside of my identity meant failure. It was scary because anything outside of what I knew was disruption of a carefully crafted life I built.

And because disruption inevitably leads to uncertainty, it asked a lot more of me than did my current vision for my life.

The truth is that none of us likes feeling untethered. We don’t like feeling as if everything we’ve thought was important, no longer matters.

And perhaps that’s what makes change so difficult. It isn’t just that we’re leaving something behind. It’s that we’re temporarily losing the thing that helped us make sense of ourselves.

We are meaning-making creatures. We want to know who we are, why we’re here, and whether what we’re doing matters. When an identity, role, relationship, or career begins to fall away, we’re often left staring at questions we’d rather avoid.

It reminds me of something Viktor Frank shared in his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, a book I picked up shortly after my mother’s death from cancer ten years ago.

Frankl believed that human beings can endure extraordinary hardship when they have a reason to endure it. Meaning doesn’t remove struggle, but it does give struggle context.

Perhaps that’s why vision matters so much.

A compelling vision doesn’t make change easier. It doesn’t eliminate uncertainty or guarantee success. What it does is give us a reason to walk willingly into discomfort because something meaningful is waiting on the other side.

But most people struggle with that something compelling enough. Or worse yet, what once did feel compelling enough no longer does…so now what?

There is also another challenge that many of us face.

Sometimes the problem isn’t that we lack purpose. It’s that our purpose has been built almost entirely around other people.

We spend decades caring for children, supporting partners, building businesses, serving clients, tending to parents, or helping those who depend on us. Those roles can be deeply meaningful. But when our identity becomes anchored exclusively in being needed, we can find ourselves untethered when those needs inevitably change.

And that is where many people get stuck—not because they never had purpose, but because they never developed a vision that belonged to them.

I often think about my mother in that context. She was a physician, a caregiver by nature, and someone whose life was centered around helping others. When she retired, she struggled to find a new vision for herself because so much of her identity had been built around serving the people who needed her.

As so when cancer hit, it was perhaps simpler to hand over her vision to the inevitable end that cancer brought. I think about the time I would spend with her during treatments — she would often talk about how even her grandchildren were getting older and no longer needed her in the same way.

Looking back, I don’t think she was simply talking about her grandchildren. I think she was wrestling with a much deeper question:

Who am I when no one needs me quite so much anymore?

Which brings me back to this hesitance we all have with putting vision to paper. Vision for so many simply translates into this idea of how do I continue to have value. How do I earn my space on this earth and what is it that I should be doing with my life?

But that isn’t really what vision is at all.

Vision is about what you want and what inspires you. I often call your vision your anchor because it makes all of the choices in your life incredibly clear. A vision teaches you what is a definite no, and what deserves a yes. It’s literally an anchor because without it, everything seems important, every opportunity feels tempting and everyone gets access to you…which is freaking exhausting.

So why not put your vision on paper?

Here’s the thing. You might still be reading this and want to scream back at me, “But Linda, didn’t you hear me the first time — I have no idea what I want!!! I have no idea what it looks like to even focus on me.”

I hear you.

And also, I’m going to tell you it’s bullshit.

You see, just because it’s not on paper doesn’t mean you actually don’t have a vision. You’ve seen it. It shows up in the quiet whispers and the gentle nudges. It shows up in the wishes you don’t dare tell anyone or discount as stupid or silly.

Your vision is there, you just have to uncover it.

You have to be willing to get a little uncomfortable and recognize that perhaps some things are going to have to change — maybe not all, but some.

I was recently told by a friend that they had spent a decade wishing they could change their life like I did — they wished they could pick up and move countries like I did. But, they said they just couldn’t — they weren’t brave enough to do it.

I smiled and said nothing because the truth is that it had nothing to do with being brave. It had to do with finding a vision so compelling that giving up my comfortable life felt easy. It felt like the only obvious choice.

And maybe that’s what I’ve learned after years of coaching people through change.

Most people don’t struggle because they don’t know how to change. They struggle because they haven’t allowed themselves to acknowledge what they want.

Instead, they stay focused on logistics, timing, risks, and the opinions of others because those things feel more manageable than confronting the truth.

But vision isn’t about creating a perfect plan.

It’s about telling yourself the truth. And it’s about being honest enough to admit what keeps tapping you on the shoulder.

Here is what you get to ask yourself:

—> What keeps showing up in your daydreams.

—> What keeps whispering, “There’s more.”

That’s the thread you can pull on to learn more. And ultimately, by putting that vision on paper, you will be asked to do something more. You might even have to disrupt the life you’ve carefully built or outgrow a version of yourself that has felt safe fora very long time.

But I think that’s the point.

A vision isn’t meant to keep us comfortable.

It’s meant to call us forward.

So if you’ve been avoiding putting your vision on paper, perhaps the question isn’t whether you know what you want.

Perhaps the question is whether you’re ready to admit what you want.

Linda

I was thinking about this when I met this lovely British couple at the airport a while back. Our flight was delayed and we struck up a lovely conversation about their travels in retirement. We were fully in agreement on everything until the gentleman said something about having a few extra pounds he was contending with — but that was a natural part of aging and “just how things were, now.”

I silently nodded, but inside I kept thinking about how many invisible limits we absorb — without ever realizing they’re shaping the lives we believe are available to us.

As a woman, I’ve absorbed all sorts of quiet conclusions about what life is supposedly meant to become with age — that at some point you become less visible, that menopause and exhaustion are simply the price of admission, that weight gain and physical decline are inevitable, that your body slowly betrays you and your best years quietly move behind you.

And it’s not just aging (or things women are told). We inherit ideas about relationships too — that long-term love naturally flattens, that loneliness inside partnership is normal, that emotional disconnection is simply what adulthood looks like after enough years together.

We’re taught that wanting too much is selfish. And that stability matters more than aliveness. We believe self-sacrifice is noble, even when it slowly erodes the self doing the sacrificing. And that numbing is normal. That practicality should outrank curiosity, desire, reinvention, or joy.

All of these socially prescribed pills are swallowed without even a single question.

And eventually, those beliefs stop being observations and start becoming the boundaries of our lives.

But that doesn’t mean people who hold these beliefs are weak or misguided. Most of us absorb them because they’re reinforced everywhere around us — through family, culture, relationships, media, and the quiet ways people adapt to disappointment or limitation over time. Eventually, repeated ideas stop feeling like beliefs at all and start feeling inevitable.

And the truth is that in order to undo the impact of these beliefs we have to understand fully where they came from in the first place.

Most of us grow up absorbing information we didn’t ask to absorb. We grow up watching how people talk about marriage, how women talk about aging, or how men talk about responsibility. We observe how people abandon themselves, settle while calling it maturity and slowly wither into a rhythm that they make excuses for — explaining why nothing is different.

And once we’re done absorbing all this — we then internalize the information.

While on the surface that may not feel like a big deal, these “truths” we hold become limitations and barriers for how we live our lives.

Take the lovely British couple I met. In our entire 20-minute conversation, they mentioned no fewer than three constraints that are simply a natural part of aging. They didn’t question them or do anything about them. They merely accepted there was a new constraint in their life.

Life had presented them with a new limitation and they weren’t going to challenge it.

Most of us live that way.

We simply figure, that’s the way it is and become resigned. And here’s the tricky part - life doesn’t immediately become different. It’s not visibly worse so we figure the limitation isn’t so bad.

But over time, those quiet resignations begin shaping the entire architecture of a life.

Not suddently, but moment-by-moment.

You stop reaching for certain things because somewhere along the way you quietly concluded they were no longer available to you.

Certain parts of ourselves slowly go untouched because we’ve internalized the idea that this is simply what adulthood or aging or long-term partnership looks like. We begin tolerating levels of disconnection that once would have felt unbearable and stop exploring possibilities that once would have felt exciting because somewhere along the way they started to seem unrealistic, irresponsible, or no longer available to “someone like us.”

And perhaps the strangest part is that none of this feels dramatic while it’s happening. Life still functions. There are still responsibilities, routines, dinners, vacations, laughs with friends. It feels almost silly to complain or worry about limitations — which is exactly why these shifts are so easy to miss.

But here’s the thing, eventually the little things add up.

You notice life simply doesn’t feel like it used to. Your moods become more erratic and your desire to do new things fades away.

For some people, that contraction simply becomes the emotional backdrop of their lives — a low-grade dissatisfaction they can never quite explain, a persistent feeling of being disconnected from themselves without understanding exactly when it happened.

For others, the distance between the life they’re living and the life they secretly ache for becomes too large to ignore and eventually arrives as a breakdown, an affair, a health crisis, depression, resentment, grief, or the terrifying realization that years have gone by while they were busy convincing themselves they were “fine.”

And what strikes me is that many of these moments are often treated as though they appear out of nowhere, when in reality they are usually the accumulation of years spent unconsciously accepting limitations that were never fully examined in the first place.

At some point, though, many of us do begin questioning them.

Sometimes it happens after heartbreak or betrayal. Sometimes through illness, loss, aging, divorce, burnout, or watching someone else live with a kind of aliveness we quietly envy. Other times it’s triggered by moving countries, falling in love, losing someone we thought would always be there, or simply waking up one morning with the unsettling awareness that our life looks acceptable on paper but no longer feels fully inhabited from the inside.

And once that questioning begins, it becomes very difficult to unsee how many things we’ve mistaken for inevitabilities.

We start realizing that many of the “truths” we accepted were often just inherited coping mechanisms passed from one exhausted generation to the next.

It was our Mothers convincing themselves they no longer wanted things because wanting felt too risky. Our grandparents calling resignation maturity because they didn’t know how to pursue aliveness anymore. Or our fathers adapting to disconnection so thoroughly that they stopped recognizing it as disconnection at all.

None of this means life is endlessly controllable or that aging isn’t real or that relationships don’t require work. The reality is there are many truths that existthat we can’t deny. Bodies do change. Loss happens to everyone. Long-term partnership asks things of us that they didn’t early on.

I don’t want to pretend that reality doesn’t exist. But there is a real difference between accepting reality and unconsciously surrendering to limitations that may never have been true to begin with.

I think that distinction matters more than most people realize.

Because the moment we stop assuming that exhaustion, numbness, disconnection, shrinking desire, emotional flatness, or even midlife weight gain are simply “what happens” is often the exact moment life begins opening again.

In my experience, curiosity returns first. You begin to ask one simple question: “Is this true?”

“Is this even true and does it really have to be this way?”

Then comes possibility. If it really doesn’t have to be this way, what else may exist here? What might I want? What is a different solution that can give me a outcome.

Then comes the dangerous and beautiful realization that perhaps there are still entire parts of ourselves we have not met yet — even now, and even after all the years we’ve already lived.

And maybe that’s the deeper tragedy of the stories we absorb without question. It’s not simply that they limit us, but that they convince us our lives have already become smaller than they actually are.

Which brings me back to that moment in the airport.

Sitting beside that lovely couple, listening to this man speak so matter-of-factly about limitation as though it were an unavoidable contract he had signed simply by growing older, I remember thinking very clearly that I don’t want to unconsciously do that to myself.

I don’t want to absorb conclusions about aging, relationships, money, work, reinvention, or what is possible at this stage of my life without first examining whether they are actually mine.

Because the conclusions we absorb about life rarely announce themselves loudly. They arrive through repetition until one day we find ourselves speaking about our lives with the same resignation we once heard in other people.

Maybe the real work is noticing when we are confusing adaptation with truth and becoming willing to question the limitations we have accepted before they become part of our identity.

I know I want to become more aware of the places where I do this to myself. Not because I believe life should be free of hardship or limitation, but because I want to be certain the boundaries of my life belong to me and not simply to a story I inherited from someone else.

Linda

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As my dear friend Nancy Levin always says, when you share, share from the scar, not the wound. We don’t want to process all our yuck on others.

I take that seriously.

But today, I’m writing about something I haven’t fully processed because it’s a fork in the road moment that many of us face — and I want to talk about how I’m dealing with it real time. Not because my way of dealing with things is superior — because it’s real.

And if This Human Journey is about anything — it’s about sharing the real messiness of life in a way we often don’t talk about. It’s stripping away the polished veneer we show online and dig deeper and show that sometimes the process of how we get to the other side is equally important.

So…here we go.

There are bad people. And I forget that.

I had to learn that the hard way this past week after I discovered that someone who had access to my apartment here in Lisbon stole all my important jewelry. They broke into a safe, they stole from my jewelry box and did it with me giving them access. To be honest, I’m not sure exactly who did it, but it was someone who had access because my apartment wasn’t actually broken into.

And let me tell you, that is painful.

It’s one thing to experience the betrayal of someone in your home that you trusted. It’s entirely worse when you know you allowed them in.

The word that keeps coming up from anyone who has been in my shoes before is violation. It’s a violation — of trust, security, and my kindness.

I also feel a tremendous amount of sadness because the things that were taken can’t be replaced. They were more than just things – they held precious memories and included pieces that were from my mother. And while I can keep them in my memories — something about being able to touch them connected me to those places, people and moments in such a profound way.

So, to be honest, I’m angry. And scared. I no longer feel the same in my home. I also don’t dare give out my keys to anyone (yes, I’ve changed my locks).

I have instantly become more guarded.

Being guarded is a natural byproduct from an event like this. But the thing that nobody really talks about after something like this happens is what will this do to the way I view the world — and people?

Moments like this create a fork in the road.

You can become more closed, suspicious and hardened. I know plenty of people who have used events like this shut the door to others. And you can’t blame them.

You can start seeing danger everywhere and questioning everyone’s intentions.

Or…you can allow the experience to make you wiser without letting it make you fearful.

That’s the part I’m trying to navigate right now.

The good news is that I’m used to processing events like this through the lens of learning, opportunity and possibility. My years of coaching and doing my own work have given me that.

But also, I don’t want to skip over the anger and frustration I feel right now. I don’t want to make this positive.

And that’s ok.

I think as humans we don’t give enough space to feeling. We want everything to be ok and move forward. Sometimes that’s possible. And sometimes, you have to be pissed off.

Like anyone in my situation, I’ve replayed the scenarios wondering who could have done this. I think about someone actually being in my home and going through my things. I feel upset that the police didn’t take any real action in this case and that it took three days to get them to fingerprint my apartment. I struggle with the fact that the criminal justice system in a foreign country doesn’t move with the preciseness of my own.

And I wonder if people I’ve trusted for three years could really do this to me.

But the worst part is that I’m probably never going to know who did this. There is no finality.

There is a violation without a conclusion.

That part is more than frustrating because ambiguity is what can lead to becoming more guarded. At least if I knew what happened, I could create a story around the why.

Ambiguity does something strange to us.

When there’s no conclusion, no confession, no certainty, the mind keeps searching for resolution. It replays conversations, looks for clues and revisits moments that once felt innocent and now feel loaded.

If you’re not careful, that uncertainty can quietly turn into suspicion toward everyone. The empty narrative can lead you to believe that bad people exist everywhere.

The truth is there are bad people.

And.

My years as a criminal defense attorney taught me that people do bad things. They do stupid things. And they do desperate things, as well.

The one question I was always asked when I was a lawyer was, “how could you represent people who you knew were guilty.” It was hard to explain that the truth was more nuanced than guilt or innocence.

And the reason people did what they did was also a little bit more complicated than simply beeing greedy, evil or bad.

Look, I wonder how anyone who had real conversations with me could actually sleep at night after violating my trust, but also…I have to make space for the truth that maybe I don’t know everything.

So, I sit here trying to make peace with what has happened to me. And I’m giving myself the space to honor my feelings without making it ok for others. You see some of the people who did have access to my home are worried about the impact this could have on them. They worry about a police investigation.

I get it.

But also, I am not trying to make it ok for them.

I’ve changed my locks, I’ve limited access to me, I’ve bought a video camera for my home and I’m taking precautions.

Most importantly, I’m trusting my intuition. That last piece is critical.

I’m trusting that I’m not ready for certain interactions or allowing people to have keys to my home. I’m being kind to others, but I’m also being kind to myself.

If it’s not feeling right for me — it’s a no, even if I don’t have facts or logic to support it. And to me, that’s the most important outcome from this.

If I can still trust myself, then I will be ok in the future. I truly believe that.

Maybe that’s the real lesson I’m trying to hold onto right now.

Not that people are all good. And not that people are all bad either.

The real lesson is that life will eventually hand all of us experiences that tempt us to shut down and become more fearful, suspicious and disconnected from one another.

And while I don’t get to control what happened to me, I do get to decide what happens next inside of me.

I will be more careful now — more discerning. I’ll be more protective of my space, my energy and my trust.

But I refuse to believe that one painful experience should become the lens through which I see humanity. Despite everything, I still believe there are good people everywhere too.

I’ve seen it. I live it every single day.

I’m just no longer naïve enough to believe that’s the whole story.

Linda

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P.S. If you haven’t read my article about Good People Everywhere, you can find it here.

As you open your eyes, you find yourself thinking about your life. Like a movie playing out, your mind quietly reviews the different aspects and your thoughts go somewhere you didn’t expect.

You’ve reached that point you thought about when you were young – that time of your life where you imagined things were going to be easy, settled.

Your career is humming, your kids are thriving (or at least battling the normal rites of passage of growing up), your relationship is solid and you feel comfortable in your own skin. Everything you’ve fought hard to achieve is right in front of you.

You think about your younger self for a moment and recall thinking, “When I hit that point, I’ll finally be happy. I will finally feel great.”

And that is when it hits you. Something feels off. Not dramatically off, but just enough that you can’t ignore it. It feels like a life you built… but not one that fully fits.

You feel guilty because other people would be grateful for this. Your partner seems content, as does everyone else around you.

So, you shove the thoughts down or at least wonder, what is this? Why am I having these thoughts? What is wrong with me that I can’t take this all in?

I can remember the first time these thoughts hit me, lying in bed, not quite understanding what had shifted. I was in my mid-thirties living a full life as a mom, wife and rising star in my law firm. My life sounded cool, but I felt like a fraud — showing up put together on the outside, but silently suffering because I wanted to enjoy my life in its current state.

Like most people, I didn’t want to explore my own thoughts because they felt threatening. In fact, I treated them like uninvited intruders sent to disrupt something that was otherwise working — so instead of giving space to my doubts, I pushed back against them and wondered why I couldn’t just be happy like everyone else.

And the truth is, I didn’t trust the reliability of my own thoughts. I had shifted paths before, felt certain about things that later unraveled, and learned how quickly conviction could turn into something else. So when that feeling surfaced, I didn’t see it as something to understand. I saw it as something to question.

I didn’t know if it was insight or just another phase, another restless moment that would pass if I didn’t give it too much attention. And if it was just a phase, then the smartest thing to do was nothing at all—to let it move through without disrupting anything that was already working.

So I did what most people do, even if they don’t say it out loud. I got out of bed, stepped back into my life, and let the rhythm of the day take over. I pushed the thoughts aside, not forcefully, but deliberately enough that they lost their edge, and I leaned further into the version of my life that, by all accounts, should have been enough.

And for a while, that worked.

The truth is, so many people live their lives like this every single day — a good life, but not a fully aligned one. A life that, by all external measures, makes sense, but leaves you with the subtle feeling that you are standing slightly outside of it. It’s not dramatic, and it doesn’t interfere with your ability to function, but there is a quiet disconnection that shows up in the spaces in between, in the moments when nothing is demanding your attention and you can’t quite avoid yourself.

And the reason that happens is that most people are driven more by the thoughts that pass through their mind each day than by any deeper sense of knowing within themselves. Thoughts that sound reasonable and keep things stable — they remind you of what you have, what you should appreciate, and what you shouldn’t risk. Which, in reality, is entirely reasonable. So you organize your life around them.

Because it feels responsible to do so. It feels grounded and aligned with the version of yourself you’ve come to trust. But at the same time, you begin to override the quieter signals, the ones that don’t come with clear language or immediate justification, and instead lean into what can be explained, defended, and understood.

But something subtle begins to happen when you live that way.

You don’t fall apart or make dramatic mistakes. You continue to build a life that works, and in many moments, works well. You still experience joy. You still have times where you look around and think, this is good, this is what I wanted. From the outside, nothing appears off.

Underneath it, something else begins to take shape.

That quiet voice you once brushed aside doesn’t disappear. It lingers and returns in small, almost forgettable moments. And over time, it becomes harder to ignore—not because your life is falling apart, but because some part of you keeps noticing that, even in the middle of a life that works, something still doesn’t fully land.

In my own life, ignoring it didn’t make it go away. It just delayed it.

Because what begins as a quiet awareness doesn’t stay quiet forever. When your thoughts aren’t given space, they doesn’t resolve — they wait. And by the time they demand to be heard, they rarely arrive in a way that feels thoughtful or contained. In my case, my doubts didn’t lead to a gentle shift or a considered change. They led to an unraveling I could no longer control.

And I often wonder what might have been different if I had trusted that initial moment enough to stay with it, before it required something much bigger to get my attention.

What makes this even more complicated is that the very thing that could reconnect you to yourself is the thing you’ve learned not to trust.

That initial thought, that subtle pull that something isn’t quite lining up, becomes something you question rather than something you stay with long enough to understand.

And the longer that pattern continues, the harder it becomes to tell the difference between a passing thought and something worth paying attention to. Everything begins to blur together, and self-trust slowly erodes, not because you made the wrong decisions, but because you stopped allowing yourself to fully hear what was there in the first place.

So the question isn’t whether you should want more, or whether something is wrong with you for feeling the way you do. The question is whether you are willing to stay with that initial moment just a little longer than you’re used to, without immediately trying to fix it, explain it, or push it away.

Because what if that quiet thought you’ve been so quick to dismiss isn’t a disruption at all, but a signal that something within you is trying to come into alignment in a way it hasn’t before?

And that’s the part no one really talks about—this isn’t just about wanting more. It’s about what happens when you don’t listen early, and what it eventually costs you when you wait too long.

Because the shift from good to great doesn’t come from finding something better out there. It comes from being willing to pay attention to what’s already happening within you, even when it doesn’t make immediate sense.

It’s not that people don’t have the opportunity for more. It’s that they’ve become so practiced at overriding themselves that they no longer recognize the moments that could lead them there. They’ve become so good at maintaining a life that works that they stop listening to the part of themselves that knows when something no longer fits.

And the truth is, great doesn’t usually arrive as a clear plan or a fully formed next step. It starts as something much less convenient. A thought you can’t quite explain. A pull that doesn’t feel practical. A quiet awareness that something is asking for your attention before you’re ready to give it.

The question isn’t whether you should act on it immediately. It’s whether you’re willing to stop dismissing it so quickly.

Because the difference between a life that is good and one that actually feels like your own isn’t always found in what you change. It’s found in whether you trust yourself enough to stay with what you notice… long enough for it to show you what comes next.

Linda

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This Human Journey is a space for the thoughts we don’t often say out loud—the ones that sit just beneath the surface of our lives. The quiet questions, the subtle tensions, the messy, in-between moments we move past too quickly. It’s where we slow down long enough to notice what’s actually there.

My son has an incredible devotion to his craft. He writes every single day. He works on improving his craft and isn’t afraid to reach out to people who can guide him.

And still there are days when he wonders if what he’s doing is the right thing. He sees friends who are already in career jobs — working for a bank, going to law school or pursuing more lucrative paths. They seem to be thriving he tells himself and openly to me, he wonders if he is falling behind.

It’s that last part that always gets me.

He’s only 24 and believes he’s falling behind. I always ask, “Behind what? Whose timeline are you following?”

The truth is that feeling behind is a very human. And I’ve been noticing it everywhere lately — including in myself.

Feeling behind carries with it this quiet pressure of thinking “I should be somewhere by now”. It’s not a loud panic, but it’s more of a low-grade, persistent measuring stick that we hold ourselves against. Hearing it out of my son’s mouth felt surprising because he’s still so young, but the truth is that the feeling of I need to berurther along shows up across ages.

I almost wrote that it shows up across cultures, but I do feel it is a more Western phenomenon — and maybe even more specifically American. Although I do see some form of measurement here in Europe as well.

It’s a pervasive judgment that shows up not as ambition, but rather as evaluation.

It’s the inner monologue in your head that looks at the various areas of your life and judges. Sometimes I picture it like we’ve been handed an actual measuring stick for life. Each stage is marked of with where we should be at every age — school, career, relationships, friend, marriage, kids, money. And without really thinking about it, we lay down our lives next to it and see where we fall short.

Where did we miss the mark? Where did we think we should be further along?

And then we let that measurement tell us something about who we are. If we’ve hit our targets, we are valuable and happy. If we’re not on track then we’re behind — and not as valuable as we hoped we would be.

For some hitting those targets works, for others it simply means checking off boxes in the life you think you’re supposed to build. I can remember being 34 and having hit most of the markers I had set for myself. I was married, had two kids and was working successfully as an attorney in Chicago. I looked at the measuring stick and hit every target — and by all accounts should have been happy.

I wasn’t. I felt empty.

I hear this from a lot of people who build lives they’re supposed to be building. People who are told if they do x,y,z, life will reward them. They check marks off the measuring stick the same way our parents logged our height on a doorway growing up.

They are meant to mean we’re advancing on this journey of life.

But over time, those markings don’t just guide us—they start to define what we think we value. When in reality, they’re just the standards we use to measure ourselves.

Our values turn into our life scorecards.

For example we might say we value success, growth, nurturing relationships — so we go out and pursue those things. Instead of simply allowing those values to guide our direction, they turn on us and become a means to judge how we’re actually doing.

And that’s where this dangerous thinking of falling behind thrives. Because hidden behind that are all our fears and limiting beliefs that expose how much we think we can achieve, deserve and ultimately — are worth.

I call it dangerous becaue when we feel the presure of not being where we want to be we do stupid things. We do things that lead us off our own path and toward a life of shoulds.

I think that is why so many people wake up mid-life wondering whose life they’ve created anyway — I know that was true for me. at’or even a “right” way to live life, I forced things. I forced myself into a career, a first marriage and even friendships that matched the values I set.

I’m not embarrassed about any of that. And to be honest, I’m not sure I would do anything differently than I had back then because living my life that way taught me that the shoulds of life are actually not real.

There is no real arrival point. There is no path that guarantees happiness, success, support, love or anything else you’re hoping to achieve. And that’s maybe a good thing.

So, when I was talking to my son about him feeling behind, I realized that the best thing I could do was help him reframe his thinking. Instead of trying to soothe him and tell him that everyone was on a different path, I could remind him to check the actual map and ask himself, “is this actually mine?”

Is this the direction I want to go?

I told him he could always go to med school, law school and what not — but that would mean he would have to give up on the journey he was currently on. And he immediately knew that wasn’t what he wanted. He realized that the measuring stick he was looking at wasn’t his. It made it instantly easier to stay the course he was on.

I think the part that has taken me the longest to understand is that there’s a difference between living your life and constantly evaluating it.

They can look almost identical from the outside. You can be doing all the right things, making thoughtful decisions, moving forward in ways that make sense — but internally, the experience is completely different.

One is grounded. It allows for movement, for change, and for uncertainty. It lets you respond to what’s actually in front of you.

The other is always watching. Always measuring. Quietly asking, “Is this enough? Am I enough? Should I be further along than this?”

Or worse yet — “Am I failing?”

And the hardest part is that most of us don’t even realize we’ve crossed over. We think we’re living, but we’re actually tracking, comparing, assessing every step along the way.

I know I’ve done that. I know I still do it at times.

But the moments that have felt the most honest, the most aligned, haven’t come from getting closer to some imagined mark. They’ve come from stepping out of that constant evaluation, even briefly, and just allowing myself to be where I am.

Not ahead, not behind, not aligned with someone else’s picture of what my life should look like – just here.

And maybe that’s the real shift.

Not figuring out how to get further along the measuring stick.

But noticing when you’ve picked it up—and asking, was this mine in the first place?

Linda

This Human Journey is a space for exploring the thoughts we carry, the patterns we repeat, and the quiet truths we don’t always say out loud. It’s where I write about life as it’s actually lived — messy, meaningful, and constantly unfolding.

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Not the kind you fight back. The kind that take over before you can make sense of them.

What had just happened on that call hit me harder than anything difficult I’ve experienced this year.

Not because it was harsh. Because it was kind. So very kind.

The kind of kindness that doesn’t ask for anything back — the kind I’m not sure I know how to receive.

You see, I had just finished a networking call with one of the more interesting people I have met on my networking journey. A man who grew up without a lot — he was one of 12 children who found success by reading books and contacting the authors to mentor him.

I had been introduced to him through an incredible networking community I had joined earlier this year and during the call it felt like we aligned on core business philosophies and approaches. At some point, he asked me how he could help and I explained my wish to make a bigger impact at this point in my career.

His next sentence is what blew me away because most people in his position might simply say I can connect you with a few people and be on their way, but instead he said, “I’d like to connect you with some people, but what I would really like to do is continue this conversation and really talk about how we connect you to the people who need you.”

He was giving me the most valuable thing in the world - time. And I knew it.

My immediate instinct was to ask, what can I do for you? How can I give back to you? I don’t often find myself in this position.

It made me think about what my new friend Nicholas Banting asked me before I joined the networking group that got me here — “How do you feel about receiving support without giving back immediately?”

How do I feel?

Well, in that moment I felt all of those negative beliefs we hold about ourselves bubbling to the surface.

This is rude.
This is undeserved.
This is selfish.
This is too much.

And that’s when the tears came.

It was as if his kindness was a mistake.

I immediately thought I must pay this forward. This is beautiful. I must do that for someone else. It was as if I had disregarded how often I actually had already been that person. And as Nicholas’ question came back into my present memory, I realized that I had built a life where I am comfortable being the one who gives.

I like being the one who shows up and offers value. It makes me feel good.

But being the one to receive it — without earning it, matching or immediately returning it — that felt unfamiliar at best, threatening at worst.

And the more I started to share this story with others I realized how many of us are comfortable with giving, but haven’t yet learned how important it is to receive.

We get used to giving and often think nothing of it, but to receive brings to light how much we feel we deserve in this world. So, as I sat in this moment, I had to think about what had changed so that I could actually sit with this feeling without acting in return.

I was immediately guided back to my word of the year.

Each year I select a word to support me through my journey and help me stay focused on the goals I want to achieve. This year, my word of the year is “chosen”. It is a word that reminds me that I’m already chosen, picked, loved, and wanted. I don’t have to DO anything to become chosen — I am already there.

I chose this word equally as much for the feelings being chosen generates, but also as a reminder of how differently we show up when we know we’re chosen. Rather than give into fear, people pleasing or compromise, chosen reminds you to stay true to who you are and what you want.

Chosen also reminded me to stop hiding and stop waiting. It allowed me to start reaching out to people and walk into rooms I hadn’t been willing to enter before — for fear of not belonging or even being rejected.

I realized in that moment that chosen also meant that you allow yourself to be met where you are — even if that’s not where you want to be. And maybe that is what had changed — and why I was suddenly seeing kindness everywhere.

Like so many people I know lately, this year has presented me with numerous growth opportunities (I like seeing them this way, rather than challenges) and the way people have shown up keeps reminding me that good people are literally everywhere — we simply have to remember to see them.

Noticing how many people simply want to help, connect or support made me realize that maybe I’ve missed kindness that has come my way — not because it wasn’t there, but because I didn’t know how to let it in.

And as I sat with that, it occurred to me that maybe this isn’t just about me.

Maybe a lot of us have learned how to give in ways that feel safe…but never learned how vulnerable it is to receive.

The truth is most of us feel more comfortable in relationships where we give.

It’s risky to receive because receiving ultimately, receiving removes control and worse yet — it exposes what we believe we’re worth.

Chances are if you struggle with receiving kindness, you likely also struggle to fully stand in your own worth. Others may see it, but you don’t — so you continue to give rather than dare put yourself in the position where someone has to give back.

Unlike giving, receiving asks you to sit still — it will challenge everything you know about how you bring value to others. Receiving asks you to let go of proving yourself, performing and not give anything back. And it is in that space that you come face-to-face with what you believe you deserve.

It really is fascinating much receiving kindness can expose — even for me who has spent so much time working on my self-worth, what I recently realized is that there still lingered some doubt that taking wouldn’t cost me something. That it wouldn’t be seen as needy or selfish.

I was surprised to still see that there. But also, leaning into my word of the year — chosen — I could suddenly see that I could perhaps lean into receiving in a different way and adopt a new perspective.

You see, receiving requires trust and it requires something that our society doesn’t talk enough about — interdependence. Rather than going it alone, interdependence asks that you understand that together we go farther. In fact, during the conversation with the incredible man I mentioned at the beginning of the story, we talked about interdependence.

Giving and receiving allows for that interdependence. And the more we can learn to sit in the stillness of what is given to us, the more we can honestly give to others — without using giving to value ourselves.

And the funny thing, it made me appreciate my word of the year even more.

I thought “chosen” meant putting myself out there more — networking, reaching out and avoiding rooms I had been avoiding. I didn’t realize that it would also mean allowing myself to be chosen — in unexpected ways.

Chosen allows you to be met, supported and yes, to receive — without proving, earning or giving back.

That is the challenge — and I’m still in it.

Because what the offer of kindness that came from that Zoom call wasn’t just the gift of time, it was an opportunity to sit with something I would normally rush past.

And the more I think about it, the more I realize… that’s the ripple.

Not just in what he offered me — but in what I choose to do with it.

Not by immediately giving something back to him, but by allowing myself to fully receive it. And then, from that place, showing up differently for someone else.

Maybe that’s how this actually works.

Someone offers you something real — their time, their attention, their care — and instead of turning it into a transaction, you let it change you.

And somewhere down the line, without forcing it, you become that moment for someone else.

Linda

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On any given day when presented with life’s challenges, I tend to think about the worst happening and then find myself ruminating.

It’s not enough to think about how bad things might get. I play out scenes in my head and then scan my environment, looking for evidence that my worst fears have merit. I try to predict how I might handle “the worst” or ways that I can prevent the bad from happening. This can go on for minutes and maybe even days (on and off).

That’s not the easiest thing to admit in such a public place. But I can share it now because I’ve learned to hold those worries differently than I once did. They still visit me, but they no longer run the entire show.

I often joke that part of it comes from being Eastern European. I grew up with parents who believed the best way to stay safe was to be prepared for bad things to happen. Expect the worst, and you won’t be surprised.

For a long time, I assumed that was just the way my mind worked. Sometimes I even wondered if I was the only one who thought this way—especially since I tend to surround myself with people who have an almost Pollyanna outlook on life.

I love those people. They bring out the naturally optimistic side of me. But, at the same time, I start to wonder if they’re just hiding something deep down or in fact, there is something wrong with the way I think (see, there’s the Eastern European wiring!!).

For years, I liked to say I was realistic. But after doing my personal work, I realized that what I thought was simply worrying might actually be something deeper. Many of us who experienced instability early in life become experts at surviving hard things. We learn to anticipate problems, brace for disappointment, and prepare ourselves for loss. Those skills serve us well in difficult seasons. But they don’t always teach us how to live inside good ones.

Recently, I had a conversation with a friend of mine who shared that for too much of her life she’s simply been surviving and has no real concept of what it means to be thriving.

That hit me.

Certainly, life can deal some hefty blows at times, but did that mean you get through life by clinging on for dear life?

I know I’ve shared this quote from Shakti Gawain before, but it’s always return to it when I find myself pondering how most people live their entire lives. In her book, Creative Visualizations, she shares:

“Let us imagine that life is a river. Most people are clinging to the bank, afraid to let go and risk being carried along by the current... At a certain point, each of us must be willing to simply let go and trust the river to carry us along safely. At this point, we learn to “go with the flow” — and it feels wonderful.”

That image has stayed with me for years. Because when you’ve spent much of your life preparing for what might go wrong, letting go doesn’t necessarily feel freeing—it feels risky.

Survival teaches you to grip the banks of the river tightly. It tells you to stay alert and to anticipate the next challenge — just to stay safe.

But at some point in life, many of us begin to wonder whether holding on so tightly is the only way to live.

I often think adult life is about unlearning the coping strategies you used to stay safe as a child. In other words, what worked then is the exact thing that is holding you back from having a great life now.

But for those of us who grew up around instability, trauma or uncertainty, that can feel impossible. And it doesn’t have to be Capital T trauma or Big I instability. If you lived in a household where you were told anything could go wrong at any given time, had parents whose behaviors were unpredictable or even experienced financial instability, chances are you learned to be vigilant early.

The lesson was simple: anticipate bad things and you won’t be blindsided by it.

That skill is incredibly valuable in hard environments. But it does something subtle to the way we live later.

As my friend and I discussed, many of us get adept at getting through hard things, solving problems quickly, leaving bad situations, being responsible and pushing forward when others collapse — it can even look like mad optimism when the chips are down.

But that skill doesn’t translate when you’re living in good seasons. And this is where the concept of surviving versus thriving really comes into play.

Interestingly, this pattern isn’t just something many of us notice in our own lives. Psychologists have spent decades studying why some people come to expect the worst while others naturally believe that good things will continue. One of the pioneers in this area is Martin Seligman, whose research on learned helplessness offers a fascinating explanation for why so many capable, resilient people still struggle to believe life can actually get better.

In his early experiments, Seligman discovered something remarkable. When individuals repeatedly experienced situations where they had no control over the outcome, they eventually stopped trying to change it—even when escape later became possible. The mind had learned that effort didn’t matter.

He also discovered that many of us are wired to have negative explanatory patterns for good and bad outcomes — and the difference between our explanatory patterns can make a difference between a life well lived and one that leaves you clinging to the side of the river bank.

People who possess a pessimistic explanatory pattern often believe that bad things are personal, permanent and pervasive. They also believe that good things are temporary, fragile and a matter of good luck. So, even when life improves, the nervous system stays in that survival, prepared-for-loss mode.

People who feel this way tend to expect the other shoe to drop, minimize their successes, feel suspicious when life gets calm, trust problems more than peace, self-sabotage when things are good and create urgency — even when there is none.

Conversely, people with an optimistic explanatory style tend to think bad things happen because of outside, uncontrollable circumstances, while good things are a result of their own characteristics or work! They expect good things to keep happening to them, and so too will work to achieve them.

Now, if you’re reading this and feel yourself leaning toward a pessimistic explanatory style, don’t fret (even if that’s your nature). There is nothing wrong with you and in fact, those with pessimistic explanatory styles are incredibly important to normal functioning (think accountants, lawyers, doctors). It only points out why survival has become a habitual way of life for you.

And the good news is that you can change your explanatory style and your outlook.

But it does require a clearer understanding of what thriving actually looks like.

Thriving is not endless happiness and sunny days. It’s actually something simpler. Thriving means waking up each day without bracing for what’s next. It’s about allowing yourself to fully experience joy — without waiting for it to disappear or be cut off.

Thriving means allowing stability, peace and self-worth (even when the world around you isn’t always reflecting that back to you). It means setting boundaries without fear leading the way, and letting go of preparing for the worst.

For many people, that level of calm actually feels unfamiliar at first — almost suspicious. But, it does change the narrative of your life and ultimately, how you feel.

So the real question becomes: how do you do it? How do you shift from surviving into thriving? Especially when your life might look like you should be thriving from the outside.

It might be tempting to simply shove down each of your negative thoughts and force positivity into your life. But, after coaching thousands of people, I’ve learned that positive thinking is often temporary. It’s nice to feel momentarily, but underneath the surface — lying quietly in your subconscious operating system — your pessimistic explanatory style is simply waiting to show up and prove your positive thinking wrong.

Instead, it begins by slowly increasing your capacity to hold good things.

I often say that awareness is one of the most powerful tools of change. So, when you notice yourself bracing or beginning your negative internal narrative, allow yourself to breathe. You don’t have to change anything, but you can just be with your emotions without becoming your emotions.

The next important piece is giving yourself more credit. When good things happen, own it. Own your genius, your hard work and your input. It can be so easy to dismiss the good things — as if that was expected of you to achieve, but giving yourself credit reminds you that you have ultimate control over your life.

It also calls for you to embrace good things without questioning it or experiencing what vulnerability researcher and author, Brene Brown calls foreboding joy. Let something just BE good for a moment.

And when something negative happens, it’s important to not go negative on yourself. I’m not telling you to go blaming everyone else for everything because I believe learning the lessons from your past is crucial for living a powerful life — BUT, I am saying that you allow for the option to see how things outside of yourself may have been a factor. It helps you get back up and fight another day.

The truth is thriving can be learned. But it’s not dramatic and swinging the pendulum all the way to the other side. Thriving actually demands quiet. It demands acceptance. And it demands being in the flow and trusting as Shakti Gawain points out in her quote.

In fact, every time I return to that quote, my worrier softens just a bit. It allows me to let go of the over-controlling nature of surviving.

Some of us spent years learning how to hold on tightly. It kept us safe. It made us strong. It helped us get through.

But thriving asks something different of us.

It asks us to loosen our grip on the riverbank and trust that life might hold more for us than we’ve been prepared to believe.

And that is where the magic of being on this human journey really begins.

The worrier in me may never disappear completely .But these days she doesn’t grip the riverbank quite as tightly anymore.

Linda

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What I didn’t want to do was get political.

I’m not afraid of taking a stand or sharing my opinion — God knows if you’ve hung out with me in person, I can be pretty damn direct. And because I was a criminal defense attorney in my former life, I have always known that the truth has many different lenses and perspectives. What I see is definitely not what someone else sees — no matter how much I believe in my truth.

But given what has been happening in the US lately, I feel like I wanted to share something for all of us to think about — it isn’t political, but it is human.

The truth is it feels stranger to ignore what’s happening than to risk saying the wrong thing and get into a war of words.

What actually drove me to write this was the fact that I stumbled upon a post of a person I’m connected with on social media that claimed that ICE struggles only struggle in states that see tons of fraud. There was a lot of agreement from their followers and it dawned on me that I hadn’t really gone into the fraud allegations happening in Minnesota as the justification for increased ICE activity — and I started to think I wasn’t alone.

What I learned from my review was this.

The story that ignited the latest outrage in Minnesota does not begin with some vast, coordinated immigrant conspiracy. It begins with an American woman and a Somali man, and with allegations of fraud tied to government programs — allegations that are still exactly that: allegations.

Not proven facts and not verdicts.

And even if those allegations are ultimately substantiated (along with the other allegations of further fraud), I’ll be super honest — there is nothing novel about them. And there is nothing inherently tied to immigration or immigrants.

Fraud in government programs is not new. It never has been.

In my 17 years as a criminal defense attorney, I saw this pattern repeatedly — Medicaid fraud, food stamp fraud, mortgage fraud, bank fraud, misuse of support funds — the list goes on and on. Any system that distributes large sums of money will attract people who try to exploit it. That reality isn’t political, it’s structural. It’s also human and predictable.

None of that excuses wrongdoing — it never does. And none of it is shocking.

What is striking is how quickly these allegations were transformed into something else entirely — a justification, a symbol, a shorthand explanation for actions and responses that reach far beyond the facts of the case itself.

That leap — from allegation to moral certainty — is where things begin to unravel.

What that unraveling looks like, in real time, is this: once an allegation hardens into certainty, curiosity disappears.

Questions stop being asked and distinctions blur. Instead of holding complexity, we reach for something much simpler — blame.

I understand the impulse. It’s only human — we want a reason, an explanation and a cause. We want to believe that if those people hadn’t done that thing, none of this would be happening and somehow our lives would feel less heavy, or at the very least — be more financially secure.

Certainty feels grounding in moments of fear. It gives us something solid to stand on when everything else feels unstable.

But certainty is also what creates distance.

What gets lost almost immediately is proximity — the actual, lived closeness that makes nuance unavoidable. The kind of closeness that forces you to sit with contradiction. The proximity that makes it impossible to reduce someone to a headline, a category, or a political talking point.

That’s also why so much of what’s happening in Minnesota gets mischaracterized.

The people standing up, pushing back, showing up — they’re often dismissed as part of some coordinated left-wing effort, as if this is about ideology or rebellion or harboring immigrants for political effect. But that explanation doesn’t hold up very well when you look closer.

Many of these people aren’t acting out of abstraction. They’re acting out of relationship. They know their neighbors. Their kids go to school together. They share grocery stores, workplaces, streets, and daily routines. Proximity changes what you see — and what you’re willing to risk.

When you’re close enough, this stops being theoretical and starts to feel deeply personal, because the questions shift from abstract debates to lived principles — about due process, about constitutional rights, about whether a government gets to cross its own lines simply because it has found a reason it believes justifies doing so. What’s being defended in moments like this isn’t allegiance to a political party, but a belief in how power should and shouldn’t be exercised when fear enters the room.

That nuance tends to disappear in the noise.

At the same time, it’s hard not to notice how quickly government itself turns toward blame.

One agency points to another. One level of government shifts responsibility upward or downward. One narrative is offered to justify the next escalation. Fraud becomes the explanation and nforcement becomes the solution — no matter the cost to American lives. And somewhere in the middle, human beings disappear entirely.

Blame is efficient like that — it creates the illusion of control. It keeps everyone focused on who’s at fault instead of asking harder questions about proportionality, restraint, and principle. Whether intentional or not, it’s a distraction — one that pulls attention away from the human cost and toward endless argument.

And while institutions argue, something quieter continues to happen at the human level — we lose our humanity.

When you actually spend time with people — not arguing with them, not debating them, but sitting with them long enough to hear how their lives unfolded — something subtle but important happens. You stop confusing behavior with motivation. You start to recognize that underneath very different choices, beliefs, and even harmful actions, there are often the same basic drivers most of us carry: fear of losing stability, a desire to feel safe in the world, a longing to be seen as worthy and to belong somewhere.

The circumstances may be different, the expressions may look nothing alike, but the underlying human needs are remarkably familiar.

I learned this over and over again in my seventeen years as a criminal defense attorney.

I sat across from people who had done things I would never do. People who had lied, stolen, defrauded systems, and hurt others. I never excused what they did, but that was never the point. But I did get to know them and really understand them. And once you’re in the room, certainty starts to soften.

You hear about their families, their upbringing and you learn where things went sideways. You see fear underneath bravado, desperation underneath bad decisions, sometimes entitlement underneath arrogance. You laugh unexpectedly, and you recognize pieces of yourself you’d rather not admit.

You see how thin the line can be between stability and collapse.

Up close, people stop being symbols.

That’s why it becomes so hard to maintain hatred when there’s proximity. Hate needs distance. And it needs labels, abstractions, and certainty. It needs us far enough away that we don’t have to look someone in the eye (which these days happens with more and more frequency). When we’re close enough, hate starts to fall apart — not because we suddenly agree, but because we can no longer pretend we’re dealing with something other than a human being.

This is where I think we keep getting lost.

We keep believing that being right will save us.

That if we assign blame correctly, enforce hard enough, argue convincingly enough, something will resolve. But being right has never healed anything. It has never reduced fear and it has never restored trust.

What does change things — slowly, imperfectly, without spectacle — is relationship.

Real conversations – in person, without an audience or a platform where we get to hear from others just like us that our view of the view. Without the need to perform certainty or defend an identity.

In relationship, we honor conversations where listening matters more than winning and curiosity replaces accusation.

The truth is I don’t have a policy solution here. I don’t have a neat conclusion that ties everything up.

What I have is an invitation.

Stop trying so hard to be right and get close to people. Close enough that your certainty starts to crack. Close enough that you’re forced to see the human being underneath the story.

Because when we do, we usually discover something both inconvenient and grounding — that beneath the blame, the labels, and the noise, we are far more alike than different.

And that’s where the human journey actually lives.

Linda

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It’s either hijacked, dysregulated, hypervigilant, sensitive, triggered, or unsafe.

The language is familiar—too familiar.

I can feel it land in my body the moment I hear it. Hypervigilance churns in my stomach, triggered lives in my throat, unsafe lights up my whole body.

I’ve learned how to track my nervous system, name it, and manage it. I understand the architecture of trauma and the ways the nervous system learns to protect us long after the danger has passed.

You might even say I’m obsessed with learning about the nervous system because I want to understand how we all have ended up where we are.

But something that has consistently stood out to me—while I had become fluent in the language of dysregulation—was that no one ever taught me the language of the opposite.

I’m not talking about healing, happiness, or joy — I am talking about relief.

I can tell you exactly what it feels like when my system is on high alert. What surprised me was how unfamiliar it felt when the body finally stood down. When the scanning stopped and the pressure quietly left the room. Not because something amazing happened—but because nothing was wrong enough to require vigilance anymore.

The moment didn’t roll in like any previous ah-ha’s or breakthroughs.

It didn’t feel elevated or expansive. It felt like an exhale I didn’t know I’d been holding. And in its own quiet way, it felt spiritual—not because it lifted me out of my life, but because it returned me to it.

What no one warns you about is that relief doesn’t immediately feel good.

It can feel boring, yes—but more than that, it can feel foreign. When a system has been organized around vigilance for a long time, the absence of threat doesn’t register as safety right away.

Relief can register as disorientation, flatness, or even a quiet sense that something important has gone missing.

For a while, I mistook that sensation for a problem. If nothing felt urgent, surely I was avoiding something. If my body wasn’t bracing, maybe I’d gone numb. You become so accustomed to intensity signaling meaning that neutrality can feel suspicious, even wrong.

But relief isn’t emptiness—it’s information.

I’ve always believed in collecting data—not the kind you argue with or analyze to death, but the kind you notice. For years, that looked like noticing shifts in other people’s moods or emotions, so I could act accordingly. It also meant looking for danger or rejection, so I could protect myself or plan ahead.

Data was always there to inform me how to armor up.

More recently, though, I started to gather new data. Data that asked how I feel in any given moment.

I started to notice what happens in the body: what changes without effort, what no longer needs to be managed and when relief showed up for me in a real, sustained way for the first time.

It was stunning data. Not because it solved anything, but because it was unmistakable and allowed me to see how much I had actually been holding onto for so long.

I wanted more of it.

I wanted more of it because, for the first time, I didn’t feel like I was bracing. I wasn’t looking for insight, strategy, or healing language.

It was the first time the body stopped negotiating with reality — where nothing needed to be explained or prepared for, and where the nervous system seemed to say, quietly and without drama, this is safe enough.

That desire was surprising, even if it wasn’t aspirational. It was a simple recognition: something essential had shifted, and my system knew it before my mind caught up.

I had unconsciously assumed that relief would flatten me. That without urgency or vigilance, something essential would disappear. For so long, aliveness had been paired with intensity—alertness mistaken for presence, and scanning mistaken for engagement. The hum of readiness had felt like proof that I was paying attention and awake to life.

Feeling real, sustained relief challenged that assumption.

Instead of dulling my experience, it revealed a different kind of aliveness—one that wasn’t fueled by threat or anticipation, but by availability. What I mean by that is that when I no longer remained hypervigilant, sensations sharpened rather than dimmed. I could remain present to moments, and I didn’t have to numb—I was unarmored.

Somewhere along the way, we’ve confused vigilance for vitality.

You start to believe that if you’re not bracing, something must be wrong. Calm begins to feel like a precursor to collapse, and letting go can register as disengaging or even giving up.

But relief isn’t about numbing. It’s about releasing.

What makes relief feel spiritual is not that it lifts you into something higher, but that it brings you into alignment with something older and quieter. Relief is the moment the body trusts life more than the story it’s been telling itself about what’s required to survive.

And story matters here.

The stories you live inside are rarely dramatic narratives you consciously choose. More often, they’re inherited assumptions written directly into the nervous system: Stay alert. Don’t get caught off guard. If you loosen your grip, something bad will happen. These are stories you’re told, and over time, they stop sounding like thoughts and start sounding like truth.

Relief interrupts that script.

In that interruption, something loosens—if you allow it. It loosens not just in the body, but in identity. At least that has been my experience.

The grip you keep softens. The need to manage, anticipate, or explain begins to fade. What remains isn’t passivity, but trust. Not blind trust, but embodied trust—the kind that doesn’t need reassurance to exist.

Personal development pioneer Shakti Gawain once described spiritual growth as the moment we stop clinging to the riverbank and allow ourselves to be carried by the current. I’ve heard that metaphor many times, but relief helped me understand it differently. It isn’t just about being “in the flow.” It’s about releasing the exhausting belief that you must always be holding on.

Relief is spiritual because it marks the end of gripping.

It’s the quiet surrender that happens when the body realizes it doesn’t need to prove its worth through endurance anymore. When the soul recognizes something it has always known: that safety doesn’t come from control, and aliveness doesn’t require vigilance.

That moment—when the body trusts life more than the story—isn’t dramatic. It doesn’t announce itself. But once it’s felt, it’s unmistakable.

And once it’s known, it becomes something you recognize not as an escape from life, but as a deeper way of being in it.

Before anything needs to be understood or explained, it’s worth noticing what’s already true.

—> Where in your life has the pressure eased, even slightly, without you making it happen?
—> What sensations show up when nothing feels urgent and the body isn’t preparing for impact?
—> What part of you wants to dismiss that moment, label it unproductive, or move past it too quickly?

There’s no action required here. Just attention.

If any of those questions stirred something—even briefly—that response is not something to analyze or improve; it’s simply information. It is a momentary signal from the body that something has already shifted, however quietly.

Relief rarely announces itself in full sentences. More often, it shows up as a pause, a softening, or the absence of the usual internal noise. When it’s unfamiliar, it can be easy to miss or dismiss. When it’s recognized, it doesn’t need to be interpreted further to be meaningful.

That shift is enough.

When vigilance loosens, aliveness doesn’t disappear, but it does reorganize. Presence becomes quieter, sensation becomes clearer, and life stops needing to be managed in order to be lived.

Relief isn’t something to pursue or hold onto. It’s something to recognize when it appears, and to let inform what’s possible next.

Nothing needs to be added to that. Nothing needs to be fixed.

Sometimes the most meaningful transformation isn’t the one that propels you forward, but the one that allows you to finally rest inside what’s already here.

Linda

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My first reaction was to partly agree, but also couldn’t help but notice how much the post was dripping with judgment — using buzz words like narcissistic and self-obsession. I assumed the person who shared it was trying to be helpful, but after re-reading it, the post suddenly felt heavy.

It made me wonder, was all the personal growth work making us worse? And whether or not that is true, is the goal of personal growth or simply growth, to be better?

What stayed with me wasn’t the criticism itself, but the tone underneath it. There was something sharp in the way personal growth was being framed — as indulgent, self-obsessed, even narcissistic. As if the very act of turning inward had become suspect and the curiosity about oneself automatically meant fixation.

And yet, I couldn’t ignore the other feeling rising alongside my resistance: recognition.

Because somewhere along the way, personal growth did start to feel a bit heavier. It became less like an invitation and more like a quiet demand. Not come home to yourself, but fix this, improve it, optimize it, move past it, and be more digestible to others.

I think that is how we think about growth when we’re in the middle of crisis or trying to find answers to why life isn’t going quite as we’ve planned. But recently, as I’ve thought about personal growth, I’ve come to really embrace that it has nothing to do with all the external forces in our life.

Personal growth is really about understanding — it’s about making sense of patterns and healing what has been bruised or buried. It’s about making space and tenderness — for things to evolve a bit more slowly.

Unfortunately, this often gets missed when people talk about personal growth. It feels more driven, goal oriented and judged.

Instead of asking Who are you becoming? The question quietly becomes, Why aren’t you there yet?

And that’s where something shifts.

Growth, which once felt like an invitation, starts to feel like a measurement. A way of tracking progress, evaluating worth, and determining whether we’re doing life correctly. Even meaningful inner work can take on an edge — less about understanding what’s here, and more about correcting what isn’t.

When growth is fueled by curiosity, it expands us. When it’s fueled by the belief that who we are isn’t enough yet, it tightens. We begin to watch ourselves more closely and question our reactions. We begin to wonder if we’re doing the work “right” and evaluate our outer world looking for proof. And without realizing it, we turn that inward work into a form of self-surveillance.

I wonder if this is what people are reacting to when they criticize personal development so harshly.

Not the desire to grow, but the pressure underneath it. The way stillness can feel like failure. The way being human messiness — cyclical, unresolved, imperfect — gets treated as something to move past.

Which leads me to a different question entirely.

What if personal growth isn’t really about becoming someone new — but about remembering who we already are?

Here’s why that question matters.

When growth is framed as constant becoming — more healed, more aware, more evolved — it quietly assumes that wholeness lives somewhere ahead of us, waiting to be earned. At first, that idea can feel hopeful. It gives us direction, especially when things feel painful or unclear. But over time, it can create a low-grade pressure — the sense that we should be further along by now.

Growth stops feeling like an invitation and starts feeling like a requirement.

And in that posture, we begin to relate to ourselves as projects rather than as living, unfolding beings.

There is another way to understand growth — one that feels less like accumulation and more like return.

What if true evolution isn’t about fixing what’s broken, but about reclaiming what’s already intact? About remembering who we are beneath the strategies we’ve adopted to survive, the identities we’ve outgrown, or the belief that we must continually improve in order to be whole.

From this place, growth feels quieter and less urgent. I know for me there is more peace when growth allows for pauses, reflection and less pushing. It actually feels like growth because my own patterns and needs no longer feel threatening or driven to be seen.

And in that space, something subtle but important happens — you get to stop treating your humanity as a problem to solve — and start relating to it as something to be known.

Here’s what I mean by that last part.

I recently spent a sleepless night ruminating about something in my life. I tossed and turned, unable to quiet my mind, replaying conversations, imagining outcomes, rehearsing what I might say. In the past, a night like that usually meant one thing was coming next.

I would wake up with a kind of urgency — the need to do something. My pattern would be to name the hurt and to ask for reassurance. I would point out what felt wrong or misaligned. Sometimes that looked like asking someone else to honor me differently. Sometimes it looked like trying to correct a misunderstanding. Often, it carried an unspoken hope that if the other person responded in the “right” way, the discomfort would finally settle.

But this time, something was different.

Instead of turning outward, I stayed with the discomfort a little longer. I paid attention to the familiar patterns underneath it — the stories I was telling myself, the old wounds that were getting activated, the places where I was still seeking safety or certainty from outside of myself.

What became clear wasn’t something I needed from anyone else. It was something I needed to release.

Some of what I was carrying wasn’t current, it was old (a memory as I shared in a previous post). Some of it was interpretation and not truth. And still some of it was a protective reflex that once made sense, but no longer fit the life I’m consciously building.

Seeing that didn’t make the feeling disappear immediately — but it changed my relationship to it.

From that place, I was able to share my truth later — not as a demand, not as a correction, and not with an expectation that anyone needed to do something about it. I could speak from ownership instead of urgency — I often call this responding from my true self because it’s so self-assured, quiet and allowing.

Recognizing that gave something back to me that I hadn’t realized I’d been handing away before: agency.

Not the kind that comes from controlling outcomes, but the quieter kind that comes from trusting myself. Ultimately, it made me see that that I am allowed to be self-guided (which is very different from self-absorbed). It showed me that my life doesn’t move forward because others adjust to me, but because I stay aligned with the vision I have for how I want to live, love, and show up.

That, to me, is what personal growth actually is.

It’s not becoming better or fixing what’s wrong. It’s about returning to yourself — and choosing, again and again, to live from that place.

I am not saying that I have perfected this. But, it does help me see that personal growth is still relevant in 2026.

I don’t believe personal growth makes things worse.

When it’s honest, it interrupts the legacy of pain rather than amplifying it. It brings into awareness the patterns we absorbed without choosing the reactions that once protected us, and the stories we’ve carried forward long after they stopped being true. Not to judge them — but to loosen their hold.

Personal growth doesn’t ask us to rewrite the past. It simply gives us a chance to stop repeating it.

It also opens the door to possibility. Not the loud, optimistic kind that insists everything will be fine, but the quieter kind that allows for something different to exist. A different response. A different way of relating. A different future that isn’t dictated by what’s already happened.

And perhaps most importantly, real growth returns us to the present moment.

It brings us back into relationship with what is actually here — with the choices available now, the agency we still hold, and the life that is unfolding rather than the one we keep trying to manage or correct.

That’s not self-obsession. It’s self-trust.

And it isn’t about becoming better. It’s about being more fully aligned with ourselves — and choosing to live from that place.

So, I leave you with a final question: What might change if personal growth wasn’t about becoming someone else — but about trusting who you already are?

Linda

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One of those deep, guttural screams that come from holding so much in year after year. Only there was no sound. In reality, I was still under the covers, staring into my dark bedroom, hearing nothing but planes flying outside my window.

It was all in my head, playing out like a scene from the movie Garden State, where I was standing on some cliff finally letting it all out.

The day before, it had been pointed out to me that whenever I’m asked where I’m holding certain thoughts or beliefs, it’s always in my throat. The throat chakra, I thought. How unsurprising.

It stayed with me the next morning. Not the scream itself — the place it came from.

When I’d been asked the day before where I tend to hold certain thoughts or beliefs, my answer had come immediately. My throat tightened before I could answer. Of course.

Since I was a kid, my voice always got me in trouble. My sister still likes to tell me that I never knew when to shut up — that I would say that one extra thing that would land me in trouble or get me smacked. I was always the one who would defend others or speak up against an injustice, no matter the cost.

I can remember how my family would relentlessly tease me when I got on a roll. They called it “poodling,” because my words would fly rapid-fire and my voice would raise an octave. It was not a compliment, and it made me incredibly angry.

I learned quickly that my voice got me hit, labeled, punished… misunderstood.

I can still remember the look on my mother’s face when she came back from my kindergarten parent-teacher conference. “Linda talks too much,” was the feedback.

I stood in the hallway outside my bedroom crying and realized something very clearly: expressing my voice was not safe. It wasn’t so much that I was “too much.” It was that I was too much for the nervous systems around me.

So I adapted.

If I wanted to belong, fit in, or be loved, I had to temper and tamp down my voice. I had to keep what I thought to myself.

Life, of course, found ways to reinforce that belief. As I grew older, speaking up in school, with boyfriends, or with friends often made me feel stupid, sparked anger, or led to rejection. It made me cautious.

While I found it impossible to go completely silent (I’m still me), I did get strategic.

Like so many who lose their true voice, I learned to soften explanations, to over-explain, to ask more questions than I asserted, to read people and rooms before speaking. I became a good listener and an advocate for others.

I never went completely silent. And in fact, losing your voice rarely looks like muteness. It looks more like edited truth.

At the time, I didn’t think of any of this as silencing myself. It felt like maturity, growth, awareness, or emotional intelligence. But underneath it all was a simple, repeating thought: If I say what I really think, something bad will happen.

Silencing my voice was one way I could stay safe. It didn’t always work — as my sister likes to remind me, I couldn’t help myself at times — but it was something I could control, especially when my beliefs kept screaming at me about the impact my voice could have.

These are beliefs many of us hold.

→ Speaking up will cause conflict.
→ I’ll be rejected.
→ I’m always misunderstood.
→ No one wants to hear from me.
→ I’ll be criticized.
→ I’ll be punished.

Ultimately, it all came down to a core belief: speaking out wasn’t safe for me. And while there were certainly times my voice was valued, this protective logic silenced me in moments that mattered.

When my first husband criticized me for my previous relationships. When I was paid less than my colleagues. When I was insulted by someone I loved. When I didn’t pitch myself for better work.

Many of the ways I stayed silent happened behind the scenes. And I think that’s common for so many. I know because I’ve spent a lifetime giving voice to others — as an attorney, a writer, and a coach — and it’s always the little ways we stay silent that erodes who we really are.

In truth, it’s not surprising that I ended up standing beside people as they spoke their truth. It’s safer to facilitate voice than to risk your own — giving others their voice is often the last place we’re allowed to hide.

But as I lay in bed that morning — still half in the dark — I wondered how many people have dreams like the one I had. Dreams where they finally get to let go of everything they’ve been holding. Where they show up unfiltered and admit that it’s been hard. Where no one judges, corrects, or pulls away.

It doesn’t have to be a scream. Maybe it’s setting a boundary, admitting a deep secret or saying a truth that has felt profoundly unsafe to share.

What struck me wasn’t the intensity of the dream — it was what it revealed.

My voice hadn’t disappeared. It had been waiting for safety — and permission. Waiting for a place where it wouldn’t have to defend itself, explain itself, or brace for impact.

I began to understand that reclaiming your voice isn’t about forcing yourself to speak louder. It’s about creating the conditions where speaking no longer feels like a risk.

Later, when I started reading about the throat chakra — a concept that comes from ancient Hindu and Buddhist traditions — it didn’t land as something new or mystical. It felt like language for something my body already knew.

It wasn’t an explanation so much as a recognition, it was more pattern coherence — a way of naming the place where expression and safety intersect – about connecting the dots between life experiences, feelings, and behaviors, and finally seeing a pattern that made sense.

When you silence yourself, the root cause is often elsewhere. It’s usually about compromised safety. If speaking up once cost you connection, love, or acceptance, your system remembers — and it works hard to make sure it doesn’t happen again. But that protection comes at a cost. It cuts you off from parts of life, and from parts of yourself.

I know it did for me. I eventually realized it cost me far more than it ever protected.

And chances are, if you see yourself in this, it has done that for you too.

This is where things get confusing — because if you know me, it might be hard to imagine that I ever lost my voice at all. I’ve never been particularly quiet. I’ve spoken up, pushed back, argued, defended others, stood on stages, and built entire chapters of my life around words.

For a long time, that’s exactly why I didn’t recognize what was happening. I assumed losing your voice looked like silence, shrinking or disappearing.

But for many of us, it doesn’t look like that at all.

It looks like saying most of what you think — just not the part that carries the most risk. It’s about being articulate but careful, expressing opinions while holding back needs. It means speaking freely everywhere except the places where it actually matters.

I didn’t lose my voice because I wasn’t expressive enough. I lost it in moments where honesty felt too costly — where my system learned that staying connected mattered more than being clear.

So reclaiming my voice was never going to be about getting louder or finally unleashing everything I’d been holding back, even though I still daydream about that kind of release.

It was about creating enough safety to stop editing myself in real time. Letting a sentence land without softening it and trusting that my truth didn’t need to be defended in advance.

That also meant learning to tolerate what came after — the awkwardness, the discomfort, the disappointment. In the past, I would rush to repair anything that felt threatening to connection. Now, I try to stay. And each time I do, my system learns something new: that I can speak and still remain connected to myself.

None of this has been dramatic. But it has been honest. And over time, honesty has begun to feel safer than silence.

I won’t pretend I don’t still daydream about screaming off my balcony — though I suspect my Portuguese neighbors might have questions. But the steadier I become in my voice, the less I need it to arrive with force.

As my daughter recently noted, I’m calmer now. Still a live wire — but calmer. And that feels like a solid place to keep learning how to speak.

If you take anything from this, let it be this: notice where your voice tightens. Not to fix it. Not to push through it. Just to notice.

And know I’m here with you.

Linda

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It feels almost commonplace to hear someone talk about how anxious they’ve been feeling over the last days, weeks or year (especially this year). And while I love that people are talking about anxiety — especially because it was such a taboo subject when I was a kid — I think there is still a stigma attached to being chronically anxious.

And more importantly, I don’t think we’ve learned how to talk about what anxiety actually feels like from the inside.

Not the headlines or the symptoms—but the lived experience of carrying it.

Anxiety doesn’t always feel like panic. Sometimes it feels like awareness without a place to land.

It’s noticing the shift in someone’s tone before they’ve admitted anything has changed. Or replaying a conversation—not because you’re dramatic, but because something didn’t sit right. Or it’s feeling the weight of what might happen before anyone else has named the risk.

For a long time, I thought that feeling this way meant something was wrong with me. That I was too much, too emotional or simply broken.

But after years of living with anxiety, I’m no longer convinced anxiety is a malfunction. I think it’s a signal—one we were never taught how to interpret.

When it shows up for me, I usually feel it before I can explain it. It’s a sinking feeling in my gut, a tightening in my entire body and a feeling that I have to be hyper alert — as if something is lurking just around the corner.

I go into this mode where my mind scans for what just shifted. I look for signs – a shift in behavior, a tone, a word choice — whatever might clue me into why I am responding when nothing looks wrong on the outside.

Then it takes a stronger hold — seeking answers, hunting and scouring, like a dog that has caught a scent. It looks for reassurance or confirmation so it can be released from the tension..

Whether it’s lasts minutes or days, anxiety is exhausting when it takes hold.

The sheer amount of energy it wastes in rumination and concern would power a small island.

But worse than the energy expenditure, anxiety that rises to the level of rumination and hypervigilance erodes something deeper: self-trust and worth. It makes you second guess everything you know or believe — even things that felt solid minutes before. It makes you question your capabilities and erodes the good thoughts you have about yourself and, even the world around you.

That level of anxiety can also weigh on others around you. Anxiety needs constant reassurance — it seeks constant validation that it will be ok. And when they can’t give it to you, you retreat back to your brain…full of shame and internal questioning.

Anxiety is quiet self-doubt on repeat.

But here’s the part that rarely gets talked about…anxiety doesn’t show up at random. And it doesn’t attach itself to the numb or the disengaged.

It shows up in people who feel deeply. People who are perceptive. who notice undercurrents, shifts, and emotional weather before it becomes obvious to everyone else.

Anxiety often lives in those with strong intuition—but without a trusted way to ground it. It lives in people who care about impact, who read rooms instinctively, who sense what’s unsaid and unresolved.

The problem isn’t that they’re imagining things. It’s that they don’t yet trust themselves enough to interpret what they’re sensing.

So rather than welcoming anxiety as a sign, it becomes awareness turns inward. It takes sensitivity and turns it into suspicion — intuition gets hijacked by self-doubt.

What looks like anxiety from the outside is often uncontained perception on the inside.

Recently, a therapist said something to me that reframed anxiety in a way I can’t unsee. Anxiety, she explained, isn’t actually about the future. It’s about memory.

Not memory as a story we can recall — but memory stored in the body. It is all the old experiences, old memories of rupture — times when something went wrong and the nervous system learned to stay alert.

When anxiety shows up, the body isn’t predicting catastrophe. It’s remembering the last time we experienced something painful.

And without a trusted interpreter, the body doesn’t distinguish between then and now.

So a shift in tone doesn’t register as information—it registers as threat. A familiar pattern doesn’t register as insight—it registers as danger. Perception arrives, but it’s filtered through a nervous system trained to protect and assume that the worst will happen..

This is where anxiety goes off course.

Because when awareness meets unexamined memory, intuition gets overridden by fear. The signal is real—but the meaning assigned to it isn’t.

Anxiety isn’t too much awareness—it’s awareness without context, and memory without discernment.

And because most people who experience this degree of anxiety carry so much shame for holding this much fear, they don’t admit it to anyone — even when they do, they’re often dismissed as irrational or, conversely, soothed momentarily — only to have the anxiety return when they’re alone again in their own head.

It becomes a slow roiling boil that takes over until it either exhausts itself or proves itself right — or wrong.

I have felt all these things. And until recently, I thought anxiety was simply something I had to accept about myself. I believed I could live most of my life normally, but then from time to time, I would encounter these moments of intense emotion and suffering — yes, suffering.

But, just like the other things I thought I had to live with, I realized I didn’t actually have to live with it…I could shift it.

Instead of always thinking about how to stop it, I could use it.

A therapist taught me that when those moments arise, I could settle myself by allowing myself to experiencing all the worst thoughts in my head for 30 seconds — alongside all the possible positive thoughts that I could muster. If I was busy catastrophizing, she wanted me to imagine all the equally positive thoughts and feelings so they could learn to live side-by-side, instead of in isolation.

I then could learn to ask myself the questions that would shift my pattern of thinking:

• What is this trying to protect?

• What am I sensing that I don’t yet trust myself to name?

• What part of me is ahead of the moment?

When I began doing this, I learned that anxiety may be early detection—not catastrophe. Sometimes, it might not even be anything at all.

Instead of running away or trying to quell the rolling boil that is anxiety, I could lean in. But let me clear, leaning in doesn’t mean indulging spirals or obeying every single thought.

It means asking better questions. Instead of What is the danger? I ask What am I sensing? What am I really afraid of? The shift allows me to sit with what is actually there and still sit in the possibility of receiving the best out of life.

The truth is that, anxiety can be a powerful tool.

But only when it’s no longer treated like a problem to eliminate.

Anxiety becomes destructive when it’s misunderstood—when it’s shamed, silenced, or handed over to someone else to fix. But when it’s met with steadiness and curiosity, something shifts.

The body begins to learn that awareness doesn’t always mean danger. It learns that sensation doesn’t require immediate reaction or action. It also doesn’t mean that there is anything wrong with you or weak or fragile — it simply means that you’re perceptive.

And the more you can honor your own perception, the more you can rebuild your confidence and self-trust — which ultimately lessens the frequency and intensity of anxiety.

Ultimately, the goal isn’t to get rid of anxiety. It’s to become someone who can stay present with themselves when it arises.

Someone who can say: I feel this—and I don’t have to abandon myself because of it.

Over time, that’s how sensitivity turns into discernment. It’s how intuition finds its footing — and how self-trust gets rebuilt, quietly and slowly.

And maybe that’s the part we’ve been missing.

Anxiety isn’t asking you to be less aware. It’s asking you to become more rooted.

If anxiety has been part of your story, I invite you to ask yourself one question: What might change if you stopped treating it as an enemy—and started listening instead?

Linda

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The Enneagram? Love it.
Human Design? Absolute fun.
The WHY Assessment? It’s one of my favorite tools to use with clients.

But here’s the part I don’t always admit: every time I found a new label that “fit,” I felt a tiny rush of relief.

Finally. This explains me.
This is why I think the way I do.
This is why I react the way I do.

It felt like someone turned the lights on inside my head.

And then—slowly, subtly—I stopped noticing the side effect.

Because every label that made me feel understood also made me a little smaller.

I didn’t see it at first. I thought I was growing. I thought language = awareness. I thought self-definition was self-development.

But the truth is this: Somewhere along the way, I started organizing my life around a set of descriptions that were never meant to be destiny.

“I’m a ______, so of course I…”
“That’s just my Enneagram 8 showing up.”
“I can’t help it, that’s how I’m wired.”
“This is who I am.”

Little statements that felt harmless… until I realized they were quietly deciding what I believed was possible for me.

And it makes sense why it felt so good. Our brains crave labels. They’re wired to reduce uncertainty—anything that turns the chaos of being human into something tidy and predictable.

A label gives your brain a shortcut: Oh good, I know what this is. Instead of evaluating yourself moment by moment, your brain grabs the label and uses it as a template. It saves energy, avoids internal conflict, and keeps things predictable.

But once a label sticks, confirmation bias takes over. You stop seeing who you are, and you start seeing who you’ve decided you must be. The brain doesn’t cling to labels because they’re accurate—it clings to them because they’re efficient.

This is where growth slows. Because what if the comfort of a label quietly gives you permission to stop evolving?

When you start filtering your decisions through “Does this match who I say I am?” your identity becomes static. You stop exploring new behaviors and instead build your world around the label. You stay close to the familiar and lean into the predictable.

The things you want—more impact, more confidence, more expression—stay on the other side of the fence you unknowingly built.

You keep yourself stuck in who you say you are.

And while personality tests can absolutely give you insight and point to growth (the good ones are designed to), no label is a prophecy. It’s just information. It’s a data point—one piece of a much larger, constantly changing picture.

I remind my kids of this all the time. When they insist someone “is” a certain way, I ask them to consider that maybe they’re just seeing a moment, a behavior, a context—not a fixed identity. Labels don’t capture the season someone is in, the stress they’re under, the trauma they’re healing, the environment shaping them, or the growth they’re stepping into.

And when it comes to ourselves, letting a label define who we are is a quiet way of giving away agency. You end up surrendering your power to a word or category that was never designed to contain the whole of you.

The labels from childhood are often the hardest to shake.

They sneak in early and settle deep. I was called cute or happy, which put a spotlight on my looks and behavior—never my mind. It left me believing I wasn’t smart enough and that being liked depended on being upbeat. I was also labeled talkative and told to tone it down, which convinced me for years that no one actually wanted to hear what I had to say. I carried the belief that I was a “bad speaker,” collecting proof every time my voice wavered or a story didn’t land.

It took a long time to believe my voice had value.

You’ve likely carried your own versions. In relationships, you become the fixer, the avoider, the strong one. At work, you’re the reliable one, the creative, the glue. Or you take on quiet, self-protective identities such as anxious, broken, too much, or not enough.

Roles that keep you from becoming something bigger than you are now. You do that because the roles feel familiar — but they limit where you can go and to be honest — they were probably never yours in the first place.

That’s the real danger of labels—they don’t just describe who you’ve been. They start deciding who you believe you’re allowed to become. They turn identity into a ceiling instead of a doorway.

What if every label you’re carrying is simply a past-season version of you that you haven’t paused to outgrow?

What if you treated labels as hypotheses instead of truths?

Treating them this way would allow you to let these labels inform you instead of define you. Instead of locking yourself into “I am,” you might shift into “I’m practicing,” “I’m building,” “I’m learning,” “I’m experimenting”

Your identity is meant to move and grow. Any label that can’t stretch with you doesn’t deserve to stay.

Because the most powerful version of you won’t fit inside the words you used to describe yourself.

So, today, I invite you to simply notice the labels you carry and the way they might be limiting you today. Simply see how many doors you’ve been closing and begin to test out new hypotheses that might bring you closer to the things you truly desire.

Linda

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I felt my shoulders tense, my jaw clench in sympathetic response. It’s only natural to react that way. We feel aghast whenever we hear harsh language thrown at others, and our instinct to defend becomes instantaneous.

But here’s what I didn’t realize until my therapist pointed it out: I was preparing to use that same language on myself before bed.

The cruelest voice in my life isn’t on my news feed. It’s in my head. And I know I’m not alone.

So many of us talk about the increase of harsh language in the media and everyday culture, but what we don’t really talk enough about is the way we have taken that kind of assault and turned it inward. We worry about being attacked by others – but what’s worse is that we’ve the normalized verbal attacks in our own head.

It’s not as if we think being awful to ourselves is ok, it is simply that we’ve gotten so used to our own harsh inner monologue over the years that we almost don’t hear it. And we certainly don’t hear the subtly mean voices in our head that simply sound like “reality” or “pragmatism”.

It’s as if we swallowed all of our critics from early childhood and allowed them to live in our brain (rent free, of course) so they could remind us of every flaw, fuck-up, gaff or imperfection at any given moment.

It’s horrible.

And if I’m being honest, I have long known I have some of the harshest critics living inside me commenting on my body, my actions, my inactions, my aging, my stupidity, my awkwardness and my perceived failures. But, I had actually thought I had done a lot of work over the years to quiet them. I thought I had found compassion for myself in many ways.

It wasn’t until my therapist pointed out that some of the language I used to talk about myself was very condemning that I realized that maybe I was silently still swallowing my own harsh criticisms without realizing it.

She pointed out that words like self-betrayal, dramatic, failure, self-sabotage, unaware, or self-destructive are not merely observational words — they’re deep judgments that impact our sense of self and self-worth.

Using words like self-betrayal or self-sabotage are common for me, so it didn’t even dawn on me that I might be diving into an assault against myself. A condemnation of you will. But, hearing her words made me see how right she was.

I was being hard on myself.

As I shared in my last article when I talked blame and responsibility, being hard on yourself can be a form of self-protection and self-control. If you blame yourself, in some way you give yourself the illusion that you can do something to change your situation. But, often what results is an erosion of your psychological strength — and you end up glued to the situation you’re most trying t avoid.

Hearing her reflect back my own words was eye opening. She also offered me a reframe to help me see my actions in a more human light — one that allowed for good intentions and imperfections to live together without judgment.

And in doing so, she allowed me to relax and let my shoulders drop. I instantly became softer.

The Body Keeps The Score

I recently read an article that talked about how the way you speak to yourself matters, physically. The article noted that harsh self-criticism was linked to high inflammation and gut problems. It also led to other physical ailments. But, when individuals replaced their negative thoughts with compassionate and kind statements, the body reduced inflammation naturally in just two weeks!

Bessel van der Kolk, author of the book, The Body Keeps The Score also points out that contemporary neuroscience research demonstrates that while many of us are busy practicing mindfulness and self-reflection — it can only produce healing when combined with self-compassion, something those of us who have experienced trauma or repeated guilt or shame struggle with immensely.

But, he points out that self-compassion can be learned.

Instead of criticizing ourselves for our misgivings, he (and my therapist) suggest that maybe we might try to thank those parts of ourselves that acted — the parts that were perhaps protecting us in misguided ways.

It’s not so much about ignoring our actions or making them nice, but seeing that when we act, we’re not acting from a single space — we often have parts of ourselves in charge we’re unaware of and a lot more goes into our decisions than a simple right or wrong action.

Seeing that can allow for compassion to thread through our life and repair some of the damage our inner dialogue sets out to do.

Start by Listening

So here’s what I’m doing, and what I’m inviting you to do with me: Start listening to the voice in your head as if it were talking to someone you love.

For the next week, just notice. Don’t try to change anything yet. Just catch yourself when you’re using damning words - the ones that sound like diagnosis but are actually condemnation:

Words like: Self-sabotage. Dramatic. Failure. Self-betrayal. Weak. Procrastinator. Burden. Fake. Quitter. Needy. Coward.

Notice when you’re using “should” and “always” and “never.”

Notice when you judge or dismiss your own feelings with “it’s not a big deal” or deflect compliments with “anyone could have done that.”

Notice when you tell yourself “I need to do better” or “I should be further along by now.”

Just notice.

Write down what you observe and see how often they show up. Notice which ones are on repeat.

This first step is harder than it sounds because these voices have become background noise. They’re the soundtrack of our lives, playing so constantly we’ve stopped hearing the lyrics. But once you start paying attention, you’ll be shocked at how mean you are to yourself - and how often.

I know I was.

The Translation

Once you start hearing these voices clearly, try this: translate the verdict into what actually happened.

Instead of: “I self-sabotaged again”, try: “I made a choice that didn’t work out the way I hoped”

Instead of: “I’m such a failure”, try: “I tried something and it didn’t go as planned”

Instead of: “I betrayed myself”, try: “I acted with the best information and intentions I had at the time”

Instead of: “I’m lazy”, try: “I was exhausted and needed rest”

Instead of: “I’m so dramatic”, try: “I had strong feelings about something that mattered to me”

This isn’t about making excuses or avoiding accountability, it’s about accuracy. It’s about remembering that you’re a whole person, not a single action. That you’re still learning, still growing, and yes — still human.

It’s about the difference between “I made a mistake” and “I am a mistake.” One allows for growth. The other is just cruelty.

The Practice

Van der Kolk suggests something even more radical: thank the parts of yourself you’ve been attacking. It’s not easy, but the parts of you that drove your actions were protective parts — parts that tried to keep you safe, loved, and thriving.

They’re not bad parts — just focused on your survival.

I know itsounds strange to thank those parts, but what you’re doing is treating yourself the way you’d treat a scared child - with curiosity and compassion instead of contempt.

Van der Kolk describes it as “compassionately negotiating with those inner parts of you.” You acknowledge what they’ve done for you and you thank them. And then you remind them - gently - that you’re safe now, and you’re ready to be in charge.

This isn’t weakness. This is the hardest work there is.

This is the work of healing. This is the practice of treating your broken places with care instead of contempt.

I’m still learning this. But I’m noticing now when I reach for words like ‘self-betrayal’ and catching myself before they land. I’m asking: is this accurate? Is this kind? Would I say this to someone I love?

The answer is almost always no.

So I’m practicing something different. Something that allows me to be both imperfect and whole at the same time.

And maybe, just maybe, that’s the real revolution - not in how the world speaks to us, but in how we learn to speak to ourselves.

Because here’s what I’m discovering: when you stop attacking yourself, when you replace condemnation with curiosity, something better happens. You don’t become complacent or excuse bad behavior. You become stronger and more honest about how you treat yourself — and others.

You become someone who can look at your life clearly - all of it, the beautiful and the broken - and say, “This is mine. And I’m learning.”

That’s not self-betrayal. That’s self-compassion.

And it might just heal more than just the noise in your head.

Linda

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I’ve done this too. I regularly scan for the part I played — what I missed, misunderstood, or mishandled. Sometimes taking the blame feels like a bridge back to connection, even when it costs something quietly essential. Other times, it’s a way to reclaim control — to turn chaos into something I can manage, something that still makes sense.

And then there are others for whom blame feels unbearable, almost contaminating — as if admitting fault might expose too much or unravel something they’ve worked hard to hold together. For them, blame is dangerous territory, best avoided at any cost.

That contrast has always fascinated me: Why do some of us rush to shoulder responsibility while others can’t bring themselves to touch it? What shapes our relationship with blame — early lessons, personality, power, love?

The truth is, our relationship with blame begins early in life. Whether we learned to take the blame or to deflect it often depends on what we were taught about safety, love, and responsibility. It can also be a reaction to what we observed — the decisions (or rather, promises) we made to ourselves at an early age.

For those who tend to take blame, doing so can create a sense of agency — a small feeling of control in an otherwise chaotic situation. It’s often easier to believe “I caused this” than to believe you’re completely helpless.

In my case, blame was a strategy I learned early to keep the peace.

With a volatile father who could be incredibly kind one minute and cruel the next, blame became my way to restore calm — to bring down the temperature of any room. I learned that by taking the blame, I could rebuild the connection and safety I needed as a child to get some of my needs met.

Were these conscious actions? No. But over time, they became default strategies — ways to preserve my sense of safety and agency within the home.

A friend of mine recently shared that she had an entirely different experience — for her, taking blame only made things worse. Her parents and siblings would belittle and berate her anytime she admitted fault. She quickly learned that the best defense was a good offense.

For her, taking blame damaged her self-esteem and left her feeling exposed. It took years — and many partners and friends gently pointing it out — before she realized she had adopted an unhealthy pattern that pushed people away and kept real connection at arm’s length.

The decision to absorb the blame or to push it away happens on a subconscious level for most of us. Psychologists call it attribution — the way we explain why things happen. Some of us turn inward, assuming we caused it; others look outward, to circumstance or luck. It ties to something called our locus of control — where we believe power lives. When we think control sits inside us, we’re more likely to take the blame. When we believe it lives outside, we’re more likely to pass it along.

Neither is inherently better when it’s used as a mechanism to stay safe. But it does explain why we might default into one camp or the other. Simply noticing how you show up — how you tend to handle fault — can reveal a lot about what you learned about safety or keeping peace. It can also show you what might not be working in your relationships today.

Taking the blame can feel momentarily noble, just as avoiding it (or projecting it onto others) can feel vindicating or righteous. Both are protecting something. One hides from the sting of shame; the other hides from the chaos of helplessness. Somewhere in between is the harder work: holding our part without losing ourselves in it.

And that’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.

Maybe self-blame is, at its core, a kind of hope — a belief that things could have gone differently if only we had done better, known more, tried harder. It hurts, yes — but it also lets us keep believing we have power, that we’re not just at the mercy of randomness or other people’s choices.

But the truth is, there’s a third option. One that actually creates real choice.

That third option is responsibility. Responsibility is the idea that you may have played a role in your current situation — and that information is useful. Taking responsibility can bridge the gap between people and build connection, but more importantly, it allows you to learn.

Responsibility doesn’t mean taking the blame to feel better, to fix a relationship, or to keep the peace. It simply recognizes that where you are today is the result of the choices you made yesterday, last week, last month, and years before.

Responsibility allows you to see where you side-stepped your intuition, where you said yes when you meant no. It’s a truthful examination of how you’ve shown up — so you can choose differently from this day forward.

Often, taking blame or avoiding it is a way of rewriting our own history — of avoiding the deeper feelings attached to it. Responsibility, conversely, simply asks that you see your role clearly and be willing to do something differently, so you don’t repeat the future.

I had forgotten that part in my own life — that responsibility isn’t punishment, it’s freedom.

Blame ties us to the past, replaying what went wrong and appeasing others. Avoidance keeps us blind to what could be different. But responsibility lives in the present moment — the only place we have any real power.

Maybe that’s the work: to notice when we’re taking blame to feel safe or avoiding it to stay untouched, and to pause long enough to ask, What’s the truest thing I can own here?

Not out of guilt. Not to fix.
Just to begin again — from truth, not protection.

— Linda

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I am admittedly still a kid who loves the celebration, the attention, the presents and of course, the cake. I know that I’m supposed to be more modest about these things, but I’ve never shied away from celebrating my birthday and being grateful for the markers of progress, goals achieved and years counted.

But, as I meet another milestone middle-aged birthday, I find myself approaching the day (and year) with more intention and introspection.

In fact, over the last several months, I’ve found myself thinking more about this birthday than many before — it’s as if I am looking toward that date like it’s an invitation to take stock yet again — a moment to pause inside my own life and feel like it’s like to be here — in my body, in this season and in this unfolding version of who I am (and am becoming).

I realize I’m not alone.

I’ve noticed lately that women in their 50’s tend to no longer look forward with an intention to simply reinvent, improve or chase – but rather there is a pull toward what’s real, what’s important.

It’s as if every cup of coffee, every conversation and every moment carries some new importance of who I want to BE right now. And unlike birthdays before, it’s not so important that I mark everything with the outside trappings (which admittedly feels surprising), but rather really think about how I want to spend the day and year following.

There is something about this birthday where I set aside all my previous notions about how I might spend the day and instead asked, what will feel most supportive nourishing and honoring.

Maybe it’s the gift of getting older — the way it strips away the noise.

The striving, the proving, the performing — all the things that once felt essential start to feel heavy. What remains is the desire to show up without the layers, to live with truth and care.

Here’s how this looks now…

Choosing Presence Over Proving

In my twenties and thirties, I equated growth with forward motion — new goals, bigger milestones, more financial achievement. That worked for a while. Until it didn’t.

This decade feels different. I’m less interested in acceleration and more interested in alignment. I want the things I say “yes” to — in work, relationships, and my own wellbeing — to feel like an honest reflection of who I am.

My daily question to myself is: “How does this feel in my body?”

“Am I racing, or can I stay in the moment and stay right here?”

Presence is no longer something I have to remind myself to practice; it’s something my body demands. I notice the way I breathe when I’m rushing. The way my shoulders tense when I’m overextending. The way my energy drains when I say yes out of obligation instead of desire.

So I’m paying closer attention — not to control, but to listen (which for me is HUGE). What feels expansive? What feels draining? What feels like truth?

The voice that used to drive me no longer pushes or let’s fear take over. It’s more about integrity — not as a moral high ground, but rather as a truth in living.

Health, Strength, and Awe

Part of this turning inward has been physical too.

Even though I’ve consistently strength trained since my 20’s I saw a decline in my strength and fitness in my 40’s. It was tempting to blame aging, but in the last year I’ve noticed a revival.

I wouldn’t have believed I’d feel stronger in my mid-50s than I did a decade ago. But here I am — lifting heavier, moving better, recovering faster.

It’s not about chasing youth. It’s about partnership — honoring my body for how it carries me, and how it keeps saying yes to life.

Every time I push it — whether in the gym or on a long walk/run — I’m reminded of what’s possible. The strength I feel now isn’t flashy or competitive. It’s steady.

And that physical strength has created space for something else: wonder.

Wonder (and maybe awe) in how the body repairs and adapts. Wonder in how travel, movement, and new experiences wake up something inside me. Wonder in the people I meet and the stories I get to be part of (or are shared with me).

I think that’s one of the most beautiful parts of midlife: you stop taking wonder for granted. You start noticing it again — in the rhythm of a day, the softness of light, the laughter of someone you truly care about.

Work That Feels Real

I’m also thinking about the kind of work I want to keep doing.

The older I get, the less I care about work that looks impressive, and the more I crave work that really makes a difference in other people’s lives.

Good work is fine — but real work, the kind that integrates my curiosity, intuition, and skill to make a difference— that’s what satisfies me. I want my work to be an offering, not a performance.

In the past year that has meant getting super clear. It means aligning with clients and projects that share the same integrity, curiosity, and care. It means being brave enough to stop doing things that are technically “working” but no longer feel aligned.

And rather than judge the way I’m showing up, listening to the critics or the people who think I should be doing this or that — it feels more real and honoring.

I think that is something that gets easier with age. Somehow, all the voices that mattered and influenced no longer seem to take center stage. It’s not so much that you’re throwing out the advice, it’s more that you are trusting where you have been, and where you’re going. It feels different and as I’ve been told a few times in the past year — it feels different in terms of impact and results.

Reclaiming the Right Time to Reflect

For most people, reflection happens at the end of the year — a flurry of goal setting in December, new intentions in January.

That’s never really worked for me. The end of the year almost feels to rushed, pressure-filled and other focused.

October feels like my true new year. There’s something about fall that invites reflection. The pace slows, the air clears, and I can think again.

So, over the next few days, I’ll be revisiting my vision and goals — not as a list of things to achieve, but as a map for what I want to experience and express in the year ahead.

What do I want to build more of?
What’s ready to shift or simplify or magnify?
How do I want to feel as I move through the next twelve months?

When I approach visioning from this place, it feels like alignment, not ambition. I’m not trying to build a future that proves something — I’m sketching a map that helps me live more truthfully right now.

A Birthday Wish

My birthday wish this year is simple: to keep showing up for what’s real — in myself, in others, and in the quiet, awe-filled moments of ordinary life.

If you’re reading this, maybe it’s not your birthday, but perhaps you’ve felt that same inner nudge — that pull to pause, to look inward, to ask what’s next from a place of wholeness rather than lack.

You don’t have to wait for the calendar to give you permission. The best time to reflect or re-vision your life is when you feel ready — when something inside you whispers, it’s time to look again.

So maybe take this as your own small invitation: light a candle, pour a coffee or a glass of wine, and sit with the question —

What do I want this next season of my life to feel like?

Because the truth is, our next chapter rarely begins on January 1st.

It begins the moment we’re willing to pause, listen, and see ourselves clearly enough to imagine what’s possible.

As for my birthday — yes, I’ll still celebrate. I’ll still have cake, candles, and probably a toast or two.

But mostly, I’ll celebrate the chance to keep showing up to my own life — awake, honest, and focused on what matters most.

At this stage, that’s the real gift: being here, fully, and becoming who I’ve always been.

Linda

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