Rousing music filled her ears, she gasped, and that breath froze in space and time. Inspiration parachuted in from the sky, lightbulbs flashed like a paparazzi tsunami. She knew in that moment exactly what to do with her life. Finally, her purpose was clear. It was bold, world-dominating, and life-changing for herself and others. She stood tall, chin up, chest expanding, solid, grounded. Ready AF. Then a thought arrived like an uninvited stranger at a party helping themselves to the drinks and hors d'oeuvres, unwelcome, puzzling, and most of all really f*cking annoying, “Who am I to do this?” The music screeched to a halt.
(Disclaimer: this essay requires you to fasten your seatbelt)
We like to imagine that changing our lives is a one-off cinematic moment. A sudden flash of clarity where the clouds part, motivation surges, cartoon animals gather around your ankles warbling songs of happiness and joy, and you effortlessly pivot toward greatness.
The reality is far harder.
Changing your life isn’t an act of inspiration, it’s an act of extreme physical and psychological endurance. Healing is brutal. Most people have the desire, but they don’t want to face the truth… they don't have the stamina.
Instead they tell themselves they’re doing the work (and they are!). They’re on a “healing journey” where they’re building awareness, having insights, meditating, habit-stacking, regulating their nervous system, and endlessly managing their emotions.
Putting out fires rather than finding where the wiring is dodgy is not the same as changing the wiring so the fires don’t keep starting.
Instead, they stay stuck in the same old subconscious patterns. The patterns that create the same old emotions. The emotions that lead to the same old behaviours. And the behaviours that lock in the same old identity.
“It’s just who I am.”
(It’s not who you are, it’s a programme running on a loop that you think is who you are. It’s Not-You.)
It’s painful, but it’s easier than doing the actual work, because most people are not equipped for the gruelling, multi-phase assault course required to break free from the default existence they’ve been programmed with by their parents and society since they were child sponges making sense of themselves and the alien world they were born into.
A new life requires a new identity.
(No, not in the Witness Protection sense!)
Living as the Not-You isn't just frustrating, it’s emotionally bankrupting. It’s a low-vibrating anxiety, an undercurrent of resentment that poisons your achievements, and the deep sadness of knowing you’re betraying yourself just to keep everyone else comfortable.
So, accessing the identity of the You, requires athletic stamina and the willingness to suffer consciously in order to end the suffering you’re enduring by living the subconsciously driven life of the Not-You.
And yes, you’re going to grieve Not-You. You’ve been Not-You for so long.
I first wrote about Not-You here:
You get to choose your pain.
Because either way you’re suffering…
But what's on the other side of healing is a life lived as the You that releases feral levels of energy, clean motivation, and an inner peace so profound it feels like a superpower. It will feel wildly unfamiliar at first (because you aren't used to winning this easily), but your body will lock onto it like a joy-seeking missile. And you’ll feel it in your bones before you can even explain it to yourself.
The vast majority of people aren’t living their own lives. They’re living a hand-me-down reality.
From the day you are born, you are fed a steady diet of “should” goals. You should want this career. You should buy this house. You should value this specific type of status. These benchmarks are meticulously programmed into us by our parents and society (who were simply programmed by their parents and society). It is an endless chain of hand-me-down conditioning.
The very first step of change needs an immense amount of energy just to wake up and realise you actually have a choice.
But, turns out waking up is heavy.
Awakening starts with admitting that your life is not the life you actually want, and feeling the pain of the gap between where you are and where you wish you were.
And if you don’t even know who you wish you were then you can find out by getting into it and eliciting your deep, authentic core values. When you live aligned to those bad boys, you are already winning!
(Warning: discovering your core values might even change where you wish you were)
Now, values elicitation is not picking values like “integrity” or “success” off a pre-approved menu. It means putting your head torch on and getting into the caves of your psyche to find what actually makes you tick when no one is watching.
And when you do that you’re faced with a whole new responsibility… You can no longer blame your upbringing, your boss, or your circumstances for your unhappiness.
(Victim mode: deactivated)
Taking full accountability is the first weight you have to lift.
But when you do, it’s so empowering to know you have choice, you’ve always had choice, and now you consciously get to choose. And by choice I mean you get to choose your next steps, and you get to choose how you respond to what life throws at you.
Next, you find yourself at risk of losing people close to you.
When you decide to stop chasing the “shoulds” and start chasing what’s yours, the people around you will get uncomfortable. Some will change with you, but for others your changes hold up a mirror to their complacency. The moment you change the rules of your life, you disrupt the comfort zones of everyone else in it.
To cross this phase, you have to have the stamina to potentially endure the passive-aggressive guilt trips from family, the shedding of old friends who only loved the compliant version of you, and the heaviness of temporary isolation, not to mention the guilt of “people dis-pleasing” and the fear of abandonment, as well as the rage of not actually having been accepted for who you were, because the role you were playing is what was acceptable.
(You enter the “oh f*ck" zone…)
Most people quit here, because they don’t have the stomach to handle being the bad guy in someone else’s story, so they slip back into the safety of the herd.
But when you do, and you move through the sadness and the grief of losing people, oh wow do you find new levels of energy, and you open space for new people to come into your life who see (and love) you, as You!
Next, you point yourself toward your true goal (the one aligned with your core values), take your first real steps, and immediately trip over your own feet.
This is the competence gap.
Moving toward a non-borrowed goal can expose any area where you’re under-equipped. So, before you can do anything else you may have to fill a skills gap. However much confidence you might have doesn’t mean sh*t without competence.
Getting through this gap could mean being really bad at something for a while. It may also mean you have to be willing to fail, fall on your face, and figure it out as you go.
It takes immense ego-stamina to tolerate weeks, months, (or maybe even years) of extended failure and all the shame that brings up.
(I promise it gets easier to “fail” the more you do it! Trust me, I know)
Most people’s self-esteem is too fragile to survive being a beginner again, so they go back to the things they are already good at, even if those things drain their soul.
But when you do fill that gap, you are set up! You change your relationship with failure, and it’s no longer a stop sign, it’s just data. Every step is a lesson, and an opportunity to pivot and adapt.
Next, comes the point where theory meets punch-you-in-the-face reality.
Congratulations! Now it’s time for the action part.
Yes, actual action, not a spreadsheet of ideas, an entire eco-system of your empire, or a mind-map of everything you need to do, but a physical step in that direction.
This is where many fall to the wayside, because this is where the biggest, most ball-breaking resistance shows up. The Not-You (your old identity) will be fighting for survival, and begging you on its knees to stay in the familiar, that there are “beasts in them there woods” and that if you do this you will die!
Or at least that’s what your subconscious programming is doing.
In reality it looks like constant planning and building, it sounds like “I’m not ready”, it feels like “Oh sh*t oh sh*t oh sh*t, what if they judge me, what if I fail in public, what if I succeed, then what?”
But when you do take the action aligned with your goals, based on your core values, with your competence turned up to 88% (trust me you don’t need a 100% - that’s for perfectionists and we all know they don’t get anywhere), you find that you don’t die in the process, that opportunities start to open up, that Not-You is becoming a stranger, and you’ve built emotional adaptability into your system.
But that’s not all…
Along the way you’ll have to tolerate emotional discomfort that sits in your stomach like a brick, as well as the crushing uncertainty of the unknown.
This is why most people stick with the “should” goals.
Let’s assume you have the mindset, the drive, and the willingness to go through this process. You still have to contend with your subconscious (mind and body).
Your subconscious does not care about your happiness, it only cares about your survival. To your nervous system, predictable misery is always safer than the unpredictable unknown.
Every single step toward a new life triggers a physiological threat response. It’s literally how we humans are wired. It’s Caveman OS.
To actually change, you have to actively sit in the fire. You have to regulate your nervous system through waves of existential panic. You have to manually expand your capacity to tolerate agonising discomfort. You have to heal the past traumas that told you it wasn’t safe to be seen, wasn’t safe to fail, or wasn’t safe to succeed. And integrate the parts of you that protected you, because you can do all the nervous system regulation you want, and you can reach calm states, and feel grounded, but if you haven’t integrated and healed, you haven’t locked in your new identity, and you will default to the Not-You.
And you will mourn the Not-You because that version of you has worked so hard to keep you safe.
(Side-bar: It’s OK, we can give them a promotion)
But letting it go is a loss, even when it's what you know you have to do, and that grief becomes a sign you're almost through. It will always get darker before it gets lighter…
Like I said, healing is brutal.
Most people aren’t stuck because they don’t have a vision. They’re stuck because they don’t have the stamina to endure the discomfort of becoming a stranger to their past. So they stick with “should” goals, because it’s easier and safer to do that.
Better the misery you know, right?
This is also why doing it alone takes years. Your nervous system doesn't rewire in isolation. Being witnessed, seen, held in a safe space, and co-regulated with isn't a luxury add-on to this process. These are the active ingredients. And all these things BTW are human to human. You can read the books and chat with Claude all you like but nothing beats human to human.
(I know this because the biggest healing I have experienced has taken place in the presence of others, and I was born onto a “healing journey” so I’ve been doing this sh*t for over half a century, mostly solo, because I was a warrior who wasn’t allowed to show weakness)
What about you?
Have you been there, done that, got the T-shirt? Or are you stuck in “waiting to be ready”?
(Readiness is not a feeling it’s a decision BTW)
Well, you've just seen the assault course, I mean, the map!
When you work with someone who has walked every phase (fallen down a lot and got up again), knows what it costs (folded up hundreds of damp tissues into neat squares), and can hold and celebrate you through it (and also make you laugh in the process), you’ll get to You a lot faster.
This is the work I do!
(And if I’m not your cup of tea, then find someone who is)
This is not for the faint-hearted as you know, they stay in their comfort zones.
Which zone do you want to be in?
She wakes up to the sound of birds singing. A gecko announces itself by name, and the banana tree leaves clap against one another. She’s awake inside what used to be an impossible dream. There’s no standing ovation, no full orchestral accompaniment, and none of the fireworks she used to live for, crave, and then have to recover from. She reaches for a cup of tea, breathing in the scent of jasmine before she sips. The sea breeze makes the wind chimes chatter. She smiles. Sighs. She didn’t wait to feel ready… she just chose it. And she found the stamina.
🪩 People who recognise themselves in this tend to be exactly who I work with. The next step is finding out which subconscious pattern is draining your energy. 📞 Book a free 15-minute Pattern Audit Call
| Subconscious Rewiring Coach | Hypnosis, EFT & NLP Practitioner | Creator of Neuro-Emotional Wisdom™ |
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