I could be making more money.  I SHOULD be making more money.

The truth is that there are things that I KNOW that I know, and I have no doubt that my areas of expertise could be an immense help to so many people.

I am a thinker at heart and I'm always reframing experiences, words & ideas. I have ideas for hosting seminars and retreats and writing books and making jewelry and designing shirts and building authentic communities where people really EXPERIENCE one another.....but few of those ideas have actually gotten beyond the door of my office.

Because for as much as you SEE me do...there's triple the amount of things I don't do. And I have a lot of very "rational", "logical" reasons for this, of course. The standard lies we tend to tell ourselves when we get scared & decide that tapping out would be easier than doing the work.

The idea isn't ready yet. It's not a good time for this. I'm not ready. I'm waiting on ____ to help me with _____. I don't know how to do it. (<<--my all time favorite)

But these, my friends, are lies. And because I've been telling lies, my income isn't doing what it could be doing. It's not doing what it SHOULD be doing. And in case you were wondering, apparently there IS in fact a direct correlation between telling lies & making money. Just FYI.

Monday I had an early morning, major breakthrough about my work, my business and what's actually holding me back. I wasn't even consciously thinking about it but the revelation showed up anyway:

I'm afraid that making more money will require me to live a life that I don't want.

That more money will demand I become drastically more entangled & stressed in the everydayness of life, and that I might end up with so much responsibility that I feel like I'm suffocating. 

And suffocating is a big fear of mine.

In work and in my relationships, I'm afraid of feeling like there's not enough space for me to be me. Like I will be drowned.  

Because after growing up constantly feeling and being told that who I was, what I looked like & how I spoke was "too black/white", "too much" or "too grown", I've evolved into a woman who's very protective her essence. I may not have had a choice as a child, but I certainly have one now. And I exercise it. 

But stepping into the kind of success I imagine for myself means I'm going to have a lot more things going on. And I never knew, until this week, that somewhere deep down, the idea of  "a lot more things going on" makes me feel like I may not be able to be ME.

Now I understand why I've been both pulling close & pushing away the very things that I want most. This is a huge ah-ha in my world.

I know several people who make anywhere from multiple six to multiple seven figure incomes and when I look at their lives, I don't see anything that I want. I don't believe in being stressed out, over committed, sick, exhausted all the time or endlessly complaining.

Yet I see a lot of this in them.And it's a major turnoff for me.

I somehow started equating more projects & more financial abundance with what they have: Stress. And it's made me recoil.

And I get that this may sound a bit odd to you but I think it's important to tell the truth about how we feel, no matter how it may sound to others. So I am.

My truth is that I'm afraid of being trapped with too much responsibility in a life I fundamentally don't want. Because I actually love how I live now....I just want MORE. 

So I've been unpacking this idea all week, and I've come up with a ton of ideas & thoughts and my work. Things I'll tell you more about in another post.

But here's what I know for now:

That it's time to really get to work. To do what I could&should be doing.

The reality is that I love money. Not for what it can buy, but for who it helps me to become & how it helps me show up in the world. So I'm not serving myself--or anyone else--by avoiding a life of greater abundance. That's Bible. 

It actually is NOT easier to avoid doing the work.

If there's a chance I'm gonna be "suffocated" by doing the work or "suffocated" by not getting the work out/being able to live the kind of life I want then....I'd rather take the chance and create art. And to move forward trusting that the road will be paved along the way.

So I am.

And if any of this resonates with you, please leave a comment or drop me an email. I'd love to hear from you.