The voices aren't yours

This week a client said, "I get scared when I look out into the world and spend so much time focused there that I don't even consider what I actually want for myself."

I understood completely, because I've lived it. Different people, different companies, and the same conversation, all week. Everyone was focusing on, ruminating over, and, I'd say, addicted to what they perceive as their own limitations.

Most of us carry a bias toward the limit. We learn early that naming what's wrong with us is a way to fit in, and fitting in feels like the price of belonging. So we keep our attention there, and the radiance waits.

I know that room. For most of my life I hid myself in places where I couldn't thrive, focused on what I believed was broken in me. I stayed far too long at my last nonprofit because I thought I had to shrink to help fix it. Shrinking was how I stayed in the room. I was so focused on what the place needed that I lost sight of what I wanted, and it cost all of us, me included.

What changed came gradually and not always easily. I started listening from the inside first, and only then deciding what to do on the outside.

Slowly it became clear that the limits I'd been carrying were voices and messages from somewhere else. The radiance I kept looking for had been coming from within the whole time, and so has yours. Limits keep us where we fit. Radiance leads us toward where we thrive.

This week, in the next quiet minute, or the next meeting where you're tempted to read the room first, ask:

What's possible for my life, and what do I already know has to change?

Let the answer come from the inspired place inside you.

Maybe expansion isn't something we reach for, but what's left when the borrowed voices go quiet.