Your professional identity is all tangled up with who you know yourself to be and how you value yourself—in complex and vulnerable ways.

(And it keeps you stuck in a way of practicing your profession that is suffocating you.

Underneath it, there is truth—just not the whole truth.

(And most often, an outdated truth.)

It can feel like a heft—of grief and relief—to take the layers off. You begin to peel them off, and you feel naked, vulnerable, disoriented—devalued even.

So you keep reaching back for them, trying to transform aspects of your professional self (or lessen their load) without releasing them.

Because you know that professional self, really damned well. And everyone else knows that professional self damned well.

That you is sharp—and serious. People easily understand what you do—and they respect it; they take it seriously. (It doesn’t challenge their sense of the order and rightness of things; it doesn’t confront their fear—or their longing.)

That you is excellent at what you do—and that gives you a sense of purpose and accomplishment (even if you’re not satisfied or fully alive).

That you has a focus and a direction (even if it’s not what you’re ultimately here to do).

That you knows who you are (even if it sacrifices essential and powerful parts of who you actually are).

And that feels like solid ground when what’s calling leads you into what feels like boundless uncertainty—and vulnerability. (Why would you give that up?)

As much as you long to release the roar of your soul into form—and create a new body of work from an entirely new way of being (you know it’s needed, and not just for you)—you also long for safety, belonging and understanding. (You’re human after all.)

So, you don’t know what to do.

(It feels like you could be stuck on this treadmill of limbo for the rest of your career—and you can’t. That you cannot do.)

You actually do know what to do.

(And you don’t need to sacrifice professional respect or financial stability.)

It’s just that, right now, fear of the unknown and desire for certainty are telling you that you don’t know. 

So, you stop before you experience the miracle of your own calm, clear certainty and the power of what it creates.

When there is literally only one thing keeping you from it.

(Seriously. It sounds like some cheap marketing ploy, but there really is ever only one thing at the root of it. Untangle that, and it shifts everything.)