Stop Playing Small; You Are Enough to Realize Whatever You Desire

Understand that you are enough to think big, play big and manifest whatever you desire

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Have you ever been asked a question that stopped you dead in your tracks? One of my mentors posed such a question the other day: “What do you allow others to believe about you that is not true?”

Her own response was that she allowed others to believe that she had it all figured out.
At first I thought to myself, I do the exact same thing. The more I thought about this, I realized that there was a time when I allowed others to believe that about me, but not anymore. Now I allow others to believe that I am less than I really am.

Fuck. That was a truth I did not want to see.

How could I, the fabulous woman that I am, defender of other women and true believer in every human beings’ greatness fall for the lame ploy of playing too small? How could I allow others to pick up the false belief that I had carried with me for so many years and allow them to reflect back to me my own worst fear — that I am not enough?

But there it was, in plain sight, and I couldn’t deny it.

I had to face the truth that for the past 18 months I had been fighting a mostly losing battle with myself around feeling like I am not enough.

If you had asked me two years ago about my self-worth I would have told you that I didn’t have any issues. At least I didn’t as long as I played a role in my own life in which I was less than whom I knew myself to be. Less than whom I dreamed of one day becoming. As long as I kept that version of myself under wraps where no one could see her, I was all good.

It really shouldn’t have come as any surprise to me though since I had taken a somewhat radical turn in my work in the previous year and the main focus was on helping other women learn how to become the version of the woman that they see in their dreams. The person their dreams require them to become in order to be capable of living the life they dream of living.

It seems pretty obvious that I, too, would then need to become someone new; and in many ways I had. I had learned how to earn more than $20,000 in a single day, instead of barely making that in a year. I had hired a team to support my business, got a visa and relocated to the States, and I had grown a community of 10,000+ women who all dreamed of one day being the woman they dreamed they could be.

The problem was that once I became that version of myself, there was still yet another dream waiting to be fulfilled, to be realized, waiting to be lived by me. And that dream was asking something very different of me than my dreams had ever asked of me before. That dream was asking me to let go of this false belief that I myself am not enough.

Not that there’s not enough money, or love, or opportunities, or time or freedom, but to believe that I, myself, am enough.

I had failed to do one of the very things I warn my clients of — I had failed to force my expectations to keep pace with my dreams and desires as they grew. Instead, I allowed my expectations of myself to remain stuck in the past, where I had been before. And as a result, I projected that version of myself out into the world only to have it mirrored back to me by the people I surrounded myself with. The people whose opinion of me matters most, but whom I always feel I never quite measure up to their expectations of who they think I am, or what I am capable of.

As Kate Northrup said, “…truth seeps out eventually, even if you’re trying to ignore it.”

I am now in that very uncomfortable place of messy growth that most of us do whatever we can to avoid. While I personally count growth and expansion as two of my top core values in life, I, perhaps like you, resist the very things I desire. Why? Because growth can’t happen if we remain where we feel safe in our lives and within ourselves.

Growth happens by being willing to peer into the darkness that we hold within and to shine a light of recognition, of awareness, that ‘YES! I do want to change’.

We claim it and say to ourselves, I know that this is likely going to be bloody painful and I know I will be asked to give up being the person I once was, but I’m willing to do it anyway. Because what lies on the other side is far more valuable than staying right here where I am today.

And so, I willingly choose to face the parts of myself that are not yet able to keep pace with the version of myself that I most deeply desire to be. The woman who knows at the deepest levels of her being that she is always enough. The woman who knows that truth not just in words on paper or spoken as a rallying cry to other women, but who knows it in thought and action too.

It is not enough to say that I want to change. I must be willing to be transformed by my desire for more, to trust that I can have more, that I will have more. And that is the place where we get stopped. We stop choosing to believe that we can have more because we’re afraid to face the truth that we already have it all within us. And all this time, we told ourselves that we didn’t.

We told ourselves that we had to wait or that something or someone had to change first, only to wake up one day to realize that we had the power within us all along.

We were just too afraid to believe it, to go digging around in the depths of our subconscious to find the truth of all the ways we willingly gave up our power and chose to remain hidden from ourselves and from others.

We need to remember that there is always enough love to heal, air to breathe, joy to share, laughter to spread and kindness to soothe. When will we wake up and start believing in our own goodness, our own greatness, and share that part of ourselves with the world? When will we stop allowing ourselves to believe the false stories we see projected about who we are and what we’re capable of?

We are enough.

I am enough.

You are enough.

I’m going to say something that will quite possibly alienate and offend you because it’s worth the risk to say it if it wakes you up to your own truth hidden deep inside. What if we, collectively as women, stop believing that we are not enough? What if we stopped allowing others to believe that we are not enough? What if we stopped believing that there was a glass ceiling someone else holds over us? Or a law, a man, or a nation that had the right to tell us we are not enough?

Don’t confuse my words with saying that this will solve all our problems, but if our thoughts really do create our reality, both as individuals and collectively, then we have an obligation to take responsibility for what we’re thinking and the feelings those thoughts give rise too. If we continue to believe that our power lies outside of ourselves — in the hands of a man, a corporation, a paycheck, a law, the approval of another human being or even our own country — we have no hope of ever fully realizing our greatest potential.

This is a call to arms for every woman who has ever played small, who has hid her light, who pretended that she didn’t know the answer, or that she didn’t know how to take care of herself.

You know what you must do.

You have known all along what you are being called to do.

You are here to heal not only this wound within yourself, but also the wounds of the world, for they are all one.

Who will you choose to be today? Will you continue to allow others to see you as a person who is less than who you know yourself to be inwardly? Or will you softly, quietly, begin the revolution within that’s been pushing at the doors of your consciousness, calling you to rise up, to be seen, to be heard, to sing and to dance and to pray like the beauty that you are. The beauty that this world is so desperately in need of right now.

Who will you be today?

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