The Dream Was Never The Problem

 There is a message that comes in at 11pm on a Wednesday. It comes in more often than you would think.

She writes me that she has a dream. A real one. Not the vague, one-day kind. A specific thing she wants to build, a business that actually supports her life, clients she loves, work that feels like what she was always supposed to be doing.

She can describe it in detail to me and I am amazed. I think: ‘Why hasn’t this worked yet for her?’

And for three years, she has almost done something about it.

Year one, she said she needed to learn more first. She took a course. A good one. She finished it. She understood more things. The dream did not move.

Year two, she hired a coach. She did the mindset work. She journaled. She wrote affirmations. She could name her blocks clearly, trace them back to where they started. The blocks did not move.

Year three, she made a plan. Dates on it. She was going to post consistently, raise her prices, be more visible. In January she set the intention. By March the plan was sitting in a folder on her desktop, unopened.

And during those years she opened her banking app at the end of every month and felt the same thing. A drop in her stomach. A tightening. A quiet, physical verdict.

Not enough. Again.

She told me she started to wonder if she was the problem. Not her strategy. Not her timing. Her. Some essential thing, missing, that other women seemed to have been born with. She watched people she started alongside move forward, she said. And the conclusion she said that settled in was: they have access to something I do not.

But she was looking in the wrong place for answers and conclusions.

What had been making the decisions was not her mind. It was her body. Before she could think about posting, her nervous system had already assessed the risk and chosen retreat. Before she could raise her price, something in her chest had already tightened, already braced, already decided: not today. Not yet. This is too much.

It was not laziness. Not weakness. Not the wrong mindset.

It was a pattern stored in her body from a time when making herself smaller felt like the only safe thing to do. When standing out meant something was coming. When wanting more meant she was asking for too much.

Her body and her nervous system have been protecting her from the exact thing she was trying to build.

And no amount of understanding that had changed what the nervous system did next.

The year I built my tiny house, I had five thousand euros. No plan, no certainty, no obvious path forward. I did not lie awake calculating the risk. I did not hesitate before taking the first step. I just moved toward it, and everything came to meet me. The money appeared. The right people appeared. The location appeared.

For a long time I called that luck.

I know now it was the absence of blocks. There was nothing stored in my body telling me that dream was dangerous. So the dream got realised, so easily and effortlessly.

My business was a different story. The patterns were there. The income ceiling was there and it seemed it was made out of concrete, instead of the ‘usual’ glass one. And I had to do exactly the work I now do with clients before anything in me was willing to move.

Now I know it was the absence of blocks, that made me realise the impossible.

What changes things is not understanding the pattern. Most women already understand their pattern. They can describe it with precision. They can trace it to its origin. And they still freeze when it is time to post.

That gap is not a knowledge problem.

It is a body problem. And it requires a different level of work. Finding the belief in the body, staying with the sensation it produces, allowing the charge to dissolve at the root. Not talking about it. Feeling it. In the place it actually lives.

That is when the dream stops with just being a dream and becomes reality.

The woman I described at the beginning is still deciding. She has twelve tabs open right now. One of them is a coach she has been following for four months. One of them is her own Instagram account, a caption she wrote last Tuesday that she never posted. One of them is her banking app, already closed, because she checked it this morning and felt what she always feels, and she does not want to feel it again today, so she walked away from it.

She is reading this in the tab she almost closed twice.

She has been carrying this for three years.

She does not have to carry it for a fourth, if she makes the decision to release the limiting beliefs that are stored in her subconscious and her nervous system.