8 things I’d tell anyone ready to stop waiting and actually take the leap.

“Leap and the net will appear.”

Who knew that six little words could hold so much power over the way we choose to interact with the world?

I’ve heard this phrase many times throughout my life, often not thinking twice of it. But most recently, it has come up as I’ve worked through Julia Cameron’s, ‘The Artist’s Way’ – the world renowned, 12-week creative recovery program that has helped millions of people find their way back to themselves. And as my finger slid across these particular words on the page, I finally sat back and realized: I have taken the leap over and over and over again. Yet somewhere in the accumulation of all of it, I stopped giving myself credit for any of it.

We do this, humans. We clear a hurdle that once felt insurmountable, and before we’ve even caught our breath we’re already measuring ourselves against the next one. The thing that terrified us six months ago becomes the thing we did, filed away and forgotten, replaced immediately by a new and more elaborate version of not being enough yet.

In 2022, I started posting on social media. That sounds small, but I think anyone who has ever thought about sharing their life online can attest to the particular flavor of vulnerability that comes with letting yourself be perceived… especially in the early stages… especially by people who already know you. And I was acutely aware of what people must have been thinking. 

“Who does she think she is, posting like that?” 

The content was bad.. genuinely (it all still lives on my pages if anyone wants to go digging, which I invite you to do for the humbling experience of it lol). But something in me relaxed the moment I posted anyway. Like I had finally stepped onto a path that felt more like mine than anything I’d tried before.

Then I left the country. And then I kept leaving! 

The first time felt enormous, because it is scary to step outside of everything you’ve ever known. But the day I actually went, something within left me feeling like I had come home to myself. I was a completely different traveler then than I am now, and I know that because I went. I learned what I love and what I don’t, what to prioritize and what to leave behind. And none of that knowledge was available to me from the safety of staying.

And then I have my business. And all of the pivots and uncomfortable seasons of sitting in uncertainty while finances make everything that much more heavy. It’s always felt like the “right” answer refuses to show itself on any reasonable timeline. So, every time I’ve made a big decision to change direction – to scrap something that wasn’t working and start again with a new idea that felt more aligned – it has been deeply uncomfortable. Yet, every single time, I’ve come out the other side a little closer to the answer.

I tell you all of this to give you a little more context to where the following advice comes from. Because while I am still learning and growing through it all, too (I don’t think I ever won’t be), I’ve also lived it enough to know it’s true.

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1. The “responsible” path was designed by, and for, a different generation living in a completely different world.

We all know how the timeline is supposed to go. The graduation, the college, the job, the partner, the house, the kids. Rinse and repeat, generation after generation, the blueprint passed down like an inheritance nobody thought to question.

This is what sociologists call autodomestication – the process by which a society subtly trains people to want what the system needs from them, so early and so thoroughly that the cage never feels like a cage. It just feels like Tuesday.

But just as we’ve stopped carrying paper maps because better navigation exists, this path is an outdated framework designed around circumstances (job security, affordable housing, a cost of living that bore some relationship to actual wages) that largely no longer exist. And yet we’re still handing it to people like it’s the only map available. Like deviating from it is reckless rather than rational.

Following that path out of genuine desire is one thing. Following it out of obligation.. out of fear.. out of the pressure of everyone around you having done the same?? That’s not noble.

The fact of the matter that I fear too many still don’t understand is that this path never promised to make you happy. It promised to make you comfortable. And comfort and happiness are not the same thing. One keeps you stable.. the other makes you feel alive.

You are allowed to want the second one. You are allowed to build your entire life around it. The fact that not many people in your immediate world have done it is not evidence that it isn’t possible. It’s just evidence of how rare it is to actually choose yourself.

You can be the person who does.

2. Tell someone about it. Expose yourself to the world.

I am a firm believer that our ideas, our inklings, our DREAMS, are all planted in our hearts for a reason: because that is our destiny, and we are meant to act on them.

The dream, however, lives in a very comfortable place inside your head. It’s protected in there. Nobody can question it, nobody can watch it fail, nobody can hold you accountable to it. And that comfort is exactly what’s keeping it a dream instead of a reality (do we see the common theme here, yet?)

So, what would happen if you decided to say it out loud? What if you told a friend? Or, better yet… posted about it online? You don’t need an audience to achieve your goals in life. Many people will even die on the hill of “building in silence.” 

I’m a proponent of the opposite, though. Because the moment you say it out loud it stops being a fantasy world that you can coax yourself into accepting it’s “just not meant for you.” That’s when it starts becoming a plan. I mean… how embarrassing for you to not follow through, now? (In the most loving, ‘kick in the ass and start living up to your damn potential’ kind of way.)

3. Write things down.. not for content, not for anyone else, just for you. The details fade faster than you think.

The details fade a hell of a lot faster than you think, so write it all down. The moments, the feelings, the half-formed 2am thoughts that don’t make complete sense yet. Maybe you start a note in your phone, a journal nobody else reads, a voice memo recorded in the dark.. whatever form works, just capture it. You never know which ordinary Tuesday thought becomes the next big thing, and you never know which passing moment becomes the one you most need to remember on the days you’re convinced you haven’t moved at all.

4. You are allowed to change your mind about what this looks like as you go.

The only constant in life is change. This may as well be somewhat of my mantra at this point. I’ve echoed this over and over to just about anyone who will listen – I even have a reminder permanently tattooed onto my body, I embody it so much.

I have started over more times than I can count. Different business models, different content directions, different ideas about what I was building and why. Every pivot felt, from the inside, like I had failed at the thing I was “supposed” to be doing and was awkwardly beginning again.

But nothing in nature treats transformation as failure. A snake doesn’t mourn its shed skin. A tree doesn’t grieve going bare in autumn, knowing that the bare season is what makes the blooming possible. Every version I’ve outgrown was doing precisely what it was supposed to do: teaching me something I couldn’t have learned any other way. 

This one showed me what lights me up. That one showed me what drains me. This business model taught me what I’m actually good at. That content direction taught me what feels performative versus what feels true. This is the world’s way of showing us, through lived experience, who we actually are and what we’re actually here to do.

We are not supposed to arrive at one fixed answer and stay there. We are constantly in metamorphosis – shedding, blooming, being quietly remade into whoever we are being led to become next. The caterpillar doesn’t fight the dissolving. It surrenders to it completely, trusting that what’s on the other side of the undoing is worth becoming.

5. Let people help you.

The instinct to figure everything out alone is strong, especially if you’re the kind of person who has always prided themselves on being capable and independent. I understand it. I’ve lived inside it for long years.

But that instinct is an armour. And what it keeps out, along with the discomfort of needing help, is connection. Real, meaningful, life-changing connection.

Ask the question you’re embarrassed to ask. Accept the offer you’d normally deflect. Receive the kindness without immediately looking for a way to return it. The people who have helped me most on this journey only did because I let them, after realizing this was the Universe’s way of reminding me it’s always got my back.

You don’t have to do this alone… maybe more importantly: you shouldn’t.

6. Show up for your craft on the hard days, too.

Anyone who has ever committed to a fitness journey knows the plateau. The first few weeks carry their own momentum. That’s when you’re motivated! You feel amazing! The novelty alone is enough to get you out of bed and into your shoes! And then one day, without warning, you look in the mirror and feel as though the progress is invisible. You think back to all of the hard and grueling work you’ve put in… and realize that what you’re getting back seems like… nothing.

This is where most people stop.

Creating something – a business, a creative practice, a life that looks like yours – works exactly the same way.

There will be days (many of them) where the output feels mediocre. You’ll sit down to face your work with all of that doubt and criticism starting to creep in, wondering why you ever thought you could do this in the first place. And somewhere in the back of your mind, a shiny new idea will start whispering, asking for you to divert your attention.

What you need on those days is to become the manager. Tap in the the steady, unglamorous, unsexy part of you that shows up, not because it feels good, but because you said you would.

The inspired days are easy. Everyone shows up for those. Consistency across the unglamorous days, though, is what separates people who achieve something from people who almost did.

7. The first version probably won’t be the good version.

I have content living on my pages from 2022 that I would genuinely prefer you never find. Fuzzy footage because I forgot to wipe my camera lens. Awkward angles because I felt the fear of pulling my phone out in public. Some of the most painfully mediocre editing you may ever see. 

There on my page exists a version of me who was just figuring it out, in public for anyone to see, with absolutely no idea what she was doing yet.

And I posted it anyway. Every single cringe-worthy piece of it.

The first version of anything is not supposed to be good. The first draft is always rough. The first trip is always full of decisions you’d make differently next time. The first offer, the first pitch, the first time you put something you made into the world – it will not be the version you’re proudest of. 

What it will be, though, is the version that makes the next version possible.

The gap between where you are and where you want to be only closes one way, right?

8. Pay attention to who you feel most like yourself around and spend more time there.

You know the feeling. You leave a conversation and something in you is buzzing. This electric pulse of aliveness that comes from a room that allowed you to say the things you didn’t know you believed until they came pouring out of your mouth.

I have felt it sitting around a table somewhere in Patagonia with people I had known for four days, talking about life and death and the grief that comes with both. I have felt it in co-livings at midnight, in the middle of a work conversation that somehow became a passionate act of dreaming out loud about the lives we were actively building. I have felt it on trails, in hostels, in the comment sections of the internet at strange hours. Every single time, it has pointed me toward something true about who I am and what I need more of.

I have felt the opposite too. The conversations where I could feel myself shrinking in real time. These are the ones where I’m editing before I speak, softening the edges of opinions, and leaving with a vague, sourceless tiredness that takes a few hours to shake. And these are rarely dramatic. Nobody is ever unkind. But something in the dynamic asks us to show up as a dimmer version of ourselves, and oftentimes, we oblige without even noticing.

Well, start noticing.

The people who are right for this season of your life will make the vision feel far more possible just by being near it. They won’t flinch when you say the audacious thing out loud. They’ll match your energy. Maybe they’ll even raise it! They’ll ask you questions that crack something open in you that you needed to see.

There is a specific kind of relief that comes from being truly known. The right people meet that version of you and lean in. But you’ll never find them until you allow yourself to show up so fully, specifically, unapologetically yourself that they recognize you from across the room.

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If you’ve read this far, I don’t think you found this post by accident. 

I think you’re standing at the edge of a decision that’s been living in your chest for a little bit longer than you’d like to admit, getting heavier with every day you don’t act on it.

I’m not going to tell you it won’t be scary. It will be. I’m not going to promise it’ll go exactly the way you’re picturing. It won’t. But I will tell you this, from someone who has stood at that edge more times than she can count and jumped anyway:

The version of you on the other side is someone you are going to love meeting.