Greg did nothing wrong

So why was I on the daybed with an ice pack and a Coke?

Conditioning is a sneaky little bastard. It doesn’t always arrive wearing an apron and telling you to be a good girl. Sometimes it comes through the mouth of a man you respect, wrapped in a compliment. And after 71 years on this planet, I can still fall for it.

Not long ago, I was sitting outside in the cool of the evening, drinking a cup of tea with my friend Greg. Greg owns businesses. He knows what building something substantial looks like. We were talking about my Substack when he said, “Monica, you are building an empire.”

Well, good golly Miss Molly. An empire. I was VERY PROUD that he saw that possibility in me.

Within minutes my imagination had slipped into a pencil skirt and started carrying a clipboard. I could see the book publisher, the podcast, the interviews, a small staff, meetings, projects, expansion. Busy, busy, busy. Ridiculously busy. Seems the retirement portion of my retirement had been canceled due to unforeseen empire-building.

There was another piece of it I didn’t want to admit. I have experienced business failures in my life, and one of my daughters has been keen to remind me of them. Some tiny part of me thought, Finally. I’ll show her what I can do.

Oh honey. There were enough warning signs in that sentence alone to light up Times Square. But I missed every single one of them.

Instead, I went into high gear, which is what I tend to do when somebody hands me a shiny new possibility. I bypassed the slower gears completely. And my body started complaining.

For weeks I had pain through the upper part of my back, shoulder and left arm. I tried changing positions, I used ice, I used heat, I propped myself against pillows, and I kept going back to the desk. Because, you know, EMPIRE.

Then one Monday morning the pain became so uncomfortable that I threw up my hands and said out loud, “Not today.”

I went into my living room, piled a ridiculous number of pillows around myself on the daybed, poured a Coke, put ice on my arm and announced that I was taking the day off. Naturally, I immediately started “working” from my phone. We women are nothing if not committed to misunderstanding our own instructions.

The phone limited me, though. I can answer messages on a phone. I can fiddle around. But I cannot create the magic I want to create for my readers from that little rectangle. So for 7 days I more or less made do.

Then I wandered right back to the desk for another 14. The pain had eased enough for me to convince myself everything was fine. And besides, I had an empire to build.

Mercy. That grand idea was something I never would have thought of myself. Read that sentence again, because I didn’t see it at the time either: I NEVER WOULD HAVE THOUGHT OF IT MYSELF.

Still, I went back to writing articles, publishing articles, reading advice, studying growth strategies, trying to learn everything I supposedly needed to learn to become the successful little empress I had suddenly decided I was supposed to become

.

And something very strange happened. My writing stopped connecting. I knew it, and my readers knew it. My words were technically there, but I wasn’t. I couldn’t write something that connected with you because I had disconnected from myself.

Then came the moment that finally slammed on the brakes. I was trying to repurpose an article I had published before, and something about it felt wrong. It felt like I was feeding the machine. And I heard it inside myself as clearly as if St. Peter had shoved a trumpet into my ear: THIS IS NOT WHY YOU ARE WRITING. THIS IS NOT WHY YOU WERE CALLED TO WRITE.

I shut off the computer, went back to my cloud of pillows, and cried.

The next day two members of the Breakthrough Circle shared significant breakthroughs in their own lives that they believe came directly from meeting with me each week. I went to bed weeping with satisfaction and appreciation.

Here is what I thought this story was about when I began writing it. I thought it was about working too much, about getting caught up in Substack gurus and growth strategies, and about listening to my body. All of that is true. But it is not the story.

The real story hit me several days later with all the subtlety of a frying pan to the forehead. A man had described a future he could see for me, and I went running toward it without once asking myself: Do I want this?

Holy Mother of God. THAT was the story.

Greg did nothing wrong. That matters. He wasn’t telling me how to live, he wasn’t controlling me, and he wasn’t trying to turn me into something I didn’t want to be. He was complimenting me. He saw potential.

The conditioning happened inside ME. A man I respected saw a possibility for my life, and before checking with myself, I turned his observation into an assignment.

How many times have women done exactly that? It sounds like “You’d be so good at this,” or “You have such a gift,” or “Your family needs you,” or “You could make something big out of this,” and off we go.

Our generation of women became Olympic athletes at accepting assignments. We learned how to be good daughters, good wives, good mothers, good church women, good employees, good volunteers, good caretakers. We learned how to be useful, dependable, needed. And then some of us retire and keep right on accepting assignments. Different uniform. Same conditioning. Nobody even has to tell us what to do anymore. We can do it to ourselves.

That realization brought me straight back to something I have been teaching women for quite a while now.

Trust.

Not trust as a nice word on a coffee mug, but trust when it costs you something, when there is no evidence yet that you are right, and when everything outside of you starts hollering that you had better get back in line.

Because right about the time I decided to stop grinding and return to my own way of doing things, something happened that scared the daylights out of me. I lost 16 paid subscribers. And nobody replaced them.

In subscription businesses, people leave. That is churn. Usually, while somebody is heading out one door, somebody else wanders in through another. Not this time. The number dropped, and dropped, and nobody new came in.

That is when all my lovely talk about trusting my soul and intuition suddenly had to report for duty. I was scared. Really scared. This publication matters to me emotionally, but it also produces income.

I could hear that old business voice whispering: See? You pulled back, you stopped pushing, you stopped following all the advice, and now look at what’s happening. Get back to work. Post more, do more. FIX IT.

And more than once I said out loud, “Rosie girl, it’s time to step up or shut up.” Because either I believe all this stuff I have been talking about, or I don’t. Either I trust the relationship I have built with my intuition, my soul and my faith, or I only trust it when the numbers agree with me.

That was the test. Not whether I could sit peacefully in my pink robe and listen to my intuition when everything was going beautifully. Anybody can trust herself when the universe is handing out cookies. Could I trust myself when 16 people walked out the door, keep choosing what felt right when there was no immediate reward for choosing it, and resist running back to the empire simply because fear told me an empire might be safer?

THAT is trust.

I had to really wrestle with it. I had to sit down and listen. It was uncomfortable.

It was a wake up call and I knew I had to pay attention.

The days before the wake up call my mornings looked very different. I would wake up, grab the coffee I had programmed the night before, put on my pink fluffy robe and my clunky sheepskin-lined house shoes, shuffle straight into my office, collapse into the desk chair and announce, “Well. Here I am again.” UGH. There’s an inspiring way to greet another day of being alive.

Now the coffee is still there. Coffee has survived the metamorphosis. But I stay in the living room, sitting in my favorite chair in the pink robe and ridiculous house shoes. Sometimes I do breathwork, sometimes I sit quietly, sometimes I watch television, and sometimes an idea floats into my awareness. And I stay there until I feel myself. Only then do I get dressed and wander toward my desk. It usually delays my arrival there by about 2 hours. The empire has somehow survived without me for those 2 hours. Imagine that.

And the strangest thing has happened. I want to write again. I want to talk to you again. Not because my content calendar says I should, and not because some guru has informed me that Thursday at 9:42 a.m. is the optimal time to monetize my vulnerability, but because something inside me has something to say.

That is why you came here in the first place. You didn’t find me because I had perfected life in retirment. You found something I wrote. It connected with something inside you. And you stayed.

So perhaps this story isn’t only about me at all.

The more I think about it, the more I realize it is likely that somewhere in your life there is an empire you are busily constructing that you never actually asked for. It may not look like a business. It might look like being the family problem solver, the dependable grandmother, the church volunteer, the caretaker, or the woman who hosts every holiday because everyone says, “But you’re so good at it.” It might be the retirement everybody told you you’d love. It might even be a dream somebody praised you into having.

That’s the tricky part. Sometimes the goals that take us furthest away from ourselves don’t arrive as demands. They arrive as compliments.

So before you put one more ounce of your life into making something happen, sit still long enough to ask yourself a question we women were not encouraged to ask nearly often enough: Do I actually want this? Not “Am I capable of it?” or “Would I be good at it?” or “Would everybody be impressed?” and not even “Could I make money doing it?”

Do. I. Want. It.

And if you don’t know the answer yet, good. Don’t manufacture one. Pour the coffee, stay in the bathrobe, and park yourself somewhere comfortable and give yourself enough quiet to hear the woman who has spent decades underneath everybody else’s expectations. She’s still there.

You don’t need to blow up your life tomorrow, you don’t need another 14-step program, and you don’t need to know exactly what comes next. But sooner or later you are going to come face to face with the question I had to answer: do you trust yourself only when everything is going according to plan? Or do you trust yourself enough to keep listening when the numbers drop, the old conditioning starts screaming, and you have absolutely no proof yet that you are making the right choice?

That is where trust stops being an idea. That is where it becomes yours.

And when that moment comes, here is what I heard when I finally sat still and listened:

Things always work out for you. Why would you stop trusting that now?

If this has you wondering how much you actually trust your own voice, I created Building Believable Trust for exactly that reason - to help you strengthen the relationship with your intuition, your soul, and your own inner knowing.

Join The Daily RE-Wire with an annual membership and I’ll give you the Building Believable Trust guidebook as part of your membership.

Because knowing what you want is one thing. Trusting yourself enough to follow it when old conditioning, fear, or somebody else’s expectations start shouting is where everything changes.

Become an annual member and get Building Believable Trust included.

I know some of you are struggling right now, so I’ve taken 20% off this particular annual membership. I want this work to be within reach for the women who need it.