I recently heard something that really stayed with me…
Someone once defined hell as this—
Hell is a comparison on the last day of your life…
when you come face to face with the person you became…
and the person you could HAVE become.
And I don’t know about you…
but that hit me.
Because it made me think—
what is actually standing between who I am today…
and who I COULD become?
And I want you to think about that for just a second.
Not the polished version of you…
not the “Instagram version” of you…
But the real you.
👉 If nothing held you back…
who could you become?
And THEN the harder question…
👉 what is actually in the way of becoming her?
Because I don’t think it’s a lack of ability.
I don’t think it’s a lack of opportunity for either of us.
I think for most of us…
it’s this— we were never taught how to lead ourselves well.
And when I say that…
I don’t just mean planners and schedules.
I don’t mean productivity hacks.
I am talking about something deeper.
How we lead ourselves emotionally.
Because if you really think about it…
There are two things that determine how you show up in your life:
👉 What you do with the good in your life
👉 What you do with the H.A.R.D. in your life
And most of us?
We were never taught how to do either.
And this starts way earlier than we think.
It starts when we’re kids.
We don’t just learn from one place.
We learn from everything and everyone around us.
From what people say…
From what people don’t say…
From how people look at us…
We learn from other kids being mean.
We learn from being told to quiet down.
We learn from feeling like we’re too much…
or not enough.
👉 Let me ask you something…
Have you ever held back something you wanted to say…
because you were afraid of how it would be received?
Yeah… me too.
And at the same time…
Many of us were raised with messages like:
Be humble
Be obedient
Be good
And those aren’t bad things.
But somewhere along the way…
They got translated into something else.
The translation became:
Don’t stand out.
Don’t take credit.
Don’t put yourself first.
And then emotionally?
We were taught:
“There, there, stop crying.”
“You’re fine.”
OR “I’ll give you something to cry about.”
So what did we learn?
We learned to disconnect.
We learned to push things down.
At a very young age we learned to buffer…
We learned that what we feel…is something to manage… not understand.
And those patterns don’t go away.
They follow us into adulthood.
You want to speak up… but you stay quiet.
You know you’re capable of more…
but there’s this voice that says:
“Who do you think you are?”
“People like you don’t do that.”
👉 Does that sound familiar to anyone?
And then there’s this part—
the receiving part.
You look at your life…
And you DO see where you used to be…
And where you are now.
You see the transformation and if you’re like me, you may even wonder at the amazement of how far you have come.
You remember how hard it was.
The effort.
The discipline.
Every time you fell down – yes you may have stayed there for a bit but you got back up every single time.
The baby steps forward that were required of you to get where you are today and the small shimmers of pride in those steps forward that you took more than once to makeup for a few steps backwards at times.
And you can acknowledge all of it…
but you still struggle to say:
“I did that.”
And this is where something has to shift.
Because yes—
God was there.
Yes—He helped you.
Yes—He strengthened you.
But you also showed up.
👉 You made decisions.
👉 You took all those baby steps even when you were scared and didn’t know if it was going to workout in the end.
👉 You got back up when you got knocked down.
👉 You kept going.
And that matters.
But for so many of us…
receiving that accomplishment as our own feels uncomfortable or completely foreign.
We deflect it.
We minimize it.
We brush it off.
“Oh it was nothing…”
“I just got lucky…”
“it was all God”
But what we’re really doing…
is disconnecting from truth.
We are discounting our active participation of leading ourselves well in our own life.
And I want you to listen to these next few sentences if you don’t hear anything else that I say –
- It is okay for you to be proud of the hard work you have invested into becoming the woman you are today.
- You are worthy of receiving that accolade – it could not have been accomplished without YOU.
👉 Let me ask you this:
When was the last time you fully allowed yourself to acknowledge something you did well?
Not halfway.
Not with a disclaimer.
Just YOU – just owning it.
And that is not a rhetorical question I am throwing out for you to skim over – I want you to think about the answer and answer it for yourself.
Journal about it if it helps you to process through the emotion of allowing yourself to be proud of your accomplishments.
For me…
This went deeper than behavior.
It went back to what I believed.
Growing up, my interpretation of some basic fundamental principles became distorted in a way, that today, I truly do not believe God intended for them to be interpreted.
Be humble
Be obedient
Be good
Became:
Don’t take credit.
Don’t put yourself first.
And I internalized that as:
“I’m not deserving.”
“I shouldn’t claim that I was responsible for outcomes or things that went well”.
Now again— that was my interpretation – which I now know was wrong.
But it shaped how I lived my life – how I interacted with people – how I thought about myself for a long time.
But over time…
I realized something.
That wasn’t the full truth.
Because yes— On my own, I fall short.
But because of Him… Everything changes.
Because God delights in me.
He loves me more than I can even comprehend.
His thoughts about me outnumber the grains of sand.
👉 Think about that for a second.
The God of the universe…
has that many good thoughts about you.
So it’s not that you’re undeserving.
It’s not that I am underserving.
It’s that you and I are loved beyond measure.
And because of that love…
We are freely given the good in our lives.
And if that is true…
then there’s a responsibility that comes with that.
To steward your life well.
To take care of yourself.
To lead yourself well.
Because how can you do what you’re called to do…
if you’re not taking care of the life you’ve been given and that you have earned?
👉 Let me say this clearly:
Leading yourself well is not selfish.
👉 It is stewardship.
But the other side of this…
is just as important and has to be explored as well.
Because we weren’t taught how to sit with hard things either.
We were taught to avoid them.
Fix them.
Numb them or buffer so that we don’t have to feel them.
Something as small as consoling someone and telling them to dry up their tears, let’s get some ice cream to feel better and to not think about that hard or messy thing that happened today will begin to sow the seeds of learning to avoid the hard instead of allowing ourselves to feel the emotions and process through them.
I remember this so clearly after Mark passed away…
The heartache of losing him was not anything like I had ever felt before. I could physically feel it in the middle of my chest – the ache, it was there for so long and I remember a particular day, I said out loud that I just didn’t want to feel it anymore.
I just wanted the pain to stop.
And maybe you haven’t experienced that exact loss…
but you’ve had something.
👉 A moment where you just thought:
“I don’t want to feel this anymore; it’s been too much for too long.”
And in a way, it’s so understandable – right? I think so.
But self-leadership requires something different.
Self-leadership needs us to sit in the H.A.R.D. and feel it – it asks us to process those feelings that really do seems unbearable at times because that is the only way to show ourselves that we can handle the thing that we are sitting in the middle of.
We may not do it well all the time and that is okay.
The simple fact that we are there – is what matters. We take it in. We feel it because it is also worthy of our owning the circumstance and allowing it to shape us and mold us into a better version of us than we were before we faced such horrific events.
We allow the H.A.R.D. to equip us with tools and the emotional capacity we need to face the next thing that comes our way, both stronger and with more gratitude whether they be beautiful or terrible.
👉 You don’t lead yourself well by avoiding the hard…
👉 You lead yourself well by learning to sit in it… without destroying yourself.
👉 Let me ask you this:
If your 80-year-old self could talk to you today…
what would she tell you to do?
If that quote is true… That the greatest regret would be seeing
who you could have become…
Look at the gap between who you are today…
and who you could become…
I will tell you from firsthand knowledge – that gap is not filled with talent or opportunity.
👉 It is filled with self-leadership.
And self-leadership looks like:
Which means understanding your worth…
and being honest about this—
The good in your life didn’t just happen to you…
you showed up for it.
And when you allow yourself to fully own that…
it creates a whole different level of confidence in how you see yourself.
Which means that sometimes life is terrible and we don’t like anything about it at all.
And there are some things that we cannot change at all – no matter how much we would want to make them not true. So we have a choice to make in how we are going to face those moments. When we decide to feel them, to process them, and walk through the circumstance the best way we know how…
That’s how you become her.
That is self-leadership.