If you have a desire, it is always being fulfilled.

The first time I heard my coach say that, I got mad. Like, really mad. I desperately wanted to double my income, so I could move to a better neighbourhood, take a Uber on a night out so I wouldn’t arrive at a date all sweaty after a short trip on the underground (#londonproblems) and just have a better quality of life.

I had been hustling 24/7 for a couple of years to make it happen. I was blogging, posting on social media every day, going to networking events, doing webinars… You name it, I was doing it.

And it wasn’t working. 

None of it. I had a burning desire to double my income and I was working hard to reach that goal… so why didn’t I get the result I wanted? Why wasn’t my desire fulfilled?

The truth is, if your desire isn’t being fulfilled, there is a deeper desire – deeper than the 10K months or a booked out group programme – that’s being fulfilled instead.

Let me tell you a story…

Conscious VS Subconscious Desires

A few years ago, I was stuck in what I call strategy hell. It’s a place every entrepreneur finds themselves in at some point. You want to grow your business, so you start looking online for advice.  Every guru out there has a different strategy that’s absolutely essential to make it in business (or so they say). 

Before you know it, you’re spreading yourself thin doing a gazillion things, have lunch at your desk every day, and are overwhelmed to the point of burnout. And yet, you don’t get the results the gurus promised you if you did all those things. *sighs*

One day, I decided to attend a coworking & cake event hosted at a posh hotel in Chelsea. I started chatting to a women’s empowerment coach and she invited me to a free session. Little did I know that session would be a game changer for me.

During that session, I had a powerful AHA moment. Almost in passing, I blurted out my fear that, if I were more successful than my partner and my friends, they wouldn’t like me anymore and they’d leave me.

I thought I was doing all the right things to fulfil my conscious desire of doubling my income. In reality, I had a deeper desire for safety and belonging that was sabotaging all my efforts, keeping me stuck in busy work instead of making the big moves that’d move the needle forward.

If your desire isn’t being fulfilled, what deeper desire are you manifesting instead?

The Real Reason You’re Manifesting What You Don’t Want

Your desires are always being fulfilled. If you desire to reach 10K months, fill your group programme or be on the Tim Ferriss Show and it hasn’t happened yet – despite all your hard efforts! – you have a deeper, often unconscious, desire you’re manifesting instead. 

Here are a few common desires that get in the way of you manifesting what you desire:

✨ The desire for attention: Human beings need to be seen and heard, yet society criticises anyone who dares to stand out and attract attention to yourself. The only exception? Playing the victim. As long as you stay stuck in strategy hell, blaming everyone and everything for your lack of results, you get sympathy and attention. 

✨ The desire for being right: You desire to be right about your belief that you’re not good enough, you’re not worthy of it, and that it’s not possible for you. If you were wrong (and you are) and you knew you could achieve your goal, that’d shattered your identity.

✨ The desire for belonging: You desire to fit in with a certain group of people (your friend, your family, your partner) and are worried that, if you become too successful, it’ll hurt the relationship. You may even lose them. 

✨ The desire for control: You believe that if you can control every detail of how you’re going to reach your goals, you’ll be able to get there without anything bad happening in the process. In reality, you just keep pursuing a course of action that makes you feel safe, but doesn’t work.

Which of these desires are you currently manifesting in your life?

The Desire For Safety

At the root of all these desires is the desire for safety. 

Your goals are exciting. But they’re outside of your comfort zone. They require you to do something different, something you’ve never done before.

Your brain uses your past to predict the likelihood of your success in the future. If you’re doing something you’ve never done before, your brain has no proven track record that it’ll work. 

Without any guarantee of success, your brain interprets your efforts to go after your goal as a threat and will throw all kinds of self-doubts and fears at you to make you stop and go back into your comfort zone.

The irony? A lot of what your brain fears will NEVER come true. I know this from personal experience. 

Once I broke through my fear that if I were more successful than my partner and friends they’d leave me, I was able to double my income – and my partner and friends stayed in my life! They were actually happy for me and my success.

What if you could be safe AND reach your wildest goals?

How To Break Through Your Fears And Manifest What You Desire

Now you know the deepest desire you’re manifesting instead of your goal, here’s how to break through it, so you can manifest the 10K months, a booked out coaching business, and anything else that’s still on your vision board:

Step 1: Identify The Root Cause Of Your Fear

Your deepest desires manifest through a limiting belief. In my case, my deepest desire was to belong. The belief that manifested it was: being successful is dangerous. If I’m more successful than my partner and friends, they’ll leave me.

Once I uncovered this belief, I shared my fear with my partner and friends – they were shocked I ever felt like this. They loved me and wanted me to be successful. They assured me they wouldn’t be going anywhere.

So where was that belief coming from? 

When I was 7, I was badly bullied for being smart. I’ve always loved learning – and I was proud to show it. I happily raised my hand when I had the right answer and my essays were so good, my teachers were reading them in front of the class as examples of great writing.

The other children didn’t like it. I was getting good grades, but I had no friends and was often alone at playtime.

I quickly got the message: if I’m more successful than others, they won’t like me and I’ll end up alone.

I wasn’t 7 anymore. But that belief was playing out in the background and running my business. 

Now I knew what was really going on, I could do something about it.

Step 2.  Act Like The Person Who Already Has What You Desire

Most people identify the limiting belief at the root of their fear and change that negative belief into a positive one – and then stop here. This is surface level mindset work. It’s a necessary first step, but if that’s all you do, you’ll be the person with the positive mindset and no results to show for it. 

Once you have come up with a new story – for example, I can be successful and loved -, it’s time to act like the person who believes that story.

✨ What does she think?

✨ What actions does she take?

✨ How does she handle nerves, self-doubt, and procrastination as they come up?

✨ Does she have any routines to help her feel the fear and do it anyway?

Here’s the catch: acting like that person does NOT feel safe. You’re doing something different from what you were doing before, making your brain freak out. Anything out of the ordinary is a threat, remember?

Before you can act like the person who has what you desire, you need to calm down your nervous system so that you feel safe enough to take that step.

Over the years, I have developed a toolkit of high-performance tools to help you feel the fear and do it anyway (without anything bad happening in the process). I share them into my online training course, The Self-Sabotage Solution, for female entrepreneurs who want to break the cycle of self-sabotage and go to their next income and business level. You can join us here.

Once you’ve done this work, it’s time to uplevel your identity and think and act like the person who has what you desire. When you show up like her, success is inevitable.  

Step 3: Aligned Strategy

Your fears and limiting beliefs keep you stuck in busy work, tricking you into believing you need to do all the things to reach your goals. But, when you spread yourself too thin, nothing has the chance to grow and you stay stuck where you are.

Every strategy works, but only if you’re the person who can implement it fully. 

An example? A lot of my clients want to get clients from Instagram. They’re posting every day in their feed and stories and then wonder why no one is paying attention. Getting clients on Instagram involves a lot more than that: you need to show up live on videos, sell on stories every day, and start conversations with potential clients in the DMs.

If you’re scared of bothering people, feel pushy selling every day, and are afraid people won’t like you, you’re only going to implement the part of the strategy that feels comfortable to you – and NOT get the results you want.

This is why strategy is the last step of my Success Embodiment Method. When you’ve mastered your mindset and broken through your self-sabotaging pattern, you can implement any strategy and get results.

I do recommend you pick a strategy aligned with your personality, lifestyle goals, and business mission to minimise resistance and get results faster.

When I allowed myself to ditch busy work and go all in with an aligned strategy (after doing the mindset and embodiment work), my income DOUBLED in 3 MONTHS!

Wrapping It Up

If you don’t have what you say you want, it’s because you desire safety more than success. Use these tools to do the deep mindset work to transform your identity and become the person who can push past the fear and achieve her wildest goals – without anything bad happening in the process. 

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