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 had racked up a lot of debt to learn how to build a successful coaching business and had no clients.

I desired to have a steady stream of high-tickets clients, make enough money to live a luxury lifestyle in London, empower hundreds of women to build their empires…

Instead, I was hustling hard posting on all the social media platforms with no results to show for it, was living in a crappy flatshare in a dodgy area of London, and had no clients I was empowering with anything…

How could she say my desires were being fulfilled when my reality looked so different from what my heart desired?!

The truth is, if your desire isn’t being fulfilled, there is a deeper desire – deeper than financial freedom or making an impact in other people’s lives – that’s being fulfilled instead.

Let me share with you how this works…

Conscious VS Subconscious Desires

Your desire for financial freedom, making an impact in the world, launching a podcast, etc is conscious. You know you want to achieve it and are taking steps every day to get there.

But your conscious mind only makes up 10% of your brain function. The other 90% is subconscious. Your subconscious is made up of your limiting beliefs, all the reasons you’ve picked up along your life (from your parents, school, the media…) about why you shouldn’t do something.

Most of the time, you’re not even aware of what your limiting beliefs are. But, as you start taking action towards your goals, they come up and sabotage all your efforts – without you even realising it!

Remember my desire to build a successful coaching business? That was a conscious desire. But subconsciously, I was terrified of being exposed as a fraud. What if people paid me and I couldn’t get them results?

The belief of “I’m not good enough to help people” was sabotaging all my efforts. It showed up on discovery calls. It showed up when I met people at networking events. It showed up when I did a live on Instagram. People could feel I didn’t trust myself and so they didn’t trust me.

Consciously, I desired a successful coaching business. But subconsciously, I desired to stay safe and not being exposed as a fraud – and that’s exactly what I was manifesting.

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 subconscious desires that get in the way of you manifesting what you desire:

1. The desire for attention: In order to build a successful business, you need to promote yourself, share your message, have your voice heard. Yet society criticises anyone who dares to stand out and attract attention to themself. The only exception? Playing the victim. As long as you stay stuck in overwhelm and busy work, blaming everyone and everything for your lack of results, you get sympathy and attention. 

2. The desire for being right: This is a bit tricky for the conscious mind to understand, but hear me out. This is the desire to be right about whatever you believe about yourself and what’s possible for you. For example, I had a belief that introverts can’t network and do public speaking. Admitting that belief was wrong would have shattered my identity, so I’d have no excuse NOT to network and do public speaking gigs. Scary, right?

3. 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 these relationships. You may even lose them. 

4. 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 keep doing more of what doesn’t work, hustling hard with nothing to show for it.

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 to 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 of being exposed as a fraud, not only I started attracting clients, but they were getting massive results – like booking out coaching programmes, being featured in Buzzfeed (a dozen times!), and doubling their income. All of this in 60 to 90 days!

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 be safe. The belief that manifested it was: I’m not good enough to help people.

Once you uncover the belief, ask yourself, “Where is this belief coming from?”

It came from my childhood. I grew up with a grandmother who was never satisfied with what I did. No matter how much I tried to please or what approach I tried, I’d always be told nothing I did was good enough. I wasn’t good enough.

When I started my coaching business, that belief reared its ugly head again. If I weren’t good enough for so many other things, what made me think I was good enough for this?

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 know more than my clients and can help them -, 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). The Self-Sabotage Solution is a proven system, available only inside The Leadership Advantage membership, 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 and consistently. 

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 putting strategy before mindset does NOT work. 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 the aligned strategy next level Giorgia would have used to reach her goals (after doing the mindset and embodiment work to break through self-sabotage), 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 hustling.

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