In graduate school years ago, I shared a house with a male classmate. What I loved about our relationship is that it was 100% platonic, so the boundaries were clear between us (you’ll know why I’m saying this in a moment). Which meant we could have some pretty deep conversations about relationships, sex, and connection in general, knowing there’d be no “unspoken expectations”.  

One night after I made us a housemate dinner, he opened up to me and said, “I keep wanting to attract a woman who is loyal, devoted, passionate, intelligent, & will stick with me through thick and thin, but so many I date are superficial, disloyal, can’t go the distance, and don’t understand true devotion. Why can’t I seem to find someone who values those things? I’m asking you because you’re a woman just like the one I want to find & maybe you have insight as to why I can’t find women like this?”

While what he said was flattering, I’m not sharing this to act like I’m perfect (I’m not, of course). I’m sharing this because this was when I saw how we can act against our own best interests & not even realize it.

For him, he claimed womxn he met just didn’t have it in them to go the distance, and build a true deep bond of loyalty & devotion with him… yet he kept asking out or flirting with womxn who simply didn’t have the capacity to meet him in the way his soul longed to be met. And he hadn’t taken the time to develop his own capacity to show up as a vibrational match for what he wanted. Instead his actions were telling the Universe he didn’t want what he said he wanted.

Since I lived with him, I had, on several occasions, watched him reject womxn who fit the bill of what he wanted perfectly. He couldn’t seem to feel attracted to the very type of womxn he claimed he wanted to meet. One even asked him out & he turned her down with some lame excuse.

He said he wanted one thing, but his lack of emotional capacity was sabotaging his truest desires. Because he didn’t possess that emotional capacity to see and heal his own patterns, they worked against him. His stunted emotional capacity and discernment in this area made him unable to attract what his soul really wanted.

In the same vein… recently, a womxn applied for my mastermind saying she was the most highly “motivated” and “committed” womxn I would ever meet when it came to joining & getting the results she wanted. She kept mentioning in her application how when she wants something she makes it happen, and she was determined to be a part of the mastermind.  

Yet, when my team offered her many time options to speak with me, she wasn’t willing to make a single one work and said “oh well! Guess I just won’t join!” That is the complete opposite of “motivated & committed”. Yet she didn’t see her self-contradiction. This is not a judgment against her. It’s an observation. And it’s not specifically about her — I have seen this happen with people who apply to work with me hundreds of times in the last 9 years of doing capacity work.

I’ve done this too, by the way. It took me three years to write my first book. I kept telling everyone I was so committed to being a published book author, yet there was always an excuse why I couldn’t do it. “My business is growing so fast that I can’t find the time! There’s just too much going on for me to set this time and money aside to do this!”  

The actual evidence showed I was lying to myself about my commitment to being a published author, even though I wanted it so badly. I finally just faced that I was lying to myself because my actions didn’t match up with what I said I wanted. When I did that, within months the book was done and out there! We sold twice the number of copies I had set as a goal to sell. I could have had that result three years ago if I’d stopped smokescreening myself about my commitment level and gotten real with myself.

We lie to ourselves a lot.  

We can be blind to how our lack of capacity blocks us from getting what we truly want. We let excuses stop us and use them as justification for giving up on the next level of our impact.  

We say we want out of overwhelm and overfilled calendars. We say we want more opportunities than we know what to do with and we also want the ability to navigate it all like the internally peaceful badass we want to feel like. 

But what are our actions saying about what we are really committed to?  

If you aren’t getting something you want, consider how many times what you want has stood right before you, wanting you, and you have rejected it.  

Until you build your discernment (one of the pillars of my capacity framework) this will keep happening. Don’t lie to yourself.

In love & capacity,