lisa fabrega
On Monday, I woke up to screaming. It was me, screaming at myself in my head, “My life is just beginning to get really good, this is only the beginning! I create my reality!”
It was the voice of my higher self (I call her my sovereign self) yelling at the voice of my tricky ego. And it must have been one hell of a battle in my sleep if she was laying down such fierce boundaries with my ego.
Something happened to me when I turned 38. At the time, I searched online for other women who might have started to have this happen to them when they turned 38, too and I found NOTHING.
Weird voices I’d never heard before started creeping in. They said things like “no one’s going to want you when you get into your forties. It’s all downhill from there” and “no one will want to have children with you now because the older you get the more everyone will assume you’re not fertile”.
I started to have intermittent panic-wake-ups about this at 4am. I’ve always prided myself for being independent and going against the grain of what society deems to be “acceptable”. Yet here I was in the middle of the night being woken up by this involuntary and persistent sneaky thought my life was now “essentially over.”
“What’s the point of setting these big goals if it was already too late for you? How dare you keep asking for your deepest desires after you’re “no longer valuable”?
The most confusing part of all of this–at the same time I experienced one of the most profound self-love revolutions of my life. I woke up to a much deeper level of understanding my body was a tremendous gift. It frequently moved me to tears the amount of love, kindness and acceptance I felt for myself.
I was deepening into my sovereignty and power like never before, yet every once in a while this little pesky voice would creep in and wake me. What felt REAL to me was the self-love revolution I was experiencing. Not the ego voices.
And then all of the suppressed grief and pain of the world erupted with the murder of George Floyd. And it erupted all the decades of grief and bottomless anger I’d been feeling myself over the murder and abuse of non-white, non-privileged people.
Every time I saw one of these cases pop up in the news over the years, or another story of corruption from a billionaire white male who got away with it, yet a black man/woman killed in their sleep due to a police error or some minor infraction…
Every time I saw another young white man (Brock Turner) get away with only three months of jail time for a brutal rape and heard a judge “feel sorry” for him, when Emmett Til was brutally murdered at 14 for “allegedly flirting” with a white woman who made the story up…
Every time a client shared a story of emotional, psychological or financial abuse from an industry leader leading “cult-like” masterminds…every time I saw yet another virtual summit or event filled with mostly only white speakers or white men…
Every time I saw a client doubt her worth and as a result make less money because of the false things the world and its systems had taught her about “her worth”…
I’d say to myself “I don’t know how much more of this we can take before we burn all of this sh&t to the ground.” And then there were finally fires burning while people rightfully raged and protested all over the world over George Floyd and CENTURIES of abuse.
And I was glad for it. It needs to burn.
On Monday, the theme in all my coaching calls was Sovereignty (one of the pillars of Capacity Work™️). Specifically this: the ways we’ve been taught to give away our power and sovereignty to “systems” and authority figures which never earned our trust in the first place.
One of those systems is toxic patriarchy. The other is white supremacy. And this is what needs to burn. SO MANY of the capacity issues I work on with leaders directly come from toxic patriarchy and colonialist ideals (which are rooted in white supremacy). If you’ve been here a while you’ve heard me talk about this ad-nauseum and mention it in many of my posts.
When I work on Money Capacity with my clients.. We have to talk about the issues they have with money (whether they’re making thousands or multiple millions) coming from all the effed up ideals colonizers set up and taught as “religion” to stop the slaves they exploited from rising up against them. The best way to control you financially is to teach you it’s somehow more holy or “good” to be poor and work your ass off for nothing.
It comes from the white men who benefit from these systems telling women they’re unattractive, intimidating or undesirable for making money, because they want to use money to maintain control. It comes from colonialist ideals which say only “certain, God-ordained” (aka white European men) people have a right to abundance.
When I work on Visibility and/or Emotional Capacity with my clients… we always talk about their fears of fully being seen in their work coming from old patriarchal ideals which say leaders must a) always be perfect and never mess up b) show no emotion c) always have the answer or at least pretend they do.
Why do you think so many white entrepreneurs have horrendously botched their responses/lack of response to what’s happening in the world after they were rightfully called out?
They had the “privilege” of not having to work on anti-racism work for years. And when they get called out, instead of just admitting “You’re right. I need to work on this and I was dead wrong”, they scramble to find clever ways of “covering up” they were imperfect.
They call up PR firms to “maintain their image” instead of being willing to appear as a growing, imperfect human beings. In the colonial world, being imperfect equals death. Hence their obsession with “saving face”, because they don’t even realize they’re bought into the colonialist, systems of our world. I can guarantee you 99% of them don’t even SEE this is why they botched their responses so badly or stayed silent.
This is also why you’re terrified of someone not liking your work, or criticizing you when you become more “visible” or saying “who do you think you are?”. Because we’ve all been taught this lie we must be infallible and perfect at all times. Colonialist patriarchs set this system up so they could hold themselves as “knowing more than” and being “more powerful than” the people they oppressed. And the world bought it.
For every Capacity area I talk about with clients there is an effed up belief deep down in there related to these toxic systems which have been the foundations and scaffolding upon which our world has been built.
This is why it drives me insane when I hear from yet one more person “I know I need to work on my Capacity, but I’m going to hold off for now because of “insert excuse here”, so I need to focus more on my strategy/ad spend/business model right now.”
You think the toxic and oppressive systems inculcated into your brain cells from the moment you’re born don’t affect your capacity to build aligned wealth and create impact in the world? Think again.
Everywhere you look, from TV ads, to billboards, to the ways your salary is determined, to how marketing & sales gets taught to you, to the diet industry to the dating industry are constantly broadcasting to your subconscious the toxic messages of colonialist mentality.
Think about all the tiny unconscious actions you’re taking daily because some system or authority figure told you this is how you have to show up to “make it”. Think of all the ways those systems taught you you’re unworthy of your desires and to settle for less so those systems and its beneficiaries can reap all the rewards while you have to still buy into “hustle culture”.
Think of the ways those so-called authority figures became the little voice that tells you you don’t have the capacity to hold, handle and receive the big things you want to create and receive in the world. But certain “chosen ones” do. Starting to see it now?
All of the above are capacity issues. And they inform all of the areas in your work where you feel stuck, held back, frustrated or overwhelmed.
That’s why it’s not your strategy, it’s your capacity.
This is what I realized eventually about those nasty little voices telling me how worthless I was now I wasn’t in my twenties with zero wrinkles and a “perfect uterus”. It was the parts of me indoctrinated by those systems. It’s the colonizer installed in me at birth, wanting to devour my true, authentic self whole.
And it’s my duty to send the colonizer voice within me packing. That’s why my sovereign self woke me up screaming. She was reminding it who’s in charge and telling it to take several seats.
It’s your duty to do this with yourself, too, especially if you’re someone with big goals of impacting the world with your work. Because the voice is always gonna try to stop you and get you to “conform”.
“Fixing your business model” is not the answer to this problem. Strategies don’t teach you how to send the voice packing and root it out of all the secret places it hides and controls your actions.
But Capacity work will.