The Wall You Were Made to Climb
You cannot get over it with the strength you are already using. That is the point.
You are good at what you do.
You have built something real. It works. The clients come, the money comes, the reputation is there. From the outside, nothing is wrong.
And you can see your clients with your eyes closed.
Your business is working fine, but it is slowly numbing you inside.
If that is where you are, I want you to know something first. There is nothing wrong with you. Ten, twenty years of doing something well will do this to almost anyone. The structure that got you here was built by a version of you that no longer exists. Of course it feels tight now.
But there is a whisper. And it will not leave you alone.
There is more.
Steven Pressfield wrote a line that I come back to often, to make sure I am heading in the right direction:
“Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.”
Resistance feels like a wall.
And it is a wall. But it is a wall you were made to climb.
Not because climbing is noble. Because you cannot get over it with the strength you are already using. It will ask you to reach for something you have never needed before.
That is what the wall is for.
Which is why the wall is also information. It shows up at the exact border between who you have been and who you are becoming. That is why it feels so uncomfortable.
It is not telling you that you are going the wrong way. It is telling you that the old identity is fighting for its life, because it knows there is not room for both.
In a feel good world, we are taught that if something feels hard, it must be wrong. But it is not wrong. It is you outgrowing your current container of beliefs.
Your mind will hand you every reason to turn back. It is too hard. It is too complicated. It is not for you. Success built that way is not real success. Most people believe the story.
They stop.
They go back to something they already outgrew, and they tell themselves they made the mature choice.
Pressfield calls this rationalization. We spend our days building beautiful arguments for why the comfortable thing is actually the wise thing.
And here is what makes it so convincing. The rationalization does not feel like fear. It feels like clarity. It feels right.
Pressfield made a list of what reliably brings resistance out of hiding. On the list is the launching of any entrepreneurial venture or enterprise, for profit or otherwise.
Then he explains that resistance is present in:
Any act that rejects immediate gratification in favor of long-term growth, health, or integrity. Or, expressed another way, any act that derives from our higher nature instead of our lower.
Read that again.
Even if you have been in business for years, even if you have a practice of decades, restructuring is like giving birth to something new. It requires a different person, that desire is coming from your higher nature.
So it brings a lot of resistance. You are not adjusting a strategy. You are asking a twenty year old identity to step aside.
I am in this right now. Phil and I are building something new.
I am not ready to share the details. But three years in, we have more desires. We have grown as people. There are more possibilities on the horizon.
Is it exciting? Oh yes. And it also brings a lot of resistance.
It is new, and because it is new, we meet resistance. This is not in the autopilot bucket like other parts of our business. Some days it feels like it does not want to get made.
We shake. We dance. We move the body.
And then we sit down and do it anyway.
That is not a beautiful answer. It is the only one I have found that works.
You can prepare for resistance, you can soften it, you can meet it with kindness. But you only move through it by moving through it.
Before this we had to stop. We paused. We reassessed. We reconnected with what we actually want to build, not what we already know how to build. And then we chose.
Sometimes you have to slow down to go faster.
Now, the thing I want to be honest with you about.
When Pressfield says you give up immediate gratification, I do not want you to hear that as give up pleasure.
You are giving up the cheap version of it.
The Candy Crush version. Click, sound, reward, hit. Your brain lights up and nothing in your life has changed. You launch another cute little thing, and nothing really moves for the long term.
That is not what I am asking you to leave your comfort for.
I will not see the results of what we are building tomorrow. It takes months. And in the meantime, this is what is actually here: aliveness, and excitement, and fear, all living in my body at the same time. The pleasure and enjoyment of discovering more of myself and what I am capable of.
That is a different relationship with pleasure entirely. It is not the reward at the end. It is what it feels like to be the one choosing. It is what I wake up to every day, choosing again, and finding out how powerful I am.
Pressfield says one more thing, and it is the reason I am writing to you at all.
Resistance is directly proportional to love.
The opposite of love is not hate. It is indifference.
So if you are feeling all of this, if the pull to rebuild is huge and terrifying and will not shut up, that is not evidence that something has gone wrong.
It is evidence that the love is still in there.
You did not lose it. You built a structure that had nowhere to put it.
You are allowed to want more. You are allowed to outgrow what you built. You do not need anyone’s permission, and you are not going to get it, so you may as well stop waiting.
Do not let fear keep you in a warm numb life.
I am not going to tell you what to do here.
But I will leave you with this.
Somewhere in your week there is a thing you keep not doing. You know exactly what it is. You have a very good reason for not doing it, and the reason sounds like wisdom.
Just notice how much love is buried underneath it.
With Love,
Carolina
P.S. if any of this is stirring something in you, here is one available next step for you to consider.
We made a map. It shows you which of the three relationships is challenging you right now: the one with yourself, the one with your work, or the one with something greater. You answer a few questions, and you get to see in one coherent picture where the resistance is strongest.
Take a look and see what you find.
