Today, I’m talking about what I call the Proving Pause. It’s that moment when you step off the hamster wheel of trying to earn your worth and start living from a place of deep inner knowing and truth.

If you are anything like I was, you’ve spent decades proving. Proving you’re good enough, smart enough, capable enough. Proving you’re worthy of love, of success, of being taken seriously.

And even if you’ve never been the type to seek approval, I’m going to gently suggest that the urge to prove might still be there, quietly baked into how you measure your worth, how you define success, and how you judge yourself.

The truth is, we’ve all been conditioned on some level to perform for praise, to chase perfection, and to measure our value through productivity and output. We’re encouraged to tick the boxes, hit the milestones, and build a life that looks right on paper. The partner, the house, the kids, the business or the career, the body, the status, the trips, and so on.

But year after year, those goalposts keep moving. Am I right? And no matter what we do or how much we achieve, there’s always this next level we’re meant to reach before we can finally feel enough.

And here’s what I know. Living in this constant, prolonged proving energy is exhausting. And it doesn’t build our worth, it erodes it. Until eventually, we hit burnout. We get to a point of breakdown. Or we reach that quiet moment of reckoning where we start to ask ourselves, is this really what life is meant to feel like? Is this all there is for me?

So, if you are tired of performing, exhausted by the pressure of conforming, and you are ready to trade proving for peace, this episode is for you.

I’m sharing my own story of burnout and breakdown and the powerful pause that changed everything. And I’ll walk you through five simple soul-deep shifts that help me stop performing and start living.

Because my friend, when you start truly living, you start wildly loving your life.

Welcome to The Self-Creation School podcast, for women who are ready to ditch mediocrity, step up and get more of what they want, and finally say YES! to a life that sets their soul on fire. I’m your host Leanne Letica, Self-Creation Coach, founder of The Self-Creation School AND Queen of YES!. If you’re ready to play life by your own personal rule book, and give yourself permission to say YES! to yourself and your wildest dreams, this podcast is the place for you.

I want to start this conversation by sharing something really very personal. Because this idea of the proving pause isn’t just a concept I teach. It’s something I lived. Deeply lived.

For years, I chased success like it was the only thing keeping me afloat. I poured myself into achievement, into building businesses, being a high performer, ticking all of the boxes. Not just for success, but for beyond success. The kind of success that says, “See? I am worthy. I do matter.”

I was caught up in this cycle of overcompensating, trying to make up for this deep lingering sense of not-enoughness that had lived in me since my early childhood. And I lived my life thinking if I just go the extra mile, if I just make it more than perfect, if I just do more, be more, have more, achieve more, earn more, then I’ll feel enough. Then I’ll be enough.

But the more I chased perfection and achievement, the further away from inner peace I felt. And eventually I worked myself into burnout. Not just physically, but mentally and very much emotionally. I hit an all-time low in myself and in my life. And I realized that the harder I tried, the less I actually felt valued. The less I actually valued myself. Because if I had to try that hard just to feel worthy, then maybe I was never meant to be worthy in the first place.

And it was at this low point in my life that everything started to crumble. My marriage was on the edge of divorce. A major business deal at the time was heading south and fast. Covid hit. My relationship with my family was falling apart. And my health, it was in a very bad place. I had gained weight for the first time in two decades, which triggered some very painful old wounds from a past eating disorder. And I faced a double cancer scare for the second year in a row.

I really felt in that moment like I was failing at life despite overcoming the impossible and achieving everything that I had actually achieved. I felt like the writing was on the wall for me. If I couldn’t be happy in this life, I didn’t deserve it anyway. And if my success wasn’t enough to prove my worth, then nothing I could do would ever be enough.

And I was in this moment, with almost every aspect of my life cracking at the seams, I was forced to take pause.

Now, I don’t so much mean slowing down physically, although I definitely did that. What I mean by taking pause is coming to that sacred, pivotal moment when you stop chasing, stop striving, stop pushing. Where you just stop the outward living and start inwardly questioning.

It’s that moment where you stop asking, what do I need to do to be enough? And you start asking, why do I even think I need to earn my enoughness in the first place?

That’s what the pause gave me. It gave me the space to notice the pressure I’d been putting on myself. The invisible rules I’d been living by. The insane standards I’d normalized for myself, and not just for myself, but for my entire life and those in it. It’s no wonder my marriage was crumbling given the pressure of my expectations.

But here’s the thing. Proving is addictive. It’s intoxicating. Especially when it brings the external validation that we think we need. But it’s also never ending. There’s always a new level. There’s always a new goal. There’s always a new reason to tell yourself that you haven’t made it yet. You’re not allowed to rest. You haven’t earned peace. Not yet.

And that’s where the power of the pauses comes in. The pause disrupts that cycle. It slows the spin. And in that space, you start to hear yourself again. Your real self. Not the high-achieving people-pleasing, perfection-chasing self, but the you beneath all of that with everything external stripped away.

The woman who’s tired. The woman who feels like she doesn’t matter in her own life. The woman who’s asking, what if I don’t want to do it this way anymore? What if this is not what I’m really here for?

Now, the pause doesn’t fix everything, but it’s where everything starts to shift. Because it opens a door to something we’re so rarely encouraged to do as women, and that is to give ourselves permission. To stop seeking permission from everyone else and instead give it to ourselves. The kind of permission that can only come from within.

The permission to question our truth. To question our alignment to the life we’ve chosen to pursue. To question our purpose in this world. To question what else might be possible, what other way of living could be true. This is really about giving yourself permission to challenge your norms and your shoulds, and peel back the layers in terms of what doesn’t feel good to live even though it might look good on paper.

Then there’s giving yourself permission to feel and to feel what you’re feeling, whatever it is. No judgment. No resistance. No more telling yourself you shouldn’t feel this way. No more needing to be the strong one, the one holding it all together. Just allowing. Just embracing what is for you. And just really owning that these are your feelings and you have every right to feel them. There’s no wrong or right way to feel.

I know for me, on top of feeling like a failure, I felt all kinds of things from disappointment in myself and with my life. I felt very disillusioned by the life I created and the false promises it would make me happy.

I felt a lot of guilt for being unhappy with my life, for wanting more than I already had. I felt like I didn’t have the right to feel negatively about my life because I was living quite a privileged life. I shouldn’t want more. I should be happy with what I had. And again, if I wasn’t then maybe I didn’t deserve this life. Maybe, that’s why everything was crumbling away.

Which actually raises a really important point. This isn’t just about the permission to feel what you feel, but it’s also about having a conversation with those feelings. It’s about pausing long enough to hear what they are trying to tell you, and being open to hearing the message.

My message became loud and clear. Being deserving in the external sense had nothing at all to do with my life crumbling away, but it had everything to do with it in the internal sense.

It was the point of realization for me that no amount of proving and performing and perfection could ever make me feel worthy because worthiness is an inside job. It’s a feeling we give to ourselves. And it isn’t dependent on anyone or anything outside of us. It is dependent on us recognizing our own unconditional, innate worthiness.

Giving yourself permission is also about giving yourself the green light to want what you really want. For it to be okay. Again, no judgment. No resistance. No telling yourself you shouldn’t want what you want. It’s also the permission to stop doing the things you don’t want to do anymore. The permission to ask, what would it look like to honor me? To honor what lights me up? To honor what could be possible for me if I stop living the life I should?

And this is where it really starts to get raw and tender for a lot of women because most women have never been taught how to give themselves permission. We’ve been trained to ask for it, wait for it, to earn it. We look to someone else like the boss, the partner, the culture to say, you’re allowed. But the truth is, and it’s always been, you already are.

And taking pause from all of this external permission seeking makes space for you to realize that you are the only one who has to live your life. You are the only one who can give yourself the life you actually want. And you are the only one who needs to approve. And until you give yourself that permission to explore what that life even is, you’ll keep defaulting to the one that you believe is expected of you.

The pause creates the space. But permission is the choice that you must make in that space in order to stop spinning away your years on the hamster wheel of a life that was never designed for you.

It means deciding that you don’t need anyone’s approval to honor what feels right for you. That you don’t need anyone else’s permission slip to rewrite your rules for the way you do you and the way you do life, and for living a life that feels right to you. It’s just you saying YES! to you and no one else.

And actually on that note, I have been working behind the scenes here on a masterclass called YES! TO YOU, and I will be running it live on April 17. So that’s coming up real soon. You can join me and it’s completely free and I’d love to have your company, but you do need to register to join and places are limited.

I’ll be walking you through my proven process for saying YES! to you and creating a life you love in this masterclass. And it could just be the YES! your next chapter is waiting for. So, if you’re interested to join me, you can find out more and claim your spot over on my website at https://selfcreationschool.com/yestoyou. I’ll also leave that link in the show notes for you. And if our time zones don’t align, there will be a replay available if you register.

Back to pause and giving yourself permission.

When you do start giving yourself this kind of permission, this real, deep and honest permission, something powerfully shifts. You stop pushing, you stop performing, and you start being with yourself again. You become present in the moment of you. You become present in your life. Present in your body. Present with your thoughts and your feelings. Present enough to notice what’s true for you and what’s just noise.

For me, once I gave myself permission to stop performing for approval, I realized just how absent I was in my own life. I was physically there, yes. But emotionally, mentally, energetically, I was checked out. I was just going through the motions, turning up every day doing everything, but not actually feeling anything. I’d been so busy trying to live the life that looked right on the outside, I hadn’t stopped for a very long time to ask if it felt right on the inside.

And presence is what will reconnect you to that inner compass. It doesn’t mean all of a sudden everything starts to feel good and in alignment. But presence gives you the opportunity to tune into the nudges, the signposts, the still small voice inside you saying, this is it, this feels true, or maybe this isn’t.

When you are fully present in yourself, you are no longer abandoning yourself. You’re paying attention. I know for me, the more present I became, the more I noticed a difference between what was aligned, what was just expected, and what was expected that actually was aligned. And that awareness is where truth starts to rise.

When you become present with yourself, you begin to hear your truth again. Not the filtered version. Not the people-pleaser version. But your truth. What matters to you. What success means to you. What actually feels like love, like joy, like freedom. What you’re no longer willing to tolerate. What you want more of, not because it’s impressive, but because it’s yours. Because it lights you up and it feels true to you.

Your personal truth is what gets revealed when you stop performing and you start listening.

For me, this was huge. I realized that so much of what I’d built the businesses, the goals, even some relationships, it had been created from the energy of proving. I was trying to be valuable, trying to be enough, trying to earn my place. At first, I thought I was going to have to scratch the whole lot and start again. Which at the time, I’ll be honest, it felt pretty overwhelming.

But when I let that proving and performing kind of energy go and I just got honest with myself, I realized that not everything had to be thrown away. There was actually a lot of things in my life that I already truly loved, they just hadn’t been lived in the right energy.

I’d been living for the approval of them instead of living them because I love them. And there’s a really big difference between those two energies. One is played out on the hamster wheel of approval. The other is played out from a place of personal truth.

And personal truth really is so very powerful. It’s grounding. And once you connect with it, you can begin to rebuild your life. Not based on pressure or performance, but on alignment. And I don’t necessarily mean burning everything to the ground and starting from scratch kind of rebuilding here. That might be necessary, but often it’s not at all the case.

Like for me, often it’s a case of owning and living your life from a different energy. The energy of personal truth, the energy of self-approval and self-alignment, instead of external approval and fitting in with the mass.

It truly is a very powerful shift. And what many women discover through this process is that they are in fact living a whole lot of a life they love. But it takes peeling back the layers of proving yourself through living that life to appreciate living that life.

Again, maybe for you that might be different. Maybe for you, there are parts that do need to be lovingly released or rebuilt entirely. Either way, the path to waking up each day to a life you can’t wait to experience is through you taking pause on this whole proving business, giving yourself permission to come within and being present in your personal truth.

And my friend, where you land from here truly is worth the journey. Because when you are no longer trying to prove your worth, when you pause long enough to give yourself permission, when you’re present in your life and connected to your truth, you come into this beautiful place of peace.

You finally feel free to be you and to live your life. Not a perfect life. Not a finished product. But an everyday life that has this deep, grounded sense of I’m okay right here. I trust myself here. I like who I am here. I don’t need to be more, but I can choose to be more if it feels true to me. I don’t need to have more, do more, but I can choose to if it feels true to me.

I can honestly say right now, having come through this process, I feel peace in who I am. I feel peace in my choices. I feel peace in my direction. Not because I figured it all out, but because I’ve stopped trying to force it all to fit into a box of shoulds. I’ve stopped living in an external energy. For the most part anyway, because listen, this isn’t about perfection. I hope I’ve made that much clear.

I definitely still have moments where I find myself in proving and performing energy. And when I find myself in those moments, I come back to the pause. I come back to permission. I come back to being present in my personal truth. And then, I move forward.

And this process is ongoing for me and it will be for you too. But I’ve learned to love the process because it is, at the end of the day, what allows me to live a life I love. So I encourage you to fall in love with the process too.

The beautiful thing is when you stop fighting to be seen and you start choosing to see yourself, when you say YES! to you, everything changes. Your energy shifts. Your relationships shift. Your self-talk shifts. Your life shifts. Because you begin to say YES! to a life that actually fits you because you created it for you. When you say YES! to you, the life you dream of experiencing will say YES! to you too.

Coming through this process of pausing the proving, giving myself permission to live with my presence in my own personal truth, and finding peace within myself, honestly? It changed my world in such a beautiful way.

My marriage turned around almost overnight and everything else followed suit with it. I freed myself from relationships that were built out of the need to prove. I freed myself from living within boxes I realized were limiting me. I freed myself to start experiencing the small joys for what they are, to allow them to matter, and to go after whatever my heart desires because I want it for me.

It is such a liberating way to live and you too can tap into it a whole lot quicker than you might realize. So before we close out this conversation today, I want to offer you a few questions to sit with and reflect on that will help you do exactly that. So grab your journal and jot them down. And then allow yourself some still time this week to ponder them.

Are you ready? I have seven questions for you, so here we go.

Where in your life are you living in proving energy? What might it feel like to take pause from this proving? What would you give yourself permission to stop doing or start doing if you didn’t need approval or to prove anything to anyone, even yourself?

Where do you feel disconnected from yourself or your life? What might you notice if you allowed yourself the space to be present free of the need to prove or perform? What is one personal truth you’re ready to honor? And if you gave yourself full permission to live your truth, what kind of peace might become possible for you?

And my friend, you don’t need to have all the answers to these questions right now. You don’t need to force or rush. Forcing and rushing creates resistance. Allowing creates ease and flow. There’s no timeline here. This is about creating space for the pause so you can begin listening to what comes up for you when you ask yourself these kind of questions.

Remember, the moment you stop proving is the moment you start living. And when you start truly living, living in your personal truth from a place of permission, presence, and peace, I promise you will start wildly loving your life.

That’s it from me today. If this episode resonated with you, please consider sharing it with a woman who might also need to hear it.

And don’t forget, my YES! TO YOU masterclass is happening on April 17. It’s free to join but you do need the claim your spot. So head over to my website https://selfcreationschool.com/yes-to-you and register to join me today. Don’t wait, my friend. This masterclass could be the YES! your next chapter is waiting for.

I’ll see you here again next Wednesday for more of my Self-Creation Secrets for living a life you wildly love.

Until then, be the woman who says YES!

Hey, want to know what’s stopping you from saying YES! to you and a life you love?

Head over to https://selfcreationschool.com/yesblock and take my FREE 60 second quiz to find out what’s standing in your way today and I’ll send you my Self-Creation Shift process for shifting it.

That’s https://selfcreationschool.com/yesblock. I’ll see you there.

Today, I’m talking about what I call the Proving Pause. It’s that moment when you step off the hamster wheel of trying to earn your worth and start living from a place of deep inner knowing and truth.

If you are anything like I was, you’ve spent decades proving. Proving you’re good enough, smart enough, capable enough. Proving you’re worthy of love, of success, of being taken seriously.

And even if you’ve never been the type to seek approval, I’m going to gently suggest that the urge to prove might still be there, quietly baked into how you measure your worth, how you define success, and how you judge yourself.

The truth is, we’ve all been conditioned on some level to perform for praise, to chase perfection, and to measure our value through productivity and output. We’re encouraged to tick the boxes, hit the milestones, and build a life that looks right on paper. The partner, the house, the kids, the business or the career, the body, the status, the trips, and so on.

But year after year, those goalposts keep moving. Am I right? And no matter what we do or how much we achieve, there’s always this next level we’re meant to reach before we can finally feel enough.

And here’s what I know. Living in this constant, prolonged proving energy is exhausting. And it doesn’t build our worth, it erodes it. Until eventually, we hit burnout. We get to a point of breakdown. Or we reach that quiet moment of reckoning where we start to ask ourselves, is this really what life is meant to feel like? Is this all there is for me?

So, if you are tired of performing, exhausted by the pressure of conforming, and you are ready to trade proving for peace, this episode is for you.

I’m sharing my own story of burnout and breakdown and the powerful pause that changed everything. And I’ll walk you through five simple soul-deep shifts that help me stop performing and start living.

Because my friend, when you start truly living, you start wildly loving your life.

Welcome to The Self-Creation School podcast, for women who are ready to ditch mediocrity, step up and get more of what they want, and finally say YES! to a life that sets their soul on fire. I’m your host Leanne Letica, Self-Creation Coach, founder of The Self-Creation School AND Queen of YES!. If you’re ready to play life by your own personal rule book, and give yourself permission to say YES! to yourself and your wildest dreams, this podcast is the place for you.

I want to start this conversation by sharing something really very personal. Because this idea of the proving pause isn’t just a concept I teach. It’s something I lived. Deeply lived.

For years, I chased success like it was the only thing keeping me afloat. I poured myself into achievement, into building businesses, being a high performer, ticking all of the boxes. Not just for success, but for beyond success. The kind of success that says, “See? I am worthy. I do matter.”

I was caught up in this cycle of overcompensating, trying to make up for this deep lingering sense of not-enoughness that had lived in me since my early childhood. And I lived my life thinking if I just go the extra mile, if I just make it more than perfect, if I just do more, be more, have more, achieve more, earn more, then I’ll feel enough. Then I’ll be enough.

But the more I chased perfection and achievement, the further away from inner peace I felt. And eventually I worked myself into burnout. Not just physically, but mentally and very much emotionally. I hit an all-time low in myself and in my life. And I realized that the harder I tried, the less I actually felt valued. The less I actually valued myself. Because if I had to try that hard just to feel worthy, then maybe I was never meant to be worthy in the first place.

And it was at this low point in my life that everything started to crumble. My marriage was on the edge of divorce. A major business deal at the time was heading south and fast. Covid hit. My relationship with my family was falling apart. And my health, it was in a very bad place. I had gained weight for the first time in two decades, which triggered some very painful old wounds from a past eating disorder. And I faced a double cancer scare for the second year in a row.

I really felt in that moment like I was failing at life despite overcoming the impossible and achieving everything that I had actually achieved. I felt like the writing was on the wall for me. If I couldn’t be happy in this life, I didn’t deserve it anyway. And if my success wasn’t enough to prove my worth, then nothing I could do would ever be enough.

And I was in this moment, with almost every aspect of my life cracking at the seams, I was forced to take pause.

Now, I don’t so much mean slowing down physically, although I definitely did that. What I mean by taking pause is coming to that sacred, pivotal moment when you stop chasing, stop striving, stop pushing. Where you just stop the outward living and start inwardly questioning.

It’s that moment where you stop asking, what do I need to do to be enough? And you start asking, why do I even think I need to earn my enoughness in the first place?

That’s what the pause gave me. It gave me the space to notice the pressure I’d been putting on myself. The invisible rules I’d been living by. The insane standards I’d normalized for myself, and not just for myself, but for my entire life and those in it. It’s no wonder my marriage was crumbling given the pressure of my expectations.

But here’s the thing. Proving is addictive. It’s intoxicating. Especially when it brings the external validation that we think we need. But it’s also never ending. There’s always a new level. There’s always a new goal. There’s always a new reason to tell yourself that you haven’t made it yet. You’re not allowed to rest. You haven’t earned peace. Not yet.

And that’s where the power of the pauses comes in. The pause disrupts that cycle. It slows the spin. And in that space, you start to hear yourself again. Your real self. Not the high-achieving people-pleasing, perfection-chasing self, but the you beneath all of that with everything external stripped away.

The woman who’s tired. The woman who feels like she doesn’t matter in her own life. The woman who’s asking, what if I don’t want to do it this way anymore? What if this is not what I’m really here for?

Now, the pause doesn’t fix everything, but it’s where everything starts to shift. Because it opens a door to something we’re so rarely encouraged to do as women, and that is to give ourselves permission. To stop seeking permission from everyone else and instead give it to ourselves. The kind of permission that can only come from within.

The permission to question our truth. To question our alignment to the life we’ve chosen to pursue. To question our purpose in this world. To question what else might be possible, what other way of living could be true. This is really about giving yourself permission to challenge your norms and your shoulds, and peel back the layers in terms of what doesn’t feel good to live even though it might look good on paper.

Then there’s giving yourself permission to feel and to feel what you’re feeling, whatever it is. No judgment. No resistance. No more telling yourself you shouldn’t feel this way. No more needing to be the strong one, the one holding it all together. Just allowing. Just embracing what is for you. And just really owning that these are your feelings and you have every right to feel them. There’s no wrong or right way to feel.

I know for me, on top of feeling like a failure, I felt all kinds of things from disappointment in myself and with my life. I felt very disillusioned by the life I created and the false promises it would make me happy.

I felt a lot of guilt for being unhappy with my life, for wanting more than I already had. I felt like I didn’t have the right to feel negatively about my life because I was living quite a privileged life. I shouldn’t want more. I should be happy with what I had. And again, if I wasn’t then maybe I didn’t deserve this life. Maybe, that’s why everything was crumbling away.

Which actually raises a really important point. This isn’t just about the permission to feel what you feel, but it’s also about having a conversation with those feelings. It’s about pausing long enough to hear what they are trying to tell you, and being open to hearing the message.

My message became loud and clear. Being deserving in the external sense had nothing at all to do with my life crumbling away, but it had everything to do with it in the internal sense.

It was the point of realization for me that no amount of proving and performing and perfection could ever make me feel worthy because worthiness is an inside job. It’s a feeling we give to ourselves. And it isn’t dependent on anyone or anything outside of us. It is dependent on us recognizing our own unconditional, innate worthiness.

Giving yourself permission is also about giving yourself the green light to want what you really want. For it to be okay. Again, no judgment. No resistance. No telling yourself you shouldn’t want what you want. It’s also the permission to stop doing the things you don’t want to do anymore. The permission to ask, what would it look like to honor me? To honor what lights me up? To honor what could be possible for me if I stop living the life I should?

And this is where it really starts to get raw and tender for a lot of women because most women have never been taught how to give themselves permission. We’ve been trained to ask for it, wait for it, to earn it. We look to someone else like the boss, the partner, the culture to say, you’re allowed. But the truth is, and it’s always been, you already are.

And taking pause from all of this external permission seeking makes space for you to realize that you are the only one who has to live your life. You are the only one who can give yourself the life you actually want. And you are the only one who needs to approve. And until you give yourself that permission to explore what that life even is, you’ll keep defaulting to the one that you believe is expected of you.

The pause creates the space. But permission is the choice that you must make in that space in order to stop spinning away your years on the hamster wheel of a life that was never designed for you.

It means deciding that you don’t need anyone’s approval to honor what feels right for you. That you don’t need anyone else’s permission slip to rewrite your rules for the way you do you and the way you do life, and for living a life that feels right to you. It’s just you saying YES! to you and no one else.

And actually on that note, I have been working behind the scenes here on a masterclass called YES! TO YOU, and I will be running it live on April 17. So that’s coming up real soon. You can join me and it’s completely free and I’d love to have your company, but you do need to register to join and places are limited.

I’ll be walking you through my proven process for saying YES! to you and creating a life you love in this masterclass. And it could just be the YES! your next chapter is waiting for. So, if you’re interested to join me, you can find out more and claim your spot over on my website at https://selfcreationschool.com/yestoyou. I’ll also leave that link in the show notes for you. And if our time zones don’t align, there will be a replay available if you register.

Back to pause and giving yourself permission.

When you do start giving yourself this kind of permission, this real, deep and honest permission, something powerfully shifts. You stop pushing, you stop performing, and you start being with yourself again. You become present in the moment of you. You become present in your life. Present in your body. Present with your thoughts and your feelings. Present enough to notice what’s true for you and what’s just noise.

For me, once I gave myself permission to stop performing for approval, I realized just how absent I was in my own life. I was physically there, yes. But emotionally, mentally, energetically, I was checked out. I was just going through the motions, turning up every day doing everything, but not actually feeling anything. I’d been so busy trying to live the life that looked right on the outside, I hadn’t stopped for a very long time to ask if it felt right on the inside.

And presence is what will reconnect you to that inner compass. It doesn’t mean all of a sudden everything starts to feel good and in alignment. But presence gives you the opportunity to tune into the nudges, the signposts, the still small voice inside you saying, this is it, this feels true, or maybe this isn’t.

When you are fully present in yourself, you are no longer abandoning yourself. You’re paying attention. I know for me, the more present I became, the more I noticed a difference between what was aligned, what was just expected, and what was expected that actually was aligned. And that awareness is where truth starts to rise.

When you become present with yourself, you begin to hear your truth again. Not the filtered version. Not the people-pleaser version. But your truth. What matters to you. What success means to you. What actually feels like love, like joy, like freedom. What you’re no longer willing to tolerate. What you want more of, not because it’s impressive, but because it’s yours. Because it lights you up and it feels true to you.

Your personal truth is what gets revealed when you stop performing and you start listening.

For me, this was huge. I realized that so much of what I’d built the businesses, the goals, even some relationships, it had been created from the energy of proving. I was trying to be valuable, trying to be enough, trying to earn my place. At first, I thought I was going to have to scratch the whole lot and start again. Which at the time, I’ll be honest, it felt pretty overwhelming.

But when I let that proving and performing kind of energy go and I just got honest with myself, I realized that not everything had to be thrown away. There was actually a lot of things in my life that I already truly loved, they just hadn’t been lived in the right energy.

I’d been living for the approval of them instead of living them because I love them. And there’s a really big difference between those two energies. One is played out on the hamster wheel of approval. The other is played out from a place of personal truth.

And personal truth really is so very powerful. It’s grounding. And once you connect with it, you can begin to rebuild your life. Not based on pressure or performance, but on alignment. And I don’t necessarily mean burning everything to the ground and starting from scratch kind of rebuilding here. That might be necessary, but often it’s not at all the case.

Like for me, often it’s a case of owning and living your life from a different energy. The energy of personal truth, the energy of self-approval and self-alignment, instead of external approval and fitting in with the mass.

It truly is a very powerful shift. And what many women discover through this process is that they are in fact living a whole lot of a life they love. But it takes peeling back the layers of proving yourself through living that life to appreciate living that life.

Again, maybe for you that might be different. Maybe for you, there are parts that do need to be lovingly released or rebuilt entirely. Either way, the path to waking up each day to a life you can’t wait to experience is through you taking pause on this whole proving business, giving yourself permission to come within and being present in your personal truth.

And my friend, where you land from here truly is worth the journey. Because when you are no longer trying to prove your worth, when you pause long enough to give yourself permission, when you’re present in your life and connected to your truth, you come into this beautiful place of peace.

You finally feel free to be you and to live your life. Not a perfect life. Not a finished product. But an everyday life that has this deep, grounded sense of I’m okay right here. I trust myself here. I like who I am here. I don’t need to be more, but I can choose to be more if it feels true to me. I don’t need to have more, do more, but I can choose to if it feels true to me.

I can honestly say right now, having come through this process, I feel peace in who I am. I feel peace in my choices. I feel peace in my direction. Not because I figured it all out, but because I’ve stopped trying to force it all to fit into a box of shoulds. I’ve stopped living in an external energy. For the most part anyway, because listen, this isn’t about perfection. I hope I’ve made that much clear.

I definitely still have moments where I find myself in proving and performing energy. And when I find myself in those moments, I come back to the pause. I come back to permission. I come back to being present in my personal truth. And then, I move forward.

And this process is ongoing for me and it will be for you too. But I’ve learned to love the process because it is, at the end of the day, what allows me to live a life I love. So I encourage you to fall in love with the process too.

The beautiful thing is when you stop fighting to be seen and you start choosing to see yourself, when you say YES! to you, everything changes. Your energy shifts. Your relationships shift. Your self-talk shifts. Your life shifts. Because you begin to say YES! to a life that actually fits you because you created it for you. When you say YES! to you, the life you dream of experiencing will say YES! to you too.

Coming through this process of pausing the proving, giving myself permission to live with my presence in my own personal truth, and finding peace within myself, honestly? It changed my world in such a beautiful way.

My marriage turned around almost overnight and everything else followed suit with it. I freed myself from relationships that were built out of the need to prove. I freed myself from living within boxes I realized were limiting me. I freed myself to start experiencing the small joys for what they are, to allow them to matter, and to go after whatever my heart desires because I want it for me.

It is such a liberating way to live and you too can tap into it a whole lot quicker than you might realize. So before we close out this conversation today, I want to offer you a few questions to sit with and reflect on that will help you do exactly that. So grab your journal and jot them down. And then allow yourself some still time this week to ponder them.

Are you ready? I have seven questions for you, so here we go.

Where in your life are you living in proving energy? What might it feel like to take pause from this proving? What would you give yourself permission to stop doing or start doing if you didn’t need approval or to prove anything to anyone, even yourself?

Where do you feel disconnected from yourself or your life? What might you notice if you allowed yourself the space to be present free of the need to prove or perform? What is one personal truth you’re ready to honor? And if you gave yourself full permission to live your truth, what kind of peace might become possible for you?

And my friend, you don’t need to have all the answers to these questions right now. You don’t need to force or rush. Forcing and rushing creates resistance. Allowing creates ease and flow. There’s no timeline here. This is about creating space for the pause so you can begin listening to what comes up for you when you ask yourself these kind of questions.

Remember, the moment you stop proving is the moment you start living. And when you start truly living, living in your personal truth from a place of permission, presence, and peace, I promise you will start wildly loving your life.

That’s it from me today. If this episode resonated with you, please consider sharing it with a woman who might also need to hear it.

And don’t forget, my YES! TO YOU masterclass is happening on April 17. It’s free to join but you do need the claim your spot. So head over to my website https://selfcreationschool.com/yes-to-you and register to join me today. Don’t wait, my friend. This masterclass could be the YES! your next chapter is waiting for.

I’ll see you here again next Wednesday for more of my Self-Creation Secrets for living a life you wildly love.

Until then, be the woman who says YES!

Hey, want to know what’s stopping you from saying YES! to you and a life you love?

Head over to https://selfcreationschool.com/yesblock and take my FREE 60 second quiz to find out what’s standing in your way today and I’ll send you my Self-Creation Shift process for shifting it.

That’s https://selfcreationschool.com/yesblock. I’ll see you there.