A lot of women in my world are hanging out in a place called the middle-ground. It’s that place where everything is fine, everything is good enough. You can make do with life as it is. At least you tell yourself that. But if you’re honest, fine feels more flat than it does fabulous.

The problem is, because you are not a woman who is currently in crisis or having a meltdown moment in your life, you’re not feeling like your life isn’t working, there’s this kind of don’t fix what isn’t broken thinking going on, right? If it runs, if it gets us from A to B, it’s working good enough.

And so you carry on. You sweep aside the nagging feeling, the whisper from deep within that really deep down things are not fine. You normalize that feeling. You maybe even gaslight yourself for feeling it. And you learn to cope with the low hum of discontent, the flatness of your days, of your soul, the quiet ache deep inside that whispers fine isn’t enough.

Here’s the thing. That ache? It doesn’t go away. It just sinks a little deeper day by day and starts costing you in ways that you do not even notice. Until you do. Until you wake up in a life that doesn’t feel at all like yours, like you don’t even really exist in it. You stop feeling vibrant in your own skin. Your relationships feel less meaningful or connected. Your days feel like a monotonous blur of the mundane.

And you find yourself craving something more. Something more like freedom, purpose, joy. But you’ve swept the idea of more aside for so long now you’re not even sure what that is anymore.

And your life starts to crumble around you. You start to crumble. And your fine existence now feels more like a failed existence. And, like what happened for me, you reach flat bottom in your world. Suddenly you found yourself a woman in crisis.

This is the danger of living in the middle-ground. It doesn’t hurt bad enough to wake you up and motivate you to change. It doesn’t push you to reach out for more to make your life feel fabulous. Instead, it keeps you stuck in this deceiving place of comfort and it’s slowly drains a life out of you while you pretend everything is fine until the scales get tipped, and now things have to change.

And that’s what I want to talk about today. The very real cost of living in the in-between, the middle-ground, where nothing’s wrong, but it doesn’t feel deeply right either. Because here’s the truth, you do not have to wait to hit rock bottom to break through to a life that feels fabulous every single day. You just have to stop living in the middle-ground pretending fine is enough.

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.

Thanks so much for joining me today. I’m so grateful to have your company. Over the past few months in the work that I do as a coach, I’ve seen a lot of women in my world choosing to stay in the middle-ground over taking action and reaching out for something more in their life.

And by more, I don’t necessarily mean chasing the next big thing, ticking off the next big goal. That’s okay if you want it, by the way. But I mean more in the sense of depth, meaning fulfillment, connection, freedom, peace, joy, fullness. More like self-confidence, more self-belief or trust or respect.

And the reason I speak with such conviction about choosing yourself and creating a life you’re wildly in love with is because I know what it feels like to slowly lose yourself through this kind of inaction. Through living in the middle-ground and making do with fine. Settling for a life that’s good enough on the surface.

Because what happens in the middle-ground is our garden of life looks pretty enough. There’s a few weeds, yes, but not enough weeds to make us do the work to remove them. And maybe our garden isn’t planted with the blooms we really love, but the green that’s there, well, it’s pleasant enough.

So we leave our garden of life alone. We let it do its thing because let’s face it, it’s easier not to do the work that doesn’t seem all that necessary than it is to take the time and pull out a few weeds. But those weeds? Eventually when you don’t tend to the garden, they start to take over.

And gradually, the pleasant greenery gets wildly overrun by these weeds, and your garden starts to look like a very big mess. Then the work to clean up your garden becomes a very big job. And you literally feel like the best thing is to rip it all out and start again.

And you reach what I like to call a line in the sand moment. The moment when you realize that your garden of life is so overrun with weeds, the plants you once enjoyed are no longer even visible. It’s just this mess of dead plants, strangled and outgrown by those once seemingly insignificant weeds. Your garden has reached crisis mode and you know you have to do something about it. Your garden can’t stay as is. It has to be dealt with and it has to be put right.

We often see our crisis moments as things that suddenly happen to us, but more often than not, they don’t just happen. They happen slowly. They happen over time. They happen one weed at a time that we leave be until it seems like you wake up one day and suddenly all the weeds have taken over.

And we leave them be because our life, our garden if you like to stay with the metaphor, it looks fine even if there are a few weeds. So we choose the middle-ground of inaction. We choose not to tend to the weeds today. And we choose not to add some of the blooms that really would take our garden from pleasant greenery to the most spectacular blooms. We choose not to add them today. We’ll do that someday, maybe. Maybe someday when we tend to the weeds.

Usually we don’t do either. And the thing about human existence is that when things are left alone to be they tend to gravitate towards decline, not towards something better.

Think about it. If you leave your health and fitness to be what it is, over the years do you get better, stronger, more flexible? If you do, I want your secret. But usually the answer is no. You gradually lose muscle mass. You become stiffer. You start to notice that you’re out of breath on the stairs.

I remember being told once that even the sharpest razor will go blunt over time without use. The blade will go dull. It will slowly corrode. Until it’s no longer a bit for purpose. And this is how staying nice and comfortable in the middle-ground played out for me, and I see it play out for so many women.

Years ago when I eventually had my meltdown moment, where I realized my life wasn’t fit for purpose anymore, I didn’t just draw a line in the sand and make a decision to clean up my garden and plant it with the most spectacular blooms I could find. I made the decision that I wanted to dedicate my life’s work to encouraging women not to live in the middle-ground.

Because it broke my heart more than I realized that my heart already felt broken when I saw the look of self-loathing I had that morning when I faced myself in the mirror and saw just how overrun with weeds my life had so unnecessarily become. The pain I felt in that moment is not a pain I would wish on my greatest enemy. And that’s why I am just so driven to share my message, to spark the motivation within you to stop making do.

Because you don’t have to have a mirror moment like I did. You don’t have to wait for your marriage to face divorce, your business to go south, your relationships to fall apart, your health to spiral, your sense of self to be completely eroded before you tend to your garden. But you do need to find the reason to take action. You do need to pay the price of discipline today so that you don’t end up paying the price of regret one day when your fine starts to fail.

And my hope in having this conversation today is that this might be your wake up call. That it might help you take action to weed your garden and start planting it with the most spectacular blooms. Not because it isn’t fine or functional as it is, but because you finally understand that you are playing a very risky game settling for fine.

I think back to the time when my daughter received her Asperger’s diagnosis. She was 14. It was a very late diagnosis. And the only reason it happened was that she hit crisis mode. All the years we didn’t put two and two together, had chipped away at her soul, at her confidence, at her sense of worth until she couldn’t make sense of herself or her place in the world at all.

What we didn’t see was how she had slowly started numbing herself because her world had become too confusing, too painful for her to exist in. And she started self-harming. Not as I eventually realized in a suicidal way, but in an attempt to feel something again way. In an attempt to feel alive in her world.

Now, as a parent, it’s one of your worst nightmares. It completely breaks your heart to see your child suffering like this. And my husband and I dropped everything to help her. We were consumed with doing everything we possibly could to help put her world right once we realized the extent of her problems.

There wasn’t a dime I wouldn’t pay, an hour I wouldn’t spend. And I spent every day trying to help her. I took her to see all of the specialists, the counselors, the psychologists, the psychiatrists. When I wasn’t with her, I was researching, reading, trying to understand her better so I could help her, so I could help me be a better parent for her.

I asked countless questions. I searched for countless answers. I threw everything I had at helping my daughter. I didn’t have to look for motivation because seeing the heartbreak of my daughter’s pain and laying awake every night wondering what I would wake up to find the next morning was all the motivation I needed.

I was forced into action brutally, but really, the signs had been whispering for quite some time. And deep down, I think I knew that. The thing is on the surface, she was fine. She was functional. There wasn’t any urgent need to look any further, to lift the lid on things. And she was fine and functional until she wasn’t.

And that’s the cost of not listening to the whispers, not paying attention to the signs. Just sweeping them aside into the “it will be all right” basket. The cost of that was pretty heavy and it is still very heavy to this day.

And the point I make is we don’t tend to stop and calculate the cost of living in this middle-ground and not tuning into the dull ache, not weeding our garden. Instead, we end up just paying whatever the cost ends up being when the time comes. And it will. We pay the emotional cost, the physical cost, the financial cost. We end up with no choice but to pay it. And we will pay every last cent for the pain of our crisis to go away.

I reflect on this a lot. In business, you generally don’t wait until things hit rock bottom to make changes, make improvements, or small adjustments to make your business perform better and to grow so that it can return a greater profit.

But when you are invited to invest into something that will help you grow your business, it’s a simple return on investment calculation. The price you pay delivers a tangible return in your business, usually in the financial sense. It’s a straight financial cost of the investment versus the financial return for doing so.

But living an optimal life, investing into ourselves to grow who we be, improve and fine-tune what is on the surface already working good enough, it’s so much harder to calculate the return on investment, right? There’s no mathematical equation that says, when I invest the time or money into my personal growth and optimizing myself and my life, I’m going to get this amount of time or money back in the bank.

Because what we are really investing into is a feeling. The feeling of freedom, fulfillment, peace, happiness, joy, that growing who we be and working on ourselves can bring. And it’s hard to understand or to calculate what feeling fabulous about your life is worth over continuing to live a life that feels fine.

But if you think back to any crisis moment you’ve ever had in your life, you would have and probably did invest no end of time and money and effort to take away the feeling of your pain in that moment. It’s not even a question. You will give whatever it takes to move out of your pain and even just get back to things being fine.

You probably know all too well the price of being in crisis. And like I said, you pay it without question. But when it comes to paying the price for growth, for stepping out of the middle-ground that is technically working for you, so many of us we hesitate, we stay stuck in inaction because we don’t really have a gauge for what that next level life is really worth to us.

Here’s the thing I want you to consider. It’s worth not experiencing the price of your crisis mode pain that you will eventually pay if you continue to exist in the middle-ground. If you don’t tend to your garden, you will eventually pay the price. That’s what investing into you is worth.

And when you finally experience something more than just fine in your life, when you experience the return on investment and how truly fabulous life can be, I promise you that you will pay anything to stay there. It becomes a no brainer to invest into yourself just like it is when you hit rock bottom.

The question is, which state do you want to be in when you pay the price? A pain state or a pleasure state? And by price I mean emotional, physical, mental, spiritual, and financial. I mean, your time, your effort, your action, your discipline, your decision. Do you want to wait until you are forced to invest whatever it takes to move away from your pain? Or do you want to invest right now while you’re in the middle-ground and things aren’t too hard to move towards a much deeper, much more fulfilling and meaningful state of pleasure?

For me, it’s a no-brainer to invest now in the middle-ground and to invest even more than I might invest in crisis mode because we have just one life. And it truly can be spectacular. It doesn’t have to exist mostly in the middle-ground and below. It can exist mostly in the upper ground and sometimes below.

My friend, the middle-ground is costing you in ways that aren’t always visible to you right now. The cost only becomes visible when you experience either the pain of falling below the middle-ground, or you experience the pleasure you’ve been missing out on when you reach for something more. When you decide that buying is no longer good enough.

What the middle-ground costs you either way is time. Time making do. Time in relationships that aren’t quite right. Time shrinking yourself or your dreams. Time regretting not going after your dreams. Time putting things back together. Time mending and healing your pain.

Time you could be experiencing something so much better. Like feeling vibrantly alive, fulfilled, and deeply and fully present in yourself, in your relationships, your life, in your every day. It’s time that you cannot get back and before you know it, the weeks turn into months and the months they turn into years.

Living life in the middle-ground comes with a price tag too, my friend. That’s the price I’m inviting you to consider when you stay undecided about investing the time, money, and effort into taking your life from fine to fabulous. What is the cost of waiting out your middle-ground life really going to end up costing you? Because I promise your inaction has a price tag.

It’s so much easier to tend to your garden every day right now and pull out a few small weeds than it is to need to overhaul your entire backyard. It’s easy to do a few things every day to change the landscape of your life. But it’s also easy not to do, especially when you don’t understand the price you’re paying and you are not yet feeling the pain of your inaction.

My friend, don’t wait until the wheels fall off. Don’t wait for a diagnosis, a breakdown, a rupture, a betrayal, a moment of collapse before you act. Before you willingly pay whatever the price might be. Understand that you are paying a price, whether you wait for the crisis, stay in the comfort of your flat, but fine middle-ground life, or you invest into a more fully expressed and expansive life.

Let me ask you something. If nothing changes, if you keep living exactly as you are right now, what will your life look like five years from now? 10 years from now? What might it cost you in your relationships, in your health, in who you be, in your sense of self? In the way that you look back on your time and ask, did I really live it? Was I really present?

I paid a very dear price for waiting. I waited until my dull ache became a scream. I waited until I loathed who I saw in the mirror. I waited until every shred of self-worth had disappeared. I waited until my marriage was nearly over, my body was breaking, and my world felt like it was running on fumes.

And looking back now, now that I no longer live in the middle-ground, I would have given anything to have woken up sooner. To have said YES! to myself before it all went sideways. YES! to paying the price of weeding my garden every single day. Because when I finally did, when I finally stopped waiting and started living my life like my life depended on me taking that action, everything changed.

Now, I’m not saying it’s easy to do the work on you. But I am saying it’s worth it. Because the pain of discipline, the discipline of choosing yourself day after day, that will never compare to the pain of regret or the pain of your crisis.

So spend some time today and think about what is your one life really worth to you? What price would you avoid paying at all costs during your one life? And what price are you willing to pay upfront today to avoid paying it?

Remember your middle-ground life is costing you even though you might not yet be writing the checks. You can pay what feels like a big price today and choose to take action, whether it’s small action like making one different decision about how you spend your time or bigger action, like saying YES! to working with a coach like me. Or you can wait and pay a much bigger price when your okay life is no longer okay.

The choice as always, is yours. And whatever you choose, my hope is that you start seeing the cost of inaction and action through a different lens. And that you at least make the decision to act or not to act in the full knowledge of the price that you are choosing to pay.

And if you are at the point where you are done with making do and things being fine but not fabulous, and you see the value of investing into having a coach in your corner to help you do this deep work, to shift your life out of the middle-ground and make the rest of your life the best of your life, I’d love to invite you to join me for 12 life-changing weeks in the YES! Factor.

Right now I’m offering this as a private mentoring and coaching opportunity to the woman who’s ready for her and her life to finally feel like it clicks in 12 weeks or less.

If that sounds like you, if you’re ready to stop wasting time in the middle-ground and start living a life you wildly love, head over to my website at https://selfcreationschool.com/the-yes-factor, and book yourself a complimentary YES!. Session with me today to talk about how I can help you do exactly that through my proven Self-Creation Solution and YES! Factor framework.

Do it today, my friend, because if you are already feeling the cost of your middle-ground life, imagine what the cost might look like six months from now. Don’t wait until the wheels fall off to finally invest in the life you actually want to live. I’ll leave that link in the show notes for you if that’s the right next step for you.

And if all you do today is decide that the middle-ground is no longer your home, it’s no longer your baseline, that’s enough. Because decisions change things. Decisions shift energy. Decisions create momentum. The life you deep down want to experience, it’s waiting on the other side of your next brave choice.

Stop holding your fabulous life ransom to one that’s just fine. Stop giving your power away to the dull ache. Stop polishing a life that functions, but doesn’t make you feel fully and vibrantly alive. And start creating one that does.

This is your one life, my friend. Stop tolerating. Stop accepting, making do with the middle-ground, and say YES! to living it out in the most expansive way you can imagine.

Thanks again for joining me today. If you’re still listening, then I know this message has landed somewhere deep for you, and I’m excited. Because I also know what happens when you wake up to the opportunity of your one life and you choose to pay a different price.

I’ll be here to share more on how you can create a live you wildly love next Wednesday. Make sure you hit the subscribe button so that episode is queued and ready for listening right inside your favorite podcast library.

And if you haven’t yet given the show a rating or a review, I’d really love if you would take just a few moments to do so. Your thumbs up and few words really do help this podcast to reach more ears and to change more lives.

So if you find what I share, helpful, insightful, or it has impacted your life in some small or big way, I would be so grateful if you would share that in a review and give the show five stars. It’s a small action that you can take right now that really will create a big ripple effect in the world.

I look forward to your company next week.

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.

A lot of women in my world are hanging out in a place called the middle-ground. It’s that place where everything is fine, everything is good enough. You can make do with life as it is. At least you tell yourself that. But if you’re honest, fine feels more flat than it does fabulous.

The problem is, because you are not a woman who is currently in crisis or having a meltdown moment in your life, you’re not feeling like your life isn’t working, there’s this kind of don’t fix what isn’t broken thinking going on, right? If it runs, if it gets us from A to B, it’s working good enough.

And so you carry on. You sweep aside the nagging feeling, the whisper from deep within that really deep down things are not fine. You normalize that feeling. You maybe even gaslight yourself for feeling it. And you learn to cope with the low hum of discontent, the flatness of your days, of your soul, the quiet ache deep inside that whispers fine isn’t enough.

Here’s the thing. That ache? It doesn’t go away. It just sinks a little deeper day by day and starts costing you in ways that you do not even notice. Until you do. Until you wake up in a life that doesn’t feel at all like yours, like you don’t even really exist in it. You stop feeling vibrant in your own skin. Your relationships feel less meaningful or connected. Your days feel like a monotonous blur of the mundane.

And you find yourself craving something more. Something more like freedom, purpose, joy. But you’ve swept the idea of more aside for so long now you’re not even sure what that is anymore.

And your life starts to crumble around you. You start to crumble. And your fine existence now feels more like a failed existence. And, like what happened for me, you reach flat bottom in your world. Suddenly you found yourself a woman in crisis.

This is the danger of living in the middle-ground. It doesn’t hurt bad enough to wake you up and motivate you to change. It doesn’t push you to reach out for more to make your life feel fabulous. Instead, it keeps you stuck in this deceiving place of comfort and it’s slowly drains a life out of you while you pretend everything is fine until the scales get tipped, and now things have to change.

And that’s what I want to talk about today. The very real cost of living in the in-between, the middle-ground, where nothing’s wrong, but it doesn’t feel deeply right either. Because here’s the truth, you do not have to wait to hit rock bottom to break through to a life that feels fabulous every single day. You just have to stop living in the middle-ground pretending fine is enough.

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.

Thanks so much for joining me today. I’m so grateful to have your company. Over the past few months in the work that I do as a coach, I’ve seen a lot of women in my world choosing to stay in the middle-ground over taking action and reaching out for something more in their life.

And by more, I don’t necessarily mean chasing the next big thing, ticking off the next big goal. That’s okay if you want it, by the way. But I mean more in the sense of depth, meaning fulfillment, connection, freedom, peace, joy, fullness. More like self-confidence, more self-belief or trust or respect.

And the reason I speak with such conviction about choosing yourself and creating a life you’re wildly in love with is because I know what it feels like to slowly lose yourself through this kind of inaction. Through living in the middle-ground and making do with fine. Settling for a life that’s good enough on the surface.

Because what happens in the middle-ground is our garden of life looks pretty enough. There’s a few weeds, yes, but not enough weeds to make us do the work to remove them. And maybe our garden isn’t planted with the blooms we really love, but the green that’s there, well, it’s pleasant enough.

So we leave our garden of life alone. We let it do its thing because let’s face it, it’s easier not to do the work that doesn’t seem all that necessary than it is to take the time and pull out a few weeds. But those weeds? Eventually when you don’t tend to the garden, they start to take over.

And gradually, the pleasant greenery gets wildly overrun by these weeds, and your garden starts to look like a very big mess. Then the work to clean up your garden becomes a very big job. And you literally feel like the best thing is to rip it all out and start again.

And you reach what I like to call a line in the sand moment. The moment when you realize that your garden of life is so overrun with weeds, the plants you once enjoyed are no longer even visible. It’s just this mess of dead plants, strangled and outgrown by those once seemingly insignificant weeds. Your garden has reached crisis mode and you know you have to do something about it. Your garden can’t stay as is. It has to be dealt with and it has to be put right.

We often see our crisis moments as things that suddenly happen to us, but more often than not, they don’t just happen. They happen slowly. They happen over time. They happen one weed at a time that we leave be until it seems like you wake up one day and suddenly all the weeds have taken over.

And we leave them be because our life, our garden if you like to stay with the metaphor, it looks fine even if there are a few weeds. So we choose the middle-ground of inaction. We choose not to tend to the weeds today. And we choose not to add some of the blooms that really would take our garden from pleasant greenery to the most spectacular blooms. We choose not to add them today. We’ll do that someday, maybe. Maybe someday when we tend to the weeds.

Usually we don’t do either. And the thing about human existence is that when things are left alone to be they tend to gravitate towards decline, not towards something better.

Think about it. If you leave your health and fitness to be what it is, over the years do you get better, stronger, more flexible? If you do, I want your secret. But usually the answer is no. You gradually lose muscle mass. You become stiffer. You start to notice that you’re out of breath on the stairs.

I remember being told once that even the sharpest razor will go blunt over time without use. The blade will go dull. It will slowly corrode. Until it’s no longer a bit for purpose. And this is how staying nice and comfortable in the middle-ground played out for me, and I see it play out for so many women.

Years ago when I eventually had my meltdown moment, where I realized my life wasn’t fit for purpose anymore, I didn’t just draw a line in the sand and make a decision to clean up my garden and plant it with the most spectacular blooms I could find. I made the decision that I wanted to dedicate my life’s work to encouraging women not to live in the middle-ground.

Because it broke my heart more than I realized that my heart already felt broken when I saw the look of self-loathing I had that morning when I faced myself in the mirror and saw just how overrun with weeds my life had so unnecessarily become. The pain I felt in that moment is not a pain I would wish on my greatest enemy. And that’s why I am just so driven to share my message, to spark the motivation within you to stop making do.

Because you don’t have to have a mirror moment like I did. You don’t have to wait for your marriage to face divorce, your business to go south, your relationships to fall apart, your health to spiral, your sense of self to be completely eroded before you tend to your garden. But you do need to find the reason to take action. You do need to pay the price of discipline today so that you don’t end up paying the price of regret one day when your fine starts to fail.

And my hope in having this conversation today is that this might be your wake up call. That it might help you take action to weed your garden and start planting it with the most spectacular blooms. Not because it isn’t fine or functional as it is, but because you finally understand that you are playing a very risky game settling for fine.

I think back to the time when my daughter received her Asperger’s diagnosis. She was 14. It was a very late diagnosis. And the only reason it happened was that she hit crisis mode. All the years we didn’t put two and two together, had chipped away at her soul, at her confidence, at her sense of worth until she couldn’t make sense of herself or her place in the world at all.

What we didn’t see was how she had slowly started numbing herself because her world had become too confusing, too painful for her to exist in. And she started self-harming. Not as I eventually realized in a suicidal way, but in an attempt to feel something again way. In an attempt to feel alive in her world.

Now, as a parent, it’s one of your worst nightmares. It completely breaks your heart to see your child suffering like this. And my husband and I dropped everything to help her. We were consumed with doing everything we possibly could to help put her world right once we realized the extent of her problems.

There wasn’t a dime I wouldn’t pay, an hour I wouldn’t spend. And I spent every day trying to help her. I took her to see all of the specialists, the counselors, the psychologists, the psychiatrists. When I wasn’t with her, I was researching, reading, trying to understand her better so I could help her, so I could help me be a better parent for her.

I asked countless questions. I searched for countless answers. I threw everything I had at helping my daughter. I didn’t have to look for motivation because seeing the heartbreak of my daughter’s pain and laying awake every night wondering what I would wake up to find the next morning was all the motivation I needed.

I was forced into action brutally, but really, the signs had been whispering for quite some time. And deep down, I think I knew that. The thing is on the surface, she was fine. She was functional. There wasn’t any urgent need to look any further, to lift the lid on things. And she was fine and functional until she wasn’t.

And that’s the cost of not listening to the whispers, not paying attention to the signs. Just sweeping them aside into the “it will be all right” basket. The cost of that was pretty heavy and it is still very heavy to this day.

And the point I make is we don’t tend to stop and calculate the cost of living in this middle-ground and not tuning into the dull ache, not weeding our garden. Instead, we end up just paying whatever the cost ends up being when the time comes. And it will. We pay the emotional cost, the physical cost, the financial cost. We end up with no choice but to pay it. And we will pay every last cent for the pain of our crisis to go away.

I reflect on this a lot. In business, you generally don’t wait until things hit rock bottom to make changes, make improvements, or small adjustments to make your business perform better and to grow so that it can return a greater profit.

But when you are invited to invest into something that will help you grow your business, it’s a simple return on investment calculation. The price you pay delivers a tangible return in your business, usually in the financial sense. It’s a straight financial cost of the investment versus the financial return for doing so.

But living an optimal life, investing into ourselves to grow who we be, improve and fine-tune what is on the surface already working good enough, it’s so much harder to calculate the return on investment, right? There’s no mathematical equation that says, when I invest the time or money into my personal growth and optimizing myself and my life, I’m going to get this amount of time or money back in the bank.

Because what we are really investing into is a feeling. The feeling of freedom, fulfillment, peace, happiness, joy, that growing who we be and working on ourselves can bring. And it’s hard to understand or to calculate what feeling fabulous about your life is worth over continuing to live a life that feels fine.

But if you think back to any crisis moment you’ve ever had in your life, you would have and probably did invest no end of time and money and effort to take away the feeling of your pain in that moment. It’s not even a question. You will give whatever it takes to move out of your pain and even just get back to things being fine.

You probably know all too well the price of being in crisis. And like I said, you pay it without question. But when it comes to paying the price for growth, for stepping out of the middle-ground that is technically working for you, so many of us we hesitate, we stay stuck in inaction because we don’t really have a gauge for what that next level life is really worth to us.

Here’s the thing I want you to consider. It’s worth not experiencing the price of your crisis mode pain that you will eventually pay if you continue to exist in the middle-ground. If you don’t tend to your garden, you will eventually pay the price. That’s what investing into you is worth.

And when you finally experience something more than just fine in your life, when you experience the return on investment and how truly fabulous life can be, I promise you that you will pay anything to stay there. It becomes a no brainer to invest into yourself just like it is when you hit rock bottom.

The question is, which state do you want to be in when you pay the price? A pain state or a pleasure state? And by price I mean emotional, physical, mental, spiritual, and financial. I mean, your time, your effort, your action, your discipline, your decision. Do you want to wait until you are forced to invest whatever it takes to move away from your pain? Or do you want to invest right now while you’re in the middle-ground and things aren’t too hard to move towards a much deeper, much more fulfilling and meaningful state of pleasure?

For me, it’s a no-brainer to invest now in the middle-ground and to invest even more than I might invest in crisis mode because we have just one life. And it truly can be spectacular. It doesn’t have to exist mostly in the middle-ground and below. It can exist mostly in the upper ground and sometimes below.

My friend, the middle-ground is costing you in ways that aren’t always visible to you right now. The cost only becomes visible when you experience either the pain of falling below the middle-ground, or you experience the pleasure you’ve been missing out on when you reach for something more. When you decide that buying is no longer good enough.

What the middle-ground costs you either way is time. Time making do. Time in relationships that aren’t quite right. Time shrinking yourself or your dreams. Time regretting not going after your dreams. Time putting things back together. Time mending and healing your pain.

Time you could be experiencing something so much better. Like feeling vibrantly alive, fulfilled, and deeply and fully present in yourself, in your relationships, your life, in your every day. It’s time that you cannot get back and before you know it, the weeks turn into months and the months they turn into years.

Living life in the middle-ground comes with a price tag too, my friend. That’s the price I’m inviting you to consider when you stay undecided about investing the time, money, and effort into taking your life from fine to fabulous. What is the cost of waiting out your middle-ground life really going to end up costing you? Because I promise your inaction has a price tag.

It’s so much easier to tend to your garden every day right now and pull out a few small weeds than it is to need to overhaul your entire backyard. It’s easy to do a few things every day to change the landscape of your life. But it’s also easy not to do, especially when you don’t understand the price you’re paying and you are not yet feeling the pain of your inaction.

My friend, don’t wait until the wheels fall off. Don’t wait for a diagnosis, a breakdown, a rupture, a betrayal, a moment of collapse before you act. Before you willingly pay whatever the price might be. Understand that you are paying a price, whether you wait for the crisis, stay in the comfort of your flat, but fine middle-ground life, or you invest into a more fully expressed and expansive life.

Let me ask you something. If nothing changes, if you keep living exactly as you are right now, what will your life look like five years from now? 10 years from now? What might it cost you in your relationships, in your health, in who you be, in your sense of self? In the way that you look back on your time and ask, did I really live it? Was I really present?

I paid a very dear price for waiting. I waited until my dull ache became a scream. I waited until I loathed who I saw in the mirror. I waited until every shred of self-worth had disappeared. I waited until my marriage was nearly over, my body was breaking, and my world felt like it was running on fumes.

And looking back now, now that I no longer live in the middle-ground, I would have given anything to have woken up sooner. To have said YES! to myself before it all went sideways. YES! to paying the price of weeding my garden every single day. Because when I finally did, when I finally stopped waiting and started living my life like my life depended on me taking that action, everything changed.

Now, I’m not saying it’s easy to do the work on you. But I am saying it’s worth it. Because the pain of discipline, the discipline of choosing yourself day after day, that will never compare to the pain of regret or the pain of your crisis.

So spend some time today and think about what is your one life really worth to you? What price would you avoid paying at all costs during your one life? And what price are you willing to pay upfront today to avoid paying it?

Remember your middle-ground life is costing you even though you might not yet be writing the checks. You can pay what feels like a big price today and choose to take action, whether it’s small action like making one different decision about how you spend your time or bigger action, like saying YES! to working with a coach like me. Or you can wait and pay a much bigger price when your okay life is no longer okay.

The choice as always, is yours. And whatever you choose, my hope is that you start seeing the cost of inaction and action through a different lens. And that you at least make the decision to act or not to act in the full knowledge of the price that you are choosing to pay.

And if you are at the point where you are done with making do and things being fine but not fabulous, and you see the value of investing into having a coach in your corner to help you do this deep work, to shift your life out of the middle-ground and make the rest of your life the best of your life, I’d love to invite you to join me for 12 life-changing weeks in the YES! Factor.

Right now I’m offering this as a private mentoring and coaching opportunity to the woman who’s ready for her and her life to finally feel like it clicks in 12 weeks or less.

If that sounds like you, if you’re ready to stop wasting time in the middle-ground and start living a life you wildly love, head over to my website at https://selfcreationschool.com/the-yes-factor, and book yourself a complimentary YES!. Session with me today to talk about how I can help you do exactly that through my proven Self-Creation Solution and YES! Factor framework.

Do it today, my friend, because if you are already feeling the cost of your middle-ground life, imagine what the cost might look like six months from now. Don’t wait until the wheels fall off to finally invest in the life you actually want to live. I’ll leave that link in the show notes for you if that’s the right next step for you.

And if all you do today is decide that the middle-ground is no longer your home, it’s no longer your baseline, that’s enough. Because decisions change things. Decisions shift energy. Decisions create momentum. The life you deep down want to experience, it’s waiting on the other side of your next brave choice.

Stop holding your fabulous life ransom to one that’s just fine. Stop giving your power away to the dull ache. Stop polishing a life that functions, but doesn’t make you feel fully and vibrantly alive. And start creating one that does.

This is your one life, my friend. Stop tolerating. Stop accepting, making do with the middle-ground, and say YES! to living it out in the most expansive way you can imagine.

Thanks again for joining me today. If you’re still listening, then I know this message has landed somewhere deep for you, and I’m excited. Because I also know what happens when you wake up to the opportunity of your one life and you choose to pay a different price.

I’ll be here to share more on how you can create a live you wildly love next Wednesday. Make sure you hit the subscribe button so that episode is queued and ready for listening right inside your favorite podcast library.

And if you haven’t yet given the show a rating or a review, I’d really love if you would take just a few moments to do so. Your thumbs up and few words really do help this podcast to reach more ears and to change more lives.

So if you find what I share, helpful, insightful, or it has impacted your life in some small or big way, I would be so grateful if you would share that in a review and give the show five stars. It’s a small action that you can take right now that really will create a big ripple effect in the world.

I look forward to your company next week.

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.