Uncommon Self Trust - Going Deeper

I lived in France for ten years.

I still speak B1 French. After living there that long, a person should speak fluently without even trying, right? 

I used to make a joke about being married to an interpreter. I defend myself by saying that I worked in English every day, wrote in English. All my clients were English speaking.

Blah, blah, blah. Just noise. Except I really believed it. I said it so often it became my identity. 

Not because I couldn't have gotten much better. I made dear friends there. Encounters at la boulangerie, le métro, la pharmacie, and even retail stores offered opportunities to practice. French people commented that my accent was charming, assumed I was British, and upon learning I was American had so many questions for me. They wanted to practice their English and ask about America. A woman at Maison du Monde spent ten minutes patiently teaching me the difference between my e's and my r's, as others behind me in line rolled their eyes and huffed. It was Christmas. She did this for nothing, because she wanted to.

When I bought furniture on Leboncoin, my husband told me no one would deliver it. It simply wasn't done in France, he said. He was wrong.

France said yes to me, mistakes and all, for ten years.

So why did I stay at B1?

Because in one room, in my own marriage, I wasn't accepted as a person in progress. I was a hologram of a wife. Being an ideal left no room for human imperfection. An ideal doesn't get to be wrong. Only a person does.

I could be gloriously imperfect with strangers, with new friends who wanted the real, fumbling version of me. But at home, every sentence came back corrected before I'd finished saying it, and somewhere in there I learned the rule: don't let anyone see you get it wrong, or the display breaks.

So I stopped taking risks. Ironically I had made this bold move to come to Paris originally, to follow a dream. I met the challenges needed to get there. And then I stopped doing the very thing I had come to do. Not because I couldn't speak French. Because I'd stepped into a version of myself, someone else's version, and it re-opened old conditioning, old fears that I believed I'd erased years ago.

This is not only about French.

This is about the journey of living. It is about how we meet familiar discomfort. 

I had created so much I was proud of. Taken off for Paris, alone, simply to learn a language I loved for nine glorious months in a city I loved. I'd found an amazing apartment, in my favorite arrondissement. I'd packed most of my personal belongings into a storage unit and found renters. I'd even, very reluctantly, found the perfect new home for my beloved boxer, Bentley. I had just finished my second book and was working on marketing it. 

Forward progress. Momentum. Despite some deeply painful losses that happened right before I left. I thought I was invincible. Unstoppable.

And then I walked into a new room. A new relationship. And a complete immersion program with multilingual college students who simply wanted to spend a year in Paris.

We have an expression in coaching: new level, new devil.

It wasn't anything I didn't already know. And yet, slowly, almost imperceptibly, I started translating my own sentences in my head before I let them out. I started measuring my opinions before I offered them, softening what I actually thought until it felt small enough to be safe. The woman who had dismantled an entire life and rebuilt it alone, in a foreign city, in a foreign language, could still catch herself shrinking by a centimeter in a room with the wrong energy in it.

New level, new devil was never about a bigger problem showing up. It's about a familiar one that shows up in a new room. A room where it hasn’t been tested.  

A room that has no mercy for imperfection. Where only the polished version is allowed to be seen. It isn’t a flaw. It’s a familiar pattern of responding to conditions that feel threatening. It’s protection. It’s where we try to close the door on what we cannot bear to feel. 

In Human Design, open centers represent the doorway for this conditioning to walk through. They can show us why we may feel strong and certain in one environment, and find ourselves responding completely differently in another. (Never seen your chart? You can run it free here.)

Much like my unconscious fear of speaking French incorrectly, this conditioning exists whether we are aware of it or not. As energetic beings we are always exchanging our gifts, expectations, fears, challenges, and knowing with one another.

And much like my unconscious fear of speaking french incorrectly, this conditioning exists whether we are aware of it or not. As energetic beings we are always exchanging our gifts, expectations, fears, challenges, and knowing with one another. 

Finding a voice for this became very important for me because in my 12 years of doing this work, this point is where I watch so many women give up and self flagellate. 

They, like me, have done real work and felt real change. And then something happens. It doesn’t feel like one step back. It feels like failure - until you learn it is not.

Often that very change creates the new challenge. When it hits the same old nerve, the pattern we’ve spent most of our lives staying “safe” in rears its head with a vengeance. Leading us back to “careful, correct, or simply, good enough to get by.” The fear that “it didn’t work” is more terrifying than shrinking back to what we know. 

Except the only thing the fear really proves is that you are growing. You’re stepping into something unknown. It can be scary. Maybe even terrifying. You’re moving. Evolving. Shifting. Healing.

None of this can stay in  a fixed position. It isn't a place you arrive at once and hold forever. It's a muscle that we keep flexing. It's what growth feels like. (I first wrote about this muscle in the original Uncommon Self Trust essay — this month, we go deeper.)

Where have you decided you're back at square one?

Where have you confused being safe with being silent, or small or perfect?  

These are not  character flaws.  Shame would have you think so. Shame is wrong. 

It’s a pattern. A protection you may have come to claim as “just who you are.”

It’s not.  

I created a quiz that supports you to identify those patterns. Chaos to Clarity is a free peek into unconscious patterns that are running your life.

The start of a complete path, step by step to support you to see where the pattern sneaks in and what you can do to meet it before it takes over. 

And practices to shift familiar protective patterns into a life worthy of you.

Joyful, expansive. Worth living. 

Because the moment we find our passion again, we see ourselves. Not the hologram. Not the version of us we have used to “keep the peace.”

The person who was in there the whole tim. The one we finally allow to be seen. Come back to her. Take the free quiz.