Do You Have To Burn It All Down To Get To Where You Want To Go?
The story of upper limit ceilings in the ambitious heart that’s called to more, but doesn’t believe it’s available to them.
I am a visionary, which is a beautiful gift with a really annoying dark side. I live for a good, clean slate. Give me the fantasy of walking away from something complicated and rebuilding it perfectly from scratch, and I am right there. And when doubt creeps in – when overwhelm feels like it might swallow me whole – my knee-jerk instinct is almost always some version of “burn it down and start over”, because there’s no way I can get there while I’m also still stuck here in this mess.
I’ve learned the hard way (which is how I learn everything, apparently) that when that instinct fires in me, it’s not usually a directive from God. It’s more like a warning shot that I’ve hit the edge of my capacity, that I need to slow down and do my actual job as a visionary – which is to sit with what’s really being asked, not react to the overwhelm hovering on top of it.
If you were with me at the Kitchen Table for last week’s article, you already know the two lies that tend to sneak in around this same intersection – that this thing is too out of reach to actually pursue, and that I am too spread thin to be the one to do it. Both are lies, and the burn-it-down instinct is what those lies produce when they collide with a visionary brain that’s used to solving problems by starting over. Or worse, avoiding a calling because they assume they will have to start over.
Starting over isn’t always the answer.
Sometimes it is, but usually it isn’t. And the only way to know which one it is for you is to slow down long enough to ask the questions that actually reveal it.
This is not just my quandary, however, because I’ve sat beside a whole lot of clients and peers who wrestle with this same struggle.
Liz Hartke Founder Luminary Leadership Co mentoring business owners
Brielle, a long-time client of mine, sat across from me in one of our first sessions years ago and looked like she’d been carrying something heavy on her chest for months.
She had built a wildly successful multimillion-dollar accounting business over the previous decade. She had a team, a client roster full of people who trusted her deeply, and a reputation she could genuinely stand on.
And she had come to me because she was fully convinced that in order to step into where she truly wanted to go, she would have to nix it all.
What she was actually sensing, when we untangled it, was that she was being called into a different kind of work – guiding people through wealth opportunities and their actual relationship with money. Not accounting exactly, but something adjacent to it. Deeper than the numbers themselves and much more about the human being behind the balance sheet than the balance sheet itself.
But she had convinced herself that answering this call meant shutting the whole thing down or selling because so much of what she built depended on her. She was so busy, so needed, and the thought of taking on more felt nearly impossible. She was exhausted and grieving before we ever got to the answer. And ultimately, she was also very, very wrong about how this calling would become her reality.
The Big Next is that deeper God-given assignment asking more of you than your current work is asking.
Quick catch-you-up if you’re new around here. This is where we have Kitchen Table Conversation, the corner of the internet where I write about what’s really going on underneath the surface for driven people who sense they’re being called into something bigger than what they’re currently doing. The Big Next, which is the language I use in my forthcoming book (Your Big Next), is that deeper God-given assignment asking more of you than your current work is asking. And most of the high-achieving people who show up in my private rooms are wrestling with the same tension Brielle was wrestling with – the panicked belief that answering their Big Next requires them to torch what they’ve built to get here, and because of that, they hesitate. They don’t begin because it feels like too big of a risk.
For most of them, that is not what God is asking, it’s just what their overwhelm is asking.
Here’s what actually happened with Brielle.
Nothing got burned down. Her clients stayed, as did her team. What we did was reposition her – and by extension, reposition the entire trajectory of her business – around the actual assignment God was calling her into.
Her accounting expertise became the foundation for something bigger, not the thing she had to leave behind to build something bigger. She started guiding her existing clients (the ones who already trusted her with their financial lives) into deeper conversations about their relationship with money, about what wealth was actually for in the context of their families and their legacies. Her offer suite evolved along with her positioning, and eventually her whole identity did too. But the underlying container – the business she had built, the people she had gathered around her – stayed intact and became the actual vehicle for the calling. Other people on her team had the opportunity to step into new levels of leadership and opportunity as they helped to get Brielle into her sweet spot and out of the day-to-day.
Brielle came into that conversation exhausted and grieving what she was so sure she was going to have to walk away from… either her business, or her calling. But she ultimately walked out of it reinvigorated because she wasn’t building from lack anymore, she was building from possibility.
Evolution instead of demolition.
If you’re sitting somewhere reading this and you can feel the pull of your Big Next, but your dominant thought about it is some version of “oh my gosh, do I really have to blow up everything I’ve built to do this?” I want to gently suggest you might be reacting to overwhelm instead of listening to instruction. And I want to give you a few questions to sit with instead, questions I’ve used for myself and my clients.
Over the years I’ve built out a set of questions I use with my private clients to help them get honest about whether they’re being called to burn it down or evolve what they’ve already built. It’s called the True North Clarity Playbook, and the full version is a proprietary document I use in my private work. It’ll be included as a bonus with the pre-sale of Your Big Next when I officially open pre-orders (hi to my early birds already on the waitlist). But I want to give you a handful of the questions here, because I think they might do some real work in you this week if you let them.
Sit with these.
What stories or skill sets have you discounted that are meant to be center stage?
What calling has been nudging at you, beyond your current business model, that you’re now ready to claim?
What chapter is closing that you keep trying to rewrite?
What is the assignment you’ve resisted because it feels too big or too bold?
Grab a journal and give yourself an actual hour to ask God what He’s saying to you underneath each one of them. No panic allowed!
For most of the driven people I sit with in private rooms, the answers that these questions surface are not “burn it all down.” They are some version of you already have most of what you need. You just need to reposition your energy around what you’ve been trying not to see was actually the calling all along.
That was Brielle’s answer, and it’s been mine many times over.
Whatever yours is, please do not act on it while you’re panicking. That is not the version of you who’s meant to be making the call.
Love + prayers, Liz
P.S. If you want the full True North Clarity Playbook (all sixty-something questions I use to walk clients through this exact process), get on the pre-sale list for Your Big Next. The full playbook will be included as a bonus with the book for anyone who pre-orders. Get on the list here.
