Lifting the Veil Between The Life You’re In, And The One That’s Waiting For You
It’s wild how far you can feel from the life you truly desire, despite how close you really are…
It’s absolutely wild how very far you can feel from the life you desire, and how very stuck you can feel in the life you’re living, despite how very thin the veil is between the two.
The problem, though, is how opaque that veil is. You cannot, for the life of you, see through it to what stands only a thin layer away from where you are. I’ve felt the pull to write about this not only because I’ve experienced it many times over (especially as of late), but also because I’ve been walking a lot of other highly successful, ambitious leaders through similar seasons and I’ve taken note of why it happens, and what works to lift the veil.
This is going to be one of those late night Kitchen Table Conversations that requires ice cold milk and some homemade cookies or somethin’, because it’s heavy. But by the end of it, I think it will infuse you with the hope we’ve all been needing in our valley seasons.
If you’ve walked with me for a while, you know that I experienced the most horrific wake-up call when I delivered our son stillbirth, and then nearly lost my own life soon after. If you haven’t, you can read about it here. Although there was an unbelievable amount of clarity offered in the depths of my despair, I never want to paint a picture that it’s been smooth sailing ever since.
In fact, although I miraculously survived losing over 50% of my blood volume, a part of me did die that day. It was the death of the hyper-ambitious, productivity-driven identity fueled by success, advancement, and calculatable gains. Since then, I’ve walked through what has felt like a two year reckoning to discover the version of me that God has been calling me into.
I’ve had to choose to stay on this side of the perspective gained and it’s regularly a battle.
I share this because sometimes I read inspiring stories of leaders who go through something impossibly hard, and then the next part of the story is that they gained a unique perspective and are forever changed. Maybe that’s true for them, but that wasn’t my experience. That perspective had to be earned, continuously, for the last two years. In particular the last six months. Yes, my second chance offered an opportunity for complete transformation, but I’ve had to choose to stay on this side of the perspective gained and it’s regularly a battle. Nobody tells you that part – that suffering doesn’t change you, it just extends the invitation to leverage it for good.
It’s tempting to skip to the good part, where I’ve found my way out of this reckoning, but that would rob you of the opportunity to be reminded how seen you are as you walk through yours. There is a good part, too, that includes how I got here, so track with me for a bit and we’ll get there.
I wrote a few weeks ago about how I was convinced – at a DNA level – that my book would fail.
This wasn’t a contrived thought or even an anxious one. It just was. I genuinely, unemotionally believed it to be the truth.
And that defeated thought was fairly representative of many other thoughts that lived rent free in my brain during that season. There was, as I mentioned before, an impenetrable veil that blocked me from living – or even seeing or believing – in possibility. Like a swirling, dark storm system, it hovered over me and convinced me that maybe the sun no longer existed, or at least that if it did, it wouldn’t come out for me.
I know that sounds a little dramatic, but when I was in it, it didn’t feel that way. It just felt like fact. Nothing more, nothing less, really.
That’s why I’m writing about this. Because I know someone reading this has accepted their current reality in life, work, marriage, their health, their financial situation, their level of joy or purpose as fact. As though they packed their belongings and moved into this valley, going as far as making it so familiar that it has started to feel like home. I find that we don’t just endure our valleys, we actually start to decorate them.
Maybe it’s because a certain smallness starts to feel safer than an uncertain bigness, and at least down here, nothing more can be taken from us.
I’ll also tell you that in my line of work I have the opportunity to get under the hood of the businesses – but even more so, the psyches – of very well respected and successful entrepreneurs and leaders. They’re people whose books you may have read, speeches you’ve watched, or content you’ve consumed in an attempt to learn how they’ve done what they’ve done. Yet still, they too at some point or another, experience a similar reckoning of their own.
Like me, those leaders tend to go more insular when they navigate seasons like that. And I’ve come to believe it’s because success shrinks the number of people you can be honest with. The more people admire the life you’ve built, the more it costs to confess that you can’t see your way through it right now – so the most-followed people I know are often navigating their hardest seasons with the fewest witnesses. The advantage to having a mentor or confidant alongside them is that oftentimes the person on the outside can catch and identify that veil more easily than the person living with it. That’s why I always invest in someone to advise and mentor me.
When I noticed myself slipping into a belief system that would prevent me from stepping fully into the calling ahead of me, I reached out to my mentor.
I told him the whole ugly thing, word for word. I think my book is going to fail. I’ve been shrinking the launch plan. I can’t seem to find the version of me who believes this is possible.
Saying it out loud was its own small crack in the veil, by the way. These beliefs prefer the dark. They do their best governing when they stay unspoken, because the moment you say one out loud to a person who knows you, it has to stand there in the daylight and be looked at. Exposed. Mine did not hold up well under inspection.
Here’s what he didn’t do. He didn’t debate me. He didn’t list my accomplishments back to me or remind me how many people my work has reached or pull up my track record like a defense attorney. He’s been doing this long enough to know something it took me years to learn in my own client work: you cannot argue someone out from behind a veil. It isn’t a conclusion they reasoned their way into, so there’s no reasoning them back out. The veil doesn’t respond to evidence, it filters evidence. Every win gets reclassified as a fluke, every open door as a coincidence, every compliment as kindness.
The veil is not a thought you’re having, it’s the actual lens you’re having all your thoughts through.
So instead of arguing with my lens, he gave me an assignment…
Book a flight to Utah. Come work with me in person, alongside the premiere writing coach who literally wrote the book on writing non-fiction and has coached some of the best authors alive. And while you’re at it, put your name in the ring for a mini podcast tour while you’re out here.
Within a day, I had five in-person shows booked.
His point: in order to break through the veil – or even see through it – you have to access and do what you know would be on the other side of it.
I had been doing the exact opposite. I was operating like the other side didn’t even exist. My belief said the book would fail, so my behavior obeyed – cancel the launch party, skip the podcast asks, don’t bother the friends. And every act of obedience to the belief produced more evidence for the belief, because a shrinking launch plan does, in fact, produce a shrinking launch. I wasn’t predicting my future, I was manufacturing it, and then citing my own manufacturing as proof.
This is the mechanism almost nobody sees while they’re inside it.
The veil never has to be true, it just has to be perceived as true.
Almost every story of faith I’ve ever taken seriously has the same inconvenient sequence in it. The priests carrying the ark had to step into the Jordan before the water parted – not after, not once the riverbed was dry and the footing was guaranteed. The ten lepers were healed “as they went,” which means they had to start walking toward the priests while still covered in the disease. Peter had to put his actual foot over the side of the actual boat. In every one of these, the body moves first and the confirmation comes second. God seems to have a consistent policy about this – and I’d like to file a complaint about it – and also I’ve stopped filing complaints about it because it keeps turning out to be the whole point.
We’ve gotten this exactly backwards in modern life. We wait to feel ready, to feel confident, to feel like the person who could do the thing – and then we plan to act. But the feeling doesn’t come first. It never comes first. The feeling is downstream of the doing, which is downstream of the being long before we’ve even become. Belief, it turns out, follows the body.
And no – before anyone lights a candle – this is not manifestation. I’m not talking about sitting on our lazy cans visualizing abundance until the universe capitulates. Manifestation says believe harder and reality will rearrange itself around your thoughts. What my mentor handed me was almost the opposite: stop waiting for the belief. Act in the direction of the calling with your actual body and your actual calendar and your actual money, and let the belief catch up on its own schedule. One is wishing, while the other is the oldest move in the life of faith.
So he asked me the question that started to lift the veil: what would it look like to debunk your thoughts? If the version of you on the other side of the veil were running things, what would she do?
Well… she would go to Utah and go all in on her book and master her strategy.
She would put herself in rooms with people who are smarter and further ahead, but also people who believe in her and could see what she could not.
She would do what successful authors do.
She would share her story – including the raw parts that no one else wants to risk talking about because they might look small, or behind, or… human.
She would relight the spark, carving out time to do what she teaches – being in her sweet spot, doing what God has called her to do.
And she would live like she believes it – all out, full out – for an allotted period of time, and watch how quickly the veil lifts.
So that’s what I did. Flights booked, podcasts scheduled, manuscript packed.
In less than three days, I was on the other side of it.
I’ve thought a lot about what actually shifted in those three days, because “I took action and felt better” is the kind of shallow takeaway that would make this whole story useless to you, and it also isn’t really what happened.
What happened is that somewhere between the booking and the doing, my worth came unhooked from my production.
When your identity is riding on an outcome, every action becomes a referendum on your soul.
Send the podcast pitch and get ignored? That’s not a logistics problem anymore – that’s evidence about your value as a person. Launch the book and it lands with a thud? That’s not a marketing miss – that’s a verdict on who you are. And when the stakes are set like that, avoiding action isn’t laziness, it’s just a form of self-protection. Some deep part of you is refusing to gamble your whole worth on a dice roll. The math is bad. Nobody should bet their soul on a launch, or anything else for that matter.
Which is why the veil is, in its own twisted way, comfortable. Now catch this… the veil asks nothing of me. Believing my book would fail excused me from the terror of trying to make it succeed. Low expectations were functioning as insurance – if I never really went for it, I could never really be found wanting. Somewhere under my awareness I had signed that quiet little bargain where you trade the life that’s waiting for you in exchange for never having to find out if you could have had it. A lot of us have signed it and it’s the fine print on every valley we’ve moved into and made feel like home.
But when your worth is settled somewhere the outcome can’t touch it – for me, that’s in being God’s daughter before I am anyone’s author – the referendum ends. Failure gets demoted from indictment to information, and a person for whom failure is just information becomes very hard to stop, because I can fail, tweak, and go. Stopping before I start no longer makes sense, because there’s nothing on the table anymore except the work itself.
There was no more swirling storm. No stuckness. Even though the book still isn’t out, the numbers haven’t moved, nothing external has confirmed a single thing, I can see again. I’m clear and cruising!
That’s how you lift the veil.
You say the belief out loud to someone standing on the other side of it and you actually let them hand you the assignment your lens would never generate.
You identify what the version of you over there would do, and then you do those things – full out, for an allotted period of time – with your body moving well ahead of your feelings, the way the feet get wet before the water parts. And somewhere in the middle of the doing, if you let it, your worth slides off the outcome and back to its rightful place, in your soul.
This is what I walk my clients through when they hit their own version of this, and I’ve watched it work on people whose books you’ve read and whose stages you’ve watched – people who looked at me through their own storm and could not see what was standing two feet in front of them. The veil doesn’t care how successful you are. If anything, success feeds it, because the more you’ve built, the more your identity has to lose, and the more insurance the veil appears to offer.
And now I have a completely different story about myself, and therefore, about my book.
If you’ve moved into your valley and started unpacking boxes – if the storm has hovered long enough that you’ve quit checking for the sun – I’d gently ask you to consider whether some part of you signed the bargain, too. Whether the low expectations are actually protecting something, and what it would cost you, really cost you, to keep the insurance.
Then find someone who can see through your veil, tell them the ugly belief word for word, and let them hand you an assignment.
The water’s not going to part while you’re standing on the bank. It never has.
Love + prayers, Liz
