Eighteen months ago I was sitting at our dining room table with a calendar open in front of me, looking at the next twelve months of my business, when something settled in me that I really, really didn’t want to settle in me.

I was looking at a year that was going to be objectively spectacular. A mastermind I’d run for twelve years, already half-sold. A dream contract with an industry leader I had admired for over a decade, very lucrative, very prestigious, sitting at the big tables with the big boys talking about big things. A podcast that had grown more in the last year than the previous five combined. The kind of year that I had dreamt up…

But I had this unwelcome realization that absolutely none of it felt quite right.

That kind of knowing is wicked annoying, by the way. I’d like to register a formal complaint about how often God gives you a knowing without giving you the playbook for what comes next. It’s like getting a text that just says “we need to talk” and then no follow-up for six days. Cool. Cool cool cool. I’ll just be over here completely fine, not living in a mild panic.

As I often do, I tried to talk myself out of it (I have an Italian gift for negotiation, and I tried both on God for several weeks with absolutely no success). I asked all the questions a sane person would ask. Why would I change work that was working? What about the revenue? What about the team? What about the people who’d already paid? What about the reputation I’d built? What about the next book I’d been planning to launch off the momentum of this exact platform?

And every time I tried to make the case for staying or seeing things through, this one obnoxious truth kept rising up from somewhere underneath the mayhem of my mind – none of it is your life’s work anymore. It’s all good work. It’s not bad work. It’s not even the wrong work. It’s just no longer YOUR work right now.

I think this is the thing I most want to say to the high achievers reading this, because I sit with people like you on a regular basis and I see this pattern playing out in your lives on a weekly basis…

The thing that’s currently producing your most impressive external results is very rarely the same thing as your actual life’s work.

And the longer you’ve been doing it, the more those two things tend to drift apart.

It’s not because the work is bad. It’s because the work has finished forming you. There’s a season where your business, your career, your offers, your craft is shaping you – making you sharper, deeper, more capable, more humble. You’re growing every quarter, you’re a different person at the end of the year than you were at the beginning. But you cross a line, hitting competence and mastery. The very thing that used to develop you starts to maintain you instead. The work becomes a thing you do rather than a thing that’s doing something to you.

A lot of people get really good at one thing, they get celebrated for that one thing, they build an entire identity around that one thing, and they spend the rest of their professional lives perfecting and protecting and scaling the one thing they figured out in their thirties. Although the business world calls that being an expert, I’m starting to suspect that for a lot of us, it’s actually being stuck.

I’ve been having conversations recently with founders who’ve generated tens of millions, sometimes more, in their industries. Authors with books I’ve read sitting on my shelf. Speakers with names you’d know. The pattern I keep seeing is this strange dissonance where they’re at the very top of their game externally and they have this restlessness they don’t quite know what to do with. They came to me asking for help scaling, but by the second hour we’re together, almost every single one of them has admitted something else… they think there’s something else calling them, and they don’t know how to make the jump because the current thing is paying so well and they’re so well-known for that thing so slowing down enough to figure it out feels like a bad idea.

High achievers have built our entire sense of self around mastery.

The reason this is hard for high achievers specifically is that we’ve built our entire sense of self around being good at something. Our whole psychology is wired toward mastery. We’ve been rewarded our whole lives for being the ones who figure things out, who learn fast, who deliver, who get praised for our competence.

So when God starts nudging us toward a piece of work where we’ll have to make space for something outside of our norm – where we’ll likely be unknown, unproven, possibly not even very good for a while – we don’t always experience that nudge as exciting. We experience it as a kind of psychological warfare where everything in us resists. Surely God wouldn’t ask me to leave something this successful. Surely there’s a way to do both. Surely if I just outsource more, automate more, delegate more, I can keep doing this thing AND pursue that thing.

This is where things get tricky… lean in.

This is what I see ninety percent of my clients trying to do. They want their life’s work to fit into the margins of the work they’ve already built. They want to keep all of the safety, the reputation, the income, the identity of the proven thing, AND somehow squeeze in the calling on the side. They treat their life’s work like a side hustle so it doesn’t disrupt the busy work that’s currently feeding them. Then they wonder why their life’s work never really launches and they continue to feel unsettled in their lives.

You can’t apprentice yourself to your next assignment while you’re still trying to maintain your last one.

It doesn’t launch because you can’t apprentice yourself to your next assignment while you’re still trying to maintain your last one. You have to release the grip. Some of the grip, all of the grip, varying degrees of the grip depending on what God’s asking – but you have to release something. Because the energy, attention, courage, and faith required to step into work that’s brand new for you is the same energy you’re currently using to keep the proven thing running smoothly. There’s not an infinite supply of either and you have to choose.

The reason you can’t tell whether you’re called to release something is usually because you don’t want to be called to release something. Your discernment is muddied because your incentives are clear. The proven thing pays, the proven thing is known, the proven thing is safe. And we are very good at confusing the call of God with the call of comfort, especially when we’re high-functioning enough to dress the comfort up in some pretty sophisticated language about wisdom, leadership, and timing.

I did this for years before I finally let God prune. I called my holding on smart business and consistency. I called my delay “discernment.” I called my refusal to release “leadership of what I’d built.” Underneath all those very spiritual-sounding words, the real word was just fear. I was afraid of becoming a beginner again, of being unknown, of losing the version of me I’d worked so hard to construct, of being wrong about what God was asking, and so I just kept doing what I knew worked.

I had a death grip on the perception of safety.

What I’ve learned in the months since I actually released, since I paused the mastermind and walked away from the contract and paused the podcast and started writing on a platform I had to Google how to use, is that life’s work feels nothing like proven work. Like, nothing.

Proven work feels like running, life’s work feels like learning to walk again.

Proven work feels like running because you’re fast, you’re capable, you know the terrain, you can do it half-asleep. Life’s work feels like learning to walk again. Baby giraffe style.

It’s also where I’m being formed in a way I haven’t been in years. I’m risking things I can’t quantify and I’m creating the playbook as I go. I have moments where I think “what on earth am I doing”, but underneath all of that, I am seeing the Holy Spirit bless what’s in line with my purpose and potential versus me strong arming my performance.

That’s the test, I think. Not “is this working?” but “is this making me who I’m meant to be?” If the work has stopped making you, it might be done with you and you might be done with it, even if you’re really good at it and even if it’s paying well, and most painfully, even if you’ve built your whole identity on top of it.

I don’t know your specifics or what’s between you and your actual life’s work and I wouldn’t presume to guess, but I will tell you that if you’re sitting at a table somewhere, looking at a year that’s about to be objectively spectacular and not feeling inspired or connected to it… maybe it holds more importance than you think. What if it’s time? What if there’s a divine conversation you’ve been avoiding because the answer would lead to a level of disruption you keep trying to put off?

The answer is almost always more inconvenient than the question. But on the other side of releasing what was working is finding what was actually meant for you, and I don’t think there’s a single one of us reading this who wouldn’t trade performance for purpose if we genuinely believed we could have it.

You can have it.

You just probably can’t have both.

Love + Prayers

Liz