The Most Expensive Thing You Give Away For Free

We’ve all done it.

You already know your answer. Maybe you have known it for a while (longer than you are willing to admit). But you go ask someone anyway. Your best friend. Your sister. Your therapist. A stranger in a Reddit forum. Or maybe it’s ChatGPT at 11 pm while you lie in bed.

You say you’re just asking for advice. But is that really what it is?

“What do you think I should do?” is often not a real question. Trust me, I get asked this a LOT in my line of work. This question is a mask for, “Please tell me I am doing the right thing.”

If their answer matches what you already knew or wanted to hear, you feel relief. Validated! So you move forward.

And if it does not match? You go ask someone else.

The Way We Abandon Ourselves

Most people do not think of this behavior as self-abandonment. You are just being thorough! Doing your due diligence.

But let’s go a layer underneath that.

Every time you take what you already know and run it past someone else before you trust it, you are sending yourself a message. The message is: my own knowing is not enough. It needs to be verified. Approved. Signed off on.

You do it in the big decisions, obviously. The job offer. The relationship. The move across the country. But you also do it unnecessarily in the small ones.

• You do it when you anxiously re-read a text three times before sending it, trying to control how it will land.

• You do it when you finish a piece of work you feel proud of and immediately wonder what other people will think about it.

• You do it when you know what you want to order, and then look around the table to see what everyone else is getting first.

• You do it when you feel a clear no in your body, and then spend the next week talking yourself into a maybe.

None of it looks like self-abandonment from the outside. It just looks like being a thoughtful person. But the cost of it is enormous, and it accumulates without you noticing.

Where The Conditioning Begins

Most of us were conditioned to look outward for answers. As children in school, as adults at work, and in most organized religions, we are placed in positions where someone else holds the power.

We learn to turn towards books, research, and experts. Which is not a bad thing, but it is a muscle we overdevelop. And then we have this impulse of seeking outward before we ever trust what we discover inward.

We were not taught how to check in with ourselves. How to slow down and notice what is moving inside our own body. How to tell the difference between a gut feeling (intuition) and fear. How to interpret what our intuition was actually saying versus what our anxiety was making up.

Two muscles. But only one of them got trained.

So by the time you are an adult, you have a highly developed external-research muscle and a comparatively underdeveloped internal-listening muscle. And when life asks you a question, you, by default, use the muscle that’s “stronger.”

You Google. You read another book. You ask one more person. You take another course. You consume another podcast. You collect more information.

And none of it is wrong. I catch myself doing it too. The problem is what gets skipped on the way. You never actually PAUSE to check in with yourself, to ask what YOU think.

When Intuition and Survival Get Crossed

You are intuitive, my friend. We all are. The body is constantly picking up on subtle information, sensing before the mind has words for it. That is not a special gift. That is just how a human nervous system works.

But most of us are also walking around with nervous systems that are slightly (or significantly) dysregulated. Primed for threat. Scanning. Vigilant. Looking for what could go wrong before it goes wrong, because at some point in your life, it was very useful for you to do that.

And here is what happens when those two systems are running at the same time.

The signals get staticky.

The voice of your intuition and the voice of your fear start to get jumbled. They both come from inside the body. They both feel urgent. They both want you to do something. So you stop being able to tell them apart and seek answers outside yourself.

The work then becomes learning to tell the two voices apart again. It took me YEARS to do this, and I grew up in a household where we talked about intuition. So I have empathy if you grew up in a household where that was NOT a thing. Here’s the best piece of advice someone once gave me about untangling these two voices:

• Your intuition is quiet. It’s calm, it feels like a tap on the shoulder. It says no without spiraling. It says yes without needing you to justify it.

• Your fear, on the other hand, is loud. It is persuasive. It will give you a PowerPoint of a thousand different scenarios in your head and urge you to get just a little more information before making a choice.

If you have spent decades listening to the loud one, the quiet one starts to feel unreliable. Simply because it just isn’t as convincing. But I promise you, your intuition has been there the whole time. Underneath the noise. Trying to get through to you.

I Turned Down Money to Take a Chance on Myself

Writing this made me think of one of the big leaps I made that led me to where I am now. I used to be a full-time professor and would work all year round, no summers off. I worked in the summer because it was good pay and, newsflash, this country pays teachers a sh*t salary.

But one year, as the spring semester was ending, a friend approached me about working with her on these behavioral health trainings for the United States Military. It wouldn’t pay as much as teaching did, but I’d get to travel all over the world, help better the lives of these brave souls in the military, and see where the road would take us. There wasn’t much guaranteed other than it would be a unique experience that not many would ever get a chance to do.

It was a full body YES! Travel? Teach? Make the world a better place? Uhhh, dream job, sign me up! Then the other voice came in…

“But what about your summer classes? If you give them up, you’ll lose seniority. There’s no guarantee you’ll ever be offered them again. What will you do next summer to pay your bills? And will your wife be okay with you traveling weeks at a time without her? You two have never been apart that long.“

It was a legitimate question, one I had to sit with. I ruminated and ruminated. I worked so hard to be in the place I was now. Was I really willing to give up my seniority for this lower-paying, temporary gig? My nervous system was going wild, and the scarcity mindset gremlins were taking over me.

And then after about a week of just circling all the dark places of my mind, my wife and I sat on the bedroom floor talking about it. She listened to every concern, doubt, and fear that I had.

And then calmly said, “Honey, this is such a unique opportunity. Will the time apart suck? Yes. Will the money be a little tight? Maybe. But I think you’ll regret not going for it. Whatever you decide, I support you. Just know we’ll be okay at home.”

Her loving support almost made it harder…because this meant if I said no, I had no one to blame but me. Luckily, I found the courage to DECLINE the summer classes I had been offered and take the leap into the unknown. It was exciting and terrifying.

But saying YES to that opportunity led to meeting incredible people all over the world, expanding my outlook on what’s possible for my life, and the creation of my business. It was the first time I can recall turning down a “secure job” to take a chance on myself. And I have ZERO regrets. By the way, after that summer, I never taught another summer class again. Not because I wasn’t offered them, but because I got a taste of a different kind of freedom, work/life integration, and never looked back!

The Lack of Self-Trust

I don’t believe self-trust is a feeling. I believe it’s more of a practice. A practice of not overriding your inner voice and becoming comfortable with uncertainty.

It is the daily decision to let that inner whisper actually count as reliable data. To let what your body is telling you be part of the equation. To stop treating your own instincts as a rough draft that needs outside approval before it becomes real.

You already know more than you are acting on. Most of us do. The gap is not knowledge. The gap is permission, your lack of self-trust.

And the tough part is that no one can do this for you. Just like no one can go to the gym for you and get you in shape. Every time you seek permission, certainty, confirmation from an outside source…you take a little bit out of your self-trust bank. Now, I’m not saying DON’T EVER SEEK OUTSIDE counsel. That’s silly! Of course, you need to have a small group (small being the keyword) of people you can turn to when you’re really unable to see something clearly. But you have to practice trusting yourself more. An easy way to do that? Keep the damn promises you keep making to yourself.

• You swore you were going to work out 3 times this week? Better get your a$$ to the gym.

• Promised a friend you’d send them recommendations for their trip? Better make the time.

• That junk in your closet, you said you were going to donate? Better go get a box.

Trust is built in small moments. And the thing about trust is it’s asymmetrical. Takes time to build, but just a moment to break. How can you show up for yourself in small moments each week?

Coming Back to Yourself

The version of you that trusts yourself is not some future, more evolved version. That version is not waiting for you on the other side of more therapy, more clarity, more evidence that you are reliable enough to listen to. That version of you can be found today, if you’d just slow down and take a look. And the timing couldn’t be better to do this work.

We just had a Taurus New Moon over the weekend, and this week Mars moves into Taurus too. Two cosmic events, same message. Slow down. Get grounded. Stop spending your energy on anything that is not actually building the life you want. Build slower. Build from the inside out.

You are worthy of building this life I know you’ve secretly envisioned. You are. So it’s not a matter of how…it’s a matter of when you’re going to finally start trusting yourself enough to build it.

Last Call for In-Person Event This Wednesday!

May 20th, 2026 (Orange, CA)

Join us for an intimate gathering in Old Towne Orange. Maha Abouelenein and I will be hosting a live fireside chat around the theme of REINVENTING YOURSELF.

Think of it as a live podcast, but where YOU get to ask questions, get personalized advice, and hang out with us (and a ton of other cool people) afterwards. If you research Maha, you’ll see that she was the former Head of Global Communications at Google. She has advised Fortune 500 companies, governments, and some of the most recognized brands and individuals in the world.

But that’s not why I’m collaborating with her on this event. Maha has been though some things, ya’ll, some real grief.

She has been a caretaker most of her life. When she was 14 years old her mother was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. And later on in her adult life, her father was diagnosed with ALS. She moved to Egypt with them at 27 years old after building an incredible career in the States.

Maha went to Egypt with no job, no professional network, and no clear plan. She ended up taking an office manager job that she was overqualified for and rebuilt a career that eventually spanned continents. But even that chapter in Egypt ended when her parents passed away, and she moved back to the States during COVID.

More letting go. More grief. More rebuilding.

That’s who’s walking into Social Space in Old Towne Orange on May 20th. Two people who have not had a perfect linear path. Two people have had to reinvent themselves multiple times. Sitting with grief, the uncertainty, and the fear of starting again.

So, if you’re in the middle of your own identity shed right now, if something in you is being asked to release, to expand, to step out onto the ledge, come step into your new era with us.

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