The Gap Between Wanting It and Having It

On identity, entrepreneurship, and why I'm shifting how I show up as a coach.

I want to talk about something that has been building for a while – a shift in how I am showing up as a coach and why.

Not a dramatic pivot, more of a sharpening.

Because, the clearer I’ve gotten about what I believe and who I am here to serve, the more I realize that the work I’ve always done, and the world we are living in right now, are more aligned than ever.

My belief: The future is women.

We are living in a world that is actively calling women into leadership, into community, into their power. And that call cannot be answered from a place of being stuck, small, or disconnected from what you want, or from who you are.

Sound, supportive leadership cannot be sustained on a foundation of survival. You can’t build community and connection with others, while disconnected from yourself.

So my focus, the thread running through everything that I do, is helping women close the gap between the life they want to be living and actually living it. From desire to done.

The gap between wanting it and having it is rarely ever about strategy, it’s about identity.

I know this because I’ve lived it.

My path into entrepreneurship wasn’t graceful, at all. Truth be told: it was a fucking gauntlet. And for a long time I couldn’t figure out why.

I wanted it badly enough, I was working hard enough, I was doing all the things I thought I was ‘supposed’ to do, and yet I kept hitting the same walls, taking the same wrong turns, ending up at the same dead ends.

I was going in circles, one step forward, ten steps back.

What I eventually came to understand (through a lot of uncomfortable experience and reflection) is that the life and the business I was trying to build required a version of me that I had not yet become.

My patterns and programming (shout out to a childhood lack of adults with any emotional intelligence or regulation,) were built for survival, for protection, for a completely different environment:

Hyper-independence. Everything is on me (because Lord knows I couldn’t trust anyone else.) An absolute inability & fear to get things wrong. Those survival patterns kept me alive and functional in the environment I grew up in, but they were in direct opposition to everything entrepreneurship required.

To my nervous system, building a business looked like taking on more when I was already drowning.

It looked like risking everything, when my system only knew how to protect. Each step forward had all my system’s alarms going off, and it would pull me back (or freeze me in my tracks) every time.

I didn’t need better strategy; I needed a new identity. And I had to earn the trust of my own system to get there.

You don’t think your way into a new identity; you build it through the choices you make when everything in you is screaming to go back to what’s familiar.

That process, understanding what’s running underneath the surface, interrupting the patterns that are keeping you stuck, and intentionally building the identity that can hold what you want, that IS the work.

That is what I do with my clients, and it is the foundation of everything I teach.

I have spent years refining this; not just through coaching other women, but through living it myself, and I can tell you that having support through that process, (someone who understands what is happening underneath and can help you navigate it) makes a huge difference.

Not because it makes it easy (it won't,) but because you spend less time on dead ends, you take more turns in the right direction, you don’t have to spend so much time collecting data on what doesn’t work.

That is my mission. To make your journey through this faster and less painful than mine was.

That being said, let’s get one thing clear:

My coaching isn't about helping you put good vibes and gratitude over your pain and discomfort, just to call it “peace.”

I'm not here to tell you to look the other way while the world is burning. I'm here for the raw and real conversation, I am here for every part of who you are, and this work is going to ask a lot of you.

But if you’re here, you already know that surface level shit isn’t cutting it.

And I already know that you’ve done harder shit than this.

With Love & Fire,

Shannon