EP148: Ready Isn't a Feeling. It's a Decision. Here's What That Actually Looks Like

There's a version of you who already knows exactly what she wants to do next.

She's not waiting for the conditions to be perfect nor waiting for the fear to disappear. She's not waiting for a sign either. 

She's just waiting for you to stop asking the wrong part of yourself for bloody permission.

This week I'm getting personal, because I think this is one of the most important things I'll say on this podcast. Readiness isn't a feeling. It's a decision. And until you understand the difference, you'll keep waiting for something that was never coming.

I talk about:

• Why the survival self will never give you the green light, and what to do instead
• What the moment of knowing actually felt like, and why I still argued with it for months
• How I built this business through chronic illness and why "I'll do it when things settle down" is the most expensive sentence you'll ever say to yourself
• Why the leap isn't the reinvention. It's the evidence of one that's already been happening underneath
• What Be Her Now actually means when nothing about the conditions feels right

This isn't the highlight reel version. It's the real one.

If it hits something for you, share it with the woman you think needs to hear it today. And if you're ready to do this work properly at identity level, drop me QUEEN in my DMs on Instagram or email sarah@thequeenofreinvention.com

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Transcript

Sarah Elizabeth  00:02

You know, what this week we're going a little bit deep, because I left a high-status job that was pretty secure and had a pretty good salary attached, and I left it without a job to go to, and I want to say that again, because I think we need to sit with it for a sec without a job to go to. This role was an accumulation of all my years of knowledge and experience and skills in social work, I'm talking a professional identity so fucking solid it had its own bloody gravity, and I walked away from it with no backup plan. The business was definitely not making equivalent money by any means. Nothing was lined up perfectly. There was no neon pink sign from the universe that says, "Your time is now, babes. None of that, nada, none of it. Yes, do I walked away, and I did that because my designed self was ready, even though arguably I absolutely categorically was not so today, that's what we're talking about, about what it actually looks like to reinvent in real time, not the highlight reel version that you see on the gramme, the real one, the one with the Crohn's disease fucking flare-ups and the debt and the times of being awake at two in the fucking morning, where you think, what the actual fuckery fuck have I done? Because I think you, you gorgeous listener, I think you're waiting to feel ready, and this episode is basically gonna show you, tell you that ready ain't coming. So, welcome to the Reinvention Era Podcast. I'm Sarah Elizabeth, Queen of Reinvention, and this episode, this this one's personal, so let me paint you a picture of what my life looked like from the outside, maybe three years ago, two, three years ago on paper, impressive as quite honestly, very senior role in safeguarding child protection, kind of job where you walk into a room and people take you fucking seriously immediately, like straight away, partly because the weight of the work is almost visible on you, and also the type of job where your title speaks for itself. Right, I'd spent two decades in social work, which means I'd spent two decades witnessing, observing, seeing what happens when people survive shit that really should have broken them, and I was good at it. I was really good at it. I was good at it, and I made real changes and real impact at a society level and at a personal level. I had a decent car, I had a gorgeous house. Well I've still got this kind of gorgeous house, but you know what I mean. Decent wardrobe of clothes with various mulberry handbags to compliment, you know, I've got this, Chanel watch that, that's a whole other story of the ex-husband shenanigans, you know. On paper, it looked freaking good. I had the salary that most people would look at and think, "She is fucking sorted isn't she? I had all of these external markers that people, society consider success, right? Those society metrics, and because two things can be true at once, I had all of that, and I was absolutely falling apart inside, and it wasn't, it wasn't dramatic, it wasn't obvious. It was in that very specific way that high-performing women have this tendency to fall apart in a way that is silent and competent, and usually while still doing all the fucking things, and answering all the emails, and meeting every fucking single deadline is that kind of way, you know. On the outside, you're functioning inside. I had the Crohn's disease, which I'd had for years by this point, that had become something that. I managed around, I suppose, not even managed, but around that. That's the point. Like, there's a difference. Managing it properly would have meant resting when I needed to rest. It would have meant eating what my body needed. It would have been saying no to the evening commitments that left me fucked for two days afterwards. That's what managing it properly would have looked like. I managed around it, which meant that I pushed through, you know, showing up and acting just fine.

Sarah Elizabeth  05:37

Fine, I'm fine, everything's fine, everything's fine, doing what every fucker expected of me, and then getting home and just lying there at 10 o'clock at night, wondering if this was just it, if this was what the rest of my fucking life was gonna look like, quite frankly, I had built this survival identity that was so damn sophisticated that I'd started to mistake it for my actual personality. I thought that's who I was. Do you know that feeling when you've been so fucking capable for so long that you actually can't tell the difference anymore between who you genuinely are, what you genuinely want, and what you've just trained yourself to accept, like where your tolerance for discomfort is so high that you don't even see it as discomfort anymore, you don't recognise it as discomfort, it just feels like any other day, you're so used to it, you've normalised it, you've normalised it, I definitely normalised it. and that my love is the survival self, that's the survival self, that's her operating in her full capacity, and the survival self's brilliant, by the way, freaking amazing, actually, that version of me, my survival self, she kept me alive through some genuinely hard shit, like losing both parents, infidelity, domestic abuse, divorce at 40, losing everything, leaving me with fuck all, building a business with a chronic illness, like for all of us, right, for all of us, we go through shit, and our survival self is resourceful as hell, right? She's clever, she's, she's clever because she's protecting us, right? And she absolutely does not give a damn toss about your dreams. All she cares about, she cares about one thing, and one thing only, and that is to keep you safe, and to her, to the survival self, safe looks like familiar, even when that familiarity is slowly killing you and making you so damn miserable, so there I was back then with this picture perfect life on the outside. I was building Queen of Reinvention on the side. Well, actually, it was still focused on divorce then, but working on the business in the evenings, on weekends, in the margins of a job that was already fucking taking everything I had, right, and every month I'd look at the bank account, look at the business revenue, and looked at the gap between the two, and tell myself I'm not ready yet, not ready, not yet. There's, there's too much of a gap. I'm not ready, I'm not ready. Maybe when the business is making, you know, bit more money, x amount of money, maybe when I've got six months of savings, maybe when things just settle down a bit, and you know what, the thing about when things settle down a bit is that they don't never fucking do, because your nervous system will always find something to be unsettled about. If staying unsettled means that you don't have to take that leap, you don't have to make that jump, but we think we have to be ready for something, and and we need to talk about this readiness for a hot minute, because I think we've really, as a culture, got this really completely and utterly wrong, because we talk about readiness like it's a destination, don't we, like there's this one single. Point at which all the conditions align, and the fear disappears, and the money's sorted, and the time is perfect, and you just, you know, you just feel it. The no, the green light flashes off, you go. Not how this works. Readiness is not a feeling, it's a decision, and the decision doesn't happen when the conditions are perfect.

Sarah Elizabeth  10:33

It happens when you decide that the cost of staying is higher than the cost of going when it's more uncomfortable to stay comfortable than it is to get really fucking uncomfortable, and the thing that you need to know about that decision, that decision, go or not, your survival self will never make it. She will never make that decision. She can't. She is literally designed to not make it. Her entire operating system is built around avoiding risk, keeping the status quo, keeping you in the lane that you know, keep staying your lane, but stay in your lane. She will always find a reason to wait, always. She's actually really freaking good at it. So, if you're sitting there thinking, but I'll know when I'm ready, I'll know when I'm ready. I need you to hear me when I say you're waiting for permission from the wrong fucking part of yourself, the part of you that is ready, that's your designed self, your auto queen, who is built and created consciously from your sovereign self, the version of you that exists underneath all of that conditioning, all of those masks, all the survival strategies, all the roles that you've been fucking performing for 20 years or more, that design self, she's not waiting, she's been waiting, she's just waiting for you to stop asking the survival self for sign, or sign your sign, I spent a long time in social work watching identity, right, and that sounds a bit abstract, but it isn't. It's actually the most practical thing in the world, right, because when you work with people in crisis in former, you see really quickly that the ones who transform aren't the ones who waited until they felt ready, they're the ones who took one step in a different direction whilst they were still fucking terrified, and that step created the reality, not the other way around, and I knew this professionally for years before I actually applied it to my own bloody life, which is when I think about it now almost quite funny, almost do as I say not so doing all that. It's almost easier to see others rather than yourself, right? Yeah, so what did it look like when I actually did finally make the decision to leave? It wasn't all glamorous, it wasn't, you know, there was no moment of sudden clarity once I stood at the window of my office with my silk blouse billowing in the breeze, looking out to the horizon, and this is it. I'm ready. Fucking none of that. It was more like it was more like an accumulation of, I don't know, sitting in a meeting. I can't even tell you what meeting was about, any meeting, because they're usually about a meeting, about a fucking meeting. That's how present I was in my own life at that point, but I just had this collection of thoughts, really quietly, I suppose, not loud, and I think that's when you kind of know when you've got this persistent quiet thought, this feeling that's so clear, it's so clear, almost like a message that had been queuing to come through for months, had finally found a signal, and all I felt was this isn't my life anymore. This is not my life anymore, and, like, I say, it wasn't dramatic, it wasn't an epiphany, it wasn't this whole breakdown, it was just this knowing, this increasing knowing the kind you really try and argue with, because the knowing is really incredible. Ringing, and it's expensive, and quite frankly, it's fucking terrifying. So, you just argue with it. You can't. I'm not ready. I'm not ready. I'm not ready. I'm not ready. I'm waiting for.. so I argued with it for another few months. If I'm on it, it's more than I should have done. It definitely more than I should have done. I did fucking spreadsheets on it. I did pros and cons lists. I had conversations with people who loved me and were probably pretty fucking understandably alarmed at my plans, my thoughts. I spoke with business mentors, I spoke with a therapist. I adjourned on it to within an inch of its fucking life. I did all the things that a woman who is very, very good at thinking what she does when she wants to avoid the things she already knows she's gonna have to do. You know it, right? We go round, man, man, man, you already know what you got to do.

Sarah Elizabeth  15:57

The decisions already been made, it just hadn't been made by my head, it had been made by a part of me that had spent years watching this survival self on the show, and had very, very patiently been sitting, waiting, building for this, you know, and then one day, just before Christmas last year, I handed in my notice, and like I say, my financially I wasn't ready. Emotionally, I don't think I was ready. Practically, I wasn't ready. I still was waiting for surgery for this fucking arm, like nothing was right about it, but I handed in my notice just before Christmas. I didn't tell anyone in the team until after Christmas, but yeah, I handed in my notice, and the moment I did it, the moment I made that verbalised it, my body body, I swear to you, it was just.. it was like a release. It was a relief, right? This kind of exhale, like every single cell in my body was going.. oh, thank God. Thank God, she's finally seen us. I mean, the fear arrived about half an hour later, you know. Final schedule, totally normal, but you know, I had that, that, that small window of relief, but then then is when the actual real reinvention started, not the concept of reinvention, that's when the actual messy, fucking inconvenient identity level work started to become someone that I've only ever been in private. I had to learn that I had to reinvent that, and you know what, I think that's what we need to talk about. You know what reinvention actually bloody looks like, because the version that gets shared on social media is, let's be honest, curated and maybe the curated version does a whole disservice to every woman who's in the middle of it, wondering why hers doesn't fucking look like that, because real reinvention is not linear, it's got days where everything clicks and you feel like her, your design self, your altar queen, she's fully activated, she's there, she's certain, she's grounded, she's clear, she's, she knows exactly what is what, and then you got that, is where you're lying on the sofa with Crohn's fucking nightmare and a dodgy broken arm and infections and surgeries and several overdue emails in your inbox and you just think, oh my fucking good god, and you just, you're there going, have I just made the most catastrophically expensive mistake of my adult fucking life, Both of those are reinvention, by the way, the yes, yes, yes, we're on, we're on, we know where we're going, and all of them are done, they're both reinvention, the high days and the floor days, because reinvention isn't just this one off thing, when you're ready, it's not like a vibe, it's a practice, it's a practice, and it's a process that happens at the level of your identity, not the circumstances around you, and what I mean by that is that you can change your job, your house, your. Relationship, your hair, your postcode, all of it, and because two things can be true at once, you can also still be running the same old identity underneath it all. The survival self does not care what the fucking scenery looks like. She'll operate the same way in your new life as you did in the old one. The only thing that changes the patterns is changing the identity that's driving them. That's what the edit code is. That's what the Queen Edit does. It's not a motivation programme, it's not a mindset reset, it's an identity level reinvention, and it works in the way that identity change works, which is layered, and it's sometimes really shitty and really uncomfortable, and occasionally it can be bloody breathtaking, but it's always, always worth it. Do you know what the E in edit code stands for? Energy Rehab, and when I left that job, I needed a complete fucking total energy recalibration. I had been operating in complete depletion for so long, I had completely normalised it.

Sarah Elizabeth  21:20

I didn't know what it felt like to have capacity to make decisions from a full tank to move through my day without rationing myself in some way, and that's the thing about the survival self, and this chronic high performance, you become so damn efficient at running on empty that you actually forget you're supposed to have fuel, it's like you're running the car permanently on the red and only fill up the tiniest little bit when you absolutely have to, and then when you finally stop pushing and you let yourself rest, you forget about it, and then actually you know what, fuck me, that question's real, and that's what it feels like, that that energy, that that crash is real. The grief is real, actually, because you have to grieve the version of yourself who held all that together at a cost that was never really acknowledged. You never acknowledged it. I never acknowledged it. I had to grieve her, and I'm not ashamed to say that, because she was fucking amazing, and she was not who I was choosing to be anymore. And also, I think you know, I've mentioned Crohns a couple of times. I do want to talk about the Crohns piece, actually, specifically, because I think there's something important here for every woman who has some kind of health condition, a kind of illness, a body that doesn't always cooperate with her ambitions, you know, like me having ear of issues breaking my arm just after business pivot, it's so damn inconvenient, let me tell you, but on the cones, the old narrative, the old identity, the survival self told herself something like, you know, invest in yourself when you're healthy, build the business when the flares are more under control, when, when everything's, you know, a bit calmer, go for the thing, when the you have more convenient energy, it's not convenient, you know. And what that narrative was actually doing was giving that survival self, that identity, a really legitimate sounding reason to keep me exactly where I was, because chronically honest is real. Crohn's is real, the fatigue, the pain, the days where I genuinely can't leave the fucking house, they're real, they're real, and they're also not the reason to wait, because if I had waited for perfect health to build the Queen of Reinvention, I'd still be waiting, and the woman who needs this work would still be waiting, and I would still be in a job that was taking far more from me than it was giving, running on fumes, calling that shit resilience. What the fuck is that? Like, it's a fucking positive thing. Resilience, fuck that. And you know what I've learned, and this is the sovereign energy management piece, the designed self doesn't need the perfect conditions, she just needs the right conditions, and right conditions are something that you create, they're not something you wait for, they're not going to suddenly appear, you've got to create them, and part of that means understanding that your energy is currency, knowing how much you have, what spends it, what restores it, what you need to save, make decisions accordingly, not ignoring the body, fucking listening to it, I've ignored it for so long. But listen to it and don't let it become the ceiling either, because there's a difference. I built this business with Crohn's disease with a year long broken arm. I write the content, I run the sessions, I host the podcast, I develop the programme, I do the IP, I and I do all of it in and around a body that is genuinely some fucking awful days, and that isn't because I'm superhuman, it's not because I'm resilient, it's because I stopped waiting for my health to align with the stars before I allow myself to build the life I wanted. That's the altar queen, that's the designed self. She moves first, and the conditions arrange, rearrange themselves around her. Something I also want to name explicitly, because I think it's important. This leap I made, leaving the job, that wasn't the reinvention. The leap was really the evidence of a reinvention that has already been happening underneath the surface, because your identity always comes first. The action is like an expression of it, not the other way round.

Sarah Elizabeth  26:17

When women come to me and say I want to change my career, or I want to start a business, or I want to get out of this relationship, or I want to finally feel like myself again. Whatever it is, the first thing we're looking at isn't the goal, it's the identity she's operating from, because if she goes after the goal from inside the survival self, she will either self-sabotage before she gets there, or she'll get there and feel nothing, because the thing was never the thing, the thing she actually wants to feel is like her, like a sovereign self. And I spent years in that pattern, chasing the salary, the status, the profession, the external markers that said that I was doing all right, and that I was enough, that the chaos of my earlier life hadn't defined me, and every time I got the thing I thought would fix it, there was a moment of, oh, oh, right, still me, still this, still the same low hum of this ain't my deep inherited self, my inherited self absorbed this script that achievement equals worth, so the survival self execute that script brilliantly, but neither of them could give me what I actually wanted, which was to feel like myself fully without any fucking apology, and that's what the decode phrase of the Queen Edit does, it shows you your script, not to blame anyone who wrote it, not to dwell in it, but just to see it clearly, so you can decide consciously, intentionally what you're keeping and what you're not, and then the recode phase, which is where you design the designed self, where you say, okay, if I were not shaped by conditioning and survival strategies and other people's expectations of who I should god be, then who am I? Who am I? What do I actually want? What does my own altar queen look like? And that process is not airy fairy, it's not woo, it's the most practical work you will ever fucking do, because every decision you make after that design happens from a different place and different decisions compound over time into a completely different life, and so I want to come back to this readiness thing, because I think we need to put it to bed properly. Readiness, the way most people think about it, is this feeling of certainty of safety of knowing it's going to work before you start, and I understand why survival self desperately wants it. She wants a guarantee before she'll move, right, but the guarantee is on the other side of the action, not before it. Self trust, real self trust is not believing you'll never fail, but it's knowing that you can handle whatever happens. It's built in those times where you take a step, however small, without a guarantee, and you find out you're still standing. You're still fucking standing. You didn't fall down, so then you take another step, and another, and slowly that evidence accumulates that you are someone who keeps their word to themselves, who moves forward towards her own life, even when it's inconvenient, even when it's so fucking hard, even when it's shit, you're someone who shows up. For the design self, even on the days that the survival sculpt is screaming at you, that's be her now, that's the third phase of the queen edit, and it's also the most radical instruction I can give anyone, be her now, not when you're ready, not when the conditions are right, not when you get signed, not when you've done enough work to deserve it now in this moment in the decision that you make in the next five minutes, next 10 minutes now, because the identity comes first, the evidence follows.

Sarah Elizabeth  30:33

I wasn't ready to leave the job, I was not ready financially, I was not ready in terms of the business, I was not ready to manage uncertainty, I was definitely not ready with my health, and I was not ready to sit with the discomfort of building something from scratch, while my entire nervous system was screaming at me to go back to the familiar, but the designed self was ready. She'd been ready for years. I just finally got out of her way. So, if you're listening to this, and you're in the middle of your own waiting room, I see you. I know what that room looks like. I know the particular quality of the silence in there, the way you've decorated it to make the wait feel more comfortable. The career that looks fine from the outside, the life that's not that bad, not bad, just quite yours. That moment that you catch yourself in the mirror and think, ah, now she's in there. I just don't know how to get her. That's that's all in that room. And you know what, she's not far, she's not far, she's not behind some picture perfect version of readiness on the other side of a plan. She's underneath all of that conditioning, she's underneath the survival strategies, the masks, the roles that you've been playing, the scripts you've been running since before you had any say in the matter, you had no say in this. Reinvention is about taking all these masks off and designing and activating the identity who leads the next chapter. It's not creating someone new, it's just returning to you, and that work starts with one decision, and it's not a huge, terrifying leap off the cliff with no parachute decision, it's just one decision that the design self makes instead of the survival self, one moment where you choose your inner queen over comfort, and if you're ready to do that work properly at the identity level, where the process actually addresses these layers where change happens. The queen edit is my private three month container for exactly this, it's the edit coding practice, it's the decode, recode, be her. Now it's all that work done with you, not at you, it's with you. It's personalised. It's the most significant investment in identity work I offer, because the women who've been through it will tell you there's nothing quite like it. If you want to know more about it, just drop me the word Queen in my DMs on Instagram, or drop me an email, Sarah at The Queen of reinvention.com I'll send you all the details, and if you're not there yet, that's okay as well. Just keep listening, keep showing up your designed self. She's already here, she's just waiting for you to stop waiting, so that's all for me. I'll be back next week with more from the Reinvention Era. If this episode hits something for you, share it with the woman you think needs to hear it today, because that's how we do it. We don't keep this to ourselves, we share, we grow together, we have each other's backs, because we're all in this. We all have an inherited self, we all have a survival self, and we've all got a suffering self. So, let's fucking shine as our beautiful inner quaint. So, until next week, when I'll be back in your beauts, badass earbuds, I am sending you so much love. Bye