I’m three times divorced, and I honestly believe it’s because I settled every time, but each time in a different way.

I’m not ashamed of this fact. I’ve actually come to be grateful, because the wild ride of life experiences I had because of those marriages have given me valuable things to share with others.

But I wanted to share one of the biggest things I’ve learned from the last 20 years: not getting specific enough about what I truly, deeply wanted kept it from arriving.

I feared I’d be handcuffing the universe, making its job so hard it would take exponentially longer, nearing on impossible, to deliver anything at all.

20 Years of Good Enough

I never got too specific in my dating process. I made a lot of allowances and concessions.

“The biggest mistake,” I told myself “would be getting too specific. You’re liable to end up alone.”

I thought getting attached to the “cursed hows” was how you blocked the thing you wanted from arriving.

So I didn’t put too many parameters on the partners the Universe sent my way.

And when the proposals came, I said yes three times, when my entire being was internally screaming, NO!

So when my third marriage finally ended in January 2026, I told everyone the same thing: I was done.

Not taking a break. Done.

I reasoned that I had bad luck, was hard to live with, and deep down felt it would be unfair to put my family through another tumultuous round of “Eryn’s Bad Dating Luck” again.

The Cruise that Remapped the Destination

In December of 2025, I was cruising for the holiday with my parents. And there’s a rhythm and routine when I travel with them.

So imagine my surprise when going to the bar for a glass of ice for my mom resulted in making a friend.

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I absolutely see value in putting in some focused effort in the summertime. For me, I’ve got longer days, good vibes, and plenty of pool time, so I can balance it with some focused activity.

Whether you’re hearing summer sprint or summer marathon language, the message is: push through, stay consistent, and keep the pace.

The underlying sentiment is the same: achieving your goals is an athletic event, and you’d better lace up.

But just walking outside on this 92º hot and humid Florida summer day, the last thing I want to do is run anything. The thought of it genuinely exhausts me.

What I would do, however, is go to the beach.

And it turns out, going to the beach is actually a better framework for manifesting your goals. What you’re responsible for, what you’re not, and exactly how those two things work together.

Most frameworks give you pieces. Mindset over here. Action plan over there. What’s rarely handed to you is the complete process, the full 360º of how this actually works.

So I decided to lay out the steps of manifesting in a way that finally makes the whole picture make sense to me (and hopefully you).

So I want you to picture this for a moment.

You’re at the beach, standing on the shoreline with the waves gently touching your toes. Stand there for just a moment. Don’t move.

As the waves go in and out, can you feel the sand shifting under your feet?

You didn’t do anything to cause the grains of sand to shift, and yet they do.

The ocean is doing something you cannot control and would never think to try. Understanding this concept of the inevitability of the sand moving, is key to manifesting. So let’s get started.

Step 1: Prepare For Your Beach Walk

Before you hit the sand, you need your sunscreen.

Sunscreen is your mindset. It’s the protection you put on before you ever touch the water.

And just like the real thing, nobody else’s sunscreen does you any good. Your friend can be fully covered and completely protected, and you will still burn. This one is yours to apply.

There are two things that go into this particular bottle of SPF.

The first is keeping your eyes on your own paper. This is your beach walk. Your goals, your timeline, your actions.

But here’s the thing.

Eyes on your own paper goes deeper than just not comparing yourself to other people.

It’s about where your energy is going, full stop. Energy flows where attention goes. What you focus on grows.

Here’s the image I want you to sit with for a second. Think about two different people arriving at the beach for a walk on the same day.

The first person has a wagon. And in that wagon is a pop-up tent, two folding chairs, a beach blanket, a cooler of drinks and snacks, three books (because they couldn’t decide), and approximately seventeen other things they thought they might need.

Dragging that wagon through the sand is exhausting. Setting it all up takes another twenty minutes. By the time they’re actually at the beach and set up for their day, they’re already tired.

The second person has a great insulated water bottle, a sun hat, their sunglasses, and their beach bag. They are ready to walk. They’ve got full energy.

That second person is who we’re trying to be.

This is your invitation to look honestly at everything in your wagon (business). The activities that haven’t been working. The platforms that drain you. The strategies you’ve been hauling around out of obligation or guilt or because someone told you that you couldn’t afford not to.

You don’t have to throw any of it away. It still exists. You’re just not bringing it to the beach.

If you are spending your energy on the algorithm not showing your posts to enough people, on what everyone else in your industry is doing, on the flood of marketing telling you that you need to be doing something more, different, or less, then you are focusing on things you cannot control.

That’s like trying to control the waves at the beach. The waves are completely oblivious to your attempts. You are spending real energy on something that is simply not possible to control.

So let this be an invitation for you to “unsubscribe.” From the newsletters, the accounts, the voices that are consistently pulling your attention away from your own shoreline.

Maybe not forever. Just for now.

Guard your attention like it’s more valuable than gold. Because it has the power to create everything you want in your life.

Gratitude Is Your SPF 50

The second thing that makes your sunscreen effective is gratitude.

Not a list you write one day and then forgo the practice. Active, daily gratitude.

It’s impossible to hold gratitude and anxiety simultaneously. And it’s actually extreme gratitude that has changed my life.

So I’ve begun to practice gratitude for everything.

When things go right, I’m grateful.

And when things don’t go my way, hallelujah anyway. (Justin Bieber has a song called Everything Hallelujah, and I absolutely made it the soundtrack to my practice.)

There will be cloudy days at the beach. It might even rain. But I acknowledge the challenges, feel my feels, and stay grateful.

That is my practice. And it’s what keeps me in the kind of awareness that this whole framework depends on.

I invite you to give it a try.

So now we have our SPF. We’ve got our attention and our gratitude aligned. Next, we need to talk about your beach bag.

Step 2: Grab Your Beach Bag

Your beach bag is your container. It’s the structure that holds everything you’re bringing to the beach with you.

Your beach bag is your goal. The overarching intention. The timeframe you’re working within.

Maybe that’s a quarter. Maybe it’s the last stretch of the year. Maybe it’s a specific date that matters: a program launch, a revenue target, a decision you need to make by a certain point.

Whatever it is, you need a container for it. A beginning and an end. Not because everything will necessarily happen within that window, but because you need a point on the horizon to walk toward.

My partner Al learned this the hard way. He was walking the shoreline in Hawaii, from Waikiki Beach toward Diamond Head. It didn’t look that far. It didn’t feel that hot. So he just kept walking. And kept walking. And never stopped to reapply his SPF.

He came back absolutely horrifically sunburned.

The point on the horizon gave him something to walk toward. What it also gave him – and what he missed – was a built-in reason to stop, check in, and reapply.

That’s what your timeframe does. It’s not a deadline in the punishing sense. It’s a checkpoint. A moment to assess what’s working, what needs adjusting, and yes, a reminder to put on more sunscreen.

Pick your point on the horizon. Name your goal. Set your timeframe. Write it down. That is your beach bag. Now let’s talk about what’s going in it.

Step 3: Action Bottles & Ocean Bottles

Bottles are what fill your beach bag. And they represent that actions you’ll take and the things you’re going to ask for as you take your beach walk.

Now remember, this is a metaphor. You’re not actually going to pollute the ocean.

But we need a visual that connects you to what you’re actually doing in order to manifest your goal.

Think of them exactly like a message in a bottle. You write what you need or want, you pop a cork in it, and you throw it out into the waves.

The ocean receives it. And the ocean gets to work.

But here’s what makes this framework different from anything you’ve visualized with before. There are two completely different kinds of bottles, and they require two completely different relationships from you.

The first kind are your action bottles.

These are the things within your control. The actions you are willing to take to reach your goal. The work that is yours to do.

You write the message, you seal the bottle, and you throw it out. That’s the concept of “doing the thing.”

You make the call. Send the email. Show up. These bottles are within your ability to act upon.

Ideally, the actions you’re willing to do are aligned with how you are actually wired to take action. Not the actions that look right on paper or the ones that work for someone else.

The ones that work for you, given how you’re built, how you think, and how you move through the world. If you’re not sure how to determine if something is aligned, that’s how I can help you.

The second kind are your ocean bottles.

These are the asks. The things that would be absolutely extraordinary if they happened, and that you could not make happen on your own no matter how hard you tried.

Timely referrals.

The right person crossing your path at exactly the right moment.

A conversation that opens a door you didn’t even know existed. Synchronicity, Serendipity, and Magic.

The kind of thing that makes you stop and go, “How did that even happen?”

You write those message and seal those bottles. Those messages will be the ocean’s job to act on.

Step 4: It’s time for our Beach Walk

This is where everything comes together. You’ve got your sunscreen on. You’ve packed your beach bag. Your bottles are ready. Now you have to actually go to the beach and walk the shoreline.

Walking the shoreline is being in motion. Not frantic motion. Not exhausting, hauling-everything-you-own-across-hot-sand motion. Just walking. Present, intentional, moving forward.

Your job on this beach walk is to walk the shoreline and throw your bottles into the ocean. In other words, TAKE ACTION. On every single one of your bottles. That’s your only job.

If you said you’d post on LinkedIn three times a week, post.

If you said you’d send 3 emails per week to prospects, send them.

No matter what activities or actions you determined you were willing to do, get into motion.

Now the ocean is going to get to work on your asks, too. The ocean bottles are beyond your control, but you can trust that they are in motion for you.

But here’s the magical part. Your actions are not just yours. They are ocean-assisted. Every single one of them.

Because what I need you to understand: the ocean doesn’t know which kind of bottle you threw in. It receives your action bottles the same way it receives ocean bottles. and it goes to work on them too.

Your ocean bottles aren’t separate from your action bottles. They’re being amplified. Every bottle you throw into the ocean is getting unseen assistance even though you didn’t ask for it.

The two types of bottles work together.

Go back to that visual of you standing on the shoreline. The waves go in and out. You can’t control them, but you can trust that it will happen. Now picture your bottles in the ocean. They WILL come back to you. It’s inevitable.

The incredibly refreshing things about this metaphor is that it shows you that your entire life is ocean-assisted. You can trust that the tide will come back in.

Step 5: Stay Aware as You Walk

This is where most people stop paying attention. Don’t.

Walking the shoreline and throwing out your bottles is only half of this. The other half is noticing when they come back.

The ocean returns things. It always does. But if you’re not in a state of awareness, you will walk right past the very thing you asked for and never recognize it as an answer.

This is why the gratitude practice from your sunscreen isn’t just a mindset exercise. It’s training your eye. Every day you practice noticing what’s working, what’s arriving, what’s shifting, you get better at recognizing a returning bottle when it shows up. The email that comes out of nowhere. The conversation that opens a door. The referral that arrives on a random Tuesday. There it is. That’s your bottle.

Now, I can already hear some of you. “But Eryn, I’ve heard stories about messages in bottles washing up on beaches in completely different countries. What if my bottle ends up in Australia?”

I get it, but for the purposes of this framework, we are assuming your bottles are coming back to you.

And here’s the thing: those stories of bottles crossing oceans? They actually prove the point. Those bottles didn’t disappear. They were still out there, moving, making their way to the shore. It just took longer than expected.

If your bottle hasn’t returned yet, it doesn’t mean it’s gone. It means it’s still in the ocean. Keep walking your shoreline.

When a bottle does return, you acknowledge it. You track it. You say, out loud or on paper, “That came back to me.”

Even on the days when what came back wasn’t quite what you expected, or when the sky is cloudy and nothing seems to be moving. Keep walking and throwing out bottles (taking action). The ocean is still working.

Here’s something else worth saying directly: you don’t have to walk this beach alone. A solitary walk is completely valid. But if you can find a coach, a mentor, or a community of people who are also throwing bottles and tracking returns, the harder actions become easier.

The uncomfortable bottles are less scary to throw when someone is walking next to you. If you’re inside a container or a community where this kind of work is happening together, use it. And if you’re not, consider finding one. You were not meant to do all of this by yourself.

Now, about adjusting. This is where I want you to pay close attention, because this is the place where most people go wrong.

You are going to develop such a heightened state of awareness from this practice that you will start to read the weather before the storm arrives. You’ll feel the shift in the air. You’ll notice the signals that something isn’t quite landing the way you hoped. That’s not failure. That’s information.

But – and this is important – one cloudy day is not a weather pattern. One week of a strategy not working is not a signal to throw the whole thing out and start over.

But that’s what we do. And it is the reason so many of us never get to see what’s actually possible.

If you’ve been sending LinkedIn connection requests with a written message and the acceptance rate feels low, you don’t abandon the strategy. You tweak the approach.

Maybe this week you try sending the request without a message at all. Same action, small adjustment, different experiment. You keep walking the shoreline and you stay curious as you throw out your bottles.

Read the weather. Make smart tweaks. But keep walking.

You already know how to do this.

You have been to the beach before. You know what it feels like to walk a shoreline. You know the way the sand shifts under your feet without you doing anything to cause it. You know the way the ocean moves completely independently of whatever is happening in your life, your business, or your head.

You have always known, on some level, that there is something out there bigger than what you can control. You just didn’t have a framework for working with it.

So here’s my question for you: does this metaphor land for you? I’d love to hear how you’re thinking about your own beach walk. Drop it in the comments.

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It’s true. It’s not that I don’t love the beach, but it’s a foregone conclusion that more than a few minutes spent waveside is a recipe for a sunburn.

That doesn’t stop me from thinking about the beach in a poetic, sitting-on-the-shore-with-a-glass-of-wine kind of way.

But my beach musings yesterday seeded a different idea, a very specific, this-is-actually-how-co-creation-works kind of story.

I’ve never heard manifesting and co-creating with the Universe told in this way, so I have to share.

The Goal (And What My Brain Did With It)

On May 31st, I started thinking about setting a summer goal. I wanted to commit to achieving something really significant. I’ve got plenty of time and space to do the work, so I figured why not go big.

My first idea, “book $100k in revenue this summer.”

I’ve done this before in my business. I know that I can. Essentially, I feel certain that I can hit that goal.

But it didn’t excite me.

And because I’m all about playing with energy, I kept digging.

Next came the thought, “but what if I bank it? Cash in my account. By August 31st?”

There’s a difference, and my body felt it immediately.

The first was a “spreadsheet goal.” Doable. Practical.

But the other felt like an exciting challenge. I’ve never done it before.

And if I actually achieved it, the impact would be REAL.

It might actually change the shape of my life, clean up some divorce-induced messes, and prove something I’ve been trying to prove to myself for a while now.

My body said yes to the goal of banking the cash before my mind could object.

But my mind caught up quickly.

The first thing I did was open a calculator, curious.

If I sold my signature Flowprint offer, a $197 assessment that helps female founders, entrepreneurs, and solopreneurs understand their unique decision making blueprint, how many would I need to sell to hit $100,000?

I want you to sit with that number for a second, because I did.

508 individual transactions.

In 90 days.

It felt instantly impossible.

I felt the familiar burden of revenue generation settle in and heard my internal voice utter the chorus.

“Here we go. Guess I’m carrying this one alone.”

Which, as I would come to understand over the next 48 hours, was exactly the problem.

The More Powerful Question

I’ve been an entrepreneur for over a decade.

I build businesses by design, literally, using tools like Human Design and Kolbe to help women understand how they’re actually wired, so they can build and grow their business more easily in concert with their wiring, instead of fighting themselves.

I know a lot about alignment. I teach it. And I live it. Most days.

So instead of laughing at the absurdity of the 508 Flowprints math, I asked a more powerful question.

Over the many years of doing this work, I’ve realized that when the math crushes me, it usually means I’m asking the wrong question.

My mentor Kelly Ruta talks about the power of asking a more powerful question.

Here’s what surfaced:

“What if I could find just ONE client who would pay me $100,000 this summer?”

Next, I started looking for evidence that this was even possible. Not from the internet. From my own life.

It’s what I always do next when my brain is searching for what’s possible.

I’d worked inside of $100k contracts at that level before. Writing Kolbe-infused job descriptions for growing teams. Coaching entrepreneurs on sales, marketing, and funnels. Up-leveling leadership, restructuring teams, putting the right people in the right seats inside companies already doing serious revenue.

The evidence was there.

And I knew that I could deliver that tier of value again if the correct project came along.

Always In Conversation

Here’s what I’ve come to understand about myself: I am always in conversation with the Universe.

Not formally. Not with a candle lit and a journal open and an intention set.

Just constantly, in the background of my daily life, asking, noticing, moving through the world in a state of ongoing co-creation. It’s like breathing for me.

I didn’t write the Universe a love letter that afternoon. I just asked a powerful question, almost under my breath, and then let it sit, and went about my evening.

What I wasn’t conscious of in that moment, was because I’d asked, the Universe had already started moving and rearranging to answer my question.

Because that’s the thing about being in constant conversation.

I don’t always remember that my questions are being constantly worked on by the Universe.

The responses aren’t instant. I can’t see the progress bar. So I just ask, trust, and stay in motion.

Or at least, that’s what I’m supposed to do.

The gap I’m discovering, the one jury duty cracked open on day two of this experiment, isn’t between asking and believing.

I ask. I genuinely ask.

The gap is between asking and genuinely believing and trusting that I’m going to receive.

The Ocean (What Co-Creation Actually Looks Like)

Here’s what I’ve been sitting with since my jury duty realization.

Imagine you’re at the beach, standing on the shoreline where the waves meet your toes. The waves are coming in and going out in rhythm.

And even though you’re not thinking about it, every single wave is moving the sand beneath your feet. Shifting it. Rearranging it.

Doing something you could never do yourself, grain by grain, particle by particle, with a force and intelligence that has nothing to do with your effort.

You don’t control the waves. You couldn’t if you tried.

But you’re not passive either. You’re standing there present. You’re in relationship with something larger than yourself, and you’re asking.

That continuous co-creation relationship with the Universe is doing real work on your behalf, whether you’re paying attention or not.

Now imagine you’re carrying an oversized, super cute beach bag with flamingos on it.

And in that beach bag are dozens of glass bottles.

In every bottle is a message you’ve written: an ask, an intention, a question you’ve put out into the Universe. Each conversation you’ve had. Every action you’ve taken. They’re all messages.

At this point you have two jobs.

Walk the shoreline. Throw out and pick up returning bottles.

Not stand in one spot waiting for the tide to bring everything back to exactly where you’re planted.

Move. Take the next action. Have the next conversation. Complete the next circuit.

Because the bottles won’t come back to the exact spot where you’re standing.

They’ll come back to where you are heading.

So back to my gap.

I put the powerful question out. The universe started moving.

And then I literally forgot that I’d thrown out my bottle.

Instead, I kept them all in my cute beach bag, and I started trudging down the shoreline, trying to personally hand-deliver every single one.

Because somewhere underneath everything, I don’t actually trust that the tide is going to bring them back.

So I take on the work of doing everything myself. Making it hard. Resisting the belief that I’m going to get my bottle back Universe assisted.

The Couch (Or: The First Bottle Came Back)

That evening I was having a relaxed conversation with my mom. Wine, dogs, couch, summer breezes.

We were thinking out loud together about one of my longest standing client relationships and how I might continue supporting this client going forward with some of their newest challenges.

I wasn’t strategizing around or trying to solve the $100k question. I’d forgotten I’d even asked it.

But somewhere in the middle of that conversation, an idea arrived that I absolutely did not manufacture.

A way to bring my work into his world at a scale I hadn’t considered before.

Not a small engagement. The kind of opportunity that, if it it worked out, would result in one client paying me $100k cash this summer.

And I already had the relationship I needed for the introduction to be possible.

My mom and I looked at each other.

Why not? What do I have to lose?

I might as well ask.

(An aside, because this matters: part of my design is that my best ideas don’t come to me at my desk. They arrive when I’m in motion, in conversation, doing something else entirely. I wasn’t thinking about my question in that moment. I was living. This is what it looks like when someone operates from their actual wiring rather than existing inside someone else’s blueprint. If you’re curious what your wiring looks like, grab your flowprint here to take the first step (FlowprintFormula.com.)

My $100k question had it’s first possible answer.

I’d asked a powerful question. I’d thrown a bottle into the ocean. And the answer arrived while I was sippin’ rosé on the couch, in a relaxed conversation.

A bottle returned.

More Bottles Return

This is where it gets real for me.

On day three of this experiment, I was doing something completely unrelated to my $100K question.

I was setting up a payment portal to pay out a referral fee to my friend Molly. Just completing a circuit. Honoring what I owed. Walking the shoreline.

In the flow of that conversation, Molly mentioned she was doing a collaboration this month with another one of the “$100k clients” I’d imagined working with this summer.

So I told her my big ask in a 10x is easier than 2x moment.

She didn’t even pause.

“Oh my God, I can introduce you to exactly the right people at the company.”

I didn’t manufacture that. I didn’t strategize my way to it. I threw a bottle, kept walking, and it came back.

That’s not magic. That’s not luck.

That’s what happens when I stop trying to carry all the bottles in my beach bag trying to personally deliver each one to its destination.

The Question I’m Living Inside

I’m 4 days into an experiment I’m calling co-creation in real time.

The goal is specific. The obstacle is not strategy, not market conditions, not the economy.

The obstacle is this: I am a woman who has spent over a decade building a life and a business through agency, discernment, and self-trust.

I am very good at doing hard things alone.

And I have confused that capability with a complete operating system.

It isn’t one.

The ocean doesn’t need my help moving the water. It needs me to throw the bottles and keep walking.

So here’s the question I’m living inside right now, and I’ll be honest, I don’t have the answer yet:

What would I do differently, what would I ask for, what would I try, if I actually believed the bottles were coming back without my struggle?

I’m finding out this summer. Come walk the shoreline with me.

Because after living in this county for only three years, I was genuinely flabbergasted that I was being called for the third year in a row.

I wish that my first thought had been some evolved, spiritually aware sentiment around how I consciously create my outcomes.

But after three years and three summons, it had started to feel like the Universe and the Clerk of Courts were in cahoots.

Despite the population swell of on of the fastest-growing county in the state of Florida offering many fresh citizens to choose from, I couldn’t buy myself a year off.

The first two years I didn’t have to appear, so I pinned the summons on the bulletin board at the back of my mind.

Part of the backbone of my business is a spiritual practice built around trust, gratitude, things working out for me, and believing that the Universe has my back.

On the spiritual plane, I simply hoped I wouldn’t be chosen for the “winning” team.

The Night Before (A Masterclass in Not Doing the Thing I Teach)

I refreshed the jury duty website for the 14th time at 3:52pm on Monday night, to find that indeed my number had been called.

Cue my mini emotional meltdown.

Texting with a friend later that evening about my summons, I got the first reminder that my bad attitude was my choice.

We were texting, or rather I was whining at him with my thumbs. My energy came through the screen, and he knew I was off energetically.

Drop your shoulders.

Take three deep breaths.

Reset.

I knew he was right, that I could choose to adjust my energy, but I was secretly ashamed that I had been called out.

And so I dug in deeper instead of taking his advice.

With full awareness in that moment of my option to course correct my attitude, I chose to continue the spiral straight through to bedtime.

And just to really seal the deal on a guaranteed bad night’s sleep, I picked up my phone and spent my final waking hour investigating the personal redemption arcs of two musicians I barely like.

The whole time, some part of me knew.

This is not helping. You are choosing this.

The Morning (Or: The Universe Has a Sense of Humor)

I had been to the old courthouse several times last year, during my exhausting divorce proceedings.

On most of those visits, I felt scared, deeply uncertain, and mistrustful of the process.

It was also frustrating trying to navigate a system that is dysfunctional and slow during its best weeks.

The energy of that building carried everything that had brought people there. You could feel it in the walls.

That deeply penetrating energy suck was what I was expecting this morning as I approached the building.

But consider me surprised that the three year old civic center was so clean and quiet it almost felt like Google Maps had failed me.

Plenty of parking. Modern bathrooms. The kind of building that makes you think, ‘huh, my tax dollars occasionally get used to do something correctly.’

I joined a small conference room with about 8 other people, jumped back into reading my summer reading list mystery, and waited an hour as the jury-sitter directed people to the bathroom on repeat.

My energy had recovered a little after finding out that the max trial was one day….no bonus days for me. That was a relief.

But I was still feeling pretty grouchy despite the fact that the universe had arranged an ease-filled morning for me, despite my personal pity party, sleep sabotage, and overall bad attitude.

I was too annoyed to notice.

The Judge (Three Minutes, Give or Take)

When they finally called us into the court room, the judge took a few minutes to explain how the process worked.

Why we were there, what jury duty means, how the system functions. He wanted the people in that room to understand what they’d shown up for.

I sat in the back corner and watched people actually lean in. Nodding. Genuinely interested.

And I noticed something shift in me, just slightly, as I realized that some of them actually wanted to be there. They were curious and/or found meaning in the civic weight of it.

I was just keeping my fingers and toes crossed that I was about to be sent home.

I got my wish and was in my car shortly after 9:00 AM.

The Awareness (In a Swimsuit, On a Porch, Slightly Mortified)

I got home just before 10am, in time to salvage what I had written off as a lost workday.

I changed in my “work swimsuit,” grabbed my journal, and settled into my spicy hot screened lanai overlooking the pool.

Gratitude for home welled up in me. I’ve spent years deliberately building my environment into the kind of space that cradles and restores me.

I hadn’t planned to have a revelation. I was just trying to get my feet back under me. And gratitude and journaling always helps.

But there it was, in my own handwriting from a few days before:

Everything always works out for me.

I read it. And my first thought was: that’s exactly what just happened.

Followed almost immediately by: so why didn’t I believe it?

Because if I’d actually believed that, my behavior would have looked different from the outset.

My reaction would have been significantly different. I wouldn’t have spent eighteen hours in resistance to something that turned out to be completely fine.

I’d written those words only 5 days ago. By Monday night I was acting like someone who had never uttered them.

That’s my gap.

Not between knowing and doing.

Between believing something when life is calm enough to write it in my journal, and actually trusting it when something arrives that I didn’t choose.

Now I can’t unsee my own pattern.

I’m working on something big right now in my business. I have a significant goal to hit that really matters to me, in a season that’s turned the heat up to 11 because of circumstances I couldn’t prevent or control.

But if the pattern holds, if I only extend trust to the things I chose, I risk white-knuckling my way through the exact season that most requires me to actually believe what I say I believe.

Jury duty, of all things, illuminated my pattern.

Everything always works out for me.

Even the parts I didn’t pick.

But do I really believe that?

Here’s what I’m sitting with now: I thought I believed it.

I’d written it dozens of times, said it out loud, built a practice around thinking that I believed it.

But a three hour civics lesson exposed the truth. I don’t currently believe it all the way to my bones. My head believes it’s true. But I still pick up the sword to fight the battles feeling like an army of one.

Which makes me wonder. Is there something you’re giving voice to, something you’d swear you believe, that a small inconvenience might expose as not quite bone-deep truth?

Not as a judgment. As an invitation.

Because sometimes the circumstances we don’t choose can show us more than the ones we carefully control.