As I talk with people about my new group coaching experience, “Creating What’s Next,” I am noticing a distinction that is becoming more and more obvious.

The distinction is between being ready for something, and being ready to be ready.

An example of this is when you are not actively looking for job, but then a recruiter calls and suddenly you are all ears.

You really want this to be the right thing. You want it to work.

Because you are ready to be ready.

If you were truly ready, you would have already updated your resume. You’d be networking, and interviewing. You’d be actively creating whatever you wanted to create next.

Being ready moves you into that uncomfortable zone. Because truly being ready means you accept the fact that you don’t what is going to happen next. You don’t know how it’s going to work out. And yet you are taking action anyway. You are in the act of creating.

Most people never admit to themselves that they are ready, for that very reason. They don’t want to step into the unknown. It’s too uncomfortable. It’s too scary.

But are they ready to be ready? Are they willing to entertain offers? Are they willing to make a change if it is easy and not too uncomfortable?

You bet.

Early in my coaching career, I talked to someone for whom every job change had been because a recruiter called. She had never initiated her own search.

What had she given up in that? She had ended up with a series of very similar, uninspiring roles at uninspiring companies. She had made essentially no career advancement, despite her obvious talent, in over twenty years.

What are you giving up?

When you are ready to be ready, you are willing to sign up for someone else’s idea of what is best for you.

When you are actually ready, you are ready to own what you want to create. Even if you don’t yet know what that is or how it will work out.

If you and I have a conversation, I can tell pretty quickly how close to ready you are. If you are ready for someone else to save you, imagine how much more powerful it will be if you save yourself.

With a group of people who are all working toward the creating the same thing—the highest, most powerful version of themselves that they are currently capable of.

In the last week, I feel like I have made several major mistakes, with clients, with prospects, with the direction of my business, with the balance between my work and personal lives, even with my own health.

I’ve noticed this pattern in the past when I have too much going on. That, while exciting, the energy can cause me to focus on activity rather than connection and to ignore the subtle signs of my own body and the person in front of me as well.

It can be thrilling until it crashes down.

And then what?

I’m still learning to navigate this. The challenge of building a business while maintaining and deepening connection. Of doing the right activities while coming from love and connection rather than fear disguised as velocity. Of learning new skills while being patient with the learning process and with myself.

Of fully engaging in the path of mastery while having compassion for myself as I do it.

Because this is all new territory.

Building a team, building support for a group of clients, deepening my own capacity to continue to challenge my current clients as they take on new challenges. Raising the bar, for myself and my clients, with love.

Getting help has been incredibly helpful for me. When you face new challenges, or feel like you’ve hit a wall and just want to collapse, what has been helpful for you?

We were sitting in a coffee shop in Boulder, just off Pearl, in the midst of two days together. My client had been reminding me that she wanted me to tell the “SVP story.” She had been talking about her career, taking about the shifts in her career and herself since we had started working together.

She told me about the fourteen years she had spent as a VP at two major firms. How she was comfortable at that level, how she was making good money, how it was enough.

Except it wasn’t. There was a part, inside her, that always knew she could be more. But she had created this ceiling for herself, and she had gotten to the point in her career where abusive bosses were beginning to take advantage. Where maybe she had been at that level for so long that she no longer seemed like a threat to them.

She saw something else was possible. And within ten months, she was at a new firm, a firm whose mission she cared about, making more money than she had ever made, plus an equity stake should that firm go public.

Two years later, it did. And shortly after that, she was recruited by the CEO of another publicly traded company to take a role reporting directly to him.

I asked her what had changed for her, what was the shift that allowed this to happen after 14 years of being a VP. I confess the answer completely surprised me.

“It was you,” she said. “It was the fact that you saw I could do it. When I saw how much you believed in me, I began to believe in myself.”

When I work with a client, we make a commitment. I make a commitment to see the pure potential of my client, to see what they really want, to show it to them if they are having trouble seeing it for themselves, and to help them get there with all of my ability.

My client makes a commitment, too. To me, yes, but by far the most important commitment my client makes is to themselves.

To stop selling themselves short. To admit to themselves what they really want. To stop settling for good enough, just because it is easier, or because it doesn’t suck enough to quit.

If you are wanting to do that, if you are wanting to feel alive again after 14 years of being a VP, we should speak.

I’m putting together a group of leaders just like you to go on a three month adventure that will radically shift how you see yourselves and what is possible for you. People who see it is time to make big change. And we will commit to each other to make this shift, together.

You can do this. Deep inside, you know you can. You’ve known for awhile.

You’ve just been waiting for a sign.

This is that sign.

A client of mine cried today. Tears of relief, joy even, as she was able to let go of a lot of judgmental thoughts that had been getting in her way as a leader.

We are just finishing the first day of a two day retreat, and we were doing a lot of work with exploring how she was creating herself and her reality.

We are using a lot of the curriculum that I will be following in my upcoming group coaching program, “Creating What’s Next.”

We spent the day exploring two fundamental truths.

First, that everyone’s experience of the world is 100 percent internal, and constantly changing. It is not “real” in any traditional sense of the word. (This is the part that blew her mind.)

Second, that what we call our identity isn’t solid either. It’s a series of stories that we have innocently created or innocently believed, often at a very young age. (This is the part where she cried.)

Third, since we are always creating our reality and our identity, we can consciously create them in much more useful and powerful ways.

We can let go of the past. It was the best we could do at the time. It looked useful. But if you’re 50 now, do you really trust your 5 year old self to run the show?

There is innocence and even beauty in how we learn to protect ourselves at such a young age.

And now that we no longer need that protection, we can choose differently.

There is incredible power in that. Power that can be used to create whatever you would like. The innate capacity that each of us have to see everything and do anything.