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.

I watched Inception with my 13-year-old this weekend. It’s fun showing Christopher Nolan movies to him for the first time, seeing how much he understands at first pass.

But the truth is I do it for me. And there is so much in Inception about how we create in the world, about how ideas can take hold in us and never let go.

But it was this quote, near the beginning of the movie but repeated in different forms throughout, that really hit home for me.

My leap of faith came in 2016. I had just lost my corporate job. I had successfully delayed doing what I really wanted to do. I kept telling myself that in two more years, I would start my coaching practice.

I had been on that two year plan for about ten years.

But now the plane was at 10,000 feet. My parachute, in the form of my savings and my newly found extra time, was strapped on. I was standing in the doorway, and the only question was whether I would jump, not only into coaching, but also in a move across the country to a small mountain town in which I had met exactly two people.

I jumped. And I’ve never looked back.

Today, I find this is the key moment for people. They know THAT they want make a change. They sometimes even know exactly what kind of change they want to make.

And the stand at the open door, waiting to leap, sometimes for years.

If you are that person, I am here to help you. To give you that little push and ride with you on the way down. To watch the chute open and see the smile on your face as it does.

Don’t be that person who lives a life of regret.

Take the leap of faith. And if you’d like support, reach out to me.

What would you continue to include?

What would you change?

You might find that you are creating things that you don’t think you want. But on some level, those things, like worry, like defending yourself, like trying to look smart or not feel stupid, are based on a simple misunderstanding of who you are.

You are not the identity you have created (or let others create). You are the creator of that identity. We all are. To me, this is what it means to be made in the image of God.

How are you using that infinite creative capacity? What do you think of your creation so far?

If you realized your innocence and began again, what would you create with the full knowledge of what you are doing?

What could you create?