You’ve got to be RUTHLESS when it comes to living a life that matches your potential.

Hey, my love,
Here I am again with some tough love and a big-sister smackdown! You’ve got to be ruthless when it comes to living a life that matches your potential!

Ruthless. Notice how I didn't say mean, cold, heartless or walking around cutting everyone off because you’re “protecting your energy.”

I mean being absolutely clear about what gets to stay, what has to go, what gets access to you, and what doesn’t. Because if something or someone is consistently pulling you away from the woman you know you’re capable of becoming, you have to be willing to delete it, distance yourself from it, put a boundary around it, or put the damn blinders on and keep moving.

And yes, sometimes that means people. Sometimes it means environments, habits, distractions, commitments, expectations, old goals, old identities or the version of you that keeps making excuses for all of it.

You cannot keep saying you want a bigger life while continuing to make room for everything that keeps you small. At some point, you have to decide that your potential matters more than your attachment to what is familiar.

But here’s the part nobody really wants to hear: the number one person who can stop you from ever living your potential will always be yourself.

You can blame the circumstances, the industry, the economy, the algorithm, your past, your parents, your partner, your competition, the people who didn’t believe in you and maybe some of those things genuinely made it harder. But eventually, you have to look at yourself and ask: where am I still choosing NOT to become who I say I want to be?

Because becoming ruthless isn’t about becoming ruthless with everyone else. It’s about becoming ruthless with the bullshit inside your own mind. It’s becoming ruthless in your mindset, ruthless in your identity, ruthless in the actions you take, ruthless in the moves you make and ruthless about the standards you have decided your life is going to meet. It’s about becoming unavailable for anything that requires you to abandon yourself, betray yourself, shrink yourself or constantly second-guess yourself.

It means becoming unavailable for saying you want one thing while continuing to act like you want another. Unavailable for waiting until you feel ready. Unavailable for needing everyone to understand your choices before you make them. Unavailable for making yourself smaller because your expansion makes someone else uncomfortable. Unavailable for endlessly talking about the life you want while continuing to protect the habits, relationships and identities that are keeping you from it.

And this is where it gets really real, because potential means nothing without action. You can know exactly who you want to become and still spend another five years behaving like the old version of yourself. You can have the vision, the goals, the ideas, the talent, the desire and still keep yourself stuck because you refuse to make the decisions that the next version of you would make!

So maybe it’s time to stop negotiating with yourself. Maybe it’s time to stop asking, “Can I really do this?” and start asking, “What would I have to decide if I was serious about becoming her?” Then make the decision. Have the conversation. Set the boundary. Leave the thing. Start the thing. Say no. Say yes. Change the plan. Take the risk. Put the blinders on. Keep fucking going.

Because living up to your potential is not about becoming some perfect, hyper-disciplined version of yourself who never gets scared, confused or tired. It’s about becoming the woman who is no longer available to repeatedly abandon what she knows she is capable of. It’s about deciding who you are, deciding what your life gets to look like, and then becoming increasingly unavailable for anything that pulls you away from that decision.

Your potential is not asking you to become someone else. It’s asking you to stop betraying the woman you already know you could be.

And sometimes, loving yourself enough to become her means getting ruthless about everything that keeps you from her!