The Frustration That Keeps Returning

From Shared Moments with Michelle · 15:37

Show by Michelle L. Potter

This is the first of ten conversations about purpose and meaning, and I’m glad you’re here. If you listened to the audio, thank you. This post is the written side of the conversation, with a few thoughts that did not make it into the recording.If you read my long-form article this week, The Road That No Longer Fits, you know that I spent months adjusting my business, including my offers, my pricing, and my tiers, and that it came with a lot of frustration. I’ve come to see that frustration as information and not as failure. Today I want to go underneath that.If we’re new to each otherI’m Michelle Potter. I’m an author, a Certified Next Level Human Architect, a Certified IGNITE Her Frequencies Guide, and the founder and editor-in-chief of Lived Logic, a magazine of real voices and lived stories. I’m the author of two books, From Hell to Rebirth and Awakening: Truth Be Told, and I write here on Substack. My own journey through chronic illness, healing, and personal transformation has shaped how I understand identity, resilience, and the stories we carry.What I stand for is simple. People deserve to be heard before they are helped. Everyone has a story worth hearing, and no one should have to earn their place at the table. My work is told through lived experience, and someone else’s lived experience does not have to become your truth for it to be worth hearing, so take what fits and leave the rest.The question I kept askingFor months, there was a question I kept asking myself, and it turned out to be more useful than any answer I found. The question was, what am I doing?Over about six months, I kept changing things. I reconsidered what I wanted the business to look like. Every decision made sense when I made it, and I would feel some relief for a little while, the kind of dopamine hit that comes from changing something. Then the frustration would come back, and the same questions came back with it.The honest answer to what am I doing was that I was trying to do too many things at once. I was building offers, adjusting programs, creating content, and trying to keep every piece moving while still trying to have a life. Somewhere in the middle of all of that, I became so overwhelmed that I could no longer tell what actually mattered most.Nearly every question began with howLooking at it now, I notice that nearly every question I was asking began with how. How do I do this better? How do I get myself out there? How do I make this work? I was putting a great deal of energy into the how and almost none into a different question.Do I want the life this takes?Getting out there usually points toward social media, and I am not a huge fan of it. I really like my quiet times. I try not to scroll, because it is easy to fall into comparison traps, watching how far along other people seem to be in their businesses and their success. In most cases, you are looking at a highlight reel, and every person is in a different season or a different chapter of their life.What my quiet time showed meIf you have read my books, you know I write a lot about visions and downloads, and I receive them quite a bit. In my quiet times, I usually get flashes of scenery, snapshots in a sequence. They are very much puzzle pieces: scenes, signs, symbols, colors, numbers. I have to put the pieces together to understand what is being presented.In my quiet time, I saw those snapshots of what I want my life to look like. That is when I realized that what I had been doing and what I wanted did not go together. They were not in alignment.Capable is not the same as wantingHere is part of why that was so hard to see. I knew how to build programs. I knew how to create content, organize a community, and develop an offer. I spent years learning and refining those skills, but something was still missing.Being capable of building something is not the same as wanting the life that comes with keeping it going.It took me a long time to separate the two.When frustration does not mean the wrong roadI want to be careful here, because it would be easy to hear all of this and decide that frustration always means you’re on the wrong road. It doesn’t. I lived with chronic illness for a long stretch of my life, and I’d be misleading you if I suggested that every hard thing can be solved by choosing differently. There were years when I was frustrated with my limits and with not knowing what the next day would bring. I wanted things to change, and wanting it did not give me the power to make it happen. I looked for answers. I went through harsh treatments. I kept going. Some things helped and some didn’t, and on many days, getting through the day was enough.I wasn’t frustrated then because I had built the wrong life. I was frustrated because I was living through something I never would have chosen, and there was no way around it. Telling someone in that place to simply follow what feels right leaves out illness, money, family, relationships, and everything else that…

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