I want to tell you about a pattern I’ve watched play out more times than I can count – in my own life, and in the lives of just about every client I’ve ever worked with.
It goes like this…
Something feels a little off. Not dramatically, not urgently – just a low-level hum of discontent, a sense that something needs attention.
Maybe it’s a relationship that’s started to feel draining. A business that’s paying the bills but not filling you up. A version of yourself you’ve been meaning to revisit for a while now, when things calm down, when the time is right, when you’ve got a bit more headspace.
So you push it down, push through, keep going – because that’s what we do, isn’t it? We’re good at that. Impressively, exhaustingly good at it.
That’s the pebble. Small, easy to step over, easy to dismiss.
The trouble is, pebbles don’t go away just because we ignore them. They get bigger… and rocks are much harder to navigate. It’s also impossible to pretend aren’t there, though plenty of us give it a good go.
After the rocks, if we keep looking the other way for long enough, the boulders arrive.
The boulders, in my experience, don’t ask permission.
I know this because I lived it.
I was good at ignoring pebbles. Decades of practice. I’d built an entire high-functioning, well-dressed, professionally impressive life on top of a growing pile of things I wasn’t looking at, and for a long time it held together well enough.
Then it didn’t.
The boulder that finally stopped me in my tracks came in the shape of what I now lovingly call my Eight Weeks of Hell – a stretch of loss, grief, financial collapse and emotional reckoning that left me hiding under my mother’s dining room table, wondering how I was going to get back up.
Looking back, I can see every single pebble I stepped over on the way there. Every signal I dismissed. Every moment I told myself things were fine when they clearly, weren’t.
I don’t regret any of it, because it led me exactly here – though I’d be doing you a disservice if I didn’t pass on the most important thing I learned from the whole experience:
You don’t have to wait for the boulder.
Pebbles are information.
Those signals we’re so keen to sidestep aren’t problems – they’re data.
They’re your inner knowing – call it intuition, gut instinct, soul wisdom, whatever resonates – trying to get your attention before something more dramatic has to step in and do the job instead.
The question isn’t whether you’re feeling the pebbles; almost everyone I’ve ever worked with is feeling them.
The question is what you choose to do with that information.
The answer is rarely as difficult as we’ve been telling ourselves it will be.
Very often, the gap between where you are and where you want to be is bridgeable – it just requires you to stop stepping over the pebbles and start picking them up, one at a time, and having a proper look at them.
Something to try this week.
Find yourself ten quiet minutes – actually quiet, not scrolling-through-your-phone quiet – and ask yourself these three questions:
- What’s the thing I keep meaning to address but haven’t? The one that surfaces occasionally and then gets pushed back down again?
- What story have I been telling myself about why now isn’t the right time?
- If a trusted friend described what they could see from the outside of my life right now, what might they gently point out?
Write the answers down. Don’t edit them, don’t talk yourself out of them, just write them. Sometimes that’s enough to start with – letting the pebble exist in the light for a moment, instead of stepping over it again.
Before I go…
The most power-full work I do with clients rarely starts with the big dramatic stuff. It starts here – with the things they’d been meaning to look at for months or years before they finally picked up the phone.
You don’t need to be in crisis to deserve support and you definitely do NOT need to be at rock bottom before it’s worth investing in yourself.
The pebble stage is actually the best time to start – when there’s still plenty of solid ground beneath your feet and the boulders are still a long way off.
That’s exactly where I do my best work.
#UnleashYourAwesome
Taz
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