Last year was my highest income year to date. I hit a milestone I had been working towards for years and, while I’m proud of that, I’m also acutely aware of what it cost.

I achieved it while undercharging, overdelivering, raising two boys and navigating perimenopause.

And honestly, as I closed out the year, despite being excited about my business, I was also utterly exhausted.

I was excited because I’d made a promise to myself to make my business more sustainable for me. To create more income, more impact and, most importantly, more ease as I worked towards my next big business growth milestone.

And so it was that I essentially ripped up the business model that got me to this point and made the decision to do things differently.

And what came next completely threw me. My income dropped. Significantly. 

I’ll be honest, initially I think I was just in shock. And with time, I started to question my decisions and wonder if what I was trying to achieve was even possible. Self-doubt started to circle and, for quite a while, those thoughts weren’t even that obvious to me. They just slowly started taking over in the background. Affecting how I moved through my days. 

I found myself paralysed with indecision, unable to figure out what to do next or create any new offers, which only further compounded the drop in income.

And then it dawned on me.

Maybe this drop wasn’t only about my refined niche, higher prices and changed business model. Maybe it was something internal.

I remembered a book I read years ago called The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks, in which he talks about the upper limit problem. Here’s how he describes it:

“Each of us has an inner thermostat setting that determines how much love, success, and creativity we allow ourselves to enjoy. When we exceed our inner thermostat setting, we will often do something to sabotage ourselves, causing us to drop back into the old, familiar zone where we feel secure.”

And when I looked at it through that lens, I could immediately see how I had been sabotaging myself. Not showing up powerfully to my business, allowing distractions and self-doubt to derail my efforts, giving in to my fears and essentially putting the brakes on my own success.

What I started to see was that my belief in my own ability to reach my next level in business had faltered. 

That realisation lit a fire under me.

I reminded myself that I know this stuff and decided to practise what I preach. I doubled down on my new refined niche, got more consistent with my newsletter, offered market research calls and gift sessions to the very people I most want to serve, reached out to colleagues to ask for referrals and practised outreach regularly.

And slowly but surely, things started to pick up.

In the last few months I’ve seen an uptick in 1:1 applications, an uptick in subscribers, more engagement with my content and more people sharing about me and my work with others in their network.

And now, after those first few months of spiralling, I can’t help but laugh at myself for forgetting something I’ve always known to be true.

Belief is where the magic lives.

You can have all the strategies in the book, but if you don’t believe that what you desire is possible for you, you’re going to struggle to act in a way that makes it possible.

And I’m not saying that in a fluffy “just believe and it will happen” kind of way.

I’m saying that when you don’t believe something is possible, it changes how you show up. You hesitate, hide, overthink, delay the offer, avoid the conversation, let distractions pull you away from the work that matters most and keep tweaking the strategy instead of actually practising it long enough to let it work.

You start looking for more proof that it won’t happen, instead of gathering evidence that it can.

Now you might be thinking, well that’s all very well, but how do you change what you believe?

And I don’t think the answer is to sit on your sofa trying to force yourself to believe something you don’t yet believe.

For me, belief shifts when I start gathering evidence. I remind myself of what I already know, look at what I have already done, return to the strategies that have worked before, stop treating every wobble as proof that something has gone wrong and start treating it as information.

I also take action from the belief I want to strengthen. So instead of waiting until I feel completely certain, I ask myself what I would do if I did believe getting to my next level in business was possible. What would I write? Who would I reach out to? What would I create? What decision would I stop circling? What would I stop tolerating?

Because belief isn’t just something we think. It’s something we practise.

And the more I started practising the belief that I could create even more clients and income through this new version of my business, the more I started showing up differently. I felt clearer, more intentional, more focused and more determined. 

And unsurprisingly, things started to move.

I’ve also been remembering something my first coach used to say to me whenever I wasn’t sure what to do. He would simply ask me:

What would a highly successful, fully booked coach do?

I’ve found myself coming back to an updated version of that question a lot recently. Because asking it helps me notice when I’m in doubt, fear or scarcity and come back to the version of me I’m trying to grow into. It helps me ask: what would the version of me who already has the business I desire choose here?

It’s surprising how easily that can shift my mindset.

And I’m pretty sure it’s not just me.

For one person, the stretch might be believing they can get their first consistent clients. For someone else, it might be believing they can have steadier months, raise their prices, be more visible or move from making six figures to multi-six figures with ease and spaciousness.

The details are different, but the pattern is often the same. We reach for something bigger, steadier or more aligned, and part of us starts to pull back. Not because we don’t want it, but because we don’t fully believe we can have it, hold it or create it yet.

So maybe the question to sit with is this:

Where has your belief started to falter?

Not because you’re failing or because you’re doing anything wrong, but because you’re reaching for something that asks more of you and you’re not yet sure if it’s possible.

And if your belief has faltered, what would help you begin to rebuild it? What evidence can you gather? What action can you take? What would you do this week if you trusted that what you want is possible? Let me know in the comments. 

Of course strategy matters. The offers matter, the pricing matters, the content and conversations matter. But we implement strategy very differently when we believe it can work than when we’re already half-expecting it not to.