Why Playing Small Is Holding You Back: Lessons from Miranda’s Journey
Teaching Miranda to Step into Her Own Spotlight
Miranda, a woman in her mid-50s with a remarkable gift for making everyone around her feel special, reached out to me for business coaching.
Now, I don’t exactly consider myself a coach. One-on-one work feels a bit foreign to me—I’m a teacher at heart, someone who thrives on guiding groups toward transformation. Yet, life has recently been sending people my way who are seeking one-on-one help. Who am I to refuse what life hands me? That’s the essence of surrender, isn’t it?
By the way, if you’re someone who’s serious about making deep, lasting change, I have limited spots for one-on-one work. Details are at the end of this article.
Miranda arrived at our first meeting armed with a stack of financials—balance sheets, profit-and-loss statements, cash flow reports—the works. I glanced at them, curious but not too fixated, and started asking questions. Lots of them.
The first ten questions were met with surface-level answers. She’d point to various figures on her P&L sheets or talk about her margins, but I was looking for something deeper, waiting for a crack in the armor of QuickBooks professionalism. I needed to understand how she truly felt. Frustration started to creep in as I realized I wasn’t getting anywhere.
Miranda is a consultant (I’ll keep her field vague to protect her privacy), charging $375 an hour and bringing in $270,000 annually. She has $150,000 in cash, works just five hours a week, and lives in a beautiful beachside home with her successful husband. On paper, Miranda had it all—the kind of life many dream of. So why was she sitting in front of me, unsure of why she even needed my help?
After a while, her defenses started to lower, and slowly, the real story began to emerge.
Uncovering Miranda’s Hidden Beliefs
Miranda confessed that she’d kept her hourly rate at $375 for the past five years, too afraid to raise it. She felt $375 was already high and worried that increasing it might drive clients away. Yet she knew that, at her level, charging $500 an hour would be entirely reasonable.
She then shared a long-held dream: becoming a top influencer in her industry—a level marked by respect, visibility, and significantly higher rates. Despite having the talent, contacts, and clients to make it happen, she’d held back. “I hate sales,” she admitted. “I can barely bring myself to make three calls a day.” All her business came through word of mouth; she’d never invested in marketing. And, of course, there were hints of “I’m too old.” She mused, “Maybe in my younger days I’d have wanted to be at the top, but now, in my mid-50s….”
It was becoming clear: Miranda had spent years keeping herself small, comfortably hiding in the background while longing for a spotlight she felt was just out of reach.
Then came the big reveal: She didn’t believe she was good at business. She was even contemplating retiring to rely on her successful husband, whom she saw as far more competent. She went on to admit that she was deeply unhappy—a feeling she hadn’t confided to anyone. As we continued, it became apparent that Miranda believed she was “broken.” She was stuck in a cycle of “fixing” herself, convinced she needed therapy, trauma work, and constant improvement.
Here’s the thing about human nature: it's rarely about what we think it is. She arrived with a stack of numbers, but it was never really about those figures. It’s far easier to focus on February’s profit margins than to face the deeper beliefs that keep us stuck.
Miranda’s Hidden Beliefs
Miranda believed she was broken, so she kept herself busy “fixing” what wasn’t really broken. This distraction kept her from embracing her strengths and stepping fully into her own success.
Miranda saw herself as bad at business, so she avoided sales and marketing, keeping her business small. Ironically, she’d then complain about the very smallness she maintained. It’s easier to play the victim, to blame “below-average” circumstances, than to confront the ways we’re showing up as “below-average” ourselves.
Miranda believed she was “poor” even though she had financial abundance. This belief kept her from truly welcoming wealth.
Miranda believed she wasn’t enough, and that belief seeped into her business, keeping it small and limited. She held back, giving her business “not enough” effort, “not enough” attention, like a garden she wanted to bloom but kept under-watered and under-sunned to match her self-image. How can someone who feels they’re “not enough” create anything more than that?
Our businesses, our relationships, our lives—they’re all reflections of how we treat ourselves. The way we care for people, places, and things mirrors our own self-care. It always starts with you! If Miranda wanted a thriving, rockstar business, she’d first have to become a rockstar herself.
Miranda avoided stepping into the spotlight because she felt undeserving of it, preferring to play a supporting role in her own life.
And Miranda was secretly addicted to her unhappiness, using it as an excuse to avoid stepping into her full potential.
When we resist our own greatness, we find clever ways to sabotage ourselves. Miranda had everything she needed to be exceptional, to live an extraordinary life, yet she found every way possible to avoid stepping into her spotlight.
Miranda’s Action Plan: Becoming the Star of Her Life
Over the next three months, Miranda’s job will be to step into her own spotlight. Here’s the to-do list I gave her:
Raise your rates to $500 an hour.
Hire a rockstar salesperson.
Invest in top-tier marketing with that $150,000 in savings to build her brand.
STOP the endless fixing and trauma work. Miranda had a PhD in what was “wrong” with her—she needed to step out of “awareness hell.”
As Above, So Below. As Within, So Without.
These actions might look straightforward, but without reprogramming her subconscious, they’re useless. 90% of our thoughts today are the same as yesterday—we can’t transform our lives with the same thoughts that created our current reality. As Einstein famously said, “You can’t solve a problem with the same thinking that created it.” If Miranda is going to move from being “wallpaper” to being the star, she must change her thinking—especially the subconscious thoughts running on autopilot.
Miranda’s mental “software” has been programmed to keep her small. It plays a constant tape of “I am poor” and “I am not enough”—scripts that have likely run her entire life, maybe even handed down over generations. Without reprogramming these beliefs, she’ll unknowingly push wealth away. She might raise her rates but won’t close deals because she’s continually discounting herself. Or, she’ll hire a marketing team but sabotage the success they bring her.
While these actions take place in the external world, they must be paired with inner work in the “unknown.” Miranda can’t just tackle the outer steps of hiring, raising rates, and marketing. She needs to dive into her internal operating system—her subconscious—where her beliefs, often unexamined, reside in the unknown.
Without doing the “unknown” work, the external steps in the “known” world won’t have a lasting impact. Her $500-per-hour rate may quickly slide back to $375 out of fear, or she’ll keep discounting her rate, even though she's taking my coaching and saying the words “$500.” Outer actions, without inner transformation, will keep her stuck in a cycle of self-sabotage.
So, as she takes on the “known” actions above, she’ll also need to do the “unknown” work below:
Read “Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself” and “The Power of Awareness”—two books to help her start rewiring her beliefs.
Live in possibility. Step away from the sensical (known) and into the non-sensical (unknown).
What Does It Mean to “Live in Possibility”?
The key to rewiring your subconscious starts with being present. Being present is the cure you’ve been searching for. It’s the key to living an extraordinary life because everything you desire—success, love, health—exists in the present.
Think of the present as the unknown. When we’re present, we step into the unknown, and that terrifies most people. Why? Because the unknown is uncomfortable.
We crave the known, the familiar, because it feels safe and predictable. The known gives us the illusion of control. But control is an illusion.
When we cling to the past, it’s because it’s familiar—even if it’s painful. When we worry about the future, we think we’re preparing ourselves, but we’re really just trying to predict what could go wrong—once again, sticking to what we know.
Everything in our external world—our job, possessions, identity, money, mortgage—belongs to the known. These are the things we hold onto for a sense of security. But here’s the truth: everything we desire—whether it’s financial abundance or a soulmate—exists in the unknown.
In the present, somebody becomes nobody. Something becomes nothing. Somewhere becomes nowhere. Sometime becomes no time.
In other words, everything we think is true and real—our thoughts about the past and future, and our external world—ceases to exist. And where no things exist, there is space for anything to exist. Can you follow that?
The unknown, or present, is where possibility lives. When nothing exists, there’s infinite potential to create something new.
The present is like a blank canvas, representing limitless possibilities to create whatever we want. When we remove the limitations imposed by the known, we open ourselves up to the limitless—where everything is possible.
Your current relationships that no longer serve you, your limiting beliefs, your environment, your circumstances, and your past—all the knowns that you cling to and think are real—are exactly what’s keeping you stuck on the hamster wheel.
Are You Ready to Become Present and Step into Your Own Spotlight?
Are you prepared to confront your deepest fear—that you are powerful beyond measure? Are you done playing small? Join The Magicians of Beauty, a community dedicated to living in possibility and to doing the necessary inner work that translates into outer success. This is a community of people who are serious about change.
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That’s it for this week. I hope each of you finds the courage to step into the spotlight of your life!
See you next Thursday or Friday!
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