We need to talk about what happens when you mix impatience with inner work.

I have seen so many former clients and students expressing frustration with feeling as though they should be further along in their journey than they are.

They say things like, “Why am I still getting triggered by this?” or, “I thought I worked through this before. I’ve already done the work. Why does this keep popping up?”

I think it’s important that we have a conversation about why this frustration is so common. A lot of it is because a lot of us don’t know how to be in observation mode. A lot of us don’t know how to sit and observe what’s currently transpiring; we don’t know how to be present without wanting to escape ourselves.

What do I mean by this? Let me tell you…

Why You Aren’t “There” Yet

So like I said, I’ve seen a lot of frustration surrounding people not understanding why they still get triggered by something they’ve supposedly done the work around, or why they’re not receiving the things they’ve supposedly reached the point of receiving. (For instance, I hear a lot of, “I’ve done all the work. Where’s my person? Where’s my man?”)

There is such a rush to get to the “other side” of this work, and I don’t want to knock being there, all right? I don’t. One of the reasons we do this work is to experience a different experience in life, in our minds, in our bodies, all of it.

But here’s the thing: you actually can’t get there without taking a look at what’s here right now. And as long as we’re trying to escape what’s happening right here, right now, as long as we’re refusing to observe it, we’re going to find ourselves feeling more and more stuck, because we’re trying to rush a process.

You know why we do this? Because we’re trying to escape our own selves. There’s a feeling of dissatisfaction and dislike for some aspect of yourself that’s popped up, and rather than getting curious and examining it, you want to skip right over it.

For example, let’s say you got triggered. Let’s say you blew up and you got really angry, but you identify as a very nice person. You think of yourself as someone who never gets angry. So when you get triggered and lose it, you start making it all about yourself and what it could mean about who you are.

Because you’re so focused on why you’re not behaving like the person you believe yourself to be, you aren’t actually paying attention to what’s happening with you.

In the personal development world, people are often just trying to escape themselves. They’re trying to adopt all these different ways of doing things as opposed to actually taking a look at what’s happening with them in the moment.

When you get triggered, there’s something to discover there. There’s a part of you that wants to be seen that isn’t usually allowed to be seen. This is its chance to blow up. And you know what? Oftentimes the key to our own transformation, our own elevation, is in those moments right there.

When we get triggered, when we’re jealous, when we are viscerally angry about something…as long as we keep playing into the story of, “What does this mean about me? I thought I was more ahead than this. I thought I worked through this already,” not only are we in entitlement mode, we’re also refusing to observe what’s actually playing out for us.

Curiosity with Inner Work

When inner work all started for me, when I first discovered things I did due to my abusive upbringing and things like that, I would actually observe and witness without getting upset and angry at myself. I would actually observe and witness when I would people-please and when I would be in my perfectionistic energy.

I actually remember having moments where I would catch myself being really perfectionistic in grad school, and rather than getting frustrated with myself because I “already did the work” (AKA, watched a video on perfectionism on YouTube) I actually sat with it, even though it was a bit uncomfortable.

That’s extreme entitlement energy, by the way. “I watched a YouTube video on perfectionism and how it’s linked to whatever could have happened in your childhood, and now 25 years of patterns should be gone. I don’t actually have to do inner work. I don’t actually have to examine myself. I don’t actually have to look at the parts of me that resist letting go of perfectionism, resist letting go of people-pleasing.”

People think they can watch an inner work video or listen to an inner work podcast and poof, 30 years of trauma will vanish just like that. The entitlement of it all is insane to me, because when I first discovered this, I remember being so curious about myself, so curious about my patterns, so willing to be observant.

That is how I responded to these “out of character” moments that would happen. I did not get upset with myself. Instead, I looked at myself through a lens of compassion and understanding. I had a lot of patience with myself, because I knew it was going to take time.

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It’s Going to Take Time

When you’re getting frustrated with yourself for repeating a pattern even after you’ve become conscious of it, understand this: you’ve been performing this pattern for 20+, 30+, 40+ years, right? Then, suddenly, you have this very small moment on your timeline where you get aware of these patterns. You’ve been doing them all your life, but then you have a moment where you heard something, you read something, you watched something, and you become aware.

Understand this: the awareness doesn’t mean 30 years of people-pleasing goes away. What it means is that you now get to see all the spaces and places where you’ve already been playing out these patterns, and then you get to make a choice every day about how you want to respond to that.

We don’t leverage and optimize awareness enough. Instead, entitlement drops in. We tell ourselves, “I just listened to Beatrice’s podcast episodes about people-pleasing, so I’m not a people-pleaser anymore.”

But in actuality, there are parts of you that are advocating for and desiring to people-please, because you’re getting some kind of benefit out of it. And it’s only when you continue to stay in awareness mode and you continue to stay in observation mode and you’re committed to seeing these parts of you that things naturally begin to shift.

What we do instead is try to skip the part of inner work where we sit in observation mode, because we’re allergic to seeing ourselves as we are. Instead, we are fucking obsessed with putting on an ego.

We say, “I used to do that, but I don’t do that anymore. Oh, I used to be a people pleaser, but that’s not me anymore.”

Yet, it shows up in your business.

It shows up in your career.

It shows up when your mom asks you to do something and you don’t have any time, and you say yes automatically.

The Power of “Not Yet, But Soon”

How about we just own that we’re not yet where we want to be with our inner work, but we’re on our way there? What is so difficult about that?

That shows a high level of leadership over your life, by the way, if you can come to that place where you’re like, “I am not yet where I want to be, but I am on my way there,” it shows leadership energy.

It’s not a self-loathing attitude, either. We don’t want to shift from entitlement to the total other end of the spectrum; we don’t want to start telling ourselves we’ll never get there.

What I’m saying is that you should consider shifting that thought process to, “I just caught awareness of a pattern I’ve been playing out. Thank God that it’s come to my awareness, because I’m in a position where I can do something about it, where I can do some inner work. I can do some ego work and some shadow work.”

You can drop your entitlement and understand that 20 years of a pattern you’ve been playing out are not going to get reversed in a day, but you can be willing to actually be by your own side through this inner work. You can actually be willing to see these difficult parts of yourself play out as you contemplate and figure out what you’re going to with that information. You can be willing to do what you need to do to see yourself to the other side.

By the way, that’s what shadow work is: the willingness to see yourself for who you actually are, without turning and running the other way. This inner work journey is not about becoming somebody other than who you are. It’s about the courage to see yourself for who you actually are in this moment, in every moment in the past, in the present, and in the future, and not run.

I know it sounds easier said than done, but it actually is the key to your own transformation. These are the types of things I help my clients do, because sometimes you need to have someone there with you as you’re witnessing all of these parts of you and holding them and doing inner work.

Sometimes if you don’t know how to navigate it, this part of inner work can be a lot. That’s why so many of us just kind of hide back in our shadows and insist, “That’s not me. I don’t even do that.”

Imagine this. Part of us actually views witnessing and seeing ourselves for who we are in the moment as troubling…as a burden. But what if we actually look at it as something incredible? We’re getting to see new layers of ourselves through this inner work, and they don’t actually define us. Something to think about.

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