Tell me if this sounds familiar…

You’ve hit a high in your life, whether that’s a business high, a relationship high, a money high, or something else. It feels great…

Except that it doesn’t.

You can’t stop looking over your shoulder, checking both ways before you move, waiting for the other shoe to drop at any moment. Things have been going too good, so something bad has to be coming next, right?

I’ve heard almost every single student and client experience this in one form or another. They’re always waiting for the other shoe to drop when things start getting good.

It’s like your brain is searching for something to worry about. If nothing on the outside is actually going bad, you’ll end up conjuring something bad into existence.

Where does this feeling of waiting on the other shoe to drop come from? Let’s explore.

Impending Doom

So, why are you always waiting for the other shoe to drop once things are going well?

And when I say things are going well, I mean…maybe  you made more money in your business than you ever thought you could. Or maybe you got hired for a dream position, and you never thought you were going to make it past an interview.

Whatever the situation is, you end up sitting there and thinking, “I just know something bad is going to happen.” That feeling of impending doom settles in, and it’s almost impossible to shake off.

The Capacity for Joy

Basically, when you’re thinking to yourself, “Oh my God, how is it this good? How could things possibly get this good? Something bad has to be on its way,” then guess what? You have just seen your capacity to hold joy, to hold happiness, and to hold pleasure in your body.

You’ve just seen your truest capacity to hold it all before it becomes too much; before you need some type of relief.

You’ll either look for the other shoe to drop externally, or you’ll create that sensation internally.

You’ll feel your mind spiral, or you’ll create an argument, or you’ll create something to disrupt the present moment of you experiencing happiness, joy, or pleasure.

Kind of a mindfuck, right?

The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of the Ego

This is all unconscious, by the way. It’s not like you’re sitting there and saying, “Oh, this is my capacity for joy. Let’s stop it here.”

The unconscious part of you is fully aware of how much joy you can hold. So when your ego catches a whiff of you hitting your capacity, it’s going to start fucking shit up.

Either you’re going to find yourself doing something to distract yourself from experiencing what’s happening in the present, or externally, you’re going to track down a problem to get the other shoe to drop.

For example: maybe everything is going so good, but then…shit, there’s the parking ticket. Or maybe you forgot to pay a bill.

When you’re waiting for the other shoe to drop, you will unconsciously lead yourself to situations where you either externally prove yourself right, or internally, you’ll create a situation where you start spiraling in your mind.

When I say prove yourself right, I mean proving this association—that’s really just a made-up thing in your head—that with more happiness, with more joy, with more pleasure, comes a negative experience.

So you will find a way to prove yourself right about expecting the other shoe to drop, whether externally or internally…but always unconsciously.

People will do this with love, too—not just with business or money.

If you’re the type of person that has this belief that something always has to be wrong, you might go on several dates with someone and get in a relationship with them, even though there are red flags left and right. They’re showing you exactly who they are from the beginning, but you will unconsciously tune down your ability to be present with who that person is.

You will unconsciously ignore every single intuitive hit, and you’ll get into a relationship with them, and then four or five six months later, you find yourself going, “Who is this person? I don’t recognize them. I don’t even know who they are. It’s like they changed.”

But in reality, they showed you who they were the whole time. It might have been more subtle in the beginning, because usually we put our best foot forward, and then later it becomes glaringly obvious.

Regardless, it was there the whole time. But if you have this belief that the shoe was always going to drop, you might engage in a pattern where you’ll tune out your ability to tune into who the person actually is so that you can play out that belief. You’ll even get to play the role of the victim.

With success—for example, when you gain more followers on your platform of choice or the platform you use for your business—this shoe-dropping belief can show up as believing that with more visibility, with more people following you, or even when you start making more money, people are going start tearing you down. You could possibly get “cancelled,” or friends and family might turn on you…basically, you believe that by growing your platform and visibility, you’re going to be left alone because everybody is going to tear you down.

When it comes to money, you might take on a job that isn’t good for your mental or physical health, but in the beginning, you convince yourself you can take it on. And then sometime down the road, you finally give out. You get sick, you burn out, whatever it is, and it leads to a downward spiral.

Maybe you use up all your sick days, or you start fearing that you’re going to get fired because you’re calling out of work all the time because you can’t handle being there. And then you get to a point where you start convincing yourself that you expected the other shoe to drop eventually. The job was supposed to be this higher-paying job, but it was too good to be true, so of course this all went wrong.

You convince yourself, “See, I can’t have it all. It never gets to work out.” And again, you get to play into victim mindset. It never gets to work out, but there’s something there where you get to benefit from that experience.

I know it sounds backwards, but seriously, we as human beings only ever do things out of desire, whether it’s conscious desire or unconscious desire. And your unconscious desires…let me tell you, they will find a way to make themselves known.

So unconsciously, even when you’re consciously miserable, you’re benefiting. You’re getting something that you don’t actually get to experience consciously. Welcome to the unconscious world.

For business owners, causing the other shoe to drop might look you having a “high cash month,” and you think, “Oh my God, this can never happen again. I can’t sustain this.” So what do you do?

You might—and I’ve done this before, my mentor has totally called me out on this many moons ago—start plugging out of your business a little bit. You stop marketing as much, so you stop selling as much. You end up in cruise control mode because you just had a high cash month, and the next month you say, “See? I couldn’t sustain that.”

No, you could have sustained it. You just weren’t putting in the work and running a business like a business owner should. You caused the other shoe to drop just to prove that it would.

When my coach reflected that to me, I was mind-blown. I thanked her for reflecting that pattern to me, because I didn’t even realize I was engaging with that pattern.

If you’re noticing that pattern in yourself and sinking into a bit of shame, just know that our patterns are very unconscious. I wouldn’t have seen it without my coach pointing it out.

The question is…when those patterns are revealed to you, when you get the gift of awareness of your patterns, do you choose to continue playing them out? Or do you come up with another excuse and voluntarily choose to play out your patterns and get the other shoe to drop yourself?

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The Better It Gets, The Better It Gets

So how do we transmute this concept of expecting the other shoe to drop? How do we shift into the concept of “The better it gets, the better it gets?”

We want to embrace the idea that you can hold joy, happiness, and pleasure in huge quantities,  and it doesn’t mean that something bad has to follow subsequently. You can actually just enjoy life, period, without waiting on the other shoe to drop.

This is actually a process of expanding your capacity.

Remember how I was saying in the beginning that this is about your capacity? The cool thing about your capacity for anything—your capacity for money, your capacity for love, your capacity for success—can all be expanded.

One way to expand your capacity is to allow yourself to experience these things and feel joy in them, even when you feel those oppositional feelings or thoughts from your lovely ego.

Even when those oppositional thoughts and feelings arise, you stay present in what you’re currently feeling and want to feel.

This, by the way, is a very rebellious act. It’s a very rebellious act against what we’re traditionally taught, which is that if something feels bad, if something feels uncomfortable, you need to get rid of it. It’s a rebellious act to choose to be in your body rather than escape into the mind.

The second way to expand your capacity is to find the pattern. You have to dig to the root and find out what you gain from continuing this loop. You’ve got to clock that unconscious pattern that you’re playing into with yourself, and you’ve got to choose to no longer play into it.

Once you do that, you will be able to shake the feeling of waiting for the other shoe to drop and instead enjoy the things you’re receiving. The better it gets, the better it gets.

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