Why Success Feels Unsafe: The Upper Limit Problem Explained

You say you want more — more money, more visibility, more impact.

So why does your body tighten when things start going well?

In this episode, we’re breaking down the Upper Limit Problem- a term coined by Gay Hendricks- through the lens of nervous system regulation, visibility resistance, and what I call The Fear of Becoming.

Because the truth is this:

Most self-sabotage isn’t laziness.
It isn’t lack of discipline.
And it isn’t mindset.

It’s protection.

Your nervous system would rather repeat a familiar reality than risk an unfamiliar expansion. Even if that expansion is what you consciously want.

Inside this episode, we explore:

• Why success can feel unsafe
• The nervous system’s attachment to familiarity
• The “Invisible Loyalty Contract” that keeps you small
• Money programming and relational belonging fears
• Why you pick fights, procrastinate, or get sick before big moments
• Self-sabotage disguised as spiritual humility
• How to expand your capacity for more without collapsing

You’ll learn why growth triggers fear before it builds confidence — and how to work with your body instead of against it.

If you’ve ever noticed that momentum brings resistance…
If visibility makes you want to disappear…
If making more money feels complicated…

This conversation will help you understand why.

Transcript

0:00

Hi. Welcome back. Okay, so do you ever feel a. Like maybe you might be afraid of wanting more. Maybe it feels a little uncomfortable underneath the hood when you think about wanting more money, more visibility, more impact in the world, even when you logically know that you're capable of it. In this episode, we are gonna explore the upper limit problem and the unconscious fear. That you may have of your own expansion. The invisible blocks, the nervous system resistance, and seriously, we even see this in our relationships when everything is going so well. You know, when you choose an awesome date night to suddenly pick a fight, that is what I'm talking about. It's when we come up against these upper limits of goodness, what our ceiling of what we're capable of, what we're comfortable with, and how this might be showing up in your life. So if you have ever become exhausted while attempting something new or perhaps you suddenly doubt yourself and feel like an imposter, when like the week before you were like, I'm on fire. I'm amazing, right? And all of a sudden you just tank. If you can think of these moments that this has happened to you, I want you to recognize if you can, take a moment and recognize that you are hitting an upper limit. That sabotage that's happening, that inner saboteur, that's taking, over, is you hitting an upper limit, which is an invisible ceiling. Your nervous system, your, this inner saboteur have been protecting you from probably years. Safe feels familiar and safe, feels known. But safe is not growth and we need to shift and make changes and reprogram our systems to feel at the very least, that maybe we feel safe enough to move forward. Maybe we can start to trust that we. Can tolerate and get through and deal with whatever comes up when we are faced with the unknown. So if we know safety is not the goal. And your nervous system would love for you to stay small. For some of us, it would love for you to stay on that hamster wheel of sameness, right? To repeat the patterns. You know, those of you that say, I'm a creature of habit, quote unquote, right? I want you to listen up and you say, I'm a creature of known. I like to go to the same restaurants. I like to do the same things. Especially for you guys, your system probably screams when you try to expand and do stuff that's new because it feels so uncomfortable because you've gotten yourself into these habits of doing the same things over and over again. Now, growth. Feels unsafe before it feels empowering. So the hope is that once you can get through this safety gates here, right? Once you can get through this threshold, on the other side of it is you feeling empowered. And that's exactly why we often sabotage ourselves just as the moment starts, right? Because your nervous system prefers the familiar over the discomfort, it prefers that Groundhog Day over the unknown of. Possibility of whatever you're trying to expand in your life. And honestly, it's crazy to think this, but somehow we can also find happiness itself threatening unconsciously, of course. But I'll even ask many of my clients, if I had a magic wand and I could make you happy 100% of the time, do you have any discomforts with that? At first, a lot of people would be like, I know I'd love to be happy all the time. But then once you think about it and you get in your head a little bit and start to break it down, you're like, well, what would you be most comfortable with? Would you be comfortable with 100% of the time? Or, some of my clients would like. Well, how will I know if I'm being duped? How will be? How will I know if I'm being taken advantage of? How will I know if something bad is happening and I shouldn't be happy? I don't wanna just be like happy for the sake of like being happy a hundred percent of the time, right? And so we start to realize that being duped, being afraid of missing something that you know, because you're being busy, too busy being happy, you're not realizing something bad is happening, right? All of these things are very fear based and. That is why we sabotage our happiness is because on some level it can feel unsafe. Actually,. Marcy Shimoff, author of Happy for No Reason. She said that researchers have found that no matter what happens to you in life, you tend to return to a fixed range of happiness like your weight set point, which keeps the scale hovering around the same number. I think we all know that feeling your happiness set point will remain the same unless you make a concerted effort to change it. That is why I love working with people to help shift their emotional setpoint, because it's very much the same thing. If your habit is to have a low grade emotion, right? A low vibrational emotion if you're agitated, an anxious, tired, depressed, right moody, uh, spitting and resentment. If your mood and the way you talk to yourself is negative, like the set point that you have is the emotion that you experience most often. And if your habit is to experience happiness and then sabotage it because you know your set point for that that experience, that feeling is lower, right? I want you to watch for that. Because experiencing the feeling of happiness or joy can be your upper limit, right? Next time you feel a high, next time you feel joy or happiness. Hopefully that's today, but watch how long it lasts for. I want you to watch what you do with it. I've done this myself, and it's, it's baffling to me where I notice, I'm like, I'm having this super high emotion. Oh, hey, I'm feeling really good today. You know that feeling of like the, the, the day the sun shines, after winter's been around, and you're out in your car, you can even put the window down like you're like, oh my God, it feels so good. A good song comes on. You're in a good mood. Or maybe just you're in a great mood for whatever reason, right. And all of a sudden I have a negative thought about something bad that's happening in my life, and suddenly I'm spinning on that because we really are so much more pain avoidant than we are pleasure seeking. And so we are always, our brains are always wanting to search for that negative piece. So take a inventory for yourself. Good little experiment for you. Just check it out and try it. So let's talk about that upper limit and your fear of expansion. This is the fear that shows up the moment your desire starts to take shape. It's not guilt. It's not usually I shouldn't want more. I mean, there can be some of that, but it's always wrapped typically around fear. And now some people fear who they're become because maybe you know something when you think about and you project out for what you want, your wildest dreams, like what would be your wildest dreams? And if you were to think about like, you know, did you have a role model for that? Were there beliefs in your family or friends about becoming that or being that, um, were there judgments? All of that we bring to the table and we look at trying to change and so the fear that wanting more might. Mean you're gonna be too much for people, might make you greedy or just loyal, or you'll be seen as greedy or disloyal. You'll be following new social norms maybe. And people will be like, who does she think she is? It might distance you from the people you love. It might put you in situations your nervous system just doesn't know how to handle. And if you have a belief that having more means working harder, you're already tax burnt out system is like. We're gonna get sick. This is gonna be too much for us. We're just, we're just gonna get sick, or we're gonna self-sabotage in some way. And now other people, sometimes just blatantly fear the failing. So some people are fearing like the judgments and what it will mean they're becoming will mean. But for some of us, it's truly just that fear. Fear of failing. And usually that comes from one of those core wounds, right? The, fear of just not being. Good enough, capable enough. You fill in the blank, right? Whatever blank enough that comes from your not good enough wound. Now we have three core wounds and we could look at more, but those are the one three that I tend to talk about. So there's one that I'm not enough. The other one is I'm not lovable. So if you're not lovable, your fear of failure is about also feeling rejected and. Unwanted or in some way if you fail, people will abandon you or you won't have the things you want. Right? You won't belong. And belonging is a comm, huge commodity, right? It's big for us. And the third one is. If you're not worthy, so we've got not, not enough, not lovable and not worthy. And if you are not worthy, well, you're gonna make a fool of yourself because who are you to think you could do this in the first place? Right? It's complicated. When we step foot to the threshold of change, it's complicated. And here's the truth. That fear is totally natural and everybody, even the people that you see out there that are so successful, they feel it too. Most people feel it. I mean, you have to be like a robot. Maybe there's some people out there that could truly say they've never felt the fear of this, but I just don't know them. I've not seen them, not heard of them, and I don't believe them. It's part of our growth process. Imagine if you really believed and even celebrated that, oh my gosh, look at this. Look at this fear. This must mean that I'm doing something awesome. This must mean that I'm growing. This is so cool, right? No, that's not where our brain goes, I realize. But it's a natural growth part of the growth process, and it's your nervous system protecting you from stepping too far too fast, but it's not your destiny. It's the parts of you that are trying to help you stay safe. It's the younger parts, the old parts, the limiting beliefs that are stuffed into these parts, right? And these parts of you are trying to keep you safe. And really they need to know that you're gonna take control and take over, and that there's a leader inside of you that, that knows the way and is going to lead the way. And you are gonna need to have some discipline to get in charge. But it is important for you to really recognize, you know, what is going on for you so that you can show up in it. When it happens, they need to, we need to flag these so that when they happen, you're like, oh, wait a minute. So I think a lot of us can have this invisible loyalty contract. Like if I surpass my family financially, do I betray them in some way? Like, am I gonna like no longer belong in the same way? Are we not gonna live in the same place where we complain about not having enough money? What kind of rules and what is the communication what are the habits that happen between you and your family that you might be breaking? And we have to really look at some of these loyalty contracts. If you outgrow your friends, like if you change, you're going to somehow no longer belong, you're going to maybe even feel like you betray them because you're becoming different. They may truly feel that way too. It's not untrue. We don't know that it's true, but it's definitely stuff that we can unconsciously fear, I think these are really important to notice these loyalty contracts that we feel that we have, because most of us do not recognize we are operating in them. We do not realize it until we get to the point where. We start getting clarity like, hmm, I could see where there's some part in here for me. We have to look at these and see them and name them so that we know when they're happening, right? So these unspoken rules. They're learned early. Most of the stuff that you have, like little contracts you might have inside, where unconsciously they're often from family, from culture, even from ancestral programming that you just got twirled up in your DNA coming down here. Sometimes we listen. While family or friends judged others for even less. And you don't remember that story necessarily? You might, but a lot of us don't remember. You know that story that we heard repeatedly from my mom about how she was talking about her friend when I was like 12, but my body does. So my body, my nervous system, my physical, emotional and spiritual self need to get aligned so that we can move forward. Your nervous system does equate belonging with survival. So whenever expansion threatens belonging, your system will choose belonging every time until you get ahead of it. Right until your brain shows up and you start creating new ways of thinking, new ways of feeling, and new set points for your body, emotionally, what you can tolerate, what you can handle, and you get new stories inside your head that you tell yourself about yourself and who you're becoming and really who you're becoming is already who you are. You wouldn't want it if it wasn't for you. It's really simple, but we make it so complicated, right? So here's the catch. Growth asks you to grieve the version of you that survived by staying small so you can step into the version of you who's gonna thrive. And that bridge, that, that journey very simple journey can feel like a thousand steps. Another little nugget that I'm going to share with you here is we can sometimes disguise spiritual humility with self-sabotage, right? And so we could look at another piece of a puzzle here. It's like sometimes when we. We think this is humility, versus ego. We can feel like I am doing the more humble thing. I'm doing the right thing, or I'm doing the, uh, thing that I feel most aligned to being a good person, being nice or kind. Really though some of these actions are fear in disguise. Okay? So underpricing yourself. If you have a business, you're underpricing your services, you're bending over backwards, you're not having boundaries. You're over giving to others. You're hiding your expertise so you don't outshine people. Maybe you're finally doing some joint ventures and or you're in meetings with people and you are very careful to not. Outshine so that you taper back your light and sharing your genius. Maybe it's just simply you avoid visibility because it's just so hard being seen and heard. Or maybe you just call your own power, ego. So whenever you start really shining you, you apologize. You say, oh, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to take up so much space. Right? Or you feel like you just let your ego outta the bag and everybody saw it and you feel shame. Spiritual humility is beautiful. Don't let fear hide behind it. The desire to stay small is not virtuous, okay? It's not. It's protective. And protecting yourself does not have to mean hiding your light. But the message is clear and we can sit and hold space for this that. Your upper limit issues, right? Your expansion fears. You are bumping up against this ceiling of how good it can be, how big you can get, how visible you can put, make yourself, how much you can be seen, heard, and known. They are your nervous system's. Way of saying, slow down please. I can't handle this yet. Compassion is key here because it's not a flaw. It's just a signal. It's just a signal saying, Hey, this is where we're at right now. I get you wanna be over there, but right now we're over here. So your job is to slow down, pay attention, and get yourself over the bridge to the place where you can. Push yourself out there. Shine more, be more visible, do all the things. So how do we do, how do we work with this fear? First, you have to notice it. That's what we're doing today. Um, this listening to this episode is all about you naming it, noticing it, or at least looking forward so you can start collecting information. I want you to be curious, non-judgmental, and I just want you to be like scientific about it. Like, Hmm, isn't that interesting? Look for the evidence. You know, where do I have fears of expansion? What kind of stuff is coming up for you? The growth that you want does require. You expanding safety with probably visibility. Practicing receiving without totally collapsing or feeling overwhelmed that it's too much. You should, you can't receive that much. Funny enough, people with big receiving wounds, like, I can't receive money, I can't receive gifts, I don't want other people to help me too much, I desperately, deeply want it secretively deep down inside, I really wanna receive from everybody. I have huge needs for receiving, but I can't. It's so uncomfortable. I don't like it. I shut it down. Those people struggle the most with. Their business is making money or, or, having abundance because really your business is about a, a energetic exchange and one 50% of that exchange is receiving the bank account can't get bigger. The footprint can't get bigger if you cannot receive. And so I'm always telling people when you're getting to this point, if you have a business or you're working on something, and it really means you're involved in this exchange, in your growth, you're wanting more abundance, you have to look at your willingness to receive it, and your body has to feel that it's safe to receive it. And so it's so important, to really do the work of finding safety and receiving. And sometimes that's just small steps. And this is gonna sound harsh, but one of the things I really had to really work on that was really hard for me is letting people misunderstand me. I will, I, I have really built up muscles around, like I'm putting this out there and if people want to judge it, if people want to think I'm this or that, or I've really had to hone in on, building these muscles that I release and let go. I release and let go. Love and back to sender. I just send love back to the people who might judge and. People who are judging you are not in the ring with you. I think it was Brene Brown that said something about this that I loved. I'm not gonna quote clearly 'cause I'm thinking of this off the cuff, but I really remember she said something about, the people who are judging you, they don't have the kaons to get in the ring with you. They are not themselves making themselves as visible. They are not themselves, putting themselves out there and being vulnerable. They are not growing. They're not stretching, they're not expanding, or they would not be judging. I want you to hear that. You're not in parallel lanes here. When people are judging you, they're coming from whatever their shit is, and it has nothing to do with you. So most importantly. Part of the work is building the trust that you can hold more. And a lot of us really self-sabotage and because deep down as I were afraid of burnout, maybe we're already burnt out, and trusting that I can hold more, may feel not great when you're already at burnout A lot of the time it's just not. Believing in our capacity, um, or actually doing this stuff to take care of myself and having the inner dialogue, the inner support, the inner cheerleader, the, you know, the inner coach. I have, an inner advocate, I do not always allow for that inner critic. When that inner critic comes through, I quickly resort to my inner advocate because we have to switch the language. We have to switch the story that's happening. We have to change and be in charge and a lot of the times. We don't trust ourselves. Before I started this podcast, I 100% would tell you there's no way that I could have done it. I'm on 101 episodes, by the way, in case you missed my last episode. And so, hello, I am just spoken to you. About all these beautiful things. I've had this incredible opportunity, this incredible experience at this microphone talking to you 101 times. And I swear to you that before I did this, I thought there is no way in hell I could ever follow through with something that, that, that would take. That much for me, I'm, I have a story that consistency is not my thing and I can do a million things and then I wanna switch over and do a different million things this was me proving to me I have the capacity for it. Um, the easier it got, the less capacity even took right? Beginning. When you're making your changes, when you're shifting into expansion, it feels ginormous because it's new. But trust me, when I tell you in five, six months. Down the road or maybe a year, it's gonna be like old hat and it's gonna be such a big deal and you just gotta get to the point where it's not a big deal. So just a little takeaway. I want you to hear this message. I heard it once and I loved it. Wanting more is not greed. It is growth sister. It is not greed. It is growth. We literally, as a soul come down here to want, that is one of the gifts of being here on earth. We were saying, come down to this crazy place. You're gonna get to experience the full spectrum from pain and sorrow to heightened experiences and love and everything in between. And we want you. To want things because actually the act of wanting in itself is a communication that's sacred with source. When you want something, it's information that's being. Disseminated out into the source universe all around you is sending ripples everywhere, and our frequencies are changing. As we want more, we become more. That is the possibility here for you. But if you're not allowed to want, if wanting isn't safe, then trust me when I tell you, you're going to lose out on what you came here to do. You're gonna lose out on s. Seeing how expansion feels on changing now, I think no matter what you're gonna change. In fact, I know you're gonna change no matter what. That's just like the laws of the universe. You are changing in a constant evolution. So why not change on purpose versus. Happenstance. I wish you a blessed week. I hope it's a beautiful one, and I'll look forward to talking to you next week. Bye for now.