The Truth About Your Circumstances That Nobody Tells You

Now just isn't the right time.

The kids need you. The schedule is already full. The finances aren't there yet. And once this season passes, once things settle, once life gives you a little more room, then you'll do the work. Then you'll focus on yourself.

If any version of that sentence has lived in your head lately, this episode is for you.

In today's conversation, Misty takes on the most loving, most convincing, most completely believable reason women give for staying exactly where they are and gently, firmly, honestly tells the truth about what's actually behind it.

Because here's what nobody tells you: your circumstances are real. Every single one of them. And they are not the reason.

Misty shares the season when her own teenagers became the most legitimate excuse she'd ever had and what she discovered when she finally got still enough to look honestly at what she was actually doing. What she found wasn't failure. It wasn't selfishness. It was a story her fear had been telling in her love's voice. And it was so convincing she almost believed it for longer than she should have.

This episode will change the way you see the wall you've been standing in front of.

In this episode:

• Why waiting for the right circumstances is actually protecting you from something else entirely
• The crucial difference between your circumstances being the context of your life versus the author of it
• Misty's personal story about her teenagers and the moment she realized it wasn't them, it was her
• What your children are actually learning from your waiting
• The one decision that doesn't require your life to look any different before you make it

✨ Don't feel like yourself anymore? Take the Identity Reset quiz and discover the truth behind your invisibility, your secret powers, and 3 simple steps to more energy, fulfillment, and joy. (Less than 90 seconds. More clarity than you've had in years.)

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🧭 When you're ready for the next step, everything you need is waiting at Your Utmost Self.

You are more than everyone's everything. You are someone.

Transcript

The Right Time Myth

Misty Celli 0:00

I want to start today with something I think you've said recently. Maybe out loud to someone who asked why you haven't prioritized yourself yet. Maybe just in your own head in that quiet eternal accounting you do when you're honest with yourself about why things haven't changed. It sounds something like this. Now just isn't the right time. My kids need me, my husband needs me, the finances aren't there. The schedule won't allow it. Once things settle down, once the season's passed, once the kids are older, once work calms down, once life gives me a little more room, then I'll do the work. Then I'll focus on myself. Then I hear you. And I want you to know I'm not going to tell you that your circumstances aren't real, because they are. Every single one of them. The kids, the schedule, the finances, the season you are in, all of it's real and all of it matters. However, here's the truth about your circumstances that nobody tells you. And I mean nobody, not the self-help books, not the Instagram posts, not the well-meaning friends who tell you to just put yourself first. Your circumstances are real. And they are not the reason. They never were. If you are tired of feeling like you don't know who you are anymore, and when you look in the mirror, you catch yourself thinking, is this all there is? Even though you know you were made for more, you're in the right place. I'm Misty Celli, and I help women step into their highest potential and design a life that feels true, rich, and deeply satisfying. A life built by design, not by default. On this podcast, you will learn the principles and strategic tools that create real lasting transformation in your health, your relationships, your confidence, your goals, and the deeper parts of you like purpose, growth, love, and parenting. This is where you begin the process of becoming your utmost self and reclaiming a life that feels like yours again. Welcome to your utmost life podcast. Before you say anything, I want to honor something. The reason you've been waiting for the right circumstances isn't laziness. It isn't lack of desire. It isn't even fear. Exactly. Though fear is part of it, but it's love. It is the love of a woman who cares so deeply about the people in her life that she has made their needs, their stability, their well-being the primary condition of her own becoming. You have been waiting because you love them. And that love is real and it's beautiful. And I'm not asking you to question it for a single second. However, I am going to ask you to question something else today. Not your love, but your logic. Because I think the logic that says I can't do this until my circumstances allow it, have been protecting you from something. And what it's been protecting you from, and what it's been protecting you from, is not the chaos you're afraid of creating. It's been protecting you from hope, from the vulnerability of wanting something fully and risking the disappointment of not getting it, from the terrifying, exhilarating possibility that the life you actually want might be available to you right now, in the middle of these circumstances, without waiting for anything to change first. That is a lot to hold. Therefore, take a breath. And let's look at this together. Here is what I think has been happening inside you, and I want you to feel how close this lands. You look at your life and you see the fullness of it. The needs that are real, the people who are counting on you, the schedule that genuinely is packed, the finances that genuinely have limits, and you think, how could I possibly add one more thing to this? How could I justify spending time or money or energy on myself when there is so much that still needs me? And therefore, you wait responsibly, lovingly, patiently, and the waiting becomes its own kind of life. A life organized entirely around the conditions that will one day make your own becoming possible. A life where you are always almost ready, always one season away from the right time, always on the verge of the circumstances that will finally give you permission to begin. However, here's what I want to gently, firmly, lovingly point out. The circumstances keep changing, and the right time keeps moving, because the right time was never really about the circumstances. It was about something underneath them. It was about a belief, a fear, a story that has been running and using your circumstances as its most convincing costume. And until you look underneath the circumstances, and until you see what's actually been running the delay, you will be waiting for a season season that never quite arrives. I want to tell you about a season in my own life where I use the most loving, most legitimate, most completely believable excuse I ever had. My kids were moving into a middle school and headed toward high school. And if you know anything about that season of parenting, you know it's not the time when children need less. It is the time when they need you differently, more visibly, more steadily, with a presence that says, I am here. No matter what, no matter the mistake, no matter the emotion, you can always count on me. And I wanted to be that for them with everything I had. So I made sure I was always available, always reachable, and always ready to drop everything the moment that they needed me. I kept myself in a kind of perpetual standby mode, never fully present with myself because I wanted to ensure that if the moment arrived, I could be fully present for them. My heart was completely in the right place. And I want to be honest about that because this is not a story about a mother who was wrong to love her children fiercely. It is a story about a mother who had the right love and the wrong logic. Because here is what I discovered when I finally paused. When I stopped moving long enough to actually reflect on what I was doing and why, it wasn't them, it was me. I wasn't holding myself in standby because they needed it. I was holding myself in standby because I was afraid. However, when I got still enough to really look at that fear, and when I examined it honestly instead of just obeying it, I realized something that shifted everything. They already knew who I was. The years of showing up, of loving them through everything, of being the mother I had committed to being, that foundation was already laid. They knew my character, they knew my love. They didn't need me to freeze myself in a place to prove it. And furthermore, here is the part that changed me most deeply. What they needed from me in that season was not self-sacrifice, it was guidance. And guidance is not demonstrated by setting yourself aside. Guidance is demonstrated by showing them what it looks like to live fully, to know yourself, to love yourself with the same unconditionality you offer them. I realized, sitting with that truth, that in trying to be everything for them, by being nothing for myself, I was teaching them the wrong lesson, not intentionally, and not because I didn't love them enough, but because I had confused self-sacrifice with love and hadn't yet understood that they are not the same thing. Self-sacrifice says, I matter less than you. Love says, we both matter, and I'm going to show you what that love looks like. My circumstances were real. My kids were real. The season was real. However, the belief that season required me to pause on myself, that was not real. That was a story my fear was telling in my love's voice. And it was so convincing that I almost believed it for longer than I should have. Here is what nobody tells you about circumstances, and I mean this as the most important thing I will say today. Circumstances are the context of your life. They are not the author of it. That distinction sounds simple. However, I want you to really sit with it because the difference between those two things, context versus author, is the difference between a woman who is waiting for her life to give her permission and a woman who understands that permission was always hers to give herself. Your circumstances, the kids, husband, finances, the schedule, they are real. They create real constraints, demands, complexity. And I'm not dismissing any of that. However, here's what circumstances cannot do. They cannot decide what you believe about yourself. They cannot determine whether you think you're worth the work. They cannot choose whether you trust yourself to navigate change without losing the people you love. They cannot make the decision about who you are becoming. Those things, every single one of them, belong to you, not to your schedule, not to your bank account, not to the season that your children are in, but to you. Therefore, when you say my circumstances won't allow it right now, what you're actually saying underneath the circumstances is something closer to this. I don't fully believe that I can do this without something breaking. I don't yet trust that the people I love will still be okay if I take up space for myself. I don't yet believe that I am worth the disruption. And those beliefs, not your circumstances, are what have been keeping you waiting. However, here's what I know with absolute certainty because I've walked this, because I have watched women walk this, because I have seen what happens on the other side of the waiting. Your circumstances do not need to change for you to begin. You need to change how you see your circumstances. And that shift from my life won't allow it to I am the variable that determines this. That is not a shift that requires a different schedule or a different season or a different set of conditions. It requires a decision made right now in the middle of exactly the life you have. I want to offer you a reframe that I think is going to sit with you long after this episode ends. You have been thinking about this work, the work of coming back to yourself, of reclaiming your identity, of becoming the woman you know yourself to be, as something you add to your life, something you fit in, something that requires room that your current circumstances don't have. However, what if that's backwards? What if this work is not something you add to your life, but something that changes the foundation everything else is built on? What if becoming more fully yourself doesn't require more room in your life, but actually creates more capacity within it? Because here is what I have seen in my own life and in the lives of women who have done this work completely rather than stopping halfway. The woman who knows who she is moves through her circumstances differently. She makes decisions more clearly, she shows up in her relationships more fully, she parents from a place of groundedness rather than anxiety, and she loves from fullness rather than debt. Her circumstances don't change, her foundation does, and a different foundation changes everything about how the same circumstances feel to stand in. Furthermore, think about what you are modeling for your children right now. In this season, with these specific kids who are watching everything you do and learning from it at a cellular level what it means to be a woman, a mother, a human being who matters, what are they learning from your waiting? What lesson does your perpetual standby mode teach them about their own worth, about whether the people who love them most believe that they deserve to be fully alive? You were put in their lives not just to love them, but to show them. And the most powerful thing you can show them is a woman who chose herself, not instead of them, for them. Because she understood that her becoming was the greatest gift she could give them. That is the lesson they need, and you are the only person who can teach it. I want you to imagine a specific moment not far from now that I think that you've been afraid to let yourself picture. You're in the middle of your life, the same kids, the same husband, the same full and complicated and beautiful life. Nothing dramatic has changed. The circumstances are largely the same. However, you are different. Not in a way that anyone can immediately name, but in a way that everyone around you can feel. There is a groundedness to you that wasn't there before, a clarity, a sense of a woman who knows where she stands and therefore doesn't need to keep checking whether the ground is still there. Your teenage daughter comes to you with something hard, something that she's been carrying. And instead of coming to you carefully, testing the waters, checking whether this is a good time, wondering whether you can handle it, she just comes directly fully because she knows that without thinking about it, that you are already there, not in standby, but actually there, with enough of yourself intact to hold her without losing your footing. Your husband looks at you across the room and sees something that he has been missing. The woman who is fully present in her own life and therefore fully present in theirs, not managing from a distance, but here, eyes open, alive. And you, standing in the middle of the same circumstances, feels something that you've been waiting for the right time to feel. Ready. Not because the circumstances finally aligned, but because you stopped waiting for them to. That is what becomes available the moment that you understand that you were always the variable, that the circumstances were never the wall, that the decision was always yours to make in this season with these kids in this life right now. Here's what I want you to carry out of today. Your circumstances are real. Every single one of them. I'm not asking you to pretend otherwise or to push past them with willpower or to add more to an already full life. I am asking you to look at them honestly, the way I had to look at my teenagers and realize it wasn't them, it was me. And ask yourself the question that changes everything. Is this circumstance actually the reason? Or is it the story I've been telling in the most convincing voice I have? Because when you can answer that question honestly, when you can see the difference between the real constraint and the protective story, something opens up. Not in your schedule, but in you. And that opening is where everything begins. The work of coming back to yourself doesn't wait for the right circumstances. It creates them. It doesn't require your life to be different. It makes you different enough to live the life you have more fully than you've ever had before. That process, the actual work, the real steps, the method that takes you from where you are right now to the woman who stands in her circumstances rather than hiding behind them. That is exactly what I built your utmost method to walk you through. Not a concept, not a framework you read about and try to apply alone, but a guided, complete, step-by-step return to yourself. The first step doesn't require your circumstances to change. It requires you to decide that you are the variable, and that decision is available to you right now, in this season, with these kids in this life. The first step doesn't require your circumstances to change. It requires you to know what's actually been running the delay. Your utmost self isn't someone you become. She is someone you embrace. You are more than everyone's everything. You are someone. If you have not yet subscribed, please do so. I'll see you Monday.