Woke up super late today as I’m in the process of moving apartments. Love this new place I’m moving into. Has exactly my kind of vibe and space. But shifting is a hectic process and so please bear with me if you find a few mumbles and mistakes here and there in this newsletter. I’m trying my best to keep my eyes open.
Last week, I spoke with a client, Naomi, who’d been circling the same decision for the better part of a year. She wanted to leave her corporate job and start a studio of her own. She had the skills. She had a small handful of clients already lined up informally through word of mouth. She had savings that could cover six months.
What she didn’t have was permission from herself.
“I just don’t know if I’m the kind of person who can actually do this,” she told me. Not “I don’t know how to register a business” or “I don’t know how to price my work”. Those are answerable questions. This wasn’t. This was something closer to a verdict she was waiting on, as if somewhere out there existed a jury that would eventually tell her whether she qualified to want what she wanted.
I asked her what she thought would prove TO HER that she was the kind of person who can actually do this.
Landing a certain client? Hitting a certain income? Getting through a full year without failing?
She paused for a long time, because the honest answer was: nothing. There was no number, no clent, no milestone that would settle it, because the question she was actually asking wasn’t about logistics at all. It was about worth.
The Two Ways We Look at a Goal
There are two fundamentally different lenses people use when they look at something they want.
The first lens treats the goal as a test. Every step along the way becomes evidence in a trial about whether you deserve to be there. A setback doesn’t just mean you have more to learn; it means the jury might be leaning against you. Feeling behind doesn’t just mean you started later than someone else; it means maybe you were never cut out for this in the first place. Under this lens, the goal isn’t really the goal. The real thing on the line is your identity.
The second lens treats the goal as a list of requirements. There is simply a set of things that need doing, skills that need building, hours that need logging, and people who need reaching out to. A setback under this lens is just information about which requirement still needs work. It doesn’t put a question-mark in front of your entire identity.
Almost everyone I’ve coached who feels stuck on a goal; a career change, a fitness target, starting something creative, rebuilding confidence after a hard period…is operating from the first lens without realizing it. They think they’re procrastinating, or lacking discipline, or not wanting it badly enough. What’s actually happening is that some part of them has quietly decided this goal is a referendum on their worth.
What a ‘Requirements List’ Actually Looks Like
Here’s the exercise I did with Naomi. I asked her to set aside the question “Am I the kind of person who can run a studio?” entirely, and instead write down, in plain terms, what a studio requires.
A handful of paying clients. A pricing structure. A simple website. A system for invoicing. A basic understanding of contracts. Consistent outreach, on some regular schedule, to find new work.
That was it. Nothing on that list asked whether she was talented enough, brave enough, or “ready”.
Every single item was learnable, buildable, or doable with effort and time. None of them required a permission slip from some internal panel of judges.
The moment she saw the list in front of her, something in her posture changed. She told me it felt almost anticlimactic, like she’d been bracing herself for a mountain and found a checklist instead. That reaction is common.
People expect the thing they’ve been avoiding to be enormous and existential. Written out as requirements, it’s almost always smaller, more concrete, and far less personal than the fear made it seem.
This works for practically anything you’re chasing.
Wanting to get physically stronger isn’t a referendum on whether you’re “an athletic person”. It requires consistent training, adequate protein, sufficient sleep, and enough recovery.
Wanting a promotion isn’t a test of whether you’re “leadership material”. It requires visible results, relationships with the right people, and a track record of solving problems before you’re asked to.
Wanting to feel secure in a relationship isn’t proof of whether you’re “someone who deserves love”. It requires honest communication, the willingness to bring up hard things in an empathetic manner, and consistent follow-through over time.
Every one of these, reframed as a requirement, becomes a project. Reframed as a test, it becomes a threat.
Why We Default to the Test
Part of the reason this lens is so sticky is that our minds are wired to protect identity before they protect progress.
A threat to your sense of competence, belonging, or worthiness registers in the nervous system in a way that’s hard to distinguish from an actual physical threat. So when a goal touches something we’ve quietly tied to our self-image such as “am I smart enough?, disciplined enough?, lovable enough?”; the brain treats every step of pursuing it as a small trial, and mounts the same defenses it would against any threat: avoidance, procrastination, endless preparation instead of action.
This is also why people can work incredibly hard toward goals that don’t threaten their identity, and freeze completely on goals that do, even when the second goal matters more to them.
Separating the Requirement From the Identity
None of this means the emotional weight isn’t real. Naomi wasn’t imagining her fear. Starting something new after years of stability is genuinely uncertain, and it’s reasonable to feel exposed by it.
The distinction I want to draw is between feeling the fear and letting the fear write the terms of the goal. You can feel afraid and still open the spreadsheet. You can feel unsure of yourself and still send the email. The requirement doesn’t care what mood you’re in when you complete it. It only cares whether it gets done.
That’s actually good news, because it means you don’t have to solve your self-doubt before you’re allowed to start. You just have to keep working the list, doubt and all, until enough requirements are met that the results speak for themselves.
There’s a kind of quiet confidence that comes only from this direction…from having actually done the things, not from having first proven you were worthy of doing them. Confidence, in this sense, is a byproduct of the requirements getting checked off. It’s rarely the starting gate.
An Exercise for This Week
Pick one goal you’ve been circling without much progress.
Write down, as plainly as you can, what it actually requires; just the concrete list of things that need to happen.
Then look at the list and ask yourself which single item on it you could start today.
You’ll find that the goal was never as large or as personal as it felt in your head.
Until next week,
Dimple V
P.S. I’m curious, what goal have you been treating as a test rather than a checklist? Write down the actual requirements this week and see what shifts. Hit reply and let me know what you find because I read every response.