Hello Reader,

Welcome to the conversation.

For a long time I carried a carefully curated list of people who had held me back: My mother. My first husband. That manager. The circumstance. The timing. The industry. The economy. The story was airtight. The evidence was convincing. And I told it so many times it became the wallpaper of my interior life, so familiar I stopped seeing it as a story at all. I thought it was just the truth.

And then one day, in a moment of radical honesty I was not entirely prepared for, I saw it differently.

None of them kept me small.

I did.

I stayed. I minimized. I made myself palatable. I swallowed the thing I needed to say. I chose the path of least resistance so many times it became the only path I knew how to walk. I did that. Not them.

That realization did not arrive gently. But on the other side of it was something I had never expected to find there.

Freedom.

“ The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any. — Alice Walker

From My Chair to Yours

I remember the exact quality of the moment it landed.

I wasn't in therapy. I wasn't in a workshop. I was just still. Sitting with myself in the particular quiet that follows a season of deflation, when the noise dies down and the truth gets louder.

I had been running the familiar inventory. Who had done what. Who had failed to show up. Who had said the thing that confirmed the story I was already telling. And somewhere in the middle of that inventory I stopped.

Because I saw myself in it. Not as a victim of the list. As the author of it.

Every time I had stayed silent when I needed to speak, that was me. Every time I had made myself smaller so someone else could feel larger, that was me. Every time I had waited for permission to take up the space that was already mine, that was me.

My mother didn't know she was teaching me to shrink. My first husband didn't sit down one day and decide to keep me small. That manager didn't have a plan. They were all just living their own unexamined patterns, and I walked into every single one of them carrying mine.

The moment I stopped blaming them was the moment I got my power back.

The Lens

Sovereignty is not a destination. It is a decision. And it is one you will make (and remake) hundreds of times before it becomes the default.

Here is what it actually means to claim it:

Ownership is not self-blame. There is a difference between taking responsibility and punishing yourself. Sovereignty does not ask you to flagellate yourself for the years you spent giving your power away. It asks you to see clearly, without flinching, and then turn toward what's possible now. The past is data. Not a verdict.

If you created it, you can uncreate it. This is the freedom living inside the hardest truth. The same patterns that kept you small, the silence, the shrinking, the waiting for permission, were learned. Which means they can be unlearned. Not instantly. Not without discomfort. But they are not permanent. They are not who you are. They are what you practiced. And you can practice something different.

Sovereignty is a daily practice, not a single moment. You will choose it clearly on Monday and lose it entirely by Wednesday. You will find it in one relationship and abandon it in another. That is not failure. That is the work. Sovereignty is not about never shrinking again. It is about noticing when you do, understanding why, and choosing differently the next time the moment arrives.

The people on your list (the mother, the husband, the manager) they were mirrors. Reflecting back the places where you had not yet claimed yourself. You can be grateful for the reflection without staying in front of it forever.

You are the author now. Write something different.

Reflection

This week, I want you to sit with one question (just one) and let it be uncomfortable for a little while before you answer it.

• Where am I still keeping myself small? And what would it cost me to stop?
• Not what it would cost you to claim your space. What it would cost you to keep giving it away.

Because there is a cost to sovereignty. And there is a cost to staying small. You have been paying one of them your whole life.

It might be time to pay the other one.

-Joanna

Joanna Douglas
Conscious Leadership Coach, Speaker, Teacher Founder of Enneagram Ensight

P.S. If this issue stirred something in you and you want to go deeper, I recommend The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks. It is one of the most accessible and honest books ever written about the ways we unconsciously limit ourselves, what Hendricks calls our Upper Limit Problem, and how to begin moving beyond it. It will make you uncomfortable in the best possible way.