When Getting What You Want Feels Uncomfortable
Most of us spend so much of our lives bracing for things to go wrong that we don’t know what to do when they go right.
As a life coach, that second part is where I watch a surprising number of capable, accomplished people quietly struggle. Not with the hard stuff. With the good stuff: more time, more money, more room than they're used to.
If you grew up with some form of scarcity — where there was never quite enough time, money, space, or attention to go around — then having more than enough as an adult can feel less like relief and more like a problem you don't have a solution for. In this article, I’ll show you what I mean.
The look my clients give me when I point out that they have a surplus of time, money, or energy.
Imagine that something good happens. An errand wraps up early and your whole afternoon opens up. A payment lands and there’s more in your account than you were expecting. A client you were expecting to have a hard time with ends up bringing you new opportunities.
Now watch what happens next.
If you’re anything like the people I work with, you fill it. Quickly.
The open afternoon gets handed to a task that could have waited until tomorrow. The extra money finds a bill, a debt, a “might as well while I have it” purchase. The extra energy gets spent worrying about “the other shoe” and when it will drop.
This is usually the moment people start judging themselves, so let me say something to that whisper growing in you.
“You’re not bad with money, time, or rest. ”
You are not doing this because you lack discipline. You’re doing it because, somewhere underneath, having more than enough feels unfamiliar.
Surplus, abundance, spaciousness, whatever word you want to call it, feels strange to the side of you that learned to get by on just enough, and maybe even feel proud of how you’ve made the most out of so little.
And like the rest of us, when something is unfamiliar, it can register as unsafe. So we let the extra time, money, or energy go right back out the door soon after it shows up, until it settles back into a level that feels tighter but familiar.
Scarcity Hides Where You'd Never Think to Check
The slippery thing about scarcity is that it hides in plain sight, inside our most ordinary, sensible-sounding phrases.
"I'll start saving once I've paid everything off."
"I can't relax until everything on the list is done."
"It's easier if I just handle it myself."
Each one sounds smart and responsible, which is exactly why the pattern underneath them goes unexamined for years. So when you finally sense something is off, you go looking in the obvious place. If it shows up around money, you scrutinize your spending. If it shows up around time, you rebuild your calendar. If it shows up around rest, you try another morning routine, another app, another system.
But you can manage your calendar for years and never touch the thing that keeps filling it back up. Same with money. Same with rest. The pattern isn’t living in any one of those rooms. It’s underneath all of them at once, running through the pipes that get jammed up anytime there’s suddenly more than you’re used to.
That’s why it can feel like whack-a-mole. You catch it in one area of your life, and it surfaces again, wearing different clothes, somewhere else.
The Client Whose Money Left as Quickly as It Arrived
I worked with a client who runs his own business and sends money home to his family. Every time money came in, it went right back out, almost immediately, while he kept himself on a strict budget. A payment would land and within a day it was already spoken for. He described taking five steps forward in his finances and feeling like he’d slid ten steps back within a day or two.
When we slowed down, what surfaced wasn’t a budgeting problem. It was his guilt. It showed up any time he had more than he strictly needed. In our sessions, he traced it back to growing up watching a parent live inside a constant loop of borrowing and owing. In his entire life, money had always represented a thing that you owed someone else. So holding onto it felt almost wrong.
As our coaching continued, we noticed something interesting. The exact same thing was happening with his energy. The moment he had a little extra after coming home, he poured it straight into his housemates or into whatever needed him. He couldn’t hold a surplus of money, and he couldn’t hold a surplus of energy. One belief. Two different ways of showing up.
That’s the thread. Once you spot it in one place, you tend to see it everywhere.
How I Inherited My Scarcity Mindset, and Rewrote It
I know this one from the inside.
I grew up in an immigrant family with a mother who was remarkable with money. She would walk up and down the street for an hour to save a quarter. She could stretch a dollar like nobody else. That is a real skill, and I’m genuinely proud to have inherited it. My partner and I still get a thrill hunting down a good sale.
But there’s a point where carefulness tips into something heavier. My mom would go without things she actually needed because, underneath it, she believed her money could disappear at any given time. Growing up in a war-torn era will do that to you. I knew young that I didn’t want to live my life this way, but what I couldn’t see for a long time was how faithfully I was repeating it anyway.
Fast forward to when I started my own business. I didn’t hire a single person to help me for almost five years. Not because I couldn’t, but because spending on support felt like putting myself in debt, even when I clearly needed it. I had quietly inherited the same rule. Hold on tight. Don’t let it go. More might not come. I’d built a business that regularly brought in money, and I was still running my mother’s program in the background.
What finally shifted my behavior wasn’t a spreadsheet. It was getting honest about what I actually wanted money to do for me by connecting it to my values. For me, money is freedom. The kind that buys back time. I get to be time-rich instead of being busy all the time trying to chase six figures.
Money also connects me to wholeness. It allows me to actually tend to my mind, body, and soul instead of running them into the ground. (I started this business promising myself that I wouldn’t overwork myself the way my previous jobs had.)
Naming what money is for turned out to be only half of it. I also had to look, clear-eyed, at the other half. What are my current choices quietly setting me up for? What are they costing me? I do this with clients all the time, because real clarity needs both sides.
“ Look only at the upside and you get ungrounded optimism. Look only at the risk and you get fear-driven action. You need both to guide you toward where you want to be. ”
The analogy I use is a bowling lane. You can spend years trying to get good enough to send the ball straight down the middle on willpower alone. Or you can put the guardrails up on both sides, so whatever the day throws at you, the ball keeps traveling toward the pins you’re aiming for. Getting honest about both the payoff and the cost is how you raise the guardrails. Once mine were up, paying for help stopped looking like a leak and started looking like me keeping a promise to myself.
You need more than will power to break out of a multi-generational pattern.
The next evolution of my money mindset? I want to treat money like water. Held too still in one place, it goes stagnant. When I let some of it go, I’m making room for what comes next. I won’t pretend this mindset feels easy, but remembering it takes away a lot of the quiet authority my old beliefs about money had over me.
Scarcity Came with a Map. Having More Never Did.
Most of the people I work with learned, early and well, how to operate in scarcity. How to stretch, ration, brace, make it work. That map kept them safe, and more often than not, it’s part of what made them successful.
But the map they were handed was built for scarcity. It doesn’t fit surplus, and most of us never went looking for a different way. So when more than enough finally shows up, you reach for the only map you have, and it can’t read the terrain. You end up doing the thing you do know how to do. You shrink the surplus back down to a size the old map can make sense of.
The work here isn’t forcing yourself to spend or relax on cue. (That’s just another rule to obey.) The work is noticing the belief that rushes in to fill the space, and getting honest about whether it’s still true for the person you are now.
What to Do When You Finally Have More Than Enough
You don’t have to overhaul anything today.
The next time something good lands, an unexpected hour, a little more money than you planned for, a stretch of unbothered calm, you don’t actually have to do anything with it. Just notice the urge to fill it. Notice how fast it arrives. Notice what it seems to be protecting you from.
That noticing is where it begins. The space was never the problem, and what you do with it is only the surface. The thread worth following runs underneath, the quiet belief that decides what you let yourself keep, whether it shows up in your money, your time, or your energy.
That thread is hard to follow on your own, because you’re standing inside it. It rarely feels like a belief. It feels like plain good sense, which is exactly why it can run for years without ever being questioned.
That is the kind of thing we do together on a free discovery call. No pressure, and no pitch in disguise. You bring the question this stirred up, maybe why can’t I hold onto money, or why does an open afternoon leave me restless instead of relieved, and we start pulling the thread right there.
If reading this named something you keep doing, that recognition is most useful while it’s still fresh. Book a free discovery call, and we’ll start mapping out what it looks like for you to hold onto a good thing, your time, your money, and your energy, without flinching. And if you’re curious but not quite ready to talk, you can join my newsletter, where I work through this kind of thing each week.
If you read this and thought that's me, don't let the moment pass.
That flicker of recognition fades fast, and it's the best doorway in. Keep it open by booking a free discovery call, and we’ll start mapping out what it looks like for you to hold onto a good thing – your time, your money, and your energy – without flinching.
And if you’re curious but not quite ready to talk, you can join my newsletter, where I work through this kind of thing every few weeks.
