Are You Making This Error Unintentionally?

I was working with a client yesterday who kept saying she just wanted to "be happy." Another intention from someone who attended my last Overview Experience event:“I want to choose myself without feeling guilty”. Sounds reasonable enough to the untrained eye.That's when it hit me (again) how often we set intentions that seem healthy but are actually... well, impossible.You know the ones:"I'm going to be the confident version of myself.""I want to be fearless in my approach.""My goal is to be happy and healthy."Look, these sound great. I've set them myself. But I've gotta be honest – these intentions are pretty much sh*t.Why Your Good Intentions Are Secretly Sabotaging YouWhen you set an intention to "be happy," or to “choose yourself without guilt”you're unconsciously creating this fantasy where sadness and guilt can’t exist. Take a guess what happens to you when they do.You freeze and run away. (which is exactly what happened to the woman who finally chose herself–then ended having to confront feelings of guilt about it). This is why positive thinking fails you.Same deal with confidence – you're imagining some magical version of yourself that never feels doubt.I did this for years, by the way. Kept thinking I just needed to try harder.Why the therapy and personal development work wasn’t “working”. And here's what I've realized after working with hundreds of people (and cleaning up my own mess): At every level you grow, in every relationship you're in, in literally every situation you face, you'll always have something to fear and something to feel sad or guilty about.This is the reality of our ever-present shadow parts.It’s not about eliminating this resistance.It’s about expanding our capacity to feel them.That sounds kind of depressing when I put it like that. But weirdly, it's actually the most freeing truth I've ever embraced.What's Actually Happening I see this exact pattern all the time:You set an intention for “happiness/success” → inevitably feel sad/failure about something → think you're failing at your intention → push harder for “happiness/success” → feel even worse when sadness shows up again.What an exhausting, brutal cycle.What's actually happening is that the more desperately you chase a one-sided magnet, the less capacity you have for when your shadows show up. And it’s ever present– especially when you choose to uplevel your life/business/relationship. So you end up getting bulldozed by the very emotions you were trying to avoid.You end up lacking emotional resilience.Self compassion gets thrown out the window.I remember thinking I was somehow broken because I couldn't maintain this state of "arrived happiness" that everyone else seemed to have figured out. Turns out, nobody actually has that. Not even the Instagram happiness gurus. Maybe especially not them.The One Shift That Actually WorksI’m inviting you to practice an alternative.I stumbled on this by accident, honestly.Instead of setting intentions of “happiness/peace/health…”I started practicing: "Whether I'm happy or sad, whether I'm scared or brave, whether my health is good or bad, my intention is to become compassionate with myself (and do the damn thing anyway.)"It's not just rewording things. It completely changes the game. Instead of trying to eliminate half your emotional experience(which doesn't work anyway), you're building capacity for your full humanity.Try it tomorrow. The next time you feel that knee-jerk urge to "just be positive" or "just be confident," catch yourself. What would happen if you welcomed whatever experience that was actually there?There's way more to this, obviously. I couldn't possibly fit it all here, and a social media post isn’t the same as the somatic practice of it. But this one shift might be enough to start breaking the pattern–a pervasive pattern of shadow-avoidance that is part of a toxicpersonal development culture that keeps you stuck.A culture that promises transformation but delivers shame instead. The one that keeps showing you images of "arrived" happiness while your real, messy, beautiful humanity gets pushed further into the shadows.I've watched people's entire lives transform when they finally stop chasing the fantasy and start embracing their full spectrum of emotions. Relationships heal. Creative blocks dissolve. The exhausting performance of "having it all together" falls away, replaced by something much more powerful: Authentic presence and Magnetism.This isn't just theory for me. It saved my life, my relationships, and ultimately led to the deepest fulfillment I've ever known. Not because I finally "arrived" at permanent happiness—but because I stopped believing I needed to.There's a freedom waiting on the other side of this shift that most people never experience because they're too busy chasing the fantasy.Until then, be gentle with yourself. All of yourself.Your ...