The Familiar Life vs. The Fulfilled Life – How to Create a New Familiar
Tara Swann is an Emotional Empowerment & Embodiment Coach and three-time Author who guides women to alchemise emotional patterns, reclaim their inner power, and manifest a life that reflects their deepest truth.
Recently, I decided to cancel a coaching program that I’d been planning for months. I’d poured so much into coaching, time, money, energy, but it had never really paid off financially, and to be honest, it was never really where my heart lay. I loved it, but it wasn’t my true passion.
So, after seven years of trying to make coaching “work”, I decided to make the move into writing. This felt both liberating, and terrifying.
Why pivoting in life is scary
When we decide to pivot in our lives, whether because it makes sense logically or because it’s what our heart and soul desire, it can become really uncomfortable. The way you’ve been living becomes so familiar that it becomes your comfort zone, or more accurately, “safe” according to your mind.
Your brain equates familiarity with safety, whether it's comfortable or not, sometimes even whether it’s actually safe or not. Anything unfamiliar then becomes “unsafe” because what’s on the other side of something unfamiliar is unknown and, therefore, could be dangerous. This is your brain still operating as the survival tool it is designed to be, potentially halting the expansion you truly desire.
Your subconscious mind, shaped by your past experiences, controls the majority of your thoughts and behaviour until you make them conscious and choose a different story.
Your nervous system adapts to repeated experiences, not what you want. This is why it not only feels scary, but also why you can remain stuck even when you know you want more.
Your survival brain, subconscious, and nervous system, all deeply interconnected, can often work against your soul's desires, but not maliciously. I say this to build awareness, not create a war within yourself.
The grief of letting go
When I decided to make the move into writing, I had to grieve old parts of myself that were so attached to making coaching work for me. I had parts of myself attached to success, money, and validation as a coach. I had to let go of where I thought my life was going and recalibrate my body, mind, and nervous system to make this new way of living my new normal: relaxing as a mother, writing and creating around my children, and allowing myself to receive more and to be provided for. This, in itself, was scary for a woman who has had to navigate financial independence when leaving past unhealthy relationships. Although my present-day relationship is beautiful and safe, my body still held fear that if I didn’t have my own independent income, I could be at risk.
When I decided to pursue my creative passions, I also started receiving opportunities, such as grants. In the shedding of the old came the new. I started following those opportunities, and self-doubt flooded in.
Your doubts are your doorways
I woke again at 3 a.m. Lying in bed, I started noticing negative thoughts creeping in, as well as old familiar feelings of depression. Since pursuing the grant opportunity, I have noticed myself feeling the need to write “better”, to include better excerpts and poetry in the application. I had thoughts like, “Your current writing isn’t good enough. This won’t compare to others applying. It needs to be better,” and I started pacing, wondering how I could make my application better, to stand out so that I would be “accepted”, even though I’d already decided that I would pursue writing, whether I was successful with the grant or not.
The truth is, it wasn’t about the application, nor the poetry; it was old parts of myself wanting to pull me back into the familiar, a state of stress, of needing to achieve and succeed, of not feeling good enough, with the old beliefs of “you need to work harder to be worthy” and “you need to be perfect to be accepted”.
I noticed and acknowledged that the ways I’d been thinking, acting, and feeling were all signs that my heart wanted to expand into a life my brain and subconscious weren’t ready for. But I was ready.
Consciously, I know I want to live a life of flow, creativity, rest, and play, especially as a woman and mother of three, but subconsciously, I was in fear, and my brain was pulling me back to “keep me safe” because, again, familiarity equals safety to our brains.
Expanding into more
I lay there, loving on those old parts of myself, with my hand on my heart, telling them it’s safe and that I am here with them, as my Higher Self speaking to the younger parts of me in fear. I breathed into my body, creating safety and envisioning my body and nervous system expanding to hold more. More joy, more freedom and flexibility, more money, and more playful creativity, without the need for sacrifice and struggle. I allowed my body to catch up to what my heart and soul were longing for.
That’s when I got up out of bed and started writing.
You get to choose again
Whenever you decide to move into something new, especially when following a creative passion or maybe starting a business that you don’t know is going to work, it feels like a huge risk, and it can feel terrifying. You may decide to do it anyway, and in that, you may notice old parts of yourself wanting to pull you back to “safety”, just as I experienced, in the old stories of the mind, in the thoughts you think, “It’s too risky”, “I’m not ready”, “The timing isn’t right”, “I’m not good enough for this”, and in the old patterns, like anxiety or feelings of depression, that were imprinted through living in those states for long periods of time. For me, I lived with anxiety and depression for 17+ years, so those feelings were very familiar to me.
I chose again. I recognised the old thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. I acknowledged them, breathed into them, and then said to myself, “I give myself permission to live a life of joy, freedom, abundance, and creativity,” because I do. That is what I choose for myself now.
Create your new familiar
There are two main ways to change your subconscious patterns. The first is repetition: to repeat something over a period of time until it becomes familiar and, therefore, safe to your mind. The second is emotional processing: allowing the energy of the old story, belief, or feeling to move through the body by expressing and releasing it, and making space to invite in the new stories, beliefs, and feelings. For example, the story of “I am not good enough” holds energy. If I feel into my body, I can locate that energy. I can choose to be present with it, move with it, and express it through several different tools, such as emotional release, movement, sound, breath, and dance, to name a few, and then consciously choose again, “I am good enough. I am worthy of a life of joy.” Then I would make it a daily practice to further imprint this new belief through repetition.
Visualisation is another great tool to make something familiar. The brain doesn’t know the difference between real and imaginary, so visualising your new life, career, relationship, or whatever it may be, repeatedly can expand your nervous system’s capacity to hold it.
This is manifestation
You create a new reality by expanding your comfort zone, expanding your nervous system’s capacity to hold more, to upgrade into a new way of being, a new life. Your mind may try to hold you back, but with awareness and loving presence, you can create enough safety for those old parts of yourself to integrate, alchemising fear into faith, and for you to expand into your new life before it arrives. When you embody the energy of the new, of financial abundance, of deeply connected, loving relationships, of following your creative passions, your actions follow, and you begin not only to create from this place but also to allow the Universe, God, to meet you there. It still amazes me what miracles can occur when you choose to upgrade your energy.
Make the decision now
You already know what you want. You already know which area of your life feels stagnant. You can already feel the discomfort in your existing comfort zone. This is your invitation to make a new choice. Expansion usually follows contraction, just as spring follows winter. This is nature’s intention, but winter is always more pleasant when you lean into it, nurture yourself by drinking hot tea by the fire, and indulge in beautiful essential oil salt baths when you’re cold and stressed, so gift your inner world the same nurturance. Love those terrified parts of yourself into safety, and expand into joy anyway, because life is ever evolving, and so are you.
If you loved this article, you will love my books, You Don’t Have Anxiety and Becoming Her: The Woman You’ve Been Taught Not To Be. You can find them on Amazon worldwide or here.
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Read more from Tara Swann
Tara Swann, Emotional Empowerment Coach & Author
Tara Swann is an Emotional Empowerment Coach, Author, and Speaker known for helping women alchemise emotional patterns into personal power. She guides women into deeper confidence, clarity, and self-connection through her unique blend of emotional mastery, feminine embodiment, and manifestation work. Tara is the author of You Don’t Have Anxiety, Becoming Her, and The Ocean Is She, and is currently deepening her expertise through formal Tantra Practitioner training. Her mission is to help women remember who they are and consciously create lives that feel aligned, expansive, and unapologetically alive.
