Have you ever heard of “upper limits?”
This is when you’re about to break through to the next level in your life or your business, and something terrible happens.
You get sick. Your house gets vandalized. Your partner breaks up with you. Basically, the Universe throws a curveball at you that screws everything up, and you’re like, “WTF, mate?”
I first heard about upper limits in the Gay Hendricks book “The Big Leap.”
My friend Paige Filliater describes it as the universe giving you a double opt-in. (The online marketing nerd trapped inside me finds that hilaaaarious.)
If you’re not familiar with the term, in email marketing a double opt-in is when you enter your email address, and then you have to go to your email and confirm that you actually want to receive the thing you signed up for a second time.
When you’re upper limiting, that’s what the Universe is doing to you.
Say you’re about to have a huge launch, make a lot of money, get married, or launch a brand-new website like I just did.
It’s not long before the Universe swings on by into your personal inbox (aka your actual life) asking if you’re sure that you actually do want to take this next big step that could change everything for you.
I’ll tell you what happened to me on a Saturday night. At the time I recorded this video, I was about to launch my brand new, hot to trot, professionally designed and branded new website.
We worked on it FOR A YEAR.
The branding, the photography, the copy, the opt-in quiz, all of the funnels, the behind-the-scenes work, the edits and edits and more edits.
It’s still not perfect, but eventually, you have to reach a point where you’re like, “Okay, I choose to move forward.”
So, to tease it out to my friends + family, I went ahead and posted a preview of my new home page on my personal Facebook page.
Five. Minutes. Later.
My roof started to leak.
Now, I live in San Diego, and it NEVER RAINS HERE, but on that particular Saturday night we had a wild thunderstorm. (Okay, yes, I was home working on a Saturday night. What can I say? When I’m doing something creative, it’s like play to me.)
And the pipe above my couch actually started leaking.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
(Fun fact: when I told this story to my friend and fellow copy babe Erin Lindstrom, she said the exact same thing had happened to her when she launched her new website. And that the exact same thing had happened to our other friend Dr. Lindsay Padilla, The Rebel Professor, when SHE launched her new website. So, if you’re planning to put out a new website, consider this your warning!)
Now, picture this. I’m sitting, working away on my laptop on my new gorgeous digital space, while water is pouring down the wall directly behind my head.
I upper limited so hard, I LITERALLY BROKE THE CEILING.
Now, what do people normally do when they hit an upper limit?
They stop.
They go right instead of left, they push pause, or they quit altogether.
They say that the upper limit is a sign that they’re not meant to do whatever it is they had planned to do.
They hide. Retract. Maybe they say they’ll try again later.
Here’s why that’s a bad idea:
If, on this particular night, I had shut down the laptop and stopped working, that would have been GIVING IN TO OLD PATTERNS OF BEING.
That would have told the Universe, “Thanks for sending me this dream, but I don’t actually want it. It’s inconvenient for me to have it right now, so you can take it back. Give it to the next girl.”
When you do back down in the face of an upper limit, you’re telling the universe or whatever it is that you believe in, that you are not ready for what comes next.
Now, I didn’t just sit there and let the ceiling rainwater down on me and my laptop. That would’ve been nuts.
Of course, I dealt with the problem.
I called our building’s maintenance man (the privilege of renting!!), and he came up here to fix it while I continued to work on my new website.
They did their work.
I did mine.
My website stayed on track.
And I was even able to deliver a copy project to one of my clients because I stayed committed to finishing what I’d started.
Just because an upper limit pops up in your life, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a sign that something is wrong.
It doesn’t necessarily mean that anything bad is coming.
It doesn’t have to be ominous.
And, in fact, you don’t even really have to react to it.
It would’ve been easy for me to sit here and cry about my ceiling leaking.
But I didn’t.
Instead, I laughed. And HARD.
I actually posted about it on Facebook, which is what inspired this video blog.
Those upper limits, babe?
They’re just old things shaking out.
(My friend Alexia Usgaard refers to it as “The jiggle.”)
You need to shed it all, and you need to shake it loose.
You can think about it like a detox, if that helps.
It’s just taking your old ways of being, your past limiting beliefs, the things you used to believe were good enough for you but aren’t any longer, and you’re flushing them out of your system and falling out of your vibration.
It’s like when a sliver that’s been buried deep comes to the surface so the body can get rid of it.
You don’t hold onto the sliver.
You don’t say, “I’m reeeeeally attached to this sliver. We’ve been through a lot. I’ve already poured so much time and energy into caring for this sliver. I’d like to keep it.”
You say goodbye to the damn sliver.
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