There’s a word that I’ve noticed we use constantly in the personal development space. We use it in coaching programmes, in podcast episodes, in Instagram captions; and don’t get me wrong, I’ve totally been guilty too.

AND I have been increasingly conscious of the potential impact of that.

The word is becoming.

I believe it could well be one of the most comfortable lies we tell ourselves.

Before you click away, hear me out. Because I’m NOT saying we should abandon the vision. Not at all; the vision is everything. Knowing who you want to become, what she looks like, how she moves through the world, that clarity is absolutely non-negotiable. Without it you’re not living, you’re just drifting, and drifting is exhausting in its own very annoying way.

But becoming lives in the future tense. 

And to me? If you’re not careful, the future tense can just be a very, very comfortable place to park your dreams indefinitely.

The trap nobody talks about

Think about how we use it.

I’m becoming more confident. Lovely. When, exactly?

I’m becoming the woman who runs her own business. Brilliant. So when does she show up?

I’m becoming financially literate. Great. What are you actually doing about it this week?

Becoming, left unchecked, slowly turns into permission to wait. It becomes a socially acceptable, even aspirational-sounding way of saying later. Once I feel ready. Once the timing’s right. Once life calms down a bit.

But.

Life is not going to calm down. I’ve been waiting for mine to calm down for about thirty years and it has yet to happen.

The shift isn’t to stop having the vision.

It’s to stop letting her live permanently in the future tense. 

Bring her into the now. Not become her eventually. Be her now. There’s a difference, and it’s everything.

The week that gave me this

This realisation didn’t come from nowhere. It came from a week that threw several things at me at once, the way weeks sometimes do when they’re trying to tell you something.

I started the week coming off the back of a VIP day with a brilliant human design specialist who is one of those women who has the slightly unnerving ability to see straight through you in the best possible way. I’d been doing all the things. Finishing the book. Planning an event. Building and creating on every front at once, because that’s apparently just who I am. And somewhere in the middle of all that doing I noticed a very familiar feeling creeping back in. The burnout feeling. The achieving-everything-but-feeling-none-of-it feeling.

I’ve been there before. I refuse to go back.

What came out of that day was something about coming back to myself underneath all the doing. Writing, because it’s where I lose myself for hours and come back more myself, not less. In-person connection, because I need to not just be productive behind a screen. And a very deliberate decision to stop letting my Survival Self drive the bus just because she’s so bloody good at driving fast.

But then a few days later, at a property investing event of all places, something else happened that gave me the real spine of this piece.

The stranger who heard what I was building

I was at an event with one of my mentors. At some point during the day, money came up, as it does when you’re talking about property investment. And I made a comment, casually, the way you do when you’re not thinking about the weight of your own words.

I said I was financially illiterate.

The man sitting next to me turned and said, quite gently but quite directly: well, that’s the problem, isn’t it. The way you’re speaking about it.

And I sat there for a second. Because he was completely right.

I don’t actually believe I’m financially illiterate. But there’s an old part of me, a conditioned part, that still reaches for that language the second money and investing comes up. I traced it back, as I always do, to where it started. A father obsessed with pensions and financial planning. A rebellious kid who switched off in response. And then years of a financial shitshow in a marriage, where my financial confidence was systematically dismantled.

I’ve done years of identity work since then. Reinvention after reinvention. And sitting in that room, I realised that some piece of that old story was still running quietly underneath my language. Every time I said I’m financially illiterate, I wasn’t describing a fact. I was rehearsing an old identity. One built under conditions that no longer exist, but one I was still speaking into being, every single time.

That landed hard. I’m not going to pretend it didn’t.

Which is exactly why we need to watch the words we use.

Abracadabra

Most people think of it as a magic word. Something you say before pulling a rabbit out of a hat.

But the actual translation of Abracadabra is I create as I speak.

Every time you say I’m too old for this, you’re not describing reality. You’re creating it.

Every time you say that’s just not me, you’re not stating a fact. You’re casting a spell on yourself, one sentence at a time, and then living obediently inside it.

Your words don’t just describe the woman you are. They install her. Every single day, in conversations you don’t even remember having, you are either reinforcing your Survival Self or you are quietly, consistently building your Designed Self. The woman who has always been there underneath all the conditioning, waiting not to be created but to be uncovered.

This is identity, in real time, being spoken into existence by you, about you, usually when you’re not paying attention.

Predictability versus possibility

Here’s the real reason we stay stuck in the becoming, stay stuck rehearsing old identities through our language, stay financially illiterate or too old or not ready or not that kind of woman.

Predictability feels safer than possibility.

Predictability is the identity you’ve already proven. It’s the one with evidence. The one that’s never let you down, because it’s never once asked anything genuinely new of you either.

Possibility is unproven. It asks you to trust something you can’t yet see, can’t measure, can’t hold any evidence for. And that is genuinely uncomfortable for a nervous system that has spent years prioritising safety over expansion.

But what I know to be true is that certainty and trust are not the same thing.

You will never have certainty about who you’re becoming. There is no spreadsheet tight enough, no five year plan detailed enough, to give you certainty about the woman on the other side of real change. What you can have is trust. Trust that you are capable of figuring it out as you go, the same way you have figured out every other hard, unprecedented, nobody-gave-me-a-manual-for-this thing in your life so far.

You’ve got through some real hard stuff. Every single bit of it. That’s not nothing. That’s everything.

Be her now

So here’s what I want to leave you with.

Watch your language. Just notice when are you speaking from the woman you were conditioned to be, and when are you speaking from the woman you’re actually building?

Be careful with the word becoming. Have the vision, absolutely. But don’t let her live permanently in the future tense. She doesn’t belong there. She belongs here. Now. In the decisions you make today, the way you walk into a room today, the words you choose about yourself today.

Decode. Recode. Be her now.

Not become her eventually.

You create as you speak. So this week, listen carefully to what you’re building.

Sarah Elizabeth is an Identity Designer, author, speaker and host of The Reinvention Era podcast. She works with high-performing women who are done surviving and ready to design the identity that leads their next chapter. Find out more at thequeenofreinvention.com

Ready to start catching your own scripts before they catch you? The EDIT Your Life No BS Reinvention Journal is ninety days of daily identity conditioning work, the exact four pillars Sarah teaches, available now on Amazon in paperback and hardback.