The Distance Between Wanting Something and Actually Receiving It.

Hello and Happy Sunday!

Sunday, 31st May 2026 - 8-minute read

My hands stopped mid-air last Wednesday.

Fingers poised as if resting on an invisible keyboard. Breath caught. Eyes glazing over. And then my body flooded with the realisation of it — all at once, no warning.

An involuntary ‘oh’ escaped me.

I was listening to a video. Joe Hudson — a coach whose work I keep coming back to. And he said something that sent my mind bouncing like a diamond being held up to the light, turning it, examining it, watching it throw colour in directions I hadn’t expected.

Then it landed.

‘Shit’ I breathed out loud. To nobody.

Something opened deep in my chest. I suspected it was my heart.

Grab your drink, take a breath, and let’s go.

―――

Reflect on this before we go further.

Where are you going through all the motions of wanting something — and quietly, carefully, keeping it at arm’s length?

We’ll come back to it.

What he said.

He was talking about letting things in. Really in.

Not acknowledging them. Not noting them with a polite nod and filing them away. Letting them land in the body and rearrange something.

He said something like: how many people do you impact on a daily basis? Be honest with yourself. Let it in. Let it land deeply.

And I realised I had never done that.

Not once.

I had looked at numbers. Metrics. Pixels on a screen. I had noted them as data and moved on.

Digital coldness, wearing the costume of being informed.

But in that moment, for the first time, I let the numbers become people.

Real people. Sitting in their kitchens. Tea on the go, a chocolate digestive to dunk, the familiar warmth of a Sunday morning. Listening. Listening to me. Smiling at something I said. Arguing with it out loud. Coming back the following week anyway.

I could see them.

And the question arrived immediately: what does the version of me — with her dogs and books and chaos and geekiness and cobbled-together tech — do with that now?

"Being you is enough," the video said. Right on cue.

My world continued to shift in wisps and sparkles and glints, rearranging itself quietly.

I wrote this in the third person first.

Here’s the thing I need to tell you.

I wrote about this moment — the hands suspended, the involuntary oh, the chest opening — for a creative writing exercise this week. Show Don’t Tell.

I wrote it as ‘she’.

She felt it. Her world shifted. Her heart opened.

Not I. She.

I told myself it was a craft choice. Third person creates distance, gives the reader room. All true.

But when I looked at it honestly, I could see what I’d actually done.

I had written about receiving — and kept myself at arm’s length from it in the very act of writing it.

Even in the essay about letting it in, I hadn’t quite let it in.

That is not a small thing.

That is the pattern.

The gap between wanting and receiving.

I’ve been thinking about this all week. The specific texture of the not-letting-in.

Because it doesn’t feel like resistance. It doesn’t feel like fear. It feels like being perfectly reasonable.

You look at your numbers and you think: those are decent. And you move on.

Someone tells you your work changed something for them and you say: oh that’s so kind. And you move on.

You get the recognition, the love, the money, the learning — and you process it the way you process your inbox. Noted. Filed. Next.

Nothing wrong has happened. Nothing has been rejected.

But nothing has landed either.

And the thing you keep wanting keeps feeling strangely elusive — even when it’s standing right in front of you, handing itself over.

The not-letting-in is quiet. It’s polished. It looks a lot like being grounded and pragmatic.

And it costs you everything it touches.

What I’m doing differently.

The Wednesday moment didn’t just shift something about numbers and metrics.

It hit in the middle of something I’ve been reviewing about my whole approach.

I’ve been asking myself what people actually value. Not what the content strategy says. Not what the algorithm rewards. What people actually come back for.

And the answer keeps being the same thing.

The coffee conversation. The one where something real gets said. Where the coaching question settles in the middle of an ordinary moment and something opens. The experience of it. The presence to it.

That’s what the podcast is at its best. That’s what my coaching is. That’s what these Sunday mornings are — when I let them be.

Not a broadcast. A conversation. An experience.

And the shift I’m making — consciously, this week — is to let that be enough. To receive the truth that the version of me with the dogs and the books and the cobbled-together tech is the thing people are actually here for.

Not the polished version. The real one.

‘Being you is enough.’

Working on letting that percolate.

The clearing, then the clarity.

What people tell me most consistently about my coaching is that they feel safe enough to be completely open.

And in that safety, a different kind of letting in happens.

Not the receiving of compliments. Not the acknowledging of results. Something underneath all of that.

The thing they’ve been circling for years without quite looking at directly. The limit they’ve been bumping up against and calling something else — bad timing, the wrong circumstances, not quite ready yet. The version of themselves they’ve glimpsed in certain moments and then quietly talked themselves back from.

When someone feels genuinely safe — unhurried, not judged, not managed — the things they’ve been resisting stop needing to be resisted. They come up on their own. They speak the words they’ve never said out aloud.

The clearing comes first.

The unconscious limits. The old stories still running as if they’re true. The identity that formed around a set of circumstances that no longer exist. The fear dressed up as logic. The weight of the invisible baggage that’s pinning them back. Letting all of that in — seeing it for what it is — is what clears the ground.

Then comes the clarity.

Not a new idea about who you should become. The recognition of who you already are, underneath everything you’ve been carrying. The releasing of everything that's been limiting you, until you can see what's true.

I have two 1-1 coaching spaces opening in June.

If something in this is resonating for you — hit reply with the word ‘in’. I’ll come back to you.

What AI can and can’t do with this.

Here’s something worth trying.

Go back through the last month of your conversations with AI — whatever you use. Read what you’ve been asking for. What problems you’ve been bringing. What feedback you’ve been seeking.

Then ask it this: based on what I’ve shared with you, what evidence is there that my work is landing?

Watch what happens when you read the answer.

Do you receive it? Or do you process it — note it, file it, move on?

AI can reflect your patterns back with a precision and consistency that’s hard to replicate. It can show you the evidence of your own reach if you ask it directly. And it’s getting better at it week on week.

What it cannot do is make you let it in.

That moment — the involuntary oh, the chest opening, the world rearranging in wisps and glints — that’s not a language task. That’s a human one.

AI simulates pattern. Humans embody pattern.

The receiving is always yours.

Three questions. Specific to this edition.

First: What is the thing you keep wanting that somehow keeps feeling out of reach — even when the evidence of it is right in front of you? Name it specifically.

Second: How do you process it when it arrives? Notice the exact mechanism. The deflection, the reframe, the polite nod and the filing away. What does your not-letting-in look like?

Third: Ask AI to reflect back the evidence of your impact from your recent conversations with it. Then notice: do you receive it, or do you process it? Write down what shifts — if anything — when you read it as truth rather than data.

This is how you start writing a different future into the machine. One conscious interaction at a time.

One question before you go.

What would change — in your work, your relationships, your sense of yourself — if you let the good things actually settle?

With all my heart,

Heather

Coach, writer, and strategist at the intersection of language, NLP and AI, helping humans reclaim identity, time, and impact.

Email: [email protected]

Website: heathervmasters.com

Choosing Happy: choosinghappy.space
Start With AI: startwithai.online
Creative Writing Tips: Creativewritingtips.club

P.S. If you’ve been here since the early days of this newsletter — thank you. You’re exactly who I picture when I write. If this one landed somewhere real, pass it to the person in your world who deflects every compliment and files every good thing under ‘nice but not quite’.

P.P.S. If you’ve been thinking about building your offer, community or membership on Kajabi — this week only they’re running 50% off. I run everything through it. Email me 'Kajabi' and I'll send you the details - the offer ends 2nd June 2026.