Reach Out and Touch the Barrier

When there is something between you and a big goal, the instinct is to point at it. The bank said no. The timing is wrong. The market is not ready. The person standing in the way will not move. These are the external things, the outside parties and circumstances, and they are real. They deserve to be taken seriously.

But here is what I have learned, across years of hitting barriers in my own pursuit of big change, and watching others do the same: before you accept the barrier as the explanation, reach out and touch it. Push on it a little. Find out what it is actually made of.

Because a surprising number of the time, what looks like an external wall turns out to have your handprints on it from the inside. The fear that the harder path will expose you. The assumption that no means stop rather than redirect. The belief that something is impossible that is actually just uncomfortable. The barrier is real. But the reason you cannot move past it may be less about the obstacle and more about the fear that moving around it would require.

And here is the gift in that discovery: the moment you realize the thing in your way is inside you rather than outside you, you gain the power to solve it. External obstacles can only be navigated. Internal ones can be dissolved.

The Bank Denial and the Hero's Journey

Here is an example that captures this precisely.

You want to start a business. You go to a bank with the skills you have now, the money you have now, the track record you have built so far. And the bank denies you. Reasonable. You are at the beginning, the exact point where the gap between who you are right now and what the venture requires is widest.

Most people take that denial and keep it forever as the reason they could not do it. The bank said no. That was that. No further action available.

But decode what actually happened. Underneath the accepted explanation is a fear: the fear of the other ways of getting funded. The pitch to the startup incubator. The investor meeting with influential people. The messy, uncomfortable, socially exposed path that requires promoting yourself in front of experts who will evaluate you.

The bank denial was comfortable in a specific way: it was a form, a process, a known channel with a known outcome. It was possible to try and be rejected without having to be seen trying. The alternative paths are not like that. They require you to be seen trying. And that is the actual barrier.

When you go the harder way around, something else happens too. The hero's journey begins. You start building skills, partnerships, networks, and relationships that the one-click bank approval would never have generated. You become someone who knows how to pitch. Someone who knows where early-stage funding actually lives. Someone who has the relationships in the room that change what is possible next. The denial sent you on the longer path, and the longer path is where all of that was waiting.

The But Dot Dot Dot Tells You Everything

Listen for it in conversations with people who want to change something. And listen for it in your own internal monologue.

I have been wanting to start this. I have been craving a new way of working. I want to try this goal. But.

Everything after the but is worth examining honestly, because most of the time it is pointing at someone else or something else when the real block is inside. The but is almost always a fear or a belief that something is not possible, which is almost always inaccurate because most things are possible in some form once you decide you are willing to go the way around.

The question to ask when you catch yourself at a but is: what part of this challenge am I creating? What part of this barrier do I own? Not as a self-blame exercise. As a power exercise. Because the part you own is the part you can change. The part you own is where the superpower is hidden.

Life Is Testing You. Here Is How to Win.

The tests life puts in your path are not random and they are not punishment. They are, if you look at them squarely, exactly calibrated to the skills you need to develop to get where you want to go.

The test of the bank denial is the test of whether you are willing to be seen trying, willing to promote yourself, willing to enter a room full of experts and pitch your idea before it is polished. Pass that test and you have a skill you will use for every venture, every negotiation, every difficult conversation for the rest of your life.

The test of the difficult relationship is the test of whether you are willing to end what is not working rather than manage it forever. Pass that test and you have the muscle that protects every future relationship from the same slow deterioration.

Every barrier is a test. And the only way to win the test is to push past your uncomfortable edge, that one thing you would not have done before because it seemed too awkward, too adult, too disruptive, too selfish, too far outside the expected lane, and discover that on the other side of it is a door you did not know was there.

That is the KindEdge approach: seek the change. Push toward the uncomfortable edge. When you hit a barrier, ask what part of it you own. And then own that part, solve it, and let the solving of it make you more capable of everything that follows.

Join me at kindedge.com. It is not going to be easy. But it is going to be fun.

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