Your Allowance Edge

Are you finding it hard to create results in your life? Do you take a lot of action, and yet you find yourself sabotaging yourself? If so, you need to expand your allowance edge, which is what today’s result is all about.

Bonjour, and welcome to The French Kiss Life Podcast, where personal development meets style. I’m Tonya Leigh, certified master life coach and the hostess of this party, where we explore how to live artfully and well. Each week, I’ll be sharing inspiring stories, practical tips, and timeless wisdom on how to elevate the quality of your everyday and celebrate along the way. Let’s dive into today’s episode.

Well hello, my friends. Welcome back to another episode. And hey, if this is your first time joining us, I’m so glad that you’re here. So, I’ve been having a really fascinating month, and I wanted to share with you all what has been going on for me because I know I’m not alone in this.

So, I’ve had an incredible month. We opened the doors to the School of Self-Image on October the 1^st and we exceeded how many women we thought were going to join. And not only that. We’ve been getting so many emails from women just saying how, in such a short amount of time, they’re experiencing so many shifts and how fast things are changing for them.

And on top of that, I’m traveling for a month. So, right now I’m in Beverly Hills. I was in Vegas for the weekend. Things are actually going really well. And I’ve hit up against my, what I call, allowance edge. And that’s what we’re going to talk about in this podcast.

Because I see this with my clients. I definitely, you all, see it in myself. And it’s something that women often ask me about. And the question that they usually ask is, “Why do I self-sabotage?” And the reason why you self-sabotage is because you’re hitting up against your allowance edge.

So, I like to describe your allowance edge as the largest possible quantity of what you can allow into your life. You know, we often think that what we want is happiness or joy or abundance or love. But what we subconsciously seek is comfort. And do you know what’s comfortable? What’s familiar.

And so, whenever you start to create outside of your current self-image, it’s uncomfortable. And so, the brain thinks that there is a danger and it wants to pull you back into what you know and to what is familiar.

So, if you’re not accustomed to feeling good, for example, for long stretches of time, what’s going to happen is your mind’s going to say, “Danger, this feels uncomfortable,” even though it’s what you want. It feels good. If you’re not accustomed to feeling good, your brain will interpret that as a danger.

And what ends up happening is that you begin to take action to bring you back into the life that you can allow for yourself. I see this all of the time. And again, I do it to myself. When things start to get really, really good and I exceed my goals and things are just crazy, I’m like, “Can things get even better?” My brain immediately says, “No.”

My brain usually says, “The shoe’s about to drop. Life’s not supposed to be this easy or this fun or this good.” And if I keep in that energy and following those thoughts, guess what I do. I prove it true to myself. I’ll do some crazy thing to make it hard. I’ll do some crazy thing to self-sabotage, to come back into what I ca allow, to my allowance edge.

Now, fortunately, I’ve been doing this for a long time. And so, I keep pushing my edge out a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more. And I’m a little bit of a slow learner. Actually, I’m not. I relate to so many of my clients when they say to me, “I get it intellectually but the practice of it is so much more difficult.”

And let me tell you, I can relate to that statement 100% because I’m actually a very fast learner. But the implementation over the past years, I’ve been slower than some at implementing it. But this crazy thing is happening within me, you all, that I’m getting quicker at it. It’s like I’m in this quantum energetic field where my allowance edge is just being pushed further and further out and much more quickly.

And so, I wanted to talk about this and share with you some of the things that I’m doing to expand my own allowance edge. I was recently on a call with one of my dear friends and her goal is to find the love of her life.

And she called me up and she was telling me, she was like, “I met this incredible man. He’s amazing. It’s going so well.” And then, I could tell that she’d hit up against her allowance edge because she started to say things like, “This is too good to be true. This is probably not going to work.”

She started to talk about the things that she doesn’t like about him. Which weren’t many. But I could see what was happening on a meta view of my friend’s just hit her allowance edge. From her past, she’s had some bad relationships and so now, this incredible guy has appeared within her life and it doesn’t fit within her current self-image.

Our self-image is everything, you all. Our self-image depicts how much we can allow into our lives. And so, if your self-image says things like, “I’m not lovable,” or, “I’m not good at relationships,” that’s ultimately what you create. And so, with her, I just pointed out how she was limiting herself because of what she can allow into her life.

You know, if you are someone, for example, that you really want to be acknowledged, you want to be appreciated, but you notice that whenever someone compliments you, you deflect and you don’t really take it in, it’s an example of you don’t get what you want; you get what you allow.

You’re pushing away the very thing that you don’t want because it’s so uncomfortable for you. The same goes for money. I see this so often. Women will come to me and tell me, “I want to grow my business. I want to make more money.” But when we start talking about it, you can tell that their self-image doesn’t allow for it. Their allowance edge only allows for so much money in their lives.

So, no matter how much they work, no matter how much they try, they don’t make the money that they want to make. In fact, I have actually seen my clients, when they first start to work with me, have incredible opportunities come to them that would help them generate money. And what do they do? They say no or they sabotage it because they don’t have the energetic capacity to hold that yet.

So, the work is to expand your self-image, which then expands your allowance edge to hold what it is that you want for yourself. You can see this play out in different areas of our lives.

You can see it with money. I think about someone who’s a billionaire, how they have the capacity to have that much money energetically. It feels safe to them. It doesn’t feel like a threat to them.

I think about people who are in amazing relationships. They have the allowance edge expanded enough to allow for that much love and that much connection. I see it in weight loss. Someone who has an expansive allowance edge can allow for all the emotion that comes from losing weight. And they can allow for the body that they truly, truly want.

And all of this comes down to your self-image; how you see yourself. That is what is creating your allowance edge. Your current life is a reflection of what you can allow and what you disallow into your life. So, I want you to think about, what do you allow into your life and what do you push away?

Now, for some of you, what you allow into your life is things that are keeping you stuck, things that feel heavy, things that don’t grow you as a human. But guess what. It’s comfortable. It’s familiar. Now, some of you are actively working on expanding your own allowance edge of what you can allow into your life. But it’s also what you disallow. What don’t you allow into your life?

I mean, I think that’s just as good of a question. What are you a no to and what are you a yes to? Because that is what is creating how much you can allow into your life. And here’s the thing; pushing up against your allowance edge is so uncomfortable. Which is why most people don’t do it.

But do you know what else is uncomfortable? Knowing you are meant for more and not having the courage to go and do it, create it, become it, experience it. The way I like to describe this to clients is there’s the you today and where you are. And most likely, you’re feeling a little discontent. You’re feeling a little uncomfortable. Or maybe you’ve hit rock bottom and you’re like, “I’ve got to do something about my life.

And so, you set out to change and you start rising and rising and rising. And all of a sudden, you hit that allowance edge. And that too is so uncomfortable. The difference is, it’s an unfamiliar discomfort. You know how to do the other discomfort really well.

I remember me with my weight loss struggles. I knew how to be overweight really well. I knew how to diet. I knew how to focus my energy in that direction. Do you know what I didn’t know how to do really well? Be a naturally slim woman. That was uncomfortable.

I didn’t know how to have a healthy relationship with food. It did not fit into my self-image. And so, I could lose weight, but all of a sudden, like clockwork, I would put it right back on.

So, what would happen is that I would leave the discomfort of being overweight and I would start to work my way up and I’m losing weight, losing a little bit of weight. And I hit my allowance edge. And instead of continuing to step into that discomfort that’s now unfamiliar, I reverted back to the familiar discomfort.

So, how do you keep pushing through your allowance edge. The first thing I want to offer you is that you need to question the thoughts that tell you to turn around. The thoughts like, “This is too good to be true. You can’t keep the weight off. Something bad is about to happen. People shouldn’t feel this good. It’s too easy.”

These are just thoughts. And I want you to see these thoughts for what they are. They are simply there to bring you back to the familiar. So, it is up to you to question them.

It’s just like, for me, when we launched the School of Self-Image and I’m like, “Oh, my goodness. This didn’t just happen. This is too good to be true.” I hit an extraordinary goal, and instead of just relishing in it and appreciating it and being excited about it, my mind went a little bit crazy.

But I know now not to ride that train. I stepped off the train and I just watched my crazy thoughts go by. And I really started to question it. I’m like, “Why can’t this be happening?” Because obviously it is. How extraordinary is this? How much fun is this? What if it just keeps getting better and better? What if this is the way life is supposed to be?

But when I’m resisting life, I cannot access this kind of energy. And so, as I begin to question these crazy thoughts in my head, what I’m actually doing is I’m pushing my allowance edge out more and more and more.

I think it’s also powerful to ask yourself quality questions; questions that push the boundaries of what you can allow. So, for example, asking yourself things like, “How much can I allow right now and why?” Figure out why that is your answer.

“What if I am limitless?” What comes to your mind when you ask yourself that question? What would it look like if I allowed my life to be fully abundant, fully full of love, fully full of joy? What would that be like?

And as you begin to ask these kinds of questions, your brain is being rewired to think about the possibility of that. And not only that. But it’s up to you to prove to your brain that it’s safe for this kind of allowance into your life.

So, how is it safe that you have abundance? How is it safe that you have lots of love? How is it safe that you are full of joy? Because the brain is always going to choose comfort over all of those things, unless you manage it properly.

Your higher self needs to be in the driver’s seat of your life instead of your toddler. We all have that toddler brain that’s freaked out about everything. But when you drive with the higher part of you at the wheel, I am telling you, anything is possible for you, my friend.

I am also a very visual person. And one of the things that I have done that has really supported me in expanding my own allowance edge is when I’m hitting up against it, to literally use my body as an expression of how I want to be in that situation.

So, for me, that looks like shoulders back, chest out, being so open and, like, breathing in the expansion. I’ve often talked about having a bring-it attitude. One of my favorite mantras is, “Bring it. I was made for this.” And that is such a useful mantra in all of life’s situations. But I’ve often talked about it when you’re in a challenging time.

But what about when you’re in a good time and your brain’s trying to tell you that you shouldn’t be having such a good time? You can equally say to yourself, “Bring it, I was made for this.” and use your body as a representation of that mantra. Hold yourself highly. Open your arms and literally say to life, “Bring it. I was made for this.”

I was talking with my friend the other night and I’m like, “What would life be like if we lived fully expressed? Whenever we hit that allowance edge, we just stepped into it over and over and over again, constantly pushing it out?”

Imagine how much we could hold in our lives. Because a lot of you are trying to get there through a lot of action. And action is a part of the equation. But if you don’t have the capacity for what it is that you want in your life, you’re going to sabotage yourself every single time.

The key to lasting change and getting results so much more easily is to constantly evolve your self-image, which will ten expand your allowance edge. Because if I've learned anything, it's this; you don’t get what you want. You attract who you are. And your allowance edge is being depicted by who you are.

And, guess what, you get to decide who you are. You get to decide how much you can allow into your life. And listen, you all, this is our one life. Why not see what’s possible? Why not see how big we can allow our lives to be, by allowing more of the good stuff in our lives?

 Want us to stop pushing it away. I want us to stop saying no to it. I want us to be people that are willing to walk into that unfamiliar discomfort. Because on the other side of it is your new normal. It’s a new allowance that you’ve created in your life.

If this is something you know that you want to work on, if you’ve tried to take a lot of action but you feel stuck, if you just can’t seem to make way for what it is that you want, the answer is to transform your self-image, which will, again, expand your allowance edge.

This is the kind of work that we do within the School of Self-Image. We do it by focusing on your mindset, how you’re thinking about yourself, what you are saying yes to and what you’re saying no to and how that’s impacting you.

We also do it through your style. Your style is such a reflection of your image. How are you showing up in the world? Are you showing up on purpose? Are you showing up as the biggest version of yourself?

And then, we focus on your surroundings. Because your surroundings are a reflection of what you allow and what you don’t allow into your life as well. And we just opened the doors for the November class. And so, if you want to join us, head over to schoolofselfimage.com/join, where we go deeper into this work and we practice it on a daily basis.

So, I want to leave you with this one question; what are you not allowing into your life? And what would it look like if you would expand your allowance edge for space for the things that you truly, truly desire? Have a great week, everyone.

If you enjoyed this episode and you want to dive even deeper into the French Kiss Lifestyle, let’s start with a makeover; a mindset makeover. You can download my free training, The Three Mindset Makeovers Every Woman Needs, by visiting frenchkisslife.com/mindset. Because, after all, mindset is the new black.