When you’re someone who has been a hot mess publicly and more than once, like I was, the best part about turning it all around and creating the life of your wildest dreams isn’t the experience of living your dreams — it’s realizing that your worthiness had nothing to do with it. At all.

What it did take was the inner work of taking the steps I was guided to by my intuition. If you look closely at most rags to riches stories, you’ll find that they almost always go against what everyone thinks they should do, only to defy the odds and pull off some miraculous feat at the last minute. Now, while those stories can be a lot of fun to watch because they are entertaining and heartwarming from the outside, they are not the funnest to live through.

I believe the reason why most people don’t create the life they know deep down they should be living is because it is so hard to be in the world but not of the world. You have to be able to hold onto hope when everything around you seems to be crumbling. The main reason I was able to go from a nobody in my industry to attracting Deepak Chopra’s team as my very first sales coaching client (and how Alethea became the first student at her high school to be accepted into the Ivy League, but that story is for another day) was that I went against the grain and did the opposite of what seemed logical or responsible. Things can and will transform for you quickly — no matter how young, old, successful, or failed you think you are — by letting go of what you think you are supposed to do or think is true. And then, you gotta hang on for dear life.

I was sitting on the beach in Puerto Rico, having just launched my sales coaching business with only six months of experience under my belt, and no idea where my first client would come from, when my phone rang. It was Deepak Chopra (more like the Chopra Center —I’ve never worked with Deepak personally, just his team — but the point still stands). There I was, just months after quitting my corporate job in retail, with its consistent salary, insurance, and benefits, to become a remote high-ticket closer. I had tried for almost a year to get out of corporate, so I was willing to work on 100% commission, with no benefits to speak of, for a famous business coach.

I went through a grueling, two-week, unpaid trial, where I had to compete live against 19 other people all vying for this closing position. And after winning this role, which meant getting to work from home and making more in one month than I had my entire life, I 100% believed that it was the beginning of my dream come true. I thought I’d made it. No more struggle, no more worries about paying the bills, no more 14-hour-days with two-hour-long commutes.

A few months in, I was feeling pretty great. I had just hit my first five figures in commission when I got a phone call from said business coach — let’s call her Daphne — who tells me she’s planning to pack up the entire sales team in the middle of the night. She wanted to get us out from under the evil CEO of the coaching company that had recruited, hired, and trained us because they were not fulfilling their side of the agreement. So we left then and there.

In hindsight, thinking I was about to live my dream come true made what came next that much harder. I’ll never forget the despair, unfulfillment, and fear I felt on the job search. I was terrified that I would never find a career that allowed me to pay the bills and spend time with my daughter. We only had a couple of years left before she went off to college when the opportunity of a lifetime, or so I thought, landed in my lap. I thought, “This is it.”

I was losing sleep. We’d abandoned the CEO — let’s call her Caitlin, because that’s her name, Caitlin Doemner, one of my dearest friends and one of the geniuses behind the Ecstatic Way — who was a kind woman with a family of six to provide for. She’d been calling me hourly for days since we’d left, but I had been instructed by Daphne not to answer. I had no real choice. I had just quit my job, and I needed to provide for myself and my daughter.

But then, I began hearing complaints from the business owners who I’d sold these $25,000 to $30,000 marketing packages to. They weren’t getting results, or what they thought they had paid for. Come to find out, Daphne was better at marketing her marketing services than actually delivering them. These people were remortgaging their homes and scraping together spare change to buy from me. They had trusted me with their livelihoods. I wanted to believe Daphne when she told me they weren’t doing the work to get the results, so I stayed.

But I was no longer performing. After my first month in the role, I was closing at 50%, which was pretty much unheard of for a closer at the time (I now often coach my closers to enroll at 60%, 80%, and even 100% a month, ethically). But my heart wasn’t in it anymore, so I couldn’t close a deal to save my life. I either had to fake it ’til I made it and lie to close these deals, or I had to quit. It’s one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever made, but I had $14,000 in back commission to rely on as I decided to take a chance and go out on my own… or so I thought.

I should have seen it coming. Daphne was willing to steal an entire sales team out from under the woman who had built it for her. I should’ve known that when I told her I was leaving she wouldn’t pay me that back commission. I was devastated. I cried more than when I was 16 and suicidal, because now I had a daughter who trusted me with her dreams, and I had believed that we had made ours come true.

I was determined. I was not giving up.

What I did next was a little irresponsible, and the exact opposite of the logical next step, which would have been to crawl back to Caitlin. I thought about it. I thought about asking for my old job back before deciding to listen to the other voice within saying “Screw it. Take a week’s vacation to Puerto Rico and launch your own sales coaching business.” The voice wasn’t quite as loud as it had been 18 years earlier, when it was saving me from myself on my deathbed, when it told me that I could choose to die or live. But I knew that I had to listen.

I booked the flight, and my first ever Airbnb rental, the Dreamcatcher, just a short drive from Old San Juan. I sat at my little desk, writing my very first social media post as a sales coach, and I was so proud. So. Proud. I even allowed myself to dream that my goal of being a single stay-at-home mom by 33 was still possible, so I went out for a market margarita on the beach to celebrate.

I was sitting with my feet in the sand when the phone rang. It was Caitlin, who I had ghosted for weeks. But that little voice spoke up again, and it said answer the phone. So I did. I was fully expecting her to chew me out, but what I got instead was “Debb, how are you? Are you still working with Daphne?” “No,” I answered, a little shocked at the excitement in her voice. “I’m not. I quit last week, and I flew out to Puerto Rico to launch my own sales coaching business.” As those words left my mouth, I got a little embarrassed. She had trained me just months prior, and I left without a word. Who did I think I was to start my own business?

But she didn’t miss a beat. She asked if I had heard of Deepak Chopra.

“Yes, who hasn’t?”

She’d just signed him as a client, and was calling to ask if I’d come work for her again.

Instead of making the “responsible” decision, I followed that inner voice, and I manifested Deepak Chopra’s sales team as my first coaching client. I lept before the net was there, and the rest is history. In all my years of burning my life down, hitting rock bottom, and building it back up again, I’ve learned that it is that still, small voice, your intuition, that knows something the ego does not. And when you build a conscious relationship with that source of intuition, your life will take on a magical quality, like mine did, and you will begin to experience the mystery of manifestation.

Be sure to check out my podcast, The Mystery School of Manifestation, to hear this story in more detail.

Remember: You are a spiritual being having a physical experience. You are infinitely loved and supported by the entire cosmos. Here is to collapsing timelines, and co-creating our version of forever, happily ever after, our new heaven on earth, because the odds may be stacked against you, but you are not a statistic.