You Can’t Compete with You

There's a voice inside you that won't shut up.

It whispers during your morning coffee. It taps on your shoulder while you're folding laundry. It wakes you at 3 AM with visions of what could be, what should be, what's meant to be.

You've tried drowning it out with busyness. You've bargained with it, maybe later, maybe when things settle down, maybe when I'm more ready. You've even tried convincing yourself it's ridiculous, that you should be grateful for what you already have, that wanting more is somehow ungrateful or greedy.

But here's what you're really doing: You're competing with yourself. And it's a competition you will never, ever win.

The Soul Nag That Won't Quit

That restless feeling gnawing at you isn't dissatisfaction with your life. It's not midlife crisis or empty nest syndrome or hormonal fluctuation, though those might amplify it. What you're experiencing is your divine design refusing to stay dormant any longer.

After 50, something shifts. The voices that once drowned out your inner knowing, society's expectations, family obligations, career demands start losing their volume. And in that quieter space, your authentic self gets louder. More insistent. More undeniable.

This isn't your imagination running wild. It's your purpose calling you home.

When you try to settle for a mediocre existence that requires you to dim your light and shrink your dreams, you're essentially fighting against the very essence of who you are.

It's like trying to hold your breath indefinitely. You can do it for a while, but eventually, your body will override your conscious choice because breathing isn't optional, it's essential to your survival. Your divine urge works the same way. It's not going away because it can't go away. It's woven into your spiritual DNA.

The Misery of Settling

Let's be brutally honest about what happens when you try to compete with your divine urge by suppressing it.

You become a walking contradiction. Your words say "I'm content" while your energy screams "I'm dying inside." You smile through family dinners while your spirit withers from neglect. You check all the boxes society handed you while your soul keeps writing a completely different to-do list.

This internal war creates a specific kind of suffering, not the acute pain of obvious crisis but the chronic ache of unexpressed potential. It's the heaviness of carrying gifts you never delivered, wisdom you never shared, impact you never created.

And here's what makes it even more insidious: You can't actually make that divine urge disappear by ignoring it. It just shape-shifts. It shows up as irritability with people who've done nothing wrong. As physical ailments your doctor can't quite diagnose. As depression that seems to have no clear cause. As rage that erupts over minor inconveniences.

Your body, mind, and spirit all know you're betraying yourself. They're just trying to get your attention the only ways they can.

Women often come to me describing this feeling as "soul nagging", an accurate term because it does feel like being constantly nagged by something you can't escape. But here's the reframe: That nagging is actually love. It's your authentic self loving you enough to keep calling you home, no matter how many times you try to silence it.

What You're Really Fighting

When you compete with your divine urge, you're not fighting against doing more. You're fighting against being more, more authentic, more visible, more powerful, more you.

This resistance often disguises itself as practical concerns. I'm too old. I don't have the resources. What will people think? I've missed my window. Someone else is already doing it better.

But underneath every practical objection lies the same core fear: What if I step fully into who I'm meant to be and still fail? What if I give this dream everything and discover I'm not enough?

Here's the truth that will set you free: You can't fail at being yourself. You can only fail at being someone else.

The divine urge inside you isn't asking you to compete with anyone else's gifts, talents, or timeline. It's asking you to stop competing with your own emergence. To stop fighting the very thing that makes you irreplaceable.

Because here's what that voice knows that your fear hasn't figured out yet: There's something in you that only you can bring into the world. A specific combination of experiences, wisdom, perspective, and passion that creates a unique contribution no one else can replicate.

Your life, every triumph, every failure, every detour, every lesson has been preparing you for something that only you are designed to deliver. Not because you're better than anyone else, but because you're you. And you can't shortcut that. You can't substitute it. You can't compete with it.

The Cost of Competition

Every day you spend trying to convince yourself to settle is a day you're not living. Not really. You're existing, maintaining, managing, but you're not fully alive in the way your spirit knows is possible.

And the tragedy isn't just what this costs you. It's what it costs everyone who needs what you came here to give.

Think about the women watching you settle. Your daughters, your friends, the younger women in your circle who look to you for permission to dream their own dreams. When they see you shrinking to fit into a box, what are you teaching them about what's possible after 50?

Think about the communities that need your specific gifts. The problems that would be solved if you stopped competing with your divine design and just let it express. The healing that would happen. The transformation that would ripple out.

You didn't come this far to spend the rest of your life trying to make yourself smaller, quieter, more convenient for a system that was never built to handle your full power anyway.

Making Peace with Your Purpose

Here's how you stop competing with yourself: You surrender to the truth that your divine urge is smarter than your fear.

You accept that the restlessness you feel isn't a problem to solve but information to follow. You recognize that every single time you've honored that inner voice, even when it scared you, even when it didn't make logical sense you ended up somewhere better than where you started.

You acknowledge that you are not fighting against an enemy when you resist your calling. You're fighting against yourself. And that's a battle that creates casualties with no sides because there are no sides, there's only you, divided against yourself, exhausted from internal warfare.

Peace comes when you recognize that the divine urge isn't trying to ruin your comfortable life. It's trying to liberate you into your authentic one.

This doesn't mean blowing up everything you've built. It means building on what you've created with the materials of your true design instead of the blueprints society handed you.

It means understanding that the stirring in your soul isn't discontent with what is, it's recognition of what's meant to be. And only you can manifest it because only you carry the exact combination of wisdom, experience, and divine assignment necessary to bring it into form.

The Emergence That's Waiting

You're not becoming someone new. You're not trying to be someone else. You're simply allowing yourself to fully emerge into the allness of who you've always been.

That divine urge? It's not external pressure to achieve more. It's your authentic self knocking from the inside, asking to be let out. Asking to be seen. Asking to finally stop competing with all the false versions you've created to survive and just BE.

At 50 and beyond, you have the accumulated wisdom to recognize truth when you hear it. You have the life experience to distinguish between society's agenda for you and your soul's agenda for you. You have the battle scars to prove you've survived every single thing that tried to diminish you.

Now it's time to stop using all that strength to hold yourself back and start using it to step forward.

Because you can't compete with you. Your divine design will always win. The only question is how much misery you're willing to endure before you stop fighting and start flowing with what wants to emerge through you.

That voice inside isn't going to stop. It's going to get louder, more persistent, more undeniable until you finally listen. Not because it's trying to make you uncomfortable but because it loves you too much to let you waste the magnificence you came here to express.

You are here to bless others with your gifts, your talents, and your wisdom in the way only you can. Not someday. Not when you're more ready. Not when conditions are perfect. But NOW!

Now, in this season of your life when you're finally powerful enough, wise enough, and done enough with other people's opinions to actually do what you came here to do.

Stop competing with yourself. You'll lose every single time. And the world will lose what only you can give.

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About the Author

Dr. Diva Verdun, the Fierce Factor Expert and Architect of Ageless Power™, is the founder of FENOM University and the Age with Power™ movement, where she empowers ambitious women to crush it after 50 and rewrite the rules of aging. Through her signature Core 4 Principles of F.I.R.E.™ — Purpose, Passion, Prosperity, and Power — she guides women to ignite their inner brilliance, embody their authentic power, and expand into a life of bold, liberated expression. On the campus of FENOM University, Dr. Diva leads transformational experiences, legacy brand training, and deep mindset shifts designed to help women rise into their next chapter with unstoppable fire.

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