By Poppy Delbridge

You Don't Need to Try Harder, You Need to Feel Safe

The unlock was internal

For a generation that knows more about its own biology than any before it, feeling truly well still feels like a destination rather than a reality. Poppy Delbridge built a methodology used by thousands of women. None of it happened until she stopped pushing and started listening. She talks to theALLBRIGHT about fear of success, the fawn state, and living your own life.

I don’t talk about this very much, but yes, there was a version of my life where I stayed in a relationship in which I felt I didn’t belong, had the big TV job, whilst quietly ignoring the pull I had towards the transformational work, I do now. That path was available to me. And I think about it sometimes, not with regret, but as a reminder of how close we can come to choosing the familiar over the true. It could have been mine had I selected it. Or rather, it would have been mine if I hadn’t found just enough courage and confidence to make a different pivot.

The block I encounter most often in others, the one nobody admits to having, is a fear of success. Specifically, the fear that having more: more visibility, more money, more impact, will cost them something they can’t afford to lose. It sounds counterintuitive but I see it constantly in high-achieving women. It’s the Blue Gremlin in my work; the subconscious belief that expansion is dangerous.

Traditional tapping draws from ancient acupuncture and acupressure, the same meridian points used in Chinese medicine for thousands of years, combined with modern understanding of how the nervous system holds emotional memory. It was developed into Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) by Gary Craig in the 1990s, building on earlier work in applied kinesiology. Tapping specific acupressure points while using precise language sends a direct safety signal to the amygdala. Cortisol drops and blood returns to the prefrontal cortex. It isn't a belief system, it's biology.

I thrive on achievement. I was over-pushing in every direction, and then my body made me stop. I ended up in an MRI scanner, starting to lose my sight, a cancer diagnosis followed and I pretty much lost everything in my life in the space of one year. Saving my life and made me see a bigger picture. But that diagnosis was the moment I finally started to see clearly, not just metaphorically, but actually.

“What surprised me most wasn’t the overworking but how much I had needed other people to confirm my worth before I felt safe to move.”

When your vision begins to go, the noise falls away very fast. Everything I’d been white knuckling suddenly looked less meaningful. I could see, perhaps for the first time, that I had been seeking external validation so relentlessly that I had completely lost contact with my own internal signal. What followed was the journey that became my book, Unlock Your Power. I learnt to spot my negative spirals before they take hold, thereby shifting myself from pushing to sensing - from performing to pattern-spotting. One layer at a time, I've changed my negative spirals.

The pattern that surprised me most wasn’t the overworking, it was how much I had needed other people to confirm my worth before I felt safe to move. I cared what people thought about me so much that I settled inside a life that wasn’t really my true choice. Once I could see that, really see it, I didn’t need the MRI to tell me something was wrong with my nervous system. I could feel it, and I could shift it too.

When I was at university, I became a young parent and lost my father in the space of six months, and even though everyone told me it was absurd to continue with my degree, I did. Then I entered a newspaper competition to win a job in television as a creative in London. On paper, I had very little going for me, I had a baby very young, I wasn’t living anywhere near London. How could I get it? But I decided it was possible for me. I used my Keys™ method before I knew what they were, to make it feel already done. Not as wishful thinking, but as a genuine internal shift of inner power and confidence. Working through Desire to get honest about how much I actually wanted it. Using Decide to stop hedging. Using Debunk, the big key, to clear the voice telling me it wasn’t ‘realistic’. Letting myself feel it as Done before any external evidence supported that.

I got the job offer and a First Class Degree. I didn’t push myself hard, I pulled it in.

“That’s the real version. Not a perfectly structured morning. Just a commitment to not letting a hard moment become a hard life. ”

I’m a Global Ambassador for Mind, the leading mental health charity, and I will always say: if you’re feeling in a very low or disconnected state, please seek out a professional one-to-one. That is always the first step, and there is no shame in it whatsoever. My work is trauma-informed and the book is clear about its scope.

What would I say to the woman reading this who has tried everything and still feels stuck? You’re not, you’ve hit your Limit, which is a very different thing. The Limit™ isn’t a wall. It’s a pattern. And patterns can be shifted quickly once you can see them. The reason nothing has worked is probably not the thing you tried. It’s that none of it reached the subconscious layer where the pattern actually lives. You can understand something entirely intellectually and still be running a 20-year-old belief in your nervous system. That’s not your fault. But it is your responsibility and power to address.

I am not someone who sits there thinking I’m terribly successful and joyous every moment of the day. I want to be clear about that. When things get too much, I go back to basics. I make sure I am nurturing myself properly, long hot magnesium baths, upping my supplements, my nutrition, my hydration. The physical foundations matter. I can’t do the inner work from a depleted body.

And I decide to speak to myself in an impossibly kind and affirmative way. The kind of way that most people would genuinely find strange if they heard it. I don’t even get out of bed if I’m not feeling I can face the day, and it doesn’t take very long to reset using what I’ve put into this book. That’s the real version. Not a perfectly structured morning. Just a commitment to not letting a hard moment become a hard life.