or: what Merlin St. Germain is actually asking of us.
I was six years old when I got my first badge.
I grew up in the Boy Scouts. Little colored patches, sewn onto a sash, for something I’d learned to do. And here’s what nobody told me at the time, that patch wasn’t the beginning of learning. It was the beginning of a way of learning. A whole operating system, quietly installing itself in a kid: do the thing, get the token, feel the worth.
I’m forty-something now. Let me tell you where that operating system took me.
Fifteen years in the military. That’s a full architecture of badges, awards, ribbons, extra schools, every one of them communicating: you are now more. I got out and went civilian. Chased dev certs to break into app development. Pivoted to Agile, stacked the PMP. Started a business with family. Business struggled. Went and got an MBA, bought a credential explicitly to fix the money problem, because that’s how I’d been taught the world worked. Get the paper. Solve the thing.
The MBA helped. It didn’t fix it. We still aren’t making enough from the business to walk away from a paycheck, and I’ve been at this over ten years. I’m looking for work right now, actually, while I write this. The system doesn’t care about my inner magic. I still have to pay rent.
For fun, I played MMOs. Achievement games. Level, quest, badge, repeat. Even my leisure runs the same loop.
I’m not telling you all this to complain. I’m telling you because at some point I realized I had never lived outside this operating system. Not once. Six years old to now, every environment I’d stepped into ran on the same core code, external acknowledgment is how you know you’re worth something. Scouts, Army, civilian workforce, credentialing bodies, game designers, the whole market. They all run it. Some of them designed it. Some of them just inherited it. All of them use it.
Then the civilian world did the thing the machine wasn’t supposed to do. It stopped confirming me.
You come out of the military with real skills, real leadership, real experience under real pressure, and civilian workplaces look at you like you’re speaking a foreign language. The badges that meant something inside the system meant almost nothing outside it. I got treated poorly enough, in enough places, that my sense of self-worth took a hit I wasn’t prepared for. Because the whole operating system was built on a promise: do the things, get the tokens, be valued. I’d done the things and even with glowing results and successes. I had the tokens, framed and sparkly. And the world shrugged.
That’s the moment the real work started. Not because I chose it. Because there was nothing left. When the external validation machine finally breaks on you, either you find something inside that holds you up, or you don’t. I did. Not gracefully. Not overnight. But I did.
That is the closest I can get to what this week’s card is actually asking.
Merlin St. Germain’s message this week is acknowledgment, and his mantra is “guide me to my inner magic.” I don’t believe he’s talking about materialism, and I don’t think he’s talking about intellectualism, and I know for certain he isn’t talking about the wall of badges. He’s talking about the thing that’s still there when all of those get stripped away. The knowing. The craft. The quiet, unprovable competence that lives in your hands and your chest whether anybody signs off on it or not.
Here’s the piece I want to be careful about, because I don’t want this to read as a rant against learning or credentials. My wife and I run an academy. We literally sell learning for a living. So let me draw the line clean: there is a difference between learning to grow and learning to prove. Same activity on the surface. Opposite spirits underneath. One expands you. The other collects tokens. Merlin isn’t against the first. He’s asking us to notice how much of our life we’ve spent doing the second and calling it the first.
And this is where it gets hard, because I don’t want to give you the tidy spiritual version either. I can’t tell you to opt out of the system. You can’t opt out of a system while you still live inside it. You still job-hunt. You still have to eat. We all still have to speak enough of the world’s language for anyone to hear us. Complete rejection of credentialing, achievement, external structures, that’s fantasy. It’s a bypass. It sounds enlightened and it doesn’t feed anyone.
What Merlin is asking is much harder than opting out. He’s asking for an inner reorientation while the outer situation stays messy. You can wear the credentials without letting them wear you. You can chase the job while knowing the job isn’t what tells you your worth. You can build something that teaches differently while still using enough of the system’s language for people to find the door. You can hold both. That is not hypocrisy. That is maturity. Hypocrisy would be pretending you’d escaped a system you were still standing inside. Walking through it with your eyes open, using what you have to use, refusing to let it define you, that’s the practice.
The badges are fine. The certifications are fine. The MBA is fine. The job is fine. What isn’t fine is outsourcing your acknowledgment to any of them; to institutions, to belief systems, to structures and constructs and rank ladders and level caps and titles. Because none of them can hand you the thing Merlin is pointing at. None of them can walk into your chest and press the button that says you are already the real thing. That button only responds to you.
Acknowledgment isn’t given. It’s claimed.
Every certificate on your wall is somebody else acknowledging you. Merlin is asking for the opposite move, the one nobody can hand you, that no institution can grant, that most of us have never actually done. You can have a wall full of proof and have never once, quietly, in your own voice, said yeah. I know what I’m doing. I’m the real thing. That sentence is the whole practice. And it’s harder than another certification, because there’s no ceremony for it. No badge. No cap and gown. Just you, sitting with yourself, and finally telling the truth.
Be kind to yourself while you do it, too. That part matters. The reason most of us can’t say the sentence isn’t that we don’t believe it, it’s that we’ve been trained to only say kind things about ourselves after someone else says them first. Merlin isn’t asking you to be arrogant. He’s asking you to be as generous with yourself as the credentialing bodies would be, if only they knew what you actually know.
I’m still in the system. I’ll be in it Monday morning, sending resumes. Playing the game as it’s designed, because that’s the world we live in. But I’m not in it the way I used to be. I’m not looking for the next badge to tell me I’m enough. Something in my chest already answered that question, quietly, on a hard day when the outside stopped saying it.
That’s the inner magic. That’s what he means. And it was in you before any of the badges were, and it’ll be there after all of them fade.
Guide me to my inner magic. Guide us all.