Tiny Brave Steps. The Blog. 

Other women have figured something out that I haven't. You see her everywhere. The woman whose post has three hundred comments. The one who launched her program and filled it in a month. The one who seems to know exactly where her people are. And you scroll past with a quiet ache you don't say out loud. So you do what she does. You post when the experts say to post. You follow the plan that worked for everyone else. You build your week around someone else's rhythm. And when i

If I'm being difficult, I must be wrong. For a lot of us, that thought arrives before any other. Someone pushes back, and we don't ask whether it's right for us. We ask how to make them comfortable again. So you say yes to the extra revision. You knock a little off your price because it's been a slow month. You answer her email at nine at night because she seemed anxious. You agree to the project you already know you'll resent. Nobody made you. That's the part that stings. An

I tried that once. It didn't really go anywhere. Maybe it was the workshop where four people signed up. The newsletter whose open rates you stopped checking. The offer you launched and all you heard was silence. You did the brave part. You put it out there. Then the numbers came back small, nobody said much, and you quietly closed the drawer on it. You haven't opened that drawer since. When you're building something on your own, there's no one down the hall to tell you what t

You're going to do it. You've decided. Once you feel ready. Once the nerves settle and you're more sure of yourself. Once the confidence shows up. So the thing waits. The invite sits in your drafts. The idea you haven't quite finished detailing remains half-done. You hesitate to say what you really want to do out loud. And you wait right there with it, for a feeling that hasn't come. Can I tell you something that will change how you see this? It isn't really about the idea.

I was eighteen, in my first year of college, on a bus to a choir performance when a friend asked me a question. “Tell me three things you like about yourself.” I couldn't name one. I remember feeling at a loss. Saying anything positive about myself was so foreign to me that I couldn't come up with anything. So she began naming things she saw in me. My compassion. My kindness. My singing. The way I listened. She could see those things. I couldn't. That conversation stayed with

There's a sticky note on your mirror. Maybe you wrote it last week. Maybe you've been carrying it for years without ever writing it down. The place you're not willing to end up. The woman you refuse to become. And all week, it's been catching your eye. If this is your first time here, let me catch you up. There's a distance between who you are right now and who you're meant to become. I call it the chasm. You cross it on a bridge, built one plank at a time, with a plank bein

You can see it. The thing you want. Maybe not in detail, but you can feel how you want it to look. The work that would matter. The relationship you're quietly aching for. The version of your life that’s more you than anything you’ve ever done up until now. And then you try to move toward it, and something happens. A cavern opens up in front of you. You see the whole thing at once. Every step between here and there, stacked on top of each other, all due now. And it's so big t

You took the break. You blocked the afternoon. You told yourself that this time you would actually stop. And then something needed you. Something always does. So you handled it the way you handle everything, and by the time you sat down, the time was gone. You went back in anyway. And you were worse than when you left. Shorter with people. Thinner-skinned. Bracing before anyone had said a word. So you put it away quietly, the way you put most things away. I must be so burned

Somewhere in your life there is a no you never questioned. Someone drew a line, or you assumed one, and you stepped back from it without ever testing whether it would hold. I want to tell you about a woman who tested hers. First and second go to the finals. Third gets a wildcard. Fourth goes home. Those were the rules when Michelle Weger competed in the Speaker Slam semi-finals in Toronto this summer. Michelle came fourth. So she went home, crushed. That should have been the

A few years ago, when I was building this business, my desk was covered in lists. Plans for the plans. Steps before the steps. Contingencies for things that hadn't happened and mostly never would. I thought that was the work. I thought if I could just get all the pieces in place, line them up, account for every turn and every surprise, then I'd be allowed to begin. So I kept asking the same question, over and over. How. How do I build this? How do I make it work? How do I ma

Nadine was standing in a grocery store lineup when she started laughing. She'd looked down into her cart. And there wasn't one thing in it that she would have bought if her husband had been with her. Not one. Every item was something she actually liked. Something she'd given up, item by item, year by year, without ever deciding to. She'd been divorced a few months by then. Nineteen years of marriage behind her. And the thing that undid her in that lineup wasn't grief. It was

There is a voice inside you, I call him Fred, who’s been running a very specific con for a very long time. Fred isn’t malicious. He's protective, in his own misguided way. But his favorite move is comparison. He finds the most polished, most credentialed, most together version of every woman in the room and holds her up like a measuring stick. Look how far ahead she is. Look what she has that you don't. You watch other women and wonder what they have that you don't. The one

The ones who get unstuck aren't the ones who finally find the perfect answer. They're the ones who take one honest, imperfect step in the direction of what matters to them, and let that step teach them something. Every step creates real-world information that no amount of waiting-room thinking ever could.

I learned how to belong by being indispensable. If people needed me, they'd keep me. If I was useful enough, available enough, present enough, the belonging would hold. I was good at it. I made myself necessary in every room I entered, every relationship I invested in, every role I stepped into. And I never once connected that strategy to the fear underneath it. The fear was quieter. It ran in the background the way a low hum runs in a building you've lived in so long you s

You knew exactly what she needed to hear. And she was so grateful to hear it. “That’s exactly it!” she said, sitting across from you - coffee cooling between her hands, voice relieved. After you left, you felt pretty good about how you had helped, but then - somewhere on the drive, you caught yourself doing the exact opposite of everything you'd just said. The wisdom you had for her evaporated the second the question was about your own life. That gap - between what you can se

There's a version of this fear that only visits when nobody's watching. Not at the meeting. Not at the dinner table. Not when you're holding everything together for everyone else. It comes after. When the house gets quiet and your mind gets loud and the question just... surfaces. Do I actually have what it takes? Or am I just good at faking it? You don't say it out loud. Of course you don't. There are people counting on you. People who believe in you. People who would be sh

You knew what you wanted to say. And then you looked at their face - or imagined their face - and you changed the words. Not all of them. Just enough. Just enough to make the thing you actually meant land softer, sit smaller, cause less of a stir. You told yourself it wasn't the right time. That they'd had a hard week. That the relationship mattered more than the point. And then you went home carrying the thing you didn't say. You do this in small ways and large ones. You

You know the dream. ...The million-dollar one. ...The famous author one. ...The married and living happily ever after one. The one you've stopped mentioning. The one that felt too large to say out loud , so you made it smaller. More defensible. Safer to fail at. Or maybe you haven't shrunk it exactly. You've just stopped feeling it . You keep moving - one careful step, then another - and something has gone flat. The aliveness you were expecting to find hasn't shown up. And yo

You're not afraid of ten minutes. You’ve done harder things than that. You’ve led meetings. Raised children. Built things from nothing. Held everyone together when life bent sideways. And still - there you are at 11pm, rearranging slides for the sixth time. Six. Changing fonts. Moving bullet points. Reading it out loud. Then again. Not because you don’t know your material. Because something feels at stake. That quiet voice starts: What if this doesn’t land? Why are you this s

You know what you're meant to do. It's not a vague idea. It's a burning. You can see the women you're meant to reach. You can feel the impact you're supposed to make. You know — beyond a shadow of a doubt — that what you carry inside you could change someone's life. And yet. You write the post and delete it. You plan the offer and shelve it. You rehearse the conversation in your head and never start it. You watch other women do the very thing you know you were built for and w