At this point, you’ve had a week of hanging out and getting intimate with your inner critic.

Remember I said on day one, first we write to explore, then we write to understand.

Today we’re switching to writing to understand

Day Five: Read It Back

You’ve met the critic, found whose voice it borrowed, named what it’s afraid of, and talked back. That’s a lot of pages. Time to go back to read them over.

Reading for Patterns, Not Proof

I know your inner critic is already getting geared up to do their thing with the writing. What if I did it wrong? This is stupid, this writing is lame, etc. Take a deep breath, and invite them along.

Hey girl, c’mere, sit next to me and we can look at this stuff together.

Read it the way you’d read a friend’s journal if she entrusted you with this precious gift and asked her to help her see what is missing.

Two rules in this process:

Rule one: It’s all information.

With my clients, we make an agreement - everything that comes up is just information. It’s not good, it’s not bad, it’s just something to look at together.

Rule two: Be Curious.

We are not here to judge. Think of yourself as an archeologist examining a text - what can you learn from this? (I hope my archeologist readers will let me know if that’s not what you do, I’m imagining though.)

Now that we have that established, I’m going to give you two prompts. A reading prompt, and then a writing prompt.

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We have given our inner critic a lot of leeway, we let it have its say.

It’s only fair you get to talk back.

Talking Back Is Not Arguing

I’m not talking about fighting your inner critic. I’m talking about a reality check. Remember, your inner critic is a part of you that thinks it’s protecting you! If it’s telling you to get small, it’s only trying to make you a smaller target. If it’s telling you you should quit, it’s trying to extricate you from a situation it thinks might be threatening.

Talking back is taking things back into your own hands. Your inner critic is loyal, overworked, and stuck doing a job you no longer need it to do. It’s kind of freaked out so you may have to speak kindly but firmly to it to convince it you’re the boss.

I did not fire Big Red or Kuato. I thanked them, told her them I had it from here, and gave them a smaller jobs, such as nudging me when they’re worried so I can address their concerns. I also suggested they take a vacation. They were exhausted.

They still show up, but they’re much more willing to listen to me when I ask them to step back.

The Pact still holds: timer set for 15 to 30 minutes, no editing, no cleanup pass.

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That critical voice might seem angry, or maybe condescending, or contemptuous. But, just like with people, those stances are hiding something more vulnerable. Underneath, your inner critic is almost always afraid. It attacks your work before your boss can. It calls you lazy before anyone notices you’re tired. It figures that if it hurts you first, the real thing will hurt less.

You can’t reason with a fear you haven’t named. Once you know what the critic is guarding, you can start to negotiate.

The Pact still holds: timer set for 15 to 30 minutes, no editing, no cleanup pass.

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Hi, hello to day two of our exploration - did you give your inner critic a name, yesterday?

I have a couple - one of them is Big Red. This is what he looks like on a good day:

He is a big guy but also a little guy. He’s a little kid and has the personality of a toddler, so when he’s laughing, truly, the whole world laughs with him.

Other days, he wraps his hairy red arms around my neck and holds on like a drowning person.

On those days, I’m convinced something terrible is about to happen. I’m probably going to get fired, or suddenly lose my house, or someone is going to hit me with the car. SOMETHING.

He hangs out with a friend I call Kuato. This is him:

Kuato is the one who whispers in my ear that I should give up because I’m bad at stuff.

They work in tandem. My worrier and my not good enough BFFs.

When they’re loud it can be hard to get enough space to find myself in there.

The thing is, both Big Red and Kuato are babies. I mean, look at Kuato, he’s ugly but he’s baby! They’re scared babies and when I can get them to disentangle from my spinal cord (they hang out there), I can give them some tender loving care and suggest they take a nap.

Right now, maybe you’re squinting at the screen because you think I’m nuts - but I have a whole graduate degree and years of experience as a therapist and what I’m doing here is called parts work. And it can be transformational. Especially when you’re working on your most critical parts.

And here’s the thing — they didn’t come from nowhere. The inner critic almost always speaks in someone else’s voice.

Day Two: Find the Source

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On Monday, I wrote about the six types of inner critic—and promised a five-day challenge to help you turn down the volume. Well, here we are! Day one.

Before we start: your inner critic is a part of you that thinks it’s protecting you. Be gentle with it. It has good intentions.

Writing to Explore, Then to Understand

We write for work, for publication, or to document.

Here, we are writing in two steps: first explore, then understand.

First, we write to explore. Your brain is full of competing voices, child memories, and internalized ideas. Writing to explore slows that soup down and captures a snapshot on the page. It’s inherently messy, and that’s a good thing. Don’t edit. Let the words come out—messy, meandering, meaningful, or just meaning-ish.

Later, we come back to understand. We read through to spot the patterns, themes, and ideas we didn’t notice while writing. We’ll get to that later in the challenge.

The Pact: Set a timer for 15–30 minutes. Use a notebook, typewriter, laptop—whatever works. Four days of exploration, followed by one day of reflection.

Day One: Get to Know the Critic

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It was me, I am that woman.

There is no one more brutal to deal with than our own inner critic. Yours may not be as straightforwardly critical as mine.

We call these self-critical voices our “inner critic,” but usually it’s more accurate to say “inner critics” - we have two or three who work in concert but take different approaches.

Look, it sucks to have someone in your head undermining you every time you turn around. But what you may not know is that the inner critic thinks it’s protecting you. That voice that calls you a loser, that worries about what people think, that pushes perfectionism relentlessly — believe it or not, has good intentions. Intent is a key word here – they may be undermining you to protect you from a threat that doesn’t exist.

Your inner critic is a part of you that acts like a tired and scared kid. It yells louder when you try to ignore it. Maybe all it needs is a snack, a hug, and for you to soothe its fears.

Some younger version of you received some harsh feedback or careless words from a parent, teacher or manager, some adult said something brutal and immediately forgot. Meanwhile, this specific turn of phrase got seared into your brain forever.

That version of you got the idea that achievement and impressive results would keep you safe. No one has updated it to let it know the current state of affairs.

To a certain degree, the inner critic knows their stuff – the critic got built for a reason and it may have worked. It has gotten a lot of people promoted. Of course, the inner critic’s plans for you don’t always jibe with your plan for yourself.

Research identifies six main archetypes of inner critic — at least one of them has to be eerily familiar to you.

This study also looked at people who coped well with these inner demons - they identified self-compassion and self-protection, tailored to the kind of inner critic, as the central practices used by people who cope well.

Yeah, that is so generic, I see it. So I built a whole system and script for you.

The Teamster/Relentless Driver. Let’s call her Miranda.

She cuts you with a look. Who knew a part of yourself that solely lives in your head could cut you with a look? But she can.

Generally, she thinks that nothing you do is good enough, nothing you wear is fashionable enough, and she’s exhausted from your incompetence.

What it looks like:

A client told me recently that, even though she was experiencing symptoms of exhaustion and depression and that she knows she needs a break, “I feel like I’m somehow lying about it and I should just be able to work through it.”

Ma’am. I don’t think you’re the one who is deciding here; seems like your body is doing that work for you.

What to do:

Take a breath. Ask yourself, what would I tell a friend going through the same thing?

You would tell them to take a few days off and rest. You would tell them that you are only human and the only way to keep achieving is to take care of your human needs.

What to tell Miranda:

Miranda, I appreciate all the opportunities you give me to achieve and I definitely will be back but I must take care of myself right now. I promise I’ll be in Paris for Fashion Week.

The non-feeler. Let’s call him Jimmy.

The inner critic who does not have time for your big feelings. Enough. DO NOT CRY! He will publicly humiliate you for crying after he publicly humiliated you.

He’s constantly yelling at you that what you’re feeling is the wrong thing and you probably shouldn’t even be HAVING any feelings in the first place.

Listen, I know Tom Hanks is America’s sweetheart or whatever but this is SUCH a dick move.

What it looks like:

I’ve been looking forward to seeing my friend at dinner for a week - then she cancelled. She had a good reason, but I’m still really upset. I should be more understanding! I shouldn’t be mad! Why do I feel this way?

What to do:

Remind yourself that feelings are human, and you’re allowed to have them. Not only that, but they are going to be there, whether you yell at yourself or not. “I was looking forward to a night out, so it makes sense that I’m disappointed. Their reason can be valid, and my feelings can be valid too. I can let myself feel hurt without blaming them or attacking myself.”

What to tell Jimmy:

Jimmy, I have a very good reason to feel the way I do. No one needs to be angry just because I feel sad. Now give me a tissue and go back to the dugout.

The Worrier. Let’s call him Cameron.

He’s pretty sure you’re going to mess it up. And get in trouble. And maybe even die as a result. He does not think it’s a good idea, whatever it is that you’re about to do. Are you sure you’ve thought it through?

Generally, he thinks you’d probably be safer in bed.

What it looks like:

You sent a proposal to a potential client yesterday. They haven’t replied.

Obviously, you charged too much. Or not enough, which is how they know you’re an amateur. You should have explained the timeline better. What if they show it to someone else? What if that person also thinks you’re an idiot?

You have now reread the email eleven times. You are hoping a twelfth reading will give you access to their thoughts.

What to do:

Give yourself one thing you can actually do. Decide when you’ll follow up. Put it on your calendar.

Then remind yourself that waiting is uncomfortable. You want the work - it’s okay to want it. You’re allowed to want it.. At this point, however, it’s out of your hands. Go eat lunch while someone else makes a decision.

Sadly, you can’t write an email so perfectly that it eliminates uncertainty from your life. I’m sorry. I would also like that email. If I find out that someone has figured out how to write that email, you will be the first person I tell.

What to tell Cameron:

Cameron, I checked the numbers, I checked the boxes, I crossed the t’s and dotted the i’s. I’ll follow up Thursday. I am not in control of someone else’s inbox. Please let me eat my sandwich.

Not Good Enough for Self. Let’s call her Paris.

She has very high expectations of you and she fully intends you to exceed them. She’s willing to do whatever it takes and will accept nothing less than the best. She will keep you up all night writing and re-writing that presentation until it’s perfect. Other people can do “enough.” She will ensure that you do “the best anyone’s ever seen.”

What it looks like:

Your presentation was thorough and objectively excellent. People asked great questions. Your boss gave you a thumbs up.

But you stumbled over that one answer. You knew the answer, you practiced the answer. Somehow, when you opened your mouth, a different and considerably less qualified person answered.

Now you cannot stop thinking about that moment. You thought of it the whole way home. You haven’t heard a word your family has said since you walked in the door, you can’t stop berating yourself about that dumb answer.

What to do:

Notice the standard you’re holding yourself to. Who gets to decide if that answer was good enough? Because your boss was happy, your coworkers were into it and you won the account.

Give yourself permission to have a moment of being a human (instead of a perfect robot) and maybe let yourself feel good about the actual presentation.

What to tell Paris:

Paris, we are allowed to finish a presentation without receiving a standing ovation. I answered a question awkwardly. I’ll be clearer next time. Remember, successful people learn from their mistakes. How will we ever be successful without making a few to learn from? We are going to bed.

Not Good Enough For Others. Let’s call her Regina.

Regina thinks nothing you do is cool enough, nothing you wear is pretty enough, and she wants you to know that everyone is talking about you behind your back. She thinks that those shoes are fugly and that you need to lose three pounds by Wednesday.

Regina is here to fill your head with the imagined criticisms everyone around you is really thinking about you.

What it looks like:

Someone you worked with three jobs ago just announced a huge new position on Linkedin.

You were having a perfectly decent Tuesday until you saw the post. Now you’re deep-diving her substack, her entire employment history on Linkedin, and somehow her kitchen renovation.

She’s clearly more successful than you. Everyone must know it. You’re filled with shame at what they must be thinking of you.

You have acquired a remarkable amount of information about everyone’s private opinions from a photo of a woman holding a coffee.

What to do:

Step away from the app. Someone else’s curated life made you feel a sudden sense of being left behind or erased altogether.

It’s okay to gun for a promotion and dream about more prestige. But you forgot about your own kitchen filled with light in the process. Also, no one is thinking about you. I know, it’s a double-edged sword.

Also, you’re so not the only one who saw that post and had a stomach drop. That’s kind of the whole thing with social media. You didn’t fail some secret good person test.

What to tell Regina:

Regina, take a seat. I don’t need to imagine what a bunch of people are thinking, if they want to say something to me, they’re free to tell me directly. Otherwise, I’m very busy going to the mall.

Hated self. Let’s call him Bojack.

He’s pretty sure there’s something fundamentally wrong with you. He doesn’t think it’s possible that you’d be good at things or attractive to other people. He’s pretty relentlessly trying to convince you you don’t deserve recognition, safety or rest.

(Of all of these, he’s the toughest. And for the record, he’s so wrong about all that.)

What it looks like:

You forgot to reply to a friend who was having a hard week.

When you realize it, you feel awful. Then the voice starts.

Of course you forgot. You’re selfish. You always do this. You don’t deserve the friends you have.

Now you’re avoiding the reply because you feel so ashamed, which gives him even more material.

What to do:

Take a moment - it’s a missed text message. This happens every damn day. It’s the modern condition. If your friend is hurt, you can apologize. She’ll appreciate it.

If being kind to yourself feels impossible, think of someone whose kindness you trust. What would they say about this? Could you borrow their perspective for a minute, even if you can’t quite believe it yet?

Send a text. Be nice to you.

What to tell Bojack:

Bojack, I wish I’d answered sooner. I’m going to apologize and ask how she’s doing. I’m having a hard time being kind to myself right now, but I’m not going to keep helping you tear me apart.

Ready to make friends with your inner critic?

This issue names the problem: the critics running around in our heads. But naming them is only step one—learning how to manage them in real time takes practice.

Starting this week, I’m launching the paid tier for Signal Strength.

While the free weekly newsletter will always focus on naming the core dynamics—the inner critic, the ambition scam, the fear of being obsolete—the paid tier is about how to put these ideas into practice.

When you upgrade, you get:

• The 5-Day Writing Challenge: Making Friends With Your Inner Critic (Starting this week—a go-at-your-own-pace guide to tuning into and turning down the volume on your critic), along with future challenges and self-guided exercises.

• Practical tools, exercises, and values alignment frameworks.

• Discount codes for upcoming cohorts and workshops.

(If you join as a founding member, you’ll also get a 1:1 hour-long coaching session that can be applied to future intensives.)

If you’re ready to quiet the noise and put these tools into action, upgrade your subscription today.

Subscribe now

The content will be available to anyone who subscribes, and it’s go at your own pace, so don’t stress if the timing isn’t right yet. It will be there for you.

If this issue stirred something up, may I recommend the free Values Sort. It takes ten minutes, and you walk away knowing which values actually drive you. It’s an excellent place to ground yourself for future conversations with your inner critic.

A client of mine once worked for a boss who would gas her up, tell her she was brilliant, and then deliver cutting remarks the second he felt stressed. He would create fire drills that required her to stop everything and clean up a mess, then imply that if she were better at her job, the mess wouldn’t have happened in the first place.

Another client recently left a job where she was perpetually undermined and dismissed. Not just overlooked or ignored, and not even receiving difficult feedback—actively undermined. Her boss left her team’s work out of presentations, made dismissive digs, and used passive aggression and the silent treatment.

She was expressing how frustrating it was to work without any affirmation, and she was blaming herself for internalizing that frustration: “How do you balance needing affirmation from other people versus giving it to yourself? Is it just human nature that you need it, or should I be more self-reaffirming?”

I hear this question a lot. Especially from women and those raised as women, who have been systematically conditioned to prioritize other people’s feelings over their own. It’s a question I’ve asked myself, too.

I’ve written before about how making someone else happy is a business metric designed to make you insane. In all areas of life, but especially at work, if the goal is another person’s emotional state, the goalpost always moves. You can’t control where it lands.

Years ago, I worked with a PR client who was dissatisfied with almost everything. No message, no strategy, and no result was ever “right.” I started to dread client calls. I felt heart-pounding anxiety that I would never figure it out.

Then, during a typical call, I looked at this man and realized something: he wasn’t unhappy with me. He was unhappy with everything. He was questioning his own product direction, his team’s engineering decisions, even the basic premise of the company’s vision. His dissatisfaction had nothing to do with me or the work my team was doing. If I set a goal of satisfying him, I would simply never achieve it.

In that moment, I realized I would have to decide when the work was good enough, because he was never going to say it was.

It was one of those moments in real life that feels like a zoom-pan shot in a movie—where the character realizes Bruce Willis was dead the whole time. Everything shifted. I was in the driver’s seat. We had agreed to certain deliverables, which we fulfilled. We executed our contract, did good work (because my team always does good work), and then we moved on.

Wanting appreciation is not a character flaw.

Getting recognition for your work is a critical part of staying engaged and effective. You are not “dependent on affirmation.” You are a human being pouring a lot of your precious life into the work you do, and part of being a good boss is providing that feedback.

Critically, there is a difference between a boss who fails to affirm you and a boss who actively undermines you. The second one is not a problem with your work or a flaw in your personality, though it sure can feel like one. A confident, competent leader simply does not act that way. When a boss actively undermines you, it’s often because they are projecting their own insecurities all over you.

Sorry babe, you were being slimed.

If you step outside the system for a moment, if you put down the HBR articles on effective leadership and the MBA matrices and Lean Out, the setup starts to look absurd. There is an unspoken understanding that we’re not supposed to be fully human at work.

If you ask yourself right now, “Can I bring my whole self to work?” you might feel a real gut reaction—a tight chest or anxiety sweats. Why do we blame ourselves when basic human needs intrude on our striving to be a good worker?

We’re taught relentless individualism and complete self-sufficiency. Got feelings? Deal with those on your own time. Meanwhile, your brain is filled with mirror neurons. We are physically wired for connection, and our nervous systems are co-regulated by the people around us. No one wants to put in extra labor to maintain a regulated nervous system when their boss can’t manage their own.

You want to work for people who can appreciate your work and collaborate with you. You should want that.

What do you do when you realize your current situation is tearing down your self-esteem?

First, take a breath.

Second, do not freak out. Don’t talk sh*t. It will be so tempting. You will be looking around you, thinking, does anyone see this?? They do. But more importantly, you do. And you can trust your own gut.

Remind yourself this isn’t your fault. Then, start treating yourself like you would advise a friend:

1. Write down specific instances where your boss made you feel small.

   • What happened: “When I asked for feedback, he said, ‘I guess you’re ok at some things. We’ll see.’”

   • How you felt: Defeated, sad, small, silly for expecting more.

   • How this feedback helped you do better work: It didn’t.

   • Actionable insights: None.

2. Separate stories from facts. We can’t read minds. Let yourself off the hook for anything that wasn’t specifically said out loud. Listen only for actionable feedback, incorporate it when it makes sense, and leave the rest in your notebook.

3. Define “good enough” on paper. Write down the specific deliverables you promised, document the metrics involved, and track when you deliver them. Make a promise to acknowledge your own work, even if your boss cannot. Create the goalpost for yourself, and move it only based on agreed business outcomes—never on someone else’s mood swings.

4. Plan your exit. Once you know the environment isn’t right for you, start making room to leave.

Ambition (which, as I’ve written before, is a scam) under toxic leadership is a trap. The idea that if you just give enough or perform well enough, the system will finally grant you worth and rest. An undermining boss works in dark concert with your internal drive to achieve, triggering your body’s stress responses:

• Fight: Rolling your eyes, making passive-aggressive comments, or feeling like it’s your job to get retribution.

• Flight: Wanting to run by quitting loudly or fantasizing about abandoning your career entirely. Browsing flower farms for sale on Zillow.

• Freeze: Numbing out, scrolling endlessly, or disengaging just to make it through the day

• Fawn: Unconsciously abandoning your own needs to appease a threat, working harder the more they push, or desperately trying to get them to like you.

These responses are hardwired in your body. This isn’t an attitude, it’s survival. Don’t be hard on you.

When these kick in, your prefrontal cortex goes offline. Time to get it back.

Doing the concrete work of articulating your deliverables and documenting what you’ve accomplished brings your thinking brain back online.

When my team worked for that unhappy CEO, we had clear, agreed-upon deliverables. We delivered them, checked the boxes, issued the invoices, and moved on. Many job situations aren’t that clean, but you can always start by scoping your work in writing.

When you get detailed about what you’re actually doing, it’s no longer someone’s unstable opinion that defines “enough.” It’s the scope you defined.

You get to decide what’s good enough.

The new hotness is FOBO: The Fear of Being Obsolete.

I have clients right now who are haunted by the idea that their skills will become irrelevant overnight.

AI is changing everything about work, and it’s accelerating every day. I work for myself and have three different AI tools doing a million jobs for me—some jobs that I used to pay someone else significantly more than my $20 monthly fee to do. Dissecting the moral, economic, and environmental impact? Other people are doing this far better. Instead, let’s look at how this impacts human identity, work, and anxiety.

I think FOBO is an existential, body-level reaction to the vastness and uncanniness of AI. It’s not about being fired. It’s not even about a fear that you won’t be able to learn and use the endless march of AI tools. It’s something that hits at the identity level.

As I’ve thought about this topic, the first place my brain goes is to the pure absurdity of it all. You are a human being. In a human world. You are entirely unique and simply cannot be made obsolete. You matter, even if the way you are used to measuring mattering will change. This is part of why I believe that we all need to be doing some big, brave untangling.

At the same time, AI is not a monolith, and it’s infinitely available. Some stories just from the last few weeks from friends and clients:

A client is a brilliant creative marketer who has a general fear that AI might be able to do his job.

Meanwhile, Anthropic is hiring writers and brand creatives at a wild rate, because you know who can’t do that job? Claude. Not yet.

I have a friend who is a contract chief of staff at a very large tech company.

She taught herself how to use the company’s own AI tools to build an agent to automate some of the most frequent and tedious parts of her job.

Then the C suite found out - and were ecstatic -- because they wanted someone to build that very thing.

They didn’t have anyone building that thing but they knew they wanted it.

She is not an engineer. She’s an operations person with a background in marketing who had some time on her hands and got curious about what she could get AI to do for her.

Today, in 2026, big tech companies who are making the very AI tools that will, theoretically, take over all our jobs still haven’t figured out how to automate the tasks they want automated. Someone with some curiosity, a need, and some time on her hands built it for them.

A friend who is a professional ghostwriter channeled her own anxiety into curiosity and created an entire engine to capture and replicate people’s writing voice using AI. She taught herself how to turn her own extensive interview process into an engine you can plug into an AI tool. She let me be a beta tester. Her tool is aeons ahead of anything I’ve tried before.

Here’s the thing about our current AI world: It’s still the wild west, baby.

If your LinkedIn feed is anything like mine, it’s filled with people sharing custom Claude skills or showing off agents that automate deal flows. LinkedIn is the white hot center of FOBO. Just like Instagram influencers don’t live in a softly lit dreamland 24/7, people on LinkedIn are putting their best, most ambitious foot forward.

The truth is, the tools are everywhere, they’re cheap, and learning how to vibe code or create your own workflows only requires curiosity, patience and some time.

I believe to my bones that what makes you human will continue to be the most valuable and critical skill you can hold on to.

I was already writing this piece when a friend sent me ’s latest piece, which encourages us to take a rebellious stance:

The tech industry thinks they are the only ones who know what is right for AI. And to them the right path has been about replacing the human in everything and gleefully bringing on the job apocalypse. I say leave them to their fantasies.

She sees AI as a vast medium with endless possibilities, and calls for an emerging counterculture that only humans can create. I cannot properly summarize but you should read it, here. I will tell you how it made me feel: excited, intrigued, hopeful.

Then she put perfect words to it:

Three Cs to Combat FOBO

As Abi says, keep your forms of humanness alive.

First, cultivate curiosity

Curiosity is the antidote to fear.

When we’re experiencing big, broad, anxieties like FOBO, we’re watching a movie play out on our inner IMAX screens, a post apocalyptic hellscape where marketing pros wander the streets looking for scraps.

When you turn away from your own projections and start asking questions, it’s an immediate mindset shift.

It’s never been easier to follow your curiosity about technology. To teach yourself to build something. To read a book or reach out to someone you respect.

It might lead you to build something that changes your career in real time.

Or it might lead to the second c: connection.

Construct connection

Lately, I’ve been giving coaching clients assignments based on ’s project of reaching out to 100 people in 100 days. I call these “curiosity conversations” It looks like this:

List people you are curious about — not just people who can lead you to a specific place.

Include people you already know, but don’t stop there — include in this list people you’ve admired from afar: people whose careers have fascinated or impressed you, people whose writing or art or teachings you love. People who have done things that have moved you. People who seem terrifying to reach out to - include those, too. Who are your dream coffee dates? Moonshots.

Don’t talk yourself out of anyone. If you clench up thinking about it — put them on the list.

This isn’t just about networking, although, sure. It’s networking. It’s about actively pushing back against the isolation inertia inherent in our modern world. We spend so much time looking at screens, digging ruts into the ground with our routines, driving cars, slapping headphones on, we need to purposely create chances to be surprised. To find new information. To remember what it’s like to talk to someone you don’t talk to every day.

This is where new ideas come from. This is how we, as says, increase our surface area for luck.

Channel creativity

Make something.

Last year I made this painting -- it’s watercolor with tiny gel ink circles. It’s 18” x 24”. It took me approximately 60 hours to make. (Seriously questionable decision, ergonomics-wise. You can zoom in and see the tennis elbow.)

I am not someone who is a trained artist, but I like to make stuff. I thought it was cool, so I submitted it for a show and it hung in a gallery -- but when I started to think of the art as something I was doing to fit a market -- to sell, to build a reputation around, I went from feeling like I was creating cool stuff as an expression and experiencing a wonder around how it comes together -- like pulling something out of the air -- I started to feel small and overwhelmed and silly.

Where the actual, big value is in creating something: the act of creation itself. Creating connects us to our humanity, shifts how we view the world, and opens up room for big ideas to take root.

If you’re feeling that FOBO creeping in this week, let’s make the comment section an active antidote. Tell me: What is one weird, curious project you’re working on—or wanting to start—purely for the sake of doing it?

In 2015, during the Obama-era heyday of tech abundance (before 2016, and a general sense in Silicon Valley that maybe tech was less better world and more making cigarettes), I worked for a little startup company that was acquired by a great big behemoth for a lot of money.

There were, maybe, 60 of us?

The leaders of that company were committed to protecting their employees. Full payouts, no layoffs. Dream scenario. Equity in a startup that pays off, followed by a job at a big corporation with fat big-corporate compensation.

Living the dream.

Except what happened after that was that my job kind of got relegated to the side.

I worked at a tech startup acquired by an apparel company. Wildly different worlds. The new team was in a whole other state, and they didn’t know quite what to do with me or my team. Mostly, they took a stance of benevolent neglect. No real meetings, no KPIs.

My job wasn’t in danger, but I mostly didn’t have a job.

I had entered the phase of startup life immortalized in the show Silicon Valley called “rest and vest.”

I had enough to do to take up a couple of hours of the day. Beyond that, I felt adrift.

I’ve always said that if I have 100 things to do, I’ll get them all done. But if I have one thing to do, I’ll struggle to do it at all.

The ballad of adult ADHD.

I showed up. Did a bit of work. Spent a couple of hours on a hike. Checked in to make sure no work had magically appeared. Then logged off.

I cannot tell you what a dark and existential time that was for me.

I felt trapped by unvested options. I struggled to look at all that free time as an opportunity to work on my own projects. My friends could not understand.

I couldn’t really understand.

But the longer I hung out in the job, the more I felt like I was spending the day trapped in the backrooms, complete with a shadow creature stalking me.

No one was pressuring me. The CEO of the startup still turned to me for critical projects and valued my counsel. There simply weren’t that many of them anymore.

There was zero threat.

And yet it was exhausting and existential. Dread about each day with no real obligations on the calendar. Anxiety chased me: about wasted time, wasted potential, wasted opportunity to spin up a side hustle while I got paid. But I couldn’t make room for that.

When I left, I left some pretty big sums on the table.

No regrets.

I’ve struggled to name what was happening there. Then a new study named it for me.

Burnout isn’t only about having too much to do. It can also come from having so little meaningful work to do that you start to feel like you simply don’t matter.

The study suggests that workload alone isn’t a straightforward predictor of burnout. The whole person is involved in the equation.

The researchers point to “reduced feelings of significance,” including mattering, belonging and feeling valued; diminished wellness, including vitality, satisfaction and serenity; and elevated emotional distress.

It me!

At the time, I felt shame about being so adrift. I kept beating myself up for not taking full advantage of the extra time.

Why wasn’t I inventing programs I could execute at work to prove my value?

Why wasn’t I building a robust side hustle I could jump into?

Why couldn’t I just enjoy getting paid an alarming amount of money to go hiking?

But making up programs was not especially useful when I didn’t have the resources to execute them and the skills I was great at were not the ones the new organization valued. Building something of my own was hard when I felt increasingly depleted and insignificant.

I was treating an environmental problem like a personal failure.

That’s like beating yourself up for not being able to breathe in a room without oxygen.

The elements of the job that fueled me were either greatly diminished or gone altogether. The things that made me feel that my work mattered. That I belonged. That I was valued.

It was sucking my vitality, satisfaction and serenity right out the window.

The burnout we all know and love is generally understood to be a result of too much or not enough.

Too much work. Too many hours.

Not enough downtime. Not enough vacation. Not enough people to do the job.

That’s part of the picture.

What this study suggests is that emotional well-being may be just as significant as workload. Burnout risk is not only about the amount of work you have. It is also about what your experience of that work does to you.

In fact, feeling like you matter may be a protective factor against burnout.

Think about a time you were working on a huge project. You were exhausted, but exhilarated by some part of it. Maybe it was the team beside you every step of the way. Maybe it was the belief that the work could make a real difference. Maybe it was the satisfaction of doing something difficult that required precisely the things you are great at.

You were carrying a lot.

But you mattered.

Those feelings of significance, belonging and value can fuel us. This is why taking highly visible, meaningful or important work away from someone in an effort to reduce their burnout may have the opposite effect. Their workload gets lighter, but so does their sense of significance.

On the other hand, when you don’t feel that you matter, belong or contribute something of value, even an objectively easy job can become exhausting.

The thing that depleted me wasn’t pressure.

It was meaninglessness.

Last week, I wrote about how ambition is a scam and how ruthless alignment can shift us from feeling stuck toward feeling big energy around our goals.

This study complicates that idea in a useful way.

Burnout prevention isn’t only about asking, How much am I carrying?

It may also require asking, Do I feel like I matter here?

Sometimes the signal isn’t exhaustion from doing too much.

Sometimes it is the exhaustion of slowly disappearing.

A small experiment: Think about the work that has made you feel most alive—not necessarily the easiest work or the most prestigious work. What made you feel useful, valued or part of something?

That might be a signal worth following.

If this essay made you think of someone who is exhausted by a job that “should” feel easy, send it their way. And subscribe to Signal Strength for more honest thinking and practical tools for figuring out what comes next.

Every career conversation I have right now is secretly an existential one.

These are conversations about priorities, values, anxieties, things clients and friends have internalized along the way. People who might categorize themselves as “high achievers” are examining the price of ambition, more focused on avoiding burnout than chasing satisfaction.

I was already trial-running a hot take on the concept of ambition, before I saw this:

I was lightning quick to jump in and share my thesis:

I’ve been noodling on this and drafting a newsletter on the topic because that’s how I think things through lol — I have been thinking of it as taking back the concept of ambition. Identifying as “ambitious,” has so many implicit assumptions:

- it’s about work. the life is what you get around the ambition, not a part of the ambition

- it requires you to sacrifice of something you really care about (time for family, your authenticity, or real connection)

- it’s insatiable.

Ambition is always climbing. That kind of ambition, in our current extraction economy, is a scam.

Ambition should be for us and not fueling someone else’s bottom line.

Then suggested something brilliant:

Well.

This is interesting.

The Etymology of a Scam (A Quick History Lesson)

Thank you, Maya, for sending me down this very helpful rabbit hole.

The ancient Roman origins of ambition is pure ego and power. A popularity contest, literally. “a striving for favor, courting, flattery; a desire for honor, thirst for popularity”

Of course, there’s the literal definition and there’s what we actually mean when we say a word. In this case, the connotation of “ambition” was sneaky. Negative. Manipulative.

It’s giving every creep you loved to hate in literature. Littlefinger. President Snow. Delores Umbridge. The worst.

The middle ages brought the piousness of christianity to the concept and in early Bibles ambition was linked to the very origin of sin itself in the Garden of Eden. Pride. Greed.

In his book on the topic, William Casey King wrote, “Ambition was inveighed against in official Elizabethan homilies read by order of the state in pulpits throughout England; defined as “the unlawful and restles desire in men to be of higher estate then God hath geven or appoynted unto them”; identified as one of the major causes of rebellion; and associated with Satan, madness, damnation, and sin.”

Ambition as a concept was vilified because it threatened the order of power. You want to stop serf-ing? That’s satan’s doing.

Enter colonization, when, King writes, ambition “suddenly transformed from a vice, ever blind and destructive, into a virtuous undertaking.” Ambition as way to rally people behind the cause of conquering and destroying other cultures.

Look at the pattern: the definition of ambition has always been manipulated by whoever holds power to get people to do the dirty work.

There’s been some serious ambition evolution since then. Within my lifetime alone, there’s been the Gordon Gecko, “greed is good” model of ambition, the girlboss era, influencer/image as ambition, and in silicon valley we had first computer nerd ambition and then the bro billionaire version, which includes massive resource hoarding at the expense of literally everyone else.

Today, we are deep in an extractive economy amplified by AI and widening inequality. Professionals who chased traditional ambition are finding themselves running faster on the treadmill just to stay in the same place while fueling someone else’s bottom line.

The ambition isn’t leaving our bodies because we got lazy. It’s leaving because we’re done being extracted from.

Running Out of Cheap Fuel

Let me tell you about how I ended up with the coaching practice I have.

I had built and run a lucrative communications business by tapping into the startup ecosystem through a network of VCs, other founders, other comms people. There’s a big river of work (and money) there and I stepped in to break off my tributary. It was great! But I knew I wanted something different.

I decided to go back to school. I became a therapist and now work part time in community mental health. I backed into this career change.

When I knew I wanted to marry my skillsets and create a coaching business, I thought -- why not tap into that selfsame VC network? Create programs for corporations and executives focused on performance, personal development, communications skills, etc. This is a tributary I’ve got experience tapping, after all.

But every time I started to think about building that business I’d get stuck. The wind would fall right out of my sails and I’d be sitting there on still waters, just waiting for inspiration, but none would come.

Why?

Lots of reasons. But a big one? I no longer was motivated by any of the same things I was earlier in my career. Not motivated by money (I mean, I want to make money, but it’s not my motivation). Not motivated by status, not motivated by the title, the team size, or the logo on my resume.

As soon as I tried to line myself up behind those type of goals (which had always worked SWIMMINGLY for me in the past), I was dead in the water.

What changed? I did. The more myself I felt, the more regulated, the more, dare I say, I healed the ambition drained out of me.

At least that’s what it felt like.

Not All Motivation is Created Equal

Psychology makes a clean distinction between two types of drive: extrinsic motivation (money, titles, status, external praise) and intrinsic motivation (doing something because the act itself is rewarding).

When you run purely on extrinsic motivation, your sense of control shifts outside yourself. You aren’t moving toward what you actually want; you’re moving toward whatever carrot the system is currently dangling. And that goalpost never stops moving.

Extrinsic rewards work fine if you’re managing simple, repetitive output. But for complex, creative, and strategic work, heavy external pressure actually degrades your performance. It narrows your focus, spikes anxiety, and forces your brain out of creative play and into risk management.

When high achievers say they’ve “lost their drive,” they haven’t lost their capacity to work hard. They’ve just run out of the cheap, dirty fuel of external validation.

From Ambition to Ruthless Alignment

I stopped trying to force myself down the lucrative path and started to align myself behind what I actually want in my life -- not just my career, but my whole life. I articulated my values, I tapped into who I am when I am at my very best. I ruthlessly aligned to my best self.

Once I started from that place, the ideas and excitement poured out of me.

I envisioned a world where I could help people do the same thing. To experience the energy and peace that comes from putting a career in its place: behind the goal of a great life. It wasn’t as simple to build as my old business, but the energy behind it was self-sustaining. It didn’t take life force from me; it generated it.

When you shift from external ambition to intrinsic alignment, you are one step closer to exiting the the extraction trap. You stop treating your life as a ladder to climb for someone else’s benefit, and start treating it as a series of possibilities to explore on your own terms.

Ambition is climbing higher in a system that burns you out. Ruthless alignment is having the courage to create a whole life worth striving for in the first place.

You can start this shift today. It all starts with tapping into the truest elements of yourself -- you can find free tools on my website, including a values sorter, an exercise to tap into your best self, and more.

You’re at your desk. You hear a notification. It’s not Slack. Is it your AI agent, done with a task? A new email? Wait, maybe it’s a Gchat. Which tab was that in? Or is it a text message?

Your shoulders are tense, you’re getting a crick in your neck, and you start to sweat. You’ve got bigger fish to fry, though, because you missed a deadline you forgot about because you didn’t read the email from the AI agent that is supposed to help you manage your email, and you have to train on a whole new tool management is rolling out to help you “do more with less.”

The future is now, baby, and you’re working in it.

If you’ve been beating yourself up for being overwhelmed, exhausted, and confused, you’re not alone. But before you add “figure out why I’m like this” to the pile, let’s talk about paradoxes.

The current it girl paradox: Jevon’s paradox

It’s been making its way through my feed for weeks. From Hank Green, to substack’s own to NPR’s Planet Money, it’s a great big Jevonniasance.

You probably don’t remember Jevon’s first big breakout because it was in 1865.

Economist William Stanley Jevons wrote The Coal Question an unputdownable romp explaining Great Britain’s growing reliance on its favorite nonrenewable resource, circa 1865. His argument was that the more efficient coal powered engines became, the more demand there would be for them, and the more coal Britain would consume. He was right about that.1

Jevons paradox says that as an engine becomes more efficient, demand for the resource spikes instead of dropping. Tech commentators love applying this to AI: if tools make cognitive labor faster, we’ll just demand more cognitive labor. More jobs, not less! Bada boom. Done.

Here’s the thing, though: Jevon’s paradox is about coal. Coal is a nonrenewable resource with devastating climate effects, yes, but very consistent, coal. Burns at a set point, acts how you expect, every single time. Sure, it burns out, but predictably.

But people are not coal, and AI is no steam engine. People, not such a consistent resource. Much messier. They have feelings, they have physical needs, and pesky labor laws2 govern them. Right now, we’re still figuring out where the burnout breaking point is for people, and what impact that will have on <gestures around> all of this.

Meanwhile, just how efficient AI is is still in question. AI hallucinates, it needs to be checked, re-prompted, and babysat. AI creates a whole new layer of shadow-work that lands squarely on your shoulders.

So far, people are not working less. A recent BBC article on Meta’s internal AI work describes people working up to 90 hours a week building AI tools.

“You’re literally working in teams of people trying to replicate humans doing jobs,” one former employee said. That work, the person added, seems “endless.”

If AI were making people more efficient, you’d expect their workload to shrink. It’s doing the opposite. A UC Berkeley study, reported in HBR, followed roughly 200 employees at a US tech company for eight months: “AI tools didn’t reduce work, they consistently intensified it. In an eight-month study of how generative AI changed work habits, we found that employees worked at a faster pace, took on a broader scope of tasks, and extended work into more hours of the day, often without being asked to do so.”

All this to say, every bit of this is up in the air. You may be experiencing Jevon’s paradox, you may not end up jobless. But in this metaphor you’re the coal. You’re living through an extraction cycle—where unreliable tools create more friction, managers respond with more software oversight, and the worker absorbs the strain.

There’s a new girl in town: Socio-technical Burnout Paradox.3

Claremont Graduate University just released an analysis of the human cost of this recent avalanche of AI. They identified a pattern they call the Socio-technical Burnout Paradox.

Tell me if you’ve heard this one before. Big digital demands at work (tech-driven workload plus organizational and cultural pressure) erode people’s well-being, which produces paradoxical outcomes (reduced focus, slower work, lower creativity, disengagement, intent to leave), which loops back into more digital demands, because managers respond to declining performance with more oversight, more tools, tighter deadlines. The cycle reinforces itself.

This isn’t AI’s fault. It’s certainly not yours. It’s a system grinding the humans involved into dust. The same humans who beat themselves up when they miss deadlines, who push themselves harder when they feel their energy flagging. Humans that absorb the harmful effects of the system that’s trying to build tools to replace them.

From the study: “Digital burnout is not an individual failure or weakness, but a systemic socio-technical condition shaped by the interaction of technology design, organizational structures, cultural norms, and human well-being.”

Which brings me to Linkedin (I know, but stick with me)

I posted a Business Insider piece about Silicon Valley therapists and the mental health toll AI is having on tech workers. I expected my usual engagement. (You know, like two likes from my sweetest friends and a reach of 78 people). Nope.

Thousands of people. Whole discussion in the comments among people I don’t even know. Multiple reposts. I hit a live wire.

People are exhausted from being told, somehow, “this is a you problem.” That burnout, moral injury, chronic stress are one workout away from being solved, if only you’d move your lazy butt.

Maybe it’s NOT me

If this is you, you are in a system that relies upon extracting a human cost from you in order to drive profits. This system depends upon you blaming yourself, upon you continuing to show up despite what emotional toll that takes on you. This is no longer about labor.

Now what? Coal never had to advocate for itself. You do. A few suggestions:

Change the tune. Instead of, “what’s wrong with me that I can’t keep up?” it’s “I can see clearly this system isn’t built for me.” Catch and interrupt self blame.

Untangle career and identity . This is where the great disentanglement comes in -- for many of us, work achievement and identity are deeply intertwined. We have built a career, a reputation, an internal model of self on being successful in work systems. Which was working, for a long time. Possibly could have worked indefinitely in the old model, despite the costs. Until AI showed up and superpowered the extraction engine. If you don’t redefine based on your values, for yourself, the system will do it for you, at the expense of your wellbeing.

Be a radically, unapologetically, unleashed thinker. If there’s one thing AI does well, it’s be boring. It does repetitive, boring tasks. It spits out smoothed-over, predictable text. Perhaps the reclaim you need now is to do the thing that the extraction engine can’t: be human. Connect with other people. Make stuff. Carving out a space for creativity is one way to fight the rigidity of systems and ease their impact on us. Ultimately, AI can work without exhaustion, it doesn’t get bored, it doesn’t need to pee. But it’s shit at hugs and rarely makes huge leaps in new thinking while taking a shower.

Consider a healthy case of the fuckits. If we can acknowledge the systemic issues, if we can disentangle our worth from the systems, maybe we can turn down the volume on fear. Also on Linkedin this week4:

The fuckits can be small but liberating as hell. Try declaring email amnesty on your next vacation.

Try dropping a few balls. Let AI catch them.

Catalyst: A MidCareer Pivot Cohort is a 6-week cohort for people at exactly this point: mid-career, clear that something’s off, tired of processing it alone. Six live sessions, weekly work on values and strengths, a private group for the people doing it alongside you. You leave with a vision statement, a strengths map, and momentum toward what’s next.

$1,300. Six weeks, starting September 15. Capped at 8 people.

“It’s giving scientology. It’s giving jargon. No one knows what clarity means.”

I wrote a whole page of copy about the virtues of clarity and asked a friend for critical feedback. She did not miss a beat before telling me it read like bullsh*t.

I’ve been trying to describe what it feels like to drop in, tune in to yourself, trust your gut. What it means when all the miasma of searching and thinking clicks into place and boom - you’re ready for action.

Like Magic.

In the nineties, we’d go to the mall and stop by the poster kiosk to stare at Magic Eye1 posters. You’d stare and stare, try a soft focus, maybe cross your eyes a little, then

BOOM

A fishtank.

The mess becomes order. The 2D image goes 3D and there’s depth, a whole landscape to explore. You get it. You see it all so clearly.

Sometimes you’d be staring at that dang mess forever before it clicked, and there’s this euphoria, feeling like you’ve opened the door to a magic world.

That’s what I was grasping for.

But it’s a terrible metaphor. First, once the Magic Eye reveals its glorious hidden image, after the brief thrill of achievement, you start to get a headache.

Then you blink and it’s gone.

Then I read Andrea Clarke’s excellent essay on the concept of drift. Her father is a navigator. She says “if you set off on a journey and you drift even one degree off course .. over time, you’ll end up a thousand miles off track.. . Drift is what happens when we’re clear on what we want to exit —the job, the relationship, the version of ourselves that we’ve outgrown—but we postpone the decision to move.2

Clarity is one thing. Movement is another. Change only happens when we start moving.

I applied for grad school in 2020 during lockdown. At the time, I rationalized it as “something fun to do while I can’t travel.” Looking back, lockdown put a sudden and forceful hard stop to my drift. I already knew I wanted to move, but until the world forced me to stop, I kept kicking that decision into the nebulous future.

My career pivot, at this point, is six years in the making. I became a therapist, reworked my existing business, went through a whole meandering burnout period, and now am building a whole new business. It’s been one step after another. It wasn’t a 30-second Magic Eye reveal. It was a long, messy process of taking small steps forward while still figuring things out.

Deciding to try grad school didn’t come after a lightning bolt of realization. In fact, up until I actually walked into the classroom, I wasn’t even sure I’d go through with it. Then I thought I’d go to school but not practice. The list of things I didn’t think I would actually do goes on — but the point is that the act of applying created the momentum. Momentum is what helps us gain insight over time.

If you’ve been circling a major pivot, you don’t need to stare at the wall until a clear picture magically appears. Waiting for clarity is a trap. You have to go out and find clarity.

What you need is a catalyst to kick yourself into a new orbit. Motion comes first; insight follows.

I texted my friend, “It’s not clarity! It’s Motion!”3

There’s this quote by Jung4:

You’ve done the research.

You don’t need another self-help book, another personality assessment, or six more months to “figure yourself out.”

When I went through grad school, the most valuable part wasn’t just the coursework—it was doing the entire journey alongside a cohort of twenty people going in the exact same direction. We had community, built-in accountability, and shared momentum.

Maybe what you need is a cohort.

I’m launching a new program called The Catalyst Cohort, and it kicks off September 15. It’s built specifically for those who have done the research, who are tired of drifting, and who are ready to start moving.

Six weeks, six to eight people, live weekly sessions and community accountability.

I hope you’ll check it out, here.

As long as I can remember, I’ve had some pretty loud internal voices with outrageously high standards. They have generally had an opinion that I probably should not be resting at any given time.

And if things feel less than stable? Time to get louder, while insisting that’s probably all my fault.

At one point the voices were certain that that every time I made a mistake at work that I was about to take a swan dive into the abyss. The parts of me that simply could not allow me to rest, who didn’t believe I deserved a moment of peace, got so damn loud they pushed me straight into existentialism.

I thought, “I’m going to be dead someday, and then what? What will the point of all this endless anxiety have been?”

It was at that moment that I made a deal with my most insistent part, the one screaming in my ear about my imminent failures. “I cannot do a good job while you’re hijacking my nervous system,” I said. “Please back off and I promise I’ll do good work.”

In my personal life, my wife and I have a deal — if one of us is having a big reaction to something, the other one asks, “what do you need right now?” I might say to my wife, “I need to scream at the wall for a bit then I want a hug,” and she’ll say, “sounds good” and go load the dishwasher until I ask for the hug.

Ideally, we would be able to give ourselves the same deal, especially in times of much-needed change. Space to feel that shit, in your own time. Comfort offered and given in a way that works for you. No demand that you be anything you’re not.

The need for change often comes because we feel like we’ve been hijacked by life-- our energy has been obliterated by a workplace that extracts without bounds. We’ve been so deeply dissatisfied with an unhappy relationship that each day feels like an exercise in chafing against invisible shackles. We’ve gotten so numbed out from overwhelm that we’ve forgotten what it feels like to access simple joy. We have shocked ourselves by our own anger and irritation, we’ve lashed out at someone we love and poured shame into the mix.

Arguably, when those voices get the loudest, when they’re yelling at you to run, that’s the signal to slow down, not speed up. Change, however glorious, requires energy. It requires space. And for many of us, this is the moment when our most vicious voices start piping up.

You can’t berate yourself into being happy. You can’t beat yourself into a better life. You can’t hate yourself into a more fulfilling career or a more connected relationship.

You need grace to muddle about. , in his treatise on the power of muddling, says “befriending yourself beats berating yourself every time.”

Real, lasting change has to be grounded in care, compassion. In love.

You need to be able to send your loudest inner critics into the kitchen to load the dishwasher.

If this is you, the noise is at an all time high. So, how the hell do you get yourself to back the hell off so youy can find our signal?

Have an (internal) family meeting.

No person is just one thing. We contain multitudes. A coalition. We are made up of a whole lot of parts. So the voice that’s haranguing you? That’s just one part of you. Despite the harsh words and the tendency to jack up our nervous systems, even our super critical parts have good intentions. They exist to protect us, and they’re usually not operating on a full set of information. Whatever part that’s insisting that you’re failing and it’s all your fault is trying to protect you.

Most of these parts are like scared little kids - the more you ignore them, the louder they get. Time to have a sit down with that part.

Here’s the thing about anxious kids - they want boundaries. They want to know that the person in charge knows what they’re doing. And if you try to ignore them, they only get louder. Treat them like you would your own scared kid - listen to their concerns, let them know you’ll protect them. Tell them they can ride in the passenger seat, but they can’t drive.

Build some Boxes.

When I told my wife that I needed space to rage, she gave it to me. Building boxes for change is one way to give this space to yourself.

Career change is a topic that really stirs up the hornet’s nest of loud parts - when I work with coaching clients we build boxes by making the terms real. For example, clients do the math to figure out exactly what they have to work with in terms of financial runway, compensation needs, and retirement. A laid-off client who knows they can invest, say, 3 months of time into exploratory work when they do not need to generate income, can put the voices to rest within that box. A client who is being driven mad by their current toxic workplace can game out the consequences of creating new boundaries. What’s the worst case scenario? If they fire me for leaving by 5 every day to have dinner with my family (unlikely but possible), what would happen? I could get contract work until I land the next thing if I have to. We’d be okay. That client moves the locus of control — permission isn’t granted by your boss, it’s granted by you. Instant room opens up in your life. ( has excellent advice on actually doing the math, here.)

These clients have bigger, existential topics come up, as well. Life questions about family planning, whether to move, how to manage relationships, etc. - the box is a parking lot and a timeline to return to those questions. Once you’ve committed three months to this work, you can revisit the question of whether you should go to grad school.

Sometimes the uncertainties that hound you are beyond your own realm of control. Politics, climate change, whether Rihanna will actually ever release new music, etc. talks about creating a Goddess Box in her book Modern Tarot:

Create a box in honor of whatever deity you like to imagine watching over you. (You do imagine a benevolent force watching over you, don’t you? Try it! It feels nice!) Inside this box will go every single thing that you have no control over, the terrible things you’re having a hard time letting go of, everything you’re fighting against accepting. These things can be big-concept, like injustice; that’s super-hard to accept. They can be downright trivial, like your bestie’s annoyingly shitty taste in dates. Write down each one, fold up the paper, and slip it into your Goddess Box. It’s out of your hands now—you’ve handed it over.

Connect to Love.

You may not be in a place yet where you’re ready to embrace yourself unconditionally. But you’ve got the love in your life. You have the love to give. Spend some time connecting with that love.

Some writing prompts to get you started:

What would you say to someone that you loved? What advice would you give to the people to whom you feel the deepest tenderness? What would it take to give that tenderness to yourself?

If you want a place to start grounding, the Values Sort takes about ten minutes.

If this named something you’ve felt, send it to someone who’d recognize it too.

I was raised professionally in PR agencies, trained to enter any meeting prepared to steer. To have an official agenda and, if needed, my own unofficial agenda. To know who each person is, to understand (or learn quickly) their objectives - what do they care about, what are their goals and how do they align (or not) with my own or that of my client. To make sure that the action items are taken and distributed, even if it’s not by me. To use what I hear to inform strategy. I was trained by powerful, unstoppable (mostly) women who knew how to control a room.

Then I became a therapist. I learned right away that control has no place in a therapy session.

I approach therapy client work with curiosity, connection, compassion. Work being done in session is led by my client, centered around their needs, goals, readiness to go deeper. Control would be completely antithetical to the work.

Shifting from control to connection was revelatory, freeing. It changed my relationship to work completely.

When you work at a PR agency, there’s a common metric: “is the client happy?” Do they feel good about the work you’re doing? Do they like you? Part of the focus on control is about controlling your own (and your agency’s, and your client’s) image. Looking back, I’d argue that’s a business metric designed to make you insane.

Doing good work can make a client happy, yes. But it doesn’t guarantee it. Sometimes, a client is just unhappy. It may have absolutely nothing to do with you. Maybe you remind them of someone who bullied them as a child. Maybe they’re insecure, and they’re poised to throw you under the bus as soon as they’re questioned. Maybe they’re a CEO whose expectations have nothing to do with reality and managing expectations means a lot of emotional labor to avoid puncturing an ego.

As a therapist, my job is to build rapport and trust, to develop a relationship. My goal isn’t to make my client happy. It’s to make them feel safe. Trying to make someone feel happy when they don’t, twisting yourself up in order to make someone happy — those things make people feel unsafe. A goal of controlling a perception is counter entirely to a goal of being trusted. You can’t trust someone who only tells you what you want to hear.

Managing how you’re perceived is a cog quality. It’s what a system rewards. It was never a measure of whether the work was good. And it has a way of eating away at your confidence and efficacy.

When you’re oriented around managing people’s view of you, that’s a lot of mental space spent chasing a moving target that is frankly impossible to hit because it turns out we don’t and cannot control how other people feel. When you’re focused on making someone perceive you in a certain way at work, you’re not focusing on the work.

Making this shift, for many of us, will result in more satisfying careers, better lives — and likely will result in better relationships at work.

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t be concerned about what anyone thinks. After all, success is tied to people wanting to work with you. I’m saying, let go of the idea that you can control what other people think of you. Let people tell you what they need from you instead of trying to anticipate and change course based on unspoken cues. If you want a good relationship with someone, curiosity and connection trump control every time.

A lot of the work I do with coaching clients is about a journey of moving the focus from the external to the internal. If you’re guided by your own values, if you’re confident enough to ask questions, if you understand that boundaries around work will improve your efficacy: this is the work of seizing agency.

Recently, I was working with a client on this exact shift. She’s been interviewing for a position at a tech company that requires endless rounds of meetings. She’s focused on being conscious of the process as not something that requires her to prove herself, to viewing it as an information-gathering process instead: How do I feel when I talk to these people? How do they see the problem to be solved? Does the work culture jibe with my strengths? She was describing a recent interview that she felt great about, and said, “If my job is to make that guy happy, I’m in.” Then she immediately caught herself, and offered a reframe: I liked collaboration with this person, I appreciated their POV.

It’s work shifting this mindset.

But the result, becoming someone who can look for internal vs. external cues for success, can make you unstoppable.

If you want a clearer read on what you’re actually working from instead of who you’re trying to please, the Values Sort takes about ten minutes.

If this named something you’ve felt at work, send it to someone who’d recognize it too.

Nature is cool. See you next week when we are back from Glacier National Park.

Any time I work with teams who are encountering and negotiating the same decision over and over, I say, “Oh, you need a Divorce Schedule.”

I have divorced parents - they got along okay, but when my sister and I left the nest something kept happening when we were back for holidays or vacations - we would end up each day in a negotiation with nebulous and high stakes. “Are you spending the night here tonight?” asked with the full weight of someone who needed the answer to be yes. Every meal, every night, every hour of each day ended up disappointing someone. Everyone involved ended up exhausted and disappointed.

I complained about this to my therapist. He said, “Oh, that’s easy. You just need a schedule.”

He explained: before you go, write up an email with every day and night mapped out. Which parent, what activity, when. Everyone agrees to it in advance. Every night you go to your dad’s, you tell your mom — it’s the schedule. The decision is made.

It worked immediately. Within a few trips, everyone in the family was asking for the schedule. The drama didn’t disappear, but the daily negotiation did. The decision had already been made. We were just following it.

The Decision Made Framework

The Divorce Schedule belongs to a category of boundaries that I refer to as decision made frameworks.

I’m a big fan of traditional decision-making frameworks. Suzy Welch’s 10-10-10 framework, for example, asks you to consider what you might feel about your decision from three points of view: you 10 minutes from now, you 10 months from now, and you 10 years from now. These type of frameworks are invitations for information-gathering, consequence-weighing, and perspective taking.

A decision-made framework is different. It’s designed to bypass a moment of conflict. It’s taking the heat out of a situation that might otherwise activate you, where judgement could be clouded by guilt, money, fear, you-name-it. If you know that you’ll be in a situation on a regular basis where you’ll have to negotiate around your own or other people’s complicated emotions - that’s when you need a decision made framework.

A decision you’ve already made requires no willpower in the moment. It keeps you from negotiating against yourself.

This is how you stop overriding your own instincts. The decision has already happened. You just focus on what comes next. The reason most people perseverate over decisions is not that they don’t know what they want. It’s that they’re in conflict about it.

Bypassing the yes’es that are really no’s

I recently went on a walk with a friend I hadn’t seen in awhile - we lingered a bit longer than we planned and she looked at her phone and let out an expletive: “ugh, I told someone I would do this call and I forgot.” Then she paused and said, “You know when you say yes when you mean no? It was one of those.” She also demonstrated what happens when you say yes when you mean no -- you subconsciously sabotage. You forget the meeting. You show up frazzled or late or distracted. Your brain is still saying no, even when you said yes.

This very principle is why Whipsmart, my PR firm, had a rule: we never take business just for the money. There are a lot of great reasons to take on a client - an excellent, visual story, a stunningly good mission, very cool innovation (sorry for the blatant plugs but our clients are the coolest). But without those reasons, a fat retainer is just a recipe for regret. Any time we did it, it was the wrong decision. It’s not easy to turn down money. But it’s easier than trying to get a team to motivate on work they don’t really want to do. It’s better than the diligence it requires to keep from subconsciously undermining the work.

I have a rule that has radically improved my life: if the only reason I’m doing something is fear, obligation, or guilt, I don’t do it.

The word “only” matters. There are plenty of things I do because obligation is part of the picture. I go to work events I’d rather skip because I’m obligated and because I get to connect with colleagues, learn new things, or grow professionally. Those other things make it worth my while. The rule gets enforced when the only argument for saying yes is that my sense of obligation steps in and overrides my no.

You know exactly what I’m describing. It’s the acquaintance whose name appears on your phone and you feel immediately drained -- then, just as quickly, the guilt sets in, and suddenly you have set aside the afternoon to go to coffee instead of . . . literally anything else. Staring at the wall, for example. Taking a nap. That dread you feel? It’s information. It’s telling you that somewhere in the decision, your signal got overridden by noise.

The framework makes the decision clear and, almost every time, it eliminates regret. Just like any boundary, there will be people who don’t like it or understand it. That’s okay. If we spend all our time and energy trying to placate those people, we will not have time and energy for the work of building the life and career we want.

If you want to try this for yourself, start to notice the telltale signs of saying yes when you meant no. Dread, avoidance. Anxiety.

Pick an area -- work, relationships, time — and keep notes about your feelings when you make decisions. Feel it in your body — the pit in your stomach, the slump in your shoulders, the drag in your step. Start to notice when you’re giving the yes’es that mean no, then try to name why. That feeling when you want to cry “for no reason?” that’s the reason.

Then, make a rule. Make a rule that’s specific enough that you could test a decision against it and get a yes or no. Not “I’ll be better about boundaries.” A rule.

The rule won’t protect you from hard situations. But it protects the part of you that knows the answer from the part that’s been trained to override it.

What’s one rule you’ve already made for yourself — the kind that takes a decision off the table before it happens? Hit reply.

If this resonated with someone you know, send it their way.

I talked to 20 therapists in two weeks.

Actually, considering I also talked to my own therapist, and I talked to my co-workers and friends, I probably talked to more like 25 therapists. (I am a therapist, and I talk to myself constantly so let’s call it 26.)

I sent a note to a local listserv looking to build a referral network for my coaching clients, and my calendar instantly filled up with back-to-back Zoom calls. I was unprepared for the response. But, I was game!

One morning, my wife asked, “what do you have going on today?” and I said, “Not much — just a bunch of calls with therapists. Like, seven.”

She stood stock still and said, “Holy SHIT.” Like I just casually mentioned I’d be running an ultramarathon this afternoon. Like I declared I was shaving my head.

My wife is an introvert. A delightful, dirt-digging, animal-loving, hilarious and adorable introvert. The idea of having a calendar full of zoom calls is, for her, a low-level Dante-style ring of hell. I said, “Oh, this is so easy! Low stakes! I just talk to a lot of cool people!”

She said, “That’s straight up crazy.”

Here’s what I learned from talking to many, many therapists in a week: I discount what I am good at.

A quick 30 minutes, make a new pal. Easy! And I met so many of them! I even am working on planning a meetup because therapists don’t get out and meet other people in our field nearly enough, and what’s more fun than 20 zoom calls with strangers? A picnic on the lake with 20 strangers!

I’m very good at getting on a phone call, establishing rapport, sharing information and asking questions. Those are the skills that make me a good communicator. They are the fuel I use to feed my galaxy brain and to create programs that help and delight my clients. They are skills that, after years and years of honing, are as available to me as breathing. And I was looking at a day full of back to back meetings as an “easy day.”

As I reflected on this, I realized something else — seven-meeting days are not, in fact, easy for me, either — preparing, being present, following up — all require work, and at the end of a day full of this, I’m tired. But I’m playing in my comfort zone. I don’t dread the day, I don’t feel dysregulated at the end of it. The extra energy required to force myself to do something I don’t want to do feels like so much more work than 8 hours of work I enjoy.

I constantly forget how much work it took for me to get good at these things. I’m really great at doing an intake call because I worked for PR agencies for decades. I’m unintimidated by meeting a stranger because I’ve met thousands of them.

I was talking to a friend who is a deeply seasoned, gifted practitioner of her craft — who had to be reminded that people aren’t paying her to make a phone call. They’re paying her for the years of experience and deep relationships that make it so she knows exactly who to call and precisely what to say.

Even if you don’t have decades of experience, if you’re a natural at something — you’re still doing something that many, many people can’t. Or that they would take so much more time and effort to do.

And here’s the rub: When we discount what comes naturally, we over-commit until we snap.

I went to grad school, ran a business, and planned a wedding at the same time. All things I was interested in and that felt “easy” at the time. I sat in a place of feeling like I wasn’t doing “enough” because nothing felt “hard.” Then I hit a huge burnout wall. Because I was actually doing like three full time jobs and giving myself credit for none of it.

The problem wasn’t the workload. It was the perception. I had convinced myself that if it didn’t feel hard, it didn’t count.

I’m not doing that again.

My wife thought seven meetings was a crisis. I thought it was a light day. We were both right — we were just using different measuring sticks.

Next time you finish a task and think, “Well, that was nothing,” stop. Write it down. Your brain might be telling you it was easy, but your energy levels later will tell you it was real work.

After all, it took millions of years to evolve a brain that makes breathing look effortless.

If you’re ready to stop writing off your best work as “no big deal,” let’s look at it together. Book something here.

My wife has a dream. She calls it her “lotto dream” — the big, extravagant lifestyle choice she would make if she could have anything in the world. Many of us do. Maybe you do, as well. Yours might be a chalet in Tuscany or a trip around the world or a wardrobe of couture.

Hers is a 90’s-era Toyota Tacoma pickup.

The other day, on a dog walk, we passed one sitting in a driveway, covered in dirt and cobwebs, and she swooned.

I said, “Babe, we have two cars. Just trade yours in and get one. It’s not like you’re lusting after a cherry Corvette. It definitely will cost less than your paid off Nissan.”

She was shocked. She literally put her hand over her heart and stared at me. (Side note omg she’s the best.) It hadn’t occurred to her that she could just... do that thing. Stop pining and buy the $10k used car! LIVE YOUR DREAM!

On the way home she was stunned and ecstatic. She waxed rhapsodic about how she will turn heads when she drives that old truck down the street. (I don’t know how you could look away from that level of pure joy, to be honest.)

Here’s a harder version of the same thing.

I have a friend who described her job as “a prison cell with the door open.” This friend is a relentless achiever. You know that tech company? She’s worked for it. She’s done marketing work that has made those companies millions. She looks at her career with a structured pragmatism — collecting resume builders, working for different size companies to get a breadth of experience, from startups to FAANG giants. She recently told me that the juggernaut for which she currently works has a culture that feels stiff and uninspiring. Her boss is “likable” but requires a lot of managing up. She figures she’ll spend another year or two there before it becomes unbearable. In the meantime, she’s cooking up ideas. She’s dreaming of side hustles.

I said to her, “You know how to make money.” Because she does.

Recently she pitched an idea to me to help me grow my business, in exchange for a percentage, which I immediately said yes to.

She said, “I’m not sure I do.”

Lady, you literally just got me to write you a check from a single text message. I must disagree.

The idea that you can’t make money? That’s what keeps you sitting in your prison cell, despite the fact that the door is hanging open.

But I don’t think it’s really about the ability to make money.

Starting something new requires you to jump off a cliff.

Working for yourself requires you to jump on a regular basis. When I started Whipsmart, my PR firm, I learned quickly how to do it.

Each time I reached out to a contact, took an intake call, wrote a proposal — I had to work through the emotional run-up. The reason we don’t jump off cliffs is because we have a reasonable expectation that we would die. Most of us stay safely on the ground, a truly reasonable decision. But there are a few thousand people each year who gear up and try BASE jumping — flinging themselves off of high places for fun. They push past whatever fear grips them because they believe the rewards will be worth the risk1.

Building my business took a lot of conversations, a lot of networking, a lot of proposals. Each time I pitched our services, each time I reached out to someone new, I built up the skill of the emotional base jump. Turns out, the work that I and my team did was valuable to a lot of companies. We have done incredible work over the years, and billed millions of dollars. Those base jumps were absolutely worth it.

It’s not that you don’t know how to make money. It’s that some part of you believes that the risks are so high that you’re safer sitting in that cell.

My wife can buy the truck. She always could. The story she told herself — that a Tacoma was a lotto dream, not a real one — was the only thing in the way.

We tell ourselves that our dreams are impractical, impossible, unattainable, not doable. In that way, we make sure they are.

What’s the $10k used car version of the thing you’ve been pining after? Go look at the price tag today.

Early in your career, you’re rewarded for raw competence: the flawless spreadsheet, the perfect deck, the late nights crossing every t. It makes sense you’d develop a deeply-honed vigilance for being right.

But the further up the ladder, the softer the skills required. There’s a whole other currency that may not show up on your resume: warmth, relationship-building, and EQ. People crash and burn when they can’t regulate their emotions. Brilliant executives derail1 when they lack human connection, even if their deliverables are getting met. Relationship building is the way we build trust. When people trust you, they don’t mind if you make mistakes. When you’re seething, defensive, unregulated and overworked, people don’t see the work you’re doing. They only know how you’re making them feel.

High-achieving women, especially, are socialized to take on more than we can reasonably handle. We spend our lives making sure nothing falls through the cracks at home or at work. If a ball gets dropped, we pick it up. If a presentation is half-baked, we stay late to finish it. Years ago, a friend and I came up with a phrase to describe a way out of this trap: Smile more, do less.

What does it mean to smile more and do less?

You very likely built your career by demonstrating vast competence, technical knowledge, and a dedication to the work. You may have taken on the unofficial role of making sure the action items happen, that every presentation has all the t’s crossed and the i’s dotted.

We watch our less vigilant peers blithely make mistakes while charming their way through the organization. (Nowadays, the kids might say there’s a personality hire exercising weaponized incompetence. Potato PoTAHto.)

We overwork ourselves and start to nurse violent fantasies of stabbing that coworker everyone loves between the eyes with a pencil. And because we are doing work that technically falls on someone else’s plate, we’re mostly not being acknowledged for the extra work at all. We think, “Doesn’t anyone SEE what’s happening here?”

At this point, we have become grumpy and passive aggressive. That personality hire is not only getting away with far less drudgery; everyone wants to hang out with them and no one wants to be around you.

In my work as a coach and a therapist, I tell clients that resentments are a signal that they have an unmet need. At this point, you have many of them to address.

“Smile more, do less” is not about slacking. It’s about taking responsibility for the part of the mire that you can control.2 It’s about setting and holding boundaries, and right-sizing the work so you can introduce more ease into your life and improve your work relationships at the same time. Perhaps the reason that spreadsheet wasn’t perfect is because realistically it did the job and no one is ever going to look at it again. Maybe it’s okay if Chad’s presentation kind of sucks, because that’s not even your work. Chad can be responsible for Chad. If the company doesn’t get the account because of it, Chad (and his boss) can deal with that.

Here’s the structural fact that smile more, do less is built on: people don’t succeed just because they’re really good at paperwork, the grind, even strategy. Even results. People ultimately succeed because other people want to work with them. And no one wants to work with the person who is seething with resentment.

If you’re feeling an angry prickle of resistance right now, I get it. (Write what you know!)

The things you do are technically correct. You are doing more work. But the voice telling you to fix everything is a habit from earlier in your career, the kind of overcompensation that got you here but won’t get you further.

Know this: you don’t need to prove yourself anymore. Everyone already knows you’re competent.

It’s time to step into the next part of your career. The part where you do less, so you can smile more.

Where can you do less?

When I say “smile more,” I’m not talking about performative friendliness. I’m talking about genuine ease — an actual better state of mind that shows up in how you work with people. Do less is a permission structure. Here are some ways to grant yourself that permission:

Make peace of mind a KPI. Right now, work ambition and the ambition to feel better may feel like they’re in conflict. They don’t have to be. Ask yourself what needs you have that aren’t currently being met, and what you can do to bridge that gap. The things that restore you — the run, the hour to yourself, the after work drinks with a friend — aren’t indulgences. They’re necessary tools. The inner voice that says “if you take time for this, you will fail” has it backwards. Try: “if I don’t take time for this, I will fail.”

Prioritize connection over perfection. This means releasing your death grip on the idea that you need to be right. It’s cutting you off from other people. If you find yourself arguing with Chad in your head before you drift off to sleep, it’s time to stop being right and start being curious. There’s a saying in marriage counseling: you can be right, or you can be married. At work, you can be right, or you can have allies. Choose allies. As soon as you’ve set up a situation when one person wins and one person loses, the relationship has already taken the hit. If you’re prioritizing a relationship, you welcome another person’s point of view (even if you think they’re wrong. Especially if you think they’re wrong). Sometimes, people just want to be heard. You don’t have to agree to hear someone out. The act of listening lowers the stakes and eases the path forward.

Ask for help. I’m not saying you’d ever say to your boss, “that’s not in my job description.” I’m not crazy. But you can ask for help prioritizing. “Hey, I’m fully focused on getting the Q3 strategy locked down by Friday. To make sure that stays on track, I need to leave Chad’s presentation entirely with him. If I step in to polish his slides, the strategy deadline is going to slip. Are we aligned on keeping my focus on the Q3 launch?”

Start small. Pick one ball this week that isn’t yours, and watch it hit the floor.

Chad will survive. So will you. But only one of you will be smiling about it.

If you have a friend who is currently staying up until midnight fixing someone else’s slides, send this to them. They probably need the permission to let it drop.

Ready to do this work with a thinking partner? Signal Strength

Here’s a tale of two conversations from this week.

The client.

I had a client write out all the qualities of her dream job.

It came with an excellent list of must-haves: killer team, juicy challenges, cool mission, good boss. The things she loves to do — parachute in and fix a project that stumbled, manage big stakes, solve complex problems. Collaborate with smart people. Each one carefully couched within what she considers her lane.

The very last item, right under “I’d like to work flexibly”:

“I want to create a retreat center with a therapist friend where we can offer workshops on career development, self-care and actualization with mid-career women. This will take place in a tranquil Northern California location. I will facilitate these workshops. We will create corporate-specific retreats for tech companies like Google and will use the revenue generated from these budgets to offer affordable opportunities for people from all walks of life.”

One of these things is not like the other.

Our collaboration dashboard is full of recruiter calls for exec positions at tech companies. Meanwhile, there’s a fully formed business plan casually lurking at the bottom of the list.

The friend.

A friend I’ve known for 20 years, whose career is a thing of legends, called to talk about a position she’s interviewing for. “Interviewing” might be a misnomer, considering the dance they do when big public companies headhunt a key exec. Orchestrating, maybe? A litany of meetings and tests and conversations, an invisible network of calls and backchannel reputation checks, CEO to CEO. They probe and prod and look for weakness. A process requiring a candidate with a constitution of steel.

She knows she wants to leave her current position. She has options at a level of responsibility and compensation most of us will never see. Deservedly so. A generational talent.

During our conversation, she talked about the responsibilities and expectations of the position, and then she paused. “I have a vision for what I see as the future of my industry and practice. I see the impact that AI and other forces are having. I want to help usher in the next generation of folks as we shape what the future of this looks like, together. I’m hoping I can use their resources to do that.”

I said, “Why don’t you just do it on your own? It’s such a clear vision, you could absolutely build that.”

She gave me an immediate and decisive: “I can’t. I’m not ready.”

Why not?

Her kids are about to go to college. She wants the bandwidth for them and for her family in the coming year. She wants to deepen the relationship with her partner and support him as their parents age.

“Do you think the job you’re looking at — at the compensation they’ll pay you — is going to take less bandwidth from you than doing your own thing?” I don’t know for certain. But I cannot imagine a world where that would be true.

The case.

When you’re deferring your dream, you’re often working very hard. It’s not out of a lack of motivation or fear of hard work. Instead, we construct a case. We are masters at building the evidence, which is based both in realism (doing this plan would require capital I don’t currently have) and in arguments we make to obscure something deeper. From within the safety of that case, there’s no need to pursue the other thing. At least not right now.

Part of what makes the case so convincing is this: building your own thing requires a different kind of work than most high achievers have ever done. These are people who excel at operating within a structure. Give me the KPI, I’ll hit it. Give me the framework, I’ll master it. That is a real and hard-won skill.

Building something from scratch requires a different question: what is the framework? Do I have to build it myself? Not knowing what winning looks like before you’ve defined it is genuinely uncomfortable for people who’ve built their identity on knowing the answer. The case feels true in part because this part of it is.

Here’s the rub: the path they’re choosing instead may not be as secure as it looks. Spirit Airlines closed overnight. Whole divisions of companies have are being eliminated in a single budget conversation. The exec role that felt solid last year was gone by Q1. The certainty you’re trading the dream for was never guaranteed, and it is less guaranteed now than it has ever been.

In fact, at the end of the day, we are not guaranteed any tomorrow. Tim Denning uses this mindset to create what he describes as a “psychopathic sense of urgency:”

Whenever I try to delay priorities I tell myself “Timbo, you had a near-miss with cancer in 2015. What the hell makes you think you have the extreme privilege of being alive in three months to start this goal then?”

Without fail this thinking always makes me move faster. Believing you’ll be alive beyond today is sheer arrogance. It’s ego. And it’s bloody disgusting. How dare you. You could be dead tomorrow. So do it today or shut up and stop complaining

A psychopathic sense of urgency is a pattern interrupt. Use it.

He uses this as a way to keep himself focused. I think it’s also a useful way to tackle some of the objections in our case. My brain is excellent at spinning elaborate what-ifs (what if I fail, what if I do it and I hate it), and a surefire way to put those in perspective is to remind myself that the only thing I know for sure is I’m going to die, so if I want to do the thing, I better do it now.

As always, for every case, there’s a counter.

How to argue your case.

Like a good lawyer, you should be able to argue both sides. List every reason you can’t do the thing, then argue as opposing counsel.

I don’t have the skillset. I’ve only ever worked in one industry. Your honor, I object. Each of these skills can be put to good use building the thing you want to build. Any you don’t have, you can learn.

This isn’t the right time. For the jury’s consideration: what would the right time actually require that this time doesn’t have?

Building that would take way too many resources. Permission to cross-examine the witness: please list all the resources the current path requires. Then compare them to the other one.

You built the case. Give it a prosecutor.

If this landed somewhere, hit reply. I read every one.

If it resonated with someone you know, send it their way.