When you ask them why the answer is never “I love mornings” or “I’ve always been a night owl.” Instead, it’s some version of “that’s the only time when nobody needs anything from me.”

Want to know why we do this to ourselves?

Most of us were raised on a very simple rule. Finish your homework, and then you can watch TV. Get your chores done, and then you can go outside. Do your soccer drills, and then you can be on your phone. Required things came first. Work before play. Whatever you actually wanted to do had to be done in whatever time was left over. It’s such a normal part of how we were raised that it barely registers as a rule at all. It just feels like how things work.

There’s an actual name for it, for anyone curious. Psychologists call it the Premack principle, though you probably know it as Grandma’s rule: eat your vegetables, then you can have the cake. It’s effective. It’s also why you can likely still hear the exact voice, and remember the exact bargain, from your own childhood version of it.

Join The Coaching Circle

Nobody explained the fine print at the time, which is that the rule only works if work eventually ends.

Homework ends. A chore list ends. A season of drills ends. When it ends, there’s time left over, and the rule pays out exactly the way it promised it would.

Then you become an adult, and the required list no longer ends. It doesn’t even come close. There’s no bell, no teacher dismissing class, no season that wraps up in June. The job doesn’t finish. The housework doesn’t finish. The parenting doesn’t finish. At some point, you could do every required thing on the list, correctly, without stopping, and there would still be a required thing waiting when you were done. Which means if you’re still running on the original rule, still waiting for the leftover time you were promised once the list clears: it’s not coming. It was never going to.

Most women don’t consciously decide to break that rule once they figure this out. They just start stealing the only unclaimed square footage left in the day, which happens to be the hours on either end of everyone else being asleep. Even if it’s at 1AM.

The writer Oliver Burkeman built an entire book, Four Thousand Weeks, around this exact trap. One line of his has stuck with me since I read it: “The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control.” He’s right. So here’s what we do.

We stop waiting to be done with our work before we enjoy our life. That was a rule created to build discipline in childhood not to punish us in adulthood.

The fix isn’t to be more productive. Paradoxically, it’s to schedule yourself into the week before the list takes over.

I unpack this idea on the podcast this week, The Week That Works for Everyone But You, and I talk about why this pattern is so hard to interrupt, and what it actually looks like to build a week another way. I’d love for you to give it a listen.

PS — If this is a pattern you recognize in yourself, I’m teaching the actual process for building your week the other way in my live masterclass, Your Week, Your Way, on September 9th at noon Eastern.

Register Here

Watch or listen to this week’s episode wherever you prefer:

[YouTube] [Spotify] [Apple Podcasts] [Substack]

Have you ever looked at your calendar and realized you've created a week that works for everyone else, but leaves very little space for you? In this episode, I'm exploring how we end up in this pattern and what it takes to create a week that supports the life we actually want.

I'm talking about why "life is full" is a more empowering way to think about busy seasons, and why waiting until everything else is done before making time for yourself often means that time never comes.

Together, we'll explore how to rethink your priorities, protect what matters most, and create more room for the things that help you feel like yourself.

Show Highlights:

● Why full and busy are not the same thing. [04:42] ● How we accidentally create weeks that leave us out. [08:10] ● Why the "work first, play later" mindset stops working. [12:32] ● The hidden costs of constantly putting yourself last. [19:40] ● How losing touch with yourself happens over time. [24:58] ● The power of "crowding out" what doesn't serve you. [29:44] ● How to put the most important things into your week first. [33:22] ● Creating a week that works for you, too. [42:10]

Join The Coaching Circle to attend the September masterclass, Run Your Week Your Way, and learn the complete system for designing a week that reflects your priorities.

Join The Coaching Circle to apply what you learn on the podcast with structure & support: https://brilliant-balance.com/coachingcircle

To book an exploratory call and learn about coaching options: https://brilliant-balance.com/explorecoaching

Subscribe for weekly content from Cherylanne straight to your inbox: https://brilliantbalance.substack.com/

Follow Cherylanne on Instagram: www.instagram.com/cskolnicki

I’ve been thinking about, writing about, and talking about balance professionally for more than sixteen years. And yet I didn’t learn that balance requires self compassion until somewhat recently. And then I re-learned the lesson today. Here’s the story…

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For years I tried to make this issue solve itself, hoping I could somehow circumvent the laws of space and time. If I just wrote it all down, eventually I would get to everything. Right? Wrong.

Lists are great for keeping track of what we want but not so great for making them happen. It’s like picking up a hammer to tighten a screw.

Keeping a “to do someday” list didn’t help me because it just grew longer and longer. What I needed was a way to create throughput based on that list - to move things from “to do” to “done”. Which meant I needed to find a way to decide, out of all the things I want, which ones will actually get a time and a place on my calendar this week.

Attend the September Masterclass

It turns out I’m not alone. The psychologist Peter Gollwitzer spent years studying why people who genuinely want to do something so often don’t, and found that it was all about having a specific time assigned to the task. He called it the difference between a goal intention (I will do X), and an implementation intention (I will do X at time Y). Only the second one reliably gets acted on, a finding that holds up across decades of studies on everything from exercise to health screenings to cleaning out the garage.

This is the actual mechanism behind the dynamic I was experiencing and that I see in so many high-drive women. We have goal intentions stacked ten deep. What we don’t often have is the second step, the implementation intention, the one that takes any single item off the pile and assigns it an actual time to be done.

I remember a client once sharing with me that she and her husband hadn’t had a real date night in two years. There was no dramatic falling-out, and they actually liked each other. But life was so busy and the calendar was so full that date night just fell by the wayside.

We set out to change that. And the fix was remarkably straightforward.She put a recurring date night on the calendar for every third Friday. She didn’t have a specific plan for what they’d do, or a sitter lined up, just a calendar entry to hold the space. She told me it felt almost silly at first, scheduling something so loosely defined. But the placeholder did exactly the job it needed to. It stopped being a fuzzy hope and became a fixed point that gave her specific decision to make a week or so in advance - where are we going, who’s watching the kids. A year later, the placeholder is still there…and so are the date nights.

The same principle applies to our daily to do list. Most of us have one but it’s a long inventory of everything we mean to get to. It doesn’t usually specify when we’ll get to it. If you take your list and assign each task an actual time slot, its odds of happening increase dramatically.

Some phases of life allow us to wing it, but when you’re living at peak complexity, practices like this one make a crucial difference. I’ve seen the impact time and time again.

I’m sharing my entire Weekly Edit process with Coaching Circle members this month. It includes this principle and much more. The live masterclass is on September 9 at 12PM ET and we’ll follow that up with a coaching call two weeks later. You can sign up here.

Watch or listen to this week’s episode wherever you prefer:

[YouTube] [Spotify] [Apple Podcasts] [Substack]

Take the Quiz & Find Out

We all have good intentions. The challenge is turning those intentions into action.

In this episode, I'm revisiting one of the very first episodes of the Brilliant Balance podcast because the message is just as relevant today as it was then. As I navigate a busy season of travel, family transitions, and sending another child off to college, I'm putting this principle into practice myself.

If you've ever wondered where the time went or why the things that matter most keep getting pushed aside, this episode will show you a simple shift that can help your calendar reflect your priorities.

Show Highlights:

• Why I'm bringing back one of the earliest episodes of the podcast. [00:00]

• The simple principle that has guided my planning for years. [02:00]

• Why it's not enough to know what you want to do. [08:00]

• How to use your calendar to protect what matters most. [11:30]

• The difference between a to-do list and a real plan. [20:00]

• Why scheduling your tasks reduces procrastination and increases follow-through. [29:30]

• The biggest mistake people make when they become more productive. [39:30]

• How to align your calendar with your values and priorities. [34:00]

Resources Mentioned:

Join The Coaching Circle to attend the September masterclass, Run Your Week Your Way, and learn the complete system for designing a week that reflects your priorities.

Join The Coaching Circle to apply what you learn on the podcast with structure & support: https://brilliant-balance.com/coachingcircle

To book an exploratory call and learn about coaching options: http://brilliant-balance.com/explorecoaching

Subscribe to the Brilliant Balance Weekly: www.brilliant-balance.com/weekly

Follow Cherylanne on Instagram: www.instagram.com/cskolnicki

For years, I dealt with a particular kind of Sunday dread. Not the Sunday scaries everyone talks about, where the evening sort of sucks because you don’t want to go to work the next day (I love my work - lucky me!). Mine showed up earlier than that, usually by early afternoon, sometimes by late morning, as a sinking feeling that the day was already slipping through my fingers “How can it be noon already? This day is basically shot.” As if Sunday only had a few good hours in it instead of a full stretch of them waiting for me.

The reality I keep having to remind myself of is that Sundays can feel expansive if I’m mindful about how I spend the time.

What makes it feel expansive instead of squeezed isn’t doing less. It’s also not rushing through a set of chores to complete like an obstacle course before Monday arrives. (I’ve tried that - epic fail.)

It’s more about giving space to things I don’t always get to during the week when work and school are competing for space.

Here’s what an actual Sunday looks like for me these days…

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These days, as a managing director and partner at Boston Consulting Group, she leads the firm’s transformation practice in North America and co-founded its behavioral science lab. This year, her first book came out, How Change Really Works, co-written with two BCG colleagues. It opens with a startling statistic. Of the 2,000 corporate transformations they studied across twenty years, only about 500 were still succeeding. The other 75% hadn’t failed outright, but they had quietly fizzled out. Kristy’s book is classified as a business book, but I’d argue it’s really a behavioral science book using organizations as its case studies. There is so much to learn about human behavior buried within it.

Here’s the first thing that surprised me: when Kristy’s team surveyed thousands of people heading into a major change, the number one emotion they reported wasn’t dread. In fact, it was curiosity. We’ve been sold an entire mythology around the idea that people hate change, but what people actually hate is having change done to them when they have no say in it. Give someone a genuine role in shaping what’s coming, even a small one, and their curiosity carries the day.

But then what? After the kickoff energy is gone and the first burst of discipline runs out, why does change stall?

Most of us blame organizational overwhelm. We argue that the individuals involved just don’t have the capacity to see the change through. They can’t add one more thing on top of their current workload and do it well.

So consultants build heat maps to show how many initiatives each person is carrying, and figure out who is overloaded. But what Kristy and her team found is that two people can be carrying the exact same number of commitments and one can succeed while one fails.

That’s because some people genuinely have a capacity problem. But others have a confidence problem.

Explore PRIVATE COACHING

A capacity problem is caused by real scarcity; it’s when you genuinely don’t have the bandwidth, because something else is already eating it up. A confidence problem looks the same to an outside observer (the work is stalling) but the cause is different. In this case, the task is new to you, so it takes more energy to do it (in the form of vigilance, second-guessing, and sheer mental effort), and that extra energy requirement is what eats your bandwidth.

When change stalls and you want to get it back on track, you have to know which one you’re facing, but most of us never slow down long enough to ask.

This is almost exactly the trap I watch high-drive women fall into, over and over. Their ambition always says yes to the next thing but they don’t assess their capacity. And when the wheels start to come off, most of them blame themselves (assuming it’s a capability or a confidence problem). But nine times out of ten, it’s a capacity problem wearing a confidence costume. You don’t fix that by trying harder. You fix it by getting honest about what’s actually on your plate and then building the capacity you need to take on what’s next.

As a BOLD alum, Kristy is a shining example of what this looks like in practice. It was a great conversation, and an especially fun one for me, since I got to reflect on the whole arc of her journey and celebrate this bucket list accomplishment with her.

Which brings me to this. Sometimes people think coaching is designed for people who need help catching up. But my best clients are always the ones who use coaching to get further ahead, people who need to create enough capacity to fuel their ambition.

If that sounds like you, let’s see what we can do together.

Watch or listen to this week’s episode wherever you prefer:

Explore PRIVATE COACHING

[YouTube] [Spotify] [Apple Podcasts] [Substack]

Take the Quiz & Find Out

Change is hard. But it isn't because people resist it.

In this episode, I'm joined by Kristy Ellmer, Managing Director and Partner at Boston Consulting Group and co-author of How Change Really Works. We explore why so many personal and organizational changes fail, what behavioral science teaches us about making change stick, and the simple shifts that can help us move forward with more confidence.

Whether you're leading a team, navigating a career transition, or trying to create new habits at home, this conversation will change the way you think about transformation.

Show Highlights:

• How Kristy's early career shaped her approach to uncertainty and change. [04:15]

• Why most transformations fail and what "change distance" really means. [10:20]

• The surprising role agency plays in helping people embrace change. [15:10]

• Why rituals matter more than willpower when creating lasting change. [23:30]

• The biggest misconception about how people respond to change. [34:15]

• How curiosity creates an opportunity for change to succeed. [36:45]

• What the IKEA Effect teaches us about getting people to buy into change. [42:30]

• Why a "fresh start" can be the key to rebuilding momentum. [1:05:10]

• How understanding your emotions can reduce cognitive load during periods of change. [1:16:40]

Resources Mentioned:

How Change Really Works by Kristy Ellmer, Julia Darr, and Philip Jamieson: https://amzn.to/3S1UZuO

Connect with Kristy Ellmer on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristy-r-ellmer-b25b7a23/

Follow Kristy Ellmer on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kristy_ellmer/

To book an exploratory call and learn about coaching options: http://brilliant-balance.com/explore

Join The Coaching Circle to apply what you learn on the podcast with structure & support: https://brilliant-balance.com/coachingcircle

Subscribe for weekly content from Cherylanne straight to your inbox: https://brilliantbalance.substack.com/

Follow Cherylanne on Instagram: www.instagram.com/cskolnicki

We leave this Wednesday to move my son into his college dorm in San Diego. And here’s something you may not know. I've danced with the idea of living there for years, but the stars have never aligned. I grew up in eastern Pennsylvania, went to school in upstate New York and then started my career in Atlanta. After I finished my MBA and got married, we moved to Cincinnati where I’ve been ever since. We’ve built a life here and it’s been a good place to raise a family.

But in four days, my 19 year old is going to follow his dreams all the way to California. I've been standing in his room here in Ohio today folding shirts he probably won't fold again for a year, and sitting with a feeling I didn’t expect to have this week. Envy. I expected the grief, but not the envy. I probably should have seen this coming, but I’m still figuring it out. I sat down to unpack this unexpected emotional loop (which it turns out is about way more than his new zip code) in case there’s something we can learn from it.

Pull up a chair…

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“I’m going to give you the playbook I wish I’d had,” she told me. And then she did it, literally, outlining which two sponsors I needed to stay visible to while I was out, how to time coffee dates so my name kept coming up in the rooms I was no longer in, what to ask for in my first month back, how to make sure nobody quietly gave away a job I wanted without putting me in the running for it. It wasn’t a pep talk. It was more like a battle plan with specific names, specific timing, specific asks.

Ondrea didn’t just buy me a baby gift and wish me well; she reached her hand down and pulled me onto the rung of the ladder where she was already standing.

This is the essence of what it means to lift as you climb. You don’t just hand out platitudes. You hand over a playbook.

I have been sharing my version of that playbook ever since. With women who worked for me later at Procter & Gamble. With women who work with me now, inside Brilliant Balance. With clients I coach who are in a season I’ve already lived through: the return to work after having a baby, the career pivot, the promotion that terrifies you, the year everything gets super demanding all at once. How do you get through a complicated, demanding season of life without shrinking your ambition? You don’t try to figure it out yourself. You get your hands on a playbook.

Join BOLD Open House

This is, not coincidentally, the exact thing BOLD was built for, and it’s one of the things I’m proudest of in the entire Brilliant Balance portfolio. BOLD is built for women sitting at the peak of life complexity: growing families and growing careers at the same time, increasingly aware that their ambition has quietly outstripped their capacity. The issue? No one has ever handed them a playbook for closing that gap. That’s what I’m trying to teach in BOLD. Not how to want less, but how to build the capacity to keep climbing as far as your heart actually wants to go.

Betsy Hamm, my guest on the podcast this week, gets it because she’s done it.. She spent years in marketing at Hershey Entertainment (the actual sweetest place on earth) before being recruited to a scrappy little donut startup called Duck Donuts, where she became, in order, the CMO, the COO, and eventually the CEO, taking the brand from twenty locations to two hundred along the way. (If you have never been to Duck Donuts where they are warm, made to order, and with a plethora of topping combinations, you’ll want to remedy that immediately.) Betsy has since left Duck Donuts and is out on her own now, building a consulting practice and getting a podcast of her own off the ground. She already believes, down to her bones, the exact thing I’ve spent my career teaching: women are not good at supporting each other, mostly because, as she put it to me, most of us were never handed the tools to do it in the first place.

In this conversation, we get into her whole career arc, from stewarding an iconic, century-old brand, to scaling a scrappy startup into a national name, to starting something from absolutely nothing. It’s a genuinely fascinating behind-the-scenes look at three completely different seasons of one career. We also just riff, for a good long while, on what it actually looks like for women to support other women in practice, not just in theory. I think you’ll enjoy listening to two people nerd out about that nearly as much as we enjoyed talking about it.

PS - If you might benefit from having a playbook and a personal board of directors to help you navigate this season of your life or career, get yourself registered for an upcoming BOLD Open House. A list of dates and the registration link are here.

Watch or listen to this week’s episode wherever you prefer:

[YouTube] [Spotify] [Apple Podcasts] [Substack]

Which of these 3 challenges are you facing?

Find out what’s keeping you stuck and what could help you move closer towards the life you actually want.

Take the Quiz

What does it take to build an ambitious career without losing sight of what matters most?

In this episode, I'm joined by Betsy Hamm, former CEO of Duck Donuts and founder of Loud & Lifted. Betsy shares the unexpected career moves that took her from marketing iconic brands to leading a company through rapid growth, private equity, and international expansion. Along the way, she opens up about the invisible rules she had to rewrite, both at work and at home.

If you're navigating a season of growth, leadership, or reinvention, this conversation offers a refreshing reminder that success doesn't have to come at the expense of your values.

Show Highlights:

• How Betsy's career evolved from Hershey to Duck Donuts. [08:30]

• What it was like to help grow Duck Donuts from 20 to 200 locations. [26:10]

• Why she stepped into the CEO role during one of the most challenging seasons. [45:15]

• The pressure of leading through private equity, rapid growth, and COVID. [49:30]

• The invisible rules she had to let go of at home and at work. [1:00:20]

• Why delegating at home was harder than delegating at work. [1:02:15]

• What she learned about building the right leadership team. [1:10:30]

• How leaving the CEO role led to an unexpected new chapter. [1:20:45]

• The mission behind Loud & Lifted and creating spaces where women support women. [1:28:20]

• The legacy Betsy hopes to leave for her daughters. [1:40:15]

Resources Mentioned:

Learn more about Betsy Hamm: https://betsyhamm.com

Listen to the Loud & Lifted Podcast: https://loudandliftedpodcast.com

Connect with Betsy on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/betsyhamm/

To book an exploratory call and learn about coaching options: http://brilliant-balance.com/explore

Join The Coaching Circle to apply what you learn on the podcast with structure & support: https://brilliant-balance.com/coachingcircle

Subscribe for weekly content from Cherylanne straight to your inbox: https://brilliantbalance.substack.com/

Follow Cherylanne on Instagram: www.instagram.com/cskolnicki

If your feed has looked anything like mine this week, you’ve seen the phrase “Lion’s Gate Portal” more times than you can count.

For the uninitiated, what that phrase refers to (and yes I had to look it up) is that astrologically speaking, as the Sun moves through Leo (symbol = lion) it lines up, briefly, with Sirius and Orion’s Belt. This is referred to as the Lion’s Gate portal and the stretch of days from August 8-12 are said to be when abundance, confidence, and alignment with what you want come more easily than usual.

Whether or not you buy into astrology, you can leverage this moment in time.

Katy Milkman, a behavioral scientist at Wharton who has spent years studying something she calls the fresh start effect, first clued me into the power of temporal landmarks when she was on the podcast back in 2021. Seven years earlier, in her research, she found that people are dramatically more likely to act on their good intentions right after one of these temporal landmark moments: the start of a new year, a new month, a birthday, or even a Monday. This isn’t because the calendar has any power of its own, but because a landmark gives you psychological permission to draw a line. The old version of you with her missed workouts, unanswered emails, and various and sundry bad habits gets filed under “before.” You get to start the next chapter as a slightly different person.

This is really just research confirming what most of us already know instinctively. We don’t wait for January 1st to change because there’s something magical about January. We wait for it because it gives us a moment in time to anchor our change to. If that’s true, then the Lion’s Gate Portal can be an anchor as well.
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Our brain doesn’t care whether the landmark is astrological or arbitrary; it just needs to feel like a line.

For me, this portal comes at a good time. This particular season has already been rearranging the furniture of my life in ways that have nothing to do with the stars. Things are changing around me whether I like it or not, and I’m keenly aware that I can harness this inflection point with intention or let it carry me along against my will. I’ll always choose intention.

So I spent time this weekend thinking about who I want to be as I walk into this next season. Not what I need to get done (although there’s plenty of that) but who I’m becoming.

The reflection unearthed some exciting possibilities…

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That morning, as I zipped up my suitcase for a ski trip I’d been looking forward to for months, I was all worked up. By the time we got to security I’d cried once and snapped at my husband twice. He was walking on eggshells and I was defensive, but not sure why.

Had I forgotten something? Nope. Everything I needed was already in my bag: jacket, base layers, goggles. I was wearing cute boots, and I’d skied before, dozens of times in fact. But I felt completely out of my element.

As people boarded the plane, I took mental notes. The woman in 14C, her jacket. The guy loading a bag over my head, his boots. The stunning blonde with the gorgeous luggage and the fur hat. I wasn’t just noticing; I was trying to discern what I had to do to get it right in a place like Vail.

Because while I’d skied before, I had never been to Vail. My anxiety had apparently built an entire mythology around this storied resort town, and I was failing to measure up before I’d even arrived.

There’s a name for what was happening on that plane, and it isn’t really mine alone.

I Want to Learn Emotional Resilience

In 1967, the developmental psychologist David Elkind coined a term for something he’d observed in early adolescence: the imaginary audience.

Elkind was studying why teenagers become so acutely, almost unbearably self-conscious. He looked at why a slightly wrong outfit or a stumble in the hallway can feel like a five-alarm crisis. His answer was that adolescents, in the middle of developing the cognitive ability to imagine what other people are thinking, overcorrect. They assume that because they can now imagine other people’s thoughts, other people must constantly be thinking about them. The result is a teenager walking through a school hallway convinced that everyone (the whole cafeteria, the whole bus, the whole world) is watching, evaluating, and remembering.

For those of us who are well past adolescence, I have good news. Elkind believed this dynamic fades with cognitive maturity. Later research has complicated that a little.

It seems that some version of the imaginary audience persists across our lifespan and it spikes whenever we’re in a socially novel or high-stakes situation.

A new job. A room full of people more senior than us. Posting something publicly. Or getting on a plane for your first trip to Vail.

We never fully leave the high school hallway. We just get better at hiding our feelings about it.

I think it’s worth asking why this particular fear is so stubborn, why, unlike so many other adolescent anxieties, it doesn’t just quietly age out. And the answer, I think, isn’t a flaw. It’s a feature that outlived its original job.

For most of human history, being judged by your group didn’t just threaten your ego. It threatened survival.

Humans evolved in small tribes where social standing determined access to food, protection, and mates so exclusion from the group could be a literal death sentence. The nervous system that developed under those conditions was exquisitely tuned to detect even small signals of disapproval, because for most of our evolutionary history, disapproval was upstream of danger. Being talked about wasn’t a social inconvenience. It could be the first sign that you were about to be cast out.

That wiring didn’t get an update when the stakes changed. Your brain, sitting in a work meeting deciding whether to say the unpopular thing, is running threat-detection software built for a world where the tribe’s opinion of you determined whether you ate that winter. It doesn’t know the difference between “my coworker might think this idea is bad” and “the tribe might leave me behind.” It responds to both with the same tightening, the same hesitation, the same overriding urge to just not do the thing you were about to do.

This is also, I think, why social media doesn’t just tap into the imaginary audience. It makes the audience real, permanent, and quantified. Elkind’s teenagers imagined a hallway full of eyes on them and were, for the most part, wrong. Post something publicly now, and there genuinely is a visible, countable audience right there in the likes, views and comments.

So when you feel that jolt of dread before you hit send, before you speak up, before you wear the thing or pitch the idea or tell the truth, you’re not malfunctioning, but you are running very old, very well-preserved software, doing exactly what it was built to do.. The problem isn’t that the software exists. The problem is that almost none of us has gone back and asked whether it’s still calibrated correctly for the actual stakes of the actual room we’re standing in. A smoke detector that goes off because you made toast isn’t broken. It’s doing its job on information that’s badly out of date. That’s closer to what’s happening here than any story about something being wrong with you.

That’s the distinction I want to leave you with, because I think it changes the way the fear feels once you can name it. The fear of judgment isn’t evidence that something is wrong with you. It’s a very old alarm system, doing its very old job, in a world where the job mostly doesn’t apply anymore. You are allowed to notice the alarm going off. But you are not required to obey it.

I go deeper into this in this week’s podcast episode Performing for People Who Aren’t Even Watching where I get into what the fear of judgment actually costs us when we let it drive our choices.

And if this is a pattern you recognize in yourself, join me on August 11th for a live masterclass on the skill of emotional resilience: how to actually tolerate hard feelings, including this one, and keep moving forward anyway instead of waiting for the fear to go away first. The work isn’t silencing it. Not obeying the alarm doesn’t mean making it stop ringing.

You already survived the actual high school hallway. You get to decide how much longer you perform for it.

Watch or listen to this week’s episode wherever you prefer:

[YouTube] [Spotify] [Apple Podcasts] [Substack]

Are you ready to feel progress and presence in your life?

Find out what’s keeping you stuck and what could help you move closer towards the life you actually want.

Take the Quiz

How many decisions do you make based on what you think other people will think?

In this episode, I'm unpacking the quiet fear of judgment that shapes so many of our choices. Whether it's speaking up in a meeting, showing up at a reunion, making a career change, or simply deciding what to wear, we often act as though everyone is watching our every move. The truth is, they're usually much more focused on themselves.

We'll explore why this happens, what it costs us, and how to stop performing for an audience that mostly exists in our own minds.

Show Highlights:

• The surprising lesson I learned from a summer full of high-stakes moments. [05:20]

• Why we overestimate how much other people notice us. [15:10]

• The psychology behind the "spotlight effect." [21:40]

• The hidden cost of performing for an imaginary audience. [31:15]

• Why fear of judgment keeps us from pursuing what we really want. [40:20]

• What to do when people really are judging you. [50:45]

• A simple mindset shift that can change the way you make decisions. [59:10]

• How to stop asking, "What will people think?" and start asking a better question. [1:05:30]

• Building the emotional resilience to move forward anyway. [1:11:20]

Join The Coaching Circle to attend the August masterclass on Emotional Resilience and apply what you learn on the podcast with structure & support: https://brilliant-balance.com/coachingcircle

To book an exploratory call and learn about coaching options: http://brilliant-balance.com/explore

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Follow Cherylanne on Instagram: www.instagram.com/cskolnicki

For most of this summer, my answer to “why is this project off track” has been some version of the same sentence: “I’m choosing to make the most of this time with my family.” Which is true. But that sentence is working overtime. That sentence has closed my laptop when it should have stayed open, cleared an afternoon that had time blocked for important project work, let a handful of things that matter deeply to me slide “one more week”… and then another. Nobody has questioned the reason I gave. Why would they? How do you argue with a mother wanting to be present before her son leaves home?

I didn’t question myself either. Not really. Until a few days ago, packing for this trip, when I caught the sentence doing something a good reason doesn’t usually do - making me feel some big feelings.

I felt it like a low hum that wouldn’t quiet down. So I did what I always do when something is nagging at me and won’t resolve on its own. I grabbed a journal and started asking myself questions, one after another, until I landed on a sentence I hadn’t seen coming; it was the kind you write and then just sit staring at before you can make yourself keep writing.

It doesn’t matter what that particular sentence was because this isn’t a piece about my specific list; it’s about the reason-to-excuse switch underneath it, which is what we’re all grappling with. So I sat down right after my journal time to record an audio for you and I talked through what happens when we build a reason so airtight that no one challenges it, not even us.

Press play below. Then, if it lands the way I suspect it will, go through the journal prompts underneath. They’re the actual questions I asked myself, in the order I asked them. I hope they unlock something for you that gets you back in motion.

And in case you’re worried, I’m not planning to wreck this week of time together to catch up on these two projects! It’s the insight that mattered; not the speed with which I address it.

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George Lucas has credited it as the scaffolding for Star Wars. You’ll see it reflected in everything from Harry Potter to The Lord of the Rings, The Lion King to The Karate Kid. Once you see it you can’t unsee it…heroes slaying dragons, literal or figurative.

Campbell wasn’t particularly interested in dragons. He was interested in what these stories reveal about the human condition, about the places we refuse to go, and what that refusal costs us.

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There’s a moment in the hero’s journey he called the refusal of the call. The invitation arrives, to cross the threshold or face the unknown thing, and the hero’s first answer is almost always no.

Not yet.
I’m not ready.
The timing is wrong.
There’s too much I’d have to give up.

Campbell didn’t judge the refusal; he understood it as fully human. But he was not soft about the cost of it: “The result of the refusal of the call,” he wrote, “is the life not lived.”

Then he drops the mic.

The cave you refuse to enter holds the treasure you seek.

I’ve confirmed that, over and over, from my front row seat to the lives of real women. And moreover, our cave is never random. We don’t feel dread about things that don’t matter; we feel it about the things that do. The cave is always where the treasure is, and every time we find one more reason to come back to it tomorrow, we are choosing in some small, quiet way to not live the life that is meant for us

I had a client who knew, for a long time, that her marriage wasn’t working.

Not in a vague way. She knew it the way you know things you’ve stopped saying out loud. She knew it at dinner when the conversation stayed surface-level for the hundredth time. She knew it on their rare vacations, when the distance between them didn’t close just because the scenery had. She caught herself doing the math, that elaborate calculus of reasons why now still wasn’t the right time to have the conversation.

She was very good at math. Most of us are.

For years she found other things to focus on. The kids needed her. Work was demanding. This was just a hard season. It was fine. She was fine. None of that was a lie, exactly. It just wasn’t the whole truth. She was refusing the call in the smallest possible increments daily, by looking at anything except the one thing she already knew.

The conversation finally felt impossible to avoid so she started it. Which led to a separation, a divorce, a custody agreement, the division of assets. And grief. The specific grief of ending a marriage, even one that needed ending.

And then, on the other side…the life that had been waiting for her. The one she hadn’t let herself fully imagine while she was busy not having the conversation. She’s remarried now. And she’s not fine anymore. She is genuinely, deeply happy.

Not every cave holds a marriage.

I’ve watched women refuse the call in far smaller rooms. The decision they keep not making, while they rearrange their lives around it instead. The symptom they’ve explained away for another year, telling themselves it will resolve on its own, while it quietly doesn’t. The conversation about workload or pay that keeps sliding to next quarter. The child who probably needs testing, with parents who keep deciding it can wait, until it finally happens, and a whole world of support opens up that simply wasn’t available before.

The calculus is always the same. The imagined discomfort of doing the thing feels worse than the real discomfort of not doing it. So it doesn’t get done. And it doesn’t get smaller during the waiting. In fact, it grows.

What I’ve learned by walking with women through this work is that the avoidance is a clue.

We don’t avoid what doesn’t matter. We avoid what does.

The dragon is always guarding something. Which means the place you feel the most resistance is precisely the place most worth walking toward.

When we’re doing this work, I’ll often ask clients, “What do you already know, that you’re not saying out loud yet?”

Because we usually know where our caves are. The avoidance is a choice. What changes everything is the moment someone crosses the threshold anyway, not because the fear left, but because the cost of staying finally outweighed it.

You already know where your cave is. Maybe it’s time to go in.

Watch or listen to this week’s episode wherever you prefer:

[YouTube] [Spotify] [Apple Podcasts] [Substack]

Feeling Stuck but Not Sure Why?

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Have you ever finally done something you've been putting off and immediately wondered, Why did I wait so long?

In this episode, I'm exploring what avoidance really is and why so many of us stay stuck, even when we know exactly what we need to do. From difficult conversations and health decisions to everyday life admin, avoidance often looks like being busy or waiting for the "right time." But underneath it is usually something else.

If there's something you've been circling for weeks, months, or even years, this episode will help you understand what's keeping you stuck and how to start moving forward.

Show Highlights:

• The personal health decision I avoided for years and what finally changed. [04:30]

• Why avoidance is more than procrastination. [14:10]

• The hidden emotional cost of putting things off. [20:45]

• Why difficult conversations rarely get easier with time. [27:15]

• The surprising ways avoidance shows up in parenting, health, and everyday life. [36:50]

• How the "complexity illusion" keeps us from taking action. [47:20]

• Why the things we avoid are often easier than we imagine. [55:40]

• What avoidance teaches us about ourselves and why it always comes with a price. [1:02:30]

• One simple question that can help you take your next step. [1:08:10]

Join The Coaching Circle to apply what you learn on the podcast with structure & support: https://brilliant-balance.com/coachingcircle

To book an exploratory call and learn about coaching options: http://brilliant-balance.com/explore

Subscribe for weekly content from Cherylanne straight to your inbox: https://brilliantbalance.substack.com/

Follow Cherylanne on Instagram: www.instagram.com/cskolnicki

Someone at an event where I was speaking recently asked me what I actually do on the morning of a keynote to prepare. They didn’t want to know about the weeks of preparation that go into the content itself, but the morning of. What I eat. What I wear. Whether I run through anything one more time before I walk in.

I gave a few answers off the cuff, and enough people wrote them down afterward that it seemed worth putting together properly.

It was fun to think about what I’ve learned works over the years - and while some of these are probably broadly adopted by speakers, I think a few of the things I’d never skip are unique. I recorded an audio for you and also pulled my Top 10 into a list…

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Then fate intervened. Because later in the day, we found ourselves running ahead of schedule, and someone suggested I do an impromptu Q&A to fill the time. I walked back onstage with nothing prepared. Just me and a microphone.

And I came completely alive.

I was energized, animated, present, maybe even funny. It was like a whole different person had materialized on the same stage. When I came off this time, my team wasn’t comforting me. They were applauding. And urging me “More of THAT. That was you in your zone of genius. Let’s bottle it.”

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It took me a while to understand what had actually happened. I kept trying to frame it as a nerves story. I was nervous about the keynote, but then more relaxed during the Q&A. Simple, right? But that wasn’t it. I wasn’t more nervous for one than the other. I was more constrained.

The keynote failed because of my narrative about what a keynote was supposed to be. I was trying to deliver something I had prepared, word by word, beat by beat. What I didn’t realize was that my entire skill set is about something completely different: creating something live, in the room, with the specific people in front of me. The script wasn’t protection; it was a cage.

That’s the moment I actually became a different kind of speaker. Because once I stopped trying to deliver a speech and instead started trying to connect with the audience, I started noticing what had always been true from the stage: the room is never actually quiet. I can see the person in the third row who’s opened her laptop and started answering email, and the one beside her whose face changes the second something lands. Both of them are telling me something. Most speakers only ever notice the first one and brace against it. I’ve learned to work for the second one instead… to rearrange what I’m saying in real time to reach her, because she gives me something I can steer the whole room toward.

That’s what I mean by holding a room. Not performing so well that you wow people into silence, but staying close enough to the people in front of you that you’re willing to change your mind about what happens next. It’s a two-way conversation whether anyone says so out loud or not… in a keynote, a board meeting, a big presentation. The audience isn’t passive. They’re just as much in it as you are.

In this week’s episode, “How to Hold a Room,” I get into what I actually watch for in the first two minutes on stage, what changed the moment I stopped reciting and started responding, and why the best speakers I know are working harder to listen than to talk.

That night, I thought back to the version of me who walked off stage in tears. I thought the problem was nerves. It wasn’t. It was that I’d shown up ready to deliver something I’d rehearsed, when the room needed me to be in dialogue with them.

That’s what I think of as “holding a room” - not performing so well that you wow the audience, but staying connected enough to the people in front of you that you can adapt to meet their needs in real time. Because speaking is a two-way conversation. This is probably common knowledge among speakers but almost never said out loud to an audience. When you’re sitting in the audience in any room from a keynote to a board meeting you’re not a passive receiver. You’re in the conversation.

In this week’s episode, I share more about my experiences onstage so the next time you have to hold the room, you have some new tricks up your sleeve.

Watch or listen to this week’s episode wherever you prefer:

[YouTube] [Spotify] [Apple Podcasts] [Substack]

What makes someone command a room? It isn't having the perfect script.

In this episode, I'm sharing what I've learned from hundreds of speaking engagements, including the biggest mistake I made at my very first live event. It taught me that presence doesn't come from memorizing every word. It comes from connection.

Whether you're leading a meeting, giving a presentation, interviewing for a job, or stepping onto a stage, these lessons will help you communicate with more confidence, connect more naturally, and hold the room without trying to perform.

Show Highlights:

• The painful lesson from my first live event and what it taught me about presence. [04:20]

• Why speaking is always a two-way conversation. [16:15]

• The audience signals every speaker should learn to recognize. [23:40]

• How to stop letting one disengaged person steal your attention. [32:10]

• Why connection should come before credentialing. [37:55]

• The hidden cost of over-scripting your message. [46:20]

• How to prepare for high-stakes moments without memorizing every word. [55:10]

• Simple ways to calm your nervous system before you speak. [1:02:45]

• The habits that help you show up with more confidence and presence. [1:09:30]

Planning an event? Learn more about booking Cherylanne for keynotes, workshops, coaching roundtables, and fireside chats: https://brilliant-balance.com/speaking

To book an exploratory call and learn about coaching options: http://brilliant-balance.com/explore

Join The Coaching Circle to apply what you learn on the podcast with structure & support: https://brilliant-balance.com/coachingcircle

Subscribe for weekly content from Cherylanne straight to your inbox:

https://brilliantbalance.substack.com/

Follow Cherylanne on Instagram: www.instagram.com/cskolnicki