Nobody said a word. Nobody even looked up from their desk, as far as I could tell. But I was the only mom on my team at the time, leaving at 5 was not the norm around me, and every step of that walk felt exposing in a way nothing in my career had prepared me for.

To explain how I ended up making that walk, I have to back up a little.

When I was getting ready to go back to work after our daughter was born, a mentor gave me advice I still think about constantly.

She told me that nobody else was going to protect my time with my family for me. If I wanted to be home for dinner every night, I was going to have to draw that line myself and hold it.

And then she said the part that really stuck: you’re senior, and you don’t need to ask permission. Block the time on your calendar, leave when you need to, and everyone will figure it out.

She was right, and I knew it. I also knew that if I didn’t protect this, I was going to regret it. So I blocked the time, and I made the walk, and it was horrible exactly once a day until it wasn’t.

I’d be lying if I told you the self-consciousness ever fully disappeared. A shred of it still shows up occasionally.

What changed is that I got comfortable with it, because I know what the full picture looks like. I take the subway, I have dinner with my family, and I pick my work back up afterward. I’m usually one of the first people in and one of the last ones on at night. I know I’m damn good at my job, and that the things that need to get done get done.

The part nobody warned me about is that the constraint made me better.

When I knew I had to be out the door at 5, I stopped wasting the hours before it. If I didn’t need to be in a meeting, I didn’t go.

If something could be handled over email, we handled it over email. And the deadline pushed me toward a better set of questions: who on my team could I empower to take this on, and who was ready for a step up?

Watching people rise to those opportunities turned out to be one of the most rewarding parts of leading, and it helped the team grow in ways my sitting in every meeting never could have.

In the very first edition of this newsletter, I told you about the moment I realized no one was coming to save me. This was the same lesson wearing different clothes. No one was coming to protect my time, either. That job was always going to be mine, and honestly, I’m glad it was, because it meant the decision was mine too.

I’ve started to think that the things that matter most to us don’t get protected by accident. There will always be a meeting that could run long and a perfectly good reason to stay.

Whatever you’ve decided is non-negotiable, you have to defend it on ordinary days - especially the ones where defending it feels a little uncomfortable. For me, that was dinner with my family. For you, it might be something else entirely. The specific boundary matters less than the decision to hold one.

So instead of leaving you with a question this week, I want to leave you with a small experiment.

Pick the one thing in your week that no one else is going to protect for you, put it on your calendar like the meeting it deserves to be, and hold it just once. Then hit reply and tell me what you picked, because I would love to be cheering for you on the day you walk out the door.

More soon!

Teresa

One of the hardest career decisions is knowing when a path that once felt right no longer fits.

You can be succeeding, earning more responsibility, and moving steadily toward the next milestone, and still catch yourself wondering whether you want the life waiting at the end of it.

From the outside, leaving might look like a mistake. From the inside, the question keeps getting louder.

That question found me at 27, a few months after I became the first female Vice President at my private equity firm. It was the milestone I had spent three years chasing, and I fully expected to feel relieved when it arrived.

Instead, I kept turning over a question I couldn’t put down: could I see myself doing this for ten more years?

Within a few months of getting the thing I had worked so hard for, I left. (My mom, for the record, spent the better part of the next decade asking if I was sure.)

I’ve thought a lot since then about how you recognize that moment, because mine did not announce itself. The most useful test I’ve found is to look at the people ten years ahead of you and ask, honestly, whether you want the lives they have and not just their titles.

Titles look great from a distance. What their weeks actually look like, and the trade-offs they seem to keep making, is a different conversation. When I ran that test, I liked and admired plenty of the people ahead of me. I just couldn’t picture myself in their lives.

Here’s the piece that took me longest to accept: a chapter can be over while everything in it is still perfectly good.

The best description I have is that the box got too small. I kept growing, the box grew a little, and the gap between the two widened every year. The work was interesting and the people I worked with were great, and none of that changed the fact that I had stopped fitting.

If you’re waiting for something to break before you let yourself reconsider, you might be waiting a while. Good paths rarely break. They get outgrown.

What kept me in place longer than it should have was the fear of starting over.

People trusted me where I was, I had spent years building a reputation, and walking away felt like handing it back. Having now done it a few times, I can report that the fear fades with repetition, and that the fresh start has real upsides nobody mentions.

Every move became a chance to take stock of what I had gotten right, what I wished I had done differently, and what I wanted to carry forward.

These days I’m in a role I love, doing the kind of building I used to daydream about, and I still hold it loosely.

Everything I’ve described is written in pencil. What we need from a chapter changes as we do, and the real practice is staying honest with yourself about what still fits, and trusting yourself to act on the answer. I certainly haven’t gotten every step right. But betting that I would figure it out has served me well every time, and I don’t think that’s unique to me.

So here’s the question I’ll leave you with this week.

If you looked at the people ten years ahead of you on your current path, would you want the life they have, and not just the job?

Sit with it, and then hit reply and tell me what comes up. I read every note, and I’d love to hear where this one lands for you.

More soon,

Teresa

I’ve been wanting to start this for a long time, and I kept finding reasons to wait. I wanted it to be polished. I wanted to have a perfect plan for what it would be. And then I realized that waiting for the perfect version is exactly the thing I’d tell a friend not to do. So here we are. The imperfect first one.

Let me tell you a little about why I started this.

Six years ago, I was standing in an airport security line while a TSA agent swabbed the bags of breastmilk I’d packed in a cooler. I was traveling constantly at the time, pumping between meetings, trying to keep all the balls in the air.

And somewhere in that line I had a realization I didn’t particularly love. No one was coming to save me. There wasn’t going to be a magical day when work got easier, or parenting got easier, or I suddenly felt less stretched. If I wanted a life that felt aligned and sustainable and actually mine, I was going to have to build it myself.

So I started paying attention. To the women who seemed genuinely happy. To the leaders who were successful without being completely consumed by their work. To the small habits and boundaries and mindsets that actually held up in real life, not just in theory.

I learned from mentors and friends and books and the brilliant women I was lucky enough to work alongside. I experimented. I got plenty of things wrong. And slowly, over years, I built a version of success that felt like mine.

This space is where I want to share what I’ve learned along the way.

Not the polished, everything-figured-out version. The real one. The reframes that changed how I show up. The small decisions that turned out to matter more than the big ones. The questions I keep coming back to, and the ones I’m still sitting with. I want this to feel less like advice from a stage and more like the conversation you’d have with a friend who’s a few steps down the same road and is rooting for you completely.

I’ll also be sharing more soon about a book I’ve been writing for working mothers, coming from BenBella Books in the fall of 2027. It grew out of everything I’ve been describing here, and I cannot wait to tell you more about it. But that’s a story for another day.

For now, I just wanted to say hello, and thank you. So many of you have encouraged me to start writing in a space like this, and it means more than you know.

I’ll leave you with the question I find myself asking most often these days, the one this whole space is really built around:

What would your life look like if you built it on your own terms, instead of someone else’s?

Sit with it. I’d genuinely love to hear what comes up for you. Just hit reply.

More soon. I’m so happy you’re here.

Teresa