1. First, thank you to everyone who voted on my glasses. And now I am fully stuck. The thing I’m stuck on is that I don’t know where my most recent prescription is. Finding it will take about 3 minutes of searching my Gmail. Which I can do as soon as I remember the name of my eye doctor. Which I could figure out if I drove down the street and looked at the sign on her building. But I plan to avoid all of this for another couple of months, so we’re aiming for a big glasses reveal sometime in 2027. Stay tuned.

2. Second, my kids play soccer year round, but this past weekend was the official start of full soccer chaos. All three kids, two games each, and me back in my camp chair on the sideline. My new-ish strategy for the early morning games is to sit at the very far end of the field, put my headphones in, and do the grocery order while I listen to “chill morning mix” on Spotify. It is, indeed, chill. If I was able to squeeze in a run while they warmed up, even better. So I get to sit there sweaty and smug, feeling like I already won- regardless of what happens in the game.

But here’s what actually happened this weekend.

I’m sitting in my chair listening to Rusted Root when one of those invasive lantern flies (the ones we’re all supposed to kill on sight) lands on the back of my upper arm. It was extra flappy on the landing too. To say I overreacted would be the understatement of the season (and it’s only the first weekend.). I came out of my chair like I was the one about to be flattened on the bottom of a shoe— waving my arms and making these little, short unhuman screaming sounds.

Meanwhile, the mom next to me did not even look away from the field. She was full John Travolta, Saturday Night Fever mode. One smooth move, stretched out her leg, stomped the thing, scraped it across the turf toward her, and gave me the tiniest little “I got you, sister” smile. I sat back down feeling like a complete weenie, but also very grateful for her.

Thankfully this scene was not captured in actual pictures so chatgpt helped me recreate it below. Neither of us were this made-up at 7:45am today but you get the idea.

Anyway, I want you to know that every single week I tell myself I’m going to take it easy on you guys and keep this week’s post short.

And… as you know, every single week it turns into a novel. Sorry.

Moving on to the main thing I wanted to tell you.

A good friend, a car ride, and my sudden, intense case of chief of staff envy

Saturday night I caught up with one of my good friends. She’s an executive at a tech company (the kind of person who is perpetually 1K on United because she is always on a plane and wears sneakers with jeans and a blazer to work.) She has a big, important, genuinely cool job that comes with big, very relatable organizational and leadership issues. So, we were driving a van full of boys to Top Golf and she led the conversation off with—”oh, so remember that chief of staff job I was hiring for that I told you about last time… she’s onboard!”

“Oh yeah! How’s THAT going?”

“GREAT!”

Then she went on to tell me how she’d found this magical chief of staff, the mentoring approach she’d taken, how proactive and resourceful and funny this person turned out to be, how, oh yeah, did she mention how well it was all going.

At some point I just asked, “So you feel more productive?”

She looked at me like I’d asked if water was wet.

“Um yeah. Because you know, I have all these thoughts, all these ideas, and I just download them to her, give a sense of priority, and she makes them happen.”

I was so jealous. So so jealous.

I have wanted a chief of staff since I was one, many years ago. (I also want a home manager but that’s just been since I found out a such thing existed. Honestly, at this point I’d love anyone onboard to just handle things- at home, at work, wherever.)

And look, I’ll be honest about the less noble part of the fantasy too. There’s a status piece to this. An executive assistant is good. A chief of staff is the next level. A security detail is the level after that.

But I don’t want it for the status. I really don’t. I want it for the actual amplified productivity.

Here’s the thing though. It turns out this isn’t just my sideline soccer-mom fantasy. It’s an actual trend, and a well-documented one.

(I’ve included the research below so you can walk away feeling like you got something substantive return out of your time invested reading this. Might I suggest you play Spotify’s chill morning mix while you read this next bit to really capture the vibe.)

Chief of staff job postings doubled over the past year, and the number of people holding that title in North America has roughly tripled since 2021, according to research from Korn Ferry. This isn’t a fluke either. The Chief of Staff Network has tracked close to a 30 percent rise in these roles since 2019, driven largely by smaller companies, not just the giants who’ve always had a CoS on staff.

And it’s not a glorified assistant job anymore. Pay has been climbing fast, with average base salaries jumping from around $131,000 in 2023 to nearly $168,000 in 2025. Companies are pricing this as senior strategic talent, not calendar management.

What really got me, though, was the reasoning behind why the role is exploding right now. As more of the logistical, scheduling, note-taking stuff gets absorbed by AI, the human parts of a chief of staff job (judgment, reading a room, knowing when a decision is actually ready to be made) become more valuable, not less. Korn Ferry frames the modern CoS less as a helper and more as a trusted strategic advisor. Which, honestly, tracks with what my friend described. She wasn’t describing someone who managed her inbox. She was describing someone who turned her ideas into motion.

Okay, back to my normal writing…

Here’s an exercise for the rest of us

So here’s where I landed, somewhere between Top Golf and my own driveway. Almost none of us are getting a chief of staff. It’s not in the role, it’s not in the budget, and I’m not entirely sure how it would even work for someone like me.

But my friend said something else that stuck with me. Before she could hand anything off, she had to actually sit down and figure out what was even appropriate to delegate, and get this new person up to speed on it. That part, I think, is available to all of us, chief of staff or not.

So here’s my homework for myself this week, and I’m inviting you to do it with me.

Imagine you were getting a brand shiny new chief of staff.

What would you actually hand them?

Once you have that list, the real question is whether there’s a scrappier, more resourceful way to get some of it off your plate anyway. AI tools, outsourcing, a system, a fifteen-minute conversation with your actual team.

I’ve been talking to a company that does AI training for small and mid-size businesses, and the results people are reporting are wild. There might be more available to me here than I’ve been willing to look for.

Because at the end of the day, the goal isn’t the title or the status symbol. It’s getting back the hours and the headspace for the stuff only you can do. The stuff that needs your best thinking, not just your time.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a prescription to not look for.

On the first trip, I saw pumpkin spice Cheerios. I walked by, turned around at the lobster tank, got out my phone and took a picture like I was documenting a crime scene… because I WAS!

And then things got worse.

Seven days later and I’m in approximately the same point in my rush job shopping trip but have to stop AGAIN when I see... pumpkin spice Special K.

I mean, seriously. What the what?

It’s a direct, unmistakable “oh, Cheerios is doing that? We’re doing that too” move. It’s giving little sibling who saw the older kid get waterproof mascara and told their cosmetic-sympathizer parent that they also immediately needed waterproof mascara too, despite showing zero prior interest going near the pool, beach, sprinkler, etc.

But I digress.

I have a visceral reaction to pumpkin spice showing up this early, and it’s really two reactions stacked on top of each other.

The first is just about the flavor itself. Pumpkin spice is polarizing. You either want it in everything, or you find it insulting as a concept. In contradiction to the point I made just two sentences ago, I’m kinda neutral about it. But for all of you who care one way or another, you’d have to admit that it’s earned its place. Starbucks basically invented the modern seasonal flavor as a business strategy with the PSL, and everyone since has been trying to catch up. So, when a cereal shows up with “pumpkin spice” on the box, I get it.

But my second reaction is what pushed me over the edge. It really has nothing to do with pumpkin spice and everything to do with timing. It is August and it’s 90 degrees outside. I didn’t even come close to thinking of putting a sweater on that morning. And yet apparently, I am supposed to be emotionally and digestively ready for a flavor that should come with a very specific set of conditions: chilly air, boots, Friday night football games, and a more general sense that I should be more productive now (that might just be a personal thing.)

But even if you love pumpkin spice, love it in your coffee, love it in your candles, love it enough to put it in your cereal bowl, there’s a decent chance some part of you also thought: TOO SOON!

That “too soon” feeling is the actual thing I want to talk about.

The clock nobody voted on

We are all walking around with a surprisingly specific internal calendar for when things are allowed to happen, and most of us never agreed to it. It’s just there, humming in the background, telling us what’s appropriate and what’s premature.

Some of it is big and obvious. There’s a version of the calendar that says you should be married by a certain age, a homeowner by a certain age, a parent by a certain age, retired by a certain age. Researchers actually have a name for this, the “social clock,” and Pew went and asked people around the world what they thought the ideal age was for each of these milestones. In the U.S. sample, among people willing to name a number, the average answer was about 26 for marriage, 27 for having a first child, 29 for buying a home, and 62 for retirement. Those made me LOL.

But what I really loved was that a lot of people also said there is no best age at all, and then turned around and gave a very precise number anyway. We say we’ve evolved past the clock. We still know what time it says.

And it’s not just personal milestones. The clock also runs on a much smaller, more mundane loop. There’s a right and wrong time to send an email. A right time to follow up and a point past which following up becomes “annoying.” A right time to deliver bad news and a right time to ask for something. Nobody wrote these rules down, but everyone seems to have gotten the memo.

Meanwhile, actual life has stopped cooperating with the schedule. In the UK, the share of adults aged 20 to 34 still living with their parents climbed from about 26% in 2014 to 28% in 2024, which works out to 3.6 million people, a jump of nearly 10% in a decade. When the timeline in your head doesn’t match the timeline you’re actually living, it’s easy to read that as a personal failing instead of what it usually is: a structural one.

Where this shows up in your career

I started noticing my own version of the clock the second I went looking for it.

We tell ourselves things like: it hasn’t been long enough at this job to ask for a raise. It’s too late to switch fields. I haven’t been in this role long enough to leave it. I should be further along by now. A career break will set me back permanently. I need to be fully qualified before I apply.

None of those are facts. They’re all timing beliefs that can be incredibly limiting.

I have my own version of this in the speaking and coaching world. I have very specific, very unexamined beliefs about the right time to start building a talk, the right time to start rehearsing, the right time to walk into the room before I go on stage. Some of that is legitimately useful preparation logic. But some of it is just a clock I inherited somewhere along the way and never questioned, the same way I apparently inherited a rule that pumpkin spice isn’t allowed before October.

The workplace we actually operate in now includes nonlinear careers, lateral moves, people re-entering after caregiving, people reskilling in their forties and fifties, portfolio careers, longer working lives. The old sequencing rules were built for a workplace that mostly doesn’t exist anymore. So the useful question isn’t “am I on time.” It’s “whose timeline is this, and does it actually fit the conditions I’m living in right now.”

A few questions worth sitting with if you want to go hunting for your own hidden clock:

• Where have I said “it’s not the right time” recently, and who decided that?

• Is this a real constraint, or a story about sequencing I picked up somewhere and never checked?

• Pulling a thread from last week, if a friend described this exact situation to me, would I tell them they were behind, or would I tell them to go for it?

• What would I do here if I’d never been taught there was a “normal” order for this?

• Am I waiting for permission, or waiting for a feeling of readiness that was never going to show up on its own?

That last one gets me every time.

---

Now, the really not important part

I need your help with something far more urgent than pumpkin spice or the conditioning problem: glasses.

I tried on a handful of pairs Warby Parker and I genuinely can’t tell if any of them are right. Vote in the comments, or just text me. And if none of the options are it and you have a completely different pair in mind, I want to see that too.

Sources, for the nerds in the group (affectionately, I am one of you):

• Pew Research Center’s 2025 global survey on what age people consider “best” for major life milestones, based on interviews with over 23,000 adults across 18 countries plus a separate U.S. sample: pewresearch.org

• UK Office for National Statistics, 2024 data on adults aged 20-34 living with parents: ons.gov.uk

• 2024 study comparing U.S. and Japanese social norms around hybrid work timing: dl.acm.org

(And I’m not at all embarrassed to admit that I’ve learned so much about how my girls think by watching them referee a stranger’s mess, and I feel deeply, smugly proud every single time. Like decades of me sharing unsolicited opinions at the dinner table finally paid off and this is the return on investment.)

Anyway…

Over the weekend, I came across a debate happening right now on Reddit directly that felt familiar. (Who am I kidding… I went searching for something just like this and voila!)

Anyway…

The story was that one woman had built her career, her family, the whole stable-adult-life package. The other one walked away from the career she trained for and has spent years chasing something else. Speech pathology, then a hardware store, then training for service dog work, then a library science degree, then studying for a civil service exam she couldn’t pass. Still applying. Still searching.

The stable friend snapped and had posted an AITA asking if she was in the wrong for telling her friend it might be time to give up the dream and get real.

The commenters answers, overwhelmingly: yes, kind of, but not for the reason she thinks.

Here’s the thing I noticed. Almost nobody argued that you should chase a dream forever no matter what. The pushback was narrower and sharper than that.

It was: since when do you get to decide someone else’s dream is over?

And I think it applies to way way more than a Reddit thread.

We keep confusing “this is impractical for me” with “this is impossible for you.”

The stable friend has kids, bills, a specific version of what a responsible adult life looks like. Fine. That’s a real and legitimate way to build a life. But she took her own math and tried to force it onto someone else’s spreadsheet. Her friend isn’t wired the same way, doesn’t have the same constraints, and might genuinely value meaning over predictability. That’s not a character flaw. That’s just a different set of variables.

We do this to each other constantly. We do it to ourselves, too. We take our own tolerance for risk, our own definition of “enough,” our own exhaustion, and we quietly decide it’s the correct answer for everyone. It isn’t. It’s just yours.

Here’s the question I actually want to ask you this week:

What is the specific feeling you’re chasing?

Or feelings? I’ll give you more than one.

I’m not talking really about the job title or the pivot or the thing you’d type into a LinkedIn headline.

What’s the feeling underneath it that you want?

Is it freedom? Relevance? Being taken seriously? Getting to build something instead of maintain something? Proof that the last twenty years amounted to more than a decent 401k?

Most of us never actually answer this. We just keep swapping out the external circumstance and hoping the next one finally delivers the feeling, when the feeling was never really about the job in the first place. I say this as someone who does it too. I pop an idea, chase it hard, get bored or spooked or distracted, abandon it, pop another one. I have basically accepted that I might be 95 years old still doing this. Not because I haven’t figured life out. Because that’s just how I’m built. It’s a feature, not some tragic unresolved flaw I need to fix.

If you’re a striver who also wants peace, by the way, those two things are going to be in a permanent, low-grade fight with each other. Nobody warns you about that. You don’t get to have relentless ambition and total contentment at the same time. You get to pick which one you’re willing to be a little uncomfortable about.

Now, the part of this story I think actually matters more than the career debate.

Buried in that thread was the real issue, and it wasn’t the friend’s career choices at all. It was five straight years of resume reviews, mock interviews, and career-counseling-disguised-as-friendship. The stable friend wasn’t actually exhausted by her friend’s dream. She was exhausted by being unpaid career support staff for half a decade with no end in sight.

That’s a boundary problem asking like a career advice problem. And I’d bet you’ve done this too. Somewhere you’ve confused “I need to stop doing this for you” with “you need to stop wanting this.” Those are not the same, and they don’t require the same conversation.

So here’s your actual homework, if (and only if) you want it:

Where in your life right now are you not sure if you should keep going or let something go?

A job. A side project. A relationship dynamic. A version of yourself you’ve been trying to force back into existence.

And separately: is there something you’ve been quietly deciding is “unrealistic” for someone else, when really it’s just unrealistic for you?

There’s no clean answer here. I don’t think there’s supposed to be one. Midlife just comes with this extra layer of pressure because the clock feels louder, and we start treating “not knowing yet” like a failure instead of what it actually is, which is just being a person who’s still paying attention to their own life.

Tell me where you land. Are you the friend telling someone to get real, or the one who’s still popping ideas at 95?

Because in my head, a runner looked like something specific. A runner had a pace per mile. A runner had the physique and the outfit and the watch and the whole apparatus. (Okay, so now I have ALL the watches… maybe that was the trick?) But before that a runner was a category I hadn’t earned my way into, so I just left myself out of it.

Which, when I say it out loud now, is a little absurd. I was doing the running. The running is the thing that makes you a runner. There is no committee. Nobody was going to knock on my door and hand me the title. I had spent almost three decades gatekeeping myself out of an identity I had already, factually, met the only real requirement for.

That gap, between what you actually do and what you’ll let yourself claim, is what I want to talk about this week. Because it turns out it’s where a surprising amount of our agency lives.

The conversation has shifted

If you spend any time around coaches, teachers, or the whole manifestation corner of the internet right now, you’ll notice the question has changed. It used to be “what are you going to do?” Now it’s “who are you going to be?” Oprah has a whole recent episode on it. The framing everywhere is that you don’t attract what you want, you attract who you are.

I’ll be honest: some of that language makes me itchy. I’m not going to promise you that thinking hard about being rich will deposit money in your account. But strip off the shimmer and there’s a real, well-documented idea underneath, and it’s this: your identity drives your behavior, and your behavior drives your results. James Clear puts it about as cleanly as anyone. Every small action is a vote for the type of person you’re becoming. His own example, and I promise I didn’t plant this, is that the goal isn’t to run a marathon, it’s to become a runner.

So, the useful version of “become the person” isn’t magical thinking. It’s just recognizing that the identity comes first, and the behavior tends to follow the identity more reliably than it follows a goal. You’re always in pursuit of a feeling. And the feeling is more sustainable when it comes from who you are than from something you’re straining toward and haven’t reached yet.

Fine. But that raises an obvious problem. If identity is the lever, how do you know which of your identities to work on? You have a hundred of them. Most of them you never think about. So I did the thing I always do when I have a pile of stuff I can’t sort, which is draw a 2x2.

The four quadrants

Two axes. Along the bottom is desirability, low to high: is this an identity you actually want more of, or not? Up the side is authority, low to high, by which I mean how fixed and inflexible the definition is. Some identities have a strict, outside-the-lines definition. Others are squishy and mostly up to you. That gives you four boxes.

Quadrant 1, top left. Assigned and observable facts. High authority, low desirability, and I mean low desirability in the neutral sense, not as an insult. These are the factual, visible traits. Your height, where you were born, that you’re your parents’ kid. They aren’t good or bad. They just are, and you don’t really get a vote.

Quadrant 2, top right. Officially earned roles. High authority and high desirability. These are the identities you set out to earn, the ones with a clear definition and someone else holding the gate. Surgeon. Attorney. Licensed, certified, degreed. You work toward them, there’s a test, and somebody outside of you decides when you’ve made it.

Quadrant 3, bottom left. Unhelpful patterns. Low desirability, low authority. These are the labels and habits you’d rather not keep. The “I drink too much” or “I’m the person who procrastinates” or “I’m just kind of stuck right now.” And here’s the important part: the definition of these is genuinely squishy. There’s a behavior behind it, sure. But the identity is not a fact. It’s not fixed. You have been treating it like Quadrant 1 when it actually lives down here.

Quadrant 4, bottom right. Chosen identity. High desirability, low authority. This is the good stuff. Healthy. Steady. Creative. Strong. Disciplined. Generous. Brave. A runner. Nobody hands these out. There’s no board exam. You get to define what they mean, and then you get to practice your way into them.

The whole move is one arrow

Here’s the gist, and it’s really just one arrow on the whole picture.

You can’t do much about the top two rows. The facts are the facts, and the officially earned stuff runs on somebody else’s timeline and rubric. But the bottom row is where you have all the room. The move is to find an identity sitting in the bottom left, one you don’t want and that no external authority actually owns, and walk it over to the bottom right, where you get to define it generously and start acting like it’s already true.

I was living in the bottom left as a “not a runner” for no reason. The definition was mine the whole time. I just held it in a way that kept me out.

But how long until you actually count?

This is the part I keep chewing on, so I’ll bring you into it rather than pretend I’ve solved it. How long do you have to do the thing before you get to claim it? How long do you have to skip animal products before you’re a vegan? How long sober before you’re a non-drinker? How many slow runs in an old t-shirt?

There’s a case for a long runway. A track record builds your own belief in your follow-through, and it gives everyone else time to catch up and see you the new way. Fair.

But there’s a case for a short one, too, and I find it more persuasive. If you make yourself wait for some arbitrary metric to show up before you’ll adopt the identity, you’re artificially delaying the very thing that makes the behavior stick. You’re standing in the doorway asking permission to walk through a door you’re allowed to open.

I don’t think there’s a clean rule. But I notice we already have a beautiful set of tools for the in-between, and it’s the qualifiers. Aspiring. Recovering. Practicing. Trying. In training. You don’t have to wait until you’ve fully arrived. You get to say “I’m becoming a runner” and start casting votes today. The qualifier is honest and it’s still an identity claim. It still points you the right direction.

Why now

We’ve got a real window here. There are about four solid months left in the year, and let’s be adults about it, December is spoken for by chaos. August is a natural change point anyway, with everyone shifting into fall routines and back-to-school reset energy. So realistically you’re looking at roughly one clean season. A season is plenty of time to build enough of a track record that a new identity starts to feel less like a costume and more like a fact.

So that’s your move this week. Plot a few of your identities into the boxes if it helps. Then find the one sitting in the bottom left, the one you don’t love and no one else actually gets to define. Ask yourself a smaller question than “what should I do differently.” Ask “how would I have to think about myself, and how generous would I have to be with the definition, to move this into the box I actually want.”

Then cast one vote. Old t-shirt entirely permitted.

What’s one identity you’ve been gatekeeping yourself out of? Hit reply and tell me the definition you’ve been using, and the more generous one you could use instead. I read everything.

You know the setup. You’re in the tube, you’ve got a cooler of Diet Cokes bobbing along behind you on a rope, and you’re mostly just going where the water takes you. Every so often you paddle a little to keep from smacking into a rock or drifting into the weeds, but for the most part you are along for the ride. The current is in charge.

That’s a lot of my week. Meetings I didn’t call, threads I got added to, calls that were already on the calendar before I had an opinion about them. And most of it is fine. That’s just what work is. You cannot custom-build every interaction, and honestly most days I don’t want to.

But I’ve started to wonder if part of that low hum of “something’s missing” that a lot of us carry around is actually pretty simple. It’s not burnout, or at least not only burnout. It’s that we almost never have the conversations we actually want to have.

Think about the last conversation that lit you up. Not the efficient one (those I love those too!) But a good one. The one where you lost track of time, where you said something you didn’t know you thought until it came out of your mouth, where the other person surprised you. They can happen by accident and those are delightful surprises— but we can’t count on them just magically happening to fill us up.

So, I’ve been trying something super, embarrassingly small.

Once a week, I ask myself one question:

What is the conversation I most want to have this week, and who is it with?

That’s it. Then I try to make it happen. Sometimes it’s a work thing, a real debate I’ve been avoiding because the float is easier. Sometimes it’s a person I’ve been meaning to reconnect with. Sometimes it’s a topic I want to think out loud about with someone smarter than me.

And before I have it, I do the tiny bit of prep I’d never normally do for a conversation. What do I think about this? What am I trying to figure out? What do I want to bring?

It sounds like a lot of choreography for something that’s supposed to be spontaneous. It isn’t. It takes about four minutes, and it changes the whole week.

The thing about a great conversation is that it gets you out of your own head, which is frankly where most of us are stuck most of the time. You can have one with someone you’ve known for twenty years or someone you’ll never see again. Doesn’t matter. It’s one of the fastest ways I know to feel like a person again instead of a task-completion machine with a nice cooler of Diet Cokes.

So, this week, before the current picks you up and carries you off:

What’s the one conversation you actually want to have? Go schedule it.

Here’s me with my extra-long arm & claw hand snapping a “point 5” during a great conversation with lovely, lovely people I’d nearly just met.

And, like always, I feel like there’s a lot going on. Which is true. But I’m feeling it extra hard right now, because there’s a lot going on in my head, and with an international flight taking off this weekend, time feels especially tight.

Of course, it won’t all get done before we leave. It can’t. And more importantly for me to remember, it doesn’t need to. But I still feel like it should, I should be capable of getting it done. Like, how amazing would it be to leave for vacation feeling like you only left a clean slate behind you? The alternative is jamming a bunch of mental to-do items into what is already going to be an overstuffed suitcase.

So, I laid it all out.

Here’s what’s in my head on the left and the system I try to continually reinforce on the right.

Two things jumped out at me.

One, I have constant brain chatter. Same as everyone.

Two, my perpetual urge is to solve the puzzle of turning that chatter into tasks. Things I can plan, schedule, execute, and clear out. Somewhere along the way I decided that peace and calm equals a less busy brain. That I’m winning if I keep converting thought into action fast enough.

But look at the picture. The thoughts are squishy. Amorphous. They expand and contract depending on what I’m most worried about that day, or which due date is closest.

It’s like trying to sort and pack vapor into the pillbox of a schedule. I can’t catch it all. It moves, or it gets too big, or it fades out completely and joins the pile of unrealized ideas that make me feel a little loss, a little regret, a little inadequate for not getting it all done.

That makes it sound sad. It’s not, really. It’s more like I’m resigned.

If you want to make one of these for yourself, here’s what I did.

I used Copilot, but plenty of other tools would work. First I did a massive brain dump out loud and transcribed it. I think that part matters. It needs to come out of your mouth, without the filter that kicks in when you type. Give yourself a minute to pull up your prompts too. Your lists, your email, your calendar. Walk around your house. That alone will shake loose a dozen more things.

Then I dropped all of it into the LLM. I also searched for examples of infographics and gave it one to work from, so it had a look and feel to start with. (You can use mine if you want to save this step.)

And then see what you think.

When I look at mine, two things happen. I feel more compassion for myself. And I also see, clearly, that I need to go back and revamp my list and my expectations and schedule for this week. I clearly have to cut it down to the things that no-kidding have to happen before we leave.

And then... and then... maybe I’ll do a compare and contrast when we get back :)

If you do this, send me your image. I’m very very curious to see what other people’s brains look like!

Do I know?

Unless you think it’s possible that I’ve been wandering through Death Valley without a mirror for weeks, an assumption is safe here. Yes. I know. These are not squint-your-eyes-to-see spots. They are located on the front of my face, which I look at every day, on purpose, in good lighting.

She wasn’t being rude. She actually sounded concerned. I attribute her bluntness to her considering herself part of my overall health team. And fair enough. She IS medically adjacent and diligently asks about how I’m DOOO-INGGG before we start. The other thing is that English is her second language. Fewer words in your repertoire can mean less nuance.

(Take me, for example, ordering at a café in Paris. “Pain au chocolat moi maintenant, s’il vous plait merci” translates to “croissant me now please thank you.”)

BUT ANYWAY... her question still caught me off guard because there was no cushioning or wind-up. She just delivered her observation at point-blank range. I assured her I was okay and kept my now-swirling obsessive thoughts tucked under the sheet with me.

We have a word for the things about ourselves we can’t see. Blind spots.*

Yet we don’t have a pithy phrase for the opposite, do we? I’m talking about those things that are plain to see but that we’re self-conscious about. And, in my case, normally wear makeup to cover up. But they are so blatantly, gloriously obvious that everyone knows but politely doesn’t talk about them.

Except…in sanctioned settings. Take my dermatologist, where I am a frequent flyer.

Each appointment, he knocks AS he’s walking in, busting out his standard opening, “So what brings you in today?” He’s ultra efficient, which I appreciate but each appointment, I sit there shifting and crinkling the paper, incredulous and gesturing at my entire face.

Now, he has good vision, training, and experience. I’m sure he has his own ideas about stuff. But I’m also sure he’s been coached by the chirpy office manager lady not to lead with any assumptions. I could see how it’d be bad for his reviews if he starts pitching Botox when someone came in for a wart. So, he’s conditioned to ask what’s wrong because, for me on that day, it might be any one of a dozen complaints. He just needs me to narrow it down.

This whole dance is one of the “features” you get when you have both zits AND wrinkles. Other features include being a kind of “all of the above” shopper in the skincare aisle. Or the predictable look I get from teenaged clerks at the grocery store when I’m buying wine. They card me because they’re supposed to, but they give me this look that says, “WAIT a minute. I might still have zits when I’m as old as HER?!”

Anyway, as self-conscious as I am about my skin, Brian is the opposite about his hair.

If you haven’t met him, my husband is bald. He, in fact, has been bald since we met, twenty-plus years ago. It doesn’t come up often in conversation (and never when he’s there), but when it does, people slow down and get careful. They reach for squishy language. “He keeps it really short, huh?” “You all must save a fortune on shampoo.” And I’m always like, guys. He’s bald. I know. He knows. You can say it. It’s the actual correct vocabulary word to describe his head. Also, he’s totally hot. So, it’s literally fine. Better than fine because we did used to save on shampoo. (Definitely not now with the girls and all their hair.)

But here’s the thing about Brian’s head. He doesn’t hide it nor does he make it a personality. He lives with it completely unselfconsciously. In fact, he keeps a Costco-sized can of SPF 50 sport sunscreen in the console of his van. Every time he gets out, he sprays a little personal cloud over his head. No shame, no ceremony.

That’s the part I keep coming back to. There’s something we instinctively respect about people who carry their obvious things lightly. There’s this unspoken pact. I know, and you know I know, and I know you know I know, so nobody has to perform anything. The awkwardness only shows up when someone pretends not to see it, or when we pretend it isn’t there.

Whatever this opposite category of blind spot is deserves some attention too. And not just the cosmetic stuff. What about the personality version? The way I work, the way I talk, the way I show up in friendships. The things everyone around me can plainly see, that I can plainly see, that we’ve all just mutually agreed not to mention.

I don’t think there’s anything to fix here, honestly. Most of these things don’t need fixing. The only time they cost us anything is when we start spending real time and energy trying to hide something that’s tougher to cover than a little concealer can manage. Or when the fear of someone naming it out loud starts chipping at our confidence. That’s when the obvious thing stops being a fact and starts being a full-time job.

Otherwise? What are we going to do? Nothing. It’s fine.

And no, I am not posting a selfie with closeups of the red spots. Use your imagination. Oh fine, whatever. Here you go.

Spot on!

* Wait, didn’t we just talk about them here a couple of weeks ago? (This would be easy for me to check but I don’t feel like bothering.)

It wasn’t a worry. Just air. Just the word.

So I took a breath, and the word kind of echoed around for a minute. Then came “water.” And by then the intellectual side of my brain had clocked in for its shift and started playing out the rest: earth, fire.

So, when my brain handed me “air” on a Sunday morning, I followed it.

Air. I’ve been getting a bunch of Instagram ads about breath work for runners. This incredibly fit woman is talking about better CO2 processing, more oxygen in the blood, heart working less hard when you’re pushing— and how much faster she is than her husband (which is a really compelling selling point that I shouldn’t admit but here we are.) I already have breathing tools in an app I mostly ignore. I do check in with my breath every day, even if it’s 30 seconds, but there’s no real practice there. Just good intentions and an unused app subscription. This one is still a little mushy for me, honestly. But there’s something in being intentional about breath instead of just, you know, using all the air.

Water. Here’s a confession. Well, it’s not really a confession because I’m positive I’ve talked about this before. I’ve spent my whole life telling myself I hate drinking plain water. I’m like hydrophobic or have rabies or something like Old Yeller. So, I dress it up with lemon. Apple cider vinegar. Drops, powders, flavors, colors. Or just skip it and call it “good enough” when I’m drinking a kombucha, Poppi soda, or, of course, coffee. But lately I’ve been toying with the idea of doing something bold and daring. What if I just drank the water? Like, a big amount of very boring, completely plain water every day. I’m sure I need to buy something off Amazon to hold it in first. So still in the planning stages around this.

Earth. Plants. I eat mostly plant-based already, so there’s less work here. But it’s worth naming that I simply feel better when I’m eating more plants. Not as a rule about what I “can’t” have— and certainly not a judgement about anyone else. I just think of it more as my food foundation. Get as many plants in as possible and then if some Oreos squeeze in on top, fine.

Fire. This is output. Sweating every day, for sure. With DC recently hovering in the 90s and at about 1000% humidity, this hasn’t been hard. Fire is a run, OTF workout, or some other kind of real exertion. But first is also the other kinds of burn: hard thinking on a work problem, full-attention time with my kids, tidying up and restoring order to the house, etc. Fire is the spend. And honestly, fire is the whole point of the other three. I can’t just build energy reserves have them- I need and want to use them.

(Note these are all pictures I’ve taken over the last week or so except… the water one which is a stock image. In the 35K+ pictures I have on my phone, there is not a single one of me drinking a plain glass of water.)

Here’s why this air, water, earth, fire framework is appealing to me.

The older I get, the more simplicity I crave.

And I’ve noticed that so much of what I do “for my health” has gotten complicated with all these layers and caveats and exceptions and add-ons. I can optimize to the point of being unsustainable. It’s not that the supplements, the tracking, the flavored everything, the app I pay for and don’t open are wrong. They’re just a lot when piled on top of each other. Each piece made sense when I added it but altogether they’re a lot of noise.

But four elements? Breathe, hydrate, eat plants, exert?

Maybe that’s it. That’s the day.

I keep coming back to an Indigo Girls line that’s been lodged in my head for decades: the hardest to learn was the least complicated. And then maybe by some woo woo sign, it was the first song in the queue on this random Spotify playlist I picked for walking the dogs this morning.

Because less complicated is hard. Simple is hard.

Plain water is hard when you’ve spent years convincing yourself you hate it. Thirty seconds of actual breathing is hard when there’s a phone within reach.

I don’t know yet how I’d measure this quantitatively.

Is there a number for energy reserves? Or is it just a subjective score, a gut check when I wake up, the same audit I’m already running every morning? I don’t know yet, but I can say for sure as someone who regularly wears three watches that I’m not giving up on figuring out the tracking part.

So, this week I’m trying it on. Not as a program or some X number of days challenge with a hashtag.

But as a reflection question: did I tend to all four today?

Air, water, earth, fire.

And does keeping it that elemental actually get me closer to the thing I’m really after, which is waking up with energy to spend on a life I love.

By now, you’ve clearly figured out that this week’s piece isn’t a solution. It’s me giving a little airtime to a first-thought-of-the-morning and seeing where it goes.

But I’m curious about you.

Where have you made your health more complicated than it needs to be? What would it look like to strip it back to the elements?

The hardest to learn is the least complicated. I’m going to try to learn it anyway.

I know half of what I share with you starts with “so I found this Reddit thread” or “I heard this on a podcast.” That’s the deal when the most interesting stuff in your life involves coaching clients and coworkers who would prefer to remain anonymous. And employed. And same same for me. So I either have to heavily “disguise” the person and situation so they don’t even recognize themselves— or just pull real things from other people’s lives. It’s a whole thing.

Anyway. Back to the Reddit thread.

People post photos of their bookshelves and strangers analyze what the shelves say about them. Bookshelf detectives. It’s as addictive as it sounds.

The post that hooked me was a guy who shared his shelves and asked why women kept telling him he was “too much.” The internet was not gentle. The consensus (across thousands of comments (I had chat analyze) was that he had wall-to-wall mainstream titles that had clearly never been opened.

Performative, not authentic. A bookshelf doing an impression of a person.

My personal theory is that it was also just, literally, too much. There was a lot going on. Both things can be true.

What I’d love to tell you is that I then I bravely posted my own shelves and asked the internet to roast me.

Um, yeah. I did not. I did the scaredy-cats version. I uploaded a photo to ChatGPT and asked what my books say about me. (Note this picture is carefully cropped so you can’t see all the clutter on the shelf below still left over from the last day of school. I’ll get to it… hopefully before August.)

Before the results, a little context....

These shelves are technically a blend of my books and my husband Brian’s, though let’s be honest, they’re mostly mine, and the color sorting was all me. A few years ago, when we remodeled, I organized everything by rainbow. The books that made the cut were not our favorites or our most formative reads. They were the ones with colorful spines that physically fit. I regret nothing even though now if you want to find a book, you need to remember what color the cover was.

So maybe this wasn’t the best sample because it’s a bookshelf curated for looks, with a few of Brian’s books mixed in, filtered by height requirements.

And yet.

ChatGPT called me a “builder, not a collector.” It said my books aren’t organized around prestige, they’re organized around problems I’m trying to solve. That I treat books like mentors. That my shelves lean toward coaching, speaking, and curiosity instead of strategy, which suggests I believe people problems are leverage problems. I’m still turning that phrase over.

Then it guessed my profession, knowing nothing about me: executive coach, leadership consultant, facilitator, keynote speaker. (Okay, who am I kidding. Chat, Claude, and anyone else on the internet can know anything about me. It’s all “out there.”

But regardless… my reader, I gasped.

I spent years building a website and a bio and a whole personal brand, and apparently I could have just handed people a photo of my bookshelf. I curated those shelves for aesthetics and they snitched anyway.

Which I think is the actual lesson here. You can arrange the evidence however you want. Who you are still leaks through. The Reddit guy’s shelves told on him, and my rainbow told on me.

So here’s my ask.

Take a picture of your bookshelf, upload it to ChatGPT or Claude, and ask what your books say about you.

Then reply and tell me what it got right, what it got hilariously wrong, and whether you gasped.

I’ll be waiting here— just refreshing my inbox.

When you walk the dogs or run around the neighborhood/local trail as much as I do, you end up looking at the ground a lot. And you’d be surprised at how much the ground is full of stuff people have dropped, left, or lost without realizing it- a glove, all kinds of receipts and grocery lists, pennies, a surprisingly good pen, etc.

Fifteen years ago, I started obsessively picking up screws and nails I see on the street after having to wait on the side of the road for 2 hours for someone to help fix my flat tire.

I have an entire photo collection of single shoes. Why is there just one shoe, sitting on a sidewalk, with no explanation? Every one has a backstory I will never get to hear. How do you lose one shoe? Where is the other shoe? Are you okay?

Anway, the other day I’m walking the dogs and I see this eight of hearts. It was face up on the sidewalk. My first thought was: oh, buddy. You are going to be missed.

Somewhere out there is a deck of cards that doesn’t know it’s broken yet. The owner has no idea. She’ll find out the next time she sits down to play Crazy Eights. Everything will seem fine at first and then… the whole night will probably fall apart.

But here’s the thing. That card is one of fifty-two.

By any reasonable math, it is the definition of replaceable. And yet without it, the entire deck is basically useless. It’s not just that you can’t beat your little sister at Crazy Eights. You can’t beat her at most things. (Okay, fine. You can beat her at war. War does not care about your feelings or your missing cards.) But really when one card out of fifty-two goes missing, the whole system stops working.

Which is funny, because we usually assume the opposite.

We assume one of fifty-two barely matters.

Compare cards to cicadas. They’re an entire species whose whole strategy is that no single bug matters at all. There are just so many of them that a few thousand losses round to zero. Maybe that’s a bad analogy but you get the idea.

Anyway, it got me thinking about replaceability. Which, if you’ve ever worked anywhere, you know is a thing we talk about periodically (or everyday depending on how annoyed we are with our coworkers.)

Someone gets nervous about their standing, or somebody leaves, or there’s a reorg, and inevitably a leader says some version of “we’re all replaceable.” And then, to sound humble about it, they add: “Even me.” Everyone nods. It feels very mature.

(I have probably said this exact thing. And somewhere in the back of my head, a small voice always goes, “Sure. Technically. But things would not be as good.” Which is all ego, ego, ego for sure.)

But back to you, I want to offer another way to think about it.

In coaching we talk a lot about choosing thoughts on purpose. Not positive thinking. Just noticing that a thought generates a feeling, and the feeling drives what we do. It’s the think, feel, act cycle which is really life’s big cheat code.

In the think, feel, act cycle, the question isn’t whether a thought is true. The question is whether it’s useful.

Take the thought: “I’m replaceable” then play it forward. That thought tends to generate feelings like insecurity, apathy, a kind of low-grade disconnection. Why lean in if anyone could do this? They’re not feelings most of us are chasing.

But notice that that same thought, on a different day, might be a relief. If you are drowning in obligation and convinced the whole thing rests on you, “other people could carry this” is not a threat. It’s permission to put something down.

Now take the thought: “I’m irreplaceable.” Play that one forward. It’s a little egocentric as we’ve established, sure. But it also tends to generate responsibility, clarity about your specific value, and a willingness to show up and deliver it. That can be exactly the fuel you need. It can also be the thing that has you answering email at 11pm because obviously no one else can.

Neither thought is right or wrong. They are just engines, and they point in different directions.

So, here’s the practical part. If you’re feeling unmoored lately, or like your work isn’t landing the way you want it to, it might be worth poking at how you’re thinking about this. Is there one unique thing you bring that you could lean into harder? That’s the move toward irreplaceable, and it’s available to you on purpose.

And if you’re the opposite, if you’re fried and over-responsible and convinced the deck collapses without you, the move is the other direction. Where can you distribute? What can you take yourself off the hook for? You are allowed to not be the eight of hearts in every single game.

This is the whole cycle, really. We choose a thought. It rarely feels like a choice, but it is, and it can change. The thought creates a feeling. The feeling is the engine for every action we take, because we are always either chasing a feeling or reacting to one. And our actions create our results. So when the results aren’t what you want, you can walk it backwards. Result, action, feeling, thought. And then, if you want to, choose a different card.

Anyway. I hope nobody’s still looking for that eight of hearts. But if you are, it’s on the sidewalk near the trail, and it misses you too.

P.S. I’m so excited to share that my dear friend and I just launched the first episode of our new podcast, Overexplained. It’s a six-part series where we pick one topic and go all the way down the rabbit hole: overanalyze it, overthink it, and then, for good measure, overexplain it. Episode one is up on YouTube now, and it’s all about enduring friendships and relationships, which felt like the right place to start for two people who have been friends for forty years. Go take a listen, and consider subscribing.

The truist version is that I love this work and I struggle a little with the rhythm. I like consistency. I like a routine. I like quiet downtime for my fitness and my health and my family and my writing and all the things. So when we hit one of these intense stretches, I think I feel more disjointed than someone who isn’t quite so attached to… coffee at 5, running at 7, homemade breakfast at 9, carpools at 5, etc.

It’s a “me” thing as much as a “the work” thing.

We’re in one of those stretches now, building toward a presentation next week. There’s been so much goodness. There’s also been a fair amount of chaos. And here’s the thing I keep relearning: there is always chaos. Confusion, rework, frustration, a little regret, some anger, flashes of both confidence and incompetence, all of it mixed together.

There are people in this world who believe that’s a problem (the run-up to submittal messiness) to be solved. They believe that the existence of the mess proves something is broken and needs a better process.

I agree there’s always room for improvement. I also think some of the mess is just the cost of doing high-stakes work where there’s money and hope and fear all stacked on top of each other. Smooth it out in one place and we’ll find something else to obsess over. The dogpile near the end is a feature, not a bug.

Which brings me to my own obsession (hangup?) this week.

My job on these is orals coach, which is a fancy way of saying I work with the team on the script, run the rehearsals, and manage all the feelings that come with both. I’m used to a lot of different personalities. On this bid, there’s someone who’s hard to read, who I haven’t worked with before, who is absolutely critical to the team, and who is also pretty critical of the team, of me, of where we are, of how it could all be done better. And dealing with that became a focus. He started consuming a disproportionate amount of my attention.

Disproportionate is the key word. Because here’s what’s true: he is one of six people. Structurally, he’s already doing his job just by being on the team. When we get to the room, he is one of six. But for a few days there I let his read on me set the temperature for the whole thing. I felt judged. I got sensitive. I got attached to my own way of doing things and didn’t adapt as cleanly as I’d have liked, even while I was telling myself I was being responsive. I pulled off my own game.

Then the body caught up with the mind, the way it does. We’d all traveled together, two intense days that I think were the right call, but travel brings what travel brings. Late nights, too much food, too much wine. On the last night I had a 4 a.m. car to catch an early flight home for a full day of unrelated meetings, and I slept maybe two and a half hours. Actually, I know it was two and a half because I have all the little tracking devices now that tell me exactly how badly I did. It was one of those nights where you’re so desperate to get back to sleep but your mind just swirls, and none of the meditation or breathing or calming-down tricks land. This is me, middle of the night in my hotel room- smiling but not really, you know.

Predictably, the next day I was wrung out, depleted, diminished, defensive. All of it.

And then I got lucky, sort of, by being forgetful. The plan was for me to ride up with Brian and the kids to Philly for a World Cup game. While they were there, I’d stay with my mother-in-law, and then we’d all ride back to DC the next morning.

Except I completely forgot to sort out boarding for the dogs, and on a holiday weekend there’s no room anywhere. So I’m staying home. I’m sad to miss that time with the kids and my mother-in-law. But somewhere in the disappointment I saw the other thing it could be, which is a reset. Eat clean. No wine. Get some longer runs in. Write. Journal. Walk. Get a massage. Reconnect with the parts of my life that aren’t this one presentation.

Because that’s what gets lost when you’re this tired and this in it. Everything starts to feel like it’s falling apart, and it isn’t. There’s still so much good happening. But being really tired and feeling judged has a way of making one thing feel like the whole thing.

So that’s what this weekend is for. Not proving anyone wrong. Just getting steady again, remembering what actually energizes me and who I am when I’m not running on two and a half hours of sleep, and putting this project, and this one hard-to-read person, back where they belong.

One of six. Down to size.

My personal combo is kids, work, and a relentless restlessness that makes it hard to be okay with everything just being okay. I’m always hunting the next thing: both the next fix to whatever I’ve decided is broken and the next [PEAK WORD].

Maybe yours is similar. Or maybe it’s health stuff, or caregiving. Maybe it’s needing to be everywhere at once or having nowhere to go. No one gets off easy, at least not for long.

But life has been a lot for a while now. If you’ve been here for a minute, you already know this because I talk about it all the time.

I laugh at my twenty-something self who told an aggressive Mary Kay recruiter on the dance floor at a wedding that I couldn’t possibly sell makeup because I was “sooooo busy.” I genuinely thought I was busy. (I don’t regret skipping the Mary Kay side hustle and, for the record, and I love makeup and have nothing against a pink Cadillac.)

But still.

My fear around life being a lot is two sides of the same letting-someone-down coin. I worry that I’ll miss something, an important thing slipping through the cracks. Or that I’ll be so preoccupied I end up letting myself down, like there’s something more meaningful I should be doing instead.

And as I’ve talked about endlessly here, I’m hypersensitive about time and perpetually afraid of wasting it. So, fear of being disappointing and fear of future regrets shape a lot of my decisions. Maybe all of them.

At 51, I have enough experience to know it’s fine. I’m fine. It’s all going to be fine. And yet some part of me worries that this chapter (the calendar chaos, the dozens of weekly work and family commitments) is permanent. The thought never quite forms into words in my head, but it’s there underneath: it’s always going to be like this. It’s always going to be like this.

And then, of course, it isn’t.

We get a free night from sports. A meeting gets cancelled. Everything suddenly and easily falls into place and there’s a moment of calm.

I keep laughing about something that happened this week.

I’d taken Marin to soccer and stayed in the car just long enough to pick a podcast, then got out to walk around the field, completely oblivious to the weather. It got gusty. I looked up to a massive storm rolling in. And right at that moment I was passing Marin’s coach and team, and like a scene left on the cutting room floor of The Wizard of Oz, he was yelling, “Don’t worry! It’ll blow over!” while cones spun through the air around his head.

Then lightning. Which means everyone sprints to their cars. Then they called it. Go home. Practice cancelled.

But of course, it did blow over.

The next night there was a nearly identical storm, except I was safely inside, chatting with the moms from Linc’s soccer team at their end-of-season pizza party. (Yes, a sports bar, but the World Cup was on, which somehow made it fine that there were sixteen twelve-year-old boys there.) We stepped outside to a spectacular double rainbow.

Years ago, when Baya was little, a summer storm did the same thing. She ran downstairs after the downpour yelling, “It’s rainbow weather!” She hadn’t actually seen a rainbow yet. She just knew one was likely, because the sun was coming back out.

And she was right. There it was.

There’s a reason the simple next thing is so hard to see when you’re in the middle of it. When the brain is overwhelmed, it shifts out of calm, flexible thinking and into threat-management mode. Our attention narrows. Everything starts to feel urgent and complicated at once, and the obvious next step just disappears. Then the pressure drops and there it is, plain as anything.

Overwhelm narrows your attention. Calm gives the choices back.

Which is maybe a long way of saying what a four-year-old already knew: the sun is coming back. You can call it before you see it.

So, I’m in the storm of activity right now, trying to remind myself that this one will blow over too.

It’s rainbow weather.

The class was called a “gravity workshop,” which sounded straightforward enough. I’m into gravity… and mass, energy, and centrifugal force, all the physics favs, for that matter. But either way, I took it to mean handstands and headstands, with more of a whiteboard and a lot of talking. I checked our 46 soccer schedules, realized I had a free couple of hours, and signed up.

I did not, it turns out, read the description. This will become relevant.

Worth knowing before we go any further: I hate being upside down, and I am the least flexible person alive, past or present. 27 years of slow-ass running nearly every single day and not stretching even one time has led me here.

My joints are more like stale turkey jerky than Twizzlers.

The yoga studio was downtown in a renovated row house. I mean, obviously. The person checking us in on her tablet said sweetly, “Just to confirm, you know this is an advanced class?” And I said, “yeah yeah yeah, fine, yup, I’m Robin.” She tapped my name and moved on.

Meanwhile Anna leaned over to whisper that she had never actually been to a yoga class. Like ever. Which was questionable, given her perfectly matching yoga outfit (but I’ll have to follow up on that part later. I’ll let you know what I find out.)

But anyway, Molly shushed back, “Do NOT tell them that. They keep mentioning the advanced part.”

Then the instructor greets everyone at the door. He was not the soft, smiling, long-curly-haired yoga teacher of my imagination. He was a good-looking, extremely fit man who had clearly shaved his legs more recently than I have.

He looked me dead in the eye and confirmed, one more time (with a whiff of disdain) that I understood this was an advanced class. Molly, doing damage control on behalf of the family from two mats over, chirped, “We’re going to do our best!”

Reader, our best was not good.

Wait, let me be more precise. My best was not good. Turns out Molly is a yoga sandbagger, and Anna is strong and flexible enough to fake it. So that left me and my turkey jerky joints to muddle through.

I set up in the farthest back corner spot near the wall, which turned out to be the single best decision I made all day, because I tipped over roughly every ninety seconds and needed to secretly steady myself with the barest of fingertips.

The instructor spoke in a low voice that was hard (for me) to hear. What I could hear sounded like disappointment. Everyone else was following along fine. I spent the first 45 minutes of class trying to mimic the woman in front of me. I was convinced I’d outed myself as yoga-challenged and was about to get thrown out.

I was sweating through my spandex and actually needed the hand towel I’d brought thinking I’d look professional but wouldn’t really need it. Wrong. I felt like a bag of laundry mixed with a bag of leftover Auntie Anne’s pretzels.

Then I noticed on the brick wall there was a beautiful rainbow pride flag, all the colors and the words “everyone is welcome here.” And I thought, well, yes, and thank you for all the important ways.

But people who are bad at yoga, though? Welcomed here? Meh.

In his defense, it was advertised as an Advanced class. And as I’ve mentioned, they did point it out multiple times. And if you’re paid to teach an advanced class, you teach advanced. And…surely, it’s cooler to teach people who are already good. And it’s, of course, more satisfying to fine-tune another pro and call them out for micromovement failures while ignoring the flopping sweaty mess in the back corner. And I’m sure he believed he was protecting the experience for everyone else.

Then somewhere around the 50-minute mark. I realized, yes, I was bad. I mean, clearly a beginner. But I was staying on my mat and not bothering anyone…so I was harmless enough. I figured since I wasn’t being disruptive, he’d just let me stay and struggle.

Which brings me to my actual point. Sorry it took so long.

I think my presence in that room, in full laundry-heap form, was actually a gift. Yes, my presence today was a gift to the advanced yoga class participants.

Hear me out.

It is deeply satisfying to be better than someone at something. They woke up today just thinking they’d hit yoga before stopping at Whole Foods but wait! A noob!?

They got to glance across the room and feel completely, spectacularly superior in skill and form. Though no one was really paying any attention to me, they definitely noticed, and justifiably felt better about themselves. They should have! They’re way better. They’ve done the work.

So, you’re welcome, 10:30 gravity people!

With all that, here is what I’m actually selling you this summer.

Go be a beginner at something. On purpose. Be willing to be genuinely, visibly bad at a thing.

Choose your venue with some care, because if you wander into the wrong advanced class, you will absolutely incur the wrath of a Serious Yogi. But most places are overwhelmingly kind to beginners.

The benefits to us individually are real.

• I left humbled, with a clearer sense of where my body actually is, which I normally measure only by my running pace and the number on the scale.

• I got to admire what other people could do, and a good number of them were middle-aged women, which gave me a useful glimpse of what’s possible.

• It also made me appreciate what my son is doing even more. He’s twelve, and he asked to sign up for ice skating lessons because he wants to play hockey, and apparently you cannot just start playing hockey. You have to learn to skate first.

• So there he is every Wednesday at 5:10, the oldest kid in the class and the only boy, doing laps next to a cluster of seven-year-old girls. He rolls his eyes the entire time. He also does every single thing they ask him to do. I find that incredibly impressive.

That’s the whole thing, really.

We avoid being beginners because we know it’s going to feel uncomfortable, and we don’t have the right gear, and nobody wants to look foolish.

But there’s growth in it, and perspective, and a fresh read on what you’re actually capable of.

And there’s the bonus gift of superiority for everyone watching you fall over. Two birds.

Go find your gravity workshop. Tip over a lot. Make someone’s day.

And I have to be honest with you: for me, that’s basically a perfect day. Standing up, holding a mic, and saying something that matters to a room full of people has become over the years a feeling I love and chase in a way that probably reveals more about my personality than I’d like to admit. But there you go. And I’m guessing you’re not surprised.

Here’s me right before I got “my” moment that was in no way about me but…

…

And I know. I know. Not everyone feels that way. Those of us speaker geeks can so easily spot each other. We’re hovering at the front or sitting at the edge of our seats with a hand free, ready to raise it at the first opportunity.

But I know for a lot of people, the thought of speaking in front of others (or even just coming off mute in a meeting) is somewhere between “I’d rather not” and “I’d rather die.”

I think about that gap a lot.

Which brings me to a podcast I caught this week. (And I mean, how common has that line become... “I was listening to this podcast the other day...”)

Anyway, one of my go-tos is the Next Big Idea Club. This week they had on Ben Rhodes, former Obama speechwriter and someone I’d followed from the Pod Save America universe. He just released a book called All We Say, built around fifteen speeches that shaped American history and culture. The conversation was solid but, while he reviewed a few of his selected speeches and made a point about civil discourse, I was like yeah yeah yeah but... What was stickier for me was his underlying argument.

We should all be speaking more.

That the act of speaking, publicly, personally, imperfectly, is how we connect, persuade, move things forward, and show up as fully human to each other.

I am, of course, a thousand percent sold on this idea and hence why I’m bringing it to you here.

(In fact, it’s actually why my full-time gig exists, and in the world of government contracting, it’s a more emerging role. The need for an orals coach has come to be because so many prospective clients want to hear directly from the people who will be supporting them. Not a polished AI-written proposal scored by an AI reviewer, but a real human being, making a real case, in their own words. The irony of that moment being undervalued is not lost on me.)

But this isn’t just about proposal presentations or formal speeches. It’s about every moment where you have something to say and you hold it back because you’re not sure it’s important enough, or you’re worried about how it’ll land, or you just don’t feel ready.

Here’s the thing about ready: it’s a trap.

Waiting to feel ready before you speak is a great way to never speak.

The mindset I keep coming back to, the one I talk about in my Leap First work, is getting comfortable going before you feel prepared. The growth, the connection, the good stuff, it’s all on the other side of that moment where you decide to open your mouth anyway.

So this week, I want to ask you: where’s your microphone?

It doesn’t have to be a literal one (though I hope someday it is). It might be a meeting where you’ve been hanging back. A conversation you’ve been avoiding. A thought you’ve been sitting on because you’re not sure it’s fully formed yet.

Say it anyway. Don’t pre-judge whether it’s important enough or whether it’ll land. Just find the moment and take it.

That’s the whole thing.

*Reading a Maya Angelou poem is both an honor and a lesson in knowing your limits. I did not listen to recordings of her reading it. Some comparisons are just not ones you invite.

Part of what made it work was that the program was incredibly well built. Every lesson came with detailed instructions and activities. You’d review the plan ahead of time, show up, run the activity, and that was it. It was really low prep but had this big payoff hopefully for them- but definitely for me and my fellow coaches.

One day the activity was a skit.

I remember reading the lesson and thinking, there is no way this is going to work.

We were outside on the blacktop. There were no props or stage. We split the girls into three or four groups, gave them the prompt, and told them to take maybe ten minutes to pull something together. My expectations were, like, very low. I was already checking my watch and trying to come up with a Plan B when they all revolted and said they didn’t know what to do. But… that didn’t happen.

Then pulled some complete random ideas together and then they performed.

Each group took the same prompt and went in a completely different direction. There was no hesitation and nobody hung back. Everybody had a speaking role. They were clearly making most of it up as they went, forgetting their own lines, improvising over each other, and it was genuinely, fall-over funny. Group after group, us coaches were just rolling.

And I remember thinking…

There is no chance would go the same way with a room full of adults.

I mean, can you imagine?

I do a lot of meeting facilitation and cringe at the thought of trying to pitch this.

I think about given them the same prompt, same ten minutes, but in a conference room instead of a blacktop. We’d need paper and sticky notes. We’d need markers. We’d need more time, obviously. Someone would take charge, (maybe a little too much charge), and start assigning speaking parts. Someone else would quietly decide they were not doing this and open their email. And underneath all of it, everyone would be running the same calculation: how do I get through this without looking stupid?

That’s the whole thing, isn’t it?

Somewhere between ten and thirty, we stop asking “what could this be” and start asking “how do I not embarrass myself” or “how do I get through this as quickly as possible so I can get back to my ‘real’ work?”

I don’t know exactly when it happens. But I know what it costs.

We get slower and need more certainty before we’ll move. We trade the messy, joyful, make-it-up-as-you-go version of trying for a careful, protected version that rarely produces anything surprising.

We get really good at not looking bad, which is a very different skill than being good.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe.

I don’t think we get to fully wind it back. I’m not going to wake up tomorrow with a ten-year-old’s willingness to flop around on a blacktop in front of an audience. But I do think we can designate corners of our lives, and our teams, where it’s allowed to be messy again. Where it’s fine to waste a little time, a little paper, a little brainpower on something that might be silly and might get thrown away ten minutes later. The point isn’t the output. The point is remembering that you can make something from nothing without a charter and a kickoff and a month of lead time.

So, if you want to practice getting back into that kid headspace this week, a few small things to try:

• Give yourself ten minutes and a bad prompt. Write the worst possible opening line for an email you’re dreading. Sketch the ugliest version of the slide. Make it deliberately terrible. The goal is to start, not to be good, and “bad on purpose” is a sneaky way around the part of your brain that needs everything to be right.

• Build one low-stakes rep into a meeting. Throw out a half-formed idea before it’s polished. Say “here’s a rough thought” and let it be rough. You’re not just sharing the idea. You’re modeling that it’s safe to think out loud, which is the thing your quietest people are waiting to see.

• And maybe my favorite idea…Make something you fully intend to throw away. A terrible poem. A pointless doodle. A wildly over-ambitious plan you’ll never execute. The disposability is the point. It removes the stakes and reminds you that not everything you make has to justify its existence.

The girls on that blacktop weren’t brave. They just hadn’t learned to be afraid yet. We can’t unlearn the fear completely. But we can get a little of the blacktop back, ten messy minutes at a time.

I saw the outside world exactly once. The rest of it was indoor, fluorescent, all-consuming. There was a lot going on back at the office, so we only made it to some of the events, but it was still good to have dedicated time together.

And here’s the thing about dedicated time together. The same thing happens at the end of a girls weekend or a week with my family. When you’re a few days into an ongoing conversation with the same people, you get past the agenda and the surface-level status updates and you start talking about real problems. Bigger, more systemic ones. You start hearing themes. And at a conference especially, where you’re sitting through sessions about industry challenges, all sorts of improvement opportunities start to surface.

Which is great.

I can’t say I love problems, but I enjoy solving them. I think most of us do.

I’ve worked long enough now to know that there is another problem right behind this one, and another behind that, and another behind that. The supply is literally infinite.

So this common underlying assumption we seem to carry around — the one that comes out as judgment or exasperation or annoyance at unsolved problems — feels a little immature when you look at it directly. Yes, that’s a problem. Yes, we could solve it. And if we do, we’ll be presented with a different one.

So, the real question is:

Do we want to start working on a different problem, or are we all still enjoying admiring this one?

We solve problems in our personal lives only when the status quo becomes intolerable. I get up to go to the bathroom during a good movie only when I’m pretty sure a super embarrassing accident is imminent. Brian and I switched to grocery delivery ten years ago when it became impossible to get to the store with two toddlers and an infant. I’ve told you about my friend who kicked off massive weight loss the day he had to ask for a seatbelt extender on a plane. I could go on, and I’m sure you could too.

But at work, it can be maddening to listen to people talk for weeks or months or years about the same problem. If it’s within their control, that’s on them. When it’s bigger than one person to solve, though, the honest read is that the status quo isn’t yet intolerable for everyone. In fact, whether they realize it or not, the status quo might be working for them.

Approval chains are an obvious example. We all know that two or three layers of approval are too many and slow everything down. You can objectively measure the time cost of routing something through emails just to get people to nod and say okay. Everyone could step back and see the cost. And yet the people in the chain are often the most resistant to streamlining it, because streamlining removes them from the process — even a process they themselves think is wasteful. So we continue.

Anyway, I say all of this to say: keep solving problems because it’s fun and intellectually stimulating. Just not because you think you’ll be problem-free on the other side. Solve problems when you’re so bored with your current set that you genuinely want to see what else is out there.

Acting like we’ll someday arrive at some problem-free nirvana is naive. “Pick your poison” sounds a little tragic, though, so I’m going to try a more positive spin: pick your perennial. Because if you’ve planted thoughtfully, you’ll get to admire the one in bloom for a while. It’ll die back, and then another one will come up.

I’m not sure the analogy fully works. But it’s nicer to look at.

Something clicks. You’re hatching a real idea. It’s not a tweak around the edges but, an actual move. You can see it. You can almost see the Teams meeting, like a TV movie, where you’d pitch it and everyone would be on camera, nodding.

And then, before you’ve even finished imagining it, a commercial for something like a prescription drug comes on. The one where you walk it around to Finance, then Legal, then the three people whose teams it touches, then the VP who hasn’t said yes to anything in a year. You hear the voice speed up and say: side effects may include new acronyms, pilot testing, stakeholder engagement, marketing meetings, diarrhea, and possibly death.

The closer is the worst of them all: “Let’s socialize this first.” At that point, you know whatever version that comes back so sanded down you wouldn’t recognize it.

So, you don’t pitch it. You don’t even write it down.

That’s the trap.

It’s not that your organization is broken. It’s that it’s working exactly as designed.

• Teamwork.

• Collaboration.

• Communication.

• Buy-in.

These are the words that would be on posters in the lobby if this was still 1998, and they’re not wrong.

In fact, they got you promoted.

And now… they make bold things almost impossible.

Marshall Goldsmith wrote a whole book about this kind of problem. What Got You Here Won’t Get You There. His argument, roughly: the behaviors that made you successful at one level quietly become the behaviors that hold you back at the next. He lists twenty-one of them. The one I keep thinking about isn’t on his list, but it’s the same shape.

Call it consensus-building. Or alignment. Or “making sure everyone’s on board.” It used to be a skill. Now it’s the thing eating your best work.

Here’s what nobody tells you about consensus. It does not produce good ideas. It produces survivable ones. There’s a difference. A surviving idea is one that no one in the room hates enough to block. That’s a low bar. That’s how you get a strategy that reads like it was written by a committee of cautious people trying not to get blamed, because it was.

The real ideas, the ones with edges, don’t survive that process. They get rounded. Eventually somebody adds “as appropriate” three times and the thing is dead.

So, what do you do.

Here is what I would offer, and I’m still working it out myself.

Stop trying to get everyone to agree before you move. Start trying to get the right two or three people to nod once. That’s not a shortcut around teamwork. It’s a different theory of how teamwork actually works. Most teams don’t move because everyone agreed. They move because somebody with credibility decided, and a small handful of people they respect went along.

Find your small handful. Tell them the idea before it’s polished. Ask one of them to poke holes. Ask another one to imagine the version of this that actually ships.

Most importantly! Don’t ask for buy-in. Ask for sharpening.

Then go.

If the idea is right and the timing is decent, the rest of the org will catch up. They will object, they will edit, some of the edits will even be good. But you’ll be moving by then, and a moving idea is a different animal than a draft circulating for comment. Moving ideas attract people. Drafts attract notes.

I’m not saying torch the values poster. But if you’re sitting on three ideas right now that never made it out of your head because you got tired just imagining the rollout, that’s the cost of consensus.

You don’t have to pay it.

(Credit where due: the bones of this thinking come from Marshall Goldsmith’s What Got You Here Won’t Get You There*. He’s the one who first made me see that successful behaviors have shelf lives. Worth a read.)*

First, this isn’t the post I originally wrote for you today. It was too boring, so I’ll save it for my Inc. audience.

Second, and definitely unrelated, I did it again. This past Saturday I had to go back to Home Depot to deal with an appliance order issue that customer service couldn’t resolve over the phone. Same exact setup as a couple weeks ago. Walked in knowing I’d hit the nursery afterward, didn’t grab a cart because of the navigation issues, and again picked out way more plants than I could carry. The line was long, so I had to nudge the largest tray scraping across the cement as we wound toward the register. After I paid, the elderly (I am not kidding) man behind me clearly felt so bad and so confused that he offered me his cart to get to my car. Someday I’ll learn. Or Home Depot will see me coming and start pre-positioning carts randomly around the store.

Okay. The thing I actually want to talk about starts with the word halocline.

I learned it decades ago watching one of those marine biology documentaries in high school on a TV the teacher rolled into our classroom on a cart. A famous research scientist and cave diver was describing the point in a body of water where the salinity changes dramatically and creates this shimmery, visible line between one section of water and another. I thought that was cool partly because of the science and partly because I liked the sound of the word. It’s like harlequin. Or amphitheater. Or chassis. Words I love how they sound but rarely get to use in regular conversation.

Anyway, I’ve been trying to find the right word for the thing so many of us hit in midlife. We’ve been striving toward a certain point in our careers, we get there, and then we face these big questions about whether this is it. Is THIS it? Is this IT? It’s those nagging questions about what’s next and about what would actually feel fulfilling. All of that is real. But when I go into my head and try to picture it, it looks like a halocline. A point we perceive in our environment where the water we’ve been swimming in just seems like it couldn’t possibly give way to water on the other side. It’s still water but the other water looks uncertain and unfamiliar and possibly uninhabitable.

It’s a little like the idea of the glass ceiling, but not really. The glass ceiling is a real barrier, and the people pressing against it are doing the work and trying to get through. The halocline is different because it’s a perceived barrier.

We’re the ones not crossing, because we don’t know what’s on the other side or whether we’re up for it.

That’s been on my mind. I’m playing with how to describe it, how to write about it, how to coach around it.

And then, I was walking laps around Linc’s soccer practice listening to a Rich Roll interview with David Epstein. Epstein is the researcher who calls into question a lot of the popular productivity and leadership research we all quote at each other. One of the things he talked about is how constraints drive creativity. We know this from truisms like “necessity is the mother of invention,” but most of us actually live in the opposite reality. More often than not, our problem is too many choices and too many tools. It’s overwhelming so it has a paralyzing effect. He pointed out that artists and writers often impose arbitrary constraints on themselves on purpose, just to force something different to come out.

So, I tried it for this post today. My usual writing process is to collect ideas in a Word file, dump them out as stream of consciousness or voice memos, and then edit. (AI has made that even faster and better.) The constraint I gave myself was to describe the halocline using only descriptor words that start with A, B, C, D, or E. That’s it. Nothing else fancy.

It was more interesting than I expected. The constraint forced me past my first three words for everything, which are usually my laziest. Here’s the list on a Post-it and the mini-essay I wrote with Claude is below. It was quick (and sorta fun?) and the experiment did what Epstein said it would- got a fresh take.

Two things I’d love from you this week.

1. One, if you’ve felt the halocline yourself, or noticed it in colleagues, tell me. I’m trying to sharpen the description and I want your words for it.

2. Two, pick a creative constraint this week that’s completely arbitrary. Write something using only one-syllable words. Make a deck with no bullet points. Draft an email under fifty words. See what happens when you can’t reach for your usual tools.

I’ll report back on mine if you report back on yours.

The Career Halocline

You aced the early career. You accomplished the details. You bridged every arduous circumstance and elevated even the dismissive culture around you. And now? You are bored.

Beware the abyss.

Amid all that ability, a cold halocline forms. On one side, the career you brainstormed at twenty-five. On the other, a daunting, ever-shifting water you cannot quite see into. You disagree with the brainwash that says be eager, be elated, be ever-accomplishing. You disagree with the dismissive voice that says be careful. You disagree, even, with yourself.

The disdain is real. The boredom is a clue.

A creative career is not a bridge you cross once. It is a circumstance you keep choosing. So be brave. Be caring. Be bored, briefly, and then be brainstorming again.

The abyss is cold. The other side is not.

So, Marin has some stories, images, a few facts of her own but she doesn’t have the full picture, and she knows it.

She wanted to get my two sisters’ perspectives on why they started it and why they keep it going (equally important!), so she asked for my help drafting the text to them.

A text.

Apparently, this is how school research is done these days. Back in my day… (Britannica, library, letter-writing, 3x5 notecards, what am I forgetting?)

My “help” consisted of talking her through what to write them while I drained pasta. The whole exchange happened on phones. Like, her ask was for them to text her back?! Wait, I should stop her and just note that she wanted help writing the text so that the request was clear- not because she’s intimidated in anyway by talking to them. They talk all the time about other important things- game stats, Love Island, Sephora finds, etc.

Anyway, the essay is underway, which is great. But it got me thinking about a related problem that does not go away when you grow up.

We do not just have to write about things we do not fully know. We have to speak about them. Out loud. In front of people whose opinions of us actually matter.

In school this is fine, right? Everyone in the room knows you are regurgitating research. The stakes are a grade.

At work, the stakes shift.

You get asked to present on a topic that is not your specialty, or defend a decision you did not make, or pitch a direction you are not fully sold on yourself. It is part of the job. And it can trigger real anxiety, because you are not just standing in front of a room. You are standing there saying things you cannot fully back up if someone pushes. You find yourself praying nobody asks a follow-up question, because your knowledge runs about an inch deep.

You cannot opt out of these moments. And you cannot show up, admit you do not know much, and read a script with your head down. Neither of those is leadership.

So here is what actually helps.

Write it down first. Anytime you are speaking on a topic you do not know cold, you have to do the writing work ahead of time. There is no winging your way through unfamiliar territory and sounding credible. The writing is where you build the foundation that lets you stand up and speak with any kind of steadiness. It is also the part you have the most control over, which matters when so much else about the situation feels shaky.

Lead with emotional truth, not technical mastery. Here is something I think people get wrong. They assume the audience needs them to be the expert on the facts. Most of the time, the audience needs them to be the expert on why it matters. You may not know every technical detail of the system you are presenting, but you do know what it feels like when teams are stuck, when customers are frustrated, when a decision keeps getting pushed off. That is the part people connect to. Facts inform. Feelings land. So when you write your remarks, lead with the human truth of the situation and let the data support it, not the other way around.

Define your own frame. This is the work version of what fiction writers call world-building. You do not have to cover the whole topic. You get to decide what is in scope and what is not. Open with something like “I am going to focus on three things today” and you have just done yourself an enormous favor. You have told the audience what to expect, and you have given yourself permission to leave out everything you are not solid on. This is not dodging. This is structure. The people who seem most confident when they speak are usually not the ones who know the most. They are the ones who decided ahead of time what they were going to talk about and stayed in that lane.

Borrow from people who have lived it. Before you stand up to speak, talk to one or two people who actually know the topic. A colleague who ran the project. A customer who uses the thing. Someone on the team you are presenting on behalf of. Ten minutes with the right person will give you more usable material than an hour of reading. You will pick up the language they use, the examples that resonate, the things that matter to them that you would never have guessed. Then you can carry their voice into the room with you.

Use your research, do not hide behind it. Read enough to be conversant. Then stop. There is a point where more research becomes a way of avoiding the harder work of deciding what you actually think. You will get something wrong eventually. That is part of being someone who speaks up at work instead of staying quiet. Research supports your remarks. It does not replace your judgment.

Then, and this is the part people skip, practice it out loud. Not in your head. Out loud, in your kitchen, in your car, in front of a mirror, into your phone’s voice memo. Because if the first time you hear yourself say these words is in front of an audience, your brain will absolutely betray you. It starts a running commentary in real time. Liar. Is that even right? You sound like you have no idea what you are talking about. That voice tanks your delivery. The fix is simple. Make sure your mouth has already said the sentences before the room hears them. Familiarity steadies your voice and frees up your attention for the people in front of you.

You will still get questions you cannot fully answer. That is fine. Saying “I do not know, let me find out” lands a lot better when the rest of your remarks were grounded and clear.

You do not have to be the expert. You have to be prepared.

In the desire for perfect efficiency that I bring to everything I do, I made my first tactical error. I didn’t get a cart.

My logic was sound. I was going to appliances first. No cart needed there. It’d be too hard and too heavy to push through the busy store. But I knew after that, I’d swing by the garden center and grab just a few things. Just a few… I could manage.

I bought two hydrangeas with tags claiming to be low maintenance. They were lovely and really convincing. But they weren’t small or light (they’d just be watered.) They absolutely require the flatbed thing- one of those massive metal sleds that never drive straight but every Home Depot garden center still stocks them because plants are awkward and humans are optimistic.

So, cart-less but still efficiency-minded, I dragged the flowers one by one over to the checkout line. Everyone else was standing sensibly, scrolling their phones behind their giant flatbeds loaded with mulch and landscaping stone. (I should also note that I’d picked out three much smaller replacement (dirty-er) herbs that I had to tuck under one arm. In that moment, I’d decided that I’d just change my sweatshirt when I got home.)

Anyway, the guy working the register (who was maybe 22 and cuter than average- a detail unrelated to this story but thought you should know) rang me up.

At the end he asked, “Do you have a Home Depot card?”

“No.”

He paused and then mostly to himself said, “Yeah... why would someone without a cart have a Home Depot card?”

He wasn’t being mean. It was just the observation of a man who has seen things in his probably 4 months of working in the garden area. And honestly? Fair.

Then, completely unprompted, he pushed his sunglasses down from the top of his head and said, “I think I’m just gonna wear these the rest of the day.”

“I think you should,” I said. “You look way cooler.”

And that was that. Defying the odds, I triumphantly made it to my car in one trip and drove home.

While congratulating myself on winning efficiency (again), here’s what stuck with me.

He assumed I didn’t have a Home Depot card — which, fine, accurate, I don’t — but the assumption behind the assumption was the interesting part. People who show up often and ready to spend money have the special loyalty card. I shop at Home Depot with some regularity. I paint, I do little wood projects, I have ambitions about my garden that I recommit to every spring. But I don’t have a store card. I don’t have any store cards. I just have one credit card because I think it’s simpler that way.

In this same vein, I have a dear, dear friend who, every time she orders steak at a work dinner with people she hasn’t eaten with before, gets the same comment. I thought you were a vegetarian.

Nope.

These micro-assumptions are funny when you catch them. But they’re also worth paying attention to, because we do this to each other constantly at work.

We assume the person in the meeting who isn’t speaking isn’t engaged. We assume the person who doesn’t push back agrees. We assume the colleague who seems relaxed isn’t working hard.

We build a story from incomplete data — a missing cart, a steak order — and we act on it.

So, here’s what I’m thinking about this week:

What assumption do people consistently make about you that’s just... wrong? Not offensive wrong. Just amusingly, inexplicably off-base.

And maybe more interesting: where did it come from?

Side note: Pay attention to your own quirky little contradictions — the places where you don’t match the story people expect.

A speaker I heard recently had a great tip for introducing yourself: use a rule of three. Two things that are true and make total sense together, and a third that completely doesn’t fit.

Applied to my Home Depot habit, mine might go something like…

I come from a long line of skilled gardeners, I want desperately to be one, and yet I manage to kill everything that comes home with me — which is why I’m a loyal Home Depot customer who keeps replacing the plants that didn’t have the will to survive on their own.

The contradiction is the hook. Your quirks are worth naming.