This past Tuesday, over a poke bowl sitting outside in the delightful California sunshine, my friend Tracy tore me apart...

Allow me to explain....

Tracy is a psychotherapist in Los Altos who works with people navigating eating disorders and with teenagers drowning in anxiety, and she is, by far, one of the most intuitive humans I've ever met.

I go to Tracey for counsel the way the ancient Greeks used to consult very esteemed oracles, except their oracles answered them in cryptic drivel and never split the lunch bill.

Anyway, usually I bring Tracy a problem and she gently takes it apart.

But this time, as I mentioned above, she took ME apart. Over raw, spicy fish.... Rude.

But I deserved it.

A couple of months ago I was asked to give the closing keynote at the Women's Networking Alliance's Fall Mixer and small business summit. It's a genuine honour.... giving a talk in a big room, filled with wonderful and accomplished business women.

And until about 2 days ago, I had told approximately... no one.

Not in passing. Not "oh, funny thing." Nothing. I'd been sitting on it like a curmudgeonly dragon sitting on treasure they didn't want anyone to know about.

Then last week the organisers sent a mass email, subject line: "The keynote everyone's been talking about."

I knew, in my gut, before I even opened it, that they meant mine. And I felt... SICK.

Physically unwell.

It got worse. Lovely women who'd also gotten the email started messaging me. "How exciting!" "So cool!" "I'll be there, can't WAIT!"

Every kind, supportive, cheerleading message landed like a tiny but painful gut punch. Which made no sense to me. Who feels nauseous about accomplished women being nice to them?

I told Tracy all of this, rather pleased with how insightful I was being about my own peculiar reaction.

She folded her arms, fixed me with those sage eyes of hers and asked me one question.

"Have you written the speech yet?"

My stomach did the "i'm going to be sick" lurch again.

"No... I just... haven't had the time..."

"And when were you planning to sit down and write it?"

"Ooof. I dunno. I need to find a window..."

"Sylvie. THIS is why you feel sick. You haven't done the work. Your inner child feels exposed, your perfectionist teenager is wringing her hands about the deadline, you're paralysed, and your brain has landed on the tidiest available story: that you're a fraud. That people will turn up and SEE you're unprepared. So you've hidden the whole thing and gotten stuck right there. Unprepared and unready."

GOD, I hate it when she's right (which is always).

My stomach, it turned out, had a point.

I felt like a fraud on this specific thing because, on this one specific thing, I was behaving exactly like one.

I hadn't written a single word.

"I always know what to say in front of people," I offered, weakly.

"Winging it isn't a strategy, and you know it," said Tracey, still watching me writhe uncomfortably like a worm on a hook.

I DO know it. I know it so well I say it to other people for MONEY.

I tell the individuals and couples in my office practically every day: you cannot wing the important things and pray they work out.

Good results come from setting aside the time and doing the work, in small consistent bites.

So. How do you eat an elephant?

(Yes, yes, nobody wants to eat an elephant, I KNOW, it's a saying, bear with me.)

You eat an elephant one bite at a time.

I said this exact thing last week to a couple who'd convinced themselves they'd never find their way back to each other after a long, knackered, postpartum dry spell. Because most people treat reconnecting after a baby like one enormous pass-or-fail exam, a single terrifying mammoth of a task, and they freeze.

When the move is one small bite, then you can relax knowing that even the tiniest thing shifts the needle, then the next one.

I'm a gym rat these days (40 week streak, Woooooo!), so here's a gym analogy for you too.

You do not stride in to the gym on day one and reach for the 50lb weight. You'd strain something, hate it, and never come back.

A smarter strategy is you go in and pick up the 3lb one. You do a workout with that. Then the following week, you trade up for 5s.

And you keep going, unglamorously, until one day you're bicep curling the 25lbs and you've forgotten you ever couldn't. (This, incidentally, is the entire origin story of my magnificent biceps, thank you for asking!)

So there I was. A woman who eats elephants for a living, staring at my own personal elephant, this keynote, trying to swallow it whole in one panicked gulp.

No wonder I felt ill.

Tracy, being Tracy, didn't let me marinate. "Book a time next week. We'll draft it together. Then you set up more times, and you iterate."

And just like that, the nausea eased. Because now there was a plan. And I can follow a plan. The elephant became bites.

Which is the whole reason you're hearing about any of this.

Feeling less sick made me brave enough to finally tell people. Including you.

So: I'm giving the closing keynote at the Fall Mixer, and if you're in the Bay Area, I'd love you there.

Four other brilliant speakers are giving keynotes, plus my friend Amie Wang (a Play Instructor, and an absolute joy) is running a stretch-and-movement break so nobody seizes up, and lunch is included in the ticket.

It is not a poke bowl with Tracey, because those are priceless. But it's still lunch.

My talk is called The Dominatrix Principle: What Power, Consent and Control Taught Me About Building a Business That Lasts.

Which is exactly as fun as it sounds.

(That, by the way, is a Real Clickable Button. Tracy ALSO told me off, correctly, for never putting proper buttons in my newsletters and instead burying links in the text like a woman hiding vegetables in a toddler's pasta. So. Look at me. TECH-ing.)

I'm so grateful for friends who make me eat my own dogfood, and who remind me that it's a thousand times easier to dish out wisdom than to swallow it.

And as one of my heroines, the great Golda Meir, reportedly said: "Don't be so humble. You're not that great."

Really hope to see you there!

Lots of love,
Sylvie

P.S. Some more Links now that I'm "button savvy"! (Click on them! They HOPEFULLY work! If they don't... let me know!)