On capability, self-trust, and learning to listen before deciding what to do.
The checklist on my desk seemed to get longer every time I crossed something off.
I was in the middle of launching a new program, which meant there were emails to write, web pages to finish, and all the small loose ends that appear whenever you are trying to bring something new into the world. I had also committed to attending a Polka Dot Powerhouse meeting that morning, and as the time to leave got closer, going felt increasingly impractical.
I started doing the math. How long would it take to drive there? How long would the meeting run? How much time would disappear into the conversations before and afterward? If I stayed home, I could keep working while I was already in the flow and probably knock several more things off the list before lunch.
There was also the less noble calculation. I would have to change out of my comfy clothes. Staying home meant no hair, no makeup, no transition from desk to car to meeting and back again. The case for staying home became remarkably persuasive.
And yet every time I got close to deciding not to go, the decision didn’t quite settle.
Part of it was simple. I had said I would be there. I follow through on commitments, and this was a commitment not only to the women in that community but to myself. I had joined because I already suspected that building a business entirely from behind my desk had limits. I wanted to become better at connection and collaboration.
Still, none of that quite explained the feeling. The practical case said stay. Something quieter said go.
There was nothing on that checklist that said: Go meet the person who may change how you think about everything else on this list.
Of course, I didn’t know that yet.
What I knew was that I had work to do, and I have always been very good at doing the work.
“I’m the one who gets it done” is one of those things I could have told you about myself with considerable confidence. I would not have said it boastfully. It was simply part of the evidence I had accumulated about who I was. Give me a problem, and I will figure it out. Give me a responsibility, and I will carry it. If I don’t know how to do something, I will research it until I do.
That version of me has been useful.
She learned to work in technology when very few women were in the room. She moved between roles and learned new ones. She left the workforce for years to raise a child and later figured out how to build an entirely different kind of working life. She wrote, created, started a business, learned new platforms, built programs, solved problems no one had assigned her, and completed projects for which there was no instruction manual.
I never thought of independence as a philosophy. It was simply what being capable looked like.
Somewhere along the way, though, I added something to the definition without noticing. Being capable began to mean that I should be able to figure things out myself. Asking for help was what you did after you’d exhausted your own options. Bringing someone an unfinished thought felt premature. If I was going to ask for another person’s time or opinion, I wanted to arrive with something worthy of it.
***
Even one quality I have long been proudest of carries a little of this pattern.
I am a really good listener.
I enjoy hearing how people think. I am curious about the stories underneath the stories they tell, and I can stay with someone else’s thoughts without immediately trying to redirect the conversation toward my own. For years, I considered my reluctance to offer an opinion quickly part of what made me a good listener.
Some of it was.
Some of it was also me waiting until I had a complete idea. Something worthy of airtime.
I wanted a useful contribution, not a half-formed one. I wanted to listen long enough that when I finally spoke, I could offer a clear thought or a plan that moved things forward. It rarely occurred to me that the unfinished thought might be the thing worth saying, or that another person could help me discover what I thought before I knew how to articulate it perfectly.
***
Entrepreneurship has been effective at exposing the limits of this belief.
There is always more that can be done when you work for yourself. Another email, another post, another page, another idea to refine, another “quick” task that somehow requires forty-five minutes. Enough to make dinner on the fly or rescheduling coffee with a friend one more time feel temporarily reasonable. A problem appears and, if you are wired as I am, the most natural response is to put your head down and solve it.
The satisfying thing about doing is that you can count it.
Three emails written. Website page finished. Presentation revised. Proposal sent.
The value of a conversation is harder to put on a checklist.
So is the value of a nudge.
I started noticing how quickly I can call something urgent simply because it is unfinished, measurable, or visible to someone else. An email waiting for a response can feel more important than a thought I cannot yet explain. A deadline announces itself. A quiet sense that I need to go somewhere, call someone, or pause before deciding rarely does.
The checklist has evidence on its side.
Inner knowing often does not.
***
I went to the meeting. There, I met a business coach. Yes, coaches need coaches.
What has mattered most about our work together is not that she handed me a better plan for getting through the mile-long list. She helped me question my instinct to begin there at all.
Again and again, she has asked me to notice what I know before rushing toward what I should do about it.
That sounds obvious when I write it now. It has not always felt obvious while living it.
Doing has always been one place where I know how to locate myself. Action gives me something solid to respond to. A task can be completed, a problem can be solved, and a plan can be improved.
Inner knowing is less accommodating. It rarely arrives with bullet points.
Sometimes it arrives as a hesitation I would push past or a pull toward something that does not yet make practical sense. It even shows up as a quiet no when I have already invested considerable energy in making something into a yes. Sometimes it becomes clearer only after I begin talking, when another person asks a question and I hear myself say something I did not know I knew until the words were already in the room.
For someone who spent a good portion of her life believing she should arrive with the answer, this shift is inconvenient.
It is also liberating.
I spent years trusting the part of me that could make a logical case. I am learning to trust the part that sometimes knows before it can explain why.
That has changed what connection means to me, too.
Over the past few years, some of the most useful things in my business have come through people rather than plans. Someone makes an introduction. A casual conversation reveals an idea I’d been circling but could not quite name. I say something out loud before it is ready, and another person notices the part of the sentence I almost skipped over. A connection leads somewhere I could not have planned from my desk because I did not yet know the destination existed.
For a long time, needing another person’s perspective felt uncomfortably close to not having figured something out for myself. I understand that differently now. A good question can help me hear my own answer. Speaking an unfinished idea aloud can reveal what I actually think. Another person’s perspective can sharpen my knowing without replacing it.
My capability does not diminish when it encounters someone else’s, and self-trust does not require me to solve everything alone.
Perhaps this is why some identities we carry can become so difficult to examine. They are not necessarily false.
I am independent, a good listener, and the one who gets it done. All of those identities are true.
But truth may not be the only interesting question we can ask about the identities we carry.
Another question worth exploring is what happens after we name them.
A description repeated often enough can become an instruction. I am independent quietly becomes I should handle this myself. I am a good listener becomes I should wait until I have something especially valuable to say. I get things done becomes the best use of my time is probably whatever produces the most visible progress.
The identity does not have to be false to become limiting.
In some ways, its accuracy is what gives it so much authority.
We build a case from our own history, remembering how often the quality served us and how frequently it received praise. Eventually, what began as an observation can become something closer to an obligation.
Then life asks something new of us.
The business asks something the corporate career did not. The person who could once solve almost anything by working harder discovers that effort is not the only intelligence available to her.
***
Growing does not require rejecting the person we have been. It asks us to stop making her prove herself.
I still like getting things done. There is genuine pleasure in crossing something off a list, and I don’t expect to become the person who serenely walks away from a launch because some inner voice nudges me toward playing a game of fetch with my dog in the backyard.
I am less certain than I used to be about which of those two things automatically deserves to be called productive.
The harder practice has been learning that practical and wise are not always synonyms, just as urgent and important are not always the same thing. Sometimes practicality is exactly the wisdom I need. Sometimes it is simply the old identity reaching for familiar ground.
I am still learning the difference.
I am also more willing to leave some boxes unchecked, to go to the meeting when I cannot fully explain why it matters, or to say, “I haven’t figured this out yet, but here’s what I’m thinking,” and trust clarity does not always have to arrive before the conversation begins.
The list on my desk is still there. There is always another one.
But every once in a while, I remember that morning and the version of myself that almost kept me home. I think about how sensible staying at my desk would have been, how easily I could have defended the choice, how productive I probably would have been.
And I think about the woman I would not have met.
The one at the meeting, yes.
And the one I was becoming because I went.
