I don’t know.

Three words. Twelve letters. And for the first three years I worked as a trainer, I could not say them out loud. I would rather stumble through a half-answer, redirect to something vaguely related, or say “Let me come back to that” and hope they forgot—anything to avoid admitting I didn’t have the answer on the spot.

It was because, in my mind, one question I couldn’t answer would expose the my deepest fear:

Maybe I wasn’t really an expert.

Maybe I was a fraud who got lucky and the entire room would see it.

If the fear of being asked something you don’t know keeps you from presenting, facilitating, or speaking up in meetings, you’re not alone and you’re not paranoid.

You’re responding to a real pattern: women’s credibility is questioned more often and more harshly than men’s. One gap in knowledge feels like proof you don’t belong.

But here’s what I learned after years of presenting, training, and facilitating:

saying “I don’t know” doesn’t disqualify your expertise. Faking it does.

Why “I Don’t Know” Feels Like Failure

Not knowing an answer feels like it threatens your status in the room. This fear is especially acute for women, who already face credibility challenges and impostor syndrome in professional settings.

When someone asks a question you can’t answer, your brain doesn’t register it as “a gap in knowledge.” It registers it as rejection from the group—a threat to your belonging.

So you panic. You talk longer than necessary, hoping you’ll stumble into something that sounds right. You hedge with “I think...” or “It’s possible that...” You redirect to something you do know, even if it’s not what they asked.

The worst response is a rambling attempt to fill the silence. Because while you’re fumbling, the person who asked the question is watching you avoid admitting the obvious: you don’t know.

And now they’re wondering what else you don’t know—and whether you’ll be honest about it.

Admitting You Don’t Know Actually Builds Credibility

Here’s the counterintuitive truth: admitting what you don’t know increases people’s trust in you.

When people know you’re willing to be clear when you don’t have knowledge, they’re better able to rely on you for the knowledge you claim. Your honesty about gaps makes your expertise more credible, not less.

Saying you don’t know doesn’t make you look incompetent. It makes you seem self-aware and like someone who actually wants to do good work.

Think about the last time someone gave you a rambling non-answer to a direct question. Did you walk away thinking “Wow, they really know their stuff”? Or did you think “They just wasted two minutes avoiding saying they don’t know”?

Your audience can tell when you’re faking. And they respect honesty more than performance.

The Three-Part Response Framework

Read more

It is because you just told them—without realizing it—that even you don’t believe your work is worth what you’re charging.

If talking about your pricing makes you want to immediately explain, justify, or offer a discount before anyone asks, you don’t have a pricing problem.

You have a belief problem and it’s costing you thousands of dollars a year.

The Apology Epidemic

Women consistently underprice their services 20-30% lower than male counterparts for comparable work. This isn’t about delivering less value. It’s about undervaluing expertise because we’ve been conditioned to believe that charging what we’re worth makes us greedy, difficult, or unreasonable.1

Here’s what that looks like in real conversations:

• “The investment is $2,000... but I can work with you on that if it’s too much.”

• “It’s normally $5,000, but for you I could do $3,500.”

• “I charge $150 an hour, but I’m flexible if that doesn’t work for your budget.”

Every one of those sentences is an apology and every apology costs you money.

Why “But” Kills Your Credibility

When you say “It’s $X, but...” you’re immediately undermining your own price. You’re signaling to your potential client that the number you just stated isn’t real—it’s negotiable, inflated, or optional.

Justification is a sign you’ve already conceded the higher ground. If you aren’t confident in your prices, it shows up in how you present your offer, which nudges people away from buying. This leads them to ask for discounts, encourage endless debate, or simply not act.

The Language That Undermines Your Authority

Go back and look at the last 3 times you talked about pricing—in an email, on a sales call, or in a proposal. Count how many times you used:

• “I charge...”

• “But if that’s too much...”

• “I’m flexible...”

• “I know that might seem high...”

• “Just let me know what works for you...”

Each of these phrases is a pre-emptive apology for asking to be paid what you’re worth. Now compare that to these versions:

• “The investment is...”

• [State price, then stop talking]

• “That includes...”

• [No commentary on whether it’s high or low]

• “Let me know if you’d like to move forward.”

One set of phrases assumes your price needs defending. The other assumes your price is fair and states it as fact.

The Pause That Changes Everything

Here’s the most counterintuitive advice you’ll get about pricing:

after you state your price, shut up.2

A slight pause before you state the price and an even longer pause after are critical. Use a 2-3 second pause after delivering your pricing statement. Your objective is to ensure the client speaks first after you’ve shared the price.

That pause will feel unbearable. You’ll want to fill the silence with explanations, justifications, or discounts. Don’t.

The pause gives your potential client time to think and respond. It also keeps you from talking past the close and introducing objections that didn’t exist.

Most people who sell panic during that silence. They speed up, over-explain, or immediately offer a lower price. That’s how you lose authority—and money.

If you’re the kind of person who reads something like this and thinks, “Okay, now what do I actually say when someone asks about my price?” you’re who I build the paid member section for.

Below the paywall, I walk you through a simple protocol you can practice so that pause stops feeling like panic and starts feeling like power.

If pricing conversations are a live issue for you, hit reply with the word “pricing.” I want to know where you freeze so I can keep building tools that move this from your head to your hands.

Read more

It wasn’t because I was unqualified—I’d been designing corporate learning systems for years, facilitating workshops, and training trainers. But every time I introduced myself as someone who knew something, my old programming would kick in and recall the warnings:

• Women are to be seen, not heard

• Humility is a virtue—boastfulness is sin.

• A godly woman builds others up, not herself.

• Don’t make yourself too visible or you’ll look like a rebellious Jezebel.

I grew up in a religious home where my father was a pastor and women were taught to be seen, not heard. To defer to men. To speak softly, serve quietly, and never, ever claim authority. That programming doesn’t leave just because you get a degree or build a career. It sits in your throat every time you try to say what you’re good at.

If talking about your work feels like bragging, it’s not because you’re arrogant. It’s because you’ve been socialized to believe that claiming expertise is the same as claiming too much.

You Were Taught That Visibility Is Dangerous

Whether you grew up religious or not, the message was everywhere:

• Women who speak up are attention-seeking.

• Women who claim authority are aggressive.

• Women who state what they know without softening it are difficult, unlikable, or threatening.

The research1 confirms what you already know. Women provide less favorable assessments of their own performance than equally performing men—even when women know they outperformed others.

This isn’t about confidence. It’s about consequences.

When women self-promote, they face backlash for not conforming to expected feminine traits like humility and collaboration. That backlash has been so consistent, and so pervasive, that it has socialized women to downplay accomplishments even in settings where gender isn’t disclosed.

So you didn’t just stop bragging. You stopped stating facts. You stopped naming what you built, what you know, abd what you’ve done. You learned to attribute your success to luck, timing, teamwork—anything but your own skill.

And now, years later, when someone asks what you do, you still hesitate.

The Invisible Editing You Do Before You Speak

We’ve spent so much time downplaying our expertise that it could be difficult to even notice it.

You say “I’m just a______” instead of “I’m a______”
You say “I’ve been trying to________” instead of “I teach________”
You say “I might be able to help with that” instead of “That’s exactly what I do.”

Women resist claiming individual impact because we’ve been conditioned to focus on the collective. We don’t want to erase the contributions of others. We place high value on relationships and worry about alienating colleagues.

But here’s what that costs you: when you don’t talk about your abilities, you hold back opportunities to help others. You make it harder for people to find you, hire you, refer you, or recognize what you’re capable of.

The Reframe: You’re Not Seeking Admiration, You’re Offering a Solution

Self-promotion isn’t about feeding your ego. It’s about helping others understand how you can bring value.

If you don’t speak up about your expertise, you risk being overlooked—not because you’re not good enough, but because no one knows what you do.

Think about the last time you needed help with something specific. Did you hire the person who said “I might be able to help” or the person who said “I do this, here’s how it works”?

Clarity isn’t arrogance. It’s service.

When I say “I help women experts position and package their knowledge into paid offers,” I’m not bragging. I’m making it possible for someone who needs that exact thing to recognize me as the person who can help them.

The problem isn’t that you talk about your work too much. The problem is that you’ve been taught to feel shame for doing it at all.

What to Do Instead

You don’t have to become loud or performative. You don’t have to post inspirational quotes about your wins or humblebrag on LinkedIn.

You just have to state what you do plainly, without apologizing for knowing it.

If talking about your work makes your stomach tighten or your voice go small, you’re not broken. You’re reacting to years of being told that being visible is dangerous.

Before you click away, I want to hear what this looks like in your real life. Hit reply and tell me about one moment where talking about your work felt uncomfortable — a meeting, a bio you had to write, a conversation with a friend who asked,

“So… what do you do again?”

You don’t have to write it perfectly. Just describe the scene. I read every reply, and future letters will be shaped around the places you actually get stuck, not where some marketing guru thinks you should be.

Read more

“I’m a consultant” or “ I’m a coach”

or “I’m a trainer who works with organizations on leadership development.”

I’m guilty of using these introductions at one point of time or another. I’ve since learned that these aren’t bad answers—they’re just incomplete. They describe your role, not the transformation you facilitate.

When someone asks what you do and you can’t answer in one clear sentence, the problem isn’t nerves. It’s positioning.

Why Generic Answers Kill Conversations

Here’s what happens when you say “I’m a consultant”, for example:

The listener mentally files you under “vague professional services” and moves on. There’s nothing for them to remember, no way to refer you, and no reason to ask follow-up questions.

Compare that to: “I help women trainers turn their expertise into paid Substack newsletters so they can build authority without relying on corporate clients.”

One answer describes a role. The other describes a specific transformation for specific people using a specific method.

The Standard Formula

Most coaches and course creators will tell you to use this format:

Examples:

“I help mid-career women in tech move into director-level roles through 1:1 positioning work so they can lead without burning out.”

“I help experts package their knowledge into paid newsletters so they can monetize what they already know without building an audience first.”

This approach works. It’s clear and direct. It’s a statement, not a pitch.

But it’s also what everyone else is doing.

The Approach I Actually Use (And Teach)

I prefer the “You Know How...” pattern because it creates conversation instead of performance—and it immediately differentiates you from every other expert reciting their elevator pitch.

The Template:

You know how [specific people] [struggle with specific problem]?

[Wait for response]

Well, I help [those people] [achieve specific outcome] without [the pain point or friction they expect].

Examples:

“You know how experts spend years building knowledge but can’t figure out how to turn it into actual income?”

[Yeah...]

“Well, I help women who write, teach, and speak position and package their expertise so they can get paid without needing a huge audience first.”

---

“You know how trainers create amazing content but it all disappears after the workshop ends?”

[Totally.]

“I help facilitators turn their workshop content into paid newsletters so their expertise keeps working for them long after the session.”

---

“You know how mid-career professionals feel stuck even though they’re clearly qualified for the next level?”

[Yes!]

“I help women in tech move into director roles without burning out by repositioning how they talk about their leadership experience.”

Why This Pattern Works Better

It creates agreement first. When you describe a problem they recognize, they’re nodding along before you even mention what you do. You’ve already established shared understanding.

It feels like conversation, not a pitch. You’re not performing—you’re checking if they relate to something real. The natural pause after “you know how...” invites them into the exchange.

It positions the problem, not your product. By starting with the struggle instead of your solution, you’re meeting them where they are—which is exactly what makes positioning work.

It eliminates the need for jargon. When you describe a specific, relatable problem, you don’t need industry terms or credentials to sound credible. The problem itself does the positioning.

It differentiates you immediately. While everyone else is delivering their rehearsed “I help...” statement, you’re having an actual conversation.

Crafting Your “You Know How...” Statement

This isn’t something you improvise. It requires the same level of clarity as any positioning sentence—you just deliver it differently.

Here’s how to build yours:

Step 1: Identify the specific, relatable problem
Not a vague pain point. A moment or frustration your ideal client has experienced and can picture immediately.

Step 2: Test if it creates recognition
Say it out loud to someone in your target audience. Do they nod? Do they say “yeah” or “oh my god, yes”? If not, the problem isn’t specific enough.

Step 3: State the transformation clearly
After they agree, your “Well, I...” statement should name exactly what changes and what friction you remove.

Step 4: Write it out word-for-word
Don’t use bullet points—you can’t edit what’s only in your head. Practice it until it sounds like natural speech, not a script.

Why This Makes Pitching Easier

When you have one clear positioning sentence that starts with a problem people recognize, you stop searching for words in the moment. You’re not improvising.
You’re repeating something you’ve already refined.

More importantly, you stop second-guessing whether people will “get it.” If your positioning is clear, the right people will recognize themselves immediately.
The wrong people will eliminate themselves. Both outcomes are useful.

Your Positioning Sentence Is Not Forever

This isn’t a tattoo. It’s a working sentence that evolves as your work evolves.

The goal isn’t perfection. The goal is clarity—one opening you can deliver with confidence when someone asks what you do.

When you have that, pitching stops feeling like performance. It becomes conversation.

And conversation eliminates panic.

I’m Shannon D. Smith, Certified Professional in Talent Development. I help women experts turn trapped knowledge and expertise into visible, profitable work. Become a paid member to build your body of work with weekly guidance and priority access to labs and mini-classes.

That’s where this story starts.

Not on the stage.

Not at the podium.

In a hotel room, alone, across the country from my kids, fighting back tears I didn’t even see coming — because that’s what extreme stress does to me. Always has. My dad used to say, you cry…

Read more

You sent it. The pitch you prepared, revised, ran through the simulation for, finally let go of. It landed in someone’s inbox and you closed your laptop and took a breath and told yourself you did the thing.

That lasted about four hours.

Then the silence started talking. Not them. The silence.

Your brain moved in and began furnishing it with meaning, with their facial expression reading your subject line, with the quick scroll past, with the quiet decision that it was not quite right.

Nobody told you no. Your brain wrote the rejection anyway, and now you are living inside it, checking your email like you might catch the moment they change their mind.

Silence Is the Hardest Part of the Pitch Process

Here is what I want to name directly, because most pitch advice skips straight from send to follow-up without acknowledging what actually happens in between.

The waiting is not neutral. For women who have learned to read rooms, to track other people’s responses, to manage the emotional weather of a situation, ambiguity is not just uncomfortable.

It is physiologically activating in a specific and documented way.

Your nervous system does not experience the silence after a pitch as simply unknown. It experiences it as unresolved threat and an unresolved threat does not sit quietly.

It recruits your imagination, your pattern recognition, your memory of every previous rejection, and builds a story out of the absence of information.

That story is almost always a version of no. You then begin grieving an outcome that has not happened yet, which means by the time the actual response arrives, you are already in a defensive posture.

If it is a yes, you are surprised. If it is a no, you are depleted.

Either way, the silence has already cost you something.

This is not anxiety as a character trait. This is your nervous system doing exactly what nervous systems do with ambiguous social information. Understanding that changes what you do with the waiting.

Why Uncertainty Hits Harder Than Rejection

The research here is specific and worth knowing.

Neuroscientist Ming Hsu and colleagues at UC Berkeley have demonstrated that ambiguous threat, situations where the outcome is unknown, activates the amygdala more strongly and more persistently than a known threat, even when the known threat is negative.

In simple terms: your brain finds confirmed rejection easier to regulate than prolonged uncertainty.

This is why the waiting is harder to deal with than the no. A no has edges. It is a known variable. Your nervous system can begin to process and adapt.

The silence offers no edges, no information, no endpoint, which means the threat response stays active, scanning, interpreting, generating worst-case narratives to fill the gap.

Research on what psychologists call intolerance of uncertainty consistently shows that individuals with high uncertainty sensitivity not only experience more distress in ambiguous situations, they also make poorer decisions from that distress.

They follow up too soon, from anxiety. Or they do not follow up at all, from the conviction that the silence already means no. Both responses cost them the opportunity.

The protocol is not about managing your feelings about the silence. It is about making a regulated decision inside it.

The Silence Is Not Theirs to Fill

If you have a pitch sitting in someone’s inbox right now and the waiting has started doing its work on you, I need you to hear this. The silence is not a verdict.

It is a condition. Conditions can be responded to with intention. That is what we are building next.

Read more

You knew your numbers. You knew your value proposition. You had practiced the ask in the mirror and it landed clean and clear and confident. You walked into the room ready.

Then the conversation started shifting, the pushback came, and something in you went quiet in a way that had nothing to do with your talking points. You gave a number and immediately offered a lower one.

You said yes to a timeline that does not work. You walked out with a deal that was almost what you deserved and told yourself that was good enough. You prepared everything. You just did not prepare the part of you that was going to be in the room.

Negotiation Is 80% Nervous System. 20% Talking Points.

Here is what the research will not let me soften.

The experts who consistently negotiate well, who hold their number, who decline the low offer without apologizing for it, who leave the room with the terms they came in requesting, are not necessarily smarter or more credentialed than the experts who do not.

They are not tougher in some innate, unteachable way.

They are not more confident as a baseline personality trait.

They are more regulated.

Their nervous system, in the room, under pressure, with someone pushing back on the ask, stays in a state that keeps the prefrontal cortex online. Which means their language stays deliberate.

Their body stays open.

Their silence, when they use it, reads as authority rather than uncertainty.

Their no reads as a position rather than a flinch.

That is not charisma. That is physiology. Specifically, it is what happens when you prepare your body for the negotiation the same way you prepare your talking points.

Most people prepare the 20% and walk in hoping the other 80% handles itself. It does not. Not reliably. Not under real pressure.

The Research on Physiological State and Negotiation Outcome

The evidence on this is direct.

Harvard researcher Amy Cuddy’s work on expansive posture and neuroendocrine response demonstrated measurable shifts in cortisol and testosterone levels based on physical positioning alone, changes significant enough to affect risk tolerance and confidence in high-stakes interactions.

Subsequent research has complicated the specific hormone claims, but the behavioral outcomes, greater willingness to hold a position, lower capitulation rates, have been replicated consistently.

More directly relevant: research on negotiation and affect regulation by Gerben van Kleef and colleagues shows that negotiators who experience and express negative emotion, anxiety, resignation, apology, receive systematically worse outcomes than those who maintain neutral to positive affect, regardless of the quality of their opening offer.

Your emotional state in the room is not just an internal experience. It is information your counterpart reads and responds to, often without realizing they are doing so.

You are not just negotiating with your words. You are negotiating with your nervous system state. That state is legible to everyone in the room.

Here Is the Framework That Prepares the 80%

In the paid section, I am going to walk you through the exact pre-negotiation body protocol I teach, and the three in-room anchors that keep your nervous system regulated when the pushback comes.

You Were Not Undertrained. You Were Underprepared in the Wrong Direction.

If you have left negotiations knowing you left something on the table, this is the piece that explains why. Not because you did not know your worth. Because your body was not ready to hold it under pressure.

That is what we fix next.

Read more

You wrote it. It is not perfect but it is real, and somewhere in your body you know it is good enough to matter. Then you read it back.

Then you read it again.

Then you change a word, then change it back, then decide the whole opening is wrong, then close the laptop and tell yourself you will come back tomorrow.

Tomorrow you open it and the whole cycle starts again. The piece is not getting better. You are getting more afraid. There is a difference, and knowing the difference is everything.

Most Writers Fail at Publishing, Not Writing

This is the part nobody talks about honestly.

The writing gets done. Imperfectly, slowly, painfully sometimes, but it gets done. The draft exists. The ideas are on the page. The expertise is there, in ink, in your words, waiting.

The failure happens later. In the specific window between finished draft and published piece. In the re-reading, the second-guessing, the quiet convincing yourself that it needs one more pass before it is ready for someone else’s eyes.

This is what kept me from publishing my first book 3 years after I had written it.

The thing is, that window is not an editing phase. It is a fear phase wearing the costume of quality control. Your brain tells you it is about the work. Your nervous system knows it is about the risk. You are not refining anymore. You are retreating, one revision at a time, back to the safety of the unpublished.

This is not a writing problem. This is a publishing problem. They require different solutions.

Fear Has a Location. I Have Mapped It.

After working with women who write, teach, and speak for public audiences, I noticed something consistent enough to name.

The hijack does not happen at the blank page, though that is where we expect it.

It does not happen in the middle of the draft, though the writing can be hard.

It happens at a specific checkpoint, the moment the draft feels complete enough that publishing becomes a real and imminent possibility. That is when the nervous system registers the actual threat.

Not the hypothetical threat of maybe writing something, but the concrete threat of someone is about to read this and know I wrote it.

Researcher Brené Brown’s work on vulnerability and exposure consistently points to this same threshold: the moment before the thing is real is when fear peaks, not after.

Your body knows what is coming before your brain has made the decision.

Research on performance anxiety also shows the same pattern. Anticipatory threat, the fear of what might happen, activates stronger physiological responses than the event itself. You are most afraid at the checkpoint, right before you cross it.

That checkpoint has a name. It has a location. It is predictable. Predictable means it can be prepared for.

Here Is What to Do When You Hit It

In the paid section, I am going to show you the exact checkpoint sequence your nervous system runs before publishing, why revision loops are the primary symptom, and the three-question audit that moves you from draft to delivered.

The Piece Is Not the Problem

If you have a draft sitting in your folder right now, I want you to hear this directly. The piece is not the problem. The checkpoint is. You wrote something worth publishing. The question is whether you are willing to cross the line that makes it real. That is what we are doing below.

Read more

A survey published in The Book of Lists found that Americans ranked public speaking as their number one fear, above death, above heights, above financial ruin.

Jerry Seinfeld turned it into a punchline: at a funeral, the average person would rather be in the casket than delivering the eulogy.

We laugh because we recognize it.

We recognize it because for a lot of us, standing in front of a room and being looked at by people who are waiting for us to say something worth hearing feels, in the body, exactly like danger.

Not metaphorically. Physiologically.

Your body is not being dramatic.

It is being precise.

It Is Not the Speaking. It Has Never Been the Speaking.

Here is what I want you to sit with, because this distinction changes everything.

You are not afraid of public speaking. You talk all day.

You explain things, you teach, you hold conversations, and you tell stories to people you love.

You are articulate, warm and clear.

The speaking is not the problem.

You have been doing that your whole life.

What you are afraid of is a specific condition that public speaking creates:

the condition of being evaluated…visibly…by multiple people. Simultaneously.

Not having the ability to monitor every face and adjust in real time as you can in a conversation.

That is a different fear entirely. It has a different name. It has a different mechanism.

The thing is, almost every piece of advice you have ever received about public speaking assumes the problem is the speaking, so it hands you tips about eye contact and vocal variety and where to put your hands.

Meanwhile your nervous system is running a completely different program underneath all of it, one that has nothing to do with your hands.

Until you address the actual fear, the tips do not stick. They cannot.

You are solving for the wrong thing.

What the Research Actually Says About Why We Freeze

Psychologist Mark Leary at Duke University has spent decades researching what he terms social evaluation threat, the specific fear of being negatively judged by others in a public context.

His research consistently shows that the physiological and psychological response to social evaluation threat is distinct from generalized performance anxiety.

It is not simply nerves about doing something difficult.

It is the activation of a deeply wired social survival system.

Neuroscientist Naomi Eisenberger at UCLA has demonstrated through brain imaging research that social rejection and exclusion activate the same neural regions as physical pain, specifically the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex.

In plain language: your brain processes the threat of being seen and found lacking in the same territory where it processes being hurt.

Your body is not overreacting when you grip the podium.

It is responding to something it has classified as a threat to your social belonging.

For women in particular, researcher Sarah Brosnan’s work on social hierarchy and threat response, shows that the stakes of public evaluation are compounded by context, by rooms that were not historically built for our authority, and by audiences conditioned to scrutinize women who claim expertise out loud.

This is not a confidence problem. This is a survival system responding to real historical data.

You Were Never Bad at Speaking

If the room has ever felt like too much, I want you to hear this clearly. You were not failing at public speaking. You were succeeding at self-protection.

Those are not the same problem, and only one of them is worth fixing.

That is exactly what we are doing below.

Read more

• Updating your slide deck.

• Taking another certification.

• Tweaking your LinkedIn bio.

• Reorganizing your content calendar for the third time this quarter.

Each of these tasks is real. Every one of them is productive. Not one of them requires you to be seen. That is the difference between building and hiding.

Building produces something. Hiding produces activity. Both feel like work.

Only one moves your expertise from your drafts folder into the world.

If you have been busy every single week and still have not released the thing you finished months ago, you do not have a productivity problem. You have a busy work problem.

Why Busy Work Is the Expert’s Preferred Hiding Spot

If you were in avoidance by scrolling on your phone for three hours, you would know.

You would call it procrastination. You would feel guilty. But busy work does not feel like avoidance. It feels responsible.

It comes with a to-do list and a sense of accomplishment. You checked the boxes.

You were disciplined.The thing is: you showed up to everything except the release.

Nobody questions a woman who is “still working on it.”
Nobody challenges a professional who says she needs “a little more time to prepare.” The culture around you will validate your delay indefinitely because preparation looks like diligence, and diligence is what good women do.

But preparation without a release date is not diligence. It is a holding pattern.

What Is Actually Happening in Your Brain

There is a stage of learning called Conscious Competence. You can do the thing, but it still requires deliberate effort. You are skilled, but the skill has not become part of your identity yet.

That gap between competence and identity is where busy work lives.

Your brain’s threat detection system reads the release of your work as socially dangerous. It cannot distinguish between physical danger and the risk of being judged. So it reroutes your energy toward tasks that feel productive but keep you safely below the visibility line.

You are not choosing to avoid. Your nervous system is rerouting you.

Every time you reorganize the content calendar instead of publishing the post, your nervous system gets what it was looking for: brief relief from the threat of visibility. The pattern reinforces. Eventually you cannot tell the difference between genuine preparation and a freeze response wearing preparation’s clothes.

Why Motivation and Courage Are the Wrong Tools

Here is what most advice tells you to do: feel the fear and do it anyway. Find your courage. Get motivated.

Here is why that does not work at the threshold.

Motivation is a mood state. It fluctuates with sleep, stress, and whether your toddler threw oatmeal at the wall this morning. Courage asks you to override your nervous system through sheer force of will at the exact moment your amygdala has the most control.

That is not a fair fight. What can interrupt it is a pre-decided system that removes the decision from the moment entirely. A system that does not need you to feel brave, motivated, or ready. The women I serve do not need more inspiration. They need a protocol.

Read more

Writers, teachers, and speakers need the same concept.

Most of the women I write for don’t stall because they have nothing to say. They stall because they’re trying to ship the final, perfected version of their message every time.

So nothing ships.

In this post, I want to give you a different standard: the Minimum Viable Message—the smallest, cleanest version of your idea that’s allowed to go into the world.

Your first job is clarity, not completeness.

Why you need a Minimum Viable Message

When you’re serious about your work, it’s easy to unconsciously set this bar:

“I’m not allowed to say this until it’s airtight, beyond reproach, and fully built out.”

That internal rule turns every:

• Email into a mini‑white paper

• LinkedIn post into a full essay

• Short talk into a one‑woman conference

And because your life is already full, you rarely have the time or energy for “airtight, beyond reproach, fully built out.”

So you either:

• Keep polishing in private

• Or don’t start at all

A Minimum Viable Message (MVM) gives you a different rule:

“I am allowed to share a message as soon as it is clear, honest, and specific enough to be useful for one person—even if it’s not the whole thing yet.”

That shift is what makes consistent publishing, pitching, and presenting possible.

The three questions every Minimum Viable Message must answer

An MVM isn’t half‑baked. It’s just right‑sized.

Before you send anything out—email, post, or talk—check it against these three questions:

1. Who is this for?
   One kind of person. Not “everyone who might…” but a specific kind of woman you can picture.

2. What is the one idea I want them to leave with?
   Not five points. Not a whole framework. One clear idea.

3. What is the next tiny step I want them to take (or consider)?
   Not “change your life.” Something like: think differently about X, notice Y this week, try one small action.

If you can answer those three questions in a sentence or two, you have a Minimum Viable Message—even if you haven’t said everything you eventually want to say.

Let’s make that concrete.

Read more

I was explaining mindset to my daughter the other day, and I kept using language I’d just absorbed from a book on mindfulness and spirituality I couldn’t put down.

Eckhart Tolle’s concepts, and terminology made sense to me because I’ve been practicing mindfulness and spirituality for years now. But I raised my daughter in a traditional Christian context, which is more familiar to her than what I was sharing.

As I watched her eyes glaze over mid-sentence, I realized something:

I wasn’t being unclear. I was being inaccessible.

She didn’t check out because the idea was too complex. She checked out because I had piled unfamiliar language on top of an unfamiliar concept, and her brain couldn’t hold both at once.

So I stopped. I said things differently. No jargon. No layers. Just the core idea in language that made sense to her life.

“Oh, okay,” she said. “Now I see what you mean.”

The conversation moved forward. But the real lesson stuck with me.

You know your field so well that the language feels neutral to you.

But to someone outside that space, every unfamiliar term is friction. It’s asking their brain to decode the language and understand the idea at the same time.

Most people don’t have the energy for that translation work. So they stop listening.

This isn’t about dumbing anything down. It’s about recognizing that your audience is working with different context than you are.

• They don’t have years of practice.

• They don’t live in your framework

And the moment you assume they do, you’ve lost them.

What’s actually happening in that moment when someone’s eyes are glazed over

Cognitive load theory says your brain can only hold a limited amount of information at a time. Picture your working memory as shelf.

• Every unfamiliar term takes up space on that shelf.

• Every new concept takes up space.

• Every layer of context takes up space.

When you pile them all on, you’ve maxed out the shelf before the actual idea ever lands.

My daughter’s brain was spending energy decoding “mindfulness”, “presence” and “ego” instead of understanding what those words actually meant in her life.

By the time she caught up to the definition, I had already moved three ideas forward. She was lost not because she’s not smart. She was lost because I overwhelmed her working memory.

The fix isn’t to repeat yourself louder or slower. The fix is to give your audience’s brain less to decode so it has space to actually think. This matters more than you realize, especially if you’re an expert. Here are 3 things subject matter experts do this constantly (yes, I’m guilty, too) :

• We use terminology because it’s precise.

• We layer concepts because we see how they connect.

• We assume our audience has the same reference points we do.

Newsflash: they don’t and every time we forget that gap, we are building a wall between our expertise and the people who actually need it.

So how do you know if you’re falling into the jargon trap?

Pay attention to three things this week.

1. First, notice when you’re explaining something and the person’s face goes blank. Not confused — blank. Confusion means they’re still tracking. Blankness means they’ve given up trying to decode what you’re saying. That’s your signal that the language needs to shift, not the idea.

2. Second, listen to yourself. Are you using terms that only make sense inside your field? Words like “cognitive load” or “mindfulness” or “nervous system regulation”? Those words are precise to you. To someone outside your world, they’re just... words. There’s nothing wrong with precision. But precision without translation is just gatekeeping.

3. Third, try this: explain an idea to someone who knows nothing about your field. Your kid. Your partner. Someone at the coffee shop. If you have to backtrack and explain every other sentence, you’ve got jargon. If they nod and ask follow-up questions, you’re translating.

The thing is, you already know how to do this.

You do it at work. You do it with your kids at different ages. You code-switch without thinking about it because survival requires it.

But when you’re writing, teaching or speaking about something you care about, something you’ve spent years studying, you forget to translate.

You get caught up in how you think about it and assume everyone else thinks the same way. They don’t.

Your expertise is only as powerful as it is accessible.

I learned that by watching my daughter shift when I stopped using spiritual jargon and started using language she understood.

The idea didn’t change. The bridge did and that bridge is everything.

When you’re writing, teaching or speaking, the goal shouldn’t be to sound smart.

You want to be understood. Start there. Watch for the blank faces.

Translate without apology. Notice what happens when you do — how people lean in, how your expertise actually lands. That’s when you know you’re speaking to the person in front of you.

Let’s Discuss!

What's a term or phrase you use all the time in your work that you've watched someone completely glaze over? And what did you say instead when you caught it?

Leave a comment

Subscribe now