A friend from college, who was already on her way out, moving into something new of her own right around the time I was coming in, mentioned a financial services company where she worked. She referred me into their system. When I thanked her afterward, she brushed it off. She said she had not really done anything, just made the referral. But the referral opened the door. What happened after that was mine to do, with no financial services background, and I got the job.

I became an operations associate. My work was account maintenance: converting Roth accounts, closing brokerage accounts when clients moved to firms like Vanguard, moving models and positions before market close every afternoon. Checks and mail-in deposits came through, and I entered and allocated that money into client brokerage accounts myself, roughly three million dollars a day. Whatever a client asked to do with their account, I was the one who executed it inside the system. It was not glamorous work. It was precise work, and I was good at it.

A year in, the company was in the middle of a merger, trying to modernize its systems faster than its own infrastructure allowed. Someone in leadership needed a product person, someone who actually understood the operations systems from the inside. I decided to apply.

I was competing against people who had done account maintenance for years longer than I had. People with more tenure, more history with those systems, more claim to the role than someone one year in.

Before I applied, I told my manager the truth. I said I was interested in the internal opportunity, even though it meant leaving her team, even though I had no guarantee I would get it, even though she had never once heard me say I wanted something other than the job she had hired me for.

She told me she had known, from the moment they hired me, that I would not be staying long.

Discipline is hard. So is being unprepared. Having the difficult conversation is hard. So is living with the resentment of never having it. Starting over is hard. So is staying stuck somewhere you have already outgrown. Trusting yourself is hard. Abandoning yourself to keep the peace is hard too.

Not making a choice is still a choice. You may decide you do not want to play the game. That will never mean you are not already inside someone else’s.

I got the role. Five years later, I am still in product, still building things that did not exist before I got there.

For a long time I thought choosing the hard thing meant gripping it. Clenched jaw, force it through by sheer will, prove you can outlast the discomfort. That is not what happened the day I told my manager the truth, and it is not what has actually worked in the years since.

Gripping is what fear looks like when it is trying to pass as discipline. It is holding so tightly to an outcome, or to a version of yourself, that there is no room left to do the thing that is actually in front of you. Grasping is a quieter version of the same problem: reaching for the result before you have done the work that earns it. Wanting to already be on the other side of hard without walking through the middle of it.

Surrender is neither of those. Surrender is not giving up. It is releasing your grip on how it has to go, so both hands are free to actually do it. I did not know if I would be chosen over people with more history in that building than I had. I let go of needing to know in advance. That is what let me tell my manager the truth before I had any evidence it would pay off.

Self-discipline is not restriction. It is the highest form of respect you can offer yourself: keeping your word to yourself when no one is checking.

Your capacity for change was never really about willpower. It is about how much truth you can tolerate about yourself. Growth does not stall because someone lacks discipline. It stalls the moment they would rather stay comfortable inside a story about themselves than face the version of themselves that actually requires changing.

And the fear of being seen rarely announces itself as fear. It shows up dressed as procrastination. It shows up dressed as perfectionism: one more round of edits, one more credential, one more version of ready. Both are the same sentence wearing different clothes. Not yet. Not yet. Not yet. Meanwhile the room fills up with people less prepared than you, doing the thing anyway.

Every hard thing carries two possible meanings. It can be evidence that you are not enough, or evidence that you are building something. The facts of the situation do not decide which one is true. You do, every time you choose what it means and act from there instead of waiting to feel ready.

I did not know it at the time, but the room in Philadelphia that felt like nothing the night it happened, the counter in Newark I wrote about last time, and the year I spent proving I belonged in a title nobody had given me yet are the same three lessons, in the same order. Stay present, before you have proof you belong. Take authority over what is actually yours to control, and nothing more. Choose the hard that is yours on purpose, because you decided your life is worth building around it rather than around everyone else’s comfort with you.

Sacred. Sovereign. Selfish. That was never a slogan I invented after the fact to describe what I do. It is the order in which I actually learned to do it.

That closes the three ideas that got me onto that stage. What I write from here is what happens after you have chosen: what it costs, what it gives back, and what nobody mentions about building a life instead of simply enduring one.

I still think about what my manager said sometimes. Not because it explained anything. Because she saw something in me before I trusted it enough to act on it myself. That gap, between what other people can already see in you and what you are willing to admit you want, is where most of us stay stuck the longest.

You are who you practice to be. I have been practicing this for a long time now.

I sat down across from the director of the Ecuadorian consulate and told him, in Spanish, that I was there for my student visa appointment. He looked at his system and told me I wasn’t in it.

Not late. Not incorrect. Not there.

I had two weeks before I was supposed to leave for a semester in Quito, Ecuador. No visa, no departure. No departure, no program. I did not have room to wait for the system to be right about me.

The part nobody prepares you for

Most advice about advocating for yourself assumes a version of the problem where someone is willing to help you and simply needs to be asked. That is not what this was. The director was not resistant. He was indifferent, which is a different and more difficult thing to work with. He had no appointment on record, no urgency of his own, and no particular reason to invent either.

I could have argued that the mistake was his system’s, not mine. I was right, and it would not have mattered. Being right and being unstuck are not the same thing, and this was the first time I understood that difference in my body instead of just knowing it as a fact.

So I did not ask him to fix it. I asked him to let me fix it.

I told him it would take less than twenty minutes, that I would do the work, that it would cost him almost nothing to let me sit at his computer and enter my own information into a system that had somehow failed to hold it. I made the ask as small as I could make it, because I was not trying to win an argument about whose fault this was. I was trying to leave that office with a visa.

He let me behind the counter. Twenty minutes later, I had what I came for.

What actually happened in that office

It is tempting to tell this story as a lesson in confidence, and it would be a comfortable story to tell that way. I don’t think it was confidence. I think it was precision.

I did not walk in loud. I walked in with proof, with a clear read of what the director actually needed from me in that moment, and with a request scaled to exactly what he could say yes to without friction. Most people, when a system fails them, escalate the emotion. I narrowed the ask instead. Twenty minutes. Low cost. Easy for you. That sentence did more work than any amount of frustration would have.

This is the part of controlling your controllables that gets flattened when people turn it into a slogan. It is not about controlling outcomes. I could not control whether the appointment existed in that system, whether the director cared, or whether Ecuadorian bureaucracy moved on my timeline. None of that was mine to control, and pretending otherwise would have just cost me more time I did not have.

What I controlled was whether I kept waiting on someone whose job it was to solve this and who, for whatever reason, wasn’t. That is a narrower kind of control than most people mean when they use the phrase, and it is also the only kind that is real.

Where this actually shows up

I think about that office more than I think about the semester that followed it, which says something, because the semester held its own weight. I was teaching English to children of incarcerated and unhoused parents. I was building a senior thesis on how race and language shape perceptions of desirability for Afro-Ecuadorian and African American women, work that came directly out of what I had done with Zapotec speakers in Oaxaca that same summer. Both of those experiences changed how I think. But the visa office is what I return to, because it is where I first understood something I have needed again and again since.

Waiting for the person responsible to become responsible is a choice, even when it feels like patience. In high-stakes environments, this shows up constantly and rarely announces itself as a decision. The stalled approval you keep checking on instead of routing around. The unclear ownership you accommodate instead of naming. The sponsor who says they’ll raise it and doesn’t, while you wait for a version of them that isn’t going to show up in time.

None of that requires confrontation. It requires the same thing that office in Newark required: knowing exactly what you need, understanding what the other person can actually give you without cost to themselves, and asking for precisely that. Not more, because more invites a no. Not less, because less doesn’t solve anything.

Control your controllables is not a poster in someone’s office. It is the discipline of knowing, in the exact moment something is not moving, whether you are still someone waiting on it or whether it is time to go behind the counter yourself.

I made the flight. I still have the screenshot.

This is the second in a series built around a convocation speech I gave on staying present, controlling your controllables, and choosing your hard. If you missed the first, “Presence Before Proof,” you can find it here. Next: what controlling your controllables actually costs you.

I’ve watched myself fall into that thinking more times than I’d like to admit, waiting for the room that seemed to matter, and quietly sitting out the ones that didn’t look like they would.

A couple years ago, I joined an organization called Rewriting the Code, a nonprofit supporting women in early career and in undergrad who are pursuing STEM. I’m still part of it today, even though I’ve grown past the exact stage of career it was originally built for me at. Most of their events happened in the cities you’d expect: the hubs, the places with the built-in energy and the guaranteed turnout. And then one came up in Philadelphia. Smaller. Quieter. Not a city the org was fighting to prioritize the way it did New York or Boston. Fewer than five of us showed up.

I went anyway.

Nothing about that decision felt significant at the time. I didn’t walk in with a strategy or an expectation that it would lead anywhere. I walked in the way I walk into most rooms, with intention, fully there, not because I sensed this one mattered more than usual, but because that’s simply how I show up. I didn’t expect anything beyond the event itself and meeting a few people.

But I was there. Actually there. I talked to the people in the room instead of half-listening while mentally drafting my exit. One of those conversations was with the event’s organizer, no different, on the surface, than a dozen other polite exchanges people have at events like that and forget by the following week.

She didn’t forget. Not long after, she reached out. Rewriting the Code represents over thirty thousand members. She chose me as one of twenty-eight delegates to represent the entire organization at a conference in Las Vegas, a room with real stakes, hosted by a major data company, full of people making decisions I’d have had no path into otherwise.

One conversation. One room nobody was fighting over.

I think about that often when I hear presence described as a soft skill, something nice to have, something you work on in a wellness workshop between the actual, serious parts of building a career. That framing has never made sense to me, and that day is a big part of why. Presence wasn’t the thing I did instead of strategy. It was the strategy. I just didn’t recognize it as one until years later.

Here’s what I mean, and why it connects to the three words this entire body of work is built on: sacred, sovereign, selfish.

Sacred, because showing up fully in a room that doesn’t look important yet is an act of honoring your own worth before anyone else has confirmed it’s worth honoring. You don’t get to know in advance which room matters. You only get to decide, each time, whether you’re going to actually be in it.

Sovereign, because presence is a form of authority nobody can hand you and nobody can take from you. Half-showing up is a way of protecting yourself from disappointment in advance: if I didn’t really try, it doesn’t really count if nothing comes of it. Full presence removes that protection. It’s a small, quiet, unglamorous act of leadership over your own attention.

Selfish, because the version of me who walked into that Philadelphia room fully present wasn’t performing generosity for anyone. I wasn’t there to be noticed. I was there because I’d decided my own energy was worth spending completely, even on a room that didn’t look like it would pay me back for it. It did. But that was never the point, and I think that’s exactly why it worked.

There’s something else presence gives you that I didn’t understand until much later: the ability to actually see who’s in the room with you.

The poet Nayyirah Waheed has this idea that’s stayed with me, that when you share your story, people do one of two things. They contract, or they expand. Something in them closes, or something in them opens. And that reaction, more than anything they say out loud, tells you exactly who you’re dealing with.

You can’t see that if you’re not actually present. Half-attention doesn’t register contraction or expansion. It only registers whether the conversation is almost over.

I’ve started thinking of relationships less like permanent fixtures and more like transportation: a ship, an elevator. Some people ride with you the entire way. Some get off after one floor. Neither one is a failure. The elevator doesn’t owe you the whole ride to be worth boarding, and neither does a person. There are lessons available in a single floor, if you were present enough to receive them. The friendship that lasted six months and the one that’s lasted twenty years can both have been exactly what they needed to be.

But you only get access to that grace, the ability to let a season end without treating it as a loss, if you were present enough inside it to actually witness the other person. Bearing witness to someone, even briefly, is its own quiet form of power. It’s how sacred, sovereign, and selfish communities actually get built: not by everyone staying forever, but by everyone being fully seen while they’re there.

And presence does one more thing, maybe the most practically useful thing of all. It’s the only way you find out what’s feeding you and what’s quietly draining you. Dread before a conversation. Fatigue after an event that should have energized you. Ease in a room you didn’t expect to feel comfortable in. None of that data is available to you if you’re not paying attention to your own state in real time.

Once you can see it, you have to do something about it, because not choosing is still a choice. Staying in a conversation that contracts you, saying yes to a room that exhausts you by default, is itself a decision, even when it doesn’t feel like one. Presence is what turns that invisible default into an actual, visible choice.

I’ve sat in plenty of rooms since then that looked far more important on paper and given them far less of myself than I gave that one. The size of the room was never actually the variable that mattered. My presence in it was.

If there’s a practical version of this for the ambitious women reading, the ones navigating leadership, corporate complexity, the pressure to perform importance in every room you enter, it’s this: stop pre-sorting rooms into ones worth your full self and ones that aren’t. You don’t have the information to make that sort correctly. A small room in a city nobody was fighting over didn’t look like it held the key to a stage in Las Vegas. It just looked like somewhere worth actually showing up.

Be present anyway. Not for what it might lead to. Because it’s the only way to actually be somewhere, instead of merely occupying space in it.

This is the first in a series built around a convocation speech I gave on staying present, controlling your controllables, and choosing your hard. Next: what controlling your controllables actually costs you.