When COVID hit, I was a leadership development program coordinator at a small consulting firm, facilitating leadership curricula for corporate professionals and running youth programming on behalf of the Urban League of Philadelphia and the School District of Philadelphia. Like a lot of people that year, I was laid off because of COVID. I did not tell many people for a while. Not because anyone asked me to hide it, but because it is hard to be seen inside a story that has not resolved yet.
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.