We’ve all had these types of days. The ones where you’re running on empty, where sitting alone in the car for five minutes feels like heaven, where nothing can restore you, and at some point you stop looking for a plan and start looking for a rescue. My “salvation” arrived at 8pm on a Friday, through Instagram, in the form of an astrologer holding a mason jar full of water up to the sky. This is the story of how I discovered moon water. It’s also my argument for why a woman who lives in spreadsheets by day is better at her job because she makes moon water every twenty nine days at night.

I found the moon water ritual through exhaustion: the specific kind of exhaustion of a 41-year-old running a company, packing lunches for my six-year-old, and hitting publish on a newsletter at midnight.

Q1 had just come to a close, and it was the fifth Friday in a row that I got home at 4pm and beached myself on the bed like a sea lion. I couldn’t move a muscle until hunger finally won and I thought: maybe I should eat dinner.

So I did what a lot of us do on a night like that. I opened Instagram.

I was looking for a quick fix, and the algorithm knows our weaknesses. So it served me an astrologer making moon water. She was promising that the water releases the attachments and obstacles that hinder our growth. Which, at 8pm on that Friday, sounded exactly like what I needed released. What sold me wasn’t just the hope. It was how simple it looked. A jar. Water. The moon.

My personal moon water set up

The ritual

Here’s my ritual. On the night of the full moon, I fill a jar with water. I write my intention on a hand-torn slip of paper, fold it, and set the jar on top of it. My crystals go next to the jar. I read the intention out loud, hold the crystals for a moment, and put them down. I leave the water and crystals out to “charge” from the energy from the moon.

Before the sun is fully up, I collect it. I drink some of the water and read my intention again. The jar sits by my desk for a few days and I sip from it when I need to. Whatever’s left at the end goes to the plants. The crystals come back inside and go where I can see them.

The first note was a prayer for rest: help me feel rested and energized enough to show up big. This is admittedly a lot of weight to put on something I learned from an influencer, but I no longer believe a ritual has to be handed down ceremoniously to be legitimate.

The influencer had her jar posed against a handful of crystals, and I thought: I can do that too. We already had crystals in the house. My son started collecting rocks at three, the way many three-year-olds do, and somewhere along the way he got entranced by the prettier ones. The pretty rocks turned out to be crystals. His collection grew, and then it started coming with us to Mexico City, where the best ones come from shops run by brujas, (Spanish for witches). On our last trip, he picked out his own. He’s six now, and the best pieces are his.

This last full moon found us on vacation in the desert in Mexico. My son clutched his crystals with both hands, turned around so (he thought) I couldn’t hear, and whispered to the universe: “To my crystals, I want to become a chess master.”

I heard it anyway.

He took the job seriously. I had told him sunlight couldn’t touch the crystals, so the next morning, before we were even awake, he had already brought everything inside. The crystals and the moon water, rescued from the light.

I wish I could say that he treats them with great care now. They’re scattered across the house. I find them mostly in the bathtub. But that means he sees them most days, and that’s the point. They aren’t magic rocks. They’re daily reminders of our intentions.

Back to my intention. The support I need most today isn’t for my work or my child. It’s right here on this page: Spreadsheets and Shamans. Help me feel energized to show up big, that’s what my paper says these days. And I’ll take all the support the universe can offer. Putting my writing into the world is new to me, and like so many other beginners, I am frequently humbled. Earlier this month I posted a snippet on LinkedIn and it got three likes. Three. Would you judge me if I told you I refreshed the page forty times? As if the number might move if I asked it enough. The number never budged, but I did. After twenty-four hours of silence I realized that I was still alive after my fear of seeming irrelevant came true. I was free. A few days later, I had another piece ready to go, and I drank the last of the moon water at my desk, reread my note, and posted.

The Evidence

I research everything I put my time and energy behind, so of course I went digging for the evidence on moon water.

On the water itself, I can’t find anything. Moonlight is reflected sunlight, and no study has found it changes what’s in the jar. On the moon and what it does to our bodies, the evidence is thinner than the shaman in me would like it to be. The studies observing lunar influences on our sleep, our moods, our cycles mostly come back empty.

But then I think about the turtles. Last December, on a beach in Costa Rica, I watched sea turtles hatch and make their run to the sea, timed to the moon. They wouldn’t be here without the moon. Neither would our seasons, which stay stable only because the moon holds our planet’s tilt in place. The moon isn’t a nice-to-have. It runs the whole show. When it comes to the power of the moon, absence of proof isn’t proof of absence.

Proof does exist on the ritual, though. A hundred years ago an anthropologist named Malinowski noticed that Pacific fishermen held no ceremonies before fishing in the calm inner lagoon, but they performed elaborate rituals before sailing past the reef into the open ocean, where boats didn’t always come home. Same men, different odds. Rituals aren’t for the parts of life we can predict. We build them for the parts we can’t.

The uncertainty I face is a far different weight than death by drowning. I’m most worried about whether the school nurse will call today, which, admittedly, is a 10/10 on my anxiety radar. But all anxiety is valid in the eyes of the beholder.

I’m now several months into my moon water ritual, and here is why I continue: The intentions I fold under the jar. The crystals around the bathtub that I sometimes step on at 6am. The sip at my desk before pressing publish. When I drift, and I always do, these pull me back on track.

A full moon comes back roughly every twenty-nine days. It’s on a rhythm that doesn’t care about my calendar. I set intentions every January and lose many by March. The moon doesn’t let me forget. Every twenty-nine days it’s back, reminding me to revisit my intentions.

I run a company. I own its P&L, which means I’m the one responsible for whether we made money this month or lost it. The moon has yet to improve my numbers, but the ritual does keep me from losing track of my own intentions. One of those intentions is to keep my energy high throughout the year, which in my book is critical for the success of the business. The ritual gives me a standing appointment with my intentions, set by something I don’t control and can’t move. This might seem woo-woo to some, but it works for me.

I own a P&L. I drink moon water. And the moon, of all things, is the one keeping me on track.

The Practice

Start with the paper, not the jar. If you don’t know what to write, go back to January. What were you hoping to accomplish this year?

Write the thing. Fold it up, fill a jar with water, and set the jar on top of the paper somewhere the moon might get to it.

Get the jar before the sun’s up and drink some. Keep the paper where you’ll see it, not in a drawer. Mine sits by my desk until the next full moon comes around.

Wednesday the 29th is the full moon. It’s full enough Tuesday night too, so either one works.

Crystals optional. Kids welcome.

Moon Water Recipe from The Spell Book for New Witches by Ambrosia Hawthorn

The Shelf

If you got this far and still aren’t buying the moon water ritual, read Casper ter Kuile’s The Power of Ritual. His argument is that people who left religion didn’t stop needing ritual, they just stopped having any, and that ordinary things become sacred when you do them on purpose and keep doing them.

The Invitation

The full moon is just around the corner. What’s going under your jar on the 29th? Put it in the comments. My intention is to keep writing, even when the algorithm punishes me. My son’s will say something about chess.

Made it this far? Tap the ❤️ so I know it landed. And forward this to someone who needs a new ritual to keep them on track.

I was sitting across from her in an open-air yoga pavilion. Rain hammered the tin roof and drifted in at the edges, the way it does in the Caribbean in December. It was my final session of the retreat, and it had long since gone into overtime, but I was desperate to tell her the saga of my last year. The interview processes that each spanned months. The sixteen conversations deep before every no. The executive recruiter who explained I wasn’t quite a CEO and offered me consulting as a consolation prize.

The elder shaman was quiet for some time. Then she said, “You are being redirected.”

I can’t count how many people had already said those exact words to me. Fifty? Friends said it over coffee. My coach gestured at it. A former colleague texted it with a prayer hands emoji. Every time, I smiled and seethed. I told you last week what those words felt like: one of my son’s flimsy plastic Spider-Man band-aids, slapped over a wound that was oozing.

But when the shaman said it, in that pavilion, something in my chest unclenched. I didn’t argue. I didn’t refute her with my resume. I just nodded, and I believed her.

The words were identical. Same four words, same order. Nothing about the sentence changed between my life in San Francisco in November and this pavilion in December.

What changed was me. Something happened in the weeks in between that took my rebuttals away.

This letter is about those three weeks.

Three weeks earlier, I was in the worst stretch of my sabbatical. A family medical crisis, caretaking all day, final presentation prep until 3 a.m., three no’s in one week. Boom, boom, boom. Medical bills arriving in envelopes I’d stopped opening quickly, no paycheck coming in, and the question I’d taken the year off to answer still blank.

That was the week a friend of a friend reached out. There was a retreat in the Caribbean, he said. A week long. A shaman. And it was covered. All of it. Someone had dropped out, and the spot was mine if I wanted it.

The trip was paid for. The only thing I had to contribute was a yes.

The spreadsheet version of me ran the numbers. A week offline in the middle of a family medical crisis and a job search? Absurd. Irresponsible, even. But the version of me that existed that week didn’t have the strength to argue. I said yes because I was too tired to say no.

I didn’t know it yet, but that was the first surrender.

On retreat during rainy season.

I didn’t arrive enlightened. I arrived with my laptop. I had negotiated with myself: I’d do the retreat, but I’d keep an eye on the job pipeline. Then the island took my options away. No Wi-Fi. 3G, at best.

The days had a shape and the shape was not mine to manage. Yoga in the morning. Long stretches of silence. Chanting, which I was sure I would hate and didn’t. Ancestral music at night. I drew, badly. I walked into the ocean and floated. Nobody asked me what I did for a living. For seven days, I was not a former CEO or a candidate or a caretaker. I was just a body walking through a rainy season.

Somewhere in the middle of the week I noticed something had gone quiet. It took me a day to identify it. The worry. For fourteen months, a hum had run underneath everything: what am I going to do, am I safe? My body couldn’t tell the difference between a stalled job search and a tiger in the grass. So it ran the program to protect me from tigers, all day, for over a year.

On that island, the hum stopped. I had not found the answer, but for the first time in months, it felt safe to be present.

In the silence where the hum used to be, messages started coming through. They felt less like thoughts I was producing and more like mail I was receiving. Slowly, one at a time, over the back half of the week, three deliveries arrived.

The first delivery was about shame. I was sitting cross-legged, mouthing sounds in an ancient language I didn’t speak, when I finally heard the voice I’d been carrying for fourteen months. It said: you have a Stanford MBA. You just sold a company. You were featured in Forbes (back when that was a flex). You should have been able to find a job by now.

That was the wound. Not the rejections themselves, but the verdict I’d hung on them. My friends who never got off the ladder were vesting RSUs bigger than my last few years of income combined, and I was watching my savings drain into medical bills. The gap between where I was supposed to be and where I was felt like proof of a defect.

And then, underneath the chanting, came a quiet voice: there is nothing wrong with you. Difficult years are the tuition for being human. Everyone pays it. In the last year of my thirties, mine had simply come due all at once, in the shape of a career crisis, an identity crisis, and a family health crisis.

I did not take this insight gracefully. I sat there and argued: if nothing was wrong with me, why nine rejections? Why was I watching my savings drain while I did everything right? The quiet voice didn’t argue back. It just stayed. I wasn’t broken. I was having a brutally human year. Delivery one.

The second delivery came a day later, while I was floating in the ocean.

Since the recruiter call, I had replayed that final presentation dozens of times, hunting for the moment I blew it. The question I whiffed. The reason for rejection. Floating, I finally admitted what I’d been avoiding: there wasn’t one. I had spent eighteen hours preparing, between doctor’s appointments and caretaking. I was myself, at my best, and it still wasn’t what they wanted.

At first that felt unbearable. If I’d made a mistake, I could fix it. A flawless performance that still gets a no means there’s nothing to fix, no control at all. I’d been torturing myself with the replays because the torture felt like agency.

All I ever controlled was what I put in, and I had put in everything. The outcome was never mine. Do your best. Let go of the rest. It sounds like one of those Successories posters from the mall, circa 1996, the eagle soaring over the word PERSEVERANCE. But then you exhaust every counterargument you have, and the poster turns out to be right. Delivery two.

The third delivery took the longest, and it found me near the end of the week, sitting alone in the same pavilion where, days later, the shaman would say her four words. And what came through was the hardest one: trust. It’s the one I’m still working on.

Here’s what trust was up against. For as long as I could remember, my safety had one source: me. My vigilance, my preparation, my ability to see the problem coming from three moves away. Nobody catches you. I caught myself. That belief had built my whole career, and it had a perfect record, because every time something worked out, I could point to the work I’d done to make it. Trust wasn’t something I’d forgotten to try. It was the opposite of how I’d survived.

So my first instinct was to call the retreat luck. But on a solo walk through the property, I ran an audit, and I couldn’t take credit for any of it. A friend of a friend making a connection. A spot that opened up on its own. A retreat that was fully covered. Even the flight had cost me nothing but miles, banked in my years on the corporate ladder. The old life had quietly paid the airfare to the week that would carry me into the next version of myself.

I can’t prove the universe was taking care of me, and I can’t prove the surrender caused anything that came after. A skeptic would say I was counting the hits and ignoring the misses. A fair one would add that my fall had a cushion: years of shiny-company paychecks turned into savings, a network built over two decades, the exit that gave me the standing to take a break at all. True, all of it. The old life didn’t just pay the airfare. It funded the entire fall.

But I had just spent fourteen months living the opposite hypothesis, the one where nothing catches you and everything depends on your force. I had run that experiment all the way to the end. It produced nine rejections and a body stuck on tiger alert. The trust hypothesis didn’t need to be provable. It needed to be livable, and I had exhausted the alternative. So trust stopped being a claim I had to defend and became a bet I was finally willing to place. The retreat was a gift, and not one everyone gets. The bet itself costs nothing: stop forcing, be findable. The right thing would appear when I was ready. Delivery three.

Then I flew home, and home was exactly where I’d left it. The same kitchen where those four words used to make me seethe. The same bills. Every condition that had built the hum was still there, waiting to restart it.

It didn’t restart.

Instead, I did the opposite of everything I’d been doing. I stopped the exploratory chats. I stopped pounding on doors. The spreadsheet where I’d tracked every recruiter and every process stayed closed. When a plausible role came along in January, good title, good company, wrong everything else, I typed a two-line no-thank-you, the kind of email fourteen months of scarcity had convinced me I wasn’t allowed to send. No panic followed. That’s how I knew something had changed.

I also stopped going through it alone. I joined a group of business school classmates in the same boat. It found me no job. It fixed something better: I stopped feeling like the only one. Most executive searches, I learned, take the better part of a year, often longer in a tough market. Fourteen months wasn’t a verdict. It was barely above average.

I didn’t surrender everything, though. That same winter, I was fighting a loved one’s medical crisis with everything I had. Scheduling forty appointments. Politely terrorizing receptionists for earlier slots. Slipping nurses Amazon gift cards inside heartfelt thank-you notes. And it worked. The health scare resolved through vigilance and industrial-grade Type A behavior. The interview panels passed on these qualities, but those same qualities made me exactly the person you’d want running your medical crisis.

It took me the whole year to see the pattern. Some problems are spreadsheet problems. They reward force, follow-up, conditional formatting. And some problems are surrender problems. They punish force. The harder you push, the more closed they get. I’d spent fourteen months confusing the two. The career question was never a pipeline to manage. It was a door I had to stop kicking so it could open on its own.

Then, months later, it did.

One Tuesday morning, I was scrolling and saw a role at a company I’d known about for years. And my body did something before my mind caught up. A small lift in my chest.

I’d forgotten that feeling existed. For the last year, I had done the opposite: read a description, figured out who they were looking for, and quietly begun folding myself into her. Rounding down my ambitions here, inflating my enthusiasm there. Somewhere along the way, I’d stopped asking whether I wanted the job and started asking only whether I could become it.

This was different. I read the description and thought, without negotiating with myself: this is what I want, and I’m good enough for it. Not a box to fold into. A fit.

No recruiter. No backdoor, no referral. I applied on LinkedIn, the thing everyone tells you never works, and closed the laptop.

That was the job. It didn’t happen overnight and it wasn’t on my timeline. The process took five months, slow enough that the old me would have called it dead and started forcing something else. The trust I’d found on that island got tested weekly. But the role I’d spent more than a year hunting showed up only after I stopped hunting it. It was that unceremonious.

I took this break to answer one question: what I wanted to do with my life. Here’s what I know now. I’ll be asking it forever. We all will. It doesn’t get answered. Only the next step does. And that’s enough.

The spreadsheet is still in its folder. The question is still open.

It turns out both of those things are fine. Nobody warns you about that either.

The Practice

The sorting question. Next time you’re stuck, ask: is this a spreadsheet problem or a surrender problem? One test: does effort move it? If there’s a call to make, an appointment to book, a receptionist to politely terrorize, make the call. But if you’ve made every call twice and the door hasn’t budged, you may be prying at a surrender problem. Sort first. Then pick up the right instrument.

The Shelf

The Wisdom of Insecurity, Alan Watts. Written in 1951, and it reads like he spent my sabbatical taking notes. His argument is that chasing security is what creates the feeling of insecurity, that the grasping and the anxiety are one motion, not cause and cure. It took me fourteen months and a tin roof in the rain to learn what he put in a hundred pages. Start with chapter one and see how far you get before you feel personally described.

The Invitation

What’s the thing you’re currently forcing? The door you keep kicking, the search you keep running, the conversation you keep having, expecting a different answer. Name it in the comments or hit reply. Then ask yourself the sorting question. I read every one.

Made it this far? Tap the ❤️ so I know it landed. And forward this to someone who’s tired of kicking a door.

My phone buzzed. It was the executive recruiter for the CEO role I’d spent weeks interviewing for. I was certain it was good news. I’d nailed the final pitch. A managing partner had reached out afterward to thank me for an excellent presentation. It was my first time experiencing that much enthusiasm after an interview. I was confident this job was mine.

Then she started talking. “You know, Nathalie, they loved you,” she said. So much so that they wanted to bring me on as a consultant. But they didn’t think I was right for the top job. They wanted someone who was “more of a CEO.” I still don’t quite know what that means. Perhaps they were looking for a man named Pierce with an impressive collection of Patagonia vests.

I don’t recall what I said in response. Something gracious. I’m good at gracious.

I had just sold a company. As the CEO, I turned it around in twenty-three months, with a baby, in a pandemic. And a woman I’d never met in person was explaining, kindly, that I wasn’t quite CEO material.

This was supposed to be the part where the sabbatical “recharge” paid off. That’s the story we tell ourselves about a break. You take a gorgeous sabbatical in Bali. You earn it, you step away, you come back restored. I was ready to come back and I was being told that I wasn’t good enough.

I took the break because I couldn’t take another job without taking a beat. I wasn’t just tired. I was spent in a way vacation doesn’t fix.

And, I had no idea what I wanted to do next.

That was the part that scared me. I’d taken over an early-stage company and, in two years, reshaped it into something someone wanted to buy. It taught me a dangerous thing: you can become almost anything you want. It sounds like freedom, but it’s really a blank page. When every option is open, no one hands you the next one. I’d have to write my own damn JD. There was no ladder left to climb, no title to hide behind.

I figured the challenge of taking a break would be slowing down. Sitting still. Not checking the inbox. I got good at all of that. I even did the glamour part too. Three months in Europe. (Side note: no one needs three months of pure vacation. Ever. Vacation works because it ends. By month three, the magic does too.)

(The Instagram version of my sabbatical in Paris)

The unraveling started small. When I got back from the Instagram version of my sabbatical, I had to plot what to do with my life. I treated my job search like a J.Crew catalog. Flip the pages, see what’s in season. This Business Development role. That founder-in-residence thing.

First page of the catalog: the handful of recruiters who had reached out before I left. Let’s talk after Labor Day, I’d told them. Crickets. Now I was chasing them.

So I did what every good MBA is taught to do. I built a spreadsheet. Every executive recruiter I should know. Every headhunter. The private equity contacts. Categorized, prioritized, worked in between the hours of 9:30 and 3, because as a parent you never truly take a full sabbatical, and I was still doing preschool pickup.

I worked it. Every call, every coffee. The advice from these calls was always the same. Keep talking to people. Keep putting yourself out there.

So I kept talking. I took on consulting work while I figured it out. It was the fitting room to my J.Crew catalog. I’d try a role or two on for a few months, check the mirror, hand it back. Twelve months into my career break, I’d tried on plenty and bought nothing.

I was getting closer to what I wanted: one meaty role I could throw my weight behind. The interviews for the big jobs started rolling in. Nine full processes. Some were CEO roles. Some were senior seats at prominent tech companies. Some I was overqualified for. Twenty hours of prep for each final presentation. Sixteen conversations deep before every no.

You already know how one of them ended. The nailed pitch, the thank-you email, the afternoon call. “More of a CEO.”

While I was failing to figure out my career, someone I love got seriously ill. The kind of illness you have to put your life on hold for. Forty doctor’s appointments in eight weeks. My lowest week was right before the holidays. Caretaking all day, preparing final presentations until 3 a.m., and then three no’s in one week. Boom, boom, boom.

Somewhere in those weeks, figuring out my career became a luxury. The career crisis stayed open. There was just a more urgent one I was fighting now.

That was the week the regret showed up. “Showed up” is probably a misnomer, since the regret had been lurking there all along for years, apparently waiting for my defenses to subside before it pounced.

Maybe I should have stayed at Google. Maybe I should have taken one of the FAANG offers and never gotten off the ladder to become an early stage co-founder/CEO. The ladder feeds you; it doesn’t ask you to go catch your own dinner.

On the ladder, this year would have looked different. Platinum insurance. A leave of absence, a job waiting for me at the end of it. But I wasn’t on the ladder. There was no safety net underneath any of it. Just me.

Instead I was doing all three at once: getting someone I love the care they needed, watching the medical bills pile up with no paycheck coming in, and pretending the question could wait.

The question being the one I’d taken this entire break to answer: what did I actually want to do with my life? Somewhere in there I started working with a coach again. I was stuck. Help me find the next job, I told him. That was the assignment. So we worked on the practical. We built a system for the pipeline. And then one day he said: I get the sense that following your spreadsheet of people to talk to isn’t going to get you any more clarity. He was right. It wasn’t like ten or fifteen more conversations would get me closer. The spreadsheet could organize the search. It couldn’t tell me what I was searching for. Even the person I was paying for answers was telling me there wasn’t one for sale.

I later came across research that helped me understand what those months of aimless searching and heavy rejection cost me. In 2016, neuroscientists at UCL had volunteers play a game where turning over the wrong rock earned them an electric shock. A 50 percent chance of a shock stressed people more than a 100 percent certainty of one. They could see it in cortisol, in pupils, in sweat. Not knowing was worse than the bad news. The brain would rather have a bad answer than an open question. I was doing the same math with my career. Nine full processes. Sixteen conversations deep before every no. I wasn’t holding out for the best rock. I was grabbing the nearest one so I could avoid the pain.

If uncertainty itself was the injury, any answer, job or no job, would have felt like relief. I wasn’t only interviewing for jobs. I was trying to buy an ending to the not-knowing. Every rejection handed the question back to me. “What do you really want to do, Nathalie?”

Everyone else had an answer for it. People kept telling me I was being redirected. I told them to cut the psychobabble bullshit. I wasn’t being redirected. I was a woman with all the receipts, standing in my living room, being told she wasn’t quite a CEO. Companies founded by women raise about 2 percent of venture dollars. Most venture-backed startups never reach an exit. I’d done both. I’d already cleared a bar most CEOs never even touch. The term “redirected” was one of my son’s flimsy plastic Spider-Man band-aids, slapped over a wound that was oozing.

I’d been living in waiting rooms for weeks by then. Nobody in a doctor’s office thinks they can rush the results. You sit, you wait, you find out when you find out. I’d do that all day. Then I’d go home and run the same search, asking the same people, expecting a different answer. Then I’d spend my nights refusing to learn the same lesson about my own life and career.

It took me too long to hear what the waiting rooms and the no’s were saying in unison. Nobody was going to hand me the answer on this one. Not a recruiter, not a coach, not a spreadsheet with perfect conditional formatting. The question was mine. The answer had to be too. I just wasn’t ready to sit with it yet.

I was tapped out, done fighting it. A career break long past any luster, overflowing with anxiety and regret. Months later, a shaman said the same four words every kind person had been saying to me. “You are being redirected.”

And that time, they landed.

I never did find a rock with the answer written under it. I just, eventually, stopped needing one. The not-knowing didn’t vanish. I’d just stopped treating it like an emergency. The spreadsheet is still in a folder somewhere. I don’t open it anymore.

How I got there is more than one letter can hold. That part is coming next week.

The Practice

The certainty audit. For one week, catch yourself every time you try to buy an answer. Mine looked like this: the job board scroll at 11 p.m. One more advice call. One more assessment that would finally tell me who I was. Don’t stop doing any of it. Just write down, each time, the question you were actually trying to answer. Then read the list at the end of the week.

The Shelf

Dark Night of the Soul, John of the Cross, the Mirabai Starr translation. I’ll be straight with you: this book is a hard read. A 16th-century Spanish mystic was not writing to hold your attention, and the prose fought me most of the way. Read it anyway if you’re in the worst stretch of your life. It’s the only accurate description I’ve found of what that period actually is. Not punishment. The part where the old instruments stop working on purpose.

The Invitation

What’s the question you keep trying to buy your way out of answering? The one behind the job boards, the advice calls, the assessments. Name it in the comments or hit reply. I read every one.

Made it this far?
Tap the ❤️ so I know it landed.
And forward this to someone who’s in their dark night of the soul.

Nathalie

I sat in front of Wilson last week as he told that story on stage at the Aspen Ideas Festival, on a panel about youth mental health. Wilson sat next to psychiatrists from Mount Sinai who study suicide data and run clinics. Wilson was one of two people on that stage who don’t treat patients, yet he told the ones who do that you can have amazing doctors and nurses, but to treat the youth mental health crisis, you need something “extra” too.

Photo of Russell Wilson from my camera roll at Aspen Ideas: Health

I am a spreadsheet person. I own a P&L. I came to that panel for the data. But I could not disregard what was underneath Wilson’s message. He was telling a room of clinicians that the thing deciding health outcomes was the one thing none of their instruments or tests could measure. It was a belief in themselves, faith, intuition, whatever you want to call it. And I caught myself leaning in.

Around the same time, an ocean away, Oprah was saying her own version of it on a stage at Cannes, with Devi Brown.

“That little feeling you have,” she said, “has led me to this seat. You just have to get still enough to follow it, and most of us can’t, because there is too much noise. Because we keep asking everybody else. Because we ask the world to tell us what it wants for us. It wants your stillness. It wants your reverence. That is the still small voice of your soul, and if you listen to it, you will not be led wrong. Every single time I have gotten myself into trouble, it is because I didn’t.”

“The problem is most of us don’t trust it,” she said. “You think everybody else’s voice is louder than yours.”

Two extraordinary humans. Two of the most credentialed stages on the planet, the same week. A quarterback and a woman who built an empire on connecting with individuals. Neither of them is short on proof that they are excellent at their respective crafts. And both of them, when handed an open mic, skipped the work you would expect them to credit and talked about a feeling: faith, intuition, again, pick your preferred label.

Wilson calls it the something “extra.” Oprah calls it the still small voice.

I can already hear the skeptics… Easy for the Super Bowl winner and the billionaire to credit their gut. That is survivorship bias. For every Russell Wilson who trusted something “extra,” there is a guy who trusted his gut and threw the interception that ended his season.

Fair. So I researched what is actually known about when a gut is worth trusting, because we cannot write permission slips based on two famous people and a nebulous feeling.

Here is the permission slip that is backed by science. The gut they are describing is not the opposite of the work. It is the foundation of it.

Wilson’s something extra sprang to life only after thousands of practice ground balls (and thousands of snaps). Oprah’s still small voice only spoke after decades of reading what a person is not saying. To outsiders, it can seem like these intuitions came out of nowhere, but they were actually the product of thousands of hours of practice.

Here’s the research that backs it up. Daniel Kahneman and Gary Klein spent years disagreeing about intuition but ended up agreeing on exactly when it works. Two conditions. One, the world you are reading has to be predictable enough that there’s a real pattern to learn. Two, you have to have practiced in it long enough, with accurate feedback, to actually learn from it. Meet both, and your gut is a real instrument. Miss either, and all you have is blind confidence, or, as Kahneman refers to it, “the illusion of validity.” The upshot of all this: your gut, under the right conditions, can provide valuable data, but subjective feelings of certainty don’t tell you anything about whether your gut is trustworthy.

So when you have put in the reps, the instinct you cannot fully explain is likely not just an errant feeling. It is pattern recognition outpacing your ability to narrate it. Stop discounting it just because it will not fit in the slide deck. Count it among the data.

By contrast, when you’re working in areas less familiar to you, your gut instinct is less valuable, and should therefore be accorded less weight.

Wilson did not win the Super Bowl because he believed. He won because he could read a defense and believe. Oprah did not build her empire on a feeling. She built it on decades of reading people, and then on a feeling she had earned the right to trust.

This is the whole reason this newsletter exists. Not to tell you to light a candle and wait. To show you that the people operating at the very top of their game are running two instruments at once, the spreadsheet and the something “extra”. Years of interviewing people and thousands of passes. And a feeling they could not diagram.

I have spent twenty years in rooms where it was not safe to show both halves of myself. If you have worked in finance, law, consulting, or anywhere that runs on the spreadsheet alone, you know the specific pain of this. You get to the answer early. You feel it is right before you can defend it. So you sit on it, because the room only speaks one language, and three weeks later the data crawls to the spot you were already standing on and everyone calls it insight.

The silence of holding this cost me something real. It left me believing I was less than the people who could run SQL to arrive at answers. It made me feel like I would never be as good, when the truth was we were playing entirely different games.

I’m done sitting on it. Last week, Oprah and Russell Wilson handed me the permission I have been quietly collecting for years. It is not only okay to be a Spreadsheet and a Shaman. It is what gets you to the top. I hope you take it as your permission slip too. You are more powerful running on both.

Rigor got me into the room. I’m no longer apologizing for the something “extra” that has transformed me into a leader.

The Practice

This week, find the one call you are sitting on. The read you already have but haven’t said out loud, because you can’t defend it yet in the room’s language.

Ask this question:

Have I done real reps here, in a place that gave me honest feedback about whether I was right?

Yes? Stop waiting for the data to catch up. Say the damn thing already.

The Shelf

Gary Klein, Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions. Klein is the one in that Kahneman study who spent his career watching people make fast, correct calls under pressure with no time to do the math. If you want the long version of why an earned gut is real, and how it actually fires, this is it. The stories are the point.

The Invitation

If you’re still here, that already tells me which instrument you run on.

So tell me. When did your gut get to the answer before your spreadsheet could, and did you trust it or talk yourself out of it? I read every reply.

And if you’ve made it this far, please tap the like, leave a comment, restack it for the operator in your life who is still apologizing for their gut. It is how these words find the next person.

xx Nathalie

Last Tuesday morning, I went forest bathing on Lake Hallam in Aspen, led by a woman who studied the practice in Japan. We stopped to smell wild mint along the water and read poetry out loud. A deer foraged a few feet away, unbothered by my human aura.

As the day went on, I sat in sessions led by experts on mental health, psychedelics, and the fight over AI chatbots in healthcare. I had matcha and drinks with founders, CEOs, and investors. A couple of those conversations changed how I think about my business. Over lunch, I played with puppies from the Aspen Animal Rescue Shelter. After, a sound bath in a geodesic dome.

All of this happened on a Tuesday. All of it was work.

Forest Bathing at Lake Hallam at the Aspen Ideas Health Festival

Years before, my Tuesdays looked different. On paper they were great. Three gourmet meals a day at the office. A job people envied. That was the problem. I was living a great life. It just wasn’t my great life. It was someone else’s, and I was very good at it. Underneath, it wasn’t me. The panic was my body knowing before I did. I know how that sounds. A privileged pain, to be sure, but pain nevertheless.

When I asked my mentors how to get a freer, more honest version of my life, they handed me advice steeped in spreadsheets. Make a list of thirty people you need to meet. Schedule the coffee chats. Work the list. You can change function, or you can change sector, but not both. Find a lateral move that’s only a half-step away. Hang on for the next promotion cycle. Build your five-year plan. Self-limiting belief, dressed up as prudence.

And every option was a half-step. A lateral, a function swap, the next rung up. You don’t reach a different life by getting more efficient inside the one you’re trying to leave.

The throughline was always the same. Treat your career like a logistics problem. Inputs, outputs, a clean route between two known points. But I didn’t know the destination yet. And you can’t route to an address you can’t name.

So I dreamt. On paper and in my head. I asked myself how I wanted to spend my Tuesdays. I journaled it. I fantasized about it. I didn’t know the specifics, but I could feel it in my body. I could feel what it would be like to wake up on a Tuesday with the space to write in the morning. To take a walk with the sun in my eyes. To sit in the audience at my kid’s school performance at 2:30 on a Tuesday without the guilt of feeling behind.

That Tuesday, I realized I’m a lot closer to that life than I was a few years ago. I’m not all the way there. I still have grand visions I’m working on. But I’m close enough that I want to show you how I got here. Because the advice that worked was not the advice I was given.

Two things got me here. A rough vision, and the belief that I was allowed to chase it.

The vision came from paying attention. I’ve always known what I like, and I’ve never been embarrassed about it. Even deep in the grind on the wrong path, I noticed when something felt good. A midday yoga class I could take because a meeting got cancelled. A coffee that ran long and turned into a real conversation. I kept notes on what energized me, and I pictured a life with more of it.

The belief is that you’re allowed to build the life you want. Protecting the life you do want is your job. This one took the longest to comprehend. It’s a muscle, and mine built on the word no. I say no to most “pick your brain” requests now. Not because I’m unkind, and not because I don’t care. Because at some point I had to put myself first, and every yes I gave away was a Tuesday I didn’t get back. The first few felt terrible. They get easier. The discomfort is the point.

I’d be doing you a disservice if I didn’t say the other part out loud. I’m ruthless about hitting my goals. You don’t earn the room to play if you’re not delivering, and you can’t keep delivering without the play. The spreadsheet earns the shaman her freedom. The shaman is the reason I can run the spreadsheet at all.

Here’s where the spreadsheet people get to feel vindicated for a second, because there’s real neuroscience under all of this.

When you picture something vividly, your brain runs a partial simulation of actually doing it. The same regions that fire during the real experience fire during the imagined one. This is well established in the research on mental rehearsal, which is why athletes who visualize a routine perform measurably better, and why the effect shows up in the brain scans, not just the locker-room mythology. Imagining the thing primes you for the thing.

Then there’s the part that explains why my mornings started rearranging themselves. Your brain takes in millions of signals a second and throws almost all of them away, because you’d drown otherwise. What makes the cut is shaped by what you’ve decided matters. Get specific about what you want, and you start noticing the version of it that’s already around you. There’s a boring name for this. Selective attention. It’s the same reason you buy a particular car and then see it on every corner. The cars didn’t multiply. Your noticing did.

There’s a study on this. People who pictured the process of getting somewhere, the actual steps and days, outperformed the people who pictured the prize. Imagining the texture of the thing beats imagining the trophy. Which is what I’d been doing without knowing it. I never pictured a title. I pictured a Tuesday.

So when I say I pictured the mornings I wanted and they started showing up, I’m not claiming I bent reality. I got better at spotting what was already there, and what I spotted changed what I said yes to. The yes is the part that actually moved my life.

The version of this you’ll hear from manifestation coaches is too clean. The brain doesn’t conjure opportunities out of the ether. It doesn’t reward a vision board you glance at twice.

The shamanic part and the scientific part are describing the same event from two perspectives. One calls it intention. The other calls it selective attention. I’ve stopped needing them to agree on the language. They agree on the instruction, which is this: Get specific about what you want. Feel it in your body. Put yourself where it could happen. And move when it does.

Long before instruments, Polynesian navigators crossed thousands of miles of open ocean. No compass. No charts. No coordinates. They read the swell against the hull, the flight paths of birds, the positions of stars they’d memorized since childhood. They didn’t know the exact dot they were sailing toward. They knew the direction, and they were tuned to signals the rest of us would sail right past.

You don’t need the coordinates. Most of the time you can’t have them yet. What you need is a direction you can feel, and enough attention to read the water you’re already in. The deer at the lake that morning wasn’t following a map. Neither was I, ten years ago, when I started noticing which Tuesdays felt like the life I wanted.

If your Tuesdays don’t look like the ones you want yet, you are not off course. You’re mid-crossing. Get clear on the direction. Tune yourself to the signals. And when the wind shifts in your favor, and it will, move.

I read poetry in a forest last Tuesday morning. It was work. Ten years ago, it was a daydream I couldn’t have routed to if I tried. I just kept choosing the next thing that felt like mine.

The Practice

Pick one Tuesday on your calendar. Not a vacation day. An ordinary one. Write down how you’d spend it if guilt and logistics weren’t a factor. Don’t solve for how yet. Get specific enough that you’d recognize the day if it showed up. That’s your direction. Now watch what you start noticing.

The Shelf

Designing Your Life, by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. It came out of a Stanford course, and the whole premise is that you prototype your way toward a life instead of planning your way there. The spreadsheet people, quietly admitting you have to try things to find out.

The Invitation

Reply and tell me one thing you noticed this week that felt like the life you want. One Tuesday detail you’re steering toward. I read them all.

Have you made it this far?

• tap the ❤️ so I know it landed

• leave a 💬 with the Tuesday you’re working toward

• forward this to someone who’s quietly living someone else’s great life

Run on both,
Nathalie

Picture the richest man in America sneaking out of his own mansion at dusk.

He dismisses his coachman for the night. He checks over his shoulder. He walks to an unmarked building and sits down across from a woman with dark, shining hair, surrounded by birth charts and tarot. Her name is Evangeline Adams. She is an astrologer. The man paying for her time is J.P. Morgan.

My version of this scene is admittedly colored by too many hours watching HBO’s Gilded Age. But the crux of it is true. Morgan, the richest man of his era, maintained a documented practice with his astrologer, year after year, quietly and in private.

I know that feeling. I’ve spent most of my life hiding the half of me that reached the answer before the numbers did.

Eighteen years ago, I walked into 345 Park Avenue, the J.P. Morgan office, as an analyst. Credibility there looked like one thing: all numbers, no voice. You earned the right to be heard by having the data to back every decision. Anything you couldn’t put in a cell didn’t count.

The job was building models, fast and clean. I was slow at it. I could not give a damn about Excel shortcuts. On a floor that measured worthiness by arbitrary skills that signaled analytical horsepower, I was mediocre.

It took me years to see what I actually had. On top of the moderate quant skills, I had something the pure quants didn’t: I could feel where a situation was heading before the analysis got there. Pattern recognition, if you want the technical name for it.

It took me even longer to learn the thing had a name and a body of research behind it. Herbert Simon, a Nobel laureate who helped build the first artificial intelligence, spent decades arguing that intuition isn’t mysticism. It is, in his words, “nothing more and nothing less than recognition.” The chess master doesn’t out-calculate her opponent. She has seen the pattern thousands of times, and the right move surfaces before the reasoning does. The veteran firefighter walks his crew out of the building moments before the floor gives way, and he can’t tell you how he knew. His body knew. It had cataloged every fire he had ever stood in.

That is the second operating system. Not a sixth sense. It is experience, stacked up over years, that the brain matches to the present moment faster than you can reason through it. The quants weren’t smarter than me. I had a second engine going, and I had been trained to be ashamed of it.

So I hid it. I got good at leading with the slow stuff. Models, build-outs, the work I could point to. The fast thing I kept to myself. Who was I going to tell? There’s no line on a performance review for knew it in my gut.

So I tried to fix myself. I believed that if I just built better spreadsheets, I’d be a worthier human. As if human worth could be measured in a spreadsheet.

That was my excuse. Young, scared, everything to prove. A century earlier, the most powerful man in America hid the same instinct, and he had none of those reasons. He hid an astrologer.

You’ve probably even heard the line they attribute to J.P. Morgan. Millionaires don’t use astrology, billionaires do. It’s everywhere. And almost certainly fake. The oldest version anyone can find surfaced around 1989, more than seventy-five years after J.P. Morgan died, with no source cited.

But the truth is better than the fake quote. In her 1926 memoir, The Bowl of Heaven, Evangeline Adams wrote that she taught Morgan astrology herself, read his chart many times, and that he returned to her for readings year after year.

So the astrologer is the fun part. How he actually made decisions is the point. Morgan didn’t build the House of Morgan on star charts. But he didn’t build it on spreadsheets either. Asked under oath in 1912 what he lent money on, he didn’t say collateral. He said character. The first thing, he told Congress, is character, before money or anything else. A man he didn’t trust couldn’t borrow from him on all the bonds in Christendom. That is not a quant talking. That is a man putting a value on the one thing no model on his desk could measure, a read on a person, and betting the largest fortune in America on it.

On top of the analysis sat the part he could never have defended in a meeting. That was the edge. The astrologer was just the most private corner of the same instrument. Morgan was one of the most powerful spreadsheet-and-shamans who ever lived, and it was the combination, not either half, that made him.

The character and the nerve he could show, because they passed for judgment. The astrologer he could not. So he hid her, behind a dismissed coachman and an unmarked door, and let the world believe the rest was just good sense.

Morgan wasn’t an exception. He was the rule. Run the numbers. Then do what your gut already told you. And say nothing.

We still don’t have permission to trust our gut when the spreadsheet says otherwise. We don’t have permission to count a tarot reading as one more data point when we’re deciding whether to quit. We tell ourselves the people at the top got there on data alone.

They didn’t. They ran on data and instinct, like everyone else. They just learned to keep the instinct quiet.

I did too. It’s 2020. Day one of the company I’d just taken over. My desk was a corner of my bedroom, a forty-dollar table I’d bought off Facebook Marketplace in the middle of the pandemic. I was supposed to be building the sober plan: a list of VCs, a list of metrics to fix. Instead, I was thinking about a founder I’d worked alongside at Google, whose product I’d championed inside the company for a stretch. I’d just read that his latest company had been acquired for an absurd number, and it made me smile. I was happy for him. I was also a little in awe, because he’d done it again, a second sale most people never get once. I’d had a front-row seat to how he operated. I watched him build the alliances, work the rooms, position himself years before there was a deal. Nobody handed it to him.

The smile wasn’t only joy. It was recognition. My body remembered the lesson before my brain could spell it out. I knew what that kind of outcome looked like from the inside, because I had watched one get built. So I stopped writing the sober plan and wrote a different list. If this company were going to end the way his did, who would buy it? I named six buyers. For each one, I found the person who’d have to say yes to a deal, and wrote the name down. The first real thing I did was start pulling those six people close. Onto the cap table. Into the story. Years before there was a deal to do.

No spreadsheet told me to do that. A pattern my gut had filed away years before surfaced as certainty I couldn’t yet show my work for. Twenty-three months later, we sold. The math made the case eventually. My body had made it on day one.

That’s my practice. I’ve pulled a card, sat with an astrologer, held the crystal. They have their place. But the one I actually steer by is quieter, and I almost never name it out loud. The gut goes tight on the deal that pencils out perfectly. Or everything in me goes still and certain about a call I can’t yet defend on paper. I’ve spent my career learning to stop overruling that, and to start treating it as the first data point instead of the embarrassing one.

Morgan had an astrologer and a fortune to hide behind. I have a feeling in my chest and, for a long time, the same instinct to keep it off the record.

The difference is I’m writing it down. Under my own name. While I still have something to lose.

The Practice

Pick the next decision where the data says one thing and something in you says another. Before you decide, write down what your body is telling you. One line. Then decide however you decide, and note which one turned out right. Don’t act on the body signal yet. Just start collecting it. You trust what you can measure, so measure this. Give your intuition a spreadsheet and watch how often it was already correct while you were busy overruling it.

The Shelf

The Bowl of Heaven, Evangeline Adams, 1926. The actual source, Morgan’s astrologer, tells it herself. Fair warning, it’s a hunt. Out of print, but you can find it in the Internet Archive or dig up a copy on eBay. Worth it for the receipts alone, but the real surprise is the prose. Watching how a woman wrote about power and intuition a hundred years ago, formal and certain in a way nobody writes now, tells you something the content doesn’t. We didn’t just hide the practice. We lost the voice that talked about it without flinching.

The Invitation

What do you already know that you’re waiting for the spreadsheet to confirm? Name the decision where your body has already voted, and your head is still stalling for cover. You don’t have to act on it today. But stop pretending you don’t know.

I had joined Airbnb because I love to travel. I thought working at a travel company would give me more of it, that the job itself would fill the part of me that came alive on a plane, in a new city, ordering something I couldn’t pronounce. The logic felt airtight. Go where the energy is. Work where your curiosity already lives.

I took one business trip the entire year I was there.

Here’s what I’d like to tell the 34-year-old woman who leaves a corporate job because she loves the idea of travel and thinks working at a travel company will give her more of it: just make more money and go on your own vacation. Working at Airbnb does not mean you get to travel. It means you get to sit in Zoom meetings about travel.

Three months before I joined Airbnb, a voice in the desert had told me I’d be the CEO of a wellness company by the time I was 40. I thought leaving Google for Airbnb was the leap. It wasn’t. It was trading one cage for a slightly different-shaped cage.

Here’s what the voice kept saying, even when I tried not to listen:

There has to be more.

I started doing the thing the restless woman always does before she actually leaps. I looked sideways. I followed early-stage wellness companies on LinkedIn. I read founder interviews. I told myself I was “getting inspired.” I was actually auditioning for a different life.

One of the companies I found was called Expectful. A small wellness brand in the maternal space. They had an opening for a Head of Business Development. There was zero chance I was going to leave my Airbnb salary and RSUs for a pre-seed role. I live in San Francisco. I had a nanny. A baby. The math didn’t math.

But I reached out anyway, because the voice was loud, and I pitched myself to the founder through a workaround: I can’t take the full-time role. But let me be a BD advisor. A few hours a week. I’m good at what I do. I’ll deliver what you need.

He said yes.

In my first few weeks, I helped him close a major deal. And then the founder called me and said something I was not prepared for:

I think you’d be a great CEO of this company. Would you come on as a CEO?

Reader, I was holding an infant when he said this.

At the same time I was moonlighting at Expectful, I was also interviewing at every FAANG company you can name. My brain was hedging. If the voice was wrong about entrepreneurship, I wanted an escape hatch. I ended up with four very senior offers in Product Management, a leap from where I currently stood. Each one promising more scope, more comp, and more autonomy. Each one was the next rung on a ladder I was no longer sure I wanted to keep climbing.

And then there was Expectful. Pre-seed. Months of runway. A title that sounded impressive and a bank account that did not.

This was the hardest decision of my life.

I could not sleep. Yes, I had an infant, and people kept assuming that was why. It wasn’t. I was awake because the voice was getting louder, and the voice was excited about Expectful in a way I could not rationally explain, and turning it down was starting to feel sinister - like a betrayal of something I couldn’t yet name.

So I did what I always do. I went to my mentors.

I want to tell you something about mentors, because I think it’s the most important thing I’ve learned about making big decisions, and almost nobody says it out loud:

Mentors can tell you how they’d make your decision. They cannot tell you how to make yours.

Some of mine said stay. Some said leap. The split was roughly fifty-fifty, which is exactly what happens when a decision is actually yours. If the answer were obvious, the smart people around you would converge. They didn’t. Because the answer wasn’t in them. It was in me.

Do not outsource your inner compass. You lose your power every time you do.

The thing that finally broke the tie was a podcast.

I was listening to Guy Raz on How I Built This, and he was telling the story of Jim Koch, the founder of Sam Adams. Koch had been at Boston Consulting Group, making a fortune, on the exact trajectory smart people tell you to stay on. And when he finally left, he said something that rewired me on the spot:

Staying at BCG was dangerous, but not scary. The danger was continuing to do something that didn’t make me happy, and getting to sixty-five and looking back and going, “Oh my God, I wasted my life.”

Guy Raz’s distillation of it: Failing is scary. Wasting your life is dangerous.

I pulled over to write it down.

I had been conflating “risky” and “dangerous” my entire career. The four FAANG offers were safe. They were also, for me specifically, dangerous. Because I knew, with the kind of knowing you cannot un-know, that taking one of them would cost me something I couldn’t get back.

The pre-seed role was scary. It was not dangerous.

Once I could tell the difference, the decision made itself.

I joined Expectful.

I raised $4.2 million in my first 90 days. I came in, grew the business. We sold the company 23 months later.

I’m not telling you that to brag. I’m telling you because the receipts matter. Somewhere in this newsletter’s audience is a woman who is about to turn down the “safe” role, and she needs to know that the woman she becomes on the other side of that yes is still standing. Not just surviving. I’m proof. I built the thing, sold it, and still packed a kindergartner’s lunch this morning.

My intuition was right. My intuition is almost always right.

The work is learning to hear the difference between the intuitive voice and the survival brain that mimics it. The survival brain says: stay, this is practical, what about the RSUs. The voice says: this is dangerous, and you know it, and you’ve known it for months.

Listen to the voice. She’s not asking you to be reckless. She’s asking you to stop being quietly dangerous to yourself.

The Practice

Try this week: The Risky vs. Dangerous Inventory

Take out a piece of paper. Make two columns.

Column A: What would be scary to change about my life right now? (Leaving the job. Ending the relationship. Starting the thing. Saying the true thing out loud.)

Column B: What is dangerous about my life right now if nothing changes? (The version of me at 65 who stayed. What did she become? What did she lose?)

Most of us have never actually written down Column B. We let it live as a vague dread. Put it on paper. Read both columns side by side.

The scary things are almost always smaller than the dangerous things. They just feel bigger because they’re closer.

The Shelf

Things I’m sitting with this week:

Listen: How I Built This with Guy Raz. Any episode, but the back catalog on founders who left “good jobs” is where the risky-vs-dangerous frame lives.

Read: The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. I know. Every spiritually-inclined woman has read it. Read it again. The Morning Pages practice is where the voice gets louder.

Use: A mentor audit. Write down the five people you ask for advice. For each one, ask: Is this person giving me their truth, or telling me what they would do? The difference is everything.

The Invitation

What’s the scary thing you’re avoiding because it feels risky?

And what’s the dangerous thing you’re choosing, every day, because it feels safe?

Hit reply. I want the actual answer, not the safe one.

Onwards.

With warmth,

Nathalie

I was 34. I was four days into a seven-day juice fast at We Care Spa in Palm Desert. My last meal had been a cup of warm flavorless vegetable broth. It was the highlight of my day. I was wrapped in a thick wool blanket, sitting in a circle around an open fire, being led by a woman shaman who had flown in from Peru. She was kind. She was gracious. She kept reminding us, in a voice that didn’t need to be loud, of the power we already had inside us.

I’d written one line on a piece of paper and thrown it into the flames:

Give me clarity about what I’m supposed to do with my career.

I’d written two other things too, but those are between me and the fire.

Here’s what I want you to understand about the moment just before I threw the paper in. Part of me thought this was ridiculous. Woo-woo. The kind of thing I’d never mention in a Monday standup. But when you’re four days into a fast in the desert, you don’t have Love Is Blind to scroll through. You don’t have Instagram. You don’t have the thousand small distractions you use at home to avoid your own life. You have the evening entertainment the spa gives you, and that night, the evening entertainment was a fire and a shaman and a pen.

So I gave it everything I had. I had nothing to lose.

At 3AM, I woke up and the voice was so loud she could not be ignored.

You are going to be the CEO of a wellness or hospitality company by the time you are 40.

Not a suggestion. Not a hope. A verdict.

I wrote it down in my journal that night. I still have the page.

Three months later, I left Google for Airbnb. Fifteen months after that, I was the co-founder and CEO of Expectful, a women’s wellness company. And by the time I turned 40, I was the General Manager of a wellness business inside a public company, operating at a scale I couldn’t have drawn on paper at 34.

The vision kept delivering. Every time I trusted it, it delivered again.

Nathalie at We Care Spa in 2019

Now I want to tell you about the week before the fire.

I was sitting in a cross-functional meeting at Google, in a conference room that smelled like whiteboard marker and boxed lunch for maximum efficiency. I was nodding. I was taking notes I would never look at again. And I was telling myself a very specific lie:

If I can just get to Director, I’ll be able to leverage the title for something really big outside of Google.

I said that sentence to myself so many times that I believed it. I said it in performance reviews. I said it to my husband. I said it on the 101 at 7:45 in the morning to justify three-hour daily commutes, five days a week. It was the kind of sentence that sounded like ambition and felt like compliance.

I was at the mercy of equally helpless people above me, who were at the mercy of equally helpless people above them. Everyone was waiting for permission from someone who didn’t have permission either.

This is the part no one warns you about. You can be crushing it on paper. Good title, good comp, good company, good reviews. Lobster lunches (only in the London office) and bi-weekly massages. And quietly dying inside a cage you keep mistaking for a career path.

Here’s the thing about the cage. The door is open. It’s been open the whole time.

She’s the one who keeps closing it.

This newsletter is for her.

The woman who hears the voice and tells herself to wait one more vesting cycle.

The woman who books the ayahuasca retreat, has the breakthrough, flies home, and on Monday morning puts her head back down for the third failed promo cycle in a row.

The woman who’s read the books, done the tarot, hired the coach, made the vision board, and still can’t quite give herself permission to trust that the “woo” and the work are the same engine.

The woman who is, whether she’ll admit it out loud or not, a motherfucking lion pacing around in a cage with the door wide open.

I’m writing this newsletter because I’m tired of pretending that Manifestation and MECE are mutually exclusive.

They aren’t. They never were. The most successful bet I ever made on myself was the one I made at 3AM in the desert, with a juice-fast headache and a wool blanket and nothing to lose. And the second most successful bet was the spreadsheet I built the next Monday to back it up.

Manifestation without a spreadsheet is a daydream.

A spreadsheet without conviction is just math.

When you fuse the two, you stop hoping and start building toward something specific. You stop choosing between the woman who hits the number and the woman who hears the voice. They become the same woman. And she is a force.

Quick note on who I am, because I think it matters.

I’m not writing this from a yacht. I packed my kid’s lunch this morning. I run a P&L inside a large public company. I am, by most measures, successful, and by most measures, still very much in the arena. I’m not here to tell you I figured it out from a villa in Lake Como. Though, full disclosure, I do love an evening cocktail at the MO in Blevio. I’m here because I’m doing the work in real time, and I’ve decided to stop keeping it a secret.

If you stay, here’s what I’ll show you:

How to stop choosing between the woman who hits the number and the woman who hears the voice.

I’ll bring you inside the practices, the frameworks, the 3AM downloads, the spreadsheets, the weird stuff that worked, the rational stuff that didn’t, and the tools I actually use. Not the ones I tell people I use.

I won’t give you morning routines you’ll never do. I won’t give you girlboss affirmations. I won’t pretend the cage isn’t real. It is. The mortgage is real. The RSUs are real. I’ll just show you, issue by issue, how I’ve been picking the lock from the inside for the last decade, and how it’s worked.

If that’s what you’re looking for, hit subscribe.

If you’re already on the list, forward this to the friend you’ve been texting at 11PM about whether to quit her job. She knows who she is.

The Practice

Try this week: The One-Line Fire

You don’t need a shaman or a juice fast. You need a piece of paper, a pen, and something you can safely burn. A candle works.

Write one line. Just one. The clearest question you have about your life right now, in the form of a request. Not “should I quit my job.” Try: Give me clarity about what I’m supposed to do with my career. Or: Show me what I’m not letting myself see.

Burn it. Watch it go.

Then sleep on it. Literally. Keep a notebook next to the bed. If something wakes you up in the night, write it down before you decide whether it’s real. This is the part most people skip.

The voice doesn’t usually come at 2PM on a Tuesday. It comes at 3AM, when your defenses are down. You have to be listening.

The Shelf

Things I’m sitting with this week:

Visit: We Care Spa in Palm Desert. No affiliation. Just the place where the fire was.

Read: Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert. The chapter on ideas as living things that shop for a host should be required reading for anyone who’s ever had a 3AM download and ignored it.

Use: A paper notebook next to your bed. I know. Revolutionary technology. Your phone is not the same. The blue light kills the voice before she can finish the sentence.

The Invitation

What’s the lie you’re telling yourself in meetings this week?

The specific one. The one that sounds like ambition and feels like compliance.

Hit reply and tell me. I read every one.

Onwards.

With warmth,
Nathalie

Hi.

If the video landed for you, you’re already in the room.

Strategy and Manifestation live next to each other in my life. They probably do in yours too. Or you wouldn’t be here. Spreadsheets and Shamans is the newsletter that came out of giving up on choosing between them.

It’s for the woman who recognizes herself in that. Who’s been told her whole career to keep the two halves of herself in separate rooms and is quietly done with it.

Intuition and IPOs. Manifesting and MECE frameworks. Both, not either. And pretending otherwise has cost us more than we’ve admitted.

First essay drops Sunday, June 7. Weekly from there.

Subscribe below. I’ll see you in your inbox.

xx Nathalie