The Lion Who Keeps Closing Her Own Cage

For the woman who hits the number and hears the voice. And is done pretending they're different women.

At 3AM in the desert, a voice told me I’d be the CEO of a wellness company by the time I was 40.

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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