Still Showing Up

On looking good when nothing feels together.

My extensions didn't match.

My makeup was somewhere between applied and surrendered. I was crouched on the highest penthouse in New York City with the Empire State Building behind me and I felt absolutely none of what this photo suggests.

I was in a transition.

The kind you can't really explain to people because it's not one thing, it's everything shifting at once. The kind where you keep moving because stopping feels more dangerous than the uncertainty ahead. Where you're holding space for everyone around you and quietly not sure where to put your own stuff. Where you get dressed, you show up, you perform the version of yourself that people need from you that day, and then you go home and sit with the gap between who you're presenting and who you actually are right now.

Someone pointed a camera at me and I just stayed in it.

Here's what I've learned after 15 years of sitting across from leaders in rooms that looked nothing like their LinkedIn profiles.

The transition is the work.

Not the outcome on the other side of it. The actual in-between, the dissolution of one version of yourself before the next one is fully formed, that is where everything important happens. And it is deeply uncomfortable in a way our professional culture has no language for.

We talk about pivots and growth and next chapters. We don't talk about the Tuesday afternoon when you're not sure who you are anymore and you still have three calls and a deliverable due.

Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio spent decades studying how the body processes what the mind hasn't caught up to yet. His research on somatic markers shows that during periods of major change, the nervous system is working overtime before we have words for what we're feeling. The fatigue that doesn't make sense. The low hum of anxiety underneath otherwise ordinary moments. The sensation of performing a version of yourself that fits slightly wrong, like a suit cut for someone a little different than you are right now.

That's not weakness. That's biology. That's your system doing exactly what it's designed to do when the ground is shifting.

And then there's what the city did that day.

There is something that happens when you get high enough above it all. The gridlock below stops being chaos and starts being pattern. The noise becomes texture instead of threat. Something in the nervous system exhales. Problems don't disappear but they become proportionate, and proportionate is all you need to take the next step.

I've since learned that's not just poetic. Research on awe, specifically the kind triggered by vast physical perspective, shows it measurably reduces self-referential thinking, the mental loop of worry and identity threat that keeps us stuck. Your brain literally quiets the part of itself that's been screaming.

I didn't plan to have a neurological reset that afternoon. I just climbed something.

I've coached hundreds of executives through transitions. Founders mid-pivot. Leaders mid-reinvention. Brilliant, accomplished people in the middle of quietly falling apart while their calendars stayed full and their reputations stayed intact.

The ones who move through it fastest are never the most polished. They're the most honest. With themselves first, then with the people around them. They stop performing certainty they don't have. They let the gap between who they were and who they're becoming be visible, at least to someone.

Because here's the thing about that gap. It's not a flaw in your story. It's the most important part of it.

So the photoshoot went on. Melting makeup, mismatched extensions, and somehow — I looked good.

Because I think we need more honesty from humans who are mid-transition, mid-mess, mid-becoming, and still showing up. Still climbing to the top of buildings. Still crouching on ledges and letting the city remind them that whatever they're in the middle of is never the whole picture.

Presence isn't performance. It never was.

It's the quiet, daily, sometimes mascara-smeared practice of returning to yourself. Especially when the gap between how you look and how you feel is at its absolute widest.

That gap isn't something to hide.

It's proof you're still in it.

NYC, July 2025