Four Cities. Seven Stages. 10,000 hours.

Speak to a thousand people for an hour, and you haven’t just given a talk. You’ve spent a thousand hours of human life.

That’s the math I run before every stage.

Not “how will this go?”

Not “will they laugh or learn …?”

Just — I’m about to take the one thing not a single person in that room can get back. With a thousand people in the room, that’s a thousand hours, and I had better be worth it.

Over the next ten days I’ll have taken the stage seven times. Roughly 10,000 hours of humans’ time.

Phoenix first, where I’ll speak to the construction industry, education, and then the tech sector. Then onward to California, to talk with government and legislature…

Next Chicago, for women in the financial industry…

And wrapping my week in the Bahamas, with association executives.

Seven rooms with almost nothing in common. Different regulations, different economics, different money, different vocabularies entirely. A superintendent on a Phoenix job site and a legislative staffer in Sacramento are not having the same week.

And yet, one of those rooms booked the same talk.

They’re stressed.

They’re working inside uncertainty that has no end date printed on it.

And underneath whatever line item I’m filling on their agenda, an awful lot of them want to know the same thing:

Is something wrong with me? How can I stay engaged and healthy and keep my team doing the same when my whole life feels so draining and uncertain?

Nothing is wrong with you.

Prolonged uncertainty + no recent evidence that your actions matter = the flatness you’ve been calling burnout, or laziness, or “I’ve lost my edge.”

You didn’t lose your edge. Your edge is waiting on data. And you might have more control here than you think.

The reps

Here’s the inconvenient part. There’s exactly one source your brain will accept evidence from, and it isn’t reassurance or motivation. It isn’t a plan. It isn’t more information.

It’s the actions you take.

So move — forward, backward, sideways, off at some angle nobody asked for. Every time you engage in action, you’re building a rep that pays out data:

• It works, and now you know.
• It doesn’t, and now you know THAT, which cost you a week instead of a year.
• It half-works, and you adjust.
• It works and you hate it, which is information most people never go and get…time for another pivot.

There is no version of this where you took action and accomplish nothing.

Compare that to the alternative, which is sitting still, running the simulation one more time, waiting to feel ready…..and let’s be honest about what that actually is.

Sitting still isn’t neutral. It’s a rep too. It’s a rep for helplessness — for believing you have no agency or influence over how your future pans out. But the kicker here is that your story doesn’t update until YOU take the action. Which means you’ve got to try before you feel ready.

Not when you understand the issue, or when you’ve read one more thing about it, or found the person who’s already done it, or finally gotten somebody to promise you it’ll be fine. Only when you actually do the damn thing. That’s when you get the data you need to begin to build confidence. INDEPENDENT OF THE OUTCOME.

Your actions will lead to feeling more in control, becuase you will either get it right (confidence boost) or figure it out (confidence boost) or need to pivot (confidence boost — you now understand what you need to do differently). You don’t build confidence by being ready. You take the action and become ready. That’s the order, and as much as we may wish it to, it does not run in any other direction.

So — am I stressed?

You’d better believe it.

Four cities. Seven stages. Seven industries whose worlds I have to get right. Rooms full of people handing me a morning or an afternoon they don’t get back. I am fully, physically amped: heart rate up, sleep negotiable, running the open in my head on the tarmac… STRESSED.

And I’m grateful for it.

The day I stop feeling stressed walking into a week like this is the day this work has stopped meaning anything to me. That energy is not a malfunction to be managed down to zero. It’s my body handing me fuel for something I’ve decided is worth doing. I’d be a fool to try to hand it back.

So when you see me out on the road, know that I’m about as wound up as you are. The only real difference might be that I’ve decided to treat it as one big adventure rather than a verdict, and to take some small action every single day inside the uncertainty. To build my reps.

You’re allowed to move before you feel ready. That isn’t recklessness — it’s the only way you ever learn you have control, and it’s how you have done every hard thing you’ve ever done. Go collect the data. I’ll be out there doing the same.

Stay stressed, friends. Let’s all just learn to fear it a bit less (together).

Xoxo

Rebecca