Your Heart Already Knows — On Curiosity, Courage, and Trusting Yourself Again

Here is what I said at TEDx Youngstown in 2022.

Curiosity makes heroes out of all of us.

Not ambition. Not hustle. Not the willingness to grind until something breaks. Curiosity. The simple act of asking what might be possible if I did not already know the answer.

I believe that. I have believed it for a long time. And I believe it because of what I have watched happen in rooms with women who came in thinking they were stuck and left with something they could not quite name but immediately recognized.

They did not find an answer they had not thought of before. They found the answer they had been arguing with.

This is the thing about the heart. It is not unreliable. It is only unfamiliar to women who have spent a lifetime being told to override it. To be practical. To be reasonable. To weigh the evidence and make the sensible choice and get on with it.

The heart knows what the mind is still debating.

I know this because I spent most of my early life on the wrong side of that sentence. I trusted what I could earn, what I could prove, what I could build with both hands. And when that was not enough, I trusted what I could drink away or fake or hide from. It took me a long time to get still enough to hear what I already knew.

Sobriety was the beginning of a different kind of listening. It taught me that the answers did not live in the doing. They lived in the quieting.

Women who come to work with me are not broken. That is the first thing I want to say. They are not lost. They are at a crossroads — and there is a difference. Lost means you do not know where you are. A crossroads means you know exactly where you are. You are just not sure which way to go next.

And you have been so busy being capable and good and reliable for everyone else that you have stopped asking yourself which way you actually want to go.

Coaching is not about telling you which way. I am not a way-finder. I am a way-pointer. There is a difference.

What I do is help you ask the question you have been avoiding. Not because it is a hard question. Usually because it is a simple one, and simple questions have a way of cutting through all the things we have built up around the answer.

The bravest question I have heard women ask in my years of doing this work is not what do I do next or how do I fix this or where do I start.

The bravest question is: what do I actually want?

Not what makes sense. Not what would look good. Not what would make everyone comfortable. What do I actually want?

If you have not asked yourself that question lately, or if you have asked it and immediately talked yourself out of the answer, that is where we start.

Your heart already knows. That has always been true.

Resign from the debate society. Come and find out.