Just a couple weeks ago I gave my biggest talk yet to 85 people at The Battery, a members-only social club in San Francisco. The talk was called Human Design: Your Energy, Decoded.

I didn’t fully realize until I was on stage that I couldn’t feel the room in the way I had with smaller groups. I had a mic, a stage, and an hour-long arc that I had to trust. It felt like a threshold moment because a different part of me was invited to lead.

Not the part that is most relational, responsive, or attuned. But the part that can hold a coherent point of view even when internal signals are mixed and external feedback is limited.

My leadership. And I’d been training for that without fully realizing it!

Writing here on Substack has been exercising that exact muscle: clarity of thinking, clarity of structure, clarity of POV. Because once you start working with story structure, you start seeing it everywhere.

Hook → Relatability → Challenge → Reflection → Takeaway

So showing up for anything becomes less about “what do I say?” and more about “what is the spine that can hold me while I say it?”

 

How This Talk Was Built

About four months prior, I started shaping the idea with my dear friend Ashlee, who organizes events at The Battery. At that point it was just about direction.

Two months out, I laid out the structure. With an intention to take people through a journey: from realizing that burnout is not just about workload, but about energy alignment; to understanding how the systems we live and work in challenge us; and finally to seeing how trust in ourselves is built through understanding our own energy, decision-making, and lived patterns.

Then I wrote the first full draft. All 7,500 words of it.

Not in one sitting—three separate blocks of about three hours each. Just trying to get the thinking out of my body and into something coherent.

Then I let it sit. I went out of town and didn’t look at it until I got back. I think that part matters more than it seems because it lets things reorganize subconsciously.

About six weeks out, I came back to it and refined the full structure. Focusing especially on molding the intro into something that felt really good and human—because for me, the opening is everything. If I can land well oriented at the beginning, I know I’ve got the rest.

I like to ground people (and myself!) early. A breath. A question. Something simple that brings everyone into the same space. In this case it was: how many of you are new to Human Design?

 

At four weeks out, once the structure felt solid, I moved into building a few simple slides that supported the structure and would keep everyone on the same page. That was about three separate sittings of a few hours.

Then I started practicing. I began with just the 20-minute intro. Once a day, sometimes with notes, sometimes without. The goal wasn’t to memorize it but to build familiarity and capacity in my nervous system.

Often times I’d also make adjustments because sometimes written words don’t sound like something you’d actually say out loud.

Then I stopped again for a long weekend when I had a visitor in town. I didn’t stress, I just took it as a good break to let all the hard work sink even deeper into my subconscious.

When I pulled it back out, I worked the second half in pieces, then eventually the full hour in a few runs.

About five days before the talk, I practiced with my coach in person. That’s where it got real and I hit a block. A freeze response. Not panic, more like internal blankness paired with excitement. A kind of “I know this matters and I can’t fully access myself right now” feeling.

Naming that changed everything. Because it made me realize I didn’t need to eliminate that state to perform—I just needed to stop confusing it with inability.

I learned I could be frozen internally and still speak completely fine. So if I had done it before, I could do it again. Because part of the fear of public speaking is not knowing what part of you is going to show up.