There’s a thing I teach that I call the raft.

You build a raft to cross a river. It works. It saves you. And then you get to the other side and you keep carrying it, because it’s the thing that got you here and you’re not about to set it down.

Mine is achievement. Pure ambition and a work ethic that will not quit.

I’m one of six kids. If you wanted something in my house, you went and got it first, and you got it faster than the other five. That raft carried me a long way. It got me through school. It got me a doctorate in psychology.

It’s also the reason I might stop listening to people. It’s why my work-life balance has been a joke for stretches of my career. And when I’m really in it, I’ll bulldoze somebody to get where I’ve decided we’re going.

The raft that saved me at nine is now the thing costing me at work.

Here’s the part that makes it a little more difficult.

Anders Ericsson spent his career studying how expertise develops, and one of his findings is that people plateau not from lack of effort but from repeating what they’re already good at. The strength stops improving and starts calcifying. What made you effective quietly becomes what keeps you from getting better.

And you can’t see it. That’s the whole problem. It doesn’t feel like a raft. It feels like your personality. It feels like the thing people praise you for.

So, it takes someone else to actually call it out. Usually, a woman who is carrying a raft of her own and recognizes the weight.

If any of this is landing, applications for the Lair are open for one week.

It’s my women’s coaching group. Ten women, nine months, about three hours a month, and I coach it myself. You get real insight into how you’re actually seen, you make deliberate decisions about what isn’t working anymore, and you become more influential because of it. And you do all of it next to ten other women who know exactly what you’re carrying.

This is the last group I’m opening this year. If you don’t want next year to look like last year, this is the thing that changes it. Apply, or send it to a woman you know who needs it.

You can put the raft down. You’re not in the river anymore.