Last month, I sat on a front porch in my mother’s village in the Swiss Alps, watching my Godmother peel apples to can for the winter.

Her name is Leticia, or as friends and family call her, “Leti”. As many of you know, she inspired my company name.

She was a flight attendant. She lived in Brazil, Israel, and Portugal. She worked for IBM. At sixty, she taught herself to weave because she decided she was going to be an artist.

So, I asked her how women get ahead.

She didn’t look up from the apples. She said the women in her village tell her they could never run a weaving shop, do their own taxes, or have the fortitude to be so independent. And she said, I just do it. Whether I do it perfectly or not, I don’t care. I can. Of course I can.

Listen to what she didn’t say. She never said she’d be good at it. She said she’d do it.

Most of us have that backward.

We treat confidence like something we need to establish. Something you’re supposed to feel first, and then you’re allowed to go. So, we wait for it. We take one more course. We rewrite the email four times and still send it three days late.

Albert Bandura spent fifty years studying where belief in your own capability comes from. He found four sources, and none of them are equal.

The strongest by a wide margin is “mastery experience”. Having done the thing. Badly counts. Messy counts.  Never perfectly correct.

The weakest is verbal persuasion. The pep talk. Your mentor telling you you’re ready.

So, every hour you spend preparing to feel ready is an hour spent on the weakest input available to you.

And here’s what I think she was saying at 92, without any of the vocabulary for it.

Strength isn’t a feeling you have. It’s something you do on the days the feeling doesn’t show up. Leti has never needed to feel certain in order to act certain, and after ninety-two years of acting, the certainty is just there.

You don’t get ready and then go. You go, and readiness catches up.

So pick the thing you’ve been circling. The role, the conversation, the rate you haven’t raised in three years.

Kind of like the Nike ad.  Just do it.