She Didn’t Wait for Permission From Her Circumstances

I was listening to a podcast this weekend that stopped me in my tracks.

It wasn’t new content. It had been recorded in March 2020, the very month the world locked its doors. The coach, Brooke Castillo, was speaking with that particular kind of calm that only comes from someone who has trained herself to operate from her future, not her fear.

She was talking about making decisions not from the conditions around you, but from the woman you already know yourself to be becoming.

And I sat there, in April 2026, listening, and I realised I was now the future she had been describing.

The Future Version of You Is Available Now

The version of you who already knows the outcome is available to you right now.

I know what that moment in 2020 felt like from the inside. It was not calm. It was not certain. The world was contracting by the hour, and I had a business, Athena, built on the sacred energy of women gathering in rooms together.

Monthly meetings. Real presence. Embodied community.

And I had a decision to make.

The Question That Changes Everything

I asked myself the question that I now believe every woman in business must learn to live inside:

If I knew I would not fail, what would I do?

The answer arrived before the government advice did.

We were going online.

Not because it was easy.
Not because it was popular.

Because I could see, from the future version of myself that I was choosing to lead from, that it was the only true path forward.

The path that would keep our franchisees generating an income.
The path that would keep our members connected, supported, and growing, even as the world outside their windows grew frightening.

When Vision Leads, Everything Shifts

When you anchor your decisions to your vision rather than your circumstances, everything shifts. The tension resolves in favour of where you are going.

There were haters. There were naysayers. There were women, people I had built real relationships with, who could not share the vision and let me know it loudly.

One of the most powerful things I learned through my training in the creative process is this:

The inner voice of doubt, the one that says this is not possible, you are not enough, the conditions are not right, is simply the ego’s fear of the unknown.

It is the pressure that, without the right tools, collapses a vision before it ever has the chance to become real.

Holding the Creative Tension

But I had been trained in something different.

I had learned to hold the creative tension between where I was and where I was going.

Not denying what was true.
Not catastrophising what was fearful.

But choosing the vision anyway.
Returning to it.
Breathing through it.

Dum Spiro Spero

While I breathe, I hope.

My family motto, from the Rogers line, translates roughly as this. I have always carried it.

In 2020, it became more than an heirloom sentiment. It became a practice.

A moment-to-moment returning.
A refusal to let the noise of outside conditions be louder than the signal of inner vision.

Not Everyone Will Come With You

Those who could not hold the tension left.

That, too, is part of the story.

Not everyone is built for the forward motion of a growing vision. Some people are driven by what they want to escape rather than what they genuinely love, and when conditions get hard, that becomes visible.

There is no judgement in it. It is simply what was true.

The Expansion That Followed

Six years later, Athena is still here.

More than that: it evolved.

The pivot to online was not a compromise of the mission. It became an expansion of it.

Women across the world, women who had never been able to attend a physical meeting, suddenly found their way in.

The community grew larger and more diverse because we were forced, because I chose, to meet reality honestly and hold the vision anyway.

You Don’t Need Permission

We can do hard and unimaginable things when we stop asking our circumstances for permission.

Your future self is not waiting for conditions to improve.  She is already in the room.  The question is whether you are making decisions from her, or from your fear.

What 2020 Vision in Hindsight Really Teaches Us

Hindsight is not just a rearview mirror.

Used well, it is evidence.

It is the proof that your future self has always been available to you, that she existed before the outcome confirmed her, and that the decisions made from her perspective were the ones that moved life forward.

A Final Question

Wherever you are right now — in a moment of contraction, confusion, or pivoting — I want to ask you the same question I asked myself in 2020:

If you knew you would not fail, what would you do?

That woman already knows the answer.

Make decisions from her.