The Gap Nobody Talks About

Last week a woman sat across from me after a keynote, mascara a little smudged, and said something I hear more than almost anything else: “From the outside, my life looks like I have it all together. Inside, I feel like I’m one bad meeting away from everyone finding out I’m faking it.”

I call this the gap — the space between how you look on paper and how you actually feel walking into the room. And here’s what I want you to know today: the gap is not proof that something is wrong with you. It’s proof that you’ve been managing your inner bully instead of taming it.

Managing gets you through the day. Taming changes your life.

Here’s how to start closing that gap for good.

1. Name the moment, not the mood. Self-doubt doesn’t show up as a vague cloud — it shows up in specific moments. The negotiation. The board meeting. The introduction where you have to say what you do. Instead of telling yourself “I just feel anxious,” get specific: “I shrink when I have to ask for what I’m worth.” Specificity is where power starts.
2. Interrupt the story before it finishes. Your inner bully loves to finish sentences for you — “they’re going to think I’m too much,” “I’ll probably mess this up anyway.” The moment you catch that sentence starting, stop. Don’t argue with it. Just say, out loud if you have to, “Not today.” You don’t have to win the argument with your inner bully. You just have to stop giving it the floor.
3. Do the thing your feelings haven’t caught up to yet. Confidence is not a feeling you wait for. It’s an action you take first. Send the email before you feel ready. Speak up in the meeting before the fear fully shuts you down. The feeling of certainty almost always arrives after the action, not before it — and every time you act first, you prove your inner bully wrong a little more.

The truth is, you already know how to do hard things. You’ve built a career, raised a family, led a team, survived things that had the potential to flatten you. What you haven’t been taught is how to bring that same competence inward — how to lead yourself the way you already lead everyone else.

That’s the work. And you don’t have to do it alone.

If you’re ready to close your own gap, I’d love to talk with you. I’m giving away one mentoring package this month to a woman who is done trying to do it on her own and is ready to be tamed — I mean it, tamed on the inside, so the outside finally matches. Hit reply or grab time on my calendar, and let’s talk about what that could look like for you.

I’m rooting for you.