We disqualify ourselves before anyone else gets the chance to. We shrink the ask, talk ourselves out of the room, edit the email down to nothing, and call it being realistic. There is a name for that quiet little no we say on our own behalf. Self-elimination. And I have come to believe it is the most expensive sentence most of us will ever speak.

I know it intimately, because I built a career around it. I am a producer. For years I was the person behind other people, making other people famous and other companies money, brilliant at staying out of my own way by staying out of my own light. I was the scripted girl. I knew my lane. I stayed in it.

The idea for my book came to me while I was brushing my teeth. Not on a stage, not in a meeting. At my bathroom sink on an ordinary morning, foam in my mouth, when the thought just arrived: write the book. It was clear, and it was mine.

And then I did the thing I had done my whole life. I pre-rejected it. I waited 359 days to start.

359 days of not yet, not ready, who am I to. I counted them later. That number still stops me cold, because it is the most honest proof I have of how this works. I almost talked myself out of the very thing I am now building my life around.

I finally started. The book is called ALL THEY CAN SAY IS NO. And this newsletter, Asking Anyway, is me refusing to wait 359 days ever again, building the rest of it out loud, with you watching.

I am turning Goldilocks Productions, my own company, into an independent media empire that tells stories about badass women. And I am done staying behind the scenes of my own life. So every other week I am going to bring you the real thing. The asks I am making right now. What is working, what is faceplanting, what I am learning as I go. And one move you can take into your own life that same week. Not a highlight reel. Not advice from someone who has it all figured out. Field notes from a woman doing the thing while she writes to you about it.

Here is what I believe, all the way down. You are more ready than the fear is telling you. The thing standing between you and what you want is rarely the other person’s no. It is the no you say first, for them.

This work does not promise outcomes. It promises expansion. You will not always get the yes. You will always get bigger.

So if you have ever waited to be picked, edited an email down to nothing, or told yourself “that is not for me” before you even tried, you are in the right place. Welcome. I am so glad you are here, and I do not want to do this in front of you. I want to do it with you.

So if this is landing, do three things:

1. Follow along and subscribe, so you never miss what comes next.

2. Share it with the woman (or man) in your life who has been waiting for permission they could have given themselves all along.

3. Come be part of this. We are becoming a community of people who have stopped saying no to themselves, and there is a seat here with your name on it.

Reply and tell me the one ask you have been sitting on. I read every single one.

Stop pre-rejecting yourself. Start asking anyway.

Kristen