Ten days before Christmas, my husband fell in love with a lab-hound in a pink rhinestone collar. I can’t blame him; she’s fetching. Her eyes are so intelligent, they remind me of Virginia Woolf’s.

I suppose I’m partly responsible; beyond our travel-work schedules, Dominic and I are terrible at syncing our calendars. Roughly two times a year, we double book; it’s annoying but not annoying enough for either of us to have remedied the situation yet.

“Forget you had a grandmother?” It’s what mine always said to me when I waited too long to call or stop by.

It wasn’t that I hadn’t been thinking about her, I had.

But I was a twenty something year old English professor and it was the end of the semester, which always landed me in scarcity around time. I wouldn’t even call to say hi or stop in and check on her like I normally did because I’d so much rather go over for what usually amounted to at least an hour, if not an entire afternoon.

When Tamsen Webster invited me to be a VIP at the Boston Opera House on October 12, 2017 for TEDx Cambridge, I started packing. Tamsen had previously asked me if I’d be interested in weighing in on the talks, providing much needed feedback to the participants as they began the several month process of distilling their areas of expertise into succinctly prepared–18 minutes or less– talks deemed worthy of TED’s tagline, “ideas worth spreading.”

“After all,” she said. “This is what you do.”

My friend, Cheryl, invited me to hang with some friends I hadn’t seen in a while when we ran into each other outside our kids’ school at the end of last winter.

When I politely declined, she asked me what was up…if everything was o.k.

Everything wasn’t o.k. It was the middle of a New York winter, the holidays had been stressful, the side of political conversations at every meal had given me chronic indigestion, friends didn’t seem to understand me anymore, and, in my business, I had to make some tough decisions I wasn’t expecting to have to make so soon

A week or two ago, I had a memoir chapter submission due to my writing coaches. A threesome of writers, this particular configuration has been submitting to each other twice a month for about a year. You’d think it’d be old hat by now but when I attached the document to the e-mail I’d written, I felt incredibly anxious. I was reluctant to click send.

I grew up in Astoria, Queens; an Italian enclave, just outside New York City, my grandparents lived there too. My paternal grandmother’s brothers and sisters lived down the road apiece, in the once hardscrabble neighborhood of Ravenswood. Fireworks were legal in the mid 70’s, though tricky to get and dangerous to use, and the dark-alley Ravenswood streets seemed the perfect place for my great-uncle Pat–short for Pasquale–and the “old-enough” contingent of his nephews and sons to play with whatever fireworks he’d managed to score.

I should have suspected that starting a business would be the single-most important creative endeavor of my life to date—second only to gestating, birthing, nursing, and rearing children– but for the first two years, I didn’t.

For the first two years, I worried more than I worked.

Then I got un-stuck.

I was in The Film Practice with Dan Cordle at the Helm. I’d enrolled to get over the fears I had about being on camera. I saw it as the next right-business move.

Ron Tite, award winning writer, creativity, and branding expert, and author of the insightful new book Everyone’s an Artist, took the stage at last year’s Heroic Public Speaking Live admitting he had no preconceived notions about what to expect when power couple Amy and Michael Port, the hosts of the event, had invited him. He followed up his frank admission with an apt joke about all of the mothers in the audience who’d told their families they’d be at a “conference for work” –said in a way that communicated all the bore and dread generally deserving of such events—and ended up dancing in the aisles and hooting and hollering at the prospect of taking the stage in a big way while their partners filled the void at home.

When my then business mentor, New York Times bestselling author Michael Port, prompted me to explore this question, my answers led me to the single most important element of myself that I needed to change to get out of my own way and get my business moving in the direction I wanted it to go.

Killer confidence.   We all want it. On good days, it manifests itself as the feeling that we’re invincible. On more challenging days, we’d be thrilled with good enough. When we’re feeling confident, we perform. When we aren’t feeling confident, some of us perform anyway, getting confidence as we go (if we’re lucky). The rest of us hide.