Terri responded at 6:22 this morning.
I know the exact time because I was already awake, staring at the ceiling, running through the hierarchy of possible responses. The best case: enthusiastic yes, let’s get coffee. The worst case: polite deflection. The truly worst case: no response at all, which is its own kind of answer. I had prepared myself for all three. I had not prepared myself for what she actually said.
“Leigh! I was literally just talking about you last week. Yes, absolutely. How about Thursday at 2? I’ll call you.”
Seventeen words. Exclamation point and everything. No hesitation, no “let me check my schedule,” no carefully worded three-day delay. She just said yes.
And then she added: “Also, good for you.”
I have been thinking about those three words for eleven hours now. Good for you. She doesn’t know what I’m planning. She doesn’t know about the 60-Day Save or the spreadsheet or the blog or any of it. All she knows is that I said “going independent” in a text message, and her instinct was good for you. Like it was obvious. Like this is what I should be doing.
I don’t know what to do with that yet.
Here’s my problem. The call is tomorrow. Thursday at 2. And I realize, sitting here at the kitchen table with my laptop open and a completely blank document titled “Terri call notes,” that I have not actually figured out what I’m asking her.
I know what I want to ask. I want to ask: is the 60-Day Save a real thing? Will someone pay $12,000 for me to come in and tell them how to not lose the accounts they’re about to lose? I’ve been doing this work for 24 years inside companies, and I think I can do it as an outsider. But thinking and knowing are different currencies and I’ve been spending a lot of the first one.
That’s what I want to ask. But that’s not how conversations work. I can’t call a woman I haven’t spoken to in three years and open with my pricing model. Or I could, but that’s not what she said yes to. She said yes to twenty minutes with someone who’s thinking about a change. Not a pitch meeting.
So what am I actually preparing for?
I started a list. Things Terri might know that I don’t. How she got her first client. Whether she missed the salary or just the certainty. How long it took before she stopped introducing herself by her old title. Whether she ever sat in a parking lot and reconsidered the whole thing.
The list got long. I had to cut it. Twenty minutes is twenty minutes and I’ve sat through enough meetings to know that twenty means fifteen if you’re being respectful and twenty-five if the conversation is actually good.
I picked three questions. The ones I can’t answer by reading another article or listening to another podcast.
Then I closed the laptop and sat there for a while, because something else is bothering me. Doug walked through the kitchen around 7 and asked if I wanted eggs. I said sure. He made eggs. We ate them. He went upstairs to his office. A completely normal morning in a house where one person is secretly preparing for a phone call that might be the beginning of leaving her career, and the other person is thinking about eggs.
I’m not being fair to him. I know that. He’s not thinking about eggs. He’s thinking about whatever he thinks about, which is plenty, and he deserves more credit than I give him when I’m being dramatic about this. But the fact remains that I’ve now told a former colleague, the internet, and a spreadsheet about this plan before I’ve told my husband. And every day that gap gets wider, it gets harder to explain why it exists.
I’ll deal with that. Not tonight. Tonight I need to figure out how to spend twenty minutes with Terri without sounding like I’m asking her to validate something I’ve already decided, or like I’m asking her permission to decide.
There’s a version of this conversation where I’m honest. Where I say: I have one idea, it’s specific, I think it’s good, and I need someone who’s done this to tell me what I’m not seeing. That’s the version I want to be capable of. I’m not sure I am yet.
Tomorrow at 2. I’ll let you know.