The big news from last week was that I left the house.

gasp (I know.)

For those who don't know: I've been remote since 2006. My previous employer (a behemoth with 700k employees) didn't require me to be on-site. Most of the people I supported were global anyway. Since the pandemic, we've been a one-car household and my wardrobe can best be described as t-shirt and shorts chic.

This was the hardest part of being laid off. Twenty years of producing results for a globally remote team, complete with raises and promotions, suddenly didn't matter. I was told I had to report on-site for any role I interviewed for. Cue fully stubborn Deb. (The bane of my Mom's existence, truly.)

Leaving the house was too real.

Behind a screen, in my home, is safe. Going out to meet people - just to meet people, with no conference or other agenda around it - felt like too much exposure. I couldn't fake my way out of that. So I've avoided in-person meetings as a business owner.

I went to this one because my Coach made a point of telling me she'd be in town (she lives in DC) and had asked me more than a month in advance to commit. And then the day of, I got the time wrong. I thought it started at 11. It started at 10. I rolled in at 10:45, totally confused, into a Connection Table brunch with folx from my Sales/Marketing coaching community.

Besides sampling the glorious fare at French Meadow Bakery & Cafe, I got to meet other entrepreneurs at various stages in their business.

It was wild. Mainly because I showed up as a business owner rather than an unemployed woman fumbling her way along.

That same day I went to pick up Smidge and we stopped at a place I'd been eyeballing since we relocated to the Minneapolis area in 2021. A pizza place that's well known in this neck of the woods but one I'd never experienced. Walking in felt a bit like stepping back in time circa 2007 when I was running karaoke in Houston bars. The self-serve popcorn machine, the TouchTunes jukebox, the sassy bartender... I thoroughly enjoyed the ambiance and the food.

The rest of the week was a whirlwind.

I met my Branding/Design guru idol, Chris Do, on a webinar (he said I'm a bundle of energy), ran several intermediate corporate training sessions beside my personal AI guru Brannon, sent a proposal for another corporate training for a small but mighty People team, spoke on a panel at the Hacking HR Workplace Wellbeing & Mental Health Summit, and best of all, hosted a Friday Jam Session full of new faces and kicka** women ready to make AI their biaaatch.

I ended the week discussing training for a London nonprofit that helps women find jobs after incarceration.

While I dreamed about this being my life, I'm not sure I ever thought it would be possible. I think a part of me was playing chicken with myself, waiting for me to flinch.

None of this is sudden. It's been built day by day - small consistent actions that over time built momentum so I could show up as my business and be recognized as providing something of value.

Turns out the version of me I kept waiting to feel like? She was being built the whole time. I just couldn't see her until I left the house.

Which brings me to what I keep forgetting.

Here's what I keep forgetting: certainty doesn't come first. It comes after.

I kept thinking I'd feel like a business owner one morning, and then I'd start acting like one. That the shift would happen inside me, and then I'd go out and prove it. That's not how it works. The shift happens after you've already been her in real life a few times. Reality has to mirror you back to yourself.

Here's the part that gets me: the thing that did it wasn't the panel. It wasn't the proposal. It wasn't the London call. It was brunch.

Brunch. With people. On a Tuesday.

That's how small the evidence has to be. Not the moment that defines your business. Not the launch. Not the post that finally goes viral. A thing so adjacent to the thing that you almost don't count it. Except it counts. It's the only kind that does.

Every time I wait for the feeling, I'm waiting for something the feeling can't give me. The feeling needs evidence. The evidence has to be small enough to actually happen this week.

So if you're the one with the LinkedIn post in drafts since March. If you're the HR director sitting on the AI policy memo. If you're the would-be solopreneur waiting until you feel ready. You're not behind. You're waiting for the wrong thing to count.

I don’t remember much of this past week (the gift and curse of having ADHD) but here are some links to things that touched, moved, inspired me, or simply made me laugh entirely too hard.

How to get your kids to text you back immediately

That escalated quickly. Who knew all those hours you spent angsting to 90s tunes in your bedroom would finally pay off.

The opposite of fight, flight, freeze, and fawn

Cecelia Mandryk on what your nervous system is actually trying to do when it's not in survival mode. Saving this one for the next time I catch myself white-knuckling a Thursday.

Everybody mambo

Sound on. Trust me. The cure for a slow Monday is exactly this unserious.

Tiny donkey haircut

That's it. That's the link. Ten seconds. You're welcome.

Turns out newsletters don't pay for themselves. Who knew?

This week's partner helps keep the lights on (and has been recommended by folx in my Fractional People People community.)

The AI Report distills the day's most important AI news into one free 5-minute read. No jargon, no filler — just what 400,000+ business leaders need to know before their first meeting.

Subscribe free today

If you have a Claude account and you're running 200-message chats that lose all their context the second you start a new one, this is for you.

If you've ever said the words "Claude doesn't remember anything," this is REALLY for you. Because Claude can. You're just not using the workspace feature that makes it.

Projects is the thing inside Claude that holds your context across every conversation. Your voice guide. Your past work. The rules you keep having to repeat. The stuff about your business. The instructions for how you want Claude to talk to you. You upload it once, and Claude reads it at the start of every chat.

Most of you are paying for this feature and not using it. That's the entire reason I built the guide.

It's the companion to Claude Code for Humans (the one from back in Issue 40). Same format. Same plain language. Same "written for humans, not developers" approach. Walkthrough of what Projects is, who it's actually for, how to set one up, what to put in your knowledge files, and how to write custom instructions (including a sneaky prompt that gets Claude to interview you and write them for you).

The meta-prompt that powers the freebie. The one that makes Projects actually work.

Writing custom instructions from scratch is the part everyone gets stuck on. You sit down to write them, realize you don't know what to write, close the tab. Project never gets used. This skips the stuck.

Paste this into Claude (or any chatbot, really). Let it interview you. Get a working set of custom instructions in under 20 minutes.

(**There is ONE bracket in the Context section you’ll want to fill out**)

ROCO = R, O, C, O. Role, Objective, Context, Output.

Three things make this prompt actually work.

The "catch minimizing language as it happens" line in the Role. Same lesson as Issue 44 - don't ask yourself to notice when you're underselling. Tell the AI to notice it. You'll catch yourself saying "it's just a little newsletter" and Claude will hand it right back, name what you're actually doing, and ask if there's a truer version.

The exit condition in the Output. "If you have enough before question 6, say so." Permission to be done when you're done. The document doesn't have to be perfect. It has to exist.

The shape of the final document. Second person, scannable sections, no preamble. Custom instructions get read at the start of every conversation - they have to be built for that job, not for your benefit reading them once.

Run it. Drop the result into your Project's custom instructions field. You'll have a working Project before you finish your tea.

The Matriarchy Minute is where I spotlight women doing work in AI that you should know about but probably don't.

This week: Jenny Kay Pollock

If you've ever heard "AI won't replace humans, but it will replace humans who don't use AI" and felt your blood pressure spike, this section is the antidote.

Jenny Kay Pollock is the co-founder and co-CEO of WOMEN x AI - a global community building the AI industry as if women belonged there from the start. Not as a side project. Not as a diversity panel. As the actual room.

A few things she's done lately:

What I love about her work: she's not trying to make AI nicer. She's trying to make sure the women already doing this work - founders, board members, engineers, policy leads - get the rooms, the mics, and the investment they should have had years ago. The framing isn't "include us." It's "we're already here, catch up."

If you want into the WOMEN x AI community, the link is in her bio. If you want to follow someone who's been quietly opening doors for hundreds of women in AI while the rest of the internet argued about chatbots, she's the one.

Friday, May 15 | 10:30 AM CDT (30 minutes later than usual this week!)
Friday Jam Session with Joy Prompt Club. 30 minutes. No agenda. Just prompts, play, and people who get it. Open to anyone who wants to join in and has questions or a problem they’re trying to solve. You do not need to be in Joy Prompt Club to benefit from these fantastic humans.

The Executive AI Edge - Digital course (90 minutes) with me and Kate Sargent. $449. For the executive in your life who's nodding along in AI meetings and understanding none of it.

AI Confidential for Teams - The corporate AI training that doesn't sound like corporate AI training. Send the link to whoever's making training decisions at your company.

Joy Prompt Club - My favorite little virtual place in all the interwebz.

AI Confidential Prompt Kits - 10 copy-paste-ready prompt kits for the stuff you actually need help with - resumes, LinkedIn profiles, interview prep, content, career direction, caregiver sanity, all of it.

If the only thing you do this week is one small visible thing - the email, the post, the brunch - that's enough. That counts.

Take care of yourself, take care of each other.

Deb 💜

P.S. If you set up your first Project this week, hit reply and tell me what you put in it. I want to know what your stuff looks like.