The Ask I Finally Made

Spoiler: she said yes.

For six years I’ve attended the Idaho Summit in Twin Falls. One day, personal and professional development, and I leave lit up every time.

For just as long, I wanted to present there.

I never asked.

Here’s what was actually running:

Two versions of me were available every single year that Summit came around. One version knew exactly how asking would go. Rejection, or being seen as too unrealistic for wanting it in the first place. So she didn’t ask.

Not from cowardice. From a decision made so far below conscious thought it never registered as a decision at all.

That’s a M.U.D.

A Misguided Unconscious Decision. Not a character flaw. A conclusion, drawn once, running on repeat, long after the moment that produced it disappeared.

This year, a different version of me showed up.

I messaged Cari, the woman who built the Summit. She said check back in June. I did. She said she was busy, check in later. I did that too. We finally scheduled a face to face at a local coffee shop. Turns out we wrote two different days in our calendars.

The familiar version reads a missed appointment as an answer already given. A reason to stop, politely, before being told to.

The other version showed up anyway.

We met today. She’s thrilled I want to speak. She said yes. There’s still a committee that has to approve it, so the story isn’t finished.

But here’s the part that’s already true, no matter what they decide: the asking happened. The persisting happened. The refusal to read a delay as a no happened.

That’s not confidence. Confidence is a feeling, and feelings are unreliable narrators of what’s actually happening underneath. This was a different identity, running a different script, whatever I happened to feel in the moment.

The Familiar Road vs The Foreign Road

This is what the Two Roads framework is actually pointing at. Not two versions of a personality. Two different roads available at the exact same fork, and a nervous system that defaults to the one it already knows, every time, unless something interrupts it.

In the POWERS framework, Perception comes first. Before Ownership. Before Wisdom, Engagement, Resolve, and Sharing. It comes first because you cannot choose the Foreign Road while you’re still perceiving through the Familiar Road.

You cannot rewrite a story you don’t know you’re telling.

The version of me who didn’t ask for six years wasn’t short on desire. She was seeing through a story that made asking read as dangerous. Once the seeing changed, the asking stopped requiring courage.

It became the next available action.

The story you don’t realize you’re telling

This is the layer I’m working with over the next four weeks, starting July 30th. The Perception Experiment: one Story Circle a week, one Perception lesson, weekly Belief Repatterning and Neuroplasticity sessions, daily Breath Enhanced Emotional Processing practice between sessions.

Twenty people. Four weeks. $87.

It’s the work underneath the asking. The seeing that has to shift before anything downstream gains traction.

Details and enrollment here: → I’m ready to see differently