💛 Hey friend,

Let me be real with you for a sec: I love this work, but sometimes it costs me a lot.

My favorite people's biggest moments – birthdays, babies, career milestones, etc. – I miss many of them.

(I’m betting you know exactly what I’m talking about)

So when I found myself in LA, with one day off amid the whirlwind of the 2026 Joy Tour, and my best friend called and said, Can you help me with my event, I said yes. Immediately.

She’s a badass events consultant, and was hosting an auction to raise money for the LA school system. I figured I'd be in the back, refilling lemonade or something, wearing sneaks and jeans, and staying out of the way.

Then, I got there.

"Surprise,” she said. “I'm gonna need you to be Vanna White.”

So there I was. Dead tired. My first day off in I-don't-know-how-long. Front and center in a room of 400 strangers, and suddenly needing to give much more than I thought I had left.

If you’re a leader, you’ve been there. Tired, off-kilter, already giving all you’ve got, and yet, the moment asks you to turn it up anyway.

Here’s how I go there, when needed.

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“Bitch, This Is Not About You.”

That's the thought I kept coming back to.

The parents in that room were the exact high-powered, crazy successful, people who fly me around the world to work with them. But in this setting, they had no idea who I was. Which I won’t lie – was kind of a trip.

Going from a position of power – where everyone knows they’re there to talk to me – to suddenly being a no-faced Vanna White, where no one has a clue what I do (or that I’m kind of a big deal) was jarring.

But here’s the thing about leadership, and I know you’ve been here too: It doesn’t matter what’s going on with your ego.

Your job is to be laser-focused on the north star. And the north star, always, is to be of service to the transformation that’s happening for the people in the room.

Whether it’s employees, investors, or a room full of slightly-tipsy SoCal moms – doesn’t matter. Sometimes (okay… often) you need to go beyond yourself in search of the thing that everyone else in the room needs from you.

That’s the hard part of leadership. But it’s also where the magic is ✨

When I’m mid-facilitation, there is no ego. I'm a container. The only question that matters to me in those moments is: What do I have available in my wheelhouse to get us to the North Star?

That night, the north star was simple: support my friend, raise money, and use the skill that so often keeps me away from the people I love, in order to be of service to one.

That meant one thing: leverage the energy in the room.

People were wasted (it was a wine auction). And to honor the North Star, I had to lean into that – get louder, get rowdier, run from one side of that room to the other holding giant QR codes, and basically heckle 400 less-than-sober wealthy Santa Monicans into pushing their donations further than they’d originally planned.

It meant pushing myself further too.

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When It’s Over, You Need To Come Back To Yourself

As leaders, we all carry a lot. The nature of my role is that I’m often the person people talk to when they can’t talk to anyone else.

When a company’s at risk of missing payroll, I hear about it. Co-founder fracture, I hear about it. If a founder loses a baby, I’m often the only person who knows about it in their professional lives.

It’s heavy shit.

And if you're reading this, you carry a version of that too. Probably longer and further than is fair for anyone to ask of you.

Nobody tells you how incredible you are for doing that. So this is me telling you: you're genuinely magnificent. And for your sake, and the sake of every person you serve, you need to be putting that weight down sometimes.

One of the most useful things I've ever learned came from a famous psychoanalyst (and friend) named Rita Lynn.

She taught me this technique, and I now use it every time I leave an intense experience.

She called it “dropping people off.”

On the ride back to my hotel after a big event, as the car moves through a city I mentally “drop off” people at points along the way. That person I’m still thinking about – I let them out at the corner. The one whose energy I’m still holding – I leave them at the tree. Etc.

One by one, I “drop them off,” until I've put everyone down, and returned to myself.

It sounds simple, but it works. And it’s important because the weight of a room doesn't automatically lift when you leave it.

You have to choose to set it down.

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A Lesson From The Spartans

I was talking about all of this with a friend recently, and he mentioned a story from history I think you might like.

In Steven Pressfield’s Gates of Fire, about the famous stand of the three-hundred Spartans, he says that before they went into battle, Spartan men used to break a twig in half. One piece, they carried with them. The other, they left with the wagon train, and when the battle was done, they would return to the wagon, and collect their other half.

The move was part utilitarian. By counting the unclaimed sticks, the army knew how many they’d lost in the chaos of any given day.

But there was another purpose too; A ceremonial reuniting of the two parts of each man’s self.

The half he carried with him – the blood half – represented the kind of person he had to be to survive the strains of war. The other half – the wine half – was the part of him that was civilized, that loved beauty, and felt fear, remorse, or tenderness.

By breaking the twig in two, he acknowledged that both parts existed, and that he was leaving one behind for the time being. In doing so, he gave himself permission to focus, while trusting that when the fight was over, if he survived, he would come back and be whole again.

A common problem for leaders is that we forget to reclaim our other half.

We spend so long in the fray, carrying everyone else, that some of us forget we even have another half. Or worse – we worry that if we tried to reclaim it, all we’d get back is stick dust.

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Bottom Line...

One common thread between me and the people I work with is that we are all very comfortable and willing to walk away from our center.

We do this because the impact we create when we go beyond ourselves creates so much meaningful change for others.

It's a blessing and a curse.

And the leaders I respect the most have figured out both sides of it: how to go beyond themselves when the moment calls for it, and how to find their way back when it's done.

💛 Angela

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PS. My bestie is a living legend in the experiential event production space. If you're looking for a top-tier producer for events (fundraisers, competitions, auctions, galas, parties) — hit me up and I'll connect you.