85. The Power of Now: Leadership Happens Before You Feel Ready

You have the skills, the experience, and the ideas, but something is holding you back from speaking up, taking the lead, or stepping into visibility. You wait for the perfect moment, the right level of confidence, or the ideal circumstances. What you might not realize is that waiting isn’t protecting you. It’s quietly eroding your authority and delaying the very confidence and leadership you are trying to build.

In this episode, I explore why confidence is built through action, not in advance. I share how emotional tension, uncertainty, and fear are signals to move, not stop. Using real examples from my coaching clients and my own experiences, I show how acting in the present moment builds self trust, authority, and leadership muscle. This episode explains why later is rarely strategy and how to practice leadership in the here and now.

You’ll learn how to step into discomfort without shrinking, regulate your nervous system under pressure, make decisions despite uncertainty, and trust your authority even when it feels scary. Leadership isn’t built in the future. It is practiced moment by moment, in the now.

Interested in working with me? Book a free 1:1 consultation here!


What You’ll Learn from this Episode:

  • Why confidence is built through action, not waiting.

  • How waiting quietly erodes authority and leadership presence.

  • How to act despite fear, uncertainty, or emotional tension.

  • Why the most powerful women stop letting fear decide.

  • How to build self trust by engaging with the present.

  • Strategies to move in the here and now without overthinking.

  • How to expand leadership capacity through imperfect action.

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Full Episode Transcript:

If this sounds like you, I want you to know that this is one of the biggest patterns I see in the high-achieving women leaders I coach every single day. This is what it sounds like. “I'll speak up later. I'll be bolder after we make that big sale. I'll ask for more once I prove myself. I'll set expectations after I build more credibility. I'll trust myself after I feel more confident here.”

But here's the problem. Confidence is not built before action. Confidence is built through action. If you are constantly waiting to feel more ready, more confident, more certain, or more prepared before you move, you are delaying the very thing that would build your confidence in the first place. And today, I'm going to show you why. The most powerful women are not the women who feel the least fear. They are the women who stop making fear the decision-maker.

By the end of this episode, you are going to understand why your brain keeps convincing you later is better, why waiting is quietly eroding your authority, and how to start building self-trust and leadership now, not three months from now.

Welcome to The Balanced Leader, hosted by Yann Dang, a Leadership and Life Coach with over 20 years of corporate experience. Drawing from her journey as a former global finance leader and second-generation immigrant, Yann understands the unique challenges women face in male-dominated workplaces.

Each episode offers insights on balancing masculine and feminine energies, mastering soft skills and building emotional intelligence. Join us to transform frustration into empowerment and unlock your authentic leadership potential.

Hey podcast listeners, I have a very powerful episode for you today. And it is all about the Power of Now. I don't know if you've read the book, but the power of now is really something that I have been tuning into because I have been coaching so many women over the last year, and their brains, and our brains, listen, my brain too, our brains love later. And I'm going to talk to you exactly why this is because this keeps coming up when I'm coaching women and the pushback that I get. And I want you to be on to yourself because this is really powerful. If you get this episode and you are able to take action now versus later, this is going to be so powerful for you in your life for the rest of your life. Okay, so let me tell you about this.

Oftentimes when I'm coaching clients and I say, hey, you should have that conversation with that senior leader. It is important. It sounds like you have a lot to share. They will oftentimes say, let me wait for that big deal to happen. Let me wait for that reorg to happen. There will always be something. And I always tell my leaders to use their discernment. Sometimes, there is a good reason to wait, but oftentimes, and I would say 90% of the time, our brain loves later. Why? Because later feels safer, later feels cleaner, later feels more controlled. Because your nervous system believes if I wait longer, maybe I can avoid discomfort. We want to outweigh or delay the emotional discomfort that we may be experience even thinking about doing this thing, making that move.

But most of the time, later is not strategy. It's emotional avoidance dressed up as wisdom. It is our way of self-protecting. And we're so sophisticated. Women are so sophisticated. We are going to think up the very best reasons why later is better and we are going to say, hey, later is going to be better for X and Y reason, right? But I want you to notice this because this is also the thing that is quietly eroding your authority right here and right now.

And there's a big dynamic that happens as we grow up. I think I talk about this and of course, it's general because, you know, you might have had a little bit of a different upbringing, but this conditioning happens to a lot of women. We are told to be safe, be careful, to be ladylike, to take our time. Whereas boys are meant to be rough and tumble and go for it and, you know, not really think about the outcomes of everything, which is not always great. But in this scenario, it is helpful when they're learning.

When you're in a corporate space and you're learning and you are taking up space and you are able to like be more visible with folks, right? This is where men's attitude towards not overthinking and making that move and learning from it actually helps them to learn faster, how the dynamics work, what's going on here. They're not waiting for perfection. They're not waiting for emotional security. They may not even be as emotional and thinking about the emotions because the reality is women, you know, have a lots more emotions. We have more attunement to things and we have been taught to notice other people's emotions. You know, like, hey, be nice, like you hurt this person's feelings. There's a way that I think little girls take that on even deeper, right?

And I was just catching my daughter the other day. She spilled something all over the floor and she was just so worried about how her father would react, you know? And I was telling her, like, even if he's upset, that's his upset, it's not yours. That's a very big concept to teach a four-year-old, but I was just noticing how much she was worried, not about the here and now that she spilled these things, but that her dad's reaction to it was so scary for her, right? And so I just want you to know that we do have this emotional fear of being vulnerable, being out there in the world. But the reality is the more we avoid that emotional discomfort, that emotional tension, that is going to continue to play out in our lives.

When we are meant to speak up in a meeting that matters, right? If we're not able to embrace that emotional tension and move forward and our brain tells us it's better to wait. What ends up happening is we wait for certainty, we overprepare. We're waiting for that emotional tension to disappear first. And the reality is in high stake rooms, that emotional intensity is just there. It is part of the dynamic, it's part of the context. You are making big decisions. And so you can't wait for the perfect moment. You've got to make your move.

And what's dangerous is women often intellectualize this pattern. They call it being strategic, responsible, and thoughtful. Like I said, we are very sophisticated. But a lot of times, and again, I'm saying this a lot of times it's actually self-protection. It's us not wanting to embrace that emotional tension. The cost is not only the opportunity you missed in the moment. The cost is the authority you've never practiced building because the more you embrace this discomfort, make your move, the better you're able to build your emotional capacity to be in these situations again and again.

So I'm going to share it one more time around men and how they take action, right? One thing I've observed for years in leadership spaces and working with a lot of men. I was usually the only woman in the room. Men often take action before they feel fully ready. They say things like, I might be off and then they'll just go in and say it, right? Whereas women often wait to feel fully ready before they take action. A lot of the women that I coach will literally be like, I need to create a presentation. I need to be able to present my ideas and the data. They're like obsessed with data because they think that the data and having the perfect polished presentation will have them not feeling this emotional tension. They think that they can outperform the emotional vulnerability that they may be feeling in the moment.

So this is not because women are less capable. It's because women are often conditioned to avoid mistakes, rejection, embarrassment, conflict, or even being perceived negatively, especially when you're in a room full of men and the room wasn't built for you. It makes sense that your brain is going to offer you these ideas. But we need to override our own brains if we are playing a game where we want to win, where we're learning to build the muscle of authority. It happens in the here and now.

So the boys get the reps. They move, they try, they fail, they recover. And over time, these men build a relationship with that movement itself. And most oftentimes men have more of that relationship early on in their lives. So here's an important distinction though. Now doesn't mean all impulsive, crazy action, right, is healthy. I am not telling you to not use your judgment and discernment. Reckless movement is not what I'm going for here, but there is something powerful about being willing to engage with the moment instead of endlessly rehearsing for it.

This is the power of now. This is why this moment is so important because I think sometimes when I'm talking to folks, they want to delay, whether it's coaching with me, whether it's making their move, right? They want to say, let me do that in the future. They get so excited and they're like, yeah, okay. And then I'm like, okay, let's get started. And they're like, let's do this later. Let's do this after all these different circumstances.

And the circumstances feel real, but I think it's more the emotional tension that they're feeling. Like really saying, hey, I'm going to engage in investing in coaching for myself. It can feel scary. It can feel scary in your body to be like, whoa, I'm really taking myself this seriously. I'm actually going to invest the time, the money, my ability to do this work, which is actually moving muscles and actually having to put yourself into more emotional tension in order to build the muscle so that it doesn't feel so tense every time.

The real power is not in the future, though. And it's not in the past. I think sometimes people are like, I was so much more confident in the past and they are almost obsessed with their past self or they think in the future when this happens, when, you know, this person is in leadership or there's more women in the room or when I find that perfect job, you somehow outsource your power in the here and now to your future self or to your past self. And that is wasted energy and time because the reality is that you are never more powerful than in the here and now. In the here and now is where your authority gets built. Now is where trust gets built. Now is where leadership gets practiced.

This is not urgency and frantic energy. It's not hustle culture. It's actually slowing down and having a real conscious conversation with yourself and a decision, making a decision that this moment matters, this conversation matters, this decision matters, this version of me matters. It's a way of you embracing the emotional tension and saying, I am ready to be in the here and now and to exercise these muscles versus delaying, procrastinating.

I wanted to share this because a woman in my Command cohort, my six-month container where I coach women. What we do in Command is literally practice this emotional tension. One of the assignments that is really impactful for folks is imperfect action right now, right? And it gets them to take the action.

So this week in our cohort, I was talking to one of our members who started a job and she was literally like, I am not even 90 days in and I've made such an impact, right? Part of her is really working on visibility and she has taken up more space, she has given shared her ideas really powerfully in so much so that her leaders have shared it with other people. And she has decided to show up. Now, does it seem like she's totally not fearful or anything like that? No, she is feeling fear. She's feeling uncertainty. You send that email, you feel uncertainty. You're not getting anything back, you feel uncertainty.

It is the power to hold that uncertainty and still move through it and to catch your brain's thoughts about that uncertainty. Because sometimes we don't know until we know. We don't know the outcome. Sometimes when my clients ask me or say, wow, I don't know, did I, you know, was I too visible? Was I too much? And I oftentimes say, what was the outcome? Was the outcome effective? Not how you feel about what you did, but what was the outcome? Because sometimes our brain and body wants to attach to the feeling and be like, whoa, this was a lot, this is too much.

But if you are focused on the outcome, and sometimes the outcome hasn't happened yet. They're literally like, I don't know, I sent the email, I'm waiting to hear back. And I'm like, okay, as you wait to hear back, remind yourself to celebrate the rep that you did, that you decided to move forward. And in this moment of uncertainty, you can also create calmness and safety inside yourself. And that is how you start building that self-trust even in uncertainty.

And one of the thoughts that I've been working on myself as I am building my business, making lots more offers, sharing all of these things, having open launch dates for a lot of my programs. A lot of times, I'm literally like, here's all this value. Come and get it. And then I wait. And in that waiting can feel really triggering. You're like waiting and you're like, did it work? Did it not work? I don't know. You start questioning yourself.

But this is the deeper emotional work. I want you to practice this because as you take more and more action in the here and now, most women believe uncertainty means don't move or something's gone terribly wrong. But powerful leadership requires emotional capacity. A powerful woman learns she can hold both desire and uncertainty at the same time. So I'm going to say it one more time. You can hold desire and uncertainty at the same time.

So you can want more while not fully knowing how it's going to unfold. You can feel fear while still moving. You can feel discomfort without abandoning yourself. The women who advance are not the women who eliminate uncertainty and fear. They are the women who stop requiring certainty before they trust themselves. This is truly about emotional maturity. It's learning how to trust yourself. It's the willingness over readiness. It's about being willing to make that move. And this is how your nervous system expands. This is identity work all wrapped up into all of these concepts, right?

You don't become that person who's willing to risk it, who's willing to cross the line, who's willing to trust herself even in the unknown until you do it again and again and again. And then you learn to trust this version of yourself who is doing this, who is making these moves. This is super important because I'm going to just bring it back to the client that I shared about. Like this woman, she was like, whoa, I haven't even hit my 90 days role. And really in her mind, she was thinking, should I wait? Should I observe longer? Should I understand all the power dynamics?

But instead, I coached her to build credibility now, to take visibility on now, and to clarify expectations now, speaking up now, leading now, building trust now, not through pressure, not through performance, not through domination, through presence. And you can only be present in the here and now because credibility is not built someday. It's built moment by moment. And every moment that you wait to build it, every moment that you wait to speak up and to feel powerful is a moment where you are quietly saying to yourself, I need to wait for more. I need to feel more ready.

So you don't become more self-trusting by waiting. You become more self-trusting by moving with yourself through uncertainty. And the future version of you're waiting for, she is in you now. You just need to tap into her. You need to be like, hey, we're ready now. If we're ready now, what are we going to do in this conversation, in this moment, in this decision, in this uncomfortable action? And maybe the most powerful question you can ask yourself today is not why is it better to wait, but why is it so important and powerful to move now? And to really take that question seriously because I have been having those same conversations with myself. In some ways, I'm like, oh, I don't know. I don't know if I should launch this next group. And I'm like, no, I need to launch it now. I'm going to get better at launching now and opening these groups up to more people by actually building the reps to do so.

And if my mission is to impact a thousand women a year to advance without burning out, I can't wait. These women are waiting for me. They need this work. They need to be able to practice a place where they can actually practice building their authority now, not later, but now. And so if I can ground myself to that mission, to that service, then I will also get very clear on why now is the perfect time and why now is the place where I build this muscle and I build this container and this platform for more and more women to come in versus saying, oh, I'll do it after summer vacation. I'll do it when my kids are a little bit older. If you keep pushing things out, that just becomes your mode of action and you become somebody who waits versus somebody who is powerful in the here and now and who takes action and learns to hold desire and uncertainty at the same time.

A powerful woman does not wait for the perfect future moment. She learns to fully occupy the present moment because now, now is where authority is built. Now is where leadership changes. Now is where your identity expands, not someday, right here, right now.

All right. Well, go out there and use this message and think about yourself today and hold yourself as the most powerful being right in the here and now. Now is the most powerful moment to speak up, to show up, to be in your authority. Go have a beautiful day and know that you are the most powerful right here, right now. I want to hear how this episode landed with you. Feel free to DM me on LinkedIn, stay connected to me, share how all of this is landing for you, but this is so, so important. Have a beautiful day. Take good care. I'll see you next time.

Thank you for being a part of The Balanced Leader community. We hope you found today's episode inspiring and actionable. For more resources and to connect with Yann, visit us at aspire-coaching.co. Until next time, keep leading with confidence and purpose.

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84. How Powerful Women Lead Even When They Feel Fear