Hi Reader,

In German, there’s a saying about our eyes sometimes being bigger than our stomach. I’ve been wondering if the same can happen with creative ideas.

For almost a year, I’ve been working on my book. I chose a Choose Your Own Adventure format. A business novel where you, the reader, make decisions for the main character. Learning leadership not through frameworks, but through lived consequences.

I still think the idea is… quite brilliant.

But somewhere along the way, I realised something uncomfortable. My eyes were bigger than what I could actually chew and digest.

The feedback from a small group of alpha readers has been encouraging. There’s something there. But at the same time, I’ve hit a tension I can’t ignore. I can either go deep into the topic of Unprofessionalism… or I can go wide, building multiple narrative paths that all need to hold together. Doing both, at the level I want, feels like trying to run in two directions at once.

And lately, something else has been happening.

After almost 20 episodes of the Unprofessionalism podcast, I’m starting to see the topic differently. New angles. New contradictions. New questions that feel too important to squeeze into a structure I committed to months ago.

So here I am. Killing another darling.

Maybe not killing but pausing. Stepping back before I turn something I care about into something I just want to finish.

It’s a strange place to be. On one hand, there’s grief. Time invested. Energy poured in. A version of the book that could have been. On the other hand, there’s a sense of relief. Space opening up again. Permission to not have it all figured out yet.

And if I’m honest, that feels oddly aligned with the very thing I’m trying to write about.

Maybe the book becomes something more hands-on. A field guide to becoming unprofessional in a professional world. Maybe it turns into a non-fiction exploration of the invisible obstacles that keep us performing instead of connecting. Or maybe it becomes something else entirely.

I don’t know yet.

And for now, I’m letting that be enough.

🎤 Waiting for you on the Unprofessionalism podcast:

Tramaine has a rule for herself and everyone she manages: what you allow will continue. She learned by watching what happened when she didn't set a boundary, and what happened when she did.

With +15 years of managing teams across industries and seven countries around the globe, she spent a lot of that time being called difficult for doing things like putting her own phone number on an emergency contact list so her junior team members could have Christmas or pushing back against a request that would disrupt her team’s weekend.

Tramaine is a leader who runs toward the hard conversation, takes the consequence that comes with it, and has taken a demotion more than once because she decided the price of staying was higher than the price of leaving. We talked about what it costs to be called difficult as a woman in corporate, how she decides what's worth the fight, and why everything - every choice, every boundary, every stance - has a price. The only question is whether you've made peace with paying it.

🎧 Click here to listen to the interview

📥 Download my 1-page summary

​UP_015_Summary.pdf​

🎧 The workshops work Podcast Club

Next week, the workshops work Podcast Club will gather again around the topic of Play - from different perspectives that may go beyond the standard definition. I hope you'll join us!​

​Click here to find out more about the next gathering.​

That's it from my side. I hope to see you next week!

Myriam