The Day I Knew Exactly What to Say — and Couldn't Say a Word

A conversation with Cassandra Crowley Mayo on her podcast Is Your Way In Your Way?

You don't notice the coat until you take it off.

For 25 years I wore my employer's brand like a second skin. Their voice. Their colours. Their calendar, booked a year in advance.

Then a restructuring ended it — on someone else's terms.

And the calendar emptied overnight.

That's where most people expect the story to get hard. The empty calendar. The lost title. The question of what comes next.

For me, the hard part came three days later.

I sat down for a VP interview. The kind of room I'd walked into a hundred times. I'd led talent acquisition. I'd hired people. I knew exactly how an interview works, from both sides of the table.

And I drew a blank.

Not nerves. A blank. Not one intelligent word came out of me. If anything, I said the most self-sabotaging things I possibly could.

I didn't need them to call me back to know how it went.

Walking home in the rain, it became clear: this was never about another executive job. It was about a life that needed to change.

That moment is the whole reason I do the work I do now.

Because here's what I learned the hard way. Knowing what to do and being able to do it are two different things. The gap between them is almost never a skills gap — I had the skills, I'd built a career on them. What froze me was a belief running quietly underneath, one my subconscious had decided was true a long time ago.

That's the layer I work in.

On this episode, Cassandra and I go there together. We talk about:

• Selling encyclopedias door to door with $100 to my name — and why selling is a skill that serves you for the rest of your life

• The 25-year corporate career, and the mentors who hired me before I "had the papers"

• The coat: how you slowly stop being fully yourself inside a big organization, and what's left when the brand comes off

• Nine years sober, and the single hypnosis session that changed everything in one afternoon

• How belief becomes emotion, emotion becomes action, and action becomes your life

• What hypnosis actually is — and what it isn't (no, it's not the stage show)

• The belief I'd give my 20-year-old self as a gift: you matter

If you've ever looked successful on paper and felt stuck anyway — if your life looks like a 10 from the outside and runs closer to a 7 on the inside — I think this one will land.

You're not broken. You never were. You're exactly where you are, for good reasons. And from here, you get to choose something else.

🎧 Listen to the full episode here:https://www.youtube.com/live/oVzxk12QkLI?si=vKaqWzKMl2lc6mOM

And if something in it stirs, faites-moi un petit coucou. I read every one.

Hypnotiquement vôtre, Janylène xo