Trust what you've been given to build
Dear leader,
Stop carrying what you are building as if no one is allowed to see it yet.
There is a difference between the moment something is finished and the moment it is being built. We celebrate the first. We rarely talk about the second. The season of building in the middle of not knowing. The part when the outcome isn't visible yet and things are uncertain.
In the fall of 2020 when I was forming Yogamazia, I was also sitting with something I could not fully name yet — watching my eldest daughter navigate one of the hardest seasons of her life. In a way, Yogamazia became part of her healing — though I could not have known that then. I was still showing up to my corporate job every day, forming a business I could not yet fully explain, moving toward something I could feel but not yet see. But I didn’t wait until it all made sense or until she was okay to start. I could not. The leading came before the proof did. So I moved and started making plans to leave that corporate job to make it work.
The studio opened in spring 2021 while she was still healing and I kept building anyway.
In the summer of 2022 she left for college. I could not take her because my emotions were too high. My husband made the drive with her and helped her move in while I stayed behind. I had to trust in something I could not see yet, the same way I had trusted when I formed the business, the same way she was trusting as she walked toward a future neither of us could fully see for her.
Earlier this spring I closed the studio with a clarity I had not expected to allow the business to evolve beyond what four walls could hold. My daughter also graduates college this month.
Two of her chapters have bookended two of mine. Neither of us waited for proof before we moved. And now we are both standing at a new edge. Both of us being asked to trust what we have been given to build before we can see where it leads.
I see the same in the women I support.
I recall one woman specifically who started working with me as her doula just over a month before her birthing time. She had mapped her birth preferences, booked her birthing center, and chosen her midwives. She had built her plan carefully and she trusted it.
Then week 39 arrived with elevated blood pressure readings and everything changed. What followed was four days of labor induction in a hospital room that looked nothing like what she had imagined. On day four, exhausted by it all, she texted me: I can't do this anymore. I'm so tired. That text was not a breakdown. It was the moment she let herself be witnessed in the middle of it. Right there, in the hardest hour, she allowed someone to see exactly where she was.
Together with her partner and her care team, she found her voice. She asked for what she needed: lower Pitocin levels, rest, pain relief. She made the decision to have a Cesarean on day five - not from defeat but from clarity. I was in that operating room and watched her welcome her son to earth.
By week four postpartum she was back to planning marathon training and navigating a combination feeding plan with confidence. One year later, she invited my family and I to celebrate her son's first birthday.
The plan she built was not what carried her through. The willingness to be seen mid-uncertainty was.
Not underestimating herself. Not waiting until she figured it out before allowing others to walk alongside her. But thriving together because you cannot thrive in isolation. Not as a parent. Not as a leader. But as a woman building something real in the middle of a season that does not yet show you who you’re becoming.
How do you trust what you've been given to build?
Name what you are building to one safe person. Not for feedback or validation. Just to say it out loud to someone who will not try to redirect or minimize it. The act of naming it breaks the isolation that makes uncertainty feel like failure.
Separate the proof from the practice. Write down one thing you did toward what you are building. Not what it produced, but what you did. The return on your investment will come. Your job right now is to keep showing up for the work.
Observe who you are becoming in the process. The building changes you before it produces anything visible. That change is not nothing. It is the whole point and being intentional along the way is how you remain authentic.
Where is one place in your life right now where you are building something real and need to stop carrying it entirely alone? Maybe it is a pregnancy you have not told your manager about yet because you are afraid of what it will cost your career. Maybe it is a business you are growing in the margins of a life that is already full. Maybe it is a version of yourself you are becoming while the people around you are still waiting for the old one.
Whatever it is, you do not have to have it all figured out to let someone see where you are. Being witnessed in the not-yet is not weakness. It is the most honest form of presence there is.
My daughter does not know what comes next in her path. Neither do I with mine. But we are both still moving.
That is the practice. That is the presence.
From my desk to yours,
Dr. Michelle El Khoury
