💧 A drop of preframe is worth a gallon of reframe

⏱️ Reading time: 5 minutes

Welcome to Fearless — my weekly-ish newsletter where I share leadership insights and honest advice for women of color in social impact navigating power, career, and change.

Quick update from my slow season: I had an epic 40-ish birthday pool party planned for today. My milestone birthday, finally happening a full year late. Or so I thought.

Enter Tropical Storm Dolly (no relation to Dolly Parton, may she rest in power), which rolled in right as Puerto Rico was wrapping up a brutal summer drought. Bad news for my pool party. Genuinely good news for the island, which has been living through a water crisis that corrupt government made so much worse than it needed to be. So — mixed feelings, pero bueno.

Have you ever had a plan you were so set on, so looked forward to, get completely rearranged by something entirely out of your control?

Here's the part I actually want to talk about: it hadn't rained all summer. Drought, remember? And yet, some part of me had quietly been expecting it anyway — like I knew, on some level, that a milestone birthday pool party was exactly the kind of thing the universe likes to mess with. So when the storm actually showed up, my mood shifted from "upset" to "okay, well, that tracks" in about thirty seconds.

That's not because I don't feel disappointment. I do. It's because I'd already done the work before the rain started falling.

Reframing is what most of us are taught: something bad happens, and then you go looking for the silver lining after the fact. It works, but it's slow, and some days you just don't have the bandwidth to dig for the lesson while you're still standing in the wreckage of Plan A.

Preframing is different — it's deciding, ahead of time, that the plan you're excited about might not survive contact with reality, and making a little room for that possibility before you need it. It doesn't mean you expect the worst. It just means you're not betting your whole nervous system on one outcome.

This has taken me years and years to build, honestly. It's not a switch you flip. But I promise it gets easier with practice — and I'll also say, a birthday party is about as low-stakes as this gets. I'm not trying to flatten what preframing looks like when the stakes are higher — a layoff, a diagnosis, a relationship ending. This is real grief. Your emotions are valid there, full stop, and giving yourself grace matters more, not less, the higher the stakes are. This is just the smallest possible version of the practice.

There's a name for this in coaching work, and it's actually baked right into what I named this newsletter and our business after: leaning into your fears. Not avoiding them, not white-knuckling past them — actually sitting down and asking, calmly, what's the worst that could realistically happen here? Not as a morbid spiral. As a strategic move. Once you've genuinely looked at the worst case, named it, and thought through what you'd do if it landed, it loses a huge amount of its grip on you.

That's inner work and outer work at the same time, which is exactly why it matters for leadership.

Inner, because you're building your own capacity to sit with discomfort without flinching away from it.

Outer, because you're the one in the room who's already thought a few steps ahead when everyone else is still catching up to the bad news.

That combination is what keeps you steady instead of spiraling. It's a different skill than optimism. Optimism hopes the storm won't come. Preframing has already looked at the storm and knows what it's going to do about it.

Practically speaking: the party isn't canceled, it's postponed to next weekend. Tonight, while it rains sideways outside, a handful of friends are still coming over — cozier, smaller, candlelit. Next weekend, we do the big version. Somehow I get both, plus a few extra days to stretch my birthday into September, and an excuse to book myself a spa day. That's not me finding a silver lining under duress — that's the plan I'd half-expected all along, just running.

🧭 The tool: Odyssey Planning

One tool I come back to constantly with coaching clients is the Odyssey Plan from Designing Your Life: instead of one rigid life plan, you sketch three different plausible versions of your next few years, side by side, before you need any of them. It's preframing, structured.

I love this exercise because it's fun and creative, rather than rigid and linear, and it takes the pressure off finding "the right answer." Most of us walk into a crossroads moment assuming there's one correct path and we just have to be smart enough, or brave enough, to find it. The Odyssey Plan dismantles that with joy and possibility. You're not choosing the right life. You're sketching three good ones — the one you're already on, the one you'd build if that path disappeared tomorrow, and the one you'd choose if money and other people's opinions weren't a factor — and then noticing what shows up in more than one of them.

That overlap is usually the real information. Here's what a real coaching client said:

You tend to come out of it lighter — not because you've solved anything, but because you can finally see you were never actually choosing between "right" and "wrong." You were choosing between different flavors of a life that could work.

​→ Check out the Odyssey Planning Template​

You don't need a storm to do this exercise. But if you've got one, it's as good a nudge as any.

Warmly,
Maya 🧡

P.S. A small personal note tucked in here: this is only the second birthday party I've ever had. I grew up in a home where we stopped celebrating birthdays, and I had unfortunately internalized that celebrating myself was selfish and vain. There's a lot of deprogramming I had to do to get here, so even a rained-out birthday party still feels like something worth fighting to keep. More on that another time.

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💛 Hecho con amor en el archipiélago de Puerto Rico 🇵🇷 | 1607 Avenida Ponce de Léon, GM6 PMB165, San Juan, Puerto Rico 00909