You Don’t Need Motivation. You Need A Marcie.

I just got off the phone with one of my oldest and dearest friends, Jessica. She is an actress and an entrepreneur, which means she lives somewhere between auditions and invoices.

She told me that an acquaintance once gave her this advice: if you are having difficulty getting something done, give it to your assistant. They will handle it efficiently and effectively.

Jessica does not have an assistant. So she invented one: Marcie.

Marcie is the diligent, no-nonsense, does-not-need-a-snack-break version of Jessica. When something feels overwhelming or tedious or mildly terrifying, Jessica hands it to Marcie and Marcie always figures it out.

I laughed. Then I stopped laughing, because I realized I had spent most of my career with a built-in Marcie. I just never noticed her.

In live entertainment, accountability is not a mindset practice. It is a structural fact.

Opening night was on sale before rehearsals even began. The date was fixed. The audience was coming. Athletes get injured. Performers get sick. Monster trucks break down. The show goes on anyway. That pressure was not something I manufactured, it was engineered into the system around me. A team, a run of show, contingency plans way past plan B, a room full of people whose jobs depended on everyone else doing theirs.

And I was very good under that kind of pressure.

What I get now that I did not fully appreciate then was that I was not just performing under pressure, I was being held by it. The deadlines, the teams, the vendors, the audience, the boss (aka my Dad), they were doing accountability work I never had to do myself.

The show was not won on opening night. It was won in rehearsal halls that smelled of sweat, exhaust, and manure. In early morning conditioning sessions when no one was clapping. In the repetition that happens long before any lights come up. Preparedness is not glamorous. It is disciplined and often boring. And it was always held in place by external structures.

This is the thing we do not say plainly enough about the in-between.

It is not just that the work is harder or lonelier or more ambiguous, though it is all of those things. It is that the system that used to make you accountable, the clear scoreboard, the financial targets, the KPI’s, the launch date, the colleague who needed your part before she could do hers, that system is gone. And that can feel destabilizing. 

High-achieving women are rarely afraid of hard work. That is how we got here. We are afraid of undefined work. Work without a drumroll, without a metric, without anyone watching. It is hard  to motivate in a vacuum when we are used to being motivated in a very loud, very well-staffed room.

So what do you actually do when the structure is not built-in?

Find your board. Say your goals, wants, and wishes out loud to a trusted circle. When they follow up, you need to have an answer. Treat them like investors and show up with a detailed report.

Make promises to yourself and mean them.  I schedule the work like it has an audience and I create the deadline before the deadline exists. I know exactly how hard I am to please, which means I really do not want to let myself down. Turns out I am a pretty effective boss.

Ask for help and be specific. People are not just willing to share their expertise. They are proud to. But you have to ask, and vague gets you nowhere. "Can I pick your brain?" is not a question. "Can I have 20 minutes to talk through X?" is.

Stay curious and do the research. Some tasks take me longer now. That used to frustrate me. I have made peace with it. The learning is happening inside the doing.

Go find the room. Workshops, courses, seminars, salons. When you are inside an organization, learning comes to you. On your own, you have to go get it. I treat that like a standing appointment, not an optional one.

And I have made peace (most of the time, anyway) with the fact that the metrics are softer right now. Growth in the in-between is often invisible, foundational. The kind that does not show up on a scoreboard yet. That does not mean it is not happening. It means you have to decide to believe in it before you have proof.

The lights do not create excellence. They reveal it.

When the opportunity swings back around, and it will, you will not rise because of adrenaline. You will rise because you practiced when no one was watching.

Even if you had to build your own Marcie to make yourself show up.

From Your Biggest Champion,

Nicole