The Remarkable We Keep Calling Ordinary
What March 5th gave back
KP Bizdom: You cannot give someone a tool you have refused to pick up yourself.
I walked into the The M Dash Team Bryant Park showroom on March 5th having spent the better part of three weeks preparing to give something to the women who showed up, and I left having received something I didn’t know I still needed.
That’s the honest version of what happened.
The conversation covered three things, and I want to bring them here because they belong in this space, and because saying them out loud in a room full of extraordinary women was, unexpectedly, one of the more healing experiences I’ve had in a long time.
I’ll be honest about something else too: I watched the recording back and cringed at myself more than once. My brain, when it knows it’s trying to hit a specific mark, doesn’t always give me the words I rehearsed, and the analytical reasoning I can sustain for hours in a classroom with minimal notes apparently has a different relationship with a scripted landing point, agh!
Some of my threads dangled, some of my stories didn’t connect the way they were supposed to, and it felt, at moments, like I was trying to stick the landing on a gymnastics routine I had just learned 10 minutes earlier...
Sara Lyon, who moderated with the kind of instinct that only comes from someone who actually knows you, helped me sound as good as MM LaFleur made me feel in the gorgeous olive suit that is so amazing you could sleep in it! That suit is comfortable in the way that good design is always comfortable, the kind that doesn’t ask you to choose between feeling put together and feeling like yourself.
MM LaFleur’s whole mission is built around that idea; that fashion can be functional and powerful, that clothing can shift how you carry yourself, that you deserve to feel as strong and beautiful and present as you need to be to take up space on your own terms.
I have accepted that I cannot go back to the pre-cancer athlete body, the one with energy for days and no nerve pain radiating down my arm; that my curls are doing what they do, and that spending any more than 5 minutes a day in the mirror can still shock me into not wanting to leave the couch. I felt better about my body in that suit than I have in a long time. Loving who I am in the mirror has required real work, and brands that design with intention make that work a little easier.
Also, can I take a moment to gush about their marketing strategy??? As a professor of Integrated Marketing and Communications at NYU, I have spent years watching students hear about relationship and community-based marketing models and ask whether any brand actually pulls it off while still covering CAC, LCV, and ROMI.
MM LaFleur is THE ANSWER I'm going to use in class. It is genuinely one of the smartest strategies I've encountered; a CFO's dream with a real finger on the pulse of what human connection actually means. The way they build community, host these gatherings, and create space for women to connect and invest in themselves simultaneously is something I have been talking about to anyone who will listen because it is that astute and effective.
The first exercise I brought started with the comparison trap, and not the obvious version- it is NOT the scrolling-through-someone-else’s-highlight-reel version that gets written about constantly. I shared the version I’ve lived; the one I recognize in almost every capable person I’ve ever worked alongside.
It is quieter and more specific: you are surrounded by people whose brilliance you can see clearly, celebrate freely, and describe in precise detail, and somewhere along the way you use their proximity as evidence that your own is ordinary.
The comparison doesn’t feel like jealousy, at least not to me. It feels more like being appropriately calibrated (which of course, it isn’t). It’s a big lie that wears the costume of humility, and I spent far too many years inside it to pretend otherwise.
The exercise was simple: list three things you’ve done in the last five years that you’re proud of; things you’ve probably dismissed as “just what needed to happen.”
Then the reframe: if your best friend told you she’d done those exact things, what would you say to her? The gap between that answer and how you evaluate yourself is the discount in action. Remarkable gets called ordinary so many times, from the inside, that eventually you stop noticing the difference.
The second was capability, and what we do to it (or how we ignore it). Most of the women in that room had built real things, things that required sustained judgment, operational skill, strategic thinking, the kind of resilience that doesn’t make it onto a resume because it’s woven into everything else. AND….most of them had filed it under “just what I do,” which is the most expensive habit I know.
The question I asked: If you had to write a job description for your life, what would it say? AND…would your resume match? The silence that follows that question is always instructive. We see operational excellence in each other immediately. Recognizing it in ourselves feels like arrogance, when really it’s just accuracy. Many folks who go through this exercise will notice that they have left some (many) key wins out, because the challenges are a vicious cycle: Theme 1 → Theme 2 → Theme 3 become circular conflicts that will have your brain spin indefinitely if you aren’t paying attention.
The third was identity, and the particular damage done by treating it as linear, as though you become one thing and that’s the version that counts. The most capable humans I know carry multiple identities simultaneously, each one real, each one informing the others, none of them canceling the rest out.
The question that opened that part of the conversation: if the thing you spend the most time on disappeared tomorrow, the job, the role, the responsibility, who would you be? That question lands differently depending on where you are, and it’s supposed to. When it feels impossible to answer, it usually means the identity you’ve been centering has quietly become a utility rather than a brilliant light, and that’s worth sitting with.
I have lived inside all three of these cycles for longer than I want to say out loud. Standing in that room and saying so, watching people recognize themselves in real time, was cathartic in a way I didn’t anticipate and probably needed more than I realized.
You cannot give someone a tool you have refused to pick up yourself, and there was a long period when I was handing these frameworks to everyone around me while quietly exempting myself from the work.
I’m taking all three exercises into the Freedom in a Framework community this month, and I’d love for you to be part of that conversation. If you’re not in there yet, that’s where the work continues. Q1 is almost done. More to come.
Here’s to freedom in a framework.
Kristin-Marie
P.S. Many thanks to my PR maven (Nick) and my rockstar associate with ALL the skills (Ava) for making sure everything went well…and for always continuing to shine brightly in all you do- I cannot wait to see the impact you make on the rest of the world!
