Real power doesn’t need an audience.

It doesn’t need to shout.

It only needs to be true, and to hold.

I have repeated that sentence to myself more times than I could count, in boardrooms and in bad hours and once, memorably, in the blue light of a ballroom with my shoulder still burning.

It is the most useful thing anyone ever told me, and it runs directly against nearly everything the world teaches about power, which is all audience and volume and the performance of strength.

My mother had known the opposite, and had tried to give it to me before she ran out of time, and had very nearly not managed it, and had managed it anyway.”