Hey, I'm Cheryl and welcome to ABGW, which means amazing, brilliant, gorgeous, wonderful. Um, I'm starting a little mini series here again. This is a small, steady space for people who carry a lot, who think deeply like me, and don't always give themselves five minutes quiet time. So over the next few short episodes, we'll be slowing things down, just enough to help your nervous system remember that calm isn't something you earn, it's something you practice. So wherever you are, find your breath, find a little space, and let's begin. Remember you are amazing, brilliant, gorgeous, wonderful. Not because your weak is, but because you are. Even when you're running on caffeine, duty, and spite, today's problem, you're tiptoeing around someone, someone's mood at work, like it's a I don't know, live wire. And what I want you to think about is if I set a boundary, I'll look difficult, disloyal, not a team leader, and that's not true. Here's the bleakly relatable part. When you're a senior, you don't just manage work, you actually manage the atmosphere. You walk into a meeting and you can sense it, the tight jewel, the clipped tone, the cold silence that says someone's having a day and you're all to pay for it. Okay. And because you're intelligent and you're capable and you do what most competent women do, you adapt, right? You soften, you anticipate, you sometimes overfunction, and then later you repay the whole thing. What did I do wrong? The thing is, your job today is not to fix the mood, it's to notice what's going on for you on the inside. I remember once watching a woman in a leadership meeting shrink in real time. One sigh from a senior person, and suddenly she was explaining to herself like she'd been caught stealing the stationery. That was the moment it hit me. Mood can become an unofficial hierarchy. It's like when you walk into a room where the atmosphere is broken, everyone's freezing, and instead of fixing the thermometer, you're apologizing for not being warm enough. So here's the reframe. Like I said, a boundary isn't loyalty, disloyalty, disloyalty, it's role clarification. So right now, if you can, I want you to feel your feet. I want you to drop your shoulders a millimeter or two. I want you to unclench your jaw and say silently, the mood is information, it's not instruction. One thing you can think of today is I want to keep this constructive. What decisions we are making and what we need from me, what are the decisions that you need from me? In the next episode, we'll tackle the bit nobody says out loud, but it's complicated, you don't understand the dynamics. If something in today's episode landed for you, even quietly, that matters. And you don't want to make a big deal out of it. I just want you to notice what it was because that's information. And if you'd like a bit of extra support, you can download my new emotional first aid to kit at herguru.co.uk if you want resources like this. It's here for moments like this where you need to take a pause. Why not take this pause with you? Because remember, every step you take, no matter how small, is a step towards a brighter, more balanced future. Trust in your journey. And remember, progress is progress no matter the pace. Bye for now.