Sending Three Pitches at a Time: Pacing Yourself Through Fear
I have a list of podcast guests to pitch. People I admire, some of them a little intimidating, and the ask is simple: write the message, hit send, move to the next name.
It should have been simple. Instead I opened the list, felt my whole body brace like I was about to do something stupid enough I should have prefaced it with "here, hold my beer," and closed my laptop. Twice.
If you've ever had a "simple" task that made your body act like it was standing at the edge of a cliff, this one's for you.
The Law of Timing, Turned Inward
John Maxwell's Law of Timing says that when a leader acts is every bit as important as what they do and where they're going. Most people hear that as strategy: waiting for the right market conditions, the right quarter. I want to bring it somewhere more physical. Sometimes the "right time" isn't about the calendar. It's about how much you can actually hold in one sitting, and pretending that doesn't matter is how good ideas turn into avoided ones.
What Actually Happened
I sat down to send fifteen pitches in one afternoon, because that's what "efficient" is supposed to look like. I got through one message and had to stop. My chest was tight, and my thoughts were already writing the rejection before anyone had even read it.
So the next day, I told myself: three. Just three today. And that tightness actually unclenched.
My inner critic did not approve. It said real business owners don't ration their to-do list, and right behind it, that if I couldn't do fifteen, I wasn't cut out for this. Underneath that is the real pattern: if I need to go slow, I don't get to call it working.
So here's the pivot question I asked myself: if a friend told me she could only send three hard emails a day without spiraling, would I tell her she wasn't cut out for this? Or would I tell her she'd found a way to actually get them sent?
I think we already know the answer.
Why Your Body Does This
Trauma researcher Peter Levine uses a concept called titration: approaching something activating in small, manageable doses instead of all at once, because the nervous system can integrate a small exposure and come back to baseline, where a flood just overwhelms it and shuts the whole system down. Three pitches isn't a smaller version of the real work. It's the dose your body can actually process, which means it's the version of the work that's actually going to get finished.
Dr. Kristin Neff's research on self-kindness points out that staying gentle with yourself under difficulty isn't about lowering the bar. It's about staying in the game long enough to clear it. Forcing fifteen in one sitting and burning out for a week produces zero pitches sent on days two through seven. Three a day, sustainably, produces more by Friday than the flood-and-crash version ever does.
The Reframe
Pacing a hard task isn't the small, apologetic version of doing it. It's the version built to actually get finished, instead of getting attempted once and abandoned. You're not someone who "can't handle a full list." You're someone who found the dose your body can actually carry, and carried it anyway.
Try This This Week
Name your real number. Not the number that sounds efficient, the number you can actually do without your whole system bracing for disaster.
Send that number, then stop. Don't punish yourself for stopping. Stopping on purpose is the plan working.
Let the list wait. It's not going anywhere.
Celebrate the send, not the outcome. You did the brave part the moment you hit send.
Return tomorrow for the next three. That's the whole practice.
The size of the batch isn't the measure of courage. The fact that you sent it at all is.
If this named something you've been avoiding at full size, the Sovereign Practice was built for exactly this: meeting yourself where your capacity actually is instead of where you think it should be. Sovereign Practice
Next week: what packing up a house taught me about how much of my identity was quietly living in the walls.
