What Are You Practicing?

Because we become what we rehearse

Jun 28, 2026

Hello and welcome to the thirteenth edition of The Ferocity Letter, a softly fierce Sunday note for visionary women—and everyone who supports them.

My mission is to empower you to trust your intuition and communicate with presence, clarity, and resonance.

Every other week, I share field notes, practices, and words from women.

This week’s letter is about practice.

FIELD NOTES

Do you ever think about your future self?

What is she like?

How does she move through her world?

What does her voice sound like?

What does she do differently than you do today?

I recently discovered Molly Gebrian, a musician, neuroscience scholar, and author of Learn Faster, Perform Better: A Musician’s Guide to the Neuroscience of Practicing1.

She writes about how our brains learn how to do things differently.

Her book explores how we can use neuroscience to learn to play music better, but I think what she offers can also apply to how we learn to communicate better. It has a lot to do with creating new neural pathways as we practice.

So, what would it look like to practice communicating the way your future self does?

First we have to imagine her.

When I imagine the version of me who is 20 years older, I notice her energy first. She holds herself in a way that feels more relaxed and confident. She makes people feel welcome, but she owns her space. She makes more eye contact. She asks thoughtful questions. Her voice has wisdom.

I also notice that she doesn’t doom-scroll, she inspo-scrawls. She writes by hand in her journal just to see what creativity might like to say through her that day. She photographs light. Her hands have colorful paint on them half the time, because she got lost in another big canvas.

She doesn’t actually seem all that fierce. Until I remember she is. Her ferocity lives in the way she pays attention. In the way she speaks truth with love. It looks an awful lot like peace.

This summer, I am going to rehearse what it’s like to be her. Practice being both relaxed and confident. Make more eye contact. Ask more thoughtful questions. Own my space. Absorb and share more wisdom. Use my fingers to write more, capture more, create more. Swipe the screen less.

We often imagine transformation arriving all at once as a breakthrough.

But neuroscience suggests something much less dramatic.

We transform over time. We imagine how our life will be, and then we act. And if we act differently, if we choose to practice a different way of being, over and over, then we create a new neural pathway. Forming and strengthening new neural pathways is how we change. But we must practice them.

We don’t become pianists by reading a book about the piano, we become by placing our fingers on the keys and moving through the scales and arpeggios until they become familiar.

Communication is no different.

We don’t suddenly become a great communicator. We become because we've rehearsed listening deeply to people, we’ve rehearsed looking people in the eye, we’ve rehearsed asking more thoughtful questions, we’ve rehearsed writing what’s true, we’ve rehearsed speaking what’s in our heart.

We practice.

PRACTICES

Imagine the person you want to become. 10 years from now. 20 years from now.

What does she think about?
How does she speak and write?
How does she connect with people?
What does it feel like to be her?

This summer, choose one way future-you communicates that you admire but have not yet fully embodied.

Write it down.

Then, look for opportunities to practice it.

Also, get plenty of rest. According to Gebrian, much of what we learn through practice is consolidated while we sleep, and the neuroscience proves it2. Sleep is an integral part of the practice.

WORDS FROM WOMEN

TOKO-PA TURNER, Dreamworker and award-winning author of “Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home” and “The Dreaming Way”

“Reversing the culture’s materialist approach to life would be like turning a mighty ship around in a powerful current, but at the individual level it’s a much more manageable shift. Every one of us can learn to take our cues from the imagination. And if enough people pivot to follow the way of their dreams, we become like a murmuration that can reorient on a dime.”3

ELLEN J. LANGER, Social psychologist, writer, and professor of psychology at Harvard University

“Mindfulness, as we study, isn’t a practice. It’s a way of being, and it comes about through the simple but difficult understanding of uncertainty. Everything is always changing. Everything looks different from different perspectives, so we can’t know. People are afraid of not knowing because they think they should know. Once you realize that nobody knows — some people pretend they do, but nobody knows — it becomes very easy to pay attention to what’s going on and to learn new things.”4

MOLLY GEBRIAN, Professional violinist and scholar of neuroscience

“Mental practice is hearing and feeling everything you need to be aware of when you play your instrument, but inside your head without actually doing it. Invariably, the things that are the hardest for us to imagine are also the hardest for us to play as well. If you make it clear in your head, it will be much clearer when you try it on your instrument.”5