I started simplifying my business because I wanted to scale it.

I didn’t realize I was about to simplify my entire life.

What happened

For years, Healthy Italia grew the way most small businesses grow. One more product. One more exception. One more special case because a client asked nicely. Every decision landed back on my desk. Every time.

So I started cutting. Fewer products. Fewer processes. Fewer versions of the same offer with a different name. Because a business cannot scale when every decision keeps coming back to the founder.

And somewhere in that cleanup, I noticed I had built my personal life the exact same way.

What I thought it meant

For years I thought my problem was discipline. Not working out enough. Eating sugar I told myself I wouldn’t eat. Going to bed late even when I knew better.

So every day I made ten decisions instead of one. Do I feel like working out today. Do I feel like saying no to the sweet thing in front of me. Do I feel like going to bed on time.

I thought the problem was the workout. It was never the workout.

The why, once

So this time I did something different. Before I made the promise, I sat down and asked myself why.

Not why should I work out. Everyone knows the reasons. Health, energy, longevity, all the things we already know and never feel. I needed a why that actually moved something in me.

So I kept asking. And underneath it, I found this. I want to like my body. Because if I don’t like my body, I don’t feel good. And I want to feel good. So if I want to feel good, I need to like my body, and if I want to like my body, I need to move it. One hour a day.

That is the why. I only had to find it once.

Same with sugar. I love sugar. I am, honestly, a sugar addict. But I asked myself why I would ever choose not to have it, and the real answer was not the number of reasons doctors give you. It was this. When my body is busy processing sugar, that is all I can feel. Everything gets muffled underneath it. And I did not want to miss what my body, my spirit, is actually trying to tell me. I wanted to feel that. So I decided.

Same with sleep. Same with starting my day with fruit instead of something sweet. All of it comes back to the same thing. I don’t want my body busy processing sugar when it could be telling me something.

But here is the part that actually changed everything. I found the why once, for each promise. And then I stopped needing it.

What I think now

The real problem was this. Every time I broke a promise to myself, I trusted myself a little less.

And I did that over and over, for years. I would promise myself something, and then a hard day would come, and I would say, it’s fine, today was hard, let me have this. I would tell myself I was too tired. Too late. Too much had happened.

Each time felt small. But it was never actually about the workout, or the sugar, or the sleep. It was about my word. And I kept proving to myself that my word did not hold.

That is where the fraud feeling actually comes from. Not from being Italian and not liking cheese. It comes from being the one person who broke promises to herself and got away with it every single time, because no one else was there to notice.

So I stopped trying to fix ten decisions a day. I collapsed them into one.

Do I keep the promise to myself, or do I break it.

That is the only decision now. Not whether I feel like it. Not whether today was hard. The decision was already made when I made the promise. What’s left is just whether I honor it.

I no longer ask myself if I feel like doing it. I ask myself if I am someone who keeps her word.

And then I noticed something even simpler underneath that. I don’t actually need to remember why I wanted to like my body, or why I didn’t want to be busy processing sugar, or any of it. I have ten promises now, maybe more. If I had to recall the reasoning behind each one, every single time, I would be back to ten decisions a day.

But I don’t. Because there is only one why that actually matters anymore, and it covers all of them at once. I keep my promises because I am rebuilding the trust I broke in myself, one kept promise at a time. That is the only why I ever think about now. Not the why behind the workout. Not the why behind the sugar. Just that one.

What I’m practicing

Now, if I get home late, tired, and I still have not moved my body, there is no negotiation. I know I owe myself an hour walk. I don’t debate it. I don’t check in with how I feel. I just go.

Because the priority stopped being the workout itself. The priority became keeping the promise.

And here is what changed underneath all of it. For most of my life, I was the last person on my own list. If I am honest, I don’t think I was even on the list. Everyone else’s needs came first, every time, without question.

Simplifying my decisions is what put me on the list at all. First, actually. Because the moment I made keeping my word to myself the priority, I had to start counting myself as someone worth keeping a word to.

This is the same thing I am doing in Healthy Italia. I think of it as one broth. Not a rule I apply once and forget. An environment. A broth I let my whole mind sit in, so that whatever I touch comes out simplified, because that is the only water it ever soaked in.

At work, I am immersed in simplify. In my personal life, I am immersed in the same thing. It stops being something I have to remember to do. It becomes the environment my decisions are made inside of. So the business simplifies, and I simplify, at the same time, in the same broth.

And that is when I saw the circle. The business grows only as much as I grow. But growing the business is also what taught me how to grow myself. It is not one feeding the other. It is the same person, doing the same work, in two places at once.

Every kept promise closes a little bit of the distance between the woman I say I am and the woman I actually live as. Every one makes me someone I can trust a little more.

Maybe that is how I stop being a fraud. Not by proving anything to anyone else. By finally becoming someone whose word means something, starting with the only person who was there for every single broken one.

This week’s question

What is the one promise to yourself that you keep renegotiating instead of just keeping?

Every week, I write one honest letter from inside the life I am building, the business, the book, and the woman behind both. If this resonated with you, subscribe and come back next Sunday.

A couple of months ago, Susan came to me with a question.

Susan is my COO. She asked me: how do you feel about doing a pasta bar for a customer’s daughter’s graduation party.

And my honest first thought was: what is even a pasta bar.

I had never done one. I did not know what it looked like, what it meant, what people expected when they asked for it. Susan showed me pictures. She told me most families do this kind of thing through a country club, with a whole team behind it.

So I researched. And the more I researched, the more scared I got.

Because if I was going to do this, I was going to have to charge a lot. Not because I wanted to take advantage. Because I had never done it before, and doing something for the first time is work. Real work. Work that takes time just to understand what the client has in their head before you even start building it.

I did not want to disappoint them.

I was so afraid I would not meet their standard, or the picture they already had in their mind that I could not see.

So we gave the family the price for the pasta bar.

And at first, they said no. Too much. They were looking to spend less.

I remember thinking: okay. That confirms it. That is exactly what I was telling myself would happen.

Then a week before the party, they came back.

They said: would you still be willing to do it. My daughter really wants this.

And something in me shifted. I told Susan yes. Let’s do it.

Here is something I know about myself. When someone gives me a real challenge, I do not go in at a hundred percent. I go in at more than that. I go all in, because I want to execute to the best of my ability, every time, no exceptions.

So I started researching every pasta bar offer I could find. And I did not like a single one.

But I had a picture in my mind, and I wanted to make it real exactly the way I saw it.

There is another idea from Alex Hormozi that I think about just as often as the one about sucking at things when you start. He talks about overdelivering, about giving people so much more than what they expected that they cannot help but notice. That is exactly the standard I hold myself to. It is not enough for me to meet what someone asked for. I want to give them an experience they were not even imagining was possible.

So I spent an entire morning just buying decorations and ingredients. I wanted a specific kind of tomato, so I went to one supermarket for that, and then to another supermarket for a second kind I also wanted. I wanted fresh basil, but I needed the plants a certain size, so I went to one place for a bigger plant and another place for a smaller one. I ordered the tablecloths. I ordered the burners. I ordered the containers. Everything.

The only real trouble we ran into was with the power cords. But we figured it out together with the venue, and honestly, they were incredibly helpful.

The one thing I could not get was headbands to match the tablecloths. I had ordered them, and they did not arrive in time. There was nothing I could do about that one. So I let it go.

Everything else, I made exactly the way I had pictured it. The decorations, the service, how easy the whole experience felt for the family and their guests. All of it was intentional.

And it was beautiful. It was a great success. The guests loved it. They left us a review afterward that still means more to me than I can fully explain here.

Here is the part I keep coming back to.

A month later, one of the guests from that party reached out and asked if we would do the same thing for her.

That is the proof I trust more than any compliment in the moment. You can think you did a good job. Anyone can say it was nice. But when a guest becomes a client, that is not a compliment. That is evidence.

And this is what I want you to understand, because I think it is bigger than pasta.

I still feel like a fraud constantly. I felt like a fraud the moment Susan asked me the question, because I did not even know what a pasta bar was. I feel like a fraud almost every time someone asks me to do something I have never done.

But I do it anyway. Every time. And then I refine it.

I do not wait to feel ready or qualified. I take the chance, I do it the best I know how for the first time, and I let the next time be better because of what the first time taught me.

There is a line from Alex Hormozi I think about constantly: you are supposed to be bad at something the first time you do it. Expecting yourself to already be good at it, before you have ever done it, is not fair to you.

I know this because I lived it long before the pasta bar.

The first two cooking classes I ever taught, I threw up from the anxiety. Actual vomit, from actual fear. Not because I did not know how to cook. I did. I know how to make sauces, how to cook pasta, how to build a menu, all of it. But I had never stood in front of a room and taught a crowd before, and that fear made me physically sick.

Now, ten years later, I walk into a cooking class and I do not even remember the menu ahead of time. I do not need one minute of preparation. I just walk in and teach.

It took ten years to get there. The skill was never the problem. The fear was. And I had to be bad at it, terrified and shaking and sick to my stomach, before I could ever get good at it.

So if there is something you have been putting off because you have never done it before, I want you to remember this: you are supposed to be bad at it in the beginning. Everyone is. The people you admire were bad at their first version of it too. The only difference between them and the person who never starts is that they did the first bad one anyway.

I will tell you honestly, it is never enough for me. Even after a night like that one, I am already thinking about what I would do differently, what I would push further next time. I do not know if that ever fully goes away, and maybe it is not supposed to.

And I am so grateful for every person who has ever trusted me with something before I trusted myself with it. That trust means someone saw a version of me I could not see yet. I do not take that lightly.

I hope more of those chances keep finding me. And I hope, every single time, I have the courage to say yes.

Because even when you feel like a fraud, if you try anyway, you might be surprised how much of a fraud you actually are not.

Here is the part nobody tells you, though.

Even now, after ten years of teaching, I am still anxious every single time I have a class coming up. All day. It does not go away. It never got easier in the way I thought it would when I started.

What changed is not the fear. What changed is me. I stopped waiting for the fear to leave before I would act.

I think we tell ourselves a story that courage comes first, and then the hard thing becomes possible. Say the truth, once you feel brave enough. Make the change, once you feel ready. Walk away, once you finally feel strong enough to do it.

But that is backwards. I do not think the strength shows up before you start. I think it shows up in the middle of it, while you are already doing the thing you were sure you could not do.

You do not become ready and then act. You act, and somewhere in the middle of acting, without noticing exactly when, you become the person who was capable of it all along.

There is no shortcut around that. No trick that makes it feel easy first. You just have to walk through it while it is still hard, and trust that the version of you who can handle it is already forming, right there, in the walking.

Whatever it is you have been circling for a long time, waiting to feel ready, waiting to feel brave enough, waiting for the fear to finally quiet down. It will not quiet down first. Go anyway. You have more strength in you than you think, and you will only ever find it by using it.

This week’s question

What is the thing you keep waiting to feel ready for, that you will actually only feel ready for once you are already doing it?

Every week, I write one honest letter from inside the life I am building, the business, the book, and the woman behind both. If this resonated with you, subscribe and come back next Sunday!

At six in the evening, the light disappeared.

Completely. One minute there was still some sun behind the trees, and the next minute it was gone, and it would not come back until six in the morning.

No electricity. No power. No light switch to reach for out of habit. Just a small house in the middle of the jungle, and me inside it, for eight nights.

I was there for something bigger than a vacation. An intense spiritual experience, the kind that strips away everything you use to distract yourself. And one of the biggest lessons did not come from a ceremony or a teacher.

It came from being alone in the dark, terrified of my own house.

Here is what happened every night.

I would walk into that little house and the sounds would start. A noise I did not recognize. A vibration under my feet that I could not explain. My brain, which had never lived without light before, started building a whole world out of nothing. What was that. What is out there. What if something happens and no one hears me.

I tried to sleep. I would wake up an hour later even more scared than before, because in the dark, alone, with no one to check my thoughts against, fear does not stay the same size. It grows. It invents. It tells you stories you would never believe in daylight.

At some point, one night, I could not take it anymore.

I opened the door.

It was still the middle of the night. Still dark. Nothing about the hour had changed. The only thing on my side was a full moon, just enough light coming down through the trees to make outside feel different from the pitch black of the house.

And the strangest thing happened. The same noises that had terrified me for hours suddenly felt smaller, only because I was standing in the middle of them instead of hiding from them behind a door.

I remember standing there, under that moon, saying it out loud, almost surprised by my own voice:

Outside, it is actually less scary.

I thought, at first, that this was just a story about a jungle and a scary night. A funny memory to tell at dinner.

But then I came home. And I started noticing the same pattern everywhere, in a life that has plenty of electricity and plenty of light and none of that seems to matter, because the dark I am talking about is not the kind you fix with a switch.

It is the dark inside your own head.

The version of a conversation you have not had yet, that gets worse every time you replay it. The version of a decision you have not made yet, that grows teeth the longer it stays inside you. The version of a fear that only exists because you have never actually opened the door to look at it.

That is when I understood what the jungle was really teaching me.

Whatever you are holding inside your head is always heavier than it is once you take it outside.

The same week I got back, I was anxious. Just the regular weight of running a business and a life at the same time. And instead of doing what I usually do, which is wait until the anxiety passes or blame someone for it, I told myself something simple.

Tonight, you are going to the gym. Alone.

I cannot tell you how many times I have packed my bag, said the same sentence to myself, and then not gone. Because I need someone waiting for me. An appointment. A friend. Anyone to make the commitment real, because apparently my own word to myself has never been enough.

But that night, I went. By myself. For the first time, no one was expecting me there.

And when I finished, something had physically left my body. The anxiety I had been carrying all day was gone, because I took it out of my head and put it into my body, into a room, into a barbell, into something outside of me.

Fuori fa meno paura.

Outside is less scary.

And then I thought about the conversations I keep avoiding.

I am a people pleaser. I will admit that plainly, because it is true. There are conversations I need to have with people on my team, direct conversations, adult conversations, that I have postponed for weeks because in my head they turn into disasters. I imagine the hurt on their face. I imagine them not being able to receive it. I imagine the relationship breaking.

None of that has happened yet. It only happens in the version that lives inside my head, at night, alone, with no light on.

I have never once had one of those conversations and found it as bad outside as it was inside.

Not once.

So I am starting to wonder how much of my life I have spent scared of a house, when the actual jungle outside, dark and all, was never the monster my head built at midnight.

I think about Tony Robbins a lot, and I consider him a friend even though he has no idea who I am. He says it simply. If you are in your head, you are dead. Same lesson, different classroom.

But there is something about learning it barefoot in the dark, with no electricity and no one to save you, that hits differently than hearing it from a stage. Nature does not explain itself gently. It just puts you in the situation and lets you feel the whole thing, until you are forced to open the door yourself.

And once you open it, you cannot unlearn what is on the other side.

So here is what I am practicing now, in the most ordinary parts of my life. The employee conversation I have been avoiding. The workout I keep promising myself and not doing. The relationship where I am guessing instead of asking. The decision I keep turning over at eleven at night instead of just making it in the morning.

Every single time, the instruction is the same.

Open the door.

Because whatever is waiting for you outside, even if it is uncomfortable, even if it is hard, is almost never as bad as the version your mind built while you were sitting alone in the dark with it.

This week’s question

What door have you been standing in front of, too scared to open, because the version in your head is worse than anything waiting on the other side?

Every week, I write one honest letter from inside the life I am building, the business, the book, and the woman behind both. If this resonated with you, subscribe and come back next Sunday.

What happened

Someone told me to rest this week. To stop thinking about work. To enjoy the day, because it was beautiful outside.

I said no. Not out loud, but in my head, immediately: rest from what?

There’s a story I keep coming back to, about Sergio Marchionne, one of the people I admire most. When he took over Fiat in Italy, he walked into the office in August and found nobody there. He asked, where is everybody? They told him, on vacation. And he said: vacation from what? We’re losing a million dollars a day, and people are on vacation. Vacation from what?

That’s exactly how I feel about myself. Every time someone tells me to rest, I hear the same question in my own head. Rest from what?

And then, this Saturday, something smaller happened that explained the bigger thing to me.

I was driving. Not in the office, not in the kitchen, not at the store. And I caught myself recording a voice memo of ideas for this newsletter, and the first thought I had was: I should stop doing this and actually work. As if what I was doing wasn’t work. As if thinking, planning, building, was something I was allowed to do only after the real work was finished.

Except I was working. I just didn’t recognize it as work, because it didn’t look like the work I grew up watching.

What I thought it meant

For a long time I thought the resting problem meant something was wrong with me. That I didn’t know how to receive kindness. That when people offered me permission to slow down and I rejected it, I was either lying to them or they were wrong about who I am.

Because here is the thing: people look at me and see someone successful. Someone who works hard, who has built something real, who deserves a break. And I look at the same person and see someone who is still at the beginning. My business should be bigger by now. It should be working in a different way. I should have more money. I should have invested better. I should have the relationship I want. None of that is true yet, so how could I possibly be the person they’re describing?

I used to think this made me a fraud. Like I was cheating people out of their compliments. Like if they really knew how far I still am from where I’m supposed to be, they would take the rest, take the kindness, take the praise, and give it to someone who actually earned it.

I’m tired of tracing everything back to childhood, but apparently we carry it forever, so let me trace this one anyway.

My father worked every day. Eight in the morning to eight, eight thirty at night. Including Saturday mornings, Saturday afternoons and Sunday afternoons. The only real time off was one week in December and three or four weeks in August, because in Italy most businesses close for the month and there was nowhere to be but closed with them. We took one vacation a year. Ten days. Beach or mountains. Never a random weekend away, because a random weekend away meant the business was being neglected, and the business being neglected meant something terrible was about to happen. When he wasn’t in the office, he was traveling the world for work, and sometimes he took me with him, which is a whole other story for another week.

So the equation got built early, before I had any say in it: working means being physically present somewhere, doing something that costs you. If you are not there, suffering a little, you are not working. And if it doesn’t cost you anything, it definitely doesn’t count.

What I think now

I live in a different country now. I run a different kind of business. Most of what I do doesn’t require me to be in any specific place, except teaching, where I actually do have to be in the kitchen. I know this, logically. And yet there is a part of me that still discounts what I am doing in this exact moment, recording an idea in the car, as not-real-work, because it doesn’t match the picture I inherited.

There’s a second layer underneath that one, and it took me longer to see it. I don’t feel like I’m working when I love what I’m doing. So when people tell me to stop working, I tell them I’m not. I’m “just” recording a newsletter idea. I’m “just” teaching a class.

Last night I covered a cooking class I wasn’t even supposed to teach. I complain about being on the teaching schedule, not because I don’t enjoy it, but because every hour in that kitchen feels like an hour I’m not spending moving the business forward, and that builds a quiet frustration in me. But the second I start teaching, I am the happiest person on earth. I give it everything I have. I’m good at it. It took me ten years to get this good, and it is part of my identity now, even though I still struggle to just say that plainly, out loud, without qualifying it.

When the class ended, I stayed two extra hours making sure everything was put back exactly right. Then someone asked me what I did last night, and I said, “oh, I just taught a class.” Not, “I worked.” Two extra hours of unpaid, unasked-for care, and in my own mouth it became nothing.

It happens with recipes too. I always say I don’t like writing them. I love sharing them, but sitting down to nail the exact measurements feels like a chore, something I avoid. Except that’s not entirely true either. When I actually have the time to do it properly, I enjoy it, because I love precision, I love getting a thing exactly right. The truth is I never have the time anymore, which means by now someone else should probably be writing my recipes for me. But I haven’t let go of that one yet, because some part of me still believes that if it’s enjoyable, it shouldn’t be delegated. Real work is the part that hurts. The rest is just me having fun on company time.

So here is the connection I didn’t see until this week. The reason I can’t rest, and the reason I don’t recognize half of what I do as work, are the same belief wearing two different outfits.

I don’t have the money I think I should have yet, because I haven’t fully become the person who knows how to make it, manage it, and accept that she’s allowed to have it. I don’t have the business I want yet, because I haven’t become the person who runs that kind of business. I don’t have the relationship I want, because somewhere in me there is still a belief that I’m not enough to be loved the way I want to be loved.

And if work only counts when it’s unpleasant and visible and costs me something, then almost nothing I actually do counts. Teaching doesn’t count, because I love it. Recording ideas in the car doesn’t count, because nobody can see me doing it. Even building this newsletter doesn’t fully count some days, because it doesn’t feel like suffering, it feels like exhaling. So if none of that counts as work, then I haven’t worked enough to deserve the things I want. And if I haven’t worked enough to deserve the things I want, I definitely haven’t worked enough to deserve a day off.

That’s the whole trap, in one sentence. I built a definition of work so narrow that almost nothing I do fits inside it, and then I punish myself with rest I refuse to take, for work I refuse to count.

So when I say I haven’t worked hard enough, what I actually mean is: I haven’t become her yet. The version of me who has the business, the money, the relationship, the life, and who also believes that joy can be productive. And until I do, my nervous system won’t let me rest, because resting feels like agreeing to stay exactly who I am right now.

I still believe everything happens at the right time, when we’re actually ready for it. Not when we want it. When we’re built for it. I think I’m in the process of being built. That doesn’t make the waiting comfortable. But it makes it make sense.

What I’m practicing

I’m practicing telling myself: I don’t have it yet. Not, I don’t have it. Yet changes everything. It turns a verdict into a timeline.

I’m practicing calling things work, out loud, even when they were easy or joyful or invisible to everyone but me. Last night I taught a class. I worked. This morning I recorded an idea in the car. I worked.

I’m practicing separating the part of me that pushes hard because it’s building something, from the part of me that pushes hard because it doesn’t believe it’s allowed to stop. Those two things look identical from the outside. They are not the same thing.

And I’m practicing letting people call me successful without arguing with them. Not because I’ve decided they’re right. Just because I’m done correcting people about my own life.

Question for you

What do you do all day that you’ve quietly stopped calling work, because it didn’t hurt enough or look enough like the work you grew up watching?

And underneath that: what are you still telling yourself you haven’t earned yet, that you might actually just not have grown into yet?

Every week, I write one honest lesson from building a business, becoming the person my future keeps asking me to be, and figuring out, slowly, what I’m actually worthy of. Subscribe if you want to follow along.

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There is a sentence in Italian that has lived inside me for as long as I can remember.

A fare le cose fatte male e a farle bene ci vuole lo stesso tempo. Tanto vale farle bene la prima volta.

Doing something badly or doing it well takes the same amount of time. So you might as well do it right the first time.

My father said this so many times that I stopped hearing it as a lesson and started hearing it as a standard. A quiet rule written somewhere deep inside me. A voice that shows up without being invited.

I hear it when I walk into Healthy Italia and a label is crooked on a shelf. When an email goes out with a typo. When a class is set up in a rush and someone chose the easier version instead of the right one.

Most people would not notice.

I always notice.

Because my father is the kind of man who taught me that the way you do something is never just about that thing. It is about who you are. It is about the respect you give to every small act, because small acts carry your name.

He is right about that. Completely, entirely right.

And it is not only about work. He has always pushed me to be a better person too. To be at service. To show up fully, without complaining, without waiting to be asked, without letting people see that you would rather be somewhere else.

I remember being a little girl at Sunday Mass. In Italy, when you are sitting near the center of the church, there is a moment in the service when someone is supposed to bring the gifts, the bread and the wine, up to the altar. It is a small thing. A gesture of participation. Of being present and willing.

I never wanted to do it.

A couple of times it was clearly my turn, and I stayed in my seat. I looked away. I let the moment pass.

On the way home, my father was furious. He looked at me and said something I have never forgotten: when it is your turn to be at service, you do it. You do it without questioning. You do it without complaining. And you do it with joy, like you mean it. Because if you do it showing everyone that you would rather not, you might as well have stayed home.

He was right.

The contradiction, and I say this with love, is that my father himself never brought the gifts to the altar. He never stood up to read at Mass. He is the one who taught me a lesson he had not fully applied to himself.

But that is the thing about the people who shape us. They teach you the person they wish they were, alongside the person they actually are. And sometimes the teaching lands deeper precisely because you can see the gap.

What I took from that Sunday, and from every version of that lesson that followed, is something I carry into Healthy Italia every single day. When I teach a class, I am fully there. When I greet a customer, I mean it. When someone needs something from me, I try to give it like it is the thing I most want to do in that moment. My father calls it being at service. I call it the standard he put inside me.

He also taught me something he called rubare con gli occhi. To steal with your eyes.

It means you learn by watching. You observe the person who knows how to do something, how they move, how they decide, how they carry themselves in a room, and you quietly take that lesson with you. Because nobody is going to stop and teach you everything. You have to build your education from what you observe, not only from what you are told.

I have built almost everything in my life this way. Cooking. Business. How to read a room, how to lead, how to belong somewhere before you feel like you belong.

Before I had credentials, I had eyes. Before I had confidence, I had observation. Before I had permission, I had attention.

That skill, the one my father gave me without probably realizing how deeply I took it, has been worth more to me than any degree, any certificate, any title I could have earned in a classroom.

And this connects to the most important thing my father has ever taught me, which is not a sentence at all. It is a behavior.

He teaches by example.

When words alone did not work, he showed me instead. He found teachers to teach me English after school when I was still in elementary school. When I was too young to understand why it mattered and eventually gave up, he did not give up. He took me with him on business trips around the world. He let me see, with my own eyes, what it meant to move through a room in another language. To negotiate. To connect. To belong somewhere far from home.

He always says: you need to teach by example. And most of the time, he is the example.

That is why the English lesson eventually took. Not in a classroom. In the world. Because he showed me what was possible before he asked me to believe in it.

There was one exception to all of this, one area where the standard somehow did not apply, and thinking about it now still makes me smile because it reveals everything about the beautiful contradiction that my father is.

School.

He always told me I studied too much. That I was overdoing it, pushing too hard, wasting energy on books that did not need that level of attention from me. He would say, with complete sincerity, that if he had studied as hard as I did, he would have become at least an astronaut by now.

An astronaut.

I think about that sentence often. The man who demanded excellence in everything told me I was being excessive in my pursuit of it. The same man who taught me that good enough is never enough told me I was studying too much.

That is my father. Full of standards. Full of contradictions. And somehow, both things at once make perfect sense coming from him.

Now, the English he pushed me to learn came with something he did not plan for. Something I have spent years trying to make peace with.

My Italian accent.

When I arrived in America and the language started to become mine, the accent came along for the ride. And for a long time, that accent felt like a problem. Like something that arrived without my permission and announced, every time I opened my mouth, that I was from somewhere else. That I belonged somewhere else. I worried it made me sound less credible. Less serious. Like I was still in the process of arriving.

People would tell me they loved it. That the music of it was something they could listen to for hours. And I would smile and feel uncomfortable, because what I heard underneath those compliments was: you are different. You are still from somewhere else.

What I am learning, slowly, in the way I learn most things, is that the accent is not a flaw in my translation. It is the original. It is proof that I came from somewhere real, and that I chose to build something somewhere new, and that both of those things are true at the same time.

The accent is not a problem to fix. It is part of who I am. It is mine.

And my father, actually, is the reason I have it, because he pushed me toward the language, even if the accent was the part that came along for the ride.

Now for the harder part.

My father also told me, at some point, that I could not be beautiful, smart, and rich. The message was closer to: you are probably not any of them, so be realistic about what you are reaching for.

He told me I would die poor, because I spent too freely. What he saw as recklessness was, in my own understanding, generosity. I was always spending on other people, on gestures, on care. That part I carry differently.

Those sentences were painful. The kind that do not land all at once. They land slowly, over years, in the quiet moments when you are already doubting yourself and then his voice adds its weight to the doubt.

But here is what I have had to learn about my father. He says hard things because he is a man made of hard things. He has lived a life with very little softness in it, and he does not always know how to hand me something he has never received himself. The sentences that stung were the shape his love took when it got tangled up with his fear.

He pushed me because he believed I could be pushed. He expected more because he thought I was capable of more. Even the painful sentences were, underneath, a strange form of ambition on my behalf.

I have spent years trying to prove him wrong. And somewhere along the way, I realized I was also trying to prove him right. To become the version of myself he was too afraid, or too limited, to name out loud.

What I am still unlearning is the part where I believed, even for a second, that the limits he described were mine to carry forever. The love is real. That I know. What I am choosing to release is the weight of words that landed harder than he probably intended.

They are not his best words. But they are not the whole of him.

He is the man who sent me into the world with a standard. He is the man who taught me to learn with my eyes open. He is the man who stood at the back of a church and told me to carry the gifts to the altar with joy, even while he stayed in his seat. He is the man who dragged me across the world so I could see with my own eyes what was possible.

He is full of contradiction, the way most people who shape us are full of contradiction, giving us the best of themselves and the hardest of themselves sometimes in the same sentence.

I am old enough now to hold both things at once.

I keep the lessons. I keep the standard. I keep the push.

The parts that made me smaller, I am letting go. Slowly, carefully, with gratitude, because even those parts were trying, in their clumsy way, to prepare me for something.

Whatever he told me, he made me the person I am today.

And I am grateful for every single bit of it.

This week’s question

What did someone important teach you that you have never thought to question? And what did they say that you are still, quietly, working to outgrow?

Every week, I write one honest letter from inside the life I am building, the business, the book, and the woman behind both. If this resonated with you, subscribe and come back next Sunday.

There is a pattern in my life that I keep discovering over and over again.

Not because I forgot it.

Because I am human, and humans need to relearn the same lessons in different costumes until finally, hopefully, one day, the lesson stays.

The pattern is this:

Every time I forced something to happen, it didn’t happen.

Every time I let go, life moved.

I want to tell you about the Empire State Building.

Not as a tourist. As a rejection.

When I decided I wanted to come to America, I was living in Italy, working as a CPA, and watching TV on a Saturday morning, which I almost never did, because on Saturdays I was always working.

But that Saturday, for some reason I still cannot explain, I was home. The TV was on. And there was a woman on a show talking about her internship in New York, doing international accounting.

I am a CPA. I remember sitting there thinking: I could do that. I want to do that.

So I did what I always do when I want something. I went after it. Hard.

I found a CPA firm in the Empire State Building. I wrote them an email. I explained who I was, what I could do, how much I wanted this.

They said no.

Not cruelly. Not unkindly. They said: you do not know American tax law. When you do, reach out again, and we will reconsider.

I remember reading that email and feeling the particular sting of a door that doesn’t slam, it just closes quietly.

So I found another way. I came to America on an internship with a nonprofit that produces contemporary operas in Brooklyn. It was not the plan. But I came.

And once I was here, I joined a meetup group called “Language Exchange”, because I wanted to practice, to connect, to belong somehow in this enormous city.

At one of those meetups, I met a man.

He asked me what I wanted to do.

I told him.

He said: send me your resume.

He sent it to three CPA firms.

One of them was the exact firm in the Empire State Building that had said no to me a year before.

This time, they said yes. They interviewed me with five different people. And then their lawyer sent me an email that I will never forget.

I am working on your visa.

They had hired me.

The firm that rejected me became the firm that sponsored my life in America.

And I needed to get rejected first.

I needed to come through a different door, learn something I did not know, become someone slightly different — before I was ready for the thing I had wanted all along.

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I think about that a lot when I look back at my life.

How many times I was absolutely certain I was ready. How many times life quietly said: not yet. Not as punishment. As preparation.

Because there is something I have learned that is easy to say and almost impossible to feel in the moment when you are desperate and the door is closed:

The lesson always comes before the door opens.

You just cannot see the lesson while you are still banging on the door.

I see this same pattern in one of the most meaningful professional experiences of my life.

If you do not know me yet, last year I appeared on a show called The Fixer with one of the businessmen and investors I have admired most since I moved to the United States, Marcus Lemonis.

What most people do not know is what it took to get there.

For a year and a half, I followed him. I went to motivational speaking events where he was a keynote. I tried to meet him, to get a moment, to pitch him my business. Every time, he would say the same thing: send me an email. And every time, I did. I applied for the show. Nothing happened.

At some point, I planned one last visit. I was going to bring him a gift basket. I was going to try one more time.

And then I got sick. I could not go.

I remember the moment I made peace with it. I said to myself: you did your part. Now leave it to the universe.

Seven months later, they reached out to us.

An invitation to be part of the show. The thing I had been chasing for a year and a half arrived the moment I stopped chasing it.

I will tell you the full story — every detail, every door that closed, every email that went unanswered — in a future letter. Because it deserves its own space. But for now, it is simply the clearest example I have of what I am trying to say:

The moment I let go, life moved.

I see this same pattern with hiring too.

It comes in cycles. There are moments at Healthy Italia when we desperately need someone: a person for the store, an assistant for the cooking school, someone to help carry what the team cannot carry alone. We post the job. We wait. And either nobody shows up, or the wrong people show up, and I find myself asking the universe directly, somewhere between a prayer and a complaint:

Where are my people? Why won’t they come?

And every single time I have been in that place of desperation — please, someone, anyone — the right person does not arrive.

At first I thought it was bad luck. Then I thought it was the job market. Then I started to notice something uncomfortable.

Every time the right person did not show up, there was something I had not figured out yet.

A process I had not built. A role I had not defined clearly enough. Something I still needed to do myself, so I could teach it properly when someone arrived. A restructure that needed to happen first, so that when the right person walked in, there would actually be a real place for them to land.

The people were not the problem.

I was not ready to receive them yet.

And so I have learned (slowly, through enough cycles to finally believe it) to stop asking where are my people? and start asking what is the lesson I still need to learn before they arrive?

Show me what I am missing. Show me what needs to be built, clarified, decided. And then, once I have done that work, send me the person.

Every time I have shifted the question like that, something inside me settles. And eventually, the right person comes.

I know what you might be thinking.

This is all beautiful in hindsight. But what do you do when you are in the middle of it? When the door is closed and you cannot see the lesson and you just want the thing you want?

Honestly? I do not always do it gracefully.

I get frustrated. I want to control things. I want to push. I want to make it happen through sheer force of will, because I am an Italian woman and force of will is basically my first language.

But I have started to notice something.

The pushing never works. It exhausts me, and then the thing still does not come until it is ready to come.

So I am learning slowly, imperfectly, sometimes with more resistance than I would like to admit, to do something different.

To prepare as if it is happening.

And then release as if it is not up to me.

Both things at the same time.

Prepare like it is your job. Then release like the timing is not.

Because most of the time, I find that when I do not get something, it is not because the universe is ignoring me.

It is because there is still a lesson that I need first.

And once I learn it, the door opens.

Not always the door I was expecting.

Sometimes a better one.

The Saturday morning I watched that TV show in Italy was not an accident.

The language exchange meetup in New York was not an accident.

The man who asked for my resume was not an accident.

They were all part of the same sentence, just written in a language I could only read after the fact.

I am still learning to trust that.

I am still learning to let go of the timeline my anxiety proposes and trust the one that life actually has in mind.

It is the hardest practice I know.

But the evidence is there, written across my entire life:

Every time I forced it, it didn’t happen.

Every time I let go, life moved.

This week’s question

Where in your life are you pushing something that might be asking you to let go instead?

Not give up. Let go. There is a difference.

Giving up means you stop believing.

Letting go means you prepare, you show up, you do your part and then you trust that the timing is not yours to control.

Maybe the door is not closed because you are not worthy of what is behind it.

Maybe it is closed because you are not finished becoming the person who is ready to walk through it.

Every week, I write one honest letter from inside the life I am building — the business, the book, and the woman behind both. If this resonated with you, subscribe and come back next Sunday.

He called me The Italian Fraud.

His name is Scott. I had known him for maybe forty minutes.

It was June 3rd. We were at a mastermind retreat at Jesse Itzler’s house in Connecticut, the kind of place where interesting people end up in the same room and something unexpected always happens. They invited us to go for a walk around the neighborhood. Scott and I ended up next to each other, and he started asking questions.

So I started talking.

I told him I was an Italian woman. That I owned an Italian marketplace and cooking school. That I taught people how to cook Italian food and sold products straight from Italy.

And then I told him the rest.

That I do not like cheese.

That I do not like wine.

That I do not drink coffee.

That I do not like whole tomatoes.

He looked at me.

And then he said it.

“You are an Italian Fraud.”

I laughed. Because honestly, it was funny. We had just met. He had no idea he had just handed me the title of my newsletter and maybe, one day, of my book.

But that is the thing about the right words at the right moment. They do not feel like a big deal when they happen. They just stay with you. And stay. And stay. Until you realize they were not really about food at all.

The fraud that was not about food

Basically, if there were a citizenship test for being Italian based on food stereotypes, I might be deported.

I know. Very suspicious.

But the more I thought about what Scott said, the more I realized the phrase was staying with me for a reason that had nothing to do with cheese or wine or tomatoes.

Maybe I have felt like a fraud for a lot longer than that.

Not because I am fake.

But because I have spent so much of my life feeling like I needed to explain myself before people misunderstood me.

I am Italian, but I do not fit the perfect Italian image.

I own a cooking school, but I am not a chef in the traditional way.

I built a business, but sometimes I still feel intimidated by the business I built.

And here is the part I do not talk about enough.

I built it because I had no other choice.

I came to America to practice my English. I got a job at a CPA firm in the Empire State Building. And then my father (an entrepreneur, son of an entrepreneur, grandson of an entrepreneur) told me that a nine to five in the country of opportunities was not enough. That I had to think bigger. That I had to bet on something.

So I did.

I got an investor visa, tied myself to my own company, and walked away from the only safety net I had. From that moment on, there was no plan B. No going to work for someone else if it got hard. No quiet exit.

I had to make it work.

And I did.

Last year, Healthy Italia did one and a half million dollars in revenue. I have thirty employees. I built a cooking school and a marketplace from an idea and a leap of faith my father dared me to take.

And I still wake up some mornings wondering who gave me permission to do any of this.

The permission problem

I love personal development, but there are still days when I do not feel developed at all.

I want to write a book, but I keep waiting to feel more ready. More qualified. More organized. More successful. More clear. More something.

And maybe that is the real fraud feeling.

The feeling that you cannot start because you are still full of contradictions.

The feeling that before you speak, you need to become more polished.

The feeling that before you are visible, you need to have everything figured out.

The feeling that before you call yourself a writer, or a leader, or a founder, or a woman with something to say, somebody has to give you permission.

I have waited for permission in so many areas of my life.

Permission to write.

Permission to be seen.

Permission to lead.

Permission to want more.

Permission to say, “This is who I am,” without immediately adding a disclaimer after it.

For a long time, I thought the answer was confidence. I thought one day I would wake up and feel ready.

But I am starting to think that readiness is overrated.

Maybe the point is not becoming a woman who never feels like a fraud.

Maybe the point is becoming a woman who can keep moving even when that feeling shows up.

What the business taught me that nobody warned me about

You think you are building a business.

Then one day you realize the business is building you back.

It shows you where you avoid conflict.

It shows you where you need approval.

It shows you where you confuse being busy with being brave.

It shows you where you want growth, but you do not always want the discomfort required to hold it.

It shows you where you say you want to be visible, but secretly hope nobody looks too closely.

That is the uncomfortable part of entrepreneurship nobody warned me about.

You think you are building systems, marketing, and numbers.

Then you realize it is asking for a different version of you.

Why I am starting this newsletter

That is why I am starting this newsletter.

Not because I have all the answers. Actually, the opposite.

I am tired of waiting until the story is perfectly packaged before I tell it.

I am not writing this from the mountaintop.

I am writing from the kitchen. From the store. From the office. From the car after a hard conversation. From the notebook full of ideas I still have not organized. From the messy middle of a business I love and a version of myself that changes every day.

This newsletter is going to be about business, but not only business.

It is going to be about personal development, but not the polished kind where everything becomes a lesson immediately and everybody sounds enlightened.

Because sometimes the lesson comes after the crying.

Sometimes the lesson comes after the mistake.

Sometimes the lesson comes after you say the same thing to your business coach for the hundredth time and finally hear yourself.

Sometimes the lesson comes after life makes you so uncomfortable that you have no choice but to become more honest.

So yes, I will write about business, about Healthy Italia, about food, about identity, about leadership, fear, ambition, money, relationships, loneliness, family, visibility, and all the strange comedy of becoming yourself in public.

And I think this newsletter is also going to be part of how I write my book. Because I have been saying for a long time that I want to write one. And I have also been doing the very human thing of waiting.

But maybe a book does not start as a book.

Maybe it starts as one honest page. Then another. Then another.

So this is my first page.

I am not an expert. I am evidence.

Evidence that you can be full of contradictions and still build something meaningful.

Evidence that you can feel like a fraud and still be real.

Evidence that maybe the parts of you that make you feel unqualified are the exact parts that make your story worth telling.

So welcome to The Italian Fraud.

A weekly letter from an Italian entrepreneur building a business, a book, and herself.

I do not know exactly where this will go.

But I know this: I am done waiting to feel ready before I begin.

This week’s question

What is the thing you keep waiting to feel ready for?

If this speaks to you, subscribe and come with me. Every week, one honest lesson from building a business, writing a book, and becoming the person my future keeps asking me to be.