Becoming Bold Enough to Build What You've Never Seen

This episode is a conversation with Behzod Sirjani about what it actually takes to build something you've never seen modeled for you. We get into the difference between a fence and a boundary, why "move while scared" beats waiting to feel ready, and the exact test Vivianne uses to check whether fear is lying to her. Note: this post may have affiliate links and we donate 100% of those funds to non-profits and a children's group home🫶🏾

There's a version of "bring your own folding chair" that gets quoted at conferences like it's a mic drop. Pull up a chair when they won't give you a seat. Vivianne hates that quote. If nobody's making room for you at a table with nice chairs, the answer isn't a raggedy folding chair with a napkin folded under one leg to keep it level. The answer is building your own table. Or, better, your own ecosystem, one where nobody has to earn their seat by shrinking first.

Ambition and peace were never enemies

Vivianne asked Behzod Sirjani a question a client once posed to her at a fireside chat: can you be deeply ambitious and deeply at peace at the same time, or does one always cost you the other? Behzod's answer starts somewhere most people skip. The peace he's talking about isn't a Sunday-afternoon calm. It's closer to the Buddhist idea that life involves suffering by default, that you're only ever in one place at one time, and that most of what you want you will never get to. Once that's actually settled in your body, ambition stops being a chase. It becomes a choice you keep making on purpose, one you can be at peace with because you know you're the one making it.

Vivianne's version of the same idea: ambition was never about proving something or endlessly chasing. It's about creation, alignment, and choosing courage over comfort. Peace doesn't come from slowing down. It comes from knowing why you're moving, and making sure the movement isn't eroding you while you do it.

The difference between a fence and a boundary

Vivianne tells an old story from Genesis, one that's mostly genealogy and easy to skim past. A father sets out on a long journey with his sons, headed for a specific destination. Partway there, one of his sons dies. The family grieves, keeps moving, and eventually arrives somewhere that shares the dead son's name. They settle there. They never make it to where they were originally headed.

The line that stuck with her: his greatest source of pain became his greatest fence. Fences get built out of precaution, not understanding. They come from knowing the consequence of something without ever examining the purpose of it. A fence protects you from getting hurt again in a way you already recognize, but it also blocks the view of whatever's on the other side. A boundary is a relationship with yourself. A fence is usually a relationship with fear.

"Fences tend to be, we tend to put up fences more from a place of being reactive. And fences often focus on relationships with others, whereas boundaries can focus on relationship with myself." -Vivianne

The follow-up question Behzod adds is the useful one: if you took this fence down, what's actually the worst that could happen, within reason? Not the five-standard-deviations-away catastrophe your brain jumps to. The fence doesn't stop the tornado anyway. That's what the bunker is for. Most of what a fence protects is a feeling of safety, not the thing itself, which means it's worth asking what you're actually protecting and whether there's a better way to do it than staying penned in.

Move while scared

Once you can name the fence, the next problem is the waiting. Vivianne's most-used move against scarcity thinking has nothing to do with confidence. It's permission, specifically the kind nobody else can hand you. Scarcity lives in the gap between desire and action, and hesitation is what fills that gap while you wait to feel ready. You won't. And even the readiness you eventually feel won't look like what you imagined it would.

"Instead of waiting to feel ready, move while afraid. Move while uncertain." -Vivianne

Her test after taking a small action is almost comically literal: did I die? Send the scary email, then check. Make the uncomfortable ask, then check. Most of the time the answer is no, and each no becomes evidence that replaces the fear a little more. Safety was never in the waiting. It gets built through the momentum of taking the next small step, not the certainty of having a perfect one already planned.

Prototype the life before you commit to it

Behzod's version of the same principle shows up as an actual practice: prototype before you propose. Someone wants a nicer car because they think it'll change something. His suggestion, rent that car for a weekend before chasing the promotion that pays for it, and pay attention to whether it actually changes anything. Someone wants to run workshops for a living. His question, have you offered one internally at your current job yet, for free, just to find out if you like doing it? The point isn't to fully commit. It's to gather real information instead of imagined information, because the beginning of any new path will always look worse than the middle of the one you're already standing in, and that mismatch is exactly what makes people quit before they start.

Your legacy is the table, not the chair

Behzod's theme for the year is no small things. Whatever you're doing, if it's worth any of your time, it's worth your full focus, not a box you check on the way to something else. Vivianne's theme runs parallel, drawn from a Latin phrase that translates to fortune favors the bold. Not the comfortable. Not the ones waiting for permission to feel like enough.

Vivianne is explicit that she doesn't exist for anyone's consumption, and she's not interested in contorting herself to be palatable to people who were never going to vibe with her anyway. What she wants left behind isn't a personal brand. It's a model other people can use to build their own tables, their own ecosystems, places where people are nourished and seen without having to endure anything to earn it first. That's the whole reason the podcast exists in the first place: no ad revenue goal, no plan to monetize it into something bigger, just two people who keep having good conversations and decided to record a few of them, on the chance it moves one person to bet on themselves.

If you've been circling a decision and the only thing missing is permission you were waiting on someone else to give you, From Stuck to Starting was built for exactly that gap. 

Originally aired as Episode 11 on the Choose Courage Inc. podcast.