It is Saturday, morning. The stove light is the only light on. Coffee is still dripping, and the fridge hums the way it only hums when the house is asleep. My notebook is open on the counter, and I have been sitting here and reflecting on the last fourteen days that surprised me…
For the past two weeks, my Business Innovation rotation was in the risk department. The assignment looked simple on paper. Sit with the team, learn what they protect and how they think. What the paper left out was the mental posture the work demands. To find the holes in a system, you have to become the person who would climb through them. You start reading an ordinary process the way a burglar reads a house, checking which window stays unlocked and which door everyone trusts because it has always held.
Let me be careful here, because I did not spend two weeks becoming a criminal. I borrowed a mindset the way you borrow a coat. You wear it for the length of the task, then you hang it back up. The criminal brain scans for weakness and works backwards from the exploit. It assumes the worst about everyone in the room, including the nice ones. Especially the nice ones.
Then, somewhere in the second week, something shifted. I was reading an ordinary approval workflow and a question arrived before I invited it: where would I get in. That was the moment I knew the coat had stopped feeling like a coat. The mindset had moved in.
That got me thinking about how many brains we actually carry.
My mornings belong to the artist brain, the one that tolerates mess and keeps asking what if at strange hours. In my private practice I wear the coach and mentor brain, the one that listens more than it speaks and trusts that the person across from me already carries the answer. When I was running schools, I lived in the educator brain, watching for the moment someone was ready for the next step, then getting out of the way. And at General Motors I spent a decade in the project manager brain, thinking in dependencies and deadlines, quietly asking of every plan, what could slip.
Each one is a posture, a set of questions you can practice until they start asking themselves. The criminal brain belongs to the same family. It simply optimizes for a darker question.
Now for the honest part, the part these letters exist for.
While I lived in the criminal brain, my creativity dropped. Not slightly. My scripting and journaling pages went thin, two paragraphs where there are usually four. Ideas stopped finding me in the shower and the car park, which is where they usually do. Some mornings I sat at this same counter with the pen feeling heavy in my hand and produced almost nothing. That has not happened to me in a long time.
At first I blamed tiredness. Sitting here this morning, I think the truth is simpler. A brain that spends all day scanning for threat has no spare room for play. Creativity needs a nervous system that feels safe enough to wander, and I had spent two weeks training mine to expect an intruder at every window. Your nervous system believes what you practice, not just what you intend.
Which brings me to Monday.
On Monday I move into the legal rotation, and I have a hypothesis. I am stating it plainly so you can hold me to it. My creativity is going to come back, and it may come back stronger. Legal thinking still examines systems, but it examines them from inside the rules rather than against them. I suspect that difference matters more than we assume. So I am writing the prediction down this morning, before any evidence exists. Write it first. Live it second.
You get to watch the experiment with me. Same counter, same coffee, and next Saturday I will tell you whether the hypothesis held.
Write it first. Live it second.
With love from the in-between,
Magdalena
P.S: I am curious about you. Which brain do you live in most days? The artist, the coach, the educator, the project manager, or (be honest) the one checking the windows. Hit reply and tell me. I read every one.
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