Bite Off More Than You Can Chew (And Then Chew Like Hell)

It's still the best piece of advice I've ever been given.

I was sitting at my mother-in-law's dining table, a glass of champagne in hand, listening to her and her friend talk about events, food, travel, and finally we got on the topic of business, I could talk about business for days. This particular friend had driven up from Batemans Bay — a real estate agent, confident, sassy and self-made, the kind of woman I wanted to be, she owned more than one agency and had loads of advice to share. She asked me about my plans. Not in the polite, filler-conversation way people usually do, but properly — leaning in, genuinely curious. I only had one spa running at the time, but I had plans, a vision and big dreams.

Most of the time, I kept those plans to myself. I'd learned to. Say too much about wanting more and you risk the look — that "isn't what you've got enough for you?" energy. I'd been on the receiving end of that before, quietly accused of never being satisfied, and I'd started to internalise it. I was embarrassed by how much I wanted. As if ambition were something to apologise for.

It's taken me years to understand what was actually happening in those moments. My dreams were too big for the room. I was too driven, too willing to actually follow through on the things I said I'd do — and that unsettles people more than they'd ever admit. Someone else's momentum has a way of holding a mirror up to your own stillness, and most people would rather knock the mirror out of your hand than look at what it's reflecting.

I had a friend once who turned this into something of a competitive sport. I remember times when she would compete with me weather it was good or bad. I was always baffled by this behaviour, the only person who ever lost was her.

The the week my marriage ended. Instead of offering support in the hardest time of my life, she went in for the bat — divorce isn't really something you want to win at — but somehow, in the depths of it, she turned it into a game, her and her husband became a "power couple." The kind you'd see wearing matching t-shirts. This from the woman who, by her own account for years, had arguably the worst marriage of anyone I knew. Apparently nothing revives a shaky marriage quite like someone else's falling apart.

Then there was the opening night of my second spa. Friends had rallied, glasses were poured, everyone showed up to help me carry the thing over the line — except her, who developed a sudden and urgent marriage crisis of her own, timed and dramatic, as always, to make sure all attention had quietly been redirected back onto her.

When I opened the second spa, and announced the third not long after, I half-expected more of the same, more people saying 'you can't handle this' Instead, my phone buzzed. A message from Robyn:

"Bite off more than you can chew, and then chew like hell."

I actually laughed out loud, alone, staring at my phone. She got it. Completely. She'd been exactly where I was — she knew precisely how much I'd bitten off, and how hard the chewing was about to get — but there wasn't a shred of doubt in it. Just certainty that I could pull it off.

That's the thing about the people who actually matter in your corner: they don't try to shrink your appetite to match theirs. They just hand you a bigger fork.

We share our dreams so rarely, and half the time it's because we've learned the hard way they don't survive contact with other people's insecurities. But no one else can see what you can see. No one else is standing where you're standing. So bite off more than you can chew — and then chew like hell.