What The Magazine Cover Taught Me About Visibility, Fear, and Trusting The Call
There’s a particular kind of fear that shows up right before you’re asked to be seen.
Not judged, not tested, just seen.
I know that fear well. I’ve sat across from enough people in my client sessions to recognise it instantly in someone else.
What I didn’t expect was how loudly it would show up in me the moment Indre Ratkele asked if I’d be part of I Am Ready Magazine.
My first instinct wasn’t excitement.
It was a very fast, very convincing list of reasons someone else made more sense than me, for the cover.
The Work Of Holding Space vs The Work Of Being Held In It
For years, my role has been to hold space for other people’s stories.
To sit in the quiet and let someone else’s truth take up all the room.
That’s a role I know how to inhabit. I’m good at it because I’ve never had to think about how I look while I’m doing it.
Being asked to put my own face, my own name, and my own story on a cover flipped that completely.
Suddenly, I wasn’t the one holding space. I was the one being held in it.
And that is a far more vulnerable place to stand than I expected it to be, even after everything I’ve walked through and everything I’ve helped others walk through.
This is the part self-discovery rarely talks about honestly.
We talk a lot about becoming visible to ourselves.
Nobody warns you that becoming visible to the world is its own separate initiation, and it asks something different of you.
I said yes anyway.
Not because the fear resolved itself, but because I’ve learned that the fear doesn’t go anywhere useful if you just leave it parked.
Every time I’ve avoided something uncomfortable in the name of waiting until I feel ready, the discomfort has simply waited for me further down the track, usually larger.
Why It Was Indre, Not Just The Magazine
What actually made this possible wasn’t the opportunity itself. It was who was holding it.
Indre has a way of asking a question and then just… waiting.
No script.
No sense that she needs a particular answer out of you.
She wasn’t interviewing a version of me curated for print.
She was listening for the true one, the one underneath the roles and the achievements and the tidy summary version of a life.
That’s a rare thing to be met with, and I recognised it because it’s the exact space I try to create for the people who sit across from me.
Somewhere in that process, without either of us naming it out loud, Indre stopped being the editor of a magazine and became someone I’d call a soul sister.
The interview, the photos, the whole process, none of it felt like being profiled. It felt like being witnessed by someone who actually cared what she was witnessing.
That distinction matters more than it might sound like it does.
Being seen by someone who is truly paying attention is healing.
Being observed by someone who just wants the content is not.
I got the former, and it changed how much of myself I was willing to bring to the page.
The Discomfort Was Never About The Moment
Here’s the thing I keep coming back to, the thing I’d want anyone reading this to actually take with them.
The fear beforehand is almost never about the real moment.
It’s about everything your mind constructs in the space before it happens.
I had built an entire imagined version of the experience, one where I’d feel exposed, overexamined, not enough.
The actual process was nothing like that.
It was warm.
It was easy.
It felt like being cared for rather than assessed.
That gap, between the story we tell ourselves about what visibility will cost us and what it actually costs us, is where so much of our growth quietly waits.
I’ve spent years teaching people to notice that gap in their relationships and their boundaries.
I hadn’t fully expected to be handed such a direct, personal lesson in it myself.
I Am Ready Magazine Cover Feature – Lyndal Schultz
What Opened Once I Stopped Making Myself Small
The part I didn’t anticipate at all was what came after.
Since the feature, podcast hosts I’d never spoken to have reached out wanting me on as a guest.
People I’ve never met have started asking about collaborating. And then there’s the piece I genuinely wasn’t ready for: people I worked with fifteen, twenty years ago, back in my corporate life and early years volunteering with cancer patients, reaching out out of nowhere to tell me how much our time together shaped who they’ve become.
That kind of message stops you in your tracks.
You don’t expect to hear, decades later, that something you said or did once still lives in someone’s life this clearly.
It’s one of the most humbling things that’s happened through any of this.
None of it was chasing me before.
It found me only once I stopped shrinking myself out of the frame, and I don’t think that’s separate from the magazine at all, I think it’s precisely because of it.
It’s exactly because Indre has built something with the reach and the integrity to put a story like mine in front of people who needed to hear it.
That’s the quiet power of a publication built the way I Am Ready Magazine is built.
It doesn’t just tell a story. It puts that story somewhere it can actually find the people who need it.
If you’ve got a story that’s been sitting in you, one that could genuinely help someone else feel less alone in what they’re going through, I’d say this without hesitation: reach out to Indre.
The care she takes in truly understanding who you are before she ever starts writing is exactly what allowed me to say yes to something I would otherwise have talked myself out of. It might be the thing that reaches the one person who needed to read it.
There’s a quieter, more intuitive layer underneath all of this too.
The kind of inner nudge that doesn’t come with a full explanation, just a knowing that says “say yes to this, even though you can’t see where it leads yet”.
I’ve learned, slowly and sometimes the hard way, to trust that nudge more than I trust the fear that argues against it.
This was one more proof point.
The call rarely arrives with a guarantee attached.
It just asks whether you trust yourself enough to answer it anyway.
Coming Home To Being Seen
Stepping into visibility isn’t about becoming someone new for the camera or the interview or the stage.
It’s the same work as everything else I teach, just aimed at a different mirror.
It’s coming home to the version of yourself who was always allowed to take up space, always allowed to be witnessed, and never actually required to earn that right first.
If you’re sitting on the edge of something that would put you a little more in the open than you’re used to, a stage, an interview, a cover, a conversation you’ve been avoiding, I’d gently offer you this.
The version of it in your head is almost never as hard as the real thing. And you will not know what’s waiting on the other side of that discomfort until you’re standing in it.
If this stirred something in you about where you’ve been shrinking yourself small, the Self-Discovery pathway is a good place to start unpacking that.
Much love
Lyndal…
xx
