My Story
Why I built Take Time To— and the sentence that almost stopped me from doing it.
When I was sixteen, a local newspaper covered a tennis tournament I’d played well in. The headline read:
golden arm and stone legs.
I read it the way a sixteen-year-old reads anything in print— as the truth.
I don’t think the journalist gave that sentence five minutes of thought. I gave it thirty-two years.
For most of my life, I played it safe. Not just in sport— in life.
Sport was always part of who I am. Tennis. Golf. Training. I showed up, I played, I improved— but only to a certain point. Looking back, I can see it clearly now. Every time I got close to something more, I drifted back, as if that was where I belonged.
It showed up in different ways. In golf, I stayed in the fairway, avoiding the shots that required real commitment. In training, I’d start with motivation and slowly lose it the moment things became demanding. In tennis, I sometimes stepped onto the court already convinced I would lose— playing not to win, but to confirm what I already believed.
I told myself I was being measured. In truth, I was holding back. Not because I wasn’t capable— but because I was afraid. Afraid of failing. Afraid of not being good enough. Afraid of discovering my real limits.
For a long time, that felt like control.It wasn’t.
It was hesitation dressed up as wisdom.
And it wasn’t only in sport. I trained as a lawyer. I wrote two children’s books. Each chapter of my life held real work, real skill— but none of them, on their own, could hold all of me. So I’d reach a certain point in each one and quietly step back, telling myself the market was too crowded, the standard too high, the timing not quite right.
Big dreams. Small action. And underneath it all, an old sentence about a sixteen-year-old’s legs that I had never actually questioned.
The Shift
Then something changed. Not suddenly. But deeply.
My kids were growing up. Watching me. And one day I had to ask myself the question I’d been avoiding for years: what example am I actually setting? Was I showing them what it means to take risks, to believe in yourself, to go after your potential? Or was I quietly teaching them how to stay safe?
That was the first crack.
The second came on a tennis court in Lugano. I was forty-eight. My coach, Simona, had been watching me for months— watching me hit beautiful shots and then not run for the difficult balls. One afternoon she stopped the drill and said, plainly:
“Don’t be stuck by your old beliefs. At forty-eight, you run more than you did at sixteen.”
I stood there with my racket in my hand and understood, for the first time, that my body had outlasted the sentence about it. The legs the journalist had described at sixteen had been carrying me for three decades while I treated them as the problem. Simona was right. I was the one still running the old story.
I started running for the ball.
And slowly, I started running for everything else, too.
Why I Created Take Time To
I didn’t create Take Time To because I had it all figured out. I created it because I finally understood what had been quietly running my life— and I knew I wasn’t the only one.
Every woman I know carries her own version of stone legs. A teacher’s offhand comment. A parent’s worry dressed as concern. A colleague’s “joke.” A sentence she heard young, took as truth, and has been negotiating with ever since— without realizing the negotiation was even happening.
The cost isn’t dramatic. That’s what makes it so expensive. We don’t fail because of these sentences. We just don’t fully go for it. We stay in the fairway. We don’t run for the ball. We let the comfort zone disguise itself as good judgment.
Take Time To exists for the moment you decide to stop.
The cards are simple, sport-inspired rituals— for golf, tennis, training— designed to do one thing: get you to act before you feel ready, so your body can prove the old story wrong. Because that’s how the loop actually breaks. Not by thinking your way out. By moving first, and letting the evidence rewrite the belief.
A Different Way to Play
It’s never too late to start playing for real. Not perfectly. Not fearlessly. Just honestly— one shot, one serve, one rep at a time.
If you have your own version of stone legs— a sentence you’ve been carrying since long before you should have had to— I made these for you.
Come and play.
— Angie
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