You Outdid Yourself

📖 “He gives power to the weak, and to those who have no might He increases strength.” — Isaiah 40:29 (NKJV)

It was 21:01 when my phone lit up.

I was still in that tender, hollowed-out space that follows a stage — the kind of quiet that settles after you’ve given everything, where you’re not quite sure if what happened was real or whether you’d only dreamed it. My heart was still somewhere between the lights and the words and the room full of people who’d sat so very still while I spoke. I was home, but I wasn’t fully home yet. I was still standing in the echo of it all.

🕯️ And then Prajesh messaged me.

“Hi Patrizia — just wanted to say well done for today, you outdid yourself your words your power your emotion just so powerful. I am so so so proud of you and I hope you’re proud of yourself as well.”

I read it once. I read it again. I held my phone in both hands like it was something precious, and I sat there in the stillness and let the words land — really land — which, if I’m honest with you, is something I don’t always let happen.

✍️ There’s a particular vulnerability in being seen well. It’s not always easier to receive than criticism. Sometimes praise is the more tender thing, the thing that catches you off guard and presses gently on all the places you’ve been quietly doubting yourself.

Prajesh wasn’t offering pleasantries. He wasn’t being kind for kindness’s sake. He was responding to something he’d witnessed — something he’d sat in — and he named three things specifically: my words, my power, my emotion. Not one of them. All three.

🕯️ This journey didn’t begin today. It began last year, when Prajesh and I first met as Speakers Institute bootcamp participants. He’s walked beside me through so much of this process — watching every video, giving feedback, helping with the shaping and the refining, and gently pressing me to go deeper when I’d rather skim the surface. Tonight, his words carried the weight of someone who’s seen the whole journey, not just the moment on the stage.

And there have been others cheering me on too — coaches who’ve poured into me along the way.

On Monday, Wyndi spent half a day coaching a group of us in person at her home. I came home rather frazzled afterwards — I think partly because I was bracing myself to hear what was wrong with my presentation more than what was right with it. That in itself tells a story, doesn’t it?🤔

🌱 Then there was the one-on-one pre-TENx coaching session with Craig — CEO and Managing Partner of Speakers Institute Corporate. My stomach was all knotted going in. I carried that familiar weight of fear and expectation — waiting for the judgment, bracing for the criticism. It’s an old reflex, one that runs deeper than I’d realised. At the end of the session, when Craig told me it was a good speech — affirming, encouraging, kind — I unravelled. I didn’t know what to do with his kindness. Something inside me still whispered it’s not good enough, and when someone contradicts that whisper with genuine warmth, the tears come — partly from the surprise of it, and partly, I think, from the quiet realisation that maybe it was good enough after all.

🕊️ The unravelling in Craig’s session sent me to prayer ministry on Thursday night. I needed to understand why affirmation felt so dangerous — why kindness made me crumble rather than stand taller. What was revealed in that session stopped me in my tracks. At the age of 12, I experienced affirmations — and they were followed by molestation. Somewhere in the deep places of my heart, a cruel connection was made: affirmations mean something terrible is coming. Betrayal follows praise. Kindness carries an ulterior motive. That wound had been quietly shaping my responses to encouragement for decades — making me flinch where I should have flourished, shrink where I should have received.

🪨 Knowing the root doesn’t instantly dissolve the reflex. It does change everything, though. It means I can begin to tell a different story — not the one the wound wrote, but the one God is writing. It means that when Prajesh says you outdid yourself, I don’t have to brace for what comes next. I can simply receive it as the gift it is.

There’s something the Lord has been teaching me — quietly, patiently, the way He tends to — about the difference between striving and surrendering. For so much of my life, I’ve pushed through on my own reserves, white-knuckled and determined. I thought that was faithfulness. I thought that was what strength looked like. What I’m learning — slowly, with many stumbles along the way — is that the strength that shows up when I surrender is a different quality entirely. It’s not earned. It’s lent.

📖 “He gives power to the weak, and to those who have no might He increases strength.” — Isaiah 40:29 (NKJV)

This morning, before I stepped onto the stage, Craig messaged me: “Go you good thing. Have an amazing day changing lives today. Be yourself and make a difference.” I carried those words with me into the theatre.

🪨 The strength that carried me onto that stage today wasn’t only mine. I know that. I felt it in the room when the words came — not from my notes, not from my preparation, though both mattered — but from somewhere deeper than either. There were moments when I wasn’t entirely sure what I was going to say next, and then I said it, and it was exactly right, and I knew in those moments that I was held by something — Someone — far greater than my own capacity.

✍️ He also turned it back to me with the most generous of nudges: I hope you’re proud of yourself as well.

Oh, Prajesh. You know me well enough to know why you had to say it.

Those of us who’ve stood in the fire — who’ve carried the broken pieces and watched God turn them into something gold — we sometimes have the hardest time believing what everyone else in the room already knows. We remember too clearly what we were before the mending. We still feel the cracks, even when the kintsugi is visible to everyone watching.

🕊️ So tonight, I’m practising something that doesn’t come naturally to me. I’m receiving. I’m sitting with the gift of being seen and not deflecting it back out of habit, not shrinking from it out of false humility. I’m letting myself say — quietly, honestly, with trembling gratitude — yes, Lord, I think something happened today. I think You moved. I think You used me. I think You were glorified.

🕯️ Tonight feels like a threshold moment. Like standing at the edge of something I’ve been walking towards for a very long time, and finally reaching it, and discovering it isn’t an ending at all — it’s an opening.

I think of kintsugi — that ancient Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold, making it more beautiful for having been broken. I’ve carried that image in my heart for years now. It’s the language of my ministry, the metaphor at the centre of everything I teach about healing. What I felt today, on that stage, was something of that made visible — all the breaks in my story, all the places where I was shattered and gathered and mended — offered to a room full of people who needed to know that their breaking wasn’t the end of their story either.

🌱 The words, the power, the emotion that Prajesh witnessed today — they weren’t manufactured. They were born from the very wounds that God has been patiently healing in me. That’s the miracle of testimony. That’s what it means when it says they overcame by the blood of the Lamb and the word of their testimony. The story itself becomes the weapon. The healed place becomes the gift.

🪨 I don’t say any of this with pride — not the puffed-up kind. I say it with awe. With a kind of reverent, wide-eyed wonder that this is what God does. He takes the girl who once couldn’t speak her pain out loud and sets her on a stage in Auckland. He takes the cracked vessel and pours His light through every fracture, and the room fills with something that no one quite expected, least of all her.

✍️ I’m writing this tonight so I don’t forget it. I’m writing it because I know myself — I know how quickly the morning can bring fresh doubts, fresh voices suggesting that it wasn’t as significant as it seemed. So I’m writing it into permanence: something happened today. God moved. People were touched. And Prajesh — dear, faithful Prajesh — made sure I knew.

🕊️ Thank You, Lord. From the very bottom of my heart — thank You.

💡 Reflection:

• When someone offers you genuine, heartfelt praise, what is your first instinct — to receive it or to deflect it, and what do you think lies beneath that response? 🤔
• Where in your life are you still seeing only the cracks, when God — and those around you — are seeing the gold? 🤔
• Can you name a moment when strength showed up through you that you know you didn’t manufacture on your own? What did that feel like, and did you let yourself acknowledge it at the time? 🤔
• Is there a wound in your past that has quietly shaped the way you receive kindness or affirmation? Have you ever brought it to the Lord and asked Him to reveal its root? 🤔
• What would it look like for you to receive your own story with the same compassion you’d offer someone else’s? 🤔

🎺 Affirmation:

I am seen. I am held. I am called — not despite my brokenness, but through it. The strength that rises in me is a gift from the One who knows my limits and exceeds them. Affirmation is not a trap. Kindness is not a prelude to betrayal. I am safe to be seen well. I don’t have to earn this. I don’t have to minimise it. I am allowed to stand in what God has done and let it be beautiful. I am His, and He is glorified in my story.

🙌 Prayer:

Lord, thank You for today. Thank You for the stage and the words and the moment — and thank You even more for the journey that made it possible. Thank You for every shattering that You refused to waste, for every wound You turned towards the light. Thank You for Craig, for Wyndi, for Prajesh — for the coaches and companions You placed beside me for this season. I receive this day as a gift from You. Help me to hold it without clutching it, to be grateful without becoming proud, to move forward from here with the same surrender that carried me through today. Where I still struggle to believe the good things — where the old wound still whispers that kindness cannot be trusted — would You be louder still. Heal the place in me that flinches at affirmation. Let me receive love the way You intended — openly, gratefully, without fear. Let me see myself the way Prajesh saw me tonight; more than that, let me see myself the way You see me. Whole. Yours. Worth it.

In Jesus’ Name, Amen.

There is a kindness in being witnessed. There is a grace in being named well by someone who knows you. Tonight I received both, and I’m holding them gently — not too tightly, not too loosely — as a reminder of what God can do when we stop holding back and simply trust Him with the room.

This is my story. This is His glory. Trixi 🌿