Picture a sixth-grader in the mid-1980s, standing at the edge of a school dumpster, working up the nerve to climb in. Cassie Divine had accidentally tossed her orthodontic retainer onto her lunch tray and into the trash. This $150 device might as well have cost a million dollars, in her household. Her mother insisted she find it. So in she went, alongside the school janitor, digging through the garbage until she came up with the retainer in hand.
The retainer got sterilized, but her reputation didn’t. Word spread, and in an era when Garbage Pail Kids were having their pop-culture moment, a classmate landed on the nickname that followed her for years: “Trashy Cassie.” She was certain her life was over. She begged her mother to let her switch schools.
If that middle-school logic sounds familiar, you’re in good company. On this episode of She Counts, hosts Questian Telka and Nancy McClelland both admit they made the exact same plea to their own mothers. “Can I just change schools?” seemed, at the time, like a completely reasonable solution to an unbearable problem.
But this episode isn’t really about surviving middle school. It’s about what that scrappy, humiliated, dumpster-diving version of Cassie became, and how, three decades later, Cassie discovered she could summon her on demand.
From Dumpster to Boardroom: Meeting Your Alter Ego
Fast-forward thirty years from that dumpster. Cassie Divine is a former Intuit SVP who led QuickBooks for nearly two decades. But Cassie found herself in another impossible situation. She was leading an initiative where tens, maybe hundreds of millions of dollars were on the line. But her senior male colleague kept talking over her, dismissing her ideas, and twice called her boss to complain that she was being “too aggressive.”
“I remember driving home on my commute and thinking through like, what are my choices?” Cassie recalled. The adult version of “Can I switch schools?” had arrived.
Nancy and Questian immediately recognized the double standard. “With a man, it’s leadership and confidence,” Nancy pointed out. “But with a woman, it’s aggressive.” When they asked if either had met a woman who hadn’t faced this, the answer was unanimous: never.
Stuck in traffic and dread, Cassie thought about Trashy Cassie, the girl who climbed into that dumpster and survived the humiliation that followed. “She can deal with this,” Cassie realized. So she channeled that sixth-grader’s resilience long enough to text her colleague and set a clear boundary: “You can’t treat me like this. You can’t treat our team like this.”
“You don’t have to become someone tougher,” Cassie explained. “You remember that you already are her, and she’s available for you to be in this moment.”
The beauty of this approach is that you’re not pretending or manufacturing a new personality. You’re accessing real strength from your own history. When Cassie needed to advocate for a team member, she remembered being “the toughest mom you’ve ever seen” as she advocated for her daughter in a hospital room. That’s who she became in the meeting.
Building Your Catalog of Courage
The alter ego only works if you can summon it intentionally. That means building what Cassie calls a “catalog” of the times you’ve survived hard things.
“You’ve survived 100% of your hardest days,” Cassie said, borrowing a line from Peloton instructor Robin Arzon. Those survival stories can include advocating for someone in a hospital, surviving an illness, or even finding the right words to console a teammate who lost. Each memory is proof that you’ve already been the person who could handle whatever you’re facing now.
Nancy suggested turning this into a journaling exercise. Name your alter egos and write down their three strongest traits. What makes Trashy Cassie powerful? What about the version of you who comforts someone through loss? “Reject everybody else’s definitions for you,” Cassie advised, “and decide the ones that you are.”
The shift is profound. Instead of asking “Can I do this?” you ask “When have I already been the person who could?”
But we often believe you need to feel confident before you can act that way, and that trips up many ambitious women.
Confidence Is Something You Do, Not Something You Feel
“You’re not going to feel confident until you act that way,” Cassie said, cutting straight through one of the biggest myths about professional authority.
Nancy, drawing on cognitive behavioral therapy, explained the mechanics. Your thinking, feeling, and doing selves don’t need to align in order for you to take action. Her shorthand is “putting your yoga pants on.” You can dread the class, doubt you need it, and pull the pants on anyway as you head there. The action doesn’t wait for the feeling’s permission.
Cassie keeps the wisdom “Just act as if” on a Post-it note. The feeling follows the behavior, not the other way around.
For Questian, this revelation reframed her entire early career. “I looked up to women who were farther along and assumed they felt as confident as they appeared,” she admitted. “The idea that they might be projecting confidence they didn’t feel was a foreign concept.”
To trigger this shift on demand, all three women use specific cues. Cassie keeps a picture of a goldfish wearing a shark fin. It looks like a shark in the water, but it’s still just a goldfish underneath. It’s a good visual reminder.
Then there’s the music. Cassie maintains “imposter syndrome playlists” to hype her up beforehand, and one called “Victory Lap” loaded with ridiculous anthems like DJ Khaled’s “All I Do Is Win” for celebrating afterward. Nancy rediscovered Elton John’s “I’m Still Standing” during a brutal tax season, hearing it as proof she’d survived before and would again.
Each time you act confidently and survive, you bank more evidence. The behavior gradually becomes genuine confidence. It’s a hack that builds on itself.
The Guardrails: Clarity Over Cruelty
With this kind of power comes the need for boundaries. Cassie is clear that “this isn’t permission to be unkind. This is permission to be clear.”
The alter ego is situational armor. It’s something you put on for a specific moment and take off when it’s done. If you feel yourself ramping up the “tough lady” too much, that’s your signal to recalibrate. The goal is always clarity, and you never want to lose alignment with your values.
Cassie’s most powerful reframe might be to lead with the outcome rather than the feeling. “So many times our feelings affect what we say and how we say it,” she explained. “If instead I’ve shifted to why it’s important to give this feedback or why it’s important to raise my prices, it sets the tone for everything.”
Her final guardrail, written on another Post-it, is “Talk less, say more.” She learned this after spending 15 minutes explaining her feelings to a difficult colleague and getting nowhere. In a similar situation some months later, she kept it simple. When he said “I don’t know what you mean,” she replied, “I think you do,” and that was that. It was far more effective.
The group shared their favorite conversation-enders. After drafting 17 angry email responses to a jerk colleague, Cassie finally sent just one word: “Unsubscribe.” He read it exactly as intended (“I’m done with you”), and it led to their most productive conversation ever.
For accounting professionals, these tools apply directly to our daily challenges, including pricing conversations, scope creep, and difficult clients. The same playbook works whether we’re setting boundaries with a bully or holding our rates with a demanding client.
Permission to Be Powerful
What Cassie offers is permission to access the strength you’ve already proven. Her mission with Career Hack reflects her goal of helping more women gain power and use their voices more often. Not everyone needs to be a CEO, but learning to act with impact makes the profession better for everyone.
“Women don’t lack capability or intelligence or ambition or work ethic,” Cassie said. “But I do think we lack permission.”
The next time you face a hard conversation, a big project, or a room full of people who underestimate you, remember you don’t need to become someone new. You just need to remember who you’ve already been.
As Nancy put it, “When have I already been the person who can handle hard things?”
Listen to the full episode, and then join the conversation by following the She Counts LinkedIn podcast page and share your answer: When have you already been the person who can handle hard things?