The Life of a COO-Girl

A This Is Fine: A COO Story Segment

A COO wears a ridiculous number of hats: strategist, firefighter, therapist, spreadsheet whisperer, emotional support adult. Some days you’re building infrastructure; other days you’re just trying to keep it from catching fire.

The biggest myth about the role is that you’re supposed to wear all those hats at once, like if you just stack them high enough, you’ll somehow achieve executive enlightenment. Spoiler: you won’t. You’ll just look tired and mildly concussed.

The real skill isn’t balancing them but switching them—taking one off, setting it down, and picking up the next completely, intentionally, and without apologizing for the pile of chaos left behind.

But since I hate hat metaphors (and wearing hats), let’s call them something that makes my Swiftie-heart happy: Eras. Not the kind that sell out stadiums, but the kind that make up a Tuesday. One minute you’re the Change Agent. The next, the Firefighter. Then the Diplomat, the Analyst, or the exhausted Showgirl holding everything together with caffeine and willpower.

Each role has its own rhythm, its own emotional key, its own costume change. And if you squint hard enough, being a COO starts to look a lot like performing Taylor Swift’s entire discography…on shuffle, in the same day, without a setlist. But she did it, and so can we.

You Can Only Operate in One Era at a Time

Here’s the thing I wish someone had told me early on: you can’t be all the Eras at once. You can’t be the strategic visionary while also crisis-managing, while also coaching someone through their feelings, while also fixing the budget model. It doesn’t work. You just end up half-assing all of it.

Just like Taylor can’t sing “Shake It Off” while simultaneously performing the bridge of “All Too Well (10 Minute Version),” I can’t run a leadership meeting while mentally triaging fires and stress-testing next quarter’s numbers. Each era needs your full attention—its own energy, its own brain space, its own vibe.

But here’s the part that makes this job borderline unhinged: that doesn’t mean you only get one era per day.

Some days I switch eras every hour. Some days, every five minutes. The skill isn’t staying in one mode. It’s recognizing when the song changes and switching gears before anyone notices you’re still singing the wrong chorus.

The Eras of a COO-Girl

Fearless: The Change Agent

“Fearless is not the absence of fear. It’s being afraid but jumping anyway.”

This is the “we’re burning the old playbook” era. You’re leading transformation that scares everyone, including you. Maybe it’s blowing up the org chart. Maybe it’s killing the software everyone’s emotionally attached to, even though it’s held together by prayers and duct tape. Maybe you’re just trying to get people to stop treating “change” like a swear word.

Fearless is about showing up with optimism when the room has gone silent. It’s being the one who says “let’s go” when everyone else is still looking for reasons to stay put.

You’ll know you’re in this era when you catch yourself starting every sentence with “okay, hear me out…” or when you’re selling a vision you’re only 70% sure will work.

Speak Now: The Coach

“Speak now or forever hold your peace.”

This is the say-the-hard-thing era. The performance review no one wants to give. The “your behavior is tanking team morale” conversation. The feedback you’ve been rehearsing in your head for three weeks because you keep hoping it’ll magically resolve itself. (It won’t.)

Speak Now doesn’t do vague hints or “let’s revisit this later.” It’s direct, honest, uncomfortable, and it’s the only way anything actually changes.

You’ll know you’re here when you’ve rewritten your opening line four times, practiced it in the shower, and are currently giving yourself a pep talk that sounds suspiciously like “just don’t cry.”

Red: The Firefighter

“We are never ever getting back together” with this crisis.

Everything’s on fire. The deadline was calculated wrong. The thing that was supposed to sync with the other thing didn’t do the syncing thing. The vendor ghosted. There’s a Teams message that says “can we talk?” with no context.

Red is chaos at full volume. It’s rapid-fire decisions, ruthless triage, and keeping your voice steady on calls while your brain is screaming. You’re telling people “we’ve got this” while having absolutely no idea if you’ve got this.

You’ll know you’re here when your calendar becomes a suggestion, your to-do list says “SURVIVE” in all caps, and you’ve answered 47 emails in the last 12 minutes.

1989: The Builder

“Shake it off.”

Clean lines. Fresh systems. Big main-character energy.
This is your pop-era COO moment.

This is the boldness era. You’re building the infrastructure that will take the company from scrappy chaos to actual scale. New systems, new processes, new ways of working that don’t involve 17 Teams channels and a prayer.

1989 is confident and unapologetic, and so are you. You’re designing workflows that might actually work, creating dashboards people will use, and building the scaffolding for 2x growth. The criticism and skepticism? “Shake it off.”

You’ll know you’re here when you unironically get excited about process documentation and start sentences with “okay, but what if we standardized this?”

Reputation: The Operator

“Look what you made me do.”

Heads down. Noise cancelled. Getting. It. Done.
Reputation playing in my office is normally a sign to come back later (if possible).

The strategy’s set—now you’re making sure it actually happens. You’re in the dashboards, unblocking teams, tracking every deliverable, catching the details that slip past everyone else. This is execution mode: unglamorous, essential, relentless.

Reputation doesn’t need visibility. It runs on precision. You’re operating in the background, quietly keeping the engine running while everyone else takes their bows.

You’ll know you’re here when someone asks “where are you on this?” and you’ve already finished it.

Lover: The Diplomat

“You need to calm down.”

The room’s tense. Someone’s being unrealistic about timelines. Two people are passive-aggressively talking past each other. Someone just sent an email that could detonate three relationships.

Lover is bridge-building mode. You’re translating between teams with competing priorities, finding common ground as deadlines close in, and defusing conflicts before they blow up next quarter’s roadmap.

You’ll know you’re here when you’ve said “I think we’re actually aligned on this” four times in one meeting, or when you’re diplomatically rewriting an email before it torches a key relationship.

Folklore / Evermore: The Culture Keeper

“This is me trying.”

The quiet era. You’re in reflection mode—running the post-mortem, documenting what actually happened versus what we thought would happen, making sure the lessons don’t evaporate the second everyone moves to the next fire.

This is about preserving institutional memory in a place where half the team has been here less than a year. It’s capturing the origin stories, the close calls, the reasons behind decisions that now just look like “how we’ve always done it.”

You’ll know you’re here when you’re telling a story that starts with “so back when we had three people…” and realize most of the room wasn’t there.

The Tortured Poets Department: The Analyst

“Everything comes out teenage petulance.”

This is the era of data purgatory. You’re knee-deep in spreadsheets, trying to make sense of what the numbers are actually saying—and whether you trust them. You’re reconciling reports that don’t quite add up, building models that get you closer but never quite all the way there, and muttering “that can’t be right” for the fifth time in an hour.

The TTPD era is where clarity meets chaos. It’s the long pause before the insight clicks, the frustration of knowing the answer is in there somewhere if you could just stop overthinking long enough to see it.

It’s quiet, tedious, and oddly meditative—the kind of work that looks still on the surface but feels like paddling underwater.

You’ll know you’re here when your eyes blur from Excel glare and you start negotiating with your data like it’s a moody teenager who refuses to tell you what’s wrong.

Midnights: The Strategist

“It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me.”

This is the era of strategic insomnia. You’re awake at 1:07 a.m., staring at the ceiling, rewriting org charts in your head, drafting next quarter’s OKRs in your Notes app. You know you should sleep, but your brain’s still running a full staff meeting.

Midnights is where all the ideas live before they’re ready for daylight—half insight, half anxiety, all caffeine. You’re connecting patterns, questioning decisions, reimagining what’s possible, and occasionally spiraling into “what if we burned it all down and started fresh?”

It’s a little brilliance, a little chaos, and a lot of typing “ignore this if it’s a bad idea” into Teams at 11:42 p.m.

You’ll know you’re here when your best solutions come at the worst hours—and somehow, you don’t even mind.

The Showgirl: The Integrator

I’ll be your father figure

This is the meta-era—the one that makes all the others possible. You’re the quiet choreography behind the curtain, the structure that keeps the whole operation from flying apart.

You’re coordinating, translating, smoothing, holding. You’re making sure the CEO’s vision actually reaches the people doing the work, and that the people doing the work still feel human in the process.

It’s the most invisible kind of labor—the kind that’s only noticed when it’s missing. When it works, no one sees it. When it breaks, everyone does.

You’ll know you’re here when you’re completely spent but still smiling through it, sending the follow-up email with emojis because optimism is part of the brand—and somehow, that still counts as grace.

The Art of the Seamless Transition

The hardest part of this job isn’t the work—it’s keeping up when the tempo changes.

Some days you get a clean handoff between roles. Other days you’re mid-sentence in one conversation and realize you’ve already shifted into another version of yourself without meaning to. That’s the trick of COO life: noticing the transition, adjusting, and pretending it was intentional.

This morning alone, I ran through six eras before lunch:

• Reputation – reviewing Q4 metrics, trying to sound confident about the numbers I only half trust.

• Red – vendor meltdown. (Of course it happened during my one open block of the week.)

• Lover – mediating a leadership disagreement while mentally drafting three follow-up emails.

• Speak Now – giving feedback I’d been avoiding for a month.

• TTPD – disappearing into the data to figure out why the math doesn’t math.

• Midnights – the quiet spiral afterward where I rethought the entire plan, fixed it, and accidentally built a better version in my head.

The transitions happen fast. One minute you’re managing conflict, the next you’re troubleshooting, and somehow you end up deep in a Google Sheet wondering how you got there.

It’s not graceful, and it’s definitely not choreographed. But it works. You just learn to move with it—one song, one problem, one conversation at a time.

How to Know What Era You’re In

The hardest part isn’t doing the work but figuring out which version of you the moment actually needs. I’ve picked up a few shortcuts for when I can’t tell which era I’m supposed to be in:

• If people are confused or hesitant → Fearless.
  Lead with optimism and direction. Say “we’ve got this” even if you’re still half-convincing yourself.

• If someone’s behavior is derailing the team → Speak Now.
  Have the conversation. Don’t hint around it on Teams. Just say it.

• If everything’s on fire → Red.
  Prioritize fast and stop trying to save everything. Sometimes “good enough” is the only option.

• If you’re building for scale → 1989.
  Think systems, not heroics. Document it so future you doesn’t want to throttle past you.

• If it’s a normal Tuesday and things just need to work → Reputation.
  Get in the weeds. Check the boxes. Keep the trains running on time.

• If the room’s tense → Lover.
  Slow it down. Translate. Help everyone remember they’re (theoretically) on the same team.

• If the team’s running on fumes → Folklore / Evermore.
  Hit pause. Debrief. Reflect before you sprint again.

• If the data’s being difficult → The Tortured Poets Department.
  Step back and ask better questions. You’ll find the story in the numbers eventually—probably after coffee.

• If everything feels disconnected → The Showgirl.
  Zoom out. Tie the pieces together. Keep the show moving and pretend it’s all part of the plan.

The Exhaustion Is Real

Taylor performs for three-plus hours straight.
I perform for nine—powered by caffeine, Filevine, and the faint hope of inbox zero.

The emotional whiplash of constant era-switching is real. You can’t fake it. Some days you do it with a broken heart (or a broken calendar), with a migraine, or after two hours of sleep. You smile anyway. You keep the rhythm. You tell yourself, “It’s fine — this is the bridge.”

Being a COO means holding a dozen different tempos at once. You’re the thread holding the rhythm steady while each department plays its own song.

And while you’re conducting everyone else’s orchestra, no one hears how loud it gets in your own head.

Still, the work keeps moving. You find the beat again. You always do.

One Era at a Time

What I’ve learned (usually the hard way): you can only live in one era at once.
Not because you’re limited, but because being fully present is the job.

Half Firefighter, half Diplomat is just confusion with a calendar invite.
Better to go all-in for five minutes of chaos than half-commit for fifteen.

The magic isn’t in mastering all the eras—it’s in knowing which one you’re in, showing up for it fully, and then letting it go when the song changes.

Some mornings, it’s nine costume changes before lunch. Other days, it’s the same song on repeat. Either way, the rhythm’s the same: feel the shift, change pace, keep going.

Because being a COO-Girl mostly means figuring it out as you go—and pretending that was the plan all along.

Note: Are all of the images AI generated? Yes. Does that mean that some of them are weird? Undoubtedly. Enjoy the weird.