I'm Sydney Senior, the coach and creator behind By Sydney (@by_sydney). I help ambitious people stop getting in their own way, so they can go after big goals without burning out.
Here's the core of everything I teach: most people waste their best energy on fear, self-doubt and overthinking instead of action. Redirect that energy and you move faster, enjoy it more, and burn out less.
I didn't learn that from a book. I learned it the hard way, twice.
I was always ambitious. Once I figured out I was good at school, I doubled down. Straight A's. National Merit Scholar. Top 1% of my class. About 9 AP exams. A 2260 on the SAT. Everyone expected it: "Well, of course. We wouldn't expect anything less."
And nobody pushed me. It was all me. "I have to be good at this. Why? I just have to." I never understood "Cs get degrees." (I do now.) I didn't have any sense of who I was outside of what I could measure.
So I got into Emory, and I was the most miserable I had ever been. My dad said, "Why don't you just leave?" Leaving felt inconceivable. Being the achiever was my whole identity. I left anyway.
At 18, between years of college, I went to Australia on a working holiday visa, one-way, by way of Thailand. My family was all for it. They pretty much pushed me onto the plane.
It was not all beaches. One of the scariest moments of my life was standing alone on a street after a bad experience, dropping off my resume, and calling my parents.
At 19, I did my first skydive, over the Great Barrier Reef. I was terrified of heights. TERRIFIED. Like made-them-stop-the-roller-coaster-so-I-could-get-off scared. On the plane I thought I was going to pass out. When we landed, a girl came up to me and said, "Oh my God, are you okay? You looked so pale."
I was more than okay. That jump permanently raised my baseline for what I know I can handle. It's where I learned one of the ideas I teach most: the more difficult and scary things you do, the less difficult and scary things there are.
Then I came back and finished my degree in entrepreneurship.
I got into tech sales with no experience by networking hard and posting on LinkedIn. I got promoted quickly, got laid off, landed more roles, and eventually got a closing role at a company that had never hired someone without that experience. Posting on LinkedIn brought me jobs, connections, and even paid webinar hosting and paid posts. I've also worked in product marketing.
I was good at sales. I was also running on fear of failure, my reputation and other people's expectations. I'd wake up and go straight onto Slack, already stressed. Nightmares. Constant headaches from grinding my teeth. Sick all the time. Every time I hit a goal, it just moved.
Then I closed the biggest deal of my career, a $50,000 commission. It should have been the best month of my life. I remember thinking, "Okay, that's great... but what's next?" And then, a little louder: "I cannot do this another day."
I quit that month.
I had money in the bank and still felt frozen. I tried a few business ideas and jumped from thing to thing. Every time something didn't work, I took it as proof I wasn't smart enough to be an entrepreneur. I forgot I was a beginner. People told me to "just follow your gut." What does that even mean when you've spent years ignoring it to perform?
I rested. I lowered the bar. I protected my peace until protecting my peace became a cage.
I'd changed my job. I hadn't changed the way I operate. I had to fix the headspace first.
The work was never the problem. It was everything I piled on top of it: the overanalyzing, the judgment, the "what will people think," the need to get it right on the first try. And year after year, I'd look back and realize I still hadn't done the thing I wanted to do.
So I tried the opposite. Stop caring so much what people think. Stop needing it to be right the first time. Stop waiting for the whole plan.
Grind until you break, or want less. Both were wrong. The third option was changing what drives me. Results stopped being a verdict on who I am. Now they're just data. So I try more, fail faster, take bigger swings, and it costs me a lot less than fear ever did.
Same drive. Different fuel. Higher ceiling.
I had deleted all my social media about 5 years earlier because it was messing with my brain. On October 9, 2025, I finally got tired of my own nonsense and posted my first TikTok.
It did not take off. It took until February to hit 1,000 followers, and I was trying to make every video better. In March, one went viral. My monthly challenge videos kept working, so for April I made a workbook to go with the challenge, and it was downloaded about 5,000 times.
That April, I had people in the challenge (me included) build an "audacity ladder" of increasingly scary things. The very top rung of mine was charging someone for something. Since then I've sold workbooks, hosted paid webinars, run paid cohorts, and coached clients 1:1. The top of my ladder in April is now the floor.
Today there are 57,000+ people in the community, my videos have 6M+ views, and my workbooks have been downloaded 6,000+ times.
I've been doing this work on myself for about 15 years: books, podcasts, courses, "hacks" and a LOT of messy trial and error. If it's out there, I probably tried it. The more people I've worked with, the more patterns I've seen, and the faster I can help someone shortcut what took me years.
We start with capacity, not a to-do list. If you're burnt out, scared or overwhelmed, a bigger goal won't help yet. So we get you back to a baseline you can actually sustain. Then we get clear on what you actually want, find the moves that matter, and change your relationship with them: the fear, the beliefs, the stories about what's realistic.
Then we act, in small steps. You don't need giant massive action. Tiny actions, repeated, compound into something much bigger. When a step doesn't happen, we don't judge it. We troubleshoot it: what was the blocker, and how do we make tomorrow easier?
The goal isn't for you to need me forever. It's to teach you the skill, so you can keep using it on your own.
Most of the people I work with are building something: a business, a creative career, or a way out of a job they've outgrown. If you're busy all week but the outreach, the pricing and the sales conversations keep getting pushed to next week, that's not a time problem. Fear doesn't just freeze you. It keeps you busy with the safe stuff.
A few more things I say a lot: Ready is a choice, not a feeling. An idiot in motion goes further than a genius at rest. Never miss twice. What if it were fun?