Just Show Up. The Plan Will Find You.

Your heart knows something your head does not. And until you act on it, you will never find out what.

I sat down recently with Lucia Murguia, Business Development at KPA Engineers in Georgetown, Texas, and co-founder of the Round Rock Young Professionals council. By any rational measure, almost nothing in Lucia’s career was supposed to happen. She applied to a job she did not understand. She moved to a city she did not want. She started a business from grief. And at every one of those crossroads, the voice telling her to go was not logic. It was something quieter. Something that did not wait for permission.

Near the end of our conversation, Lucia told me what she took from JumpStart, the entrepreneurship program through the Round Rock Chamber. The single biggest lesson was this: just show up. Just do it. Even without your packaging, your logo, your finished plan. It does not have to be pretty. Just do it. I have said versions of that for thirty years. But hearing Lucia say it out of her own experience landed differently, because her version comes with something I want to add: the reason to show up is that something inside you already knows the answer. The plan is not missing. It is just waiting for you to move first.

The Internship She Almost Talked Herself Out Of

Lucia studied journalism at UT Austin. Halfway through, she knew she needed to pivot. She was scrolling one day and found a marketing internship posting at a transportation and bridge engineering firm. She read it. She thought: I do not know what that means. That is not me.

She applied anyway.

Something pulled her. She cannot fully explain it now and could not explain it then. The rational case for applying was weak. She did not know the industry, did not know the company, did not know if she would be good at it. But she applied, got the internship, and was hired full-time. The firm eventually created a business development role around what she was already doing naturally: walking into rooms full of engineers and city officials and translating between them. Nobody had mapped that role before she filled it. The plan did not exist until she showed up.

I have watched this pattern in conversion work for thirty years. The customers who become advocates, the employees who become leaders, the founders who build something real: they almost never followed a calculated path to where they ended up. They followed a feeling to a room, and the room shaped them. The ones who waited for the right plan rarely got one.

The City She Almost Did Not Choose

In 2021, Lucia and her sister were trying to buy a house in Austin. They kept getting outbid. Her sister suggested Round Rock. Lucia remembers her eyes going wide. She had done Leadership Round Rock and loved the experience, but living here was a different question. Her community was in Austin. She had her people there. A smaller city would be starting over.

She moved anyway.

Not because the data convinced her. Because her sister was right in a way she could not argue with, and because somewhere underneath the resistance she knew it too. Within two years she had helped co-found the Young Professionals council, gotten involved in the Chamber, and built what she now describes as her tribe. Not in a bragging way, she said. Just in the way you say something when it still surprises you. She is now the chair of Leadership Round Rock’s largest class in the program’s history: people learning what the city is and how it works, led by someone who moved here reluctantly four years ago.

The head said stay in Austin. The heart moved to Round Rock. The heart was right.

The Business She Built From Grief

Last September, Lucia lost her dog Zoey. A lab mix. Twelve years of companionship across every move, every apartment upgrade, every city transition. Zoe had cancer. Lucia had extended her life by six years through fresh, protein-rich, non-processed food. Then Zoe was gone.

At the same time, she was at a company where the values had stopped aligning. Two major losses at once. She told me she had a choice: let this happen to her, or choose an abundant mindset. She channeled her love for Zoe into a fresh dog food company, customized for dogs with illness-specific nutritional needs. She applied to the Round Rock Chamber’s JumpStart program went through four weeks of building from nothing, made her first sale, and built a pitch deck for an idea that started as grief and became a business.

Nothing about that was rational. Grief is not a business plan. But love is a kind of knowing. And the business that came out of it was truer than anything she could have reverse-engineered from a market analysis. She did not wait until the idea made sense on paper. She followed the feeling.

When the Head Says Wait and the Heart Says Go

We are trained to distrust the pull we cannot explain. The business world teaches us to validate before we move, to test before we commit, to build the model before we make the bet. And there is wisdom in that. But there is a kind of knowledge that does not show up in spreadsheets. It shows up in the moment you read a job posting you do not qualify for and feel something anyway. In the moment someone you trust says move and you know they are right before you can say why. In the moment grief becomes a product because love has to go somewhere.

I call this intuition, and I have learned to respect it professionally in a way I would not have admitted twenty years ago. The best conversion decisions I have ever been part of were not purely data-driven. They were data-informed. Somebody in the room said “this feels wrong” or “I think customers want something different” before the data confirmed it. The intuition led. The evidence arrived later.

What Lucia is describing with “just show up” is not recklessness. It is trust. Trust that the pull you feel toward something is information worth acting on, even when your rational mind has not caught up yet. Clarity does not come first. It comes after you move. The plan does not find you on the couch thinking about it. It finds you in the room.

The Question That Cuts Through

At the end of every Leadership Round Rock session, Lucia asks her class: who learned something new today? Every single hand goes up. Lifelong Round Rock residents. People who have been here for decades. Everyone. Every time.

That detail stops me every time I return to it. It means that even people who think they know a place are still learning the moment they show up in the right room. You do not know what you will find until you go. The insight does not come in the planning. It comes in the presence.

So here is the question I keep coming back to after talking with Lucia: there is a room somewhere that is pulling you toward it right now, and your head has a list of reasons to wait. What does your heart know that your head is not saying out loud?

Watch the full conversation with Lucia Murguia on Rock Solid: Round Rock Business Leaders.