Blog

There are exactly 4 people in the world for whom I would drop everything in an instant and go do whatever they needed – no matter the cost, no hesitation, no questions asked.  How many are on your list? Mine is small, by design.  I used to try to be all the things to all […]

How many times have you been asked to do something, agreed – because you felt bad or obligated or too tired to fight it – and later regretted it? Maybe you felt resentful or irritated or exhausted or underappreciated afterward. How many times have you asked someone else to do something, only to have them […]

I’ve been hanging out recently with two types of people: 1) exhausted corporate workers whose jobs/lives feel like constant firefighting, and 2) actual firefighters. Based on my purely anecdotal observations, it seems like the latter group has a lower #burnout rate than the former. Which is insane.  Here are some things I’ve learned about how […]

A year ago, I stepped away from a great job at a great company, with almost no notice and no other full-time employment lined up. I was doing complex, lucrative work with cool clients and a super supportive employer. So what happened? Answer #1:  I’d been preparing to go full-time solopreneur for a while, and […]

“Make a different mistake.” This has been my mantra through dozens of critical decisions and moments of uncertainty over the last couple of years. Trusting myself hasn’t come easily. Years of gaslighting and unwinnable situations scrambled my signals and created paralyzing doubt around my choices. Reaching some mystical moment of perfect clarity was, most of […]

Something really powerful just happened. Like so many of us, I have struggled mightily with shame, self loathing, and a sense of brokenness.  We all have different “parts” or facets of our personality that try to protect us from encountering those painful emotions in different ways. (The more trauma you’ve experienced, the more disjointed these […]

I spent last weekend in a house with eight other women, celebrating a friend’s wedding. This kind of thing, in the past, would’ve left me drained, overwhelmed, and inevitably sick. (I am an introvert’s introvert, and get easily overstimulated – to the point I used to beg my parents to let me skip my friends’ […]

Confrontation is the worst. Who’s with me? If I had a nickel for every difficult personal conversation I’ve avoided, I’d have *almost* enough nickels to fund all the therapy that not-having-the-difficult-conversations necessitates. On the plus side, the sheer terror of initiating confrontation led me to spend an inordinate amount of time figuring out how to […]

I like to think I’m decent at integrating difficult feedback from other people. (That comes easily when you’re your own harshest critic, and constantly assume you’re in the wrong.) What’s more challenging, I’ve found, is taking feedback from myself. Signals from my body and my emotions are things I long tried to suppress, deny, and […]

“I don’t need you to be the perfect student. I need you to tell me what’s actually going on.” Most of us have had to be perfectly composed and “on” so much that we don’t recognize the opportunities we DO have to let that guard down and be real.  It doesn’t occur to us that […]