Gratitude sounds like: I love you, I appreciate you, I see you, I hear you, I feel you, I celebrate you, I recognize you, etc. Gratitude is bigger than Thank You.

How it started

A few years ago I found myself bed-bound, lost both of my businesses and my husband was working multiple jobs while also taking care of me and our two elementary age children. It was a dark rock bottom as I was diagnosed with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis and told I’d be lucky if I didn’t get worse. I was in bed 20-22 hours a day, couldn’t tolerate light or sound most days and it was devastating to reflect back on my life at 37 and realize I might be done truly living.  While In bed, in between sessions of researching how I could heal myself, I discovered that the reason my body was struggling so much was because I had spent the majority of my adult life following the rules, trying to meet expectations and fulfilling obligations I had learned from the world around me. Responding and...

Clarify that loyalty to anything outside yourself is likely going to compromise you at some point. Being loyal to your own core values, your truest and highest self is the most effective long term strategy for health, happiness and fulfillment.

What do I really want to say?

Loyalty to anyone outside of yourself is going to create resentment, lost time and inauthenticity. For many years I was loyal to the rules and expectations of my family. The rules of marriage, the rules I understood about parenting and the rules of the company I worked for. Loyalty was something people could rely on mm for.  But the more I slowed down, the easier it was to hear my internal wisdom speaking to me. The more I listened to what I wanted and needed the harder it was to fulfill my obligation to be loyal to a system of beliefs that started to not make any sense to me. 

And after working with 1000s of women over the last 18 years, Loyalty is one of the biggest lies we have been told about how to...

Productivity is the lie we've been told about how we're supposed to function. It's a performative based version of perfectionism. It's one of the legs of perfectionism that we have adopted into our lives that make us think that we're not actively doing something that qualifies as productive.

That we should feel guilty and shame

And that we should start doing more, doing more is the lie that we've been told. Doing more in terms of your relationships, doing more in terms of your health, doing more across the board is what we have been taught and then agreed to that we are here to do more. It doesn't matter what it is, just stay busy so that you're not being lazy. Procrastination is what we deem as laziness as well. But lazy is not a thing. Lazy has this negative connotation because it is the antithesis of productivity. Productivity is how perfectionists measure their day's success. A lot of us think at the end of the day, that if you weren’t productive that means I had a good...

A lot of us grew up with the mindset that you have to set a goal. You go achieve it, move on to the next thing. The problem with that is if you are over-focused and you have tunnel vision for achieving a specific goal, there becomes a never ending cycle of trying to produce that. 

It doesn't allow you to actually experience the moment that you're in. 

And it requires when you're constantly going after goal, what could I be doing next? What could I be doing right now to get me closer to that goal, rather than looking at the practice of living the life of the person who will have achieved that goal. The intention is to switch from being goal oriented, which is where I lived most of my life to becoming someone who is practicing their life, practicing what it actually looks like to be this person that you want to become. Think about who you want to become. 

Who do you want to be remembered as? 

What kind of mom do you want to be? What kind of partner do you want to...

One of the most challenging parts of being a perfectionist is the continuous reality checks we receive when we think we have finally figured it out. IT being your health plan, your relationship communication, your money saving budget and then reality swoops in and reminds you that NOTHING is that predictable.

No matter how hard we work at creating the perfect plan, the most beautiful strategy that accounts for all the mishaps and potential detours, reality is not plannable.

Setbacks happen.

Big and small. Enormous game changing obstacles and little tiny micro hindrances all add up to an ongoing opportunity to remember that we aren’t in control of anything, even our own selves, our own bodies sometimes.

You have a few choices:

- Deny that the setback occurred and try to move forward with plan A

- Throw your hands up in defeat and say why bother, and stop making plans.

-Or start to expect that there will be detours and obstacles in every plan you make 

Knowing that your...

Who do you need to forgive in order to land in 2021 with more peace and freedom? If you just answered yourself, you are not alone.

What does it mean to forgive ourselves? Where do we feel the pull of guilt, shame, and remorse? And what happens when you have the underlying sense of unresolved forgiveness of lack of reconciliation?

What does forgiveness actually mean? 

To cease to feel resentment against an offender, it’s the detachment of carrying the resentment with you of a mistake or harmful situation. Forgiveness is something we crave when we feel guilt, shame, or remorse.

We feel these things in parenting, partnering, in managing our money, in how we interact with our parents, our friends, our clients, our coworkers…You’re carrying guilt about whether you call your parents enough, whether you are available for your kids enough or in the right way, for not being the initiator for sex with your partner, not responding to texts or...