This weekend, Glenn and I are staying in a beautiful Airbnb located in Lafayette, TN. We traveled to visit Glenn’s daughter, her husband, and their 3 children. This date was carefully chosen so that we would be able to watch our granddaughter, Kamdyn, who is 8 years old, play her last basketball game of the regular season. We intended to spend the rest of the visit building a basic tree swing out of wood and rope, flying kites, and just hanging around their home doing grandparent things.

My writing, I have found, is often my way of exploring or working through something that is happening in my life. The origin of this post was about 2 weeks ago as I was headed to pick out a bathroom vanity. After doing lots of online research, and visiting a Home Depot store, which honestly left me feeling like I would never be able to afford what I wanted in a vanity, I came across Columbus Liquidators and they seemed to have higher-quality vanities than I was finding online. As a liquidation store, their inventory changes from moment to moment, so I really had no idea what I would find when I arrived.  As I was headed to the store, I was inspired to film a video.

How many times have you had the experience of telling a boss you quit a job, needing to cancel a commitment, end a relationship, or let an employee go? There is a difficult and/or necessary conversation to be had. Leading up to the actual moment we start to play the conversation in your heads. If you are like most people, instead of just saying what needs to be said the conversation just becomes longer and longer. We try to justify, to explain why this must happen. The reality is these conversations are best kept “short and sweet.”

In 1991, at the age of 22, I moved from Stamford CT to Cincinnati, Ohio. Shortly after that, I landed a position as the executive assistant to the CFO of The United States Playing Card Company (USPC), David Sommerkamp. This position handled payroll for all hourly employees (handling other people’s money is still the most stressful thing to me)and interacted with everyone in the company from production to the art department. USPC was a big company but small enough for everyone to feel like family.

Yesterday, my friend Marla, who is also my real estate agent, and I visited a home that I knew I was not going to buy but wanted to visit, nonetheless. After viewing the pictures online, I felt myself being drawn to the house in a major and somewhat inexplicable way.  Although it checks many boxes for us, it is brick, has 2 fireplaces, tons of windows and large rooms, this lovely house, built in 1937, only has one-bathroom, major issue. Also, it has what looks to be a gutter drainage issue, the foundation is in poor condition and there is a lot of deterioration due to the moisture. It is a no, still I had to see it in person. Marla was ready and willing to show it to me. 

At some point in 2022 I decided that I was done watching and listening to the TV/radio news completely.

For several years prior I had been shown signs that I should stop watching and/or listening to the news but I guess I just was not ready to make the change.

What happens when you decide there is a better version of you available and you want to become them? A version of you who is a better listener, meditates to become less reactive, wants to learn to enforce boundaries with the people in your life. You are beginning your personal growth journey!!!

There are a million cliches and let’s not forget all the song lyrics!

Over the last few weeks, I have sort of made a list of things that I thought would never change, things I thought I would be doing for the rest of my life.

In the simplest terms, manifestation is putting your intention towards something that you hope will happen, and then watching it happen in real life. In other words, if you think it, it'll come true. - Julia Malacoff Look around the space you are in, you will find something that you once upon a time did not have, but desired, and now it is in your reality.

“Come on bro, man up.” “Act like a man.” “Be a man.” These phrases are heard by boys from a very young age from the media, their peers and sometimes even their own parents. “Be a man” is used in attempts to say, “be tough.” - June Kitahara. While this is the way the phrase is most often used (negatively), for me it resonated in a very different way.

As I am writing this blog post I am preparing to present an in-person workshop on boundaries. What they are, why we may not have them, and how to create them in our lives. Boundaries are one of the 3 most important tools I ever learned about and then came to implement in my life. Along with my daily routines and being present, learning about and implementing boundaries has had an everlasting impact on me and my life.

I am pretty sure that, as long as I can remember, I have always wanted to be a 50-year-old woman. And, perhaps a Crone **

The women I was in awe of my whole life, were all “older.” They were well dressed, wore bold jewelry, had perfectly styled hair and were beautiful. They had such an air of class and confidence about them. That’s what I wanted, so badly.

I absolutely love stereotypes! They are what comedy is all about!! Making fun of people and the things they do whether that be the stereotype of the typical white hillbilly, the TikTok about the things “white people say,” black people eating fried chicken and watermelon, Asians being good at math! Nothing cracks me up more than Dave Chapelle doing one of his white guy impressions.  

Back in the day, I was kind of controlling. My whole life I had been a planner, I liked people to arrive when they were supposed to, having dinner on the table when I said it would be and everyone to jump up and come to the table when I announced dinner was ready. When deciding what restaurant to go to I wanted to be one to choose, where we went did not seem to matter to others, but it did matter to me.

On September 21st I woke up, fed our dogs, got my tea, grabbed my journal, and sat down to start my morning routine. (Journal, look at the current transits, then meditate) Just as I settled in to meditate, I had a “pinge” to check my text messages. As a rule, I do not check my phone until I have completed my morning routine. Our phones can send us into a spiral of thoughts and activity and these dopamine hits can make or break our whole day. This morning something told me to look at my phone right away.

That is what my mother always told me when I was a kid, often enough that it stuck with me. As I got older the reply to that comment, in my head at least, was “that I do not possess.”

Ah public speaking, I just checked, and it is still at the top of the list of things that people are afraid of! It ranks above heights and going to the dentist!! Although I was scared to death and possibly “unable” to speak in public, I am happy to say that by taking a job that would push me out of my comfort zone and face speaking in public head on, I was able to make great progress in the public speaking arena. 

There are some events that can immediately transport us back to our childhoods. For me, that is “getting in trouble,” even at the age of 54 I am a woman who still worries about getting in trouble and can feel like she is 7 when the possibility arises.

Do you ever feel like the same events, situations, or what are known as “tests” keep showing up in your life? Like they are trying to get your attention and tell you something? Well, they really are! And unless we stop, listen and take the time to learn the lesson they will just keep showing up. In this week’s blog post I want to share how I stopped to learn, listen and grow from such a test.

Let’s start with the definition of an expander from Lacy Phillips on her Podcast, To Be Magnetic, is someone who has created or achieved something in their life that we desire to also have or create.