Real stories. Quiet truths.
Reflections
Everything I share here is rooted in my own life experience.
These reflections come from the hardest seasons of my life - the moments I questioned everything, and the small shifts that helped me find my way forward. Some entries are personal stories. Others are quiet reminders or hard-earned truths. All of them come from my journey of healing, becoming, and learning to trust myself again. If something here speaks to you, know that it comes from a place of honesty and care. You’re not alone in what you’re carrying.
This Month’s Reflection
The Crash That Changed Everything
The Crash That Changed Everything is a raw reflection on what happens when your body fails before your will does and the life you were racing through comes to a halt. This blog explores the physical pain, emotional unraveling, and post-trauma wisdom that followed a spinal injury and years of slow recovery. It’s not about instant healing. It’s about surviving the crash, facing what was buried, and learning to rebuild on your own terms.
THEME: Navigating Change & Resilience
The journey isn’t linear. Find the words you need, right when you need them.
Seeds of Wisdom
These midweek reflections are drawn from moments of growth, clarity, and honest self-talk. They’re part of our Wisdom Wednesday series—short truths shared to meet you where you are. Want more? Follow along every Wednesday on Instagram.
My favorite tree is the Southern or Virginia Living Oak or as some call them Live Oaks for short. They are majestic fast growing trees that reach full size in 70 years, although they've been know to live for a thousand years. While many focus on their foliage or the Spanish Moss often dangling from their limbs, I tend to look at their trunks, branches and roots. There is an unexplainable beauty in these parts of the tree, they tell its story and that story mirrors our own human experience. When faced with adversity a tree doubles down and turns its energy inwards to deepen its roots, a lesson worth noting but a tree also teaches us to:
Stay grounded
Connect with our roots
Turn over a new leaf
Bend before you break
Enjoy your unique natural beauty
And always keep growing
In short we could all learn a valuable life lesson... Be Like a tree.
Ever since I wrote about quiet quitting last month, I can’t tell you how many people have reached out to me expressing their concerns about the lack of balance in their lives. To my surprise the lack of balance wasn’t just related to work, more often it centered around the obligations we feel to also prioritize our family and friends before ourselves. In my continued, or better said, never ending journey of self-discovery and growth I am learning that the only person I can rely on to create balance for me… is me. Without determining what is important to me and how I want to honor those priorities, I found that someone else will inevitably prescribe how I will send my precious and unrenewable time. For me, that became unacceptable and that’s when I realized that I had the power to own my day. Do I always live my ideal day, no, but knowing what it looks likes has me consistently finding more balance. That balance, as you might expect, has me feeling more grounded and settled but it also has made me productive at work and more present with family and friends.
How to you create your balance?
I have come to learn just how impactful negative self-talk is. We all have it, that voice inside our head telling us, “you can’t do it,” “you’re not worth it,” “you’re not smart enough or healthy enough.” The truth is, that negative voice is louder than we give it credit for. We are what we tell ourselves.
In recent years, daily positive self-affirmations have become a social media trend. Trend or not, they are a powerful tool in unlearning negative self-talk. I expressed my inner negative voice to a friend, who was horrified that I spoke to myself that way. They repeated back my words and asked if I would ever use them to describe someone else. My answer was easy, “No, never!” Then why speak of yourself that way, they challenged. They were right. They shared how they viewed me. I wrote that description down and for weeks have kept it by my bed, reading it to myself every morning.
I’d be lying if I said that my negative self-talk has completely disappeared, but it has become considerably softer, and I am beginning to acknowledge things I do well versus focusing on what I don’t. I am happier and feel more empowered today and for that I am grateful.
I recently read, James Clear’s Atomic Habits (I know I’m late to the game on this one), where I learned that by creating a system for our regular daily task frees up our mind’s capacity to focus on bigger, more meaningful things. Take for example, my weekly travel as a consultant – I book my flights within a two window, I fly the same airline, I connect through the same airport, I drive the same route to the airport and park in the same spot, I go through the same security checkpoint, fill my water bottle at the same water fountain, eat the same pre-flight snack while sitting in the same chair, I board the plane at the same time, put my luggage in the same overhead head compartment and sit in the same seat – you get the idea. I never gave what I did much thought, never referred to as a system or process, never recognized that over time I gain efficiency and free myself up to concentrate on more critical things or that my system permitted me to adapt quickly to changes like flight delays and cancelations. I can see how on a broader scale, developing daily routines and consistently executing them – managing the easy stuff, can help anticipate, address, and adapt to the difficult stuff.
Someone once asked me what I would do if I was 10X bolder. I was caught off guard and quickly realized that all too often we focus on constraints, fears, and risks, not ever opening our minds to the possibility of what could be without them. Looking back now I realize I barely gave a response that was 1x bolder. I liken it to mentally rearranging preverbal deck chairs on the Titanic, when I should have been thinking big, much bigger.
It is often said that by aiming high, even if you fail, you’ll land among the stars. Now that’s a view that I could get used to.
I learned the concept of giving myself a permission slip from Brene Brown. According to her, their primary purpose is to serve as an explicit intention setting tool. I use them to help me lean into engagement especially when I am trying something new, while also giving myself permission to fail. And YES... I really do physically write them out on Post-It Notes and hang them on my mirror.
As a result of consistently using this tool I've been able to exert more intentional focus and energy on what makes me truly happy. As a bonus, I have been experiencing less #guilt about putting me first. I'm starting to realize that when I'm fulfilled I have more to give others.