Coming to you from inside the holidays… Over the past few years, I played the same mental game with the holidays that I used to play with motherhood, and with adulthood in general. I.e.: I started out by trying to force myself to do the holidays “right.” But no matter what I do, they just don’t feel all that right. Because of social media I’ve discovered I’m not alone in my discomfort.

I'm reading Motivational Interviewing. It’s a psychology textbook my husband kept telling me about. I just started reading it yesterday and btw I have no training in psychology. If you can accept those caveats, I will share some nuggets with you. Because this textbook is the juiciest, nuggetiest textbook I’ve ever read.

In 2020, I hope you don't create a content calendar for your business. Creating a content calendar is a swell way to do a few lousy things. Maybe you love nice and neat content grids. But you know what else is a nice and neat grid?

It’s so hard to start things, isn’t it OR IS IT?... My first time bowling was in Big Bear Lake, CA. My parents drove us up to the mountains for a long weekend. It was summer, so no skiing. Just fresh air and pine trees.

I hear this. Unsurprisingly this comment on my FB page comes from a mom. You can tell because Moms know ourselves. We know what we like to do and what we don't like to do because... Everybody demands we expend our energy on things we don't like to do all day long. LEAVE US ALONE. Someone else do it for a change. GAWD. I respect this conclusion.

A few days ago I watched a woman give a presentation who is smart, funny, dynamic, a terrific speaker. She's got that Grit. She tells it like it is and she's not afraid to be seen in all her gesturing, funny-face, loud-voice glory. So when she said toward the end of her presentation, "my personality is nowhere on my website or social media channels," I felt... sad.

Back in May I was in Tokyo, jogging. AS ONE DOES. I jogged by a school that had a bunch of German flashcard-type stickers pasted to the side of the cement school building. Because... Japan? I don't know why. Anyway, this was one of those flashcards.

You know that quote attributed to Henry Ford? “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” It means, "Don't give people the product they say they want. Give people the product that actually solves their problem." Right?

My son turned 5 in September. That means my business is about to turn 4. For the first year of his life I worked a full time remote job. I remember clearly deciding to quit my job. It was a lot of little things that added up to a moment.

"The business is not you. The business has its own fans, its own energy. ... You are stunting your business growth by treating the business and you as the same thing, especially if you are a solopreneur." I jotted this down while I was interviewing Denise Duffield-Thomas a couple of months ago.