In October 2025, I had an idea for a program to help someone design and create their intentional life. It was robust. The program included every area of life, from home to relationships to tech to spirituality to personal style and more.

I’ve evaluated and curated each of these areas of my life over the last several years, and I wanted to teach how I did that. I wanted to help people who desire an intentional life actually create one. One specific to them. Not one that looks like mine, of course, but one that feels like theirs. I wanted to walk them through each area over the course of a year so that at the end of it, they would be living inside a life they had thoughtfully designed.

But talking about this program proved tougher than I realized it would. I spent the last six months talking about it, designing and re-designing the damn sales page, writing about it, sharing Instagram stories and posts about it, recording podcast episodes about it, and writing emails about it.

I wanted to help someone change their whole life. Perhaps that is too much. Even though I had it strategically planned and did my best to make it manageable, I can understand how reading about this program could’ve felt like a lot to take on.

And it was a lot for me to take on to market it. I don’t subscribe to most of the business advice we’re told is THE way, but I do understand why they tell you to focus on selling one outcome and speaking to the problem that you solve. Ugh. I wanted to speak to the DESIRE this time. I wanted to tell people what was possible for them and what their intentional life could look like if they took the time to create it.

I didn’t want to focus on telling them that they’re missing out on a life they could be living or that time is passing them by and now is when they should start because the longer they put it off, the longer they wait to experience the life they could be enjoying right now.

Nobody wants to be told their life could be better. It feels like they’re not enough or their life isn’t “there” yet and Instagram already has us feeling that way. I wasn’t trying to add fuel to an already fast-moving wildfire that we are excruciatingly aware of. We see every day that people have the lives we want. We scroll past their beautiful homes, their happy relationships, their sweet babies, their booming businesses, their adventurous travels, and we compare and despair enough. I didn’t want to add to that.

What I DID want to say is that you don’t have to keep scrolling and comparing, but instead, you could be creating. You could use the scenes you’re seeing as inspiration, as ideas for what’s possible, and you could sit with yourself and ask the question, “What do I want?”

Not what do I think I want, what should I want, what do other people want for me, what do I want?

I wanted to facilitate the asking of that question and I desired to hold the space for it to be answered over the year together alongside other women who were creating their intentional lives, too. But then nobody purchased my program.

I bumped the start date back again and again. I thought I needed more time to sell it. I thought I needed a better way to talk about it. I kept telling more of my story. I kept giving examples. And then I stopped. A week or two before the program was supposed to start, I did the opposite of what you should do in a launch. Instead of doubling down, sending more emails, and sharing more posts, I did less.

I kept asking myself why I did that. It was like I didn’t even want it to work. I decided it wasn’t working and then decided not to make it work. I was getting good feedback from friends and clients who had already worked with me, great open rates on my emails, and genuine responses, but no bites.

And then I sort of spiraled. I threw myself a bit of a pity party. I often say this to clients – throw the party. Blow up the balloons, have the cake, sit there and sulk. Then, wrap it up. Pop the balloons, throw away the cake, and let’s get back to it.

This is me getting back to it. Party’s over, bitch. We gotta decide what to do from here and act accordingly.

And that’s the part I’m kinda struggling with now. What DO I want to do now? Do I want to go back to talking about 1:1 coaching? Am I so embarrassed that this didn’t work that I don’t want to talk about anything because I feel like a fuckin’ idiot? Yes.

And yet, coaching makes me feel alive. I can’t not coach. When someone achieves something they came to me to accomplish, when they have a breakthrough, when they start believing in themselves, when they unlock one little block that has kept them from something they want, when they finally feel free to be themselves, I feel a feeling of fulfillment that nothing else gives me. I am designed to coach. And I know this because I’ve tried a zillion careers in the last decade and a half, and this is the only one I feel high on life while doing. I know people search for the kind of work that makes them come alive and I feel blessed to have found it, but pissed as hell that in order to do it, I have to market like a madwoman and sell people on themselves and FUCK.

So anyway, the launch of Your Intentional Year was a failure, but I learned a lot. Will I offer it again? Will I delete everything I spent months creating? Will I go back to 1:1 coaching? Will I only ever coach 1:1? Will I ever have a group? Is group coaching even for me? Am I supposed to scale? Hell if I know.

But one thing about me is that I’ll keep trying. If nothing else, I do resilience well.

Is this the part where I’m supposed to tell you that you can click here to work with me? Probably. Maybe I wrote all of this to learn that I gotta figure out how to like marketing more. Eye roll. Okay, fine.

• Learn how to play pickleball properly

• Re-learn how to play guitar

• Take pottery classes

• Establish life and work routines

• Start writing on Substack

• Get back to releasing weekly podcast episodes

• Start marketing on Pinterest

• Enroll 40 members in my program, Your Intentional Year

I wanted to spend less time scrolling my phone in the hours after work, more time outside enjoying this beautiful place I reside in, and to push myself to market my program by living what I teach out loud.

A month ago, I decided to start checking those things off. Not only to do the activities, but to create a video series about it, and hold myself even more accountable by posting them on Instagram. You can see that here – it’s titled, Trying & Failing, Doing & Learning. If nothing else, I would be the example of what it looks like to take action on the things I’ve been thinking about for far too long.

Well, I’m happy to report that this experience has delivered. I’ve made new friends, started playing pickleball multiple times a week, marketed my program more authentically, written three (now four with this one) Substack posts, gotten back to podcasting, and am doing things like meal prepping on Sundays to make my weeks easier.

Something that I’m most surprised by is how much fun I’ve become. Not that I wasn’t fun before, but I can admit that I was a tiny bit boring. Sure, I was going to yoga on the beach on Friday mornings and meeting new friends there. I was going to a ladies’ walking club, visiting parks in town I hadn’t been to before, and connecting with people I had never met. But aside from that, I was mostly going to the beach by myself on the weekends, spending most of the time there journaling ideas for my business.

Then, I started playing pickleball. Now, it’s not that pickleball itself is the magic cure for turning me from a little boring to totally magnetic, but I believe the joy I’m experiencing from being a beginner again IS.

I had only played pickleball a handful of times with friends. Going into the Intro to Pickleball class, I simply wanted to understand the game. But then I had so much fun that I instantly wanted to improve at the game. It was enticing to be new at something and to need to work at it to get better.

I started meeting other newbies. We kept playing. We enjoyed watching each other improve, giving each other a hard time about our quirks, and encouraging each other when we nailed plays. I booked a coaching lesson, asked for tips from better players, and game after game, became more energized by the experience of developing this new skill.

Doing just this one thing has led to funny conversations with my friends about challenging each other to games, being told I have great energy by multiple new friends (the kindest compliment!), and willingly feeling uncomfortable and embarrassed at times, as I go through those wobbly beginning phases.

Ultimately, the process is the point of this experiment. Taking action on that list I kept putting off, feeling the discomfort of doing something new, and staying through the parts that bring up my perfectionist tendencies, my desire to get it right, and the urgency to get through to the other side, where I’ve learned it and can call myself good at it.

Turns out, that’s where the magic is. I’ve gotten to walk myself through the embarrassment of being beaten at pickleball by two kids, aged eight and eleven, and keep playing more games with them, allow the frustration of not getting my serve down as quickly as I wanted to, and keep practicing anyway, and show up to market my business more vulnerably than I had been in months instead of stopping myself from going there.

The duality of discomfort and empowerment has existed intensely this last month. Perhaps that’s the real magic.

I’ve spent most of my life disliking my nose. Group photos where you’re told to “turn to each other and laugh” were my worst nightmare.

A few years ago, I went to see a plastic surgeon for a consultation. I was considering a rhinoplasty. We talked about the things I didn’t like about my nose, the changes I wanted to see, and we even looked at potential surgery dates.

I went home to visit family between the consultation and my final decision, and I found myself comparing my nose to everyone’s — my parents’, my siblings’, my aunt’s, my grandma’s, and my nana’s noses. I made the argument that mine was the largest, the most prominent, and my side profile was certainly the ugliest. They all disagreed. They said things like, “Your nose is fine. Embrace it. It's not as big as you think.” Even my brothers-in-law, whom I'd never talked to about this, said, “We do not notice your nose in the way that you think people notice your nose.”

I ended up not going through with the nose job. I kept thinking about how great it would be to become someone who fully embraces myself, prominent nose and all.

To do that, I started looking for examples. Women with prominent noses like mine. During that time, a video came across my Instagram scroll of a woman with a prominent nose. She was gorgeous. She was talking about embracing her nose. It was exactly what I needed to hear. I started looking for pictures of women with Roman noses on Pinterest. Then, I went to Italy for my sister’s wedding and used that as an opportunity to find more examples of beautiful women with prominent noses. Not one time did I think that any of them were less beautiful because of their noses.

It was so easy to see their beauty, and still so hard to see my own.

Last year, I had some new photos taken. I wanted some updated headshots and to commemorate my time in Montana – a chapter of life I deeply cherished – by being photographed by someone whose work I loved. During that photoshoot, she had me look to the side several times. Each time, I obliged, but cringed a little inside, worrying I’d probably dislike those particular photos.

To my surprise, when I got them back, the side-profile shots were some of my favorites. A year later, I love them even more. I now see myself with so much more love when I look at those photos, and when I look in the mirror.

Photos by Blue Roan Photo | Livingston, Montana

In the world of personal development, the world that I’m in, the phrase “love yourself” is uttered often. You see it written in beautiful font on Instagram posts and Pinterest boards. And yet, when it comes to the details of ourselves and our bodies, critique feels more natural. Intellectually, we get why loving ourselves is important, but actually doing so takes time and intention. And yet, learning to love the parts of yourself you’ve spent years disliking will give you more confidence than anything else. It’s worthwhile work to do.

I understand why people get procedures, and I don’t judge them for it. I know how loud those thoughts in your head sound – I lived with them for a long time. I'm grateful I gave myself the chance to see things differently before I changed something I've now grown to love.

Photo: Blue Roan Photo | Livingston, Montana

I am an eldest daughter, as you now know, and if I say so myself, I am very good at doing it all.

I learned domestic skills at a young age. I learned basic cooking skills as a kid because my family cooked at home a lot. My siblings and I were required to make our beds and ensure our room was clean before we came downstairs for breakfast every morning, per our Dad when he’d wake us up each day. On Saturdays, we’d have to choose chores from a jar, and we weren’t allowed to trade, and then we’d spend part of the day helping our Mom clean the house. I grew up on a farm and was driving tractors and cutting grass at 11 years old.

Now, as a single 35-year-old, I take care of absolutely everything at home. I do all of the meal planning, cooking, cleaning, lawn maintenance, bill paying, money management, and then, of course, I work.

I can handle a lot. I do handle a lot. I am skilled at a lot. I’m grateful for that. I’m empowered by the belief that I’m capable of handling it all. And now and then, I wish I didn’t have to.

I’ve had this conversation with some other single friends and clients who are in a similar place, who love the freedom and flexibility of single life, and who occasionally crave the relief of having help.

I’ve also been married. I’ve experienced sharing life with someone. It doesn’t mean we did a great job of sharing life’s responsibilities, though. I often think about that when people tell me they desire a relationship and the experience of not being the only one doing it all. Getting into a partnership doesn’t necessarily guarantee that you’ll be absolved from a lot of the responsibilities you currently carry. It CAN, and I hope it does for you if you want that.

If I could inject some oldest-sister advice here, I would advise you to be crystal clear about what sharing life’s responsibilities means to you, and have those conversations as you are dating. Honestly, I didn’t even think to have those conversations when I was dating my now ex-husband in my twenties. But TRUST, lessons were learned.

And let me add, I am very aware of my side of the street in my relationships. I know my tendencies to take care, to do it all, to not even ask for help because I’m so used to being the one who handles it all, and to feel resentment when help isn’t offered when I needed/wanted it. Because of those years of marriage and being shown myself in the way marriage reveals ourselves, I know what partnership means to me now. I know what I want it to look like the next go round.

Over the weekend, I was doing the usual — it all — and thinking about this. I was reflecting on how nice it would be to have someone take care of cleaning up the leaves on the patio and cutting the grass, how great it would’ve been to have someone else fire up the grill, prepare the charcoal, and grill dinner Saturday night, and how I might be a little less tired today if someone else had taken care of part of those responsibilities. I don’t mind the time spent outside. I quite like the smell of the grill on a warm spring night, and knowing I can cook on a charcoal grill. Well, I’m learning how to.

Yes, I could pay for some of the services I currently handle, but I don’t want to right now. It has been extremely helpful in the past when my plate was fuller than it is now. I’ve hired lawn help and meal prep help in previous busy seasons of life.

I’m proud that I am not only able-bodied and can do all of these things, but also that I was taught them or picked them up along the way, and that aside from the occasional YouTube video, these skills come naturally and easily to me.

I guess I just wanted to be able to say that it would be nice to have someone else do some of them sometimes, without even being asked.

Photo: Blue Roan Photo | Livingston, MT

Before I share about myself, I want to start with why I decided to start this Substack. I’d like to be an example of hope, of possibility, and of an intentional life. If you’re in your late 20s or early to mid-30s and you’re wondering if you’ll ever figure it all out, you won’t. No one does. But if you’re willing to spend energy on getting to know yourself and following your little nudges of desire, you’ll end up in a life you quite like.

I am the oldest of five in my family structure, the daughter of two oldest siblings, and the firstborn grandchild on both sides. I began helping raise my siblings around the age of ten. I’m thirty-five now. Essentially, I grew up a long time ago, so if anyone thinks they can tell me what to do or offer me any advice that I haven’t already considered, they should think twice. lol

I was the one my siblings would call late at night when I was four hours away at college, and they didn’t want to go downstairs to ask my parents how to get the end of the Q-tip out of their ear after it detached from the stick. I’m the person my friends send voice memos to and start them with, “I know you’ll understand,” or “I know you won’t judge me for this,” or “I’m gonna talk this out with you,” or “I’d love to hear what you think.”

I’ve also lived a lot of life in my thirty-five years. I’ve tried multiple career paths. I’ve gotten various degrees and certifications because I love learning and increasing my skills. I’ve gone from business building to jobs back to business building, often while still having a job or two. I’ve been married and divorced.

I grew up on a farm in the southeastern United States and have a lot of love for the southern life – hot, sticky summers, and all. In 2023, I sold nearly all of my things and traveled across the United States on a nomadic adventure. Since then, I’ve lived in states on the opposite end of the weather spectrum — Montana and Florida.

I’ve achieved nearly every dream I’ve set for myself, but let me be clear, not without hardship. From business achievements to life achievements, I know what it’s like to desire something for so long and then finally get it. I also know what it’s like to desire something, never get it, at least not in the way I wanted it, and even choose to walk away from it.

I know the rollercoaster of financial stress. I’ve experienced a negative bank account multiple times, and can honestly say I was living on a prayer. I’ve had my faith tested and then multiplied again and again, and I quite like that those times gave me stories of a God who always takes care of me in the end. I’ve gone from making $50k a year to $125k a year, gone from $60k+ in debt to being completely debt-free, and everything in between.

I know what it feels like to dream of traveling across the US and seeing landscapes so different from those I’d known, to imagine a cozy winter wonderland with light, fluffy snow, not wet, icy snow, and then get to live through that in Montana. I also pictured life close to the beach for years, and now I live that reality.

I have so many new dreams now that I am actively working toward, including prioritizing my coaching business again, writing about life here, and picking up old hobbies I’ve thought about for too long.

What you can expect here — stories, insight from real-life experiences, oldest sister energy that will include a lot of love, sometimes a little tough love, and resources for becoming the person you desire to be. Resources like mindset shifts (not affirmations that you don’t believe), applied neurology tools you can use in your daily life to ground your nervous system, and books/podcasts/people I love learning from.

Some core values of mine are — give a damn, good things take time, there’s magic in the mundane, have fewer things, make more memories, an intentional life is worth cultivating, we can figure anything out, and we should make our 90-year-old selves proud now.

When I'm not writing here, you'll find me at the beach or on my yoga mat, strength training, or sitting on my patio with a quality cup of coffee. I coach Millennial women in my group program, Your Intentional Year, and host the Overwhelmed to Intentional Podcast — both are good places to find me if you want more of this energy.

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