Hello Reader, Welcome to the conversation. My preferred Enneagram school, the Chestnut Paes Enneagram Academy, is closing at the end of 2026. I heard it live. From them. At a retreat I almost didn't attend. And in the days since, I've been sitting with a feeling I don't have adequate words for. As it turns out, that is exactly what this newsletter is about. Beatrice Chestnut and Uranio Paes changed the trajectory of my life. My work, my relationships, how I show up in a room, how I understand...
8 days ago • 3 min read
Hello Reader, Welcome to the conversation. I forget sometimes that I am Ahh-Maze-Zing. There. I said it out loud. And I'm guessing I'm not the only one. We live in a world that is constantly offering us new metrics to measure ourselves against. Followers. Revenue. Title. The number on the scale. The square footage of the house. And somewhere in all that measuring, we lose track of something much more fundamental. Who we actually are. Not what we've built. Not what we've proven. Not what we've...
15 days ago • 3 min read
Hello Reader, Welcome to the conversation. Somewhere along the way, we decided that verification meant approval. A blue checkmark. A credential. A title. A track record clean enough to display. We built entire identities around being confirmed: by institutions, by audiences, by algorithms that decided we were real enough to matter. And yet. LinkedIn created a verification system to fight fake profiles. The checkmarks appeared. The scams continued. CLEAR scans your iris at the airport to...
22 days ago • 3 min read
Hello Reader, Welcome to the conversation. Some of what we carry as truth was given to us before we were old enough to refuse it. The story of who we are. The story of who hurt us. The story of who we are not allowed to be. We received these stories the way children receive everything...without checking the box. And then we built a life on top of the inheritance, never quite noticing that we had not chosen it. At some point, if we are lucky, life hands us a moment that asks us to open the...
29 days ago • 4 min read
Hello Reader, Welcome to the conversation. The fitting in is exhausting I was on a walk in my neighborhood when it landed. A Mel Robbins podcast was playing through my earphones, her conversation with Seth Godin, and Seth was talking about how we wait to be picked. By employers. By audiences. By clients. By the right person at the right moment. How the waiting itself is the thing keeping us small. I slowed down, because I realized I have been waiting to be picked my whole life, and I am only...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Hello Reader, Welcome to the conversation. There's a scene in season three of Schitt's Creek that I've watched three times now and it still gets me. John Rose, former billionaire, current resident of a motel he once would have dismissed as a punchline, has agreed to help Stevie develop partnerships for her small hotel. They visit a golf course. And John, who misses his former life with a longing he can barely contain, shows up dressed for a round. He drops hints. Elaborate, transparent,...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Hello Reader, Welcome to the conversation. What if nothing in your life needs to change but everything could look different? Not as a platitude. As a genuine question about vantage point. Perspective isn't positive thinking. It isn't reframing for the sake of feeling better. It's the literal coordinate from which you are seeing your life. And like any coordinate, move it even slightly, and what was invisible becomes clear. “ The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes,...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Hello Reader, Welcome to the conversation. There was a woman in a coffee shop line who apologized before she even knew what she's sorry for. She was still deciding what she wanted, still in the sacred, ordinary act of choosing, and someone walked in behind her, and she folded. Sorry. Sorry. I'm sorry. I watched her and thought: what is she praying for? Because I've been thinking about this lately. The idea that our words are not just communication...they are invocation. They are the thing we...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
Hello Reader, Welcome to the conversation. For a long time I carried a carefully curated list of people who had held me back: My mother. My first husband. That manager. The circumstance. The timing. The industry. The economy. The story was airtight. The evidence was convincing. And I told it so many times it became the wallpaper of my interior life, so familiar I stopped seeing it as a story at all. I thought it was just the truth. And then one day, in a moment of radical honesty I was not...
2 months ago • 3 min read