Your Body is a Wonderland

During the month of April, we are exploring beauty in nature and life. The best thing about this series is that not only am I learning more, but also noticing more good stuff. Thanks for joining me. For the best reading experience and formatting, you can view this post on my website by clicking here.

“The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.”

— Psalms 19:1

Just before Mother’s Day a few years ago, I was out shopping with my friend, Ginny. We were looking at spring flowers at Pike’s Nursery, and inside they had this display of terrariums.

So cute!
So little!
So alive!

I bought one for my myself and my mom, boasting that these mini gardens would never die. We could snub them with our shriveled, brown thumbs and still they would live on!

Except they didn’t.

Mine first. Then my mom’s.

What happened?

I first learned about self-sustaining terrariums in third grade. Our class built one together. These mini ecosystems are really cool because if you do them right, they’re mainentence-free and last “forever.” However, this sealed terrarium must be able to clean, feed, and restore itself. If you think that sounds impossible, you’re right! The rules for proper terrarium care can be intimidating:

You’ ve got a checklist that includes choosing:

1. The right plants.

2. The right container.

3. The right light.

4. The right water.

5. The right microfauna (insects).

“Ecosystem: a biological community of interacting organisms and their physical environment.””

— Dictionary.com

What I find fascinating about terrarium building is that each one is a tiny microcosm of the world we live in. This beautiful planet, delicate and fragile, pivots on an invisible axis as the heavens blaze all around it. Miraculously, it’s exactly the right size, contains both water and air, enjoys the sun from a comfortable and safe distance, and houses all the plants and animals it needs to function efficiently. Within this extra large sphere, smaller biomes exist. Everything works together with everything else to achieve harmony and balance.

But like all things in nature, they don’t exist indefinitely unchanged. Disruption is inevitable. In addition to the wide scale destruction leveraged by mass disasters, there’s extinction, and even tinier disturbances like the famous “butterfly effect." None of you were surprised when I told you that our world is basically just an extra large terrarium. Sure. It’s one of those things you accept as fact, like the earth is round or the sky is blue.

But did you know that your body is ALSO an ecosystem?

Why is this important?

This week, I attended a Brain Health Forum hosted by Emory University’s Goizueta Center for Alzheimer’s Research. Over and over again, the researchers stressed the relationship between healthy habits and functional living. Like that terrarium that needs water and light, your body needs different kinds of energy to thrive. If you neglect one aspect, the whole body suffers. But humans are notoriously stubborn and weak and we live in denial about a lot of things. When it comes to how we care for our own bodies, we’re especially deceptive. We would prefer to cherry-pick our healthy habits by negotiating bargains like these:

• I’ll exercise, but I’m not going to quit drinking alcohol.

• I’ll practice good oral health, but I’m not going to get eight hours of sleep every night.

• I’ll spend time learning a new skill, but I’m not going to give up fat and sugar.

Maybe you’ve told yourself that by the time your brain or heart begins to fail, science will have invented new drugs to stave off all the scary stuff. The problem is that you don’t wake up one morning, suddenly not able to remember what you did yesterday, or have a heart attack just because you sneezed really hard. These seemingly acute diseases fester over decades. And unfortunately, some drugs don’t even work if they’re started too late!

What CAN we do?

There’s a quote by author Anne Lamott that I’m applying here (slightly out of context):

What do we do during times of loss or general dread? WE DO WHAT’S POSSIBLE.

When faced with the IMPOSSIBLE, a great place to start is with this question:

What IS possible?

I came away from the forum feeling overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information I ingested. These PhD/MD types use a lot of big words and talk really fast. But also—the body is complex, and because of the interconnectivity of the body’s systems, the medical professionals I heard from tended to focus on their hyper-specialized area of expertise.

Here’s what I took away from the day:

K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple, Stupid)

1. Remember that what’s good for your heart is good for your brain.

2. Practice good sleep hygiene. (Make yourself a dedicated, distraction-free space that’s cool, comfortable, and devoid of light and sound pollution)

3. Depression and anxiety are risk factors for cognitive decline. Do not be afraid to ask for help when you need it, and stay connected socially.

4. Take care of your teeth. (So weird, but oral bacteria can travel to your brain and affect memory.)

It would be so easy—and no one would blame you—if you also came away from a lecture like that thinking, “It’s too hard. I can’t do all the things I need to do to stay healthy, so I might has well do nothing!”

A tiny part of you might be right. It’s true. You drop the ball on any one of these directives and your body will surely break down.

But I’m reminded of that Mother’s Day terrarium, short-lived though it was. Mine got too wet and mold started to grow. My mom placed hers too close to a sunny window and it dried out.

We did get to enjoy them for a little while. For a time, our beautiful terrariums brought so much joy and color into our homes. I may not have tended it to the degree that my gardening-loving-friend, Ginny, did hers, but I did what was possible for me.

A Lesson from Mrs. Jones, my favorite teacher ever

In third grade, I learned to appreciate the beauty of life. Through an engaging and interactive science project, I learned the importance of nurturing living things. There, my curiosity about the world was first sparked. Through practice, I became a steward of the land and gained a new understanding about the complexity of our natural world.

I have observed the power of the watermelon seed. It has the power of drawing from the ground and through itself 200,000 times its weight. When you can tell me how it takes this material and out of it colors an outside surface beyond the imitation of art, and then forms inside of it a white rind and within that again a red heart, thickly inlaid with black seeds, each one of which in turn is capable of drawing through itself 200,000 times its weight—when you can explain to me the mystery of a watermelon, you can ask me to explain the mystery of God.
William Jennings Bryan

The BIG Take-Away

The thing I’m learning most these days is that I don’t have to understand how everything works in order to appreciate my role in the ecosystems I inhabit. I want to harness my inner eight year-old, the girl who thought that collecting cool rocks, climbing trees, and making dandelion bracelets was the pinnacle of a fun afternoon.

Somewhere between those frivolous days spent outdoors cultivating curiosity, another girl emerged, a girl who became frustrated by all the things she didn’t know. Now I understand that there’s immense joy in being able to admire something and care for it and cultivate its beauty (even if you don’t fully “get” it)—not just in nature but in my marriage and in my children and in my friendships. I have a responsibility to be a faithful steward of the future. There are real consequences to neglecting the needs of organisms in the environment, the organizations we serve, and the organs in our bodies.

Knowing that my body is a complex network of nerves, blood vessels, enzymes and other tissues bound by both mind and soul actually inspires me take care of it more. Nothing stays the same, not our plants enclosed in their glass towers or our bodies wrapped in aging skin. That’s actually kind of cool. There’s always something new to explore and learn. All I really know is that I don’t want my body to break anytime soon. I’m not smart enough to fix all the things that could go wrong and paying someone else to do it will no doubt be very expensive.

That drug I mentioned earlier—the one that doesn’t even work if you start it too late—costs nearly $30,000/ year. (And nobody wants to drop that kind of cash for nothing!)

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Where is Your Light Coming From?

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Happy Spring! This month on the blog, we’ll be exploring beauty in nature and life.

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Light

Weird question: How do you feel about light?

You probably feel like I do. You don’t think about it much until you don’t have it. You walk into a dark room and your hand instinctively searches for the switch. You flip the porch light on for the kid who’s out late. The flash goes off as you snap a picture of a friend blowing out her birthday candles. And is it just me or do you sometimes turn on your phone’s flashlight to read the menu at fancy restaurants?

Here’s an unpopular opinion: I kind of like it when the power goes out. There’s something hopelessly romantic about gathering all the candles in the house, rooting around for the flashlight in the bottom of the toolbox, and getting cozy under a blanket in front of the fireplace.

I love it.

I also love the morning, of letting in the light as I travel from room to room opening up the shades and welcoming the day. Good morning, Bedroom. Good morning, Living Room. Good morning, Kitchen.

Good morning.
Good morning.
Good morning.

Light is universal, the first thing God spoke into being in the story of creation. No one has to tell you that life depends on light.

Phototropism

In Biology, specifically Botany (the study of plants), we talk about light as it relates to something called Phototropism.

It’s a big word that describes how plants develop. Most plants rearrange their tiny plant organs (chloroplasts) to bend toward light in order to maximize food production and grow.

Move a houseplant to a dark corner, and you’ll see its leaves bend in the direction of your nearest window. Or maybe you’ve driven by a field of wild sunflowers and been mesmerized as the sunny rows bow in reverence in the direction of afternoon light. Even the trees growing on the side of a steep hill stretch upwards, directly toward the light.

Light is the fastest known phenomenon in the universe. We will never fully understand it, though we try. According to Einstein’s theory of special relativity, nothing with mass can reach or exceed the speed of light. But as humans, we just can’t leave it alone. We want to capture it.

And so we admire the sunrises and sunsets.
And we invent complicated math problems to measure its wavelength and frequency.
Just recently I read that scientists at CalTech invented a camera that can capture light at a trillion frames per second.

We need light like we need air and food and water. Like plants, humans bend toward light.

The Light Inside

We allow light to fill us from the inside out.

My daughter has an album on her phone that’s just a series of sunrises and sunsets, the day opening up wide and clear, all hazy gray and pink and teal and then again as the day says goodnight with sweeping brushstrokes of orange and purple. The canvas of the sky is more beautiful than anything hanging on our wall, breathtaking, and so she opens the camera and finds the light, a moment frozen in time.

Those photos are almost painful in their beauty because they remind us how close we are to darkness, how quickly it covers the day, but how easily, too, the day can wash it away.

As I grow older, the light is dimming, and I constantly find myself saying I need more light.

But what is it I really need?

Do I need more food?
Sustenenence?
Energy?
Guidance?

“The pupil dilates in darkness and in the end finds light, just as the soul dilates in misfortune and in the end finds God.”

— Victor Hugo, Les Miserables

We claw our way into the light when we are born, and slip gently towards it again we die. Light is the metaphor for all the good within us. In the hours before Jesus’s crucifixion, darkness covered the land. It’s no coincidence that the resurrection happened just as the day was breaking.

So maybe what I really need is more God.

Lord, help me to bend toward your light.

It’s Okay to be a Crybaby

During the month of March, we’re continuing our series on women’s issues. Some formatting may be lost if you received this post via email. To get the full experience, please visit my website here.

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Women cry more than men.

You heard it here first.

Just kidding.

No one needs to tell you that women cry more than men. Women have often been accused of being the “weaker” sex, the more “emotional” sex,

But is crying necessarily a BAD thing?

When was the last time you cried?

I’m the kind of girl who cries twice a year.

I’m not proud of it. It’s probably due to an emotionally repressed childhood.

Studies show that most women cry an average of 5.3 times per month, while most men cry an average of 1.3 times per month. I found these stats hard to believe—for both men and women, that sounds like a lot of crying to me—but the American Psychological Association defines crying as anything from moist eyes to full-on sobbing. By that definition, my tears are probably more in line with the average. I’m especially a sucker for a book with a sad ending. (I wish I could list them here because I count sad books among my favorite books of all, but I don’t want to spoil anything for you.)

I’ve always admired people who could cry with abandon, who cared not what others thought, but just let the tears roll freely down the cheeks. As I get older, I’m trying not to fight that stinging feeling at the edge of my eyes. I’m trying to be more present in my body, to allow myself to feel what I feel.

Tears, like good sleep and nourishing food, have a myriad of health benefits. Tears (even those associated with sadness) actually boost mood, promote empathy, and reduce aggression (by 43%!!). Not only that but tears contain salt, and salt heals.

What is this saty discharge? Jerry asks Elaine.

The Healing Properties of Tears

The antibacterial and antifungal properties of our tears have the ability to make us feel better both physically and emotionally. Tears help us self-regulate, and because tears contain oxytocin and endorphins, crying (especially during times of distress) can help reduce pain.

I used to think that I couldn’t cry unless I was literally breaking. Stress can do that to a person. And I think that especially women with young families are prone to breaking. My first daughter cried a lot when she was a baby. I suspected she had colic, and then someone told me that the definition of colic is when the baby is crying, and you are too. Check and check.

We don’t need to cry just because we are sad or because we got a papercut. If crying is this good for you, then cry when you see something beautiful, when awe overwhelms you, when love bubbles up in your chest and you cannot contain it, when gratitude fills your heart, and when thanksgiving spills out.

Cry your little eyes out and feel better. And don’t let anyone make you feel bad because you’ve already cried 5.3 times this month. Or I don’t know. Let them make you feel bad. And cry about that, too. It’s good for you!

Tell me what makes you cry. I read every reply, and I’d love to know!

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If You Can't Say Anything Nice

Today, we are continuing to talk about issues affecting women. You may want to click here to read this post in your browser, as some formatting in lost in email. Like this post? Forward to a friend!

If you can’t say anything nice…..

You know how this sentence ends, don’t you?

If you can’t say anything nice, then don’t say anything at all.

I don’t know how it happened, but my husband and I noticed recently that we can be really critical of people. Of course, if Gavin were reading this post, he would temper that statement with something akin not to criticism, but evaluation.

We like to evaluate, Chantel. That’s what we do. We evaluate to make things better. At least that is the story we’re telling ourselves.

Call it what you will, but when it comes right down to it, we find ourselves just not being very nice.

If it’s just he and I talking privately, that’s okay, right?

Well, no. Not exactly.

Our kids take their cues from us. How they communicate is a reflection of how we communicate.

OUCH.

Before I had kids, I didn’t really think about the example I set for other people. Once my first daughter was born, however, I became hyper-vigilant about a great many things that never bothered me before. For example, I noticed what kind of music I played, what I watched on TV, and of course what kind of toys and books I allowed in our home.

Years have passed. Decades. I’m not as careful as I used to be. I’ve been thinking about this lately with parenting. As a young mom, my front row seat (and a playroom adjacent to the family room) afforded me the opportunity and authority to dictate a lot of choices before my kids made bad ones. If they wanted to phone a friend, they had to use mine. I stood with them at the bus stop. I drove them every place they needed to go. We ate all our meals together, and I tucked them in at night.

Part of parenting is setting boundaries that help families thrive. 

But part of parenting is also creating the space for kids to explore life and become their own people. So as they got older, I took my cue to “get lost” so to speak. They walked themselves to the bus stop, set up their own playdates with friends, and I no longer mediated arguments they could solve on their own.

But somewhere along the way, things went sideways. Disappointment and loneliness gave way to jealousy and anger. My adorable kids and their precious friends turned into mini mean girls.

Then, when MY friends got together we would lament that “raising girls is so much harder than raising boys,” and “oh my gosh girls are so awful to each other.”

And then I realized why.

Mean Girls, Mean Moms

That’s what my friends and I were doing to each other! No wonder we knew so many mean girls. They were the daughters of mean moms—and I’m embarrassed to say that I, too, was part of that group.

Our own Bible studies and coffee dates were filled with hours of chatter…ahem…gossip about all the people we knew. After all, we were with our friends. We didn’t feel like we needed to censor our words. We should be able to say what we really thought. Again—that’s the story we were telling ourselves. The problem, though, is that our thoughts needed auditing.

“Watch your thoughts, they become words;
watch your words, they become actions;
watch your actions, they become habits;
watch your habits, they become character;
watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.”

— Frank Outlaw, Late President of the Bi-Lo Stores (Yep, I was surprised, too, but Quote Investigator confirms this)

I’d be crazy to think that when I got home and relayed these conversations to Gavin that my young daughters weren’t picking up not only on the tone of my voice but also the actual words I was using to describe people that I supposedly liked.

I was convicted then, and I’m convicted now.

So what should we do?

It’s actually pretty simple.

Think before you speak.

Think before you speak. And when you speak, make sure you err on the side of positivity.

I’m trying harder these days to see the best in everyone. To believe the best. To try my best to understand and empathize when I am tempted to be unkind.

There’s a rule of friendship that says that the words you use to describe other people to each other are the attributes that other people will actually ascribe to you. For example, if you are telling a new acquaintance about a friend who is generous, welcoming, and warm, that acquaintance will actually apply those adjectives to YOU, even though you’re talking about someone else.

Pretty cool, huh?

And then just this week, I read about a study that tried to figure out why some kids were popular and some weren’t. Believe it or not, the most popular kids weren’t necessarily the ones who were pretty, smart, and athletic (although obviously these traits contribute to overall popularity). The common denominator among the most popular kids, though, was that these were the kids who told the researchers that they “liked everybody.”

LIKE EVERYBODY—And love them too!

I’ve found that I like people a lot more when I spend time talking TO them rather than ABOUT them.

I hope you will, too.

If you hear me saying something unkind, consider this blog post your permission slip to call me out on it.

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The Key to Success in Business and Life...WOMEN?

This stat blew my mind:

Collective intelligence increases in proportion to the number of women on a team.

Note what does NOT increase Collective intelligence:

• IQ

• Group Satisfaction

• Group Cohesion

  Group Motivation

Surpised? Me too!

But I’m not surprised that women make teams better.

I’ve always thought that diverse perspectives and life experiences add value to any group gathering. Gender, race, education, religion, and geography add richness to even the smallest gatherings. But collective intelligence—that’s a new one!

Women make teams work smarter.

I find this fascinating because even though we live in a day and age when women truly can do anything, it hasn’t always been that way.

For many years, women were barred from many professions. The first professionally trained woman doctor didn’t start practicing medicine until 1849. That might seem like a long time ago, but considering the fact that women didn’t start entering medical school in larger numbers until the 1970s, progress has been slow at best. In some states, women were forbidden to own businesses or property. It wasn’t until the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964 that employers were expressly forbidden from discriminating based on sex (in addition to religion, race, color, and national origin.) And believe it or not, a woman couldn’t even get a credit card without a male co-signer until the mid 1970s.

Fun Fact:

President Franklin D. Roosevelt may have been ahead of his time when he appointed Frances Perkins as the Secretary of Labor. In 1933, she became the first woman to hold a Cabinet position in a U.S. president's administration. (Currently, women make up more than half of President Biden’s cabinet.)

The researcher in the Harvard study points out that this increase in collective intelligence may be because women score higher on tests of social sensitivity than men do. “What do you hear about great groups?” Anita Woolley asks. “Not that the members are all really smart but that they listen to each other. They share criticism constructively. They have open minds. They’re not autocratic. And in our study we saw pretty clearly that groups that had smart people dominating the conversation were not very intelligent groups.”

These findings correlate with Duhigg’s research in his book, Supercommunicators. Though he doesn’t specifically delineate between men and women, he does note that “supercommunicators,” the people who have the best ability to bring about connectivity within groups, are the people who listen closely to what’s said and unsaid, ask the right questions, match the mood of the room, and make their own feelings easy to perceive. I don’t know about you, but I find that many of the women I know often complain that their husbands are emotionally unavailable or uninterested in what their wives are thinking and feeling. (Honey, if you’re reading this, I’m not talking about you!)

Of course, we all want to believe that we are modern thinkers, that we value diversity in every setting, but the reality is that what we believe and how we act don’t always align.

Fourteen percent of the most influential companies in the world don’t have a single female board member. One surprising finding was in the area of fashion. Women, who spend nearly twice the annual amount on clothing every year than men, are notoriously underrepresented across the world in this industry. Just one third of apparel companies assessed publicly commit to promoting gender equality and women’s empowerment. Of these, just 16% set specific targets. One of my daughter’s favorite stores, Brandy Melville, is notoriously misogynistic. For years, I thought Ms. Melville was the brains behind the brand, but in reality, the founder is a man named Silvio Marsan and his son, Stefan, and Brandy Melville herself is actually the fictional tale of two people – Brandy, an American girl, and Melville, an English guy who met in Rome and fell in love and inspired the brand’s name and logo.

Some careers are equally filled by both men and women (marketing, human resources, and education). In recent years, some traditionally male-dominated industries are including more females.. Parity in both work and pay is on the rise! We shouldn’t be surprised, then, that equality is finally happening in industries like law enforcement, accounting and finance, culinary arts, and science. What IS surprising is that it took so long! Think about it—in two parent households, women generally make most of the purchase decisions for the family. They assume the role of disciplinarian, manage the cooking, and experiment daily, whether it’s helping with the 8th grade science project or trying to figure out how to grow a lemon tree in a climate not conducive to lemon trees.

It makes perfect sense that they would enter the workforce and want to be paid for these roles.

What can we learn?

I think it’s fair to say that any gathering that’s ALL MALE or ALL FEMALE will not be as strong as it could be.

The key to making smart decisions in any setting is to keep an open mind and allow all voices to be heard. Think about how you can incorporate this principle of equality in your families, book clubs, small groups, and business meetings. I also think it’s important for women to realize that there is NO reason to be intimidated in a room full of men. Because YOU are there, that room is smarter than they would be without you there. Wherever you go, your presence makes the place better.

The takeaway: To any male who happens to be reading this post:

If you want to be successful, make sure you have some women on your team.

Hey, the research proves it!

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There's No Such Thing as a One Dimensional Life

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March is Women’s History Month, so this month I’ll be focusing on themes relating to women in the workplace, at school, at home, and of course among our peers. Let’s honor one another today and always!

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PREJUDICE? WHO? ME?

You know me. I’ve always got a book in my hand, and this week, I just finished Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg. Tucked among all the interesting research and anecdotes was a little tidbit about women that got me thinking. Because he was talking about identity, I was intrigued. You see, identity is a buzzword in the Christian community, and I’ve always felt it’s been a bit overused. (Like, GAH, talk to me about something else besides identity already!)

But here goes….

In a 2005 study at Texas Christian University, a researcher told a group of male and female students that he was studying GRE performance. The lead researcher told the students that he was studying this because of the well-known theory that men typically outperform women on these tests. (He said this on purpose to ensure that the stereotype would be at the forefront of the students’ minds while they took the test. )

Then the researchers divided the students into three groups.

• Group #1: Went to a room and took the test with no further instructions.

• Group #2: Were told to think about their identity in a general way and were given an example that showed a bubble chart with the word “ME” in the middle and then three or four branching bubbles that included words like “student,” “sister, “ and “employee.”

• Group #3: Were also told to think about their identity, but to use as many branching bubbles as they could muster. This group saw an example that included the words listed above but additional descriptors like “advice giver,” “animal lover,” and “dean’s list.”

The researchers wanted to see if the stereotype threat could be mitigated by reminding individual women of their multiples roles and identities.

WHAT I LEARNED

I didn’t think this would be such a big deal, but even women who are high achievers in the area of math often score twenty points BELOW men in tests where ability is measured. Specifically, they do worse on timed assignments. They run out of time because they’re subconsciously thinking, “I need to double-check. I need to be careful.” Anxiety and distraction slow them down.

So you can probably guess what happened in the experiment I just described. The women who were not told to think about their multiple identities or who were only asked to describe themselves in a very basic way, scored lower than those women who were given ample time to think about and write down their various identities, the clubs they belonged to, the offices they held, their roles in their families, sororities, and sports teams. In fact, the women who internalized their identity scored the same as the men!

According to Duhigg, “the existence of the stereotype generated just enough anxiety and distraction to slow the women down, which resulted in lower test scores,”—twenty points is a big deal!

THE MULTITUDES

I share this story because even though most of the women reading this blog will probably never take another college entrance exam, you will encounter situations where you may perceive yourself as the underdog. And maybe that’s because you’ve spent a couple of decades raising kids at home and now you’re ready to enter a different kind of workforce. Maybe you’ve been asked to join a board and you feel unqualified or unprepared. Maybe you’re leading a volunteer team that’s composed primarily of men who think they have all the answers.

Negative self talk loses its force when we as women think about who we are in as many categories as possible. We can render powerless all those voices telling us we’re not smart enough or good enough if we just remember that we contain multitudes. Our identities are not so one-dimensional.

I’ve talked about this before, but I’ll never forget meeting a new friend after my oldest daughter was born. We introduced ourselves, and then she asked, “So are you just a mom?” Of course, all I heard was that little qualifier..JUST…JUST…JUST….

You’re not a JUST anything, and neither am I. We contain multitudes, and that’s a good thing because that means we can connect with people on so many levels. Remembering that we are more than what we seem and that others are too (and this is key) is a valuable tool for empathy, understanding, connection, and progress in both work and relationships.

Of course, as a Christian, I would be remiss if I didn’t also say that while remembering who we are is important, remembering WHOSE we are is paramount. Any one component of our identity is actually pretty fragile. Your position at work, your role at home, your status in your community—all those things can change in an instant. Even so, my friend, we shall be forevermore children of God. You can take great comfort in knowing that.

For more reflections on identity, read this and this.

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Let's All be a Little Extra

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This is the last blog in our February series on friendship and relationships. Today, let’s think outside the box. We’ll be talking about what today is—LEAP DAY. Take a leap—do a little somethin’ extra for somebody in your life. For the best reading experience, you can click here to read this message on our website.

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EXTRA! EXTRA!

Quick show of hands:

Who else gets excited when you open up an 8-count from Chick-fil-A and discover there’s an EXTRA NUGGET tucked among the few you actually ordered? Nine nuggets! It’s a cause for celebration.

We all love a little something extra, whether it’s a chicken nugget or something a little more valuable—say an extra 15% off at your favorite store (Thank you, Anthropologie UP membership.)

But seriously…

Today is February 29th, and so we’re all getting an extra day. Maybe, like me, you’ve found yourself wishing for an extra 24 hours. What would you do, if only you had some extra time? After four long years, here it is—Leap Year 2024. Hooray for February 29, 2024. And yeah, I know, I know what you’re thinking.

But Chantel, today is THURSDAY.

So yeah, maybe today doesn’t feel so “extra.” After all, if you have a standing Thursday appointment, I seriously doubt it got canceled today just because the calendar says it’s February 29th and not March 1st. If your kids have soccer practice, they still have soccer practice. If your husband works late on Thursday nights, chances are he’ll still be working late tonight. And if Thursday is your laundry day or grocery day or cleaning day, you might feel like you can’t skip. To be sure, laundry, groceries, and other household chores will be waiting for you tomorrow.

And no one wants to fall behind.

But let’s welcome today for what it is. It really is an extra day!

So until February 29th becomes a national holiday (who wants to lobby Congress with me? 🙋‍♀️), make a pact to give yourself—and others—a little extra love today.

• An extra 10 minutes in bed this morning?

• An extra bright pop of lipstick before you run those errands?

• An extra cookie in the lunchbox?

• An extra helping of mashed potatoes at dinner?

• An extra episode of your favorite show?

• An extra long bath with your favorite bubbly?

• An extra story for your kids at bedtime?

• An extra long snuggle with your honey?

Put a little extra into everything you do today. The possibilities are endless. Don’t let today be just another Thursday. In four years time, we can elect a new President, watch the Olympics, and get an undergraduate degree from an accredited college. Also..we can celebrate LEAP DAY. Frankly, I’m surprised at the lack of pomp and circumstance..

Let’s change that.

Be the EXTRA.

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Maybe the Best Reason Ever to Be Self Employed

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The Hurkle Durkle.

 It sounds like a funky dance move from the 60s.

I first heard the term this week, after it apparently made its rounds in both the New York Times and the New York Post, as well as that beacon of pop culture Tik Tok. And let me tell you, I wish I had heard the term sooner because it’s my new favorite pastime.

“To lie in bed or lounge around long after you should be up and about”

— The Scotsman

The Scots are onto something.

For years, I set an alarm for 5:00 am so I could work out and shower before getting the kids off to school. Gavin often had to be at work by 8:30, and our mornings were hectic. Even on Saturdays, early games and even earlier tiny risers often disrupted what could have been a beautiful morning of blissful hurkle durkling. Fast forward 16 years and here we are, with independent kids, a business we own, and a schedule we control.

Around here, the hurkle durkle is in full swing. (Now, that really does sound like I’m talking about a dance move.)

You’re probably reading this post and rolling your eyes. I will admit that a few years ago I might have read a blog post like this and slammed my laptop in frustration. A luxurious morning lounging under the covers in my cozy bed? “Surely you jest,” I might have scoffed. That’s a pipe dream, not something that a regular person like me could do. Never could I imagine such a life! Surely hurkle durkling was a pastime for the independently wealthy or the devastatingly jobless. Not regular ‘ol me, a mom with four kids, a husband, and a busy household to run.

Around here, life looks different than it did a few years ago. Things just aren’t as busy as they used to be. I have margin for a lot of things that used to be out of the realm of possibility (In fact, I’m thinking of taking up gardening. Pro tips welcome.) Of course, we can’t hurkle durkle every day, but every once in awhile…I mean, why not?

Hurkle durkling is a quiet luxury. It’s like using fancy French soap or sleeping on one thousand thread count Egyptian cotton sheets. Getting out the good china. Going for the crushed ice in your soda.

No need to KNOCK IT. YET.

On a day when you don’t have to get up to an alarm or when someone else is taking care of the kids, revel in your own version of the hurkle durkle. Cuddle with your honey…OR DON’T. Read a book. Listen to your favorite album. Open the windows and breathe in that crisp-almost-springlike air. Anything goes when it comes to hurkle durkling—as long as you don’t actually get out of your bed.

And you don’t need to feel guilty about it, either. With a name like hurkle durkle, it’s got to be good for you. There’s nothing better than a little luxury that costs you nothing. Oftentimes, giving something simple like “an extra five minutes of rest” a fancy name like “hurkle durkle” makes it feel extra special.

For a country famous for its kilts, whiskey, and the Loch Ness Monster, I’d even argue that hurkle durkling might be my favorite of all Scotland’s many contributions.

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A Lesson in Life from Rachael Ray

Today, we continue this month’s series on friendship. For the best reading experience, you may want to open this blog on your browser by clicking here. Some formatting does not show up correctly when delivered via email.

Today might not be your most productive day of the week, but I’m writing this on a Wednesday. If you’re reading this on a weekday, chances are you also got up early, made the bed, and got the kids out the door for school. On time, no less. Maybe those kids even brushed their teeth and are wearing matching socks. If it’s a good day, you probably even ate breakfast and exercised.

Resourcefulness and independence are two of the greatest joys of adulthood, aside from being able to eat whatever you want for breakfast and choose your own bedtime. You, my friend, are crushing it, maybe even in spite of eating whatever you want and choosing your own bedtime.

Good work. Congratulations on a job well done.

Two decades ago, I was hardly the put-together picture of grace I am today. KIDDING! But I was a brand new stay-at-home mom. I was frazzled and worn out and often at a loss of what to do with myself or my passel of babies. Every day brought new surprises. To cope I spent long waking hours bouncing little ones on my hip while episode after episode of Food Network cooking shows played in the background. The dust bunnies on the floor could have used a little focused attention, but common housework be damned—I was going to make a home-cooked meal for my family.

My good friend Rach (yep, I called her Rach😉) chatted happily with me from the TV in my keeping room. That girl could get a meal on the table in a half hour flat. Go, 30 Minute Meals!

Rachael used abbreviations for common ingredients (hello EVOO!) and rarely bothered with trade essentials like measuring cups and scales. Instead, she improvised this whole cooking thing. And really—isn’t improvisation in cooking a metaphor for life, too? So how did she do it? How did she get everything done within the constraints of that thirty minute time slot?

As you might have guessed, Rachael Ray isn’t known for being a pretentious gourmet or classically trained chef. She learned how to cook by watching and doing. In fact, whenever Rachael Ray used a shortcut like a boxed cake mix or a spice blend or even a can of chicken broth, she’d say, “Take the help where you can get it.”

Hey, are you talking TO ME?

Rachel made me believe that yes, I could do this, too.

Take the Help Where You Can Get It

I’ve never forgotten those words.

Take the help where you can get it is applicable to a whole range of disciplines. And though you might pride yourself on your independence and resourcefulness, (who wouldn’t?) we all know that life throws curveballs—some for which we’re woefully equipped to handle on our own and some we’re not expecting at all.

And so we take the help where we can get it.

We have to.

Let me tell you a short story about someone who helped me when I needed it most.

My fourth child was born right after Thanksgiving the year I had a second grader, kindergartener, and three year-old. Mornings were especially hectic, as I worked to get everyone out the door. Two of my kids could catch the bus in front of my house, but the three year-old had to be driven to preschool a few miles away nearly two hours after the other two loaded the bus. The timing of that run coincided perfectly with the newborn’s morning feeding and nap schedule. Now that I’m on the other side of parenthood, I’ll be the first to admit that in the grand scheme of things, loading the baby in the car and driving three miles to school is a minor inconvenience. But three miles with a cranky newborn IS a big deal when you’re sleep deprived and nursing! I wasn’t the best version of myself in those early days. Taking my son to school was hard, but you know what’s worse—forgetting to pick him up! Yep, I did that twice. (I’m not proud of it).

Enter my friend, Tami.

Tami came over three days a week, and took my little boy to preschool for me. That preschool was just a five minute drive from my house. But her help was a God-send. Surely she had her own long list of errands and chores that had to be completed on those days. If I protested, I don’t remember. At any rate, Tami ignored me. Bless her little heart. Day after day, she showed up at my house after she got her own kids off to school, and then helped me with mine. Her unselfish kindness blessed us both, Tami as the giver and me as the receiver.

Our friendship deepened.

As I rocked my little one to sleep, we often drank tea or had a snack together. Tami probably has no idea how valuable her friendship was to me during those early days. There was nothing especially earth-shattering about what she did. She simply filled a tangible need in that easy, unassuming way she has with all her friends. In doing so, Tami ended up helping me through what could have been an incredibly lonely season of isolation and exhaustion.

My youngest can now drive herself anywhere she needs to go. But maybe, like that younger, more harassed version me, you have friends who are facing challenges of their own. Maybe they look like they have it all together. You may be thinking, “I don’t know how they’re doing all this by themselves.” There’s a good chance they don’t know either. They want to be strong. They want to think that they don’t need anybody. Trust me—I know it’s hard to ask for help. But let’s be real—we don’t have to be that strong, and we do need each other.

There is no prize for being a solitary martyr.

If today you are facing a challenge and you feel overwhelmed, I hope you will TAKE the help where you can GET it. Your friends are standing by, ready to pour themselves out on your behalf.

And if this is not you, take a note from Tami’s playbook and OFFER the help where you can GIVE it.

I wasn’t lying when I said our friendship deepened. I don’t know what I would have done without her. Tami and I no longer live in the same town. When I moved from that house a year later, Tami came over and helped me pack up my kitchen. Her company alone was such a blessing to me. I will always count her among my dearest friends, and one of the main reasons why is because I know I can always count ON HER.

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The Friendship Equation

Anything worth doing takes time.

That’s what they say, anyway.

You know this is true. There’s no such thing as a get-rich-quick-scheme that works. And diets that promise quick weight loss often backfire in time.

This is true of relationships, too.

Psychologists Julie and John Gottman are considered the foremost leaders on love and relationships. Dr. John Gottman is known as the “guy that can predict divorce with over 90% accuracy.” So when he talks about relationships, people tend to listen. One of his biggest lessons: The Magic Six Hours. He maintains that couples need about six hours of quality time together per week to ensure a lasting and healthy relationship.

This is good news for Gavin and me because we literally grew up on the “six hours a week” rule, as that was the number of hours my parents allowed me to spend with my boyfriend when I was in high school. Little did they know back then that those hours would become the bedrock of our happy and intentional marriage.

Six hours a week might be okay for two spouses, but most of us don’t have that kind of time to invest in other relationships that are important to us.

Turns out, we need just eight minutes to keep those relationships in tip-top shape.

You read that right. Eight minutes.

The Eight Minute Rule

Sounds too good to be true, right?

When my friend, Heidi, shared this information with me, I was skeptical. “Just eight minutes? A week? “

But she persisted. “It’s true,” she said.

And I did find corroborating evidence at the New York Times to validate her claim.

Sometimes I think we put off investing in friendships altogether because we simply can’t find an hour to block off for lunch or a night out. Factor in the time it takes to travel to your destination plus the added logistics of securing childcare and ensuring that everyone at home has what they need, and it just seems easier not to go anywhere at all.

But this isn’t healthy or advisable.

With a little advance planning, even our busiest seasons don’t have to be filled with loneliness.

I think we can all find eight minutes at some point during the week. That might be a hands-free call while you’re putting on makeup in the morning, prepping dinner, or sitting in the carpool line. I discovered that the trip from my house to my daughter’s school is exactly eight minutes, and I often use that time to send a Marco Polo to my friend, Melanie, or my sister-in-law, Stacee.

If you’re not familiar with Marco Polo, it’s a social networking app that allows you to send a video message to to your intended recipient. While it’s technically a one-way conversation, the beauty of this method of connecting is that my friend can listen to the message and then respond at her convenience. Trust me when I say that I am up-to-date on the latest happenings in both Stacee and Melanie’s lives. That we no longer live in the same town or have kids the same ages is irrelevant. No more excuses. I talk when I have time, and my friends listen when they have time. To be sure, we send and receive messages almost everyday because Marco Polo is both easy and convenient.

The New York Times article quotes heavily from Dr. Bob Waldinger, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the author of the book The Good Life: Lessons From the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness. He said that most busy people tend to think that in some unspecified future, they’ll have a “time surplus,” where they will be able to connect with old friends. Turns out, that time surplus rarely pans out.

He’s not wrong.

As we built our family and the kids got older, I too, thought I would have more time, but life gets in the way, and bigger kids have bigger problems. Their relationship drama, school pressure, and diverse extracurricular activities spill over into a sphere that overlaps mine.

It’s no secret that having a few close friends imbibes us with a sense of belonging and purpose. But did you also know that benefits include boosts to our self confidence and a reduction in stress? The Mayo Clinic says that friendship supports good lifestyle habits, like exercise and healthy eating. If all it takes is eight minutes a week to reap all these benefits and more, what are you waiting for?

In just eight minutes, you can microwave a baked potato, listen to a couple of songs you love, run a mile, take a shower, or…simply call a friend. So go ahead. Call the friend. (But I would recommend finding time to take that shower, too!)

And remember, no one is limiting your time together to just eight minutes. In these busy seasons, though, agreeing to spend eight minutes connecting with someone you care about doesn’t seem like such a huge sacrifice. I believe that friendship is worth it.

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Friendship: It's Not that Complicated

This February, we’ll be talking about love and friendship. I hope you’ll join me for these weekly conversations. Let’s get started!

Friendship.

It’s only two syllables, and yet it’s a big word, loaded with meaning and possibility.

If you are a normal human being, the odds are good that relationships are important to you. Since the beginning of time, humans were created for relationships. Our survival depends on it! We’re better together, and that’s an undeniable fact. You may have even grown up hearing that the quality of your life depends on the quality of your relationships.

But what is friendship, really?

Friendship is just two humans mutually agreeing to be in a relationship for no benefit except they enjoy each other.

Friend: A person you enjoy

It’s really not that complicated.

And yet, adults are lonelier than ever. Friendship, as a hobby, is dying a slow death in America. Loneliness has even been called an epidemic! Friendship peaks at age 25, and steadily declines from there. One in four people admit to having no confidantes at all, and a staggering 75% of people confess disappointment in the friendships they do have.

Yikes. That’s some scary stuff.

When I look at my relationships through the lens of “people that I enjoy,” I see that I really have a rich life filled with lots of friends. There are so many people that I enjoy, and whether I get invited to every party, networking event, or pop up pickleball game is irrelevant.

• Can I call you and have a nice conversation?

• Can we hang out in a coffee shop together?

• Can we go on a walk?

• Am I happy to see you when I run into you at the grocery store, church, or the ball field?

Sometimes I think we have a tendency to overthink our friendships, wondering if someone likes us before we’ve even had a chance to get to know each other at all.

Here’s a tip for you: when you share your story (along with all the gory, not-so-great details), people tend to like you more, not less.

Best Friends

My friend Melanie always says there are people like us and people who just like us. (I’ve always loved that sentiment!)

She and I are best friends, even though I don’t share her love of Star Wars or zombie docudramas, She’ll never understand why I fall asleep during Broadway musicals and in the middle of late-night card games. She takes her coffee black and I like mine with chocolate. I like everything with chocolate. But when it comes to the important stuff, we are for each other.

When it comes right down to it, we simply enjoy each other.

And if that’s all it takes to make a friendship work, then I think we can all find success. Yes, there will always be people who are too busy to return our calls or who can never find time to meet us for lunch. There will be people who “forget” to invite us to the neighborhood potluck. And yes, there will be people who simply don’t like us. That’s okay.

My mom always told me that to make friends you have to BE a friend. It is within YOUR power not to be the one who forgets. It is within your power to be the one who extends the invitation. It is within your power to check in even if you haven’t talked to each other in months…or years.

Go ahead. Don’t be shy.

Loneliness might be an epidemic, but it doesn’t have to be contagious.

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What I Want to Do vs. Who I Want to Be

What do I want to do
vs.
Who do I want to be

Thanks for sticking with us. This post is the last one in our series about motivation and goal-setting. Next month, we’ll be talking about friendship.

Unfortunately this post did not go out last week due to some technical issues with my email. All has been fixed (fingers crossed), and we’re back on track!

(Some formatting may be lost in your email. You can always view this post in your browser by clicking here.)

About this time every year, discouragement sets in. On January 1st, the possibility of the new year greets me with arms wide open, but four weeks in, I realize that the plans are just that—plans—not promises.

Many are the plans in a man’s heart, but the Lord’s purpose prevails.

Proverbs 19.21

This realization can be daunting but it doesn’t have to be overwhelming. If you’d like to stay on track with motivation and goals, it’s worth taking a little time this week to think about all the big (and little things) that are in the hopper this year. When it comes time to decide what to do, you’ll be armed and ready with the tools you need to say yes—or no.

In my years writing about motivation and goal setting, I’ve learned that while most people don’t struggle to make goals, they do struggle to keep them. And I think the biggest reason why is that as the year progresses, we are faced with so many other things that compete for our time and attention. It’s these little annoyances that crop up in the normal course of our day-to-day that threaten to push aside our real intentions (As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I had an email problem last week that took two days from me! Then I came down with a terrible cold, and well, the rest is history.)

True masters of motivation are able to overcome the normal woes of life because they have created a system that allows them to easily decide which choices matter most—even when life goes sideways.

A Lifetime of Decisions, A Million Little Choices

This plays out a few ways. Let me give you some real life examples of the curveballs we encounter:

First, if you have kids, you should assume that the next crisis might be right around the corner. After all, kids make their own choices, and sometimes they don’t choose to do the things that we think are best. If you have toddlers, they may rebel against the boundaries you set for them. An older child may be struggling in school and you have to decide if they just need a tutor or if this school is really the best fit for them this year. Or maybe there is friend drama, and technology issues, and you will be tempted to make a rash decision about a variety of tangential activities because you JUST WANT IT ALL TO GO AWAY.

Or maybe you are a student and as you look as this semester’s syllabus, you are overwhelmed with all the tests, projects, and papers that are due. If you are a recent graduate, you might feel frustrated in a new job. As you are getting used to your new role, you must decide how you will approach communication and team building within the company as well as decide which projects to tackle first.

All you have to do is look at your to-do list to understand that it never really gets any shorter. It’s hard to focus on accomplishing anything significant when responsibility and duty call.

And this is true, whether you’re a student or a parent or an entrepreneur or even retired.

Increase the chances of success.
Implement a new system.

Decision paralysis is not inevitable. Smart individuals and businesses have figured out that choices are not really about our desires, but about our values.

That’s true for the big ones, like marriage and family. For example, you probably want your marriage to work. No, not just work. You want it to be successful, filled with love and trust. But if one spouse values honest communication and fidelity and the other spouse does not, the chance of success will be limited for sure.

I could even argue that all our tiny choices are really value assertions. As I sit here writing this, I feel the beginnings of hunger. I can choose to eat the salsa-flavored Sun Chips sitting in my pantry or the honeycrisp apple on the counter. It’s certainly easier to dive into a bag of chips than to peel and slice the apple, but if a healthy lifestyle is a value, then at this very moment that choice should be an easy one.

I find that facing decisions armed with my values makes deciding what to do a whole lot easier.

“Is this a value I want to uphold?” is a very different question than “Is this good for me or is this bad for me?” It also helps put into perspective the idea that sometimes what we want right now is not what we want most.

Delayed gratification becomes easier when we frame our choices in light of our values.

Try it the next time you’re faced with a decision and you’re not sure what to do. Ask yourself, “Is this a value I want to uphold?”

Whatever you’re facing this year, I hope that this conversation about values is an encouragement to you. It’s a big year. We’ve got a lot of choices ahead of us, including electing a new president.

Don’t know what your values are?

Learn more. I’ve written about values here and here. Or read this one for more insight on how to make your days a little more productive.

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Let's Talk About Practice!

We’re continuing our January series on motivation and goal setting. Today we’re talking about practice.

We’re Talkin’ About PRACTICE

I don’t watch a lot of basketball, but I’ll never forget hearing Allen Iverson of the Philadelphia 76ers talk about practice. Or rather, I heard Allen Iverson talk about NOT practicing. During his two and a half minute rant with the press, Iverson says the word “practice” 22 times.

And trust me, it’s not because he loves practice.

Now, more than two decades later, we’re still talking about practice. This time, in pop culture. The fictional futbol coach Ted Lasso turns the tables and schools his franchise player, Jamie Tart, on what practice really means. (Hint: it’s not just about you.)

You can watch a cool mashup of the two scenes here:

Whether a fictional futbol coach like Lasso says it is or a celebrated basketball player like Iverson says it isn’t, I think we can all agree that practice is important.

Most of us were not born sports prodigies. In order to get better at something, we have to do it the old-fashioned way—through grit and hard work—and yes, lots and lots of practice.

Remember the butterflies that tickled your tummy the first time somebody asked you to get on a bike or jump from the diving board into the deep end of the pool? Learning new skills can feel scary and even unsafe. But these everyday activities aren’t really terrifying and dangerous at all.

They ARE simply unpracticed.

Many, many hours of sustained practice go into making hard things look easy.

I read just this week of a woman who first started playing the piano at the age of 60. Now she’s in her 80s and has been playing beautifully for more than twenty years.

Humans have an infinite capacity for learning.

Practice is never wasted.

It’s hard to learn new things as we get older, but not for the reasons you might think. Acquiring new skills is harder because most older people tax their brain worrying about relationships, work, and money. These worries take their toll and hijack the gray matter that could be dedicated to curious pursuits. (We’ll talk about how to turn off worry in another post)

You know, I sometimes dream of going back to school and getting another degree. There’s a small part of me that thinks, “But Chantel, you’ll be in your 50s by the time you graduate.” And then I remember: “And how old will I be in four years if I don’t go back to school?”

What gets practiced gets perfected. Somewhere, there’s a person who has something to learn. And somewhere there’s a person who has something to share. And somewhere there are people who are making each other better because they are committed to practicing (and perfecting) together.

Don’t quit. Just practice.

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Tell me what you’d like to learn in the new year or what you’re practicing now. I’d love to know, and I read every message. :)

When Progress Means Backward Motion

Progress.

I’ve always liked that word because progress feels like I’m doing something. Something important. Something that matters. Progress means I’m going someplace good.

And making progress is fun because it’s the physical embodiment of that up-and- to-the-right graph that’s prized by researchers the world over.

But thinking about progress can also invoke fear. As a kid, I dreaded the progress report sent home by teachers every four and a half weeks. Was I “on track?” Was I “a joy to have in class?” Did I “spend too much time talking?” That report told me exactly where I stood at that exact moment in time.

So progress is good, but also scary. How much progress we’ve made has implications in a wide variety of fields. We want to see forward movement. That’s why I was surprised a couple of weeks ago when I heard Adam Grant as a guest on Hidden Brain talking about how progress sometimes means going backward.

Wait. What?

Going Back

He said that in order to progress, you need to imagine alternative realities, and sometimes that means you will have to change the way you do things. For example, he said, suppose you want to become a faster typist, but you’ve spent your whole life hunting and pecking. You can hunt and peck all you want, but you’ll never be as fast as the person who learned how to use the keyboard by memorizing the home row and going from there. When you’re introduced to this new way of typing, you’re going to be pretty slow…at first. And that’s okay. You WILL get faster because the new and improved process of learning and the system it utilizes insures a faster typing speed.

Adam said,

Progress rarely happens in a straight line. It typically unfolds in loops. Day by day, it can feel like you're spinning your wheels.

The Downside of Accountability

After a fancy dinner at The Optimist last week, I told my family I was going to “up” my cooking game. No doubt there will be many kitchen disasters on my way to gourmet chef. To be sure, every meal doesn’t have to be a culinary work of art—even though I want it to be! Trying new techniques might feel like wasting ingredients. Taste is nuanced and personal. Everyone in my family can’t be expected to like everything I make.

I used to be a part of a cohort of entrepreneurs. The people in that group proved to be great accountability partners, but our monthly meetings left me feeling pressured to report only what was going well. That wasn’t the intention, of course. My own insecurity is what kept me from being totally vulnerable about the things I tried that didn’t work. But now I know what it means to “fail forward.” What we learn through failure makes the next step possible.

If this is the year that you’ve resolved either to try something new or to get better at something you’re already doing, I hope you find the idea of going backward for a time as a bit of encouragement. I know that doing so feels like the opposite of progress, but when you approach the experience with curiosity about what you can learn through the process, the pain of going backwards feels a little more bearable.

The Science Behind the Theory

I want to leave you with this final thought, and it’s a scientific principle that we can apply to life. A lot of people think speed and velocity are the same thing. The reality is that speed is how fast you’re going, but velocity is how fast you’re going in a specific direction. Adam Grant said that progress can feel like spinning your wheels, and it can if you’re not paying attention to direction.

We all want progress. But..if you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.—CS Lewis

Keep going, my friend. Just remember that going backwards might be just the direction you need to take right now.

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How Thinking Small Might Lead to Your Next Big Breakthrough

Happy 2024!

If you’re anything like me, you welcome the new year with open arms. For many, it’s a time to reflect on what worked and what didn’t and to devote at least a day or two to deciding what’s worth taking into the new year.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this blog and what I want my writing life to look like in 2024. While I wrote everyday last year (I have the journal to prove it!), I knew that heading into this year I wanted to be more intentional about what gets shared in this space. To that end, you’ll be seeing some changes. For one, each month will encompass a theme aimed to help you—and me— be more intentional with the work we do. I promise the content will be short, yet helpful.

January’s theme: Goal Setting and Motivation

This week: Think Small

The 1960s ushered in the Creative Revolution in the world of advertising. Bill Bernbach spurned traditional advertising theory and urged marketers to think differently. He said,

“Let us blaze new trails. Let us prove to the world that good taste, good art, and good writing can be good selling.”

— Bill Bernbach

And he didn’t waste any time. His ad campaign for the Volkswagen Beetle turned advertising on its head by eschewing the flashy pictures and wordy content that had been popular for selling muscle cars for decades. Two words: THINK SMALL accompanied a tiny picture of the Volkswagen surrounded by a whole lot of white space.

This ad campaign, while innovative for the time, might not turn heads today. After all, you and I have grown up in the era of Apple Computers. Minimalism is firmly entrenched, and dare I say—here to stay.

But those words—THINK SMALL—they should cause us to pause. In a world that’s constantly telling us to think bigger, I appreciate someone giving me permission to think small. When thinking big seems overwhelming, take a moment to reflect on the small things that give you life. While you may not be able to spend 2024 going back to school or starting a new business, you might be able to volunteer in a school helping kids to read or maybe you can sign up for a class or workshop to learn a skill you’ve always wanted to try. You never know what big things might be birthed from the little choices you make today.

The Upside of Thinking Small

One of the best things about the Volkswagen campaign was that it was honest. The car was small, slow, and ugly. BUT…it could fit in tight parking spaces, the insurance payments were low, and repair costs were cheap too. Thinking small allows us to be honest about our own imperfections. To be sure, your imperfections are your superpowers!

That last statement may sound trite, but you know how I know it’s true? Because I know people who are facing insurmountable obstacles, who can barely dare to imagine what this next year will look like because of what they already know they are facing down. And yet, by God’s grace, these friends are putting one foot in front of the other and getting through the days, minute by minute and hour by hour. They are thinking small, and by doing so, they are living LARGE.

But I digress.

Why Now

If you wait for the big revelation, just be mindful that it may never come. If you feel like life is busy and that you never have time, chunking down a big goal into smaller daily deposits can be the key to getting you where you want to be in 2024. I know I didn’t do everything I wanted to do last year, but everyday I found time to read one chapter of the Bible, write one page in my daily journal, and practice Spanish for ten minutes. While these small habits won’t win any prizes, they helped me realize that thinking small is about more than habits. Certainly, there’s no shortage of strategy advice about how to make resolutions stick. We don’t need another tip or trick to do that, thank you very much.

This year, when you think small, think about Volkswagen and about how their ad campaign revolutionized the world of advertising. They didn’t do what everybody else was doing, and they changed the world. You can, too.

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Come Sit With Me

My first memory of kindergarten is of playing a game called Sandwich. The object was to lay flat on the floor as person after person piled on top of you, trying not to make the “sandwich” fall over. Even as a five year-old, I remember that feeling of being trapped, squeezed, pinned down, and unable to breathe.

Although I couldn’t have verbalized it back then, all I really wanted was a friend to sit beside me, not on top of me.

Fast-forward forty five years and even though we’re no longer playing that game I’ve discovered that I’m part of that unpopular club called the Sandwich Generation. You know the one I’m talking about—sandwiched between parents over the age of 65 and also caring for kids still at home.

The toppings are beginning to pile on. Do you feel it, too?

Two friends just found out that their parents have cancer, three other friends (my age!) are managing a cancer diagnosis themselves, another friend is getting divorced, and my older daughter just got engaged.

Yep, you read that right.
Christiana is engaged! (Something happy in the midst of so many hard things)

It feels a little surreal because:

#1: I can’t believe my daughter is old enough to get married, and
#2 I can’t believe I’m old enough to have a daughter who’s old enough to get married.

I remember my own engagement with such fond memories, the fun of choosing a venue and a dress and adding dishes, towels, and small appliances to a registry, like we were playing grown up with a pretend house in a make-believe world filled with real china and gadgets that you could actually plug into the wall. When Gavin and I walked into our first apartment together, I think we paused on the threshold and just STOOD THERE for a minute. “We’re home!” we cried.

Our first “chore” as a married couple? Recording a joint message for our family answering machine, a long and annoying song we wrote ourselves that drove everyone crazy. It was 1996, baby!

One night I came home late from work to find Gavin laying on the couch with all the lights off and the blinds open. He was watching the first snowfall of the season drift down to the parking lot outside our first-floor window. Together, we snuggled under a cozy blanket and watched the flakes sparkle in the dim glow of the streetlights.

Why does that one, random night stand out among all the others?

Those early years were filled with lots of trial and error as we navigated all the normal grownup rites of passage—like rejection letters and sucky first jobs and fights about who is going to make the bed in the morning. Stupid stuff and big stuff, too, like buying our first home and welcoming our first baby. I have an old scrapbook photo of Gavin cutting the grass. Our grass! We spent fun weekends with neighbors and met new friends. We hosted themed parties, and Gavin started graduate school. We moved houses, welcomed more babies, and then, like people everywhere, we realized that we’re not just growing up, we ARE grown up.

Now we’re smack dab in the middle of actual middle age. Our friends are celebrating milestone birthdays and retiring. I think I’ve been to more funerals in the last five years than weddings, although that’s shifting a bit now that our friends’ kids are getting married.

At Bible Study today, we talked about love, and of course you can’t talk about love without reading 1 Corinthians 13:4-8. If you grew up in church, you can probably recite these verses from memory.

“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. ”

— 1 Corinthians 13:4-8

My friend, Ashley, said that years ago a therapist told her how you could tell if a couple was going to make it or not. The therapist said that the couples who think about the little things, like bringing a glass of water to their spouse when they’re getting one for themselves or filling up the car with gas without being asked tend to make it through the big, hard things. The big things don’t topple them because all along they’ve been working out their love muscles in these tiny little ways.

Maybe that’s why I remember coming home from work on that snowy night in January 1996. “Come sit with me,” Gavin said. Surely it had been a long day. I hadn’t even had dinner. I didn’t care. That one small sentence, “Come sit with me,” has been a part of our vocabulary these last (almost) twenty-eight years.

One person sitting next to another person.

As we enter this new season, I don’t want to take for granted a single minute. This middle life sandwich isn’t the curse the self-help articles make it out to be. I’m grateful for having both my parents and my children in my life in big ways. I’m also grateful for the wisdom that comes with the maturity of simultaneously being someone’s child and having children of my own.

Maybe you’re reading this, and you feel like that girl trapped inside the kindergarten sandwich—squeezed to the point of crumbling. I get it. This season isn’t easy. There are no pat answers to the hard things you’re experiencing right now. The human capacity for holding a multitude of emotions is spectacular. Fear, anxiety, anger, confusion, and love all live in the same body.

I’ve heard that gratitude is the antidote for scary feelings. But let’s be honest—who wants to be told to just be more grateful? And while Autumn is traditionally a season of intentional gratitude, my prayer for you today is that you’ll find the people who don’t pile on top of you, but instead sit beside you—in the midst of all the beautiful and terrible things we’re called to carry with us.

Be the person who says, “Come sit with me.”

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Effort is a Long Game I'm Willing to Play

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The Dilemma

Is the effort worth it?

This is the question I’ve been contemplating lately. Sounds like the kind of question a lazy person would ask, but really I’m just curious.

You may remember studying effort in high school Physics.

Copyright: https://cotswold.gloucs.sch.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Y11-Summer-Work-PE-2-2018.pdf

From the diagram, you can see that resistance works in opposition to effort. Humans, weighed down with the loads they carry (both physical and metaphorical) want to avoid effort. Our brains are hardwired to conserve energy.

Start typing Effort into Google and auto-fill will populate the page with EffortLESS links, covering topics like:

• Effortless beauty

• Effortless health

• Effortless math

(I’m pretty sure that last one does not exist.)

But here’s the thing. Even though we resist effort with every fiber of our being, we actually assign the greatest value to things that require the most effort. (i.e. baking a complicated souffle, caring for a child with disabilities, running a marathon)

Psychologists call this the Effort Paradox.

Whether we’re talking about exercise, makeup, or algebra, the real paradox is that while we as individuals value effort (that special quality that lives inside of us), society as a whole values outcomes (the successes or failures that live in full view of the public).

But listen to this—

“Continuous effort—not strength or intelligence—is the key to unlocking our potential.”

— Winston Churchill

We think we have to be strong and smart to start, but strength and intelligence are the result of effort, not the impetus for it!

I get frustrated when my kids don’t want to do hard things.
“Can you at least TRY?” I plead.

I’m just like them, though. Given the chance, I’ll take the easy way out. It’s why my Instagram feed is filled with Easy Weeknight Dinners, Easy Cleaning Hacks, and Easy Everyday Outfits. It’s why I sometimes do a YouTube exercise video at home instead of driving five miles to the gym. And why I’ll procrastinate making appointments if I have to call someone on the phone versus scheduling online.

We can see outcomes. Effort, that’s harder to quantify. Effort is messy and punishing. It’s sweaty and private and happens early in the morning and late at night and behind closed doors. Effort brings us to tears and breaks our hearts.

Effort is a long game.

Effort increases in proportion to the value we assign to the problem.

Invisible Work

Take another look at the diagram I shared earlier. While the load is obvious and heavy, notice that the effort is invisible.

But invisible work is still work.

I’m trying to be better at acknowledging effort, both for my own sake and that of my kids. I may be the only one, after all. At school, they receive praise for good grades. On the field, for goals scored. At work, for sales made. As a parent, I have a unique opportunity to validate the effort that contributes to their success. I can say, “You’re working really hard. What are you learning?” Or “You’re up early. What’s on the agenda today?” or “I heard you practicing piano (guitar, cello, etc.) I’m proud of you.”

Sustained effort requires discipline. So much discipline. In a world that wants nothing more than to divert our attention from the values that matter most, how do we stay laser focused on the effort, especially when the results don’t come as fast or as easy as we want?

I wonder?

If I was more encouraging, would my kids try harder? Would they log more hours doing the things they think they hate because they’re not any good? And what if no one else ever tells them that they are as special as I think they are?

Remember, Churchill said that sustained effort is the key to unlocking our potential. (As a kid, how many times did you hear that you weren’t living up to your potential? If someone—anyone—had encouraged the effort, would it have made a difference?)

I believe the research I cited at the beginning of this post has interesting implications for education and learning, for how we talk to our kids about their future and how we think about our own work. It’s interesting because the research shows that when we reward effort—not success or failure—people are more willing to tackle harder challenges in the future.

In high school, I only cared about the grades on my report card and the resume I was building for college. Everything I did was filtered through the lens of whether or not it would look good on a college application. Now, I understand that life is about so much more than what we see on the outside. People everywhere are walking around doing meaningful, invisible work simply because it matters. Yes, outcomes are important. And of course we all want to be successful in the eyes of our peers. There’s an old maxim that says “what’s rewarded gets repeated.” I can only imagine that if we continue to recognize effort, we’ll get more out of ourselves and the people around us, too.

Bottom line: don’t focus on the “A,” (or the “B” or the “C”) but on the unseen effort that made it possible.

I see you. Keep going.

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Hey You, Is Your Life GOOD?

Jonathan Fields, host of The Good Life Project podcast, always ends conversation with guests with this question:

“How do you define the ‘good life?’ What does a ‘good life”’look like to you?”

Human science expert Brene Brown answered, “ A good life happens when you stop and are grateful for the ordinary moments that so many of us seem to steamroll over to try to find those extraordinary moments. To me, my good life is soccer practice and carpool line. And tuck-ins. And date night. That’s the good life for me. And knowing it’s good. Acknowledging and stopping and saying that it’s good.”

What’s interesting to me is what she didn’t say.

No mention at all of being grateful to write six New York Times best-selling books, host two podcasts, or hold a research fellowship at the University of Houston. She didn’t have to say that she’s the premier voice for courage and empathy. Those are the things that define her work.

And her life is not defined by her work.

The good life is all these little things.
Easily within reach of any one of us.

And this isn’t new information. Kurt Vonnegut once said, “Enjoy the little things in life because one day you’ll look back and realize they were the big things.”

(***We all nod our heads and murmur in agreement. ****)

Some things we have to discover on our own.

It’s our experience that changes how we perceive the present.

As I sit here writing this, my new kitten is basking in a patch of sunlight, and my other kitten is nestled against my back and the chair. They both got so excited when I opened a package of treats earlier today.

I started thinking about my own small things journey.

• Walking out of a cold building and into the hot August sun (am I the only one that loves that?)

• A surprise thundershower this afternoon that brought with it a cool breeze.

• Finding a bag of my favorite chips hidden in the pantry.

• A package waiting for me on the front porch.

Dr. Brown said we should stop and acknowledge that it’s good.

And this is where I struggle.

Because when I’m in a big room and someone asks me about my life, these little things sound pathetic when I say them out loud. And I know that’s a “me” problem, not a “them” problem. I’m the one who needs to come to terms with my good life.

It really is so, so good.

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Good Bones

I broke my first bone when I was 33 years old.

I don’t know if that means I’m strong or I’m a coward.

It probably means I’m not a risk-taker.

On this particular day, a child (who will remain nameless) left a pair of shoes on the stairs going out to our garage. Carrying my newborn daughter, I tripped over the shoes, saving the baby in my arms, and sacrificing my third metatarsal in the process.

I still say I have good bones. After all, I did manage to hang on to the baby.

At my age now, the conversation has turned from boners to bones. The Big O stands for… Osteoporosis. Good bones need Calcium and Vitamin D. And plenty of it. Good bones need regular, weight-bearing exercise. Thirty minutes per day or more is ideal. Good bones require maintaining a healthy weight. BMI needs to be under 25. Sparkling water? No thanks. Carbonation is bad for your bones. (My son just told me that last one is a myth.)

Anyway, there’s a famous poem by Maggie Smith called “Good Bones.” A bit disturbing, but worth the read. Poetry is nothing if it doesn’t make us think more deeply about the world in which we live.

GOOD Bones by Maggie Smith

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
n a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.

You could make this place beautiful.

Reading this poem today made me think not about the way we describe our homes, but ourselves. We are the ones who have good bones. In fact, the human body is made up of 206 bones (a fourth of which are found in the hands and feet alone) The largest bone is the femur of the upper leg, which explains why I love squats and lunges so much, and the tiniest bone is the stirrup of the inner ear, which assists in conducting sound waves. Bones are highly specialized connective tissue with a built-in ability to remodel based on the demands placed on them.

That means we humans are highly adaptable.

And adaptability is a prized soft-skill useful both at work and at home.

Adaptability

As women, we’ve been told we need to take care of our bones. But it’s more than that. Women in military service are seven times more likely than men to suffer from musculoskeletal injuries and ten times more likely than men to suffer from hip and pelvic stress fractures. If a woman carries more than 25% of her body weight, she is five times as likely to sustain an injury than a man of the same aerobic fitness and strength. (source)

These statistics are frightening, but are we really the weaker sex?

Let’s not go crazy.

Luckily, our skin provides more than just a house for all our bones. I don’t want to get into a whole thing here, but research shows that women have greater physical endurance than men, a higher pain tolerance and stronger immune systems, and even heal faster than men.

None of this would be possible without the supporting infrastructure of our strong bones.

It’s that Adaptability thing again. When it comes to bones, we can thank German anatomist and surgeon Julius Wolff for his contribution to Orthopaedics. His “use-it-or-lose-it” theory of bone regeneration is famous. All this means is that bones subjected to heavy loads will reconstruct themselves to carry that load. Likewise, bones that don’t get used will weaken, just like muscles.

Rib bones show an unusual capacity to regrow and repair themselves even when a large portion is damaged. Metaphorically, I find this fascinating especially in the context of this passage from the Book of Genesis:

So the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man’s ribs and then closed up the place with flesh. Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man. The man said, This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called ‘woman,’ for she was taken out of man.” That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh.

Together, with our good bones, we make this place beautiful.

Our first-ever human-to-human connection was fused through the sharing of bone. If you believe the story outlined in Genesis, a bone from Adam’s rib launched the human race. That means we were born with good bones. (Remember—God himself said, “It was good.”) We have bones that were literally made for holding one another up. You might even say we have a moral obligation to do so. As bones support and shape your body, so a life well-lived supports society and shapes culture.

This place could be beautiful. You could make this place beautiful.

Are you???

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Is there any such thing as a silly fear?

What are you afraid of?

That was the question our family pondered together around the dinner table tonight.

• Spiders

• Moldy bread

• Pop quizzes

• Small children who have eaten too much sugar and haven’t had enough sleep (That one is mine.)

And then somebody mentioned clowns.

And everybody was like, “Oh, yeah…clowns…SO CREEPY.”

WHEN DID CLOWNS GO FROM BEING KOOKY TO CREEPY?

Aaron piped up: “2016! That’s when Stephen King’s It came out in theatres.”

But then Gavin pulled up a YouTube video of the famous Bozo the Clown of the 1960s. He sure looked creepy to us, but the crowd went wild for him—in a good way!

Bozo the Clown 1966

I did a little digging and found that creepy clowns go all the way back to 1928, way before Bozo entered the scene.

Weirdly, the baptist church in my hometown used to have a Clown Ministry, of all things. I wish I could find an old YouTube video of that!

The reality is that most fears are irrational. Take that fear of spiders, for example. Less than 1/10th of one percent of the more than 37,000 spiders known to exist are dangerous. That’s crazy! What are the chances that the tiny guy dangling from a thread on my back porch will actually cause me any harm?

It’s ridiculous when you really stop and think about it.

Even on Vacation…

We were in Hilton Head last month and a friend from the gym—an older gentleman— warned me that there was a shark on the loose.

Yep. Those were his exact words—Shark. On. The. Loose.

It became a sort of running joke. All week we laughed about the “shark on the loose” in the great big Atlantic Ocean!

My daughter sent me this photo from one of the beach dives that caters to tourists. Her caption:“I found the shark on the loose!”

I found the shark on the loose!!!

The funny thing is that sharks only kill 6 people per year (on average). I’ve never been too afraid of sharks in Hilton Head, even though (even though!!!) there’s always a guy with a fishing pole reeling one in!

Around town, we mostly see alligators lounging on the grass next to ominous signs warning hapless tourists not to feed them. But even alligators only kill 3 people per year. (Our vacation family told us that.) While their family discussed various hypothetical vacation disaster scenarios, one of the kids discovered an online stat warning that coconuts are far more deadly than either alligators or sharks, killing a whopping 150 people every year!

Who knew?

So why all this talk of fear? Am I scaring you already?

Well, today I read an article about how fear can warp ambition. I don’t think I would have stopped to read the article at all, but I was curious because both fear and ambition are so complicated.

EVERY TIME YOU MIX EMOTION with DESIRE, THINGS GET Pretty COMPLICATED.

Think about it for a second.

Fear can be a good thing.

• Fear signals danger and motivates us to respond to potential threats.

• It heightens the senses and helps us recognize risks to avoid harm.

• Confronting our fears encourages us to step out of our comfort zones and try new things.

BUT…Fear also has a nasty underbelly.

The article I read highlighted the fears of unworthiness, uncertainty, insecurity, and rejection as the things that could undermine ambition. And I get this because in my own life, especially as I’ve gotten older, I’ve allowed fear to cloud what could be healthy ambition.

And WHY? Why have I allowed fear to choke me like that? Have you felt it it too?

I think most fears are the direct result of a lie we’ve believed. Some of us hear these lies and vow that “We’ll show them! They’ll see! One day they’ll be sorry that they ever said THAT about ME!”

But some of us (and I’m talking about myself here), realize much too late that all our lives we’ve been believing something that was never even true. And that thing that we believed might be keeping us from doing our best work. I think it’s the reason why every single women’s conference I’ve ever been to has had one of two themes: Either “I am Worthy” or “I am Enough.” And to be honest, I’ve kind of shunned those conferences because I grew up knowing I was worthy and that I was enough.

But I’m gonna be real honest here: I grew up knowing I was worthy in the same way that I know spiders aren’t scary and that sharks rarely patrol the waters surrounding Hilton Head Island. I know these things to be true, but I’m still gonna scream my head off if a spider falls on my head, and it’s going to have to be a pretty hot day to get me to wade farther than waist deep into those tempting waves.

Seriously…

Who told you you were fat?
Who told you you were ugly?
Who told you you were average?

Who told you that?
But here’s the bigger question:
WHY DID YOU BELIEVE IT?

LIES! LiES!

So the lesson here is: the next time you’re sitting under a palm tree debating about whether or not to wade out into those tempting waves, you better look up first and make sure there’s not a coconut about to drop on your head.

I’m kidding.

THAT IS NOT THE LESSON.

The lesson is that fear is only fear because of what we don’t know. And the truth is that you don’t know what amazing things you might be capable of doing. Until you actually try to do them.

Doesn’t it seem like everybody is a little bit more anxious these days?

Late one night, Gavin and I were talking about how there’s not much we don’t know anymore. I mean, at the touch of a button, we can see where every one of our four kids is in real time. We know exactly what route to follow and even how long it will take to get to them. If I get in the car and plug that address into my GPS right this very second, a kind voice will direct my every move turn-by-turn. I don’t even have to think about it.

It’s crazy to think that just a couple of decades ago, my college boyfriend would drive up from Georgia to Indiana armed with nothing but a map and a prayer—”Lord, help me make good time.” Once or twice he just showed up at my door and didn’t even tell me he was on the way! What if I hadn’t been home? What if I had made other plans? What if something had happened to him on the way?

WHAT IF did not exist. We just lived.

It’s okay not to know what’s next, despite the fact that everywhere I go these days, that’s the question I get asked. We’re scared because we can’t see the future, and we’ve become accustomed to seeing everything in real time. But the thing is—we NEVER see the big picture. We can only see where we are right now. Those maps from the olden days are relics of yore. We know nothing now of hazy landforms or unmarked detours. We’re scared because we’ve been told that the world is a scary place and that we must be VIGILANT. AT. ALL. COSTS.

But maybe, just maybe, sitting in the dark for a little while is a good thing.

I believe a little bit of fear is good for our faith.

Just imagine those two emotions sitting next to each other in peaceful companionship. For a moment, let faith cover fear with her brave, strong hand. Give faith permission to speak truth over the lies that have allowed your fear of the unknown to grow. What wonderful things might you discover if you embarked on such a journey?

I’ve always loved this verse in Hebrews 11:1: “Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.”

What is the lie that’s keeping you from your greatest ambition?

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