The Anchor

Hey Reader, In the corporate world, performance reviews are designed to be the ultimate feedback loop. They offer a neat scorecard, clear metrics, and visible proof that your input equals your output. If you hit your numbers, you get the rating, the bonus, or the promotion. It happens on both sides. Climbing the ladder or working for yourself, we let those formal metrics define our whole sense of worth. When you sit in a corporate role, you can end up waiting around for an annual review just...

Hey Reader, Earlier this week, we took inventory of the roles we carry every day: wife, mom, daughter, leader, friend. When you look at that list, one thing is hard to ignore. Our best energy, sharpest focus, and strongest hours go to those roles. We make sure everyone else is cared for, supported, and seen. Then when it's time to work on the business, the vision, the thing God put on our hearts, we build with whatever is left at the end of the day. We give our dreams the leftovers. I've been...

Hey Reader,Every time we decide to hit restart, we tend to fall into the same mental trap: we believe we have to erase who we were yesterday and become an entirely different person overnight. We try to overhaul our whole routine at once, burn out by day four, and feel like we failed. It took me a while to realize I didn't need to become a brand-new person to begin again. Now, don't get me wrong. There are times when wiping the slate completely clean is the best move. Just yesterday, I...

Hey Reader, We are trained to measure capability. It is what is rewarded the most in our society. For many of us, including myself, saying yes has gotten me through so many doors. If you have the skill, the experience, and an open slot on the calendar, the assumption is that the answer should be yes. Being able to do something and having the capacity for it are two separate things, and most of us only ever check the first one. This is a school of thought I re-visit OFTEN. Ability is about...

Hey Reader, Okay, so, for a minute there I actually caught a break. My daughter got her license (finally), which meant the daily driving-lesson and family “Uber” hustle just... stopped. I felt room open up in my schedule for the first time in weeks. I was not mad about it. On Tuesday, we ended up at the vet, and it was one of those moments where somebody looks at you and says "your call," and you have to decide what’s next. He needed emergency surgery and we said yes. He's home now, and I'm...

Hey Reader, It has been about a week and a half since my last note. You noticed. The Daily Anchor did not show up in your inbox, and I am not going to pretend it was a scheduling thing. I wanted to quit. Not one thing on my calendar. This. The videos I create, the stuff I write, all of it. I let the thoughts in my head get way too loud. Am I too far behind? Am I actually gonna reach my goals? Is it all worth it? When there is a gap between what you are trying to build and where you actually...

Hey Reader, If you noticed a pause in your inbox after my last note about grief, I want to be completely real with you: getting into the school groove last week was hard. Between navigating the emotional weight of my daughter’s senior year and getting my son settled into his new routine between "big boy" school and his ABA therapy, my capacity was stretched to its limit. I simply did not have the bandwidth to write. In the past, my overachieving, people-pleasing brain would have spiraled into...

Hey Reader, I am going to be completely honest with you today: grief sucks. Life has taught me that grief comes in different shapes, forms, and fashions. It rarely hits in a predictable line. Instead, it comes in unpredictable waves. The first time I remember feeling its weight was in 1999 when I lost my grandfather at 16. A few short years later, my grandmother passed away. Over the years, like many of you, I have grieved lost loved ones, lost jobs, lost friendships, and lost seasons....

Hey Reader, Last week I told you action is one of my real antidotes to regret and shame, to that spiral of trying to figure it all out in my head instead of moving. Taking action is a big deal for me. It's how I get unstuck. Sitting in church yesterday, our pastor was talking about performance, and something in me sat up. Because I think for me, that performance mindset is really rooted in people-pleasing. I'm a recovering people-pleaser, and the more I sat with it, the more I realized...

Hey Reader,Over the last few days, we’ve covered a lot of deep emotional territory. We’ve talked about sitting in the sting of a hard choice, how regret’s first cousin is shame, and how we have to redefine success as collecting daily breadcrumbs rather than chasing a trophy. Today, I want to talk about what actually gets us out of our heads and back into our lives: action. As a high-achieving, recovering overachiever, the hardest place for me to exist is in the space between one win and the...