But I can tell you what got me this far.

It was Katie. It was Mike. It was the Y. It was a Wednesday schedule I protect like a client contract. It was a number I set at the start of the year that has nothing to do with growth targets and everything to do with who is home at four o’clock. It was and continues to be a very intentional structuring of our life.

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When we moved to Columbus we got closer to family, but closer is not the same as next door. On a week to week basis, we were still very much on our own to figure it out.

In Indiana, before we moved to Columbus, I worked at the Y where trained caregivers were down the hall. Childcare was a building I already walked into every day. Without that structure built into their business, I’m not sure I would have been able to return to work like I did. That was my first education in allowing the system to work for me, rather than just falling into it.

Hiring my first employee

When we moved to Ohio in 2020 a contract job turned into a full time job a few months in. While Mike finished his masters and started finding his footing in a post-pandemic workforce, I knew we would need help with our three little girls — just 8, 5, and 2 at the time. So I did what you do. I posted in a Facebook group, looking for a stranger to spend the days with my daughters at home while I worked.

I wasn’t simply hiring a babysitter. I was hiring an employee. Someone who would navigate life alongside me and my family for years to come. Someone who shared our values. Katie answered. At the time she was a recent grad from OSU in early childhood education. We clicked on the video call, and the in-person interview a few weeks later sealed the deal.

That was five years ago.

The girls are older now and the structure has changed, but it’s still a structure, and I built it deliberately. Katie and I allow it to evolve naturally with the girls’ needs, around counselor-in-training at YMCA summer camp, softball practices, friend visits, travel and swimming.

How we make it work

Mondays and Tuesdays are heavy work days. The girls have more independence now, and with it more responsibility, and they understand the balance we’re all striving for. Nobody clings to my thighs anymore when I leave the room to work. Katie is still here for the greater portion of those days, but her role has changed. She’s a mentor now, a big sister, a wonderful twenty-something navigating this confusing world a few steps ahead of them. They look forward to her company every summer.

On those days the three of them head out to the pool or the park together, and that is a deliberate choice. Staying off screens in this day and age takes exceptionally intentional effort. It has to. The rest of the world is telling them that’s where the fun is, and our job is to tell them to shut it off and find the adventure in their own backyard.

On Wednesdays I work from home with the kids. I limit any meetings and invite a friend over to play, then tap in and out where I can while trying to keep the house from falling apart. This usually looks like water play out back in the sprinklers and slip n slide. Crafts in the art room, and the occasional movie day when the weather doesn’t behave.

Then by Thursday, Katie comes in again so I can complete whatever is left for the week. Friday I take off if I can swing it and we go to the pool or the park. Amidst all of this, I do what I can to fit in some gardening and exercise. Summer makes being active easier as the sun wakes us up and kisses our cheeks each day, welcoming us into its playground.

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What my company has to clear

Here’s the part I don’t think gets said enough.

My budget is built on that schedule. Not the other way around. The minimum my company needs to bring in every month is reverse-engineered from what it costs to have Katie here Monday, Tuesday and Thursday, and from what it costs me to not be working on Friday. The life budget came first. What I wanted us to make in order to thrive, not just survive. The care schedule is part of that, just like softball practice, basketball clinics, and a slim vacation when we can fit it in. I didn’t build the business and set the budget and force my life to fit into it. I figured out what I needed, and every month I strive to hit that target.

What this also means is that summer is not a time for growth. And that’s not easy. It is a constant reminder I have to give myself, that this time is for my family. I keep up with my current workload, but I am not driving more work. I’m maintaining. Because these are the priorities I set for myself. The rest of the year is when I drive and push growth.

Most of the advice for women running their own thing has it backwards. Grow the business, then buy back your time. I set the time first and made the business clear the bar. It wasn’t always smooth, and it still isn’t some months, but the target remains the same. The priorities remain the same.

That’s the whole trick, and it took me years and one full career to learn it.

Motherhood math

Summer isn’t a season for me, it’s a logistics operation. Evening activities start revving around four. Kids need food and need to be packed by 5:30. I know every appointment, every practice, every test, down to the minute, because if one piece slides the rest of the day goes with it.

Motherhood math isn’t bargaining. It isn’t reverse-calculating a departure time. It’s carrying the entire day in your head at all times and still showing up to a client call sounding like a put-together person.

This version works. Not because I found balance, whatever that is, but because I stopped treating help as something you resort to when you’ve failed to manage on your own. Help is the infrastructure. It’s the load-bearing wall. If you can’t buy help, find your help. Build your own community of friends, caregivers, mentors. I’ve been building it since my first daughter arrived and I’ve paid for it every year since, on a nonprofit salary and then on my own revenue.

So, no meltdown yet. Ask me Thursday. This summer was better than the last. I was able to be more present, more aware. More involved with my clients and my kids. It’s a constant process of learning and evolving. It’s not easy, but it has been effective.

And it’s nearly fall, which means it’s my turn. I’ve joined IAW and I’m excited for growth alongside some pretty incredible women and entrepreneurs, whatever that entails. Stay tuned as I navigate this next phase of my business.

If you’re still figuring it out

I’m still figuring it out too. Every year the girls change and the structure has to change with them, and every year I get something wrong. But these are the questions I keep coming back to, and right now is when to sit with them, while the summer is fresh enough that you still remember what needs to change.

What was your worst week, and what specifically broke? Not the feeling of it. The mechanics. A camp that ended at noon. A client who only takes morning meetings. One Thursday with no coverage. You are looking for the single hole that made everything else suffer.

What does your year cost with care in it? Most of us set a revenue goal and then discover in June what childcare does to it. Try it the other way. Add up what your family needs to thrive rather than survive, put care inside that number, and let it tell you what your business has to bring in.

What season are you actually in? Not every quarter is a growth quarter. I stopped pretending summer was one, and it cost me something to admit that, but it also stopped me from failing at a goal I was never going to hit.

Who is already close by that you haven’t asked? I found Katie in a Facebook group. Other people find a neighbor’s college kid home for the summer, or two families who trade days. Help doesn’t have to show up as a full time nanny to count. Build a system that works for you.

Start now, not in May. The good caregivers get hired by March, and the good structures take a few months of thinking.

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When my father-in-law died in 2018, my husband and I both lost ourselves for a while.

Mike was carrying a grief he couldn’t put down. I was carrying Mike, along with three kids, two jobs, and a house that never stopped needing something. We were still functioning. We showed up to work, got the girls where they needed to be, kept the lights on. But underneath it, we were worn down to almost nothing.

Alcohol was part of how we coped, the way it had always been part of our lives. We both grew up in families where drinking was simply what you did. A beer after work, wine at dinner, a toast at every celebration, a drink to take the edge off every hard day. It was casual and it was constant and nobody questioned it. So when the grief settled in, we did what we knew.

One drink leads to two, the way it does, and that’s never helpful. We drank a little more to feel a little less. But the guilt we felt in turn was palpable, and with three young kids, we knew something had to change.

Mike cut it out first. I followed a short while later. For me it wasn’t some dramatic moment. When you grow up a social drinker, a couple of glasses at night feels normal. But I watched what happened to Mike once he stopped. He was healthier, more confident, more focused on where he wanted to go. I wanted that. I wanted to find clarity in the mess. Which meant I had to face it, head on.

By then COVID had arrived, and everyone was grappling with some version of the same thing. For a lot of people, confinement meant boredom. Not us. Three kids, a move to Ohio, and a brutal job search meant we were anything but bored. But the stress and the fear of it all were enough, so one day I simply decided I was done and I never looked back. Nobody likes to drink alone anyway.

We were going against the grain, though we had no idea at the time. When the lockdowns hit, Americans drank more, not less. Liquor store sales jumped more than fifty percent in a single week that March. One large national study found heavy drinking rose about twenty percent between 2018 and 2020, and it stayed elevated for years after. What I couldn’t have known then is that the country would eventually turn the other way. By 2025, the share of Americans who drink had fallen to fifty-four percent, the lowest Gallup had recorded in nearly ninety years of asking, down from sixty-two percent just two years earlier. The people who still drank were drinking less than they had in decades. We were early to something a lot of people are only now arriving at.

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The irony isn’t lost on me now. Both of our families, the ones who taught us that drinking was normal, hardly drink at all anymore. Mostly for health reasons. The thing we all treated as harmless turned out to be something nearly everyone stepped away from once they knew better.

Cutting it out became the catalyst for something bigger. Once the alcohol was gone, we could finally see the industry for what it is. A business that profits by selling people something that harms them, dressed up as celebration and connection and reward. We started seeing the food industry the same way. We cut most of the junk out too, with a few honest exceptions. Pizza on Friday nights and the occasional Chinese delivery. We still indulge in fast food when we’re on the road and there’s nothing else. We just stopped being blind to the fact that these products are not made with our wellbeing in mind. They are being made in spite of it. And as registered dietician and hormone expert says, you still have to live your life, it’s all about balance.

We’ve tried to raise our girls to see it clearly, too. These industries build their fortunes on people who trust them, and the distance between the people at the top and the product is hard to miss. Not long ago the CEO of McDonald’s posted a video of himself taking a small, reluctant bite of a new burger and calling it “the product.” He claims to eat there several times a week, and maybe he does (I’m not buying it), but the moment went viral because it named something people already felt. The ones who profit most from this system seem to live at arm’s length from it, and from what it does to the people who actually indulge in it. Our daughters are growing up understanding that an ad for McDonald’s or Miller Lite isn’t speaking to them. It’s selling to them. That distinction matters. They’ve learned to notice it and to walk away from it.

We’d rather they understand how these industries work than absorb the story the industries tell about themselves. We’ve watched documentaries with them about how the food industry operates and why it matters where your food comes from. I’m teaching them to grow our own herbs and vegetables. It’s fairly small right now, but I plan to keep building on it as they get older and these industries keep doing what they do.

In my mind, alcohol, fast food, cigarettes… they’re all the same thing. We just don’t treat them that way. That’s the part I can’t get over. I refuse to get over it.

As for me and Mike, taking those things out of our lives made room we didn’t know we were missing. Cutting out alcohol didn’t force us to wake up one morning with a grand new purpose. It wasn’t that direct. What happened took place over time, and it mattered more. It cleared out the guilt we’d been carrying, of doing something we knew wasn’t good for us. It also sharpened our sense of what we owe them as parents. Not just to raise good humans, but to raise kids who take their own health seriously, are aware of some of the unfortunate pitfalls of the consumer industry, and feel some responsibility to the people around them.

Once that guilt was gone, we had space to think about what we actually wanted. Mike left a job in the tobacco industry that had slowly eaten away at him. He went back to school for his master’s and focused his job search on community impact organizations. He returned to his music and produced his first album and many more songs that followed. He also saw a therapist and did the work of processing his dad’s death, and unlearning what had been handed to him.

As for me, I invested more time in myself, how I was raising my kids – not just through the lessons I was teaching but through the behavior I was exhibiting. I started building my own company and created more autonomy over my day-to-day. Those choices came later, and they came from a lot of things. But cutting out the bad habits came first.

Today, we are happier, healthier, our relationship is stronger, and we are more fulfilled than ever before. The grief of losing Mike’s dad resolved itself in time, the way grief does. Losing a parent young is never easy, no matter how you approach it. But we healed. We still miss him every day, and we honor his life through memories, laughter, love, and by living the best way we know how.

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Sources

• Gallup Consumption Habits survey, 2025 (conducted July 7–21, 2025). The share of U.S. adults who drink alcohol fell to 54%, down from 62% in 2023 and 58% in 2024, a record low in nearly 90 years of tracking. news.gallup.com/poll/693362

• Keck Medicine of USC, published in Annals of Internal Medicine, November 12, 2024. Heavy alcohol use among U.S. adults rose roughly 20% from 2018 to 2020 and remained elevated through 2021–2022. Reported by CNN, November 23, 2024.

• “Alcohol Consumption during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Cross-Sectional Survey of US Adults,” 2020. U.S. off-premise liquor sales rose 54% and online alcohol sales 262% in mid-March 2020 versus the same period in 2019. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7763183

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For two years, generative tools have made polished content close to free. Two years of AI saturation trained audiences to recognize and dismiss generic, formulaic writing. Effort or credibility took a back seat to convenience and ease. People learned to scroll past it. What went scarce, and therefore valuable, is the thing these tools can’t reproduce: a real point of view, specific experience, and a voice that clearly belongs to someone. Agencies tracking 2026 describe the same shift, that authenticity now shows up through lived storytelling and real experience rather than manufactured AI slop, and audiences are moving toward brands that feel unmistakably human.

Edelman’s 2026 barometer puts consumer demand for authenticity from brands at 76 percent, and story-focused brands are seeing meaningfully higher customer lifetime value. Marketers now talk about trust as the scarce resource and voice as the thing worth investing in, with founder-led and expert content outperforming polished corporate messaging. Authentic storytelling has moved from a nice-to-have to the key differentiator in a standout brand.

So what makes a brand authentic when the majority of marketers are admittedly using AI in some way, shape, or form? Authenticity requires an actual perspective and lived experience to contribute to your message. What we talk about here often: you have to put yourself in your brand. An organization without a clear voice, mission, vision, and values is lacking direction, as well as a relatable path forward.

So the rise of authentic storytelling is really a rise in the value of the foundation underneath it. The organizations winning the work actually know themselves, so everything they produce makes sense, moves the needle in the right direction, and sounds like one voice.

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Finding your brand voice

Finding your voice starts with knowing who you are as a brand. That means you’ve done the work: researched your clients and what they actually want from you, taken inventory of your team and the perspectives they bring, and aligned your voice and your content with the larger company mission. You understand your values. You know what your unique proposition is and what makes you different from your competitors. Do that hard work first, and the rest comes easier.

From there, a few questions to guide the work:

1. Why do you do this work, and what makes the way you do it different from everyone else in your space?

2. What matters most to you as a company, and who is this actually for? Who is it not for?

3. What do you want people to think when your name comes up, and what are your clients already saying?

4. What do the people who work with you say about you? Why do they work for you, and what kind of culture are you building?

5. Where are you genuinely strong, and where do you still have work to do?

Those answers point to what a voice is actually built from. It has a point of view, which is the belief underneath everything you make. It has a set of words that are clearly yours. It has a posture, whether that’s plain and direct or warm and unhurried, and it stays recognizable across a post, a landing page, and a pitch. When those pieces line up, storytelling stops being something you produce and becomes something you just do.

Authentic storytelling keeps getting more valuable, and it rests on a foundation most organizations skip, the work of deciding what’s actually true about your brand and the voice that carries it. That’s the work I do with mission-driven organizations. If you’re trying to sound like yourself and it keeps coming out generic, let’s build your foundation together.

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This is the ordinary situation for most mission-driven organizations. The people with the most authentic connection to the work are volunteers, and they get handed a microphone with a folder of talking points in the car on the way over.

The prep that fixes this is smaller than people think. It is a few hours, and helps you avoid showing up like these folks:

Decide who speaks, and about what

The first decision is not how someone should sound. It is whether they should be in the room at all, and what they are there to do. A festival chair can speak to logistics, programming, and what a family will experience on the ground. A board member can speak to why the organization exists and why this event matters to the community. Those are different jobs, and if you have not assigned them, both people will try to do both and neither will do either well.

Write down what each person owns and what each person hands off. Include the topics nobody addresses on this tour, and name who does address them if a reporter goes there. Finance questions, personnel questions, anything unresolved on the board’s plate. Your spokespeople need a clean, honest place to send those, and the message should be written in advance.

Three messages, and the ability to say them differently

Most people over-prepare content and under-prepare recall. They arrive with a page of facts and lose the two that mattered.

Build three messages. What problem this addresses, why it matters to the people watching, and what you want them to do. Under each one, put a single concrete example: a person, a number, a moment from last year’s festival. The example is what a viewer will still be thinking about long after the conversation ends.

Then have each spokesperson say each message out loud three different ways. The version they land on the third time is usually the one that sounds like them, which is the one that will show up live.

The hard question gets a rehearsal

Every organization has one. Funding, a program that closed, a leadership change, a community concern that has been simmering. Someone will ask, sometimes gently, sometimes not, and often on the way to something else.

The structure is straightforward. Answer the question directly and briefly, then move to a related message you have already prepared. Practice this specific move at least five times, out loud, with someone playing the reporter and pushing back. The instinct under pressure is to keep talking, and over-explaining is the most common way nonprofit spokespeople get themselves into a story they did not want.

Record it, and watch it

The single highest-return thing you can do in a prep session costs nothing. Put a phone on a tripod, run a five-minute mock interview, and watch it back together.

People cannot hear their own filler until they see it. They cannot feel that they are talking for ninety seconds without breathing. Playback does in one viewing what coaching does in an hour.

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Prep for the format, not just the interview

A television segment needs something to look at. If your festival has a costume, an instrument, a food item, a piece of art, bring it and tell the producer it is coming. Radio needs your spokesperson to be genuinely conversational and needs your logistics to be clean. Print will give you depth, so that is where the longer story about why the organization started belongs.

Send a one-page brief to every producer and reporter ahead of time with names, correct pronunciations, titles, the date, the time, the location, ticket information, and two or three photos they can actually use. Offer them access. Invite them to walk the site while it is being built. Make it easy and interesting to work with you.

The morning of

Get there early. Do one run-through in the car and then stop. The last five minutes before a segment do more good as quiet than as one more rehearsal of a line.

Have one person from your team on site whose only job is to hold the phone, take a photo, and capture the clip afterward. That footage becomes your social content, your donor update, and your proof of concept for the next pitch.

Do you have an upcoming appearance you’re preparing for? Share details below.

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Need someone to help you through it? Send me a message. I’d love to learn more about what you’re working on.

That is not a wellness statistic, it is a structural one. It comes from the Surgeon General’s 2024 advisory, which looked at the 63 million parents living with children under 18 and found that a third reported high stress in the past month, against 20% of other adults. Nearly half said their stress is completely overwhelming on most days.

So why are we resisting the solution?

We already know the price

Let’s start with the cost of care. The federal government considers childcare affordable at 7% of household income. The average American parent is now paying 20% or more, and nearly a third are pulling from savings to cover it. In 38 states and the District of Columbia, a year of infant care costs more than a year of in-state public college tuition.

Now look at who provides that care. Childcare workers earn a median wage near fifteen dollars an hour, which places them in the bottom five percent of all occupations in the country. The sector opens roughly 160,000 positions a year, almost none of it from growth. It is turnover. Parents cannot afford to pay more. Providers cannot afford to pay their staff enough to stay.

The whole system runs on underpaid people watching other people’s children so those people can go to work.

And we know what works

Flexibility is not an experiment. The peer-reviewed research is about as settled as workforce research gets. Hybrid work cuts quit rates by roughly a third with no measurable hit to productivity.

We are not withholding it because it fails.

Look at how it gets distributed. In early 2026, roughly three quarters of new job postings were fully on-site. Stanford’s research group found that even after every announced return-to-office mandate takes effect, the national share of work done from home drops by less than half a percentage point. The proof is there, and yet the needle barely moves.

Part of the issue? Flexibility is offered by seniority. In new job postings this year, 28% of senior-level roles came with hybrid or remote options. At entry level, it was 19%. And “entry-level” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Research has found that a majority of jobs advertised as entry-level require three or more years of experience. These are not twenty-two-year-olds. These are people in their late twenties and early thirties, which is a prominent group of people having babies.

So the parents facing the highest childcare bill of their lives, on the smallest paycheck they will ever earn, are also the ones offered the least room to be home. Then we call it a personal choice when they leave.

Here is why we resist

Presence at home has never been counted as productive. Pay a stranger to watch your child and it registers as economic activity. Do it yourself and it registers as nothing. The daycare invoice shows up in the national accounts. The parent doing identical work at three in the afternoon shows up nowhere.

So every time a parent chooses presence, the ledger reads it as a loss. Reduced hours, off the partner track. We built an entire measurement system in which being there for your kid is an absence from something that society counts.

And the office is the last place where presence still gets counted, not output or results, just attendance. Even if that means staring out the window for hours on a Thursday afternoon because you have already completed your tasks for the week. We spent five years proving that being at the desk was never what got the work done, and we went back to it anyway, because a manager who cannot see you does not know how to value you.

That is not an economic argument. That is a trust and control problem, plain and simple.

Someone has to pay for childcare. We decided it would not be the government or employers. So it is parents. They pay with savings. They pay by cutting back at work. And for many of them, one paycheck goes almost entirely to the care that lets them keep earning it.

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What we offered instead

Look at what we did put on the table. A $2,200 credit per child, once a year, at tax time. Infant care costs about $1,230 a month, so the entire credit covers roughly six weeks of daycare.

And it is structured backwards. The refundable portion caps at $1,700 and requires earned income to access. CBPP estimates 19 million children will get less than the full credit, or none of it, because their families do not earn enough. ITEP found that 41% of the benefit from the recent increase flows to the richest fifth of families.

Then there is the thousand dollars we deposit for each new baby, into an account nobody can open until the child is seventeen. Fewer than four in ten eligible families have signed up.

We did not misjudge the amount. We misjudged the problem. Parents are not short on savings vehicles. They are short on time, care, resources, and room to work.

So they leave

Here is what happens next, and it is the part nobody wants to name.

Women are leaving. Not going home. Leaving to build something of their own.

Women now own 15.7 million U.S. businesses, 40.6% of all firms, employing 12.6 million people and generating $2.8 trillion in revenue. Between 2022 and 2025, the number of women-owned businesses grew 12.1%, nearly double the growth rate of men-owned businesses. In 2024, women started 49% of all new businesses in America, a 69% increase since 2019.

Ask them why. Seventy-five percent say they want to be their own boss. Sixty-two percent want control over how and when they work. In a separate survey, 56% of women business owners named flexible hours and work-life balance as the primary reason they started.

Meanwhile, women make up 44% of the global workforce and hold 31% of vice president roles and above.

We have been calling this empowerment. Some of it is. Plenty of it is an exit.

These are not women who lacked ambition for the corner office. These are women who looked at what the structure was offering, and built a better one. They were right to leave.

They should not have had to.

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I was in your shoes

I spent nearly 20 years inside a structure that was never going to accomodate my life. After this became painfully real, following the birth of my oldest daughter, now 13, I began building my own business on the side with the goal of finding a better balance between work obligations and home obligations.

My life now is still hectic, loud, and overcommitted. It’s still occasionally held together with a bit of hope and a prayer for a nap. What changed is not the volume of work, it is the freedom of choice, and the ability to decide what matters on any given day.

I do not miss a pickup. I do not miss a deadline.

That is not a personality trait. It is a structure. And it is available to far more people than currently believe it is.

I see it every week. Nonprofit leaders running hybrid schedules while building pathways out of poverty in the neighborhoods that need them, helping other parents start businesses of their own. Healthcare professionals who spent years watching the gaps in their industry and are now coaching, creating, and building companies to close them, on a timeline that fits their family instead of fighting it. Publications backing entrepreneurs and innovators, making work that serves a community.

None of them followed the prescribed path. All of them are building something that supports their mission and lifestyle.

Make your own

Flexibility is not a perk you earn once you make VP. It is the only version of work that survives a sick kid and continues to fuel a career pathway. Every client I have who is building something real is really building the same thing: a container for a life.

So stop doing what you think you are supposed to do. Stop following a path someone else told you was the only one. Make your own.

That is where I come in. Not only as a marketing advisor, but as a guide and a thought partner. We start with where you are, and we build. One channel. One message. One step you can actually keep.

You should not have to choose between building something and being there at three o’clock. That is not naive. It is the entire reason I do this work.

If you are ready to build the version that fits your life, let’s talk.

I had a few hours to myself, in a public space, which almost never happens.

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At first, unsure of what I should do, I laid out in a lounge chair and enjoyed the quiet. Then I decided to actually use the time. I floated the lazy river by myself with my eyes closed. I went down the speed slides. I flew through the racing tunnels and landed with a deeply uncomfortable wedgie. Yes, we still get those at 41. I walked around by myself. I relaxed by myself. I played by myself.

Being alone is a muscle. I try to keep it strong during these years of packed schedules, constant obligations, and the emotional strain of running a business while raising three girls. As a solopreneur, I spend a fair amount of my time during the day alone with my thoughts. My client work is built on partnership, but the writing and thinking happens in my own head before I ever bring it to them. I am comfortable there. I find peace there.

I spent the early part of my career in busy offices. When COVID hit and we all returned home, I was surprised by the contentment I found. Those years made me ask what my life could look like if I built real balance between my work and my family.

After ten years of building this business the way I wanted it, I have that balance. While our lives are still busy as ever, I am not competing for time in the same way I was before. Rushing home to meet the kids off the bus, struggling to make softball practice or prepare dinner. Some days that means throwing turkey sandwiches in the cooler and running out the door. But overall, there is a satisfaction in the autonomy over the days that I set.

Now my girls are heading toward middle school and high school, and I find myself thinking about what comes after. I have another ten or fifteen years before the house empties out, and time still moves faster than I expect it to, but I know it’s coming. We moved to Columbus six years ago and it feels like we just got here. The girls keep growing and I keep thinking about how I want the rest of my life to go. What example do I want to set for them through each phase of my life? The job doesn’t end when they leave the house, after all. It just changes.

I do not do this because I struggle to stay present. I do it because the next phase, whichever phase you are in, is something you build toward. Life can happen to you by default, or you can decide on purpose. I prefer to decide. It gives me something to look forward to, while still enjoying where I am today.

I picture a cross-country trip in a van set up to sell plants, with space for Mike to make music. I picture writing that travels, books and publications that come looking for the work. None of that arrives on its own. It comes from knowing who you are and what you want, and then building toward it on purpose.

That is what a few quiet hours at a waterpark reminded me of. Being alone is a skill worth keeping. And the life I want is one I get to decide. What about you? What are you building toward in your current phase?

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Fresh out of Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, I moved an hour south to Indianapolis, certain I would land my dream job in the big city. For a young woman who had rarely left her hometown of Fort Wayne, it felt huge. I graduated as an honor scholar athlete with two internships under my belt, and I thought I was ripe for the picking.

They told me the path was reliable: get the degree, land the entry-level job, climb the ladder. The degree itself was a ticket to play, but getting in the door was just the beginning. That degree didn’t teach me how to navigate office politics, recognize red flags, or build a career that actually fit my life. It was the entry fee, nothing more.

I graduated on the cusp of a recession. The economy collapsed just as my classmates and I were launching into adulthood. Hiring freezes swept through every industry. I came to learn that entry-level did not mean what I thought. Most jobs wanted upwards of five years of experience. My network was small enough to count on one hand. So I did what you do when you’re young and scared and bills are piling up. I adjusted the plan.

Fate stepped in when Nordstrom called. I still remember what I wore to that interview: a red silk button-down with black dress pants and matching stilettos. I had chosen the outfit carefully, manifesting my future and channeling Anne Hathaway from The Devil Wears Prada. When the manager offered me the role in women’s intimates and athletics, I was so proud just to be considered. I never expected to add certified bra fitter to my résumé.

At first, I told myself it was temporary, a placeholder. But the women in that department changed something in me. Some had been there twenty years. They knew customers by name, remembered birthdays, asked about kids and grandkids. Their job wasn’t transactional. It was relational. They weren’t just selling bras. They were creating trust, offering dignity, making women feel seen.

I stopped thinking of the work as wrong for me. I started thinking of it as training I hadn’t known I needed. The skills I gained weren’t the ones on my résumé. They were the ones I was building in a job I had never wanted.

Then the recession hit full force. Commission checks dropped from $2,000 every two weeks to $800. I lived off bagels and rice for months in my cozy downtown apartment that I shared with a high school friend. Eventually I had to leave. But that year taught me that every role matters, even the ones you never planned for. That dignity isn’t determined by your title. It’s determined by how you show up.

The job search that followed was brutal. I applied to anything I could that would pay. Navigating the workforce was still new to me, and I didn’t know how to be strategic about it yet. When an alternative news magazine called about an account representative position, I didn’t hesitate.

The office was very cool, creative types with strong opinions and stronger coffee, but the work was revenue-driven: numbers on a board, quotas, cold calls until someone hung up on you. The rejections piled up until they stopped feeling personal. It was another job. Another moment of thinking this couldn’t be what I had worked for.

About six months in, I cold called a massive gym and ended up speaking with the manager, a former NFL player who had bought into the facility. We talked about ad placements, and somewhere in the conversation he asked if I would ever consider working for him as a sales director. After a couple of follow-on conversations, he offered to take me to dinner at a high-end steakhouse downtown. I went, thinking it was a professional opportunity. The meal itself was fine. But after that night, things changed.

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He started asking to hang out outside of work, and one night I said yes. I’m still not sure why. Maybe desperation, maybe loneliness, maybe the hope that this connection could turn into something legitimate for my career. He came over, but I made sure a friend was there with me. Some part of me knew not to be alone with him, even if I couldn’t articulate why. When he left, there was a $50 bill on my kitchen counter. I stared at it for a long time. It was survival money. I felt the pull toward relief on one side and shame on the other, knowing what leaving money implied, what he thought this was. Later that evening, he sent me a text message and invited me over for a massage in his apartment. That solidified the uncertainty I was feeling.

I called my parents to explain the situation. My dad showed up the next morning. He took me out to lunch and just listened. Per the guidance of a family friend and police officer, I texted the manager that I would not be taking the job and that my dad didn’t think it was a good move. His reply was fast and defensive. It confirmed what I already knew. He wasn’t interested in my potential as an employee. He was interested in other things. Within days, I was packing my apartment and moving home to Fort Wayne.

The floor dropped out. I felt like I had failed at everything: my career, my independence, my ability to navigate the world as an adult. It took me months, if not years, to accept that it wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t the way I dressed. It wasn’t my kindness being mistaken for flirting. It was him. He saw a vulnerable young woman and aimed to take advantage. I once thought moving home was a failure. Now I see it as self-preservation. I’m grateful I had a place to run to. Many women don’t.

After settling in at my parents’ house, I landed a job as a server at a local Italian restaurant to pay bills while I figured out what was next. The service industry is hard work: taking orders, managing difficult customers, staying on your feet for hours. Moving home at twenty-three felt like admitting defeat. All my college friends were building careers in big cities, posting photos from happy hours and work events. I was back in my childhood bedroom, serving pasta to people I’d gone to high school with, hating everything about it.

I spent a lot of nights out with friends I’d met at the restaurant I worked at trying to find my answer in dark rooms with loud music. I was looking for something. Validation, distraction, proof that I was still young and free and not failing at everything. But you can’t find direction at the bottom of a glass or in the attention of strangers who don’t know your story. Some part of me knew the nights out were just noise covering up the work I needed to do. The real work of figuring out who I was and what I actually wanted, not just what I thought I was supposed to want.

After about six months, and more applying into what felt like an empty void, I was offered a position as a fundraising coordinator at a local nonprofit. A small but mighty team supporting children with muscular disabilities. A strong female-led organization, which was exactly what I needed. What I didn’t expect was how much helping others navigate challenges far more difficult than my own would heal me. When you’re helping others, you stop drowning in your own struggles. For the first time since graduation, I felt like I was moving toward something instead of just filling a gap.

I was building my foundation, even if I couldn’t see the whole picture yet. Each role, each experience was contributing to a direction I didn’t fully understand. The skills from Nordstrom, how to read people, how to build trust, carried me through every job after. The gut instinct I developed after the gym manager incident protected me in future situations and taught me to listen when something felt off. Waitressing taught me resilience, and taught me to never look down on someone serving my table. The fundraising work taught me how mission-driven organizations operate, what they need, where the gaps are, and where I am destined to serve.

Most jobs are like that, in my experience. You take what you learned and leverage it for the next position. Nothing is wasted if you’re paying attention.

The gym manager wasn’t the last difficult encounter I would have in the workforce. There would be many more. Tears would be shed, caused by men and women both. But with each experience I learned, I grew, I became more resilient and more confident. And along the way, I found my people. The leaders doing good work, building a more equitable workforce, striving for positive change, dedicated to making opportunity more accessible and feasible for all of us.

I’m stronger today because of all of it. Not in spite of the recession, the cold calls, the $50 on my counter, the nights I spent looking for answers in the wrong places; because of them. Every one of those experiences sharpened my instincts and clarified what I would and wouldn’t tolerate. They taught me what kind of workplaces I wanted to build and be part of, and what kind I would walk away from without apology.

Now I’m a mother of three daughters, and I think about the workforce they’ll inherit. I think about the young woman I was at twenty-three, certain she had failed, with no framework for understanding that the system was never built to support her in the first place. I don’t want them to learn what I learned the hard way. I want them to walk in already knowing their worth, already trusting the voice that says something is off.

That’s why this work matters to me. Helping people connect the dots between everything they’ve done and where they’re trying to go isn’t just a service I offer. It’s personal. I know what it feels like to do everything right and still end up in your childhood bedroom wondering where it all went wrong. I know what it takes to claw your way back. And I know that the strain so many of us feel, especially parents trying to build meaningful careers without losing their families in the process, isn’t a personal failing. It’s structural. It’s a design problem. And design problems can be solved.

So I keep building. For my daughters, for the next generation, and for everyone still standing in the middle of the mess, certain they’re the only one who hasn’t figured it out yet. You’re not failing. You’re paying attention. And nothing you’re living through right now is wasted.

Adopted from Erin Gregory’s memoire, Living on Purpose.

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That gets treated as a personal failing. A scheduling problem. Something a better morning routine could fix. It isn’t. It’s a structural problem, and the structure is what we keep refusing to look at.

Start with who is doing the work.

Mothers with kids under 18 participated in the labor force at 73.9% in 2025, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Since February 2026, women have made up the majority of everyone employed in nonfarm jobs, for only the third time since 1990. Mothers with young children drove a lot of that. They came back after the pandemic in record numbers and held the line while federal child care support disappeared underneath them.

So the economy is leaning on these workers. And it is built to lose them.

In the first half of 2025, more than 212,000 women age 20 and older left the workforce. Over the same stretch, 44,000 men joined it. Participation among mothers of children under five fell from 69.7% to 66.9% in six months, which researchers at the University of Kansas called the steepest midyear drop for that group in more than 40 years.

Look at what changed at the same time. Full-time, in-office mandates among Fortune 500 companies climbed to 24% in the second quarter of 2025, up from 13% at the end of 2024. Amazon, JPMorgan Chase, AT&T, and others tightened the rules. The flexibility that let a parent manage a sick kid and a 2 p.m. meeting in the same afternoon got pulled back, and the people who depended on it most were the ones who left.

This is where it stops being about preference and starts being about money.

Child care for one kid runs between 8% and 19% of a family’s income. In 2025, 46% of children under six lived in a child care desert, a place where licensed options can’t meet demand. KPMG found child care prices rising at roughly twice the pace of inflation. When a five-day office mandate lands on top of that, a parent is often choosing between a paycheck that barely clears the cost of care and leaving. A lot of them are leaving, and the ones doing it are mostly mothers, because mothers still tend to earn less and absorb more of the caregiving.

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I left a traditional structure for this exact reason. I wanted to be present for my kids without handing over more of myself to a job that was supposed to support my family in the first place. I had the credentials and the runway to build something on my own terms. Most parents don’t get that exit. They get the mandate, the invoice from the day care, and a sobering conversation at the kitchen table about who steps back.

Here’s the part the “working mom” framing keeps ignoring. This is not a women’s issue that women should go solve in a wellness webinar. The share of fathers leaving the workforce to care for home and family rose from 4% in 1989 to 23% in 2021. Younger dads want the flexibility too, and research shows they get penalized for asking, because it exposes caregiving the workplace pretends they don’t have.

We designed work around a person with no one depending on them. Someone who can stay late, travel on a day’s notice, and treat the office as the center of their life. That person is increasingly fictional. We keep optimizing for them anyway, and then act surprised when the actual humans raising the next generation of workers can’t fit inside the shape.

The fix isn’t a perk. It isn’t a lactation room and a flexible-Friday pilot that disappears the next reorg. It’s measuring the work instead of the hours. It’s building roles that have reasonable expectations. It’s understanding that parents bring a kind of leadership most teams are starving for. It’s treating caregiving as a feature of your workforce rather than a liability to manage out.

It’s taking care of your people, plain and simple.

The trajectory we’re on is clear enough. We are pushing experienced people out, mostly mothers right now, and calling it their choice. Then we are turning around and worrying about a labor shortage and a birth rate we engineered with our own policies.

Both things are true at once. The people holding up the labor market are the people our workplaces are structured to lose. We can keep treating that as their problem to solve. Or we can fix the thing we actually built.

I got tired of adhering to a structure that wasn’t interested in fixing the problem. So I built a company that lets me further the work of organizations and leaders who decided to stand up and do it themselves. If that’s you, striving for change inside your own organization, let’s talk.

They build things that matter.

Yes, they matter to me, obviously, or I wouldn’t be supporting their work. But they matter to the world I want to see my daughters work in.

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Staffing firms that open doors for people who’ve been overlooked because their resume didn’t fit the algorithm. Journalism and marketing teams that shape how we talk about workplace culture. Nonprofits doing the unglamorous, necessary programs that fill the gaps for the underserved. A construction company that decided being a good partner was a competitive advantage in an industry that doesn’t expect it.

Mission-driven and workforce-centered, every one of them. That’s not a coincidence.

Neither is why I do this.

If you’re new here, hello! I’m Erin.

I spend my days helping leaders navigate change, building brands for organizations doing work that matters, and writing about what it looks like to design a career around your life instead of the other way around. I’ve been doing this work for twenty years, and the thing that keeps me going is pretty simple. I have three daughters, and I want the workforce they walk into to be better than the one I did.

Whether they end up working for someone else, building something of their own, or figuring it out somewhere in between — if I can’t change it at scale, I can build tools that help them think about it. Frameworks. A fresh perspective. A way of seeing their career like a puzzle to be solved instead of a course to finish first.

That’s what I’m building here. For them, for my clients, and for the version of me that needed it twenty years ago.

I didn’t set out to specialize in this. It happened because the people I kept being drawn to were doing similar work from different angles. Finding their voice. Getting clear on what they were actually built for. Deciding what mattered, personally, not just professionally, and building from there.

Partnering with so many of them has been the most beautiful discovery of this work. It’s also put personal practice behind what I do every day in my professional life. I’m not teaching something I figured out once and packaged up. I’m living it.

Case in point: I spent part of this week project managing a phone call with my sister. She’s getting married in August, and as we walked through the run of show I asked questions, helped her find the gaps, kept bringing her back to the goal, which is not to execute a perfect wedding. It’s to be organized enough beforehand that on the day of, she can just have fun and be in the moment.

That’s a brand strategy conversation. It’s also just a life conversation.

What I teach isn’t about putting together a compelling sentence, although there is a bit of that (communication matters, after all). It’s about being strategic — with your business, yes, but also with your time, your relationships, your decisions. When you look at everything through a values-interests-natural advantages lens, you stop compartmentalizing. Life informs work. Work informs life. You start living more holistically, and you don’t have to force it. It’s what happens when the framework actually fits.

Here’s what I know now that I wish I’d known earlier: change management isn’t simply a project management discipline. It’s a life skill. Understanding what sits at the core of resistance, transition, and transformation changed how I see almost everything. Workforce challenges. Client friction. My own career pivots.

Most of us are looking for steady. We think if we can just get the right job, land the right client, reach the right milestone, then things will settle.

They won’t.

Not because you’re doing it wrong, but because steady isn’t the destination. Change is the constant. The sooner you stop fighting that, the more interesting everything gets. On the other side of change is something you haven’t seen yet and that discovery is the whole point.

The race is long. The obstacles shift. The opportunities shift. The version of you that gets there won’t look exactly like the version of you that started.

Be strategic. Look at it like a puzzle and learn to move with it.

You always have something to look forward to if you’re willing to stay in the game long enough to find out what it is.

What’s Coming Up:

Join me and tomorrow (Tuesday, June 16) at 1:30PM for a free live conversation about pitching strategy and earned media. If you've ever wanted to get published and didn't know where to start, this one is for you.

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This week in Building a Meaningful Brand, the paid tier of this work, I’m walking through the thought process that took me from a consultant scrambling for assignments others were handing to me, to going after it on my own. This is the first summer I’ve felt like I have full ownership of my time, and it’s strange. I still catch myself thinking I should be working. Then I remember that time was the whole point.

If you’re trying to figure out how to create more ownership in your life and work, this one’s for you.

Thanks for being here.

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Pitching isn’t about having the best writing. It’s about understanding what a publication needs right now and making it easy for them to say yes to you. Those are two different skills, and most people only develop one of them.

This week inside Building a Meaningful Brand I’m sharing a one-page worksheet to help you land your next pitch, plus office hours to review yours with me directly.

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is a published poet and a publicist with 25 years in PR and journalism. He started his Substack nine months ago with zero following, no email list, and a story about his son he had to tell. He’s at 1,600 subscribers now, because he understood how to make it easy for people to say yes.

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I found Chris the way you find any of your friends and collaborative partners on Substack: through the writing. He writes about caregiving for his son with the kind of honesty and authenticity that makes you stop scrolling. We started talking and realized pretty quickly we were working from a similar place. Advocacy for people who get overlooked. Raising kids who pay attention to the world around them. And a shared belief that personal, thought-provoking writing isn’t self-indulgent, it’s the whole point.

That’s what pitching actually is. A way of thinking about what someone else needs and whether you can give it to them.

Check out some of Chris’s successful pitches:

Chris B. Writes

Pressed Send on a Whim

I didn’t arrive to Substack with a strategy. No funnel. No growth plan. Just a moment…

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4 months ago · 106 likes · 59 comments · Chris B. Writes

Chris B. Writes

The Believer, An Award-Winning Poem About The Daily Grind of Caregiving

There is nothing more humbling as a poet and a writer than when people truly see you. I am honored to share that my poem The Believer has won the 2025 BREW Poetry Award - Community Poem of the Year…

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a year ago · 115 likes · 64 comments · Chris B. Writes

I came up in PR through the nonprofit world. At the Y, earned media wasn’t optional, it was the strategy. Tight budgets, big missions, and a community that needed to know you existed. You learned to pitch or you went unnoticed. Those years taught me that a well-placed story does something a paid ad never can. It says someone else decided you were worth amplifying.

When I started writing bylines for Forbes Health, the work compounded. Those pieces led to ghostwriting roles with Nationwide Children’s Hospital and Wexner Medical Center. That work led to executive writing roles. One of those led to a position with the Department of Veterans Affairs, advocating for equitable healthcare for veterans. All of it eventually led to launching Erin Gregory Creative.

My latest pitch success story can be found here:

None of that chain exists without the pitch. And for those of us who can’t stand traditional selling, pitching is a more attractive way to get your voice out there and get your brand noticed.

Earned media is having a moment right now because everything else is getting harder. Algorithms shift constantly. Paid reach is more expensive. Audiences are searching for more honest, authentic brands. And AI engines cite earned media at a rate of 84%. Paid and advertorial content accounts for 0.3%. A byline in the right publication doesn’t just reach human readers anymore. It’s how you show up when someone asks an AI what you do.

The skill just matters more now.

So, Chris and I decided to share our insights and experiences with all of you.

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We’re going live together on Tuesday, June 16 at 1:30 PM. Here’s what you’ll walk away with:

Why fit kills more pitches than quality does. Most writers assume rejection means the writing wasn’t good enough. Chris will walk through how to read a publication the way a publicist reads it: as someone asking whether this piece fills a gap for that audience right now.

What a subject line is actually doing. One sentence opens a door or closes it. Chris has written them and received them for 25 years. We’ll talk about the difference.

How to handle rejection without losing momentum. 180 rejections. 20 acceptances. A 5-10% win rate in a competitive space. His mindset on that ratio is worth showing up for alone.

What your pitch says about you before anyone reads your work. The writers who get published aren’t always the best writers in the room. They’re the ones who made it easy to say yes.

Free and open. Come ask us something.

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If you want to take a stab at your own pitch before we go live, this week inside Building a Meaningful Brand I’m sharing a pitch positioning framework for mission-driven founders: how to think about your content before you write a single line of the actual pitch. And I’m holding office hours to review yours with you directly.

If you’re a paid subscriber, you already have access. If you’re not, this is a good week to change that.

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It’s about why mission-driven organizations are turning to fractional leaders and why the relationship works as well as it does when the fit is right.

Read it below.

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I did not set out to become a fractional worker. I didn’t even know that was a thing until my mid-30s. I had been a freelance writer for years, which I thought of as a nice side income to support my measly nonprofit salary. Then an opportunity to dabble in consulting came my way, and I learned how to step in and out of an organization, how to coach and advise, how to respond quickly to needs. The pace was a natural fit. The clients were aligned with what I really enjoyed supporting. The structure just needed my attention, so I built one that fit my life.

A business began to form around what had started as a side hustle, and the market was shifting around me while it happened. LinkedIn profiles mentioning “fractional” roles grew from 2,000 in 2022 to over 110,000 by early 2024, and the FRAK State of Fractional Industry Report found the number of fractional professionals doubled from 60,000 to 120,000 in the same window. It’s not freelance transactional consulting or temp junior talent filling gaps. It’s senior professionals choosing a different career architecture, and companies choosing a different staffing model.

The organizations drawn to fractional support are disproportionately the ones with vital communications needs and limited budget for a full-time senior hire. Nonprofits, health ventures, and purpose-led companies all have campaigns to run, boards to brief, donors and funders and patients and staff to keep connected. A full-time director of communications would solve the problem and bankrupt the budget, where fractional solves both at once. But the longer I worked with these organizations, the more I realized the financial piece was only part of the reason it worked so well.

The Path Most of us Took to Get Here

Most people who end up in fractional work got there through the intentional restructuring of their life. Fifteen or twenty years inside organizations, and a series of moments that made the traditional workforce structure unattractive. For me it was motherhood and the realization that the career and life I had built was not the one I wanted to keep building. The traditional 9-to-5 was never designed to accommodate working mothers. I wanted a presence at home and with clients. I wanted work and a lifestyle that reflected who I was. I wanted to show my daughters that they didn’t have to live a life that didn’t fit who they are just because someone designed it for nineteenth-century factory floors. I wanted them to see they can have it all without losing themselves in the process.

I left a full-time marketing and consulting career to do work that fit who I am and who I constantly strive to be: a present mom, a strategic partner, a garden-loving health-minded woman. FRAK’s research shows 72.8% of fractional professionals have 15+ years of experience, and 30.4% have 26 or more. This is a path people take after they know what they are doing and who they are, not before. Those early years in the workforce are vital. And since the vast majority of jobs in the current marketplace are still entry level, and will continue to trend in that direction, the economy is supporting this change whether it realizes it or not. Gain that early experience, figure out what kind of life and work you want to own, and start building on the side. When the time comes, the opportunity will be there.

That also impacts what I look for in clients. I want to work with people who are building something, creating something, doing something that makes this country a little less broken than they found it. Work that uses everything I know and matters to someone on the other end of it. Mission-driven organizations are constantly navigating uncertainty. That’s our economy. Senior operators think across functions anyway, and mission-driven work lets me use that range instead of asking me to stay in my lane.

In a given week I might shape donor communications for a foundation, coach a nonprofit CEO through a board presentation, or help a purpose-led founder decide what her company actually stands for. One of my clients is going on maternity leave in a few months and asked me to tag in for project management while she is out. Fractional work gives me the flexibility to plan for her. That’s work that matters to me. Supporting the people, not just the organization.

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The Partnership Approach

Most mission-driven organizations already have mid-level talent who can execute. What they need is someone to guide that team, ease the burden on the CEO, and collaborate on direction, while also delivering on the tactics. That combination of senior judgment and execution isn’t the norm in fractional work, but it’s what these organizations need more than senior availability alone.

There is also a trust layer that matters in this sector and gets underestimated everywhere else. Mission-driven organizations have been burned by consultants who show up with impressive decks, frameworks, and high budgets, then disappear after the project is complete. The people they keep are the ones who learn the staff by name, treat the work like their own, and stay long enough to see change happen. The fractional leaders I know who left full-time work for value reasons (like yours truly) tend to show up that way by default, building relationships they intend to keep for years rather than firms designed to scale.

Full-time roles inside mission-driven organizations still matter. For a significant share of nonprofits, health ventures, and purpose-led companies, fractional is simply the structure that fits the work, the budget, and the people who do it well. The senior operator a mission-driven organization assumed it couldn’t afford is often available on exactly the terms it needs, and just as invested in the outcome as a full-time hire would have been. Sometimes, even more.

This shift is happening in the choices of experienced professionals who walked away from the traditional structure and the mission-driven organizations who figured out how to work with them. The 9-to-5 was designed for a different economy, and what’s replacing it is being built by people who know what the work actually requires alongside the organizations willing to meet them there.

Read the Original on Fractional.io

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What makes Mud Girl different is that it is built to be achievable by all. The whole ethos is simple: we can, we will, we are. That felt right for what we were trying to show our daughters. Also worth noting: since 2017 the Mud Girl community has donated over $554,000 to organizations fighting breast cancer, a cause that is personal and important to us. Showing up for yourself and showing up for others at the same time. We are here for all of it.

Side-by-side, we launched ourselves into pools of muddy water, traversed high climbs, and carried heavy weights across the landscape. There was a lot of screaming and laughing, often at the same time. It has been a few years since I have done anything like this. Once upon a time I completed half marathons, sprint triathlons, and trail runs multiple times a year. Injuries and life got in the way and forced me to shift my approach to fitness. Sunday was a wonderful step back into that world.

Kelly and I swam together at Ball State University. Fitness has never been just a physical health factor for either of us. It has been a vital emotional one, too. It has been our way of coming back to ourselves time and time again, through children, life changes, transitions, and career ups and downs. When life gets complicated, we move through it. Literally.

This was the first time we invited our daughters into that world. And watching them take it on was something else entirely. Proud doesn’t even begin to explain how we felt at the end of it.

We keep health and fitness at the forefront of their lives, not as an obligation but as an operational reality. They go on bike rides and runs with us, hike trails, play sports, and we help them train, building their confidence and capability along the way. It is a lifestyle, not something they have to do. It is how we operate as humans. Even our vacations, while full of relaxing elements, often include physical activity. Hiking a new course in a place you have never been is just what we do.

So when we showed up to that starting line on Sunday, they were ready.

These girls didn’t overthink it. They trusted the journey because we told them they could do it. At this age, their moms are still stronger, faster, and more experienced, and they leaned into that. That story will change as they get older, more into their own athletic journeys, and more capable on their own. That change is important and something we are already looking forward to. As it does, it will only become more important for Kelly and me to keep challenging ourselves alongside them, to show them that age is not a barrier but simply a part of life. Just as they faced this course young and inexperienced, we will face the next one older and more experienced. Different advantages. Same willingness to show up. But for this race, if one was down, the other picked her up. That is the lesson here. Not just completing the course, but completing it together.

Our mission, as moms and women, is to show our daughters exactly that. It’s not just about good grades, winning the game, or getting from one step to the next. It’s about doing things you didn’t think you could do, supporting one another, and constantly challenging yourself, because what is on the other side of those challenges is incredible.

Both of us took the leap to start our own companies over the last few years. We are each other’s cheerleaders, checks and balances, and thought partners. There is something specific about building a business alongside your sister. She has seen every version of you. There is nowhere to hide, and that’s the point.

That mud run course and the work of building something from scratch have more in common than you might think. There are climbs that feel too high. There are weights you are not sure you can carry. There are moments you are face down in the mud wondering how you got there and whether getting up is worth it. The answer is always yes, but you do not always find that answer alone.

The mentality that got us across that finish line on Sunday is the same one we bring to our clients every day. You lead with your strengths. You build resilience by doing hard things, not by avoiding them. And when someone on your team is down, you pull her out of the mud and keep moving. That is not just how we raced. It is how we are building our businesses, and it is what we try to model for every person we work with.

That philosophy shows up in how approaches nutrition with her clients too. Functional. Lifestyle oriented. Not a fad diet or a quick fix, but a sustainable method woven into your day to day. The same way we move our bodies because it is simply how we live, Kelly helps her clients eat in a way that supports the life they are actually building, not the one they are trying to sprint through.

As for me, going it alone as a solopreneur, as a mom, can be so difficult. You need to find your community. You need that support system. Whether you are navigating your own personal health challenges or struggling to get that business idea off the ground, find your team. That’s what I’m here for.

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Sunday was a physical reminder of something we carry into our work every day. Our daughters saw it. We hope they felt it. We are not raising girls who define themselves by a straight or clean path from one safe step to the next. We are raising girls who know how to get muddy, get up, and keep going.

If you are striving to take your health to the next level, Kelly is your person. Find her at Nutrition.

If you are ready to take your business into your own hands and build a brand that reflects who you are and what you have built, that is exactly what I do. Find me at eringregorycreative.com.

Find your people. Jump in the water. We’ll be the ones already muddy, cheering you on to the finish.

The question this worksheet answers is: how do I connect the dots between everything I’ve done and the offer I’m building now?

The job here isn’t to invent something new. It’s to surface what’s already there. The patterns, the unique capabilities, the position you’re already standing in without quite naming it yet. Work through it in order. By the end you’ll have a working position statement you can start testing in real conversations.

Before you begin: this isn’t about what you think you should be good at or what sounds marketable. This is about excavating what your actual experience shows you’re uniquely positioned to offer. Be honest and specific.

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Somewhere in the middle of the conversation, the program director paused and asked me a question I didn’t expect.

“What would you have done at a younger age to further your career?”

Their students are high schoolers in inner city schools. Kids working hard to move beyond their circumstances, looking for any edge they can find. I’ll be in a room with some of them soon, and I’ve been turning the question over ever since to figure out how I want to incorporate my response into the workshop I’m building for them on safe social media use and building a personal brand.

I thought about it for a second, and then I gave her the answer I’d been sitting with for a while: I would have started a newsletter earlier.

I would have started documenting my journey sooner. I would have shared the career woes, the challenges, the small wins that felt big at the time. I would have started connecting with an audience while I was still figuring it out, instead of waiting until I thought I had something polished to say.

I would have loved to read those entries now.

Here’s what I know on the other side of two decades of work. Every experience you collect along the way contributes to the career you end up building, if you let it. The job you took because you needed the paycheck. The role you outgrew faster than you expected. The manager you left because he didn’t treat you right. The skill you picked up on a side project that turned out to matter more than the full-time job. None of it is wasted. All of it is material.

The trouble is, you can’t see the through-line while you’re inside it. You only see it later, when you look back and realize the seemingly unrelated chapters were actively building the same person the whole time.

That’s part of what I’m doing with the book I’m working on. It’s part memoir, part workbook for people building something of their own, and a lot of what I’m pulling from is that earlier stretch of my career. The seasons I didn’t think to document while I was living them because I was struggling. Struggling inside a system I didn’t understand that I thought I had to fit into. The lessons I had to reconstruct later from memory.

Digital real estate is one of the most valuable things a young person can build right now. If you can start capturing an audience and honing your writing and digital marketing skills while you’re still in high school or college, that compounds for the rest of your career. It doesn’t matter what direction you end up going. The skill of telling your own story, the discipline of publishing consistently, the muscle of finding the people who care about what you have to say. That work pays off everywhere.

It’s a big part of what I educate clients on, whether it’s a healthcare professional, a workforce-focused nonprofit, or a photographer building a business from the ground up. Share your stories. Share the lessons learned. Help your audience find you.

You don’t need to wait until you’ve made it. The documenting is the making.

Most of you reading this are already past that first hurdle. You’ve started. You’re publishing. You know your story and you know who you’re trying to reach. The question isn’t whether to do the work. It’s whether the work is pointing at the right thing yet.

You sit down on a Tuesday morning. The cursor blinks. You know your story. You know your expertise. You know what you’ve lived through and what you’ve learned. And still, when you try to name what you actually offer the world, the words don’t quite land. The brand feels close, but not yet yours. The business feels real, but not yet sharp.

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That gap is the thing I work on with clients more than anything else. Helping them see that the job from ten years ago, the certification nobody noticed, the volunteer work that taught them how to lead, all of it belongs in the offer they’re building now. Not as a resume. As proof of the person behind the brand. The learning and growth documented along the way.

I help you leverage your lived experience to build a life, brand, and successful business that align with who you are and what you’re naturally good at.

Next week inside Building a Meaningful Brand, paid subscribers get the Experience-to-Offer Mapping Worksheet. It’s the same tool I walk clients through when we’re figuring out what they’re uniquely positioned to offer based on the patterns in everything they’ve already done.

By the end you’ll have:

• A clear view of what people consistently come to you for, across work, volunteer projects, and the rest of your life

• The specific problem you solve better than most, named in plain language

• A defined target so you stop writing for everyone and start writing for the person who actually needs you

• A working position statement you can test in real conversations starting that same week

If you’re sitting on years of experience but can’t quite name what makes your work yours, this is the one to grab.

The work behind a brand that lasts happens inside Building a Meaningful Brand. Come build yours with us.

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Headshots

A lot has changed since I went full time, in such a beautiful way. The podcast. This Substack. A roster of clients doing work that matters, from healthcare, to civic tech, to community development, to nursing education, to purpose-filled employment. The work has been fulfilling and I’m so proud of where it has been and where it has potential to go.

That’s why these photos mattered. They had to show up where I am now, not where I started.

When was the last time you updated yours?

Your photo is doing a job. It’s setting expectations before anyone reads a word you’ve written.

Maybe it’s easy to hold on to. Fewer crow’s feet, darker hair, less gray. But those years are important. They’re experience, patience, competence, grit, understanding.

So what happens when someone asks to meet with you and you’re quite a different person than who they see on your digital platform? Are you hiding behind an older, safer version of yourself?

A few questions to consider:

• Have your service tiers, audience, or positioning changed since the last shoot?

• Are you still wearing the blazer you bought for a job you no longer have?

• Have you started reaching for a cropped phone selfie because the “real” one feels wrong?

Pixelated photos undercut everything else you’re building. If you’re charging premium rates, does the way you show up match the work you deliver? A professionally crafted appearance, brand, and positioning reflects the quality of your delivery.

Now, that doesn’t mean you have to put on a Brooks Brothers suit. It means you need to spend the time developing an image that reflects who you are in a way that resonates with your brand and your client base. For me, that means my office setting, my garden, my podcast. The versions of me that come together to create a holistic marketer. A brand that puts values first.

Here’s what I love about a fresh shoot — you walk away with material. It is immediate gratification. New website hero. New podcast cover. New Substack header. New press kit. One good afternoon can feed a year of brand assets if you plan it that way. My brand is going through a bit of a redesign, more on that in the weeks ahead.

A photo sets expectations. The trouble is that most headshot advice produces the same photo. Neutral wall, blazer, arms crossed, slight smile. It works, in the sense that nothing about it is wrong. It also doesn’t tell anyone anything about you. It checks a box and nothing more.

The photos at the top of this post were taken in my podcast studio, my office, and my garden. Three settings that show up in my actual life and my actual work. That wasn’t an accident, and it’s not something you need a stylist or a creative director to pull off. You need a plan.

Here’s how I built mine.

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The catch is that AI is only as useful as what you feed it. Dump a screenshot of your dashboard and ask “what do you see,” and you’ll get something that sounds smart and says nothing. Pull the right data, ask the right questions, and you can find the the patterns that should be shaping your next quarter.

Here’s how I do it.

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Season one of Notes from the Messy Middle had been running, the episodes were getting downloaded, and I had a working assumption in my head about who was listening. Mission-driven professionals. People in the messy middle of meaningful work. A wide net.

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The numbers told a more specific story.

The people actually showing up were entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, and mission-driven leaders. Not the broader audience I had described in my positioning. Not the “anyone building something that matters” version I had written into the early episodes. A narrower, more identifiable group of people who were running their own thing and trying to figure out how to keep it sustainable.

I sat with that for a while. Then I let the data do what it is intended to: help steer the direction for the next phase of work.

Season two is being built around what the audience actually told me it needed.

The conversations are more specifically angled toward people running small operations. The questions I am asking guests are more intuitive. The episodes I am planning solo are about the actual problems entrepreneurs and small leaders are bringing to the work. The positioning is following the people, not the other way around. If you missed season one, you can find it wherever you listen to podcasts.

Check out Season 1

This is the part of building something that you learn along the way. You think the work of clarity is figuring out what you do. Most of the time, the harder work is figuring out who you do it for, and being willing to look at what your audience is actually telling you instead of who you thought they were.

That is why I tell clients to just get started. Put down what you know. Find your audience and tighten your positioning as you go.The honest stock-taking part of any practice is not just an inventory of what you offer. It includes what is coming back to you from the people you are trying to serve. Those two things have to match for the work to keep going.

I am still mid-build on this. Season two is not out yet. The new positioning is still settling into the website and the Substack and the way I introduce myself in rooms. But the data did its job. It told me something true, and gave me the chance to evolve with it.

This is the work every good marketer should be doing every six to twelve months.

Reanalyze the data. Tailor your position to address audience trends and needs. You do not change who you are or what you offer. You shift your presentation so the people you are already serving can find themselves in your work more clearly.

So here is your prompt:

Open your analytics. Look at the last six months. Notice who is actually showing up, what they are responding to, and what that tells you about the work you have been doing. Sit with whatever you find before you try to fix it.

If you want a partner and community in this part of the work, that is what Building a Meaningful Brand is built for.

This month we are inside the starting point with the Brand Inventory. The framing essay this week walks through how to use it. The difference between honest stock-taking and the self-criticism that gets you stuck. What to do when something on the page bothers you. How to mark a tension without rushing to resolve it. If your data is telling you something you have not yet evolved to meet, that is where the practice lives.

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