If you are like me, you are buying new Moleskin notebooks, obsessing over the school calendar and which stainless steel bento box won’t leak, and purchasing clothing for warmer days. Even though Halloween decorations and pumpkin spice lattes are ubiquitous, summer is not over. I said what I said! Officially, it ends on Monday, September 21st when we are moved into the Fall equinox. The day where light and dark share time equally. The tomatoes in my garden are just now able to be harvested, for goodness sakes and I made my first batch of zucchini muffins last Sunday.

Here is what I am doing to make this late Summer season feel sticky and slow using the six pillars of being well. This is my “August 2026 Edit”, just to change things up:

Emotional: Setting Intentions for our School Calendar

Our family dynamic can get chaotic and out of whack with the amount of neurodivergence pickle balling around our house. My son is heading to Kindergarten (WTF), and my daughter is heading to Pre-K. This will be the first time since June 2020 that my husband and I will have 8:30am-5pm accounted for with our children (cowbells! triangles!) Just typing this is likely jinxing me and I will still be responsible (by choice) for mid-day school pick up.

I have created a color coordinated spreadsheet of each of our days and who is responsible for what child to get where, what activities are happening in the evenings, what our dinner theme will be and who is cooking it (let’s be honest, it will be me), and what nights my husband and I get to “take off” so that we can have some personal time to pursue our hobbies, or sit quietly and stare at a wall. When our nervous systems get into a really solid rhythm, I find that our family dynamic is often much calmer, even if it’s mind numbing from week to week.

Physical: Camping One Last Time

Labor day weekend, we will be doing our third and final camping trip. We usually don’t go into the wilderness on big holiday weekends, and instead like a weekday camping vibe. But, we found a special spot through Hip Camp that really spoke to us. We will bring our loudly colored paddle board and feel our feet and legs in the cool, salty water one last time until 2027. These s’mores bars developed by my friend will be coming along as well.

Not to toot my own horn, but my camping guide linked in this newsletter is pretty helpful. We use it each and every time that we go out, and I can say with certainty that we never forget anything!

Spiritual: Planning a Values Workshop for The Fall Equinox

A ping keeps coming to me to teach another values workshop, and the Fall Equinox on Tuesday, September 22nd feels like the perfect time. This will be a 90 minute deep dive on core values and how to work with them to live in more alignment. I will have tiers of payment (fully free —> sponsoring someone to join). If you cannot attend live, you will receive a recording. I would love to see some of this community there.

Will you come?

I cannot stress enough how foundational this work can be if you are feeling like you want to begin a reset. If you want to hear more about how meaningful values can be, Suzy Welch is doing a 16 part series right now on her podcast.

Vocational: Launching Office Hours

September is a natural time of reset (as well as January, April, and June), and I have been thinking about my own capacity as we enter into this new month. When I left the day to day operations of my company in May, I had no idea what time would look like when I didn’t have heaviness on my shoulders 24/7. Well, it turns out that I have much more capacity.

Office hours is a single session with no commitment. It is just an hour with me to work through whatever is loudest for you right now to gain some momentum.

This seemed like an obvious step because I kept getting messages that people were not ready for my full six month+ engagement, but had something they really wanted to work through: feeling sticky in their daily lives, at a career crossroads, or contemplating a business idea they needed some feedback on before they took it to the next step.

So now there is a place for that in my work!

I avoided this for a while, mostly because I work in such a relational way. But, I think there is a real need right now, especially with everything that is happening to people's careers and identities in 2026. You can now book directly on my site if you have been interested in coaching but aren’t ready to take the full step with me (yet!).

Relational: Have a Back to School BBQ for my Friends

I have barely seen my group of friends this summer in a meaningful way. We entertain often, and I find I am the “go to” to bring my neighborhood people together. On my menu is this chicken with corn and lime basil butter with some modifications, a peach and rhubarb crumble with vanilla ice cream, and a reliance that my culinarily attuned friends will do the rest.

Speaking of relationships, I wrote a piece on quiet quitting that really resonated with you all this month. Let’s loud quit instead, and just have a direct conversation. K?

Authentic Self: Canning Tomatoes and Playing Hookie

Last year was the first year that I grew San Marzano tomatoes, and I canned them for the year ahead. I will do the same this year, as it seems we are having a bumper crop! Canning seems intimidating, but it is actually one of my favorite summer traditions. If you have a gigantic pot, and some of the unique tools, it is actually easy! We have already canned blueberry rhubarb jam this July, and I will likely also can some bread and butter pickled cucumbers later this week.

Before September 22nd, I will be taking a day I would have otherwise worked and go to the beach, eat a picnic lunch, and read a novel. We live a three minute drive down the hill from Puget Sound, and I find that I do not utilize this magical amenity enough. I also have this guilt complex with doing anything for myself Monday-Friday between the hours I have childcare. Doctor’s appointments are fine, but a walk without a meeting or enjoying a lunch while not at my desk? Unacceptable.

Although I am looking forward to getting back into a more consistent routine this Fall, I really want to make these final weeks last.

How are you spending the rest of your summer?

XO, KBW

There I was, going about my day on autopilot. Nothing had changed, really, except this dripping ache for more. A dynamic that matched effort and values, that mirrored growth, that validated and saw. There was less presence, a bit more coldness, and this feeling that the previous dynamic was harder to reach.

My familiar whisper inside saying, “Do you see me? Do you hear me? Does what I say mean anything to you?” These are the questions anyone in relationships are asking themselves when they slowly begin to back out of their lives. The relationship has ended, and yet nobody has been explicitly told.

The term quiet quitting was everywhere in 2022, mostly in regards to work. Employees coasting and “acting their wage”, overall disengaged with the construct of 9-5. But, the concept actually came about in 2009 by economist Mark Bolger in regards to millennial career attitudes.

What is Quiet Quitting

We all know the trope: an employee stops going out of their scope and chooses to do the bare minimum, is emotionally defunded, and yet technically still showing up every day. This concept resonated for so many in 2022 because … it is SO recognizable in human behavior!

But, quiet quitting is NOT just for the workplace. Any relationship can experience this phenomenon: a friendship where one person stops initiating; a business partnership where one person stops expressing their real opinion because they know it won’t be considered; a marriage where one person stops fighting because arguing requires the will to care. Same dynamic, different face. Someone in the relationship has made a decision, aware or not, but hasn’t told the other.

Here are a few examples:

At Work: doing the exact scope you were hired for and nothing more, showing up to meetings quietly under the radar, a lack of effort to push yourself or ask for feedback, and an overall disinterest in growth

In Friendships: one person making all the effort for initial outreach, longer than previous response times to texts, shorter responses that don’t allow the conversation to tennis back and forth, and surface level conversation that used to go way deeper

In Business partnerships: withholding unique ideas, deferring to the other partner constantly, going through the motions of collaboration to keep the peace, and the shift from engaged to polite compliance

Through Intimate Partnerships: emotional withdrawal, separate bedrooms, absence of conflict due to lack of care, and politeness that feels cold

Why?

Often, not always, quiet quitting happens after one person (or both) have put a lot of effort into the relationship in a positive way. Conscious engagement, attempted repair, or energy to move forward. But when efforts don’t pan out, the nervous system stops feeling safe. The avoidance goes back long before the current relationship and protection mode (aka protector parts!) kicks in. The candle of hope that anything could change has fully burnt out.

Is it you?

This is a hard question because most of us would rather not admit that they are quietly quitting. Have I personally done this in a relationship? YES. A handful of times in all categories, and I am not proud of my approach.

Think about the last few times you were asked to show up with the relationship you are questioning: How did you feel when the person cancelled last minute? Have you emotionally started to pack your bags from the dynamic? How have you already played out the ending of this relationship in your own head or with a friend? Are you hoping that the other person notices first and says something?

There are seasons in every relationship where we need to pull back — this is normal and healthy. But, there is a difference between needing space and slowly backing out of a room without saying why or goodbye.

Is it me?

News flash: quiet quitting goes both ways! You can quiet quit your job, but the job can also quietly quit you — the boss that stops pushing you, the team you get removed from, the review where there is no possibility of promotion.

In personal relationships it can be even more lonely because there is no HR department to help you navigate.

It can start with you always doing the outreach. Then, noticing that there is a distraction or preoccupation even when the person is physically there. Next, your conversations feel withdrawn and curated or even avoidant. The problems that you were always asked to help solve are no coming to you. And, you can see this warmth with other people that you used to receive in the past, and you question what you have done wrong.

Unsolicited Advice

Before you fully decide to exit, ask yourself if you have actually given the relationship a real conversation in present day. You do not owe anyone a relationship that is not working, but do you owe a present day conversation. Many of us avoid conversations based on past experiences with that person (hi! me!), but we can only be present with the dynamic that is the now.

If you are the receiver, consider speaking to what you are observing without blame: “I have noticed we have been less connected lately and I want to understand more what is happening from your end. Here is mine….”. Some people are people pleasers and avoidant, and will not tell you the truth, but in my experience, if you ask real questions with curiosity and care, most people will slowly begin to reveal their truth. Sometimes a slow repair is possible from here, and other times this is the moment where both of you come to the reality that it’s time for a change.

Not all relationships are meant to be saved. Regardless, it is the honest conversation that moves the path of the relationship to whatever phase it needs to go next, as painful as that can be for most. Whether that means staying at your job with a newfound intention, deciding to separate from your partner of many years, or accepting that your former best friend is now just someone you see a few times a year.

Everyone deserves more than a slow fade, and time under duress can be torture.

Is there a relationship in your life right now where someone is backing out of the door? Or are you? What would it take to start having the conversation with that person out loud?

And in case you need a song to help you process, Lily Allen says it best.

XO, KBW

I had so many topics to talk about today, and many drafts in my Substack queue. High summer does this to me with the abundance of light lingering well past my bedtime. My racing mind finds more time to wander aimlessly, think expansively, and explore curiously.

There was a thought to write about the architect and the archeologist. A framework I have been exploring in a new way – how we must excavate before we can build to make sure that what we are building is on solid ground. “Career as a Mirror” was the title of another piece where I wanted to discuss patterns at work and how we can use those to get clear about what we really want. Two other titles are “How to Get Unstuck” and “The Shadow Side of Values”. I will get to these.

But, after reading this article today, all I want to do is be able to play, and… I don’t really know how.

From a young age, life got pretty serious – especially once I committed my young life to becoming a professional ballerina. Play was around, of course – I have memories of catching flashing lightning bugs in mason jars after the sun went down, chasing warty bullfrogs to anxiously scoop up with my bare hands, and playing freeze tag with the neighbor kids in that humid after-dinner haze. But more often it was taking my hobby, ballet, and becoming so serious that it no longer felt “fun” and instead became something to achieve. There was no Yin in my life – Yang was Queen and I was about output, success, and getting “picked” by whatever archetype was standing at the front of the room.

Naively, I thought having children would cure this. Dreams of me sitting on the ground, and being in the moment – reteaching my inner child how to play trains, dress up dolls, and sing karaoke out of plastic microphones. Sadly, I am not that breed. Like my parents before me, I want to focus on my personal interests, and have them come along for the ride.

Play is natural in children. They don’t have the worries of quarterly taxes, or why a business colleague is giving them the cold shoulder, or crafting time to repair a broken cabinet door. Instead, if their bellies are full, water bottles are filled to the top, and they can get in the flow, hours are spent in borderless imagination. As I watch it, I feel sad that I can’t drop down into that place. The grief of adulthood sits like a heavy backpack on my shoulders, relentlessly asking me to carry the load while society stuffs more in.

Given this, I think I need to reframe play for myself. Growing food, making a dish from it, playing with shapes of vegetables I am cutting feels no different than my daughter making dirt cupcakes in her mud kitchen. Aimlessly paddling around the Puget Sound feels like watching my son move his boat around the bath. My inner child is in there somewhere, but I might be looking in the wrong hiding spot.

I can’t expect myself (nor want) to become the mom who is ever present on the floor at this point. But, I can expect my children to see me in my form of play – even if it’s not their sandbox. The boundless imagination of planning a garden, pushing my oar through the salty water, or creating a stunning salad can still work.

My form of play this week was created a dish inspired from an August garden harvest.

Crispy Chickpea and Sungold Tomato Salad with Pole Beans and Feta

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Spoiler alert: you’re probably not.

Most of us build our lives from the bottom up – making small decisions that are right in front of, not stopping to ask whether the life we are building is actually the one we want. Days, weeks, months, and even years go by while we are in a reactive state. Then, one day, you wake up and ask yourself: “How the F did I get here?”

Humans are wired to be reactive – this isn’t a character flaw. Not all of us can sit down and design a five year vision and stick to it. Everyone I know is guilty of this in one way or another. The people we most admire haven’t planned either.

But when you aren’t intentional with decisions everyday, you naturally loop into your patterns. And a pattern that is looped overtime becomes your life. This is fine if the life you are living works for you, but what I hear over and over again is that people are disillusioned with where they are at, and they want the cycle to change.

So, how do I do it?

To stop this cycle, we must begin with core values work. I have watched some of the most impressive people in my life build their dreams based on someone else’s values. Milestones are achieved, letters are printed after their names, and houses are purchased with many commas and zeros. Yet, there is never any satisfaction because it wasn’t their race to win.

Before you can map where you want to go, you have to get brutally honest about what is actually true for you – not what society says you should want, not what is trending or the ubiquitous “should”, but instead what you genuinely value when you are being real with yourself.

Future Casting

Some people call it manifestation. Some people call it goal setting. Some people call it strategic planning. I call it future casting. Regardless, it usually starts from the wrong place. We focus on what feels possible right now, and then work forward. Which means that your future ends up being a slightly improved version of your current circumstances, constrained by whatever is blocking you from your full imagination and potential.

I personally like starting at the end. Five years from now, if you were to have your dream life, what would be true for you? What hard choices would you have to make? What would you have to let go of to make room for what would be next?

And, yes, I know what you are probably thinking – I just don’t know if that dream life would make me happy. This is where values come in. I am less focused on the what and instead on the who and the how. If we can focus on how we want to feel and who that future person is living by their core values, the outside circumstance usually don’t matter as much.

Most of us have been taught to keep our dream life and ambitions reasonable and not to get too attached to outcomes.

I want you to be unreasonable.

What do you actually want? What does your life look like when it fits you completely? What is unreasonable right now but that you still dream of having in this lifetime?

The RBW Lens

There are many frameworks that people live their lives from, and mine uses my six pillars of being well based on Aristotle’s Eudaimonia: Emotional, Physical, Spiritual, Relational, Vocational, and Authentic Self. These are the areas where my life needs to be in harmony so that it feels complete.

In discovery sessions, I am often asked “how do you work with clients?”. I don’t have a specific template, because each person I see are in very different parts of their personal journies. I always have people do values work, and we talk about their six buckets and we future cast across all six. From personally experience, I know you can have a thriving career and a completely depleted body (me in 2019). You can have beautiful relationships and no real sense of who you are authentically underneath them (me in 2009).

So when you imagine your life in 5 years, use my six buckets. What does your emotional life look like? Are you regulated? Resourced? In therapy 2x a month? What does your vocational life look like? How does it feel to show up to your job everyday? Are you making impact? Are your strengths being fully expressed?

Designing with the End in Mind

Once you have an idea of where you want to go, you can start backing into your current life.

If you want to live in a new location in five years, what needs to be true a year from now? What about three months from now? What can you do today to start making that happen? Is it a conversation with your loved one? Is it research to see if your company can transfer you?

This is where your future version of yourself gets designed each day in the tiny decisions you make towards that goal. Manifestation is not magic. It’s small actions towards where you want to go, and saying yes to the opportunities that move your towards them. Especially if you create those opportunities yourself through actions that align with your core values.

The Ask

Pick one bucket today and ask yourself where you want to be in 5 years. Then ask what’s one small thing you could do this week that moves you one inch in that direction.

It is a series of tiny, manageable steps. Not gigantic leaps without a parachute. You get to decide which direction you are moving in. We build our future everyday.

XO, KBW

P.S. I am taking on two new coaching clients and one consulting client in September. Is this feels like it might be you? Let’s talk!

Here are some of my favorite discoveries and moments from July, using the six pillars of The Recipe for Being Well as my guide.

The Emotional

Let’s give credit where I think credit is due. My hypothesis is my HRT is making me joyful. Out of my 25 day cycle (god help me), I used to be in good spirits for 5 of those days. FIVE! 20 days a month to be a grump is not acceptable for anyone in relationship with me, including myself. This month I feel a world of difference in my mood and how it swings. There are still back and forths (I am an HSP), but the delta between them is not as vast. I am on nightly progesterone, and an estrogen patch that I change out weekly. If you are a cycling woman in your 40’s and are feeling unwell, consider talking to your doctor about your hormones!

The Physical

As I do, this recipe sat behind a paywall a few weeks ago in my “week in the life” as career coach essay. You have been patient, and I couldn’t help but share because it’s just that good. If you make it, will you please tag me?

Creamy Corn, Tomato, and Bacon Pasta

Makes 4-6 servings

Prep time: 15 min, Cook time: 20 min

Ingredients:

• 6 slices bacon, sliced into thin batons

• 4 stalks green garlic, thinly sliced (or 2 cloves regular garlic, minced)

• 1 bunch scallions, thinly sliced

• 3 ears corn, shucked and kernels sliced off the cob

• 5 oz. fresh spinach

• 1 lb. short cut pasta (I used fussilli)

• 1 package Boursin

• 1/2 pint cherry or grape tomatoes, halved

• 2 Tbsp chives, chopped

• 1 Tbsp fresh thyme leaves

• Salt and black pepper to taste

Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil and cook the fusilli according to package directions. Reserve 1 cup of pasta water before draining.

Cook the bacon in a large skillet over medium heat until crispy. Transfer to a paper towel lined plate. Drain all but about 2 tablespoons of fat from the pan.

Add the green garlic, scallions, and corn kernels to the skillet and sauté over medium heat until the corn is golden and the aromatics are softened, about 4-5 minutes. Add the spinach and toss until just wilted.

Reduce the heat to low and add the Boursin and some pasta water to loosen, stirring until the cheese melts into a creamy sauce.

Add the cooked fusilli and toss to coat, adding more pasta water as needed to loosen the sauce. Fold in the tomatoes and bacon.

Finish with chives, thyme, and a generous crack of black pepper. Serve immediately.

Helpful tips:

Here is an article about how to easily remove corn from the cob.

I love this protein pasta brand that we get from Costco!

If you are vegetarian, skip the bacon. It won’t be missed. You could also add grilled zucchini to this for a little umami. And if you have the grill going, do the corn as well for an extra level of flavor.

The Spiritual

This was a beautiful conversation sent to me by a friend all about the guidance of nature in spirituality, healing that move in spirals instead of straight lines, and finding meaning in uncertainty — all through the lens of tarot. This summer will be known as the summer I truly healed my nervous system since 2020, and I can attest that grief, healing, or any sort of growth is decidedly obtuse.

If you missed it, I wrote a post on “scrubbing your Karma” and my realization that my life lesson is about collaboration. Substack has become my personal journal, that I have made public. I laugh in the face of vulnerability. Ha ha ha ha!

The Vocational

I am proudly a values nerd, and this conversation with Bréne Brown (love) and Adam Grant (meh) about the near and far enemy of our values inspired me to add deeper shadow work into my teachings on values. If I was to do a workshop in early September, would you attend? It would be a “pay what you can” with a suggested price for full pay.

And, a person who might be even nerdier than me about Values? Suzy Welch, who is a professor at NYU Stern school of business, and did her PhD thesis on Values. Her take is a little different than mine — she studied Shalom Schwartz’s work and has narrowed her values down to 16 from his 10. I work with 75 words, which I have been meaning to narrow down, but 16 feels limiting to me.

Kim Scott authored one of my favorite business books, Radical Candor. And, she has a podcast that I just discovered which broaches so many topics about leadership. This conversation with Liz Wiseman about multipliers was so eye opening.

They talk about authoritarian leadership (not to be confused with authoritative) versus what Liz calls being a multiplier: a leader who amplifies the intelligence, capability, and native genius of the people around them, rather than acting as the smartest person in the room (wouldn’t that be refreshing!). The conversation gets into how leaders can create environments where people do their best work and have their best relationships, all while being themselves.

The Relational

Speaking of Bréne Brown — this is one of my favorite teachings of hers on blame (and is downright hilarious). I do this exact same thing, but insert the word Patrick instead of Steve.

Not to make excuses, but I keep going back to this thought that nobody taught me how to have a marriage. I am from divorced parents, and can’t think of one couple growing up that I looked to as expanders for how to be. Navigating marriage alone is similar to becoming a first time parent — just crossing your fingers you got a good one when the times get tough. If it wasn’t for the The Gottman’s, Zach Brittle, and Harvel and Helen Hendrix, I would be doomed.

The Authentic Self

I have been on a reading tear this Summer. I scraped by on the Shampoo Effect due to it’s lackluster plot and abhorrent character development. It felt like the summer version of a made for TV holiday movie — I considered not finishing, but didn’t have anything in my queue. After that waste of time, I treated myself to purchasing my first book in 2026, Yesteryear. It was well worth the $20 I spent. I don’t need to go into details about the book — the internet has done that for you — but what I will say is that the ending completely surprised me, and I detested each and every character, in the very best way.

And then, on Monday night this week, I finished The Calamity Club. This was one of the best books I have read in my lifetime. Brilliant writing, the characters felt like delightful yet imperfect friends, the few month storyline was twisty and needed the 600+ pages of text, and I didn’t want it to end.

Until next month,
KBW

Kari Brunson Wright is a leadership coach and consultant in Seattle, Washington. To get in touch about potentially working together email hello@karibrunsonwright.com For more, join me on LinkedIn and Instagram, or book a discovery call.

I have a complicated relationship with collaboration.

Not because I don’t value it. I deeply do, or at least I want to. Yet every time I have entered into a significant partnership in my life, something has gone….sideways. A co-founder relationship that started with shared vision and ended in mediation. A first marriage that began with excitement and dissolved into resentment. And even smaller collaborations of any kind, have a way of surfacing something in me that I haven’t fully resolved.

For a long time I pinned this as bad luck. But, let’s be honest, at some point the pattern became too consistent to keep blaming my circumstances on something external. When the same lesson keeps showing up in different setting, wearing different faces, it is usually trying to tell you something. As my mom would say: you are the common denominator, Kari.

That something, I have come to believe, is my karma.

What Karma Actually Is

Most of us grew up with a watered down version of karma. Do good things, and then, poof! Good things happen. Do bad things…well you know what happens next. A universal cause and effect. Taylor Swift even has a song about it.

But the original understanding of karma, came from Hindu and Buddhist philosophy and is significantly more interesting and useful to me. In Sanskrit, karma means action. It believes that every action or thought or intention leaves an energetic imprint (i.e. a pattern), and those imprints accumulate across all fields of consciousness that follow you like a shadow until they are resolved.

Karma in this sense is not punishment. It is a curriculum!

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I got a great set of questions from a potential client last week post our discovery session. Generally, I don’t go into such detail with clients post my thirty minutes, but the questions got me thinking, so I decided to address each one and spent an hour on a response. And since I am an efficient person, I decided to take what I wrote to her, and turn it into a newsletter. She asked me questions on topics like business goals, measurable progress, a roadmap with milestones — very reasonable things to ask a coach before you hire them, especially if you have a corporate background, which she did. And also, if I am being honest (which you know I love to do), questions that assume I am going to hand her a plan.

I’m not going to hand her a plan. That is not what my job is. At least not my coaching job.

What I keep having to explain (gently of course) to smart, capable people who are used to KPI’s and quarterly goals and roadmaps with owners assigned to every line item is that… I am not that kind of coach. Sure, I have the business background, the consulting chops, the strategic mapping templates, and could coach executives. I could absolutely sit across from you and build you a business plan with milestones and deliverables and job descriptions. But, I choose not to be this kind of coach.

I got certified in Internal Family Systems and put “spiritual” in my business name for a damn good reason. I am interested in the full, holistic picture — one where you are making the decisions from a deeper inner place and I am your guide. And your precious nervous system is going to be along for the ride whether we plan for it or not, so we might as well plan for that.

What This Actually Looks Like

When someone asks me what the first two to three months of coaching will produce, the honest answer is: I don’t know yet, because you haven’t told me. I don’t set your goals for you:) You set the pace, and I hold the shape while you move through it.

This is the part people sometimes find frustrating at first, and then later tell me is the whole reason it worked. This is “buy-in” at it’s greatest.

What we would likely start with is rebuilding your internal foundation, not the business plan or the end goals. What does success mean to you now, versus what it meant inside the structure that burned you out? Where do your values actually intersect with your business partner’s, and where do they diverge? What is the mission underneath the mission, and will that still be true on the hard days? Where are your shadows?

Measuring Progress Without Faking It

I track progress on three levels, and none of them are vanity metrics.

We start emotionally. Your unique capacity, your sleep, whether your decisions are coming from a grounded place or an old urgency pattern doing its best impression of ambition.

Then strategically. Whether your choices align with your actual core values and long-term vision, instead of just the most available, reactive option that feels easiest at the time.

And finally, practically. The real, concrete outputs I can hold you accountable for — a conversation you finally had, a working document, a shared vision with your business partner.

Self-Trust, AKA: The Real Work

Here is what I will not do: manufacture false confidence. It helps no one and it doesn’t last.

What I will do is treat self-trust the way you’d treat exposure work in therapy. Small movement toward the uncomfortable thing. Back to a safe place. Repeat, until the movements get less small and leaving starts to feel less like leaving and more like just how you live now.

Some uncertainty is a fear part talking. Some of it is real information about timing or misalignment. The work is learning to tell the difference, one small brave test at a time.

So if you came to me looking for a five year plan, I’m sorry. Sort of. What I can offer instead is this: your nervous system already knows things your Google calendar does not. It knows when you are building from a grounded place and when you are building from an old pattern wearing your schedule or a business plan as a fancy costume. My job is not to hand you the plan. It is to help you get clear enough to hear what your body already knows about what it needs to do.

KBW

Last week was a workweek that I have been dreaming about for a while. It was truly fulfilling to finally be inside it, noticing and soaking up all that this new chapter has already become.

Life is certainly not perfect. A career change at 43.5 during perimenopause is not for the faint of heart. I am still untangling my ownership role in my company, our neurodivergent family life is a constant source of tweaks and tense conversations as we figure out the right formula for all of our personalities. And, my mom, who has lived with us for 8 years, is not doing well.

But manifestation is real, at least the science backed way I practice it. If you have a vision for your life and you are willing to do the work, almost anything is possible. Last week was proof of that for me.

So here is a week in my life. I personally love these kinds of posts, and was inspired by Kate Citron’s of the same vein, so scroll ahead if you are only here for the recipe.

A Week In My Life as a Full Time Coach and Consultant:

Monday
Hours worked: 6.5

7:00am — Get woken up by a child, which wakes up the other child who sleeps on my floor, which wakes up the 8 month old dog in the XL crate in our bedroom. Chaos ensues.

8:45am — Fifteen minute strength workout. It was a full moon, which meant I was paying attention to everything a little more than usual and a little lot on edge.

9:00am — Co-work block with some of my business cohort members.

10:00am — Two hours teaching my two month Generative Business Coaching Container, a group of therapists, counselors, and healers I have been working with since early June. This group is incredible, and this week we talked about money energetics which was a lot to hold.

12:30pm — 30-minute office hours call with a cohort member.

2:00pm — 55-minute 1:1 client session and follow up with homework.

3:30pm — Discovery call with someone new who instantly signed up. By 4pm I had been on Zoom for most of the day and still had energy. This is genuinely new for me.

4pm — My husband took our daughter to the climbing gym, and my son started showing signs of getting sick, so I naturally took him to ice cream. I made a beef and bean Kari bowl for dinner, stood in the garden for a few minutes barefoot, gave my son a popsicle bath (aka: bath while eating a popsicle), and watched the full moon come up over our alley.

8pm- In bed, as always.

Monday recap: A full moon and a full calendar. The kind of day that could have exhausted me and now just feels right. I loved this day.

Tuesday
Hours worked: 5ish

5:45am — Woke up naturally and read a book and drank matcha in silence.

7:00am — My son sleeps late, and my daughter rises demanding homemade pancakes, which I make because she eats the most in the morning.

9:00am — Our cleaner came, which is its own category of good day. We also host a nanny share at our house this summer and all four kids were there, which was absolute chaos. Our nanny arrived with a new mud kitchen to put in the backyard. I did a walk around 9:15 specifically to calm my nervous system with all of the bodies showing up in my house at once.

9:30am — Therapy for one hour with my therapist of 13 years.

10:30am — Answer emails and prep for clients, second matcha.

11:00am — 1:1 client session. Fifty-five minutes.

12:00pm — 1:1 client session. Fifty-five minutes.

1:00pm — 1:1 client session. Fifty-five minutes.

2:00pm — Lunch at home, consulting project work, and proposal writing.

3:00pm — Relieved our nanny and with the children until my husband got home.

Evening — Gym pool with the whole family. Tacos for dinner. In bed by eight.

Tuesday recap: The most logistically chaotic day of the week. Four kids, a cleaner, therapy, three back to back client sessions with no break. The “no transition between sessions thing” is real and I felt it. This exercise is making me fix this choice.

Wednesday
Hours worked: 6

6:45am — Everyone wakes and we do our usually morning thing.

9:00am — Workout (notice a trend here?!)

9:30am — 1+ hour check in with a consulting client at Current Coffee in my neighborhood. Stayed and did the rest of my workday there. There is something about working from a neighborhood coffee shop that makes me way more productive than being at home if I don’t have client sessions.

12:00pm — Discovery call with a new referral that I wasn’t sure was a fit. They turned out to be a better fit than I was expecting, but likely we will not engage. The referrals are starting to come in more frequently, and I am trying not to rush the feeling of that.

12:30pm — Email follow up with 1:1 clients and work for three consulting projects — one that is rolling out soon. Matcha number 3 on deck, no lunch.

4pm — Each Wednesday I get a solo night to myself. Went out for a steak salad and fries (since I didn’t eat a proper lunch) at our neighborhood divey restaurant, and started Yesteryear, which I realized I was loving from the first page. In bed by ten, because I was reading.

Wednesday recap: This day felt satisfying — having a check in meeting midway through an engagement, then client work for a big Summer roll out, and a discovery session that surprised me. Having a solo night is always lovely, but I am such a homebody that I often find myself craving being solo in my home all by myself rather than having to leave the house, even though I know its good for me.

Thursday
Hours worked: 3ish

9am — Walk with one of my best friends, which we try to do at least once a month. We talked HRT, husbands, children, houses, and mental health.

10:30am — 1:1 client session. Follow up with homework via email.

12:00pm — Virtual HRT appointment with my naturopath. We are trying progesterone and estrogen since I don’t feel good like 20 days of the month. Stay tuned.

1:00pm — Watered the garden for a full hour while listening to the podcast Why Therapy Isn’t Working and What We Need To Do Instead. An hour of garden watering while listening to something that makes my brain feel alive is genuinely one of the best things I have built into my life lately.

2:00pm — Consulting work, marketing work for my own business, and refining a few Substack drafts.

4:00pm — My son was sick, so we had a very chill evening where we aborted our dinner plan, ate tomato soup and grilled cheese, watched movies, and got in bed early.

Thursday recap: The lightest work day of the week and somehow the most nourishing. A walk with a good friend, sunshine finally, my garden, a podcast that made me think, and then a slow evening with a sick kid who just wanted to watch movies and be close.

Friday (technically a holiday)
Hours worked: 3.5

8:00am — Everyone got up late due to sickness. Rushing to get breakfast eaten, dog walked, teeth brushed, and everyone dressed.

9:00am — Two hour consulting session via Zoom with my client who was on the road. Had one agenda and ended up needing more work from the first point, which felt exciting to discover and excavate more efficiencies and organization I could provide.

11:00am — 15 minute strength workout and walk/podcast.

12:00pm — Emails, and more consulting work. Checking in on late invoices, and checking in with clients who didn’t see me this week.

1:30pm — Matcha date with my husband! We have become those people who have to sneak away during the day to actually talk because I go to bed early, he stays up late, and our children do not give us much space for 1:1 time in this season of life.

3:00pm — Nursery with my children to buy vegetables, and miscellaneous errands. It was my husband’s night off so we planted the vegetables in their garden bed and played in the backyard until dinner.

6:00pm — I made a corn, tomato, and bacon pasta (maybe the only reason you are reading?) from extra ingredients in my refrigerator, and dare I say it is a winner for a Friday night in July. Recipe below!

Friday recap: This was a hybrid day — both work and personal life showed up in full. A little bit of satisfying work because I would like to rather than “have to”, moving my body in the 70 degree weather, a matcha date with my husband in the afternoon because we actually can now. A holiday weekend starting and nowhere urgent to be. I have been chasing this feeling for a long time.

Weekly totals
Total hours worked: 24.5 (I have childcare for 32-33)
Client sessions: 4 1:1’s, 1 x 30 min office hours, 1 x 2 hour group session, 2 x discovery calls
Consulting hours: approximately 8-10
In bed by 8pm: most nights

Here are my noticings:

24.5 hours of work across five days. Seven client touch points. Two consulting projects running in parallel and one proposal signed, and work has begun. Two discovery calls that came in through referrals, which still feels like a small miracle every time it happens. Admin work and this Substack in the in-between moments.

What I keep coming back to is how different this feels from what I was doing before. Not just the work itself, but the texture of the days. I have time to water my garden, which technically I did before, but it felt like an escape instead of a reward. There was always a guilt attached to it like I should be doing something else. I take a much needed walk with a friend. I purposefully make a matcha date with my husband in the middle of a weekday because there is nowhere I choose to be instead.

The hard part of this week was Tuesday, three back to back sessions with no breathing room. I know my own nervous system well enough to know I need transition time between clients to come back to myself — at least 15 minutes. After noticing this, I plan to correct it on my Calendly. I also write my clients homework emails post our sessions, and found that I did not have the energy or time to do them that day. Instead, they got their homework 24 hours later which isn’t bad, it just isn’t my style.

I also have to remind myself that I am not beholden to my laptop between 9-4 daily (my blocked work hours). I CAN take breaks. I get to choose! Nobody else is telling me where to be or when except my own self and the boundaries I have created.

I also noticed that I have a lot more capacity in my work week. This example week had a lot of cushion in it, leisurely walks with friends or solo, watering my garden, an observed holiday. Let’s be clear, I am not going to get rid of those moments — this is the magic of working for yourself with no employees. And, I also want to grow into more working hours over time, because savings and travel are on the vision board and what I charge per hour now makes both feel possible.

This is an early day example of what the life I dreamed about actually looks like up close. Busy and full, with room for breathing, a little chaotic, a good pasta recipe on a Friday night, and nowhere to be by 8pm.

I will take it. Happy Summer, y’all.

You have been patient! Now to the recipe that is… yes, behind a paywall. It is more important than ever to consider supporting Substack writers that you love — especially ones that rely on this income to make a living.

Creamy Corn, Tomato, and Bacon Pasta

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It feels so good to be officially in summer! Seattle sometimes does not show up in June, but this month it mostly delivered, a mild heatwave and three quarters of the month with blue skies and sunny days. We’ve been eating sun-ripened strawberries and listening to ROLE MODEL with the windows down.

Thank you for all of your support and encouragement around my announcement about leaving Frankie & Jo’s. Just so it is clear, I am still an owner for now, but have stepped away from daily operations after ten years. The relief is immense. I have been feeling a deep itch to experience something else in the last part of my career, and the universe delivered.

Here are some of my favorite discoveries and moments from June, using the six pillars of The Recipe for Being Well as my guide.

The Emotional

It is not news to me that suppressing thoughts and feelings makes us sick, but it did come as a shock that only children and oldest daughters suffer the most with autoimmune conditions. This podcast is worth a listen if you have ever been known to be a "good girl." I certainly have, although I was not very good at it.

The Physical

Uzi NYC are my favorite basics, and I had to add to my collection this month after finally getting a hole in the knee of my favorite pants after six years. I also got the Nina Shirt in Brown Speckle and I think it would look really good with cutoff jean shorts and this new pair of Birkenstocks I just bought.

My neighbor introduced me to this body sunscreen and I cannot stop thinking about how it feels like skincare and does not get sticky. She also brought out this face powder, and my mind was blown. How am I almost 44 and did not know this existed?

Watermelons are in season, and I just learned from my friend Kirsten how to pick a perfectly sweet one. The five things to look for:

1. A bright yellow spot

2. A brown stem end

3. A very firm, rock hard rind

4. A “bucket full of water” sound when you tap on it

5. It should feel very heavy

The Spiritual

Every time I write a more spiritual newsletter, the unsubscribes start coming. And, let them. There is not anything I do without my deep belief in energetics and spirituality.

Last week I wrote a piece on how the 22 major arcana in tarot are based on the hero’s journey, found in most modern story arcs, including our own. The hero’s journey is not just a narrative structure. It is a map of how identity actually changes, and when I started looking at my own career transitions through that lens, the parallels were impossible to ignore! I am in The Star card. Where are you?

What we celebrate publicly is almost always the same arc: someone builds something meaningful, earns recognition, and arrives. What we talk about far less is what happens when the thing you built no longer fits you. Not failure after failure, but success after success, and then a persistent internal signal that something is no longer aligned. That is where the real transition begins, and it is where most career advice completely falls short.

If you are in the middle of something like that right now, the discomfort is not a sign that something has gone wrong. It is a sign that something is changing. Very different thing.

The Vocational

This month I brought on three new coaching clients, and I have two three retainer consulting clients. I am in a rhythm of work that feels really good. I am fully on my own path for the first time since 2011 and I know this is how it is meant to be.

I have been scared to be seen and put myself out there. Writing is the only way I have been comfortable sharing my story, and I have a major block around Instagram, the algorithm, and how to share what I do with a larger audience.

Is my practice full? Not yet! Could I bring on more consulting clients? Yes, maybe one or two. I know I need to be patient since it has only been two months, and I also want to make sure I am not getting in my own way.

This is where expanders have been really helpful, people I look to who show me that what I want is possible, and who show up online in a genuine way that feels authentic yet effective. If you are one of those people, I am watching you and taking notes.

The Relational

Last weekend we went camping with some of our family best friends. After 24 hours of getting settled in, my children were shoeless and wild, freely scootering around the circle path of all the campsites. If you are also a camper, this newsletter has a helpful packing list as well as my favorite meals to make in the woods.

Unlike being in nature, this podcast on AI chatbots was downright terrifying. I use AI to help scrub larger forms of content while consulting, and sometimes even for grammar edits on newsletters like this one. But there is a moral line for me, and I cannot imagine what it would be like to get truly lost in it.

The Authentic Self

My son turned six this month and has been having some nighttime anxiety. We decided it is best that he start each night on his floor bed in our room. I know, I know, do not come at me. Although this decision is right for our family, I cried when we made it. Mostly because I deeply cherish my time alone in bed reading every night.

I can come in later, but I still do not feel comfortable turning on my side light. After getting over myself, I purchased this reading light and have successfully finished Go Gentle, Our Perfect Storm, and In Her Defense by its glowing amber light. Next up, How to Read a Book.

Small joys in an energetically abundant season. That is what June gave me.

Until next month,
KBW

Kari Brunson Wright is a leadership coach and consultant in Seattle, Washington. To get in touch about potentially working together email hello@karibrunsonwright.com For more, join me on LinkedIn and Instagram, or book a discovery call.

A dear friend taught me about reading tarot around 2013 at a bar over a bottle of savory white wine. I thought tarot was saved for psychics with long nails, neon signs, and crystal balls, but no, no. I was wrong. From then, I started reading tarot intuitively, first for myself, then my friends, and then eventually some of my clients. It almost called to me, a way to make sense of what was happening in a spiritual framework that had such a long lineage.

Tarot, as we know it today, originated in northern Italy in the early 15th century, initially as a card game called tarocchi played by the nobility. The cards were not used to find meaning at first. That came later, around the 18th century, when French occultists began interpreting the imagery as a symbolic system connected to Kabbalah, astrology, and esoteric philosophy (sign me up!). The major arcana, the 22 cards that tell the soul’s journey, became the centerpiece of that spiritual tradition. By the time the Rider-Waite deck was published in 1909 (the one most people picture when they think of tarot) the imagery had been deliberately designed to encode layers of psychological and archetypal meaning. What began as a game had become a spiritual roadmap.

Most people are familiar with the hero’s journey, the narrative arc that Joseph Campbell identified across myths, religions, and stories from every culture in human history. The hero receives a call, crosses a threshold, faces trials, is transformed, and returns changed. What fewer people know is that the major arcana of the tarot is built on the exact same foundation. The 22 cards trace the full arc of human transformation, from the first innocent step into the unknown all the way through to integration and completion.

When I started looking at my own transitions through this lens, I realized it was the most accurate description of what actually happens during a period of change that I had ever encountered. Not because tarot is magic (because it is), but because it is sharper than most frameworks in a way that actually gets at what is happening inside you.

Here is what that arc actually looks like through the lens of transition.

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If I am being honest, just writing this newsletter feels like climbing a mountain made entirely of cringe. Saying my new job out loud, claiming a title, promoting myself, asking you to read this and maybe even share it or hire me. All of it makes some old part of me want to crawl out of my skin. But I am doing it anyway, because the work matters more than my discomfort with being seen.

And I want to give myself a little credit for even writing this newsletter. It has taken me three+ years of exploring, changing my title more times than I can count, and trying to figure out how to talk about the work I am so passionate about. For a long time, I was crafting a coaching practice for what I thought people wanted me to be, hoping someone would connect with it. But I wasn’t working.

And then, slowly, it started to come together. The work I’ve been doing on myself, my curiosity about personal development, and my coaching practice all began to weave into something that finally felt clear.

So here it is: I am officially a psycho-spiritual leadership coach and consultant. Ahhhh! That feels so good to say.

If that term makes you tilt your head….stay with me.

How did I get here?

Quite honestly, by chance. I never set out to become a coach. What I set out to do was live a life that felt true to me, even when that meant taking risks or walking away from the known path. Along the way, I became an entrepreneur, a leader, a mother, and a seeker. Each role stretched me in different ways, and I often found myself asking the same questions my clients ask me now: Who am I becoming? How do I make choices that honor both my ambition and my humanity? How do I keep showing up when I feel like I’m unraveling (I ask myself this one a lot)?

I didn’t realize it at the time, but every business I built, every team I led, every personal challenge I worked through was preparing me for this work. Coaching found me because people started coming to me with their questions, their doubts, and their desire for something more. And somewhere along the way, I understood that this wasn’t just a side hustle, but instead, my calling and my soul’s path. I have always been in the business of healing. Through dance, through food, and now through active listening.

The way I coach is different.

In ballet, you have to learn the rules of technique before you can break into improvisation. Coaching is the same for me. I am ICF-certified, Internal Family Systems-informed, and I bring 15 years of entrepreneurial experience. But the way I coach doesn’t look like a coaching textbook. It’s rooted in lived experience, intuition, and truth-telling.

I’ve built businesses, led teams, raised children, and walked through my own seasons of growth, chronic burnout, crippling anxiety, and tons of change. Most likely, I haven’t lived your exact story, or had your exact job, but I’ve either experienced something close or held space for someone who has.

That’s where my kind of work lives: in the middle of senior/executive leadership, spirituality, and personal growth. It’s where your inner world and your outer leadership start to align.

Most coaches help you set and reach goals. Most spiritual mentors help you look inward and somatically experience yourself. Most leadership framework stays in the mind with lots of exercises and tools. I help you work at the intersection of all three, where I believe the real transformation happens.

And no, I don’t have a “niche.” I don’t just coach entrepreneurs or executives. I coach people. Full, complicated, brilliant humans who are ready to be coached as their whole person. Every client I work with is seeking transformation…not just in their career, but in their life. Because, newsflash: your personal work is your professional growth.

If you have to split yourself into one version at work and another version at home, that isn’t just unsustainable. It’s exhausting. I believe the more integrated you are, the more powerful your leadership becomes.

How is this different from therapy?

Therapy often looks back. It helps us name and heal the wounds of our past, which is vital work. I’ve been in therapy most of my life and with my current therapist for over a decade. Coaching, however, looks forward. It asks:

• Who am I beneath the parts of me that feel pain, shame, and programming?

• What version of me is trying to emerge right now from a version that is no longer relevant?

• How do I design my future self, one decision at a time?

Together, we might explore burnout, inner critics, embodiment, spirituality, power dynamics, or purpose. It isn’t about fixing you. It’s about remembering, unblocking, and reclaiming yourself.

Clients often find me when they’re at a crossroads. What worked before isn’t working anymore. They may be in transition, stepping into leadership, quietly unraveling inside while looking “successful” outside, or realizing that the sweater they’re wearing feels two sizes too small. They come to me not for answers, but for a space to be honest, unmasked, and in process. And for someone who knows how to hold them there. Because this has been me, and will be me again.

How I work:

• I work on a retainer model, not one off sessions. You’re not just hiring me for a call. You’re stepping into a partnership where change has space to take root.

• I’m certified as a professional coach, trained in IFS (Internal Family Systems) and Human Design, and I bring 15+ years of experience as a creative entrepreneur, leader, and coach. I was also a former ballerina, so I understand habits and discipline.

• I am deeply human & transparent, and I expect you to be too.

• My superpower is naming the patterns others don’t see, and speaking the truths people have been circling for years. I am kind and firm, and hold my clients accountable to their goals while cheerleading them along the way.

I like to think of myself as part strategist, part mystic, and part future therapist.

If this resonates, especially as we enter into a new season, or you’re curious if psycho-spiritual leadership coaching could be right for you, I’d love to connect. I offer free 30-minute discovery calls so we can explore what’s possible together. No pressure. Just presence.

At the heart of my work is this: I’m not here to optimize you. I’m here to help you return to yourself.

Be well,
KBW

Over last holiday season, I ran into someone I hadn’t seen in a while. After the hug and the familiar catching up, they asked the question I’ve been hearing more often lately: How is Frankie & Jo’s doing and what are you up to these days? It wasn’t intrusive, just curious in the way people are when they’ve known you inside a chapter for a long time and aren’t quite sure how to place you as that chapter seems like it is closing.

For years, Frankie & Jo’s has followed me into grocery stores, school gatherings, dinner parties, and casual conversations with strangers. It has been shorthand for who I am, a way people orient themselves to me without needing the whole story — oh that’s Kari, one of the Frankie & Jo’s owners. When you build something publicly and over a long period of time, it stops being just your work and begins to shape how you are seen, how you introduce yourself, and sometimes how you understand yourself as well.

So here it is. A change I have been waiting for and ready to shed for a while now: as of May 1, 2026, I am no longer operating Frankie & Jo’s (cowbells, triangles, confetti!) — although I still remain an owner, for now.

Leaving hasn’t been dramatic or abrupt. It’s been a long, often painful, and ultimately thoughtful unwinding — full of conversations, transitions, logistics, and an emotional landscape that doesn’t resolve linearly. There has been relief alongside sadness, gratitude alongside grief, and a sense of rightness that doesn’t cancel out the loss of a project I have poured my whole heart into. The work is now learning how to inhabit myself without something that once took up a lot of space in this life of mine.

This isn’t my first time navigating an ending. Before Frankie & Jo’s, there was Juicebox, and before that, my ballet career. I grieved each of those chapters in my own way — not just the work itself, but the versions of me that lived inside them. Those endings taught me something I trust now: grief doesn’t mean you made the wrong choice, you are a quitter, or weren’t committed. It means something mattered enough to shape you. And if I’m honest, I’ve been grieving this decision for years and years already.

What’s been clarifying in the stillness that follows leaving is how slowly, and consistently, my identity has been shifting — as it always does when I career change. With dancing, I was teaching myself how to cook, and suddenly retired as I was accelerating in my career. With Juicebox Cafe, I had Frankie & Jo’s, and I knew the 2020 closure was the right strategic business move during the tumultuous time of Covid. And long before deciding to step away from Frankie & Jo’s, my work had already begun moving inward and relationally — away from products and toward people, away from constant output and toward sustained conversation. I found myself more interested in the internal lives of leaders than in the next launch, more drawn to the questions people carry privately than to the metrics they share publicly. For years now, I’ve been sitting with founders, operators, and creatives as they navigate exhaustion, misalignment, growth, and the reckonings that come with success.

Over time, those conversations became the place where my energy gathered rather than drained. I noticed how naturally I listened, how easily I tracked patterns across someone’s history, how attuned I was to the moment when someone was ready to tell themselves the truth instead of repeating a story that kept them functional but stuck. As I always quote, “The Universe whispers before it screams”.

So when I say that what comes next is building my coaching and consulting practice, it doesn’t feel like a pivot or a reinvention, and nobody here is surprised. Right? It’s a continuation of what I have been doing. Coaching is where my years of building, leading, failing, learning, exiting, and letting go converge — where I get to work with the internal architecture that shapes how people lead, decide, and live, rather than only the external structures they build.

If you find yourself in your own in-between, I know how tender and disorienting that space can be. I also know it isn’t empty. It’s active, reorganizing things beneath the surface. It needs patience rather than urgency (something I deeeeeeeply struggle with).

This is where I am now: grieving what was, grounded in what I’ve learned, and stepping forward into work that feels aligned and true to me (and hopefully my final career… maybe?). And, not because I have everything figured out, but because I trust what’s been forming over time.

I am still a ballet dancer. I am still the founder of Frankie & Jo’s and Juicebox Cafe.
And, I am now a leadership coach and consultant.

To new beginnings and letting go,
KBW

Wow, the month of May was not exactly what I expected. You can probably tell there has been a heaviness over me, and I thought the rope of angst would have been cut by now. Instead, it is an unexpected slow rip of the fibers, one by one. A life lesson, I guess. We cannot control the way it unfolds.

I planted seeds on the May 1st Full Moon, and they are all sprouting up, ready to be harvested soon. Two kinds of peas, kale, chard, lettuces, arugula, tomatoes, herbs, peppers, and cucumbers will all make their debut in my pottery bowls this summer as salads, garnishes, and sauces. Promising to nourish me as I have nourished them. At least I have gardening season when times feel heavy!

Here are some of my favorite discoveries and moments from May, using the six pillars of The Recipe for Being Well as my guide.

The Emotional

I am sitting on the couch with my children watching Inside Out, one of the greatest movies Disney/Pixar has ever made, and I just realized the entire film is essentially a visual representation of Internal Family Systems therapy. Each emotion is a part, each part has a job, and when one of them hijacks the control panel and runs the show, everything falls apart. Joy spends most of the film trying to run the show and keep Sadness out of the way, which is one of the most accurate depictions of a manager part I have ever seen in a children’s movie. The whole arc is about what happens when you exile a part, pushing Sadness to the margins because she feels inconvenient or counterproductive, and how that exile eventually creates more chaos than the feeling you were trying to avoid in the first place. By the end, Riley does not heal because Joy wins. She heals because Joy finally lets Sadness do her job. That is parts work.

Speaking of parts, I could not finish All the Way to the River by Elizabeth Gilbert, and let me tell you, I tried hard. Never before have I read a book that felt like my body was being infected by the story being told. It is a tale of codependency at its worst, and ultimately I saw parts of my past self in her story, which was likely why I put it down.

The Physical

On my early journey of perimenopause, I have been exploring interventions to help me weather what feels like a 26 day cycle of unrest. I feel good about four days each month, day four after my period until right before I ovulate, and then it all crashes down hormonally from there.

I have been reading up on MCAS and how taking H1 blockers like Allegra and H2 blockers like Pepcid can help with inflammation and perimenopausal symptoms. This month I am going to take them consistently post ovulation and will report back. Below are two great articles about hormones and histamine. I also switched up my cortisol supplements to this one, and so far, I love it.

Rewilding Health

Histamine is Trying to Get Our Attention

As perennial health fads go, by now you may have seen it: flocks of women taking to social media, praising the Allegra/Pepcid cocktail for giving them their lives back. Allegra (fexofenadine) blocks H1 histamine receptors — the ones typically associated with allergic response, inflammation, itching, flushing — while Pepcid (famotidine) blocks H2 recepto…

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4 months ago · 499 likes · 55 comments · Sara, RN

Victor

Where You Gain Weight Tells You Exactly Which Hormone Is Broken (And How to Fix It)

The Weight Goes to the Same Place Every Time…

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4 months ago · 3513 likes · 290 comments · Victor

The Spiritual

I was today years old when I learned what the term “once in a blue moon” means. I always assumed it was just a poetic expression for something rare, which it is, but the origin is genuinely interesting. The phrase dates back to 16th century England when a blue moon was considered something impossible. Over time it evolved, and now a blue moon technically refers to the second full moon in a single calendar month, which only happens about every two to three years. Which is fitting, because this May we have two full moons — the Flower Moon on May 1st, which I planted my seeds under, and a Blue Moon on May 31st — today!

What is your Karma? This podcast explains it in a way I had never heard of before. Elise Loenen’s guest Janine Slome is an intuitive and numerologist who breaks down what karma actually is, where it comes from, the different types, and what you can actually do about it in this lifetime. Yes it’s a little woo, which I love, but it’s also educational and creates a digestible framework.

The Vocational

Conversations surrounding AI are hard to avoid these days — I hear people talking about it everywhere I go. The sibling/co-founders of Anthropic (AKA Claude), Dario and Daniela Amodei, sat down with Oprah for a conversation that is worth listening to even if you think you are not an AI person. They talk about the ethical weight of building something this powerful/evil, their refusal to remove safety guardrails when the Pentagon asked, and what it actually means to be a public benefit corporation in an industry that is moving faster than any of us can actually track.

Should you change careers? Liz Moody always has the best guests for these kinds of questions.

The Relational

Strangers has been a topic of conversation across many of my friend groups. Honestly, I did not take issue with the privilege in the book since the author spent considerable time naming it herself. I loved the story of healing and uprooting generational patterns. If you have not read it, I would highly recommend it. Another great one I read? Bitter Sweet. It reminded me of My Last Innocent Year but I liked it even more — the story line felt richer overall.

My friend Erika sent me the article below, and it relieved some (some!) of my angst about how our parenting journey has been going. I did not co-create two children who sit quietly turning pages in their rooms, building blocks, or doing art. No, no. I got the kind that climb on counters, talk extremely loud, and have big, big feelings all the time that other kids seem to have less of.

A more accurate metaphor for what parents do is this. You set the stage. You don’t write the play.

You can choose the materials, the lighting, the rough acoustics. You can keep the stage safe. You can show up reliably and respond to what unfolds on it. What you cannot do — what the science is fairly clear you cannot do — is direct each scene. The child arrives with a script you didn’t write, in a body whose temperament was set before you held it, and walks into a nonshared world of peers and chance and one teacher in third grade who said the right or wrong thing on the right or wrong day. The play is theirs.

My Fertile Brain

The Parenting Advice Industry Is Selling You Anxiety

Open your phone in the morning and the advice is already waiting. Don’t shush. Always shush. Co-sleep, but not like that. Praise effort, not outcome. Never praise. Set firm limits with a soft voice. Validate every feeling. Don’t validate too much. Do this or your child won’t form a secure attachment. Do this or you’ll damage them for life…

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4 months ago · 124 likes · 41 comments · Manuela Kouakou, MD-PhD

The Authentic Self

Although this month and most of 2026 have been heavy, I do feel like I am coming into the newest version of my self. My Next Self, if I may:) I have some incredible projects lined up, and know that when I look in the rearview mirror of 2026, I will see it as a painful and yet beautiful season of change, growth, and courage. I will have more on this soon!

Until next month,
KBW

Kari Brunson Wright is a leadership coach and consultant in Seattle, Washington. To get in touch about potentially working together email hello@karibrunsonwright.com For more, join me on LinkedIn and Instagram, or book a discovery call.

I know it has been a while since I shared a recipe, but I do still plan to make this a consistent part of this space. Transparently, I was getting bored with myself and didn't feel like I had anything worth posting about.

And, be brutally honest: do you all even make these recipes?

As summer gets closer though, my produce-obsessed self is itching to make crunchy salads, colorful pastas, and new “Kari bowls”.

We moved to our current house in Seattle four and a half years ago, mostly because our 720 square foot home with no basement was feeling a bit too small knowing I was about to have another baby. It took me a while to get used to the new place. I loved our first home and had touched every nook and cranny of that space to make it feel like ours.

What got me loving our new property was changing some of the landscaping and building a garden. But, it was also that we share an alley with some incredible neighbors, all with children around the same age as ours. There is something really special about watching your kids grow up together through scooting on the street, conversations over dolls in bedrooms, and pillow fights in the living room. You make unlikely friends by sheer proximity and realize you have so much in common beyond your shared street address.

Last night we had our neighbors over for a potluck — a new tradition we seem to do every few months. On the menu was juicy grilled sausages with whole grain mustard, Rancho Gordo baked beans with bacon, a lemon curd and summer berry trifle, and this salad. Enjoy!

Early Summer Cherry Panzanella

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If you looked at my career from the outside, it would probably read like a series of bold, decisive moves.

Ballet to restaurants. Restaurants to entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship to coaching and consulting.

But that’s not how it happened.

While I was dancing professionally, I started teaching myself how to cook. It wasn’t strategic at all, or even a planned pivot — because that wasn’t a word used ubiquitously until 2020. I definitely didn’t see it becoming my next career. It was just something I couldn’t stop thinking about and needed to do. I started a food blog, I cooked constantly, and over time it became an entirely new outlet for my creativity that felt just as important as ballet, even though I had no idea what to do with it yet.

I didn’t leave ballet because I had some grand plan — it was quite the opposite. I left because I couldn’t continue in the way I had been. I was at the top of my personal career, but I was also dealing with an eating disorder, and the pressure of that world was no longer sustainable. Cooking wasn’t a meticulously thought through backup plan, but I fell in love with it in a professional setting and suddenly retired from my ballet career knowing I was likely going to be good at something else.

From there, I started working in restaurants, which turned out to not be exactly what I expected — grossly underpaid, late nights, too much drinking, garbage bags breaking on me with fish guts running down my legs. I craved autonomy, so I became a private chef and cooking instructor with more freedom in my schedule and an ability to make more than 35k a year. Then I decided to open my magical cafe, which was fortuitously followed by opening four locations of my ice cream company, Frankie & Jo’s. None of those were singular decisions. They were expansions from the previous one. One thing building into another, often before I fully understood what we were actually creating.

Years later, career burnout became the catalyst for the next shift. I hired an executive coach to help me navigate the intensity of running a business. What I found myself most lit up by wasn’t just fixing operational problems — it was my love of working directly with people. I was drawn to understanding how they think, how they lead, and how they grow.

So I started studying, then practicing, and then officially coaching as my side hustle (can we come up with a better word for this?) in early 2023.

Over time, coaching became something that had real weight in my life and gave me a deep sense of purpose and impact. At the same time, Frankie & Jo’s started to feel different. What once felt expansive began to feel constricting. Not because the business had suddenly changed, but because I had.

This is the part that feels important to name.

None of these transitions started with a clean break. They started with something small that I added alongside what I was already doing — something I followed before it made any sense or had any strategy.

Looking back, it is only now that I can see the pattern.

This piece is part of “The Next Self” series. To get caught up, you can start with:

• The Next Self

• Leaving Well

• What Career Season Are You In?

• The Rewrite

Here is what I’ve noticed about how career change actually happens…

Add something, don’t leave something

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It was 1992, and I had just gone to a new pediatrician at my mom’s clinic. Truthfully, I don’t remember having a primary care doctor before that. My mom was a physician, so her nurses gave me my routine vaccines and she tracked my growth herself. During that visit, the pediatrician did a standard exam, found a mole that needed to be removed (it was precancerous), and casually mentioned that I was starting to get “breast buds.”

I was thrilled. Maybe Joey McIntyre would notice me if I ever went to a New Kids on the Block concert.

I was already shaving my legs, taught by the older girl down the street who also passed her “training bras” down to me which I clearly did not need. I would stuff them with pillow innards and strutted around the house, spending hours in front of the full-length mirror, imagining what it would be like to look more womanly. At dance, though, I couldn’t hide my real shape. My friends were getting armpit and pubic hair, and I was barely developing at all.

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That said, I do remember a few moments where a book actually pulled me in. Those rare times when reading felt more like an escape with its comfort, immersiveness, and a way to step outside of my own life for a bit. Books have saved me and my nervous system the past few months.

If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you know I tend to share what I’ve already read. But what I haven’t talked about is what I’m looking forward to reading in 2026.

So imagine this: all of these books stacked over a foot high on my nightstand, next to an oversized water bottle, a Tempur-Pedic eye mask I’ve had in rotation for 20 years (not the same one), and my Brick so I don’t get distracted and start scrolling.

Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke — A tradwife influencer with 8 million followers wakes up in 1855, forced to actually live the life she has been selling. Darkly funny and completely unhinged in the best way. Cannot wait to read this one!

Kin by Tayari Jones — The story of two women, cradle friends, and whether that kind of bond can actually hold when life takes you in completely different directions.

Famesick by Lena Dunham — Lena traces her rise from Girls to now and asks the question a lot of us are afraid to answer: was it worth it? Raw, honest, and highly recommended to me by one of my savviest friends.

Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage by Belle Burden — Her husband of twenty years left without warning or explanation. This is the memoir she wrote trying to understand how she missed it, and who she became on the other side. Everyone is talking about this one.

How to Read a Book by Monica Wood — Three people connected by the same crime find each other in a Portland bookstore. A quiet, hopeful novel about second chances and what books do to us. This isn’t new, but I will read it this year.

Go Gentle by Maria Semple — A stoic philosopher with a perfectly curated life meets a man at the ballet and suddenly nothing is curated anymore. Funny, smart, and a little chaotic. I loved her other book, Where’d You Go, Bernadette.

Dear Monica Lewinsky by Julia Langbein — A woman in her 40s realizes her own college affair mirrored the Lewinsky scandal she never bothered to defend. Monica shows up, literally, to help her reckon with it.

Lady Tremaine by Rachel Hochhauser — The Cinderella retelling we actually needed, told from the stepmother’s point of view. She is not wicked. She is just a woman trying to keep her family alive in a world that is not set up for her.

The Shampoo Effect by Jenny Jackson — An outsider falls into a tight coastal friend group, a pregnancy blows everything up, and suddenly everyone’s secrets are surfacing. Saving this one for summer.

The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett — Mississippi, 1933. A group of women who have nothing decide to take everything back. Stockett’s first novel and not yet out! I have already preordered at the library.

What would YOU add to this list? Tell me in the comments. Also, are you on Good Reads? Let’s be friends!

XO, KBW

I have a text thread going with two moms I adore. They are real, and we don’t mince words or issues we are having. Refreshing is an understatement — to still find “your people” in your late 30s, early 40s, who are also going through the trials of child raising, and wife-being, and person living. We have held each other in the dark times.

And dark this month has been — too much caffeine, so much anxiety, beta blockers for breakfast, nothing for lunch, and cortisol for dinner.

I am slowly crawling out of that place and my friends have been there every step of the way. They have voice texted, shared words of encouragement, and validated feelings. You know your true friends when they are still there holding you even when you have turned to ash.

So with that, this month’s theme is all about the nervous system.

Here are some of my favorite discoveries and moments from April, using the six pillars of The Recipe for Being Well as my guide.

The Emotional

This episode of the Liz Moody podcast was eye opening, especially in a moment where it feels like everyone is diagnosing themselves with ADHD — myself included.

She interviews Jenna Free, who breaks down why so many of us feel distracted, restless, bored, unable to focus, or stuck in cycles of procrastination. Her core point is that what we often label as ADHD may actually be a disregulated nervous system stuck in a fight/flight/freeze/fawn loop.

That distinction was revealing! It sent me down a deeper path of listening to more conversations around ADHD in 40 year old women, and eventually creating two very simple lists in my notes app: where I clearly experience ADHD symptoms, and where I don’t or am masking. For now, I’m starting to believe that a lot of what I’ve been feeling is less about diagnosis, and more about my nervous system being wildly out of sync.

The Physical

I was invited by a client to Von Sauna, a floating sauna on Lake Washington. She convinced me to cold plunge twice, rotating between the 50 degree lake and a 210-degree sauna for about 90 minutes. Sitting in the heat, looking out at the water and boats through the glass, then dropping into freezing water… it was intense, and honestly, exactly what my body needed after this month.

My husband and I started watching Rooster, which we both love. It’s short and snackable, about 30 minutes, so I can still read at night and be in bed before 9pm, and Steve Carell is brilliant as always.

This book was just delightful, and took me away from my rumination each night before sleep. Nothing about it was too deep, but it also wasn’t light. The characters were interesting, and the protagonist was based off of Jeanette McCurdy — another author I love.

The Spiritual

I hate-listen to a show called The Bossticks. They somehow manage to book incredibly interesting guests alongside people I find… less compelling (aka the dumbest people on Earth).

That said, their episode with Danny Morel stuck with me as so much of my spirituality is similar to how he speaks. He has a bit of a Tony Robbins guru energy, which isn’t usually my thing, but maybe because I was in a harder emotional place, it actually gave me a sense of hope.

The Vocational

Are you sick of The Next Self series yet? I hope not because I haven’t even scratched the surface!

Here is what I have written about so far:

And, here is what is in the queue:

• How to actually change careers (a practical “how to” using my exact process for my transitions) - so excited for this one!

• Your career as a mirror

• What comes after “the brand”

The Relational

A theme that has been coming up with my clients, and very much for me as well, is “keeping your shape”.

When someone else is asking something of you, or pulling on your energy, there is a tendency to adjust, to meet them where they are, or to become what the moment requires. But there is also a practice of staying rooted in your own shape. Not collapsing, not overextending, not shapeshifting.

A reminder, for me especially, to stay anchored in my own energy.

I also listened to a podcast on being present with your children, which hit in a very real way. When I am stressed, I tend to get airy and leave my body a bit. Being present, especially in those moments, can feel uncomfortable, and even painful. No, I don’t want to be bossed around about how to play in your dollhouse. But, presence is also where connection actually happens.

The Authentic Self

“Siddhartha thanked him and accepted the position, and thereafter lived in the merchant’s house. The merchant told him about his business, showed him merchandise and storehouses, showed him ledgers. Siddhartha became acquainted with many new things, listening carefully but saying little. Kamaswami [the merchant] ran his business conscientiously and often passionately, but Siddhartha regarded it all as a game, the rules of which he strove to learn accurately, but the substance of which did not touch his heart. ... The way a ball player plays with the ball, so did he play with his business, with the people around him, watching them, finding amusement in them; his heart, the wellspring of his being, was not in it.”

This passage from Siddhartha came through a client, and it landed so clearly for me.

It speaks to parts work in a way that feels tangible. The idea that we can be disengaged, functional, distracted, or even successful, while still being fully connected to our Authentic Self.

This month, I could feel how blended I was with different parts of myself. My anxious part, my controlling part, my angry part. They were loud, and at times, they felt like me. It is taking effort to separate them back out, to remember that those parts are real and trying to keep me safe, but they are not the entirety of who I am.

Returning to that steadier place, where there is more space, more perspective, and a sense that things will be okay, even if they are not okay right now, felt like the real work of the month.

Until the next!
KBW

Kari Brunson Wright is a leadership coach and consultant in Seattle, Washington. To get in touch about potentially working together email hello@karibrunsonwright.com For more, join me on LinkedIn and Instagram, or book a discovery call.

As soon as I began to be conscious, around 3 or 4, I started creating a file about myself. What I liked, what I didn’t, and my identity slowly started to take shape in my mind. For two decades, that file told a very specific story: I was a Type A ballerina, someone who took no shit, had hard edges, and was so competitive that anyone who got in my way became the villain.

My file was the internal narrative I used to understand who I was and how I navigated the world.

The thing about my file is that it didn’t stay accurate. Each time I moved through a meaningful transition, there was an opportunity to update it like my birthday, my career changes, motherhood, marriage, and especially grief. Something in me registered that a shift had occurred, and feeling like the language I had been using to describe myself no longer resonated.

I remember reconnecting with a few friends from my ballet days a few years after I had retired, and one of them said, almost casually, that I had softened. It landed immediately because it was so true. Something in me had changed, but no one had mirrored it to me, and I hadn’t updated my own understanding of self to reflect it yet.

That moment, small as it was, is what the rewrite process often looks like. A recognition that who you have been is no longer the most accurate way to describe who you are now.

And yet, most of us don’t actually engage with that update.

It’s not because we don’t feel the misalignment. Instead it is because updating your file is actually really hard. It requires honesty, and sometimes that honesty brings us into contact with parts of ourselves we would rather not look at too closely. In my case, it meant acknowledging that the version of me I had relied on for years, the one that made me successful, driven, and resilient, had also likely hurt people and created a particular reputation. It felt terrible, and I didn’t want to integrate it.

So instead of updating the file, we keep using the old one because it is easier.

We stay fixed in earlier versions of ourselves because they are familiar and efficient. It allows us to keep moving without having to pause and re-evaluate, and when life presents us with moments that invite a rewrite, we often reach for what we already patterned rather than allowing something new to take shape.

Part of this is because the rewrite requires space, and space can feel deeply uncomfortable or, if you are me, unavailable. Without a clear identity to anchor into, there is a kind of openness that quickly turns into uncertainty, and most of us (raises hand) have not been taught how to sit inside that without rushing to resolve it.

So we fill it.

We take on another role, a new title, or a different version of a life that at least “appears” coherent from the outside. Something we can explain away when people ask what we are doing. That allows us to maintain a sense of momentum, because that feels safer than not knowing.

But when you skip the update, you end up continuing to build from a version of yourself that is no longer true. Over time, that creates dissonance. Things can look right on paper, and still feel off in your body.

At that point, it is very natural to look outward for a solution: a new job, a new relationship, or a different environment. Something that will resolve the feeling without requiring you to examine the structure underneath it.

But the work, at least in my experience, is almost always internal first.

And if that’s true, then the question becomes less about what you should do next, and more about how you actually update the file you’ve been operating from to feel more like you.

For me, that process begins simply. Let’s dig in.

This piece is part of “The Next Self” series. To get caught up, you can start with

• The Next Self

• Leaving Well

• What Career Season are You In

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I can’t believe I’m saying this on the internet, but I got sober in 2025. For good.

Growing up, alcohol was always around. My parents drank, often too much, though I didn’t really register it until the consequences became personal. My mom, for example, would turn my stories into entertainment at dinner parties. The more she drank, the more my life, my feelings, my choices, my struggles, became a kind of public spectacle. After my parents divorced, she went from bottles to boxes, and even living far away, I could hear the ice clinking in her white wine glass when we spoke on the phone a few times a week.

On my 18th birthday, when she was about to turn 48, she didn’t call. The next day, she quit drinking cold turkey and never looked back. I didn’t understand it then, but it stayed with me. Somehow, without realizing it, I was on a trajectory that mirrored her own.

In my 20’s, alcohol was SO fun. A weekend release from ballet’s relentless pressure. Countless glasses of Yellowtail Shiraz red wine (IYKYK) staining my teeth purple, vodka sodas with lime, anything to check out from the week behind me. Weekdays were sacred. I rarely drank, careful not to compromise my performance or my job. But as I got older, that boundary eroded and I would be hungover the first part of class, never doing a port de bras forward for fear of nausea. Alcohol, and other white substances, started to follow me everywhere. It was there when I wanted to celebrate, to numb, to forget, and often to feel brave.

After ballet, my relationship with alcohol deepened in the restaurant world. Nights blurred together. Drinks daily before, during, and after shifts, then waking up late with shaky hands, and starting over again. I held my liquor pretty well, but the truth was, I had mild alcohol use disorder. I was in a cycle that didn’t look like a problem culturally from the outside, and honestly didn’t feel like one most of the time, because I was so good at managing it and around people doing the same.

Relationships made it worse. After my divorce in 2009, I fell into a rebound with a toxic, abusive, alcoholic partner. I knew it, and I stayed anyway because I was scared and I didn’t feel worthy of better. His drinking became my rhythm, and by the time we broke up in my early 30’s, I couldn’t remember the last night I went without drinking.

I’ve tried to stop before. In October 2014, my now-husband and I went a month without drinking. I cried almost every night. Trauma from ballet retirement, my divorce, that four-year rebound, starting a restaurant, all of it, came rushing back. Emotions I hadn’t felt in decades surfaced — fear, grief, longing, anger. The month ended, and of course, I drank again.

Pregnancy slowed me down. During late 2019 to mid 2020, and again from mid 2021 to early 2022, I obviously paused drinking. I thought having children would force me to change. But postpartum, the urge came rushing back. My tolerance was high, my habits were automatic, and my 4 pm “shift” post work started with a drink in hand while watching my kids play until bedtime. Alcohol helped numb my sensitivity to sound, light, touch, and honestly, the world in general. I needed something to take the edge off my own nervous system.

And socially, I was high-functioning, fun, and proud of never getting hungover. So I thought.

Then came the experiments and rules: Only natural wine, only clear liquor with no sugar, only one drink at a time while alternating with bitters and soda, switching to cider on weeknights. I would announce limits before hanging out with close friends, planting little seeds of accountability, but that container was never the real solution. The root was deeper.

My therapist, who I’ve worked with since 2013, once said, “Just be careful to respect it like a friendship, or the relationship won’t last.” That stayed with me, even as I kept breaking those unspoken rules.

High-functioning or not, I knew something had to change. My body, my mind, my energy were all asking for something different and alcohol began to fuck with my sleep. And, over everything, including my children, sleep is the most important function in my life. The universe whispered, and sometimes yelled, in those 2 am wake-ups from alcohol cortisol spikes, “are you done yet, Kari? is tonight going to be the last night?!” And then, like I didn’t even recall the conversation, at 4 pm the next day, I would forget and start again.

Until April 16, 2025.

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