What is success, really? Why am I doing what I’m doing? What actually matters here? Certainly more questions than answers.

I don’t think this is going to be some profound piece about how I redefined success. It’s more a snapshot into the mind of a woman navigating things as she goes, completely unsure some days whether she is making any progress at all, while somehow feeling, in the midst of it, that she is exactly where she is meant to be.

Both of those things are true. I’ve tried to stop waiting for one to cancel the other out.

Success is a funny word. Google tells me it means achieving a desired goal, positive result, or favorable outcome. Simple enough.

But my mind immediately goes to: whose goal? Who decides what constitutes a positive result? Favorable to whom? That’s where things get a little blurry.

I’ll be the first to admit that I struggle to feel any real semblance of “success.” Little milestones along the way, markers of forward progress, measurable results that look better or bigger than the last time they were measured, they often register in my brain as: good job for doing your job.

And this isn’t limited to work. Health, relationships, personal growth, business. My default assumption is that things should be moving forward. That is the baseline.

Which makes it incredibly difficult to actually see success, celebrate it, or feel as though I’ve attained any measure of it whatsoever.

I’m 16 months into leaving a decade-long corporate career and starting a business. There have been plenty of things along the way that could objectively be called “successful.” We have clients. We have more revenue this year than last. We’ve grown the team. People like working with us.

By many conventional measures, my life probably reads as successful. And yet I almost never feel successful.

Maybe that isn't a contradiction to be solved. Maybe it's just the truth. And maybe that's okay. Maybe I can be, at the same time, someone who has built something real and someone who doesn't really feel whatever is supposed to come with that.

Not cancelling one another out. Just existing together. Both things can be true at the same time.

Which makes me wonder what I'm even going for here. Do I actually want success at all, or am I chasing expansion? The next edge. The next version of myself. The next thing I don’t yet know if I can do. (Spoiler alert: it’s the latter.)

Because if success means reaching a desired outcome, I have reached plenty of them. And somehow, it is never enough. So maybe the question underneath all of this is actually: what is enough?

And maybe success and enoughness were never the same thing to begin with.

I don’t know that I will ever stop wanting to see what else is possible. I believe human beings have an almost incomprehensible capacity to create, stretch, become, and surprise themselves.

I want to squeeze every drop out of this life. I want to keep listening, experimenting, risking, creating, believing beyond the boundaries I’ve already reached. And I also want to be able to sit still inside what I’ve built without immediately reaching for the next thing.

Truthfully, I don’t know where healthy ambition ends and an inability to ever feel satisfied begins. I’ve stopped expecting that line to reveal itself cleanly.

What I do know is that metrics don’t seem to answer the question. Numbers. Milestones. More clients. More money. Investor expectations. Family expectations. Society’s expectations.

None of them are built to produce the feeling we’re asking them to produce.

Maybe success isn’t a fixed thing at all. Maybe it’s meant to be fluid, meaning something different in every season, constantly redefined to meet the next version of myself.

Touching something I once thought impossible for myself. Meeting a part of my own potential I didn’t know existed. Looking around every once in a while and thinking: oh. I’m actually here.

Even while, five minutes later, already wondering what comes next.

Both things are true. Always both things.

XO,
Helena

Happy isn’t quite the right word. It’s more like the feeling of finally inhabiting yourself so completely that there’s no gap between who you are internally and how you show up externally. No performance, no apology, no quiet wondering if you’re supposed to be doing this differently, or if the version of you that other people expect is somehow more valid than the one standing in your kitchen at 8am making coffee.

Fulfilled is closer. But even that doesn’t fully capture it.

I think a lot of us are building from a version of ourselves we didn’t actually choose. The one shaped by what was expected, what was rewarded, who the world wanted us to be. And we are good at it! We climb, we deliver, we earn the trust. But there is a part of us that knows, quietly and persistently, that something is slightly off. Not wrong necessarily, just not as aligned as it could be.

That gap is where most of the friction lives. In the decisions that feel harder than they should. In the opportunities we say yes to when some part of us already knows they are not right. In the exhaustion that is not really about workload, but about constantly performing a version of ourselves that does not feel fully true.

I spent years in that gap. I have not found my way out of it completely, because I do not think any of us ever do. But I have found a way to recognize it and return to myself faster. That way out was not through a pivot or a new strategy, but through something that sounds much less like business advice: I learned how I am actually wired, and I started working with that instead of against it.

This is how I did it. And more importantly, this is how you might find your version of it.

The clues were always there

I spent a decade working inside organizations. I learned how to be good at it: earn people’s trust, climb, make more money. But there was always a part of me that felt slightly misaligned, like I was running someone else’s operating system on my own hardware.

When I really looked, the signs were always there. People called me intimidating my whole life, and I spent years trying to make my “big personality” smaller because of it. I was told I seemed older than my age. I got to a point where executing someone else’s vision, no matter how aligned I felt with the work, was no longer something I could do. I kept hitting the same patterns: saying yes from pressure instead of clarity, feeling the weight of a moving finish line I could never quite reach, building fast when I actually needed more time.

I didn’t have language for any of it. Until I did.

I found astrology first, in my mid-twenties, already sober, already deep in personal growth work. Then Human Design. Then Gene Keys. Each one gave me a different layer of the same map, not to tell me who to be, but to show me what was already true. I do not need you to believe in these systems. I do not look to them to explain everything. But when I dug in, they gave me language for patterns I had already been living.

To be clear: none of this is about excuses. I believe deeply in personal responsibility. What these systems gave me was a map. A map does not decide where you go. It just makes it harder to pretend you do not know where you are. And I think a lot of us spend our lives pretending we do not see things we actually see very clearly.

Learning I was a Manifestor in Human Design (an initiator with a closed and repelling aura, literally designed to be felt before I’m understood) finally explained the intimidation thing. My energy speaks first – and sometimes pushes people away. Once I could see that, I could work with it vs. reacting against it. Understanding my Emotional Authority explained why my fastest decisions were consistently the ones I had to unwind later. Seeing my Core Wound in Gene Keys named the exact mechanism by which external pressure overrides my own discernment. And recognizing that my Life’s Work in Gene Keys is Patience, a theme that shows up across all three systems, finally made sense of why building at someone else’s speed has never worked for me.

Sobriety at 23 started the excavation. These systems gave it language. And starting a company is what happened when I began building with a clearer understanding of how I naturally lead, decide, and create.

The more I studied my chart, the more obvious the throughline became. I am an Aquarius Rising, oriented toward the future, technology, independence, and disrupting systems that have outlived their usefulness. I am a Manifestor, designed to initiate and lead from the front rather than wait for permission. Building a technology services agency in an industry still largely dominated by older, male, legacy-institutional leadership is not a departure from who I am. It is almost comically literal.

That understanding has given me confidence. Not because I believe a chart guarantees success, but because it has helped me trust that I am not forcing myself down the wrong path. I am building in the direction I am wired toward.

What I actually learned

The most useful thing these systems gave me was not self-knowledge in the abstract. It was pattern recognition – specific, nameable patterns I could catch in real time instead of only understanding in retrospect.

The biggest one was timing. Multiple signatures across all three systems point to the same thing: I am not built for the spike. I am built for the compound. My decision-making authority (Emotional Authority in Human Design) requires riding a full emotional wave before committing. My Life’s Work archetype is literally Patience (Gene Key 5). My astrological profile points toward slow, serious, structural becoming (Saturn in my 1st house).

This has been one of the most practically useful things I’ve learned as a CEO. When I feel the pressure of things taking longer than they should (which is constant when you have investors, goals, and want to win), I come back to this: the timeline I am measuring myself against is not always mine. I grew up in sales. I still do my dials, build the pipeline, follow up. The effort does not go away because I believe in the stars. But when I don’t see immediate results, I try not to panic. I remind myself I am laying the groundwork. Earlier this year, an astrologer friend told me June and July would open up for clients. I kept doing the work, didn’t force the timeline, and let it compound. We closed three contracts in June. The pipeline is the fullest it has been since I started. Could this be momentum? Absolutely. Is it also aligned with how I am designed to build? Yes. I don’t think those two things are in conflict.

The second pattern was what I now call the worth wound, and it showed up in all three systems. My open Heart center in Human Design carries the pressure to prove my worth. My Pearl, Gene Key 48, carries the shadow of Inadequacy, while my Core Wound, Gene Key 12, shows how concern with legitimacy and perception can override my discernment. The fear of not being legitimate enough. The moving finish line. The pressure to prove my value instead of trusting it. Under pressure, I can confuse fear with opportunity – say yes to something because it looks validating, not because it is actually aligned. Naming this pattern has not made me immune to it. But it has made it possible to catch it mid-activation and ask a different question. Not “should I take this?” but “what part of me is making this decision right now?”

The operating system

Over time, I built an actual operating system across these three frameworks. I work with daily and weekly transits layered against my natal chart, and I use a private AI workspace that holds my full chart and pattern history to synthesize what is active and what it means for decisions I am making right now.

What the operating system gives me is not prediction. It is orientation. On any given day, I have a clearer sense of what I am susceptible to, what my decision-making authority requires, when I am in a window that favors bold external moves versus internal recalibration. I know when fear is likely to be running the show and I need to slow down before I make a call.

It sounds esoteric, but it functions like strategy. I believe knowing ourselves, truly and objectively, is one of the most important leadership skills we can develop. You can have the best strategy in the world and still distort it through fear, pressure, urgency, or misalignment. Self-knowledge does not replace strategy. It helps me recognize when fear, pressure, or urgency is beginning to distort it.

What is your operating system?

I am not saying you need to know your Gene Keys to run a business. I am not saying astrology predicts your pipeline or that Human Design determines your outcomes.

What I am suggesting is this: there is a version of you operating from your actual nature, and a version operating from external conditioning. The gap between those two is where most of the friction lives. In your decisions, your relationships, the way you lead, and the things you keep trying to force even though some part of you knows they are not for you.

These systems were my way in. But the system matters less than the willingness to look. Your mirror might be astrology, Human Design, or Gene Keys. It might be religion, therapy, coaching, somatic work, the Enneagram, or simply a season of brutal honesty about what is and is not working. Perhaps even a sober rock bottom.

What matters is finding the map that makes your patterns undeniable, the one that reflects back what is already true until you can no longer argue with it.

So if you are wondering where to start, start here.

Where do you consistently create friction for yourself? What do people keep reflecting back to you that you have dismissed? What decisions do you make from fear, proving, or urgency rather than clarity? What kind of work gives you energy before it gives you validation? What part of you have you been trying to make more palatable?

And maybe most importantly: what would you build if you finally trusted that your nature was not the problem?

I spent a long time thinking “coming home to yourself” was a soft concept. Something you said but did not really operationalize or embody. Standing in my kitchen a few weeks ago, I understood that it is not a soft concept at all. It is the work beneath so much of learning, growing, leading, and building. It is the foundation beneath the revenue, the contracts, the strategy, and the vision.

You can build a lot of things from a place of misalignment. Many people do.

But you cannot build something that truly feels like yours while constantly leaving yourself behind.

What is your operating system?

XO,
Helena

I make my electrolytes, then my coffee. I bring it into my morning room – PMF mat, red light, no agenda – and I decide what the morning needs to be. Some days I journal or meditate. Some days Conor and I walk the dog first, our half-mile loop that we’ve done so many times it’s become its own kind of prayer. The point is that I get to decide. I cannot start my day reacting to something already. I have to choose first.

Today marks ten years sober. April 2025 is when I started my company. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

I hear all the time that I have my shit together. That I seem so responsible. So intentional. So much older than I am. And I want to give you a peek behind the curtain of what it actually took to get here, because what’s visible now is not the whole story. Not even close. What’s visible is the life that got built on top of a decade of work that most people never saw, some of which I’m still healing from, some of which I haven’t fully figured out yet.

To understand why that decade matters, you have to understand what it actually looked like. The hard parts. And what those years quietly built at the same time.

What It Cost

My mornings used to look very different. In my early twenties, I was picking up a bottle of wine most nights on my way home from work, waking up foggy, moving through my days without much seriousness or direction or any real sense that I was building toward something. I wasn’t. I was surviving the week so I could get to the weekend, and the weekend was the point. I was good at it, too. I was a party girl, the one who brought people together, the one everyone expected to have the plan, to know where the party was. And I usually did. And I was also the one least okay with it, for years, in ways I couldn’t articulate and was certainly not ready to face.

The moment everything shifted didn’t happen the way you might expect.

I went on a women’s retreat in the spring of 2016, about five years after I’d been kicked out of college for drinking, which means I had been quietly asking myself whether I had a problem for a long time by then. How I got there is a story for another time, but the bottom line is that I was starting to wake up, look at my life, and ask myself: is this really it? I knew my drinking was not normal. Some part of me always knew. But knowing something and being ready to do something about it are two very different things.

At this retreat, a woman I had never met before looked me straight in the eyes and said: “You’ve been numbing your whole life, and you’re going to have to make a decision about that.”

I completely lost it. I don’t think I have ever sobbed so hard in my life.

And then I went out with my friends the following weekend, as one does when you’re 23 and it’s May in Chicago, and got blackout drunk. Because that’s what we did. That was the culture, and I want to be clear that I had built that culture as much as anyone. I was the first person to pressure someone to drink more, go out one more night in a row, stay out just a little bit longer, justify margaritas on Taco Tuesday. Everyone thought it was fine. Everyone laughed. And I remember thinking that weekend: everything is not fine. I am SO not fine. I had been struggling with this and questioning it for years, and nobody around me could see it because I had made myself very, very good at making it look like fun.

I woke up on Sunday May 22, 2016, and I never drank again.

I was terrified. But I was more terrified of staying the same.

Not because I had finally hit some external bottom. But because that woman at the retreat had said the thing out loud that I had been unable to say to myself, and once it was said, I couldn’t unknow it. I had two paths in front of me: The one I was on (and I could see very clearly where that led – unhappy marriage, alcoholism, deep loneliness and dissatisfaction with my life), and one where I chose differently and became a woman I respected.

The truth was, I didn’t respect myself. I hadn’t decided to respect myself yet.

Quitting drinking was that decision. Everything that came after, the personal growth work, the time and energy poured into becoming, the slow and sometimes excruciating process of deconstructing every wall and belief and pattern that had gotten me there and rebuilding from the ground up, all of it was me learning what it actually means to keep that promise to yourself.

To understand what got built, you have to first understand what got lost. And that story starts at Saint Mary’s College.

Saint Mary’s is a small, private, Catholic all-girls school directly across the street from Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. I am third-generation legacy. My grandmother went there. My aunt went there. It was where I was always going to go, and it came with a promise, the kind that gets passed down through families like heirloom jewelry. No, literally, we all wear the same class ring our whole lives (I still wear mine every day). The women you meet at Saint Mary’s will be your sisters. Your best friends. Lifelong relationships. The kinds where you grow together, celebrate weddings, babies, 20th reunions, 50th reunions, girls trips, and everything in between.

And honestly? For a while, it was exactly that. I loved those women fiercely and completely, the way you only love people when you’re young and living on top of each other and everything feels permanent. After I got kicked out my freshman year, I was so adamant about going back and catching up to graduate in 3.5 years so I could walk with my class at graduation. I wanted to graduate with those friends, my sisters, and not get left behind, which is what I did. We moved to Chicago together after graduation. Got apartments. Navigated first jobs and bad dates and the specific chaos of being 22 in a big city, figuring out who you are and who you want to be in the world.

And then, about a year into all of that, I got sober.

I want to be careful here because I don’t want to tell this story wrong. My friends were supportive. Very supportive. Nobody issued an ultimatum or made me choose. What happened was quieter and in some ways more painful than that. I started changing, rapidly and in ways I didn’t yet have language for, and I couldn’t figure out how to bring my old life along with me. I was in my own emotional soup: navigating sobriety, a serious relationship, a career, my family, all of it at once, without a map. I didn’t know how to hold all of that and also show up as the version of myself my friendships were built around. I wasn’t equipped. I wasn’t even close. Truthfully, I was drowning.

What I remember most about that season is still trying. Showing up to the dinners, the bars, the group hangs, sitting with my soda water and laughing at the right moments and doing my best to fit into a version of my life that was slowly becoming a size too small. Nobody told me to leave. Nobody openly made me feel unwelcome. I just didn’t fit anymore, and I could feel it every time, and I kept showing up anyway because I didn’t want to lose them. I still wanted to be included. That’s the part that doesn’t get talked about enough. I wasn’t pulling away cleanly or confidently. I was holding on. And then the invitations started coming less. And then life moved on the way it does, and the shape of things changed, and I was on the outside of a world I had helped build and didn’t know how to re-enter sober.

Some of that grief I’m still in, honestly. Not all of it. I’m in a much better place now than I’ve ever been. But there’s certainly a part of me that hasn’t fully healed from that chapter. I’m not sure it ever will. And I’ve made a kind of peace with that.

There was one friendship in particular. The kind of friendship you file under permanent, under given, under she is my person and that is simply a fact about the world. We were inseparable. I truly believe she was a kind of soulmate.

Something fractured between us in those early years after I got sober. It wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t one conversation or one moment. It was the slow accumulation of me becoming someone different and not knowing how to explain it, of feelings I couldn’t articulate and situations I didn’t handle well and the general mess of being 23 and in transformation and completely out of your depth. Years went by. By the time I left Chicago, four years later, I reached out. We met up. And I looked at her and asked the question I’d been carrying for years: will we ever be close again?

She said no.

I did a lot of apologizing that day. I meant every word of it. I took responsibility for how I had navigated those years because I know I wasn’t at my best, I know I couldn’t give her what she needed from me, I know the version of me that moved through that season was still very much under construction. And even with all of that, even with the accountability and the years of distance and the genuine love I still had for her, the answer was no.

That was one of the greatest heartbreaks of my entire life. I’m still healing from it, honestly. Not with bitterness, but with grief. I’ve watched from a distance as her life kept moving, the wedding I wasn’t invited to, the baby I found out about through a screen, the milestones I always assumed I would be there for. I still wonder sometimes, in the quiet moments, what version of that friendship exists in a parallel universe where 23-year-old me had handled things differently. Where I had been able to articulate what I was going through instead of disappearing into it.

Nobody tells you that part. The sober content that exists in the world is largely full of clarity and gifts and transformation – which do come. But it is not full of women talking honestly about the friendships that couldn’t survive who you became. About the cost of becoming, which is real, and which doesn’t cancel out the becoming, but which deserves to be named.

What’s strange is that Saint Mary’s gave me back something too, just not what I expected, and not who I expected.

My sister was a freshman there the year I was a senior. We weren’t particularly close growing up. We weren’t close when I was drinking. But five months into my sobriety, in October of 2016, she turned 21. And I went back to South Bend for her birthday.

I was not ready. South Bend was where so much of the drinking had happened, the same campus, the same bars, the same streets. Going back at five months sober, walking into those places for her, was one of the harder things I did that first year. But I wanted to show up for her. So I did.

Somewhere in that first year, she said something to me that I’ve never forgotten. That I was the best version of a sister she had ever known. That I was a much worse sister when I was drinking and she liked this version of me a lot better.

She is my closest friend now, and my biggest cheerleader.

The campus that represents the friendships I lost is also the campus where the most important relationship of my adult life found its footing. I don’t think you get to choose which gifts sobriety gives you or which ones it takes. You just stay the course and find out along the way.

The friendships I have now are different in a way that’s hard to fully articulate. The women in my life at this stage – grounded, spiritual, intentional, fun, hardworking, loving – they don’t even know a version of me that drank. It has genuinely never come up. Not as a topic, not as a factor, not as part of any conversation we’ve ever had. They just know me. And I just know them. And the connection was never built around a bar tab or a bottle of wine. It was built around who we actually are, now. I didn’t know friendships could feel this uncomplicated until I had them.

What It Built

Here is what I know now that I couldn’t have seen then: the loss and the construction were happening at the same time. The same years that cost me so much were building something underneath it all. You don’t get to choose which one comes first. You just keep going and eventually you look up and realize what got built while you were in the middle of it.

Here is something less romantic, but no less true: we saved a lot of money.

When you’re not drinking, you’re also not doing most of the things that drinking is attached to. You’re not at the bar, not splitting the bottle at dinner, not spending Saturday at hair-of-the-dog brunches or having Sunday Fundays. Conor and I were home. We were quiet. We were, in the way that people who are actively rebuilding themselves tend to be, quite boring by the standards of our peers.

We paid off our college debt by the time I was 25. We were completely debt-free before we got married. We bought homes. We built a financial foundation in our 20s, steadily and without really talking about it that way, and that foundation has funded every risk we’ve taken since.

I think about this a lot when people look at our life now and say things like, you’re so lucky, or, you two have it so figured out. And we do have a great life. I’m not pretending otherwise. But the luck had a lot of loneliness inside it. The figure-it-out came from years of Friday nights we weren’t invited to and time we were pouring back into ourselves instead, and a social life that had to be built from scratch because the one we had didn’t fit anymore. There is a version of the story where that sounds sad. There is another version where it sounds exactly like what it was: the unglamorous, necessary work of building something new.

What we were actually doing in those years, beyond saving money and rebuilding our social lives from scratch, was investing deeply and seriously in ourselves — in enormous amounts of time and energy.

I got involved in intensive personal development work in Chicago. Years of it. Two hours every Tuesday night working through the different areas of life: family, intimacy, personal power, spirituality, self-care. Then years of ongoing work after that, small circles, skilled leaders, real assignments, and the kind of accountability that requires you to look honestly at your life and your part in it. Conor and I did this work together and separately for close to seven years. We gave enormous amounts of time to becoming people we respected.

In those rooms I learned things about myself that I could not have learned anywhere else. I learned that I had spent most of my young life performing, performing confidence, performing fun, performing okay-ness, and that underneath all of it was someone who had never really decided she was worth showing up for. I learned what it means to take honest responsibility for your experience without collapsing into shame. I learned the difference between being driven by fear and being pulled by excitement toward something you actually want. I learned how to have a hard conversation without needing to win it.

Conor and I did a lot of this work together. People tell us all the time that we have the best marriage, that we seem so solid, so figured out. I am so proud of our marriage. It is one of the most important things in my life. But what people don’t see is the years of work underneath it. The couples coaching. The individual work we were each doing on our own patterns and beliefs so we could show up better for each other. The conversations that weren’t easy. The version of us that exists now didn’t happen by accident or by luck or because we were just a good match. It got built, the same way everything else did, deliberately, over years that looked from the outside like nothing was happening.

That same clarity started showing up in my career in ways I didn’t fully appreciate until later. Sobriety gave me a kind of advantage I didn’t understand at the time. Not because I was better than anyone else, but because I was clearer. The commitment, the stamina, the way I could be fully present in a room and actually track what was happening, people noticed, even when I never said a word about not drinking. Trust accumulated. Opportunities followed. Sobriety didn't make me better than anyone else. It made me available to my own life. It is why I was chosen to be chief of staff. It is part of why my investors backed me without me ever having to pitch. It is woven into every room I’ve ever walked into and every relationship that has mattered in my career. I built a company on a foundation that sobriety made possible. I’m certain of that.

All of that work, paired with sobriety, reinforced the container. Deepened it. Made it something I could actually trust to hold the weight of a real life.

Here’s how I always describe what these ten years actually felt like from the inside.

The first four years felt like high school. I was figuring out who I was without the thing I’d used to define myself, navigating the fallout, making mistakes, finding my footing. The next four felt like college, more confidence, more self-knowledge, more capacity, but still very much in formation, still working things out, still carrying the identity of someone in recovery as the primary lens through which I moved through the world.

And then somewhere around year eight or nine, I graduated.

I just woke up one day and felt like myself. Not a project. Not a person in recovery. Not someone who had to evaluate every social situation through the filter of whether alcohol would be present and how I’d navigate it. Sobriety had moved into the background of my life, still completely part of who I am, still something I’m proud of, still something I’ll talk about openly and without hesitation, but no longer the thing standing at the front of every room I walked into.

I was no longer trying to become myself. I was just living as myself. Finally, after almost a decade, I was just living.

I didn’t get sober to become a CEO. I didn’t get sober to build an AI-first agency or move back to Tennessee or have a strong marriage or any of the specific things that are currently true about my life. I got sober because I looked at two versions of my future, one where I kept drinking, one where I stopped, and I chose the one I could respect. That was the decision.

What I didn’t know at 23 is what that one choice would keep unlocking. My entire life since has been a series of saying yes to the next right thing, and every single one of those yeses has been made possible by that first one. Sobriety was the first time I chose myself. Everything downstream of it, the company, the marriage, the mornings, the friendships, the foundation, has flowed from that one choice.

The container holds everything now. The health routines I’ve maintained for a decade. The capacity I have to be fully present in a room, to remember names and track conversations and show up sharp even after a long conference day and a late night. Yes, I still love a good night out, I always will. You can take the alcohol away but you can’t take the party out of a party girl! I wake up the next morning without anything to recover from except being tired. The ability to hold hard conversations without spiraling, to sit with uncertainty without needing to numb it, to make decisions from clarity instead of from fear or fog.

None of that is accidental. All of it got built in the years that looked, from the outside, like nothing was happening.

Ten years in: this is not a retrospective. I am in act one.

I have barely gotten started, and I know that now with a certainty I've never had before. There is so much more in front of me than behind me, and the reason I can say that is because I trust what I’m standing on.

What you see now – the mornings, the company, the life – is above the waterline. What built it is below. A decade of Tuesday nights in a circle of chairs, hard retreats, honest conversations, friendships that didn't make it, time poured inward, days strung together one at a time, long before I had any proof it was going anywhere.

The life that looks effortless from the outside has the most work underneath it.

That’s what a decade looks like. And I’m just getting started.

XO,
Helena

Not in a throwaway way, in a real “this is a problem with you” way. I’m a firstborn. I’m an Aquarius rising with Saturn ruling my first house. I’m a Manifestor in Human Design, which means I have what’s called a “closed and repelling aura.” I literally see the world through my own experience first. It’s just how I’m wired.

For a long time I thought something was wrong with me.

And then I picked up Emma Grede’s Start With Yourself on a flight, and somewhere around page thirty, I had to put it down and sit in silence for a few minutes.

Not because it wasn’t good, but because I’d heard it before.

Not from another business book, not from a mentor or a podcast. From the inside of my own head, the one I slowly rebuilt, from the ground up, getting sober in my twenties.

Emma Grede is everywhere right now, and she should be. She’s the co-founder and CEO of Good American, founding partner of SKIMS, self-made, British, working-class East London origin story, four kids, no apologies. She’s the kind of female CEO I actually respect, not because she’s palatable, but because she isn’t. She says the things that make people uncomfortable. She got canceled (briefly) for saying work-life balance is your problem to figure out (I couldn’t agree more). She describes herself as a “max three-hour mum” on weekends (I don’t have children and don’t really want them, but she’s giving me a vision of what’s possible). She talks about money in rooms where women aren’t supposed to.

I love her for all of it.

What I realized reading Start With Yourself is that so much of what she’s built her philosophy around, the personal responsibility, the radical ownership of your own story, the refusal to wait for the world to be fair before you move, is the same operating system I built getting sober at 23.

She learned it in East London. I learned it in a folding chair. Same lesson.

Here’s the thing people don’t tell you about getting sober young: it is, at its core, an exercise in radical personal responsibility.

You cannot get sober and stay in blame. The first real work, the unglamorous, cry-on-your-bathroom-floor kind, is looking at your own part. Not to punish yourself, but because your part is the only thing you can actually do anything about.

I did that in my 20s. I made the lists. I looked at every resentment, every grievance, every story I’d been carrying about what had happened to me. And then, the part nobody warns you about, I had to find my part in it. Every single time.

It was the most humbling and most freeing thing I’ve ever done.

Emma writes: “I take full responsibility for my life, and I create my own future, regardless of what comes back at me.”

I read that and thought: I know. I learned that the hard way.

People told me I was selfish for getting sober, too, in their own way.

Not directly, but in the distance that opened up. Friendships that quietly dissolved. The social fabric I had built entirely around drinking that couldn’t hold me once I wasn’t drinking anymore. I lost a lot of people when I got sober. At the time it felt like punishment – like I had done something wrong by choosing myself.

It took me years to understand that what looked like selfishness was actually something else: the decision to stop managing other people’s comfort at the expense of my own life.

Emma has a chapter on sadness that hit me hard. She writes about being a loner, about loneliness even at the height of success, about the friends she had to leave behind at different chapters of her life. “Certain habits and ways of being, certain social groups, and sometimes my comfort zones needed to be firmly left behind.” She talks about pruning relationships to grow, and grieving what gets left behind in the process.

I know that grief. I lived it. I still live it today.

What I didn’t know then, but understand now, is that the pruning was the point. Getting sober didn’t cost me my people. It cost me the ones I couldn’t grow with, and those are two very different things.

Emma is also direct in a way that I relate to deeply and that other people find polarizing. She says what she thinks, doesn’t soften her asks, doesn’t apologize for wanting more. She writes about the pattern she sees in women, the hedging, the qualifying, the “no worries if you don’t have time” emails, and calls it what it is: a failure to advocate for yourself dressed up as politeness.

I’ve watched this my entire career, and done it myself, in moments I’m not proud of.

Sobriety taught me a version of this through a different door. When you get sober, you have to learn to tell the truth, to yourself first, then to other people. You have to stop managing other people’s reactions to your reality. You have to say I don’t drink in rooms where that’s awkward, at dinners where someone already ordered you a glass of wine, at weddings and conferences and client events where the expectation is that you’ll just go along.

At first it was excruciating. Then it became ordinary, and eventually a superpower.

The directness I’m known for, the thing that makes me good at sales, good with clients, good at building trust fast, I didn’t learn it in a boardroom. I learned it by getting sober, because I had to.

And that directness extends to money. Emma has a whole chapter on it, the way women avoid the conversation, deflect the question, dress up financial ambition in language about helping others so it sounds more palatable. She’s blunt: that’s a disservice to ourselves. You can’t shift anything from a place of scarcity.

Sobriety gave me the capacity to actually want things. When you’re numbing, you’re not building. You’re managing the shame, the guilt, the things you said and did that you’re not proud of. Getting sober means living through all of that without the escape hatch, sitting with it, working through it, coming out the other side with actual space in your life. Space you start filling with things you actually want. For me that meant a career that mattered, something real to build, and the willingness to say out loud what I was building toward.

Emma names the money part directly. Sobriety taught me to do the same.

The other thing Emma says that I keep coming back to is this: “We’re living in a culture where everyone feels aggrieved and takes the world personally. I don’t think this is a productive way to live.”

She’s talking about blame culture, the kind where it’s everyone’s fault but your own. The government’s fault, the neighbor’s fault, nothing is ever anyone’s personal responsibility. She made a conscious decision to operate differently.

I made that same decision. Mine just came with a lot of inner work and a few really hard years.

Here’s what I know about blame: it feels like protection. If it’s someone else’s fault, you don’t have to change. If the world is unfair (and it is, genuinely, actually unfair), then you’re off the hook. You can wait for fairness to arrive before you start building.

But fairness doesn’t arrive, and while you’re waiting for it, your life is happening.

Getting sober before it was cool, before there were influencers and NA cocktail menus and whole CPG categories built around it, before anyone was making sobriety look aspirational, that was its own lesson in not waiting for the world to catch up to your choices. I had to build my life around a decision that nobody around me was making. No blueprint. No community, at first. Just a choice I made for myself and had to keep making, alone, every day.

Emma also writes about something that gets missed in most business advice: the trap of overthinking the future. She’s big on making a decision and then making it right, iteration over certainty, forward motion over the perfect plan. Her frame is: “I don’t know what I don’t know, but I can learn anything.”

Early sobriety taught me the same thing, the hard way. I used to torture myself thinking forward. Am I really never going to drink at my wedding? How do I get through the holidays? What does the next ten years look like without alcohol? None of that thinking helped. None of it. The only thing that ever worked was the next right action, right in front of me.

One day at a time is the whole curriculum, and it turns out it works for building a company too.

I work in enterprise commerce. I’ve spent 10+ years in this industry and now I’ve built a company inside it. Emma co-founded two of the most culturally significant retail brands of the last decade. We operate in overlapping worlds, but that’s not why this book hit me.

It hit me because she’s not writing about retail. She’s writing about what it actually takes to build something, including yourself, from the inside out. And almost everything she names, I learned before I ever had a job title worth putting on a business card.

Personal responsibility. Emotional hygiene. Knowing your worth. Not waiting to feel ready. Letting go of the people and places that can’t hold the version of you that you’re becoming.

Sobriety was my MBA. And nobody gave me a diploma for it.

There’s one more thing: Emma writes that she believes the universe is in constant communication with you, if you care to pay attention. She talks about operating on vibe, trusting her gut, reading signs in rooms before she can explain why. I highlighted that line because I felt it in my body.

My sobriety would be nothing without spirituality. I don’t think that’s unique to me. I think women leading at the highest level are almost always tapped into something beyond themselves, whether they call it God, the universe, intuition, Human Design, or just a knowing they can’t fully explain. Emma calls it vibe. I call it all of the above. The point is that the most powerful thing sobriety gave me wasn’t discipline or clarity. It was access, access to myself, and through that, access to something bigger. That is the real superpower, and it doesn’t show up on a resume.

Emma’s book is called Start With Yourself. That’s also, more or less, the whole curriculum of getting sober.

You cannot outsource your recovery. You cannot blame your way into a better life. You cannot keep the relationships, the habits, the stories, and the thought patterns that kept you sick and expect to get well. You have to start with yourself, with what you actually think, what you actually want, what you’re actually willing to do.

I did that at 23. In a way nobody would have called strategic. In a way that cost me a lot before it gave me anything back.

But it gave me back everything.

The directness, the personal responsibility, the comfort with hard conversations, the inability to wait for external permission before I act. A practice, not a personality trait. Built in the years most people were doing other things.

Start with yourself. Do the work nobody sees. Stop waiting for fair.

Everything else follows.

XO,
Helena

If this resonated, share it with someone who needs to hear it. And if you’re curious about Emma’s book, go get it. It’s worth it.

Just kidding. (Kind of.)

I have been spending a lot of time with AI lately. Like, a lot a lot. It’s part of how I’m building my agency, it’s part of how I’m thinking about the future of the work we do for clients, and honestly at this point it’s just part of how I think. I have been so deep in it that my husband has started giving me a look when I’m still at my desk at 9pm and I have to explain that no, I’m not “working”, I’m just...“tweaking”.

I’ve been wanting to write about it here for a while because I think there’s a version of this conversation that’s missing. The female voices I see in AI content are mostly oriented toward solopreneurs, creators, people building digital products. That’s a real and valid lane. It’s just not mine. My lane is enterprise. B2B. Complex implementations for big retailers. And not many in that lane are women writing honestly about what it actually looks like to bring AI into that world in real time.

So I’m going to try. Starting with something that happened this week that I cannot stop thinking about.

I’ve spent ten years inside agencies that designed and implemented enterprise commerce websites for some of the largest retailers in the country. I know what it takes. I know the timelines, the stakeholder reviews, the number of people in a room arguing about a button color. I know what it costs, in budget and in energy, to get a homepage live. I have sat in those rooms for a decade.

So when I tell you I watched an AI tool frame out an entire website in under an hour this week and my first reaction was holy shit, this is insane, I want you to understand that’s not someone who just discovered the internet talking. That’s ten years of context talking.

Here’s what happened.

I’ve been sitting on a website refresh for a while now. The one we had was fine. It was built a year ago when the business was younger and the positioning was still finding itself. A lot has evolved since then. The brand has sharpened. The point of view is clearer. I had done the work to get ready for a rebuild: new positioning, new content, a proper style guide. I had the pieces. What I didn’t have was a process I loved.

I tried other tools. OnePage. Framer. I wanted to be able to get in and do this myself (mostly to prove I could, hello ego!). Neither of them clicked for me. The interfaces felt hard to navigate and the results didn’t feel like me. I kept starting and stopping. I’m not a coder or a designer, but I kept hearing how “easy” AI was, people were “vibe coding” everything, and I thought I could figure it out!

Then Claude Design dropped this week. My head of engineering uploaded the content document and the style guide I had already prepared. One hour later, we had a framed website that looked more like my brand than anything I had tried to build before. Cleaner than what I had and actually on brand.

I’ve been iterating on it since then and the thing that keeps catching me is how I’m doing it. Not in a design editor. Not marking up a Figma file. Just back and forth in a chat window, describing what I want, watching it happen, asking for something different, watching that happen too. It’s the most fluid I have ever felt in a design process and I have been adjacent to design work for my entire career.

I should tell you something about myself here, because I think it’s relevant. I am an Aquarius rising. (If you’re not into astrology, just know that it means I am constitutionally wired toward the future, toward technology, toward what’s coming next.) I have not felt a lot of resistance to AI. Where I see some people bracing, I tend to lean in. I think that orientation is part of why I’m able to write this without a lot of the discomfort I notice in other people’s takes on these tools. But even for me, something shifted this week. Not in my intellectual position on AI, but in my felt sense of what it actually is now.

Because here’s the question that surfaced almost immediately, sitting right underneath the excitement: what does this mean for the people who do this work?

I think about resourcing constantly. That is the unglamorous reality of running a services business. I am always thinking about what roles we need, what we carry full time versus bring in for specific projects, where we have capacity and where we have gaps. Design has always been part of that calculation – It requires a real skill set, it takes time, and it is often where projects slow down.

And what I watched happen this week is making me think differently about that calculation in a way I haven’t fully resolved yet. The design layer just became more accessible than it has ever been, and I don’t entirely know what to do with that observation. I’m not ready to draw conclusions, I’m still very much in it. Everything is moving SO fast – and the best we can do is try to learn together as we go.

What I do know is that I've been in enterprise commerce long enough to recognize when something actually changes how the work gets done. I've watched platform shifts do it. I've watched headless architecture do it. This feels like that kind of moment, but faster and closer than those felt at the time.

The website isn’t live yet. I’m still tweaking. And honestly, part of me is taking my time because I’m enjoying the process more than I expected to, which I did not see coming!

If you want more of this from me, tell me in the comments. I’m having so much fun exploring this right now and I’m happy to keep sharing if it’s landing.

Here’s to being builders.

XO,
Helena

It was the end of March, last year. We had just launched. I had gone out that night, done the thing, been at the table at Omnia like everything was fine. And then I got in a cab and cried the whole way back. The thought running on loop was: I am never going to be able to do this the way they did. Every person I had watched build something in this industry was running through my head. What am I thinking? You are insane. You are never going to pull this off.

I want to be honest about that moment because I think we skip over it too fast when we tell founder stories. The launch post goes up, the logo is clean, the positioning sounds confident. And somewhere that same night, the person behind it is falling apart in a car on the strip wondering what on earth they were thinking.

That was me a year ago.

Here is what I know about why I left to build something of my own.

I had been through two major acquisitions, absorbed into organizations so large that the thing I cared most about, the client, kept getting further away. I could see what needed to happen. I understood the market, I understood what was shifting, I had spent a decade building the pattern recognition to know. But I was twelve layers deep in bureaucracy with no runway to actually do anything about it.

I also felt a pull toward something more conscious. For a while I had been circling sober coaching, fractional work, something more directly impactful. And then this opportunity landed and I felt something unexpected: a calling back in. Not back to corporate the way I’d known it. Back into the industry as myself, fully. As a woman who believes the market needs conscious female leaders inside it, not just adjacent to it. A demonstration that you can build something with integrity and soul inside a system that doesn’t always make room for (or appreciate!) either.

So I went for it! And then I questioned it every single day for about six months.

The loop was constant. Do I have what it takes? Are people going to hire me? Is anybody going to care about this? I didn’t walk around in crisis, but I had that running in the background on most days, like a tab I couldn’t close.

What started to shift it was the reflection coming back. The first client who signed. The people at trade shows who said things like, “You’re a force,” as if they could feel what I was putting into it. Peers who got it. The universe starting to reflect back: you were made for this. Keep going.

It wasn’t as fast as I wanted. It wasn’t as big as I needed it to feel on the harder days. But it was real, and I listened.

There is a moment I go back to a lot. Early on, I realized the direction I had committed to publicly, the platform bet I had made and told my whole network about, was wrong. About five weeks in, I could feel it. The space was saturated, the economics didn’t make sense for the kind of company I wanted to build, and something in my gut was pulling hard toward something else.

I had to walk into a board meeting, with a legitimately financially-driven board who had every right to ask me for numbers and logic and proof, and say: “I know I can’t run a company on vibes and feelings. But I cannot bet this company on this direction. I need to go find us something else.”

I meant it. I knew it was right. And I also knew that “I have a feeling” was not exactly the opening most boards are hoping for.

They trusted me. I went and found the right partner. I have not stopped believing in that bet since.

Conviction is not the same as certainty. Betting on yourself means being willing to say what you know out loud, in rooms that might not immediately understand it, before you have the proof to back it up.

I did not do this alone, and I made a deliberate choice not to. I signed up for leadership programs. I stayed close to the people in my corner who had built things themselves and knew what this actually felt like. On the days when I needed someone to reflect back that this was worth it, I had people I could call. That was not by accident. Choosing your support structure is one of the first decisions you make as a founder, and I made it intentionally, and continue to do so.

And then there is my husband, Conor, who I have written about here before. You all know I believe marriage is a superpower, a force multiplier, and he is the reason I have been able to hold the thread on the hard days. He is the one who reminds me to celebrate the small things, a signed contract, a good piece of feedback, a post that landed. He reflects back to me, consistently and without me having to ask, that I was made for this. When I am in the spiral, he is steady. That is not a small thing. That is everything.

This year, at the end of March, I was back in Las Vegas. Back at Omnia.

This time I was hosting. I had invited people. Partners, potential clients, people I wanted in my energy and wanted to show something to, not a pitch, just who Helena actually is. And at some point during the night I looked around and felt something I did not feel the year before.

I felt like I belonged there.

Not performing belonging. Not white-knuckling my way through a room hoping no one noticed I was measuring myself against everyone else’s version of success. Just present. Myself. Worthy of being exactly where I was.

The drive back this time was different.

One year in, the thing that surprises me most is how happy I am. I knew it would be hard. I knew the stress would live in my chest differently when it was mine and not something I could clock out from. What I did not expect was how deeply aligned it would feel. How much it would matter to be in charge of the direction, to lead from a place that is actually mine.

I am a Manifestor in Human Design. I am built to initiate, to go first, to move before there is consensus or permission or proof. Operating in alignment with how you are actually wired is not comfortable. It is better than comfortable.

It’s the whole point.

XO,
Helena

At some level, all humans are complex and contain multitudes. We all have layers, stories, experiences, and internal worlds no one else sees. But I have very much felt like an enigma in my life and that contrast only sharpened when I got sober.

When I quit drinking at 23, people genuinely did not know what to do with me. I got so many comments, from so many people.

“You don’t have a problem.”
“But you’re so fun!!”
“You’ll grow out of it eventually.”

It was as if the idea of a young, blonde, recent graduate of a Midwest party school choosing sobriety on purpose broke people’s brains. Like, surely I couldn’t possibly mean it?? But deep down, I KNEW my drinking was a problem and I had to quit. This was the first moment I realized: what people saw on the outside had absolutely nothing to do with what was happening inside of me. That mismatch was the beginning of understanding myself as an enigma.

As my sobriety deepened, so did my spirituality. I started exploring different traditions and teachings (so many rabbit holes… and I’m sure there are many posts in my future about all the paths I’ve gone down, but saving that for another time!!) and learned more about astrology, my Sagittarius Sun & Aquarius Rising, which explained so much. Outgoing, future-facing, ahead of my time, deeply philosophical, never quite inside the lines of my very traditional Catholic upbringing. Add sobriety and a corporate career on top of that, and we’re just… everywhere!! Again: enigma.

What I’ve learned is to embrace the contradictions! Because honestly, that’s what makes life fun. Why flatten yourself for other people’s comfort? Why choose “one lane” when you can be a woman who contains multitudes?

One contradiction people cannot seem to wrap their heads around: that I’m a sober person who LOVES a night out. I mean LOVES. I’m talking: raging music, a dark nightclub, dancing alone in the crowd, losing myself in the vibe and energy (all WITHOUT drugs or alcohol). Not every weekend, but a few times a year? YES. I am absolutely in my element. (Seriously – friends, acquaintances, networking contacts, strangers… cannot fathom this).

Part of this is because I’m a true extrovert – other people’s energy literally charges me. But it’s also because over the years, I’ve learned how to manage my energy as a sober extrovert who travels constantly and does a ton of events. That took a long time and a LOT of grounding practices (another post for another time).

What’s always hilarious is when people meet me after the fact and discover I’m sober. They just assume I must’ve been drinking all night because of how I look or the vibe I give off. And the cognitive dissonance of “wait… you’re sober AND you were raging??” is always elite. Yes. This is what I mean by enigma.

And speaking of contradictions… last year I had one of the most “only Helena” back-to-back experiences of my life.

I was in Las Vegas for work in March and had the opportunity to go to Mexico to join my friend Gertrude Lyons on her Spring Equinox retreat (check her out on Substack) to hike a sacred Mayan cave, where on the Spring Equinox the sun aligns perfectly with the cave’s opening. This ancient-mystical-spiritual kind of thing is my superbowl.

I knew we were planning a big night out in Vegas on the final night (celebrating the end of a chapter at that company), and I also knew that in order to catch the Equinox alignment, I would have to take a super early flight straight to MX. Most people would say I was insane, but IDC. I wanted both. I live for this type of stuff.

So after pulling an all-nighter, I hopped on a plane to Mexico and joined a group of women for the hike up to the cave.

Something interesting happens when you live aligned with your own energy: transitions between worlds become effortless. I landed in Mexico, cleansed myself of the nightclub energy, and immediately shifted into mother-earth-spiritual mode. I thought I’d be exhausted, but those are honestly just stories we tell ourselves. Our bodies are capable of so much more when our minds aren’t in the way.

I was more energized than ever. I remember basically SPRINTING up the trail to the cave. Was it the Equinox energy? The high from the night out? Who knows. But what I do know is that when you’re living in alignment with yourself – allowing your curiosity, joy, and desires to flow into real life – you can tap into parts of yourself you didn’t know existed. That’s what that moment felt like. Like I accessed a higher realm of who I am.

To me, this isn’t a contradiction. It’s the truth of who I am.

I love my work life. I love going out, laughing, connecting, and being in the energy of people. And I love sitting in silence on ancient rock, meditating on a spiritually charged Equinox day.

It’s more limiting to choose one identity or force yourself into a box that makes sense to other people. And honestly… where is the fun in that?!?

As humans, we naturally simplify things so we can understand them. Our brains categorize, label, reduce. But that can be incredibly limiting. The truth is: you never have to be “one thing” just to make yourself easier for other people to understand. Let them be confused. Let them wonder.

And to bring it full circle: sobriety is the thing that allows all of this.

Because I’m clear, I can navigate late nights out while rooted in myself. I can see what’s actually happening around me. I can hold my energy without getting swept up into the haze of a drunken night. I can enjoy it on my terms. And I can step into the spiritual realm with no hangover, no regrets, no fog.

Obviously going straight from a Vegas nightclub to a sacred cave in Mexico is an extreme example… but it’s also a perfect analogy for what becomes possible when you choose yourself with clarity and integrity. Your life naturally expands to hold the full range of who you are. This is where sobriety becomes a superpower. This is where you become multidimensional.

Let people be confused.
Be an enigma.
Give them something to wonder about.

It might just be the thing that leads you home to yourself.

XO,
Helena

It’s been a little while, and I have a lot to share. I’m still kind of buzzing from this weekend.

Conor and I just got back from our first annual couples visioning retreat. We spent the weekend at Dunya Camp, a glamping spot about an hour and twenty minutes from Chattanooga, just across the border in Georgia. Think: a tent you can open up to the outdoors, a hot tub on the deck, a sauna, fresh air, no TV, no distractions. Just us.

We called it our Spring Equinox retreat, and there’s a reason we chose March instead of January. For us, January still feels like winter. Energetically, it’s still a dead time. Spring is when things actually start to move, when the energy shifts and something wakes up. We wanted our visioning and planning to be aligned with that. So we chose to do this closer to the spring equinox, and honestly, it felt much more right than trying to force it into the first week of a new year when we’re still in holiday fog.

Now, a little context, because this did NOT come out of nowhere.

Conor and I have been doing deep personal growth work, individually and together, for about twelve years (another deep dive for another day!). We’re both sober. We see a couples coach at least once a month. We’re also in a couples group that meets every three weeks, led by a couple we really admire. Doing conscious work around our relationship isn’t new to us. It is genuinely one of our values as a couple.

So this “retreat” wasn’t random. It was us taking something we already care deeply about and giving it more time, space, and a structure. We’ve always believed that the foundation of our marriage supports everything else in our lives. I really think being married, being in a conscious and intentional partnership, is a force multiplier. And I don’t take that lightly.

So what did we actually do?

A few weeks before we left, we built out a framework together. We used Claude and ChatGPT to help us flesh out the process and put together a full agenda. When we arrived, we knew exactly what we were doing and when (Yes, I am an eldest daughter, yes, Conor is a Virgo - this works for us!) For example, Saturday at 9am we were working through one area of life. Saturday at 11am, another. We built in time for the sauna, the hot tub, and walks in nature (bc we’re not totally crazy!!), but we also set aside real, focused time blocks to actually do the work.

The areas of life we looked at were: body/health, home, finances, family, communication/teamwork, work/career, friendships/community, and purpose/principles/spirituality. We went through all of them.

We intentionally went deeper on work and career this year because our lives have shifted so much in the last twelve months. I started my business almost a year ago. Conor is in the process of acquiring a small business and stepping onto his own entrepreneurial path (in addition to a full time corporate job). We’ve both made massive changes, and we knew we needed to update our vision, our routines, our systems at home, and our communication to match where we’re actually going.

You can’t expand into the next version of yourself if everything around you is still set up for the person you used to be.

We also really focused on friendships. We don’t have kids, and we want to call in more aligned relationships. Deep, nourishing friendships with people who are building, growing, and want to talk about their lives and their goals. That matters to us, and we wanted to be deliberate about it.

We came out of the weekend with a full plan. A 10-year vision. Standards we’re holding each other to. Operating agreements for our home, our mornings, our finances, and our date nights. But honestly, more than any document, we came out with a deeper understanding of each other. Our fears, our dreams, and the places we’re each holding back. I think people can operate so independently sometimes and never share those things with their partner. Conor and I have always believed two is better than one.

Our marriage is something we actively rely on as a source of strength, support, and momentum – the foundation from which everything else grows.

This was our first year doing it this way, and we will absolutely keep doing it. It was nourishing in a way I didn’t fully expect. When you’re both growing businesses and your lives are moving fast, carving out time to simply want and dream together is genuinely one of the most important things you can do.

I really believe the most important project we will ever work on is ourselves. Our lives, our relationships, and the love inside them. Conor and I try to run our relationship a lot like we run our businesses: We check in, we audit, we make agreements, we course correct. When you’re unconscious, you can drift from point A to point B and have no idea how you got there. I try hard not to live that way. I want to be consciously co-creating my life, with God and with my partner, pointed in the direction we’ve chosen together.

This retreat is one way we do that.

If you’re curious about the framework we used, reply to this post or drop a comment and I’ll share it with you.

XO,
Helena

Truthfully, the year has been off to a crazy start and it’s only getting busier as the months go on. As things start to take off, conference season ramps up, and my business grows, I want to talk about something I get asked about a lot:

“How do you do it?”

And by do it, I mean travel a lot and stay healthy on the road.

It is no secret that traveling can wreak havoc on routines, sleep, digestion, and nervous system regulation. I am no expert, but I like to believe I’ve learned a few things along the way that have really supported me in staying healthy and feeling as close to 100% as possible on the road.

A little context…

I’ve been traveling consistently for work since about 2018. In 2016, I stopped drinking. In 2017, I “went vegan” for about six years (that’s a longer story for another day!). I share that because I’ve navigated some pretty “weird” behaviors in a very corporate, very sales environment. Think: client dinners where everyone is drinking and ordering steaks. LOL.

I do a lot of conferences and trade shows and regular meetings in cities all over the country.

When I stopped drinking, I really started to feel my food. What I mean by that is: when you’re no longer numb, you start to notice how everything affects your body: food, caffeine, sleep (or lack of it), stress, and yes… toxic people. That awareness led me down a path of editing my life so I could be as healthy as possible and feel as good as possible.

This is true of anyone who is on a health journey. It’s why so many healthy people don’t drink, and why so many sober people become focused on wellness. That was certainly the path my journey took.

All the while, I was working a corporate career that required a lot of travel and I had to learn how to manage that and stick to my healthy habits.

I will say: it’s not easy, and it does take planning. But for me, the payoff is absolutely worth it. I learned in sobriety to take full responsibility for my experience, and this follows that same rule of thumb. This isn’t advice, it’s just what I’ve found works for me after years of reps.

My #1 travel routine is not supplements or a hack. It’s 100% responsibility for my energy and outcomes.

​​This is my baseline. I travel like I’m the asset, because I am.

Here is how I put that into practice.

Airport & Flights

I do not eat airport food. Hard stop.

I pack snacks so I never go without (more on that later), but I have a hard rule of not eating airport food. I think it’s gross. You don’t know where it comes from, it’s usually not healthy, and it’s overpriced.

In a pinch, I will sometimes grab a banana from the lounge or beef jerky from a store (usually I already have this with me, which also saves the company money!!).

I have been known to cook burger patties or hard-boil eggs at home ahead of time and bring them with me to the airport if I’m flying at a weird time and need “real food.”

I also try very hard not to consume any food while in the air. I’ll drink water, but I try not to eat. Flying really messes with digestion and, most of the time, I can wait 1-4 hours and eat when I land.

Also, I don’t drink the water on a flight, accept their snacks, or get hot coffee/tea. The water situation in the air is gross, and I don’t need that in my body.

Hydrate + electrolytes, duh! I won’t bore you with information that’s already all over the internet.

Control the Environment

I am incredibly specific about the hotels I stay at on the road.

I hate “corporate” hotels like chain Marriotts and Hiltons (sorry, points people!). I love a local, boutique hotel in a walkable area. This checks a lot of boxes for me.

Usually boutique hotels have:

• A real restaurant option with higher-quality food

• Quality coffee + breakfast/lunch options

• More curated choices overall

This also matters because I don’t usually workout on the road (keep reading), so being in a walkable area and having somewhere I can reliably get good food is a big part of my strategy.

Snacks & Consumption

I am never without a snack that I will actually eat.

For me this often looks like:

• Beef sticks (I like to travel with Paleo Valley)

• Midday Squares (love a sweet treat, cannot lie!)

• Fruit: Bananas/apples/oranges

• Protein bars (I like Jacob and Rawr bars - minimally processed, whole food ingredients)

I rotate things in different seasons and it depends on where I am going.

I also try to do protein in my coffee if it’s the first thing I am consuming (yes, I know coffee on an empty stomach is “bad” and yes, I do it anyway sometimes!) It’s one of my easiest ‘stay stable’ moves.

If I’m going to NYC, I know I’m going to be surrounded by healthy markets and options for organic/healthy snacks. If I’m going to a trade show and I know I’m barely going to make it out of a conference center for three days, I pack a lot of snacks.

Does it take planning and foresight? Absolutely. But it’s worth it for me to not be in a pinch and make a food choice that makes me feel like shit later.

Supplements

I go back and forth on supplements.

Sometimes I travel with them. Sometimes I use travel as an opportunity to pause my supplement regimen (I don’t take a lot of supplements to begin with). It also depends on what kind of trip it is.

For conferences, I always pack immune support. You’re around a lot of people for multiple days and no one wants to get sick.

My travel immune stack:

• Beekeeper’s Naturals Throat Spray

• Ion Immunity

• Cymbiotika Vitamin C

• Global Healing Zinc

This has been my immunity stack for several years and it WORKS.

Water

I am a psycho about water. No, for real. People I’ve worked with in the past have made fun of me for this. I don’t care.

I will not drink tap water. Not anywhere. I do not care if “New York City has the best tap water in the country!” (GROSS!!)

When you’re traveling, flying, changing climates, and working 14+ hour days, hydration is very important. I’m also incredibly specific about the type of water I drink.

Usually when I land somewhere, I find a store and buy a case of water to keep in my hotel room. I’ve even had cases of water delivered to my hotel room ahead of time (conferences in Vegas specifically) so that I have what I need when I get there and won’t be worried about being dehydrated.

This is a perfect example of the core theme of this post: think ahead, plan, and take 100% personal responsibility for your outcomes.

Restaurants / Dining / Entertaining

My top tip is to know your order and be okay with being boring!

My restaurant orders basically consist of: eggs, Greek yogurt, steak, salad, vegetables.

Sure, I will have a bite or share an app if it’s that kind of thing, but I usually just stick to my script. It’s way easier.

Movement

Okay, unpopular opinion here (maybe?!), but 90% of the time I do not work out when I travel.

There are a few reasons for this:

1. I usually don’t have time.

2. I’m also a woman! Getting ready, showering, hair, makeup, etc. takes time… and it takes more time after working out.

3. Packing workout clothes takes away room from the cute outfits I actually want to pack & wear. I’d rather have room for an extra pair of shoes (Facts!!)

Instead, I “stack” my workouts when I am home. If I know I have travel coming up, I do my best to get my movement in the days ahead of time when I’m home and in my normal routine.

And when I’m on the road, I prioritize walking. Always.

Coffee shop? Walk.
Dinner? Walk.
30-minute break in the day? Walk around the block.

This has worked really well for me.

I have also learned to not give myself a hard time about not working out on the road. I’m usually working a lot mentally, and that is enough to wear me out.

Energetic Maintenance

This one is HUGE for me.

I’m an extrovert! I love talking to people, staying out, hanging out. So I take in a lot of other people’s energy.

At some point along the way, I started showering every night when I’d get back to my hotel room. At first, I thought I was doing it because I would often be in conference centers vacillating between shivering and sweating all day, and I wanted to go to bed clean.

However, I later learned that showering can be a powerful energetic ritual – a way to cleanse and release other people’s energy.

This has now become my ritual on the road.

For starters, a warm shower is calming and soothing and can prepare the nervous system for sleep. Additionally, I use the water as a tool to cord-cut: to rinse off any energy I take in from other people and environments.

I’ll use a mantra like: “I call back my energy, clean and clear.”

This helps me come back into my body and release anything I picked up throughout the day.

This is non-negotiable for me. It doesn’t matter how late I get back, you better believe I am showering before I get into bed.

Other People’s Opinions & Personal Responsibility

Luckily, we are in a world now where choosing health is a lot more acceptable. But that doesn’t mean it’s always easy.

When I was sober and vegan early in my career, I cannot tell you how many comments I consistently got at dinners about “being boring” (LOL they clearly don’t know me that well!) or how I must have no fun or no joy in my life.

But my point is: people have a lot of emotions wrapped up in food and alcohol. And if you’re choosing healthier, it’s bound to trigger others. We all want “partners in crime” in one way or another.

Remember to stay on your own side, build a thick skin, and not let other people’s opinions change your course.

Also: you don’t have to explain your standards to anyone. Being in integrity with yourself is the real win.

I know some of this might sound like a lot, or you might be thinking “wow, that takes a lot of upfront effort.” And yes, that’s true.

But that’s because my body matters. My mental health matters. My energy matters. One of the only things I can control is how I show up – and you better damn well believe I’m going to do everything in my power to show up my best!

Joy + Living a Little

You can’t out-hack a personality! And the truth is, I LOVE traveling. I’m a Sagittarius – I’m built for movement, new cities, new restaurants, new energy.

I love exploring a city, finding the best coffee shops, working from a buzzing hotel lobby.

A whole milk cappuccino + a pastry at a French cafe in NYC? I’m choosing that every time!

Because joy matters. The point isn’t to be “perfect.” The point is to feel ALIVE. To experience my life. To enjoy the privilege of getting to do what I do.

The real skill is knowing the difference between:
A conscious choice that adds joy to the experience
OR
A slippery slope choice that steals your energy tomorrow.

For me, that’s the balance: I keep my foundation strong (water, protein, walking, sleep, nervous system)… and then I curate joy on purpose.

Because we cannot forget to LIVE a little. I’m blessed to get to do what I do, so why not enjoy the shit out of it?

So, yes I’m intentional. And yes, I’m enjoying it.

XO,
Helena

I’m very excited about 2026. There’s already a lot of people talking about the shifting energy astrologically and spiritually, moving from the year of the wood snake (a 9 year, a shedding year – and yes I’m sure we’ve all felt it) into the year of the fire horse (in February, technically), which brings us into a 1 year. Giving us fresh start energy, creativity, and movement. I’m extremely ready for it and cannot wait to dive in.

I also have a December birthday, so this time of year is always reflective for me. I naturally start looking at the previous year and the vision for the next. I always get an astrology reading around my birthday to support my process, and this year for me is all about WORK. And I’m pumped – it feels right on time and right on purpose. Most of my planets are clustered in my 10th house of career, so 2026 for me is about locking in and focusing on my company. I’m not trying to be too “girl boss” energy here, but I do think it’s important to recognize that life moves in cycles. Some are for resting and some are for grinding, and I happen to be moving into a work hard phase and I am READY FOR IT.

Anyway, that is a complete aside and update, but today I am here to share my thoughts on DRY JANUARY.

This was a completely spontaneous post, so bear with me as I ramble on a topic that I feel 100% qualified to speak about as a person who has never actually done Dry January, but has been alcohol-free since May 2016.

We had a quiet dinner with friends last night (NYE) and we were talking about the New Year, resolutions, health fads and trends, and we all sort of collectively agreed: why wait for January if you want to make a change in your life? I firmly believe anytime is a good time to make a healthy change. Like truly. Any day is a great day to start something new, choose yourself, or choose differently.

But that doesn’t mean January isn’t a great time too.

This is kind of my whole point, honestly. You don’t need January to change your life, but January can be a supportive container if you’re curious.

And I think curiosity matters more than people realize.

Because the most important project we will ever work on in our lifetime is ourselves. Not in a self-centered way, but in a “it’s our responsibility to live a great life” kind of way. How we show up, how we treat our bodies, how we treat other people, how we manage our energy, how we respond when things are hard. I personally believe we are here to evolve and grow and become more of who we actually are and live our best lives possible.

And yes, “best” is completely subjective. I don’t mean this in a “never good enough” kind of way, because that’s exhausting and honestly not the point. We need to acknowledge who we are and be at peace with ourselves at times. AND… I also think it’s our human responsibility and human nature to be seeking, growing, learning, wondering, dreaming, creating, influencing, towards the betterment of ourselves and the betterment of humanity.

Which brings me back to Dry January.

If you feel called to try being alcohol-free for a month, January is a great time to do it. Not because January is magical, or because you need a trendy reason, but because it sets up a few conditions that make experimentation easier.

First, other people are doing it. And there IS power in the collective. There is power in people moving in the same direction together. Call it inertia. Call it momentum. Call it whatever you want – it’s real. And you can use that momentum to support you with something that otherwise might feel a little harder.

This matters because a lot of change is less about willpower and more about environment. Sometimes it’s not that you “can’t” do the thing, it’s that your environment is working against you. January is one of the few times where the environment is kind of working with you.

Second, it’s Capricorn season. And I don’t care if you don’t believe in astrology or whatever – this time of year tends to support structure, commitment, and follow through. So if you’ve been thinking about taking a break from drinking, why not work with that energy instead of against it?

Third, experimentation. If you’re curious about how you feel without alcohol, how are you going to find out if you don’t try it?

I think a lot of people assume alcohol is neutral in their lives because it’s normal. It’s everywhere. It’s social. It’s the default. But normal does not mean neutral. Normal just means common. And if you’ve never taken a break long enough to actually see what changes, you’re missing important information about your own body, your own mind, and your own life.

So if you do try Dry January, I think it’s worth paying attention. A few things you could notice:

• Sleep quality

• Energy in the morning

• Socializing - how do you feel? How do you make others feel?

• Workouts & recovery

• Patience & reactivity

And probably a hundred other things I haven’t mentioned. But even picking one or two things to pay attention to can make the month feel more meaningful. It helps to have a “why.” In this case, you’re learning, you’re collecting data about your own life. You’re becoming a more conscious participant in your own experience.

But the truth is, you don’t need January, or anyone else, or a cultural trend to tell you when to change your life. Small decisions add up to big change, and you’re in control of how you show up every day. January can be a container. Capricorn season can be supportive. The collective can carry you. But ultimately, the decision is yours.

If you want to make a change, why wait?

XO,
Helena

As a spiritual girl, I know 33 is considered a big year. Angel number 33 is all about personal growth, creativity, and manifestation. It’s also a “master number” and often called your “Christ-consciousness” year (Jesus was allegedly 33 when he died) – more love, higher awareness, and a spiritual growth milestone.

In my household, though, birthdays are also jersey years. My husband ties every age to the best athletes who wore that number – which means 33 comes with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Larry Bird, and Scottie Pippen energy. So, no pressure!!!

To mark the occasion, I was inspired to capture 33 things that have shaped how I live today. Absolutely no one asked me for life advice, but in true spiritual-girl-with-a-Substack fashion, I’m sharing it anyway.

In honor of my little “Jesus Year,” here are 33 things I’ve learned so far (subject to change as I continue to evolve / mess up / learn again):

1. You have no idea how good it gets. One year ago I was in a corporate job that I hated and had no idea I’d be an entrepreneur a short 3 months later. It’s amazing what happens when you follow your gut and put in the work.

2. Learn that you can choose to create your own experiences. No, I’m serious. We get to choose every day how we show up and how we react to situations in our lives. Learn this and take it seriously.

3. Never stop believing in yourself!! Ever! People ask me all the time how my business is going and I often say, “I have a borderline delusional level of confidence in myself” (in the best way). You can in fact just choose to believe in yourself. :)

4. Ask for what you want – you might just get it. When I was 25, I was in an inside sales role and an Account Manager position opened up at my company. I thought the leader of that team was so cool and I really wanted to work for her. I asked for a meeting and told her I knew I had no AM experience, but I knew the company and I knew I could serve our clients in that position. She took a chance on me, and that single role change set me on the trajectory of my career to date. I have many examples of this. Be bold and go for it if you want something – it might just work out in your favor.

5. Say yes to opportunities – most of them. I won’t say all of them (use discernment, of course), but just say yes. You never know what one yes can lead to.

6. If you’re curious about something – chase it. Read, learn, talk to people. My curiosity has led me down many spiritual rabbit holes and I’m continuously shaped by the things I learn and unlearn along the way.

7. Consume a bunch of personal growth and health & wellness content in your 20s and implement what works in your 30s. I’ve found myself consuming less and stripping back my rituals and routines these days. Clarity comes with age and time, and it’s important to build that foundation.

8. Invest in your personal development. I don’t mean this in a woo-woo spiritual way or a therapy-speak way – I mean be someone who actually cares about becoming a better version of yourself. This can look a lot of different ways (mentors, coaching, reading, working out… whatever floats your boat!).

9. Learn who you are. See the coaches, the therapist, the mediums. Get the spiritual readings, go on the retreats. But don’t let it rule you – use it as a tool to get to know yourself and let yourself be your ultimate guide.

10. Be your own guru. The older I get, the more I find myself just wanting to turn inward and listen to my own heart and my own voice – and not the thousands of opinions of other people and spiritual gurus.

11. Wear your beliefs like clothing. Literally, change them as easily as you would change an outfit. This is something my husband always says, and we try to live by it. Be willing to change your mind when faced with new information. For example, I was vegan for a long time and now I’m not (thank God!!).

12. Learn to love hanging out with yourself. I am definitely an extrovert and love being around people, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve come to really enjoy spending time with myself. I think this is a skill that requires cultivation and can often be overlooked.

13. Marry your best friend. Seriously. I didn’t need someone to give me this advice because it happened for me anyway, but it’s the best thing I’ve ever chosen. In the words of the great T. Swift: “Please, God, bring me a best friend who I think is hot.”

14. Invest in your marriage (or relationship). I cannot stress this enough. My husband and I have been together since we were 21 and 23 and have been seeing a couples coach and working on our relationship consciously for 10 years. It’s one of the best investments we’ve ever made.

15. Having a sister is the greatest gift in the world. I know sibling relationships can sometimes be difficult, and I’m grateful my relationship with my sister has only gotten closer as the years have gone on.

16. They’ll forever be your parents. Seriously. They were doing the best they could. I read somewhere: “If you’re 30 years old and still blaming your parents for your life circumstances, grow up and take responsibility for your life.” I could not agree more.

17. Spend time with your parents. Cliché, but true. I’m at the stage where I wonder how many [insert holiday or occasion here] we might have left. Every trip, dinner, or extra effort is worth it. (I recently spent a day fishing with my dad and it was such a beautiful reminder of this.)

18. Let yourself grieve things you’ve let go of or have outgrown. This one is hard for me as I love to just move on quickly and pretend everything is always fine, but I’ve lost relationships over the years and really needed to allow myself space and time to process what letting go felt like (this goes for many other things, too).=

19. Health is wealth, baby!! This might be my #1. Investing in my health – mental, emotional, spiritual, physical – will always be my #1 non-negotiable because I know it’s a direct investment into my future self.

20. Do hard things. I hate working out (yes, actually loathe it). It takes everything in me to go into my garage and lift weights or get on the treadmill. Do it anyway.

21. Get comfortable cooking at home. Find easy things you love to eat and make. It’s such a beautiful way to nourish yourself and build healthy habits.

22. If a morning routine doesn’t work for you – don’t force it. Find what works for you and stick to that. Some days I like to meditate, some days I journal, some days I enjoy my coffee in silence, some days I walk the dog with my husband (I never work out LOL). I gave up feeling “guilty” about not being able to stick to a routine a long time ago.

23. Don’t let your job become your identity. I didn’t say don’t work hard, don’t try very hard, or don’t care a lot – do all those things if you want to be successful. Just don’t let it become all of you. Let it be a part of your life, not your whole life.

24. Tell the truth and speak up. Be the person who says the things that are uncomfortable to say – at work, in your family, in your marriage, with friends, etc. It’s always better to put it out on the table, IMO. You might be shocked that you actually build trust with people (this was true for me in my corporate career specifically).

25. Learn what you’re good at and outsource what you can that you’re not good at or don’t like doing. This goes for work and for life. You will enjoy your life more. I promise.

26. If you want to move – move. We moved out of Chicago on a whim in 2020 and it was one of the best decisions we ever made. Hard, yes. But I’m so glad we did it when we were young.

27. If you want to make new friends – you have to try. The older we get, the harder it is. We have less time and are pulled in more directions. Put in the effort if you want results. You also might need to “friend date” a lot of people.

28. Surround yourself with people you want to be like. I told myself I wasn’t going to talk explicitly about getting sober in this piece, but I want to make my point. When I was early on getting sober, I went to some AA meetings (I was living in downtown Chicago at the time). I would go into these meetings and I was not inspired by what I saw. Yes, you can say “well, duh,” but what I’m trying to say is: I wanted to be inspired. And I KNEW there were amazing, cool, thoughtful, rich, successful, smart people who were sober and I wanted to find them. And I did. And this helped me, because I wanted to be like them. The fastest way to be like someone is to be near them. So this goes for friends, business partners, mentors, life partners – put yourself in the zone with people who have lives you want to have.

29. Always make an effort to see friends and cultivate your network. I learned this one from my dad growing up. Anytime we would go somewhere as a family, my dad would say, “Oh, I’ll call up so-and-so,” and next thing you know we’d be out to dinner with an old college roommate he hadn’t seen in 15 years or a business acquaintance of some kind. My point is: be the person that makes the effort. Send the text, make the call, say, “Hey, I’m going to be in town.” Even if you don’t connect, they will remember. Your network is your net worth, after all.

30. Stop expecting other people to read your mind. Get comfortable asking for what you want, being clear about your expectations, and being honest. This goes for any relationship. The more you master this, the more satisfied you will be in your life and your relationships.

31. Stop complaining. Seriously. Just stop. It helps no one and creates absolutely zero positive results.

32. Read. Read a lot. There is so much to learn in books. Read fiction. Get lost in it. In a digital world, this is even more sacred.

33. Keep going. It only gets better every year.

Truly, it only gets better and better and better! There is so much life out there to live, and I’m really grateful I get to share a little slice of mine with you.

Thank you for being here and reading along.

XO,
Helena

Sobriety is one of those decisions where the returns keep compounding. You don’t get everything at once. The gifts reveal themselves slowly, year after year.

Here are the ones I feel most grateful for today.

A Clear Mind

My husband and I always joke that it took years to get the “gunk” out of our brains after we quit drinking. It’s funny because it’s true. Each year, my mind has gotten clearer – sharper, steadier, more regulated. I remember things better. I connect information faster. I’m in control of my thoughts instead of being tossed around by them.

Clarity, for me, is noticing. The subtle shifts in someone’s mood. The nudge that something needs to be said (or not). The quiet awareness that I’m choosing and designing my life on purpose.

I feel it most in moments that used to overwhelm me – hard conversations, uncomfortable feedback, tension with people I love. Sobriety didn’t make life easier; it made me more equipped to handle it.

An Open Heart

Sobriety strips away our ability to numb. You have to feel things. The highs aren’t as high, the lows aren’t as low, but I am able to move through the world with a groundedness and stability that wasn’t available before.

The biggest gift here has been connection. Real, meaningful, adult friendships – I’ve even built some of the most surprising, beautiful relationships in my work life. Sobriety opened the door for that.

Time Back

No more lost mornings. No spirals of shame. No hours wasted replaying what I said or did. We don’t talk enough about how much mental space guilt and shame steals.

Now, I get to spend my time living. I cherish soft mornings – warm drinks, reading, meditating, walking the dog with my husband. I have energy for my life, my body, my work. And I’ve reinvested that time into building a company, traveling, reading, my health, and actually inhabiting the life I’m creating.

Deeper Relationships

When I got sober, I committed to stop lying to myself – and that commitment extended to every relationship in my life. I cut the BS faster. I chose friends differently. And honestly, I’m grateful for the relationships that fell away. I would have held onto versions of myself I had outgrown.

Sobriety gave me the space to choose people based on who I am today, and who I am becoming, not who I was trying to be when I was drinking.

Connection to God

For me, drinking separated me from God. Sobriety brought me back. Not instantly, but slowly, over time as I learned that God has been with me always.

I’m in constant conversation with God now. I notice signs. I co-create my life with Him. And when you clear the noise and the numbing, you can hear things you didn’t even know were speaking. This gift came later in my journey, but it’s one of the most profound.

Integrity + Self-Trust

Sobriety began with becoming a woman I respected. If I wanted others to respect me, I had to become respectable. That was impossible for me when I was drinking.

Integrity, to me, is simple: Do what you say you’re going to do. Mean what you say. Tell the truth (to yourself first).

This rebuilt self-trust has shaped the way I lead, work, and build my company. People want to work for leaders they respect. And choosing clarity, health, and wholeness is one of the most respectable choices a person can make (in my humble opinion).

A Clear Vessel

Without alcohol in my body, I feel everything more clearly: food, energy, intuition, creativity. Once you know what “clear” feels like, it’s impossible to go back.

Removing toxicity – whether food, habits, or people – creates a vessel that can receive, discern, lead, and create. It’s not always easy, but the confidence that comes from living aligned is worth everything to me.

Deeper Gratitude

Sobriety taught me gratitude in layers. In the early years, it was survival. Now, it’s peace. I can appreciate the highs and the lows, the growth, the challenges, the relationships, and the constant unfolding of who I’m becoming.

I am forever grateful for the deep, quiet peace of knowing my life is my creation, co-authored with God. There is something indescribably sacred about that.

Perspective

My perspective has shifted slowly but in major ways over the years. When I first got sober, it was very much about me – how I was feeling, my experience, my healing (more on that later, I’m sure). Over time, it gradually moved toward how I show up in the world, the impact I have on other people, and the ripples I create.

Sobriety has allowed me to go back and forgive myself, to see my parents, friends, and peers in a more loving and generous way, without being triggered or viewing everything only through my own lens. It’s allowed me to see the whole picture and stay grounded in who I am.

Life is so big, so full, and so rich with experiences and opportunities if we allow it to be – and sobriety has gifted me with the perspective to embrace that.

Perspective is the gift of being able to appreciate both who I was and who I’ve become. I’m grateful for every version of myself that got me here.

Radical Personal Responsibility

The biggest gift I’ve received (and at some points, the hardest pill to swallow!) is that sobriety revealed the truth that changed everything: my life is my responsibility. Not in a heavy or punishing way, but in an empowering, liberating way. I am not a bystander in my own story. I am the creator of it.

Radical personal responsibility has been probably the single greatest gift sobriety has given me.

It’s the knowing that:

I am responsible for my decisions.
I am responsible for my reactions, my growth, my energy.
I am responsible for how I show up, every day.
I am responsible for becoming the best version of myself.

And, that means I also get to take responsibility for my joy, my success, my peace, my alignment, and the vision I’m building. Sobriety gave me the clarity and courage to own my life fully.

It’s always fun to reflect and look at how things have changed and compounded over the years. Sobriety truly is the gift that keeps on giving. Wishing you all a beautiful Thanksgiving and season of gratitude, nourishment, and grounding.

Thanks for reading!
XO,
Helena

The truth is, while I’ve always wanted to have an impact on people and be an example that you can live an awesome life sans-alcohol, I just never REALLY wanted it to be my whole vibe – my whole “brand,” if you will.

Now, I joke that I missed my chance to make it big as a sober influencer – seriously, I don’t think people realize how different it was 10 years ago.

Let’s take a little trip down memory lane.

It’s 2016, podcasts are not really a thing yet, Ruby Warrington hadn’t even published Sober Curious (that happened in 2018 and was really the book that put Sober Curious on the map), and no one was really KNOWN for being sober publicly.

There were a few women talking about it (Holly Whitaker and Laura McKowen are two that come to mind – look them and their books up; they really helped pave the way), but largely this was not yet a healthy or trendy topic to be discussing.

So me, a 23-year-old who pretty much built my entire adolescent and young adult identity around drinking, hanging out with people who drank, and figuring out where I was going to get my next drink, was a little… lost.

There were no cool, curated Instagrams to follow promoting living a sober, healthy life (there are tons now – and for that I am grateful), but my point is, I really had nowhere to turn – no one to learn from, be inspired by, or show me the way.

I remember one of the first things I did was start reading sober memoirs – one of them being Caroline Knapp’s Drinking: A Love Story (which was published in 1997!!!). It helped, but it also felt quite heavy.

I am forever grateful for the few voices that were available, because early on, they did help me feel less alone – but it wasn’t really what I was looking for.

Those early days were dark, they were hard, and I found myself questioning (and crying) a lot – wondering who I was going to be, what my life was going to look like, if I would ever have any friends again who like me if I didn’t drink.

I remember constantly thinking about things like:

“Omg am I really never going to drink at my wedding one day?”

“How will I ever enjoy a Notre Dame football tailgate again?!”

“What is my family going to think when I show up and tell them I’m not drinking anymore?”

The one thing that really consumed me was friendships. I was young, I was social, and I had no idea how to rebuild my friendships around not drinking (Friendships is probably a whole post for another day).

I was really yearning to meet other young women who also were on the journey of being sober, sober-curious, or alcohol-free. The problem was – I had no idea where to find them.

I call this next part my “Maya Angelou” moment, i.e. “Be the change you want to see in the world” (I later learned that apparently this quote is actually attributed to Gandhi, but I digress), and I decided that if I wanted to meet other sober young women, I would have to create it for myself.

(Lesson #1 in Sobriety: Radical Personal Responsibility.)

So what did I do? I logged onto the website MeetUp (anyone remember them??!!), signed up for an account, and created “Sober Curious Young Women MeetUp Group Chicago.”

I wrote a description and scheduled our first meetup for once a month at the Whole Foods in Lincoln Park. Shockingly, it found its way to a few women, and we started meeting with a handful of women who were trying to get sober, sober-curious for health reasons, or just wanted to meet other women who didn’t drink.

The group actually took off, and at one point we were meeting regularly with up to 40 women a month. That’s when I started to realize there was something here.

However, I was still pretty early in my own sobriety and I wasn’t sure about how I was relating to it, defining it and myself, and how I wanted to represent that – things that have all been part of the journey.

Once the group was growing (we ran from some time in 2017 until the 2020 pandemic shutdown), I started getting a lot of emails and calls from journalists and reporters who wanted to write pieces on the “Sober Curious Movement.”

I did several interviews – some saw the light of day, others didn’t (see below: front page of the Chicago Tribune Life + Travel Section!) – but I really struggled with how I wanted to represent myself and my sobriety so early on.

I found myself trying to navigate questions like,

“Am I really an alcoholic?” (spoiler alert: still undecided! And I don’t think it matters – a topic for another post!)

“Why don’t I like AA?”

“Who should I be telling about this?”

I was seeing positive results in my life: brain fog lifting, health improving, sleep getting better – but my social life was suffering.

I was growing distant from old friends, and I had really strained relationships with some important people in my life at the time. I really couldn’t make sense of who I was and who I wanted to be in my new “sober” identity.

AND at the same time, I also had a ton of support – I was constantly getting Instagram messages from acquaintances telling me how cool they thought it was and how inspiring I was.

Truthfully, it was just a very confusing time trying to reconcile who I was inside with the attention I was getting on the outside.

To be honest, my 15 minutes of sober-curious fame has always haunted me a little bit – I knew I was meant to be an example for other women, I was just afraid to fully claim that.

So, I really shied away from the attention. It was too much, and I needed to build myself up in private before I could be more public.

I tell people all the time that I really didn’t truly feel like myself again until four years sober.

I thought about it like my “high school graduation” of sobriety, and that came again at eight years sober (which felt like a “college graduation” of sobriety) – and then I was ready to be myself in the world again.

But my point is, it took a lot of inner work and a lot of cracking myself open and rebuilding to get to this place.

Additionally, my career and life were growing during that time period too – moving from Chicago to Tennessee, getting married, three job changes, and now starting my own business (more on that later, I’m sure) – so like I said, it’s all part of the journey.

All throughout these years I’ve talked to, supported, and mentored probably 50+ women who have also wanted to get sober. Private conversations in my DMs, phone calls, texts. So I’ve been watching the interest in sobriety and sober-curious content grow at the same time I was growing myself.

It’s amazing to see how many resources are now available for young people (I mean, we barely had any non-alcoholic beverages in 2016 and now it’s an entire CPG category!).

I think the biggest shift throughout this whole decade was that for me, it was never just about being sober.

It was about being a whole person.

Someone who is self-responsible, someone who chooses to live a healthy life, create healthy relationships, give my all in everything I do – and just being known for being sober wasn’t enough for me.

I wanted to do more and have more of an impact – and that’s why I’m here on Substack.

I’m finally ready to bring it all together, to be a whole human, who just happened to build my foundation on being sober.

And why Substack?

I’ve never wanted to post my face and talk in stories on Instagram. I just haven’t been able to bring myself to do it consistently.

Maybe it’s a natural reaction to a topic like sobriety – it’s so nuanced, so personal, so delicate – that I could never reduce it down to bite-sized reels and glossy images.

It never felt like me. And when it doesn’t feel authentic, you just can’t do it, you know what I mean?!

I’ve also had tons of people telling me to post more on LinkedIn and I just don’t think this belongs there either (not yet, at least).

I love the idea of Substack being a little more raw, free-flowing, long-form.

I’ve always been an avid reader (and now maybe also a writer?!) and I think it’s the best place for this kind of conversation to live.

So, am I an alcoholic?

Who knows, who cares?

What I can say is that after almost ten years alcohol-free, I love my life without drinking.

I love the opportunities it’s given me. I love being tapped in and tuned into my body, my emotions, and my health.

I love having my mornings back. I love knowing what I say, I mean.

I think the labels are unnecessary (this is also probably a whole other post).

If the last decade was about building my foundation, this next one’s about sharing what’s been built – honestly, imperfectly, and in my own words.

Thank you for being here and please let me know if there are any topics you want me to dive deeper into.

XO,
Helena

“How you do one thing is how you do everything.”

That’s my personal mantra – and the reason why my sobriety has become my professional superpower.

Let’s rewind for a second. I was your classic party girl. I loved organizing the night – where we were going, who was coming, what we were drinking. I thrived on it. It was my entire identity through college and early in my career.

When we talk about what makes us successful at work, we usually point to accomplishments, titles, or projects. Rarely do we look at the personal choices – the ones that shape us into who we truly are.

At 23, I started wondering if my drinking was a problem. Not that I said it out loud, of course, God forbid I admit it. I come from a lineage of alcohol use, so it wouldn’t have been shocking. But I was surrounded by other heavy drinkers, and it was hard to tell where the line was.

Eventually, I hit a point where I knew I couldn’t keep living that way. The turning point was simple but profound: “If I don’t respect myself, how can I expect anyone else to respect me?”

That realization led me to quit cold turkey. I never looked back. That was nine years ago.

What followed was a season of complete unraveling. I lost friends. I lost the identity I had clung to. I stripped myself down to the core and rebuilt from there. That journey, of becoming a woman I respect, is a story for another day. Today, I want to talk about what sobriety did for my career.

In my early twenties, I worked in sales. That meant endless events, happy hours, and networking over drinks. At first, I didn’t know how to navigate addressing my sobriety, opting to lead with “I don’t drink!”

But that was just a shield, an attempt to get it out of the way before anyone could ask questions. Shielding myself wasn’t sustainable, but I didn’t know how else to address this topic.

“Helena, you don’t owe anyone an explanation.”

Those words, from a trusted mentor (also sober) changed everything.

I stopped offering explanations. I didn’t lead with my sobriety, but I didn’t hide it either. I just let it be. And then something unexpected happened: I started noticing my edge.

One of the first moments it clicked was at a trade show in Vegas. My colleagues showed up the next morning exhausted and hungover. Meanwhile, I was up, clear, and ready to go. Present. Energized. Sharp. That was the first time I thought – wait a second… this is an advantage.

And the more I paid attention, the more I saw it. I remembered names better. I showed up early. I was prepared. I never needed to fake confidence or fill awkward silence with a drink in my hand. I was present – and that’s something you can’t buy, teach, or fake.

Sobriety didn’t just give me more mornings – it gave me more power, more presence, and more time to become the kind of leader I wanted to be.

Over the years, I’ve learned this simple truth again and again: How you do one thing is how you do everything.

The way I show up for myself after hours is the same way I show up in the boardroom. If I’m clear in my personal life, I lead with clarity professionally. If I’m grounded in my values, I can make hard decisions without spiraling.

Sobriety taught me that integrity isn’t compartmentalized. There is no “work self” and “home self.” There’s just me, and how I move through the world.

Sobriety is a journey – and it took me time to understand even if I stopped drinking, I never stopped being me. I still loved to go out, to dance, to connect with people. I’m an extrovert – why pretend otherwise? Pretty soon, I started gaining a reputation as “that girl who doesn’t drink but still has a great time.”

At first, I couldn’t believe people found that cool. I was still grieving my former self. But what I didn’t realize then was that I was becoming someone people deeply respected – for showing up fully, without numbing a single part of who I am.

Years later, I was out in Vegas again – this time during a job interview process with a fast-growing startup. Young CEO, party vibe, big energy. One of the lead investors asked me why I wasn’t drinking. I paused, then said: “Do you want the real answer or the fake one?” He said, “The real one.” So I told him the truth: “Because I went to rehab when I was 19 and I’ve been sober for 6 years”

He looked at me, nodded, and later that night said something I’ll never forget: “You’re the kind of person we build companies around.”

In that moment, I knew: my sobriety wasn’t a liability – it was my edge. My clarity. My discipline. My self-awareness. My ability to be 100%, 100% of the time.

A few years later, that CEO asked me to be his Chief of Staff. He told me he trusted me because I brought consistency, clarity, and groundedness to the table. My sobriety had helped me become a woman I respect – and a woman others could trust to lead.

And now? I’m the Founder and CEO of my own company (backed by that young CEO & that same investor.)

In a world that normalizes numbing, sobriety is a radical act.

And for me, it’s a superpower.

Not drinking didn’t make me less fun – it made me a force.

I started Superpowered as a space to write about what happens when you strip away the noise, the numbing, and the narratives we’ve inherited about life and success – and start leading with clarity.

I got sober (almost) 10 years ago and always shied away from talking too much about it publicly – partly because it was really hard back in 2016 (the sober curious and alcohol-free movement was nowhere near as popular as it is today), and partly because I didn’t want to be “known” for being sober.

However, over the years – as I’ve grown in my career, life, marriage, spirituality, and friendships – I’ve come to realize that my sobriety is the foundation of everything good in my life.

It’s my total superpower.

Now, I’m ready to share my musings and thoughts on sobriety, getting sober, staying sober, and ultimately choosing, every day, to author my own life in a conscious and loving way.

It’s about showing up awake – in business, in relationships, in life.

If you’ve ever felt like you’re meant for more but want to do it consciously – you’re in the right place.

Thank you for being here.

XO,
Helena