COCO BORDEAUX

The life changing magic of unfollowing hot people on Instagram

2018-03-01T10:12:00.000-05:00

Hi there, it's me. I wrote a new post, but it's not here. It's on my brand-spankin'-new web site, under my REAL NAME not this pseudonym that I've been hiding under lest my employer slash clients discover my innermost thoughts on the internet. So colleenbordeaux.com it is, and my web designer will be doing that magical thing where this URL auto-directs to my new site but I didn't want to just spring it on you, you know?

So! The post, near and dear to my heart, about the joyful magic of unfollowing hot people, can be read here. My new website took all of your feedback into consideration and includes a robust archive of all my articles, organized by category, that can be accessed here. Taking it to the next level, friends. Going from hobbyist to whole hog, whatever that means, and taking myself and my writing seriously from this day forward.

Thank you for all of your support, I love you, that is all.

Colleen

What it means to let go, and how to do it

2018-02-13T17:28:00.000-05:00

Hello there, happy Fat Tuesday and sixth week of 2018. This post has been floating around in my mind for a while, loose and seemingly random ideas that I've now realized are closely connected.

Wes and I started the year of less as a way to eliminate activities and things that weren't adding value in order to refocus our resources and energy on what truly matters to us. In the original post, I gave a lot of examples that centered on impulse shopping and eating out because those were the major activities that wasted our money, prevented us from appreciating what we already had, and kept us from planning, creating and enjoying healthy meals in our own kitchen.

After that post, I received a lot of comments, email and direct messages on Instagram about this idea of 'letting go,' asking if I'd considered expanding the definition beyond tangible things like shopping and eating to cover arguably more important topics such as how we spend our time and where we focus our attention.

The truth is, I hadn't gone very deep on what I really meant by 'letting go' as it related to the year of less. It was more of a reaction to all the stuff and Amazon boxes and overstuffed closets and overwhelm that came with a tough, disorganized year and wanting to get back to a simpler, more manageable and enjoyable life.

Thanks largely to all your comments and suggestions on how to expand the concept, I've been putting a lot of thought into what we mean when we say we're going to 'let go' of something. In a world where we're encouraged to always be adding more to improve our lives (more clothes, more things, more workouts, more progress, more connections, more responsibilities, etc.), it's sort of countercultural to shift your focus to letting go and having less in order to improve your life.

If you've been reading this blog for a while, you'll know that I'm a big proponent of taking control of your own mind and thoughts, and actively redirecting them to drive better outcomes. While the year of less is certainly about stopping the flow of 'more' and letting go of things and activities that aren't adding value, many of you have helped me to realize that I'd been missing the bigger purpose behind it. Yes, it's a challenge for Wes and I to create a better life for ourselves, improve our savings, and refocus on what matters - but at its core, this year is an effort to permanently shift my mindset, to train myself to identify areas of my life that are sucking time, killing energy, sapping joy and committing to do what it takes to drop them for good in order to live my best life.

Thinking about the year of less from this perspective has expanded the challenge beyond just dialing back my home, and has shifted the frame of how I was thinking about it. After mulling this over, I realized that to get the most out of the year of less, I needed to structure my thinking about 'letting go' according to the areas of my life with the most opportunity for improvement. I landed on five basic categories, and outlined them below along with some of the decisions I've made according to each category. Without further ado...

#1 Letting go of things

Although this has been covered at length in the original year of less post along with the basic rules for how we're stopping the flow of new, the things we already own that I've decided to let go of this year have been any material item in my home or life that isn't serving a purpose, clouding my ability to appreciate and use the things that are value-added. I've been purging my wardrobe and donating / consigning clothing, shoes and accessories. We've gone through our garage and gotten rid of an astronomical amount of clutter that has built up in that space in the year-and-a-half we've lived in our home (think old paint cans, broken appliances, the fluorescent lightbulbs that I hate and hide from Wes in there, lawn games we'll never use, etc.). I've been slowly working through our kitchen, starting with the dry goods and spices, to get rid of expired labels and items not aligned to our diet and reorganized those cabinets to put the commonly used items in easily accessible places to support our meal planning goals.

The tangible and measurable progress that comes with letting go of things is incredibly fulfilling, an exercise that it going to take many more months for us. (Even the thought of attacking my bathroom cabinet and drawers terrifies me…) It's been kind of fun to take stock of what we have in our possession, and put it to use in the way we intended to when we bought it. Rescuing an old bookshelf from the garage that formerly held clutter and placing it in our loft has allowed us to go through our paperbacks and bring them back out into the daylight to be read and enjoyed.

Rearranging the furniture and décor around the house has given me fresh ideas on how to design rooms to better support how we're using them, like hanging old shelves sitting in the back of our garage in the office to provide desperately needed storage. Opening my newly organized spice cabinet has inspired me to create new recipes and allowed us to stick to our meal planning goals, and we've been enjoying long homemade Sunday brunches at home and improving our communication as we discuss the week ahead and what meals we'd like to eat and what we need to get at the grocery store to create them.

#2 Letting go of habits

Although the original year of less post touched on some of the habits we needed to break (e.g., shopping mindlessly, eating out at restaurants multiple times a week, etc.), it didn't address the fact that there are plenty of habits we have that suck time and energy, sap joy, and don't add value. Things like spending too much time on our phones, drinking too much, spending too much time in front of the TV, throwing our things around our homes instead of putting them in their place, eating out of boredom, gossiping about coworkers, friends or family members, saying judgmental or negative things that make other people feel bad about themselves, avoiding paying bills, etc.

It can be kind of painful to recognize your own bad habits, and super uncomfortable to break them. However, it's necessary if you want to carve out the time and space to build better habits that serve you and help you to realize the outcomes you want in your life. For me personally, I've recognized that I need to let go of my habit of checking my email and social media on my phone during downtime. It's a distraction that limits me from fully enjoying time with my husband when we're hanging out at home, and sucks time and attention when I'm bored and might really need to be alone with my thoughts rather than looking at #fitspo on Instagram. So I've been considering putting some rules around it, including having off hours where I set my alarm for the next day, plug it in next to my bed, and don't touch it after a certain time of the evening, or implementing off days where I avoid use of my phone entirely except for text messages and phone calls.

Another habit that I've decided to let go of is throwing things around my home instead of putting them where they belong. Wes and I had gotten in to this habit when I was traveling and we relied on our cleaning lady to put everything back in its place only to have our house fall to disarray a couple of days later. It simply wasn't working, and it caused a lot of stress and fights. We decided to do daily and weekly chores and forego the cleaning lady altogether! Now we make our bed and straighten our master bedroom daily, clean our kitchen nightly, follow the 'one minute' rule for picking up around the house (if it takes a minute or less, just do it) and take a little time to divide and conquer bigger chores (e.g., vacuuming, cleaning bathrooms, etc.) every weekend. It's not perfect, but has definitely gotten rid of the cluttering habit since we know we'll have to deal with it!

#3 Letting go of thoughts

We hear a lot about 'negative self-talk' these days, and regardless of what you may think about it or the approaches to overcoming it, I think we all have certain mental loops that suck our time, damper our happiness and crowd out more productive thoughts. I'm going to put myself out there and share some of the mental loops that I get stuck in that I've decided to let go as part of this year of less:

· "Everyone has figured out what they want in life except me"

· "At this point in my life, I should have achieved more"

· "I'm unqualified to be doing this job"

· "Why is she so much more successful?"

· "I should weigh 120 pounds and wear a size 0"

· "The time I have to do this is running out"

I've realized that I have several mental loops that focus on defining success / achievement, comparing myself to others, and obsessing over weight / dress size and they are almost like background noise, thoughts that pop up often without me even realizing it. They're crazy and 0% value-added, they sap my joy, and they're totally fixable if I am willing to take control of my own mind and stamp them out.

Practically speaking, I've been attempting to recognize and catch these thoughts as they come, and redirect them to a more positive, productive place. Instead of allowing my mind to focus on weight or dress size, I will catch that thought and make myself consider if I've been eating clean, healthy foods that nourish my body. Instead of letting my thoughts center on comparing myself to someone and thinking about where I am falling short, I will catch that thought and redirect it to acknowledge all of the hard work I've done and support I've had to get to the place I am today. Instead of permitting my mind to stress about a false life clock that dictates when we need to do certain things (ahem, have a baby), I will catch that thought and refocus my attention on appreciating my life at the present moment. It sounds so crazy to type this out, but it has helped me to feel lighter, more free, and more grateful.

#4 Letting go of people

Honestly, I debated putting this one in here, but decided it needed to be said. We all have those coworkers, family members, long term acquaintances, childhood friends, etc. who are balls of drama and negativity. They're the people who take, but don't give; who complain, but don't listen; who judge, but don't reflect - and being around them always seems to sap your energy. As they say, ain't no one got time for that! They also say that you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with, so if you want to be an amazing, positive person who brings light to the world, your inner circle cannot include Debbie Downer who you've known since preschool.

The good news is, letting go of people is an actual solution. Really! Although for family members it is more about limiting your time, for almost everyone else it is actually quite simple and easy to do. You know who they are, they may know who they are, and you know the situations where you encounter them regularly. If it's a colleague you're trying to let go from your life, you'll need to find a way to change desks, or projects, or invest in a great pair of headphones or find other reasons to limit your interactions. If it's a family member, you'll need to figure out the events where they'll be and choose not to attend, or influence the seating chart to avoid interaction. If it’s a friend, you'll need to either fade away with noncommittal text messages or have an awkward conversation with them where you explain that you feel you're going in different directions. If it's a romantic relationship, you'll probably need to have the awkward conversation.

My point is, just make the decision to let them go and then do it. We all have these people in our lives, and while some of them may be worth the time investment to help them see the light and change, most aren't worth the cost of your time, energy and joy. We so often keep these people in our lives because it seems somehow easier than committing to one of the tactics I described above but the reality is that we end up just delaying the inevitable and wasting our precious time in the process.

#5 Letting go of obligations

Do you feel it, too? That pressure to say yes, to do all the right things, to be everything to everyone at every moment, to bite off more than you can chew, to be as overwhelmingly busy as everyone else? The truth is, so much of what we think we need to do (and define as 'obligations') are spreading us so thin that we're basically making no impact at all. We're not progressing, generating the outcomes we want, or pleasing anyone - especially not ourselves.

A few years ago, I read Greg McKeown's "Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less" where he articulates that relentless need to say yes so poignantly, and offers perspective on how to pare back to find meaning and purpose in what you do on a daily basis. It changed the way that I approached my work, made me so much more protective of my time, and in general improved my effectiveness. It also led me down a years-long reading wormhole (is that why they call us bookworms?) on the topic of how we spend our time relative to what we're trying to achieve. After rethinking the letting go process, I went back through my 'books to buy' note in my iPhone and downloaded Cal Newport's "Deep Work" that covers this topic from the lens of creative output and how to maximize it in a distracted world.

The concept has been blowing my mind lately, and is the reason I've been giving impassioned speeches on conference calls that could be titled "What the heck is this meeting for, anyway?" It also helped me to define 'letting go of obligations' as a category to evaluate as part of the year of less and consider the areas of my life where I feel obligated to do certain 'otherwise optional' things. We do things like attend weddings we don't really care about, accept invitations we don't really want, say yes to requests for help that we'd prefer to avoid, etc. There are two reasons to let go of almost everything you feel obligated to do, but would prefer to avoid. The first is because time is literally our only limited resource, and there simply isn't enough of it to spend doing those things that should be optional but you feel some innate sense of pressure to say yes. The second is because it is sort of dishonest to do those things that you wish you'd avoided. Personally, I don't want someone agreeing to have lunch with me because they felt they had to, but wanted to be somewhere else the entire time. So I've started taking the approach of, "if it's not a hell yes, it's a no" to optional requests of my time, time that could be better spent doing practically anything else - including providing the necessary downtime to sit on my couch in my pajamas for a full day to recharge.

I hope you found 'things, habits, thoughts, people and obligations' framework to be helpful when considering where you have opportunities to let go and refocus on what matters in your life. Would love to hear your thoughts on this post, and if you're going to be doing any dialing back yourself. As a Catholic, with the 40-days-of-less that is Lent starting tomorrow, this post was helpful in choosing what to give up for it. I'm toying with using Lent to change one of the most difficult areas to let go in my life and resolve it for good: my addiction to SkinnyPop. No, really. I hit rock bottom lately after Wes purchased a bag from Costco that was almost as tall as me and I cannot admit on the internet how quickly I consumed it. (See picture below.)

Anyway, that's all I have - thank you as always for reading and please let me know what you thought of this post in the comments!

Colleen

The Great Kitchen Purge

2018-02-01T13:56:00.000-05:00

Hello there, I'm writing to you from my clean, orderly kitchen and happy to report that one month in, 'the year of less' is going very well. To be fair, we've had a few challenges and still have a ton of work left to do, but I thought this post could serve as an update on one of the most impactful projects we've completed to date and its effectiveness at improving our lives and savings overall.

Since there are literally dozens of mini projects that we need to do that involve sorting, tossing, and organizing, we started with the ones that were most relevant to the habits we are trying to break as part of this year of less. In reflecting on the past month, I've realized that our commitment to omit non-social eating out has been the hardest habit to break and has also paradoxically led to the most amazing benefits well beyond our savings goals.

So this post is going to cover just one project, which I will henceforth refer to as "The Great Kitchen Purge of 2018" that entailed organizing our kitchen to make it as easy as possible to plan, purchase, and cook our own food in support of the goal to break our eating out habit.

This project was formally initiated when Wes and I sat down at our kitchen table with a pad of paper and a pen exactly one month ago, and talked about the meals we both liked and could easily make at home (which fall in either the Crock Pot or frozen protein + fresh produce categories), and wrote them down on a Post-It note, along with the ingredients we needed to make these meals.

With a clear understanding of the meals we wanted to make at home, we needed to 1) understand what ingredients we already had 2) identify the ingredients we needed and 3) organize our kitchen to make it as easy as possible to use these ingredients and create the recipes of our dreams.

In order to understand what ingredients we already had and organize our kitchen to make it as easy as possible to use them, we embarked on an inventorying and organizing process which entailed:

Purging the spice and oils cabinet, which taught me that I love impulse buying cayenne pepper (we had no less than four containers of various sizes) and owned bay leaves that lived in individual jars a la the decaying rose in the Disney Beauty and the Beast movie. Literally everything came out of the cabinet, and I tossed anything expired, suspect or rarely / never used. Then I reorganized the spice and oils cabinet to put the spices and oils we use most often (cumin, oregano, parsely, red pepper flakes, sea salt, avocado oil, coconut oil) on the easiest-to-reach shelf and DID NOT CROWD THEM. No sir, no mam. Those spices and oils have room to breathe, to stretch, and be seen. Meaning that they shout at me, "Make white turkey chili!" or "How about chicken taco lettuce wraps?" the moment I open the cabinet.
Cataloging the dry goods cabinets, which showed me that I inherited my mother's tendency to believe that dry goods can be harbored and used to survive for decades in a bomb shelter should we need to go down that road. Those expiration dates are just marketing! Wes and I used to have CONSTANT debates about expiration dates. He's a stickler for them, I ignore them except for perishables. Realizing that Wes would not eat things like chickpea pasta purchased back in 2014, all dry goods past or approaching their expiration dates were tossed. As were all dry goods that are no longer conducive to our diet (goodbye, wheat flour, white sugar and breadcrumbs). Our dry goods cabinets were reduced to a hand-selected assortment of lentils, cannellini and garbanzo beans, flax and chia seeds, cans of diced tomatoes and grain-free things like edamame spaghetti noodles and almond flour.
Downsizing the nuts and sweets cabinet, which demonstrated that we have a strong preference for marcona almonds, macademia nuts and walnuts, yet tend to allow pine nuts to waste away because Wes hates them. In the process of going through our nuts and sweets cabinet, I decided that I was no longer going to do things like toast my own pine nuts and toss them with my own plate of long-expired chickpea pasta while Wes eats leftover Papa John's pizza. We also threw away the wayward candies and sweets that get tossed into that cabinet and forgotten. Wes doesn't have much of a sweet tooth, and I stopped eating sugar almost entirely back in July. (Instead, I purchase Lily's vegan, sugar-free dark chocolate bars in bulk to have on hand when I inevitably get a sweets craving.)

It took about a weekend to get through all of these cabinets, and resulted in a TON of junk getting tossed that was distracting us from the meal options sitting right in our very own kitchen that we'd been ignoring in favor of heading to a restaurant. With a clear view of what we had on hand, along with a list of ingredients we needed to make the staple meals we'd agreed on, we went grocery shopping to fill in some of the gaps of items we wanted to have on hand - organic chicken stock, canned green chilies and jalapenos, jars of roasted red peppers, frozen organic shrimp, ground turkey, salmon, and chicken breast - as well as the produce we needed to create our meals for the week.

In case you're curious, here are the basic meals we've had in our rotation:

White turkey or chicken chili, made with organic frozen meat that we defrost in the refrigerator the night before and put in the Crock Pot in the morning (I love this recipe from Williams Sonoma, altered to remove dairy)
Baked salmon or tilapia with roasted vegetables, made with organic frozen filets that we defrost in water shortly before cooking and organic produce purchased that week (typically broccoli, green beans, Brussels sprouts, etc.)
Sausage and lentil soup, made with canned tomatoes, dried lentils, and spicy Italian sausage (here's the recipe we love)
Shrimp or chicken stir fry, made with onions, garlic, a little coconut oil, red pepper flakes, almond butter, low sodium soy, and assorted fresh vegetables. Someone suggested we buy a party platter of chopped vegetables each week, and it's THE BEST for cooking two-person meals and limiting waste. We add snap peas, pepper and broccoli to shrimp stir fry and snack on the rest.
Taco salad, made with organic frozen lean beef or turkey and organic taco seasoning and served over chopped romaine with canned jalapenos and roasted red peppers.

A couple of other notes: we've been cooking extra dinner, and then packaging it for lunch the next day. It's not a perfect lunch planning system, but has been a dramatic change in the amount of 'buying lunch out' of our former lives. We've also decided to allow takeout once per week as needed, as well as one date night per week. For takeout, we plan to order Thai on nights where we both have to leave early and work late and have been buying cauliflower rice each week to have on hand as a replacement for the white rice to keep it healthy.

The Benefits of Our Great Kitchen Purge of 2018

This may sound crazy, but this exercise has dramatically improved both our relationship and our waistlines beyond the obvious monetary savings we expected.

From a relationship perspective, taking time to plan our meals for the week on Sundays (over a homemade brunch of coffee, eggs and almond flour pancakes) has led to better communication about our work and social obligations. We used to fight when one of us (OK, usually me) forgot to mention that we had to work late, or had a client dinner, or scheduled plans with a friend on a Friday night. Now we have a structured time to talk about our upcoming week, and jot down a simple meal plan on a Post-It note that we use to guide our grocery shopping that day, and then put on the refrigerator as a reminder. We've also decided to allow one date night per week, with the rule of treating it as a special occasion. It's amazing how much more fun our nights out have been with that mindset shift.

From a waistline perspective, it's natural that cooking at home more often gives you improved control of what's going in to your body. But I think there are a few other factors in play related to the weight loss we've both experienced this month:

Our meal time has shifted to be an experience rather than a utility: we started taking time to set the table, light candles, play music and actually enjoy each other's company for 45 minutes vs. our old pattern of running out to a restaurant in starvation mode, eating quickly, not registering as full, and finding ourselves snacking at 9p.
One of my personal goals related to the 'letting go of things and activities that don't add value' was to stop my obsession with weight and dress size (if we're connected on Instagram, you may remember this mini post on the topic): instead, I decided to replace it with a healthy focus on eating whole, clean, nutritious foods. Redirecting my thoughts has been challenging, but has resulted in me thinking about eating less often, and therefore actually eating less in general. Who knew!
Overall, we're in a happier and more contented place in our lives and relationship: in addition to the better communication, improved connection over meals and what that means for our relationship, Wes and I are individually in better places. For me, I think it's largely because I'm focusing so much more of my energy and attention on what I have vs. what I do not have, and seem to have more time to spend thinking and reflecting. Although I'm certainly no expert on the topic, a lot of what I tend to read related to health claims that our mental states directly impact things that affect weight like gut health, sleep, etc.

At some point I'll do a comparison of what our hard savings are in the category of omitting eating out but thought that these benefits were surprising and a lot more interesting to share. Also, I'll be sharing a bonus post with the breakdown of all of the projects we've completed this month, along with the simple, low or no-cost approaches we utilized to get them done. If you're interested in this content, please sign up for the newsletter.

Thanks so much for reading, and for all of your input / suggestions / tips related to this year of less challenge (especially those meal planning tips… all of them were spot on)! Please feel free to let me know your thoughts in the comments, and I hope you have a wonderful rest of the week!

How to bundle up in style

2018-01-15T17:00:00.000-05:00

Hello there! Happy mid-January to you. Popping in to give a brief update on how the year of less is going, and also update an old post from the archives of this blog covering a topic near and dear to my heart this time of year: how to style your outfits when you live in a climate of single-digit temps, snow, and slush. You know, the kind of place where it becomes socially acceptable to show up to social gatherings in marshmallow coats with snot frozen to your face, glasses fogged over, and pants that you've slept in (possibly multiple nights in a row). (I've been there… recently… so this refresher is for both of us.)

Ok, first things first: the YOL update! Two weeks in, and we're going strong with meal planning and have received only one Amazon Prime delivery to restock my Skinceuticals CE Ferulic serum. I've had zero temptation to buy anything, but we have run into a few questions around rules for the year:

Are we going to allow ourselves a 'date night' budget that counts as social eating out, or does it need to be eat at home if it's just the two of us?
Should we have more constraints around budgets for social eating out? After I went out to dinner with a girlfriend at an extremely hip, very expensive restaurant and we accidentally had multiple very expensive bottles of wine, Wes made the point that it would be easy to inadvertently shift our savings into overspending in other areas we're allowing for this year and it might be wise to hold ourselves to a cap each month.
Do candles count as groceries? (I burn candles constantly, and they are important triggers for me to unwind, right up there with music and dimmer light switches.) My candle supply is going to last me until mid-February, so have a little time to think on this one.
How should we handle birthdays? Allow for gifts, or contain it to experience-based investments?

If you have advice or thoughts on how we should answer these questions, please feel free to leave me a comment or shoot me a note.

Alright, on to the topic at hand for this post: how to avoid succumbing to the temptation of dressing like the Michelin man for the next few months. If you live closer to the equator or in the southern hemisphere, you can drop off here.

Figuring out how to style myself for an average winter day was challenging when I moved back to Chicago a few years ago. Learning how to invest in outerwear and boots was one part of the challenge, but figuring out some of the following questions took time for me:

What kind of pants do I wear with equestrian boots? Snow boots? Chelsea boots?
What kind of socks do I need to wear so they don't fall off in my boots?
Are there ways to style my clothes so I can avoid wearing tights?
What kind of coat do I need to wear with a dress? A tunic?
How can I layer myself so that I don't suffocate on my train commute?
How do I wear these leather leggings in a way that does not make me look like a dominatrix?

You get the idea. They sound funny when I type them out, but all of those questions have come up for me in the past as I tried to get dressed for the cold.

If you've been reading for a while, you know that I am big on planning out your outfits in advance in order to improve your style. You also may remember that I believe that all outfit planning should start with selecting the shoes (or boots) that will work for the various activities you have going on in a day. I know some people wear snow boots and carry extra shoes with them to change into at work or at a party, but for me that's too fussy and would introduce the risk of forgetting or losing my shoes.

Anyway, I am saying all of this because I spent one Sunday afternoon planning a few weeks' worth of outfits to avoid YOL boredom / temptation to buy, and decided to kill two birds with one stone by sorting through every single pair of winter-appropriate footwear I own and building outfits around every pair to have plenty of options for the various* activities I do during the winter.

Speaking of boots, this is a great segue to the first tip below - I hope you enjoy them all (and the reminder if you remember this post from back in 2015)!

#1 Collect boots that multitask

Invest in boots you love that can be worn in a variety of settings, from hiking through slush to the train, to meetings at work and social events on the weekends. I ignored the over-the-knee boot and Hunter boot trends for this reason, because I didn't think they would get great mileage in my wardrobe. A great pair of black ankle booties with a pointed toe, a pair of flat boots in black leather that are roomy enough to be worn with Smartwool socks, and a pair of knee-high black rubber equestrian boots for really snowy days are really all you need. A few years ago, I also invested in a great pair of black suede mid-calf pointy-toed Sigerson Morrison booties that are the perfect high heel replacement for any outfit.

Since this was originally posted, I also added a pair of simple Stuart Weitzman tall black leather flat boots that hit just below the knee, and ended my search for a pair of boots with the comfort and utility of UGGs but chic. (The ones I bought were from House of Harlow 1960, pictured below.)

#2 Up the quality of your sweaters

I have a few amazing cashmere and wool sweaters (I love the brands Vince, ACNE and Eileen Fisher) in neutral colors (cream, black, gray) that are on constant rotation in my wardrobe during the winter. I've shown an oversize ACNE one styled a few ways in this post. After cutting out shopping for a year, I realized that I gravitated towards my sweaters that were super high quality, slightly oversize, and in neutral colors. After recognizing that, I made an effort to avoid anything that didn't meet those qualifications and developed a willingness to spend significantly more if I found one that did.

#3 Invest in a several simple-yet-wonderful coats

In cold temperatures, your coat sets the tone for your whole outfit and it's worth having a good selection that you can rotate. Over the years, I've invested in a few basics with timeless shapes (like a wool pea coat and a long blazer coat) and have used them season after season. You can also layer lighter coats to get more out of your collection. I should also note that I have a long down jacket a la sleeping bag that I use for purely utilitarian purposes like taking my dog out and other non-stylish events of the like.

(As an update to this tip, I decided to style my long down jacket with an oversize cashmere scarf, great shearling gloves and apres ski boots for an example of how to upgrade the basic leggings-and-UGGs when you venture out on the weekend! See below.)

#4 Use hats as a statement piece

For a really long time, I hated hats and convinced myself that they'd ruin my hair volume and make me look ridiculous. But they are absolutely essential to staying warm, so I got over it and have since built up a nice collection of cool hats that not only keep heat from escaping from my scalp but also add an element of cool to my winter outfits. I've got a Russian fur hat, a basic American Apparel beanie, a classic French wool beret, and a cashmere beanie that I rotate as accessories. When I started thinking of them as accessories, it changed everything. Where my 22-year-old self would think I look crazy in a hat, I think they lend my outfits an air of "I don't take myself too seriously" or just that practicality never goes out of style. As my dad says, it's impossible to be cold if you're dressed right.

#5 Add an unexpected accessory

By unexpected accessory, this can be a pair of fun earrings, a vintage silk scarf worn as a bracelet, or a beautiful clutch that hasn't gotten enough airtime lately. Lately, I've been trying to mix in my 'summer' bags to freshen up the monotone, all-neutral looks I tend to wear this time of year.

#5 Mix and match your hats, scarves and gloves

I've built a small collection of oversize cashmere scarves in neutral colors (one each in black, gray, and cream) and love to mix and match them with my collection of hats-of-varied-textures referenced in point #3 above. Because my scarves and hats are so simple, they go with all my coats and add variety and a much-needed element of eclectic luxury for those days that I'm plodding through slushy, brown snow to the train.

#7 When all else fails, wear red lipstick

My aunt recommended Armani Express Moisture lipstick a few years ago when I was complaining that my dry, chapped lips were interrupting my lipstick game. I picked it up in the perfect red shade called Rouge Ecstasy and it's changed my life. Even when there are tears frozen to my face, I feel stylish whenever I wear it. I wear it constantly and it lasts forever, and is worth every cent. However, if you cannot reconcile spending $40 on a tube of lipstick, Burt's Bees lip balm with a red tint does the trick as well and adds some much needed color to a simple-yet-very-warm outfit of all neutrals.

That's all I've got for you, hope you enjoyed this post and would love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

*By various, I mean three activities, if we are not counting my homebody habits of sitting in front of my fireplace in my pajamas or in front of Wes's ginormous TV watching Netflix with a Costco-sized bag of SkinnyPop at the ready. (Which has been done more nights in the past two weeks than I care to admit. Old habits die hard, especially in winter.) Those three activities are going to the office, dining out with friends, or relaxing with friends via pedicure, Chinese massage, or sitting around someone's living room with wine and Cards Against Humanity.

The Year of Less

2018-01-01T16:21:00.001-05:00

Happy first day of 2018, folks! Thank you so much for your readership and all of your support over the past year, and especially the outpouring of love and encouragement following my last post on the struggle that was 2017. I'm happy to report that we're on the up-and-up, photo of us smiling in Hawaii as proof.

Today marks the beginning of a year-long project that I am calling "The Year of Less" because it is focused on subtracting things and activities that are not adding value to my life in order to achieve a few objectives that are important to both me and Wes. It's a long post, intense with lots of bullet points, most of it written in my iPhone notes over the past several weeks. Some of you have reached out to me via email or Instagram that you're taking steps this year to reduce your own consumption. I encourage you to share your thoughts and approaches in the comments on this post for the other readers of this blog who might see a need to cut back in their own lives, but the approach I am describing here might not be an appropriate fit for what they may want to accomplish. That said, here's the post:

What The Year of Less is all about

If you read my last post on happiness and living life to the fullest, you may remember that there was a nod to the idea of living beneath your means. An idea that honestly used to tick me off, growing up with frugal parents who made me babysit and do odd jobs to earn money and ride around in ultra-uncool cars.* Basically, my parents were extremely wealthy and we wanted for nothing: my dad was a corporate litigator for the largest power utility in the country, my mom stayed home to raise us, we lived in a 6-bedroom, 4-bathroom McMansion that they custom-built in a community so elite that the village property taxes paid by individual families regularly hit the 20 to 30 thousand dollar mark and the high school student parking lot was filled with Range Rovers.

In the midst of this abundance of wealth, my mom and dad's strategic approach to parenting was to convince us that we were dirt poor, a giant Irish Catholic stereotype plopped into a bubble where we didn't belong. They provided the basics and routinely reminded us of this fact: roof over our heads, three square meals a day, the necessary clothing, shoes and accessories for our lifestyles and various extracurricular interests, etc. My dad was notorious for telling us that he owned everything, including the shirts on our backs, and that our home was not a democracy but a dictatorship. Our room and board was contingent on successful completion of daily and weekly chores that were cruel and unusual punishment: making our beds and cleaning our rooms, clearing the table and doing dishes after dinner, sweeping the floors for the former, and Saturday morning yard work** for the latter.

Three things happened to me as a result of this parenting style:

I learned what it took to make money, and how much the non-necessary things I wanted cost in both money and the effort to make that money.
I developed expensive taste and love to spend money on beautiful things.
I married a CPA who routinely goes to lunch at Costco to eat a $1.50 lunch of hot dog and soda.

My point is, this concept of living frugally despite having plenty of money is sort of embedded in my psyche. It was probably one of the subconscious reasons I was attracted to and then married Wes, because he embodied this value my parents prioritized yet I detested growing up and my subconscious mind figured he would keep point #2 above in check.

Although it took some time to land on a balanced approach to spending versus saving versus investing our money, Wes and I made it a priority to strike that balance early in our marriage. (For more on our approach to money management and building wealth, read this post.) In 2017, we were faced with a few major challenges but money was never part of our decision-making process because of the fact that we had been consciously living beneath our means and had a generous cushion of savings.

In reflecting on the past year, I've come to recognize a few things as true and important that need to be a bigger priority in my life:

Wes and I have enough, of everything. More than enough, in fact, in our home and in our closets and in our lives.
We have done a bad job of appreciating and valuing and using the more than enough that we have, and spending time and money on things and activities that aren't adding value.
Because of point #1 and point #2 above, we are effectively bloating ourselves, complicating our lives, and adding unnecessary stuff and stress and weight and spending money that would be so much better used to grow our investments and savings.

This is a problem, people. Maybe you can relate, or possibly Wes and I are alone on this. If you've been reading this blog for a while, you'll remember that I did a "no new things" challenge where I cut out shopping for wardrobe-related things for an entire year. It was the best thing I ever did to hone my personal style: it totally revamped my approach to how I thought about spending related to my wardrobe, allowed me to fully inventory my closet and make best use of what I already owned, and enabled me to make some amazing, thoughtful, formerly cost-prohibitive investments in a select few pieces to fill gaps or add a fresh element that I'll use for years. It worked, and fundamentally changed how I thought about and made purchases.

The objectives for the Year of Less

For 2018, Wes and I have decided to partner on a project to subtract the activities and things that are not serving us. It will be an expansion of the "no new things" challenge mentioned above, covering much more than just wardrobe purchases in order to accomplish the following objectives:

#1 Appreciate, value and take better care of what we already own

There are only so many opportunities in a 365-day period to actually use an item that you own, be it a zucchini noodle slicer or a pair of leather leggings. From a home perspective, we have a list of at least 50 little projects that need to be completed but will be left untouched and the supplies collecting dust if our focus were to remain on acquiring new or different décor or gadgets. From a wardrobe perspective, having too much stuff paradoxically cramps your style because it distracts you from using the items that you love, that are your favorites and deserve more repeat wears throughout the year but fall to the wayside when you introduce alternatives that you don't need or really love as much.

Absolutely all of our basic needs are covered, and then some, for the next year. Forcing ourselves to use what we already own will keep our focus on the abundance we enjoy in our home, and our life in general. Constraints inspire creativity, after all. Personal style, an amazing home and a fulfilling lifestyle all require thought, planning, and originality. They also require love, in the sense of caring for and appreciating the elements you're using to build your style, design your home or create a more purposeful life.

Yet we don't consciously take the time to consider all of the elements we have in our closets or our homes, and ask ourselves if they are truly adding value and serving our lives in the way we thought that they would when we bought them in the first place. In The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy (one of the best books I read in 2017), I learned about the "5X" principle: if you want to truly understand the cost of something you are purchasing, take the price and multiply it by 5 - it will give you the approximate value of that money had you chosen to invest it.

Before you start asking things like "After how many years?" or "What type of investment are we talking about?" or "What if the market were to crash?" or "Isn't this an oversimplification?" let me just say that I appreciate the 5X principle as a framework and a way of better evaluating what we purchase by contrasting it with an approximation of the potential value of that money if applied differently. We will be using that principle to evaluate everything we currently own, and everything we buy after this year of less.

#2 Develop the mental strength and habits to drive better outcomes in our lives

If you read The Baby Post, you'll remember the easy-yet-in-utter-disarray life that I described. So this is a big one for us. Despite the fact that I was consciously cutting back from a wardrobe perspective, I still bought more than I needed this year while already having too much in my closet. From a home perspective, we're still overwhelmed with so much STUFF and it is actually causing stress. And even amidst this overwhelm of stuff and stress, we're making thoughtless impulse purchases, shipping Amazon Prime boxes to ourselves and keeping the 7-Eleven down the street in business.

If you study up on the psychology of purchasing decisions, the general perspective is that we buy things we don't need for one of two reasons:

We feel pleasure when we spend money: it "scratches an itch," so to speak, by altering our mental states from a place of discomfort - same goes for eating, drinking alcohol, etc.
We believe the thing we are buying will solve a problem that we are currently struggling with: it's a a quick fix, so to speak. For example, gained weight and don't feel good about yourself? Why not solve it with a new pair of pants in a different size that make you feel better? Or, insecure and feeling unloved? Why not purchase a designer bag that will cause others to envy or admire you?

It's so crazy, right?! But absolutely true. For me, and for Wes, impulse purchasing has been a mental crutch to supposedly solve for a whole bunch of problems. We'll have a few drinks to escape the uncomfortable mental state we're in after a stressful day at work, or run out to buy some unnecessary snacks from 7-Eleven because we're watching a movie, a bit bored and it's a thing to do. Then we think that we could stand to lose a couple of pounds, so we order some fitness products on Amazon Prime that we will definitely use instead of stick in a closet to collect dust / remind us that we have still not broken our drinking and / or snacking habit.

My point is, the thoughtless spending is a mental problem. It requires self-awareness and mental strength to recognize what's driving your desire to consume something, and then rise above it. Keeping our focus on the abundance we enjoy in our lives and using what we already own will put our minds in a better place of appreciation and contentment.

The rules and guidelines for The Year of Less

In order to accomplish the objectives of taking better care of what we already own and developing better habits, we will be implementing the following rules for all purchases we collectively make in 2018:

Eliminate all retail shopping entirely, including Amazon Prime, with the only exception being for groceries, health or skincare-related necessities (i.e., supplements, medication, SkinCeuticals, etc.)
Eliminate all wardrobe-related purchases, including eBay, vintage and thrifted pieces allowed in the original challenge, and live with existing wardrobe for the next 365 days
Eliminate all non-social eating out (e.g., Starbucks runs, buying lunch at work, our new habit of eating at restaurants 3-5 nights per week due to disorganization and lack of planning)
Eliminate all home-related purchases, except for improvement projects that add resale value (i.e., refinishing floors, updating fixtures or appliances, etc.)
Donate or sell every item in home not used by 12/31/2018.

Sticking to these rules will force us to create better habits, including:

Planning out our meals and buying groceries in advance to prevent emergency dining out scenarios (if you already do this, would love any tips / advice)
Inventorying everything we own, and organizing our home to support using the things we find worth keeping to test how value-added each item truly is in our space
Updating our nightly and morning routines to include eating breakfast at home, packing lunches and preparing dinner
Planning out my outfits on a rolling 30-day basis to rotate and use all of the elements I own, and prevent the illogical desire to buy something new.

Although I am sure this sounds slightly crazy or extreme to many of you, I am honestly feeling a little relieved to get started. It's going to be uncomfortable, and difficult. But we needed something drastic to break our patterns that have created many of our unnecessary struggles. It will also help to dramatically grow our cushion of savings, beef up our investment strategy and give our future selves a gift of better habits, more wealth, an improved mindset, and an appreciation of the blessings in our life that have manifested as stuff we currently have in our possession.

If you've made it to the end of this post, thank you so much for reading and I hope you found some value in it. Would love to hear your thoughts in the comments, or feel free to shoot me an email. I'll be sharing a lot of bonus posts about our full journey and lessons learned throughout the course of the year. If you're interested in access to all of these posts, feel free to join the newsletter. If not, you can check back here for some of it!

*To be specific, these two cars were either a maroon Ford Taurus sedan (the preferred option) that deteriorated in a compounding manner as each of my five siblings gained a driver's license and proceeded to get in minor scuffles with inanimate objects in parking lots and spill every single beverage that entered the car's gray polyester interior, or a giant Ford Clubwagon van that we referred to as "The Church Bus" for its cavernous capacity and ability to hold all eight of my family members. These cars instilled in me a deep love of walking and public transportation, and later led me to purchase a BMW X5 to compensate which I deeply regret every time I fill the tank with premium gas or have to pay to get it serviced.

**Even when there was no raking leaves or lawn mowing that needed to be done, my dad would make up jobs for the sole purpose of waking us up early and keeping us busy. He got particularly bad about this after I challenged him multiple times, accusing him of having 6 children so we could do all this work for him. He laughed for a solid five minutes. Later, after observing that no other family on our block had a gaggle of children raking leaves or mowing the lawn, I suggested that he outsource to one of our neighbor's landscaping companies, mentioning that I knew he could certainly afford it. Eventually I gave up and just did the work without protest, and took a job working at a bakery in town the moment I could be legally employed. I'd get to work at 5:30a on Saturday mornings as a 15-year-old in order to avoid yard work and eat as many cookies as I wanted.

On happiness and living a full life

2017-12-19T15:38:00.000-05:00

You know when you start complaining about something, and the person you're complaining to tries to put it in perspective by saying something about how you're lucky that you're not a starving child in Africa or missing a limb or a Syrian refugee and your problems aren't really that bad?

It's the WORST. Technically you know they're right, but since you're NOT a starving child in Africa and all you've got is your own unique set of problems to worry about, trying to focus on starving children doesn't solve anything. Problems are relative. A fact that doesn't make the ones you suffer any less painful to you.

Then there are those people who tell you to just smile, because your muscle memory will convince your brain that you are ACTUALLY happy instead of a girl in two-day-old pajamas with a three-week-old melancholic mood that subsides occasionally but settles right back in once she's alone with her thoughts. And she is going to fake smile about it OVER HER DEAD BODY.

There's a reason that people like to tell you that your problems aren't that bad, to put on a fake smile and snap out of it. It's because our culture suggests that we should ALWAYS be happy. And if we're not walking on sunshine 100% of the time, there must be something terribly wrong with us. A problem that must be FIXED! With a fake smile, a starving African child, a pill, a new washer-dryer set maybe?

But it's a lie. Life is a cycle of highs and lows, times of joy mixed with periods of sorrow and a whole lot of unremarkable time in between, where we're not exceedingly happy or down-and-out but neutral, living our day-to-day lives doing what it is that we do in our natural states-of-being, fluctuating between our wide range of human emotions that allow us to express ourselves and experience our lives to the fullest.

And I've come to realize that living life to the fullest requires us to get comfortable with periods of sorrow, of pain, of melancholy. Those emotions and states of being are part of the experience, making us appreciate the times of joy and the times that are utterly unremarkable, honing our minds to reflect and learn and grow in a way that you simply cannot when your heart is exploding rainbows. And our cultural need to be constantly happy and fulfilled is a problem, making us feel like there is something wrong with us that needs to be fixed when we hit one of life's low points, preventing us from working through it and growing because we're too busy searching for the right solution to repair ourselves.

Now that we've gotten that out of the way, I am going to tell you a story reflecting on the past year. Frankly, it was the hardest I've had in my 31 years of life, and I say that knowing full well that my problems aren't really that bad, yada yada yada. This was a hard post to write, but one that felt important to share here with you. So often, we choose to internalize our struggles, opting to stay silent about the topics that are dominating our thoughts rather than sharing them out of fear of what others would think. That's what I did this past year. I buried my problems, stayed silent, maintained my Polly Positive image and suffered alone despite desperately needing someone who could relate.

Honestly, had I opened up and found this person, I would have hugged her, made her come over, kept her wine glass perpetually full and cried to her while we held hands and bonded. And it would have cured me, made me feel like what I was going through was hard, yes, but also normal. It would have been easier, somehow, to have felt less alone. So that's why I am sharing this post, so you can come back to it when you're having a hard time, pour yourself a glass of wine, and read it from the comfort of your couch in your days-old pajamas knowing that according to at least one other person on Earth, you are normal and not alone.

(In full disclosure, this post is going to get a little dark, but it will have an upswing at the end and have a few life lessons and 2018 resolutions sprinkled in that you might find worthwhile.)

Why 2017 was a bad year

New year's day of 2017 started off hopeful, with Wes and I agreeing that it would be our 'Year of Yes.' We'd try new things! See new places! Make new friends! And in general, say yes to as much as we possible could fit into our schedules. In tune with that theme, we decided we'd try to see Hamilton THAT VERY EVENING. Boldly turning to Craigslist, we hoped to find a hungover couple who couldn't get it together and would sell us their tickets.

And find them we did, show up to the theater in our Sunday best we did, and discover we were scammed we did, too. (I KNOW. WHERE WAS MY BETTER JUDGEMENT? I WAS TRYING TO BE BOLD AND IGNORE THE RISKS!) Taking it in stride, we dusted off our pride, went to nice dinner, and laughed about how it could only go up from here.

Days later, my husband left his job after requesting flex time or remote work options from his company in order to be with his sick father in North Carolina and help his overwhelmed mother. Sorry, they said. The HR policy does not allow it. SCREW THEM, I said. WE'LL FIGURE IT OUT! YOUR FAMILY NEEDS YOU. WE CAN AFFORD IT.

He packed our car with his things and our dog that night, and drove 16 hours straight through the snow to his parents place for the uncertain timeframe that comes with a declining health profile. "Could be weeks," we said, "or this could last months." I cried by myself on our couch, sad, lonely, and stressed. In one swift move, I became the breadwinner and my income plus our hard-won savings account that we prided ourselves on were going to have to tide us over for as long as it took, covering our mortgage and typical expenses along with back-and-forth flights to North Carolina as we tried to implement some structure and semblance of balance to an otherwise unpredictable situation.

As if on cue from the Universe sensing our mounting stress and 50% drop in income, my wallet was stolen off of my desk at my client site the next week. With $800 cash in it. (I KNOW. WHO CARRIES THAT MUCH CASH? IT WAS A GIFT, I WAS GOING TO BE ON THE ROAD FOR THREE WEEKS STRAIGHT AND DIDN'T HAVE TIME TO GO TO THE BANK.) [Insert face-palm emoji here.]

Wes flew home a few days later, to spend some quality time together and pick up a few more things. That weekend, I had brunch plans with some girlfriends and asked Wes to help clean our master bathroom, which has a Whirlpool tub that needed sanitizing. "Plug the tub," I said, "pour in a cup of bleach, run the water to fill it so it covers the spouts, and then run the bubbles for 20 minutes." He was on it, and my brunch was amazing! Until I walked out of the restaurant, checked my phone, and saw DOZENS of missed calls, frantic text messages and even a few emails from my husband, my sister, my cousin, my mom, etc.

Long story short, Wes had followed my instructions but realized he had some time to kill while the tub was filling with water. "Why not check the mail?" he thought to himself, going down two flights of stairs, exiting our home and promptly locking himself out. (To recap, bleach water is running and about to overflow the tub, mere feet from our vintage Moroccan rug and above our kitchen that we'd paid an arm and a leg to have painted baseboard-to-ceiling only a few months earlier. Not to mention that this was all directly over our kitchen table a.k.a. my makeshift desk.)

I rushed home, arriving shortly after the locksmith left, and walked upstairs to find water streaming from the chandelier all over the table and floor and my husband in an eerily calm panic, clipping my notebooks and work papers to various chairs and windows, air drying them in hopes of salvation. My computer was tipped on its side, drip-drying on the kitchen island.

One emergency plumber, $2,000 and a need for another fresh paint job later, Wes and I found ourselves sitting in a dry area of our kitchen in defeated silence, mentally tallying the unnecessary expenses and income forgone over the course of a couple of months. (People, it was THOUSANDS. MANY THOUSANDS.) "We need to get away," one of us said, staring into the soggy mess of our home. We booked a long weekend trip to Miami that night, a brief reprieve from the expensive swirl that had become our day-to-day lives.

Here we are in Miami, avoiding our problems!

We spent months fighting, fueled by Wes's back-and-forth trips, his denial and rage that I couldn’t fully grasp, his dad's nosediving and stabilizing health, and the unspoken understanding that the only end to the situation would be his father's death. One, two, three months went by, and we started to doubt why we'd gone down this road to begin with, that maybe he would get better, that maybe Wes leaving his job was hasty. Four, five months went by and we couldn't find a single thing to agree on. Our relationship was in a pressure cooker, with each of us trying desperately to do what is the right thing to do in a situation that we hoped to never find ourselves again.

One night, after a serious fight that ended in an agree-to-disagree truce, we sat down and talked about whether our marriage could survive if this continued. We were running out of steam, out of money, out of love. And we weren't sure it could. Wes came home, started working again, and his dad died two weeks later, over the 4th of July weekend. We got the call that he was in hospice and flew down in disbelief, then went through the motions of wake, funeral, sorting through belongings, and returning to real life with a dull sense of relief mixed with guilt.

Watching my husband lose his father, grieve him and make sense of the next steps in life without him was hard. It felt like my hands were tied behind my back, with nothing to say and no comfort to offer, feeling selfish for my limited ability to be there for him, feebly suggesting grief therapy and quietly giving him space to process it by himself while simultaneously fearing the intensity of his emotions because they made me imagine the place I would be if (when) I lose my own father and mother. And I've been creepily attached to them ever since. (Morbid, I know. I think my parents are getting sick of me insisting on weekly Sunday dinners.)

What one bad year taught me

While Wes has spent the past several months grieving, waking at four o'clock in the morning and doubling down on his work, I've spent it soul searching, thinking long and hard about what I want our life to look like going forward after a long year that we're ready to bring to a close. Here's where I landed on the important things in life:

From a family lens: as hard as marriage is, or as babies sound, this year has taught me over and over again that family is all there is at the end, and that it's a commitment and an investment that grows in value over time. Wes and I had our marriage tested and pushed to what seemed to be its limits this year, and have come out on the other side stronger and more prepared for the challenges we'll face together in the future. Being there for the birth of my nephew, and hearing from my sister and mom and friends (including many of readers of this blog) about their experiences in marriage and motherhood has strengthened my resolve that Wes and I can handle it when we're ready to take that step in life.

From a career lens: after years of convincing myself my 80% travel schedule was fine, I finally told my company I needed to be home regardless of what that meant for my career growth. And what an amazing thing it is to be home in the middle of the week! Airline and hotel status be damned, there is no travel perk that can compete for the fulfillment I get from using my Crock Pot and eating dinner with my husband at our kitchen table instead of a desk in my Marriott hotel room. This set up will last until April 2018, career moves after that point to be continued…

From a health lens: almost immediately after Wes's father's funeral, I decided to do something about the physical toll the stress had taken on my body and saw an oriental wellness doctor who put me on a 90-day elimination diet that cut all sugar, alcohol, dairy, processed foods, etc. It reset my health in a way I cannot describe, breaking several bad habits I'd developed, implementing better habits for the long haul, and transforming my body, my skin, my hair, and even my moods.

From a money lens: having the ability to go down to one income and rely on our savings reinforced our belief in the importance of living beneath our means because it gave us the freedom for Wes to leave his job with no notice or planning on our part. It's inspired me to do another "no new things" challenge in 2018 to reset my priorities when it comes to money and things. (Post coming soon…)

From a writing lens: realizing that the most cathartic posts I wrote this year were also the ones that were the most personal, the most well-received, and the most widely shared has taught me that my writing, at its best, is a tool for processing my own experiences and sharing them here to build meaningful connections. This year has taught me that we need more people and places to turn to for perspective when we're going through those things in life we all experience but don't necessarily talk about openly, and there's no reason why this blog can't be one of those places.

Although it has been an incredibly challenging year, I wouldn't change it. And really, couldn't have changed it as much as I wanted to with something, anything to make it easier to bear. The lessons I've personally learned over this 12-month-long life dip have been incredibly valuable and will stay with me for the long haul, there for utility and comfort the next time I hit a phase in life that doesn't have a happiness cure-all.

The end. Thank you so much for reading, and for all of your support, thoughtful comments, kind emails, and continued engagement on this blog. It is such a pleasure for me to write, mostly because of all of the inspiration you provide through your readership. I hope you have a wonderful holiday season, and here's to a very happy (but with natural ups and downs, not forcefully happy since we've agreed that is terrible) 2018!

Love,

Colleen

The Baby Post

2017-11-27T17:05:00.002-05:00

Oh hello there, I'm writing to you from my couch, in mismatched pajamas and slathered in retinol cream, surrounded by papers, bottle caps, half-full notebooks and a Lily's chocolate bar that I'm willing myself not to eat. There's dog hair all over my floors and laundry piled in various places around my house that have been sitting around for so long that I can't remember which clumps of clothes are clean and which are dirty. Wes and I had Tostitos and salsa for dinner because we don't have edible food in our fridge and we were too tired to go out and too hungry to order in.

My workout bag has been packed and ready to go to the gym all week, yet I've left it sitting by the door because I couldn't muster the energy to even carry it to work (much less hit the treadmill). I just paid $305 to the City of Chicago for two unpaid parking tickets that had final determination notices and I don't even remember getting the first ones. Don’t even get me started on what our recycling situation looks like or how many piles of mail we have yet to address. Our bed is unmade, probably also covered in dog hair. There's also a list of half-finished or yet-to-be-started house projects in my notebook, including things like "change the air filters" and "fix doorbell." You know, those basic things that help you breathe and not miss the FedEx delivery man there to drop off the replacement credit card you lost at the airport. Or maybe Starbucks. Or maybe in your couch, now that you're thinking about it.

Why I'm scared to have children

Wes and I can't feed ourselves, process our mail, or keep up with the sheer amount of Amazon boxes we need to carry out to the recycling bins. (Walking into our garage is treacherous.) We turn into Todd and Margot from Christmas Vacation the moment something goes missing, or the moment one of us discovers a mystery spill on the kitchen floor, or the moment my Audible subscription that I cancelled at least three years ago auto-renews again. The reason I'm telling you all of this is because it is important for you to understand that the life Wes and I have built is in disarray 10 out of every 13 days* and there is absolutely no logical reason for it considering how much help we have (dog walker, cleaning lady, handyman, etc.) and how easy and uncomplicated our lives should be all things considered. So if we're this much of a mess between the two of us, the thought of placing a miniature human being in our exclusive care is terrifying.**

TERRIFYING! So terrifying, in fact, that I believe I am high-risk for postpartum depression driven not from the baby but from the sheer lack of sleep, my husband's inability to organize himself, the uncontrollable disarray compounded by bottles and boppies (whatever these are) and the 129,746 accessories that one needs to keep a baby alive, my inability to control my irritation under duress, the loss of the ability to escape on a whim, and my innate selfishness that I try hard to suppress*** but will certainly rear its ugly head when an innocent, helpless baby is crying at two in the morning and my auto-response will be to put in my earplugs and ignore it.

And because my husband and I are both intense, passionate and opinionated, our typical sparring and head butting will be pushed over the edge. We'll become exhausted, survivalist versions of ourselves prone to implode under any additional pressure such as getting a parking ticket or recycling what one of us thought was junk mail but was actually our baby's social security number. Oh, and our baby, so joyful and full of zest for life, will slowly develop emotional problems over the years and start a global support group for children of high-strung parents and later write a New York Times bestselling novel about how we ruined her life.

And I'll read it alone in my detested-yet-practical Honda Odyssey, contemplating how differently things would have turned out if I'd followed through on my threat to call off my engagement to her father that one time we got in a fight on the Ile de la Cite in Paris. It was triggered by my need for sleep, Wes's need to be at the Musee d'Orsay no later than 6 o'clock in the morning, hours of waiting in line because he was right, miles of walking in boots I hadn't fully broken in, and a disturbing discovery of our fundamental differences in vacation preferences. I'd stopped to rest my Band Aid-covered feet and have a café au lait and pain au chocolat, and Wes questioned whether we'd make it to the top of the Notre Dame cathedral if I continued chewing at an escargot pace. At my wit's end, I dramatically threw my partially eaten croissant in the trash, stormed out of the café, and considered for a few minutes whether to book a flight home to prove how seriously ticked I was at his rudeness. We cooled off for an hour, then made up on a park bench. Wes apologized for his Germanic efficiency in viewing as many monuments in one day as humanly possible, I apologized for my Iack of urgency while eating croissants, we vowed to never go sightseeing together again, bought some vin chaud, held hands the rest of the day, and proceeded with our engagement as planned albeit with eyes wide open to the balancing act that would ensue in our marriage.

Wes and I have learned that marriage is hard. Very hard. We love each other deeply, and occasionally have homicidal thoughts about each other, too. My suspicion is that marriage with babies is harder, if only based on observations from my childhood. Which involved six children, separated by a mere nine years. Just so we're on the same page about those observations, here's a brief synopsis of my mom's life:

My frame of reference for what life is like as a mother

Mary Lou woke up every day at Lord knows what time, dressed her children and likely her husband, curled each of her daughter's hair, made breakfast, cleaned wayward Cheerios off the floor and smashed bananas off of our faces and prevented at least one child per day from eating Chapstick or putting a finger into an electrical socket. She'd make sure our homework and lunches were packed, walk some of us to school, get others to the bus stop and drop my dad at the train, all before 8:30a. Then she'd spent the rest of the day using her master's degree tutoring children with special needs and somehow also dust, vacuum, bleach toilets, Windex windows, and wipe down every surface in our home only to have all of her children tumble back in at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, drop their belongings all over her freshly mopped floors, smudge the countertops with peanut butter, and leave trails of graham crackers behind them. My mom would literally clean up behind us, shuttle us to soccer practice, swim lessons, and the library, then come home to make dinner, oversee homework and negotiate conflicts. Finally, she'd round us all back up for one more outing around 7p. to pick my dad up from the train, serve dinner, clean the whole thing up, bathe us and read to us and pray with us, put us to bed, and repeat the entire thing the next day.

She had no help (sorry, Dad). None. Nor did she escape via yoga or Pinot Noir.**** My mother is a saint with a bottomless well of patience. She also routinely talks to herself and can have an entire conversation with you where she appears engaged and offers appropriate follow up questions but will have no memory of the conversation a few hours later. We think she developed this as a survival skill against her horde of children constantly competing for her attention, and her husband's bad jokes.

Considering the sharp contrast between my life (easy yet in utter disarray) and my mom's (miraculously together despite every reason for her to throw in the towel and run off without speaking to any of us again) helped me to better understand the roots of my fears related to having children. In short, it's an enormous amount of work, requires an unbelievable amount of selflessness, sacrifice and patience, and is a milestone that poses the most significant, permanent, life-altering changes you'll ever experience. Not to mention it produces a human being that could potentially embody all of the most irritating qualities of your spouse and drive you batty for the rest of your days.

We're in a unique place in history where children and marriage are truly a choice, life milestones that are culturally encouraged but ultimately 100% optional. Our first world societies have advanced to a place where the physiological and safety drivers that incentivized the traditional family structure in hunter-gatherer and farming communities (brawn, iron, field hands) are no longer relevant, and the psychological and fulfillment drivers have expanded to include an endless array of options beyond settling down and having a family.***** Nod to the suffragettes, trailblazers, and feminists who paved the way for me to consider the quite viable alternative life option spent independently wealthy, alone and entirely fulfilled in a Parisian apartment filled with books for the rest of my days - a vision that bubbles up in direct proportion to the number and volume of laundry piles in my home.

Given that children are a ton of work, and entirely optional, let's get back to the question of why we give up our single, commitment-free lives and choose to have them in the first place.

The basic reasons we choose to have children

Here's the rationale from my personal point of view: we know that this life is bigger than us, and children give our lives purpose. They're our legacy. We're pretty sure we'd regret it if we didn't. It's instinctual. They're adorable. Our friends are having them and it's getting harder to relate to each other's lives without them. When we're old and crotchety and want to say whatever we damn well please, we need a captive audience who loves us and will be willing to spoon-feed us Jell-O in our nursing home rocking chairs. It gets boring sometimes, just the two of us, eating a civilized dinner of Tostitos and salsa at our white lacquer kitchen table. We're obsessed with our niece and nephew. We have a nagging sense that we're supposed to be doing more with our time, our talents, our resources and our love.

And yet despite all these valid reasons, I'm still sitting here writing this, terrified: of what would happen to our relationship if we tried and succeeded, or if we tried and failed. Of what would happen to my priorities, my mindset, my friendships, my time, my body. My body! That I know so well, that I work so hard to keep in shape, that defines a part of my identity that I cannot describe and would unpredictably and permanently change. Of the gamble that is genetics, and knowing the mental and physical deficiencies that run in my family. Of the tradeoff that is choosing to have your own versus fostering or adopting, and what it means to the children who could have been. Of the absolute permanence of the commitment that is creating or taking responsibility for another human life. Of the endless crying, pumping, feeding, burping, soothing and sudden, ever-present impulse to give everything of yourself. Of the perpetual pressure (self-induced or not) to be the selfless mother on top of being the loving wife, effective homemaker, accomplished career woman, and amazing friend. Of the fear of losing yourself in the mix, setting aside the things that have defined you up until this point in life to be shuffled and reevaluated in light of the fresh, hot, breathing little body now entirely dependent on your support. Of what it would mean if I decided to walk away from my lucrative career to prioritize spending more time raising my child, and how my relationship and power dynamic with my husband would change. Of what it would mean if I decided to stay put and continued to advance in my career, and entrust that time spent caring for my child to someone else.

Despite my terror and obvious over-analysis, I am fortunate enough to have a network of mothers among my family, my friends, my colleagues and my connections through this blog. This network crosses the spectrum of "mother-types," from stay-at-home to CEOs, from what seems like every relationship status, from women whose maternal instincts kicked in at 22 and couldn't wait to pop one out, to those who bit the bullet and had a baby so they wouldn’t regret it down the road. And I asked them, every single one of them, to share with me one thing they wish someone had told them before they went down the road of having a baby. The responses covered everything from things to keep in mind before you get to the hospital to give birth, to how you'll feel when your child goes away to college. And it was effing beautiful, so beautiful that I cried weird happy tears as I tried to synthesize all the advice into this post. In a nutshell, here's what they said:

On pregnancy and childbirth:

That you shouldn’t listen to advice - there is no right or wrong, and you need to do what's right for you (Kate) and if you can handle labor, you can handle anything motherhood throws at you (Lou)
That you should continue to eat well and exercise during pregnancy, because it will help you get back to your pre-baby body - and if you're home with the baby, do something each day to get out of the house (Wear This Like This)
That you should seriously consider pelvic floor therapy - you'll be grateful you did down the road (Claudia)
That you may want to consider placenta pills to ward off postpartum depression and read The Continuum Concept by Jean Liedloff (Jill)
That the first few hours in the hospital you will be poked and prodded like a science experiment (Jennifer)

On the first few months:

That you MUST ACCEPT HELP, and limit visitors to 30 minutes at a time for the first few months (Julie)
That those first few weeks are incredibly hard, and your body feels foreign, but eventually it all falls into place (Kellianne) usually after the first 6 weeks - and the first smile helps tremendously! (Jillian)
That the postpartum can be more painful than the pregnancy and delivery, made worse because no one talks about it (Sheila)
That the level of HARD and TIRED is beyond words, but the level of LOVE is so unimaginable (Bridget)
That babies are quite easy - aside from sleep, food and diaper changes, they mostly just want love (Melissa)
That you really do need to sleep when the baby sleeps, and remember that not everyone instantly falls in love with their baby the moment they see them - sometimes, the bond grows over time (Red Shiny Lips)

On parenting:

That you should trust your instincts: if something doesn’t feel right, it isn't (Little French Beds)
That it's completely normal to worry, but to remember that everything will be OK and you've got it (Wendy)
That you need to take things one day at a time (Ilene) and enjoy every moment, because it goes too quickly (Lynn, Golden Girl Gruss)
That you need to define your own family dynamic, talk to your child every day, figure out what makes your child "tick" and adjust accordingly, learn to tell your child "no" and teach them to work hard for what they want in life (Tara)

On identity change:

That your child will be the only thing that completes the circle of your life, that they'll make you crazy, but they'll return your love in spades (Sartorial Choices)
That you'll never stop worrying, even when your child is in college (Nicky)
That your heart - and life - will change in ways you cannot imagine (Lulu, Theresa) and cannot contain the love you feel for your child (Kellianne)
That you need to find a healthy balance between not wanting a baby to change any part of your life versus turning everything upside down (Aunt Honey's Estate)
That you'll learn what it means to be selfless and will do anything for your child (Stephanie)

On lifestyle change:

That it's totally awesome and exciting to see this little person grow and it doesn't feel like work - it may take more intense scheduling, but you'll continue to do everything you want and feel like a total badass for handling it all (Claudia)
That you'll never use the bathroom alone, at least for a decade or so - and childcare is SUPER expensive (Tatjana)
That school becomes more stressful than when you were in it yourself, and the good days will carry you far (Katie)
That you may be tired forever, even if your child is a great sleeper (Laura)
That it IS scary - but the cliches are true, and being a parent is amazing (This Is Mom Jeans)

The one underlying theme, shared across the board, is that you will never regret it, because it is worth it one billion times over. Honestly, I've talked to literally hundreds of mothers and cannot find even ONE who has regretted her choice to have a child. And observing my sister and friends become mothers has been especially inspiring, almost as inspiring as watching the tiny beings they've brought into the world develop personalities, learn to express themselves and grow into dynamic, lovable little people that never would have existed without the decision to create them in the first place.

So here I am, still terrified but with a strengthened resolve that, like marriage, children are an incredible amount of work that pay dividends in joy. And while I know that it's a highly personal choice, and that one can live a fulfilling life that is also devoid of children (and spouses, for that matter), my personal perspective is that I'd be remiss to not try, if only because I'd be missing out on the 25 well-organized bullet points of life experience detailed in the above list (go ahead, count them).

After considering the perspectives of those who have been there, the questions I am left with are how and when: whether we'll have our own, or foster, or adopt, and determining our timeline. And Mom, if you're reading this, I know you're thinking "Why not now?!" and I acknowledge the widely held opinion that there is never a right time, but I am someone that needs time to process, to hold ideas in my mind, turn them over and over and over, and come out on the other side having made a decision, confident that I am going in eyes wide open and prepared as much as I possibly can be for the kind of experience and responsibility that is bringing a life into the world.

If you're still with me, congratulations on making it to the end of this post and through the inner workings of my neurotic brain. Would absolutely love to hear your thoughts on this post, especially if you have additional thoughts or perspectives to share on the journey of motherhood. Please let me know in the comments!

*My house is cleaned biweekly, and the clean, serene orderliness lasts for exactly two days.

**This doesn't even touch on our shared fear of managing through nine months of pregnancy, which will probably involve lots of tears, negotiating with myself about whether to have that glass of wine, and blaming Wes for every possible discomfort I experience.

***OK, I don't try that hard.

****She did Richard Simmons videos in our living room and enjoyed Celestial Seasonings as her evening beverage of choice. Her only real escape came with her frequent migraines, which triggered long, Imitrex-induced naps.

*****Despite these advancements in human society, we haven't evolved to the point where nosy relatives are extinct - I'm pretty sure family gatherings 100 years from now will continue to be forums for probing questions into our dating lives and unsolicited opinions on our aging eggs.

Three ideas that will change your life

2017-11-01T11:36:00.004-04:00

Looking for some life-altering ideas, are you? Welcome, take a seat, and enjoy what the better part of my years of research* and self-discovery** has produced. These concepts are fundamentally simple, yet somehow still changed my perspective on what I do every day, how I think and what I prioritize. So, I thought they were worth sharing with you here in case you've been looking for ways to shake up your own patterns.

Without further ado…

#1 You become what you do every day

This concept is what inspired me to make some major changes, including quitting alcohol for three months. I read some really tactical examples of what bad habits, repeated every day, can do to your life and realized that I was allowing my bad habits to affect my health, my mood and even my relationships. The examples were from a great book called "The Compound Effect" by Darren Hardy. In it, he makes the argument that there is an operating system running your life whether you know it or not.

This operating system is programmed by your unconscious mind and controlled by the tiny little things you do out of habit. We do almost EVERYTHING out of habit, and those small, seemingly insignificant choices build on each other over time. If you look at all of the elements of your life as they are today - your health, your relationships, your career, your mindset - and rewind time, you'd see that they're simply a culmination of small things you did consistently over a very long period of time. And the kicker is that there is no standing still: those small things that you're doing automatically are either moving you forward towards your goals, or dragging you backwards away from them.

This is why the small things matter, like making your bed, paying your taxes, eating spinach, saying no to Jelly Bellys, controlling your temper, being nice to strangers, etc. Learning how to "hack" the unconscious operating system that's running your life in order to override bad habits and replace them with better ones that compound over time into the life outcomes you want - your ideal relationship, a fit body, a career with limitless potential - is what the book is all about.

Not a reader? I wrote a bonus post for my email subscribers with the top 10 pieces of advice from the book that you can immediately implement to improve your own life. You can sign up for the list here if you're interested in reading it.

#2 You are not your mind

Stop right now and think about what thoughts are floating around in your mind. Maybe you're thinking about that last paragraph you read and considering the eight million Reece's Peanut Butter Cups you ate last night and how much that onslaught of sugar will drag you backwards from your hot body goals. Whatever it is dinging around between your ears, the fact that you have literally taken a step outside of your mind to reflect on what's happening in your mind suggests that you are a separate entity than your mind. Spiritual implications aside, this is hugely powerful because it enables you to control your thoughts.

There are a lot of people in the world who don't control their thoughts and simply emote, allowing their minds to run wild and drive decisions that are irrational. (Think road rage and other public displays of emotion that violate social norms and make people uncomfortable, bad managers with biting feedback who make their subordinates despise them, etc.)

Although we all think that we're rational beings completely in control at all times, we're not. Think about the periods of your life that were the most stressful. Your emotions run high, your mind tends to race, and it can feel overwhelming. Learning how to take a step outside of your mind and reflect on why you're thinking what you're thinking is immediately calming because it imbues logic, refocuses you on outcomes and allows you to redirect your thoughts.

Recognizing that my mind was something that I could control was a game-changer for almost every area of my life. Although I joke a lot about my neuroses, there have been and will continue to be plenty of moments when I need to stamp them out and actively redirect my thoughts for better outcomes. For example, getting even remotely negative feedback at work used to make me angry or embarrassed, which can easily translate into defensiveness or crying in the bathroom. Both are irrational and don't exactly demonstrate that you're ready for more responsibility. Training myself to take a step back, think about why the feedback was making me think whatever it was that I was thinking, and then talk myself into using it as a data point and not taking it personally took some time and energy, but now it's my automatic response to all feedback. And I also now give a lot of unsolicited advice to my colleagues about how showing your negative emotions at work is a sign that you lack power and share tips on becoming unflappable.

#3 The present moment is the only thing that matters

If we can agree that you become what you repeatedly do, that we cannot change the past, and that we cannot control the future, that leaves us with this exact moment to focus on and use to our advantage. Have you ever heard that depression is driven by focusing on the past, and anxiety is driven by focusing on the future? We know that those states of mind are unproductive in general, but especially when you consider that there's literally nothing you can do to change the past or control your future. It doesn't mean that you shouldn't learn from your past or plan for your future, because you should. It's a question of where you focus your mind, your thoughts and your energy.

So that leaves us to focus on the present moment. If you want to change something, now is the time to do it. Want to lose weight? Take the first step in this exact moment. Decide that you're going to do it, go throw out all the junk food in your house, buy some great books or magazines to read on your couch at night instead of sitting in front of the TV where you're tempted to snack. Want to have a better relationship with your husband? Take action in this exact moment. Text him right now that you love him, or do something for him that he'll appreciate later. Want to make more money? Use this moment to update your resume, schedule a meeting with your boss for the end of the week, and make a list of where you can take on more responsibility or add more value to share with the person who oversees your work and can help you get to the next level.

Whatever it is, do it now. Thinking about it, planning it, or dreaming about it doesn't get you results. Only taking action does. Using the present moment to make decisions and take immediate action builds momentum. Once you've got momentum, it compounds to get you the results you want. It's easier said than done, because it take a lot of energy to get started, requires you to get past your fears and insecurities, and necessitates some risk. But remember that there's no standing still. What you do with this exact moment might as well be helping you get what you want.

To end this post, I'm going to leave you with a question and a quote to think about (both have been top of mind for me):

Think about yourself at this time last year. What did you think would be different about your life today?

"For what it's worth: it's never too late to be whoever you want to be. I hope you live a life you're proud of, and if you find that you're not, I hope you have the strength to start over." - F. Scott Fitzgerald

Ok, that's all I've got for you. Please let me know what you think of these ideas in the comments!

*Reading through the contents of entire USPS boxes filled with Amazon books delivered to my door two days after one stressful, sleepless night where the only thing that would console me was Googling "how to be less neurotic," asking my friends, colleagues and strangers mildly intrusive questions about their lives and deepest desires, and watching enlightening documentaries such as Iris.

**I don't even really know what this means, but it sounds nice, doesn't it? There's actually not much to discover. I think it's more like, "self-assessment" but that sounds too sterile.

A short guide to making friends in a new city

2017-10-05T20:43:00.000-04:00

Let me start this post by saying that I truly believe there is no more humbling experience than being plopped into a city where you have exactly zero friends. It doesn't even matter if you weren't that popular to begin with, even going from one friend to zero has got to be just as terrible. Suddenly finding yourself in a situation where you are utterly friendless is a unique brand of loneliness that I will attempt to describe by sharing this excerpt from a birthday card my friend Michelle sent me after I moved to Washington, DC all by myself at age 23: "Dear Colleen, happy birthday! I hope you don't have to use the pink grenade this year."

Earlier that year, I'd called Michelle from the local hardware store on in my neighborhood to describe a run-in I'd had with the checkout clerk. My first floor one bedroom apartment was in a neighborhood I'd randomly selected in order to cut short a stressful apartment hunt with a particularly irritating relocation specialist, and I'd spent a few too many sleepless nights wondering how long it would take for someone to find me if I was murdered in my sleep. (Morbid, I know. I landed on three days.)

Deciding to beef up on security, I walked to the hardware store and stuffed my shopping cart with dozens of those magnet alarms meant to be used on windows and doors to scare off burglars when they opened them. To be extra safe, I sprinkled in some pepper spray and a rape whistle. When I got to the counter, the clerk looked at the contents of my cart, asked if I was new to the neighborhood, then told me that I didn't need all the stuff I was trying to buy.

Instead, he said, reaching underneath the counter, "you need a pink grenade." He handed me a small pink device that did look just like a grenade, with a pin and everything. He told me to keep it next to my bed and pull the pin if anyone tried to break in, promising that it would be so loud they'd run away. So I bought it, put it in my nightstand, and started sleeping soundly with my newfound sense of security. For the record, I never had to use it.

While sleeping alone in a one bedroom apartment without a friend for hundreds of square miles is certainly lonely, it's not so bad on the weeknights for someone who loves solitary activities like reading and journaling and going to bed at 9:30 p.m. The weekends, however, are a different story.

There are only so many workout classes, Whole Foods trips and Target runs you can do in a 65-hour timeframe before you start to lose your mind. We're hardwired for social connection, and wanting to be part of a community is a survival instinct. One Sunday morning, I walked to Whole Foods to get supplies for a new recipe I planned to cook and eat by myself that night, and passed a group of girls laughing over drinks on a patio. It immediately made me wonder if I would ever have friends again, and then consider how uncomfortable it would be if I invited myself to join them. I continued my walk in silence, slowly picked out the best leeks and onions in the entire store after examining every option, and made my way back home in deep thought about how I was going to muster up a group of friends from scratch.

And muster them I did, but before I dig in to the basic steps to making friends as an adult in a new city you wouldn't have chosen for yourself, I want to also mention that the same challenges exist even if you're moving with a partner. Moving from Washington, DC to Charlotte, NC after I got married was really tough, even though Wes was with me. I dragged my feet in agreeing to move there, thinking that living to the south meant I'd be pressured to wear pastel paisley outfits and monogram my initials in pink curlicue script onto all of my monogrammable belongings in order to fit in. (This turned out to be only partially true.)

Wes was the reason we'd moved in the first place and he had close friends from college living in the area, which was great fuel for the pity parties I threw for myself on Saturday nights for the first couple of months. Wes felt guilty and tried to help by inviting me to events with his friends, hoping I'd warm up to the wives and girlfriends who tagged along.

One day, I agreed to attend a barbeque and found myself sitting in a group of at least ten potential new friends. After a few minutes of casual conversation, I mentioned that I had friends visiting from DC and asked the group to recommend some cool activities that I could do with them besides brunch and shopping. It was silent for a solid 60 seconds, until someone finally chimed in: "I heard the first lady's pin collection is on display at the Mint Museum." My immediate reaction was to spit out my wine, start laughing uncontrollably, and leave the party early with my angry husband in tow while unsuccessfully trying to explain the absurdity of the situation.

Anyway, my point is that moving to a new place is hard either way, and it's especially challenging when you have a full time job and limited time on your hands. The last thing you want to do is go out on a Tuesday night to talk to strangers, but investing some time up front to meet a few friends who you click with will pay dividends in terms of your long term happiness and popularity in your adopted home.

Without further ado, here's a list of the basic guidelines to improving your social capital:

#1 Get comfortable doing things by yourself

While this should seem obvious, you're going to have to learn to love your own company and start doing things by yourself while you're just getting started. "Doing things" does not include sitting on your couch with a bottle of pinot noir, as tempting as that sounds. It means attending events and visiting places where other people hang out all by yourself. Keep an eye out for community events, volunteer opportunities, museum exhibits, art classes, etc. and force yourself to show up with an open mind and a willingness to test your conversational skills.

#2 Accept that you're desperate

One of the hardest things to accept was that no one was going to come hunting me down to be their friend. As a person with exactly no friends, it's on you to make the effort. Accepting that you're desperate means admitting that you need help. Reach out to your geographically undesirable network and ask if anyone has friends, friends-of-friends, cousins or colleagues who live in your new town and ask them to make the connection for you. Admit to other people that you're new in town and looking to make connections, and ask them for advice and suggestions for getting plugged in to the community.

#3 Lower your standards

This sounds harsh, but bear with me for a moment. Let's assume you have a gaggle of girlfriends 1,000 miles away who know everything about you, can make you die laughing on a moment's notice, and are the most fabulous people to ever walk the earth. Holding any potential new friends to that kind of standard just isn't going to work. You need to cast a wide net. There are benefits to doing this, including the opportunity to find really interesting people who stretch and challenge you in new ways and would never cross your path otherwise. Some of my closest friends to this day are those who I might not have met if I hadn't been motivated to open my social circle.

#4 Take the initiative

As in, ask people to hang out with you after you meet them, regardless of where you met. This requires you to be a bit aggressive, meaning asking for phone numbers and quickly following up with a proposed date, time and place. Because you're comfortable doing things alone, you should have a short list of activities to invite people to join you in attending. Be persistent, and generous with reschedule requests. I found one of my very best friends in DC (hi, Karena!) at an alumni association happy hour and insisted on exchanging business cards, emailed her the next day and basically didn't stop until we made our date.

#5 Commit to saying yes

Related to the above, anyone who offers to set you up on a friend date or asks you to hang out will get a yes.* Every. Single. Time. You may meet some weirdos, some people who you may never want to see again, and some keepers. Making friends from scratch is a numbers game, after all. And you'll get momentum from filling up your social calendar as much as you possibly can.

#6 Join group activities

Even if you lack hobbies and hand-eye coordination, I guarantee there are several group activities that you can join to pick up some pals. The concept of "sports" these days has expanded to include many things that hardly qualify as exercise and they'll take anyone (think shuffleboard, kickball, etc.). There's an entire website devoted to organizing interest-based meet ups and even has meet ups for those with no interests beyond "new in town." Check out alumni associations, book clubs, professional organizations and not-for-profits. Keep joining and trying new activities until you find something that sticks, or until you meet a good number of new pals and don't feel the need to keep trying. I met one of my very best friends in Charlotte (hi, Pam!) at a meetup and never went back

Ok, that's the end of the list. In my experience, once you've made one or two great connections, it gets a lot easier to make friends because you'll have company in your quest. In Charlotte, my first friend (hi, Ashley!) and I met at a neighborhood party and realized we were both friendless. We decided that there was no reason we couldn't be the coolest, most popular people in town and crafted a recruiting strategy for friends that involved inviting every girl who seemed remotely interesting to a weekly wine night. We swelled to numbers we couldn't possibly keep up with, then pared it back to a group of girls who were truly wonderful. They made it really hard to move away from Charlotte and I still miss them!

There are probably other strategies and ideas for making friends that I haven't listed here, or you may have some anecdotes of your own about being alone in a new city. I would love to hear your thoughts - let me know in the comments!

*With the exception of romantic advances. Remind me to tell you about the time that a cab driver asked me to dinner.

How to get anything you want

2017-09-28T19:13:00.001-04:00

A few years ago after a particularly rough project, I applied to another consulting firm - considered the best of the best, the kind of place that brands itself on having the smartest consultants in the world and tests them by asking them to calculate in their head important Universal questions we all have such as how many golf balls could fill up a stadium.

Much to my surprise, a recruiter called me to set up an interview. What she said will stick with me forever: "We had to understand how you turned a state school journalism degree into a consulting career!" Reading between the lines, she meant: "You're grossly unqualified and have zero credentials to be doing this job. Tell us your secret!"

So tell her I did. I also completed several interviews where I was asked to estimate all sorts of things in my head, imagining how I'd sit around with my new Mathlete friends and laugh gleefully at those who improperly sized the market for paper ketchup cups. In tandem, I also read Eckhart Tolle's "The Power of Now," learned how to deal with my work stress in a productive way, got promoted, and stayed put.

Anyway, despite all the painful estimation exercises, that experience reminded me that I was in fact grossly unqualified and had zero credentials for a consulting job, and it forced me to reflect on what steps helped me to get where I am today. In a nutshell, I learned that getting what you want is a repeatable process that we can use in any area of our lives.

If you read my last post, you'll remember that I was in a terrible rut where I spent a lot of time struggling with how to move forward with some of my creative goals, questioning why I haven't achieved more in those areas of my life. After taking some time to reflect on the specific actions that helped me to become successful in my career, I realized that I was failing to repeat those steps in other areas of my life to generate the outcomes I wanted. Simply put, the reason I've been struggling to make progress in my creative ventures is because I haven't even taken the first step!

As a friendly reminder for myself, for you, or for anyone in general who might be a bit down and out for not making Forbes 30 Under 30 List*, here are the fundamental steps to getting anything you want in life:

#1 Decide what you want, despite advice you may get to the contrary

Although it seems obvious, this is the hardest step to take. Identifying what you want can be hard, because it means making tradeoffs. The word "decide" literally means to cut off all options. This step is about defining what you're going to focus all of your attention and energy on. If you don't decide what it is that you want, you'll be distracted, unfocused and will have a hard time making progress. I recently read a GREAT book called "The Compound Effect" by Darren Hardy, where he made an analogy about the power of focus. He described how a little kid, when using a magnifying glass, can harness the energy of the sun and focus it in a powerful way to burn things at will. The power of decision and focused action is like a magnifying glass for your energy, helping you to harness it and get the results you want.

This is the first thing I told that recruiter who asked about my success-in-consulting-despite-utter-lack-of-credentials: I decided that I was not going to be a journalist, because it sounded like the industry was dying and I didn't want to be surviving on ramen noodles in an English basement apartment. I decided that I would have a corporate job, learn about business (whatever that meant…), make lots of money, travel to exciting places, and do whatever else corporate types did.

A lot of people told me I was unqualified, couldn't do it, should have picked a different major, etc. Many advised that I just bite the bullet and take a job related to my degree because it would be easier. My parents offered this perspective: "College degrees mean nothing. You all know exactly nothing when you graduate, and companies expect you to be able to learn on the job."

Taking that in stride, I crashed the business career fair** at my university after doing extensive research on the companies represented to find the ones that didn't require a business undergraduate degree, stood in the long lines and used my rehearsed 2-minute blurb on why I loved the company, wanted the job and thought I'd be a perfect fit for it. Then I bombed a few interviews, including one for a buyer position where the interviewer STOPPED the interview and asked me if it was my first time after it became evident that a) I had no idea what a buyer was and b) I knew nothing about the company.

Despite the ego bruises, reality checks, embarrassment and list of other reasons to quit, I kept at it because it was the only route to getting the corporate job that I decided I would have. Special shout out to General Mills and their business management associate development program for interviewing late in the process and snapping me up for my first job after I'd gotten all my mistakes out of the way. (It was one of two total bites, out of Lord knows how many interviews…)

#2 Commit to doing what it takes, no matter how hard or lonely it gets

When we think about "doing what it takes," sometimes we realize that we don't really want the thing we thought we wanted after all. It's nice to imagine yourself happily married to the man of your dreams, but signing up for Match.com, going through a series of awkward first dates, falling in love only to discover your dream man has an expansive collection of reptiles living in his apartment, and then going back to the drawing board and allowing your mom's friends and your hair dresser to set you up is a whole different ball game. Doing what it takes in this scenario sounds exhausting, but it's necessary to commit to doing those things to find the man of your dreams. And if doing what it takes sounds like too much, that's OK too. It's probably a sign that you don't want it badly enough. (Note that committing to do what it takes also applies to marriage.)

My first company transferred me across the country twice. The job was tough, requiring me to do pricing and margin analysis when I'd never even taken a finance class. I lived through a cold, lonely winter in Minneapolis***, and learned a few times over what it felt like to be in a new city with no friends. My phone stopped ringing and I'd spend Saturday nights alone on my couch with a bottle of wine and a bunch of tabloids because my mom AND grandma were both too busy to sit on the phone with me.

There were a hundred times that I felt like throwing in the towel, moving back to my old bedroom at my parent's house, and finding an easier route. Actually, I almost did: I verbally accepted an offer that would have taken me back to Chicago. It was safe, it was easy, and it didn't sit right with me. In my gut, I knew that the role wouldn't have been challenging enough for me to grow, and the only reason I wanted it was because it would solve my two biggest problems: loneliness, and knowing that my current job wasn't it, either.

Have you ever heard the old adage that you only fail when you stop trying? I totally believe this. Trying, failing, applying your newfound lessons, and continuing to take action is literally the only way to grow and advance towards what you want. Success compounds on itself, builds your confidence and gives you momentum to do and become more.

#3 Figure out the steps as you go, regardless of how confused you may feel

It's tough to figure out the right steps to take, especially when there are plenty of distractions, alternate paths and no right answers. It's easy to get discouraged, lose your confidence and want to give up when you're charging towards something and the map isn't totally clear.

After sticking it out in my first role just long enough to get pretty good at recommending trade spend, I got transferred again to DC with a totally different set of responsibilities that I had to learn. Although I got better at the whole making friends in a new city thing (e.g., get comfortable with asking girls out on awkward friend dates, join group activities that require minimal talent / hand-eye coordination, etc.)****, over time I started to realize that pushing Cheerios might not be a venture worthy of accepting a transfer to yet another city. So I got really clear with my objectives for a next role, did my research, sent out my resume, networked like crazy, and ended up with a job in consulting.

Which was terrible. As in, I cried the first week on the job and wanted to quit after the third. OMG. I cannot even tell you how bad it was. There were many times on my way to work in the morning when I would stop in Starbucks and gaze too long at the barista, jealous of her job, wishing I could be behind a counter making lattes instead of spending hours on end in a windowless conference room silently making Visio process maps and counting down the minutes until I could leave.

This next step was supposed to SOLVE my career woes, not trade them in for another set of problems! Looking back, it was exactly the right step in my path: I needed to learn a few lessons, and it was the perfect environment to teach me. The first thing I learned is that there is no such thing as a perfect job. The second thing I learned is that I knew nothing. The third thing I learned is what I never wanted to be when I became responsible for managing other people. It was at this job that someone taught me how to make a life filter and explained how to use it to make decisions more in line with my values, goals and aspirations. (It's a tool I still have and use, years later!)

#4 Stick with it for as long as it takes

One thing I've learned to be true in my life to date is that anything worth having can only be obtained over time. There's no such thing as an overnight success, and the process with all of its highs and lows is absolutely necessary to get you where you're going. You need to develop patience, because it takes a lot of time to fall down and fail, to be pushed to your limits, to be stressed, to be uncomfortable and to come through it on the other side as a better version of yourself. I wish someone could have explained that to 25-year-old me. But even if someone did, I probably wouldn't have listened because I needed to learn it for myself.

Long story short, learning some lessons the hard way, understanding how to be more strategic in my decision-making and gaining enough real-world experience to have the confidence to wait for the right opportunity aligned to my goals is what ultimately led me to my current role. I've been at my consulting firm for more than five years, and while there have certainly been some trials and tribulations along the way, sticking with it has been one of the best decisions I made in my career to date.

It has has allowed me to work with colleagues and clients who are smarter than me, who push me, who challenge my thinking and who hold me to extremely high standards. I've been able to grow constantly, and can honestly say that I am a better person for it.

Following these simple steps - making a decision, committing to do what it takes, figuring out the steps as you go, and sticking with it - sounds easy, but it's not. Getting what you want takes intention, energy, and a ton of focused effort over the long haul. I think the process is necessary to make you value whatever it is once you have it, and to be worthy of having it in the first place.

For me personally, it's helpful to think about what I want to achieve in my creative ventures in the framework of this process that I've applied to my career. It takes the pressure off of producing results, and puts the emphasis on taking consistent action over the long game.

Ok, the end. Would love to hear your thoughts on this post, especially if you're like me and have some areas of your life where you've been wanting to make progress. Let me know in the comments.

*The kid voted "Most Likely to Succeed" in my high school is valued in the BILLIONS by Forbes. We all doubted his money making schemes back then, but look who's laughing now.

**I simply walked past the guy checking University IDs without offering mine. It really wasn't hard. I don't know why more people don't do this.

***For my non-American readers, this is basically Canada. It regularly gets to -34 degrees Celsius or lower in the winter.

****Post entitled "How to make friends when moving alone a to a new city that you likely would never have chosen for yourself" coming soon. [UPDATE: This post has been written, read it here.]

P.S. For my next newsletter, I'm writing a synopsis of the 10 small changes Darren Hardy recommends to immediately improve your health, your relationships and your life. You can sign up for the newsletter hereif you're interested in reading it.

P.P.S. Thanks so much for all of you who have signed up for the newsletter already. You're awesome and I am forever indebted to you for trusting me with your Gmail.

P.P.P.S. If you STILL haven't signed up, I respect your hard stance against my enticing gestures to lure you in. But just know that I see those repeat page views and I know we're secretly friends and you'll eventually be on my Rolodex for life. So cough it up, girl. You know you want to.

For anyone who's ever been in a rut

2017-09-13T20:15:00.001-04:00

To say that I've been in a rut lately would be an understatement. There have been at least five times where I've tried to write this post and just sat there, wind out of my sails, staring at the blinking cursor on my OneNote, mind wandering to the large jar of almond butter in my desk drawer and how big of an effort it would be to get up to find a spoon. My rut is a mix of writer's block and identity crisis, and it's translated into me trudging through the past couple of weeks basically wearing the same three outfits day in and day out*.

For a few too many weeks, I escaped my rut through chardonnay and (seriously effective) impulse shopping and watching endless strings of Lost episodes on Netflix in dirty leggings. Then I half-heartedly downloaded the Tony Robbins classic, 'Awaken the Giant Within,' to my Kindle in hopes that somewhere deep inside my uninspired, almond butter-filled body there is an amazing, fabulous version of myself who is capable of being so much more than I have been lately.

Although I wish I could tell you that I finished the book and I'm sitting here in my most dazzling outfit, all of my sass fully intact with a new lease on life, the reality is that I've only made it through 35 pages because I can't wake up early enough to read and have been unable to break my string of Lost episodes in the evening. What I'm trying to say is that I'm wallowing, bored, aware that it's all my fault and fully up to me to fix, but I just can't right now. To be honest, I've come to a realization that it's important to let yourself go a bit, to loosen the restraints and loll about for a while.

In the midst of all of this indulgent lollygagging, I have mustered some motivation to make a few changes, and wanted to share them here with you. The first is related to the chardonnay. The second is related to my career. And the third is related to my writing. There are a few reasons I want to share: because I think some of you have similar struggles, because some of you have ideas and wisdom to help, and because it's preoccupying my thoughts and therefore easy to write about.

Change #1: Reclaim my healthiest, most vibrant body

If you've been following along for a while now, you know that being healthy and fit is a priority for me. Yet it's something that's a constant struggle, because, you know, wine and chocolate were invented and "doing cardio exercise" is a seriously, horrifically, terrifyingly awful way to spend 45 minutes. There are a lot of creative strategies that I use (to the dismay of some readers *cough, Jessica's mom, cough*) that work really well for me to balance these competing forces.

Yet there were these nagging little issues building up that I'd been ignoring for a long time. A persistent rash on my face that wouldn't go away. Sores that took way too long to heal. Mood swings and irritability that I'd never experienced before. Fatigue and low energy that led me to have the personality of milk toast by the end of the work week.

Since my dermatologist is basically the only doctor I trust,** I went to go see her and she promptly told me that I had rosacea and signs of chronic inflammation. She prescribed a low-dose antibiotic and gave me the name of someone can only be described as a shaman healer*** who could help me with identifying what was causing all these problems.

So see him I did, give him 11 vials of my blood I did, along with $1,200 of non-reimbursable dollars, and in return was given a list of foods that I was allergic to but eating constantly (like all RICE! And YEAST! And PORK!!!) or rubbing directly on my face (like CUCUMBER!!) as well as a 90-day plan to eliminate dietary causes of inflammation.

You guys, I've been doing it for ~8 weeks now and my problems are COMPLETELY GONE. My skin is as smooth as a baby's butt, my energy levels at an annoying all-time high, and I HAVE A SIX PACK**** for the first time ever because all of this unnecessary flab and bloat has melted off of my body. It's also made me feel strangely powerful and in control of my health and well-being.

If you're having similar symptoms and interested in learning about the blood test and 90-day plan, there's a bonus post on my freebies page for my beloved email list members. (If you're not on the list, but want access, click here to join and I'll send you the link.) WARNING: This bonus post is not for the faint of heart, and has some verrrrrrrry unconventional advice that some people *cough, Jessica's mom, cough* might not want to read.

Change #2: Drive my career with intention and purpose

Have you ever hit a career wall, where you wake up one day and find yourself wondering why you've been doing this job all these years? That happened to me, in almost that exact way. It was after a long period of reflection at the end of my father-in-law's life, where I spent a lot of time considering what qualifies as a fulfilling and purposeful life, and then applied that lens to my own life. And I literally work up one day at 4 o'clock in the morning thinking this exact thought: "I have basically spent my adult life living in a MARRIOTT!! In the panhandle of Florida! In the suburbs of Philadelphia! In Texas and California and Tennessee and other places where my husband, family, friends and dog are NOT!!!" and I could not muster a tangible example of a lasting, important impact that resulted from this investment of my time aside from completed objectives of the projects I'd supported (save for my client BFFs and a strange new skill that I describe as the ability to mentally depart from my body during meetings that are going south).

I realized that I needed to get really clear with myself on a vision for my life's work, and then intentionally drive towards it. So I wrote out the vision I have for my life, in extreme detail, covering everything from where I live to what I do every day. And I've decided to simply say no to things that aren't aligned to this vision, to save myself time and space to do more of those things that matter.

That might sound selfish, but I think it's the opposite. You may have heard that you live your life in moments, and I've started to realize that you have to be intentional about how to spend your moments or they become absorbed in unimportant activities and mindless tasks.

Of course, there's an art to saying no that can occupy an entire post, but it's an absolute necessity to be intentional with your time in order to live the life you want. This little exercise has taught me that what fulfills me has very little to do with my day-to-day responsibilities. It's also not a simple as making the choice between a corporate and creative path. Instead, the things that I love relate to developing others, figuring out how to do something better, more effectively, and doing work that is of value to others.

Change #3: Take my writing seriously, for the first time ever, and forever

Related to point #2 above, I've been making some changes to carve out more space to do the things I love, and am good at, both in my full-time and creative ventures such as writing this here l'il blog.

One of my biggest challenges in writing is this insecurity that it wouldn't be accepted or approved of by colleagues and clients at my full time job because it is so off-the-beaten-path of what I do for a living. So I've kept it a secret, written it under a pseudonym, and have let it grow organically rather than sharing it for fear of judgement. I think that trying to take parallel creative and corporate paths while overinvesting in one of them has led me to my current rut, where I'm ready to stretch and run with my writing but also in a place where I feel that I have more to lose in my corporate career.

In tandem, I've felt a lot of pressure to define what it is that I'm doing on this blog, to focus it, to "define my niche." But I am just not a person who can be in a niche. In fact, I think it is essential to be able to talk about my thoughts on Siddhartha and whether or not denim culottes are socially acceptable in the same stream of consciousness. So I am letting go of feeling the self-imposed pressure to decide where I am going with my writing or this blog. Because we're going all over the place, folks. Feel free to hitch your wagon.

The End.

Notes:

*Four if you count my pajamas. And including the leggings in the picture above. It's amazing what a good trench coat can do for an outfit you've been living in for days, amiright?

**Driven by vanity, maybe, but she has the skin of a newborn baby and my other doctors give me dubious, potentially ludicrous diagnoses. For example, my dentist told me I had a "microcavity" (what is THAT?!) and couldn't give me a straight answer when I asked for a black-and-white answer on whether or not I do, in fact, have a cavity.

***Doctor of Wellness and Oriental Medicine

****Only first thing in the morning, when flexing with a tremendous amount of exertion

Oh, hello there. Made it all the way to the end, did you? Do you have any advice for snapping out of a rut? Are you feeling like I'm overdue to give you the chance to opt in for certain topics? Have any additional thoughts on culottes or Siddhartha that you'd like to share? I'd love to hear your thoughts. Let me know in the comments.

For Henry, and middle children everywhere

2017-08-24T12:12:00.000-04:00

Last week, my mom and I escorted my very pregnant sister and brother-in-law out the front door of their home, excitedly taking pictures of the two of them before they departed for a C-section surgery they had scheduled to bring their second child into the world.

Before they left, my mom told them that if they were lucky, this day would be celebrated in 90 years. We quickly calculated that it would be the year 2107, and that we would either be dead or cryogenically frozen somewhere while this baby we had yet to meet would be wrinkled, wobbling around with a cane and probably eating Betty Crocker yellow cake with chocolate icing and a sparse sprinkle of candles in his new Gold Toe socks if our family birthday traditions continue to get passed down.

I thought it was a very circle-of-life thing for mom to say, and then considered how she must be feeling like the largest size of a Russian nesting doll, responsible for producing all of these other people. Then we sat down at my grandmother's old kitchen table that Karen had shipped to San Francisco after she passed, enjoying our coffee and tea, making plans for brunch and laughing about the cold reality that 19-month-old Emily was about to face as her status of center-of-the-Universe, only-child-in-the-world was about to come crashing down around her.

For a long time, I thought that it wouldn't be possible to love another niece or nephew as much as I loved first-born Emily. She was exciting and brought with her a whole round of first experiences for her parents and our family. Over time, she's recognized her celebrity status and has become accustomed to posing for photos basically any time an iPhone is taken out in her presence. She's honed how to charm an audience via FaceTime and has the ability to fake laugh at the appropriate moments amidst an adult discussion. Now that she's able to wobble her way around the house, she's also become the master of her environment and has developed a saucy attitude that garners her the attention and adoration she's grown to love.

Maybe this is the reason I felt compelled to be there for the birth of the second child, to mark the significance of his entry to this Earth despite the fact that there were fewer celebrations, more hand-me-downs and a matter-of-fact efficiency to the pregnancy and birth that comes with the territory of a seasoned mother. I think my need to be there was really just an act of solidarity, to hold him on the first day of his life and welcome him to the fraternity of middle children that I am also a member.

And I did hold him, the first actual newborn I've ever seen, amazed at his tiny body and microscopic fingernails, staring in wonderment that he had hours before been literally inside of my sister's body. He opened his eyes and looked right at me, and I told Karen that he had inherited our earthworm toes while I wiggled them with my pinky finger. I sat with him, quietly studying his little face while my sister and brother-in-law struggled to order a chicken dinner on the hospital TV menu (which, by the way, is incredibly challenging even for two people with multiple graduate degrees between them). It struck me that the last time I'd been in a hospital room was with my dying father-in-law, and how stark of a contrast it was to be sitting with a human being at the onset of his life after just accompanying another through the end.

When Henry's older sister was born, I wrote her a post that listed out some instructions for life. In thinking about what to write for Henry, I realized that he's not going to need those instructions, because he'll learn them all from watching Emily. Instead, I decided to write him a list articulating the top ten advantages in life he has thanks to his birth order that I've learned through experience. Here it is for your reading pleasure:

Ten Reasons Why Being a Middle Child Is The Best

You'll always have someone to support you - a built-in tutor to help you with your math homework, counselor for when you're having a problem you can't solve on your own, personal assistant to remind you that it's your mother's birthday, and partner-in-crime for when your parents are being crazy and no one else could possibly understand [Note to Henry: your mom still texts all her siblings to remind us to call our mom on Mother's Day. Annoying, yes, but necessary for some of us.]
Building on the above point, you will never be the first to do the scary things in life like graduating from college, getting a job, etc. Which by default will make you seem tough and brave. [Note to Henry: watching your mom do all of these things before me gave me an insider look and a boost of confidence that I could handle it (including terrifying major life decisions like moving across the country alone, getting married, having a baby, etc.).]
Because the oldest child will automatically be the perfectionist, responsible people-pleaser, you'll be free to be yourself and become a true original in tune with what sets you apart in the world. Because you don't have to worry about people-pleasing, you'll develop a thick skin and learn to care only about the feedback that matters.
You will be smarter than your siblings, because you'll learn everything they know and observe and avoid their mistakes in addition to learning from your own experiences. [Note to Henry: be sure to pick Emily's brain, often, because that's where you'll find almost all your best tricks and shortcuts. Copying your mom was hands-down one of my smartest moves in life.]
Nothing will ever be completely and totally your fault, since there will always be a shadow of doubt when there are multiple potential culprits. So go ahead and live a little. Break the rules, often. They'll never know for sure that it was you...
Sharing the attention of your parents means that you'll learn to do things to please yourself. You'll be more independent and free to do things by yourself, for yourself - and you'll be happier and have more fun without the pressure.
Having an older sibling trying to boss you around all the time will help you develop a healthy disrespect for authority that will later translate into high level executive functioning. [Note to Henry: you can thank Emily for your ability to remain calm and cool in stressful situations, effectively bargain and negotiate, handle confrontation, and think strategically about how to overcome obstacles. Your mom and other aunts and uncles helped me to develop these abilities that went unappreciated until I started my corporate career.]
Although Emily may get privileges that come with being the oldest, such as accomplishing all of the "firsts" of the family, you will develop the ability to think outside of the box and take a more creative approach to your life. You will push yourself to do things differently, just to set yourself apart. As Stephen Richards so wisely put it, "If you do what everyone else does, you'll get what everyone else has."
Your ability to fly under the radar will serve you well in many areas of life, especially during group chores like yard work and at certain family gatherings. [Note to Henry: when you're old enough, I'll give you the rundown on how I used this to avoid eating my peas and other dinner foods not to my liking, reprimands from my dad, etc.]
Any time you succeed, you will get exponentially more attention and celebration because it will come as a surprise to everyone. It might take a little longer for the world to notice your latent genius, but that will make it all the more satisfying.

Based on my own anecdotal evidence, I'm pretty sure the impact of birth order on personality development is a real thing and I truly hope that Henry develops the same middle child syndrome that I benefited from in life. As Procter & Gamble put it with their famed diaper slogan, "Live, learn and get Luv's," middle children really do have it better, that despite the tempered enthusiasm, hand-me-downs and bargain diapers, they get the invaluable benefit of experience. So Henry, welcome to the club. Enjoy Emily's used toys and if you ever forget how good you have it, give me a call and I tell you about all the wonderful things about my life that wouldn't have been possible if it weren't for your mom preceding me in life.

If you made it to the end of this post, hello and thanks for reading! I'd love to hear your thoughts on this topic and any words of wisdom for the newest member of the exclusive club of Middle Children.

P.S. Sorry I've been M.I.A. and neglecting this blog. Have been making some big changes in life that are stressful in a good way. Also have been simultaneously wallowing in a creative rut that I cannot shake no matter how many Tony Robbins books I read, spending more of my free time than I care to admit watching endless episodes of Lost with my husband (I realize the irony in that statement…), consuming Costco-sized bags of SkinnyPop and wearing leggings as pants. Send help.

A farewell to my childhood home

2017-07-21T10:54:00.003-04:00

We'd wait to eat dinner until my dad got home, setting the table and expectantly waiting for my mom to round us all up in the car to pick him up from the train. Our table was giant, a special order to comfortably seat six kids, two parents and handle the wear-and-tear that comes with years of family dinners, dyeing Easter eggs, carving pumpkins, baking cookies, painting and gluing and glittering things on to construction paper, and even occasionally being climbed on by a sleepwalking child.

After he'd washed his face and changed out of his suit, we'd take our reserved seats at the table, my dad at the head, mine two seats to the right, flanked by my little brother and rotating-favorite sister and directly across from the patio door, which had a tiny Gumby and Pokey standing on the frame to test the observational skills of newcomers to our dinner parties. We'd always say grace a few minutes into the meal, some of us out-of-sync in order to be technically correct in thanking the Lord for that which we had already received. Participation in dinner conversation was mandatory at our house, a lively round-the-table report-out of the day that tended to deteriorate into a number of scenarios, commonly starting with a diatribe against "the liberal Left," occasionally devolving into a tearful breakdown by my not-to-be-named, less-talkative sister when put on the spot to offer her opinion, sometimes extending for hours to allow time for an ungrateful child to finish his peas, and infamously involving a few head-to-head battles that could only be resolved by bringing the dictionary, atlas or encyclopedia to the table.

My mom cooked every night, unimpressive to me at the time and which now strikes me as incredible, seeing as I have no children of my own and a frequent nightly habit of frantically texting with my husband about how to feed ourselves, usually culminating in a Thai takeout order.

After dinner, my siblings and I would embark on our bumbling group project of cleaning the kitchen. As group projects go, some pulled more weight than others. (I will admit to pushing a wet rag over the surface of the table for many minutes longer than necessary to avoid being the one having to sweep the floor.) It was a serious job that ended with an inspection by a thankless, detail-oriented man who had no problem rearranging the dishwasher or demanding a re-sweep of a still-dirty floor, seemingly unconcerned by the self-assessed exhausted and overworked children standing before him in defeat.

We'd then disperse to our rooms, Karen and I in the front, Patty and Meghan next door and my brothers to the luxury of their own separate rooms (or to the makeshift basement computer lab, where my brother would take apart, lay in pieces on the carpet, and then successfully put back together our family desktop for no apparent reason other than to prove he could). The hallway that connected our bedrooms was filled with family photos and mementos that remind me of my mom, Catholic figurines and framed artwork that I'd made in third grade. My sisters and I shared a giant, communal bathroom with a double vanity that was always littered with Neutrogena and Chapstick. We unquestioningly respected our agreed-upon shower schedule for survival purposes (a stark contrast to our no-sharing-clothes contract).

Significant square footage of our house was reserved exclusively for my parents, decorated with our baby pictures but not welcoming of our presence. We were invited into their bedroom or office only when we'd done something wrong, or had a genuine need for a private conversation (which did not include inter-sibling disputes unless they involved blood or fire). The dining and living rooms were invite-only, and it was usually just Karen who made it to the adult table during the parties and get-togethers my parents threw often. My most potent memory of time spent in the living room was the night I got engaged, sitting in there with my sisters and my parents, crying and laughing and drinking too much wine in front of the fireplace, welcoming Wes into the fold.

At our house, Tostitos were a food group, Christmas decorating a sport, and Sunday mass mandatory. The acre of yardage was meticulously maintained on a weekly Saturday morning schedule by my disciplined dad and his crew of free and somewhat unreliable laborers. On lazy weekends and summer days off, my grandma would come over with a coffee cake and we'd have hours-long brunches that lasted until the second pot of coffee ran out.

My parents worked with an architect to design the house to the exact specifications they needed for their large and uncontemporary family (including one design flaw which they learned about twenty years later when we explained how we used the basement stairs into the garage to sneak out past curfew). It was their dream house that they'd saved for years to build so their small children would have the space to grow up, to be the backdrop for all of our childhood experiences and family memories. They built it when I was in second grade, and I remember visiting it one night with my dad right before they finished construction. The base cabinets had just been installed, and he lifted me up to sit inside the cavity where they were putting a wall oven. It's funny to flash forward from that vantage point and moment in time, remembering everything that would happen in that soon-to-be-finished house. The day we moved in, my youngest brother cried and later told everyone that he would be painting his room black and sharing it with my mom.

Every time I walk in the door, I revert back into the 17-year-old who'd last lived there, my stress melting away in the comforting familiarity and sense of security that comes with it. My parents sold the house today, downsizing to a place perfect for spending the warm Chicago months in retirement. It's just a house, and that cheesy saying about home being where the heart is and all that stuff is all true. But I was surprised how sentimental I was at saying goodbye to the place that served our family for decades, and how much I wanted to set down roots and buy my own home with Wes when my parents told us they were selling it.

As my childhood home was renovated and staged for sale, Wes and I did buy our own place. It's taken on a life of its own, becoming the new family gathering spot and the place where we gather to eat Tostitos and drink cheap wine and have brunches that never end. It's a work-in-progress that I've been focused on designing and improving, forgetting that there's much more involved in making it a home than what meets the eye. A few weeks ago, I did a little DIY video tour of our progress on it to post here on this blog, but revisiting that video today, I realized that there's some Catholic paraphernalia, family photos and children's artwork missing that needs to be addressed in the coming months and years in order to give this place the kind of character and personality I grew up with on Garfield Avenue and didn't fully appreciate until today. More to come on that...

Ok, that's all I have. Would love to hear your thoughts in the comments, especially if you felt the same when your parents sold the place you grew up.

P.S. If you want to see the video or just hear what my voice sounds like after reading my typing for hours on end in your time following this blog, I've posted it on my downloads page for your viewing pleasure. (If you're on my email list, you can access it via the link at the end of my last newsletter. If you're not on the list and want to see it, you can join here for access.)

P.P.S. I know, a couple of sappy posts in a row. Thanks for staying with me. Something fluffy and fashionable coming soon... and I promise to set up a reader preferences survey as soon as I figure out how to do it, so you can choose which topics you care to receive!

On death and the meaning of life

2017-07-06T16:38:00.000-04:00

He looked like one of those wax figures at Madame Tussauds, where the cloned bone structure and lifelike features could fool you if not betrayed by a peculiar yellow skin tone. Aside from the slight puffs of air that escaped from his lips, my warm, witty, larger-than-life father-in-law was nothing more than a shell of a human being.

We held vigil at his bedside in hospice in the days leading to the end, watching him wither away, placing our hands on his chest, feeling every single one of his rib bones beneath the thin blanket. I held my husband's hands and his father's limp, lifeless fingers as we timed the pauses between his breaths. Waiting with eerie expectation for the moment he would finally slip away and leave behind the scarred, worn-out body that carried him for 70 years, a lifetime of memories spread over generations of family and friends, and a ghost of a future filled with grandchildren he'd never meet, family trips he'd miss, Thanksgivings and Christmases he wouldn't attend and a retirement spent traveling the world with the love of his life that he'd never enjoy.

We knew the end was coming for months, a steady decline with chemotherapy being the last bleak hope of an upswing that never came. My husband, an only child, left his job in January to go back and forth to North Carolina to be with his dad, knowing that their days together were numbered. Wes had a complicated relationship with his father, made more so as he watched his mother transform into a primary caregiver, shuttling his father to doctor's appointments, carrying him and his wheelchair and his anger, holding and feeding and rescuing and counseling her thankless charge, administering medication to her unwilling patient while losing part of herself in the process. My husband and his mother had watched helplessly for years as the rock of their family lost himself, his mind, his ability to walk, and finally, his will to live. It was messy, marked with daily battles and marred with regrets on all sides. The end was a mix of acute sadness at the loss of the man who once was, and a dull relief to surrender the human being who took his place.

How the value of a life is determined

My father-in-law, the man who once was, can only be described as a character, the kind of man who went through the trials and suffering required to have such strength of soul, clarity of vision, and inspired ambition. He was adored as a true original, a salt-of-the-earth pragmatist and a scrappy, self-made multimillionaire who built several businesses in Los Angeles using his Southern accent as an asset in negotiations with what he referred to as "slicks" (which we interpreted to mean "businessmen in expensive suits"). He used his quick wit, common sense, sound judgement and ability to outwork anyone, anywhere, at any time to his advantage. I could spend paragraphs describing his shrewd ventures and dogged determination to succeed, but in the end, all who knew him described the value of his life in terms of service: to the United States Navy, to his friends, family, employees and customers, and to the son he adopted and raised as his own. In the context of this service, his humility, sense of humor and unusual intelligence set him apart.

He taught me skills I'll use for life - like how to service a car engine and change a light fixture - but the biggest gift he gave me was his practical wisdom, shared in tidbits over the past seven years we’ve known each other.

I wish he'd have stuck around long enough to tell his future grandchildren that it's a gift to be underestimated, because your competitors will never see you coming; that there's no need to rush, because you've got the rest of your life to get where you're going; that becoming successful requires you to do things no one else will, because if it were easy everyone would be doing it. I wish he'd have stayed here a little longer so I could tell him how much he inspired me with his strong sense of self and conviction that everyone is a Jeff Gordon fan even if they don't know it yet; his utter disregard for popular opinion, his deep belief in the power of a dissenting voice, and his passive resistance against waste and abuse in government; his abhorrence of pretentiousness and associated love of Sutter Home Sweet Red; his dichotomous personality, including his penchant for wearing a $15,000 Rolex with Carhartt coveralls, work boots, women's reading glasses, and an ancient cell phone on a lanyard around his neck; his mental shortcuts that Wes and I will forever quote, including referring to all women whose names he could not recall as "Petunia" (as in, "I saw Petunia from the school board in line at the bank") and referring to all persons whose competence may be in question as "Nematodes" (as in, "Let me tell you what that Nematode married to Petunia from the school board did this time"); and his joyous, boisterous bouts of laughter and genuine love of all people (minus the aforementioned slicks and nematodes, of course).

What death tells us about how to live our lives

He passed away on Saturday, after a years-long struggle with an illness that not only ended his life but absorbed what they say is supposed to be the best years of it. Sitting next to his bed in his final days, it struck me how we exit the world in much the same way that we enter it, surrounded by friends and family in waiting, anticipating the brief presence of some higher being that both gives and takes away life, focused on the potential and value of the life in question. In death, we recognize our own mortality and it brings into sharp focus what we should be doing with each day we're given, making us conscious of the fact that we're not guaranteed another one. If there's any silver lining to an early death like that of my father-in-law, it's the salient reminder to those left behind on why we're all here. Whether you believe in God, or Universal Intelligence, or simply feel that there must be something beyond this life, we're all judged in the end not by our worldly accomplishments or what we may pride ourselves on, but by how we've touched and served others. Someone who my father-in-law deeply touched left a beautiful note on his obituary with a quote that I think says it best:

"Strange, isn't it? Each man's life touches so many other lives. When he isn't around he leaves an awful hole, doesn't he?" - Clarence the Angel, It's a Wonderful Life.

I think that awful hole is related to the meaning of life. It's a concept that I've been struggling to define for myself recently, after coming to the stark realization that I've allowed years of my time and attention to be absorbed without taking a step back to examine what it's all for, anyway. If evidenced by nothing other than reflections on my father-in-law's life with the people who knew and loved him, the key to a meaningful and fulfilling life is directly related to how you've channeled your talents and abilities to make the world a better place. There's a quote jotted in one of my journals, captured when I was first starting out in my post-college life. It found me today during a hunt through memory boxes for photos of my father-in-law, inviting itself to be added to this post for it's perfect articulation of the criteria for evaluating a life:

"To laugh often and much; To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; To appreciate beauty; To find the best in others; To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Although the last years of his life were blemished with the heartache, regret and grief that accompany a protracted decline, my father-in-law was a living expression of joy and kindness who left all those who came to him better and happier. (In particular, a 24-year-old girl who will never forget how she was wholeheartedly accepted by him the moment they met, despite her being the daughter of a slick Yankee Catholic lawyer and having a dubious appreciation for Nascar and Southern cuisine.) His legacy lives with those of us left behind, especially in his only son Wes, who has more of his father in him than he knows. My husband and I have our work cut out for us to honor the life of this man, to follow his footsteps in fostering, adopting and loving unconditionally a child in need of a family; to listen to his guidance and use it to build something of importance and significance; and to internalize his wisdom and teach our future children everything they will need to learn from the life of their imperfect, incredible Grandpa Walt.

How to define the purpose of your life

My father-in-law's final lesson, shared through his death and the gaping hole he left, was the importance of living a purposeful life: to define what makes you unique and what you're naturally good at, to seek ways to use it to help others, and to strive to be the best version of yourself every day. Easier said than done, of course, as it wouldn't be a worthy venture otherwise. There's a little prayer that I say when I feel lost on that purpose, and thought you might find it to be a helpful reflection whether you believe in God, Universal Intelligence or something else bigger than ourselves:

"What would you have me do? Where would you have me go? Who would you have me be?"

Somewhere deep down, you probably already know the answers to these questions. Because of my father-in-law's example, I'm convinced that figuring out those answers and finding the courage to act on them will lead us to live purposeful, fulfilling lives; to use whatever challenges life throws at us to develop strength of soul, clarity of vision and determined ambition; and to help us to be the best versions of our unique selves to serve the world in our own way.

To my father-in-law, who among everything noted above also made sure to tell me he loved me every chance he had; who started calling me "Annie Oakley" instead of "Darling" after teaching me to shoot targets fashioned out of rival Democrat campaign signs; who raised my incredible husband and gave him a sound work ethic, strong character and a side-splitting sense of humor (and bragged about him behind his back to keep him humble); who married and loved deeply an extraordinary, intelligent and virtuous woman who reciprocated his love until the end, quietly and nobly honoring her marriage vows as they relate to sickness and health, even when it seemed futile and impossibly strenuous to continue; who we'd hoped would grace us with his company, his laughter, his stories and his wisdom for the next 20 to 30 years of our lives: I forgive you for leaving so soon. I'm sorry I didn't call more often, visit more often, and sit through the races with you more often. I love you more than you will ever know. We will miss you forever.

If you've made it this far, thank you for reading and I hope you took something away from this post (even if only a newfound love of the name Petunia). I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Time-tested tactics for staying in love

2017-06-21T18:36:00.002-04:00

One thing that really gets under my dad's skin is wedding toasts. Granted, the man has a lot of pet peeves, but this one is so true. Your typical wedding toast goes something along the lines of this: "Sam and Sally's relationship is so amazing, their love is so rare, she is his perfect match, he falls all over himself to do anything she wants, they are blissful 24/7 and being in their presence depresses me because it reminds me that I'll never find anything that can possibly compare." This brand of wedding toast is based on the premise that no one in the entire room has ever felt love before, assuming that 200+ guests are all just a bunch of miserable old farts who hate their lives and wish they could be like Sam and Sally but they can't so they'll drop a $500 check in the glittery box on their way out in hopes that the next generation might be able to do it better.

To me, the cheesy wedding toast perfectly encapsulates how our culture treats the topic of love. Like it's a special magical golden unicorn that only the truly lucky can find. The reality is that anyone can fall in love and it's not really that special (see 'Teen Mom,' 'Brangelina,' and 'Conscious Uncoupling'). Staying in love, however, is a true skill. Putting two fully functional adults into a scenario where they are perma-roommates with vastly different interpretations when one of them says something such as "we need to clean our home" or "want to watch an awesome movie" or "give me 5 minutes" is really a perfect formula for the kind of head-butting that you can't possibly imagine while enacting the cliché of stuffing overpriced cake into each other's faces and haphazardly kissing it off in a haze of bliss.

This is why we are all so deeply touched when we see a couple of octogenarians slowly shuffling around in the park holding hands. "How have they kept it alive all these years?" we ask ourselves in wonderment, suddenly acutely aware of the text message we sent to our true love about his insulting suggestion of Chinese takeout for dinner when he knows full well that we've written off chicken fried rice for life. We don't assume that they're hot and heavy because they just met at Bingo night at the nursing home, because we understand that the kind of love that overcomes decades worth of trials and tribulations is at once aspirational and achievable.

It's aspirational because we know that it's the real, genuine, and hard-won thing that everyone wants to have at the end of life. I want my old, bald, bag o' bones husband there with me on that park bench in 60 years and I can't even explain why sometimes other than the deep belief that life is better when shared with someone who knows you inside and out and can make you laugh harder than anyone. It's achievable because somewhere deep inside our souls, we know that it is completely within our power to build that kind of marriage despite what the next several decades may present.

Why it's hard to stay in love for the long haul

Have you ever heard the saying that love is a verb, not a noun? It's so true. Although it's easier to think of love as something abstract and out of our control, derived from unique chemistry shared between two people, it's actually much less complicated. In reality, love is a culmination of choices, actions and habits that are sometimes profoundly easy to do, and other times extremely difficult (such as when you are deeply annoyed by the way the dishwasher has been loaded). Those actions and habits inspire the feeling of love, but the feeling in and of itself means nothing when not backed by the choices themselves. It is my firm belief that anyone married more than a few months has learned that there is a very thin line between loving and loathing your spouse, and the deeper you love someone the higher the propensity you have to throw things when angry.

For me personally, it was a painful process to learn this in my own marriage. I'm convinced our first year was a challenge because I was benchmarking my relationship with Wes against an impossible cultural standard, and it took time to learn that the golden unicorn of a picture-perfect marriage like Sam and Sally's wedding toast didn't actually exist. In fact, I'm pretty sure anyone who claims to have a perfect relationship is just married to a bad communicator who deeply detests them. (Sorry.)

What you can do to keep the love alive

They say no marriage is alike, but based on my research (ahem, late night Googling…) there are some common truths to making the love last that are well within our reach. A lot of it is good old fashioned, somewhat antifeminist Mom advice. Most of it is basically just reminding yourself to stop being crazy. (Which we all are, by the way.) All of it is about how the quality of our relationship is 100% within our control, despite what we would rather believe.

If you're interested in the best-of-the-best of what the interwebs and my mom's friends have to offer on making love last, please join my email list for access to a bonus post on 8 tried and true tactics for making love last. It covers the basic rules of happy marriages and some delightful anecdotes that you may or may not find entertaining, but will likely make you feel less alone in the world when you inevitably find yourself seething in your car over something you logically understand is utterly stupid but emotionally CAN.NOT.DEAL. (We've all been there.)

Ok, that's all I've got. It was a little risky to write this, mostly because I kept having this nagging little thought in the back of my mind that maybe those marriages of sunshine and rainbows we see all over social media are actually the real deal and it's really just Wes and me who can't get our act together. But according to surveys of my mom and her gaggle of girlfriends, and most of my married friends and colleagues who answer my probing personal questions, they're not real and our struggles are the same.

Anyway, would love to hear your thoughts on this post in the comments!

P.S. If you liked this post, you'd probably like this one on what nobody tells you about marriage, and this one with instructions for living a good life.

P.P.S. Yes, I am still asking for your email address. Just like when people don't really want to be my friend in real life, they eventually break at my merciless persistence. If you've been reading this blog for awhile and reluctant to sign up, it's only a matter of time so you might as well just cough it up now. (I promise you won't regret it.*)

(*You can always unsubscribe if you do.)

Why dressing for success (still) matters

2017-06-15T20:50:00.000-04:00

Last week, a group of low income students visited my consulting firm to participate in a day-long business skills program. I hadn't met the other volunteer coaches before, and was impressed by a junior staff member who kicked off the program by addressing the room with the poise and perfectly tailored outfit of a seasoned partner.

As the day progressed, that same consultant was called to present to the group again - and it was only then that I was surprised to learn that she wasn't a colleague, but one of the students who had come for the coaching! She told the group about her challenged family background, her struggle to balance supporting herself on a low wage job and attend classes part-time at a community college, and how one organization opened doors for her that she hadn't thought possible.

The organization was Dress for Success, a nonprofit you may have heard about before. They hooked her up with a suit (complete with heels and a bag) and two weeks of professional outfits that enabled her to land not only an interview and ultimately a position that lined up with her professional interests, but the confidence to show up at that job every day looking the part.

It's easy to forget the impact that our appearance has on those around us, and I'm grateful to that sharp young woman for reminding me and inspiring this post.

"How you do anything is how you do everything" - a wise person, who was not wise enough to copyright this statement

Have you ever heard that quote before? It's one that I think perfectly articulates why "dressing for success" matters in the workplace. There are some fundamental behaviors and characteristics that translate into success for any job, in the history of all jobs. These are the things that your parents were attempting to instill in you when they made you brush your teeth, go to church, do yard work and practice the piano - activities that require conscientiousness, discipline, and attention to detail. These 'success factors' are simply habits that we develop in our personal lives, and they tend to dictate how we approach literally everything we do - including our work.

Whether you like it or not, others tend to determine whether you've got those successful habits locked down by evaluating your outward appearance. The image you choose to portray expresses a little bit about who you are, what you care about and pay attention to, and how you approach life - in essence, how you approach everything.

If you're disciplined, conscientious and detail-oriented, you likely have a good routine down for taking care of yourself and your well-being and regularly invest time and resources into how you present yourself to the world. This translates into a healthy, rested person who's taken time to do her hair and makeup, invested in quality clothing that fits well, and feels good about herself and her abilities to do other things, too.

If you work a full-time job, approximately 70% of your decisions about how you choose to present yourself are for work. Paradoxically, it's the area where many of us struggle for a few reasons:

Dress codes can be hard to interpret, especially for women: even if your company claims to embrace a specific dress code (business formal, business casual, creative, etc.), it's important to figure out how to interpret that particular dress code in the way that works for your company's culture and for your personal style.
Closets and bathrooms usually present an overwhelming amount of choices that we are not prepared to make at 6 o'clock in the morning: rummaging through dresses, trying to remember if we picked up our favorite pants at the dry cleaners, and staring at our bedhead in the bathroom mirror without a plan for wrangling it into submission eats up valuable time and leads us to be late and look harried.
Work days tend to be treated as something to suffer through, rather than embrace and enjoy: hitting the snooze button on your alarm five times, dreading the day, and allowing yourself to indulge in a negative mindset about how much is on your plate, how frustrating your co-workers are, or what you'd rather be doing saps energy, lowers self-esteem and demotivates you from doing the necessary things to be successful.

Even if you've got some work to do on your own personal habits, it's easy to overcome the daily conundrum of getting ready for work with a little bit of thought and planning. Understanding your dress code, organizing your closet and bathroom to support a streamlined morning routine, and re-thinking your workday as a gift rather than insufferable torture are the basic steps to showing up at work every day looking, feeling and performing at your absolute best.

My 80% travel requirement for work has helped me to refine the art of getting ready, and doing it as efficiently as possible. It has required me to learn how to quickly assess and understand the culture and dress codes of my various clients, plan (and pack) my outfits ahead of time, and find ways to get excited about my work and show up as my best self even on days when it's easy to feel stressed, exhausted and negative. Although there are still days when I forget my own rules and struggle to get out the door, refining a system has truly helped me to build a work wardrobe - and a daily routine - that truly works for me.

You may have already mastered the art of getting ready for work, so if that is the case I salute you and hope you'll leave some of your habit-building and time-saving tips in the comments. If you're one of the many of us still struggling in this area, I've put together a short guide (really, more of a bonus post) to dressing for success that includes:

How to interpret your company's dress code - and the key pieces you need to dress for it
How to organize your closet and bathroom to get you out the door faster every morning
How to establish a successful mindset every morning to perform at your best

If you're interested in my 7 Step Guide to Dressing for Success, join my email list for access!

P.S. Current members of my Rolodex, I so appreciate you! You can access this guide at the same link, or just sit tight and I'll be sending it out to all of you with my next email update.

P.P.S. You may have noticed that I've started a little campaign to collect all your emails. This is because I secretly want to drop off all social media one day and need to be able to reach you from my cave.

P.P.P.S. Can I just say that Dress for Success, the actual organization, is amazing? I think we should all figure out how to give a little bit of our cool, overflowing closets to help them help others. And at the same time absolve ourselves of guilt over poor past purchasing decisions.

Ok, end of post scripts... would love to hear your thoughts on some of the challenges you've had (or seen others struggle with) when it comes to this topic!

Has original thought gone out of style?

2017-06-08T18:06:00.001-04:00

Before diving in to this post, I'd like to acknowledge that the American media and general public are currently in the throes of the Comey testimony and the timing of this topic is not a coincidence. If you're anything like me, you've probably had a building sense of exhaustion at the news cycle and may share my growing outrage that we've allowed the attention of our entire nation to be directed to tweetable stories, at the cost of enabling (and maybe even encouraging) glaring leadership failures. Such as collectively freaking out about allegations of Russian hackers interfering in our election, meanwhile allowing the leader of one of our most critical federal agencies with access to the most highly classified information to intentionally feed salacious information to the media before and after the most contentious election in recent history. (Remember how he decided to go ahead and tell everyone that he found some more Hillary emails just days before voting? And we're focused on Siberian teenagers with virus-ridden desktop computers from the '90s.)

That said, this post has been forming in my mind for months about how our media has officially parted ways from the hallmarks of journalism that have served the American public throughout the course of our history - and none of us are recognizing the problem, thinking for ourselves, or doing anything about it. (In short, this post is basically a sales pitch to bring critical thinking skills back in style.)

A friendly reminder on the role of the news media

My favorite professor in college was a former Washington Post journalist who was "old school" in every sense of the phrase but most notably in his strict adherence to the fundamentals of the science of reporting. His class was twice a week at 9 o'clock in the morning, the crack of dawn for a 20-year-old who lived on the opposite side of campus.

He required each of us to come to every class with a compilation of five grammatical, spelling, reporting or AP Style mistakes from national publications with the current date. This meant that I spent every Tuesday and Thursday morning at 6:30 a.m. poring through the New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, and The Wall Street Journal with a fine toothed comb. All 15 students came to class each morning with a neat package of that day's failings of the journalism industry and left that semester with a habitual, spasmodic ability to spot errors (to the detriment of our future spouses and direct reports... see meme below).

We also came to abhor and judge reporters who broke the fundamental public trust of the trade by editorializing, inserting their own opinions, using unnamed sources, or failing to investigate alternate viewpoints to offer a balanced and fact-based story. Our professor taught us that words matter, because they incite thoughts, beliefs and actions - and a reporter's job was to present the facts in a way that enabled the reader to think critically about the story and come to his or her own opinion.

Fairness and accuracy are the foundations of ethical journalism, meaning that stories must be written with facts and balanced perspectives. Journalists are ethically bound to honor their duty to the public by reporting the truth, acting independently, providing transparency, and omitting their own biases to put the principles that guide their work first.

Why the role of the news media as a public servant is gone

That same professor is the reason that I never took a job in journalism, despite my love of writing and annoying yet uncontrollable penchant for striking up conversations with strangers. On the last day of class, he stood before us and pronounced that newspapers were dead. "Media is changing rapidly," he explained, "and transforming how information will be collected, reported and shared in the future." He made us promise to protect the fundamentals we learned in his class regardless of what our work would look like in the future. (Instead, I opted out and went down the road of corporate communications which has conveniently enabled me to pontificate on this subject from the point-of-view of a detached outsider.)

As my wise professor predicted, journalism has been transformed by social media to a point where it's almost unrecognizable. Real-time updates are shared online before there could possibly be time to check the facts. Anonymous phone calls and Facebook posts have become cited sources. Dubious and shabbily reported stories go viral on Twitter and YouTube. And the American public eats it all up without stopping to think about what it is they're hearing and subsequently believing. The majority of our news industry has transformed from one that used to encourage opinions and healthy debate, into one that discourages any perspective that represents a diversion from the court of public opinion.

I think the shift in how money is made when it comes to sharing information has got to be one of the primary drivers of the decline in trustworthy reporting: newspapers used to sell information to audiences, and today media outlets sell audiences to companies. The problem with this shift is that facts and balanced perspectives don't win likes, shares, comments and follows on social media. Organizations that develop and distribute "news" are incentivized to do things that grow their audience, meaning that driving user engagement takes the place of adhering to the fundamental ethics of journalism. It no longer matters if the information is true, but if it is popular.

How this is dangerous for all of us

We all know what catching our attention looks like. Our feeble human brains are wired for survival, meaning that we enthusiastically tune in to shocking information that either a. threatens our lives (e.g., natural disasters, terrorism, the great debate on eggs and heart attacks, etc.); b. threatens our identities (e.g., opinions on education, family and relationship norms, politics, whether or not there is life on Mars, etc.); c. feeds our voyeuristic urge to watch disasters happen to others (e.g., the Bachelorette, 15-car-pileups on the highway, coverage of Kim Kardashian's attack in Paris, etc.); or d. is purely entertaining.

So here we are in a time where popular opinion has replaced truth, retweeting puppy videos and consuming snippets of Comey's testimony that relate to Russian hackers electing the president and blabbing about our poorly structured thoughts on the matter to all of our equally uninformed yet strongly opinionated friends and colleagues. (I think you get the idea.) Amidst all this chaos and distraction, there is still a government collecting our taxes and waging wars and making decisions on our behalf that affect our country, our lives, our children's lives and we don't have any reliable insight into what is actually happening nor do we really seem all that interested anyway.

What you can do to be better informed

So what to do about this in the event you've made it this far in the post and haven't been distracted by a gif of a cat hanging from a ceiling fan? I suggest you shrug your shoulders, sigh, and turn on House of Cards to temporarily placate your utter despair at your powerlessness. Just kidding, of course. I've been trying to answer this question myself for a while, and decided to do a few things to better educate myself and take a more proactive approach to staying informed. The most important of which has been cutting out any publication that violates the fundamental principles and ethics I learned in my college journalism classes (looking at you and your "anonymous sources," CNN) and reading all information with a critical lens.

Here are a few tips to keep in mind that can help you to identify better and more trustworthy information sources…

#1 Actively consume information with a lens of balance, asking yourself two key questions while you're listening or reading:

Can I tell what the reporter personally thinks about this story or situation?
Can I understand at least one other point of view in this story?

If I can't answer "no" to the first bullet, and "yes" to the second, I tend to disregard as unbalanced and poorly reported.

#2 Apply doubt to everything you hear, listening for the facts

This is the good old "prove it" tactic that you already use on a daily basis when people are trying to sell you on something. A healthy dose of doubt never hurt anyone and in fact probably helped you to invest in better anti-aging creams and index funds. Might as well apply the same principles to what you allow to take hold in your mind, right?

#3 Consider the source

A time tested tactic that should never have gone out of style. Trustworthy sources of information are independent, meaning that there is nothing influencing the information other than the desire to present the facts in a balanced way. When newspapers first came online, they offered subscriptions to access content in order to enable them to remain independent. This tactic was criticized, but it's allowed the ones that stuck to their guns to continue to hold themselves to the highest standards. This model relies on viewers to value independence, and be willing to pay for it to be better educated. Which is something I'm realizing is well worth the cost.

Ok, that's the end of my rant. I'm a believer that if you complain about something, you take on responsibility for helping to fix it, so I hope that this tirade did something for you. If you took something away from this, or have thoughts on the topic, please leave me a comment, shoot me an email, or share this post.

Five mistakes to avoid if you want amazing personal style

2017-05-23T11:41:00.000-04:00

One thing I love to do with my girlfriends is invite myself over to their homes to overhaul their closets, give them unsolicited style tips, and put together outfits for them using things they already own. It's sort of like "happy hour and shopping on a Friday night" but backwards and costs a lot less. It typically involves a couple bottles of wine, lots of emphatic tossing of things on the ground, and rounds of forced try-ons and posed pictures to file away for future reference. It tends to be a ruthless process with A LOT of items ending up in the 'toss' pile and some third-degree questioning about why certain things needs to be saved or why others are never worn. It's also extremely rewarding in that it yields many new outfits that had been sitting there all along, results in a short shopping list of items that are truly needed to round out what's left in the closet, and feeds my insatiable need to be in charge at all times. (Just kidding, of course.)

After going through this process with many of my friends, I've learned that we all struggle with the same things when it comes to getting dressed every morning. Over time, I've realized that there are five common mistakes most people make with their wardrobes and I wanted to share them here along with some thoughts on solutions in case you run into these pitfalls, too.

#1 They spend too much on trendy, occasion-specific items rather than investing in basic, everyday staples

We all fall into this trap, but avoiding it and instead committing to allocate your money towards the items you'll truly get the most cost per wear is a surefire way to develop better style. When my friend Gill and I went through literally every item in her closet, it amazed me that she had several extremely expensive designer cocktail dresses that were literally collecting dust in her closet yet didn't own black jeans, high quality cotton tee shirts, silk blouses, or a great tailored blazer. To survive this closet of many gaps, she wore Lululemon leggings everywhere.

Without a collection of great basics that work well together, getting dressed every day is difficult and requires more effort and thought. Before spending money on a new dress for a special occasion, think about what basics your wardrobe is lacking and whether that money might be better spent on something that will get more mileage like a great tote or a pair of tuxedo pants that fit you perfectly.

#2 They overlook really amazing items because they're not sure how to style them

Leather skirts, cage heels, and trendy items like bell sleeves are great because they have the power to spice up an otherwise basic outfit. I have many friends who buy these things but don't wear them because they're not sure how to incorporate them into an outfit. One of the best styling tricks I've learned is to pick one item as the focus and balance it by choosing opposing items that are different textures, shapes and colors. For example, a leather skirt is an edgy, tough fabric that needs to be balanced with a softer texture like cashmere or cotton and dressed down with flats to make it appropriate for day. A shirt with 70s style bell sleeves needs to be balanced with simple classics like distressed jeans and basic pumps.

#3 They don't make the time to plan outfits in advance

Whenever I fall into a rut with my closet, I intentionally carve out a couple of hours on a weekend to go through it item-by-item and put together outfits, try them on and take photos so I'll remember the combinations. It gets my creative juices flowing and gives me a great reference file of outfits to pull. Every night before I go to bed, I pick out my entire outfit (starting with the shoes) based on the weather and what I have to do the next day. It guarantees that my outfit will look put-together and helps me get out the door faster. Advance planning is the only reason why I can put together a stylish outfit in one minute.

#4 They fail to assess gaps in their wardrobe before going shopping

This is the root cause of pitfall #1 above, and it the most difficult habit to break when it comes to developing style. In a culture of instant gratification, it's so much easier to think that your wardrobe woes can be cured with a trip to a store to buy new things rather than recognize that you have work to do in evaluating what you already own, how your wardrobe works for you, and your purchasing decisions.

The absolute best thing you can do to develop great style is to buy less and spend more strategically on items that will truly fill a gap in your wardrobe. Prior to my "No New Things" challenge, I was a victim of 'bargain' impulse purchases that didn't serve what I really needed. Now that I'm older and wiser, I've realized that it's actually cheaper to make investment purchases. After spending a lot of time planning and assessing my wardrobe gaps for a year, I've spent in the ballpark of $2,500 on just 7 pieces: a couple of high quality flats that I'll use for the next 5 years, a few timeless dresses that can be styled for countless occasions, an amazing oversize woven tote bag that can go anywhere, and a timeless trench coat that fits me perfectly and can be worn with literally everything.

That might sound like a lot of money to some of you, but I'm convinced it's far less than what I would have spent if I didn't have a plan. How many times have you spent under $100 on a 'bargain' dress, or pair of shoes, or a bag or jacket that you didn't really love and just took up space in your closet until you eventually donated them? Wouldn't it have been worth it to omit those purchases and save that money for a few thoughtfully selected pieces that will really serve your lifestyle for years to come?

#5 They lose focus on what works for them, their shape and their lifestyle

Getting brutally honest with yourself about what works for your body and your lifestyle is a challenge, but will help you have better style. Cap sleeves, the color yellow, empire waists, and strapless styles are examples of items you will never (or extremely rarely) see me wear because they just don’t work for my broad shoulders, pale skin, or boyish shape. Learning to avoid wholesale the things that don't work for me and selecting items that highlight my assets has been a game changer. It's also been a game changer to really look at my lifestyle across a 365 day span and consider the percentage of time I spend in various settings such as work, lounging at home, on dates with my husband, out with friends, or at parties and fancy events. Making sure that my wardrobe reflects that lifestyle has helped me to refine my everyday style and focus where I build my wardrobe. For me personally, this means spending more on versatile items that I can wear to the office or dress both up and down, and deciding to buy cashmere sweatpants that work for both reading in my living room and for the times my husband successfully drags me out to a neighborhood bar on a Friday night.

In addition to these common mistakes, I also tend to find common gaps in my friends wardrobe or missing staples that would help to create dozens of new outfits. And I think this is a problem that can be hard to diagnose without an outside perspective. Many of you have also emailed or left comments in the past asking for thoughts on the basic, foundational items that everyone should own.

Although I'd love to be your online personal stylist and Skype-edit your closet, I figured it would be easier to just create a checklist of spring + summer wardrobe staples to help you take inventory of your own wardrobe, guide your purchasing decisions, and develop better personal style. If you're interested in my wardrobe staples checklist, please join my email list for access to a free copy!

P.S. This post is dedicated to my friend (and beauty vlogger) Pam Sanchez and the 300 flow-y tops I forced her to donate. May they rest in peace.

Why failing is good for your personal development

2017-05-05T13:41:00.001-04:00

If you've never failed at anything in your entire life, this post is not for you. And for the record, I assume you must live in a bubble and be incredibly boring and we would never be friends because perfect and interesting are mutually exclusive concepts in my world.

That's not to say that I think I'm a failure. There are some things that I do pretty well: corny puns, rearranging furniture, finding grammar mistakes in newspapers. My dog literally thinks I'm the most amazing person on Earth. But there are thousands of things that I do terribly: anything that requires hand-eye coordination, selecting gifts, remembering to RSVP, carrying a tune, cooking chicken breast. Among others that I could spend hours listing here.

I've been thinking a lot lately about shortcomings and failure, and reflecting on the lengths I personally (and we collectively as a culture) go to correct or avoid them. From a very young age, we're taught what's expected, and over time we unconsciously begin to do two things:

Strive to overcome shortcomings
Avoid failing at all costs

There's something inherently wrong with both of these tendencies. An innate drive to change ourselves to meet some false vision of perfection leads us away from who we truly are as human beings, and what we're really meant to do for the world with our unique talents. A fear of failure holds us back from experiences and lessons that are necessary to learn, grow and expand our value to others.

Rather than making us collectively better human beings, striving for 'perfection' and fearing failure causes us to become versions of ourselves based on false standards that might not be quite right for who we are as people. My girl Eleanor Roosevelt said it best: "When you adopt the standards and the values of someone else, you surrender your own integrity. You become, to the extent of your surrender, less of a human being."

How often have you heard the tale of the straight A student who followed the path of achievement until they morphed into a miserable investment banker yearning to own a food truck? Or the one about the young woman who forgets to relish the amazing, independent life she's built because of an intense loneliness driven by a false life timeline that dictates expiration dates for brides and mothers?

The pressure to achieve other people's vision of perfection can be overwhelming, and the fear of failure can paralyze us. It doesn't matter what you do, where you live, who your partner or friends are, or what your version of perfection and failure looks like. We all experience this and have to get past it in order to be better people and more value to the world.

Why Falling Short and Failing Is Good For You

A reader (hi, Cindy!) recently helped me think about this from a fresh perspective. After reading one of my posts, she emailed me to say that she was unsubscribing because she was offended by what I wrote. I was stunned. After exchanging a few emails with Cindy to better understand her perspective, I realized how badly I failed: in her explanation, Cindy told me that she loved to read this blog and often printed the posts to reread. Like many people, she'd grown weary of the negativity in American politics and exhausted by the constant commentary. Finding that tone on a blog she'd grown to trust to provide a positive and productive perspective was incredibly disappointing.

For me, realizing that I made at least one reader feel marginalized and negatively impacted their day was a much-needed wakeup call. I'd forgotten something I learned from one of my longtime favorite authors E.B. White, who famously said that the purpose of writing is "to lift people up, not lower them down."

Failing in this example taught me that I had an opportunity to better serve my readers and needed to be more thoughtful about the purpose and intent of my messages. The lesson Cindy helped teach me that day also made me consider where I needed to be more thoughtful about the value I was delivering in other roles in my life, including as a sister, daughter, wife, friend, colleague, manager and consultant.

Beauty, prestige, popularity, money, and power are some examples of how our culture defines perfection and success. If you struggle to resist those powerful cultural forces, you're not alone. In fact, I think we'd be hard pressed to find someone who doesn't have that same struggle. I personally believe the fear and insecurities driven by those false ideals are the reason why we as individuals become stagnant, and why our society is collectively anxious, exhausted, lonely and obsessed with efficiency, productivity and instant gratification.

The good news? There's a cure! And it's easy, but requires that you actively recognize and resist those external influences, and take steps to consciously focus on what truly matters to free yourself up to fall short, fail and feel fine about it (otherwise known as "growing"). To get you started, here's a list of life truths that I find particularly inspiring when I start to get sucked into the comparison trap:

#1 You are the only person on Earth who truly understands who you are, and who you are becoming

People love to tell you what you should or should not do, how you're holding yourself back, what you should value or what should or should not be important to you. They probably have good intentions and presume to know you, but are really just projecting their own standards onto you. Learn to ignore them, and stay focused on what you truly value and know to be right.

#2 Prestige or money should never be your motivation for anything

Instead, understand who you serve and the value you provide in your efforts and define your success around that concept. Failure, at its essence, is when you do not serve others in the way you've intended, or do not provide value to others in what you're doing. Prestige, money and other rewards may come if you are exceptionally good a delivering value or serving others but it cannot alone motivate you to become successful. Focus instead on the things you are doing every day and how those things are helping the world.

#3 If you're not failing regularly, you're not growing

It's that whole 'a ship is safe in the harbor, but built to go out to sea' cliché, I know, but it's true. Playing it comfortable and safe got nobody anywhere. If you think back on your life and career, I bet it's the times that were the hardest where you were forced to take stock of yourself and your life that helped you to grow and made you who you are today.

#4 Make balance a priority in your life

I don't know why this is, but we tend to brag about how busy we are, how little sleep we get, how crazed our lives are, how early we got to the office or how late we stayed. This is inherently ridiculous, and I've started to realize that when I do this, it's coming from some internal drive to prove my work ethic or importance or some other quality that I feel the world uses to measure my value. Instead of bragging about busy-ness, seek to simplify and put the things that matter most in life at the top of your priority list. Remember that how you choose to spend your time is how you will spend your life.

#7 Criticism from people that matter is necessary to improve

It gives you insight into the value you provide or are expected to provide to the person expecting it, and enables you to shift, change and grow to increase your impact and value to the world. The hard part is defining the people that matter (see #1 above). For me, my close friends and family and the people that are inherently affected by the work that I do - my clients, the junior staff on my projects, my colleagues, my readers - matter. As do all of the people I've encountered in life who have inspired me, challenged me, invested in my and helped me along the way.

#6 Allow yourself to change your mind

This is so important today, more than ever. Our media is rapidly changing, moving away from trusted sources of balanced truth to conglomerate engines that put ratings and viewership over their duty to the public. We form baseless opinions based on what we hear others express, rather than thinking critically about what we're hearing and seeking alternate perspectives. Then, we associate those opinions as part of our identity and defend them even when presented with conflicting information. Replace the need to be right with the desire to understand, and be open to change.

#7 Anything truly wonderful and worthwhile takes time

This is a hard one to accept in a world where you can have virtually anything you want shipped to your home within a matter of minutes or hours literally without lifting a finger. Having an incredible marriage, a meaningful and fulfilling career, a healthy body, a home you love, a higher purpose to your life are great things to aspire to, but cannot be achieved without significant effort. There's no such thing as finding the perfect man, or job, or diet, or short sale. The value you realize in any of these endeavors is directly related to the willingness you have to do the tedious, unglamorous, and often self-sacrificing work involved. It's taken me a very long time to recognize this, but I've realized that the primary reasonI value the most wonderful elements of my life is the sacrifice and effort that it took to obtain them in the first place.

#8 Actively fighting off negativity is the only thing that can make you happy

Although I talk about the power of positivity a lot on this blog, I've been very susceptible to negativity during certain times of my life. It was easy for me to blame external factors at the time, but the reality is that I allowed myself to become lazy in my thinking and enabled cynicism to take over. It saps joy, diminishes your motivation, blocks your ability to be grateful and blinds you to the amazing blessings in your life. Choosing to be happy is actually a thing.

In summary, I'll leave you with my all-time favorite quote that helps to keep me centered, resist external influences, and focus on the things that truly matter to me (and if you've been reading for a while, you'll remember this from a past post):

"To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best day and night to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight and never stop fighting." - E.E. Cummings

Thank you so much for reading! I'd love to hear your thoughts on this post - please let me know in the comments.

Seven items that will spice up your spring style

2017-04-25T11:36:00.001-04:00

This post is in honor of those of you who follow this blog for style ideas. I've been lagging a little in this category, partly because I've spent more of my money on books this year than clothes. Which actually is something that I hope to do forever, because your brain should be getting bigger investments than your closet. However, I promised to continue sprinkling in style posts so voila!

There are a few things that I've hunted and invested in over the past several months that I wanted to share here, because they've truly been worth it and on repeat in my closet. Not only were these pieces awesome in their own right, the fact that I've worn them so much is a little boost of confidence that my year of cutting back has helped me to become a more discerning shopper, in tune with what I truly need or will enjoy wearing for years. I've included links to some of them because I felt they were great buys worthy of sharing, but do not under any circumstance encourage you to buy them unless you've considered your own wardrobe gaps first!

Without further ado, here they are in no particular order:

#1 An oversize, pleated midi dress

This dress pictured above deserves its own post (note to self) because it is hands down the best piece of clothing I've purchased in years. It was pricey, but I decided to invest in it after trying it on, walking away, realizing how many different ways I could wear it, and calculating the cost per wear. I went back to buy it and dropped the cash guilt-free. It's super high quality, versatile and hand made in the USA which meets all the qualifications in my book. I love that it can be styled so many ways, for weddings with cage heels and a cool clutch, weekends with flats, even the beach with sandals.

If you're looking to make an investment, here's the link to this exact dress.

#2 Statement, artsy earrings

Although I wear the same fine jewelry every day, I realized that I had a gap of truly special earrings in my collection that can be a statement for outfits that are otherwise simple and basic. I looked for a few months before finding these perfect two-tone semicircle earrings and snapped them up on the spot because I could think of a dozen outfits that I'd pair them with AND they're also hand made in the USA.

If you love these too, here's the link to these exact earrings.

#3 An oversize woven leather tote

When I was 17, I found this woven leather Falor tote at TJ Maxx and fell in love with it, but didn't buy it and have always had it in the back of my mind since. It's simplicity, lack of branding and hardware, oversize shape and quality construction make it amazing. When I decided to invest in a new tote, I selected this one over the Gucci Boston bag that I've had my eye on for a few years. It's been coming with me everywhere lately, including work.

#4 A crisp, white blouse

…That's not an oxford or a tunic. This blouse is from my favorite consignment shop in Chicago (shout out to McShane's Exchange for all my Chicago based readers) and has given more mileage to my work outfits by adding some excitement to my tailored pants and skirts, and also polishing up my weekend basics like these distressed jeans.

#5 A small, neutral, high quality weekend bag

There's something about a great bag that makes anything you wear look better, and I realize that while I had a few great weekend bags that were small and easy to throw on and go, they were statement pieces that couldn't be worn with everything. I needed something in a camel or nude that wouldn’t compete with my outfit choices and would balance out items that might be a little out there (such as a pleated midi dress…). When I found this 3.1 Philip Lim nude bag at a great price point (and second hand), I snapped it up and have been wearing it every weekend since.

#6 Amazing, walkable heels

The two pairs of shoes that been breathing new life into my wardrobe lately are a pair of glitter block heel pumps from &Other Stories, and a pair of velvet strappy sandals that look much more expensive than they actually were (and have been inspiring me to keep my toenails painted to I can continue to wear them). I've been taking my go-to basic all-black or black-and-navy outfits and adding glitter heels to dress them up for nights out. I've been pairing these velvet pink sandals with my tried-and-true favorite spring dresses and they're making them feel fresh and new.

#7 A trendy off-the-shoulder dress

Although I've resisted the OTS trend for a while now, I picked one up at a cheesy tourist shop when Wes and I were in Miami because I was literally DYING OF HEAT in my maxi dress. Also broke my rules on hemlines and heel heights (but when in Miami…) and sort of loved it. I'll be wearing this with cool sandals, hats and bags all summer once it's hot in Chicago.

Also, special shout out to the Illesteva sunglasses worn in basically every picture here because I cannot get enough of them. There are a few other items that I have on my want list for spring and summer (like white high-vamp flats and a straw bag), and I'll share those in a separate post once I've fully vetted my choices…

Anyway, thanks for reading! Please feel free to leave me a comment and let me know what you think of these picks, what you've picked up recently that has helped to refresh your wardrobe for the warmer months, or what you want to see more of on this blog.

The career advice I'd give to my 22-year-old self

2017-04-06T22:12:00.002-04:00

Tomorrow I'm presenting to a group of college women about my experience as a woman in business, what it was like to transition from college to the workforce, and what they should be thinking about as they prepare to graduate. Loaded topic, right? Thinking about what I wanted to say, I realized that 22-year-old me could have really benefitted from some practical advice about topics people don't really talk about (e.g., staying motivated while sitting still inside of a beige cubicle, excusing oneself from meetings to cry in the bathroom, etc.) She also could have also used some straight talk about how almost everyone in the world would determine her value, how she needs to develop a thick skin, and how to be both fulfilled and successful.

Instead of planning remarks, I decided to write up a list of the key things I've learned in my career to date to share with the group and hit on a couple of them with some stories about the amazing people I've worked with in my career and encountered in my life who have helped me to learn these things. I thought I'd share this list here, expecting that you may relate!

Understand that no one in the entire world, especially in business, cares how nice you are, who your parents are, whether you were a National Merit scholar, where you went to undergrad, or how smart you are. They care about the value you provide to them and how you can make their lives easier, simpler or happier in some way.
Accept that you know literally nothing as a 22-year-old despite what your college degree may seem to suggest. You desperately need experience, and should be doing everything in your power to gain skills and relevance in the market. The first company that hires you is banking on three things that you absolutely must deliver on if you want to move forward:

Your eagerness to gain experience no matter how menial the tasks you're asked to do may be (i.e., order lunch, coordinate meetings, complete mind-numbing PowerPoint formatting tasks, etc.)
Your ability to learn quickly
Your positive attitude and ability get along with others

Let go of the need to have a predictable path with clearly defined milestones that you've enjoyed in your 22 years of life to date. You are in uncharted territory, and the direction your life takes is 100% related to the decisions and actions you choose. It's terrifying, but extremely exciting and empowering. Know that the decisions you make in your twenties will lay the foundation for the rest of your life. ('The Defining Decade' by Dr. Meg Jay should be required reading in college.)
Learn to manage and save your money. Give the maximum amount to your 401K.
Know that the only way to gain responsibility (and more interesting work) is to take full ownership of literally everything that crosses your desk. Think critically about what you're doing, understand every single input you're given, ask detailed questions. If you don't understand the answers, continue your line of questioning until you do. This is how you gain the trust and confidence of the people who have the ability to push you forward.
Do not assume, under any circumstance, that you are the smartest person in the room. You are often quite the opposite. Remember that you can learn something from literally every person with whom you cross paths, and making it your job to figure out what they know will make everything you do more effective.
Be an interesting, dynamic person. Let go of trying to be cool, because you're not. Try new things, often. Stop caring about what everyone else is thinking or doing. Take risks. Have an opinion. Tell stupid jokes.
Invest as much as you can afford into a high quality work wardrobe, and be thoughtful about how you present yourself in a professional environment. Your judgment, level of confidence and attention to detail are reflected in how you dress. Doing this right from the start will make everything else easier.
Be open-minded and a voracious reader. Keep this quote taped to your bedroom mirror: "You will be the same person in five years as you are today except for the people you meet and the books you read."
Surround yourself with brilliant, uplifting people who do remarkable things. Never forget that you are the average of the five people that you spend the most time with.
Stop expecting praise and thanks. Do excellent work, every day, because you hold high standards for yourself. If you let your sense of fulfillment and motivation to continue to push yourself rest with other people, hoping to earn some sort of A plus equivalent feedback, you won't last long.
Remember that almost every job is a sales job. If you can't influence people to take action, you'll go nowhere fast. Know that influencing people requires the most basic steps that many people struggle with, and you can differentiate yourself by learning to do these things:

Ask other people questions about themselves, care about and remember their answers, and reference the things they are interested in every time you see them. Get to know them on a personal level.
Listen to other people's ideas, use their ideas every chance you can, and avoid at all costs negating them or disagreeing with them (especially in front of other people)
Give credit and praise often, generously, and never to yourself
Admit when you make a mistake, and apologize. It has the exact opposite effect you think it will.
Add value to their lives. (See #1 above.)

Develop a thick skin and be resilient. You cannot avoid criticism, rejection, or jerks, so you might as well figure out how to expect and embrace them. You'll look back at the worst times in your career and realize that's when you learned the most. The terrible manager who made you cry was the biggest reason you're a really good one today.
Stick to your values, especially when it feels like there will be consequences if you do. There will be moments in your career that truly test your character and ethics, and you will never regret sticking to your guns on the things that truly matter.
Have a life. Reserve time for things that give your life and career meaning. Pick up a hobby that has nothing to do with your job. Say yes to random requests for dinner dates. Force yourself to meet your friends at that filthy D.C. bar after the longest day of your short career. (You'll meet your future husband there.) Be as good of a daughter and friend as you are a businesswoman. Remember that there are four elements of your life that will give it purpose and meaning: your spirit, your family and friends, your health and fitness, and your life's work. In that order.

What advice would you give to your 22-year-old self? Please let me know in the comments!

P.S. Thank you to Becky Howe for the photo, and to Patricia Green for gifting me those amazing suede heels I'm wearing in it (the most fabulous-yet-comfortable pair in my work wardrobe, a great buy for #8 above).

How to drop a dress size in a week

2017-03-22T16:08:00.002-04:00

If you're anything like me, the end of winter tends to be the most lethargic and melancholy time of the year. Months on end of Netflix, red wine, and stretchy tights and knits have enabled your body to become a smushier version of what it was last summer. Even though I consider myself to be pretty healthy (I exercise regularly and watch what I eat most of the time), the end of winter usually calls for a body re-set to get in my best shape for the warmer months.

The topic of weight loss and weight management is controversial, probably because it touches close to home for nearly everyone. I believe that almost everyone has wanted to lose weight at some point in their life, and that maintaining a healthy body is a daily battle that we all struggle with from time to time. We're also prone to excuses, especially when we're not feeling great about ourselves. It's easy to look at people who are in great shape and attribute it to genetics or some freakish, mutant love of exercising, rather than taking stock of our own habits and choices and taking steps to change them.

When I feel like my smushy body needs to change, conventional dieting wisdom of 'eat less, move more' doesn't really work for me: my demanding job doesn't allow a lot of time for movement, and the concept of 'eating less' works as long as I'm not hungry. That said, I tend to do a lot of research on how to whip my body back into shape as quickly as possible, and then balance there going forward versus trying to do the loooooong game of making tiny changes that never yield results, or following a strict diet for months on end.

Because my "get back in shape ASAP" posts tend to be quite popular (such as this one), I thought I'd lay out my game plan for the next week in case you're trying to do the same spring / summer prep for your own body.

#1 Cut out all alcohol Sunday through Thursday

I never said that this would be fun. Before you stop reading entirely, remember that alcohol dehydrates your skin, ages you and is high in calories. Begin associating a glass of wine with wrinkles and fat, and you'll stop wanting your nightly Pinot Noir in no time. If you've got a nightly drinking habit, it helps a lot to replace your drink of choice with something healthier. I drink club soda out of a wine glass with dinner and relax with a piping hot mug of Sleepy Time Vanilla tea before bed.

#2 Eliminate all processed foods, dairy and gluten for the entire week

If you're thinking, "But Colleen, what am I supposed to eat?" then you are on the right track. Vegetables, fruits, lean proteins, and nuts (in moderation) are all fair game. It's not fun, but it will be WORTH IT when your butt starts shrinking (because it will).

#3 Don't eat after 8 p. and go to bed by 10p.

This one is huge, because it prevents you from late-night snacking AND sets you up for eight hours of sleep to give you enough energy and willpower to stick to you healthy eating goals for the next day. Although on Instagram I've been hating on the guided meditation 'Breathe' app for failing me in traffic, I've been setting a timer for 9:45p. to do an 8 minute 'body scan' meditation that puts me in a trance where I can hardly keep my eyes open. Getting to sleep by 10p. is no longer a problem for me.

#4 Fast intermittently for at least two days

This basically means that I don't eat anything for an 18-hour period two or three times per week - an intermittent fasting cycle will last from 8p. through 2p. the following day. There are a lot of benefits, including giving your body a break from digesting so it can process cellular waste and resetting your appetite. (If you're interested in learning more about the benefits of IF, check out this post.) I do intermittent fasting on Saturdays, Mondays and Wednesdays and cannot say enough for what it does for my weight management and general health. It takes a little getting-used-to, but is worth setting it up as a habit for the long haul.

#5 Plan out your meals

The absolute WORST thing you can do is end up hungry without a plan. Even in those situations where you don't have a plan or forgot to pack your healthy lunch, you should have a backup plan. My 'forgot my lunch and I'm starving' backup plan is a Jimmy Johns Turkey Tom Unwich, easy mayo, with a pickle on the side. I also have a stash of protein bars in my desk drawer for emergencies when I would otherwise hit the vending machine.

#6 Eat the same things every day

Otherwise known as "killing your appetite with boredom." For the most part, we all stick to a pretty limited rotation of foods. It's human nature to gravitate towards following a pattern. Hacking this element of human nature can help accelerate your weight loss goals, because it's establishes a meal routine that is healthy AND drives boredom which will lead you to eat less over time. When I'm trying to reset, I'll eat this exact diet pretty much every day:

· Breakfast: green tea, protein bar or shake

· Snack: apple

· Lunch: salad with protein and oil/vinegar dressing

· Snack: olives, pistachios or dried vegetables

· Dinner: vegetables with chicken or pork

· Dessert: two or three squares of extra dark chocolate, or a decaf coffee with almond creamer

Keeping snacks and dessert as part of this is important to me so that I don't go crazy after I switch to meals with more variety. By day 3, I'm usually skipping my snacks and eating just what I need to actually ward off my hunger. Saves calories, and time!

#7 Avoid snacking whenever possible

While we're on the topic, aiming to cut snacking out of your pattern is also extremely helpful tactic. Even snacks that claim to be healthy, like nuts, are going to slow you down. Avoiding snacking is the goal, but sometimes you've got to give in. Having healthy options on hand (like dried veggies or blueberries) in the event that you cannot control the monster inside of you begging for chips will keep you on track.

#8 Limit fruit

Fruit in small portions (e.g., peaches on your Greek yogurt) is fine, but remember that fruit has a lot of sugar that your body treats the same as the sugar in, say, a Snickers bar. Overdoing it on fruit will slow you down.

#9 Exercise strategically

I believe there is such thing as too much exercise, the kind of thing that stimulates your appetite and causes you to eat all your gains. Instead, exercise smarter: add 10-15 m. of cardio exercise every morning and add two sessions of 30 min weight training during the week. I either walk my dog, or do burpees, squat jumps, and run up and down the stairs of my townhouse to get this in, and then see my trainer for the weight sessions.

#10 Take the "broccoli test" every time you want to eat

Here's the test: when you feel that niggle of hunger or wanting to eat something, ask yourself this question: "Would I eat a plate of broccoli if that's all I had?" If the answer is no, then you're probably not hungry. This would be the time to have a cup of tea, a giant glass of water or a stick of gum.

#11 Drink 72 ounces of water per day

I start my day every morning with a glass of water with lemon, to take my supplements. Then I carry around one of those plastic reusable 16 ounce Starbucks water cups with a straw and make it a point to fill it four times. This much water is great for flushing your system, improving the look of your skin, and keeping hunger in check.

#12 Walk everywhere

To the grocery store, the pharmacy, the dry cleaner, etc. Those extra steps add up! This 'walk everywhere' mantra also helps me to get more done around the house. Taking out the trash, vacuuming, picking up the living room, putting away laundry, etc. all count as movement that burn calories.

#13 Attach a reward to your goal

As in, "I will allow myself to buy those gold Valentino flats the moment the scale says X or my old pants fit again." I use this tactic for dual purposes: to prevent myself from spending money, and to reward myself for meeting a goal. I also like to take these fabulous turquoise silk pants that I've owned forever and hang them front and center in my closet. They are the most unforgiving article of clothing that I own, and the prospect of fitting comfortably into them motivates me to stay away from bad eating habits.

Some people might think these tactics to weight loss and weight management are unhealthy, and I recognize that everyone has to find what that work best for them. These are the ones that work well for me personally, and I'm always looking for new ideas - would love to hear any of your tips and tricks!

P.S. Do you want to get to your ideal shape even faster? Click hereto subscribe and download a free copy of my secret (and very controversial...) shortcuts to fast-track weight loss.

Three things you'll wear forever, according to a fabulous Frenchwoman

2017-02-01T17:16:00.004-05:00

Maybe it's just me, but I find it to be strangely thrilling when someone with amazing style walks past me on the sidewalk. Generally, I stare and take mental notes to reference later when I'm trying to recreate the look and tend to assume that said person is amazing and would definitely be my friend because we have so much in common, such as appreciation for floral boots.

Social media makes this phenomenon even more accessible, and I love finding bloggers with fresh taste and a unique sense of style that stands out from the masses. The ones I love have an ageless style and repeat key pieces often, which gives me inspiration on restyling my own closet. When I find these special timeless unicorn bloggers, I tend to seek out their profiles on Instagram and regularly check up on them for styling ideas that I can steal.

Today, I'm introducing you to one of my favorite fabulous French bloggers who, as they say in the South, is "a girl after my own heart." (For my non-American readers, this means we like similar things. Not to be confused with "bless her heart," another Southern saying that is a subtle insult that generally implies that you don't have a brain in your head.)

This fancy Frenchwoman has a very distinct personal style that's classic and a little offbeat. She loves vintage and consistently demonstrates how a few standout pieces can totally transform wardrobe basics. She and I connected on Instagram where I creepy stalk her for ideas about how to style my classic, neutral, everyday pieces in quirkier, cooler ways. I decided to take my creepy Insta-stalking to the next level by creepy messaging her to see if she'd be interested in being interviewed for this blog to share her favorite pieces in her closet that she's had forever and make her style so timeless and wonderful.

Without further ado, I'd like to introduce you to Emilie Darel, a 26-year-old real estate agent originally from Reunion Island and currently based in Toulouse, France. Here she is in all her glory, mixing navy with black and spicing it up with sequined pumps:

[Side note: I've been trolling the 'net for sequined pumps ever since I saw them on Emilie... contemplating these from &OtherStories. Do you think they'll stay relevant for a few years? Should that even matter when they look this good with neutral basics?!]

If you want to become more fabulous and French, keep reading for Emilie's thoughts on style and the timeless pieces in her wardrobe...

Q: How do your friends describe your style?

"Chic, eccentric… but I love all styles, I’m a chameleon!"

Q: What are your favorite pieces in your closet right now?

"Now, my favorite piece for this winter 2017 is obviously my pink puffa jacket! The oversize puffa jacket is very fashion for this season!"

[Side note: this endorsement by Emilie prompted me to wear my oversize J.Crew "puffa" all weekend which makes an icy January all the more bearable...]

Q: What are the three items in your wardrobe you've kept for the longest, and why have they stayed relevant so long?

"First, my blue faux fur coat because I love it and it’s stayed trendy and chic for several seasons. Second, my derby shoes because I love the boyish look. And third, my big burgundy bag because I can put everything in it."

[Side note: Does anyone else now want a navy fur coat after seeing Emilie in it? I have a giant white fox fur one from Wes's grandma that would look nice on a modern-day drug lord. Emilie has inspired me to take it to the furrier and inquire about an update...]

Q: Who are some of your icons in fashion or other creative fields?

"I love two women in fashion: Solange Knowles and Shay Mitchell. Both have chic and elegant styles. And they are so beautiful!"

Q: What do you do when you're short on creative inspiration?

"I listen some music to empty my mind. And suddenly, the light appears!"

Thanks so much to Emilie for her thoughts, and for providing these photos. I asked her to include a few pictures of her actual closet and was surprised (and very inspired) to see how clean, compact and well-edited it is. She proves that you need only a few amazing pieces to have wonderful, remarkable style, and helped me to see that I still have more work to do in refining my own small closet.

I hope you find Emilie to be as much of an inspiration as I do! If you do, definitely take a few minutes to check out her blog, www.lescoquetteriesdemilie.com.

Also, I'd love to hear if you have anyone that you creepy stalk on Instagram for style ideas so I can add to my rotation and potentially interview - let me know in the comments! Thank you as always for reading and supporting this little blog.

How to master the subtle art of not giving a f*ck

2017-01-26T14:31:00.004-05:00

Before diving into this post, I want to acknowledge the tone of divisiveness and negativity that is permeating conversations across the world right now. Although I spend a lot of time on this blog talking about the importance of controlling your thoughts and being careful with what you allow to enter your mind, these past few weeks I've allowed myself to wallow in pessimism and it has not been a good look. (Picture endless pajamas, melancholy sighs at random intervals, fixation on dissecting every single problem and potential future problem in my life, and a very concerned dog spending most of her waking hours sitting on my feet.)

To kick off this (long overdue) first post of 2017, and to reset my own attitude, I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that everything is going to be OK and we all need to simmer down. I'd also like to suggest that the population of America is not a simple-minded group that is easily edged into two neatly packaged and conveniently polarized factions as many of our politicians and media outlets would like us to believe. I'm going to remind myself that fervor and despair following an election is not unusual in our history, and is necessary to strengthen our democratic processes. And, I'm going to consider what I can do with my own thoughts, actions and interactions to drive my own little sphere of influence forward in a positive and productive way.

With that being said, and on a somewhat related note, let's begin today's topic: how to master the subtle art of not giving a f*ck except about those things that are truly worth your time and attention. This is derived from one of the best books I've read recently, Mark Manson's 'The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.' (Please excuse the foul language; I tried to replace THAT word with a classier substitute but "hoot," "darn," and "care" just didn't get the same message across. So, we're going with Mark's original choice and hopefully you can forgive me for that.) Here's the short summary of Mark Manson's method for how to stop caring about everything except what really matters:

#1 Remember that there are very few things that truly matter in life

You innately know what these things are, and they're pretty obvious. A great way to figure out what those things are is to flash forward time and imagine yourself on your death bed and what would be going through your mind. There have been studies on the topic of what dying people regret, and it's generally related to time they didn't spend with the people they loved and instead spent on empty careers, living up to other people's standards and expectations, and chasing things they mistakenly thought would bring them happiness.

My grandmother, pictured above in the sassy pink dress, is someone who stayed focused on the things that truly mattered in her life. She was the happiest person you'd ever meet who was dying of cancer, saying that she'd done everything she could have ever hoped to do, created a wonderful family she loved, and had no desire to spend her last days undergoing chemotherapy in a hospital. "I'd rather die of alcohol poisoning right here with all of you!" were her exact words on the last day I saw her alive.

#2 Understand that you have a limited amount of f*cks to give

While we can all acknowledge the truth in point #1 above, it's difficult to keep it in the forefront during our busy, demanding lives (and also unhealthy to be constantly imagining yourself on your deathbed, but that's besides the point).

Let's cue Maslow's hierarchy of needs for a moment, and consider what modern psychology has proven we benefit from caring about. Things like putting a roof over our heads and food on our tables, living in safety and security, having a family we love, developing confidence and earning respect, and striving towards higher values pretty much cover the drivers of fulfillment in our lives.

Yet we're exhausted and unfulfilled because we stray from focusing our attention on what actually matters. Instead, we waste our f*cks by freaking out in traffic jams, gossiping about our irritating coworkers, worm-holing on Facebook for hours, fixating on past or future choices, obsessing over a mistake or an offhand comment we can't take back, or getting overwhelmed by cleaning our houses filled with stuff we don't need.

#3 Realize that other people are constantly telling you what to care about

In addition to all of the time-sucking activities we voluntarily sign ourselves up to care about, we have a whole set of additional time-sucking activities that other people try to force upon us. It is extremely hard to say no to a mentor that tells you to spend more time networking and "building your brand" when you're craving authentic connections at work. It's challenging to say no to a colleague who wants your time, energy and support of a new venture when all you want is to carve out time to go to a yoga class. It is annoying to say no to giving your money to a skincare pyramid scheme your friend joined when you're really satisfied with your current face wash, thank you very much.

It's equally difficult to say "no" to ideas, suggestions and feedback about what you should be doing, how you should be spending your time or what you should really value. Here are a few examples I've struggled with: I've had people tell me I have too much time on my hands when I talk about a book I loved. Colleagues have insisted I will have no future unless I invest the time and money into getting an MBA. Friends have told me it's a shame that I waste my time and talent writing this blog, that I need to shift my focus to monetizing it or quit entirely. Certain family members have told me to take a step back in my career, otherwise it would end up hurting my husband and our future family.

#4 Know that listening to them sucks your time, attention and joy

Instead of saying no to these non-value-added activities and unsolicited suggestions, you feel guilty and do all of the above and consider the ideas that don't line up to your values. After taking the time and energy to care about all of those dumb things you cannot control, you have no energy left to invest in walking your cute dog, or taking a spontaneous road trip with your husband, or calling your wonderful mom or volunteering your time to help youth learn to read, or writing that novel on your bucket list.

If you're like me, you tend to ruminate over these things even if you do know that they don't matter. I waste a significant amount of time ruminating, which is yet another thing that detracts from enjoying the moment and the things in my life that are truly worth my energy. As the Souza quote above suggests, time is our only limited resource and it's our prerogative to use it wisely.

#5 Get comfortable saying no and ticking people off if you really want to change

Spending your time and attention on things that don't add value to your life throws things off balance, causes unnecessary stress and angst, and ultimately prevents you from having the most fulfilling experiences possible. You have to make a conscious decision to change, and learn to start saying no and to stop giving a f*ck about the things that don't really matter.

Implementing this in real life is hard to do because not everyone is going to like your newfound lackadaisical attitude towards what they want you to care about. After trying this concept out myself, here are some helpful, tactical suggestions for mastering the art of not giving a f*ck:

A. Quit Facebook and any other modes of social media that make you care about stupid things.

Seriously, it's non-value-added and you'll be amazed how people are still able to contact you by leveraging other modes of communication. No one will artificially remember your birthday, but the best gift will be forgetting the names of people who you should have omitted from memory in 8th grade. I've been off the 'book since 2012 and can honestly say that when people complain about seeing ultrasound images of the fetuses of distant acquaintances, I cannot relate.

B. Offload all of the commitments you currently have but don't really want.

Also opt out of any optional activities that you feel obligated to partake but don't really understand the value. We're told never to give up under any circumstance, and I think this is bogus. So does Mark Manson. Giving up the right things can set you free! Or, at least will set your time free to reinvest in something you actually care about.

C. Train yourself to say no in creative ways.

When someone makes a suggestion or gives advice that you don't value, simple say "Thank you for your input, I'll consider that" and don't let it take hold in your mind. If someone asks you to do something that you don't care to do: Say, "Thank you for thinking of me for this. Let me consider that and get back to you." Then, simply follow up with a brief, polite "No thank you."

Ok, that's all I have for today. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this topic, and what works well for you when it comes to staying focused on the things that you care about. And if you totally disagree and hate this whole post, let me know that too!

Eight rules for developing style

2016-12-31T15:47:00.000-05:00

Welcome to the last day of 2016, folks! I've thought for a long time that this year of my self-imposed no shopping for new things vow would end with much (internalized) fanfare and a long, exciting shopping list of things that I can't wait to run out and buy with my thousands in savings.

This post has taken me several days to write because each time I sat down and opened my OneNote to organize my thoughts, I kept coming back to the fact that I don't really want much. So I'm going to wax poetic for a few minutes on what I've learned, and then give you a few pieces that I've observed are gaps in my wardrobe that I intend to fill in 2017.

At the end of this year, I've realized that style and fashion are two very distinct and separate concepts. Fashion is seasonal, mass marketed, and driven by trends. Style is forever, highly individual, and driven by choices. What we choose to buy and how we incorporate it into our existing wardrobes is what builds style. It truly cannot be bought, and I'm convinced that it's impossible have great style without taking the time to inventory and organize your closet, thoughtfully plan outfits, and carefully identify the gaps in the pieces you own to drive your purchasing decisions.

I've also started to think of developing style like we think about furnishing a home. There are pieces that you buy intending to use for years and years, such as your couch and dining table. And there are items you buy and move around from room to room as your inspiration changes, like rugs and accent tables. There are also a few accessories that you buy to add some spice to your rooms and realize that they're impractical and just collecting dust so you donate them quickly.

Building your wardrobe should follow the same thought pattern, considering the foundational pieces you'll wear forever and then selecting pieces that work with your basics to create new and creative combinations of outfits. There are eight major rules about developing great style that I've learned from my year of cutting back, and I've synthesized them for you below (along with some thoughts on the gaps I have in my wardrobe and how I plan to fill them for those asking for the "want" list).

#1 Invest in quality coats

Coats (and coatigans) stay in style longer, hold their shape, and can make your entire outfit when you live in places with long winters. None of my cheap coats survived the Goodwill donation purges that I made this year. I gravitated towards only the really wonderful coats I already owned, and most I've had for several years. Neutral colors (gray, black, cream), quality fabrics (wool, cashmere, down, leather), classic cuts and slightly oversized are the elements that will make a coat last in your wardrobe for a long time.

I've learned how to take better care of my coats, how to layer them, how to accessorize them and how to make them the focus of an outfit. And I've also realized that there's really only one classic coat missing from my collection: a camel wrap coat that I can toss on over a suit, a dress, or a pair of jeans to look fabulous. I plan to invest in a cashmere MaxMara wrap coat in 2017 and hold onto it for the rest of my life (and have my initials embroidered inside so my future granddaughter can think of me fondly when I'm long gone and she's wearing it in 2087).

#2 Buy remarkable, walkable shoes

Although I have an extensive collection of heels, fabulous flats and walkable low heels get the most wear in my wardrobe because they can go literally everywhere. My lace-up, strappy and super-high-quality flats took me from meetings to weddings to Friday night dinner-and-a-walk dates with my husband. In 2017, I'll be investing in a couple of additional pairs to round out my options and add some extra personality to my outfit combinations.

If you're curious what's on the list, I've been eyeing these nude Valentino Tango pumps (a classic in my opinion) and these satin Manolo Blahnik Hangisi flats. (FYI, I plan to get them both from eBay or ThredUp rather than new. I have this complex with new designer items, sort of like the whole buying a new car paradox where the premium depreciates the moment you drive it off the lot.) I've also had my eye on a couple of trendy flats that have stayed relevant for years that I might spring for if I find them at the right price point.

#3 Go with classic bags

Like coats and shoes, bags also have a much longer shelf life in your wardrobe and deserve extra thought and investment. Right now, I'm good with my selection of bags and have gotten a lot of wear out of my well-loved and reasonably priced Monserat De Lucca Docente large tote bag. It travels well, holds everything, has an interior zippered pouch to keep your wallet and phones secure, and comes with a cross-body strap.

Once it wears out, I'll continue my research on the best bags. I've been looking to upgrade one basic bag that everyone thinks is a leather Longchamp but is actually a cheaper lookalike that is starting to look tired. I'd upgrade it with this one. I've also been eyeing a few super-structured, wear-it-forever bags (on my friend Pam, and real estate agent Renee) like this onethat I'll also wait for the right deal to come along. And just like with the shoes, I plan to source second hand.

(I've also been hearing a lot about Cuyanaand Shinola from my colleagues so will be investigating those brands, too.)

#4 Stick to simple, fine jewelry

While getting my toenails painted, I came across a magazine ad for Patek Phillipe that justified the cost of fine jewelry in a way that spoke to my heart. It read, "You never own a Patek Phillipe, you simply take care of it for the next generation." I think this touches on why we love certain pieces, because they have history, memories, stories. There is meaning attached to it that cannot be bought.

That lens is a great one to apply to the jewelry you choose to buy and wear. For the past year, I've worn the same jewelry every single day aside from a select few pairs of earrings, a Lucite 80s necklace, and a carved bone bead necklace I got on vacation in Europe. I've worked to pare down my jewelry collection to only those pieces I truly treasure, enjoy wearing, and would save for future generations.

#5 Wait out the trends

Old Colleen used to snap up trendy items without much thought, such as spending $300 on a pair of leopard print jeans that were out after a couple of seasons. Taking a year off and observing some of the trends this year gave me a chance to see if they'd last, and really think about whether I need to add them to my wardrobe. (It turns out I have no desire to purchase flamenco sleeves and a saddle bag.) Giving trends a year or two before deciding to buy in has the added benefit of lower cost because you can find the better quality pieces at consignment shops or on eBay.

#6 Trust your inner judges

This might sound crazy, but I think everyone has an inner 8-year-old self and an inner 80-year-old self that drive the balance of fun and practical in our choices. My inner 8-year-old wants me to eat cookies for breakfast and buy glitter heels, while my inner 80 year old wants me to take care of my health and avoid bunions. They are both right, and learning to listen to them has helped me to build better style that is both fun and practical. (In this example, the answer would be a coconut chocolate RXBAR for breakfast and well-supported glitter flats.)

#6 Don't be a snob about your sources

One of the reasons our culture is stuck in the fast fashion cycle that is polluting our environment and making us collectively poorer is because we're sold this idea that the ability to buy lots of new things makes us rich. Feeling rich and actually being rich are two very different things. Feeling rich for a day because you can buy a pound of polyester clothing on sale at Ann Taylor that will collect dust in your closet does not, in fact, make you rich. (We all know this but forget it when we find that cute top for $49.95.)

Shopping on eBay and hunting consignment, vintage and thrift shops are amazing sources of high quality pieces, and it's also a sustainable practice because you're not adding to the demand for new clothing to be made in Bangladesh by poorly treated and compensated women and children. I think people are afraid to shop in thrift stores and consignment shops because that somehow means they are poor or don't have the means to get clothing from traditional retailers. Or that it's gross to wear used clothing. Just remember that all billionaires are people who think differently than the masses, and that it's equally gross that a five year old sewed those pants you fell in love with in Banana Republic.

#7 Choose versatile items that can be worn many ways

Traveling with my wardrobe has taught me the value of versatility. Any new item that I purchase going forward has to provide me the ability to wear it in many ways and for many occasions. I've written a lot about my collection of suits, and trying to style them in multiple ways without feeling stodgy and corporate. I received a comment (hi, Erin!) that suggested a suit should make you feel the opposite. It inspired me to donate EVERY suit that made me feel too stodgy, and led me to do some research on what would be the perfect suit that would make me feel fabulous no matter how I style it. Nordstrom has a signature line with Caroline Issa, and right now has an amazing navy tuxedo pant and matching jacketthat have my name on it.

#8 Remember who you are and what you value

Last but certainly not least, I feel like the biggest thing that I've learned this year is how to be honest with myself about my lifestyle and what I care about. It's so easy to be influenced by beautiful pictures, seriously talented marketers, and what everyone else seems to be doing. In taking a conscious step back, I've learned that resisting influence with thoughtfulness is the ticket to building a wardrobe that works for you and your personal style.

This year has also taught me that style is deeper than the choices we make regarding what material things are worthy of swiping our little plastic cards. Style is about how you think, what your opinions are, what matters to you, and how you express those things to the world. In many ways, it's a means to give other people a sense of your personality and worldview. That's why I think we all find it so fascinating.

And finally, some closing thoughts for you...

In reflecting on the past year, I've been thinking about what these takeaways mean for what I want to share in this forum. One thing that bothers me about style blogging is the hyper focus on telling people what to buy. (I'm convinced that "like it to know it" is creating the largest outside sales organization on the planet.) We're collectively overwhelmed by people pushing things on us, and it's leading us to overspend and generate waste. (FYI, I counted every single promotional email I received in one day and realized that I get one EVERY 20 MINUTES round the clock, not counting the lists I unsubscribed - that's 26,280 in a year!)

Instead of focusing on what to buy, I want this blog to be a forum for ideas and inspiration about how we can think differently, be more authentic, and make better use of our time and resources to improve our lifestyles. And I'll still talk about developing personal style every chance I get because I love it. More to come on that…

That said, thank you so much for taking the time to follow this little blog, read this particular post, and for your thoughtful comments and encouragement over the past year. I am so appreciative of your support, and look forward to hearing more from you in 2017!