A life of discovery

Kia ora (hello in Kiwi)

On Thursday, I came out of the closet live on LinkedIn (thank you, Micha Goebig) and declared myself a compulsive spender.

An ex-shopaholic. 

Huh?

Well, twenty-four years ago, I stopped using alcohol or anything else that affected me from the neck up.

Alcohol sucked as a solution to deal with inner turmoil and was causing a ton of problems. 

Around ten years ago, I realized I was using money as a way to avoid emotional pain. 

Yup, just like alcohol. 

I tried to fi…

I was on Andrea Heuston's Lead Like A Woman podcast recently.

Big fun.

It won't be released until March, but she has plenty of other awesome guests to listen to, like Congresswoman Nancy Mace and Hope Zvara, CEO of Mother Trucker Yoga. 

As well as asking me why I have had 35 different jobs, she asked me what was the best business advice I had every received. 

Spoiler alert!

Here's what I said. 

"There is enough time, money and love."

One of my mentors, Suzy told me that. She wafts serenit…

I just found a really cool way for you to realize how amazing you are & meet new female friends, and it's so much fun!

My other half got an Oculus for Christmas, but I've been playing with another software instead as it leads to meeting other awesome women,

Imagine LinkedIn meets Choose Your Own Adventure meets Girl Scout badges.... and with that, those really great talks when you meet a new friend and within minutes you're sharing the real stuff in your life, not just the edited version that …

Kia Ora (hello)

Just in time for the holidays....when I realized 28 of my podcast guests, all women, all amazing, had written books, or published a magazine, or created cards to help with grief, I added a page on my website to showcase them. 

If you go to this page, you will see categories such as business & inclusion, fiction, curls & calories, mindset and relationships. 

Subjects range from returning to work, how to find your soulmate, why people buy, why you need a LinkedIn Business Page,…

Kia ora (hello) , 

Last week I wrote about some of my hacks for those days when everything seems in the too hard basket, or you want to have more freedom to dash out on the deck on the rare days Seattle is sunny in winter. 

This week, here's a few of my business hacks if you're just starting out as a solopreneur, or if you'd like to. If you have been in business for a while, I'd love to hear you solutions, let me know and I'll add them to an upcoming resources page. 

Templates (also good for …

Some days I can conquer the world. Other days sending an email seems in the too hard basket.

I mentioned this to a group of women friends and guess what? Their energy is fluid too - but life still needed us to show up. We could hold a summit on why women are held to different standards, but for now, here's some of my hacks for when I can only be a part time human. They all come under delete, delegate and defer. 

Some of these require buying your time back, which isn't possible for everyone. Ho…

I was just told I’m a minor celebrity in a community in Moscow.

Bet you didn’t know that!

So, here’s what happened.

I belong to a peer-facilitated recovery program (you’re welcome to message me confidentially and ask me more).

There are many to choose from, but one I have been closely involved with for the last few years has to do with the repercussions of not having a healthy relationship with money. It completely changed my life and led to me living in Seattle, but that’s another story.

A…

My birthday was last week. I had an absolutely wonderful day filled with love and yellow flowers to combat Seattle grey and me being stuck in bed after having feet (yes, both of them) surgery.

I also got a lot of weird marketing pitches. Does that happen to you? 

OK, I can deal with my orthodontist and optician sending me birthday texts. They obviously have a system and think this counts as customer engagement (i.e. maintaining our...not sure what to call it. Mutual dependency?) And if you're …

Right now I'm wearing stripper pants. 

Well, that's what I call them. They're Nike, and have domes up both sides so I can take them on and off easily without having to pull them over my feet. 

Why? 

I had feet surgery - yes, both feet. I won't bore you, but thanks to my friend Micha Goebig, a great coach, I now know about stripper pants. She had a broken leg a while back and passed on the fashion hack. Given that I'll be in a moonboot for at least ten weeks, I'm about to order another pair. 

There's not much bathing suit season left, but I swim all year round at a local pool, so I have a plethora of swimsuits. Plethora - great word, right?
However, that means attention to...body hair.

Sigh.

It's a huge subject, but for the sake of your valuable time, I'll skip the discussion about the @%#@!! decades of pressure to defoliate.

Although some of my suits have boy trunk bottoms or skirts or frills etc., I do have a few suits where a bikini wax or a close encounter with a razor is goin…