The Shadow Hunter

How do you recharge after a busy day? (PS: if this is even a fraction of how your morning goes, you probably need it!) Let me know if this sounds familiar.   It’s 8:20am. I have 17 new notifications on my phone. My Slack channels are alive and running with the ever present “popcorn” notification — tap tap tap — people are chatting away. My phone buzzes with a text. Then another. There’s an Instagram notification. A Teams notification. My email dings. Then again. My calendar reminds me that I have a Zoom meeting coming up in exactly 9 minutes and I may or may not have just rolled out of bed 15 minutes ago (whoops). I quickly find some lipstick and mascara. And a sweater. Sure, that’ll work, its Zoom, right? Hair fluff. Ok, go. Wait, wait, coffee — do I have time to get coffee? Yes, I do. Yessss. Ready. Crap. Where exactly did I leave my AirPods?! (I am constantly misplacing my AirPods). Ok, now I'm ready! Let’s go.  And its now only 8:30am.  Whew! And for all of it, I’m grateful, t

So... I need to be honest. This blog took days to write.  This is because my computer keeps yelling at me. A box with an urgent yellow triangle in the right hand corner of my screen kept  aggressively appearing with: YOUR DISK IS ALMOST FULL. SAVE SPACE BY OPTIMIZING STORAGE. Oy.   (IGNORE) I’ve moved documents and folders to the cloud, but my computer has a woefully tiny drive and every giant PDF and powerpoint I download for work eats that right up.   Finally, I surrendered to the yellow triangle, and t he act of moving and removing files was actually a cathartic process.  Each file I moved or deleted brought up a new memory. Some memories were very happy, others I greeted with an audible sigh of relief.  Here’s the thing about memories. They are in the past.  The initial pain, or happiness, whatever emotion they caused -- now presents a mirror to you — it is an echo of what you felt before. You can never feel THAT thing again — joy, grief, pain, excitement, anger — for better for wo

They say hindsight is 20/20, right? But I'm beginning to see that intuition is a hundred times stronger...its like hindsight and foresight combined (with some night vision thrown in there for fun)! It's really that powerful...the key is trusting it.  In Fall 2020 I pretty much flat out refused to listen to my intuition. I was VERY stubborn, but looking back, I learned a valuable lesson.  After I got back to the United States after working remotely in South America, my long-term freelance contract with a large agency in Milwaukee ended. They had offered me a generous full-time position, but deep inside I knew it wasn't for me. I declined the offer, and started tentatively building my business. I'd been wanting to start my own brand strategy business for years, and I finally had, but admittedly, I was afraid of allowing it to grow.  I was afraid of branching out and networking and actually finding new business connections and staying with one agency just seemed so much...

I used to think of gratitude like I was quickly scribbling out a thank you note to a friend (...my doctor's-esque scroll is  mostly legible...its the thought that counts!).  I’d be thankful for something that a person did for me or gifted to me, so I’d shoot off a quick and friendly thank you to that person and move on to the next thing. It was efficient and polite, but rather…short lived.   Or, I’d sign an email with “thanks!” — but is that really gratitude? Are we grateful for them reviewing the document and sending detailed feedback? (In advertising? Probably not…!) Then, there’s Thanksgiving. The day when we’re supposed to be grateful for everything. But that’s only one day a year, and we’re often on a turkey-high so the gratitude fades a bit.   This year, I learned that gratitude is so much more than that. It’s actually a way of life, an energetic current.   When I’m grateful for what I have on a continual, daily basis, good things flow. And when I’m not actively practicing gr