My hand crafted card from my daughter. She bought me a frog years ago saying it looked like me (charming), then she bought me and Matt wedding frogs and now I have a finger frog card. Her friends are always horrified but it filled my heart with joy and made me laugh out loud. It’s just our thing.

Another Year of Becoming Birthdays have a way of making you pause. You look back at the year you’ve had and it’s never just one thing. There are the wins you’re proud of.
The moments you didn’t expect.
The challenges you would never have chosen.
The things you handled because you had no other option.
The parts of you that changed because life asked more of you. A birthday isn’t just about getting older. It’s a marker. A moment to notice the person you are becoming. The real version of you. The one who has kept going. Kept learning. Kept showing up. Kept finding a way through when life got messy. Today’s POWERUP: don’t only celebrate what you’ve achieved. Celebrate who you had to become to get here.

Fuel or Brakes Yesterday, I asked an expert for advice. After a few months where I’ve had to step back, I realised my personal brand had gone a bit missing. Not only that, someone with the same name as me, also in the leadership space, had started showing up more strongly. Nothing wrong. Nothing stolen. Just a reminder that the world does not pause when you do. So I asked how I could build my own brand presence again. The response? Maybe I should just support “your amazing husband” Matt instead. I don’t disagree, he is amazing and I love supporting him but… Now, I had a choice. I could have heard that as a reason to stop. I could have let it confirm a doubt. I could have made it mean there wasn’t space for me. Or I could let it light a fire. And it did. Sometimes the thing someone says can become the brakes or the fuel. The words might be the same, but what we do with them is ours. Today’s POWERUP: not every comment deserves to stop you. Some are there to remind you how much you still care.

I was paid $100 for a 1 minute speech. Tell me in the comments if you want to know more.

Start With One Room Sometimes life feels like a chaotic mess because, quite frankly, it is. Since Matt and I got married, we’ve been trying to fit two households into one house. That means stuff everywhere. Boxes. Decisions. Duplicates (we have 2 washing machines, 2 tumble dryers. 2 sofas and until last week 2 dining tables 🤯). Things with no obvious home. And on top of that, all the normal life things still happening in the background. The chaos was starting to create stress everywhere. Yesterday, I didn’t sort the whole house. I didn’t create the perfect system.I didn’t magically fix everything.I just spent some time sorting one room. The room we spend most of our time in. And it felt better. Not perfect. Not finished. But better. Sometimes that’s the move. When everything feels too much, don’t try to fix the whole thing. Pick one room. One corner. One task. One decision. One small place where you can create a bit more ease. Today’s POWERUP: you don’t have to sort everything to feel a shift. Start where you spend the most energy, and make that place feel a little easier.