Help me welcome @Kay Em to the Community! And a quick plug for tomorrow's weekly call. I will be helping folks determine how much "wiggle room" they have in their budgets. This is the first step in deciding if a big move is in your future.

My wife has owned a massage therapy business for 15 years, and many of her clients come to her for a massage to support them with complications from cancer surgeries. During COVID, she got frustrated that she couldn’t help her clients because we were all locked down, so she came up with the idea for a bra that women who had undergone surgery could wear all day and that would promote lymph drainage, similar to what the massages did. When we talked about actually creating the bra, she came up with all sorts of reasons why she didn’t think it would work. So, I kept taking them away. When she said, “ I don’t know where to start”, I said, “Just start…figure it out on the way”. When she said she didn’t have the knowledge, I told her she could hire someone. Finally, she said, “Can we even afford it?” I remember the day that we were sitting at a table out on our patio, and I said, “You should do it!” She looked at me like I was crazy, so I said, “We have the resources, and right now you have all the time in the world; why NOT?” When I think back to that day, I remember the moment she started to believe it was possible. Finally, she realized that SHE was creating the reasons why the thing couldn’t be done. She didn’t feel totally prepared, not educated yet, but confident. And that was enough. It was enough to get her to take the first step and start thinking about the next. That same day, she started drawing up the plans for the bra. That week, she went and bought materials to finish the prototype, and within a month, she was working with someone to design it. The project took about a year from idea to design to manufacture, which in hindsight felt crazy fast! I share this because I also learned something that day on the patio: She kept bringing up every reason NOT to act, and all she needed was to say them out loud to someone who could help her delete them one by one. I also realized that it is uncomfortable at first, and doubt will linger for a while, or may never totally go away. But that moment when someone helps you realize there aren’t any more reasons NOT to do something is empowering.

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