Before I share this letter, I want you to know about something.
If you spent December holding everyone together—the family, the team, the emotional temperature of every room you walked into—and now you’re staring at January wondering why you can’t seem to want anything for yourself…
This is for you.
I’m teaching my first live workshop in five years.
The 2026 Reset
Friday, January 23rd · 12:00–1:30pm ET · $47
I built this for women whose goals feel like punishment. Women who are so good at caring for everyone else that their own desires went underground. Women whose lives look impressive and feel exhausting.
In 90 minutes, we’re going to figure out which of your goals are actually yours—and which ones you inherited from your family or absorbed from a culture that rewards women for disappearing into service.
You’ll leave with: → A framework you can use on any goal for the rest of your life → 3 nervous system practices that fit into a real, demanding life → 2 rewritten goals that come from want instead of should → A workbook that’s yours forever
Camera off is fine. There’s a replay if life happens.
Save your spot here.
The letter below is about how I actually set goals now—after years of setting them from fear. It’s personal. And it’ll show you why I built this workshop in the first place.
A Letter About How I Actually Set Goals Now
As I’ve mentioned many times in this Substack, I write the content I most need—or that I’ve worked through and am still learning. This is particularly true for the January goal-setting content I’ve been sharing with you this month.
Up until about five years ago, I was the classic example of making a long list of resolutions that didn’t come from my soul. They didn’t come from my heart. They were completely informed by fear.
Fear around my body and how it was perceived in the world. Fear about finances—this maladaptive belief that there would never be enough, that it would all be taken away from me. Fear about proving myself professionally. And social influence around what I thought I should be doing.
It’s a tale as old as time, I know. But for me, it correlates to something deeper: for most of my life, the fuel for my drive and ambition was fear, not a sense of generativity or mission or connection to my intuition.
Inevitably, the goals I created from that place were also the goals I created in impossible quantities. More than three people could accomplish in a year—or even two years. I was always setting myself up for failure. And then came the self-flagellation when I inevitably fell short.
Even when I went after those goals with everything I had, the amount and the pace felt deeply punitive. It would lead me to self-soothe in some pretty maladaptive ways, just to get a break from the strain.
Needless to say, it wasn’t a great recipe for goal-setting. Or for visioning my life for the next year.
So what changed?
About five years ago, I moved through even deeper layers of my relational trauma recovery work. I did some profound EMDR processing and ketamine-assisted psychotherapy that finally—finally—rewired the deep-seated fear channels in my brain tied to money, performance, and worth.
That’s when I began to feel a power shift. A shift in my way of being in the world. A shift in how I approached everything related to my profession, my finances, and the goals I set in my personal life.
The shift meant I was reducing the fuel of fear and finding a different fuel. One that felt more like it was coming from a deep knowing—a sense of mission and purpose and genuine desire to take care of myself and my body.
This was around the time I started to re-engage with my spiritual side, too.
That part of me had been present as a kid and as a young adolescent. But then I really amputated it off as I coped with my unresolved childhood trauma through drive, achievement, and academics. It got put on the backburner for a very, very long time.
It would crop up occasionally. Like the day I had both the LSAT study book and Clarissa Pinkola Estés’s Women Who Run With the Wolves sitting side by side on my tiny desk in my yurt at Esalen. But then it would go underground again, because I didn’t prioritize it.
About five years ago, though, everything shifted. Not only did I do a very deep layer of relational trauma recovery work with multiple evidence-based modalities, but I also started reconnecting and reintegrating that soulful side of me.
The combination of pursuing my goals less from fear and more from a sense of generativity and mission—combined with the integration of this intuitive, soulful part of myself—has totally transformed the way I approach goal-setting.
Instead of treating my goals now as a list of things that must be done in order to keep me safe, keep my life afloat, or that feel like the goals I should be setting, I actually spend quite a bit of time in November reflecting on what I’ve accomplished and what I’d like to craft of my life in the coming year.
Why November?
Because I spend the month of December building my vision boards.
I know that might sound pretty woo-woo—spending a month building vision boards. But let me explain.
I treat vision boards like an art form.
The vision boards I made in 2022 were poster-sized. One for my personal life, one for my professional life. I bought frames for them—poster-sized frames—and I kept them in front of my laptop, near my desk, every single day. They were informed by how I want to feel, and less about the concrete accomplishments, though there were very deliberate images of what I wanted to achieve.
Let me give you some examples of what I put on those boards.
A picture of my dream house—the one I ended up purchasing in my dream town through an incredible story and confluence of circumstances. (That could be an entire Substack letter someday.)
Selling my company. Which I did at the top of 2025.
Publishing a book. Never did I imagine that a top literary agent and a top publishing house would reach out to me without me ever sending in a proposal.
I’m not kidding when I say that the bulk of what was on those two vision boards came true.
I know that sounds wild to believe. But my husband and my best girlfriends are witness to it.
