two hours well spent
subscriber saturday: an hour with holly becker and another with the professor of happiness
Hello, friends. I’ve had a very enlightening week, and I hope to take some of that light and shine it for you. Our weather turned from late winter back to warm spring this week here in the Black Forest, and beauty abounds in every direction. Daily walks are pure endorphin shots.
The ramps have finished for the year, always bringing a bit of melancholy for foragers, but the baby stinging nettles are still going strong. We plotted out and filled 6 raised beds and will cover them now with hay, to be planted when we return from Italy, a trip we’ve planned for a while now.
Mulch pathways will be early next week’s task to cover and give a finished look to the area. These are filled with wood chips, leaf mulch, compost and organic soil. Because we used our own compost, the worm load is huge in each of these! I’m looking forward to returning and doing the planting up, and I’m not worried about it being a bit late, because it’s a cool spring here.
This week, I had the gift of spending over an hour on Zoom with my good friend
. For those of you who don’t know Holly, she’s been one of the top interior style and trend experts internationally for almost two decades. She’s a course developer, instructor, best selling author. She had her own magazine, called Holly, here in Germany and her blog, Decor8 is iconic.We got to know each other personally when I visited the 2019 launch of her capsule collection in Frankfurt for a major European interiors retailer called Depot. Our expat-in-Germany experiences coupled with a deep common interest in all things lifestyle gave us a great base to develop our friendship. We talk, and laugh, and text - a lot. We were both business people in the states, and both have had to reinvent ourselves several times over to make life on this side of the pond work for ourselves. It’s very comforting to know that she knows how I’m feeling without me having to even explain it, because she’s been there too.
Sometime during early spring, we talked about helping each other out as accountability partners in a more structured way. We set aside time, planned a couple of Zooms, with each call being about one of us from a professional standpoint. The thing that is most magical is that we are both full-on capable to flip the switch and go into 100% professional mode during these calls. And we’re both smart ladies. So what’s resulted is coaching, accountability, support, mastermind and brainstorming with the best of intentions, steeped in friendship. And honesty - lots of it.
I have never done anything like this before, and to be honest, Holly set me on fire this week during our session. I mean, I know her, but I was still blown away at the perceptiveness, the smarts, and the feedback she handed me. I hope I did something close to it for her a few weeks back, because when I came off this week’s call with a head full of ideas, I was lit.
Lit.
And I thought, what we can do for each other when we have other’s best interests at heart. The sky really is the limit.
The reason why I’m sharing this here
Women, subconsciously or not, turn themselves into wallflowers when it comes to acting on ideas that could bring them forward. And at some point, we really can benefit from someone who loves and knows us looking at us in the eyes and challenging us on why we’re still wallflowering and not activating our highest desires.
Maybe there’s someone in your life you can support and help in making their ideas make sense to them. Or maybe there is someone who can do that for you. What’s really stopping us from just helping each other?
And if there’s no one in your life who meets that description, what about a coach who can get you where you need to be? The right person could change everything. The point moving from inertia to action to focused steps will make you a happier person. More on that later in this post.
Manifesting ideas and concepts into actionable steps involves means believing in yourself and turning a deaf ear to negative voices, real or imagined, from inside or out. There are, and always will be a million reasons why we shouldn’t do our Big Life Thing. There only needs to be one reason why we should. Because we want it.
Because we deserve it. And because the path to get to our goal will teach us a million more things we didn’t know while we were wallflowering.
Ok, that’s three reasons.
It was in a watershed of gratitude that I walked through the rest of my week, journaling and thinking.
While laying out the ideas that have been dancing around in the back of my head for years, it’s my next responsibility to give those beautiful plans life and call them forth.
How about you? What ideas do you want to bring into the world?
The world needs us. Let’s help each other make shit happen.
Now to the other thing that stopped me dead in my tracks this week.
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