Welcome to Making Sense…

… a place for Strivers to learn, practice, and grow - gently.

You are enough.

It’s a thought you have but can’t really hold onto. One that sits in your brain, like red lipstick scrolled on a mirror, beautifully there, but not really a reflection of how you feel day to day in your bones.

You are constantly seeking to optimize. You have one life, and want to live it meaningfully.

The thing is, somewhere along the way, it became more miserable than fun.

It started imperceptibly, when we began conflating productivity with satisfaction. Believing that if we do the most possible in the most efficient way, then we will feel satisfied. We started reaching harder with more intensity, only to erase our preferences, needs, wants and desires in the process.

Exhaustion, we had to assume, was the cost of doing well.

So we kept on believing and doing: more and less consciously telling ourselves that if we just kept going, harder and longer, at higher levels of intensity, we’d eventually have done “enough” to finally feel “enough”. For our bones to settle inside our skin.

But… if you’re anything like me, or the hundreds of people I’ve worked with over the last decade: they haven’t.

I was walking with a dear friend, a light in every room she enters. She has been working on Wall Street for just under a decade now.

“Are you satisfied do you think? At the end of the day?” I asked.

She paused.

“I used to be the happiest person I know. I’m not now.”

This space exists to help your bones remember how to settle. How to reclaim enough, in your actions and your sense of self.

I work at the intersection of high performance and mental health, and have spent the past decade working directly with hundreds (perhaps closer to thousands, if I stop to tally) of individuals and now also (yay!) over one hundred organizations across industries. Lawyers, Executives, Entrepreneurs, Founders, Doctors, Journalists, Athletes… and other top performing professionals: who look great on paper, and feel like they’re falling apart.

People who:

• Feel pressure to be "on" all the time, but don’t remember the last time they felt fully present

• Carry a constant low-grade hum of anxiety, irritability, and fatigue

• Oscillate between pushing too hard and shutting down entirely

• Wonder if they’re burned out, or just not trying hard enough (insert: meditation challenge, diet, intense exercise regime, etc. here)

• Live with a sense that rest is risky, or that slowing down might mean falling behind

• Keep succeeding, but feel more empty and lonely then they do satisfied and at ease

• Feel guilty when working, guilty when not working, and guilty for struggling

• Built their identity around achievement, output, and being needed

• Are overwhelmed and exhausted, but can’t see what to put down

• Feel behind or lost, comparing themselves to others and wondering what they are missing

• Use overwork, avoiding important conflict and friction, and seeking perfection to feel secure in themselves

• Wonder, with some sadness: "Is this just what being a grown-up is?"

I am here to help. This was me, is me still… in part … from time to time.

A Striver.

Someone who takes life seriously and with reverence, who achieves so ambitiously and ferociously, that she needs support. Tools. Practices. To keep finding satisfaction. To keep learning, and enjoying the process.

I know I am not alone.

I make up, you’re a Striver too.

We don’t need more productivity hacks. More advice telling us to try harder, optimize better, do more with less. More of that means doing until we don’t, and then giving up and feeling worse than when we started. What we need is a way to understand what’s really happening underneath our burnout, our busyness, our fear, our drive, our big dreams and our audacious ambition.

What we need is a way to understand ourselves. How we make sense.

We need to learn how to strive differently, radically… with ambition still, and also perhaps, gentleness.

This space is about high performance. The real stuff. The human stuff. The stuff that gets you excited to wake up in the morning and has you smiling as you sip your coffee.

What I want to help you see if that:

• Work is, in part, personal.

• Learned patterns repeat.

• And peak performance is not powering-through.

The way we’ve been taught to work, often, doesn’t.

In this Substack, I’ll share:

• Insight into how your childhood and adolescent experiences shape your default responses at work today

• Explanations and deep dives into tools and practices that help you grow, to: recognize the patterns driving your choices, rewire your body and brain to have a greater potential range of choices at work (and beyond), to regulate and move flexibly between states as the context demands, and relate meaningfully to yourself and others. I call this, striving radically.

• What I’m thinking about, listening to, reading, and daydreaming on…

• Answers to your questions, comments, ideas and challenges - making space for our complexity and finding joy together

• … and my favourite: stories of people just like you, who are on the journey and figuring it out as best they know how. These will either be about me and my journey to peak performance, or they will be completely fictionalized and anonymous, to protect people I deeply admire, the space we’ve created together in our work, and the sacred moments we share.

This space is for us, fellow Strivers.

You, who are about reaching your potential, and wanting to feel satisfied and enough all the while.

It’s about supporting your peak performance, and becoming who you know you are, in a world that demands too much.

I’m not here to fix you. You aren’t broken. I’m here because you deserve to feel more alive and more joy. Luckily for us, that’s something we can learn.

I’m glad you’re here. In this place where we can learn how to help our bones settle in our skin. To feel satisfied. Finally.

Be gentle out there, with yourself and one another.

PS - If you’ve been running on fumes, this space is for you. You make sense. Let’s find our way back to something more human, together.