Happy Sacred Sunday!
I was sitting with one of the couples I work with, doing a quarterly review of their life and business. We started by noticing what had happened in the last three months: successes, surprises, milestone moments, and challenges.
It took them a minute to jog their memory. It wasn’t that they didn’t have anything to write down. It was that they had too much.
Does this happen to you?
Your life is full. You work a lot. You serve a lot. You keep a million balls in the air between your personal and professional endeavors.
The busy days become blurry months.
No matter how much you achieve, life keeps challenging you. It offers you new ways to grow, new lessons to learn, and new desires to fulfill. If you’re not careful, this tricks you into believing you haven’t progressed much at all.
So back to my couple. At first, the wife was drawing a blank.
Now here is what’s fascinating. I success file with her every single week. And even still, this was happening to her. I get it, because it happens to me too.
But when you do this work, that feeling is only temporary. Because the work works for you.
Once we began revisiting her monthly intentions and taking a bird’s eye view of her months, it started coming back. As we sat together, recalling all the successes we’ve logged over the last few months, I could see her surprise. The glimmer in her eye that said, We’ve done all that? That’s us? Wow, that’s more than I remember.
She remembered not only what she did, but who she has become.
There is always more than you remember. Our brains hold on to the negatives: the disappointments, the upsets, the perceived failures, the moments when we weren’t our best selves. Remembering the good stuff is where the real discipline comes in. The good stuff is slippery. It just rolls off.
That’s why weekly isn’t enough. Success filing every week keeps your wins from slipping away. A reset day lets you see them all at once.
I loved my time with this couple because I got to witness their incredible life unfolding. Regardless of all the hits they take along the way, they continue to choose to write a beautiful story.
Remembering gives you the evidence to move forward with confidence, clarity, and courage.
My theme for September was Remember. I didn’t plan for the biggest lesson of September to land on the fourth day of October, but here it is. An intention keeps teaching us even after we’ve moved on to the next one.
So if you haven’t looked back at your month or your quarter, this is your reminder to do it today. And if you’ve been reading my Sacred Sunday letters for a while, but you haven’t integrated this practice into your life, reply to me and let’s have a conversation.
Sending you love today and always,
P.S. On today’s podcast, we announced the collective intention for October, and I can’t wait to find out if it resonates with you. [Listen here]
Success Filing
Happy Sacred Sunday!
Do you have “a spot” in your home? A corner you use to do something specific like knitting, puzzling, or reading? A space that triggers peace, coziness, or joy signals in your brain?
I used to sit on a black rubber mat, under our squatting rack, in the corner of my garage to journal and meditate. It was random and not fancy at all, but it served me well until we remodeled our home in 2023. That’s when the floral chair and an acrylic end table near a lamp became my morning journaling and meditating spot. I have written many of these Sunday love letters to you from this spot in the last 3 years.
Well, I lost my spot for several weeks while we replaced the floors in my home, and boy did that make a difference in my mornings. There’s something really powerful about having a designated place where your brain is already primed for the activity it’s going to perform.
That’s why it was so exciting to have my home back in order and have my precious chair waiting for me this morning. I sat down with my journals. (I have more than one.) I opened my 5 year journal where I’m committed to writing one entry per day and I realized there were 15 blank pages between my last entry and today’s. It’s normal for me to have one or two blank pages in the middle of a week, but fifteen blank pages was significant for me.
It got me thinking about how easy it is to drift away from a habit when life interrupts your routines, or when you haven’t repeated a routine enough to build a habit. And how tempting it is to discard the practice altogether when you feel like you’re too inconsistent to maintain it. Sometimes we would rather not do something at all over doing it imperfectly.
But here’s the thing. There are some practices that are so important, it’s better that they be inconsistent over nonexistent. Reflection is one of those practices. Specifically success filing.
So this morning I opened my calendar and my camera roll and started slowing September down. I’m actually still in the middle of it. I stopped to write this email to you. But I did notice how in those fifteen days I’ve been a friend, a mom, a wife, a business owner, and a homemaker. Fifteen blank pages didn’t mean I was failing. It meant I had been living without recording it. And recording it is what turns a run on sentence into chapters.
This week on the podcast I’m explaining all things success filing, a practice I learned from Susan Ford Collins. I shared how my best friend Frances success filed for me this week. Opening my journal this morning helped me notice why I hadn’t been success filing for myself. I had drifted from my morning journaling practice.
If you have your own blank pages, go get them back. Open your calendar, open your camera roll, and slow September down before October gets here. And if you don’t have a spot where you do this, look around your house and notice what little space calls your soul. I’m going to finish mine as soon as I hit send.
[Listen to this week’s episode]
Sending you love today and always,
P.S. My chair was waiting for me this morning. That’s what a designated place does. It holds your seat until you come back. Wednesdays at The Well are that for the women inside it.