What's On Your Wall?

I love giant Post-it notes.

The kind that stick to the wall and give me an enormous blank space to think.

I’ve used them for years for goal setting, project management, brainstorming, planning and basically any situation where the inside of my brain needs to become visible on the outside of my body.

But for the last year or so, the giant Post-it note on my wall has been mostly empty.

Things have come and gone from it. Ideas. Reminders. Plans I thought I might pursue.

But mostly, it has stayed pretty quiet.

And that makes sense.

For a long time, I wasn’t really in a building season.

I was surviving.

And recovering.

And healing.

And resting.

And fighting fires that just wouldn't stop.

Then figuring out who I was after so much of my life changed.

There wasn’t a five-year strategic plan for that.

There was just getting through it.

But something has been changing over the last couple of months.

I’ve had this incredible amount of exposure to new places, people, ideas, experiences and possibilities. Some people have stayed. Some haven’t. Some experiences lasted weeks. Others lasted only hours.

But so many of them gave me something.

A glimpse.

A question.

An idea.

A reminder.

A little piece of information about what I’m drawn to, what I want, what I don’t want anymore, and what might actually be possible for my life.

And since coming home a few days ago, I’ve been sitting with all of it.

What do I actually want?

What kind of life am I trying to build?

What deserves my energy?

What am I willing to work really hard for?

And maybe even more importantly, what am I willing to give up to get it?

That last question deserves an entire post of its own.

But I’ve gotten some incredible clarity.

And today, I took some action.

Then I put it on my wall.

Because here’s another thing I know about myself:

I can make an incredibly important life decision on Tuesday and apparently completely forget I decided it by Wednesday.

Shiny object.

Squirrel.

New idea.

Interesting person.

Unexpected opportunity.

Tiktok. Facebook. Blog. Email.

Swirling around in my own brain for no reason.

Wait. What were we doing?

Some of that is my ADHD brain. Some of it is that I have spent much of my life performing incredibly well when external forces demanded something from me. Crisis, responsibility, expectations, deadlines and other people have historically been much better at keeping me focused than my own internal discipline.

I want to change that.

So I put the things that matter where I can see them.

And today, my wall isn’t empty anymore.

I actually felt some pretty significant hesitation about sharing what I wrote on it.

It’s one thing to privately write down what you want.

It’s another thing entirely to say it out loud where other people can see it.

Because there’s fear in that.

Fear of judgment.

Fear of failure.

Fear that I won’t follow through.

Fear that I’ll enthusiastically declare I’m going to learn something new and discover I’m terrible at it.

Fear that next week I’ll say, “You know what? I changed my mind.”

Fear of being witnessed wanting something before I know how the story ends.

But I think sharing it anyway is part of my own personal expansion.

I’m trying to become more comfortable naming what I want without requiring myself to first prove that I can have it.

I’m trying to give myself permission to pursue something wholeheartedly and still change my mind if I learn something along the way.

And I’m trying to stop treating changing direction as evidence that I failed.

Maybe six months from now, everything on this wall will still be there.

Maybe some of it won’t.

That’s okay.

The point isn’t to publicly lock myself into a version of my future.

The point is to be brave enough to name what feels true for me right now and then do something about it.

So, here goes.

Money and income generation.

Not simply managing the money I already have. Creating more of it.

I want financial freedom. I want to build wealth. I want to create an incredible life, leave a legacy and have the resources to make an impact in ways that matter to me.

That requires me to confront some old beliefs about money, self-worth, capability and what I believe I’m allowed to have.

One of the skills I’m diving into right now is trading. Swing trading. Day trading. Maybe eventually things I don’t even know enough about yet to know I want to learn them.

I want to become really good at it.

Not because I need another hobby, but because learning how to generate money is part of the life I want to build.

My body.

I don’t want my health goal to be “walk 10,000 steps.”

I want to be strong.

Flexible.

Capable.

Energetic.

I want to see what my body can become in this stage of my life.

And I want community around me that wants the same thing. I’m actively looking for women around my age navigating perimenopause and menopause who aren’t interested only in managing aging, but in becoming stronger, healthier and more physically capable than they have ever been.

I want to be surrounded by people who make me want to rise.

Leaving Ketchikan.

This one doesn’t have a perfectly constructed plan yet.

It has a direction.

There is a lot to figure out. Where I will live. What stays. What goes. How I structure my life. What happens with my house. What home even means when I can choose it for myself.

For now, part of moving toward that life looks incredibly unglamorous:

Purging closets.

Cleaning drawers.

Getting rid of things I don’t need anymore.

Creating physical and emotional room for whatever comes next.

I don’t know exactly where I’m going yet.

But I know I’m going.

Relationships and connection.

This one matters more than I sometimes want to admit.

Survival taught me to turn inward.

I know how to power through something alone.

I know how to carry enormous amounts of responsibility.

I know how to depend on myself.

Those skills have served me extraordinarily well.

But I don’t want a life that is simply a demonstration of how much I can carry by myself.

I want people.

Community.

Connection.

Intimacy.

Love.

Passion.

Desire.

Friendship.

Fun.

I want to nurture the relationships I already have and make room for ones that don’t exist yet.

That requires time and intention too.

And finally, there is something on my wall that has been living somewhere inside me for nearly a decade.

Cashier to CEO.

I had the idea maybe nine years ago.

Then I tucked it away.

Buried it.

Decided I probably wasn’t going to do anything with it.

Except it never completely went away.

The concept is simple:

How do you help someone move from where they are to where they know they are capable of going?

Maybe they’re literally working an entry-level job.

Maybe they’re successful on paper but know they are capable of more.

Maybe they have no idea what comes next, only that this isn’t it.

How do you build confidence?

How do you develop skills?

How do you change your relationship with money?

How do you learn to lead?

How do you take responsibility for your own life?

How do you stop waiting for someone to choose you and start choosing yourself?

I don’t know exactly what Cashier to CEO will become yet.

But I know I want to start creating it.

Because I literally went from cashier to CEO.

And somewhere along the way, I realized the bigger accomplishment wasn’t becoming the CEO of a business.

It was becoming the CEO of my own life.

So that’s what’s on my wall.

Not resolutions.

Not a perfectly mapped-out five-year plan.

Areas of focus.

Directions.

Things that deserve my time, attention and energy in this next chapter.

And after looking at a mostly empty wall for a very long time, it feels incredible to have a solid direction of where I am going with steps to take to help me get there.

So now I’m curious:

What’s on your wall?