Welcome To The Balance and Rise Blog

Your brain will straight up lie to you. There’s no way to sugar coat that, friends, there just isn’t. But your brain also creates beautiful ideas and inventions, and well, everything you see that surrounds us. It’s the power of the AND. Your brain is the king of the “and.” The first step in finding balance is recognizing this. The second step is discerning the beautiful part of your brain from the beast. The third is not reacting to, judging or negotiating with the beastly part. It’s tough, tough work. It’s lifelong work. And even if your friends start calling you things like the “definition of balance” (a term so kindly bestowed on me by some friends recently). You’re still gonna have to work your a** off on this part for the rest of your life as you sway back and forth, in and out of balance. Does it get easier? Yes and no. The beauty of understanding the feeling of balance is that you don’t have to rely on your brain so much. You know how it feels to be in a place of solid, grounded peace, no matter what your brain is shouting you “should” or “could” be doing. The harder part is that the more you find balance, the more likely it is that you are upleveling your life. Your focus and pure presence have likely brought about more of whatever you define as a successful life--mentally, physically, or materially. That uplevel can mean those brain lies cut a little deeper, make you question every decision you make to protect your peace. If you’ve learned to sit with that pain in your belly, it might fight a little harder to make you pay attention to it. It might put up a bigger fight to try to force you to listen to those untruths. This is when you have to remind yourself, your brain will straight up lie to you. Under no circumstances should you negotiate with these thoughts. That’s where spiraling lives, that’s where lack of balance lies. Sometimes holding hard to your balanced routines will do the trick.

What you might see when you look at this picture is a physical transformation. My size, my shininess, the polish of my look. What I see, is the change in my eyes. 

I am living proof that people can, in fact, change.

Here's how my journey towards achieving balance started.

As hard as I work to maintain the flow of a balanced life, there are days that still remind me I suffer from an incurable disease. There are days like I had this week where my mental health takes a turn and my brain simply won’t shut up. I call these bad brain days.

I posted on social media this week about Soup Sundays at the Warren house. It is a near sacred practice here, and very much a part of living a balanced life.

One of the most impactful physical wellness lessons I have learned came from a Real Housewife.

Steps to planting Katherine firmly in her happy place:

Your body whispers before it screams.

I’m being reminded a lot lately that one of the most powerful practices of mindfulness is sitting with whatever is.

It never fails, when I try to explain the beautiful, balanced culture we are building at KidGlov (focused on finding joy in our work), someone inevitably says, “Oh, you mean good work/life balance?”

There’s an art to vulnerability, especially at work. Being real is what connects us as humans, but that doesn’t mean you need to share every nitty, gritty detail for someone to relate.

What does wellness mean to you?

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it means to inspire someone.

I’ll likely never forget this meeting for the rest of my career as a “culture keeper.”