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There’s a question I hear a lot: “What does the NextGen want?” And usually, it’s asked with good intent. But often…it’s asked too late. Or asked in a way that doesn’t actually work. Because here’s what I’ve seen: Most NextGen leaders aren’t resisting responsibility. They’re resisting misalignment. They don’t want pressure without context.They don’t want a role without clarity. They don’t want ownership without identity. And they definitely don’t want a plan that was created w

There’s something I’ve noticed after years of talking with financial advisors. And even more recently, leaning into those conversations more intentionally. The entire system is built around a single idea: Retirement. Work hard. Build wealth. Preserve it. Step away. And on paper, it makes sense. But when you sit across from founders…entrepreneurs…people who have built something from nothing…It doesn’t quite land. Because most of them aren’t trying to retire. They’re trying to

There’s a question we’ve started asking more often. Not out loud. But underneath everything we see. Which comes first? The disconnection…or the suppression of our gifts? Because after watching this in our own lives—and in the lives of so many others— it’s hard to separate the two. We tend to talk about addiction, distraction, and disconnections the problem. But what if they’re not the starting point? What if they’re the response? A response to something deeper. Because when y

A few years ago, we were part of a home church group. We hosted. We showed up. We wanted alignment. Not surface-level agreement—real alignment. So we did what felt right. We sat down with the minister and shared where we were. What we were learning. What we were experiencing. Especially around healing. And his response stayed with me. He said: If you talk about physical healing, people will line up. Stadiums would fill. Coliseums. And he asked us not to go there. I remember s

You don’t always know. We think gifts are obvious. We think if something is real, it would have been visible earlier. We think we would have known. But sometimes…the person you’re sitting next to—the person you’ve built a life with—has gifts that haven’t had permission to exist yet. Last night, someone asked me a question about Kevin’s gifts. And I had to stop. Because the truth is…for the first 20 years of our marriage, I had almost no idea. This is the same man who once loc

My mom knew she should leave. She just couldn't. I was 23 years old, two kids already, sitting in a car in a parking lot outside an attorney's office. She was too weak to drive by then. The pain medications made everything slower, heavier. She'd been living with a Stage 3 cancer diagnosis for five years and she was still holding it all together the way she always had — which is to say, she was holding everything. She had a manila envelope in her hand. Paperwork for a financia

There’s a story about Sam Walton that stuck with me. His landlord gave him 90 days to leave the store he built. So he spent the next 40 years building something no one could take from him. I didn’t get 90 days. I got years of slow realization. I grew up in family business. Multiple businesses. My dad was a serial entrepreneur—construction, real estate, storage, trucking, anything that could be built, scaled, or figured out. And I loved it. At 18, I was given a furniture and

For years, I ran our family like a well-intentioned dictator. Not harsh — just decisive. Clear expectations. Strong structure. Rooted traditions in central Wisconsin. I carried vision. I set direction. I required responsibility. And then we disrupted everything. We left the rooted version of life. We shifted into furnished rentals. We loosened structure. We stopped optimizing the environment. And I did something uncomfortable: I took my hands off the wheel. What Happened When

For years, Kevin and I were working on our marriage — but we didn’t know what we were working on. We read a LOT! Patrick Lencioni’s Getting Naked Don Miguel Ruiz’s The Four Agreements. Anthony de Mello’s The Way to Love. Bradley Nelson’s The Emotion Code. At one point, we were reading 20+ books a year. We mapped fears. We worked with coaches. We studied DISC profiles. We did marriage intensives. We were improving. But we were still looping. What we didn’t yet understand was