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The other day I caught myself laughing. Not just smiling. Laughing. At something that seven years ago would have turned into an argument. I stopped for a second. I looked at Kevin. And I thought…We’ve changed. Not because life got easier. Because we did. I don’t know that I could have imagined this version of us. Kevin and I joke that we divorced the first version of our marriage. Not each other. The first version of us. The people who were trying really hard. Trying to be go

As businesses grow, decisions stop being simple. They stop being isolated. They stop being reversible. They stop affecting only one person. At a certain level, decisions begin to shape families, partnerships, teams, capital, and legacy itself. And yet—this is often the moment when leaders have the least space to think clearly. The Real Risk at Higher Levels of Leadership In early stages, the biggest risks are operational: cash flow execution traction speed But as organization

When we work with business owners, we are often getting clarity on their unique calling. If we removed income from the equation… If time and money were handled… Who would we serve? Not what would we build. Not what would we monetize. Who would I contribute to? Who are you drawn to? What problems are you willing to live near? Where do you actually belong? Calling isn’t found through brainstorming everything. It’s revealed by noticing what keeps returning. Let's call it - The

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

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