One powerful question to change how you feel in your body

The journaling prompt that dramatically shifted my perspective

Some personal news: I’m a snowshoer now! (That is nine feet of fresh powder, btw.)

I almost don’t want to write about what I did over the weekend. It’s too hard to explain in a way that does it justice, and too easy for others to potentially judge, dismiss, or raise eyebrows. But I’m going to do it anyway, because it was a powerful and transformative experience, and I really want to share some of it with you.

Bit of back story: About a year after I went freelance (almost four years ago now!), I was craving some self-reflection and support — not that annual performance reviews were literally ever helpful during my on-staff career, but I was looking to create some space to analyze what was going well, what wasn’t, and the directions I might want to explore in the coming year. I decided to hire a coach for a session to steer me through my own personal annual review. I knew it would be helpful to work with someone who had some familiarity with the media space (and what media people can do with their skills outside the traditional media world), and

Jenni Gritters

turned out to be exactly the person I was looking for. The coaching sessions I now do with Jenni about once a year are consistently the best investment I make in my business — we sometimes explore lofty, ambitious goals (like, cough, starting my own media project), and sometimes tackle more bite-sized but meaningful changes (like adjusting my daily routine or the way I structure my contracts or rates). They give me the chance to celebrate and feel proud of all I’ve accomplished, and to think bigger about what could be next for me.

Jenni does a lot of other amazing things, including leading coaching groups, and this winter she held her very first retreat for freelancers and solopreneurs. My friend

L'Oreal Thompson Payton

decided to go and sent me a handful of friendly little nudge texts until I decided, just hours before the deadline, to join too. The retreat was at Suttle Lodge in Sisters, Oregon, on a beautiful frozen lake surrounded by snow-covered buttes and Ponderosa pines. We spent three days alternating between resetting our nervous systems — with massage, sauna-and-snow sessions, snowshoeing, and yoga — and engaging in deeply focused coaching, journaling, and workshopping sessions.

Maybe you’ve done something like this before and can imagine how powerful it all was. Personally, I’m not the biggest journaler or intention-setter in the world, and I think if I’d realized how much of this more ineffable work would be involved, I might have shied away from this experience — I tend to be more of a brass-tacks person and there’s something about this kind of deep introspection that…I don’t know, intimidates me? I think I swing back and forth between thinking it’s a waste of time (which it isn’t, obviously!) and being afraid of what I might find if I go too far inward.

But what I found wasn’t scary at all. It was, in a word, abundance. I shared on the last day of the retreat that I never would have described myself as having a scarcity mindset before, but I discovered so much abundance and possibility — both in myself and in others — over the course of the weekend that the difference felt stark.

Abundance is what I’ve felt here, too, in your enthusiasm and participation and generosity. I’m so proud of this community we are building together, and I’m so grateful to you for being part of this.

While I wish I could bottle up all that I discovered at this retreat and just pass it straight onto you, that’s sadly not possible. But there was one moment during the retreat that felt particularly impactful, and relevant to what we’re doing here, so I wanted to share it with you.

It’s a question I asked myself that led to a painful but powerful breakthrough, and that’s helping me reset the way I approach my life and feel in my body.