A client of mine had a really hard year. When she told me she was heading out on a hiking trip to celebrate making it through, I told her to give it to the mountains. She came back transformed. Today's episode is about why transitions need ceremony — and what we lose when we just drift through them.

To Bless the Space Between Us: "We have fallen out of belonging. When we stand before crucial thresholds in our lives, we have no rituals to protect, encourage, and guide us as we cross over into the unknown."

This is an episode about ceremony — why we need it, why we've lost it, and how to make one for the chapter you're finally ready to leave behind.

Question to carry into your day: What are you still carrying that deserves a ceremony of release?

One of the best videos on the internet: Maggie Rogers being discovered by Pharrell Williams performing Alaska. Go watch it. Then go listen to the song. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSFGP-hBRjk

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I went to Lourdes with a plan. I was going to do the bathing ritual. I was going to get dunked in the sacred water and it was going to be transcendent. And then I looked around at the line I was standing in and heard something very quiet and very clear. This is not yours.

Everything Belongs says it like this: when you can get little enough, you will find that the little place where you really are is ironically more than enough and is all that you need. At that place, you will have nothing to prove and nothing to protect.

This is an episode about the spiritual maturity of right-sizing, and what becomes available when you stop pushing for the thing that was never actually yours

Question to carry into your day: What are you pushing for that might not be yours right now, and what might be waiting for you if you stepped back?

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When I arrived in Lourdes for an eight-day spiritual retreat, my first thought was: I made a terrible mistake. This happens to me every single time I go on a spiritual retreat.

What happened next — a voice memo to a friend, and something my teacher said in the opening — is what today's episode is about.

When Things Fall Apart says it like this: "To stay with shakiness — to stay with a broken heart, with a rumbling stomach, with the feeling of hopelessness — that is the path of true awakening."

This is an episode about the threshold — the doubt that arrives right before something real — and why the sacred yes you said before the doubt arrived is still true.

Question to carry into your day: What sacred yes did you say that the doubt is now trying to talk you out of?

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A coaching client said something to me recently that I have heard a hundred times in a hundred rooms, and I finally want to say out loud what it actually means. "I'll try my best" sounds like effort.

It sounds like earnestness. But underneath it, it is an exit — a door built into the back of the commitment before the commitment has even been made.

The hedge is not humility. It just looks like it. And closing the back door is one of the bravest things you can do.

Question to carry into your day: What are you giving yourself permission to fail at before you've even fully tried?

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If this one hit somewhere real — if you recognized your own hedge — write me at [email protected]. Tell me what you're committing to. I read every one.

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I used to tell myself I was going to put away the laundry before I went to sleep. And I knew, even as I was saying it, that I wasn't going to. That small comfortable story — repeated in hundreds of tiny private moments — was costing me more than I realized.

Martha Beck writes in The Way of Integrity: "To be in integrity is to be one thing, whole and undivided. Know what you really know, feel what you really feel, say what you really mean, and do what you really want."

This is an episode about the quiet, unsexy foundation of real power — and why it starts with telling yourself the truth, especially the truth you don't want to hear.

Question to carry into your day: What are you telling yourself that you know, if you're honest, isn't quite true?

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If this one landed somewhere specific, write me at [email protected]. I want to hear about it. I read every one.

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I was on my way to Lourdes, sitting next to a man who coughed the entire flight, and I was catastrophizing at altitude in a way that was decidedly not my wise mind. My friend Karen said five words to me in the airplane aisle that I have not stopped thinking about since.

Viktor Frankl writes in Man's Search for Meaning: "Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."

This is an episode about the space between what happens and how you respond — and the freedom that lives there.

Question to carry into your day: What have you decided about a situation in your life that you might not have to keep deciding?

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The night before I left for Lourdes, I was depleted in a way I hadn't fully admitted to myself. I went to my women's circle and I did something I don't always do easily. I asked to be held. And what happened on the way to the airport the next morning reminded me of something I thought I already knew.

Bell Hooks writes in All About Love: "Loving friendships allow us the chance to revel in community joy, navigate challenges, and remain connected amidst differences and disputes. Friendship is where many of us first encounter the redemptive power of love and community."

This is an episode about the difference between waiting to feel connected and actually asking for connection — and why the asking is the whole move.

Question to carry into your day: What are you carrying alone right now that you haven't let your people know about?

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If this one is sitting with you, write me at [email protected]. Tell me what you need. I read every one.

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I did something recently that was genuinely hard for me — not complicated, just vulnerable. I needed to ask about ten people for something, and every single ask was nerve-wracking. And then the universe made me ask again. And again. And what happened on the other side of all that asking was not what I expected.

Kate Bowler writes in No Cure for Being Human: "We are as fragile as the day we were born, and we will need each other if we're going to tell the truth: Life is beautiful and terrible, full of hope and despair and everything in between, but there's no cure for being human." Needing people is not a design flaw. It is the design. And the silence around the need costs everyone more than the ask ever would.

Question to carry into your day: What are you protecting someone from needing, that they might actually want to give?

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If this one is sitting with you, write me at [email protected]. I want to hear about it. I read every one.

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Last week I sat in coaching session after coaching session hearing people make declarations about their lives with complete certainty — certainty that came not from experience but from fear. A business coach I worked with years ago had a question he would stop me with every time I did the same thing. Nine words.

It stopped me cold then and it stops me now. Pema Chödrön writes in When Things Fall Apart: "When we think something is going to give us misery, we don't know. Letting there be room for not knowing is the most important thing of all."

Fear and knowing are not the same thing. But they feel identical from the inside — and that is the whole problem.

Question to carry into your day: What are you treating as a fact that is actually a fear?

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If this one is sitting with you — if you recognize the declaration, if you know exactly which fear you've been treating as a fact — write me at [email protected]. Tell me what you thought you knew. I read every one.

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I have been saying the same thing to people for twenty-five years — in treatment rooms, on retreats, seventeen miles deep in the forest with someone who desperately wants to be out of it.

And last week my social media coach said it back to me, and my mouth dropped open.

Urgency is never wisdom unless there is a lion chasing you. Everything else is your fear of trying to speed up the process.

Question to carry into your day: What are you trying to rush that is quietly asking you to stay in the process a little longer?

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• Questions or want to share your story? Email me at [email protected]

An Operation Podcast production | @OperationPodcast