When the world stopped in March 2020, Emily Guerra's career stopped with it. As a wedding and event planner in Los Angeles, she watched her industry vanish overnight. Weddings were canceled, events disappeared, and the work that had consumed most of her days, evenings, and weekends simply ceased to exist. For someone who thrived on organization and structure, the sudden absence of both felt disorienting. But what seemed like a devastating loss would ultimately force Guerra to reimagine not just what she did for work, but how she approached work itself. Her journey from event planning to mindful productivity coaching reveals how crisis can strip away the elements of our careers that no longer serve us and create space for something more aligned with who we actually are.

Read the full article here.

The email arrived like countless others before it, but this time something was different. Karen C.L. Anderson sat staring at the message from her mother, feeling that familiar knot tighten in her stomach. The words on the screen weren't overtly cruel, they never were. Instead, they carried that subtle energetic signature she'd learned to recognize over decades: the implicit demand to stay small, to not outshine, to remain less than. But in 2010, after years of therapy, self-help work, and slowly building her own sense of safety, Karen made a choice that would reshape her entire life. She decided to cut off contact with her mother completely.

Read the full article here.