Notes from the Field: My Slow Summer of Expansion 🫐

Why a slow summer might be your most expansive life season.

This season of life looks different than usual for me.

As I’ve written before, as a new mom, I’m currently spending summer in Tuscany, after moving away from city life, to embrace this slow new baby season.

I’m currently not launching anything, I’m not feeding into Instagram’s algorithm by posting a few times a week / creating graphics, and I’m taking a break from my consulting work.

Instead, I’m doing something that is just as important and expansive. And probably even more transformative.

I’m creating space for the next version of me. Where life and work will be shaped differently. I’m redefining what my version of work and motherhood looks like right now. And I’m intentionally building a path in between.

Something not only I am thinking about, as this article on the NYT, shared by a friend, suggests.

Right now, I’m taking things very slow, enjoy going to the local farmers market with our now 5-month-old baby, eat pasta and gelato most days, go for morning walks at the beach, and check fig trees daily, desperately waiting for them to be ripe 😅 and look for hidden gems like this beautiful book about shells.

daily life in Italy

I’m also making space for my creativity. The ideas are still flowing. And I plan to reconnect with this community again in the Fall, bringing back our most popular cohort program. And while I often find it hard to accept that I can’t put things out as fast as I used to, I also think it’s really powerful (especially as someone with a lot of new ideas popping up all the time) as it’s making me less reactive, and more grounded in what I actually want to bring into this world.

I‘m thinking a lot about how I want to set myself up in the future, and how I can design my life and work for this next season, integrating my work as a founder of this platform, my workplace culture + employee experience coaching work, next to making space to spend more time with my baby. Ideally, I’d like to keep laptop work to about 4 hours a day, 4 days a week, keeping my Friday off (which is what I’ve been doing for a while now). Therefore, I’m thinking about how to reshape my offering, as well as invest in a small team to lean into the areas I focus on.

So now I take notes and write up concepts and newsletters, like this one, on my phone during sling-walks with the baby, or during a little journaling session while my husband is out on a walk with her, and have short moments on my laptop to manage and fulfil book orders and other things that require laptop time.

For this edition of Notes from the Field, I’ll leave you with some words from

Phoebe Lovatt's Public Library

: “it feels like a good time to make use of the month’s inherent slowness; to be still and listen to what comes up. Choose a handful of novels and work your way through them. Gather outside with friends and family while the weather still permits. Declutter your home in preparation for the return to indoor living that lies ahead (Winter is always coming....) Sleep. Rest. Go inward. Consider how you might want or need to reorient your life in the face of all you’ve witnessed this year. Let August be as quiet as a Sunday afternoon.”

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If you’re also thinking about what this next season might look like for you, I’d love for you to join our upcoming program. And until then, you might find some sparks of inspiration on our Creative Ways of Living interview series, where we’re widening your aperture around ways of working and living that allow us to build our identities around all of the vibrant — and varied — different parts of ourselves.

Here some of my recent favorite interviews: