A Practice for Recalibration
I made you an audio if you’d prefer to listen here. (private link)
At the end of 2024, I realized I no longer identified as a "business coach." Not because I'd fallen out of love with the work—I still love helping people build their big business dreams. Something felt off: like a stuck gear or a slightly off-pitch guitar string. My gut was telling me to step back from the fray and find a way of working that made room for all of me.
I needed a recalibration.
If you've followed me since the early days from small-town health coach, yoga teacher and studio owner, travelling trainer and business coach, then you've noticed a non-linear career trajectory (with similar themes). But at one point in my life, I was singularly focused on my goal-oriented life trajectory: I was going to be a researcher.
My dream as a young girl was to work in a Think Tank, surrounded by people who were similarly committed to using intelligence, skill, logic, and creativity to solve the world’s most intractable problems.
Some of those intractable problems intersected with my own life these last few years, resulting in some communication gaps.
There are many reasons. A divorce. A cross-country move. Another cross-country move. A new baby. I gave you the bullet points, but not context.
My divorce was considered “high conflict,” entailing almost 7 years of frantic attempts (mine) to encourage resolution, repair, or at least a re-focus on the child involved.
As these interpersonal challenges crept further into my day-to-day life, I had to choose the kind of parent I wanted to be. The logistics of managing a complicated teaching and travel schedule as the Director and Lead Instructor of a training center proved untenable and impractical for my new life as a solo parent. My child needed my presence. So I prioritized their needs over my career.
As humans do, I adapted: I built online programs, centered my business on coaching, but in 2018 I temporarily shuttered my online business and training programs for a serious reason (stalking is real and dangerous).
Those years became a long search for a new path.
I found new forms of joy and new kinds of work: supporting mission-oriented organizations, providing fractional Co-CEO consulting for micro-enterprises, and working in the AI industry. Tech is an ideal industry for a solo parent crunching out work between school-drop off and pick-up— or at the “Toni Morrison” hours (before the light comes and the world wakes)—because the machine never sleeps.
My work in AI sparked renewed intellectual enthusiasm: paired with an equal amount of existential dread. Outsourcing my brain to the machine on the daily, along with so many others, gave me a glimpse into humanity’s trajectory.
It made me question everything (again). Yes, it is amazing and intoxicating and exciting and—if you’re obsessed with learning—the most exciting piece of technology ever to exist. But that still doesn’t answer the question: Why? To what end are we building?
To further exploit the most vulnerable?
To flatten our differences and become a homogenized summary of data points spit back to us in identical-sounding, if oddly worded, simulacra of cognition?
To collectively co-opt (read: steal) the intellectual property of every creator since the dawn of the internet age in order to re-package and sell back to us?
To outsource our most precious of human gifts —deep thinking and creativity— to a planet-destroying, water-guzzling, superpower that is the developmental equivalent of a toddler running with scissors? (a polymath MENSA-level toddler is still dangerous: arguably, more so).
Eventually, I could no longer handle the cognitive dissonance that left my nervous system wrecked and my mind restless with the implications of the tools I was helping to build.
To cope, I returned to a practice I call the 3 Rs: Reading, Releasing, and Reclaiming.
The first R: Reading
The first step is the most restorative. Reading things that move and inspire me is a genuine respite, and the more I read, the better I feel.
As I've grown older, there is less time for the reading I love most: poetry, spiritual texts, vintage knitting patterns, historical fiction, magical realism, biographies, YA sci-fi, scientific papers (I know. I’m strange).
Making reading a deliberate practice again—with a joyful rather than productive focus— improved my life immeasurably. It also served as a kind of brainwashing in the best possible way: like giving my brain a restorative slow dance in the rain.
The research backs this up.
A large study following nearly 20,000 middle-aged and older adults across 15 countries found leisure reading was prospectively associated with better health, well-being, daily functioning, lower cognitive impairment, and greater longevity. A 2024 evidence review on reading for pleasure reached the same conclusion: volitional reading is linked to meaningful gains in wellbeing alongside cognitive benefits.
The freeing part: genre matters far less than the habit. Graphic novels, children's books, home-decor magazines, vampire romances, the complete works of Vladimir Nabokov—the act of reading for pleasure carries the benefit. *Books appear to confer a particularly strong longevity advantage over newspapers and magazines, so lean toward books for the most benefit.
But the headline holds: Just read something.
The next two Rs: a dialectic within yourself
Releasing and Reclaiming work together.
Each begins with a single question:
What do I want or need to release?
What do I want or need to reclaim?
That's the whole practice. The tricky part is answering honestly. Ask the question, then let your intuitive self answer — the first thing that surfaces is usually the answer (the "why" is less important and often comes later).
After a few years of this practice, I noticed clear patterns.
Releasing, for me, usually shows up as something that drains my energy: mindless scrolling, obsessing over headlines, being less-than-present with my children, rumination, self-recrimination, complaining.
Reclaiming, for me, usually shows up as a nudge toward practices that restore or joys I’ve forgotten: a walk in the woods, my art-journal practice, morning pages, planting flowers, gratitude lists, reconnecting with a treasured friend, knitting a sweater, crafting a poem, playing the guitar. There is an untapped well of joy to be found in activities that challenge you just enough. And daily life is full of simple pleasures that oft go unnoticed and unclaimed (see pictures from my garden below for a perfect illustration of this point. The audacity of those zinnias
There's a good reason this simple inventory works. Contemplative practices that build present-moment awareness are consistently linked to stronger emotion regulation — the capacity that lets you notice what depletes you and choose what refills you, instead of running on autopilot.
This type of self-inquiry is a virtuous circle of mutual emotional aid —self-care that is more than self-centered navel-gazing. Engaging in this type of contemplative inquiry creates the inner conditions that nourish mental health.
But it isn’t enough: if the contemplative practice is the rain, the social determinants of health are the soil. And research consistently shows that these factors far outweigh any mental health maintenance, emotional housekeeping, and self-work in action. This is an important distinction in a society that discounts the impact of its own dysfunctional systems on individuals and marginalized communities. Creating the conditions that nourish health begin at the structural and societal level. It is far too much to ask of any one individual.
Yet, the daily actions that nourish the conditions for mental health, emotional regulation, physical well-being exist in the literature and in one’s own ancestral line —if you exist, you’re living proof that your ancestors, despite all they endured, were survivors of the fittest caliber.
These practices are simple, not always accessible. That doesn’t mean they don’t matter or that we abandon those practices. For the sake of humanity, it’s time to double down on them.
Emotional regulation is violence prevention.
Social connection is addiction-prevention in practice.
Mindfulness is conflict resolution training.
And in an increasingly violent, disjointed, divided, polarized world, we need more people committed to modeling the best of humanity’s qualities: compassion, empathy, connection, creativity, care, insight.
When little girl Kellie envisioned working as a researcher in a Think Tank, this is what she thought the work would entail: humanity’s brightest and most diligent scholars, putting their heads together with care, compassion, and creativity to solve the world’s most intractable problems.
Now that I’m older, it’s clear that the initial spark of career aspiration was filtered through the rose-tinted lens of childhood: a childhood full of trauma, emotional neglect, and intellectual isolation.
Yet, the practices I’ve been drawn to over the years, the studies I’ve pursued, have been gently guiding me back to that original career aspiration.
An Inner Recalibration
I hope you’ll try the practice when next you need your own Inner Recalibration. I can't promise it will help you as much as it has helped me. But if you try it, will you let me know how it goes?
Read something.
Release something.
Reclaim something.
That's the whole practice — and it might just awaken the insight you've been too busy to hear (until now).
TL/DR
The 3 Rs — Reading, Releasing, Reclaiming — is a simple daily practice for awakening intuition
Reading for pleasure is linked to better well-being, cognition, and longevity.
Releasing and Reclaiming are practices that protect and restore a connection to your own insight, skills, forgotten strengths, and resourcing practices.
Contemplative awareness strengthens emotional regulation, resulting in better choices: for oneself and for the world.
Try the 3 Rs this week, then tell me what surfaced. I read every response.
Thanks for being here.
