Permission to Do It Your Way - November 06, 2026

I woke up around 2:30 a.m. with that lovely feeling of panic—and I actually went back to sleep. That’s progress, my friends. Today I’m talking about feeling like I haven’t done enough, finding a mission that feels like me, and a voicemail from Jennifer Navarrete about falling in love with podcasting again. A quick invitation, too: My Kaigi is November 14 . Come spend some time looking at what you want to do, what you want to let go of, and who you want to be next year. Use NAPODPOMO for 50% off , just for those of you here with the podcast. -------------- This morning—well, actually, maybe it wasn’t even this morning. It must have—well, I guess it was this morning. Probably around 2:30 a.m., something like that. I woke up with that lovely feeling of panic. You know, the one where you wake up and then something, unfinished something in life, crawls into your brain right as you’re supposed to just let go. I started to get a little bit anxious. Yeah, that wasn’t great. It’s because I have so much going on. But there’s just—I mean, it’s wonderful. I really love it. But I do feel like I have balls up in the air, and I just move from one thing to the next, and hopefully I’m gonna be able to push through and get all the stuff done. And then there was a feeling of it wasn’t enough. Like, “I wish I had done more” feeling. And for a moment there, I almost spiraled. Because what I have found out for myself is, if I allow even just one or two extra seconds of that to continue, I won’t be able to go back to sleep, and it will just totally wreck me. So I was able to stop that, take a moment, put my hands on my belly, lay directly on my back, and slowly exhale. And I was actually able to go back to sleep. Not by forgetting, but by putting a pin in it. I will be able to deal with it in the morning. And that is progress, my friends. That’s progress. A lot of progress. I had chosen before—just because I just felt I was always in a fighting space about a year ago. And it was this constant nagging feeling that I wasn’t doing enough, and things simply weren’t going to work out. And I had to continue to feel like I had to… Oh my gosh, it’s very hard to come up with words for this. To justify my value. I think that is it. I felt like I had to justify my value daily in a way that wasn’t healthy at all. And thankfully, I am not in that place anymore. So it was just a moment. I’m just sharing that because I think a lot of us have that. And it has taken a year for my nervous system to not go back to its comfortable route, which was to just get stressed out. Because that’s what it is, right? And I’m just thankful for that. So if you’re going through that, I feel you, and it’s going to be okay. It’s going to be all right. This week, for my mentorship experience—which I have not talked about, which is bizarro—I’m in, right now, week three. Next week is going to be—no, this is week four. Oh my gosh, this is week four. Is it? Yes. It’s week four, okay? We’re talking about mission, vision, and values. And the way that I like to work, about helping folks find that piece of themselves, or, like, find out what their mission statement is, or what their values are, and what their vision is for themselves, isn’t from an outward perspective. And I use this metaphor that just came to me when I was talking about it, because that’s how I feel. I feel this happens all the time when you do exercises to work on your mission statement and things like that: they tend to come from the outside in, where we’re looking for that lovely little statement that’s just going to encapsulate everything that we’re in. I sense, when I see those types of statements in either brands or companies, organizations, that in some case