Welcome to Edit Your Life, a podcast to help you edit the unnecessary from your life so you have more room to enjoy the awesome.

Through episodes with me, Christine Coe, and a range of smart, compassionate guests, you will come away with insights and tactics to help you find the agency and space to simplify

and declutter your home, time, mental space, and more.

Hello, friends, it's my birthday week, and so not surprisingly, I've been in a space of reflection,

and it is so interesting the difference a year can make. Last year,

when I turned 50, I was coming out of an intense period of professional turmoil. I headed into

the summer feeling like I needed to figure out how to be a human being again. This might sound

dramatic, but if you knew the details of what I was

experiencing earlier last year, it would make a lot of sense. Anyway, this year is so, so different.

For over a year now, I have been on my own work-wise and really exploring what it looks like

to work towards my own human ideals,

which is related to how I show up in my relationships.

And notably, I've developed a very different lens on work.

I love being creative in my work.

Work is essential for things like paying for college.

But I feel like there has been a really critical shift in work, not being the end-all, be-all of my existence and the first thing

I identify with. This is a really tremendous shift for me, given how tightly wed work was to

financial scarcity and survival, pretty much

starting when I was a freshman in college and learned that I would be on my own for the remainder

of the ride. There's also another related thing. Over the past year, I have found that I have just

not had the same urge to strive for what I call

cookies, or rather traditional cookies, like accolades, new projects, even the occasional trophy.

...