The 10 essentials to create an ambitious and balanced life

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Today on the podcast I’m offering to you 10 essential things that you need to do in order to create an ambitious and balanced life.

I have distilled so much of what I teach my clients, and what I teach here on this podcast, down to 10 essential things.

I’m going to cover each of them one-by-one, highlighting why they are important in creating an ambitious and balanced life. And even offer some tips and tools on how to get started with them right away.

You ready? let’s get to it. 

Topics in this episode:

  • Tips on separating thoughts from truth to reduce stress. 

  • Advice on blocking time for important tasks during the workday. 

  • Importance of setting clear goals and priorities for balance. 

  • Creating space to feel and process emotions. 

  • Practicing intentional thinking daily. 

Show Notes & References:

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Transcript

Intro

Today on the podcast, I am offering to you ten essential things that you need to do in order to create an ambitious and balanced life. 

I have distilled so much of what I teach my clients and what I teach here on the podcast, down to ten essential things. 

And I'm going to cover each of them one by one, highlighting why they are so important in creating an ambitious and balanced life. 

And even offer you some tips and tools on how to get started right away. You ready? Let's get to it. 

Welcome to the ambitious and balanced working mom podcast, the place for women who want to balance their ambitious career goals with their life as a mom. If you're looking to feel more confident, decisive, and productive at both work and home, then this is the place for you. I'm your host, Rebecca Olson. Let's get to it. 

Hello, working moms. Happy almost summer. 

We hosted a Cinco de Mayo housewarming party yesterday in our backyard, and it was like, such a beautiful day. Clearly, summer is on the horizon. 

But what's so amazing was actually the day before on Saturday. Like, it dumped rain. It dumped rain so much so that I went out in the backyard Saturday evening because the rain had stopped by then, and I, like, was pouring out buckets that had filled with water around my yard. So it was crazy. We went from this downpour to beautiful sunshine the next day for our party. 

And I just know for so many of you in this community, you are likely transitioning, starting to transition into summer schedules, summer camps, vacations, being out of rhythm. 

So I just want everybody to know, I'm here for you. I'm with you. I totally get it. 

Let's jump into today's podcast, where I am talking about ten things that you must do if you want to create an ambitious and balanced working mom life. 

Now, of course, there are many more things that one could do that would be helpful for you, but I really wanted to distill this down to just 10 of what I would think is the absolute essentials in creating an ambitious and balanced life. 

All of this is stuff that I teach to my clients that I think my clients would probably come back to me and say, would name one of these ten things as being some of the most pivotal, most important things that they learned in coaching. 

And so I am going to bring it to you here on the podcast today. This is in no particular order, so just want you to know, don't read into the order in any way. I came up with the list, and I just picked around where I was going to start. 

Separate your thoughts from truth. 

So, number one, the first thing that I want to talk about that you need to do in order to create an ambitious and balanced life is you need to separate your thoughts from truth. And here's what I mean by this. 

Your brain is designed to think thoughts, right? That's its function. That is what it is meant to do. 

But thoughts are just thoughts. They are not truth. 

I talk a lot about thoughts on the podcast, and I teach my clients how to evaluate their thoughts, how to break them down, how to learn how to think more intentionally, how to think more positively on a much more foundational level. 

Because you have to learn how to question thoughts that your brain offers to you. Right. you have to learn how to ask yourself, like, is that really true? 

That's one of the most common things I ask my clients. Is that thought really true? 

Like, when your brain thinks, I don't have enough time, which then, of course, has you spinning. 

It has you spinning in overwhelm. 

It has you spinning in not enough, trying to, like, take on too many things to get more things done. 

There has to be a moment if you want to create an ambitious, imbalanced life where you stop and you ask yourself, is that really true? 

Is it really true that I don't have enough time? 

There are 24 hours in my day, and there were 24 hours in my day yesterday. Is it really true that that's not enough for me to live the life that I want to lead? Right. 

If you get home from work and your brain thinks, I didn't get enough done today, and that, of course, has you feeling behind and like you're not successful and like you haven't been productive today, it leaves you feeling very exhausted, sort of detached, disconnected. 

There has to be a moment if you want to create an ambitious, imbalanced life where you ask yourself, is that true? Is it true that I didn't get enough done today? 

How might that actually be not true? 

How might it be true that I actually got done today exactly what I needed to get done today? 

Because you could probably make an argument for that statement as well, right? Because thoughts are not true. 

Thoughts are just thoughts. They're perspectives. 

I have told this story on the podcast before. I think it's such a great illustration of this, though, so I'm going to say it again here. 

“Not enough time with my kids.”

But several years ago, I had a client, her name was Danielle, and she came to our coaching time together, and she said, I just don't have enough time. I don't spend enough time with my kids. I get home at 5:30, they go to bed at 8. That 3 hours with dinner and homework and showers and everything that needs to get done, it's just not enough time. 

And over the course of our coaching together, we, started to break that thought down. 

Is it really true that you don't have enough time, or is it just the way you're spending your time? 

And so as we slowly started to question that thought, she started to actually believe a bit more. 

Because I challenged her to believe it. I said, what if you instead believed that you had exactly the right amount of time? Maybe it's the perfect amount of time to spend with your kids. 

And with that thought, she started to shift. The way she showed up in those 3 hours, she was more present, she prioritized differently, she felt more connected to them. 

And then by the end of our coaching time, she wrote in her evaluation, she said, I spent exactly the same amount of time that I spent before with my kids. 

Nothing has circumstantially changed, but it feels completely different. 

Why? Because her thoughts have changed. 

Just because your brain thinks a thought doesn't mean it's true, right? 

So the first thing on this list of ten things you need to do in order to create the ambitious and balanced life that you want is start separating your thoughts from truth. 

Start questioning what your brain is offering to you. 

Number 2: the 2nd thing you need to do is schedule in time for your projects and your priorities during your workday. 

So this is like a workday, strategy, if you will. So if you want to have an ambitious and balanced life, your time cannot be sucked up in meetings. You can't have all day meetings all of the time. 

You have too much to do. You have too many items on your to do list, too many things that you're trying to check off, right? 

And for most of you listening, you're probably at that point in your career, that sort of midpoint in your career, you got people that are reporting to you. You're dealing with all the things that they have going on. You have your own things going on. You have things that you're reporting up, right? And so there isn't this luxurious amount of time to get everything done. 

And so rather than kind of wait around until an empty time slot on your calendar appears, which, of course, we all know doesn't tend to happen, instead, what you need to do is prioritize ahead of time by actually scheduling in time blocks into your calendar for just you and your priorities for the work day. 

So this is one of the strategies I bring to my clients very early on, if they're telling me that they're not getting through what they need to get done during their work day, I start telling them what we need to do. 

Time block your calendar. 

Let's look at your calendar together. Let's find two or three blocks of time that you are going to block off for just your to do list, just your priorities, and then let's talk about how we're going to protect them. Always, right. 

It's not just about scheduling it in. It's also about not moving that calendar commitment around. It's about not scheduling over it. 

It's about not prioritizing other things and just saying yes to a meeting or something that might try to sabotage that time. Right. It's actually learning how to protect it. 

So the second thing you need to do in order to have an ambitious and balanced life is to have regular scheduled work time to get your to do list completed. 

This is one of the simplest ways to really start to take back control of your time, which is absolutely essential if you're going to create an ambitious and balanced life. 

Have very clear goals and priorities.

Okay. Number 3 is to have goals and priorities that are super clear to you and your brain. 

If you want to have an ambitious and balanced life, you have to feel clear about what an ambitious and balanced working mom life means to you. Right. 

Your brain needs to know that the decisions you're making, the way you're spending your time and your energy and your life, ultimately, like, you're headed in the right direction. 

And that requires some intentional planning, some intentional thinking about what that means. 

Am I living my best life?

You literally have to take time away on a somewhat regular basis to evaluate, am I living the life that I want to lead? 

Like, am I on the right track? Am I raising my kids in the way that I want to raise my kids? Am I on the career path that I want to be on? Am I in the job that I want to be on? Am I moving in the direction I want to go? 

An assignment that I give my clients, it's actually a formal workbook. All my clients get a printed workbook, like a thick workbook that I send them that we do some of these exercises in. They also get it via Dropbox as well. 

Define your regret free life.

But one of them, and this is the one that so many of my clients say, wow. That one exercise, the defining your regret free life exercise, that's what I call it, was one of the most hardest exercises that we did in coaching.

And it was also one of the most important because so many women that come to me and I know so many of you that are listening right now, I know I say this a lot, but everybody resonates with it on some level. 

So many of you get to this moment in your life, kind of in your usually kind of late, mid to late thirties, early forties. You kind of get to this point and you, and you have not planned your life past this moment, right? 

What’s next?

It was you wanted to get into mid level, kind of mid level into your career, feel successful, perhaps get married or be in a partnership of some kind, have kids. And it's like what, what's next? Right? You actually have to figure out what's next for you. 

If you want to have an ambitious and balanced life, there has to be goals. 

That's what your ambitions are leading you toward. Right? 

And so I have my clients, I actually walk them through this multi sectioned, if you will, workbook to really help them think about, think more long term about what they really want their ambitious working mom life to be and to look like. 

So that is the third. You have to have a clear, clear priorities and goals or like direction in order for you to create that ambitious and balanced life.

So number four, this one is so important, so important for me because it's one of the hardest ones for me. And I know it is for so many of you out there as well. 

There must be fun!

But there needs to be fun. Yes. If you want an ambitious and balanced life, there is time in your calendar. There are activities that you do that are just for fun. 

There needs to be joy, there needs to be adventure, there needs to be good rest. There needs to be self care. Right? 

Ten years from now, you're not going to look back at this moment in your life, this season and think, man, I'm so glad I worked 50 hours a week. I'm so glad I worked 60 hours a week. I'm so glad I spent so much time prioritizing work. You're never going to do that. 

You're going to look back at the season and you're going to remember memories, everyday memories, vacation memories, milestones that your kids hit, right? 

You're going to look back and remember the fun moments of your life. And so you want to be cultivating or curating even more fun in your life as an ambitious and balanced working mom. 

I recently had a client finish coaching with me and when she came to me, what she told me is she spent very little time for herself. 

She came home absolutely exhausted from her work day, usually working beyond what she really wanted to work. She didn't really have the energy to engage in activities even though she knew that she had lots of other interests. 

She had classes she wanted to take, and she had books she wanted to read, and she just couldn't find the energy to do any of it. 

And so, over the course of our time together, we worked at really mitigating her stress and her overwhelm and getting her back down to, like, a 40 ish hour workweek and so she can get home and feel like she had energy. 

And so by the time we ended our coaching together, she had already taken a pottery class. She was starting, like, a painting class. She had read five or six books. She was training to run a five k with her son. 

She had all this time that she had spent on just herself that was fun, and she had this joy and this smile that was about her. 

That is what we all want as working moms. We need this time for ourself. We need to have a life that feels fun. 

Take ownership. 

All right, number five, in order to have an ambitious and balanced life, you have to take ownership. 

Now, I talk about ownership a lot on this podcast. It's almost like a pillar of the ambitious and balanced working mom community. 

What I mean by ownership is that you need to believe that if you are not experiencing balance in the way that you want, if you're not limiting your work time in the ways that you want, if you are not stopping your brain from thinking and ruminating about work, if you are not engaged in fun activities and prioritizing yourself, if you're feeling exhausted and stressed all of the time. 

I don't want this to sound harsh, so I want. We'll talk about this in a moment. But you ultimately, in order to have the ambitious, imbalanced life that you want, you have to own the fact that that is on you, that you are the problem, that you are the one that is creating the overworking and the exhaustion and the stress. 

You are the solution. 

Here's what I want to say about that. Again, I don't want this to sound. I don't want you to, like, experience, shame or judgment because of this. But here's the thing. If you're the problem, then you also get to be the solution, right? 

If the problem is your company just is understaffed and there's too much to do and not enough man hours to do it, if the problem is you don't have a partner that is helpful at home, and so you're, like, carrying the weight of absolutely everything in the household and working in all these things, if the problem is you don't have a boss that's supportive of you, or you don't have upper management. They all work 80 hours a week and so, it's expected that you work whatever it is. 

If the problem is something other than you, then you don't have control over the solution. 

Then you're sort of waiting around for your company or your boss or your partner or your kids or somebody else to do something in order for you to create the ambitious and balanced life that you want. 

Here is another thing I want to say about this that's also very important. It's like a little side note here. I recently did a podcast where I interviewed amazing woman. Her name is Orly, and she is from an organization called Moms first. 

And in that podcast, we talked about the systemic problems that are going on for working moms in America right now. We talked about how we don't have enough legislation that protects working moms. 

We don't have, you know, paid parental leave in America, which is just unheard of. We don't have companies that value working moms. And see, you know, the connection to quality childcare that's necessary for working parents to be able to work. 

We don't value women in the workplace as much as we value men. We don't value working moms in the workplace as a culture as much as we do. You know, other demographics, right? 

We have systemic problems in America. There's no question about it. And we need to be and are continuing to work to change those systematic problems to make a balanced life easier for us as women. And we're in the messy middle right now of creating that. 

So while we're going about making systemic changes, we also, at the same time, have to do our part in controlling what we can control, say no, where we can say no, managing our own emotions, our own negative thinking and so forth, in order to create the life that we want to create. 

So it's going to be a both and right. 

There are systemic problems that need to be changed, and then there are individualized problems that we need to take ownership of over to create the life that we want today. 

So ownership is about kind of identifying and knowing what piece of the problem is yours that you can control. 

And it always is going to come down to the way you're thinking, the way you're feeling, and what you're doing, and then identifying that so that you can actually go about making the changes that you want right now in our current stage or current stage of America and life and parental leave and all of the things that we're trying to work on systemically. So that's five. Take ownership. Be both the problem and the solution. 

Feel your emotions. 

All right. Number six, if you want to create an ambitious and balanced life, you need to create space to feel. 

Yes, I know that sounds very kind of wishy washy. It sounds a little woo woo. It sounds very, maybe not very practical. 

But the only thing that ever gets in the way of you being able to stick to your priorities, to adhere to your boundaries, to make time for yourself, to make time for fun, to feel successful and valued, all the things that you want, right. 

In an ambitious, imbalanced life, the only thing that ever gets in the way of you being able to do that and create that is an emotion. 

And usually it's like an icky feeling emotion is what I like to say. It's a feeling that doesn't really feel good in our body and what we do as adults, it's sort of what we're taught to do and how we think about emotions as a culture as well, is we're taught to stuff our emotions. 

We're taught there's a time and a place for emotions. We're taught to not feel our emotions. We're taught to bowl, particularly as ambitious people. We're taught to bulldoze through those emotions, right? Not to feel them. 

And so what happens over time, right, over hours, over days, over weeks, as you begin, as you continue to not feel your emotions and either bulldoze through them or stuff them or whatever, is these emotions, either one explode and big feelings down the line, anger and all these other things that we all cannot have an experience. We all know what that feels like on some level. 

But what I have found for my clients is what happens is there is this low kind of low level baseline of stress and overwhelm that is taking place, like, all of the time, even in the restful moments, there is stress and overwhelm, because there's all this built up emotion that isn't really being processed over time. 

The pivot protocol

And so with my clients, I teach very specific tools. one in particular, I call it the pivot protocol. It's a six step process that I teach my clients to help teach them how to give space to feel their feelings, to really learn how to feel, and then redirect their feelings in a much more productive way. 

So we stop avoiding our feelings. We start kind of doing what we are meant to do with our emotions, which is to feel them, is what I like to tell my clients. 

So that is absolutely one of the pillars of creating an ambitious and balanced life. It's a life where you are not avoiding or bulldozing through your emotions, but you are feeling them. 

You are learning how to take ownership over how you feel, over your happiness, over your balance, and all of the experiences that we want to have as working moms. And we do that by creating to feel our emotions, both in, like, the little moments of life, and then perhaps even in bigger ways. 

Intentional thinking time.

All right, number seven, in order to create the ambitious and balanced life that you want, you need to have intentional thinking time. Now, for me, that intentional thinking time usually takes place in the morning. 

Thought Work Time.

It's first thing when I get up before my kids are awake. That is when I get out my journal and sometimes a book that I'm reading, and I will do what I like to call my thought work time. It's my intentional thinking time that I am kind of evaluating what I am thinking about and redirecting my thoughts to much more positive intentional thoughts. 

I’ve done a couple of podcasts on how important a morning routine is, and I walk my clients through a very specific daily practice. Its a ten minute daily exercise. I call it the daily work. 

It’s a six step process that really helps them get into this intentional thinking space. But there really is no right or wrong. In fact, I was just having a conversation with one of my clients today about how she wants to kind of carve out very specific intentional thinking time every single morning. 

Because she's in a really good space where we're about two thirds of the way through our coaching, she has, like, really come over that those big emotional hurdles that we were experiencing early on. 

She's feeling much more balanced. She's out of the overwhelm and the stress, and she feels much more controlled. And now she's in this place of maintenance. 

And as we were talking about maintenance, I told her, one of the most important things you need to do is in maintenance is still make time and space for your thoughts and intentionally directing your thoughts, because otherwise your thoughts are just going to run wild like they normally do. Right. 

You need actual space to sit there and look at and think intentionally. She totally agreed. We talked all about all of the different tools that she has that she's already knows, new tools that I could give her to help kind of create some more intentional thinking space for her. 

But ultimately, there's really no right or wrong. I've had clients that are night owls or that just think better at night or want to do it right before bed so they get a good night's sleep. 

You could do this at any time of the day, but there needs to be absolutely daily time that you are taking your thoughts and you are intentionally directing them in a really positive way. 

Journaling, affirmations, meditating so many different ways that you can do it. 

I had a client, her name was Erica. She's actually been on this podcast before, but I even think she told this story potentially, or I did, I don't know, at some point. But she tells the story about how when we first started working together many years ago, she was in a corporate America type of job, but she really wanted to quit that job to start her own business. 

She dreamed of being a professional, organizer and having an organizing business. And so when we first started working together, I challenged her to write down just the thought, I will have a successful organizing business. I told her to write it down absolutely every single day. 

That's an intentional thought, right? She's directing her mind to that. So she said she did this for months. She wrote that same thought every day. She said she did it when she brushed her teeth, so she never forgot. 

And sure enough, I think about nine or ten months after she had started that practice, she quit her corporate job. She opened up her organizing business. That's what she's been doing for the last several years. It's been super successful. 

The power of intentional thinking. 

But one of the practices, the daily practices that she did that really manifested, that was intentionally thinking, every single day, I will have a successful organizing business. And then she went out create that. That's the power of intentional thinking. 

Practice sufficiency.

Number eight, if you want to have an ambitious and balanced life, one of the things that you need to do is you need to practice sufficiency. 

Now, over the last seven years of coaching working moms, I have now coached hundreds of women individually on creating an ambitious and balanced life. And I have really discovered that it all comes down to really just believing three thoughts, 

  • I am enough

  • I am good enough

  • I am doing enough. 

The Enough Triad

I call that the enough triad that is really at the heart of what it takes to create an ambitious, imbalanced life. And I call that enoughness. I call that sufficiency. Thats, generally speaking the way, if I were to put an emotion to it, thats what were talking about. 

Enoughness is this sense of completion. I have everything I need. You’re full, you

re, sufficient. And you can practice sufficiency in any and all situations all of the time. Literally practice it. 

And I've gone in and out of doing this myself based upon different seasons of life when I have needed it. 

But it really is as simple as taking a couple of moments throughout your day, closing your eyes, taking some really good, intentional, deep breaths, and focusing on how you have absolutely everything you need in this moment. 

You're not lacking anything. 

You have the dream life that you've always dreamed of living. 

It is taking your mind and practicing thinking those thoughts and letting your body fill with that feeling of sufficiency and then sitting with it for a minute. Right? 

It's not zooming past it. It's not just checking off the list, if you will, and like, okay, I'm going to sit here, I'm going to breathe, I'm going to think these thoughts, and then I'm going to move on. 

It's no, you're going to think these thoughts. You're going to let that really good feeling of enoughness just, like, fill your body, and you're going to let yourself smile, which is what usually happens, at least for me, when I start thinking those thoughts and I breathe in that sufficiency. You're literally practicing that sufficiency. 

Our brains are hardwired to see lack.

And the reason why that's so important is our brains are very hardwired to see the lack of everything, to look at the insufficiencies, to look at the failures of life, to think of the things that we're lacking that we don't have. 

And so we're very practiced at feeling insufficient and not enough. And so we have to just work our way back the other direction and really practice that good feeling of being totally full and complete. And when you practice feeling full and complete, it's going to get easier for your brain and your body to recreate that on a daily basis.

So it's one of the tools that I work with my clients on is practicing in any and all situations some of these feelings that we want to be experiencing on a much more regular basis. 

Be okay with messy.

All right, number nine, to have an ambitious and balanced life, you need to be able to leave things messy and undone. You are never going to look back at this season of life and think about how clean and tidy your house was, right? You're never going to think about how often you had everything checked off on your to do list where you had a really short to do list, right? That's not what you're going to remember ten years from now. 

As you look back, you're going to remember, just like we talked about before, all of the everyday moments. You're going to remember the fun and the adventures and the smile and the magical moments of family life and. And success that you've had at work. Right? 

An ambitious life is going to be a messy life. 

I mean, even the idea of having ambitious goals means that you have goals that you've never achieved before. So there's not going to be a very clear, linear path towards achieving those goals if you've never achieved them before. 

There's going to be ups and downs, there's going to be failures, there's going to be successes along the ways. It's going to be a bumpy journey. It's going to be a messy journey. That's okay. 

In order to have an ambitious and balanced life and go after big goals, you have to allow mess that's both like internal mess, like your brain and your body and your heart are a little out of whack, if you will, from time to time. 

And externally, you're going to have to allow mass, because simply having a clean and tidy house all of the time is just not going to be the priority in an ambitious and balanced life. 

Manage how you think about YOU.

The last thing that you need to do, the 10th thing that you need to do in order to create an ambitious and balanced life is proactively manage the way you're thinking about yourself. 

Now, I know I'm talking about this one last, but it could absolutely be the number one thing that you need to do, because your thoughts about yourself are the most valuable, important thoughts that you have all day. 

They are what make you feel successful or valued or good or enough or sufficient or loved, because there is a connection between the way you're thinking and the way you're feeling and what you do. That's what basic behavioral science teaches us. 

So if you're having lots of thoughts about yourself, like I'm not enough and I'm not doing enough and I'm not good enough, then you're likely feeling not good enough and like, you're not doing enough and you're feeling insufficient and you're feeling not valued and not valuable and not successful and ineffective and incapable and all of these things, right? Because you're thinking those things. 

So if you want to feel happy and joy filled and balanced and calm, then you have to have thoughts that lead you there, right? 

And those thoughts, the most important ones, are going to be the ones that are directed at yourself. 

Remember, your brain is hardwired for survival. It's hardwired to see the not enough. It's hardwired to focus on all of the failures. And so I use this word manage very specifically, you have to manage your thoughts about yourself. Because your brain naturally is going to point out all of the things that you're doing wrong at any given time. 

It's always after a presentation, you're going to walk out the door and you're not going to think about all of the amazing things you did. You're going to think about everything you should have done differently. 

When you get home at the end of a work day, you're naturally going to think about all the things you did not get done today and all of things that you left undone and the communication that is still, you know, drafted in your inbox and all of the things, that's how your brain is hardwired. 

You have to actively force your brain to think about what you did well, how good you are, how much value you gave your company today, how good of a mom you are. 

“That's going to help build up your confidence, your self esteem, your self worth.”

Even in the midst of, you know, an episode with your kids, you still you need to redirect your mind to how amazing you are at any given time. That's going to help build up your confidence, your self esteem, your self worth. And then that is going to be such an important part of creating that ambitious and balanced life that you and I and all of us want in this community. 

There you are working moms. tTen things you need to do in order to create an ambitious and balanced life. 

Hiring a coach.

Now, the quickest, most effective way that I know to put these things into practice and actually experience the ambitious and balanced life that you want is to hire a coach. 

Because, in hiring a coach, what you're going to do is have regular and intentional conversations about your goals of having an ambitious and balanced life. And then you're going to have conversation around what's specifically getting in the way of you being able to meet those goals by yourself. And then ultimately, you'll learn all the tools that's necessary in order for you to go after those goals. 

Now, I am a coach for ambitious working moms, so I might be the perfect coach for you. And if you want to explore what coaching might look like with me, you can go to my website that is www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com. 

There you can learn all about what I teach, how our coaching together would look, and then ultimately there's a link there to schedule a free coaching call with me to get a sense of what coaching is like and for us to ultimately decide if we're a good fit for each other. 

Working moms, go follow these ten things. Reach out for help. If you need help, schedule that call. I'm here for you. 

Have an amazing transition into summer. And until next week, let's get to it.

Rebecca Olson