Tomorrow will be my 53rd birthday.  53!!!  Where did the time go?!  The very last daily blog post I wrote was written exactly three years ago today on the night before my 50th birthday and was titled “What 50 years have taught me”.  That blog post read as follows:

Tomorrow I’m turning 50 years old and knowing that has caused me to be introspective about a few of the things those 50 years have taught me: *They’ve taught me that happiness comes when we put God first, family second, and everything else third. *They’ve taught me that excelling in the things of righteousness is […]

For more than ten years of my life I’ve been writing a daily blog, yet these last eleven days I haven’t been able to bring myself to write about what’s been going on because writing about it makes it real and I don’t want it to be real… When my father-in-law first called to let […]

Who we will marry, how many kids we will have, where we will live, what house we will live in, what schools to go to, what career to pursue, what restaurant to eat at, what brand of laundry detergent to use, what car to drive, do we want to buy skim milk or 2%….the list […]

“When you encounter someone you were destined to meet the conversation will take flight as if it were on the wings of angels, complete strangers confiding in each other as if you were lifelong friends.” – Kevin Hall Have you ever had the experience of meeting someone for the first time, but having that feeling […]

Talk about a brilliant strategy for growing a business!!! This story perfectly illustrates why giving great customer service is a BRILLIANT STRATEGY for growing your business: The Greatest Customer Service Story Ever Told, Starring Morton’s Steakhouse (as shared by Peter Shankman) The following story is entirely true. More importantly, I swear on my entire professional […]

As I left the Chick-fil-a drive through window today after grabbing lunch to take to my husband, who was working furiously on our office remodel, I couldn’t help but wonder, “Why can’t every company be as good at customer service as Chick-fil-a is?? From the moment you pull up to their building they are waiting […]

I can hardly believe it was a full year ago last week that my husband was hospitalized with COVID.  I remember so clearly getting that phone call from him telling me I needed to get him to the Emergency Room immediately which caused me to burst into tears instantly as I knew it must be […]

8 years ago today my husband did something that led me to share some valuable advice for husbands which I shared through a blog post I’d written eight years ago titled “NEVER let your wife’s car run out of gas!”: I was leaving the house early the other morning in the middle of that terrible […]

Throughout my life I’ve been blessed to know many truly good people.  From my family, to my friends, to my business associates, I’m surrounded by incredibly good people in my life. And whenever I meet a person who is truly good I get super excited to have them meet all the other truly good people […]

We will never accomplish anything spectacular until we attempt to DO something spectacular. Sometimes there are projects or goals so big they seem like they’d be totally impossible to accomplish. Especially as you start to think about every little thing that would need to happen to bring it to pass…all the stars that would need […]

“The Lord works from the inside out. The world works from the outside in. The world would take people out of the slums. Christ would take the slums out of people, and then they would take themselves out of the slums.The world would mold men by changing their environment. Christ changes men, who then change […]

Today I received the sweetest email from a dear friend of mine with a message that made me tear up.  It read “thanks for being on my train” with the following message attached: “Life is like a journey on a train… with its stations… with changes of routes… and with accidents!  At birth we boarded […]

Today I gave a keynote speech at the 25th anniversary of the “What’s Up Down South” Economic Development Conference, Southern Utah’s largest business gathering each year.  Normally the conference is held in beautiful St. George but because of COVID this year the conference was held online.  You know it’s said that public speaking is the […]

Over the weekend I saw a post my daughter had written on social media about an experience our family had over the Thanksgiving holiday. It was a little thing that happened, but as I read her post I realized that the impact of that little thing is so much larger and ought to get shared, […]

All of us in the world have been dealing with some really heavy things that have let floodgates burst open allowing fear, sadness, insecurity, anger, and a whole host of other negative emotions to run through each of our lives like never before…which has only served to discourage, dismay, and detract from our focusing our […]

Taking the last few weeks off from everything – no checking emails, no taking phone calls, no watching any news stations, no wearing pants with zippers – has been absolutely fabulous. I literally unplugged and decided I wasn’t going to let myself think about anything so I could be in the moment with my family […]

I can honestly say that 2020 has felt like the longest year EVER!  It’s crazy how normal 2020 started and how quickly everything changed by March.  And as quickly as everything changed in the world it seemed to slow to a near halt. Time went by so slowly this year…it honestly feels like we’ve lived […]

Ten years ago this week I was in Israel with my husband and two kids. We were there to visit the places where Jesus Christ had lived. It was an amazing experience to visit the place where He was born, grew up, and died, and it was incredibly special to be doing it the week […]

Forty years ago tomorrow, December 21, 1980, my favorite Christmas movie of all time, “Mr. Kruegar’s Christmas” starring Jimmy Stewart as Mr. Kruegar aired for the first time. I was only nine years old when it aired, but even as a nine year old I appreciated the touching story of Mr. Willy Krueger, a widowed […]

Today I had a full plate….a ridiculously full plate. And not the yummy kind of full plate of holiday fudge and Christmas cookies (I wish!), I’m talking about the far less pleasant kind of full plate filled with all kinds of must-do’s that were time-sensitive (the worst kind of to-dos). So I dug in and […]

Note to self:  December is NOT the month to have not felt well.  I knew when I was under the weather at the beginning of the month that I was falling way behind on my preparations for Christmas by staying in bed, but believing I am actually Wonder Woman I told myself not to worry […]

Returning from Thanksgiving I was exhausted. I told myself it was just exhaustion from having had several weeks of sleepless nights prior to the trip, combined with the the drama of dealing with a myriad of problems while on the trip (such as the kids and grandkids flight getting cancelled, the redeye rebookings to a […]

Remember the days when you got a sniffle and you didn’t immediately jump to thinking you might have a deadly virus…I really miss those days.   It’s impossible not to let your mind run wild these days as soon as you feel a little off. Some days I wonder if the fears associated with the pandemic […]

Losing a loved one hurts a lot. It’s a pain that never really goes away, it just becomes a little more bearable as time goes on. And while I am grateful that my religious beliefs are that we will see our loved ones again someday in the eternities, there is still the hurts of missing […]

With the craziness of traveling to Washington DC over the Thanksgiving holiday and returning home and immediately jumping on an all day zoom session of meetings and then speaking on a panel at a University, I hadn’t even noticed that the month of December had begun… Then I saw that I’d gotten a text from […]

Normally for Thanksgiving I host my family and extended family at my home for dinner, but because my Mom and Dad have to stay isolated this year there wasn’t a dinner planned. So my husband and I decided we’d take our kids to Virginia to spend Thanksgiving with two of my brothers and their families.   […]

Before you head out for Thanksgiving weekend to gather with your families and extended family members you may want to step into a room alone, take a deep breathe in…hold it…and slowly let it out. Then remind yourself that while the next few days will likely be full of chaos, screaming children, siblings fighting, food […]

Today is Day #4 of the seven day #GiveThanks challenge. You can read all about the challenge in yesterday’s blog post I shared, but the gist of it is that each day for seven days you post pictures and a blurb about something you are thankful for on social media. I’ve been posting them on […]

Last Friday in a worldwide broadcast, President Russell M. Nelson, both a physician and a global faith leader, prescribed the following seven day challenge that will allow you to experience the healing power of gratitude: “As a doctor, I know the value of good therapy. So, dear friends, may I prescribe two activities to help […]