Tag Archives: blessings

Overwhelmed and Inadequate: Balancing Work and Family Life

Back when I was single and working full time with two small kids I often found myself feeling overwhelmed and totally inadequate. All these women around me seemed so perfect, with perfect kids and perfectly ironed clothes and homemade bread on their counters. I felt like a complete failure compared to them. My home was […]

Everything You Can Imagine Is Real

“Everything you can imagine is real.” – Pablo Picasso Did you know that your subconscious brain can’t tell the difference between something real and something imagined? There are no filters in our subconscious to distinguish the difference between the two. That is why visualization is so powerful!  Let me share some examples: A study was […]

Good Riddance April Showers…Bring On The May Flowers…And All The Other May Celebrations

I don’t know about you but I am more than ready to say goodbye to those April Showers and hello to those May Flowers!  I am SO READY for warm spring weather and sunshine! Plus May is full of fun reasons for all of us to celebrate – for example:  Not only is May National […]

They may be myths but they are still a lot of fun

Myths, old wives tales, superstitions, legends…they are all kinds of fun to read about even if they turn out not to be true. We are 20 weeks in to the 40 weeks it will take to have our very first grandchild come into this world. Since the moment we found out our daughter-in-law was pregnant […]

The Value of a Clear Conscience

“If you have to sneak to do it, lie to cover it up, or delete it to avoid it being seen, then you probably shouldn’t be doing it.”  -unknown When we try to live such that we are able to have a clear conscience, life is so much easier! When I look at people who […]

Everything Can Change In A Single Second

Saturday morning I awoke to a phone call alerting me that my son Dalton and his pregnant wife Alexis had been in a car accident on the freeway. Getting that phone call was one of the most terrifying moments of my life. I rushed to the Hospital Emergency Room where I spent the rest of […]

Avoid coming down with the “I’ll Be Happy When…” Syndrome

I call it the “I’ll be happy when…” syndrome. It starts subtly but it spreads quickly. It goes something like this:  I’ll be happy when I finish this project, or, I’ll be happy when I can afford to buy _____, or, I’ll be happy when I can lose ten pounds, or, I’ll be happy when […]

Don’t wait for “someday” to make time for family

Tonight I attended the pre-funeral viewing for my Uncle Buzz who passed away last week (his funeral is tomorrow). Walking in the doors of the room where the viewing was taking place and seeing so many of my aunts and uncles and cousins and siblings and my parents all gathered together inside the room was […]

The Biggest Secret I’ve Ever Had To Keep

Keeping exciting news a secret is not something I enjoy. When I buy someone a gift it’s all I can do not to tell them the moment I buy it. It makes keeping Christmas presents a surprise incredibly difficult. But today I am proud of myself because for the last two months I have been […]

God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want

“Whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want.”  C.S.Lewis I was recently talking with a friend who had a plan they had made for themselves and they had done all in their power to make it happen. But despite their best efforts […]

Sharing a little about one of my Heroes

21 years ago today I gave birth to the most amazing little girl in the world. Ashley made her entrance in the world in the same epic fashion as she has done everything else since she was born – she came out bottom first! That made for an amazingly difficult labor and delivery for me, […]

Never Think Nor Say “I Can’t”

Someone once told me that the moment you either think or say the words “I can’t” you’ve lost, so never to do it. Hearing that advice had a big impact on my life because I believed it and I tried to never allow myself to think or say it when it came to my business […]

Find something new to get excited about!

I hope everyone had an amazing Christmas! I was able to celebrate Christmas several times last week – we celebrated mid-week with my son and his wife and my daughter in an early Christmas celebration since my son and his wife were heading to spend the actual holiday with her family this year, then my […]

What To Do and What NOT To Do

Throughout my life I have been blessed with some incredible mentors and role models. They have taught me the “what to do” things in life, and the “how to be” qualities, that if we embrace will turn us into someone others will want hope to emulate someday as well. The more in life I would […]

It is better to give

Throughout this month I will try to share some of my favorite Christmas stories and poems that inspire me.  This story below is one I heard when I was growing up and I still remember the way it struck me as I heard it. It has a great message that inspires you to want to […]

How to Make the Right Decisions

Every now and then I will go back and read past blogs I have written on subjects that I am dealing with in my life that day. Tonight I read one of my blogs from back in 2012 that was exactly what I would have written to share tonight: Life is so full of decisions […]

#LIGHTtheWORLD In 25 Ways. Over 25 Days.

Today I learned about an awesome challenge for all of us to “light the world” in 25 ways over 25 days as we lead up to Christmas. It’s a challenge meant to help us focus on incorporating more Christ-like attitudes and behaviors in honor of this Christmas season and over 800,000 people have already joined […]

Do you want to build a snowman?!

When I left to work this morning there wasn’t a drop of snow on the ground, so imagine my surprise when I go to leave work tonight at 6:30pm only to find that it had been dumping down snow leaving my car covered in snow and the roads home a snowy mess. …And of course […]

The more you recognize it, the more you will have of it

I love a great motivational speaker. Zig Ziglar has always been a personal favorite because he is always so amazingly positive, so when I came across this excerpt from the book “Attitude is Everything: 10 Rules For Staying Positive” by author Vicki Hitzges, which shares a story about Zig I had to share it with […]

It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like….

I would love to say it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas outside, but as I walked out of the Little America Hotel after giving a speech at a big Women in Business Conference today the temperature was in the mid 70s and that made it look like anything but Christmas here in Utah! […]

The Secret to Change

“The secret to change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.” – Socrates A lot of things are changing in our world right now, and whenever there are times of major change, it often results in feelings of uncertainty, fear, and sometimes even dread. But […]

Love Them All The Way To The End

I love the holiday season – I love the decorations and the holiday goodies and that extra feeling of love in the air. And I especially love Hallmark Christmas Movies!!! For those who don’t know what I am talking about, the Hallmark channel on TV puts out a bunch of original Christmas movies every year […]

We can feel JOY regardless of what is happening, or not happening, in our lives

“We can feel joy even while having a bad day, a bad week, or even a bad year!   …We can feel joy regardless of what is happening—or not happening—in our lives.” – Russell M. Nelson I love that quote because it reminds me that it is absolutely possible to feel joy whenever we choose to, […]

What would you do?

Here is an interesting story I came across: A letter was found in a baking powder can wired to the handle of an old pump that offered the only hope of drinking water in a very long, seldom-used trail across the Armagosa Desert. The letter read: “This pump was all right as of June 1932. […]

“The essence of honesty and integrity is not the words you use, it’s the message you convey.”

Honesty. It’s something that has always been of extreme importance to me in life. Perhaps being raised by a father who was in the FBI and who valued absolute honesty without exception had something to do with that, but I know that I was raised to value honesty and integrity above all else. I tried […]

Recognize Your Own Song And Sing It Well

In the book ‘Wisdom of the Heart’ Alan Cohen tells the following story: When a woman in a certain African tribe knows she is pregnant, she goes out into the wilderness with a few friends and together they pray and meditate until they hear the song of the child. They recognize that every soul has […]

From Strangers to Friends

For the last two days I was invited to be part of a special project in which I was introduced to 28 strangers who came from incredibly different backgrounds and who had incredibly different personalities. This particular group of people would likely never have crossed paths with one another in the course of normal life […]

When it doesn’t work out the way you had hoped..

If you have done all you can do, giving it your very best effort, and it still doesn’t work out the way you had hoped it would, then you have to trust that it wasn’t in your best interest for it to work out that way. Sometimes when we are excited about something going a […]

Who’s Packing Your Parachute?

“Charles Plumb was a US Navy jet pilot in Vietnam. After 75 combat missions, his plane was destroyed by a surface-to-air missile. Plumb ejected and parachuted into enemy hands. He was captured and spent 6 years in a communist Vietnamese prison. He survived the ordeal and now lectures on lessons learned from that experience! One […]

The Kindness of Strangers

Late Friday night my husband and I began our drive home from Idaho where we had attended our Aunt’s funeral, back home in Utah. We had intended to get an earlier start home but we had spent the day scanning in all of our Aunt’s photos and papers so the family members could have digital […]