Tag Archives: happy

An Ending and a New Beginning

For the last four years I have had the privilege of teaching an amazing group of young women every Sunday at church and then attending weekly fun activity nights with them on Wednesday evenings.  Four years ago I was assigned to teach the 14 and 15 year old girls in a class and then after […]

“A blink is like a teeny, tiny clap for your face. So even if no one else is cheering you on today, your eyelids are.”

Somedays you have to be your own cheerleader.  Some days you have to look in the mirror just like the little girl in this AWESOME video clip and say out loud, “I like myself, I like my hair, I can do anything!”  Watch this short little video clip and see exactly what I am talking about […]

Some days you just need a hug…or a pint of Ben and Jerry’s!

Today was one of those days.  It wasn’t that it was a really bad day and it wasn’t that anything horrible happened…it was just one of those stressful days where you are going like crazy all day yet feeling like you are making no progress at all…when you are being pulled by this person and […]

The Grass is as Green as You Make it!

We are all familiar with “the grass is always greener” syndrome.  That syndrome that causes people to look around and think that something else would be better than what they currently have.  Most commonly you hear of people catching that syndrome in their dating or marriage relationships, although it can extend to other areas of […]

Advice to Pass On To Every Young Woman You Know

I came across an article written by a woman named Patricia Davis in which she had put together a list of advice of all the things she wanted to pass on to younger women.  I think her advice is amazing and we should share her advice with every young woman we know, whether its a daughter, a sister, […]

Endings and Beginnings, Happy and Sad, But Never Alone

I hate that we sometimes feel alone in this life – the fact is that we are never alone – there are always others out there going through the same thing that we are, it’s just that we need more of us who are willing to be honest about it so we give permission to […]

Twas the Day After Christmas

I hope all of you had a marvelous Christmas Holiday!  For me it was a marvelous day because we were able to be together as a family, with my son joining us on Skype.  It was amazing to see his sweet smiling face on the video.  It was also fun to watch he and his […]

Last Minute Gift Ideas

So for those of you out there who are like me, and who are still struggling to come up with a few more gifts before Christmas next week, I decided to put together a list of some last minute gift ideas that could help you if you are stuck trying to find a few more […]

Tips for Coping With Holiday Stress

Today I was feeling the stress of the holiday creep in and I decided that I needed an action list of things I could do to help take the stress off during this holiday season.  Here is the list of ideas I came  up with to help all of us cope with holiday stress: Make […]

True Christmas Joy

Only 10 days til Christmas!  I can’t even believe it!  How did that happen so quickly??!  Good heavens I am not even kind of ready yet!  Thank heavens for Amazon Prime two day shipping is all I can say! Maybe I am the only one that feels this way, but picking out Christmas presents is […]

A Sneak Peek Into the Upcoming Sundance Film Festival!

Sundance Film Festival is coming up from January 16th – 26th, 2014 and I am super excited about it, especially after getting a sneak peak tonight into the list of films that will be shown at the upcoming festival. For those who may not be as familiar with the film festival, it was originally started […]

Always Remember That Life Goes On

I came across a poem that has a great message and wanted to share it with all of you: What a great poem to read, especially at Christmas time?  It reminds us that life is short so why waste a moment of it being unhappy?  No matter what goes wrong, life is going to go […]

Shopping, Shopping…oh, and More Shopping

“How much shopping can one person do?!?”, my husband called out as my fingers clicked madly away on the keyboard jumping from one cyber-deal to another as quickly as I could. “It’s almost midnight!  Don’t distract me!  I am working against the clock here!  Just wait til you hear how much money I saved us”, […]

Welcome Home, There is Only 23 Days Til Christmas!

It was a wonderful Thanksgiving Holiday weekend.  We went to visit my husband’s family in Idaho on their family farm.  There is very little as fitting as celebrating Thanksgiving on the farm.  We had amazing food (all homemade of course!), my daughter learned to drive the front loader tractor, and they went shooting clay pigeons.  […]

“Thanksgiving, after all, is a word of action.” -W.J. Cameron

And there is no better week to take the action of giving thanks and showing gratitude than Thanksgiving week.  This is the perfect week to extend a helping hand to someone in need.  And we can always find someone out there who is in greater need than we are.  It’s so easy to get sucked […]

Perspective and Gratitude

Several years ago my family and I were down visiting the small town of Bicknell, Utah with our dear friends.  We went to a church meeting down in Bicknell back then and a very humble young man got up and gave a talk on perspective and gratitude that was awesome.  In his talk he shared […]

The Healing Power of Human Connection

Today started out rough.  I had to deal with a situation related to someone from the past that I once considered to be a friend, but who turned out to be an incredibly dishonest person who did a lot of horrible things that caused a lot of damage to a lot of people. Not exactly […]

Never be afraid to fall apart

“Never be afraid to fall apart because it is an opportunity to rebuild yourself the way you wish you had been all along.” – Rae Smith Ya know every now and then you just have to have that momentary break down…that day when you break down and cry…when you fall apart just a little bit…it […]

Get Candy, Get Candy, Get Candy!

Happy Halloween Everyone!  I love seeing all the cute little kids in their fun Halloween costumes on Halloween going door to door in search of candy.  And according to a news report I saw on TV this morning those cute little kids should be hiding their candy stashes when they get home tonight – they […]

Here’s To Strong Women

“Here’s to strong women.  May we know them, may we be them, may we raise them.” Tonight the University of Utah held a Women Alumni event at our REES Capital offices and they asked me to hold a Q&A forum with the women where they could ask me questions about my past experiences and life […]

“Ahhhh, now I get it”

Do you ever have those moments when life’s deepest lessons suddenly click and you say to yourself “Ahhhh, now I get it!”    The older I get the more I seem to have those “Ahhhh…” moments where things I have struggled for years to understand suddenly become completely clear and I think to myself “Dang I […]

Conquering Blah Days

“It’s just a bad day, not a bad life.” Some days are just blah days.  Nothing great, but nothing bad either…just blah.  That was how today was.  It seems like when the weather gets cold the blah days come with it…unfortunately.  So today I decided to gather ideas on how to best handle a blah […]

And Everyone Wins

Hug O’ War I will not play at tug o’ war. I’d rather play at hug o’ war, Where everyone hugs Instead of tugs, Where everyone giggles And rolls on the rug, Where everyone kisses, And everyone grins, And everyone cuddles, And everyone wins. – Shel Silverstein When someone tries to pick a fight with […]

Face Your Fear; the Result Might Be Amazing (Forbes Article)

“Courage is not the absence of fear, but the mastery of it.” -Victor Hugo Do you remember back to when you were a kid? When you blew out the birthday candles to make a wish with the belief that it would actually come true? Or when you pinned a towel to your shoulders and played […]

Hyper-focus Mode

Do you ever have those days where you sit down to work on the computer and you literally find yourself so entrenched in what you are doing that you cannot move, you cannot look away, you can’t even get up to run to the restroom because you refuse to break your focus from what you […]

The difference between the fight you think you’re having and the fight you’re actually having

Several weeks ago I was sitting with a group of male friends who are all married and we were discussing their frustration with not being able to understand women very well.  One of the men had been in a disagreement with his wife and he was explaining to me why his wife’s side of the […]

Be a Satisficer, not a Maximizer!

We make hundreds if not thousands of little tiny decisions every single day: whether to hit the snooze button, what to eat for breakfast, what to wear, what emails or calls to answer…and the list goes on and on, and usually we can make most of these decisions without having to put much thought into […]

The Open Your Heart Experiment

A few years ago I was invited to hear a talk being given by author Virginia Hinckley Pearce. In her talk she shared with us an experiment that she did that led her to write her book called “A Heart Like His: Making Space for God`s Love in Your Life”. It was awesome. And as […]

Happy or Sad, Good or Bad, Love It or Hate It, It’s All in How You View It (Forbes Article)

As a business leader, one of the many lessons I learned was that employees often viewed the world around them in ways that were completely different from what was actually going on. I observed time and time again employees who interpreted something one way when the reality was actually totally different. I learned that when […]

The First Day of the Rest of Your Life

Yesterday was my 42nd birthday, which means that today is the first day of the rest of my life!  And if you think about it, for every one of your reading this blog, today is the first day of the rest of your life as well – and you didn’t even have to have a […]