“Your sweet spot—where you are most remarkable—is at the intersection of your strengths, weaknesses, differences, and passions.”
As we head into quarter four, something I’ve been intentional about doing is spending time with my vision board. When I create my vision board at the end of each year, I’m never quite sure what it is going to look like. I don’t go into it with a specific plan or try to force myself to find images that perfectly represent every goal I have. Before I start, I make a list of goals and break them down into different areas of my life: home, family, health, professional, creative, and exploratory. From there, I allow myself to flip through the pages and see what speaks to me. Sometimes it’s an image, sometimes it’s a phrase, and sometimes it’s something I don’t fully understand the significance of until much later.
From time to time, I revisit my vision board to see if I’m staying aligned with what I said I wanted for myself. I’m always a little taken aback when I look at it and realize how much has actually come to fruition. I believe there is something powerful about manifestation, but I also recognize that so much of what I’ve manifested has been coupled with consistency and accountability. I didn’t just put something on a board and wait for it to happen. In many cases, I had to create the systems, tolerate the discomfort, change my habits, and continue showing up long enough to see the thing through.
At the top of my vision board for 2026 is a cutout with three words: Develop a strategy. I wanted to go into this year allowing myself the opportunity to be more consistent and strategic in what I did, both in my business and in my life. Professionally, I wanted to give myself more room to be creative while also taking what I learned through the Goldman Sachs program and actually applying it to my business. One of the areas where I knew I needed to do that was marketing, which is interesting because marketing is not something therapists are traditionally taught how to do. There was no graduate school class on how to market yourself, create content, build a brand, develop campaigns, or figure out what you're supposed to say on social media. Yet, those are very real parts of running a business in the world we're in now.
So, I decided to focus less on whether I naturally felt comfortable with marketing and more on whether I could be consistent with it. I created consistent social media campaigns, continued publishing my quarterly newsletter, started sharing more think pieces on LinkedIn, and became more intentional about how I showed up online. Another phrase on my vision board is Expand your campaign online, and doing that meant eventually having to confront something I really did not want to do: make videos of myself.
Making videos felt so cringe to me. It made me anxious, and being in front of the camera is just not a space where I naturally feel comfortable. In the beginning, something that ultimately became a minute-long video could take me hours to create. I would overthink what I was saying, how I looked, whether it sounded right, and whether I should post it at all. Over time, though, I developed a system. I created a calendar for content, established a recording schedule, and figured out how I wanted to promote what I created. Something that once required an enormous amount of mental energy became part of a process that I knew how to repeat.
Is it perfect? No. Do I still watch something back sometimes and think, This is cringe? Absolutely. But I remind myself that when I initially started my social media page in 2018, I did it with the belief that maybe this information could help someone somewhere who wouldn’t have access to it otherwise. When I remind myself that this is what I’m grounded in, it becomes easier to tolerate the discomfort. I can create it, put it out into the world, and then honestly not look at it again because I’ve already done what I intended to do. I’m learning that growth doesn’t always mean the discomfort disappears. Sometimes growth is realizing that the discomfort can still be there and no longer be in charge.
Another phrase on my vision board is Slow down to connect, and I was very intentional about doing that this summer. Interestingly, that showed up not only in how I spent my time, but also in my home. Something else on my board is The color experiment. I wanted more color around me. I wanted to step away from all of the muted neutrals that didn’t intentionally invoke much of anything for me and create a home with colors that made me feel excitement, warmth, comfort, and pride. I wanted my surroundings to feel like something I had actively chosen rather than something I had simply accumulated.
That led to a deep reset of my home. I got rid of things that I realized I had kept simply because I had always had them. There wasn’t necessarily anything wrong with those things, but they also weren’t things I would choose for myself now. I started bringing in new pieces that were intentional and that fit my actual space rather than a particular moment or trend. Somewhere along the way, what started as changing the way my home looked became something much more meaningful. I was able to settle myself into the safety of something I had intentionally created and then allow myself to actually experience that safety. There is something very different about looking around your space and realizing that the things surrounding you are there because you chose them, not because you never stopped to question whether you still wanted them.
As I’ve been revisiting my vision board, one of the quotes that stands out to me the most is, “Your sweet spot—where you are most remarkable—is at the intersection of your strengths, weaknesses, differences, and passions.” That quote feels particularly reflective of how I’ve moved through each quarter of this year. My strength has been developing a strategy and holding myself accountable to it. My weakness has been doing things I haven’t done before and having to work against the voice that immediately tells me, This is cringe, this isn’t right, or this is too hard. The goal was never to completely silence that voice. I think I’m realizing that the goal has been to stop allowing it to make all of my decisions.
The “differences” part of that quote has shown up more in the conversations I’ve had with myself about how I define progress. I’m a person who is used to equating progress with something tangible. I like being able to point to what I accomplished, check something off, or see a finished product and know that I did it. One of my goals for this year challenged that because the goal was simply to be consistent over the entire span of the year. There was no way to accomplish that goal in January. I couldn’t check it off in March or decide I had completed it by June. The only way to achieve it was to continue showing up, which has required me to recognize that sometimes progress is not a finished product. Sometimes progress is the accumulation of all the ordinary times you did what you said you were going to do.
And then there are my passions. This year has given me so many opportunities to be creative. It has allowed me to think differently about my work, my business, and the kinds of tools that could be helpful for the people I see in my practice as well as people I encounter online who may be experiencing similar things. It has allowed me to create simply because I had an idea and wanted to see what could happen with it. In a lot of ways, it has allowed me to return to something I’ve done since I was young, which is experiment. Try something. See what happens. Decide what worked, what didn’t, and what I might want to do differently next time.
The year is not over, and I think that distinction matters. I’m not writing this as a year-end reflection or pretending that everything I wanted to accomplish has already happened. There are still things I want to do, things I will probably change my mind about, and things on that vision board that may never happen in the way I originally imagined. But when I take a moment to pause instead of immediately moving on to the next thing, I can acknowledge that I’m proud of how I’ve shown up this year. I’ve shown up on my worst days, on my best days, and on all of the incredibly ordinary days in between. Not because I had to, but because I owe it to myself to continue becoming the person I know I can be and to seek the same growth that I promote.
Maybe that is what I want to carry with me into quarter four. I don’t necessarily need to look at the remaining months of the year and figure out how much more I can squeeze into them. Instead, I can look at what I’ve already learned and decide what deserves to come with me. What worked well enough to keep? What am I ready to release because it no longer serves me? And what deserves to be reimagined now that I have more information about myself than I did when I created that vision board?
The year isn’t over, but there is already so much worth noticing. Keep going!
<3 Ashley
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