The Habit I Didn’t Realize I Lost

A year ago, my home burned down.

On January 8th, 2025, my house, along with everything I owned, was destroyed in the Palisades fire. There was no real warning. When the evacuation notice came through, we had minutes to get out. We grabbed what we could and ran.

What followed was a year of stress, chaos, and living almost entirely in fight-or-flight mode.

And honestly? I thought I’d moved past it.

But last week, I realized I hadn’t.

This past Friday, I did a ‘Wheel of Life’ exercise with my executive coach. If you’re not familiar, it’s a simple but confronting pulse check across the major areas of your life: health, business, finances, relationships, spirituality, energy, etc. You rate each category from 1-10 based on how you actually feel, not how you think you should feel.

As we went through each section, I kept landing in the same range of 5s and 6s, and even a couple of 3s.

Not disastrous, but not great either. Then we got to the final category: energy.

And that’s where it hit me.

If you’ve known me for any amount of time, you know my energy is my calling card. At my best, it’s one of my greatest strengths.

Positivity.
Good vibes.
A natural fire-starter.

But sitting there, staring at that score, I realized something uncomfortable:

My mindset, appreciation, and energy never fully recovered after the fire.

I went from being someone who genuinely felt grateful to someone who understood gratitude logically, but struggled to feel it in my body.

I actually said this out loud to my coach: “If I can’t be grateful and energized for all the blessings I have right now, I’ll never be able to.”

It’s not that I’m ungrateful.

It’s that my nervous system built a new habit after the fire–a constant, low-grade anxious survivor mode. Always scanning. Always bracing. Always waiting for the next thing to go wrong.

And that state is exhausting.

It also caps how well you lead, create, and perform as an executive.

Quick pause: if any part of this feels familiar and you want a clearer outside mirror on your business or leadership patterns, you can book a conversation with my team here.

We’ll help you identify what’s actually holding things back internally and operationally.

Here’s the reframe that mattered most for me:

When your brain consistently focuses on what it’s grateful for, it opens pathways tied to creativity, abundance, and happiness. That doesn’t just feel good. It directly improves how you show up as a leader.

It leads to better decisions, and more patience, clarity, and capacity.

So instead of pretending I was “fine,” I made a decision.

I’m relearning gratitude.

My executive coach is texting me every single day; not with affirmations or platitudes, but with a simple check-in to help rebuild that muscle. Because gratitude isn’t just a mindset, it’s a practiced state.

And in the spirit of rebuilding it, I want to say this plainly:

Thank you.

Thank you for reading these newsletters.
Thank you for replying, sharing them, and engaging with me.
Thank you for being part of this conversation.

This wasn’t a business lesson I planned to learn, but it’s one I wish I’d caught months ago.

If this serves as a mirror for you to check in on how you actually feel (not just how things look on paper), then it did its job.

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Three Things You Can Do Today to Apply This

1. Run your own Wheel of Life. Don’t optimize the answers. Rate how you actually feel, not how successful you think you should feel.
   

2. Identify one “invisible drain.” Ask yourself what experience, season, or unresolved stressor may still be shaping how you operate today.
   

3. Rebuild one internal habit on purpose. Whether it’s gratitude, rest, reflection, or boundaries, treat it like a system, not a personality trait.

Leadership isn’t just about scaling businesses. It’s about restoring the parts of yourself that quietly took a hit along the way.

And sometimes, noticing that is the real breakthrough.

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