I Want to Hear from You!

Tell me...

How can I serve you best?

Good morning!

I wanted to post today for a few reasons:

1. Because it's Tuesday, and that's what we do here.
2. To make a confession, and
3. To see how I can serve you better.

I have a few incompletely-formed ideas in the works floating around for you, and I hope you'll indulge me for a second to hear me out (and, even further, to let me know how I can help you the most).

It's been bumpy over here of late. Stress, personal events, Leonidas peeing a ton & drinking enough water to fill an ocean for no discernible reason ($500 of tests later, still no idea why), strange feedback from people (or none at all), eating like an asshole for a while there, etc. We've all been there, haven't we?

Maybe without the dog pee mystery, but pretty sure we've all had the rest of it.

I'd been feeling ineffective at everything I do, basically. Last week was the first week since the inception of Strong by Steph that there was no blog, because my thoughts are super raw, and I was feeling this pressure of letting people down if I didn't have one useful tip to stop eating Halloween candy before you've housed everything you were gonna give the tiny ghosts coming to your door or 5 hacks to make your squat better or a wonderful story of the time I just got radically honest and then my life changed.

(That last part is real, because, I mean, here we are, with me sharing all my feels at you. And not that those other things aren't useful, because they are. I've had candy sitting in a bucket largely untouched for 3 weeks, so, let it be known, you can have binging tendencies and still not eat all the candy in your path sometimes.).

I was up really early last Tuesday morning, struggling to come up with something to write to you. I knew there was some goodness in my brain, but it was like a pinball machine: everything was going on in there, and I couldn't focus on any of it.

Sometimes, we feel like a tube of toothpaste, where people are just squeeeeeezing us to get that last little bit out, and there's nothing left. Some people call this burnout, but I really think it's just overextension. Which might be the same thing, but, for some reason, it feels different: I could do all my work; I just wasn't happy with any of it. I was frustrated with myself, because it's not like my workload is unusually high or like the aforementioned personal events are unmanageable. I couldn't figure out why I felt like I
was trying my best & nothing was working; I was trying my best, but, somehow, I wasn't doing my best.

And then it hit me: a voice came gently ringing in the stillness that "our best" changes from day to day. My fitness program has changed in the interests of stress & fatigue management; why not my life?
So, I decided to just sit in the chilly fall morning stillness and allow myself to rest. 

This is not meant to be a pity party, but to let you know: there is as much value in the pauses of life as there is in the work.

AND HERE WE ARE, one week later, with renewed energy, and the passion reignited. 

Which brings me to the following question:

How can I serve you best?

When you come to this page, what are you hoping to find?

I've had a few ideas that I've been excited to create for you, and before I flesh them all out, I want to know what you'd like to see.

Some of the options include:

• A 7-14 day fitness and mindset challenge, with a PDF of a 14-day workout calendar and 3-5 weekly journal prompts
• A fall recipe breakdown for veggie-laden soups, stews, crockpot creations (I don't really label those, because they're bowls of deliciousness)
• Creating a closed Facebook group with weekly challenges: some workouts with an associated mindfulness discussion
• Monthly conditioning circuits (3-5 short workouts delivered at the beginning of every month that could stand on their own or be easily tacked on to the end of a lifting session)

Let me know which of those three sound the best to you, or, if you have some combination or something you'd really like to see covered, let me know! That goes for topics, downloads, products, anything. Lay it on me.

I'm looking forward to hearing from you!
Until next week,
xoxo,
Steph