Women Who Change the World

Discovery and Vulnerability

Cindy Morris — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 16:05:35 GMT

I haven’t written in over a month. I had a block. Writing about my SWOT analysis so publicly felt so hard that afterwards I froze. Which is sort of funny because I am self-aware enough to know that every one of my weaknesses are obvious to those who know me. And yet, acknowledging them, writing about them, laying bare my biggest fears and calling them threats-that left me with a sense of vulnerability that I did not know how to respond to.

As I write this, I just realized that “left” and “felt” use the same letters, and yet are such different world choices. I am no linguist, and I am sure this is a coincidence, but acknowledging that I was left vulnerable and felt vulnerable seem so perfectly braided together. Was I actually left vulnerable? Probably not. I felt vulnerable. If I was left vulnerable, I cannot take ownership over it. If I feel it, then I can. I think I’d rather know that vulnerability is a choice and that is a choice worth making.

As we continue down our path of this discovery phase, in which we have addressed our stakeholders and our SWOT analysis, it is time for us all to think about vulnerability. Isn’t it fun that we call this a discovery phase? After all, when else in our mid-life have we granted ourselves permission to discover ourselves. We live in a world in which discovery is supposed to be finished by now. We have broad permission to explore ourselves for two or maaaaybe three decades. But to revisit this in our fifth or sixth decade? This is a luxury. Or is it a luxury? Perhaps it is as necessary as air and water. And when we deny ourselves the permission to continue to discover, are we dehydrating ourselves, making ourselves weaker and without breath?

The discovery phase is integral to our strategic planning. It is not a luxury. It is a requirement. And so, because we are thinking strategically about ourselves, the discovery phase is vital. And, WOILA! We have permission to discover ourselves!.

When I set out on my own strategic plan, I spoke to almost fifty different women (and a few men), who I respected and looked up to. I knew none of them were doing it all. That is impossible, but they were all doing something that was inspiring to me. They were respected professionals, parents, game-changers, partners, explorers, mentors. They were kind, valued care, sought peace. They were storytellers, learners, teachers. They were willing to talk to me.

During this discovery phase, I was facing the end of a relationship with someone I loved very much who is an addict, and I attended a few Al-Anon meetings. I have thought back so many times to this one woman I met there. I do not know her name or where she lives or really just about anything about her. I do know she was married to an addict. I know they divorced and I know they are remarried to one another. I know that she has spent over twenty years in Al-Anon. And I know that its support has let her hold on, not just to him, but also to herself. And I am happy for her because she seemed to be happy with the choices she has made. But it was in learning her story that I knew I was not interested in living a life that I needed a support group to live in with grace. Her story gave me the strength to leave the person I loved.

And when I look back on all the people I interviewed during my discovery phase, I think first of her, a woman I did not interview, but gifted me with learning. What I learned from her has so clearly shaped who I want to be.

In his book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman argues that productivity is not as valuable as choosing what we can neglect. If we cannot do everything, then everything we choose to spend our time on is a deliberate choice. We cannot change the fact that we have limited time so we should not allow ourselves to fill our time with anything that does not matter to us.

That woman in Al-Anon taught me that I was unwilling to spend my limited time giving up any piece of myself in trade for a relationship with someone I loved who could not fully reciprocate my love due to his illness. I decided then that any relationship I was in had to elevate me, had to help me be who I wanted to be. I would not trade down. That is not to say that the woman whose name I don’t know did trade down. She simply valued that relationship enough to see it as a worthy trade. I did not.

But beyond her, I often think back to those interviews and to one woman, Diana, who had it seemingly all together. She, like me, had prioritized her parenting stage when she was deep in that part of her life and was reveling in her professional stage now that her life had shifted. I had heard for so many years that we could not do it all at once, but I had internalized the constant messaging that once women pause or slow their careers it is so hard to rejuvenate it later. And so I was living in a state of anxiety about how the choices I had made two decades earlier were going to affect me in the long run. Talking to Diana helped me realize that both were possible to invest in and to feel fulfilled by.

Interestingly, our conversation (and subsequent ones with her) have reminded me that what I prioritize in my life largely is influenced by the identities I carry. Diana taught me that identities shift and transition in our lives. And that is a good thing! They key is to understand who we are and who we want to be as separate from what we do and what we we want to do.

So, as we continue down our Discovery Phase, it is important to think about our identities. Often I’ll say I wear multiple hats, and I do, but my hats are what I do, not who I am. I love thinking of our identities as faces rather than hats we wear. A hat is something you take on and off. It is something that goes out of fashion. It is something that is weather and season related. I miss my favorite knit hat in the summer and my bright orange baseball hat all winter. But a face…that is something that always exists. We don’t get a new one. We can add make-up with bold eyeliner or neutral blush. We can wear hot red lipstick or simply chapstick. We can turn green or blue or red depending on how we feel. We can accent our unique characteristics (like my beloved freckles) or hide them (like I do with the singular ugly hair that grows just under the right side of my lip no matter how many times I have plucked it). We can make our face look like anything we want, but underneath our face is our face. It is who we are.

So, when we think about our identities, we ask ourselves, what faces do we wear and when do we wear them? During my interviews, I received some advice from a person who was in recruitment. They told me to stop asking myself what I wanted for my future, but rather to force rank my desires. Which are the most important? When we apply that to our identities as part of our discovery phase, we realize the very clear connection between desire and identity.

Are you 30% wife/partner, 10% career-driven, 35% mother, 10% community member, 15% family member? I once was. But as I did this activity during my discovery phase for this next season of my life, I realized I did not connect with those prioritizations for now. During this season of my life, for which I was creating my strategic plan, I was willing to mother less in exchange for learning more. And if you had asked me that ten years before, I would have said I wanted to mother more. But this singular activity of writing all of the identities that I had and then force-ranking them let me see how I was changing and how that was shifting my priorities.

Acknowledging that was hard. Doing this exercise took me hours. I was moving my numbers around and around and around. And then I realized I was answering out of guilt. I wanted mother and family member to matter more than anything else because that felt like I would be wearing the honorable identities that others would approve of the most, but honestly, it wasn’t how I wanted to live. I felt guilty for not having a high level percentage listed for community member, which personally connected to my faith. What would my ancestors say if it was not high enough? So around and around I went until I was willing to be vulnerable enough to be honest. What was my true breakdown?

Woman in midlife
Explorer
Mother
Extended Family
Business Owner
Partner
Friendships
Community member

I wanted to be in mid-life the most. I wanted to value the uncertainty, opportunity and fragility of change the most. And while I highly valued motherhood and family, I also valued learning and exploration, which I did not want to limit in order to be a mother or connected to my family. I didn’t want my relationship to be anywhere near the top. I wanted me to be at the top of my priorities. I wanted to be unapologetically selfish in this mid-point of my life that granted me permission to change, adapt, and become.

I was recently having lunch with an 87-year old friend and mentor. She told me she broke off her relationship of seven years because her partner wanted to retire and relax and she wanted to keep going, going, going. It wasn’t that she did not value him or the relationship. She just realized that she didn’t want to become obsolete.

I asked her if she was scared of falling, becoming ill, getting hurt and laying on the floor of her house dying alone because she chose to end her relationship. I may have let my own anxieties lead with that question. She told me she wears an apple watch to make sure that if she falls, emergency services will come to help her. And we both knew that what she meant was that not being useful, engaged and enthralled with her life was more important to her than dying on the floor alone was scary to her.

It doesn’t surprise me that there are women in the world who value their relationship the most, or their family the most, or their independence the most. What surprised me was learning that this might change for me over time and it was ok that it had.

And in making those choices, we make ourselves vulnerable, but we also make ourselves powerful.

A Personal SWOT Analysis

Cindy Morris — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 14:12:35 GMT

After completing my needs assessment regarding my resources, I was ready to think more clearly about my own strengths and weaknesses. The needs assessment framed this out for me, forcing me to really confront where I had chosen to invest in myself and others and where I had not.

In a strategic plan, we always start with a SWOT analysis. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. This lets us be far more analytical and honest with ourselves. As I worked on this, I didn’t want to just think about my SWOT broadly; I wanted to focus specifically on my own well-being, since that was why I was pausing in the first place, so I specifically looked at my strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats in how they related to my well-being.

But I did not want to just think about the here and now. So, when I looked at each of these, I also considered what I knew was coming up in my life and what could be coming up in my life. This let me address my SWOT with the practicality of my existence as it was, while also opening myself up to possibilities (both the exciting ones and the scary ones).

My strengths included:

A career that was interesting to me and had room for growth as my aspirations grew.
Circles of friendships that I valued and that valued me, but that I could invest in further.
The start of a healthy financial footing that needed to be focused on, but was a strong beginning.
A family that wanted me to be happy.
A home that I owned and an ability to manage my finances, keep to a budget and hold myself accountable.
A community that gave me opportunities to learn and experience new things but also afforded me access to nature.
Forgiveness to myself for having children that did not value the traditions I had hoped they would care about (that was a hard one!), but also seeing the value of the traditions that we did share.
I also had perseverance, the ability to build community, an authenticity that helped me feel connected to people, intellectual acuity, empathy, and passion.
A desire to invest in myself and a willingness to follow through on that desire.
A willingness to try and fail.
And mentors that were willing to guide me and support my growth.

My weaknesses list felt long at first and included:

I was intimidated by exercise.
I am a single mother attempting to save for my own retirement.
I had recently been devastated by a relationship that had broken my very fragile ability to trust.
I had never chosen what city I wanted to live in and the chance to do that was terrifying to me.
I cared deeply about disappointing my parents and extended family.
I compared myself to others.
I was utterly exhausted from caregiving.
I hated my body.
I am terrified of heights and falling to the point that I can’t do activities I want to.
I am stubborn, self righteous, and my anxiety gives me control issues.

I can keep going, but you get the point.

As I wrote down (and yes, I actually wrote them down) my strengths and weaknesses, I began to see the opportunities and threats before me.

I began to understand that by owning my own business, I was in control of my time, finances and work-life balance.
I understood that for me my financial and emotional well-being were deeply connected. I was allowing my finances to cause me undue stress. When I began to look into this, I learned that most women are deeply concerned about their financial well-being, but feel uneducated around it. So rather than remedying what needs to be fixed, we get caught up in a cycle of stress and fear, and because we don’t talk about money, we remain caught in that cycle.
I was living with real physical pain in my life that I wanted to alleviate. I realized I could solve that physical pain with a mix of a breast reduction, some physical therapy, a surgery to relieve my incontinence and a regular workout plan that I knew I could follow.
My children were growing up and moving out, giving me the chance to go anywhere and do anything. I was soon to become a single empty-nester with a job I could do from just about anywhere.
I am a hopeful person. My ex-husband used to tell me I could only remember the good stuff. He meant it as a problem. I took it as a compliment.
My entrepreneurial focus let me see the nuances and opened doors for me.
My authentic connections with people created pathways for me to try new things, go to new places, and explore new possibilities.
I was soon to be a single empty-nester…and that meant I could go anywhere and do anything in just a few years.

Those opportunities were exciting to me,but the threats were there.

My retirement is dependent on what I could save. I would never have a pension and did not feel I could trust social security.
I was living with a level of anxiety that affected my relationships and my work.
I owned my own house but it was expensive to maintain and I wasn’t sure I wanted to maintain it.
My parents were aging and would probably require additional support in the coming years.
Climate change is real and I live on an island.
The limitlessness that my soon-to-be freedom offered me could give me the room to make wrong decisions and choices.
I was scared.

Writing this down was hard. Acknowledging it in black and white forced me to begin to see things I had been hiding from. It also really started to frame out what I wanted for myself.

When my grandmother died at the age of 93, she had lived through the Great Depression, the normalization of air-travel, multiple wars, the civil rights movement, second wave feminism, the turmoil of the Nixon years and the election of America’s first Black president. She had grown up in the time of the Holocaust and raised her children in the time of the Cold War. She was born on a farm in Connecticut, but built a thriving business with her family in Miami. She lived through a divorce in a time when that was filled with shame and had raised her children with a man who led with love.

This was a woman who knew her strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.

Our lives would be boring without all of them. Understanding this helped me not to feel shame about my weaknesses or live in fear of my threats. It prevented me from being prideful of my strengths and overly-ambitious regarding the opportunities before me. Instead, I came to value all of it.

I was building a strategic plan because one day when my granddaughter looked back on my life, I wanted her to see that I had built a life that celebrated and appreciated all of these aspects. But even more so, I didn’t want to have to wait for some future generation to look back on my life. I wanted to feel that sense of acceptance and joy while I was living it.

Your personal SWOT analysis is an odd mix of being highly analytical and highly emotional. It takes a level of honesty that you may not have felt within yourself before. Years ago, as I was traversing a difficult period, I remember praying to never have to be as strong as I needed to be right then again. Since then, I have needed to be that strong and stronger. And my SWOT reminded me of that. It reminded me that resiliency is built from valuing all our lived experiences and seeing what comes from them.

A Needs Assessment Does Not Make Me Needy

Cindy Morris — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 14:04:41 GMT

Years ago my cousin wrote a book about widowhood. It was published right around the time of my divorce. In her book, she tells this story about being in a park and seeing a couple in their seventies or eighties holding hands. She gets upset that she will never have that with her husband who had just passed, but she approaches them to ask how long they have been married. Their answer? They weren’t married. They were just dating.

I held on to that story for the next 12 years. It was sacred to me. My marriage had fallen apart so I would never celebrate a 50th anniversary, but that did not mean I would be alone. Maybe one day I’d be in my eighties and on a date in a park.

A few months ago, I was having breakfast with my cousin who wrote this book and told her how much this particular story meant to me…how it had become a beacon in my darkest days as I traversed my divorce and life after it. And that is when she told me she made it all up. She explained that writers get to do that. Sometimes you need a perfect story and a writer is allowed to make those stories up. At first I was devastated. Did this mean I would also be alone at 80? But my cousin continued. The point was not that the story was real or not. The point was that it held meaning and hope for me.

She is right. I don’t need the story to be real. I need the story to be inspiring. In that moment, when I was transitioning to a new place in my life, what I needed was hope.

Don’t worry, this story is true. I’m not as creative as my cousin, so I don’t know how to make up stories that other people will find inspiring or interesting. So rest assured. I was, in fact, inspired by a fake old couple in a fake park holding fake hands on a fake date.

And that is how I learned that when you are looking for the resources you need, they don’t always have to be real. Sometimes they just need to fill a hole for you.

When we build a strategic plan, it is vital that you think about how you are resourced. What do you have now that can build your success and what are you missing that would help you become successful?

Without this information, you cannot effectively create achievable goals. When I read that story, I thought what I needed was to know that I would not be alone forever. In fact, I did not need to know that. What I needed was simply to have hope, to believe that my life would continue to grow, change and evolve. Having a partner was not the goal. Having a full life was. That is why it didn’t matter if the story was true or not. The hope it resourced me with was real.

About ten years ago, psychologists, Carol Ryff and Corey Lee Keyes published a piece that detailed the definition of well-being as being generally satisfied with one’s life. I like that definition because it isn’t asking us to be ecstatic about our lives or even impressive. Rather it asks us to simply feel generally satisfied. By taking a pause and building our plan, rather than seeking something impossible or perfect, we seek a balance that leans towards satisfaction, and that feels right.

However, that does not translate our well-being into mediocrity. It translates into having a realistic expectation of feeling good. In other words, this is not the Instagram version of wellbeing in which we take 37 selfies, then filter one, and photoshop out our double chin before we share it. It is the real well-being that we actually feel when we are alone and not comparing ourselves to anyone else.

When I first decided to pause, I spent six months interviewing women who I thought were doing something right. I didn’t interview any woman I thought was doing everything right. That is impossible. But I wanted to know how someone had a job they were passionate about, a family that they felt connected with, a partner they felt engaged with, a community they were involved in, a financial plan they could count on, as sex life they were excited by, a body that was healthy…the list goes on. Some of the women had experienced all of these things at different times. Some were experiencing a few of them at once. None of them were experiencing them all at once.

As I interviewed them, a few things became highlighted to me. I didn’t want an Instagram worthy life. I simply wanted a worthy life. I wanted to consciously work towards a life of well-being. In speaking with these women, I learned that before they had achieved success in the area that I was inspired by, they had resourced it. The common thread between all of them was that they had consciously or sub-consciously sought out the resources they needed for success.

And that made perfect sense to me because I would never build a strategic plan for an organization without making sure they had the resources they needed. Obviously I needed to resource my own strategic plan as well.

Psychologists talk about nine types of well-being to achieve that psycho-social sense of satisfaction with our lives that Ryff and Keyes wrote about. They include:

Emotional Well-being talks about our mental and behavioral health.
Social Well-being talks about our relationships with others and moving past a competitive mindset.
Cognitive well-being focuses specifically on our minds and mindset and ridding ourselves of negative self-talk.
Financial well-being does not mean having wealth. It does mean having a solid financial footing that allows us to feel secure.
Spiritual well-being allows us to feel connected and is not dependent on religion or belief in deity(ies), but rather lets us feel gratitude.
Cultural well-being is based on having, appreciating and building meaningful traditions that connect us to others, whether or not we share the same culture.
Physical well-being is exactly what it sounds like and includes nutrition, exercise, weight management, sexuality, tobacco, drug and alcohol use, disease, disease prevention, etc.
Occupational well-being lets us feel personal satisfaction in our jobs, career, schooling, or lifestyle.
Environmental well-being connects us to our reciprocal relationship with the environment as we work to protect it and receive clean air, water, etc.

It would be impossible to control every aspect of our well-being as we look at each of these 9 types of well-being, but when we think about resourcing ourselves to feel good about where we are and who we are in life, it is vital that we think about how we are resourced in each of these areas, not because we expect to resource all of them. But instead it will help us priotize them.

This sort of needs analysis challenges us to really evaluate which of these forms of well-being we are prioritizing now and which ones we want to prioritize. We can’t resource everything at once. In fact, attempting to resource them all at once is probably what causes us to feel burnt out to begin with. Instead, our needs analysis lets us really see where our strengths lie and where we have room to grow, which is why after conducting our needs assessment regarding resources, we will focus on evaluating the opportunities that lie in front of us.

Meeting Your Stakeholders for the First Time...Again

Cindy Morris — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 15:16:08 GMT

In the 1970s, feminist consciousness-raising (CR) gatherings were small, women-only groups that met to discuss their personal experiences with sexism and oppression. It was through the act of openly talking about, sharing and analyzing our lives, women could move from seeing our problems as individual failures or petty circumstances to understanding them as systemic, social issues. These gatherings were a foundational strategy of the women’s liberation movement precisely because we understood that our learning had to be in a communal space, opening ourselves up to speak about issues that were deemed private and often censored. In fact, one could argue that deeming the issues we faced as private and not the dirty laundry that we should air, was part of the systemic oppression of women.

How would we know that marital rape, domestic violence, hetero and non-hetero-normative desire, health issues, caregiving, and the lack of financial independence were issues if we couldn’t talk about sex, marriage or money?

Conscious community building is a vital component to gaining our strength. That is why it was a vital feminist action. It is what gives us learning, strength and power. It is what gives us a voice.

By defining our stakeholders and determining who our community is made up of, we open ourselves up to the learnings from the members of our community. We learn from our stakeholders.

In building our own strategic plans, we must first take the time to define who in our community are our stakeholders. This process is meant to help us define our community. So, I wrote a list:

My children
My parents
My ex husband
My new boyfriend
My bonus kids
My siblings
My niblings
My extended family
My friends
My colleagues
My staff
My clients
My neighbors
My adopted parents
My community members

And, you know what? Seeing that list just made me feel even more exhausted. I looked at it and didn’t feel uplifted. I felt overwhelmed with responsibility. I had confused stakeholders with care partners. I had listed all the people I felt responsible for and to.

That is when I realized that the problem I was facing was that I had forgotten what a stakeholder was. Stakeholders are the people or groups that are invested in a project. In this case, I was the project. And yet, I was defining my stakeholders as the people I was invested in. I was supposed to be defining my stakeholders as the people that were invested in me. If I was the project then my stakeholders had to be those people and groups who wanted my success.

So I rewrote the list. And this time it looked like this:

Me
My children
My parents
My ex husband
My new boy friend
My bonus kids
My siblings
My niblings
My extended family
My friends
My colleagues
My staff
My clients
My neighbors
My adopted parents
My community members

The obvious difference? Adding me to the top of that same list. The less obvious one: shifting my own mindset from seeing my community as responsibilities and instead opening myself up to the learning and care that they were willing to invest in me.

My first attempt at this was not wrong. I had just forgotten that our care-reciprocity is influenced by my health and wellbeing. The problem was not that I had confused stakeholders and care partners. The mistake was forgetting to include me in the list of people invested in my own wellbeing. I had written a list of people I felt responsible to care for, and I DIDN’T INCLUDE MYSELF. No wonder that list made me feel exhausted. Re-evaluating that same list to include me and to see all of those people as investors in my well-being made me feel cared for, worthy of investment, and open to learning from them.

Thinking about who was invested in my strategic plan challenged me to remember that this strategic plan was about me and the people who care for me and the people I care for. It reminded me what being invested means. My stakeholders are invested in this process because they benefit from the success of it and conversely can be harmed if I am not successful, but also because they care about me.

As we build our strategic plans and pause to reflect who we want to be and how to become that person, we need to remember that this is not a selfish action. Rather all our stakeholders benefit from this as much as we do.

Afterall, central to my womAnhood is my womEnhood. There is a reason we say “it takes a village.” It doesn’t just take a village to raise children. It takes a village to be human. And it definitely takes a village to advocate for the changes I wanted for me. Change was never meant to be a lonely act. Understanding who was invested in my intentional effort to improve my own wellbeing gave me permission to focus on it without hesitation.

As a woman, I have been programmed to put my needs at the bottom of the list. Thinking about who my stakeholders are made me think about this so differently. I realized that my community was invested in me because this process didn’t just improve my life. It made their lives and our relationships better too.

Gaining Your Why

Cindy Morris — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 21:14:32 GMT

So, you have decided that you need to begin to strategically address your own personal growth.

Congratulations. That is a big deal. Now the question is… where do we start?

The first step is to decide why you are taking this step at all. What do you want to get out of this process? Because - just to be clear - this process isn’t easy. It takes time and thought. But more importantly it takes vulnerability, true honesty and transparency.

For me, when I started this process, I recognized that I was about to enter a state of massive transition. I was sending my first child off to college and realized I would be empty nesting within four years. In no time at all, I would be living alone for the first time since I was twenty-two years old.

When I graduated college, I followed my future ex-husband to Boston. We got married and then I followed him to Long Island. I was living in a home he had wanted in a region of the country he had selected that we came to for a career he was chasing. I had raised my children here so we could maintain our family even as we split into two homes post-divorce. Since I left for college, I had not singularly chased my dreams. I had followed along on someone else’s path.

And don’t get me wrong. I had chosen to do that, but I realized that in four years I would be free to make my own path and that was terrifying. I had no experience doing this and I had no idea how to do it. I needed a strategy.

So, when I began this process, I was simply looking for a roadmap.

But as I spent time in the discovery phase, I began to understand why I was feeling the way I was feeling.

Transitions and change are normal and healthy and part of our continuous lifelong learning journey. And yet, we do not offer ourselves the grace to embrace these changes. In fact, we do the opposite. When one studies child development, we learn that the various stages are broken down into small spurts of three to five years. We celebrate every moment of a child’s transition. From becoming mobile to going to school to making friends to graduating. Transition is a moment of excitement. But at some point, usually around our mid-twenties, we are expected to have it figured out. Change and personal exploration are no longer celebrated. It is critiqued.

When my children were little, I registered them for every sport. Not because I thought they would be talented at them all or even enjoy them all. But because I wanted them to experience new things and decide what they liked and what they wanted to continue to explore.

I had not done something like that for myself in decades.

Why not? Because I had learned from societal expectations that as an adult, my period of personal exploration was supposed to be complete. I was supposed to be focused and centered. Those that weren’t did not have their lives together.

But what if it isn’t child development that should recognize the need to explore, learn, transition and change in three-to-five-year blocks of time. What if that is human development?

Guess what.

It is.

And by chance, I had happened into a four-year span of time that was immediately before a major life change for me.

I decided it was time to start celebrating every time I rolled over, learned to crawl and took my first steps again. I was going to activate a side of me that had been squashed for decades.

That doesn’t mean I wasn’t going to take my life seriously and stay focused. But it did mean that I was going to use these four years to refocus my energy on personal exploration and becoming prepared for a new phase of my life. I would pause to reflect on who I might become and how I wanted to become that person.

That is what I decided I wanted out of my pause. I wanted to dive into my own passions and interests. I wanted to explore parts of me that I did not yet know. And I wanted to prepare for being alone without being lonely. I wanted to be ready to celebrate the stage of my life that I was coming to while still being able to appreciate the part of my life that I was moving on from.

I recently heard Kate Hudson say in an interview that during Covid, as she thought about her life, she was perfectly content with her parenting. She was proud of who she was as a mother, but that she felt she hadn’t fully explored or shared her art, and that saddened her.

That was exactly how I felt. I had spent decades of my life putting being a parent before everything else in my life. My mother used to tell me that I had “MOM” written on my forehead from the time I was a little girl. All I had ever wanted to be was a mother. And I loved being one. But somewhere in there, I had forgotten that I could be a good mother and Cindy. The result is that my children are fascinating, interesting, kind, compassionate… the list goes one. But I, like Kate, felt that I had not explored or shared my own art.

Now, I will never stand on a stage and act or sing. My art is different. My art was being an entrepreneur, community building, and taking risks that made my heart flutter but kept my feet firmly planted on terra firma. What I wanted to get out of my strategic planning process was a plan for how to begin to focus on my art.

How did I figure all this out? I decided to be honest with myself. Knowing what you want from your strategic plan is the first requirement because otherwise you may end up building a plan to get you to the wrong place. Opening yourself up to feeling your actual feelings about where you are in your life versus where you want to be in your life takes a level of vulnerability that may feel uncomfortable. That is because we are programmed not to ask those questions.

As women, we are programmed to feel grateful for where we are and what we have. We are programmed to accept our realities and not try to alter or shift them. Just by being born a girl, we enter a world that teaches us to lead with an oppressed mindset.

Our work to ask ourselves these questions demands that we shift from an oppressed mindset to a liberation mindset… a mindset that believes we are worth changing for and believes that we can change.

If it feels like the buzzword of the last few years is resiliency. Because it is. But what I’ve learned is: if you really want to be resilient, you have to see yourself as someone who can be resilient… and that takes self-efficacy.

Self-efficacy is not fearlessness. In fact, it is the opposite. Self-efficacy helps us to be brave. Feeling scared at times is natural. But bravery is when you attempt something even when you are scared. That takes a belief that you may be successful and even if you aren’t, you are worth putting the effort into.

I am scared of heights, so you can imagine that ziplining just isn’t my thing. That being said, years ago I attempted it. While traveling alone in Panama, I decided I would do everything I feared. That included things like sleeping on an island by myself. Hiking alone in areas with snakes (don’t get me started about snakes!). And zip lining. And so, one day, I found myself strapped in and hiking up a mountain with a small group of strangers that included a little girl. We got to the top and I froze. I could not move. The guide got me down the first zipline, but there were about five or six more. And I wasn’t going to do that. Instead, while the group finished this, I walked down the mountain. At the bottom I met up with them and the little girl questioned how I could be so scared. I immediately reframed this for her. I was the bravest one there because while everyone else was doing something they knew they would enjoy, I was attempting to do something I was terrified of. And that takes bravery. I learned I couldn’t zipline that day. I also learned that I could try the things I feared whether or not I would succeed at them.

That takes self-efficacy.

I was reprogramming myself to believe that what felt impossible was worth attempting. I was moving myself from an oppressed mindset to a liberation mindset.

Selecting your personal reasons for taking a pause is brave. It is audacious. It is bold.

And it is just personal and private enough (unless you decide to write about it publicly) that you can do it even if you find yourself still existing in that oppressed mindset. Don’t worry. As you write your strategic plan and implement it, you’ll find yourself naturally gaining self-efficacy.

What is a Strategic Plan?

Cindy Morris — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 13:52:08 GMT

A strategic plan is simply a map. It does not tell us a destination. We determine that. It simply acts as a GPS system to get us there. It determines a safe route, looks for hazards and comes up with ways to navigate around them. It predicts the time and resources we will need to get where we are going. It offers us rest stops and evaluation points. And it does all of this while keeping in mind who is going on the journey, why they are going, and what they want to get out of it.

When I think back to those days that my dad seemed like he could simply get in a car and drive to some distant location without needing a map, I laugh now. Because I am the adult that is supposed to be able to do that. And now I realize how little credit I was giving him by giving him too much credit. While the little girl in me just thought he could do this seemingly impossible task without thought, intention, time, or energy, the adult in me wants to give him the credit for planning the trip, doing the research, and getting guidance. The adult in me appreciates the work he put into the planning far more than the child in me could ever appreciate that he got us to the destination.

A strategic plan is the work you put into figuring out how to get where you are going.

There is easily far more value in that work we ever realize and will ever celebrate. And yet, by pausing to do that work, we are far more likely to arrive.

When I build a strategic plan for a client, I start with the discovery and research phase. That looks like what you would expect it to. Due diligence includes asking the right questions and seeing out who and what can give us the right answer. The key to that discovery phase is to create a timeline. There is an unending amount you can learn. We can always tweak the plan as we move forward if we learn more, but spending too much time on discovery can prevent us from moving forward.

During the discovery phase, we want to determine seven key things:

Who are your stakeholders?
What resources do you have and what resources do you lack?
What competes with your ability to succeed?
What are your strengths and weaknesses?
What are your opportunities and threats?
What are the values that guide you?
What is your vision for success?

Once you know those answers, you can easily direct your own mission. While your vision teaches you where you want to go, your mission tells you how you want to get there.

From there, we design our goals that will direct us for an extended period of time and the tactics that we will work to achieve so that we can attain our goals.

It sounds so simple, but the thing is that without a really thorough discovery phase, you can’t possibly be effective in designing your mission, goals and tactics.

But that is the part we rush through. We, as women, are so busy getting things done, we rarely take the time necessary to get through that discovery phase.

That is the point of the pause. The pause is the time we need to conduct our discovery phase.

Ultimately, we will build that mission and start working towards our goals. But, as high achieving women, we need to pause and reflect on that discovery phase so that we can build strategies that are aligned with who we want to be and what we want to become. Without an effective discovery phase, we are simply writing a to do list, which is the last thing any of us need another one of.

As we turn our mindset away from our constant state of doing, and enter a state in which we are focused on becoming, pausing to discover the answers to those 7 questions is vital.

Discovering My Priorities

Cindy Morris — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 19:12:50 GMT

When I first hit pause on my life, I was forty-five years old and had two sons, each a Freshman, one in high school and one in college. I didn’t know much about what I wanted, but like many women, I was done feeling burnt out and frustrated by feeling that I didn’t know what I wanted next.

I played with the idea of going back to school. I considered changing jobs. I struggled with finding the identity that I wanted. I didn’t know where to focus my energy or what my goals should be during this period in which I was going to pause, but I was focusing on so many exterior solutions. It felt like I was in a constant state of possibilities and couldn’t figure out what to do and when to do it.

But I write strategic plans for a living, so I knew how to think strategically and decided that as with any good strategy, I needed to start in a discovery phase.

So, I wrote a list of women I knew that I respected some part of their life. Were they balanced? Did they have a great career? Were they part of a caring and respectful relationship? Were they connected, smart, engaged? Did they provide care without regret and resentment? I knew no one woman was doing it all constantly, but I wanted to speak to women who were doing something consistently.

I knew that consistency trumps doing anything constantly. If I wanted to understand what makes successful women successful, I need to talk to them. So after writing this list, I spent six months interviewing these women.

Here is what I learned.

Living a fulfilling life does not happen by chance or accident. It is something you have to work towards. As women, we spend years being taught to care for others. Prioritizing our needs feels selfish. But the women who have succeeded in some part of their life prioritized that part of their life. They created goals they worked towards. This doesn’t mean that they didn’t care for others, but they built strategies that enabled them to achieve the goals they most valued. And it didn’t mean that they were trying to do everything, but they were all doing something.

During this time, I met with a recruiter to discuss my career. He asked me to list out the priorities I had for a career and FORCE RANK them! Wow! You know how when someone asks you what you want and you can give a list, and that feels hard. Putting them in rank order from most important to least will feel impossible. Force ranking that list where only one item can be the most important was quite daunting. Doing this was the most difficult and helpful thing I did during this time. And since then, I have held myself to that process repeatedly. We can’t do it all all of the time. If you have to choose what you are going to do, where you are going to focus your energy, you need to pause for real reflection to determine the most important thing. And that means force ranking.

At the end of those six months, I had force ranked my priorities and determined that I needed to:

Feel good
Be vulnerable
Stop worrying

Since committing to those first three priorities, I have added four more.

Stop hurting
Gain strength
Be brave
Invest in myself

But those first three priorities encompassed so much for me. I knew I was in a state of high anxiety and deep unhappiness. Before I could focus on solving for the issues coming at me, I needed to focus on the ones that were coming from within me. And that is how I prioritized those three items to feel good, be vulnerable and stop worrying.

Now that I knew my priorities, it was time to build the strategic plan that could help me achieve them.

Why do we need to pause?

Cindy Morris — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 15:09:52 GMT

Why do we need to pause?

Because we can’t do it all. My first son was graduating high school when I finally realized this. As he graduated, I took stock of my own life and realized that I was not where I wanted to be. Rather instead, I was where I had ended up. I was not building the life I wanted. I was living the life I had.

I had a great job, an amazing supportive family, was paying my bills with limited debt. Anyone who looked at my life would have high-fived me. But they were not seeing what lay beneath.

Beneath all of that was a woman who often woke up in a state of panic, hadn’t had a functional relationship in a dozen years, was in and out of therapy and had a job that was not paying me enough to properly save for my future.

And the truth is that I was still better off than so many women in the world.

But the last time I could remember giving myself permission to pause and plan for my life was at the age of 22 when I was graduating college and deciding where I wanted to live. And even then, I didn’t pause. I simply followed my boyfriend to Boston.

We celebrate every moment of transition a person goes through for the first few decades of their life, but then we stop. We take pictures, applaud, call the grandparents when the baby rolls over, walks, and goes to kindergarten. We attend science fairs and tell our children they don’t have to win… they just have to apply themselves. We throw parties when they graduate and take pictures when they head off to college, trade school or their first day at their first job. And then we combine those celebrations with expectations. Our twenties and thirties are for engagements, weddings, buying a home and having children. These giant life goals have become check boxes that define success rather than building blocks to our long term happiness. And that isn’t good for us.

Because when those things don’t happen on this prescribed timeline, we feel like failures.

Because when those things do happen we see them as goals instead of experiences.

We have converted the amazing process of meeting someone, sharing ourselves, and creating an impactful relationship into simply a process to meet a goal.

And we have rinsed and repeated that over and over again and passed it onto our children, whose every experience is being translated into their achievement.

What are we doing simply for the enjoyment of doing rather than achieving?

But even worse than that is that we capped off all of this. For women all over, we have made it clear that by the time we are 30 or 35 we should have met these goals. If we haven’t, we have failed. And if we have, our focus is now shifted from continuing to become to ensuring our families are successful. There is a reason why this all feels so wrong and unnerving. Because it is wrong and should unnerve us.

We have designed our lives to ensure that for the second two thirds of our life, we are done celebrating transition, change or growth. Rather, we are expected to live in a space of having our life together. But by 30 or 35, we have only had a fully formed frontal cortex for a decade at most. What a waste of a brain if we are expected to be done “becoming” by then so that instead we can just be.

This ageist notion that we hit middle age and should have our lives together is terrifying and limiting. This moment in our lives is actually when we have the most to share and the greatest ability to keep developing.

This is the time to explore our creativity, invest in our relationships, celebrate our experiences, and continue to think about the future. Just as we give permission to young people to learn and try things so they can evolve, we must give ourselves the chance to do this.

Claiming our right to constantly grow empowers us to reach potentials that we could have only dreamed about when our younger selves were first working towards our next great thing.

When my children were little and they didn’t want to stop doing one thing to go to the next one, I used to tell them, “Come on, let’s go do the next fun thing.” And yet for me, I had stopped thinking about the next fun thing. My life had become centered around the next responsibility, the next obligation. At what point had I stopped thinking I was worth going on to my next fun things? At what point, had I assumed that being an adult meant being settled, safe, and secure instead of outgoing, experimental, and _____________? I had settled into a life that appeared successful to everyone looking in, but I had lost myself.

And at 45 years old, as my first son was leaving for college, I suddenly realized I didn’t want to “be” any more. I wanted to “become.” I wanted to try things and fail. I wanted to make plans for my future and go after some of them. I wanted to keep learning, growing, elaborating on my own existence. That meant doing something unhinged. It meant prioritizing myself enough to admit that I deserved the time to pause and consider what I actually wanted.

So why do we need to pause? Because thinking takes time, patience and resource. And because I am not advocating that you blow up your life, this will take thought.

For over twenty years, I had not paused and so I had ended up where I was instead of allowing myself the permission to become what I wanted. And what I wanted was to be someone who was constantly evolving, exploring and experiencing new things.

That might not be what you want to become, and that is ok. But until you pause to reflect on that and give yourself the space to think about that answer, you won’t know what it is that you want to become. We limit ourselves by not giving ourselves the chance to even think about what else we could become.

The Pause Theory is simple. It tells us that we, as women, deserve the chance to think and redirect ourselves to keep moving forward throughout our lives. But pausing isn’t easy. It takes practice and patience.

The Backstory

Cindy Morris — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 18:09:15 GMT

We all have a backstory, but the thing is that our individual backstory doesn’t determine our need to pause. I say this because it doesn’t matter who I talk to, we are all feeling overwhelmed and exhausted.

There was a study done to determine how trauma affected our lives. The ACE (Adverse Childhood Study) is a large-scale research project that investigates the link between childhood trauma and various health and social outcomes. Generally speaking, what the ACE studies have shown is that trauma changes who you are. There is no sucking it up and getting over it. Trauma lives on in our health and wellbeing for the rest of our lives.

So, what are these triggers? According to the Cleveland Clinic, they are the things in our lives between the ages of 1-17 that make us feel terrified, helpless, at risk of danger or in danger, or physically hurt. You may be like the other 60-80% of adults who experienced natural disasters, violence in the home or in your community, shootings, bullying, a car accident, emotional, physical or sexual abuse, witness divorce, or violence or death or a loss of a family member. On the Clinic Cleveland website in which they explain all of this, they ask “Who is at risk of having an adverse childhood experience?” The very first example they give… GIRLS! After that they list:

Racial or ethnic groups classified as a minority.
Children who experience socioeconomic challenges.
Children of parents or caregivers who experience stress.
Children who have family members or friends diagnosed with substance use disorder or a mental health condition.

OK… Pause.

Can we discuss what that means? We as women, are the top example they give as a group that experience triggers as children that affect our wellbeing for the rest of our lives.

Above poverty, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation… above all of it… just having once been a girl is the top example.

And then we grow up.

And that whole time we are growing up, we are being offered up a plethora of societal, family, and cultural expectations that define our entire lives.

Women are our globe’s greatest resource and like most natural resources, there is always a battle to own them. Power over natural resources is central to our political, social and economic story.

Let’s look at just the last 100 years from a non-historian’s historical timeline.

In the 1920’s we start to see women breaking out of their long-time constraints. In America, we have received the right to vote and the work of abolitionists and feminists have collided into a time of growing freedoms for white women and increased danger for women of color.

We have come out of World War I and Americans are terrified of getting entangled in another war. The 1920s saw a “return of normalcy” led by President Warren Harding. This emphasized economic development, industrial expansion and isolationist mentalities that limited immigration.

As America experienced the Second Industrial Revolution, women were leaving the house to work in factories and in clerical positions. Over 2 million women joined the workforce in that decade spurred on by new opportunities, the rise of the Flapper, that challenged social norms, and financial necessity. Remember, the federally funded social nets we know now did not exist in the 1920s.

In 1929, this was all turned upside down. The Great Depression meant that jobs became scarce, and as we have seen and will see repeatedly, scarcity means those in power protect their own. In the 1930’s available jobs were going to men. The Worlds Process Administration, that is heralded for creating jobs in America during the Depression was not designed for women. In its peak year, 1938, only 13.5% of WPA employees were women. The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was designed for men. A separate smaller program known as FERA camps served only 8,500 women in its four-year existence. Millions of men participated in CCC. While the number of women working increased significantly in this decade (by 24%), women were largely confined to specific roles with 90% of women working in only 10 professions. My grandmother came of age during this time. She trained to become a bookkeeper. Her two sisters became nurses.

But don’t worry… women will get back to work again. America joins World War II in 1941 and our boys are going to Europe and the Pacific. Who will build our war machine? Women! Plus, we don’t even have to pay them as much to do it! The 1940s saw a dramatic increase in women working. Rosie the Riveter called to us to join the workforce so our men could join the war. And we did. Specific numbers vary, but it is estimated that almost 20 million worked in the US by the end of the war.

And that is where the trouble started. Our men returned from war in 1945 to find an entire generation of women who had:

Only known a lifetime when they could vote.
Never known a time when they had to wear stifling corsets.
Had access to work and the community, freedoms and knowledge that goes with that.

The world’s greatest and largest natural resource were talking, making decisions, and voting!

And that is why we see a massive campaign in the late 40s and 1950s that encouraged women to find fulfillment in family and home. Never before had a campaign been so necessary. Prior to this, women assumed their roles in family and home were the norm. For the first time, we had an entire generation of women that had to be convinced that this was where they belonged.

And the convincing was real.

The new technology of television was ripe with examples of women’s success being defined by their support of their husbands and children. Moms were pretty, thin, and put together. They knew how to dress, be quick witted and make a pot roast. If they had a job, it was not their focus or was for comedic effect.

American values were on the news every night, as we led our entire nation by fear… fear of communism, fear of black and brown people, fear of nuclear war. Standing up for civil liberties and equal rights were viewed as acts of subversion. Women were being taught that asking for an equal place at the table was un-American and dangerous. And for a generation of women born in war, danger meant something real.

But by the 1960’s people around our country and globe realized that not demanding an equal seat at the table was far more dangerous than asking for one, as we were sending our men back to war, especially our poor, brown and black men. (Women went to that war too as nurses and in support roles… we just didn’t acknowledge that for another 20 years). We were learning that being manipulated by fear made us much less safe than anything else.

I was born in 1978. When my mother had me, I was her second daughter. My mother had her own checking account, made legally accessible in 1974. She was on and using birth control (accessible in 1969… the same year my parents got married), which is how she was able to wait 6 years after marriage to start her family, while she had a full-time job and was supporting our family because my father was still in school. Access to abortion was (we thought) permanently granted.

My mother was one of three sisters and a brother. My aunt recently told me that their father gave the girls the choice of becoming nurses or teachers when he sent to college. She broke the mold when she became a dental hygienist, but it was close enough to nurse that he was ok with that. My mother had wanted to be a journalist. Instead, she ran the newspaper club at the school she would teach in for 39 years.

Now those first 50 years were all history to me by the time I was born. Here is what I have seen and remember:

A woman was on a major political party’s ticket for the White House in 1984. I was six years old. Mondale and Ferraro were defeated by Reagan and Bush.
I cried in 1988 when Bush won the Presidency. I was sure that this would mean the end to access to abortion. I was 10 years old. I was right. His Supreme Court Nominee, Clarence Thomas was the start of a hard right swing to the court that would dismantle abortion rights 30 years later.
TV shows I watched showed mischievous boys and darling girls.
Powerful strong women were starting to be seen as sexy, but still a sidepiece to the exploits of men in the movies I watched.
In 1991, my cousin, who was a lesbian, danced with her partner openly at my Bat Mitzvah, while the world turned their back on gay men who were dying from HIV and AIDS.
In 1993, I became a peer sex educator. Women had conquered their fear of getting pregnant by having something to be more afraid of, AIDS. And so, sex ed was about disease prevention for the first time.
I went to college in 1996. I weighed 110 pounds. I thought I was fat.
In 1997, I was almost raped by a man I had consented to “hooking up with.” He stopped. At that point, his actions would not have been considered assault.
In 1999, I was massaged by the man I interviewed with at my first post-college interview.
In 2005, I became a mother. My husband had a demanding job, as did I, but I was responsible for the emotional and physical caregiving for our children.
In 2006, in my race home from work to pick up our child from daycare, get him fed, played with, bathed and to bed, I forgot the first step and received a call at home while I was making dinner that I forgot to pick my son up from daycare.
In 2008, we had our second child. I did not forget to pick him up from daycare, but I did leave him there vomiting on the day we moved houses. The teacher never called me. Instead she sat in a corner and held him, covered in his vomit because she knew I could not take on one more thing.
In 2012, I was divorced and I turned down “alimony” despite my husband earning 80% of our combined income because in New York State it was called Maintenance. I was adamant that I did not need to be maintained by anyone, much less the man I was divorcing.
In 2016, I took my children into the voting booth so they could be a part of voting for a woman for President. I cried as they took turns helping me to fill in the bubble.
In 2017, we marched on Washington together. That year, I was told by a man that he’d rather date me than work for me (when I was interviewing him!). He did not get the job.
In 2020, we lived through a pandemic that disproportionately killed people of color and women. While working full time, I, like countless others, navigated childcare, caregiving, my own fears and anxiety, and social isolation. (Social isolation and loneliness is as unhealthy as smoking 19 cigarettes a day.) I lost my business, paused my mortgage payments, got a new job and built a team made up of women who were all just as overwhelmed and exhausted as I was.
In 2021, I was fired from carpool because I kept forgetting to pick up the children from school because I would get too caught up at work.
In 2022, abortion rights were effectively rescinded in the United States, when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. This decision eliminated the federal constitutional right to abortion, allowing individual states to regulate or ban abortion as they see fit.
In 2023, I was offered a promotion I had advocated for. It came with about a $10,000 raise that meant I was then only earning about $30,000 less than a comparable job would have paid. I took that promotion with gratitude despite my frustration, anger and hurt.
Since 2025, we have seen immigrants under assault. Social Nets that have been in place for 60+ years targeted and dismantled. The Department of Education and Title IV that protects us against reverting to Separate but Equal again are under attack. And social security has less than a decade to continue its ability to support America’s older adults in its current model.
We are witnessing a decline in the birthrate across the country and globe. We are seeing a rise in pronatalism.

So that is the backstory. It’s incomplete, as is any history. It is told through my own privileged lens. But it is enough to see the patterns that exist.

Women gained rights, access to better jobs (if not equal pay), the ability to make choices about reproduction, but they didn’t gain resources.

While we gave women access to education and better jobs, we didn’t create systems of care for children that enabled women to be successful in those jobs.

When we talk about systemic discrimination that is what we are talking about.

Just because you have access does not mean that the systems in place encourage achievement.

Without a shift in cultural norms around male caregiving, funded caregiving supports at a federal level for childcare, elder care, the care of our partners and those who are disabled, and the end to financial discrimination against women and caregivers, we cannot be successful.

And when women are asked to do it all, it is as dangerous for them as when they are forbidden from doing anything at all.

The Pause Theory

Cindy Morris — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 16:58:46 GMT

When my brother was a surgical resident, he had an attending doctor he worked with that used to say “Pause” instead of “Stop” when he needed to get attention in the operating room. He explained that “stop” often led someone to making a move that could be dangerous, but “pause” felt calming by its very nature and allowed everyone to simply… well… pause… to see what was going on and how they may need to alter course.

It is an interesting concept. The word “stop” puts us on the defensive. It has a sense of urgency to it that can trigger a fight or flight response. Stop has a power to it that can feel overt.

Pause doesn’t do those things.

We pause to think and reflect.

We pause to navigate.

We pause to take stock.

And yet, those words are so often misconstrued.

A pause does not lead us to a stoppage. In fact, in most cases, pausing is integral to forward movement.

I remember when I was little, I was always amazed that my dad seemed to always know how to navigate anywhere. No matter what road trip we were on and where we were heading, he seemingly got in the car, started to drive, and arrived there. I was a child whose mother used to tell her that she couldn’t get a driver’s license until I could find my own way home from the neighbor’s house (and for the record, we shared a driveway). I could get lost finding my way out of a brown paper bag! And yet, my dad could navigate to anywhere. It wasn’t until decades later that I learned that my dad didn’t have an internal GPS. He just paused to figure out where he was going and how to get there. It was so intrinsic to the process that the little girl with pigtails who wanted to grow up and become a lawyer and an actress never even noticed a pause was happening.

Because pausing is natural. When we study the act of hunting prey, we see both predators and prey using it. Pausing allows predators four key benefits:

Increased element of surprise: Staying still before an attack can help predators avoid detection by motion-sensitive prey, increasing the chances of a successful pounce or chase.
Energy conservation: Predators like those employing ambush strategies or shorter-distance pursuits benefit from remaining motionless or pausing before a burst of energy, conserving valuable energy for the critical moments of attack. They may also conserve energy by waiting for prey to weaken before attacking.
Reduced risk: By waiting for the right moment or a weakened prey, predators minimize the risk of injury during a struggle.
Effective flushing: For hunters utilizing flushing tactics to move game from cover, pausing frequently can make the quarry believe it has been detected, prompting it to move and become a more accessible target.

For Prey, pausing is also vital.

Camouflage and hiding: Pausing or freezing can help prey animals blend into their surroundings and avoid detection by predators who are more adept at spotting movement.
Increased chance of escape: By stopping and observing before reacting, prey can better assess the threat and choose the most effective escape route or defense mechanism. This can be particularly helpful if the predator is far away, allowing the prey to delay escape until the predator is closer, forcing a greater adjustment to the predator’s attack and increasing the chance of escape.
Vigilance and risk assessment: Pausing allows prey to raise their heads and scan the environment for predators, balancing the need for foraging with the risk of being preyed upon.

And yet, we live in a time and culture that pushes us to go, go, go.

Can you imagine if we attempted to hunt in the same way we attempt to live. When I gave birth the first time, I could not breastfeed. My baby could not latch on. I was so defeated. I was failing at the most basic piece of motherhood. I couldn’t feed my baby. On the day of his bris, I sat on the floor of my bathroom, leaned against the bathtub and sobbed. My poor then-husband just sat next to me so confused as I explained, if I was an animal, my baby would be DEAD because his mother couldn’t feed him!

Look, I’m not going to pretend that there may have been some hormones involved in this moment, but the reality is that we, as humans, are animals. And when we have babies, we become even more animalistic. There is a reason we are called mama bears…

And yet, while I could revert back to my most animalistic instincts in that moment, we push away those instincts in allowing ourselves grace.

Can you imagine if we attempted to hunt with the same approaches that we use in our day-to-day lives?

We’d wake up and immediately head out to hunt. We probably wouldn’t alert our pack that we were heading out. We definitely wouldn’t ask for help from them, so we’d be on our own running full-tilt at some animal who would see us coming a mile a minute, hair waving behind us while we clicked selfies so we could post about this triumph.

Our prey would hear us, see us, and sense us because we would have had no element of surprise.

And they would start to run.

And we’d run faster because that is what we do. When something needs doing, we just keep going… faster… and faster… and faster.

Until we burn out.

And then we’d stand there panting, hungry, feeling like a failure, knowing that our prey had gotten away.

And then we’d have to head back home to cry on the floor of the bathroom because we couldn’t feed our babies.

There is a reason that lionesses hunt in packs. There is a reason that birds fly in v-formation and take turns at the lead. There is a reason that wolves stalk their prey. There is a reason why hawks survey the area.

And yet, women have been conditioned to do it on our own, carry the weight until we are exhausted beyond measure, attempt to do too much all the time, and be on constant guard for the unknown.

We aren’t pausing.

I am not a historian. I am not a political scientist. I am not a counselor or psychologist. I do not have a single credential that makes me educated in these subjects. But I am a woman who was living without pause. And this is simply my story. You may be able to relate. You probably will…. because the truth is this isn’t my story. It is our story.