I built a nighttime ritual I actually do now. One prize wheel, one spin, whatever it lands on. The decision gets made before my brain is too far gone to make it. That’s it.

But let’s back up a but to how I got here. I‘ve been on a longer journey of learning to actually listen to my body, and one of the things that accelerated it was doing DNA testing with . What came back was specific enough to change how I think about my whole day: when my cortisol spikes, it stays high. And that directly impacts my sleep.

The end of my day, unbeknownst to me until now, is a cortisol management situation. What I do, watch, engage with, and think about in those last few hours before sleep either supports that or works against it. So rude, right?

My mornings are dialed. I’ve built a routine I actually love, one I revisit every six months so it stays fresh, and I feel genuinely supported by how I ease into the day. At night? That’s a different story.

The evening is the next frontier.

By 4pm, my brain is done. I wake up around six, I go to sleep around ten, which means 4pm is already two thirds of the way through my actual day. My nervous system has done the math even when I haven’t. And asking my 4pm brain to choose a restorative evening activity out of the blue is asking it to do the thing it is least equipped to do at that moment. So it reaches for whatever has the lowest entry barrier.

For a long time, the default at the end of the day has been putting on TV and numbing. Currently in rotation: Love Island. It’s literally on like every day so it’s reliable as a default. And I’m watching, and I’m scrolling, and I just feel like I’m numbing.

The insight that finally cracked it came from a call with my somatic movement coach Sam (she’s incredible and trains you on how to process the stored emotions in your body in a way that feels safe and supportive).

We’ve been doing movement and visualization work and this week, we landed on the topic of rest. On my relationship with it. On where I learned that rest needed to be earned.

My mom self-abandoned to host every holiday. The days of prep, the hours in the kitchen with no help while everyone else enjoys themselves. Started as just Easter, became every single one. My dad, an entrepreneur and the bread winner, also built the house we grew up in with his own hands. Weekends were projects. The message underneath all of it was: there is always more to be done.

The belief I’m still untangling is “if I stop moving, I’ll fall behind.” And when I’m in a rest cycle, I feel guilty about it, which creates pressure, which creates freeze, which means I have to dig myself out before I can actually rest. By that point I’m just putting on Love Island and calling it a night.

I already knew this. It’s not NEW information. The sauna is where I feel it most clearly. No book, no phone, just existing. I feel amazing after. I don’t struggle to know what rest feels like. The struggle is trying to decide how to do it when my brain is already mush.

Think about when someone is grieving…you don’t ask them what they need. The part of the brain that generates preferences and makes choices is offline. The most useful thing you can do is show up with a plan and remove the burden of deciding. You bring the soup. You make the call. You take the choice off their plate entirely.

My brain at 4pm is in a similar place. Rest requires a micro-decision: pick the thing, get up, do the thing. Scrolling requires zero decisions. That is where the whole evening goes.

Here’s how I solved this in the most fun way I could think of

So I happened to have this prize wheel from a conference event I did. Obviously. Who doesn’t have a prize wheel?

When I mentioned my plan in my HOT GIRL FNDR group chat, the ideas came in immediately. My friends sent ritual after ritual. I now have a full backlog I’m still sorting through. The crowd-sourcing happened so naturally because the premise was specific enough to make it easy to contribute and I happen to be surrounded by the most brilliant baddies who make me feel super supported.

So there it was. I had everything I needed. I put rituals on the wedges. One spin, that’s the protocol. Whatever it lands on, I do it. I can spin again and stack if I want more. I can swap wedges whenever the novelty wears off. I don’t have to generate the idea from scratch when I’m already running on empty.

The wheel is working. The gap between knowing what would help and actually doing it is almost never willpower. It’s friction. And friction at the end of the day, when your brain has already closed up shop, compounds everything that didn’t get processed.

Here’s what’s currently on my wheel:

Building Your Own Wheel

🔒 The full annotated backlog, plus a framework for building your own wheel based on your Moon sign and your actual depletion window, is below for paid subscribers.

The wheel works because it removes the decision. But what goes on the wheel matters too. A list of rituals that don’t actually fit how you’re wired will still sit there unused, just in a different format.

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In Part One, we built your 00 Social Kit: a color palette screenshot, brand patterns, and stickers and badges, all living in a single folder on your phone. You snap them into Instagram in under thirty seconds and everything looks unmistakably yours.

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There’s a version of building a business that looks really good from the outside.

You’re booking clients. You’re showing up online. You have a website, an offer, probably a Notion workspace with a color-coded kanban board. Things are moving.

And yet—something still feels slightly off. Not broken (don’t be dramatic!) Just… misaligned. Like you’re playing a role you designed for yourself a year ago, and nobody told you it was okay to update the script.

I see this come up in a few different flavors:

• You’re growing, but the growth feels scattered. You’re saying yes to things that don’t quite fit, and you can feel the drift but can’t name it.

• You’re questioning whether your work still reflects who you actually are now, not who you were when you started.

• You’re newer to this and trying to build something intentional from the beginning, so you don’t end up in a version of your business that you have to burn down in two months…or two years.

The common thread across all three: you haven’t yet named your standards.

Not your values (we’ve all written those). Not your mission statement (useless, I’ve covered this). I mean the actual operating principles that dictate how you show up, how your work feels to the people in it, and what you will and won’t do regardless of the pressure or the payday.

Your Embodied Standards of Working are the difference between a business that runs you and one you actually want to be inside.

They’re what you return to when someone makes a request that feels slightly off and you can’t articulate why. They’re what keeps your brand coherent across offers, content, and client experiences. They’re the gut-check you’ve been doing instinctively but have never written down.

Once you name them, they become a compass. And decisions get a lot cleaner.

If you want a quick version before going into the full exercise, start here:

What do people consistently say they get from working with me? And am I actually delivering that on purpose, or just hoping it happens?

Sit with that for a second. What came up? Because that’s usually where your first standard lives.

The full exercise is below. Inside the paid section, I’m walking you through all five steps: how to identify what people actually get from working with you, how to name your core commitments, and how to turn those commitments into clear, written standards you can actually use.

Not as a brand exercise. As a business tool.

🔒 Continue reading for the full guided exercise

Inside, I’ll walk you through how to surface your standards, write them clearly, and make them specific enough to actually use when a decision gets hard.

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I’ve been spending more time inside Substack lately, both writing and helping clients think about how they want their content to feel, not just what they want to say.

And one thing I keep coming back to is this:

Mos…

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Feeling pulled in ten directions at once? This is the simplest business audit you will actually finish. Three questions that tell you exactly where to put your energy next. Let’s dive in.

There are seasons where life and business don’t feel wrong, exactly. They just feel cluttered. Too many tabs open, too many moving pieces, too many “good ideas” competing for your attention. Sometimes it’s not even that anything is dramatically broken. It’s just that everything has gotten a little too loud, a little too heavy, or a little too far away from what actually matters.

When I get into one of those seasons, I’ve noticed that my first instinct is usually to try to optimize my way out of it. I’ll want a better plan, a cleaner system, a more motivating routine, or some magical burst of clarity that makes all the right priorities obvious. But most of the time, that’s not actually what I need.

Usually, what I need is a way to sort signal from noise.

That’s why I come back to this exercise over and over again. It’s simple, but it cuts through the chaos fast. I use versions of this when I’m in a pivot, after a launch, when my content feels disconnected, when my offers need pruning, or honestly any time I can feel that I’m spending energy in too many directions at once.

What makes this tool work is that it doesn’t ask you to reinvent your whole life or business. It just helps you get honest. What’s no longer working? What actually wants your attention now? And what’s already supporting you that you need to stop overlooking?

Because a lot of the time, overwhelm is not a motivation problem. It’s not even always a capacity problem. It’s a sorting problem. You haven’t yet separated what’s outdated, what’s distracting, what’s still valuable, and what needs to begin. So everything starts to feel equally urgent, equally noisy, and equally unfinished.

And when everything feels equally loud, it becomes almost impossible to make clean decisions.

That’s where this audit comes in. It gives your brain and your nervous system a structure for seeing clearly again. Not in a dramatic “burn it all down” kind of way, but in a grounded, useful, “okay, this is what’s actually happening here” kind of way.

If you want a quick version of it before doing the full exercise, start here:

If I were only allowed to make three decisions right now, what in my life or business would I stop, start, and continue?

Don’t overthink it. Just write the first thing that comes up under each one. You’ll usually know more quickly than you think. That’s often the interesting part. The truth tends to arrive pretty fast once you stop asking it to compete with all the noise.

This is one of my favorite tools for moments like the beginning or end of a month, a post-launch cleanup, an offer pivot, a season of burnout prevention, or just one of those weird in-between periods where your calendar is full but your progress feels fuzzy. It’s especially helpful when you know something needs to shift, but you can’t yet tell whether the answer is to let something go, build something new, or simply recommit to what’s already working.

And if this is already bringing something into focus, the full version is below.

Inside the paid section, I’m sharing the complete Stop • Start • Continue audit, including a Canva template you can use in your workspace, how to choose the right focus area, the exact prompts I’d use for each section, and a few different ways to turn what comes up into actual action. Because reflection is useful, but reflection without a next step is how people stay in the same loop for six months and call it “processing.”

🔒 Continue reading for the full guided audit

Inside, I’ll walk you through how to narrow your focus, what to stop, start, and continue, and how to turn your reflections into real decisions and next steps.

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Most small business owners think brand consistency requires hours in design software. It doesn’t. When I was at Hearst Magazines (in my former corporate life in product design), we were acq…

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