The fireplace in my home once had a beautiful plaster façade — a cornucopia spilling fruit and vegetables. It wasn’t grand or elaborate. It was simply graceful and elegant.
During the first remodel in 2002, it was destroyed.
In its place now stands a cold white marble fireplace.
Some may consider it beautiful.
But I long for the original one.
I am enveloped with the same feeling when I wander through flea markets in France.
Among the antique silver and old books you can find boxes of black-and-white family photographs. Wedding portraits. Babies. Soldiers. Women in hats. Children laughing.
Once, these people were someone’s whole world.
Someone kissed those cheeks. Someone mourned when they died.
Now the photos are stashed in a cardboard box and sell for a few euros each.
It makes me feel unexpectedly sad.
I think about my great-aunts who spent forty years teaching elementary school in Newark, New Jersey. They poured their lives into other people’s children — teaching cursive, multiplication tables, and good manners.
Most of those children probably never think about their old teachers.
What happens to all that love? What happens when the memories of the people fade? What is left?
Why do I find myself mourning what was instead of feeling excited about what could still be?
Transitions
I think I’ve finally figured it out.
I’m not grieving fireplaces. Or old photographs. Or my aunts.
I’m grieving the lost connection to the past.
The woman who was a wife. The woman who kept the family together. The woman who believed safety came from keeping everyone else happy.
Those versions of me deserve to be honored.
But they cannot be allowed to keep living my life.
For a long time I thought the antidote to grief was acceptance. Sit with it. Make peace with it. But I’ve come to believe the real antidote is something more active. Not moving on — but moving forward with intention.
That, I’ve discovered, is what agency actually requires.
Not controlling life.
Choosing it.
Agency Is Built Like a Muscle
Over the past several weeks I’ve been thinking about agency as something very different from confidence.
I don’t think we’re simply born with agency. I think it’s a collection of muscles — awareness, self-consultation, desire, choice, emotional tolerance, boundaries — that grow stronger through deliberate practice. Like physical muscles, they fatigue when weak. They strengthen with repetition. Eventually, they become part of who we are.
Today I want to share three more muscles — the ones I believe actually have the power to change your life.
Self-trust. Standards. Congruence.
Self-Trust
For years I believed self-trust was something lucky people were born with.
Now I know it has to be built.
As a child, I was always picked last in PE. No one expected me to be athletic. I can still feel it — the slow dread of standing there, watching everyone else get chosen, learning in real time what my body was worth to the world. I began to identity as uncoordinated. That became my identity for decades.
The interesting thing about self-trust is that it isn’t created by believing.
It’s created by evidence.
My writing taught me this. Readers began writing to tell me my words helped them feel seen. That didn’t build my worth — it built evidence that I had something meaningful to say. Each message became a data point I couldn’t argue with.
The same thing happened with smaller choices. In redecorating the house, I had to find a temporary place for the five of us to live (this includes the dog, Cooper). I had to pick a contractor. I had to select a bathtub… You know how remodeling goes… 100,000 tiny decisions. I don’t believe I would have trusted myself with all of this in the past. But now, I feel like a Nike ad. Just do it! This is all building evidence that I can trust my decisions and everything will turn out, or else, we can PIVOT!!! The Life-Changing Magic of Pivoting!!!! I am not RIGID. I am flexible. I can make decisions and change my mind. And it will all be OK!!! My friend painted her house light blue. Guess what. She HATED it. So she had it repainted. This time in dark blue. Now she LOVES it. Why live with what you HATE when you have the power to change it?
Self-trust isn’t built through affirmations, or meditation, or therapy, wishing it were so.
It’s built through evidence, one small kept promise at a time.
Standards
For years I focused almost exclusively on goals. I wrote about productivity and goal setting. I led workshops and retreats. I read everything I could find about achieving your goals. I was pretty obsessed.
Lose ten pounds. Live in France. Make new friends. Write a successful newsletter.
Goals matter.
But standards changed my life.
Goals ask: What do I want to accomplish?
Standards ask: Who am I committed to becoming?
Goal vs. Standard
Lose 10 pounds
Nourish my body with respect.
Make three new friends
I do not abandon myself in relationships.
Live in France
Create beauty and pleasure wherever I am.
Become more confident
Tell the truth even when it’s uncomfortable.
Goals are destinations. Standards are ways of living.
The beautiful thing about standards is that they raise the floor. As you grow, your minimum acceptable shifts upward. The old floor becomes unacceptable. You have a new baseline — not because you forced it, but because you became someone different.
You don’t have to wait until you’ve arrived somewhere before becoming the woman you want to be.
You simply begin living as her.
Every day.
What is acceptable for the woman I am becoming?
That one question has changed hundreds of small decisions.
Congruence
Congruence means your outer life reflects your inner values.
For years mine didn’t — and I felt the gap long before I had a name for it.
I believed in beauty, but my office was chaos. I encouraged women to take care of themselves, then ignored my own body. I taught confidence in the pool, then quietly doubted myself the moment I got home.
I remember standing in my kitchen one evening, having just delivered what felt like a meaningful water aerobics class — women laughing, moving, feeling strong — and coming home to a disorganized office I’d been avoiding for three days, a supplement I kept forgetting to take, a conversation I’d been putting off. The woman I was in that pool and the woman I came home to felt like strangers to each other.
That gap is exhausting in a way that’s hard to explain. It’s not the exhaustion of doing too much. It’s the exhaustion of being two different people at once.
Peace, I’ve discovered, doesn’t come from becoming perfect.
It comes from shrinking that gap. It comes from living in congruence.
One boundary. One honest conversation. One healthy meal. One organized drawer. One courageous choice.
Congruence isn’t perfection.
It’s alignment.
What the Photographs Were Really Saying
Looking back, I realize those old photographs at the flea market weren’t making me sad because they represented forgotten people.
They reminded me that every season of life eventually becomes a memory.
The question isn’t whether you should honor your past. Of course you should. The question is whether you continue living there.
Agency asks you to remember with gratitude and choose with courage. To carry forward the wisdom without dragging along the identities that no longer fit.
Every one of these muscles strengthens the same way.
Not through one dramatic breakthrough.
But through hundreds of tiny repetitions.
Every time you consult yourself. Every time you tell the truth. Every time you honor one small desire. Every time you choose the woman you are becoming over the woman you’ve always been.
That is how agency is built.
Before almost every decision now, I ask myself one question:
What is acceptable for the woman I am becoming?
Then I let her answer.
The Tarot Nook
Eight of Pentacles Reversed
At first, I was surprised to pull the Eight of Pentacles reversed for an article about building the muscles of agency.
Then I realized...
The card isn’t asking whether I’m practicing.
It’s asking what I’m practicing.
For years, I practiced saying yes when I meant no.
I practiced putting everyone else’s needs ahead of my own.
I practiced doubting myself.
I practiced asking for permission.
Eventually, I became very good at all of it.
The Eight of Pentacles reversed reminds me that every repetition strengthens a muscle—whether that habit serves me or not.
If I want a different life, I don’t need one heroic act.
I need different repetitions.
Self-trust is practiced.
Boundaries are practiced.
Standards are practiced.
Congruence is practiced.
Agency isn’t something we discover in a single day.
It’s something we build, one small choice at a time.
The question isn’t whether you’re building muscles.
You’re always building them.
The real question is: Which muscles are you strengthening every day?
And are those the muscles you INTEND to build?
I tell my kids: You become like the five people you hang around. Muscles are the same. You get the muscles you practice. If you practice good manners, you will have good manners. If you practice thinking through your decisions, you will think through your decisions… etc.
You get what you focus on.