Hey Reader,

I had a shotgun wedding three months ago.

Well… kind of.

There was no actual shotgun, for the record. 😂

But I did find out I was pregnant in April and then got married to the man who had been my boyfriend when this year began, only a few months later. So, I know how it looks for sure.

From the outside, I’m sure it looked like we saw the positive pregnancy test, panicked, and rushed to get married before anyone could do the math.

That isn’t exactly how it happened.

My now-husband and I had been talking about marriage and discussing having a child for years. We already knew we wanted those things in the future.

We just thought we had more time to figure out every detail before life started moving quite so quickly.

The pregnancy didn’t suddenly create a new future we wanted.

But it for sure accelerated the timeline.

Suddenly, a lot of things were happening at once.

I was adjusting to pregnancy, dealing with first-trimester exhaustion and nausea, planning a very private wedding, reconsidering what I wanted my work and life to look like, and trying to function with a level of energy that changed from one day to the next.

Unsurprisingly, many of the routines I had before all of this started didn’t survive intact.

The newsletter became quiet.

The podcast stopped.

Many of my personal and professional projects moved more slowly.

My workouts changed.

Some days, the amount I could accomplish looked nothing like what I had once considered a “productive” day.

And for a while, I kept thinking that eventually I would catch up.

That I would return to everything when I had more energy or when life "quieted down".

When life felt more settled.

When I could create a proper schedule and follow it consistently.

But the longer I waited to restart properly, the bigger restarting seemed to become.

I think that’s because I had confused consistency with never stopping.

I thought being consistent meant finding the right routine, maintaining momentum, and continuing to show up in the same way, week after week, without any interruptions.

But life doesn’t usually cooperate with that definition.

• We get sick.
• Work becomes demanding.
• Our energy changes and wanes from day to day.
• We travel, move, get married, become parents, experience losses, or enter seasons that require something completely different from us.

Sometimes we make a plan, and we simply don’t follow it.

If consistency requires us never to stop, most of us will eventually have to conclude that we’re just not consistent people.

But I don’t believe that anymore.

I think consistency has much more to do with how willing we are to return after something (usually, just life) interrupts us.

It isn’t about "never stopping".

It’s actually more about shortening the distance between stopping and then starting again.

That’s what I’ve been practicing lately.

• Writing another newsletter after being quiet.
• Returning to projects in smaller pockets of time.
• Moving my body in ways that work with the energy and the body I have right now.
• Continuing to build my coaching work, even when I can’t give it the pace I originally imagined.

I haven’t returned to everything in exactly the same way.

In some cases, I couldn’t (or it simply didn't feel right at this moment of my life).

But changing the pace isn’t the same as abandoning the direction.

And beginning again doesn’t mean we have to make up for all the time we 'lost'.

• We don’t need to write five chapters because we stopped writing for five months.
• We don’t need to exercise for two hours because we missed a day or a week.
• We don’t need to rebuild the entire business plan because we haven’t looked at it since January.
• We only need to make contact with the thing that matters to us again. And probably, again and again.

Sometimes that can happen in 10 minutes at a time.

Open the document and write one paragraph.

Put on your shoes and take a short walk.

Send the message you’ve been avoiding.

Reopen the course you stopped taking.

Spend 10 minutes on the business or creative project you still want to bring into the world.

The goal isn’t to recover all your 'lost progress' today.

It’s to provide yourself with new evidence:

I can stop and still return.

I can lose momentum without losing the goal.

I can begin again without punishing myself for needing to restart.

This idea has become an important part of something I’ve been creating called Make Your Idea Real.

It will be a free 14-day experience designed to help you take the business or creative idea you’ve been carrying around in your head and begin turning it into something real, through small decisions and practical actions you can continue returning to.

I will share it with you in the coming days, but if you’re reading this email, you’re already on the list. You won’t need to sign up again.

For now, I’d love to know:

​Hit reply and tell me.​

It could be a business, a creative project, your health, a relationship, or something else you stopped prioritizing even though it still matters to you.

I read every response, and what you share will also help me make Make Your Idea Real genuinely useful for the women I’m creating it for.

Something I’ve kept returning to 💪

Six years ago, I lost my period for more than a year, had anemia, and constantly felt tired and bloated. My hormones were also extremely imbalanced; PCOS girly over here. 🙋‍♀️

That was when my doctor first encouraged me to start lifting weights.

Until then, I mostly did yoga, aerobics, walking, and spinning. I had no idea how to use the machines at a gym, so I joined one that offered semi-personalized sessions and video training.

Over the following months, I started feeling better and eventually got my period back. I don’t credit one habit with resolving something as complex as hormonal health, but strength training became one of the practices that helped me feel stronger, more energized, and more connected to my body.

It also became something I’ve returned to again and again through very different seasons of my life.

I recently shared a short video about why building muscle matters for so much more than how we look, including our strength, energy, metabolic health, and how we age.

I think it makes the case for considering strength training and building muscle an important habit to add to your wellness stack.

​Watch the video and learn all the benefits of strength training HERE. →​

If your movement routine has disappeared, you don’t need to return with the perfect program or the hardest workout of your life.

You can simply start moving your body today, in smart ways that create a real difference in how you feel.

I’ll write you again next Thursday.

P.S. You don’t need to recreate the person you were before life interrupted your plans. You only need to take one step as the person you are now.

Love creating your mind one day at a time? Forward this to a friend so they can get in on the action and sign up below. Subscribe to The Created Mind Thank you for reading and sharing, Jenny ​​​​

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