Category Archive

I can now ride a bike further than I can run. I can say this because I rode the Chilly Hilly, a 33-mile ride around Bainbridge Island, this weekend, which is further than I have ever run. Or ever biked. Seven-year-old Z calls the ride the Chilly Willy, which seemed apt as we were waiting to disembark from the Seattle-Bainbridge ferry at 8:30 on a cold, gray Sunday morning. I expect there were lots of them around me. Before the …

We have a new chicken. It’s complicated being the new chicken. We had a flock of five happy chickens until a raccoon came for a visit one evening. I arrived just in time to see my favorite brown hen, a smart, spry girl, disappear over the back fence in a raccoon’s mouth. I guess she wasn’t smart or spry enough. We lost two more chickens over the course of that bloody weekend. The raccoon enjoyed the intellectual puzzle of the …

When friends ask me about our trip to South Africa, I think about being hunted by wild dogs. I think about throwing a frisbee with a girl in Swaziland. And walking in the bush with cheetah cubs. This is the story of our family’s travels in Africa, a place we’d never really imagined going. It’s a story that started by accident several years ago at a school fundraising auction where I was mildly intoxicated and overly competitive and bid, to …

I have a friend who is afraid of highways. She loses sleep if she knows she is going to have to drive on one. Loses weight. Organizes her life to avoid them. I respect deep-seated fears and don’t tend to mess with them. I did wonder, though, how this fear was making her life smaller. So we came up with a plan. Our kids were taking swimming lessons together this summer at a pool most easily accessed by highway. We …

I’m coaching my 6-year-old daughter’s soccer team. This is despite having played only a year of JV soccer in middle school and losing every game. My parents came to a game and cheered the wrong girl. Anyway, the league needed coaches. How hard could it be? Taking my new soccer coaching responsibilities very seriously, I crafted a careful email to my players’ parents highlighting the date and time of our first practice in yellow: Tuesday, September 4 at 5:30. Without …

This is the toast I gave to Jeff and Jill at their wedding in Bloomington, Indiana this weekend. Jeff asked me to share it here. Hi, my name is Kathryn. I’ve known Jeff since the first day of business school, and he was the second person to hold each of my children after they arrived — so hopefully that establishes my credentials for standing before you all now. I’m going to read this toast from my notes because I tend to …

A favorite client struggles with a god-awful boss. Demeaning, incompetent, aggressive (no, I’m probably not talking about you) – not a fun combination for my client to manage every day. My client is in an active, highly-organized job search. She’s leaving this boss as soon as she can. In the meantime, she has to go to work every day. And takes a hit to her confidence and optimism every day. So how do I coach this client? I’m not about …

Once a week I’ve been getting up at 5 a.m. to bake muffins. I feel like a pioneer woman cooking breakfast before dawn for my family. I then get my 8-year-old son up and we head east for a day at an alternative wilderness school. I like that he’s full of warm, healthy muffins for his day of wild weather in the woods. Last week I baked banana muffins. The kitchen was full of the warm smell of baking when …

Aliens have abducted my husband. My Spock-like software engineer of a husband – or his alien clone – put a gratitude journal on both our phones. Who is this guy and what has he done with my husband? Every morning at 7:30 this app pops up, disrupting whatever else I happen to be doing, and I have to stop and think about and write down what I’m grateful for in this moment. After a couple of weeks of this, I’m …

A favorite coaching client recently convinced her partner to work with me on career coaching. When he got home after meeting with me, he told her: “You’re not allowed to say ‘I told you so.’” I think about that off-hand comment a lot. I can hear such love and humor and care for each other in it. And it was a needed affirmation for me, one year into this journey of self employment. It was an affirmation that, yes, I …