Do you have a garden that you're getting into this time of year? I come by my love of plants and gardening honestly. My mom has the greenest thumb of anyone I know. Her garden and landscaping at my childhood home are seriously jaw-dropping. It's magical to be there during the summer. But I always used to tease her about the pictures she would take of her landscaping.

In the last two weeks, one or more of my kids have been home for a holiday, a cold day, a snow day, a positive strep throat test, and today, a terribly, obnoxious cough. Here's the step-by-step of how I go from receiving the phone call (or in my case today, hearing the cough) to getting things done and even having a little bit of fun on days when nothing looks like what I had planned.

When you've tried all the things and still don't follow through, it's time for some external accountability. For someone else to create the deadline and hold you to it. To hold the space on your calendar for you to do the thing you've said you want to do. There's nothing wrong with asking someone to help you do the thing you can't seem to get yourself to do.

The reality is that doing things that stretch you, rarely feels good at first. But that doesn't mean you stop. It means you sit with the discomfort knowing that this is exactly how it's supposed to feel. Nothing has gone wrong. It WORKING! So when I'm trying to help a client break a habit, make a change, and stretch themselves into a new self-concept, I assign small, but uncomfortable homework challenges.

Making decisions in advance about how you want to spend your time, makes it so much easier to say yes or no to things that come up along the way. You can always change your plans or change your mind, but for now, you're creating a tentative map. And that feels so good!

We're conditioned to want the next thing, to make the next change, or hit the next milestone. But what if you decided that settling in and fine-tuning the life that you have right now IS the next milestone? What if your next phase of growth happens BECAUSE you chose to coast?