Articles on Navigating Change, Strategic Goal Setting, and Partnering With Others in Life-Changing Ways
Article 03: The satisfaction of doing hard things
Sarah Bond - January 11, 2026
Hey friends, it’s been a while since I’ve posted here. I’m happy you’re here. My focus for some time now has been on my immediate work in the community with foster care advocacy and on serving as a coach for teams and individuals within that agency.
This new chapter has invited me to take stock of the last year. 2025 was filled with some unexpected and life-altering experiences. Last January, I decided that my old approach to New Year’s resolutions was not serving me well.
At the start of each year, I tend to dream of areas I want to grow over the year to come and begin stacking them, like a server trying to take all the dishes from a table of 8 all at once. But this last year, I decided to stick to one goal and one goal only. And thanks in part to my own leadership coach, who helped me craft my goal and check for blindspots and flaws in the plan, I achieved my goal.
My one singular goal for 2025 was fluency in Spanish, and I knew without a doubt I would need accountability and community to make the plan work.
I began by talking with my coworker who shared the goal of Spanish learning, and she and I agreed to check in with each other about our progress each week. Next, my husband and I began talking about trading all other annual travel plans for a more radical, life long dream of spending a summer abroad.
I found a language school in Barcelona, where I would be in the company of international students in an in-person classroom for 20 hours a week for 7 weeks. Initially, it was terrifying. Each morning, as the professor began a conversational prompt and asked us to begin, I broke out in a sweat. I was tossed into a class with only 2 1/2 weeks to catch up on the 5 1/2 weeks I had missed before taking the exam. I passed (by the skin of my teeth!) and journeyed on with my classmates into the next level.
At the end of the summer, I had moved forward several levels in Spanish, much quicker than ever before. I knew how to talk with strangers and friends in several verb tenses about the recent past, more distant past, and habitual actions as a child or during a prior season of life. Back in the states, I didn’t freeze at work when I placed a call and discovered the person on the other end only spoke Spanish. I could pivot. I could be a bridge to Spanish-speakers in my community.
In August, I knew I couldn’t go back to the same routine of prior fall seasons if I wanted to keep growing. So I joined the intermediate Spanish course in my hometown and asked a friend to join me. Again, I had accountability and community to make my goal realistic and achievable for my learning style and personality.
Not only did I make new friends in class (some of whom are native speakers and are willing to practice with me), but I deepened my friendship with a longtime friend by navigating a challenging class together, and found the momentum and deadlines to keep me committed to my goal for rest of 2025.
Now that Spanish is a habit, I began to notice the new muscles of confidence and discipline I have as I approach fresh goals for 2026.
I have discovered that I can trade little bits of time usually spent on mind numbing activities for small bits of study or other goals and feel a jolt of joy afterwards. The fruit of discipline.
Seeing my brain change in my midlife years has been encouraging. I may not have the neuroplasticity of a child or even young college student, but my brain can adapt to the regular discipline of learning and I can find fun, easy ways to overcome new goals, too.
On the days I do something small that taps into a growth goal, I feel a deep, satisfied joy at a life well-lived at the end of the day. I know I’m not just passing the days; I’m seizing the day and creating a legacy of relationships and ways of leading and influencing the world around me that I am grateful and satisfied to experience. I know I’m doing what I’m made to do.
When have you felt this way?
What were you doing at the time and how did it connect with a value you hold for your life?
In this new year, I’ve begun by several weeks of pausing on all social media while I discern where I need to pay attention and create goals for 2026. In simply shifting another habit, I’ve found even more time to be present and joyful, to read more nonfiction, to write down a creative idea, to text a person I’m thinking of, to give an hour to a college student who needs career guidance.
My questions for you from my last year of personal growth through small, regular habits are these:
What one goal do you want to tackle regularly for the entire year? How do you keep that one goal simple and focused? If you focus on just that one goal, where will you be next January?
What small thing can you fast from for 30 days that will free you up in your time and emotional capacity to work on your goal?
Who do you need to help you achieve that goal? What level of social support would make your goal achieveable and sustainable for the full year ahead?
I invite you to send me an email to share your goal, and I’ll check back with you in a couple weeks to see how you’re doing!
Article 02: Declutter your space: lessons on beginning
Sarah Bond - January 30, 2019
Are you thinking about getting your home and life organized and you’re just not sure how to begin? Here are a few helpful starting places that have activated powerful change for my home and life organization clients this year:
First, identify your core values. What will make the hard work worth it? Life coaches of many kinds are some of the best people to help you unbiasedly, effectively unearth your priorities. You can return to these driving values as you do the work of decluttering your home and life. For example, several of my clients have identified their driving priority in decluttering as quality time as a family on the weekends. They know that without as many hours of chores needed to store and straighten excess belongings, they will have more unhurried, unstressed time together in a more open, relaxed, and creativity-inspiring environment. What is your driving why?
Second, trust that decluttering starts messy and gets more chaotic before it gets better. That’s just part of the process. To reduce the temptation to get overwhelmed or spin in circles of unfinished projects. It helps to target one area of your home or a type of item that is stashed throughout your home and finish that area or item before moving on to others. Jot down other sub-projects you discover as you’re organizing that first target area but don’t go down a rabbit trail of organizing those other things until you finish the first task at hand.
Third, resist the urge to shop for more storage bins until you greatly reduce the amount of stuff you own. It’s easy to become more clever in storing an excessive amount of stuff which circumvents the real, lasting, time-saving work of clearing out what doesn’t “spark joy” (Kondo, 2014). Likely you’ll clear out so many belongings you will find new open storage bins, files, and baskets that are ready to store the few things you really do want to hold onto and use seasonally or return to for nostalgia.
Fourth, couple mental and physical action. Plan and process the vision for your life and home organization with someone like a coach, so the changes you enact come from lasting lifestyle and mindset shifts and will create long-term results. The more you couple internal change with external environmental change, the more powerful, deep, and lasting the transformation becomes.
Fifth, fight resistance and just begin. The actual work is not as great a barrier as the dread and overwhelm you feel about beginning. When you feel stuck or uncertain or when the amount of tiny items and piles is daunting, team up with a friend, spouse, or other supportive individual, pull everything out of that specific space to a staging area that you won’t need back right away, and.just.begin.
If you need a backdrop of motivation and vision for all stages of this process, do yourself a favor and check out New Minimalism, a book I absolutely adore on the topic of home and life simplification and watch a few episodes of Marie Kondo’s show on Netflix: Tidying Up. It feels so much less overwhelming when you just begin so block out the time and invest in these goals. I promise you will experience freedom and ease in so many other areas of your life as you establish harmony, open space, and freedom in your primary environment.
Sixth, invite others into the process. You may be the initiator, but you don’t need to do the work alone. As you lead the way and start organizing, those you share space and life with will notice and they’ll likely get sucked into the fun, addictive momentum and freeing feeling that comes from simplifying and streamlining your home, life, and systems.
There are many more nuances to the process that are unique to you, your life, schedule and goals, but with these ideas in mind and a team to help you, you absolutely can effectively reset your lifestyle and home and keep it on a healthier, freer, more balanced track for the rest of your life.
Article 01: Cutting ties with my inner perfectionist
Sarah Bond - January 2, 2019
One string at a time, I’m cutting ties with my inner perfectionist. It’s that voice that whispers self-doubt after I’ve done something vulnerable or can crush my joy with the weight of self-analysis as my vision filters out the good and looks only for the lacking.
Steadily, I’m silencing this voice, adapting my perspective, taking chances, and letting go of the weight of shame, regret, and fear. I’m enjoying the best of my personality and the thirst I have for learning and personal growth without expecting things to go perfectly or last forever. I’m able to step into the moment with my kids, husband and friends more quickly and fully.
I don’t want to undervalue the importance of growth. It’s a beautiful thing to constantly seek improvement, but not at the expense of celebration, gratitude for what is, and fully investing in people who matter most to me. To thrive, I desire to celebrate what is already great and who is already in front of me and to set aside what could be cleaned up, straightened, grown, or checked off my list.
Today, as I listened to an amazing podcast on personality, I felt both seen and released from the clutches of my inner perfectionist. This freedom is too good to keep to myself, so I wanted to share it with you.
I know that perfectionism can keep us locked away in fear, keeping the best parts of ourselves and what we have to offer the world at bay.
Let’s commit this year to getting freed up from the voices that criticize and hold us back.
Here are links to the podcast that sparked some new thought and freedom for me today as well as a few books I’ve read over the past two years that have become constant references for me on my journey towards freedom from perfectionism and my inner critic:
The Typology Podcast
Typology Episode 049: Julianne Cusick (Enneagram 1) Finds Her Inner Encourager
I absolutely love the self-awareness, wit, and tangible steps towards growth Julianne Cusick offers in this podcast. She shares a few sayings she has coined, including “done is better than perfect,” and “anything worth doing is worth doing poorly…let’s go ahead and do it and experience it rather than not doing it at all.” Julianne realized about 15 years ago that she wanted to place relationships over perfection, a mindset shift that now helps her choose to celebrate when she comes home to a messy kitchen that’s riddled with the aftermath of quality family time. There are many powerful, quote-worthy nuggets in this podcast. Listen to the entire episode (and other episodes of this incredible show) when you get a chance, and have a notebook and pen ready!
Books by Brené Brown
This accessible book is absolutely delightful. Brené ends each chapter with practical strategies for DIG-deeper (“get deliberate, inspired and going”) into the area of vulnerability and shame resilience she’s explored in that chapter. Really, perfection tells us we need to hide our vulnerability and one of the biggest experiences of perfection is shame. Her strategies give us practical steps for identifying the lie in the perfectionistic mindset and being vulnerable with a selection of core safe people in our lives when we’re in shame so we can recover and turn around the situation rather than compounding it with isolation and coping behaviors that only lead to greater, you guessed it, shame.
Another great book by Brené. This is a great read to follow the thoughts you’ll find in The Gifts of Imperfection. One story she shares is the journey of a client who was working to overcome perfectionism. Brené shares that one of the sayings that helped the client move past the barrier perfection is “perfection is the enemy of done.” I recite this saying to myself nearly daily as I confront the fear or sense of ideal, perfected process or end result that has to be required of me to move forward. It helps me just do it, fully dive into the experience or clear something that’s standing in my way (like laundry that has to be special washed) and accept natural, human, real-life imperfections that come with the territory.
Daring Greatly is one of the most powerful books I’ve read with my local book club and you can find a fabulous reading guide and discussion questions by Brené here: Daring Greatly Reading Guide.
Kim Fredrickson: Books and podcast on self-compassion
Two years back, I had the opportunity to interview Kim Fredrickson on her incredible journey as a therapist and discovery of one of the things her clients needed most: self-compassion. You can listen to that whole conversation on my podcast here. In our conversation, Kim gets practical about silencing the inner critic and becoming your own compassionate friend. I love something she points out in the beginning of her first book on self-compassion and in her sequel on self-compassion for parents: we are one of the greatest influences on our own lives. We are constantly dialoging with ourselves, and it can be shocking to tune into the kind of tone we use as we speak to ourselves about our character, decisions, and the meaning we’re deriving from our life experiences.
When I’m in a negative self-talk space, I am not the kind of mom, wife, friend, or version of myself I desire to be. My inner critic is often the root of that negative filter. When I think kindly about myself when I make mistakes, speaking like I would to a friend, my emotional, psychological, and even physical experience of the event is dramatically different.
What voice of criticism or self-doubt gets in the way of your freedom?
What voices of truth and compassion can help you silence this negative voice this year?
To continue the conversation, message me here.
Wishing you a more free, more authentic year ahead.