Episode #471 – Where Will You Be in 9 Years?

Well, my friend, as you tune into this episode of the Brilliant Balance podcast, we are celebrating nine years of the podcast. It just…

It’s never going to feel right that it’s been that long. I don’t know. I really can’t believe it. I actually said to my team, “You know, I think that we should just wait until 10 years. We’ll do something at the 10-year anniversary of the show.” And I got convinced that maybe we should do something to honor the nine-year anniversary, which counts just as much.

Nine years is a long time, y’all, to be sitting down week after week doing this podcast. And some of the people who listen to this show—you know who you are—have been here since the very beginning. I just owe you such a debt of gratitude for your loyalty and for your growth with me over the years. When you send me notes to tell me about it, it just makes my whole day.

I’ve gotten to have conversations with a few longtime podcast listeners lately who are finally ready to come into coaching, and it’s just pure delight. So thank you for spending your mornings with me, or your evenings, or your walks, or your commutes, and listening to the show.

It’s still fun to do this, so we’re going to keep it going, hopefully for another nine years. We’ll see!

Because this is the nine-year anniversary of the podcast, it made me look back at what I was talking about nine years ago. I went back to episode one of the show. Where did this whole thing start? In a very meta coincidence, I was reflecting in that episode on a question that I had asked my family a year earlier.

The question was, “Where will you be in 10 years?”

It is still, by the way, one of the most popular episodes of this podcast ever, I think, and for good reason. When I originally asked that question, “Where will you be in 10 years?” I was sitting on my back patio with my family in the summer of 2016.

I was projecting forward to an era when—and I think I say this in the episode—I got teary as I thought about it. I would have children who were 16, 19, and 21.

And that is basically what I have now. So I am sitting here in the future version of that vision-casting exercise. I asked the question, “Where will you be?” And apparently, this is where I will be.

It’s making me reflect. I got into a reflective cycle as I was preparing for this episode, so I’m going to share a little bit about some of the things that happened over those years, from the time I asked the question 10 years ago to today.

Also, since this is the nine-year anniversary of the podcast, it’s making me think about where we will be nine years from today. I don’t care if you ask the question about nine or 10 years from now. I was thinking about nine years from now, when those same children will be 25, 28, and, with a deep breath, 30, God willing.

In nine short years, I will be at another milestone birthday of my own.

I think we often just get stunned into silence when we ask these questions. We’re like, “I don’t know. I don’t want to think about that. That seems crazy.” Sometimes I’ve asked this question in a room full of women, and people will tear up. You might be tearing up as you listen.

But I think those questions have to move us to action. Asking that question has to help us make adjustments to our course that will really change things for the better.

I knew this nine years ago when I was starting the podcast. That’s why it was the very first episode, because that question had been so formative just a year before.

In those nine years, lots of things happened that I could never have imagined, much less predicted or planned for. We had a global pandemic in the middle of those years. That was not on my bingo card or any of ours.

But the intentionality that was really formed by that question—”Where will you be in 10 years?”—made a number of things a reality that I don’t necessarily know would have happened otherwise. We really did sit down and think about what we were going to do differently.

I’m going to re-air that original episode for you today in a minute, so you can go down memory lane with me. But first, as part of this preamble, I’m going to share some of the things that happened in that decade in my family and in my business that I just don’t know I would have said yes to in the same way, as readily, or with as much confidence without the intentionality of knowing that we had a 10-year window to really make some hay, because these kids were growing up so fast.

I was looking across the table at the time at a six-year-old, an eight-year-old, and an 11-year-old. Those are little people. And all of a sudden, today, I have two kids out of the house and one who wishes she were, right? One who’s a junior in high school.

So here are some of the things that happened.

The first thing that happened right after we had that conversation—I mean, it happened within months—was that we bought the house, the kind of house we’d always hoped to raise our family in.

Conservative, risk-averse me probably wouldn’t have done it without that conversation. It was a big leap forward from the house we had before. We had bought one house when we first got married, and I had convinced myself it was perfectly fine. We could stay in that house forever, and we could have. We absolutely could have.

But we took the leap and asked, “What do we really want to have for the years we’re raising these kids?”

We did it, and we’ve had this house since 2016. I have zero regrets about that decision because we really did get to raise our family and have our older children in this home.

We also did a complete kitchen renovation, which gave me my dream kitchen. I’m sure it could be even fancier, but the space I had in our old house, for somebody who loves to cook, felt like it had room for improvement.

I am grateful every day when I walk into the kitchen we renovated in this home. It brings me so much joy to host events in the kitchen, make meals for the kids, and just spend time in it. It really is a delight.

We also built out a home gym, or what I refer to as the wellness studio, in our basement. We did that, I guess, right after COVID.

I’m so grateful for that space and for the opportunity to have it right in my house without having to leave home. I love the aesthetics of it and the way it’s become a place the kids use a lot with their friends. I think they turn it into more of a TikTok dance studio because it has big mirrors, but I love having that space.

Those were some things related to the house.

We also completed our college savings plans. When I think back to where we were 10 years ago, looking at those balances and wondering if we were ever going to get there, I remember asking myself, “Are we going to be able to send these kids to college?”

We nailed that goal, and it was very intentional. Sometimes it required sacrificing other things, but it was really important to us to get those savings where we wanted them.

Two of the kids graduated from high school and started college during those years. They got into the colleges they wanted to attend and went there. One is still on that path.

We’ve done a lot of cool things with the kids during those years, too. I think we started making plans for them and leaned into those plans. We’ve traveled to six countries with the kids in those 10 years.

I love that we did that. Again, these decisions are not easy. You have to work, be intentional, and plan and sequence things to make them happen. But those kids’ worlds have opened up to the point where my oldest daughter went and studied in London for almost a month during her J-term, in January one year, and then studied in Europe for a full semester this past year, which was great.

We also traveled with the kids to a lot of really cool places in the U.S. We went to the Grand Canyon. I have one of my favorite pictures I’ve ever taken of them sitting at the Grand Canyon. We loved Zion National Park. We loved Yosemite National Park. We went back to Disney World. We’d been there when they were really little, but we went back when they were a little older.

I took my youngest daughter, her besties, and their moms on a beach trip that I organized. That was so fun.

I also took solo trips with each of the kids, which was something we said we really wanted to do. It’s fun to travel with the whole family, but what would it be like to do what just they wanted to do?

That was great. We went to New York City for Christmas twice. I was only going to do it once, I promise. Then we got talked into doing it a second time and said, “Why not?”

Here’s one that came to mind when I was reflecting on all of this: We saw Taylor Swift on the Eras Tour as a family.

I genuinely think that is a night I will never forget. I think I’ll be thinking about it when I’m 95, I hope. It was such a magical era—pardon the pun—in pop culture. Having the kids get swept up in it and getting to go together was just amazing.

We got really lucky and got to see the show in our home city. We got tickets in the lottery at the beginning.

I hosted an 80th birthday weekend for my mom with all of her siblings and their families. Actually, we did it twice. We split it into two weekends because there were so many people, and we wanted them all to be able to stay with us. I will never forget that.

We also did things like helping all three kids get their first jobs, bank accounts, and debit cards. They grew up financially and started saving.

When I look at where my older two are, because they’ve had a little more time to develop those skills, I’m so proud of what they’ve been able to do in terms of building financial awareness, savings, and investments. My oldest daughter has an investment portfolio. It’s like watching them build knowledge and responsibility around their own futures. It’s so great.

My husband accumulated a truly extraordinary collection of vinyl. If you know anything about music, you know vinyl has really been trending over the last several years. I guess it’s been around forever, but he has amassed quite a collection, and it’s become a genuine passion for him. Building that collection and really leaning into music was a very intentional decision.

At work, I’ve launched—I lost count of this, so I went back and looked—10 distinct programs for women in those 10 years. They had names, curriculums, and people who went through them. Ten distinct programs over that period of time!

Maybe you were part of one of them. If you were, thank you. It was so much fun to have the creative outlet to do that over that decade.

I’ve also recorded 470 podcast episodes in those nine years.

Another highlight for me, and I’m so glad we’re doing it in bold again next year, is that I’ve hosted more than 13 live events or retreats for women.

Some of them were connected to those programs, and some were for the community at large. But that’s a lot of live events in those years—13 opportunities to bring people together. I think that’s something I really want to do more of.

I built an office for Brilliant Balance, which was a long-held dream of mine. Eventually, I closed it because I think the state of the economy today lends itself to remote work. I’m able to build the best team when I’m not constrained by geography.

After COVID, we closed the office, but it was such a dream to build it out, gather the team in one space, and have that experience.

And then I have a complete draft of my first book. This one is coming in under the wire, I think, as I recount these accomplishments. While it isn’t out in the world yet, I can say I have a complete draft. It’s going to take some editing, y’all, but I can hold it in my hands. That’s something I’m so proud of, and it was such an intentional dream.

When I look back at all of that, I hope you do the same. I hope you take this as an opportunity to look back and say, “Okay, over the last nine or 10 years, what’s happened for me on purpose? Where did I call my shot and say, ‘I’m going to do that’?”

Honestly, I put this together last night. If I thought about it longer, I’m sure I could come up with even more things that happened that I’m not talking about in this episode. But that’s a pretty good list of things I meant to do, things I set out to do, and things we put time, energy, attention, and resources toward because we really wanted to make them happen.

I think it’s a good time to stand at that fulcrum and ask the question: What could the next nine years hold?

If these things happened in the years since the podcast started, where will we be nine years from now?

I’m going to have you listen to, or perhaps relisten to, Baby Me in the very first episode of the Brilliant Balance podcast as a way to frame up that question.

Thank you again for being on this journey with me, for being a listener of this show, and for growing alongside me. It is genuinely such a delight and such a privilege to do this with you and for you. I hope we’re still doing it a long time from now.

All right, here we go: Episode One of the Brilliant Balance podcast, “Where Will You Be in 10 Years?”