Then something happened.

I watched my father spend seven years of his life  re-interviewing for his position with the “stable” company he had worked at for twenty-five years. I watched the stress build, his attitude change, and his health decline. I watched him count down the days until he could retire at 55, gain a guaranteed pension, and try his hand at something new. He died of a massive heart attack seventy-three days before his 55th birthday.

Something clicked that day. A lot in my life changed.

I started asking better questions. I didn’t want to follow down that same path.

I was already facing layoffs, cutbacks, and job insecurity in my own position. My husband had faced three layoffs in three years. Was this really what we wanted for ourselves? We weren’t even thirty, and the stress was already building.

So we stopped everything, reevaluated our lives, and started over from scratch.

We started a photography studio and built it up to be one of the premier studios of its time. We were selling online and built up a phenomenal web presence at a time when the online gurus were saying we couldn’t do it. In the late 1990’s, we had over 20,000 images online. The gurus kept telling us to take them down, we couldn’t succeed doing it that way. Most people accessed the internet through dial-up. There was no way people would spend time on our site waiting for that many images to load. We proved them wrong.

In 2001, we were at the top of our game in the photographic industry. We specialized in weddings, worked with clients from many different cultures, from all over the world. Every event was in a different city, a different venue, and we loved it! We won awards from all the major photography organizations. I began my speaking career, and started blogging and writing. I created a color coffeetable book, Being A Bride. I signed with a publishing house to write my first nonfiction book, Studio Without Walls.

When people began asking, “How’d you do that?”, we designed a new business to answer that question. And my coaching career was born.

Just because you find something that works for you right now, today, doesn’t mean it stays that way, right? We’re all human. And that means every day brings new changes into your life.

I’m still in caregiving-mode for a mom who never took health seriously. Just like I didn’t want to follow in my father’s footsteps of heart disease at an early age, I have no intention of moving into assisted living because of poor health. I’m very actively doing my part to ensure that isn’t my path.

I’ve been biohacking my health since I was thirty. I don’t accept the norm. I question everything. And if something doesn’t make sense, I look for a different path.

What’s next? Who knows! But I do know I only get one shot at this life, and I’m making the most of it every single day.

Want to come along? I welcome you to sign up for my newsletter. I post a new article each week, and my topics vary greatly from life as a writer, to the latest health resource I’m using.

I’m still with my best friend. We travel when and where we want. We’ve moved to the Pacific Northwest, and roam freely (when we’re not staying-in-place.)