In the school year, I have a system. I know what time the bus comes. I know what the kids need packed. I know exactly when I can sit down and eat an actual breakfast like a functioning human being.

Summer? My kids go to camp at different times. They get picked up at different times. One keeps forgetting to put on sunscreen despite me asking seventeen times before leaving the house, so I have to run back to the house after we’ve already departed. Another has a water bottle that is always, without fail, missing. Getting children to camp takes significantly longer than getting children to school, and it happens at the precise moment my body is expecting its normal morning routine.

By 9:30 a.m., I’ve driven two separate routes, fielded a question about whether we remembered the permission slip (we did not), and consumed approximately one-third of a cup of coffee.

This is not a willpower problem. This is a logistics problem dressed up as a nutrition problem.

Here’s What Every Other Summer Eating Article Gets Wrong

Every summer, the wellness internet produces the same content: “10 Healthy Summer Snacks.” “How to Eat Clean on Vacation.” “5 Tips for Staying on Track.”

All of it assumes the same thing — that you don’t know what healthy eating looks like, and if someone just hands you the right list of foods, you’ll be fine.

You already know that yogurt with berries is better than a stale muffin. You already know a salad needs protein. Nobody needs to tell you that watermelon is hydrating.

You’re failing because the infrastructure that quietly executed that knowledge for you during the school year — the predictable lunch window, the consistent bedtime that meant you weren’t running on fumes, the rhythm that made good choices automatic instead of effortful — disappeared the day camp started.

This is not a “what to eat” problem. It’s a systems problem. And systems problems need systems fixes, not better information.

So here’s the one system that matters more than all the rest combined.

The Single Highest-Leverage Fix: The Weekly Protein Anchor

If you do nothing else from this article, do this.

Pick one protein at the beginning of the week and cook a batch without knowing exactly what you’ll do with it. Not a plan. Just a supply sitting in your fridge, waiting.

My default is tofu — diced and fried at the start of the week, because it’s easy to throw with whatever vegetables I have around and it doesn’t require me to think about it. It also keeps for up to 6–7 days in an airtight container, a day or two longer than cooked chicken (3–4 days). For those of us who get a little anxious about how long meat has been sitting in the fridge, tofu’s longer shelf life isn’t just psychological comfort — it’s real.

If chicken is your go-to, cook a big batch on Sunday. You don’t need to know yet whether it becomes a salad, a wrap, a grain bowl, or a fork-and-fridge situation on Wednesday afternoon. You just need it to exist.

Here’s why this one habit is the infrastructure fix, not just another tip: it single-handedly solves breakfast, lunch, and the 4 p.m. spiral, because all three failure points have the same root cause — no protein within reach when decision fatigue hits. One Sunday batch removes the decision from all three moments at once. You’re not making three good choices a day. You’re making one good choice a week.

Don’t know what should be your go to protein to prep? What do you most often go after at the Whole Foods “ready to eat right now” section. Use that as your starting point.

Other proteins that pull their weight all week, zero cooking required:

• Hard-boiled eggs (about a week in the shell)

• Canned beans or chickpeas (rinse and go)

• Cottage cheese (criminally underrated)

• Canned tuna or salmon (no timing, no fridge anxiety). I found this website thanks to a fellow soccer mom who eats their canned fish all the time…and it’s women-owned. Fancy canned tuna and salmon delivered.

The Three Moments This Protects You From

Quick hits — because you already know the why, you just need to see exactly where this lands.

Morning: Coffee is not breakfast, even excellent coffee. I tried adding protein powder to mine once, hoping to combine the two — it just made a thick, caffeinated sludge. Hard pass. Two eggs, Greek yogurt, or cold tofu from your batch eaten over the sink while finding the permission slip — that’s breakfast, and it’s the buffer that keeps your whole morning from running on cortisol alone.

Midday: A salad with chickpeas is a meal. A salad without protein is plant confetti. And here’s the part that doesn’t get said enough: skipping lunch to “save room” for dinner doesn’t just wreck your blood sugar — it dulls your ability to read your own hunger and fullness cues, so you arrive at dinner depleted, eat past full, and still don’t feel satisfied. Pack your own lunch in the same five minutes you’re packing the kids’. Future you, sitting in camp-pickup traffic at 3:15 already behind on dinner, will be grateful.

4 p.m.: This is where decision fatigue cashes in every bad option in the pantry. Decide your 4 p.m. snack in the morning, like it’s a meeting you can’t skip — roasted chickpeas, yogurt, an apple with nut butter. Your tired afternoon self isn’t weaker than your morning self. She’s just out of decision-making capacity. Don’t make her use any.

The One Other Thing Summer Quietly Drains: Water

Heat, more time outside, more activity than the school year — your fluid needs go up exactly when your routine makes water the easiest thing to forget. Keep a bottle in the car. Drink something at meals instead of treating it as an afterthought. Watermelon, berries, cucumber, and oranges all count, especially for kids who’d rather negotiate a peace treaty than drink a glass of water in July.

The Bigger Picture: Infrastructure Includes People

Here’s the last piece of infrastructure, and it’s the one most wellness content skips entirely: you are not supposed to build or maintain any of this alone.

Think about why Coca-Cola still advertises. Why McDonald’s still advertises. You already know exactly what those brands are — nobody on earth needs another commercial to learn that McDonald’s sells hamburgers. So why do they keep showing up in your feed, on the radio, on the highway billboard you drive past every single day?

Because there’s actual research behind this, and it’s called the mere exposure effect: people develop a preference for things they’re repeatedly exposed to, even when that exposure is brief, and they’re barely paying attention. It doesn’t require new information. It just requires the thing showing back up in your environment, over and over, until it feels familiar — and familiar things feel like good options. That’s the entire mechanism. It’s not persuasion. It’s just repetition, quietly doing its job in the background of your brain.

Here’s why that matters for vegetables, protein, and your Sunday batch-cook: a group chat works the same way. Nothing dramatic has to happen. Someone just has to post “made the tofu thing again, still good” for the third week in a row, and suddenly tofu is in your head as an option in a way it wasn’t before — not because anyone convinced you of anything, but because it kept showing up.

This is what I call a Power Posse — a small group of real people putting healthy options back in front of each other on repeat, the same way a billboard does, except it’s people you actually like instead of a corporation that wants your money. Someone who texts at 9 a.m. to ask about breakfast. A friend who mentions her grocery list. None of it is new information. All of it is exposure, and exposure is what moves the needle that information alone can’t.

Summer is the best time to start one, because nobody has it together right now, and the bar for showing up imperfectly is refreshingly low.

A Note on Shame (Because It Comes Up Every Summer)

Summer eating feels like failure to a lot of women I talk to, and I want to name that directly. The inner monologue shows up fast: I have no self-control.

That narrative isn’t accurate. Your environment changed, your schedule changed, and the invisible systems that were quietly doing the work disappeared. That’s not a character flaw. It’s logistics.

The goal isn’t perfection. It’s one piece of infrastructure back in place — the Sunday protein batch, the 4 p.m. snack decided in advance, one person to text — so September doesn’t feel like starting over.

I’m Mandy — physiotherapist, health coach, and founder of Innovative Life Physio and Wellness. I write for women in midlife who are tired of wellness advice that ignores what their lives actually look like. If this resonated, subscribe and share it with someone who needs it.

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And in the middle of that reset, I keep coming back to one question my career counselor encouraged me to sit with last week: why do capable women keep trying to do personal goals alone?

So now you’re part of my quest — a dive into my own mind and the research on why I have been complete crap at reaching for specific goals and why the answer keeps pointing to the same uncomfortable place—committing to be vulnerable with a friend(s) who can help me stay accountable to the one person I tend to leave in the dust. Myself.

Brace yourself — because this next number is about as welcome as a toddler with a Sharpie near a white couch.

Only 8% of people actually achieve their goals. Not the goals they halfheartedly mention in January. The ones they genuinely want. The ones they think about on repeat in the car, or in the shower, or at 9:17 pm when the house is finally quiet and they have five minutes to themselves before they collapse into bed.

8%. Those are not the odds I want for my kids (or myself). And since I am committed to showing my kids that I can continue working for the things in life I want, even when it is really hard, I am making sure I figure out the best system for me to get there, imperfectly, sliding into home plate with a few teeth missing but still sliding in there.

The most common reason people don’t hit their goals isn’t laziness. It isn’t a lack of discipline or willpower — although that is what we all say we don’t have enough of, right after we finish doing six things at once while mentally composing a grocery list. It isn’t that the goal was wrong or the timing was bad or life got in the way — although life absolutely gets in the way, because it always does.

The most common reason is that people try to do it entirely on their own and never even write it down. They set the goal quietly in their head, carry it quietly, and when it doesn’t happen, they let it go quietly too. Nobody knew, so nobody needs to know it didn’t work out.

So why are we like this? Why are the most capable, competent women still convinced they need to white-knuckle their own goals in silence? We’ll rearrange the entire calendar, and spend hours on deep-dives for our kids dreams — yet when it comes to asking for help with our own goals, we act like it’s a sign-up sheet for a lifetime supply of mom guilt.

We will move mountains for everyone else. We will quietly abandon our own mountains and tell nobody.

The research says goals shouldn’t be hard.

The research has never stood in a kitchen at 6:00 trying to remember what it wanted for itself while simultaneously locating someone’s shin guard. Just sayin’

Dr. Gail Matthews, a psychology professor at Dominican University, ran one of the most cited studies on goal achievement ever conducted. She split 267 participants into five groups, each with a different level of structure and support around their goals.

Group one simply thought about their goals but never wrote them down. Group two wrote their goals. Group three wrote their goals and made specific action commitments. Group four wrote their goals, made action commitments, and shared both with a supportive friend. Group five did all of that — plus sent that friend a weekly progress report.

The results were not subtle. The group with the full structure — written goals, action commitments, a person they shared with, and weekly check-ins — achieved 77% more than the group who only thought about their goals and kept everything to themselves.

It wasn’t just telling a friend that moved the needle. It was the specific combination of writing it down, committing to action, sharing it with someone, and then checking in consistently. Each layer added something, and when combined, it was like chipotle lime mayonnaise.

I didn’t use mayonnaise until I found chipotle lime. Before, it was just plain, and it didn’t work for me, but the chipotle and lime BOTH added up to make it a secret sauce of life—just like when you think about goals alone or make action steps alone. They don’t work. It is the combination of thinking, writing, planning the steps to get there, and consistently sharing that with a friend that makes it the secret sauce of goal pursuit.

James Clear talks about accountability in Atomic Habits, but his approach is built around avoiding embarrassment or punishment — like setting up a contract where you pay money if you mess up. That’s the “I don’t want to look bad” strategy. What Dr. Matthews’ research shows is different: it’s about moving toward what matters to you, not running from failure. And research consistently shows that positive, forward-facing motivation outlasts shame-based motivation every time. Shame is not the secret sauce, but fear of shame can be why we don’t look for a friend to create some secret goal sauce.

Why does sharing goals feel so hard?

The first reason I will probably hear from most people is time. And don’t get me wrong, my time and your time is like a toddler in a tiara, short and precious.

BUT it’s not really about time — a check-in with a friend takes less time than the time I spend redirecting my kids to get ready for school in the morning. Seriously, it is interesting that every day it seems like a surprise that they need socks. They get dressed but never ever come down for breakfast with socks.

Research from Carnegie Mellon published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology found something interesting: women are actually more willing than men to share both the good and the hard stuff — but only when someone else goes first. We’re wired for connection and disclosure. We will absolutely tell you everything once we feel safe enough to start.

Decades of research on self-silencing — a term introduced by psychologist Dana Jack — shows that women learn to suppress their own thoughts and feelings specifically to protect their relationships and avoid conflict or judgment. Not because we’re private people. Because somewhere between seventh grade and now, we learned that certain kinds of honesty carry social risk. That wanting something out loud and not getting it is its own kind of humiliation. That the safest move is to keep the real stuff quiet until you’re sure — really sure — that the room is safe.

Taylor Swift had the right idea. Shake it off. But first, you need a room where there’s nothing to shake off in the first place because the people around you are rooting for you, not quietly sizing up whether you’re qualified to make it.

The actual problem to solve to get your own secret sauce of goal pursuit is to find the specific one, two, or three women with whom being seen wanting something you don’t have yet is not risky — it’s the whole point.

That’s not a therapy assignment. It’s a practical decision about who gets access to the real version of what you’re working toward.

I wrote about exactly how to find and build that group a while back — the advocates, the trusted critics, the people you think are just a little bit badass. I called it your Power Posse, shamelessly stealing the name from a Robin Arzon Peloton workout. If you want the how-to on actually finding your people, that piece is worth your time.

P.S. Find the link at the end of the article

The part we rarely stop to think about when we talk about going after our goals

Here is something the self-help industry almost never tells you — possibly because it makes the whole enterprise feel a little less like a “self-help” and a lot more like “us help.”

When you decide to take better care of yourself — and you do it openly, with a friend or two as a weekly touchpoint — the benefits don’t stay with you. They leave the room, and a ripple effect follows.

Harvard physician and sociologist Nicholas Christakis and political scientist James Fowler spent years analyzing the Framingham Heart Study, one of the longest-running health studies ever conducted, tracking over 15,000 people across decades. What they found overturned the way most of us think about personal health decisions.

Healthy behaviors spread through social networks like contagion — three degrees out. Your choices influence your friends. Your friends influence their friends. Those people influence their friends. People you will never meet are quietly being shaped by you.

Think about what that means for a small group of women reaching toward something better together. You are not just building your own momentum. You are — measurably, statistically — improving the health trajectory of the people connected to every woman who is in your power posse. The ripple goes out three degrees in every direction, to people who will never know your name.

That is not a small thing. That is the actual science of why women rise further together. And it is a considerably better reason to show up for your goals than guilt, discipline, or the vague hope that this time will be different.

Next week: Brené Brown, a World War Two general, and Sheryl Sandberg all figured out the same thing about imperfect action — and I’ll give you the questions I have been using with my Power Posse. It takes each person 15 minutes to go through the questions. If you are meeting with one other person it is 30 minutes of your week you can do while taking a break after getting the kids out the door for school.

If this landed somewhere real for you, forward it to the woman in your life who has been carrying a goal quietly for too long. She knows who she is.

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She finally snaps: “I’m done doing everything for everyone while you just exist here.”

If you’ve seen it, you know. If you haven’t, look up The Skorys on YouTube Shorts (obviously after you read this post, because otherwise you will get stuck in the YouTube short zone and this article will be ever so much better than that). The short in question is 90 seconds of every mom’s breaking point. This is exactly where this story starts—but not because the breaking point is the destination. Rather, it’s because most of us have been there, and nobody talks about what comes after.

Now, let’s move from that breaking point to what follows. Do you just occasionally keep exploding in anger? Do you accept that your entire family and your spouse are huge jerks that don’t care how hard it is to do what you do day in and day out?

____________________________________________________________________________________________

About five months ago, I handed off something I had been carrying for years. Not with a speech. Not with a printed color-coded calendar. I just told my husband that scheduling the kids’ dentist appointments — and actually taking them. Everything involving the dentist was now his job.

Simple, right? Except we were living overseas at the time, which meant every dental appointment came with a full administrative side quest: pay out of pocket, collect the receipt, scan it, upload it to the reimbursement portal, and then — because nothing abroad is ever clean — probably re-send 23 times to the correct place when the first submission vanished into bureaucratic void where only Brad can see it and it is not Brad’s job to get the reimbursement to you so he does nothing. I hate Brad.

But I digress: I explained the whole system. He understood it. He made the appointment.

And then a last-minute work meeting came up, and I took the kids.

And then we evacuated from the Middle East before the reimbursement receipt never got submitted.

So, mixed results on round one.

ROUND TWO

Fast forward to this week, back stateside. New dentist, new forms, fresh start. I found the dentist, filled out all the new-patient paperwork online, and handed it back to him: you’re taking them and dealing with anything else that is needed.

He took them. And then he called me from the waiting room to ask whether the kids had had X-rays at their last appointment or had actually seen a dentist, because the kids said yes, and he didn’t know if that was true.

I stood in my kitchen, holding my phone, feeling the familiar pull—the one that whispers in these moments, “I should have just gone myself.” “I would have known all this.” “Why do I even bother with getting help, because it is faster if I just do it.”

But instead, I just answered the questions (potentially with an exasperated sigh and a non-verbal eyeroll felt across the universe). He handled the rest. He did great.

And here is what I know to be true after years of being the person who kept everything in her head and years of slowly, painfully learning to let things go:

If you carry everything, track everything, manage everything — and you never hand anything off and let someone else figure out the learning curve. But if this is your choice you cannot also be angry that they don’t know how to help. You didn’t give them the chance to figure it out. You kept going until you burned out, and then, from the pit of despair, note that it is everyone else’s fault that you are at the bottom and too burnt out to climb out.

That is not a system. That is a trap you built for yourself. I know because I have done it a time or two. And the exit is uncomfortable for everyone, including you, because to get out, you have to start handing things over and accept that you also, in part, got yourself there.

The Drawer Doesn’t Have to Look Like You Did It

I make my kids fold and put away their own laundry. Their drawers do not look great. We are not running a Gap Kids display situation in this house. But I have painted what done looks like for them — clothes folded, put away so they can actually find things without destroying the whole drawer the next morning (Thank you Marie Kondo) — and when it’s just shoved in there, I ask them to do it again. I don’t do it for them. I don’t silently refold everything at 10pm and feel both virtuous (I am the ONLY one who can do this right) and resentful (I’m done doing everything for everyone while you just exist here).

Because here is the thing I say to my kids all the time, and I mean it every single time: I am not raising children. I am raising adults.

And raising adults is genuinely harder than just doing everything yourself. I am so much faster than they are at every single thing that is adulting. I whine about 27 million times less. It is deeply, sometimes spiritually painful to stand there and watch them do something slowly and imperfectly when I could have finished it in forty-five seconds.

But the point is that they are being set up to function as humans when they leave this house—so they aren’t baffled by laundry or expecting someone else to manage dental insurance.

The same logic applies to your partner. Getting help from someone you haven’t really pushed for help from before is painful at first. There is a learning curve. There will be a phone call from a waiting room asking about X-rays. That is not failure. That is just the beginning of the process.

Paint What Done Looks Like

Brené Brown has this concept she uses in leadership called “Paint What Done Looks Like.” Don’t assume everyone shares the same mental picture of what finished means. Be specific. Be clear. Not in a condescending way — just in a this-is-what-I-need-the-end-result-to-be way.

It is time-consuming to do this for the first time. It will feel, at least once, like you are explaining something to another fully grown adult who should probably already know it. That feeling is valid, and you are allowed to have it quietly in your own head or acknowledge it with a friend, as I did with my friend Alice yesterday. Just don’t say it out loud to the person who is currently attempting to give you what you consider mediocre help.

But the alternative is keeping the whole operating manual inside your head—every appointment, every deadline, everything that needs to happen before the next thing—and wondering why no one else seems to notice the hill you’re climbing every day.

They don’t notice because you never showed them the hill.

You know the receipt needs to be re-uploaded, the lunchbox washed the night before, and that camp registration opens in January and fills up quickly—because you built the system and kept it to yourself.

Being a family means everyone pulls their weight in some way, shape, or form. That is true whether you work outside the home, inside the home, or some exhausting combination of both. It means communicating before it is Wednesday, and you really could have used two hours at a coffee shop to think — and instead you are white-knuckling it through the week because no one knew to offer.

Dad Dinner and The Charcuterie Board

In our house, for the past two weeks, there has been Dad’s dinner day, which means grilling and a very basic salad. There is also charcuterie days most weeks, which is really just throwing fruit, vegetables, crackers, cheese, and meat onto a large surface and letting the kids graze outside while I do not have to referee their arguments because I sit inside with my charcuterie and some wine.

Those nights exist because I need them. I cannot cook from scratch every night and also have energy for things that matter to me, like exercising or a walk with a friend. So some nights, someone else handles it in their own way, and I try to let that be enough, even if my husband thinks I have a judgmental face when his way of making salad is to open the grocery store container and put tongs inside.

Maybe I do, and maybe I don’t.

Here is the thing to keep in mind. A different way to do a task doesn’t mean it is wrong (still working on this myself, as my husband will be the first to tell you).

The task is no longer yours, which was the whole point. Paint what done looks like and then walk away. They can figure out how they want to do the process for themselves. So if you, too, have a resting judgmental face, potentially leave the room or the house so that the task can be completely owned by that member of the family.

Your Kids Are Watching All of It

There is a longer game here, and it matters more than any single dentist appointment.

Your son is watching. If he grows up seeing his dad exist in the house — present, well-meaning, but functionally uninvolved in the logistics of keeping a family running — he is getting a very clear education. He is learning that the invisible work isn’t his job to notice. That it will just happen, the way the heat comes on, or the fridge stays full. Running a household is someone else’s problem. It is someone else’s domain.

Your daughter is watching too. She is learning what to expect from a partner. Whether equal means equal, or whether it means she spends the next twenty years running everything alone and calling it FINE. She is quietly seething with anger over what needs to be managed, but no one will help her because she never tells people she needs help.

Mom’s—we don’t teach this with a conversation about whether there are specific gender roles in our house. We teach it by letting our kids watch both parents doing the boring, invisible, logistical work of running a home together, imperfectly, with a phone call from a waiting room about X-rays and a charcuterie board on a Tuesday night.

The unseen work of a family should not fall on one person. Share it, show it, and let everyone take part. That ensures your kids learn that running a household is everyone’s responsibility, not just yours. The mom in that video didn’t want to snap over frozen chicken. She wanted a partner. She wanted her kids to grow up knowing that household management belongs to everyone.

That’s all any of us want. The hill is real. It belongs to everyone. Show them the hill.

The hardest part of all of this is getting it out of your head and onto paper. I made a free worksheet to help you do exactly that — a fillable “Paint What Done Looks Like” guide broken down by every area of your household. Meals, laundry, medical appointments, school and activities, seasonal projects. Each one has space to write exactly what done looks like, assign an owner, and set a frequency.

Paint What Done Looks Like Innovative Life Household Management

268KB ∙ PDF file

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→ Grab the free worksheet here

If any part of this sounded like something you have talked to with your Alice, send it to them. The woman who has everything mostly handled except herself is everywhere — she just doesn’t always know how to make life look different.

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You already know what that version looks like. You’ve thought about it in the car, at the doctor’s office, in the shower before someone knocked on the bathroom door to ask where their socks are.

Here is the thing nobody tells you about that version of your life: you are not going to get there by trying harder alone. You are going to get there because of who you decide to let into it.

I want to tell you about the Power Posse. And then I want to help you build one.

First, a word about the name

Power Posse was not coined in a research lab. I shamelessly stole it from a Robin Arzon Peloton workout I sweated through a while back and I have never once apologized for it. If academic researchers wanted their work to sound less like a mandatory HR training, they should have called it The Power Posse Phenomenon instead of The Effect of Social Construct Paradigms. Just saying.

The concept, however, is backed by some of the most robust research in behavioral science. And once you understand what it actually shows, you will never think about your social circle the same way again.

The uncomfortable truth about who you’re surrounding yourself with

In 2009, two business professors at Columbia University — Paul Ingram and Michael Morris — fitted students and executives at a campus social mixer with recording devices and tracked every conversation during the evening.

Before the event, 95% of participants said they were eager to meet new people and expand their networks.

By the end of the night, half of them had spent the majority of their time talking to people they already knew.

We say we want to grow. We default to comfortable. Every single time.

This matters more than it sounds because of what Harvard physician and sociologist Nicholas Christakis and political scientist James Fowler found when they spent years analyzing the Framingham Heart Study — one of the longest-running health studies ever conducted, tracking over 15,000 people across decades.

Healthy behaviors spread through social networks like contagion, three degrees out. Your choices influence your friends. Your friends influence their friends. Those people influence their friends. The same is true in the other direction — obesity, smoking, and unhappiness cluster and spread through social networks too.

Which means the people you default to talking to at a Tuesday night mixer are quietly shaping your health trajectory. Not by giving you advice. Just by existing in your orbit.

John Maxwell put it plainly:

He wasn’t being motivational-poster vague. He was describing a mechanism that researchers have now confirmed operates at both biological and behavioral levels.

You are not just influenced by the people closest to you. You are statistically shaped by their friends too. And their friends’ friends.

So what actually is a Power Posse?

It is not your best friend group.

It is not the people who already agree with everything you think.

It is not an Instagram accountability pod where everyone posts their morning routines, and nobody talks about the hard weeks that you have faced. There is way more social pressure to eat protein as an adult than there is to take drugs as a teen, so as a result, you feel more shame about your breakfast choices than when you weren’t invited to the cool parties. But I digress.

A Power Posse is your growth network — a small, deliberately chosen group of people who, between them, can do four things:

They can listen without fixing. Some people are a ball of fun to be around, but they cannot sit in a hard conversation without immediately trying to solve it. Your posse needs people who can be still when stillness is what’s needed — people who help you think through what’s ahead without letting you spiral into everything you haven’t done yet.

They are honest about their own failures. The most valuable people in your growth network are not the ones who look like they have it together. They are the ones who are authentic about how they have failed and kept going anyway. They are safe to be honest around because they have been honest first.

They are doing something you want to do. Not perfectly. Not on Instagram. Actually doing it — making time for movement, taking their health seriously, showing up for themselves in ways you admire. Maybe it is a parent you see at school who handles things with the kind of calm you want. Maybe it is a podcast host whose framework changed how you think. Maybe it is someone you have seen from afar in your own life who is doing something you want to do and you have never once asked them how. Message them. Write them a note. Ask if they want to get coffee. The worst they can say is no and you will survive it.

They are not all from your inner circle. This is the one that requires actual courage. Your Power Posse needs people who are outside your existing comfort zone — people who will expand what you think is possible, not just confirm what you already believe.

Why this feels uncomfortable and why you should do it anyway

The Columbia mixer study showed us something important: even people who genuinely want to grow will default to the familiar when they’re not being deliberate about it. This isn’t a character flaw. It’s how humans are wired. Familiar feels safe. Growth feels like a social risk.

But here is the actual risk calculation your brain is getting wrong: staying inside your existing circle means your health behaviors, your ambitions, and your sense of what’s possible are being shaped by people who are at exactly the same level you are right now. That is not comfortable. That is stagnant.

The women who make real progress on their health — not the dramatic before-and-after kind, but the sustainable, years-long kind — almost universally have people around them who are slightly ahead of where they want to be. Not intimidatingly so. Just enough to make the next step feel visible and real.

How to start building yours

These are not big steps. Big steps don’t stick. These are small, specific actions that take less than twenty minutes total.

Get deliberate. Write down three to five names of people who are doing something you want to do — in health, in how they show up as a parent, in how they take care of themselves. They do not have to be people you know well. They just have to be people you genuinely admire for something specific.

Get outside. Go for a walk without your phone. Take a piece of paper and a pen. Let your mind wander. See who else shows up. Some of your best Power Posse candidates are people you have been passively admiring for months without ever doing anything about it.

Get going. Write down one concrete action next to each name — a message to send, a coffee to suggest, a podcast to reach out to. Write the date you will do it. Not a vague intention. A date.

You do not need a big group. Two or three people who are genuinely in your corner and slightly ahead of where you want to be will change your trajectory more than a hundred followers who like your posts.

One more thing

If you are reading this and thinking this sounds good but you are not sure exactly how to turn a Power Posse into a regular, structured check-in that actually works — that is what I wrote about this week in the main article. The specific questions, the fifteen-minute format, the research on why the structure matters as much as the people.

Start here to find your people. Go there to learn what to do with them once you have them.

Know someone who has been trying to do everything alone for too long? Send this to her. She probably already knows who should be in her Power Posse. She just needs permission to ask.

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