The Infamous They

Call her what you want but Erykah Badu dances to the beat of her own drum and inspires many by doing so. source We are always concerned about what "they" will say. They say we can't do it. They say that we must fit a certain definition. They say that this is right and this is wrong. They say all kinds of things, don't they? They know what's best. They know what we should be afraid of, what we should look like and who we should date. The infamous "they" are the general public, the media, church, family, friends, coworkers, neighbors, strangers even naysayers and haters. Many of us will listen to anyone and anything other than our own divine intuition....

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Project: Seven Hours of Sleep or More

“They sleep. We grind.” That’s a phrase I see tweeted often by Miss “FatBellyBella” aka Erykah Badu (usually as I’m doing my early morning timeline scroll). And I sometimes feel just a little bit guilty as I’m getting out of bed because I was indeed one of those who was sleeping. But then I remember that I’m just one of those people that needs rest. I currently average approximately 5-6 hours of sleep per night after squeezing in as many of the professional, parenting and personal tasks that I can cram into the other 18-19 hours of the day. I start out the week on Monday with a positive attitude, a big smile and my “to do” list tucked safely...

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Pretty Things: Low Maintenance Beauty

The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak. ~Hans Hofmannphoto creditWhile watching Lost the other day on Netflix, I thought to myself: if I was stranded on an island for months, I would look a hot mess! No tweezers, no razors, no makeup or nail polish, no HAIR PRODUCTS?!?! The visual is just too disturbing to contemplate.This train of thought led me to realize a few things:* I'm always worried about how I look* I'm more high maintenance with my beauty routines than I admit to myself* High maintenance routines are not necessary to look good* I want to live more simply and require less stuffWhy is...

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Productive vs. Busy

I recently took two tests on the New York Times website: one that tests your focus and level of distractibility and another that tests how fast you juggle tasks. I got 100% of the focusing tests correct, meaning I was not easily distracted. According to the article, “Researchers at Stanford University found that high multitaskers performed poorly when presented with multiple distractions, meaning they had trouble filtering out irrelevant information. Low multitaskers were not affected by the distractions and could hold more items in their short term memory.” I fared differently on the tests for juggling tasks, being very slow to switch in-between tasks, even when repeating the same task. “Researchers at Stanford found heavy multitaskers to be significantly slower at switching tasks…and even...

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