Tag Archives: Michelle Ghilotti

Kids Need You To Be…

Focus on your happiness, so you can raise happiness. Your joy is 1,000,000% connected to what your children need. Kids Need You To Be…

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This place ~ Amsterdam~ where I once lived and had a baby is my happy place.

This photo is from 2019 but on a warm July day in 2005 this: in fast labor, almost driven to the hospital by a taxi because we could not get a hold of our friends (me in the shower, warm water hitting my low back, asking Josh every 30 seconds while he was on the phone if he had found anyone to take us yet — there was no hopping on our bikes time this, our primary mode of transport for four years).

Turns out, our friends were at a rave and taxis are not readily available on Sundays 🚕😳🍹— landlords saving the day (the only comfortable position :::: me on all fours in the back seat of their car…their fear and mine palpable 😆😰🙏🏽).

Got there in time and a bouncing baby boy he, Nolan Luc Mandel, definitely was!!

Let’s make happiness your business by creating your authentic brand…

To the best of the rest of your life!

Life is good.

How Relationships Are Connected To Your Branding

I talk a lot about relationships as a business and brand coach because the health of our relationships IS the health or success inside our business. So, How Relationships Are Connected To Your Branding.

The relationships you hold that are fruitful, joyful, healthy, evolving and, generally, on the up and up, push those same qualities into your creations.

T r u t h.

Our relationships give us the energy, mental stamina, as well as the health & expanse of mind to fully lean in and create to our potential (a healthy relationship with self is obviously integral and included as a theme here).

To bring your full self to your business (which, as entrepreneurs, we are called to do every day 💯), we need solid (healthy) relationships, for if not, they are a distraction and drain (let some go!).

Want a more fruitful and successful business? Make relationships your business!

[The other reason I write or share about relationships: my people and PEOPLE are everything. 🙋🏻‍♀️]

Let’s make happiness your business by creating your authentic brand…

To the best of the rest of your life!

Life is good.

Their Time, Not Ours

“I don’t want to be and I don’t GET to be in my own “stuff” on Nolan’s time!”

That’s what I said to a friend recently, when we were talking about parenthood ~> as parents, let’s make sure our inner wounded kid is NOT the one raising our kids.

Every morning, we do GET to recommit to seeing or feeling what ails us and walk straight into dismantling it, or making clearer sense of it so that we don’t pass that particular “work”, trauma or ancestral wounding to our kids…period, end of story (and we do want it to be period & the end of the generational story in most cases).

Carve out the time to continually be doing your work on YOUR stuff, so you’re not acting out the wounding or trouble from LONG ago on their time / in their life or in their relationship with you (have it be instead what it’s meant to to be ~> brand new and ah filled with equilibrium, openness, wonder and pure, like you’re creating an entirely new relationship with new rules, new mutual respect, a new healthy love and new spirit baked into every ounce than maybe you grew up with?).

We want to pass down a lot to our kids and trouble and/or our trauma ain’t two of those things. 😉

It’s not theirs to do with or deal with, it’s ours to handle and the great thing is that we have the capacity for it.

They’re so worth it…as are you, as are you!!

(the younger Nolan in these pics or the older Nolan IRL is the best!).

Let’s make happiness your business by creating your authentic brand…

To the best of the rest of your life!

Life is good.

“Our” Kids Belong To LIFE

CELEBRATING—I understood the assignment!

In May, in the US, we celebrate the mother and in June we celebrate the father, but hot damn if parents and mothers (moms, you carry a very specific mother load!) shouldn’t celebrate EVERY hot chance we get.

After having dropped Nolan off a couple hours away here in Mexico, I’m 💃🏽 celebrating that I get it.

He belongs to life…

And I LOVE that. True, freeing, joyful.

We dropped him off at his second conservancy project a couple days ago (the first one last July at an animal conservancy in Kenya…I didn’t sleep the night before because I was so nervous putting my child on a bus on iffy roads for four hours from Nairobi (the org’s bus, mind you, but still), but he was ready, so…ready Josh and I had to be!

At this point, they genuinely belong to life, not to us (it was an illusion anyway, they never “belonged” to us)…”my kid(s)” or “our kids” is more “these people who came from me/from us, but who are not “mine/or ours”.

For this letting go in parenthood in excitement vs nerves, I celebrate and for what it means to be the parent of a young adult and the pride held around who that young adult is, and that through the challenges we all go through and that’s he’s experienced, he perseveres and moves to his own beat (auténtico), I celebrate!

This week, he’s in mama ocean scuba diving her waters and doing marine conservation.

I share this here, but best of all, deeply internalizing this moment of feeling more ready and understanding of THE assignment.

Thank you, life for the maneuvering of all your waters, throughout the whole of my own life, for it’s clicked. 😉

In gratitude, too, for almost 17 years of the grand gift of motherhood and of the equal gift of togetherness — and that through the bobbing and swimming of both buoyant and tiring waters, we are WE.

*We* weave and swim it all as individuals, but together — together, but as individuals.

Moms, maybe, this is our *collective* assignment and celebration…
we are individuals, but, together!

They belong (we all belong) to LIFE.

Let’s make happiness your business by creating your authentic brand…

To the best of the rest of your life!

Life is good.