Field Notes from the Messy Middle
TL;DR
After 20 years building brands for businesses, I'm finally applying my own expertise to my life, and documenting what happens along the way.
Season 4 of the Joy First Podcast is my real-time experiment in becoming my own guinea pig: auditing six key areas of my life (vitality, relationships, work, creativity) while writing a book about joy: field notes from the messy middle.
What's changing: Bi-weekly episodes focused on life (not business). Deeper conversations happening on the new Joy Journal Substack. First few episodes will be life audits you can take yourself, starting with the Joy First Pulse baseline quiz.
What's coming: Six-twelve months of honest documentation as I take you behind the scenes of implementing joy first in my own life: in the midst of all the mess: perimenopause, anxiety, weight loss, marriage, kids, and business... what does it really look like to choose joy over fear, imperfectly.
LINKS
Join the conversation:
- Join the Joy Journal on Substack: https://joyfirstworld.substack.com/
- Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/joyfirstworld
- Take the Joy First Pulse audit [coming next episode]
Looking for business content?
Follow me on LinkedIn for B2B branding and marketing insights.
Welcome to Season 4
Hello, my friends. Welcome back to the Joy First® Podcast.
We're now in season four of this beautiful little joy journey, and this marks the beginning of something very different. Something special, I hope. And we're just going to see where it takes us.
The Podcast Journey So Far...
This is my fourth podcast. Maybe fifth. I've lost count.
My first was called Animal House, launched back in 2015 for pet businesses as I was building Working with Dog and writing Million Dollar Dog Brand. That was my 2016—going all in on pet entrepreneurs. I even coined the term "petpreneur" before all the -preneurs were a thing.
Then came Magic Maker, which I still love. That one holds up. Lots of personal growth navigating important years in my business development.
- Then kids
- Then COVID
- Then Pirate Radio: going live on Facebook every day for quite a while.
Then I came back to podcasting with Joy Color Impact and Dogs. The name was lame. I didn't care. I wasn't trying to be SEO-friendly. I just needed to find my feet again in audio.
As I crystallized my mission, we rebranded everything to Joy First and launched the Joy First Podcast in November 2024. We had a solid year in 2025, and now we're stepping into 2026.
The Big Transition: From Business to Life
Here's what's been happening behind the scenes for the last two years: I've been building content, ideas, and messaging for life.
All of my experience—my content, marketing, messaging, products, business—has been for business. And this transition has been a delicate dance.
We've launched new social channels (Joy First World on Instagram and TikTok). I've been experimenting to find what feels good AND what's strategically sound.
The classic "what got you here won't get you there" situation.
Why the Shift Matters
My primary job is still marketing and branding—helping people grow brands and businesses. I'll never get tired of that. I was just at a co-working mastermind yesterday, and my mind lights up when I think about the possibilities, the crossover between people's unique skills and marketplace opportunities. That's where I find flow and feel alive.
But here's what's becoming more true: the work I'm doing now has massive implications for our lives.
And my life needs more attention.
For so much of my existence, my life has been dominated by my business. I loved that. It was on purpose. Yes, I burned out twice before I was 30. But I learned lessons, and since then, so much of my joy has been aligned with my work.
But now I have young children—ages four and six. I have a maturing marriage (coming up on 12 years). I have an aging body, which is super fun. Our parents are getting older.
I'm moving into that time of life where the intellectual pursuit of work, mission, purpose, and creativity has to take a slight step back in terms of time and energy.
And I'm learning how to do that. It's new. It's challenging. It's difficult because work is my happy place.
The Unexpected Journey of Color Psychology
I never expected that pursuing color psychology would bring me to talking about clothes, makeup, and interior design. Those were never my specialties.
But the powerful transformations I've seen my clients have as we deep dive into color's role as a gateway to joy? That's changed everything.
I've been an advocate for what I used to call "freedom and fulfillment" for a really long time—since burning out young. Now it just has a different name. Now I call it Joy. And now I understand it better.
The research I've been doing on where joy crosses over with color is not only fascinating and powerful, but as I've offered these insights, protocols, philosophies, and tools to my clients and watched them apply it to their lives—I've realized this matters so much more than just brand work.
The Book: Joy First
I'm writing a book called Joy First.
It's about finding, choosing, and sharing more joy each day to live a richer, fuller, more fun life. To look good, feel great, live longer, and love better. Together.
It's about well-being AND revolution.
The book has structure. It has research. It has the Joy Codes (10 of them) and the Battlegrounds (6 of them)—the prescriptive "Joy First way" of finding, choosing, and sharing joy every day.
But here's what I've realized: none of that matters, none of it becomes accessible, none of it becomes possible for you to pick up and digest and make part of you unless it makes sense in real time. In your life. In my life.
The Gap Between Teaching and Living
I've really struggled with embodying the thing I'm writing about and teaching.
And discovering that struggle? That IS the whole point.
It's been a powerful experience, and I'm looking forward to sharing it with you. I'm looking forward to you sharing your experiences with me.
How This Season Will Work
The very first few episodes are going to be audits.
I'm going to audit six key areas of my life, and I'm going to invite you to do the same.
Any good business audit, any good transformation, has to start with a really clear, honest evaluation of where you are right now.
For over 10 years, I've used a happiness quiz inside my "why finding" work and inside communities and masterminds I've led. I've modified it with the Joy First framework.
I'm calling it the Joy First Pulse—take your pulse on where you're at now.
I'm going to be my own guinea pig first. I'll share it with you so you can take it too and give yourself a baseline. A score.
Hopefully, when we circle back a year from now, that number will be a lot closer to where you want it to be.
The Six Life Audits
My first audit is going to be all around vitality, health, and wellbeing.
I know a huge thing I need to do immediately is deal with perimenopause and getting some hormones in my body. So much of my struggle has been connected to that. And it keeps getting pushed and pushed and pushed.
Not anymore.
Health and vitality is a really important part of our joy. And as I invite you along on this journey, I hope it becomes a space you look forward to. A space where we can create interesting dialogue.
The New Joy Journal on Substack
I'm launching a Substack called the Joy Journal.
We're going back to a bi-weekly schedule on this public podcast. And we'll also be publishing bi-weekly on a private podcast for Substack members.
I'm going to be much deeper and more intimate over there, sharing vulnerable parts of the conversation I don't feel comfortable sharing to the whole world.
I'll be sharing resources and tools. One conversation I'm really excited about is a deep dive into weight loss with a friend, as that's been a really important part of my joy journey over the past year.
Not everybody cares about that. Not everybody's interested. That's the kind of thing where I'll go on tangents and share people and resources that might help you on your own journey in rabbit-hole kind of ways.
You can find us at JoyFirstWorld on Substack. We'll have chats. We'll probably have live sessions. A place where conversation goes two ways, where I can hear from you as well as share with you.
Where to Find Me
We've got a new Instagram at @JoyFirstWorld. That's going to be our primary platform for sharing the stuff we talk about in this podcast.
We do have a TikTok, although I realized last fall that TikTok is not very good for my mental health. So we're not going to be a TikTok-first creator. But we'll continue to share over there.
Instagram and Substack are where the real conversation will happen.
What's Changing (and What's Not)
Season 4 will be a lot more personal conversation about life. A lot less about business, marketing, and branding.
If you want to still receive that content from me, make sure you're subscribed to my emails and check us out on LinkedIn. That's where we'll continue to go heavy on B2B branding and marketing genius.
We'll save this space for the more intimate personal life conversation.
And hopefully, that's exactly what you need right now. I'm betting on it, because every conversation I've had with anyone has led me to that conclusion.
The Story-Gathering Mission
The place that really matters for this book is the stories.
The stories that need to be told to really make this book accessible. To get me out of that teacher-preachy "this is how it is" position and into storyteller mode.
I need to talk it out. I need to work out some stuff in my own world that I think you're going to help me do.
I want to invite you to share your stories with me about how any of this stuff has impacted you.
Together, over the next six months or so—maybe longer—we're going to curate and collect the stories that will go into this book and bring it to life.
I'm reaching out to experts. I'm documenting my own experiments. I'm inviting you into the process.
An Invitation
I will try to keep these episodes between 20 and 40 minutes so they're digestible for you quickly. It's much easier to ramble on than to be concise.
There will be opportunities in the Substack to go deeper. (I had an article come out in the Telegraph recently—I'll share all about that in one of those deep dives.)
For now, I want to invite you to subscribe to this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you listen.
Join us on Substack. Get stuck into the conversation over there.
We're doing some really cool changes online with our websites, which I'll keep you updated on.
What's Next
Next episode, I'll share the behind-the-scenes of these audits. I'll share the audit you can take yourself for your own life to start your own Joy First baseline.
And we'll embark upon this incredible experiment together and see where we end up by the end of this year.
We'll start extrapolating lessons from this experiment, from this journey we're taking together.
I'm so glad you're here 🧡
