Slingshot Designs

Category: Family & Community

  • When Growth Changes the System

    When Growth Changes the System

    Growth rarely happens in isolation. When one part of a relationship, team, family, or organization changes, the surrounding system has to reorganize around a new reality.

  • What We Grow From What We Refuse to Waste

    What We Grow From What We Refuse to Waste

    What compost taught me about systems, repair, marriage, and the quiet wins that tell us a life has changed: growth begins when we stop exporting every difficult thing and learn to process what can still become useful.

  • Field Notice: The Cardinal Chronicles Are Opening

    Field Notice: The Cardinal Chronicles Are Opening

    The Cardinal Chronicles are opening: an eight-week field series using The Cardinal Rule™ to examine growth, conflict, evidence, systems, relationships, attention, and self-leadership in practice.

  • Smoked Meat Friends

    Smoked Meat Friends

    Some relationships are like smoked meat: salty, satisfying, memorable—and best understood in small doses. Fun isn’t the same as nourishing.

  • Back on the Map

    Back on the Map

    Permanence changed more than the way I understand my hands. It changed the way my husband and I understand pain, caregiving, adaptation—and what it means to bring something we thought was lost back onto the map.

  • You’re Why Your Mom Is Crazy

    You’re Why Your Mom Is Crazy

    A funny, reflective essay about daughters, motherhood, mortality, self-leadership, and the strange privilege of letting our children watch us become people too.

  • Every Love Story Is Wonderful, But Ours Is My Favorite

    Every Love Story Is Wonderful, But Ours Is My Favorite

    Tomorrow is my grandparents’ anniversary. While preparing to write about winning, I found myself thinking about the love they built, the family they created, and the lessons that have continued unfolding long after they…

  • Love, Paperwork, and Hot Febreze

    Love, Paperwork, and Hot Febreze

    Love doesn’t become stronger because life gets easier. It becomes deeper because two people keep choosing to learn each other through every season. Sometimes that looks like Iceland. Sometimes it looks like paperwork,…

  • The Residue We Carry

    The Residue We Carry

    Yesterday, it took me three washes to remove sticky tomato pollen from my hands. It reminded me that the harshest voices we carry often aren’t our own—they’re residue left behind by relationships, workplaces, and…

  • Compliance Is Not Trust

    Compliance Is Not Trust

    Administrative Harm: Field Notes from the Patient Side A completed form is not evidence of informed participation, psychological safety or trust. One unseen electronic signature reveals how easily administrative…

  • The Goal Was Always Zero

    The Goal Was Always Zero

    This essay is one of the more personal pieces I have shared. It sits at the intersection of motherhood, adoption, leadership, and quality—and asks what becomes possible when we finally acknowledge the human systems…

  • I Wish Perspective Was Available at the Gas Pump

    I Wish Perspective Was Available at the Gas Pump

    The conversation about artificial intelligence isn’t really about technology. It’s about judgment, discernment, and how we choose to lead through change. The lessons I learned growing up in my family’s gas station…

  • The Difference Between a Sting and a Wound

    The Difference Between a Sting and a Wound

    A hidden garden flag, a patch of stinging nettle, and a morning storm became a reminder that growth changes our relationship with discomfort. The sting stayed the same. The response did not.

  • The Picture Develops Slowly

    The Picture Develops Slowly

    Pressure compresses attention. Discernment expands it. From classrooms to corporations, parenting to public systems, the challenge is often the same: learning to see patterns rather than fragments and allowing the…

  • Modern Motherhood Requires Systems Navigation

    Modern Motherhood Requires Systems Navigation

    Modern motherhood increasingly requires systems navigation, medical discernment, emotional endurance, and operational leadership. A personal reflection on vestibular migraines, healthcare advocacy, intergenerational…