Slingshot Designs
Writing
Essays, field notes, and applied observations about how people orient under pressure, notice what systems are doing, recover agency, and decide what happens next.
This is a working library, not a niche blog. The throughline is orientation: people, systems, relationships, work, place, recovery, creativity, and the practical consequences of what we notice—or fail to notice. The communities and disciplines beside this work are treated as neighbors and collaborators, not territory to occupy.
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Leadership & Systems
Decision-making, communication, operations, complexity, accountability, and the structures that shape behavior.
Family & Community
Belonging, relationships, local systems, stewardship, and what it takes to remain human when the system is under load.
Steel Toes & Plaid
Manufacturing, work, women, grit, field lessons, blunt truth, and practical rebuilding.
Cardinal Chronicles
Personal essays and narrative observation where memory, place, relationships, identity, and meaning intersect.
Recovery & Repair
Survival easing, grief, repair, capacity, and the work of rebuilding without turning lived experience into a diagnosis or doctrine.
Land, Seasons & Observation
Gardens, land, seasonal work, and the lessons that appear when attention gets quieter and more precise.
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Follow the work
Subscribe for new essays and field notes as the body of work develops. No artificial cadence is promised; the signal matters more than filling the calendar.
Latest writing
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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.
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The Accountability Lesson We Keep Teaching Backward
If you want more accountability from the people around you, the first intervention may not belong to them. A leadership essay and five-question accountability audit on starting from within.
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Run Anyway
You do not need company to begin. Sometimes the right people find you only after you are already in motion.
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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.
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One Piece at a Time
Attention has capacity. Pain, stress, grief, conflict, interruptions and decisions all consume it. Sometimes presence is simply process control: one piece at a time.
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The First Reaction Is Not the Decision
Restraint is recognizing that the first reaction is one option, not an order. Character shows up in how we use our power when another person’s free will collides with ours.
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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.
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Field Note: Curious Enough to Stay
A close encounter with a bald-faced hornet becomes a morning field note on curiosity, distance, observation, and choosing to learn before reacting.
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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.
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When Do Men Get a Group?
A man at my conference lunch table leaned back, crossed his arms, and asked, “When do men get a group?” I had been ready for that question for most of my professional life. What happened next reminded me that…
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You Don’t Have to Come in First to Walk Out a Winner
Winning is not always first place. Sometimes it is the work, the growth, the collaboration, and the scenic route that teaches us who we are.
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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…
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Just Because You Can
I had created a remarkably efficient operating system for overwhelming myself. I had proven, over and over again, that I could. That turned out to be very different from proving that I should.
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What Becomes Possible When We Stop Spending All Our Energy on Survival
There comes a point when survival gets so expensive that you forget what your energy was for. Six months of investigation, advocacy, medical answers, boundaries, and rebuilding capacity taught me something unexpected…
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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,…