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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When the Ground Moves
I spent years adapting to a world I did not fit into without understanding how much of that effort was rooted in compromised equilibrium. Vestibular migraine gave me a new lens for balance, reputation, grief, and…
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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.
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What They Hate in You Is Missing in Them. Maybe.
Jealousy may explain someone’s reaction. So might fear, resentment, misunderstanding, status threat, or something else entirely. The Cardinal Rule starts with behavior before motive.
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When Another Person’s Story Stirs Your Own
Another person’s story can stir grief, memory, fear or longing without making them responsible for what it activated. A reflection and four-step practice for holding compassion and boundaries at the same time.
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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.