The internet often rewards certainty and polished answers. But the women in this community remind me that wisdom is something different. The older I get, the less interested I am in expertise alone. I'm interested in practice. I’m interested in the messiness of everyday life, and how we show up in the moments that become our years.

I want to know how women are navigating business building alongside a culture that didn’t want women in leadership positions for the last two hundred years. I’m hungry to learn from women who let the house be messy, who shift the mental load into visible spaces; who stand up for what they believe in; who give a damn about their own rest and well-being. I want to know how women are navigating business-building alongside caregiving. How they make difficult decisions. How they rethink success. How they manage when they feel like they’re failing at everything. How they stand up for what they believe in. How they create lives that are aligned with their values—not just impressive from the outside.

The women in this community teach me every day. So I decided to start sharing some of their stories. This new series, Wisdom In Practice, is written in collaboration with , a member of Wise Women’s Council. My goal is to shine a light on the remarkable women in our community and the lessons they’re learning as they move through life and leadership. Through conversations and interviews, we’ll explore their work, the challenges they’re navigating, the lessons they’re learning, and the ideas they keep returning to again and again. Read more about the full series here.

Below is our first essay featuring decision engineer and coach Michelle Florendo. She’s been a part of The Wise Women’s Council since the very beginning, and her work has helped thousands of founders and leaders figure out how to make better decisions.

These are not stories about having it all figured out. They are stories about paying attention. These are stories about letting go of who we were, so that we can leap towards who we are becoming. These are stories about changing how we move through life.

I hope you’ll enjoy meeting the women of Wise Women’s Council as much as I’ve enjoyed learning from them.

— Sarah K Peck

Want to learn more about my group coaching program and practice? Check out The Wise Women’s Council and consider applying to join.

The Data Hidden Inside Your Feelings

What Happens When You Stop Optimizing Everything

Essay below written by

When I talked to Stanford-trained Decision Engineer Michelle Florendo, she was mid-move: boxes, logistics, the constant deciding of what stays and what goes. She mentioned it casually, like this kind of complexity was familiar terrain.

Then she said: “My brain loves optimization puzzles.”

“But the real challenge,” she added, “is communicating to all the other parties involved the things that are in my brain.”

If you’ve ever tried to explain the invisible spreadsheet in your head to a partner, a team, or a child who insists the blue cup is a catastrophe—you get it.

Michelle’s work sits at the intersection of structure and humanity. As a decision engineer and executive coach, she helps professionals and small business owners make big, complex decisions with less stress and more clarity. Her background is rigorous—engineering degree, MBA—but her core insight is surprisingly simple.

When I asked what one skill she’d teach everyone, she didn’t say productivity or confidence or morning routines.

She said: the ability to understand what your emotions are telling you—the data inside your feelings.

We’re taught to treat emotions as distractions from “real” decision-making. Michelle argues the opposite. Especially in complex situations, not all useful information is measurable. Emotions are signals—pointing to needs, values, and constraints we haven’t fully named.

Here’s the framework she uses again and again:

1. Notice and name the emotion.

Not just “I’m fine” or “I’m just stressed.”

Actually name it: frustrated, anxious, resentful, disappointed.

2. Ask what’s underneath.

Is it a real need—rest, clarity, support, recognition?

An outdated one—approval, perfection, control?

Or something you haven’t given yourself permission to want?

This is where decision-making opens up.

As Michelle put it, “If you don’t like the options in front of you, your job is to creatively generate more.” Emotions help you see where the existing options are failing—and where new ones might exist.

She sees this everywhere: in four-year-olds learning to manage big feelings, and in executives navigating burnout, recognition, and power. Naming what’s happening turns fog into information.

Michelle didn’t set out to be an entrepreneur. She’s risk-averse by nature. But motherhood made it clear the more traditional paths didn’t work—and instead of forcing herself into a bad choice, she built a better one.

She’s also clear about what’s missing from professional conversations: honest talk about constraints. Time. Energy. Caregiving. The reality that you can’t optimize everything at once.

Decision-making isn’t a game of being perfect. Perfectionism is a trap.

Decision making involves backing up from binary thinking and asking yourself to think more broadly about possibilities. Before jumping into a “pro-con” list, Michelle says it’s best to first figure out what your objectives are from the gate. She reminds people not to get too narrowed into a flipping back and forth over one single option.

Instead, ask yourself to consider a broader range of ideas. What are ALL the possibilities or courses of action that you could choose from? Are there more ways of going about this? What else could be possible?

Your emotions are essential data, because they’re telling you to look more deeply at what’s in front of you. Chances are, if you’re feeling resistance, if you’re feeling irritation or overwhelm, you could be stuck in a pro-con trap.

Maybe, maybe there’s another option that you haven’t thought of yet.

BONUS TIP: Invite a friend who is really good at divergent thinking to help you out with this part. Ask them what you haven’t yet considered.

Part of the work of decision making is the ability to think creatively and explore options beyond what you first see.

Michelle’s work is a relief, not because it makes decisions easy, but because it makes them honest. It makes them fuller. She helps people slow down long enough to hear what actually matters, instead of defaulting to what’s expected, efficient, or externally approved. The result isn’t a perfect choice–it’s something better. It’s a choice that feels true to you, grounded in your values, your dreams, your constraints, and your real life.

In a culture that rewards powering through and second-guessing yourself, that kind of clarity isn’t just useful. It changes how you move through your life.

MEET MICHELLE FLORENDO

Michelle Florendo is a Stanford-trained Decision Engineer, executive coach, speaker, and founder of Powered by Decisions. She helps leaders, founders, and high-achieving professionals make decisions with less stress and more clarity by combining decision science, coaching, and practical frameworks for navigating uncertainty. Over the past decade, she has coached hundreds of leaders, taught decision-making at Stanford, and helped redesign the decision-making curriculum for Stanford’s renowned Designing Your Life program.

Learn more about Michelle:

• Website: Powered by Decisions
• About Michelle: Michelle Florendo Bio
• LinkedIn: Michelle Florendo on LinkedIn
• Podcast: Ask a Decision Engineer

I’m interested in the messiness of everyday life, and how we show up in the moments that become our years. I want to know how women are navigating building their careers and their businesses alongside a culture that didn’t want women in leadership positions for the last two hundred years. I’m hungry to learn from women who let the house be messy, who shift the mental load into visible spaces, who refuse to dance for the patriarchy’s chains, who stand up for what they believe in, who give a damn about their own rest and well-being, who care deeply about their communities, and who aren’t hyper-focused on their individual success at the cost and expense of others.

This is one of the reasons that I first started The Wise Women’s Council. Because I wanted—longed—to talk to more women and to hear their stories, to learn what people are doing in real time, mistakes and all. I wanted to hear more than the superficial magazine cover or the glossy tips about how to have it all or do it all. No more retrospectives, thank you. I need to know how you’re dealing with it in the middle of all this mess. So I started asking people to join me in a masterminds and communities, and those conversations still haven’t stopped.

One of the greatest gifts of The Wise Women’s Council is the women themselves. Every month, I have the privilege of learning alongside founders, executives, consultants, creatives, coaches, and leaders — each of whom are navigating real questions about work, life, leadership, family, ambition, identity, and change.

But I want to do a better job of sharing the work and the wisdom of the Wise Women’s Council here, with all of you. We have such strict confidentiality rules in our community that I can sometimes forget to shine a light on the incredible women and the work that we do together. So I reached out and asked several members if they’d be open to me sharing a bit of their stories. This series, part of our new Collected Wisdom newsletter, is written in collaboration with , a member of The Wise Women’s Council.

Introducing: Wisdom In Practice

A collection of stories, conversations, and lessons from the teachers, alumni, and members of The Wise Women’s Council.

Wisdom in Practice is a series of stories, conversations, and reflections from the Wise Women's Council community. Some essays will feature a single person’s story. Others will gather perspectives from many voices around a shared question. Some will explore ideas from teachers, authors, and experts whose work has shaped our thinking.

Together, they’re an attempt to showcase the deeper conversations we have inside our community. They address a series of questions I continue to return to:

• What does wisdom actually look like when it meets real life?

• How do we choose to live in a way that is most aligned for us?

• How can we live better?

Over the coming weeks and months, I’ll be sharing stories from The Wise Women’s Council community to show you more about the ways that women are living, thinking, and leading differently. I’m excited to tell you about what they’ve learned, the lessons they have to share, and the work that they’re doing.

For the past ten years, I’ve run an intimate women’s group coaching program focused on creating peer-to-peer conversations that don’t often have a landing place to happen elsewhere. It’s a place for women to bring up hard topics, to be real, to pull down the masks and the makeup, to let ourselves be more vulnerable and raw, and to be in council with each other around the deeper questions of our lives.

Want to learn more about my group coaching program and practice? Check out The Wise Women’s Council and consider applying to join.

The internet often rewards certainty and polished answers. But I want more depth than a shiny blog post can give. I want the kind of wisdom that is lived, that is earned, and that is an active practice. And it’s the women in this community that continue to remind me that wisdom is something different. They show me how they wrestle with the questions that their lives are asking of them. They are honest about what it takes to really build, to really lead — and to do the inner work of leadership that’s required for real change.

My hope is that you’ll discover new ideas—ideas that help you learn more about your own inner wisdom.

My hope is that you’ll meet remarkable people—people you can follow and learn from and connect with.

My goal is to shine a spotlight on the remarkable women who make up our community. Through conversations and interviews, we’ll explore their work, the challenges they’re navigating, the lessons they’re learning, and the ideas they keep returning to again and again.

These are not stories about having it all figured out. They are stories about paying attention. These are stories about letting go of who we were, so that we can leap towards who we are becoming. These are stories about changing how we move through life.

I hope you’ll enjoy meeting the women of Wise Women’s Council as much as I’ve enjoyed learning from them.

— Sarah K Peck

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🟣 ​The Wise Women’s Council​ — A leadership incubator for business women deep in the mess and joy of midlife, big work, and career callings.

You can also find me on LinkedIn, Substack Notes, and Threads.

PS: If you’re thinking about applying to join us in the ​Wise Women’s Council​ this year, we’d love to see you apply if you’re looking for a community of driven, business-focused women navigating ALL the mess and joy life brings us.

I’m writing this from the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky airport, sitting at a tiny table outside a Dunkin’ Donuts, waiting for my flight home to Chicago. Around me: rolling suitcases, half-drunk iced coffees, families trying to reorganize themselves before boarding. There’s something oddly vulnerable about airports — everyone in transition at once. Between places. Between versions of themselves.

I almost didn’t come on this trip.

It’s the middle of May, otherwise known to parents everywhere as Maycember: the completely unhinged sprint to the end of the school year. Next week alone I’m chaperoning a field trip, and my daughter has a ballet recital, a cheerleading performance, and kindergarten graduation. There are permission slips and snack requests and spirit days and laundry and work deadlines and all the invisible labor that keeps a family moving.

The list felt so long before I left, that saying yes to a work trip almost seemed irresponsible.

And yet, I came.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot in relation to this month’s conversation around values, vision, and the operating systems we inherit versus the ones we choose.

Because I think one of the operating systems many women — especially mothers — absorb is the idea that our own expansion should always come second. That if something is not strictly necessary for the functioning of the household, it becomes optional. Extraneous. Self-indulgent, even. But sitting here now, tired in a satisfying way, I know this trip mattered to me for reasons beyond work.

Yes, I was here to write and report and gather material.

But I was also here because curiosity is one of my values.

Growth is one of my values.

Aliveness is one of my values.

And increasingly, I think honoring those values makes me a better mother, not a worse one.

This trip reminded me that I am not only a person who keeps things running, I am also a person who wants to see new places. Who wants to learn. Who feels energized by conversations with strangers and the texture of unfamiliar cities and long dinners and gathering stories.

I got to travel with a friend, which felt meaningful in its own quiet way. Adult friendship can become so logistical in this phase of life — voice notes, reschedules, quick check-ins while unloading groceries or sitting in pickup lines.

And suddenly here we were, walking through Cincinnati together, talking without interruption, laughing over cocktails, deciding where to go next with no one asking us for a snack or help finding a shoe.

I got to sleep in a pitch-black hotel room where nobody touched me or woke me up all night.

I sat down with the cheesemakers at Urban Stead Cheese and tasted through their cheeses while we talked about the inexorable link between cheese and community — how the best food is never really only about food. How it becomes a gathering point, a language, a way people care for each other. We talked about place and fermentation and neighborhoods and risk and building something slowly with your hands.

I lingered over earrings in a tiny shop because I could. I drank a very esoteric pét-nat with a delightfully foul-mouthed winemaker who clearly loved to hear himself talk, and somehow that, too, felt life-giving — this reminder that the world is still full of deeply specific, eccentric, passionate people.

And that’s part of what travel gives me. Not just rest. Not just inspiration. But texture.

It breaks the spell of hyper-functionality.

At home, especially during seasons like this, it is so easy to become a machine for managing life. Scheduling life. Optimizing life. Moving everyone through life.

Travel interrupts that. It reminds me to notice things again.

The curve of the Roebling Bridge against the gray sky. The way a restaurant sounds when everyone is slightly tipsy and happy. The sharp creaminess of a cheese tasted at exactly the right temperature. The pleasure of wandering without urgency. The strange intimacy of airports.

Every time I leave home — even briefly — I come back slightly rearranged. More awake. More present. More myself.

And I think that’s the value underneath all of it.

Remembering that I am still a person with a mind and a palate and ambition and curiosity and a hunger for beauty and conversation and discovery.

Someone still becoming.

This year, I asked one of our WWC members if she would write about her experience inside of The Wise Women’s Council, my ongoing group coaching program. Previously, she wrote about changing her relationship to rest, slowing down to be present to her own life, and the dangerous trap of comparative joy. This month, we’re digging into our core values and how they help us make decisions about the way we show up to our lives. If you’re looking for a group coaching program for women, check out The Wise Women’s Council and apply to join.

— Sarah K Peck

Hannah Howard is the author of the memoirs Feast: True Love in and out of the Kitchen and Plenty: A Memoir of Food and Family. She writes for Food & Wine, Travel + Leisure, and Bon Appetit. Hannah lives in Chicago with her family and loves stinky cheese. Subscribe to her Substack, Letters from Hannah. She is also a member of The Wise Women’s Council.

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For most of my life, writing things down was a way for me to understand things better. But as I became more and more sleep-deprived, as my body changed, I found it harder and harder to write. The massive adventure ahead of me of pregnancy, giving birth, becoming a mother—it was daunting. It was no small fact that my identity, life, and known world would be subject to massive upheaval. I didn’t know how to make sense of it. I felt lost and insecure.

Pregnancy: I wanted to understand it. I wanted to catalog it. I wanted to explain it, tell the stories of pregnancy. Yet all I could write were the worst clichés, and then wincing, knowing that that wasn’t it. How could I go through something so deeply human and yet struggle for words to explain it?

I decided to use my friend’s Clarity Card process2 as a structured way to journal towards the end of my pregnancy. The method is simple and beautiful, and I ended up in tears just by having this as a guide. Below, I’ll walk you through the four-step process he outlines — and how I used it to chart out ideas, insights, and clear perspectives on being pregnant. Plus, I’ll include some of my original notes from when I wrote this out when I was eight months pregnant. It helped me.

A 4-Step Guided Framework for Journaling and Gaining Clarity

Much like Julia Cameron writes about in The Artist’s Way, just getting pen on paper and making a list can be an extraordinary way to dive into your mind. The mind, I’ve learned, is an incredible tool that can be cued with phrases and questions. All you have to do is let your mind respond to the questions you put forth.3

Here’s how I did it:

Read more

Read more

Read more

For too many years, one of the last things on my list was taking care of myself. If I even made the list. To be honest, it never crossed my mind to put myself on this list as a consideration — I jus…

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Here’s what I tell people when they ask me what to expect if they’re trying to build a business AND a family at the same ti…

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When I search for images of leaders, executives, bosses, and founders, the pages of results are quite dismal. I did a screenshot series back in 2021, which is still relevant today, because these images are what LLM (large language models) are learning from.

Here’s what a quick search of UnSplash ga…

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• One was breastfeeding her baby while talking about her seed funding round.

• Another was leading a 40-person company, but wondering how to keep…

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This piece was originally published in July 2024.

I don’t think I was prepared for how exhausting and lonely parenting can be in the modern world. Despite having active young kids and constantly taking them places, I still find myself longing for time to myself. Time to think, and time to talk to other adult humans about things beyond parenting. But the dishes keep spinning and the laundry keeps crashing and the days all run into each other in one giant blur.

We’ve talked before about how exhausting and lonely parenting can be in the modern world. But it’s not just parenting—it’s modern life. I think many of us are far too lonely and disconnected. There’s a real hunger for community, for depth, for true connection. It’s only when I step out of the extreme workaholism of modern parenting and take a break—when I go camping, when I get into nature, or when I finally take that day off I’ve been meaning to take for ages—that’s when I realize just how bare-bones and lonely parts of everyday life can become.

We’re not meant to carry all of this burden in siloed houses so far apart from each other. The nuclear family is too small. (There, I said it.) Marriage isn’t really working. We can begin to drown inside of it, and forget that all of these fights—the fights over the cooking and the cleaning and the work and the children—are really about something else entirely.

Kurt Vonnegut, an American writer, humorist, and the author of fourteen books, speaks to the depth of loneliness that so many people feel and why we’re really fighting with each other. In the essay collection “If This Isn’t Nice, What Is?” Vonnegut shares sharp, precise notes on why it’s too much—and what we can do about it.

What we’re really fighting about, he argues, is that we don’t have enough people.

“Only two major subjects remain to be covered: loneliness and boredom. No matter what age any of us is now, we are going to be bored and lonely during what remains of our lives. We are so lonely because we don’t have enough friends and relatives. Human beings are supposed to live in stable, like-minded, extended families of fifty people or more.” — Kurt Vonnegut

We need other people.

We need fifty other people. Or more.

One person cannot be everything and everyone for another person. Our partner cannot be our therapist and our confidante and our bowling pal and our reading group and our cooking group. It’s impossible to be all of this to each other.

A marriage is not enough. A friend is not enough.

We need more people.

Do you have fifty people?

Vonnegut goes on to talk about marriage, and why marriage isn’t falling apart because marriage is wrong, but because our families are too small.

“Marriage is collapsing because our families are too small. A man cannot be a whole society to a woman, and a woman cannot be a whole society to a man. We try, but it is scarcely surprising that so many of us go to pieces.” — Kurt Vonnegut

So, he recommends, “everybody here [should] join all sorts of organizations, no matter how ridiculous, simply to get more people in his or her life. If does not matter much if all the other members are morons. Quantities of relatives of any sort are what we need.” And the cause of fights in marriage? It turns out, he surmises, “what they’re really yelling at each other about is loneliness.”

“What they’re really saying is, ‘You’re not enough people.’”

We are born into our immediate families. These families have gotten smaller and smaller over the last century, and farther apart. Many of us are just starting our own immediate families now.

But we don’t get told to invest as much time in developing our communities, being active socially, or building the networks we need beyond the structure of family or work. Your job is not your family. Your job is not your community. It is a component—but it is not the entirety.

We need warm-blooded people, to mix and mingle with, to be in the presence of. They do not have to be perfect people. They do not have to have all the same ideas and opinions as you. It does not matter much if all the other members are morons, he says. Find what they are good at—perhaps they are good at cooking food, or repairing faucets, or teaching your kid how to play an instrument or a sport.

We need a bunch of people. More than most of us have.

In a second speech, he goes on to elaborate on knowing the secrets to what women and men want. It’s remarkably similar to his story above:

“I know what women want. Women want a whole lot of people to talk to. And what do they want to talk about? They want to talk about everything.”

And men? “Men want a lot of pals.”

Obviously I don’t agree with the simplicity of men and women being entirely different (nor do I believe that marriage is just about a man and a woman) — but the underlying point rings true: as people, we want other people to hang out with. We need other people to be around, to check in with, and to talk to.

“[We] want a whole lot of people to talk to. And what do [we] want to talk about? [We] want to talk about everything.”

Content is not community.

At night, the loneliness inside all of us conspires to bring us to our tiny slot machines, those little window boxes of Internet access. Whether it’s the phone or the pad or the wall screen, we scroll through TikTok and Instagram and Messages trying to find the closeness we crave. What we want is so powerful: we want laughter and connection and human touch and art and magic.

But what we get from tiny screens is not enough. He warns against trying to find community inside the screens. “Don’t try to make yourself an extended family out of ghosts on the Internet. Get yourself a Harley and join the Hell’s Angels instead.”

“I hope you know that television and computers are no more your friends, and no more increasers of your brainpower, than slot machines. All they want is for you to sit still and buy all kinds of junk, and play the stock market as though it were a game of blackjack.”

We need, he writes, warm-hearted people. “And only well-informed, warm-hearted people can teach others things they’ll always remember and love. Computers and TV don’t do that. A computer teaches a child what a computer can become. An educated human being teaches a child what a child can become.”

Consumption is not community.

There is a difference between consumption and connection. Scrolling through an algorithmic feed and leaving comments on posts is not deep enough for connection. It is info-tainment, entertainment, and communi-tain-ment (is that a thing?). It is Community-Lite.

We need more time in conversation, where the words tumble out and spill onto the table. Where we let each other ramble and discover. Where we wander and pause and pick back up again.

We need more creators and keepers of local community. We’ve forgotten how important this work is for each other, and Vonnegut, in a commencement speech, reminds people that while there may be “a handful of celebrities” from your graduating classes, the majority of people will find themselves “building or strengthening your communities.”

And this is the point that is so important I highlighted it and underlined it:

“Please love that destiny, if it turns out to be yours—for communities are all that’s substantial about the world.” — Kurt Vonnegut

It’s up to us to reach out, meet as many people as possible, and build our extended families, our communities, and our loose ties. These are the ties that hold up the human ecosystem, and they are so fragile and precarious for so many of us right now.

When I am the happiest in my life, it’s when I’m surrounded not just by high-quality soul sisters and friends who I love spending time with, but also by neighbors I wave to on a daily basis. It’s knowing the names of the local business owners, and chatting with neighbors in the street. This is one of the reasons why I’ve prioritized joining communities throughout my life. Online, offline, local, distant—I want the breadth and the depth. I don’t want to live alone, and I can’t pretend my family is enough. I want to be vibrant, connected, and communal.

And it’s even harder when you’re overwhelmed by the load of parenting and the slam of long work hours. In the early days, I had to challenge myself to get out and find ways to connect. I browsed the local bulletin boards, and I read up on what the local library had on offer. The community college has regular classes, and I did a six-week drumming circle and tried the salsa club, as well. Now I see many of these people regularly at the local coffee shop and we bump into each other at the library and yoga studios.

Getting out there and fighting the tide of overwork and the isolation of modern life is extra effort in a world of work that already wants to eat all of our available time.

But community is more important than we know.

Go find your people. (Even the doofuses.)

It will be more people than you think you need.

— Sarah K Peck

Leadership | Business | Parenting | Mindset | Humor
​Wise Women’s Council (Leadership Incubator)​
​Startup Parent (Podcast & Essays)
​Founders With Kids (Community)

PS: As an entrepreneur, I could tackle many projects, many of which are more scalable than what I’m building. But I’m focused on building community and connections. My focus is connection and intimacy (often within the niche of parent founders). It’s not an easy project, but what we’re building is working. It’s why I built The Wise Women’s Council and Founders With Kids.

THE WISE WOMEN’S COUNCIL: FALL 2025!

I run a year-long leadership program for ambitious, kind, creative women who want to live life on their own terms. We’re kicking off the next cohort of The Wise Women’s Council this October. There are pages and pages of notes from women who have been through the program — read what they have to say here.

Apply to join the next cohort!

We will need you to download an app for the school dismissal system. Please tell us how you will be getting your child to school! Here is the new driving map, which has changed from last year. If your license plate starts with the letters A through K, your new drop-off line for cars now goes behind the school and across the tennis courts. If your license plate has odd numbers, we would like you to wait on the football field. Please don’t drive too hard, we need to maintain a pristine field! Even when it’s a parking lot. Please do not drive across the basketball court as we are re-paving it and your car will probably get stuck in the fresh asphalt!

If you are sending your child on the bus, we have good news! We have enough bus drivers this year for at least half of your children! The bus will pick up your child as long as you figure out how to log into the app. This can take up to ten minutes. Do remember what color bus your child is on. **This is important.** But please also be prepared to drive them to school if we don’t have enough bus drivers! If there are no more bus drivers available that morning, you will be driving your child to school! We recommend never scheduling any meetings before 10 a.m. for ease of the drop-off transition.

Please encourage your older children to walk to school! That way we can reduce the number of cars on the tennis courts, and save space on the buses! But please be careful, as there are no sidewalks, so please teach your children how to walk in the road safely. We recommend you walk them to school wearing brightly colored vests!

Oh also, there are a few more apps you’ll need to download for music, gym, library, technology, and the use of the printer! None of the apps work together, and they are all rated 2-stars or fewer and frequently crash because we have no budget, sorry about that! Please also note that your child is limited to one sheet of paper per day!  

As you get adjusted to back-to-school systems, do note that we operate on a week that is six days long, and doesn’t match any other calendar you use! You’ll need to log into the school website so you know what day of the week it is!

Your elementary children who are ages five to seven years old can arrive at school between 8:20 a.m. and 8:35 a.m. but cannot arrive earlier than 8:15 a.m. For those of you with siblings, please note that any elementary children who are eight years and older can only arrive at school between 8:35 a.m. and 8:50 a.m. Please have them walk to school on their own if they can! But do not form a crowd outside the school for too long. Also, the staggered start is good for children! You will now get to spend an hour each day getting two children to school, which should be great quality time.

On the days that school is dismissed early at 10:45 a.m., you will get to spend two hours driving for two hours of classroom time. Don’t worry, we will feed them a snack, but please remember there is no lunch on early dismissal days! Enjoy your coffee hour And speaking of lunches, your child will get a five-digit code to access the school lunch system. Please have them memorize this code and practice punching it in.

Don’t lose the piece of paper your child came home with! It is a very tiny slip of paper, because we used one piece of paper to print them all. On this slip of paper is your secret QR code for the app. Which app? That’s a mystery, because we didn't have enough space to put it on the paper! Check your email for the instructions! They are inside of a PDF attachment on the last page! It is not searchable, so good luck! Please note that if you lose it, we can’t print it, because we only use fax machines. 

One last thing, we also need you to bring in six boxes of Kleenex, four cartons of water, and the entire aisle of school supplies from Walgreens. We also need a framed photograph of your family for your child’s cubby. And please label everything that is not permanently attached to your child! You can also label your child! If you’d like to get tattoos made of your QR code, you can apply them to your child each week. They can use them in the lunch line if they forget their unique ID number.

Good luck everyone! We’re so excited to teach your child! And don’t forget that school gets out at 2:20 p.m. for the small children and 3:05 p.m. for the older children, except Wednesdays, when school gets out at 1:40 p.m. for everyone, and we will be sending out a new driving map for Wednesday’s special pickup routine when every parent arrives at school at the same time!

PS: The PTSA will be reaching out next week with our fundraisers and to get all of you onto a volunteer slot!

PPS: Don’t forget that Spirit Week is coming up!

— Sarah Peck

I hope you all are surviving the back-to-school era. It’s a crush of paperwork and forms and schedules and tiny details. I posted a shorter version of this on my LinkedIn page, and a teacher wrote back, “I'm a teacher and I'd like you to know that I have no idea where the piece of paper is either.” and I about died with laughter.

Please know this: I love teachers. And school. And childcare. The teachers work SO HARD. The budget is not enough. I am happy to bring the entire aisle of school supplies for you, and scavenge the free websites for new classroom bookshelves or containers. Thank you for all the work you do.

It’s the chaos of all of it that is mind-boggling. I know you get it.

You likely know this feeling. You feel it in your bones.

So what can we do about this exhaustion?

I’ll make a confession that feels strange to say, but I know is important: Once a week, I stay in bed for a late morning. Not on the weekends—those are typically filled with kids waking up too early and starting dance parties. But during the week, I give myself permission to rest. It’s hard to do, especially for someone like me, who was trained in the corporate world where productivity is the gold standard.

Hustle culture teaches us that if we’re resting, we’re ‘lazy’ or ‘underperforming.’ We’re told to maximize every hour of the day, become more efficient, and pack our mornings with multiple habits to ‘win.’

Maximize all hours of your day, productivity experts shout.

Increase your efficiency and output, systems experts tell us.

If you’re not doing 5 things in your morning routine, are you even winning?

I learned, painfully, that if you push all the time, your body will demand rest. Constantly pushing ourselves leads to burnout, illness, exhaustion, and apathy. At some point, more coffee, cold plunges, habits, or routines won’t repair the 100+ hour work weeks that people do trying to balance parenting, care taking, life, and work.

The solution is to carve out rest in more unusual ways.

Good rest is the unlock to real productivity.

Our culture doesn’t prioritize rest. It asks people to push harder, and then replaces people when they burn out. In today’s world, prioritizing rest is a radical act.

The biggest fallacy of rest is the idea that it will happen later. Only after you finish this big project will you take a vacation. The problem with this thinking is that most of the time it doesn’t work. There’s always another project or deadline. When you finally get that big break or vacation, often people get sick — it’s shown that when people push themselves too hard for too long, their bodies collapse afterwards.

Rest needs to happen every day. It’s like earning money: sure, it’s nice to think about winning the lottery, but it’s almost always a better strategy to set up an automatic savings that happens in small, regular amounts.

This is where micro-rest comes in.

Micro-rest is the small, daily practices that help us recover and sustain ourselves over the long term. These practices don’t require big chunks of time, but they add up to better long-term wellness and productivity. What does micro-rest look like?

• Stretching after back-to-back meetings

• Taking a slow morning once a week

• Doing deep exhales and stretching your eyes every couple of hours

• Setting a timer to roll your shoulders back twice a day

• Doing a quick gratitude journal in the morning

• Pausing in your car for a few minutes of silence before or after meetings

• Taking a social media or news break for the day

• Enjoying a leisurely lunch

• No-meeting Mondays

The key to micro-rest is that it’s small enough to start today. It’s the kind of rest you can stack with other habits—like stretching while waiting for your coffee to brew. Over time, these practices help you feel better immediately and leave you less exhausted at the end of the day.

The mindset shift that need to happen

The hardest part of building this practice is breaking the cycle of constant productivity. When you're in "hustle mode," the brain tells you to keep going—"Just one more thing!" But the art of micro-rest is learning to stop, even for a moment. It’s about developing the muscle of pausing and checking in with your body before pushing forward.

Constant productivity is like an invisible “Dopamine Stairmaster” that gets a reward for checking things off the list. This monster tells you not to stop. It’s this moment, when you’re in the middle of the push, that you learn to pause and say, right now, let’s take two deep breathes. Let me check in with my body. This is the key practice. For many, this “rest muscle” is atrophied and out of practice.

This isn’t easy. The first 30 days are the hardest, but micro-rest becomes more natural over time. You’ll begin to notice that these small shifts add energy back into your life, instead of draining it.

Every time you push harder, you also need to rest.

• It means unpacking the scripts that we’ve been sold about hustle culture, working overtime, and pushing harder at all costs.

• It means testing and iterating to find the ways that we can rest effectively so that our capacity actually improves.

• It also means understanding the long game, and being honest about the real consequences are when you force yourself into overdrive for too long.

Tiny micro-shifts that add up

We are humans, not machines. Rest is not a luxury, it’s a necessity. And it’s not just for founders, entrepreneurs, or high-powered execs—it’s for everyone. Parents, caregivers, and those juggling multiple roles need to build rest into their lives as a non-negotiable practice.

For me, it’s about taking one midweek morning to rest and reset. After getting the kids off to school, I jump back into bed, sip tea, and relax. It’s a simple act, but it’s my way of resisting the pressure to constantly push. Rest doesn’t have to be a luxury reserved for vacations. Through tiny—sometimes rebellious—acts, we can make it part of our daily lives.

How do you carve out moments of rest in your own schedule? What are your favorite downtime practices, especially if they go against conventional wisdom? I'd love to hear how you incorporate rest and recovery into your daily life.

— Sarah K Peck
CEO & Founder

To read more about the seven types of rest we need, and why social time, creative time, and community activities matter, check out The Seven Types of Rest We Need →

👋 I’m Sarah K Peck and I’m the founder of Startup Parent, where we think about building businesses, lives, and families differently than the norm. My motto? We don’t have to do things the way they’ve always been done. Join me if you want to imagine (and build!) better futures for work, life, and parenting — I'm on LinkedIn, Instagram, Threads, and BlueSky.

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✍️ Essays, stories and insights on parenting and life on Substack​

👾 Founders with Kids — We help tired parents make friends. Apply here​

💜 The Wise Women’s Council, our leadership incubator​

🎧 The Startup Parent Podcast, listen everywhere.​
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