So I Built the Place I Wanted to Return To

Over two decades of building businesses, I kept accumulating things that worked. Every time something shifted, a new technology, a new philosophy, a burnout, a breakthrough, I was quietly adding to the pile. But the pile had no home. When things got hard, I didn't know where to reach. When I needed to return to what I knew worked, I was digging through notebooks and old files and half-remembered conversations.

So I built the place I wanted to return to. From the contrast. The confusion. The burnout. The successes, the joy, the abundance, and the in-between.

I built it for me. And now I'm making it available to you. I've shared these tools with the interns I've mentored, my ClarityLAB clients, and my workshop participants, and watching them reach for these practices in their own seasons, for their own decisions, showed me something I didn't expect: how much they live outside of me. You deserve a place to return to, too.

Here's where that contrast became impossible to unsee. Not even four months before the pandemic, I had walked away from four years spent trying to force a consulting business into being.

Defeated. Frustrated. Full of sadness and grief.

My calendar was full, and none of it felt like mine.

Then, the day after sheltering-in-place orders hit my city, I said yes to something that made no logical sense. I picked up my camera and started photographing families on their front porches, a pay-it-forward mission to support local businesses. I checked in with my values and my capacity first, that took about ten minutes, and the decision was immediate.

Over 40 photographers joined almost immediately. Together we photographed more than 4,000 families over three months of social distancing, generating an estimated $1.28 million in economic impact for our local communities. I personally delivered more portraits in those three months than in the previous eight years of my career combined.

And I never burned out. Not because I was superhuman.

Because I was organized around what actually mattered: values clear, priorities named, capacity honored.

Holding that year against the year I walked away, the difference wasn't in the output. It was in the energy. When I was living my purpose, I could work the longest days of my career and feel alive. When I was performing it, I collapsed under a fraction of the load.

That contrast is how the C.A.L.M. Compass was born.

The best parts of people are patiently waiting for permission to show up. If someone comes to mind while reading this, I'd be so grateful if you passed it along.

"I have met very few people who are organized creatives. Jenn is one of those. Her thought process for business blows me away."

— 360 Survey