Untie your lines began with my own search for more.
For much of my life, I was very good at building the life I thought I was supposed to have. I became a mother, built a career, cared for the people around me, and learned how to hold a lot together. Somewhere along the way, I became less certain that I knew what I wanted.
Untie Your Lines began with that realization, and with the question that followed: What happens when we start listening to ourselves again?
ABOUT UNTIE YOUR LINES
It started with a boat. Sort of.
Years ago, I started learning how to sail. One of the first things you learn is that the ropes on a boat are called lines. Before you can go anywhere, you have to release the lines holding the boat to the dock.
I couldn’t stop thinking about that.
At the time, I was doing something similar in my own life. I had left my marriage. I had made a major career change. I was beginning to question roles, expectations and stories I had carried for years.
I thought untying my lines would feel like freedom.
Sometimes it did.
But mostly, at first, it felt like being untethered.
Because releasing the thing that held you in place doesn’t automatically tell you where to go next.
Freedom turned out to be quieter than I expected.
When I first began this journey, I imagined transformation as something dramatic. Make the brave decision. Leave the thing that isn’t working. Find your purpose. Become the person you’re meant to be.
I’ve come to understand it differently.
Most of the meaningful changes in my life haven’t happened in one enormous leap. They’ve happened through smaller moments of honesty. Hearing something I had been trying not to hear. Letting go of a story that no longer fit. Allowing myself to imagine something different. Taking one next step before I could see the whole path.
Untying your lines isn’t one epic act of reinvention. It’s something we do again and again as we grow, change, lose things, find things, and become more honest about the lives we actually want.
That is the idea at the heart of Untie Your Lines today.
I know what it’s like to be somewhere in between.
There are seasons when the life you’ve built no longer quite fits, but you don’t yet know what comes next.
I know that space.
I also know how tempting it is to believe you should already have the answer. To make a plan. Pick a direction. Reinvent yourself. Get on with it.
But I’ve learned that some of our most important transitions ask for something different. They ask us to slow down long enough to hear ourselves again.
That’s the kind of space I want to create here.
Not a place where someone tells you who to become. A place to be honest about where you are, loosen your grip on what no longer fits, imagine what else might be possible, and begin finding your own way forward.
Sometimes we need to do that privately. Sometimes we need other women beside us. Sometimes we need to write, make, talk, wander, question, grieve, laugh, or simply sit with what we don’t know yet.
Untie Your Lines makes room for all of it.
ABOUT LESLIE
I’ve spent a lot of my life helping people navigate change.
For more than twenty years, my professional work has centered on people, organizations, and what happens when the old way of doing things no longer works. I’ve worked as an HR leader, consultant, facilitator, and coach, helping people make sense of complicated transitions and find a way forward.
Somewhere along the way, I realized that the questions I was helping people navigate professionally weren’t so different from the ones I was asking in my own life.
What do we keep? What do we let go of? What happens when the identity, relationship, career, role, or version of ourselves that once made sense doesn’t anymore? And how do we move forward when we can’t yet see exactly where we’re going?
Untie Your Lines brings those parts of my life together.
I’m not here because I have life figured out. I’m here because I’ve learned how powerful it can be to have a thoughtful person beside you while you figure out what is true for you.
That’s the work I want to do here.