Ley - Growing Boldly: Dare to Build a Life You Love

H i, friends.

Lets kick this book off with a gut check. How are you? Like, how are you really?

I finished writing this book just one month before COVID-19 swept our world. Little did I know what our lives would look like in the months following my submission of this manuscript. Like the lives of people across America and worldwide, everything in my life was turned upside down. Suddenly, I became a homeschooling mom navigating an uncertain future amid a terrifying global pandemic. The landscape of business changed. Our global economy took an enormous hit. And I found myself struggling to answer three small childrens seemingly unanswerable questions about life and death.

And yet this experience has been life-changing in our house in beautiful ways. Quarantine magically, devastatingly cleared our schedules and we suddenly found ourselves appreciating the small things once again (time together, fresh food to eat, and joy found at home when the hustle of life comes to a screeching halt). Like the canals in Italy, whose once-murky waters cleared from lack of boats and pollution, our priorities crystallized. And as the weeks and months stretched on, I found myself both grateful for the lessons learned and hopeful for brighter, happier, more meaningful days to come. In short, the challenges of 2020 taught me a lot.

This book is written with love and hope and is centered on truths that are unchanging. Life is short. You are worthy. And its entirely possible to bloom in the driest of seasons, to flourish when life feels as if its falling apart.

Even if your heart has been ravaged by grief, fear, or uncertainty, my hope is that the words in this book help you evaluate where you are, determine where youd like to be, and map out a solid plan for how youre going to get there. Lets get to work.

Twelve years ago, I founded Simplified, a brand of day planners and organizational tools, to help women simplify their livesand to solve problems I was facing in my own. Through a lot of ups and downs, Ive taken Simplified from a solo side hustle in my guest room to a multimillion-dollar company with nine team members and more than 150 products in our online shop, plus licensed collections in Walmart, Target, Office Depot, and Staples. Sometimes I pinch myself when I look at how far weve come, as if it happened by some stroke of luck. But really, this dream became my reality because I decided there had to be something better than where I was and dug up the courage to do the workto boldly build a career, a family, and a life I loved.

I identified a quirk about myself (a gift, even), allowed that quirk to develop into a passion, and created a life out of it. I created Simplified and the Simplified Planner because I live a real life. Its messy and complicated and sometimes really unsimplified because thats life. But God gave me an ability to see to the heart of mess and complication and towhen possiblesort through it methodically and precisely, to apply routine and structure, and to make something peaceful out of something otherwise frenetic. My hope is that my words here help you do exactly that, as you look at your own growth and goals.

Ive grown a lot over the last twelve years. But growing is one thing. We all do it every day, whether we like it or not. Growing boldly (especially during seasons of uncertainty) is another thing entirely. Merriam-Webster defines bold as showing an ability to take risks; confident and courageous. In the pages that follow, Im going to invite you to challenge the idea that where you are today is as good as it gets. Together were going to push our boundaries, challenge what we think we know about ourselves, strip the layers of doubt and fear, and allow ourselves to be inspired by stories of other courageous women owning their imperfect journeys and building lives they loveeven in the face of unprecedented hardships and tragedy.

Growing boldly often looks a lot like allowing your outsides to match your insidesyour words to match your thoughts and your actions to match your beliefs. Do you ever feel the disconnect? The distance between who you are at your very core and the way youre living at home, at work, or in your circle of friends? Bridging the gap takes work, but mostly it requires couragethe courage to own what you want and the confidence to go out on a limb despite the fear of criticism or failure.