Well•come, kin. Pause, and take a deep, calming breath with me. In... and out... As you breathe, remind yourself of your innate wisdom and wholeness. With each breath—be here. Fully present, as we embark on this journey together.

LaShaun Here to help you feel good & function well in the most meaningful areas of your life. Because being stressed, striving and stuck in survival mode was never the goal. ​ #whensciencefeelslikemagic

I want to tell you about a woman I know: let's call her U.

U is brilliant. the kind of brilliant that fills a room without trying. She leads a team, raises two kids, 1 grandchild, maintains a marriage that she love, keeps a journal, and carries, at any given moment, approximately 15 goals U is Actively Working On.

She isn't exactly failing at any of them. She's also not finishing any of them.

When i asked her what she'd been up to, she gave me the answer i've come to recognize as the signature response of the high-functioning overwhelmed: "So much. honestly? So much."

So much…as a full accounting of a life.

The goals themselves weren't the problem. U had exquisite goals. She'd selected them carefully, curated them, color-coded them in a system that would make a productivity influencer bawl.
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She wanted all of them.
She deserved all of them.

What she hadn't reckoned with was this: the human brain, that magnificent and metabolically expensive organ, is not built for parallel processing. It is built for depth. For immersion.For the particular kind of focus that takes a thing all the way from intention to done.

Wanting it all at once was, is accidentally, a very elegant form of self-sabotage.

What can change everything for U is one reframe.

You can have it all. Just not all at once.

Before you write me off. It is, actually, a liberation. Stay with me for 2 more minutes.

Think about the ocean for a moment, not as metaphor (we're retiring tired metaphors here) but as physics. The ocean doesn't arrive on shore all at once. It comes in waves, each one gathering itself in the deep, building, rolling forward with full force. Spending itself completely on the shore, and then pulling back. Making space for the next one.

Full force. Complete spend. Then: retreat. reset. the next wave.

This is the ocean being effective. You can work this way, too.

What i'm inviting you to try is something I call living in waves.

She took her 15 goals and she asked one uncompromisingly honest question: which three or four of these, if they were the only things i completed this year, would make me feel like the year was a genuinely meaningful?

Just those. The ones that would make her exhale with satisfaction.

Everything else (and this is the part that requires some courage) goes into the not yet. Not the graveyard. Not the failure pile. The not yet.
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This is harder than it sounds. Choosing five feels like you're abandoning the other ten. That's real. The goals you loved, the ones you'd been dreaming about, the ones that felt like proof of who you were becoming. Setting them down, even temporarily, asks something of you.

and it is also, eventually, a relief.

What happens next?
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U finished things. Whole things. Things that had been orbiting for eons suddenly had the gravitational pull to actually stick the landing. The work got better because attention is a resource that compounds when it isn't fractured.
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And then: and this is the part i love most, when those 3-5 things are done, open the not yet and chose the next wave. And the wave after that.

This is how you have it all. Not as a simultaneous explosion. As a life, lived in glorious sequence.
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There's a reason 3-5 works. I'll tell you why.

the technology: chunking

The mechanism behind wave living has a name. Cognitive scientists call it chunking. Your brain's ability to compress multiple related items into a single, manageable unit. George miller's foundational 1956 research established that short-term memory holds roughly seven items at once. More recent work has refined that number down to three to five. The sweet spot where the brain can hold a chunk with full fidelity, without dropping pieces or losing coherence.

Applied to goals: three to five isn't arbitrary. It's the number your prefrontal cortex can actually hold (track, tend, and move toward) without fracturing into the scattered vigilance of too-many-things-at-once.

The practice:
the wave audit
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​Set aside twenty minutes. Make something warming and pleasant. Sit somewhere you don’t usually work.

step one: write down every goal, intention, project, or aspiration currently making a claim on your attention. don’t edit. don’t prioritize yet. Let the full list exist on the page.

step two: For each item, ask: if this were the only thing I completed, would it matter? Circle the ones where the answer is an honest yes.

step three: From your circled items, choose three to five for your first wave. The criteria aren’t complexity or urgency, they’re readiness and resonance. what is your nervous system actually capable of doing well, right now? What, if completed, would most expand your capacity for what comes next?

step four: Label everything else the 'not yet'. Write it on a separate page. Put it somewhere you can refer to it.

step five: Work your wave. Fully. Completely. When it’s spent on the shore, open the 'not yet' and choose what’s next.

If anything you’ve read here has been resonant, nourishing, or of service to you in a meaningful way, please do, share this email. I appreciate your reciprocity.

In sharing, you contribute to a bigger picture - a world pulsating with well-being and wholeness. I'm grateful for you!

Here are more ways I can support you.

• Feedback, love notes, and other inquiries? Just hit reply
• Want me to give a talk at your event or with your team? Workshops, consulting + speaking inquiries, apply here.​

p.s. Reader, the "not yet" is not failure. It is faith in your own future capacity, in the next season, in the version of you who will be ready when the wave comes.

p.p.s. What would you put in wave 1 if no one was watching?
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