On Alignment, Intuition, and Quarter 2 Beginnings

I was finishing my second cup of coffee and about to head into my office to prepare for my first meeting of the day when I realized my phone was missing. After retracing my steps with no luck, I opened Find My Phone on my computer. A distant pinging sounded from the garage. I walked out and found it sitting on the roof of my car. Right where I'd set it while buckling my daughter into her car seat for daycare. It had been up there the entire ride there and back.

Face palm.

Honestly, I wasn't that surprised. The last several weeks had been chaotic, and when things get chaotic in my schedule, my inner world gets messy too. The routines that help me stay grounded, like morning yoga and journaling, and afternoon walks, had quietly slipped to the back burner. My house got messier. My constant to-dos crowded out everything else. And then I started doing things like forgetting to hit send on an important email and leaving my phone on the roof of my car.

I took the almost-tragedy of losing my phone as the sign I needed to return to my theme for 2026: alignment.

I pick a theme word every January — a lens, an intention, a quiet north star to return to when things get noisy. This year, focusing on alignment felt right in a deep, clarifying way. Not because I thought I had it figured out, but because I knew it was something I had to keep choosing across every part of my life.

I started January really leaning into the practices that help me stay present. But as February bled into March, the busyness, sick kids, and days stacked with meetings became a swift current. And I got swept along with it.

Here's what I've learned about being a leader, a business owner, a mom, a person trying to hold a lot of things at once: busyness can feel noble. Every skipped lunch feels justified because someone needed me. Every early morning and late night felt like dedication. Like showing up.

But somewhere in the accumulation of all that showing up for everyone else, I slowly stopped showing up for myself.

The morning routine slipped. The walks got skipped. The hours stretched longer. And right on cue came the racing mind at 3 am. The neck and shoulder tension. The mid-afternoon crash from too much caffeine. The sinking feeling right after saying yes to something from a place of people-pleasing rather than genuine conviction.

Shaking my head and sitting down to start my workday with my miraculously intact cell phone, I realized that my intuition had been flagging this busyness as problematic the whole time. I just kept telling her to wait. 

But my intuition is tireless, the hardest-working member of my team. 

She speaks up when something's off — in a relationship, a decision, a direction I'm considering. She's usually right. She's almost always early. And when I'm living at a pace that lets me actually listen, she meets me on my walks, shows up on my journal pages, and sends quiet nudges throughout the day.

But when I ignore her long enough, she doesn't quit. She finds another way. She walks straight into my body and starts speaking her truth there. Neck tension. A low hum of anxiety. A kind of bracing I can't quite name but immediately recognize. She's not punishing me. She's persistent because she is for me. She always has been.

My theme of alignment means committing to listen to my intuition before she has to get loud.

That's the whole practice, really. It means being honest about what I can actually hold in a day. It means treating my rest, my movement, my creativity as needs that belong in the same category as my clients' and my family's, not nice-to-have luxuries. It means having the difficult conversation from a place of groundedness rather than waiting until the ache is too loud to ignore. It looks less like pushing and more like play.

My phone-on-the-roof moment landed at the exact seam of March ending and April beginning, the year already one quarter over, spring arriving without much fanfare. And it was exactly the reminder I needed to help me recalibrate as I enter into the second quarter of 2026.

If Quarter 1 took more from you than you planned to give — I see you. This year has moved fast and asked a lot.

But Quarter 2 is its own beginning. Not a guilt trip, not a reset that demands perfection. Just an invitation to slow down, get honest about what matters most, and check back in with that loyal, tireless part of yourself who has been trying to get your attention.

She's still talking. She never stopped.

The only question is whether you're ready to listen.