A Letter to Myself

Dear Laura, 

In typical Laura fashion, you are writing your new year intentions nearly two weeks into the New Year. But for the first time, in a long time, you don’t feel guilt or shame around it. Your ADHD diagnosis has been freeing and has given you permission (which you didn’t need, but that’s for another time) to accept how you work and who you are on a whole new level.  

I’m proud of all you accomplished this year. You became Purpose Built by Laura early in 2025, not sure if you wanted to continue the business on your own. You loved having a business partner, making joint decisions, brainstorming and visioning together. You had to grieve losing the partnership. Grieve the loss of your vision for what that business was and move through it. 

This rollercoaster is hard and wonderful and exhausting and freeing. 

In retrospect, your word of 2025 was Clarity. You’ve been talking about it all year long for others and through that you yourself were starting to get it.  The January 2025 version of you didn’t have it.

When you set out to do this business on your own, you didn’t know exactly who you wanted to work with, what programs you wanted to offer, or what value you could add. It took a while for you to start to form your thesis. And yes, people could tell. You started scattered, but by mid-year the most common message you got was “Your emails are so much clearer now!” 

More clarity will come this year for sure. It’s like an ever-narrowing spiral, where the more you do this work, the clearer you get. Just keep going.

In 2025, you gained confidence in your voice - in being Laura. Confidence in sharing your opinions even if they weren’t 100% formed, or researched like an academic paper. You started to hope that people would disagree with you so that you could learn and be pushed.  

You built that confidence (which yes, like clarity, still has a lot of room to grow) through the action of doing. You pushed yourself to share your ideas publicly in your newsletter and on social media. Instagram is still scary. You’re not convinced whether it’s worth it, but you’re also not just thinking about posting. You’re are posting. You’ve put yourself out there and made videos and posts amidst all your insecurities. This year, let’s go bigger and scarier. 

You have a truly supportive group of people who have been your sounding board, given you feedback when things didn’t make sense, and tested your products - even when it required them to dig deeper than (maybe) they wanted to. 

You built Impact into the foundation of your business, providing 50 pro bono hours of support this year, many of whom were impacted by the USAID defunding earlier. This year, you have set goals for pro bono hours each quarter.  

Over the summer, you weren’t sure you should continue. It was hard to see it ever getting easier. You didn’t know if you had enough traction. You were putting a lot out there and couldn’t see how or if it was landing. When you expressed doubt to a friend, her encouragement and support was enough for you to give it more time. 

You’re glad you didn’t make big decisions while in the middle of the toughest moments. You took that doubt and bet on yourself. You hired marketing support and a virtual assistant. You realized that as your kids’ emotional needs get bigger (bigger kids, bigger problems) and your dad’s health suffered, you needed help. You needed to pay attention to how the emotional weight of life was impacting your work. You wouldn’t be able to build the business carrying everything.

There will be more moments like these. Life will keep on life-ing. The business will have great weeks, days, and months - and hard ones. 

So this year, our word is Perseverance. Take everything that you learned and started to grow last year and just keep going. Work through the sticky bits, the downs, and relish the highs. Then just keep going. Launch, Test, Learn, Iterate. Again and again. 

Part of having your own business is needing to believe that you can make it happen. If you don’t believe it, how can you expect others to?

I get pure joy from helping people build businesses they love, supporting them as they work past the invisible expectations that shaped their careers — and choose work and a life that reflects who they are today, not who they were rewarded for being.

Writing this letter feels a bit like a middle-school assignment and at the same time wholly grounding and true to where I am now. In all of its silliness, I think I’ll look back on it next year and be glad I took a breath to reflect on what I’ve done and where I’m going. Time is flying, and this helps me hold on to it just a little bit longer. 

With love, 

Laura