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What if it was brought to your attention that you may have a belief deep down that says: "Do not step fully into the arena until you can guarantee that the result will confirm who you believe you are." What would you do? How would you take it? What would you think? Being on the Outside It was brought to my attention that this may be me. Unfortunately, for me, a few weeks ago I read President Roosevelt's "Man in the Arena" quote and instantly felt like the "do not step ful

I am unsure what day it is in the challenge, and I am unsure how many posts I have written, but I am beginning to feel that I am hitting a wall. I think I am halfway through, but I am running out of things to write about. Right now, I am not writing to focus on GrandValli. I am just writing whatever comes to mind to build the habit, but man, it's tough. As a kid, I wrote a lot. I wrote poetry, song lyrics, and I even wrote a whole movie script by hand in multiple different n

Man, I don't care what anyone says, it is hard to deal with the feeling that you just need one moment to change everything, and you are wondering when it will hit. You keep doing the small things, and you are being consistent, and yet you still fail to see the results or the progress that you have been hoping for. It is hard to keep moving and grooving and still not see the drastic change. If that happens to you, what do you do? That is a question I ask myself all the time. H

I ended up scrolling Facebook today and went down a rabbit hole of regrets people had. It was one of those pages where strangers write anonymous notes and leave them in a jar, and someone reads them out loud later. What I noticed from many of the notes was that there were a lot about love and relationships. Some relationships were intimate, family-based, friendships, etc. What I noticed is that a lot of people regretted not saying how they felt about someone, saying somethin

Today I learned about options - the financial kind. Options are things I have heard of but never really paid attention to or even really thought they applied to me. Come to think of it, I think I even thought they didn't apply to me. Today I realized a few things: 1. You really don't know what you don't know until you do. 2. Sometimes we limit ourselves because we think certain things just are not applicable to us 3. There is more than enough to go around Money and finan

Where are the growth opportunities? Where are the challenges? Where are the moments that pull you from one phase of life into another? Oh, wait. They are behind the challenging thing we avoid, feel we can't do, or don't even attempt. In some ways, being an adult sucks as it limits us by fear and insecurities and removes the childish bravery that never lets us stay down when we fall. Have you seen a kid try to walk? They fall and get back up over and over. At what time in

Boring, beautiful repetition is something that I believe we all have to make friends with. From what I have seen and from what I have learned, it is the difference between complete and incomplete, good and better, growth and being stuck, creation and imagination. I bring this up because there are many instances in life where we all aspire to achieve or create something or to become something. We dream to be fitter, healthier, more financially stable, to be creators who share

One of the most overlooked body parts, I think, are the feet. We use and abuse them every day. We wear shoes that hurt. We stay on them when the pain is kicking in, and we do very little to rehab them and take care of them. I feel like the feet are like our hands; we don't think to care for them until something happens, and then we are being reactive. But what if we are proactive and incorporate activities and exercises every day that improve the intrinsic muscles in our feet

Have you ever told yourself you were going to do something just to get distracted and not do that thing? You could have just been starting the thing or getting ready to do the thing, just for another thought or idea to cross your mind, and now you are doing the other thing. I don't imagine that many of us realize how many things we don't actually get done because we get distracted or how much longer something takes to get done because we get distracted. More so, we don't rea

How do we create luck? Can we create our own luck? Can we increase how lucky we are? Are some people truly luckier than others? I am not a luck expert, but lately I have been thinking more about luck. What is luck? If you Google it, you will see that apparently, potentially, it is the phenomenon of events occurring by chance or happenstance that positively or negatively affect a person. I like to think that each of us comes into this world with a certain level of luck, o

One of my greatest struggles has always been thinking I needed to have everything figured out or a level of certainty that a certain thing would play out a certain way. I would wait till I felt ready to do anything, but ready required me to know, and knowing required me to research and feel prepared, and to do that, it often led to analysis paralysis. Luckily enough for me, I lived my life like that for so long that it became exhausting, so exhausting that I just couldn't ov

There are griefs synonymous with endings. Questions that come along that make us pause and ponder whether we are making the right decision or should we make another. There are joys in endings. Releases that never cease to remind us of the resilient beings we sometimes forget we are. There is peace in ending. An ability to still and let go with no desire to control or hold, but to be free of the weight that used to exist. There are smiles, and there are cries. Each one, its ow

So, I went to an RnB and Ribs event, and it didn’t hit me to host one until I was about to leave the event. It was my first time at something like that, and the vibe was amazing. Everyone was dressed however they felt made them feel good. The fashion was diverse, the music was great, and the energy was contagious. I want more events like that to be accessible because I want more people to feel there are opportunities to truly enjoy themselves and dress in a way that is authe

On July 1st, I committed to writing something for GrandValli for 30 days. So far, on day 4, I have kept it up. My biggest struggle with GrandValli, and really anything I start, has been not finishing or being consistent with what I say I am going to do or what I simply need to do to build momentum and get something done. I have relied heavily on emotional factors to push me into action or pull me away. Since I have decided to bring GrandValli out of hiatus, I told myself tha

I imagine that if you are reading this and have become curious about GrandValli Table, you may be wondering who it is for. You may be wondering who is invited, who can attend, what the energy will be, and what the vibe may feel like. Right off the bat, let me state it clearly: everyone is invited. If you are into new experiences, learning about people, and hearing their stories, then GrandValli Table is for you. If you are a foodie and believe that food brings people togeth

When the table feast or event happens, I hope those who attend find it worth their time and experience. A win would be that more people want to attend another one, but more importantly, that they become curious about those around them and their stories. I hope people recommend other people and businesses to me to see if a collaboration or project is possible. Referrals and introductions go a long way, and people are more likely to use, explore, or visit places and things that

What will be the GrandValli Table’s theme for the first go-around? Honestly, I am working to narrow it down. As I stated in another post, the original idea for the Table was to collaborate with chefs, restaurants, and other food creators to tell their story through food and invite people to enjoy it. I have been to a few great limited-seating events where the food is amazing, but you also get to enjoy learning about the flavors, combinations, and the why behind a dish and be

To get straight to it, the point of GrandValli is to create opportunities and to tell stories without waiting for permission or for a chance opportunity to be presented. After I did the original podcast episodes, I played around with the idea of doing something with food. I love food and consider myself a foodie and I thought it would be great. However, I didn't want to create something that was just another basic food experience. I wanted something that would resonate and co

I have been sitting with this idea of gathering. Not just going somewhere because there is an event. Not just eating food and leaving. Not just networking in a room full of people you may or may not ever talk to again. But actually gathering. Good food. Good music. Good energy. Real conversation. A reason to be in the same room with people and feel like something beautiful could come from it. That is the heart behind this GrandValli food experience. I am creating a limit

I asked ChatGPT to compile a list of all the ideas I have had and have struggled to determine what I want to focus on. Here it is for anyone who may find it interesting. 1. GrandValli Platform / Empire Ideas GrandValli LLC as a major platform A platform for opportunity, storytelling, human capability, small businesses, talent, and “what are we capable of?” GrandValli as an Amazon-style ecosystem Not just one product, but an empire with media, commerce, services, events, edu