I’ve always been curious about people and what makes a life feel well lived.

I think my love of people’s stories started around a kitchen table.

When I was growing up, my dad’s sister and her husband would bring their ten children from Oklahoma to Kentucky in the summer, or we would all head west to see them. Wherever we were, somehow everyone ended up in the kitchen.

And I mean everyone.

People were around the table, sitting on counters, leaning against them, sitting on the floor and spilling into the next room. There was food and plenty of laughter, but mostly there were stories.

Stories about people we knew. Things that had happened years before. Things that had happened yesterday. Family stories that got told so many times we all knew how they ended, but we listened anyway.

I loved it.

And I don’t think I’ve ever really stopped.

I still love a table full of people. I love having people in my home and at the lake. I love the conversations that happen over dinner, on the porch or sitting on the boat. I want to know where you’ve been, what you’ve done, who matters to you, what you’ve learned and what you’re thinking about now.

Maybe that’s why executive recruiting suited me so well. I’ve spent years interviewing people at nearly every stage of their careers, and I’ve always been interested in far more than what’s written on their résumé.

Because everybody has a story. And I’ve learned that if you ask enough good questions and really listen, people will tell you remarkable things.

I’ve worked in hospitality, sales, management and executive recruiting. I’ve owned businesses and built teams. I took two bookstores from an idea through designing the spaces, building them, opening the doors and operating them.

There have also been years when family needed more of me. I’ve raised children, become a grandmother and cared for people I love.

When I look back, I don’t see those as separate lives or times when I started over.

I see one experience building on another.

The work changed. My responsibilities changed. Life changed. But I took what I had learned with me.

And somewhere along the way, after spending so many years asking other people what they wanted, what they were good at and where they wanted to go, I started asking myself some of those same questions.

Not someday. The one I’m living now.

I found myself thinking more about what I wanted my life to hold. I wanted the health and energy to enjoy it, work that still mattered to me, time with the people I love and the freedom to make choices about how I spend my days.

And there were still places I wanted to go, things I wanted to learn, experiences I wanted to have and things I wanted to build.

None of that came from being unhappy with my life.

I love my life.

I love being a wife, a mom and a grandmother. I love our home in Northern Kentucky and escaping to our lake house at Lake Cumberland. Give me a day on the water, a long conversation on the porch, music around a firepit, a good book, somewhere new to travel or a table filled with family and friends, and I’m pretty happy.

My faith and my family come first. They’ve also taught me something about time.

It moves quickly.

And the more grateful I am for the life I have, the less interested I am in wasting any of it.

I’m still reading. Still asking questions. Still building things. Still discovering things I want to learn and places I want to see.

And when I find something useful, interesting or worth knowing, I have a tendency to tell people about it.

You should see what I read.

You should know what I learned.

Have you ever thought about this?

And, of course, I want to know what you think too.

That curiosity is a big part of what eventually became the Second Wind Circle.

I didn’t create it because I have life figured out or because I think there is one right way to live it.

I created it because I still believe in what I learned around those crowded kitchen tables all those years ago.

There is something valuable about bringing people together, sharing what we know, listening to each other’s stories, asking good questions, laughing together and learning from people whose experiences are different from our own.