I hope you're having a great weekend!

This week I spent a couple of days in Joshua Tree for the Integrated Wealth Advisor program I am participating in, and it was such a magical and productive time in the desert.

The beginning of the program has been primarily focused with deepening my understanding of my own relationship with money and my Self--the statement "you can only take someone as far as you've gone your Self" in practice. The trip to Joshua Tree was the transition to how we can begin to help our clients better understand their Selves and their relationship with money. I'm excited to bring the questions and exercises to my work--I'll share some questions here from time to time as well.

If you ever go to Joshua Tree you definitely need to make a stop at Integraton for an amazing sound bath--I promise it's not like anything you've experienced before.

Reviewing a clip on Cultish Creative

I joined my friend Matthew Zeigler for another episode on his Cultish Creative YouTube channel. He's said I'm his guinea pig when it comes to creative ideas, and in this episode, we tested a new approach to his show in which a guest watches a clip from a previous episode. Instead of getting the clip before recording, I watched it while we were recording, so my reactions and comments were live and in the moment.

Ok, let's get to this week's Notes...

📝 this week's Daily Notes

5.27.26 #1214 advance confidently in the direction of your dreams

5.28.26 #1215 well-being

5.29.26 #1216 how is your media diet shaping your experience?

5.31.26 #1217 make someone smile

6.01.26 #1218 be bored

6.02.26 #1219 knowing what works best for you

6.07.26 #1220 adventure

📺 The Five on AlignedLife: "The Hidden Cost of the Perfect Self

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Every week on The Five, we find one headline and one deeper idea across all five pillars of aligned living — Spirit, Mind, Body, Money, and Creativity — and ask what they mean for the life you're actually trying to build.

This week, a clip went viral that most people laughed at. Steven Bartlett — host of one of the world's most listened-to podcasts — said that three glasses of wine "ruined three days of his life."

The internet mocked him.
Brad Stulberg wrote about it.
And we decided to use it as a mirror.

Because the real question isn't whether wine is bad for you. It's what it means when the pursuit of your best self makes you so brittle that one disruption breaks three days. And whether that story — in some form — is living in you too.

In Spirit, we look at what the Global Wellness Summit is calling the over-optimization backlash — and what it says about the inner life hiding behind all the metrics.

In Mind, we sit with Brad Stulberg's identity fragility framework and the question no sleep score can answer: who are you when you're not performing well?

In Body, we give the physiology its due — and then ask whether there's a difference between listening to your body and managing it.

In Money, we get into the economy built on optimization anxiety — and then break down the headlines actually moving markets right now, from the Moody's credit downgrade to the Fed freeze to what rising bond yields mean for your financial plan.

And in Creativity, we make the case for the one thing optimization can't produce: looseness.

Five pillars. Five Conversations. This is The Five.