Audacity has become my new favorite word.

It’s confident and take-charge. But not judgmental, bossy, or mean. Or self-serving. It rejects the status quo, daring to swim upstream to do something meaningful.

Audacity has vision and purpose.  Its first focus is the decision to get started and do, believing the desired result will naturally follow.

Audacity takes its task very seriously and perseveres.  It believes in the big picture. The greater good. It includes, doesn’t exclude. And it is generous. Audacity holds nothing back to get there, then shares with all because IT KNOWS that’s the real joy.

We saw it -felt it!- in the recent Artemis mission. Not just getting something done, but joyfully, with kindness and respect for their fellows. And then this popped up in my feed today. Easter Sunday 2020, at the beginning of the world-wide COVID shutdown.

Launching design and staging businesses as consultancies in 2007 was audacious.  Even more so when just a few weeks later, real estate imploded and went POOF.

I won’t lie. In their early days, other words came to mind lol. Often. But I knew what I knew about people.  Their quest to understand, untangle, and balance the relationship they have with their spaces and their possessions. And I saw how much is possible when someone’s space is right in whatever way that meant for them. I wanted to make it easier for more.

Home is our sacred space; having it right for you is powerful and profound. What something costs, what it looks like, is important, but ultimately means little if it’s not first tied to intrinsic value. If there’s no problem solved, no improvement made, no minds eased, no joy, then it’s just an academic and emotional discussion.

SO…deep breath. I created The Refreshed Home and Orange Boom to change the world, one home at a time.  It was an infrastructure to give people the tools to make their own best decisions.

At first, I just thought the whole ‘change the world’ part.  Then I’d whisper it, really more to myself in the beginning. It wasn’t easy to explain without sounding all prissy-pants about it.  So I just “did”, and let the results build.

19 years in, I still pick and choose when I’m going to say it. But I know its truth and value, to my toes. Change will happen. It can be a good thing.  Just get started.