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One Woman’s Journey to Help Others Share Their Stories

August 9, 2011 in Transitioning, Writing with 1 Comment

A few months ago, a friend of mine pointed me towards the blog and online shop of Katie Clemons. My friend knew that I love to journal and thought I would like her stuff and her story.

And he was right. I love the story of how Katie came into journaling and how that passion for story and writing fueled her endeavor to develop her own line of journals.

Keeping a journal has been one of the most important ways that I have been able to thoughtfully reflect on my life. That reflection has been really important as I have made decisions and transitioned through different stages of life.

So I decided to ask Katie a few questions about journaling and life. I hope you enjoy, and I hope you find her story inspiring.

  1. Katie, I love the story about how your journals came to fruition. Can you share what the catalyst was behind you launching Gadanke?

A couple of years ago, NPR’s StoryCorp was in town. It was also my grandma’s 90th birthday.

The two of us decided to hop into the recording studio to capture some pieces of her story. I had all sorts of prompts to help her with her story telling. (I was always the listener, the one who asked question after question.)

The only problem?

My grandma couldn’t remember. Too much time had passed.

Later, my dad turned to me and said, “Katie, I need you to write down your story.” I knew he wished he had his mom’s stories. So I started writing. I started wondering about all of the other women who have stories deep inside of them, and I started thinking about how my tendency to just listen and ask could help put those stories onto paper. Gadanke was born with fabulous writing prompts and recycled papers. I feel so lucky to be living my dream.

I’m fascinated by the various transitions in our lives and I’m wondering how journaling one’s story can better help them navigate these transitions? Have they helped you navigate your own transitions in life? How for example?

When you journal, you are not audience-focused. Blogs, facebook, and conversations with friends have added so much to our lives. But we tend to share what we want other people to know or what we think will get the biggest response.

Journaling is about connecting with your heart or God.

I often think of a dear customer of mine. She has been struggling with infertility. Not too long ago, her sister announced her own pregnancy, and in all this joy for the sister, the woman also felt so much pain and sadness. She couldn’t talk about this pain on something like Facebook or her blog. She wanted to be happy for her sister!

So she journaled.

She let out that pain by writing about it.

These are transitions in life that are obvious and that we can feel. I want to help people draw those stories out.

I also want to draw out the stories that we don’t even realize are something that matter. We don’t realize that our normal right now will be totally different in 20 years. So often, we don’t even realize the transformations growing in our hearts. But they show up on paper. In 20 years, wouldn’t it be awesome to read about? Wouldn’t it be awesome to read that about our parents and grandparents?

What advice would you give someone who really wants to write more about their life, but feels like they have nothing to say….or feels like they don’t know how to organize their thoughts?

First – your story DOES MATTER. It matters to the people who know you. It matters to the people who will know you in the future. It’ll matter to the people who will never get to meet you but will hear about you. And it matters for you.

My entire mission with Gadanke is to create prompts that capture the stories for you. I love creating quotations that will have you thinking about favorite foods in childhood, where you dream of going, and what a typical today is like for you.

Katie, there are lots of journals out there in the marketplace, but I was wondering if you could tell us why you believe yours are best designed for people who want to “celebrate their story.”

I cannot claim to be better because our stories are all so different. So I focus on making something that can be most adaptable to anyone. Here are two things customers embrace in my products:

1. Gadanke journals have loose rings that you can pop open. Add more pages; reorganize the pages; hole punch and add letters, postcards, and memorabilia. It becomes a scrapbook with your story if you want it to be.

2. Gadanke journals have lots of extra bits. Library cards, tags, pockets, stickers, and Italian patterned papers give your stories a visual dimension. Plus they’re so fun to vary your writing on!

You can connect more with Katie online at:

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Today We Are Debt Free: $75,000+ Paid Off in 31 Months

May 19, 2011 in Transitioning with 27 Comments

My wife Heather and I will never forget today…May 19, 2011.

As of today we are completely debt free.

We owe no one any money for anything.

We got up this morning and paid off our final debt to Citibank…goodbye graduate school loans. It has been a long, hard process, but one of the most freeing experiences of our lives.

In 2007-2008 my wife and I began to talk more seriously about moving from California to Texas so that we could be closer to family. Our daughter had just been born in July of 2007 and we were feeling overwhelmed living in Los Angeles. Don’t get me wrong…we loved living there, but we had made some unhealthy financial decisions that just left us feeling like we didn’t have any room for error, or any room to step out and take risks.

Like a lot of people in LA we were hoping that the home we had purchased in Pasadena in 2005 was going to pay us back a huge profit after we sold it a few years later. And for a while, that dream looked like it might come true. I would on occasion search comps in our neighborhood and I noticed that our home’s market value was listed about $110,000 more than what we had paid for it two years earlier. But that all came crashing when the housing bubble burst, and the home that we thought was going to make us a huge profit ended up costing us.

So in June of 2008 I quit my job as the college director at Bel Air Presbyterian Church. We sold our house in July of 2008…having to actually come up with $40,000 to pay off the loan (that’s how bad our house price sunk)….wiping out all of our savings that we had stored away in a savings account…$40,000 to be exact. And in August of 2008 we loaded up our cars and drove from Pasadena to Dallas, TX.

We felt overwhelmed.

My wife was continuing to work for her company in LA from our home in Dallas, and I was struggling as a marriage and family therapist associate…often bringing home $-0 after we figured in what I made that month vs. the amount of money I was paying for supervison.

$55,000 in student loans for two graduate degrees.

$20,000 in credit card debt that we racked up in the month leading up to the move and the move itself.

Total: $75,000….it seemed like a mountain we couldn’t overcome and we felt stuck.

So we just decided in October of 2008 that we were “sick and tired of being sick and tired” of all the debt. I had heard that phrase from Dave Ramsey who I had just discovered on the local Dallas affiliate 570AM. I had heard of Dave before, but I just thought he was that crazy guy who told people to cut up their credit cards and pay with cash for things. But the more and more I listened to him the more and more I was drawn in.

I still remember my wife and I purchasing his book The Total Money Makeover Workbook and audio CD’s. We probably actually bought them with credit at the time…sorry Dave. For a couple of nights we sat down and listened through the audio CD’s and we worked through the workbook. We were stunned. Could it really be this easy to get out of debt? No tricks? Just straight forward hard work?

Those couple of nights sitting down at the kitchen table with Heather as our baby daughter was asleep were the turning points for us. We made a promise then to just attack the debt with “gazelle intensity” as Dave talked about.

So for 31 months we drastically changed our lifestyle.

We stopped eating out…except for an occasional inexpensive meal every few weeks.

We stopped buying clothes. I think Heather and I probably have spent a few hundred dollars in the last 31 months on some necessary items.

We drastically cut entertainment. We’ve probably been to less than 10 movies in those 31 months. We cut magazine subscriptions. We didn’t buy new gadgets or spend much money on music.

We stopped buying books and started visiting our local library. (Wow…talk about huge savings there).

We stopped going to coffee and made our coffee at home.

I stopped buying lunch at work and started packing my lunch.

We drew names at Christmas. Heather and I limited our gifts to each other at 1…$25 limit (that drew out our creativity).

Heather and I went away on 1 vacation for 5 days…but that was it.

We drive 8 and 12 year old cars with 136,000+ miles on both of them. And when we buy cars next they will only be bought with cash. No car leases for us moving forward…or as Dave calls it, “car fleecing.”

And those are just some of the things we did.

Even as I talk about the things we did and didn’t do, I heard stories of others who were even more intense. We realize now that there were many things we could have done better, but we have made it. We made mistakes along the way and still kicked ourselves for overspending at times. We did get rid of all of our credit cards, but one….don’t know why…..but that is now on its way out the door.

Looking back we think that we could have knocked off that debt even sooner, but life got crazy at times and emergencies happened and we lost motivation and will at times. One of the most crucial turning points for us is when we saw Dave Ramsey speak live at the Potter’s House in Dallas in March of 2010.

Seeing Dave speak live was just the kick in the pants we needed. You see, we had paid off $20,000 between October 2008 and March of 2010, so we felt pretty good about ourselves. Our friends couldn’t believe how much we paid off. But after seeing Dave live we realized we had to pick up the intensity or it would drag on for us. So from March of 2010 to May 19, 2011 we paid off $57,000…14 months.

As we sent off that payment today we looked at each other and almost couldn’t believe it. For our entire marriage we have always had some kind of debt hanging around our necks like a slowly tightening noose. And now we finally feel free. Without the debt a lot of our decisions don’t hang on finances and we feel the freedom to make choices we wouldn’t have been able to make years ago.

But this is just the beginning for us. If you know anything about Dave Ramsey’s 7 Baby Steps, well then you will know we are only now beginning Baby Step 3. We want to buy a house (the only debt the program allows–15yr fixed loan w/20% down on the house/a payment that is less than 25% of your take home pay) so bad, but we don’t want to make the same mistakes we have made before.

So we are going to be patient. And we are going to continue to work hard. We will work on our 6 month emergency fund, and then we will work on a down payment for a house…and we will continue to work the program. It is what has worked for us.

We always believed before that somehow we would be rescued. Some new job…some huge bonus…winning the lottery even though we don’t play.

But waiting around to be rescued by someone or something else got us nowhere and left us feeling powerless. We realized we had to take responsibility for our debt and radically eliminate it.

This makes sense to me.

As a Marriage and Family Therapist I continue to tell couples that their marriages only improve when each individual in the marriage takes responsibility for themselves and stops waiting for, or pointing at their partner to change. Only then, when we own our stuff, and take responsibility for our issues..that is when true change can happen in a marriage.

The same goes for debt. Only when we own our debt and take complete responsibility for it…then we can eliminate it and live in the freedom of not being slave to the lender (Proverbs 22:7).

I was hesitant to share some of the details of our story because money is a touchy issue in our culture. But we have shared our story with friends and family…and we have seen them motivated by what we are doing and they have begun to do the same. Change is happening. I also share my story quite openly with many of the clients that I work with in the therapy setting because finances are quite often the main point of contention within the marriage. And I have seen clients embrace Dave Ramsey’s program and have witnessed them change their lives because of the principles that Dave teaches.

And quite honestly, I don’t think Heather and I would have made it without the countless friends we have who are also working the 7 Baby Steps. They have been constant encouragement for us on this journey. Every Friday Heather and I looked forward to listening to the Dave Ramsey Show because it is “Debt Free Friday” where people call in to scream they are debt free. We have been astounded at the stories that people called in with. Many people paid off less than the $75,000 we have paid off…but I think even more people called in who had paid off way more money than Heather and I have paid off…often in shorter periods of time. That weekly show was the fuel that kept us going for 31 months and it’s going to be a huge source of encouragement for us as we continue to press on.

The work is not done but we feel a huge load of relief as we know that all of our hard work has paid off.

This Friday Heather and I will be celebrating our being debt free by dining at a nice steak house in the DFW area. But do you want to know how we are paying with it? We are paying with the cash we collected from all the coins we put in a milk jug from October 2008 to May of 2011. In fact, we loaded up the whole family last Friday. Heather, our 3 and half year old daughter and 10 month old son…and myself…and we dumped all our change into the Coinstar at Kroger as it counted up the money we had saved. That was our tangible motivation and we wanted my daughter especially to know at such a young age the importance of being debt free. Every week we added more coins just hoping that at the end of this we might have enough money to celebrate at a nice restaurant. We looked forward to this steak dinner for 31 months. And now it is here.

So no matter what your debt situation is, don’t give up hope. You can do this. Thousands and thousands and thousands of people have done this.

Start today.

Our final goal is to drive out to Nashville to the Dave Ramsey headquarters so that we can scream we are debt free from the lobby of the building. I know it sounds crazy…but not anymore crazy than living in debt.

Change and Transition: Re-Defining and Re-Negotiating Your Marital Roles

January 10, 2011 in Marriage-Family, Transitioning with 5 Comments


[image by the Welsh Poppy]

In a marriage, changes abound.

The couple may move houses. They may move states.  They might have a child, or two, or three, or more.

The mom may work as a stay at home mom. Or maybe even the dad might take up that work (I did for a short period of time–easy change, but super hard transition).

They might change jobs, or go back to school.  One of them might get cancer.

Change is going to happen, and the couple is going to have to adjust to the changes.

But what they might not do is transition.

Perhaps a couple has kids that begin to go to school, and the wife/mom who has always worked full-time as a stay at home mom is now re-entering the work force outside of the home. That is a huge change. But I wonder how many couples work through the transition of that? And why is that important? Because though the change has happened, dealing with it psychologically, emotionally, relationally, spiritually, etc. is a whole other aspect of that change.

What happens when that mom goes back into the work force full-time? Does the dad expect the mom to continue on not only with her new job, but also all the same things she did before she worked outside the home? If expectations are not discussed, and are different, then their roles need to be re-defined and re-negotiated, because the change brought about a transition they were unprepared for.

What To Do?
People change and grow and evolve, and so it only makes sense then that so do marriages. Couples need to sit down and look at the evolution of their marriage and how what originally helped them define their roles has perhaps changed. In recognizing that things have changed, then a couple can begin to assess and negotiate how things might now look.

With change in a marriage not only comes the need to transition, but to possibly re-define and re-negotiate the roles. I feel like this is a process that my wife and I are constantly in as we continue to work through changes in our own marriage. When I resigned my job as college pastor at Bel Air Presbyterian Church in 2008, that was a pretty easy change. But it was a super hard transition. And there was a re-defining and re-negotiating of our marital roles. We went from both working, to one working, to me being the primary caregiver, and my wife the primary breadwinner. Easy change. Hard transition. Lots of re-defining and re-negotiating.

Look at some key areas of the relationship that have perhaps changed over the course of the marriage, or that you would like to see change.  Here are some that come up fairly often in my work with couples:

  • Re-Defining and Re-Negotiating the tasks around “keeping house” (i.e. laundry; dishes; cooking; cleaning; yard work, etc.)
  • Re-Defining and Re-Negotiating parenting roles
  • Re-Defining and Re-Negotiating vocation roles (one income/two income; part-time; full-time; etc)
  • Re-Defining and Re-Negotiating hobbies and activities (helping a partner make time for them and achieve them)
  • Re-Defining and Re-Negotiating dreams, goals (travel; volunteer work; retirement; passions; etc.)
  • Re-Defining and Re-Negotiating spiritual life (place of worship; certain beliefs/practices; etc.)

When couples engage one another in the practice of re-defining and re-negotiating roles in their marital relationship, they are also giving their partner the ability to begin to dream again of some things that they might want for their life.  Things that have possibly never been discussed, or that have laid dormant for years.  “Many times, spouses, are willing to make sacrifices for each other and the relationship, but are unaware of what the goals and dreams of their partners are about” (The Essential Humility of Marriage by Terry Hargrave, pp. 193).

Change vs. Transition: Why Most People Will Fail at Achieving Their 2011 Goals

January 6, 2011 in Therapy-Psychology, Transitioning with 8 Comments

Without a transition, a change is just a rearrangement of the furniture.

–William Bridges

I can easily say that I learn as much from my clients in the course of a therapy session, then perhaps they often learn from me. At the end of each day when the last client has left the office, and I lock my door and head home, I am grateful for the many insights that come in my interaction with them.

Recently, one very astute client declared during session, “I love change, but hate transition.”

I was instantly intrigued. My blog for many years has had the tagline, “Transitioning Life’s Journey“, and transition is a topic that I speak a lot on, and that has been an important concept in my own life. But I don’t think I have thought much about the difference between change and transition.

And there is a big difference. Failure to differentiate the two can lead a person down two very different paths.

In the book, Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes (HT: to my dad Timothy Smith and my friend Adam McHugh for suggesting this book to me) William Bridges differentiates the two very nicely:

Our society confuses them constantly, leading us to imagine that transition is just another word for change. But it isn’t. Change is your move to a new city or your shift to a new job. It is the birth of your new baby or the death of your father. It is the switch from the old health plan at work to a new one, or the replacement of your manager by a new one, or it is the acquisition that your company just made.

In other words, change is situational. Transition on the other hand, is psychological (bold added for emphasis). It is not those events, but rather the inner reorientation and self-redefinition that you have to go through in order to incorporate any of those changes into your life. Without a transition, a change is just a rearrangement of the furniture. Unless transition happens, the change won’t work, because it doesn’t ‘take.’ Whatever word we use, our society talks a lot about change; but it seldom deals with transition. Unfortunately for us, it is the transition that blind-sides us and is often the source of our troubles.

And that is the very reason for why many of the changes that people hope to make in 2011 won’t “take.” They will spend all their time making the situational changes, but little or none of the psychological changes.

A husband and wife will commit to change some habits and commit to more date nights, but they may do little or nothing of the psychological work to build and maintain an emotional, spiritual, physical and psychological connection. Date nights alone don’t make for an improved marriage.

A pastor may make changes to the mission of the church he or she pastors, but may have dealt with little or none of the psychological issues in their own lives that may hamper them from effectively bringing about the change. New mission statements don’t make for a new vision.

A recent college graduate may make the change to move to a new city for a new job, thinking this is the answer to their loneliness and feeling of disconnection, but may do little or nothing in the way of dealing with psychological issues that are at the root of the problems. A change of scenery doesn’t create connection.

Change can come easy, but transitioning will take work. So don’t commit to just changing this year, but commit to transitioning.