Halloween traces back to Samhain, the ancient Celtic festival when people believed the boundary between the living and the dead blurred. For one night, spirits could return to walk among us. Two thousand years later, we’re still being haunted, only now the ghosts are very much alive. They’re the clients who vanish after months of…
Until I started coaching two years ago, I was a brokerage executive. My job was keeping top agents happy, developing rising talent, and recruiting new agents. I loved it, especially the creative problem-solving and the business development strategy. Recruiting was the hard part. I liked meeting new people and catching up with agents at other…
This week marks two years of Molly B. Coaching & Consulting. Two years of big ideas, hard decisions, the occasional existential crisis, and one revelation I keep running into: Knowing better and doing better are two very different things. There are plenty of schools of thought on what makes a good coach. Some ask carefully…
One of the worst things you can do with a good idea is ask too many people what they think about it. I posted some version of that on Instagram last week, and I keep coming back to it. We’re taught that feedback is a good thing. Get input, pressure-test the idea, ask people you…
The view from my fence this morning is decidedly fall, thanks to the leaves the nor’easter knocked down overnight. For months, fall has been the marker. After Labor Day. After the Jewish holidays. Once October starts, everyone will be back, and the market will get moving. Well, here we are. And already, I’m hearing the…
Yesterday was the fall equinox, one of two moments each year when day and night are roughly equal. Today, they aren’t. The balance has already tipped. The days are getting shorter, the nights longer, and nobody calls that a failure of the system. That’s the system working exactly as it should. I’m thinking a lot…
I have long believed that everyone should have two résumés. There’s the regular one. Jobs, titles, accomplishments. The document designed to explain, in a page or two, why someone should take you seriously. And then there’s what I call the alt résumé. Mine includes: lived on a commune in Oregon for six months, hitchhiked across…
Every fall I have some version of the same debate: tartan or leather? Am I a black leather moto jacket person this year, or a three-quarter-length plaid coat person? Some years the details shift, but apparently I assign an unreasonable amount of identity to outerwear. The coat isn’t really the point. Something about fall makes…
Okay. I’ve been to the beach. I’ve clocked hours staring at the ocean, eaten an heirloom tomato like an apple, let my hair go full wannabe surfer girl, driven down a country road blasting an epic song with one arm out the window, cooked dinner for friends in my bathing suit, gone sailing with my…
My friend Maggie dropped her daughter Emmy off at college this week. They met the roommate, helped her set up her dorm room, did whatever last-minute fussing parents are still allowed to do, and eventually there was nothing left to do but leave. Maggie and her husband got into the car, and he looked at…
When I was in my twenties, a therapist told me that if I got to the end of my life with five friends I could truly bare my soul to, I should consider myself lucky. I remember thinking that sounded incredibly bleak. At the time, I took friendship VERY seriously. I didn’t really know how…
Growing up, my mother had a friend named Olga. As far as I was concerned, she knew everyone. If you needed a car, you called Olga. If you were looking for a rescue dog, you called Olga. If your teenager needed a therapist, you called Olga. If you needed an architect, a contractor, a restaurant…