For most of my working life, I fed people.

I spent years in the food business, selling products and services of multinational companies to clients worldwide. It was a challenging and taught me something the wellness industry seems determined to forget: a good meal can hold a difficult day together. A week of grabbed sandwiches and lukewarm coffee will, eventually, come for you. Food was never just fuel. It was a daily conversation between you and your own life, and you could tell pretty quickly whether the conversation was going well.

But meeting rooms are not gentle places. The hours are absurd and the travelling time from meeting to meeting is exhausting. For a long time I believed this was what serious work looked like, give everything, skip lunch, keep moving, rest when you retire. I was good at it and I was also, very quietly, running on fumes.

There was no dramatic turning point. No collapse, just an ordinary Wednesday when I realized I couldn't remember the last time I'd sat down to eat a meal. I'd been guiding my sales teams and was forced to the next agenda point. Somewhere in that absurd little contradiction, I understood I'd been treating my own life the way I suspect most of my readers now treat theirs, as something to get through, not something to actually live in.

So I made changes, but not too quickly. Nobody rebuilds a life in a weekend, despite what a lot of Instagram carousels will try to tell you. I trained as a startup consultant, because I wanted to understand what I'd been missing in myself and help other people find it in their own lives. I turned to nature because I needed to remind myself that I was a body in a landscape, not just a head in front of a screen. I got a dog, Quinny, who has since become my most reliable teacher in the practice of simply being somewhere. Dogs don't optimize their mornings, they just show up for them, and they expect you to do the same.

What I’ve learned little by little, and with a few setbacks along the way, is that “balance” isn’t a peak you climb in athletic gear. It's a bunch of small, unglamorous moves, repeated often enough that they start to add up to a life you recognize as yours. A real breakfast instead of a granola bar eaten in the car and a walk before the laptop opens. A pause, however brief, before the next meeting or a book instead of the scroll at eleven o'clock at night.

None of this is revolutionary. It's almost aggressively unrevolutionary. That, I think, is the whole point.

Everyday Anchors is where I bring the threads of my life together, the food knowledge from two decades in the Fast-Moving-Consumer-Goods business, the sales consulting tools I use to help people change things they'd decided couldn't be changed, and the slower, quieter way of living that country life and long walks with a ridiculous dog have taught me. I'm not a guru, I don't sell self-discovery weekends. Some weeks I still skip breakfast and stay up too late reading. But I know how to come back, and I know how to help other people come back too.

I'm building this openly, writing, cooking, walking, and using Claude as a thinking partner because one person can't do all this alone and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

If any of this sounds like home, come in. Take off your shoes. I'll put the kettle on.

— Jens