This is My Simmer Summer

Hi! New here? Welcome to the Uplifters! I'm Aransas Savas. I've spent the last 20 years at the intersection of behavior change research and coaching. On The Uplifters Podcast, we share diverse stories of women who have found something beautiful on the other side of the hard stuff. Despite self-doubt and fear (and honestly, who doesn't have those?), they've done big, brave things anyway, and show us how we can too!

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I spend 72 hours each week making sourdough bread.

That’s not true. I’m actually only “making” for about 10 minutes. The rest is rest. It’s yeast and flour and water doing their thing.

Out of the 4,320 minutes that pass from flour to loaf, the bread demands my active attention for just 10 of them. The rest? Patient simmering.

I'm calling this my Simmer Summer – a season where I'm deliberately stepping away from my usual love affair with forcing functions and decisive action. Instead of chasing another marathon PR or trying to clear the decks every day, I'm finally doing The Artist's Way after 20 years of talking about it. I'm running without music, without pace goals, without any agenda except to see what bubbles up when I strip away the noise. And just like that bread dough, I'm discovering that the magic happens in the spaces between action.

We live in a culture obsessed with those 10 active minutes – the hustle, the grind, the visible doing. But what if the real transformation happens during the other 4,310 minutes? What if our greatest breakthroughs need time to proof, to develop complexity and depth we can't rush?

I've always been suspicious of rest, viewing it as time stolen from progress. But on the latest episode of The Uplifters,

Mo Browne – Djeli Said

, shared something she remembered the legendary Colleen J. McElroy saying to her and other poets, “Are you writing the poem or are you in the way of the writing?”

Maybe all of the doing is getting in the way of the poem that most needs to be written. So, what if this summer we let ourselves off the proverbial dough hook and just experiment with doing less for a minute to see what emerges.

What if this season, instead of forcing the rise, we let ourselves proof?

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Listen to Mahogany’s whole story here for living proof that we can move forward without feeling ready.

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