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Coffee or tea. Black pants or the gray ones. Cowboy boots or cowboy boots (kidding, well, not really). Email now or after lunch. A salad or the burger.

Most of these are background noise. These “tier one” questions don’t move the needle on your life.

Then there are the choices that do—let’s call them “tier two”: How will I show up for my clients today? How will I give them my best? How will I lead my team on the days when I’m not feeling it?

I’d argue there’s a third tier. The most important choices you’ll ever make are the quietest ones—the ones nobody sees you make:

Healing and happiness are choices we can make every single day.

That’s the line I gave during a magazine interview, and I meant every word of it. Because I’ve lived on both sides of it.

Thirteen years ago, I found a swollen lymph node in my neck and diagnosed myself with stage 2 Hodgkin’s lymphoma, which meant:

six months of chemo, a supplement protocol, a divorce, three kids, a busy chiropractic practice, and a life that did not pause to let me catch up.

Cancer did not feel like a choice. But every day inside of it, I had a choice.

Am I going to find one good thing today? Am I going to be kind to the person who’s just doing their job? Am I going to laugh, even a little, even when nothing’s funny?

Most days, yes. Some days, no. But the choice was always there.

1. The choice doesn’t disappear because the situation is hard. This is the lie we tell ourselves. I can’t choose joy right now; look at what’s happening to me. But the choice is most available exactly when the situation is hardest, because that’s when your brain is most desperate for relief. Neuroplasticity doesn’t take days off. Every reframe rewires you a little. Every “I get to” instead of “I have to” is a small SHIFT™ in the direction you actually want to go.

2. Healing isn’t a destination. It’s a practice. I’m cancer-free. I’m also still healing. From the diagnosis, from tirelessly rebounding, from the version of me who thought I had to do everything alone. Healing is not the moment you get “all clear.” It’s about prevention too. Healing is what you choose—on Tuesday, when nobody’s watching, when the test results are old news and life is just life again.

3. Happiness in the middle is the whole point. Happiness after the hard thing is over isn’t a strategy. It’s a hostage situation. I’ll be happy when … I get the promotion, the diagnosis lifts, the kids are grown, the practice runs itself. No. The whole point of Positively Altered—the book, my keynote message, the work—is that happiness lives in the middle of the mess. You don’t earn happiness by waiting. You choose it by showing up.

I’m sharing all of this because something lovely happened, and it’s making me reflect. On May 1, I was at Logan University to receive the 2026 Dr. Beatrice B. Hagen Award, which the university gives for an outstanding woman in the chiropractic care and education space. I told the magazine it was unexpected, and it was. But what’s stayed with me isn’t the award itself; it’s an idea that keeps returning to me: making a difference in others’ lives.

That’s the only metric that matters to me. And it’s available to every single one of us, every single day. We just have to choose it.