Online to reality

Almost two years ago, a friend who used to teach at Mizzou introduced me to a mom who was connecting with other professional moms. We both happened to know a lot of the same women in the mom blog world. Not long after that, Hollee Schwartz Temple asked me for a favor: to review her new book, Good Enough is the New Perfect. She wrote it along with Becky Beaupre Gillespie and focused the writing on research that helps us all better understand where many women are finding success and failure with work/life balance. The book looks at research that finds type-a moms or "never enoughs" tend to be more stressed and unhappy than moms who allow moments of imperfection. The "good enoughs" are okay with store-bought food or skipping a soccer practice. I enjoyed the book and blogged about it on Born Just Right back in 2011. After the blog post, Hollee and I became Facebook friends. We would talk there and on Twitter from time to time.

Fast forward to this week. Our local women's network invited Hollee to speak about her book and research. We finally had a chance to meet! We had breakfast together, I helped shoot video of her speech and I quickly discovered I'm SO glad we had a chance to meet online because we were meant to meet in person. Moving a friendship that starts online and moves into the real world is one of my favorite parts of being in the social media world. I've met people from around the world who I would have never known and when we can actually meet in person, the relationship just grows. It is never awkward for me because the person I appear online is exactly who I am in person.

I'm looking forward to my next chance to meet up with Hollee... and many, many more people as I move into my next career.