The Place: Cafe Medici
The Cup: An iced coffee for both Molly and myself. Special guest, Luke, enjoyed a bottle of juice and because his teeth are on their way in, he skipped the scone and opted instead for a red, rubber spatula.
Background: That darn Steve Harper, Cup 5 was up to it again. When he met Molly she told him a story about her interest in talking to strangers and, well, he immediately thought of me and emailed an introduction to the two of us. There was no way I could pass up the chance to visit with a fellow lover of strangers. Lucky me, I got two for the price of one. Molly’s little man, Luke, joined us for our coffee. Can you believe how adorable he is?
Molly has a lot going on in her life right now – a new baby, a new career and figuring out how to balance it all. She has an incredibly level head and her philosophy for keeping it all together is remarkable. We’ll get to that in just a bit, but first, some:
Common Grounds
- What is the last movie you saw? Man In the Iron Mask on Netflix.
- What is your guilty pleasure? Chocolate. I love desserts.
- How did you make your first buck? Babysitting.
- Where is your favorite place to eat in Austin? Depends on my mood. I really like Uncorked because I love wine and they have good wine and cheese boards. If I’m hungry, I really like Zocallo. They have great sangria and queso.
- What was your favorite TV show as a kid? Wishbone. A show about a dog that went through the classic stories from literature.
- What is the last thing you fixed? One of my bracelets.
- What is the best part about your job? Helping people find their dreams. I just helped some friends buy their first house and they are so excited. I get to give them their keys tomorrow.
- What would be the worst job for you? Anything monotonous. I just cannot deal. That’s why I did project management – because everything changes constantly.
Like me, Molly isn’t an Austin native. She was born in Cincinnati, where her dad was finishing up his medical school residency. When she was pretty young, her family moved to a very small town in Indiana called Batesville. She describes her young self as the “loud second child”, always trying to get attention – “Look at me!” style. Then, in late elementary school and into junior high, she had the misfortune of being the target of the mean girls, and decided it might be better for her to quiet down and try to blend in. I learn this when I ask her what people might be surprised to learn about her, and she tells me that she was a shy nerd in high school, adding, “I always had louder friends.”
College offered a chance at a new beginning – or perhaps a return to her authentic self. “I thought, no one knows me here, I can be as happy and gregarious as I want to be,” she said. And so the butterfly emerged – social butterfly that is!
After a year at Clemson University, where she had joined a sorority and made lots of friends, she made what she admits was the best mistake of her life. She transferred to a new school to follow a boy. Fortunately, that school was Purdue – known as an excellent engineering school, which was Molly’s area of study. A girl who knows what she wants and goes for it, she called up the head of the sorority she wanted to join and told her she was transferring and that she’d like to move in. The woman said this wasn’t how it was usually done and Molly said she understood that. In the end, she got what she wanted and says she thinks about her sorority days fondly, sometimes longingly.
Although Mr. Wrong is the guy she moved to Purdue for, she wound up finding Mr. Right – a fellow student and a fellow Greek. He ended up in Austin after graduation and they tried the long-distance romance thing. After spending nearly two years in Phoenix, working in construction project management, she decided she’d see what Austin had to offer and give the relationship the chance it deserved. This time, the choice was right! She and Shawn got married in Sept. of 2010 after getting engaged at Disney World the previous Thanksgiving in front of her whole family!
That is a great story! But here’s an even better one. Last spring, the couple decided they were ready for a baby and, well, stopped trying to prevent such matters. During an evening out with a girlfriend, Molly says her friend looked at her, martini in hand, and declared her to be pregnant. “What? No!” Molly thought. But the next morning, curiosity got the better of her and she decided it best to prove her friend wrong.
Imagine this scenario: It’s Easter, there are 30 people set to arrive any moment and THIS is the time Molly decides to dig out a pregnancy test and give it a whirl. Molly says, “I literally went on the stick and the doorbell rang.” As she was about to walk out the bathroom door, she glances at the stick, sees a positive and out she goes to welcome her guests.
OMG! {I realize that’s overused, but it’s completely warranted here!} “What did you do?”, I eagerly asked her as my nerves started fraying at the thought of it. “Nothing. What could I do?” So she just acted like everything was totally normal. She didn’t manage to fool everyone though. Shawn knew something was up. But not suspecting a bun in the oven, he assumed he’d done something wrong and was in trouble.
Once the guests left, he found out the great news. {Let’s all exhale together now!}
On December 14, 2012, their lives were forever changed when little Luke came into world.
Molly had made the decision that once she became pregnant, she’d begin working on getting her real estate license. Which she did and a few months later, she joined the Keller Williams team in Austin. Her philosophy in business and in life is all about helping people. “I try to give to the world as much as I get,” she says. “One day I cold called this woman and was asking her how I could help her. She said to me, ‘Honey, do you make any money at all?'” Molly laughed and said, “I start with trying to help people and when I do that, the money will follow.”
The most significant thing that’s happened to Molly in the last 30 days was attending a real estate business course offered to Keller Williams agents called BOLD. It left her energized and ready to get serious. She says, “I’d been limping along in business as I figured out this motherhood thing. I decided it was time to play for real, so I hired a real estate coach to help me with my business.” It’s obviously paying off as she sold two houses this past weekend.
I love asking people about their bucket lists. For Molly and her husband, there isn’t one. And that’s deliberate. Molly says, “We don’t like to save it up. We try to live life fully all the time.” Instead of a list of things to do or see, they mark significant life events or chapters closing in big ways. For example, once they knew they’d want a baby in a year or so, they started what they refer to as “The Year of Yeses”. The premise was, anytime anyone asked them to do anything socially, they had to say yes. It didn’t matter if they were tired or not. “Yes!” would be the default answer. The thought was that once the baby came along, they would be into a new chapter that was focused more on their immediate family, and they realized they’d have less time and energy for social stuff. They choose to live life without regrets and want to say at the close of a chapter, “That was awesome! What’s next?” To which Molly adds, “We always say that our favorite day is tomorrow, because then it’s never here.”
A book that Molly found particularly impactful, was The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks. She and Shawn shoot for reading roughly one book a month together – typically choosing heady topics. She said reading The Big Leap changed how they live their lives every day. She says it’s about doing work that doesn’t feel like work and getting out of comfort zones.
I ask Molly what she considers to be the biggest issue facing society today and she says it’s seclusion. “People aren’t going out and meeting other people,” she says, “we all just live in our own little houses and keep to ourselves. I don’t think that’s how we were meant to live. The concept of castles makes a lot of sense to me,” she adds. I tell Molly that I agree with her and confide that I secretly think the idea of communal living makes sense. I think the ideal life would be to have land with one large main house that has a big kitchen and common areas surrounded by a bunch of small cabins. You’d live among friends and family, have meals together and share the work, but still have privacy and a little space to get away. She laughs at this and tells me when the real estate market was struggling in 2008, and she and Shawn were looking at buying their first house, they somewhat jokingly said they should pool their money with friends to buy a million dollar mansion that had six masters.
The thing that drives Molly is a desire to look in the mirror and see someone successful looking back at her. She tells me that as long as she’s doing work she’s passionate about, she is unstoppable – often having to be reminded to take a break.
What would she change about herself? She’d be better at letting things go. “I struggle with perfectionism, and it can be crippling at times, but I’m working on it. She cites two examples as proof that she’s making an effort. The first – she has a load of laundry that hasn’t been folded in four days. The second example is about meal preparation. She says she used to be meticulous about planning and preparing their meals, but since Luke came along and business has been picking up, P. Terry’s has become their personal chef. Knowing this wasn’t the healthiest solution, she saw room for improvement and they are now picking up meals from My Fit Foods, which are healthy and convenient. When I tell her I’m impressed, she tells me it’s a struggle, but she’s trying to let go.
I ask Molly what she’s looking forward to most and her answer is beautiful. She says, “I love my life – the life that Shawn and I are creating. I look forward to waking up every day and living this amazing life.”
If she had 30 seconds to make a speech to the world, this is what she’d say: “We all need to listen to the great philosopher that is popular in 2012, and that’s Ke$ha- who sings It’s A Crazy Beautiful Life. If you look for it, you’ll find it, so you should just start looking for that crazy, beautiful life, because it’s there. Instead of going out trying to find it somewhere else – you’ve already got it.” She then reminds me of the Acres of Diamonds story of the farmer in Africa who hears tales of fields of diamonds. He sells his farm to go out in search of them. After spending the rest of his life searching for diamonds and never finding them, he throws himself in a river and drowns. Meanwhile, the farmer who bought the land from him finds a strange rock in his field and takes it into the house and places it on the mantle. A visitor asks him about it one day and explains to the farmer that this stone is an uncut diamond. In fact, it’s one of the largest diamonds ever found. There were many others just like it and it turned out the first farmer had owned, free and clear … acres of diamonds. But he had sold them for practically nothing, in order to look for them elsewhere.
Molly is living proof that happiness is all around us. There’s no need to set off in search of something more, bigger or better. If it’s happiness we seek, we simply need to look for reasons to be happy. Understanding that often the best way to help ourselves is to help others and to live our lives in a way that leaves us proud of who we see staring back at us in the mirror. To wake up every day, thankful for the crazy, beautiful life we’ve created – perfect in its imperfection.
To learn more about Molly, check her out on LinkedIn or visit her website.
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