Megan Bruneau, M.A. RCC

7 months and 23 ✈️’s into pregnancy, heading home to to stay put—and hopefully get hit with this so-called “nesting” urge 🐣

(You still get it if your version of “organization” is little piles scattered all over the house, right..?)

All in perfect time ✨

For our baby girl, that’s July 2026 💕

Kicked off our year of 40 with lifelong gfs and a millennial Galentine’s dream 🤩

After nearly two decades of working with high-achievers, these are the patterns I see most often.

1. Having an inner critic vs. an inner coach:

We don’t take risks when failure means self-evisceration. Resilience isn’t built through an abusive relationship with yourself. It comes from trusting you can coach yourself through whatever unknown.

Next time you fall short, ask: would I say this to someone I’m rooting for?

2. Believing you can willpower your way out:

You can’t muscle your way out of patterns that exist for a reason. They initially developed to help you.

Instead of forcing change, get curious: what is this pattern protecting you from? 

3. Prioritizing optimizing and performing over connecting and being:

If you had three months to live, how would you spend them? Probably not chasing the next milestone. The richness of life lives in presence, intimacy, and play—not perpetual self-improvement. 

Schedule one thing that has no purpose other than enjoyment—and protect it.

4. Waiting to be free of doubt before taking action:

You’re waiting for confidence or certainty that may not arrive until *after* you act. Doubt often signals intelligence or humility—so hear it out, but don’t mistake it for a stop sign.

Do one thing scared. Not reckless—just before the doubt clears. Prove that action creates clarity.

5. Running from pain instead of toward meaning: 

We’re wired to avoid discomfort. Without clarity on what matters, you’ll keep choosing safety over alignment. The goal isn’t eliminating pain—it’s choosing your suffering: the contraction of avoidance, or the vulnerability of growth. 

Name what emotions you’ve been avoiding and ask: what does the afraid part of me need to handle them?

6. Measuring your reality against a fantasy:

The gap between expectation and reality is where suffering lives—and it widens every time you scroll through curated success, saccharin happiness, FaceTuned beauty, and Disney-style romance. That life doesn’t exist for anyone. 

When you catch yourself comparing, remember: everyone’s life includes grief, shame, and hard seasons.

room for the messy and exhale a sigh of relief that you’re *not* failing everywhere 🤍.

Nearly a decade ago, I was connected to a prominent literary agent in NYC. She saw potential in my writing and in my idea for a book about healing perfectionism. We worked together for months on a proposal—that she ultimately decided she wasn't confident enough to shop.

So I wrote the book anyway and came back to her with it two years later. She was impressed this time, and optimistic we could get a deal, so we went back to work on a proposal with the intention of going to market in the Spring of 2020.

Then the pandemic hit, creating chaos in the publishing industry. She told me it was too risky to represent a first-time author, ending our partnership once again. I was devastated. That unpublished manuscript still sits in my Google Drive—an ironic symbol of the very “failure” I sought to teach readers to fear less.

Last September, I received a contact form inquiry from an acquisitions editor at asking if I’d be interested in submitting a proposal on the same subject. At first glance, I thought it was spam. Was this the same publisher responsible for and the majority of behavioral health books I’ve read and courses I’ve taken?

Fast forward to a year+ later, where I’ve just submitted my ~100k word manuscript to my editor. It’s not exactly the pop psych book I wrote years ago...it’s so much better! I truly can’t express how honored I am to weave my story into a clinical manual for therapists and coaches 🤍.

This isn’t a story of persistence—I’d shelved my dream of being a published author and wasn’t out there looking for agents or publishers. But it is a story of perseverance—of trusting that the authentic partner, client, or opportunity will find you at the right time.

Here’s a sneak peek at what is VERY unlikely to be the published book’s title, and the first pages of a several hundred-page-draft in an environmentally friendly but visually unsatisfying format 😆.