Hi, I’m MJ. I’m the creator and founder of the A$$piration Project. Since I was a kid I’ve loved a challenge, and I give my all to everything I do. In fact I spent most of my life giving my all to achieve the ‘checkboxes’ we are told will make us happy: career, relationships and physical appearance. But as the checkboxes added up, I felt more and more hollow. 

I finally had to stop and ask myself, why? 

That got me thinking about the constant flow of messages dictating what women should want, what we should aspire to and who we should be. I tried consciously tuning out this external noise, and realized that’s the easy part.

The hard part was answering a deceptively simple question: ‘what do I really want?’

Answering that question was hard because listening to myself had become so secondary that I barely even knew the sound of my own voice. Like a sponge, I’ve absorbed those ‘should’ messages my whole life. When I blocked them from the outside, they bubbled up on the inside, insisting on ideals no sane person would want. Beauty standards that expect me to pause in time, relationship norms that encourage me to put my needs last, and a status system that asks me to equate my identity with my job title. 

So I turned to the anchors in my life for clues - like friendships with women, and equally, my relationship with fitness. Spending time thinking about why these aspects of my life are so beneficial sparked the idea behind the A$$piration Project.

There is power in female friendship, because of the innate understanding of what we all experience while moving through the world as girls and women. Even if the details aren’t the same for everyone, this understanding creates support, community and psychological safety.

Fitness holds a bounty of benefits. There are too many to list here, but a few were essential to the creation of the A$$piration Project (I’ll be exploring these and others in newsletters and blog posts!)

The first is the space fitness creates where our own voice becomes a little easier to hear. The second is the feedback loop fitness provides; a microcosmic training ground for life. And the third is a basic but crucial truth: fitness makes us stronger. We’re going to need all these benefits to block out the bossy noise telling us what we should want, do the work to figure out what we actually want and courageously go after it.

In speaking to other women, there's a sense that the pressure to live a one-size fits all good life is universal, but so are the anchors of fitness and female friendship. This was the tipping point for the A$$piration Project. I created it as a way to push back on the checkbox bullshit and provide a place to help women uncover and embody their own unique ambitions in fitness, richness and in life, all while cheering on friends to do the same. If that sounds like a difficult mission, you’re right. But I did say I love a good challenge, and I promise to give it my all.

If this sounds like a space you’d like to spend time in, I hope to see you around! Let’s tune out the noise, find our own voices, dial into our true ambitions and work together to achieve goals we never thought possible.