September 2026 Quarterly Connect: Go Slow To Go Fast
We're still energized about last Monday's Quarterly Connect.
Sarah, Jeska, and Bryanna gave us the kind of panel we hope for every time: honest, specific, and willing to go to the harder places, especially when Bryanna opened up about her cancer journey.
The question we came in with
What if going faster is what's slowing you down? Everyone in that room recognized the version of themselves that runs faster the more is on the line, and I think most of us realized we're on a first-name basis with her.
Sarah on why
Sarah Collins built Lucky Locks after 15 years of a career and a really honest reckoning with digital burnout, and her superpower on the panel was returning, over and over, to the “why” underneath everything. You can move fast on the wrong thing for a really long time, but you can't move fast on the right thing without knowing what makes it right in the first place. Sarah's whole practice is grounding every decision, big and small, in what's actually driving it, and when you're clear on that, when to slow down often becomes obvious on its own.
Bryanna on non-negotiables
Bryanna Emmerling runs global accounts at Happylucky and has worked with brands whose timelines don't wait for anyone, so her framing carried real weight. She shared a practice we haven't stopped thinking about: her non-negotiables list, kept front and center at all times, like the ticket wall on The Bear.
Non-negotiables aren't the things you'd like to protect, they're the things you actually will, and everything else has to earn its place around them. If you don't name them, they get quietly compromised by whatever's loudest on your calendar in the moment. Once you name them, you start noticing how often you were about to give them up without even meaning to.
Jeska's imaginary board of directors
Jeska Clark spends her time in polar training, high-altitude mountaineering, and Deschutes County Search and Rescue, so when she talks about decision-making, the frame is closer to life-or-death than to marketing-and-margin. The practice she shared that lit up the room was small and quiet, which somehow made it hit harder.
She keeps an imaginary board of directors in her head, people she admires and doesn't know, and when she faces a hard call, she considers what her board would tell her. It isn't a workaround for lacking access; it's a way of putting yourself in a room with a version of you that's a few years further along than where you are now. If enough of us started doing this every week, we'd probably make different choices.
Jeska's two-question filter
Before you say yes to something, ask two things. Is this actually urgent, and does it get you closer to your goals? Most things that feel urgent fail one of those tests, and most things that would actually move you forward don't feel urgent enough to protect. But if you can hold both questions at once, you can stop moving fast on things that don't matter and start moving deliberately on the ones that do.
Jeska on SAR-GAR
Jeska walked us through the framework her world uses to make team-level decisions whenever a new assignment lands or the conditions shift. It's six factors, checked every time:
Supervision (who is in charge)
Assignment (what actually is it)
Fitness of the team (are we ready)
Environment (the terrain we're in, physical or digital)
Team composition (who's actually here)
Improvisation, or Planning / Resources depending on the model (what do we do with what we've got)
The room got quiet while she walked us through it. It sounded like emergency response, but it also sounded like every meeting we've all sat in where we jumped straight to execution before anyone bothered to ask whether the team was even ready. Try running SAR-GAR the next time something big lands on your plate, especially when you're moving fast.
Bryanna's story, and what none of them would rush
Bryanna shared her journey through breast cancer, and what a forced slowdown teaches you that a chosen one can't. When your body pauses your career for you, you learn very quickly what actually matters, and you don't lose that clarity when the treatment ends.
Her framing stayed with us all night: life is long, but it is also short. Make it count.
The rest of the panel picked up that thread and ran with it. Choosing a life partner. The friendships that hold you when work is chaos. Health. The quiet work of tending to what actually sits under the ambition. The stuff you can't put on a Notion doc. The stuff that shows up in your life whether you set it up on purpose or not.
The panel's willingness to be that honest, and the room's willingness to let it happen, is what made this night different, and it's honestly why we do what we do.
A word that came up over and over
Intentionality. Not as a productivity buzzword, but as a leadership skill. Every decision to slow down that any of them described was really a decision to be intentional about pace, direction, or foundation. They didn't slow down because they were tired; they slowed down because they had learned that intentional speed compounds and reactive speed just depletes.
Jeska's book list
For anyone who wants to keep going after us:
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
Slow Productivity by Cal Newport
Essentialism by Greg McKeown
The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande
Deep Work by Cal Newport
Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
Lead the Field by Earl Nightingale
A big thank you supporting the food drive
You filled a whole car with donations for Family Kitchen. That's not a small thing. Family Kitchen serves the people in our community who need it most. Every item you brought Monday goes directly into meals and services for people who count on them. Thank you for showing up for our neighbors.
If you couldn't make it Monday but still want to contribute, drop-offs are always welcome at 231 NW Idaho Ave in Bend.
Some big news we announced Monday
Two things we shared on stage that we want to make sure everyone knows.
DWB is now officially fiscally sponsored by the Bend Chamber of Commerce. In practice, this means we now operate under the Chamber's 501(c)(3) nonprofit umbrella, which unlocks the ability for us to accept tax-deductible contributions, pursue grant funding, and expand our programming with real institutional support behind us. Importantly, we continue to run independently, with our own board, our own programming, and our own voice, and the fiscal sponsorship gives us the infrastructure to grow without changing what makes DWB feel like DWB. It's a big step for what we're able to build from here, and a real signal from one of the region's most established business organizations that women in business are core to Central Oregon's future.
We were awarded our first grant, a $5,000 award from the Oregon Community Foundation. This is a first for us, and it will go directly toward growing our resources and programming, the systems, the events, and the community infrastructure that make everything we do possible. We're really grateful to OCF for supporting the work, and we take the responsibility that comes with it seriously.
Both of these are the result of a lot of behind-the-scenes work over the past year, and they open the door for what DWB can become over the next one. Thank you for being part of what makes it worth building.
What we're carrying into October
The September panel named something a lot of us are familiar with: when life gets busy, we tend to default to moving faster, but moving fast on the wrong thing just gets you to the wrong place sooner. In September, we had the panel conversation. In October, we're going to do the work.
Our October Learn & Connect is a hands-on workshop led by Alicia Jabbar, built for anyone who left September thinking "yes, but how do I actually do this next week?" The focus will be on what intentional pace looks like in practice, and how to build it into the way you lead, decide, and move through your days.
Thank you to the partners who made it possible
Monday doesn't happen without the people who show up to make it happen. A huge thank you to OpenSpace Studios for hosting us, to Bowtie Catering, to Jen Lee Photography for capturing the night, and to Lagree HD for continuing to invest in this community and in the women who show up for it.
If you're a Central Oregon business owner thinking about sponsoring future DWB events, we'd love to talk. These partnerships are how we keep the programming strong and the ticket prices accessible.
Thank you
To Sarah, Jeska, and Bryanna, for showing up as honestly as you did and to the community that keeps making this possible.
We're really lucky we get to do this with you.
See you October 21.
DWB
