This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Lauryn Bosstick, the 40-year-old founder and CEO of The Skinny Confidential, based in Austin. It’s been edited for length and clarity.
Before founding The Skinny Confidential, I was bartending five to six nights a week while in college full-time. I also taught Pure Barre and Pilates.
I was doing what you were “supposed” to do, but it wasn’t lighting me up. I was beating to the tune of what society told me I should do, and I felt incredibly entrepreneurial yet didn’t know what to do.
I started The Skinny Confidential as a lifestyle blog in 2011, in my junior year of college. From the beginning, I saw it as a brand. It was a place to share what I was genuinely curious about, from beauty to relationships and routines, but I was just as curious about other people and their habits.
Jeff Jones Photo
I worked on it seven days a week for three years before I made a dime. I was focused entirely on building trust with the audience. Monetization came later through ads. When I started making money from the blog in 2014, I decided to go all in. Here we are, 12 years later — it’s been a slow, strategic build.
I launched a clean beauty brand in 2021 to elevate women’s daily routines. I’m the co-host of a podcast called “The Bossticks” with my husband, Michael. I’m also an investor and a mom of three.
My family moved from California to Austin in 2020 to have a slower-paced life. Here’s a look at a typical day in my life.
I wake up every morning at 7 a.m.
I don’t grab my phone right away when I wake up, and it’s nowhere near me when I sleep. It’s in the other room on airplane mode.
I’ve learned, by trial and error, that the worst thing for me is waking up and grabbing my phone. I don’t look at text messages, emails, notifications, or Instagram until about 11 a.m.
I don’t like having to react to what everyone else needs from me. I need to spend my morning in creation mode: visualizing, meditating, and thinking about everything I want to accomplish.
If my children are still asleep at 7 a.m., I have about 30 minutes to meditate
I’ll go to the red light bed in our home and meditate for 20 minutes, or I’ll put my feet up on the wall in my bed and lie there, usually ending around 7:30 a.m.
I also immediately hydrate with electrolytes.
I have a baby, and we’ll take a walk around 7:45 a.m. The phone is not with me. I’m present, I’m thinking about my day. Our walk is about 20 minutes.
At 8:15 a.m., I’ll get the kids ready for school
I help them eat and get ready, and by 8:45 a.m., I’m making the bed and changing. I have help. It takes a village in every area, and I’m definitely someone who’s very open about that. I have a beautiful nanny who helps us.
I do the same thing every single day. I have an outfit I like to wear to the gym in different colors; it’s the same pants, socks, and shirt.
I have the same breakfast: either cottage cheese with a little bit of mango or kiwi, or three scrambled eggs with Sriracha. If I’m running out the door, I’ll have a Ballerina Farm chocolate protein froth with fiber.
The water I drink before the gym is a mango amino water with a scoop of creatine. My nanny helps me get it ready; she knows the cup I like, the amount of ice, and it’s all dialed out.
I work out from 9:30 a.m. to 10:30 a.m.
In the gym, I’m 100% present. After the gym, I usually start sipping my coffee and getting into my day around 10:30 a.m.
My coffee is a mold-free coffee by Kion. I’ll add milk. Sometimes I’ll sprinkle in some cinnamon, froth it up over ice, and I’m good to go. Next, I’ll get into the text messages, emails, asks, and calls.
I’m a big supporter of the office and am in it five days a week
When I’m in Austin, I’m in the office. We travel a lot for work, we’re interviewing guests all over the country, and so sometimes we’re in L.A. or New York, but I’m still going into the office there.
It’s about 25 minutes from the gym to the office, and I’ll listen to an audiobook on the ride. I like to come into the office fresh and ready.
I listen to the same audiobooks every day. It’s either Robert Greene or Dr. Wayne Dyer. I find that monitoring my thoughts and how I think shapes my life.
I get to the office around 11 a.m.
The second I get there, it’s back-to-back meetings.
If it’s a podcast day, I’ll get my hair and makeup done while I’m on calls. I’ll get 10 calls done in an hour and a half, and then we’ll go straight to the podcast room.
We’ll podcast for anywhere from two to six hours
If it’s not a podcast day, I’m in my office, doing interviews and writing. I write a lot. I’m working on a manuscript right now, so that’s been taking up a lot of my time.
The rest of the time is spent making creative decisions and developing a strategy for the show and the product line.
I see AI as an incredible thinking partner
I use it every day to pressure test ideas, challenge my assumptions, research, edit, organize my thinking, and find perspectives I may have overlooked. One of my favorite prompts is simply: “What am I not seeing?”
I’m less interested in using AI to give me the answer and more interested in using it to sharpen my own thinking. The most valuable thing it can do for me is expose a blind spot, challenge an idea, or show me a perspective I hadn’t considered.
Lunch comes at 1 p.m.
I have the same order for lunch every day. It’s a chicken plate with jalapeños, a little bit of sweet potato, and a black iced tea with no sweetener.
If I’m not picking up my kids, I’ll leave the office between 5 p.m. and 6 p.m.
The second I get home, the phone is away. Everyone knows how it feels to have someone who’s on their phone when they’re talking to you, and it doesn’t feel good. I’m thoughtful about the phone and its role in my relationship with my children.
About two years ago, I banned TikTok for myself. My Instagram feed has been curated to work for me. It’s Dr. Wayne Dyer, or Louise Hay, or something that’s uplifting in my feed. I don’t want anything low-vibration.
We also don’t watch the news in our house. I want my kids to have a pure, simple childhood. I’m very much a homemaker and into my feminine side.
Our dinners are protein-forward
I’m no chef, but let me tell you, dinner is definitely protein-forward. There’s a lot of grass-fed steak, ground beef, chicken, and a lot of eggs at night. We’ll have breakfast for dinner all the time. Sometimes we’ll go out to dinner if someone’s in town visiting.
Our nanny, Michael, or I cook. It depends on who’s doing what and how much time we have. We love butter, and my kids and I have butter toast almost every night.
I have a little trick for parents. I don’t turn on the lights upstairs at night; I use red light. It works so well because it signals to children’s little brains that it’s time to go to bed when they go upstairs.
The kids wind down and get in bed together around 7 p.m.
Each child picks a book to read.
I also like to set the environment, so there’s a lot of chimes, frequency music, salt rock night lights, and humidifiers.
I get in bed around 8 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.
My go-to when I get in bed is the Kindle. There’s no phone or TV in our room. I have my Kindle on dark mode and warm, so the light is low.
What can derail my day is having to work on a screen at night; that’s really hard for me. I think I’ve trained myself to be so militant about the screen at night that when I have to write or be on my computer late, I don’t sleep well. Then that snowballs into the morning.
I read for about an hour, sometimes two or three hours a day
I read a lot of personal development, memoirs, biographies, historical biographies, and old Hollywood biographies.
I think reading has given me an edge in business and in life because I’ve been able to learn about different characters, which makes me a better interviewer. Reading is probably one of the No. 1 things I attribute to any kind of success I’ve had.
I’m asleep by 9:30 p.m.
I work 7 days a week, which means some work on the weekends
On weekends, I’m not in the office, but I might attend an event and use it to promote our product line. I like to keep my weekends sacred for my children if I can.
I’m structured but also flexible. If I woke up and my kids needed something right away, and I couldn’t meditate or take them for a walk, that’s OK. I try to get it right 80% of the time.
For fun, I enjoy a skinny margarita on vacation, eat a buttered piece of sourdough with crunchy sea salt and a square of Hu dark chocolate while I’m in bed, and love reading, traveling, and doing paint-by-numbers with my kids.
