Jessica Ritchie

Hello, Spring 🌸

First morning of spring and I had to stop and take in this view on my early morning walk.

Flowers everywhere. The sun rising through the clouds. The moon still high in the sky behind me…That beautiful feeling that a new season is here.

There’s something about spring that reminds us to look up, notice what’s blooming around us and welcome a little new energy in.

A pretty lovely way to start September. 🌺☀️

The most powerful personal brands make you feel something.

And Dolly Parton has always done that.

The hair. The sparkle. The humour. The heart. The energy.

She has never tried to dilute what makes her different. If anything, she turned it up.

“It costs a lot of money to look this cheap.”

“If you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.”

There is only one Dolly — and you know her the second you see her, hear her or experience her.

But what I love most is what she has done with that platform.

Growing up with very little, with a father who couldn’t read or write, she went on to create Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library — putting hundreds of millions of books into the hands of children around the world.

That’s more than a personal brand.

That’s making your mark.

And I still remember the disappointment of discovering that Dolly and Kenny Rogers weren’t actually married. 😂 I was CONVINCED they were.

But maybe that says something about her energy too.

The warmth. The connection. The way she makes you believe what you’re seeing and feeling is real.

You don’t make your mark by trying to be memorable.

You make your mark by being so unmistakably YOU that people can’t help but remember how you made them feel.

And Dolly? She’s a masterclass in it.

Thank you for shining your light on the world. May you rest in peace softly on cotton and not in rhinestones ✨

One of my favourite humans would have been 99 years old today. ❤️

Sharing this beautiful moment of my dear Nanu opening my book for the very first time. I’m so grateful I got to share this with him- a moment I’ll treasure forever.

I learnt so much from this man.

My memory of him is as a quiet man. Well… quiet in nature, but loud in volume because he was borderline deaf. 😂❤️

He listened far more than he spoke, usually with a quiet smile, happy to sit back and take it all in. And to me, when he did speak, it was always worthwhile. You listened.

He was a fierce protector of his family. Strong, loyal and always there.

And maybe that’s part of what making your mark has come to mean to me.

It doesn’t have to be loud. It doesn’t have to be about being the person everyone notices. Sometimes the greatest mark we leave is quietly made - in how we show up, how we listen, how we love and protect our people, and how we make them feel.

Nanu certainly made his mark on me.

Happy heavenly 99th birthday, Nanu. ❤️

So grateful I got to be your granddaughter.

Two siblings. Same site. Same day. Very different jobs. 🤣

My brother finished looking like he’d wrestled the worksite… while I facilitated so I stayed (mostly) clean.

Proof that we were both hard at work… just in very different roles!

7 years ago today… so much has changed, and so much has not. Grateful to do work I love with people I really like ✨

Eight hours of strategy around the boardroom table, balanced by this view and beautiful weather.

Building strategy always feels a little like completing a jigsaw puzzle. Every discussion, insight and perspective helps another piece fall into place.

This project is bringing together a marketing and communications strategy for both internal and external audiences, alongside a redesign of SharePoint to integrate the findings from work completed two years ago.

Looking forward to bringing it all together with one of Australia’s leading exporters. The best strategies are never rushed. They evolve, one piece at a time.

My little lap warmer, Paddy, has decided that four hours of induction training renewal for a client is much more manageable if he supervises every minute from the comfort of my lap.

I don’t think he’d approve of me taking a break!

Tonight, I cooked Maltese baked rice for the first time.

At 40 years old, that might not sound particularly significant, but this wasn't really about cooking. It was about becoming the keeper of something precious.

I've eaten this dish for my entire life. It was made by my Boz Nana (Maltese great-grandmother), then my Nana (pronounced Nunna), then my mum. For forty years, I've simply sat at the table and enjoyed it without ever really thinking about what it took to get there. I never thought about who carried the recipe, remembered the ingredients, knew when it looked right, or ensured it wasn't lost. Like so many things in our families, it was simply always there.

Over the last few weeks, Mum and I have had countless conversations about baked rice. In hindsight, I think I may have been driving her slightly mad. Every few days she'd ask, "Have you made the baked rice yet?" and every few days my answer was the same.

"Nope."

At the time, I blamed being busy. Work. Life. The endless list of things that seem to fill our days. But if I'm honest, I knew there was something more going on. I just couldn't quite articulate it.

The truth is, I wasn't putting off cooking the baked rice. I was putting off what it represented.

When I finally slid the tray into the oven, I realised why.

For years, this dish has been one of the ways my family has loved me. It's what greets me when I go home and what I look forward to when my family visits. Living hours away from the people you love means you begin to treasure the things that connect you. Sometimes those things aren't phone calls, photographs, or text messages. Sometimes they're recipes.

This dish instantly transports me back to being a child sitting around the table with the people I love most. It represents comfort, familiarity, belonging, and home. And if I'm completely honest, there may have been a few tears as I stood in the kitchen.

Not because I was cooking rice.

But because I suddenly understood what I was really holding in my hands.

For years, this dish has been one of the ways my family has cared for me. One of the ways they have helped me stay connected to who I am and where I come from. And now, for the first time, I was the one making it.

Perhaps that is why it felt so significant.

I realised that all those years I wasn't simply eating a meal. I was receiving an inheritance. Not one measured in dollars, but one measured in memories.

At one point I called my Nana to ask how she makes it. That's when something beautiful happened. Her version wasn't exactly the same as Mum's, and Mum's wasn't exactly the same as the one I remembered from years ago. Each generation had adjusted it slightly, added something, changed something, and made it their own.

Suddenly I understood that the recipe survives because it changes, not because it stays the same.

The women before me weren't trying to create replicas of one another. They were carrying something forward. Adding their fingerprints to it. Leaving their mark.

And now it was my turn.

Not to become my Nana.

Not to become my mum.

But to honour them while bringing my own hands, my own story, and my own love to the dish.

As I stood in the kitchen stirring the rice, I realised this is true of so much in life. We spend years being held by traditions, values, stories, and wisdom passed down to us. Then one day we wake up and discover we are no longer simply the recipient. We have become the custodian. The bridge between what came before and what comes next.

The recipe is now written in my handwriting.

The dish came out of my oven.

And the people waiting to eat it were my children.

As the baked rice cooked, both boys wandered into the kitchen commenting on how good it smelled. They immediately knew what was coming. They recognised the smell before they even saw the dish.

And that stopped me in my tracks.

Before my boys know the full story of our family. Before they understand where Malta is on a map. Before they know who my Boznanna was or why this dish means so much to me, they already know the smell of home.

The smell has become part of them, just as it became part of me.

We often assume the things that get passed down are the big things. The family stories. The photographs. The heirlooms.

But sometimes what survives is far simpler than that.

Sometimes it's a smell drifting from an oven.

Sometimes it's a meal shared around a table.

Sometimes it's a feeling that says, without words, you belong here.

And that's when I realised the story wasn't ending with me.

It was already continuing.

The baked rice turned out beautifully. The boys had second helpings.

But that wasn't the real victory.

The real victory was realising that something I love, something that has shaped me, and something that connects me to generations of strong women before me is no longer at risk of being lost.

Because now I carry it too.

And then another thought crossed my mind.

For weeks, I thought I was trying to preserve something.

Protect it.

Learn it.

Keep it alive.

But the moment the boys recognised the smell before they even saw the dish, I realised something beautiful.

I wasn't keeping it alive at all.

It already was.

And that's the thing about making your mark.

It's not always found in the big moments.

Sometimes it's found in a family recipe, a handwritten note, a phone call to your Nanna, or a familiar smell drifting from the oven.

Sometimes it's found in the quiet realisation that one day, without even noticing, you became part of the story.

What's one tradition, lesson, recipe, value, or story that has been passed down to you?

And how will you make it your own?

What a brilliant way to finish my Friday. ✨

A huge thank you to everyone who came along to our Sydney Writers’ Festival Live & Local session at The Empire. It was such a special conversation with the wonderful Emma Mactaggart, who made facilitating our discussion about Making Your Mark look so effortless, warm, and natural.

We dug deeper into who the author is behind the books, the realities of life and writing, and the very human moments that exist behind the pages. 📚

We must admit… we had a good laugh when the room completely disappeared after Trent Dalton and we were briefly left with three people remaining in the audience 😂 But then the doors opened properly for our session and the room filled right back up. Honestly though, I would have been absolutely stoked to speak to three people too.

Thank you for the beautiful feedback, the encouragement, the conversations afterwards… and for SELLING OUT my books! I was genuinely pinching myself. 💙

I feel incredibly grateful for the support of this community and for opportunities like these. Lucky gal, indeed.