Project Little You
We believe every one of us started out whole.
Then life happens, and we start putting parts of ourselves away. We think it will keep us safe.
And maybe in some ways it does. But it also keeps us from living as our true, unique selves.
The Problem
Ask a 5 year old what they love and you'll get a list that's all over the place.
Climbing trees and picking flowers.
Building forts and playing with dolls.
Jumping in mud puddles and reading books.
Nothing tucked away or hidden. It just goes together. To kids, it's all about being yourself and doing what you love!
Then the rules show up.
Nobody announces them. They come through a coach, a teammate, a friend's older sibling, a parent repeating something they were handed. Big boys don't do that. Girls don't say that. And kids learn to put pieces of themselves away.
It happens piece by piece, and years later, many of us realize we're trapped in boxes that we don't really like.
The Idea
Project Little You started with one children's book.
Then one became two. And two will hopefully become millions more stories of Little Yous.
Stories that remind us to set our inner child free and hold onto, or find our way back to, the freedom to be fully ourselves.
The First Book
Little Jeremy’s Heart-Strong Adventure
That first book was written by Heart-Strong's Vision Steward, Jeremy Litchfield.
It's about a little boy. A boy who notices everything, feels everything, and loves life out loud. A boy who loves climbing trees and playing with dolls. A boy who loves playing baseball and basketball and dancing and singing in the kitchen. A boy who has a stuffed monkey and a dad who takes him camping and fishing. A boy who starts to notice that something about being a boy feels like it has rules. Rules nobody says out loud. Rules you should just know.
The story is Jeremy's own. It is part autobiography, part memoir. He was that kid. The kid with a dad who took him camping and fishing. A dad who followed the rules he was given and passed them on the best way he knew how. Not because he was a bad father. He was a great father. But like most men, he passed along “rules” because nobody ever asked him to question them.
Jeremy didn't set out to write a children's book.
He spent a year exploring and writing about where love and fear show up in our lives, especially in the lives of men, and how freeing men from fear can heal individuals, communities, and systems. People following his adventures kept telling him he had a book in him. He agreed and figured it would be a book for adults. A book about masculinity and love and fear. A self-help book for men.
Then he heard a podcast with Terry Real talking about how the man code comes down on boys as early as 3. And on a walk on a beach in Costa Rica, he had a chance encounter with a children's book illustrator. That made Jeremy realize something. The book he had in him was a children's book.
He wanted to go upstream. He wanted to write something that could reach boys before the code locks them up. Something that could give them language for what they're already noticing. And something that could give parents a tool to talk about the “rules” culture puts on people without ever questioning where those rules came from.
The Second Book
Little Becca’s Heart-Song
The first person Jeremy shared his book with was his wife, Becca. She read it and felt it deeply. It made her think about all the parts of herself she put away because of her lived experience. Her creativity. Her joy. What she called her heart song.
It inspired her to write her story. Not necessarily to share with others. For herself. What if she put herself back into the mind of her younger self like Jeremy did in writing Little Jeremy? Back when she was full of life in a way that hadn't been edited out or put away. What would she notice? What would she feel? What questions would she ask?
She wrote that story and called it “Little Becca's Heart-Song.”
More than a Children’s Book
Jeremy started sharing his manuscript with people he trusted. Parents. Business leaders. Spiritual leaders. Children's book authors. The same thing kept happening.
People saw themselves in it.
A leadership coach called it a Trojan horse, a piece of art that opens the door to conversations between adults and kids and adults and themselves. A former CEO cried for both the boy and the dad. A minister said it reminded him how much he loved being that boy. A 15 year old read it and said it made him feel seen. A children's book author said it simply. This is so much more than a children's book. It's also a picture book for adults.
Little Jeremy's Heart-Strong Adventure has the potential to be a powerful story for parents to share with their kids. A story to help them start having conversations about all the small and quiet ways kids learn to put parts of themselves away. As one father put it, “I would totally introduce this as a staple to my boys.”
That's the upstream work.
But the book doesn't stop there. It goes downstream as well. When adults read it, it turns into a mirror. They start thinking about the parts they put away. The moments they stopped being freely themselves. That is exactly what Becca experienced.
Why It’s a Project and Not Just a Book
Both Jeremy and Becca experienced the freeing power of writing their stories through the lens of their curious younger selves, and they want to help others do the same.
Because if we can reach kids before they put parts of themselves away while inviting adults to look back through the curious eyes of their younger self, at the parts they put away, we can give people the courage to live as their whole selves.
And we believe when that happens, families heal, communities grow stronger, and the world gets a little closer to what it could be.
A world where more of us are pulled by love than controlled by fear.
Where We Are and Where We Are Going
The manuscripts for both books are complete and are in the process of being illustrated. We hope to be ready to launch the books and the overall project in early 2027.
We plan to bring this all into the world and fund it through a crowdfunding campaign. We're self-publishing, which means the people who show up early are the reason this happens at all.
If you want to be part of helping to make this happen, the best thing you can do is subscribe to our Substack. That's where the campaign will get announced first. And it's where we will share the creation of the book from illustrations and roadblocks.
As with everything we do, we want to build Project Little You in community for community.
Subscribe to our Substack to stay in the loop about Project Little You.
If this project or any of the other things we are working on connects with you, we would love for you to consider making a donation.
Why are our donations built around 5?
The main thing we ask anyone for is curiosity. And a great way to get curious is to start with 5 questions. Who? What? When? Where? Why?
Plus, 5 was our Vision Steward's number in basketball his senior year in high school. And we love to make connections between seemingly unconnected things.
We'd love for you to consider giving $5 (once, every month, every year) to support our work.
Heart-Strong is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, so your gift is tax deductible.