Ten years ago, my life looked very different.
I was working as a paralegal in estate planning and asset protection. I had built a career in the field and developed a great deal of knowledge and experience, but I was also burned out. Much of my work revolved around planning for what would happen when people died, including how their assets would be protected, transferred, and distributed.
At the same time, my personal life was changing. I had recently ended a significant relationship and was reaching the point where I was ready to start dating again. I was beginning to think about what I wanted the next chapter of my life to look like when my mother became ill.
She passed away ten years ago this month.
When I returned to work after her death, I returned to the same conversations I had been having before she died. My days were once again filled with estate plans, assets, and discussions about what would happen after someone passed away. Planning for death was all around me, and after losing my mother, I knew I could no longer spend my professional life immersed in it.
I was done.
What I didn’t have was a carefully constructed plan for what would come next. I didn’t leave my role knowing exactly what my next career would be or where this new chapter would take me. I simply knew that I could no longer continue on the path I had been following.
Sometimes we recognize that something needs to change long before we know what that change needs to be.
When the Questions Become Harder to Ignore
Looking back, I can see that my mother’s death wasn’t the beginning of my dissatisfaction with my career. The burnout was already there, and there were already questions beneath the surface about my work and what I wanted from my life.
Losing my mother didn’t create those questions, but it changed my perspective and made them much harder to ignore. Suddenly, I was looking at my time, my work, and my future differently. I wanted to understand what kind of work would feel meaningful and what I wanted my life to look like going forward.
That reflection led me to look more closely at my career. Was this how I wanted to spend my working life? I considered what I was good at, which parts of my work felt most natural to me, and what I might want to carry into whatever came next. I didn’t have the answers yet, but I was finally giving myself permission to explore the questions.
You Don’t Always Need to Know What Comes Next
There can be tremendous pressure when you’re contemplating a career change to have the next move figured out before you make it. We want to know what we’re moving toward, what our new title will be, how we’ll make the transition work, and whether we’re making the right decision.
Those are reasonable questions. Our desire to have every answer can sometimes keep us in a situation we already know is no longer right for us.
When I left my paralegal role, I embarked on a period of personal and career reflection. Rather than immediately replacing one job with another, I began looking more carefully at my experience, my strengths, what I enjoyed, and the parts of my work that had always felt most natural to me.
That reflection eventually led me to an important realization. I had essentially been coaching people throughout my career.
Sometimes the Clues to What Comes Next Are Already There
Coach wasn’t my title, and I wasn’t working in a coaching practice. When I looked more closely at how I had worked with people throughout my career, I began to recognize a consistent thread.
So much of what came naturally to me involved listening to people, asking questions, guiding them through important decisions, and being there as they navigated complicated situations. Those were not incidental parts of my work. They were the parts that told me something important about what I did well and how I wanted to work with people.
Becoming a coach didn’t mean throwing away everything I had done and starting over. Instead, it allowed me to take the parts of my previous experience that fit me best and build something around them. Once I saw that connection, becoming a coach began to feel like the logical next step, and eventually I opened my own coaching practice.
Today, I have the opportunity to work with professionals and leaders as they navigate many of the same kinds of questions I once had to ask myself.
A Career Change Doesn’t Always Mean Starting Over
One of the fears I often see around career change is the belief that choosing something different means everything that came before was wasted. I don’t see it that way.
Our careers give us experiences, skills, relationships, perspective, and knowledge. Even when we decide we no longer want to remain on a particular path, we don’t leave all of that behind. We get to decide what is worth carrying forward.
Perhaps you don’t want your current role anymore, but you’ve discovered that you love developing people. Maybe you no longer want to work in your industry, but you’ve learned that you’re exceptional at solving complex problems. You may no longer want the promotion everyone assumes you should pursue, but you do want greater autonomy, flexibility, or an opportunity to make a different kind of contribution.
Or perhaps, as I discovered in my own career, you’ve been doing something throughout your professional life that comes so naturally to you that you’ve never stopped to consider its importance.
Sometimes the next chapter isn’t about becoming an entirely different person. It is about recognizing more clearly who you’ve been all along and deciding how you want to use those strengths differently.
You Shouldn’t Have to Wait for Life to Force the Question
My own period of reflection was accelerated by loss. I wish my mother had not died when she did, and I would never suggest that something painful needs to happen for us to grow, change, or discover what matters.
In fact, I believe the opposite.
We shouldn’t have to wait for a life changing event before we reconsider what matters to us. Burnout, changes at work, relationships, health concerns, and other circumstances can certainly cause us to look at our lives differently. But those events don’t have to make the decision for us.
We can choose to pause periodically and consider whether the career and life we’re building still reflect what matters to us. That reflection doesn’t mean something needs to change. Sometimes it simply confirms that we’re exactly where we want to be.
Other times, however, reflection brings something to the surface that we may have known for a while but haven’t yet been willing to acknowledge. When that happens, we have an opportunity to decide what we want to do with that awareness.
Your Definition of Success Is Allowed to Change
What we want from our careers and lives isn’t fixed. The goals that motivated us at one point may not motivate us forever. The title that once represented success may become less important. The way we want to use our time may change as our relationships, responsibilities, interests, and priorities evolve.
That doesn’t mean our earlier choices were wrong. They may have been exactly right for who we were and what we needed at the time. We can appreciate the life we’ve built while also recognizing that we want to build the next chapter differently.
That idea sits at the heart of both Own Your Career and CEO of Your Life.
Owning your career means recognizing that you have a role in determining where your professional life goes rather than simply following the path that appears in front of you. Being CEO of Your Life means widening the lens beyond your career and considering your time, relationships, health, priorities, interests, and the experiences you want to have. A successful career is important, but it exists within a life. The question isn’t simply what you want to accomplish professionally. It is also what you want that career to make possible in the rest of your life.
CEO Moment
As I reflect on the ten years since my mother’s death and everything that has happened since, I keep coming back to a question that I think is worth asking before circumstances force us to answer it:
If something in your career or life has been quietly asking for your attention, what might happen if you listened to it now instead of waiting for circumstances to make the decision for you?
You don’t need to know exactly where the answer will lead. Sometimes the first step is simply being willing to ask the question and giving yourself enough space to hear your answer.
10 Questions to Ask When Your Priorities Are Changing
If you’re in a season where something feels different but you’re not yet sure what it means, consider spending some time with these questions:
- What matters to me today that mattered less to me five or ten years ago?
- What am I continuing to pursue simply because it once mattered to me?
- What parts of my career still give me energy, and which consistently take it away?
- What strengths or abilities have been a recurring thread throughout my career?
- What do people naturally come to me for?
- What would I want to carry forward if I made a career change?
- What does my career need to make possible in the rest of my life?
- Is there something I already know needs my attention that I keep postponing?
- If I didn’t need to have the entire plan figured out, what question would I be willing to explore?
- What do I want the next chapter of my career and life to make room for?
You don’t need to work through all ten questions at once. One question may be enough to uncover something worth exploring, and that exploration can begin long before you know exactly what you want to do about it.
You Get to Consider What Comes Next
Ten years ago, I couldn’t have known where leaving my role would eventually lead me. I didn’t have a clear picture of what would come next or realize that my period of personal and career reflection would ultimately lead me to coaching and opening my own practice.
I simply knew that the path I was on no longer felt right for me, so I began asking questions. Over time, those questions helped me recognize a thread that had been present throughout my career. I began to see how I could take what had always come naturally to me and use it in a new way.
Today, much of my work is about creating that kind of space for other people. It’s a place where professionals and leaders can think, reflect, question assumptions, recognize possibilities, and determine what they want to do next.
You don’t need to wait for something difficult to give yourself permission to have those conversations with yourself. Your priorities are allowed to change, and so is your definition of success. When they do, you are allowed to reconsider what comes next.
Successful Career. Fulfilling Life.