what’s my story?
I built a career in tech start ups, and I’m not going to be the person who says that my career wasn’t fulfilling and that I was climbing the wrong mountain the entire time. I actually really love my career, and feel good about the decisions I’d made to get where I was.
I crafted a career within corporate that protected my autonomy and freedom. I’d made it to high levels of leadership where I was in board meetings. I’d been able to do interesting work with smart people and see the world. I spoke at conferences and led small group discussions about customer success in Paris. I’d largely avoided the Sunday Scaries. I’d had unlimited PTO since 2015 for heaven’s sake!
This isn’t a story about how I slogged through my corporate life until one day I got a spark and starting asking “what’s the point.” This is a story about me getting fired.
In my last tech job, the job that I manifested that was meant to be a pinnacle for me, something I’d been reaching for: I underperformed. I did. I wasn’t winning. And I got fired as a result.
I was so shocked because I had never been fired from anything! Let alone from a role that I thought had felt so aligned. But I realized that the dominant emotion I felt when I was let go was relief. The reason I wasn’t performing was because I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to do this anymore. That’s not to say that some days over the course of the last 15 years I hadn’t felt like I didn’t want to do something, of course not. But this was a cosmic, nahhh not this, not anymore level of relief. And it surprised me more than getting fired did.
I spent some time with myself and realized that the through line of my career was around fine-tuning my relationship with work. And I followed my own breadcrumbs to realize that in the last few years I’d:
Joined a slow-reading book club that encouraged me to read closely with a pencil in hand
Gone to India for a month to get my 200 hour yoga teacher certification and started teaching yoga
Gone deep into my spiritual practices
Launched a TikTok account (a surprise for me!)
With each layer deeper I went, I learned more about myself and my desires, and I somewhat unknowingly outgrew the phase of my life where I wanted to work in tech startups. Those kinds of shifts almost always start out as a whisper, where you start to leave yourself clues about what’s working and what’s not.
I decided that since the whisper had become a scream, I’d better listen to it. So I started working my actual dream job at a bookstore, slowed all the way down, and opened myself up to what I truly desired in terms of my career and my work.
That’s what I want to help you do, follow your own breadcrumbs to understand what you really want. If that means making a change? Cool. If it means refining your relationship to work? Amazing. If that means simply taking stock of your life and figuring out how to do more of what you want? Excellent.
Either way — we’re gonna unlock something together. What’s your story?
