When I decided to leave my last role, one of the questions people understandably asked was:
What are you going to do next?
I didn’t know.
I had ideas.
I knew I wanted to work differently.
I knew I wanted to bring what 20 years of working and leading had taught me to leaders working on climate and systems change.
There were things I’d seen about leadership, change, and the way we work together that I wanted to do something with.
I knew I wanted to create something of my own.
I just didn’t know what yet.
But I didn’t have a polished business plan or a new title and job scope waiting for me.
So I had to practice saying something that was surprisingly uncomfortable for someone who had spent much of her career being competent, prepared, and able to figure things out:
I’m not sure yet. But I trust I’ll figure it out.
Even writing that now makes me smile.
Because that sentence required something different from me.
I had already done the work of recognizing that something no longer fit.
Now I had to decide what I was going to do with what I knew.
I had to begin living like I believed myself.
And those are not the same thing.
At some point, what we recognize begins asking something of how we live.
For me, it meant walking away from a fabulous paycheck and mission and team.
A leadership role I’d worked hard to earn.
A professional identity I understood.
Communities where people knew me and knew what I did.
A version of success I knew how to explain.
And stepping into…
I don’t know yet.
That was uncomfortable.
Not only because I didn’t know.
Other people didn’t know either.
People I loved and respected questioned my decision.
Was I sure I wanted to leave?
Did I understand how hard the road ahead might be?
Was this really what I wanted to do?
Some didn’t quite understand the leadership development, coaching, and advisory work I was beginning to explore.
And sometimes their reactions stung.
But I don’t think they were trying to hurt me.
They cared about me.
They could see the risk.
They knew failure was a possibility.
And they were offering their perspective on what they believed was in my best interest.
The difficult part was learning that I could hear their concern without making it my answer.
Their perspective mattered. And so did mine.
I could let someone question my decision without immediately questioning myself.
Or, more accurately, without requiring my own questions to mean I was making the wrong choice.
Because I questioned myself, too.
I still do sometimes.
This is hard.
There are days when I think:
Oh shit. I’m actually doing this.
There are moments when I wonder whether I should have chosen an easier path.
There are things I am learning how to do that I used to have entire teams and organizations around me to support.
And there are things I’m doing that I’ve simply never done before.
There are professional communities and relationships I stepped away from for a while because I needed space to hear myself without feeling pressure to explain what I was becoming before I knew.
And there are new communities I intentionally joined because I knew I didn’t want to navigate the threshold alone.
Not because I wanted someone to tell me what to do.
Because I needed places where it was okay to be unfinished.
To be a beginner.
I think this is one of the things we don’t talk about enough when we talk about becoming more fully ourselves.
We talk about awareness.
Authenticity.
Trusting ourselves.
Following what feels true.
But eventually those things ask something of us.
They ask us to choose.
And choosing can have a cost.
We may disappoint someone.
Or perhaps, as I’ve had to recognize, we may need to become okay with the possibility that we’ve disappointed them.
We may be misunderstood.
We may have to relinquish an identity we’ve spent years building.
We may have to become a beginner at something after being highly competent at something else.
We may have to let people watch us try before we know whether it will work.
We may fail.
Learn from it.
And choose to try again.
That’s real.
And I don’t think the work is pretending those possibilities don’t scare us.
Fear can be information without becoming authority.
Fear can tell us:
This matters.
There is risk here.
You don’t know how this is going to turn out.
Pay attention.
But fear doesn’t necessarily get to decide.
Neither does someone else’s concern.
Neither does someone else’s definition of success.
Neither does the identity we’ve already built simply because we’ve invested years building it.
At some point, we have to choose.
Maybe that’s what courage actually looks like.
Not certainty.
Not fearlessness.
Sometimes courage is choosing while fear is still present.
I’ve been practicing that for the last few years.
And practicing really is the word.
Trusting myself didn’t suddenly become easy because I left my job.
I didn’t wake up the next morning completely confident in every decision.
I didn’t stop caring what other people thought.
I didn’t magically know how to build a business.
I still have moments when I wonder what the hell I’m doing.
But something has changed.
I’m learning to trust my own knowing differently.
I’m learning that I can listen to someone else’s perspective without abandoning my own.
I’m learning that uncertainty doesn’t mean I’m lost.
And I’m learning that I don’t need to know exactly who I’m becoming in order to participate in becoming her.
And perhaps that’s part of why this work feels so alive to me.
I’m not standing on the other side of becoming, showing someone else how to get here.
I’m in it, too.
There are also moments now when I get to see what has become possible because I chose to try.
A client sees something about herself or her work she hadn’t been able to see before.
Someone tells me what she’s been practicing and what changed because of it.
A woman recognizes an incredible strength she had learned to hide or make smaller.
A team says things to one another they haven’t said before.
One honest comment opens a completely different way of thinking.
A leader begins approaching her team differently because she understands something she couldn’t see before.
Those moments are incredible to me.
Not because I made those things happen.
Because I get to witness what becomes possible when people have the space to recognize something, work with it, and make a different choice.
We remind ourselves of our humanity.
And every once in a while, I have another:
Oh shit. I’m actually doing this.
Except now there’s some delight in it, too. :)
Maybe becoming more fully ourselves isn’t a moment of finally knowing exactly who we are.
Maybe it’s a willingness to keep participating in who we’re becoming.
To notice.
To listen.
To trust.
To choose.
To try.
To discover what happens.
And to choose again.
So this week, I’m holding a slightly different question than I was a few weeks ago.
Not only:
What am I recognizing?
But:
What is what I recognize asking of me?
Maybe you already know something.
Maybe you’ve known it for a while.
You don’t have to know where it leads to take what you know seriously.
The question may be: What is what you know asking of you now?
Want to explore this together?
On September 9, I’m hosting a free 90-minute live experience:
Leadership Through Transition
How do we continue leading while becoming more fully ourselves?
This won’t be a conversation about having everything figured out before you move forward.
We’ll reflect, get curious about what’s shaping us, and practice listening differently to what we already know as we consider how we want to participate in what comes next.
If you’re navigating a transition, or simply sensing that the way you’ve been living or leading may be asking something different of you, I’d love to have you there!