For a long time, I had plenty of evidence that things were working, my career was a success.
I had built a career doing meaningful work in climate and systems change. I had increasing responsibility. A strong network. Interesting challenges. A good paycheck. People trusted me to figure things out.
And I usually did.
I could see around corners. I noticed the gaps. I thought several steps ahead. I built bridges between people and ideas. When something wasn’t working, I stepped in.
I was competent, capable, and trusted.
And increasingly, carrying too much.
I was over-functioning. Trying to solve problems that weren’t mine to solve alone. Believing that if I could just find the right approach, build the right bridge, make the right case, I could move something much larger than myself.
From the outside, and on paper, much of this looked like leadership.
For a while, I thought it was, too.
Sometimes misalignment doesn’t look like failure.
It looks like competence.
There was a moment when I recognized something wasn’t right.
It was a feeling at first, like a twist in my gut.
And then it became an ache in my bones.
But nothing was obviously wrong enough to make the decision for me.
There was always another reason to stay.
The paycheck.
The network.
The status.
The opportunity.
The challenge.
The things I was still learning.
I remember telling myself:
If I stop learning, that’s when I’ll know it’s time to leave.
There was only one problem with that logic.
I’m almost always learning.
I’m deeply curious. I love trying new things and considering different perspectives. Give me a good challenge and I’ll usually move toward it. Tell me something can’t be done and some part of me hears that as an invitation.
I had accidentally created a condition for leaving that I might never meet (and I think, deep down, I knew that).
I mean, have you ever made a bargain with yourself like that?
When X happens, I’ll know.
After this project.
Once I get promoted.
If it gets worse.
As long as I’m still learning...
Meanwhile, that bargain I made with myself allowed me to avoid the simpler and much more confronting question:
Do I still want this?
If I don’t want this, what do I want? ← yikes, why does that one feel so difficult?
At some point, I realized I had become very good at describing why my life made sense on paper.
But, I’ve never loved working on my résumé….because it never felt like me.
The roles I’d held were real. The accomplishments mattered. The experience was mine. I don’t mean to diminish or look down on anything I’ve done. It’s all shaped me.
But somewhere along the way, I had confused the evidence of my success with the definition of it.
What I was identifying as success was, at least in part, someone else’s version of success.
That distinction changed something for me.
Because when I stopped working for the résumé and started listening to myself, I realized I wasn’t even sure what my markers of success were anymore.
If I’m being honest, they’d been bulldozed over a while back.
Buried beneath responsibility.
Expectation.
Achievement.
Being useful.
Being capable.
External validation
Being the person who could handle it.
So deeply buried that I wasn’t sure how to find my markers of success.
We tend to recognize transition when something changes externally.
The job ends.
The restructure happens.
We get promoted.
We quit.
We burn out.
Our body gets sick.
(Note: A few of those were true in my case.)
Something visible changes, and we say:
I’m in transition.
But I’m increasingly interested in what happens before that.
Because I think transition often begins much earlier, internally.
It begins in our knowing.
A feeling in the gut.
A quiet voice.
Something in the heart.
Or, as I experienced it, knowing something in my bones before my mind was willing to agree.
I knew I needed to move on.
And then my mind got very busy explaining why I didn’t.
Fear is remarkably persuasive, isn’t it?
It doesn’t always sound like:
I’m afraid.
Sometimes it sounds perfectly reasonable, practical even.
This isn’t the right time.
You’re lucky to have this.
What would you even do instead?
You have too much invested.
Maybe you’re the problem.
Try harder.
Be patient.
You can make this work.
Whoa. Our inner critic can get loud and mighty when we’re contemplating stepping away from something that still looks good from the outside, is actually quite uncomfortable, but there’s comfort in the familiar.
For a while, I listened.
Eventually I had to become willing to recognize what was already there. There were too many signs and signals.
I recognized this wasn’t the culture in which I wanted to continue growing and being mentored.
I recognized that my voice wasn’t going to move the needle in the way I kept hoping it would.
I recognized I was carrying responsibility that only I knew I was carrying.
I recognized the toll that fighting to remain in a room I no longer wanted to belong in was taking on me (I realized I had outgrown the experience!).
And maybe most importantly:
I recognized that I didn’t need to know exactly what came next in order to tell myself the truth about what was happening now.
What I’ve learned since is that,
Something can be successful and no longer be right for us.
Something can be working and no longer be working for us.
And recognizing that doesn’t mean we need to immediately blow up our lives.
We don’t have to quit tomorrow.
We don’t have to have the five-year plan.
We don’t have to know what comes next.
We don’t even have to decide that what we have is “bad” in order to acknowledge that something has changed.
We can appreciate what something has given us and still recognize that we may have outgrown it.
That’s regeneration.
You’re not rejecting or discarding the previous season. You’re metabolizing it.
Perhaps one of the greatest gifts we can give ourselves in a transition is honesty without urgency.
The honesty to recognize:
This doesn’t fit the way it once did.
And enough space not to immediately turn that recognition into another problem we have to solve.
Instead, we can get curious.
What has changed?
What matters to me now?
What am I carrying that isn’t mine?
What have I outgrown?
What does success actually mean to me in this season?
What might I hear if I stopped trying to talk myself out of what I already know?
Honesty without urgency. Honesty without problem-solving.
Maybe you’ve experienced this, too. Or, maybe you have a friend.
Something in your life or leadership still looks perfectly fine from the outside.
Maybe you’re even very good at it.
But somewhere underneath the competence, achievement, responsibility, or momentum, something has changed.
You don’t have to know what to do about it yet.
Maybe recognition is enough for today.
So I’ll leave you with two questions I’m holding:
What have you outgrown that still looks successful from the outside?
What becomes possible when you allow yourself to recognize it without immediately needing to know what comes next?
I’m spending this season exploring what happens in these moments—the space between what has worked and what wants to emerge—and how we continue leading while becoming more fully ourselves.
On September 9, I’m hosting a free live experience:
Leadership Through Transition
How do we continue leading while becoming more fully ourselves?
We’ll explore transition not simply as something to solve or get through, but as a developmental threshold we can learn to participate in to become more fully ourselves.
I’d love to invite you to join!