I Know This Feeling Well. Because I've Lived It
It’s that quiet sense of emptiness that comes with building a career that looks successful on the outside…
but doesn’t align with what's important to you.
That makes it hard to fully enjoy what you’ve built because it doesn't light you up and fill you with joy.
I know that feeling because I’ve been there myself.
I grew up in a working-class family in West Virginia, where the expectations for what someone like me could build were modest.
So I worked hard. Really hard.
And for a while, that satisfied me.
I spent three decades building a career in tech—
eventually becoming a product leader at Google, where I spent 15 years building products that generated hundreds of millions in revenue.
From the outside, it looked like success. But at a certain point, something shifted. I realized I had built exactly the career I thought I wanted.
And it felt nothing like I thought it would.
I spent the next several years feeling confused and stuck, blocked by my own limiting belief that I had no other options—locked in by fear of financial instability and a limited view of what was actually possible for me.
Right before my 50th birthday, I hit bottom and realized I couldn't spend the next phase of my career feeling this way.
So I started making changes.
Not all at once. And not by blowing everything up.
But step by step—bringing more into my career that lit me up. I moved into public speaking, coaching, and eventually building my own business.
Each step brought me closer to work that actually fit. And each step brought new energy into my career.
Looking back, what I needed wasn’t more effort.
Someone who could help me see what I couldn’t see myself—and figure out what came next in a way that was intentional, not reactive.
Financially sound, not reckless.
Someone who could help me create a strategy that made sense with what I loved, the skills I already had, and the life I wanted to build.