My career has never been a straight line, and I stopped apologizing for that a while ago.

I came out of college with a degree in Philosophy and Religion.  It was the mid-seventies so it was cool at the time and useful for almost nothing on a resume in my twenties. So I bartended. Ran a bar, then a restaurant. Did that, one way or another, for about twenty years, and never loved it.

Somewhere in there I became a travel agent, then worked for an airline. That wasn't it either. At forty-one, I went back to school and finished a master's in health and wellness program management. I trained clients. I built a private practice in energy medicine. I liked parts of it. Genuinely loved parts of it and still felt something wasn't quite right. What finally wore me down wasn't the work itself. It was how many people wanted to be “fixed”, as if I had a lever they didn't.  It just didn’t feel right.

At fifty-eight, I closed that practice and started a nonprofit. I still run it.

A few years into that, I knew two things at the same time: I wasn't done working, and the executive director role wasn't using all of what I actually have to offer. So at sixty-nine, I started coaching.

Sixty-nine. Not thirty-five with a business degree and a five-year plan. Sixty-nine, after four careers, a graduate degree earned mid-life, and a body of work that never once looked like a straight line from A to B.

I'm telling you this because I think the not-knowing gets treated like a flaw, and I don't think it is. My whole life has been an attempt to figure out what I'm actually here for. Clarity didn't arrive early, or all at once. It's only been now that my boundaries are clearer, what I understand my role to be is more focused, and I've mostly stopped being sick of my own second-guessing.

What got me here wasn't a breakthrough. It was learning, slowly and sometimes painfully, that I'm allowed to feel comfortable in my own skin. That I could stop organizing my life around other people's criticism. That there's a tribe I fit into, even when it took decades to find it. And that I'm not a bystander in my own life.  I understand the next chapter is mine to build, not something that happens to me and it uses all of the expertise I have to offer.

If any of that sounds familiar, I'm not across the table from you. I'm just might be further along the same road.