I Thought I'd Made It. Then I Got There.

Nobody tells you that leaving a job you outgrew can feel like grief. Not just relief, not just excitement, actual grief. For the team, the mission, the identity you spent twenty years building. That is where my story starts.

I always thought Chief Operating Officer was the job that meant I had made it. The respect, the authority, the freedom to make a real difference. So imagine my surprise when I stepped into the role and found it looked different in practice than I had imagined through all those years of working toward it. Over time I found myself further from the work that energized me most: the creating, the building, the developing of people, and I had to get honest with myself about what that meant.

That honesty is not easy to sit with. But it is the one that changed everything.

What I lost when I left was not just a title. It was structure, predictability, a team I had poured myself into, and an identity I had spent nearly two decades building. I thought I would retire there. Leaving meant grieving something even as I knew it was time to go.

What I did not expect was how much of myself I would find on the other side.

Fear had always been the thing that kept me from betting on myself. I have always had an entrepreneurial spirit - my late brother once said he never met a seven-year-old who understood supply and demand better than me, back when I was selling my Easter candy in June. But understanding something and trusting yourself to build it are two different things. Fear kept me longer than I planned. I gave my notice in September, celebrated with my family at a fancy dinner in October, and did not actually walk out the door until June 30, 2025, because I had so many limiting beliefs to work through first.

But in November of 2024, my co-founder Courtney and I looked at everything we had built together over the years - the Leadership Training Academy, the national conference presentations, the genuine passion we share for developing leaders, and decided it was time to build something that was actually ours. We knew it would be hard. We were scared. We were also more ready than we realized.

What I know now that I did not know then is that the title was never the destination. The work is. And doing the work in a way that is fully aligned with who I am turns out to feel completely different. I have never been happier.

If you are a leader sitting inside something that no longer fits, wondering whether the discomfort is you or the situation, I would just say this: sometimes both things are true, and figuring out which is which is where the real growth begins. Call us. We would love to chat.