When I experienced my first big career shock, I didn’t have language for it yet. Nor did I think I’d someday be coaching folks on how to build their own regenerative businesses.

All I knew was that my body was shutting down, my purpose felt hollow, I had to find healthier ways of working, and the career I had built with care and credentials no longer fit the person I was becoming.

As I shared last week, I get the question of “What made you leave academia?” often. But the shift in conversation comes with the next part (which I think is usually the real question): “How did you know what you wanted to do next?”

And here’s what I always want to say first:

I didn’t have it all figured out.
I didn’t even call it “leaving” or a pivot at the time. (Afterwards, I joked I put myself into early self-retirement.)
I just stopped pretending it was fine.
At first because my body made me.

The mainstream conversations about career advice sure does leave much to be desired. One of the biggest misses: The reality that the practical and personal need to be intertwined.

So today I’m sharing a new free resource that offers a more integrated approach to career advice! From navigating my own career in, through, and out of academia, I learned that change is already challenging and it is possible to feel ease and support. It’s taken me decades to learn this, but we don’t have to always make things so damn hard on ourselves.

I get asked this question often (especially in the last couple months):

“What made you leave academia?”

Often folks assume that I left academia because I was disillusioned.

And in some ways, yes, I was at certain points. But not at first and not when I left.

Each April, Earth Day reminds us to appreciate the beauty of our planet and the urgency of our climate crisis.

But Earth Day isn't a day. It's a heartbeat. It’s a rhythmic call to action. A pulse that calls us back, not just once a year, or for a month of feel-good green campaigns, but into an everyday relationship with a climate-changed world.

Over the past five years, I’ve written, reflected, and grappled with ideas around career grief, embodied resilience, leadership, climate, and the midlife career change journey, often guided by the same question many of you bring to our coaching or workshops: Where do I even begin in order to move forward?

Spring is a vibrant pulse of both expansion and contraction. A moment where the world around us reemerges from the wintering season of rest and rejuvenation. Spring stretches toward the sun, moving from deep rest into gentle emergence. And also a retraction as it rests before its next growth spurt.

Too often, we push forward against our natural energy, expecting linear productivity rather than honoring the ebbs and flows that make our work (and lives) truly sustainable. It’s all the push without the contraction.

I recently started coaching a woman who was leading impactful work outside the US with USAID. Like so many other federal workers, she finds herself now navigating an unexpected career roadblock when the administration hacked services and funding. A year ago, opportunities seemed to find her. Now, USAID is totally shut down, the landscape looks completely different, devastating. The options she once relied on no longer exist.

This is the reality so many professionals face right now. Our work systems are shifting, and the path that got us here won’t be the path that moves us forward.

I led a really powerful practice with my clients recently that is too good and juicy to not share it with you. We worked with a visualization exercise I called Mapping the Edges of Possibility. It’s a way to see and expand the limits of what we believe is possible.

Institutions (academia, corporate, traditional creative spaces) often frame the future in zero-sum terms—as if only a few people or ideas will “win.” As such, we are often trained to see limitations first. Instead, relational creativity teaches us to ask, “What else is possible?”

What happens when the career you built—your expertise, your passion, your dedication—is no longer enough in the eyes of the institution?

What happens when being pushed out shows up as increasingly extractive work systems that want more production, more output, higher workload, all with way less support?

One of the biggest challenges folks have in their careers is when they are met with transitions whether it’s forced or from contemplating a shift, feeling stuck, or navigating uncertainty. Often what I find for myself and others is we get stuck in a very understandable scarcity mindset. The fear of "not enough" can creep in:

I don’t have enough experience to make a change.
There aren’t enough opportunities in my field.
If I leave, I won’t find anything better.

But underneath these fears often lies something deeper: career grief.

We talked about the linear career pathway last week. This is a common Western default model because we are a society built on the myth of constant upward growth. It makes sense if the linear practice from last week came with ease and today’s practice feels like a little more of a stretch. 

We start by loosening the grip of our linear thinking which has often followed a straight-ish path even if you’ve hopped around or made some pivots or side trips.