After leaving my last W-2 job in 2013, I was surprised at how seamlessly the various strands of the next phase in my life fell into place. It all hinged on making a couple of key decisions. The first one was easy: All I had to do was listen to my inner voice. Acknowledging and accepting two powerful visions was a little harder but happened quickly.
In fact, the day after I turned my back on corporate America, my overarching goal for the foreseeable future appeared seemingly out of nowhere and stuck. It was an easily achievable, albeit small, almost trite goal: “to remain independent for as long as I could without bankrupting myself.”
It is as relevant to my activities today as it was 11 years ago.
I’m also a very visual person. Until then, I had been through two major transitions. Each started with a very specific and re-occurring visual:
At the age of 28, I decided it was time to earn some real money, it was the vision of me talking to businesspeople on a NYC street wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase that convinced me I should do an MBA at NYU’s Stern Graduate School of Business. (It was the 80’s, after all.)
Seven years later when I met my husband, I immediately had a vision of us building a future together. We celebrated 30 years this year and although not everything has worked out the way I saw it back then, the commitment from both our sides has always been there.
When in 2013 at the age of 53 I had backed myself into a corner professionally two visions kept coming back to me:
One was of me before the first transition. I was barely making enough to get by but I had an apartment, my independence, and a real sense of self.
The second vision was literally very concrete – it was a wall with molding common in NYC pre-war buildings. The wall had been painted over four, five, or more times. I kept returning to a vision that I had to start scraping the paint off (eg. my corporatized life) to get back to the original wood (eg. the authenticate me).
Despite the concerns that I might indeed bankrupt myself if I followed these visions, they wouldn’t stop and I decided it was time to start the third major transition of my life.
And I still have lots of money in the bank.
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