I was very good at other people’s growth.
For more than twenty years, I worked in corporate people leadership and change management. I built teams, developed leaders and walked organizations through the moments most of us would rather avoid: the restructures, the hard conversations and the change nobody asked for.
I was trusted in the difficult rooms, when the stakes were high and the way forward wasn’t obvious. From the outside, my life looked complete. The title. The responsibility. The respect.
And quietly, I was doing the very thing I helped everyone else move beyond.
Settling.
I knew the conversations I needed to have. The boundaries I needed to set. The decision I kept postponing. I had spent years helping people stop waiting for permission, and there I was, waiting for my own.
So I made the decision. I left the security of a long career, not because anything was broken, but because what I wanted and what I believed I was allowed to want had stopped matching.
That gap is where I think many of us quietly lose ourselves.
The first thing I needed to change wasn’t my life. It was the view I was living from. Once I saw differently, I could choose differently.