Hello lovely humans,

This time last year Megan was on the brink of her biggest inflection point in her professional career and there was no clear path ahead. "I didn’t know what was next," says Megan. "I was going through a CEO transition trying to figure out my new normal and it was taking a toll on me mentally and physically."

Reset versus recreate

If you’ve run a company, you know the inflection point she's talking about. The thing you built with your name and your nervous system wired into it, suddenly needs to go in another direction. Megan knew that and was doing the responsible thing: working with someone to find her footing, trying to engineer her way back to some kind of new normal.

Then came the breakthrough. She didn’t need a new normal. In her words: “I needed a hard reset.”

A reset suggests what this was, a return to the core. A shedding of the layers that had accumulated over her foundation. By her own admission, the company had become inseparable from her identity. She left because she understood that you cannot fully reset inside the same environment that wore you down. Megan started the journey back by subtracting what was distracting her so she could hear the voice inside her. She began walking down her own via negativa (path to higher self by subtraction).

She embarked on a deliberate stripping-away. She saw a functional-medicine doctor and got the insights on what years in fight-or-flight had cost her body. She slowed down. In fact, she stopped completely. At one point, she literally just stopped walking and looked at the view for ten full minutes, which, if you’ve been moving a million miles an hour, can be oddly disorienting.

She also joined us on retreat five days in Jamestown, RI with what she called “type A strangers all trying to figure out our next chapters." She picked up a hobby she’d shelved because previously she didn’t have the time. She spent her first summer in fifteen years as the family taxi driver, cook, therapist, and nurse. Apparently, she's also perfected the chocolate chip cookie (chilled dough, 360 degrees, if you’re wondering.)

Coming home

Notice that none of these are additions to a résumé. They are returns to who she was before all the noise. Coming back to her body, her family, her own time, and the small pleasures that a decade of building a startup had crowded out.

We often treat transformation as a reinvention, as though the person you’re looking for is somewhere ahead of you, waiting to be constructed out of new habits, new parts, and a new title. Megan’s story reminds us that it's almost always the opposite. You're coming home to yourself. Peeling back the layers that have accumulated and seeking what was there all along.

She didn’t become someone new. She cleared away enough to remember who she already was.

Now with more purpose

In the time Megan took to step back and reflect, she realized she was better prepared than ever to lead. When her next chapter finally revealed itself, it wasn’t a pivot into something unrecognizable. “Water found me once again,” so she’s heading back into the water sector she knows, to keep solving real problems but now with more clarity and energy than she’s had in years. She describes herself now as the best version she’s been in a long time, maybe ever.

The media will have you believe that midlife is when you step down and finally relax, but this is precisely when the good work tends to arrive. The research on entrepreneurship confirms that that average female founder behind the new ventures is forty-five, and a fifty-year-old is nearly twice as likely as a thirty-year-old to build something that succeeds. Megan isn’t past her prime. She’s walking right into it. And this time. she's bringing the wisdom and discarding the burdens.

The move is not to optimize your way back to yourself. It’s to take inventory of who you are at the core. Strip away the stories that no longer serve you. Whose voice is telling you to hurry back? What would you subtract? You don’t have to burn your life to the ground to do this. But you do have to stop mistaking momentum for direction.

If you’re weighing a reset of your own, full or partial, she’s glad to be a sounding board. We’ll echo that. This is the work Second Harvest exists for. There is no normal. There’s only the person buried under the last chapter, and the slow, deliberate work of digging her back out.

With love, Devon and Richard

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If you're thinking about what's next for you and want guidance on starting a new business or just injecting some momentum into an existing venture, please join us at one of our Midlife Entrepreneur webinars or workshops.

For those looking for a Guided Journaling session with Devon, add your name to this online event on August 20th.