Unlearning the ‘Right’ Way to Live

Forging my own path

Since we only have one life, I believe in living it on our own terms.

That sounds like a beautiful, pithy tagline. But I’ll tell you this: I earned it the hard way. I started out life on what felt like a clear path: I studied to become an engineer (all the way through to masters level), I got married, and got a good job at a very prestigious tech company making good money. It was a good life.

But something was niggling inside me, whispering that it wasn’t my life. I began to realize that none of what I’d chosen felt like it fit: neither the city nor the job nor, most sadly of all, the husband. I was young, so I blew it up in spectacular fashion, and within a few months I had divorced my husband, sold most of my belongings, and moved to Europe to get one more degree… this time an MBA.

That was the very start of me making my way to a life that fit me. There’s something about blowing everything up that (while I wouldn’t recommend it per se) can be incredibly clarifying. For the first time, I really allowed myself to get curious about what I wanted.

And it turns out, what I actually wanted looked pretty different than what I had. From Switzerland, where I attended business school, I moved to London. There, I worked as a strategy consultant for FTSE 100 companies before landing my dream job at IDEO. They sent me to Melbourne (the Australian one) for a year to lead a key client relationship. While there, I pioneered a new practice for IDEO, called venture design, which helped companies reinvent themselves. After my stint in Australia, I joined IDEO’s Singapore leadership team.

Eventually, I moved back to the US, feeling the pull to be closer to my family, and to be a part of the lives of my nieces and nephews while they were still young. Now, I split my time between a lakeside cabin I designed in Maine in the summers and a beachside apartment in Florida in the winter.

But here’s what you can’t see from the outside: Nearly every one of these evolutions happened in a really hard way. Lots of uncertainty, second-guessing, angst, and stomach aches.

Until I decided there must be a better way to do this, and if anyone had the skills and experience to redesign it, it was me. After all, I’d made my living by helping companies reinvent themselves. To boot, I’d gotten certified in mindfulness teacher training, and I’d studied a rich mix of disciplines about how the brain and the body support (or hamper) our actions in life. I learned about behavior change science, somatics experiencing (think of it as ASL for your body, learning to speak the language your body speaks), neurobiology, and more.

And so I did it. I reinvented how we gain momentum on what matters most. You can read more about it here.

What have you done to reinvent your life, and does it look now like you expected 10 or 20 years ago?