Every Season is Preparing You for the Next One
One of the things I've come to appreciate as I've gotten older is that life isn't nearly as disconnected as it feels when we're living it. While we're in the middle of a particular season, it's easy to think that's what the season is about. We focus on the job, the title, the business, or the role we're playing. It's only years later, looking back, that we realize life was quietly teaching us something much bigger.
Right out of law school, I joined a small estate planning firm, where I spent the next seven years learning not just the law, but how to serve people. Every day I sat across from families making some of the biggest decisions of their lives. I learned how to help people think clearly when emotions were high, how to simplify complex issues, and how to bring a sense of peace to conversations many had been avoiding for years.
Then I surprised just about everyone I knew by leaving the practice of law to build a Mary Kay business. At the time, I thought I was learning how to sell skincare and build a team. Looking back, I wasn't really learning either of those things. I was learning how to develop people. I was learning how to encourage women, ask better questions, mentor them, communicate with confidence, and help someone believe she was capable of more than she thought.
Seven years later, I returned to practicing law and launched My Pink Lawyer®. Most people would probably say that chapter taught me how to build a successful law firm. It certainly taught me entrepreneurship, but it also taught me how to lead people. I learned how to build a team around a shared mission, how fear influences decision-making, how perfectionism quietly keeps smart women stuck, and how creating the right systems can give people more freedom, not less.
At the time, those chapters felt completely unrelated. Looking back, I don't see three careers. I see one continuous education.
The first seven years in law taught me how to serve people.
Mary Kay taught me how to develop people.
My Pink Lawyer® taught me how to lead people.
Today, through My Thrive Life™, I get to integrate all three.
That's not something I could have planned. If someone had told me thirty years ago that all of those seemingly unrelated experiences would eventually come together into one body of work, I would have laughed. But that's exactly what happened.
It's also changed how I think about transitions. I hear people say they're "starting over" all the time. They're retiring. Selling a business. Changing careers. Becoming an empty nester. They talk as though everything they've done up to this point belongs to a previous life.
I don't think that's true.
I think we carry far more with us than we realize.
We carry our wisdom, our discernment, our resilience, and yes, even our mistakes. We carry the difficult conversations we've had, the problems we've learned to solve, the people who've challenged us, and the seasons that stretched us. None of those things belong to a particular job title. They've become part of us.
That's why I don't think of My Thrive Life™ as a reinvention. It feels much more like an integration. Every lesson, every business, every success, every disappointment, every role I've ever played has found its way into the work I'm doing today.
This realization also made me think differently about the transitions so many accomplished women face. Maybe you're thinking about retiring, selling your business, stepping away from a leadership role, or simply wondering whether the work you've always loved is still the work you're meant to do. It's natural to focus on what you're leaving behind. I've done that too.
But perhaps the better question is this:
What has this season prepared me to do next?
That's a very different question.
It assumes that nothing meaningful has been wasted. It assumes that every season has been quietly equipping you for whatever comes next, even if you can't see it yet.
In my first article, Who Are You When the Role Changes?, I wrote about why our roles are not our identity. In the second, What a Waste, I shared why I've learned to trust myself when I sense one season has run its course, even if other people don't understand. This feels like the natural continuation of those ideas.
Looking back over my own life, I no longer see unrelated chapters.
I see one story.
And every season was preparing me for the next one.
Continue the conversation
If you haven't read the first two articles, you may enjoy starting there:
Or, if you're curious about the philosophy that connects these ideas, I invite you to explore the Identity OS Framework™.
