I was nervous approaching the bundle of sticks on the floor…

It was April 2025, the final day of my coaching certification program. We’d spent the past three days together laughing, crying, and appreciating each other in ways that felt almost reckless for a room of adults who’d known each other for less than a year. Now, the faculty had ushered us all out of the seminar room and into the hallway. A bundle of sticks lay at the doorway. One by one, we would be called to cross the threshold, in a symbolic act of leaving old burdens behind and recommitting ourselves to our calling.

Before we filed out, they asked us to sit with three questions:

How is life calling you? What do you need to let go of to answer that call? How committed are you?

I knew my answers. That was the problem. I knew what I wanted to commit to, and I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to follow through. Not afraid of doing the ceremony wrong; afraid of making a promise to myself that I couldn’t keep.

When my turn came, I paused at the threshold. It all felt very serious.

I took a deep breath. I closed my eyes.

When I opened them, I saw the warm smiles of my classmates and the faculty. I smiled back and proudly stepped over — maybe even with a little swagger — and stood beside them on the other side.

And then, for the first time in what had to be years, I broke down and cried.

It was relief, first. Relief at finally making a promise to myself. And then grief, for the years of putting off that commitment. For the cost of listening to the “shoulds” of others, rather than to my own voice.

Later that day, I wrote in my journal:

I need to remember those feelings, and that promise to myself, to not let my dreams and my happiness wait, not to let them be held back by the weight of expectations, or permission from others, and just proudly be who I am and pursue my purpose unapologetically. I cannot sit around waiting any longer. My development and happiness and purpose comes first; not as a wishful hope if allowed.

The promise I made wasn’t abstract. It was a commitment to stop keeping the most meaningful part of my work, and myself, on the margins. To stop treating my own priorities, the things that mattered deeply, or that made me feel alive, as something I would “fully pursue later.” To let those parts of me take up real space. Not as a side interest, not as a “someday,” but as something central and non-negotiable.

At the time, I thought that was the threshold.

It wasn’t.

Over the months that followed, life did what life does. The ceremony receded. The commitment I’d made didn’t disappear exactly, but it settled into the background, crowded out by the daily rhythm of a career that was still running on the old terms. I was still inside the same structure, still navigating the same metrics, still pulled between the work that felt most alive and the work that was most rewarded. The vow was there, but I wasn’t honoring it the way I’d promised myself I would.

I don’t say that with judgment. That’s just what happened. It’s the kind of gap most people feel but don’t talk about: the distance between what you declared in a moment of clarity and how you actually live on a workday when the pressure’s high.

Then, on an unassuming Monday morning in December, I sat down for a vaguely titled “check-in” meeting with my manager and someone from HR. And I learned I was being counseled out of the firm. Given a choice: take the Performance Improvement Plan, or enter into a Career Transition period to find something new.

This wasn’t how it was supposed to go.

For a long time, I’d been building the moment up in my head as some triumphant moment of courage and clarity. The version where I finally walked into my boss’s office and handed in my resignation on my own terms, confident in my next step, full of resolve. That’s the version I’d fantasized about. That’s the version that would have felt like a proper resolution to all those years of wrestling and questioning.

Instead, it felt like the opportunity to rewrite my own story had been snatched away.

The first emotion to surface was shame. Shame for failing — something I’d always been afraid of and gone out of my way to avoid. I’d learned early to stick to what I was good at, where performance was clear, where intellect was currency. And here I was.

The honest self-assessment was something like: I messed this up. Not that I believed I couldn’t cut it. But I wasn’t giving my best. I wasn’t buying in. And it showed. They caught it, and they were right to.

Then there was the looming thought of having to tell people. Of explaining my “tarnished” career narrative. Of feeling exposed. And the grief, not just for the job, but for the way I’d always imagined this moment going. For the big cinematic payoff that didn’t come.

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But something in me had already begun crossing a different threshold.

This hadn’t happened overnight. Over time, my center of gravity had been shifting. I’d been pulled toward work that felt more human: mentoring, people & culture, DEI, coaching conversations. Over all those years, I clung to the rebellious notion that I wasn’t going to settle for continuing the hollow climb, even when I didn’t have clear answers. I tested limits. Explored edges. Followed what felt meaningful, even when it didn’t translate cleanly into the metrics that were rewarded.

So, when the time came to choose my path, even though it wasn’t the fairytale version I’d pictured, I chose alignment. Not because everything happens for a reason. Not because I had some clear vision of what was next.

I chose it because I knew what I had to commit to. I’d known since April, standing in front of a bundle of sticks on the floor.

And I felt relief. Maybe it didn’t feel free and soaring, the way I’d always fantasized about. It was mixed, heavy even. But it was honest.

The day I formally chose the Career Transition, I sat down and wrote a letter to myself. Not polished or planned. Just letting the feelings land on the page. I wrote:

I’m here to remind you, Will, that the circumstances around your transition should in no way diminish the reality of this opportunity you’ve carved out for yourself by doing the challenging work of listening to that pull deep down. Long before today, you declared your intentions to pursue work that felt meaningful and true.

And this:

I’m so glad that you learned to reflect back on your winding journey, with all of its ups and downs, and realize that those twists and turns were all part of becoming exactly who you’re meant to be.

And this, which I needed to hear most:

The path ahead won’t look exactly like you imagined it would, but what matters is you’re walking it now. And there’s real wisdom in the messy reality that doesn’t quite map to the storybook ending.

Here’s what I didn’t expect about the other side: how ordinary it would feel. Not ordinary in a disappointing way, but in the sense that it just became my life. Quickly. Naturally. Without the fanfare I’d always imagined would accompany a moment like this.

Lynea was the first to name it. A few weeks in, she told me I seemed different. Lighter. More present, especially in the evenings (or when peak “Sunday scaries” used to show up). Not performing “doing well.” Actually doing well. She could tell I was doing something I believed in, and it showed up in ways I wasn’t even tracking yet.

My family started to notice too. For years, I’d gone vague whenever anyone asked about work, deflecting, keeping it surface-level. I was scared of being seen as a failure or not living up to my potential, so I just didn’t let people in. When I started publishing my essays, my dad told me, “I never realized you were carrying all of this.” He wished he’d known, because maybe he could have helped. I told him I was glad we could finally talk about these things freely now. And then we started doing actual coaching sessions. Him opening up about things he’d been sitting with, me showing up with the part of myself I’d spent years telling myself “maybe someday.” I didn’t plan that. It just grew out of the space that had opened up, and it’s brought us closer than either of us expected.

When my sister calls me mid-week now to talk through a work dilemma, I’m genuinely excited to be the person she calls. That kind of thing never used to happen when I was guarded about my own career. Something about finally being honest opened the door for everyone else too.

I’ve also been reaching out to old friends, former colleagues, people I’d lost touch with. Not because I need anything from them, but because this new chapter has made me want to tend to those connections in a way I never made time for before. And what keeps surprising me is what comes back: conversations that go deeper than the usual catch-up; people sharing what’s actually going on. Something about showing up from a more honest place seems to invite honesty in return.

It’s not all smooth. There’s real uncertainty in this, and Lynea and I are navigating it together: what the finances look like, what the timeline is, what “working” even means for a practice this new. When a discovery call doesn’t land, or a prospective client goes quiet, it stings in a way that’s more personal than any performance review ever was. I care about this deeply, and that means the stumbles hit closer to home.

But there’s something else I notice now, almost daily. I’ll spend an hour at a friend’s coffee shop, just talking about life and work and whatever’s on our minds, and I don’t feel the old pull of guilt about the “real work” I should be getting back to. Those conversations are the work now. Same with losing myself in a book, or mixing a mini DJ set in my home office at the end of the day. In my old career, those things always felt like stolen time I’d have to pay back. Now they’re just woven in as part of how I show up.

And when someone from my old world says “I could never take a risk like that,” I don’t hear flattery. I hear the threshold they’re standing at. And it makes me want to keep going, to keep showing up as an example that something more you is possible. Not my version of the story. Theirs. It doesn’t have to be a dramatic exit. It can be feeling less stuck. Or showing up with more energy and less dread on an ordinary Monday.

I don’t have this all figured out. I don’t know that I ever will. But I’m free, and I’m committed, and I’m doing the thing I promised myself I would.

Your threshold probably doesn’t look exactly the same. Maybe it’s the tension you feel on Sunday night that you’ve gotten too good at explaining away. Maybe it’s the promotion you don’t want as much as you thought you would. Maybe it’s the insistent thought you keep having and keep dismissing: I can’t keep leaving myself out of this.

Crossing over doesn’t always look the way you imagined. Sometimes it comes with shame. Sometimes there’s grief. Sometimes, the most honest thought is just: why haven’t I done this sooner? But once you see clearly what you need to commit to, not crossing begins to carry a weight much heavier than you expected.

You don’t need a ceremony or a threshold made of sticks. You don’t need HR to force your hand. You just need to be honest about the questions — and willing to let your answers really mean something:

How is life calling me? What do I need to let go of? How committed am I?

If you’re standing at your own threshold right now, nervous and unsure, give yourself a second to pause. Take a breath. Look around for the warmth that’s already there.

And then step. Because waiting on the other side is a life that feels like yours.

Since launching my coaching practice, I’ve gotten a lot of questions about the name. Usually, right after: so, what is coaching, anyway? Let me take a crack at answering both.

It all starts with two very different experiences of being coached.

About eight years into my career, I decided it was a good time to go to business school. As I mentioned in previous essays, I had a sense that the path I was on didn’t quite match who I wanted to be, but I didn’t have any better alternatives in mind. Maybe the answers could be found at UC Berkeley. After all, there were plenty of other folks there searching for their North Star.

My first experience with coaching there was well-intentioned but mostly transactional: What role are you targeting? What’s your timeline? Let’s build an action plan. That’s all helpful… if you already know what you want. But I didn’t. I was in the fog. And no amount of goal-setting was going to cut through it, because the issue wasn’t a lack of planning or execution. It was that I genuinely didn’t know what I wanted.

Not ready to give up on the idea, I tried coaching again a few months later. The experience was nothing like the first. This new coach wasn’t interested in my five-year plan. She asked a completely different kind of question. Not what job do you want? but what’s true about you that you’re not seeing?

That opened up something I wasn’t expecting. I started to see qualities in myself — humor, relatability, the ability to hold complexity and sit with people in hard moments — that had always been there but never felt like they “counted.” They don’t show up on a résumé. They weren’t part of any performance review. But they’re central to who I am and what matters to me. I just hadn’t had the space, or the permission, to take them seriously.

Something shifted. Not because a coach gave me the answers, but because they created the conditions for me to find and trust my own.

That’s what coaching is, at its best. And it’s very different from most of the guidance that’s available to us in our careers.

Career advice, mentorship, strategic planning… They’re useful, but they tend to share an assumption: that you already know what you want, and just need help getting there. Most of the people I encountered at KPMG were already incredibly capable when it came to executing plans, hitting targets, and delivering results. And there was no shortage of guidance on the performance side.

The formal career and performance support is valuable for what it is. But it doesn’t leave a lot of room for the harder questions. The ones that sound like: What if the promotion I earned didn’t bring pride or excitement — just relief for not coming up short? What if the path I’m on isn’t the right one, and what I want isn’t actually here?

If you’ve had some version of those questions running in the background, you already know they don’t fit neatly into a development plan or a performance review. And you probably also know that ignoring them doesn’t make them quieter.

The hard part is that there aren’t many places to take them. Your boss has their own incentives: they may care about you, but they also need you performing. Your friends and family want what’s best for you, but they may not know your professional world well enough to sit with the complexity, or they’re so invested in your stability that the questions themselves feel threatening. So the harder questions tend to stay internal, circling without anywhere to land.

Coaching at its most powerful meets you in that messy middle, where the deeper questions live. In that stretch where something is stirring but hasn’t taken shape. Where the honest answer is I’m not sure anymore. That’s not a problem to solve. It’s the starting point.

As a coach, I’m not here to fix people who think they’re broken. I’m here to create space for people who sense something’s off but don’t yet have the language to trust that sensing. If that’s you, the starting point isn’t a plan. It’s permission to take what you’re noticing seriously.

So what does it actually look like?

If anything I’ve described sounds familiar (the circling questions, the gap between what’s expected and what’s true), here’s what it looks like to actually work on it.

It starts with a real, honest, and sometimes uncomfortable conversation. We begin with whatever is most alive for you. Maybe it’s a decision you’re sitting with. Maybe it’s a restlessness you can’t shake, or a creeping sense that the life you’ve built doesn’t quite fit the person you’re becoming. You don’t need to arrive with a clear summary or neatly-defined issue. Most people don’t.

From there, I ask questions. Not to interrogate, but to help you hear yourself more clearly. The patterns you’ve been running on autopilot. The stories you’ve absorbed about what a “good career” or a “responsible life” is supposed to look like. The thing you keep circling back to that you haven’t let yourself take seriously. My job isn’t to tell you what to do. It’s to help you notice what’s already true and decide what you want to do about it.

Over time, that noticing turns into movement. Together, we design real practices and experiments that you take into your life between sessions to try out the shifts that matter to you. And afterward, we reflect on what happened, draw out the insights, and adjust accordingly. It’s not about a single breakthrough. It’s about developing something authentic that sticks, so that you keep choosing well long after our work together is done.

People don’t usually need someone to hand them the answers. They need someone to help them slow down long enough to hear the ones they already have.

And that distinction — the difference between being handed a roadmap to someone else’s destination and learning to follow your own sense of direction — is the reason my practice is called Compass & Flame.

The compass is your sense of direction: the values you keep returning to, the impact you want to have, the underlying knowing that something needs to change even when you can’t explain why. You might not trust it yet. It might be buried under years of doing what you thought you were supposed to do. But it’s already there.

The flame is the energy and aliveness that show up when you’re working and living in a way that feels genuinely yours. When there’s authenticity and vitality in what you’re doing, not just competence.

When both are present, when your work reflects what you care about and makes you come alive, that’s the sweet spot. Coaching, the way I practice it, is about helping you reconnect with both your compass and your flame, and building a next chapter that honors both.

Trust your direction. Commit to what matters.

If something here hit close to home, I’d love to hear from you — whether that’s a reply to this email, a note to will.oldfather@compassandflame.com, or a Discovery Call to talk about what you’re navigating.

No pressure, no pitch. Just a real conversation

Amidst the near-constant stream of headlines and think pieces about AI progress and the transformation of work, there’s a topic I think gets overlooked: the thorny, uncomfortable questions about where we fit into all of this. The very real worries and uncertainty about the role we still get to play, and the value we bring, when the very structure of entire industries starts to shift.

For some, roles are evolving gradually. For others, the shift feels abrupt. Layoffs are real. Expectations are changing. The ground feels less stable than it did a year ago. What used to look like shaping strategic direction might start to feel more like coordinating bots. Tasks that once demanded deep domain expertise could soon amount to reviewing AI’s work. And that changes how we think about who we are, not just what we do.

For me, the shift isn’t just about how we produce. It’s about deciding what’s worth producing at all, and how we, as humans, relate to those processes.

I use AI in my own writing process. Sometimes I’m not even sure it saves me time. I still find myself wrestling with the output to make sure it actually sounds like me. But if AI can soon get you 80% — even 90% — of the way there, all by itself, the million-dollar question then becomes: when is that enough? And when isn’t it?

There are contexts where 80% is perfectly sufficient. Efficiency and speed do matter. But there are moments when 80% feels hollow. When what’s required isn’t a more polished output, but a fully human presence. Sitting across from someone who’s wrestling with an important decision, and sensing what they aren’t saying. Creating something beautiful because you actually felt something, even if the form isn’t technically perfect.

In those moments, the last 10–20% isn’t cosmetic. It’s the whole point. It’s the humanity in connection.

In this moment, I don’t think the response is clinging to what’s disappearing, or rushing headlong into whatever is new. There is room for both grief and curiosity here. When maintaining the status quo is no longer an option, we are invited into harder questions. And opportunities.

What do I actually want to be responsible for now? Where does my judgment truly matter? If certain constraints in my work fall away, which ones was I leaning on, or even hiding behind?

When structure shifts, so do the assumptions we were resting on. That can be destabilizing. None of us are outside this. But it can also be clarifying, not just about where the future of work is heading, but about who we want to be inside it.

We don’t have clear answers about what the next few years will look like. The changes are real, and happening fast. The uncertainty is real. But if standing still is no longer an option, then the question isn’t whether we move. It’s whether we move deliberately.

We may not get to keep all the old stories about what made us valuable. So we are invited to author new ones. I’d encourage us to do so intentionally.

And as we do, it helps to stay connected to the people and the things that remind us why we’re still valuable, even if what or how we produce changes.

There’s a song that’s stayed with me for a long time.

I first heard it freshman year of college, just after I’d moved onto campus. One afternoon, I was coming back to the dorms when I heard this soaring, theatrical music blasting from one of the rooms. I poked my head in and found my classmate, someone I wouldn’t have pegged as a musical theater enthusiast, belting out the lyrics to a Broadway cast recording, door open, completely unselfconscious.

A little stunned, I asked what it was.

“You haven’t heard of Wicked?” he said, incredulous. “You have to check out Defying Gravity. It’ll blow you away.”

And it did, mostly in the way good music hits you when you’re eighteen. It was catchy. Big. Uplifting. It resonated, but I didn’t yet have the lived experience for it to really take hold.

Then, years passed. A career unfolded. Responsibilities accumulated. And somewhere along the way, the song started returning, this time with weight. Not because of nostalgia or spectacle, but because of the specific threshold it names so cleanly: the moment you realize something inside you has shifted, and there’s no way to go back to not knowing it.

“Something has changed within me. Something is not the same.”

Early in the song, there’s an argument between Glinda and Elphaba that I’ve come to hear as a clash between two selves that can no longer peacefully coexist.

Glinda speaks for the part of us that believes in the bargain: keep your head down, strive, earn approval, and eventually you’ll arrive. You’ll have everything you always wanted. That voice isn’t foolish or shallow; it’s protective. If the bargain no longer holds, what does that say about all the effort, compromise, and sacrifice you poured into it?

Elphaba speaks from the moment of awakening. The point at which she realizes that what she thought she wanted now requires her to shrink, to look away, to betray something she knows to be true. And her most honest line isn’t defiant, it’s grief-tinged clarity:

“But I don’t want it. No, I can’t want it anymore.”

That’s the friction many high performers recognize. It’s not that the titles, money, or prestige have lost their allure. They often still hold real appeal. But once you’re awake to the quiet distortion — in your pace, your work, or the version of success you’ve been inhabiting — you can’t unknow it. You might keep going, but you’re no longer unaware of the other self that’s present.

Awareness, unfortunately, doesn’t arrive with instructions. There’s no clean reset button, no obvious next step. Just the growing sense that continuing as-is will slowly erode something essential. This is where capable, conscientious people often find themselves. Not because they lack courage, but because they’ve built lives worth protecting: mortgages, reputations, people who depend on their steadiness. You don’t want to run away from your life; you want to move toward a version of it that feels worth inhabiting.

I lived in that in-between space for years. Anyone close to me knew that something felt off in my relationship with work. I could name pieces of it: wanting more meaning, not recognizing myself in the people one rung up the ladder, feeling like I was trading what mattered for titles and money.

And yet, I stayed.

It was never as simple as “just leave.” I didn’t want to run away from something; I wanted to move toward something that mattered. That was incredibly hard. I often felt stuck, caught between a system that no longer fit and a future that hadn’t fully taken shape.

Without a map for that terrain, it can feel safer to keep the deeper questions at arm’s length. To numb them. To tell yourself you’ll deal with them later.

But there is a cost to staying aligned with a story that has become a costume, usually paid quietly, over time in drained energy, resentment, and a slow erosion of self-trust. We tend to fixate on the risks of change while ignoring the compound interest of remaining in a life that no longer fits. There is no cost-free option.

So, what is one to do? We often hear “close your eyes and leap” as a call to blind risk. And that’s where many people recoil, including myself.

But Defying Gravity points to a different posture.

It’s time to try. Not decide. Try.

“I think I’ll try defying gravity.” That framing matters. Trying isn’t a leap into the void; it’s more experimental. It suggests you don’t have to torch your current world to take yourself seriously. Trying looks like paying closer attention and trusting your intuition. Following energy instead of numbing it. Making small, informed moves toward what feels more alive, even when the outcomes aren’t guaranteed.

In this light, defying gravity isn’t about escaping constraints. It’s about discovering which constraints are real, and which ones are simply inherited scripts, passed down by people whose lives you don’t actually want to live. Closing your eyes doesn’t mean abandoning discernment; it means closing them to the distraction of should.

To the borrowed definitions of success, insisting that the only way to achieve a good, respectable life is through self-sacrifice, assimilation, and quieting your inner voice/sense of direction.

And the leap isn’t necessarily into a new job or a dramatic exit. Sometimes the leap is quieter (and harder). It’s the decision not to leave yourself behind. It’s choosing to stand in your own authority right where you are, even when there are no good examples of what that’s supposed to look like.

In my own life, I was fiercely protective of that inner knowing. The sense that something more true was asking to be lived. I kept asking questions. I kept reflecting, experimenting, and staying in touch with what felt true, even when there was no clear roadmap showing me the way. I tried to show up more fully, testing what alignment could look like from the inside, even when the structure itself offered few examples.

Sometimes that stance felt rewarding. Sometimes it was deeply frustrating, especially when I bumped up against the limits of what was possible inside a large organization.

But what I learned, slowly, was this: the courage wasn’t in the eventual departure. It was in the daily refusal to abandon my own authority while I was still there. That winding path — the uncertainty, the “not yet”, the trying — became the very thing that now allows me to stand beside others in similar terrain.

If this song has been haunting you, it’s probably because you’re living somewhere inside that try. You’re learning to trust your instincts. To trust your direction. To believe you’re not wrong for seeing what you see, even if the next step is still obscured.

The next step isn’t always a leap. Sometimes it’s the quieter work of staying in contact with the questions, without numbing them, rushing them, or forcing answers that aren’t ready yet.

That kind of listening is already an act of courage. You don’t have to figure it all out at once, and you don’t have to do it alone.

If you’re somewhere in the try, you’re in good company. New reflections about once a month. Sign up below.

I’ll never forget the feeling…

The night I moved to Shanghai. Despite the 14-hour flight and 13-hour time difference, I was buzzing. As soon as I got to my hotel, I dropped off my bags and stepped out into the crisp October night, greeted by dazzling lights and the drone of countless motor scooters. The whole city felt alive with possibility and untold adventures. I had finally arrived.

Back then, achieving my dream of living and working in Shanghai meant everything to me. Even before KPMG hired me, as a 20-something college kid, I had the audacity to tell my Atlanta-based interviewers that I intended to go on rotation to Shanghai. So, from the start of my career, my entire focus was on reaching that one destination. What came after, I had no clue — but this fantastic place was where it would all work out, if I could just get there. Unfortunately, that’s not quite how things happened.

My time in Shanghai was amazing, but after the initial rush of achieving my goal wore off, I realized I had no idea what to set my sights on next. “Fulfilling your dream of moving to Shanghai” is only something that happens once. And so, without a new destination on the horizon, I started to feel lost. If this move wasn’t the end-all and be-all, what should I set my sights on next?

After moving back to the U.S., I spent the ensuing years searching for the right target that would finally make it all click. I pursued graduate school, I pivoted into data analytics, but — to my great frustration — I still didn’t feel any closer to an answer. Surely my true calling, that place where the lightbulb would suddenly go off, was out there somewhere, and I was just failing at finding it. Maybe an MBA was the key to finally solving the mystery.

And while business school didn’t magically answer all my questions, it is where my perspective began to shift. My insightful career coach (shout out to Eileen) helped me learn to stop scanning the horizon for my North Star out in the distance and reflect more on my values and what was resonating most in the here and now. I started to appreciate that purpose isn’t a target you discover ‘out there’ that suddenly alleviates all tension. It’s the reward you get for paying attention to the life you’re already living. It’s the practice of looking inward for your compass, instead of outward for an ‘X’ on the map, and learning to navigate by the light of what truly resonates, right here, right now.

This change in mindset also gave me a new appreciation for my own past. I realized that my winding path, those years I felt like I was flailing for answers, wasn’t failure at all. It was part of my unique journey, and every pivot and moment of uncertainty gave me valuable lived experience. And it suddenly became clear why the exact topic of navigating a purposeful career journey resonated so deeply with me. Having lived the ups and downs, the frustration of the search and the relief of a new perspective, I know how much it matters. The idea of sitting alongside others on their own journey — offering encouragement, a different angle, or the reassurance that the path isn’t always a straight line — wasn’t just an interest; it was an inspiration.

And that’s why I’ve become a coach, one who believes this journey of a career — and, ultimately, our lives — isn’t about getting to a destination where everything suddenly works out. It’s about navigating the path itself, and all the living, discovery, and adventure it brings. That philosophy of navigation is what inspired the name of my coaching business, Compass & Flame Coaching.

Because while you can’t just zip yourself ahead through the tough parts of the journey, you can equip yourself with the right tools for the trip. The compass represents the reassurance that if you stay aligned with your values, you’re always on the right path. And the flame represents that spark of inspiration that lights your way, no matter how uncertain the road may be.

I’ll be the first to admit that I still don’t have everything figured out. The messy but exciting reality is that uncertainty never truly goes away. There will always be other decision points, other questions, other unknowns. But I’ve learned that the goal isn’t to find the perfect destination where uncertainty no longer exists; it’s to find your own compass and flame to navigate the journey with purpose and a sense of wonder. It’s about dropping your bags and stepping out into the bright, noisy adventure of the unknown, alive with possibility.

So, my fellow professional travelers, I hope you feel seen in these words. If any part of this story resonates: the search, the frustration, or the desire for a path with more meaning, know that you’re not alone on that journey.

And if you enjoyed this story and would like to hear more reflections like it, on navigating the career journey, identity, and fulfillment (with a dash of adventurous spirit), sign up below to receive new essays about once a month.