Why I Left a 27 Year Career to Become a Health Coach at 43
I started my career when I was 16 years old.
My mom worked at a local orthotics and prosthetics company and got me a job there as a file clerk. I didn't think much of it at the time. It was just a job, something to do after school, a way to make a little money.
I stayed for 27 years.
Over those years I worked my way up from that file clerk position all the way to Chief Administrative Officer. I oversaw a team of more than 40 people. I knew that company inside and out. It was a huge part of my identity, and for a long time, I was proud of what I had built there.
And then everything changed.
When the Ground Shifted
A few years ago the company was acquired by a large corporation. I tried to make it work. I showed up, I put in the effort, I told myself I could adjust. But within a month I knew something was deeply wrong. The environment had shifted in ways I couldn't ignore, and for the first time in my career I found myself truly unhappy at work.
So I resigned.
Two weeks later I started working for a new company, building their orthotics and prosthetics billing department from the ground up, hiring my own team, creating something new. It felt like a fresh start.
But something else was happening underneath the surface that I didn't fully recognize at the time.
I was burning out.
I had heard the term burnout before. I thought I understood what it meant. But it wasn't until I stepped away from that first job and finally slowed down enough to breathe that I realized how depleted I actually was. I was also in the middle of healing from mold illness, which had been quietly affecting my health for longer than I knew. My body was exhausted. My nervous system was running on empty. And I was just beginning to understand how connected all of it was.
That season of healing is what sent me down the rabbit hole that changed everything.
The Rabbit Hole That Changed Everything
When you start researching mold detox, you end up learning about inflammation. When you learn about inflammation, you start learning about hormones. When you start learning about hormones, you realize you might be in perimenopause. And when you realize you're in perimenopause, you suddenly understand why the last few years of your life have felt so hard in ways you couldn't quite explain.
That rabbit hole led me to the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, where I enrolled in their health coaching certification program. It led me to the Institute of Menstrual Health. It led me to a completely different understanding of what my body needed and what I wanted my life to look like going forward.
And it led me here.
In January of this year I found out that my current position was being dissolved. The department I had spent four years building was being shut down in a matter of months. I braced myself for the fear and the panic.
Instead, I felt relieved.
That relief told me everything I needed to know.
The Fear Is Real — and I Am Still Living It
I want to be clear about something. I am not writing this from the other side of a tidy success story. My job ends in just a few weeks. I don't have a full roster of clients yet. I don't have a guaranteed paycheck waiting for me.
The fear is real. The uncertainty is real.
What makes it possible for me to take this leap is that my husband is supportive and able to carry us financially while I build something new. I want to be transparent about that because I know not every woman has that option, and I don't want to gloss over how much that matters. We have debt. We don't have a lot of savings. This is not a decision made from a place of financial comfort. It is a decision made from a place of knowing that something has to change.
My dad passed away three months ago from Alzheimer's. Watching him go through that, and losing him, has shifted something in both me and my husband in a way that is hard to put into words. Our son just turned 18 and graduated high school. He is staying close to home and starting community college, which I am grateful for — but watching your kid become an actual adult overnight is its own kind of surreal. Our daughter is going to be a sophomore. Time is moving faster than I ever expected it to.
And I kept asking myself the same question over and over again. How much longer am I going to spend dreading Monday mornings?
I spent so many years feeling like work was draining the life out of me. And I finally decided that even if this is scary, even if it takes longer than I hope, even if there are hard months ahead, I would rather be building something that lights me up than stay somewhere that was slowly dimming it.
What I Would Tell You If You Are Sitting on That Same Fence
If you are reading this and feeling that pull, that quiet restlessness that tells you something needs to change, I want you to know that what you are feeling is real and it is valid.
I am not going to tell you to quit your job tomorrow or that everything works out perfectly if you just follow your passion. That is not the world most of us live in.
But I will tell you this.
If you can find a way to try, even in a small way, even just by starting to explore what lights you up, it is worth it. Life is genuinely too short to spend it dreading the thing you do every single day.
I spent 27 years building a career that looked successful from the outside. And I have no regrets about those years. They taught me so much and brought me to exactly where I am now. But I also know that the version of me who is learning to support women through perimenopause, who is finally connecting her own health journey to a real sense of purpose, that version feels more alive than she has in a very long time.
And that matters.
If you are in the middle of your own career crossroads and want to talk through what the next chapter might look like for you, I would love to connect. Sometimes just having one conversation can help you see things more clearly.
