full-body 'yes'

While getting ready for a first date a couple of weeks ago, I spontaneously turned my camera on and started talking about it. I didn’t have a script, and it didn’t fit into any strategic content plan. It was an impulse in the spirit of being more open and vulnerable; less curation, more me. I told the story of a man managing a construction site near my house—one I’d passed by almost daily for months—who stopped me on my morning walk a few weeks earlier. Without knowing a thing about me, he asked me out in the middle of the street with unabashed boldness. I was floored not only by his approach, but by the person who showed up in our first proper encounter. Nothing about this meet-cute or match made sense. And yet, as I write this, multiple (long) dates and phone calls later, I can’t fight my body’s signals. My logical mind is attempting to reconcile the ease and lightness I feel with the specific image I’ve long held in my mind of the partner I’ve been calling in. And despite the incongruity, it feels like a big exhale, a long time coming after a lifetime of holding my breath.

I’ll back up. I’m forty. I ended my marriage shortly after a fairy tale wedding. I also walked away from a corporate career I’d spent fourteen years building. Often, I feel like I’m still finding my direction while friends I’ve known since childhood are long since settled: careers established, families formed, the whole picture of their lives assembled on schedule. They have what I’ve always pictured as the definition of success at this age. I know the comparison pattern for what it is, and some days I still can’t stop running it anyway. But below the starting-over feeling is a new narrative I’ve been gradually crafting with the help of great coaching, mentorship, and years of my own, often arduous inner work: I’m not behind; I’m re-writing the definition of success, creating my reality in real time, on purpose.

It feels safe to show the idyllic travel photos on Instagram and the polished presentations on LinkedIn. It feels far more unsettling to reveal that revenue hasn’t yet become predictable, or that all the profit gets reinvested back into my own coaching and development. It’s uncomfortable to share the part where I’m sitting at home on Friday night in sweatpants, feeling lonely, or when I’m ghosted after a date with a man I thought I’d see again.

And yet, life is the sum of it all. It’s the contrast between the mundane Tuesdays and the moments that catch you entirely by surprise and take your breath away. It’s the résumé full of noteworthy accomplishments on paper, and it’s you, looking at yourself in the mirror, asking, “Why do I feel like something is missing?”

I’ve reflected deeply in the four and a half years since my mother’s passing, and I can see now how much of her life she spent chasing the picture of success. I name it without judgment because I understand exactly where it came from, and I can see how important it was to her to ensure everything looked perfect from the outside. All of it, the entire architecture of achievement as measured by everyone around her, and in the end, none of it mattered to her. I’ve carried her on my shoulder through most of my own life edit, observing my similar tendencies, and vowing not to lose the truth of myself the way she did. By the end, mom traded the designer shoes and bags for t-shirts and flip-flops, and the big house in the gated neighborhood for a cottage by the water. She never stopped loving her bling, but she wore it differently, rocking it in her leather jacket, while flying free on the back of her partner’s motorcycle (yes, that’s her in the image below, just a couple of years before she died). She’d finally let out her own long exhale: forgoing the facade in favor of the feeling underneath it. I think about that trade constantly, and while I, too, love wearing her bling, her lesson of freedom is the most valuable inheritance she left me.

I remember when I learned that everything we want in life is for a feeling. I held that notion conceptually for a long time, but in these last few years, as I’ve blessedly returned to the wisdom of my own body—to really feeling again—it’s finally landing.

I posted this note on Substack last week: “What if the thing you want ends up looking nothing like what you thought you wanted, but it feels exactly like you wanted to feel on the other side of getting what you want?”

This new relationship has been a powerful mirror of that. And I’m watching the same principle rewrite my business right now. I’ve spent years trying to model success after coaches I admire, and what keeps getting reflected to me is less forcing it into a mold, less linear plan, more portfolio, more me: different interests intersecting and weaving into something that somehow makes sense. Maxwell Maltz named this same thing decades ago in his book Psycho-Cybernetics: “Creative striving for a goal that is important to you as a result of your own deep-felt needs, aspirations, and talents, and not the symbols which the Joneses expect you to display, brings happiness as well as success.”

If you’re reading this and some part of you feels behind, questioning your own measures of success, I see you. And if some version of your life looks right on paper and you’re still lying awake feeling like something underneath it isn’t right, I see you, too. But let’s take a walk together in nature, shall we? Let’s remember our essence and our innate freedom, deep below the layers performed for the ‘Joneses.’ Let the universe dish up its magic, surprising us while we’re tending to our hearts, giving us no choice but to listen for the full-body YES, just like I did, gratefully, when that man appeared in front of me on my morning walk.