I used to sit in my car in the parking lot of my office every morning before work.
With the A/C blasting, I took deep breaths to untie the knot in my stomach and delay what felt like a wave crashing over me the moment I walked through those doors.
I remember the daily commute after Covid-era “flexible work” perks faded and leadership called for a full five-day return to office. As a good HR soldier, I was naturally expected to model the way. Yet there I was: physically at a job I had somehow convinced myself I had no choice but to keep doing, mentally wishing I were anywhere else. So I would sit, breathe, and manufacture a smile lest I seem anything but grateful to be there.
And I was genuinely grateful. I didn’t take for granted a well-paying position I’d worked incredibly hard for over a fourteen-year corporate career. But everything in me was revolting. I kept telling myself there was no other option. I was “in too far.” Sure, I could go elsewhere, but deep down I knew that wasn’t the cure-all. I’d been through too many company rodeos. Different horse, same ride.
In hindsight, the story I was telling myself — that it was too late to change — was not the truth. It is what truth sounds like when it has been filtered through an uninvestigated paradigm. From inside the container of obligation, fear, and an identity built entirely around fitting in somewhere, the possibilities look bleak. This is not a failure of imagination. It is what happens when we have been inside a system long enough that the system’s ceiling becomes our own.
I’ve been listening to different thought leaders lately who are addressing the nature of this moment of awakening and increasing transparency we are in. One of them is Todd Rose, a Harvard-trained social scientist who studies collective illusions and the psychology of social conformity. He contends that we profoundly and consistently miscalculate what other people actually think, and that miscalculation drives us to conform to an imagined consensus that often doesn’t even exist. In the context of my own unquestioned beliefs, I see now that part of me assumed I was following the expected path, and that everyone around me thought it was the right one; the very definition of success.
But who is everyone anyway, and why did I care?
My brain was doing what brains do: keeping me safe, which looked like staying the course and conforming to the expectations of the groups I belonged to. There was an unspoken agreement: if you are here, working hard, you must love it, and it must be right. Right?
Rose also asserted that we are living in the age of courage over conformity, and he made a distinction between fitting in and belonging.
Fitting in is conditional. It requires a performance. It says: hold these beliefs, occupy this kind of role, present this version of yourself, and you will be accepted. Belonging is something else entirely. It does not require you to make yourself smaller, safer, or more palatable. It does not depend on the role, the title, or the company name on your résumé. It arises naturally when you dare to be your authentic self, and all of you is welcomed, even when others don’t agree with your viewpoint or decisions.
That stuck me. At some subconscious level, I stayed because I didn’t want to risk rejection, and I had no other model or community to welcome me.
Most of us have been optimizing for fitting in since we interpreted the danger of not doing so as young children. The corporate world, for all its real gifts, is one of the most sophisticated systems ever built for producing that particular trade. I say this as someone who spent more than a decade inside it and was genuinely good at it. In my HR capacity, I even helped build it (often touted as “culture”). What I didn’t have language for in that parking lot was that the dread was not really about the commute, the emails, or even the job. It was the cost of the trade finally coming due. My nervous system was telling me, with increasing urgency, that the version of me walking through those doors each morning was not authentic or even alive, really. I was seeking to fit into a mold of who I thought I should be, upholding a corporate culture I represented, all the while never belonging to the one person who mattered most: myself.
The poet John Keats had a name for the capacity he believed made great creative work possible. He called it Negative Capability: the ability to remain in uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.
Negative Capability is not only a poetic ideal. It is the essential inner skill of every meaningful life decision.
What also kept me on the corporate track despite the daily dread was not a lack of desire to change. It was an inability to tolerate not knowing what I was changing toward. Every time the message got loud enough to register, my mind would immediately retort: But what would you do instead? How would you make a living? Who would you even be? I could not produce satisfying answers (fear disguised as a lack of clarity), and so it was easier to stay inside the story of “I’m in too far,” “I’m too late,” or “I’m being responsible.”
What I understand now, having lived on the other side and walked this path with clients long enough to recognize the pattern, is that the path does not reveal itself in advance. It reveals itself to the person who has developed enough interior capacity (or Negative Capability, if that term resonates) to stand in the uncertainty without it destroying them.
The path is made clear for the person who has the courage to take the first step. And then another…
Despite displaying the courage to leave corporate and walk the path of creator, I’ve still been trying my darnedest to conform.
So, to come full circle, let me say the thing I have been too afraid to say.
What I believe is that for most people, your life’s work is not inside a corporation. Not because there is anything wrong with corporate work; I still work with leaders and teams inside organizations and know there are genuine exceptions. But because the full, irreplaceable expression of what you are uniquely here to bring forward rarely belongs to someone else’s institution or bottom line.
It is whispering somewhere inside you right now. You may hear it in the parking lot before you walk in, on the drive home, or in the quiet moments when you are alone with yourself. Maybe it is the work you do on the side that lights you up differently. Maybe it is the thing you keep saying you will do someday, when things are less uncertain.
But things will never feel less uncertain. The time is not coming to find you. You have to find it by becoming someone who can stand in the not-knowing without reaching for a way out.
We are in an extraordinary moment. The tools to build something entirely your own — a one-person business, a body of work, an expression of your gifts (whether it’s a source of income or not, no matter) — are no longer reserved for a few. A device that fits in your pocket is enough to get started. And the technology that makes it possible to reach, serve, and build is only going to grow more powerful from here. What’s available today is the least advanced it will ever be, and it is considerably more so than what existed just a few years ago as I sat in that parking lot.
The question is not whether it is possible. The question is whether you are willing to hear what is calling you, reject the gravitational pull of conformity, and develop the safety inside yourself to explore what’s alive in you.
Who do you want to serve?
What do you care about?
What are you uniquely capable of offering the world?
I’m not saying leave your job tomorrow, or that the path should look the same for everyone. Some people will feel this clearly. Others will drive in both lanes for a while (or forever) from desire, necessity, or both. Personally, I had to leave the corporate world entirely to hear the Truth inside of me clearly. But that was my journey, and I’m grateful I had the option to do so.
What I am saying is: You’re never too late. You’re always right on time.
And your life’s work is not waiting for you to have it all figured out.
It is waiting for you to drive out of that parking lot without a GPS, trusting your inner compass to help you find your way.
With courage,
Nathalie
I’m hosting a free live masterclass this Friday, June 19, from 1–2pm ET called From Corporate Work to Life’s Work, where I’ll share the 5 inner skills for walking this path, even before you have clarity on where it leads. The replay and tools I share will be available through June 26, and then only available to my paid subscribers.