Kristina's Monthly Note: March

Updated:

I recently read a piece in Business Insider about how professionals are increasingly using midlife as the ultimate career rebrand and rebuilding their lives in a more intentional way. "My 20s and 30s were about surviving. My forties are about execution. I'm operating from calling," said Tiara Neal, a former TV producer who left a decade-long career to lead a health equity nonprofit at 40.

I am a big believer that everything we need is already inside us and always has been. But when we're young, the signal gets buried under societal expectations, under other people's definitions of success, under the pressure to check the "right" boxes in the "right" order. We spend our twenties and thirties building the life we think we're supposed to want. And then, somewhere along the way, we start to feel the gap between that life and who we actually are.

I left my tech career at 32. Everything looked right on paper - promotions, a career trajectory. But I was deeply burned out and deeply misaligned. Starting Etalon didn't make logical sense to most people. My mom certainly had questions and kept asking me when I would find a “real job”. But working in Silicon Valley, I'd spent years watching brilliant people hunched over laptops, completely disconnected from their own bodies. My engineering background gave me the tools to think about the problem structurally. My Pilates training gave me the language of the body. And the burnout itself taught me what it feels like when your life is out of alignment. For a long time, I thought these experiences were random. Then I realized Etalon was the apotheosis of all of them. Life was preparing me - I just couldn't see it yet.

The research says this isn't unusual. Women over 40 are the fastest-growing segment of entrepreneurs. More than 60% of professionals over 40 have considered a major career change in recent years. And Harvard Business Review research suggests that mid-career professionals who make intentional pivots often experience higher long-term satisfaction than those who stay in roles that no longer fit. Elder millennials are entering midlife with something they didn't have in their twenties: experience, credibility, leverage, and a clearer sense of what they truly value.

There's even a spiritual framework for this, too. In 1990, therapist Maureen Murdock developed the Heroine's Journey - a model based on her work with women in therapy - describing how women first strive to succeed by masculine rules, then experience a descent (burnout, disillusionment, a quiet knowing that something is off), and finally turn inward to reclaim what they'd set aside: their intuition, their creativity, their own definition of what matters. As Murdock wrote: "The feminine journey is about going down deep into soul, healing and reclaiming." That descent isn't the part of the story where the heroine becomes herself.

You're not behind. You're not late. Every experience - even the ones that seemed random - was leading somewhere. As Steve Jobs put it: “You can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future”.

I'm turning 40 next year. And for the first time, I'm not bracing for it - I'm looking forward to it. Because I can feel the dots connecting. The striving, the burnout, the descent, the rebuilding - it all led here. And I have a feeling the best is still ahead. For me, and for you.

Trust the dots. Trust the descent. Trust the journey.

With all my support,

Kristina

Trending

Try Etalon posture improvement products

Back to blog

Leave a comment