“If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it’s not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That’s why it’s your path.” — Joseph Campbell

The Inhale and the Exhale

A friend who is a yoga teacher once told me that we can’t always be growing, just like we can’t always be inhaling. We need to exhale too.

A few months later I was in a Human Design class and the teacher brought up how Generators grow. It’s like stair steps. We grow and then we plateau, and then we grow and we plateau. And we get frustrated and feel stagnant like nothing is happening in that plateau.

But what’s really happening is that momentum is building. That feeling of frustration that nothing is happening — we need to manage our energy while we wait for that next thing to respond to. Our brains need that rest. And the plateau is actually needed for our next expansion, just like an exhale after we take a gigantic inhale.

Hold that image of the inhale and the exhale. I’m going to come back to it at the end.

The People Who Played a Role in This Story

This last year has been a lot. And I want to tell you about it.

Let me go back and introduce you to a few people who played a really important role in this story.

In August of 2024 I met with a new business coach named Dallas. That was the conversation where she planted a seed about collapsing my timeline. I was not ready to hear it yet, but something shifted in me that day.

Two months later in October I started working with Heather Wick, she was on my last podcast/article episode about business energetics [1]. At first we were doing energy work together and I had no idea that a few months later she would introduce me to the concept of business energetics and that it would completely change how I showed up in my business.

Then in January of 2025 I started working with a career coach, Nic Frick. I was still thinking I needed a bridge job, some kind of interim role that would get me through the next few years until I could make the leap into coaching full time. And she asked me a question that stopped me in my tracks.

It seems so simple. “Erica, what do you really want?”

I have actually adopted some of that visioning work with my own clients since then. “What do you really want? And how does it feel to BE in whatever you want?”

How I Turned a 5-Year Goal Into a 9-Month Reality

Honestly, I still don’t know how this happened. I just know that there were a lot of things that came together that I could not have dreamed of two years ago.

When Dallas asked me about my goals in August of 2024, I told her I wanted to be a part-time coach with a part-time job in three years. My five-year goal was to leave full-time employment altogether and be a full-time coach. And she challenged me. She said, “What would it feel like to get that three-year goal in two years?”

I felt my throat close up. I felt my chest getting tight. I felt this sinking feeling in my stomach. And I said, “I don’t know. I don’t know how I would do that.”

I knew I needed to leave the library sooner than three years, but leaving full-time employment entirely felt like a completely different thing. That was the goal that felt five years away.

But something happened that day. She challenged me in a way I couldn’t consciously do for myself. Because when I would think about leaving full-time employment, I would think about all the steps I needed to take. I was looking at square nine when I was still on square one.

She said, “I’m just planting this seed.”

The Reorganization and My Resistance

Around that same time we were in the middle of a huge reorganization at the library. I was moving from a branch I had worked at for four years to a pair of branches. That transition did not go well. I showed up every day and I was deeply unhappy. They talk about presenteeism – that was me. I felt symptoms of burnout coming back. I felt like every time I was making some headway I was also meeting resistance.

I did have a project that helped me feel needed and allowed me to dive deep into my love of spreadsheets and logistics and coordination. But I kept finding myself trying so hard to force myself to settle into this new role and this new place.

And then some opportunities outside the library started to show up. I was invited to be part of a retreat that was amazing, and I am so grateful because two of the women I hosted it with are now former clients and dear friends.

The longer I stayed at the library, the more I knew I did not want to do library work anymore. It felt so misaligned – and it had for several years. I burned out in 2022 and I was still there. I knew I needed a change but I didn’t know what else I could do. So my career coach suggested doing informational interviews to help me figure out how I could take my skills somewhere else.

I would do an informational interview and just get this feeling that I could never go back to a corporate job. And then I started having dreams of feeling trapped. My body was sending me very clear messages and I was finally starting to listen.

The card I pulled on the morning of March 31, 2025
(Sacred Rebels Oracle Deck by Alana Fairchild and Autumn Skye Morrison)

Three Conversations in Ten Days

March 31st, 2025. I had a really hard day at work – another day of calling my husband during lunch after a meeting, crying on the phone to him. He came home that day and said, “I think it’s time for you to leave the library.”

In my body and my mind I had known it for a while. I think I just needed him to be on board.

A week later, I met with my career coach Nic. And she said something I wasn’t expecting. She told me she was afraid that if I found another job I would just repeat the same patterns I had been repeating for years. That I would love the new job for about 18 months and then I would be right back where I started – unhappy, misaligned, and too depleted to build my business on the side.

Two days after that, on April 10th, I met with Heather Wick. And she asked me the question that made my stomach drop.

“Erica, what would it feel like to leave and not have a backup plan?”

Immediately my brain went into all of the excuses.
We have bills to pay.
We have to send my kid to camp.

Money was my biggest excuse. And she said, “I want you to sit with it for a while.” And she did some energy work with me.

Later that night I had a real conversation with my husband. Not just that it was time to leave. But that I wanted to leave without something else lined up. I wanted to focus all in on my business and be in it full time.

And he said something I will absolutely never forget.

“I trusted your intuition before with the adoption and needing to move to a new house, and I have to trust it again. I know that you have done everything you need to do and that you don’t make decisions like this lightly.”

I remember just crying because I was like — oh my gosh. This is really happening.

Three conversations in ten days. And EVERYTHING changed!

The Morning After

The next day I went to work at the library and two people asked me what was different about me. “Did you get a haircut?”

Maybe because my hair is short. But I just felt so much lighter. I felt like a whole different person overnight.

I felt like I could take one step.

I didn’t need to know all the steps to get to square nine. I just needed to take the leap from square one to square two.

I didn’t give notice for four more weeks. But it gave me time to really envision what I wanted and to start embodying a new version of myself.

I kept asking, “Who is $4K Erica? What is she like? What does she do?”

Four thousand dollars a month was my original income goal – the number that would replace my library salary.

But what I did not consider when I was focused so tightly on that number was that my happiness, my sense of contentment, my mental health, and my nervous system did not have a dollar value on them.

Within a few days of making that decision I got a new client. A month later I got another one. And it turned out I suddenly had too many clients to keep working at the library.

Which was exactly the goal.

What If the Ducks Don’t Have to Be in a Row?

So often we think we need to be certain.

We want to know exactly how things will happen.

We think – I will do that in five years.

It’s a someday goal.

And then we have all these things we feel we have to check off before we can get there. All of our ducks need to be in a row.

But I can tell you – sometimes the ducks are scattered all over the place and they cannot be put in a row.

And what if square nine isn’t even where you want to be?
What if getting there just means following the same old patterns and doing what you think you should do?

So what would it feel like for you to take one of those five-year goals and make it happen in two years? Or even one year?

Notice what comes up.
Does your chest tighten?
Does your stomach drop?

Does your mind jump in and say,
“YOU ARE CRAZY! Who do you think you are?Anyone responsible would not make that choice without having all their ducks in a row.”

I felt all of that. And I knew I had to do it anyway.

There are still days I think I’m crazy. Still days I think I should just get a part-time job. And then later that same day something pops up to remind me exactly why I’m doing what I’m doing.

The Exhale That Was Preparing Me

I think about what my yoga teacher friend said about the inhale and the exhale.

Those years at the library – the burnout, the reorganization, the feeling that I was going nowhere – that was my plateau and my exhale. It felt eternally long and slow and completely uncomfortable.

And leaving was my inhale. A big deep one!

If you are on a plateau right now and it feels like nothing is happening, I want you to hear this.

There is momentum building under the surface. You might not notice it yet. But your exhale is preparing you for that next inhale.

You do not need to know what square nine looks like. You can vision it. You can say this is what I want.

But the biggest thing is you just need to be willing to take one step from square one to square two. Because you might discover that square nine over here is a lot better than what you originally thought.

Three Little Parties

It has been one year since I made this life-changing decision.

It has not been easy. It has been one of the hardest things I have done in my entire life, other than being a parent to a now 12-year-old.

But it has also been the most fulfilling work I have ever done.

I wake up on Monday mornings excited to do the work I get to do. There are some weekends where I think – I’m so excited for tomorrow.

So I’m going to have three little parties for myself this year.

March 31st — Celebrating the day my husband and I agreed it was time for me to leave the library.

April 10th — Celebrating that hard conversation with Heather and the even harder one with my husband that same night.

April 14th — Celebrating the anniversary of the first episode of this podcast.

And the biggest one — May 23rd. My one-year anniversary from the day I walked out of that library for the very last time.

The end of my 19-plus year career that I thought would be my career for the rest of my life.

Your Turn

Do you have a milestone to celebrate? A date when you made a big decision or something just clicked?

Maybe you celebrate with a little dance party. Maybe you take yourself out for a cup of tea at your favorite cafe. Maybe it’s lunch with a friend you haven’t seen in a while. Do something to mark it. You really deserve to acknowledge how far you’ve come.

It has been a rough winter for a lot of people and a rocky start to spring. I will be celebrating right along with you. There has got to be something you are celebrating, even the tiniest thing.

Ready to Look at Your Patterns?

If what I shared today resonated – the patterns, the plateau, the moment of finally saying yes to yourself – that’s exactly what we look at together in a Life Patterns Review.

It’s a free one-on-one session where we look at the patterns you’ve developed through all areas of your life. The ones you developed to keep the peace and because you were running on autopilot. The over-giving. The saying yes when you really wanted to say no. Trying to be the version of you that makes everyone else comfortable and who you think you should be.

In a Life Patterns Review we look at all of it together. The roles you’ve picked up. The patterns you’ve repeated so often you stopped noticing them. And we start to untangle what’s actually yours from what you inherited or picked up along the way.

Book Your Life Patterns Review

[1] Listen to Heather’s podcast conversation