We often spend so much time trying to control our lives: mapping the next promotion, the next milestone, the next five-year plan. We set ambitious goals and convince ourselves that if we just work hard enough and plan carefully enough, we can guarantee the perfect outcome for everything we want. For a lot of ambitious women, true passions and joy sometimes get lost in the process.
Of course, no matter how carefully crafted and perfected the plan is, life has a way of changing the itinerary anyway. It certainly doesn’t ask for our opinions or buy-in on the unexpected challenges it throws our way. A career takes an unexpected turn. A relationship ends. A health diagnosis shifts everything.
Life’s pivotal moments ask us to dig deep within ourselves, and that’s exactly where real resilience is found. Often our most trying moments reshape the path we’re on in ways we never would have chosen for ourselves. And more often than not, that new path leads somewhere better than we ever could have imagined.
I’ll be the first to say if resilience were a frequent flyer program, I’d have hit top-tier status by the time I was done with 2025. Given how much of my actual flying got interrupted that year, that feels like the universe’s idea of a bad joke.
Why Resilience in Life’s Unexpected Changes Matters
Early 2025, I was 46, at the top of my career, making good money, operating like I had Clear and Global Entry for my entire life, and living the kind of life that came with airline and hotel status from all the work and personal travel: first class plane tickets, five-star hotels, Michelin-starred restaurants, and room service. Then, on a two-week vacation to Costa Rica, I got violently ill three nights before I was supposed to fly home. What was supposed to be two weeks turned into three. I was too sick to fly back to the United States.
The local tests turned up no answers. An amazing clinic in Playa Herradura got me stable enough to finally make the flight home, but two days after I landed, I was sick again. That’s when the real search for answers started: appointments every week, test after test, all of it inconclusive, for the better part of a month. The answer finally showed up almost by accident, at a colonoscopy screening I was already a year overdue for. That’s where the most amazing gastroenterologist on the planet gave me the reason behind twenty pounds I’d lost in a few weeks without trying: a life-changing autoimmune condition. My first flare-up, when the disease reared its ugly head, turned out to be triggered by stress I hadn’t fully let go of, even on vacation in beautiful Costa Rica.
My Unexpected Health Journey and the Power of Resilience
The year that followed was hard in ways that don’t make it into the highlight reel as I learned to live with chronic illness. Depression crept in. Between the doctor’s appointments, the medical bills, the infusions, and the sheer time it all consumed, there wasn’t much life left outside of waiting rooms and hospital buildings. Life was absolutely lifing, whether I liked it or not.
Somewhere in there, as I learned to manage my new way of life, I started wondering if I’d ever get to travel again, the one thing I love most in the world (besides my Cavalier King Charles, Gwynnie). I didn’t think it would be possible around the infusions, the refrigerated medications, the appointments, and everything else that comes with chronic illness.
For a while I tried to push through and keep performing at the same level at work, determined to get back to my old plan: keep climbing, stay in leadership, go, go, go. Mind you, the old plan included working twelve to thirteen hours a day, often with no break or lunch, then logging on again before bed, leaving about five or six hours to sleep if I was lucky. Work was my life. It took me longer than I’d like to admit to actually listen to what life and my body were telling me: slow down, put yourself first, take care of you. It’s something many ambitious women stop doing as we push, at all costs, toward the next milestone.
My job and my title had consumed my life, and I hadn’t stopped long enough to even notice. Until I hit the breaking point. It was time to get honest about what success actually meant to me, because whatever I’d been doing for the past sixteen years clearly wasn’t it. And if I’m honest, I’d been unhappy for a long time before that.
Redefining Success After Life Throws You a Curveball
Instead of looking backward at what I thought I’d lost, I started paying attention to the present and what I actually wanted going forward into my next chapter of life. I couldn’t control my illness, but I could control what I was going to do next, and so I started designing my own path. That’s where resilience really began to blossom, as I found the courage to navigate change on my own terms. Change is the one constant none of us get a vote on. What we do get to decide is what comes next.
Walking the Camino: A Testament to Our Strength
I used a lot of that downtime, the days I spent resting in bed, to read, and eventually signed up for a coaching certification program to start pursuing my dream of making a difference by helping other people. As I slowly started feeling physically better, I needed something to look forward to, and through a coaching mastermind I’d joined, I ended up walking seventy-two miles of the Camino de Santiago. I signed up on a whim and thought, well, maybe a trip is just what I need, though at the time I genuinely did not think my body could handle the flight, let alone walking seventy-two miles. Worst case, I figured, I’d cab it town to town, sample the sangria, and hold down the fort until the rest of the group caught up: my own personal Camino de Vino.
As I prepared for the trip mentally, physically, and emotionally around my medical schedule, things began to shift. Having something to look forward to again changed my outlook, and a lot of the fear I’d been carrying started to subside. It stopped being about whether I’d make it to Santiago and became more about the healing journey itself, one I’d already started months before I even boarded the plane.
Once in Spain, milestones gained a new meaning on the Camino. Every morning I laced up, and walked, and walked some more, completing an average of 14.5 miles each day. The thing I was most afraid of, that my body would give out on me, never happened. It was proof that I could still show up for my own life.
And I learned, step after step on the Camino, to never underestimate myself: when you dig deep in the harder moments of life, you’re truly capable of more than you ever thought possible. I’ve always believed travel is transformational, and seventy-two miles proved it yet again, reigniting a sense of hope and feeling alive that I hadn’t felt in a long time. It gave me back the confidence to come home and start making lasting changes in my life, and it reconnected me with the dream I was already chasing: building a life and a career centered around helping other women navigate their own pivotal moments.
Life changing the itinerary without asking permission isn’t always a loss, though it feels like it at the time. Sometimes it’s the push toward a decision you’d never have made on your own, the decision that ends up changing everything for the better. We always have the power of choice. That’s what I’d tell any woman facing her own pivotal moment: you don’t always get to choose what life hands you, but you do get to choose everything that happens next. Dig deep. Don’t underestimate yourself. You are far more resilient than you think you are.
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