I walked away from my 20 year career in advertising to..

image courtesy of @RLTheis via Twenty20

….work with hurting moms.

What?

It’s an interesting season in my life as I make a dramatic shift from running global advertising accounts for one of the largest communications holding companies in the world, to working for myself as a Mayo Clinic Certified Health & Wellness coach. The look on people’s faces is pretty fun to watch when they ask what I’m doing now. They nod positively and smile, and usually say something like, “umm, what’s a health & wellness coach?” I’m sure there’s a healthy amount of skepticism about my mental state given that in my corporate job I was traveling to places like Hawaii on a regular basis and had a great team of people working for, and around, me. I was at the stage in my career where I wasn’t afraid to speak up, disagree, be passionate, fight for my clients, and my team, and from the outside had that “glamorous” job that people might strive for. 

So, what the heck?

Drugs. Yep, drugs are ultimately what shifted my world 180 degrees over the course of 2 years. It would be far less complicated to say I had a life-changing epiphany on a long flight home after a QBR, or that in closing in on the 50-year mark I decided to make a radical change to a “helping” profession, but the truth is, the ugly world of fentanyl, Xanax, heroin, OxyContin and a child who was a slave to them, brought me to the world in which I now live.

And I couldn’t be happier.

As unfortunately, many parents these days do, I watched my oldest son get sucked deeper and deeper into the world of drug addiction and the horrific life that comes with it. For five years my close family members and I lived a daily nightmare of wondering if my son, their brother, grandchild, nephew, cousin, was dead, alive, in jail, in a drug house, in the hospital…it was excruciating beyond imagination. To watch your own child harm themselves, every day, often flaunting it in your face, takes a toll on a person in ways I had no idea. To describe it as torture would be a grave understatement.

After multiple attempts at detox, rehab, schooling and starting over, our world came to an involuntary screeching halt in April of 2017 when we got “the call.” My son had overdosed, for the second time that week, and was non-responsive in the hospital ER. It was as if a grumbling tectonic plate which had been barely holding our family together suddenly had a massive shift, and we were all tossed into the air in slow motion – none of us knowing when or how we’d come down, or what we’d find when we did.

We all found different lives when the “landing” eventually happened. For my son, he became one of the miracle statistics of a person who survives two fentanyl overdoses and, in working his ass off to build a new life free of the drugs and people and thinking that left him on life support just 2 years ago, is thriving as a college student. 

For me, I emerged, finally, with a resilience that requires me to do something positive with the pain and experience I’ve been handed. Silencing myself and my ability to help others who need to build their own resilience wasn’t an option, so when a corporate structure change came, I walked out of the open-floorplan, Slack-ing, hipster traveling, super-cool space that held me for so long and haven’t looked back. 

Do I miss the occasional night in a relatively luxurious hotel on someone else’s dime? Yeah, there were some nice moments. Do I miss the people who went into fox holes with me to pitch business that we didn’t win after killing ourselves for months? Of course I do, we’ll always have a bond that comes from wicked-smart, kind, funny and passionate people giving 110% of themselves for someone else’s cause. 

But now I’m giving 110% of myself for my cause – which is helping moms who have kids with substance use disorder find their strength, motivation, resilience and even joy so they can live their best life, no matter what. And no matter what trauma, drama, pitch, travel, proposal, quota, campaign, diagnosis, divorce, layoff, child, parent, habit or situation may be happening, they know they have a trusted partner, ally and advocate in their corner to work through it with them.

So that’s why someone steps out of corporate America, and into their passion, their calling, their meant-to-be. At least that’s why I did.