"...we truly cannot walk in another’s shoes...we each have our own divine and unique path and to ignore that fact creates pain, misery and suffering in our lives."

 

August 21, 1991 was the single most important day of my entire life: It was the day I took my life back. Up until that day I’d met everyone else’s expectations but my own. Now it would be my turn. It was the day I came full-circle back to the truth of who I am and who I was always meant to be. It was the day I learned about courage, and it was the day I learned about leadership.

On that Wednesday afternoon I sat on my couch in my New York apartment gazing out the window and contemplating my life. As the Vice President of Sales for a European clothing company, I’d just returned, completely spent, from a 10,000-mile intercontinental adventure. Although the couch was four years old it was, perhaps, only the fifth time I’d sat on it—I’d been too busy running from myself to enjoy the things I’d worked so hard to acquire.

Startling to me was the realization that the view from my apartment was of a brick wall. Now, of course, I already knew that. Technically. But that was the very first time that the brick wall and my life felt like one and the same. I knew I had to do something different before my life completely changed me into someone else.
 
Awaking from my reverie, I asked myself ‘THE QUESTION’: “How much money will they have to pay me for me to forget how much I hate my life?” That question was an irresistible invitation to change; one I couldn’t pretend wasn’t asked.

The answer? The universe conspired to my benefit and I was fired from that oh-so glamorous job. I got a ‘DO OVER!’ and within a few short years I was living on the beach with my dog and I’d gone back to school to become a psychotherapist. It’s what I should have been doing from the very beginning, and it was the most authentic thing I’d ever done. Ever since I can remember, I was the ‘go to’ gal for my troubled friends: I was the one who’d helped the lost, confused or troubled find their way back to themselves. I wanted to use my gifts to help people to heal themselves. Most of all I wanted to have impact, to make a difference that had nothing to do with hemlines or heels.

My parents had wanted me to become a teacher. They’d wanted me to go to college, meet some great guy they approved of, get married and, after we had our 3.2 children, I could return to teaching. How seventies of them! Instead of standing up for myself, I sold out. At the time I didn’t have the self-confidence to go against my parents’ wishes. It wasn’t the nice Jewish girl thing to do, and even more than being a therapist, I wanted their love and support. That decision cost me 18 years of my life. My teaching career lasted precisely one year—I hated the paperwork and the politics—and I ended up on Seventh Avenue following my family’s footsteps into the fashion industry. Deep inside, a still small voice told me that this was someone else’s path, not mine. I didn’t listen.
 
I rationalized my way into my new career, erecting a case for compromise as I went along. I reasoned that although the fashion industry had a glamorous aura about it, and while the starting pay was pathetic, the perks were still plentiful enough to lend amnesia to my doubts. My youth seduced me into believing that I could be happy, if not passionate, and that "good enough" really was good enough. It would take me many precious years and far too much therapy to figure out that, underneath it all, this was my desperate attempt to get my father to finally notice me.  That would never happen.

The higher I climbed the further away I got from what was important to me. I did what so many of us do when we’re living someone else’s lie about us—when we’re not walking our path but someone else’s.  I pretended I didn’t notice, figuring that if I worked harder and faster at the things that weren’t working then somehow they’d work better. By the time that brick wall confronted me, I’d worked my way up to the top of the field. I was generating $25 million in sales in my territory—North America—I wore the right clothes, went to the right clubs, ate at the right restaurants and read the right books. I was absolutely miserable and I made those around me the same.

I was fortunate—I pulled the ‘get out of jail’ card. I spent the next year reuniting the remnants of my soul and, for the first time ever, heeding the voice of wisdom within me.  I remembered that the true purpose of my life was wrapped around people and their relationship to themselves: My passion was helping them to be more powerful, to live their lives on purpose, to demonstrate their own brand of brilliance.

I learned many things from that journey, but my greatest lesson—the one I learned the hard way, is that we truly cannot walk in another’s shoes:  That we each have our own divine and unique path and to ignore that fact creates pain, misery and suffering in our lives. The two things I now know for sure? How we walk in our lives and why we go where we go is far more important than the actual destination. Lastly, it is who we are, not what we do, which is our lasting legacy.

 

Nancy