There's a version of goal setting that serves us well for the first half of our lives. And a version that's waiting to serve us even better in the second. Most of us never find the second one because we never knew to look.

There are three places most of us live in our relationship with goals at some point in our lives, and almost no one talks honestly about the middle one — the messy, disorienting in-between where the old framework has already crumbled and the new one hasn't arrived yet, and you aren't sure whether you are evolving or just quietly giving up.

I've lived in all three of these places, and I'm beginning to sense the edges of a fourth. I want to share this journey with you because I think many women in the second half of their lives are standing somewhere in this same landscape, feeling the pull of something truer than the rigid framework we've been handed, and not quite having the language for what that something is.

This evolution happened to me slowly and not always gracefully, as I grew more honest with myself, more present in my own life, and more willing to let what wasn't working fall away — even when I didn't yet know what would replace it. I didn't actually design it. Life guided me toward it, and I was open enough, eventually, to be follow it's lead.

Stage One: The Scoreboard

For most of my professional life, I worked in healthcare IT, and I was good at it in a way that felt deeply satisfying, because the thing I was good at was execution — taking a complex problem and breaking it into its component parts, sequencing the steps, managing the dependencies, until the outcome I had planned for arrived more or less as planned. There was a logic to that world, a reliable relationship between effort and result, and I thrived inside it. I trusted the framework and the framework, reliably, held.

I also absorbed, somewhere in those years, a definition of goals that I never once stopped to question, one that felt so natural and obvious that it barely registered as a belief at all.

A goal, in this framework, felt more like a promise. A goal was something you set in stone. And were obligated to keep, exactly and completely and on time, and if you didn't, it was failure. There was no partial credit, no acknowledgment that ninety-five percent of the way there was still remarkable movement, no room for the possibility that life might have had a different and perhaps wiser unfolding in mind. You either hit the mark you had named or you had failed. And the answer to that was always to be more disciplined, more committed, and more relentless in your execution next time.

What this framework gave me was results, momentum, the deep satisfaction of execution, and a life that looked, from the outside, like evidence of a person who knew how to make things happen.

This was me in my 20s and most of my 30s. The first half of life is a time of building — careers, families,  identities, and foundations — and the Scoreboard is a perfectly appropriate tool for that season. There's nothing to be ashamed of in having lived there fully and wholeheartedly.

But there can come a point where this way of living begins to cost more than it returns, where the pressure that once felt motivating begins to feel like a weight you are tired of carrying, where you start to wonder, quietly and then less quietly, whether the person achieving all of these things is actually the person you are, or simply the person you learned to be. 

For me, that cost accumulated slowly, the way debt does, while I was busy achieving. Slowly degrading my joy and presence, the ability to value activity that didn't translate into results, and eventually something more fundamental than any of those things — my relationship with myself. Because I had become the sum of my outputs, I no longer quite knew who I was when the outputs weren't there.

I didn't know there was more to me than my accomplishments. I didn't trust myself without the structure. And I thought that pressure was the only thing that made me go.

The First Crack

I was a very active volunteer in the PTA at my children's school, bringing the same results-oriented, get-it-done, be-the-best energy I had always brought to everything — because that was the only way I knew how to show up, and because somewhere underneath all of it I deeply believed that I had to prove my worth, that approval was a reward for performance, that who I was mattered far less than what I produced.

One day, I received what I call a "download." Take that however you want. I know it sounds very weird and woo-woo. But it happened. I got an instruction — not a thought I had generated, but something that landed in me with a clarity that required me to listen:

You need to realize you are loved for who you are, not what you do.

Not that I am loved for who I am, not what I do. But that my work was to realize it.

This was so entirely foreign to anything I had ever believed about myself or the world. I had to google it. But I couldn't unhear it, and something in me recognized it as true even before my thinking mind could catch up.

This was the first crack in the framework. Not a collapse, not a transformation, just a hairline fracture in something I had always assumed was solid — the beginning of a long, slow, and deeply necessary journey toward a different way of being in the world.

Stage Two: The Retreat

What followed was a gradual softening, an opening into spaces that were more feminine, more relational, and more interested in presence than performance. I dipped my toe into surrender and trust, stopping using the word goals altogether, replacing it with intentions, holding everything loosely, allowing life to breathe.

There was real wisdom in that season — a necessary unwinding of programming that had been running silently in the background for decades, and I needed every bit of it.

The Breaking Point

During this Retreat period, I left the working world entirely to build a coaching business, and I carried with me the residual assumption that whatever I had been learning about softness and surrender applied to the PTA and my regular life, but that my business was different. My business was the place where I had to set "real goals." Where I had to produce "real results." Where the old rules still applied, because that was the point.

I was wrong. And I learned it by failing.

I could not implement a client the way I had implemented a system. I could not sequence the steps that would make someone choose to work with me, or control the timeline of another human being's transformation, or guarantee the result I had promised myself by the date I had written down. I set revenue targets and worked toward them with everything I had and still fell short, not because I hadn't done the work but because the work, in this domain, did not come with that kind of guarantee. The relationship between effort and result was no longer logical and traceable — it was relational and unpredictable and profoundly not mine to control.

I wanted control anyway, and I kept reaching for it the way you reach for a light switch in a room you know well, forgetting for a moment that the power is out.

There were times, in the frustration of it, when I went looking for a way back — scrolling job postings, reading descriptions, telling myself that maybe this whole thing had been a mistake and I should return to the world where I knew how to win. And every time I did, something in me responded with a feeling I can only describe as a kind of dying inside feeling — a full-body, unambiguous, this-is-not-your-life-anymore knowing that rose up before my thinking mind could argue with it. I would have felt more in control, yes. And it would have also been soul-sucking.

I was caught between:

A framework that no longer served me but that was still the only one I knew, still the voice that told me what serious people did and how real success was measured, and

The repeated, humbling, impossible-to-ignore experience of trying to force what could not be forced, and somewhere beyond both of those, barely visible, the outline of a different and unknown way of moving through the world that I couldn't yet name and wasn't yet sure I trusted.

Life would not allow me to to go back. And it was not yet showing me clearly where I was going. It was simply, and somewhat mercilessly, removing every option except forward.

Slowly, I moved into The Retreat related to my business. Setting intentions rather than goals. Surrendering rather than trying to control out comes.

But I want to be honest that it was, at least in part, self-protection. I had grown defeated and disappointed and quietly devastated by the gap between what I had aimed for and what had arrived, and I had decided, unconsciously, to stop aiming, not because I had made peace with uncertainty but because I was protecting myself from ever feeling that particular kind of failure again.

And in that protection, I had also stopped expecting much from myself or from my business.

I was drifting. 

Drift is what happens when nothing is overtly wrong and yet no one is holding the compass. When the days are pleasant enough, and you're moving, but in whatever direction feels easiest rather than the direction you would have chosen if you were paying attention.

Intention setting, I came to see, had become drift wearing more elevated language — not because intentions are directionless by nature, but because mine were. I was using the softness of the word to avoid making any commitments, staying vague enough that I could never really fail.

Seneca understood the cost of this when he wrote:

"If a man knows not which port he sails for, no wind is favorable."

Without a destination, every current feels equally valid, and you end up wherever the water takes you rather than wherever you chose to go, and one day you look up and realize you have been a passenger in your own life for longer than you want to admit.

I stayed in the retreat longer than I needed to, because I never found a healthier framework to come back to, and because somewhere underneath the surrender was still the old belief — that I couldn't quite trust myself to show up without the pressure and expectations.

Learning to Trust the Larger Plan

It was the Bhagavad Gita that finally offered me a way out of the drift.

The Bhagavad Gita is an ancient Sanskrit text — a conversation between a warrior and his divine guide on the eve of a battle he doesn't want to fight, and at its heart, a profound teaching about what it means to act with full commitment while releasing the outcome.

And what it taught me wasn't a new idea so much as a living description of what I had already been slowly learning. That I couldn't make a client choose me, or guarantee financial outcomes, or control the timeline of someone else's transformation.

But I could get clear on where I wanted to go, take the next honest action, and trust that the direction mattered even when the destination wasn't guaranteed.

Act fully. Release the fruit of those actions.

But the Bhagavad Gita was pointing at something even deeper than strategy or discipline. It was pointing at the humbling, liberating reality that we do not know—cannot know—what our actions are actually for. We think we know. We set the revenue target and measure success by whether it arrives. We build the business and measure it by clients and income. We show up for someone and measure impact by what we can see.

But we don't know which conversation changed someone's life. We don't know whose path we altered by simply existing and doing our work, even imperfectly. We don't know what our so-called failures made possible — for us, or for someone else who needed exactly that unfolding to happen so that something in their own life could shift. We don't know what ripples move out from us after we are gone, or what seeds we planted that won't break ground for decades.

What I thought was failure was sometimes protection. What I thought was a closed door was sometimes a redirection I didn't yet have the eyes to see. And what I wanted—the outcomes I was so certain I needed—maybe I wasn't ready for them. Or were too limited by what I knew how to imagine.

Something larger is always at work, moving through us and around us and sometimes in spite of us, with a plan we aren't supposed to see.

This is what it means to release the fruit. It's not passivity or indifference. It's not giving up on direction or discipline or doing the work with everything you've got. It means acting fully, from the deepest place you can reach, and then genuinely trusting that the outcome is not entirely yours to determine. That something wiser than your goal-setting mind is also in the room.

The drift showed me what life felt like without a compass. The Scoreboard showed me what it felt like to grip the compass so tightly it left marks.

What I was looking for was something in between: A direction I choose, held with full commitment and an open heart, taken seriously without being taken hostage.

And slowly, I began to find it.

Stage Three: The Compass

Recently, I heard a definition that helped me finally feel at home with the word "goals" again:

A goal is something you are committed to moving toward.

Not a performance, not a promise with consequences, not a measure of my worth or my will or my seriousness about my own life, but a direction — a declaration of where I am pointing myself and a commitment to keep walking that way, with my whole heart, regardless of what the path looks like on any given day.

And I realized, that I had never had a broken relationship with goal setting — I had a first-half-of-life definition of what a goal was, and it simply took me time to mature into what goal setting looks like in the second half. I didn't need to reject goals. I just needed a definition that fit who I am now.

This is the stage I am practicing now. The inner drill sergeant still shows up. The scoreboard still beckons on hard days. There are mornings when I catch myself measuring instead of moving, grading instead of going. But the framework has shifted in a way that feels real and sustainable, and the catching-myself has become part of the practice rather than evidence of failure.

I don't see this as a permission slip to lower my expectations of myself or let discipline slide in favor of whatever feels easiest in the moment. Because I know that dopamine, sensory temptation, and the pull toward instant gratification are some of the most powerful forces in human experience, and without something to orient toward, I'd follow them most of the time.

The compass doesn't eliminate the need for discipline — it changes what discipline is in service of.

Instead of forcing myself to execute a plan because I should, I'm choosing, again and again, to engage the part of me that thinks clearly and asks the questions that actually matter: "Does this move me toward what I am committed to? Does this support the future I am trying to create? Does this reflect who I am becoming?"

And, does this also align with my life? Right now? 

There's an image I return to often when I think about this balance: a river and its banks.

The banks are the structure, the direction, the pointed-toward-somewhere quality that gives the water its purpose and its power, and without them the river spills over its edges and loses all focus and force, spreading thin across the landscape until it simply disappears. But banks without water are just two walls of dry earth, rigid and purposeless and utterly still.

It is the combination - the banks that hold the direction, and the water that flows creatively and responsively within them - that makes a river alive and capable of moving things.

The compass goal is the banks. The flow of your life, your intuition, your responsiveness to what is actually unfolding, your willingness to let the path be winding — that is the water.

You need both, and neither one diminishes the other.

We've got a compass, the banks and river, and now I've got one more metaphor for you: a garden.

Direction is not singular. I'm not a woman with one goal, moving in one straight line toward one destination, willing to sacrifice everything else along the way. I have a marriage I want to tend. A body and a brain I want to protect. A business I want to grow. Relationships I want to deepen. A inner life I want to keep honest.

And I've learned that I cannot pursue any one of these at the genuine expense of the others, because they are not separate gardens. They are one garden, and what I starve in one corner eventually shows up as drought in another. 

This is where the Compass becomes less like navigation and more like cultivation. I'm not driving toward a finish line. I'm tending living things, each with their own seasons and needs, each requiring attention and nourishment and the willingness to let some things rest while others grow.

Alignment, for me, is the daily practice of asking: Am I nurturing what actually matters to me, or am I optimizing for one thing while quietly neglecting everything else? I fall out of alignment. I come back. That returning is the practice.

Self-Belonging

I've known for a long time that I was on a path home to myself. That underneath all the achieving and the retreating and the searching, there was a truer, freer version of me waiting to be uncovered.

What I didn't see until recently was that my relationship with goals was part of that journey, too. In retrospect it seems not just logical but inevitable. Of course the way I related to direction, discipline,  and my own worthiness was woven into the same cloth as everything else I was unraveling. Of course learning to hold goals with a softer grip was part of learning to belong to myself. It couldn't have been otherwise.

That is what self-belonging feels like to me. Choosing my direction from the inside out, moving through my days with the awareness that I am authoring something, neither gripping nor drifting but showing up, on my own terms, for the life I actually want to live. The life I'm meant to live. 

Stage Four: The Current

Now I'm speaking about territory I have not yet fully entered. Something I can sense more than see, the way you can sometimes feel a shift in the air before the weather actually changes.

I believe there's a deeper layer of the Compass where the direction and the flow become so integrated, where self-trust runs so deep and the relationship with life is so honest and so rooted, that the distinction between effort and non-effort begins to dissolve. Where you're moving not because you decided to go but because going is simply your nature, and you've finally stopped fighting it.

The Taoists called this wu wei. Effortless action, doing without forcing, the kind of movement that feels less like pushing and more like expressing, the way a river doesn't effort its way to the sea but simply goes, because going is what rivers do.

And I think there is something even deeper here, something that both humbles and releases me when I sit with it: the possibility that there is a plan we are each a part of, that the life we are building is also, in some sense, the life we were always going to live, that what we thought was force and control was really us finding our way back—through all the striving and the retreating and the searching—to who we were always meant to be. That we're not just authors but also, in some mysterious way, characters, following breadcrumbs we may or may not have laid out and arriving at destinations we may or may not have designed, and that the whole journey was never really about achieving the right outcomes but about peeling back, layer by layer, everything we were trying to be, until what remained was simply who we are.

I don't know exactly what that looks like from the inside. I'm not standing there yet. But I can feel it the way you feel a warm room from a cold hallway, and I find that I'm walking toward it with more trust and less effort than I once thought possible.

Why Any of This Matters

If you're a woman in the second half of your life, and you've spent decades achieving, executing, optimizing and performing, and something in you is tired in a way you can't quite name — I want you to know that the tiredness is not weakness, and it's not ingratitude. And it is not a sign that you need a better system, a stricter protocol, or a more disciplined approach to your goals.

It's a sign that you are ready to evolve your entire relationship with direction itself.

What I know, for myself, with more certainty than almost anything else, is that I do not want to arrive at the end of my life and realize I was not brave enough to live the life I was meant to live — that I let fear, and dopamine, and the path of least resistance make my choices for me, and that I spent my one life performing and achieving instead of truly being. That I copped out.

And for me, a fully lived life doesn't look like travel or grand adventures or dramatic reinvention. It is quieter than that, and more personal: it is becoming who I was born to be, it's about the relationships I'm cultivating, the way I'm of service, and how I feel when I lie down at night. It's whether I showed up that day as the woman I feel proud to be, moving toward the things that actually matter to me, with intention and with love and with an open heart.

You don't have to choose between striving and surrender, between high expectations and self-compassion, between trusting the universe and pointing yourself somewhere, because these things were never actually in opposition — they only felt that way inside a framework that was too small to hold all of who you are.

So, pick up the compass.

Choose your direction, with care and with honesty and with the full weight of your intention behind it.

Walk toward it with discipline and with flow, trusting that the path will meet you, and that you—all of you, the striver and the surrenderer and the woman still becoming—are exactly enough to make the journey.

If This Resonates, Here's the Path

The evolution I've described in this post didn't happen in a vacuum, and it didn't happen through thinking alone. It happened through years of inner work — learning to understand the beliefs I had absorbed without questioning them, healing the wounds underneath the achieving, and slowly, incrementally, finding my way back to myself.

That inner work is exactly what The Whole Soul Way™ is built for.

If you recognize yourself in the Scoreboard—if you have been measuring your worth in outputs, driving yourself with pressure, and wondering why it never feels like enough—this is where that unraveling begins. Not with a new productivity system, but with the deeper question of who you are when no one is keeping score.

The Whole Soul Way™ is a free foundational course that walks you through the inner work of coming home to yourself: understanding your inner protector, working with shadow, healing your inner child, regulating your nervous system, and learning to move through life with more wholeness and less armor.

Begin The Whole Soul Way™ (it's free):  

🎥 YouTube
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📓 Free workbooks

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What is one direction you have been drifting away from — not because you don't want it, but because you never quite gave yourself permission to name it as somewhere worth going?