Beyond Expertise

A big title and a steady paycheck can still come with a surprising emotion: grief. When you wake up one day and realize you’ve outgrown the career that made you “successful,” it can feel disorienting, and even embarrassing, to admit that you want something different. I unpack why that misalignment happens, how it builds slowly over years, and why so many high-achieving professionals feel oddly gui...

Getting fired can punch a hole straight through your identity, especially when your career has been the proof that you’re “doing fine.” Mary Korn’s story cuts through that illusion. She had the title, the money, and the corporate ladder momentum, yet privately felt misaligned and depleted. Then she gets fired from a job she took in desperation and suddenly has to answer the scariest question of al...

Success can look flawless on LinkedIn while still feeling wrong in your body. That tension is exactly where my conversation with Yvonne Furneaux begins and where it gets most useful for anyone thinking about identity reinvention, career change, or a second chapter beyond a corporate title. Yvonne spent more than 25 years in corporate communications, employee experience, HR, and DEI leadership, and...

A career can look successful and still feel strangely unfamiliar. Joe Arno spent decades building in sales, real estate leadership, and recruiting, only to realize that the work he was doing no longer matched the life he wanted to live. After a move, a bout with cancer, and one too many “shiny new” opportunities that didn’t fix the underlying problem, the misalignment became impossible to ignore....

The hardest part of leaving corporate life is not losing a paycheck. It’s losing the built-in credibility that came with your title, your team, and the company name on your badge. When you become independent, you are the marketing department, the PR department, and the sales team overnight, and it can feel scary to put yourself out there when visibility was never part of your old job. We dig into...

Two widowmaker heart attacks will either break your story or rewrite it. I sit down with Adrian “AJ” Jones, a longtime financial services leader who had to confront the question most high performers avoid until something forces it: what if the life you built no longer matches who you are? AJ walks me through the early twists that pulled him from international relations into finance, how comfort ca...

The strangest career clue is not burnout, it's relief. When concert cellist Kate Kayaian watched her entire performance calendar vanish during COVID, she expected panic. What she felt instead was a weight lifted, and that single emotional moment forced a bigger question: if the “dream” disappears and you feel freer, what does that say about your identity? Kate grew up in a world where music w...

A layoff. A cross-country move. A booming coaching practice. Then a stroke that forced a hard pause. Chip Scholz’s story is a sharp reminder that career and identity reinvention rarely unfold as we script them, and that “success” can still quietly pull us away from the life we actually want. On this episode of Beyond Expertise, we trace Chip’s path from working non-stop in college, landing in sale...

Your job title can make introductions easier, but it can also quietly take over your identity. In this episode, I’m digging into what happens when we tie our self-worth to corporate roles, company logos, and the status that comes with them, then suddenly realize it feels unsettling or empty. After leaving the corporate world and starting my own solo consulting business as a fractional CMO, I ran s...

Your career can provide you with status, structure, and a straightforward answer to the question “Who are you?” Then one day, that answer stops working. Maybe you’re tired of climbing the corporate ladder. Maybe your role disappears in a layoff, merger, or firing. Or perhaps you decide to walk away. Whatever the reason, you might find yourself in a strange middle ground. No longer where you used t...