When None of Your Plans Work Out And That Turns Out to Be the Point.

teo.elynn
4 days ago
4 min read

I left my corporate career before COVID hit, convinced I was done with that chapter forever.

No real plan. Except desperately knowing that something had to change.

My mother died at 46.

I did the math one day - really sat with it - and realised that if I followed the same path, I might only have seven years left. Seven years. And I still didn’t know what my purpose was. I just knew that something was missing. That I had spent so long being good at a version of myself that didn’t feel like me.

So I left.

Plan A: Becoming a Therapist

The first thing I did when I left corporate was start my own healing.

I somehow felt I was broken.

So I went deep. I enrolled in a Master’s in Counselling and a coaching certification in NLP. And somewhere in that process, I thought: "I want to help other women do this."

I was going to become a therapist.

But as I went further, I discovered something. Traditional therapy wasn’t quite where I felt most alive. I found myself drawn to somatic coaching - work that isn’t just about the mind, but about the body, the nervous system, the way we carry our stories in our shoulders and our gut and the way we hold our breath when someone asks us how we really are.

Yet concurrently working towards the future I desire.

That’s what’s so profound about this work.

Life Lesson 1: Know your values and your vision - know who you want to become.

I didn’t leave corporate knowing exactly what I was walking toward. But I knew what I valued: depth, transformation, presence, truth. And I let those values lead me, even when the path wasn’t clear. Plan A wasn’t wrong. It was the first step toward something truer.

Plan B: The CFO I Never Expected to Become Again

Around this time, an old friend was building a start-up. He needed help. I said yes, just to help out.

And then that help turned into a CFO role.

I won’t pretend there wasn’t a part of me that felt like I was going backwards. I had left corporate. I had declared I was done. And here I was, back in a leadership seat.

But here’s what was different: I was different.

I wasn’t the same person who had burned herself out trying to prove she deserved to be in the room. I had done the inner work. I had learned to lead from a different place - from values, not fear. From presence, not performance. I became a different kind of leader. Quieter. More grounded. More honest. And I honestly love it!

The CFO role wasn’t a detour. It was evidence that the work I had done on myself was real.

Life Lesson 2: Take small, aligned actions using your values and vision as your compass.

I didn’t plan to go back to corporate. But saying yes to my friend was an aligned action - it came from a genuine desire to contribute, not from chasing status or security. When your actions are aligned with who you’re becoming, even the unexpected ones move you forward.

Plan C: When My Body Spoke, I Finally Listened

Turning 40 was a moment of reckoning.

I started noticing things I had been ignoring. My digestion was off. My weight was shifting in ways I couldn’t explain. These were signs I realised my body was shouting for help.

I started looking into nutrition, supplements, and what it meant to truly support my body from the inside out. I found products that helped. I found a community that cared. What started as a personal health journey quietly became another thread in the larger tapestry of what I was building - a life centred on transformation, wholeness, and helping other women feel well from the inside out.

Plan C wasn’t something I designed. It found me because I was finally paying attention.

Life Lesson 3: Trust the journey - and trust your own vision.

None of this looked the way I thought it would when I walked out of my corporate office. There was no straight line. There was no five-year plan that held. What carried me through wasn’t certainty - it was trust. Trust that the values I had identified would keep pointing me in the right direction. Trust that the messy, unexpected, sometimes contradictory chapters were all part of one story.

This Is Who I Am Today

CFO. Coach. Entrepreneur.

None of the plans I made predicted this combination. And yet, here I am - living all three, not because I mapped it out, but because I kept saying yes to what felt aligned, even when it didn’t make sense on paper.

I don’t sit neatly inside any one of these roles. I move between them. Some days the work is financial strategy. Some days it’s sitting with a woman while she finally admits she’s exhausted. Some days it’s building something from scratch and not knowing exactly where it’s going.

But every single day, I wake up with a sense of purpose. Not because I found the perfect plan. But because I stopped waiting for one.

That is the life I left corporate for. It just didn’t look the way I thought it would - and that’s exactly what makes it mine. 🤍

What I Want You to Take Away

If you’re reading this and you’re somewhere in the middle - between who you were and who you’re becoming - I want you to know something.

You don’t need to have it all figured out.

You need to know what you value. You need to take one small, honest step in that direction. And then you need to trust yourself enough to keep going, even when Plan A doesn’t look the way you imagined, and Plan B surprises you, and Plan C arrives in the form of something you never expected.

The path reveals itself to the woman who keeps walking.

Elynn is the founder of The Mind Studio, where she works with women who have done everything right - and still feel like something is missing. She guides them to step into their inner truth and wisdom to become the CEO of the life they deserve.

If any of this resonated with you, DM her on Instagram or take the free Quiet Burnout Audit to understand where you are right now.