There's a business card on the dash of my car. 

It's been there for almost twenty-five years. The ink has gone soft and the edges are frayed. 

You can barely read what it says anymore, but I don't need to: I wrote it.

I didn't come up with the phrase. I saw it on a  billboard on the Pennsylvania Turnpike in 2001, in the middle of a construction zone with barrels, lane closures, and the traffic at a dead stop. The Turnpike was being torn up and rebuilt that year, and somebody had put that sentence up over the mess. 

I was sitting in the backed-up traffic, driving a U-Haul home to a life I didn't want to go back to.

A billboard the size of a barn said the one thing I needed to hear. 

So I pulled over and wrote it down. The only paper I had was a business card from the job I was leaving, and I wrote it on the back of that. It said:

When I tell this story, this is the part I usually skip. 

The truck was full of a life I'd been building: clothes, books, and mismatched furniture accumulated from a soon-to-be past life. I was driving all of it home, back to where I came from. 

Moving back home was lonely and uncertain, and for many years I regretted it. 

I didn’t know it at the time, but it was the kind of regret that comes when you know you’ve made the right call.

I went home because my younger sister was pregnant, and going back felt necessary. It was the right thing to do, I believed that then and I believe it now. I grieved the life I was leaving the entire drive from Virginia to Michigan.

It might sound strange, but a mix of certainty and grief rode with me the whole way, mile after mile. 

Nobody had ever told me those two could travel together like that.

So I'll say it plainly in case you’re also going through something like this.  

You can do the right thing and still mourn what it cost you.

I thought I was going backward. 

I'd been the first in my family to graduate college. My dad drove a truck and had barely finished high school. My mom never went further than a diploma because she had me. 

I was the one who got out. 

Now I was pointing a U-Haul straight back at the thing I'd left. I was certain I was undoing my life, but really, the story was yet to be written. 

That's why the billboard caught my attention, and why I've kept those words on my dash all this time. I kept it to hold onto while I did what looked, from every angle I could see, like giving up. 

As the sign said, the road is still under construction. 

It took years to understand what that drive would be the beginning of.

I can now sit with someone who made an honorable choice and is feeling devastated by it.

I learned how to do that on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. 

Everything I now teach about the nonlinear path and the chapters that don't fit the upward story, I learned by living it myself. I was unable to tell, while I lived it, that I was building anything at all.

That's the part I want you to hear, because most of us get it backward.

The clients across your desk arrive ashamed of the gaps in their journey. The years they stepped out to raise a kid, or care for a parent, or to move home. We're trained to help them smooth it over and get the story going in a straight line again.

The transformation the client is struggling with is the exact thing that's making them into someone worth becoming. The cruelest part is that they can't see it yet. That clarity comes after.

The real work is keeping that card on the dash even when you don't believe a word of it. 

I keep reading it because it helped me hold a line I couldn't hold on my own. 

The road was under construction that year, and so was I. 

How are you helping your clients build their own road to success?

Heather

The Coach for Career Coaches

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