You Are Not Starting From Zero
What twenty-five years actually leaves behind, and why so few women can see it themselves.
A woman I’ll call R sat across from me on a call a few weeks ago, General Counsel of a business most people reading this newsletter would recognise, and said the sentence I now hear almost every week:
“If I left, I’d basically be starting from zero.”
I let it sit for a second before I answered, because I used to believe it myself.
She meant it plainly. No company logo behind her name. No team of forty reporting to her. No case, in her mind, for why anyone would pay her for anything until she had figured out what that “anything” was. Twenty-two years of law had produced a title and a salary, and very little else she believed would travel with her out the door.
That is almost never true. In fact, I have started to think it is one of the most expensive beliefs an accomplished woman can carry into her second act.
When I left my first executive role to build something of my own, I felt exactly what R described. No org chart. No assistant. No P&L that existed because someone else had built the systems underneath it. I remember sitting with a blank notebook, genuinely unsure what I had to offer that wasn’t attached to a company name.
What I actually had, though I couldn’t see it then, was thirty years of experience that had quietly become something more than a job history.
I found out what, almost by accident. A transport company with a single truck asked me to help them figure out how to grow. I didn’t have a formula. I sat with their numbers, asked the question that made their supplier uncomfortable, and walked out with a better contract than they’d had in years. None of that came from a course. It came from thirty years of doing exactly that for someone else’s company, without ever writing it down as a skill of my own.
The truck became two, then five, then forty.
That is the part almost nobody tells you before you leave. The skills that built your career do not stay behind with your security badge. They come with you. What disappears is only the packaging.
I’ve now sat with enough women in these conversations to notice a remarkably consistent pattern. Someone arrives describing herself in terms of absence: no idea, no plan, no obvious next step, sometimes no confidence that she has anything worth building on.
Ninety minutes later, we’re usually looking at something completely different, together: a practical inventory of what she actually knows how to do, who already trusts her, the problems people naturally bring to her, the abilities she’s relied on for years without ever calling them assets.
It’s the same gap I had with my own blank notebook. Not a gap in ability. A gap in visibility. You’re too close to your own experience to price it. To you, it’s just Tuesday.
I think this is one of the hidden costs of spending decades inside a successful corporate career. The organisation tells you where your value sits through your title, your responsibilities and the people around you. You never have to build the muscle of describing your value outside that structure because, until now, you’ve never needed to.
So if you’re somewhere in the middle of the sentence R said to me, “I’d basically be starting from zero,” I’d like to offer you a different version.
You are not starting from zero. You are starting from an inventory you haven’t written down yet. Twenty, twenty-five or thirty years of experience don’t disappear the day you stop reporting to someone. Neither does your instinct, your perspective or your ability to recognise what matters. They’re simply uncatalogued.
Here’s a smaller way to start proving that to yourself. Think of five problems people have brought to you, unprompted, over the last two years, because they trusted you to handle them better than they could themselves. Not your job title. The actual problems. Look at what’s common across all five. That list will probably tell you more about your second act than another year spent trying to find your passion.
You don’t need me for that part. A notebook and twenty honest minutes will do it, and this time, I suspect, the notebook won’t stay blank for long.
If you’d rather do it out loud, with someone who has no stake in keeping you where you are, that’s exactly what a Second Act Strategy Session is for. Details here. No pressure either way.
Warmly,
Pia