The Deconstruction Before the Rebuild

We're all raised inside a set of rules we never chose. The norms of our family of origin, the community we grew up in, the unspoken "this is just how it's done" — nobody asks if you agree with any of it. You just absorb it, then spend your adulthood navigating life through that inherited lens instead of one you built — until something happens that makes you stop and ask what you actually built your life around.

I know this one personally. I spent fifteen years climbing the corporate ladder, doing everything right, checking every box, until I finally reached the C-level — and realized it was not at all what I wanted. That's a disorienting thing to sit with after fifteen years. It's not a bad day. It's the ground shifting under a life you spent over a decade building.

What comes after that realization isn't just a change. It's a deconstruction. You have to take apart everything you were handed — the rules about success, about worth, about who you're supposed to be — before you can figure out what's actually yours underneath it. That deconstruction is the unlearning. And on the other side of it, if you let the process finish, is something better: discovering what energizes you, and coming into the wisdom and knowledge of your own purpose this side of heaven.

I had Susie Fishleder on the podcast recently, and her story is this exact arc, just in a different costume. Fifteen years in corporate sales, three kids, every box checked, until a full-body wave of "I have to get out of here right now" sent her running out of her office and onto a park bench, sobbing. She thought the fix was walking away, so she stepped back from her career and moved her family to Indiana. It wasn't the fix. Without the job title and the external validation she'd built her identity around, she lost herself all over again.

The real work took her two years. She calls it her chrysalis — reading, unlearning, deconstructing everything she'd absorbed about success and worth, and slowly rebuilding a version of her life that was actually hers. That's where she landed on the realization that changed everything: this wasn't a her problem, it was a systems problem. She'd been playing, in her words, "a game I was never gonna get to win."

If you're in that midlife stretch where the life you built stopped fitting the person you've become, this isn't a sign something is wrong with you. It's the deconstruction doing its job.

Two questions worth sitting with this week:

• What rules from your family of origin or your community are you still living by without ever having questioned them?

• And underneath all of it, what actually energizes you?

Susie's full story — the bench, the deconstruction, and the two years it took to rebuild — is one of the most honest conversations I've had on this show.