2026: Your year for...?

A look back at when I listened to the voice inside

Recently Optionality member Joanna Bloor wrote a newsletter that really stuck with me about how we conceptualize the past and the future :

What If the Future Is Behind You?

The most evocative passage?

The Aymara people of the Andean Highlands gesture forward when they talk about the past, and backward over their shoulders when they talk about the future.

This isn’t just poetic. It’s literally how their language works.

• Yesterday? They point ahead.

• Tomorrow? They gesture behind them.

Their reasoning is kind of brilliant: what’s known (the past) is in front of you, where you can see it. What’s unknown (the future) is behind you, where you cannot.

This feels counterintuitive and true at the same time. Both obvious and unexpected. It explains why often we can’t see the common threads; we can’t connect the dots until we get some distance from our past. Or perhaps according to the Aymara, not until we see a fuller landscape ahead with more of our past to survey.

What I’ve known for many years is that I have a voice inside me that already knows what’s right or necessary (I think most of us do), but sometimes it takes me a minute to stop and listen. When I do listen, big things happen, and these are just a couple of examples:

When my voice asked me, “Do you really have to???”

I got into tech at the absolute best, lucky time…during the dot.com boom. But that means I also was in tech at the worst, sucky time…the dot.com bust. I had a job and team I loved at a company that was spiraling downward. I had had many bosses in a relatively short time, and even though at some point everyone on the team reported to me, and I alone reported to the VP, it was never me that was appointed the VP…and I became pretty sure I was never going to be. Meanwhile, there was layoff after layoff, and we were trying to do the same or even more work with fewer and fewer people. Eventually a week came when I knew a layoff was coming at the end of the week, but no one had talked to me to weigh in, so it seemed pretty reasonable to assume I was on the list. I knew what the severance package was, and I found myself actually looking forward to Friday.

But I didn’t get laid off. More people were gone, including every other woman in leadership; I was getting yet another new boss, and I was the most senior woman left standing. I spent all weekend feeling depressed and saying, “Oh God, I have to go back there on Monday.” Back to doing more with less, with my head pressed hard against a glass ceiling.

As Monday approached, I heard a small voice inside me. It asked, “Do you really have to go back?”

I was a thrifty person. I had prided myself on not succumbing to over-leveraging myself during the heady boom days. I had a full year of net pay in the bank. Was it the nadir of the bust at that point (although we may not have known it was the nadir)? Yes. Did it seem impulsive and foolhardy to leave a good job with good pay while so many friends were struggling in the job market? Undoubtedly to those friends it seemed very foolhardy indeed. But the voice was telling me I had reached my limit. So on Monday I went in and asked the COO if it was too late to get “on the list.”

It wasn’t quite that simple. I ended up negotiating a lengthy transition period, but yes, six weeks later I was walking out the door with the package (and even a contract to finish up a project I’d been leading as a quarter-time consultant).

My voice wasn’t done, though…

…because I had assumed I would walk out that door and go get that VP job I wanted at some other company doing something relatively similar. I mean, that’s what I wanted right?

But I wasn’t really going out and getting it. Sure, if someone came to me I’d have the conversation, but I wasn’t working my network or even really mining all the job boards and listings the way someone who really wanted that job might do. it took me a while, but finally I stopped and asked myself, “Why aren’t you…a go-getter…going out and getting?”

And that voice piped up again with, “Maybe that is not what you want. Maybe you are tired of being the only woman in the room more often than not. And tired of the way you have to code-switch and accommodate to be taken seriously in this industry and this role. Maybe you want to take a different leap.”

I listened to that voice and, despite never having dreamed of being an entrepreneur (or even my own boss) before, I ended up deciding to experiment and see if I could take two passions, one old…theatre…and one new…blogging…and create a business around it. I began consulting with organizations about blogging as a marketing channel before that was really a thing, and before too long I met Lisa Stone, Jory Des Jardins, and BlogHer became a thing.

It took getting quiet, recognizing that I wasn’t acting how I usually acted, asking myself leading questions, and listening to my own answers.

This month at Optionality we’re going to explore these inflection points in our lives…how to recognize them. How to listen to your own voice. How to answer what is sometimes the toughest question of them all: “What do I really want?”

All in preparation for 2026. And making 2026 the year that you ___________. Fill in that blank with us.

Do you know how to fill in that blank right now? Or are you still working on it?

Kick off 2026 by listening to your own voice, answering the big questions about what you want, and then doing the work to move toward that new vision. Join us over in our new community space, powered by Mighty Networks. We’ll be launching a six-week program at the New Year, available at no charge for Premium members and for a reasonable fee that can be applied to Premium membership for Public members. Sign up now to get all the details.

PREMIUM BENEFIT SPOTLIGHT: Join us every Friday morning for a quiet co-working session for writers. Some of us are working on writing marketing copy. Some on online content. Some on presentations and pitches. Some on a book. But we come together on Fridays to say “hi,” turn off our mic and camera, focus for one hour, then say, “bye,” feeling satisfied with having taken an hour to put all our devices on DND and FOCUS. Together.