Why would you leave when everything is going so well?
That was the question I kept asking myself before I ended my 15-year career in the pharmaceutical industry, sold almost everything I owned, packed my life into seven suitcases and bought a one-way ticket to Dubai.
Because from the outside, things were going well.
I had a successful corporate career. I was making good money. I had spent years building a reputation and relationships in an industry I knew how to succeed in.
Outside of work, I had built a second career in fitness. I taught at a studio I loved, had a community that meant everything to me and was surrounded by people I genuinely didn’t want to leave.
I had a good life.
And that was what made leaving so hard to explain.
There was no dramatic moment where I woke up one morning, hated everything about my life and decided to burn it all down.
I just couldn’t stop wondering if the life I had worked so hard to build was still the life I wanted.
There was always a next thing
For most of my career, whenever that feeling showed up, I assumed it meant I needed something else within my career.
Maybe I needed a more challenging role.
Maybe I needed to move into Learning & Development.
Maybe I needed to become a sales leader.
Maybe I needed a different company.
Maybe the next achievement would be the one that made me feel like I’d finally arrived.
And to be fair, achievement had always worked for me.
I was the good student. I got the degrees. I built the career. I won the awards. I climbed the ladder.
So I kept doing what I knew how to do.
The problem was that the goalpost kept moving.
There was always one more thing I could achieve before I gave myself permission to seriously ask:
What do I actually want?
And that was a much scarier question.
Because what if I didn’t know?
What if wanting something different meant walking away from the income I’d worked so hard to earn?
What if I wasted 15 years of experience?
What would other people think?
And if I wasn’t the successful pharmaceutical leader I’d spent my adult life becoming, who was I?
It was much easier to choose the next logical step.
Until eventually, I didn’t.
From proving to choosing
Toward the end of my corporate career, I had one last thing I wanted to prove to myself.
I wanted to know that I could lead and succeed without sacrificing myself to do it.
At the end of that year, my team finished number one.
And instead of immediately wondering what came next, I realized something:
I didn’t need another title.
I didn’t need another promotion.
I didn’t need another achievement to prove that I was capable.
I’d spent 15 years doing that.
Maybe the next chapter wasn’t about proving anything.
Maybe it was about choosing.
So I started asking myself a different question:
If I stopped making decisions based on what made the most sense for my career, what would I actually want my life to look like?
Dubai had been sitting quietly on that list for years.
Previously, I’d imagined that maybe one day my corporate career would take me there.
This time, I stopped waiting for that to happen.
I had been teaching fitness alongside my corporate career for years, so I started looking at fitness opportunities in Dubai.
I found one.
I got an offer.
And I said yes.
A few months later, I got on the plane.
Not because I knew exactly how everything was going to work.
I didn’t.
And, spoiler alert, a lot of it didn’t work the way I thought it would.
But I’m learning that choosing your life isn’t about knowing exactly how the story ends before you’re willing to begin it.
Sometimes it’s just about being willing to pull the thread.
That’s what we’re doing here
In case we haven’t been properly introduced, I’m Samantha.
I’m a former pharmaceutical sales leader, a life coach for high-achieving mid-career women, a group fitness instructor with Barry’s and Echelon, a lover of lifting heavy, a podcast host and a Canadian living in Dubai.
And Make a Life, Not Just a Living is where I’m exploring what happens when the definition of success that got you here no longer fits the woman you’ve become.
We’ll talk about careers, identity, burnout, boredom, ambition, self-trust and the options that exist between staying miserable and blowing everything up you’ve worked hard to achieve.
I’m still figuring some of it out, too. Lots of it, if I’m being honest.
I’m a woman in progress.
My life isn’t the prescription.
But I do want it to be an example of what’s possible.
If you’ve found yourself quietly wondering Is this it?, I hope you subscribe and stay awhile.
And if you’re ready to explore what comes next with support, that’s the work I do with high-achieving mid-career women through private coaching.
You don’t need to know the answer yet.
You just need to be willing to pull the thread.