A few days ago, I did something that felt a little strange.
I asked AI to read a bunch of my old writing and tell me what it noticed about my voice.
Some of what came back was interesting.
Some of it was flattering.
And some of it made me squirm a little.
Apparently, a machine could describe parts of my writing voice more clearly than I could.
That got me wondering where that voice actually came from.
Not the writing voice I have today. The one underneath it.
So I went back to my corporate years.
And that took me all the way back to being an engineer.
For a long time, I communicated exactly the way you might expect an engineer to communicate. I brought the facts. I brought the numbers. I brought the answer.
What else could anyone possibly need?
If the spreadsheet said we should do something, surely everyone would look at the spreadsheet, nod thoughtfully, and do it.
You can probably guess how well that worked.
Somewhere in the middle of my career, I gave a presentation that landed with an impressive thud.
I don't remember the subject anymore. I remember the feeling.
I had done my homework. I knew the material. I had the data.
Nobody moved.
A consultant happened to be in the room that day. Afterward he said something to me that stuck.
"Lynn, you can give them all the data you want, but they are not going to move until they feel something."
I remember thinking, "Well, that's inconvenient."
I knew how to explain something.
I knew how to prove something.
I wasn't nearly as sure how to make someone feel something.
And maybe you've had that experience too.
Especially if you've spent 30 or 40 years inside a company where being right, being prepared and knowing your stuff were rewarded.
Then PowerPoint arrived and gave all of us another way to avoid the problem.
Bullet.
Bullet.
Bullet.
Next slide.
We got very good at squeezing ideas into little rectangles.
Eventually I started realizing that the format itself was shaping how I communicated. I wasn't telling a story. I was reporting information.
So I started trying to wrap some kind of narrative around the numbers.
I wasn't particularly good at it.
A chart was easy.
A story was hard.
A chart sat there and behaved itself. A story required me to understand the people in the room.
What were they worried about?
What did they want?
What were they afraid of losing?
Why should any of this matter to them?
I never completely figured that out while I was in corporate life.
But at least I had started asking the question.
And I've learned that asking the right question sometimes matters more than having the answer right away.
Then I left the corporate world.
That's when things got interesting.
Because when you leave a company after a long career, you discover something nobody puts in the retirement brochure.
Some of the authority you thought belonged to you actually belonged to your title.
Your position.
Your company.
Your email signature.
The box with your name in it on the org chart.
Inside the company, people returned your calls because of the role you held.
Outside?
Nobody cares that you used to be Vice President of Whatever.
That can be unsettling.
It certainly was for me.
And I think this is where a lot of people in their 50s and 60s get stuck when they start thinking about doing something of their own.
You've spent decades becoming very good at something.
You know things younger people simply haven't had enough years to learn yet.
You've solved problems. Managed difficult people. Survived reorganizations. Built teams. Made mistakes. Fixed mistakes. Sat through approximately 14,000 meetings that should have been emails.
There is an enormous amount of value there.
But suddenly you have to explain that value without the company standing behind you.
You have to answer a much harder question:
What do I know that somebody would actually pay me for?
That question isn't very corporate.
There isn't a competency model for it.
No annual review.
No promotion ladder.
No boss telling you what the next step is.
And strangely enough, that's both terrifying and incredibly freeing.
For me, part of the answer was learning how to communicate differently.
I started studying copywriting because I wanted to understand how people persuade without simply adding another slide to the deck.
I worked at it for quite a while.
I wouldn't say I ever felt like a natural.
Then I started podcasting and discovered something I had probably known for years.
Speaking comes more naturally to me than writing.
Put me across the table from another person and I'll find the words.
Put a blank page in front of me and suddenly I'm reconsidering every decision I've made since 1978.
So that created another question.
How do you take the voice you already have and get it onto the page?
For me, part of that answer has been Maggie.
She's a much better writer than I am, and over the years she's helped turn some of my wandering thoughts into words people might actually want to read.
When AI recently looked through my archive, I could see her influence all over it.
Which brings me back to why I'm writing any of this.
I'm not interested in becoming the guy who sits around telling stories about the good old days.
Nobody needs another person saying, "Back when I was at 3M..."
The past only becomes valuable when we can use it to build something next.
And I think that's especially important for those of us who are 50-plus and asking what the next chapter looks like.
Maybe you've had enough of corporate life.
Maybe another reorganization doesn't exactly get your blood pumping.
Maybe you're tired of spending half your week in meetings discussing what you're going to discuss in the next meeting.
Maybe you're not ready to retire.
You just don't want to keep doing this.
You want to build something.
Consult.
Coach.
Teach.
Create a small business.
Turn something you've spent 30 years learning into work that actually feels like yours.
Work with a little more purpose and a lot less corporate nonsense.
But there's a catch.
You have to figure out what you have to say when the title disappears.
I've been playing with a simple test for myself.
I call it the usefulness test.
The name probably won't survive, but the idea might.
When someone reads something I write, hears me speak, or works with me, I want four things to happen.
Do they know something they didn't know before?
Do they feel something that gives them enough energy or confidence to move?
Does it spark an idea of their own instead of simply repeating mine?
And can they actually do something with it?
Know.
Feel.
Spark.
Act.
I'm not convinced that's the right order.
I'm not even convinced those are the right four words.
But I do know this.
The engineer in me spent a big part of my career believing "know" was enough.
Give people the answer.
Give them the numbers.
Give them the logic.
It took me a long time to understand that people rarely change because they received one more piece of information.
That consultant told me that in a hallway decades ago.
Apparently I needed about 30 years to finish processing it.
I'm still figuring this out.
And maybe that's the point of this stage of life.
You don't have to show up with everything figured out.
You don't need another title.
You don't need permission from the company.
You can take what you've learned, what you're good at, what you care about and what people seem to need from you, and start building from there.
Your experience isn't the business.
But somewhere inside all that experience might be the raw material for one.
Part 2 will get into what I'm learning about turning that experience into something useful, something people understand, and maybe even something they're willing to pay for.
For now, I'll leave you with the question I've been asking myself:
When the company name, title and org chart are gone, what's left that's uniquely yours?
