On professional evolution

Embracing liminal spaces and places they lead to

When I first heard about the concept of liminal spaces, they felt magical.

I was a strategist working on the Axe Shower account and we had an expert come in to educate us on showers as a liminal space. And although I wasn’t sure that the pimpled dudes that we were selling pugnaciously-fragranced products to were the aspirational avatars of these wondrous liminal journeys, the idea of spaces of in between, spaces where normality is suspended and the spirit floats, instantly hooked into my imagination.

This was around 2008ish - the iPhone, Facebook, Twitter and others were just beginning their attention-sucking march into our collective world; even in those early days, I felt the constraints of the digital tools that were rapidly infiltrating our lives, creating new expectations around availability, sharing and what it meant to be a functioning adult in the world.

So in that 2008-ish moment, the idea of a liminal space felt like a lifeline. In contrast to the machines that were rushing in, there was something deeply romantic about the idea of places that felt free and unconstrained, where the mind could wander and creativity had space to bloom. I started to recognize them throughout my own experience - yes, when I showered, but also when I was in the opera house, when I was on planes. I thought it all so beautiful.

And then I lived through my first professional liminal space.

Actually, if I’m being accurate, my first professional liminal space actually happened right out of college. I was ready to dive into the world of advertising; instead two planes dove into the World Trade Center and the economy stopped. For two years, I waited tables, waiting to see if my professional life would ever start. It was very liminal space.

But the first professional liminal space that I recognized as a liminal space while I was in it happened a few years after learning about the concept: at age 31, I quit my job, bought a truck and drove around America.

This was pre-#vanlife. There was no glorious Instagram feed nor societal admiration — I was simply a road rat who had walked away from an accelerating career while all my friends continued to climb the proverbial ladder. It challenged me emotionally and spiritually at a molecular level - I had never stepped off the path, never stopped producing, never just existed.

And then after parking the truck and taking another professional run for almost a decade, I got laid off, twice — once from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (also, the company I had founded during this decade closed a few weeks later) and then five years later I got laid off from Oatly — adding two more liminal space moments.

How excruciatingly difficult the professional liminal space can be.

Whether self-imposed or as a result of my “services not being needed anymore,” these professional in-between periods did a number on my ego, on my sense of self, on my confidence. And even though when in them I know I’m going to be fine and I know breaks are really good for me, in the moments of detachment from the capitalistic momentum that I have been groomed to conquer, it can be hard to keep my spirit strong and my fears at bay.

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2001, 2009, 2018, 2023. Four professional liminal space moments. The first one was discouraging (9/11), the second one ripped me apart and then put me back together again (the truck), the third one was straight up fucking devastating (CZI and the closing of my company) and the last one was the easiest (post-Oatly).

Easiest? Let’s talk about an easiest liminal space!
Here are the three things made the last one easiest:

First, I took my friend Molly Graham’s advice: if you are fortunate enough to have the means, pick a date in the future and do not have any professional conversations — with yourself or others — until that date.

I got laid off from Oatly on October 30th; my date was February 1st. For three months I allowed myself to just be, to wake up every morning and truly ask myself the question of what I wanted to do that day and then do just that. I slept, I journaled, I read, caught up with friends, worked out, had a nice birthday… all the good things.

Having that date let the frantic side of my brain chill out — it gave purpose and boundary to the break. It reassured my conscious and subconscious self that we are going to get back to it, all in good time. It let people know I was taking care of myself and that I would be back in touch (which I did - I kept a spreadsheet of people who I need to reach out to come February 1st).

In that period, anytime I came up with an idea of “what I could be doing with my life,” I jotted down a phrase on a dedicated Note in my phone — clocking it told my brain that I got it down, we don’t have to think more about it right now.

The second thing I did was when I started working again, I came back SLOW. I got active again in reaching out to people and posting, but I didn’t make a grand proclamation on LinkedIn that I was back. I set up an LLC but I didn’t start a company. I brought on collaborators as needed but didn’t hire. I took on projects of all different kinds with limited scopes to see how it all felt.

I watched myself. How’s my energy with this person? How do I feel when I get on a Zoom on this project? How am I sleeping? Am I joyful? Am I annoyed? Is this system I’ve built working? If not, what needs to be changed? I watched closely how I reacted to everything and gradually rebuilt the understanding of myself.

Which leads to the third, arguably most revolutionary thing: I let myself evolve.

You see, Heidi in her 30’s was in a serious momentum moment. I built a really fucking cool company and was loud about it — I posted all the time, gave talks, did interviews… it was #girlboss all the way. I had great projects and mind-boggling professional experiences and later in that decade and into my early forties, I was brought into other companies to build.

I was that bitch.

So in the fourth liminal space moment — coming off of being laid off which, even though it was right thing in that moment, was still an ego-smack — it was tempting to rush backwards into what had worked before.

No one would have been surprised, myself included, if I had done the Heidi thing and created another company, made some grand proclamation about my view of the world and work and rallied a band of misfits to come along with me (I do love a good band of misfits).

It was jarring when I allowed myself not to be that person anymore.
It was a relief to allow myself to change,
to live in today’s reality versus chasing yesterday’s ideas.

In what is often shocking to myself, I have little to no interest in building an empire or being a LinkedIn influencer (god, LinkedIn is turning into a swamp of contrarian downers and AI slop, no?). I’m fine with not being on stage anymore and rarely get asked on podcasts. And, to clear, it’s not that any of those things are bad; rather in this moment, they just don’t figure into my definition of success.

After years of building teams, I’m happier doing work myself. I’ve found that by being in this executive-level-strategy-assassin mode, I get to work on the properly juicy problems for the first time in my career. Basically, if you’re a leader that is trying to crack a thorny problem at the intersection of your company and people/culture, you call me. And there are so many provocative, mission-critical problems that sit at that intersection, problems that my brain loves.

By flying solo, I intimately work on the toughest parts that need to most nuance and customization, versus bringing in a strategy team machine that chomp chomp chomps through more known challenges via predetermined frameworks and processes.

So I’m doing things like not only doing all the strategy work end to end, but writing decks from scratch and fine-tuning paragraphs and doing final design checks to make sure there are no widows, things that I have been directing versus doing these past 15 years.

Many days I wake up and ask myself, are you SURE you’re good with this?
And so far, the answer has been yes.
Not just good with it, but deeply in my skin with this.

(side note: being good with this is allowed to change, btw)

I don’t think I would have landed where I needed to be in this era, had I not taken that break and not started slow. Both of those actions are proper liminal space actions, and also in direct conflict with the speed that we’re “supposed to” operate at to stay relevant and successful.

I don’t know, the older I get the more I think all the “supposed to’s” are absolute fucking madness. What a mess our species has made, all in the name of chasing some manufactured idea of progress and success, moving forward so quickly that we often forget to ruminate and dream.

Maybe we chase because liminal spaces are tough. I have suffered and been shredded in them and found myself unable to hide from the not so amazing aspects of myself while in their haze. I have wallowed in feelings of worthlessness because I dared to step back from the machine and its endless demand of more.

But liminal spaces are also beautiful, necessary. They help us expand so we can refocus, imagine so that we can more confidently make, ponder so that our progress is relational and rooted in goodness.

The ego fights these spaces because the system doesn’t recognize them - I’ve found in the moments that I can truly surrender to them, there is no tangible outcome or progress, there is nothing to readily point to, there is no gold star because I made something great. I just am.

But as humans, as souls, if we can overcome the conditioning, those liminal spaces can result in the most profound of openings and surprising pathways forward. We just have to allow them, which in itself is a radical act in a system that doesn’t readily make room for one to breathe.