You’ve Already Made the Leap. Here’s Why the In-Between Feels Like This.

You’ve Already Made the Leap. Here’s Why the In-Between Feels Like This.

The hardest part of career reinvention isn’t the decision to leave. It’s the disorienting stretch after you’ve left — when the old identity is gone, and the new one hasn’t arrived yet. Here’s what that actually looks like from the inside, and what to do while you’re in it.

If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you’ve already done the hard part. Maybe you made the decision yourself — to leave, to step back, to stop doing the thing that had defined you for years. (As I did when I decided to stop dancing and try my hand at producing.) Or maybe the choice wasn’t entirely yours. Maybe you delivered your best work, hit your numbers, earned the respect of your team, and still found yourself on the wrong side of a restructuring. The outcome was the same either way: you’re out. The chapter is over. And now you’re on the other side of it.

And it doesn’t feel the way you thought it would.

It feels unsettled. Unmoored. Some days it feels like opportunity is right around the corner, and some days it feels like you’ve lost something you can’t get back. You’re working hard, thinking constantly, moving in what feels like circles — and the version of yourself you’re building toward still feels abstract, far away, more like an idea than a reality.

This is the in-between. And almost nobody talks about it honestly.

I’ve been in it five times. The first time, I didn’t understand what was happening. By the fifth, I recognized it immediately — not because it got easier, but because I knew what it was and what it wasn’t. What it isn’t is failure. What it is is one of the most predictable and necessary phases of any real reinvention.

Let me tell you what it looked like for me the two times I think about most.

From producer to founder: the transition nobody saw coming

By the time I left producing, I had co-produced two major Broadway productions — The Color Purple Musical and Legally Blonde the Musical — raised capital from some of the most prominent business leaders in the country, executive-produced cast albums, touring productions, and launched my own shows Off-Broadway. From the outside, it looked like a career that was working.

From the inside, I could feel the pull toward something different. My Columbia EMBA had introduced me to XR technology at exactly the moment it was beginning to find real commercial applications. I immediately saw opportunity that few in the theater world were pursuing. And I had a specific skill set that few in the tech world had: I understood audiences, storytelling, and what it takes to create an experience that moves people.

So I leaped. I pitched the Tony Awards on broadcasting their show in headset using a new tech stack I was introduced to in an entrepreneurship class at Columbia, which was being used for sports events. CBS, the Tony Awards broadcast partner, couldn’t grasp that idea, and instead, asked me if I could produce a 360-degree video tune-in promo featuring the cast of Hamilton. Having never done that before, I, of course, said yes. What ensued was a mad scramble to find the right team to create that content — and I did, very successfully. That project became a marketing consulting practice built around XR. And then, with a co-founder, I built a company from scratch — a language learning platform using immersive 360-degree video. We bootstrapped, built a product, found users, and eventually the company was acquired by Exit Reality.

You can watch the Hamilton 360 video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9AyO8h2I0k

On paper, that’s a clean arc. In practice, it was anything but. What nobody tells you about moving from a creative field into entrepreneurship is how completely the ground shifts under you. As a producer, I had a title, a role, a clear set of relationships, and a tried-and-true business model. As a founder, I had none of that. I had a vision, a co-founder, and a lot of days where the gap between where we were and where we needed to be felt insurmountable.

When the transition isn’t your choice

I’ve also been in the in-between when I didn’t choose to be there.

After the acquisition of my startup and my time at Exit Reality, I joined Accenture as a Tech Innovation Strategy Manager, working with Fortune 100 companies on XR strategy and implementation. I was good at the work. My performance record was strong. And then, fourteen months in, I was laid off in a restructuring that had nothing to do with my performance and everything to do with organizational priorities shifting away from XR and towards AI.

That version of the in-between has its own particular quality. It isn’t just disorientation — it’s disorientation with an edge of injustice to it. The work was good. I was well-liked within the company. The layoff happened anyway. And there’s a specific kind of questioning that comes with that: not just “what do I do next?” but “was any of it worth it?” When the implicit contract — deliver excellent work, keep your place — turns out not to be a contract at all, it destabilizes something deeper than just your job security.

What I found, though, was that the work required to navigate it was identical to the work required in a chosen transition. The questions were the same. The plateau was the same. The path through it demanded the same things: clarity about what you actually bring to the table, discipline in the absence of external structure, and the willingness to build forward rather than stay oriented toward what was taken.

The in-between looks the same from the inside, whether you chose it or it chose you. The disorientation is real in both cases. So is the way through.

What I know now about navigating it

Looking back across five transitions — chosen and unchosen — here’s what I understand about the in-between that I didn’t when I was inside it.

First: the disorientation is structural, not personal. It’s not a sign of weakness or wrong-headedness. It’s what happens when you’ve shed an identity before the new one has fully formed. Every person I’ve worked with through Project Future Self who is in this phase has described some version of the same experience — the groundlessness, the uncertainty about whether the feeling means something is wrong. It doesn’t. It means the transition is real.

Second: the in-between has a shape. It follows the same plateau logic I’ve written about before — the steep climb of the decision and the immediate aftermath, followed by a period of consolidation where growth is happening beneath the surface even when it’s not visible. The plateau feels like stagnation. It rarely is. Your sense of self and your understanding of what you’re building are doing significant work during this phase, even when the external evidence is thin.

Third: what you do during the in-between matters more than most people realize. This isn’t a waiting room. It’s a workshop. The people who emerge from reinvention with clarity and momentum are almost always the ones who used the in-between actively — not to rush to the next thing, but to do the honest work of understanding what they’re actually building toward and why.

That means doing the Identity Audit work — the structured examination of what you’re made of beneath the titles and roles you’ve held. It means building the daily discipline and accountability structures that will carry you through the plateau when motivation alone won’t. It means being honest about the gap between the story you’ve been telling about yourself and the one that’s actually true.

What this phase is trying to show you

When I was building the language learning startup, there was a stretch of months where I couldn’t clearly articulate what I was. Not to investors, not to potential partners, not really to myself. I was a former Broadway producer turned XR entrepreneur — and that sentence raised more questions than it answered for most people I met.

What that pressure eventually forced me to do was get very specific about what I actually brought to the table that was real, transferable, and mine — not borrowed from a previous title or inherited from a previous industry. The ability to see what an audience needs before they know they need it. The capacity to hold a complex vision together across a team while executing on the details. The discipline to show up to work every day, regardless of how the story was going.

None of those came from producing or from tech. They came from 20 years of dance, and they’d been with me through every transition — chosen and unchosen — without my fully recognizing them. The in-between, both times, forced me to see them clearly.

That’s what this phase is trying to show you. Not that you made a mistake, or that the wrong thing happened to you. That you have more than you think — and that some of it has been invisible to you precisely because it’s so fundamental to who you are.

You don’t have to navigate this alone

The hardest thing about the in-between is that it’s isolating by nature. The people around you — colleagues, family, friends — are often operating from a framework that doesn’t quite fit where you are. They want to help, but the help they offer is usually practical: have you tried networking, have you updated your LinkedIn, have you thought about what you want to do next? All reasonable questions. None of them quite reaches the thing that actually needs attention.

That gap is exactly why I built Project Future Self. Not as a motivational platform or a collection of career frameworks, but as a structured space to do the work that the in-between actually requires — with someone alongside who has been through it, who knows what phase you’re in, and who can help you use this time to build something real rather than just endure it.

If you’re in the in-between right now — whether you chose it or it chose you — I want you to hear this clearly: you are not lost. You are in the most important part of the process. The question isn’t whether you’ll get through it. It’s whether you’ll use it.