How to Reinvent Your Career: What 11 Years as a Professional Dancer Taught Me About Starting Over
After 11 years performing on the world's greatest stages, I walked offstage for the last time. What came next — five careers, one acquisition, and an MBA — taught me more about reinvention than I ever expected.
For eleven years, I traveled to more than 40 countries and performed in some of the world's most celebrated theaters as a Principal Dancer with the Paul Taylor Dance Company — I even met the Queen of England. That career defined my days, my body, my sense of time, and mostly, my identity as a dancer. It also taught me the single most important lesson I've learned about reinvention: the transition out is where everything begins.
When I decided to stop dancing, I didn't leap blindly. I had already started laying the groundwork for what came next. At first it was taking acting lessons to help me fill my roles with more nuance and subtext, then it transitioned to understanding the business behind theater. That deliberateness — that overlap — turned out to be a pattern I'd repeat across every transition that followed. But the first one was the hardest, because the first one required me to answer a question I hadn't had to ask in over a decade: who am I when I'm not a dancer?
Starting over isn't the same as starting from zero
From concert dance, I made a transition as a performer in musicals and plays — on tour, regionally, and then on Broadway. Shortly after leaving Paul Taylor, I joined the first national tour of Contact, the Tony Award-winning musical, and subsequently performed in two Broadway productions. Performing in musicals was different. While stage presence, the ability to execute under pressure, and the psychological discipline of giving 100% every night were the same, doing the same show eight times a week was a completely different challenge. It required a new way of keeping the performance alive and fresh. What was consistent was the discipline and the focus.
But I wasn't content to simply cross from one performing discipline to another. While I was in the cast of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, I started asking the lead producers a lot of questions. Not casually — deliberately. I understood the rigors of the creative process, but what I didn't know was the inner workings of the business of theater. So, alongside the producers, I sat with the marketing team, the company management, and the publicity team. I wanted to understand how every function of a production worked, not just the part I was playing.
My curiosity wasn't idle. It was preparation. By the time I was ready to transition into producing, I had enough knowledge and credibility to raise capital — first as a co-producer on The Color Purple Musical and Legally Blonde the Musical, then as a lead producer and executive producer in my own right.
Reinvention is rarely a leap. More often it's a long, deliberate overlap — where you're still doing the old thing while quietly building fluency in the next one.
The unexpected door: from stage to startup
While I was producing 50 Shades of Musical Parody Off Broadway, I applied to Columbia Business School and earned my EMBA. Earning my degree did something I did not anticipate: it introduced me to emerging technologies at exactly the moment XR (extended reality) was beginning to find real business applications.
I saw an opportunity and, using my relationships with Broadway marketers, I pitched an idea to the Tony Awards. It landed. The result was a 360-degree promotional video for CBS featuring the cast of Hamilton, created to drive tune-in for the 2016 telecast. That project launched a marketing consulting firm built around XR technologies — a pivot that would have seemed completely disconnected from dance to anyone watching from the outside, but felt entirely continuous to me.
The same instinct that had made me effective as a performer — my ability to understand what might excite an audience — turned out to be exactly the right foundation for immersive media. Skills don't always transfer in the ways you expect. Sometimes they transfer through what I would call unconscious awareness: what lies beneath what we see and acknowledge.
The part no one plans for: being acquired
From XR consulting, I co-founded a company to teach languages using 360-degree video. A few years in, that company was acquired by Exit Reality, a company focused on creating tools for training, meetings, and virtual experiences using XR technologies. I stayed on for over a year, then moved to Accenture as a Tech Innovation Strategy Manager. Suddenly I was a consultant in a major firm, working with Fortune 100 companies — but the transition was completely logical. I had spent the better part of a decade building and learning XR technologies and their applications. When Accenture needed XR leaders, I was one of the few who had real experience. From there, an advisory role with an AI company. Then Chief Growth Officer, North America, for Zykrr, a customer experience software platform.
Five careers. Not five jobs. Five genuinely distinct professional identities, each one requiring me to release the previous version of myself and build credibility somewhere new. Each transition carried some version of that same uncomfortable pause between who I had been and who I was becoming.
What changed across each of those transitions wasn't the challenge. It was my relationship to the challenge. I got better at recognizing disorientation as a signal — not that something was wrong, but that something real was happening. As a dancer I had learned that growth happens in plateaus. There is a steep climb to the next level, then a plateau when you get there. In the plateau phase, you are regenerating the energy and confidence to make the next climb. I found this to be true with every career transition I made.
What I know now that I didn't know at the beginning
Reinvention is not a personality trait. It's not something some people have and others don't. It's a skill — one that can be developed, practiced, structured, and applied. The people I've watched struggle most in career transitions aren't the ones with the fewest options. They're the ones who conflate their identity with their current role so completely that ending that role feels like ending themselves.
The dancers who navigate the end of a performing career most successfully are the ones who understood early on that they were never just the performer. They were an accumulation of discipline, skill, grit, and tenacity that allowed for their success. The executives, founders, and professionals who make effective pivots are the ones who can say: here's what I've built, here's what I've learned, and here's what I'm building next — without needing the last chapter to validate the current one.
That's the work. Not the resume update or the networking coffee. The work is in understanding what you're actually made of, separate from what you've been doing.
Why Project Future Self exists
I built Project Future Self because I kept encountering people who were exactly where I had been after leaving the Paul Taylor Dance Company — accomplished yet disoriented, and without a useful framework for what comes next. People who had achieved goals, surpassed target metrics, or climbed the ranks of an organization, and were now discovering that the metrics they had measured themselves by had never quite pointed at what they actually wanted.
What they needed wasn't more career advice. They needed a structured way to do the thinking that reinvention actually requires. That's what I've spent the last several years building — a methodology drawn from five transitions and a lot of honest reckoning with what starting over really takes, and how rewarding it can be.
If you're standing at the edge of your own next chapter, I built this for you.