Choose the Path That Lights You Up

Think about the last time you lost track of time doing your work.

Not because you were behind. Because you were in it. The hours went somewhere, and you didn’t miss them.

Now think about the last time a Sunday night sat on your chest like a weight.

Both of those moments are giving you intelligence. One tells you where your energy lives. The other tells you where it’s being drained.

Most of us were trained to listen to neither.

What It Actually Is

Choosing the path that lights you up isn’t chasing a feeling. It’s reading your own energy as data and letting it decide where you invest your life.

Light is the signal that the work and the woman doing it are aligned. Your attention sharpens. Ideas come faster. Setbacks sting less, because they’re in service of something you care about.

It isn’t the absence of hard work. This path will still ask everything of you. The difference is that it gives something back.

How It Gets Withheld

For a lot of us, the path was chosen before we ever got a vote.

Take the stable job. Don’t make waves. Be grateful you’re in the room at all. If you came from a family, a community, or a workplace that told you your options were narrow, you learned to pick the path that kept you safe, not the one that kept you alive inside.

Then the system reinforced it. The assignments that drew you in went to someone else. The work you were good at but never loved became the work you were known for. Every review rewarded you for staying in the lane you were placed in.

Nobody had to forbid you from choosing. They just made every other option feel like a luxury you hadn’t earned.

Why You, and Why It’s Not Weakness

You may have been told that wanting work that lights you up is self-indulgent. Something for people with money, connections, or a safety net.

Hear me on this. Wanting your energy back isn’t indulgence. It’s maintenance.

A leader running on empty makes smaller decisions, tolerates more than she should, and stops seeing possibility for herself and for the people behind her. You can’t light the way for anyone from a place that’s gone dark.

And you’ve already proven you can endure. Endurance was never the question. The question is what you’re enduring for.

The Leadership Impact

When you stay on a path that drains you, it leaks.

Your team feels the flatness even if you never name it. Your patience runs shorter. You start managing tasks instead of leading people. And quietly, you teach everyone watching that this is what success costs.

When you’re on a path that lights you up, the opposite happens. You bring ideas into the room, not just answers. People want to be near the work because you’re visibly in it. And the women coming up behind you see a different picture of leadership: not martyrdom, but alignment.

Where you spend your energy sets the climate for everyone around you.

How to Take It Back

You take it back by paying attention, then acting on what you see.

First, run an energy audit. For two weeks, at the end of each day, write down one thing that gave you energy and one thing that took it. Don’t analyze. Just record. Patterns show up faster than you’d think.

Second, find the thread. Look at what lit you up and ask what those moments have in common. Teaching? Solving the hard problem? Building something from nothing? Advocating for someone without a voice? That thread is your direction, even if the job title doesn’t exist yet.

Third, take one step you can stand behind. You don’t have to walk out of anything tomorrow. Volunteer for the project. Have the conversation with your manager. Enroll in the program. Choose one move that puts more of your time on the thread, and make it this month.

The path doesn’t appear all at once. It appears one step at a time, and only after you start walking.

What It Feels Like to Stand in It

It feels like being awake.

Mondays stop being something you brace for. You still get tired, but it’s the tired that comes from giving, not the tired that comes from leaking.

Your voice gets steadier, because you believe what you’re saying. And it feels like freedom. Not because everything is easy, but because you chose it. A path you chose is a path you can own.

From the Coaching Chair

I worked with a leader I’ll call Carla. Senior program manager, twenty years in, respected by everyone, and completely flat.

In our first session she told me she was fine. Good job, good pay, no complaints. Then she said, “I just don’t feel anything anymore.”

I asked her to run the energy audit. Two weeks later she came back frustrated. Nearly every entry on the energy side was the same thing: the one hour a week she spent mentoring two new hires. Almost everything else landed on the drain side.

She said, “That’s not a career. That’s a side thing.”

I asked her who told her that.

She was quiet for a long time. Then she said, “Nobody. I just never thought I was allowed to want it.”

Over the next six months, she built the case for a role in talent development, pitched it, and got it. Same organization. Same pay grade. Different woman. “I feel like myself again,” she told me.

Nothing about her talent changed. She just stopped treating her own light as optional.

Final Reflection

The path that lights you up was never a reward for finally being good enough. It was always yours to choose.

You’ve spent years proving you can carry what was handed to you. You’re allowed to set some of it down and pick up what’s actually yours.

Where does your energy rise, and what have you been telling yourself about why you can’t go there?

And if no one had ever told you what you were allowed to want, what would you choose now?

Closing

This was Foresight. I see you. And I’ll see you next time.