Starting Where You Are: Finding Clarity in Life's Pivot Points
The cardboard box felt heavier than it should have as I lifted it from the attic floor, decades of accumulated papers and forgotten trinkets shifting inside. Just hours earlier, I had hung up the phone with my boss, my role eliminated in a restructuring that felt anything but structural. The fury that had propelled me through that conversation was now channeling itself into something else—a methodical sorting of what to keep, what to release, what to reimagine.
Organizing boxes in the attic.
The Edge of Everything
When our professional identity becomes untethered, it's tempting to immediately start rebuilding what was lost. But sometimes, the most powerful perspective shifts happen when we pause at the periphery—that edge space where what was meets what could be.
Like standing at the edge of a river, we can see both the immediate currents and the broader flow. From this vantage point, change isn't just something that happens to us—it's an invitation to notice what we couldn't see when we were in the middle of the stream.
Finding Your Edge Space
For me, that edge space was literally my attic. Six years of professional identity had been carefully packed away in boxes: conference badges, project binders, thank-you notes from colleagues. Each item represented a story I had told myself about who I was and what mattered.
But perspective isn't just about looking backward—it's about finding the intersection between what has been and what could be. As I sorted through those boxes, I wasn't just organizing physical objects. I was creating space to notice:
What energized me in my previous role
Which projects made time disappear
What I had always wanted to try but never had the courage to pursue
The Power of the Periphery
When we're deeply embedded in our usual routines and roles, it's hard to see alternatives. But at the edges—those spaces where one thing transforms into another—we have more freedom to experiment and explore.
Think of ice melting: it doesn't happen uniformly throughout. It starts at the edges, where flexibility meets opportunity. The same is true for personal and professional transformation. The periphery is where rigid structures begin to soften, where new possibilities first emerge.
Starting Where You Are
You don't need a dramatic upheaval to benefit from edge thinking. The invitation is to:
Notice your intersections: Where do your various roles and interests overlap?
Map your edge spaces: What areas of your work give you room to experiment?
Embrace the perspective of the periphery: What becomes visible when you step back from the center?
The Clarity Beyond Chaos
That day in my attic marked the beginning of a decade-long journey toward living into my true purpose. But the transformation didn't happen through forcing or fighting. It happened through finding clarity in the chaos, through allowing myself to operate from the edges rather than struggling to maintain my position in the center.
Remember: Sometimes the most powerful thing we can do is simply start where we are, with what we have, seeing with fresh eyes what has been there all along. Your edge space might not be an attic full of boxes. It might be:
A side project that lights you up
A volunteer role that lets you experiment
A quiet morning practice that helps you see differently
The invitation isn't to abandon everything and start over. It's to notice where you already have room to explore, to play, to see things differently. Because often, our next chapter isn't about becoming someone entirely new—it's about seeing who we've always been, just from a different angle.
This article is part of a series highlighting the 7P Leadership Revitalization Framework from Development Without Limits, focusing on Perspective as a pathway to sustainable change and authentic leadership. If this piece resonates with you, consider checking out our Comeback Leadership program to continue your resilience journey.
