Last Tuesday was the strangest day I’ve had in a long time, which in retrospect feels a little dramatic considering almost nothing happened. That was actually kind of the problem. For most of my adult professional life, my Tuesdays have been my heaviest meeting day with team calls in the morning, client sessions in the afternoon, recording squeezed in between when I could manage it, prepping scripts late into the evening. Last Tuesday my calendar was basically empty. Not “lightly populated.” Empty.

The baby had been up most of the night and was on my hip wanting to nurse. Two of our older kids had started coming down with something. There were groceries on the counter from the day before that I still hadn’t put away, a couple of errands I’d been postponing because… well, ADHD, and there I was standing in my kitchen looking at an Asana dashboard so light I almost wondered if the page hadn’t fully loaded. (It had, I checked…twice.

I had this rising feeling of moderate panic – something underneath all of it that kept whispering the same thing my anxious overachieving brain has been whispering for the better part of fifteen years. You’re supposed to be producing something. You’re supposed to be useful. You’re supposed to be making something happen. You’re not earning your place in this kitchen, woman, why is your dashboard so light?

And I just stood there with the baby and the empty calendar and the unorganized counter and almost talked myself into believing I was watching myself become irrelevant. (Briefly. I am mostly okay now.)

I had a call with one of my private clients this morning. I won’t say her name, but she would recognize herself if she read this so hi if you’re reading. She’s an incredibly successful business owner – the kind of person who has spent over a decade producing measurable, repeatable, impressive results in her industry. And she was on the phone with me today telling me she’s terrified she’s lost her edge in business.

She isn’t producing the way she used to. The energy that used to feel like aliveness now feels more like effort. The opportunities she would have closed without thinking now feel heavy in her hands. She’s wondering if she got tired, if she lost her hunger, if the version of her that built her empire has somehow gone missing in this season and she doesn’t know how to call her back.

You haven’t lost your edge, God just put down the sledgehammer and picked up the chisel.

I told her what I’m telling you. She didn’t lose her edge, God just put down the sledgehammer in her life and picked up the chisel. The reason she can’t see what’s happening is that she’s been measuring her growth by sledgehammer metrics for fifteen years – output, revenue, momentum, the visible markers of expansion, and the chisel doesn’t move any of those numbers. The chisel is working on the woman who’s going to have to be ready for what God has prepared for her next, and the woman who built what she’s already built was not prepared to take on the next mission.

Steadiness is being carved into her and I can fully relate as I’ve walked that same painful refining process, too. The version of me who needed constant external scaffolding – meetings, deadlines, revenue targets, the next milestone pulling me forward – is being remade into someone who can hold her own pace, her own rhythm, her own stillness, without it triggering an existential identity crisis.

I think this is the part I’m finally, after years of resistance, starting to actually understand about answering your calling. The metrics have to shift, they just have to. Because the kind of work God actually asks of us is rarely the kind of work that’s optimized for visibility, scale, or external proof. It tends to be deliberate, more available, less rushed, more willing to sit with discomfort and slowness for a season that has no clear end date.

There’s also a deep adaptability getting formed in me that I didn’t have access to before. The previous version of me was very, very good at one thing – building inside systems I had already constructed. The version of me being made right now is being made supple enough to follow God into rooms I haven’t been in, work I haven’t yet encountered, terrain I can’t anticipate. The flexibility required for that comes from being unbuilt and rebuilt over and over, but painfully not from confidence in what I already know how to do.

The deepest release happening in me right now is the one I am most resistant to and most grateful for, which is the slow, painful, ongoing chiseling away of my need to be measured externally.

For most of my adult life, I have had to earn my place in any room I walked into by proving I belonged there.

My calendar, my revenue, my recognition, my reputation – all of it was bolstering for an identity that required external confirmation to feel real. That scaffolding is being dismantled, piece by piece, and the woman underneath it is being allowed to exist on her own terms for the first time. She’s a bit more chill than I thought she’d be, also pretty well rooted.

There’s another piece being chiseled that I think might be the most significant of all, and it’s the part where my actual priorities are starting to match my stated ones. For years I would have told you my kids were the most important thing in my life while a quick look at my calendar would say otherwise. My time and attention went to clients, prospects, content, contracts, and whatever the next thing was that squealed the loudest. My mouth said one thing, my week said another and finally that gap is closing now in a pretty significant way. My time is going where my values say it should go. I’m actually living the priority structure I have always claimed to have… how novel!

And underneath all of that, the most fundamental thing being formed in me is faith. Not the sermon-version of faith but something far more stable where I allow God to drive. The previous version of me believed God was my co-pilot, which sounds spiritual but was actually a lie that allowed me to keep the wheel and just consult Him on major decisions… sometimes. I really do believe that it’s all going to work out for good, even on the rough roads. (Especially on those.)

None of this is happening on a stage or a contract negotiation. It’s not happening during a podcast launch or a viral moment or a quarterly revenue milestone. It’s happening on more-than-usual-chill-Tuesdays in my kitchen with a fussy baby on my hip.

I keep thinking about what my client shared on the phone this morning, telling me she thinks she’s lost her edge. And I keep coming back to this – what looks like losing your edge from the outside is so often the sharpest part of the chisel, working on the most precise area of you, removing the last bits of marble that have been hiding the actual figure underneath.

She’s so far from losing her edge, she’s being epically refined in full preparation for her Big Next.

If you’re in your own version of this – if your dashboard is light, your meetings are sparse, your edge feels dull, your output is down, your visibility has dimmed, and you’ve been wondering whether you lost the very thing that built your career – I want to suggest, with everything in me, that you might have it exactly backwards. Remember, the chisel does its most important work in seasons you’ll only fully understand in retrospect.

The point is not to escape the carving but to recognize what it is while it’s happening, so you stop fighting it. Stop trying to drag the sledgehammer back out because you’re so familiar with it. Let God do the precise, slow work of making you into the steward who can carry what He’s already prepared for you next.

Your Big Next is bigger than this version of you can hold which is exactly why this season has to happen.

Michelangelo was good, but your sculptor is even better.

Love + Prayers

Liz