Reinvention isn’t always a deliberate choice—sometimes, it’s what happens when life disrupts your best-laid plans in ways you never expected. It can creep up slowly, like a quiet dissatisfaction you can’t shake, or it can hit like a thunderclap, forcing you into a new direction before you’ve had time to process what’s happening. There’s rarely a roadmap for these transitions, only the choice of how to respond to them.
Do you resist and cling to the familiar, or do you step into the unknown, trusting yourself to adapt?
My own journey is a patchwork of reinventions, some carefully considered, others entirely reactionary, a few the result of (bad) luck or poor choices. At times, it felt like a free fall, but looking back, I see that each shift led me somewhere interesting. Maybe not where I was expecting to be, but an interesting place to be nonetheless. Reinvention isn’t just about changing careers or starting over, it’s not just about getting back up when you’ve been knocked down. It’s about having the resilience to reimagine what’s possible when the ground beneath you shifts.
I started my career in finance and accounting—solid, predictable work. By chance, really, I transitioned into Functional ERP Consulting, a case of being at the right place at the right time, though at the time it simply felt as a natural evolution as the digital era took hold. By the time Y2K arrived, I had nearly a decade of corporate experience. Yet, strangely, I still felt like an impostor, questioning whether I really belonged in the world of consulting, despite all evidence to the contrary. Maybe it was the strong dislike of wearing business suits.
When the market slowed, rather than feeling threatened, I saw it as an opportunity to do something different. I’d always loved food, was no longer dependent on my parents approval, and could now afford to pay the expensive, private college tuition fees, so I retrained as a chef. Working in kitchens, I re-discovered the beauty of discipline, creativity, and the humbling reality of starting from scratch—where before I was solidly middle management, responsible for teams and multimillion dollar budgets, here I was the oldest person entering a career at the bottom of the food chain. I loved it.
The challenge of learning something new, the adrenaline of trying to perform at your highest level for hours at a time, the stamina of persisting with thankless but essential tasks, the mundane reality of scrubbing the rubber seals on fridge doors with a tooth brush. But also, a comradery that far surpassed the dynamics of corporate teams and the virtually instant feedback on the quality of your work. The plate either comes back clean, or it doesn’t. I had spent years working on giant ERP implementations that would last at least 18 months, before finding out that yet again, the budget had been blown to smithereens and still the solution didn’t quite meet the client’s expectations. In the kitchen, you would know at the end of every day exactly how well, or not, you performed that day. And the following day, you start over with a clean sheet, a chance to do better than the day before.
Then came a series of unexpected twists, in close succession. Following my marriage, a move to Dubai, where working in restaurant kitchens wasn’t quite the same as the Michelin star restaurants in London. I pivoted to food writing, lucky enough to bump into an Egyptian endocrinologist who needed a ghost writer for a cookbook on Healthy Arabic meals and bold enough to write TimeOut magazine a letter, asking for a chance to be one of their restaurant reviewers.
Then, a miscarriage and divorce, followed by the decision to move closer to my ailing father in the south of Spain. This would also mean leaving the culinary world behind and a return to corporate life—I needed financial stability. In Marbella in 2004, digital transformation wasn’t yet thriving, far from it, most businesses would first need to go through a business transformation, to even begin thinking about software solutions.
With no jobs available for my skillset and experience, rather than settling for any of the jobs that were available in this tourist mecca, I built my own consultancy from the ground up. I applied corporate best practices and kitchen pragmatism to local SMEs, turning lessons from my previous careers into real-world impact. I never set out to become an entrepreneur, yet now I was one.
When my father passed in 2011, I felt the urge to move again. This time, it wasn’t necessity pushing me forward, but possibility. The Spanish economy was still reeling from the 2004 construction bubble bursting and the global financial crisis that followed several years later. My business was not thriving, no business in Spain was, and I felt restless and trapped in a tourist resort, with nothing holding me there, now that my father had passed away. Vietnam captured my heart with its energy and entrepreneurial spirit in 2012. What began as a spark of curiosity quickly became home. For the past 9 years, I have led Shutta, a digital transformation company that, like me, has undergone its own reinventions to meet the demands of an ever-changing world.
Looking back, my path has been anything but linear. I’ve been an accountant, a consultant, a chef, an entrepreneur. I have moved around the world, living adventures and collecting stories, never quite sure what is coming up next. Through it all, the only common thread has been curiosity, resilience, and reinvention. Sometimes it was by choice. More often, it wasn’t. But every time, the same principles applied: stay curious, trust you can adapt, stay humble, never stop learning, and keep putting one foot in front of the other. Row on, there’s dawn beyond the night.
Clouds are upon the summer sky
There’s thunder in the wind
Pull on, pull on and homeward hie
Nor give one look behind
Row on, row on, another day
May shine with brighter light
Ply, ply the oars and pull away
There’s dawn beyond the nightBear where thou goest the words of love
Say all that words can say
Changeless affection, strength to prove
But speed upon the wayLike yonder river would I glide
To where my heart would be
My barque should soon outsail the tide
That hurries to the seaBut yet a star shines constant still
Through yonder cloudy sky
And hope as bright my bosom fills
From faith that cannot dieRow on, row on, God speed the way
Thou canst not linger here
Storms hang about the closing day
Tomorrow may be clearClouds are upon the summer sky
G.P.R. James, Esq. from his 1844 novel Arabella Stuart
There’s thunder in the wind
Pull on, pull on and homeward hie
Nor give one look behind.
So if you find yourself facing change—whether it’s the end of a chapter, a shifting market, or a personal upheaval—know that reinvention is possible. And more than that, it’s where the real magic begins.