An Inverted 5-Year Plan + Walking Backward into What's Next

Five years ago, none of this was part of the plan.

Prior to the pandemic and part-way into it, I was a teacher. Since around that same time, we’ve moved across the world to Japan(and back), I left teaching to became a personal trainer, earned a nutrition certification, coached in a gym, started my own business, hosted my first fitness retreat, filmed an entire exercise library, and eventually built a custom app for my strength training programs with my husband so the business could run more simply and sustainably.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, I also found more space for myself, my family, and new interests (like bodybuilding), and started imagining a future that might include splitting time between the U.S. and Japan (✌️condo project 🇯🇵).

None of these steps felt like part of a big, formal "5-year plan” at the time. They were just the next logical, sometimes scary, sometimes exciting decisions in front of me.

For the first ~15 years of my adult life, I stayed put because change felt risky.

The last 5 have taught me that forward momentum doesn’t come from having everything figured out; it comes from being willing to take the next step before you feel ready and trust that clarity and a cohesive narrative shows up later.

I don’t know exactly what’s next. 🤷‍♀️ But I do know that, so far, it’s all made sense in reverse.

There’s an idea in Andean cosmovision that we walk backwards into the future—blind to some extent, and unable to see what’s coming—while facing forward to see the past, which is (now) known and visible. 🔄 (Yes that's a little trippy - try not to think too hard about it)

That feels exactly right. Every big shift I’ve made only makes sense now that I can see the trail behind me. At the time, I was just taking the next step I could justify, doing the best I could with the information I had.

(Side note: I also love to think that my time as a teacher was already shaping my future as a trainer, which I was (at the time) still blind to and that experiences like my Fulbright to Ecuador and Peru introduced me to ways of thinking about the nature of time that created more cognitive flexibility and less linearity to how I perceived my career and life journey.)

Hindsight really is 20/20. 😉

Where have the last five years taken you? And where do you feel pulled to go next? Maybe you don't need a 5-year plan to get there. Perhaps you just need to take the first step and trust yourself. 👣