Cyndie Spiegel - Reinvention Stories

"Tell me about a time in your life when you had to reinvent yourself.  What happened?"

"I worked in corporate fashion, I was on a plan and on a ladder to always be in corporate fashion.  I did that for fourteen years until I woke up one day and decided that wasn't the life that I wanted anymore. So I walked in after being at a job for 7 years and I quit.   I didn't know what I was going to and it took about two years, but eventually I figured it out.  I'm now consulting entrepreneurs on building small businesses. But I completely left behind everything I did for 15 years."

"Was it literally -- you woke up one day? Or was there cathartic moment?"

"There was a cathartic moment.   While working at this corporate fashion brand, I did a yoga teacher training not intending to teach yoga, but intending to understand the philosophy of it. I think that there was a collision course of what I was doing that didn't align with what I believed in."

"Were you aware of this conflict before taking the yoga course?"

"I think it was underlying. It was a sentiment that was there, but I didn't know what it was and I didn't know what to do with it. I just felt conflicted.  And now I think I'm doing what I was put on this earth to do.  I'm 37  -- I was 20 when I started working, but I think the work that I'm doing and the people that I'm working with...There's no greater thing that I can imagine doing and it kind of happened by mistake -- but not so much. So I'm passionate about it and I think that it's right.

We're so used to climbing a ladder that we don't realize we can get off whenever we want to and we can reinvent and recreate and become the person that we always wanted to be.  It was very much an experience of stripping it all down to figure out who I am. And I'm still figuring it out, I think I always will be, but I think I'm closer than I've ever been."

In collaboration with Narativ.