"I Know I Owe You Me"

SMART Talk...Conversations That Matter

I've been reflecting on the lessons of the past as I navigate through this amazing time in my life. I've recently taken a break to fill my head with new visions and intentional second acts from a life well-lived. I've thought about the many chances I've had to love, live, and lead.

I'm sure you've also had times when you've stepped back and asked yourself, “What’s next?”

Second acts don’t come at the end of a career, a lost love, a divorce, or other milestones we face. They come with intention. They are shifts when we ask ourselves the ultimate question, “Why am I here?”

This weekend, while going through old journals, I came across a passage written after the loss of the greatest love of my life. In 2010, during a time of growth, rebirth, new love, and new life, life suddenly threw us a curveball. The loss was devastating. Losing a best friend, a love greater than life, taught me lessons I never thought I needed to learn, like how to let go.

A second act is scripted, staged, and directed. And that reinvention of my life from 2010 through 2024 was empowered by intention and became the most productive nearly fourteen-year season of my life. Navigating that first-second act from CEO, business owner of a luxury cosmetics brand distributed through Macy’s department stores, serving in executive director and senior c-suite leadership roles of several human service and non-profit organizations, mother of graduating high schoolers, college-bound young people, becoming a grandmother, writing five self-published books that did pretty well on Amazon (written under my pen name Loni Webb), I found my voice and my strength to lead and to navigate this life without my best friend.

Our curtains must go down on our first and even our second acts, and we must move with intention into the next act of our lives. I know several executive leaders and friends who are fine-tuning their next act, moving into and out of transitions. Some are into retirement, some into launching new business ventures, and some are moving abroad and saying goodbye to lives built on sand here in the US.

As for me, I filmed my first commercial last week (it starts running in about a week, look for it). I am moving with the intention of building a new brand and a legacy.

All of this I learned from my love, my best friend. And all I can say is, “I know I owe you me.”