Eight-Year Cycles: Giving Yourself Permission to Not Know Yet with Chetal Patel

What if the version of you who doesn’t know what comes next isn’t lost... she’s just between chapters? My friend Chetal Patel has lived her life in eight-year cycles. Eight years on Wall Street. Eight years teaching English to immigrant kids in NYC public schools. Eight years raising her children, including twins who came after a long and hard infertility journey. And now: a fourth cycle, a certified health coach who specializes in change itself, sitting in the in-between and letting herself not know yet what comes next. We met in Emily Fletcher’s Evidence of Magic community, and the way Chetal talks about her own life stopped me the first time I heard it. Not because she made dramatic leaps, but because she has this uncanny ability to feel when a chapter is truly closing and to trust that signal, even when everyone around her is asking why she would walk away from something good. In this conversation, we talk about the moment 9/11 planted the first seed of “what am I actually doing with my life,” leaving six figures for a classroom because a cousin asked the right question at the right time, what postpartum depression taught her about the difference between the life that looks perfect on paper and the life you can actually live in, and why sitting in the unknown is still the muscle she is building, even now. This one is for you if you know something is shifting but you don’t yet have a name for what comes next. Chetal makes that space feel a lot less lonely. What You'll Hear On This Episode🌟 How 9/11 cracked open the first real question Chetal had ever asked herself about her own life, and why it took years for that question to actually change anything🌟 What it felt like to leave a six-figure Wall Street career in her mid-20s when nobody around her understood why, and how her husband’s support made the leap possible🌟 The pivot muscle: why her first career change was the hardest and every one after that got a little more familiar🌟 What she discovered about herself inside the isolation of motherhood, and how therapy and meditation became the foundation for everything that came after🌟 Why she’s deliberately sitting in uncertainty right now, not building the next thing yet, and what that is teaching her about modeling a different kind of life for her kids🌟 The deathbed question she has always used as a quiet gut check, and why it keeps pointing her toward what’s true🌟 Her reminder that you are not carrying skills from the past into an empty future: you are integrating, not replacingConnect with Chetal@chetalppatel on InstagramFIND VICTORIAVictoria Steward is a Financial Empowerment Coach and Certified Profit for Keeps® Coach who helps senior women in tech and engineering build the financial clarity and career confidence to leave corporate on their own terms. After 20 years as a civilian engineer for the U.S. Navy, she took the scenic route to get here... and she’s been reaching a hand back ever since.Register of the May 1st MasterclassThree Strategies to Move From “Just One More Year” to Your Real [email protected] on Instagram@victoria-steward-coaching on LinkedInvictoria-steward.com