Nicole Gotsch

I wish I could say I had some perfectly planned career path and followed it from beginning to end, but that has definitely not been my story. I became a mom young, started working at 17, raised my family, changed jobs, learned new things, experienced a layoff, went through a divorce, and had seasons when I was honestly just trying to figure out what came next. Sometimes I knew exactly what I wanted, and other times I was simply making the best decision I could for myself and my family at that point in my life.

Looking back now, I can see that none of those seasons were wasted.

Work and family have been connected for me from the very beginning. When you have people depending on you, career decisions are not always about titles, promotions, or climbing some perfect career ladder.

There have been times when stability mattered more than advancement, times when flexibility mattered more than a title, and times when life needed more of me somewhere other than work. None of that meant I stopped caring about my career. It meant I was building one while also living a very real life.

Over the years, my career has taken me through scheduling, healthcare, insurance, revenue cycle, operations, problem-solving, consulting, and eventually career and résumé support. Those roles might look different on paper, but I can see now how much each experience prepared me for the next one.

I learned how to help people who were frustrated and needed answers, research something until it finally made sense, work through complicated healthcare and insurance issues, communicate with different personalities, and manage a lot of moving pieces at once. I learned to keep digging when the first answer did not make sense, advocate when something needed another look, and figure things out even when I had never done them before.

Most of those skills were not built during some huge career moment. They developed quietly over years of simply doing the work, learning from it, and carrying what I learned into whatever came next.

When the Plan Changes

A little over a year ago, I was laid off from a job I genuinely loved. Suddenly, I was back on the other side of the job search, updating my résumé, looking through job postings, comparing my experience to job requirements, and trying to decide what direction made sense next.

It is amazing how quickly you can begin questioning yourself when you are the person looking for a job. You can spend years successfully doing work you know how to do, then read a job description and somehow start wondering whether you are qualified for anything. Going through that experience gave me a much better understanding of what job seekers can feel when they suddenly have to explain their entire career on a couple of pages.

The layoff changed where I worked, but it did not erase what I knew. I still had all the experience I had built in healthcare, insurance, revenue cycle, operations, customer service, problem-solving, and working with people. My employment had changed, but my experience had not.

That is something I think people can easily forget during a layoff, career change, employment gap, or simply a period when life needs more of their attention.

Circumstances can change without taking away the knowledge and skills you spent years building.

Rebuilding More Than My Career

The bigger change in my life came when I went through my divorce. That season made me look at much more than my career. I was figuring out how to move forward personally, how to create stability for my family, and, in many ways, how to rebuild parts of myself too.

There is something about having your life change in a way you never planned that makes you start asking different questions. I began thinking more about what I was capable of, what I actually wanted for my future, what I could build on my own, and which parts of myself I wanted to find again.

Rebuilding was not one big dramatic moment for me. It was a series of smaller decisions made over time. I kept working, kept learning, took care of my kids, handled whatever was in front of me, tried things I had never done before, and slowly learned to trust myself more.

That season is also where the deeper meaning behind Purpose & Glow came from.

It was never about creating a résumé company. The idea came from knowing what it feels like to rebuild your life and realizing how easy it can be to lose sight of your own value when you are in the middle of a difficult season.

For me, the name became about much more than career services. Purpose represents figuring out what comes next and believing there is still something ahead of you, even when your original plan changes. Glow represents finding your confidence and pieces of yourself again along the way.

Seeing the Value We Sometimes Miss

One of the things I notice most now when I help someone with a résumé is how often people minimize their own experience. Someone will casually tell me that they trained employees, solved a major problem, took on additional responsibilities, helped improve a process, or became the person everyone went to for answers, yet none of it appears on their résumé.

I understand why that happens because I have done the same thing with my own career. When you have been doing something for years, it starts to feel normal. We stop thinking of it as a skill because it is simply what we do every day.

Sometimes another person can see your experience more clearly because they are not standing in the middle of it. They hear the things you barely mention and recognize the leadership, problem-solving, communication, adaptability, or knowledge behind them.

That has become one of my favorite parts of helping people. I am not creating experience that was not there. I am helping someone recognize and explain the experience they already earned.

Confidence Does Not Require Having Everything Figured Out

I used to think confidence meant knowing exactly what you were doing and being certain about what came next. I do not believe that anymore. Some of the strongest decisions I have made happened while I was still unsure of myself.

There have been plenty of times when I did not know how everything was going to work out, but I continued moving anyway. I applied for things, asked questions, researched, learned new skills, took on opportunities that made me nervous, and eventually started a business. I did not do those things because I suddenly woke up completely confident. A lot of the confidence came afterward, when I could look back and realize that I had figured out one more thing I once did not know how to do.

That changed the way I think about confidence.

Sometimes confidence is not believing you are the most qualified or capable person in the room. Sometimes it is remembering how many times you have already found a way forward when you did not have all the answers.

Faith When You Cannot See the Whole Plan

Faith has also been an important part of how I have made it through the seasons I never planned for. For me, faith does not mean I always understand why something is happening or that difficult things suddenly become easy. Most of the time, I still cannot see exactly where everything is going.

What faith has given me is the ability to believe I can take the next step without seeing the entire path first.

There have been times when I looked at my life and had no idea how everything was going to come together. During those times, I learned to focus more on what I could do right then instead of trying to solve everything at once. Eventually, I would look back and realize I had moved much farther than I thought.

Some doors closed that I wanted desperately to stay open, while others opened that I never expected. Some experiences showed me what I wanted more of in my life, and others taught me what I never wanted to accept again. I cannot say I would have chosen every part of my story, but I can say I learned something from every season of it.

Still Building

I still do not have every part of my career or my life figured out. I change my mind, question things, have goals I am still working toward, and have ideas I have not completely figured out yet. The difference is that I trust myself much more than I used to.

I know now that one job does not define me, a layoff does not erase my experience, and divorce did not erase who I was or what I was capable of becoming. Choosing what was best for my family never made me less ambitious, and starting over did not mean I was starting from the beginning.

That may be one of the biggest lessons I have learned. When life makes you start again, you are not returning to zero. You are bringing years of experience, lessons, strength, mistakes, knowledge, and growth with you.

If you are in a season where your career or your life looks nothing like you thought it would, give yourself some credit for everything that came before this moment. Think about what you have learned, what you have handled, and the things you know how to do today that once felt impossible.

Your path does not have to be straight for it to be meaningful or successful. Mine certainly has not been.

I am still building my career, still building Purpose & Glow, still raising my family, still learning, and still figuring out what comes next. The difference now is that I no longer look at the difficult chapters as proof that I somehow went off course.

They are part of the story that brought me here.