Getting laid off in your 50s can feel like an ending. I decided to treat it as a turning point.

For much of my professional life, I followed a familiar definition of success: work hard, earn the credentials, accept more responsibility, build a respected career, and keep moving toward the next achievement.

I earned my MBA, became a certified Project Management Professional, and spent years leading complex programs, cross-functional teams, organizational initiatives, budgets, risks, schedules, and stakeholder expectations. I worked in demanding corporate and aerospace environments where the ability to understand both the larger strategy and the smallest operational detail mattered.

I also spent years mentoring professionals, developing team members, and leading organizational-improvement efforts. I saw how much talent and experience people often overlook in themselves — especially when their confidence has been shaken by a difficult workplace, an unexpected transition, or a changing industry.

Then I experienced an unexpected career transition of my own.

Getting laid off in your 50s is not simply a professional event. It can make you question your identity, your accomplishments, your security, and whether the experience you worked so hard to build still matters. It forced me to ask questions that many experienced professionals eventually face:

• What do I want this next chapter to look like?
• Which parts of my former definition of success still belong to me?
• What have I learned that could serve a new purpose?
• How can I use new technology without losing the judgment and perspective that experience provides?
• Am I starting over — or am I starting from experience?

Striding Forward grew from those questions.

I created Striding Forward to help people approach reinvention with greater structure, honesty, and intention. My approach combines professional mentoring, strategic coaching, program-management principles, and practical AI tools.

We begin by understanding the current state. We clarify the desired future. We identify the gap, the resources, the stakeholders, the risks, the opportunities, and the next manageable steps.

AI can support that process in powerful ways. It can help us organize years of experience, research new paths, identify transferable strengths, develop a professional narrative, test ideas, build content, and accelerate the work of creating something new. But AI should not replace experience, judgment, intuition, or humanity — it should help us use those qualities more effectively.

My perspective has also been shaped by horses and horsemanship. Horses have taught me that leadership requires clarity, consistency, awareness, confidence, trust, and a willingness to make small adjustments. Pressure without direction creates confusion. Movement without intention is not necessarily progress. And sometimes the most important thing you can do is stop following the path in front of you long enough to decide whether it is still taking you where you want to go.

I do not believe that reinvention requires you to discard everything you have built. You are not beginning with nothing. You are beginning with experience, resilience, relationships, lessons, judgment, and perspective. You may simply need a new way to use them.

That is what it means to stride forward.