When I invited Nat Sang, founder of The Midlife Reset, to join me for the Starting From Zero Substack Live Series, we began exactly as you might expect: exchanging messages, discussing what we might talk about and arranging the practical details. At some point I sent Nat my telephone number and told her to call if she wanted to chat anything through.
Her response wasn’t quite what I expected.
Wait. Do you live on Long Island?
It turned out that this woman I had discovered through Substack, whose work I had been reading online and who I was preparing to interview virtually, lived 7 minutes away from me (8 minutes with traffic).
The following day, she came into the studio and we met properly for the first time.
I love this story because it captures something I hadn’t anticipated when I began Starting From Zero. I thought I was building a publication, but increasingly I’m discovering that I’m also creating opportunities for conversations, friendships and connections that I could never have planned in advance.
And in many ways, that became the perfect beginning for my conversation with Nat, because so much of her story is about what can become possible when life stops following the plan we thought we were supposed to be following.
When the thing you didn’t want becomes the thing you needed
Nat spent more than 35 years in corporate healthcare, beginning at ground level and eventually working her way into senior leadership. She earned her MBA, completed the training, accepted the promotions and continued moving towards the next level because, for a long time, that was simply what success looked like.
There was just one problem.
Somewhere along the way, she realised she didn’t love it anymore.
She loved aspects of it, and I appreciated how candid she was about that. She loved the title and the money, and she was good at what she did, but beneath all of those external signs that things were going well, she felt increasingly empty.
I think many accomplished women will recognise the complexity of that feeling because it can be incredibly difficult to question a life that, from the outside, appears to be working.
When you’ve spent decades creating something, walking away from it can feel as though you’re rejecting everything it took to get there.
But perhaps outgrowing something doesn’t mean it was wrong.
Perhaps it simply means it did its job.
For Nat, the decision was eventually made for her. In October 2025, she was unexpectedly told she would lose her job at the end of the year, and what initially brought pain, confusion and anguish ultimately became what she now describes as one of the greatest blessings of her life.
Without the corporate role, Nat began writing.
She came to Substack without a perfectly defined niche or a grand plan for what her publication would become, and through writing, talking to readers and paying attention to what continually interested her, The Midlife Reset began to emerge.
I found that particularly interesting because we can become so preoccupied with figuring everything out before we begin.
Sometimes beginning is how we figure it out.
Who are you when the title disappears?
One of the questions I wanted to explore with Nat was what happens to our identity when the professional title we’ve carried for years is suddenly removed.
Because a career gives us much more than an income. It can give us structure, status, validation, routine and a ready-made answer to that familiar question: What do you do?
But Nat’s experience also showed the other side of that identity.
The final years of her corporate career had taken a toll on her confidence. She described a toxic environment in which she gradually began questioning herself, becoming less willing to speak up and absorbing messages that made her wonder whether what she had to say was worth hearing.
What she has been doing since leaving isn’t simply discovering what comes next professionally; it is unlearning the version of herself that those years taught her to become.
We talk so much about everything women need to learn when they begin again, but perhaps one of the more interesting questions is:
What do we need to unlearn?
The belief that our value comes from a title.
The assumption that somebody else needs to validate our ideas before they’re worth pursuing.
The habit of making ourselves quieter in environments where being fully ourselves feels inconvenient.
And perhaps even the belief that at a certain age, our most interesting possibilities should already be behind us.
Nat is 52 and speaks about this season with an enthusiasm that is infectious. Her philosophy is that midlife isn’t the beginning of the end, but the beginning of some of our best chapters because we arrive here carrying an extraordinary amount of experience and knowledge with us.
Which is why I’m increasingly questioning the language of starting over.
We’re not starting empty.
You don’t have to blow up your life to change it
There was another part of Nat’s story that I think is important to include because conversations about leaving corporate life can very quickly become unrealistic.
Nat was clear about the privilege involved in being able to step away from the workforce and the support she has from her husband. She isn’t suggesting that everybody watching should hand in their resignation tomorrow and dramatically reinvent their life.
The deeper invitation is to become more conscious of how we’re actually experiencing our lives.
Nat described spending years living towards Friday. Monday to Friday became a blur, followed by weekends that were themselves interrupted by the anxiety of Sunday and the anticipation of another week beginning.
Now, one of the things she values most is the feeling that an ordinary day can be a good day.
That might sound simple, but I think it’s an incredibly useful measure of success.
We spend enormous amounts of energy planning the life we want to have eventually, while sometimes paying remarkably little attention to whether we enjoy the Tuesday we’re currently living.
Perhaps a reset doesn’t always require a resignation, relocation, new business or dramatic announcement.
Sometimes it begins by recognising that the way we’re living isn’t working anymore.
And that is exactly where Nat begins her own process.
Nat’s Strategy for
During our conversation, Nat shared the story behind her 7R Reset, a framework that emerged from documenting her own experience.
Rather brilliantly, the seven steps first appeared at 4am when she woke, grabbed the napkin underneath her glass of water and wrote them down before going back to sleep. When she woke again, the sequence was still there.
She starts Recognition, and I think there’s something important about beginning there. Before we can change something, we have to become willing to tell ourselves the truth about it.
What isn’t working?
Where do I feel disconnected?
What am I continuing because I’ve genuinely chosen it, and what am I continuing simply because I’ve been doing it for so long?
From Recognition, Nat moves into Release beginning to identify what we’re willing to let go of so that a different picture can gradually come into focus.
And maybe that’s enough of a place to begin.
We don’t always need to know exactly what the new life looks like before acknowledging that something in the current one needs our attention.
What starting from zero has taught Nat
I also asked Nat what starting from zero on Substack had looked like for her, and I loved that she didn’t pretend she arrived with a perfect strategy.
She started writing.
She didn’t know exactly what her niche was.
She paid attention to what interested her, what readers responded to and what she couldn’t seem to stop thinking and talking about.
And gradually, the work found its shape.
Nat described the attitude behind what she is building as requiring a little delusion — the willingness to dream bigger than the available evidence currently suggests you should.
My business partner Jackie calls a similar quality being “foolishly optimistic,” and I think there is something wonderful about both ideas.
Because when we’re starting something new, evidence is often the one thing we don’t have yet.
We can’t always prove that the publication will work, that the business will grow, that the friendship will develop, that we’ll love the next career or that the idea scribbled on a napkin at four in the morning will become something meaningful.
At some point, we have to be willing to move before certainty arrives.
And perhaps that is the thread connecting so much of Nat’s story: she is learning to bet on herself again.
If You’re Considering Your Own Midlife Reset...
You don’t need to dramatically change your entire life after watching this conversation, but there are a few questions from my time with Nat that I think are worth taking away with you.
Start with recognition rather than reinvention. Before asking what you should do next, ask what is actually true now. Where do you feel fulfilled? Where are you depleted? What have you quietly outgrown? Honesty gives you somewhere much more useful to begin than pressure to immediately create a new identity.
Look for the patterns that have followed you throughout your life. Nat realised that coaching and mentoring hadn’t suddenly appeared as a new career idea; people had been coming to her for guidance since she was 22. Sometimes the clue to what comes next has been appearing throughout what came before.
Ask what you need to unlearn. Starting again isn’t only about acquiring new skills. Consider which beliefs, expectations or versions of yourself belong to an environment you no longer want to carry forward.
Pay attention to your ordinary days. If you’re constantly living for Friday, the holiday, retirement or some future moment when life will finally feel different, it may be worth asking what could make the life you’re living now feel more like yours.
Don’t wait for perfect clarity before beginning. Nat didn’t arrive on Substack knowing exactly what The Midlife Reset would become. She wrote, connected, listened and allowed the idea to evolve. Sometimes clarity is the consequence of movement rather than the prerequisite for it.
And finally, leave room for the unexpected. A few weeks ago Nat and I were two women who had found one another on Substack. Then we discovered we lived seven minutes apart. Now we’ve met in person, she’s been photographed in our studio and we’re having this conversation together.
None of that was on either of our plans.
And maybe that’s rather the point.
Perhaps We’re Not Starting Again After All
The more conversations I have as part of Starting From Zero, the less convinced I am that starting from zero means what we think it does.
Nat didn’t lose 35 years of experience when her corporate title disappeared. She carried the leadership, mentoring, resilience, mistakes, knowledge and relationships with her, and now she gets to decide what she wants to do with all of it.
Perhaps the same is true for the rest of us.
At this stage of life, we aren’t beginning with nothing. We’re beginning with evidence.
Evidence of what we’ve survived, what we’ve learned, what we’re extraordinarily good at, what no longer fits and, increasingly, what we’re no longer willing to tolerate simply because we once thought we were supposed to.
So perhaps midlife doesn’t require us to reinvent ourselves at all.
Perhaps it gives us an opportunity to stop becoming who we thought we should be and become more interested in the woman who has been emerging underneath it all.
Watch the full conversation with Nat above, and then we would love to continue the conversation it with you in the comments.
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Outside of Substack, you’ll find me creating Intentional Living Magazine and helping private clients build their platforms through House of Brand.
