Pivot Dispatch — Issue 2: The Thing About a Cliffless Life

"There is no such thing as a cliffless life." — Jim Collins

I read that line this week and it got me thinking. Especially about the women struggling with life's transitions and thinking that this is unique to them.

This statement comes from Jim Collins, who spent years studying hundreds of lives to understand what to make of one. A cliff, in his words, is any moment when life as you knew it changes and does not change back. A job ends. A marriage ends. A diagnosis arrives. The last child leaves. Sometimes the cliff is even a success so large that the chapter is simply over.

His conclusion was blunt. If you are alive, a cliff is coming. Probably more than one.

If you are reading this, you may be standing at the edge of one right now. Or you may have already gone over and landed somewhere you did not plan to be.

Collins has a name for where you land. He calls it the fog.

The fog is the part nobody warns you about

It is the stretch after the cliff when nothing is clear, every direction looks the same, and you cannot tell whether you are lost or simply early.

Even Oprah has had a "fog season"... catch that! In her podcast interview with Jim Collins, Oprah described her own fog after she ended her talk show. Years of things not feeling right, even with every resource in the world.

This really had me alert! The fog is not a personal failure. It is not proof that you chose wrong.

Collins found it in the most accomplished people he studied. It is a phase, not a verdict.

So you have pivoted, left the marriage, broken the relationship, left the country, it could be anything. The mistake is not the fog. The mistake is panicking inside it.

Do not leap. Take the next right move.

When women get frightened in the fog, they tend to do one of two things. They freeze or they leap. They stay too long in a life that no longer fits, or they jump so fast to escape the discomfort that they fall straight off the next cliff.

Collins offers a third way, and it is almost annoyingly simple. Do not leap. Take the next obvious step. Reassess. Then take the one after that. Oprah called it asking, "What is the next right move?" One move. Not the entire staircase.

I love this, because it is exactly what a financial runway does.

Most women I coach cannot tell me their number. If you changed something tomorrow, how many months of the life you actually want have you already paid for? Without that number, the fog feels total, because every option is judged by feeling instead of fact.

The number does not clear the whole fog. It lights the next step. It tells you whether the next right move is to leap this quarter, to build quietly for six months first, or to start something small on the side while the main thing still holds. That is not a smaller dream. It is a survivable one.

There is a difference between what you are good at and what you are built for

Collins draws another line I have watched play out in session after session. You can be excellent at something that is quietly draining you. Many of the women I work with are. They are highly competent, well paid, and slowly going dim.

Collins calls this the competence loop. You are good at it, so you get paid, so you get better, so you get paid more, all while drifting further from the work you were actually built for.

This is why so many pivots arrive at our stage and not earlier. It can take two decades to notice that the thing you are best at is not the thing you are for.

The hopeful part is that this encoding does not expire. Toni Morrison published her first novel in her forties. The lives Collins studied are full of people whose truest chapter came late, not early. Forty is not the gate closing. For a lot of women, it is the first time the real question gets asked out loud.

Money is fuel, not the prize

Collins asks one more question that sits at the center of everything I do. Is the purpose of your work to make money, or is the purpose of your money to let you do your work?

Most of us were raised on the first version. The people who thrive, he found, quietly live the second. They treat money as fuel for the calling, not the prize at the end of it.

That is the whole reason I coach the way I do. Your runway is not a spreadsheet. It is fuel. It is the number of months you can afford to spend on work that is finally yours. My job is to help you find that number, then stretch it, so the fog has an edge and the next right move has a budget.

Where I am pointing you this week

Two invitations.

The first is small. Ask yourself Oprah's question, not about your whole life, only about this week. What is the next right move? Then ask mine. Can I afford it, and for how long? You may not love the answer. You will be steadier for having it.

The second. I am still working with women in exactly this place. If you are in the fog and want a real number under your next move, the Financial Runway Coaching is built for that. And for the women turning a pivot into something they run themselves, my workshop on agentic AI shows you how to do far more with less hired help, so your runway lasts longer.

I am keeping it to 12 women so the room stays useful.

To join or to learn more, DM me or email janeonoka@finsavvywoman.com.

The cliff is not the end of your story. The fog is not the end either. It is only the part before the next right move becomes obvious.

Take the step you can see. I will help you afford the rest.

Jane Onoka
Financial Clarity Coach | Certified Behavioral Finance Advisor | Certified AI Consultant. Founder of The Pivot by FinSavvy Woman, a community for women 40+ intentionally designing their next chapter.