Check Your Own Resume

I was on a podcast recently talking about the courage to reinvent yourself, and something came out of my mouth that I keep thinking about.
When you're standing at the edge of a big leap — quitting the job, starting the thing, finally saying the quiet part out loud — the easiest move is to look at someone else's highlight reel and decide you're not ready.
Their path looks cleaner.
Their confidence looks permanent.
Their timing looks perfect.
And your brain, which loves what is familiar, will happily agree: Not yet. Not you.
So here's what I want you to do instead:
Check your own resume.
Not the one on LinkedIn.
The lived one.
You've already done hard things.

Before Superbloom, I was a dancer/cheerleader/theater girl from Rochester who bounced through college looking for her fit — then New York City and FIT. Two degrees. One leap into a city that does not care if you're ready.
I worked for Steve Madden. Creative. Fast. Tough. After about five years I was burnt out and missing my family, so I came home.

A recruiter later called about a company whose mission was let's make the world a better place to work. I thought it was too good to be true. It wasn't. I fell in love with culture and employee engagement — partly because I had already sat inside cultures that got it wrong.

Years after that, following a chapter that wasn't mine and my mom's breast cancer diagnosis, the truth got simple: I had one life. I wasn't happy. I felt called to something bigger with no clean map.

So I quit. Totally scared. With some savings, a coach, a therapist, and a belief I still hold:

The most important meeting of the day is the one you have with yourself.
I took one coaching class as an experiment. I loved it. And I told myself something that changed everything:
I never want to send my resume anywhere else again.

Superbloom was born from that sentence — not from certainty.
Confidence is built, not borrowed
People see the sold-out event. The workshops. The woman with the mic.
What they don't always see is that I still get nervous. I've given talks where I was breaking out in hives and could barely breathe. Imposter syndrome does not retire because you started a business. It just changes outfits.

Confidence is not something you have.
It's something you chip away at through lived experience.
You learn to line the butterflies up instead of waiting for them to disappear. Those sensations often mean you're scared enough and challenged enough — which usually means you're exactly where you're supposed to be.

Fear and faith can feel almost identical in the body.
The difference is whether you move anyway.
Familiar is not the same as right
We make decisions from love or fear. And the brain will almost always choose what's familiar over what's unknown.
Once you clock that, you can catch yourself:
Is this actually right for me…
or is this just comfortable?
I lived the corporate version of that story for more than a decade. Climb the ladder. Get the title. Hit the salary. Then you'll feel worthy.
I was good at it.
I was also quietly dormant.

Now the question I ask myself — and the women I work with — is different:
How do I want to be before I walk into the room?
Because if you can be successful at something you hate, you can absolutely be successful at something you love.
The skills transfer.
The self-abandonment does not have to.
The valley is part of it.

Anyone building something real will meet the stretch where the shiny announcement is over and it's just you and the work.

I've launched things that landed with silence. A coaching program I was sure would fill? Not one person. Not because the work wasn't valuable — because I wasn't fully in my authenticity when I offered it. People can feel when you're performing belief instead of living it.

That stung. Then I tweaked. Then I tried again.
You're still alive after a miss.
You're still allowed to want the thing.
What helps me isn't toxic positivity. It's gratitude with a backbone. When I remember why I left — and who I already proved myself to be — the valley gets quieter.

Good things take time.
If you're on the edge...
If your career looks good on paper and quiet in your chest…
If you're waiting to feel "ready" before you bet on yourself…
Check your own resume.

Where were you scared before — and you did it anyway?
Where did life already train you for this next chapter?
Nothing needs to be added to you for the next season to begin.
The seeds are already there.
You don't need a perfect plan.
You need a little quiet time with yourself.
A little honesty about the ladder you're climbing.
And enough self-trust to take the next step while you're still afraid and filled with joy.

That combination has marked almost every valuable thing I've ever done.

Maybe it's marking something in you right now.
Cheers to checking your own resume — and believing what you find there.

xo
Alana

Inspired by my conversation on In Good Company with Mike Thomas — "The Courage to Reinvent Yourself."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjWSbLMjz4s