When the curtain goes down at the end of the performance, when the final claps of applause fade away and there’s no one left to please but yourself, do you truly feel satisfied with what you’re doing and the choices you’ve made?

That’s a question I found I needed to ask myself many years ago after committing my youth and early adulthood to professional ballet.

When I found that the answer to that question was not a full and whole-hearted “YES!” my dance career came to a close and it was time to find new passion and purpose that matched my talents and aptitudes. Suddenly, it was up to me to reassess my path and carve out a future that used my talents, reimagined my creativity and harmonized with my personality.

Mine is a story that many can relate to. Lots of folks find themselves invested in careers that they suddenly find are not at all where they had hoped to end up. Perhaps they have the job, the salary, the car, the house that they had always envisioned, but the accompanying happiness they had expected to come along with it is nowhere to be found. This is often when you hear about mid-life crises or people quitting their wall-street jobs to join the peace corps or flee to France to learn to be a chef.

Reinventing one’s life is a wonderful and noble pursuit, but what if, instead of having to make that leap half-way into a life and fully-formed career, we took that leap from the beginning? What if we were encouraged as young adults, first stretching our wings to leave the nest and make flight in the world, to forge our path ahead with a better understanding of who we are and what makes us thrive?

After spending years working successfully in business, then working within our less-than-inspiring educational system, I realized I wanted to help young people discover, design and create their paths for college with a plan for launching their careers in a way that was both holistic and pragmatic. I wanted to be the mentor to a new generation of students and innovative education professionals that I wished I had had. Thus, Beyond the Applause was born.

“Beyond the Applause” means to start asking the right questions from the beginning. It means understanding ALL your options, creating back-up plans if necessary, harnessing the abilities that are unique to you and knowing how to get where you’re intending to go.

If you’ve had an experience of reinventing your life or discovering a new path for yourself, please share it in the comments!