You Have a Calling. You Just Can't Figure Out How to Make It Pay

I still remember my first business cards from 2009. I had designed a logo, come up with a name, thought through what the business could look like.

I was working for a small private company in the tourism industry at the time, organizing educational trips for school groups visiting Washington, DC. My office was right by the White House and I loved everything about my job but the commute. I was good at what I did. Not just competent, I mean genuinely good. Clients asked specifically to speak with me because they trusted me to take care of their groups. I was upselling, cross-selling, building relationships, and the company was making good money off my work, while I received an insulting amount of small pay.

One day it hit me: I could do something similar like this for myself. Maybe not tours because of the non-compete agreement I had signed with my boss, but I could start an event planning business along with my first husband and bring along his photography expertise.

So I did what felt like the next logical step. I designed the logo. I printed the business cards through Vistaprint. I even registered the company. I had the whole thing mapped out in my head.

But then life had other plans.

The marriage started falling apart. The business idea got absorbed into the chaos of the relationship, then the divorce, and then it was just gone. I put the cards somewhere and never looked at them again.

What did I do after that? I went back to what felt safe. A regular job, a steady paycheck, and a very quiet agreement with myself to stop dreaming.

Eventually I found my way to the State Department where I began teaching Bulgarian to American diplomats. I loved that job more than any other job I ever had. I loved teaching and I loved the public service aspect of the work. For many years the idea of starting a business disappeared from my mind.

However, shortly after the new president was inaugurated last year, in 2025, a large restructuring began inside the State Department – it was all over the news, if you remember it. Thousands of employees were laid off in multiple waves. Even though I was technically a contractor, the layoffs dramatically affected me due to the reduced number of students learning Bulgarian. Eventually there were simply no students left for me to teach.

Around that time I was also dealing with very serious personal challenges. By then I had gone through two divorces and I was struggling with a severe chronic illness that left me almost bedridden for three and a half years. At my worst I needed a wheelchair or a walker just to move around. Because of my illness and limited mobility, I had also gained a significant amount of weight.

Finding a traditional job in Washington, DC under those circumstances felt almost impossible. Thousands of highly qualified professionals were suddenly competing for work, and physically, I was not in a position to return to a demanding office job.

For the first time in my life, I was forced to think differently.

So I started asking the obvious question: what could I possibly build for myself?

I looked at everything I knew.

Tourism was the first thing that came to mind, since I had a background in it and I was clearly good at it. But the pandemic had already shown how fragile that industry was. One disruption and the whole thing collapses. I couldn’t build my financial future on something that unstable.

Teaching Bulgarian was next. I had spent years doing it and I genuinely loved it. But Bulgarian is spoken by roughly nine million people in the world. It is not a scalable niche. There was simply no market demand large enough to build a real business around it.

In between my other careers, I also had three years of experience as an IT Business analyst but that was the last thing I considered. I had the training and the experience. But I had always been an employee within larger systems, never the person running something. It never sparked anything entrepreneurial in me and honestly, it still didn’t.

I spent many nights feeling completely stuck. Crying, if I’m honest. Wondering what was going to happen to my future.

Then one day a different thought appeared.

I realized I could not possibly be the only woman going through something like this. There had to be thousands, if not millions of women around the world dealing with divorce, illness, financial instability, career disruptions, or simply reaching midlife and feeling like life had knocked them flat.

And that was the moment everything shifted.

The idea didn’t come from a market research spreadsheet or a trending niche on social media. It came from standing in the exact spot where my experience met someone else’s needs. I knew what it felt like to have no safety net. I knew what it felt like to be a midlife woman staring at a completely blank future. And after investing in a couple of high-end professional courses, I knew enough about building an online business to actually help someone start one.

That intersection became the foundation of everything I am building today.

I’m telling you all of this because I suspect your story has a version of those Vistaprint business cards in it somewhere.

Maybe it was a notebook full of ideas you never acted on. A conversation where someone said “you should really do something with that” and you smiled and changed the subject. A skill you give away for free constantly because you never figured out how to attach a price to it.

Having a calling is not the same as having a path. The calling is often loud. It shows up early, resurfaces every few years no matter how many times life buries it. But the path is silent. It doesn’t announce itself and it doesn’t come with instructions.

Most of us spend years assuming that if the calling were real, the path would be obvious. So when it isn’t obvious, we quietly conclude that it’s not meant to be.

And that’s simply not true.

When life knocks you down repeatedly, something subtle happens to your sense of identity. You stop thinking of yourself as someone who builds things. You start thinking of yourself as someone who survives things. And underneath all of it sits a belief so vague you might not even notice it: that wanting more is somehow selfish after everything you’ve already been through.

It is not.

The path starts with one honest inventory. You look at your life, the hard parts especially, and ask: what do I know because I lived it? What do I understand from the inside that someone else would genuinely pay to learn or be guided through?

Your version of that intersection already exists. You just may not have recognized it yet.

If you’re sitting with this and have no idea where to begin, I built something to help you.

It’s a free guide built around AI prompts that walks you through exactly this process. The AI asks you questions about your life, your experiences, and what you know. You answer honestly. Then it analyzes your answers and helps surface the best business idea for your specific situation.

You need about 20-30 minutes, maybe a little more if you go really deep, which I’d encourage. The more honest your answers, the more useful the output.

It won’t hand you a finished business. But it will get you out of the fog and into a starting point, which for most women is the hardest part.

[Get the free guide here → ]

dani@glowandgrowanyway.com

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