I’m writing this from Scotland, where I’ve spent the past two days helping my daughter Emma move into her new flat. Today, she starts a new job at Falkland Palace, where she’ll spend the next year working in art conservation.
Her path here wasn’t a straight line. And that’s exactly the point.
From Pre-Med to Art Conservation
Two years ago, Emma took a risk and moved to Wales to pursue a master’s degree. Her original plan had been medicine. She’d triple majored in biology, psychology, and neuroscience to get there, years of coursework built around one goal. She’d spent her college years in labs and lecture halls, building toward a future in medicine that made sense on paper and looked impressive on any resume.
But somewhere along the way, she realized medicine wasn’t her calling. Art was.
That’s not a small thing to admit after years of coursework across three demanding fields pointed you in one direction. It would have been easier to finish the path she’d already invested so much in. Most people, once they’ve put in that much work, keep going simply because stopping feels like waste. Emma didn’t. She looked honestly at what she wanted and made a different choice, even though it meant starting over in a field she hadn’t trained for.
She applied to the master’s program in art conservation at Cardiff University. She got in. This past week, in Wales, she finished it.
A New Country, A New Chapter
Now she’s in Scotland, a country where she doesn’t know a single person, starting an entirely new chapter. She had two days off between finishing her program in Wales and starting her new job here. Two days to pack up one life and step into the next.
I’ve watched her do this before, and I still find it remarkable how calmly she handles the in-between moments, the ones with no certainty attached. There’s no roadmap for moving to a country where you don’t speak the local shorthand yet, don’t know which grocery store has what you need, and don’t have a single friend to call if something goes wrong. She’s building that from scratch, starting today.
Even the everyday logistics look completely different here than they would back home. Her commute to Falkland Palace is an hour each way by bus. Getting a car isn’t really an option either, since a UK driver’s license isn’t something you can just walk in and get. So she’ll be walking to the grocery store and the pharmacy, and relying on buses and trains to get to nearby cities when she wants to explore. It’s a smaller, slower kind of life than what she’s used to, and she’s stepping into it without hesitation.
Today she begins a yearlong role at Falkland Palace, working in art conservation, the field she chose for herself after realizing medicine wasn’t it.
Is It Worth the Risk?
Was this an easy move? No.
Is it worth the risk? Absolutely.
Will there be hard days? Absolutely.
Building confidence isn’t about avoiding hard days. It’s about being willing to walk into them anyway. This is the heart of my REAL Method®: real confidence gets built by embracing the failures and uncertainty along the way, not by waiting until everything feels safe.
I won’t pretend this is easy for her. Emma is stressed. She’s anxious. Moving to a new country, starting a job she’s never done, and doing it all without a single familiar face nearby is a lot to carry at once. But she’s showing up anyway, stress and anxiety along for the ride. That’s what confidence actually looks like.
Think about the last time you did something before you felt ready for it. Maybe it was a new job, a hard conversation, a move of your own. Chances are you didn’t feel prepared going in. You figured it out by doing it. That’s the same thing Emma is doing right now. Readiness isn’t something you wait to feel. It’s something you build by moving.
Emma’s version of that is a career change and a move across an ocean. Yours might look completely different. The principle stays the same.
The Confidence to Change Course
When I look back at who Emma was a few years ago, I see someone who was unsure of what she wanted and afraid of the future. When I look at her today, I see a woman who’s figuring it out as she goes, one bold decision at a time. She’s willing to take risks because that’s where the biggest growth happens.
We never know exactly where our decisions will take us. But if we sit still and never try, nothing happens at all.
What strikes me most is that Emma didn’t wait for permission or certainty before she moved. She didn’t need every detail figured out. She trusted that the next step would become clear once she took the current one, and that trust is what real confidence actually looks like in practice. It rarely looks like fearlessness. It looks like moving forward anyway.
The Takeaway
So if you’re standing at the edge of a decision right now, wondering if you should take the risk: the answer is yes. You never know where it’s going to take you until you try.
If stories like this one resonate with you, you can hear more conversations about building real confidence on Her Unshakeable Confidence, the podcast I co-host with my daughter Olivia.
