Life After Selling: How Ambitious Women Redefine Success Without Burnout

There’s a silence that follows success.

After spending decades living inside the rhythm of an industry, it shaped my identity. For me, that was the automotive industry. It’s the world I grew up in and the one I lived in for more than twenty years. Selling our dealerships shook the foundation of who I believed I was and didn’t just mark the end of a business chapter.

Life after selling the dealerships was a notable change. I know countless dealers, including my father, who could never imagine what their lives would be like if they weren’t car dealers. In some ways, it is all we know. Many of us grew up in the business and were primed from an early age to carry it forward. It’s a legacy, and a way of life. More dangerously, it can become who you are. We never had a choice, so to speak.

My husband, Eric, and I sold our Kia dealership and closed it in March 2022—a Thursday.

By Saturday morning, we were sitting at home, drinking coffee, staring at each other, not knowing what to do with ourselves. We always wanted to be at the dealership on Saturdays. It was our favorite day of the week. There was something special about the energy of the buzzing showroom or humming service department. It was addictive.

Suddenly, we had nowhere to be. No deals to close or team depending on us. Just silence.

We became irrelevant. And we felt guilty.

In our “previous” life, golf was only reserved for Sundays, the one day when dealerships were typically closed. Yet, here we were, watching golf on TV on a Saturday morning. It felt almost…wrong. As if we had abandoned the rhythm we had lived in for so long.

Luckily, or perhaps planned by design, we didn’t sit for too long in that discomfort. Within a week, we were on the road traveling to Europe, the United States, and Mexico. Travel became our reset button and allowed us to breathe again.

What surprised me most about selling was the grief, not regret.

If you grew up in the automotive world like I did, you know it’s more than a job. It’s generational. It’s what we do.

I was highly emotional during the sale of our dealerships. I cried a lot! My husband joked that there weren’t enough tissues available to soak up all my tears. And he wasn’t wrong.

The tears weren’t about second-guessing the decision or because I had regrets. They came because I had spent so many years tying my purpose to the dealership. My worth was entangled with the never-ending stream of calls, emails, employee challenges, manufacturer demands, and customer needs. For the first time in decades, we weren’t needed, and it hit harder than I expected.

When you pour your life into something that becomes your identity, letting go feels like death. You’re releasing a version of yourself, not just selling a business.

That’s why travel was so important.

Taking time to get away, breathe, see the world, and reconnect with my husband provided us the opportunity to heal. It was our chance to recalibrate. We needed distance from the very environment that had shaped us to rediscover who we were outside of it.

I learned you can’t discover who you are after the grind if you are still surrounded by everything that built it. Taking time off was a way for us to recharge and refocus before deciding on our next career move. What do we want the next chapter to look like?

We could finally exhale.

Of course, stepping away wasn’t easy. The guilt was real.

When you’ve spent your entire life proving value through output, stillness feels like laziness. The voice in your head whispers, “You’re unproductive” or “You’re wasting time.”  But what’s more damaging is living your entire life without ever enjoying what you’ve earned.

For years, the dealership defined us, and the KPI’s (key performance indicators) validated us. Our worth was measured by how much we produced. When that noise subsided, we had to confront a reality that most high achievers avoid. We didn’t really know who we were without the grind.

There’s no question that the decision to sell our dealerships was a difficult one, but it also offered new opportunities in our lives.

We weren’t quitting or retiring. We were simply ready for the next chapter. The dealerships served us well, but they weren’t going to define the rest of our lives. We were prepared for ventures that valued our experience without demanding every ounce of our energy. And let me tell you, it was liberating.

But liberation always comes with discomfort. If you’ve ever left a career or stepped out of a long-held identity, you know the strange mix of freedom and fear. What’s next?

This was the lesson that shaped the birth of Drive Her Forward.

I built Drive Her Forward because women are exhausted from carrying identities that were never designed for sustainability. Too many high performers confuse momentum with meaning. We know how to achieve, but few of us have ever been taught how to redefine ourselves once we’ve arrived.

That’s why so many successful women feel lost. They collect their titles and achieve what they thought they wanted, only to face deafening silence.

Have you ever felt like you wouldn’t know who you are without the title, schedule, or grind?

Have you ever felt restless after success, unsure why reaching the goal didn’t feel as good as you imagined?

You’re not alone. You’re allowed to want something different, even if what you had was successful.

I did.

So, here’s my question to you: Who are you when the noise stops?

What would it look like if you stopped measuring your worth in productivity and started building a life around purpose?

Welcome to Drive Her Forward. We are about helping women rise above and thrive outside the grind with confidence and freedom.

Life after selling wasn’t the end. It was the beginning of something new.

I learned that letting go doesn’t diminish what you’ve built. In fact, it honors it. Selling gave us the freedom to write a new chapter, one defined by choice and not obligation.

And I want every woman who has ever questioned if she is “more,” to know that she is. Yes, you are more than this role or title.

You don’t need to wait until an exit or major life shift to discover it. You can start now.

You’ve already proven yourself, so now it's time to define yourself.

Because there is life after selling, and it might just be the best chapter yet.