Megan Dalla-Camina on Why You Build Purpose, You Don't Find It

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that does not show up on a performance review. It is the exhaustion of being excellent at your job while quietly disappearing inside your own life. Megan Dalla-Camina knows that exhaustion intimately. She built an 18-year career at the highest levels of corporate leadership while doing everything else too -- and it took a phone call to her mother, sitting in a car park outside her office, for her to finally say the thing out loud.

The Guest

Megan Dalla-Camina spent nearly two decades inside GE, PwC, and IBM, rising to Head of Strategy for a multi-billion-dollar division before walking away to build something entirely her own. Today she is the Founder and CEO of Women Rising, a global leadership movement that has supported more than 10,000 women across 70 countries, a bestselling author, and a PhD researcher in women's spirituality and feminine wisdom.

Highlights

The car park moment.

Megan describes the exact moment her corporate career ended -- not in a boardroom, but on a phone call to her mother from outside her office, expecting reassurance and instead hearing the truth: "Of course you can't. You have no life." Minutes later she walked into her CEO's office and said three words she had never said before: I am done.

Build it, don't wait for it.

Megan's reframe on purpose is one of the most useful things you will hear this year. Most of us wait to find purpose, as though it will arrive fully formed. Megan's research and her own life say otherwise -- purpose is built one breadcrumb at a time, picked up without needing to know where the path leads.

The paradoxes women are asked to live inside.

From the leadership paradox to the motherhood paradox, Megan unpacks the quiet, contradictory rules so many women have absorbed without ever naming them -- and why naming them is the first act of stepping outside them.

Returning, not arriving.

Megan's newest book, She Who Remembers, is built on a single idea: the wisdom you are looking for outside yourself was never missing. It was always there. The work is not acquiring it. The work is remembering it.

A rupture is not a failure.

Burnout, grief, an unraveling -- Megan reframes these not as breakdowns but as invitations. The moments that feel like falling apart are often the moments something true is finally being heard.

From the Conversation

"It's working externally, but it's not working internally. It's working for everybody else. Not for you."

"Every no is a yes. If it's a no to this, it's creating space for it to be a yes to something else."

Where This Leaves You

If you have ever felt the gap between a life that looks right on paper and a life that feels true, this conversation will meet you there. Megan's invitation is not to blow anything up. It is to pick up the next breadcrumb, however small, and pay attention to where it leads.

Connect with Megan Dalla-Camina: LinkedIn | Website

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