Bottom line – “Embracing and loving who I am and what I’ve done is not a fixed state- it’s a long work in progress.”

As many of my friends know, I’ve immersed myself in a 9-year life reinvention, and shifted from a miserable and chronically ill corporate professional to an author, consultant, speaker and entrepreneur who absolutely loves what she does for a living and what she’s focused on, despite the enormous challenges.

It’s been one heck of a ride, with pitfalls, bumps, highs and transformations, that I barely recognize myself from the individual I was 10 years ago. The core essence of me is still there, of course, but there’s been so much shifting and morphing that now I see much more clearly what I truly value and need to have in my life and work and family experience. I “get” myself a lot more deeply than I did before.

So, I started what I call my “My 52 Mistakes” Project. These are the biggest mistakes I’ve made in my life and work thus far. I want to share them so you won’t feel alone in your mistakes, and you can learn from mine. The goal of the My 52 Mistakes Project is to give brief look at the havoc each mistake wreaked in my life, and the breakthrough that emerged from it, so my mistakes can be of use to others. I’m also hoping this will provide a needed, open forum for women around the world to candidly share their mistakes, what they’ve learned, and how they’ve grown and healed from them. My “mistakes” are as follows:

As a professional…

1) Letting my ego lead me around by the nose

2) Believing the myth, “Build It and They Will Come”

3) Letting the “pendulum effect” rule my life (Waiting too long to take action, then being devastated and running to the opposite extreme)

4) Spending too much money on my business before learning how to earn

5) Listening to people who claimed to be experts but who are in fact full of s—t

6) Putting all my eggs in the Plan A basket without having a Plan B

7) Holding back from sharing my insights, wisdom, and knowledge for fear I’ll give too much away for free

8) Not listening enough to my instincts and my gut feelings about people and directions

9) Ignoring my husband when he said, “This is not working!!”

10) Running around thinking I’m God’s gift to the world

11) Wasting time in the company of people I don’t adore and respect

12) Comparing myself to others instead of figuring out exactly what I want to offer, to whom, and why

13) Staying too long in a job I hated, not realizing it will, eventually, hate me back

14) Hiding from my fears instead of getting in the cage with them

15) Doing the same thing over and over expecting a different outcome (thanks, Einstein!)

16) Taking on a narcissistic “Goliath” expecting to be a successful “David”

17) Remaining in toxic, miserable situations believing that I had good reasons to do so

18) Letting my salary define me

19) Feeling like an “impostor” because of my flaws and mistakes

20) Thinking that this just “happened” to me– not realizing I co-created it

As an author/writer…

21) Believing I’d get rich writing a book

22) Launching my book and work into a vacuum

23) Letting my accomplishments blind me

24) Thinking my personal story was enough to generate a bestselling book

25) Mistaking myself for a writer when I wasn’t writing and reading every day

26) Longing for national recognition from writing a book

27) Being overly attached to one idea, approach, or outcome that I thought was amazing (as journalists say, it’s time to “kill the baby”)

28) Keeping the truth from myself about, “What do I want, and what do I really want?” from my writing and my work

29) Not having had the guts to say what I mean – to a whole slew of people

30) Being wholly unprepared for the transformational process of writing and launching my book

As a coach/therapist…

31) Believing the hype of “experts” about the earning potential of coaching (sorry folks, there’s very little money in it)

32) Not having sufficiently powerful boundaries to protect myself from the pain of helping people who are suffering

33) Letting people walk all over me because I felt badly for them

34) Wasting months not liking my therapy work but thinking I should (if you don’t like it, you’re not supposed to be doing it!)

35) Believing having my own coaching business would be an easy way out of my miserable corporate job

36) Not understanding,” If you don’t LOVE your clients, you don’t love your work”

37) Stuffing myself into another person’s “model for change” when I wanted to create my own

38) Not healing my wounds sufficiently before being in service of others

39) Coddling my clients instead of helping them turn their mess around by themselves

40) Limiting myself to seeing only one way to make a living

As a woman…

41) Wasting precious time not speaking up for myself

42) Waiting for my Prince to come and rescue me (and being really pissed off when I realized my husband wasn’t the Prince)

43) Letting my mistakes devastate me

44) Being exactly the perfectionistic overfunctioner that I write about

45) Spending more time complaining about my situation than changing it

46) Worrying about polarizing people and alienating other women (it happens – get over it)

47) Not accepting that having it all means I’m working non-stop and so busy that my head’s going to explode

48) Waiting too long to find amazing, awesome people to connect and engage with

49) Believing I didn’t need or want great female role models

50) Letting my gender, generation, upbringing, traumas, cultural baggage, beliefs, fears (my “whatever”) keep me from accomplishing what I wanted to

As a human being on this planet today…

51) Listening to my mind to the exclusion of my heart and soul

52) Not understanding until my forties that I’m unique, special and powerful and can make the difference I long to make

Reprinted with permission by Kathy Caprino @ Ellia Communications, 2010.

Kathy Caprino, 51, is a nationally-recognized women’s career and marketing coach, speaker, and author of Breakdown, Breakthrough: The Professional Women’s Guide to Claiming a Life of Power, Passion and Purpose. She is also the founder and President of Ellia Communications, Inc. — a career coaching and marketing consulting firm dedicated to helping women achieve their life goals.  Kathy regularly shares her story of her midlife personal and professional breakdown, when her crushing career and inability to live and parent as she longed to broke her spirit, her body, and her voice.  She explores her journey to breakthrough – of reclaiming her passion, power, and purpose in life and work, and finding a new voice as a professional and a mother along the way. Her children are 14 and 17 years old. Kathy is a regular contributor to Forbes Magazine.