Redefining Success Outside of the Circle: an interview with Ali Davies, founder and CEO of Outside of the Circle

Ali Davies is the Founder of Outside of the Circle and a Change Coach. She specializes in helping successful professionals who feel unfulfilled with the status quo in their life and work redefine what success means to them, design their next chapter, and create change to live on their own terms in a way that is fulfilling and meaningful to them.Ali shared that, growing up in Liverpool in the UK, money was not talked about. After she graduated from college, she went to a training program with a soft drinks company, staying in the industry in supply chain management and logistics for ten years. Towards the end of her corporate career, she realized that, although everyone around her considered her a success, she wasn't feeling fulfilled."You get to a stage of life where you think, is this it? Is this really it? And people are telling me it's great and you're this and you're that and the other, but this, that, and the other doesn't make me feel happy or fulfilled. And that was when I started challenging what does success really mean and started researching that. And that's where it started." - Ali DaviesKey takeaways:- Just make the decision and the rest will follow. Ali believes that most people hold themselves back from making a change, because they think they need to know what they’re moving towards and how they’re going to get there before they make the leap. Instead, once you make the change it starts that catalyst of thinking and action and research.- Start with small steps. Ali shared a story of how she and her then boyfriend, now husband Martin left a New Year’s Eve party early in 1999, after realizing that they were choosing to conform to society’s expectations of how they should celebrate the New Year. They instead decided to hike and watch the sunrise from the top of a peak, in keeping with their mutual passion for nature and the outdoors. This helped them to begin to challenge the way they were accepting society’s expectations of how they should work, something which takes up so much of our lives.- Know that fear is normal when making any big change. Ali and her husband made sure that all the safety mechanisms were in place, including financial, before leaving their corporate jobs but still found it hard to actually take the leap because of all the fear and the emotions involved. She was able to leave her job once she realized that she thought she needed to be without fear before moving forward, rather than recognizing that fear is part of the human condition.- Think of Designing Your Life as a way of being, rather than a project. Rather than thinking: this is what I want to do with the rest of my life; and this is what I want my relationships to be the rest of my life;  and my business to be the rest of my life, think of your life in chapters. Because things change and we change. As Ali learned, the things she wanted when she left the corporate world 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago, are very different than what she wants now.About the guest:Ali Davies is the Founder of Outside of the Circle and a Change Coach. She specializes in helping successful professionals who feel unfulfilled with the status quo in their life and work redefine what success means to them, design their next chapter, and create change to live on their own terms in a way that is fulfilling and meaningful to them. She has been teaching people how to achieve what matters most to them for 20 years. She is from the UK but has lived in the West Coast of Canada for the last 10 years.Linkedin:- https://www.linkedin.com/in/alidavies/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thealidaviesWebsite:- http://outsideofthe