The Gift of Challenge: How Reinvention Begins Where Comfort Ends

Posted on March 29, 2025 by Christin Schmidt, One of Thousands of Leadership Coaches on Noomii.

There’s a moment in life when the familiar script suddenly stops making sense.

For me, it was during the pandemic. At first glance, everything seemed to be lining up. I had been living abroad for years—relocating often, building a career across continents, forming friendships in every time zone. I was what you might call a true global citizen, always in motion, constantly evolving. And yet, beneath all the movement, I had started to long for something quieter. Not an end to the international life I loved, but a stable anchor—a home for my soul, a retreat where I could land and reconnect between the whirlwind of countries, projects, and roles.

I had just bought an apartment in my hometown of Berlin. I wasn’t living there yet, but it felt like a step toward something I was missing: proximity to family, a space of my own, a sense of belonging. When the world shut down during COVID-19, it almost felt like the universe was giving me what I had asked for—time to slow down, to settle in, to finally arrive. I worked remotely from Berlin, renovated my new space, and for a while, it felt like a blessing.

But once the walls were painted and the last picture was hung, something else crept in: silence. The city was still closed. I couldn’t go out and build a new life, couldn’t meet new people, couldn’t travel to see the ones I loved. My friends were scattered across the globe, and slowly the freedom to work remotely from wherever was taken away. I found myself shuttling between two empty apartments—Berlin and Brussels—sitting alone at different kitchen tables, surrounded by stillness and questions.

My inner engine—the one that had always pushed me forward—was no longer running. I felt disconnected, unsynced, uncertain. For the first time, I didn’t have the answers. What do I want now? How did I even get here? Was this just a phase—or had something inside me truly broken?

I knew I didn’t want to feel that emptiness any longer. I wanted my happiness back. But I was broken, and I didn’t know how to begin. What I did know was that no one could fix it for me—I had to do the work myself.

So I started reading—voraciously. Books about purpose, the inner child, the weight of societal expectations, identity, and self-worth. I dove into exercises that took me from my earliest memories to my adult life, tracing the threads of what shaped me, what drove my decisions, and what stories I had been telling myself all along. It was intense, emotional, and sometimes exhausting. But I kept going, peeling back layer after layer in search of something true.

And while I was doing the deep, often painful inner work, I was also chasing moments of light. As soon as the world began to open again, I threw myself into travel and social life—anything to feel joy again, to fill the inner void, to balance the introspection with bursts of positive emotion. It was a wild contrast: diving deep into my soul by day, dancing through life by night. But in hindsight, it was all part of the healing.

Eventually, something shifted.

After going down the rabbit hole, the light turned back on. Slowly but surely, I began piecing myself back together—this time with intention. Each puzzle piece of self-discovery found its place, and with it came clarity. I wasn’t just recovering; I was reinventing. A new version of me emerged—one with a bigger vision, a deeper truth, and a sense of synchronicity that I hadn’t felt in a long time.

That feeling—of mind, heart, and gut finally in sync again—is what I had been missing. It is my inner peace. My inner motor. And now that I had reclaimed it, I felt reenergized. Inspired. Ready for the next chapter.

I even caught myself thinking, „Why did I waste so much time searching when I could have already been building this new life?“  
Of course, that thought is silly—because the searching was the building. But that fleeting impatience was proof that I was back. Bigger. Stronger. Wiser. And fully, finally, whole.

Reinvention Comes in Many Forms

What I learned from this experience—my so-called midlife crisis moment—is that reinvention doesn’t always come with a grand announcement or a shiny new beginning. Sometimes it comes disguised as a breakdown. A silence. A sudden stop. It can look like life pulling the rug from under you, leaving you with nothing but questions and a version of yourself you barely recognize.

Reinvention comes in many forms. At times, it’s driven by curiosity or ambition—exciting, adventuresome, full of momentum. But the truly transformational ones? They’re often the unplanned kind. The ones forced on you by the outside world, when you least expect it and least feel ready.

And here’s the truth I came to understand: you can’t push it aside.

You can try. You can distract yourself. Perform. Pretend. But that inner unrest—the disconnect between who you are and who you’re meant to be—will eventually catch up with you. It becomes a quiet curse that eats you from the inside. The only way out is through.

Reinvention requires courage. It asks you to take radical responsibility for your life, even when you feel lost. It asks you to stop looking outward for validation and turn inward—to reconnect with that small, forgotten voice inside you. The one that remembers who you really are. The one that just wants to feel seen, safe, and whole again.

That voice is your inner child. And when you learn to listen to it, nurture it, and integrate it into your grown-up self, something powerful happens: you stop surviving and start truly living.