Cinzia reinvented herself four times. I'm still on my first.
What my third podcast guest taught me about the shape of your own path.
Cinzia was a biomedical engineer. Then a telecommunications engineer. Then a program manager in France for seven years. Now she is an astrologer, coach, and quantum healer who works with women in transition all over the world.
Four careers. Three countries. One inner thread running through all of it.
When I asked her how she made the final leap, the one from a stable manager’s salary to building her own practice, she didn’t tell me a clean story. She told me she ignored the signs. She pushed through her first burnout. She told herself, one more year, one more year. And then she said something I haven’t been able to forget:
“The universe didn’t help me, because I got my first burnout.”
She said it with a small laugh. Like the universe had been patient with her, and then, finally, firm.
Cinzia is the founder of Beyond Your Patterns. We met on LinkedIn, I liked one of her posts last year, then I decided to follow her, and she did something almost no one does: she sent me a private message to thank me for following her. Months later, here we are.
She is the kind of person who, within five minutes of meeting you, sees something in you that you’ve been hiding from yourself. She did this to me on the podcast, read my chart live, told me things about my early life I had never said out loud, and I kept thinking, how does she know that?
She knows because she has spent the last fifteen years studying how people work. The body, the soul, the family tree, the patterns we inherit before we are old enough to choose.
What stayed with me
Cinzia named her company Beyond Your Patterns for many reasons, but one of them stopped me cold.
The word pattern comes from the Latin pater (father).
Her father died two months after she resigned. He didn’t get to live one of his own dreams. And in the grief that followed, she understood something about her own life she had been circling for years: she had become a biomedical engineer because her mother had always wanted to be a nurse. She had unconsciously taken on her mother’s dream, lived it for years, and only realized it after a family constellation session in Berlin.
“Sometimes, unconsciously, we take on the dreams of our parents. And then later on, during the midlife crisis, we realise okay, that’s not really me. And we start to remove all the parts that aren’t us.”
That sentence made me think deeply.
For most of my life, I told myself I had nothing to do with what my parents wanted. I left Romania. I built a life elsewhere. I thought distance was proof of independence. But a few years ago I realised I was living the thing they had wanted most for themselves, to be independent, to be free. And the shape of my freedom, no romantic relationship, no family yet, my own path, my own rhythm, was their dream, not mine.
Once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it. And the work of the last few years has been about asking what I actually want, separate from the inheritance.
My reflections since the episode
Three guests in, I am noticing something I didn’t expect.
No two stories rhyme.
Alina asked her question at thirty, in a quiet office, and acted on it slowly over years.
Marta felt it on a cliff in Portugal, and let the feeling reshape her piece by piece while she kept her engineering job.
Cinzia ignored the signs until her body forced her to listen, lost her father in the same season she lost her old life, and built a practice from grief and remembering.
Different ages. Different countries. Different doorways. Different costs.
I came into this podcast thinking I would find a pattern in the people I admire some shared blueprint for reinvention I could follow more cleanly. What I am finding instead is the opposite: the more honestly people tell their stories, the less they look like anyone else’s.
That has been a quiet relief.
I have spent a lot of my own life looking for a template. Reading other people’s books, watching other people’s interviews, trying to figure out what the correct version of this journey looks like so I could make sure I was doing mine right. Cinzia, in one conversation, gave me permission to stop.
She said something near the end of our call about how to tell which fears to listen to and which to walk through. “Is this fear trying to shrink me, or expand my soul? If you feel a sensation of expansion, that is the right choice.”
I keep coming back to that. Not as a rule. As a tuning fork.
There is no one shape this is supposed to take. There is just your shape, slowly revealing itself, and the small daily question of whether what you’re choosing is shrinking you or expanding you.
A question for you
Which of your dreams are actually yours?
Not as an attack. As a curiosity.
Sit with the things you say you want the career, the relationship, the city, the version of success. and ask, gently, whose voice that wanting first arrived in. Yours? A parent’s? A teacher’s? A culture’s?
Some of the answers will surprise you. Some of what you thought was inherited will turn out to be deeply your own. And some of what you thought was yours will turn out to be a dream you’ve been carrying for someone else.
Either answer is useful. Both are green lights.
Listen to my full conversation with Cinzia on YouTube or Spotify (linked above). We talk about her four careers, the day she sent her resignation letter and they “lost it” in the post, what it means to read your own energy pattern, and why pausing (really pausing) is the most underrated tool we have.
It does not cost you anything to share. And sharing is caring!
Until next week,
Cris
Author of Follow That Whisper · Host of Catching More Green Lights in Life