When Your Soul Has Already Left the Building 🌿
By Sage Robinson-Miller – Growth Coach – Growing Sage
One of the questions people ask all the time in personal growth circles is whether I've ever ignored my intuition. Every time I hear that question, I find myself struggling with the answer because I don't think my experience fits the way most people talk about intuition. Usually, the stories go something like this: "I knew I should leave, but I stayed."Â Or, "My intuition was screaming at me, but I ignored it."Â Then there's a dramatic ending where everything falls apart and the lesson is that we should have listened sooner.
That's never really been my story.
If anything, my intuition has always been annoyingly early.
And I mean annoyingly early. 🤣
The problem was never that I didn't know. The problem was that I often knew long before it made sense to act. Looking back, I can see that pattern throughout my life. There have been friendships where I knew things were changing before there was any visible evidence. There have been situations where I knew a chapter was ending long before the final page arrived. There have been opportunities, relationships, and phases of my life where something deep inside me quietly whispered, "This isn't forever." The frustrating part was that those messages never arrived with a timeline attached. My intuition would show up, drop off some life-changing information, and then disappear without providing a single useful detail about what I was supposed to do with it. 🤣
Athletic training is probably the best example I can give.
By 2020, I knew.
Not logically.
Not strategically.
Not because I had a five-year plan.
I just knew.
Somewhere deep down, I knew my athletic training career was beginning to wind down. The strange thing is that knowing it was ending didn't make me want to leave faster. It actually made me want to stay more present. When people hear that I knew years before I retired, they often assume that means I was miserable. They assume I was counting down the days, looking for an escape route, or desperately trying to figure out how to leave.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
The truth is that I loved that job with my whole heart.
I loved the athletes. I loved the coaches. I loved the referees. I loved the parents. I loved the Suburban rides to away games, the tournaments, the state championships, the heartbreaking losses, the unforgettable wins, and the random conversations that happened when people spent enough time together. I loved walking into a gym and recognizing almost every face. I loved being part of something bigger than myself. I loved helping kids through difficult moments and watching them become adults. Some of those athletes are now raising families of their own, and I still smile when I think about the journey.
That's what made leaving so complicated.
I wasn't just leaving a profession. I was leaving relationships.
When you've spent twenty-five years showing up in the same places, those relationships become woven into the fabric of your life. Coaches become friends. Officials become familiar faces. Athletes become people whose stories you know by heart. Entire communities begin to expect your presence. People walk into a gym and subconsciously assume you'll be there. They don't even think about it because you've always been there.
And I knew that once I stepped away, some of those relationships would naturally begin to fade.
Not because anyone did anything wrong.
Not because the connections weren't real.
Simply because life keeps moving.
That reality hit me harder than the career change itself.
The other piece of this story is responsibility.
Not the imaginary responsibility I talked about in my last blog. Real responsibility.
One of the reasons I didn't immediately act on what my intuition was telling me was because I cared deeply about the people who would still be there after I left. I wasn't just thinking about myself. I was thinking about the coaches I had worked alongside for years. I was thinking about the athletes who depended on consistency and support. I was thinking about the next athletic trainer who would eventually walk through those doors and inherit everything I had spent twenty-five years helping build.
I wanted that transition to be successful.
I wanted the coaches to feel supported. I wanted the athletes to feel supported. I wanted the next athletic trainer to have every opportunity to succeed instead of walking into unnecessary chaos. I wanted systems in place. I wanted relationships transferred. I wanted people to feel cared for.
Maybe that's the athletic trainer in me.
Maybe it's just who I am.
Either way, I never viewed leaving as something that should only benefit me.
At the same time, I knew there were pieces of my personal life that needed attention too. I wanted my finances in order. I wanted to know what the next chapter looked like before I jumped into it. I wanted to create some stability after spending decades living at a pace that most people would consider completely unreasonable. Looking back now, I can see that I wasn't delaying the transition. I was preparing for it.
That's a very different thing.
I think we've created a culture that sometimes glorifies dramatic exits and impulsive decisions. We celebrate people who burn the ships, quit overnight, and leap before they look. And while there are certainly times when that approach is necessary, it never felt right for me. I had poured too much of my heart into athletic training to leave that way.
I wanted to leave well.
I wanted to leave with integrity.
I wanted to leave with gratitude.
Most of all, I wanted to know that I had honored the people, relationships, and experiences that had shaped such a significant chapter of my life. When the day finally came to walk away, I didn't want to be wondering whether I should have stayed one more season, helped one more athlete, or finished one more project. I wanted to know I had done everything I reasonably could to prepare both myself and everyone around me for what came next.
Looking back now, I don't regret that at all.
In fact, I think it was one of the greatest gifts I could have given myself.
Because when the time finally came, I wasn't carrying a bunch of unfinished business. There weren't dozens of loose ends pulling me backward. There wasn't a constant voice in my head asking if I had left too soon. I knew it was time. And I knew I had done my best to honor what came before.
One of the things people don't talk about enough is how much grief exists in positive transitions. We tend to associate grief with loss, tragedy, and heartbreak. But sometimes grief shows up when you're leaving something beautiful. Sometimes grief shows up because you loved a chapter so much that it's difficult to imagine life without it.
I think that's why I stayed longer.
Not because I didn't trust my intuition.
Because I did.
I trusted it completely.
What I didn't trust was rushing.
For the first time in my adult life, I wanted to be fully present. When you're working eighty-five hours a week, you don't spend a lot of time soaking in the moment. You're solving problems, helping people, putting out fires, managing schedules, and trying to survive another week. Then suddenly another season is over. Another year is over. Another decade is over.
I didn't want that to happen anymore.
I wanted to pay attention.
I wanted to appreciate every football game, every wrestling tournament, every track meet, every conversation, every relationship, and every tiny moment that had quietly shaped my life. I wanted to look around and truly see what had been there all along. I wanted to experience gratitude instead of simply moving on to the next responsibility.
Looking back, I think that's one of the greatest gifts intuition ever gave me.
It didn't tell me to leave.
It gave me time.
Time to appreciate.
Time to prepare.
Time to grieve.
Time to honor the chapter before I closed the book.
The older I get, the more I think intuition and timing are two completely different things. Intuition might know exactly where you're headed, but timing has to account for all the moving pieces. It has to account for relationships, responsibilities, finances, emotions, commitments, and the very human reality that endings take time. Sometimes the next chapter looks obvious on paper, but life isn't lived on paper.
Life is lived in relationships.
Life is lived in memories.
Life is lived in the spaces between people.
And those things deserve to be honored.
That's why I get a little skeptical when people talk about intuition as if it's always demanding immediate action. Sometimes intuition is asking us to move. Sometimes it's asking us to stay. Sometimes it's asking us to prepare. And sometimes it's simply asking us to appreciate what we have before it's gone.
I think that's what mine was doing all along.
It wasn't trying to get me out of athletic training.
It was helping me say goodbye.
And because of that, when the time finally came to walk away, I wasn't carrying a bunch of regret. I wasn't wondering if I should have appreciated it more. I wasn't wishing I had paid closer attention.
I had already done that.
I had spent years doing that.
The older I get, the less I think intuition is about knowing what to do. I think it's about understanding timing. It's about recognizing that there are seasons in life when our soul can see the next chapter long before our physical reality arrives there. And sometimes the wisest thing we can do during those seasons isn't rush ahead.
It's stay present.
Because there are relationships to cherish.
There are memories being created.
There are moments that will someday matter more than we realize.
And there are chapters worth fully living before we turn the page.
Looking back, I'm grateful my intuition was annoyingly early. It didn't just prepare me for what was next.
It gave me time to appreciate what already was. ❤️
Thank You for Growing w/Me.
With Love,
– Sage 🌿
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