After building The Author Incubator and Difference Press into a publishing business that generated more than $50 million in revenue and helped roughly 2,000 authors, Angela Kingdon stepped away to pursue a very different vision: creating an Autistic-led media and cultural ecosystem.

Angela’s pivot unfolded gradually. After nearly a decade of freelancing, she built a highly successful publishing company, but the pandemic, a search for answers about her health, and an autism diagnosis began changing her relationship with the business and the work she felt called to do.

Today, Angela is the founder of the Autistic Culture Institute and co-founder of the Autistic Culture Podcast Network, which brings together more than 25 Autistic-led shows across seven countries.

In this Pros Who Pivot conversation, Angela and Noelle discuss the identity that can become attached to a successful business, how to recognize when your work is leading you in a new direction, and what it means to carry valuable experience forward without recreating what you built before.

Content note: This conversation includes a brief discussion of suicidal thoughts. If this topic is difficult for you, please take care while listening. If you’re in the U.S. and need support, call or text 988 or visit 988lifeline.org.

In this conversation

• Angela’s path from freelance work to publishing and entrepreneurship
• How she built a publishing business that generated more than $50 million in revenue
• How the pandemic, a mystery illness and an autism diagnosis changed her relationship with her work
• Why her pivot unfolded gradually and how she knew when it was time to make a change
• The experience and lessons she carried into her next chapter
• What Angela is choosing to do differently as she builds again and her vision for Autistic-led media, culture, and belonging

Angela’s story shows that a pivot doesn’t require leaving everything behind. It can mean taking the experience, insight, and conviction you have earned and using them to build something that reflects who you are now.

A question for listeners:

Which parts of your past work would you want to bring into a next chapter, and which parts are you ready to leave behind?

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Women are encouraged to build experience, deepen their judgment, expand their networks, and lead bigger things. Then, at a certain point, the very experience they were told to accumulate can be read as a problem: too senior, too expensive, overqualified, or no longer the profile an employer has in mind.

This episode begins with the story of Stacey Duguid, a former fashion editor and writer who spoke publicly after sending more than 150 applications over roughly 16 months with little response. 

Her story drew tens of thousands of new followers and messages from women in their forties, fifties, and sixties who were experiencing something similar. The scale of the response turned one woman’s job search into a much larger conversation about age, work, and visibility.

This story connects significantly with The Quiet Breakup: the internal separation that can begin before a woman visibly leaves her work. One describes what happens when women question whether they still want the old system. The other shows what can happen when a woman wants to return and the system no longer knows what to do with her. Both lead to a more intentional question about what comes next.

This is not an argument that every woman should leave employment and build a business. Returning to an organization, creating something independently, or combining stability with experimentation are all legitimate choices. 

The aim is to choose a direction based on the life you want now, without allowing a flawed hiring process to become a verdict on your value.

In this episode we discuss:

• Why silence from the hiring market is not reliable evidence of your value
• The difference between translating your experience and apologizing for it
• How to tell whether you want the work or the validation of being chosen
• Three second-act routes: return, create, or combine
• How to name the problems you solve rather than relying only on previous titles
• Why agency matters even when bias and real-life constraints remain

Three Important Takeaways:

• Do not turn a market response into a personal verdict.
• Decide which future you are actually trying to create.
• Treat your experience as an asset you can move, translate, and test in a new setting.

Reflection Resource

Download the Second Act Direction Finder to separate what you want from what you feel you have to prove, identify the value you can carry forward, and choose one experiment for the next thirty days.

Resource link:  Second Act Direction Finder 

Connect with Noelle:

Website: www.noellevan.com
Instagram: @noellevanbeyond

YouTube: @noellevanv

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A difficult conversation can end while the argument continues in our head. We replay what was said, construct the response we wish we had given, and carry the conflict into the rest of our day.

In this episode, Noelle looks at what the need to be right may be protecting: a value, identity, pride, control, or simply the desire for solid ground in an unpredictable world. She explores how disagreement can start to feel like dismissal and how quickly we can reduce another person to a position we need to defeat.

The alternative is not passivity or false agreement. It is learning to separate understanding from endorsement, notice when the body has moved into battle, and decide which conversations are capable of creating anything useful. 

The episode closes with a reflection designed to help us question our assumptions while maintaining boundaries and discernment.

In this episode we discuss: 

• Why certainty can feel like safety
• How disagreement becomes personal and reactive
• The physical signs that you have stopped listening and started preparing a rebuttal
• Why understanding another perspective does not require agreement
• How to decide whether a conversation deserves your energy
• A guided practice for separating what you know from what you have assumed

 Reflection From Verdict to Curiosity

Think of one person you find difficult to understand—someone you can safely be in relationship with, not someone abusive or threatening. Then work through these questions:

1. What am I protecting right now?
2. What do I know, and what have I assumed?
3. What experiences, fears, loyalties, or information might make this view make sense to them?
4. Is there even ten percent of their perspective I can understand without agreeing?
5. What would openness look like in my next interaction?

Connect with Noelle:

Website: www.noellevan.com
Instagram: @noellevanbeyond

YouTube: @noellevanv

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In this solo episode, we explore aging on your own terms and the stories women are often handed about what is possible after 40, 50, and beyond.

This episode challenges the cultural narrative that possibility narrows with age and offers a more expansive view of midlife and beyond as a time of deeper honesty, vitality, ambition, relevance, and self-authorship.

Rather than competing with an earlier version of yourself, this conversation invites you to let this chapter have its own identity, rhythm, beauty, ambition, and definition of success.

In this episode I share: 

• How culture can narrow the story around women’s ambition, vitality, and relevance as they age.
• Why many women are not becoming less themselves, but more honest with themselves.
• How ambition changes when it becomes less about approval and more about freedom.
• Why vitality is about aliveness, not simply appearance or endless energy.
• How relevance deepens through wisdom, perspective, discernment, and lived experience.

Connect with Noelle:

Website: www.noellevan.com
Instagram: @noellevanbeyond

YouTube: @noellevanv

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In this solo episode, we explore decision fatigue,  the quiet mental and emotional exhaustion that comes from constantly making choices for everyone and everything around you.

This episode looks at how decision fatigue can erode self-trust, why urgent decisions often crowd out the important ones, and how women can begin protecting their energy for the choices that truly shape their next chapter.

Choosing yourself first is not selfish. It is a way of rebuilding trust with yourself, honoring your own clarity, and creating enough space to hear your own voice again.

In this episode I share:

• What decision fatigue really is and why it often shows up as procrastination, irritability, or overthinking.
• How carrying the emotional weight of everyone else’s needs can make your own choices feel blurry.
• The difference between urgent choices and important choices.
• Why self-trust is built through small moments of inner alignment.
• Practical ways to reduce low-value decisions and protect your highest-stakes choices.

Connect with Noelle:

Website: www.noellevan.com
Instagram: @noellevanbeyond

YouTube: @noellevanv

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In this solo episode, we explore The Good Girl Bargain,  the unspoken agreement many women make to be pleasing, responsible, agreeable, and easy to approve of in exchange for belonging, safety, and success.

This episode looks at how patterns like people-pleasing, perfectionism, over-functioning, emotional monitoring, and achievement can begin as adaptive strategies, but eventually become limiting. 

I share how resentment can offer important information, and how women can begin writing new rules rooted in intuition, honesty, and self-trust.

This is a conversation about loosening the old bargain and choosing inner alignment over approval.

In this episode we cover: 

• What The Good Girl Bargain is and why it can be so hard to recognize.
• How over-functioning, people-pleasing, and perfectionism often begin as protection.
• Why resentment can be a signal that a new boundary is needed.
• The difference between being kind and abandoning yourself.
• How to begin practicing new rules that honor your capacity, truth, and intuition.

Connect with Noelle:

Website: www.noellevan.com
Instagram: @noellevanbeyond

YouTube: @noellevanv

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What if the life you are living is shaped by stories you never consciously chose?

In this episode of The Change Effect, Noelle sits down with Carrie KC West, author and founder of The Rewrite System, for a conversation about story, identity, reinvention, and what it means to reclaim authorship of your life.

Carrie KC West is the founder of The Life Rewrite System and author of Life Rewritten and Money Rewritten. Her work sits at the intersection of storytelling, personal transformation, psychology, and reinvention. Drawing from her own life and her years in the film industry, Carrie helps people recognize the hidden narratives shaping their choices and begin to consciously choose new ones.

In this conversation, we explore:

• How early life experiences and inherited messages shape the stories we live 
• Why reinvention often feels so big, uncertain, and overwhelming
• The importance of awareness in breaking old patterns and creating lasting change
• How small shifts can redirect the course of a life over time
• Why women are being called to reclaim authorship of their lives, work, and leadership

This episode is an invitation to look at the story you are living and ask: Is this still the story I want to carry forward?

Connect with Carrie:

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There's a common assumption that when women step away from traditional definitions of success, they've stopped wanting more.

In my experience, the opposite is true.

The ambition doesn't disappear. It becomes more personal, more honest, and more aligned with who they've become

In this episode, we're exploring what happens when your ambitions change, the fears that come with redirecting them, and why wanting something different may require even more courage than staying the course.

In this episode:

• The inherited definition of ambition
• Why changing direction isn't giving up
• Common fears around reinvention
• Owning what you want now
• Building your own definition of success

Your ambitions are allowed to evolve. You don't have to keep chasing a version of success that no longer fits simply because it once mattered to you. My hope is that this conversation gives you permission to get honest about what you want now and the confidence to pursue it wholeheartedly.

If you want to go a bit deeper on this, I've attached a simple exercise for you called The Ambition Audit, to explore what you want now and what you will need to do differently to get it. 

Download:  🖊️The Ambition Audit HERE

Connect with me:
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📸 Instagram: @noellevanbeyond
💼 LinkedIn: Noelle Van

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Some of the most meaningful conversations in our lives are the ones we do not know we need to have until time begins to narrow.

In this episode of The Change Effect, Noelle sits down with Yvonne Caputo, author of Flying with Dad and Dying with Dad, for a powerful conversation about family stories, parent-child relationships, end-of-life wishes, and the unexpected healing that can come when we meet someone with curiosity instead of expectation.

For many years, Yvonne’s relationship with her father was distant. Then one evening, he began telling her stories from his time as a B-24 navigator during World War II. What started as one story became a deeper path toward connection, trust, understanding, and eventually the conversations that helped Yvonne honor his wishes at the end of his life.

In this conversation, we explore:

• Why listening to a parent’s stories can open the door to deeper understanding
• How curiosity can soften complicated family relationships
• The importance of having end-of-life conversations before a crisis
• How grief can hold both sorrow and sacred joy 

Yvonne also shares how the Five Wishes document helped guide meaningful conversations with her father, and why these discussions can become a profound gift for both parents and adult children.

This conversation is a reminder that it is never too late to ask, to listen, to understand, or to begin again.

Connect with Yvonne: 

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Resources Mentioned: 

Flying with Dad by Yvonne Caputo

Dying with Dad by Yvonne Caputo

Five Wishes

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We often think of change as the risky choice.

➡️  Changing careers.
➡️  Leaving relationships.
➡️  Starting businesses.
➡️  Choosing something new.

But what if staying carries a cost too?

In this episode, we're looking at the quieter risks. The ones that accumulate over time. The energy drain, the erosion of self-trust, the dreams we postpone, and the subtle ways we adjust our expectations to fit our circumstances.

This conversation isn't about convincing you to make a change. It's about helping you see the full picture so whatever decision you make is one you've made consciously.

In this episode:

• Why we underestimate the cost of staying
• How self-trust gets worn down
• The hidden tax of postponing what matters
• Signs you're staying by choice or by default
• Questions to help you honestly assess where you are

Whatever your next step, my hope is that this conversation encourages you to pause and take an honest look at where you are. Sometimes staying is the right decision. Sometimes change is. The important thing is that the choice is yours, and that you make it with clarity, intention, and your eyes wide open.

If you want to go a bit deeper on this, I've attached a simple exercise for you called The Cost of Staying Audit,  to take a closer look at what it may be costing you to stay where you are.

Download: 🖊️ The Cost of Staying Audit HERE

Connect with me:
🌐 https://www.noellevan.com
📸 Instagram: @noellevanbeyond
💼 LinkedIn: Noelle Van

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