Someone said something to me once that I’ve never forgotten.
I’d just left my job. Walked away from the safety net, the salary, the structure. I had a vision, a calling, and absolutely no idea how I was going to land.
“You jumped off a cliff without a parachute,” they said.
And they were right.
One of the first things I did was invest in the right support. That was how I built mine.
Recently, I was at a business event, not as a delegate, but as an observer. And what I noticed wasn’t on the stage. It was in the room.
There were couples there. Partners who had come together, sat together, leaned into each other during the moments when a big decision hung in the air. And I watched what happened in those moments. The quiet conversation. The nod. The hand on the arm that says I’ve got you. Let’s do this.
The commitment became possible because it felt shared.
I thought about my own journey. When I was considering investing in my business development. It was a significant step, financially and emotionally. I thought about my husband. I knew, in that moment, that I would have supported him to take that leap without hesitation, and I believed he would have done the same for me. That belief was enough.
That was my parachute, even before I found the formal one.
But not everyone has that.
There was a story shared at the event that stayed with me. It wasn’t told by the person it happened to: it was told by someone who had watched it happen. As a child.
Her mother had come into some money unexpectedly: not a windfall, but the kind that comes wrapped in loss and paperwork and decisions you never asked to make. She wanted to do something meaningful with it. She walked into a business she loved, a little ice-cream shop, and asked the owners if they’d ever consider selling.They said yes.
They promised to train her. To hand over everything she’d need to know.
The day the sale completed, they were gone. No handover. No training. Just keys, a till, and tears.
And a child who saw everything.
Her mother figured it out. Of course she did. But she built her parachute on the way down, and her daughter carried the memory of watching her struggle to find her wings.
What struck me most wasn’t the practical challenge. It was the emotional health cost. Not just for the woman who had to hold herself together with customers to serve and no one beside her, but for the young person watching, absorbing, learning what it looks like when someone you love has no one in their corner.
Because that’s the thing about struggling alone. It doesn’t just affect you. It ripples.
There’s no trophy for that kind of survival. It takes extraordinary courage and resilience to free-fall and land on your feet. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
The difference between those couples making their decision and that woman standing alone wasn’t ability. It wasn’t intelligence or drive or determination. It was simply this: someone in their corner. Someone to share the weight of the leap.
And here’s what I’ve come to understand through my own work in emotional health: that weight is real. The fear, the doubt, the loneliness of big decisions, these aren’t weaknesses to push through. They’re signals. And when someone is beside you to help you hear those signals clearly rather than drown in them, everything changes.
That’s what great support does. It doesn’t make the jump for you. It doesn’t remove the fear.
It just makes it possible to step off the edge and believe, genuinely believe, that you’ll be okay.
Sometimes that support is a partner. Sometimes it’s a community. Sometimes it’s a coach, a mentor, or the right programme at the right moment.
But whatever form it takes find it before you jump.
You deserve a parachute.