For most of her career, Dawn Klinghoffer was immersed in work. She built a long career in technology and people analytics, eventually becoming one of the field’s most recognized leaders at Microsoft.

She’d also known for years that she didn’t intend to keep doing it forever.

Dawn had set a goal of leaving Microsoft at age 55. Financially, she had prepared for it. But leadership transitions and her sense of responsibility kept her there longer than she’d planned. By the end, she knew she was ready to go. She was burned out. She was bored. And, as she put it, she felt as though she was “dying a slow death.”

So she left. What surprised Dawn was how much she enjoyed being away from work. “Oh my goodness,” she told me. “I keep waiting to wake up and realize that I’ve just been dreaming. I always knew that it would be good, but I didn’t know it would be this good.”

For someone accustomed to research, data, and answers, Dawn was discovering something unexpected: there could be value in not knowing what came next.

What Drove the Pivot

Dawn's decision was the culmination of a long career and a growing recognition that the way she’d been working no longer fit the way she wanted to live. She’d spent years studying employees and organizations, including burnout. Now some of what she knew professionally had become personal. She recognized the exhaustion and her growing cynicism. Perhaps most telling was the loss of satisfaction in work that had once energized her. Staying an extra year, she now thinks, probably wasn't the right decision.

She also had something that made stepping away possible: financial stability. Years in technology, saving, and planning meant she didn't need the focus to be about income. She had friends who had retired before 60 and demonstrated that life without a full-time job didn't have to mean boredom.

Dawn knew one thing with certainty: “I won’t ever go back to working full-time again.” But she wasn’t completely sure what was next.

Transition Process

Dawn made an unusual decision for someone whose career had been built around solving problems: she decided not to solve this one immediately.

She left Microsoft at the end of June, 2026 and gave herself the summer. No serious conversations about work. No rush to construct the next professional identity. She wanted roughly three months simply to experience life without work responsibilities.

She cooked. Her food blog, which once had thousands of followers, became more of a personal record of recipes and food discoveries. She played tennis and joined a daytime team. She traveled. She completed home projects.  She spent time with people she cared about.

And she wasn't bored. In fact, she told me she could imagine living this way forever. That realization mattered because Dawn had never wanted her identity to be her job. She is proud of her expertise in people analytics, but she didn’t want that to be the whole story of who she is. She joked that she'd rather her identity be “a foodie.” She wants to be known as an amazing mom, a friend, a traveler, a tennis player, and all the other parts of herself that a demanding career can crowd out.

The pause gave those identities more room. It also gave Dawn room to ask a different question. She knew she was done with the career she’d been living. But was she done contributing? The answer is no.

Current Direction

Dawn is still figuring that out, and that's precisely why I think her story matters. “I know what I don't want,” she told me. “I don't know what I do want, yet.”

She can imagine teaching. She can imagine advising companies, products, and people analytics leaders. She likes the idea of helping someone structure a problem, see possibilities, and determine what to do next without becoming the person responsible for doing all the work.

A model such as working four hours a day, four days a week, 40 weeks a year appeals to her. So does being selective rather than taking the first opportunity that appears. There’s no urgency to decide. “I think everything I do from here on out is going to be an experiment,” she said.

That sentence helps explain why Dawn's pivot is still unfolding. She’s a Resetter now according to my pivot typology, deliberately creating space between a demanding corporate career and whatever comes next. But there’s already an Experimenter pivot type emerging.

But Dawn is challenging what that result implies. Just because she values freedom and feels satisfied with her former career doesn't mean she's finished contributing. She wants to contribute differently, perhaps by defining an entirely different kind of career from the one she previously experienced. That may be exactly what this period of experimentation will allow her to discover.

Advice for Others

• Don't rush to fill the space. If your circumstances allow it, give yourself time before committing to the next thing. Dawn deliberately protected the first months after leaving work.

• Don't mistake uncertainty for a problem that needs to be solved immediately. Not knowing what's next can create room to discover what actually fits.

• Don't take the first opportunity simply because it appears. Dawn wants to understand her options before deciding where her limited time is worth investing.

• Maintain your relationships. After years studying careers and organizations, Dawn is convinced that contacts are enormously important. She also admits that, as an introvert, she hasn't always followed her own advice.

• Give yourself permission to stop an experiment. Trying something doesn't mean committing to it forever. An experiment can tell you what you want or what you don't.

• Recognize that not everyone has the same freedom to pause. Dawn knows that financial circumstances, family responsibilities, and involuntary job loss can make an extended break impossible.

Closing Reflection

When I interviewed Dawn, she was in an unusual place for someone who had spent much of her career producing insights from data. She didn't have the answer and she was delighted about it. Her career had given her expertise, relationships, financial security, and a considerable professional reputation. Stepping away didn't erase any of that. It simply gave other parts of her life more room.

What comes next may include advising, teaching, volunteering, or something Dawn hasn't encountered yet. She may create an entirely different kind of career. Or she may decide that some experiments aren't worth continuing.

For now, the significant change isn't what Dawn has chosen to do next. It's that she has stopped assuming she needs to choose right now. She knows she wants freedom. She knows she still has something to contribute. And she knows she doesn't want to recreate the career she just left.

For the moment, that’s enough. And judging by the way Dawn described this period of her life, the pause itself is pretty close to bliss.