For many women leaders, real transition doesn’t start on a calendar—it begins in the body, in the quiet signals we’re taught to override. Mariangela Zanchetta shares a vulnerable, powerful look at how her own nervous system led her through overdrive, collapse, and renewal.
By Mariangela Zanchetta
Some changes begin long before we can name them.
Before the decision, before the announcement, before the brave “I’m ready.”
The body already knows.
It starts as restlessness: a hum in your brain, a vibration under the skin, a pulse that quickens even in silence. You can’t quite articulate it yet, but something in you has already left the old chapter. The body often leads the mind by miles.
For women in leadership, that moment can feel disorienting. We’ve been trained to navigate complexity through intellect, structure, and speed—to lead from the neck up. Our bodies, meanwhile, become the silent machinery keeping the rhythm. Until one day, they stop.
When I left big tech, I expected the change to be professional: a few months of rest, maybe a sabbatical, then a title shift.
I thought I could make transition live in my calendar.
Instead, transition decided to live in my body.
What followed was not a clean arc but a cycle, a deeply physical metamorphosis that moved through three recurring phases: Overdrive, The Crash, and Repatterning.
Each one changed not only how I worked but how I inhabited myself.
And if I’m honest, I’m still living them, not as a linear journey but as tides. Each return is a little softer, a little clearer, a little more forgiving.
At first, I didn’t stop. I just changed projects.
Cry & Giggle, the children’s storytelling YouTube channel I started with my son, was meant to be light, creative, and cathartic; a way to breathe again and, honestly, to be closer to my son.
Within hours, I had turned it into a business model. Ten tabs open. Five AI tools downloaded. Merch in progress.
The poor cartoon scooter hadn’t even learned to roll yet, and I was already scaling.
That was my nervous system in overdrive, running on the residue of adrenaline and still operating by the old logic of “build, optimize, prove.”
I told myself I was being creative and loving it, which was true, but only partly. What I really was, was terrified of stillness.
Because stillness invites questions you can’t “spreadsheet” your way through:
Who am I without my title?
Who am I when my name no longer unlocks inboxes?
What happens when the show goes on, and I’m not in it?
A quiet panic kicked in:
So I kept building, because busy felt like belonging.
It was the only way my body knew to feel safe.
It took time, a very patient coach, and a supportive husband to recognize that overdrive isn’t ambition. It’s self-protection disguised as productivity.
The nervous system doesn’t yet trust stillness, so it fills it with motion.
What began to shift things was learning to pause in the body, not just the schedule.
To stop chasing the illusion of control and ask instead:
“Am I creating from expansion or from fear?”
If it was fear, it felt tight, urgent, performative.
If it was expansion, it felt warm, open, quietly electric, like curiosity without the need to justify itself.
This process is not linear. You loop through it again and again.
But with each return, the breath deepens, the body softens, and the pause arrives sooner.
That’s when overdrive begins to loosen its hold, when you start to understand that safety doesn’t come from proving—it comes from presence.
Eventually, the body intervenes.
Mine did quietly, without drama: a morning when I woke up heavy, as if gravity had turned personal.
My neck ached. My breath felt shallow. My limbs moved as though underwater.
I had spent months performing resilience. My body had finally called my bluff.
This is the part of transition no one prepares you for: the silent grief that arrives once the adrenaline fades.
Grief not just for a job, but for an identity, for the woman who knew exactly what to do every morning, for the rhythm that once held her.
The body understands endings before we do.
It carries the weight of every unshed goodbye, every meeting replayed in dreams, every version of us that no longer fits.
I thought I was tired. In truth, I was mourning.
And mourning, I learned, isn’t emotional. It’s physiological.
It lives in the shoulders, in the breath, in the nights that refuse to rest.
It’s the nervous system processing what the mind can’t yet name.
For a while, I tried to optimize even my healing: meditation apps, planners for “growth goals.”
But grief has no interest in being managed. It wants to be felt.
So I stopped fixing and started witnessing.
I cried, loudly and privately, inside and in writing.
I walked in silence.
I let myself do nothing without apology.
Slowly, stillness stopped feeling like surrender. It began to feel like repair.
Grief stripped me of every story about who I was supposed to be.
I forgot how to answer “What do you do?”
I learned to say, simply, “I’m in between.”
And in that space, that unbranded, unoptimized pause, I am finding new truth.
That crash isn’t failure.
It’s the body saying, I can’t and I won’t carry the old life into the new one.
It’s the nervous system’s version of grace.
Then one morning, the air shifted.
Not dramatically; no sunrise epiphany, no soundtrack of renewal.
Just a faint ease in the chest, a little less tension in the jaw.
A sense that maybe I could move through the day without guarding myself.
That was the beginning of repatterning, the long, slow re-education of the body as it began to remember safety and recognize what made it feel better.
The nervous system begins to test new rhythms: curiosity instead of control, movement without agenda, rest without shame.
I started noticing what didn’t hurt,
how mornings felt when I didn’t reach for my phone,
how peace sounded when it wasn’t tied to productivity.
And gradually, I began to choose not from habit but from resonance.
Does this energize me?
Does this drain me?
Does this support who I’m becoming?
That became my compass.
The answers were subtle: a hum in the chest, a lightness in the step, a softening in the breath.
But they were honest.
I began to realize that clarity doesn’t come from thinking harder.
It comes from feeling safer.
That’s when I stopped treating my experience like something I might lose if I paused too long.
I hadn’t forgotten and I was not going to forget all those years of leadership. I was finally letting those years integrate — from intellect into instinct and wisdom.
Some days, I still slip back into old reflexes: the rush, the planning, the self-imposed urgency.
But now I catch myself sooner. That, too, is progress.
Repatterning isn’t a return to who you were.
It’s a reunion with the body that carried you here and a quiet agreement to walk together this time.
If transition truly begins in the body, then healing must start there too. Not as another goal, but as a relationship.
Here are a few practices that continue to guide me, not prescriptions but possibilities I’ve discovered through lived experience:
And, when you are ready to build again, please, for the love of all that is sane,
I used to think transition was about reinvention.
Now I see it as re-inhabitation, learning to live inside myself again.
These days, I measure progress differently.
Not by how many projects I build, but by how deeply I breathe.
By the looseness in my jaw, the steadiness in my voice, and my ability to cherish the small joys life gives me, like my son’s laughter and companionship.
Change no longer feels like something I have to perform.
It feels like something I get to feel and move through on my own terms.
Mariangela Zanchetta is a global strategy, product, and operations executive with 20+ years driving transformation across Fortune 100 technology companies, including Oracle, Amazon, and Microsoft. A recognized 0→1 builder, she has shaped multicloud strategy, developer ecosystems, and compliance automation at global scale—guiding organizations toward clarity, alignment, and purpose.
She writes about reinvention, transition, and the quiet human truths inside ambitious careers, drawing on a life lived between cultures and worlds. Fluent in Italian, German, and Spanish, she brings the same curiosity to leadership that she brings to food, travel, and connection.
© Athena Alliance 2025
