In 2007 I was in painful transition. I had led an online community for professional women for eight years. I had launched the community in 1999 from my guest bedroom. I lived in Chicago and was in the tech industry, so I called the group ChicWIT - Chicago Women in Technology.

By 2007 ChicWIT had become WorldWIT, sixty thousand women had joined as members, 84 WorldWIT chapters around the world held networking events and shared advice on moderated list-servs, and sponsors like Liz Claiborne, Merrill Lynch and Deloitte gave us advice and funding.

We had an awesome women's camp in the spring, sunrise yoga and business workshops and improv at night. But I was frustrated.

My voice was not in the mix, although I was writing for Business Week, Yahoo! and the Huffington Post. I knew I had something to say, but I was so busy running our office and the global community that I had no time to figure out what it might be, much less to say it.

From a business-model standpoint our company was an advertising engine, and I felt the drag on our team's mojo and my own turning that crank every day without time or energy to grow our flames.

I wanted to write white papers about the way work should be. When would I write them? It wasn't in our business model.

My 13-year-old daughter staged an intervention. She met me in our driveway as I dragged my bags from the car to the house on a Sunday afternoon. I was returning from another women's conference.

I was in the state beyond exhaustion, the one where you want to get down and kiss the driveway because you can't believe you made it through the slog, with hours yet to "rest" before work again on Monday.

My daughter asked "Mom, you know Rachael Ray?" Of course I did. Who doesn't?

Rachael Ray is a spunky cooking diva.

"Rachael Ray has opinions about cooking," said my daughter. "People follow her. You know what she could do?"

"What?" I asked. I was panting, carrying two suitcases. My daughter's younger brothers ranged in age from four to thirteen years and were waiting inside. I was traveling too much.

"She can do whatever she wants," said my daughter. "Hot pads. Hot sauce. Magazine, talk show." I nodded.

"You know what she doesn't do?"

"What?" I asked. I hadn't been expecting a strategy grilling from my eighth-grader.

"She'd never package an audience and sell it to sponsors who want to reach women," she said. "She'd never say 'Yeah, look at these demographics, ninety-nine percent BA holders and thirty-five percent master's degrees. Look at this household income!'"

It was a thunderbolt.

"Dang," I said.

"You have to say your own thing," said my daughter.

"Forget re-selling the audience and just get your message out there. Whoever's gonna follow is gonna follow. They should follow the message, right?"

It was good and bad news at the same time. Okay, I said. The kid nailed it.

We held an awesome event at an art gallery, went next door for margaritas and I told my teammates we were going to close down the business. We took two months to wind everything up. We wrote resumes for our team members and finalized the last events around the world. We told the community, "Thanks, that was fun!" We sold the PCs and desks.

It was a very odd time.

I felt like writing career advice. I felt that the topic "How do I get a job or manage a career nowadays?" was underexamined.

I had written about job search but never broken down the process and looked at it. I had never teased it apart to see how the parts of a job search hooked into one another. I had never built a job search methodology.

I hadn't looked closely at the function of mojo in a job search, although now it's obvious to me how mojo is the whole enchilada in a job search. It's central.

Mojo was the thing we never talked about in job search, so I dove into that topic, and how to put a human voice in your resume, and how to side-step the evil Black Hole to reach a hiring manager directly. My friends were horrified.

"You've got to be kidding -- you're writing job search advice?" they asked me one after the other. "Yes, why?" I asked.

"It's -- it's kind of tawdry, don't you think?"

ME: Tawdry how? I want to understand.

WHOMEVER: Job search. I mean, it's so -- New York Daily News, Word Scramble, you know. It's not real business advice. It's throwaway advice. There's no credibility in it.

ME: Why?

WHOMEVER: Because everybody knows how to get a job. Job search columns just rehash the same stupid advice over and over.

ME: I won't do that.

THEM: But what else is there to say?

ME: A lot!

THEM: You have a very solid corporate and startup resume. You could consult for corporations. Why taint your brand as a career columnist?

ME: Don't worry! I'll consult, too. It's all the same conversation -- flame and muscles and mojo, right? Fear and trust and energy. I appreciate your concern, though. (Hug)

I started writing career advice against my friends' advice. I was surprised how often my touchy-feeliest stuff ended up in the Business section of a newspaper.

Careers are not a subset of Business. The subject of careers by definition is personal. Only people go to work.

Our careers are inextricable from our health, relationships, diet, parenting and a hundred other "life" subjects. We can pretend that business is aloof and separate from the rest of life, but we know it’s not.

People power every workplace - mojofied people especially. Of course work is a human place. We have to stop buying into the notion that when we're at work, it's okay that we're not ourselves.

We have to un-tell ourselves the lie that it's fine to turn off your brain or your personality at work, because someone is paying you.

Work doesn't have to be that way. We can shift it. We can talk about mojo and energy all the time, and make the topics of trust and fear at work as ordinary on a meeting agenda as our schedules and forecasts.

We have to stay awake and conscious to do that, because we’ve been trained to feed Godzilla without thinking. Just an ounce of raised awareness toward our positive and negative contribution to the energy field at work would weaken the beast considerably.

We won't bring about the Human Workplace by making somebody else -- bosses, for instance, or employees - the bad guy. It's buy-in to the Us vs. Them mentality that fortifies Godzilla.

Managers and CEOs look at teams of employees and the human complications they bring and think "Do they know how hard I work, when they come to me with complaints?" They feel justified because they are right - it's incredibly hard to get a business off the ground and keep the engine turning. It's hard to have a job. It's hard to juggle work and life.

It's not easy for any of us. Letting down that guard as a manager enough to say "You guys, honestly, I don't always know what I'm doing. Let's figure this stuff out together" is a huge step. That's how you build trust on a team, by being honest. That's how you break the Godzilla I-am-a-suit wall down.

Anyone who says "I can't wait for my employer to become a Human Workplace" is missing the point. We all bring the Human Workplace to life every day through our actions, thoughts and words.

We grow our own muscles and fortify the people around us.

First step: name the beast. Tell the truth at work when you could easily keep quiet. Say "I feel emotional" if you do. Don't pretend to be a robot.

When you're happy at work, laugh. When you're angry, say "I feel angry. Can we talk about this?" Don't ignore other people's feelings and emotions. Real people come to work, and people bring emotions with them, the same way they bring smarts and pluck and ingenuity.

Listen to your gut, even when it tells you to do things that seem stupid or random. My friends told me that writing career advice would trash my credibility as a Corporate Professional and a serious businessperson.

They felt that way because they weren't familiar with the genre I was planning to invent called Business Advice with a Human Voice, evangelical biz-nertainment or whatever else we might call it. I followed my gut instead of my friends' advice, and it all worked out fine.

Reinvention is hard. We want certainty, the one thing we don't have. The world is big, and your possibilities are endless. You only have to twist the frame a little to see the light beyond the scary darkness.

Step a few feet into the void and trust yourself. The anxiety that accompanies uncertainty about your future will be more than outweighed by the fun of getting to see how your chord resolves.