Eva Chen says nothing in life is wasted. She's not saying it to be inspiring. She's saying it because she spent thirty years on what looked like the wrong path and now uses every piece of it in her work.
Carolina Wilke and I spent an hour with her on Episode 003 of In Full Light, and the conversation was the kind that doesn’t really leave you. Eva is the founder of Second Callings. She works with midlife professionals who built a good life, hit the markers they were told to hit, and now feel something else stirring. Her job is to help them name it, see the pattern that has been running quietly underneath everything, and build the work that fits who they’re becoming.
She did not arrive at this work in a straight line.
Eva’s father died when she was fifteen. He was a physician, a dreamer, and he left blueprints for a hospital on the dining room table. Plans he never got to build. Eva spent the next three decades trying to make her time matter in his honor. She went to business school because her mother was struggling with finances after he died and Eva promised herself she would never not understand money. She built businesses that looked successful from the outside. She fainted at her desk once from exhaustion. She gave from a cup that was empty for so long she forgot what a full one felt like.
Five years ago she started circling the work that is now Second Callings. She could not quite step into it. She kept editing, kept hiding, kept telling herself she’d be ready when she was ready. Eventually she stopped trying. She surrendered the whole thing to God, the Creator, in her words. She said whatever you want me to do, I will do it. I have no desire.
And then a door she did not expect opened. An opportunity came to manage some investments. The part of her resume she had been most ashamed of, the finance training she resented for two decades, became the thing that funded the launch of the work she was born to do. She told us she can’t quite recognize her life now.
The reason this episode matters for our community is not just the story. It’s what she’s doing with it.
There is a moment in the conversation where Carolina asks her what she wishes more people understood about her work. Eva’s answer is the cleanest articulation of a pattern we see constantly. Most people, she says, know the label. I’m an achiever. I’m a perfectionist. But naming the pattern doesn’t change it. You can build a whole new business with the same old energy running underneath, and it will just hustle in a different costume. The real work is slower. It’s quieter. It goes deeper than the labels.
She also said something about authority that I want to underline.
She used to equate her competence with her income. If she wasn’t earning, she wasn’t good. The marketing world made it worse by selling proof-of-competence through screenshots. What she has come to believe, and what she now offers her clients, is that the credential people actually want is lived experience. They want a guide who has been where they are standing. Not a curriculum. A witness.
If you are someone who built the life you were told to build, and you feel something quieter and truer trying to surface underneath it, this episode is the kind of conversation you’ll want to sit with twice.
A few other threads from the full episode:
The Care framework she built during her pause year, and the moment of internal safety it depended on.
Why play is not a reward you earn at the end. Why it has to be part of the process or the process eventually hollows out.
The Autopilot Assessment that names the pattern running in the background, and why she designed it as the first step.
Her 25-year vision, including the conversation she is currently having with her university about bringing this work into education.
The phrase she used that we keep coming back to: “We are a once-in-a-lifetime cosmic event. There is nobody like you.”
Thank you Josh Woll, Michele Gill, Claire Machado, Laura-Jean Anderson, and many others for tuning into my live video with Eva Chen and Carolina Wilke! Join me for my next live video in the app.
This episode was originally published on sacredbusiness.com on May 18, 2026. You can find the canonical version, along with related essays on sacred business and nervous system work, there.
