The Circuit Board Maker

Client Snapshot	Sienna: The “Circuit Board Maker”
Who:	Engineering project lead who quit a stable medical device career to find freedom—then discovered that freedom without direction triggered her sky-high internal standards, making exploration feel “frivolous” and “indulgent.”
Stuck Point:	Professionally successful but unsatisfied. The impact felt too distant, the corporate lip service exhausting, and she couldn’t shake the sense she was building the wrong things for the wrong reasons.
Handbrake:	“I Can Optimize My Way Through This”: She’d been operating as if any situation could be tweaked into the right fit—adjust the role, push through discomfort, find “the thing” faster. This kept her from admitting when the structure itself was fundamentally wrong.
Insight:	She’s not flaky or uncommitted—she’s a Circuit Board Maker: someone who embeds in systems, diagnoses misalignments, engineers elegant fixes, then moves to the next challenge. Moving on isn’t a bug; it’s her edge.
First Step:	Resigned without a plan and launched two experiments: freelancing in PCB design to test whether autonomy resolves technical work dissatisfaction, and volunteering at a community hub to apply her diagnostic eye to how human systems actually operate.

Sienna had achieved what she was supposed to achieve. Project lead at a medical device company. Good salary. Respected by colleagues. Her younger self would have high-fived her.

So why did she feel like she was slowly suffocating?

“I was miserable,” she says flatly. “I kept thinking—maybe I just need to tweak a few things about the role. Maybe I’m just complaining too much.”

On her baseline assessment in February 2025, she wrote: “There’s a big misalignment between perceived societal value and my own internal rating of its value.” She’d been drawn to medical devices for the “direct-ish through line to helping improve people’s lives,” but somewhere along the way, she’d lost sight of the water picture. The impact felt too diffuse, too distant. She was designing circuit boards for devices that would eventually help someone, somewhere, but she couldn’t taste the clean water or see the person using the ramp.

The job was fine. She was good at it. That was almost worse.

The Pattern Was Always There

When Sienna was a kid growing up in Ontario, she borrowed her neighbor’s tools to build a birdhouse with the kids on her street. Her parents didn’t want her going down that path—tools were for boys—but she wanted to, so she did it anyway.

“I didn’t even show them,” she remembers. “It wasn’t for them. It was just for me, I guess. Just to be able to build something, create something.”

Then, next project.

Years later, at the end of high school, she organized a massive group performance for a coffee house. Fifteen people—instruments, vocals, percussion—all performing one song together as the finale. She’d made connections across different social circles and wanted to bring them all into one space to create something tangible.

Then, next project.

Frisbee and climbing were the only activities that stuck, and for a telling reason: every game is different, every climb is new. They’re inherently renewable. They don’t require maintaining a long-term structure.

She didn’t see the pattern then. She just knew she cycled through a lot of activities as a kid—karate, violin, art, guitar. She thought maybe she was flaky. Maybe she couldn’t commit.

It turns out she’s not a maintainer. She’s a spark person.

The Clarity Wasn’t About Where. It Was About Why.

In February 2025, Sienna started working with Chris through the ARC methodology. She was hoping for answers: What should I do with my life? What’s my perfect career path?

That’s not what she found.

Instead, over two and a half months, she logged her energy drains and pumps. She completed assessments. She sat with Chris for deep-dive interviews, telling stories from her childhood and career. And slowly, she gathered evidence. Not about what to do next, but about why she was miserable.

Her dissatisfaction wasn’t about needing to tweak her job. It was structural. The corporate environment was fundamentally misaligned with how she’s wired.

She needs to be the captain of the ship. She needs proximity to impact—to see, touch, witness the change she’s creating. She has an unusually sensitive detector for when stated values don’t match actual behavior, and corporate life is full of “keyboard warriors” and “lip service.” It was like being constantly poked by misaligned systems.

The insights she gained weren’t about where to go. They showed her it was right to leave the path she was on.

By April, she was having back-and-forth discussions with her manager about a leave of absence. The parameters he described didn’t feel right. She’d been stuck in limbo, exhausting herself trying to explore while also being fully committed to her job. (She can’t half-ass things—if she’s in, she’s in.)

Finally, on April 17, she sent in her resignation.

“It felt nice to just have the closure,” she says. “To just not be in this ambiguity. Now it’s like, alright. That’s it. This chapter is closing.”

Her husband had been incredibly supportive throughout. “Don’t try to jump into anything right away,” he told her. “You’re trying to create space to gain clarity on what you really want to do. There’s no rush.” That permission—from him, from her 95-year-old future self she imagines—made the leap possible.

The Last Day

Sienna’s last day at work gave her an unexpected gift: validation.

Some coworkers had genuinely heartfelt goodbyes. They told her they’d also been feeling stuck but seemed fine on the surface. Seeing Sienna make the leap gave them courage. Maybe the stability was just “false peace,” and real peace required shaking things up.

But other reactions were disappointing. Resentful, even. People who made her feel bad for leaving.

“In another version of myself, it would have really shaken me,” Sienna reflects. “Like, oh shit, I shouldn’t have quit. But where I’m at right now, I was like—no. This just proves that this was the move I needed to make for my continued growth.”

Those negative reactions weren’t a sign she’d made a mistake. They were a sign she’d made exactly the right call.

The Explorer

Six months into her sabbatical, Sienna is what she calls an “explorer of anything and everything.”

She’s freelancing in PCB design to test whether autonomy resolves her dissatisfaction with technical work. (Verdict’s still out.)

She’s volunteering at the front desk of 10C, a community hub in Guelph—part co-working space, part café, part gallery, designed for community change-makers. She sits there every week, greeting people, asking what they do, learning the nitty-gritty: what scheduling system they use, how their invoices work, why people complain about the sign-in process.

“I see the way that the space runs, and I think—that’s really cool,” she says. “Why doesn’t this exist in other places? How do you make it happen?”

She’s not just curious. She’s diagnosing. She sees where the current isn’t flowing right in community systems the same way she sees it in circuit boards. Then her brain automatically starts redesigning the connections so power reaches where it’s needed.

She’s starting to see what she’s always been: a Circuit Board Maker for Communities.

She embeds in organizations and communities, spots integrity gaps others miss, engineers flexible structures that turn stated values into lived practices, then hands off the design and moves to the next challenge.

It’s the birdhouse pattern. The coffee house pattern. The same thing she’s always done, just applied at a different scale.

The Pressure and the Permission

Sienna would be lying if she said the uncertainty was easy.

A friend observed: “It sounds like you’re putting a lot of pressure on yourself to find the thing.”

She laughed. “Totally. Yeah.”

That pressure—driven by her sky-high internal standards (94th percentile in conscientiousness)—makes the exploration “not fun” sometimes. She’s sent out applications for old design lead jobs in moments of doubt. Is the sabbatical frivolous? Indulgent? Just a phase?

But then she remembers: she’s young, financially stable, has no dependents, and has a partner who can work remotely from anywhere. Her 95-year-old self would tell her to stop rushing back to productivity and actually use this ridiculous freedom.

She’s planned a getaway to a yurt for “pure analog brain and pencil” reflection. She’s visiting a second community organization in Mississauga to compare models. She’s exploring YPO and “Buck the Small Talk” events to understand structured community building.

She’s gathering data. High-signal data. Not about finding her perfect career, but about understanding herself and what makes systems work for real humans.

What She’s Building Toward

Sienna doesn’t have a five-year plan. She doesn’t have a business card that says “Community Systems Architect” (though maybe she should).

What she has is a heuristic: Does this help me use my diagnostic eye and building instinct to create tangible change in communities?

She’s learning that she doesn’t need to maintain the systems she creates. That’s not flakiness—that’s her edge. She’s the spark person. She comes in, diagnoses what’s broken, prototypes an elegant fix, catalyzes the change, then moves on when someone else can maintain it.

Maybe she’ll run her own consultancy, moving between different communities as an outside catalyst. Maybe she’ll embed in one organization long enough to take on multiple challenges. Maybe something entirely different will emerge from her stepping stones.

She didn’t need someone to hand her a destination. What she needed was to trust that leaving was right, even without knowing where she’d land. She needed language for patterns she’d been living her whole life but couldn’t quite name. And she needed to know she wasn’t crazy for walking away from stability to figure this out.

Working through ARC with Chris showed her she wasn’t alone in venturing off the beaten path. Others are doing it too, along very different routes.

Sienna’s still figuring it out. The circuit board isn’t complete. But for the first time in years, she’s not miserable while she works on it. The current is finally flowing in the right direction.

And when her 95-year-old self looks back at this moment—young, free, unencumbered, exploring—she’s going to be so damn proud she took the leap.

What This Reveals

Sienna’s story reveals a pattern many high-achievers face: mistaking a structural mismatch for a personal optimization problem. What looked like inability to commit—cycling through activities, leaving jobs after launching them—was actually her innate role as a spark person who diagnoses, designs, and catalyzes before moving on.

If you’ve achieved what you’re “supposed to” but still feel suffocated, the question may not be “What should I do next?” but “What pattern have I been dismissing as a character flaw that’s actually my edge?”