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She thought she had it all. A loving husband, a high-paying job in New York, two homes, two cars, nights at the theater and enough frequent-flier miles to travel anywhere she wanted. But something still seemed to be missing.

Mary Gottschalk didn’t have serenity.

Growing up in the Midwest and moving to New York after graduate school to pursue a career in financial and economic research, Gottschalk found herself with everything she could possibly want, but without any time to enjoy it.

Struggling with the stress of her job and constantly worrying about everything, Gottschalk couldn’t find the inner peace she was looking for. Long hours at work were putting strains on her, her husband and their faltering marriage.

“We were working all the time and at very, very, very high-stress jobs,” she said. “I had gotten to the point where I enjoyed the work intellectually, but I was always so tired and so drained and so exhausted. It put strains on my marriage, it put strains on me, and I think my husband felt the same way.”

It was at this point when Gottschalk decided she needed to take a risk and escape her stressful lifestyle. In order for anything to change in her life, she realized that she had to take the initiative and bring the change to her. And so she did.

Gottschalk and her husband quit their jobs and planned a three-year sailboat trip in anticipation that it would reignite their marriage and rekindle their love.

“Our response was ‘Hey you only live once. Let’s go see the world while we’re young; we’ll come back and worry about it then,'” she recalled. “And so in a way it was a big risk.

“We were leaving a world that was very competitive, and there was a real risk that when we came back we would end up working as carpenters or waiters.”

Knowing the potential consequences of their actions, Gottschalk and her husband, Tom, set out to sea, putting their most important possessions into storage and getting rid of everything else. This was the change and the risk that Gottschalk was searching for in hopes of transformation and serenity.

“Before I went away, I worried a lot,” she said. “Whether it was about making a contribution, about doing the right thing, about doing the job thoroughly, about being what my boss wanted me to be, about being what my husband wanted me to be. I worried about a lot of stuff.”

The journey

Despite the constant worrying, Gottschalk was determined to let go once she got to sea and jettison the burdens of her New York life. She didn’t want to worry anymore, and truly, there wasn’t a lot to worry about.

“When I got out on the boat, there were a couple of things that happened,” she said. “One of them was the realization that not a lot could go wrong. The only kinds of things that could go wrong were things that you had no control over whatsoever. You live for months on end with the realization that on the one hand, life is pretty good, there’s not much that could go wrong; but on the other hand, if something does go wrong, there is nothing you could do about it.”

With these realizations, Gottschalk gained a greater understanding about herself and about life. All the little things she worried about in her everyday life seemed to drift away, and the change that she was so scared of was now emerging as a blessing in disguise.

“At a certain point I took a risk and as a result of taking that risk I learned so much that I would never have known if I would have done the safe thing,” she said.

Unfortunately, Gottschalk’s marriage didn’t make it; she and Tom divorced after the three-year voyage.

Now, Gottschalk sleeps like a baby and doesn’t worry about a thing. “Whatever is going to happen is going to happen and if I can do something about it, I do it, and if I can’t, I go read a book.”

Looking outward

Thankful for the risks she took, Gottschalk reminds other women to feel empowered and take risks to get to their desired destinations in life.

“If you are unhappy with what you are doing, you need to do something different,” she said. “And the question is whether or not you can identify something that you would really like to do whatever it is.

“It doesn’t have to be a sailboat. The sailboat is a metaphor for taking risk.” Risk, she says, is “giving up what you’ve got before knowing that the other one works.”

Giving up something before the resulting outcome is known involves a lot of risk and a lot of change, and most people don’t like change, Gottschalk said. So in order to embrace change, she encourages people to take the time to search for something that is important to them, something that means a lot to their happiness and personal success. “If you’re feeling stuck, then you need to have some serious conversations with yourself about why you’re stuck,” Gottschalk said. “Part of you being stuck may be that you’re just not confronting what you really need to do.

“You may be unwilling to take the risk of reaching out for what you want to do.”

Going forward

Gottschalk told of her most recent risk. Having been in the consulting business in Des Moines for the last few years, she decided that she wanted to make a career shift and pursue her passion to be a writer and speaker. She told her consulting clients to stop calling, and within three months they did.

Unsure about what to do with her newly claimed spare time, Gottschalk remained optimistic that she had taken the right risk. Luckily within a few months, her phone started ringing again as the publishing date approached for her new book, “Sailing Down the Moonbeam.”

Now, Gottschalk is busy doing book signings and working on speech and presentation materials that will complement her book.

“You set out on a journey, and you end up in a place that’s even better than where you thought you wanted to go,” she said. “And I would say that describes exactly how I felt about it. It was a wonderful experience. It has made the rest of my life even better.”