ABOUT ANN EILEEN THOMPSON
I’ve spent my career learning that success and alignment are not always the same thing.
For more than 30 years, work has been one of the places God has shaped me most.
I’ve built a career I was proud of, led people and organizations, started, scaled, and sold a business, navigated unexpected transitions, and learned firsthand how easily achievement, responsibility, and other people’s definitions of success can begin shaping the way we work, lead, and make decisions.
Along the way, God has changed the way I think about work, leadership, ambition, identity, trust, and what it really means to be successful.
Today, through coaching, group experiences, writing, and speaking, I help faith-led professionals and leaders bring their work and leadership into closer alignment with who God created them to be and where He is leading.
My work brings together real-world experience, practical wisdom, and discernment with God, helping people look beyond the obvious question, recognize what may be influencing their choices, and respond with greater wisdom and intention.
For a long time, I thought success was the best evidence that I was on the right path.
I was ambitious, capable, and willing to work hard. And that approach served me well for years.
For years, the formula seemed pretty straightforward: work hard, deliver, take on more responsibility, and keep moving forward. There were accomplishments I was proud of, opportunities I was grateful for, and plenty of external evidence that things were going well.
But I was also becoming increasingly dependent on achievement, affirmation, and forward momentum to tell me I was okay.
Working harder was often my answer when I felt uncertain. Producing more helped me feel valuable. Success gave me confidence, but it also made it easier to overlook the ways fear, performance, control, and other people’s expectations were influencing how I worked and led.
Eventually, my body and soul could not keep up with the pace.
Burnout became an unexpected turning point.
What followed was not simply a season of rest. God began changing the way I understood work itself. He challenged my assumptions about ambition, identity, trust, and what it meant to be faithful with the gifts and opportunities He had given me.
I began to see that a career can look successful and still be out of alignment.
Not only, What can I accomplish?
But, Who has God created me to be? Where is He leading? What is mine to do in this season? And what might I need to loosen my grip on in order to follow Him more freely?
Those questions changed the trajectory of my work and leadership.
They also became the foundation for the work I now do with others.
I’ve worked in the kinds of environments where these questions get real.
Each chapter of my career has taught me something different about who God created me to be.
That journey has taken me from climbing ladders and chasing performance goals at Procter & Gamble, a large multinational company, to stepping in to lead an established small business, to co-founding, growing, and eventually selling a company of my own.
Along the way, there were promotions and successes I was proud of, plenty of mistakes, a firing that humbled me, rapid growth that stretched me, and eventually burnout that forced me to rethink how I was working and leading.
God used all of it.
The successes helped reveal the problems I love to solve, the ways I naturally lead, and the contribution I am uniquely equipped to make.
The harder seasons exposed other things: how much I depended on performance and affirmation, how easily fear or control could influence my decisions, and how much I still needed to learn about trusting God for provision, identity, and direction.
I know what it is like to succeed and still wonder if you’re on the right path.
I know what it is like to get something wrong, recover, and learn from it.
And I know what it is like to discover that the question God is asking may be different from the one you thought you needed answered.
The breadth and depth of those experiences shape the way I coach, teach, write, and speak today. I bring practical experience and wisdom to the work, but also a deep conviction that some of our most important work and leadership questions are about more than strategy.
They’re also about identity, trust, and discernment with God.
A few things I’ve come to believe about work and leadership.
The longer I do this work, the more convinced I become of a few things:
God is intentional in how He created us.
Our strengths, gifts, energy, experiences, and even the kinds of problems we notice are not random. Understanding how God has designed us can give us important clues about how we are meant to work, lead, and contribute.
Success is not the same thing as alignment.
We’re often taught to evaluate our work by the results we can see: promotions, growth, recognition, money, opportunity, impact. Those can all be good things, but they are not the only things that matter.
Scripture also points us to the fruit God produces in us as we live in alignment with Him. Joy and peace are not things we manufacture through achievement or perfect circumstances. They are fruit we can receive and enjoy, even when life and work are difficult. Jesus tells us to seek first His Kingdom and trust the Father with what we need. That means external results matter, but they are not the first or only evidence that we are on the right path.
Faith and practical wisdom belong together.
Jesus taught us a lot about leadership, stewardship, courage, humility, relationships, responsibility, and how we use what has been entrusted to us. I don’t see faith and practical wisdom as two separate lenses. When we understand both well, they inform each other.
What is happening in us matters as much as what is happening around us.
Our work can expose fear, performance, control, comparison, insecurity, or the need for approval. It can also become a place where God grows trust, courage, freedom, and a more secure sense of identity in Him.
Alignment does not always mean changing jobs.
Sometimes God leads us somewhere new. Sometimes He changes the way we work, lead, make decisions, or approach responsibility right where we are. The goal is not constant change. It is greater faithfulness to who He created us to be and where He is leading.
These beliefs shape everything I coach, teach, write, and speak about. I believe our work matters deeply, but it was never meant to tell us who we are or become the measure of whether our lives are successful.
I’ve shared a lot of my story. I’d genuinely love to hear yours.
I love meeting people and hearing about the work they’re doing, the questions they’re wrestling with, and the things God has been teaching them along the way.
So if something you’ve read here resonates with you, I’d be delighted to meet you.
We can spend 30 minutes getting to know each other and talking about what’s happening in your work or leadership. If there’s a way I can be helpful, we can talk about that too.
Prefer to start by exploring on your own?
The free Alignment Wheel gives you a personalized snapshot across eight dimensions of alignment in your work and leadership.