Twenty-five years. When I say that out loud, it gives me pause.
I’ve spent 25 years working in public relations and communications. My career has taken me through federal government, corporate communications, public education, higher education and, eventually, entrepreneurship.
I started out thinking I might become a newspaper reporter. Instead, I discovered public relations, a field that embraces my passion for curiosity, writing and storytelling, many of which attracted me to journalism in the first place.
What I could not have known when I started was just how much this profession, and I, would change.
Today, I run Avant Solutions, the communications consultancy I founded in 2019. I created Anvil Ready, an online communication strategy-building tool. I teach and train other communicators. I speak and write, including my book, Chart Your Path: A 9-Step Method to Getting Unstuck.
None of those things happened because I developed one skill and spent 25 years repeating it. They happened because I kept learning.
In March 2026, I joined Dr. Pam Perry on her Get Out There and Get Known podcast. Our conversation reminded me how much professional growth depends on our willingness to evolve. Sometimes that means learning something new. Sometimes it means letting something go. And sometimes it means giving yourself permission to become the professional you could not yet imagine when you started.
Here are five lessons I have learned along the way:
1. Sometimes growth requires unlearning
One of the biggest adjustments I had to make when I became an entrepreneur was not learning how to run a business. It was unlearning the mindset I had developed after decades of working inside organizations.
For years, there was always a structure around me. There were policies, processes, supervisors, budgets and established ways of getting things done. Even when I was leading teams, I was still operating within a larger system.
Then I became the system.
Suddenly, I was the person deciding what we would pursue, how we would approach it and whether an idea was worth trying. I caught myself mentally asking a question that entrepreneurs do not have the luxury of asking very often:
Can I do that?
Who exactly was I waiting on to give me permission?
That realization was powerful.
Sometimes experience teaches us valuable discipline. But experience can also build fences around our thinking. We become accustomed to how things have always been done, and before long, those boundaries begin to feel permanent.
They are not. Growth sometimes requires examining what you have learned and deciding what still serves you. Keep the wisdom. Keep the discipline. Keep the lessons. But don’t be afraid to tear down a fence that no longer needs to be there.
2. Your technical expertise will only take you so far
When I started Avant Solutions, I knew communications.
I had spent years doing the work.
What I quickly discovered was that knowing how to practice public relations and knowing how to run a public relations business are two very different things.
Entrepreneurship requires you to learn another language. Pricing. Profit margins. Business development. Operations. Accounting. Contracts. Staffing. Technology.
You may enter entrepreneurship carrying a toolbox filled with technical expertise, only to discover that you have walked onto an entirely different construction site.
That doesn’t mean your experience is not valuable. It means you have another set of muscles to build.
One thing that has helped me tremendously is having a community of other business owners. There is something invaluable about being able to sit with people who understand the decisions, uncertainties and challenges that come with building something of your own.
We need people with whom we can exchange ideas, ask questions and occasionally say, “Is this happening to you, too?”
Whatever stage of your career you are in, find those people. Professional growth does not have to be a solo sport.
3. Strategy starts before tactics
This lesson applies whether you are building a business, promoting an executive or creating a communication campaign.
We have to resist the temptation to jump straight into tactics. Someone wants media coverage. Someone wants a social media strategy. Someone wants to launch a podcast. Someone wants to “go viral.”
My first question is always some version of: Why?
Before deciding where you need to show up, understand who you are trying to reach, what you want them to know or do and why any of it matters. Then we can talk about tactics.
That is where Gini Dietrich’s PESO model®, paid, earned, shared and owned media, becomes valuable. Each channel gives us another way to reach an audience. But choosing a channel without first understanding the destination is like jumping into the car, stepping on the gas and only then asking where we are going.
Communication strategy should begin with research and clear objectives, and it should end with an evaluation. If your goal was to attract 2,000 people to an event, don’t finish your campaign report by only telling me how many media impressions you earned.
Tell me whether 2,000 people came. Activity is not the same thing as achievement. That distinction matters.
4. Technology changes. Our responsibility does not.
There’s no way to work in communications today without paying attention to artificial intelligence. I use AI. I learn about it. I attend training. I experiment with different platforms and pay attention to how the technology is evolving.
One of the things I appreciate most is having what feels like another “brain partner” available to help me think through ideas and work more efficiently.
But here is what hasn’t changed: We are still responsible for the strategy. We are still responsible for judgment. We are still responsible for accuracy. And we are still responsible for understanding people. Technology can help us move faster, but speed without direction does not get us anywhere useful.
Think about GPS. It can calculate the fastest route in seconds, but you still have to tell it where you are trying to go.
AI works much the same way. The communicators who thrive will not necessarily be the people who chase every new tool that appears. They will be the people who understand how to combine emerging technology with the timeless skills our profession requires: curiosity, critical thinking, ethical judgment, empathy, creativity and strategy.
Our tools will continue to change. Our obligation to communicate responsibly will not.
5. Big goals become possible when you stop trying to carry them alone
For years, I wanted to write a book. And for years, I didn’t take it on.
Eventually, I joined a cohort of women working through their own personal and professional goals and began working with a life and career coach. During those conversations, something unexpected happened.
As I talked about the different challenges I had navigated throughout my life, my coach noticed a pattern. She pointed out that I seemed to move through a series of steps whenever I encountered something difficult.
I hadn’t recognized it myself. That observation eventually became the nine-step methodology behind Chart Your Path. But there was another important ingredient: accountability.
I completed the book as part of a structured process with deadlines, editors and other people expecting me to keep moving.
And sometimes, that’s exactly what a dream needs. Not another inspirational quote or another year sitting quietly on the vision board. It needs a deadline. A community. A person who asks, “Did you do what you said you were going to do?”
There are dreams we can accomplish alone. But there are others that need witnesses, coaches, collaborators and people willing to give us a gentle, or occasionally not-so-gentle, push.
Reinvention does not erase your experience. It builds on it.
Looking back over the past 25 years, I can see the thread connecting each chapter of my career.
The federal government taught me one set of lessons. Corporate communications taught me another. Public education stretched me in new directions. Teaching sharpened my ability to explain what I know. Entrepreneurship has forced me to challenge what I thought I knew.
Writing a book pushed me beyond another boundary. And now artificial intelligence and emerging technologies are asking all of us in communications to stretch again.
That is the nature of this profession. We are always in school. The moment we decide we have learned everything we need to know is probably the moment the world begins moving past us.
So wherever you are in your career, do not become so attached to the professional you have been that you leave no room for the professional you are becoming.
Stay curious. Find your people. Learn the new tool. Ask the bigger question. Revisit the goal you have been putting off. And every once in a while, examine the invisible fences around your thinking and ask yourself: “Who told me I could not do that?” You may discover that no one did. And that may be all the permission you need.
Monique Farmer, APR, runs a PR/Communication Consultancy, Avant Solutions, and is the creator of Anvil Ready, an online communication strategy builder that helps communication professionals create communication plans. She has taught at the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Nebraska at Lincoln and the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Farmer spent 12 years working in the federal government before her time in corporate communications at ConAgra Foods (now Conagra Brands), then leading communication strategy for Nebraska’s largest school district. In March 2024, she published her first book, Chart Your Path: A 9-step Method to Getting Unstuck.