When Patrick McCleary left his 30-year career in finance in early 2024, he was running on empty.
“I like to call it an ‘amicable divorce’,” he says, “But I was super, super burned out.” Three decades of corporate life had worn him down to the point where he knew his next move wasn’t a new job. It was recovery.
So he took eight months to do exactly that, and to consider his next steps. He did yoga in the mornings. He slowed way down. “It was really resting and repairing my brain,” he says.
During those months, he heard Chip Conley on the Third Act podcast with Liz Tinkham, and something clicked. Patrick had been aware of the immersive, next-chapter programs some universities were running, the year-long, expensive kind. MEA struck him as a five-day version at a fraction of the cost. He did a little research and decided on attending a Navigating Transitions workshop in Baja that October. “Bing, bang, boom, I signed up,” he says.
An idea worth building
When Patrick came to Baja that fall, he arrived with the seed of an idea he’d been turning over for a while. Years earlier, he’d served as executor, trustee, and medical guardian for a friend who died. It was, in his words, “somewhat of a thankless job.” But it fit him. “It really aligned with who I am, and what I’ve been doing my whole career,” he says.
That experience had grown into a vision for a company that would help people navigate the practical and emotional tangle of later life: healthcare, housing, business affairs, community, and legacy. But Patrick still had a decision to make about who to serve, and how.
There were two versions of the company he could build. One looked a lot like his old life, serving the ultra-wealthy. “Chasing after the people with money who everybody else is chasing after,” he says. The other version served people who actually needed the help. During the workshop in Baja, the choice became clear. He’d build for people more like himself: “solo agers” growing old alone, LGBTQ+ folks, and anyone facing life’s later transitions without an obvious roadmap.
Patrick is now actively building his company, Act III – Aging Navigation, as a public benefit corporation, and has named its adjoining nonprofit The Liminati Foundation, after his very first MEA cohort.
A door swings open
That first workshop accomplished what he’d hoped, and more. The setting struck him right away. “It’s beautiful, really mindful, very thoughtful,” he says, describing the space, the staff, the food, the energy, as “very elevated.”
But the real draw was the people. His cohort was made up of twenty-some strangers from all over the world, “highly smart, highly accomplished,” each carrying a different story about how they’d landed there.
What he took away from the experience wasn’t a single insight so much as a door swinging open. “I’d been a good corporate soldier forever,” he says. The workshop tapped into a creative energy he’d kept boxed up for decades and left him with a question: why not me? “I realized, hey, this is possible,” he says. “Since then it’s been one unfolding thing after another.”
Half banker, half hippie
When asked to describe himself now, Patrick says, “I’m half banker, half hippie.” The banker half is obvious, after 30 years in finance. The hippie half was always there too, he says, just kept quiet through a long corporate career. MEA gave him room to let that side out.
Since that first workshop, Patrick has trained as an ICF-certified coach and become a death doula, the latter after meeting a doctor at an MEA film festival who pointed him toward it. Not the obvious second act for a 30-year banker, but it’s the one that fits his vision of who he wants to be, and how he wants to serve in his next chapter.
Why he keeps coming back
That first workshop turned out to be the first of many. Sometimes the pull to come back was almost uncanny. At the December film festival, Patrick realized the company he was building leaned heavily on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Then he discovered that Chip had written a whole book on that exact subject, and was offering two back-to-back workshops on the topic the following spring. “It was one of those ‘is that an odd thing or is it a God thing’ moments,” he says.
He signed up for those two workshops and several others since then. He’s also taken on a leadership role in MEA’s alumni community and now leads the LGBTQ+ affinity group.
If you ask Patrick why he keeps coming back to MEA, he says it’s never really about the curriculum. It’s about who’s in the room.
“It’s the people you meet,” he says. Not just interesting people, but people taking action on their vision and building the life they want. “They’re either doing it, or they’ve done it, or they want to help you do it,” he says. That’s the difference he keeps returning for. Every workshop is another room full of people a step or two ahead of where he’s headed, or right alongside him. He even met his business partner Dana through MEA.
That’s one of the big reasons he decided to say yes to joining MEA’s first year-long Purpose Fellowship, which launched in January 2026. The investment of time and money gave him pause. But spending a year with 28 other motivated individuals building ten-year plans for their lives, with Chip himself as their advisor and coach, was something Patrick had to say yes to.
“It was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up,” he says. “When else would I ever get that kind of one-on-one time with Chip Conley?”
He says the people he’s met through the year-long program are the kind of connections he couldn’t have engineered any other way.
The road ahead
Ask Patrick where all this is heading and he doesn’t hesitate. “I feel very optimistic,” he says. He describes it as a kind of settledness, a trust in where he’s going even without a map. Quoting Lee Johnson, MEA’s Head of Land and Livestock in Santa Fe, he says, “I don’t know where I’m going, but I know how to get there.”
Without MEA, Patrick figures he’d have built some version of his company anyway, but a smaller, safer, “more businessy” version that would have him chasing the same wealthy clients everyone else chases. Lower frequency, he calls it.
That’s the real shift. Not the work itself, but his sense of what the work could be. “I could be a coach in Dallas,” he says, “or I could be a global coach.” Same starting point, much bigger horizon.
And he’s excited about what’s ahead. He’s done the work to know what he wants, and trusts himself to get there. “I’m following my instinct,” he says. “And I feel like I’m heading down the right path.”
Patrick’s MEA journey started with that first Navigating Transitions workshop. If you’re currently going through a big life change and are looking for tools and support to figure out what’s next, consider joining us in Santa Fe or Baja for one of our upcoming foundational workshops:
Explore Navigating Transitions at MEA →