Please Advise: Stop Networking. Do This Instead.
Becoming You with Suzy Welch
In this episode of 'Please Advise' on Becoming You with Suzy Welch, two listeners share deeply personal challenges. Erin, a 55-year-old single mother working in HR, feels emotionally
Key takeaways
- Leaving a soul-draining job doesn't require having all the answers—action can come before clarity.
- Core values like 'non-cibi' (helping others) and 'radius' (systemic change) are essential guides for career decisions.
Main topics
- Career burnout and purpose
- Values-based decision making
Notable quotes
"Stop building the website, and start building the business."
"Paralysis is not the same as patience."
Conclusion
Suzy Welch concludes that meaningful change begins not with external strategies like networking, but with internal
Transcript preview
Speaker 2 (0:00) I'm looking for motivation. I'm looking for a new foundation. Yeah, I'm on that new vibration. I'm building my own foundation. Pull up, baby, Speaker 1 (0:07) baby. You won't break my soul. Well, Speaker 2 (0:10) I was just thinking, you know, the great sage, the guru, the great philosopher that we all know, Beyonce. I love her so much. She released a song in 2020 that, it was a banger. It was called Break My Soul. I mention it because work often breaks our soul. It does it all the time. It does. That's life. Even me with my happy career, I've had times where work has broken my soul. But today on the podcast, we're going to answer the question, what can you do? Yes, you do to make that not your story, to make that not your narrative. I'm Susie Welch, and I'd like to welcome you to the series that we have within the Becoming You podcast called Please Advise, where I answer questions from real people, bringing real questions, and we dive into them together with the goal of getting to real, no BS solutions. Speaker 2 (0:59) So today on this pod, I'm answering two questions from two listeners with searing, soaring, totally human questions. The first is about that Beyonce song, essentially. She is Erin, the questioner, the listener. She's a 55-year-old single mom of three teenage daughters working from home in a job that is quietly hollowing her out. I mean, terrible. She's dying inside and she wants to know, should she stay? And there are good reasons for her to stay, as you will hear. Or should she go where there's a lot of risk? Now, I should mention briefly here that Erin, in her question and in her answers to my probing afterwards, mentioned something called the values bridge. And if you're new to this podcast, welcome, by the way. Here's a quick version of what that means, the values bridge. That's an assessment that I developed with my lab that helps people identify their core values, the ones that actually drive you, so that you can start to build the career and the life around you that you genuinely want. So Erin has taken the values bridge and she's sitting with the results. And she wants to know, how do I actually leave this soul-breaking place and get onto the life that I was meant to live? Like Jonah Bark, I'm not afraid. I was born to do this. And that's not a small question. That is the question for so many of us. The second question on Please Advise today is from Parnian, who is not coming from a soul-breaking place. She's more in a place of... urgency and yearning about how to grow her career without crossing boundaries in relationships. And so you'll hear her question if you stay with us today, and I really, really hope you do. Her question sends me off on a very, very personal tangent about love and shame and blame and forgiveness that I did not realize that I needed to tell, but apparently I did, and I did, and I tell it. So right ahead, two questions I'm going to advise. Let's get into it. Basically, I Speaker 4 (2:49) am a 55-year-old single mother. I have three teen daughters, and I'm barely making ends meet. I work from home doing HR, specifically leaves of absence, and for a shipbuilder company. I've been there for four years. pretty isolated working at home and feeling like I'm underpaid for what I do. I'm just kind of at odds with the company as well. Like I don't feel like they're morally a place where I feel like in sync with. So my question is, should I stick it out at this job until I've taken the time to fully understand and put my values, bridge results into action, which could be a while, or should I seek employment elsewhere? And I know these are questions like you can answer, like you don't know me. And even if you. did know me super well, you'd say, honey, you got to figure that out yourself. No, I Speaker 2 (3:35) would be unemployed if I said to people, honey, you've got to figure that out yourself. That's my job. So no, and I want to, you don't have to figure it out yourself. That's what Becoming You is about. That's what I love to do. That's my purpose. So I have some answers for you already, and I don't even know anything about you. My immediate answer is get the heck out of that job fast. No one should suffer. You are in pain. But let's do some – can we do some diagnoses here, right? You're 55. The kids are teenagers. How did you fall into this job? I was looking Speaker 4 (4:09) for a little while at going back to school to become a nurse because I love helping people. And I thought, okay, I'd have zero financial or zero science background. I had like more of a, you know, business and degree, my undergraduate degrees in business. And I thought, okay, well, I'm going to have to take a lot of like prereq courses to get this going. And I just thought once I started to take them and signed up, I was like, oh my gosh, I'm in over my head. I don't think I can do this. So I had quit my job and was working at a medical place. to try to get experience and do all of that. And then I realized, okay, this is not going to work. So a recruiter saw my resume, I think on LinkedIn or one of the places and said, oh, you have a pretty, you know, a specific background in HR that I have is, you know, leaves of absence and ADA and that kind of thing. So someone at the company was going on maternity leave and they said, we would love to get someone in here who can know the, the. work and train her up. And then here I am four years later, that person moved to a different role within the company. So they're like, hey, do you want to take it? So initially it started off like pretty good. I was like, okay, yeah, I like this and everything. But now it's just becoming like, I just feel like this is just not a great place. I don't really like the way they treat people. And I'm grateful in a lot of ways too, because I'm like, I'm lucky I get to wake up and I'm home working when my girls come and go in the day and get back from school. And I'm grateful for that. But I also know like, A lot of it, I'm working with my therapist on, okay, I got to learn to really believe in myself because that's a big factor here. Like I have very low, like, oh, I don't think I could do that. It's Speaker 2 (5:40) great that you're working with your therapist on figuring out why you don't stand up for yourself more. But one of the reasons we do not stand up for ourselves is because we don't know ourselves. And so we start to stand up for ourselves and we say, wait, is that actually me? So let's try to find out about you what we can. You took the values bridge, correct? Yes. Okay. What are your top five values? My core values are, number one, non-cibi. Okay, I knew it. Non-cibi, you've described it already when you talked about why you want to be a nurse. And by the way, we actually have data on different professions, and nurses are number one, non-cibi. So this heart of wanting to help people in intimate, one-on-one ways is definitely a defining value of yours. It's the core of a nurse, right? Yes, okay, and you're not Speaker 4 (6:20) living this value at all right now. Okay, go on. What's number two? Belovedness is number two, and Speaker 2 (6:25) it's a tie with radius. Okay. let's talk about belovedness for a moment. This is the desire to have your life organized around a romantic partner. And now you're divorced. And I mean, I don't know where your head's at around this. I mean, I remember after I was divorced from my first husband, I was so happy just to be free. That's me. Okay. All right. So fine. All right. So, but it doesn't mean that that value has gone away. I mean, I think that what that shows me is that in you, there is a fundamental desire for a partnership, but it may be on a hiatus right now. Speaker 4 (6:56) It is. It really is because I was divorced six years ago and I've dated a little bit here and there, but I'm really having a hard time meeting someone. And part of it is that Speaker 2 (7:03) I'm here working home alone and Speaker 4 (7:05) getting out is not part of my day to day. But anyway, so that is something. And by the way, when I looked at my results, the belovedness, the authenticity gap was zero. Does that mean that... Because it says you are living fully in alignment with your deepest desire to love. Right Speaker 2 (7:20) now. Speaker 4 (7:20) I Speaker 2 (7:20) mean, like right now, Speaker 4 (7:21) belovedness, you Speaker 2 (7:22) don't need it. You don't want it. You would be dating if you wanted to. I think this is, you know, belovedness is an interesting value to look at when somebody's just gone through a divorce or like me, just been widowed. For me, belovedness is down at 16. I just put it out of my life. I'd say let's put a pin on belovedness because it's not exactly relevant to what we're looking at right now. What's Speaker 4 (7:40) your Speaker 2 (7:40) third priority? Radius. Okay. Huh. Well, that must have an authenticity gap because radius is the desire to change the world in a systemic way. And you are working remotely on small HR matters, right? And so this yearning on radius. Now, many people have a high authenticity gap on radius. I'm 100%. 100%. Yeah. Ouch. Does that mean my gap is like the highest it could be? Speaker 4 (8:07) Can't be higher. And number four is eudaimonia. Yeah, eudaimonia, Speaker 2 (8:11) personal flourishing and joy and balance and self-care. So look, that one's kind of being fulfilled by the working from home and the ability to come and go as you please. And it might be your eudaimonia that has kept you in this job, okay? It has, Speaker 4 (8:27) yeah. Speaker 2 (8:27) Okay, what is five? Number five is affluence. Okay, money. That's what's keeping you in the job. Steady, affluence. And it's not making you rich this job. You're underpaid. hate, but it's certain. What's happening is two really big values, non-cibi, the desire to help people, and radius, the desire to change the world in ways that people can see and you can feel. Those things are contributing to this sense. And so this sense of like, I am in the wrong place and I'm in... I don't know if it's pain or if it's just discomfort, but it's enough that you wrote me, right? Right. And it's also a Speaker 4 (9:02) fear. I think I signed my thing like afraid and broken. It's sort of like I feel this urgency because I was, you know, given. Anyway, long story short, I had some assets when I first divorced and I kind of was like, maybe the eudaimonia. kicked in and I was like, I need to have some fun. I had a marriage that was hard and I wanted to take my kids to Europe and here I am, like I have money that I owe on