Weekly Badass Mail

I do not like needing help. Like, at all. When I quite my corporate job, I knew the math. Jae (my husband) and I had talked about it. We had a plan. I didn't just wake up one day and decide to blow up our whole life for funsies. But still. There was this part of my brain that couldn't get over the fact that, for a while, Jae was going to be the main source of income in our house. And that felt bad. Not because he made me feel bad. I want to make that very clear. And it wasn't because we...

It's not too late to sign up for The Career Reboot Group Intensive on August 16th! This is a 2-hour live group coaching session for burned-out professionals who are tired of spinning in the same “Should I stay, should I leave, what is wrong with me?” loop. We’ll use my 5 Cs framework to figure out what’s driving your burnout, what’s still fixable, and what kind of next move makes sense for your real life. You’ll leave with language for what’s been happening, a clearer read on your options,...

I was interviewed last week for a podcast opportunity, and at one point the interviewer asked me a question that made my brain do a full record scratch. She asked, basically: Do you believe coaching is your life’s purpose? And listen, I know the expected answer. This is the part where I’m supposed to say, “Yes, absolutely, I was put on this earth to do this work, every hard thing I’ve lived through led me here,” cue the soft crescendo music and the tears. But that’s not what I said. What I...

You’re not staring at one door. You’re staring at four. In this week’s episode of The Balanced Badass Podcast® I break down why your brain keeps blanking when you try to plan your next move, and what to do about the fog before you make any decisions. But there’s one part of the episode I want to go deeper on, because it’s the piece I watch change everything when someone actually uses it. When people picture leaving a job, they picture one thing. The cliff. A single terrifying leap into...

My best friend from high school texted to cancel our girls’ trip only a few weeks before we were set to all meet up in Virginia. Her dad went on hospice, and none of us know how much time he has left. So the group chat conspired without her and decided to cancel this year’s trip and just bring the trip to her. I drove 12 hours to sit in her living room and hug her. Not once did I check whether the drive was a good use of my time. No metric made hugging my best friend the smart play. And...

You’ve got a list of reasons you haven’t made the move yet. The timing. The money. The market. The fact that it would look insane to anyone watching. Every reason is true. And not one of them is the actual thing stopping you. This week I talked with LauraAura, host of The Gutsy Podcast, and she said something I haven’t been able to put down: The thing you want most is usually sitting right behind the thing you resist most. Read that again, because it flips the whole problem. We treat...

I was talking with a friend the other night about how she’d been feeling irritable for weeks. She knew she was irritable. She kept apologizing for it. What she didn’t know was what the irritability was about. She’d been calling it stress. Stress from the workload, stress from her manager, stress from trying to hold everything together at home at the same time. She’d been managing the stress as best she could by exercising more, sleeping earlier, and saying no to things she used to do. But the...

“I can’t tell anymore if it’s the job or if it’s me.” I hear that sentence almost every week, sometimes word for word. Smart, capable people who’ve been carrying something heavy for a long time, and somewhere along the way the question stopped being “what’s wrong here” and turned into “what’s wrong with me.” Here’s what makes that question so hard to answer honestly. When you’re burned out, two things happen at the same time. You start tossing out the good stuff like the wins, praise, and the...

Most of what gets written about portfolio careers is aimed at people who want one, the creative types and serial founders who light up at the thought of juggling five things at once. But maybe that’s not you. You’re looking at this because you already know what it costs to give one company everything. You did exactly that, for years. And when the burnout hit, or the layoff came, or you just woke up one morning unable to walk back in, you didn’t lose a job. You lost your income, your routine,...