Weekly Badass Mail

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,...

If you've been following me, you know I've been trying not to be on screens after 8:30 p.m. And yet, here I am writing this email at 9:01 p.m. just to get "one more quick thing" done. And I'm feeling that little twinge. That low hum of I said I wasn't going to do this. Turns out that twinge has a name. This week I talked with Courtney Townley on The Balanced Badass Podcast®, and she calls it integrity pain. It’s the discomfort you feel when your daily actions don’t match what you actually...

A quick glance at the jobs report and one might think we’re taking a turn for the better. 172,000 jobs added in May. More than double what economists expected. Unemployment sitting flat at 4.3 percent. Every headline you scrolled past called it strong and solid. And if you’re sitting in a job that’s been sucking the life out of you, you probably felt two things at once. A little relief that things aren’t falling apart. And then a knot in your stomach you couldn’t quite name. That knot is...