When What You’ve Been Doing No Longer Makes You Happy

Ep: 266

Transcript

Blake Scofield 00:05:
Hi. I’m Blake Scofield, founder and CEO of The Bridge To Fulfillment, mom to 3, USA Today top 10 professional coach, and former corporate executive who got tired of sacrificing my life for a comfortable paycheck. My mission is to expand perspective to achieve greater impact at home and work without sacrifice. This is the bridge to fulfillment.

Blake Schofield 00:39:
What do you do when you find yourself in a season of transition when what you’ve been doing either in your career or your life no longer works or is no longer what you want? You know, this is one of the places it’s really easy to get lost and not really know what to do. And what I see is really a tale of 2 cities, right, 2 approaches or two ways that you can go about this. The first is what I see people very commonly get stuck in, and it’s where I got stuck for almost a decade, which is trying to solve the problem on your own, making changes based on what you see, and hoping that the next job, the next promotion, the next thing that you do is finally going to make you happy. In that journey, I think there’s a lot well, there are a lot of trials and tribulations, especially as it relates to talking to family and friends or coworkers about the struggles that you’re having. And I really want to caution you if you’re doing that to make sure that you’re talking to people who have accomplished what you want to accomplish. Because far too often, what happens is we’re talking to the people who are not impartial. That’s number 1. And number 2, haven’t accomplished what we wanna accomplish.

Blake Schofield 01:57:
And so what ends up happening is we end up being given a lot of well-meaning but very poor advice that we should, “just be happy.” We should not worry about it as much. We should go do other things or that things are just, quote, unquote, as good as it gets. And it’s a huge part of why when I look at my journey of being in this place of a season of transition, a place of feeling this deeply unsettled feeling that there was something more for my life, clearly being able to see that while there were parts of my career I enjoyed, there were parts that I really didn’t and I didn’t have the passion that I used to have. And I was really tired of sacrificing so much of my personal life for my job, but I felt trapped because of how much money I made. I was worried about how I could give less to my job and more to myself, my kids, my friends, the things that I cared about and still be successful and not have to give up that income and do work that energized me again. And so often when I talk to people, they would just tell me this is just the way that it is. You’re not gonna get that passion back, or you should just get a hobby, or you should be happy because I had everything on a piece of paper that was success.

Blake Schofield 03:18:
And what I often see is that this is where so many of us get stuck is we’re making these changes or we’re trying to get clarity. We’re reading the books. We’re changing jobs. We are having these conversations, and they’re not moving us forward. And what happens is either you end up keep making changes like I did only to find it’s more of the same or worse. Right? You don’t actually solve the root cause of why you’re unfulfilled, or you end up giving up and leading this life of sort of quiet desperation of like, well, I’ll just wait until I retire, or I guess I just won’t love my career. I’m just working to live the rest of my life, or, well, I have this high-powered job, so I just have to sacrifice these other things. That is one side of the coin, and I could tell you after living it and then the last 7 years in my own life and how I’ve been able to help clients that that is not the only way.

Blake Schofield 04:13:
A big reason that I started this podcast was to share what’s truly possible with others so that they have examples, knowledge, and the experience that I didn’t have when I was doing that process for over 10 years. And so I wanna share with you what the other side of the coin is. The other side, which is truly looking at this season of transition or this opportunity of saying what I’m doing isn’t what I want for the future and seeing it for what it is, an opportunity to truly level up in your life and in your career. It’s a gift, but it’s only a gift if you are able to see it for what it is and take the opportunity to leverage this to actually gain the deeper insights and clarity to be able to build a career in life of more intentionality behind what you value, to be able to focus your time, your energy, and your state of mind on what will really move you forward and create what it is that you want. You know, the biggest challenge when you reach these moments is the lack of clarity. It is doing a lot of work and feeling like everything that you’re looking at is either more of the same or worse or won’t solve your problem. And when we get stuck in those circumstances, we begin to doubt ourselves. We begin to wonder if what we want just isn’t possible.

Blake Schofield 05:34:
We begin to think maybe I just need to compromise, and I want you to know that that is just not true. When you can look at this opportunity, because it is 1, and say, what is this telling me in terms of what am I to learn from this? What are the things I’m being shown as opportunities to level up? What are the ways of which maybe I have an opportunity to invest in myself to really uncover more of my personal value, right? How am I uniquely gifted? What are my secret sauce skills and unique fingerprint for success? What are the things I really value? How might I be able to learn how to shut my brain off so that I can be more present out of work? How might I be able to learn new skills, perspectives, behaviors to not let work consume my life? How might I actually uncover and be able to move into the things that will make me happier? When we lack clarity, we believe that the answer lies externally in our circumstances, in somebody’s book, in somebody else’s journey. And I want you to know that that’s just not true. The answer is always internal. It’s inside of you. The challenge is that it’s very difficult to assess that information when you are stuck in these cycles of doing things that aren’t working and because we all have limiting beliefs, biases, trauma, whether it’s big t or little t. We have conditioning, and we have limited perspectives based on our life, and those things cloud our ability to truly get the clarity that we need. It’s as if we’ve been driving cross country for 20 years and never got a car wash.

Blake Schofield 07:30:
And so a huge part about understanding your circumstances and why what you’ve done is not helping you get more clarity, in fact, it’s often getting you more and more stuck as if you’re in quicksand and you keep moving your arms and legs and getting deeper and deeper and deeper is because unless you’ve been trained and you’ve done a lot of personal work and it’s taken me, you know, almost 7 years to be able to do this myself and have that clarity in my inner compass, so I can tell you it’s very, very difficult to do on your own, if not near impossible, if you haven’t done this work, is that you’re trying to do this work on your own or with people who don’t have the expertise or the impartial perspective to be able to help you see the truth, to help you see the possibility for your life, to help unlock the inaccurate beliefs or perspectives that are keeping you stuck, and to help you truly tap into your own genius and your own skills and what’s truly possible for you and how you can align all of that to create the life that you want. You know, we often believe clarity has to be difficult, hard, and painful to get, but that’s just not true. It’s our approach that is difficult, hard, and painful. We often believe that if you have a very successful career that you have to sacrifice your personal life, that that’s just par for the course, and that’s also not true. But if we believe those things, we will create them. What I wanna share with you is what I wish I had known 10 years ago when I was sitting in a corporate job successful on paper, but unfulfilled in a lot of other areas in my life. When there were, you know, things in my life I was spending time and energy on that just honestly really drained me or I wasn’t passionate about. And I believed that this was as good as it got or that maybe something was wrong with me or that maybe what I wanted wasn’t possible.

Blake Schofield 09:30:
What I wanna share with you is that life can be so much better than you could even imagine. That that call to something more, that unsettled feeling for you is a gift and calling you to level up. You know, when we have true clarity, when we can be intentional in where we’re focusing our time, our energy, and our state of mind, and we can build a strategy based on the right next steps, we can simplify our lives and careers. We can accelerate and deepen our skill sets and our secret sauce skills and the things that we really are passionate about doing. We can create space in our calendars and have more mental and physical presence in our lives, and we can have that time to invest in building a more fulfilling personal life, to have more joy and connection inside and outside of work. 10 years ago, I would never have believed that my life as it is today would ever be possible. In 2017, when I left corporate, after moving cross country multiple times working at 5 different companies and each I’m hoping the next one would finally be it. All I wanted was a more sane life where I did more fulfilling work, and I had more time to be intentional and present with my kids.

Blake Schofield 10:57:
And it took me so long to leave because I believed I had to sacrifice my income in order to do that. And it was only through this journey that I came to understand it was my own limiting beliefs. It was a lack of knowledge or skills that I had around how I could do it that were actually what kept me stuck for so long. And through that journey and and what you’ve heard if you’ve been listening to this podcast for any length of period of time as you’ve heard our client success stories is that you don’t have to sacrifice. You really can have the life and career you want without having to sacrifice what you’ve worked so hard for or your financial security. You can have better balance. You’re gonna have joy and passion in your career again. You can feel like where you’re putting your time and attention and energy matters to you.

Blake Schofield 11:44:
You can have those deeper connections with family and friends and community. It’s all possible, but it’s only possible when we look at our circumstances and recognize where I am today is not the life I want to be repeating, and I’m done just tolerating what I have. I want more. And through deciding that you want more, you not only give more to yourself, you give more to the people that you really care about. Because when you can get up every day excited and passionate about what you’re going to do, when you have joy around your work and your life, You have that energy to be able to give back to others. You show up as the example that you want to for your friends and your family and your team and your coworkers, and you inspire others to do the same for themselves. And so if today you find yourself at that crossroads where you recognize what I’m doing isn’t working and it isn’t what I want for my future, but you’re unsure on how to get there or what the right next steps are for you to make that move without having to sacrifice something that you don’t want to. I encourage you to sign up for your complimentary personalized career fulfillment plan.

Blake Schofield 12:57:
What that will do is basically schedule a call for us to connect. An opportunity for me to be able to help you see where you are in your journey to career fulfillment, where you’re headed, what those paths are, and help you get clarity and confidence on the right next step for you. The reason I started the Bridge to Fulfillment and the reason I started this podcast is to offer the resources, knowledge, tools, and inspiration that I didn’t have so that you don’t have to go through the decade plus of hard challenges that I went through because there is a proven path and a proven way to get where you wanna go, and everyone’s journey is different. But at the end of the day, you need that impartial perspective from an expert to truly help you maximize what you wanna create for your life. And if you feel called to do so, I would love the opportunity to connect with you and see how I might help you expand that possibility for your career and your life as well. Thanks again for listening. Until next time. Have a great week.