717: Behind the Decision: Real Stories of Executives Who Left $200K–$500K Careers to Do Work That Actually Fits (Escaping Corporate Burnout and Golden Handcuffs) | Executive Series Part 2

[00:00:00] Hayley Lowe: We often rationalize our way into roles that look great on paper but feel wrong in practice, and I think sometimes it takes our intellect to catch up with our instinct. The more you ignore it, the louder it gets.

[00:00:12] Katie Hyskell: At the end of the day, you're the only person that has to wake up and live in your life. Being miserable for 40 or 60 hours a week, is that what you want to look back on?

[00:00:22] Scott Anthony Barlow: That's Hayley and Katie. Both executives, both with deep experience, both with the kind of income, titles, and team that would make most people stay, and they left anyway.

[00:00:32] Hayley Lowe: There's real power in recognizing early when something doesn't fit and being really honest about that.

[00:00:39] Katie Hyskell: If I'm gonna go back into this world, I'm gonna go back in as, like, a fully integrated person, and they either accept it or they don't. And if they don't, it's not the right culture or it's not the right environment.

[00:00:51] Scott Anthony Barlow: Two real executives, high-income earners, both with families and real obligations, exactly where you might be at right now. Both of these people made the moves that you've probably been thinking about for too long, and both of them wish that they'd done it years earlier. The really interesting part is not how did they give up everything and make a move, but instead it was how did they change to work that fits without giving up everything?

[00:01:16] This is Happen To Your Career. Most people let their career happen to them, falling into jobs by accident, staying longer than they should, and wondering if this is really all there is. But a few people decide to stop settling and do something different. This podcast is for you to take control, get intentional, and design your career to fit the life that you want to build.

[00:01:36] Real stories and real research so you can stop waiting and start making it happen. I'm Scott Anthony Barlow, and this is part two of our Executive Career Change series. And by the way, if you haven't already listened to part one of the series, then I'd suggest pausing this and then going back just one episode and starting there, or the direct link is in the show notes.

[00:01:56] On this episode, you're going to hear from both Hayley and Katie. I mentioned earlier two executives in various different executive roles, both high-income earners, and both had been in their organizations or industries for a long time. Both of them also had outgrown those same organizations and same situations.

[00:02:17] Here's the fascinating part that I've seen for so many people that we've gotten to interact with since 2013, is that they knew something was wrong for years before they acted. Both tried to fix it on their own. It didn't work, but eventually both got there with help. And what's interesting is that they both say the exact same thing about the time that they spent waiting.

[00:02:40] Hayley Lowe: We often rationalize our way into roles that look great on paper but feel wrong in practice, and I think sometimes it takes our intellect to catch up with our instinct. The more you ignore it, the louder it gets.

[00:02:52] Scott Anthony Barlow: That's Hayley, who you met earlier, and in her case, she'd been in senior communications roles for over a decade. She had a team of people who depended on her, really smart, talented people, and then an income that most people would consider proof that they were doing the right thing. Now, for Hayley, the moment of knowing and recognizing that she needed to make a change came very gradually. It was after years of ignoring the signals, and that's part of how this happens.

[00:03:19] It tends to creep up on you. It tends to go through cycles. But for Katie, it came very differently. It came as a question that she had been avoiding for many years. Okay, in Katie's case, you got to meet her at the beginning of the episode, and she had spent quite a few years in senior level, director, VP level sales roles, mostly inside of tech organizations.

[00:03:39] And I think what is sort of fascinating here is that many people in, you know, high income earning situations, many executives, they will recognize very slowly that something is off. But since they tend to be so positive, optimistic, you know, the type of people who can, in many ways, figure out anything, then they tend to tolerate it for a lot longer than what other people might.

[00:04:05] This is part of what leads to having the recognition years before doing anything about it in a more formal way. Eventually, it catches up though. And eventually, you don't have a choice anymore.

[00:04:18] Katie Hyskell: By 2024, when I hit that burnout and my health decided it was also going to burn out, I really took that stop and said, "I can't keep doing the same thing and expecting different results."

[00:04:30] Scott Anthony Barlow: In Katie's case, this was the moment when the knowing stops being something that she could postpone, and many executives that we've worked with and been able to interact with over the years have had some version of that breaking point for a long time, and that's what happens before they ever really seriously consider getting help and moving through these types of situations, before they ever pick up the phone, if you will.

[00:04:54] But let's go back to Katie's and Hayley's stories here, because we already said that once they recognized that there was a problem, neither one of them were necessarily able to address the real problem. It wasn't that they were doing nothing, it was that they were both spending years on their own to try and fix it first.

[00:05:11] Now, for Hayley, this meant an internal pivot first. You know, "If I get another role inside my company, maybe that'll help." And then she eventually moved to a new organization, which was a clear wrong fit. And then came books and assessments, and even working with a few coaches who gave her some level of clarity about who she was without ever helping her figure out what to do with that information.

[00:05:34] Now, I think what's really fascinating for most executives that I've met is that they're often driven people. They have often, you know, accomplished many challenging things in their lifetime, and they're used to being able to figure out a way through. Where this starts to break down in this case is that just having the awareness, knowing yourself enough at this level, and then also knowing where you're trying to go and what you're trying to get to isn't enough.

[00:06:01] Often, what it requires is perspective. Now, the reason for this is because you can't see past your own thinking from inside it. What got you here won't get you there, and that's true of trying to solve this type of multi-variable problem in the same ways that you have found success in the past is going to break down. The thing that's going to close this gap is almost never more thinking or doing on your own.

[00:06:29] Hayley Lowe: Wanted someone to, sort of, call me out on my BS and just, yeah, offer a different perspective on things.

[00:06:34] Scott Anthony Barlow: Part of what kept Hayley stuck for so long is that she could see clearly in hindsight, but not necessarily in the moment, and the same pattern allowed her to keep talking herself into roles that weren't actually a great fit.

[00:06:46] Hayley Lowe: I wish I had listened to those sort of early signals where I was questioning if this role would be the right fit.

[00:06:53] Scott Anthony Barlow: This is where the challenge deepens, though. When the intellect finally catches up to the instinct, the next thing executives do is often generate a lot of activity that feels like progress without producing any.

[00:07:06] That might be updating the resume, generating a bunch of calls with recruiters, responding to those, you know, people and friends that have those opportunities, interviews, conversations, movement.

[00:07:17] Hayley Lowe: Almost before I had time to really think about it, I found myself on the hamster wheel. All of a sudden, I was back speaking to headhunters and recruiters and interviewing for jobs, and there were processes. I literally felt a bit like a rat in a wheel.

[00:07:31] Scott Anthony Barlow: And generally, movement equals progress, except when you can't see what is actually stopping you. Now for Katie, the sticking point was different. Now listen to this, it's very subtle. Before she could move, she had to actually figure out what she wanted work to do for her in the first place.

[00:07:48] Katie Hyskell: The biggest benefit that I got through coaching was defining what is my relationship to work, and what does work bring into my life.

[00:07:58] Scott Anthony Barlow: She had to be a little bit selfish. The interesting thing is most of the leaders and executives that I have met along the way are not selfish people. They've gotten to their roles and areas of leadership because they think about others first.

[00:08:13] Now, once Katie could begin to answer this, "What do I need work to do for me? And then also, where can I contribute the best? And how do I want work to show up in my life intentionally?" Once she could answer these questions, the next thing she noticed was the way her income fear had been shaping every decision she was already making.

[00:08:31] But hang on to that, though, because we're gonna go deep into the data here on part three of this three-part series, but the fear of blowing up your income or your life or what you've built already doesn't only keep you from leaving, it changes how you live inside the situation that you're currently in.

[00:08:48] Katie Hyskell: What has been challenging, and I would say is challenging for most people, is going into job search and how you relate to your job with a scarcity mindset. I can't have boundaries because then I'm afraid I'm gonna get fired. I can't have boundaries because I'll never find another job.

[00:09:02] Scott Anthony Barlow: This, by the way, is something most people never really think about. The fear of leaving doesn't just delay the move. Yes, that's not great. However, what happens is it's also shaping every decision that you make while you're still on the inside of the role or the situation that you don't want to be in. In this case, we got to meet both of them, and we got to work alongside them to help them systematically get clear on what they wanted.

[00:09:28] That creates a foundation for everything else. And for Hayley, what actually worked was trying to determine where she was trying to run to before she went looking. This allowed her to be able to develop a way of targeting the right opportunities. But once that picture was real, the more important thing is the wrong opportunities stopped looking like options.

[00:09:49] Hayley Lowe: I think if I had an ideal career profile before I would never have taken the last job that I took. It's so obvious to me when I look at that ideal career profile, that would not have been the right fit.

[00:10:02] Scott Anthony Barlow: Now, Hayley didn't just transition to a role. She actually co-created a role that really fit and leveraged her previous expertise in human systems, organizational change, communication, getting things done in an organizational environment, in a context that was very different from the environments that she had been in, in the past.

[00:10:21] But more importantly, this created a much better fit for her because she literally helped architect the role that she's now in. And in her words, she's no longer dreading Mondays. Now, I mentioned earlier that Katie's work started further upstream because before she could move, she had to redefine what she needed work to do for her.

[00:10:40] Once she could answer that, the shape of what was possible looked completely different. And by the way, this took a series of months, really digging deeper and deeper and deeper into the specifics with Katie so that she could become very clear, not just about what she wanted and what work was gonna do for her, but also about what she didn't want.

[00:10:58] And, you know, even being able to create an off the table list, we're not going to consider these types of options, is sometimes just as powerful. And this was as opposed to looking at job descriptions and asking whether each one was tolerable, she started designing what she wanted her actual day to look like and working backward from there, reverse engineering the situation.

[00:11:18] Katie Hyskell: By July, I had actually created my own job function. I'm not interested in being a manager, so right now. That was really straightforward.

[00:11:26] Scott Anthony Barlow: Now, that's a sentence that almost nobody would have predicted that she'd be saying, 'cause she walked in scared, and it's also a sentence that wasn't possible until she actually did the work of figuring out what she wanted, where she was going, not just what would allow her to survive.

[00:11:43] I think it's really important to hear, to note, that a lot of the work that we've done over the years with executives, in most of those situations, we're not helping those individuals find roles that are out there. Often, we're helping them either create or modify roles, create something that's not in existence currently, or modify something that is in existence.

[00:12:03] That's part of how we are co-creating fit here. Very, very different a lot of the times than the average job search, the average career change. Now, there's a lot that goes into that that we've talked about on many, many other episodes. We'll link up one or two of those in the description in the show notes here. But here's how Katie talks about this now.

[00:12:22] Katie Hyskell: If I'm gonna go back into this world, I'm gonna go back in as, like, a fully integrated person, and they either accept it or they don't. And if they don't, it's not the right culture or it's not the right environment.

[00:12:33] Scott Anthony Barlow: Years of being in the wrong place changes who you think you are, and Katie didn't realize how much who she'd become was actually just the job and the environment until she removed herself from it. Now, what that actually looks like in practice is the kind of thing that is rarely written about or talked about.

[00:12:50] Katie Hyskell: I literally broke out. What would I be able to accomplish in my day? Can I take my kids to school? Will I be there in the afternoons? When I started networking in the job search process I said no to way more things than I said yes to.

[00:13:05] Scott Anthony Barlow: Now, when the actual life you want starts to come into focus and becomes day by day much more clear the way that it did for Katie, the math on what counts as success starts to change as well.

[00:13:15] Katie Hyskell: Hard work is not the only indicator of life success. I'm saying I'm just gonna walk away and decide it's okay to not have a title, to not have that level of prestige.

[00:13:26] Scott Anthony Barlow: Now let's go back to Hayley's situation. The thing she most wanted to say to the version of herself from four years ago wasn't about the destination. It was about this.

[00:13:34] Hayley Lowe: There's real power in recognizing early when something doesn't fit and being really honest about that. So I made the decision quite quickly to leave, which was tough because even though it was really amicable, it was quite emotionally draining kind of extricating myself from that process.

[00:13:52] Scott Anthony Barlow: What Hayley regrets isn't the move itself. It's how long she waited to start moving in a way that was gonna be effective to help her get where she wanted to go.

[00:14:00] Hayley Lowe: I wish I had taken more risks and done kind of crazy things and made more lateral moves. I'm doing more of that in the second stage of my career, but I wish I had done more of that in the first.

[00:14:10] Scott Anthony Barlow: Both of them wish that they had taken effective action many years earlier. I think that part's not a surprise, but I think what is really powerful is what it actually costs them and so many other people to wait. A lot of times it is very, very hidden in terms of what it's actually costing you to stay in the same situation, to continue to be where you are.

[00:14:31] That is what we discuss in part three, and what to do about it. By the way, I would click subscribe right now, follow if you haven't already. That way you get all of the episodes automatically, and it just shows up for you, for part three and every other episode along the way. Also, if you don't actually wanna wait till part three, then if you wanna have a real conversation with our team about your specific situation, then I would say click the link in the show notes.

[00:14:57] It's free, and it's where almost every single one of our clients started. It's in there. Click schedule a conversation, and we'll connect you with the right person on our team. Until then, I'm Scott Anthony Barlow. Adios. I'm out.