765: Career Change or Role Redesign? Why You Feel Drained at Work Even When Your Job, Boss, and Company Are Great

[00:00:00] Moira Quinlan: I must have picked wrong. The whole thing must be wrong.

[00:00:02] Scott Anthony Barlow: That's the reaction that most people have when they feel like their career no longer fits. 20 years in, good boss, good job, room to grow, and then somewhere along the way, you stop feeling connected to any of it.

[00:00:12] Moira Quinlan: Why do I feel like I have no energy at the end of the day?

[00:00:15] Scott Anthony Barlow: Moira went looking for the way out, other industries, other roles. And then, she handed it over to AI and asked what should she be doing instead.

[00:00:23] Moira Quinlan: And HR was, like, number one.

[00:00:26] Scott Anthony Barlow: It wasn't only AI who said so, though. But think about that. 20 years in, certain that she had to get out. The answer comes back, "You're already in the right career. It's already well-matched."

[00:00:35] Moira Quinlan: Everything's great, which makes it tough to be like, "What the heck's wrong when everything's like where I had hoped I would be?"

[00:00:41] Scott Anthony Barlow: How do you know if a career change is right? Even if it is, how do you know that you're asking the right questions at all? So what do you do in that situation? The job is right, the company's right, the people are right, and something is still off.

[00:00:52] Introduction: 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.

[00:01:02] 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 work to fit the life that you want to build. Real stories and real research so that you can stop waiting and start making it happen. I'm Scott Anthony Barlow.

[00:01:17] Scott Anthony Barlow: Moira Quinlan spent about 20 years in human resources, most recently as a senior HR business partner, which means she was the person executives came to about their teams and the person everybody else came to about everything else. I spent quite a few years in HR too, so this one was quite a fun conversation for me.

[00:01:35] Now, in her case, everything was actually pretty good. She had a great manager. She had the good company. She had plenty of room to grow, and yet, by the end of the day, she had nothing left in the tank, not for the hard parts, not for the parts she loved, the training, the coaching, the projects that she used to volunteer for before anybody had to ask her.

[00:01:54] So she did what most people do. She assumed that she picked wrong. She made a mistake somewhere along the way. She had to change away from HR, even though she spent 20 years there. She must have made a wrong turn. It's time to get out. And the interesting part here is that every single thing along the way told her the opposite.

[00:02:13] The strengths work we got to do with her pointed back at HR. AI pointed her back at HR. Even other careers that she'd been curious about kept landing her right back where she already was. So what do you do with that? 'Cause hating your job is the easy version. It's much more motivating if you don't like it to go and find a different one. However, this is a different version where every box seems to check out except for maybe a few, and you still can't quite figure out what's going on or what's wrong with you.

[00:02:40] So fast-forward a bit here. Moira stayed in HR, rearranged her role to become a phenomenal fit, and then she quit and left. Bet you didn't see that coming, right? It'll all make sense soon, but before we get to the end of her story, we have to start at the beginning. Let's go back to where it all started.

[00:02:54] I'm curious how you got into HR in the first place. You and I share that. We've both been a part of HR in various different capacities, and what took you to HR in the first place?

[00:03:06] Moira Quinlan: Yeah. It was an accident. I think when I started in the workforce, HR wasn't an option at universities. It wasn't anything formal, and it was right after some market challenges, I think.

[00:03:18] I graduated right after the bubble burst on tech, right? So people that had graduated a couple years before me were like, "Oh, we're going into all these startups. We're starting career at a certain number," that everybody seemed to be, like, doing great. And then I think I was the first graduating class after 9/11, and the whole market went out, and you were talking to agencies and staffing agencies, and they were just, "Well, you know, unless you have two to three years of experience already in the job market, you're competing for jobs that people just need high school degrees," right?

[00:03:47] So I started out saying, "Okay, what are things that just fit who I am and things I'm interested in?" And at the time, this is a very HR comment, but you lost your benefits after six months, not at the age of 26, right? So it was like, "Okay, how do I get benefits? How do I figure out what I can get my foot in the door in to get those two to three years of experience, and then maybe jump to something I'm more interested in?"

[00:04:09] And I was an English major, so a lot of people said, "Oh, you're gonna teach." And I remember I did some substitute teaching at first, and I had this moment as a substitute. I remember the school I was in had this cafeteria, and they had two exits, and one was an entry and one was an exit because they didn't want all the students, you know, it was causing a traffic jam, right? So I'm standing there, and this student comes up to me and he says, "Are you a student or a teacher?"

[00:04:31] 'Cause, you know, I was fresh out of university. And I said, "I'm a teacher." And he, "Ugh," you know, and he walked away, and he did the right thing, went out the door he was supposed to go out. And I remember thinking, "I'm not ready to teach yet. I haven't gone out in the world. I feel more like a student still. I feel like I have more in common with this high school student than being the teacher and saying, 'I'm a teacher.'"

[00:04:51] So I felt like I needed to go out and learn stuff before I could teach others and know what it meant to prep people for the working world. So that, I think, in going through the Happen To Your Career process kind of helped me. I think one of the things that helped me the most was going through how I ended up in HR.

[00:05:04] And so eventually I got the two to three years experience, moved back to the Boston area, ended up in a organization where they were building HR for the first time.

[00:05:13] And I was actually in accounting, which is not the fit for the background I had at all, but it was like admin accounting. And they hired their first ever VP of HR, and she said, "Hey, I know you're going back to school for your master's. You're looking to move into customer-facing areas of the business. Have you ever thought of working with internal customers in HR?"

[00:05:32] And so kind of got recruited internally once I was in an organization. And I read up on it, and I was like, "This sounds great." And then I, it was off and running and helping them build an HR department for the first time.

[00:05:42] Scott Anthony Barlow: After that point, you spent about, what? 15 years in HR, and most recently as a senior HRBP. For everybody else who might not know what an HRBP does or HR business partner does, what did a normal day or normal week in this role look like for you?

[00:06:01] Moira Quinlan: Basically, we support the employee experience. The employee life cycle, right, it starts before they're hired with, you know, the interviewing piece, and then the onboarding and making first good impression for new employees, and do they have all the tools and access to resources to do their job?

[00:06:17] Is their manager reaching out to them? Do they know where to go on day one? And the first 90 days and their interaction with people, do they have a mentor or a buddy that can take them through the culture of an organization? I specifically have been tasked in more than one organization I've worked for recognition-type projects. So results from engagement surveys.

[00:06:37] A lot of companies have metrics on how their culture is from a health perspective. Are employees engaged? Do they feel like they have everything they need to do the job? And if you wanna raise that year over year, you have to act on the feedback you get from these surveys. So I did a lot of work in that space over time.

[00:06:52] And then at the strategic level, right, you're supporting executives and higher level managers with, like, how do I organize my team to perform best? Who are my strongest players?

[00:07:03] You become more of a coach. You might get a leader that comes in and says, "Hey, I'm trying to communicate this message out to my staff or up to corporate, and how does this sound? What do I need to do to edit it?" I guess in a nutshell, anything that has to do with the health of your culture, your organization from a people perspective.

[00:07:22] Scott Anthony Barlow: To your point, you touch everything. Anything that has to do with people.

[00:07:25] Moira Quinlan: [00:07:25] Scott Anthony Barlow: And I think that leads to the next question because it really seems like getting to know your story a bit, you weren't in a place where you were miserable at all.

[00:07:35] In fact, furthest thing from it, but also it seems like something was off at some point and you started paying attention to that. What was that?

[00:07:43] Moira Quinlan: The motivation that I had for even the parts that I enjoy, it wasn't there. I did the CliftonStrengths, right? Going through that process, you get your five top strengths, and I have positivity, learner, like that kind of fun adventure, like all this stuff. I thought, what's wrong? If I'm not motivated to do the training, the coaching, the stuff that I know I enjoy, like, why is that off? Why do I feel like I have no energy at the end of the day?

[00:08:07] When you go through this process, the coaching process of like, oh, is it the manager? Well, no, she's awesome. You know, like there's plenty of growth opportunities, so what is it that's like... Why am I losing my energy really? Like the energy depletion. Positivity is on my strengths, so like usually that alone is like I see the benefit of whatever I'm doing pretty quickly and I'm like, "Oh, okay, let's roll."

[00:08:26] If nothing else, even if it's not something I enjoy, I'm gonna learn how to do something better that I do enjoy, right? I didn't know why I was losing that if everything seemed okay, and I didn't get there on my own. When I got my CliftonStrengths results, it was you can plug it into AI and say, "Hey, what kind of jobs are best for somebody with this skill set?"

[00:08:45] And HR popped up. It was like in the top two. So I figured I had to go on a longer journey of discovery and figure out what was going on.

[00:08:52] So I thought about it. I went through the process, and I think two things came out. One, I had lost my sense of why. Did I end up here because I wanna be here, or did I just say yes to stuff along the way without much of a plan? Is that what's wrong?

[00:09:07] And then also, I realized that HR has evolved a lot. And so some of the stuff I was doing when I was building an HR department from scratch, or more training and development and coaching and teaching people how to interview, some of that was shifting. A lot of organizations are going to centers of excellence, where like you become more specialized in one area of HR.

[00:09:30] So I was able to kind of identify that by getting a coach. I learned that no, you're right where you should be. Somehow you got there without structuring it formally, but you ended up in a place that's a really good fit for your strengths.

[00:09:42]

[00:09:42] Scott Anthony Barlow: That's huge. I wanna spend just a minute digging into that area. Specifically, so many people when they find themselves in a situation where it is obvious that it no longer fits, then so many people go through the iterations where it's like, "I just need to get out of HR," or, "I just need to get out of marketing," or, "I just need to stop doing in one way or another, you know, whatever it is that I'm doing."

[00:10:07] That's gonna be some version of the answer, and that's something that goes through almost everybody's head, not everybody, but pretty frequently. And when we really delve into your situation, it was really two major pieces. You know, one that you mentioned was you'd lost your why, right? And then the other one is that there's a big chunk of the job that really had just stopped fitting anymore.

[00:10:30] Was good for you at one point, and was no longer good for you in the same way as it once was. And so I'm curious about that portion that didn't fit. Before you realized that's what was going on, if you think back even before that where you were just starting to realize, "Hey, something is off here," do you remember any key points or key moments along the way where you're like, "Wow, I have to do something about this"? Or was it just a trickle of realizations over time? How did that work for you?

[00:11:00] Moira Quinlan: I think it was a trickle over time, but also, like I said, I was in an organization with so much opportunity, so like you could sign up to be like, "Oh, I wanna train this group on this or that." And when you realize you're like too tired to wanna sign up for the opportunities that excite you, you know?

[00:11:18] So it's like, okay, why don't I have any energy left for this? It's there. Why didn't I volunteer for that project? And it was like, oh,I feel like I've got enough on my plate already, but like the stuff on that plate, I didn't know it at the time, but the reason why was that I didn't have the energy left in the tank.

[00:11:35] It wasn't a bunch of tasks. It wasn't that I picked the wrong career way back when. It was just there's this task that I need to acknowledge how to manage when I do that task so that it doesn't deplete my energy, or I can refill and make sure that I'm carving out the time for the part of my job that I do love, that is still there. I just need to figure out how to access it more and identify those tools and resources to make that happen.

[00:11:57]

[00:11:57] Scott Anthony Barlow: Tell me about what you feel like you were missing as it relates to your why.

[00:12:02] Moira Quinlan: So part of it seems really simple now, but it took a long time to go through with a coaching process.

[00:12:07] If you don't know why, then you don't know if you're happy or unhappy where you are. And so I think part of my process had to be like, why am I here? How did I get here? Do I feel like the choices were smart? And then am I happy here, and for how long? And I realized that a lot of what I was doing informally was, since I was young, I've always said, "Well, what's my non-negotiable? Where don't I wanna be?"

[00:12:28] And that has sort of gotten me down a path where, yeah, I'm pretty happy where I am. So I think just going through the process of being like, "Yeah, I'm good, and now I just wanna enjoy where I'm at." 'Cause sometimes when you don't have your goals for the future and you get everything that you visioned you wanted to have and you're like, it's kinda like maybe part of why I was lost was like, I don't know where I'm going from here, but I'm really happy that I'm where I'm at, but now I'm like, what do I do next?

[00:12:53] So I think it was just confirming that I'm where I wanna be, that if I'm staying with the company I'm staying with, it's my decision and my choice, not a feeling of I'm stuck and I don't have choice. It's a conscious decision that I worked really hard to say, "Yes, this is what I want."

[00:13:08] Scott Anthony Barlow: You started saying it's really simple, and then what I hear you describing is that the simple part is the difference between falling into something and intentionally choosing to be there.

[00:13:20] And I think there's this really, I don't know, horrific but really fascinating sort of phenomenon that, as humans, we all have some desire for control, and in reality, control is an illusion, right? We don't actually have that much control over anything really in so many different ways, but we all feel like we need it badly.

[00:13:37] And so the difference between making your choices for reasons that you've decided on purpose in advance that are for you or for anything your why might serve, and the difference between somebody else making those choices, which is what happens for so many of us, like a recruiter calls or somebody says, "Hey, I think you'd be great at this," or, "Do you want to start an HR department?"

[00:14:00] Or anything that happens through the course of normal life. And if we say yes to that, then we're saying yes to somebody else's version of that, which is by definition far less intentional. So I love what you're talking about in that for you, it seems like you really had to route through, "What do I want?"

[00:14:19] And then that allowed you to get to the realization, "Wow, a whole bunch of what I want I already have." Which just even that work to decide intentionally, "This is what I want," makes it feel different even though you're in the same situation.

[00:14:32] Moira Quinlan: 'Cause you muddle through. I muddled through the first half of my career saying yes to things that people say, "Hey, are you interested in this? Do you wanna try this?" It's like, "Sure. Okay. Yeah, that sounds fun." You know? And so you kinda say, "I wasn't really thinking about it. I just fell into it, so is that still... Am I on track still? I don't know. Am I supposed to be here?" And I think at first when something doesn't feel right, you know, you lose your energy.

[00:14:53] You're like, "I must have picked wrong. The whole thing must be wrong," right? I must have somewhere along the way just said yes to, with my positivity just bounded into whatever. And then the truth when you go through the process, it's like, oh, maybe I don't need to buy a new car, I just need a tune-up, right?

[00:15:06]

[00:15:06] Scott Anthony Barlow: Do you remember when you reached out to us, like, to schedule a conversation with our team?

[00:15:12] Moira Quinlan: It's, like, a year and a half, two years ago.

[00:15:14] Scott Anthony Barlow: I'm curious, what was going on that caused you to decide to reach out to us?

[00:15:19] Moira Quinlan: Something felt imbalanced. When I think sometimes we wanna pick one thing, it's usually many things, and I just couldn't identify what those things were. And it affects, you know, home, right?

[00:15:31] If something doesn't feel right. Is home causing work? Is the work causing the home piece? Probably a little of both in most cases, right? But I, you know, without a root cause analysis, like, I just wasn't getting there on my own, and I think it was probably wintertime. So New England in winter, you get some extra darkness in the fall and winter schedules.

[00:15:51] I felt I probably was in a good place to dedicate the time to. I'm assuming. It was a bit ago, but I think I probably felt like it was a time for development and to figure out what this was. And family-wise, my son's getting older, so you also get a little bit more bandwidth as far as dedicating to yourself versus dedicating to your kids, depending on what stage of family you're at, too.

[00:16:12] So I think it was a few different things where I probably decided, okay, I've been listening to this podcast for six months or so. I tried to do the mini course on my own. I think I felt a little bit lost about what to do next, and was it personal related, work related? What did I need to tweak to feel more like myself?

[00:16:28] So I think the culture of HTYC also was appealing to me.

[00:16:32] Scott Anthony Barlow: When you first started doing the strengths work, what were some of your biggest takeaways that you remember?

[00:16:37] Moira Quinlan: I think I started connecting it to the specific [00:16:40] strengths, which I'd never done before, to specific jobs I'd chosen and reasons for leaving them, and that was really eye-opening. I feel like that was part of the biggest aha moment of what's going on here.

[00:16:51] So I'm a learner. So I think that was a catalyst for, I was at one company for a very long time, 15 years, and when I looked at why I left, that was as telling as, like, why you join, right? I think I got to a point where I felt like I wasn't learning enough. But then also, when I leave organizations, it's almost always there's a family component.

[00:17:09] At the time, we were coming out of COVID. We had done a year of remote learning for my son. I had hired somebody to the house 'cause HR kind of, especially international HR, revved up during that time, and so we needed support for a third grader that was gonna be learning remote. But we learned a lot about his style of learning and the kind of environment that's best for him for education.

[00:17:30] So it was like, okay, I think I'm ready to learn something different. Coming out of COVID, it was definitely a job searcher's market, so I knew I could dial up my focus on my son, get him established in a new school, getting acclimated to getting back into a school environment with other kids in person, that I could focus more time on that.

[00:17:49] And then when I was ready to do something new with my career, I would have the time to figure out what I wanted that was different than where I came from.

[00:17:57] Scott Anthony Barlow: At some point, you decided to take some of your strengths And then start asking AI for help as it relates to your strengths. And I think this is phenomenal, and also I want to be careful here too, because in your case, this turned out wonderfully for you.

[00:18:13] And also simultaneously, if people don't necessarily understand how strengths work and how that can line up with what different people need to create fulfilling work, it can easily cause people to draw wrong conclusions. What I'm really interested in is what did you do when you started to say, "Hey, I've got these strengths. I wonder how this interacts with different career options?" Take me through what that looked like for you. What did you do first? How did you interact with AI? And then what popped out that was really useful to you?

[00:18:42] Moira Quinlan: Yeah. So I think at first I was frustrated, right? 'Cause it said "Oh, HR would be a great job for you." And that's where I think when I started to drill down more is where I identified the pieces of HR that I enjoy. You know, that question of like, when do you work on something and the time flies by, versus when do you work on something and you feel like you just like need a week-long sabbatical or a longer sabbat... after I've done this task, I need a lot of recovery time, right?

[00:19:08] And I realize there is a whole section of HR that is, like I said, very compliance driven, very regulatory, and probably AI didn't pick up on it 'cause it's not, if you look at the textbook definition of what is human resources, you work with people, training, development. It doesn't go into like the nitty-gritty applying section 5.3 of the employee handbook policy and there's a facet...

[00:19:30] Scott Anthony Barlow: you find the collective bargaining agreement that against how much risk there is for this particular law, and then consult with... yeah. Or you're just poring over the spreadsheet in order to generate the statistical regression analysis for blah, blah, blah.

[00:19:42] Moira Quinlan: Yeah. Budgeting numbers. Year-end budgeting. So all the forecasting and things that you can't make the right decisions without it. Highly value it.

[00:19:51] To re-fall in love with my career, I had to understand what piece of it was causing the ailment.

[00:19:56] It wasn't the career, it wasn't the people, it was just identifying the pain point. And because I had a great environment in where I worked, I was able to have those conversations with people I trust that were on my team, my boss, or whatever, and just balance that.

[00:20:12] Still have a sense of responsibility and obligation, but you understand the why behind what you're feeling, then you know how to manage it, navigate it, balance it better, and talk to people with more clarity.

[00:20:23] Getting that clarity helped me to realign the work. It feels like a lot of work to go through all of that to get to a point where you decide to stay where you're at, but it helps you navigate those decisions going forward and knowing what to tell people you need or ask people for help with, or, hey, asking for internal long-term career paths.

[00:20:43]

[00:20:43] Scott Anthony Barlow: If it's okay, I really wanna push you to understand what did you do with AI? What did you enter in, if you recall, and what did you ask it for, and then what popped out that was useful versus not useful? So I'm gonna get really nitty-gritty on you for just a second here, if that's okay.

[00:20:59] Moira Quinlan: At first I was just like, "Hey, CliftonStrengths, here's what they are. What industries do you think I'd be good with these, you know, would fit?" And HR was like number one, then it was teaching, coaching, all stuff that you can do in that profession. So learning, I think entrepreneur came up, and then I was trying to ask questions because it's kind of fun to ask AI questions 'cause sometimes it says something and you know that's not right.

[00:21:23] You know, so you, "What about this? You didn't ask me about this." And then it'll say, "Actually, you're right. Let me rephrase what I told you." So you gotta know that it's just pulling an aggregate of what's already out there, so you gotta think for yourself on top of that. So I asked it challenging questions like, "Okay, so I'm in HR, that's great, but are there other parts of HR besides the coaching or the teaching?"

[00:21:46] Or, "Are you missing anything?" I made it drill down, right? And then you can ask it questions like if I enjoy my HR job, but there's something off, what part of HR might not fit these strengths, right? You reverse it, and then it's like, well, there's a lot of compliance and, you know, you don't seem data-driven or money-driven.

[00:22:05] So then it'll start talking about all that side of it, and then you can drill down to all of the facets that that leads to. So I think it's a good tool to get you thinking about things that you might not think of on your own, especially if it's pulling perspectives from the World Wide Web all over the place.

[00:22:21] But you have to, I guess, take it with a grain of salt, right? Because it doesn't know you. You know you better than anybody else knows you. And so it's a tool that you can get you started, but then you don't rely on it in a silo, for sure.

[00:22:33] Scott Anthony Barlow: I think it's a really interesting way to experiment. Like, we talk a lot about career experimentation and how do we take what we have decided that we want or we think that we want, and then how do we experiment with that in the real world to validate that continuing in HR is actually what I want versus just what I think is good for me, and what are all the parts and pieces that can get broken down?

[00:22:53] And I think that AI, especially with some of the points that you just made, it's almost like being able to, instead of going and having a single conversation with one individual that happens to have one set of perspectives and everything else, it's like talking to a whole group of individuals, so you get more perspectives more quickly.

[00:23:14] To your point, I still have to filter the same way as I would filter in any other conversation. That's really interesting. I hadn't quite heard it put the way that you did before. Very cool. So what did you take away from it? What was the most useful pieces for you when you think back?

[00:23:29] Moira Quinlan: I think it was one of the first times I'd started experimenting with the tool in that way, It helps you think of things differently than you would on your own. It does save some time as far as, like you said, you might have to book a lot of different 20-minute meetings with people from different walks of life to get cross-diversified perspectives on something, and now, you know, we can just see what it pulls together for you very quickly, which is amazing.

[00:23:56] But you need to fact-check, you need to question it, you need to challenge it. You can also program it. I've learned this, too. So I think to get back to, what was my biggest takeaway is it's one way. It's another tool. It's like the assessment tools, right? They're all geared to find out something different. Is it your work style? Is it your personal profile? Is it your strength? Is it your project teamwork style, or your executive approach? Or, so it's a tool, and it does a certain type of thing, but you can't just use that.

[00:24:25] But it's very useful if you use it the right way to get where you're going faster.

[00:24:29] Scott Anthony Barlow: I want to come back to this sense of responsibility, which is also one of your strengths. And for just a moment, you've pointed it out a couple of times along the way here, and that is one of the areas that your strength functioning normally as it does was causing imbalance as well in one way or another.

[00:24:50] So I'm wondering if you could expand on that for me. Like, how did that look day to day? I can be very good at those tasks that are maybe not, they're not exciting for me.

[00:24:59] When you understand how everything's connected and you have a sense of responsibility to the people that you care about or, and their outcomes, and responsibility for the quality of work that you put out, and that it's a reflection of yourself, then you're putting out really good work for the things that you enjoy equally to the things that you don't enjoy doing.

[00:25:18] And so you can sometimes get, you know, more of tasks that you're good at, even if it's maybe not what you would choose to do with extra time, in or out of work. So the sense of responsibility is it can, I think, launch your career insofar as people know you're dependable. They know you're gonna follow through with your commitments.

[00:25:37] If you say you're gonna do something, you're gonna do it, and it's gonna be the best quality work that you feel you could possibly have done. A lot of my success can be attributed to that work ethic, so I embrace it for sure.

[00:25:47] But it also... I was talking to somebody that, it was years ago, and we were talking about strengths. And I said, "Oh, I'm responsibility." And they're like, "Oh, that's a tough one to be strong in." And I was like, "What do you mean?" You know? 'Cause there was a sense of pride, but when overused or when others overuse it, you just gotta be more aware of it and guard your time and your balance a little bit more.

[00:26:09] It's helped launch my career for sure, probably further, easier because I use responsibility and it matters, but it's also can hinder you from gravitating towards things that you might wanna do more.

[00:26:20] That's interesting. I love looking at both sides of strengths because we were talking about tools earlier, right? And strengths are sort of like tools. It's not a perfect analogy. It breaks down at some point, but they're sort of like tools in that... they're just a thing that can accomplish something in one way or another, and they can be used for good, they can be used for bad.

[00:26:42] They're just, at the end of the, the day, just a thing. And strengths are similar-ish. That said, though, I think that every single set of strengths or individual strength, whether we're using Gallup and CliftonStrengths terminology or whether we've made up our own terminology for it, is there's that how we do anything is how we do everything, and there can be ways where our strengths work against us versus we can leverage our strengths for good. And so that's really fun to hear your description.

[00:27:10] At some point along the way you decided, "You know what? Even though this organization has so much of what I want, some things in my life have changed, and I need to consider something different here." Tell me about what happened.

[00:27:23] Moira Quinlan: Yeah, I actually was on track. My energy was good. I think just being able to have a conversation about what's on your mind with people and hearing them react in a supportive developmental mindset, you move through. Then on the personal side, my son had a change. You know, he's going into high school, and we were looking at high schools out of town.

[00:27:41] So commute has always been a thing for me. I think ever since college and then some, I always knew I didn't want to spend more than 45 minutes in a car. And I know that I need some time in office, which is not... I know a lot of people are... The strong opinions on remote versus non-remote, right? And I didn't know it till after COVID when I'd gone remote and then gone to a cafeteria in an office when afterwards, and you hear the laughing and the joking, and it...

[00:28:04] Maybe you're not even part of the conversation, but the energy's there, right? And I was like, "Oh, I didn't know that I was missing this, but I really like being around people even when they're not talking to me directly. I like the energy of a cafe or whatever." Commutes mattered. So there was one school he was looking at that was nine minutes away from where I work, and then there was another one that was 35 minutes from the house, which would make it an hour from where I work, going south versus north.

[00:28:28] And he picked the school that was in the wrong direction. So that changed everything We had discussions as a family, like, how can we make this work?

[00:28:36] Really, my priority was to stay where I was at, but it would've been like almost two hours to go south to go north to get to my work. And I'm in HR. Even if there's a component where once a week or flexibility to come and go for activities or commute, like dropping kids off and stuff, and it was there, and there was willingness to flex with me to make it work from my job.

[00:28:57] I just knew I'm gonna hate being in the car that long and then feeling like I'm not showing up for that responsibility. I'm not showing up for the people I work with in the way that I was before, and I can't stay, you know, when I wanna stay to help. You know, I support night manufacturing. Sometimes I wanna connect with them.

[00:29:15] I wouldn't be able to do it the way I used to, and so I wasn't gonna be what I wanted to be for that, and I wanted to be more present for my son while he made his adjustment. So we were gonna have to change where I work or how I work. And because I had done all this work with HTYC almost two years ago, I had done all, a lot of that pre-work already, so it was easy for me to make the decision to say, "Okay, do I have support for a change? What would a change look like? What are the favorite parts of what I do now that I would help me decide whatever I'm doing next what kind of stuff I'm looking for?"

[00:29:46] And we coached my son through high school finding process, so I was like, lead by example. It was the time to make a change based on mostly personal balance at that point, yeah.

[00:29:56] Scott Anthony Barlow: So that's when you launched into, I think, what you've called an experiment over the course of the next year or so as well, but also the next stage for you. So tell me a little bit about that.

[00:30:07] Moira Quinlan: Yeah. So I opened Quinlan Coaching and Consulting, HR consulting. So I do leadership coaching and help organizations that maybe are growing, starting up, or don't have the resources for internal HR, help them get some of those processes in place.

[00:30:25] So I figure it's a time where I can try to dial up those pieces of training, development, and coaching aspects of what I love, and create something that does more of that. It was a good time to do it. I had to make a change anyway, so it also will give me the time to figure out... I have a sort of a mindset of like, how long am I gonna play around with this before it's working or it's not, and then if I do have to look for another opportunity, I'll have time to really be intentional about that too, because there was a lot I loved about where I came from that I wanna make sure I keep in where I'm going next, but maybe again, there's that like, can I fine-tune it even more?

[00:31:02] Yeah, so I think it gave me the opportunity to be there more for family, play around a little bit. I haven't gotten to do that since my 20s, play around with my career a little bit and just see where it goes, so I think it's gonna be a fun adventure.

[00:31:14] Scott Anthony Barlow: Very cool. I'm super excited for you. And is there anything else that you wanted to make sure that we talked about as a part of your story?

[00:31:23] Moira Quinlan: I think I would want people to know that thinking about their career should be holistic. It's not you wanna point to one thing as, like, the easy thing to fix or change, but you need to think about where are you in your career growth? Where are you personally in your life? Where are your family priorities?

[00:31:40] Have you sat with your partner or anybody else that... What are their goals? Or what stage is your employer at with their change? 'Cause you hear people talk about, "Well, I started in this company and it was a startup, but now it's so corporate," or vice versa. So, like, where's the health and culture of your organization, your home life?

[00:31:56] And your financial situation matters, too, 'cause do you have the freedom, stress-free play around? So you need to not try and just pick one thing and say, "This is it." If you learn anything from being in a people role anywhere, it's never one thing. It's always both or all.

[00:32:12] And they say if you ask two people, you get two stories. If you ask five, you get five. Everybody comes with their own perception, experience. And so I think career change or whether you're happy where you are or aren't, it's holistic. If you really wanna get down to the root cause of where you have been, where you wanna go, you need to think of it holistically.

[00:32:29] Scott Anthony Barlow: As always, if you want help figuring out what is the life that you're trying to build and making that happen in the real world, that's what we do. It's what we love to do. So reach out, scott@happentoyourcareer.com, and let me know, or put 'Conversation' in the subject line, and I'll introduce you to the right member of my team. We will have that conversation, understand your goals, and then build the right type of support so that you can get where you want to go to what matters most for you. Until next time, I'll see you later. Adios.