752: When You’ve Outgrown Your Career: The Burnout Nobody Talks About and How to Find What Comes Next

[00:00:00] Scott Anthony Barlow: His boss offered him a promotion, and he threatened to quit.

[00:00:03] Scott Bartosiewicz: "If you do that, I will quit."

[00:00:06] Scott Anthony Barlow: Not because the job was bad.

[00:00:07] Scott Bartosiewicz: I had a great leadership team, had a great culture, had great clients and had great brands that I worked on.

[00:00:14] Scott Anthony Barlow: So why then would he leave this great situation?

[00:00:17] Scott Bartosiewicz: I can't do this. I cannot do this for another even 10, let alone 20 plus years. I don't really have something to pin this feeling on, but it's still there and it's very persistent.

[00:00:29] Scott Anthony Barlow: It turns out that he'd burnt out on what was once a great career. It even followed him home.

[00:00:33] Scott Bartosiewicz: Even when I'm working at home, I'm bringing that drama to the kitchen and to dinner, and I'm just wasn't myself. So it's one thing to be navigating a tough career moment, but then when it starts to spread into the rest of your life and your relationships, it starts to get scary.

[00:00:48] Scott Anthony Barlow: So he stopped waiting for a reason to leave and went looking for what he actually wanted instead.

[00:00:54] Scott Bartosiewicz: All of a sudden it just sort of felt like there were pieces of me that were coming back to life, and I'm like, "That feels like what's supposed to be happening here." You just have to trust your gut and go with what feels right.

[00:01:04] Scott Anthony Barlow: So you might ask, how does someone go from burnout in the advertising industry to absolutely loving life and work again in less than 12 months?

[00:01:12] 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.

[00:01:22] 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. Real stories and real research so you can stop waiting and start making it happen. I'm Scott Anthony Barlow.

[00:01:38] Scott Anthony Barlow: To make this confusing, there are two Scotts on this episode.

[00:01:41] Scott Bartosiewicz: I'm Scott Bartosiewicz, and I've recently left a 20-year career in advertising and marketing to open my own business, One You Love Homecare here in Chicago, focused on helping older adults get support they need and to stay safely and comfortably in their homes.

[00:01:55] Scott Anthony Barlow: Prior to that, he spent 20 years in advertising, most of it in Chicago, working his way up to group account director.

[00:02:01] And by the end of it he had much of what everybody says that they want; great leadership, good culture, good clients, big brands, and he was also so far into burnout that it was obvious to the people he was close to. But here's what makes his version of burnout very different from many of the stories that you've heard.

[00:02:20] There's not a villain in it. There's not any toxic boss or reorg that broke him. When he went looking for the reason, he ran out of people to point at. This, by the way, out of the various kinds of burnout, can be one of the hardest ones to catch because the usual culprit, like a bad job, just isn't in existence in this case.

[00:02:38] And so when that happens, people find themselves not doing anything about it. There's not something to push you forward except yourself. In this episode, we'll cover what led Scott to realize that he had to make a change, and how he figured out what could be an amazing fit for him, and even how he investigated options in the real world to make sure that whatever he spent his time on for work would actually be a fit.

[00:03:00] Also, I want you to listen later on in the episode because he has a pretty surprising journey for what led him from advertising into franchising, 'cause he did not see it coming. Here's Scott talking about what started that journey.

[00:03:12] Scott Bartosiewicz: I think the best way to describe that is that there isn't really a normal day-to-day. I think it can be... You have to be prepared to pivot and ready for the unexpected at all times. I was in a client services role, so I'm serving a lot of masters at one time, primarily the client, and making sure that they're getting what they need, their business is being addressed, everything on that end from their perspective and what their priorities are.

[00:03:37] But then internally, I'm running a team and making sure that they have all that they need, their resources are met, their questions are answered, and then of course there's executive management in the mix, and awards maybe we wanna go after. There's all these other sort of ancillary, not that executive management is ancillary, but to your core priorities of the day.

[00:03:55] And I was younger, I was always obsessed with business and being a businessman. I dressed up as a businessman for Halloween one year. I had a trench coat, and I put my candy in a briefcase. So that aspect I was always very focused on, and I would have... It may come as no surprise at this point in the story that I wasn't a huge jock or involved in a lot of sports.

[00:04:13] But I would be starting little businesses in our basement. I would have a detective agency or a car rental agency. But I always had, just the fact that I was creating those moments, had creativity and this wild imagination. So as I started to move forward through high school and when I was in college, when I stumbled across advertising, I was like, "this is it. This is such a perfectly natural fit for me of both kinds of sides of my personality, where I'm interested."

[00:04:38] So I didn't have a lot of that struggle through college of, "Oh, what am I gonna do?" When I saw it, I was like, "That... this... it couldn't be more it for me."

[00:04:45] Scott Anthony Barlow: You've got the business, you've got the creativity. They're jammed together. It requires both of those to be...

[00:04:50] Scott Bartosiewicz: yeah, absolutely. And it was later when I was working at Leo Burnett, they succinctly captured that in their sort of, one of their many mantras, that creativity has the power to solve problems and to transform human behavior. So I think that really, when you apply creativity in any setting, but in a business sense, you can solve all the problems that you've got. But that was my path, and I sparked to that immediately.

[00:05:14] Scott Anthony Barlow: That's interesting. I think one of the things that I'm curious about then is as you went down that path, what did you notice wasn't working in the same way anymore? And at what point did you notice that?

[00:05:25] Scott Bartosiewicz: Well, I think that it happens slowly and then all of at once. It's very easy, just by the nature of all the different masters you serve and the sort of all the components of your job in advertising and marketing to easily pigeonhole things and say, "Ugh, well, that client is just so difficult and demanding. That's what's making this situation worse than it needs to be."

[00:05:45] Or, "We've had a leadership change come in, and they're messing with the culture, and boy, that's really upsetting the apple cart in the way I used to love this job." But I think as I progressed, I started realizing that something bigger wasn't quite lining up. I started getting a stronger inkling of this as I was in the last positions in agency, but my last one, I had a great leadership team, had a great culture, had great clients, and had great brands that I worked on.

[00:06:11] So suddenly, I don't really have something to pin this feeling on, but it's still there, and it's very persistent that this just isn't...

[00:06:18] Scott Anthony Barlow: You're out of culprits to be able to...

[00:06:19] Scott Bartosiewicz: Yeah. I'm out of fingers to point.

[00:06:20] Scott Anthony Barlow: There's no scapegoats here.

[00:06:21] Scott Bartosiewicz: Yeah. And that was really a point where there were other things that were, I think, obvious to me, but that was a moment that was like this, at a larger level, isn't maybe working for me personally anymore. And that was really terrifying, 'cause it was like I had worked so hard down this path and felt like I was so deep into it, and it was just like, I feel like I'm the type of person that was very action-oriented, very solutions-oriented, so I am... and fail fast.

[00:06:46] So I'm gonna try something new. I'm gonna bring a solution forward. I'm gonna go in this direction and see if that works. And I suddenly didn't have any, didn't have any solutions at hand. I didn't have anything to try. It was just like I've tried different agencies for various different reasons.

[00:07:00] I've been on a multiple, a multitude of different clients and types of work, and there's been good and bad things about that, and I just, I didn't have a lever to pull, and that was another thing that frightened me.

[00:07:12] So it was like sort of these realizations happening at one point in my career, at a point when I felt if I had gone back 5 or 10 years and told myself, "This is where you're gonna be. This is what you're gonna be working on. This is what you'll be making. This is where you'll be living," I would be like, "Amazing."

[00:07:25] Scott Anthony Barlow: What else accompanied that for you that time period, that set of realizations?

[00:07:30] Scott Bartosiewicz: Well, I think it, there was a lot of burnout. So I think it was, there were elements of the job that were at its worst, and it was terrifying. And I think I'm not a risk-averse person. I'm comfortable saying, "Okay, this is a problem. I've gotta make a change. I'm gonna trust my gut and make a jump" and not like doing that in a measured sort of thoughtful way, but I'm not opposed to that. I don't have kids to support. Like, I do have a little bit more freedom, or at least in that realm.

[00:07:57] But I think the burnout that was going on, just the, you know, back to back to back to back to back calls all day long, new problems on top of problems, problems that you have tried to be proactive about and nobody listened to you or they come back, and it just, there was this weight in the day-to-day that left me, I think, identified already how I felt professionally, but even personally I'm a very optimistic and like energetic person, and I was just drained.

[00:08:23] So then I felt like I didn't have myself to rely on almost at 100% to navigate my way through this and figure out what was gonna be next or how to get out of this, and it just started feeling like repetitive day over day without a light at the end of the tunnel, without something I'm focusing on and some motion I'm taking to get me to something new, and it just started to feel helpless, and I didn't know what I was gonna do.

[00:08:49] I could tell that it was impacting my relationships. Even when I'm working at home, I'm bringing that drama to the kitchen and to dinner, and I'm just wasn't myself. So it's one thing to be navigating a tough career moment, but then when it starts to really spread into the rest of your life and your relationships, it starts to get scary.

[00:09:08] And then I think doubling down on that, I'm relatively young in the fact that I've got a lot of runway as far as my career goes and years left working. So then when I started to think about that, it was like, "I can't do this. I cannot do this for another even 10, let alone 20-plus years, and I just don't know what that means."

[00:09:28] Scott Anthony Barlow: Do you remember what that time period was where you had that realization?

[00:09:31] Scott Bartosiewicz: I do remember it was around sort of a performance, you know, an annual evaluation sort of moment where you're obviously assessing the past year, what you've done, what your accomplishments are, but very much putting stakes in the ground about where you wanna go and what your goals are.

[00:09:46] And I've always been somebody who's working on what's next, maybe even to a fault, where I get something and then I'm immediately like, "okay, now that I'm here, my next step's gonna be this." So many years or so many steps and that's where I can be and planning ahead, always the long view. And that was a moment when I realized that slowly I had gotten away from that completely in my career.

[00:10:08] Even if it was a, sort of an ERG I was participating in and what's something I can do culturally for the company and I'm excited for that to happen, not just my next role. When I was evaluating myself and having those conversations and just hearing about, "What do you wanna do next? How do we get you to the next level?"

[00:10:22] And I was like , "I do not want to go to the next level. I will not be doing that because please don't take me there." So that, I think, going through that process and being like, wow, I would be actively working against what my next step is here because that's the place I'm in. That's how I'm feeling right now.

[00:10:40] So I think that was... that sort of brought a lot of these different feelings and frustrations, burnout. It brought it all to a head and really it was an eye-opening moment, I think, when I went through that because it was... I had never had that. At every one of those types of milestones, I always had a question that I was putting to my manager or a goal that I was putting out there.

[00:11:01] You know, "How do I get to this? This is what I want." I've been very blessed with fantastic leaders that I've worked under. You know, so she was a great mentor and wanted to develop me and, you know, she was like, "You know, I wanna put you more in front of executive leadership. I wanna get you more visibility in the agency. I might wanna get you on some pitches so you can, like, amazing things to have a manager looking out for you on". And I remember I said to her, I was like, "If you do that, I will quit. I do not want that visibility. I don't want to be put into that part of the circus." I was already starting to see, and at that time it felt more of like a culture at that particular agency, so I wasn't quite connecting, like this is a bigger disconnect.

[00:11:40] To me it felt I don't wanna be part of that chaos. I'm doing great over here in my little fiefdom. That was sort of like the first seed that started to germinate that became full on apathy to my career.

[00:11:51] Scott Anthony Barlow: I think that there's some really interesting points in here that so many people experience, but really don't know how to reconcile with them. And you mentioned burnout. You were definitely having some of the clinical symptoms of burnout, and I think a lot of times we think about burnout as, like, the overload of work, but we don't realize that it's a lot more than that in terms of what it's coming from.

[00:12:14] And what you were experiencing in terms of, "I can't even imagine continuing. Like, there's no forward that is going to happen here because I don't want it." A lot of us don't realize that burnout can actually come from us outgrowing a role. Like, us changing as an individual can actually be a cause of burnout. I think what you described earlier, part of what you valued had changed along the way, and that can eventually, left long enough, start to have that separation and eventually lead to burnout. And nobody ever considers that necessarily.

[00:12:47] What was the point where you said, "I need to do something of this. I'm recognizing that this is something bigger, and I need to actually do something about this"?

[00:12:57] Scott Bartosiewicz: It's interesting, 'cause it took a few of those points that I wasn't maybe paying attention to. So I think what I started to do was, I started to do some research in a very unfocused way that was just, "I wanna, I think, change my career. I wanna change my job." So started Googling around that, looking into some potential coaching. I think at that point I couldn't envision how I step out of it without completely resetting.

[00:13:23] I for a second, thought, "Do I need to go back to school? How do I reskill myself to be something completely different?" Through that, you know, kind of aimless, "I need to change, but I'm not quite sure where and how," I had stumbled across Happen To Your Career. And I didn't realize it, 'cause each time it stopped me, and it was saying back to me what I felt, and it felt very like, "Okay, this is it. This is saying what I am, where I'm at, what my struggles are."

[00:13:48] But it just... I was still aimless. I didn't have a plan. I didn't know if it needed to be coaching. Is it just a different job that I'm not thinking of? So I had left those sort of in an open tab on my mobile device, and I think it was the third time that came across, I was like, "This sounds really familiar."

[00:14:04] And then I opened up, and I had it in all these different points in the past six months or so. So I was like, "Okay, I'm obviously missing a sign here, so I need to look into this a little bit more."

[00:14:14] Scott Anthony Barlow: What else stopped you from going down any of those other...?

[00:14:19] Scott Bartosiewicz: I felt the more I started to consider... what I was considering was in such a smaller realm that maybe the right company, the right brand, the right culture, that could be a fix. And then some of platform vendors that we work with, that could be a step in a different direction that could feel very different.

[00:14:38] Scott Anthony Barlow: I love that you have this pattern of, like you said, "Hey, we've been meaning to do this for a while," and then you did it. That's a pattern I recognize with you, is like you don't let those things linger forever. Like, this is a thing that is important or we've intended to do, and then eventually you do it.

[00:14:54] You don't let those be a just go on forever type of situation. So I think that's really cool. I'm gonna guess that just having gotten to know you a little bit, you always see the room for opportunity for improvement and everything else like that. But I think you did a really great job at exploring different avenues. Tell me what else that looked like.

[00:15:11] Scott Bartosiewicz: You know, I looked at some, you know, when I say, like, platform partners in advertising, like a Pinterest, you know, working type places, more in a sort of sales direction, which was totally different for me, and something I had shied away from for most of my career, but explored that.

[00:15:26] And then I think setting the expectation and the mindset when you kind of go into that phase of the program. Franchising came across, you know, obviously came up in discussion, and that's not a direction for me.

[00:15:37] But I was like, "You don't know what you're in, so you need to open this door, have the conversation." And I think that's what I try to do across the board, and I just hadn't thought of it in this format. So at the end of it, you know, my husband and I were talking. Not a long process, but it's a few weeks or a month or two, and then you go into sort of, like, really looking at the particular options.

[00:15:57] So we did that, and then it was just, "I think this is it. I think this is the path. I think we're gonna buy a franchise," and we did, and it's been really exciting, I think, ever since we started making our way down this road.

[00:16:08] Scott Anthony Barlow: What caused you to say, "This is the type of franchise that I'm interested in," versus obviously you started from "i don't want anything to do with a franchise. Okay, I guess I'll investigate for the sake of exposure." But eventually you started going down that road and recognizing that there might be a lot more fits than what you ever could have seen from the outside.

[00:16:30] Scott Bartosiewicz: Yeah, absolutely. And I think initially I knew there were a lot, but I, really in my mind, I'm thinking of the bigger brands that you know of.

[00:16:37] But there, I think that was my first sort of [00:16:40] revelation, like, "Oh, there are all these sizes and fits and approaches that you can go into franchising and find one that fits what you're looking for. It's not just this larger..." I think there were a few things that immediately felt really good. One was the CEO, David.

[00:16:53] I mean, just the fact that he was on the calls as opposed to some sort of franchise development person, which is what a lot of larger ones do, that, you know, no harm, no foul. But getting to have that time with David and see him as a person, understand what brought him into the business and why he started this, and just who he kind of was as a person and a leader, made us feel really comfortable with him and the model.

[00:17:15] So that was sort of the first thing that kind of drew us in. Obviously, you do your due diligence on the financials and how the company's ran and things like that, and that all felt really good and solid. And I think the really interesting thing is we've been talking about full circle moments here. So, some of the work that I did along the way had identified points in my career when I was really happy.

[00:17:36] So a lot of those laddered back to not necessarily nonprofit work, but giving back. I did a lot of work on employee resource groups, and through that, forming programs for employees that weren't there, developing internships for bringing diversity quotients forward.

[00:17:52] So it was sort of identified that you seem to get a special kind of energy from the moments when you're able to care for people and bring that forward. It was like something we identified, but it didn't not fit anywhere, but it wasn't driving a direction, but it was something that always kind of stayed with me.

[00:18:07] So all of a sudden when we arrived at this point when it was like, we feel good about this option just sort of arrived here through all this work that I've done, and it is centered entirely on caring for people. It just felt like it was like another domino that fell into place, or another chip that fell into place and it was like, I can bring that forward and here's how.

[00:18:25] Scott Anthony Barlow: That's really fun, and I think that's a much better illustration of how this happens in reality too. I think that it's easy to point to the sort of, I don't know, what feels like the sparky and passion driven type things. Like, "I love travel. Obviously, I need to work in travel." Which is, it's where we start. It's a wonderful place to investigate, and for a small percentage of the population, that is a good thing.

[00:18:50] But usually for most of us, it's something that is buried a little bit deeper and less obvious, and only obvious after you've done all of this hard work investigating, getting exposure to what else is out there, really rolling that back into your understanding of what you need and what you want, and being able to articulate that out loud, that you actually start to recognize when it shows up in reality.

[00:19:13] Otherwise, you get into those situations like you did, and you just, like, roll past it if you haven't already done that level of work. What about something that didn't work? Give me an example of something that you did investigate fairly far and, yeah, something that didn't work out. Tell me about how you explored that and some of the reasons why you determined, yeah, this is just not a fit.

[00:19:32] Scott Bartosiewicz: Well, I think at the time that I was going down the path with franchising and exploring that, still in an exploratory, not like, okay, now we're really investigating 'cause we're serious about it, but, like, we're just looking through what this option could look like. I was looking at a role at Pinterest that I had mentioned, and I was excited about it.

[00:19:51] I love Pinterest as a brand. And it was different kind of work and a different kind of entire approach, like another side of the business. So while I was excited about it, I was still pursuing it, you know, some of the things I mentioned before about it's a different lens and a different sort of perspective of some of the same work that I had been doing and some of the same, still tied to clients, still in this marketing, advertising realm, and that was, as I said, while we were investigating the franchising.

[00:20:17] And I think the spark that I was getting on the franchising and going into that, and one you love, and what that could look like, I was getting a parallel. And if that hadn't happened, I would've been so excited and all in on the Pinterest route, but because I had a parallel to compare it to, it was like, this is the excitement. This is getting fire in my belly. And I think when I really knew on the franchising is, like, I got to a point when I was excited, but it was scary. But scary in the best way, in the way that I had always loved when I was doing something bold and making a change and taking a leap, and it was like, there's a fear of the unknown, and there's risks associated with it, but it's so exciting.

[00:20:59] And I started to think about, again, what was gonna come next, what I could do, where I could go with it, and all of a sudden it just felt like there were pieces of me that were coming back to life, and I'm like, "That feels like what's supposed to be happening here." So you know, just have to trust your gut and go with what feels right.

[00:21:13] Scott Anthony Barlow: I think you mentioned something that's really important. You mentioned that because you had these different options for comparison, that's part of what allowed you to have perspective. If we think about, like, what creates perspective, it really is having seen or experienced or have exposure to a variety of different things.

[00:21:33] Like, that's ultimately, like, when we talk about somebody, somebody has the perspective to make different choices or better choices, and that's really what it's about at the end of the day. And one, kudos to you for investigating such a wide range of things where it eventually became obvious what route you should go, because that's a hard thing to get to. Easy to say on a podcast, really difficult to get to in reality

[00:21:55] Scott Bartosiewicz: But not as difficult... 'cause I remember not being in this position and seeing these, you can change your life in a lot less time than you think it takes to change. It seems so daunting at the beginning.

[00:22:05] Scott Anthony Barlow: How long did you think that when you were imagining way back when, "Hey, I'm still in advertising. Oh, crap, I need to make a change because this isn't working anymore." How long did you think it was gonna be, or what did you have in your head at that point versus how long it actually took?

[00:22:19] Scott Bartosiewicz: To be honest, I think it's so hard. You feel so buried, and you're so surviving that you can't even put a timeline on it. It felt like it had this urgency, and I needed it to have immediacy, but I didn't have anything viable happening, and it just felt like it's gonna take forever. There's no clear answer in front of me to work towards. This could take forever. This could take years. How long did it take me to get here?

[00:22:45] I think you naturally frame it in those types of terms, so it's like, okay, this is a 20-year career I'm in. Even at a half-life, that's 10, maybe if I'm lucky, five years. And it's certainly not that path that I've chosen, we're all set up and everything's running successfully, and we've got giant success under our belt just yet, but I've got the clarity.

[00:23:04] I've moved down a path. I'm in a new space that I'm excited about, and just that is something to work towards that I'm excited about is just what I was looking for. So that didn't take me as long as I think. From there to here. If you pushed me on it back then, I would've said it's gonna take five years at a minimum to be somewhere where I'm like, I've got a clear direction, I'm excited about it, and I'm building towards the life that I want again.

[00:23:27] Scott Anthony Barlow: I am curious about now is how does what you do currently align with your strengths? What are some of the parts and pieces that just align very well from what your strengths are?

[00:23:38] Scott Bartosiewicz: Yeah. I think it also is interesting how... It's the same strengths, right? It's the same strengths I was using before.

[00:23:44] I'm working with people and building relationships. I think at the core of what I did and what I'm doing is building relationships, and navigating different types of scenarios in the same way. I think when you strip it all back, what I was describing about a day in the life in advertising, it's the same thing.

[00:24:01] It's managing clients. It's managing your employees. It's managing your company, your culture, all these different aspects and determining what's the priority right now. What fire do I have to put out first? What do I have to have a proactive look on? Being strategic, I think, in how I approach problems, how I solve problems.

[00:24:17] I'm looking at the long view and how I'm building my company out, who I'm choosing to be a part of that company to build the culture that I want. All those things are part of the core skills, and activator, arranger, connectedness, strategic, all of those things helped me, at my core, be successful in my 20-year marketing advertising career, and are the same skills I'm using day to day to bring my business to life and make it successful. But that's something I would've never been able to identify a year or two ago.

[00:24:47] Scott Anthony Barlow: What advice would you give to somebody else who finds themself in that same exact place where they've reached the point, they've had all these little signs saying, "What I'm doing now is not a fit," or, "I've outgrown this," or, "I can't keep going forward. Stop the development." Whatever that point that they're experiencing, what advice would you give them thinking back to what you experienced?

[00:25:10] Scott Bartosiewicz: I think the most important thing is, one, when to listen. Like, and you probably can't stop listening if you're having those feelings. That's where you're at. But get to know what's important to you.

[00:25:21] Whether you do that through a program like Happen To Your Career, which I would highly recommend, but if you're just doing it on your own, you've got to figure out what's important to you. So I think even before identifying what your skills are and how those can take you, I think a values exercise is so clarifying to who you are as a person, who you want to work with, the type of organization.

[00:25:42] You can apply that lens in so many ways as you're starting to kind of navigate things. And then part and parcel is the visioning exercise and, but what's important to you. What do you want an ideal job to look like? And sometimes it's easiest in those situations to come at it from what are the elements of my current job that I don't want to carry forward, but hopefully that helps you start to think about what that means on the... what the positive of that is.

[00:26:04] What does a positive environment, what does me in a career that I'm excited about and fulfills me and gives me all the fire in my belly that I need, what does that look like day to day? So I think between identifying your values and identifying what your ideal scenario is, that at least helps you build a filter and something to evaluate and start to navigate.

[00:26:25] So as you start to kind of think about, even if you're doing it on your own and trying to like, oh, maybe it could be this or that, it helps you feel really solid in, that doesn't align with me. That's not what I know is important to me, or it is, or yes, that's interesting, so now I know I should explore that further.

[00:26:41] So that's, I think would be... And that, I've said this was so great at this point in my career, but I wish I had done some of this work early in my career, and I wonder how that would've changed things if I had really identified here's my strengths that are making me successful, and here's how that could work elsewhere.

[00:26:59] Here are the values that are important to me. If I had those filters through my whole career, I'm not saying I would've done things completely differently, but at least I think I would've felt more confident and really solid in the decisions I was making. I think so often it's like we're on a path, and it's either an expected path, it's a path that's like already paved and we're just moving milestone to milestone, and it's about the pay or the new title or whatever the case may be, and we're not really thinking about is the end of this path my ideal?

[00:27:29] Is that really it, or am I just on somebody else's ride here? I think we already sort of covered it, but the first thing is just definitely listening to yourself and taking some sort of action. Don't put it off. I think connectedness being one of my strengths. I always do believe everything happens for a reason, so I don't do a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking, but I think if there were one thing I was going to change, it would be following through the first time I opened the tab and was stopped in my tracks by sort of what Happen To Your Career had to say, and starting that journey then.

[00:27:56] So don't put off what you know you're telling yourself. In that instance, we do know ourselves best, and if there's a nagging voice inside of you that's saying, "This isn't it. I'm not happy. I'm not fulfilled. This isn't the direction for me," you're only gonna waste more time. In my situation, and I'm sure in many others, you feel like I'm so far down. I'm a certain age. I've made it to a certain point. It's only going to compound and become... you're only gonna be older. You're only gonna be further in that career that you don't wanna be in.

[00:28:23] So stop and listen to yourself and take some action. And I think realize you're not alone. I think you mentioned only 1% do this type of work. When I'd left and let everyone know what I was doing and that I was leaving the agency, I had the thought that everyone's gonna think I've lost my mind. I'm leaving my career. I'm leaving advertising. This is the crème de la crème of the industry working at these types of agencies, and everyone's gonna be like, "What are you doing?"

[00:28:46] And the shocking thing was how many people, high-up senior colleagues of mine, pulled me aside and were like, "How did you do it? This is, oh my God. I'm so in awe of you," and wanted to know how I did it and how they could do it. And they were burned out. They were feeling the same way, too. People that I just assumed were drinking the Kool-Aid and going along the path and were just like, "Ugh, I'm so happy for you getting out. I wanna know how to do it, too."

[00:29:09] You're not alone, and I'm sure you have these conversations every day, but it feels like you've done something wrong, I think, sometimes when you end up in this place, and you haven't. I think you've just, we evolve. Just like the Halloween costume, we have to evolve.

[00:29:23] Scott Anthony Barlow: So I suppose the question everybody is wondering is, do still, you know, take the briefcase out and dress up as a business person for Halloween?

[00:29:32] Scott Bartosiewicz: I do not. You have to evolve, right? It's all about evolution, but I...

[00:29:36] Scott Anthony Barlow: You have to evolve.

[00:29:37] If you want help with that, by the way, then I would love to invite you to drop me an email. Scott@happentoyourcareer. Put 'Conversation' in the subject line, and I'll connect you with the right member of my team, and we'll have a conversation. We'll understand what you're trying to accomplish. We'll understand some of the concerns that you have and help you figure out how to navigate through your exact situation. It's what we do, and it's what we love to do. Until next time, I'm Scott, and this is Happen To Your Career. Adios. I'm out.