Welcome to Episode #247 of the Own Your Best Life Podcast

I want to talk about the dream so many of us have had at one point or another.

The dream of having so much money that you do not have to work. Where you could quit, walk away from all of it, and finally do what you actually want to do.

No more worrying about whether a risk is too risky. No guilt about whether you are carrying your weight for the family if you decide to do something different. Just enough freedom that the pressure lifts and the choice becomes yours.

Maybe you have felt the pull of it in the car before you walk into the building. Or at 9pm when you are answering one more message you did not want to answer. If you could just get out, you could finally breathe. You could finally find yourself again.

The reason this dream comes up is that we have been conditioned to believe our lives are precarious. That any change is a life or death decision, instead of just a natural evolution of where we are and what we need now. But to understand what you actually want next, you have to understand why you want to quit in the first place. Or why change scares you even after you have already left. Or why you want something more, something different, even when things are pretty good.

Because this feeling, the pull to quit, is often bigger than your job. It is you wanting out of whatever stuck situation you are in right now. And after working with and talking to so many people on this exact topic, I started to see that there are three places, figuratively, that people find themselves in. I call them the three boats.

The first boat is burning. You need to get off. Something has to change and you know it in your body.

The second, you are already off the boat. Maybe you left, maybe you were pushed, and now you are treading water, looking for the next one.

The third, you are on the boat and it is fine. You do not want to torch it. You want it to be better. Faster. More fun. More yours.

And it helps to see all three, because people are spread across all of them. Some of you are on that first boat, ready to get off. Plenty of you are already in the water, between things, figuring out what is next. And just as many of you are on a boat that is basically good, and you want to make it better. I work with women in all three. There is no wrong one to be in. There is only knowing which is yours, so you can make the right next move from there.

But I want to go deeper than which boat you are on, into the feeling underneath it.

Here is what I have come to understand about that dream of enough money to walk away. The money was never really the point. The dream was never actually about the number in the account. It was about what you believed the money would finally give you. Permission to stop. Room to breathe. The sense that work was no longer running your whole life.

When you feel that pull to quit, what you are usually feeling is trapped. And somewhere along the way you have lost yourself. You do not recognize the woman living this life, and you have decided that the only way to find her again is to get free. Quit, break clean, and go looking for yourself somewhere the old life cannot follow.

I understand that with my whole heart, because I lived it. Twice.

I felt trapped, so I made a break. New role, more local, home at night, a real pay cut. I thought I was buying my freedom and my way back to myself.

And I was still trapped. Still working constantly. Still saying yes to everything. Still nowhere closer to feeling like me.

Because I took the cage with me.

The clean break did not free me, and I want to tell you why. The trap was never the job. The real cost was not even at work. It was everywhere else.

Because when work takes that much of you, it does not just take your hours. It takes your mindshare. It takes the part of you that used to think about your own life.

I noticed it in small ways first. I started giving my husband more say, even on things I actually saw differently, because getting into it created friction, and I did not have the energy or the skills at home to get to the root of what was really keeping us from operating as a true team. So I conceded. Not because he was right and I was wrong, but because it felt easier than the harder conversation.

And the part that stops me even now is this. I was doing that harder work at the office. The patient, root-level, get-to-the-heart-of-it work, I was giving all of it to my colleagues. I was giving the best of me to work, and what was left over to myself and to my family. I did not even realize I was doing it.

And the thing is, it is easy to miss this, because it is not as black and white as feeling like you are a pushover. Most people would have told you I was confident and very much my own person. But you can be all of that and still let your own life go untended, for years, because work keeps taking the top of your mind.

The reason you feel the urge to quit is that you can feel change is underway.

You know there is something coming, some version of your future you are not setting yourself up for. You can even sense the thing you could be doing right now to get ahead of it. But you are so busy that it never gets done. And after enough of that, you start to believe the only way you will ever get to your own life is to stop working entirely.

That is the fantasy. Not because you are lazy, and not because you do not love your work. But because your life has been piling up undone, and quitting looks like the only door back into it.

That is what the clean break was really trying to fix. And a clean break cannot fix it, because I would have carried that same pattern into every new place. I was the one building the cage.

For a long time I thought, like many of you, that the answer was to want less. To just get off the hamster wheel and be happy with what I had. But it is not that.

You are a high achiever because you have high standards. Not just of other people, of yourself. And that comes from a good place. The competition, the desire to win, it is really a desire to make the most of your time here, to not waste the one life you have.

So if you try to take that drive away, it does not disappear. It just has nowhere to go. And it will find somewhere. You will pour it into things that do not deserve it, into places it does not belong, into control or worry or perfectionism about the wrong things.

The answer is not to want less. The answer is to understand why you are achieving, and what it is for, and how to do it without it costing you something you are not willing to give.

That is the freedom you are actually looking for. Not freedom from your career, or your ambition, or your drive. The freedom to do your work without slowly losing yourself inside it. The freedom to keep competing and keep winning while staying connected to your own ideas, your own judgment, your own sense of what is right, even when it is not what everyone else in the room is thinking.

And that freedom is not on the other side of a resignation letter. You build it inside the life you already have. You build it by changing how you achieve. From survival to alignment. By learning that no is a complete sentence. By protecting your energy like it matters, because it does. By letting yourself be seen for the work you already do instead of disappearing into it.

Here is what happens when you do. The part of you that was curious, and interested, and engaged, the part that was not yet jaded, comes back online. You find your way back to the kind of creativity that comes from being in a zone of creation, not just executing other people’s ideas. The burnout gets managed and cleared. And you remember who you are.

That is the crisis so many of us are actually facing, a whole generation of high achievers coming back to themselves after years of contorting to prove we had what it took. And that space to remember who you are and what you need can feel impossible to find when you have got kids, and bills, and the full weight of daily life. So you decide you either have to quit, or you have to keep this part of you hidden a while longer, because there are bills to pay.

But that is not the choice. This raw, curious, alive part of you can come back online long before you finish your career. It is not quit now or wait until retirement. It is available to you, right where you are.

The other reason you want to quit is that you have a hard time believing this is even possible where you are. That you could have the level you are capable of and the life you actually want, in the same place, at the same time.

And a big part of why you cannot believe it is that you look up the ladder, and you do not see anyone you want to become.

You see the titles you would take in a heartbeat. But they come attached to lives you do not want. And you cannot find a single person above you who has both, the level you are capable of and the life you refuse to give up. So you start to believe the freedom you want just is not available here, and the only way to get it is to leave.

But consider this.

The reason you cannot find that person above you is that she is the person you are becoming.

You are the leader you have been looking for. The way you want to work, ambitious and excellent and also present for the moments that matter, that is not you being difficult or wanting special treatment. That is the way we need more leaders to work. You are not the problem with the culture. You are the correction.

And you help create that culture not by fighting it, but by living it out loud. I know a lot of you would rather not fight. Good news. It was never fighting. It is sharing. It is doing your work your way, letting yourself be seen doing it, and making a path that the women behind you can finally look up and find.

And you also need to know when it really is time to leave the job. Because sometimes it is.

Some of you do need to leave, and if that is you, it is a good and brave thing, and I will help you do it well and do it on purpose instead of in a panic.

I do not have a preconceived answer for you. I am not going to tell you that leaving is brave or that staying is smart. That is not my job. The point is that you get to choose, from freedom instead of desperation, and that the choice is actually yours.

But I do not want you to quit just to feel free and find yourself, only to discover the trapped feeling packed its bags and came with you. I did that. I would like to save you the trip.

So this week, before you reach for the exit, ask yourself one question. Do I want out of the job? Or have I just lost the thread of why I am doing it, and leaving feels like the only way to find myself again?

Because if it is the second one, there is another door. And it is a lot closer than you think.

This is exactly the work I do with women, and right now the doors to Spiritual Achiever® Coaching are open.

If you are standing at this decision and you cannot tell whether you want a new job or you just want to feel like yourself again, that is not a sign you are behind. Most women in this spot can see the problem clearly. They know exactly what is wrong. What they do not have yet is the way through. And that is not a personal failing, it is just the part you cannot always find on your own. It is a sign you deserve a real conversation with someone who has helped a lot of women make this exact call.

So let’s have that conversation. Book a call with me and we will look at where you actually are and what your real next step is.

You can book your call at www.mayempson.com/contact

You do not have to blow up your life to come back to yourself. You are the leader you have been looking for. Let’s find your door.

Spiritual Achiever coaching is my year-long transformational coaching experience for professionals who want clarity and capacity while being coached at the highest level.

You can learn more or start a conversation at:
www.mayempson.com/contact

Start Here: Free Training

👉 Watch the free training:
STAND OUT AND LEAD – How to use spiritual and high-performance strategies to achieve time and financial freedom.

Apply for Coaching

Ready to live a life that feels as good as it looks?

📞 Apply now at www.mayempson.com/contact
Risk-free: If you don’t start seeing results in your first month, you’ll get your money back.

Want to know more about what happens when you join?

1. When you join Spiritual Achiever® Coaching you’ll be supported for a full year: Career Revelation Academy: A 5-step career change process (if you have a job you want to stay in, I’ll show you how to love it even more) that can launch you into your next career chapter in 30 days.
2. 2x/month group training and coaching on Spirituality, Achievement, Earth Energy and Harmony. You’ll know how to design your days for breakthroughs, create a personal brand and community, lead yourself and others through change, become more physically and mentally fit, reduce stress and reinvent what’s possible in this next chapter of your life.
3. Monthly 1:1 Coaching Sessions: To help you break through obstacles, define your individual path, and to work on both strategy and mindset.