Welcome to Episode #248 of the Own Your Best Life Podcast

I am recording and sharing this one from the road, and I want to tell you about my actual day, because in reflection, it is the life I used to only dream about.

This morning, I woke up and meditated before I ran seven miles on a hotel treadmill because I’m training for the Berlin Marathon this September. Then I ran a strategy session, and then I sat with someone on my team to review data and help them prepare for a big meeting. I’m staying at a friend’s house tonight and then I have a weekend of yoga and hiking and girls trip shenanigans ahead of me. And when I get home, I have a heads down, focused sprint of work before I leave for two weeks on a family trip.

That is corporate work, and coaching work, and my health, and my friends, and my family, all in the same few days.

It is not balanced in the neat way people imagine balance. It is integrated and I am the same person everywhere I go. And getting here took real decisions. Decisions to not just do one thing, but to be genuinely part of many things. To be present and clear and participating in all of it, instead of trying to escape or hide from the parts that are hard.

That is what being in integrity across your whole life actually looks like for me. And it does not look like anyone else’s day. It does not have to. And neither does yours.

That is what I want to talk about today. What actually happens to a woman when she does this work, and builds a life like this. Not the theory of it. The real arc of coaching. Because I have watched it enough times now that I can tell you how it tends to go, almost like a map.

And this matters, because when you do not know that there is a journey, you often quit before you even get started. Or worse, you quit right before the breakthrough.

When we are feeling stuck, we want to quit, and we start to believe that the life dreams are made of is not for us. It is for someone else. We start thinking about not working at all, or whether we should step out to take care of our kids. But think about it. If we really loved what we did, and believed the way we were spending our time was right, we would not be thinking about quitting or leaving. We would be staying. Saying yes to new and interesting opportunities. Curious about what will unfold next.

So let me tell you about the women I work with. She is not one person. But you will likely recognize yourself in her, because she is you.

When she comes to me, she is often certain she needs to leave.

She is good at her job. Everyone tells her so. Her reviews are strong. And she is exhausted, knowing she needs more sleep and never quite getting it, between the demands at home and a brain that is always full of work. She thinks the way out of the exhaustion is out of the job. The boat is burning. She has to jump.

She usually cannot tell you exactly what she wants next. She can tell you everything that is wrong. I do not even know what my thing is, she says. I just know it is not this.

That is where we start. And this is how it tends to unfold.

The first thing that changes is that she gets clear on what is actually hers.

One woman I worked with kept landing in the same kind of role, over and over, the person everyone relied on to run things, and she had never once stopped to ask whether that was the work she was built for or just the work she kept getting handed. When she finally saw her own edge clearly, the fog lifted. She stopped taking whatever came to her and started reaching, on purpose, for the thing that fit. She went on to run a company as a general manager, in a role that matched not just what she was good at, but what actually mattered to her.

The clarity is always the first domino. You cannot choose your next step when every option looks equally plausible and equally wrong. Once she can name her edge, the choosing gets easy.

The second thing that changes is that she gets her energy back.

And this is the one people underestimate. Because you can know exactly what you want and still do nothing with it, if you are too depleted to move.

Another woman I worked with was carrying an enormous load with no system for sustaining it. She was not confused about her goals. She just had nothing left at the end of the day to actually pursue them. So we did not start with her career plan. We started with her sleep, her routines, the way she worked. We built her an actual formula for operating at a high level without grinding herself down. And once she had the capacity back, she walked into a major interview so prepared and so steady that by the end, she told me it felt like they were selling her on the job. She landed a role most people would call a dream.

The energy is what makes the clarity usable. Without it, your best plan just sits there.

The third thing that changes is that she lets herself be seen.

This is the one that is hardest, and the one that changes the most.

So many accomplished women are doing excellent work that no one can see, because somewhere along the way they decided the work should speak for itself. It does not. It never has.

One woman I worked with had actually stepped away from her role, undervalued and unrecognized, sure that her competence should have been enough on its own. It was not that she needed to be better at her job. She needed to let people see what she was already capable of. We worked on how she named her value and spoke about it with confidence, and that confidence did not stay in one lane. She started making bolder choices everywhere. She became a partner at one of the top firms in her field.

Her competence was never the question. What changed is that she stopped waiting to be noticed.

Now I want to go underneath all three of these stories, to the thing that was really going on. Because it was the same thing for all of them, and I think it might be true for you too.

Every one of them was slowly becoming someone she did not want to be. She could feel it happening, and she could not figure out how to stop it. And so getting out of the driver’s seat, checking out, just following a plan, started to feel like a relief.

And that pull makes sense. These women are leaders. But they are leading in so many new ways at once, at work, at home, in their health, in their marriages, that it is genuinely exhausting. And when you are that tired, part of you just wants to be a passenger. To follow a plan someone else made, because you do not fully trust yourself to know what you would do if you just did what you actually wanted.

And the plan you have been following is not bad. It is not wrong. It is just out of date. It was built for a life you are not living anymore. A life where you did not yet have a seat at the table, and now you do, and you still feel like you have to outwork and outearn everyone just to prove you belong at it. A life where you did not yet want both real leadership and real partnership at home, and now you want both, and the mental load of carrying them at the same time is enormous.

And underneath all of it is one fear. That the work is going to cost you your personal life. That you are becoming a person who is not nice enough, and somehow not edgy enough, at the very same time. That you are losing the thread of who you actually are.

So when one of my clients takes a stand, comes back to her own point of view about what actually matters to her, and can say it out loud clearly enough that she has a compass again, a north star, that is a big deal. That is the moment she starts to trust that if she took the wheel, she would not drive the car into the ground.

That trust is a skill. It is not something you are born with or without. And it is the skill we are building, together. The skill to communicate with confidence. To pause and work with your body instead of overriding it. To translate your drive and your work ethic into value that actually gets you paid and recognized. Those are not small things. Those are the tools of a whole new kind of leadership. Human-centered. Values-driven. And it still gets the job done.

There is one thing all three of these women have in common that I do not want you to miss.

Not one of them found what they were looking for by blowing up their life.

Some of them left. Some of them stayed. One of them had already walked away from her role before we started. But the leaving, or the staying, was never the thing that turned it around. What turned it around was the work. They found their edge, they got their energy back, and they let themselves be seen. And the life they wanted was not on the other side of a resignation letter, or on the other side of gritting it out where they were. It was built, step by step, from the inside.

And their lives do not look the same. Not even close. And I am not just talking about these three women now. I am talking about the many, many women I have watched do this, because the shapes their lives take are endless.

Some go from doing freelance work on their own to keeping that and adding a role at a bigger, more established company. Some stay in a traditional job, get promoted, and start a business on the side. Some get promoted and build a genuinely creative life around it, with hobbies and a business and real time for themselves. Some do something else entirely that I never would have predicted. There is no single destination here. There is no one right shape.

What they share is not where they end up. It is that every one of them, through coaching, decided what kind of life she actually wanted, and then went and lived it.

Because that is what coaching really does. It gets you back in the driver’s seat of your own life, instead of riding along as the passenger. It is the difference between your life happening to you and you deciding where it goes.

Because that is what this really is. For years, you can be driving hard and still feel like a passenger in your own life. Steering everyone else’s priorities, riding along in your own. Getting back in the driver’s seat means you see so much more of the scenery. You are part of the decisions again. And yes, it means you deal with the ups and downs of handling the car, the bumps and the wrong turns and the things that go sideways, because you are the one driving now. That is not the hard part. That is the good part. It is yours.

That is the arc of coaching. And it is available to you, right where you are.

I want to tell you why this idea of coming back matters so much to me right now.

For the last year and a half, I have been navigating a health challenge. And recently, I got the news that it has healed. That the thing I had been carrying is finally behind me.

And what has surprised me is what I am noticing on the other side of it. New interests. Energy for creating things. A general sense that I feel sturdy, and strong, and capable again. I am starting to wonder if I am coming back to myself in a way I did not even realize I had drifted from.

Because the strange part is that while I was in it, I could not fully see it. I had so much else going well in my life that the ways it was affecting me were hard to notice. I was looking back at everything I built to start and grow my business, and I felt tired just thinking about how I did all of it. The business was fine. My clients were still getting results. But I am only now getting curious about what it might have cost me, because I could not see it clearly while I was living it.

That is exactly why this idea of coming back is so alive for me. Because we are all going to have detours. A health challenge. A loss. A hard season. Kids. Burnout. Something that takes a piece of us we cannot always see is gone until it comes back.

Coming back to yourself is not a one-time event. It is not something you do once and finish. Your life is a series of coming back. Of finding your way home to yourself, again and again.

If you have been sitting with this decision, wondering whether the version of your life you actually want is possible without torching everything, I want you to know that it is. And the doors to Spiritual Achiever® Coaching are open right now.

You do not have to have it all figured out to start. Most women come in able to see the problem clearly and unable to see the way through. The way through is exactly what we build together.

So let’s have a real conversation about where you are and what your next step is. Book a call with me, and we will look at it together, with no preconceived answer about what you should do. Just clarity about what is actually right for you.

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

You do not have to blow up your life to come back to yourself and get back in the driver’s seat. You are not as far from her as you think. Let’s go find her.

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

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