Episode 68: How to calibrate your internal GPS with Belma McCaffrey

Welcome to The Career Clarity Show, where we help you find a lucrative, soulful, and joyful career path for you!

Have you been thinking about what you should do with your life? 

Today’s episode is for you if you feel like you are at the precipice of looking at questions around mission, purpose, vision, and dreaming what you want to be creating with your life. Our mission is to start thinking about your work as being more than just work but thinking about it being a sense of mission and legacy and how to really feel like you can calibrate your internal GPS to help better find your way if you’re feeling stuck or lost. If you want to find that way back to who you are and what feels aligned and juicy and life giving for you. 

We are joined by career and leadership coach Belma McCaffrey. Belma is on a mission to help individuals do work they love that makes an impact in the world without burning out.

Want to learn more about our strategic framework for successful career change? Download The Roadmap to Career Fulfillment ebook right here!

SHOW NOTES:

• Work Bigger
• Instagram @workbigger
• WorkBigger Workbook
• Belma McCaffrey LinkedIn 
• Episode 52: Taking Good Care of Yourself with Talia Rosenblum
• How to take a sabbatical from work
• How to take a sabbatical without derailing your career
• Simon Sinek TED talk 
• Michelle Obama’s Becoming on Netflix
• Read the Career Clarity Book!
• Email Lisa at Lisa@GetCareerClarity.com

Subscribe to The Career Clarity Show on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, and Google Play.

And, follow The Career Clarity Show on Facebook and Instagram — and sign up below to receive emails when new episodes come out!

 

Transcript:

Lisa Lewis Miller  0:04  

Welcome to the Career Clarity Show. If you want to create a career path you’ll love, you’re in the right place. I’m Lisa Lewis Miller, career change coach, published author and your host, and each week we’ll bring you personal transformation stories, advice and insights from experts about how you can find a more fulfilling, soulful and joyful career. 

Lisa Lewis Miller  0:31  

Hello, and welcome, clarity seekers. I’m your host, career change expert and the creator of the Career Clarity method, Lisa Lewis Miller. And today on the podcast I am bringing on a dear friend and wonderful career expert to talk about what to do if you feel like you are sitting with the question of what should I do with my life? Today’s episode is for you if you feel like you are at the precipice of looking at all these questions around mission, purpose, vision, dreaming what you want to be creating with your life, thinking about your work as being more than just work but thinking about it being a sense of mission and legacy and how to really feel like you can calibrate your internal GPS to help better find your way if you’re feeling stuck or lost or totally off mission and you want to find that way back to who you are and what feels aligned and juicy and life giving for you. So our guest on today’s episode of the podcast is the delightful wonderful Belma McCaffrey.

Lisa Lewis Miller  1:37  

Belma is a career and leadership coach, and the CEO and founder of Work Bigger a career development platform on a mission to help individuals do work they love that makes an impact in the world without burning out. Belma’s work has been featured in Forbes fortune thrive and other media platforms. Belma is also an immigrant mom. And prior to work bigger, she spent 10 years working in media and strategy roles at companies like the Associated Press and Conde Nast. Belma I am so delighted to welcome you to the Career Clarity show today.

Belma McCaffrey  2:09  

Thank you, Lisa, I’m so so excited to be here. And it’s awesome to just reconnect and spend some time chatting with you.

Lisa Lewis Miller  2:18  

Well, I’d love to start our conversation. For anybody who’s listening who doesn’t know about work bigger and you and your mission? Would you be willing to share a bit about the backstory and why helping people find a sense of mission and purpose is so important to you.

Belma McCaffrey  2:34  

Yeah, so I am doing this work. And I started Work Bigger, because I’ll say all of this just came out of a personal pain point, I spent all of my 20s feeling really driven and really ambitious and having a desire to make an impact through my work. But I also felt really disconnected from my career and my work. And I basically spent several years going from job to job trying to fill this hole. And you know, not not knowing how to do that. So I started working in, in media on the media agency side did that for a few years. And actually, I remember my first job out of college, I was like, so excited, I’m like, this is my first job, and I’m going to kill it. And it’s going to be amazing. And a few months in, you know, I just started to feel that disconnection. And you know, I said, Well, I’m going to go find another job, maybe it’s the jobs fault. And a few months into that the same thing happened. And eventually, I found myself going back to business school because I thought you know what, maybe I just need to make a full on career pivot. And the best way to do that is grad school, right? It’ll open more doors for me, it’ll open up my eyes to what’s out there. Maybe there are other careers out there that I just haven’t been exposed to. And I don’t know what those are. So let me let me explore that path. 

Belma McCaffrey  3:59  

But when I got to business school, I saw that I was one of basically almost all of my classmates everybody was kind of using Business School grad school as a way to pivot but nobody had done the deeper work to really figure out what what it is they wanted to do. And I thought I’m like, this is kind of crazy. Like this is cool, so expensive. You’re giving up if you’re going full time you’re giving up your full time salary, and I was making pretty good money when when I you know left my job to go to grad school and should only be getting Shouldn’t we know the return that we’re going to get should we have some more certainty around it. So that’s kind of what you know, it was that experience that sort of pushed me into the career space and you know, just my own struggles around the job search and finding my own mission. My own purpose that that got me here today and is why I started work bigger.

Lisa Lewis Miller  4:59  

I love  that, and I think that the, the feeling that you were noticing in yourself and what you were observing and your classmates, I think is, is almost typical of people hitting a certain point in their careers and in their lives. And looking forward and thinking, oh, gosh, I’ve got two or three decades left in the working world. Is this how I want to feel? Is this the impact that I want to be making? Is this the way that I want to be using my gifts? To be creating value and to be serving? And that can be a really confronting question to ask yourself, but it can also be a really empowering one. Mm hmm.

Belma McCaffrey  5:41  

Yeah. Yeah, it was scary. And for a lot, that’s exactly what he said, because it felt so scary is why I think it took me so long to figure it out. That’s why it almost felt like the easier thing to do was to test out different jobs or to, you know, to go from job to job and be like, maybe this is maybe this is the one without doing all the work that was really required to get there.

Belma McCaffrey  6:08  

But yeah, yeah, I totally feel that. And I’ll see to just in addition to the personal pain points that I had around my own career, I think this, you know, one of the reasons to that I started this company is because I think work, it’s when we have the privilege to do so to leverage work as a vehicle for making a difference, right for making an impact, which is so needed, right? That also just comes from my upbringing. I was born in Albania, which is this small, poor country in Eastern Europe. And, you know, my parents always instilled in me a really strong work ethic. But while we were there, last summer, my mom and I were sitting on the beach, and we’re talking about Albania and the people and, you know, she, she were talking about the work ethic, and I don’t remember exactly how it came up. But she said to me to work is to love life. And I thought how perfect that my mom is saying this, you know, and I think today work has become about climbing the ladder and burning out and pushing ourselves to the max. But when my mom was talking about it, but when when she said to, to work is to love life, it really worked becomes a vehicle to something bigger, right to to serving your life in this in this way that I think has gotten lost in the workplace today.

Belma McCaffrey  7:35  

So that’s, I wanted to share that because you know, a lot of what we do at Work Bigger in the spirit behind it comes from that as well. No, just using work as a vehicle to something bigger to making a difference using it as a vehicle for creativity and problem solving versus the status quo. Hmm,

Lisa Lewis Miller  7:55  

That’s so important. And I feel like that concept of being lost, or not being lost or being stuck or getting unstuck, could be a really beautiful starting point for our conversation today. Because I think that it’s really easy to get to a place where your life and your job might look very enviable on the outside, right, it’s steady, it’s stable, you’re making decent money, maybe you’ve got an enviable title for your age. Maybe you’re working at a very sexy brand that other people have heard of. And they’re they’re jealous of you. But you notice that same feeling that you were describing of almost like an emptiness. Or just a sense that that this this, isn’t it? I don’t know exactly what I’m looking for. But this, isn’t it? What guideance do you give to people who are in that exact same career influction point? Where they are feeling stuck, lost, adrift, confused?

Belma McCaffrey  9:00  

Yeah. So what I seen with people who are at that point, right, that inflection point that you talked about, I see a lot of people who get there are experiencing some sort of burnout, or they’re feeling really drained or exhausted, because this has been going on for a while. Now.

Belma McCaffrey  9:16  

I think when you get to that point, right? You’ve just you’ve spent a lot of time either thinking about a career pivot, or wanting to make one but not sure how, if you’re anything like me, you’ve tried different things, but things aren’t working out. So also, what I see maybe you’ve been going on this path and you realize, like, wow, I’m just exhausted. So the first place I would start is to like slow down and really just do a mindset check. Like Where are you? Are you? Like, just what are the emotions that are coming up for you? Right? How are you feeling every single day because trying to make a change from a place of burnout and exhaustion usually doesn’t work. So I always say like, start with a mindset, first do a check in, see how you’re feeling. Start there, and then move on to finding your mission. And I can happy to talk more about that too. Because, you know, it’s everything that we do at work bigger is about finding your purpose and your mission and building a strong foundation. Right that we currently don’t we don’t have when we start out in our careers. But yeah, I’ll say that the mindset pieces most important so that whatever decisions you’re making, are coming from a place of possibility and from a place of feeling energized, and from a place of excitement versus exhaustion.

Lisa Lewis Miller  10:42  

Well imagine that somebody who’s listening to this has done a mindset check in and they’ve realized, Oh, crap, I am absolutely in that burnout and exhaustion bucket. Knowing that burnout and exhaustion has a mindset element, but there’s also a real physical element. And there’s usually a real structural element of what’s going on in people’s lives. what some of the some of the things you encourage people to think about to be able to even step into the kind of mindset that would empower them to do this mission and purpose searching work.

Belma McCaffrey  11:18  

Yeah, so the first thing I would say is just pause, right? Like just take, see what you can do to take a breather. And I’ll I’ll share a personal story. I know for me, before I started work bigger, I was building another company. I know this similar to work barrows, a career coaching company, I was working full time at the Associated Press, and I just had my first son, so he was a few months old. And I was trying to do all these things at the same time. And I knew I knew my plan was I’m going to build this business, I’m going to leave my job. And I’m going to make a pivot. And that’s my plan. And honestly, it didn’t work. We ended up shutting down the business, I you know, split with my partners amicably, I was completely exhausted, I was burned out. And really where I started was like, I’m just going to stop, I’m not going to do anything. For a couple of weeks a month, I’m going to take a break. And then little by little, I started to just take on projects, I knew I wasn’t going to quit, I knew that I was going to start another business. But this way, I was going to do it in a healthier way. So I just looked at what is the lowest hanging fruit? What is something that I can do today, that feels really easy energizes me versus depletes me. And that’s where I started writing. And I, you know, I would write once a week, and I started building a blog, which is how work bigger got started. So I share that story. 

Belma McCaffrey  12:45  

Because the takeaway there is sometimes it’s important to just pause, right, just don’t do anything until you can give yourself a little bit of a break. And then start doing little things that give you joy that give you energy, right, but also letting go of any expectations around that. Right and doing it just for the sole purpose, just that it feels good. And that’s it. Right? No pressure to figure this all out. And two months, three months, six months, right, you’ll get there. But just follow that joy, follow that curiosity, follow what gives you energy in the beginning. And that’s it. 

Lisa Lewis Miller  13:28  

The way that you say it, it sounds so simple, and so straightforward, and so easy. But I know that for recovering perfectionist and a plus plus students and overachievers we become so enmeshed in our work, and having work become so much of our identity, and our sense of meaning and purpose in our lives. That the idea of doing something that has no ROI, purely just for pleasure or interest, feels rebellious, feels almost impossible. And oftentimes will bring up a really painful realization that it might have been a really long time since you have done anything purely for joy, or merely for the beauty of it that didn’t have to be related to improving your mental health, improving your physical health, improving your performance at work, improving your performance as a partner or a parent or whatever. Yeah.

Belma McCaffrey  14:31  

And I’ll say when it feels that uncomfortable, then you’re on the right path. Right? Because it’s a problem. I think if we’re tying our identities so much to our careers, and we become so attached to this result that we want, then we’re losing then we’re then what’s the point? Right, what’s the point of being on this path, right if we’re just in it for, you know, just to go from point A to point B If I want to stress that if it’s feeling that uncomfortable, and it almost feels like that shocking to your system,

Belma McCaffrey  15:09  

take a look at that. Take a look at that and see what what’s coming up for you. Right? Why does this feel so bad? What is this? What is this saying? It’s kind of like you said, like, well, it’s been a really long time, since I’ve taken a break or done anything for the just for the sole purpose of joy. Right? And then what else? Is it bringing up for you? What else is it bringing up for you in terms of your self worth?

Lisa Lewis Miller  15:35  

Oh, my gosh, there’s so many good Mic drop moments are coming up here. I love it. Because it’s really confronting in a very positive and productive way. I think because I’m really begging the question of, how do you want to feel? What do you want your life to look like? How much of your work are you making your worth? And when you can start to divorce your work and your worth, so that they are not the same. And they don’t even have to be connected to the spaciousness that that creates for play and creativity and possibilities and expansion and experimentation with new things and giving yourself permission to go explore. Is is just amazing. I love that.

Belma McCaffrey  16:22  

Yeah, yeah, think about what you can create, right? When you’re coming from that place. When you’re feeling good. We’re not really productive, or as productive as we think when we’re coming from a place of stress, and exhaustion. And that’s what I saw with my own experiences. Like, I’m doing all this stuff. I’m waking up super early than you know, I had a little baby at home. So I wasn’t sleeping great as it is, you know, I’m filling all the gaps in my day with stuff not taking any time for myself and wearing this like badge of honor, right? Like, I’m so proud. I’m such a hard worker. And it’s like, no, I had zero impact very, very little, if any. And the effect was just me burning myself out. And I didn’t build what I was aiming to build, right. I really had to. It was why when I came to that awareness, I was like, This is not the way this is not sustainable. This is just, yeah, things things need to shift. We need to operate from a healthier place of we’re going to create anything that’s meaningful.

Lisa Lewis Miller  17:28  

Yeah, well, I want to talk a little bit more about this meaningfulness piece here. But if you’re listening to this, and you are really appreciating what you’re saying, but you’re thinking to yourself, there’s no effing way I can create more time or more space or draw boundaries. I want to point you to a couple things, and we’ll link to these in the show notes. So look for them there. And thing number one is we’ve got a past episode of the career clarity podcast where I talked to burnout expert expert, Talia Rosenbloom, and she’s got some incredible super bite sized doable things that you can do to start setting stronger boundaries to have more protected personal time at home. So we’ll put that into the show notes for you. But the other thing that I’ll put into the show notes is that I’ve wrote a series of articles on how to take a sabbatical, how to take it from a financial perspective, how to take it from a career perspective. And so we’ll include those two because if you’re getting the sense that you really need a full reset a complete time off and exhale, sabbatical, where you don’t have to think about what’s coming next for work, and just some time to reconnect with who you are. looking and seeing how doable that might be for you can be an incredibly empowering, exciting thing to do.

Lisa Lewis Miller  18:42  

absolutely check those resources out in the show notes if you need a little bit more, more in terms of tips or advice or tools for how to make that happen. But now I want to take the conversation in that direction of meaning and purpose and mission. Because Velma I know that this is your jam. So it’s so if somebody is getting to a place where they have the space, and the headspace, and they’re in a frame of mind, where they’re ready and open to positive possibilities in their life, their life, but they don’t even feel like they know the first place to start with, with aiming themselves towards purpose and intentionality and impact. How do you support somebody in starting to sort of recalibrate that inner GPS to point that direction?

Belma McCaffrey  19:36  

Yeah, so we use a specific framework at work bigger, which I created by first looking at my own path and then testing it on hundreds of people at this point, and then now using it with hundreds of clients. So the framework, the first thing I want to say is what I see is there’s a couple of things that we do wrong or that we’re looking at the wrong question. Right are we’re asking ourselves the wrong questions. One is what should my job my next job be? So when we’re looking to make a change, when we’re looking for something that’s fulfilling, we’re asking what questions? What is that job role? And that question can feel really overwhelming, right? And it’s not I almost on a flip that we shouldn’t start with what the other error that I see out there. 

Belma McCaffrey  20:23  

The other question that I see all the time is, what’s my passion? Right? versus we really should be asking, what’s my mission? Or what’s my purpose, because what’s passion is really fleeting, you could be really passionate about cooking, let’s say, but you can’t turn you may not be able to turn that into a career, right? You may not want to go be a chef. Right? So when we’re, there’s just these questions that that we see out there all the time. And I know for myself, like, since I was a kid, I was like, what’s my passion, I have to figure out my one passion, that’s gonna be it. That’s my fulfilling career path. And I think those are really misleading. So I want to start there and just call those out. So if you’re asking yourself questions like that stop. And really where we should be starting is asking why, right, starting with deeper questions, understanding who we are, what we want, what really drives us, what motivated, what motivates us. And the framework that we use at work bigger really consists of understanding your interests. Right? What do you care about? And why do you care about that?

Belma McCaffrey  21:27  

And I’ll have people say, Well, again, like I’m interested in cooking, I really like sports, but I’m not going to go be an athlete, it’s not about the interest. It’s about what do these interests give you? What is the feeling that comes up? Right?

Belma McCaffrey  21:43  

What is it that they’re giving you? Right? Just to if everybody anybody’s going through listening to this podcast, just write this question down? Like, what am I interested in? And what is it giving me? How’s it feeding me? Right? So that’s the first thing that we look at second is values. Right? What what are my values? What do I stand for? A lot of the time, the disconnection that we feel in our careers comes from, because we’re working at a company that’s not in alignment, in alignment with our values, right, or the leadership isn’t in alignment with our values. Right? And immediately, we feel what we’re there, we feel off, but we don’t know why. Part of looking at your interest in values, what we do is we also have our clients and members look at their personal pain points, experiences that have shaped who you are, you know, that have shaped who you are, as you get older, and your values shifts with age, right? Because you have new experiences, you learn new things. 

Belma McCaffrey  22:43  

So this when I say start with why this is what I mean, I mean, really take a look at these deeper, bigger things that are driving you that that allow you to feel connected. Right? So that’s the first part. The second part is then we look at strengths, what are you what are you really good at, when we’re using our strengths at work, we naturally feel good, we’re more confident we’re happier. That’s, you know, that that’s been proven. So that’s the second part. And the strengths is where, you know, you start to use that to help inform the job role, and maybe what you should be doing in your day to day.

Belma McCaffrey  23:21  

So after you’ve done these two parts, you’ve done the why work and the how work, then you do the what work, then you can really start to put a strategy in place and think about, okay, how do I find that career path. But you really have to start with doing the deeper work, understanding who you are understanding what you want, how you want to feel, right? Why you gravitate towards certain podcasts, why you gravitate towards certain movies, as an example, right? or certain activities. While you find yourself if you’re somebody who does love to cook as an example, I’m thinking of one of my clients she loves, loves to cook for her family. And that’s because she has this memory growing up being in the in the kitchen with her grandmother all the time. And that gives her a sense of connection. Right? So what she gets out of that when she’s cooking with her family is his connection, togetherness. And those are the kind of the kinds of things that you want to bring into your career. Right, that desire for that bigger thing. It’s not necessarily the the interest. So I’ll stop right there. And, yeah, I’d love to hear your thoughts on that. Lisa. 

Lisa Lewis Miller  24:28  

Well, I love the framework being organized by the why and the how and the what, and I know if there’s anybody listening who heard Simon Sinek TED talk about starting with why and the concentric circles, you’re probably drawing the exact same image in your brain that I am right now. And we can link Simon’s TED talk in the in the show notes for today to in case you haven’t watched that, because it’s such a great visual way to create a hierarchy of information or a hierarchy of answering questions, and it’s so beautiful to see that And then sort of water falling through in the way that you approach creating a sense of mission and purpose. And something that you articulated, kind of at the beginning of sharing about all that, that I think is really important is that the Y is linked in implicitly, to how you want to feel day to day. And I know when I was writing that Career Clarity book, I was writing the chapter on how to identify if something is a strength for you, versus just a scalar capability. And as I was writing it, I actually wrote out, you know, you know, if something is a strength for you, because of how you feel when you do it. And I remember reading that and thinking, Oh, my sure that’s true. Is that the advice I want to be giving everybody? 

Lisa Lewis Miller  25:51  

And I think that, you know, the insight that you have been seeing with your people, and the insight that I’ve been seeing with the folks that I’ve been working with, too, is that so much of how we make decisions. And the way that we weigh trade offs, is tied to an assumed pathway to fulfillment have a specific feelings, more specific values? And if you’re doing that blindly, you know, without explicitly articulating, what are the things that you want to feel? And what are the values that you want to honor, it can be really easy to have your career ultimately end up looking like you’re throwing spaghetti at the wall, or Obama, like you were talking about, you know, moving from job to job and having that sense of sort of lingering dissatisfaction move with you. And so having people really start with, what do you value? What are you deeply interested in? You know, what, what does that allow for you to feel in your life and then using that to reverse engineer? What kind of work could feel like a mission, or a purpose is such a cool perspective.

Belma McCaffrey  27:01  

Yeah, and I love and thank you for mentioning Simon Sinek, I remember in his gonna share a couple of things. Finding your mission and finding work that’s fulfilling is a very emotional thing. Right? That’s ultimately what we’re looking for. We’re looking to feel a certain way in our careers, but we’re not taught to think of it from that perspective. We’re taught to think of it from the what perspective, what is it? What do you do? Right? That’s like the first question that you’re asked when you meet somebody, what do you do, right? So also, Simon Sinek, in his video talked about, he talked about how you know, when you start with why you’re connecting to the emotional part, right? Because he used the golden, or he talks about the Golden Circle from like a marketing perspective, and how companies that connect with consumers in an emotional way, start with the why, and the why he, I think he says, it’s like, it’s the way our brain is organized, it actually connects to the limbic part, which is the emotional part. And it just made me think like, this is perfect. This is so fascinating, because that’s part of the problem in career development, too. Were asking these questions that are so logical, when really what we’re looking for is something more emotional. 

Belma McCaffrey  28:18  

But we’re not really taught in society, how to connect with that more emotional part. And that’s why I think it’s so challenging. And I’ll even see, I’ve had members in the work bigger community who will go through the framework. And for some, it’s a lot easier than others, right? For some, it’s challenging, because doing this work and asking these deeper introspective questions, it’s like, wait, I haven’t done this ever. So it, you know, it can feel kind of triggering, too, right? Especially when we ask you to revisit some of those more challenging experiences, those pain points, but it’s important, it’s really, it’s needed to help you understand who you are and what you want on that, on that deeper level.

Lisa Lewis Miller  29:02  

It’s almost this trade off of going through some more intensive emotional exploration, discovery and probably dredging up some stuff that has been suppressed or ignored for years and years. In the short term, more, it’s having those emotions sit like weights in a bag that you’re carrying with you from job to job to job for years of your life, and ultimately, that then you’re trying to numb out because the weight of carrying around that dissatisfaction or that misalignment or that low key frustration or grief, or sadness or disappointment, or whatever it is, you know, that’s not a feeling that we want to have. So that’s when we start turning to things that we’re not doing, just for the joy of it. We’re doing it because it can help us to turn down the volume on how we feel.

Belma McCaffrey  29:55  

Yeah. Yeah, I love that you said that. I love that image. of like carrying the Like emotional weights, it makes me think actually, I was watching the Michelle Obama story on on Netflix, and she talks about the importance of sharing our stories and how the experiences that we’ve had that tend to be really painful. And it’s the stuff that we don’t want to look at. That’s really what helps us become who we are. And that’s what makes us unique. And yeah, so when she said that, I was like, God, like, that’s so perfect, because that’s the stuff that we have to look at that we don’t want to write. So I wanted to share that because that’s a great, I love becoming, by the way, so I highly recommend it to any of the listeners that haven’t, you know, watched it or read the book. Michelle Obama is amazing.

Lisa Lewis Miller  30:50  

I love her. Well. And you know, what, what you sharing her, her insight really sparked for me is that when we root what we’re doing in who we are, it also gives us an increased or enhanced capacity to have resilience and grit and perseverance, when stuff gets hard or challenging. Because if you’re working and you know, zooming your way up the corporate ladder, and you don’t have a really clear why associated with why you’re putting in the hours, why you’re dealing with somebody who is being short with you, or difficult with you in a meeting, it can feel like it’s all for nothing. And if you have that sense of mission and purpose that’s behind why you’re making the decisions you’re making, it can be a lot easier to know, if you need to pivot course correct. Find a new organization, start a company and do your own thing, start nonprofit and do your own thing. Or just make some more direct asks, because you have a much clearer line of sight into how you want to feel and what you want to be creating in the world and whether or not you’re off mission on your current trajectory.

Belma McCaffrey  32:06  

Yeah, and those difficult days, they become so much more bearable when you know why you’re there and what you’re trying to accomplish, right. And accomplishment also comes in the sense of like how you want to feel how you want to make other people feel not necessarily tangible. accomplishments, and I think to just as I hear you talk about mission and not having that mission or purpose when you’re in the workplace. I think so few leaders do. And I think that’s one of the reasons why the workplace can be so toxic these days, because we don’t have leaders that are grounded in in their values, right? They’re making decisions from an external place, or they’re making decisions from a place of fear. And that trickles down to everyone else in the organization. Yeah, I think it’s so important.

Lisa Lewis Miller  32:58  

Yeah, and let me say to the anybody who’s listening to this, who is a rising leader, a current leader, somebody who is stepping into a new level of their leadership or management within their organization, that it’s really good to do a little refresh on this kind of introspection and self reflection, to make sure that as you have grown, and your life has changed, and maybe your values have reprioritize themselves, that you feel like you’re still on mission, that you know where that mission is pointing you, and you understand how to help support and cultivate the people around you to better allow for that mission to become achievable. Yeah,

Belma McCaffrey  33:37  

I couldn’t agree more.

Lisa Lewis Miller  33:38  

Well, Belma I think that there’s so many great nuggets in this conversation. And in this really recenter and recalibrating of the way people are thinking about career and fulfillment around your why and around your emotional experience of life. And I think that you’ve done a really realistic job of setting expectations about what it might be like, but what if somebody’s listening to this? And they’re thinking, Oh, my gosh, I have to dredge up how many emotions you’re asking me to be emotional about work? I Oh, no, that doesn’t sound like any fun to me. 

Belma McCaffrey  34:18  

What do I say to that? Um, I mean, I’m gonna be honest, this work isn’t always fun. I’m sorry. Like, if you want to do if you want different results, you have to do something different, right? If what you’ve done so far, hasn’t worked. I really encourage you to find the courage to look at that stuff. You know, and you don’t have to do it alone. You don’t. That’s why I think coaches are so amazing. They’re there to hold space for you. You do not have to do this work alone. And actually, I don’t recommend it because it’s really important to have a support system of community, people that you can talk to and work through this stuff with Whether it’s a coach, whether it’s a close friend who will, you know, maybe refrain from holding advice and really just holding space for you to listen, right? Maybe it’s a community, maybe it’s a group of people who are like minded and who have similar goals, right, and they’re working on the same things that you’re working on. So I think it’s possible to do this work with support, it doesn’t have to be so painful, but I do I encourage you to get uncomfortable. You know, I don’t think I think if you’re feeling comfortable, then it’s not really, it’s not gonna have the impact that you want it to have, you’re not going to get the results that you may really be craving. 

Lisa Lewis Miller  35:41  

Yeah, it’s a really reminding people who are hungry for growth and learning and expansion, that change and comfort, do not usually go hand in hand. But then oftentimes, leaning into the discomfort and the expansion in the stretchiness of change can lead to more feelings of comfort or feeling of almost a homecoming, like you’ve arrived, like you have a sense of ease and exhale and what you’re doing. That’s so worth it.

Belma McCaffrey  36:13  

Yeah, after that, so beautifully said, I love that a sense of homecoming, it’s so true. It’s so true. And it’s so worth it. You know, I just, I think about just my own path around building a business and how challenging that has been through the years, but I just, I couldn’t imagine doing anything else, you know, and, for me, my mission is has manifested into a company, but it doesn’t have to look like that it could, you know, it could look like anything you want it to look like. The point is that you feel connected, you feel excited, you’re feeling that fulfillment, and when things get really tough. You have that why to help you get through it.

Lisa Lewis Miller  36:57  

Well, Belma if somebody has been listening to this conversation, and they are just eating out of the palm of your hand, and they are loving everything that you’ve been sharing, what are the best places for them to learn more about you and work bigger and the work that you do?

Belma McCaffrey  37:10  

Yeah, so the best place to find us is our website work bigger.co we have a ton of resources on there about finding your mission, a lot of blogs videos, I’ve also put together a workbook for for anyone who’s listening, Lisa and that workbook will help you figure out where you’re feeling stuck like for some people it might be I need to find my mission and I’m ready for others they might be at that mindset part right I’m feeling really burned out for others they might have that mindset and the mission peace figured out but they really need a job search strategy. So I’ve put together a quick workbook where you know you can go through it and see like where you are in the process. So feel free to download that I shared the link with you Lisa and yeah, work bigger co We’re also on Instagram work bigger, you can find us there. And then if anybody wants to connect with me on LinkedIn, you know, I’m happy to connect on there as well. It’s under Belma McCaffrey.

Lisa Lewis Miller  38:10  

Amazing. And for any of you who are wanting access to all these goodies, I will put them in the show notes for today’s episode, which you can get to at get career clarity, comm slash podcast. But Belma, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Belma McCaffrey  38:24  

Thank you for having me. This was so much fun. And yeah, it’s so awesome to reconnect, Lisa and thank you so much to everyone. To everyone who’s listening, I look forward to getting in touch.

Lisa Lewis Miller  38:43  

And that’s the wrap. Let us know what you thought about today’s episode. leave us a review on Apple podcasts. Because not only can your stars and words help us find great guests and topics to feature on future episodes. Your input also helps other people find the resources they need to discover the work that lights them up. And make sure to check out my book Career Clarity finally finds the work that fits your values and lifestyle for the link to order it go to getcareerclarity.com/book. And don’t forget to get your other tools resources and helpful goodies at getcareerclarity.com/podcast. Thanks again for joining us for the career clarity show today. And remember, if you don’t love your work, we should talk because life is too short to be doing work that doesn’t light you up. Talk to you next time.