Harmonious Return – Job Reset With Coach Taylor Short

No matter where we end up in life, we will periodically need to reset. Even in our jobs. Just like the seasons, we must also adjust and change to fully live our lives before we reach our breaking points. In this conversation with Stephen Jaye, Taylor Short, founder of Harmonious Return and author of Reset Your Relationship To Your Job, sheds some light on the different manifestations of burnout and how people reevaluate their lives when change becomes necessary. She also discusses the need to slow down, step back, and look inward, as well as how to do just that. --- Listen to the podcast here Harmonious Return - Job Reset With Coach Taylor Short A major component to our lives especially in the 21st century, although I would argue it has always been a major component to the human experience, is the idea of a reset, a time when you have to re-evaluate. I feel like New Year's in its purest form is a natural built-in reset into our schedules. Every year, we take time to stop, re-evaluate and figure out what it is that we want. On the topic of reset, I bring to you my guest, Taylor Short, the founder of a wellness business as well as an author of the book, Reset Your Relationship to Your Job. Taylor, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me. I'm glad to be here. Let's start off by talking about Harmonious Return, your wellness business. It seems like you have different types of events and coaching but all around this theme of resetting. Briefly describe what the business is about, what the goal is and what your methods are. I love that you can see the overarching. We can even start with the book. The book is the catalyst and the most accessible way to work with me or understand the work that I do in the world but on a broader level of this reset. You're so right. The whole idea around this was when I came from Corporate America. Extreme burnout on the inside but on the external, feeling conflicted because I had the corporate salary and title. All of the things that I thought should make me happy but I was feeling this incongruency within myself. Through my own journey, I started to say, "What is going on here doing this reset myself?" Mind you, this was a gradual progression over a few years but in my discovery, I looked around and said, "We are moving at this pace that is unnatural. Us humans, we are nature and nothing in nature moves and expels their energy 100% of the time." I started to dive deeper into the work that I do to help people. The first step is to pause like, "Is your life working for you?" Because we get so caught up in the days turn into weeks, months and years. I would revel in some of these people that were at the end of their lives. They have lived a long life and looking back at some of the advice they gave to us that we're fortunate enough to learn from what they learned in an entire lifetime. Many of them had many regrets, "I would have paid attention to my life more. I would have done more things that I wanted to do." The reset is around that intentional pause that we don't normally do at this pace to say, "Is work working for me? Is life working for me? If it's not then what do I need to do to reset that?" To start off the story, what was this corporate job that you had? It wasn't necessarily just one. As anyone does, I think when we graduate from our undergrad studies, at least I didn't question it. You get a job, work your way up and that's what's going to create your success or happiness. Along the way, I did that. I was successful at jumping promotions to getting salaries. I had been in different industries but in the end, I was spending time in the financial services world and was successful to all my family and people on the outside like, "You've got the salary and this title. This is awesome," but inside it was like, "I am miserable. There is something significantly wrong here." I've started to look at that like, "We're pushing for more, harder and work faster. You can't produce more out of these people." That was the corporate world. Nothing externally is changing. I'm changing. I really came to a point in my life where I was like, I cannot believe how amazing my life is now. This is the way life is supposed to be. I brought this up in a couple of previous episodes. I often describe this state of being as living by the script, the script being what's put out for you, "Go to school, get a good degree, get good grades then go to the corporation or go to some large organization and move up the ladder." I've also experienced the whole, "Work harder, work faster." It sounds like you ended up in a state that people refer to as burnout. It seems to be a couple of factors. One is the sheer amount of work and busyness but other factors often brought up are misalignment. For your story of burnout, which of these two factors do you feel was the primary contributor? It's a combination of both. Towards the end, I kept saying, "You can work at full capacity for a project, push or deadline." When it's consistently pushed on like you finally finished the sprint launch or something and then another project is just as urgent, that sheer volume and amount that was being requested to, output was a factor. At that same time, you are battling whether I was having that exhaustion and then not being able to do things that fulfilled me outside of my job because that burnout was like that misalignment too of, "I can't even do the things that I want to do outside of work because of work." That seems like a tough state and a state that a lot of people are in. It's a state that I've observed that's part of the motivation for this show in the first place is, "How many people seem to be stuck?" When it comes to this reset and re-evaluation process, I often cite New Year's. When I talk about New Year's, I don't talk about being drunk until 4:00 in the morning although I do have to acknowledge I have partaken in that. I talk about the process where you spend the last two weeks of the year summing up the year that just happened, "Where were you a year ago? Where are you now?" and then making resolutions. A lot of people make resolutions. I make goals and roadmaps but making these plans for what next year is going to be. In your view, is that sufficient? How often should someone be stopping, taking a deep breath and saying, "I need to pause?" An annual reset is amazing. However, in my book and work, I talk about using nature in this sense and aligning with the seasonal changes is how I personally do it. It's quarterly. I feel like three months is a sufficient time to practice what you've set up or how you want to be at the beginning of that season. Seasons also have different energies. We're not going to have the same amount of energy every single season throughout an entire year. Maybe you have, traditionally, winter. For example, it's hibernating and going inward. How do you want to be in winter? How do you want to be in spring? That's one of the ways. Also, sometimes people like to go with the moon cycles monthly of like, "Maybe it's a full moon. Maybe it's a new moon." Annually, it's an awesome way to look at macro-level like, "This is how it was." Looking back too is important, "What did I learn? What were some of those themes?" It's easy to get carried away. Quarterly works the best for me personally. Job Reset: People need to know their internal barometers, say when something's off and not have to get to those breaking points. Seasons are very important. It's interesting that you bring up the moon cycles because I'm originally from Long Island and I spent a lot of my life in Chicago. One of the things I realized living in Colorado is I had never paid much attention to the moon cycles until I would be on a backpacking trip. It was a few years ago when we had that total solar eclipse and my group planned our backpacking trip around that eclipse. As a result, we planned on it during a new moon. Nighttime comes and I suddenly realized, "I can see all the stars so clearly as opposed to last time we were backpacking and happened to be a full moon. There were moon shadows everywhere." I realized people in different places and areas used to have their lives impacted much more by these lunar cycles. I got goosebumps with you saying that because it's true. When you experience the night sky with uninterrupted light, it's a jaw-dropping moment because I've experienced it too. I imagined people like Galileo back centuries ago who was so excited to get out that telescope, record the exact position of stars every single night and eventually make these discoveries about how all the constellations work. It's amazing. We take that knowledge for granted. That is a secondary benefit. I teach with nature but the pace and need for reset go back to how disconnected we've become to nature. Not long ago, being in the wild was our home or the habitat of our ancestors. Even though technology has catapulted us far ahead, we've gotten to this point, which I believe that we're out of our natural rhythm a little bit. Our brains haven't caught up too. They're still very ancestral. It reminds me of one of my favorite quotes, which says like, "We have primal brains, medieval institutions and godlike technology." Our brains are not caught up to it and our institutions very much are optimized to a prior era. What do you think are the warning signs if someone needs a reset? What should you be looking for? You're talking to all your friends or you're thinking about all your friends and you're wondering, "Is this person burnt out and in need of a reset? Are they just busy?" What is the difference between those two categories of existence? I love that because it is so different. I'm such a big believer in balance but balance is not something that we get obsessed about like a daily thing. Life happens. We have to have some ebb and flow....