Journey of Transformation, Growth, and Fulfillment with Elizabeth Burke

Navigating a career change is often challenging; it's about breaking free from the confines of a single job title. When you're not passionate about your current role and it doesn't bring a sense of pride, contemplating change becomes crucial. It involves self-reflection, identifying your true interests, and embracing the courage to pursue something new. How do you navigate the complexities of transitioning to a career that better aligns with your passions and values? In this week’s episode, I talked with Elizabeth Burke. She shared her journey from feeling disconnected and unsatisfied in her career to making a significant change. She took us through the disconnection and dissatisfaction she experienced in her career to the pivotal moment when she decided to make a substantial change. But that's not all – she also offered valuable insights on navigating the lows of life, whether in your career, relationships, or family. Tune in for a candid conversation filled with inspiration and practical wisdom. --- Listen to the podcast here: Journey of Transformation, Growth, and Fulfillment with Elizabeth Burke Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. One question I think so many people are tired of being asked is, “What do you do?” Now, I want you all to think about that question for a second because, first of all, no human being really only does one thing so it’s really kind of compartmentalizing people into just job titles. But, also, how do you respond to that question, “What do you do?” when you’re not exactly in love with what you do right now? When you’re not exactly proud of what you do, you don’t exactly feel it, and it’s not the thing that you want to talk about? I know what it feels like to be in that situation and my guest today knows what it feels like to be in that situation and she even presented a wonderful speech at the recent Denver Startup Week, recent as in two and a half months ago now. --- Elizabeth Burke, welcome to the program. Thank you. I’m so excited to be here, Steven. Really appreciate getting to share. Well, I’m glad you’re here to share this wonderful story because I think that a lot of people listening and a lot of people in the world, in general, out there aren’t necessarily content. They’re not seeing all the purpose as well as the alignment. “I’m doing this for this reason and it’s aligned with how I live my life,” and stuff like that. So, well, let’s start off by telling us a little bit about your story about how you made the career change from when you were in that situation, how it felt and what you did to get to where you are now? Yeah, so I’m happy to share about that. And we’re kind of like not going to start with what I do first purposefully so that you can hold the tension of how does it feel to not know what I do as a first part of my story but you definitely will get to hear that. So, yeah, I have a background in public education and I think, for me, I went into that career and I loved it, I loved working with high schoolers, I taught high school art, built up an amazing program, taught four levels, and always felt like there was room for me to just find new parts of myself as I was teaching. And I started to notice a shift. I think there are times in our life when we maybe have been doing something for a while and we’ve gotten really good at it and we’re kind of looking for that next step, that ability to expand, and I began to just not be able to find it anymore. And I think, for me, that was starting to happen but what really kind of just became a catalyst for really seeing some things that I could no longer unsee was being a teacher during the pandemic and being a teacher during, specifically, the fall of 2021 to the summer of 2022 school year. That school year was my eighth year teaching and it was just truly like the worst school year that any teacher on record has probably ever had. It was just unfathomably difficult for reasons that we could never have expected. This was when a lot of folks were going back in person, which we thought would be easier, and it was actually just so much worse. And it was a year that just was deeply uncomfortable for me for so many reasons. It started off moderately uncomfortable when I realized this thing that I had been doing for a very long time just didn’t fit anymore and I think that moment isn’t unique to just careers, we can have that moment with a physical location we’re in, suddenly the place that we live just really no longer matches our values or what we value in life. A relationship suddenly isn’t actually in alignment with who we are anymore. But, for me, that was showing up in my job just not being in alignment with who I wanted to be as a person. What were you feeling at the time about --- what made you feel this out of alignment? Did it come abruptly? Did it come slowly? Did you feel it before the pandemic at all, just a little hint of it? Yeah, I definitely felt a hint of it and I think had the pandemic not happened, I think maybe I would have been able to not see it for longer or to just kind of push it aside. I’ve kind of been like wanting to explore my options outside of teaching but hadn’t necessarily really decided upon a course of action, I was just dabbling. It just became very painful. I felt very constricted. I felt like I didn’t want to necessarily become an administrator and there was no longer an opportunity for career growth for me from what I saw if I remained in strictly a teacher type of role. And I loved my students, I loved what I taught, I taught high school visual arts, but I couldn’t imagine teaching that same thing for the next 20 years. And also wanting to acknowledge that there’s nothing wrong if that does work for someone but that I just had to be honest that that was not working for me. I began to see how the larger system as a whole didn’t work for me. Things like how I envision retiring didn’t work, things like, oh, what if I want to move states? Oh, this actually isn’t economically sustainable for me to remain in this career anymore. And also just realizing that I was experiencing just giving so much energy but I was not able to put that energy back in other areas of my life and that’s definitely something that we have to work on. That’s not career specific. There are some careers that are more helper careers, giving careers, but how we choose to manage our own energy is our own responsibility so I had to take care of that no matter what. But, yeah, I just started to feel very constricted. And it was pretty painful when you realize something doesn’t work and you want to fix it, you want to immediately put a Band-Aid on it, like what do I need to do? I’m a very action-oriented person and it was kind of hard to just have to sit with the discomfort of knowing that this didn’t fit for me anymore but not actually knowing what it was I wanted to take action on to move myself into next. Then I think that that’s sometimes something that we can all figure and feel rather is that when we realize something doesn’t work, we want to immediately know what is supposed to work and there’s a lot of value in sitting in that place of not knowing and just really needing to give yourself permission to be there. Our careers are just kind of like a manifestation of who we are. It’s like sometimes our career can be very separate but we often just have this notion that like, “Oh, who I am at work is totally different from who I am in my personal life,” and while we can have different personalities and different ways that we show up, I had to look at why did I choose this career and I think that was a really meaningful question to ask myself was like why did I choose this and we have that moment in lots of different ways of kind of acknowledging what were we getting out of something? Why did we originally choose it? Why were we still choosing it? And that was not so fun to have to look at why did I choose this because it was ultimately helping me to look at patterns I had as a human being and those patterns were very connected to my life experiences as a whole, not just, oh, my professional experiences but looking at who I was as a human being and really having to look at some patterns. You had to go back and look at your patterns. Now, one of the problems that we experience is that people will come to this realization that what I have is not working anymore, doesn’t fit me anymore, but because of the way the world is structured, for better or worse, you can’t just instantly snap your finger and go on to the next thing. It’s not like, okay, this is not working for me, I can just leave. We have bills to pay, we have other things, we have to kind of stay in that world. So what was that like staying in that world while also kind of going back and reflecting on your life and why you picked this and what it is that you really want? It was incredibly uncomfortable. I think that, again, there’s sometimes that desire to make that immediate change and sometimes those changes can be helpful and sometimes they can actually be harmful, because we’re maybe not making a choice from a place of true knowledge and wisdom, we’re making a choice from reactivity, from fear, just being in such discomfort that we will grab on to whatever choice we think will make it better for that moment. And part of sitting in that space was actually feeling things. I talked about something called the ladder of emotions where it kind of ranks emotions and there’s lots of different versions of this that you can find but it ranks emotions kind of on a scale of very low energy, like fear, depression, sadness, stuckness, all the way up to like peace and joy at the top where we just want to jump right up. But part of actually getting to move forward is feeling. And so feeling things and feeling the discomfort,...