The Mistake That Burnt Me Out: Staying Too Long Where I Didn’t Belong

Is there anything in your career that you've done or learnt from that you think would be worth sharing with with people on here? It's a cathartic experience. It's a friendly environment, Claire. Thank you, Chris.

Well, I've made lots of mistakes over the years. But as somebody who loves to learn, I guess that's you know, I see mistakes as once I've got over the the discomfort, the the extreme discomfort, um, I look for what's the learning here, and I think that's really key. That that one that I shared a few minutes ago around attaching my identity to others' businesses was probably one of the most profound experiences in terms of mistakes because I stayed somewhere longer than I should have done.

And it it cost me a lot in terms of you know, burnout, overcompensating, you know, lots of different things I was trying to do in order to sort of stay where I was and stay hold on like to that safety. Um because I wasn't brave enough actually to go and do what I really wanted to do at that time. And yeah, and so so much of what I do now is leaning into the courage because I've learned the lesson the hard way, uh, in terms of um playing it safe and keeping in the status quo bias and keeping everything as they are.

They often say, don't they, better the devil you know than the devil you don't, but I don't agree with that at all now, having learned having learnt that lesson. Uh so yeah, I would say that was probably one of the biggest lessons in my career. Another lesson was um coming back after maternity leave. So I left a master of my arts.

I was smashing it out of the park as a leader, you know, doing some incredible things. And I didn't, because I hadn't studied neuroscience at that point, I didn't not have no idea what was going on in terms of the brain chemistry, the hormones, emotions, how lack of sleep would be impacting my cognitive functioning, and how it's it's a process that you go through in terms of um of all of that. And so when I came back into the workplace, I just felt like I'd come back as an apprentice and was really hard on myself.

Like, what's happened to you? What's going on? Why are you why are you not performing in the way that you used to? And uh, it was only my boss at the time who pushed me out of my comfort zone and got me to do something that felt so wildly uncomfortable that I never would have put myself forward for, that that started to build in the discomfort, the belief, the confidence, and all of those things.

And so so, yeah, they're probably my biggest, biggest lessons in terms of my career.