Whole Not Perfect with Laura G. Patac

Maybe you've checked all the boxes, built a successful career, cared for everyone else, and from the outside your life looks wonderful. Yet inside, something feels disconnected. If you've ever wondered whether success without fulfillment is really success at all, today's conversation is for you. 

My guest is Laura G. Patac, leadership speaker, storyteller, Gallup-Certified 
Clifton Strengths® coach, and author of the inspiring new book Whole, Not Perfect. After a remarkable 25-year global leadership career spanning five continents in the corporate world, Laura made a life-changing decision to leave external achievement behind and discover what it truly means to live from the inside out. 

Today we'll explore why so many high-achieving people lose themselves while chasing perfection, how understanding your unique strengths can protect you from burnout, and why your own life story may be your greatest untapped resource. 

Whether you're navigating a career transition, searching for more purpose, or simply longing to feel more like yourself again, this conversation will encourage you to stop striving for perfect—and start embracing wholeness.  Let's call it in!  “Call IT in With Dar!” 

Transcript

Maybe you've checked all the boxes, built a successful career, cared for everyone else, 
and from the outside your life looks wonderful. Yet inside, something feels disconnected.
If you've ever wondered whether success without fulfillment is really success at all, 
today's conversation is for you. 

My guest is Laura G. Patac, leadership speaker, storyteller, Gallup-Certified Clifton Strengths® coach, and author of the inspiring new book Whole, Not Perfect. After a remarkable 25-year global leadership career spanning five continents in the corporate world, Laura made a life-changing decision to leave external achievement behind and discover what it truly means to live from the inside out. 

Today we'll explore why so many high-achieving people lose themselves while chasing perfection, how understanding your unique strengths can protect you from burnout, and why your own life story may be your greatest untapped resource. 

Whether you're navigating a career transition, searching for more purpose, or simply longing to feel more like yourself again, this conversation will encourage you to stop 
striving for perfect—and start embracing wholeness Let's call it in!  “Call IT in With Dar!” 

Speaker Dar  
Welcome in, Laura. I'm so excited to talk about the “whole not perfect”, but before we dive in, could you tell our audience a little bit about yourself and how you got to this point of writing this book. 

Speaker Laura 
Well, hello, Darla, and a big warm hello to your listeners. My name is Laura Patak, originally from Romania, and three years ago I went through a very interesting reinvention, moving from corporate life to entrepreneurship, and that move in itself, after over 25 years of an excellent journey in the corporate landscape with living, living, and working in seven countries on five continents. In the moment when that journey came to an end, I literally went through an identity crisis because I had to ask myself two questions. What am I good at, and how can I translate those 25 years of experience into something meaningful for others, but also for myself. So, I think that we are going to deep dive a bit into that reinvention and that experience during our conversation, Darla, but what I can say is that that process of reinvention helped me become a new version of myself, where I do help mid-career professionals to rediscover their strengths, their values, and connect to a direction which is very truthful to themselves, and I also, I translated some of my experiences on some, some of my learnings in my second book, which is named “Whole Not Perfect,” 

Speaker Dar 
Yes and I'm sure that many of our listeners are even mid-career professionals, of course, we have in our listening group, but I think there's many women that kind of reach a point, and they need, they feel they just need to reinvent themselves, they just need a new chapter, a change, a step forward into something else, or somebody else than what they've been, because sometimes women just do what society wants, and they're left wanting. So, will you dive into that reinvention for us, please? 

Speaker Laura 
Well, there is, there is a truth, which I want to disclose to you, to your audience, that there was a period, period in my life when externally everything looked very successful. I had that kind of global corporate career, the leadership roles, the responsibility, the visibility, and the achievements many people aspire to have, but internally at one moment something changed, and the way how it felt, it felt that no matter how significant the achievement looked on paper emotionally I was feeling very flat that it was that kind of feeling that the direction I was moving toward no longer felt aligned with who I wanted to become and that was a very difficult realization, because success had become disconnected from my inner meaning, and that was the beginning of reinvention for myself, and I also, you know, I recall that those moments of, like, you know, listening to what's happening inside, right, and when people often talk about the often talk about the invention, maybe they don't articulate very clearly that those moments. Reinvention can feel very lonely, especially when the identity starts shifting, right? When you move from a very defined version of yourself, defined by your title, by your job description, by the status, by the certainty of the paycheck, you, you shift into a, into a space where actually you cannot really fully articulate where you want to go and who you want to become, and, and, and you know, you know, those kind of, you know, when you step away from something externally validated, right, but in the same time internally you are trying to understand a couple of things, you try to understand what truly matters to me. I was trying to understand what kind of life is going to feel more aligned with who I am, and what I want my next chapter to stand for. When you, when you start asking, asking those questions in the moment when you have this amazing external validation, I'll tell you something. Often the people around, around me, they don't understand it, because they don't understand why this shift, why this need to search something more, because from the outside my life was looking extremely successful and well, So what helped me most in, in that kind of, in that kind of shift, and maybe that's why I'm, I'm, I'm saying that reinvention, it could be a very lonely process at one moment, or at least at the beginning. What helped me the most was creating that kind of intentional space for reflection, and because patterns our natural talents, they can become very loud in silence, and one of the strongest realization for me was understanding how often I was taking responsibility for things that they were never mind to carry, that that was the first thing you know striking me, and that pattern of taking responsibilities, which were not mine, existed across my work, my relationships, my friendships, and my family, and externally it looked like capability and reliability, but internally it created so much pressure, so much exhaustion, and also it was also one of the reasons, reasons for this kind of, like, you know, emotional disconnection, so reflection helped me understand that many of the things that which they were exhausting me actually they were not weaknesses, they were just some of my natural talents over extended for far too long and 

Speaker Dar  
What a realization that might have been for internal alignment, and I think we just need to pause a minute here, because I'm sure many in our audience are resonating with that feeling that they have taken on things that really aren't theirs, and that is where the weight and pressure comes from. 

Speaker Laura 
Yeah, and I really want to emphasize here that something, which, which I said, and maybe to explain it a bit, I was, I was talking about, you know, natural talents, which actually are our strengths that overextended, or they are even overused, because in the moments of pressure, in the moments of uncertainty, in those kind of moments when we want, we are taking on more, and that creates pressure at a certain extent. Our natural talents actually, they are overreacting, and some of my natural talents, responsibility is one of the one of them. And I just described how actually I was taking responsibilities that were not mine without making space for, for, for those responsibilities that just, just adding on top of many other responsibilities, and the other one thing, which, which I learned, and I corrected somehow. The pattern was that first I'm asking the question, if that, if that thing, which I want to take over and be responsible for, is it important for me, is it important for others, and if I'm taking on, do I need to take out something else in order to make space for that new responsibility in order to avoid the over the burn out, the exhaustion. So these are the kind of when, when you know your strengths and your natural talents. Actually, you do have the capability to understand the patterns, but also to calibrate, and I think it's a very important personal responsibility, if I could say so, for individuals to really define and understand what the what the their natural talents are, and to have this calibration through understanding how they are currently using and what kind of patterns under pressure these strengths can create. 

Speaker Dar 
Yes, like I said, I'm sure several women in our audience are resonating with that feeling. Would you just kind of take this down a little bit for our audience? I heard that there's an activity in your new book, in your new book, “Whole Not Perfect.” Is it time to lead them through an activity, or do you want to talk about the book a little bit first? 

Speaker Laura 
Oh, thank you so much. Yes, so not perfect. It's very interesting, because when people are looking, they hear for the first time the title Whole Not Perfect, and the cover is very Kinsuji. They were thinking about this concept of, you know, being beautiful in spite of the cracks coming from the challenging challenges, but in fact, when I wrote whole not perfect, I started from the idea that most of the time we are trying to build perfection for the external world to be perfect in everything we do, to look perfect, to to have the perfect life, the perfect family, and actually wholeness. It means that we, we really need to live our life integrating who we truly are and integrating, integrating our strengths, values, purpose, and our story, and to me perfection is maybe what we display to the external world, but wholeness is something very, very inward, very inner core for each and every of us, and is that integration of all the elements that makes us who we are and makes us whole, so and also I think reinvention sometimes you know reinvention is seen like becoming someone else you know but the way how I do see it I see it as a process of integration, a process of reconnecting with your, your strengths, values, purpose, with the story that brought you where you are right now, and very intentionally aligning them with the life you want to build next, now I the book also emerged from my own reflections around transition reinvention, and I wanted to create something people could return to whenever life asked. It is a difficult question, so what I could say is that the whole is not perfect. It's not a book that you read once, it's a companion for different seasons of life, and I think that the book comes also with the idea of if you, if you, if you ask the question, what do people need most right now? I would say that people need most permission to pause, permission to, because we live because we live in a culture obsessed with answers, and yet many of the important answers emerge only after we spend time with the questions, so the book has also, I think, close to 80 questions, which helps the reflection around the areas which they define our wholeness, it's around the areas of strengths, values, purpose, and really understanding your origin story, that story which comes with the learnings translating in some, in something which you just become right now, so having an exit, we're talking about the exercise. The book is bringing three frameworks that enables, enables people to really focus their reflections in a way, in a much more, you know, structured way, and we are talking about a story framework, which is designed for day-to-day micro stories, so when you come back and you really want to reflect on the day, or maybe on the week which just passed, there is this structure helping you to articulate not only the events but also the insights that emerged out of that experience, and I'm just going to walk you through the to the story framework, which starts a story framework. It's like seeing tension, opportunity revelation, and you forward, so to be able to extract a very significant insight, we start from where that event or that story begins where and where does that event begin. We move a bit into that tension, and I invite the readers to articulate what challenge or decision drives that that tension, and after that we move to the opportunity when I'm asking to the reader to reflect and to write down what actions did you take or you will take in order to solve or to move forward with that decision to solve for the challenge or move forward with the decision and after that you know it's our standing for revelation because most, most, most of the time in in life we are just going through experiences we do not pause and we do not start to know asking ourselves not only what did I learn, but what is that I'm taking from what I'm taking with me further from what have I learned to this experience. So, revelation, it's about what insights emerge from the experience, and you forward it's about how does it shape your next step right now, and I think that the power of this framework is not that is giving a structure to be able to create a reflection, but it's giving a structure to create a reflection out of which you're going to be able to name an insight, a learning, and you'll also be able to decide if that learning is going to serve you for what comes next in your life. 

Speaker Dar 
I love that, and I especially love that you stressed permission to pause being in that present moment, and then your simple framework, it's simple, but it's deep going into the tension or the trigger, and then what actions are. You're going to take forward, and then the revelation comes. Beautiful, that is so insightful. Can't wait to read the whole not perfect book. Would you talk a little bit about the free gift that you have available for our audience, it is so generous. 

Speaker Laura 
Oh, that, that will be my pleasure. So, as I mentioned, Darla Whole Not Perfect is my second book, but what I would like to offer to your audience, somehow to have a bit of a complete loop, is my first book,” stories with purpose”. Your story has a purpose too. This is the complete name, and it's a book which talks about the importance of storytelling. How more than 80% of our time we are telling stories, even our today it's a bit storytelling, even our dreams sometimes that they are stories, and when we are looking to all the stories, we listen with tell in our life two stories are very important, and the first one is the story of all our, you know, key experiences that brought us where we are right now, and is not just as, as, as the story framework, which I just explained, help people frame an event or a challenge or something that which happened to them actually the stories those kind of five big aha moments in someone's life come with a lot of insight about not only the challenges but also the learnings that we carry on with us until the current moment, and the second story, the second, the second type of stories are the stories we tell to ourselves, and what the book does. The book is helping readers to understand the importance of their own story, the story, the origin story, but also the importance of the stories we tell to ourselves, and it comes with a lot of examples from my own experience, but also with some very nice frameworks helping people not only reflect but also reframe, and in some cases even building some boundaries or giving some insights about the way how you can change some patterns in the way how you think or you act in life. So, this first book, Stories with Purpose, I would like to offer it for free to your audience, and I'll be very happy to have any kind of feedback about how the book resonated with them, how helpful the book was, and I'm looking forward to also see your reaction reading stories with purpose. 

Speaker Dar  
Thank you. And as I mentioned, that is such a generous gift, and the information about how to receive that will be in our show notes. Before we wrap up today, is there anything else that you're really being called right now to share with our audience before we leave,  

Speaker Laura 
I would say I'm going to be sharing a closing reflection, because I think many, many high performers today are silently experiencing this tension between external success and internal alignment, and maybe reinvention became begins in the moment when we become truthful enough to admit that life that looks that looks successful right now for for us might not longer feel fully and totally aligned with who you are, who we are,
and that honesty can become the beginning of a much more meaningful chapter. 

Speaker Dar 
Yes, yes. Thank you so much for being with them. Today it was just such a pleasure. 

Speaker Laura   
Thank you so much, Darla, for having me. And thank you to your listeners for listening to the podcast, and definitely, you know, enjoying the two books.