What If Success Starts With Silence Instead Of Striving

The grind doesn’t always look like burnout; sometimes it looks like loving your job so much you forget yourself. After a week of being sick and “pushing through” from home, we unpack how easy it is to normalize always-on work, even when you lead a team and value healthy boundaries. That wake-up call led to a deeper reset: returning to meditation, reframing success around gratitude, and carving out a weekly pause inspired by Shabbat to protect presence, faith, and family.

We open up about the shift from a misaligned role to a workplace that truly champions growth and how that joy quietly crowded out our rituals. The result was a slow slide from alignment to achievement mode—less “I’m grateful for this life” and more “what’s next.” We trace the personal consequences, from quiet internal panic to feeling distant at home, and then map the reboot: preparing Friday night to clear chores, creating a tech-light Saturday, and choosing simple, nourishing moments like cooking with attention, sewing with our kids, journaling, and a 30-minute meditation that resets the week.

If a full day of rest feels impossible, we share practical ways to start small—blocking a four-hour no-tech window, naming a single boundary, and honoring it like your most important meeting. Along the way, you’ll hear about leadership that models rest, how gratitude shifts your energy from urgency to ease, and why presence is a strategy, not a luxury. Expect honest stories, actionable steps, and a gentle permission slip to build a life that’s both ambitious and aligned.

If this resonated, follow the show, share it with a friend who needs a reset, and leave a quick review so more people can find these conversations. What hour will you protect this week?

Transcript

Welcome And Health Update

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, everybody. This is Steel Roses Podcast. This podcast was created for women by women to elevate women's voices. Happy February. I am terribly sorry that I did not release any episodes earlier in February. I actually ended up getting very sick and not terribly sick, nothing really very serious, but I ended up just being sick for about a week and was just hanging on by a thread and trying to make sure that I still was able to do everything I normally do. It's funny because I was talking with one of my coworkers who also got sick at the same time. And we were both laughing to ourselves because we were like, if we were working in an office and this was like back when you would report in live, we both would have called out sick. But because we work from home, it was one of those sicknesses where I was like, I'm not sick enough that I can't actually work. So I sucked it up. Now, I will say this in retrospect, because um I do lead a team, I also try to be really careful about doing that sort of thing because I don't want the precedence to be, regardless of how you feel or if you're sick or not, you need to come in. So for my team, I'm always very vocal about like, no, make sure you take care of yourself. I might not be doing things the right way, but you you should kind of thing. So I am very cognizant of that because I don't want that to be the expectation for anybody. If you're sick, like you should be taking time to feel better and heal and make sure you're prioritizing your health. Like that's critical. I grew up in an industry during a time of you weren't supposed to do that. So my view on things is a little skewed, but I try to, I try to reiterate to my team that that's not the expectation. Anyway, on that note, now that I'm feeling better, what I've been doing in the past week also was a bit of a reset. So you've heard me talk before about, you know, how much meditation had changed my life and what I did and the steps that I took to get to where I am, really, that was really powered through becoming aligned with my purpose here. And um it's interesting because I was hyper focused on that from I want to say 2021 through 2024. At the time, the agency that I worked for, um, I was very unhappy with my work. I really wasn't fulfilled with it. And so I was able to, not able to, my saving grace for my sanity when I wasn't fulfilled at work was this podcast and also meditating and really diving deep and understanding more about what meditation was gonna do for me and really like getting aligned with Jenny as an adult and who I really am. So flash forward to 2025, I leave my old agency, start a new one. Now, my current agency is what I started in 2025, January. Um, and up front, I was totally fine and I continued on with my meditation practices, but then we hit some busy season. Now, the interesting thing here is, and this was actually part of my fear when I was transitioning to a new agency. When I'm at an agency where I'm appreciated and where they are valuing me as um a professional, then I start to skew a little bit. Now I've talked about this before too, where um I have a really hard time with having more than one passion happening at the same time. So when I was at my former agency, I didn't love it. So throwing everything I had into my podcast and into meditating was what kept me afloat and mentally like kept me stable for as long as it did. Now I'm at this new agency and I flipping love it. Like, I mean, I cannot express enough how important it is to have a manager be supportive of you. You know, you read quotes online that say, make sure that you're um aligned with people who will mention your name in a room of opportunities. That's my manager. She, she and I very much align on our team's success, is our success. Seeing somebody on your team rise and surpass themselves and even surpass you is such a huge deal. And it's such a beautiful thing to witness to watch someone blossom. And I'm very passionate about it, and so is Shay. So the mutual support from across the both of us is very real and significant. And I'm laughing a little bit because I fell in love so much with this agency and this work that it actually did pull me away from meditating and it did have me scale back on the podcast. Now, initially I was uncomfortable and I was trying to find a balance. And I'm still trying to find a balance, and that's why you'll see little gaps for when I'm releasing episodes, because I'm trying to maintain some kind of a balance here. I think I'm starting to find my footing again, but it took about a year because again, you know, I started a new agency, fell in love immediately with the way the agency worked and really the atmosphere, the morale, like the camaraderie, fell in love hard. I really fell for it. And to this day, I'm still very enthralled and love very much what I do. I love showing up because of the people that I work with. It's made a huge impact on me. But because I was so passionate and because I wanted so badly to show up for my coworkers and my team, that I did scale back on meditating. Long, long story short, I saw the effects of this. So leading up to 2025, I was in it hardcore alignment, made sure I meditated every single day for 30 minutes, like really very like that was my goal here. And it really showed all through 2025, I felt very aligned and I felt very like I was, I'm still living my dream, but like really started to realize like how much how close I was to the fact that I've realized pretty much my dream life at this point. And because I didn't meditate, it actually scaled me back a little bit on really being grateful and in the moment. And I started focusing on, well, what's next? What else? What else am I gonna get? What else is gonna happen? What else can I achieve for my family? And then it turned into really a more of an ego, Jenny, you need to figure this out. Jenny, you really need to do this. And that's really not the case because if you study meditation and you start reading up on what it really means to be in alignment, this is not about us taking action as much as it is about us being in the moment and being grateful and sending out the energy of I am grateful for what I have. And so it's been a really interesting shift from last year to this year because I knew it. I felt the gap. I felt that I had stopped meditating. I felt that I started to become misaligned. And in the last quarter of last year, I struggled deeply. I didn't really let on to anybody externally outside of my family, but it really started to affect myself and my husband because I was struggling so deeply internally and I was panicking internally. I was just legitimately panicking internally. He picked up on it and then he started reacting to that because I never actually told him what was going on, but it felt like I was pulling away. So it really was like a snowball of Jenny, you really need to, you need to get back to what you know. So January, you know, I started kind of pushing towards it and I started really gearing myself up towards it. February, now I'm really much more deeper in. And so I have reset myself and I've tried to get back to meditating. So this weekend, what I did leading up to the week when was I wanted very much to commit to not working on Saturday. Now, my my daytime job is nine to five Monday through Friday, but there are the occasions that I have to step up over the weekend because things are very busy. I don't really mind it. I don't have a problem with it. If I have to work for an hour or two, just get things organized, I'm gonna do it. I love, like I said, love my job, love my team, love my agency. I don't mind showing up. But because of that, it does take away from the time that you have to focus on being grateful and to really be in the moment. What am I most grateful for? Well, my husband and my kids. Most grateful for them. That was my dream for the longest time. So I'm most grateful for them. But what does it say if I'm working all weekend? Well, it doesn't say that I'm grateful for them. It says that I am putting them second. So I started just kind of researching different things. And based on a book that I'm currently reading to help me get back into meditating, um I'm currently reading Abundant Ever After by Kathy Heller. You've heard me mention her a lot in season one and season two of this podcast because she was essentially my guru. I took online classes with her and courses with her. I I've taken loads of meditation. She has guided meditations that you you can get like a$13 a month membership. And she just releases guided meditations. Really strong recommend, to be perfectly honest with anyone who's trying to tap into this. Strong recommend. So I'm reading her book, Abundant Ever After. And Kathy Heller is Jewish. And so she starts to talk about her journey with her faith when she was young, when she graduated from college, through when she started really becoming in alignment with what she was meant to do and when things really opened up for her. One of the things that she mentions, and I apologize for anybody of the Jewish faith that's listening, if I don't say this the right way, that she starts to talk about Shabbat. Now, Shabbat is the Jewish practice where Friday at sundown through Saturday, sundown, there is no work and no technology. I'm really consolidating a lot of this, but like that that's my takeaway. There's no work and there's no technology. You're not meant to cook, clean, you're not meant to do anything. You're meant to just really pull yourself out of the noise and be in the moment. Now, I think there's more to it religious-wise, right? But when I read about it, that's what I my takeaway was. This is very interesting to me because I'm like, wow, like there's a whole faith that bases their faith around, well, not the soul thing, they base their faith around. There's much more that I'm researching on it. But one of the most beautiful things to me is they actively in their faith say, you take a whole day, you take 24 hours and you reduce the noise and you just focus on your faith and your family. Now, I'm non-Jewish, I'm Catholic, but I found this really beautiful and amazing. And I'm like, you know what? Like, I I'm gonna try to do this. I can't do it to the extent that, you know, the the folks who are very religious in the Jewish faith do it, but I can try to find a medium here. Like, let me see if I can find a way to make it work for me. So Friday night was while, yes, I had been sick all week. I was like, you know what? I I really want to commit here. I really want to have Saturday as a day of rest. I want it to be a day that I'm not working. So I'm like, well, what can I take out of the equation? I can't take cooking out. It's just not possible for me at this moment, right? I can't take cooking out. Um, I have to prepare more for that. So I can't take the cooking out. I need to still do that. That's fine. Obviously, I'll still have to put the dishes in the dishwasher. I have to take touch of that electronic because I'm not gonna stand there and wash dishes either. So there's that. I can stop my family from using electronics, but I can tell them, well, mommy's taking a break from it today. You're welcome to do things with mommy today. And then what was the other piece of it? I can absolutely stop work. I was like, I'm not gonna work and I'm not gonna do chores. That part kind of killed me a little bit. So Friday night, I finished work at five o'clock. Well, I didn't finish. I still have things to do today, but I finished quote unquote, log out at about five o'clock, five thirty, make dinner, and then I dove heavily into cleaning. So I made sure I cleaned as much as I could. I refreshed everybody's beds, I washed the linens, I vacuumed, I cleaned all the bathrooms, I mopped, went through the whole thing. Because for me, I was like, if I can get that chunk done, then that level, that part of my anxiety won't be with me on Saturday. And I know I'll be able to really more so tune into just my family. Now, for Shabbat for very for strict people who follow the Jewish, who follow the Jewish faith, they don't use their cars, they don't shut, they don't exchange money. There's actually a lot more to it. I couldn't, I couldn't do all that. So what I could commit to though was I'm not gonna work and I'm just gonna focus on my family and meditating and prayer. That was what I was gonna do. Still had to cook, but nevertheless, these other things were not gonna pull my attention away from everybody. So we all went as a family out, grocery shopping to a sp like a specialty market down by us, which wasn't a heavy lift. It was just something we were doing together as a family. So I saw that as a family activity. And then when we came home, you know, obviously I cooked again for lunch and everything, but then I had time where I just sat and hung out with the kids. I, the girls got sewing kits for Christmas. So I was helping them make little dresses. And then I was able to take time to meditate and to read and to journal a little bit. So there was there was more of that in my day yesterday. And I have to tell you, I do feel much more fulfilled today. Now, normally I get to Sunday. Normally I'm stressed all day, Saturday, trying to cram in chores and all this other stuff. And then I get to Sunday and I'm like, oh my God, I still have so much work to do. I still have to do this, this, and this. So today it was interesting because I got up, I made the kids Valentine's gift baskets, which they were so excited that they got it a week early because they were driving me crazy. And then, you know, I prioritized making sure that I had time to record with you guys. So it seemed to put me at ease that I was able to do that yesterday and just solely be like, I'm just here. I'm just here in the moment. I'm just here focusing on being grateful. I'm just here. And it did achieve, I think, what I wanted it to achieve. Now, I'm gonna attempt it again next weekend. I'll keep you all informed on how I do. But the real key takeaway here is focusing on what you're grateful for. Now, if you can't give up a whole Saturday, start small and do it with um give yourself grace with it. So a whole Saturday is a lot. What if it's just from 12 to 4? I'm not gonna use technology and I'm just gonna focus and, you know, like stuff like that. Like that's actually how I started to think about it. Like, well, what if I take this practice and I try to make it my own so that I am having time to just focus on the moment and being here quietly with you, not with my device, not taking pictures of the moment, but I'm just here focusing with you. So that was really the big thing for this past weekend that I had achieved. I'm really proud of, and I hope actually to maintain the practice and actually do more of it. When it's nicer and we're able to go outside, I'll probably able to be able to get everybody off their devices. As you know, the temperatures have completely plummeted and it is so windy out that you really can't even go outside. I live in New Jersey by the Jersey Shore, and it is basically like a frozen tundra down here. I've never seen the ocean frozen the way that I'm seeing it now. It's shocking to see in New Jersey. But nevertheless, I feel like I'm walking away this weekend with a huge win and I'm super excited about it. So um, I hope you all have found this interesting, informative. I encourage you to give a shot. You know, take time to be silent and still and see what it does for you. Thank you so much for hanging out with me today and for tuning in to listen. I really appreciate all of you. And I will catch you on the next one. Take care.