26: Giving Yourself Permission to Pivot

What if you gave yourself permission to change careers, roles, or passions as often as you need to?

This solo episode is one where Stephanie shares her journey from therapy to private practice, and even podcasting, along with the lessons she’s learned about burnout, resilience, and choosing again. If you’ve ever felt stuck in a role that no longer fits, this episode will remind you that you’re not locked in. You can always pivot, redefine success, and move toward what truly lights you up.

Woven throughout is the guiding principle that grounds Stephanie: Be the change you want to see in the world.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:48

Give yourself the space to be the change in the world that you want to see. Because there is space for everyone, despite potentially what society might tell us. Because I think if you lean with a mind that has diversity and inclusion in it, you can see yourself as a diverse person and you can see yourself as a person that needs to be included in the conversation. Live your life in a way that allows you to be flexible and move towards your goals and move towards Welcome to Redefining Us, where we explore sexuality, identity, motherhood, and mental health to help women thrive authentically. Let's break free from roles that limit us and create a life where you can truly be yourself. Hi, everyone. I'm back for another solo episode. Today, I want to talk about career and redefining career and what success and work looks like. It's so interesting, my experience going into becoming a therapist, because back, I want to say it was my senior year of college, so like 2009, I I was really struggling with what direction am I going to take in my career. I really had this mindset that I needed to pick one career, one thing to do for the rest of my life. That's what I witnessed as a child. My mom doing one career for her whole career. My dad doing one type of work for his entire career. And I think I had this sense of urgency and this sense of pressure to pick just one thing to choose at, what was I, 20 years old that I was going to do at 20 for the rest of my life. And let me tell you, that was a huge stress. I went to therapy. I ended up doing career counseling, did a career test to try to figure out what felt right based on my personality, what my strengths were. And It was such an interesting time. The recession was in the works the year that I was going through this. So I was really afraid of going into the workforce because everyone that I spoke to, it seemed, kept telling me, just stay in college. There's nothing out there for you right now. The market's crap. You should go to grad school or you should do the Peace Corps. You should do something to delay going straight into the workforce. So in that career test that I took, it gave me a few options of what would suit best with my personality. The only two that I remember off the top of my head are becoming a dentist and becoming a therapist. And obviously, we all know which track that I chose is to be a therapist. I had been to therapy, like I mentioned, at that point, and I really felt it to be this warm place, this inspirational place. And I wanted to, I guess, help others do that. But I was still really uncertain about just choosing one thing. And then I remember having this conversation with the career counselor specifically about that. And they said something to me that really stuck with me and was like, you don't have to choose something forever. You just have to choose something for now. There are so many options out there. You can get stuck in analysis paralysis. If you just choose one thing, you can always switch. You can always take a turn. And it was so timely because at that time I was taking the Spanish course in college and there was a student in there who happened to be a second career college student. So I don't know. I was like 20. So I thought they were old, but they were probably only in their 40s. And I had asked her, you know, why did you come back to school? And she just said that she was burnt out from her current career and wanted a different direction. And I was like, what? You can do that? So interesting. I never thought that was an option. And now suddenly that this was an option, it made the... choice of going to grad school to become a therapist less daunting because it told me that there was an out. It told me that I can make a change. It told me that I wasn't locked in forever. So I went to grad school and I studied my butt off. It was definitely not an easy feat. I went through tears of pre-licensure, also not easy. Getting paid dismal rates for doing a lot of emotional labor, which that could be a whole nother conversation of people's value of emotional labor. But we're not going to get into that today. So I made a little prelude for a future set. I've had a future session. Look, I'm still talking like a therapist. Future recordings. But yeah, I became a therapist and I did that. For a long time, just being a therapist, like the daily grind of seeing clients, doing documentation, doing case consultation, etc., etc. So I graduated in 2013, and I primarily was only doing therapy work for the first six years of my career. I saw clients, traded every hour that I worked. So every client I saw was money. Every case I took on was my income. I worked at several different treatment centers in my time, all from substance abuse to crisis stabilization to doing in-home therapy with families and children, all very different settings and taught me a lot in my first six years. But when I got to 2019 and I was kind of sitting there thinking, gosh, I am really lonely and burnt out from doing this. What can I do to help me feel re-inspired about being a therapist or potentially pivot? And that was a really interesting moment in my life. career because I was so, so, so, so, so, so burnt out from doing work at a crisis stabilization unit. The emotional labor of working with people who are chronically in crisis or potentially just in that moment are in crisis, but you're working with people in crisis every single day is very taxing work. And the environment that I was in, unfortunately, also wasn't very suited for employee slash clinician wellness. And so I decided to make a change and leap into private practice full time, which is actually closer to 2018 that I went to private practice full time. And then I did that for about a year. And then I took a dive and started a group practice in 2019. And I hired my first handful of therapists and got a taste of what it was like to manage a business in a very, very small scale. There were contractors working for me, but it did give me a little bit more community. It did give me a little bit more financial freedom. And it was nice to take on this new role and because going back to the conversation that I mentioned, I really hated the idea of only having one role or one career for the rest of my working life. So this allowed me to put on a different hat of an employer. And then in 2020, I really started thinking in the The pandemic really changed the world about how I wanted to grow my business and change things. So in early 2020, so January 1st, I moved to a W-2 model and was truly now an employer, having more quote-unquote control over what was happening with the documentation, with the types of client care. Really setting in boundaries that maybe I didn't have the ability to do when people were contractors. Really just shifted my whole perspective. And I put on a different hat, it felt like, from a contractor employer to a W-2 employer. And I would say that since I started my group practice in 2019... The types of hats that I have worn have just seemingly changed every year. I began taking on supervisees in late 2020, became a clinical supervisor, which was a new hat and a new role. In 2022, my practice continued to grow. I was managing more and more people. In 2023, I developed a leadership team. So I moved away from having a lot of direct interactions with all of my therapists and wearing all of the hats to delegating and assigning other people roles such as outreach coordinator or compliance officer, marketing coordinator, et cetera. And then in late 2023, I became a mom, which was a new role to now balance amongst everything else. And yeah, that was an interesting journey. I've already talked about that. But then I decided when I came back from maternity leave and had a little bit of more footing underneath me, I was going to reinvest in one of my true passions, which is storytelling and journalism and interviewing, which had been things that I had considered doing previous to becoming a therapist. And yeah, I started a podcast. I did a workbook, started writing a longer work than I'm excited about. So I think I'm telling a story to remind you that you can redefine what your career is, who you want to be as a working person at a lot of different intervals in your life. It may feel like you don't have the space or the time to do that, but if it is something that's truly calling for you to do, I encourage you to figure out how you can do that because it's so rewarding to do something that you really care about every day. rather than feeling like you're just treating your time for money. I realize that a lot of people do work in that way and that is satisfying to them and that's enough for them. But as someone like myself who really wants to feel passionate about what they're doing every day, I say go for it because you are only... getting trapped in your own limiting beliefs when it comes to your ability to transition. Sure, you might have financial things that are restricting you, or you might have a relationship that's restricting you, but there probably is some flexibility that you're not initially seeing. There's probably some movement that you can take towards your ultimate goal. Even if it's taking a few hours every week to of your free time potentially to start a manuscript or maybe dedicate two hours a month to recording a podcast. Or maybe it's you decided to take up Spanish because you really want to travel and be a translator. You know, I think it's all about what is your passion and how can you fit it in. Maybe something that really excites you can become your career. Or maybe it's just a a hobby that you decide to do to balance out your nine to five that maybe doesn't bring you passion. But I think it's all about how can you fill up your cup rather than just empty it every day. And if you can do that and get paid to do it, why not? Yeah, I don't know. I'm just really passionate, I guess, about this idea that you don't have to wear any hat forever. You can take any hat off at any point. You can change your role at any point. You don't have to be stuck. You can redefine who you are and where you want to go and what you want to do. I think I always also in this conversation go back to this quote that I read at the beginning of grad school because I was really getting into Buddhism and yoga and all sorts of more things. Eastern philosophies in that time. And Gandhi, of course, I'm sure everyone knows who that is, has this very famous quote of be the change you want to see in the world. And that's really been my guiding principle when it comes to what work lights me up, what things really excite me. I oftentimes can see this world as a place that maybe doesn't have a space for everybody in it or doesn't want to make space for everybody in it. Which is devastating for someone like me, who's more of a highly sensitive person. There needs to be space for everybody in the world. There needs to be love for everyone exactly as they are. And so I live my life by that motto of be the change I want to see in the world and encourage people to find the light in dark corners. And if you really have a passion for doing 3D printing because you want people to have access to something that you can make doing 3D printing, do that. Be that change. Give yourself the space to be the change in the world that you want to see. Because there is space for everyone, despite potentially what society might tell us sometimes. Diversity and inclusion are really important to me and hopefully to you. listener, because I think if you lean with a mind that has diversity and inclusion in it, you can see yourself as a diverse person and you can see yourself as a person that needs to be included in the conversation and be included in all areas of life and live your life in a way that allows you to be flexible and move towards your goals and move towards what's going to fill your cup and make you feel like you don't have to stay stuck because you don't need to. All right. Well, that was my story for today. Hopefully that was helpful or maybe you have more questions about the topic that I talked about today or you want to connect over the topic that I talked about today. Really encourage you to respond by reaching out via email or maybe leave something in the comments. I'd love to connect with the community more. So thank you so much for listening. Thank you for tuning in to Redefining Us once again and share with other people so other people can continue to listen to Redefining Us and we can get into more listeners ears. If you follow us or subscribe or leave a comment or review, that'd be greatly helpful for other people to find us and also just for me to get some feedback. What do you guys want to hear me say? What do you women care about hearing? I'm totally open to Thank you so much for joining us. So you can be in the know with all the things that are happening in the Redefining Us community. Once again, thank you so much for listening and keep being awesome.