Carol: Take the best next step.

In this episode, Kristin speaks with leadership speaker, executive mentor, and author Carol (she/her) about what it means to redefine success before it costs us too much.

Carol shares her nonlinear career journey from corporate leadership to entrepreneurship and back again, reflecting on the personal experiences that forced her to rebalance her life along the way. Together, Kristin and Carol explore the pressure to live according to other people's expectations, the hidden cost of always appearing to have it all together, and why balance isn't something we achieve once, but something we continually create.

From divorce and career pivots to burnout, health challenges, and unexpected new beginnings, this conversation is a powerful reminder that our lives are allowed to change. And that sometimes the experiences we fear most become the beginning of something better.

How to get in touch:

• carolenneking.com
• Carol Enneking on LinkedIn

Transcript

Kristin 0:03

Welcome to Everything Counts But Nothing Is Real, a podcast about careers, detours, and the absurdity of work. Here we explore the twists, the pivots, and the tiny choices that shape our work lives with humor, feminism, and honesty. I'm your host, Kristen. Let's get into it. Hello, and welcome to Everything Counts But Nothing Is Real. Today's guest is Carol. She her, a leadership speaker, executive mentor, and author of the Rebalancing Act, a former VP of talent and leadership at a global organization. She has worked with leaders in more than 150 companies across six continents. Carol helps high-achieving professionals redefine success, move beyond the myth of work-life balance, and build sustainable careers without burning out or losing themselves. Her work blends real-world leadership experience, research, and deeply human insight into what success truly costs and how to rebalance before it costs too much. Welcome, Carol. Thank you. So excited to have you. Carol, can you tell me what you tell people at a party? What do you tell people that you do?

Carol 1:08

My very quick tagline is I help women redefine success before it redefines them. But I also talk to men. So it's not just for women. I just tend to I I know how women think because I am a woman. So that's why I tend to focus more on women.

Kristin 1:24

That makes sense. And I think that women just have different expectations from themselves and from society. So it makes sense that you're right. Sort of zero in on that.

Carol 1:33

Yeah. There's a lot of science behind that true too. So uh that's part of it.

Kristin 1:38

So does that take the form of like coaching? It does it mostly look like coaching.

Carol 1:42

It does. I didn't plan for it to, but it does. I knew that I wanted to write a book. I knew that I wanted to speak in public. And then a curious thing happened. I would start speaking to groups and they would say things like, Hey, how do we continue the conversation? Or they would say things like, Hey, can you coach me? I was like, Well, I can. And I just had never focused on coaching as a full-time vocation. I always had coached as part of leadership development, things like that. I'd done a lot of coaching, but I hadn't really thought about that in terms of follow-up work for the book specifically. But yes, I started a women's group, and it's a group of people that are really seeking connections, seeking support, professional women. Uh, they might be entrepreneurs, they might be in a corporate role, but they're really trying to rebalance things and trying to make sure that they're focused on the things that matter most. And then I have a deeper process that I go through with small groups that is more about transformation. So you're in a job that you feel like isn't all you want it to be, and you you want to grow into a larger role, or maybe you want to exit where you are and move into a different stage. I work with um women in those phases as well. So it's become a big part of what I do, but I didn't necessarily expect that when I started out.

Kristin 3:06

That's so interesting. So you were working and then wanted to write a book. That's that was sort of the order of things.

Carol 3:12

Well, when you say working, so I was in corporate where I thought I'd be forever. Then I was an entrepreneur for 18 years, kind of accidentally. Then I went back to corporate for seven years. Wow. And now I'm back to my entrepreneurial roots. So my career has taken some twists and turns that I never saw coming. And a lot of those twists and turns were dictated by events in my personal life that required me to rebalance and make a change. And so I think I knew probably 15 years ago that I wanted to write a book someday. And I was encouraged to do so, but I was way too busy at the time to stop and think about that. So I put the idea on the back burner. And then in 2023, when I had an opportunity to exit my corporate role, I kind of, you know, I had one foot in the corporate world and one foot in the entrepreneurial world. And I was thinking, okay, I'm at a crossroads here. Which way am I going to go? And some doors closed and some other doors opened, and now here I am. So yes, I knew I wanted to write a book and I knew I wanted to speak more, but I guess I didn't realize just how much the message would start resonating with people and how many other women would identify with. You know, you when you're going through stuff, you think, oh, it's it's just me. And then you realize it's not just you. So it's really created the, I've created this movement that I don't know that I ever saw coming. But I think somebody upstairs had a bigger plan for me than I had for myself. The universe was uh leading me places I didn't know were possible.

Kristin 4:40

That is just incredible. Congratulations on thank you, landing where you've landed thus far. Thank you.

Carol 4:45

I don't know that I can even call it a landing. I always tell people, I'm like, I don't know exactly where this path is leading me, but I'm here for it. So I'm trying to just be open to the possibilities.

Kristin 4:55

I love that. That's that's really what I believe in. That's the everything counts because do we ever land anywhere, or is everything sort of a phase and it's leading you to the next thing?

Carol 5:04

Yes, I think we are we are human becomings. You know, we're we're always moving forward and learning and growing. And if we're open to it, we can continue to grow and learn our entire life.

Kristin 5:17

Beautifully said. Can you talk to me about your roots? I I'm really interested in the things that shape us as young people and how we sort of end up on the paths we end up. Here is where I usually talk about like I'm interested in birth order and astrology and just your family background. Um from your your roots.

Carol 5:37

Oh my goodness, how long do you have? Um, so I am the youngest of four children and youngest by far. My three siblings are all very close in age, and then there was a big gap before me. What's interesting about that to me is that it felt very different for me growing up than it did for them. And I often talk about this with my brother and sisters because there were times when I felt like an only child because they were all out of the house by the time I was in high school, that kind of thing. I'm a Capricorn. I was born on New Year's Eve. We moved around a lot as a kid, but I didn't feel it as much because a lot of that movement happened when I was too young to remember it. We landed in Houston and then we moved once more away for a couple of years, but all roads kind of led back to Houston. So that's where I was born and raised. And so I had this cool experience of starting kindergarten in one school and graduating from high school with the same people, which as a child of the 70s and 80s was a bit of a rarity at that time. But but what I think what was most interesting about my childhood, and I do explore this in my book, is that my father, well, I had I was raised in a pretty typical family. Uh, a lot of people would say I had it really good. We didn't have a lot of significant trauma or struggles. We had the typical family challenges that a lot of families have, but it was all in all a pleasant experience. But my father was larger than life. I mean, this man had an outsized personality. He was very just vivacious, life of the party, very smart. But the way he raised us was in superlatives. So it was like be the best leader, have the best reputation, be the smartest, do best, do the best in school. He really defined what was okay and not okay in this world. And it was according, of course, to his own preferences. Um, but he he kind of left a large footprint of how he expected our lives to go. And I I mentioned that because part of my story and and part of what you can read in the book is that so much of my life was spent checking the boxes, doing what I was supposed to do, doing what I thought would make him proud. It was like go to college, get a good job, get married, have kids, get the house in the suburbs, you know, bonus points if you can be in a sorority or something, you know, it was like check, check, check. And I think I had a pretty unhealthy relationship with everyone else's expectations and worrying about what everybody else thought of me. And and it's kind of funny because, you know, somebody said once, if you realized how little people really worry about you, you'd care a lot less about what they think. But I don't know why I thought people cared if I looked like I had it all together or, you know, looked put together, that kind of thing. But but I thought my life should just go according to this cookie cutter plan. And I had kids and life was pretty good. My marriage sucked, but the thought of leaving seemed much more awful than staying. And by the way, nobody in my family had been divorced, so I didn't want to be the first person and let my dad down and you know. And I don't think he was really like that, but that was just my perception of it. But all of a sudden, I had a dream and I woke up and my husband came back in the room. He was already up for the day, and I kept I was trying to sleep in because I was trying to get the dream out of my head. This is after 22 years of marriage. I said, I dreamed you were having an affair, like it was crazy or something, and he just turns white and starts spilling his guts about his affair. Wow. So that day I asked him to leave. And a few days later I consulted an attorney. And I feel like that was the beginning of my rebalancing act because it was finally an opportunity to live life on my own terms and not worry so much about what everybody else thought. And it was a chance to do things that made sense for me. And so, as I said, I kind of unpacked that more in the book. But I think, I mean, you asked a very simple question. I gave you such a detailed answer. This is perfect. I think it just really informed so much of what I did, conforming to what I thought the world expected of me or my father or whoever. And and what I found in writing the book is that there are so many women in this world who feel the same way. They carry this burden around about what other people expect. And and that's sad.

Kristin 9:57

Yeah, quite frankly. It's heavy. And of course, same. I'm out here like, yes, this all resonates, but also I need you to know that I'm a Capricorn and I'm from Texas. Oh, wow. How cool. I liked you. So like very, very much I I resonate with this story. And yeah, thank you for sharing. I want to know what did you do in your early career in this time when you were still trying to like, you know, be the picture perfect person? What was that career path like?

Carol 10:25

Well, I went to work for Exxon. It was before it was Exxon Mobil, but being in Texas, that's a logical place to land in the energy industry. I went to work in marketing and I had the most fascinating early career. I was on their leadership development program. So that meant that I had a lot of rotational assignments. It was basically a rotational program for the future leaders of the company, potentially. But they put you out there as a territory manager managing gas stations and not a very glamorous thing to be doing. It's a 24-7 operation, and you were responsible for everything from safety and robberies to profitability to, you know, making sure people know how to deal with flammable products like gasoline and convenience stores. And it just was like running your own business. And I had no idea at the time how much that would help me when it came time to run my own business. The other thing is it was focused on leadership and I got to manage people and manage projects, and it took me way out of my comfort zone. You know, gas stations are everywhere. They're in your backyard and they're across town in the dangerous areas. Some of my operators would tell me not to come into their part of town afternoon because the bad people would come out and I could be in danger. But you know, you realize you've led a pretty sheltered life. A lot of stuff can happen at gas stations, by the way. But that's another whole discussion. But it was so great to work with people and just say, okay, here are people who are making minimum wage, maybe a little bit more than minimum wage. Um, and then of course the managers were paid more than that. But it was a different group than me coming out of college. But but you start realizing how much people have in common and how when you treat people with respect and you care about them, like truly care, not just act like you care, but truly care and get to know them, learn about them and learn from them and recognize that you don't have all the answers and they might have way more things they can teach you. Um that that's a a really great opportunity. And so I became really passionate about leadership development and and learning and development in general. And the reason I ended up leaving that job other than just being really burned out and not wanting to move, is that I really wanted to do learning and development full time. And they were taking good care of me. I was somebody on a great career path there with a high potential, whatever you want to call it. But I could have had a great career there, but it was more about checking the boxes to prove to them that I could be analytical and do a pricing job and do things that I had absolutely no interest in just to show them that I could versus what really mattered. So I did follow my passion for learning and development, and that shaped a lot of the rest of my career.

Kristin 13:03

So you stayed in corporate for quite a while. What was the turning point where you moved from corporate into entrepreneur?

Carol 13:08

I was an accidental entrepreneur. I had my first child. I was hoping to start a family and it wasn't happening. And then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, I ended up pregnant. Went back to work after having that first child. My husband had a very demanding job that required a lot of travel, a lot of hours. And I went to my boss and I said, I don't think I want to work full-time right now. And so she made me a part-timer, which was great, but I still had the grind. Like every morning I was getting up, getting my son ready for daycare, dropping him off, getting to work, working half a day, then going to pick him up, then doing, you know, and so it still felt like a regular role with a lot of responsibilities, which wasn't bad. It just wasn't like it was that much of a break. But one day my boss just said, you know, you could do this contract and you could just work from home. Now, recognize this was long before working from home was a thing. So I think it was more about just the every morning getting up, getting to the office. And then if your child was sick, what do you do? You know, had I had the flexibility of being able to work from home, that would have been a great arrangement. But it was, you know, back in the day, it was not real flexible. So I took advantage of the opportunity to have that flexibility and work from home. And then the next thing I knew, my boss left. Because I always thought, oh, I'll go back and I'll work for her and you know, I'll go back to full time when my son's a little older. And then she left and she went out on her own. And I kind of rode her coattails for a while. She helped me do some jobs um that weren't for that company. And then I ended up having another baby out of the blue very quickly. And so then the phone started ringing and people started asking if I could teach management training. And I ended up just getting to go to some great places and work with some great companies. And so that's why I say it was kind of accidental because I always just thought it would be for a little while. And that little while turned into 18 years.

Kristin 15:02

Wow, 18 years. That is that is incredible.

Carol 15:06

Yeah, so it was a great ride. And I I think I probably would have just kept doing that. But when the divorce happened, I thought that my kids would appreciate more stability. They were in high school by that point or just getting into high school. And I thought, oh my gosh, college is looming. I need health care for myself, all that kind of stuff. So I thought that it would be good to go back to corporate then. And I sold my company and then I went to work for one of my clients.

Kristin 15:31

I like this story because it is such a reminder that one, you're allowed to build a business accidentally. Yeah. And you're also allowed to be like, you know what? I need I need stability again in a different way. I think that's incredible.

Carol 15:45

Well, thank you. And that's a message I hope to get to more people because I think we're better about this in general now than we were a generation or two ago. And I mean, thank God for the trailblazers, especially as women, the women who came before us who paved the way for us to be able to work and have these opportunities. But you don't have to follow this linear career path anymore. And I always tell my kids, who are now, by the way, 26 and 28, always tell them, just take the best next step. You don't have to know exactly what you're going to be doing five or 10 years down the road. And you can pivot later. And I have a sister who's a chemical engineer, and she was obviously very smart, very capable, did great work, but she stayed at home for 13 years when her boys were little. And then she went back to work as a chemical engineer and she's been working 17 years. So it can be done. You don't have to just feel like, oh my gosh, if I take myself off the path right now, will I ever be able to come back in? Yeah, it can happen. And you need to do what's right in this season.

Kristin 16:49

That's a perfect segue into talking about your book and and your philosophy because a lot of times we'll hit a wall and we'll think, shit, what's next? What happens next? And or like, if I'm at this level and I feel so burnt out, but like, is it smart to leave this level of whatever the success is? And so I want to know like, what was the progression like for you to sort of land on this rebalancing act topic for yourself?

Carol 17:14

Yeah, well, I am glad you asked. I think the beginning of it was the divorce, as I said. I started to try to look at what do I want my life to stand for? What do I want to do? And let me tell you, in the dark days after separation, going through all that, making sure the kids are making it through, I didn't always feel like I had choices. But we always have a choice about how we show up. And sometimes the best thing I could do is get out of bed and take the best next step that day to just keep trudging through the tough stuff. And so I think that's what inspired me as I look back on it now to write the book because out of the worst times, good followed. Maybe not immediately. And you can't always see it. And you know, the only way to get through this stuff is to go through. You've got to go through it to get beyond it. And when we're going through it, we don't always see the good that's going to follow, but we have to have hope. And so as I went through the divorce and went back into the corporate world, I had my ups and downs, of course. But by the way, I found love again, which is amazing.

Kristin 18:17

Congratulations. Thank you.

Carol 18:19

And you know, the sad part is when I look back, I would have probably stayed in a not so good marriage, in a not so wonderful relationship the rest of my life because I felt like I shouldn't get divorced. Now, I have no problem with divorce, and I'm totally fine for other people, but for some reason I just had this hang up like I shouldn't do that. It was probably fear. It was fear of the unknown. But how admitting that you're not perfect. Okay, thank you. Thank you for bringing that up. Because the other thing, because of the way I was brought up, like failure was never an option. And so I hated to fail. And I felt like, oh my gosh, I'm a failure. Everybody's gonna think I'm a failure and think I'm a big loser. And people could not have been more caring and supportive, which just goes to show you that a lot of the narratives in our minds are not true. And so I didn't want to fail, but out of that came the most amazing rebirth. And the corporate role was great. The corporate role was like going back and and learning all over again. I think I wanted to prove to myself that I could make it in the corporate world after so many years away. And I and I already told you, I always thought I would go back to that. So it was fun. It was fun to go back and I was doing some of my best work, but along the way, I ended up with breast cancer. And that was, by the way, also in 2020, right in the middle of COVID. Oh my God. It was not fun. I was not sad to see 2020 go, but I know the rest of the world feels the same way. So, but it it was kind of funny because I was in the care of some wonderful specialists at the cancer hospital here and I they caught it early. And ladies, get your mammograms, by the way, because that's how it was caught. But it was important to reduce the risk of recurrence to lower my stress level. Well, I don't know if you figured it out yet, but I am a very type A workaholic personality. And the juggling act kind of came from my attempts to juggle all these different roles, you know, be a great mom, be a great employee, be a great friend, daughter, parent, you know, all the things. And so I was trying to balance the stress, but within about six months, there I was again, pedaled to the metal and doing everything. And it wasn't good. And then my body started giving me signals like I developed high blood pressure, I developed diabetes. And it was like my body was saying, please stop doing this to us. Please calm down. And I finally told my boss, I was like, I don't think I can continue working like this. And I'm so grateful to her because she helped me exit in a wonderful way. Having a severance was amazing. It helped me take some time to just think, to think about what I wanted to do next. So that was the second part of my rebalancing act. I was like, I think I'm ready to leave this job. And I don't think I want to rush back into a corporate role. So, what have I learned and what do I want to do differently? And that's when I started writing the book. That's when I started talking to others. I don't know if I mentioned, but I talked to 70 women and many men as well, and learned how they'd done it, the lessons they learned the hard way, kind of like I had, and what helped them step away from the grind and step into what really matters. And I I feel like I have gotten to that point where I'm really focused on what matters most to me and having a fulfilling life instead of just being filled with things to do. And now I'm on a mission to help others do that before life gets the best of them because you don't want to wait till you have these wake up calls like I've had.

Kristin 21:44

I this is yes. I've lost all my words because yes, to all of what you just shared. Thank you for sharing it. I guess the hope that I have is that I feel like I I'm in my early forties and I feel like we are having those conversations now at this age. Yes, good, good, and maybe. Maybe we'll we can collectively get ahead of it, but it really is also probably the like geopolitical you know meltdown that's happening around us. That's like, what matters? Yeah, what is it that we're doing in the world? And for money, that is like actually important right now.

Carol 22:16

Yeah. I mean, the world around us is scary. And so we have to think about, you know, so many things are uncertain. What is certain? Well, what's certain is what I know to be true about myself. What I can focus on is making the most out of the time that I have because nothing's guaranteed. And by the way, I interviewed a lot of 20 somethings and 30 somethings for my book. I had people from 23 to probably 73. And what kind of, I don't know, it kind of scared me a little bit, but it didn't necessarily surprise me. But even the younger people than me, much younger than me, are having a lot of the same struggles. And it's like the messages and the mediums have changed and we have all this flexibility now. But now, instead of the pressures of trying to do it all because we want to be empowered women or whatever, you know, the trailblazers, I guess. Now it's about, well, I see reels every time I turn around. I see all these life hacks and all these influencers and all these people telling me that I ought to be doing this and I ought to look like that. And I am not leading a full life unless I'm having a party like this and vacationing there. And so it's like social media has added this whole other underpinning of pressure. And the fact that women and men tend to kind of process that differently is pretty notable too, because women tend to sort of play that game a little more instead of saying, uh, I don't think I'm gonna really jump into that circus. We deep down can start having these doubts like maybe I'm not enough. Maybe I'm not doing enough, maybe I'm not enough, this, that, or the other thing. And we've got to stop doing that.

Kristin 23:57

I couldn't agree more. That is excellent. Can we transition to our lightning round? Absolutely. Uh oh. I hope I'm ready for this. You're so ready. And it's okay. Lightning implies fast, but we got we got time. What was the very first job you ever had? And what did it teach you about work?

Carol 24:12

Well, I got two jobs at the same time because both of them were extremely part-time. I was 16. I was uh working at a place called Games People Play in Houston, Texas. And I was, it was like a putt-put golf, water slide, bumper boat kind of place. And I worked inside there. Sometimes I had to clean the restrooms, and I thought, I think I'd prefer a job where that is not required of me. I don't mind cleaning my own restroom, but I'd just as soon not have to clean somebody else's, but not my favorite thing. But then the other job was I worked at a restaurant and we were the expediters. It was a steak place, and we would take people's food out to them and have them cut down the center of their steaks to make sure they were done correctly. I learned you can smell like onions very easily when you work in a kitchen all night. I guess I should believe something more than that. But you know, I think uh the the power of earning a dollar, having your own spending money, respecting how much everything costs and what you can afford, and then also just appreciating how hard people work all around us, especially in the service industry, to bring the things that we take for granted. I think you have a great respect for that when you work in in a place like that. And by the way, side note, I heard a speaker talking about Gen Z uh recently, and he said the average first job, the age at which someone has their first job now is like 22. Like they don't even until after they're out of school. That just floored me. I and I guess I should back up. I did actually babysit before that, and that's probably when I learned I babysat when I was 12, I think, and up until I was 16. I didn't love it. I didn't have a lot of patience. I didn't love it either. And my and my mom was like, Well, when you have children, God will grant you patience. And I'm 28 years later still waiting for it. Not the most patient person you'll ever meet. I own that. I own it. But yeah, babysitting wasn't my favorite job. Neither was lifeguarding. I found that very boring.

Kristin 26:13

That would be so boring. I mean, I don't know how people do that. Just sitting there very long.

Carol 26:18

Yeah.

Kristin 26:19

What is the best or worst piece of advice you've ever received?

Carol 26:22

Well, I don't know that I'd focus on the worst because my memory's too full these days, and I probably just flushed it, you know, out of my memory. So thank God for that, right? But the best, gosh, I would say, well, there's a lot. I've been given a lot of good advice by good mentors. Some quotes that stick with me. One is no one can make you feel inferior without your consent. Love that. Um, the road to success is always under construction. I love that one too. And I think that feeds into just the advice that uh you always want to be striving and learning and growing and never, ever, ever think that you've learned all you need to learn. And I think early in your career, work really hard because the reputation you make in those early years will carry you for the rest of your life. It's really great when you get to be known as someone people want to work with, someone they can count on. And yes, I'm sure my workaholic nature is coming out, but you want to work hard in those first few years and don't assume you're entitled to anything. Be willing to roll up your sleeves and work without high expectations that the world ought to come to you. Good things will come, but you got to put in the work to get the results. That's really good. That's great advice. Thank you. What's your most embarrassing work story? I have two stories. Okay. One is there was somebody with the last name. You could have pronounced it Bloom or Blow Me. And one of the guys I worked with used to make a big joke that, you know, what if your last name was Blomy? Because somebody they worked with was named Blomy. And um, I was laughing about it one night at a happy hour, and the guy across from me, that was him. Oh, it's his thing. Oh no. But he was actually kind of proud of it, but I was really embarrassed. Was that one thing? The other thing, and this was not me, thankfully, but this was somebody else's most embarrassing moment. And as a speaker and a leadership trainer, I always, always vowed to never let this happen to me. And that is my friend was wearing a lavalier mic. She was mic'd up to deliver a keynote address at a company meeting. Went to the bathroom before, and thankfully it was a very short trip to the bathroom. But when she came back in, everybody was cheering and congratulating her on the way she peed for the microphone. So God is yeah, don't ever make that mistake unless you want to be embarrassed. So yeah.

Kristin 28:46

Wow. Wow, that's a good one. I'm gonna have bathrooms about this.

Carol 28:50

Thankfully it wasn't me. I could laugh about it.

Kristin 28:52

It's perfect. What is your socially acceptable work vice? Something that brings you comfort during your workday.

Carol 28:59

Well, I'll tell you, one of the things that I love is uh maybe I'll be dressed business on the top and athleisure on the bottom. That's perfect. Com soft pants, always a good work. Soft pants or my, you know, workout gear, and then I'll throw a nice shirt on and like nobody sees me from the waist down, and then I just have to throw a t-shirt on to go take the dog for a walk. So yeah. Yeah. That's a good one.

Kristin 29:21

Okay, what is something about your job that sounds impressive but isn't actually that glamorous?

Carol 29:26

So little of my job is that glamorous. So I'm not sure I have a great answer for that. I mean, I think I mean it sounds glamorous, I guess. Maybe not glamorous, but cool to write a book. But the real process of it is a whole lot more of a grind.

Kristin 29:41

That makes sense. And also I imagine that like as you're writing it and maybe even talking about it, it probably pulls up stuff, right? It pulls up like memory.

Carol 29:50

And it's it's hard because I mean, what you end up with is hopefully something you're very proud of and you feel like it's a masterpiece. And I am proud of my book, but it's so messy when you're doing it and you're just constantly like, my husband's like, okay, she's talking to herself again. Because I was recording, I sometimes I would just want to record thoughts and then transcribe them. And so I was writing from a stream of consciousness, which works a lot better when you try to work from an outline and you feel constrained. You know, you're not always in the mood to talk about exactly what's on the outline or write about that. And so the process of it was just so messy. I had just everything from post-it notes and journals to audio and voice memos to documents and notes, and I mean, just compiling everything was messy and not glamorous at all. And then you end up with this nice polished product.

Kristin 30:42

Yeah. You have this like a book that has, you know, a cover. It's bound, it's clean.

Carol 30:47

Yeah. So it's kind of fun to see the finished product and it looks a whole lot better than all the guts of getting to that point, I guess. Sure. That makes sense.

Kristin 30:55

Do you fix typos in casual communication? Oh my gosh. Yes.

Carol 31:00

Not necessarily, I don't do that for other people. I don't want to be that person, but I am the person that if I send a text message, like I was so happy when they introduced that you could edit text messages. Oh I sent my son something. And yeah, sometimes it's just autocorrect. It's not even your own typo, but I sent something to my son. And it was one of those conversations back and forth where you're, you know, the other person's reading it immediately. And so I sent him a response and it had a typo in it. And so I immediately corrected it, but he saw it before I did, and he said, LOL mom, I know exactly what typo you just corrected. And that's so like you to do that. So yeah, my children roast me about that. But yeah, I can hardly stand a typo. And it's just really funny with autocorrect and texting and how easy it is for those typos to creep in.

Kristin 31:51

Yeah, but it's it is like that's my downfall. It's not the actual typos, it's that my phone now thinks I've said something else.

Carol 31:58

Yeah, yeah. I've had some, I mean, since we're on the R-rated topics, I really shouldn't even, I don't know why I'm gonna say this out loud, but before we had the ability to correct our texts ourselves, and you know, back when we were all kind of getting used to texting, my sister and I had traded scarves and we had similar scarves, and we traded them and she was wearing mine, and she lives in another city, and she texted me and said, I love the way your scarf smells. That's a great perfume. What is it? No, the correct name was Coco Mademoiselle by Chanel. But I was in a meeting, and so I guess I was, I don't know, trying to be quick or something. And I wrote Coco Chanel and my phone auto-corrected to Cock Chanel. And my sister comes back rolling on the floor, laughing, going, Wow, that's an interesting scent, I bet. I look back and I'm like, and I I visibly gasped in the middle of my meeting. I was like, and they're like, What? And I thank God these clients, these were clients that were our my friends and they were all women and they we were pretty close. So I could share with them the mistake I had just made. And we all got a laugh out of it. But I was like, oh, that's probably the most unfortunate typo I've ever made.

Kristin 33:08

Thank God it was my sister. Exactly. That's that makes it perfect, the sister of it all. We still laugh about that. That's a perfect place to end. That was the last lightning round question. So I have two more, you know, two more questions. Okay one, what is your advice to someone who feels off track right now?

Carol 33:25

I think if you feel it, your body's trying to tell you something, pay attention to those signals. And maybe you don't feel like you have a lot of time, but I would say just carve out even a few minutes, 10 minutes, 20 minutes, and recenter. Just stop and think. Why am I feeling this way? What's this really about? What do I need to do to adjust? One of the things I talk about, the reason I talk about the rebalancing act is that we all hear the word balance all the time. And I don't, I don't think balance really exists. I mean, it does exist, but it doesn't exist for very long. So our ability to be agile at making those adjustments in the moment and that resilience that we start to create for ourselves when things do feel off track, that's a real difference maker for us. So just try to think in terms of rebalance. What can I shift here? And is this something I can do something about? And then the other thing I always tell my kids this somebody told me a long time ago, when you're feeling like worry or dread, you know, if that's the issue you're getting, that things are off track, that things aren't quite as they should be, ask yourself what's the worst that could happen? What's the best that could happen, and what's likely to happen. Because our brain tends to go to worst case scenario pretty quickly, if you're like me. And it's like, oh my gosh, what if this happens? What if that happens? And we can start doomsday prepping in no time. And usually that's not what ends up happening. Usually it's not that big a deal. So that process of being able to retrain our thoughts and kind of get a hold of ourselves in those moments is huge. And there are all kinds of tips and techniques that can help you with that.

Kristin 35:01

It's so good. I know that that advice will resonate with listeners. So thank you. The very last question is where can people find you?

Carol 35:07

Well, thank you for asking. They can find me on my website, Carol Anniking.com, and there you can find links to my socials, to different talks, different topics. And I have a legacy blueprint workbook you can download for free if you want some help refocusing and getting very aligned on what your highest values and goals are. And really, it's it's called a legacy blueprint workbook because it's about what you want to be known for. What legacy do you want to leave with people? So that's just a resource there for you on my website. And also, you can buy my book, The Rebalancing Act, anywhere you buy your books. And it's also on Audible, there's a Kindle version, all the things. So that's where they can be.

Kristin 35:52

Well, congratulations again, and thank you for joining us.

Carol 35:55

I enjoyed the conversation. Thank you so much for having me.

Kristin 36:05

You know, I was sort of laughing to myself as I listened to the final cut of this episode because I recorded this months ago and I was organizing my thoughts thinking here are some like topics that I could pull out and reflect on. And almost all of them are topics that I've like really thought about lately and dug into. And, you know, this year has been so interesting for me in terms even of like um moments of needing to rebalance, you know, like that time I broke both of my arms. And so I actually, you know, I was thinking about like the difference between a successful life and a an aligned life, which we really explored in the last episode as well. I love thinking about the difference between the word balance and rebalance, thinking about how we don't ever really achieve balance because there's just sort of always pieces moving. We're just in a constant state of rebalancing, and that's okay. I really love that distinction. I think that is something that I have found in my own life over the last several months around my life and my health and figuring out sort of the like new daily habits that can hold me in the current season of my life. I was so interested in thinking about sort of the stories that we tell ourselves about failure. Of course, this her story is not a story about divorce, but who among us hasn't sort of experienced something that was completely ground shifting that made us feel like maybe we're failing and maybe failure was never supposed to be an option. But here we are, and things are changing so dramatically. But I think the thing that I guess came back to by the time I got to the end of the episode was the cost of performing competence, the cost of constantly looking like we have it together. Going back to her early days, those expectations that were set by her family that she held really closely, and thinking about how some there was a real cost in all of that. The cost of holding it together and then having things like your health fail and having to rethink how you show up. You can no longer show up as a perfect person, a perfect person who has it all together, especially in those moments where our lives are like shifting really dramatically. And we can look back and think about how much it cost us to be performing someone else. Anyway, there's a lot there. And honestly, you can go look at my Substack and laugh at the alignment here around some of the topics I've been exploring and around the things that she pulls out in her own story. Mostly because it's kind of random and it's kind of special how how much our lives can mirror each other because we are humans just figuring it out. We're always in the messy part. It's just life and it's allowed to be nonlinear. We can make a choice, work in corporate, leave corporate, come back to corporate, whatever our story is, it's always unfolding and we are always rebalancing. As always, thank you for being here. I am always honored. I always kind of get tripped up with this part because I'm so excited to get to come to you every week with stories of perseverance and success and balancing and rebalancing. Come find us on Instagram or LinkedIn or the web at everything counts pod. And I'll see you next time. Thanks for listening to everything counts, but nothing is real. Remember, even when nothing feels real, everything you do counts. Capitalism may be absurd, but so are we. And on that note, well, it's been real. Don't forget to subscribe. I'm Kristen, and see you next time.