Survival Mode & High Achievers | Blake Schofield

Blake Schofield made millions for her company, shook hands with the C-suite, and realized in that exact moment: it wasn’t worth it.

Blake Schofield was 32 years old, standing on a stage at JCPenney, shaking hands with the company’s C-suite. Her team had just finished as the number two buying team out of ninety in the entire organization, two years running. She sat back down and realized with total clarity: it wasn’t worth it. It took her eight more years to leave corporate. 

In this episode of Elevate Within’s Architecture of Reinvention: The Art of Unbecoming summer series, Blake joins Sandy Davis for a conversation about what she calls the ride to breakdown, the pattern of changing companies hoping the next one will finally fix the exhaustion, only to discover that each cycle arrives faster and hits harder than the one before. She names survival mode exactly as it shows up in high-achieving women: not as visible crisis, but as exceptional capability. The woman everyone calls strong and responsible may simply be running a dysregulated nervous system that has learned to perform threat response as productivity. 

Blake also shares the single question from a coach that finally broke an eight-year cycle, why ninety percent of what she once believed about success has been proven false, and her honest, nuanced perspective on where therapy helped her and where it fell short. 

Blake is the founder of Impact with Ease, where she helps successful leaders who are drained, stuck, or uncertain get clarity on their next step without sacrificing their health, their income, or their family.

What You Will Hear in This Episode

The stage moment that revealed the gap between achievement and fulfillment.

The ride to breakdown and why burnout cycles accelerate with each job change.

How survival mode — fight, flight, fawn, and freeze — disguises itself as competence in high achievers.

The coach’s question that finally interrupted an eight-year pattern.

Why beliefs formed before age seven continue to run adult decisions without our awareness.

Her honest take on therapy: valuable for awareness, not always sufficient for behavior change.

Connect with Blake Schofield

Website: impactwithease.com

Podcast: Impact with Ease, available on all major platforms

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

I was barely sleeping. So I would get up and I'd have to get on uh the Bart. So I'd have to park and get on the Bart. So I was leaving my house at six in the morning. I was getting home at six or six thirty at night. Um, sometimes being able to eat with my family, sometimes I got home after they did. I would take an hour or two to get my kids ready for bed, read books, try to engage with them, and then I would get back on my computer at eight or nine o'clock at night and work till about one, go to bed and get back up all over again. Um, at the worst, I lost 10 pounds because of the stress I was under. I um it was an open-air environment. So I multiple times a week uh at the end would go into the restroom where there were stalls, and I would cry in the middle of the day just to make it through. Um and I I remember thinking I made more money than I had ever made in my life. Uh, we lived in this beautiful golf course community. And I remember driving home one day in the car, looking at where I lived and thinking, right, this is what success is supposed to look like. And I've never been more miserable in my entire life. Um, we had a huge uh rent payment. I mean, this is San Francisco, and uh I felt so trapped, and I just knew that my body had gotten to a point where it was like, you cannot keep doing this like enough. And so I think for me, it was, I always say, uh, the journey taught me that I was in cycles that I didn't see. I call it the ride to breakdown, right? Um, because I kept changing jobs, hoping it would be better, it got better for a short period of time. But what's happened with each subsequent move is the highs weren't as high. The lows were lower and they lasted longer and they came faster. So the first cycle was like two and a half years to get to that point. In my last company, I was there for 11 months, but by the time I hit that five-month mark, I was already there.

SPEAKER_02 2:04

Welcome back to Elevate Within. I'm your host, Sandy Davis. Elevate Within is for the high-achieving women and the messy middle, the space between who you were and who you're becoming. This is a space for honest conversations about reinvention, resilience, healing, leadership, and what it really takes to rebuild from the inside out. Each week, I'm joined by my co-host Claudia Cuevas, licensed marriage and family therapist, as we explore the stories, lessons, and emotional realities behind transformation. Because reinvention isn't just about changing our circumstances, it's about understanding yourself. It's about healing, it's about letting go of who you thought you had to be, so you can become who you were always meant to be. Whether you're navigating burnout, grief, identity shifts, career transitions, entrepreneurships, caregiving, or simply asking yourself, what's next? You are not alone. So take a breath, pull up a chair, and join us at the table. This is Elevate Within. When exploring the architecture, a reinvention, sometimes the hardest thing to let go of isn't a job or title. Sometimes it's the identity we built around our lives. The achiever, the performer, the woman who learned that her worth was tied to what she could accomplish. For many high-achieving women, success becomes more than something we do. It becomes who we are. And when life asks us to slow down or choose a different path, it can feel like we're losing ourselves. But what if that unraveling isn't a breakdown? What if it's an invitation? Today's guest knows that journey well. I'm honored to introduce Blake Schofield. Blake is a former Fortune 500 executive, entrepreneur, podcast host, and founder of Impact with Ease. For nearly two decades, she billed an extraordinary career, leading major brands and achieving the kind of success many women spend their lives pursuing. But behind the accomplishments were burnout, anxiety, chronic stress, and growing realization that she was operating from patterns formed long before her career ever began. Her journey would lead her through childhood trauma, health challenges, divorce, entrepreneurship, spiritual awakening, and a profound process of rediscovering what she calls her inner compass. Today, she helps women redefine success, reconnect with themselves, and create harmony with who they are truly are. Today, we're talking about purpose, trauma, burnout, faith, identity, alignment, and what happens when we stop living the life we thought we were supposed to and start living a life that is truly ours. Blake, welcome to Elevate Within.

SPEAKER_01 5:12

Thank you so much, Sandy.

SPEAKER_02 5:14

So happy that you're here. Blake, before we talk about your work of what you're doing today, I'd love to start with your story. You spent nearly two decades building what many would consider an incredible successful career. Looking back, when did you first realize that success wasn't created from fulfillment that you thought it would?

SPEAKER_01 5:32

So it's such a good question. Yeah, I spent 18 years in corporate retail. Interestingly enough, that wasn't my original plan. My original plan was to become a marriage and family psychologist. Really? Yes. Yes. I knew very early, I would say like seven, that I felt like I had a significant purpose in my life. Uh at 10, I recognized that it was around people. And I started actually studying many of the concepts and things that I came back to uh when I was like in middle school. Um and so I think it was maybe 12 or 13 when I thought, well, that's it. I'm gonna become a marriage and family psychologist. I had had a lot of struggles in my family, and I didn't want other people to go through the struggles that I did. And so I went to college, uh, got my degree in psychology, and I was actually my junior year when I was looking to apply for PhD programs, that I began to go, wait a second, something about this isn't right. Back then we didn't have the resources we have today. And people said, Well, you're a people person, go into HR. And so I would tell you that my first year in HR, I thought to myself, my God, is this really what work is gonna be like? I was so disappointed because it wasn't what I expected. And then I got promoted and went into my second role in HR. So I started out in recruiting and then I moved into training and development and actually went through a pretty significant depression at that point because I thought, like, I have no idea what to do, but it is not this. There were pieces I loved, like training people. That was the best. But rewriting training manuals that had been done for 20 years and it's the same thing. I was just like, I can't. And so I think for me it started early and saying, I thought it would feel this way and it doesn't feel that way. And what's wrong? Like, what should I be doing instead? And really feeling lost in that. And then I ended up realizing a number of things. Um, I wanted to do work that I could see the results, uh, really felt like strategy was important. And I had been recruiting and hiring people to be buyers, which are basically entrepreneurs inside a retail business. And so I thought maybe that will solve my problem. And so I spent 16 years doing that, building, growing, and turning around businesses. Um, but I was constantly going through cycles of hoping the next job would finally make me happy. So I'd be happy for this window of time where I could come in and I could look at the business and I could analyze it and I could look at the market and I could see where the gold was and strip out all the stuff that didn't work, reinvent it, and then, you know, see it take off. I loved that part. And then after that part was done, that same unsettled feeling would come back, right? That same exhaustion would come back. It would be difficult to uh feel excited to get up and go to work. And so when you asked me, like, when did I realize that achievement wouldn't fulfill me? It wasn't one moment. It was this series of patterns of experiences where I would get that fulfillment and excitement for a period of time. And then I would end up back in sort of this low of saying, like, I thought it would feel better than this. Um why is that? Why do you think you felt that way? Well, I can understand now what I didn't understand then, which was I actually really didn't understand how I was uniquely wired to solve problems, make decisions, and create success. And so a lot of the work that I was doing was creating friction and stress. And two, I was two to three times less productive because I didn't know that about myself. And it actually took me until my third out of five companies to start to see some of that because I would actually be more in flow and I would have these moments where things were easier and I could feel that that was different than what I had experienced before, but it was still only a portion of the time, not a significant portion of what I was doing on a day-to-day. So that was part of it. Um, the other big pieces I had so many beliefs about what success had to look like. You know, I was raised in a home where my mom was working 60 plus hours a week. She brought work home and talked about it over the dinner table. She would take me to the office as a little kid on the weekends. So I was raised with this very clear belief system and expectation that in order to be this kind of successful, you had to sacrifice, right? So if I want to achieve these things, I'm going to have to sacrifice. It is going to be hard. It's going to be a lot of work. And so those belief systems uh kept me repeating a lot of patterns, a lot of emotions, and a lot of experiences over and over and over again that were actually what was creating so much of what was making me unfulfilled. But it was very hard to see because when we're in it, we believe it's the toxic boss or the crazy industry or the big project. And we don't actually realize that a huge part of what's making our experience on a day-to-day basis feel bad is the second guessing and the worrying about what to say and the, you know, the perfectionist cycles that we get in and all of these other things. So, like I said, it took me a really long time. Um, I can say that I had a very visceral moment. I was uh, well, it was um 2009. So I was 32 years old. So I'd been at this, what, a decade? I had reached the pinnacle at that point of my career. I had reached a buyer, which is a difficult job to get to, and I had been the top performing buying team at JCPenney for two years in a row. We were number two out of 90 teams in the entire company. And I got invited um to kudos to you. Thank you, and my team that did an amazing job. Um, I got invited to be celebrated with all the executives. My husband at the time was there with me, and I had worked incredibly hard for this moment. And I got up on stage, walked across, shook hands with the C-suite, and I sat back down at that table. And it hit me like a ton of bricks. The immediate thing that I knew, which was it wasn't worth it. Because at that time I had a two and a four-year-old. And I can tell you that there are so many moments for my daughter, my two-year-old daughter's uh first year and a half of life that I didn't remember because I was so exhausted just trying to balance this job and these responsibilities with trying to be a mom of two young kids.

SPEAKER_04 12:01

Right.

SPEAKER_01 12:01

And it was that moment when I sat there and I realized I had made millions of dollars for the company and gotten like, I don't know, a $25,000 bonus that, and you know, this accolade that was soon to be over, that it wasn't worth it. Um, but that recognition alone wasn't enough. Um, because what do you do when you make six figures and you are responsible for your family and you are the breadwinner? And every single thing you look at looks like more of the same, or a huge pay cut, or having to start all the way over. And so that was 2009. It took me um moving cross-country twice, two more companies, and I did not leave my corporate job until 2017. So it took me another eight years from that experience to actually be able to make uh the change that fundamentally uh opened up everything for my life.

SPEAKER_02 12:59

You got emotional when talking about that you weren't fulfilled, you know, after shaking hands with everybody and thinking about your kids. And, you know, I feel that you're living that space at that time. What were you going through emotionally to have you talk about it and it brought up some emotion for you?

SPEAKER_01 13:16

Yeah, well, first foremost, I'm a highly empathetic person. So uh my emotions are my guide. So I am somebody that if somebody cries, I probably will cry with them. Um is it a sense of release?

SPEAKER_02 13:30

It's also a sense of release for you.

SPEAKER_01 13:33

Uh for me, yes. It's also a tapping into the truth.

SPEAKER_04 13:36

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_01 13:37

You know, when I worked in corporate, it wasn't okay to be emotional. I was taught that like you have to be, you know, people have to not tell what you like versus what you don't like. Um, you're passionate, but you can't be too passionate.

SPEAKER_04 13:50

Right.

SPEAKER_01 13:50

Um, it took me a really long time, and actually not until I got out of corporate to realize that my emotions are my greatest gift. My emotions are never wrong. My emotions are guidance and data. And my passion is what has created every transformation for my life, for every business I've ever touched, for every client I've ever worked with. And so for me, a big part of just being me is standing in that and also hopefully helping other women understand that if you are highly intuitive and connected to your emotions, um, that is a gift. And that's probably one of the greatest gifts that you can give to people is to allow yourself to express that emotion. Um, because when we don't do that, we actually create so much sickness in our body and so much sickness from a health standpoint because we're not actually allowing our body to process the emotion as it comes through it.

SPEAKER_02 14:49

Right. So you made that realization like, hey, this is not for me. I need to do something else. Walk us through that. What did that look like? What did you experience? What did you learn about yourself?

SPEAKER_01 15:00

Oh, you know, like I said, I the two years that, you know, my daughter was born, I was traveling eight to ten times a year uh to New York. I uh nursed all three of my children actually for a year. So I was, I had a very set process every month to be able to pull that off and go back and forth between New York and Dallas, right? With all the complexities of how do you deal with like the breast milk and where you're pumping and doing all of this under these crazy schedules. Um and I really felt like I needed to prove myself in that work, right? Uh, I worked at a company that would have pep rallies on Mondays and Fridays, and they had literally a document where they would quartile the buying teams. So they would cheer all the people in the top quartile and then they would talk about all the people on the bottom. And if you were in the bottom quartile, I can't tell you the level of like discomfort twice a week that you were called out that your business was the worst business. So funny enough, when I started and I got my buying job, I got the business that was at the very bottom.

SPEAKER_04 16:00

No.

SPEAKER_01 16:01

And turned it to number one in that division two years in a row. Um, but that level of competitiveness, that level of um very almost fear-based driven ways of working, it very much was like you were only as good as your last, you're only as good as your last month, you're only as good as your last whatever. When you coupled that with being a young mom with two kids, the pressure of wanting to be present for my kids, the level of travel that I was doing, um, I was achieving that through really just burning myself out, right? I was having to get on my computer on Sundays just to catch up on the emails because most of the people were overseas. My workload on Mondays was so heavy because every Monday we'd have to come in and see how the business would do. The reporting we had was not good enough. So I had to build all these spreadsheets in order to analyze all the data. By Monday afternoon, we'd be sitting in a meeting with all of the leadership. My team would have to pull all of the items of apparel that we had sold, and I would have to communicate what was working in the business, what wasn't. If there was a question I couldn't answer, and that happened more than once, I was seen as if I did not know what was going on in my business and you could easily be blackballed. So these this is the level of pressure that I was under. It wasn't just um a high achiever who was a perfectionist, type A, was also in an environment that had very little space for uh everything else. I guess is probably the best way to say it. So, what did you do? How did you get out of it? I remember having a conversation with my husband at the time and saying, I have to figure something else out. Like I can't do this long term. Uh, and so I did what most women do is I started researching what else I could do. I read a million books on finding your purpose. Um, and every single thing I looked at looked like it would be more of the same, or I would have to start over. And at that point, like I said, I was a six-figure income earner. I had a home, I had two children, I had a lot of responsibility, and I knew that my husband would not be able to replace the income. And so I did what so many of us do, which is said, maybe if I change companies, a company that values work-life balance, then that will solve my problem. And that was uh 2010. I made my very first cross-cross-country move and moved my family um to Minnesota to work for Target Corporation. Okay. And I did get a lot of improvements. I went from 70-hour work weeks down to 40, 45. I worked at a company that was far more focused on strategy and leadership development. Um, I was able to work more time in my zone of genius. I wasn't expected to have all of the answers to every single thing the minute somebody asked, which was helpful. Um, but I also found myself uh still unsatisfied and still struggling with how do I do meaningful, impactful work without sacrificing my life? Because I had improved my family life and my ability to be present and get home at a good time. But what I had lost was the challenge. And really feeling like I was growing in the way I wanted to grow. Um and so, and I felt in a lot of ways, Target was the best company I ever worked for in retail. Um, so many amazing leaders, uh, really like such a gift to be there. But it's such a large company and there's so many rules and structures around what you can do. And so for me, that was very frustrating. So I was very lucky to be put in areas that were either like kind of side shoot areas or weren't performing well, that I again then got to turn around and transform. Um, and so I had more freedom in some respects than a lot of the other merchants did there. And so when I started looking at the other jobs, I was like, hmm, I don't I don't know that this is gonna fulfill me long term.

SPEAKER_02 19:59

And that seems to be a common theme for your career. So there's obviously there was something inside of you that kept tugging away at your soul, like, hey, this isn't it. This isn't it, even though you were highly successful, even though you understood and you listened to those signs internally, like this still isn't it. Doesn't matter if you moved your family, doesn't matter if you changed the company. What was that it that was tugging you inside? And when did you start to listen to it and take action?

SPEAKER_01 20:31

Well, I mean, to be honest, I was listening and taking action over and over and over again. I just didn't know what the right action to take was, right? Because that happened at Target. And then I thought, well, uh, actually, that's when I did some deeper work and I said, I think I want to be a coach. But at the time, I was the sole income earner for a family of five. Everything I looked at was two years to go back to college, and then you'd still have to figure out how to build a business. It seemed completely irresponsible, unrealistic. And so I thought, that's not, that's not possible. And so I thought maybe I can solve it by moving back south where the weather was warmer and I wasn't dealing with all the issues there. Um, and using someone else's money to build the business where I had more freedom than what I had had and more challenge than what I had had at Target. And so I moved from Minneapolis to California and I went to work for Stitch Fix and I started their plus size business from scratch. Now, when I went, the boss that hired me, we agreed this is the work-life balance I need, et cetera. Right.

SPEAKER_02 21:34

Right.

SPEAKER_01 21:35

Um, what I experienced was not that. And what ended up happening was uh the same pattern that I had experienced, which was under resourced, over overworking, and a deadline that was immovable. So I launched that business in 11 months to my team and I to a 75,000 woman wait list. In the first month, that business did more uh sales than the entire first year. Of stitch fix, right?

SPEAKER_02 22:01

Not surprise, but congratulations, but not surprise. Not surprised to hear that at all.

SPEAKER_01 22:06

Huge results that almost killed me. I was working 14-hour days again. I was barely sleeping. So I would get up and I'd have to get on uh the Bart. So I'd have to park and get on the Bart. So I was leaving my house at six in the morning. I was getting home at 6 or 6:30 at night. Um, sometimes being able to eat with my family, sometimes I got home after they did. I would take an hour or two to get my kids ready for bed, read books, try to engage with them, and then I would get back on my computer at eight or nine o'clock at night and work till about one, go to bed and get back up all over again. Um, at the worst, I lost 10 pounds because of the stress I was under. I um it was an open-air environment. So I multiple times a week uh at the end would go into the restroom where there were stalls, and I would cry in the middle of the day just to make it through. Um, and I I remember thinking I made more money than I had ever made in my life. Uh, we lived in this beautiful golf course community. And I remember driving home one day in the car, looking at where I lived and thinking, right, this is what success is supposed to look like. And I've never been more miserable in my entire life. So the last six months were me holding on with like everything I had. Um, I at the time I told my husband, you got to get a job. You have to get a job. I am not sure. I'm gonna do everything that I said I was gonna commit to. I'm gonna launch this business. I'm gonna do the things I said, but once that happens, I'm not sure how much more I have in me. And so it was at that point that I finally got to the place where I said, all right, God, clearly what I'm doing is not working. I will do whatever you want because this I could see. I kept trying to fix it and it's not working. And I can't keep moving my family and I can't keep doing this to my kids. And that's when I went and got a coach. And that's when I said, I have to figure out what the right next step is for my career. I have to be intentional about this because I can't keep doing this. And what kind of coach did you get? Um, at the time I got a career coach, I uh really felt like I need a master certified coach. This is the person that's gonna help me. Um and I'm so grateful for um for that experience because she helped me see, she asked me a question once, which uh was really powerful. And she said, when we started talking about what was she what was going on, and she said, Why are you willing to sacrifice your life for this career when they aren't willing to give you what you need? And that question, why are you willing to sacrifice your life for this was such an eye-opening truth because that is what I had been doing my whole career. I had continued to sacrifice my health. I had shingles at 28 years old. I had not so bad in my shoulders that the massage therapist couldn't get them out. By that last job in California, I had a bulging disc in my neck that I was dealing with literally ice in the middle of these appointments to deal with. I had horrible allergy problems, I had horrible back problems, I had had um injections on my back for sciatic problems. Like I had all of these things, right? And I had consistently sacrificed my health for my job and for my responsibilities. Um, it's funny, I often say this now. I'm so grateful for that experience. I wouldn't be here today without her. And in the last nine years, I've invested over half a million dollars and worked with over 20 different coaches and consultants. And the irony is at the time, my lens was get the person that's ICAF certified at the highest level. She was very impactful, but honestly, the least impactful of all of the coaches that I worked with. So sometimes our lens, yeah, and it's because I bet isn't isn't always the best.

SPEAKER_02 25:52

Right. Because we're still thinking and we're conditioned career. And how do I find a better career or how do I find a better company that is going to help me not burn out so quickly? And then finally I'll feel fulfilled, which that wasn't happening. So walk us through. So you have this coach. When was the pinnacle point where you're telling your husband, hey, you need to get another job? Was it because internally you realized I'm about to leave corporate America or I'm about to just do a complete pivot and change my life to save Blake?

SPEAKER_01 26:24

Yeah, it's interesting. When I was at Target uh and I realized I thought I might want to be a coach, I started cutting back pretty drastically where we were spending money because I didn't know what I was gonna do next, but I had this fear that I wouldn't make as much money. So I had already been a couple years into this before that. Uh, the reason I said to him, you got to get a job is I could see that it was getting heavier and harder to keep carrying the workload that I was carrying. Things I used to be able to do became much harder. I was much more drained and much more exhausted. And so I could see like I can't keep doing this at some point. It's just not viable anymore. Um, and so that's why I asked him to get the job. I thought we have this rent, this lease, I can't get out of. I'm stuck in this thing. And um, we need to start doing something to improve whatever's gonna happen so we're in better shape. So for me, I have always been very focused on mitigating risk. That's a huge part why I was stuck for so long, is I believed that the only way to create change was blowing up my life, huge change, have to take this huge pay cut. And it was those belief systems and not having a way to understand what exactly was driving my problem, that having the faith and understanding that if I did make a change, it would be the right one and how to do it in a way that wouldn't create that risk that was creating such a long journey for me that was unnecessary. I just didn't know it at the time.

SPEAKER_02 27:57

Right, right. The series is called The Architecture of Reinvention, The Art of Unbecoming. What identities did you have to release in order to become the woman sitting in front of us today?

SPEAKER_01 28:09

It's such a good question. I've had so many transformations in my life, you know, in corporate, like I said, going from HR into merchandising and then weaving from a corporate executive to become an entrepreneur. And then I multiple times pivoted my business. And then, as you mentioned, you know, earlier, um, then ended up getting a divorce from my college sweetheart. So we've been married 24 years. In each one of those circumstances, I had to challenge what I believed to be true and the identity that I uh thought I was. And so uh it's hard to give you a succinct answer to that because it was a really long journey. I think what might be more helpful is to share the tenets and what I learned from it.

SPEAKER_02 28:53

Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 28:55

Um, today I sit here and tell you that 90% of what I believed to be true about what it took to be successful and who I had to be in order to accomplish that. 90% of that I have proven to be false. How so? Well, through the methodology that I learned and then ended up developing along the way with the work, I came to understand that uh human biology uh almost all of our beliefs are formed by the time we are seven years old.

SPEAKER_04 29:27

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 29:28

And most people don't realize that uh their beliefs are changeable and they may and very likely are inaccurate. Because think about who you were at five or seven years old. The whole world revolved around you. Anything negative that happened, you blamed yourself, anything you experienced, you didn't really have the full context. And so we come up with these beliefs at you know, four, five, six, seven years old about what is necessary that very often are not true at all. And we have no idea that they're actually running every decision that we make. So when I kind of started this journey, I was very blessed to work with an amazing coach and friend, Britt. And uh, she helped me really understand that so many of the things I believed were just who I was, weren't. They were things I had been conditioned to believe, or they were beliefs I had formed based on my experience. So, just for example, when I was in corporate, I would have described myself as a type A perfectionist. And the reason I'm successful is because I work harder than everyone else and I triangulate and look at every angle. So I know, like strategically, what's going to work.

SPEAKER_02 30:39

And Blake, I just want to tell you that's every woman's speech who are high achievers. That was my speech as well. So there's a commonality in why I'm doing the series for women to be educated, like, hey, you're not alone in this. So your speech was my speech and it was some other woman's speech. But sorry, I just wanted to point that out, but keep going.

SPEAKER_01 30:59

Yeah, thank you. Yeah. Um, we'd say that I started to see gaps or holes in that belief system as I moved through my career. And I'll share it because I think often, at least for me and my clients, we learned best through the story because you can see yourself in it. Yes. Like I said, when I was at JCPenney delivering all these results, very fear-based environment, very performance-based environment, stressed out all of the time. Even though I was a top performer, I never felt safe. Because I literally watched people be blackballed in front of me for not being able to answer a question. I would carry a binder like this, this thick with every answer, so I could find it really. Seriously. And when I moved to Target and they told me if you are working 60 plus hours, you are not a good leader. That means you don't know how to manage your time and prioritize. I was like, what? Because when I was at JC Penney, it was like the person who worked hardest and did the most was rewarded. So I was like, wait a second. I had so much fear. Wait a second, I've delivered all these results by working 60 or 70 hours a week. I don't know if I can deliver them in 40. And so I had to start to learn a new way to look at it. And so I started talking to a lot of people about how they did the work and what mattered and what was successful. I had an amazing leader, Melissa Milo, who challenged me about how I was approaching going to talk to her boss, the head of women's apparel, and said to me, Why do you think you need to do all of this? What you really need to do is understand what Todd is expecting of you. And if you meet his expectations, then you win.

SPEAKER_04 32:29

Right.

SPEAKER_01 32:29

Why do you feel like you need to do all this extra stuff? And so that first year, year and a half, I was really challenged not to send any emails on the weekends, not to work late. I remember they had um early Fridays, summer Fridays, and people would leave at two o'clock. I didn't believe it. I didn't trust it. So I would stay at my desk while everyone else worked. Yes, I did.

SPEAKER_02 32:50

Even I left it too. I would let my staff go at one, and then I would leave at two.

SPEAKER_01 32:55

I didn't trust it because I had been in organizations in the past where they would say those things, but then you would get docked secretly behind. So it was like, we say this, but the secret is really this, right? So our espoused values are not values in action. And so I didn't trust it. So I was like, no, it was probably three weeks that I was like, and then I realized, oh no, they really mean it. Like people leave and they're gone. And so I started slowly moving into it. And then I started creating better results at Target than I had created at JCPenney. I took a plus size business that for a decade had been underperforming and they had not been fit able to figure out how to work it. They were actually going to replace it. The executives already knew exactly what they wanted to replace it with and everything else. My boss, my boss's boss, gave me six to nine months to turn it around. I had the tiniest team because they had stripped it down to nothing. We were running down 25% to last year. My tiny team and I turned that business around, ran the first positive sales in a decade, and drove um a huge profit increase over plan. And it taught me through the experience that maybe this belief that I have that my results are tied to how much time I'm working aren't true. And so I had those elements right over and over and over as I went. And I think so many of us have those. We just often ignore the evidence right in front of our face because our brains get into cognitive dissonance. And so we ignore the things that are in opposition to what we believe to be true.

SPEAKER_02 34:26

And we're not having enough of these conversations to identify it. We think it's normal. We think the emotional baggage that we're taking with us company to company, even though we can be successful, we're burning out quicker. But we just don't understand because we're not having these conversations, right? So we just think this is normal.

SPEAKER_01 34:45

I thought, to be honest, I thought something was wrong with me because I would talk to friends or family who didn't have the same drive that I had, and they would say to me, Why aren't you more grateful? Why can't you just get a hobby? Why can't you just let it go? And what I know now that I didn't know then, right? Is that I was never broken. Nothing was wrong with me. I wasn't ungrateful. What I was experiencing were true signs that the way I was working and leading weren't in alignment for me. And I was caught in survival mode, fight, flight, fun, or freeze that was driving almost everything that I was experiencing. And so somebody from the outside is saying, Why can't you just relax? Why can't you just XYZ? Extremely unhelpful to somebody that feels like if I stop doing this, everything is going to fall apart. And that is exactly how I felt. The more capable I was, the more responsibilities I got, the more expectations piled on. And um, the more stuck in that I became. And I see that, yeah. I mean, I've been doing this with hundreds of leaders for the last nine years, that my experience and my journey is so common. And when you don't understand those things, you have people trying to give you well-meaning advice that actually creates a lot of shame and blame and guilt and stuckness because they don't carry the level of responsibility that you carry. They aren't being as intentional or strategic. They don't have to pay the consequences for um making those changes. And so for me, I kept trying to figure out there has to be a way that I can do this meaningful work because I'm a working mom for a reason. I don't want to be away from my kids just to sit here and do stuff that doesn't matter. But man, there's gotta be a way that I like can be fully present with my kids. And there has to be a way that I can like not constantly feel like I have to check my email because my to-do list never ends. And there has to be a way that I can feel like I can can do this without everything falling apart. And I think that um these are so common, but people don't talk about them. And so we internalize so much of that. Is something is wrong with me, I should be more capable, I should be more grateful. Maybe I'll never be happy. Maybe what I want isn't possible when what you're experiencing actually isn't any of that at all. Um, it's just that it's a much more complex circumstance than what most people are talking about. There's a lot of there's a lot of great advice and tools and coaching. Um, but what I usually find is a lot of them are either surface level tactics and tools and they're not going deep enough in dealing with the things, or it's like playing whack-a-mole. So it takes years and in some cases decades trying to solve all of those problems like a whack-a-mole, which is what I was doing. It took me over a decade to finally figure out how to use my skills in a way that was meaningful without sacrificing my life. And then I've invested, like I said, another nine years of work, tens of thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars to understand why we get stuck doing this and build a map so that people don't waste years or decades of their life and then regret the time that they didn't have with their kids and regret the life that they didn't lead because they were so trapped in this cycle.

SPEAKER_02 38:05

Yeah. So you started your own company and you're the founder of Andpack with Ease.

SPEAKER_01 38:10

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 38:11

Tell the audience what you do for them and what this company is about.

SPEAKER_01 38:16

Yeah. So I help successful leaders who are drained, stuck, or feeling uncertain about what's next, right? Actually get clarity on what is the right next step for their career, why they keep going through these patterns, and actually help them unlock, right, what that actually is so that they can wake up energized and excited to go to work. They can do meaningful work without having to sacrifice their life, their health, their income, or what they've worked so hard for.

SPEAKER_02 38:45

So, for someone like me, for example, right, been in operations regionally for 25 years, had trauma of the past, kept navigating my way through, was a high achiever, very successful, had to learn it on my own, was not really trained, burnt myself out, and now starting my entrepreneurial journey with elevate operations and as well as elevate within. How would someone like me, and there's a lot of other women like that, what tools or what tips, or how would you work with me to make sure I am of sound mind to be successful in my own business?

SPEAKER_01 39:22

Yeah. Well, first of all, I would just say uh to any leaders, including you, who resonate with my message, like in a lot of cases, we are incredibly strong survivors. You don't get to the place where you are seen as the responsible, capable one by accident, right? That's how we adapted to difficult and difficult circumstances where we maybe didn't get everything that we needed, maybe not intentionally right, but by the circumstances that our life presented. Um, there's a gift in seeing that, that there's so much more capability and strength in that, even with the suffering. What I've learned though is sometimes that capability keeps us believing we have to solve it on our own. Otherwise, we'll be a burden. Otherwise, we'll be seen as incapable. That is a humongous risk. Huge. Because just because you've been successful doing everything you've been doing, you're still human. You still have blind spots, just like every single human being. And if you've never done this before, you're not gonna know how to do it. One of the greatest gifts you can give yourself is to finally get the support that you've never gotten. When I realized that, like, wow, I can actually have somebody meet me and help support me and help me see this, um, my life radically improved because my whole life I had had to do it myself, or I was the strongest one of the people around me. And I had nobody to come alongside and do that for me. So that's the first thing I would say is to recognize like if you can relate to that, that asking for help and finding somebody who really has that skill set to help you is literally one of the best things you can do. That is strength. That is absolutely strength. Because when you can really unlock the gift because you finally have the support you never had, gosh, you can accomplish so much more than you ever could when you were struggling and doing it on your own. It's just unreal. The second thing I would say is most people in your circumstances or my circumstances get really hung up because we're looking for clarity. What does it look like? How do I get there? And what you need to do first is to gain control of your time, energy, and your state of mind. One of my, you know, favorite coaches I worked with, uh, Dr. Jeff Spencer, he's an Olympian and nine-time Tour de France coach. And he coached like Tiger Woods and Lance Armstrong in their peak. Um, I went to work with him to learn how do you accomplish your goals no matter how challenging, without blowing yourself up. And he always says this quote: if you can't control your day, you can't control your life. When you're in survival mode, you actually can't access your frontal cortex, which is your creative and problem-solving part of your brain. You actually have 30% less thinking capacity. So the very first thing we need to do is be able to actually help you see that you actually have more control of your day-to-day life than you believe. To start solving the things that are creating the drained energy, friction, stress, unhappiness with really small moves on a daily and weekly basis. What happens is you start to get out of survival mode. What happens is you start to see some of the belief systems that weren't necessarily true that were driving your life. And then what starts to happen from that is you go, oh my gosh, I can, I can actually start to solve this problem. My life actually can look really different. And that's where it gets really fun. But that's why I start there first because you can't really get to the deeper work of um purpose or uh what do I really need to do or what's missing until you gain access to that first.

SPEAKER_02 42:50

Um, I like to end the show with something reflective for the women that's listening. So what do you say to a woman who's been caught between who she has been and who she's becoming? And what would you want her to remember when the path ahead feels uncertain?

SPEAKER_01 43:08

It's funny. The word that came to me was welcome home. I love that. That is beautiful. Welcome home. Welcome home. I think um I often talk about that alignment uh is ease and flow, it's childlike joy, um, it is passion and excitement. Um, it's all the things that feel like freedom. And I think for so many of us, that our survivors who um got here through the grid and the hard work and the capability, um, the greatest gift is to be able to learn how you can accomplish those results without so much effort, without all the push, without it all being on your shoulders. Um I didn't realize until I went further enough in this journey. How much I miss that little girl. And the ability to uh reconnect to that joy every day and the ability to uh for me uh life feels a little bit like playing a board game and it's just an adventure. Um that's polar opposite what my experience was 10 years ago, but it was what I think my soul was constantly calling me to, which is there has to be something more than this.

SPEAKER_02 44:29

Yeah, and you're paying it forward. And you know, for the women listening going through this, especially survival mode, is also reminding them like, hey, you're not alone. You don't have to do this alone. Tell the folks where they can find you.

SPEAKER_01 44:43

So um my website is impactwithease.com. I also have a podcast available on all the major podcast platforms, also called Impact With Ease. And I'm pretty active on LinkedIn or Instagram. Love it.

SPEAKER_02 44:57

Blake, thank you so much for joining this series. You are a blessing, and I know so many women, including myself, can resonate with your story. So thank you for taking the time to speak with us.

SPEAKER_01 45:07

Thank you for the opportunity to share a small piece of my journey to hope uh hopefully help inspire women that they are so much more capable than they believe to create the life that they want.

SPEAKER_02 45:20

If you'd like to learn more about Blake's work or connect with her directly, you'll find all of her information in the show notes. Until next time, keep elevating personally, professionally, and from within. And before I go, if no one told you that they loved you today, I love you. So, Blake, I love you. Thank you so much. If this conversation resonated with you, you're not alone. That's exactly why this space exists. Elevate within is for the high-achieving women in the messy middle, the space between who you were and who you're becoming. The architecture of reinvention is an invitation to pause, to reflect, to heal, and to begin the process of unbecoming everything you were told you had to be, so you could become who you were always meant to be. Be sure to join us each Friday for our Architecture of Reinvention Roundtable discussions, where we continue these conversations and explore the deeper lessons, insights, tools, and reflections that emerge from each story. And if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube so you never miss an episode. For Apple Podcast listeners, I would be grateful if you leave a rating or review. It helps reach more women who may need this conversation right now. And if you'd like to go deeper, join us on Substack at Elevate Within. There, you'll find weekly essays and honest conversations about burnout, grief, reinvention, resilience, healing, and the messy middle. Free subscribers receive full access to all public content, while paid subscribers receive bonus essays, early access to upcoming series, behind-the-scenes recording, and opportunities to engage directly with the community. If you know of a woman who needs to hear this conversation today, please share it with her. You can find me on LinkedIn under Sandra Davis, on Substack at Elevate Within, and if you're in need of fractional COO work or would like to book a discovery call on how I can help, you can reach out to me at ElevateOpsAdvisory.com. You'll find all those links in the show notes. Until next time, keep elevating personally, professionally, and from within