Welcome to the Aligned Achiever podcast. In this episode, we’re talking about how to test your way forward without burning your life and career to the ground. Now, this is part of our July sessions, where we’re talking about, okay, you maybe set some goals back in January, but if things haven’t moved, why, what’s been going on? So, in the last episode, episode 153 I spoke about how maybe this was the year that you said things were going to be different, and I asked you at the end of that podcast episode to just quietly count how many times you’ve had the same conversation with yourself that you need to make a change, and quietly thinking it through. Now, if you didn’t listen to the episode, I highly recommend that after this you go back and have a listen to episode 153 But if you haven’t, just jump right on in, you’re very welcome to continue listening. So, I asked you in the last episode to count how many times you’ve had the same conversation with yourself, just as a way of evidence to see, ah, how much you in a loop of, like, not moving, of not making a decision, of not, you know, deciding that you are moving towards your goals, and you know, maybe you did it, maybe you forgot by the second day, maybe you started counting, and you’re like, oh my gosh, the number is really high, all of that is data, especially part, the part where the number was higher than expected, because that’s the loop, and so today I really want to show you the way out of it, so this again, I’m going to center the fact that obviously my podcast and what I talk about really centers around careers and your professional goals, but if you’re not moving on something, this can apply to anything generic. Like, I know that for me, I have, you know, set goals in my health and my well-being. I have set goals in my own career, in finances, in my relationships, and friendships. Like, these have all been things that I’ve, I’ve set, and you know, when I’m not moving, I realize that it’s not a clarity problem. Typically, if you’re listening to this, you’re able to figure that out. You can, you’re clear, you can see your options, you know that you know what you need to do, but if there’s a piece of you that isn’t making you move, the thing that’s stuck is actually the trust in yourself to move before you’re certain, and actually I think the other layer I’ll add here is that also to meet the discomfort that comes in facing what you need to do to achieve that goal. Now I know that might sound a little bit abstract, so I’ll give you an example. So let’s say in the area of finances, finances has always been a big one for me, and I remember when I was in corporate, you know, having to fill out those expense sheets for what you paid for, and just avoiding it, because it was like the last thing I wanted to do, just want to get on with my job, but I remember being chased, really chased, and it was like got to the end where they were like, no, really, you need to submit this, and I realized that if I wanted to, you know, be better with my finances and not avoid, then I was going to have to face the fact that looking at numbers was uncomfortable for me. It would bring up feelings of guilt and shame, of like not knowing how to, you know, not understanding numbers very well, and not being able to manage it very well, and those sorts of things, and obviously that’s uncomfortable, right, to meet that element in yourself. But in order to hit the goal of becoming better with finances, then I was going to have to meet all of that discomfort and sit in that and meet the shame and meet the disappointment and meet, meet all the things that came with it. So, I share that with you as an example.

So, it’s it’s a trust in yourself to move before you’re certain, but equally, I’ll add in that layer that’s also it’s an ability to sit with the discomfort and be with it, because the off, the reason why we often avoid things is because we don’t want to meet that feeling, which is uncomfortable, so today, and like, how do you test your way forward without burning your life and career to the ground? It isn’t about getting you more clarity. You probably don’t need it now. If you do need it, I’m sure that you know there’s some tweaks there, but you know we’ve got tools these days like Chat GPT and Claude that can help us with strategy. Today is about what you do instead of the thinking, and I think what happens is that when we have the clarity, we feel like if we go and act on that idea, then we are going to have to burn our life and career to the ground, because it’s so drastically different to who we are and what we know ourselves to be and the life that we’re living. So, before I get to the how and why I think you want to test your way forward, I want to name the fear underneath all of this, because unless we name all of this, nothing I say will land. You believe somewhere in you that to feel alive in your work again, or to feel like, oh. Yes, I’m doing something meaningful with my career, and yes, I’m actually living a life that I want. Somewhere deep down, there’s a feeling that you’d have to risk what you’ve built, that the price of change is your salary, the security, your reputation, the life life that you’ve designed around all of it, and the identity that you have, and we, we so closely tie our identity with what it is that we do, and you have decided, whether you realize it or not, that the two can’t coexist, right, that you can’t feel alive in your work again and enjoy what you’re doing without risking it all. So every time you imagine moving, you imagine losing, and you stay. Our minds are very simple. Your mind’s job is to keep you safe, it’s not to make you happy, and typically it moves away from pain towards pleasure. Now, for some people, pain is running a marathon or doing high rocks. For some people, it’s hard, but it’s pleasurable. They seek that, you know, that dopamine hit of like completing something difficult. So, when I say pain and pleasure, just know that it’s different for everybody, right? Everyone’s definition is different. This is a very extreme example, like you think about, you know, perhaps an addict, you know, they would feel like pleasure would be a needle going into their arm because of the euphoria that comes with what whatever’s injected, but for most of us it’s like pain, it’s not something that we love, we don’t say, “yay, I’m gonna go for an injection today, so pain and pleasure can sound generic, and we’re all like, yeah, of course, we move away from pain and move away from pleasure, but each of us has a different definition of what is pleasurable and what is painful. So, what happens when you imagine moving, for most people, is that painful. The immediate, the immediate step you have to go through is painful, and I want to challenge that directly, because for many of the women I work with, that’s the belief that’s keeping them in golden handcuffs. It’s like, I’ll just get paid really well, and that works for me. I just, I’ll just get paid, and you know, I’ll use that to live a life that I really enjoy. But here’s the thing, security and evolution are not opposites. You do not have to burn down what you’ve built to change it. As I’m doing this work, I’m realizing that my, my philosophy with the work that I’m doing is this premise of like bold moves, but from solid ground, and bold moves can look subtle. Actually, I’m not saying it’s like quit your job from solid ground. I’m actually saying, like, a bold move might be to speak to your boss and say, ‘Hey, I want to put my hand up for that opportunity, or ‘This is not quite the role.

Can you help me see how I can relocate to a different part of the business or a different country and do this? You know, like bold moves are different again compared to the person I’m speaking to, but it’s the ground that stays solid while you move, so you, you keep the salary, you keep the security, and you still find out what’s next. And most people get this backwards, they think that you leap first and find out after, and I am not a proponent of that. I’m going to show you the reverse in this episode, so there are two parts to this, and the order matters. The first, most important thing you want to do, if you want to test your way forward without burning your life and career to the ground, is to come back to your identity first, before strategy. What does that mean? This is this point is so important. It’s the reason why I’m in a year long training to just look at this specific point. This gives you an insight into my brain and how I decide how to invest in my knowledge and evolution and development as a coach. The woman who makes the decision about life work is more important than the decision itself. I’m going to say that again. The woman who makes the decision is more important than the decision itself. If you try to choose your next move from a state of fight, flight, freeze, from a place of being frightened, certainty seeking, you’ll pick the safe non-moving move every single time you’ll talk yourself out of anything real, and if you’re listening this far, you’ve probably watched yourself do it for years. That is not a strategy problem, that’s the woman doing the choosing, so the work isn’t to find the perfect on. Option, and I know it seems like that’s what we want to do. We want to look at our CVs and our resume and look at the job opportunities out there that comes, but that’s not where we start. The place to start is to become the woman who can move while the outcome is still unknown, who can act from who she’s becoming, not who she was trained to be. When the decision maker changes, the decisions change on their own. They stop being terrifying, because she’s no longer belittling her whole identity on getting it right. This piece is so foundationally important, and when I signed up for my body mind maturation coaching certification this year, that’s quite a mouthful, try saying that a few times, I realized that this was the piece that I really wanted to go deep into, because I’m not the first person to say this, James Clear, in his book Atomic Habits, he talks about goal setting, and you know, how do you, the how do you achieve goals, and you know, in his model, you start with the identity, then you look at the process, then you look at the outcomes, right. This is not new, but what I didn’t quite realize, and what I have seen time and time again in my work, is that the problem is never intelligence or strategy for my clients. They’re smart, they’re the doers, they get things done, they’re incredibly intelligent, but it’s their identity that shapes what decisions they make, what opportunities they see, and what they tell themselves they can and cannot have, and this is all subconscious. This is all beneath the surface, and in my opinion, I really think requires support to be able to see what that blind spot is like. What is the thing that is that is running me, and so that’s really, really important.

And this is why in my program, Pivot Pathfinders, the first part of the program is actually really about rewiring, so we start with a nervous and mindset reset, nervous system and mindset reset, and we come back into the body, because we’re also not just changing the identity, we’re changing the state in which you’re operating, because many of my women are busy, a lot going on, all of them have kids, and there’s like such a small amount of time that they have, and they want to make the most of it, but when they come to doing this work, they’re frazzled, they’re burnt out, they’re thinking about the next thing, and from that thinking, like Albert Einstein said, you can’t solve a problem at the same level of consciousness that created it, it’s only going to create more of the same. So we start with that, then we audit and look at actually what is the thing that’s not working. I can’t tell you how many times that we think that a certain problem is the problem, but it’s, it’s not the real problem, and we look at one thing in silo, and what I’ve seen again, I’ve been coaching now for 13 years, my daughter’s turning 13 this year, and I remember training as a coach when I was pregnant with her, our life, our personal life, and our careers are perfect mirrors, and I don’t know about you, but workplaces can sometimes feel like playgrounds, and like being at school. Have you met characters that feel like they’re trying to say that this is my bench, you can’t play here, this is my swing? No, and I’m going to play with my friends, you can’t play with my friends, right? I mean, this is primal, so primal, and this is why it’s not just career coaching that I do, it’s it’s it’s this piece, it’s the evolution, the identity piece that we work with, but who you are in your personal life, if you can’t set a boundary, there can you set a boundary at work, and if you can set it at work, why can’t you set it at home? Maybe you know there’s a power play, like there’s so much to look at. Anyway, my point is, I could geek out on this all day. Your identity comes first, before the strategy, and that inner half is really important. And the pivot pathfinders, we look at that, we look at your nervous and mindset reset audit, what’s working and what’s not. We look at your strengths, that’s what we start with. So the inner half is so important, the outer half is the bit that you know requires the action. This is the part that you can start this week. So, the second part of this is strategically experimenting. So, you have probably been trying to think your way to clarity, maybe just getting lost. I don’t know about you, but it’s so easy just to keep going with, you know, whatever LLM, you’ll look, you’re talking to, but instead of that, I want you to test your way there, instead, and that’s the risky bit, right? It’s like, oh God, you have to go out there in the real world and actually do things, but here’s the difference, and thinking, thinking gives you more information to chew on, and you already have plenty of that, but in a. Experiment that gives you evidence, real evidence from the real world, from your actual lived experience, instead of the simulation running in your head at 2am and that’s when you get feedback, and that’s what your mind needs. Your mind is constantly scanning for evidence, and typically it’s scanning for evidence to reinforce the narrative that you have about yourself, thus reinforcing that identity that you have, but when you start to take different actions, you start to become somebody different, and I’m not saying different because you’re wrong or broken, I’m saying like that next evolution, evolution, that maturation, that I want to just not just survive, I want to live. So a strategic experiment is small, it’s reversible, it runs alongside your job, not instead of it. So, your income and your securities to exactly where they are, while you gather the data, so you’re not quitting to find out, you’re not fine, you’re actually finding out, so you never have to quit blind.

So, it looks like this: you take one of the half-informed ideas that you’ve been circling, and instead of researching it for another six months and staying safe behind a computer or in your notebook, you design the smallest real-world test that you can run, a conversation with someone already doing the thing, a small project on the side, a weekend spent doing the work because you’re volunteering, not reading about it, something concrete enough that your body gives you an honest answer, not your anxious mind, and you want to feel what it’s like. I remember, for me, when I was looking at pivoting into coaching, I did. I’ve made all the mistakes, everyone, like really, I have. So I quit my job and actually fell pregnant very quickly, and you know, actually became married at that year was 2011 A lot of transition happened, and I thought, I want to start an organic skincare business. It wasn’t like these days, I wish that there was more available, but I was like, you know what, there was something there, childhood passion, which I really enjoyed. Loved the body shop, and I was like, “Oh, maybe I want to start a business like that, sustainable for women, where these women in get in these developing countries get access to the, you know, we can take their raw materials, they benefit because we’re paying them, and then you know I can create a cool product, and you know everybody wins, kind of thing, but it didn’t, it didn’t work. I didn’t test out that option. Do you know what I did instead? I enrolled in a cosmetic science course, because, of course, what do you do? You need more study. No, you don’t. That was a wrong move, and I’m not saying you don’t need more study, but test out what you want to do before you invest, invest this money, or like really make sure you’re convicted in that, because that is a very expensive lesson for me. So, random fact, guys, I have a cosmetic science diploma, very random. I, for my next iteration, was working with a coach, and when she was supporting me, I’d worked with several coaches throughout the years, both in my career, when I was at JLL, and when I was at Goldman’s, and then with this woman for this state that I was in, which is, I don’t know what I’m doing now, you know, I have a baby, and I’d gone back to, I went back to consulting, and you know, real estate, and was doing that kind of freelance consultant thing, and I was like, but I don’t know if this is it, and then as we were talking, I was like, what are you doing with me? Like, you’re so helpful. Tell me more about this coaching thing. She’s very kindly offered me, you know, just shared with me what she was doing, and I thought, you know what, I’m going to test this out. I’m going to very transparently ask three people if I can coach them for free and be very transparent that I’m not a coach and haven’t done the training, but you know, this was 2013 at the time, coaching was less known, and I found my guinea pigs, I’ve always been interested in personal development, I wanted to study psychology at university for many reasons, did not anyway, it’s always been an interest, right, so I did the test, and I was pregnant with my daughter, and these clients were in different parts of the world. I was very scared to tell anyone about this, by the way. So I picked I was part of this business community, and I remember coaching somebody in Brazil. There was someone in Europe, and there’s someone in Australia, and this lady in Brazil, I remember she was only available, you know, with the time zone difference, like in her morning, and I did this call. The calls were like nine till 10pm That tells you a lot about my boundaries back in those days, again, my identity of who I thought I was, which is what I’ve had to evolve and grow, grow into, but I digress. Anyway, the point is, I was pregnant with my second child at that point, and I was alive. The energy after coming off that call at 10pm I felt like I was on top of the world.

I was like, this is the best feeling. I love this feeling. Those small experiments were my day to a point that yes, I love this enough to take that next step. So then I enrolled in my coach. Certification program, and it has led me on that journey, but that’s why the strategic experiment is so important. You get the data, not what you’d hoped, but what you actually felt, what actually happened, and what it actually told you. And then you design the next one, and you take that next step, that’s strategic experiment, and that insight that I have to test, because I didn’t want to waste another, you know, however many grand in a coaching certification, and to be like, oh yeah, it’s not really it, when you test it, rebuilds the very thing that’s been missing, every experiment that you complete is a deposit in your own self-trust. You did a thing in the real world, was risky, it was bold, it was challenging, and you survived it, and you found out something true. If you do that enough times, the gap between knowing and moving closes, because you’ve got evidence now, not affirmations. Trust isn’t something you think your way into, it’s something you earn from yourself, one small completed move at a time. So, how do you move forward without burning your life and career to the ground? You start with your identity first, identity first, before strategy, and then you strategically experiment, and again, this is how I’ve built Pivot Pathfinders, my signature program, six months to really get clear on what you’re pivoting into, and you know, once we’ve done the identity work, then we look at your career strategy and intentional action, and you’re actually supported in brainstorming what your realistic options are, and being supported in those experiments, because as you experiment, it’s going to bring up all the stuff, because you’re changing your identity. There’s a part of you that’s evolving as you’re taking action, and it’s like this iterative loop, and so naturally you’re going to bump up against, but I’m not good enough, and Who am I? And how’s this going to work? And is this possible for me, and all the challenges, and that is the work, and that’s where the support is. So, if you’re like, “Oh, this pivot path finds program sounds really great, come on over to the show notes at Siobhan barnes.com forward slash 154 and you can find out some more, but I want to draw the line between everything that we’ve spoken about today and land this home. So, where do we, where do we go from here? The books, the assessments, the personality tests, the late night research that you’ve done, they all gave you more to think with, and that that thinking was never the broken part, that’s actually why none of it actually moved you. What moves you forward is small enough to survive and real enough to count. I’ll say that again. What makes you move and move your way forward into clarity is small enough to survive and real enough to count, an experiment you can run without risking your mortgage, a version of yourself who chooses from solid ground instead of fear. That’s the whole thing. It’s not traumatic, and it’s not reckless, and it’s the opposite of the leap that you’ve been so afraid of taking. So, you can start this on your own this week with one small test, and if you want a small place to begin, there’s a free series that I ran back in May that I’m running again that you can do in your own time. So, if you sign up, you’ll, you’ll be moved through this process in your own time, and it’s called Bold Moves from Solid Ground, and it walks you through the foundation of all of this and takes it deeper. Again, the link to join that is in the show notes over at Siobhan Barnes forward slash 154 so come and check it out, and if you’ve listened to both of these episodes, both this one and the last one, where I spoke about how it’s the middle of the year, and maybe you haven’t made a move, and if you felt something land, and if you know that you don’t want to do this alone or be in your head for another year, that’s what Pivot Pathfinders is for.

It’s a six month program where we do this work properly, the inner work of becoming the woman who can move, and the strategic experiments that show you your path in the real world. Because, as Marie Forleo says, clarity comes from engagement, not thought. It’s not a quick fix, my program, and it’s not going to – I’m not going to hand you the answer, and be like, you should do this, rather it’s a experience for finding your own with structure and other women doing brave things alongside you, and so again, if that’s interesting to you, come on over to the show notes at one Siobhan Barnes forward slash 154 and check it out, and if you’re in Hong Kong and you’re listening to this and you’re like, oh, this is an interesting program, but I want to do something here, come and find me through Watch Her Lead, lots of good stuff happening here in Hong Kong, so just I’ll pop a link to that in the show notes as well, because there’s a lot of different ways that if you’re in Hong Kong. I can support you here as well, and if you’re not sure, just reach out, and I’m happy to have a chat on what the best support looks like for you. The truth is, you spent long enough having this conversation with yourself. The next one that you have is worth having out loud, and you don’t have to risk everything to start it. Just start with a small experiment. So, I’m going to see you next time, and I’m going to leave you here again. Please remember, you are here for a reason beyond merely hustling, grinding, and merely surviving. You matter, you.