When Your Life Is Built Around Everyone Else’s Expectations with John Chambers

priya sudarsanam: Are some people who were raised in environments where ⁓ values alignment was part of their family structure or their community, ⁓ or maybe their their religious upbringing, they're just very clear as to certain aspects of what they value. And there are other individuals who could not answer that whatsoever, or even begin to. They don't like they're like, I don't, what is a value? Right? Like they it's really quite surprising. how w that how much that varies. But it at the same time, we live in a world that constantly asks you, what do you want to do and how much do you want to make? No one's asking you like, who do you want to be and how do you want to live your life? Welcome to Unmeat with Priya, the podcast where silence ends, voices rise, and women rediscover the freedom to speak and live authentically, especially in life after 40. I'm your host, Priya Siddarsanam. Let's dive into today's conversation. My guest today is John Chambers, founder of JC Coaching and Consulting. John is an ICF certified professional coach who helps ambitious professionals move beyond burnout, shame, and people pleasing. So they can build a life that's aligned with their values instead of other people's expectations. John, welcome to the show. Thank you so much, Priya. It is such an honor and privilege to be here. ⁓ as I mentioned before, I love listening to your podcast. So I'm excited to be able to contribute to the conversation and hopefully help people feel a little more ready to unleash who they truly are, to step into the truth of who they are in midlife and beyond. Absolutely. And you bring up But you know, just even what I read about you, people pleasing and fear. I mean, those things can really take over your entire programming. It did my entire life, and you don't even realize that you just think, okay, I have anxiety. Or yeah, I'm used to a chronic stomach ache. So those things are are are I'm glad that we're speaking on this today. So as I said, this is gonna be a journey. We have nowhere where it's no clue where it's going, but that's what unmuteing is all about. But one thing that stood out to me on your website as I read about you, I love that you said I'm a burnout survivor returned resilience nerd. After years of people pleasing and achievement motivated by fear and shame, I chose to rewrite my story. And now you help others do the same. Tell me a little bit more about that journey motivated by fear and shame. Yeah. It's It's been a long a long one, a beautiful one and wonderfully nuanced and complicated along the way. ⁓ twenty twenty-three was really quite the pivotal year for me. I started the first six months of that year in EMDR therapy. And it was during that that I learned how much of who I was was learned to survive throughout my childhood. My dad was a very strict bast Baptist pastor. ⁓ we lived in a very small town. So we were raised this idea that perfection really was something that we should be striving toward, and that as the pastors' kids, we were expected to exemplify on a regular basis, which just created all sorts of complications up here in my head because it's not possible to be perfect, but that didn't stop me growing up from thinking that's what I had to try to do. So I created this entire life, this entire persona and approach to life that was really grounded in external validation and in in people pleasing, in this fear that people would see me as the imperfect human that I was. And this is something that I I think a lot of people within marginalized communities have to go through. Yeah. You learn who you are through the lens of what the world tells you you're supposed to be. And then at some point you have to start Asking yourself, but wait, how much of this is actually me versus how much of this did I just learn to take on? And I became really good be at doing because I just repeated it, practiced it over and over again. So 2023 was really a pivotal year for me because I began to really face that reality. And then I just start rebuilding who ⁓ who I was, which aspects of my values were my values, and which ones had I absorbed from other people. What did I actually want for myself professionally and personally? What did I want my day-to-day to be also again for me and not based on other people? And then as I was working through that, I had kind of a blind spot, which is my professional life, where I had really lived these cycles of burnout where I took on way too much, said yes to everything all the time, was like, I will prove myself through hard work and perseverance. And resilience over my my definition of resilience at that time, right? Overcoming constant adversity and kind of stretching myself too thin. And then as a lot of people have shared on your podcast, it's and a lot of my clients have experienced tragedy came into my life. I lost, ⁓ try not to get too emotional at this moment. I lost my little brother to suicide in October of that same year. In twenty twenty three. In twenty twenty three. Wow. And I looked around and said, Okay. I have a choice to make. What am I gonna do? Because I have a limited amount of time. Yeah. And this isn't it. I can't keep living my life like this. And so I decided that fall to do one thing for me by the end of the year that honored the journey that I was on and honored my little brother and the life that he wanted to create and the world he wanted to live in. So I just signed up for one positive psychology class online that I had actually bookmarked, I think, two years before then. And I just seen it and just kept looking over it, kind of operating on autopilot and telling myself, like, ⁓ that's a nice thing to like want, but what's the purpose? How is that really gonna serve me? One class became, I think, six classes back to back. I couldn't get enough of it. And instead of just learning it. I really wanted to experience it. So I started practicing the positive interventions in my day-to-day life. And it completely transformed my entire experience. And it was from that that I was like, okay, I love coaching people. I love connecting with people within my corporate HR position. But I was spending so much time saying yes to things I didn't want to be doing and that were incredibly depleting. And so I was like, okay, what if I just explore coaching and see what happens there? What if I just start Paying a lot of attention to where my energy, where I feel energized and aligned, and just start saying yes to those opportunities more often and practice, you know, boundary setting around the things that are more depleting for me. And that's what led me to starting my own coaching practice because it really was such a transformative experience. I sometimes ⁓ think back like who I was even, you know, five years ago. And how I thought about the world and how I presented myself versus now. And it's it feels like two different human beings. That serves me today, but it's certainly not the same same person operating as as I am now. I mean, you you that's that's the whole growth process and and the commitment to growth. So I think you have to commit commit to the growth because I I can resonate with that. I can't think about how I reacted or responded to things even just last year and I put my hand My face in my hands saying, ⁓ my gosh, because that's just the evolution and I think understanding how you wanna how you wanna show up in this world and especially especially what you brought up, which is such a sensitive place to be and understanding, hey, we've got limited time here on earth. How do we make the most of it? Yeah. How do we how do we do it according to what we want, not according to what others are have dictated for us? ⁓ yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Thank you for sharing a little bit of that journey. I mean, we've we've got whole we've got bunch of time that we're gonna explore this even more. ⁓ if you don't mind me asking in twenty twenty three how old were you had were you at that time? ⁓ this started to happen. If I have to do the math really quickly. I was around thirty five. Yeah I was around thirty five. yeah so I'm like thirty eight now. Yeah. So I was around thirty five. ⁓ my dad had passed away at just sixty two. ⁓ and he was like I said he was a Baptist pastor. I grew up kind of around ⁓ Death quite a lot. Grew up like a very small town, and he was kind of the go-to pastor for a lot of the funerals. I was his child, so I was one of the many people who just were volunteered to help with these types of things. So I always had kind of a connection to like, ⁓ we have limited time, but it didn't, it was losing him was certainly part of that process. I was thinking, I've been thinking about this a lot since I started listening to your podcast. What midlife even means. To someone who saw their dad pass away at 62 quite quickly and unexpectedly. ⁓ I was like, okay. I have to kind of be aware of I have to be really intentional about how I'm living my life, but that just takes time, right? The reality is that I might have an awareness. I I don't believe in the adage that knowledge is power. I believe that applied knowledge is power. Yeah. And you can know a lot, but if you're not applying it to your day-to-day life, it's not really empowering you or or benefiting you much at all. And this is something I I talk with my clients about quite a bit because my clients are incredibly ambitious, inspiring, successful individuals at any stage of their life. I have clients that are literally 19 and clients that are in their 60s. A lot of them know the right thing to do. They're just not sure how to do it because what they practiced and what they've learned doesn't align with what they know, right? What it and it doesn't feel I chose that that subline for my company from programmed to empowered because so many people come to me talking about how they feel like their life is on autopilot, that they're just living a life that they've been told to live and they know it's not what they want, but they're not sure how exactly to take that step in that different direction. And I think a lot of us go go through that. Consistency of messaging overrides the truth about messaging all day, every day. And we are constantly in a consuming environment, right? Like our entire economy is built on our attention and feeding us specific messages. So being able to create the space with a coach or for yourself to really think through wait, who am I apart from what I've been fed? by neuromarketing and ads and commercials telling me I'm not enough and that my entire existence is in my job and how much money I make and how much I then use that money to buy their products. It's really a beautiful process, but it can be a really scary one if you're not used to creating that space for yourself and getting vulnerable. Absolutely. I mean that's that you bring up that point about getting vulnerable. I think in this process, in this ⁓ you know, what what you're describing to me sounds like an awakening. It's so you know, a lot of the guests that I've had of women are women and luckily that's changing. The the women are talking about at this midlife point where hormones are changing. There's this awakening like I'm a mother, I'm this, I'm that, all of these I ams. And meanwhile, like without those things, then you ask the question, Who am I? Mm-hmm. without those without those defined rules, who am I? Yeah. And so it it definitely can be quite traumatic and quite disruptive. ⁓ I I've had people refer to it as feeling like death. But just because everything is crumbling beneath them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Happens. What would you say, you know, when you're when you're spending your life people pleasing, when you're got that underlying programming of fear and when you've got the shame It might seem like an obvious question, but what is the cost of all of that in a person's life? Everything. I wish it were just like one thing. Yes, joy and happiness or satisfaction are on the line, but there is a there's a physiological cost to this, right? Our nervous system then has to kind of figure out how to support these entities that we've created, these performances, oftentimes which are fairly They might conflict with who we actually are. And so then there's who we actually are and who we believe versus who we've learned to believe and how we learn to present ourselves. And that just takes a lot of energy. So we're incredibly depleted a lot. And the chronic depletion and the chronic stress that that creates wreaks havoc on nearly every physiological functioning system that we have. So within the burnout space, I love research around. burnout because they're kind of like three dominoes that take place. And when I talk to a client about this, the realization of like, ⁓ my goodness, this is my life happens so frequently. Cause the first is the mental and emotional depletion, right? There's a difference between, ⁓ I have a deadline or I have a lot on my plate right now. And it's like a little bit more than I really can take care of, but like I'll figure out a way through. When that becomes your your normal operating system. And your body gets stuck in fight or flight for prolonged periods of time, our HPA axis can't see itself through. It activates and then just keeps being activated. That becomes much more problematic. And the second domino becomes ⁓ sort of a a dehumanization. You start to distance yourself from other people, isolate, and also start to view other human beings as potential threats. Your body's just like, I can't. I'm so overwhelmed all the time. I can't have anyone else in your life. And community is incredibly important for social beings that humans are. We we need it to counter stress. It's just this lie that burnout tells us because our body gets so overwhelmed for such long periods of time. And then there this there's this third piece where we have this complete ⁓ erosion of our self-efficacy, of our belief that we are even capable of doing the things that we've been doing up to that point. So the longer you're in that space, it's actually really difficult to come out of because it's hard to believe that you are capable of coming out of it. And it's easy to believe it's your fault. And so there's a lot of self-blame. There's a lot of like, I should be doing better, I should be doing this, which just amplifies our shame. So if you live this life of fear and shame based people pleasing and performance, the longer you live in that. the more that sh you almost like feed that shame and that fear, which then makes it that much more it feels that much bigger, that much harder to come out of. When you put words to it like that, that alone makes me feel burned burned out. You know, when I even though that's you're describing perfectly so many people's journey. But that and and and then I think the problem is then you think it's this one thing, like a we know we talk about it That that that's all the stuff that's happening in life. And then you go to work and you might have one meeting and you're burned out from it. But it's not necessarily the meeting that was burning out. It's just this lifestyle, this this thing, this place that you're living in that's not an alignment that is causing the burnout. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. ⁓ yeah, bringing up a lot of stuff to the surface. So You did mention in the beginning that you was in twenty twenty three you went ⁓ you had E ⁓ EMDR, is that correct? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So what did that do for you as you as you started to have those sessions? I really so EMDR helps helps individuals to look at ⁓ really traumatic or difficult periods of their life and to learn to reprocess it from a different perspective. ⁓ The stories we tell and how we narrate our life shapes our experience. ⁓ someone you actually just had on recently, and I forget exactly who it was, talks about the fact that most people don't struggle from a fear of the future. They actually struggle with a fear of the past and how our brain then lays that on the future and tells us that's going to repeat itself. And that's often informed by the stories that we tell about our past and how we then interpret it. So I was Kind of getting caught up in these stories about my own coming out experience and the difficulty I went through during that time. ⁓ I was disowned. My dad really struggled with his role as the pastor versus his role as my dad. and individuals from my church were really quite ⁓ unkind, and some stepped into the the territory of just being cruel. ⁓ but throughout my childhood, I had a number of similar experiences that I had. Either glossed over or just had a really specific narrative related to an EMDR helped me to take a step back and say, okay, but what other ways could I look at this so that I don't just crumble other under the weight of the memory as a victim, but as someone who can choose how else it impacted me. Okay, yes, that is true. The pain that I experienced and the cruelty I experienced is part of the story, but it's just part of the story. There's so much more to it. It helped me to humanize my parents to learn that they were wonderfully flawed human beings who started having children when they were literally children and had to learn along the way, you know, how to reconcile things that they taught, right? Consistency of messaging that they had learned and then how it was kind of conflicting with what they were experiencing or how it was showing up in their day-to-day experience within their Their children and how they were parenting. And the same was true, you know, for all of these experiences. I got to view things from multiple lenses. And I got to learn and start narrating a much more holistic and empowering story about my life. And this is honestly what I do a lot with my clients is challenge the story that they have brought into. Our sessions are brought into this chapter of their life, whether it be I'm really bad at interviewing, up to like I'm a bad parent or I'm a bad employee, or I I am one of the things one of my favorites is like I hate change or I struggle with change. Our entire lives are just change all the time. That narrative. Yeah, it's constant. And when you start asking them for to start talking about the things that they're most proud of in their life, the moment the things that they Accomplished at the moments they look back and they're like, that was such a great experience. So often it's a result of or how they navigated change that led to those very experiences. And all of a sudden they're like, ⁓ my goodness, you're right. I guess I don't really hate change. I I just have learned this way of narrating my life that isn't really serving me anymore. And look, there's so much. That we learn throughout childhood unconsciously, right? To survive. We sort of have to kind of take on what our immediate surroundings gave to us. And then adulthood allows us the luxury of deciding okay, some of these defense mechanisms may have really served me, but are they still serving me now? These stories allowed me to maybe survive or get out of that. Difficult situation. But how do I want to look at it now in a way that allows me to move forward with greater confidence and courage to start really creating the life that I know I'm capable of creating or that I want to be confident I can create and feel worthy of? Amazing. That's when I hear you talk about that, that just lights me up because If everybody could do that, I think you'd have a lot more happier people walking around the planet, right? Just ⁓ I think a lot of people are just suffering quietly, not knowing that there are options or belie and believing the story. ⁓ you know, I I I love listening to Neville Goddard stuff and and he just talks about whatever's everything that's happening is ⁓ completely what is happening in your screen. So I I started to recognize that. Once I started listening to Navel Goddard and was like, so at the minute any story's coming into that screen and like, no, I gotta turn it off, I gotta turn it off. So yeah, yeah. Yeah, that bringing up how how we narrate that story is is very powerful. Would you say that now you're living in alignment with who you truly are? ⁓ it's an ongoing journey. I was actually just talking about this with my husband earlier this week. Who was challenging me to step out of coaching mode when we're when we're having conversations about his work and his life? He's like, Sometimes I don't really need you to be helping me narrate the story. I just want you to be here with me so that I can feel terrible and say all the awful things that I don't get to say throughout the day. And I was like, okay, I will try my best to do that. It's definitely, it just it takes time. And I think what's really beautiful about the process is that there isn't really a finish line. Right. Look, curiosity and a love of learning are two things that are core to who I am. I love taking classes. I love learning. I love reading. And I'm a human, right? I'm always evolving. I one of the reasons I love coaching is that I learn and am inspired by my clients as much as I feel like I help and support them. There are sometimes they say things, they come to this realization, or they try something so courageously that I'm like, why am I not doing that? Or wait, what if I tried that in my own life? I wonder what could happen. Adam Grant has this ⁓ idea of like think like a scientist. You don't have to get stuck in any particular way of doing things. You can be like, what if I just switch this up for a few weeks and see what happens? Just to notice. I think the art of art of noticing and living in our our our own curiosity about ourselves is like a lost art art form. We've been taught there's like a right and a wrong way to do everything, especially if you're in a really religious background. Even just like really at this point in in time, right? Everything is very binary in in what's being presented to us. But the but but that's not the reality of what being a human is. If you can get comfortable practicing curious experimentation, just noticing what happens. ⁓ in January of I think I can't remember if it was twenty twenty three or twenty twenty four, I spent an enti an entire week just noticing my energy levels. And like taking notes throughout the day. What was I doing? Because I just I just experienced something that shifted quite significantly. ⁓ it helped me understand that like I actually wasn't as depleted about my job as I thought I was. When I was leaving work, I actually felt a surge of energy that that lasted for a couple of hours. And I'm usually a morning person. So for that to happen at you know, 4:30, five o'clock was really quite eye-opening. I was like, ⁓ wait, the story I was telling myself about how exhausting my job was was then kind of. influencing how I was spending my time in the evening and how I was experiencing the world. All of a sudden I was like, wait, I can take advantage of that energy. How do I want to use it? Who do I want to connect with? What do I want to read or engage with? ⁓ and I did the same thing. I just did a I'm really not great at ⁓ I used to be really bad at saying no to things. So I spent an entire week intentionally saying no to everything. It's but it's ⁓ the story we tell ourselves behind it, right? Saying no is like rejection. It's all these things. It's like no, it's something you have to learn to practice. So a colleague would say, Hey, do you want pop downstairs and grab coffee? And I would say, no. But I will walk around the corner and get coffee from this other place. It just became something like a game I had to play. Like, okay, how do I reject? I do actually want to do that. So how do I say no and still follow through? But it was really, I had to teach my nervous system, right? It takes time for our brains, which are not truth detectors, they're prediction and control experts. So teaching them. To begin predicting based on new experiences is kind of a fun journey to be on eventually, but it does take time and consistency over time over time. Yeah, I love there's so many things that you said in there that one is that this is there's no final destination. This is gonna when when we think we're done, the universe is gonna show us, hey, we're not done. There's gonna be something else. And more layers if we're willing and aware to see them. And and and I love that you're bringing a sense of playfulness into this too. Cause I think when you're going through transformation like this, when everything that you believe to be true about your life is brought to the surface, we could get really serious and curled up in a ball, but being playful about it and saying, Okay, what's next? Wha what how should I do this? How can I play this game differently? That that's a beautiful way. to actually ⁓ enter into this this new new place in life that we're going. Yeah. You you were mentioning ⁓ values, the two things that were important to you. So you often help with your clients, you help people identify their core values. How has it been in that process once once you start working? Because you said you have a range of clients starting with ninety to sixty. When you say what are your values, do people typically know what their values are or do they have a hard time finding what they are? ⁓ It really depends on the individual. There are some people who were raised in environments where ⁓ values alignment was part of their family structure or their community, ⁓ or maybe their their religious ⁓ upbringing. They're just very clear as to certain aspects of what they value. And there are other individuals who could not answer that whatsoever. ⁓ or even begin to. They don't like they're like, I don't what is a value? Right? Like they It's really quite surprising. how that how much that varies. But it at the same time, we live in a world that constantly asks you, what do you want to do and how much do you want to make? Yes. No one's asking you like, who do you want to be and how do you want to live your life? I have a a coaching friend who often frames values through a really interesting way and I really like using it on occasion 'cause I'll tell people that like, you know, values are the the aspects and the principles of of your life that you're just like, if they're not like if they're not there, you feel like something's missing. It's incredibly important. You need your life, regardless of your job titles, regardless how much money you have, regardless of how successful you are, those are the things you really want. She flips it. And says the values are the things that even if on paper you were doing everything right, you look around and say you have the life you want, the money you're making, job is everything is amazing, but there's something missing. And I cannot figure out why I feel so hollow and dissatisfied. It's probably because you're missing alignment with those values. And we all have experiences in our lives that give insight into what our values are, the things that really energize us, the things that light us up, that make us feel like We are coming home to ourselves. But they're not often the moments that our society equates with success. Right. And so for so many years in our lives, you know, that's not really what people are are telling you to take time to delve into and to really understand. but it's fascinating because the even the research behind it shows that not only do we If if you align even like your goals with your values, you can understand, okay, here are the goals I want for myself professionally, even just this year, right? Here are the strategic goals I have for myself this year. If you can take a moment before you jump into like your SMART goals framework to align how is this serving your why, you're almost twice as likely to achieve those goals than if you just try to to do it largely based on external validation or extrinsic motivations. And Along the way, we experience significantly higher life satisfaction, a sense of real purpose and and meaning. We don't get obsessed as obsessed with like the the goal, we start to realize that the journey towards the goal is just as important and just as satisfying and fulfilling. And if there's a misalignment between the values and maybe the things that we're doing. People that were interacting with we're gonna know. That's right. I mean, I feel like I get those internal nudges and I haven't always listened to them. And as you were hearing talking about that, I was just thinking, ⁓ core values for me has shown up r in a big way with with with relationships with intimate partners. I before my with my last partner, I had my my friend and I had finished a couple of bottles of wine and we were this was our manifesting party. We were drawing pictures. of our partner that we were calling into our life. We were writing the values that were important to us. We put it under our mattresses and we're like, we're gonna forget about it. And I met the person and I remember pulling and I was with this person for five years. I remember pulling this picture out and this person did not match any of the qualities. But I tried to make it fit and it was misaligned for years. And and in retrospect I was like, I knew, I knew I had I had clearly laid out what was important to me, but yet I didn't listen to it. So have you found that that people Yeah, of course. Don't listen. Absolutely. We look, we're like we're biologically biased toward the familiar, right? For most of human civilization, the unfamiliar was incredibly dangerous for us. We live in a wonderfully safe environment now in theory. ⁓ So we can we can learn to embrace the new and unfamiliar, but that initial fear that we've learned is something we were conditioned throughout childhood. ⁓ the new and unfamiliar was often something that our parents or our upbringing taught us to be careful of because it was something that could hurt us. But throughout human civilization, that was also true. So that what you were experiencing is such a a common and very human experience. And it's not something you should be like, ⁓ I sh you know, I shouldn't have done that, I shouldn't have known better. It's like, no, that's okay. It was part of your journey. You made the decision. You can't go back anyway. So what did you learn from it? And I don't think ⁓ The more critical we become of ourselves, right? The harder it is to change. Because again, it goes back to that kind of like, there's a right and wrong way to do things. It was like, look, you you knew what you wanted, but you were like, I'm gonna try this anyway. I would be curious if I were your coach to hear, like, okay, well, what you know, what stories were you telling yourself then? What fears were emerging? What was it did you did you thought you you thought you might be ⁓ achieving or getting from that, right? Receiving from it. And then what were you trying to avoid at that same time? That becomes the fuller story. And it's fine. We none no one is no one is perfect. ⁓ It's all part of that that journey. I still make these decisions. There are still opportunities that come up that I'm like, that's definitely not right for me. And I know it's not right for me. That doesn't mean that it's like, ⁓ I know this isn't right for me, so I'm not going to do it. It's I know this isn't right for me, but I also fear what if something else doesn't come along quick enough? Right. Still I still struggle with scarcity mindset. I still struggle with ⁓ what could come of this? What if I, you know, say no to something that could turn into something really unexpected? Could I make the most of this? Could I just try it for a little while and then say, Okay, thanks, but this isn't really working out for me. I still have to go through that process myself. I do a lot of prospective journaling ⁓ and have to like self-coach. I have my own coach that I I meet with almost every week. because it is kind of it it's not s I don't think it's something that you just start doing and then all of a sudden you're doing it all the time. I mean, I love that you're bringing you're giving people permission to be human. and and I like I say to my friends, we're always We're only doing the best that we can in any given moment given what we had. So now I can look back and say, what was I thinking? But did I have those tools back then? No. But I needed needed to have it. So I think we have to offer ourselves grace and we have to be gentle with ourselves. Absolutely. There's this quote that's attributed to Thomas Edison. I do not know or fully believe that he's the one that said it, but technically that's who it's attributed to, where he says, I have never failed. I have found ten thousand ways that do not work. And I love that mentality and that approach. It's like, okay, just try something and try it out for a few weeks. Get really curious about what's changing, ⁓ if anything, and that's fine. And then if it's you know, and then try something else and just kind of see what works. And that is scary if you're in a moment of if you're already in burnout, right? If you're like, I can't deal with this anymore, I want to get out of this immediately. And we're being fed constantly. Neuromarketing that we should always like, ⁓ just buy this pill or just take this one course, and in 30 days you'll be, you'll be healed. You won't be. You know what the reality is, you won't be. Burnout takes months to heal from, if not years, depending on how long you've been experiencing it. And resilience is sort of an ongoing practice and skill set. But much like any muscle, the more you practice, the more you strengthen it. the better you can leverage it to your own advantage over time. ⁓ So many amazing lessons in this conversation. Let's talk about your business ⁓ and how people can get in touch with you. In what capacity do you work with people applying one-on-one? Is it grouped? Share a little bit more about that. Yeah. So I do both ⁓ individual coaching and ⁓ team or organizational coaching. ⁓ And workshops. So you can check out more on my website, coachingwithjc.com and across pretty much every social media account, Coaching with JC. ⁓ The individual coaching, I have multiple options that are available to you, ⁓ both 45 and 90 minute sessions for people who want to go a little bit deeper. We have that option. I also do a purposeful pivot career package that helps people who are trying to find a new career that is in more alignment with. With their own values and and who it is that they want to be. And then within the organizational space, I ⁓ come in and teach resilience to to leaders or to teams who are experiencing ⁓ high levels of burnout or uncertainty or are just trying to to learn how to create lives and careers that they don't have to recover from. Yeah. That that I that is applicable to so many people, and that's such a great line to end on. But ⁓ I mean, I feel like we could go into this. for hours and keep talking about this because it's such a vast conversation. There's so many things to unpack, especially when you're talking about burnout. ⁓ but we'll make sure to put all those links in the show notes so that anybody listening to this will get in touch with you. It's it's it's been a phenomenal conversation. I feel like we just barely skim the surface of the depth of what you do. But anybody who's listening to this, you know, unmute with Priya, it's all about finding your voice. It's about hitting that mute button that somebody tapped or maybe it was yourself years ago, hitting that so that you're unmuted so that you could actually start being yourself. So if somebody's listening to this, they resonate with this, they feel the fear, they feel the shame. Who knows, maybe they resonate with your story and they've spent their entire life becoming who everyone expected them to be, and they're listening to this and they're saying, I'm done. I can't do this anymore. What would you say? Where do they start? What's the conversation they need to have with themselves? I would want them to first of all hear that they're not alone. And that this isn't something they should be blaming themselves for. This is part of being human. And the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. You do not have to fix it all tomorrow. You can simply take one step at a time, one day at a time, and that is enough. John, what a beautiful message. Thank you so much for being my guest today. Thank you for making this podcast even better than it's than it was. ⁓ this conversation's gonna help so many. ⁓ Bria, thank you so much. And thank you so much for what you are doing. I cannot imagine the a ripple effect that you are having with this podcast. Not just the listeners, but the people that are sharing it with, the lives of the people. in their lives that get to experience how much they they are learning and how much they are muting themselves and being inspired by them. So thank you for doing this, for being so wonderful, so open, ⁓ and making the world a more beautiful place. ⁓ thank you. We will but this this isn't the last conversation we'll have so thank Yes. Good, I hope not. Thank you for listening to Unmute with Priya. If this conversation spoke to you, follow the show. Share it with someone who needs to hear it, and check out the episode description for all the ways to connect with myself or my guest. Join me again as we continue finding our voices together.