Ep. 49 : You're Not Stuck Because of Your Job — It's This
What if you're not stuck because of your job, your boss, or your circumstances, but because of invisible rules you absorbed so long ago, you forgot you were even following them? Laura's calling herself out in this one, and she's taking you with her.
This solo episode is Laura pulling back the curtain on five invisible beliefs that high achievers carry without realizing it, and how those beliefs quietly sabotage career transitions, even when you're doing everything "right." She's not theorizing. She's confessing. From diagnosing her own exhaustion instead of just resting, to building a spreadsheet to justify a desire she already knew was true, Laura walks through the exact moments where she caught herself living by rules she never consciously chose.
The throughline? Changing your external circumstances, the job, the title, the company, will not fix what's happening internally. Laura is brutally honest about how she burned out repeatedly across multiple corporate pivots because her definition of productivity never changed. Even after leaving her 18-year corporate career, she found herself asking, "Did I do enough today?"
The cage wasn't the corporate job. It was the internal rulebook she'd been running on.
The episode closes with Laura sharing her Ideal Wednesday practice and the rewritten definitions of productivity and efficiency that finally gave her permission to rest, trust herself, and, plot twist, actually get more done. She leaves listeners with one challenge: identify the rules you've been living by, decide if they still serve you, and remember that you are the leader of your life.
What You'll Hear
✔️ Laura breaks down five invisible beliefs, including "rest needs to be justified" and "stillness feels unsafe" that keep high achievers stuck no matter how many times they change jobs.
✔️She catches herself mid-affirmation adding a qualifier, and realizes that one small sentence reveals she still doesn't fully trust herself.
✔️The New York City story: how a spreadsheet, a pandemic, and a daily walk taught her the difference between justifying a desire and actually trusting one.
✔️ Laura redefines productivity and efficiency from the ground up using her Ideal Wednesday journaling practice, and the new definitions will make you rethink your whole relationship with output.
"It wasn't the external circumstances that led me to burnout. It was me. It was what I allowed, how I saw myself, what I thought my definition of what being a good worker was."
— Laura Dionisio
If this episode hit something real, Laura wants to hear from you. DM her and tell her: ‘’what rule are you letting go of?’’
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You made the move, or maybe you're about to, or maybe you're still in it, showing up, performing, delivering, while something quiet in the background keeps saying, "This is not it." Either way, something has shifted, and you can't un-know it. Here's what nobody tells you. The landing strip is a little rocky once you come down from the high of accomplishment.
There are moments of real excitement, real clarity, like, "Yes, this is exactly where I'm supposed to be." And then night comes, and the anxiety rolls in, the what-ifs, the what am I actually doing? Not because you made the wrong choice, by the way, but because you're standing in the space between who you were and who you're becoming.
Done pretending this is enough, done pushing through, done ignoring the thing that keeps pulling at you. That's exactly where this podcast lives. I'm Laura [00:01:00] Dionisio, founder of Lead Intact, and I've been exactly where you are. The corporate success that stopped feeling like success, the leap that was equal parts terrifying and necessary, the messy, non-linear process of building something that actually fits, and learning to trust yourself through all of it.
This is the pivot point. Real conversations about what's actually happening beneath the surface and what it takes to build a life that feels as good as it looks. Not just the wins, the attempts too. Because I'm not here to romanticize the journey. I'm here to show you what it's really like. Let's get into it.
What if the thing that is actually keeping you stuck isn't your job or your present circumstances, but it's actually the invisible rules that you've been [00:02:00] living by your entire life? This episode is all about the invisible rules that high achievers absorb without realizing it. Guilty over here, by the way.
Here are some rules that I discovered within myself, invisible rules that I had been living by, that inadvertently was keeping me stuck or making the transition into something new a lot harder than it needed to be. So as I say each statement, just notice, is this me? Do I resonate? And then we'll get more into it later on in this episode.
So one, rest needs to be justified. Two, desire needs to make logical sense. Three, trust must still look productive. Four, efficiency means filling every available moment. And five, stillness feels unsafe.
Now, you may be wondering, "I don't understand why this matters to me." Well, here is what I realized in working with clients for the past six years, or [00:03:00] even reflecting back on my pretty amazing career pivots, but still felt really hard at times, is that these beliefs can shape whether you even start the transition, how you move through the transition, and even what happens after.
That last part, nobody has told me, or I didn't know at the time, that changing your external circumstances isn't gonna make you magically feel better.
So let's talk about rest, because if you are a high achiever, high performer, it's like, "I ain't got time to rest. There are too many things to do." And this could apply for you at your job. Maybe you are a functional team lead, maybe you're a manager, or it could even apply in your personal life. Maybe you're the primary breadwinner, maybe you're a busy mom, or maybe you're the entrepreneur who suddenly has found themselves inadvertently becoming the bottleneck of their team, because everything needs to run through them.
You may be [00:04:00] thinking, I can rest when I'm dead." You may think There are too many things to get done. if I rest, then everything's gonna fall apart. Here's the thing. If you're at a place where you feel stuck, frustrated Overwhelmed and you don't give yourself time to rest, then there is no space for your inner wisdom or your deepest desires to come through because you're too busy doing all the things.
And maybe even in the small moments of rest, the desire does come through. If you have a belief that rest needs a reason, you're gonna shove that desire back down. I don't have time to find a new job because I got bills to pay, or I don't have time to hire a new team member because I have to train them.
I'm already overloaded. So all of this, if you don't allow yourself to rest or if you believe that you're only allowed to rest if there's a reason, like [00:05:00] maybe your body is finally like, "Fuck you," and then breaks down, then you are leaving no room for the magic to come in.
So here's an example,
this happened to me a week ago. What I noticed is that I felt really exhausted. And my mind automatically started to go into diagnostic mode. Am I eating enough calories?
How many hours of sleep did I get? Do I need to schedule a nap? What have my activities been? Have I been working out too much? And I found myself thinking thoughts like, "There's no reason for me to be tired. Why am I tired?
What's wrong? What's wrong? What's wrong?" And that's when I realized that I was making myself wrong for my body needing to rest, as if I needed a reason. Now you might be thinking, "Of course I need to know the reason. How can I fix the problem? How can I address my tiredness if I don't know why?" Here's the thing.
If you start to see needing a rest as a problem to [00:06:00] solve, that in itself tells me that you are making rest into the bad guy, like it's a bad thing. Here's where I encourage you to lean into the simplicity You feel tired. Your body's like, "I need a rest." And then you just say, "Okay, I need to rest."
Let's look at the impact of that versus what I was doing. What I was doing was trying to evaluate what went wrong. Is it my nutrition? Have I been going to the gym too much? But I haven't been going to the gym. What's wrong with me? So now, in addition to my body feeling really exhausted, I've added additional stress on top of it, and I've made myself wrong for feeling tired.
Now let's look at the alternative. Say I just noticed that I felt really exhausted, and then I just said, "Okay, what does my body need right now?" And maybe it's sleep in, don't go to the gym today.
Okay. And then that's it. I just rest, and I go about my day with ease.
And here's what I realized that I was doing inadvertently. Every time I questioned why my [00:07:00] body needed to rest, I was telling myself that my body's cues are not to be trusted. I need evidence to show why I need rest before I allow myself to rest.
And then that got me thinking about this idea of trust. The idea that trust needs a qualifier. So in that example, it's the idea that my body's wisdom of telling me you need to rest, I needed a qualifier before I was like, "Okay, you're right, my body needs a rest." Because how many of you can relate to this where you think back, "Well, I have-- I've been sleeping enough.
I've been drinking enough water. I've been eating enough. I don't know why I'm tired. You know what? I'm not gonna take that nap because I don't deserve to." So what you're saying is like you don't trust your body's wisdom, and I would invite you to think about in what ways am I not trusting myself and feeling like I need to have evidence to support something that I just innately know to be true?
And an example of this is I had a desire [00:08:00] to move to New York City. I approached this in two ways. The first way is that the desire came up, "I want to move to New York City."
And because I didn't trust my own desires, I needed justification as to why that desire was okay. I didn't admit to myself that I wanted to leave Upstate New York to move to New York City. I said you know, I'm not really sure. Maybe I wanna move to New York City, maybe back to LA, maybe to Boston." And what I ended up doing is I picked up my engineering tool set, created a spreadsheet, and followed this whole process, only to not make a decision because I'm like, "Well, I don't know."
Can you relate to that? You won't even admit what you really want unless you can see evidence that it makes sense, that it would work out, that you can craft a plan around it? I'm raising both hands here, because that was me.
Two years after that, pandemic hit, and I allowed myself rest. I was taking daily [00:09:00] walks and in one of those walks, the desire came through, "I want to move to New York City." And then I trusted it, and I was like, "Yep, okay." Did I have a game plan? No. I owned a house that had three bedrooms and a basement.
I didn't know where in New York City I was gonna live. I didn't know if I was gonna be able to keep my job. Did not care. I trusted myself. If you are unhappy at your job, if you feel stuck, if you want something new, the importance of trusting yourself without having to have a qualifier, without having to prove why it makes sense, see the validity or the viability, then you will confidently move forward.
And I promise you, the next step is gonna show up, and if you really trusted yourself, you're gonna trust yourself to figure it out along the way.
So, here I am, I'm like, "Okay, I need to trust myself, trust future self." So now because I am who I am, I started specifically as part of my daily affirmation statement is, "I trust that every decision I make is the right [00:10:00] one."
But then I found myself in conversations with people when they would ask, "Oh, what are you working on these days?" Or, "How are you doing these days, Laura?" And I would say that, right? I would say, " I trust that every action I take is the right one, and sometimes the action is to pause."
And then I would add a qualifier to that. I'd be like, "But you know, of course it doesn't mean that I'm just gonna, like, lay around and be complacent. Like, I'm not just gonna let it come to me. I'm still gonna take action." And that told me that while, yes, I have done amazing strides to learn to trust myself a little bit more, it told me that there was a little bit more work for me to do.
Because if I truly trusted myself, if I truly trusted that every decision I made is the right one, then I wouldn't need to make that qualifier. And I thought about it. I was like, "What is that qualifier about? Why do I feel the need to prove, not to the other person, but, like, to myself, that, 'Oh, but I'm still gonna take action.
Like, I'm not gonna be complacent.' If I already know for a fact that I'm just not a complacent [00:11:00] person, why did I feel the need to justify that?" And then I realized I had internalized the idea that productivity is king. How many times have you heard that? I've heard that multiple times. I've seen it displayed multiple times in terms of the accolades I've gotten when my productivity, like output-wise, was really high. Uh, I've seen it being rewarded for other people.
And I really had to take a step back and ask myself, okay, first of all, what is my definition of productivity? And when I thought about it, in its simplest form, productivity is determined by how many things you get done. And I was just like, "That shit doesn't work for me anymore." That definition of productivity is actually keeping me stuck... Because if you think about it, if your identity is to be productive is to be good, and productive means getting as many things as you can get done, then of course you're not gonna wanna rest.
Then of course you're not just gonna naturally trust yourself 'cause you're like, "But how [00:12:00] does that look in terms of my output?"
And I'll be honest, I have lived this personally where I switched jobs. I've had multiple career pivots in my corporate career, and I felt good for a while because the external circumstances changed. But I didn't change. My definition of productivity was still the same.
So ultimately, it led me to burnout over and over again because in my mind, I kept being like, "How much can I get done? How quickly can I get done? How can I shove everything in one day?" So it wasn't the external circumstances that led me to burnout. Sure, contributing factor. It was me. It was what I allowed, how I saw myself, what I thought my definition of what being a good worker was or what being a high performer was.
And I have to say, this is even sneakier when you are looking to start your own thing. So my latest pivot is that I left my 18-year corporate career to go out on my own, and I found [00:13:00] myself at first being like, "Oh, freedom. I don't have the recurring meetings anymore. I don't have the same obligations.
People aren't DMing me," that kind of thing. And still, day to day, I would ask myself, "Did I do enough? Oh, wait, I shouldn't rest. I don't deserve to rest. I didn't get enough done." And again, it had to do with my internal definition of productivity and my identity of someone who is highly productive.
What I realized was as much as I was making corporate the bad guy, the villain in my story for caging me in, curbing my freedom, it was me. It was the internal definition of things and the identity that went along with it. This is why it matters so much in a career pivot, when you're starting to build something new, when you're looking to scale something you've already built.
If you don't address your internal definitions, your internal assumptions, you're gonna keep running into the same issue that you had [00:14:00] in your previous role, whatever that role might be.
So then I asked myself what actually would support me. And I was going through this practice called Ideal Wednesday practice, where basically every Wednesday, usually in the morning, I just let myself free flow as if I was already living my dream life on that Wednesday, that time that I'm writing, what is going on in my life, and then I write it in present tense.
And what came up was this beautiful definition of productivity and efficiency. I said, "I'm so happy and grateful now that I no longer see productivity as the amount of things that I get done in a day." Because before, I used to think that the day was a good day if I got a lot of things done with no definition of what the things are that made it good.
And now I live such that productivity means how quickly can I clear my slate, because then I can be more efficient. Where efficiency no longer means how quickly can I get the thing [00:15:00] done with no definition of what the thing is that makes it good, efficiency becomes how quickly can I act upon my inspired ideas.
And now I have a beautiful ecosystem of productivity and efficiency because in order for me to take inspired action, then that means that I must clear my slate, and sometimes clearing my slate means going for a walk. Sometimes clearing my slate means sorting the mail, doing my taxes.
The point is, it allows me to start to trust in me again rather than on an external marker of number of things that I've gotten done and how quickly I've gotten them done. The trust belongs within me, and this has allowed me to begin living my life with ease. I actually End up doing more things than I used to, but it doesn't feel like it.
It feels good, and I rest as needed. I rest a lot more, in fact, and things just feel so much easier. So when I wrote that in my journal, I was just like, "Holy [00:16:00] moly. Yes. This is amazing. I'm no longer gonna see productivity the way I used to.
I'm no longer gonna see efficiency the way I used to."
And so, I would love for you to really think about what definitions or identities have I embodied and just accepted as truth? Start with identifying it, and then once you do, ask yourself, " Does this still serve me? Do I want to continue intentionally choosing this?
Or do I want to come up with a new definition?"
We don't often think about the rules that we've been living by because it's reflected to us with other people, with your career perhaps, maybe even with your clients. But here's the thing, you are allowed to revisit the rules you've been living by. You are allowed to intentionally choose to keep living by those rules, and you are allowed to change your mind later and decide to redefine it because at the end of the day, you [00:17:00] are the leader of your life. And that means you are empowered to make any changes you want in your life externally, but more importantly, internally, so that you start living the life that you've always dreamt of starting today.
You do not have to wait for your external circumstances to change. Before you start to feel better inside, it starts with investigating what rules have I been living by, and do I want to continue living by these rules?
I just wanna say this is not a knock on being a high performer or being ambitious or being a high achiever. It's about becoming intentional about the rules that you're allowing to run your life and choosing what that even means to you, that identity. Because success should feel good, success in your career, success in your life, success in your business, because otherwise, what are we doing?
If this episode hit something deep, send me a DM and tell me what rule are you letting go of? And if you're not already [00:18:00] following the show, make sure you hit subscribe so you don't miss any new episodes. If you enjoy this episode, leave us a review, leave us with five stars, and share it with a friend, because these conversations need to happen.
And with that, I will leave you with this: Proceed as if success is inevitable, because it is.
If this episode hit something in you, good. That's not an accident. The discomfort you're feeling isn't a sign that something's wrong with you. It's a sign that you're done. Done living in the eh, done waiting for it to magically feel better, done being really good at a life that doesn't actually fit you anymore.
And if good enough stopped being good enough a long time ago, that's exactly who I work with. I'm Laura Dionisio. I'm a coach for high achievers who are done pretending that checking the boxes is enough, and are ready to do something about it. If that's you, let's [00:19:00] talk. Book a free clarity call at leadandtact.com/booking.
We'll figure out together what's actually going on and what your next aligned step looks like. And if you're not quite there yet, that's okay too. Subscribe so you don't miss the next episode. Share this with a friend who needs to hear it. You probably already know exactly who that is. And with that, I'll see you next time.