Why Adding to My Plate Eased My Burnout
Episode 548 | Author: Emilie Aries
When taking on more is inspiring, not exhausting.
I get a certain question a lot, from friends, family members, clients, colleagues, strangers: how do I manage a full-time corporate job, run Bossed Up, raise two little kids, renovate houses, and bake goods for a pop-up Saturday bakery in my neighborhood? I get it. On paper, it looks nuts.
But if you’re one of those people who finds your daily grind exhausting, not so much physically or mentally but emotionally, I have a hot take: sometimes adding to your plate - not subtracting - is the key to increasing your engagement.
A different treatment for burnout
There’s absolutely the kind of burnout that leaves us dragging at the end of every day, that saps our energy and makes sleep the only thing we have space for. When we’re told that the solution to our burnout is doing less, saying no, and setting better boundaries - that’s absolutely the right path forward for overwhelm.
But what if your burnout stems from disengagement or misalignment? From the pressure of the daily grind taking it’s toll without lighting you up? In that case, watching TV or reading a novel when you get home from the office might not have the restorative effect you’re hoping for. Sometimes, it’s less about doing fewer things and more about doing different things with your time. That has certainly been the case for me lately.
Why did I add another layer to my life?
The hats I wear have always checked different boxes. My day job pays the bills and is both challenging and impactful, if not perfectly aligned with my sense of purpose (although to be fair, I don’t expect it to!). Bossed Up fulfills my sense of purpose and urge to tackle the big issues I care deeply about: gender equality, women’s leadership and advancement, and systemic change. Being a mother plays an enormous role in that sense purpose too, of course. But I realized earlier this year that I wasn’t fully realizing the holistic life I’ve spent a lot of my career encouraging people to build. I was craving community, feeling overwhelmed by the dystopian headlines, and felt detached and isolated from my neighbors - even though I knew there were lots of great people and families nearby who I wanted to connect with. Enter: a pop-up bakery.
I talked in Episode 538, Rebalance Your Career Portfolio, about everything that led to launching my porch bakery. I’m more than a month into this endeavor now, and I’m so pleased with how it’s filling in the blanks my knowledge economy work has never been able to. It feels frivolous, in a way, lighthearted compared to talking about income inequality or designing leadership development programs, and it’s incredibly cathartic to be working with a totally different part of my brain.
It’s undeniably a business. It calls on me to develop recipes and make pricing decisions, source inventory, and track pre-orders. It requires plunging my hands into dough, which is a physical catharsis best explained by Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s insight, “If you work with your hands, sabbath with your mind. If you work with your mind, sabbath with your hands.” And it’s deeply communal. I’m blown away by how many neighborhood connections my family has already cultivated in just five short weeks.
How did I start another business?
This is all well and good, Emilie, you might think. Anyone who knows me knows I’ve always had a surplus of energy that makes doing something feel more restful than sitting on the couch. Although, as Janel Abrahami points out in Episode 549, Managing Through the Millennial Career Crisis, that’s definitely the type of rest some versions of burnout and crisis call for. But there’s still the question of hours in a day. No one can magic 24 hours into 27; this extra time for planning, and advertising, and baking, and relationship-building had to come from somewhere.
If available time is the biggest hitch in your dream’s realization, I highly recommend taking an inventory of the potential tradeoffs you have at your disposal. Give yourself permission to experiment with what you’re putting all of your effort and focus into. Identifying tasks you could deprioritize and swapping them out for this new endeavor can make an incredible difference.
For me, this resulted in trimming a number of things. In addition to lobbing off several hours a day of doomscrolling (the benefits of which are immediately obvious), my task inventory revealed just how much of my family’s laundry I had been doing: nearly all of it. It’s not that my husband, Brad, was weaseling out of that chore, but we’d slipped into a habit and that invisible labor slipped onto my plate since I work from home two days a week and he does not! When I did ask for more support, Brad jumped in and has since taken on more of the kid’s laundry, which has been incredibly helpful. That, combined with letting my sock drawer get a little emptier before doing my own laundry, has freed up a surprising amount of time.
I also recently quit breastfeeding my 19-month-old, and as anyone who has lived that saga will appreciate, that did more than just restore countless hours to my schedule; it also returned to me a ton of bodily autonomy and energy, which has been such a gift. That, combined with taking a small step back from my regular exercise schedule (one to three days or so a week instead of five), has enabled me to give the bakery the attention it requires. These trade-offs weren’t easy, but they were all about realigning my priorities for this new season of life.
Of course, my business model helps make this time management approach work. I’ve deliberately structured it as flexible and focused on Friday evening and Saturday morning baking, with lots of space to pull back or skip entire weeks when other parts of life need to take precedence.
The reality check
To be clear, I’m not superhuman. I still experience moments of overwhelm, and people and situations in my world still get sick or need to be bumped up on the to-do list for various reasons. And I absolutely can’t undersell how much having a willing load-bearing and insanely supportive partner has been in all my career pursuits. Brad has always been my hype man. He’s the person who, when I say “I have an idea,” doesn’t come back with “another one, really?” but with an emphatic “let’s do it!” If you don’t have one already, I highly recommend snagging a partner who serves as a catalyst for your dreams - I feel so fortunate to have found that in Brad.
The motherhood equation
A lot of people curious about my teetering career portfolio tack something else onto their “how and why?!” inquiry. They feel the need to point out that I have two small children at home. While it’s not necessarily their intent, this raised eyebrow sometimes feels like a judgment: how can I possibly be an attentive mother when I’m doing way too much? The question is posed innocently enough, but it always strikes me as odd.
For one thing, I don’t believe a kid-centric family dynamic is healthy for kids or for parents. My four-year-old is involved in all sorts of activities, but he doesn’t do them every day of the week. I love being a mother but I have no desire to be a part-time chauffeur. Furthermore,I believe my kids benefit so much from watching their mom get excited about a new idea and bring it to life. And they get to be part of the experience, helping me bake, serving their community, and carrying on conversations with customers before they’re even school age. In my opinion, that’s just as big a benefit devoting every minute of my schedule to schlepping them from one after-school activity to the next.
Secondly, any implication that a parent can’t have hobbies and passions outside her kids erases the concept that even as a mother, you are your own person. In traditional family dynamics like mine, it also erases the role of the other parent. My children don’t need me to be focused on them every moment, in large part because they have a wonderful father and a community of extended family caregivers on call as well. Any do we ask this of men who start their own side hustle? Do we say, “but how? You such two small children?!” with a raised eyebrow? I don’t think so.
So this is my soapbox moment to remind you: if you’re a mom with a big idea, you are allowed, you deserve, to shift your priorities and pursue whatever you’re dreaming up. I can’t promise it’ll work, but you are entitled to the space to try. And it doesn’t make you any less of a great mom to explore your own passions.
The science: rumination and recovery
In an upcoming episode of the Bossed Up podcast, I’m sharing my conversation with Donna Jackson Nakazawa, the author of Mind Drama: The Science of Rumination and How to Outwit Your Inner Defeatist. She explains the neuroscience behind why knowledge workers (those whose jobs require primarily mental work) get even more than restoration out of physical activities like baking bread. These activities interrupt the neurological patterns that drive big burnout culprits like rumination and anxiety.
Our brains internalize anything we do frequently. When we spend eight plus hours a day strategizing and problem solving, our brains easily get stuck in that loop of scanning our environment for risk, which can cause undue anxiety. Tactile, sensory engagement like kneading dough demands we stay in the present moment; it seizes our attention in a whole new way. Our hands stay busy, our senses stay focused on the task, and the mental hamster wheel slows. For people like me with overly busy minds at times,, doing something physical and tactile is the deepest kind of restorative rest we can get.
This personal example of my work life is exactly the kind of career portfolio diversification I talk about in Episode 538, Rebalance Your Career Portfolio. Not only am I checking the financial and fulfillment boxes, but I’m avoiding the trap of keeping all my income eggs in one basket. And this takes me to my final point.
Realistically, if you have multiple eggs, they can’t all be full-time jobs. A lot of folks assume that, now that baking is part of my world, I have a future dream of opening a shop and becoming a full-time baker. Could I do this? Sure, probably. But I don’t have any desire to do so and that’s okay. If you think you can’t dabble in a side project because the only true definition of success is turning it into a full-time, six-figure business, I encourage you to let that barrier go. Start filling up your life plate with all the things you love, regardless of their potential for growth.
What is filling up your plate right now? How might you reexamine your priorities and shuffle your to-dos to build a holistic career and life that truly nourishes every part of you? Wherever you’re at in this, I guarantee you’re not alone. Check in with our group on Facebook or join us on LinkedIn to build community around this exciting exploration.
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[CONFIDENT RHYTHMIC DRIVING THEME MUSIC WITH DRUMS STARTS]
EMILIE: Hey and welcome to the Bossed Up podcast, episode 548. I'm your host, Emilie Aries, the Founder and CEO of Bossed Up. And today I want to get personal with you because I recently got an email from my aunt that I think perfectly captures something that a lot of people,
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people are wondering and maybe feeling right now when it comes to burnout and how to overcome it and are a little bit horrified by me [LAUGHTER] and the never ending like list of things that I do because frankly I think it's like offensive to some people how many hats that I wear at one given moment. So here's the gist. Okay.
My aunt found out that I'd launched this pop up porch bakery that I've mentioned here before, which I just launched about five weeks ago now on the north side of Denver. And she sent me this email that just made me laugh out loud. Here's what she wrote and I'm reading from this verbatim quote, “I cannot compute how you could possibly fit this into your schedule along with your two other jobs, renovating houses and two little kids. It is totally beyond me.” end quote.
And then she asked me the two questions that I feel like everyone in my life has been wondering. She said, quote, “how do you do all of this and why?” [LAUGHTER], and I was just like so appreciative of the straightforwardness and like the candor behind it because I've been getting the same kind of questions from lots of people in my life. My mother in law, he who takes a very different tact, was sort of like, but Emilie, you have two young children. Or she would say you don't have enough going on, you know, and she's got the same narrative running through her head, very different approach.
And I get it. I totally get it. On paper it's bananas, right? Like, I have a corporate day job in leadership development. I've got you listening to this. Bossed Up. Which to be fair, I've scaled back and dialed back on all that I'm doing at Bossed Up, in like years ago now. But thank god I didn't quit because here we are still having this conversation. And I would feel so bummed if I had quit this completely when I could just dial it back and keep it going. And on top of those two jobs, I have two young children and so now I'm baking bread and pastries on Friday nights and Saturday mornings for my neighbors. Like, why on earth would I want to add to my already full plate? It perplexes people.
And I get it, but here's the thing, and this is what I want to dig into today. That pop up bakery is not draining me, it's fueling me. And I think there's something really important in that. For anyone who's been told that the answer to burnout prevention is always to do less, to pull back, to subtract. Because sometimes the antidote to burnout isn't doing less, it's doing something different.
So I wrote my aunt back a pretty long email, honestly, and it kind of turned into something of a personal manifesto. And that's what got me thinking that I should share this conversation here. Because I realized while I was writing it that these are the same two questions, like how and why that I've been getting from everyone in my life. And the why is very simple. My day job, as well paid and interesting and engaging as it is, it doesn't light me up, right? I'm good at it. I just in fact won a company wide award for a new leadership program that I helped to launch last year. And they keep giving me raises and good performance reviews. But it's not exactly aligned with my sense of broader purpose, nor am I asking it to be, nor am I expecting it to be right.
And while Bossed Up, certainly fulfills my sense of purpose and allows me to talk about it and work on the issues that I care most about around gender equity, equity and equality and advancement and leadership. Like in so many different ways, this forum is fueling my sense of purpose. It's also just one part of the purpose that I feel in my life. And as someone who spent my entire career talking about designing a life that you love, holistically, thinking about work, love, wellness, everything, right? I noticed that I was starting to feel a very specific kind of longing or searching that can happen when you're head and your heart are misaligned. It wasn't burnout from too much. It was, it was the kind of burnout that you get from having too little of the right stuff.
And this bakery, you know, as silly as it is, it's like it feels sort of like frivolous, like it feels so much more light hearted than the kinds of heady, intellectual work that I've been doing for the rest of my career like this. Not that baking is an easy endeavor by any means, but like, there's just something about the bakery that scratches every itch that my knowledge economy work has never scratched. It's creative, right? I'm developing recipes, designing an experience for my neighborhood, building a brand from scratch. It's entrepreneurial. I'm figuring out pricing, managing inventory, thinking about sourcing the best ingredients at the best cost, running pre-orders and really making a business that actually works. And it's physical. I'm working with my hands in dough, which after eight hours of emails and meetings, it feels like a revelation. And finally, it's deeply communal. In just like five weeks, it's connected my family to neighbors of all ages and backgrounds in a way that nothing else has.
And now to the how. And I want to be really honest about this because I do innately have a lot of energy. I always have. I'm convinced it's genetic. I'm like channeling my grandmother, my maternal grandmother, Nani, who is just full of energy. And like, she told I remember years ago, she said to me, after a certain age, Emilie you just don't want to sleep. She like, didn't sleep in her later years. And I'm like, I get that. And I also think I understand why I have children that don't sleep. That would be my fault. That's definitely a gene I passed on. My kids are terrible sleepers and so am I. And I've never been really good at resting and recovering through rest and renewal. And I don't want to apologize for that, but I do want to acknowledge that. So it's like part of my just innate biochemistry.
But even with all that energy, I couldn't carve out the time for this without being really, really intentional. This did not happen by accident. I made some very deliberate trade offs to create space for this. And I just started swapping things, like deprioritizing things, even things I care about, to see what would happen in my household if I stopped holding up the sky for us. For example, laundry. I've never done so little laundry as I have in the past month. And it, it didn't even occur to me until I stopped, thought, huh. I have been doing all of our children's laundry. And huh, huh, I've been the one doing all of our towels and sheets and collective communal laundering things.
My husband is not malicious. He wasn't weaseling his way out of these duties. I was just stepping up and doing them. Especially because I work from home on Mondays and Fridays, so it was easier for me to do. I saw a laundry pile. I tackled it. When I started the bakery. I said, look, hey Brad, could you do your children's laundry? And of course he said, yeah, happy to. And then I realized, huh, you've not been doing this, how interesting. We should probably like sit down and talk about that sometime. And I've just like let the ball drop on that front with the help of my husband who's picked it up the slack.I'm also like, you know, getting down to the last of my socks and underwear before I do my laundry. So I'm just like, lowering my own expectations for myself when it comes to my household labor and that front.
Second of all, I'm proud of having breastfed Josephine, my youngest until she was 18 months old, she's now just over 19 months old. But on her 18 month birthday, her year and a half birthday, I quit that s***. Let me tell you, it has been so liberating. She is not a baby who is ever gonna wean herself, okay? She was using me as her own personal human pacifier. She did not need my breast milk. She has been never really been exclusively breastfed. She had, she was a combo fed baby with formula and breast milk and then at 12 months she started drinking cow's milk like it was no big thing. But she just still was breastfeeding.
And man, when I got my bodily autonomy back and just sort of said after spring break week, when you're home together all week that week, we kept it going. And then on her right after, then she turned 18 months old, I said, I think that's it. I think I'm done. And it's been such a relief to have some time back, to have some physical autonomy back. It's like it's, there was m way more time being spent doing that than you even realize. So that was a huge amount of time that I got back all of a sudden.
And then the last one here that I think is worth mentioning and because it's kind of funny is I really pulled back on exercise. And this doesn't sound like the advice you would normally hear from me because I've always been about wellness and exercise and the stress reduction benefits of physical movement. But I've always been an exerciser. I've always been really diligent and like, committed to exercise. And I just wanted to give myself permission to chill out a little bit. Like, pull back. That is just not my number one priority right now. And to be clear, I still play in a volleyball league on Monday nights. Like, I'm still exercising at least twice a week. I like to get walks in midweek too. So maybe it's like three times a week, but I'm not exercising for five times a week anymore. And so what? Who cares? Truly, I do not.
And so, you know, like pulling back on things that I used to care more about and giving myself permission to have a little space to experiment with something I think I care more about at this moment has been wildly liberating, particularly when it comes to dialing back the household sort of labor and childcare that I've been doing without even really thinking about it. So Brad has been important, and we'll talk more about his role in all of this.
But I also just want to acknowledge the business model itself as a hobby slash business. This is designed for flexibility. Like, I only bake Friday nights and Saturday mornings and it's only what people are pre-ordering during the week based on limited options, like limited amounts of things that I offer. And frankly I can skip a week whenever I want. I just skipped last week because I was traveling and it was not a big deal at all. That being said, between the flexibility inherent to this business model and what I've deprioritized, I couldn't do any of this without my husband Brad.
So I do need to give full credit where credit is due because he is my secret weapon on, on so many fronts. And he deserves credit because he's my ultimate hype man. It's always been true. Like he and I came into our lives, came into each other's lives when we were making some big pivots when I was starting, Bossed Up. And he has always been the kind of guy who when I come to him with a harebrained idea, [LAUGHTER] and trust me, there have been many he doesn't criticize, he doesn't raise an eyebrow, he doesn't say, are you sure? Do you really have time for that? He goes, let's make it happen. Like what do we need to do?
And he has stepped up around the house in a big way so that I could step into this bakery moment. He's been by my side on Saturday mornings with the kids. Like he's genuinely excited about it. He got the vision right away. He gets the community building benefits that, that we're all reaping a reward on right now. And he's genuinely excited about it. And I'll say this, if you are like me, if you're in a I have an idea person, I highly recommend finding yourself a let's make it happen person to marry. Because I really do feel unstoppable with him in my corner.
That being said, every other week I feel like, excited and energized and hyped up about things. And then I do like every normal person, have my moments where I feel overwhelmed and, like, confused about where to begin and have to shuffle things around. And when the kids get sick or when life just happens. Like, there are hard trade offs that we do have to make. So it's not like I've magically found extra time in the day, but I've tried to, within reason, exchange the things that were draining me for things that fill me up. And I have a partner who's on my side, who's like a team player in making space for me to do that.
And I do want to acknowledge here for a moment, the aspect of motherhood behind all of this. So a note here for the moms and for everyone who knows a mom or loves mom. And by the way, Happy Mother's Day. I got to address something that's been bugging me about this the entire time, because people say this to me constantly, even people who mean it with all the love in the world. They say, but, Emilie, you have two small children. And for a while, I just couldn't really figure out why that was bothering me so much. But it was. It was getting under my skin. I'm like, so what? Has been my response. Like, what does that mean? Like, what are you insinuating? And I couldn't figure out what was bugging me. But it, I realized it was this, the idea that this comment assumes so much, doesn't it? It assumes that if you want to chase down a new idea, if you want to take on a hobby, if you want to start a business, that you must somehow be falling short on your motherly duties or you must not be showing up for your kids if your Saturday mornings are now occupied by this. And that is just not true. Okay?
First of all, it's not good for my kids if my entire life revolves around them and their activities. I refuse to. And this is philosophy with Brad. We've aligned on this as parents. We're not going to be the kinds of parents I, I will laugh. I'm sure at some point, like 10 years down the road. My kids are in high school and I'm listening back to this. But I do not want to be in the kind of household where the entire household revolves around the children's activities every single night of the week. I don't think that's healthy for the children themselves, for the world to revolve around them. And don't get me wrong, I schlep Max to dance class every Friday afternoon. We've done basketball lessons, we've done swimming lessons. We're looking into soccer teams, and drum lessons, and guitar lessons. Like, we're doing a lot of things, but I refuse to do all of those things at once. And I refuse for my life to just revolve around my children's after school activities, okay? That is too much of a child centric family dynamic. It's not healthy for them, and it's definitely not healthy for me.
And second of all, they benefit from having a mom who's engaged in her community, who's engaged in her life, who's happy, who's fulfilled, right? Who's lit up and pursuing things that excite her. Like, my children got to witness me go from an idea to making a business happen. They heard me talking about the bakery. They saw me recipe testing, right? They saw me putting everything in order and getting this idea to fruition and making something out of nothing. They get to serve coffee to their neighbors if they're feeling like it. They get to make dog treats from scratch with me and serve them to the neighbor's dogs as they walk up to the porch, pop up. I mean, they've learned to hold a conversation with a stranger eyeball to eyeball, right? And, like, basically experience giving good customer service at the age of 1 and 4, respectively. That in and of itself is a valuable activity and engaging lesson to be learned there.
So I reject the entire premise behind the question, oh, my gosh, but how could you possibly be doing this when you have two young children? Because it erases the personhood of the mom in question, right? It erases the entire concept that you should have your own interests. And I understand no one means it that way, but that is how it is received on my end.
And speaking of erasure, it also erases the other parent in the picture here. It's not like Brad's babysitting when he watches the kids on Saturday mornings. If I'm occupied with, with the bakery, right? He's parenting. And so I just, I don't see people asking men the same question, like, how could you possibly launch your new startup? You have two young children. It's just, like, not even considered, because we all assume that he's got someone covering things at home. A woman, more often than not. And I know it's a fair question to ask, because how the h*** can any of us survive motherhood alone? And I'm not. I'm not doing this alone. That's the thing. It does take a village. And I am grateful for having a village, including my parents who are in the picture and my grown siblings who are in the picture. So my children have me and they have an entire community of caregivers.
So I want to say this out loud for every mom who is listening right now with a hair brain idea, with a crazy passion project, or with a spark inside you that you want to explore further, you are entitled to exploring that. You are entitled to scratching that itch. You are entitled to put down the laundry, dial back the housework and go for it. Whatever it is. It doesn't mean it's going to work out, right? But how will you know if you can't even give yourself the time or the space to try? It just does not seem fair. Your, your ambition is not at odds with motherhood. They can in fact coexist. And if anyone makes you feel like they can't even kindly, even with the best of intentions, I just want you to notice it, name it, and move forward anyway.
And now I want to get into the science behind all of this because I think it's really important to the reframing around how we think about burnout, I sat down recently with Donna Jackson Nakazawa, the acclaimed science writer behind the book Mind Drama: Science Of Rumination And How To Outwit Your Inner Defeatist. And that interview is coming out um, soon to the podcast here in a couple of weeks. So keep an eye out for it and subscribe now if you haven't already. So you never miss an episode. And something she and I spoke about that she really writes a lot about in her work really resonates here.
Neuroscience shows that for knowledge workers, people whose jobs live primarily in their heads. For those workers, physical hands on activity like, I don't know, say baking breads or making cookies. It doesn't just feel restorative, it actually interrupts the neurological patterns that drive rumination, anxiety and burnout. Here's why, when you spend your life working in your head, strategizing, emailing, problem solving, talking things out in meetings like your brain can easily get stuck in loops. Especially the rumination kind. Replaying a conversation, worrying about a project, feeling just generally anxious about nothing in particular. Research shows that when you're fully engaged in a manual task, kneading dough for instance, it's really difficult for your brain to ruminate at the same time.
I've heard other bakers on Instagram talk about this. They get into like almost a Zen like state while baking. And I totally share that. The tactile sensory engagement demands your present moment attention in a way that screen based work does not. Your hands stay busy, your senses are fully engaged and the mental loops quiet down. There's this saying that I've been turning to again and again that I actually included in my email back to my aunt. It's often attributed to 20th century theologian Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who said, quote, “If you work with your hands, Sabbath with your mind. If you work with your mind, Sabbath with your hands.” And I've had this idea echoing in my head ever since I started baking.
I think it captures something about burnout that our culture gets completely wrong. We assume that when you're stressed and burnt out, you need to rest, and that rest is defined as doing nothing. But for those of us who work with our minds all day, doing something physical and tangible and tactile can actually be the deepest kind of restorative rest that our brains can get.
So here's the reframe I want to offer. We talk a lot about burnout on the show, and rightfully so. It's a huge problem. But I think we oversimplify the prescription. The standard advice is, if you're burnt out, do less. And to be fair, sometimes that is the right answer. If you listen to my recent conversation with Janel Abrahami about the millennial career crisis, her rest pathway is absolutely the right path forward if you're running on fumes. But there's another kind of burnout that doesn't come from doing too much. It comes from doing too much of the wrong things or not enough of the right things. It's the burnout of boredom, of under stimulation, or just feeling like your talents are not aligned with your purpose. Your head and your heart are on different tracks for that kind of burnout that leaves you feeling searching or longing for something. The answer is not to subtract more. It's to add something meaningful that uses a completely different part of you.
And for me, that turned into a pop up bakery. For you, it might be something totally different. A pottery class, a volleyball league, a side project, a community garden, teaching a workshop. The point isn't what it is. The point is that it engages you differently. It uses your hands. If you work with your mind, and it uses your mind, if you work with your hands, it connects you to people, if your job isolates you and it gives you tangible results. If your job feels abstract, if you caught episode 538 on, Rebalancing Your Career Portfolio, you'll recognize this as the portfolio approach to your career. I'm not putting all my eggs in one basket, right?
My day job gives us our family, financial stability. And honestly I'm grateful for that. I do not take that for granted. Bossed Up gives me so much purpose and community as it relates to the things that I care about in a big picture kind of way around gender equality and women's leadership. And the bakery gives me creative expression, physical engagement and neighborhood connection. And it doesn't need to become a full time job to do that. In fact, I love that it's a tidy little business. It's a nights and weekends kind of endeavor. And that's exactly how it needs to fit into my life right now. Rather than taking over my life. That is not the goal.
I actually notice when I tell people about it. There's this like reflexive assumption where people think that I like, assume that I want to open my own bakery one day. Even Brad asked me that. I was like, I don't think so. Full time is not necessarily my dream here. It's almost as if the only definition of success for any new venture that people can imagine is like it consuming your whole life. And I don't know why that is. Honestly, I'm curious as to your thoughts, like can it be a meaningful, profitable, joy giving side hustle? Because that's what it is for me right now. And this assumption that like, success means all in full time, like total commitment, maybe that's part of what keeps people from starting their new thing in the first place. Like this idea that you have to commit or that you can't dabble, when in fact I love a good dabble. Okay. It's like the ADHD that runs through my genetic code as well [LAUGHTER]. And I love it that way. Like I really do. It's an incredible freeing feeling that you can try something without it having to be your new full time identity and full time work.
None of the pieces of my portfolio alone would work. Like standing alone, those things wouldn't be sufficient. But together they make up a really robust full plate of life where I love everything on it. My plate is in fact fuller than ever. But it's full of the right things. So if you're listening to this and you're feeling that dull, low grade exhaustion, not the kind where you can't get out of bed, but the kind where you just feel flat and like listless and longing for something to light you up, I want you to consider the possibility that maybe you don't need to do less. Maybe you need to re-shift your energy and focus on something different.
So ask yourself, what's on my plate that's draining me and how could I trade it for something that fills me up? What would that look like? Maybe I'm doom scrolling for like eight hours a day like I used to. Which by the way my screen time has cut in half since I launched the bakery and actually have something to create around instead of just consuming content, media, even TV and movies. Like, that's my go to for resting at the end of the day and it was not restful for me. And so ask yourself, like what are you doing that you think would renew you or that you feel like, is just what we assume rest and renewal looks like, but actually isn't leaving you feeling rested? Those are the first things to cut out and figure out through experimentation, through trial and error what more active forms of rest could look like. And if that works for you.
And hey, if people think you're a little out of your mind for adding something to your plate, good, you're in good company. That probably means you're onto something. And if today's conversation got you thinking more about designing a more intentional career portfolio, go back and give a listen to episode 538 for more on that. And keep an eye out for my upcoming episode with Donna Jackson Nakazawa all about the science of rumination, which takes all of this to a deeper level. I'll drop all the links in today's show notes and I cannot wait to hear what you think of all of this and what you make of this crazy conversation.
[CONFIDENT RHYTHMIC DRIVING THEME MUSIC WITH DRUMS STARTS]
As always, let's keep it going after the episode in the Bossed Up Courage Community or in the Bossed Up Group LinkedIn. And in the meantime, let's keep bossin’ in pursuit of our purpose, and together let's lift as we climb.
[MUSIC FADES AND ENDS]
