Who’s driving your car?
👋Hi! I'm Molly. This is where I share the lessons I’ve learned from building fast-moving, messy, ambitious companies. For more from me, you can also find me on the WorkLife Podcast, on LinkedIn, and in Glue Club, a community for leaders who care about building great companies.
A couple of years ago, I took a sharp right turn in my career. I walked away from the operator/COO path I’d spent years building — the jobs I was good at and known for — because they no longer brought me joy.
The strangest part was realizing that whole categories of roles now fell into a painful new box: “things I’m great at but don’t love.” [I wrote more about the Venn Diagrams below in a post about how to choose your next job.]
Those jobs are extra tricky because you know you’d succeed in them. Other people would think they’re impressive. But deep down, you feel nothing.
That realization left me uneasy and stuck.
Anyway, this right turn I took — away from the thing I knew how to do and the thing for which other people knew me — has been a really winding and complicated journey. There have been many times when I’ve wanted to run screaming back to the old path — to go back to what seems familiar and easy, a path that other people more easily recognize.
About a year and half in to this journey I was feeling very uneasy — lost, confused, unfulfilled in some ways, and just generally stuck. I realized I needed new help, and I eventually got connected to a coach named Vanda Marlow, who specializes in many things, but significantly for me, she loves working with women in the middle of their lives who are grappling with their relationship to their career and work.
Vanda and I discussed many things as we worked together over a year and a half — including how to say no to things, time, money, art, creativity, and much more. One of the greatest gifts she gave me was a metaphor. This metaphor has lodged itself so deeply in my brain that I now use it regularly.
This metaphor arose when we were discussing who to listen to when making a decision. I’m not talking about which friends, but rather, which parts of myself to listen to. I don’t have many work regrets, but the ones I do have come entirely from moments when I listened to the wrong part of myself when making a decision or engaging in work. It can be a very confusing experience — disorienting, I’d say — to realize that there are parts of yourself that will guide you in the wrong direction if you let them have too loud a voice.
Ok, so this metaphor comes from the world of Voice Dialogue, which is a deep, sophisticated field related to IFS, so anyone who has done either will recognize this. As I’ve done lots of work like this over my life, I’ve realized that one of the most important things is how to make the work memorable. The way Vanda explained this concept to me made it instantly accessible to my weird brain.
She told me to picture my inner voices like people in a car.
