Speaker #0Before we get into this week's episode, I want to start by extending you an invitation. On the 9th of December, I'm going to be teaching a highly practical, hands-on, 90-minute workshop where you'll build the core framework for your own meaningful business. If you are hovering on the edge of really wanting to take your own work seriously in 2026, this session is going to give you the structure that you need and maybe show you some of the elements that you've been missing so you can really set yourself up for long-term success and sustainability. The link to that workshop is in the show notes. It's got all the details that you need and I would love to work with you there. If your career looks great on paper but feels wrong in your bones, you're not alone. Welcome to From Corporate to Calling. your lifeline into meaningful work. I'm Alyssa Murphy, a regenerative business mentor and former startup CEO who walked away from corporate systems to create work that brings life. Each week I share stories, reflections, and provocations to help you recognize the signs of burnout and make a career change with purpose. If work looks good but feels wrong, this is your invitation to get out of corporate and into your calling. Let's start with this moment that I think every founder needs to reach. And by founder, I want to qualify that I don't necessarily mean somebody who is raising millions in investment, someone who's going to be hiring a team overnight. A founder for me, in my mind, is simply someone with a powerful idea and the courage to actually follow through and create a business that brings that idea to life. Myself, I became a founder at 25, not because I had any idea what I was doing, I can absolutely assure you that I really didn't, but because I believed very deeply and very passionately in what the company I founded offered, which was powerful communications for very complex climate related technologies and also because back in my mid-20s i had that audacity that fearlessness that sense of i know this matters i know i can do this nothing is going to stop me and in my time with that company that i founded i worked with hundreds of other impact focused founders of early stage. startups. And I can tell you that most of the people that I work with today, so people who are coming out of corporate experience, have far more experience than those founders that I worked with. And I promise you, they had far, far more experience than I did at 25. And, you know, these are the people I'm working with, perhaps you listening, they are people who have managed very large teams. They've led multi-million pound projects or handled very large budgets. They are used to coordinating across disparate disciplines and departments that don't like working together and translating things internationally and bringing really complex stakeholders together. But here's what's fascinating, you know, those startups that I worked with in the past, those founders. They never let that lack of experience stop them, just like I didn't. You know, they built companies around ideas that weren't even tested yet. They operated on belief and momentum long before they had ever proved commercial viability. Meanwhile, the people that I work with today who have very deep professional experience, the ones who really on paper should be the most confident people like you often hesitate. And it's not because they lack talent. It's not because their ideas aren't strong. It's because they've never quite made that full-bodied commitment to their value and their work. I really want to emphasize this point, so I'm going to say it again. It doesn't matter how much experience and talent and skill you have. It doesn't even matter how strong your proposition is. If you never make a full commitment to doing that work, to becoming the CEO of your own business, no matter how small, and to actually building a viable, resilient, long-term business from that work, you will not succeed. And that's what I often sadly see, is that people kind of hover at the threshold of that commitment. They're still in that place where, you know, they're thinking, is this still a side project? You know, is this kind of a hobby that I have? Is this just kind of a passion piece that I keep in the background? Or is this really my life's work? By which I mean not necessarily the work that you're going to do for the rest of your life, but the work that you are committing your life to right now. And that could potentially serve you for the rest of your life. making that kind of commitment to your work is a really big moment and a lot of people never quite get there and I understand that it feels so real it feels really risky it feels deeply personal and it can bring up all kinds of kind of deeply embedded issues and doubts and programming from our right back to our childhoods and You can't fake that commitment. You can't kind of, you know, look in a mirror every morning and chant mantras at yourself until you've made that commitment. You don't push it. You don't fake it. So what can you do? Okay, so you can answer two questions. They're the two questions that are forming the foundations of our episode today. And when you... Answer these questions well and deeply. They will make your work far more resilient and they will give you the confidence to really commit to it. And when you have robust, grounded answers to these questions, then you can give yourself a strong structure to build from, a structure that will sustain you for years. With those foundations in place, the commitment part will start to... flow naturally you don't have to fight for it you will just feel it so let's not wait any longer let's break it down because these two pieces are so easily and so often overlooked and I know from my own personal experience as an entrepreneur both in my my previous company and in the work that I do now and in all the work that I do with clients that are setting out to build that own meaningful businesses that these two components will just make all the difference so it's so worth spending time thinking about these and answering these questions no matter what stage you are at the first question how do you actually want work to feel this piece is absolutely critical and i would be surprised if you have really taken the time to think about that because most people never have and that's understandable right because if you look at the conventional corporate world of work we don't have an awful lot of choice about how that work feels it's actually more about what are we willing to tolerate okay but this is regenerative work this is creating a meaningful business on your own terms and you absolutely get to choose how you want that work to feel and let me be clear i'm not talking about your values or your mission you know the chances are even if you've not articulated that fully that that part that kind of why part for you is actually pretty strong most people in this kind of space they have that in abundance even if it's like i say it's not something that they can reel off in a in a quick sort of one minute pitch what i'm talking about is the kind of the conditions the boundaries the balance that make your work genuinely sustainable for you. It's the rhythm of work and life. It's the strong, powerful boundaries that you put in place so that work does not become all-encompassing, overwhelming, so you never have to experience burnout again. It's the pace that you are able to work at for your life circumstances and this phase and this season of your life. It's your energetic capacity and honoring that and it's the spaciousness that you want around your work and what it needs to make room for beyond just work all the time It's the part where work and life really come together and support each other. And it's also important to be really clear about what you are no longer willing to compromise and acknowledge the experience that you have had up to this point and how things are going to be different for you in the future. But as I say, most people just skip this step because Either they've never really thought that they are allowed to think in this way, or they don't think that it's going to be viable to build a business if they're focused on, yes, but I also want, you know, work life balance and I want to be able to pick up my kids and I want to be able to take these trips twice a year. They think, well, hang on, I can't, like, I'm going to have to just compromise on all of that because I'm just kind of so lucky and grateful to be able to do work that feels meaningful to you. To that I say no. Okay, yes, of course, we're extremely lucky to be able to do this kind of work. But if you don't set up those foundations for work to support life, then you will not sustain it. You will not stick with it. You will end up back in a similar position of overwhelm or burnout or whatever your experience may have been in the past. So don't skip this part because it might feel soft. It is absolutely essential. okay and also don't tell yourself the lie that you will figure this out later that right now you're just in kind of all in kind of supersonic startup mode and you're just going to give it absolutely everything right now and then you'll be able to pull back when things start to be successful it does not work like that i promise you i have been there you need to set those boundaries from the beginning. When you do this, when you know exactly how you want work to feel, then you will start, then you will avoid the trap of building offers that you don't actually want to deliver, that don't feel good to you. You will avoid the trap of setting pricing in a way that actually works against you or attracting clients who drain you because You haven't yet defined the conditions under which you do your best work. And what happens is your work looks sustainable on the outside, but internally it pulls you back into burnout patterns. So this is the first question you really must answer if you want to build meaningful work that lasts. Not what does the world need from me? Not yet. But what pace, structure and rhythm do I need? in order to sustain the work I care about. This is where you get to be selfish in order to actually really serve others. If you don't shape this intentionally, your old pattern, your previous experience, the world of extractive corporate work will shape this for you. Okay, let's come on to the second question. and this is really quite different right at the opposite end of the spectrum if the first question was what we would you know what would conventionally be described as a softer question this is definitely the kind of hardcore question and again this is just so often missed um and you have to you have to answer this question even if it takes time even if it feels hard even if fit involves a lot of designing and testing because it is absolutely essential and again it's deceptively simple. Who urgently needs your work and is able to pay for it? I really want you to listen very carefully to this part because this is actually where I see the biggest derailments. So when I ask who urgently needs your work I'm not talking about anyone who is aligned with your values. I'm not talking about, oh, okay, I just want to work with people who care about impact or people who are in the sustainability field. Or you can't let this be a sort of conceptual idea of community because they're like-minded with you. Doesn't work, it is not strong enough. they're beautiful sentiments but they don't build businesses your work needs to reach people who feel a problem that you solve very very sharply very keenly as i said they urgently need your work they need to recognize the value of what you do pretty much immediately and they need to have the resources to be able to invest in what you offer those three components feeling the problem sharply recognizing the value you offer and having the resources to pay for it this is your who this is your avatar this is your ideal client profile it has got to come from those commercial grounding questions. And of course, at this point, you're going to want to check in and say, am I still in a place that aligns with my why, you know, that still aligns with my values. But if you've done all that foundational work, it will, it just will, you just need to take the time to really explore who that audience is. So for me, and in my development with regenerative work life, This is partly why I work with people who are coming out of. a corporate background okay because for them the pain is pretty intense most people i work with have you know been right on the brink of burnout they have had the experience of work just taking over their whole life and they know what it means to give everything you can to a corporate employer and then to just turn around and pull the plug on your team. your projects, you know, deliver restructures with no meaningful consultation. They know what it's like to suddenly be expendable to an organisation that you thought you were building your career with. They feel that pain. They know what it's like to show up every day to work that simply does not align with your values and is not working towards the kind of future that you want for yourself and for your loved ones. That's... painful, that's urgent. So for me, for the people who need what I can offer, the people who need it most urgently are those people transitioning out of corporate. That doesn't mean that I can't and don't work with people who haven't been in a classical corporate background, of course, but the majority of my clients have and they feel that pain and they urgently, urgently want to change. And then so That's why they, of course, then see the value of what I do. But also the reality is that people coming out of corporate are more likely to be able to afford to do the incubator, to do mentoring, to take time to develop a business and test out ideas. they have the resources not everyone of course but many people do have the resources to go on that journey and kind of have the startup capital if you like to build their own business so hopefully sharing that example of my work shows you just why it's so important to answer this who question with this kind of discipline and rigor because this is how the value flows this is how you get paid for what you do and if you don't have this part really solidly in place It's really likely that you will spend a lot of time having very interesting conversations about your work but people not actually converting to the point of wanting to pay you. Or you will get an awful lot of invitations because you're going to be really good at what you do and really impassioned about it and people are going to want to get involved but that doesn't mean that they are actually in a position to pay you, to... you know invest in you um you've got to have those commercial foundations in place when this piece is vague everything else becomes vague your offers your messaging your pricing your confidence like you don't need me to tell you how saturated the market is you have to be able to speak immediately to your person and you can only do that when you know exactly who they are and what you have to offer them. That clarity is so essential and it informs everything. As I've just said, your offer, your messaging, your pricing, your confidence, what it feels like to show up every day in your ability and what it feels like to show up every day for your business and your ability to build something that is going to go the distance. So these are the two questions and what they are going to give you is. a work life that truly feels sustainable and supports you and supports everything else. is really meaningful to you outside of your work and it's going to give you the commercial resilience that just has to be there in order to build a business that sustains you, supports you, supports your family. So let's look at what happens when you bring those two pieces together, when you know how you want work to feel and who your work truly serves. everything becomes simpler. Your offer becomes tighter and clearer. Your message really speaks directly to your audience. Your confidence strengthens. The time that you're spending becomes more focused. Your energy stops leaking. Decisions become easier. You stop circling around ideas and you're really able to make commitments. And frankly, When you answer these two questions, it's the difference between having a nice idea and actually building something real. And that is the moment where making that commitment that we talked about right at the beginning stops feeling scary. It starts just feeling inevitable. And if you are listening to this thinking, Alyssa, I hear you. I know I need these things. This is where I'm getting stuck. First of all, we are not alone. Most people get stuck on these things. And also that's exactly why I've created this workshop on the 9th of December. It's not theory, it's not concept, it's not sort of vague worldview or philosophy. This workshop is practical, it is structured, it is actionable. In 90 minutes, together, we will create your meaningful business quadrant. This is a simple but powerful framework that pulls together why your work matters, how you want to work to feel, what deeper value you have to offer and who urgently needs that value and can pay for it. By the end of that 90-minute workshop you're going to work well and by the end of that 90-minute workshop you are going to walk away with a clear direction for your meaningful business that you can build in 2026. clarity on the conditions that you need in order to sustain your work, a grounded understanding of your unique strengths and value, clear picture of the audience that actually needs your work, and a practical plan to take next steps to make this a reality. On the 9th of December there are going to be two time slots available that will hopefully work for my people in different parts of the world. There will be a replay available. There's workbook included. It's in a webinar format, so you will not be visible. I know this is something that's quite important for people. You know, perhaps you're still in a job or, you know, you've just recently left or for whatever reasons you want, you know, you're keen to do something like this, but you don't necessarily want to do it publicly. Absolutely fine. Webinar format. Your camera will be off. Your mic will be off. You can choose your own name. The chat will be live and absolutely encourage you to take part and get involved there. And if you want to come on and ask questions or have my feedback on your framework or get some coaching, you can do that. But it's absolutely up to you. You are in control. And if you have been one of those people that I described hovering on the edge of really committing to your work, I believe that this workshop will give you what you need to finally cross that threshold. Once again, the link with... Everything you need is in the show notes. So that's it. That is the episode. Listen back to simple questions. Lots of detail that I've shared here for how you can answer these questions for yourself. It's really, really critical that you do so. Thank you for listening. And more importantly, thank you for being someone who cares enough about your work to build it with intention. And to build it outside of the extractive systems that we all know need to stop. If this episode spoke to you, the workshop will take everything that we've covered today deeper and help you put it into action. But regardless of whether that is the right choice for you, I look forward to welcoming you back here on the podcast, continuing to support you on your journey from corporate into calling. See you next week. If this episode of From Corporate to Calling was helpful or inspiring, follow the show so you don't miss an episode. And if you know someone who's questioning their career, send them this podcast. Lifelines are meant to be shared. Remember, you don't have to tolerate burnout or misalignment. You can redirect your skills into meaningful work that brings back life to you and to the world around you.
