Speaker #0The core of my work is turning visionary ideas into reality. That's the through line of my own career as an entrepreneur, and it's also how I guide my clients. But this past week, when one of my own ideas came back around, I found myself doing exactly what I see my clients doing. I found myself very quickly retreating into self-doubt, second guessing and feeling paralyzed before I'd even begun. And so I taught myself the lessons that I teach others. And today I'm going to share with you exactly what those lessons are and how I'm actually applying them in practice and the difference that this has made in just a few days, because this time I am not letting this idea get away from me. And if you want to know you how to build the thing that you can't stop thinking about, this episode might be the only one you ever need to listen to. 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. It all started with a feeling of dissatisfaction and trusting myself to explore what was going on there. And I love my work, please don't misunderstand me, but it is a quiet love. And I have been sitting with this feeling for some time that there is a bigger expression of the work that I do. I know that the fundamentals are right, the values are aligned, but how that manifests, I think there is something more that's available to me that I have been skirting around. And at the core of that, there's this idea that I think I first played with two or even three years ago when I first started learning about. regenerative thinking. And I've never fully articulated this idea. I've just kind of circled around the perimeter of it, but it won't leave me alone. It keeps popping its head up every now and then. And this time it kind of came back and looked me in the eyes and said, are we going to do this, Alyssa? And I... I let myself write things down. I let myself get some of the ideas out of my head and onto paper without really even knowing what I was writing. It was actually, I think it was about like 10.30 at night. It was already quite late for me anyway. I have little kids, they wake me up early and I had to turn the light back on and get a notepad and paper and just start putting some of these words down on the paper. I couldn't stop. And I kept going. And it just kind of flowed out of me. And I was so awake all of a sudden. And I was so kind of energized and actually quite wired. And I was almost tempted to get up and go downstairs. And we have this huge roll of kind of like decorator paper that my kids use for artwork. And I wanted to just roll it out and start getting everything down. It was about midnight at this time. And I realized I really needed you to go to sleep, which I did. And then the next morning, I woke up, the very first thing I thought about was this idea, but it felt different. I, I'd suddenly been greeted by fear. And I felt so kind of sluggish and I was doubting myself. My mind was kind of racing. All of the unhelpful thoughts were on overdrive. And I just kept thinking, yes, but how, Alyssa? How would that work? How could you even begin to do this? What is the plan? What is it that you're actually talking about here? How are you going to make this happen? And it felt... really kind of overwhelming. And I could feel that I was close to just saying, yep, you know what, you're right. I'm just going to, I'm going to step back. I'm going to, I'm going to focus on my work as it is now. I'm not going to get distracted. But I realized that what I actually needed was a taste of my own medicine. And I was journaling again. And like the things that kept coming up were like the exact words that I say to my clients, like the exact concepts that I help them to understand and put into practice. And I just realized I needed to be on the other side of the table. You know, I needed to be my own coach. I needed to be my own guide. And it was time for me to kind of learn those lessons in an even deeper way because I needed to put them into practice this time. And that is what this episode is all about. I'm not going to talk. directly about the idea yet. It is still too delicate. It feels like, you know, like having a newborn baby. And honestly, you don't actually want to pass it around for cuddles yet because it's just, it's too early. It's too fragile. That's where I am with it right now. But I will talk about the five lessons that I have been teaching myself and how I've applied them with real specifics. of the actions that I've taken. And I hope that will really help you to embody these ideas and to put it into practice for yourself so that you can also start building the thing, building on that idea that just won't let you go. And I'm going to talk about the difference that I feel today, how much I have moved forward across a weekend when, you know, The vast majority of my attention was taken up with my kids and yet I feel like I have made more progress in the last two to three days certainly on this idea than I have in two to three years and that's really quite something because all that's really changed is my energy and my mindset around this. I've been able to tap into a part of myself that I think has kind of lame, dormant and I'm really excited to feel it awakening. I'm sat here recording with you and I feel like a different person. And that transformation, I really believe, is available to you with a few simple concepts that I'm going to walk through with you today. I'm sat here feeling like the person who built Europe's leading climate comms agency. from scratch. Climate Tech Comms Agency. I should be clear on that point. I am sat here feeling like the person who built Europe's leading climate tech. Oh my goodness. I am sat here feeling like the person who built Europe's leading climate tech. Why can't I say that word? Climate Tech Communications Agency from scratch. I am not going to have a clean take from this podcast. Shall we try one more time? My friends, I am sat here feeling like the person who built Europe's leading climate tech communications agency from scratch. And I am ready to take on that kind of ambitious growth project again. Now, let's get into the lessons and how I have been applying them. Number one, know where your energy comes from. I mentioned at the beginning that this this whole kind of process came out of a slight feeling of dissatisfaction and a feeling, dissatisfaction and also a feeling of kind of that I was somehow dampened, that things had just become much quieter and a feeling of being tired. And part of that is a reality. I am a mum of young kids. I am, you know, a hormonal woman of a certain age and you know i go through cycles and that part of that is just real but there's kind of an underlying theme of not feeling the way that I did in my sort of 15 years experience as an entrepreneur and just wondering why that gap had become so big and you know that this sense of like I'd lost something somehow and I think a lot of people you know particularly if you're on that transition out of corporate and you've stepped out of that world and you're setting things up on your own I think people will really relate to what I'm saying here this feeling that you're You're somehow now on the outside looking in and like, has it been too long? Has the pause been too long? Can you get back the parts of that that really did work for you, even as you're shedding the elements that weren't right any longer? And it's, you know, it's a really destabilizing feeling, actually. And that's why I come back to knowing where your energy comes from. You know, my energy didn't fundamentally come from being the CEO and founder of that agency. I don't believe that your energy fundamentally comes from whatever job title it was that you've stepped away from or you're in the process of stepping away from. It's more fundamental than that. And what I realized is my energy doesn't happen digitally. My energy doesn't happen even though I enjoy it from creating content. My energy doesn't happen from online connections. I need to be in the room where it happens. That is where I come alive. And I, you know, there's an element for me and there always has been of performance. And I don't mean that in the kind of the fakery sense. I mean, in like that electric connection that happens in a performing. context like what happens between you and the audience what happens between you and the person that you're meeting what happens in a workshop with people sat around a table I am very much a people person it's what made me good at business when I very in the very very early days of me being introduced to business and learning about climate tech I had a lot of opportunity to sit in on meetings and observe. And I could read people. I knew exactly what the subtext was that was going on. I could see exactly what people wanted, even when they weren't saying it, what the power dynamics were. And I know how to hold that in a room. I know how to hold the energy in a room. And it all stems from my background in performance, I think. And you cannot recreate that digitally. Like, I love... coming on camera and speaking to people. I love, you know, holding workshops remotely. I, you know, I love speaking opportunities that happen online, but it isn't the same thing. It moves me a little bit closer, but it is not the same thing as being in the room. And this is what I learned for myself. If I'm going to build on this thing, this idea, I have to be in rooms with people. So what does that look like specifically and practically? It means I need to get my butt out of my beautiful studio at the bottom of my garden, which is my sanctuary. And I'm so grateful for it. I need to get out into the real world. I need to be going to networking events. I need to be prioritizing meeting people in person. I need to be willing to travel again. I need to be in rooms with people. And that has been the question I keep. asking myself, what is the next room? What room am I going to create? How do I get in front of people wherever possible and feel that electric connection of performance? So ask yourself that question. Where does your energy come from? It may well not look anything like mine. I wouldn't expect it to. But what are the situations that you can put yourself in where you really come alive. Because if you don't put yourself in that situation, you're asking yourself to do something like without the fuel that actually makes it possible. If you're in the wrong context, you're banging your head against a brick wall. And often we don't actually see what the problem is because we think it's that the idea isn't clearly articulated enough, or we haven't put enough structure around it, or we don't have the skill or the experience, and we're just in the wrong context and our energy. isn't flowing. It's so important that you find your energetic alignment that brings you alive. And if you don't know what that is, experiment, try different things, take notes and find the energy that is going to make it possible for you to make this happen. The second lesson is to borrow confidence if you need to. So I wouldn't say that my confidence was low. I naturally have a fairly high baseline of confidence. But as I said, I'm in a very different context from when I was founder and CEO. And, you know, my regular... month would look like traveling to Europe, you know, two or three times speaking at an event, hosting several client workshops, you know, being in a room with investors, having challenging conversations, developing strategy, like, I was kind of always somewhere in the middle, like somewhere towards the edge of my comfort zone, or actually less about comfort zone, my kind of growth zone I was always in a kind of growth mode I was always um doing things and um taking things on that helped me to grow. And that has not been the case to anything like the same degree in the recent years. I've been building something I feel passionately about. I've been building something that I can do really well. That's very much based on my skills and experience that I know I'm really good at. I know that my clients get really great results, but it's quite firmly in my comfort zone. And so the real challenge for me when it comes to confidence is Yes, I have a good baseline, but how do I get to that higher level of confidence? The kind of confidence that is going to give me the audacity to build something that I can't even fully articulate yet. And that is where you need your confidence to be at. And the challenge that I see with, I would say, almost every single client that I work with is that their confidence has taken a hit. Very often that is just a simple as, you know, they were in a role, they were in an organization, they had a title, they had a salary, they had a team and a brief that made them feel a certain way. And they made a conscious choice to step out of that for really good reasons. They know they're building something that matters, but trying to access the same level of confidence without all of those kind of trappings around it is really challenging. And as I've said before, you can't fake it. You can't make your, you can't force yourself to feel a confidence that isn't there, but you can borrow it. Like this is just my favorite. I think this is like my favorite work life hack is borrow, borrow your confidence. How do you do that? Surround yourself with people who believe in you. What did this look like for me? I knew I wanted to start quickly having conversations with people about this idea. And I knew that those first people that I was going to have the conversation with needed to be people who were on my side, people who believed me, who had backed me in the past. Not just people who were going to say, oh, wow, Alyssa, that sounds great. Not that level. You know, people who have always held a higher version of my identity than I did. I don't think I've articulated that quite the way I want to. People who see the growth version of me. People who see the best in me, people who see what I'm achieving, even when it isn't clear to me. The kind of people who, if I say, hey, I kind of had this crazy idea about this, they'll be like, surely you're already building it, right? Those kind of people. Those are the conversations that I lined up for myself this week. We go back to that newborn baby. It's like, who are the besties that you are going to invite around or the family where you're like, of course you can hold the baby like you I totally trust you to hold the baby I know that you love the baby I know that you love me like you're gonna do things the way that I want you to do them like thank you for holding my baby and and I also just like didn't give myself too much time to think about this I was just like hey something's going on for me can we talk about it like I tried to meet in person where I could and that is how you borrow confidence like you build your bench of people who believe in you. You build your bench of people who will challenge you to take the next step, challenge you to step into the next version of yourself. People who will take that idea, hold it, nurture it, and believe in it alongside you. It's an incredibly effective way of building your confidence. And now that I have those conversations lined up, I'm going to be far more empowered. as I start moving into the stage of having this conversation with people that I don't know and trust yet, which is definitely for me the next piece of the puzzle that I need to put into place. So find a way to borrow your confidence. And just to say, I think this is worth saying, if you really don't feel like you have those people around you, and I think this, that is common. Like if you're the only person, you know, that has stepped out of a corporate world and you're surrounded by people who think you should still be doing the sensible self, you know, safe route, don't understand why you're stepping out and trying to build something for yourself, like find communities. that you can be part of. Form connections online with people who are doing similar things. Make sure that your feed is full of people who are doing incredible things. That will lift you up. There are lots of different ways that you can build your confidence so that you can start building on that idea. Okay, the third lesson is that momentum matters. We need to do a lot less thinking I need, let's talk about me, Alyssa, I need to do a lot less thinking and a lot more doing. It is quite comfortable for me to do that work of, you know, getting the big piece of paper out, writing out all the ideas, starting to form the connections. And then, you know, and then I'm going to want to like dive into that and kind of work out all the iterations and all the implications. And it's so easy to get completely stuck in that ideation stage. And I see this a lot. I see people who have have been in that stage for years and they are waiting for the idea to be fully articulated and for them to feel so clear on it before they even have the first conversation with someone about it, before they take any step towards making it happen. I love to think of the work of Elizabeth Gilbert here. So Elizabeth Gilbert wrote a book about creativity called Big Magic. And in it, she talks about how she understands our relationship with creative ideas. So to her, creative ideas are kind of floating around, right? They're all around us. They surround us. And sometimes they kind of land on our shoulder and they're like, hey, like, I'm here. Are you interested? And they'll hang around maybe for a little while. You know, sometimes that's for a couple of days. Maybe that's a couple of months. Sometimes that's even for years or even decades. but eventually If you don't pay any attention to that idea, it's going to move on and it's going to find someone who will. So Elizabeth Gilbert talks about the importance of nurturing those ideas when they come to us and sort of receiving them and acting on them and creating around them. I said at the beginning, I am not going to let this idea go this time. And this is one of the absolute joys of my work. work with people who have had these ideas and held onto them. And for whatever reason, the idea keeps coming back to them. And their decision to work with me is the moment that they say, I'm going to take this idea seriously. I am paying attention. I am listening. I'm going to act on you. We are going to create this thing together. And it's just such a gift that I get to help people to do that. And how you do that is by getting to momentum. Action breeds confidence. Prevarication and procrastination and kind of self-exploration, like that will kill your creativity and it will undermine your confidence. Every little action that you take, it doesn't matter how tiny, builds your confidence, builds your energy, gets you into momentum. that is what has made the difference to me in these last few days. I have been fully in momentum. When I thought, who are the people I could have this conversation with? I didn't spend two days like writing a list and thinking it over and then wondering how I was going to email them. I literally picked up my phone while I was cooking dinner and I pressed on the voice note and I sent my voice note. And I'm sure this voice note sounded pretty unhinged. to the people who received them saying, I've had this idea and I trust you and I want to talk about it. And you know what? It took me, I'm not kidding, 10 minutes to leave those messages, hear back from those people and get those calls booked in this week. Like that moved me on so quickly. And then I knew that the next stage was how do I get in rooms with people that I don't have that relationship with? How do I start testing out this idea? with people I've never met and just seeing what the response is, seeing how it resonates. So instead of like sitting and thinking about that, I just picked three events. Like, again, within like 10 minutes, I picked three events, I booked for them, I'm going to worry later about exactly how I approach them, like what job title I show up with, what I'm going to wear, what my strategy is, like, they're booked, they're in the calendar, it is happening. Like, I'm already getting ready for phase two. If phase one is speaking to trusted people, I'm getting ready for phase two, which is speaking to new people. And every time something comes into my head, I'm just kind of forcing, actually, yes, I'm going to use the word forcing, forcing myself to take action on it instead of thinking about it, right? Instead of writing it down for later, instead of planning on it, I'm like, just act, make it messy. I made a website this morning around this idea. It took me from start to finish 25 minutes, like, but it exists, right? Is that website going to stay like that for the next six months, two years? Of course not. But it exists, right? Because you There was a reason for an event that I needed a website. And I thought, you know what? Let's just build it. Let's see how quickly we can build this. Like get it done. And as I said, all of those little actions that I'm taking are having an incredible impact on my energy and my confidence. And genuinely, I think I have achieved in two to three days what it could have taken me two to three months to do if I allowed myself to stay in the... thinking stage, if I allowed this to kind of say somewhere on the sidelines, like I'll get to it later, you know, I'll make some notes, I'll come back and think about it. Get yourself in action, like momentum matters, forward moving energy all the time. Just take the next action, let it be messy, let it be scrappery. This is how you make things happen. Lesson four, trust joy. Okay, this is a little bit of a wild card lesson, but I really wanted to include it in my personal mix and in the mix for you as well. It's been a while since I have talked about joy. Joy is not often something that we talk about when it comes to kind of career navigation and business building, but it's so essential. And my whole journey with coaching started with joy I trained with someone called Martha Beck who teaches people to follow joy as an unlock to creativity and as a way of doing exactly what we're talking about here building when you don't know what the destination is when when all you know is that what you have right now is not working or it's not enough she teaches how to follow joy as your north star to navigate. to where you need to be and trust that it is there waiting and that you can make that journey. And for me, joy is so important because if we strip out the joy part and we are building something that matters, an idea, a project, a business, a new career, whatever it is, if we do it without joy, what I think happens is that we recreate eight. the same system that we stepped outside of. We build a slightly more personalised version of the same thing. And we allow things to come with us that were the very reason we left. Like, you know, like overworking, like attaching our value to our productivity, like doing things because we should, doing things because they make sense on paper, like following paths that somebody else has laid out for us. joy is what allows whatever it is that we're building to be truly new and to be true to who we are. And, you know, even if none of that makes sense to you, like if you don't enjoy the journey, like you will not stick on that path for long enough. I built a business previously over the course of, actually, the company just turned 16. I think it's actually today, which is incredible, right? I built a 16 year old company. I have a teenager. And I had no idea when I started out that it was going to, so it took me, I would say, let's just put some numbers in about 10 years to build like a really successful European wide, resilient, stable, well-recognized business. And I exited the business at about 13. years. Right at the beginning, I'm fairly sure there was a business plan somewhere that had all of that happening within the course of three years. What can I say? I was 25 and I had the naivety of youth on my side. I had no idea how long that journey was going to be. But you know what? Like the length of the journey was in no way a problem because I loved it. Like, of course it was challenging. Of course there were times when it was really hard. Yes, I shouldered a whole lot of responsibility, but I loved building Life Size because we made it fun, right? Because we had a really good time doing it. And right from the beginning, like we made that. a priority. Like we, you know, we held wild parties with like mad themes and invited everybody from the climate tech world. And people came and had experiences that they weren't having anywhere else. Like we, you know, we went out and, you know, had evenings out with people. We made a kind of, we made a club of really interesting people, a kind of supper club of really interesting people at one point. Like if we were going to do something, we'd make it fun. If we had an idea, we'd make like a big, you know, thing on the wall with like post-its and stickers and like we I don't know everything that we did we would find the joy in it right and that is what sustained us that is what sustained me that is what allowed me to like stay the course through all of the challenges and just keep in growth mode with that business until it became a real success until it got to the point where I realized I was in a position where I could. think about exiting that business and I sold it to my team and the joy carries on. So there is no point, I believe, in you going on this self-directed journey of you building something that matters to you if you are not going to enjoy it on a daily basis. So trust the joy. And like, what on earth does that look like? Okay, well, I've given you some examples of what that looked like in the company that I built. But you might be nowhere near thinking about building a company and hosting kind of sector wide parties. It can be tiny things like buy the fresh flowers and put them in your office. Like, you know, wear the outfit that makes you feel great when you go to the networking event, like take 20 minutes in your morning to make yourself a beautiful breakfast. Like it can be so small it can apply at whatever stage of building that you are at, trust joy. It will feed you. It will make all the difference and it will sustain you over the long term. And you know what? When people build things that matter, often they're building them not for like the two to three years that I thought as a 25 year old, and maybe not even for the 16 years of me building life size. They're building things that are going to be with them for decades to come and serve them well into older age. And that is. magical and joy is how you make that happen. All right, we have come to the final lessons. We started, you know, we started with energy, we've moved through confidence, we've talked about momentum, we've talked about joy and now I'm going to share a kind of, I'm going to share a truth with you. I'm going to tell you something that I believe from the bottom of my toes to the top of my head and I want you to believe it. too. The answers are already in you. I know what it feels like because I felt it when I woke up the other morning when you think, I don't know how to do this. People, I have conversations with people all the time who say, you know, I really want to leave corporate. I've been thinking about it for years, but I don't know what I would do. Or, you know, I've had this idea. I, you know, I keep thinking about it. keep learning about it, but I just don't know how to make it happen. Like, I don't know what's next. I don't know what the steps are. I don't know how to do this. I don't know what it looks like. And what I want you to hear from this today, if you hear nothing else from this podcast, is that you do know. The answer is already in you. And you don't find it by thinking harder. You find it by beginning. Just pick up the pen and put some words on the paper. That is how this started for me. I don't remember what night it was. It was maybe Friday night. I think it was Friday night. That is how it started for me. I picked up a pen, like instead of going, oh, okay, this idea is coming. And I'm, you know, really sitting with this feeling and I kind of know there's something more. I know there's something more, what is it, Alyssa? Write it down. And I'm... I need you to understand, as I picked up that pen and I took the lid off the pen and I put it to paper, I did not know what I was going to write. I did not know what the words were that were going to come out of me. But they came. Were they like beautifully articulated? Did it flow coherently? Did it like immediately make structured sense? Of course not. But something materialized on the paper in front of me. And I thought like, holy shit, yes, like that is that's. the direction. That is the thing that I want to build. So when I say the answers are in you, they're there, but they're buried under fear. They're buried under limiting beliefs. You know, they're buried under habituated patterns, but you can break through all of that if you just allow yourself to begin. Pick up the pen, write things down, get your fingers out, start typing, open your mouth and say something. to someone. It sounds terrifying. I know. I was scared coming on to record this podcast today because I have a really short, much, much shorter outline than I usually do, just the five lessons, but I just trusted that this was in me and I needed and wanted to talk about it. And I started talking about it and like we're 37 minutes in and I have, you know, I haven't looked back. I haven't felt lost once. Like I'm going to meet. those trusted people this week and I'm just going to start talking. When I left in the voice notes, I just started talking. When I go to these events, I'm just going to start having the conversation with people. Trust that the answer is in you. If you can believe that, everything else becomes possible. And you know what else? It gives you permission to stop looking outside. It gives you permission to stop comparing, to stop feeling like you need to learn. everything and believe me I went through this thing myself this weekend of like okay so maybe I just need to do like a master's in regenerative economics no no I don't like would that be interesting yes like would I learn from that of course I would do I need to do that to build this thing no I just need to start building like you just need to start the answers are in you and if you can find the courage to begin, they will come out of you. it will take shape. I absolutely promise you. Okay, let's do a quick recap on the five lessons. Know where your energy comes from and do more of that. Borrow your confidence if you have to by surrounding yourself with people, whether that's, you know, real people or online or new communities who believe in you and who call you to your higher self. Remember that momentum matters possibly more than anything else. Do much less thinking, much more doing, and remember that action breeds confidence. Trust joy. Joy is what keeps you on the journey. And remember more than anything else that the answer is already in you if you can find the courage to begin. Okay. I have really enjoyed this episode. You can probably tell I am in a good place today. I'm going on a journey and I'm going to bring you with me. I am going to share what this looks like as I keep this momentum going and I start turning this idea into a reality. And I want you to do the same for that idea that will not leave you alone. all else fails, just do something. Anything. I really mean it. Anything. And if you decide on a next step, but it just feels too big, too overwhelming, it fries your nervous system, make it smaller. Make it smaller until it feels completely manageable, then do that thing. Then you move on to the next chunk and the next until you've done the big thing. I... once ran a marathon. It's actually one of my proudest achievements. And I did this because when I met my husband, he was doing lots of long distance running. And I was like, you know what, if we want to spend time together, I'm probably going to have to get into running. And, you know, when I started running with him, I honestly, like, I was not a sporty person. I had not done any running at all. Like I couldn't run more than a few hundred meters without being out of breath. and he helped me to get to the stage where I ran a marathon, which is an incredible achievement for me. And it was really, really hard, really hard along the way. The run that always stays with me is the first time that I ran 18 miles. And it was cold and it was wet. And we were running around the suburbs of Nottingham. And, you know, there was nothing like there was nothing enjoyable to like, there's no sun on my face. There was no kind of beautiful landscape to look at. It was just running. and as we got towards... 18 miles, I just started crying. I felt so sorry for myself and I so wanted to quit and I was so miserable. And my husband said to me, all you have to do is put one foot in front of the other. And from then on, any time I was running, I just reminded myself that all I had to do was put one foot in front to the other. And if I asked myself the question, can I put my next foot down? The answer was always yes. I could always take one more step. And step by step is how you complete a marathon. So go out there and start building. 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.
