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Sometimes the noise inside your head gets too loud. There are too many things competing for your attention. It gets hard to move from where you are to where you're going. You feel stuck. You feel indecisive.

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A critical point in my career was when I discovered I was no longer energized by the work I was doing. I could not drum up the passion to do what was necessary. The conflict and the tension was growing and I had another choice to make Do I continue with what is familiar in HR or do I leap into an adventure I never dreamed I'd take, into entrepreneurship? It is likely no surprise to my listeners. I took the leap. The greatest challenge wasn't actually the leap, it was how to land. That's the short story. Hi, I'm Becky Fraser, an award-winning coach, author and entrepreneur. I'm also a leader shaped by decades of experience inviting others on a journey towards adaptable leadership and fulfilled potential. Welcome to Short Story Long.

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In this podcast, I share stories of inflection points in my life that changed who I am, what I do and how I do it. I know some people do not think of their existence through the lens of physics. However, comma, I think the laws of physics line up quite nicely with leadership principles. Maybe that's just me, but I'm going to pitch it to you. There's this guy. Maybe you know him. His name is Isaac Newton and he had some thoughts on physics. His second law of physics states no, no, stay with me now. His second law of physics states that two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time. Waves can occupy the same space at the same time and they interfere with one another. That's right. That's what was happening for me in my career Interference. I had objects pressing on each other and waves causing all sorts of chaos within me. I'm not going to lie, it was an unsettling and unfamiliar experience. I'd been in HR for quite some time and that was one object in my universe. Then I started cultivating what I might call a coaching object. It seemed that they could coexist until I realized one had to move out of the way for the other to survive. Earlier I told you the short story, and this is the long version. So listening there's a difference between hearing and listening.

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For me, it was time to listen to the voice that was singing inside me. I was ready to take a leap into something new, yet I wasn't sure what that was going to be. Yet again, I faced an important question, an inflection point, if you will. It was becoming clear for me that to feel good, I needed to release the things that didn't feel amazing. I knew I couldn't stay on the path I was on, even though it had treated me pretty well. It just wasn't fulfilling me anymore. I needed to release one object in my life in order to make room for a new object. At that time in my life I could not hold both at the same time. There wasn't space for that. You see, I was following two parallel tracks One with a 9 to 12-month coach training program while I was also working full-time in HR. My goal had really been to use some of the learning from the training to affect my energy in the HR role and to make me a stronger and fuller HR professional. Yeah, that kind of came with mixed results. I couldn't find the best way for that piece that was me to fit into that puzzle, for that piece that was me to fit into that puzzle. My inflection point arrived in a you-can't-miss-this-Becky sort of way. I was attending my third and final weekend event for the coach training program. It was a small but mighty group of future coaches. I think there were about eight of us in that particular group.

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The HR and coaching objects revealed themselves First the day that I was supposed to return from that coach training weekend. I needed to do some communications for a layoff action. The idea of that was a gut punch, an action I'd never wanted to take again. What the organization needed wasn't what I did best or what I wanted to do within HR. Still it offered security and familiarity. The second object I had was this feeling of increasing confidence and connection with the coaching process. I loved wrapping myself in the experience of someone else and helping them reveal more of the potential and fulfillment inside themselves. It was a risky step for me to go deeper into that, even if it was a heartwarming path forward. So the dilemma, the pros and the cons of the situation were not helping me make a decision at all. I wanted something from each side. The HR object was crashing with the growing coaching object. One had to move in order to have space for the other.

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I was having a hard time enjoying the powerful weekend when I had this cloud hanging over my head. So what did I do? I brought it to a peer coaching conversation within the training. That coaching session opened my heart and mind to things I just not considered. I'd never seen myself as an entrepreneur. Even when asked if I ever thought about HR consulting, I had always responded by saying oh no, that's not me, I would never do something like that. Not me, I would never do something like that. Suddenly, I had a thought I could start a coaching practice Somehow. For some reason, that actually felt a little bit different to me.

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I returned home after that weekend. I completed the layoff conversations, left a little bit of my soul on the floor when I was doing it and promptly spoke to my husband Once more. He hears hey, honey, I have an idea. Once more, he says if that's what you want to do, you should. Wow, now I might have to do it. By the end of that month of January, I had completed my articles of incorporation and opened up my company.

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I continued to be working full-time, trying to sort out, thinking about how can I get this started, but I needed to take that first step in order to maintain that commitment to that direction that I had chosen. I also, during that time, finished my coach training program and became a certified professional coach at that point in time, so three months later, I made the decision. I approached my CEO and I let him know that I was looking at the landscape in front of us all and that it was going to be really time for me to leave. I knew that in the near future there wasn't a place for me and I was just going to quietly exit stage right. And we worked out a temporary kind of fix with myself, my boss and whomever else might have been in that conversation myself, my boss and whomever else might have been in that conversation. I worked part-time for an additional three months. I worked for them a couple of days. I worked for me a couple of days. Ultimately and finally, I had my professional independence day in July of that year and went full-time into coaching. If only that was all it took. I'm going to hang a shingle. Everybody's just going to stop on by, except it doesn't work that way.

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I still needed to find out who I was as a coach. Who do I coach, what do I want to talk about? And that's just the coaching side. On the business side, I needed to set up all the systems, the processes. I was used to having organizational protocols. Now, let's all remember I'm not very good at liking those protocols and I regularly resisted them. And yet now, all of a sudden, I'm thinking, oh yeah, okay, I kind of see the value in having them and now it's on me to create the ones that I needed. So the only one to face when things didn't go well was taking a look into a mirror. Some days, all I could do was shake my head, laugh and try again. I mean, what else is there to do? Determining who I wanted to coach took some experimentation.

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Many would call this building a persona. I progressively built the persona that I now refer to as the introverted skeptic. Who's that? Well, let's break it down a little bit. The introverts they identify with statements like I'm not this reserved, antisocial, misanthropic type of person, or I'm more of an internal thinker, kind of puzzling through and having internal conversations versus needing to have that external validation or response from others. As an introvert, it's not that you can't engage with people. Often introverts are very social. It's that you prefer to do it in ways to maximize your energy spent. Spending time with hundreds of people in small talk is less appealing than spending some quiet time together with someone or a small group. You're comfortable with yourself and don't need, or sometimes want, other people around Skeptics.

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They might recognize statements like I'm a questioner, I am always wanting to know why. I'm always wanting to dig deeper to understand things, or I'm highly skeptical in those situations where I've seen evidence not to trust. Once I build trust, I can accept more at face value, but probably with a little digging too. As a skeptic, you may find yourself evaluating the expertise or the diligence of research that someone else has done. You're testing and pushing against what doesn't inherently line up based on your own personal experience or your expertise.

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When those two things become combined, they're an introverted skeptic. They enjoy taking the time to evaluate a problem, solution or idea from multiple perspectives alone. So they do that by themselves and sometimes maybe with a small or trusted group. They don't necessarily believe that you will accept or respond well to their questions, so they're not going to use their energy to ask them. Why bother asking if they're not going to get a positive response? It's also stressful for them to make decisions or take action when they don't feel there's enough clarity. How can we move forward when we don't really have a clear plan and we don't know what we're trying to achieve? We don't know success until we define what that is. Maybe that describes you and maybe it doesn't.

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Naturally, I've coached those who do not match that, but it is my most common client and, yes, they have other characteristics that are uniquely them For me. That's where the puzzle gets fun. I'm not the only person to move from corporate and become an entrepreneur. So what Now? What? What did I learn along the way? Well, that decision to make the leap right. So it's well established now that I take leaps. I trust myself to figure it out, even if it doesn't go as I expected.

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I had to see myself in a different way. Becky, the HR person, wasn't creating a coaching practice. Becky the coach, who had done HR for 15 or more years, was creating a coaching practice. So, becky the coach, I chose for her to be a deep listener, a curious partner. I've described it to my clients as learning how to float. I'm standing beside them with my hands below them, kind of in the water, deep below where they're floating. If they start to sink a little, I encourage them to reclaim that floating position. If they keep sinking, I'm a support that guides them toward the surface. Then they find what they need to keep trying HR Becky yeah, she still shows up. She always was a lot. If you are, or have been, a client of mine, you may have heard me say hey. So HR Becky just popped into the room. I'll drop this bit of insight to discuss with your HR person, so it's out of my head and into your hands. However you want to or not use it.

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When choosing a path to follow, you have to be clear about who you are and how you want to be perceived. I have different parts of who I am, but I had to parse it all out and choose my identity. I didn't want to be the HR person anymore, but I respect the role and the hard work it requires. I wanted to be a partner and an ally when engaged by an organization, not a competitor or dismissive of HR's value. They offer what I cannot, and that needed to be clear. Also, I had to stick the landing after the leap. Yes, that's another law of physics, but I'll save you from that one.

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How was I going to show up as an entrepreneur? I don't know. It was really time to shed the shoulds. I should be making a certain amount of revenue. That was beyond the plan. Nope, I should be on all the social media platforms. Nope, I should be out at every conference and networking event. Again, nope, all the ads telling me I should be making seven figures within 90 days. I say nay, nay, I didn't even want any of that, but the pressure was still there.

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Applied by who? Yeah, applied by me. What did I learn to do? I learned to spend time in places where people were interesting to me. That was a big step.

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It's possible that I'm allergic to some conferences and I have come to learn that it's not true of all of them. Go where you feel a belonging and build out from there. I deepened relationships with those who valued me being me and not trying to mimic some other person's style. I'm not that great of an actor. Yes, it makes sense to have financial goals and do the work so people know who you are and what you offer. My point is simply that, whether you do that for your own business or support an organization, in doing that you have to be you, no matter your role. You choose how you are going to show up. Are you going to own the role or is it going to own you? Do you choose from the menu of others or do you design your own? There are advantages and disadvantages to those choices. You have to decide what allows you to sleep at night and wake up valuing yourself. If you are not, that may be your inflection point. Something big happens when you get selective and find a pressure release. I can tell you.

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For me, two objects were no longer trying to occupy the same space. At the same time, I'd started finding strategies for sorting things into objects that had some separation, with a bump every now and then. As my mentor coach once told me, and I paraphrase Becky, you have one foot on the dock and one foot in the boat. You need to decide which foot are you going to move, because the tide is coming in. I use that image with my coaching clients regularly.

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I was learning how to recognize when I was acting as me instead of performing for others. I knew the masks I would often wear and made the challenging decisions to lead as me. It turned out that leading as me was empowering and authentic. I began encouraging others to find that release valve for themselves. It will be a different experience for everyone, but isn't that exactly the point? Only you can be you For me. I took my foot off the dock and committed to taking the boat wherever it would lead me. Admittedly, some other factors came into play. As you might expect, that's another story. Thank you for listening to my story. My hope is that you will get insights for leading as you. If you know someone who would benefit from this episode, be sure to share it. Interested in connecting with me on LinkedIn, drop me a note telling me where you found me. The link will be in the show notes. Okay, bye.