How to Be Successful Without Giving Your Whole Life to Your Career | EP404 - It's Your Time | Lyssna här

You can be ambitious, successful, and well paid without giving your whole life to your career. In this solo episode, Michelle A. Bourque talks about how work became the center of the calendar for so many high-performing women, and a better question to start with.

If you're good at what you do, you care about your work, and you like succeeding, this one is for you. Michelle isn't here to talk you out of any of it. She's asking who decided your career gets the whole table.

She starts with a funny story about putting dinner in the wrong car, then gets into something she's been seeing people talk about on LinkedIn: performance, success, and what happens when work is the thing everything else fits around.

Think about your week. You know when your meetings are and what your customers, your boss, and your team need. Where does the workout go? Lunch with a friend? The doctor's appointment? Work goes on the calendar first, and everything else gets what's left.

This isn't only a time management problem. It's more of a "what do I believe success requires from me?" problem. Overworking can work, which is why it sticks. So the question becomes: not "do I want to stop being successful?" but "do I want to keep being successful this way?"

In this episode

Why work becomes the center of the calendar
The beliefs behind it: if I'm available, I'm valuable; if I take care of it myself, it gets done right
Why "after this quarter" never arrives in sales and medical device
Becoming very successful at a life you never consciously chose
Choosing to work hard because it matters vs. working harder automatically to prove your value
A different question to start with: what do I want my life to look like, and how do I want my career to fit into it?

Timestamps (estimated)

00:00 The Jersey Mike's story 02:45 Success without giving your whole life to your career 04:00 When did work become the center of everything? 06:15 Not a time management problem 09:00 "After this quarter" and the scoreboard that resets 12:30 Becoming successful at a life you never consciously chose 16:30 You can want an extraordinary career and an extraordinary life 19:15 A different question to start with 22:00 Imagine this 25:30 What Performance Rewritten means, and one question for the next 5 to 10 years

Questions to sit with this week

Where am I automatically saying yes?
What am I carrying that isn't mine?
If I believed I could be wildly successful without giving my whole life to my career, what would I start doing differently?

If this one made you think of a friend, send it to her. And if you enjoy the show, a rating and review on Apple Podcasts helps other women find it.