491: Ex Google Executive, Megan Hellerer, on Living a Fulfilled Life
Oct 14, 2024
auto_awesome
Megan Hellerer, a former Google executive turned career coach, shares her profound journey from success to fulfillment. After realizing her high-pressure role was misaligned with her true self, she emphasizes the importance of listening to one's inner voice. Her insights on building a coaching practice highlight how to find the right clients and address their common struggles. Megan challenges the traditional notion of purpose, advocating for a fluid approach to fulfillment that prioritizes curiosity and adaptability.
Megan Hellerer emphasizes the significance of aligning career choices with personal values to evade feelings of dissatisfaction and disconnection.
She advocates for recognizing and trusting one's intuition as a crucial guide in navigating career paths and decisions effectively.
Megan highlights the adaptive concept of directional living, allowing individuals to explore their interests rather than fixating on predetermined outcomes for fulfillment.
Deep dives
The Journey of Under-Fulfilled Overachievers
Megan Hallerer identifies herself and others as under-fulfilled overachievers, a term that encapsulates individuals who excel academically and professionally yet find themselves questioning their life's purpose and experiencing dissatisfaction. After achieving success at Google, she faced significant mental health challenges, including depression and panic attacks, which forced her to reconsider her career path. This realization led her to a coaching class, where she discovered a connection to her own experiences while helping others to find fulfillment. She emphasizes the importance of understanding one's own needs and aligning career decisions with personal values to avoid a path of misery and disconnect.
Recognizing Internal Navigation Systems
Megan discusses the critical importance of recognizing one's internal navigation system, or intuition, as a guide in navigating career paths. This involves tuning into feelings of warmth or coldness associated with decisions, rather than relying solely on logical processes or societal expectations. She introduces the concept of the 'fulfillment ache,' a sensation that arises from a disparity between one’s true self and the path being pursued. Encouraging listeners to explore their own internal signals, she highlights that recognizing and acting on these feelings early can help prevent future crises.
The 'Not This' Experiment
After leaving Google, Megan committed to an intentional six-month period where she would not seek new employment but instead use the time to explore her passions and desires. She refers to this as her 'not this' experiment, during which she reflected on what did not bring her fulfillment and gradually discovered what did. This period of experimentation fostered an environment for trial and error, allowing her to learn from each experience without the pressure of an immediate outcome. By prioritizing this exploratory phase, she was able to start her coaching practice grounded in authenticity and passion.
Direction Over Destination
Megan discusses the shift from traditional destinational thinking, which focuses on reaching specific outcomes, to a more fluid concept of directional living that allows for adaptability and discovery along the journey. This approach emphasizes that one does not need to have a fixed purpose; instead, they need to allow their interests and curiosity to guide their path. Using the analogy of driving at night, she explains that it's enough to see just a few steps ahead rather than the entire journey. This shift enables individuals to remain open to new opportunities and adapt to changes without feeling lost or pressured by rigid expectations.
The Importance of Willingness and Open-Mindedness
In working with clients, Megan identifies key characteristics that lead to effective growth: willingness, open-mindedness, and a sense of humor. These traits help clients embrace the transformative processes of coaching and life changes while cultivating a mindset that is adaptable to new ideas and experiences. She stresses that clients often come to her with a desire for quick results, but fostering patience and trust in the lengthy development process is crucial for sustainable change. Megan encourages individuals to approach their journeys with curiosity and flexibility, recognizing that change is an ongoing and evolving process.
Welcome to Strategy Skills episode 491, an interview with the author Directional Living: A Transformational Guide to Fulfillment in Work and Life, Megan Hellerer.
In this episode, Megan shares her experience as an executive at Google and how she realized the misalignment in her career path, which led to physical and mental health issues. She also discusses how she navigated through it by listening to her inner voice and experimenting with new paths. Additionally, Megan explains how she built her coaching practice, how to find clients that are a good fit for you, the common issues clients face, and how to help them solve those issues.
Megan Hellerer is a career coach and the founder of Coaching for Underfulfilled Overachievers. She has led hundreds of women, including Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to transform their lives by transforming their careers. After checking all the traditional boxes of success—graduating at the top of her class from Stanford University and spending eight years as a Google executive—and still deeply unhappy, she quit her great-on-paper job with no plan. Now her mission is to provide others with the support and guidance that she needed when she herself was struggling. Megan has been featured in New York, Vogue, The Wall Street Journal, CNBC, and The Times. She lives with her husband and daughter in the Hudson Valley, New York.
Get Megan’s book here: https://shorturl.at/Icv8wDirectional Living: A Transformational Guide to Fulfillment in Work and Life