Non-Linear Careers, Genuine Success | Releasing the Shoulds

Career resilience isn't about following the script, t's about releasing the shoulds. Taylor Elyse Morrison  shares how rejecting societal expectations became her breakthrough to authentic success. In this conversation, we explore non-linear careers, the power of community in navigating transitions, and why your unconventional path might be your greatest strength. Discover how self-discovery and vulnerability reshape what resilience really means.

MUSIC (used with permission)
WOMAN Performed by Tiffany Villarreal - Pod artwork by Amanda Eich

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Speaking of Phenomenal is created and produced by Amy Boyle. Podcast artwork by Amanda Eich. "Woman" by Tiffany Villarreal, used with permission. Be sure to subscribe, rate, and review and share the podcast, and stay tuned for more inspiring conversations. Support the show with on Patreon.

Transcript

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Amy Boyle (amyboylephoto) (00:00)

Welcome to the Speaking of Phenomenal podcast, Taylor. I'm so glad you're here.

Taylor Elyse Morrison (00:05)

I'm so glad to be here. Thanks for having me, Amy.

Amy Boyle (amyboylephoto) (00:08)

You know, we're gonna be talking about so much today, but before we get started, I'd love to know how you're introducing your phenomenal self these days.

Taylor Elyse Morrison (00:18)

That's a great question. And honestly, that changes almost every day. Today, the way that I'm introducing myself is as a portfolio careerist who works really in personal and professional development, helping people and organizations bridge the knowing and doing gap.

Amy Boyle (amyboylephoto) (00:38)

And when it comes to being a portfolio careerist, how did you arrive at that identity? Let's dive a little bit deeper on that because I'm very curious about that as a title.

Taylor Elyse Morrison (00:51)

I was first introduced to the concept of portfolio career several years ago. And when I look back at my career, it's always been a portfolio career, which I will define and explain in just a second, but it's really only in the past few years that I started owning that identity for myself.

So a portfolio career essentially means that you have simultaneous endeavors that are ways that you make money and or produce work in the world. So when I look at my portfolio career right now, it includes being a PhD student, studying change leadership, being a co-founder of Women Facilitating, being a coach, being a facilitator and

A couple other things I'm probably forgetting. have a lot on my portfolio plate. And for a long time, I felt like I was doing multiple things until I could find that one thing that defined me. And then over time I realized, no, I'm always going to be doing multiple things. That's a feature, not a bug. And that's when I started owning, having a portfolio career.

Amy Boyle (amyboylephoto) (02:06)

We often talk on this podcast, about nonlinear careers as well.

How have you come to learn to own your portfolio career? And what kind of advice would you give anybody in this space that is just kind of wrestling with the idea of waking up one day and going, oh yeah, this is what I do and that's 100 % okay. And it is a feature, not a bug.

Taylor Elyse Morrison (02:32)

Yeah, that's a great question and a question that I wish I would have heard people answering sooner. I think first I want to tease out because there's a lot of terms that get overlapped. You can have a nonlinear career and still have a pretty traditional career. So like one of my friends who was texting me yesterday started her career, did decades in HR, eventually got all the way up to like Chief Human Resources Officer and then

made a career pivot into doing therapy. And that's like a nonlinear path that she's now taking, but still she only is doing therapy and before she was only doing human resources. You can also have a portfolio career where you're like pretty steadily doing multiple things. So nonlinear and portfolio career can overlap. And I would say for me, I have some steady state things like I've been coaching and facilitating for

a while at this point. And there are things like my PhD is a new divergent nonlinear path. So I just want to tease that out because I don't want people to think that they can't own a portfolio career or they can't own nonlinear because they don't feel the same. It's like a Venn diagram that overlaps, but not quite a circle. In terms of waking up and owning that your career looks different, I just want to tell you

that I get to talk with so many people, so many leaders in my capacity as a facilitator and a coach. And the number of times people ask me, is this normal? Am I weird for wanting this? Is like all of these things, there's something about the relationship that I get to have with people where they're opening up on the things that they would otherwise keep beneath the surface. So.

The first thing I want you to know is that you're not the only one who feels this way, is considering taking a different path or is taking a different path and maybe looks outwardly really confident, but internally you're wondering if you're making a mistake for not choosing one thing. You are absolutely not alone in that. Other things that I consider is just we spend so much of our lives working. And if you're going to spend that significant amount of time working,

You need to do it in a way that works for your brain in the long, in the short term. And I guess not just your brain, but also your goals, your values, what fulfills you and challenges you. So when I released a lot of the shoulds, I should have one thing. I should follow this like steady career ladder and started acknowledging.

This is the way my brain works. Also, these are the things that are important to me in my career. I remember pretty early on in my career when I was working at a Fortune 100, looking at the directors and VPs and having to see them work on a holiday weekend to scramble to get something done. And I was like, ⁓ I'm supposed to be aspiring to be that in 15, 20 years. That doesn't sound appealing to me.

And when I could name, ⁓ that's not a prize I want to win. I could start chasing after the things that I want. So it's a lot of naming and owning what it is that success feels like to you and reminding yourself of that, maybe surrounding yourself with people who can remind you of that because society's programming of what a career quote should look like can be really, really loud.

Amy Boyle (amyboylephoto) (06:14)

This sounds like, these components that are part of your inner workout that you created?

Taylor Elyse Morrison (06:20)

Inner workout, speaking of like non-linearity, I spent five years of my career building a body of work called inner workout. I had at one point, a mobile app, a book that was published with Chronicle, all kinds of speaking, over a hundred episodes of a podcast, five years of doing a newsletter almost every week. And so I got to do a lot of work and

build ways of thinking about inner work and self care to support people in their wellbeing. So some of those things on creating your own definition of success, internal validation definitely fall into the inner work piece and the inner work in the inner work out piece. So it's related and not exactly the same thing. I'm coming off of...

talking about that and having that be kind of what I led with for five years. And now I'm really leaning into, yeah, that's something I did and it's not the only thing that I do. So you're catching me at this year has really been a point of transition.

Amy Boyle (amyboylephoto) (07:25)

We all need that transition time to be, we are not only what we have done in the past, we are able to do more things and to be bigger than what we were and more of what we are.

How would you help people shift, ways of thinking about the shoulds and the planning and the ideas of.

even simple goal making for yourself and we're going talk a fair amount about burnout and we'll go there next.

Taylor Elyse Morrison (07:50)

Yeah, I think, I mean, there's so much to say there that those mindsets are really pervasive. think when I, whether I'm talking with people about career or whether I'm talking about self care with people, those should pop up. So with career, I gave the example of like, I should be following a ladder. I should have a really linear progression. I should just have

one thing that I'm doing. And when I align myself to that, it creates these conditions where I'm critiquing myself all the time. And I'm not actually giving myself the support that I need. I'm berating myself because I don't fit into this paradigm that someone else has created. When I think about self-care and the definition that I use for self-care is listening within

and responding in the most loving way possible. When I think about self-care, there is

There's multiple shoulds that come up. I hear people saying, I should spend a lot of time on self care for it to count, or I should be doing the trendiest thing that I'm seeing on Instagram or on Substack that people are talking about in order for it to be valid, or I should be spending a lot of money for the self care to be worthwhile.

So there's all of these shoulds. And again, similar to the conversation around career, what they end up doing is getting in between us doing what we know to be good for us in any measure. Like if I say, well, my self care only counts if I move my body for 30 minutes, but today I only have five minutes. There's plenty that you can do in five minutes. You can stretch, you can dance to a song, you can do...

Like calisthenics, there's so many things that you could do, but if I'm in that binary, I should be doing 30 minutes. So anything less than that doesn't count. I miss out on opportunities to support myself. And it gets me really fired up and sad when I think about the way that should gets in between us and what we actually want.

Amy Boyle (amyboylephoto) (10:12)

It's unfortunate, right? That, all that goodness, that if you just celebrated that five minutes, how much further we would be that it wouldn't be about the 25 that you didn't do for whatever, arbitrary, milestone that we didn't need to necessarily do for whatever reason, it was just a mere fact of doing and

being present or literally, taking the break from whatever it was to recalibrate, to breathe, to stop, to smile, to whatever it was to close your eyes.

You're in this PhD program. It's a lot of work. How are you coping? Let's talk.

Taylor Elyse Morrison (10:54)

when I wrote about burnout in my book, one of the things that came to mind is I was even before I went to my PhD, I just love looking at the research and seeing what other people have said, where terms originate from. And when you look at the conversation around burnout, it started with research around caregivers, like

people who were working in daycares or nurses or those types of things. And the burnout came from, again, the care that was required of them in their role. Sometimes when I hear people talking about burnout, I hear people kind of jumping to some of the symptoms or the results of burnout as if that is the sign of burnout. What I mean by that is when we are burned out,

then we can start to disengage or be exhausted. But oftentimes we reach that point because we care so much. So I actually have to watch myself because like right now, before this, for example, I'm submitting my first paper for academic publication or to be considered for academic publication. And I'm having the best time putting all of this together, building this conceptual model.

that I have to watch myself because when I'm doing this, I can neglect making sure that I've eaten. And I'll be honest, it's 1056 right now. Have I eaten this morning? No, I have not eaten this morning. So that's me not practicing what I preach. I also have ADHD. So there are other factors that I have to consider when it comes to making sure I remember to feed myself. But again, it's not that I'm dreading writing this paper.

It's that I enjoy it so much that I can lose sight of the other things that I need to do. Same thing for people who like really enjoy certain roles they have, whether that is your role of being a parent or your role of whatever your job title is. Caring a lot can actually predispose you in my opinion to burning out. And I think that's something that we miss sometimes. So.

When I care about something, I'm like, I got to protect myself so that I can continue to show up to that thing in the way that I would like to.

I like to call that out because I think people will just assume, well, like, I can't be burned out because I'm not caring about my job right now. And then there are the more obvious things, like when you do have a lot of on your plate and you feel really viscerally that pull between multiple things, it's a little easier to notice that you're burning out. And still, I really recommend that people name what burnout feels like for them.

And I like to think of almost like a stoplight and where am I at when I'm in like the green zone, all systems go, how am I feeling? How am I showing up to my work and my people? And then like a yellow light where there are some warning signs. So for me, it could be like, okay, I've had multiple mornings this week where I didn't move my body, which is really important to me and helping me focus and also just feel good. Or multiple days where I'm not.

eating breakfast because I'm going straight into the zone. So those are my warning signs. For you, your warning signs might be like, I notice I'm snapping at people a little bit more, or I notice I'm being a little bit more withdrawn in meetings when normally I contribute. And hopefully you can get really aware of that yellow zone so that you don't hit your red zone, which is when you're like, absolutely, I do not have capacity. I have to take things off of my plate.

So, so much of burnout prevention is really just building a lot of self-awareness and then being able to shift and mitigate as needed. That's why I love the definition of self-care. Obviously I'm biased, but the definition of self-care that I use of listening within and responding in the most loving way possible, because it really positions this as like a conversation that you're having with yourself. And on a green light day,

The thing that you need, the loving response is going to be different than on a yellow light or a red light day. And also it's rare that like one day is one thing. It could be in the morning, you're feeling green light and then by noon it's a yellow light and you have to reassess. So that self-awareness and responsiveness is so important.

Amy Boyle (amyboylephoto) (15:38)

I like the idea of the fact that, yes, of course, that it's rare that one day is any one, you know, red, yellow or green. It's not just one of those things. It can, the flow between, but also the self-awareness. And the more that we're aware, the better we can respond and also, you know, just work with for ourselves, but then how well that works.

when we are working with others because we're rarely just by ourselves, right? We're working with our families, we're working with our friends, we're working with our teams, we're working with the people we meet, whatever our human interactions are with. So those are all very important things to be aware of and all the while, starting with that kindness to ourselves and watching that ripple effect go across the board.

which is huge.

I'm very curious about your PhD as well. as we go deeper into higher levels of education and deep study, what's something that you're unlearning as you're doing all this advanced learning? What is there something that you're just going, gosh, I need to completely look at this, ⁓ this or... ⁓

a lot of these things, whatever that might be in a completely different way.

Taylor Elyse Morrison (16:58)

So what's emerging for me is like this tension between

I'm both learning to have stronger opinions in perspectives and also

unlearning the idea that like I have to be right and I have to hold my opinion so tightly. For me personally, I tend to be a person who has just been like, yeah, I can see it this way and I can see it that way. And I'm having to unlearn that approach and say, okay, this is what I think, at least even if only for this paper, this is what I think. And yeah, there's some nuance to it, but I'm going to share this opinion in perspective.

feels a little bit unnatural to me. It's also requiring me to engage more critically with other people's ideas, where again, I'm like, my tendency is to just be like, I absolutely see where you're coming from. And this is challenging me to say, I see where you're coming from. And I think that you might be missing this, or this perspective might be a little bit flawed or could be supported by looking at this thing over here.

So that's been feeling a little bit weird for me. And when I've thought about higher learning in the past, it's been like, these people know what they're talking about. They're so sure. And my first semester, I'm just now starting my second year. So my first semester, about a year ago, we had to read Adam Grant's Think Again. And...

The whole premise of the book is all about how valuable it is to test your assumptions and to challenge your beliefs and how the smartest people actually are able to admit that they're wrong and to change their mind. And that just felt like such a healthy unlearning to start my experience with, that this program is not about me getting more set in my ways. It's actually about building a toolkit so that I can engage with ideas, have a perspective, and be willing to change it.

as I get more information. And that's another thing is like, there's just always new information. So there are theories we agreed with for decades and then we get new information and then we have to reconsider it.

Amy Boyle (amyboylephoto) (19:14)

I also went back after 50 and got my masters and that was something that I was faced with as well.

I Because as you said, there's more information out there. I'm going to keep learning more.

and which is pretty fascinating and absolutely fantastic.

I also want to talk about your Fresh Eyes sessions. So tell our audience more about what is that?

Taylor Elyse Morrison (19:35)

Yeah. So I created Fresh Eyes Sessions because I love coaching as a skillset and as just a modality that has personally helped me make a lot of progress across different goals. And I found that because even though like I'm an ICF, International Coach Federation credentials coach, anyone could theoretically call themselves a coach. so sometimes people

have like bad experiences with coaching or they're not entirely sure if they, if it's going to be valuable for them and they don't want to commit to a big package. And sometimes, honestly, you just need one session. Like I had a client that I did a fresh eye session with who had just been like noodling on something for months. And then in our conversation, we were able to help her realize how she wanted to move forward with this relationship because of the structure of the conversation.

So Fresh Eyes sessions are 45 minute coaching sessions. I offer them sporadically throughout the year. So if you get on my email list, you will be the first to know when they open. They're 45 minutes, $100. And the idea is that you come with one situation that you want Fresh Eyes on. So like I said, that client was considering how she wanted to move forward with the relationship with her client. And she had

looked at all these different perspectives and was still feeling a little bit stuck. It's really good for people who already are doing journaling, already feel like you've talked it out with your most self-aware friends, but you're still not feeling right where you need to be. These sessions are really good at helping you move forward. I love the metaphor of being a fish in water. Sometimes that's how it is, where you are in your situation.

You feel like you've looked at everything, but maybe there's water that you're not actually seeing. And then I can come in as an external perspective to ask a question that you maybe wouldn't ask yourself in all the journaling you did. You're like, ⁓ I never thought to ask that. And then at the very least you get a new perspective that can help you inform your next step. So yeah, those have been really, really fun to do. And

I try to create things that I feel like I need. And so it's like, I've definitely had quote unquote, fresh-eyed sessions with other coaches that have helped me move forward when I felt stuck.

Amy Boyle (amyboylephoto) (22:09)

I was just going to ask you, so what do you do when you need that in your own life? So you work with other coaches then? For yourself? Yeah.

Taylor Elyse Morrison (22:16)

Yeah, yeah,

I try to pretty consistently throughout the year, be working with a coach, because it feels kind of an integrity. And a great thing about being a coach too is I know a lot of coaches so we can swap sessions if we need to. And have that external opinion. I also will say though, I tell my husband he should be a coach because like, I think part of it is

him hearing how I talk about things. So sometimes I'm like, just tell me what to do. And he's like, ⁓ I'm not going to tell you what to do, but I'll ask you some questions, which is very coach like of him. I'm grateful to be surrounded by people who really point me back to my own wisdom and ask questions to get me to see things differently.

Amy Boyle (amyboylephoto) (23:04)

Absolutely. Isn't it nice when you ⁓ are surrounded with that kind of great support because yes, we don't need a bunch of yes people. We do need people who ask the good questions.

So with all the different meaningful projects you've launched, what right now today is currently lighting you up.

Taylor Elyse Morrison (23:26)

That's so hard. It's like asking me to choose a favorite child. I will say, I'm going to choose two. One that I will choose is this paper that I'm writing. And I don't know if it'll be published or not in this academic journal, but I've been writing and reading a lot about independent workers and how we

Amy Boyle (amyboylephoto) (23:27)

Hehehehe

Taylor Elyse Morrison (23:49)

can be marginalized by the fact that we don't have ⁓ a full-time job and the consistent salary and what that means for how we relate to people who do have these more traditional work setups and then how they might treat independent workers as well. So that's just been really fun and interesting to pull together a lot of different bodies of research to propose a framework. And it's just like,

scratching my brain in the most satisfying way. The other thing that I've been having a lot of fun with is this year, earlier this year in the spring, I co-founded Women Facilitating, which is a group for women who facilitate a professional networking and professional development group. And I founded that alongside two co-founders. And that's been so fun to build something with co-founders because outside of

I guess I would say inner workout was a turning point after inner workout. I've done a lot more collaboration, but before that it was me building stuff on my own. And so to get to work with two co-founders and have their skillsets and perspectives is really lighting me up. But also the community just like continues to be better than I expected. Like I just posed a question in there, even as the co-founder of like, Hey, I just had a facilitation client asked me XYZ.

Not sure how I feel about approaching this. What do you all think? And like to have that support from people who have different perspectives has just been lovely. So those are the two projects that are lighting me up and giving me a lot of intellectual and communal satisfaction.

Amy Boyle (amyboylephoto) (25:34)

I love the idea of, sharing alongside with co-founders. Tell us more about the women facilitating.

Taylor Elyse Morrison (25:44)

I build things because I need them. And then they just end up supporting other people as well. And so with women facilitating, I fell into being a facilitator. I remember in my first full-time job, I had an opportunity to get trained to facilitate a specific program and then also to go through a more general facilitation training.

And I was like, this is great skill sets and I can do this. then years later, an RFP came across my desk for being a facilitator. And I was like, wait, this, this is people's whole jobs. Like you don't have to just do this as 10 % or 20 % of another job. can just be what you do. And as I was thinking about myself coming up,

I wish I would have had more community with other facilitators because I think I could have gotten further faster. And I ended up being connected with another facilitator in my network and we were chatting and she also had had a similar goal and desire to gather women specifically together. And she has a facilitation company that she founded with another co-founder and we ended up coming together to build this community. So.

Our goal is really to help women feel like they're building the skills and also the support system to show up as facilitators, whether that is their full-time job. Like we have people who have their own facilitation and consulting businesses. We also have people who work internally as facilitators. We also have people who do have it as like 10 to 20 % of their job, but they want to keep getting better at it.

we have training. We have a lot of hands-on pieces, which makes sense as facilitators. we're not about just telling people information. It is meant to be really active learning. And so we have a book club that we were doing. We have trainings that we do. We also have opportunities for people to practice. like before they do something in front of a client, they can try it with us first, or if they're feeling stuck on.

building a session outline, we can work together to say, maybe this activity might go really well here. the idea is to make people feel less alone because whether you are a solopreneur or you're working with an organization, oftentimes you can feel kind of siloed as a facilitator. It can be really lonely at the front of the room, even though you're surrounded by people, like you're caring and holding the experience and

the other people just get to be the beneficiaries of it.

Amy Boyle (amyboylephoto) (28:25)

Fantastic. Well, I can't wait to have all the information listed in the show notes so people know how to find out all the things that you're working on. ⁓ One of the things I would love to end with is how would you define what it means to be phenomenal?

Taylor Elyse Morrison (28:43)

How would I define what it means to be phenomenal?

I just come back to the power of being yourself, which sounds so trite. But when I think about myself as a Black woman, a Black, like, woman, all these different parts of my identity as I present as people often think I am younger than I actually am, like, there are all of these identities that

inform how people see me and how people treat me and to be able to show up in all of my neurodivergence and personal style and just own that rather than shrinking to go back to the beginning when we talked about the shoulds. Like I think that's what makes you phenomenal. And when I think about the people that I admire, people who just wholeheartedly love the things that they love.

approach things the way that works for them and have support other people in doing the same. there's lists of people going through my head. think of Solange, if people aren't aware of her. Solange is Beyonce's sister. She's really interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary. I think of friends in my life, Amelia Ruby is one of them who just does such a good job of

being herself and supporting other people to be themselves, that is phenomenal. There's the element of being yourself, but I think if it is only self-serving, that's like not quite phenomenal. It's like being yourself and then amplifying the selfhood of others.

Amy Boyle (amyboylephoto) (30:28)

Beautiful, I agree. people light up when they define it and they visualize their collective phenomenal, I feel like I see them all around you.

it's pretty amazing. And that's why I ask the question every week, because everybody's definition is different and everybody's why is different. And that's what makes us cool and unique humans. And I love it. So thank you for being a part of the show and please let our listeners know how they can find you.

Taylor Elyse Morrison (31:02)

Thank you so much for having me. This has just been like a good reflective conversation for me. So selfishly, I'm really grateful. If people want to stay in touch with me, the best place to stay in touch is on my newsletter. You just go to TaylorElyse.com. That's E-L-Y like yo-yo-S-E.com slash newsletter. You can get signed up. I send it as I have time and feel called. So I'm not going to be clogging up your inbox.

And then if you want a place where I post more frequently, I post a couple of times a week on LinkedIn. Just look me up, Taylor Elise Morrison, and you'll find me.

Amy Boyle (amyboylephoto) (31:41)

Fantastic. continued success on your PhD program and all your future endeavors. And again, my thanks for being on the show today.

Taylor Elyse Morrison (31:52)

Thank you for having me.