Krystal J [00:01:08]:
We have the incredible Cara Houser. She is an author, a career strategist and an empowerment coach, and she works to help high impact leaders really step into their power and ditch the things that are weighing them down so that they can build these lives and careers that light them up. I love that so much. Cara, thank you so much for joining us today.
Cara H [00:01:31]:
Thank you so much, Krystal. It is such a pleasure to be here.
Krystal J [00:01:35]:
Well, let's go ahead and just dive into it. So I like to just hand the mic off to you so you can really dive into what your story is. I think you can tell it better than anyone. So give us a little insight into your background and where that's led you today. And what are you doing today with all this work that you're doing with these high impact leaders?
Cara H [00:01:57]:
Sure. Thank you. So I was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, and I'm still there. We've done a lot of traveling as a family, but we haven't found a better place to live. So that's where we are. I spent my first 20 years of my career in real estate development, actually. And the way I describe it is I learned how to survive and ultimately thrive in that very sort of meat grinder type of business. It's a very always on 24/7 field, like a lot of fields, frankly, it's very common in American culture, American work culture, for that to be the case.
Cara H [00:02:36]:
But it was sort of this peculiar badge of honor for people to have to be so busy as to have really nothing else, no other interests or really commitments that they were really spending time on in their lives. Being in that and raising a family in it for 15 years, I got super burned out and ended up having to take a break for the sake of my own mental and physical health and to heal myself and recover and kind of get back in touch with who I really was, what I wanted, who I really was at the core, get my relationships really kind of at a more engaged and meaningful and deeply connected level and figure out what I wanted to do next. So that was 15 years in. I did that for almost two years. It took me about that long to kind of experiment with all the different things and ways that people can do and kind of what the process is for coming back from deep burnout along the way, we did a lot of fun stuff, too. We actually took our kids out of school for a little while, traveled around. So I had a lot of really cool opportunities as well.
Cara H [00:03:46]:
And then towards the end of that period, I opened my own consultancy in real estate development. And so I did that for five years, and I loved it so much more. I got all the autonomy and purpose and, frankly, made more money than I was doing before in less time. And I was like, oh, well, this is fabulous. This is suiting my life as a mom and as a person who has other interests and things that I like to do. And by that point, I'd established all of my self care, sort of passion stuff, and I wasn't willing to let that all go again, so I made sure that I kept the time for it.
Cara H [00:04:24]:
So after 20 years in real estate, I left that completely. I transitioned away, and now I'm doing what you described. So I'm a career strategist and empowerment coach and an author. I published a book a few months ago called "Burned Out to Lit Up: Ditch the Grind and Reclaim Your Life". And as you might guess, the idea for the book came from my own wonderful experiences with burnout and lessons learned the hard way and work that I now do with clients. Essentially, I was able to distill my process into a course, is how I first did it. And then once I had it kind of in my mind, pretty well structured, I thought, well, shoot, this canon should be a book. It would be very accessible to people, I think, and accessible to more people that way.
Cara H [00:05:12]:
So I did that, and the next step is to do kind of a middle ground where I was doing like a kind of a zoom, cohort based course. And so now I'm making an online, self paced course, which will be more affordable but more hands on than the book, but more affordable than the other one. It's kind of a middle ground to reach folks who have that amount of time and investment to do so much.
Krystal J [00:05:41]:
To learn from your journey, I mean, that's a lot of experience to go through, right? And a lot of transitioning. I am curious. So you said you did the consulting for real estate development? And you did that for about five years?
Cara H [00:05:54]:
Yep.
Krystal J [00:05:54]:
Did you ever find yourself getting to that point, like, later on in the five years where you're like, okay, I feel like I'm kind of repeating that same pattern of, like, I'm feeling very burnt out again and I think I need something new? Or is there another reason why you decided to leave real estate completely?
Cara H [00:06:11]:
You know, it's a good question. You know, even once we journey through burnout and get ourselves to a healed and recovered place, you know, we're not like, done. It's like maintenance on a car. You're not just like, haha, I never have to take care of myself again, right? We have to actually continue regularly between now and the day we die to do all the things that we know, nourish us and keep us healthy and well in all the ways inside and out. And so, yes, there were points in time where I think I let my plate get a little too full, but for the most part, I actually had myself so cemented in on what was most important to me and keeping that stuff high on my to do list. And I got also pretty savvy at protecting it, protecting the time in a way that I could also take good care of my clients.
Cara H [00:07:04]:
And one way I did that was by limiting the amount of work that I took on. So I just, you know, I wouldn't essentially. And I would tell my clients sometimes, you know, it was going well, and they'd say, hey, do you want to take on another project with us? And I would say, well, you know, no, actually, because it would take away from my ability to take such incredibly good and focused care of you that I'm doing now. You know, I don't want to get spread so thin that everyone suffers, that your project suffer, and that, of course, I'm saying to myself, so that I'll suffer because the world isn't doing any good when I'm just sort of a dried up mess, right?
Krystal J [00:07:43]:
Right.
Cara H [00:07:44]:
We can't show up well for others unless we're well and whole and healthy ourselves. And again, that's really the lesson out of burnout for me and for a lot of people. And I think the key. So the last two chapters of the book I devote to this topic of sustaining the gains. So we get rid of stuff that isn't working for us. We build in things that are habits, vision, mindsets, practice, and then we work on sustaining them for the long term. Because it's not like we're never going to have stress again. It's not like we're never going to have a challenge again.
Cara H [00:08:16]:
It's not like crap doesn't happen to us in life like it happens to everyone. You know, things happen. That's life, and we'll be more prepared. So even during that five years, no, I never got to the point where I was like, I am dying and need to take a break or I'm going to actually, you know, have to be hospitalized or whatever. I think honestly, and this is going to sound like a really boring answer, I just didn't want to do it anymore. I mean, 20 years is a long time to do something.
Krystal J [00:08:44]:
It is. And I think that's so powerful that you are able to acknowledge that and move forward in another direction. Because I was just on a call with another woman this morning, and we were kind of talking about just this, where people are afraid to make that pivot, especially after all that time that's been invested, right? Like, I've come so far, I've put 20 years of my life. Is it just all going to waste? But you really need to have that forward thinking mindset where it's, what do you want your life to continue looking like? Don't just settle because of the time invested. It's okay for you to change directions because you as a person are evolving, right? And your interests, things that fulfill you, all of those things are changing. And it's important to, as you stated, really be mindful of maintaining that self love and balance and finding that in your life. So I'm curious, what kind of day to day or week to week routine you have to make sure that you are incorporating those self care practices in and you're finding that really beautiful balance of making sure you're not overworking yourself but still doing all the things that you need to do to run a beautiful and successful business.
Cara H [00:10:05]:
Yep, that's the million dollar question. And this will look, interestingly, it has that there's like a recipe and a formula that I think it broadly applies, but people's specific recipe, it'll look different for each person, right? So it starts with a really strong morning routine, which I've stopped calling that because people's eyeballs glaze over and they're like, oh, God, she's going to start talking about cold showers and all this crap. I don't want to do that. And I'm not. It's really just about getting up and taking agency and responsibility and taking control of your day, basically, and not letting your day just eat you up. Because what I used to do and what a lot of my clients do is something along the lines of wake up dread. All this different stuff that you have to do that you don't want to do. Think about the fact that your dishwasher is broken.
Cara H [00:11:02]:
Why is there a leak in the roof? What's wrong with your in laws? Why is your kid sick? Maybe you have to go, like, all the things, right? And then you pick up your phone and you say, oh, my God, there's so many emails already. And you know, what is happening in the world. The world is a horrible place. You do all that stuff, and then when we do that, we are not entering the world from a place of writing our own story. We are entering the world in a very reactive place and frankly, a pretty negative place because those are not really very positive inputs to our lives. And I'm not saying that we should pretend like we don't have things to deal with. We just kind of do things first things first. So what I do is I wake up. I just remember to consciously take some deep breaths before I go racing into my day.
Cara H [00:11:53]:
I think about some things that I appreciate. And then I have kind of a series of stuff that I do now. Most days, my husband brings me coffee in bed, and that's like the best. And if we can do that, then yay. And otherwise, you know, I have kids still. They're in high school, but I still help get them ready for school. And kind of do, you know, parents do their parent thing, then I go for a run on most days. And then I'll do some form of, like, a mindfulness thing or journaling, one or the other, or prayer, you know, something like reflective.
Cara H [00:12:27]:
And then after all that stuff is done, then I'll go on my social media because that's fun. But I just don't want that to dictate my mood or my approach to the day or anything else. I want to be the one deciding how this day is going to go to the best that I can. We can't control everything. We can just control how we show up and our attitude. So that's a huge piece of it. And then just remembering whenever I put stuff on my calendar that I'm going to do, like I'm going to go take an exercise lesson or a music lesson, I'm going to play guitar with my band, I'm going to do different stuff. I do not let that get overridden by a bunch of allegedly urgent other stuff, which is demands from the outside world, which is something I used to do, and a lot of people do. So we think, oh, that can wait. And then it happens 100 times and then a 1000 times, and then we don't have anything on our schedules anymore that lights us up, that actually serves us or feeds us mentally, emotionally, physically, or whatever. And then we wonder why we're exhausted and we don't have any inner spark anymore.
Krystal J [00:14:20]:
You just answered my question because I was going to ask you about like, what your best practices are for really making it a sustainable practice.
Cara H [00:14:42]:
Right?
Krystal J [00:14:42]:
Because that was something that you touched on. Like, I can, you can tell me all day, like go for a run, write in your journal, wake up early and just reflect. But if that's not who I am or I'm not used to doing that, it takes however many days to build a habit, right?
Cara H [00:14:58]:
So, yes. So I talk about that a lot, actually it takes 30 days. So I tell folks, by the way, they don't have to do exactly what I do. They should do whatever the hell they want to do. These are grown people, and I have clients who are like, Cara, I am not a morning person so they do it at night. They wake up and they breathe and they do whatever. But their exercise happens in the evening and their whatever theirs is mostly happening later in the day because that's just how their brain is.
Cara H [00:15:26]:
They're night owls. Groovy. What you should really do, which is why I said it's flexible, is find out what are your Ingredients Of Well Being. And they could be some of the stuff I talked about. They could be some different stuff. What are they for you? And you may have to experiment, if you're out of practice with doing stuff for yourself and feeling cool about that. But once you find them, put them in a spot on your schedule and do them every freaking day for a month. Like, literally write down the list and put it by your bed. Because what happens is if we get burned out, our brains are too tired, we're too exhausted to make decisions and to force ourselves to make changes. And the least energy thing to do is status quo, right? But a status quo is not working. The best way to support ourselves is to get it all written down. And then after one week, you'll be like, okay, this isn't quite so horrible. Every day to do, and then next week, a little better. And after a month, if you've really been doing it most days, I mean, look, life happens.
Cara H [00:16:28]:
When you have been doing it most days, it's just going to be so much more ingrained in you. You're not going to have to think about it or fight with your own brain about it. You're just going to be doing it. And you'll find yourself feeling about a zillion times better because you're actually doing stuff that feeds you.
Krystal J [00:16:47]:
Yeah, I love the way you put it. Ingredients Of Well Being. I haven't heard anyone say it like that, but I really love that. And you are so right that everyone is going to have something different that really lights them up, that gets their day going or ends it on a really positive note. Just as you alluded to, some people can't do the whole morning routine. And I'm currently in a management position in my day job. And a lot of it is, you know, helping all of these individual people, trying to figure out what their daily workload looks like on a regular basis, and dealing with the stress of it all and all of these different tasks, they have to prioritize. But I'm constantly reinforcing, you know yourself best, you know how you work best. I can tell you all day long, work on this task first. But if you recognize how inefficient that is because of how you operate in the morning, you have the power to make those decisions, and it really is up to you to determine what that routine is going to look like because I can give you tips and what works best for me, but we're not the same person.
Cara H [00:18:02]:
Right?
Krystal J [00:18:03]:
So I think that's so beautiful that you're able to kind of give your clients that flexibility as well. And I really love the action of actually writing things down, right? Even if it's journaling in the morning. You alluded to, you know, being able to write your own story, but getting to actually journal in the morning, that's actually physically, literally doing it, right? Where you're writing out all these things that you're grateful for, what you're hoping the day is going to look like, and you're elevating yourself to that frequency and that feeling from all of these things that you're envisioning, and then the same thing with those tasks, just writing it down, making it something that's really tangible to hold you accountable. Such a great tip.
Cara H [00:18:49]:
Yeah, thank you. I mean, I love putting things, too. Like, for example, if you signed up for a kickboxing class or something, put it on your calendar and treat it like it's a, you know, meeting with your boss or whatever. Like, you need to go because you are as important or more than all that other stuff, right? If we don't take care of ourselves. And by the way, you must be, like, the best manager and leader because, you know, you don't micromanage people. Like, one of the most important ingredients of satisfaction in life and work, you know, is autonomy. And so people are able to be like, oh, she trusts me to actually use my own brain here and figure out what process works.
Cara H [00:19:33]:
I mean, you'll guide them and give them tools and resources as needed, but they're able to be like, okay, I've thought this through. This is how it's really efficient and awesome for me, that makes those people so much more engaged. And that's true at work and it's true in life, which is why neither me or you or anyone can say, you know, you should get up and run around the corner. People need to decide for themselves what works for them and then decide that they want to it, because until we do, we're not going to even start. But then again, we got to get over that kind of the fight that our brain gives us to keep things at the status quo. And that's why we do it, kind of, really, for that month, until it becomes easy.
Krystal J [00:20:18]:
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And going back to being in management, it really is so important to make sure that when you are working with other people, not treating them like they're like a cog in the machine, right? And they're just do all of these things in this specific order and that's that and there's no flexibility. And the same thing for any of your clients that are reflecting on themselves. You shouldn't have that expectation of yourself either, right? You are not a cog in a machine.
Krystal J [00:20:50]:
Even in your own daily personal life, you have that autonomy, and you have that power to really navigate whatever it is that you need to do to feel good. I think for me, for a while, I don't know. I'm like sometimes a morning person and sometimes absolutely not. Like, I would love to sleep in, but I've recognized the power that having a really great morning routine has. But I don't hold myself to the point where it's like, I have to do this because then otherwise, I feel like that ends up feeling more like an obligation than treating myself. And that even leads to burnout.
Cara H [00:21:31]:
Right. Because it's like, I have to do this, I have to do that. It does. And frankly, it's just straight up unreasonable. It's impossible. There's someone. I'm thinking of this dude who was always online. Like, every single day. I have run and meditated every day for two years. And I was like, get out of here. Because I knew that he was married with kids. So guess what? When the kid was barfing all night and all morning, who dealt with that? Okay. I think we all know who was dealing with that. It was the wife. And I'm like, dude, this is so freaking. I was like, unfollow.
Cara H [00:22:07]:
Very annoying. There is no. I don't like things like that that are so rigid and guru because it's so inhumane. It's not. It's not real. No one's really gonna freaking do that. And if you are, if you have no other responsibilities, which I don't even know anybody like that or somebody else is doing all this stuff. And how's that fair?
Krystal J [00:22:30]:
Yeah. Yeah. All of these things that we're talking about, it keeps reminding me of the conversation that I had this morning. So I want to flip some of those questions over to you because one of those things that we were talking about was really leaning into those things that lit you up, right? And not having to force yourself to be so rigid, as you said, and really leaning into the feminine energy of all of it, allowing yourself that ease and that flow and that intuition. So, for you, and, well, I guess we'll start with you, what was really your mindset when it came to, you know, moving away from feeling like you have to address the status quo to allowing yourself to do what feels good and do what lights you up? What did that process look like to you? and how do you address that for others that kind of lean into what lights them up or they don't even know where to begin with that?
Cara H [00:23:36]:
I mean, for me, I have thought about it and reflected on it for years now and talk to a lot of other people. It's a huge function of living in American work culture, where women are expected to just do all the stuff at work and the domestic realm and expected to do it while, you know, looking amazing and not getting tired. Somehow keep, like take. Somehow behave as people who take care of themselves while putting themselves last. So there's this expectation that you put everyone and everything else first, you be everything to everyone except yourself and somehow don't fall apart, which is a total joke and a con. Ridiculous, right? So that, to me, is what I call work life balance, which I hate. And so I talk about life work balance because we have life, and there's stuff in our life. There's relationships, there's stuff, there's other things and people that we're responsible for.
Cara H [00:24:37]:
Everybody's got some kind of house they have to maintain. Someone's dealing with this, and hopefully we're doing it in partnership. And then we have the beautiful parts of our lives that get absolutely kicked to the curb, sometimes for years, because we just don't think we have time. I know. I didn't think I had time. I was working full time. I was raising young kids. I was. We were kind of taking care of our parents, too, to some degree. And, I mean, this is just a whole lot. It is two full time jobs in one, in the space of one. It is actually not surprising that I went to the place that I did of burnout or that anybody else does, frankly, to me. And that's why the statistic of 89% of Americans saying they felt burned out last year doesn't surprise me one little tiny bit. So what kind of brought me to, I guess the boiling point of change is what brings a lot of people to that, which is like some kind of an emergency, like a health emergency in the family. It was sufficiently traumatic to me that I just kind of cracked.
Cara H [00:25:44]:
And I remember sitting there like crying, crazy, ugly cry with these friends and telling them about my attempts at doing all this stuff were just, I couldn't do it anymore, but I didn't know how to get out of it. I just felt like I had all these responsibilities. We have bills to pay. We have stuff. We were in a horrible recession at the time. I remember it was just terrible. And I remember just feeling powerless, frankly, to do anything different or to do anything about it. And my friend looked at me and said, you know, I think you should take a sabbatical.
Cara H [00:26:17]:
And I was like, sabbatical? I'm not a professor. I didn't really understand how that could be applied to people. And so I did. My husband and I put the wheels in motion, saving money, cutting expenses, doing, you know, I couldn't do it immediately, but we started to put the wheels in motion. I moved to a four day workweek. I made some changes to kind of get myself into a more sustainable place and did eventually leave. And, you know, I think just, for me, it had to get bad enough that I just really needed to take a very, very hard look at what I was doing and how I was living my life and whether and to what degree it was the life that I actually wanted to be living and what did that life look like and what were the contours of it and what were the elements of it? And it's funny, like, I was never, I had never done vision boards. I always thought they were kind of woo woo.
Cara H [00:27:15]:
But I at one point was with my daughter and we made these things called the future books and we just wrote down all these cool things about our lives we were going to be doing in the future. And I taped that to the side of my bed and looking back like that really was my first vision board without me thinking about it that way or calling it that. And I would, it just became, it became that for me. I've since done all the stuff on that and just giving yourself the space to actually think about something, to see it as possible, to see yourself as worthy of it, to see it just starts cracking open possibilities in your mind the connections that you couldn't make before when you're in your exhausted, puzzling, grinding, burned out place. All of a sudden you're like, well, I do know that one person I could talk to, and the next thing you know, you're doing step two, and next time you're on step 5000, I mean, who knows what it is that you're doing? I knew I was going to write a book, and ten years later I did. You know, like, some things are not immediate things, but just moving step by step towards them. Some will come shorter, some will come longer. And the other thing is, I didn't give a crap about just admitting that I was doing stuff for myself.
Cara H [00:28:26]:
People be like, what are you doing? And I'd say, oh, I volunteer at the kids school. I make cool dinners, I do all this stuff, and I'm learning guitar, and I'm doing this and I'm doing that. And people were kind of cool with the first things, and some people were cool with the second things, and some were less cool. They were like, oh, well, you must have a lot of time and money. And I was like, well, that is shady, you know, like, you know, sometimes people. But you have to be able to just say to yourself, self, this is fine. It's not about me. People say crazy stuff all the time because of whatever reason about them, and then you just move on.
Krystal J [00:29:02]:
I think there's so much beauty in the story that you're sharing, and I love that. It really is kind of a journey, right? that continues to unfold. And like you said, you did this thing with your daughter that you didn't even really put much thought into. Like, you weren't expecting it to do anything, but you had it up on your bedside, and then somewhere down the line, you're like that, you know, that small little task, like, actually did something. It kind of, like, unravels all of these other little things in my life. And the way that I was thinking and all of these beautiful things started unfolding, and now I'm doing all of these crazy things. You obviously are enjoying your life, which I love to see. So what, aside from really taking that time to reflect and work on your self care, what are some other things that have really contributed to the success that you have today? And with the way that you are running your agency and your consulting business, what do you think really keeps you going?
Cara H [00:30:09]:
I think it's a mix of perseverance and flexibility, right? Because we can push hard for things, but if we're just kind of just banging away in the same direction and that's not working, we need to also have the adaptability, the flexibility, the iterative. Any entrepreneur has to be an iterative thinker and a creative thinker. And you have to be able to be like, okay, Plan A is really not working as hoped. Okay, so what can we do differently? Can we tweak this? It's like a life of experimentation in growth mindset. And I read this book, "Mindset" by Carol Dweck. She's basically the inventor of growth mindset, which just blew my mind kind of in the beginning of this sabbatical period that I took. It was so incredibly optimistic to me. I was like, I can do anything. It's just like, you know, I've learned about growth mindset with my kids in school, but I didn't realize it was also for, you know, older people like me. And then I thought, wow, you know, what a cool thing. Highly recommend this book. Ps, but yeah, so I think a lot of it's like mindset and then just faith in yourself, like, I'm going to figure it out. I'm a figure it out kind of person. I've been through shit before.
Cara H [00:31:23]:
It's not the very first time that I've had a problem and I just know. I don't know exactly how it worked out, but I know I can figure it out. But I have a support system. You know, I have some really lovely people in my life, friends and family, who are just very supportive and who I can rely on when things need that support and who I give support to as well.
Krystal J [00:31:46]:
Yeah, I think that's so incredibly important to have that support system. That's definitely something that we're all about. I wish we can dive into it more. We're going to have to bring you back on for a second session so we can talk all about that because I know we were chatting a little bit beforehand and that's definitely something that I wanted to dive into. So we'll have to reserve that for session.
Cara H [00:32:07]:
I'd love to.
Krystal J [00:32:08]:
Cara, you are amazing and I really love your energy and I really love the way that you are just going about life in this kind of beautiful, easygoing, you know, excited mindset and mind frame. And I think that's so incredible to see. I love to see women that are doing that for themselves, right? Despite everything else that is on our plate. So that's incredibly beautiful. Where can all of our listeners and our viewers connect with you?
Cara H [00:32:41]:
Thank you. It's really been a pleasure. I've loved talking with you too. So thank you so much. They can find me on my Website or LinkedIn at Cara Houser. I'm pretty active there. It's actually Cara E. Houser there.
Cara H [00:32:57]:
I am not super active on Instagram, but I am there. And then if you want to read my book, the easiest place to find it is Amazon and it's on audible ebook and paperback, so you can find it in all the ways.
Krystal J [00:33:12]:
And of course, all of those links will be in the show notes. But definitely check out that book. That is absolutely something that everyone listening in on should be working on to really get out of that burnt out mindset, that cog on the wheel lifestyle, and really live a life that lights you up, just as Cara has done for herself and continues to do. Thank you, Cara, again so much for joining us. I've had such a joy chatting with you.
Cara H [00:33:41]:
Thank you, Krystal. It's my pleasure too.
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