Career Shifts with Your Whole Person in Mind with Career Coach Sarah Wagoner

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Career transitions aren’t just about the potential new job — they ripple into every part of your life. In this episode, I sit down with Sarah Wagoner, a certified leadership and transformation coach, to talk about navigating career changes while also accounting for the realities of your whole life — from raising young kids to caring for aging parents.

We dig into:

Why you can’t separate your career from your personal life (and how ignoring this leads to burnout).
The “moment of awakening” many women hit when work no longer feels aligned — often triggered by a new baby, health crisis, or family shift.
How to use an energy inventory to understand what lights you up at work — and what drains you.
The importance of knowing your values during your current phase (because values shift!) and using them to guide decisions at work and home.
Boundaries as a filter — not a wall — and what that looks like in practice for professional women.
Examples of how Sarah’s clients have designed their careers and leadership roles to fit their real lives — including moving into leadership roles, taking consulting contracts, and saying no to roles that didn’t align.

I especially love Sarah’s approach because it parallels how I teach time management for working moms and professional women: your calendar has to reflect your whole life – the personal and the professional (not just work) – for it to work because your time and energy are limited, and your plans for both have to work together as one has an impact on the other.

If you’re in a season of asking:

Is this job still right for me?
Do I even want to move up, or do I miss the individual contributor work I used to love?
How do I juggle my career and the demands of family life without burning out?

…this episode is for you.

Sarah shares practical tools, grounded strategies, and thought-provoking questions to help you re-meet yourself after big life changes — so your career actually supports the life you want in this chapter.

To connect with Sarah, you can find her at:

On her website, www.sarahwagoner.com
On Instagram: @sarahwagonercoaching
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahkwagonercareerandleadershipcoach/

Below is a transcript of the episode. Enjoy!

Full transcript:

Kelly Nolan: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Bright Method Podcast, where we’ll discuss practical time management strategies designed for the professional working woman. I’m Kelly Nolan, a former patent litigator who now works with women to set up the bright method in their lives. The Bright Method is a realistic time management system that helps you manage it all personally and professionally. Let’s get you falling asleep, proud of what you got done today, and calm about what’s on tap tomorrow. All right, let’s dig in.

Hey, hey, and welcome back. All right. Today we’re gonna dig into career transitions, including staying within your organization and handling a promotion to looking for a new job at a different organization. And we have talked about this previously with the wonderful Julia Lynch of Smarter in a sec. And we also are gonna talk today with another guest who’s going to dig into a little bit more about.

Doing this with an eye towards like the whole person, not just the professional, but your personal life as well. And I love [00:01:00] talking about this stuff because your career obviously has a massive bearing on where your time is going and your time management. So it’s a great topic to dig into over time and I’m excited to continue the conversation today.

So to that end, today’s guest is Sarah Wagner. Sarah is a certified leadership and transformation coach for women with young kids at home, experiencing the life and career transformations that come with building a family. Some have even called her a career doula. She started her career in people development as a summer camp counselor in the north Woods of Wisconsin, and then went on to spend 12 years of her career in hr focusing on talent strategy as an HR business partner in pharma and tech.

She has her coaching certification from the Cove Institute, her BA in Communications and MBA in management, and is a 200 hour certified yoga teacher. She lives in the suburbs of Chicago with her husband and two kids, ages five and seven, and loves spending time outdoors doing anything, but especially gardening.

All right, let’s take in. [00:02:00] Sarah, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. Do you wanna introduce yourself and just kind of explain how you got to becoming a career coach?

Sarah Wagoner: Sure. Well, to be completely honest, this was the plan all along, wink, wink. I sat on my parents’ front porch on the porch swing, and my mom said, what are you gonna do with your degree?

And I said, well. I’m gonna work in corporate and then I’m gonna have my kids and my house in the suburbs and I’m gonna have a garden and I’m gonna do coaching and consulting. So that’s the fast track to the end. Leading up to now, I started my career in people strategy as a summer camp counselor. We’ve talked a lot about that, and I loved it so much that I went into human Resources for the first 12 years of my career in both pharma and tech.

I spent a majority of that time as an HR business partner, but my plan and what I loved was always the coaching aspect of supporting employees with their career [00:03:00] development, helping them think about the deeper parts of their lives and how they connected to work. So when I became pregnant with my second child, I started to think about my exit from corporate into the coaching space and started my certification with the co institute.

And in fall of 2020, I made my planned exit and went out on my own as a coach.

Kelly Nolan: That’s amazing. And so you’ve been doing this for, I guess. Closing in on five years, is that right? Yes. Or wow, I guess

Sarah Wagoner: it’s not wild my son’s entire lifetime.

Kelly Nolan: That’s amazing. Yeah. That’s amazing. Yeah, and I think that we have had Julia Lynch on the podcast who is wonderful, and I think that what’s really fun about career coaching, just like time management, is that there are a lot of different approaches, different people offer and focus on different things, and I think that one thing.

Based on my understanding that makes your approach really unique and worth sharing [00:04:00] as another option for people is that I’ve heard you talk about how you coach, like the whole person. And so you talk obviously a lot on the professional given you know the role as a career coach, but you also really dig into people’s personal lives and.

As you said, like the whole person, so can you tell us a little bit more about that and why you think that is so important?

Sarah Wagoner: It’s one of the things that drew me to the proactive coaching approach when I was initially reviewing coaching programs was that they do coach the whole person, and we talk about this corporate jargon of like bringing your whole self to work.

So what does that mean? And is anybody actually bringing their whole selves to work? I can tell you a lot of my clients want to bring their whole selves to work, and to be able to surgically remove our career from our lives is completely unreasonable and unsustainable, especially for women who have small kids at home, which is a majority of my clients.[00:05:00]

So coaching the whole person. Really means that we’re taking into account everything, what’s happening at home. Many of my clients are dealing with aging parents in elder care, young kids in daycare, summer camps, demanding careers, partners, their own health things, their houses falling apart, like real adult whole life things are going on.

And so I really feel passionately and strongly about incorporating that. My coaching approach because it’s all here. We come to work and even if we’re not talking about it, your aging parent is still in assisted living. Your kids are still calling from school or daycare is calling ’cause they have a fever.

Like we cannot separate these things. Yeah. So we have to talk about the whole person. And a lot of my clients actually come to me because of that whole person. Approach because it is [00:06:00] this feeling outside of work that has brought them to talk about their careers. Yeah. And we work on integrating that and we kind of volley back and forth because it is, it’s all integrated.

Kelly Nolan: Yeah. It makes a ton of sense and it, it appeals to me in that I really approach time management in the same way of like we do personal and professional altogether in the program. Yeah. Which I didn’t fully appreciate was unique until. Some of my early programs, women were like, I like, it’s almost like a twofer.

I feel like I’m getting personal and professional dealt with. Yes. And for me, I was like, oh, I guess there are time management approaches that do just focus on work or on home. But to your point, like it’s all related it to me. You can’t solve one without the other, or at least account for one without accounting for the other.

Right. And so it makes a ton of sense to me. And I also think that we as American society at least. I don’t know when we’re kids growing up, like, so we do not talk about the actual like [00:07:00] schedule impact of different jobs on

Sarah Wagoner: No. Oh my gosh. People’s lives. I think about this all the time. Yeah. I was thinking if I was ever invited to guest speak at a college, just putting it out there into the ether.

Yeah. Like let’s talk about your vision for your life. Yeah. And how you pick your career. To match the vision of your life so that you’re not having a midlife crisis. Like I have spent my whole life in this very specialized function that does not allow me to live the life that I want to. Yeah. Because that’s where people get stuck.

They’re like, but I, I’ve been, I’m just picking on accountants, for example, or even attorneys. A lot of attorneys come to me. They’re like, I’ve done this very specialized career. Now what do I do? I don’t wanna do this anymore. It’s not, yeah. Adaptable for my life. Fill in the blank. Finance, there’s plenty of industries that are super narrow for people, so Yes.

Yeah, that I’m putting that out there. This is what I would talk about in college.

Kelly Nolan: Yeah. And I [00:08:00] think there, there are ways to make some of these professions work if it aligns with what you want. I think it’s very person dependent too. But I do think that. There’s a real dis, I mean, even in college, I remember being like, and then I’m gonna be a full-time lawyer, and I just weirdly can’t explain it.

I also was like, maybe I’ll be a stay-at-home mom too. But like, almost in the same, I don’t know, it didn’t really make sense. It clearly wasn’t a very like, forte part of my intelligence at the time, but I, I do kind of feel like it represents how we were raised to disconnect personal and professional. And so I think that it’s really, really smart to kind of.

Approach it from the whole person perspective. And as you said, I would imagine it often comes up with when the people are confronted with the people you work with have like little kids and are coming to you because they’re suddenly like, all these pieces don’t fit together in the way that something that

Sarah Wagoner: odd and like Yeah.

And it almost for many people. Like their job has become their personality, their identity. Mm-hmm. Like I’m gonna meet [00:09:00] quota, I’m gonna be a top performing salesperson. I’m gonna get promotions every two years. Yeah. I’m this hard charging professional. I’m amazing. I get high scores. And so many people who come to me are these high performing professionals who are getting the accolades, the awards, the bonuses, and then they have a family and they’re like, wait a second, this previous persona doesn’t jive with what I want now.

You said something interesting. You’re like, I wanna be an attorney and I wanna be a stay at home mom. And I feel like it’s a perfect example of that tug of war between like the brain and the heart and the gut.

Kelly Nolan: Mm-hmm.

Sarah Wagoner: Like down here you felt like, I wanna be a stay at home mom. Like in your heart and your gut and in your head you’re like, I’ll be a lawyer ’cause I have those skills and it sounds interesting and I’ll make good money and I’ll have a schedule.

How does that, like, does that resonate with you?

Kelly Nolan: It does. I mean, I, this was back in college and I don’t think, I think [00:10:00] it was more like,

Sarah Wagoner: are you saying you perhaps evolved?

Kelly Nolan: Yeah. And like my mom was a stay-at-home mom pretty much outta necessity. ’cause we moved all the time. Like, and she couldn’t get a new job in Mexico and then Brazil and Puerto Rico and all these places.

So I think it was a little bit of chasing that. But to your point. Like it is such a balance. ’cause in my heart I also wanna work. Yeah. ’cause I’m not cut out to be a full Yeah. Anytime I have my kids home for two weeks, I’m a little bit like, okay, I gotta get back to that too. Yes. So to me it’s, it’s a little messier than identifying exactly where it is.

It’s more complicated, but it’s still worth teasing out. And I just don’t think we tease out these things and I don’t know if we can, when we’re kids. No, but even just to acknowledge it and talk about the tension and the complexity of it, to be able to parse what do I want in this chapter? What do I want life to feel like and be like in this chapter?

That’s something that I just didn’t start thinking about until far later in life than [00:11:00] I, I think we should teach kids,

Sarah Wagoner: basically. Oh, a hundred percent. I think you and I should run a college course on how to vision your life and then build your life to your vision as opposed to trying to sort it out.

Kelly Nolan: Yeah, and I’ve, and I’ve heard of some, which I think are awesome. Like design your life. Yes. I believe Marina Cooley teaches one at Emory or has on similar. Yeah. And I think what just would be helpful also, which is actually why I love, I love the how I structure my day series too on Instagram and Substack is like then.

Understanding what you want for your life and then understanding what are the potential options. Not that we’re limited to options. Yeah. Which is kind of annoying in its own way. Yeah. I kind of want, yeah. Like a person who’s like, tell me my options about pro condom.

Sarah Wagoner: Yes. Your very logical brain kicks in.

Yeah. And you wanna be able to analyze the results.

Kelly Nolan: Yeah. Well, I feel like we could talk all the time and I’m like going off on a total tangent. That’s okay. But I think that I, I’d love to know. How does it typically start? Like what does someone approach you with? And they say, [00:12:00] are they just kind of saying, I’m not happy with my current position anymore?

What does it look like when clients come to you? What are the typical things you hear from the beginning of what they say?

Sarah Wagoner: So it’s interesting because a lot of clients come to me because something just isn’t feeling good anymore. The career is usually the entry point to that conversation.

Kelly Nolan: Yep.

Sarah Wagoner: And then soon we discover the moment of awakening where all of a sudden things didn’t start to feel like they were working as well as they used to.

Mm-hmm. Yep. It’s usually the birth of a child, a second child, a third child. It doesn’t matter what number you’re on, I feel like, uh, you’re a new person every time you add something or a person to your family. It could be a health crisis, it could be an aging parent.

Kelly Nolan: Mm-hmm.

Sarah Wagoner: So we have like the birth aspect and then like the crisis aspect.[00:13:00]

But the common denominator is this moment of awakening. Like, oh, my eyes are open and I’m realizing something isn’t quite right. I think it’s my career. And then we weave in the whole person.

Kelly Nolan: Got it.

Sarah Wagoner: For people with young kids, it’s like. I’ve lost track of all my hobbies. I don’t have any friends anymore.

Of course, I’m catastrophizing this for, yeah, yeah, for illustrative purposes. But it’s like I don’t have any hobbies. I’m not taking care of my body. I don’t feel like I’m being present with my kids. I don’t really like my job anymore. It feels like it’s just taking me away from my kids who I love. But when I’m with my kids, I’m thinking about work.

Kelly Nolan: Yep.

Sarah Wagoner: So it’s about volleying back and forth there and figuring out what the sticky parts are. Going into that. On a highly personal level, I don’t run a program. I don’t have like a 10 step program that will get you like your happy career and the rainbows pop out and you [00:14:00] ride a unicorn into the sunset.

That would be great. But if anybody promises that I’m very skeptical, I like to take a very highly personal approach and it’s a design your own adventure. And then I bring the tools to help my clients discover what it is exactly for them.

Kelly Nolan: What are some examples of that? Of when you’re trying to get at kind of that whole person approach?

Yeah, I’ve heard you talk about it in like centering the person again, I think is what you said, but correct me if it’s different words of like kind of bringing someone back into who they are to be able to like tap into what they want, like where to go from there. In terms of structuring the next chapter, what are some examples of, I don’t know, like things you.

Do to help them do that, or some examples of what has come out of that, wherever you wanna take it.

Sarah Wagoner: Yeah. It’s interesting. I made a note, you sent an email out earlier this week that said efficiency isn’t always the goal. Breathing space is, and then you said [00:15:00] your clients need to think, how do I want to feel and where I think that is the void that people are feeling like.

Mm-hmm. They don’t know how they want to feel, but they want to feel something different. Yeah. And so the pathway into that, like examples of what people have done, like, I’ll give you the whole range. Okay. People have started taking tennis lessons. People have started doing a pretend commute in the morning because they’re working from home and they’re just feeling crushed by being at home all the time.

They’re interviewing for a job and they need that time to like get their mind right, like they’re going to an interview. Mm-hmm. So we designed a walk around the neighborhood. Before an interview, like get dressed in your interview clothes, walk around the neighborhood, like do your little commute and come back to your desk and you’re smiling because like some of these things seem silly, but it creates No, I like it.

A shift for people. Okay, so we’ve got tennis lessons, we’ve got a walk [00:16:00] around the block. What else? Oh, for some of my leadership clients, I coach specifically women. With young kids. There’s kind of like two sectors and one of them is. Women taking on large leadership roles, either leading leaders, like a manager of managers is another way to describe that, or leading large teams and functions.

And they’re looking to be really aligned so that they’re not leaking all their energy, like kind of masking when they’re coming to work or trying to be something that they’re not.

Kelly Nolan: Mm-hmm.

Sarah Wagoner: So what that looks like is. Having an image on their desk that helps them align with their inner leader before they get on a meeting or having a mantra that they tell themselves in a meeting when they’re ready to speak up and it’s feeling scary or unnatural to them.

It could be even just placing their hands on their lap under the table to connect with their bodies before they speak in a meeting so that they’re [00:17:00] feeling really aligned with whatever the values are that we’ve discussed. Got it. And those are the action pieces. But that comes from the really deep work of identifying what their values are in this moment, because values shift.

Kelly Nolan: Mm-hmm.

Sarah Wagoner: And we don’t really sit down and talk about our values enough. And coaching offers the space to dig in and say, okay, if integrity is one of my values, then I’m gonna challenge my clients and say, well, what does integrity look like? How does it feel to you on a day-to-day basis? How exactly do you know somebody has integrity and how is it showing up and how do we bring more of that into your life?

So it’s like it’s taking these cerebral concepts and bringing them down all the way down to the microscopic level so that people know how to implement them more in their lives.

Kelly Nolan: I like that a lot. A lot of what you and I do are things that. People [00:18:00] maybe could do on their own, right? Like they could do think about this stuff a lot and think it through, but we don’t, no, people don’t do it.

And so part of this is because you have to make the time and the time is is

Sarah Wagoner: so hard and they need this space. So many people come to me and they’re like, I don’t have space to call my best friend. I don’t have space to take a deep breath. I don’t have a space to just sit and like have my mind wander.

And look at a flower or feel my kid’s hand when I’m holding their hand, when I’m walking to school. Mm-hmm. I’m holding their hand, but I’m not feeling their hand because Yeah. I’m somewhere else.

Kelly Nolan: Yeah. And I think it’s just, it’s really powerful to realize, like for the person listening, if you’re like, yeah, I’ve been wanting to do this kind of thing, and, and maybe you’re even thinking like, I know to do some of this stuff.

Are you doing it? And do you need help? With just protected time and accountability to do it. Yeah. So that you can think it through and [00:19:00] make those shifts. And I just think that that is, it’s really awesome and it’s, it’s really important and it’s something that we’re not able to prioritize a lot in our life without further support because Yeah, our lives are busy, we’re running around.

Yeah.

Sarah Wagoner: And part of coaching is creating the space to do it and holding yourself accountable to show up. Yeah. And. As a coach, I’m not afraid to ask the hard questions of people.

Kelly Nolan: Yeah.

Sarah Wagoner: Or hold them accountable and say like, something here doesn’t sound aligned. Like, how is it feeling for you?

Kelly Nolan: Yeah.

Sarah Wagoner: Is it aligned?

No. Okay. Let’s talk about really deep what is not aligned.

Kelly Nolan: Yeah.

Sarah Wagoner: And how do you wanna implement something new this week that’s gonna make it feel better?

Kelly Nolan: I like that. And I think that is really valuable. ’cause I mean, I have some incredible friends and I do have some friends who would call me and like, be tough, but not everybody does.

No. And I think that if you, if you aren’t feeling challenged by some [00:20:00] people in your life in a good way in that like healthy way. Yeah. And I think that’s really awesome. And so for the woman listening who’s like, I need some of this, but I don’t really know where to start. Do you have any like exercises, one or two small little exercises you would recommend that the listener could start with to try and tap back into herself in her body and like understand what she might, I mean, I don’t even think it’s like getting to the point of like, what does she want outta life?

It’s more like how do you get back into yourself? Yeah. And be able to be present in the ways that we’ve been talking about.

Sarah Wagoner: One of the quickest ways to do this, and I think it applies to corporate women especially, who are feeling like something’s wrong in their jobs. It’s usually like I show up at work and my calendar is full of all these meetings that other people have put on there for me, and I leave work and I’m tired.

I’m like, well, why are you tired? Let’s talk about what’s happening during the day. So an easy starting point is like [00:21:00] just doing a little energy inventory. So, okay, I had this meeting with this person. How am I feeling after this meeting with this person? And it’s like, you don’t have to sit down and listen to music and light a candle and write in your journal for 30 minutes.

You can, if that’s your thing. Literally after your 30 minute one-on-one, you just take a piece of paper and you write down like. I feel amazing. Why do I feel amazing? That person was honest. They were energetic, they were a yes and person, or I feel kind of meh. This is why I feel this way, or I feel terrible.

This person is a heck no. When they reply to my calendar, and here are the reasons why. You’ll start to see one, what you like doing at work, what gives you energy. You’ll start to identify the people that you like working with. Why you like working with them? You’ll identify the people you don’t like working with and why you don’t like working with them, and then you can start to think about designing that [00:22:00] vision of what you want your career to look and feel like.

Mostly because my clients wanna feel good when they leave their families. Yeah, there’s no better illustration of time than having a child just like growing up right in front of you and you get this perspective like, time is flying and I need to hold onto this.

Kelly Nolan: Yeah.

Sarah Wagoner: And I don’t wanna waste my time at a job I don’t like.

So once you get the inventory of like the people you like working with, the things you like doing, that really light you up, then we can work together to hone in on those values, the things that you like. And we can design hard hitting questions that you can ask the interviewers that will get you the real answers about the places that you’re interviewing, your new careers that you’re exploring, the places you’re interviewing for.

I’m not one for fluffy interviews. Like if you’re gonna have 30 minutes, let’s ask some hard hitting questions of the recruiters. They’re asking you hard hitting [00:23:00] questions, and many of the women that I coach have very sizable, accomplished careers behind them, and they’re now making the shift into like flexing their muscles a little bit.

Yeah. And saying, I have amazing skills. I am really good at my job. I’m really good at X, Y, Z, and feeling confident in that and negotiating the workplace that they want. And doing interviews where they’re actually finding jobs that they want and that are worthy of them.

Kelly Nolan: Yeah. And so just to clarify, are you helping women?

And it could be, I guess, different outcomes is, or different situations. Some women are staying within the same organization and moving into a higher role. Some women are staying in the organization, but looking for that higher role within the organization. Mm-hmm. And then some women are leaving. Looking for jobs at other organizations?

Is that kind of how it breaks down? Or do you specialize in a certain area?

Sarah Wagoner: Yes, and everything. Okay. Like I said, the career, [00:24:00] the job change. The career change is usually the entry point to the conversation. Yeah. And then we coach like all the way around that. Yep. Yep. I have two distinct groups that are emerging in my client base.

The common denominator is very young. Or school aged kids. We’re talking like elementary and down to fresh babies. Got it. Women looking to change careers or jobs, either roles at a company or companies or industries, however that’s interpreted. And women who are taking on large leadership roles who want to be really authentic so that they’re not leaking that energy all day of.

Trying to pretend to be something the organization wants.

Kelly Nolan: Yeah.

Sarah Wagoner: There’s this pattern of going into interviews and being really powerful and selling yourself, and you leave and you’re all like lit up and sparkly and then six months into the organization you look back and you’re like, [00:25:00] what happened to that girl who showed up at the interview on fire?

Like I had a vision, I had a plan, I talked about my strengths, and it’s just the nature of working in a company.

Kelly Nolan: Yeah.

Sarah Wagoner: So holding onto that kind of glitter, that sparkle, that power that they hired you for. ’cause it feels good. It feels really good and you wanna hold onto it. So that second bucket is really the leadership coaching of like you’ve taken on this big new leadership role and you wanna hold onto that, that big feeling that you have, that impact that you sold in the interview that you really believed in.

Kelly Nolan: Yeah, I like that. Yeah. And going back. People element of this. ’cause I just wanna highlight that for me, even before I had kids, I did find that while the work itself is always important and hopefully you’re interested in it, I have found the people that I work with and for to be the biggest indicators of if I enjoy my job or not.

Oh my gosh. And I don’t just mean like. [00:26:00] I like them as a person because there were plenty of people I liked as people, but I didn’t like working with. Oh, amen. ’cause they kept you like in their office too long or all day long. Or they would come in at five o’clock at the end of the day and be like, let’s have a meeting and that kind of stuff.

Versus the people that you genuinely like as people, but then also have a work style that you like for your life. Yeah. To me, that was part of the reason I asked about staying within the same organization because obviously going into a new organization, you don’t always know that, but there’s something very powerful in this of what you’re saying, even for the person listening who isn’t making moves.

But I love your point of like kind of auditing, even though that sounds such a boring word. Auditing the meetings, auditing who you like working for. ’cause I know not every organization is like this. Yeah. But for me, when I was in big law, one of my favorite parts of it is that I did have the power to decide kind of who I worked [00:27:00] with.

Like it wasn’t perfect, but I could fill my plate with work from the people that I enjoyed. Then be able to decline because my plate was full, like other people’s work who I did not enjoy working with as much. Yes. And I think that you have to take that power a little bit sometimes. I don’t think, no one came around to me and was like, you don’t have to work with everybody.

But I was like, well, I’m just gonna take it and see what happens. And that can be really power. So I just throw that out there too, to like kind of. Emphasize what you were saying, that the people in an organization are so important, and I do think you have more power than you might realize over who you get to work with, at least in some organizations.

Sarah Wagoner: Yes, I agree. It sounds like you had freedom within the system, which is really cool and And many people, you’re gonna have to interact. Everybody interacts with people who are gonna drain their batteries. Yeah. But it’s about how you interact with it, where your energy is. How you’re nurturing [00:28:00] yourself before and after that meeting that you have to have where you’re going in, like it’s a battle or you know what’s gonna happen.

And I offer my coaching clients on demand support. I’ve coached people in the car, in a parking lot before a meeting with a, the top person in the company. I’ve coached people like debriefing interviews. I’ve helped people get centered before interviews, like, all right. What do you wanna be centered on?

Let’s go deep. Let’s get centered on these three values you wanna project in the interview, and how you’re gonna talk about it and how you wanna feel coming out of the interview. Because there are going to be interactions where you’re not feeling great, or it’s a drain on your energy, but how you interact with that and hold your boundaries is really important.

Kelly Nolan: Yeah, I completely agree.

Sarah Wagoner: I heard something really interesting about boundaries and it was that boundaries are not a wall. They’re more of a filter. And sometimes the filter is super fine and sometimes the filter is a little more wide open [00:29:00] and you have to like dial it in and out. Yep. And it’s about what you let through, not about what you’re completely closing off most of the time.

Yeah, and that’s another dynamic I work on my clients with is so many people. Come with this all or nothing perspective?

Kelly Nolan: Yeah,

Sarah Wagoner: either I have to do it applies to anything. So in terms of the boundaries, the all would be the wall and nothing would be like I just say yes to everything and everybody’s energy is like all over me all the time and I’m doing all these things I don’t really wanna do.

But that filter piece is like that middle area where you’re letting the right things through for you at the right time.

Kelly Nolan: I love that. I teach something similar with what comes to mind for me is like blocking focus time. Not even like every day, but you know, just having some protected time in your week to do that heads down work, whether it’s like maker work or high level strategy work for managers, whatever it might be.

And yeah, you, you [00:30:00] decline most meeting attempts to take over that time and other work. But yeah, sometimes you have to let things through and move it around, but I think knowing that you have that flexibility. Almost like empowers you to enforce it more often. Yeah. Than if you feel like it was like a blunt tool that you’re like, well, this is too hard and it scares me to, anyway, I digress.

But I completely agree with you that boundaries. I think to make them work in a real way that feels comfortable for a lot of us, especially as women, there does need to be flexibility built in.

Sarah Wagoner: Yeah. And you need to know what you want to let through. Yes. That clarity as opposed to having that clarity being reactive, like, oh, this person says it’s an emergency, I’ll let that through my filter, and then you’re like, I can’t believe I’ve ruined my strategic time for that quote emergency.

Kelly Nolan: Yeah.

Sarah Wagoner: So that’s where it comes in. Like back to the person. You have to know yourself. You have to know what your vision is. Okay, so for a leadership client, for example, what is your vision for the [00:31:00] organization? What did you pitch that they loved in the interview, and how do you hold that? Well, all of these shiny objects, and this noise comes at you a like as you’re coming down this road to your vision and how do you say yes to things and no to things, using your vision as the touchstone.

Like, okay, this person thinks this is a big emergency, but I’m looking at the vision and this doesn’t really fit into my strategic plan for this, so I’m going to say no because it doesn’t align to the vision. Yeah. It’s the same with an individual. Like I am going to say yes to this event on a Saturday afternoon where I have to get a babysitter because it aligns to how I get my energy.

Yeah, it sounds really fun to me. Or I’m gonna say no because when I think about having to go to that event, it drains me. And I don’t wanna have to get a babysitter and pay a babysitter to go to something that doesn’t feel good to me. And I feel the power to say no to that. Awesome. [00:32:00] Awesome. All because you’ve done that work for yourself.

Yeah. And if you don’t do the work for yourself and you go and try and find another job, you’re gonna end up with the same issue that you’re having. ’cause you haven’t like Yeah. Remet yourself. We go through these like sometimes micro mini evolutions and sometimes really explosive, transformative evolutions in our lives, and I’ve been through it myself.

The reason I wanted to do career coaching for women in this stage of their lives is because having children was so mind blowingly transformative for my priorities and my values.

Kelly Nolan: Mm-hmm.

Sarah Wagoner: But if you don’t take a chance to like remeet yourself after that. You’re making decisions on an old operating model.

Kelly Nolan: Yeah, I like that a lot. ’cause I do think that we talk about like bouncing back and getting back to me and like all this kind of stuff and yeah, there’s some value in that and like there’s part of our past us that we will bring forward into current. But like it is different. Like [00:33:00] I will never be the associate attorney.

I was as a single 25-year-old that I would be as an attorney, as a 40-year-old with two kids.

Sarah Wagoner: Right. And that’s the whole point. We evolve. Yeah. And it’s good.

Kelly Nolan: And I don’t mean just like I’ll never get back to that. I mean, I’m more like, I bring a lot more wisdom and strategy and efficiency and all of that to the table and, and it doesn’t really matter what other people, whether they view it or not, but I know it.

But how do I align that with what I want in this chapter? So I definitely can see that and I, I think that it is really smart to, you know, while it is tempting and I totally get how we’re like. Onto the next job or the next promotion and focus more, not tunnel vision, but like narrowly on the professional.

Yeah. I do think that we have to realize that part of the, the reason that professional isn’t working anymore, that role is because there’s so much else going on and we have to kind of understand what we want, what, who we are, or what we want outta this next chapter [00:34:00] before we can dig into that. Yeah. So it makes a ton of sense to me.

And

Sarah Wagoner: it might be that you don’t like your job anymore, it might be. The company doesn’t align with your values anymore. Yeah. It might be your manager and then you could be going and looking for a job and like basically just throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks.

Kelly Nolan: Mm-hmm.

Sarah Wagoner: But you gotta like the deep work, you have to go slow to go fast.

And that drives people,

Kelly Nolan: unfortunately. Really?

Sarah Wagoner: Right. Yeah. No, I get it.

Kelly Nolan: I

Sarah Wagoner: get it. Like it is an act of resistance in our world to go slowly. And I read your email that you sent like four times. I was like, oh. It’s like she was reading my mind. Okay. Right. It’s not efficient to leave extra time for drop off in the morning, but it feels better to you.

Yeah. And because you start your day feeling better, the rest of your day is better. And there’s so much more possibility. It is an act of resistance to slow down in this world. Yet it is the [00:35:00] most nourishing thing. And the thing that I would venture to say, 99% of my clients, this topic comes up. Yeah, how do I slow down?

How do I create space so that I can focus on the things that are really important to me? Yeah. How am I proactive about how I’m spending my time? How I am spending my time at work when I feel like I’m missing my kids at home and how I’m spending time with my family at home when I’m constantly thinking about work.

Kelly Nolan: Before we wrap up Sarah, and I’m gonna be annoying and kind of go back to focusing just on the professional, even though that’s okay. I very much buy into the you’re not annoying model. What are some examples of what people have done? If you’re looking at like the kind of more professional transition of where someone was, obviously not names, but like where someone was and what they decided to do professionally through work with you.

You’ve given some great examples of maybe [00:36:00] someone stayed in their role, but it’s like owning that role more, having the confidence and grounding themselves more going into meetings and that kind of stuff. But for those, especially in my mind, like job transitions, whether it’s with another organization or a different career move or whatever it is, what are just some examples to get, I think it would help people to understand.

Not just how you work, but also on a broader scale, like what people are doing when they feel this way, that may might, somebody might feel similar to right now?

Sarah Wagoner: Yes. So specifically for people who are feeling like something’s not quite aligned, specifically, one client was really looking for something, I’m putting quote marks around it, like steady and reliable, first of all, like.

Study and reliable is an illusion. Okay? Like read the news any day. So you gotta detach yourself from this corporate persona of like, they’re going to feed me and pay for all of my things. ’cause one day they might not.

Kelly Nolan: Yeah.

Sarah Wagoner: And it’s the [00:37:00] unfortunate reality. So that was a sidebar. What have people done? So they’ve left the more corporate jobs for consulting or a contract role, like a year long contract role.

They’ve gone back into the same job. I’ve had clients who have taken time off work because of family, because of their own kids, because of parents ’cause of moving and they’re getting back into work. But they’re trying to find, for example, a leadership role as opposed to an individual contributor role.

And they’re getting those leadership roles because they’re taking the time and they’re selling themselves based on their values and they’re really. Certain of their skills. Skills and their strengths. Got it. Because we do that work together.

Kelly Nolan: And just to be clear, so they’re leaving an individual contributor role, taking a little bit of time off.

Mm-hmm. From the traditional career. Yep. Staying at home for a period of time and then moving back into the workplace [00:38:00] in a leadership position.

Sarah Wagoner: Yes. So I’ve had like one of everything you can think of. I’ve had people who haven’t been working who want to get back into a job. In maybe a different area, but related.

So think like same department, but different role leveraging their experience in the department and pivoting to a different role. I’ve had people go from individual contributor into leadership roles ’cause they’ve taken the time, they’ve worked on their interviews, they’ve built their examples, they’ve aligned with their values.

Then I have the bucket of people who have already gotten the job, the big leadership job. They want help with their branding and their talent strategy, which is where my HR experience comes in. I do a little bit of mentoring, which is like giving advice or ideas of how to facilitate a team meeting, for example, based on values and branding.

But [00:39:00] most of my approach is still the coaching aspect, which is helping people with the self-discovery because what they come to is way better than anything I could give them. Then it’s their own creative idea and it feels resonant for them and they figured it out on their own.

Kelly Nolan: Yeah. Have you ever, I’m just curious ’cause I feel like I hear about this dynamic a lot of, have you ever helped people who’ve gotten some high level leadership role and have realized they actually really liked the individual contributor role more Have, have you ever.

Like do people move back down that you’ve worked with, or not really that you’ve seen? Do you help them just embrace the manager role and find fit into that better?

Sarah Wagoner: I don’t think I’ve helped anybody specifically with that. Yeah, that’s fine. Clients speaking, but I have talked with friends who have made the transition back.

Yeah. And honestly, as an HR person, I’m like, good for you, not everybody. Yeah. So that is a huge. Honest [00:40:00] realization, that is also an act of resistance. Yeah, because corporate America, so many companies are designed to rise, rise, rise. When we talk about career ladders, which are very vertical, you hit a certain point, then you have to become a manager to get more money, more whatever you’re looking for, and so they take the manager role and they don’t like it or they’re not good at it, but that’s all that was available.

Kelly Nolan: Yeah,

Sarah Wagoner: so I’m seeing a lot of companies talking, and we were talking about this before I stepped out of corporate for this chapter, was creating dual tracks, like individual contributor, expert tracks and managerial tracks. Yeah, because it’s two totally different. Skillsets.

Kelly Nolan: Totally.

Sarah Wagoner: And as an HR person and interest, who is like an interest, an interests.

It’s interests, it’s skill. It’s like everything lifestyles. Okay. Like the way you deliver work is completely different. And so having been behind the [00:41:00] scenes on the coaching aspect of being as an HR business partner who’s like coaching managers on how to lead teams, more power to you, if you discover it’s not for you and you wanna be an individual contributor, I say there’s no shame in that game.

Kelly Nolan: Yeah. I love people. Trying it. I think it’s always worth trying for longer than you probably want to and get through that uncomfortable part. But I do think that, I mean, I could see it, I mean even just in my own like attorney background, I kind of loved being an associate attorney. I loved the like maker stuff.

They get to like meld like law with facts and this fascinating way and get to like write a brief and like massage out these points that were compelling to me and all this kind of stuff. And I looked at a lot of partner roles and I’m like. I’d have to leave a lot of what I love about this. To do that role.

Yes. Yeah. And not, I didn’t get to the point where I tried it, so I’m not knocking the partnership track, but I’m just saying I can relate to the understanding of not only is it a different skillset you have to develop as a manager, it’s a totally different interest. And [00:42:00] to me it’s very understandable if it doesn’t align with what your interests are.

Yeah. And so anyway, I just was curious ’cause I hear about, not I, I wouldn’t say often, but I hear sometimes people being like. I dunno if I really, I’m drawn and it’s almost a time management challenge when people become managers, but they still are drawn to doing the maker work and. Then they’re having a time management challenge of like wanting to do make your work, but also having this full-time manager role that they’re not.

It is just tricky. It can be tricky sometimes,

Sarah Wagoner: and I don’t think people get enough support on how to let go of deliver. Absolutely. The work versus the skill of delivering through others. Mm-hmm. So like, okay, so my HR hat just like appeared and like flew on and landed on my head. I love coaching and challenging people who are new to leadership because there’s so much excitement and so much [00:43:00] potential there.

And I don’t think new managers, new leaders of leaders, like when you are taking that next step up, like we’ll think like traditional ladder hierarchy. When you’re taking that next step up in leadership, there is a huge void of support this whole birth by fire concept. It burns your whole team. It burns you.

Yeah. It’s scorched earth. It’s terrible. People are not getting enough hands-on, like intimate support, which is where I think absolutely. I wish more people signed up for coaching. I wish more corporations offered one-on-one coaching and less. We’re gonna put nine new managers in here and we’re gonna run scenarios.

That is fantastic. We have to do that. I ran that training. We also need to offer new leaders. Private spaces to have their perspectives challenged to try out new perspectives, to explore their beliefs and their skills and their strengths [00:44:00] and their areas of opportunity. How to ask for help. All of this stuff, it needs to be done in private, like it needs to be done in a coaching relationship with somebody who’s invested in you and isn’t.

Assigning your compensation or your performance rating. Yeah. Or putting you on a list for promotion, which is why I think having a coach is so helpful. Yeah. Because I’m invested in the individual, I’m not invested in the budget or the person who sits next to you as ego about how they’re not getting a promotion like I am focused on one person and what they wanna do and helping them build their skills and their confidence and exploring whether it’s a good fit.

So I wish more. People going into bigger leadership roles, bigger management roles would reach out for coaching.

Kelly Nolan: Yeah, I can totally see that. Well, I mean, I need to end this just because of the sake of time. I feel like I could keep talking and talking about, I know there’s so many layers of [00:45:00] this and nuance and so I just, I really appreciate you coming on and chatting about all of this.

Sarah Wagoner: Thank you for the opportunity. I think our work aligns so well because you do focus on the doing of a lot of things, and I focus a lot on the being, but we also intersect in the middle of that Venn diagram. We both dabble in the opposite directions. Yeah. Yeah.

Kelly Nolan: I do think that sometimes at least pass me when I was overwhelmed.

You almost need. Time management to free up the brain space to then have the brain space to make really smart decisions like we’re talking about here and that, so I completely agree,

Sarah Wagoner: which is why I think Bright Method clients like love this type of coaching because they have freed up the space and now they’re feeling like, oh, I do have time to focus on myself, or yeah, take a lesson in something that I wanna do or focus on this exciting thing I wanna do with my kids.

Kelly Nolan: And I mean, I also think it really comes down to a lot of [00:46:00] clients get a handle on the time and are great, but then there’s also this weird power that comes from seeing, okay, I’ve done everything I can do on managing the time and I still don’t really look like what my life looks and feels like. And so now I know it’s not me, and now I need to like change out the other stuff.

The external stuff. Yeah. By tapping back into me, but then also like figuring that out. So I love that. Yeah. If people do wanna learn more about you, Sarah, where should they go to learn more?

Sarah Wagoner: They can go to my website, sarah wagoner.com. There’s a sneaky O in there, so make sure you put the G-O-N-E-R in the end and you can sign up.

I offer 45 minute explorations sessions that are totally free. You sign up, we chat about how the coaching works. I offer up some coaching. So that you get some coaching, whether you sign up with me or not, you’ll get a takeaway or a new perspective. And then if you decide that we will be working together, [00:47:00] then obviously that’s amazing and exciting.

And if you don’t, then you have something to take away. So I do offer that free initial exploration session so that we can get to know each other and see if it’s a good fit for both of us.

Kelly Nolan: Awesome. Awesome. And I’ll put links of all that in the show notes. But thank you for being here, Sarah.

Sarah Wagoner: Thank you for the invitation.

I was thrilled to join and I’ve just loved everyone I’ve met through the Bright Method, and you’re doing amazing work.

Kelly Nolan: Oh, thank you. Thank you. And for the person at home listening, thank you for being here and I’ll catch you in the next episode.

Links you might enjoy:

🌿 Free 5-Day Time Management Program Get five short, practical video lessons packed with realistic strategies to help you manage your personal and professional life with more clarity and calm.

Career Shifts with Your Whole Person in Mind with Career Coach Sarah Wagoner

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