John SmallMtn (00:00:00)

Welcome to another episode of Founder’s Growth. My name is John Hill, AKA Small Mountain. I’m the founder of Adapted Growth. And today we have Blake Schofield on the show. Blake is the founder of Impact with Ease, and she works with teams and organizations to work on leadership development and also about avoiding burnout.

Blake, can you talk a little bit more about who you work with inside of that broad realm of leadership development and performance and avoiding burnout?

Blake Schofield (00:00:30)

Sure. I think in talking about what I do, it probably makes sense to give a little bit of context to the background and how I ended up in this work. Early on, I knew people were my passion. I was going to be a marriage and family psychologist. Actually, that was the plan until I hit my junior year of college and I started to really see some things that weren’t lining up.

Back then, there wasn’t much in the personal development or leadership realm. Like Tony Robbins was there, but that was about it. And as a 22-year-old girl, I thought, is this even a career path and who’s going to pay me to come speak and do these things? And so I went through my first career crisis and people said, “Well, you should just go into HR because that’s where people-people go.” So I spent a couple of years in HR doing recruiting, training, and development and really felt this just gut instinct that this is not where I was supposed to spend the rest of my career.

I really wanted to see results. That was really important to me, to be able to see tangibly that the things I was doing were creating positive results. When I was in HR, I was recruiting people to be merchants, which are basically in corporate retail—people that are actually running the businesses inside retail. So it’s being an entrepreneur inside a business. At the time, I didn’t really know that.

But I ended up spending 16 years building, growing, and turning around eight and nine-figure businesses inside many of the most prominent retailers out there. Through that journey, I was a top performer in every company, but I kept going through cycles of burnout or lack of fulfillment. The biggest struggle I consistently had was: how can I continue to be ambitious and enjoy my job without having to sacrifice my life and my family to do so?

I kept hoping the next job, the next company, or the next promotion would fix it. Nine years ago, I went through my third and final breakdown moment and I just could not do it anymore. That’s when I moved into entrepreneurship and my life radically changed for the better. Really, the work that I do is helping companies as well as leaders actually really understand why they’re going through these cycles of burnout and actually understand how they’re naturally wired to thrive so that they can be fulfilled in their work, be passionate and excited to get up to go to work every day without feeling like they are having to sacrifice their health, their life, their family, or their income for their career.

Ultimately, it was my struggle and what I’ve spent over 30 years studying and understanding. It’s really a gift to be able to do this work because it blends what I learned. What was frustrating for me about HR was when I was in HR, and even when I was a leader, I could see people that were either working in a way that wasn’t aligned with how they worked best, doing work that they weren’t passionate about, or sort of going through the motions or not engaged in their work. I kept saying, “I don’t understand why these people keep coming to work every day if they’re unfulfilled.”

Through this journey, for me, I kept thinking I was alone and something was wrong with me—maybe I would just never be fulfilled. Why is it that every job that I go to, I keep having this feeling?

John SmallMtn (00:03:57)

Yeah.

Blake Schofield (00:04:04)

Nine years ago, when I started this journey, what I came to really understand was not only was I not alone, but that most people were suffering from the exact same thing that I was.

Because this is really my passion, because this is really my purpose, I’ve invested in it incredibly deeply to understand: what are the things we really need to thrive in our careers and our lives, and why the traditional things that we use haven’t worked. They’re either too siloed or too surface-level to really help people tap into what their natural passion is, the skills that actually give them energy, drive, and momentum, and how to do that without having to sacrifice all these other parts of our lives.

John SmallMtn (00:04:51)

Epic. Okay. I have a lot of questions about your path specifically, but I have some other questions first. I think burnout is one of those terms that everyone has a perception about it, right? And a lot of people probably have some avoidance about acknowledging to themselves that they’re maybe dealing with some burnout.

How does someone know if they’re on the verge of burning out versus maybe they’re just in a season of lots of goals, lots of productivity, and it’s not the same? How can someone figure out if they’re really on a path to burnout?

Blake Schofield (00:05:35)

To be honest, it took me years to actually understand that what I was experiencing were burnout cycles. Our perception of burnout is that burnout comes after a sustained period of working too hard for too long. The perception is: if I just take a vacation or I just take a break, then I will be better. Here’s what I know to be true now after having studied this very deeply for almost a decade.

Burnout is a chronic state of misalignment that most people don’t notice until they get to the absolute peak. But they have been in phases of burnout, in some cases, entire careers without knowing. What happens is we’re going through these cycles and when additional stress or additional work comes, we’re hitting that peak and thinking, “Now I’m in burnout. Let me get out of burnout, and then I’m good.”

But then I keep going through these cycles over and over and over again. What I came to realize is that most people going through that believe they just need to change jobs, they just need to take a vacation, they just need to put up boundaries in their career, or if you’re an entrepreneur, maybe I just need to start a new side of my business or something else. These tend to be the signs because we think it’s external.

There’s a pretty easy way to actually be able to start to look at what burnout is, and I ask these three simple questions:

Number one: On a scale of 1 to 10—with 1 being not fulfilled at all, I’m literally dragging myself to work every single day, I’m just going through the motions because I need to make money; to 10 being I wake up energized, passionate, and excited every day, and I spend 85% or more of my time in flow, doing work where I feel really valued—if you were to ask yourself on a scale of 1 to 10, where are you if you look at the last three months? This is really indicative. So if I were to ask that of you, what would you say?

John SmallMtn (00:07:43)

Putting me on the spot a little bit! The 85% flow, I don’t think I’m hitting that all the time. But when it comes to—

Blake Schofield (00:07:45)

I’m going to put you on the spot. You want to answer or not? It’s okay if you don’t.

John SmallMtn (00:08:00)

Getting out of bed in the morning, feeling like I’m causing change and everything else like that—I can have a bad day, wake up the next day and be ripping and roaring and ready to dive back into it and feel like it’s not all “woe is me” and stuff like this. I used to struggle with that a lot more, right? I would take one isolated event and I would make that the ongoing reality, even though that might not be the case, you know?

Part of this is I really love what I do, right? It’s arguably the hardest thing I’ve ever tried to sell or work on, but I would have these kinds of conversations. I would geek out with people about their sales conversations and help them find improvement even if there wasn’t any money at stake. So from that aspect of it, I get to do a thing that I’m very excited to do. Now, being an entrepreneur and running my own thing, there’s inherent risk and stress that comes with it. Most of when I’m feeling a little bit down, it’s not really about the work itself, it’s about the connective tissue around the work and the way that I do it.

Blake Schofield (00:09:06)

Okay, well, I think this is a really good question for people to ask themselves and consistently ask themselves because here’s what I’ll tell you: Most people have no idea how significant the opportunity is for them.

If I ask you on a scale of 1 to 10, what I hear you say is, “I’m not a 10, but I’m towards the top,” right? What I tell people is if you are below a 7, you have tremendous opportunity—tremendous. If you are a 5 or below, you are at risk. When I start hearing people say, “I’m a 3 or a 2 or a 1,” you are right around the corner of a breakdown moment. I know that because I’ve done this work so much.

What is a breakdown moment? A breakdown moment is what happens when you stay in misalignment too long and you keep pushing forward, not solving the root cause, right? You might be iterating what you’re doing with your business if you’re a business owner, or you might be changing jobs if you’re working for somebody else, but you actually aren’t solving the root of why you’re misaligned. What happens is the longer we continue on that path without solving the root cause, it is not a matter of if, but a matter of when you will hit the breakdown.

What happens in the breakdown moment is you will either suffer a severe physical, emotional, or mental burnout breakdown. I can’t tell you the number of people here in Seattle that are going on leaves of absence inside Amazon. This is right what happens when your body just says, “No more.”

The second thing is you end up being put on a performance plan or a layoff even if you’ve been a top performer your entire career. I watched this when I was in HR and kind of wondered like, what is happening? Why does this keep happening?

Then I can’t tell you the number of clients I’ve worked with over the last nine years that were shocked that this happened to them, because we tend to normalize things like the frog in boiling water, right? People always are like, “Why is the frog staying in the water that’s literally killing them?” It’s because it happens so slowly that you normalize it and you think, “Well, you know, I’m doing just fine. I can keep doing it.”

That question of being able to say on a scale of 1 to 10, “How fulfilled am I, and what does that actually look like?”—most people underestimate. Most people think, “If I’m a 6 or whatever, I’m fine.” And I always say, “No, you’re not.” But if you’re really under 5, that’s when we start seeing some pretty significant risk.

So that’s one question you can ask to really get there. The second one is really asking around like, how do you feel at the end of the day?

Are you still as energized at the end of the day as you were at the beginning? Are you mostly energized—you can do most of what you want to do, you have less energy than you did in the morning, but you’re still good? Or are you struggling—struggling to make decisions like, “What are we going to have for dinner?” because your brain is just tired and is like, “I can’t make any more decisions.”

Or the last one is like, “I’m completely drained. I’ve got nothing left. I’m literally zoning out watching TV or scrolling my phone because I’m exhausted.” That is a really key indicator of burnout. What I see is if you are ending the day struggling to make decisions or completely exhausted, again, that is another sign that you are in burnout. These are things we often don’t realize.

Then the third one really is around how you’re feeling. What happens in burnout is we start being frustrated by things that didn’t used to bother us that much, but they start to become more and more frustrating. We have a shorter fuse for things. We’re less excited about taking on additional work or projects we used to be. That then causes us to either be more cynical or be shorter in terms of how we’re communicating with people. Again, those are all signs and symptoms that you are in burnout.

These are things that I think have become so normalized as a society, right? It’s like, “Well, my job’s okay. I like parts of it, but it’s a paycheck,” or, “I’m so exhausted, I am just going to sit and scroll on my phone because I’ve been working so hard,” or complaining about the additional project that your boss gave you or the client that’s creating issues. We’ve normalized that as just the way it is without actually understanding these are actually signs and symptoms that there’s misalignment in how you’re going through and leading and living your life.

One of the most shocking things that I really came to understand in this journey is that 90% of the things that are causing frustration, stress, or anxiety for you are solvable. 90% of them. It is both empowering and can be confronting if today you don’t feel that you have the ability to create that change, and you feel like life is happening to you and there are things standing in your way of being able to create the life that you want.

John SmallMtn (00:14:44)

Okay. I’m going to get probably too deep for this show, but I have a question for you. A big part of my shift and getting to this place is around the idea of rewriting limiting beliefs, versus everything from “have to” versus “get to” and different things like that.

Where does working on changing your limiting beliefs fit so that way you don’t feel saddled with the work and you’re excited about the work? How much of that is helpful versus just calling it and admitting that you’re not in the right lane for yourself? Is one more helpful than the other? Do people just kind of miss the early stages of this, and then they hit some big, huge kind of event and it forces their clarity on this?

Because I was in sales for 10 years and always kind of felt like the odd person out because I’m not really money-motivated and I don’t need to win at other people’s expense. Through working with a coach and looking at how I view the world, my personality, and stuff, I was able to rewrite a lot of these things, and it’s been the difference-maker in me getting to here. But I don’t want to be the person who’s like, “Well, you just have to work on your limiting beliefs and change how you feel about it,” because sometimes you just are not in the right role, not doing the right work.

How does someone navigate those two goalposts?

Blake Schofield (00:16:15)

This is such a good question, and if you’ll let me, I might go a little bit down a rabbit hole. Okay.

John SmallMtn (00:16:26)

Please, I’ll go make popcorn. Let’s go.

Because I talk to people—there’s a lot of stuff about identity in this, right? I know people that have been clinging to the entrepreneurial label, even though it doesn’t validate them, it doesn’t help them, it doesn’t fulfill them, and they’re not finding success. But they’re so wrapped up in the identity of being an entrepreneur that they’re selling themselves that this is what they should be doing when they could have a solid role inside of an organization working for someone else. So I’m just kind of curious, how does someone navigate this?

Blake Schofield (00:17:00)

Yeah. Okay. So I’m going to try and hit this from a couple of levels that came to me, and then we’ll see how it lands with you and see what questions come up.

First and foremost, really the work that I do is helping people get in alignment. It’s funny. This is the same work I was doing in corporate. When I was in corporate, I was always the person put in businesses that were drastically underperforming or were stagnant.

I would be able to come in and look at the business, really dive in, and find out what was the gold in that business, what was in misalignment, what was happening in the market, and how you could reconfigure how the business was structured and working to really maximize it. I definitely am a maximizer by nature.

I took a business at Target that had not run a positive sales comp in 10 years. They were six months away from closing it down. I was like, “Just let me try.” We were down to, I think, a team of three people because the executives had already decided what they were replacing this business with. I was really able to come and see what was wrong with the business, where the opportunity was, and realign it. We ran the first positive sales in a decade. We drove 750 basis points of profit over plan and came up with a strategy to relaunch the business and create a private-label brand that was a huge trajectory for the company.

That brand today is Ava & Viv inside Target Corporation. That brand would not be there if I had not been gifted the opportunity to come in and given the trust to turn that business around, alongside the amazing partners that I had inside Target who took on extra work when we didn’t have designers, from my passion to serve that client and to see that there was an opportunity. What I could see was not only could this be a great business today, but it could be a huge growth vehicle for the organization, and it still is doing quite well for them.

What I really believe in is being able to understand what alignment really looks like, because in that case, it was understanding who is your customer and what do they really need. The same is true of each one of us.

What I’ve really come to understand is there are three areas that we have misalignment in our careers and our lives.

The first one is: We are not working how we are naturally wired to thrive. When that happens, we experience two to three times less productivity, more stress, and less fulfillment.

I look at that really from two key metrics or two key ways. I use one assessment that is not proprietary, and it’s the Kolbe Index system. The Kolbe system actually looks at how you are instinctively wired to take action and solve problems. This is really important because when you’re operating outside of that, you’re going to feel a lot of stress and friction. It’s going to take more work to accomplish things, and you’re not going to be able to lean into that natural strength.

The second thing I look at is what I call your unique fingerprint for success. This is the natural pattern behind every success you’ve ever had—not just in your career, but your entire life. Every single one of us has that. Until we understand what that is, we get really limited in terms of “this is who I am and how I do things and what types of things I can create.”

When you talk about being hung up that “this is my identity as an entrepreneur,” or for me it was “this is my identity, I am a merchant”—we can’t actually see all of the ways in which we can create our highest and best results. In today’s world, where the world of work is changing so drastically, I can’t think of a more important skill to have than to really have that deep knowledge and understanding of, “In these types of circumstances, this is what I do and these are the types of results I create.”

I look at that in terms of: What are the skills that give you energy, drive, and momentum? What is your lens or perspective on life? What are the experiences that you’ve had? And then, what is your natural way of working? It’s the combination of all of those things together that is your unique fingerprint for success. Most people don’t know what this is, so they aren’t spending very much time in flow and aren’t spending very much time actually working how they work best. That creates a tremendous amount of friction and wasted time and energy.

The second dimension of misalignment is beliefs and conditioning, back to your question. Here’s what I have come to understand and know through this journey:

I grew up and watched my mother spend a decade in therapy, and she still struggles with many of the same things today. Very early on, I started to say, “Something is broken and wrong about this. Why is this not working?” Then, as I became an entrepreneur, I really started to invest and understand how our subconscious mind works, how the mind-body connection works, and all of these different elements and modalities to help people improve their lives.

What I came to understand is this fundamental truth that most people don’t know: We as humans, by nature of who we are, form almost all of our belief systems by the time we are seven years old. As children, we personalize a lot of the things that are happening externally as faults within ourselves, and we believe that “this is just who I am.”

I would have told you, “I am a Type A perfectionist, and the reason I am successful is because I work harder than everybody else and because I will triangulate all of the answers to find the best one.” I believed it was like an eye color—it was unchangeable. I also believed that the things I was doing were the reason I was successful. I see so many people believe those things, which keeps them trapped, because I wasn’t successful because I overanalyzed and was overworking; I was successful in spite of that.

When you talk about beliefs and conditioning, what I really did was invest very, very deeply to learn from over 20 different coaches, consultants, and modalities to be able to build a map to a much faster path to work through those. What I would say to so many people is so much of what’s being taught is affirmations—processes and tools that are trying to override your subconscious and your nervous system, and they will never win.

Your subconscious drives 95% of your decision-making. It is so immediate you don’t even know. Most people don’t know the belief systems that they even have because it’s our view of the world, so we just believe it’s true.

In my journey, I was very blessed by so many wonderful mentors and coaches who helped me learn and then ultimately build a methodology to understand how to uncover what those belief systems are, how to challenge whether they were true or not, and then when I found out they weren’t true, how to replace them. That has fundamentally improved my life in ways I cannot possibly tell you—in so many ways that have removed so many of the things that kept me stuck.

For example, I always get this question like, “Well, what kind of belief are you talking about?” One of the very first beliefs I worked on was my belief around change.

10 years ago, I was a mom of three, highly successful in corporate, making more money than I had ever made, and I was more miserable than I could possibly tell you. I was working 14-hour days. The last six months of my corporate job, I lost 10 pounds because of the level of stress that I had. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t turn off my brain. I felt so much pressure and responsibility to support my family, and my body was literally shutting down. It couldn’t do it anymore.

Part of that was my beliefs around change. If somebody had asked me, “Change is ____,” I would have answered, “Change is painful, difficult, and takes a long time.” When you believe that that is the truth, what happens? You will avoid change at all costs because, “Gosh, it’s going to take me a really long time and it’s going to be horribly painful. No thank you, I’ll just stay where I’m at.”

Through the process, I actually had to come to understand what were the experiences that led me to believe that change was difficult, painful, and took a long time. Just like many people that came from my childhood, my parents divorced when I was young. I had built a stable group of friends, and then my mom moved me. That move was extremely difficult. I was bullied. I never really felt like I had reestablished that sense of security and safety.

In all of those instances, I could look back and say it really wasn’t the change that was painful. It was what happened to me relationally that was very painful—the loss of relationships and people I really cared about, and not feeling that sense of belonging. I could begin to say, “Wait, maybe it wasn’t actually that change was painful. It was the relationships and what happened with regard to that, and feeling a sense of lack of control.”

Then I could also look and say, “Have there been changes that I’ve made that have been good?” I could see like, “I’m changing stuff in business all the time, and these are great things.” I could start to see the dichotomy that change isn’t always difficult, painful, or takes a long time; it’s only been that way in these scenarios. Can I then begin to understand how I could approach those scenarios differently now that I have control, agency, and the ability to do things differently?

As I started to be able to unpack that and shift that, once I could be open to the fact that change actually could be fast, positive, and the path to getting everything that I wanted, then it started to open the door for me to look at how I could start to create change in ways that didn’t create risk, didn’t cause me to lose relationships and things that mattered to me, and actually were a simpler and better path.

So that’s misalignment number two. First one is you’re not working with how you are naturally aligned to thrive. Second one is belief systems and conditioning.

The third one is environment. Often people believe, especially if you’re working for someone else, that it’s the toxic boss, the industry, or the environment that’s the problem. Or if you’re a business owner, it’s like, “It’s my clients, or it’s the contractors or employees,” right? We externalize that.

When I talk about environment, I talk about it from the standpoint of: Often you don’t need to change your environment. We often don’t know what we need from an environment standpoint in terms of how we’re working or what that interaction looks like with people. Those things actually matter quite a lot in terms of being able to operate in flow, people really enjoying their work, and feeling valued in what you’re doing. When we don’t know those things about ourselves, we can’t orchestrate those changes, relationships, or environments that are best for us.

To your question that sort of led with this whole thing on belief systems and conditioning: When I came to understand those three things, every single person has a natural way they’re wired to thrive. When you understand that, you unlock flow, passion, and a way to accomplish more in less time.

Number two, every single one of us, by nature of just being human beings, have hidden belief systems and conditioning about how we believe that the world works or how we believe we are, which are often huge drivers of why we’re unfulfilled, stressed, or going through burnout cycles.

The third one is environment. So many of us don’t know what we need, or we’re not operating as best as we can in alignment with that. When you fix those three problems, life gets exponentially better.

John SmallMtn (00:31:13)

So I’m curious when people are coming in your direction, right, and they’re coming to work with you—well, this is a two-part question, so let me ask the first part first. Do most of them think that they just need to do a job change? Or are most of them thinking, “I’m in the wrong type of job, and I need to do a career change”?

Blake Schofield (00:31:39)

When I started this work, most of the people thought that they needed to become entrepreneurs. That was how this work first started all the way back in 2017. They believed that the only way that they could get the work-life balance or fulfillment they wanted was to work for themselves. So I was helping people build businesses based on what they were naturally gifted at and the skills that I had when I was in corporate—being able to understand how do you match that to the market to really stand out.

Then those clients started telling me, “Hey, my friends in corporate need the same thing you’re doing. Can you help them?” So then I started helping people that were unfulfilled in their corporate jobs figure out what they needed and what was missing in alignment, and how could they fix that.

Then the business expanded, and I really had three paths: “I want to become an entrepreneur,” “I want to do a career, industry, or job change,” or “I don’t know, I’m debating.”

What I came to see through that journey was that often people believed that the only way they could get what they wanted was to become an entrepreneur. Many of those people were not wired to be entrepreneurs. I also came to see that a lot of people believed that they needed to change their job or their industry or go somewhere else, and that they were continuing to make these changes just like I had.

I worked at five different companies across 18 years, believing that the next job would solve their problem, and it never did because they kept not solving the root cause. As I went through this work, it became really evident to me everyone is going through the same cycle, and they’re not solving it. Then I expanded, and I started working with business owners—business owners who had been running this business, were successful, but were feeling a lack of fulfillment or passion, or they were swamped, busy all the time, and had no space to actually take care of their health or their family or build the next version of what they wanted.

All of that work kept expanding. Then I expanded into how do I work with teams and companies to actually help them start solving these problems and recognize that if you understand these three things and you get in alignment, you solve your burnout problems and the burnout cycles. You show up more fulfilled, and it’s rapid. Within a matter of two months, the average client has found up to 20% of their time back. So they feel like completely different people, even in the exact same circumstances.

The level of passion about work, showing up as a better leader, more fulfilled at home, even the people around them commenting on how much happier and more fulfilled that they are, and that energy returning—this can be and is rapid when you actually are solving the root-cause problems.

For me, I have a unique experience in that I was this person inside companies. I thought I was alone, came out, and now I’ve helped hundreds of leaders go through this and see the exact same patterns happening in companies today. I have watched over and over again when a leader gets in alignment like this, their ability to honor how they are wired makes them so much more successful, but also makes them so much more clear in understanding the other people that they’re working with and helping them start to develop. Like, “You’re wired differently than me, and this is actually how we can best leverage you. Let me talk about this as a team and what you need.”

Because I will say one of the biggest struggles I had in corporate really was twofold: First, this perspective that we are treating people like they’re robots and easily replaceable—as if you have one job and five different people, and those five people are going to create the same outcome in that role. They will never do that. They don’t. For me, I could see, why are we treating people this way? They’re not cookie-cutter.

The second thing was leaders who—because of their lack of leadership development, because of their own belief systems and conditioning, and wanting to show up as great leaders, but feeling worried that somebody might find out they’re not as good as they think that they are—felt that they have to drive all these results. Often leaders were trying to force people to work or solve problems exactly how they would. What they were doing was creating an environment where creativity was stifled, people felt micromanaged, and greater solutions and opportunities were never really being surfaced or solved because the team underneath them didn’t feel empowered and didn’t have the space, skills, or ability to operate how they operated best.

One of the things I really love about the work that we do at Impact with Ease is it’s personalized, but it’s personalized at scale. Almost everything that you look at from personality tests and all of these traditional metrics we use either as hiring managers, as founders, or inside companies—they put people in a box. Usually it’s like, what do I do with this box? Great, I’ve learned that I’m an ENTJ. How does that impact how you show up and work? Because we’ve been doing that, we actually haven’t been tapping into and helping people optimize who they are, what actually gives them energy, and the results they create at their highest impact, because there hasn’t been an ability to get to that depth at the same level of speed.

I’ve spent over 400 hours and nine years developing, optimizing, and systematizing this so that it is done rapidly. It is done from a scalable standpoint, but it gives people that deeper understanding of themselves that many of my clients—10, 15, 20, 25 years into their career—still had not uncovered about themselves. That really enables them to show up, and it sort of unlocks that growth without the sacrifice.

John SmallMtn (00:38:31)

Unlocks the growth without the sacrifice—that’s a nugget right there in and of itself. Because sometimes when I’m talking to people, I kind of get this sense that they’re selling themselves on this path that they’re on, whether internal, external, or whatever it is. But I like the idea that no one’s meant to be a martyr for work.

Blake Schofield (00:38:57)

I think that so many of us were taught that, and the reality is with how fast the pace of work and the world is shifting, we can’t continue to operate at that point. That’s why we see eight out of ten people are at risk of burnout, with anxiety levels higher than at the peak of COVID. There’s so much stress right now that people feel like they need to know everything that’s happening about AI and everything that’s changing and keep up with it all. Literally, our bodies are not built to sustain that.

A huge part of my passion is to help people realize what we’ve been conditioned to believe. That’s part of why I got trapped for so long. I was conditioned to believe that the sacrifices I made for my career were necessary because that’s what it looks like when you have this type of career or this type of impact—that you have to sacrifice those things, and there is no other way. I have 1,000% been able to prove that that’s not true, not only for myself, but for so many clients.

When I built this business—you and I talked yesterday, so people kind of don’t know the background, but I started my business really when my kids were at school because I wanted to be able to drop them off and pick them up. I wanted to be involved in all the things. So I built a business online, and it ended up actually being two businesses by 2022. I was working 15 hours a week on these businesses and making nearly half a million dollars a year in top-line sales.

For me, I would have never thought in a million years that would have been possible. Now, of course, my business today is different, and I have more of an ability—especially with the work I do with companies—to operate differently, to be able to go and do things that I wasn’t doing at the time when I was really constraining that business to support my kids and what I wanted.

So many people believe that what I did isn’t possible, but it is. It was possible because I really came to understand: How do I find the natural pattern behind my success? How can I optimize how I work best? How do I create a business that’s in alignment with my highest value and how I like to work, in a way that creates the outcome that I want?

I think the biggest thing I see for so many people is they believe it’s not possible for them. That was me a decade ago. When I left corporate, I left over a $200,000 salary, which means I was in the top 5% of income earners for women. I believed that I had to sacrifice the money in order to do more fulfilling work and, as at the time I called it, a more sane life. I was willing to sacrifice because I just couldn’t do it anymore. It was through that journey that I came to realize how short-sighted my view was about what was possible, and that I didn’t have to sacrifice the things I thought that I had to. There was so much more possibility for my life and my career than I had ever imagined, but that only happened because I was open to surrounding myself with people who had done the things that I thought were impossible.

John SmallMtn (00:42:48)

Interesting, yeah. Big believer in we’re the average of the people we spend the most time with. When I first heard that line, I was kind of like, “No, that’s too simple.”

Then I started to look at my peer group. I was on this Kung Fu-focused path, thinking that I was going to open a Kung Fu school and that was going to be my path to greatness, or be a poker player. It definitely wasn’t sales or entrepreneurship or anything else like this. Then when I changed my environment and started spending more time with business owners, it shifted my thinking.

I want to go back to something you said, though, because I’m always kind of thinking about—and this is this weirdness that is me—what is the thing that people are telling themselves so that they don’t have to acknowledge the reality? When I was a poker player, we used to make fun of people after you found yourself saying this to yourself. You’d say, “Well, if I just moved up, if I played at a higher stake with better people, I would be winning.” This is always a false idea. It’s ego, and it’s a terrible way to try to grow as a poker player. But there’s always this version of, “I think it’s this thing, but it’s not really that thing.”

It sounds like people are sometimes coming to you because they’ve sold themselves on the idea that the only way that they can go work under a boss who’s not hard to deal with is that they have to go out on their own. But really, there’s room for them to change their perceptions. So going out on their own does not always fix the problem is what I’m thinking. Is that true?

Blake Schofield (00:44:36)

If the person is looking to go into entrepreneurship, sure. But as we talked about, I really work with a much broader swath than just that. What I would tell you, though, is it’s more universal than that. Most people are telling themselves, “It’s not that bad.”

John SmallMtn (00:44:48)

Interesting. Okay, so they’re just trying to suffer in silence.

Blake Schofield (00:45:03)

It is the story that we tell ourselves to get through what we feel that we don’t have the ability to change. I’m going to get emotional about this one.

John SmallMtn (00:45:17)

It’s all good, it’s all good.

Blake Schofield (00:45:20)

I think that, especially for leaders who have grown up being praised for their accomplishments, for being the responsible ones, we grew up with a lot of willingness to tolerate and a belief that we have to tolerate a lot of the struggles and challenges. We believe that our toleration of that is what it takes to be successful, and it’s that belief system that keeps us trapped.

Back to that point when I said to you, my belief was that change was difficult, painful, and took a long time. When you are used to tolerating and having to work so hard, you don’t see the inherent risk of continuing to do what you’re doing. The way you get through it is to tell yourself, “It’s not that bad.”

But the reality is, in the moments late at night when you replay how your night went and the frustrations you had, when you wake up in the middle of the night with the mind that won’t shut off of all the things, when those moments come when you say, “I can’t do this anymore”—that is the moment to stop and recognize that is your inner compass telling you the truth and working for your advantage.

So often we have learned to gaslight and override our own selves, believing that it’s responsible, believing that this is the commitment we have to make to be successful, believing that we will disappoint or let people down if we do something different, or believing that change requires blowing up our lives or losing our incomes. It is fundamentally that which I see—whether you are a leader in corporate, whether you are an entrepreneur, or whether you are running a large company, it really does not matter. It is the universal human belief that keeps us trapped until we can no longer do it.

You asked something earlier, which is something I know to be true. I heard part of this from Oprah Winfrey years ago, and it was also something I knew all the way back in high school. Oprah talks about: first it comes in a whisper, then a knock, then a bang, then the whole house comes down. So many of us get the signs and symptoms that what we’re doing isn’t working. It’s the whispers. It’s the moments of frustration. But we keep pushing forward because we keep telling ourselves, “It’s not that bad. I can handle it. It will get better.” We think creating this change is too risky.

I had to go through my third house falling down before I finally said, “Okay, I surrender. This is not working. I can’t do it.” The piece that I knew at 16 that I now truly live and understand at such a deep level is: Life will keep giving you lessons, and you’ll keep getting them until you learn them.

Most people don’t realize life is always working for you. We think these things are happening to us, but they’re not. They’re actually gifts to redirect our path, to help us learn the lessons of the things that are creating all that frustration, stress, or unhappiness in our lives. Because we don’t realize that, we keep ignoring them. We keep making the same decisions, and we get the whisper, we get the knock, we get the bang, and then we get the whole house to come down.

What I know to be true is the more your identity and who you are is anchored in your success—that you are a hard worker and in your accomplishments—the more likely you are to continue to tolerate and continue to suffer until the whole thing comes down.

My warning to people is always: it doesn’t have to be that way. It doesn’t have to be a leap. You actually don’t have to sacrifice the things that matter to you. You can create change in really small, tangible ways—week by week, month by month—that radically improve your life without blowing up anything. So many people believe, “I’m unhappy in my career, I’m unhappy in my business, and I need to do this radical change,” and that usually is not true.

John SmallMtn (00:50:20)

Interesting. I think I probably have like 15 questions from that, honestly. I didn’t mean to get this deep into all the free consulting that you’re handing out here, which I appreciate and hope people are paying attention to. Because I think it’s very easy to sell ourselves on—and you hit it—”It’s not that bad” mode. How does someone figure out if they’re just in a season of struggle versus selling themselves that it’s not that bad? Is there an easy way to figure that out for yourself?

Blake Schofield (00:51:13)

That’s a good question. I have two competing things, so I’m trying to let them sort themselves out before I answer you.

John SmallMtn (00:51:22)

No worries. I appreciate a deep, thoughtful response.

Blake Schofield (00:51:26)

First of all, I think we have to change our perspective about what the journey looks like. Most people think success is linear. It’s not; it’s cyclical. Our journeys and life are much of what you see reflected in nature and in science: creation, destruction, and rebirth.

If somebody is going through a season of challenge, the perspective often is that they have done something wrong. “How can I get through it as quickly as possible?” rather than recognizing it is our resistance to change that creates suffering, and that our seasons of change are our greatest opportunity to create something much more aligned with what we want.

When you lack clarity on what’s driving it, when you feel stressed because you don’t know what to do next, what I see often is people panicking. It’s like throwing spaghetti against a wall, hoping that all these other things are going to solve it. That’s why it’s really important to get guidance from an impartial expert who knows how to walk through that with you. We look at those seasons as something bad, but what I know is that those seasons are and can be your greatest gift if you use them to really get clear on: What is life teaching me? What am I being shown in my life that no longer fits? What are the things that are important to me to make sure I don’t let go of? What is it I really want, and what are the barriers in the way of doing that?

You and I talked yesterday a little bit about the internet and marketing industry. One of the things I shared with you is that my perspective is that there’s a huge swath of different skill sets and different levels of expertise. We all have to start somewhere, but I believe it’s so important to have integrity in who you are, how you help people, and where your greatest skills align.

I think so often we have people that are wanting to be the jack of all trades, like “Sure, I’ll do this, and I help people do all these things.” It’s actually a disservice to so many people, because when we lack clarity on our careers and our lives and we know something is not right, these are huge trajectory moments in our lives.

I know for me personally, when I first started this journey, and what I see for so many other people: Number one, we’re going to friends or family to solve those problems. To be honest, they often are the worst people to ask those things from because they are not impartial. They have a lot of their own biases and perspectives that are often keeping the person stuck. They don’t mean to, but they project their fears on you, they project their opinions, and it can create this horrible emotional churn.

The second thing is we are going to people who maybe say they help with clarity or career paths, but those people really don’t have a depth of knowledge or experience. They’re using cookie-cutter tools and these types of things, and they’re trying to put somebody through a process that might actually be completely wrong for who that person is and what they need.

I think it’s so critical to find somebody who has that expertise, somebody who is impartial, and somebody who can help you learn how to trust yourself and understand what is right for you. So much misalignment happens because we believe, “This person’s been successful. I just need to do the thing they did, and then that will make me happier. That will create the result I want.”

I saw very quickly in my very first program I invested in as an entrepreneur how many people created businesses based on what they thought the business had to look like—either because of their past experience that they brought with them or because of the mentor that said, “This is how you do things”—that was creating so much emotional turmoil, hesitance, and procrastination. They were blaming themselves for all of that when what they were really experiencing was, “This is not for me. This is not the right path for me.”

I see that happen so often for people. When you don’t really understand who you are and how you’re naturally wired to thrive, you don’t know what you need. It’s so easy to get off track because we think that somebody else has the answer. What we really need to do is to be able to understand how we uncover those answers for ourselves.

John SmallMtn (00:57:14)

I love that, because that’s what I was struggling with for a while. The way that I think about it is like that’s still looking for silver bullets—”I just want the one way of selling or the one way of running the business so that way everything kind of goes according to plan.” There’s a lot of depth, and I’m really glad that I got to do all of this work because I got coachable. I worked with a coach for a very long time, and then started working with other coaches, trying to just find any improvement that I possibly could.