Molly Graham

And sort of on paper, it was perfect.

The job was fancy, and I thought I'd always wanted that job.

And

If I reflect backwards, I would say that there was a very strong voice that was ego driven, what I would call my like achiever voice saying you should do this like it's shiny and everybody's going to think you're cool and you're going to put it on your LinkedIn and everybody's going to be like, woohoo, you know, it was like almost so excited about having had the job.

that I never stopped to ask, are you excited to do the job?

And eventually a friend showed up that said, are you excited about the day?

Like, are you excited about the hours in the day?

And I remember that he asked me that at a bad time.

Talk about a misplaced mentor piece of advice.

It was like two weeks before I started the job.

But I remember having this sinking feeling of like, oh, I'm not sure I am excited about the day.

But it caused me to do a bunch of work to try to sort out these voices in my head of like,

What are they each doing?

And I had a coach at the time who gave me this really great metaphor of like, it's like a car and you have voices that are in the front and they're driving, right?

And you have voices that are in the backseat and they might be shouting things, but they're a little softer.

And then there's voices in the trunk.

And she literally had me do these amazing exercises where I took people out of the trunk and talked to them about why they were there and how they got put there and also talked to the people in the front seat about what was important to them and why they were driving.

But it's like piecing apart these different parts of yourself and realizing that they have very different motivations.

And over time, it's taught me to be a lot better at recognizing which voice is talking.

And it's not like you ever get rid of them.