Emma (00:01.516)
Hello and welcome to the first solo episode of the Conscious Success podcast. I have been dreaming about this podcast and honestly working on it for years now, but I'm so excited to finally be recording and sharing it with all of you and really just seeing this vision of mine come to life. On this podcast, I wanna dig into what it takes to be truly successful, to design a career that actually works for you.
And so in this first solo episode, I thought it was only fitting to share my personal career journey with you and why I redesigned my own career and how I did it. Because I often think that the most personal ends up being the most universal. And I hope that in sharing my story as well as all the stories of the women to come in the conversations that we're going to have on this podcast helps you to remember who you truly are, helps you to feel empowered.
and leads you to believe that it is possible and to take action to really design a career that works for you. So I always like to start at the beginning and understand who we were as children and the influences that shaped us, as so often those have huge impacts on the rest of our life. And I grew up in a family that really saw and valued IQ as the top and perhaps sole form of intelligence.
Both my parents had higher education. They really valued intelligence. My older brother, who was just two years older than me, aced every test and every class with little apparent effort. And so from a very young age, I mean, really, for as long as I could remember, I knew, I remember feeling an intense pressure to be smart.
that at some level I knew that in order to belong or to be worthy in my family, I needed to be intelligent. And as far back as probably first or second grade, I remember my mom testing me with multiplication and addition flashcards. And I wouldn't be able to do it fast enough. And I would feel frozen and overwhelmed, like I was going to disappoint her or let her down.
Emma (02:15.362)
And so from a very early age, this pressure really, I felt very acutely. And then in, I think it was the fifth grade, I had to take a test to get into what was called the gifted and talented track at school. I don't know if you all had a gifted and talented program, but when the results came back for this test, it turned out that I hadn't tested highly enough to get in.
And I can still remember the look of shock and disappointment on my parents' faces when they found out the news and they actually asked the school to let me retake the test because they figured this must be some kind of one-off error, right? Like my daughter must be gifted and talented. But to me, as a 10-year-old, that really solidified this core belief and identity that I wasn't gifted or talented.
Like I'd taken this objective test, right? And the results were in. I was neither gifted or talented. And I felt so overwhelmed and so full of shame. But I wasn't even able to tell my parents or anyone at the time what I was feeling inside. That shame led me to just completely shut down and internalize and keep that a secret. And subconsciously,
I landed on the best safety strategy that I knew how that I could come up with in order to belong in my family. And so I basically figured out that if I just studied really, really hard, hopefully I would be able to trick everyone into believing that I was smart. And so this identity and this fear became kind of the core source of fuel that really drove me for the next 20 plus years of my life.
and really pushed me to succeed. And I didn't realize it at the time, but I was operating in survival mode. Any time that I feared that I might fail, I would enter a fight or flight response. An adrenaline and cortisol would kick in, and I would try to push myself to study and work even harder. And for a long time, it really worked, I mean, at least in terms of earning me those external results and metrics of success.
Emma (04:35.074)
I got straight A's in school. I went to USC and graduated early, magna cum laude. After a few years of trying to figure out my path in my early 20s, I landed a job in tech sales and really started to thrive. Now, there was so much that I loved about this job. And when things were going well, I actually felt energized and empowered and motivated and
The environment was fast paced and I was able to be creative and I was surrounded by interesting people and had fun challenges to solve. And for many years, the company was doing well. I was doing well. I was thriving. I was at the top of the leaderboard. I closed the biggest deal in company history at the time. I was earning seven figures and promotion after promotion. And look, things were good. But.
I was always faced with this objective number to hit each quarter in sales. And at a subconscious level, this really triggered that core wound. It felt like that gifted and talented test over and over again each quarter, this constant evaluation and reflection of my worth. So when things were going well, I felt safe. I felt worthy. I felt confident. But if ever it seemed like I might not hit my number or things felt
like they might not go my way, I would enter survival mode. Those same feelings of what I felt as that 10-year-old who wasn't gifted or talented came flooding back. But as I moved up the ladder and I moved into sales leadership, I relocated from San Francisco to London in the middle of COVID to build out a new international sales team.
And it was the first time in my career that I was just faced with seemingly endless headwinds and insurmountable challenges. Our targets felt impossible to hit. And now, not only did I feel responsible for my own success, but of that of the 12 reps on my team. And it was really the first time that no matter how hard I pushed myself and I worked and I tried, I just wasn't able to drive the results that we needed.
Emma (06:53.718)
And this brush with failure sent me into full on fight or flight response for well over a year. I think there were moments where that survival response would be triggered, but very often I was able to just work and turn around results and then I felt safe again. But this was the first time that no matter what I did, nothing seemed to shift. And that same pattern that had always really driven me to succeed began to break me down.
I was internalizing every business challenge in the business as a reflection of my own worthiness. And so I would spend all my time and energy trying to jump in and save the day and fix everything myself. I wasn't able to slow down enough to effectively advocate for what was needed in the business to be set up for success. I wasn't empowering others. I wasn't able to think strategically or problem solve in new and creative ways. I was just like,
duck sitting on a pond. Everything looked calm on the surface and I pretended to have everything under control, but all the while I was paddling like hell beneath the surface. And I just remember at night I would lie awake and my mind I just couldn't shut it off. It would be spinning just trying to look for answers to all the business problems that I couldn't seem to solve and my nervous system was really just stuck in an activated state.
Like I had come face to face with my biggest fear that I wasn't actually smart, I wasn't actually good enough, and I was about to be found out. And so the job that I once loved became unbearable, and I desperately wanted to escape. And during the same time, I was listening to this personal development podcast that I loved, and I heard the host talking about this coaching institute. And it was the weirdest thing, but I just immediately felt like a
ping inside my body, inside my soul that this was something I wanted to do, that I wanted to enroll in this coaching institute. And I'd always had a love for personal development. And I think that from time to time, I daydreamed if I could ever find a way to turn that into a career. So when I felt this desire, I immediately justified it with logic and told myself, OK, well, if I become certified as a coach, then I would become a better sales leader.
Emma (09:20.952)
perhaps then be able to turn things around. I was out of other options. So on top of working my more than full-time, highly stressful job, I then enrolled in a year-long coaching institute on nights and weekends. So I would basically work from like 7 AM to 7 PM, break for a quick dinner, and then I would go to night school from 8 to 10 PM. And it was so interesting. As soon as I started, I noticed something about my energy that I just couldn't ignore.
Like all day, I would feel absolutely drained and depleted and devoid of any energy. I would just feel like a shell of myself. But then when I attended class at night after already working a 12-hour day, suddenly my energy returned. And I felt alive. And I felt engaged. And I was learning. And I felt so lit up. So I could start to see, OK, well, my burnout seems to be kind of like specific to my job or the patterns that are
being activated there, not my life necessarily as a whole. I was still very confused. But it was starting to dawn on me that maybe something needed to shift. And also at this same time, I was just a few months out from my wedding. And at the time, we were living in London planning a wedding on the East Coast. So was planning this from the other side of the world. And my dad also had late stage terminal.
a cancer at this point. And I really didn't know if he was going to live long enough to even make it to my wedding. And all of this stress, it was just like a perfect storm. It just added to my already chronic levels of stress and my dysregulated nervous system and my already full plate. And so I remember going to my hairdresser. And she told me that I had lost about a third of my hair since I had been to see her three months prior. And hearing from her,
It was the first time that I actually admitted to myself, like the level of stress that I was feeling on a regular basis was actually impacting my health, and that this was something that had to change. Things had gotten so bad that I finally was forced to say mercy. Like I couldn't keep pushing and hustling and running any longer. I knew I needed to shift something. I didn't know what needed to change.
Emma (11:44.419)
I didn't know whether my career needed to change or the way that I was showing up in it. All I knew for CERN at that time was that I needed a break. Like that was the only thing I was clear on. So after nearly eight years at my company, I went to my leadership and I asked to take six months of unpaid leave, both to be able to spend time with my father in his final months and really just work on resolving my levels of stress.
And at first, they said that three months was the max that they could allow me to take under company policy. But I just knew in my bones three months wouldn't be enough to heal from the burnout that I was experiencing. And so I offered my resignation. And ultimately, thankfully, once they saw how much I needed this, how serious I was, they figured out a way to allow me to take the leave. So I stopped working.
But I still continued to attend my coaching institute. And it was still giving me energy and I think just enough structure and sense of purpose not to totally spin out from going working, whatever, number of hours a week to stopping. in that, continuing to go to my coaching institute, but also having so much space in my life, I had the ability to really pause and reflect and sit with myself for a
the first time in decades. It was the first time I stopped running long enough to actually hear myself think, to actually reconnect with that inner voice inside. And I started journaling. And I started sitting with my thoughts and processing and just working through a backlog of emotions that I had just been too busy to deal with. And at Elementum Coaching Institute, one of the core philosophies that we were taught is that
You can't take, you can't guide clients to places that you've never been yourself. So we were all required to do the inner and outer work on ourselves in order to become our own best client, in order to become the best coaches that we could be. And this was really the first time I learned about the nervous system, about trauma, attachment theory, internal family systems, and so much more. And through this work and through
Emma (13:58.627)
doing this work myself, I became aware of that experience that I'd had with the gifted and talented test in the fifth grade for the first time since, I don't know, since it happened. I'd long since consciously forgotten about it. But when I remembered, I finally made space and understood how to feel and process those trapped emotions that I'd essentially just been repressing for decades.
And what I know now is that any time we are overwhelmed physically, mentally, or emotionally, our body holds on to that as a trauma. And it tries to shape shift and to try new strategies to protect ourself. And so that's essentially what I had been doing. I had been trying to protect myself and earn my safety through proving my intelligence and worthiness all these years.
So it was the first time I understood this, and I was able to really see it clearly. And I was able to reparent my 10-year-old inner child and finally put that story to bed that I wasn't gifted or talented. And as I did this work, and as I healed old wounds and I re-regulated my nervous system, I reconnected to my sense of self, to the person I was and the desires that I genuinely had before I started trying to prove my worth.
And from this place of honesty and self-connection, I started to really ask myself the big daunting questions of, what do I want? What do I actually want for my life and my career? If I wasn't making decisions and running away from what I feared, but I was instead making intentional choices and taking actions to move towards something that I truly desired, what would that be?
And answering these questions wasn't easy. Like, think asking a woman, what do you want, is an inherently activating question for many of us. And I had just never been a person who could articulate a five-year plan. Like, I never really felt connected to any sense of vision because I was just, again, running away. And I just been climbing the corporate ladder and striving for the next promotion without really knowing.
Emma (16:08.878)
what I thought was at the end of the rainbow. And I didn't really know what I was motivated by. I didn't know what gave me energy. And so I really had to explore all this. I had to explore what my gifts were and really clarify what my values were. And slowly, but still with an incomplete picture, I started to understand, OK, well, I want to start a family in the near future. I didn't want to live to work. I didn't want the stress of my job to.
raw my ability to be present in motherhood. I realized I didn't want my boss or my boss's boss's job. And I just started to understand and make space for the things that made me feel creative and curious and inspired. And I started to feel really excited. I realized all the energy that my coaching institute was giving me and the work that I was learning there, how lit up I felt. And I started to have this idea that I could build my own business.
One, that I could wear many hats, that I could be in complete control of the goals I set for myself and where I spent my time and the work that I did, and that I could work with people that I could genuinely support and feel a sense of purpose in the work that I did. And so I started to envision that when I graduated from my coaching institute, I would combine everything I learned through that institute with all of my
business experience and really help other women to move through burnout in the same way that I had by leveraging all of the modalities that actually helped me to heal. I had been in therapy for years and it hadn't helped. It hadn't uncovered or resolved these core patterns. And so I was like, OK, this is the stuff. This is what I want to work with and share with other women.
I made the decision not to return to my lucrative tech career and instead build a coaching business. And in order to give myself permission to do this, I had to just make an agreement with myself. I pulled a certain amount of money from my savings, and I opened a business account, and I funded that account. And I said, OK, if I run out of money before I'm able to build a profitable, sustainable business, then I'll go back to tech.
Emma (18:32.054)
Like I had a big network. I had great experience. I knew I could always go back and get a job. But I thought to myself, OK, why not at least try to see if I could create something of my own, if I could build a business and a life that I actually loved, one that I actually wanted, not just one that felt safe or externally validating? And so the first iteration of my business was called Emma Lloyd Coaching. And through tapping into my network and some basic marketing,
I was able to sign my early clients. And soon they started to refer others and renew for one coaching container after a next. And as we worked together, I really got to see shared patterns and the transformations that they were going through. And I began to see kind of the same pattern emerge time and again, something I now refer to as the conscious success continuum.
So clients would often come to me burnt out or feeling really stuck in their careers, but wanting to find a better way to succeed or to avoid failure. They still wanted to climb the corporate ladder or continue to achieve in their same line of work, but they knew it wasn't feeling good and they wanted to figure out how to shift that. But so often as we did this work and we really healed any of the fear-based patterns that were going on and shifted out of survival mode,
Clients would inevitably reach a place of internalized safety, where they're no longer in survival mode, but in what I call creator mode. And from this place, they were able to really connect to their sense of self and what they truly wanted. And oftentimes, this would open a whole new can of worms, where they weren't even sure who they were or what they wanted, like what had been driven by a safety strategy in their own lives versus what was actually authentic and aligned.
very often the fear and the stress that used to motivate them to succeed stopped working similarly as it did with me. And the goals that they used to strive for and feel really important often began to feel empty or meaningless. And from here, they had to reconnect with who they were before the world told them who to be and explore the answers to that question of what do I want. And so
Emma (20:52.398)
As they did, and as we did this work together, they would find new clarity and clarify their values and goals that really felt aligned and energizing. And then from that place, we would begin the work of redesigning their careers and of taking the actions required to turn whatever that vision was into their reality. Now, sometimes this looked like just changing how they spoke to themselves and how they approached work boundaries and relationships and all the dynamics there.
But other times, this looked like changing roles, changing companies, or even starting again in a new industry. Some of my clients decided to stay in corporate. Some decided to leave. But watching each of them go through this type of metamorphosis and really reconnect to their vision and return to their power was just so incredible to witness and to support them through. And as I did, I realized that my niche was so much bigger than just helping women resolve burnout.
It was really about creating a version of success that was fueled by desire over fear. And so that's when the idea to rebrand my business to conscious success began to take shape. And so I saw that people often climb two mountains in their career. The first is often motivated by safety and approval, the need to prove our worth and to earn enough money to feel secure. But oftentimes, once we reach that first mountaintop, success still feels
hollow or misaligned or we're lacking a sense of purpose or energy or motivation. And so often begins the journey to scale back down that first mountain by healing and unlearning the patterns that really motivated us to achieve from fear over desire. And once we reach the valley floor, we're able to set our sights on a new mountain peak, one that we truly desire and goals we actually
want to achieve. And then this new version of success, as you begin to ascend and climb that second mountain, my clients would start to apply the strategies and take consistent action to reach that top of that second mountain. And along the way, I deeply believe become the versions of themselves that they were always meant to be. And as I built my business from desire over fear, I saw myself become the most
Emma (23:17.984)
empowered, energized, and aligned version of myself that I had ever experienced. And this is really what my own career journey looked like and what it has for so many of my clients. And I deeply believe that when we shift from building our career from survival mode to building it from creator mode, we can finally create this type of conscious success. And conscious success isn't tied to a certain type of career or how it looks.
But it's about creating one that is fueled by desire over fear. One that feels intrinsically motivating, not because of how it looks on the outside, but because of how it feels on the inside. Because of all of the gifts that it brings online, that it's built from a sense of purpose and creativity and collaboration and...
honesty, and it allows us to live into our values rather than causes us to abandon them. And so building a consciously successful career from creator mode, it's not that you don't experience challenges or even that you love every minute of every day of what you do. I don't think that's a realistic goal. But you know why you're doing it. You feel a sense of purpose, and you don't experience that dread when you wake up in the morning and you look at
the calendar for your day ahead and you just want to shut your computer or turn off your phone. You're not constantly self-critical or internalizing regular business challenges as personal failings. You can actually articulate that five-year plan or that vision of what you're working towards that you feel genuinely excited about and excited to learn and grow towards that goal.
And you can actually stay in the game long enough to build mastery because you're energized and devoted to that vision rather than fighting with yourself and disciplining yourself just to show up every day. And so learning how to create from creator mode instead of survival mode was like a completely new way of moving through the world and through my career. learning to make this shift and to design a consciously successful career is
Emma (25:33.229)
deep and nuanced work. But what I know to be true is that everyone who actually loves their careers and loves their lives is building from creator mode without exception. And I deeply believe that this kind of success is possible for everyone. We all have a purpose. We all have gifts to share with the world. It is never too late to pivot, to start again, to redesign and realign your next chapter with your s-
wherever you are in this season of life, whatever that may be. And so today, I'm four years into founding and then rebranding my business. And I have truly been able to build a career that I truly love in the context of a life that feels good and sustainable to me. I'm no longer running on adrenaline and cortisol, but I am fueled by creativity and inspiration and impact.
And my Sunday scaries are gone. And I genuinely look forward to sitting down at my desk each day in the morning and connecting with my clients. And it's not that everything is perfect or easy, but it does feel easeful and authentic and aligned building in this way. And now I have kids. I have my own business. I work about 30 hours a week. I'm able to show up for myself and for others as the type of person that I genuinely
want to be. And I've built the version of success that works for me. And that's not to say that my definition or the career that I've built is right for you or right for the next person. But I do believe that when we do the work to regulate our nervous system, to learn how to reconnect with and create from our authenticity and then take the consistent actions to apply the strategies to
bring your vision to life, I believe that everyone can create a kind of success that actually feels good for them. And when you begin to do this, it finally feels like you're rowing a boat downstream with the current rather than paddling upstream against it. You enter a kind of co-creative dance of the universe, and you iterate as you go, and you learn, and you make consistent progress.
Emma (27:54.295)
you are actually able to enjoy the journey along the way to whatever destination you're headed. And you know what? I'm about halfway through my career now, and I don't know all of the chapters or iterations that will come next, what my career will look like a decade from now. But I do know that if I trust myself and if I listen to my inner knowing and I follow my desires and I'm a constant learner and I lean into my growth edges,
that I'll always be able to create a version of success that feels good to me. And I deeply believe that that is possible for each of you listening as well. So I hope that sharing my story helps you to understand a little bit more about me, why I redesigned my own career, and why I'm so passionate about supporting others through this work. And I really hope that in all of the episodes to follow and all of the conversations to come,
that they will help you to expand your belief in what's possible and to be able to really choose yourself so that you can build from creator mode instead of survival mode. and my hope is that in all the episodes to follow and all the conversations to come will really help you to expand your belief in what's possible to be able to honor yourself and to rebuild from creator mode instead of survival mode.
And I hope that in all the episodes to follow and all the conversations to come will help you to expand your belief in what's possible and to be able to choose to honor yourself and build your career from creator mode over survival mode. So I hope that this episode resonated. I would love to hear what it brought up for you, as well as any suggestions for anyone that you want me to interview on this podcast or any topics you'd like me to cover or questions that you may have.
please just DM me on Instagram. It's at Conscious Success Co. I answer every message and I would love to hear from and connect with you there. So thank you for giving me the opportunity to share my story with you. Thank you for listening and I'll see you in the next episode.
