Conscious Success Co (00:00)
Hi, Seenam, I'm so happy to chat with you today. I absolutely love your sub stack and I know that so many of the women listening are going to resonate with your career break and your career redesign journey that you are still currently navigating. And I just think your sub stacks have been so honest and so refreshing. And I'm so excited to talk to someone who's actually in the messy middle, not from the polished other side where they have everything figured out, but actually still in it and so relatable. So.
Sinem (00:10)
Thank
Thank you.
Okay.
Yes.
Conscious Success Co (00:27)
Thank you for taking the time to be with us today from Vietnam to have this conversation. So excited to have you here.
Sinem (00:32)
Thank you for inviting me, I'm so excited.
Conscious Success Co (00:35)
Okay, so I love to start all the way back at the beginning. Tell us a little bit about little seen him. What were you like as a kid? What sort of things let you up? Tell us what we need to know about little you.
Sinem (00:46)
Yeah, so I was born in a small town in Turkey and the little Sinem was very much into writing books, discovering a world outside of the small town that I was in. I was always a very curious child. Everywhere I go, I would say, what is here? What is there? What is inside this? My mother always tells the stories about how I would want to know about everything.
And basically I was raised with a lower middle-class Turkish family who installed in me that the education is the most important thing. And the way to break from the middle-class is to be highly educated. So my whole childhood actually is based on chasing this dream of being an engineer, a doctor, whatever the path would lead me, but being someone with high education.
So all of my childhood from start to finish was basically my parents and me trying to crack the code of how I was going to get the best education possible in my life. And I think the curiosity bit, which was internal and the pressure to become this amazing student so that my life could be sealed, which is external, both of them combined has shaped the person that I am.
and the journey that has taken me in my younger adulthood when I got more independent basically.
Conscious Success Co (02:11)
And at the time, as a kid or young person, did you buy into that or do you still now that education was your best path to a better life? Or did that feel like you had to abandon some parts of yourself or your dreams in order to honor that?
Sinem (02:27)
I think this is a question that both answers are correct, meaning education as a lower middle class Turkish family's first daughter was my best chance of becoming an international worker.
But at the same time, It required for me to abandon very important parts of myself that I had to silence, that I had to crush and make it very little inside me and they could not speak. They were completely silent for multiple decades as I continue my journey of becoming successful.
using all of these prestigious companies and prestigious schools to make a life for myself while the other part of me was just inside me very silent, very not listened to and begging to be listened to. I think my upbringing was the answer for the time being. But as I grow old, there was parts of me that I had to
meat and I had to excavate from inside myself to become whole basically.
Conscious Success Co (03:28)
Yeah, I mean, the words you're using, parts of yourself that you had to kind of remean and excavate. do, you with clients, I do a lot of internal family systems and parts work. I don't know if you've dug into that at all, but very much we, have these various parts of ourselves. So I'm so curious, what are the parts that you had to abandon or exile that took, you know, decades to be able to reintegrate and honor again?
Sinem (03:52)
I think for me it was the curious scene I had to take a step back because there was always something to chase. When you have a lot of things to chase in terms of milestones, the curiosity becomes like a distraction and you're not able to follow it. So I had to silence it even though it was the biggest part of my childhood. And the second part was creativity. I loved writing, I love books and I always imagined myself
in some capacity writing, but it was never part of my life because you could not do the things that you were not best at. If you were not good at something and if you are not going to get financial or social approval from something, you would not pursue it in the beginning worldview in my brain. So the creativity beat was also silenced. And something that I'm understanding right now, now that I'm on this path,
to being a more authentic person in the world, the connection piece. Because I think when you're not fully yourself and when you are not talking to the parts of yourself that you're silencing, the connection that you create with others can sometimes be also partial. Now that I'm talking to a lot of parts of me and not trying to hide many of them,
The way that I'm able to connect to people has changed. So I wouldn't be having this conversation with you right now if I was not being, if I was not talking about the things that I was discovering in my sub stack, for example. So I think the connection piece is also something that was partial in my life. And now I'm slowly discovering how to make it full and joyful basically.
Conscious Success Co (05:14)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
And you're describing so much of the reason I want to have women like you on this podcast and the whole idea of conscious success. Conscious success comes from a connection to yourself, to your true self, your authentic self, the integrated self in all of the parts, and then defining what success looks like from that place. What is desire and creativity and curiosity? What is that begging you to explore and build and pursue, right? Versus
just the conventional success, which might look good on paper or just earn us a good lifestyle, but maybe is disconnected from that essential self. So I love the way that you're speaking about that because it resonates so deeply with all that I believe and have built here as well. And I'm curious, before this conversation, we were talking a little bit and you were bringing up this idea that the school system pretends to allow for failure, but actually punishes.
one slip up with like life changing consequences, right? If you don't test highly enough or you don't get the best grade in that class, then you're not gonna get into the right university, which will affect your whole rest of your life, right? And also that if you're good at this game of school and your parents are then giving you praise or validation, you begin to equate that success or that validation with love. Can you walk us through how you've seen that play out or the impacts of that in your life?
Sinem (06:56)
Yeah, when I was 11 years old, my father sat me down and explained to me that there was this test that I had to ace to get into a private school. If I didn't nail the test when I was 11 years old to get into that private school, that my whole life trajectory would have changed. So all of the tests that I have taken and all of the exams that I have taken felt like
an evaluation on the life path that I was going to have. The stakes were too high all the time. And I talk about this because there is this mindset, growth mindset or fixed mindset. And everyone talks about it when you enter the corporate system. Do you have a growth mindset or do you have a fixed mindset? And at some point I was like so angry at this because you raised us to have fixed mindset.
Every test was high stakes. You had to get the A's consistently to be able to get that to university and then that university unlocked the doors to the corporate world. So basically you raised us to be fixed mindset and then now you're demanding us to have growth mindset which requires a room for failures, a room for iteration and the school and system has no place for failure or iteration.
So it's basically almost like a guess writing to make us raise in these systems that do not allow us to fail, get back up, learn, iterate, and then asks us, why don't you have growth mindset? That was the, that makes me so angry all the time.
When I was at school, because every test was so high stakes, I tried to ace every single one of them with great effort and great diligence. The more that I got good at passing the tests, the more I could see the pride in my parents' eyes. And it wasn't maybe intentional.
but I could see every time they go to a parents and teachers meet up and they would come back to the house and I could see they were like standing a little bit taller and they were smiling. And I could see even though they did not mean to maybe that me being successful was making them happy and almost making them love me more. So I equated worth with success very early on and
it completely overtaken my identity. I was the successful one. This persisted through education and then into the workplace as well. I had to be the successful one because that was the story about myself and that's what made me worthy and lovable at the end.
Conscious Success Co (09:31)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm,
totally. And that becomes your whole identity and your whole sense of self-worth. And then back to the fixed mindset, if you're not successful at anything, then it's like, now I'm having an identity crisis and am I even lovable and am I even worthy? So how can we also have a growth mindset of, what can I learn and how can I iterate for the next time under that? And it's so interesting when you were saying that, what that brought up for me is I, similarly to you, was a
Sinem (09:52)
channel.
Conscious Success Co (10:04)
A student and I remember I would study for tests and I would be able to use a part of my memory and brain where the night before I would just study and cram and then six months after that test I knew nothing from that class because I wasn't following the curiosity. I wasn't actually immersed in the learning. I was just trying to get the A and so you look at my you know report card
And it's like, oh, a, a, a, a, a. But then I'm like, what did I actually learn in school? And then I think, now today, I don't need to remember notes from my coaching institute or from a book I read because I'm immersed and I'm curious and I'm truly internalizing and digesting it in a way. And so I think that's another part, too, that we create through our school system.
all of these students that can test well or do what it takes to be quote unquote successful, but that's not actually tied to the richness or the understanding that comes when we're truly following our curiosity.
Sinem (11:04)
Yes, I love that. I actually took the career break because I wanted to self-educate on topics that I was super interested in, at least part of the reason. And I also studied a little bit about the art of learning, meaning how would you educate yourself. And it is so different than how we are raised in the education system.
basically for adults, it's mostly experimental. So you learn by doing and then you learn by reflecting, meaning you want to learn about something, you answer it yourself about what you think and then you go and you learn and then you realize how wrong it was or what was the missing pieces and you self-correct. So it's almost like a hypothesis and then you learn and then you adjust. So...
At most you learn by doing and you need to repeat a little bit what you're learning so every once in a while you go back and you ask yourself questions etc. but most of it is based on actively thinking and curiosity. Like you want to be present with what you're learning which requires attention and which requires curiosity.
Otherwise, as you said, we would just sit down, memorize the lines and then forget about it two months later. So the self-education piece was completely different than what I was doing in the schooling system. But the other part was that I was telling my friends that who knew that learning could be fun again. It's so fun. It's filled with dopamine. It's almost addictive. It's insane that we...
Conscious Success Co (12:31)
Yes.
couldn't agree more.
Sinem (12:37)
made this thing that is joyful and fun into something that is just something that you endure for many years and then you let go of. you leave university. It's one of the most joyful, most fun experiences in the world and it should be lifelong, but we created so much drama in terms of the perfectionism,
and the need to do it right, the need to do it fully and the need to ace the test and get the A's, we slowly took away the fun and the joy from learning. And for me, my career break was me getting back to the joy and fun of actually learning things as well.
Conscious Success Co (13:19)
I love that so much. something I've talked about previously on this podcast and I talk about with clients is centering intrinsic motivation over the extrinsic. So centering things like curiosity and joy and learning and fun and collaboration and communication and all of that. And when you're actually having fun and enjoying it and allowing it to be joyful, then we can build careers where the...
extrinsic follows, hopefully, right? If we do it well, then yeah, sure, can we make money? But we have to be in the felt experience of what we're doing, where we actually are centering that. And that's what you're talking about with learning too. And when we make it all about, I just need to get the A, it's not about the joy of learning at all, then we're actually just chasing the extrinsic and totally disconnected from the intrinsic. And it is that joy of learning and those intrinsic motivations that
are our sense of aliveness that make life worth living, that are the rich texture and color and so many people in corporate that I coach and that I know, it's like, we kind of just feel like dull and removed from the felt experience of our own life. And I think what you're talking about when we get cut off from learning after university or whatever, it's like, that is a byproduct of that and of just not having.
connection to the sense of aliveness. So I love that you took this career break and you're like, I'm going to pursue learning about the things I actually want to learn about. And I'm going to make that my mission. And I'm going to center that for, it sounds like the first time in decades.
Sinem (14:53)
Yes, yes definitely.
Conscious Success Co (14:54)
So.
So you built your career inside of some seriously impressive organizations, Procter & Gamble and Amazon. Can you walk us through briefly like those corporate years and what your experience was like inside of those big companies?
Sinem (15:07)
Yeah, I think my experience in those big companies was very similar to my schooling system experience. I took the same mindset and the way that I was raised into my early working years. So I started working at Practing Gamble, which is essentially a very competitive environment to start working on. And I was trying so hard.
to continue having this successful image and being the person who gets everything right every single time. I had never majorly failed in my life up until I started working. So I had no relationship to failures or how to bounce back from failures. I basically was trying to maintain an image that I had created about myself throughout
university and before in the education system back in the corporate world. And I think for a long time it worked because you work so hard and I was working long hours and then you have your social life and all the other activities that you fill your time with. So there is no time for you to actually sit down and have an honest conversation with yourself. You just go through the motions for many years.
So that's what happened to me. I would feel some whispers saying, this really it? Do you want to do this for like 30 years? or it's not about the work or the place, how you're living, how you are showing up day to day to your life. Does it feel like you?
That question would come up all the time and I don't think it was related to job or anything. It was mainly how you are living day to day, working yourself to death at this job and then socializing until you have no space left for your inner voice. That question would come up and then I would silence it. Come up and then I would silence it until I could not silence it anymore.
So I made this extremely small mistake at work one time, but it's just something so small that it's really ridiculous for me to remember after five years, six years later, actually now seven years. But that mistake triggered something in me, which was like a cascade of emotions that could not shut up anymore after that. So I had to face that the way that I was living my life was not
coming from my essential self as the word that you use. And I was always chasing these external metrics and trying to maintain an image of being this high performer who would never get anything wrong. So that opened a crack that led me to therapy, that led me to reading every single psychology self-help book that is out there. I call this years excavation years.
So basically I had to go deep inside me to excavate the parts of me that have been silenced for decades now. And that took a process of multiple years. In those years, I moved from Turkey to Luxembourg, started working at Amazon, which was again, it wasn't about the work. It was about internal work that I was doing at the time about who am I?
what kind of things that light me up, which kind of way that I do not want to live anymore and what parts of me that have been silenced so far and asking me to really listen to them and integrate them to my life. So after three, four years at corporate, I basically entered this multiple year excavation process that at the end, after I think five to six years,
made me sit down and realize that something had to change. Because when you excavate that deep into yourself and you surface things that you have been silencing so far, it's almost inevitable that the way that you're living your day-to-day life, the choices that you're making will change. Because now you really want to listen to the parts of yourself that you have silenced forever.
Conscious Success Co (19:11)
Yes, I mean, it's such a brave choice, though, and I think it's one that a lot of people hear that voice. I think everyone has that inner voice. But very often we reach to different coping mechanisms in an effort to silence it because it's too confronting to make space to hear it. What would have to change in my life? What would I need to walk away from? How would that affect my sense of safety or my sense of self or self worth? Right. And so very often that's why we're
scrolling on TikTok or Instagram or we are workaholics or we are having the second glass of wine at night, like whatever your coping mechanism is. But I think so many of us go through a battle and arm wrestle where we're trying to silence that essential self in that voice until it reaches a fever pitch where we can't anymore. But it's still a brave and empowered decision.
to say, OK, I'm not going to run. I'm going to make space. I'm going to read all these books. I'm going to be curious about what this all means and what I actually want. What do you think it was in that time in your life or just about you as a person that caused you to lean into that discomfort rather than continuing to stay asleep, essentially?
Sinem (20:23)
For me, it was almost a forced sit down because this is something I also write about. When your mind is in denial for so long, your body takes over, organizes a coup and then makes you sit down and listen to it.
So for me, it was an anxiety crisis triggered by the small mistake that I just mentioned that would not leave and go away. So even if I wanted to pretend that nothing was happening, my body was already screaming at me to sit down and listen this time.
So I wish I was able to sit down and listen before my body told me to, but that was the process that happened to me. Because the anxiety crisis was so imminent and so long that I had to seek therapy and some external help. And then that started the process of excavation basically. I think this happens to a lot of people.
everyone that I talk about in Substack experienced a similar thing, they could not continue, not because their minds told them to, but because their bodies gave up. So I shared this note that was saying that my body left my job two years before I did. I just wasn't listening. So it was my body taking over that made me finally take the leap and...
excavate inside but when I started excavating inside which is the other shift first one was the body but the other shift was that when I started excavating it was a hard process I'm not gonna lie it was painful and it was making me lose very big parts of my identity the high achievers the always ambitious the one who was going to break the glass ceiling the one who loved leaning and carried it around in
her university years. So that girl was discovering in therapy that majority of the things that she thought was harsh, was not actually harsh. And it was making her go, okay, fine. But then who am I? Like if this is not it, if the self image that I had and the stories that I had for myself were not fully me, what is left of me? And it was a bit of a void. And I think a lot of people experienced that in therapy too.
And the biggest unlike for me, was going from then who am I? what is happening to hmm, I wonder then who am I? Like this curiosity attitude that I was able to deploy at some point, the little child of me who is obsessed with curiosity taking over and saying, okay, this is very interesting.
there were apparently parts of you and you did not listen and then they are coming up and there were stories about yourself that you believed in was the full truth. Okay, there is a loss. I acknowledge that, but where is the curiosity in this? is your wonder? Where is your awe about what is happening to you? And that changed the whole attitude and it became a more joyful and curious journey of, I wonder then who am I? Like what is happening?
Like how can I shape my life now, now that the old version of me is gone? So those two things, first body and the second, the curious attitude towards life changed the whole process and it didn't even feel brave at the end. It was more like joyful, creative, continuous discovery process.
Conscious Success Co (23:37)
my gosh, so much in that that I wanna tap on and jump in on because the body thing, I mean, that was true for sure of my journey and my initiation. I had clinical burnout, I was losing my hair, right? I was truly a shell of myself. And like you said, my body knew my body had walked out of that job two years sooner, but I was fighting it, my mind was fighting it. And I think that, you know, that's why I chose to study trauma and somatic work at such a deep level because
in order to access our essential self, our truth, we have to follow the cues of our body, which, your mind will tell a million stories, but your body will never lie, right? And it's only when you start to reconnect with that, rather than just living in your head and being disconnected or silent from the neck down that you can start to piece it all together. But very often that leads to this awakening breakdown for the breakthrough, existential crisis, whatever you want to call it, where you start to realize shit,
which parts of my personality that I thought were me are just adaptive strategies, survival strategies, things that I learned in order to be approved of or in order to stay safe or be worthy. And that's a whole reckoning, right? that can be a lot. But when you actually can start to see that like, no, for me to see that some of my programming happened before I even had...
the ability to discern for myself. And I just took that as a capital T truth and it wasn't truth at all. And I started to act in this way because it got me positive validation or because that's what I needed in order to survive. It is the opening that allows you to land at this reconnection to self, right? And so I love how you're describing it because I think anyone who's been through that knows exactly what you're talking about.
Sometimes it can seem a little woo-woo to be like, body knows, but it is actually true and it's our access to our subconscious mind and our childhood self and all of that conditioning that becomes our portal.
Sinem (25:34)
Yes, yes. It's not woo-woo at all, by the way, It is very much like... Because the parts that you have silenced so far is not part of the major story that you have about yourself. It's very logical that the brain would not let them come up while the body is not able to continue because...
those parts is not conscious maybe, is not the one that the voice that is talking to you, but it's still there. It's in the background, still continuing to function and still continuing to make demands or be visible or understood. So it is of course very logical that something breaks down in the system. I see it as the logical end of this journey basically.
Conscious Success Co (26:17)
No, there's so much science behind it. I think initially, when I first heard about it, you have to just listen to your body, it felt like for my intellectual self, I don't know what people are talking about here. But it really is obviously backed by so much neuroscience and everything else. And I often talk about when we're trying to repress parts of our essential self, right? It's like,
A beach ball is trying to come up from underwater and we keep trying to push it back down and hold it down. And you think about the amount of energy, the amount of your capacity, your life force that you need to divert and direct towards holding those different beach balls down. That's what also makes us feel lifeless and depleted and anxious and burnt out, right? And it's through this reckoning where we can be like, okay.
I'm going to let that beach ball come to the surface. I'm going to look at that adaptive strategy. I'm going to look at that part of my personality and I'm going to integrate it. I'm going to feel the feelings around it and I'm going to release it and throw it out of the pool. That as we do that eventually, we're like, my gosh, I have so much more energy. I have so much more capacity. And from that place, then we can use that to reconnect again with that curiosity and wonder and joy. And so I just think that everything that you're talking about right now is just so
relevant to anyone who's been on this awakening, reckoning career redesign journey. And so often it does take having that kind of moment or that rock bottom also from a behavioral change perspective. The pain of staying the same has to be larger than the pain of changing or the fear behind it. Otherwise, we as humans are hardwired to not do it. that's why the self two years ago that our body knew.
we still were fighting it, right? Because the pain had to get so severe to finally say mercy.
Sinem (28:07)
yeah, definitely. I think that changes though, because I think that's the initiation, the pain of staying the same is higher than the change. But once you broke down orientation towards life, that is mainly about survival or trying to be okay all the time in a frantic way, and you are able to deploy a different kind of...
life where you are experimental, you let go a little bit of the control that you feel, you don't feel the need to plan all the time and you are letting that parts of you that you silenced so far to come to the surface every once in a while. in that frame, the change can be a pull instead of a push.
So I think that's the part that I'm super interested in right now because the early journey for me was all about the push. And right now I feel like I am in the direction of being pulled towards aversion instead of being pushed towards something that I'm trying to get away from. And this is something very important to me that people understand that the change doesn't have to feel painful.
although always uncomfortable, doesn't have to feel painful all the time. So for me, it's still uncomfortable even when I'm food because growing is uncomfortable. You go to the unknown, you do things that you do not think you would do. There's uncertainty, it's uncomfortable, but it's not as painful as the previous version where you were pushed out of a life basically.
Conscious Success Co (29:39)
I couldn't agree more. And I think that initial pain is more like moving, I call it survival mode to creator mode. It's that jump from being in survival mode and being driven from fear and scarcity and lack of worth or whatever that looks like for you to then being like, okay, I'm not gonna operate from this survival mode operating system anymore, but I'm gonna actually make this big leap into the unknown. And then when we start to do everything you're talking about,
we enter and reconnect with creator mode where we can then, yeah, still uncomfortable to grow. Yeah, it's hard to meet our edges and take the aligned action to become the person that we say that we want to be or have the career that we say that we want to have. But it is that pull. You start to have a vision. You start to reconnect with desire. You start to see why you're taking the actions that you're taking. And you're excited about what that can lead to. And so it does have a totally different
energy and motivation, but I think to first jump that chasm that is where, you know, the breakdown to the breakthrough happens.
Sinem (30:45)
Yes, definitely, definitely. That's the entrance door.
Conscious Success Co (30:48)
And you've described in your writing what you call the game of safety. And this is the idea that so many of our decisions are not made from our values or a desire, but from a need to avoid that uncertainty or avoid that discomfort. And so it was still while you were in this corporate chapter, you were having this anxiety attack or whatever that looked like, this was when you began to recognize that this was the game that you were playing and made that conscious choice that something had to shift.
Sinem (31:16)
So when I had the anxiety crisis, I was still in Turkey and I was still at, I think it was at the time, practice and gamble. So my initial strategy was just trying to understand what happened to me and almost like fix myself so I can move on with my life as it's nothing changed. So that year I was in deep therapy and a lot of self discoveries were happening. And at the end of that year, I moved to Luxembourg and I was working at Amazon at the time.
And Luxembourg is very much like a utopia, meaning it's safe, it's clean, the social services are amazing in the country. So it was basically a heaven of safety and stability. And my Turkish brain, because at the time Turkey was in a big economical and also democratic crisis, and everyone, every one of my friends were trying to
kind of leave to Europe, to US, even Dubai. It was basically a mass brain migration happening at the time. So I ended up in Luxembourg. And if I stayed in Luxembourg in that utopia of silence and nature and beauty, I would have basically had at least permanent residency that would enable me to have an option outside of Turkey and the economical crisis that is going on.
So when I wrote about the game of safety, I was in Luxembourg, knowing how grateful that I was at the time to be able to have that option, but also not being able to see myself continue with that life. And that was very disorienting and painful place to be.
because every day I would wake up and I would tell myself, you should be grateful. You should be grateful that you have this life. You should be grateful that you're here, that you have this job. You should be grateful that's everything that I would tell myself. And then at the end of the day, I would be like, but this doesn't feel right. This doesn't feel aligned. And this doesn't feel like I can continue this forever. So I would oscillate between the two.
all the time. And one day I entered this conversation with my managers thinking that my performance will be rated bad, but then she tells me that they're planning to promote me. I closed the laptop and I laughed so hard at the ridiculousness of my brain of telling me a story of complete disaster while the reality was the complete opposite. And then I realized at the time that
the way that I was listening to my brain had to change because it was telling me a completely different story than what is happening in the real world. And also that contradiction enabled me to sit down and realize while I was sitting in the couch after that call that I was playing the wrong game. I was playing a game where everything was measured in terms of minimizing
unpredictability and maximizing return of investment and certainty. And the way that I was playing was leading me to a beautiful place with a lot of safety and stability, but I was not feeling alive or aligned. So the game was the wrong game. And we create these fortresses in our lives to lock away the uncertainty and instability.
everything that is scary, the unknown, we locked it away in our very big fortresses with very high walls. But then we also leave out the curiosity, the creativity, the connection, the growth, because they all required a moment of uncertainty, a moment of uncomfortable feelings, a moment of saying, I don't know what happens next, but being okay with that. what I realized is that
I wanted the curiosity and creativity and all the other things back into my life. And that meant that I had to turn down the nudge in the portraits and I had to operate from a different orientation towards life. So game of safety is basically playing in a way that you're safe, you don't have the unknown, you have the portraits, but also the curiosity, the creativity, the growth, the connection, all the things that make
life feel colorful or more alive are also outside of that fortress. So now you have to make a choice how you are going to handle that realization. For me, that meant that I had to change my life. I had to change my orientation and I had to change what I was following in terms of the goalpost.
Couple of months passed and I was thinking about what can I change in my life because I was realizing at the time that
I had certain values that were not applicable to my life, like curiosity, creativity we discussed, but also service. So I was trying to understand what can I do, but I was a little bit stuck. And when I was sitting in that couch again one day, an email came about a position in Cairo working at a humanitarian organization, very similar to what I was doing in corporate, but I would be doing it for humanitarian purposes.
that was perfect because it was enabling me to execute on majority of my values that I wanted. Curiosity, service. So, something in me recognized it as the next right step. It wasn't the full plan. It wasn't the end switch. It was simply the right next move towards a life where I was being
pulled towards my values instead of staying safe in my fortress. So that's why I left my job in Amazon and then I went to Cairo for two years to work as a humanitarian and live there.
Conscious Success Co (36:52)
I mean, it's just such a brave decision, especially I mean, so many of us tell ourselves the story of like, oh, I should be grateful and I can't take that risk. Meanwhile, we live, you know, in very
prosperous countries where there's tons of opportunity, but for you to be wow, I'm potentially giving up this safe haven, this place in Luxembourg, that's a real risk. And yet still you're like, I don't want to live inside this fortress anymore. I want to live into my values. And I know that deeply enough in
the fiber of my being to say yes to this and to go take another path. What did the people in your life, especially your parents who had optimized so much for this safety and security and upward mobility think of making that decision?
Sinem (37:38)
Yeah, so I think it was hard for them to understand, but what they told me actually surprised me a little bit They told me that I always made my choices from when I was younger, always for myself. And I built this life that they thought
they didn't even think of. So basically they told me everything that you're doing, you know the best. But it was because it was also still a job and it was also still a prestigious job. So the only difference was that I was letting go of my European residency dreams, but I was still within the boundaries of having a prestigious job and a story and all of those type of things.
So the real reckoning with how I was raised and everyone around me came when I decided to take a career break because that was a move that was outside the realm of possibilities of or understanding for anyone around me.
Conscious Success Co (38:35)
So you're working for the UN humanitarian organization, right? And you were in supply chain at Procter & Gamble and Amazon, and then you're in food aid and taking that into emergencies. that was applicable, but like the stakes changed entirely. What is it that you were
being pulled to, like you said, service and the curiosity and the creativity. Do you feel like right next step, is that actually what you experienced in those two years that you worked for the UN? Or how did that actual experience kind of have some of the same patterns hiding under different stripes?
Sinem (39:15)
I love this question because it uncovers something that I have been thinking about and writing about for a long time. And I think a lot of people are in the same place. When I decided that my old life did not fit me anymore and that I need a different orientation towards life, it did not directly...
announced itself as a new job title that I can do. It didn't say, now that you are not living like this and you are driven by these other values, now there is this new job title that you can follow. It was more like clouds, more like vague feelings of what I was searching for and what I wanted in my life. And it wasn't as certain or as obvious as the other one. I did not think I wanted a new...
business for myself, So it took me many years of experimentation, of many years of trying things, trying to excavate information.
data from the things that I was trying to come up with something at the end coherent about what I might want. And I'm still in that process and still defining that. So I could say last three years of my life were spent on experimenting, taking the next right step that I know will give me more information about myself and then taking that information and putting it back to the
experimentation mode and coming up with new experiments and repeating again because I did not know what I wanted. It wasn't as clear as me as my old life and it didn't translate into one single job title. So the move that I made from Luxembourg to Cairo was my next best step because it included service, one of my core values and it included
curiosity because I never lived outside of Turkey and Europe. So it was the next right step that would generate a lot of information back to myself. So I went there and I loved the service aspect of the job. I loved the people that I worked with. It was all in all an amazing experience. Best two years of my life. I will always remember it very fondly, but still the need to take the career break didn't go away.
Conscious Success Co (41:27)
Hmm.
Sinem (41:27)
I
still wanted to take a career break because still there were parts of me I felt like were not coming out. I love reading, I love writing, I have very intellectual tendencies as well. But those are things that I was never able to nurture in my life at that point. So for some...
Conscious Success Co (41:47)
Mm-hmm.
Sinem (41:49)
As in service and curiosity and adventurous lifestyle and experimentation and all of those things, it gave me lot of answers and validated a lot of things that I thought of. But there were still parts of me that I really wanted to explore and I had no room and that led to the decision of taking a career break.
Conscious Success Co (42:08)
Got it. Okay, so when you made the decision to take the career break, what did that look like at the start? Did you give yourself a certain amount of time? Did you have a certain amount of savings? how did you set yourself up to not only give yourself the permission to do so, but actually to make that a viable reality?
Sinem (42:26)
So the taking a career break for me was an idea that I had ever since 2022. And I did not have the financial means to do so. That's why I spent three years basically saving money, reducing my life expenses so that I can have a financial runway to be able to execute on that idea. It was not instant. It was not something that was like.
I cannot deal with this anymore. I'm just going to take a break. It was very deliberately planned for three years and impacted my lifestyle even so that I can execute later on. That's the first part. And the second part is there is this author called Paul Millard and he actually took
not a career break, but I would say like an infinite career break at this point. But he wrote about something called leap capital. And I love that phrase so much because it is basically putting a fund for yourself to be able to chase your dreams. And you can set the parameters of that fund and the timeline of the break or whether there will be any break. But basically it's
however you feel comfortable with. For me, it was monthly expenses multiplied with some amount of time so that I can feel comfortable that I will be able to come back without totally ruining my life. For others, it's other calculation types. But for me, it was basically building this lead capital for three years and deciding that I was investing in myself with that money.
to be able to learn more about myself, educate myself and do things that I never really did before. And I deserve to do because I had worked so hard to be able to get that point where I could let myself at least have one year of my life to follow this. So that was the idea that led to doing the leap capital for three years, saving for the leap capital for three years and then taking one year off.
to be able to experiment, learn, follow my dreams basically.
Conscious Success Co (44:32)
I love that. I love that concept of leap capital. And I think for, you know, those women listening, many of whom are still in corporate, sometimes it can feel like, I have golden handcuffs and I can't leave because now I have this life or these expenses, yada, yada. But when you can actually see, okay, well, what if...
your corporate job became the primary investor in your ability to take a year off or your ability to chase your dreams, even on the side or start the business. And you start to make trade-offs and save and put it into a leap capital fund. You can start to see that as the primary investor to be able to bootstrap the life that you actually want. And I think that's such an empowering mindset shift from, can't do anything, I can't leave to saying, hey, well, I'm making a
good living right now. So if I brought down my expenses what could I shift? They would then give me the runway, even if it can't happen overnight. So I love that you're saying it took three years because so often it's not like we can just have that desire and jump, especially the more responsibilities that we get in life, but it doesn't mean that we don't have options. And so I think that hearing you say that is just so.
empowering and permission giving for all of us listening. if you want to figure out a way to make it work, anyone within reasonable boundaries who is a high achieving person who has a lucrative income at some point can choose to make the same trade-offs that you did. I'm sure they weren't easy to make to set yourself up for this career break. you're 10 months in, is that right, to your career break?
and you're slow traveling through, okay, okay, so that was about a year ago now that you decided to take the career break and you've been slow traveling through Southeast Asia while also writing your sub stack and other creative projects. What has that experience been like over this last year of you've written about how...
Sinem (46:03)
So right now it's 12 months actually.
Conscious Success Co (46:24)
you don't know yet can be like a valid answer for longer than people expect. you you've given yourself this time to not know and to explore. So what has staying in that I don't know yet taught you?
Sinem (46:36)
That was the conclusion, but in the beginning, think unconsciously, I thought that if I took a career break and if I have given myself a long space to figure out, that clarity would somehow emerge. And for me, the biggest shift was understanding that clarity was not something just came and announced itself, but clarity is something that you actually learn by doing.
So you talk to someone, you write a piece, you host a conversation, you wipe code an app, you wipe code a questionnaire, whatever that is interesting, you do something and as a result, you gain knowledge from that doing and then that shapes the version of clarity. But in the beginning, for me, the career break was not about any external metrics.
I really simply wanted to give myself a year of simply doing work that I would enjoy because I enjoy, not because I needed to get something out of it. Followers, for example, is a part of it. I was writing in Substack because I really wanted to write my whole life and I did not have the space. Not trying to build a brand, but just being honest about what I was going through because that's the kind of writing that I enjoy.
I tried YouTube as an experiment because I always wanted to try videography, which I found very interesting. I did other things like wipe coding an app, which is something that I'm also interested in. And I'm coding an app that not market demanded, but something that was really interesting to me that I would use. So all of those things that I tried, I started hosting career transition.
office hours with people who are in the transition process to create this emotional connection and support for people who are in the messy middle. So all of those things were not about external metrics or getting something out of it, but I was trying to understand what I would like to do as work even if no one paid me. What makes me feel enjoyment? What makes me feel energized as a result and not drained of doing?
So all of those things, I approached it as almost like an experimentation field where I would run experiments, I will collect the data and that will form a new hypothesis and then I would collect the data. And then the clarity slowly, slowly, slowly is starting to emerge from those experiments, but it's a long, very long process than I expected. There is this book called Life is in the Transitions.
And in it, the author mentions when you go through these life transitions, the big ones, he calls lifequicks. And I think career confusion is one of those, to be honest, because it's usually tied to an identity crisis on the side. It takes at least three to five years usually to go through that process of transitioning, identity-shedding, becoming someone else, trying things. All of those things take at least three to five years. So.
For me, the whole career break was a big experimentation field with no external metrics or outcomes that I was trying to get out of. But all the things that I was trying to get was data. So I can get a little bit more clear, 1 % clear, 2 % clear every single day.
Conscious Success Co (49:57)
And I love what you're saying because it's so true. action breeds clarity. We don't get clarity because there's some like light bulb moment or we're struck by lightning and all of a sudden it's like, oh, this is exactly how I use all of my skills and the way that energizes me and make money doing it. And like I, it's dawned on me, right? And so it sounds like you weren't making this year about.
needing a certain number of followers or money or anything like that, but you were still making it about taking action to get the data to inform your experimentation cycle and to get that clarity. that was really the goal that you were pursuing. And it sounds like holding yourself accountable for not just sitting back for a year and being like, OK, I'm just going to lie on this beach and hope that clarity finds me. But OK, I'm going to vibe code an app. And OK, I'm going to host this office hours. And OK, I'm going to write a sub stack. And that's one of the reasons I
wanted to have you on the pod is like one, you're such a beautiful writer and you're such an honest writer. And I'm sure anyone listening can tell what a deep thinker you are. But it was so clear to me in being a subscriber and reading that like you truly were doing this for yourself and then sharing it out. You weren't doing it because you were trying to start with that extrinsic result again, right? And you can tell that difference. You can tell that come from and that honesty. It's like, it's...
textured into the way that you write and it's so clearly a gift of yours. So thank you for following that and sharing that with all of us because it's such a joy to receive from someone who's coming from that place.
Sinem (51:29)
Thank you so much. That makes me so happy. That's exactly what I was trying to do because this whole transition process, something that we have not discussed, I think is very lonely. It's at least for me, it felt like everyone around me was going with their lives and nothing was different for them. And I was the one who was glitching in the matrix almost like it felt super lonely and I did not know how to explain this to others.
I did not know how to ask for support from the people around me other than my therapist. The thing that helped me most was online communities and the support that I would receive from those, at least the writing, the videos, the one-to-one conversations sometimes you get or from messages, knowing that there were other people around me who were navigating similar processes.
was helping me move forward with mine, even though I was sitting in Luxembourg in that couch and someone else was sitting in Australia or in Kenya or wherever else. So that was giving me a lot of motivation to move forward. And with my writing, that's how I try to imagine it, at least that there's someone sitting in a couch somewhere around the world and reading and saying, that's not only me, somebody else is going through this too.
And we can continue facing this process, maybe separately in different cultures around the world, but also somehow together because we know that we are not the only person going through this journey.
Conscious Success Co (53:01)
Totally. And look, there's so many things that we can say negative about the internet or what it's done to society or loneliness epidemic and all of that. But the fact that we've connected and we're here on a podcast and then sharing this out with a community, that is only possible through the internet, through things like Substack, and also through you taking those actions and following that inner voice and...
putting that out there into the world. And it's so amazing to be able to connect with someone who is born and raised in Turkey and now currently in Vietnam. And I'm here in the Bay Area and to be having this conversation that's so universally applicable and so, I mean, inspiring to me and I am sure to other people listening as well. Like it just boggles my mind that that's possible today.
Sinem (53:53)
It's unbelievable because the moment that I started writing in Substack, I started having these conversations with people who were going through career breaks or career transitions. And you wouldn't believe I've talked to people from Kenya, from Mauritius, from Australia, from Kazakhstan, like everywhere around the world, people who are questioning their default approach to their work and trying to understand what they can change about it.
and what they would like that work to look like in their life. So this was just such an amazing journey for me to realize how universal the confusion and the need for something deeper that we are feeling and how everyone is navigating it universally in different countries in a very similar way.
This made me feel way less alone and more supported in my journey through the conversations that I was able to have.
Conscious Success Co (54:48)
Absolutely. Okay, so one year in, you're at the end of the time you had allotted for your career break. Where does that leave you? What now? Are you extending it? Are you going back and taking some type of job? Like, tell us what, where you've landed and what's next for you.
Sinem (55:04)
Yeah, I think how I'm thinking about my career right now has been shaped by so many things that I've read and learned and conversations I had throughout this process. So one thing that I am right now experimenting with is contract work. So I started working part-time, still in supply chain, but for a small company. So right now I will work one to two hours per week for that company.
And then the other parts of my life will still continue to be writing in sub-stack, continuing to wipe code, trying to learn new things, new skills that might give me some optionality or adaptability in the future. And how I'm thinking about this is as trying to build an anti-fragile careers. So basically having something that economically will support me, that will be my rock.
that will give me options to still write from a place of not needing to get those metrics very quickly so I can make money, but allow me to use my creativity and all the other things with the time that I have set for it in my life, continue to experiment on the creative projects too. So I think for me, the Antofere Jaro career is basically having that rock, that something that makes you economically feel safe.
and then having time and space and options to continue with the creative experiments that you're having so that you can actually go deep into different types of work that you can do and discover what is truly yours. So my sub stack, my wipe coding is going to continue, but I'm returning back to work for a contract of time work basically. And this will be the setup and the experiment that I will be running for the next year.
But for now, I'm always trying to make myself understand that I can always see this as an experiment, as a two-way door decision. Nothing has to be something that I decide and then my life is completely altered and there is no going back. That makes the stakes go so high in life. For me, for this chapter of my life, I am prioritizing flexibility and time abundance.
versus economic abundance. So right now I'm in a continued phase of experimentation and that will be my setup for the next year.
Conscious Success Co (57:26)
And did you say you're working for this company one or two hours a week or 50 % of your time?
Sinem (57:30)
one to two days a week.
Conscious Success Co (57:32)
one to two days, got it. Okay, great. That makes sense. And I love that, that you're like very clear on what you're prioritizing in this chapter in this season of life. And it doesn't have to be forever. It's a two way door and you can, you know, choose to make different priorities or trade-offs and choose to make an economic earning potential more of the focus for a time or hopefully what all that you're investing in now, you know, also leads to that as well. But I love that you are
Sinem (57:34)
Yes.
Conscious Success Co (57:58)
looking at how do I build an anti-fragile career? And you've written about how like the career ladder is dead, right? But I think that can feel so confronting. It can feel so scary. It can activate that survival mode part of us. But I think also what you're showing and demonstrating here is that it can also be so liberating. OK, if I don't have to give
40 or 50 or 60 hours a week to one job. That's my whole identity and my whole sense of safety. What happens if I take a client, you know, one or two days a week and maybe another client and I have time to write and I have time to explore all parts of myself or invest in the things that I want to learn more of and vibe code and then see if that takes off and have this constant and continuous experimentation. I think that there's a lot of hopefulness and a lot of exciting possibilities.
that come when we start to shift out that climbing the corporate ladder mindset, and you're a beautiful demonstration of that.
Sinem (58:52)
Thank you so much. But I think there are a couple of things here that I want to highlight because the carrier leather is breaking down at a speed that nobody was expecting. And I think the speed of change is so disorienting for people. And there is a big grief, I think, about losing a future that you were promised and you're realizing right now that it's not coming.
One of my favorite authors from Turkey called Ece Temelkron, she mentions this as, the first time, humanity is grieving in future tense. Basically, we are grieving a future that were promised but will never come. And I think the same is true for our careers. We thought that the answers will be clear, persistent and the...
it will be so much easier to follow them. But right now with the speed of change and upcoming changes that are coming to knowledge work, we are all being a little bit pushed out of the ladder and the answers to a place of experimentation, redefining our story, redefining our value. And it's all very scary. I'm not going to lie, but for me, there are two things. For me, fear and curiosity and coexist.
in the first place and that you have the capacity to have attention being directed to the place that you're choosing. So the fear is still inside me, it's still there, but I am trying to place my attention into the curiosity beat and trying to see the possibilities of what this could introduce.
I still want to acknowledge for a lot of people and listening as well that there is a silent grief here that we need to let ourselves feel a little bit. And there's fears which will be in the seats of the passengers as we move through. But there is an option to put our attention to the curiosity of the possibilities. I guess this is what we can do right now with all of the pace of change.
So for me, it meant making deliberate trade-offs with options that I had in my life and owning the fact that the result is something that I will live with. But for me, what is meaningful about life is the act of choosing. So act of making those trade-offs is what makes life meaningful. So for me, for this year, choosing to prioritize
still ongoing experimentation and learning, as well as some economic security versus going back to full work, was driven by multiple things. First, the realization that the career leader is breaking down at a speed rate and the safe path that they assumed was safe is not going to stay safe that long. And the second was that
There is fear, but I can choose curiosity still. And the third one is that this is a chapter and the answer can change and I'm letting myself change and grow. And this decision might look different in another chapter. So all those three decisions enabled me to at least make the decisions to continue my life in Southeast Asia for a bit longer and having this set up. But I wanna acknowledge the...
Conscious Success Co (1:01:47)
Mm-hmm.
.
Sinem (1:02:07)
part that people are feeling about the grief as well.
Conscious Success Co (1:02:09)
Yeah, and thank you for acknowledging it and also just naming like, yes, we're going through this collective upheaval and there's a lot of grief and a lot of rapid transition, which is totally destabilizing. And you'd have to be like asleep at the wheel not to be feeling that way and to say like, yeah, I do feel afraid sometimes. And I think if we're all honest, going through that much change, we all feel that and can tap into that. And also not letting that be so debilitating that you throw your arms up and say, there's nothing I can do. I'm going to lose
all hope, but you're choosing curiosity, you're choosing actions, you're choosing to try to find where you are empowered in a destabilizing time to exist, right? And keep moving forward. And I think ultimately that's a mindset that I keep coming back to. what am I empowered to control here? I can't control everything, but what can I control? Because it's so easy to focus on what feels overwhelming and what we can't.
but when we can acknowledge that, feel the feelings, move them through our body, but yet also find the parts of our world or the actions that we can take and stick with that. Ultimately, I mean, what's the other choice to just feel disempowered and hopeless? We get to have that choice to focus our attention. So I love that you're naming the both and there.
Sinem (1:03:25)
Yeah.
Conscious Success Co (1:03:26)
So
I know we're basically at time. I just want to end with one last question for anyone listening who's now like, OK, well, how do I build an anti-fragile career? What's your advice? What's the first move that someone listening could make to start building one for themselves?
Sinem (1:03:43)
I'm still in the middle of it, so I don't know if advice is the right word. But from everything that I have learned or in sub-stake through an amazing community is the woman who is building portfolio careers. I think it embodies what I'm talking about in terms of entrepreneurial career, which you are diversifying your source of incomes through different means of work.
If you're multi-passionate, you're also diversifying what you're doing through work. And it's also giving you a lot of joy, but also economic fulfillment on the side as well. So portfolio careers seems to be the pathway between...
life as we know it in the career world versus the types of work that we will see in the future. And I did not think as a supply chain professional from Turkey that I would be able to at least create a version that resembles a portfolio career for myself, to be honest. But you would be surprised that if you just go out and reach and try to search for things that
maybe your field has something that is also applicable to create it as well. So that's the first part. I would encourage people to read more about portfolio careers, which I think is how the career leader was shaped versus where we are going with the future of work. And for me, I think the other part is to create space for optionality.
So one thing that I'm discovering is my whole life and my parents life, the middle-class life was very much defined with wages of the salary that you're receiving and potentially at some point to be able to buy a house. But for my generation, that becomes a little bit of like a dream because of the economical financial situations that we are facing right now. So for me, creating income streams that can scale.
and then creates optionality is also another part that I would like to diversify my income portfolio. But right now that's not the case. So this is something that I'm planning towards versus a reality of my life right now.
Conscious Success Co (1:05:50)
Yeah, well, I love that you're building it intentionally brick by brick, making those tradeoffs, taking those actions. I think you're so inspiring. I am sure that those listening would agree. Where can people find you and connect with you and get your stub stack, all of the things?
Sinem (1:06:08)
Yeah, in Substack I'm called Sinam in Flux and my publication is called Careers in Flux. So basically acknowledging the continuous change that I am going through, but also the world is going through. I think Flux is the word that I'm embracing for the next decade of my life, I would say, and evolving as the world evolves. So you can find me in Sinam in Flux.
Conscious Success Co (1:06:33)
Perfect. We'll put it in the show notes. Thank you so much. I've loved this conversation. It was such a joy to spend this hour plus with you today. So thank you for being here.
Sinem (1:06:43)
Thank you so much for inviting me to the sofa.
