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What if the problem isn’t your job, but the version of yourself you had to become to succeed in it? Corporate jobs don’t trap us because they’re evil. They trap us because they slowly teach us to disconnect from ourselves. If you're in corporate America and your life looks successful on paper but feels empty in practice, you’re not alone.
This podcast is a space for the quiet questions you don’t say out loud at work. We explore the inner side of change: the fear of starting over, self-sabotage, the trap of external expectations, imposter syndrome, and the unsettling moment when you realize someone else’s definition of success isn't enough for you.
This isn’t about quitting your job overnight or chasing money, but asking what feels right for you and finding clarity before making your next move. We deliver actionable strategies for complex career transitions. From managing ADHD-related overwhelm at work to overcoming the disconnect of the corporate grind.
You’re not broken. You’ve just outgrown the life you built.
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Hello, and welcome to episode 96 of Working towards
our purpose. Today's episode, we are going to talk about small
decisions that can pull you out of autopilot. But before we get
into that, we're going to slow down, take a second to just check in with
ourselves.
All right. How you feeling today? Hopefully you're
able to check in and see how you're feeling. For me,
feeling a little anxious today for some reason, not sure why, but
yesterday I. I was able to go out and enjoy this beautiful weather. It's been
really warm and nice over the weekend, and I was able
to relax a bit, which was nice. It's hard for me to
relax sometimes. I always feel like I need to be productive or do
something. But yesterday I got outside in
the park by me and read a book,
and it wasn't like a nonfiction productive
book. It was just like a fiction book, so that was cool.
I got to also just sit there and look at the trees,
and that's nice. I think it's helpful for me to get into nature to try
to relax a bit. So, yeah,
that's a good thing. But,
yeah. So today I want to talk about small
decisions that you can make, I guess,
or things that can help pull you out
of autopilot. And I guess what I mean by autopilot
is we did have an episode not that long ago, maybe a couple
months ago, called something about going through the
motions and disassociating at work. And
I think that autopilot is kind of similar to that.
It's like just going through the motions of life and not really
realizing where you're going or. And I don't want to talk
about numbing yourself and disassociating this episode, but more so
how to make a change and get out of that autopilot feeling.
So perhaps if you're in a job or something where
you feel like you don't want to be and you're just going
through the actions of the day and doing what's asked
of you, but sort of feel disconnected from yourself and
disconnected from what it is that you want to be doing.
Maybe this episode's for you, but. So this idea came to me
from a podcast that I listen to from this
artist, Petey, who is a
indie rock musician. And he's also like, I
guess, a TikTok personality. He's kind of a comedian. Makes
these short skits of him being all the characters.
Maybe you've seen him, but he was talking to Rainn Wilson,
who is Dwight, but
Rainn Wilson's his real name. And he has a
podcast called Soul Boom. And he kind of just talks about
spirituality and life and all that kind of stuff.
I listen to it every now and then. It's a decent podcast for me.
But anyways, he was talking to Petey and Petey was kind
of telling his life story and kind of describing being
like in this autopilot phase of his life where pretty much all through his
20s he just worked dead end jobs that he didn't like
and wasn't happy with his life
and was just kind of doing all these things because
he had to and
was just talking about like being really stuck and unhappy. And
Rain was basically like, well, what changed? Because now you're like
a successful musician, tours, is on a major record label,
has a pretty good life it seems. So what happened and
what changed? And he
kind of boiled it down to a small
decision which I think was super interesting. So he was saying at the time
he was living in California,
I just thought this was really interesting and worth sharing. So that's kind of why
I'm reiterating it. Um, but basically he was driving like
over an hour to work each day and in like LA traffic
and working this job and like I think he said the mail room just
like kind of a job that he didn't care about, but
it was a job that he could do because they didn't really ask that much
of him and he wasn't really good at having jobs. So it was like
a job that worked for his attention span. And
he was realized that he.
Well, I guess what caused him to want to make a change was like,
I think realizing that he wanted to be with this girl and he thought his
life was a mess so he had to get his life together, which maybe is
not the most important part, but the important part I thought was that
he decided that he had to make a change. And he realized that
he was ruining his days every morning by driving to work
because he would put the directions on his phone and use
the Waze app and try to get to work as fast
as possible through this horrific traffic and
over hour commute. And by the time he got to work he
was already extremely stressed out and angry and
feeling like he was late and this and that. And he realized that his drive
to work was just one highway, like one straight drive.
But the phone would always tell you to get off and
avoid these five minutes of traffic here and whatever it does
to try to get you there quicker. And he realized that if he just
accepted that it would take him 20 minutes longer to get to work. Then
he could just put his phone down and not be staring at his phone and
not endangering his life by going to work every morning and
being completely frantic by the time he got there.
So his decision to not look at his phone and just enjoy the
ride and accept that it was going to be an hour and a half
long and that was the end of it completely
changed his life. And it made him feel like he had some
ownership over his life, and it made him start to make
more decisions about how else can I change my life? And
another thing he said, and he called these micro
decisions, which I think is great, because it's nothing like crazy.
You don't need that much motivation or
energy to make these decisions. It's just like.
I mean, that one, the driving is kind of almost just like, acceptance of your
situation. But another thing that he also
decided to do was that he said he lived by this hill, and
he grew up in the Midwest Chicago area, and it
was super flat, and he always wanted to live by mountains. And. And he said
he lived by this really cool hill. And he's like, you know what? Every day
I'm going to wake up, and as I'm going to my car to work, I'm
going to say, that's a cool hill. So between
those two things, he kind of took some ownership back over in his life, and
then he decided to start chasing music
more and all that sort of stuff. But
he didn't really change much. He didn't have to quit his job. He didn't have
to, like, make some sort of crazy decision. And
maybe your life calls for that at some points. But also, I think it's, like,
super empowering to think about what small change can you
make to give yourself some ownership that can kind of help
pull you out of that autopilot. Because, I mean, I think
we can kind of all relate to that traffic situation. Like, how many times have
you gone somewhere and you're trying to get there? For some reason,
you give yourself the exact amount of time to get there. So then you get
on the road and you're like, oh, man, there's an accident. I got to get
off here. I got to. You know, you're making yourself, like,
go crazy because you're trying to get there on time, and
for what? Like, it doesn't. Does it matter that you're 10 minutes late? Probably
not. Or just leave 10 minutes early. Like, I don't know.
It's just these, like, little simple decisions that can help Us
like help keep yourself calm. And I think that's kind of
like the one of the biggest things for him. As I was listening
to his story. One of the biggest things for Petey was that he
was helping calm himself, helping calm his nervous system so he didn't
have to act out of fight or flight motor or
being your nervous system completely dysregulated. You're
helping to calm yourself down by just deciding it's going to take 20
minutes more. And at the end of the day, that was a great
decision because the 20 minutes he never missed. But
feeling calm when he got to work completely
like changed his perspective on his life situation. And so
basically he went from this place where he thought his life was terrible and
you know, he was at this dead end job or whatever, to being
content with his life and then starting to make decisions to
pursue his music and like pursue a career and like him kind of
blowing up on TikTok and stuff. The way he described it is he didn't plan
that out. He didn't try to be this TikTok personality.
He was just having fun with his friends and he found fun again
in his life and was kind of acting like a kid and just hanging out
with his friends in his backyard and made these videos because he thought it
was interesting and fun. And I think that kind
of came through especially when he gained his
popularity during the pandemic. There's just this honestness to
it, you know, and that's sort of what
connected. And it wasn't something that he planned out, it was just him trying
to like make good decisions in his life. And,
and yeah, how can we bring that back to our own life? Like, how can
you think about your own situation? And maybe if
you're unhappy with something, like what is one tiny change that you
can do? Because it doesn't feel like that much, does it? Doesn't feel that
hard to do, but it is giving yourself some ownership back
into your own life. So then thinking about
all this, I was kind of thinking about my own life and my own examples
and I was like, have I ever done this in my life? Have I ever
kind of made change that way in these little micro decisions?
And I think, well, if I think back
to when I was first trying to get out of my corporate job,
my initial thought was like, I need to be an entrepreneur, I need to have
a business, I need to run my own business and
that will be the solution. So I didn't know how to
do any of that. And I think the first micro decision that I
made was starting an Instagram for this business that I had.
And I kind of hid behind this name, Pleasant Podcast. And I was like,
okay, this is my business. I'm just going to start an Instagram and see if
I can get clients. And at the time, that worked
because Instagram was a very different place and I was able to
reach out to some people and find clients to edit
podcasts. And it didn't seem
overwhelming because it was just like, oh, it takes five seconds to make an
Instagram. Just make one and then start messaging people.
So that kind of seemed like a micro decision. And then I took it to
the extreme and made a website and learned how to do all this
sort of different type of stuff and content marketing and like, all
website design and like, all this. Did I say that already? All this
sort of different type of stuff. And then I went to, like, a podcast studio,
and then, like, I kind of ran with it at that point.
But it started with just making an Instagram, and I think
maybe that's. Maybe that's important to notice. Another
kind of change in my life that maybe started with, again,
a micro change or a micro decision
is for me, going to open mic nights. I think I knew that I wanted
to play my music and perform my music
and do something more with my music, but playing at an open
mic night seemed intimidating. And I went
and sat at open mic nights for a while
before my friend PJ kind of forced me to do it because he knew
why I was there. But I just attended. I just went and
watched. And that was easy because it's just like you go to a cafe, you
hang out for a couple hours, you go home. So that was sort of like
a micro decision. I also had friends to help me because they were
performing, so I was supporting them. So that made it easier for me to go.
It wasn't like I was going by myself, but there were these kind of
small decisions for myself that
helped move the
scope of my trajectory,
kind of just moving the target in the vague direction
of where I want to go and just making that one little decision.
And now I'm playing my own stuff every week, and I have
a collection of songs, more than 10 songs that I can play and I've memorized.
And that's something that I never thought of doing or never thought that I could
do. So I think these little
micro decisions are so interesting, and I think at the end of the day, they're
not necessarily like, it's not about
making the right little micro decision.
It's more so actually making a decision. Because I
think that a lot of us, if I'm speaking about my old
self, me, I was lost in the past
because of the lack of decisions that I was making. And I wasn't making
any decisions. And this is what Petey talked about too. Like he was
just avoiding making a decision for so long. And you kind of
just let your life happen to you. And I think that
that's the biggest definition of what a life on
autopilot is, is that you're not making any decisions and you're just letting
life happen to you based off of where you are
and you're letting everybody else make decisions for you. And
especially for me, going to college, thinking about where I was going after high
school, none of those decisions were mine. I was just kind of
in the place, right place, right time to go to engineering school. So that's where
I ended up. And
I don't say that in a regretful way, but I say that
in more of a self awareness way that the. Yeah, I
wasn't making any decisions for myself out of fear, out
of no confidence, out of
feeling bad for myself, whatever it was, I just wasn't making any
decisions. So that's what's great about these micro decisions, because
it's like now you're actually making a decision for yourself
instead of the decision to not make a decision.
And when you make your own decisions, you can get closer to
that life that you desire, that you want.
And yeah, again, just the beauty of micro decisions is they're not that they shouldn't
be hard, they're not that hard to do.
They kind of fall in with where your life's at. But
what makes it different is that you're making the decision.
So, yeah, I thought that listening to Petey talk about his
life just really made me want to think about
that more and to share that message
and yeah, also to challenge you. Maybe if you're listening and
you're feeling sort of on autopilot in your life, is there a micro
decision that you can make right now? And
yeah, that's kind of it. So maybe this is a bit
shorter of an episode, but I did want to share that message. Thanks
to Petey and Rainn Wilson for that. And yeah, if you're struggling
with your inner critic, as always, I have a free seven day guide to help
you soften your inner critic. Link is in the show notes. Thank
you for listening, as always, and I hope you have a
great rest of your week and I'll see you on another episode real soon. Take
care.