Topics: Self-Leadership, Burnout, Self-Improvement, Entrepreneur Breakdown, Career Fulfillment
If you’re feeling stuck or want a change….
Ever felt like you’re on autopilot—hustling hard but still not feeling fulfilled in your business or creative work? In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Maike Neuhaus, a psychologist specializing in positive psychology and self-leadership, to uncover what might be holding YOU back. We dive into:
✅ Why languishing (that “meh” feeling) happens—even when you love what you do.
✅ The sneaky trap of chasing “freedom” but accidentally chaining yourself to your work.
✅ How to realign your values and redefine success so your business lights you up again.
Dr. Maike Neuhaus shares her personal story of pivoting out of a misaligned career and offers practical tips to help YOU avoid burnout and rediscover joy in your work. If you’re a creator or entrepreneur who’s tired of feeling stuck, this is your wake-up call.
We’re going into how to exit the grind and dare to build your life and your business differently!
🎧 Listen now and take the first step toward a business and life you truly love.
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MORE ABOUT THIS PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT PODCAST EPISODE
“Languishing feels a little bit like a living robot or a living zombie. You function, you can still do everything you need to do… but it feels like it’s eat, sleep, work, repeat. And that’s all there is.” – Dr. Maike Neuhaus
Connect with Dr. Maike Neuhaus
Instagram: @theflourishingdoc
The Flourishing Doc Website
- What are the first steps to realigning my business with my values?
- What small steps can I take to stop feeling stuck and start moving toward fulfillment?
- Why do I feel “chained” to my business when I started it for freedom?
- How can I figure out what success and happiness really mean to me?
Entrepreneurs: Feeling Stuck? How to Avoid Burnout and Find Career Fulfillment
Have you ever pushed yourself to the brink of exhaustion, feeling like you’re doing all the right things but still not moving forward? Maybe your business, the one you dreamed would bring freedom, feels like a cage. It’s a story so many entrepreneurs know too well: the quiet pull of burnout, that “meh” feeling of being stuck, and the struggle to find mental well-being while chasing success.
If this resonates with you, don’t worry—you’re not alone, and you’re not broken. There’s a way to stop burnout and find real fulfillment again.
What is Entrepreneur Breakdown—and Why Does It Happen?
It’s easy to hit what feels like an entrepreneur breakdown when you’re running on autopilot. You’re hustling hard, checking off goals, but your work doesn’t feel meaningful anymore. This isn’t just stress or overwhelm—it’s a sneaky state of languishing.
As psychologist Dr. Maike Neuhaus explains:
“Languishing feels a little bit like a living robot or a living zombie. You function, but it’s just eat, sleep, work, repeat—and that’s all there is.”
Entrepreneurs often chase freedom when they leave traditional careers, but instead, they find themselves trapped. The result? Burnout creeps in, mental well-being suffers, and career fulfillment feels out of reach.
Why Chasing “Freedom” Can Lead to Burnout
Here’s the irony: you became your own boss to avoid burnout and create a life of freedom. But somewhere along the way, the hustle took over. Dr. Maike highlights this trap perfectly:
“People start working for themselves in the hope to create freedom, but then they end up chaining themselves even more to the desk than before.”
Freedom without clarity on your values is just an illusion. To stop burnout and regain control, you have to pause and ask yourself:
- What does success mean to me?
- What are my core values?
- Am I aligning my business with what truly matters?
Without self-leadership—leading yourself intentionally toward goals that align with your values—you’ll keep spinning your wheels in a business that feels empty.
Self-Leadership: The Key to Career Fulfillment and Mental Well-Being
If you want to avoid burnout and rediscover career fulfillment, it starts with self-leadership. This isn’t about strategies or quick hacks—it’s about knowing yourself, defining what matters, and taking small steps in the right direction.
Dr. Maike explains it this way: “If we don’t define for ourselves what meaningful goals look like, what happiness looks like to us individually… we are running the risk of heading in a wrong direction.”
Self-leadership means pausing to:
- Clarify your values (freedom, growth, balance—whatever they are for you).
- Align your daily work with those values.
- Set boundaries so your mental well-being becomes a priority, not an afterthought.
When you lead yourself with intention, your work becomes fulfilling and sustainable.
Stop Burnout by Taking Small, Intentional Steps
The road to avoiding burnout doesn’t require a dramatic overhaul. You don’t need to quit your business or burn everything to the ground. Realigning your life and work starts with small, actionable changes:
- Reconnect with Your Values – Write down what matters most to you. Define success and career fulfillment on your terms.
- Break Up With Hustle Culture – Stop glorifying overwork. Set boundaries, take breaks, and give yourself permission to rest.
- Pursue Joy Outside of Work – You are more than your business. Rediscover hobbies, nurture relationships, and prioritize self-care.
Dr. Maike reminds us: “The more you explore and experiment, the higher the likelihood you’ll find something that works.” You don’t have to have it all figured out—you just have to take the next step.
Flourishing: Moving Beyond Entrepreneur Breakdown
When you’re stuck in burnout, flourishing might feel like a distant dream. But here’s the truth: flourishing isn’t about feeling happy all the time. It’s about leading a life that feels rich, fulfilling, and aligned with who you are.
As Dr. Maike describes it:
“Mental well-being, or flourishing, is when we feel deeply fulfilled, when we have rich and good-quality connections, and when we’re growing as a person.”
Flourishing happens when you stop settling for survival mode. It happens when you step out of autopilot, embrace self-leadership, and build a business that aligns with your values.
You Don’t Have to Stay Stuck—Take the First Step Today
If you’ve been feeling uninspired, overwhelmed, or on the verge of burnout, here’s your sign: It’s time to stop and realign. You don’t have to stay in a business that doesn’t excite you. You don’t have to keep living in a way that drains your mental well-being.
Start small. Ask yourself: What values matter most to me? Take one step today to reconnect with what makes you feel alive—because the clarity and career fulfillment you’re looking for come from action, not overthinking.
As Dr. Maike says, staying stuck in a reality you know isn’t working is far scarier than stepping into the unknown.
So what’s stopping you? Take the leap. Your aligned, flourishing life is waiting.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT WITH DR. MAIKE NEUHAUS (THE FLOURISHING DOC) BELOW:
Chardét: I’m so excited to speak with you. You focus on such an empowering area and I know people listening are going to feel better after hearing this conversation.
Dr Maike: Thank you so very much for having me, Sade. I’m excited to be here. I’m a psychologist by trade who works predominantly as a speaker, consultant, educator, coach these days.
I’m specialized in positive psychology, which is the science of the good life. How can we live a good and deeply fulfilling and happy life as well as self leadership? But then if you ask me about a mission statement Statement or something like that. I would probably say I help individuals and organizations to understand what we as humans need in order to flourish or to cultivate mental wellbeing so that we can realize our potential and create impacts that excite us both at work and in life.
Chardét: I really want to focus with you because I feel like, especially there’s a lot of professionals and business owners [00:01:00] listening and they will think, and I was this person too, that the key to success is what you do, the actions you take, the strategies you follow, but your work is so much on.
The inner part of the self leadership. So if you can talk a little bit more about that
Dr Maike: part, we are now starting to first define what actually meaningful goals look like, because we can strive, strive and take actions all along. If we don’t define for ourselves, what meaningful goals look like, what happiness look like, looks like to us.
Individually, how we personally define success, we are running the risk of heading in a wrong direction. So it’s really important to first look at what, how do I define success? How do I define happiness? What does a meaningful goal look like to me before we start taking action?
Chardét: It’s the step none of us want to take, follow the business plan than to think [00:02:00] about like, what do I really want to do?
And then also, I think the harder part, which I’ll ask you about is if you’re someone who’s been going down a certain path for a while, let’s say that it could be your business or something else to be in the position of asking those questions again, is just. It can be really demoralizing, right? It’s like, I already did the work.
Dr Maike: Yeah, and obviously I had to giggle too when you said before, well, that’s the part no one wants to do. I agree to some extent. I mean, part of me thinks, well, that’s the most exciting part, really, of all of it, because that’s where we come alive. But I agree that’s the part no one wants to do because it’s not something you can copy of, of somebody else.
That is the hard part where you have to sit down and dig deep and understand yourself and understand your values and understand your passions and your strengths and what you really want from life. So that is no recipe for anybody out there that anyone can follow. And that’s [00:03:00] Probably what makes it the hard part.
And it’s exactly what you said before, especially once we’ve already defined that once. And then we’ve started taking action, following a business plan, or maybe we didn’t do it properly the first time, then we kind of have to do it again. And we do have to revisit this. Every now and then because some things change in life, you know, sometimes our circumstances change.
Sometimes we go through different life phases and with that our values can change or what we define as success or as happiness and so forth. So yes, we do have to revisit those aspects, I guess, every now and then.
Chardét: Are there things or strategies that you recommend for making it a very Intentional practice because I know that you can listen to it and people can nod their heads and say, oh yeah, this is great.
I need to figure out my values alignment. And then no one does. What is kind of some of the intentionality that maybe we can bring to it? And I know this is jumping in fast to like the practical stuff, but I’m just, [00:04:00] because it started here, I’m very curious.
Dr Maike: You know, in order to identify your values, there are lots of different ways to do that.
I mean, you can work with a coach who’s specialized in something like that, someone to guide you through it. I have to say, I felt this incredibly hard the first few times I did this years ago because I felt like, okay, so then you have words like fairness or wisdom or freedom or security, or I don’t know.
And of course you go, uh, yeah, of course you. You know, that all resonates. So it can be a little bit hard to pick apart the ones that really light your soul on fire from the ones that are important, but maybe not your kind of jazz. Because the whole idea is for you to hone in on maybe your top five values, maybe your top 10 values.
Depends what you’re after. You know, you can identify your values in life in general or domain specific for your for your relationships, for your leisure time, whatever. So you [00:05:00] can start with a values list, narrow it down from the top 40 to the top 10 to the top five, something like that. What I always recommend is to define what those words actually mean to you, because whatever’s freedom to me might be something completely different to freedom to you.
Define those values for yourself. That’s a really good start. And then if you can prioritize those values, that’s even better because whether we know it or not, most of our decisions are based on our values. So when we come to a crossroads, for example, and we don’t know which way to decide, if we understand our values, that’ll help us tremendously make a decision and a good decision and a faster decision.
But if we know which order our values are. Are in, in terms of the hierarchy, which ones are most important to least important.
Chardét: I never thought about it that way. I think some people listening will say I kind of know my values, but I mean, the question of whether you’re creating a business or a career around them is another thing that’s very different.
Um, when you were [00:06:00] saying that I was thinking about to the definition of freedom, how it is very different for each person. I remember for me, I had a business which was in person for seven years pre COVID and my top value was freedom, but that was not freedom being like chained in person to doing that stuff.
So that’s such a good point, the hierarchy and then define it your way, not how everyone else is saying.
Dr Maike: Yeah, and isn’t that so funny Shadi and thank you for sharing that because I think this is the case for so many people who start working for themselves. They’re hoping to exit the grind right to exit the normal life that everybody leads the hustle and the constant working for someone else the nine to five plus extra hours and never having time for your own personal life and so they start working for themselves.
In the hope to create more freedom and autonomy for themselves. And what they end up doing is they basically chain themselves by having the expectations to be constantly on, to constantly be [00:07:00] hustling. That’s just what happens when you work for yourself. You have to start defining your own boundaries around work times and so forth.
And that can be really hard. And so I see that a lot. People who start working for themselves in the hope to create freedom and exit the grind. And then what they end up doing is they chain themselves just as much to the desk as they were before, even more.
Chardét: This is well, even more for sure, because I see people too, who are like, Oh, I thought this was going to be freedom.
And now I’m going to go back to my nine to five, because this is not freedom. There’s a lot more work. One of the things you talk about that I feel this word when I say it, it’s just going to hit people because many of you feel this way is, um, the languishing that you talk about. And a lot of people think that’s just with a normal.
So, um, you know, it’s a normal job, but it’s not actually that can happen to you as a business owner to what languishing is and maybe some of the choices we’ve consciously or unintentionally, uh, made to get in
Dr Maike: that position. Absolutely. So basically languishing, let’s [00:08:00] say in scientific or more scientific terms is the absence of mental wellbeing.
So maybe I need to explain a little bit more at this point. So we usually, when we talk about mental health, what we really talk about is mental illness. Let’s be honest, because when, as soon as I say mental health, people think, oh yeah, depression or anxiety or something like that. So we know that in order to be mentally healthy, we actually need two things.
We need the absence of mental illness, but only because we have an absence of mental illness or an absence of a mental illness diagnosed doesn’t mean that we’re mentally healthy. We also need the presence of mental wellbeing. And we know this also on the physical level, we know that being physically healthy is way more than just the absence of a fractured leg or the absence of a flu, right?
We want to be fit, we want to have a good endocrine system, we want to have a good metabolism, those kinds of things. And it’s the same for our psyche. So we need the absence of mental illness and we need the presence of mental well being. Now mental well being, by the way, is just another word for flourishing.
That is [00:09:00] when we actually feel deeply fulfilled. That’s when we feel like we have rich and good quality connections in life. That’s when we feel like we’re growing as a person. That’s when we actually feel happy and joyous in life more often than not. So all those kinds of things where we feel deeply engaged in life.
and interested and motivated. That’s what flourishing is or mental well being. Now imagine not having any of that and that’s when you find yourself languishing. Languishing has also been described as feeling blah or meh. It feels a little bit like a living robot or a living zombie. You function. You can still do everything you need to do.
You still operate in life. You eat, you sleep, you work, but it feels like it’s eat, sleep, work, repeat. Maybe you feel stuck. Those are the kinds of feelings associated with languishing. So it’s not a very nice feeling. And I just want to say at this stage, languishing is different from [00:10:00] being depressed or having a diagnosis of depression.
Because with a mental illness diagnosis, usually there is, there are detriments to our functioning in daily life. Often we can’t go to work anymore, or we retract from our social connections and those sorts of things. That is not the case with languishing. So I just want to make that very clear. They’re distinct concepts, even though they’re related.
We know that if you’re languishing and you’re languishing for a while, you’ll be more likely to develop a mental illness. So just maybe to describe how they’re. Mental well being and mental health or illness are related and yet distinct.
Chardét: Sometimes it happens
Dr Maike: to
Chardét: you, you know, you’re in a situation like COVID 19 where you can’t do the things that you want.
And so it’s kind of forced on you in some ways. Now that we’re out of that, when people are experiencing it, what are some of the things that they’re doing or not doing that might be holding them in that space?
Dr Maike: I guess there are lots of little different things that, that people do. So [00:11:00] for example, they might not listen to their intuition.
You know, they kind of feel like, let’s say for example, that job isn’t fulfilling them whatsoever. Or maybe they even somewhat feel like they’re in the wrong career altogether. Because how many people still pursue careers because they come with a great reputation or because maybe they don’t? Their parents wanted them to pursue that career or whatever, you know, it, it might be that they notice or they have an inkling or they know that they are stuck in a career that isn’t fulfilling whatsoever.
And yet they don’t take any action. To do something about that, or maybe they’re stuck in a relationship that is really draining them or in relationships, friendships, or, you know, relationships with family members that they’re very close with or whatever that are draining them and they’re not doing anything about that.
So, for example, people overstepping boundaries and you not establishing, communicating, honoring those boundaries. For yourself. It might be that you are [00:12:00] completely neglecting lots of different sides of your personality. So for example, we were talking about people working for themselves and hustling the the entire time.
There’s a big danger with that because, and I’ve been there myself, I’m happy to share that I started working for myself. I love what I do. It is my greatest passion. I am so lucky I get up and I love what I do for most of the time with most of the tasks. Problem is. You tend to then work many hours and you think because you love what you’re doing that that is okay to maybe not take any breaks or do some other things.
And at some stage, I was working 14 15 hour days and you can think about all the other things I didn’t do. I didn’t pursue any hobbies. I didn’t take many breaks. I didn’t maybe meet a lot of people throughout the week or on the weekend. We know from research that even though we might feel deeply fulfilled by the work tasks we’re doing, it is still crucial for us to take [00:13:00] breaks.
And break up our workdays. For example, we don’t do that. That can eventually lead to burnout, but let’s stick to languishing at this stage because we are human beings. We need the full spectrum of emotions and we need psychologically rich lives. So we need lots of different experiences in our lives.
Neglecting self care to some extent, or maybe not meeting our loved ones, not spending enough time with them, not pursuing any hobbies, not growing as a person, just being stuck. We, unfortunately, as human beings, we have this bizarre tendency to seek the familiar, to seek certainty. So what that means is that we will do the things we’ve always done.
And we actually know from research, too, that we would even rather. Choose a reality that is certain even if we’re not really happy with that over a Potential future reality that might be better and offer a greater [00:14:00] happier life, but that is uncertain How sad is that? So no wonder languishing is so common, right?
Chardét: Now we talk about mental illness in the entrepreneurship space. And as a business owner, we don’t talk about so much mental wellbeing, that idea that you were saying of when you love so much what you’re doing, or maybe you’re so tied to it, you have to make it work because you’re thinking about. What everyone will think if you fail, or your family’s depending on you, whatever the reason is, you’re so stuck in the work.
And that hits so home, because in those seven years I was telling you about, I remember my husband saying to me, You don’t have hobbies. You don’t do anything that’s not related to work. Even when it’s something that could be different, like travel, you still bring your work into the travel. Like, how can you live that way?
Dr Maike: It’s like this running joke at home that I’m just [00:15:00] terrified to leave the house without my laptop. Let alone the country. Yeah. But it’s so true, isn’t it? And you have then experienced it firsthand how at some stage you were probably just left a skeleton of your former self because we are more than our business and we need to be more than our business.
Chardét: It is a skeleton because it’s also the case of how much pressure does that put on you when you’re one source of meaning and the thing that you love is not going the way that you want or it’s challenging and you don’t have the other things. You don’t have the hobbies that make you excited. You’re not investing as much in the relationship.
It just goes. Creates this really horrible, like, I think we get codependent on our business. Yeah, I
Dr Maike: would
Chardét: totally agree. I’m so curious about your journey, like about you being an entrepreneur, because I know in all of this, where you’re helping other people, you also started from a spot of figuring out what aligns with you and then [00:16:00] also figured out.
What was the balance?
Dr Maike: Definitely don’t have it all figured out. Um, I don’t know anybody who would say they do, and if they did, then I would say they’re lying. I think we’re all on this journey and isn’t it so much about constantly adapting and adjusting because life just never stands still. So even if you’ve got it figured out today, and I’ve been there and thought I had it all figured out, chances are life’s going to throw you a curve ball the next day, and then it has to change and you have to adapt again.
But in terms of my own journey, well, you know, it was a journey of languishing. And this is the thing, languishing creeps in sneakily. It’s so quiet, so we don’t notice it. And it’s really important, therefore, that we can put a word to it and that we have awareness about it. Basically starting right in my childhood, I always knew I was fascinated by the fact that some people seem to have it all figured out, they knew exactly what they wanted and they went for it until they’ve achieved their goals and they were happy.
And that on the other side, I saw people who were constantly [00:17:00] unhappy, adults who kept telling me about their regrets. And yet when I told them, when I asked them, well, why aren’t you doing that now? The answer was always a world of excuses. At least that’s how I perceived it. And I just always thought, you know, what is it that these guys have or do that the others don’t, you know, it just seemed like.
Some people were just banging their head against the wall and then complaining about the walls. And I always thought I need to learn about the human mind. I need to learn about motivation. I need to learn how to create an amazing life because I very much saw the difference in the skillset and the behavior between those two types of people.
Their behavior was very different and the way they responded to life’s challenges. and their own dreams and goals. So I needed to know everything about it. So after school, I studied psychology and then realized at some stage that somehow everything just focused on all the things that were wrong with us, but not so much on the things that were right with us.
I moved to Australia, so moved from Germany to [00:18:00] Australia, had my first child already started working in research because there was a good work life balance and so forth. But long story short, I ended up in a research career for many, many years looking at identifying effective strategies to affect changes in behavior in workplaces.
So in office workers for the better, so for better lifestyles, healthier lifestyles and office workers. That, that’s sort of what I was focusing on for the most part. I was never quite happy in my job because affecting change that people didn’t necessarily want to adopt, but it was something that was wanted from the outside.
It was a little bit like a rock in the shoe. You know, in the beginning, it’s just there, you push it aside, you barely notice it, but at some stage. And for me, the, the epiphany basically came because what is it now? 2024, 10 years ago, my, one of my children, uh, become very sick. And so I was, out of the workforce for an entire year to look after him, um, while he was [00:19:00] on treatment.
And when I returned to work, I just realized that this little rock in my shoe had become the size of Mount Fuji, or it was probably the size of Mount Fuji for a while. And I couldn’t believe it. I was so angry with myself that I had been in a misaligned job for so long. And so, so many years without really realizing it or acknowledging it or honoring it, or let alone doing anything about it.
And I grabbed my laptop and I basically thought, okay, if I had to go back to uni, for example, what would I study? And I knew straight away, psychology again, I still love that. So I just bit by bit figured out where I’d gone wrong. And I realized that I needed to. Pivot into self leadership and positive psychology, which were two disciplines that were not taught at the time I was studying, they’re still not taught very widely, self leadership still doesn’t live in the psychology space, which is bizarre.
It lives in the management and business discipline. So anyway, so I managed to pivot and realize, well, there are no jobs whatsoever. So if I did want [00:20:00] to work in that field, I would have to start working for myself. So I started creating self leadership retreats that I taught on weekends while I was still working full time in my academic job, and eventually I created a website and social media and it all sort of took off from there.
Chardét: Interesting. Well, there’s a whole other part of this too, right? That you were traveling the world at one part.
Dr Maike: Actually, actually when I started, uh, when I started, I gave a couple of retreats in Australia still, but then we moved to France and we actually lived in France throughout the COVID 19 pandemic too.
So we lived in France. Then we moved back to Australia for a couple of years and then we became digital nomads. And yeah, for the last 18 months, we’re traveling, traveling around the world.
Chardét: Not only did you go from this place of languishing, not feeling aligned to then figuring out what you wanted to do, but you also then took it into your whole life as well.
And with a family, there’s a lot of courage that goes behind that, but also there’s like this [00:21:00] pull, right? Of I need to do things differently. I can’t always just follow the conventional way of everything, the way it’s said to be done.
Dr Maike: Um, That is so true. And you know what though, and here I’m circling back to values because I never wanted to be one of those people who didn’t practice what they preach.
At some stage, I realized just how strong a value adventuring is for me. And so I just configured my whole life around that. Adventuring, freedom, self leadership, those are all very big values for me. And I just sat down and took the time and put in the work to figure out What that actually means to me and what that looks like.
And then the whole idea of exiting the grind and daring to live differently. And it’s
Chardét: extremely inspiring because I feel that there’s, even though the majority are not doing that, I think the majority would like to be doing that. And so it’s a very interesting thing, right, where the, well, maybe I must have been a digital nomad, let’s.
Let’s not glorify [00:22:00] all of it. It is tough.
Dr Maike: And I have friends who are like, I’d be terrified to do something like you’re doing. Like that would not be for me. I like my routine. I need to know where I’m sleeping next week. Maybe not for everyone. Maybe the
Chardét: idea of the freedom for everyone. The idea appeals to many.
No, it’s so funny too. Cause I’m also coming on the other side of this. It’s six months now. Coming back to a home base. I think you’re three months now. So it’s interesting. Um, but, um, what I really love too, is that sometimes what you think you should do is still related to what you really want. So for you, psychology was always this thing you were interested in, but the way you were doing it was not aligned.
And I think that’s such an interesting thing is sometimes the problem is not the area you’re in. It’s how you are approaching it or how, what career you’ve built around it. I really wish people [00:23:00] would focus on that more because that’s why it can be so tough sometimes to leave where you’re at because you like some part of it, but you’re just not the, the manifestation of it you have is not right or not right anymore.
Dr Maike: Yeah, and it’s because it really takes that fine tuning, that fine tuning of understanding exactly what it is you’re after. Taking the time and putting in the effort to understand that, if only I had done that. If I had a coach back then who would have asked me, Michael, why exactly did you actually start studying psychology after school?
If only I had a coach to ask me
Chardét: those questions. I think that’s also very hard because it takes iterations. If the first iteration is not the one that feels good or that fails or whatever else, it’s so hard to not have that compulsion to just be like, Okay, let me go back to what I know because this clearly
Dr Maike: was not right.
It is so hard and especially because, [00:24:00] you know, what we spoke about earlier, it’s because we’re so inclined psychologically to do the things that we’ve always done and go back to the things that we’ve always known. It really is like a magnet. The familiar is like a magnet and it’s so hard to keep going in a direction where you feel like you’re tapping in the dark.
You don’t know if you’ll ever reach the light and get that insight and you have no idea when. So yes, it takes a whole lot of guts and blind faith.
Chardét: I love the tapping the dark analogy or metaphor because as long as you keep tapping you are going to find the exit but if you don’t then that’s where they say you feel stuck right like there’s so many people who listening are in that moment of I just this doesn’t feel like this is ever going to end I really don’t know when the light is coming or how I’ll get out of it.
Dr Maike: Well, you know what? I guess for me at some stage, [00:25:00] I made the decision that I’d rather tap in the dark, but be tapping to try and find the right thing, then live in a reality that I know isn’t right. Because on one hand, you have certainty that you know is wrong. And on the other I’m going to be talking about the importance of being on the journey and going on the journey.
Because the more you look and the more you tap and the more you explore and the more you get to know yourself and so forth, The higher the likelihood that you will actually find something. And I think that is always a journey worth taking. I have not once met a person who was on that journey and was unhappy, whether or not they felt they had arrived yet.
Because let’s be honest, you’re not just constantly tapping in the dark. You’re trying things out. Every time you try something new, even if it’s the wrong thing, you feel like I’ve tried it. And [00:26:00] now I’m a step closer, even though I haven’t found it yet, but that is way more fulfilling than being stuck in a reality you know you don’t like.
Chardét: When it’s reframed that way, it’s hard to, it’s hard to argue with staying in it, isn’t it? That you know 100%, like you said, that this is not right. So why continue in it? I would love to get your wisdom and your insights on What do you think it takes to kind of push past this? It’s comfort zone, but it’s also, I feel like comfort zone is so misleading a term because that feels like it’s a nice place to be and I don’t think it’s a nice place to be for many
Dr Maike: people.
So what it takes to actually leave that, that’s a very good question because I think it really depends on the person and the context because, you know, for many people, for example, you know, we don’t just have the luxury to just quit the job and then try your own endeavor and because you’re not going to be probably replaced.
Placing your income straight from the start. And I’ve been there. You [00:27:00] start right at the beginning, at the beginning and at the bottom. So, you know, it might take some saving first, you know, saving of money. And then it certainly takes courage. It might take rearranging your lifestyle. Or for example, if you’re in a relationship, if you’ve been the breadwinner, well, can your partner maybe be the breadwinner for a little while?
Adjusting your lifestyle to a lower living standard. It really depends on your individual circumstances and what you’re looking for. But I think what it definitely takes is a willingness to go against. Societal standards in many ways. It’s astonishing. So it takes a lot of courage and understanding your why, why exactly you want to live like that.
Chardét: I like this because it feels like it’s back to the values you were saying and back to the alignment, but it’s also small steps you can start to take in the direction you want to go where you’re not overhauling the job, but maybe you’re saving a bit more, you’re cutting [00:28:00] down costs. You’re also. Starting to get, um, let’s be real.
You need a thick skin to do this. You really do, because you’re going to hear so many opinions, like you said, not just on how you do your business, but how you live your life, the way that that should look, especially if you have a family or if you have a partner or whatever, like there’s so many views.
I’m thinking of like thousands I’ve heard in the last year already.
Dr Maike: I can imagine. And all the things you’re supposed to have figured out and achieve, like be married and have children by the age of 30, or I don’t know, have your career figured out all these, all these bits of nonsense that are out there.
And I find it always so helpful to remind myself of Brene Brown and what she said about being in the arena, you know, I do not listen to people anymore who are not in the arena with me living their own life and being happy with it.
Chardét: So what’s
Dr Maike: the one
Chardét: lesson that you wish people were never taught or never [00:29:00] learned?
Dr Maike: There’s this narrative around rest impeding productivity, for example, you know, whereas we know that it’s such a necessary part of being productive. So I think there are so many myths. And bizarre notions out there in society that we really need to forget about. That really upset me.
Chardét: Because I know people listening, I think, okay, I want more.
I’m inspired. Tell me more. Where can they connect with you? Where can they find more information on this? And some of these other ideas that, you know, we haven’t even touched on, but that are so crucial to finding that happiness and really to finding fulfillment in, in what you’re doing. So you can connect with
Dr Maike: me on Instagram at the flourishing doc or LinkedIn at Dr.
Mike and I house that name is probably a little bit hard to spell. So maybe head to my website and you’ve got all the links there. The website is the flourishing doc. com. That’s probably the best starting point. I’m guessing.
Chardét: I will recommend everyone to go there because [00:30:00] you will find instant inspiration.
It’s, you know, it’s definitely one of those posts where you read from you and you’re like, Oh, I’ve been doing that. Gonna think about this today. So I, I want to thank you for being here, for sharing your story, for giving so much insights and also for that little like, You know, that tough love fire under the bum to do something about
Dr Maike: it.
Oh, thank you so much, Sade. It’s been so lovely. I love when we can just have these chats instantly and feel like I’ve known you for 10 years and it was just a chat with a good old friend, so thank you so very much for having me, I absolutely love it.
