Almost a year ago, a cardiologist looked me in the eye and said one sentence that I have not been able to unhear since.
“Jennifer, it is time to decide whether your job is compatible with your health.”
I quit my job shortly after. Thirty years in corporate, the last 10 of those in executive support, gone. No plan. No savings buffer. Just my husband sitting at the kitchen table saying, rest first. You have never stayed home with the girls. You have always wanted to. If you want to build a business after, great. If you don’t, just heal.
So I did. For three months I went to doctor’s appointments and worked out and cooked actual meals and went to therapy and sat on my own back deck. And I want to tell you what nobody tells you about the rest part.
Sometimes, it felt awful.
I felt useless. I felt guilty. I felt itchy in my own skin. The instinct to start a business immediately was screaming at me every single day. Every time I tried to skip the rest part and start building, my body told on me. I would crash. My sleep would tank. My nervous system would spike. It took me months to trust that the rest was actually the work.
That, right there, is what this week’s episode is about.
My guest is Amanda Ingram, a Self Discovery Coach and the founder of Find Your Spark Coaching. She works with women navigating major life changes, and in her own words, she helps women who became everything to everyone else remember who they are.
Sit with that phrase. Women who became everything to everyone else remember who they are. That has been the silent job description of most women I know for most of their adult lives, and Amanda has built her whole practice around helping us find the thread that got buried underneath it.
Her story and mine rhyme. We both walked away from corporate careers within a few months of each other. We both had no plan. We both ended up coaching women through reinvention. But our routes there were almost opposites. Amanda quit her television industry job after her second daughter, kept pushing into building something new, and burned out so completely she had to stop everything. Sitting outside one summer watching her kids, poetry started coming through her, and she remembered the sound of her own voice for the first time in years. I had a cardiologist and a husband hand me a runway. Amanda had to crash to earn hers.
Two roads to the same place. Which is why she said yes when I asked her if slowing down was the shortcut for the kind of women we both serve.
Three things from our conversation I want you to leave with
One. There is a difference between survival mode and soul exhaustion, and the wrong response is what keeps women stuck for years.
Survival mode, in Amanda’s words, is going through the motions, being exhausted, putting yourself last and knowing it. A nap and a boundary actually help. Soul exhaustion is what shows up after you put up the boundaries and got the rest, and you are still asking, who am I underneath all of this? Why don’t I feel different? That second one is not solved by self care. It is solved by becoming a different person on purpose.
If you are not sure which one you are in, ask yourself this. Would another night of sleep and a boundary actually fix this? If the answer is yes, take the nap. If the answer is, sure, but what else is there, you are in soul exhaustion. Listen to the rest of the episode.
Two. Your wisdom did not go anywhere. It is buried under everyone else’s voices.
One of the moments from Amanda I cannot stop thinking about is when she said your inner voice has not actually disappeared. It got buried under the voices of other people, the beliefs you absorbed, the achievements you chased. When you slow down enough to quiet those voices, your own voice comes back. And it is not harsh or judgmental. It is gentle. It says, it is okay, we can slow down, you are good.
That sentence broke something open in me. If you have been telling yourself you have lost your gut, lost your knowing, lost your spark, you have not. It is just buried. And the only way to dig is to stop digging in the wrong direction.
Three. Self trust is the final piece of the journey, not the first.
Amanda has a coaching framework called Find Your Spark. I have one I call The Rewrite. We came up with them separately. We came at them from different directions. And both of them end in the exact same place. Self trust. The reason it sits at the end is that you cannot trust yourself until you have remembered who you are. And you cannot remember who you are while you are still performing the role you have been performing for twenty years.
When self trust comes back online, Amanda described it beautifully. There is a calm that arrives quietly. A lightness. The constant arguing with yourself stops. You think, okay, I will be okay no matter what step I take. If it is wrong, I will take a different one. That is what we are reinventing toward. That, more than any new job title or business or city, is the actual destination.
Here is what I want to leave you with this week.
If you are in the part of your reinvention where pushing harder has stopped working, this episode is for you. If you are sitting in the messy in-between and wondering whether the rest is the work, this episode is for you. If you have built a whole life on achievement and you have started to suspect that the achievement is not going to save you, this episode is absolutely for you.
And one more thing. The other reason I wanted Amanda on the show is that we both serve women whose brains are part of the reason self trust got hard in the first place. ADHD, anxiety, perimenopause, chronic stress that quietly broke our executive function. Amanda reframed it in a way I keep coming back to. Yes, and. Yes, my brain makes some things harder. And, this version of me is still worthy of love. We get to make space for both.
Slowing down really is the shortcut. I learned it the gentle way because my husband and my cardiologist conspired to make me. Amanda learned it the hard way because nobody told her she was allowed to stop. Either way, both of us arrived at the same truth, and we want you to get there with less burnout than either of us did.
What to do next
Listen to the full episode on Substack
Follow Amanda on Instagram and Threads, and book a Spark Session if this conversation lit something up in you.
If your brain is the part that keeps tripping you up, the free Executive Function Self Assessment will help you name your specific strengths and gaps in about ten minutes. And if you want the deeper work, the Executive Function Unlocked waitlist is open.
-Jenn Fast
Founder, Reinvention with Jenn Fast
P.S. I record and edit every Comeback Show episode on Descript. It is what made this whole show possible for me, and the affiliate link is here if you have been quietly mapping your own podcast.
