Choosing Yourself Ain’t Easy

by Laura Martinez

I spent over fifteen years in Human Resources, working across industries and companies of every size, including some of the biggest names in tech. It's a front row seat to how rewarding, or how draining, a job can be. I've watched incredible leaders build teams people who would be willing to run through walls for. I've also watched good people slowly lose themselves in cultures that were never built to hold them.

Eye-level view of a serene landscape with a calm lake and surrounding trees

Most people don't leave a bad job the moment they recognize it's bad. They can't. There's income to protect, insurance to keep, a mortgage or a family or a version of stability that feels too risky to walk away from. So you stay, and you adapt, and you tell yourself the friction is just part of the job. For a long time, I told myself the same thing.

From the start, I was a square peg in a round hole.

Early in my career, I got feedback that I was too vocal. Too opinionated. I remember being told, more than once, that I needed to soften myself because it made people uncomfortable. And I’m not talking about being brash or having a harsh delivery, it was more about surfacing the real issue professionally, calling out the proverbial elephants in the room, admitting when I didn’t agree. In HR, the decisions you're part of impact people’s future, their career, their income, their sense of safety at work. Those are real, human stakes. I never understood how caring deeply about that was a bad thing, but I tried to adapt, balancing my inner voice and my outer expression.

I wanted to succeed, so I tempered myself. I learned how to let most of my concerns go. I got good at choosing my timing. At choosing my moments. Bending over backwards to make inroads with the right people. At playing the long game, like I'd been advised to. And I got rewarded with promotions and recognition. But underneath the success, something was wearing thin. Even though outwardly I was doing great, I felt terrible. I was morphing into a person that was not me. Eventually I hit the wall a lot of us hit: burnout, the kind that doesn't just tire you out but starts to make you lose your zest for life entirely. Outwardly, it looked like I was doing everything right, but inside I truly felt like I was failing and I couldn’t put my finger on why.

That's what sent me looking for support.

I want to be honest about something, because I think it matters. I sought out a career coach, and the first program I found was as polished as it was persuasive. It promised transformation (lightning fast), and it appealed to me, someone who was tired and looking for a sign. I just wanted someone to tell me what was wrong and what to do. When I got started I realized it was a playbook, a set of really directive steps that didn't fit me, so I kept looking. That’s when I met Kim.

The difference was almost immediate. Where the other program had answers ready before I'd finished the question, Kim asked me things I hadn't thought to ask myself. We went back through the moments in my career that had felt like failures, the "too vocal" feedback, the managers who wanted less of me instead of more, and we looked at them together, honestly, without me needing to defend myself the whole time. She pushed me to get real, to consider the 'why not' question around things I was assuming were immovable. A few times she metaphorically shook me by the shoulders. But our work together was the turning point. 

And a transformation began.

I got real with myself. I admitted that the career I had deliberately chosen and invested in didn’t actually fulfill me (or fit me). I decided I’d rather give up what I worked so hard for and built if in return it meant I could pursue a new path that had the potential to sustainably fulfill me. I was able to acknowledge that I didn’t want a traditional career path in a corporate role (that was hard), and committed never tolerating being a part of a toxic work environment ever again.

Along the coaching journey, I can remember that I felt something really big shift. I got in touch with what drives and fulfills me. When I was able to articulate that, I was able to see what I really wanted. I was able to own that truth and feel relief in coming to understand that it wasn’t something about me that needed to change. I realized that I had been in the wrong environment, working to achieve agendas that were out of alignment with my core values. That distinction sounds small when I write it out, but it changed everything about how I saw my own career. It let me stop treating every piece of critical feedback as proof I was broken, and start asking whether the feedback even reflected what I actually cared about getting right. When I was able to see that, the skies cleared. I was able to start imagining again, architecting what I wanted my next 20 years at work to look like.

I found work that brings me joy and leverages my strengths.

That's the work I am doing now. I work in service of others who are trying to find their path and achieve their goals. I partner with Kim to build programs and deliver services. And I get to measure my impact every day by witnessing people get to a place of peace and happiness, living a life that didn’t even seem remotely possible when I first met them.  

Looking back on my career, I can still say that success was sweet for me in my corporate roles, but the sweetness was only the safety, the security, the compensation that reliably showed up every two weeks. Ultimately, I was able to see that along with that sweetness was a real bitterness that was slowly dimming my light. Turns out that the cost far outweighed the benefits, and as soon as I started honoring my inner wisdom, committed to and made a solid plan for my transition, everything started to fall into place. I will say, it’s different for everyone. My story is not yours. Yours is not mine. But we all have one.

If you want to see yourself more clearly, if you're standing where I was standing, tired, unsure if it's you or the job, I'd love to talk with you. Maybe we can help.