The sentence hit me like a ton of bricks. The call came from the woman who had been hired into the role I had worked YEARS to design, get approved & thought I was stepping into. Years doing the job of 6 people, endless nights, managing the growth & representing the division when no-one else cared to. The woman who got the VP role I designed and got approved while I got more work and a level of frustration & bitterness deeper than I had ever experienced before.
I didn't even care to hear her finish her thought, I ripped my headset off and slammed the receiver down.
I stood up, left everything and dashed down the aisle like I was sprinting towards the finish line of a half marathon. I barged through the glass doors, frantically pressing the button, trying to force the elevator to come faster & praying no one I knew would be in it when the steel doors finally opened.
I was desperately trying to hold myself together long enough to get outside before falling apart entirely.
Let me give some context
In 2007, I took over a small practice that wasn't getting much attention. No roadmap, not much direction, a small team and no budget to speak of. None of it reflected what the opportunity actually was. Just me, a small team and a leader who hired me into the role because he saw the impact I could make and the vision I couldn't stop thinking about. At the time I had the kind of stubborn belief that makes you answer emails at 3am and still get up at 5:30 to be ready for the 8am executive strategy meeting looking like you slept fine.
Over the next five years, I built the practice into an initiative, not just a department, a full blown company initiative. The kind that gets Board approval, and requires an organizational redesign to contain it properly. I expanded the partner & product ecosystem, built up the team, created new roles & efficiency processes, garnered approval and support from other departments, managed across multiple buildings around the country, covered the entire organization from a specialty strategy, spoke at conferences, represented the division at every table that mattered and traveled internationally to represent us on advisory boards as a thought leader in the space.
I was in my glory.
It was something new and novel, building my leadership muscle in ways I hadn't in my past roles. It gave me access to see how my Fortune 500 company worked even deeper behind the scenes, operations, procurement, installations, compensation and executive meetings I would have never had a seat at before. I was meeting with division heads and VPs of organizations from well known leaders in tech. I had the autonomy to build, whitespace to grow, support of my vision from the best boss I had ever had (still to this day).
I was beyond completely exhausted but at the time, it felt like it was all worth it, it was an amazing time in my career.
When it had grown large enough, I got it approved for a real executive leadership structure. I designed the roles myself, from all the hats I had been wearing on my own for years. I proposed the new org structure, job descriptions, built the business case and got it on the agenda to present to the Board. And among everything else, I prepped for the board of directors meeting for months. It was well worth the effort, I walked out of the meeting with approval, not just for the new leadership structure, budget and support but approved as one of the company wide initiatives for the next fiscal year.
It was one of the, if not THE, proudest moments of my corporate career.
I genuinely believed I was building my next chapter. I had grown with the company for the past 14 years and this was finally the visibility and recognition I had worked endlessly for and given up so much to accomplish. In the moment it felt like a huge victory, like I had written my ticket.
What I didn't realize in that moment of sheer pride was that I wasn't writing my own path, I was actually updating someone else's LinkedIn profile.
Not only did they not hire me, or even promote me, they hired from the outside and brought in multiple people into a different org structure to do less than I had been doing for the last few years... and I had to onboard them into the business as they took over their roles.
Less than nine months later, I picked up the phone for what I thought was our routine weekly business review. The redundant meeting where I essentially updated the newly minted VP, the woman who had been given the role I had designed & thought I was stepping into.
What she said to me, was one of the most jarring & visceral sentences I have received in my career. It hit me like she had dropped a 10 ton brick on my chest. I can still hear her voice in my head as I type. With no warning or explanation the words that came out of her mouth were:
"Katie, I don't think you're happy in this role & I'd like you to find something that would better utilize your..."
I didn't even care to hear her finish her thought, I ripped my headset off and slammed the receiver down.
I started walking, and just kept walking, in heels all the way to Grant Park, with nothing but a rage I didn't have words for yet. In the moment, I couldn't even explain how much it cut to my core.
The irony was that in just a matter of months, my proudest career moment had become my official breaking point, I could no longer ignore how beyond it I really was.
I was shaking the whole walk, ugly sobbing by the time I landed on the bench at the park, in the middle of Chicago, in the middle of the day, because I had spent years building something from essentially nothing and the woman now sitting in the role I designed had just called to offer help to find a role that "better utilized my skills."
In 15 years, I had so much growth at the company, learned how to be a seller and a leader. Build new initiatives, took on new roles and territories. Given opportunities I never expected at my age AND also never thought would cut me this deep. I left the role less than six months later and the company less than a year after that.
I just couldn't get past what, back then, felt like complete betrayal.
The feeling of being completely overlooked after building the practice into something real and now having to give status updates to the people with bigger titles and higher comp, who were now doing the jobs I had been doing on my own for 5 years... and somehow they didn't actually take anything off my plate. It was very much my Cinderella moment, without the glass slipper or prince charming. I felt like I was dealing with the evil stepsisters and I realized that my carriage was turning into the pumpkin quickly.
Honestly, what I know now is it wasn't just this situation on its own.
But this situation was the first time I actually saw the pattern so clearly, so dramatically that I could no longer ignore it. That same loop happened over and over in my career, in projects, teams, new initiatives I had started over the last dozen year of leadership.
But the loop is too hard to see when you are in the middle of it. Ambition and drive can create blindspots, preventing you from seeing it until the moment has passed, you blamed external factors and you have already moved on.
A few things happened that day as I sat on that infamous bench in Grant Part for 3 hours.
I walked around a little but kept ending up back in that same spot, on that same bench. I had no money or phone, so I had to just sit with it all, sit with just my thoughts and my anger.
It took years and learning about my own patterns to figure out what actually happened in that critical, life changing call. What I realize now:
- It happened, exactly how I needed it to happen. There was no other way I would have seen, or admitted, that I was so far past burnout that I was no longer functioning, at that point I was merely surviving. I ignored so many signs of functional burnout because I was so focused on building my path that I would never have admitted I was done.
- Support from people who believe in you and your vision is invaluable. Throughout the whole building process, I had people who believed in me, believed in my ability, my vision and my process. I learned more about myself and how I operate best through their belief in me. Don't take people who support you and your vision for granted. The boss that supported me and this vision left before any of the shakeup happened, but he was an amazing mentor to me even after he left to start his own company.
- My pattern became so obvious I could no longer avoid it. This was a recurring pattern in my career. I know now it is a part of how I am wired, I'm built to initiate. But I was initiating over and over in an organization that didn't reward initiation. Recognition and rewards came after and the initiation/foundation was quickly forgotten. I need systems that reward initiation and support the hand off instead of creating friction. By this point, my ego & stubbornness was driving me instead of my curiosity.
The worst part was… she was right, but I couldn’t admit it.
Admitting she was right, would make the past 5 years of my life feel like a complete waste. I was no longer happy in the role, but I couldn’t admit it, because I had given so much of me, to build something, for such a huge disappointment and utter devastation. I couldn’t come back from it.
Her approach taught me how not to do it, but if she hadn't been so jarring and insensitive in her approach I would have continued in a role that was literally taking every ounce of me. I was angry, bitter and definitely no longer showing my value. I was far beyond what would have helped her be successful and she said what needed to be said.
The exhaustion I was exhibiting that made her think I was "unhappy in my role" wasn't just unhappiness.
It was years of building and initiating with nothing to show me the difference between energy investment and extraction. No one to tell me that the environment was taking more than it was giving, that the way I was running was built for someone else's wiring entirely, and that I would keep recreating this same dynamic in every role I ever had until I understood the real mechanism underneath it, not just the symptoms.
It was the last time I was going to build something, watch it get noticed, and have it hired above me without recognition or compensation for my contributions.
The irony was a new role didn't address it (I tried), a promotion and a new company didn't address it (I tried both those too).
Not only do I know from my own experience, I know from working with so many exhausted executives on the other side of this as well.
The loop breaks when you finally see the specific wiring underneath it, your unique energy pattern and communication style. The exact mechanism that determines how you make decisions, how you process stress, how you actually restore, and what it costs you every single day that you override it. Because you can't unsee that. You stop recreating it, not through discipline or willpower or a better system, but when you finally understand what you've actually been doing and why.
My Tuesday mornings look different now.
No more 8am weekly business reviews and I have definitely found a role that makes me happier. I am absolutely utilizing my natural skills more now in ways that work for me instead of depleting me.
I have morning rituals that create real productivity instead of rituals that just delay the moment I start chasing emails and other people's urgency. I initiate projects and get rewarded for initiating them, instead of watching someone else take the credit and the title for what I built. I have the autonomy that someone wired like me was always going to need. I just didn't have the language for it then, or the understanding of why every environment that took it away from me felt like slow suffocation, while I looked completely fine from the outside.
My anger was inevitable, but it was a signal I was ignoring instead of using it as the lighthouse it should have been. Warning me that there were turbulent waters ahead and to find another route.
I am not describing a version of success that required me to blow up my career and start over from scratch. I left the role and the organization and moved into roles I should have taken years before. But when you understand the wiring running your patterns underneath it all, success with peace, satisfaction or excitement becomes possible because you finally understand how you're actually designed to operate, and you stop forcing yourself into a style built for someone else's wiring.
We built our process to help others understand their own wiring and looping patterns. We didn't build it from just another framework we studied, we built it from forty combined years inside Fortune 500 leadership, working with every version of the pattern we now help other people decipher. We know what it looks like from every angle, the 80-hour weeks, the 3am emails, the conferences, the strategy meetings and the performance reviews that confirm you're doing everything right while your body is quietly keeping a very different score.
We built what we would have needed.
And we have spent years making it better, more precise, and more specific to each leader's actual wiring, because a generalized result is not what breaks a pattern this deeply conditioned.
If you're the person who keeps delivering at the highest level while quietly running out of fuel, who has tried the 3 week vacation, the boundaries, the coaching, the mindset work and still wakes up on Monday feeling like you have nothing left, you are looping in a pattern keeping you stuck on the hamster wheel and it has a specific, addressable answer.
The High-Capacity Trap™ Assessment is where that process starts. It's free, it takes two minutes, and people tell us the questions alone are eye-opening, because most leaders have never been asked to look at their experience through this lens before. The assessment leads to an option to run a fully personalized pattern diagnostic report built around your specific wiring, not a generalized result you could have downloaded anywhere.
You already know you're a high performer running on empty. What you need to know is exactly why and what to actually do about it.
That's what we built, and there is nothing else like it.
She may never understand how much she truly impacted my career trajectory.
That phone call was the last time I ever spoke to her one on one. At the time I used her as my "excuse" for leaving a situation I honestly should have left years earlier. I have a love hate relationship with this story. I realize now that I didn't actually hate her, I hated what she represented. She was the mirror of the pattern that had been frustrating me for years. I will never agree with how she did it, but it did show me more than I could have ever realized in that very moment.
There was still pain for me as I typed out this story, but I am forever grateful for what I learned through the experience, the good, bad and the ugly. AND I know that if that phone call had never happened, BELIEVE BLUEPRINT LLC would never have eventually become a reality, and for that I am truly and forever grateful.
We help you understand your patterns BEFORE you feel like quitting is the only option and burnout is your only outcome. We help you address & maximize your pattern so you don't need to go through the same pain we did.
