Intuition, often our inner compass, plays a pivotal role in life’s decision-making. It’s the unspoken wisdom that guides us, helping make choices aligned with our authentic selves. By utilizing it, it empowers us to make decisions that deeply resonate. However, how can we harness it to lead a more fulfilling and purposeful life?
In this episode, we’re joined by Tara McFarland, a civil engineer turned intuitive leadership coach. Tara discusses the importance of tuning into intuition, how intuition and logic must work together in engineering and coaching. Furthermore, Tara provides a sneak peek into the highly anticipated Rocky Mountain Young Professional Summit 2023.
If you’re ready to embark on a journey of self-discovery and transformation, this episode is a must-listen.
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Tuning into Your Intuition for Lifelong Fulfillment with Tara McFarland
Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. This podcast, I always kind of describe as being a little bit of a fifty-fifty podcast in that 50 percent of it is centered around my hometown of Denver, Colorado, and 50 percent of it is with guests in some other places. In some of the more recent episodes, we featured some guests from other places but this episode is something we’ve kind of done before which we’re featuring a specific opportunity and event in Denver, Colorado, coming next month, October 13th, the Rocky Mountain Young Professionals Summit. In order to talk about that as well as her more recent endeavors is my guest today, Tara McFarland, intuitive healing coach, hopefully I got that right, and the founder of Create Conversation LLC.
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Tara, welcome to the program.
Thank you. Yeah, I call myself an intuitive leadership coach.
Intuitive leadership coach. I’m sorry, I tried to get that right.
Yeah, no worries. Well, and I like the combination between the intuitive and the leadership because my background is in engineering and so a lot of the people that I work with are very analytical types and so when we talk about leadership, people understand what that means. The intuitive part is what they’re learning when they work with me.
And one of your key endeavors has been taking people with a similar background to yours, engineering, and introducing them to kind of concepts that don’t necessarily come naturally to a lot of people with the engineering mindset. Tell us a little bit about your journey in that particular realm.
Like I said, my background is in engineering and I was a civil engineer for over 20 years. Right about year 20, I hit a very major patch of burnout where I just completely shattered, had absolutely no idea what I was going to do. I thought my career was over. And this was predicated by being in a position where I had been a technical team lead, meaning I had been doing designs for most of my career, and then I shifted into a more non-technical program position and I became a project manager, program manager, I was suddenly leading multidisciplinary teams and I actually didn’t have any idea how to do it.
Oh, wow.
And I didn’t get the training that was needed to understand what the dynamics are within teams and really how to deal with people, like I had been evaluating dams almost 15 years at that point and now I’m having to lead teams and it’s a totally different skill set. And so I was on this project that was very high profile, it was politically sensitive, it was a really big project. It would have — like if I could have carried this project through to the end, it would have been a launching point for me to continue up the ladder. What happened instead was that it was just like a series of things that kept happening where I knew that something wasn’t quite right in the project but I didn’t know how to bring that up and I didn’t know how to bring it up to the project team and I didn’t really know how to bring it up to my supervisors and we were working with this third party and it was just this really odd dynamic of our core team, a third party, and their consultant. I was in that role for three years and, at the end of three years, eventually, what happened was that I finally got to a point where I was tired of hearing about how I needed to be more careful in meetings that I didn’t seem angry.
Oh, wow.
And as a woman in engineering, if there are any women in male-dominated industries listening, this might resonate really well because I have a very direct personality style. It was hard for me to hide emotions. So we would be in these meetings, it would be really difficult, nobody’s having fun in them, and it lands on me as one of the leaders of the project that I’m looking like I’m angry or I’m upset or whatever. That point, I just lost it. I literally couldn’t see any way out of this because I had been receiving this negative feedback and, actually, it was only really a couple of times but the problem was is that throughout my career, I had gotten really good performance reviews so there was never this thing about, “We really need to work on communication, I think we need development in this area,” there wasn’t this development of potential that people saw, it was kind of like a sink or swim situation and I just felt like I sunk.
Yeah.
At that point, I remember being so upset, couldn’t see a way out that I went to not my supervisor but actually my superior so his supervisor and I told her that I couldn’t continue on the project and that I had to go part time. I was done. I really had no idea where my next steps were going to be. So, I had a really supportive supervisor and superior and they agreed to let me go part time, they hired somebody to take my place, and I started to really look at what was it that I wanted to do with the rest of my life because I knew I wasn’t going to hang out where I was. I was like, I think I’m done with engineering. But I also want to help people who are in industries like this to start to understand and unravel all this stuff that we’re told all this conditioning that we take on and get to what does it mean to lead from the inside out. So when I call myself an intuitive leadership coach, it’s because it’s having people tune into their own intuition, what they see as their strengths and leadership that are often reflected back to them but we focus so much on the negative that it’s hard to see what the positives are sometimes, and then really to cultivate a career based on that.
So you were in engineering for 20 years and I always think of engineering as having a kind of a more straightforward and linear approach and a little less, I don’t want to say touchy feely but a little less of like trying to tap into some of those things like intuition. My impression is that it tends to appeal more toward people who want to be exact and follow a direct procedure. For those 20 years that you were in that field and doing the day to day work, did you feel happy or was there another part of you that wasn’t coming out?
I can safely say that I was not happy in my career. And you’re right, it was like being on train tracks. It was just a straight, linear, if I get to this destination, I’ll be happy, if I get to this destination, I’ll be happy. That’s kind of how I went through my career. So, if I had ever stopped to, say, hang out at a stop, at a little train depot for a minute and reflect on is this really where I want to be and what I want to be doing, the answer would have been no. But for most of my career, I just pushed that to the side. That was my intuition talking, there was always this little voice of, “This isn’t really what you’d like to do.”
Yeah.
I would just push it to the side and I would move forward and I would go for the next promotion or take on the next project or try to learn a new skill, a technical skill, not a people skill, and then prove myself. There was a whole lot of, “I need to prove myself in this situation.” And not everybody is like that, right?
Yeah, for sure.
I work with sure who really love engineering and they’re just needing to find their spot in it, like where to land where they feel supported by the company. They’re doing more of what they really like to do versus just putting up with stuff that they don’t like to do.
Yeah, what’s energizing versus what’s draining.
Exactly. When I started to tune into my own intuition which happened after this breakdown, at the time, I was very lucky to have a mentor who really helped me to open up to these ideas that seemed so foreign. I mean, you’re right.
Luckily, with this mentor, I was able to start to open up to emotions are okay. I also have a therapist. I mean, like I was a teen, right? So emotions are okay and if I’m feeling drained all the time, if this stuff is so hard to get through, then do I really need to be here? Is this the environment for me to be in? And a lot of that work led me to using human design in my coaching because it helped me to really understand what is it that I’m doing that is draining and why is it draining.
I’ve spent like a decade trying to figure out why I have like energy crashes at 2:30 in the afternoon, like so many people.
Well, honestly, I think that one of the reasons why we have energy crashes at 2:30 in the afternoon is because we’re not supposed to work the way we’re working, none of us.
Yeah. 100 percent agree. I even read that old book — well, it’s now old, from 2010, The Way We Work Isn’t Working [sic] by Barry Schwartz.
Oh, I haven’t read that one. That sounds like a good one.
It’s just one of those evidence that like as much as a lot of these conversations feel new, they feel like they started maybe just before COVID but really started in earnest during the pandemic, that people have been looking into this and researching this for quite a while, and that movie Office Space is now a quarter of a century old.
And it’s still true.
It’s like were we meant to get up and sit in traffic where an old guy with a walker is going faster than you in your car.
And sitting in these gray cubes that are just depressing.
Yeah, all day long.
All day long, sit at your computer, do your work.
It’s hard for us to move through a workday and be productive the way that we think we’re supposed to be productive when that’s not really the way our energy works. Click To TweetAnd that’s where I use human design to point out to people, this is really how — human design is an archetype. It’s a system that is based on several systems. One of the main ones is astrology, so it’s very esoteric. So you’re talking about just an archetype. This is an idea of how the energy works but it really helps people to understand, well, if I’m — like, for me, personally, my archetype and human design is one in which I actually don’t really have sustainable energy. If you look at me energetically based on the chart, which is based on birth time, place, date —
Yeah, starts the exact same way.
— I am energetically very open so that means that I am constantly taking in a lot from my environment and amplifying it any which way and everything’s kind of is fairly variable for me. And understanding that led me to an understanding of, okay, then that makes sense because when I walk into a crowded store, there are times that I’m in there for like 10 minutes and I have a “I need to get out of here” feeling. It’s just because of the way that I’m processing whatever is happening around me. And so I think that it’s nice to have something like that to look at to say, Okay, now this makes sense. When I burned out of my career made perfect sense because it was right around the age of 40 and I had been operating basically as a different archetype, pretending like I had all the sustainable energy, just like, “Let’s just go for it,” and, ultimately, it wasn’t sustainable. Especially because, at that time, I was working full time, I’m married, I have two kids, I had two very young kids at the time, and I was still trying to hit the gym, I’d be there at 5:15 in the morning.
I know so many people try to do that. Yeah.
Oh, my gosh. I did that for like a year.
And it’s weird because one of the hard things that I often experience when I look at situations like that is that there’s this appearance out there as if there are so many people that are not only doing this but thriving, and it’s part of what our Instagram culture really kind of brings about, like, well, all these other people, I see all these other parents, I see all these other moms, I see all these other groups of people doing this and they’re showing their 5 a.m. workout, their full workday where they get in the office by seven, they’re there until 4:30, they come home, take care of the kids and then pull up their laptops and do a little bit more at 8:15 until 10 and somehow get by on five hours of sleep with all the other responsibilities around having children, having a home, and stuff like that, and it’s easy to get into that mindset where you’re saying, “What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I make that work?” When you were looking at this stuff, is that what drew you to look into ideas such as human design?
I like to learn. I am a lifelong learner. And so one of the things that really opened up for me and why I became a coach is that I really like to learn about people. So it’s almost like taking my analytical brain that has been very honed in the engineering industry and applying it to people in a more feeling way. So that’s what drew me to this was like trying to figure out like, well, why is it that happens? Because I would do that comparison all the time. I mean, I wrote a whole blog post once, I should repost it because it’s amazing, where I said, “Well, I’m taking care of myself. This is what my day looks like,” and I must be taking care of myself because my day didn’t look exactly like that, it looked like I had a lot more downtime, but, really, for me, one of the things that I noticed is I’ve had to understand that I’m very efficient when I have the energy to work and when I don’t have the energy to work, I just don’t have the energy to work. It’s not saying that I can’t do work because of this, it’s just learning how to flow with that energy. And so that is what, as I was trying to figure out what is going on with me, I was drawn to human design and I had a reading done by a friend of mine and I had done an astrology reading before that, probably a year before that, but the human design reading was the one that completely blew my mind where I was like, “This explains everything.” I tend to be like an explorer or an experimenter so I’m always looking for different ways to do things and when you work in a place that is all about the status quo, that’s not necessarily an attribute that they love.
It’s not compatible with what they value.
And I didn’t really understand it until I started to dig into the human design. I didn’t really understand at the time that I was going through all of this stuff. So that’s why when I focus on who do I want to support as a coach, it’s like I want to support the people who were in my position because I do believe that right about mid career, which is kind of in that 10- to 15-year zone is where people tend to start to wonder, “Where am I really going with this?” And I can say for sure that around 15 years was when I was questioning. I didn’t know where to turn was the problem.
No, I mean, it’s a tough situation. It’s a situation that I found myself in. It’s a situation that I envision many of my listeners finding themselves in as well because one of my biggest criticisms of our work culture is that it tends to be one size fits all. It tends to assume that everyone’s going to work under the same circumstance, everyone’s going to work the same exact way, which I also argue is, we took the industrial work culture and we never really adapted it to what many of the jobs today are. It was in the mid-20th century when we left the assembly line where it was very much the number of hours you’re there is the amount of value you’re producing and everyone needs to work the same hours and do the same thing, to something where we all have different talents and I want to iterate because I hope it doesn’t come across this way, I’m not trying to sound as if I’m saying anything bad about people who are of the linear engineering mindset because it is a group of people we need, I think we need all the different groups of people with all the different talents and we just need to kind of facilitate everyone being able to find who they are and find themselves, and so one of the things I’m wondering is, if someone is in that situation and they want to, say, explore their human design or they even want to look into your coaching services, what will be the best way for someone to contact you or generate that human design or any other method in which people can kind of come in and start really exploring, “Who am I? Why am I feeling this way? What should I be looking into?” much like the way you did.
I have a website, which is createconversationllc.com. That’s a good place to go because that’s where all my stuff lands. You can also find me on Instagram if you just look up Tara McFarland. My handle is TaraMcFarland111. There’s a few of us out there, I had to add some numbers. So those are good ways to get in touch with me. And it’s true, right? So, some people really thrive in that environment and that’s fine. The people I work with are the ones who aren’t thriving. Like I said, sometimes really like the work that they do, they don’t want to necessarily leave their industry but they want to figure out how to work best within it because they love the work that they do, they’ve recognized that they’re maybe in the wrong position or the wrong company or they’ve recognized that they’ve hit a burnout patch and really want to focus on, “Well, if I’m going to make a move, what is the best move for me to make?” and that’s where like the combination of I’m very analytical, I love to problem solve so I love helping people figure out, okay, what really are your next steps, and, at the same time, let’s bring it back to you and teach people how to tune into their intuition, teach them through human design how to just to look at it, just to understand like this is probably how your energy works and this is where some of these things come into play and then start to play with it a little bit. It doesn’t have to be all heavy and serious all the time.
One of the ways I teach people to start using intuition is I tell them to start asking questions about the food that they want to eat. Click To TweetOh, like what you’re craving?
Because sometimes what we’re craving isn’t necessarily what we need, right?
Oh, yeah, for sure.
But you still have a choice. You can still go, “Well, I’m gonna go eat that ice cream even though my body says it doesn’t want it.”
Yeah, I mean, for sure.
But at least you’re starting to tune into, okay, maybe it’s not really understanding. And here’s the other thing. When we’ve been disconnected from our intuition, it can be hard to trust it. And I have a theory. This is probably more of speculation than a theory because I’ve done zero research on it.
Oh, I love speculative theories.
So my speculation is that, really, in engineering, it’s actually much more creative industry and career than people give it credit for. Its constant problem solving. It’s constant looking at things that are not necessarily exactly the same as you did it the last time so how do you figure out how to move through it? So I think that engineers are probably some of the most intuitive people out there but a lot of us have been taught that it’s only what we’ve learned in our textbooks, what we learn from our professors, what we’ve learned on the job, what the numbers say, what we can calculate that we really give credence to and credit to versus, “I just had this idea and so I went —” it’s like you can have these bursts of inspiration, which is likely intuition, and then you can go figure out if it works and I think that’s what a lot of engineers do.
I mean, that makes sense. I have a good friend who’s a civil engineer and she has all kinds of intuitive theories about when to build roundabouts or traffic circles or rotaries, whatever you call it, somewhat in the US, that’s considered kind of an alternate design for how traffic is going to flow, roads are going to work and everything like that. Some people love them, a lot of people hate them. It’s different. Most people don’t know how to drive through them. But, yeah, that’s kind of an intuition, like this intersection should be a traffic circle instead of your standard traffic light with the red, yellow, green, or red, amber, and green as the civil engineers in my life like to remind.
Nice. It’s amber, not yellow. I love that.
And all those things, there’s this like combination, and it’s almost like a combination for every role where there’s a role for your intuition and then there’s a role for that whole linear, be exact area where, because also when you’re building that road or whatever you’re building in engineering, you do need to have the numbers, you do need to have things laid out the right way so the bridge doesn’t collapse or the water drains, so that the electrical circuits don’t overload, all those things are really important there too.
Yeah, absolutely, and that’s where I think that I bring something a little bit different to the coaching industry just because I kind of bridge both of those things. I play with the energy, I play with intuition, I have people play in that realm of I can’t see it or touch it or I don’t know if it really exists, but it’s like how about if you just trust it exists and then just go play in it? It’s not a big deal. And, on the other hand, yeah, we still need to get stuff done and we still need to check things and there still needs to be calculations that need to be done and it’s how do we put those two together and I think that that’s what’s really going to help people feel more fulfilled in their careers.
Yeah, for sure.
And just leaning into that and understanding that’s how it works.
I’m glad because I feel like you’re exactly right, kind of our system, starting with our education system and then going through everything on the job, doesn’t really teach us to trust intuition. If you think about the idea of a processes and procedures manual, that’s kind of like drilling into our head this idea that it’s not about your intuition, it’s not about how you feel, you’re supposed to just follow these orders and do things the way that they’re done, which, obviously, there needs to be some kind of a balance. Now, I also want to give you some time to talk about this upcoming event, the Rocky Mountain Young Professionals Summit. What’s your involvement in this event and how did you get involved in putting this together?
Okay, so let me just explain what the Rocky Mountain Young Professionals Summit is. This is a collaboration of young professionals who come together to plan this and it’s a one-day summit, it’s going to be held Friday, October 13th at the Denver Zoo. We like to choose fun places to have it, kind of a fun venue. And, basically, what we have are very speakers covering areas of personal, professional, and community development. And it’s also an opportunity just for people to get together and to make new connections and to learn something, to learn from their fellow peers and also seasoned professionals. And I actually got involved with this last summer. Smedley Events is putting it on and I met the founder, Lara, at a different event and since I really like to support young professionals, she approached me about helping out with this. And it’s also loosely associated with Mile High Young Professionals Organization. The founders, Dan and Ira of Mile High Young Professionals, originally started this several years ago.
Okay.
So it’s been on hiatus for a couple of years due to the pandemic and we’re bringing it back in person this year. I’m really excited about it. Our theme is connection from the inside out. We’ve had a great volunteer committee of young professionals helping us out brainstorm ideas, come up with speaker ideas and program flow and things like that, and I think that it’s going to be a really fantastic event for people just to come in, have some fun, and learn something. We do have tickets on sale now and you can go to the website, which is RMYPS.com and you can find all the information that you need there. You can also sign up for a newsletter where we’ve been releasing some news about the different speakers that we’re having and the different programming elements.
So, connection from the inside out. Elaborate on that a little bit. What does it mean to connect from the inside out?
When we got our focus groups and our committee together this year, one of the things that came out of all of that kind of brainstorming and asking questions and soliciting feedback was that people are really craving connection. And especially in-person connection, we’re trying to find our way in this hybrid environment and there seems to be like people who really want to be in person and connecting. So we knew connection was part of the theme from the get-go. From the inside out, because this is centered around personal development and professional development, it’s where can you be connected to yourself, because when you’re connected to yourself and you understand how you work, what the best environments are for you, and how to navigate more challenging environments, then you are able to make more connections outside of yourself. So our speakers, we have a mix of personal speakers where they’re talking about — our morning keynote, Nikki McCord, she’s talking about break free of the status quo. I’ve been to her talk and it’s awesome because she brings it in such a way that it becomes what’s your status quo.
Oh, so it’s not just the proverbial societal —
It’s just not proverbial societal, yes. Makes you really think. And then, Steven, you’re giving a presentation on less screen time.
Yep.
Which is also like a personal connection thing. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?
Yeah. As you know, that’s my newest business and something that’s really important to me and I think something also important to that. I mean, I think both kinds of connections, whether it be connection from the inside or connection out, because I think the screens that we have are a constant source of distraction and something that we’re tempted to do all the time and if you spend five, six, seven hours a day scrolling through some sort of website, social media, or watching TV, and as I always say, letting Netflix play the next one, the next one, the next one, you’re not really giving yourself the time or the space to connect with yourself and you’re also taking away a lot of the time that you have in order to go out there and make connections with others, which is very important in an era where — one thing that I point out in my presentation is that in the year 1990, they asked a survey of how many close friends do you have and a clear majority were either in the five to nine or the 10 plus category. This is close friends, people you can talk to. They asked that same survey in 2021 and over 40 percent, I think it was 48 percent, were in the one to four category and a full 12 percent startlingly had said zero, they have no close friends, and so we are in an era where we’re really in need of connection and these sites, although they officially say we connect people, I think Mark Zuckerberg said that about a thousand times by now, or more than that, these things are really not connecting people in the manner that you’re talking about here with saying get to really know who you are, get to really know who someone else is, and I’m glad my friend climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro and I can look at the photos on Instagram but there’s more to this story.
I think that’s excellent and it fit right in with the whole theme that we have going on, so we have a lot of presentations that are centered around that and talking about different styles of leadership and what it means to build a culture and things like that and so I’m very excited for this. So I do encourage people to go to the website and check it out. You can also find Rocky Mountain Young Professionals Summit on Instagram. Yeah, I would love for people just to come. And to define young professional, our definition of young professional, there’s always like a different age range, our, quote-unquote, “cutoff” for young professional is 40 so it’s actually someone who’s anyone from entry level to mid career and just looking for a little bit more personal/professional development on a Friday the 13th.
I know. I was thinking about the fact that it’s Friday the 13th a couple days ago. I was like we all have these ideas around that particular day but — and it’s weird, that’s also in October, the month of Halloween.
It is. It is very funny because we had a few dates and then it was like, oh, well, this is the only date that fits and we all kind of had a little chuckle about it.
It’s at the zoo too.
It’s at the zoo, I know.
Which I’m actually glad that I can actually walk to the zoo from my house. Also, what kind of networking opportunities will be there at the summit as well as with the organization as a whole? Opportunities to actually meet some of the other attendees as well as the speakers.
We are in the middle of nailing down a date to have a networking opportunity, like a happy hour before the summit occurs, so if you sign up for the newsletter, you’ll definitely hear about that or if you start following on Instagram, you’ll hear about that opportunity. And then we also will have like a networking happy hour near the end of the day. So, it runs from 8:30 to 5, our programming is going to go 8:30 to about 3:30, and then we’ll have opportunity for networking. We’re also still in the process of putting together some of the programming bits but we are working on sprinkling in opportunities for connection during our breaks or — everything, all of the workshops have some of interactive element so I don’t want people to think that they’re just going to come to this and it’s going to be one of those conferences that you go where you sit there and you stare at a PowerPoint and people just keep doing PowerPoints. It’s not that. Everyone who’s presenting has some sort of interactive element so it really will help you engage and get into the meat of what the speakers are presenting. And I do a lot of visioning work with my clients and so what I hope is that when people leave this summit, that they will have a little bit more of a vision of how they want their life to be. We are in a time where we are changing the way that we work, we’re creating more flexibility.
I think one of my most favorite things about the younger generations, because I’m a firmly Gen X cohort, is that they are pushing back against the norms Click To Tweet“These don’t work and we just need to find a different way,” because I think, to your point about the changing of our industries and the way that we work and the things that we’re actually doing, these are more service based or they’re more creative based. It’s different than the industrial work. It’s a different way of being, it’s a different way of thinking, of moving through problem solving, and I think the things that come up a lot is sometimes people don’t understand how taxing it is to problem solve.
Yeah.
How exhausting it can be. And so creating that flexibility where it’s like, okay, I will work really hard on this one block of time and then I get to take a break and learning how to flow with that, depending on what your preference is. Not many people that I know can work for eight straight hours and be productive for eight hours.
Which is interesting because when I think about the old assembly line, the manufacturing model that it’s all based on, a lot of tasks were not problem solving. A lot of those tasks were just kind of repeating the same motions and they had their own problems too because they would oftentimes lead to ailments that required physical therapy because people would oftentimes be contorting their bodies in the same exact way over and over again so not to say that that really worked but when we took that model, we took a model from jobs that generally weren’t to the level of mentally taxing that trying to actually figure out a whole bunch of problems can be.
I think there’s an argument there too that that old model of assembly line, industrial, 40-hour work week didn’t work then either.
Yeah.
Not for people. Maybe for the bottom line but not for people.
No, it’s kind of weird because I know the entire history behind that, I studied the — I had this list of historical villains in my head and one of them is an individual named Frederick Winslow Taylor who is considered the godfather, grandfather of management consulting, and he was the first one that started this idea, his essential premise, he’s working at the steel mills in Pennsylvania was that most of his coworkers were stupid and lazy and had to be monitored and be strictly pushed into doing things the most efficient way and if you take a bunch of measurements and he would take these stopwatches and go into companies and he would measure things and find out the best way to do it and then just create what people refer to as standard work around that one method and the problems that happened is that people tend to think on a shorter time horizon than what’s kind of most healthy. In a world where you’re a manager and you’re just worried about what your Q1 and then Q2 and Q3 numbers are going to look like, they would actually often look really good when they implemented this guy’s, Frederick Winslow Taylor, his methods only to eventually burn people out, eventually, but that’s four, five years down the road when someone else is CEO and whichever and so people started adapting and people started going, “Oh, wait, you fixed this steel mill, we’re gonna bring this Frederick Winslow Taylor guy in and bring him into our steel mill,” it’s like, oh, that can also apply to manufacturing shoes or building tools or something like that and it kind of just spread everywhere and I think it was pushed into the world of creative problem solving, which makes even less sense.
That’s a fascinating little history lesson. Thank you for that.
I don’t advocate being online unintentionally but there are still certain really cool things you can learn on YouTube.
It’s the intentionality behind what are you doing. Right?
Yeah.
Is it serving you or are you 20 minutes into a TikTok scroll going, “I don’t even know why I’m looking at my phone.”
Exactly. So, today, we talked quite a bit about a scenario that a lot of people find themselves in, especially mid career, although I do want to specify that this could be at any point in your life, at any point in your career you could reach this point where you’re like, “Why am I doing this? I’m not feeling energized. I’m not feeling I’m in the right place, I need to reexamine some things,” and so one last tidbit, for someone who is feeling that, for whatever reason they’re feeling, what do you think is the first thing anyone listening can do tomorrow morning when they wake up or at any point in the day tomorrow to take that first baby step in the process of starting to really do some of these deep examining that you unfortunately had to do yourself after kind of getting your butt kicked by the world?
Yeah. I would like to have people not quite hit the —
Yeah.
Not that way. Don’t hit a wall. I firmly believe in meditation and breathing exercises. I think that the biggest thing, if you’re feeling that crunch, anxiety, wake up with your mind racing, or you’re just not sure how you’re going to get through the day or you’re like, “God, I gotta go to this job and I’m not sure if I even wanna stay in the job,” if you are in that position, then I would say the thing to start doing is working on calming your nervous system and meditation is a great way to do that. I mean, in this day and age, you can find meditations anywhere. Insight Timer is one app that I’ve found useful. Just go on Spotify and look for music and just listen to the music. Or just spend five minutes sitting quietly, outside if you can, and just notice what’s around you and really that helps to slow you down a little bit and get you a little bit more in tune with you.
Yeah.
So it’s just starting really small with three minutes or five minutes just to slow down a little and then you can start to build from there.
That’s a great starting point. Tara, I’d like to thank you so much for joining us today on Action’s Antidotes, for telling us all about your story, which took some vulnerability on your part to share that with anyone who could potentially be listening, as well as share this opportunity that anyone has to go to the Rocky Mountain Young Professionals Summit, and I would like to also thank all my listeners out there for tuning in, for being open to any of these podcast episodes, any of these stories, any of these ideas about how we all can go about getting in touch with who we are and finding that right spot where we truly feel like we belong because I think that’s, in the end, what we’re all in essence looking for.
Thank you. This was really fun and I’m looking forward to seeing everybody at the summit in October.
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About Tara McFarland
Tara challenges the status quo of societal norms, helping her clients unlock the gifts they buried long ago under layers of expectations of how one “should” be in their careers.
Her journey back to herself began when she burned out of her 20-year civil engineering career landing on her living room floor shattered. Recognizing she was deeply unhappy and completely out of alignment, she chose to lean into support from people around her unleashing a life-changing emotional and spiritual awakening.
Guiding her clients with understanding and compassion, Tara creates a sacred space to examine their old stories and create new ones. Bridging the worlds of analytical thinking and intuitive flow, they learn to embrace all of themselves, unlock their gifts and lead with audacity.