Finders, SEEKers // Brooke Taylor

will bear all the facets of Seizing your Yeay. I'm Sarah Davidson or Spoonful of Sarah, a lawyer turned unentrepreneur who swapped the suits and heels to co found matcha Maiden and matcha Milk Bark. Ces Ya is a series of conversations on finding a life you love and exploring the self doubt, challenge, joy, and fulfillment along the way. Our third guest for the mini series is someone I hadn't met before the show, but who I'm incredibly grateful

to have connected with. I think you'll hear pretty quickly in the episode how much her unique way of articulating human behaviors around challenge and change blew me away And I can absolutely see why she is so good and unlocking the greatest potential and power in others. Brook Taylor is a highly sought after career coach, helping over three thousand women globally to heal what she calls their success

wound and find their greater purpose. So we are very lucky to have her here giving you basically a one on one session in your ears. She also brings to her work the depth of her own personal entrepreneurial experience. In her first career at Google, where she had a hugely successful career, even winning the Google Global Sales Award.

I've always wanted to have a Google employee on the show, but now she's come the full circle, including Google as one of her business's clients, along with the likes of Uber, Amazon, McKinsey, and other massive industry leaders. For anyone interested in Brooks coaching, which I feel like will be everybody at the end of this episode, I've popped links in the show notes to how you can get in touch with her for an introduction, and especially for anyone who needs to get

unstuck in their careers. Brook has so generously created a free worksheet which is also linked in the show notes. I hope you guys enjoy learning from Brook as much as I did. Brook. Welcome to CZA.

talk us through your younger self? Who did you first seek to become? What were your first ideas of jobs and pathways and what you wanted to be sort of when you grew up.

next Lindsay Lohan. Of course, of course, my parents informed for me that Santa doesn't give people as presents, so I had to change it to in sync tickets, which was a fine second option.

famous if you work really really hard. And so that desire to be significant and to be seen and to be on this kind of world stage was kind of all around me, and that's what I thought success was from a young age.

It's all success driven and what that looks like for you, And it's so cool to be able to chat to someone because you know a lot of our guests are you know, Australian or grew up in Australia and so you know, and their ultimate goal is to get to the Silicon Valley, or to get to Hollywood, or to get to la whereas you grew up around that. So I can't imagine how much the world stage was all

playing on your mind from those very early years. So I think it's fascinating that you, like many people, didn't end up doing what you first thought you would do, or you know, did start out one way and then kind of it isn't what you ended up doing now and now you help, you know, your career is helping other people forge their own pathways in the mess and noise of today. So can you give us a rundown of some of the sort of big pivots that did lead you to finding your place where you are now?

Because I know it wasn't a straight line.

And in my eleven year old brain, in that moment, I learned that success and achievement equals love and belonging, and so that created within me a belief that my worthiness of love and belonging is contingent upon what I produce, what I achieve, and what I do, rather the inherent worth of who I am. And most parents are thrilled

and pleased when their children achieve. I think that's very normal, and yet in my childhood brain, I equated that achievement with feeling safe, and so that actually created in me with something that I call the success wound. And the success wound is the pain that comes when we believe that our success equals our self worth. Right, It's that

splintering of our self. It's that, you know, our true self gets obscured by the social self that needs to produce and achieve at all costs, and the splintering of those two selves is kind of what happened in that moment at age.

finding who they really are. It does almost always involve that kind of going down the pathway where success is the be all and end all, and no matter what that looks like for you, but it's usually not the concept of success that you end up with later on in life. But that's splintering of your soul, Like it just resonates so strongly because I think, I mean, as

you know, you know, I was a corporate lawyer. The entirety of my purpose in life was to be successful, and I didn't have an identity outside that at all. So it was impossible for me to like find any other metrics for life because it was so deeply ingrained in who I was. But to have that realization at eleven, I mean you were well ahead of your time.

job at Google, which was a fantastic role. And eventually it led me to like really climbing the ladder, becoming a really young manager. But at the same time, this manic ambition, this need to succeed and achieve at all costs again made me really sick. In fact, I had to anesthetize the pain of that splintering of that wound with drugs and alcohol, and I hit out an addiction from age eighteen to twenty four, you know, and it

would look like this. I would be climbing the corporate ladder, working really hard, working in some instances seven days a week, then going out on Saturday and Sunday to relieve the pressure, waking up in that kind of guilt and demoralization and that shame over only to just kind of do it

again the next week. And it became this cycle, and you know, eventually it really brought me to my knees because ultimately it actually caused me to not even report a sexual harassment that happened to me at Google because I didn't want to rock the boat. I didn't want my chances of promotion, which I was up for at the time, to be jeopardized by what I then thought

was my fault. This was before the Me Too movement, So you know my success wound really because it is really kind of this the spiritual malady of self, right like this need to anesthetize the pain of not feeling good enough, that is addiction, and so I was addicted to external validation, to success, to alcohol, and eventually again it brought me to my knees and I did get sober at twenty four, So that was actually my first choice to heal this wound, this and allow my healthy self,

my true self, to start leading. And it was only when I got sobered that I could actually hear what that true self wanted and needed, and I needed to take a sabbatical. I needed to step away. I needed to actually get out of that kind of office environment

for a bit and listen to my true self. Basically, have my survivor self or my social self step aside for a second and ask myself these deep questions like who are you really, what kind of contribution do you want to make in the world, what type of values do you have, and how can you live in alignment

with them? And I realized that the antidote to my success wound is actually something that I'm now calling conscious success, and conscious success is how I define success, which means it's about how frequently and I feel and flow and how often I'm actually listening to the directions and the goals and the set to me by my true self,

not my social self. Because my successmen will tell me, even in my life as an entrepreneur, even in my career helping other people heal their success wounds, I can still make it about revenue, about how many people I'm impacting, about volume, about you know. And it's fine to have goals, but I want those to be set for my true self and not from a space of unworthiness and trying to fill that void. So you know. Again, after getting sober, I re entered the corporate world. I was still at Google.

I came back from my sabbatical, and I started just kind of following the breadcrumbs of what my true and healthy self wanted, And what I realized is that I wanted to bring the principles of my recovery from drug and alcohol addiction into the corporate world and help other conscious corporate women like myself, women who are more spiritual, more interested in personal development and self development, to really transform their relationship with success, because I believe very deeply

that women aren't just the biggest untapped resource, but it's tuned in turned on aligned women in their power, in their conscious success, that are the biggest untapped resource. So that has become my mission and my aligned ambition and my conscious success. And it all kind of started from that age eleven moment to getting sober and to kind of taking that sabbatical and slowly following the breadcrumbs to today.

And I think it's so reassuring to go through and see not only did you start sort of in many people's stream, job like working at Google is kind of the you know, objective dream. It's like this ultimate like you know, we'd all kill to be there, but to hear that it also costs you so much, but then you can also get yourself out of the lowest lows

at the same time to build back up. Like it's just there are so many ways that I think the dots don't connect at the time, but you can bring them back together if you're willing to do the work. There's just so much in your story that it just gets me so excited to talk about because I think, you know, in the context of what we're talking about today.

I don't know about the statistics in America, but sixty one percent of Australians don't want to change jobs in the next twelve months or don't want to change, you know, do any big life changes. But I think you're such an example, and particularly as a coach, you must see it all the time. This aversion to change, this version to stepping like even a sabbatical is kind of unheard of, Like I'm not going to take a break from my

pathway up the ladder. But obviously the growth it has allowed you by being willing to change yourself and to change fundamentally everything about your values for life has opened up this whole new chapter of your life free from addiction and lack of self worth. So what do you see now as a coach as the biggest barriers that people face to change? Weaving in what you found the biggest barriers at the time, but also how you push through them, how you push through to just be like,

this is not my story anymore. I don't have to sit in what everyone else thinks is successful because it costs me this much. I can still do it. I can go back to the same company even but be a different person.

innate sense of direction. Even Joseph Campbell, who wrote on the Power of myth, he said, after all of his research, he said that there exists within each individual a natural and innate internal track. And when we all kind of discover what that internal track is, you'll realize that not only was it there all along, but it leads you into the career and into the bliss that is available to all of us. So, really, the success wound is

where fear lives. It's where comparison lives. It's where the belief of you know, if I relax a little bit, I might lose my edge, or it might take a catalytic event for me to be jolted into finally making a change. It's where almost that analysis paralysis of okay, are you my purpose? Are you? My purpose? Is this? My path? Is this my path? And in action begets

it almost erodes our self esteem. So what I see is that women and men as well, who might even be in their a quote dream job or their fine job, they still have a hard time having right relationship with work and success. That notion of def I relax a little bit, I'll lose my edge, right or the people who are hesitant to change jobs, it really is because their social self. They've been socialized to believe that steady

and stable equal safe and loved. Right, And we are not going to make any decisions that threaten our sense of safety, security and feeling loved. And so if our sense of being loved is through external validation, well then I'm not going to risk that. I'm not going to go on a limb and fear being embarrassed or looking stupid or failing. I mean, you've had so many entrepreneurial endeavors, and I'm sure there was a fear there around failing

and looking stupid and what that would mean for your identity. Right, It's not just you know, the event itself, It's about what does this mean about who I am? And so you know, really the first step in breaking that internal barrier of that success wound is diagnosing what is the size and shape of my success wound? Like I would if I was going to the doctor and I had like this gaping hole, I'd be like, okay, it's this

mania just long. It's you know, it was caused by a laceration of this I want you to look at the causes and conditions of like, what did success look like to me growing up? What subconscious ideal am I comparing myself to about what a good podcast host looks like or a good employee looks like, or a good woman looks like. So looking at that and deciding Okay, you know, do I want that to be my story today?

That would be the first step, and then very quickly the second kind of category would be the external barriers, the very real barriers that do exist around bias, around liability bias, especially for women, attribution performance attribution bias, and maybe even socioeconomic preventions that things instances are barriers that

prevent people from actually seeking other opportunities. But I really do believe that it's the success WOMD that is really the primary barrier for people not seeking opportunities despite the very favorable job market that we're in.

give it a real life translation. Like the problem with all of these things is their intangible ideas, so it's really hard to know, Like, yes, we can all acknowledge them, but then how do I change my life based on these things? And the way you have just turned it into physically translated it into a wound is just like blowing my brain. It's so revolutionary the idea that we can measure like how deep is that wound and then

work towards healing it. For people who have trouble translating ideas into action, as you said, in action begets like lack of self confidence seeing it as slowly healing a wound and not like you wouldn't expect, like a stab wound to heal overnight. You know, you're not going to find your joy and heal your misguided or skewed views of success in one day. But it's all the little steps that you take along the way that will allow

it to heal. And that's just you know, someone just sometimes comes into your life and says something in a different way, the same thing but in a different way, and it just changes everything. That has given me such a new bective Thank you so much for that. Now, I'm like, so know what I'm saying.

who I was. They were the only things I knew how to chase. That were really the only things I cared about, not even because of financial reward, just purely because productivity was my value for myself. My innate worth had always been doing and achieving and progress. And it was really deep to the point where there was nothing else.

And you know what you were saying before, I mean the fact that you could experience something as intense as a sexual assault and still the wound would be blinding enough to make you think, no, no, I don't want to rock the boat. Mine didn't get that dire, but it did get to the complete exclusion of happiness and a whole side of the dominant side of my personality just dying slowly. And so I think for me, it

did take a cataclysmic event to arrest that cycle. But I think maybe over now the last seven to eight years, I've been able to heal it slowly, slowly that it was gaping. Now it's probably mostly healed, but does get picked open every now and then easily as well.

what ideal are you holding yourself to right now? What do you think a successful coach is supposed to look like based on what you're seeing on Instagram or LinkedIn or in the news. And so I say, okay, I'm holding myself to this false ideal. Step two is to remind myself that my success is dictated by how frequently I'm following the direction of my true self and internal guidance system and how truly embodied am I in my true self? Am I living my values? Am I treating

other people with respect? Am I having fun? Am I enjoying this one precious life? And then step three is to do something that activates my true self, so deep breathing, calling a friend and asking them to reflect back to me one strength of mine, something like that, so that success when we protocol that one two three really activates me back into my conscious success and stops that burnout and stops me from picking my battle star.

Plus the numbers are on your side. In March, job ads on SEQ were up thirty two percent compared to the same time last year and fifty one percent compared to pre pandemic levels, but job applications per job ad are down forty two percent compared to pre pandemic levels. So there are more jobs but less competition than ever before. So if you're looking to change Pathia's head on over

to seek and take advantage of the great job. Boom So, I mean, we are so incredibly lucky to have you here bringing the perspectives you have as a coach, But even just the fact that you have worked in somewhere like Google that is just such a mammoth. That is, you know, the dream on the outside, and I'm sure

there were so many incredible positives as well. But from your unique perspective as a woman, you kind of touched a little bit before on how women face an additional layer of self doubt and worth and we have different pathways and priorities that come into our career with families. You know, there's a whole unique range of things that we go through as women in corporate context, particularly as

big and as competitive as somewhere like Google. From your time, there is there anything you saw in the workplace that holds women back in particular, that might really stop women right now, we were talking about such a favorable job market that just we could be more aware of or maybe start to build a toolkit for now so that we don't miss the chance to take advantage of this job.

you know, give voice to marginalized individuals. I've done a lot of diversity, equity and inclusion consulting as well and Western society, and I guess society in general's expectations of women are unrealistic and they're detrimental, and that is regardless of if you're the industry that you're in. And know, this Western ideal for what a successful woman looks like, what a successful mother looks like, is based on patriarchal

systems that are actually intentionally designed to exclude women. And we know that because female representation is still not equal in all industries and in all positions of power. You know, when I was doing diversity, equity and inclusion consulting in Sydney, we realized that it was going to take another two hundred years to get to gender parity in the workplace

and to annihilate the gender pay gap. So women have been conditioned to think of themselves as less than and undeserving or impostors as they strive to hit a standard that is truly impossible to meet. So, you know, this disproportionate mental load that working mothers carry, not to mention the physical load a new mother, it really creates this double bind for working mothers to live up to extremely

high expectations at home and work. And you know, this is why I believe that women are actually uniquely qualified to heal their success wound and transform our culture's definition of what success looks like into a much more conscious version of success. Because imagine if our world and even our organizations and our corporations defined success not in terms of power or consumption, revenue, or wealth, but in terms of inclusion and self love and community and reverence for

the earth. And this isn't just like an airy fairy idea. Corporations really are talking about, like what does a conscious culture look like like? I know that Cisco, for example, their cultural manifesto is about conscious culture and employees now and people who are seeking jobs are so in the position of power because top talent is at a premium that they are no longer allowing for shitty diversity numbers or shitty cultures or like general bullshit, like people will

not take I saw the stack. People won't take jobs if diversity, equity and inclusion numbers aren't there. Millennials are over sixty percent of the workforce. We want meaning more than anything, gen Z, you bet your bottom dollar they're not going to work for a company that doesn't have a corporate social responsibility, you know, manifesto that they're actually following.

So these younger generations that are coming up and are occupying places of power, like they are demanding that businesses change, in our organizations change. So women and everybody need to actually look at this success women in themselves and look at it in their organization and hold these companies to be better. And I think that you can have confidence now in the safety that exists in pursuing a job that is of highest standards and is aligned with your

true self because there's always been that safety. That safety has always existed for you. But now more than ever, you're more in a position of power in a job market. And that's that's really esteam building.

a go at something you've always thought about doing. You know, the quote that I really love coming out of the past couple of years is when nothing is certain, anything is possible. So yeah, uncertainty is incredibly scary and throws everything up in the air. But you can create your own certainty. You also have choice towards what you do

with that uncertainty. But I think one thing I'd love to ask you, because you have the unique perspective of having grown up in America, come to Australia, seen our working landscape, consulted in it, and then gone back to America.

Something I've heard spoken about a lot, particularly when we had Matchimade and we were working in the US a lot is that part of the Larican Australian culture and the tall poppy syndrome that's quite ripe in our not everywhere, not in all corners, but that is generally a cultural phenomenon here, I think tends to make us very self deprecating. It's something like Aussie's use self deprecation as a form of bonding. You know, you don't want to get too

big for your boots or anything. It makes it very hard for us to pitch ourselves. It makes us really hard to put your best foot forward, even though logically that's what you should be doing. You know, it's almost like we wear self deprecation and humility as a badge. Whereas when I would go to America and would pitch things, or pitch myself or pitch our business and start with a self deprecation, people would pull you up and be like, don't say that, and I would find it so weird.

I'm like, but it would be arrogant for me to say anything other than I'm so crap. But Americans culturally would be like, dude, you are not going to get ahead if you keep like hanging shit on yourself like that all the time. And it's such a small tweak in your mentality, but it really does make a difference. So how do you think we can learn to put our best foot forward and get around the awkwardness of pitching yourself To make sure we don't miss out of this job. Boot.

so things that you can shift in your mindset. I'm taking this from a program at Google called I Am Remarkable, And in this program they made the beautiful assertion that it's not bragging if it's fact based.

is it's not bragging if it's fact based. The second element here, and I think this is probably true for many Australians is that when we were younger, we got pulled up for maybe talking about ourselves in you know, talking about our accomplishments, or had moments of being embarrassed or publicly shamed, or having those moments of trauma at school when people are like, oh you think you're so great? Oh yeah, like all of that, there's an injured part

of you inside. And so my recommendation would be when you are going in to your manager to talk about your promotions in a fact based way and you're finding yourself feeling sheepish or getting a pit in your stomach, talk to that younger part of you that felt ashamed. Can you identify or remember an instance where you felt publicly embarrassed or shamed when you spoke about yourself in front of somebody and it didn't go well. Is there a part of you that doesn't want to feel seen.

Is there a part of you that feels ashamed for something? And speak to that younger self like you would a young friend or a young cousin or a child, and just say like it's okay, it's safe, It is safe for me to go in and share my truth and my accomplishments with ease. And then the third level that I would offer to you is more of kind of

a spiritual or an energetic level. But what our words matter, and the way that we define ourselves matters, and the way we use to talk about ourselves really does matter. And so there's this exercise that I do with some of my clients where I have them write down what are the words that you describe yourself when things are going well, and what are the words that you use to describe yourself when things aren't going well. Because identity

is the most powerful force in human personality. And so even if on a subconscious level we're saying like I'm so shit, or like oh I should have you know, worn lipgloss today, or whatever it is, if we're self deprecating, that actually is coming from a small kernel of truth and kind of shamefaced identity. So you're going to want to watch that.

wasn't suited or that wasn't the right thing for me. Like, there's so much internal dialogue you can do before even going to extern results as or friends to kind of get yourself through that feeling of oof ow yuck. Like no one loves rejection. It's not something we say out, but that is like sometimes the cost of getting the one that he's meant for you is getting knockbacks first from the ones that aren't.

it's because that's something else is literally calling you too. Yeah, there is a match for you out there, from a purpose standpoint, from a calling standpoint, from a job standpoint, Like Joseph Campbell says, within each of us, there's this internal track that exists where we can find that purpose and meaning. And it's about really aligning our God given ambition to something that is meaningful to us, to a

career that is a steam building. And so if we see rejection as protection or as obstacles, as detours in the right direction, or as the fact that you know, it's just another test to raise our standards, because a lot of my clients actually like they don't have as hard time with rejection as they do getting a job offer that actually doesn't meet their standards or criteria and having to say no the bad thing, because that's the ultimate test.

want to feel every day? And go in with that criteria and do not accept anything less than that. And you do not have to in this job market. You never did have to. I truly believe that. But things are going to happen a lot faster in this job market and when you actually pursue that conviction, because it's not necessarily just about being rejected, but it is also about rejecting other opportunities in favor of the thing that's highest and best for you.

I think something that I probably leaned too much towards in the beginning of CZA was the idea of being liberated from the corporate structure because that was my pathway, that was my ya, and that has been my way of realizing my best talents and passions and everything like that.

Whereas over time I've also realized the emphasis not much more needs to be, but equally needs to be on the fact that the entrepreneurial pathway can be as creative and as diverse and exciting, and there are places where you can be entrepreneurial inside the kind of resources and power of a corporation and maybe even have more resources behind you to do the things that you want to do. You don't have to leave your job to get freedom, is what I'm saying.

So what I see in terms of people being really successful in that entrepreneurial way at these organizations is first and foremost healing your success wound and doing your personal development work. Because better human leads to better leadership leads to better performance. That kind of almost it forms a triangle, right, better human at the bottom and better performance at the top.

I teach that in my group coaching programs at McKinsey and Google and Uber, and doing your personal development work, identifying your triggers, bolstering your self awareness, increasing that metacognition or that ability to observe oneself in action, and being able to change your behavior change your emotional response is going to be so critical in your entrepreneurial journey because people want to work with other good people, Like have you ever worked for a boss who wasn't self aware?

And how much did that suck? Like when you like working with people who are like at minimum self aware and ideally who have beautiful emotion intelligence. So as a coach, like, I'm always preaching the inside out method of career development, and I always say it's not about promotion, It's about ascension, ascending to your higher self and living in alignment with that,

because that's when the innovation comes through. Brene Brown always says that you can't have innovation without vulnerability, and in order to have that vulnerability, we need to be able to rest on our courage and our confidence.

look like. What are some of the coolest things inside companies you've seen?

of experience. So that was really cool. At Google, It's like a little known secret that was awesome. I really appreciated and loved some of the programs and opportunities for learning and development at these places, and that's what also keeps me employed today. They have incredible programs for you know, they have this awesome program for women called Stretch that encourages women to kind of stretch outside of their comfort zone.

And when I took that at Google, it actually led to me launching a really innovative different product and project which actually helped me secure promotion well, they also have like mindfulness courses and that kind of thing, But I honestly, the Indian Restaurant stands out above the rocks.

oh my god, who does that? And by the end he came over and I had like a pillow under my desk, but there were no pods right, Like I just had to make a bed on the floor. I'm like, we needed pods. Every workplace needs a nap pod. Can you imagine the productivity increase.

things for a really fulfilling life. So how do you cultivate your identity outside of work And are there any kind of play activities that you do that don't have a productive outcome, that a layer to forget what time it is, and that are just for fun.