When Women Experience Burnout
Career Advisor Cara Houser On the Art of Starting a New Chapter
“Our thoughts are often wild beasts, but to the extent we can coax them toward patterns that serve our growth and wellbeing, we literally create the life we want.”
Cara Houser
For many women, finding that right balance between career and personal life demands is a perpetual struggle. San Francisco Bay Area coach Cara Houser knows this teeter totter all too well having toiled for 20 years learning how to survive the ultra-male, pressure cooker world real estate development. While her teams produced over 3,000 homes in the San Francisco Bay Area, creating over $1.5B in value, Houser says that the crushing set of expectations she faced from work, home, and beyond, sent her into a tailspin.
Today Cara Houser through her coaching practice supports women in overcoming soul crushing burnout so that they can reclaim full body living. She achieves this by helping clients in fields such as real estate development, design, engineering, construction, and management tap into their own innate power, possibility, and purpose. Says Houser:
“It's a gift to work with such incredible and inspiring clients, providing thought partnership, strategic insight, new chapter exploration, career acceleration support, and accountability. The kind we all need when in a period of growth or transition.”
After having hit the proverbial burnout wall several years ago, her path to wholeness, says Houser, involved reclaiming her own personal connection with body, mind, and spirit.
She notes:
“For me this realization was astonishingly liberating. It allowed me to rebuild my life without the pressure and shame of feeling like a failure so I could set priorities, set boundaries, and show up more freely, authentically, and joyfully in all realms of my life. I wish the same for all working parents.”
Many women who returned to the workforce post-pandemic have felt mounting pressure to reassess their direction amid conflicts between work demands and their desired lifestyle. This according to the Momentive/CNBC Women at Work Survey conducted in February, involving a national sample of over 5,000 adult women.
According to study results, growing numbers of women are considering running for their workplace exit. Particularly striking, over half of these women (56%) say their mental health has taken a hit leading to burnout in their job. Work-related stress stemming from longer hours, financial concerns, and workload overwhelm has been a major catalyst of turnover, the study found.
Says Houser:
“If you can develop housing in the Bay Area, you can smash just about any hurdle in your path. You're probably also a prime candidate for burnout, just like I was.”
She recalls sobbing at a friends’ home one day after a scary ambulance visit to the hospital for her son the night before. She adds:
“I had no idea how I got so burned out and even less of a clue how to come back to life. That’s when my friend suggested a sabbatical as a place to start. At first I doubted I “deserved” this or could do it without “permission” from others in my life, and indeed many folks loudly (and uninvitedly!) voiced their fears and warnings about the demise of my career. But my mental and physical state at the time demanded it, so I pushed forward and made a plan to reclaim my life.”
She says that a shift in perspective, strategy, and approach allowed her to rebuild her career with far more autonomy and purpose.
“Discovering that I had the power to set my own rules of engagement with the world was a watershed moment. I just had to learn how to use it. Now I help others do the same.”
On the primary catalyst behind her decision to work with clients who are experiencing burnout, overwhelm, and feeling undervalued?
My own journey from soul crushing burnout into full-bodied, joy-filled living was full of tough lessons learned the hard way. It has been a transformational passage for me, and yielded so many gifts in my life. In my 20 year career in the 24/7 pressure-cooker housing development business (much of it as a working parent), I’ve both experienced and observed burnout to be an epidemic, and according to a Deloitte survey, 77% of Americans report experiencing it.
I knew I could help other people by distilling my learnings and best practices gained over several years into a curated, accessible playbook that folks could put to work in supporting their own wellbeing even in the depths of exhaustion and overwhelm. When you’re already stressed to the max, it’s not possible to research all of this, find the best resources, compile them, absorb them, and integrate them into your daily life without support.
My program provides a framework of structured restoration that people can implement in small gradual steps, learning the mindsets, actions, and habits that will transport them from barely treading water to gliding through their lives in alignment with what matters most to them. Another way to think of it is the journey from self-neglect, through self-care, all the way to self-possession.
On The Power of Books In Her Life
My mom sent my sister and me to a neighborhood Catholic school, with old school teaching methods, and where we were given ample exposure to books and encouragement to read. I remember Judy Blume and Ramona and lots of children’s picture books as well, including “Stone Soup” and “Alexander and Terrible Horrible No Good Very Bad Day.” Both are so wholesome and real, and offer a compassionate glimpse of being a human in compelling storybook form.
On Reading To Her Kids
One of the greatest joys of my parenting journey has been reading to my kids every night for many many years. We started with picture books and made our way into delightful novels like “A Wrinkle in Time.” We never fully grew out of the illustrated books, though, thank goodness - these have so much to offer people of all ages. In fact, I often gift my clients with the children’s book “Maybe” as a joyful reminder of the limitless possibilities in all of us.
My kids now have their favorites and have established themselves as readers and explorers in the world. One piece of advice I received early on that I can’t endorse strongly enough is the idea that children ought to be allowed / encouraged / free to choose what, when, and how they read. This is how a love of reading and the limitless learning that comes with it is cultivated. Conversely, it is strangled when children are forced to read certain books in rigid timeframes, and maintain “reading logs” to document that they did it. This takes reading from being an intrinsically motivated joy to being a dull and dreadful requirement.
On Her Preferred Reading Lifestyle
Printed books over digital books 100%, with the exception being that the Kindle Paperwhite is lightweight and easier on the eyes than other tablet readers (it is not backlit). And it holds lots of books. This makes a lot of sense if you’re traveling for an extended period of time.
When we pulled our kids out of school to travel while they were 9 and 11 they both had one and it was full of dozens of books from their favorite fantasy series. They carried them everywhere and read them on trains, planes, during too-long dinners out where they got bored, and at night when they were relaxing into sleep.
At this phase in my life, though, most of my “reading” takes place neither of those ways. It takes place with audiobooks. Most mornings I run the trails near my house and audiobooks are my fascinating companions. Many authors read their own books, and it’s interesting to hear their work in their own voices.
On Her Favorite Genre of Books
Growing into leadership over the course of my career I read countless books on everything from habits, to motivation, to workplace culture, to classic leadership texts. I’m also endlessly curious about mindset, spirituality, and the art of living a meaningful, purposeful, creative life.
On Books That Have Impacted Her Life Perspective
- Mindset by Carol Dweck is a mind-blowingly useful explanation of the concepts of fixed and growth mindset, and how cultivating the latter is key to success and satisfaction in life, work, and relationships.
- The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein is impeccably argued, disturbing, and required reading for anyone remotely in the housing development universe. It chronicles how the American government intentionally and relentlessly engineered and enforced race-based exploitation through laws, zoning and financial policy, and taxation. Today, with the national housing shortage and subsequent crisis worsening every year, education on how we got here, and thus how we can get out, is increasingly urgent. For everyone.
- The Seat of the Soul by Gary Zukav is an enlightening journey through the evolution of human consciousness and how we can transform from an obsession with external power (which is damaging power-over) to alignment with our soul’s purpose (authentic, intrinsic power).
On How Books Have Served as a Vehicle For Her Own Personal and Professional Growth
Books have been ESSENTIAL! My main teachers along the path of personal growth have been lessons from the school of life and voracious reading.
After a 20+ year career as a housing developer, I now offer career strategy and empowerment coaching services to women working to create a more sustainable and equitable built environment, and recommend many of the books (and lessons learned from them) that have helped me along the way to them.
A few of my favorites are: The Artist’s Way, The Untethered Soul, The Art of Possibility, Set Boundaries Find Peace, Wouldn’t Take Nothing For My Journey Now, To Bless the Space Between Us, Change Your Mind and Your Life Will Follow, On Becoming a Leader, and all the poetry of Mary Oliver.
On Writing Her Own Book
I’m midway through the writing of my first book, to be called Burned Out to Lit Up. It provides the written guide version of the resources and practices I described above, which I offer to clients through coaching and a guided group program. The book will allow folks to work though the roadmap toward a full-bodied, joy-filled life at their own pace.
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