What if your scientific career and your creative life were never competing identities?

What if one could make the other stronger?

Dr. Anupama Hariharan has built a long career across dentistry and clinical research. She is also a published poet and fiction author.

For years, the writer in her stayed mostly in the background. Not because the talent was missing, but because the scientific path looked safer, more serious and easier to explain.

Once she gave that creative identity a real place in her life, everything shifted.

In this episode, you will learn:

• Why being analytical does not make you less creative
• How scientific skills such as research, structure, discipline and project thinking can support creative work
• How to stop treating your creative identity as less legitimate than your professional one
• Why you do not need to leave your career to take another part of yourself seriously
• How grief, frustration and difficult experiences can be channelled into meaningful work
• What can happen when you stop waiting for permission and give an idea a proper chance
• Why creativity still needs strategy, visibility and commercial thinking if you want the work to reach people
• How small acts of confidence create evidence that you are capable of more

Anu’s story is not about abandoning science to become an author.

It is about recognising that the scientist and the storyteller can exist in the same person.

Your creative side is not necessarily a distraction from your serious career. It may be the part of you that brings back energy, perspective and a stronger sense of self.

The question is not always, "Which identity should I choose?"

Sometimes the better question is, "Which part of me have I kept hidden because it did not look sensible enough on paper?"

Want to craft a career story that opens doors?

I help STEMM professionals speak with clarity, confidence, and purpose and show up as thought leaders —so the right opportunities find you.

📬 Let’s connect: angeliquegreco.com.au | LinkedIn

⭐️ Help More People Reinvent Their Careers

If you enjoyed this episode, please:

• ✅ Leave a quick ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify 🙏
• ♻️ Share it with a friend who's questioning their path in STEM

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What if the biggest thing holding your career back isn’t a lack of skills, experience, or opportunity, but a belief you’ve been carrying for years?

🔍 What You’ll Learn:

Many STEM professionals underestimate the value of their skills, overestimate the need for perfection, and assume hard work alone will create opportunities.

In this quick-fire episode, Rachel Service tackles four common beliefs that keep scientists playing small and offers practical ways to think differently.

You’ll discover:

• Why your scientific training gives you highly transferable skills that employers desperately need
• Why working hard stops being enough as your career progresses, and what replaces it
• How perfectionism disguises itself as professionalism and keeps talented people stuck

If you’ve ever thought “I’m just a scientist”, “I’m not ready”, or “I just need to work harder”, this episode will challenge those assumptions in under 10 minutes.

🧠 About the Guest:

Rachel Service is the founder and CEO of Happiness Concierge, a workplace training company that has worked with more than 200 organisations. Following her own experience with burnout and depression, Rachel built a business helping people improve communication, leadership, workplace culture, and career satisfaction.

📌 Episode Highlights:

00:00 The beliefs that quietly hold STEM professionals back

02:30 Rachel’s accidental entrepreneurship story and the burnout that started it all

03:15 “I’m just a scientist” and why that’s completely wrong

04:00 The scientific skills that transfer into almost any career

04:30 Does your work really speak for itself?

05:00 Why career growth eventually becomes a PR campaign

05:30 Done versus perfect, and the real fear underneath perfectionism

06:45 The question to ask when you think you don’t have enough time, money, or resources

🔗 Resources Mentioned:

• There Has To Be More by Rachel Service
• Previous long-form episode with Rachel Service on motivation and the “whinge phase”
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🤔 Reflection Time:

1. Which belief have you been carrying: “I’m just a scientist”, “I need to work harder”, “My work speaks for itself”, or “I’m not ready yet”?
2. What skill do you use every day that you underestimate because it comes naturally to you?
3. What’s one small action you could take this week if you stopped waiting to feel completely ready?

One of my favourite insights from Rachel was this:

“It’s not about being perfect. It’s about learning to live with the idea that someone might see your incompetence.”

That’s uncomfortable. But it’s also where growth starts.

Want to craft a career story that opens doors?

I help STEMM professionals speak with clarity, confidence, and purpose and show up as thought leaders —so the right opportunities find you.

📬 Let’s connect: angeliquegreco.com.au | LinkedIn

⭐️ Help More People Reinvent Their Careers

If you enjoyed this episode, please:

• ✅ Leave a quick ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify 🙏
• ♻️ Share it with a friend who's questioning their path in STEM

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.