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Doing too much at work: Nell Debevoise Dewey on doing less on purpose

Doing too much at work has a way of looking exactly like success, right up until the day it costs something.

Nell Derick Debevoise Dewey built a career across three continents, in nonprofits, in post conflict communities, and in a company she founded and led for ten years. By her own account she had gotten herself aligned. The meditation practice was in place. The marriage was good. The work mattered to her. And she was still carrying more than any single calendar could hold.

She traces the whole arc here, starting with a twelve year old in Hartford, Connecticut who noticed that one street decided which children got a jazz band and a guidance counselor and which ones would likely leave school early. That observation set the next twenty years of her work in motion. What followed was an elite education, a decade of building things abroad, a company she grew and then closed with clear eyes, and the realization that alignment is only the first step.

What you will find inside:

• Why available capacity decides what alignment can actually do for you
• What twelve year old Nell saw on a street corner that shaped two decades of her work
• How building teams in Rome and the West Bank taught her to invest in people first
• What horses understand about conserving energy that high performers learn late
• How she defines success now across me, we, and world

Nell's free one page guide to her Stop, Drop, Roll method, a simple way to create clarity without adding to your workload: https://nell3d.kit.com/stopdroproll

Work with Caroline: nextsuccesscareers.com

Next in this series: The Capacity Check, a solo episode on finding the room your goals require.

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Mickey Fitch-Collins: The Work She Actually Loved | Career Change After 20 Years

A career change after 20 years sounds impossible until you hear how Dr. Mickey Fitch-Collins did it. She was successful in higher education, and somewhere along the way the work stopped matching what she loved to do. She had gone into it to help students find their way, and her days had become more meetings about resource allocation than actual helping.

She calls what came next a discernment process. She asked herself what she actually liked doing, and the answer was clear: any time she had been able to train, teach, or speak, she had loved it. That took her into corporate learning and development, where she now teaches human skills and AI skills to tens of thousands of people a year, from a house in the Wisconsin woods where she gets to be a present mom.

In this conversation:

• The moment two pieces of paper helped her decide to be a leader
• What September 11th taught her about leading people
• The one question that led her out of burnout and into work she loves
• Why "mattering versus marginality" became the center of her career
• How she landed a job posting that looked too good to be real
• What success means to her now

Connect with Mickey at learnit.com/mickey for The Learnit Lounge podcast and a free 45-day Learnit TeamPass for up to 20 teammates with code "lounge."

Ready to find the work you actually love? Start at nextsuccesscareers.com.

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Subscribe to Your Next Success so you never miss an episode.

Watch full video episodes on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@NextSuccessMethod/

Learn more about Next Success www.nextsuccesscareers.com

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Micheal Shaw made his career pivot after twenty-two years of running his own photography studio, when the same digital technology that started his business changed the industry around him. The skill that carried him forward was one he had been giving away for free for fifteen years, because he assumed nobody would pay for it.

Micheal grew up in Rochester, New York, raised by his grandparents, and started his first business at eight years old selling frozen Kool-Aid cups out of the family deep freezer. He built a nightclub photography side hustle into a full studio, earned a master's in strategic marketing, and, after his six-year-old daughter's cancer diagnosis, co-founded Team Jenny Bean Childhood Cancer Foundation. That work became his book, The Invisible Currency of Philanthropy, and a consulting practice that has served several hundred nonprofits.

You will hear:

• The shoebox of receipts that revealed a $75,000 weekend business
• Why "finding opportunities and filling gaps" mattered more than the Kool-Aid
• The question his daughter asked in the hospital that started a movement
• What his best friend said that changed how he thinks about asking for help
• The five invisible currencies behind why people give, and why they keep giving
• How Micheal defines success now

Micheal Shaw helps nonprofits and advancement leaders build brands people want to give to. Reach him at theinvisiblecurrency.com.

Caroline Sangal, PhD, coaches scientists, engineers, and technical professionals. Start at nextsuccesscareers.com.

Support the show

Subscribe to Your Next Success so you never miss an episode.

Watch full video episodes on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@NextSuccessMethod/

Learn more about Next Success www.nextsuccesscareers.com