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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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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.

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Starting a business after being laid off is the path Sara Skowronski took. For twenty years she was the person every company leaned on, hired for HR and soon running IT, finance, and whatever else needed an owner. She was let go by a new owner on a Monday, and the first thing she noticed underneath the shock was how much lighter she felt. Now a fractional HR partner and Certified AI Consultant, Sara walks through the pattern that ran through a dozen jobs and the moment she chose to stop repeating it.

That moment came in an interview for a job she liked. She asked the woman she would be replacing why she was leaving, heard "if I don't do it now, I'm never gonna do it," and walked back to the BART station with her own answer.

In this conversation:

• The day a job ended and Sara realized she was free
• The sales job that taught Sara she can only sell what she believes in, and how that became her entire business model
• Five coffee meetings a week for six months, and the phone call that brought her first client
• What a small business owner taught her about HR when he said he simply could not afford the PIP
• How AI in her own practice turned three late nights into one hour, and gave her back her evenings
• The success she expected at 25, and the success she chose instead

Connect with Sara at eoshr.com or linkedin.com/in/saraskowronski. She helps founder-led companies handle HR and use AI where it saves time without creating legal exposure.

If your career looks right on paper and feels wrong inside, visit nextsuccesscareers.com.

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Dr. Kevin Snyder: The Story He Wished He'd Heard

Every choice carries a consequence you can't always see at the time. Kevin Snyder became Dean of Students at High Point University, a role he'd worked toward for years. It came with one condition: give up his public speaking. He agreed, figuring it didn't matter much. Then he realized he'd given up too much.

Most of us have made a version of that trade. We take the promotion, the safer path, the thing that looks right, and we quietly set down something we told ourselves we wouldn't miss. Kevin's story is a clear look at what it takes to notice the trade, name it, and choose again. It reaches back further than the dean's office too. After overcoming severe depression as a teenager, Kevin built his whole life around the power of belief, and the message he brings to every stage is the one he needed to hear back then and never did.

You'll hear:

The one condition attached to his dream job, and why he agreed to it

A dean, a withdrawal form, and a refusal that pointed him toward his whole career

The early moment a stranger told him his talk had helped her, before he'd ever shared his own story

Four questions Kevin asks anyone who feels stuck, and where his own answers led him

What he means when he says what you make of your choice matters more than which choice you make

Connect with Kevin at KevinCSnyder.com

Work with Caroline at nextsuccesscareers.com

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Career reinvention rarely arrives as a plan. For Graham Kuhn, it arrived as a series of jobs that looked unconnected until the day they became one calling.

Graham grew up working farms and wrestling in small-town Wisconsin, trained in opera, sang professionally for years, managed gyms, and eventually landed inside a church making videos every week. He never set out to be a business owner. The videos he made drew the attention of executives sitting in the pews, they started asking who made them, and a company formed around the answer.

In this conversation, Graham and Caroline follow the thread that ran through every chapter of his working life and turned a scattered-looking path into Focus Films.

You will hear:

• How a church side project quietly became a full business
• Why every role Graham held was preparing him for the one he has now
• What it takes to build a company where being fully yourself is the strategy
• How his music training became his sharpest tool for connecting with clients
• The moment he chose the work that filled him over the work that simply paid

If your own path has taken more turns than you expected, this one will help you see the pattern underneath it.

Connect with Graham: find him on LinkedIn and at Focusfilms.com, where he builds authentic story-driven video for business owners.

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What happens when you reach the career milestone you were certain would settle everything, then find a bigger question waiting at the top? Stan Phelps built a career at the top of sports marketing, running tennis promotions for Adidas and managing the New York Yankees relationship from an office inside Yankee Stadium. Each time he reached the role he had aimed for, the view asked more of him than the title had promised.

Following his curiosity, Stan gave himself one year to write about every part of his field, searching for the single idea to go a mile deep on. That year became his first book, and grew into twenty. He left the stability of corporate work behind, moved his family to the Triangle, and built the work and the life he wanted on his own terms.

In this conversation with Dr. Caroline Sangal, Stan shares the full arc, and what changed when he stopped chasing the next thing and started asking what he truly wanted to build.

You will hear:

• How reaching the top of a field can surface the very question you were trying to outrun
• The moment one word on a conference badge shifted how people saw him
• Why going a mile deep on one idea builds more than spreading wide across many
• The year of writing that became his first book and grew into twenty
• How Stan defines authentic success now, and where he puts his energy today

Find Stan's latest book, Speak Different, and his work at stanphelps.com.

Ready to build a career that fuels the life you want? Explore what's possible at nextsuccesscareers.com.

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You can reach every career goal you set and still catch yourself wondering what it was all for. Patrick Kamba knows that question well. He built the kind of career that looks complete from the outside, leading global programs in pharma, becoming a director, writing a book. And somewhere along the way he started paying attention to a smaller, more honest measure of success: whether he was actually around for the people he loved.

Patrick and Caroline walk through his whole path, from a kid who chose engineering while his family pictured a doctor, to a leader who learned to want less noise and more life. If your work looks right on paper and something quieter has started tugging at you, this one will land.

• What comes up after you hit the title you chased for years
• Why Patrick started measuring success by his weeknights
• How the relationships he built over ten years carried him through a career shock
• What quiet ambition means, and how to chase big goals without performing them
• Success as freedom, with people to share it with

Patrick Kamba wrote Quiet Ambition. Find him at patrickkamba.com.

Ready for a career that fuels your life? 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