Ever wondered if loyalty is keeping you stuck?

In this episode, I’m joined by former client Lara, who bravely reflects on three career design insights she never wants to forget. These are not surface-level tips—they’re hard-won truths shaped through deep experimentation and support inside our Fierce Emporium programme and 1:1 work.

We talk about:

1. The blurry line between loyalty and unhealthy boundaries
2. How your body knows the truth before your brain does
3. Why working on someone else’s passion will eventually drain you

Lara also shares her new direction—supporting people navigating grief while executing estates—and how she discovered her “fourth superpower” along the way.

If you’re in a season of stuckness, questioning what’s next, or need a gentle nudge to prioritise your kind of meaningful work, you’ll feel seen in this one.

🔗 Curious what working together might look like?

Explore how we can redesign your career:

👉 Work With Me

Listen to another client transformation:

1. Scott’s Three Career Design Insights He’ll Never Forget
2. Learn More About How To Find Your Superpowers

Hi, I'm Lucia Knight and this is the Joy At Work Podcast.

Today I'm joined by one of my former clients, someone who, like so many

of us, had a moment of weight.

Is this what work is supposed to feel like?

And instead of brushing it off and cracking on, they paused and they chose

to design their work life differently.

I've asked each guest to share the three most important insights they

learned about their future work life that they never ever want to forget.

And these aren't just light reflections.

They're the result of three, six, or 12 months of deep work together, and now

they're in a position to capture those timeless notes to their future self.

For some saying yes to my invitation, took a little bravery and a lot of

what I call powerful vulnerability.

Some had to dig deep because they really value their privacy.

Some said yes because they understood the potential power of having a touch

point to return to every year, but mostly they said yes as an act of

kindness gifted to me and to you.

Let's dive in.

lara, what is the very first worked life lesson that you never want to forget?

Don't confuse loyalty with bad boundaries.

Tell me more.

Loyalty's really important to me.

It's a very natural mode I get into, and I always thought I was bringing that

part of my best self to work, and I've learned that sometimes that just means the

boundaries were a little too permeable.

Let's just say that you know it.

You can feel like you're giving a lot of yourself and not getting stuff back.

And that confuses it when you think it's about loyalty, but if you look

at it as a boundary issue, it gets a lot clearer about what was going on.

Ooh.

I could ask you so much more about that, but I'm not going to, 'cause

we're trying to keep this short.

Okay, Lara, can you share with us the second work life lesson

that you never want to forget?

So if you're someone like me who has zero ability to hide your emotions

or how you're reacting to something.

When you're facing a decision, it's important to find a mirror.

And that could be like an actual mirror, reflective surface, direct camera.

Or, in my case, it was another person who is someone who can reflect back to you how

you sound, how you look, the discrepancy between the words that you're saying and

the emotions that you're clearly feeling.

Okay.

Have you got an example of that?

Well, it was a conversation with you, Lucia, in which I

was trying to weigh two options for my future career direction.

And if you just read them the words on paper, you might think,

oh, these are, you know, Lara's equally compelled by both of these.

But the visual difference and the audible difference was stark.

I mean, I think we both just burst out laughing when we talked about

how bored I was by option number one.

How excited I was about option number two.

It was just there was no contest, the decision was made and I just needed to be

able to like be okay with verbalizing it.

Yes.

And that was, I do remember that moment because it was so obvious, and I think we

recorded that because we knew it was going to be an important decision making thing.

And, uh, your whole body was flat.

Smaller and weirdly for you, not very emotional.

And then you talked about the other idea,

which on the face of it

wasn't perhaps so obvious that

it would be exciting, but your whole body and your pace of

language and your gesticulation and everything sounded happy.

So would you like to share?

What that, that final direction idea is?

Well, as best I can, uh, articulate it at this point, but I want to work

with people, when they are facing.

When they need to settle an estate of a loved one.

so they've, they're experiencing grief, they're experiencing loss.

It's, pretty fresh, but they've been given this enormous

responsibility of being an executor.

I'm not sure if that's what it's called, everywhere in the world, but in

the US it's often called an executor.

And they have never done anything like this before.

And they're grieving at the same time that they have to do all this weird,

complicated emergency, not emergency, but some of it urgent, some of it not.

Some of it's gonna be drawn out stuff, so they need help getting

things done while they're grieving.

Absolutely fabulous.

This is a problem in the world that connects deeply with you

and is very, very needed in the world, and it suits your superpower so perfectly.

I'm super excited about it.

So even when you were talking about.

A potentially very calm and emotional subject that you know could be described

as not exciting to some people.

Your whole body showed how excited you were.

It was powerful.

Yeah.

Fabulous.

Okay, so what is the final work life lesson that you never, ever once forget?

There is a big difference between bringing your skills to

making them useful, to problems that are somebody else's passion

and things that are your own.

And.

I spent a lot of time working with some really brilliant people on

really important problems that they were just top-notch experts in, and

I learned so much from them and I care about these, these problems,

they're just not my problems.

I mean, they're not my problems to be part of.

There's only so long you can draft behind other people's passion.

And there was a process of unlocking, you know, the fourth superpower in

talking with you, for me that it really helped me set a priority.

Like, no, that is the, that is the piece that I want prioritize in picking

the problem that this is applied to.

So the other three are all, all things that I have done within other

settings for other people's problems.

And I, they're still relevant to my, to my problem.

but this fourth one helped me say, no, this is the thing I haven't

been able to do, but I want to do.

So you haven't been able to do it ever in your other work before?

You want to find a way to get this final superpower in?

That's good.

You said something marvelous there.

I try to scribble it on.

There's only so long that you can draft behind someone else's passions.

Ah, and I don't often use that word passion, but the

way you've used it, I love it.

So I've got this image of you cycling fast behind someone on their mission versus

you pausing, stopping, getting off their bike or that bike and choosing your lane.

Thank you so much for sharing those with me.

My very final question I did not ask you, I did not ask you to prepare any of

this is what do you hope that Joy at work will or might look like or feel like to

you.

I hope it feels like

excitement for every workday.

Instead of just, you know, thinking of it as drudgery or, and instead of feeling

like, well, I'm supposed to feel a little bit bad about work because it's work.

What would you like to feel instead?

I would, Hmm, I would like to feel so many things.

I would like to feel like,

every every step of work gives me more energy than it takes, so,

so a lot of being energized by my work is a major, major goal for me.

Lara, I hope you never forget these three work lessons because

you deserve joy at work forever.

Laura and I work together one-to-one on top of her time in the Fierce

Emporium, the at-home work life redesign program, you'll find a link in the

notes section sharing the three career makeover programs on offer to suit your

personality, your desire for speed and support, and of course your budget.

They each help you create a new career strategy, whether that means big or

small change so that you can experience less stress and more joy at work.