In this episode of the Impostor Syndrome Files, we talk about the general sense so many of us have that something is missing from our careers. Maybe we feel it but can’t pinpoint it. Or, maybe it’s staring us in the face. Often it shows up as burnout, overwhelm or the constant need to prove ourselves. And, typically, when this occurs, it’s because we’ve given our power away. This week, I talk with Melani Dziire, a leadership coach and former internal audit executive about her experience transitioning out of her former career. We also talk about the importance of establishing guardrails to ensure that we remain in control of our own careers and lives.
About My Guest
Melani Dziire is the owner of Desired Outcomes, LLC. which provides coaching and business consulting services. Ms. Dziire has an extensive background in the financial services industry as a senior executive focused on risk management, internal audit, and governance functions and diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.
Ms. Dziire’s executive/life coaching and leadership consulting practice was born out of her desire to help individuals unlock their full potential by finding purpose and becoming exceptional leaders. She also hosts ‘The Unfulfilled Achiever’ podcast which delves into the often-overlooked emotional landscape of achieving levels of success but still seeking the elusive sense of fulfillment.
She is a thought leader and consultant in risk management, internal audit, and governance drawing from her many years of experience as a senior executive with organizations such as USAA, PNC Bank, and SunTrust Bank (now Truist). As a DEI Champion, Ms. Dziire has been instrumental in establishing and leading multiple employee engagement and affinity teams, namely PNC’s Internal Audit Black Leadership Advisory Council which effectively served and advocated for 400+ audit professionals.
Ms. Dziire is a proud graduate of Clark Atlanta University with a degree in accounting and completed the Graduate School of Bank Investments and Financial Management Program at the University of South Carolina. She holds a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion certification from Cornell University and is also a Certified Public Accountant and Certified Project Manager. Ms. Dziire has held several board positions and is currently on the Board of Trustees for Bennett College in Greensboro, North Carolina.
Originally from Akron, Ohio, Melani currently resides in Atlanta with her husband and son and enjoys interior decorating in her spare time. She has a passion for community engagement, corporate social responsibility, and has a proven track record in establishing community partnerships. She is a member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. and an avid supporter of the Special Olympics of Georgia and YMCA of Metro Atlanta where she has led many volunteer initiatives resulting in financial support for these organizations.
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Connect with Melani:
Facebook: Desired Outcomes Coaching
Instagram: @desired.outcomes.coaching
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Join the free Impostor Syndrome Challenge.
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Websites: https://kimmeninger.com
Transcript
Kim Meninger
Welcome, Melani. I'm so excited for this conversation today. And I, you and I have been talking offline for a bit. And I'm excited to bring our conversation to this community. So I'd love to start by inviting you to tell us a little bit about yourself.
Melani Dziire
Thanks, Kim, thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. And a little bit about my background. I'm a certified public accountant, by trade. And I've spent 25-plus years in the financial services arena, mostly focused on internal audit and risk management. That's my subject area of expertise. I've been a senior vice president at several large banks throughout my career. So it's been interesting kind of ascending the corporate ladder and seeing things from different levels and different perspectives. I'm also a champion for diversity, equity, and inclusion. No matter where I was, in my career, I always found myself building and leading Employee Resource, resource groups and affinity groups. And so that's something that I kind of did naturally. And I always gravitated toward throughout my career, I have a passion for community engagement. So while I was doing the DNI stuff, I was also always leading like volunteer efforts and building partnerships with the community with what's whichever organization I was with, I was always wanting to make sure that we gave back and partner with the community. So I was always having my team do volunteer events and things like that. So I can make sure that we stay plugged in with the community. Even though I reached those levels of success, and I've had a really exciting career, I always felt like something was missing. Throughout my journey, I felt like, I never really knew what my passion or what my purpose was. I wasn't really told, you know, growing up to find your, your passion and kind of make that into your career, I was told to go make money. And so that's what I did. But I felt like in doing that I enjoyed my career, I was happy with what I was doing. But I felt like there had to be something else to it. And at a certain point in my career, I hit kind of hit that brick wall, which we call burnout. I definitely experienced that. So I was working crazy hours, kind of neglecting my family and neglecting myself and neglecting my, my mental health, my physical health. And it all kind of came crashing down at, at a certain point. I started really experiencing really bad anxiety, depression as well, feeling like, you know, this isn't exactly what I'm supposed to be doing. But I'm working so much, I can't really take time to step back and figure out what that is. I found myself waking up in the middle of the night like experience and panic attacks and things like that. And so at that point in my career, I made a really tough decision to step back. And I walked away from, from that particular role and decided to embark on what I call my gap year, I took time off to one decompress from that experience, because it was really it was a lot it was a lot to go through. And then I really wanted to reconnect with my family reconnect with my friends. All the things that I had been neglecting for so many years, I took that year to really ground myself and figure out what brings me joy. And in that journey, I was still trying to figure out, you know, what's the purpose, what's the passion? I decided to share my experience because I started to realize that I'm not the only one I wasn't the only one who was feeling burned out. I wasn't the only one who was feeling like something was missing. And even though I'm a huge introvert, I challenged myself in that gap year to do things that scared me or that I felt were challenging like to kind of step outside of myself. And so I started posting my journey on LinkedIn. And one post in particular while I talked about burnout and talked about being in my gap year got a lot of really interesting feedback. People were super supportive and really chiming in like Yes, that's me. I feel the same way. Like I thought I was the only one and people started inboxing me and saying can we speak offline? I'd like to hear more about your journey. I'd like to kind of share because people just really felt like they didn't have anyone to talk to about it being burned out or feeling like something's missing is not something that people talk about. In the workplace. It's really taboo. And so I started having those conversations offline. And it dawned on me, I had this epiphany. I'm coaching. I'm coaching people right now. And it was finally like, Oh, this is what I was supposed to be doing this, it was like, I finally found my purpose. And I realized that all those years when I was climbing the ladder, and, and I was happy, and I was successful, but the feeling that something was missing, it was all leading me to this point where now I'm a leadership and life coach, but I had to go through those things and have those experiences to land here and be able to be an effective coach. Because whatever my clients bring to the table, chances are I've been there. I've been a new leader. I've been in new positions, I've had the bad bosses, I've had to lead and build teams and you know, create strategies for them. I've had to hire people, I've had to fire people. Unfortunately, I've had so many different experiences. I think that that makes me good at what I do.
Kim Meninger
Thank you so much for sharing that. And your story resonates so much with me because I think there are a lot of similarities in that wasn't necessarily that there was, it was enjoyable, my previous career was fine. I was fine. But it wasn't what I was meant to do. And I wonder if you think back because you talked about burnout, which is so important. And I feel like burnout doesn't just happen. It's escalating and escalating. We're ignoring it. And we're sort of rationalizing it, excusing it. We're trying maybe like Band-Aid solutions for it. But I wonder, was there a moment? Was there a turning point for you? Like, how did you realize, oh, this has gone too far.
Melani Dziire
When I wasn't able to eat lunch because we worked straight through lunch, I would get on calls, my meeting started at nine in the morning and would end at six. But then I would have to do my own work. Because I was on back-to-back meetings on the hour, every hour or every 30 minutes, I was in meetings and there wasn't respect for personal time, my husband would knock on the door and just bring me a tray of food because I would not leave my desk the entire day, I was in a very difficult environment. And, you know, my day would be from nine in the morning when the meetings would start. But I'd be up at five, trying to work before the meetings and then I would start doing work again at six. And then I'd be working until 10-14-16 hour days, every day, it really started to catch up to me. In the past, I thought I felt burnout. But it wasn't until I got into that environment where I really, really felt it. And my body started to revolt. Basically, I wasn't I didn't feel well, I couldn't work out, I wasn't eating well, all those things really kind of culminated. But then my mental health really started to suffer as well. You have to take breaks, like you have to be able to take breaks and recharge, you have to be able to get sleep. It's important that you do things outside of work, spend time with family spend time with friends, I was in this constant battle with myself of feeling guilty because I was neglecting so many things in my life. And how effective can you be if you're so out of balance? That's where it really kind of all culminated for me. But to your point, yes, I felt that along the way. Little bad habits of not, you know, putting myself first putting my roles before everything, missing out on things that were really important, you know, in my son's life, or my husband's life and my family's lives, things like that. It all adds up. And at some point, if you don't put things into perspective and start to have balance in your life, you could end up in that same place.
Kim Meninger
Yeah, and I find that oftentimes it is some kind of major physical or emotional revolt on the part of your body that says enough is enough. [Exactly.] It can't keep doing this. Yeah. When you think back on, on those 16-hour days, and the amount of work that you had to do, was there, and I don't want to leave the witness. But I just know that, especially, especially for women, I mean, you worked in a pretty male-dominated field, I'm assuming, right? What do you say, there was any part of you that was doing that, because you felt pressure and like was there this sort of, I need to prove myself. I'm it like, Tell, tell us about your experience as a woman in that space. And how much of this work approach was driven from a place of I just have to keep doing more and more?
Melani Dziire
Absolutely. Because it's a male-dominated environment, I did always feel like I had to work 10 times harder. And I had to prove that be me being a woman or me being a mom and having other responsibilities outside of work didn't affect my work, it's okay, I'll be here, I'll work late. I felt badly if I had to step away, or attend an event or something like that, that was outside of work. It was definitely not a an environment where there was any type of work-life balance, I've been in environments in my past, where that where I had more balance. Like earlier on in my career, when my son was really young, I was in an internal audit shot where we had lots of flexibility. And I felt like I was able to balance better, and I could contribute at work and still, you know, feel like I was doing well, but then I could also leave and be the, the room mom, and I could, you know, balance my day where I could do things for my son, as he got older, and I was he you know, didn't need me as much was more independent, I started, you know, ascending the ladder. And the higher you go, the more your time is devoted to that job to that role in the environments that I was in. And, you know, some people may have different environments. And that's, that's great if you are able to balance but in the environments that I was in, you know, it being male-dominated, they didn't have the same responsibilities that I had as a woman that I had to make sure that I took care of. And so I did have to start neglecting some of my outside responsibilities to be able to stay plugged in, and stay online until nine and 10 o'clock and you know, continue to work and, you know, I'm not cooking, the healthy meals that are probably should be cooked all those different things that as a mom, I really wanted to do. And like I said, that guilt really started to settle, to set in. So it definitely was challenging as a woman to try to maintain that same level of being plugged in. Something had to give and it was my family in my personal time that, that fell by the wayside, unfortunately.
Kim Meninger
That guilt is so real. I think that for working moms in particular, there's guilt on all sides because it feels like when I'm spending time with my family, I should be working. When I'm working, I should be spending time with my family. It feels like I'm never doing what enough of what I'm quote unquote, supposed to be doing. And it's unfortunate that usually a family is the one that loses out.
Melani Dziire
It is and it's hard because you want to feel successful, and you want to feel like you're contributing at work and you want to be an effective leader. I think the piece that I didn't value as much or realize as much was that you have to really find an environment in a culture that supports you and your life. And if you are when you're interviewing for a new role, or looking at new opportunities, a lot of times we don't ask those questions we're so focused on as women climbing the ladder and being able to get to the next level and maybe breaking through that glass ceiling. We understand that with that breaking through the glass ceiling comes certain things that you have to sacrifice. Well, if we are intentional about having boundaries and having certain things that you will not sacrifice, like your family, like your personal time, then you have to find cultures that support that. And that's not something that I thought about as I ascended the ladder. I was just thinking about that title. You know, getting to the next level meeting having more responsibility. And that's where you know, those other things got put on the backburner and that's something that I definitely wish that I could have done a bit differently.
Kim Meninger
Do you think, looking back that you could have made some of those changes where you were? Or do you think the culture was so fixed that you would have had to go somewhere else?
Melani Dziire
In certain cases, the culture was more flexible. And I was able to have more flexibility and provide that to my team. I even kind of demand it for lack of a better word. If I saw my team still online, after hours, I would ping them, why are you online, go spend time with your family. You know, we can get this done tomorrow, I was very flexible in how and where people worked. We had hybrid environments. And like, as long as you get the work done, that's all that was important to me. If you need to step away, and you know, do something for your family, or take care of some personal thing, that's fine. As long as you met the deadline, I was totally okay with that. But then there were other environments where that was not supported. And even as a leader, it made it really challenging because that's why I'm as a leader, when I tried to make those changes. And I was very plugged in with my team, I wanted to know how they felt what the challenges were, and I wanted to do something about it. And when I tried to make those changes, and tried to provide some more of that flexibility, I got a lot of pushback, well, this work just has to be done. And I get it, it's a business and that comes to the works comes first. But I think there are certainly cultures where people just don't care. Frankly, it's all about just getting the work done to the detriment of the team. And that becomes a revolving door, your turnover just keeps creeping up. And then on the flip side, the leaders don't understand why we have so much turnover, because you don't care about your people, you have to care about your people. If you care about your people, they know you care, you build trust, and you let them know that it's okay to have a life outside of work, people will go above and beyond to get the work done because they know you care about them. But I was in an environment where that didn't matter. And so it made it hard for me as a leader who that's important to, to have to go back and not follow through on the things that I really wanted to change for my team, it made it very difficult to operate effectively in that type of environment.
Kim Meninger
I think you bring up some really good points because they're, I'm hoping maybe, maybe sometimes naively hoping that we've learned some lessons from recent experiences that, you know, there's a limit to what humans can physically do. And our brains are only capable of so much, and that you're actually hurting yourself if you make those kinds of demands of your team. Because to your point, they either burn out, become disengaged, or they leave. And so you're it's you know, there's only so much you can get out of a human. And so there are cultures that are getting better at recognize that and cultures that are maintaining that position. And so I think as we think about individual experiences, it's so important to separate, what's the work we need to do from what is environmental, and it's just a signal that it's time to leave because I feel like you can kind of go too far in either direction. Sometimes our initial assumption might be, oh, I just need to leave here. And we're giving our power away because we're not actually taking some of the steps that we could take. In other cases, we stay too long either because we tell ourselves that we're not good enough. And it's our problem. And we if we just fix it, that things will get better or that we should just be grateful to have a job and that you know, there's, there's nothing no nowhere else that's going to pay us or is going to, you know, nothing is going to be different. And so I wonder if you have thoughts on how to navigate that. Is it me? Is it them? Like how do I figure out when is the right time to say, Okay, this is just not working for me?
Melani Dziire
Yeah, no, that's a great question. I think it takes time and confidence to be able to do that. So earlier on in my career, I did feel grateful to be there, you know, grateful to have a place at the table. And I had to really take inventory of my skills and what I brought to the table. So as I further matured in my career, I started to realize that I'm important. What I bring to the table is important, and I make a difference. And if that is not valued in the environment where I am, then I need to find an environment where it is valued. And it like I said, it takes confidence to be able to do that. But I understand it's challenging, I don't want to seem like you know, just leave, because you don't always have the ability to just leave. But think you should always be very intentional about what it is you want in a role and what your guardrails are. You should write those things down. And make sure that you honor those things. If you don't, you will just float along in your career or in a role and things will happen. And you won't be driving, if you write down what your guardrails are, what you will accept and what you won't accept, when those things happen. It's a constant reminder, this is outside of what I am willing to accept, in my career or in my life. So having goals is very, very important to make sure that you're constantly reminded of the things that you want to do. But when you find that your environment is not supporting what you are about, basically, then you need to take the steps to make a change. And that may look like looking for other things furthering your education. If it's going back to school, or maybe it's getting on LinkedIn learning and adding more skills, so that you can make yourself more attractive for the next role. But I find that baby steps help you feel better about where you are, you won't feel as trapped or you won't feel like things are constantly happening to me, you are taking steps to make changes to your surroundings in your environment.
Kim Meninger
And I love that perspective, because that comes from a place of self-empowerment, right? And I think it's really important to acknowledge that not everybody has an immediate exit strategy. But the kinds of baby steps that you're talking about are within all of our capacity, right? So it's just little steps that get you closer to where you want to be so that you can make choices. And, you know, it doesn't always feel that way. I think that that's to your confidence piece. And a big part of why I have this conversation right around impostor syndrome and confidence is that too often we aren't honoring ourselves and our skills. I love what you said about I'm important, right? Like it's not, yes, I can be grateful to be at the table and recognize that I'm at the table for a reason. And I think that is something that too many of us, we were stuck in the first half of that read, it's like, oh, now I'm here, I need to prove that I'm worthy of being at this table. And I need to make everyone else happy. And I need to make sure that everybody you know, doesn't find out that I'm actually a fraud. And all the all the stories we tell ourselves and in the process, that's where our boundaries, that's where the guardrails break down because then it's not about what do I need? It's about how do I please everybody else around me?
Melani Dziire
Yeah, and some of the things that you said are important, because we have to be really careful about how we speak to ourselves. Our subconscious minds don't know the difference between reality and what's not reality. And so if you're telling yourself, I'm not important, or I'm less than, or they know more than I do, or you know, I'm not capable, your subconscious is going to embrace that. And it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. And so you have to I'm big on affirmations, telling myself that I am worthy, I am intelligent, I am where I'm supposed to be. I have a voice people listen to me, people feel empowered by what I have to say. You keep telling yourself that you'll believe that. So be really careful about the narrative that you create for yourself, make sure you're being positive, and you're speaking the things that you want into existence.
Kim Meninger
I love that it's such an important point. I always say that, like, our brains aren't fact-checkers, right? Like, our brains, whatever we tell them, and that the language that we use is so important. And even though you know, affirmations might feel funny or silly to us. Just keep telling yourself, you will believe it. And even if that means just sort of noticing differently, I am a big believer in if you come out, let's say of a meeting, and of course, our attention immediately goes to what I said wrong or what I didn't ask that I should have or all the different things that I should have done differently to then balance that with a question like, Okay, but what went well, what am I proud of? What did I do well, right, because our brains aren't going to go there? Naturally, but if we build that habit, eventually it becomes more of a natural way of thinking.
Melani Dziire
Yes, absolutely. I love that remind yourself of what did go, well, things aren't always going to go as planned, you're not always going to have the best meeting, but I'm sure you said or did something in that meeting that was positive. Another thing that I do to remind myself of the good things is I write down the wins, even if they're small wins. So on a weekly basis, at the end of the week, you'd still at the beginning of the week, I have these are the things I want to accomplish. By the end of the week, I may have accomplished some of them, I certainly probably did not accomplish everything, because I've tried to push myself, but I write down what my wins were for the week, maybe I didn't accomplish everything. But that may have been because something else came up that was positive, that distracted me a bit from something that I had down that I wanted to accomplish. So if at the end of the week, I accomplished five things, five of the 10 things, but there weren't some pretty meaty things in there. You want to make sure that you remind yourself of your wins and reward yourself for the things that you're doing. And try to not linger on the negative things that happen. We want to learn from, you know, our mistakes, and we want to make a plan to do better. So I'm not saying just skip over, you know, challenges that you had. But I try to focus more on the wins than the things that maybe didn't go exactly the way I want it to I make a plan for those. And then I try to move on.
Kim Meninger
I love that you're talking to about how if you don't accomplish something that you set out to accomplish, it could be for a very good reason. But if we're not taking the time to reflect on that all we're doing is thinking I'm not doing enough, right? I did I say. So that that opportunity to reflect and evaluate and think about it from an more nuanced perspective is so important to our overall confidence and how we see ourselves.
Melani Dziire
Exactly, exactly is really it's a small thing to write those wins down. But if you try to make it a habit, then it makes a difference.
Kim Meninger
Absolutely. And so how has it been for you making the shift? You've had a gap year, which is fantastic. I love that you've taken this time to really connect with yourself and, and how are you feeling today when you like sort of think about yourself, compared to a couple years ago?
Melani Dziire
Wow, I am a different person. And my friends and family tell me that and it feels good. I have focused on things that I really never got a chance to focus on the gap year was really about personal development. I was never the person who like, would pick the personal development books, we talked about the fact that we're both avid readers, when I was looking for something to read. I was always trying to escape my reality. I was looking for that fiction that was going to let me live in someone else's world and hear about their story and take my mind off of what was going on in my reality. Because I wasn't driving the car, I was sitting in the car, I was a passenger and life was carrying me down the road. And so I always wanted to escape that. In this gap year, I took the wheel and I said, Okay, I've had these, you know, 20 plus years of experience. Now it's time for me to figure out what I want to do with that experience and where I want to go. And I started looking for personal development books and I dove into some of those things. And I found that it wasn't that I didn't want to do better or develop myself more it was that I had so many distractions, that by the time I got to myself, which was so firms far down on the list. I was exhausted, I was mentally exhausted, I was physically exhausted. So when I had time to put myself first, I really started to work on being very self-aware. Who am I? What are my strengths? What are my weaknesses, what things do I want to focus on? What do I want to do better? I found that it wasn't good enough to read or hear something once repetition was really important to build those muscles in the areas where I didn't put as much time in or didn't have as much focus. I would listen to my audiobooks just have it on in the car and I would hear the same thing over and over back to that subconscious, subconscious believes whatever you feed it. So I started feeding it really good positive things, telling myself I can do anything. I have the tools that I need it I already been given everything that I need to succeed, I just need to put myself on the right path to do so. And every day I get up and I take one step, I put one foot in front of the other, I don't know exactly how I'm going to get everywhere that I want to go. But I do know that if I am focused, and I continue on this journey on a daily basis, that I will get there some way somehow, I'm gonna get where I'm supposed to be. And so this gap year has been very transformative, I understand that everyone does not have the ability to take a gap year, it was really hard for me to even make the decision to take the gap year. Ironically, there was a lot of guilt associated with that thought, I was in a role where I knew that most of the people in my team structure weren't happy. I felt guilty for leaving them. There were months and months and months where I knew I was ready to leave, but I didn't want to leave the team. So there was guilt associated with that. And people might ask, Well, I can't take a gap year, you know, so how do I work on myself, if I was able to turn back the hands of time, and I had to do this while continuing to work, I would reprioritize things, I would carve out more time for myself, I would set up better boundaries of time, I would have made a plan to find another role because the environment that I was in wasn't conducive to where I was trying to go. And so like I said before, I would have taken baby steps to better myself, to make a plan to get where I want it to go, instead of sitting in that dark place and not doing anything, that's the worst thing you can do is just stay there and not do anything, just take baby steps to move forward.
Kim Meninger
Yeah, I really appreciate that perspective, too. Because you know, everybody's in a different place. And it might feel like, Oh, I can't take a gap year. But that doesn't mean that you can't do a lot of really great work within the environment that you're in today. So I really appreciate the way that you shared that. And, and I want to go back to the beginning, too. I love how you challenge yourself to step outside of your comfort zone and how you've been doing scary things. And so I know one of those is starting a podcast. So tell us more about your podcast. Yes,
Melani Dziire
I'm in the middle of my gap year, I was having lunch with a friend. And she said you should start a podcast. Now just kind of listening to my journey. One of the things I did was open myself to sharing the journey with others. Like I said, I shared online but also with my friends and family. And with my network. I shared this is where I am. And I was afraid to share that with them initially. Because incorporate, like I said, we don't talk about being burned out. We don't talk about not being happy, you come into work, and you're the most excited person and everything's great. And it's really not. And so I decided I was going to be vulnerable. And as I was networking through that gap year, I shared that, as I was getting offers to, you know, take other corporate roles, I was being honest about kind of where I was and how things were going and sharing that people embraced and they gave me really good feedback. So one of those things was you should start a podcast. Again, I'm an introvert, I was like that sounds like something I would never do that to know. But again, I started challenging myself to do the things that were outside of my comfort zone. So after I did that post on LinkedIn, one of my colleagues from a previous role reached out and said, I'm in the same place. Well, I'm in a gap year. This is crazy. So we took the conversation offline. And we realized that we were on a very similar journey. And at some point in the conversation, he said, We should do a podcast. I don't know if that's something you'd be interested in. And I literally had three pages of notes on a podcast in front of me, because I was thinking about doing it myself. But I really loved the idea of doing a podcast with a male, maybe in an African American woman and him being a white male. I felt like we brought two different perspectives to the table. But we also have very similar perspectives. And so I thought it would be interesting to be able to see that and for people to be able to understand that while we have differences, we're very similar at the same time. That's where the unfulfilled achiever podcast was born from both of us achieving but feeling unfulfilled and wanting to share our journey with others. As and to give folks a community and a platform, and at the end of the day to say it's okay, it's okay. If you've landed in a spot where you're not sure if this is the right thing, if, if you're on the right path, something's missing. Let's talk about it. And let's share some tools and some things that have helped us so that we can help others.
Kim Meninger
I love that so much. And I love the combination of perspectives. I think it is so great to be able to show that, you know, while there are differences, there are a lot of similarities. And I think that's a really important thing to remind people of. And I had the privilege of being a guest on your podcast. And so I'll put a link to that into the show notes to for anybody who wants to see the the other side of this conversation.
Melani Dziire
Yes, absolutely. In episode six of The Unfulfilled Achiever, we talked about imposter syndrome. And Kim was an amazing guest. She shared a lot of good practical tips to help us kind of identify when we are feeling like imposters and how to move out of that zone. So definitely check it out. It was a great discussion.
Kim Meninger
Thank you, anywhere else people can find you if they want to learn more about you and your work?
Melani Dziire
Absolutely. So my business is called Desired Outcomes. And that is where my leadership, excuse me, my leadership, and life coaching practice resides. And you can find me at desired outcomes.com. Also on LinkedIn, Melani Walker Dziire. recently got married couple years ago, so I'm transitioning everything over. Some people know me as Melani Walker, it's now Melani Dziire. So you can find me on LinkedIn under Melani Walker Dziire, as well.
Kim Meninger
Perfect. And we'll put those links in the show notes as well. Thank you so much, Melani, this has been such a great conversation.
Melani Dziire
Thank you, Kim, I appreciate you having me here. I hope that others recognize where they are and that it's okay. If you're feeling like something's missing. It's okay. If you're going through impostor syndrome. The most important thing is to talk about it, find someone that you can speak with and learn how to take steps to move forward. You're not the only one. I promise. There are many of us out there who have experienced the same things and who are still on the path and we're still figuring it out.
Kim Meninger
What a perfect way to wrap up. Thank you again, Melani.
Melani Dziire
Thank you