"Dream Jobs" Don't Exist

The 9-5 wasn't designed with women in mind

While presenting at TED Democracy last month, Katie Paris met a fellow presenter named Danielle Roberts. Danielle calls herself an “anti-career coach” and is all about dealing with burnout, finding a better balance, and following our passion. Katie had such great conversations with her at TED that we knew we needed to bring Danielle to the pod to share those conversations with our community!

And Danielle didn’t disappoint. She gave some valuable advice about how we can feel more fulfilled in our work and tools to re-evaluate whether we should be doing another kind of work entirely! And her advice isn’t limited to traditional jobs with a 40-hour workweek — it can apply to parenting, volunteering, relationships, or anything else in our life that we care about deeply but can burn us out.

You can listen to the pod here:

“Work-life balance doesn’t really exist,” Danielle told us. “It isn’t built into how our workplace is designed. We’re taught that success equals money, success equals productivity, success equals loyalty and sacrifice. These are all definitions of success that were put into place by white men.

The 9:00 to 5:00 was never designed with women’s bodies in mind. We are operating off of a premise from 100 years ago that was built for the assembly line. So I think it’s important to reframe around that. Otherwise, we’re just operating on autopilot.”

Danielle was an amazing balance point between our resident workaholic Katie and our self-care advocate LaFonda. Whether you work full-time, you’re retired, your activism is your work, your family is your work, or anything in between, there’s something for everyone to learn from Danielle’s wisdom.

This world is trying so hard to burn us out, but we can resist. Our communities need us.