What happens when achievement delivers everything it promised, except fulfillment?

In this episode, Kathryn sits down with Megan Hellerer to examine the quiet crisis many high-achieving people experience: success on paper, disconnection inside.

Megan shares the moment when the old rules stopped working — and how that reckoning led her to develop a different way of living and working she calls Directional Living. Together, they unpack why hustle culture’s central promise falls apart, why ambition itself isn’t the problem, and what it looks like to rebuild a life from alignment rather than external expectations.

This conversation stays with the deeper questions beneath burnout and reinvention: how clarity actually forms, why curiosity matters more than certainty, and what becomes possible when we stop organizing our lives around destinations.

In this episode, we explore:

• Why success and fulfillment are not the same
• The limits of achievement as a life strategy
• Ambition vs. aligned ambition
• How clarity emerges through action, not planning
• Why not knowing can reduce anxiety rather than increase it
• The cultural reckoning beneath hustle culture
• How truth-telling creates collective permission
• What it means to live directionally in an unpredictable world

About Megan

Megan Hellerer is a coach, speaker, and author whose work centers on helping people unlearn inherited definitions of success and build lives rooted in alignment rather than expectation. She is the creator of the Directional Living framework and works with individuals navigating burnout, career transitions, and reinvention.

Megan’s book
Directional Living: A Transformational Guide to Fulfillment in Work and Life

Amazon

Bookshop.org

Learn more on her website

Follow Megan
Instagram: @meganhellerer
Website: meganhellerer.com

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