Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
S2E20: Coach Cydnee DeToy on Burnout and the Power of Linkedin
333 Plays1 year ago
In this week’s Content People episode, I chatted with Cydnee DeToy.
Cydnee’s a Career and Empowerment coach.
Her work centers on supporting ambitious millennial women who need to recover from burnout, redefine their relationship with work, and set new, empowering boundaries.
And, fun fact: In her first 8 weeks, Cydnee made 25K of revenue from LinkedIn. And built out a nearly full book of business. Not too shabby, right?
Our convo covered:
- The content and posts that earned her the most clients.
- How LinkedIn has surprised her.
- What drives her to share her message and support millennial women
- And what it’s like to work with her.
PS. This is our last ep of season 2. We'll be back Jan 2 with Season 3!
Follow Meredith on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/meredith-farley/
Follow Content People on insta: https://www.instagram.com/contentpeoplepod/
Subscribe to the Content People newsletter: https://meredithfarley.substack.com/
Email Meredith: [email protected]
Follow Cydnee on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/cydnee-detoy/
Subscribe to Cydnee's Newsletter: https://view.flodesk.com/pages/645105018c37c66117b451ee
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Meredith Farley and Content People
00:00:04
Speaker
Hi and welcome to Content People. I'm your host Meredith Farley. I'm a former chief product officer turned chief operating officer turned CEO and founder. My agency is called Medbury. At Medbury we work with founders, execs, and companies who want to tell their stories and grow. But Content People is not about me or Medbury, it's about the creative leaders and professionals that we interview every week.
00:00:28
Speaker
We'll delve into their journeys, unpack their insights, and ask them for practical advice. If you like it, please rate and subscribe. Let's get started.
End of Season Two and Upcoming Guests
00:00:43
Speaker
Hi, everyone. It's your girl, Meredith. This is our last episode of season two. We're going to be taking a break for about seven weeks, and our first episode of season three is going to go up on January 2nd. We've got some really cool guests planned. Jessica DiFino, who writes the Unpublishable, a very successful sub-stack.
00:01:06
Speaker
Ian Michael Crum, who is pretty big on Instagram in the beauty space and has his own podcast, Beauty Curious, that's just started. Cameron Armstrong, who is the founder of Kitty and Vibe, a very cool swimmer company that's doing innovative
00:01:23
Speaker
very engaging things on Instagram and a lot more. I think it's going to be a really fun season. I'm excited to talk to some of these folks and share these ups with you guys. So just a couple of things before we sign off for a few weeks. First, I just want to say thank you so much.
00:01:38
Speaker
to everyone who's listened, commented, shared the show, supported the show. It's been so meaningful and it's been really cool to feel like something that's a fun project for me that I hope is helpful is resonating with some folks. Just thank you guys all so much. If you want to stay in touch over the next few weeks, we're going to keep doing weekly sends of the newsletter. I'll put the substack link in the show notes.
00:02:03
Speaker
It's a once a week send, it goes out on Tuesdays, and it's a really short little roundup of interesting links relevant to some of the stuff we talk about on the show and calling out one particular episode. You can also follow us on Instagram at Content People Pod, or just get in our legs, our Instagram legs, that is. But I think we're going to get going over there.
00:02:25
Speaker
And if you've been enjoying following the show, I would recommend subscribing. That way you'll get a little reminder ping when we're back in January, and it really helps show numbers. It helps the show grow. If you're feeling generous, I would ask for a five-star rating or a review. If you'd like to, those things really do help the show grow.
Preview of Sydney DeToy Episode
00:02:50
Speaker
And I think that's it. We've got an amazing episode with Sydney DeToy coming up. I think you guys are going to really like this one. Sydney is a career and empowerment coach who focuses on supporting millennial women who are dealing with burnout boundaries and finding careers that feel really aligned with the life that they want to live. It was really fun to talk with Sydney, and we really get in the weeds on LinkedIn.
00:03:14
Speaker
Sydney made about 25K in her first eight weeks and has built out almost a full book of business all through LinkedIn. So if you're a founder or someone who's dipping your toes in the LinkedIn space, I think and hope this one might be helpful. And yeah, I'll let you get into it. Also, I'll put my email in the show notes as well, merideth at medberryagency.com.
00:03:40
Speaker
If you want to shoot me a note, if you have questions, if you have ideas or suggestions for season three, just hit me up. All right. Thank you guys. I'll talk to you soon and I hope you enjoy the episode. Bye. Sydney, thank you so much for
Sydney DeToy Introduction and Burnout Discussion
00:03:54
Speaker
doing this. I'm so excited to have this conversation with you. For folks who don't know you, could you share a little bit about who you are and what you do?
00:04:02
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. It's so great to be here. My new favorite podcast, so honored to be with you, Meredith, to end talking to everyone. So my name is Sydney Detoy. I am a career and empowerment coach. I help ambitious millennial women redefine their relationship with work and create a career and life on their own terms.
00:04:26
Speaker
And essentially working with clients to create a life that feels as good as their resume. I love that. That's such a great goal. You're so passionate about coaching and you shared a lot about your journey with boundaries and burnout.
00:04:44
Speaker
I should say you've shared it on LinkedIn where you and I first connected and met. Shout out LinkedIn. We'll come back to that later. Sure did. But burnout, it can manifest in so many different ways. I'm really curious to know how you would define it. I think defining burnout is first really important to understand what the drivers of burnout are. And I think there's this really common misperception that
00:05:14
Speaker
High volume of work equals burn. And if you're working 80 hours a week, you will burn out the only people burnt out are the people who are working 80 hours.
00:05:25
Speaker
But in my work with clients, I found that the drivers are so much more varied and there's sometimes a lot of external things going. There is this high workload, you're in a really toxic environment, or you're just in a role or a function that just doesn't fit. You're doing something that feels
00:05:46
Speaker
really tiring or draining or exhausting. And oftentimes there is some internal stuff going on. So people at my clients especially have tied their identity and their self-worth to work and so everything feels a little bit more
00:06:06
Speaker
personal, weedy, folks have boundaries which can lead to burnout. And so because the drivers are so varied, the way that burnout manifests in people is so varied and it can be a mix of extreme fatigue, extreme irritability. It can spill into your personal life and the way that you're showing up in your relationships and with your family, your partner, your friends.
00:06:36
Speaker
And then I would say to answer your question, burnout is usually this feeling of just extreme depletion and having a really deep desire and knowing that you need to change something, but a feeling of helplessness and directionlessness about what that change. Let me say that back because it feels like a spot on definition I haven't heard. So it is a,
00:07:06
Speaker
feeling of depletion, like significant depletion.
00:07:10
Speaker
The second bit is a knowing that this cannot go on this way. Like this has to change, but the third is I don't know how, I cannot see a way to change this. Is that kind of the three-pronged? Exactly. And the last statement, the way you said it is I hear that so often from my clients. And I also want to just highlight what you said at the start as well that
00:07:37
Speaker
You don't have to work 80 hours a week to be burned out. Like it's not always quantitative. And I think it's really helpful and powerful for you to say that because I think there, I don't know if I've ever been truly burned out in the way I hear people talk about it, but I feel like I've had episodes of mini burnout, which I'm, maybe I'm curious to pick your brain about it. But I, in those moments, I felt, I think I couldn't say I had burnout because
00:08:04
Speaker
I wasn't working 80 hours a week, so I thought maybe I didn't deserve to say it. Other people working harder deserve to burn out, but not me, or some weird internal thinking like that. I just love that you called out, it's not always quantitative.
00:08:16
Speaker
Totally. Part of how I came to that realization is the first time I burned out in my career, it was totally because of volume. I was working in strategy consulting. I was flying around the country. I was working tons and tons of hours, but then I burned out later in my career working a fairly normal workload, and it was much more about the function
00:08:44
Speaker
and some of those environmental factors. And it took me a really long time, just like you said, to come to terms and realize it was burnout, and then also be comfortable to just say that too. Yeah. It's funny. Even as we're talking, I'm like, why do I have to qualify my experiences as many burnouts was I burned out? I don't know. It's really interesting. Yeah.
00:09:08
Speaker
So I know you work specifically or predominantly with millennial women. I'm really curious about that. Why is our generation in so much need of support and why are we all so burned out? Yeah, that's to say.
00:09:25
Speaker
Complex and meaty question, and I have written some content on this exact question that shares the eight reasons millennial women are burnt out. I know we don't have that much time today, so I'll try to hit the highlights.
00:09:44
Speaker
Somehow and along the way, our generation just started investing so much more of our identity and our energy and commitment into our jobs. We were told that work was supposed to be meaningful. And if we really leaned in, we would have this magical transcendent experience through work.
00:10:17
Speaker
smartphones and technology have grown up. And so as we entered the workplace, there's been this super speeding of connectivity that has just eroded all boundaries and ability to ever be disconnected for work. And I feel like that has happened so
00:10:36
Speaker
We also have grown up as
00:10:42
Speaker
organically and almost unconsciously for an entire generation. And there's never been this collective pause or moment to think about the implications. We, at the start of our career, all of a sudden smartphones were a thing and we started to be able to check our email on our phones in off hours and then fast forward a couple of years and all of a sudden you have slack so you can message your team
00:11:11
Speaker
all the time from your phone while you're at the dog park. And there's these dynamics that define us as millennials. And then there's these dynamics that define us as women. And so I'm not the first person ever to talk about good girl conditioning, but it's a real thing where we as women have been raised to,
00:11:38
Speaker
made people comfortable to be nice, to place value on being liked. And so when we get into a work context, it makes it hard to set boundaries, to say no. We have also, I don't know what it is about women, but we are just so confident
00:11:59
Speaker
We can't drop a single ball. We will always get the work done and we will get the work done with excellence. And then lastly, we're operating in this post Lean In Sheryl Sandberg era where
00:12:15
Speaker
I think our generation charged into the workforce and there was gender, true-ish gender equity for the first time. There were all these powerful female leaders who were doing it all. So I think we thought that we could do it all if we just worked hard enough, if we just leaned in.
00:12:37
Speaker
And it's been so much more complicated and harder than that. It's really this complex knot of
00:12:47
Speaker
the things that define us as millennials combined with the things that define us as women that make a burnout epidemic for millennial women right now. Thank you. I wonder in a hundred years how historians will look back on this time, maybe through a feminist lens. I feel like you just really highlighted some things I hadn't thought of in relation to each other in a really thoughtful way. Curious, do you think there ever is a time
00:13:15
Speaker
in one's life where it's okay for them to hustle and even hustle. I'm like, what do I mean by this question? What does one find hustle? Maybe prioritizing a particular project or goal and go in a little too hard in the paint in a way that you are aware of.
00:13:35
Speaker
I love that definition. We should write that down somewhere. So my answer is yes, absolutely. And I haven't quite figured out how to master my messaging yet, but I think there's this common misperception that stepping back from burnout
00:13:55
Speaker
hearing burnout means stepping off the corporate ladder and moving to a nine to five job with probably not a ton of upward mobility, but
00:14:11
Speaker
What I really wanted to mean and what I found with my clients is it's moving to a different ladder and still very much wanting to have a rewarding professional career upward.
00:14:28
Speaker
opportunities, growth opportunities, financial abundance, but really doing it in a way that feels healthy, both in terms of the ways in which we work and then the ways in which we think about and we relate to work. I think the sweet spot, the magic, is when
00:14:51
Speaker
you can get to a place where you are so ready to hustle, but your hustle is motivated by your passion and your desire to make an impact versus being motivated out of obligation or fear or because someone told you that this was the right thing to do to advance your career.
Sydney's Transition to Coaching Career
00:15:16
Speaker
As an example, I would say I'm hustling right now to build my business and it just feels so different than previous points in my life where I was hustling in a role, a context that just wasn't right for me. I love that. I feel like you said so many great things there.
00:15:37
Speaker
As you're talking about it, I feel like it's almost like an energetic definition. It's from a fueled place, even though you can be totally spent and tired at the end of the day or week. It has a different feeling than if it's energetically coming from a place of fear and depletion too. The word fuel is such a good way to describe it. Absolutely.
00:16:04
Speaker
You have so many amazing insights on these topics, and I know it's because you're passionate about them, but you work with a lot of women on a daily basis on what we're talking about right now. Could you paint a picture of what it's like to work with you? Yeah, absolutely. I have been thinking about this a lot recently because I have
00:16:27
Speaker
Altern described working with me as a coaching bootcamp or coaching hug, kind of depending on what my client needs, what's going to resonate with them. But I think where I've landed is it's really a coaching intensive and what it's like to work with me. And I think the things that define me as a coach are
00:16:55
Speaker
I will lovingly challenge and hold my clients accountable. So we are going to make the changes and take action to move you forward. So as soon as you step into my orbit, you can be ensured that will happen. I also will help you build the
00:17:25
Speaker
absolute conviction, belief, and trust in what you want to do next so that you feel so empowered to go after it. There's no other potential path. And then lastly, really, really good listener. And I use that when I'm coaching to help my clients see, or I should say hear and uncover things that they may not have realized about themselves or thought about as options before.
00:17:53
Speaker
Is your coaching currently one-to-ones or group coaching or a mix? It is a mix. I offer one-to-one coaching and then group coaching. I have a group coaching program right now that is focused specifically on burnout called Burnout Breakthrough, and it's helping women go through the journey of resetting, redefining the relationship with work.
00:18:22
Speaker
And then also figuring out what's next. And so one-on-one coaching happens all the time, group program. And that's when we'll be launching this winter. Very cool.
00:18:35
Speaker
So I know that you've had a really interesting career thus far and you've had a lot of really high level corporate roles, but that this coaching business is somewhat of a new venture for you. Could you talk a little bit about the kind of the birth of this business? Yeah, absolutely. And I love just even the use of the word birth makes me feel proud and excited about what I've been creating. So I started
00:19:05
Speaker
coaching in the fall of 2019 and did it for years as a side hustle and passion project and the way that you would use a hobby to do something you love and make you feel fulfilled. And then I, over the course of 2022, started to build
00:19:30
Speaker
more and more conviction that coaching was really what I was meant to do with my life, truly my life purpose. And at the same time, I was getting more and more burnt out at my job. So decided to really take a leap of faith and at the end of 2022 made the decision to
00:19:54
Speaker
We've my full-time job executive level role to start coaching full-time and really started to start building my business this summer in early July. And I think it was some time this summer where we like bumped into each other online and had a conversation. And one thing that blew my mind was
00:20:20
Speaker
You basically had a full book of business about eight weeks after launching, which congratulations. And I know that LinkedIn played a really huge role in that. Could you talk a little bit about how you leverage the platform towards such success? Because I know a lot of people are trying to make that happen for themselves.
00:20:43
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And thank you for the congratulations. We'll also add the huge caveat that I'm not making it rain yet. I'm at the right level of capacity to be able to support my clients with the level of support that I want right now. And I think that what has worked for me is number one,
00:21:10
Speaker
I leveraged and melt huge milestones for all that they were worth. I, this frame, wrote a long sappy post about leaving my full-time job, starting my business, taking a sabbatical and then coming back from a sabbatical and included pictures and lots of feelings and emotions in every single one.
00:21:40
Speaker
That really got me started. People from all over my network were excited for me and really engaged. And so just totally jump-started my business and got me in front of a lot of new people. The second thing that has really worked for me is sharing personal content.
00:22:09
Speaker
There's a ton of best practices on LinkedIn that say you need to share a lot of how to content or
00:22:19
Speaker
the 10 steps to do this, or the five ways you can master this thing, to be able to master the algorithm and get in front of a ton of people. And for me, I think that content has been fine. For me, it's the personal posts that I've shared that ties my story
00:22:40
Speaker
to what I'm doing and then also is usually accompanied with some selfie on my walk with my dog that really resonates with people and then gets a ton of engagement and then inevitably second or third connections
00:23:01
Speaker
of people in my network are seeing it and then start to reach out. So I would say huge milestone, personal content, really having the personal story that's connected to my offering and sharing and telling that in a narrative form a lot has really been effective.
00:23:22
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's really interesting. So I'll take this opportunity to plug my agency, Medbury, which does, we do LinkedIn optimization, ghostwriting, and a huge part of it is ghost engagement for our clients, as well as Instagram and newsletter management. And it's so funny what you're saying. I think you're so spot on because there is so much, if someone was trying to build their own presence on LinkedIn, there are so many things you can Google or
00:23:51
Speaker
like huge LinkedIn bro presences where it's like, oh, no, didactic, shareable, et cetera. And I have just found that for myself and my clients, just being a person is so much more powerful. But I am curious because I never read your posts and think,
00:24:13
Speaker
Oh, that's oversharing in any way. Like it feels very genuine. It does feel vulnerable and that you can tell it's coming from the heart centered place, but it doesn't feel. There's no cringe factor, but people just have different levels of comfort with what they're willing to share. And when I see your posts, I think, Oh, I love this so much Sydney.
00:24:34
Speaker
But I think there are probably even some clients of mine who would be like, I just couldn't put that out there. I don't know if I feel comfortable with that. Have you ever had a moment where you hit post and then you're feeling really vulnerable? Or how do you balance the fact that the personal is powerful? And has it ever felt complex for you on the inside?
00:24:58
Speaker
100%, I actually have a post scheduled to go live as we're recording this podcast.
Leveraging LinkedIn for Business Success
00:25:08
Speaker
And I was so cringing a little before I got onto this call and we got into this conversation. So 120%. I would also offer that if you had told me
00:25:24
Speaker
A year ago that I would post on LinkedIn with personal anecdotes and pictures of myself, I would have thought you were crazy. My old boss encouraged me to build a personal brand on LinkedIn for the five years that we worked together and I was so, so resistant. I think the things that have helped me get more comfortable was one, just getting started.
00:25:51
Speaker
And I started posting weekly at the start of this year. I didn't really know what I was going to say, but I just wanted to experiment with making myself a little bit more visible. And so I got slowly but surely
00:26:12
Speaker
more comfortable every single week that I posted. And then the second piece is I want my clients to know that they're not alone in this experience and there's hope on the other side. And so sharing my personal story is a way for them
00:26:40
Speaker
for me to connect with them and then them also hopefully to feel a little comfort and optimism. And so I really try to think about that, hold that when I'm having those cringy hesitant moments about what's about to go online. Thinking of how it's like,
00:27:06
Speaker
in service of your clients and your prospective clients. And that helps give you a little bit of maybe motivation or bravery for it. Yeah. Yep. And then just, it's almost like exposure therapy. That's all I can say. It just gets easier with time. It's so funny. I do. I think
00:27:30
Speaker
I've had that same thought. There is exposure therapy for posting online, and it's something that for me was a big hurdle too. And now I love it. I love this coming on LinkedIn, and it's so powerful. It can do so much for you. And similarly, I'm like, why didn't I wait so long? I've gotten so many opportunities and relationships out of this. And I think, oh, if I'd been doing this for the last 10 years, who knows what would have happened. I know. Can you imagine? Totally. Totally.
00:28:00
Speaker
When it comes to LinkedIn, I feel people will often say, I do it myself too. I reference the community, the opportunities, the relationships. In a more tangible way, you have a sense of the return on time that the platform has provided your business. Yeah, absolutely. So for me, the first two months of my business, I booked $25,000 in revenue from LinkedIn.
00:28:29
Speaker
And it came from two places. So 15,000 was from totally cold outreach. So people I wasn't even necessarily connected with or had connected with once. And then about 10,000 from people who were in my network. So old classmates, old colleagues who
00:28:56
Speaker
found out what I was doing and was interested in it. And yeah, like real tangible money, $25,000 for an exchange for posting on LinkedIn every day, I think is pretty good return, at least for me. And it's excited to see what that trend looks like over the next several months too. Yeah. You extrapolate those eight weeks over.
00:29:20
Speaker
That's 125K a year just from LinkedIn. That's pretty worthwhile. Yeah. Knock on wood. Talk to me in a year. But I hope so. For folks who want to find you or potentially work with you, how can they follow along and get in touch? LinkedIn, obviously, will put your LinkedIn in the notes. And I'm going to go check right after this and be like, what is this post that you are writing to?
00:29:47
Speaker
Yeah, we'll see. Holding my breath to see how it's doing. So follow me on LinkedIn. I post there five days a week. It's a mix of how-to content around beating burnout, creating a fulfilling career, and then also lots of personal
00:30:06
Speaker
of reflections from my own journey selfies with my dog. And the other place is my newsletter. It's basically the double click on what I share in LinkedIn, get a lot more into detail on my own personal journey, how I made decisions.
00:30:23
Speaker
juicy topics like how breaking up with my long-term partner allowed me to figure out what I wanted to do with my career of long-term. So it's a juicy nugget that drops into inboxes every two weeks. So would love to connect with you on LinkedIn and via newsletter. Both of those will be in our show notes. I highly recommend Sydney's newsletter too. And Sydney, is there anything that I didn't ask that you wish I had or anything else you just want to say?
00:30:54
Speaker
I would just a plus one for what you said about the opportunities that LinkedIn can create.
00:31:06
Speaker
I just think it's a pretty amazing corner of the internet. And so would love to encourage anyone who's listening today to spend a little bit more time on there, maybe not more social media time, but redirect some time from your other social media platforms to LinkedIn. And if you feel like you have something to say, just start cheering it. People will be cheering you on. Yeah, I totally, I second that.
00:31:35
Speaker
Well, thank you so much, Sunil. It was so wonderful to chat with you. This was really fun and I'm grateful for your time. Thank you. Thanks, Meredith. Thanks for having me. All right, folks. I hope that you enjoyed that episode. Thank you so much for listening. If you liked it, please subscribe or review us. And if you want to check out our newsletter, Content People, it is in the show notes. See you next time. Bye.