Britney Breidenstein joins host Stephanie Gottesman to talk about the courage, vulnerability, and creative perspective needed to pivot away from a stagnant career.
She shares about her unique approach to expanding outside her comfort zone, the self-work she did to figure out her new direction, and the tools she’s been discovering to help her along the way.
Many of us reach points in our life where we need to make a change. Either our careers have stagnated, our priorities have shifted, or we’ve lost a sense of purpose in what we’re doing. Often, when we reach that point, we end up feeling stuck because we simply don’t know what to try next. Our guest this episode, Britney Breidenstein, has reached a pivot point in her career.
Breidenstein is no stranger to accomplishment – she’s spent most of her career leading and launching programs to build up the Fort Wayne community, with her last years devoted to workforce inclusion initiatives, business development, and corporate training for Easterseals ARC, where she developed new programs, created more than 100 jobs, and placed scores of people with disabilities on life-changing career paths of their own.
After a decade of accomplishments, though, Breidenstein reached a point in her career where accomplishments weren’t enough, and even though her next steps were not quite clear, she knew she needed to take the time to pivot, explore new challenges, and figure out where she wanted her career to go. She’s here today to share some of her journey – the work she did with Easterseals ARC, the creative strategy she’s used to get more connected to the Fort Wayne community, her take on building community and creating safe spaces, and the courageous leap of faith she’s taken to make space for her next chapter.
So she started asking people to coffee – she stopped counting at 39. In the course of her journey, she got to know Fort Wayne in a new way. She joined the boards for Own Your Success, the women’s entrepreneurial community that we featured in our second episode last season, and Bring It, Push It, Own It, an organization whose mission centers around empowering teen girls. In the course of our conversation, she talks about a few tools that have helped her on her journey – a book called Pivot Point: How to Build a Winning Career Game Plan for Mid-Career Women by Julie Kratz, Dare to Lead by Brené Brown and the Dare to Lead Workshops taught by Sabrina Moon’s Problem Solving Institute. Her story is both simple and relatable, while also showing courage and creativity.
Today, Breidenstein is working as the Principal Growth Strategist for UpLinked, a company dedicated to helping businesses simplify yet enhance their Linkedin presence through education, coaching, and management services. She still doesn’t know exactly where her career is going to take her, but has fully embraced the white space of this transitional time.
This month, Andie Hines-Lagemann invited us to collaborate on recording an Own Your Success Working Breakfast. If you’re not familiar with Own Your Success or Andie’s work, check out our second episode last season, called Women are Supporting Each Other as Entrepreneurs. The topic for this working breakfast was collaboration vs competition, and while we were there, we invited the women who attended to offer some appreciation to women in their lives that have empowered them. This episode’s shout outs are from that recording. Both Own Your Success and Women Are: Fort Wayne are soon going to be launching membership programs, and the recording will be available to our members. Stay tuned for details!
Our featured song this episode is by Mad Scatter Music, founded by Trinell to produce music that challenges the boundaries of jazz concepts, and the idea of genre-static music. Trinell is an improvisational vocalist, who explores the vocal "scatting" technique, made famous by the likes of Ella Fitzgerald. She incorporates "Indie", Alternative, Soul, & Classic Rock into a crowd pleasing jazz fusion experience relative to multiple generations of listeners. This episode’s song, “Bayou,” is actually about Trinell’s relationship with God, and how society tends to discredit an individual’s spirituality if they don’t appear to be a “traditional Christian.” She has always had a fascination with Louisiana culture, although I she’s never been, so she opted to write the lyrics as a play on words. She hopes listeners will find their own emotional connection to the song.
Assuming life has resumed its normal flow, Mad Scatter Music will be performing at the Big Apple Jazz Club Series at Wunderkammer on June 14th. In the meantime, you can find her music on Spotify and Facebook.
Women Are: Fort Wayne is a production of Monstrous Regiment Media and distributed by WBOI in Fort Wayne. Our show is sponsored by the Community Foundation of Greater Fort Wayne and Silverbirch Entertainment. This episode was written and produced by Stephanie Gottesman and Traci Henning-Kolberg, and edited by Adam Blackburn. Our episodes are recorded at Silverbirch Studio, with an extra thank you to sound engineer Steve Tyler and assistant engineer, Harrison Tyler.
We appreciate you subscribing, rating and reviewing the show on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever else you get your podcasts. You can also visit us at womenare.us, or follow us on Facebook and Instagram. New episodes are released every two weeks.
