better work issue #24

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👩🏻‍🎨 How to create your life instead of choosing it

👋 Hey, it's Susan. Welcome to better work - a personal development newsletter for high-performers who put themselves first so that they can show up for the people they love.

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Our lives are our stories, but we’ve been taught to read them all wrong.

That life is a linear chapter book. Three acts, a couple themes, one ending.

Then a series of plot twists derail our story, crashing into our safe, predictable plan, scattering the pages.

We’re forced to go off script.

Every choice is our own - that’s freedom, baby! 🇺🇸

But when a choice feels like it leads to an inevitable end, we feel burdened, not free.

We feel the weight of forever.

That’s why choosing puts high-performers in a gridlock of indecision.

Deciding feels final, one or the other.

📗The End.

What if we learned how to write our stories differently?

I believe life is more like a Choose Your Own Adventure book. We will make the “wrong” decisions sometimes, but it’s not the end of our story.

One page doesn’t define the story. One decision doesn’t define your life.

So how are we turning the page without paralysis?

💡Creativity.

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Read the full newsletter below.

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My clients and I inevitably face off with The Big, Scary Question.

I ask, “What would happen if you made the wrong choice?”

Through the screen, I can tell they stop breathing. Their eyes widen. Their bodies freeze. They panic at the thought.

“You're not going to die,” I gently remind them.

I get it. As a daughter of immigrants, I grew up well below the poverty line. My parents left behind their community of family and friends in Korea to start over from zero in the U.S. We were no-safety-net, KFC-is-fancy poor.

Mistakes were life-threatening.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out why my mind catastrophizes every high-stakes scenario. Past, present, and future.

Because while today I can solve problems with money, that catastrophe conditioning lingers. When I made a significant choice as an adult, I was still scared because my inner child was running the show…

What if something bad happens? 🥺

Even when I was past the decision, even when things turned out the way I’d liked, I held the tension.

What if something bad had happened? 😭

Because making the wrong decision feels like dying.

​The average adult makes over 33,000 choices every day, which gives us plenty of options to pick wrong.

There are too many clichés to count, but common wisdom to get out of this spiral goes something like:

• ‘Stop being a perfectionist.’
• ‘Don’t overthink it.’
• ‘Be in the present.’

Those platitudes aren’t soothing - they’re annoying. That’s why I don't let people get away with preaching that brand of self-help to me or anyone else.

The solution is bigger than disrupting negative self-talk or getting great at self-care (whatever that means).

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Reframing our thoughts from choosing to creating? That unlocks something in our brains. 🧠

It frees you from the fear of making the wrong choice.

Being creative is fun. It’s naturally fluid. You can pause, pivot, or pursue something else.

Creating is what helped me switch across four industries while moving three times - one of them being an international move - in 10 years.

Creating is what helped me find my voice, find my confidence, and find my people.

Creating is discovery, not decisions

I spent my high school summers volunteering at my local library. It was my sanctuary: quiet, low-stakes, and predictable.

I loved running my fingers along book spines as I walked through the aisles, armed with other titles to return to their proper homes.

I loved (still love) the smell of old books, almonds and earth. Sliding a book back in its Dewey-decimal designated space, the satisfying soft thud, was no infinite scroll, but it was the repeatable little dopamine hit I needed.

But of all the books I tucked away, checked out, or read, my childhood favorite was R.L. Stine books. Particularly Stine’s Choose Your Own Adventure series, “Give Yourself Goosebumps.”

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In case you’re unfamiliar with the Choose Your Own Adventure genre: you start with one chapter and at the end of it, you’re given two choices of what to do next. Each choice has a designated page to turn to. You turn to that page. Your adventure continues or ends abruptly (often your character dies, it is R.L. Stine after all). If you die, you can go back to the previous chapter and choose differently.

You can make mistakes without consequences.

Maybe it was a small way I felt like I had control over my limited freedom. Until I left the house for college, I was suffocated and criticized. Running away wasn't an option.

So books became my escape. More than that, they became a protected place for me to make decisions, learn outcomes, reassess, and choose differently.

The lesson I learned from R.L. Stine is the same one I bring to clients: you need to reframe the way you think about your decisions.

A mindset where mistakes won't kill you, and rewriting your story doesn’t mean starting over from nothing.

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Our monsters change but our mission doesn’t

My clients and I build a library of their life’s work. Their options are thrilling and open-ended, but their freedom freezes them.

I like to refer to our coaching sessions as a sandbox.

Our coaching sessions are where we read ahead and skip around, free from consequences. We flesh out what happens if we turn to page 33 instead of page 50. We talk about their real-life versions of Slappy the Dummy.

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Then we face the truth together: the real monster is your "success" keeping you handcuffed to a job that pays the mortgage but leaves you miserable.

Don't think about the money at all, and you’re constantly in survival mode. Think too much about the money, and you become misaligned with your values.

🩸 Because money is the lifeblood of work, but it’s not the heart.

I’ve chased the money, calling it “stability.” I’ve chased the title, calling it “strategic.”

I know how it feels to peak fast and burn down fast. After a few rounds, I was over it.

That's how I decided to create intentionally when I started my business in 2021. Let me be clear: this approach feels like torture sometimes because the money comes in slowly. So slowly that my business has needed a few transfusions of my own personal savings to keep it from dying.

Pulling from my savings wrecked me with guilt and fear. I’m not a risk-taker by any means.

But taking risks is a skill, not an identity. I learned how to take calculated risks without second-guessing myself. I learned how to face the aftermath of each business decision without feeling like I was going to die.

I learned how to trust myself more. Here's how you can do the same.

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Choose Create Your Own Adventure

One of the first steps towards trusting yourself more is to stop judging your choices as right or wrong.

Let’s practice through a better work version of Choose Your Own Adventure. There are no "wrong" choices, so relax your shoulders.

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📍Start your adventure here:

You want something meaningful outside of work. Work that feels like yours, not just what you're good at. You've tried the self-help, productivity hacks, and mindset mantras, but they're not working anymore.

It's not about if you'll make a shift, it's about how.

What's your next move?

• A. I have an idea but it feels risky and I'm risk-averse.
• B. I have too many ideas and I need to focus. ​
• C. I tried something, but I'm not getting the result I expected. ​
• D. I don't know what I want, but I know it’s not this.​

When you click on one of the above prompts, it will send you to a better work issue that guides you through your next move. Every issue has stories, frameworks, and examples to help you.

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Or…maybe there was another better work issue that lives rent-free in your brain. Or one line that haunts you like Casper. 👻

But you have no freaking clue what issue it’s from.

I'm creating a guide to help you easily search for issues by keyword, topic, or framework.

Want it? Click here to request this guide. ​

If enough people show interest, I'll create it!

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Please clap for me

This is a special issue because it marks a major milestone of the better work newsletter: this is the 24th issue which means I completed my goal of publishing twice a month for a full year.

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This is the first time in my business where I published my newsletter consistently. I've received so much great feedback, kind words, and loving encouragement from old friends and new readers. 💜

better work is not just a newsletter. better work is a part of my healing journey and I am honored it’s a part of yours.

I have special plans for better work in 2026. But one thing won't change → I will continue to write from my chest.

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Thank you for being a part of this journey with me.

Take care of yourself,

Susan

Susan Lee

Career coach for high-performers

Founder of Hey Ms. Lee, LLC​

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P.S. Our pity party is today! Last chance to join.

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