How I Learned to Trust God With My Career - 7 Life-Changing Lessons From My Sabbatical | Episode #2

In this episode of Fulfilled with Isimemen, I’m pulling back the curtain on the 7 powerful lessons God taught me during my sabbatical. These life-changing lessons reshaped the way I define success, purpose, and identity in this season of my life and career.

If you’ve ever found yourself burned out from doing all the right things, feeling disconnected from your purpose, or stuck in a cycle of performance and overworking, this conversation is for you.

Through rest, therapy, prayer, and some serious soul work, God showed me that:

• Obedience is greater than overworking
• My worth isn’t tied to my output
• And He, not hustle, owns the outcome

🔎 What you’ll hear in this episode:

• How burnout revealed cracks in my identity and career
• Why rest is a strategy
• The inner healing required to truly walk in obedience
• How I began trusting God again with my purpose and future

Whether you’re considering a career reset, in the thick of high-performance pressure, or longing to reconnect with God’s voice in your life — this episode will give you language, hope, and next steps.

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Transcript

Welcome to Fulfilled with Isimemen, a podcast for high achieving women of color who want career success and life fulfillment God's way.

Here we trade pressure for peace, performance for purpose, and hustle for Holy Spirit led success.

Now let's get into today's episode.

Today I will be talking about the 7 Lessons I learned from my sabbatical.

Now, if you have not listened to the sabbatical episode, please take a second and listen.

Or watch because you're not gonna really get the fullness of this conversation unless you've listened to that one first.

Now, I was on sabbatical for about seven months, but I would say the last five months is when I really did not work.

And so I had a lot of time to think and reflect and just be, and I had few breakthroughs, and they were simple, but they were so deeply meaningful to me.

My prayer is that as I share my breakthroughs, that you would also experience a breakthrough, that you would also have aha moments, and that you would also realize that things are in need of a shift.

Now let's get into it.

The way I'll share these is I'll leave the best for last, the one that absolutely turned my world upside down.

So make sure you stick around to hear that one.

The first major takeaway from my sabbatical. Rest is a strategy.

Especially when you implement the Slingshot Method. Now, many of us high achievers, we are used to go, go, go and going some more because our identity has been so tied up in our performance and so that when we do, we feel high valued and we feel important and we feel seen, and we feel like we are bringing something to the table.

The other side is also true.

When we're not doing, when we're resting, when we're taking a break, when we're pulling back, so we can go further than we ever have, which is a slingshot method.

We feel a lot of guilt, and the enemy uses this to trick us out of actually resting, which is a superpower.

God rested on the seventh day and what happens when you rest?

You also are able to sit down and take into account the good things that have happened.

I heard somewhere where someone talked about God after He made something.

He sat back and He said, this is good. He called that thing good.

Many times, high achievers because they're rushing to the next thing. We're trying to win. We're trying to go big, go home, and we're always moving the goalpost right?

Because once you accomplish something, it's no longer a big deal. And we live for the hunt. We live for the thrill. So we just keep moving the goalpost.

And sometimes we have the propensity to not be grateful and not take stock of the good that's happening in our lives.

And rest brings forth that time to reflect. I had no choice but to rest on sabbatical. Right? That is why I was on this sabbatical and I just got such a, a reverence for the ministry of rest.

And of course, you might wonder how in the world am I resting with four children right in a home and all the other things I have going on.

Rest is not only going to sleep, right? It's not only taking a nap.

How many of you know that you could be resting and not really resting.

A lot of times rest is stolen from us because our minds are continuously racing as leaders, as doers and shakers.

We don't stop. And a lot of times that comes from a place of fear.

We're afraid. And let me tell you, when I say we, I'm talking about me. Everything I am saying is me. Right? But I'm just bringing us into the conversation. 'cause we are journeying together, right? That's why you're here today and that's why you're listening. And so a lot of times. It's fear.

It's fear of, "oh, I won't be able to accomplish what I wanna accomplish", or "I'm running out of time".

So we're running, running, running, and we're not taking a moment to stop and rest.

And so I have become deeply grateful for the ministry of rest it might feel like you're not doing anything, but you're actually recharging. You're actually going away, pulling back.

So you can emerge stronger so that you can go further than you ever have before.

Number two, God wants to work on the stuff. No one can see.

Inner healing is the real assignment. Oh my goodness. This is the one, let me tell you, man. Okay. So I've been saved for 20 years now, and when I got saved, I got saved at 16.

Actually, the reason I got saved is because there was a young woman who, this was in high school, of course, she was really pursuing the Lord, and I thought I was pursuing the Lord too.

But I was, you know, going to parties on Saturday nights and waking up on Sunday mornings making it to church.

There just wasn't a real transformation on my life.

And I watched her walk out her salvation,

and there was a marked difference.

This girl was living for Jesus. I don't know what I was doing.

And something about me. I feel like most high performers, they hate hypocrisy, right? Like we are about it. That's how we get things done. I just didn't wanna be a hypocrite anymore. And so I got saved, radically saved. And I, I remember I had went to the Lord and I said, God, if you're real, show me.

Like, I'm not about to do this, you know, one foot in, one foot out thing.

I'm either gonna be all about it or I'm not doing this Christian thing at all. And I'll never forget, I was outside. We were in our apartment and we had, we lived on the lower level and there was a sliding door and I went out there and I was just crying out to the Lord and He met me and I experienced Him and I heard His voice and I've not turned back since.

And from there I started to pursue the Lord.

And I gave up, you know, all the nonsense and the outward sins that are easy for people to see. But the inner work that people don't see.

When Galatians and the Word of God is talking about put away rage and malice and jealousy and envy and slander and I don't know all the other stuff y'all know.

Y'all know. The thoughts, the negative thoughts, like the things that are not God, but no one can see. That is what the Lord really worked on this year with me.

And it can be hard sometimes to admit to yourself and even on this podcast, to the world, that these are your challenges, these are your problems.

You're supposed to know better. And these sins are not the sins that people talk about. You know, everyone talks about the cursing and I don't know, the clubbing and the dressing and all these things. And those things are important. Absolutely. But those sins are the ones people can see. What about the ones people don't see?

And of course, even those they still show up. I'm sure people are close to me and not close to me. Have seen me act up and do things I'm not supposed to do. Right? Absolutely. But sometimes we just get used to these minor sins and we don't do anything about them.

And I realized this year I had gotten so used to nonsense and I was just like, "oh, that's just my personality", or it's just not that big a deal. Or you might not even say that. You might just be used to living with it, the blind spot. And taking time to be with God this year not only did He highlight to me the nonsense, He also pulled me in and healed my heart, healed the pain.

You know, there's so much that we go through in life.

So many things that have hit us in childhood, hit us in college, hit us in marriage.

Just so many things. And you always tell yourself, especially if you're a top performer, you know, "I'll get over it". "It's fine". "It's not that big a deal".

Just onto the next, onto the next, and there's just so much that has hurt you. And God took time, He's like, baby, I wanna heal you. I wanna deal with this stuff no one can see. Both the nonsense and the stuff that's hurt you. Because He's a loving God. He's a loving father. And not only does He discipline us, because He looks to disciple us and cause us to be more like Him,

He also wants to heal us. Man. So if you have not been leaning into God as a healer and as a father and as a friend, I highly recommend it.

'cause most of us are hurting and we're not doing anything about it. There's a saying that therapy reveals and Jesus heals. Therapy is such a powerful tool when used correctly, when done with the right people. I see a born again Christian therapist. She's phenomenal. And we have these guardrails where the Word of God has the final say, right? And we are working through what's going on in me through the lens of the Word.

It's extremely powerful. And so I had revelations. I told my therapist, Hey, I wanna see you for eight weeks straight. We have some stuff to deal with, and so many of these revelations. They started as seeds in the conversations I had with her. So number two point, God wants to do the inner work.

He wants to work on the things no one else can see. Number three, I can trust God. Oh my Gersh, I don't know if I'm gonna say that for every single one y'all. This was such a huge one for me. High performers. A lot of times we begin to take our work into our own hands. We begin to rely on ourselves, and a lot of times I feel like top performers are birthed from adversity, right?

There were things that we went through in life. We had to survive. We had to make sure, especially if you are a first born, I'm a first born daughter and a product of, unfortunately, divorce, and a lot of things happen when your parents get divorced, when they separate and divorce, a lot falls on your lap as they first daughter, and it's not to demonize parents. Things happen in life, but it's just what happens as a result. So I saw myself stepping into a parent role to really support my mom, and it was tough. And I realized that I learned that I'm the person I can rely on. And when people come to you a lot to problem solve. It's great, right? That's your superpower as a top performer.

You get it done, you make it happen, you solve problems. But the flip side of that is, you begin to think it's you and what gets really toxic and why it's really important to have conversations and speak to people who are wiser than you. The Bible says in the multitude of counsel there is safety.

You begin to see that I'm blurring the lines, and that's what I learned. Also in these therapy conversations that I love God. I always give Him the glory, but when it comes down to it, the language I was using, some of the thoughts I was having, they lent themselves more to "Isi you could trust you" because there were times in my life when adults would come to me to solve God sized problems.

Not that God can't use people, but hear me. They would come to me as the first line of defense. And here I am as a teenager or as a young 20 something year old, and I'm being asked to solve problems that are above my pay grade. And I'm just like, "okay, cool". But then what does that begin to, to build in me?

Okay, well I gotta get it done. I can trust me. Or if you have people in your life that are looking at you like, oh, you're the one, you get it done, then it starts to create this concept of I am worthy to be trusted. It is on me. If I don't do it, nothing happens. And that's something that I broke free of. I truly do not have to rely on myself, and I cannot rely on myself.

I am actually unreliable. Hello somebody. I'm actually unreliable, but God is not. And so that was a major lesson for me.

Lesson number four, success is obedience to God. Now, my coach, who I love to pieces, introduce me to this concept, but it's one thing to hear something and get it in your head. It's another thing to get it in your heart. And I feel during my sabbatical, I truly stepped into that because one thing top performers struggled with, and I know I have struggled with for years is comparison.

You look at yourself and you're like, I'm so capable. I know that I can make things happen. And so when things are not working out in your favor, when you are struggling, you start to wonder why. What's going on with me? Instead of saying, while I'm a human being, while I have a threshold, you start to go to, what am I doing wrong?

Why can't I do? And I was raised on the concept of no one is better than you, baby. And if she could do it, you could do a two baby. Okay. And with incredible intentions, my dad raised me to be a warrior, a top performer. You going to get it? Girl? You gonna be my little doctor. Hello? Taught me to read when I was three and it has served me and continues to serve me.

But there has been a dark underbelly. And one thing you'll realize is a lot of your strengths also are your weaknesses. And the work we have to do is recognize when we are operating in our strength and then recognize when this thing is actually becoming a handicap and a weakness. So for me, yes I loved doing well.

I love being a top performer. I loved X, Y, Z. But on the flip side, when I saw people that I loved or people I respected doing things and I found myself struggling, I would go into deep comparison mode and sometimes jealousy and envy. Can we talk about it? Right? And I had to admit to myself that Lord, I'm struggling with this.

I have struggled with this, and not because I'm this wicked bad person. It's because that's what can happen when you lodge yourself as this person who can make all these things happen. You have to now cope and have a coping mechanism when things aren't happening at the speed at which you desire and the way in which you desire.

And so I had to kill comparison by recognizing that whatever God has called me to do in this season is actually what success looks like for me. All of us are in different seasons. All of us have different tools. All of us have different backgrounds. All of us have different upbringings.

All of us are in different places and spaces. If we lined ourselves up and said, because you're 30, because you're 35, because you're 28, because you're 25, because you're 55, you should have accomplished X, Y, Z. This is the median. This is what someone else is doing. We are indeed gonna crash out and burn.

What we should be focusing on is Lord, where have you called me to? What have you called me to? And what have you called me to in this specific season and time given what I have on my plate? Given how you uniquely have made me.

All of us, as high achievers, desire to be successful. And there's nothing wrong with that. The problem is when we are measuring success. By other people's standards and not what God has called us to. That's when you get in deep waters. So for me, God has blessed me in so many ways and I have done a lot.

And I'm super grateful, but I found myself on the sabbatical while I was doing nothing. Really breaking down in certain moments saying, what am I doing with my life? Why do I need a break? There's a single mom out there right now and she needs a break. She's not taking one. Oh, look at my friend. She has kids and she's killing it.

What is wrong with me?  And there was just this constant hammering on self. And it had to die. And that's something that died during this sabbatical. And I am so grateful. I am so grateful. And what it did was it caused me to go back and sit down and ask the Lord again for another level of clarity. That's something I've always loved, and that's one of my points.

That's my next point. Clarity is a superpower. A lot of us are struggling. A lot of us are beating up on ourselves. A lot of us are feeling lost because we don't have clarity. So lesson number five, huge takeaway on my sabbatical. Once you have clarity, the journey becomes simpler. When you are clear on what you are good at, who you are in God, who He is to you, what you've been called to do, everything gets simpler.

It's not always easy, but it becomes simpler. The reason why many top performers are stressed is because we're trying to do too many things. We're trying to hit the target too many ways, and then we get overwhelmed and then we get into default comparison mode and we shut down and it just gets ugly. But when we have clarity and we say, this is what we're called to do in this particular season with the tools I have given my particular situation.

A rest comes over you. Performance is broken off of you and you're able to run in your own lane. Because the thing is when you get to running,  you get to run in like you really do well as a top performer, you really kill it, but the issue becomes when you're running in the wrong lane. Have you ever seen the image of the man who put   a ladder up  against the wrong side of the wall?

And he was climbing, climbing, climbing, but it was the wrong side. He was climbing up the wrong building. Many of us are climbing up the wrong building, or many of us have an overall vision of our lives, but we are not clear on what we're called to do in our particular season given our particular situation.

I'm a mom of four now. The way I move is different from when I was a mom of one. Or two or even three. So I was not giving myself grace. I was not taking into account that my life was different. My age was different, right? So I'm not bouncing back maybe after postpartum like I did in years past. So I got another level of respect for clarity and the importance of clarity. Lesson number six. God loves me so much. Woo. This one so simple, but so incredibly important. As a top performer, there is a tendency to find your identity, value and worthiness in how much you do. And you see that in your career When you're doing well and slaying a project, you feel like you're that girl.

You feel like you're that guy, but as soon as you get feedback. That that project wasn't as great, or you're running behind on something, you're not able to complete it to the level that you're used to. The way you see yourself changes or you start to feel like you are unworthy of that role, unworthy of the title.

You carry. Also, we see the same thing happen, and I saw the same thing happen for me in my walk with God. I knew that God loved me unconditionally, but I had conditioned myself to believe that I was most worthy of his attention and love when I was doing things. Right. Now, when you're on a sabbatical and you're just sitting there, there's not much to do.

There's not much performing happening. But even in that, when life starts to change and you're trying to find your bearings, like I was trying to find my bearings, becoming a new mom and doing all that I was doing. I had just been so used to connecting the depth of my relationship with God with how much I was doing.

But here's the thing, it starts with you knowing who you are in him. While we were yet sinners, he died for us. His love for us is so deep, it's so rich, it's unfathomable. We couldn't put words to it. We try, but we fail. And it's his love that compels us and draws us. And being someone who's disciplined, you know, I know, I wanna pray, I wanna read my words, I wanna do all these things, and that's excellent.

But, uh, an even richer version of my walk with the Lord. And your walk with the Lord is he loves me, so I am compelled, I am drawn in by his love. And so on my sabbatical, I was really able to just let God love on me as I was falling short, as I was working through all the inside junk as I felt the worst I've probably ever felt because there was so much coming to the surface. That's where I actually experienced his love the most. And it was so incredibly healing. My prayer life changed. I was now coming from a place of man, you love me and your love compels me and draws me, and I just love you.

And these pieces had always been there, but. They weren't fully there, to be honest. And there were some things muddled in. There was legalism and there was performance, because I'm just so, or I have been so performance focused, it just seeped into everything. And so that's a huge lesson. That I got during my sabbatical, really understanding the love of God. And every time I messed up, I let his love draw me back and his love compelled me and it encouraged me, my identity being set in him firm. And again, I've had my identity in Christ, but it needed to go to another level.

There was something about it that was. Off where I would still be able to completely crash out. And if I didn't pray one day, one day turns into two weeks of not praying. 'cause now I feel bad because I haven't gone and he probably doesn't like me anymore. And I know that's not true, but I couldn't feel it in my heart because I had been so performance-based.

That's something that God totally broke off of me during my sabbatical, and I hope you can see why it's so important to take time out because we need time to wrestle with some of these major concepts in our lives. We are always on the move, and yes, we have our quiet time in the morning.

Absolutely. It's phenomenal. Yes, we have our quiet time before bed. Yes, we talk to God during the day, but it is undeniable. We need extended amounts of time in his presence, letting him bring to the surface some of the nonsense that we have going on in our lives. Allowing him to heal and love on us and fix this high performance, get it at all cost attitude that does not serve us.

Last but not least, number seven. This was the biggest takeaway for me and the next episode is all about. This topic, God owns the outcome. This one right here, this broke me. This was me crying. The ugly tears in therapy just sobbing. This was the one. God did his big one when I got this revelation. God owns the outcome now.

I am a girl. If you know me. I got all the questions for all the people about all the things. I love to understand how things work and when I understand how things work, I can run with it. I was really having trouble understanding how. God own the outcome, but faith without works is dead and I need to do my part. And if I don't do my part, something doesn't happen. And it just felt super confusing and I'm gonna break it down in the next episode as I understand it. But I wanna give you a snippet of the revelation and how God has taught it to me.

God owns the outcome of my life. I'm gonna show up, do what I can. Do my best and leave the rest to him. Before this, I was so obsessed with doing everything right and getting everything right, and when I didn't get things right, I would feel really bad. And it goes back to times when people would come to me to solve problems that were out of my league. I just told myself, well, I, I have to figure it out. I have to solve it. I'm owning the outcome of this situation. But that wasn't true. When I got the revelation that God owns the outcome, there was such a release. Of performance. Oh my goodness. It was like a weight was off my shoulder because what did that mean? That meant that I would show up, I would pray, I would do, and I would trust him for the outcome. I would pray over the outcome.

I would leave it at his altar, and then I would just do what I. Can do. I would do what he has called me to do. In that season, I would do my best and leave the rest up to him. And even when I couldn't do my best, there was grace. There was grace, and this concept of God owning the outcome has set me free to completely trust him, to stop freaking out when I wasn't even performing at my best or doing everything perfectly.

It unlocked another level of trust in him. Because here's the thing, if you don't trust God, you'll never have peace. If you think your one plus one is going to equal two, and there's no space for his favor, his mercy, his grace, his loving kindness, his fatherhood to come into your life, you are gonna be toast.

Because you're gonna constantly be running on the treadmill trying to make everything happen and work with your hands and in your power. And you and I both know we are too imperfect for things to just be left up to us. Now notice that I'm still doing, I. But I'm doing from a place of rest and ease and flow and trust in my father.

Trust in what the word says about me and my career and my children and my future and my life. And does worry still want to come? Absolutely. It does. And that's why engaging with God is a daily practice. That's why we need our daily bread. Hello. You think I'm just gonna go out here with days without talking to God?

I'm toast because the world is feeding me concepts and ideas that are completely anti what he wants me to believe, and so I gotta stay with him. Gotta stick with him. And in doing so, I am now experiencing a level of rest and peace in my life, unlike anything before. And it is really beautiful. And am I still challenged?

Absolutely. Are there still things I'm trying to figure out? Absolutely. But I continue to come back and live in this place that I can trust the Lord and he owns the outcome of my life .

Now I want you to take a moment, just take five minutes and I want you to sit down and I want you to reflect what lessons stood out the most to you? Why? What lies? Negative ideas. Do you currently believe that you really need God to come in and tell you the truth about what areas of your life need his love and need his touch and need his healing?

What nonsense are you partaking in? That you need to stop, but you've just gotten blind to 'cause you're just used to it. You've taken it on as your identity or your personality, or your quirk, or it's just not that big a deal.

In what ways can you implement rest into your life, margin into your life space, into your life? So you can hear him just a little bit more

In the next episode, I will be breaking down the concept of God owning the outcome and what that looks like as a high performer. The role we play in our lives, the role God plays on the journey, and the big aha moment, the scripture. The stories I found that hit me, floored me, put me on my behind.

That made this crystal clear. Talk to you soon. See you in the next episode.