Pour Yourself Something: A Coffee Talk About May

Career Bloom Solutions Blog | Posted by Lauren Deats

Pour yourself something. We need to talk.

I am sitting here with my second cup and I want to be real with y'all for a minute, because I think we all need a little more honesty in this space and a little less performance.

April was a lot. I listed my house. My kids are limping toward the end of the school year the way kids do every May, with both feet already in summer and one eye on the calendar. The news cycle did what the news cycle always does, which is exhaust everyone with a phone and a heartbeat. And somewhere underneath all of that, I was still showing up for clients, still recording episodes, still writing blogs, still answering DMs at hours a working mother had no business being awake.

So before I say one more thing about strategy, or skills, or this job market, here is what I want to put on the table.

It is okay to take a beat.

It is okay to clear your head before you go crush the next thing. It is okay to admit the last thirty days were a lot. It is okay to look at May and say, "I need a minute to figure out what I actually want before I run at this." Taking that minute is not laziness. It is strategy. You cannot crush something if you do not know what you are aiming at.

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Now let me tell you what would not stop poking at me last month.

Whether I was on a discovery call, listening to a client talk in circles around what she actually wants to do for a living, or whether I was scrolling through yet another viral video of somebody crying in their car after a layoff, the same thread kept showing up. People do not know what their skills are. They know what their job title was. They know what their last performance review said. They know what LinkedIn keeps telling them they should be in five years. But ask somebody to list five things they can actually do, the kind of things another human would pay them to do, and watch the room go quiet.

That gap is hurting people right now. Bad.

It is hurting them because they will turn down a job that pays the rent because the title sounds too small for their LinkedIn. It is hurting them because they will stay in a role that drains them dry, because leaving feels like admitting something. It is hurting them because they will refuse to even look at a path they would be wildly good at, because somebody, somewhere, told them that path was beneath them.

Pride is a really expensive thing to feed, y'all. It does not pay your light bill. It does not buy your kids new shoes for summer. And it sure does not show up at the next interview.

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Here is the piece I keep coming back to, and I want you to sit with it with me.

A lot of us were raised inside a very specific story about work. The story said your job is your identity. The story said it does not matter what you want, it matters what looks good when somebody asks at Thanksgiving. The story said the title on your business card is the title on your soul. The story said if you cannot turn it into a six-figure salary and a polished bio, you are wasting your time.

That story is bad. It is bad theology, it is bad strategy, it is bad for your bank account. And it is the reason so many of you are sitting in jobs you hate, chasing titles you do not understand, while the actual gifts sitting in your hands go ignored.

The job market in 2026 is not the one your mama warned you about. It is not even the one you graduated into. AI changed the conversation. Remote work changed the conversation. Layoffs and quiet restructures changed the conversation. The price of groceries changed the conversation. What has not changed is the human in the middle of it, trying to make a living and feel like a person at the same time.

So this is what I want you to hear before we go one more step.

Your passion does not have to be your job. Your job does not have to be your passion.

You are allowed to have a job that funds your life and a passion that funds your soul, and they are allowed to be two different rooms in the same house. I have watched that one sentence set people free in my office in ways a resume edit never could.

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That is the conversation we are walking into all month.

Week by week, we are going to figure out what your skills actually are, the real ones, not the buzzwords. We are going to talk about what you are good at, what you enjoy, and what pays, and why those three circles do not always overlap as cleanly as the LinkedIn gurus pretend they do. We are going to talk about how to stop letting other people's opinions drive your career decisions. And we are going to land on the bigger conversation about identity, because here is what I have learned in nearly twelve years of doing this work.

Your job is something you do. It is not something you are.

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If you want to do something with this before Wednesday, here is your homework, and you can do it right where you are sitting.

Pour another cup. Grab a notebook. Write down five things you can actually do. Not skills you have heard of. Not skills your last manager said you should grow into. Five things you can sit down right now and do well enough that someone would pay you to do them.

Then write down whether you actually like doing them.

That is it. That is the assignment. If you cannot answer either column, that is exactly what we are going to fix this month.

And listen, if you are sitting in the middle of a career question that is bigger than a homework page, do not sit on it. Book a free consult with me. We will talk about where you actually are and what your next honest step looks like. No pressure. No pretending. Just us, like this, talking about what you actually need.

Book your free consult here: careerbloomsolutions.com/free-consultations

Finish your coffee. I will see you Wednesday.

xo, Lauren