In this episode of the Hello Moxie podcast, Nicole sits down with Rachel Speckman, therapist, career coach, and founder of Made for More Coaching, for a conversation that’s equal parts permission slip and diagnostic tool. Rachel spent years in the startup world, then made a full pivot to private practice therapy when she realized she didn’t want to keep helping companies. She wanted to help people. And she’s been helping them get unstuck ever since.
This one’s for every woman who’s quietly wondering: Is this it?
When Success Feels Like a Trap
Rachel didn’t leave her startup career because things were falling apart. She left because they weren’t, and that made it harder.
“It would have been hard for me to stay, but it was hard to leave. Really hard to leave and let go of the security of it and the prestige and the reputation of it all, and to start over.”
Sound familiar? Nicole shared the same feeling about her marketing agency, a business she never intended to build, that grew too fast, and that she ended up hating despite every external signal that she should feel proud.
This is one of the sneakiest traps women in tech fall into: staying in something that looks right from the outside because leaving feels like admitting defeat. But Rachel reframes that completely. Leaving isn’t failure. It’s information.
And the clearest information? The curiosity test. When Rachel was at a professional conference that should have been a dream opportunity, she found herself way more interested in chatting with someone from an anthropology conference nearby. That mismatch, the place where your energy actually goes versus the place it’s supposed to go, that’s data worth paying attention to.
The Diagnostic Question Most Women Skip
Rachel uses a deceptively simple tool with every client she works with: Is the stress you’re experiencing a good hard or a bad hard?
“A good hard is like I’m growing. It’s challenging, but I’m alive from it. A bad hard is I dread the day. I don’t even want to check my, you know. That kind of thing.”
This isn’t about avoiding difficulty. Real work is hard. Meaningful work is hard. But there’s a difference between the stretch that makes you feel alive and the dread that makes you want to hide under the covers from a business you built with your own hands.
She also asks every new client a question that lands like a gut punch: What percent are you where you are?
The average answer? Thirty percent.
Think about that. The average person walking through Rachel’s door is operating at 30% of where they actually want to be. And they’ve normalized it. They’ve built their entire professional identity around something that’s only firing at a third of their capacity, and they’re wondering why they feel depleted.
This isn’t about being ungrateful. It’s about being honest.
Values First, Always
When things feel off, in your career, in your relationships, in your body, Rachel points to the same root cause every time.
“When we’re depressed, when we’re anxious in our personal lives and our professional lives, our values are misaligned.”
The work she does with clients isn’t just about identifying values on paper. It’s about catching the gap between what you say matters and what actually lights you up in a room. You might tell yourself you want prestige, until you’re in a room that has it, and it still doesn’t feel right.
Her coach once asked her: What is the oxygen you can’t live without each day?
For Rachel, it was connection, real, meaningful, human-to-human connection. Not strategy. Not operations. Not capital raises. Once she named that, the pivot became not just possible but necessary.
That question is worth sitting with. What is the thing that, without it, the rest of the day doesn’t quite land? That’s where your values actually live.
The Woman Behind Her Moxie: Rachel’s Mom
When Nicole asked Rachel about a woman in history she admires, Rachel’s answer caught even her off guard: her mom.
Her mom is deaf, navigates the world on her own terms, and has a “give a [damn] about other people’s opinions” factor that Rachel describes as refreshingly, sometimes chaotically, low. She’s a woman who, when a tubing trip got shut down by flooding on the Delaware River, simply led 14 people down the adjacent canal instead.
Yes, the sewer canal. No, she did not apologize for it.
“She really inspires me to ask: what if nobody was watching? What would I do? What is going to fill me up?”
That’s the question underneath the question. So much of what keeps women stuck isn’t really about money or logistics. It’s about the performance of okayness. About managing what other people see and think. Rachel’s mom doesn’t do that. And Rachel has spent her career helping other people borrow a little of that same energy.
Key Takeaways
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The good hard / bad hard test. Before you decide anything, pivot, stay, or tweak, ask yourself which kind of hard you’re in. Growing-edge hard or soul-draining hard? The answer changes everything.
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Your values might not be what you think they are. What you say you want and what actually lights you up in a room can be two very different things. Do the excavating.
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Find your oxygen. What is the one thing you can’t get through a day without? Name it. Then figure out how much of your current work is giving it to you, and how much is starving you of it.
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You don’t have to burn it all down. Rachel helps clients figure out the full range: internal pivot, adjacent pivot, full reinvention. There’s a lot of space between “stay miserable” and “blow up everything.”
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Build your board of advisors. Not your network, your board. People whose careers give you a “professional crush,” who you can email quarterly, who ask you specific questions and open specific doors. Who’s on yours?
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The 80% rule. No role is going to be 100% joy 100% of the time, and you don’t actually want that. The goal is to be in something that works for you 80% of the time. That’s the bar worth building toward.
Ready to Hear the Full Conversation?
This episode is the kind that stops you mid-commute. Rachel is warm, specific, and genuinely funny, and Nicole brings her full no-BS self to every question.
Listen to the full episode now: * 3 Signs Your Job Is Draining You (And It Has Nothing to Do With Burnout)
And if this episode cracked something open for you, share it with the woman in your life who’s been saying “I’m fine” for a little too long.
