Want to stop work from consuming your life? First, learn self-awareness

Sponsored by Thomson Reuters

Andrea Millar, CPA/PFS, thought she knew what really mattered. Getting good grades in school and going above and beyond at work were part of her being. But she came to the realization that work was consuming her life, at the expense of other things she cared about.

Millar wrote about that experience, and some of the changes she made to create a more fulfilling life, in a recent JofA article. She also joined the JofA podcast to discuss the topic.

What you’ll learn from this episode:

• An explanation of how work can “unconsciously” take over our lives.
• Understanding the “default state” of being and how it can explain why we might overwork.
• How a shift to the “experiencing stage” allows us to align time and energy differently.
• Why Millar stresses self-awareness as an important first step of changing habits.
• The award that Millar’s article won in a recent media and publishing competition.

Play the episode below or read the edited transcript:

— To comment on this episode or to suggest an idea for another episode, contact Neil Amato at Neil.Amato@aicpa-cima.com.

Transcript

Neil Amato: Hello, listeners and welcome to another episode of the Journal of Accountancy podcast. I’m your host, Neil Amato, and today I’m joined by a CPA who holds the PFS designation. Her name is Andrea Millar. We’re going to talk about a topic that many of us can relate to, I think, h]ow to stop work from consuming your life. You’ll hear that conversation after a brief sponsor message.

[Sponsor message]

Amato: Welcome back to the show. As I said, our guest today is Andrea Millar. We’re talking about a serious topic, but also aiming to pass on advice, celebrate success, maybe have a little fun. Andrea, welcome to the Journal of Accountancy podcast.

Andrea Millar: Thanks so much, Neil. Thanks for having me.

Amato: We’re happy to have you on. You are the author of a feature article that published in the Journal of Accountancy’s January 2025 digital edition. It had the headline that I’ve already mentioned, How To Stop Work From Consuming Your Life. That topic, work consuming your life, would you say you have some first-person expertise in it?

Millar: Yes. I have had a lot of expertise in that, and I imagine, like you said, probably everyone listening has had expertise in that. The thing is that a lot of times it can run unconsciously when it gets to the unhealthy level of work. And for me, I had been going like that my whole life, whether in school, getting the best grades and in work, getting promotions, and doing my best [for] whoever I was working for and all of that. But slowly, well, no, probably not slowly, probably in every situation I ever did. What happened was I just did overwork and it wasn’t anywhere I worked or any person I worked for, it was just me. And I think it’s because work — that’s where you can do things and be your best and see accomplishments and it feels really good and it’s rewarding. But I got to a really unhealthy level where I was basically letting work, without knowing it, sacrifice most every other area of my life in some way.

I had someone very close to me just pass away suddenly, and the shock of that is what made me finally wake up and I was like, what? There’s nothing like mortality to get you to wake up and see things clearly. We do not have all the time in the world. We do not know when our last day is. And it made me really look at my life closely and start to think, what am I doing here? How do I get more fulfillment, purpose? There must be a way to do great work and do other areas of life in a much better way, which is much easier said than done.

Amato: It is, and obviously it’s a tough way to come to that realization, but we appreciated what you shared in the article about that and what we’re going to share on this podcast today. The genesis, I guess, of the article idea was Jeff Drew, the JofA‘s editor-in-chief, is in your session at ENGAGE 2024 and has the idea, hey, this topic could be a good one for an article. He approaches you and I’m hoping you can tell me briefly, and tell the listeners, you describe what’s called a default state of being and an experiencing state of being. What are the differences between those two things?

Millar: Sure. The default data being can be very complex and have a lot of nuances, so I’ll just give you the extreme simple version, which is that really we’re all walking around with an inherited brain and nervous system that we got from our ancestors. Our ancestors back in the day, they had to be vigilant for tons of real threats all the time in their life. Of course, they’re in the cave watching out for what animal might be there and come after them or anything. They get to be worst-case-scenario experts and seeing the worst case scenario and what do they need to do to survive that day? The ones who did survive, those are the brains and nervous systems we inherited, and so that is our default state. Of course, it’s necessary and really important because we need to be able to identify real threats in our life. But the problem is that the brain can’t distinguish between what’s real and what’s imagined.

A lot of times we just stay in this worst-case scenario like, this is the worst that can happen. Then your behaviors and your actions and your results in life are all in this rigid, vigilant protecting of your current life and your current way of being. And we’re much more wanting to protect what we have now than expanding to what we could make even better in our life because it’s scary that we might lose something we have now. It’s just something that we have to be aware of and look at when is it? A lot of times it’s running unconsciously and what guides the behaviors and then the results is that we have opinions, conclusions, beliefs that maybe if we understood those things were even running us, we would see that they’re not even true.

A lot of times it’s illogical thinking because maybe somebody said a message in childhood that made you keep carrying that way of thinking through the rest of your life, and maybe it served you for a while and it was great, but it might not serve you anymore. The unhealthy side of it, that’s not what it was meant for, is the unconscious just running our life in that way that really ends up making life much more complex than it needs to be and harder than it needs to be.

Often we’re doing it to ourselves. We think it’s circumstances and things that happen to us, but most of our struggle, and I’m totally having compassion and empathy for people who can’t help this and it’s not this default state running things, but a lot of times it is causing our struggle more than anything else.

Amato: That’s a summation of the default state. Tell me more about the experiencing state.

Millar: Yes, the beauty of the experiencing state is that once you can see the default state for what it is beyond the real threats that it’s there to serve, then you can make intentional choices because you see what’s going on. You see this pattern of these deep beliefs and opinions, making us do certain things and then getting results that might lead to being the grind, burnout, just stress, making things harder than it needs to be.

But, once you can see it for what it is, if it’s something that is based on limited or illogical thinking or just something that’s no longer serving you, then you can make the choice, which is to shift to the experiencing state, which means you’re much more in tune with what matters most to you. Then you align your time, your energy, your actions to what you really want to create in life, because you get clear on that and it’s aligned to your values to what you wanted to create. If you were looking back on your life at the end of life, what do you want to be able to say that your life was like, who you were as a person, what you did, all of that stuff, which a lot of times can get so covered up in the day-to-day keeping up with life.

The experiencing state, when you do that and you let it lead from that deep, what are my values? What matters most? What makes me tick? It clears out a lot of that limited illogical thinking. It clears out a lot of noise of saying yes to things you don’t really want to do or saying yes to things because you thought you were going to disappoint someone, but instead you disappointed yourself over and over again.

It just leads to actually doing better work, doing more quality work, having better relationships, being more in tune with yourself and who you really are and what makes you tick and what makes you have energy and passion and joy. It is hard work because just like we go to exercise our physical bodies and if you quit exercising, you tend to get out of shape. This is work that because we’re us, it’s hard for us to see ourselves, and so you have to really actively be looking at it and noticing it to create that much better state of being.

Amato: I think that’s great and you’re right. You make a couple of good points. The realization of seeing yourself, that’s hard enough, but then it’s not just flipping a switch, you have to stick with it. This realization, I guess, led you to a new career. I want to ask, how did learning some of the concepts we’ve discussed lead to you choosing a new path?

Millar: When I started to see this stuff, the first program and credential that I got was called the registered life planner credential, and when I did that, it helped create this vision and what you wanted for your life that mattered most, which sounds so easy, but it’s not easy to figure out. I just got so excited once I figured that out and almost like, then if you can get your vision clear for what you want in life, it gives the momentum for all the stuff you have to go against because of that default state to make things happen that otherwise, it might just be more comfortable keeping like it is. Even if you’re stressed and grinding, it’s just easier, but if you can get excited about what you’d really like to create instead, it can create momentum. I saw how powerful that was. Then of course, I saw all these things getting in our way, but my own vision when I came to it, it was really hard. I was like, how do I make that thing happen? I started seeing all these things get in my way and then I did more coaching programs to understand human nature and all these things that hold us back that we can’t see clearly.

I just thought, everybody needs this. We needed this back at the beginning of school in our curriculum, but maybe these things don’t really hit until life gets so hard that you then open up to look at it a different way and make it better. I just thought, what better work? I love these topics. I can’t get enough of them of the learning and it’s never ending, because it’s not like – you don’t get to the experiencing state and now life is just all roses and just perfect, far from it.

You’re going backwards and forwards all the time. You see things, you learn new things, you grow, you go in different directions, and so it’s constant. I just can’t think of anything more rewarding than helping people do that because it’s not easy. Maybe some people are lucky that they just naturally figure stuff out like this in life. For me, it’s really hard and so then figuring that out, I had to go deep to figure it all out and see how transforming it can be and what difference it makes to everything.

For the people who maybe this stuff doesn’t come so easy to, I thought what could be better than helping them do that? It leads to better work, to better relationships, to better knowledge of self to getting to the end of life and actually being happy with what you saw that you didn’t see and what you missed along the way. You can tell, I’m very passionate. I thought there couldn’t be a better line of work, so that’s why I shifted.

Amato: That shift includes, you were a colleague of mine at the AICPA and now you run your own business. Please correct me if I’m wrong on any of this, but it is Millar Life Planning that is the name of your current business, your current career?

Millar: Andrea Millar Life Planning.

Amato: Andrea Millar Life Planning, yes, thank you. On that note, some of the things we’ve shared, you’ve certainly shared them already, but are there any particulars for professionals who are just really driven to do good work, and they say, well, that’s what’s most important and so that work tends to run their lives. What advice do you give to them to have them still have success, but have it not run their life?

Millar: Yes, I take people through a process so they get really clear on their vision and their intentions and what they really want to create in life, and then we see what’s getting in the way that might be unconscious, but if I was just listening to this podcast and I’m like, whoa, I want some of this. Life is harder than it needs to be. The No. 1 thing you can do is start being self-aware. Look at your behaviors, look at your results. Everything starts with self-awareness. If you’re not self-aware, that’s what I was. I was just going along completely unconscious, having no self-awareness until my close person passed away suddenly at a young age. I would love other people not to have to have something like that. If you can just start seeing like, are you working all the time? Do you feel joy? Do you feel fulfilled? Is your life aligned to what matters most to you?

If it’s the relationships in your life, are they constantly being put on the back burner because work, work, work? Are there things that work, because often what I find is there simple things that work to clear out a lot of what’s the word? Clutter, chaos, noise. Often, for example, people will say yes to clients that they don’t even want to work with, but they feel like, well, how else is that client going to get service, so I’ll take them. Even though they didn’t really have room for more clients, so they’re doing it at the disservice of themselves when really, that client could have found somebody else who had more space that could take them. Or they keep clients for years who are no longer aligned with what they’re doing or what they want to do or who they don’t even enjoy, but they think, I don’t want to disappoint that client and they’ve been around so long.

But really, when people start doing those things, people take it well. You don’t have to say, I don’t like you, I don’t want to work with you anymore. There’s all sorts of ways, but if you can just get very diligent to see what it is you’re trying to create and then do the things that gest you that, which, yes, it can be uncomfortable if you are a person who says yes to everything and you’ve let other people run your life your whole life. But you can start to see, actually, people are okay with this and they’ll be okay. You don’t have to save everybody and rescue everyone. It’s just things like that of noticing it and being self-aware, and then what would you like to create instead? What’s one little thing you could do to start getting your nervous system comfortable with that thing that may not be comfortable? Know that that’s normal that it’s not comfortable. It may never quite.

This stuff, too — frequency, length, intensity — is always there, but as you’re aware of it and as you shift the frequency, length, and intensity of letting the unhealthy default state run things significantly goes down. Now I notice on one day I’m off and I’m stressed and I’m rigid. I just did it Monday and I’m like, what’s going on? I totally forgot all this stuff. Then I’m like OK, but I noticed it right away. Well, before I could have been going years and not noticing. That’s what happens. Don’t think this is all rosy and it’s going to be perfect. It’s a work in progress, things change. You learn, you experiment, you might come up with something you think you want and then you do it and you’re like, not so much so, then you learn from it and you [drop] it. It’s fun.

Amato: Thank you for that advice. Again, we’ll have a link in the show notes to the article that discusses these topics. That JofA article has been popular in terms of page views. It’s also received some critical acclaim. The JofA editorial team found out in early October that the article had won an Eddie Award. Eddie is part of the Eddie & Ozzie Awards, a major contest in publishing and media. Andrea, I guess Jeff Drew was the one who told you the news that the article had won an award?

Millar: He did. Yes.

Amato: What was that like, getting that news?

Millar: I was blown away because I’m not a writer, but I am very passionate about this topic and getting it out there so that people understand it because it can be so life-changing. And to hear that, I have been a long time just admirer of Jeff. We did a white paper together back in 2013 and got to know each other well then, and so I think we just have a lot of admiration and respect for each other. For us to have done this journey together of him being in the session and then collaborating on this — incredibly rewarding to see him recognized because he’s incredible and to do that with him. I’m like, let’s try again. Let’s go again.

Amato: That’s great. It was not the only Eddie Award for the JofA editorial team this year. Overall, we had four finalists for the awards. This podcast was a finalist. News writer Martha Waggoner’s coverage of IRS news was a finalist. But the two winners were your article in collaboration with Jeff Drew, and the other winner was CPA Letter, our daily newsletter with more than 127,000 subscribing. Yes, we’re tooting our horn a little bit here, but we’re glad to do it and glad to share the advice that you share in that article in a deeper way in podcast form. So, Andrea, thank you.

Millar: Thank you, Neil. This has been fun. Thanks for having me.