http://www.tamarayakaboski.com/

Dr. Tamara Yakaboski, Coaching and Consulting, Old Town, Fort Collins, CO (2025)

09/03/2025

Registration is OPEN for the 3rd Annual Creative Colorado Writers Retreat!⁠
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I’m thrilled to be leading a climate and nature-informed workshop at this year’s retreat so come hang out with me in the Denver area for:⁠
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💚 Writing with the More-Than-Human World: Kinship Narratives⁠
📅 Sunday, Sept 21 | ⏰ 9:45–11:15 AM⁠
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In this session, we’ll step outside human-centered storytelling to collaborate with land, animals, and ecosystems. (Yes, we will even be writing outside for this workshop!) By crafting kinship narratives, you’ll explore reciprocal ways of writing with nature and discovering what emerges when we listen for voices beyond our own.⁠
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The full retreat by Twenty Bellows runs Sept 20–21 at Mint & Serif in Lakewood and includes lunch or you can do a single day. Here what's happening:⁠
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📝Poetry, Fiction, and Hybrid Workshop Tracks – Focused sessions led by experienced writers to help develop your craft.⁠
📝Open Writing Time – Quiet, structured space to make meaningful progress on your work.⁠
📝Keynote Address by Poet Brice Maiurro – A powerful reflection on writing, process, and creative life from one of Colorado’s leading poetic voices.⁠
📝Adult Book Fair and Open Mic – Discover work from indie presses around the region and share your own in an open, welcoming space.⁠
📝Community and Networking Opportunities – Connect with fellow writers, editors, and creatives from across the state.⁠
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Early bird pricing already ended but here's your code for 20% off registration: Yakaboski20⁠
Spots are limited and advance registration required!⁠
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Register now at twentybellowslit.com.

07/31/2025

Have you signed up yet for next Wednesday's free workshop on career boundaries? Do that now ➡️ https://subscribepage.io/TY-Career-Boundaries-Webinar

Here are 3 of the most common struggles I see folks have when (re)drawing their boundary lines with their career. I'll lead you through 3 exercises to help shift how you relate to each so that you can redraw those lines as we shift out of summer mode and into September/back to school routines.

What questions or patterns do you have with career boundaries?

07/14/2025

What's your boundary line and do you know how to redraw that line as you and your career change? ⬅️ That's the conversation I'm having with a lot of folks right now.

One of the most radical career pivots isn’t changing your job (I argue this is important to do before you change anyway). It’s changing your expectations—of yourself and others. Letting go of self-inflicted perfectionism that drives high expectations and those frustrating, unspoken hopes for others creates space for a healthier relationship with your career.

Maybe this resonates...do any of these sounds familiar:
😬“I can’t change my job, but I want to stop feeling like it owns me.”
😬“I don’t want to lose the little calm I built this summer.”
😬“I’m tired of the emotional rollercoaster.”
😬“I keep trying to be everything to everyone—and it’s not working.”
😬“I’m not ready (or able) to leave, but I need to feel different while I stay.”

If any of these sounds familiar, I encourage you to sign up for this free webinar.

The first pivot is internal, and how you relate to your job, body, and energy can change.

signup: https://subscribepage.io/TY-Career-Boundaries-Webinar

06/09/2025

Taking a Summer Pause (but not disappearing entirely)

After sharing my latest piece - “Summer doesn’t ask us to work harder, it invites us to grow differently” - I’m honoring that message by stepping back from regular social media posting this summer.

No content calendar. No keeping up. No marketing systems. Just breathing room and a return to the slower, seasonal rhythm that summer naturally invites.

But I’m not vanishing. I’ll still be writing, reflecting, and connecting — just in quieter, more intentional spaces with deeper conversations and longer musings

📬 You can find me by:
1 - signing up for my free newsletter - Awakening Resilience (https://subscribepage.io/TYEmailList)
2 - subscribing for free on Substack at Dirt & Disobedience (https://tamarayakaboski.substack.com/)

In both of those spaces I’ll be sharing creative prompts, seasonal rituals, behind-the-scenes musings, and stories from the Summer of Resilient Joy community with the different angles and audiences that those spaces invite.

These are the spaces where I’ll continue practicing my craft and tending to the questions that matter to our lives and building a bolder world together.

So if you’re craving slower, richer creative nourishment this season… come join me there.

✨ Let this be the summer we grow differently. Together. ✨

😘

06/06/2025

Ahhh, the first week of June.

Summer doesn’t ask us to work harder. It invites us to grow differently.
It’s a season that expands us—sensory, alive, brimming with possibility. But too often, we drag spring’s hustle into summer’s warmth, hoping the same grind will yield different fruit.

Here’s the truth I keep returning to: Creativity is a seasonal practice of resilience.

And in summer, that looks like:

🌿 Listening to your body.
Let rest be part of your creative rhythm—the nap, the walk, the journal scribble, the half-formed thought. They all count.

🌿 Emergence, not performance.
You don’t need a plan or a polished piece. Just show up. Even a murmur is a seed.

🌿 A gentle rebellion against overwork.
In a world obsessed with output, creativity says: “I am enough. I am whole.”

If you're feeling blocked, scattered, or simply tired, you’re not alone. But your creativity isn’t gone. It’s simply waiting for a softer rhythm. Summer is the time to reawaken it.

Let it be messy. Let it be slow. Let it be sacred.

☀️ I’ll be sharing creative prompts, seasonal rituals, and stories in the coming weeks to support your summer emergence. Be sure you’re signed up for my free weekly Awaken Resilience newsletter, though! Link in the bio to sign up.

In the meantime, ask yourself: What part of me is asking to grow creatively this season?

Let that be your guide.

06/02/2025

When I left academia, it wasn’t really about leaving.

It was about unlearning.

About remembering.

About finally asking: “What kind of life restores me instead of depletes me?”

It took years. Breakdowns and break opens.
Healing, play, creativity.
And most of all—community.

Reimagining your life alone is the hardest way to do it.

You need mirrors. Witnesses.

Safe spaces to say the quiet things like:
“I want more.”
“I’m tired of over-functioning.”
“I’m allowed to not know yet.”

There’s something about admitting those quiet things out loud to another person that stokes the fire within.

In the beginning, I didn’t have a name for what I was doing.
I wasn’t “leaving academia” until I was.
I wasn’t “building a business” until I was.

I was just trying to reclaim the parts of me I’d buried to survive the systems that drained me.

Journaling at sunrise. Wandering gardens. Following curiosity instead of credentials.

And I kept thinking: Where do people like me go?

Folks who aren’t in crisis, but can’t go back to business as usual either?
So I built that place.

It’s called Cultivate Connection—a space for the ones on the edge of something.

If that’s you: Come as you are. No need to perform clarity. Just space to reconnect to what’s real. We meet live a few times a month - sometimes focused workshops and other times open conversations during Office Hours.

DM me if you want to know more.

05/26/2025

You don’t need another certificate.
Stop confusing overing with being worthy. You need to remember yourself.

And creativity—not more trainings—is the bridge between where you’ve been and what’s next.

One of the most common things I hear when folks are navigating a transition is:
“I don’t think I’m ready.”
“I need more training first.”
“There are other people who are more qualified…”

But what’s really going on?

We’ve been taught to overlearn, overperform, overgive—because somewhere along the line, we internalized the myth that doing more = being worthy.

I know because I did it, too.

After my 2016 burnout, I took so many trainings—some transformative, others just another checkbox. None of them made me feel “ready.”

Eventually I realized: I wasn’t broken. I was burnt out from trying to prove I was enough.

Imposterism often shows up in times of change. It’s not a personal flaw. It’s a systemic pattern that thrives when we tie our worth to output and perfection.

You don’t need to earn your enoughness. You’re already whole.

Need some support returning to yourself? Reach out.

05/22/2025

I didn’t leap or rage quit. (Although I did have a resignation letter written and saved).

I built a bridge.
One board at a time.

That bridge became what I now call diversifying your career. And it’s one of the most powerful ways I know to build career resilience.

When I experienced my first big career shock, I didn’t have language for it. My body was shutting down. My purpose was leeching out of that J-O-B. The career I had built with care and credentials no longer fit the person I was becoming.

What came next wasn’t a clean pivot. It was at times beautiful and others messy. It was slow. There was grief, trial, unlearning, and deep regeneration.

It looked like:
– Exploring new ideas outside my discipline
– Reclaiming rest, creativity and somatic practices
– Redefining purpose, leadership, success
– Grieving the loss of identity and old dreams
– Following joy and healing, not just credentials, but some

That’s how my regenerative business came to life. Not from a formula, but lived experience. And it’s what I now walk clients through with their flavor, but all our journeys take a different shape, but there are threads of commonalities.

Because diversifying your career isn’t about starting over (unless you want to). It’s about weaving your values, strengths, and lived experiences into something more adaptive and aligned.

Career shocks are not failures.
They’re invitations to rebuild, intentionally.

✨ Reflection: If I weren’t afraid of starting over, what would I allow myself to imagine next?

Ready to explore regenerative career pivots? Download the Free Toolkit: https://subscribepage.io/career-pivot-toolkit

Want to work 1:1 with me? Explore Coaching Options: https://www.tamarayakaboski.com/coachingpackages

05/21/2025

I had the pleasure of hosting a mini-online retreat this morning with the gender and women's studies faculty from Oklahoma State University and the University of Oklahoma!

As summer unfolds and folks transition from the school year into a short season of rest, many faculty are carrying the weight of exhaustion, uncertainty, and identity grief from within—and beyond—academia.

Here are some practices we worked on that I'll share with you:

Resilience isn’t about bouncing back. It’s about re-rooting in what restores you.
Your worth is not your metrics. You are more than the system’s output demands.
Creativity is your power. It doesn’t need permission, productivity, or proof. And sometimes it only need 5 minutes to reset.

We explored:
Nervous system resets to shift out of survival mode
Journal prompts to reconnect to the heart of your work
Creative rituals that resist depletion and reclaim joy

The most powerful reminder?
👉 Your creativity is still yours—and it’s still powerful.

Thanks to the lovely folks who engaged today - some new and familiar faces - always wonderful to be in community with you all. As a former women and gender studies affiliated faculty member, the work you all do is so near and dear to my core!

05/19/2025

Most career advice? It skips the real stuff. The mainstream conversations about career advice sure do leave much to be desired.

Like how a pivot isn’t just practical—it’s emotional, embodied, and deeply personal.

When I left academia, I thought I needed to update my CV, fix my LinkedIn, and apply everywhere. Sound familiar?

But the deeper truth I’ve learned—through coaching and experience—is this: The practical and the personal are inseparable.

Before jumping into job boards, we need to slow down and take inventory:
✨ What am I grieving?
✨ What’s worth holding onto?
✨ What’s missing that I actually need?

That’s why I created The Career Pivot Toolkit—a free, guided workbook to help you navigate the space between what was and what’s next.

Inside, you’ll explore:
🌀 What success feels like now
🌀 What boundaries need repair
🌀 What keeps you grounded in uncertainty
🌀 Five key dimensions of career resilience

No one-size-fits-all path. Just tools to help you hear your own voice again.

Grab your free copy of the Career Pivot Toolkit: https://subscribepage.io/career-pivot-toolkit

You are not broken. You are becoming.

Let’s walk this path together.

05/16/2025

Folks often ask, “How did you know what you wanted to do next after leaving academia?”

Here’s the truth: I didn’t.

I didn’t call it a “pivot” or a “career move.” I didn’t have a Plan B. I sometimes called it putting myself into early self-retirement as a joke.

I just knew I had to stop pretending it was fine.

At first because my body forced me to stop.

My exit wasn’t a clean break but rather a long, quiet unraveling and rebuilding.
I had the job I’d dreamt about. A respected role. Good pay. Impact. But underneath it all, I was sprinting on stress. Over-caring, over-working, over-functioning all up until my body said no more.

I literally herniated a disc on my kiddo’s third birthday trying to outrun it all. Irony: I was out running to burn off some stress and frustration in between all the things I was juggling that day because I took all that s**t on myself. That was the beginning of the unraveling.

What I did have were the smallest seeds of truth:
→ This isn’t sustainable.
→ This isn’t how I want to live.
→ There has to be another way.

Even though I didn’t know what “another way” looked like, I followed what made me feel more alive. I let healing, not certainty, lead, which is hard for a Capricorn with a Capricorn rising sign, let me tell ya.

If you’re sitting in the in-between, here’s what I want you to know:
You don’t have to quit tomorrow.
You don’t have to have it all figured out.
You just have to stop pretending that staying the same is your only option.

Start with one small, true step. That’s enough. And you can start by downloading my newest workbook: The Career Pivot Toolkit—a free resource I released last week.

https://subscribepage.io/career-pivot-toolkit

05/06/2025

I get asked often: “Why did you leave academia?”

People assume it was disillusionment. And at times, sure. But when I left? It was clarity.

I stayed for years because I believed in students and in the power of education. As chair of two grad programs, I wanted to lead differently: more human, more healing. But the more care I infused, the more the system consumed it.

It became clear: I was leading in a structure that couldn’t hold the kind of change it claimed to want. Worse, I was expected to train others to carry that same burden forward.

By 2021, I realized staying meant betraying the version of me I was becoming. Leaving wasn’t failure but rather it was radical self-leadership. I didn’t want to be complicit in training others to survive what had nearly broken me, multiple times.

So I built something new:
A slower pace of work that doesn’t glorify burnout
A business grounded in community and regeneration
A version of leadership rooted in wholeness and truth

If you're standing at the edge, uncertain but unwilling to keep betraying yourself, you’re not alone. This month’s Awakening Resilience newsletter is for you. Make sure you're subscribed. https://subscribepage.io/TYEmailList

✨ Reflection prompts included:
Where have you stayed because you believed—and what now?
What would it mean to lead in a way that gives more than it takes?

Sometimes, leaving is the most radical leadership move.

Dr. Tamara Yakaboski, Coaching and Consulting