Explore Career Fulfillment with Maya C. Popa

Maya C. Popa is an award-winning author, a Publishers Weekly editor, a dynamic educator, and accomplished founder of Conscious Writers Collective (CWC), a six-figure business that offers a learning community for poets, fiction, and non-fiction writers. Writers at all stages in their writing journey meet five times a month over Zoom to be coached by Maya and other exceptional writers. Boasting a multifaceted professional journey, she shares how her experiences have defined her idea of fulfillment and how they continue to guide her entrepreneurial path. 

1. Your work involves writing, educating, and building a community for other creatives. How have your various roles shaped your definition of career fulfillment? 

Career fulfillment means having the flexibility and space to grow within whatever I’m doing. I’m very lucky that writing is never the same from project to project, poem to poem, or essay to essay. I’m at the point in my teaching career where I can design and choose which classes I teach and how I teach them. That agency guarantees I’m continuously learning and refining what I do, and how I do it. 

In terms of building a community and coaching writers and artists, each person offering up their particular situation for guidance guarantees that my work always feels fresh. It’s tremendously fulfilling to hold a mirror up for others and help them identify and actualize their goals. It keeps me from feeling burnt out or apathetic, and again, a large part of it is that I can schedule meetings on my own terms. And part of that comes down to personality–I never loved the idea of having a schedule set on my behalf, and I suspect a lot of individuals who pursue entrepreneurial endeavors are in the same category.

2. How has your personal transformation informed your understanding of career growth?

I’m the daughter of immigrants who strongly emphasized academics, which suited me as I’ve always loved learning. I received a full merit scholarship to college and graduated from Barnard College Summa Cum Laude, then pursued two advanced degrees–at the same time–both on full fellowships. I felt safe in the notion that I was following a predictable career path towards academia. But I also struggled with anxiety, which I finally addressed through CBT in my 20s.  

I was afraid of failure, and I don’t think that you can be afraid of failure and fully realize your career ambitions, because part of what you’ll do is choose the path that seems safest each time, and that’s usually a path that has already been walked down by someone else. That’s not the past towards creating the conditions for your own career fulfillment and growth. 

I don’t consider myself an anxious person today, and I think my career growth can be attributed to the self-reflection and inner work I did to let go of the habit of fear, worry, and doubt that prevented me from hearing clearly what my motivations and ambitions were. Once I could hear myself clearly, I was in a position to figure out what I wanted to do, and how to set about doing it. When you get to that place, you’re no longer afraid of failure, because what you’re doing feels intuitive, and you understand there is no such thing as some platonic ideal of “failure.” If something doesn’t work the way you expected it to, you pivot. The sky doesn’t fall down, and you’re intact and ready to try again. 

3. What entrepreneurial practices have helped you build steady career resilience?

I’ve prescribed to the belief that failure is the price of entry for success. Accumulating hundreds of rejections as a writer teaches you that quickly. But as far as long term career resilience, it’s all about how you recalibrate after setbacks. You need to constantly fine-tune as an entrepreneur and assume that you're not going to do everything effectively from the start. You often won’t even know what “effectively” looks like until months out. You can read every business book out there and still not get your desired results in a launch. That doesn’t mean anything has gone wrong. 

I had a vision for CWC and assumed my chief priority was to offer the most rigorous courses,  contract the best possible speakers, and offer a space where everyone could push themselves to actualize their creative goals. But time and time again, the writers I worked with have remarked that it’s the community that they most appreciate, the chance to share their work with each other in small groups, and the times we get together to discuss and troubleshoot the internal and external blocks we’re dealing with in writing. My priorities didn’t necessarily align with what members actually wanted. So, I have learned that you can have your vision, but it’s essential to listen to the community you’re serving and make adjustments towards those values where you can. There’s no way to go into any career or business knowing everything you will need to know. upfront. You learn best by doing. 

4. What advice would you give to professionals struggling to map meaningful career paths? 

In my twenties, I worked as an English teacher and program director in a private all-girls school full-time. I coached and tutored privately on the side, but I held jobs that were outlined and secure in ways that have made my current career possible. I think that’s important to mention because, too often, people are afraid of pursuing what has the potential to be a more fulfilling career path because they conflate doing so with leaving security behind. No, you don’t have to quit your day job and paint full time. You don’t have to do anything. Your only imperative is to figure out if you even like painting in the first place, then slowly but surely, find ways to allocate more time and space for it in your life. In the short term, you can experience greater fulfillment by having the remaining hours in the day be spent in a way that’s meaningful to you.

Self-reflection is the ultimate tool here, as in every single other area of life. Spend as much time as possible learning who you are and what you enjoy, because that’s the baseline. I think people rush toward actionable change before they’ve even considered what makes them tick. Are you running towards something, or away from something else? 

You can also pivot within your profession. Make a list of your professional strengths, then a list of what you actually enjoy doing at work. Then, you can make a case for why/how your skills are not being fully put to use and suggest an alternative. Identifying and articulating these qualities will serve you enormously whether you stay where you are or seek a different work environment. Put that slow, deliberate step above everything else.

5. How can leaders build like-minded communities that actively encourage vulnerability and authenticity?

I’m a big believer in centering self-reflection so that people have the opportunity to discover what they actually think. I tell the writers I coach to think of a goal that they have and assign that goal a number of likelihood. 10 is most likely; 1 is least likely. If you’re at a 7, then your job is to somatically lean into that gap between 7 and 10–what belief is occupying that bandwidth of doubt? Those are your limiting beliefs, and they look very similar across the board for all of us across disciplines. I’m worried I’m not good enough. I don’t know how to do this. I’m afraid people won’t like me if—these are all profoundly human fears. But the next step isn’t just to hype the person up—their beliefs are often deeply rooted and telling them what to think instead, “You’re good enough! You’ve got this! People will think it’s great!” isn’t likely to help them help themselves. 

Instead, I love the question “What bad thing happens if you don’t have these limiting beliefs?” Who would you be if you didn’t think you weren’t good enough? What bad thing happens if you believe you’re good enough? Only then can we actually start undressing the fears beneath our fears and weeding them out one by one. 

It’s counterintuitive, but people–and perhaps artists especially–are actually afraid of success. 

The brain isn’t wired to help you thrive, but to protect you by giving you all kinds of thoughts that prevent you from going full steam ahead into uncharted territory. And evolutionarily, that’s a good thing. But it’s not always the most useful stance if you’re trying to get your writing out into the world, for instance, and your mind doesn’t want you taking actionable steps towards that goal. In those cases, it will feed you unhelpful stories to keep you safe from the idea of rejection, which is unfamiliar. It’s up to you to override its narrative.

If we’re not aware of what we’re thinking, then it’s likely we’re also not aware of the part we play in the outcomes we’re experiencing. I called my group Conscious Writers Collective after Carl Jung’s spot-on insight that “until you make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life, and you will call it fate.” Thoughts are just actions of the mind, neutral entities, and it’s the meaning we ascribe to them that makes us take action or not.

Being able to work on yourself, to self-regulate your thoughts and emotions, makes the experience of life far kinder–but it also helps you achieve your goals with greater clarity. It helps you act from a place of generosity, because you call BS on yourself more often and unsubscribe from a culture of competition and envy. You want to find ways to uplift others. You genuinely enjoy yourself more, all because you noticed the stories you were telling yourself weren’t serving you, and chose another. We get to choose again every day, and there’s greater vulnerability, authenticity, and purpose in that lifelong process.

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