Finding Your Why: A Talk with Sara McCabe
Sara McCabe, CEO of Wayside Youth, with student Adarsh Nadgir.
Many people go days, weeks, years, even decades without finding their purpose or motivation to pursue their endeavors. Sara McCabe, Chief Executive Officer of Wayside Youth, illustrates how to find your “why” through her experiences in the human and social services industry.
Students often feel pressured to conform to the norms of today’s markets, working in jobs they aren’t really passionate about. Graduating from Framingham State University with a Bachelor’s in Psychology, McCabe felt that now that she was done with her undergraduate degree, she needed to do something more. “I can’t say that I really wanted to go to law school. I just felt like it was the next step,” she says. One of McCabe’s most pivotal career moments was when she made the jump from studying law to being a counselor at Wayside. On her supposed first day of law school, she spoke on how she "intuitively knew that something felt off.”
Throughout whatever circumstance you might find yourself in, McCabe stresses the importance of following your intuition. “I went on an interview with Wayside … and they offered me the job,” McCabe illustrates, “and I didn’t start law school that night, and I’ve been at Wayside ever since.”
Working there for over 23 years, McCabe depicts her experiences in different roles at Wayside. Starting as a counselor, one of her first jobs with Wayside was working with girls in a group home. “They’re experiencing some of the worst moments of their lives, and it was just something that clicked for me.” McCabe finds herself lucky to be passionate about her work and to be able to make such a large difference in communities within the local Boston area. For McCabe, finding passion, working towards self-goals, and making a difference are all part of finding success within yourself.
McCabe speaks a little more to the roots of the issues that Wayside targets: systemic problems in education, healthcare, etc. She emphasizes the importance of tackling these problems as a leader, saying “that’s the job…to train a workforce and hire a workforce to do that work.” Finding harmful policies that work against people and addressing them is some of the best work that Wayside does, McCabe believes.
Sara McCabe addresses an important issue in today’s society: the lack of passion. Through her experiences, she shares the importance of finding your “why” in this world: understanding what you’re interested in, identifying issues you believe need to be addressed, and finding the best ways to make a difference and create a better today.