739: Career Change After 20 Years: How One Moment of Clarity Turned Misty’s 10-Year Plan Into a One-Year Career Transition

[00:00:00] Misty Leon: I would rather be stuck in a chair where my son has to help me come stand up than be engaging with my current job. That was better than working in my job at that particular point in time.

[00:00:14] Scott Anthony Barlow: Misty was 22 years into practicing law. We first met her when she was trying to figure out how to career change. She had a good enough job, colleagues she genuinely liked, and an income that kept climbing.

[00:00:26] Misty Leon: Good enough was not gonna cut it for the next 20-plus years. And is good enough really the standard that you wanna apply to get through the rest of your life?

[00:00:37] Scott Anthony Barlow: Ironically, she did know what she wanted out of work and life. She just figured it would take 10 years to get there.

[00:00:43] Misty Leon: I had the idea for starting a business in my head, and so as I started writing it out, at that time, 10 years would've been the point where both of my kids will be in college. And so my response at the time, probably immediately, was financially I won't be able to do that until that point in time.

[00:01:04] Scott Anthony Barlow: She was wrong. 10 years took 12 months. This is Happen To Your Career. Most people let their career happen to them, falling into jobs by accident, staying longer than they should, and wondering if this is really all there is. But a few people decide to stop settling and do something different. This podcast is for you to take control, get intentional, and design your work to fit the life that you want to build. Real stories and real research so that you can stop waiting and start making it happen. I'm Scott Anthony Barlow.

[00:01:33] After a routine medical procedure went sideways, Misty Leon was left physically unable to work. The thing she remembers most isn't the mobility problem. It was the relief of not having to go to work.

[00:01:46] Imagine that. 22 years into practicing law, 22 years of being the person that everyone else called upon when they couldn't solve their own problem, and yet being physically unable to work felt like the best thing that had happened to her in months.

[00:02:01] In this episode, you'll learn how Misty launched her 10-year plan in less than one year, and also how a career experiment that looked like it failed on paper turned out to be the exact thing that got her free, and how she uses a counterintuitive productivity practice that doesn't just create more space in her workday, but allows her to be more valuable at work.

[00:02:23] But let's back up for a minute. Here's Misty sharing how her career progression led to this pivot in the first place.

[00:02:28] Misty Leon: I'm Misty Leon. I was a practicing lawyer, most recently working in-house for a large company, and now I have started my own business doing consulting for law firms with business clients.

[00:02:41] Scott Anthony Barlow: Amazing. Just to kick us off here, I think your story's particularly interesting because you had made, one, what I would consider to be a big move already. You had spent quite a few years at law, at different law firms, and then, and I think it was approaching a couple of decades, if I remember correctly, and then you made a shift to in-house. Yeah, that for you, if I remember correctly, at the time was a huge win. But what did that feel like to you at that time?

[00:03:11] Misty Leon: I loved it. And you just touched on that I really haven't followed a linear career path for a long time before I ever came to working with you guys. But that in-house transition, at the time I made it, I thought that was gonna be it.

[00:03:26] I had worked at big firms. I had become a partner at a small firm, and some of the things I really loved about being in-house, working for one company instead of being in a firm with a bunch of different clients, I loved that I got to really directly collaborate with my clients. So I'm a benefits lawyer almost my whole career. That's what I have specialized in.

[00:03:48] So basically, I'm an HR lawyer, and my clients are the people in the HR department, and I love just having really direct contact with them, feeling like I was a member of their team in a way that I didn't really have at firms. And one big reason for that is that at a firm, you're billing by the hour. And so typically the clients don't bring you in until there's already a pretty immediate need for legal help.

[00:04:13] When you're working directly for the company, you get to participate in planning and implementation and be brought in a lot earlier most of the time. It's much more proactive than reactive work, and so I really loved that.

[00:04:28] Scott Anthony Barlow: I don't know if you and I had talked about this at the time, but I was that HR partner that often you were collaborating with, and so I actually really loved having that type of legal collaboration. Super fun for me.

[00:04:40] I think something that's really interesting here that is part of your career is you spent a very long time, several decades, I think probably 22 years in total, you know, being the person that other people would rely on for advice, for expertise, for what to do, that person who solved everybody else's problems, and what I'm curious about is what was the cost of doing that for 20-plus years?

[00:05:09] Misty Leon: That's a great question, and I guess really I do still solve other people's problems, but in a different capacity. There was a cost to that, even sometimes in my personal life, in my family life. You know, I would work a long day, and it would just feel like I was always having other people's problems put on me.

[00:05:28] And I do remember that you have an HR background, and so I think you probably very much understand the types of problems that you can have put on you when you're giving legal support to what can sometimes be really complex issues with sometimes pretty sad or unfortunate fact patterns.

[00:05:47] And so yes, it was a challenge off and on to really feel like my job is to hear about other people's problems, really hear what they're saying, because sometimes the client doesn't directly state the actual issue or what they need to have done, and then figure all of that out and help them solve them, and then in the rest of my life, I'm often doing that for my kids or for other people.

[00:06:15] And even when you're a lawyer, sometimes your friends and colleagues will look to you for help sorting through their issues that have nothing to do with your job. So sometimes that can be really overwhelming, and I have to make a point to recharge and pour into myself. And in fact, one of the ways I've done that is investing in coaching to make sure I'm focusing on what I need too, and not always just all these external issues.

[00:06:41] Scott Anthony Barlow: Has that been something that has been difficult for you, easy for you? How has that been being able to pour into yourself, and has that changed over the course of your career?

[00:06:53] Misty Leon: That is a great question and one that I don't think anybody has ever asked me before. Early in my career, it's not something that would've been easy.

[00:07:02] In particular, as a lawyer who was billing by the hour, there was definitely a lot of pressure at my early jobs, and frankly, even when I was a partner at a firm before I went to the corporate job, that you're supposed to pour all of your time into working the client's situation.

[00:07:21] And also early in my career, I really didn't value something that I use a lot now, time blocking, putting blocks of time in my calendar that I'm gonna spend an hour and a half on business development, or when I started doing coaching, that I was gonna put that appointment on my calendar and I was gonna do it no matter what.

[00:07:44] And when the idea was first introduced to me that I could use time blocking to have a more structured day, my initial reaction was, "Oh no, I can't do that because I have to be responsive to my clients." And over time, I realized that when you set aside time to do intentional work on one thing, and you're not constantly responding to emails that are coming in or taking unexpected phone calls or dealing with texts, what have you, that I actually still get the same amount of work done and more productive nine times out of ten.

[00:08:22] And when I finish that thing, then I can turn to the client work. But that was really a journey for me to understand that it was okay to set aside that time, and that really, to be good at what I'm doing, no matter what it is, I need to be a whole person and not frazzled and anxious about the next six things that I need to do. So it's been an important journey, but there was a lot of learning in it.

[00:08:50] Scott Anthony Barlow: I think you just described what I believe is a really fascinating illusion that many people have gone through, and it sounds like that's certainly been a journey for you. And I've experienced very much the same thing too, where it feels like because there's so much going on, that if I block out a segment of my day, you know, like with time blocking methods, like what you're describing, then that'll make me less responsive and less valuable to the other people that I'm trying to serve, my family, my, you know, clients, whoever it is, right?

[00:09:22] But in reality, as you, not just instantly overnight, but as you start to become better and more practiced at whatever method you're using, time blocking or otherwise, you know, putting that time and constraints in place, then it makes you more valuable. And for some reason, that's completely counterintuitive for all of us.

[00:09:41] It also sounds like you've had a few sort of last straw type of moments along the way before making the decision to leave your most recent organization, and totally get that, you know, there were so many things that were really, really good about that organization for you in that time period in your career.

[00:10:02] But I am curious about the form, 'cause I think that's one of those last straw moments. The one that took weeks to get signed for something that had already been agreed upon. Tell me about that. What was going on? What was going through your head at that moment, and why was that another one of those last straws?

[00:10:19] Misty Leon: Yeah. Maybe for that organization that was kind of the next-to-last straw, but it felt like the last one at the time. There were a lot of different things over a period of time, and then you have that one thing that in the past I maybe would've just gone out, and I can't remember the term, but, like, angry job search.

[00:10:39] And not have been very intentional about what the next move was, but just I needed to find one. But yes, so that was a moment where I had been in my company for several years. There were already proving to be some pretty significant downsides to the job. I had this scenario that you're referring to where I'd been working on a project, a decision was made, there were leaders of the organization involved in the decision.

[00:11:08] This was not something I was going off and doing on my own, and we needed the company to make a payment, and we needed the payment to be made by a certain day. And I don't know how, as the lawyer working on the project, I even ended up the one that was supposed to fill out this form and get it signed and have it run through accounts payable.

[00:11:30] But I ended up spending over two weeks, and what I felt was just a ridiculous amount of effort, getting the other players in this project to give me the information that I needed to get the form completed and then signed so that my company can make the payment on time, and that was so frustrating, and it was also stressful because I did have someone reminding me at the time that if the payment didn't get made, that that was going to be an issue, and they didn't say, "And you're going to be the face of that," but I kind of knew that to be the case.

[00:12:05] And so on the day that I'd already been dealing with this for about a week and a half, I listened to an episode of the podcast, and at the end of it, you invited people to reach out, and I just thought, "I'm gonna do that, and I'm gonna do it right now. I'm not gonna put this off. I'm gonna reach out 'cause this is just unacceptable that my day has become obsessing over getting a form signed. That's not what I came to this company to do."

[00:12:35] Scott Anthony Barlow: All these little events, and to your point, you know, this is what so many of us go through, where we're in something that is a wrong fit, and the evidence starts stacking up, and at some point, you know, it tips it over the edge for us to realize, okay, something's gotta change.

[00:12:50] But here's the interesting thing about that too, at least for me, especially in doing this work for the last, I don't know, since 2013, even though we all have those sets of events wherever something's the wrong fit in our life, not all of us will act upon it. And so I am curious what made you decide, "Look, I have to do something about this right now?"

[00:13:11] 'Cause it's easy to think that, and it's another totally different thing for so many of us people to actually do it.

[00:13:19] Misty Leon: Part of it was probably experience. One thing I've learned is that if you're always waiting for the right time to come along, it doesn't. If you're telling yourself, as soon as I get done with this project or I pass this milestone in my life or a holiday, there's always going to be something else.

[00:13:37] And so some of it I have just learned over time that it's better to start taking small steps in the right direction than just wait as if the greatest job on earth is gonna fall into my lap. Unfortunately, I haven't really experienced that ever happening. So that's part of it. And then for that particular situation, there had just been a lot of ups and downs, and so I would go through a period of time where I would think, "Okay, this is great."

[00:14:06] And in particular, I did really love it the first year, year and a half. And so for a little while, even when something would happen that wasn't ideal, I would just get through that period, and then there would be another good period, and I would do something like have a call with a client and really simple thing.

[00:14:25] I remember one time one of my clients said at the end of a call, "That was exactly what we needed." And that would fill me up, and so that would get me through another couple of weeks. And maybe if I'd been working on something else great at the same time I was dealing with the form, it would've been several weeks or months later before I would've really come to that thing.

[00:14:48] But it is just the cumulative experience of knowing that once you've had a certain number of experiences at a job or any life situation, that's pretty much what you can expect going forward. And in fact, over a year later when I was still at my job, because originally I thought they were gonna let me move to a different role, I found myself in a situation where I had to have a medical procedure.

[00:15:16] And so I take a couple days off to have this procedure. The procedure went fine, but I had an adverse reaction to the anesthesia, and so I found myself in a situation where for around two full days, I had serious mobility issues where I would have to get one of my family members to come over and help me if I needed to get out of a chair or when I was sitting back down.

[00:15:38] And the main takeaway that I had from that situation was I felt so free and happy that I actually checked out of work during that period of time. And even though there were still a lot of things going on, I just gave myself the time. And a few days later, it really sunk in. So I would rather be stuck in a chair where my son has to help me come stand up than be engaging with my current job.

[00:16:08] What a contrast and comparison, right?

[00:16:11] Yeah. And I couldn't have gotten a much better illumination of the situation than that; that that was better than working in my job at that particular point in time. And that was actually a lot worse than the form incident now that I look at it.

[00:16:26] Scott Anthony Barlow: Well, so let's talk about when we first got to meet you and begin working with you, because I think there's a couple of things that happened right around that timeframe.

[00:16:35] And when we first started working with you, I think you'd actually written down [00:16:40] that you wanted to... You had this long-term goal of starting your own business, and you just penciled it out for the long term, I wanna say, like, 10 years in the future. I'm curious, what made you put it that far out?

[00:16:52] Misty Leon: Well, so I had had the idea for starting a business in my head. I don't remember how long I already kinda had a placeholder for that. When I got into my in-house role, and at first I really loved it, and then at some point I didn't, I started to think, "What are some other options for me?" As part of the coaching, I did your visioning worksheet, and it specifically asked where did I see myself in 10 years.

[00:17:23] And so as I started writing it out, at that time, this was a couple years ago, 10 years would've been the point where both of my kids will be in college. And especially at that time, the way I felt about my job, I thought I'd already be thinking about retirement and transitioning to retirement. And so when I was going through the visioning worksheet with my coach, he said, "Well, this sounds great, but why are you gonna wait 10 years to do this? This is a pretty well thought out plan that you have here."

[00:17:58] And so my response at the time, probably immediately, was, "Oh, well, I just, financially, I won't be able to do that until that point in time." And even when I think about that, that's kind of silly, because when my kids are in college, I'm probably gonna have some significant expenses related to that.

[00:18:16] So I think I might have been too eager about when the expenses are gonna drop off in my life. But it was mentally maybe just nice for me to think, oh, I have this thing out there on the horizon, and this is what I'm working towards. And so it planted a seed that it really was over a year before I fully started to act on that.

[00:18:39] Scott Anthony Barlow: So where did that seed start to really grow? Where did that seed start to not just be there in the background, but really start to take hold?

[00:18:49] Misty Leon: So I had gone through the coaching program, done my experiments, and the main experiment that I ended up focusing on, I think you call it the paid researcher, but I decided that I was going to take on a new role at my company.

[00:19:09] There were a lot of things I liked about the company, and in particular, as I went through the exercises and identified what I liked and I didn't like and kinda my ideal career profile, I really liked working at the company. It was some things that felt very specific to my role and my department that I was not as sold on.

[00:19:30] And part of it was also that I had done pretty much one thing for over 20 years of my career. So as a benefits lawyer, what I did was my whole career up until very recently, I helped companies comply with all the legal requirements that apply to their retirement and health plans. And so it's a really niche legal practice area.

[00:19:56] Part of me thought, "Okay, well I've gotten to the company. They're not that excited about what I do. They do like people who are generalists who do lots of different things, so if the main issue is that I'm a specialist and that's not what they want and they will pay me to learn to do other things after I've only done one thing for 20 years, hey, that seems like a pretty good thing to check out."

[00:20:22] It was very valuable in terms of teaching me what I actually did and did not want out of the future for my career. So I had moved into the second role. It was much higher profile work, and that was directly tied to the business line and making money. So I get into the second role.

[00:20:42] At first it was great until it wasn't, and in particular it started to become clear to me that I was still going to be doing the original full-time job on top of the new role which was definitely a full-time job in and of itself, and it just was getting very, very clear that it was not a high priority to anyone other than me to solve a situation where I was filling two jobs at the same time.

[00:21:11] Scott Anthony Barlow: Here's couple things I'm taking away. Number one, I think you did such a great job identifying that there was an opportunity for an experiment here. That said, what it makes me curious about is, as you got into that experiment, what are the major things that you learned and that you took away from it?

[00:21:28] Misty Leon: Well, a couple really important things. I learned that I really didn't enjoy becoming a subject matter expert in new areas. In particular, it pushed me to where I was acting more like a junior lawyer, like I had gone back to the beginning of my career, like having to report more to people. And in my original role at the company, I had a lot of autonomy, 'cause I was basically the only lawyer at the company doing this one thing.

[00:21:59] And so I would come to work, do good work, get things done, and there was no reason for anybody to question what I was doing. The second thing that it did is what got me to reconsider the business idea. It really accelerated my desire and interest in pushing to go start a consulting business. And so that got me to go back and revisit and focus on that seed that had been planted, and figure out how I could actually make that work in less than, I guess it would've been more like nine years' time at this point.

[00:22:36] Scott Anthony Barlow: Let's just talk about the seeming absurdity and unrealistic-ness of what you just described here. So I think so many of us over and over again have the exact same experience that you had when we first got to meet you, understand your goals, what you're trying to achieve, you're imagining, "What do I want future to look 10 years out?"

[00:22:57] And then less than a year later, right around a year later, you are now bringing forward, acting on that 10-year plan. So basically, you saved yourself nine years is another way to look at that, and that seems absurd. And I think what you did that a lot of times gets lost is you, one, did a really phenomenal job recognizing and declaring what you wanted, and then putting the experiments into practice is partially what helped to expedite realizing that that could be possible.

[00:23:29] So I think that also begs the question, you know, own your own business, whatever area somebody goes into, its own career change. It's its own special breed of career change, if you will. What I'm curious about is what was the experience for you like in getting to move into this business, having the learning that goes along with that?

[00:23:50] What's been the really positive pieces that align more with you in this particular case, and how does that compare to past learnings that really just haven't benefit?

[00:24:00] Misty Leon: Well, I do, for obvious reasons, enjoy the aspect that as a small business owner, I'm learning new things every day, and even transferring a lot of the same skill sets, but applying them differently.

[00:24:16] I have been in, I guess you'd say, professional services my entire career, so a lot of the core skills that you need are very similar, 'cause I do still have clients, and in fact, my clients are lawyers or law firms. So there's a lot of transfer there. But just having to look more at the big picture and things like in my old roles, I spent more time doing really gritty, substantive projects and getting in the weeds, and now my role is often more to develop the vision for the company and then translate that to others, like my web designer, that sort of thing.

[00:25:00] And so I do really enjoy that. One thing that's been really interesting, so I talked earlier about time management, and I think I am pretty good at time management in that when I come into a day, I pretty much know the things I'm already planning to do that day. Figuring out what to put in the time blocks has been an interesting challenge that I didn't expect in terms of figuring out what are the most valuable ways to be spending my time.

[00:25:28] So that's been interesting. But I do like that I'm in a position where I can pivot my business to respond to the needs of the market and my clients, and I was never able to do that before because, as I've explained, I pretty much did the exact same thing for over 20 years. There were a lot of different aspects to it, and that's why I was able to do it for a long time before I started to get bored.

[00:25:57] But it's really exciting to me that I can take that learning skill, and also focus is one of my strengths, and just pivot to something completely different if I want. I could go work with CPA firms instead if I want to, and I get to make those decisions

[00:26:16] Scott Anthony Barlow: It's a whole new level of autonomy. You already identified that autonomy is incredibly important to you, and with that comes, of course, new problems, like now you have to decide, "What's the most valuable thing that I can work on today?"

[00:26:28] But they're better problems, and they're problems that are much more in alignment with what you value and what you want. Those problems never go away. It's about finding the right type of problems that we want to focus on as opposed to just what's in front of us.

[00:26:42] Misty Leon: Exactly, and for the first time in my career, I'm not really thinking, "When am I going to be able to retire?" And I can guarantee if I had stayed in any of my former jobs, there would've been a point in time a few years from now where I would be counting down the days till when I can retire.

[00:27:03] And I think it is more likely now; I may not wanna work a full-time schedule until I'm 80, but I really think this has given me the opportunity to take my career in different directions for a much longer period of time than I would have wanted at a more traditional job.

[00:27:23] Scott Anthony Barlow: What does your business actually do, and how does it correlate with your unique strengths?

[00:27:29] Misty Leon: So I am doing consulting with small to mid-size law firms that have business clients, and I'm helping them streamline their operations and help them figure out how to better position themselves for a legal market that's been transforming in pretty rapid and unexpected ways over these last few years.

[00:27:51] Scott Anthony Barlow: You were actually supposed to be on this podcast a year ago. You know, we'd emailed back and forth. You were in the midst of some experiments, and it was moving pretty rapidly, and that you ended up saying, "Nope, now is not the right time," canceled. What were you not willing to say out loud back then? That you are ready to say now

[00:28:12] Misty Leon: Well, so that was almost exactly a year ago that I was scheduled to come on the podcast, and so at that point, what I thought had happened, or at least when I got on the calendar to record the podcast, what I thought had happened was that I had done my experiment, it had worked, and now I had moved off into the sunset doing my new role with this new responsibility or expanded responsibility that my company had given me.

[00:28:42] And there were some conversations that had given me the impression that the long-term plan wasn't that I was going to do whatever the new thing was on top of the original job for all time. It was becoming really clear to me that I was going to be working two full-time jobs for the foreseeable future. I just realized I can't. In good conscience, get on a podcast and talk about, "Oh, look, I've arrived, and I figured it out," when I certainly... that wouldn't have been very authentic, but I also wasn't going to get on a podcast and complain about how terribly I thought I was being treated at my job.

[00:29:24] And so I'm really glad that I reached out and said, "Sorry, guys, I just don't think I can do this," because it led to the conversation of, "Well, if the experiment didn't work out, then let's figure out how we can get you back on the right track."

[00:29:39] Scott Anthony Barlow: Ironically, you had figured it out because of that experiment, just not in the way that you thought at that particular time. You know, we can't go back and do it, but it would've been really interesting to have you come back on and talk about, not that you made the transition, but what the mid-experimentation felt like, was like, sounded like, what you were doing, and what it was leading towards.

[00:30:01] I think that that's an important realization though, because the experiment was maybe even more effective than what you thought it was at that particular time. Well, let me ask you this. For somebody who is worried about, you know, not having arrived, and maybe is considering conducting an experiment or maybe in the midst of their own experimentation in one way or another, what advice would you give them having gone through a bit of that?

[00:30:27] Misty Leon: Well, and I wanna be really clear, I don't view that as a failed experiment. If anything, it gave me really critical information that I needed, and as I said earlier, it also pushed me to this business idea in a way that I don't think I would have pursued it within the next 10 years if I hadn't gotten to the point that I was at with where that experiment turned out.

[00:30:49] So I think, well, first of all, generally speaking on the experiments, I think that's really valuable for somebody like me, who was already pretty far into my career. I mean, as we're having this conversation, I'm almost 25 years into my career, and so the idea of jumping ship from a job that at least objectively looks like a pretty great job to go to something with no proof of concept would've been terrifying to me.

[00:31:17] So I think just taking the opportunity to think about, you know, I think one suggestion you make to people sometimes is maybe you could go volunteer with a trade association that practices in the area that you think that you're interested in moving into. I think that's really valuable. And then if you get into the experiment and you realize this isn't it, isn't that kind of the whole point that you're trying to work through and figure out before you make that leap?

[00:31:47] And I really liked one of the things that really resonated with me about your program was that it was so focused on intentionality. The phrase that I think I've heard you say, and I've heard lots of other people say, you wanna be running to something, not away from something else.

[00:32:06] And so I think those experiments are so valuable with just giving you a more concrete idea of maybe I've always thought this job looks like it would be really cool and awesome, but then you could have a 45-minute conversation with someone and at the end of it realize, oh, I absolutely do not want to do that ever. And so I think that's a really valuable process.

[00:32:29] Scott Anthony Barlow: That would be arguably more valuable in some ways than figuring out what is a great fit, the deterrent. That's super helpful in a lot of different ways. Different question, what's different about your relationship with work now versus two years ago?

[00:32:47] Misty Leon: I'm happy and excited, and it's hard for me to say that 'cause I don't want it to sound like there was nothing that I liked about my company; there was nothing that I liked about the people.

[00:32:59] I mean, actually, the people were one of the strongest factors. I really enjoyed my colleagues; I liked my clients. But then I get to get up every day and set my schedule and decide what is worthwhile to be working on, and I am enjoying not really having to work for anyone [00:33:20] else 'cause as we've touched on earlier in this conversation, autonomy is pretty important to me, maybe more important than I realized when I started down this process.

[00:33:31] Scott Anthony Barlow: Something I do wanna make sure that I hit on, we've acknowledged multiple times over that there were a lot of really great things about your most recent organization. Also, it sounds like when you compare it, like this is much, much, much better because it's much more in alignment, and it's not that the other situation was bad necessarily.

[00:33:50] Yeah, there were elements that were not great, but for the most part it was pretty good overall. There was a lot of great things about it. But for somebody who's listening or, you know, viewing this who's in a good enough job, that type of situation, they're not miserable, but they're not thriving, what's the one question that you feel they should be focused on or they should be asking themselves this week?

[00:34:11] Misty Leon: I guess it would be, is good enough really the standard that you wanna apply to get through the rest of your life? And for me, at the time we started working together, I knew that unless I find out about a long lost relative that has, you know, left me their inheritance, I'm still gonna be working for a long time.

[00:34:32] So for me, good enough was not gonna cut it in terms of how I'm gonna get myself out of bed for the next 20-plus years and do a job. I really needed more than that, and so I would encourage them to think about that as well. In my experience, being intentional and thinking things through and not waiting until you're in a crisis situation is usually a better way to go about it.

[00:34:59] So again, maybe just think about some small steps to take, and you don't have to have all of the answers today, and that's one that's really hard for lawyers and probably a lot of other professionals. You don't have to know what the whole roadmap is gonna look like to get started. It's better to just get started.

[00:35:18] Scott Anthony Barlow: Misty said it best. Getting started is the next best step toward finding work that actually fits. You don't need a medical procedure to go sideways to find out that your job isn't the right fit. You need one small intentional step taken before the crisis finds you. If you're in a job or a situation that isn't bad enough to walk away from and isn't good enough to build the next 20 years around, then don't wait for a sign like Misty's.

[00:35:45] What I would suggest is drop me an email, scott@happentoyourcareer.com. Put "Conversation" in the subject line, and I'll introduce you to the right member of my team. You'll get to have a conversation with us. We'll understand your goals, where you're trying to get to, and figure out the very best way that we can support you in making it happen, scott@happentoyourcareer.com. Until next time, I will see you later. Adios. I am out.