733: How One Conversation Can Change Your Career (Even When You Don’t Know What You Want)

[00:00:00] Scott Anthony Barlow: Here's some career advice that you won't find in any job search guide. Stop researching, start talking. What do I mean? Well, Shreya had a conversation, and then applied to one job, and landed it. And Travis, he made one awkward phone call, and it changed everything for him.

[00:00:17] Shreya: I couldn't relate to anyone, so I was like, "Maybe someone else has gone through this."

[00:00:21] Scott Anthony Barlow: Neither of them felt ready.

[00:00:23] Travis: Don't be afraid to make that really awkward connection. Because if you don't, you're right where you are.

[00:00:31] Scott Anthony Barlow: Neither of them knew what they were doing when they started. They just stopped waiting until they did. The one thing that moved them forward was a conversation in all cases.

[00:00:42] A single conversation might just be the only thing standing between you and work that actually fits. Okay, so here's what the research shows. The average job seeker has 25 conversations with decision-makers before landing an offer, and most of those are not formal interviews. They're brief, informal exchanges.

[00:00:59] Referrals, which come from those conversations, make up only 7% of the applicants but account for 40% of hires. And meanwhile, the average cold application has about a 2% chance of becoming an interview. The interesting thing here is that most people are spending the majority of their job search doing the activity that has the worst odds, and almost no time doing the activities that actually work.

[00:01:25] And even if they are, how do you make it work effectively in your case? What Shreya and Travis figured out is the same thing that the data keeps pointing to. Conversation is not just a soft skill; it's the thing that makes everything else work. Shreya took a good job at a good company that seemed like a good fit, but spent a year discovering that her initial instincts probably led her astray.

[00:01:48] Shreya: I really did not resonate with the work I was doing. I think it was just very monotonous. I was working in IT audit, and it's just not something that I wanted to do or envisioned myself doing.

[00:01:59] Scott Anthony Barlow: Okay, so the work wasn't a fit, and that part she already knew. But what made it harder was that everyone around her kept telling her the same thing.

[00:02:07] Shreya: Everyone was like, "This is just how it is. This is just the way it is when you work. It's just stressful. You just gotta go through the motions and then quit in a year or two. Like, this is really good for your resume."

[00:02:15] Scott Anthony Barlow: This is something we've seen over and over again, and it's very common. The people around you, who might also be suffering, convince you that suffering is the norm.

[00:02:25] And if you haven't had much else to compare your situation to, then you might not have the evidence to push back. In Shreya's case, every person around her was living proof that work was supposed to feel this way, so it felt like fact. Every new experience just confirmed what she already believed that this is just how work is.

[00:02:42] She didn't know the people who might challenge that belief, because they weren't in her life yet, so the belief stayed intact. Shreya knew something was wrong, and she also knew that she had to find someone who had gone through something similar and come out the other side. So she went looking.

[00:02:57] Shreya: I actually came across this podcast as I was trying to do a lot of research on, like, what do people do in this situation. Like, as anyone... In my own life, I feel like I couldn't relate to anyone, so I was like, "Maybe, like, someone else has gone through this."

[00:03:10] Scott Anthony Barlow: That was the first move. It wasn't, "Build a plan that's perfect." It wasn't, "Let me go get certainty around this." It was just, "I need to hear from some people or someone who has been here before."

[00:03:23] And by the way, just fun fact, this is why we produce so many different episodes with many, many different stories, so that you can hear from other people who have similarities to your situation, and get exposure to what they're doing so that you can move forward. Okay, but here's what changed everything for Shreya as she started talking to people.

[00:03:44] She didn't have a target. She didn't know what she wanted to do next. So she did what we call a Test Drive Conversation, which is exactly what it sounds like. You're reaching out to people that might be in organizations or roles that you're curious about, often people that might even be able to help you or hire you, but we're not looking for a job yet.

[00:04:03] Instead, what we're trying to do is we're just having real conversations, exploratory conversations at this point, to find out what work actually looks like from the inside. Most people don't do this because it feels presumptuous or because they're waiting to get all their ducks in a row and figure out what they want first.

[00:04:20] But that's backwards. It's also the thing about test drives. You don't, at this point, know what you want yet. That's the purpose. It's the entire point. The conversations are how you get input so that you can find out. Shreya went in curious and came out with something she didn't expect.

[00:04:39] Shreya: I'm gonna reach out to people with, like, different roles, like, that I was even mildly interested in. And coming from someone that, like, hated their job, and I was, like, talking to these people, like, they just seemed so passionate about what they were doing, and they actually genuinely loved what they were doing. And I was like, "People actually like their jobs? Like, that's possible?"

[00:04:57] Scott Anthony Barlow: She was genuinely shocked, because for a year, every person in her environment had been confirming that work was supposed to be miserable, and here were real live humans that had faces and jobs and stories who were lit up by what they did.

[00:05:12] That's not something you can get from reading a job description. You can't read your way to that realization. You have to hear someone talk about their work with that kind of energy in real time to let it register as, "Hey, this could actually be possible for me." Just one single conversation showed Shreya what was possible.

[00:05:31] Shreya: I talked to one person in particular, and he worked as a product manager for a health tech company. He was so nice to me. He was so, like, passionate about what he was talking about, and he, like, showed me what he was working on, like, all the projects in detail, and that was the moment where I was like, "Wow," like, "he's really passionate about what he does."

[00:05:47] Scott Anthony Barlow: She wasn't sold on product management. She was sold on the idea that work could feel like that, and that changed the direction of everything to come. Travis, who you met earlier, came at this very differently. He'd been in the cabinet-making business for years, and he was building real technical skills and work that just really wasn't energizing him.

[00:06:09] It wasn't feeding him any longer. His 'aha' moment actually came in working with our team, when one of our team members had asked him a deceptively simple question: "If money were no object and the day were entirely yours, what would you do?"

[00:06:22] Travis: I said, "You know, I would probably spend more time playing with my daughter. I would play more softball. I'd play some golf during the week. I've been meaning to play that new Zelda game." And she was like, "Okay, Travis, you just said play about five times in 15 seconds. So let's focus in on play.

[00:06:40] Scott Anthony Barlow: Now, this single observation from his lead coach actually pointed him in an entire industry that he hadn't considered– toys, games, and play.

[00:06:51] Okay, so it doesn't necessarily work this way for everybody. Sometimes it's a little bit harder to get to that thread. However, here's where Travis's story becomes a masterclass in something we call the Social Goldilocks method of experimentation. The concept's simple. We have many of those short conversations, the test drive conversations that we mentioned earlier.

[00:07:11] This is not incredibly formal. We're not doing a super formal networking campaign. We're not mass applying. We're not even doing what a lot of people would refer to as informational interviews. We're, like, a few steps back from that. Short, specific, targeted conversations with people who can tell you what something is actually like, whether, you know, this role that you might be interested in, talent development in HR, you know, what are some of the day-to-day pieces?

[00:07:41] Or tell you what a certain organization that you've always wanted to work for might actually be like from the inside. And when you have many of these conversations, you can start to see the patterns, and you can start to put together what you want and what you think you want in a way that becomes useful to have this information coming in.

[00:07:58] Okay, that's the trick here, is you have to keep having them until you can start to put together what fits. Now, this is not the only way that we will teach people to do experimentation and figure out what fits, but it's one easy way to understand. And Travis took this seriously.

[00:08:18] Travis: I started asking everyone, "Hey, do you know anyone that works in the toys and games industry?" I asked our across-the-street neighbors. They came over, and our kids played, and that's when she said, "Well, I know someone who works in the playground industry. Is that toys and games?" And I said, "Yeah, absolutely. Sure. Connect me with them."

[00:08:35] Scott Anthony Barlow: He wasn't actually filtering before he reached out. He was using the conversations themselves as a filter.

[00:08:41] But notice what he wasn't doing, too. He wasn't waiting until he had the perfect resume. He wasn't waiting until he had a clear enough target to feel justified in reaching out. He asked his neighbor; he texted his friend. He made the awkward connection because the awkward connection was the only path forward.

[00:08:58] And when someone offered an introduction to a contact at Mattel, he didn't just say thank you and hope it worked out. He actually made it easy.

[00:09:05] Travis: I said, "Would you be comfortable introducing me to her? I have a template. I'll send you the template, and you just say, 'Hey, I'm connecting you with my friend Travis.'"

[00:09:13] Scott Anthony Barlow: When you make it easy on someone else, you remove that friction. You make it almost impossible for them not to follow through. Sometimes that means writing the message for them. Sometimes that means, you know, taking an extra step to help them think through what would be easiest for them. When people first hear the idea behind test-drive conversations, or career experimentation, or the Social Goldilocks method that we use, a lot of times they'll go into this thinking, "Well, I'm trying to find the right role."

[00:09:42] And that's sort of true. You are. But really, what you're trying to do is you're trying to build a picture of yourself and what you want that you didn't have before, and it's way more complex than a single role. Shreya started with a list of companies and roles, and she ended with something much more clarifying.

[00:09:59] Shreya: As I was having these conversations, I think the company and the environment I work in matters more than the role I'm in.

[00:10:05] Scott Anthony Barlow: She also discovered something about her own strengths that surprised her.

[00:10:08] Shreya: One of my strengths had to do with, like, relationships and people, which was really shocking to me. Like, I did not think that I was people-oriented.

[00:10:16] Scott Anthony Barlow: The idea of career experimentation and the social Goldilocks method is actually doing something else for you. You're not just researching; you're not just job shopping. You are actually learning things about yourself that you couldn't access without taking these types of activities, without moving forward.

[00:10:35] These conversations, sort of, act like a mirror. The things that excite you or the pieces that make you lean forward or pull back, have curiosity about, those are all signals. What you might really be interested in might not show up in a formal assessment. Probably it's gonna show up, though, in how you feel about talking to a product manager for 20 minutes.

[00:10:52] And Travis found the same thing. His conversations with people inside marketing functions just didn't help him understand marketing alone. They actually helped him understand what kind of thinking he was drawn to.

[00:11:05] Travis: I was most interested in end-user and most interested in researching what does the user want. I really like the idea of market research, play testing, observing people using the product, and getting their responses.

[00:11:23] Scott Anthony Barlow: I promise you, neither of them could have written that down beforehand, but afterwards it was obvious to them. We have another episode that goes deeper into what we call systematic exposure, and we can link that up in the show notes.

[00:11:35] However, neither Shreya nor Travis had permission to do what they did. Nobody gave them the permission. Shreya was being told, in fact, by virtually everybody in her life, almost the opposite thing, that what she wasn't was realistic. And Travis had spent a decade building credentials in one direction and skills and experience in that same direction, and had to be willing to look like a beginner in a completely different direction.

[00:11:59] But what they did that was different was they made a decision to believe that something better was possible for them, and the willingness to have conversations and explore to find out, that was powerful because they didn't have certainty at that point.

[00:12:14] Shreya: Wherever you're at is not your final destination. Like, it's not the end-all be-all. There's so many jobs. There's so many companies you probably even haven't heard of. And just through research, just through talking to people, you can find those opportunities. You're never stuck in where you are.

[00:12:28] Scott Anthony Barlow: Travis felt similarly.

[00:12:29] Travis: You have to believe that it's out there, or else you kind of stop fighting for yourself. You kind of resign yourself to, "Well, I guess this is as good as it gets."

[00:12:38] Scott Anthony Barlow: Look, having a solid strategy is helpful. We're all about strategy here at Happen To Your Career. It makes a big difference. However, one of the biggest things that changes the outcome is the decision that you make before you have evidence that something better exists and that you're going to go look for it.

[00:12:56] That decision changes all the other decisions that follow, and if you go have conversations, those are going to build the evidence for you, but you have to start talking before you have that evidence. So I just want to point out again that in both their stories, one conversation started all of this, but this is not just common to Shreya, and it's not just common to Travis.

[00:13:16] This is something that we've heard over and over again, which is why we're literally making an episode about this at this moment. So for Shreya, you know, she started by listening to this podcast and realizing, "Hey, I'm not alone in this." That single realization gave her enough reassurance to take the next step.

[00:13:31] And then for Travis, it was a question that our team asked him, and the word play that surfaced five times in 15 seconds. I promise that it's gonna be something different for you. It will, absolutely. It is for everybody. However, neither of them had a plan when they started, and that's the common point.

[00:13:49] They had a direction, and then they had the willingness to find out more. So if you find yourself in a similar place, you probably already know that we'd love to support you in any way possible. If you're not sure what to do, you're not sure what conversations to have, but you know that you want to move forward, then that's where I would say reach out to us.

[00:14:08] Drop me an email, scott@happentoyourcareer.com, put 'Conversation' in the subject line. And I'll actually connect you to the right member of my team so that we can learn more about your situation, what your goals are, what's stopping you, and we'll help you put together a plan, and then figure out what work fits and allows you to thrive.

[00:14:27] It's what we do. It's what we love to do. You don't need a perfect plan to start. You just need one conversation. We'll see you in the next episode. Until then, I'm Scott Anthony Barlow. Adios. I'm out.