Scott Anthony Barlow 00:01

Okay, what are signature strengths? Well, they're the truest representation of you and most essential to who you are. They're the combination of your innate talents and how they have developed over time based on your environment and your experiences. They're the most foundational pieces of how you operate and how you behave. Okay, great, but how does that help you?

Introduction 00:28

This is the Happen To Your Career podcast with Scott Anthony Barlow. We hope you stop doing work that doesn't fit you. Figure out what does and make it happen. We help you define the work that is unapologetically you, and then go get it. If you feel like you were meant for more, and you're ready to make a change, keep listening. Here's Scott. Here's Scott. Here's Scott.

Scott Anthony Barlow 00:58

From the last decade of helping you with your career, we've learned that you get pretty excited. And many of our listeners get really excited about the idea of doing work and your strengths. We've also learned that this idea of doing work that you can't help but do anyway is super sexy, but really difficult to do in reality. This leads to a lot of questions about strengths, and particularly what we call signature strengths. What's the difference? How do I translate my strengths into hireable traits? What the heck are strengths anyway? How would I use them in an interview? But far and away, the most common question that we get is, "How do I use my strengths to get hired?" In other words, how do I turn this fun idea about my strengths into something that tangibly earns me a freaking phenomenal income? And when I show up to that role, I actually enjoy the challenges that I get to work through. Well, I'm so glad you asked. In this episode, we're going to cover, quite a bit actually, what signature strengths are, and how they differ from what you already think that you know about strengths. We'll cover a story of how one woman used her strengths strategically and how she used them, actually, to make her career change. And how a studio executive who didn't fully recognize his strengths until he actually left a VP role that was no longer good for him. And then what that ended up meeting for him and how that translated into an even better role. And then a mom who was working in communications and marketing, how that allowed her strengths to guide her to a career change. And then for not one, not two, not three, but four, back-to-back promotions. All of these stories are coming from how our clients use their strengths to get a job so that then they could use their strengths at that opportunity. Okay, there's a lot of subtlety there. We're going to cover that. But we're going to, in order to help you understand the truth behind strengths if you will, we're gonna have to cover some of the misconceptions about strengths, including the strengths and the phenomenon, the challenges surrounding strengths prioritization, and I'll give you several ways that you can specifically begin identifying your signature strengths now. Not tomorrow, but now.

Scott Anthony Barlow 03:16

Okay. So in 2016, I decided I was going to read all the books on human happiness that I could absolutely find anyplace. So several years and about roughly 50 books later, I realized two things. Well, happiness, if you have happiness as a goal, that is fleeting. It's a moving target. Now, the second is the meaning, the idea of meaning, or in this case, meaningful work is actually usually a better goal, and one that strangely brings more happiness more often. But here's why I'm telling you about this. If you read enough books on happiness, you eventually realize that many of them riff off of Martin Seligman's groundbreaking work in positive psychology. And as you delve further into his research, you'll learn that strengths are one of the major determinants of whether or not you're going to experience meaning, and particularly fulfillment on a regular basis. Now, the real question, by the way, I also learned that Seligman had coined the term signature strengths. I'd heard this term before from my days working in HR leadership at Target and some other places. But I didn't realize that it came from Martin Seligman and he defined signature strengths as those character strengths that are most essential to who we are. Now in my observation, that phrase, essential to who we are, is absurdly on point. But aside from that, like, what's the big deal with signature strengths anyways? Well, here's how I want to help you understand that. Gallup, I've mentioned Gallup numerous times because Gallup does a great job with research– both in strengths, as well as work and wellness, and quite a few other areas across the globe. Now, we've also had members of the Gallup team on the podcast in the past, Jim Harder is one of my favorites. Yeah, I loved that conversation with Jim. And hopefully, I'll get to meet him in person coming up here next time I'm in Omaha. But I want to share that, if you haven't heard of Gallup when you visit their website, they say they help organizations solve their most pressing problems. And although this is a pretty big claim, Gallup is in a unique position to achieve this mission because they have over 35 million respondents in their database. That's a lot of data, right? And the company's research consistently shows that having an opportunity to use strengths regularly matters. Here's just a small sample of the findings. You gain a positive emotional boost while using your strengths. Or the more you use your strengths in a day, the less likely you are to feel stressed, worried, angry, or even sad. When you use your strengths regularly, you're more likely to have positive emotions regularly. Okay, now, maybe these won't come as a surprise. But when you pair these findings with Seligman's definition of signature strengths, those things that are essential to who we are, you are most likely to be the happiest when you get to be yourself or when you're at your best. Okay, so what if you could spend all day working on your strengths? Think about that for a second wave. You could optimize your entire life for your strengths. How enjoyable would it be? Would you be laughing hysterically or joyful all the time? You know, the cool thing is Gallup actually has us covered there, too. The research has found that those who report experiencing happiness, enjoyment, smiling or even laughing a lot use their strengths more often than those who don't. Maybe also not a surprise. But here's the question I have, how much more is it really, like, how much more? What's the smallest change that you can make to see these different results? Gallup found that using your strengths in as little as just one to two more hours per day buys you the ticket to feeling like you're on the career happiness joy ride. And from the results that we've seen with our clients, it's more like buying a fastpass at Disney World. And conversely, at HTYC, we've seen the opposite. When you stop working on your strengths for even as little as six months, this can have a devastating psychological impact that erodes your confidence. Research, and the experiences of all our clients all over the world, it shows that you can actually get results pretty quickly when you regularly start connecting with and using what we call your signature strengths. So as you start working more and more on those signature strengths, you see a compounding effect.

Scott Anthony Barlow 07:57

Let me tell you about Maggie. When I met Maggie, she was working in communications at the time. And she said she felt stuck. Actually, what she told me at that particular time was that she was just, how did she say it, she said, "I don't know exactly what I want to do. But I'm so over this." And so she knew she wanted to be doing something different. She didn't know what. And as she started exploring what she could do next, she really began leaning into areas that came more naturally. Now pay attention to that, because that's going to come up again a little bit later on. So she ended up creating a presentation for a training program, a project that was fun and relatively easy for her compared to other people. And we'll talk about that here in a minute, too. She noted this as a piece of evidence in her exploration. And pretty soon, she realized that she was particularly well suited for Training and Development. Fast forward a few months, Maggie was working within her existing organization to make a shift in training. But this is where it gets really interesting because 16 months later, I received a message from Maggie, she had been promoted. And when I spoke to her again, just 18 months after that, Maggie, yeah, getting promoted again. Each time she was getting that title increase, she was getting a pay increase. More importantly than all of that, in my opinion, she was enjoying this experience. Okay, here's what was happening. Each time she found new ways to use her signature strengths, she got more joy out of the work that she was doing. She was contributing more, and becoming that person who people view as a high performer and want to be around. This led to additional promotions that pushed her deeper into her strengths. By exploring and focusing on her signature strengths, Maggie was led to, not just one, but all of those executive-level roles, and she's actively enjoyed.

Maggie Romanovich 09:49

One of the things that has been very eye-opening to me since going through my career change was that I have strengths that I've always viewed as, like, weird quirks, but they work really well in the job I'm at. You know, my former team leader called it Maggie magic. And I was like, "Oh, I think he will mock something there." Like, I've been able to leverage those strengths to make other people feel good about where they're at and feel more connected to each other.

Scott Anthony Barlow 10:19

Now, Maggie's voice sounds familiar. There's a reason for that. It's because we shared her story on an episode of the Happen To Your Career podcast. And we'll link that up in the notes as well. But let's go ahead and break down what was happening in Maggie's story. Let's get deeper than what we told on that podcast. When she was initially exploring, she realized that she wasn't getting to be the truest version of herself. The way that she noticed this was she observed that other people around her were really into the work. They were nerding out on all the communications and the marketing pieces. And they couldn't help thinking about and talking about these relentlessly. And so she has this going on around her. And she's like, "Yeah, I don't feel that same way." Okay, so she's noticing this, she's observing it. Next, she began to explore. She realized that she loved making and giving presentations and training. We just mentioned that a minute ago, right? But keep in mind that at first, she was only doing this in small doses, very small doses. But she found it was easy for. She found that she was enjoying it. Now fast forward those seven years, and we talked about Maggie makes career change. She gets promoted, you know, four times counting the career change where she has been working in areas of her strengths, and her performances significantly better because of how aligned her roles are with her strengths. What does she do? Well, she initially went into Training and Development to support sales teams, then was promoted to higher and higher ranks of Training, Learning, and Development leadership. So here's a pop quiz for you. What are my key strengths, really? Are they giving presentations? Are they creating PowerPoints and training others? Like, are those Maggie's strengths? Are they not? Are they not Maggie's actual strengths? To answer this question, I think it's pretty important to know what strengths are and aren't. Doesn't to be helpful information right about now. Okay. Well, we mentioned Gallup defined strengths in the past, we've talked about that a lot over the years, as what makes you talented and unique. And then we already mentioned Martin Seligman's definition earlier of signature strengths. But for our purposes, I want you to begin to think about strengths as, "what lies underneath the surface?" And this is often several layers deep. Okay, here's how I want you to think about this. Think about it as being similar to an iceberg. I know, there's a lot of iceberg analogies out there. But it works really well for this. Above the surface of the water, you see the visible or tangible outputs of those strengths. Maybe you're highly skilled at Excel, and things like pivot tables, they just come easy to you and other people are like, "Oh my goodness, I can't even do a pivot table." And maybe it comes really easy for you to keep your office tidy and organized. Or maybe you just have the ability to talk to anyone. We're gonna talk about Angie a little bit later on, and she sort of has that ability too. Those skills, abilities, and knowledge are like that iceberg. Above the water, you can easily see the spreadsheet, the tidy office, and the person having a great conversation. But below the water, underneath the surface, it's the things that are propping up that are causing it to be visible. The much larger part of the iceberg that's underwater represents the pieces that we're most interested in here. It's these pieces that are difficult to see, and there the real reason why strengths can be such a difficult concept. So in Maggie's case, she makes and gives great presentations and trainings. Right? Okay, tip of the iceberg. You go through them and you think, "Just wow! These are really great." But what you visually see is a PowerPoint training materials and her facilitating the training. What you feel and experience though, is that you're learning and engaged. And it seems as though Maggie is a master at allowing you to get the skills and knowledge you need for your job, like, nothing you've ever seen before. It appears she's having fun, and you're having fun at her training. And that's what we witness above the water. So now, that's great. But strengths are not to be confused with skills. They're not to be confused with those other things that we can tangibly see. It's what's below the surface that are many contributing reasons to why Maggie is so amazing at all of those pieces that we can see. Training and facilitating training just happens to suit how Maggie thinks. And it happens to suit her communication tendencies. You might remember that her boss calls these Maggie magic. Now what we didn't go into in her episode, and you'd only know from working with Maggie is that she's at her best when she gets to solve problems that involve developing and connecting with other people, communicating in really quirky ways to capture attention of whoever she's talking to, and translating concepts and unique ways. Why? Well, this caters exactly to make these combination of nature and nurture. The way that her mind works is she thinks, she acts her behaviors are, her tendencies are in the same way that she trains. So she can just do it. Meaning, it's how she's wired naturally. But also, she has a background working in communications and other places. So she's picked up plenty there and incorporated it into how she operates. She's even married to a teacher. So these are just, you know, tiny bits and parts and examples that add up to allowing Maggie to just simply operate, how she operates. Have you ever heard the saying, "how you do anything is how you do everything?" Well, I think that that idea can apply to signature strengths.

Maggie Romanovich 16:19

Those are little things that are gonna make a big difference in that space, and being able to figure out who I am and what's important to me. You know, the way I raised my kids, like, what are we focusing on here? The way that my husband and I spend our time and our money. You know, like, let's stop doing things we don't find value and feel obligated to do, and there's some obligations you have to do. But the same thing applies for work and in your personal life, you know, the more you can seek out opportunities that really demonstrate your strengths, the stronger your performance is going to be.

Scott Anthony Barlow 16:47

If you think about signature strengths as operating as the truest representation of yourself, then that means the goal can be reframed as finding the environments, the roles, and the situations that require the least amount of translation from who you are to how you get to do or how you get to be. Here's another interesting fact. I mentioned earlier, Maggie didn't even change organizations when she made the big career change from communications to learning, development, and training. Same company, but a better alignment in her day-to-day with who she actually was. So then how did Maggie use her strengths to get to a role where she then got to use her strengths? This is actually another part we didn't go deep into in Maggie's episode, or even when we mentioned Maggie's story in the Happen To Your Career book. Here's what she did. She allowed her strength to guide her career experiments.

Maggie Romanovich 17:48

One of the things that we did was StrengthsFinders. And so the StrengthFinders that I discovered at Happen To Your Career, the StrengthsFinders that I have in here, and like the idea of if I can amplify those strengths, rather than trying to accommodate the things that I'm not as strong in, it's going to make a bigger difference for me to amplify my strengths than to try to make up ground for things that aren't as strong for me. And so it's less of a struggle to be in my function. And it's less of a struggle to function because I'm doing things that I'm naturally drawn to, as opposed to things I'm trying to force myself into. Like to me, like, that's the whole idea of "happening to your career", rather than falling into a role because you're in the right place at the right time. You have discovered what place and what time you want to be in, and then those opportunities surface themselves to you because you're searching in a different way.

Scott Anthony Barlow 18:40

Much the same way, when you use a compass to guide you every time the compass is pointed north, that's where Maggie would continue to travel. It became very similar to making a road trip on foot. She knew originally that she wanted to make a career change, but had no idea of the direction. So she began her progress over a few months. She tried a few extra projects, some of them didn't work out. But one thing she tried, as we mentioned earlier, was making the PowerPoints for someone else's training. And as we also mentioned, she loved this, it was easy for her. Now, as a coach, if I'm helping someone hone in on their strengths, I don't think we've ever talked about this anyplace else, but what I'm doing is I'm looking for oddities. I'm looking for something that is unusual. I'm looking for something that is not normal. I'm looking for something that is extraordinary, and meaning “extra-ordinary”, not ordinary. Making PowerPoints or training materials is something that most people find tedious, or at least they're not that excited about. Also, when people first do something like this, they usually put out a mediocre attempt. This was exactly the opposite for Maggie. She was getting great feedback and it was fun and it was easy for her. And remember, though, much like the iceberg, it wasn't about the PowerPoint itself, it was about uncovering what was happening below the surface that made it this feel, we'll say, feeling this way to her, but also to others, and made it valuable to others at the same time, right? Okay, so she followed her strengths compass north to try more of this work. This led to multiple conversations with her boss, a variety of other projects that allowed her to dive deeper into her strengths. And when a role came open for Training and Development with the sales team, well, she'd already validated that this was something that she was interested in, and already connected with the people who were more responsible for that area or were in charge of that area. And she'd already built relationships with them. So even though she technically didn't have any significant learning and development experience, at least from a resume perspective, her new boss was already familiar with her background, her skills, and her experience, and more than willing to take a chance on her. Pretty cool, right? Okay. So that's part of what she meant when she said and talked about being able to allow her strengths to dictate a more intentional career change, which she called happening to her career. But what would have happened? What would have happened if Maggie didn't let her strengths lead her in the direction for career experiments, and ultimately, her career change? Well, this actually happens a lot. Way too much, I would say.

Scott Anthony Barlow 21:33

Many of you know that we use a tool behind the scenes that's called the Clifton Strengths Assessment, used to be called StrengthsFinder, used to be called StrengthsFinder 2.0. It's changed over the years in terms of the name, but the assessment is still similar. It's a pretty comprehensive assessment. It uses 34 strengths themes, then ranks them, it rank orders them for your personal situation. And now I'll tell you, I've taken literally hundreds of assessments over the last 25 plus years. And I love this one because it has built-in redundancy, which means that you're much less likely to gain the assessment, whether you're intentionally trying to do that, or whether it accidentally happens. Anyhow, regardless of how you're feeling day to day, you're much more likely in this assessment to get a true to you result, although no single assessment is perfect. The reason that we use this one, this particular tool on a regular basis, is because it provides what I call starter language. So starter language is important for beginning to understand your strengths at a much, much deeper level. Now, you might have heard this strategy in other areas, too, you might have heard that when you're talking about mastery in a given area when you're talking about training and development, when you're talking about building a culture, there's a lot of places where language, or the strategy of a tab beginning to attach language so that we have a foundation from which to talk about that area and how to think about it. So, therefore, then we can build on it. It's pretty common and pretty effective strategy. And this is true with strengths as well. The assessment provides that starter language. Now a fun fact behind the scenes before we use Clifton Strengths Assessment, we used to build that language and the understanding of what that language could be. We used to do that with our clients over five to seven coaching sessions. No joke. This assessment is a pretty cool tool. It's a gem. Because it replaces all that time and cost by providing the language in about 40 minutes. Pretty cool, right? Okay. But here's what happens. There's often this period where clients get the strength results back, and then they look at it and say, "Yep, okay. Those are correct. That's me. I'm honestly not sure how it knows me so well." But how exactly do these strengths help me? That is when we, as coaches, know that we've reached the sometimes unhappy gap between knowledge and the ability to apply that knowledge. What do I mean by that? Well, let me give you an example. My middle son was about eight years old, and I was trying to teach him to do a backflip on our trampoline, and he told me at the time, he said, "Dad, I already know how to do a backflip. I've seen it on YouTube", and he was correct. He did theoretically know how to do a backflip. But when I said "Okay, all right. You know how to do this. Go ahead and do a backflip." He couldn't do it. He wasn't yet able to apply that knowledge. It's very different now, like, fast forward to present day. He's done thousands of backflips and even 360 backflips. And he's taught the entire neighborhood how to do their own backflips on our trampoline. But it illustrates this important point that knowledge and the application of that knowledge are two completely separate events. Prior to the ability to apply the knowledge of strengths, several issues almost immediately popped up. One in particular is what we call strengths envy. Here's how it shows up. I mentioned just a moment ago that people look at their strengths and are like, "Okay, yep, definitely right. That's me." But not only how does that help, they often are thinking that they're reading their strengths, and they're thinking, "Okay, well, that's great. But like, how does that translate into something that is a useful to get hired?" And what we find is that people are thinking about those strengths, and they don't consider them valuable. They read through it, and they're like, "Okay, well, so great. I have, you know, achiever strength. But how does taking immediate satisfaction and being busy and productive actually help me?" And even though the achiever theme helps explain their drive, because achievers have a constant need for attainment, you feel as though this isn't that valuable. Okay, well, why does that happen? Why does this reading through beginning to understand your strengths and then immediately feeling like, "wow, these are not that valuable."? Why does that happen? Well, it turns out that if we're continuing along with that definition, that strengths are the truest sense of us, it's what's most ingrained in us. So our tendency, and our bias is to think that if I can do this, and I can do this well, that everyone can do this. And if everyone can do this, therefore, it's not that valuable. And then what causes this envy type of phenomenon where people are hoping for something that is new or different. But strengths are actually familiar. Some people have described them when they really understand them well, and when they get to operate in them is sort of this feeling of coming home. And that familiarity is definitely a double-edged sword. It helps, and it hurts at the same time. So way to think about this whole idea of strengths envy is, if you're experiencing that, if you are reading through your initial language for your strengths, and you're like, "Oh my goodness, like, this is not something that is all that valuable." That's normal. But at the same time, it also is exactly what most people experience, and what most people don't realize is that even though it feels like it's not that valuable to you, everyone else has a different set of strengths. So this is part of what makes you unique. All right, so we see this happen over and over again. And it's just part of the curve. So if you've experienced this already, then that's great. If you haven't, it's probably coming in some fashion or another.

Scott Anthony Barlow 28:04

One of the other things to point out, though, is that there's this tendency for us to undervalue our strengths that's more than just strengths envy. And this happens partially when we don't realize that our strengths are causing us to be successful if we don't have a full understanding about why we have been successful in a particular area as we look in the past. Let me give you an example here. Michael was an executive at a studio you've definitely heard of. Michael had gotten himself a job in the entertainment industry almost on a whim. And he'd never left. He just loved the studio aura, in many different ways, for a long time. He loved accounting and finance. He enjoyed the feeling of harmony he got from putting things in order, keeping things in balance, and his roles had become progressively better and better each time he got promoted until they weren't. So sometimes, you don't realize how your strengths show up until you remove yourself from using them. And that's what ended up happening to Michael. Michael had his boss come to him and said, "Hey, we've got this situation. And we think that you're exactly the person for the job." So he got promoted again, yet again, into another situation. Now, this was different because each of those past situations, he was getting to dive deeper in his strengths. But he didn't know that's what was going on. He just knew that it felt better and better. He was also getting to experience growth in a really positive way for him. And then with a new situation, he was thrown into a new role that on paper, should have been using many of his similar experiences in the past. In reality, it was very, very different from that and it pulled him out of using his strengths day to day. This became a terrible situation for Michael. Terrible in the fact that he was seeing a physical degrade in his health to the point where he lost 20 pounds, he was very, very worried he felt very much like a fish out of water all the time. So definitely taken a toll on him for sure. What he didn't realize was going on at the time. And only later on when he started really learning about strengths is that he had not only been pulled out of it, he was getting to rarely get him to spend any time working on his strengths in a given day. And the few times that that happened were counteracted, over counteracted, I would say, by the other times where he was not where he's asked to operate the whole rest of the day outside of his strengths. Okay, now fast forward quite a bit. Part of the way that Michael was able to get clarity on this was by leaving that organization. Now, what I'm not saying is that everyone needs to leave their organization in order to get clarity on their strengths. I'm pointing that out for two different reasons. Reason number one is sometimes you can intentionally remove yourself from a situation for a short period of time in order to generate clarity or generate new discoveries in one way or another. So for Michael, that looked like leaving his organization completely and then working a variety of different roles. And he did many, many different things. After that, he did everything from test driving cars for organizations responsible for test driving new vehicles, all the way to working in different aspects of like consulting and finance, all the way to many, many other things. So he launched headfirst into his experiments to begin to discover what resonated, what didn't resonate. And then that helped him get clarity on his strengths. Okay, again, this is not right for everyone. You have to go with where you're at. But what you can do is a much, much smaller version of that. You can design a way to systematically test where you're getting to use your strengths. A couple examples from this, that you can apply almost immediately. Something we did in the past with a client was we helped them take a two week long vacation. And during that vacation, we helped them intentionally layer in different types of activities. And those activities, many of them were new, forced them to realize where they were using their strengths and where they were not. And here's the second strategy that anybody can use too, whether or not you're combining it with a vacation, they kept a journal where they would just go back after each activity, and then tried to decipher for that particular day, at that particular time, what were the areas that they got to use their strengths? And what were the areas that came easier? What were the areas that they enjoyed? And then ultimately, as they would look back over a period of several weeks, they could start to pull together what were some of the themes, what were some of the constants. What were the things that showed up again and again? What were the patterns? And that's often what we're looking for when we're talking about strengths. We're trying to observe and piece together what are the patterns. Much the same way that you might with any other type of experiment. Okay, now, we've applied that type of strategy into an entire sabbatical that might last a year to a three-week, month-long vacation. There's a lot of different ways that you can do it. You can even do it over, you know, a really long weekend. What we found works is combining that with new experiences, new experiences force you to evaluate and look through a different lens than you normally would, which helps accelerate the learning process for understanding what actually matters about you and your strengths. Okay, so you can benefit from that knowledge. Here's another super easy thing that you can do that leverages the strategy that Michael had used. Another way that you can remove yourself temporarily is by even taking on a different type of project at work, or working out a temporary way you're going to step into another role for a period of time, or removing some of the pieces that don't feel as great, just temporarily. Now often this can be a series of conversations with your boss or your team. And when we talk about it from a temporary fashion, sometimes as little as a couple of days to even a couple of weeks, then you can still produce some of those same types of learnings. Now it's most ideal if you get thrust into another area that is new, but not really wiring such extensive experience or such extensive learning that it is highly, highly stressful. So be careful with that cautious of that. This is what I would say would be an advanced-level experiment. If you're unsure on this, then you can always get help from a coach, get help from a mentor. Obviously, this is something that we do as well, and we help with every single day. But I would encourage you to explore different ways that you can temporarily remove out what you're experiencing in your day-to-day work so that you can then buy yourself some space and bandwidth, and then leverage that as its own little experiment.

Scott Anthony Barlow 35:45

Okay, I want to give you another completely different example of how someone utilize their strengths to be able to, not only find a role that really fit them but then get to continue to do work that fit them incredibly. I want you to meet Angie. Angie is someone we worked with as a client, and she can't help but meet people and be having conversations. It's just what she does. You might say, "well, I know someone like that." But it's probably more than that. The ease of which she will introduce herself or talk to anyone is only surpassed by her excitement while she's doing it. Now this is evident if you're one of those people she meets and talks to. She's going to make you her friend almost instantly. She just puts you at ease, like, you're supposed to be wherever she is. Now, here's a bit of an odd fact, behind the scenes. Angie is actually from Moses, Lake Washington. The small town where I live with my family. And this is weird because we work with people all over the world and almost never with people from my tiny hometown. But although Angie had recently relocated away from Moses Lake to a new nearby town, when she came through to visit, we got to meet up for coffee. What I'll tell you is that 10 minutes in, it was apparent to Angie's strengths, and almost all of her tendencies were in building relationships. So what does this mean? When we think about strategy to be able to find opportunities that actually are an amazing fit for your strengths, and more importantly, leveraging your strengths to do that, Angie's a great example. Because it meant that she was most comfortable and at her best when she was face-to-face with other people. And that, of course, meant that we had to get her in as many face-to-face situations with people who could help her or hire her as possible. So we incorporated this idea into her experiment. So instead of consistently sending emails or doing lots and lots and lots of writing, then it was very focused on how does she connects with people and quickly gets to that face-to-face element in one way or another. And it wasn't just about she made the best impression. Consequently, her tendencies, since they were so suited to face-to-face also gave an indication that this is where she benefited the most, this is where she got the most learning. She was able to quickly decide whether or not something might be fit, whether or not something could be a part of her ideal as she went through her experimentation. So here's what happened. She got into a variety of different conversations, even the interviews, actually interviews, as you might imagine, since she's great at building relationships, did pretty well in interviews. So the goal there was to, instead of trying to do things a certain way, which if you've heard us talk about different types of career experiments or different strategies for moving into new opportunities, then, you know, there's a lot of them out there. And almost all of them did not suit Angie the best. The ones that suited her the best were the ones that could quickly get her into those face-to-face experiences. So she could make an impression people could quickly get to know her, people could quickly decide they wanted to take a chance on her, and she could, even more importantly than what they were deciding, she could decide, is this an area? Is this an organization? Is this a set of people that I want to work with? Pretty cool, right?

Scott Anthony Barlow 39:24

Okay. Now, before we end this episode here, I want to share a couple of quick things. I want you to think about one question in particular. So I want you to think about where you gravitate towards on a regular basis. And what I mean by gravitate towards, think about those areas of your past jobs, roles, situations that you've been in, there's often your job description, the thing that you get paid for, and then there's what you find yourself doing over and over again and going above and beyond or just can't stop doing. I want you to think about those situations. What are the, as you look at all of the different roles and places that you have been, places where you've gotten paid, what do you find yourself doing over and over again, that really is not a part of your job? It's not a part of your role, but you can't help stop doing it. That, whatever that is, to give you a clue as to where you can be spending more time. It might not be obvious at first, but that's the place where you want to start digging. And then one of the things I mentioned earlier, I want you to look for those oddities. Sometimes this is really difficult to do alone. Sometimes it's really difficult because of the same thing that causes strengths envy. We think that what we are great at, that everybody else is great at. We think that things that come easy to us are things that come too easy to everybody. And that's absolutely not true. Over and over and over again, you'll find, if you're looking for it, that's not true. So instead, I want you look for what are those oddities, those places that show up. That's going to help guide you as you're trying to figure out and dive deeper into how you can leverage your strengths over and over again.

Scott Anthony Barlow 41:26

Hey, if you've been listening to our episodes here at Happen To Your Career, and you want to make an intentional career change to much more meaningful work and have it neatly laid out into an organized framework, well, guess what? We actually have that available for you in the Happen To Your Career book. It's available on Amazon, audible, anywhere else where you get your books. You'll learn about the five hidden obstacles stopping your career change, how to figure out what truly make you happy with your career, and what brings you more happy more often. And more importantly, how to transition to a much more fulfilling career and life. You can find the book on Amazon, audible, anywhere where books are sold. By the way, people are particularly loving the audiobook, which you can access right now in seconds.

Scott Anthony Barlow 42:14

Here's a sneak peek into what we have coming up for you next week, right here on Happen To Your Career.

Speaker 3 42:21

I didn't want the success of my job to be determined by things that I didn't want to do or wasn't comfortable with.

Scott Anthony Barlow 42:27

A long time ago, I used to work for Target. And I did Human Resource Management and Leadership for Target. And it was a pretty wonderful opportunity. I love the company. They took great care of me. Much of the leadership training that I got, and have to this day, came from Target putting time and money, and effort into me. So I'm forever appreciative of that. Also, at the same time, I was working for them and they decided that they wanted to move their HR that supported stores more and more and more into the stores and more into the standard retail environment. Now, that was exactly the right decision for them. But it really wasn't that great for me, to be honest. And that's something I have seen over and over and over again, where people go through, they get a job, it's amazing opportunity, and then the company changes or it evolves into something else and it's no longer amazing. It's not even awesome. It's the opposite of that. That happens.

Scott Anthony Barlow 43:47

All that and plenty more next week right here on Happen To Your Career. Make sure that you don't miss it. And if you haven't already, click Subscribe on your podcast player so that you can download this podcast in your sleep, and you get it automatically, even the bonus episodes every single week, sometimes multiple times a week. Until next week. Adios. I'm out.

James Sannan 00:00

I think that was the hardest to basically be rejected. But then to try to internally make yourself better and then try again. So be rejected, but then just be persevering, and keep trying again and again and again.

Introduction 00:20

This is the Happen To Your Career podcast with Scott Anthony Barlow. We hope you stop doing work that doesn't fit you. Figure out what does and make it happen. We help you define the work that is unapologetically you, and then go get it. If you feel like you were meant for more, and you're ready to make a change, keep listening. Here's Scott. Here's Scott. Here's Scott.

Scott Anthony Barlow 00:45

Some people are content with just showing up for work and doing the same thing for year after year, years on it. If you're here listening to this show, Happen to Your Career, of all places, I'm guessing that's probably not you. I'm guessing instead, you want to keep learning, growing both personally and professionally. But when you're looking for opportunities to learn and grow in a role no longer is providing that for you, it's really easy to lose your sense of fulfillment.

James Sannan 01:13

I got to the point where I wasn't learning. I got to the point where it just felt like I was... stuck is kind of the best word I can describe. I got bored. And I wasn't excited about my role. I didn't want to tell people about my role, even though I think a lot of people would probably say my role was pretty cool at the time. And it was all internal. It was me just not being satisfied with where I was at.

Scott Anthony Barlow 01:39

James worked in the aerospace field for many years. Like you and many people we work with, he thrived on learning and growing. Well, there were many learning opportunities for him as he transitioned into different roles within his company, which by the way, a lot of people have heard of. He quickly came to a dead end in his growth, even described it as feeling stuck. That's where we got to meet James. And that's also where we got to help with his next career change. Here's the thing, I want you to listen for this later on in the episode. He was able to find the growth that he needed, but he had to figure out what really worked for him and what growth meant. Pay attention later on, you'll hear him describe exactly how he found that and how you might be able to find it too. But to see what led to his most recent change, James takes us back to his early days in aerospace.

James Sannan 02:29

I started out of school as a mechanical engineer. I wanted to get into aerospace– airplanes seemed cool to me. So basically, I've been with Boeing for about, I want to say we're close to 15 years. And nothing against Boeing– Boeing is a great company. And I think some of the teams I worked with customer support, I was a deputy fleet chief at one point in time, then they made me a product manager and a program manager, where I did some really cool things with a software teams. I was jumping around within the same company. And every time I jumped it was motivating. It was fun. I was doing something new. But I got to the point where I was saying, "I've done all the best jobs at this company. I want to try something new, and no other team within this company excites me." And quite frankly, even if I did make those jumps, I wouldn't be learning a whole lot because I kind of understand this business now. I understand airplanes. The thing that excited me the most, and part of this was my experience working as a product manager at Boeing, was I really liked the software aspects of building a product from the ground up that really helped people. And knowing that, I said, "Really where I should be looking." So I had this passion of trying to kind of enhance my skills in product management and kind of looking at different firms outside of aerospace to do that. But that was a huge leap. But when did I know it was time to leave Boeing? It was basically when I stopped learning. I stopped basically being excited about the incremental bit of knowledge I would get changing from position to position to position, even changing from one aerospace to another aerospace, I just didn't find the incremental knowledge gap to be very exciting. I wanted to do something entirely new. That was exciting.

Scott Anthony Barlow 04:22

So here's what I'm super curious about. You had this really wonderful background, what most people outside looking in is like, "Hey, you would be crazy to leave all of this experience you've built up and all of these wonderful, you know, sets of..." and, we have a tendency to do that, I think, as human beings. However, I remember having a conversation with you. You and I got... I don't get to chat with everybody, but you and I got to chat shortly after you found us, right? And I remember one of the things that you said is, you know, "Honestly, this was really, really wonderful" and you were having the time of your life in many different ways for a number of years, but then at some point, it sounded like it was no longer as wonderful. And you were experiencing less growth, if I remember. So I'm wondering if you could dive into a little bit of that, like what caused it to be less wonderful than what it used to be at one point?

James Sannan 05:17

It's interesting. I used to think it was just the fact that I'm just very ambitious. And I have to continue to grow in some way. And every time I would make a growth leap within that company, that started a new position, I'd get a level promotion, it was just awesome. And I was very, very happy. And then I do this new role, and all of a sudden, I'd be learning a lot of new things and that would make me incredibly satisfied. But I got to a point where I wasn't learning. I got to the point where it just felt like I was... stuck is kind of the best word I can describe. I got bored. And I wasn't excited about my role. I didn't want to tell people about my role, even though I think a lot of people would probably say my role was pretty cool at the time. And it was all internal. It was me just not being satisfied with where I was at. And, further reflection after I moved on, I think it came down to the fact that I just wasn't learning anything anymore. I was kind of, at a very mature state in my company, I was more or less educating other people on processes and history. And I just don't see myself going anywhere. And I think that's why I was getting down on myself and I was frustrated.

Scott Anthony Barlow 06:35

I think that's such an interesting place to be. First of all, it's not necessarily a fun place to be, let's acknowledge that first, like, when you're there when you're experiencing that, and you are bored, everybody else thinks your job should be exciting, but it's not feeding you in that way, then that's not a great place to be all the time. That said, I think it's really fascinating because so many people tend to underrate what they need in terms of growth from a... if we're looking at it from a fulfillment standpoint, like, what I heard you say is that, like, at some point, you know, you shifted and you are now teaching other people and no longer getting that rate of growth, which you'd grown accustomed to. But I would also argue that you really need it otherwise, you know, it dropped off the other side, and it was no longer a great situation for you. So on one hand, I think that's fascinating. And then, on the other hand, I'm curious, what did you learn about yourself out of that experience?

James Sannan 07:40

You know, I did a lot of self-reflection. I recognized I wasn't getting anywhere on my own. I think when I tried to network with my internal network, I was basically told, "You know, there's lots of aerospace companies out there. There's all these startups you could get into, you're an airplane guy, you know, you'd be great in this sort of role." And I knew, personally, I had to make a big giant leap, try something new entirely. Because I think deep down inside, I just knew I had to kind of exponentially grow my growth mindset. I needed to try something entirely different. I didn't want to do something that was pretty much similar to what I was already doing just with a different company. And so I had this goal of mine, right? So I had this goal, and I knew what I wanted, but I didn't necessarily know how to get there. And so when you talk about self-reflection, I think I was stuck then I eventually reached out to your team. Because all the networking advice I was receiving was, "Don't make a jump. You're not well equipped to make a jump."

Scott Anthony Barlow 08:42

For all the things that you want to do, yeah, don't do that.

James Sannan 08:46

Stick with what you know. You're gonna do great with what you know. And I needed somebody to tell me, "No, you can do this. Right? You can make this jump. This is how to do it." And so I think I had a lot of learning opportunities when I was working through your team to understand what my network wasn't telling me. This is how you kind of make those incremental steps.

Scott Anthony Barlow 09:11

Well, here's what I'm curious about then, if we fast forward to the end, it turns out well for you– you ended up getting an opportunity that it sounds like when we were chatting just a little bit before we hit the record button here, it sounds like it's hitting on some of those growth pieces that you need, which is amazing. But what I'm curious about is, as you think back to the process of making this change, and what you were struggling with initially versus what actually happened in the end, what would you say were some of the hardest portions of it or hardest parts for you to make the change?

James Sannan 09:48

The biggest challenges I had was trying to, well, twofold. I'm gonna say, one, is having to deal with failure. I'm not good at dealing with failure. And a good example would be, I work with Amazon. But it wasn't the first interview I had with them, I think I had two other interviews previously with them. And I did not make it through those rounds. And so I think a lot of people, when they don't make it through the rounds of a company will say, "The company doesn't want me, I don't want them, you know, we're just not a good match. Let's move on. And let me look somewhere else."

Scott Anthony Barlow 10:23

It's not for me. Peace. I'm out.

James Sannan 10:25

I knew I really wanted to work for Amazon. And so I didn't have that mindset. But at the same time, I felt incredibly rejected every time I didn't make it through. And so in some ways, I think that was the hardest to basically be rejected, but then to try to internally make yourself better, and then try again. So be rejected, but then just be persevering, and keep trying again, and again, and again, and use that as an opportunity to make yourself better. So I think that was one challenge I had to overcome. And it definitely impacted me at the heart just feeling rejected again, and again, again. And you know, honestly, it wasn't just the interviews I was being rejected from, sometimes I'd apply for a role I would think I was really good for, and then I would never be called for an interview. That was rejection in itself. So even though that individual never met me, I still felt rejected. So there's a lot of, I think, rejection.

Scott Anthony Barlow 11:18

Layers of rejection can happen in the career change process. So here's what I'm curious about, though, as you pointed out, many people would get rejected once or twice or three times, and in one way or another, through those layers of rejection that we've now uncovered, and they wouldn't keep going. So what did you do? What worked for you to allow yourself to keep going through the process? Because let's be honest, that's hard. It's much easier to sit here and say, "Oh yeah, I just need to keep going" than it is to actually functionally do it. And I know, you know that, but what did you find worked for you?

James Sannan 11:56

Okay, so I started to say, "What could I do differently next time? What did I do wrong?" And honestly, I think I overanalyze it a lot. And sometimes I feel like, "maybe I could do this differently, or I could do this differently." But the first thing that I think I started to do that was on the right path was... network with people within the company. And I started to actually cold call people on LinkedIn, at the company in these groups I thought I was a good fit for. And that was also a little bit of a learning process, because quite frankly, if you don't have any connections with an individual you're trying to connect with via LinkedIn, chances are, they're not going to respond. But I actually did have some successes there, where people did get back to me, and people actually had set up information interviews with me. And if none of those information interviews actually panned out, even though I got recommendations out of them, where the individual was, like, they had my back, and they wanted to refer me, and honestly, they didn't work out into roles, but I think what I learned from that was I became a lot more comfortable trying to network and talking to people about their jobs and being a lot more natural about it. And also in the process, I started learning about the company. And so there's all these abstract things I was getting out of this networking that weren't necessarily leading to a job, but it was definitely better preparing me next time I did an interview for the company. And so I look back on it. And you know, I was just at the playground the other day, and my kids were taking their bikes out and learning to bike and I met some of the other dads there, who are also, have kids in similar age, and they're biking. And turns out, I was talking to a CTO of a startup tech firm, who just got like $250 million raised out of Series B and we were just chatting and I got a chat with him about his job. And we really hit it off. And I'm just thinking about how far I've come to where I used to be, where I was somewhat awkward talking to people about their jobs and learning about their industries to where I am now where I love talking to people about their jobs and their industries and finding about their journeys and it doesn't necessarily lead to a job, but it leads to knowledge and that knowledge is gonna prepare you so much better when you do want to take those sorts of leaps.

Scott Anthony Barlow 14:20

I think that's fascinating. Because what I took out of that is, even though in your case, most of those meetings didn't necessarily lead you anywhere directly, they were still a critical part of learning, not just about the organization, although that sounded like it was beneficial, and not just about reinforcing what you wanted to do or where you wanted to go, but also the act of practicing the skills that you needed to accumulate to make everything else happen. So that's really interesting because I think most people when they think about a career change of any kind, they're thinking about, like, how do I just take the skills that I have and then move it over? Not, how do I upskill and then practice those skills in order to actually functionally make the change and turn something from what was potentially not possible into now possible. If you had done zero skill development, you might not have made it– I'm not 100% sure, but it's possible that you might not have accomplished your goal. But that skill development along the way, in addition to all the other pieces that you're doing, all of a sudden makes it possible. So when you look back on this, first of all, that story, standing there at the playground with your kids, now able to functionally talk to other people about their jobs, like it's no big deal. Yeah, that's amazing. That really does illustrate how far you've come. And at the same time, it also makes me curious for, what did you see in... why did you keep pursuing Amazon? You knew that you wanted to be there. But what did you see in Amazon, that you latched on to that you felt, "Hey, this could really be a right place for me" that caused you to keep going?

James Sannan 16:11

You know, the more I studied the company, the more I realized that they have a very unique culture that has not changed a lot in the last 20 years. And they have, I think, these 14 leadership principles that typically they ask you to clearly understand before you interview, but even after the interviews, those leadership principles are instilled in every meeting, they actually bring them up constantly, they make you take classes on these leadership principles. But in a lot of ways, those leadership principles were absolutely awesome, because I could read about those leadership principles. And I got to the point where I memorized those leadership principles. And I realized, too, this company was. This is at their core, who they were. And I felt, almost to the point where it became like a passion, I was very passionate about their leadership principles. And I said, "This is exact... This resonates so well with me. This is exactly where I want to be." And I could actually look at examples of other companies where I had worked and said, "They don't have this sort of principle. And I've had issues because they don't have these sorts of principles." And so I think, in that way, it made me much more passionate about the company. And I got to the point where I was trying to say, "Look, I know I'm right for this company. How do I convince them I'm right for this company?"

Scott Anthony Barlow 17:36

That's a completely different mindset than I think what most people go through. Most of the time, I find that when you are... When the power dynamic is where the company holds the majority of the power, many people think about it as okay, like, "are they going to accept me?" And to be able to switch to the type of mindset that you just talked about, like, "Hey, how do I show them that I'm actually right for this company?" I already know it's true. Like it just needs to be a product of coming out on the other side, where that they now know it as well, because you had, not because you just wanted the job, but because you'd already done all the research, because you had already had many conversations, it was no small amount of reinforcement that led up to that conclusion, I would imagine. So having gone through that and putting what sounds like a ton of research and time and effort into understanding whether or not this organization is in fact right for you, what would you advise other people to do or think about as they're researching organizations?

James Sannan 18:43

You know, I think the key learning that I had is, sometimes you relied too much on resume. You look at the job records and the requirements of the job and you look at, "Do you require an MBA? Do you require..." and of course, you think if you meet all those requirements, you're a sure fit. And that's not true, and I can tell you firsthand. Every job I applied to, I met all those requirements. And most of them, I did not actually get interviews for. It's really the personality that really gets you the job. And so when you get interviewed, they're looking at you as a person saying, "How well does this person fit into the team? Do they... Are they passionate about our culture? Do they understand us? Do they do the research before they interview?" And I think the interview itself is so much more important. And if you do your homework, and if you really show that you're passionate about their mission, their company's mission, I think that's going to take you so much further than, you know, just making sure you have all the right skills. And then how do you get to that point? How do you get to the point where you really stand out in an interview? A lot of prep. Make sure you get people at the company who can kind of give you mock interviews, for instance. And I had several people who actually gave me mock interviews, and give you feedback on how you come across in your mock interviews. Make sure you're clear and concise, but make sure most importantly, that you understand what that team does, and specifically, what they are trying to achieve. And then make sure you kind of answer those questions with that in mind.

Scott Anthony Barlow 20:23

I think that's a great example of what actually makes it feel relevant. If we're in any kind of setting, not just an interview setting, but even if you and I were meeting over coffee or something like that, and we're talking about the potential of you coming on board to this team, or this company, or whatever, you know, I think that what you're talking about is how do you translate it into what's relevant for them. And when you put it in the context of their problems or challenges, what they're trying to accomplish, what they're trying to achieve, which I heard you say earlier, really, what you're doing functionally is you're now making yourself relevant to their world, which is really any kind of marketing or sales or whatever, at its very, very core. So, one, really nice job doing that. Because when you and I chatted a year ago, it's been about a year, right? We just figured that out, you and I chatting. And I would say, please correct me if I'm wrong, I would say, you felt a lot less confident about being able to do that sort of thing in that type of environment compared to what I'm hearing, you just roll off the back of your tongue now.

James Sannan 21:37

Yeah. I look back to when I first met with you guys. And by the way, during that time, I think I had interviewed at Amazon twice. And I look back at those first interviews, and I look back at the interview where I actually made it through. I look at where I've come. I was an entirely different person by that time, not literally, but I had learned so much during that time, about the company, about what they were trying to achieve. And that's honestly what got me through. It was that journey between that first interview and that final interview, where I just really spent a lot of time invested and trying to learn about the company because I knew that's what I wanted. And in the end, I think it carried through and the team who was interviewing me saw the same thing.

Scott Anthony Barlow 22:23

What surprised you the most as you went through this career change journey? What was different than how you thought it would be?

James Sannan 22:31

I think the people who helped me out, the people who actually reached out and gave me the mock interviews, how they would take me on as almost like a... they didn't have to take me on. I had this guy from Microsoft who worked at Amazon who I had worked with briefly for maybe, you know, just a few hours, I reached out to him on LinkedIn. And he connected with me and he spent hours doing mock interviews with me. He helped me with salary negotiations, told me I should be more aggressive with my salary negotiations. And I mean, this guy really, really had my back and I just... I think that's what surprised me the most is how much people in your network, even people who haven't really worked with you that much, can really have your back and support you and be on your team. And in some ways, I feel like forever in their debt, like, I feel like how can I ever pay these people for how much they've helped me. But I think just the goodness in people. And I think in the end, too, kind of I had this original perception of this big, monstrous company, Amazon, just projecting everyone who applies to them. And in the end, I realized that, you know, they're just like you and me, they're just trying to do their jobs. They have a lot of people applying and they're just trying to make heads or tails of who's the best fit for the team. And it's definitely not personal. And honestly, if you're that passionate about it, they probably want you to be on the team.

Scott Anthony Barlow 23:55

Yeah, absolutely. I think that's such great insight. When you think about the goodness in people, is what I think I heard you call it just a minute ago, that's something that has perpetually surprised me over and over and over and over again. I think that people are... if given the opportunity, so willing to be kind and helpful and good. And that's one of the most fun things for me to see over and over and over again, especially in the work that we do here is just that there's so many wonderful people out there, and they don't always have opportunities and outlets, and in many different ways, I would be willing to bet, I don't know, you might go back and ask this person that helped you out. But I'd be willing to bet he was getting something out of that too. I bet it was good for him at the same time, and not in a transactional way. But I bet he legitimately enjoyed being able to help you and coming from a place of help. I bet it wasn't just like, "Oh, I gotta go meet with this James guy. Help him get through the, you know, the..." I bet it wasn't like that at all, right?

James Sannan 25:09

You know, and I think you're right, Scott. And I'm sure you're like this, I'm also like this– where someone's gonna reach out to me, I'm always gonna respond to them. And then that might change as time goes on because I'll just get too busy. But I always, I kind of want to help people out. I feel like I've been helped out and so I need to return the favor. And not only that, but it's kind of enjoyable, helping people out to make them happy and be part of that. I'm sure not everyone's like that. But you know, at least I feel that way. So I can relate.

Scott Anthony Barlow 25:38

For sure. Okay, so confession time. I spent... someone had messaged me on LinkedIn. And we, at this point, really, really fortunate to have way more messages than I can actually respond to. However, I spent, like, 25 minutes trying to write this thing out to help this person. And in the scheme of things, I probably should have been spending my time elsewhere, but I love it so much. And it really is... I feel an obligation to try and help those people that are in need in a variety of different ways. And so yes, I probably should have been doing something else technically for the business. But also, that's what it's all about, you mentioned the humanity earlier, like, that's where I think the humanity comes in, right?

James Sannan 26:31

That's the best part of your job, right?

Scott Anthony Barlow 26:33

It is. Like, that's kind of the reason we exist in many different ways. So if I'm never ever willing to do that, then, you know, why even do it per se. But you know, all that, to wrap back around to your journey, and I think one of the things that was really, really interesting, and your coach pointed this out, too. You know, I asked, "What did James do really, really, really well?" And he said that you were one of the most persistent people that he worked with. You mentioned the rejection earlier. He mentioned, you know, continually coming back and continually learning from each and every, what you might call a setback. So if you think way back to one of those times where things weren't working very well because we've got a lot of people that are listening to this right now that are in the midst of a career change, and probably not everything's working particularly well, but what advice would you give them that might help them or helped you to keep going in that particular moment when it's getting hard and you're getting those rejections or your things aren't working as you anticipated here?

James Sannan 27:46

I would say, "persistence always pays off". I think if that's your goal, don't let anyone get in your way, don't let anybody say you're not good enough. If you know you're good enough, you need to keep after it. And eventually, trust me, I know, I spent a year doing this, being persistent with this company, but it pays off. You'll get there. So I think persistence does pay off. But you can't just make the same mistakes over and over and over again. Look back internally, try to take each setback as a learning opportunity, and figure out what you can do differently next time.

Scott Anthony Barlow 28:30

Hey, if you love this story where we talk through and walk you through step by step how someone got to more meaningful work, then you'll absolutely love our audiobook– Happen to Your Career: An Unconventional Approach to Career Change and Meaningful Work. I even got to narrate it, which was so fun. And something that I really enjoyed doing and will definitely do for future books as well. But it also contains firsthand accounts from career changers on how they made the move to more meaningful work, just like we include on the podcast here. And actually, it's been called the best audiobook experience ever by some reviewers. You can find those reviews, and the book itself on Audible, Amazon, or any other place where books are sold. Seriously, just pause this right now and go over to Amazon or Audible or wherever you want and download it. You can be reading it and started on your career change in literally seconds.

Scott Anthony Barlow 29:24

Now, here's a sneak peek into what's coming up next week right here on Happen to Your Career.

Scott Anthony Barlow 29:30

Okay, what are signature strengths? Well, they're the truest representation of you and most essential to who you are. They're the combination of your innate talents and how they have developed over time based on your environment and your experiences. They're the most foundational pieces of how you operate and how you behave. Okay, great, but how does that help you?

Scott Anthony Barlow 29:59

All that and plenty more next week right here on Happen To Your Career. Make sure that you don't miss it. And if you haven't already, click Subscribe on your podcast player so that you can download this podcast in your sleep, and you get it automatically, even the bonus episodes every single week, sometimes multiple times a week. Until next week. Adios. I'm out.

Jenna Murphy 00:01

There comes a point in life where you have to decide, "Can I continue on this path? Or do I have to decide that it's time for me to do something different?"

Introduction 00:14

This is the Happen To Your Career podcast with Scott Anthony Barlow. We hope you stop doing work that doesn't fit you. Figure out what does and make it happen. We help you define the work that is unapologetically you, and then go get it. If you feel like you were meant for more, and you're ready to make a change, keep listening. Here's Scott. Here's Scott. Here's Scott.

Scott Anthony Barlow 00:39

When you're working in a career you once loved, it can be hard to come to terms with leaving, even if you're feeling burned out. Many times, it takes coming to a crossroads where you're forced to decide– should you stay or go?

Jenna Murphy 00:53

The speed and the intensity of which they were making cases, made it really hard to adequately juggle the caseload and the responsibilities I had there and my ability to be a mother. And when I got, essentially, inside of me got asked, "Are you going to be a mom? Or are you going to be an employee?" My question was hands down, it was answered, "I'm going to be a mom."

Scott Anthony Barlow 01:14

That's Jenna Murphy. Jenna had been a criminal prosecutor since graduating from law school, and she loved it until she didn't. In the beginning of her career, she pictured herself prosecuting criminals until she retired. However, fast forward a few years, Jenna had started a family and, not long after, began feeling burned out trying to juggle her demanding career and being a mom at the same time. Her priorities had shifted, and the things she had once valued in her job, just didn't seem as important. Recognizing it was a time for a new chapter, she set out to find a role that fulfilled her in a way that being a prosecutor once had, but also allowed her the flexibility and freedom to spend more time with her husband and her young kids. Okay, so Jenna did a wonderful job defining her non-negotiables for her next role. And then holding steadfast to those criteria. She went through the ups and downs, like many stories you've heard on this podcast. One really interesting one for her was she turned down an almost ideal role and had a few heartbreaks when roles turned out not to be what she expected. Jenna finally accepted a role that aligns with what she values most and is truly a great fit for her. So it turns out that it was such a great fit that just one month into her new role, she actually got promoted, which I'm really excited for you to hear her talk about at the end of our conversation. So stay tuned for the whole thing for that. What you're going to hear right now is Jenna kicking things off, sharing a little bit about how a family member's run-in with the law led to her becoming an attorney.

Jenna Murphy 02:55

I started as a criminal prosecutor. That's what I went to law school to do. I really don't know what the draw was specifically about the legal field. Because if you'd asked me in college, I would have told you I wasn't smart enough to be a lawyer. When I was in high school, I had a family member who unfortunately found himself in some trouble. And while I guess some part of me could have represented him, I did not think I could do that for other people. I knew that there had to be justice somewhere. But also at that time, I felt like that there might have been some injustice that was done by the Criminal Procedure process. And so I began to look and I thought, well, if I decide to go and be an assistant district attorney, which is the only thing I knew of at that point in time, at least I can make sure that the charges that I bring are appropriate. And I can feel, like, that there's a reason someone has been held accountable for the things they do. What I did not want to do was somebody walk into my office and say, "I killed those five people. Can you get me off with it?" And I just couldn't do that. But as a prosecutor, I would have the ability to be sure the charges were appropriate and to make sure justice was seen through if that's even the right way to say that.

Scott Anthony Barlow 04:07

We'll go with that. I think that sounds very accurate.

Jenna Murphy 04:12

And do it with a good conscience, I guess. And not feel like that I was ruining people's lives. But doing something that was intended to hold them responsible for the things they did.

Scott Anthony Barlow 04:22

I have a variety of friends that all are in similar positions. And when I chat with them, it seems like that conscience part, what you described that, you know, the reasons that you got into it, versus sometimes the realities of it are a lot of times in conflict, and it seems like that is the challenge continuously over and over and over and over again. And I'm curious how you feel about that and what you found are the challenges.

Jenna Murphy 04:57

So most of the majority of my work was spent in the misdemeanor and traffic world. That's just because the last eight and a half years, I primarily focused on battery family violence cases in the misdemeanor world, lots of driving under the influence, and then some traffic citations. My first 22 months, I did a lot of drug cases, a few aggravated assaults, things like that. I do think that there's a fair portion of the legal world that can be swayed or can have a bias to it. I'm not going to say that that doesn't exist. As a prosecutor though, I think when you have that perspective of trying to make sure that each charge you bring is warranted, that you also would steer away from some of the ridiculousness, I will say, that exists, that you just see it kind of unfold every single day. I feel like the Justice Department has moved, or the justice field has moved in from this middle of the road, like let's do fair each way to it's either horribly unjust or people are just not held accountable at all.

Scott Anthony Barlow 06:05

What's an example of that? I'm super curious now.

Jenna Murphy 06:08

Well, I mean, of course, you have certain incidents where they're just going to try anything and everything to make a case, it's just really not there, let's be clear. I mean, not every case that gets sat on your desk is worthy of being prosecuted. That's what is important for a prosecutor to remember in their mind is that you cannot be gung ho for every single case. That being said, the last jury trial that I tried was a DUI marijuana case, I knew that the DUI case was iffy. But the defense attorney stood in front of the jury and said, we had marijuana. My client possessed marijuana and the jury still walked in. And I think that was the point, at least for me, where I was like, I don't know why I put my effort and time into jury trials, they bring stress, they take away time from my family, that was the disillusion that I had, or the part where that I became disillusioned with trying to find justice and understanding that one charge is why we're there. We're trying that because he doesn't, but the fact that the jury just didn't care, and I get it. Marijuana has its thing in itself. But in Georgia, it's illegal. And if someone looks at you and says, "We broke the law." I just don't understand the concept of being like, man, we don't care.

Scott Anthony Barlow 07:22

What else led up for you? What else led up to you saying, "I need to make a change"?

Jenna Murphy 07:28

Becoming a mom. I'm getting married. Yes, having two babies. I have a four-year-old who just turned four in June. And I have a little over two and a half year-old. He'll be three in January. And that always, I guess, somewhere new inside of me that would change me. I just didn't realize how much it was going to change me. And it was those times that, for instance, that jury trial, that just really bothered me that I'd spent, you know... Granted, I tried to be good to them and put them to bed and do all the things. But then I may have not sat on my couch prepping for a trial that my husband sat beside me and didn't get any attention because I was working only to stand in front of a jury and a jury, like, "whatever". And that was the part that made it really hard. The burnout was extreme. I mean, I think COVID obviously had a law in it. Our jurisdiction in particular was not one that took a whole lot of time off. We got about two weeks down before we went back into actually having jail matters where we had to get people out of jail because misdemeanors you just can't keep people in jail forever. And so that was virtual, we took about 60 days, is all we took before we went back to the office full time because I went back to the office full time and told them, "Surprise! I'm pregnant again. Here we go." So and then coming back once everything loosened up post COVID, I'm proud of the sheriff's office that I worked with. But the speed and the intensity of which they were making cases, made it really hard to adequately juggle the caseload and the responsibilities I had there and my ability to be a mother. And when I got essentially, inside of me got asked, "Are you going to be a mom? Or are you going to be an employee?" My question was hands down, it was answered, "I'm going to be a mom, sorry." Like, as much as I love this job, and I love what it's offered, if you told me six years ago, I wouldn't be a criminal prosecutor anymore. I would have told you, you lost your mind. And today, here I sit. And I'm not a criminal prosecutor anymore. I don't miss that part of it. I missed the people there. But I'm proud of where I am today. And I'm proud to say that in my, gosh, month and a half, right that month and a half that I've been out of that job, I've been a better mother than I ever was throughout my entire process of being a mom and being a criminal prosecutor.

Scott Anthony Barlow 09:40

That's amazing. What I'm very curious about is when you made that decision, was it that case that really caused you to ask that question and make that decision, or was there some other event that was the catalyst to you making that decision?

Jenna Murphy 09:59

No. I mean, I think it had been a slow progression over time that I knew the burnout was there and I was just trying to figure it out. And then my kids had a Thanksgiving program at school daycare. And I can remember being in court almost running to my car to get back to daycare, or to get to daycare, to be there to watch them. My mom and my dad had come from where they lived, my husband was there. And so, of course, I rushed in and I watched his program, and thankfully, I didn't miss any of it. And then I watched the clock the entire time I was there and then rushed back to go back to court. And I think that was probably the straw that really broke the camel's back, for lack of a better explanation. I just knew at that point that I couldn't juggle both things.

Scott Anthony Barlow 10:56

I can definitely appreciate that. I actually had a really similar experience, too. I did actually miss something. I'm so glad you didn't, and that you made a change. I did miss an event. And honestly, to this day, I don't even remember what it is at this point, it probably doesn't matter. What matters is that I missed one event completely, and showed up just after it was completed. And then I almost missed another one. But I'm so glad that you didn't have to go through the missing first before you missed a chance. That's really cool actually.

Jenna Murphy 11:29

I'm really thankful that I didn't miss it. But at the same time, I think it was just... I realized in that moment that the setup of the prosecutor wasn't going to give me... it wasn't about being able to work from home or asking for those leniency, it was the fact that the judge set the schedule and that then we had to consult that before we could do anything. And I understand that's part of it. But there becomes a point in life where you have to decide, "Can I continue on this path, or do I have to decide that it's time for me to be some and do something different?"

Scott Anthony Barlow 12:03

Absolutely. What do you feel like, looking back now, were the hardest parts of making a transition?

Jenna Murphy 12:12

By far, the hardest part for me was waiting. So the one huge thing I was waiting for is I had, I think when I first decided to take this journey, I was about six months away from being able to apply for student loan forgiveness under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness. That was okay at first. I think that signing the contract, meeting with Phillip decided he was going to be my coach, that it was kind of like this renewed, okay, let's put our heads down. I can get through this. And probably about three months into that, it got real hard. It got real hard. And to the extent he and I had that conversation, "I can't do this. I have to get out now." By that point, the burnout was so bad that my therapist looked at me at one point and she's like, "I know you don't want to take meds anymore. But I need you to go back on some type of medication because you are worrying me." Not that I don't take that as I was going to hurt myself. But she could just see the physical change in me that I was depressed. I didn't want to get out of bed. I was doing what was minimally required of me to be a mom and I wasn't in a good place. And so that's when he and I started kind of shifting that transition. What can we do to get out? But the hard part I had was not having that forgiveness. I had to be in a qualifying role. And so that was by far the hardest thing, was pushing through and waiting for that opportunity. And the day I left my job, which was, this is not technically... The new job is not technically a qualifying role but the last one was. The day I walked out, my loan zeroed. Yeah. So as an Assistant Solicitor General, working for a government entity, I qualified and I had applied for and met all of the payments that I needed to. I was just waiting on a centralized way on the government to forgive the loans. So I took a risk deciding to do the senior paralegal role. But I thought, okay, here's my dive, let's go deep in like, hope I can swim. And like I said, the day I left is the day I logged in about an hour before I left my office, and it had zeroed. And so it was not a qualifying role. We had looked and looked and looked and tried to find something within that realm. And I just, we weren't able to find something that qualified, that wasn't still within the prosecution world or the government attorney world. And so nonprofits would have qualified but most of the time they didn't meet the standard of what I needed to live on. And that was where Phillip was very instrumental for me, of constantly reminding me. We set this in place. We cannot... Like I understand you want to get it out, but like, you and I have had a very level-headed conversation and you've told me what it takes to get out and we have to be true to that. And so with him there backing me up, it definitely took on an entirely new perspective for me, because I knew that I wasn't just pushing myself. But anytime I needed that reassurance, text message, email, whatever it was, I shout out to him, and he was always there to come back and be like, "Remember, this is what we're doing. It's okay, keep your head up. It will come."

Scott Anthony Barlow 15:28

When you say this, "We set this up." Expand on that for me. What was this?

Jenna Murphy 15:35

Just the progress. I mean, the ICP.

Scott Anthony Barlow 15:38

Yep, Ideal Career Profile.

Jenna Murphy 15:42

Making sure I had the letters in the right order. The ICP was really big. And he just kept pushing me back to that profile that, "Here's where we really want. But here's what we have to have." And understand we're trying and we are getting closer, we're inching closer to what you need. But you cannot just completely... Unless we can make it work and justify it in another way. That at one point in time, he and I talked about the one heartbreak incident where it was supposed to be a full-time role. And then they asked for full-time with a whole lot less money than they had told me they were going to offer. And I was like, "but" and he said, "Well, if we can make it work with less hours so that we can do something, then maybe it still fits." And so of course, we tried that and it didn't work. And ultimately, that was probably one of the times he propped me up most because I was very heartbroken at that point. To feel like, you see the light at the end of the tunnel, and then all of a sudden, it's just like, "Nope, door closed." And so that was a hard day. But after two or three days of wallowing in that which I probably wallowed more than I should have, it was just a few weeks before this opportunity opened up. And I did. I had found myself through, I had one other offer, a really good offer, but it was a litigation role. And I just really didn't want to litigate anymore, it would have required more travel, it would not have given me anything more than one more day at home than I had any other role. And as a person who I was at their offer, I just told them, "I have to stand true to why I did this. I didn't do this for money. I did this because I want to be at home, I want to have freedom and flexibility. And I don't want to answer to someone else's schedule." Obviously, every job you have to answer to someone scheduled but not as much as I would have to in a role like that, in a role like I was in.

Scott Anthony Barlow 17:35

I think what's really fascinating that I've observed over the years is your word choice there where you said, "This was a great opportunity. But but but..." And although it could be a great opportunity for someone, it's not actually a great opportunity for you because it didn't meet your ideal career profile. And just for context, ideal career profile, when you're thinking about that, it's just a checklist of those things that you must have in order to create an opportunity that really is a fit for you. And then also a list of your ideals or aspirations and where you're heading too. So that being said, first of all, that's phenomenal because that truly is the hardest part in many people's career change journeys. And hard to those areas that you've defined are actually true for you. It's so difficult. I mean, we've talked about many, many stories, hundreds of stories over the years where people have been forced to say no to something that was right in front of them in order to, later on, talk about delayed gratification, sometimes much, much later on, say yes to what really actually fits. And so what I'm curious about for you, when you think back on that, that situation, what did you find was actually in those moments, the hardest part about it, or that made it particularly challenging for you?

Jenna Murphy 19:08

Yeah. I think it's hard because you see an opportunity. In that particular case, it was a good bit more money than even what, well, it's a good bit more money than what I was making at the time. It was more money than I took to leave that job and go to where I am now. But having to really step back and say, "that wasn't" it was hard at first, because that's like, "Oh! That's more money than I've ever been paid." But money wasn't going to make me happy. You know, it wasn't going to get me the things, and as much as I even told them in my interview and in fact when I walked into the interview, the day before Phillip and I had talked about it and I went in like, okay, I'm gonna say no. But I'm going because I've already RSVP'd this thing and I'm not that person, I'm not just going to show you to stand you up and not come in. And so I went in, I interviewed, I kind of expected when I walked out the door that they were going to make an offer. And sure enough, when I email him the next day, he's like, "I'm really sorry, we take some time to think about it. I hate to hear that. I was about to make this offer to you." And so I think I took 24-48 hours in emailing back. And I said, "I really appreciate it. Thank you for consideration. One day, this may be a job that, you know, I can come back to you. I hope that if the opportunity ever comes up, and I want to go back into something like this, that you will consider me then." He actually came back to me about three weeks or four weeks after that. And so they had filled that position, but had another one and wanted me to reconsider if I would come to work for them. And again, I had to tell him, "You know, I understand from your perspective that you think this is a much better fit. But in reality, it really doesn't change. You know, I'm at work five days a week right now, but I'm in one county with one judge. With your job, I'm going to be in the office four days a week, but I can be in any county in this state before any judge. And I have to think about that. That's still not what I want." What I wanted when we put this together was I knew the amount of money I had to have to get out. I wanted a remote or, at the very most two days a week, an office job, really wanted a Christian organization. That was something that I wasn't sure I would find just to base upon the other things that I needed, but I really wanted somewhere that I felt like people would believe the way I believe, or at least had those ideals in their head and kind of that basis. It didn't have to be, I don't know, it didn't have to be a church organization necessarily, but just had that background. And I'm trying to think there was one more thing that he and I were talking about, I can't remember the fourth one off the top of my head. And three of those four, the only one we didn't know about the day that I accepted this offer was the Christian organization. And that was answered in my intro because this company, actually one of the co-founders, is a huge believer. In fact, when I was there Thursday, they actually had a Thursday prayer meeting at the office. And I was like, "Okay, if I didn't think I was where I was at before, I know the answer now."

Scott Anthony Barlow 22:10

It is deeply integrated.

Jenna Murphy 22:12

It is. And for that, I'm very thankful.

Scott Anthony Barlow 22:15

I was looking up your ideal career profile here really quick. Is it okay if I read off a couple of pieces of this?

Jenna Murphy 22:22

Sure. That's fine.

Scott Anthony Barlow 22:23

So we had, "Somewhere that truly embraces the fact that I am a mother and with love on my babies too. Somewhere with an incentive or encouragement for mental and physical health, I would love for it to be acceptable for me to exercise, even if during my work hours." Pretty cool. And we had autonomy of schedule, remote work, specifically defined work time, the ability to say no when necessary, daily flexibility. So one of the things I'm curious about, what did that mean for you the ability to say no when necessary?

Jenna Murphy 22:55

I think in my last job, because of the nature of where it was, and there's no denying that we needed more staff, we need more attorneys, we need more staff, and we needed more judges, like, anybody in that office to this day will tell you that. The county is just growing at a rate that really needed that and we just weren't going to have that. And so there was not the ability to say no. You kind of had to take and embrace whatever was asked just because it had to be done. I mean, at this point, you're working with people's freedom and their constitutional rights. And so there really wasn't a whole lot of leeway to say no. So to have somewhere that I could say, "I'm sorry, my plate is loaded. Is it possible to have somebody else work on that?" was something that was really important to me. And it's funny that you read those off because I actually was able to go back and find the ones he and I were talking about right before I said yes. And they changed a little bit. And that was pay, flexibility, career path. And then the belief structure of the organization and the pay was there when they made the offer. The flexibility was the fact that I was able to work from home. They're good about, you know, I can do daycare pickup and I can do daycare drop off. I mean, the first time I remember, as I wound down at my last job, I had to do daycare drop off on one and I looked at my husband, I was like, "What do I do? Where do I take them?" Because he had done all of this for the entire four years of our oldest life. I could count on one hand the amount of time that I dropped him off or I picked him up. And the little one even less so because he was younger. Career path, I wanted something that I had a really hard time finding places to embrace the fact that I had been a litigator and they wanted me to litigate. They didn't see the connecting dots of being able to negotiate contracts and things of that nature. So actually when the director of compliance who made my offer called, she said, "Why do you want to be a senior paralegal? Why?" I said, "Honestly, I want to have more flexibility to be with my kids. I want to be able to have more time too." So I asked him not to work. But I said I'm asking not to have to answer to anybody else's schedule other than a PTO schedule that, okay, there's too many people off I'm sorry. Or, yeah, there is something important that week, we can't go that week but we can go the next week. I said, "I want that ability." So that's why I want to be a senior paralegal. And in fact, the newest general counsel that came on, he's been here, like, a week and a half ago, he said to me, he said, "Would you have wanted to be something other than a senior paralegal?" And I said, "Sure." But I just had a really hard time finding companies and organizations to embrace the fact that I had spent my career putting people in jail or prison that I had... Sure I negotiated a lot of things. But most everywhere, one would have wanted me in a litigation courtroom-style role. And I really wanted somewhere that took a major step back. I'm not gonna say that now with the kind of the progress from last week that will ever have to happen now. But at the same time taking a senior paralegal role, also, let me learn this industry, it was going to let me have that time and flexibility that I wanted, but also would have made me a big asset to learn a different area of law and expand my horizons. So that if they couldn't offer me a jump or a different place, eventually, that at least I would have those things under my belt, finally, where other places would give me that opportunity.

Scott Anthony Barlow 26:32

Your progress from last week, as you said, when you went down to Arizona, you're now in a new role or a promotion. Tell me about that role. And then let's talk about how that happened.

Jenna Murphy 26:47

Okay. So yes, as of Wednesday, last week, I was asked to step in as the third Associate General Counsel for the company where I'm now working, that was a kind of a shock to me to walk in and just be content with where I was just there to onboard and meet everyone and get to know where I was working at. And then to walk into an office and say, "You have a lot of potential. You have a lot to offer. We would really like for you to step into a full attorney role instead of just being a paralegal." I guess I had fully prepared myself that that may never happen. I think that's just the... not because I didn't want to get my hopes up only to be like, "I'm just stuck here." But I kept reminding myself because I candidly wrestled with the idea of the fact that, yes, I have a bar license, but I'm taking this different title, this lower title, for lack of better terminology, I have a newfound respect for paralegals in general, because they are the bones behind that, what that process. And so they have a very instrumental role. And I will tell you, they earn every penny that they are offered by all stretches of the imagination. But I had prepared myself that that might not happen here. But what I kept reminding myself was that it was building and I don't say any of that, because I didn't go, and this going well, I'll be here this amount of time and I'm moving on. That wasn't it. Since my first role, I'd have just known that when the time is... when it happens, that time will come and I will know and that there will be no question. At this point, there will be no question in my mind that it's time for me to move on. And so I didn't know how that would work or if it would work. But I knew it was a great learning opportunity and so excited to walk into an office and immediately have someone go, "You offer so much more than you're being utilized for right now." It was shocking to me. But at the same time, it was also I guess, secretly something I knew. And it wasn't that this place didn't recognize it. It just felt like for all those ones that didn't recognize it before, or wouldn't notice it or wouldn't acknowledge it before, someone has.

Scott Anthony Barlow 29:07

What does that feel like in this moment?

Jenna Murphy 29:09

It feels reassuring. It definitely adds a confidence that I didn't think I could have or didn't know if I would ever have. Because it's really hard when you put together a resume, especially now with the way resumes are kind of structured with all of your successes, not necessarily what you do, but the successes that you have. I can remember telling Phillip, "I don't know how I put on here. I put people in jail." Like that's not something that people... they're not going to look at this and be like, woohoo, you know?

Scott Anthony Barlow 29:39

It feel like a success to other people viewing the resume. Is that what you're saying?

Jenna Murphy 29:44

Right. It really does. And I mean, I had some really great opportunities at my last job, probably the most notable thing that I was able to do at my last job was, at 33-34 weeks pregnant with my oldest, I argued in front of the doors Supreme Court, that's an opportunity I will probably never get to do again. Maybe if I'd stayed in a prosecution role and doing a lot of appellate work, then I might have, but some prosecutors go their entire career and never probably don't ever get away with not submitting an appeal to the Court of Appeals, but to get to stand in front of the Supreme Court of Georgia, or the Supreme Court of their state, and present an argument. And for lack of to win it, because that's what we did. We were able, I mean, I kind of knew…

Scott Anthony Barlow 30:32

That's 33-34 weeks pregnant, no less.

Jenna Murphy 30:35

Yes. My co-workers challenged me to say, "My name is Jenna Murphy in law and we represent..." and my boss was sitting beside me. But their intention was not to be him that I was representing whether it was my baby.

Scott Anthony Barlow 30:49

Yeah, that's awesome.

Jenna Murphy 30:51

But yeah, about 34 weeks pregnant and walk into the Supreme Court, I don't think I've ever been more nervous in my life. But that was kind of the highlight thing that I felt like I hung my hat on for the last job. And so that's one thing that I really like about having a new opportunity is I feel like there's more opportunities to really hang my hat in more places, and feel like I have more vast responsibilities in this role, obviously, even more so now, but to get to do more things and have more successes. Not that I wasn't successful, I mean, I had an excess of 15 to 20 jury trials, from start to finish, and for the most part been successful, and didn't win all of them, but win a lot of them. But how those translate to a resume is very different when you're trying to look at a company and say, "Knock, knock, I wanted to be legal counsel for you." And they're like, "What does that do for me?" If they have a legal department that they litigate, sure, it would have been great. But outside of that, you're kind of like, okay, thanks.

Scott Anthony Barlow 31:54

Very cool. When you think about this, I guess when you think about the future, like future transitions, future anything else, what do you think the one thing that you have learned out of this transition that will help you in the future? Maybe a different way to say the question would be, what have you learned out of this transition that you think will help you in the future?

Jenna Murphy 32:16

I think I had to learn to stand up for myself, I will say that. That was one of the things in my job, I'd always just been one to keep my mouth closed and kind of roll with the punches and do what I do and be a good employee and go with it, and I had to learn. That's probably the one thing that kickstarted. One of the other things that kick started this process was that I had to learn that nobody was going to look out for me but me. It's not true. I had friends there that were looking out for me too. But I had to learn to stand out for myself and open my mouth and say things where things bothered me or where I didn't agree with things. So I wouldn't be taken advantage of.

Scott Anthony Barlow 32:51

What helped you begin to learn that?

Jenna Murphy 32:53

Maybe it was just the fact that I was so burnt out, but I knew if I didn't say anything that was... I was having to put boundaries. So that was something I guess people kept saying, "Set boundaries". What you don't understand, I came into this job, my last job as a single. I had no significant other in any shape, form, or fashion when I moved here. I lived by myself, I ate, slept, lived, and breathed my job. I went home on the weekends occasionally to see my family. But beyond that, I had nothing. I could devote 150% of me to my job. Well, when you set that up, setting boundaries, pulling back, and setting those boundaries is almost impossible. So that's one thing I really have implemented going into this new job is, and I almost walked over those boundaries a little bit on Friday. And one of those is just to set my hours and not respond to things on the weekend. But I find myself that if I look at my email and their stuff there, I feel like I need to respond multiple times this weekend. I had to make myself like, okay, the emails there, but you have to leave it till time. So I may not tell them like if the walls are burning, and you need me because they're on Pacific time and I'm on East Coast time. And so if the walls are broken, and you need me after my hours, you can text me or you can call me and I'm happy to help. But at five o'clock my time or shortly thereafter, I am hitting the button where the only email inbox I see is my personal inbox, and I don't plan on looking at it until in the morning because my husband and my kids deserve more than they were getting before and I lived somewhat of my own doings but also for the fact that people were used to me being that person.

Scott Anthony Barlow 34:41

You can train them to expect that, right? I think that's one thing we've never talked about on the podcast before that would be an interesting episode is the idea around, if you have previously unintentionally or intentionally trained others to expect that of you to then either make that change or decide to go someplace else. And what I've found with working with many people, but also for myself is that sometimes, most of the time, it's actually far easier to make a change and then train new people on the interactions as opposed to try to retrain. It's not impossible, but man, it is extraordinarily difficult.

Jenna Murphy 35:27

Yeah, I mean, and I think that, like my last job when I started working there, we didn't work any weekends, and we took on Saturdays. And so while it wasn't the end of the world, it was once every now and then on a rotation. For me, as a mother, it hit differently than it did for people with grandkids or people with no kids, because it wouldn't have bothered me if I had been single, or maybe we had just been married and okay, fine. My husband could do whatever he wanted with the fact that he's 10 into both kids and trying to keep things quiet. Because we were by that point, we were remote, thank goodness remote, because at first it was not, we had to go to our office to do it. But just all of those things. And now I don't have to, hopefully, ever worry about that. Because I will say that's one thing with this new general counsel who came in last week like he didn't respond all weekend to emails because he has four kids. And he says that's what's important to him. And I'm like, well, thank you. I appreciate that. Because that's what I came here for.

Scott Anthony Barlow 36:31

Hey, if you love this story where we talk through and walk you through step by step how someone got to more meaningful work, then you'll absolutely love our audiobook– Happen to Your Career: An Unconventional Approach to Career Change and Meaningful Work. I even got to narrate it, which was so fun. And something that I really enjoyed doing and will definitely do for future books as well. But it also contains firsthand accounts from career changers on how they made the move to more meaningful work, just like we include on the podcast here. And actually, it's been called the best audiobook experience ever by some reviewers. You can find those reviews, and the book itself on Audible, Amazon, or any other place where books are sold. Seriously, just pause this right now and go over to Amazon or Audible or wherever you want and download it. You can be reading it and started on your career change in literally seconds.

Scott Anthony Barlow 37:26

Now, here's a sneak peek into what's coming up next week right here on Happen to Your Career.

Speaker 3 37:30

I think that was the hardest to basically be rejected. But then to try to internally make yourself better and then try again. So be rejected, but then just be persevering, and keep trying again and again and again.

Scott Anthony Barlow 37:45

Some people are content with just showing up for work and doing the same thing for year after year, years on it. If you're here listening to this show, Happen to Your Career, of all places, I'm guessing that's probably not you. I'm guessing instead, you want to keep learning, growing both personally and professionally. But when you're looking for opportunities to learn and grow in a role no longer is providing that for you, it's really easy to lose your sense of fulfillment.

Scott Anthony Barlow 38:15

All that and plenty more next week right here on Happen To Your Career. Make sure that you don't miss it. And if you haven't already, click Subscribe on your podcast player so that you can download this podcast in your sleep, and you get it automatically, even the bonus episodes every single week, sometimes multiple times a week. Until next week. Adios. I'm out

Anna VanRemoortel 00:01

The idea of stepping off that track felt like I was stepping into an abyss. And I didn't really know where I would go next.

Introduction 00:13

This is the Happen To Your Career podcast with Scott Anthony Barlow. We hope you stop doing work that doesn't fit you. Figure out what does and make it happen. We help you define the work that is unapologetically you, and then go get it. If you feel like you were meant for more, and you're ready to make a change, keep listening. Here's Scott. Here's Scott. Here's Scott.

Scott Anthony Barlow 00:37

When I was a kid, I was often asked the question, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" You probably have been asked this too. And back then, I thought this was a pretty harmless question. So I was always ready for it. Architect, obviously. That's what I wanted to be, at least for a while, until studio recording, and then the next thing, and then the next thing. And again, I just thought it was a harmless question. But many years later, I started to realize that it wasn't. I've come to realize how useless this question is, and how all it really does is teach us from a really extremely young age that we have to pick the exact career we want, instead of figuring out what our strengths are, and what's really going to make us feel more fulfilled and gathering experiences and mastery and all the other things that actually helps with fulfillment, happiness, enjoyment, and often the result of this very normalized mindset of the, "what do you want to be when you grow up?" The perfect thing is that when we actually begin to study for or practice, that one career that we've always dreamed of, if it doesn't work out, we're left feeling like we failed.

Anna VanRemoortel 01:44

None of those things that I was skilled in, like, I wanted to continue. I don't want to write literature reviews anymore. I don't want to do that kind of research work. So the things that I was good at, I didn't want to continue. And so I felt like I was almost starting from nothing.

Scott Anthony Barlow 02:00

That's Anna VanRemoortel. Anna was a PhD student at Duke University when she first came to HTYC. She worked really hard to set herself up for success. But when she actually started the PhD program, she quickly realized "This isn't what I want to do for the rest of my life." And after having that realization, and later on, working with a coach, and really diving into her strengths, and what she actually wanted, Anna decided to go out on a limb and accept an internship at a nonprofit that she was super excited about. This led to a whirlwind of events. And thanks to a lot of intentional hard work from Anna, she ended up as an executive director of a nonprofit organization just a short 10 months later. Take a listen, as she tells what led up to her transition over this last year.

Anna VanRemoortel 02:49

So to give people listening a little bit of context of what the past few years looked like. So I was in the PhD program when I decided to leave. I left my PhD with my Master's, I was able to kind of... it took me so long to decide to leave the PhD that I ended up getting a Master's. That's kind of funny. I moved home and I ended up being unemployed for a little bit living with my family, which was my worst nightmare. At the time, I thought, like, that was like what failure looks like. And which was not. It was really great actually. And then I did a lot of volunteer work, which really helped set me up for this kind of job. So I reached out to a small organization in my hometown that was all about, like, supporting small businesses. And I just did some volunteer work with them. Then I applied for an entry-level job at an organization in Boston that has the programs in a public park, that I really admired them for years, and I ended up not getting that entry-level job. Instead, I got an internship, which was still really great, because I kind of viewed it as still like the experiment phase that is part of the career change process with you guys and that just allowed me to build some experience that wasn't academic and get my foot in the door with Boston nonprofits in general. And then I also was so lucky that during that experience, I had a supervisor that was just so amazing. And she helped me as I was applying for new jobs. And she was kind of another career coach. So that was super great. And then I threw all of this, I was really focusing on Main Streets organizations. So Main Streets are, it's kind of this umbrella term to describe organizations that focus on a commercial district and supporting local businesses and revitalizing that area. And I was really interested in that. And so Boston has 20 of them. And I started just reaching out to people on LinkedIn that were directors of these Main Streets. And I actually got to talk to a bunch of them. They're all super open to having me ask questions. And one of them was actually an alum of my undergrad University. And so we actually met up for coffee. And I just asked her about her job and everything and we really connected and she was like, "Oh. By the way, we're going to be hiring a program manager in a little bit. The job description isn't posted yet, but just let you know, this might be an opportunity." I'm like, "Oh, that's amazing." And so from that kind of casual conversation, which I wasn't even asking for a job, that she led me to a job to apply for. So I applied through them. And then during the process, I got into the manager position in November. But during that whole transition, the current E.D left, it wasn't a super great fit. So she moved on to do some other work. And so we were actually without an Executive Director for a little bit. One of our board members stepped in as interim E.D and I worked with her. And we actually started hiring for E.D. We put the job description out, I was part of the interview process. And we interviewed a few candidates. And we just didn't feel like it was a great fit. And actually one of the other managers in the organization, he was like, "What about Anna? Like, what if Anna just steps into the role?" And I was like, "I would be interested in that. I kind of imagined doing that in, maybe, like two or three years, but I'd be up for the challenge if it was offered to me, and if I had support from the board." And so throughout all of that, the board decided to offer me the job. And so then, about a month ago, I stepped into the E.D role. And so now I am the Executive Director of the organization. And it was definitely a lot of growth and transition. And I'm still, like, growing and getting used to this role. But it's so exciting now, like, I love doing this kind of work. I love managing the organization and just thinking about where I wanted to go in the future because it has such a rich history of impact in this community. And so it's been so great to now be in the position where I can help lead it into the next year.

Scott Anthony Barlow 06:50

What led up to the point where you were wanting to make a change?

Anna VanRemoortel 06:55

Yeah. So I was at Duke University in their Sociology PhD program. And so for many years, pretty much throughout my late teens and early 20s, I really want to be a sociology professor. I love studying prosocial behavior, like what motivated people to take on certain actions and to intentionally do good things, intentionally build community. And I really liked researching that. I loved researching in my undergrad. And I had this goal in mind that I wanted to, like, be like my professors in undergrad, and go for that PhD. And so I spent the second half of my undergrad and a year between undergrad and grad school, really working towards this goal. I secured funding, I worked for professors with research assistant positions. And then I spent pretty much that year leading up to grad school applying for different programs and finding the best fit for me. And when I got there, I pretty quickly realized that it wasn't for me.

Scott Anthony Barlow 07:52

Okay, tell me about that. What took place that caused you to realize? It sounds like there were some specific events. What happened?

Anna VanRemoortel 08:00

Yeah, I think one big piece is it was really my first time researching full-time. So before when I was doing research, I had all these other things going on too, that really kept me engaged in my community, that were pretty social activities. And this was the first time I was doing research full time, like, 40-hour work week, of course, it was way more than 40 hours, as you could probably expect. And so that was like, the first time it, kind of, just became my everything. And I realized that the issues I really cared about, and I was researching, I didn't really feel that connected to. It kind of felt like the research process made me take a step back. And I felt pretty removed from it. And I think part of it is like, you kind of have to do that as a researcher to produce good research and to be objective. But I just felt like I wasn't connecting with issues in the way I wanted to be connecting with them.

Scott Anthony Barlow 08:52

That's fascinating, actually, because what you're saying is that, hey, I initially went in and thought I would be more connected with the issues but research, by definition, in many ways, you sort of have to take a removed more objective stance. Maybe not perfectly, but it was taking you further away from the ways that you wanted to be connected as opposed to closer. So that's really fascinating.

Anna VanRemoortel 09:19

Yeah. And I think I learned a lot about myself through this process because before I'd always kind of identified as an introvert. And so the idea of reading and researching my whole life, and that kind of sounded good. But I didn't factor in the fact that, like, I have been doing a lot of other social positions throughout my life as I've been doing researching before I took it on for a full-time job. And so my life became pretty isolating with research. And it was... I felt like I just couldn't really connect with people and I wasn't getting the energy that I wanted to from my research experience. I was missing that personal connection.

Scott Anthony Barlow 09:41

Let me ask you about the introvert piece. Do you still identify as more of an introvert or lean more towards introversion? Or how do you think about yourself now, after that set of experiences?

Anna VanRemoortel 10:10

Yeah, I don't think I'm an introvert anymore. I think I thought it was about, like, being shy, but I think I've, like, realized that it's really about more where I get energy. And I realized, like, throughout my life, like, stuff like this, this is what I get my energy from. It's meeting with people. When I was doing research, when I was interviewing people in a qualitative method, that's where I was getting my energy from. It wasn't really the work alone, like, combing through data and writing up a literature review that felt very draining for me after a while.

Scott Anthony Barlow 10:43

It wasn't about the research, it was about the interactions. It sounds like.

Anna VanRemoortel 10:47

Yeah. And that was kind of the big thing that I learned throughout this whole process. Like I'm pretty young, I'm 26. And so I think I was still very, like, influenced by my college career program where, you know, at that age, people are like, "Oh, what are you interested in? What do you want to do?" And your answer is kind of like, "Oh, I majored in Sociology and Economics. And my career path is kind of defined by these topics I was interested in, not actual tasks." So I kind of wish that someone asked the 20-year-old version of me, like, put aside what you're interested in, like, what's your favorite part of the day? Where do you get your energy? Like, what tasks do you most look forward to? And if it's having a meeting with someone, like, that says a lot. If it's reading, like, that also says a lot. And I think focusing on tasks versus big concepts, that was a mindset shift that helped me during the career change process that led me to a career that I actually enjoy.

Scott Anthony Barlow 11:42

So then it sounded like you were in the PhD program, recognizing that wasn't necessarily where you want it to be. What caused you to make the final decision that, "Hey, I need to do something about this. I cannot continue to be here in this place, and this way."?

Anna VanRemoortel 12:01

It was a long process. And honestly, like, so I started my PhD the fall of 2019. And a few months later, I found your podcast, because I was just like, I knew I wasn't happy. I didn't know if I wanted to leave the program, like I was thinking, "Oh, maybe I just need a new advisor, or I need to be at a different university, maybe I need to think about the methodology I'm using and find something that's more exciting." But there was like this little voice in the back of my head saying, like, "Maybe you can quit." But that was just such a scary thought for me. I've been pretty much, like, building up to this for many years, and I thought that leaving it would just be failure. And I didn't really see a lot of other people around me doing something like this, like, I saw my peers being, like, really enthusiastic about their work. And so it just felt, like, really wrong of me to not be excited about it and want to leave. And so I actually started listening to your podcast in 2019. I listened to it for maybe like, a year and a half or two years before I actually reached out to you guys. And that was just like, a way of normalizing leaving a career. Like I needed to hear experiences of people who left their careers, and it was fine. Like I needed to hear what it's like on the other side in order to just get out of my head and be able to talk about it out loud.

Scott Anthony Barlow 13:18

What do you think after going through that type of experience? I'm just curious about your opinion on this because I've been forming my own hypothesis for years and years and years and years. But why do you think it is so, whatever the opposite of normalized would be, the unnormalized in our society, that you could leave the PhD program, and that would be okay, or socially acceptable, or whatever word you'd throw in there. But why do you think it is so much the opposite way, or we feel it so much the opposite way?

Anna VanRemoortel 13:51

It's so interesting, because I knew in my mind, objectively, people who get PhDs, like, statistically don't end up in tenure track positions, like, that's a very small percentage of people that get that position that everyone's working towards. But I think this idea of, I think, I've just been, like, socialized to always want to pursue one thing in my career. And another big part was, I was told I had potential and I was like, people praise me like, "Oh, you're at Duke. That's awesome. You're gonna get your PhD from Duke. That's a great thing to have on your resume." And so I was really scared to let go of that, even though I knew the success rate of what I was going for was incredibly low. I wish I was worried of wasting my potential, or not living up to what people said I could live up to. And also, like, I knew the structure. I had been a student pretty much my entire life. And so being a professional student, I knew how to play the role of the student very well. And so the idea of stepping off that track felt like I was stepping into an abyss, and I didn't really know where I would go next.

Scott Anthony Barlow 14:58

You and I had talked, and I remember you saying something about that, like, that stepping off the abyss. Or you said, "I don't even really know what I'm stepping into." And that wasn't exactly how you put it. But what about that made it scary or uncomfortable or whatever at the time? And then tell me a little bit about what you ended up doing in order to move through that because I think it can be scary.

Anna VanRemoortel 15:26

Yeah, I think one big piece was that I just had my identity so tied up with academia, and I had like my resume and my skills so tied up in academia. And so when I looked at my skills, I thought they could only apply in an academic context. Like, I looked at my experience, I was like, "Oh, I have experience writing literature reviews, and like gathering data, and writing research reports and proposals." And I kind of thought that my resume that I built, I had to build off of that to find a new job. And it was frustrating, because none of those things that I was skilled in, I wanted to continue. I don't want to write literature reviews anymore. I don't want to do that kind of research work. So the things that I was good at, I didn't want to continue. And so I felt like I was almost starting from nothing, which now I realized wasn't true. And that's what was really helpful working with Alistair, like, we started off from the very broad strengths base kind of approach where we did StrengthsFinder. And I just was able to separate myself from the academic skills and focus more on, like, my broad strengths that I had been developing from, I guess, academia, but everything else I've done, like hobbies and volunteer opportunities. And once I was able to focus on that, and think about my strengths, versus my actual resume experience, that was what allowed me to kind of shift and think about new opportunities that I could be good at. Before I was like, only looking at research positions, I was like, "Oh, I've experienced the research. I should be looking at research positions, but I didn't want to be doing research." And so shifting to that strengths-based approach, that's what allowed me to look at new opportunities.

Scott Anthony Barlow 17:07

That's such a great point. And a little bit of context for everyone else listening because I found one of the biggest confusions around strengths is often we have a tendency to think about strengths as skills. Because skills are, as you pointed out, like, that's what we see, and that's what we're experienced in, and that's what we're doing. Like you're writing the papers, and you are like doing all the things, and then we can visibly see those, like, if we think about it sort of as an iceberg a little bit. Like that's the tip of the iceberg. However, strengths are not skills, they are the things that are lying under the surface that make you predisposed to be better at some things versus another. So the reason I wanted to point that out, though, is you made such a great point about the things that you were good at, were not the things you wanted to spend your time doing. And I think that's such a confusing thing because people are like, "These are my strengths." No, they're not. They're actually just the skills and skills are good, but that doesn't mean you have to spend the rest of your life doing it just because you happen to have the skill. So when you have that realization, how did that impact what you thought you might be looking for from there on out?

Anna VanRemoortel 18:23

I think when I realized that, I was able to look at my past experience and like the things I've done that I wasn't necessarily paid to do. So I took my volunteer experience more seriously. I took even like the things I did when I was a college student, I looked back at those experiences and I thought like, "What was my favorite thing I did when I was a college student?" And I remember working in ResLife, and I just loved connecting with people and building community and having those like in-person interactions, and that I was not getting that in grad school. And so I think the shift from skills and like a very resume focus, like this program is not about fixing your resume and cover letter, which is... if I signed up for those kinds of career change programs, like, I would not be where I am today. I needed a shift to strength and to take my unpaid experience. And just like my general interest and like how I presented myself with my friends and family, I needed to take that experience more seriously.

Scott Anthony Barlow 19:22

Well, I think that you mentioned identity just a minute ago. So go back to something that you had said and that was a struggle for you to let go how you were thinking about yourself and what was wrapped in your identity. The thing that people don't realize about identity, most of us don't realize that your experiences regardless of whether they are volunteer, they're paid, they're at one type of role, they're at another type of role, they're out of a PhD program, whatever they are, like, it's much healthier to look at my identity and the combination of my experiences as opposed to I do this thing or only look at certain type of experiences because we really get wrapped up in that. But it's much healthier to say, okay, nobody can take away all my collective set of experiences, whatever they are. And that can be a portion of my identity. And that is so much more of an effective approach, I'll say, but also a healthier approach too, like, there's a lot of great evidence around that at this point.

Anna VanRemoortel 20:23

Yeah, I think that was so important when I was changing careers. Because if my identity was tied to my academic job, and I felt like I was just not excited about it, I didn't feel like I was doing good work, because I wasn't excited about it. So if I tied my identity too closely, but that I was not feeling good about who I was as a person or who I was as a professional. And so I really needed to just separate that and kind of see myself beyond an academic role, and then rebuild that confidence, because I definitely lost a lot of confidence in grad school, because I tie my identity so closely to that. And it's tough with a career change. Because when you're leaving one career, and you're like, untying your identity from that, you can feel really lost. And I spent some months unemployed. And so like, what am I going to tie my identity to now about experiences I actually enjoyed in my past and not my current job? Or my employment status?

Scott Anthony Barlow 21:18

Yeah. Absolutely. It makes me think of a totally different question. And I'm very curious, as you got into the actual transition, what would you say were the hardest parts for you?

Anna VanRemoortel 21:32

Yeah. I think the hardest part was everything that led up, maybe, like the first and second session with Alistair, like, I was very wishy-washy. I even met with him, and I was like, "I think I'm gonna leave." I'm kind of like, still testing the waters. And he was like, make a decision by the next session. And I was thinking, like, "Oh my God, I can't do that. I can't make a decision like this. This is too big." I thought I needed more time to gather more data, ask for more advice. But honestly, I didn't. Oh, my God. So I think the challenge was moving from a very passive role to a more active one, where I was actually taking a change and making something happen for myself, because I was so good at consuming career content. And I listened to you guys for like a year and a half before I did anything, and I read books on career change. If there's a book on leaving academia, I already own all of them. So I was very good at just consuming that content. And I think that kind of speaks for my experience being a grad student, too. So the most challenging part was in the first few sessions where Alistair was like, "Alright, this is the end of the passive part and the beginning of a more active role." So I made a decision to leave the program. And then I started telling my friends and family, like, I'm making a career change. And once I was out of my head, and it was out in the world, like, oh, I put this out there, everyone knows about it now, it was so much easier to just be honest with people. I felt like I was just hiding it for so long, and I was ashamed of wanting to leave a PhD. And it makes sense. Some people said, like, "No, don't leave. You're going to regret this." I had professors telling me that I would regret it. But then I also had people tell me, like, "No, you're not going to regret this." I had other people who have completed their PhD say, "I regret saying you should leave now." So it was really hard to step away from all the advice I was getting and to just focus on myself and actually just taking a step.

Scott Anthony Barlow 23:31

I think that's something we haven't really talked a lot about on the podcast, particularly the idea of, once you have made that decision and once you start interacting with other people in an active way, that it feels different in some way. So many wonderful ways, I would say, maybe there's some less wonderful ways. And certainly, it's harder to go and live what you actually want. However, I very much felt what you described that I sort of felt like when I was in... It's been quite a period of time ago. But you know, when I was in a role where I stayed about 18 months, it felt like I was living a double life. I felt like I was not honest with everyone else, like, my wife and my boss and my friends and everything else. I felt like I was having to hide this really terrible thing almost.

Anna VanRemoortel 24:27

Yeah. And I remember like, even before I met up with Alistair for those first few sessions, I was still doing, like, networking calls, like, I would often, like, reach out to people that I thought were doing interesting work. But I would always approach those conversations like, "I'm a grad student, and I'm interested in your work", and they were kind of confused, like, "My work is not what you would be doing in six years with a PhD, like, why are you interested in my job?" And I felt awkward and kind of ashamed and I felt like I couldn't tell them the truth. And then once I finally just kind of put it out in the world, and then I could approach those conversations. And I was like, "Hi, I'm a grad student, and I'm thinking about leaving my program, and I'm interested in the work you do." And then we're able to have an honest conversation. And it was just, I got so much more out of those conversations, because I was honest with them about where I was at in this whole process and I didn't feel like I was hiding anything.

Scott Anthony Barlow 25:22

That's really interesting. It shows up too in the real world, it shows up in interactions. And actually, before you and I had hit the record button, you said something to me about, like, yeah, even my, like family and friends have told me I seem happier. And then I had told you that, yeah, like you literally sound different, you literally sound happier. And you sound different compared to when you and I chatted all those months ago. So, that's just evidence of what you're saying. I think, like, if you can be more of yourself, and not have to feel like you're hiding something, or however that shows up for different people, then it changes those interactions.

Scott Anthony Barlow 26:03

How did you adapt that into as you started doing interviews, as you started having other interactions? Functionally, how did you adapt that type of mindset or approach where you're willing to share more and have more authentic conversations? Was there anything that you did in order to make that easier for yourself?

Anna VanRemoortel 26:03

Yeah. And I think that kind of authenticity frame was present throughout all of the modules that I went through with Happen To Your Career, like, I remember, even with the networking, like the testing your career, those kinds of conversations, I felt like I could just approach it with more authenticity, and even like interviewing, I felt like, I just had better practice not hiding things throughout this whole career change process. I was able to go into an interview, and just be more authentic and connect with people and be like, "These are the strengths that I know I have. This is what I know your organization needs. And it just felt like more of a collaboration, like, let's work together. Like, let's see if this is a good fit." And I wasn't like, "just give me anything, I'll take any job. Like I'd be happy with anything." I was just much more open about where I was, what I needed from a job, and what they can offer. And if it was a good fit, great. If it wasn't, I was happy to learn that then instead of actually taking any job that they would give me.

Anna VanRemoortel 27:23

I think a few things. I think the first step was just rebuilding confidence and thinking of myself as a professional that was worthy of people's time. And honestly, like a lot of this happened before I went through coaching, like, grad school, it was a tough time. Like, my mental health wasn't great. And so I worked with a therapist for two and a half years. And that was really essential because I just needed to process a lot of things and figure out who I was outside of the student role. Because most of my life, I've kind of been a student, which has been very low on the totem pole of any organization. And so I felt like, I've kind of learned this behavior of acting like a student and coming into these conversations like, "Oh, well, I'll take whatever you can offer me, thanks for even talking to me." And I had to really separate that and regain some confidence again. And then with you guys, the scripts really helped a lot. Like I remember, even when I was negotiating my salary for the first job I had with my current organization, I was watching the videos that you've recorded about, like how to have these conversations. And I had never seen them framed that way. I always thought I'd be going into, like, an interview or a salary negotiation with this weird power dynamic. Like I was asking them for something and just hoping that they would give me anything. But the way your organization frames and all the modules and even the email templates, it's just framed as like a collaboration, where I have more confidence, which makes me look like a more attractive candidate too. And then even when I was negotiating my salary for my manager role a few months ago, like, I understand that nonprofits have limited budgets. I understand that they couldn't offer me, you know, a million dollars. And so I was upfront, I was like, "I understand that the budget is limited. But let's work together and see if we can make this an attractive offer by being a bit more creative with vacation days and professional development. Like, what are some other tools that we can use to make this a great opportunity for both of us?" And so that mindset shifts both from like, regaining confidence, and then also using those scripts. That is what has just, it's really changed the way I approach conversations today, too.

Scott Anthony Barlow 29:39

I've heard that feedback quite a bit where like, I was just having a conversation with another person who's been on the podcast in the past, Laura Morrison, and she had said something similar in that, "Hey, this actually, literally, changed how I..." Like, the approach that I was using to be more authentic and just try and work together and collaboratively and in a partnership to figure out how to create wonderful opportunities. Like, I've now found that over the last four years, I'm using that literally in my job every day with that same type of approach and mentality and some of the skill sets that she built during her change. And that was really interesting to hear it in that way. But it sounds like that was a little bit the case for you, too, or has been. You've done such a great job with this through doing things that many people in the rest of the world might not do, and are difficult, and it's created a different set of results for you, which is so wonderful. So I really appreciate you taking the time and coming and sharing your story and experiences. And I'm so excited that this transition led to even something better within a few short months too. It's so cool to see.

Anna VanRemoortel 30:53

Yeah, it's been a wild ride. And I'm so grateful to you and like your team and Alistair, it was so great to go through this process with a team. Grad school can be isolating. Leaving a career and starting something new can be really isolating and like this program, career changed, this is what I needed during this time. This is what allowed me to actually want something better. Like, if I hadn't reached out to you guys, I think I would still be, like, getting my PhD.

Scott Anthony Barlow 31:20

In PhD land. Yes.

Anna VanRemoortel 31:22

Which, like, isn't bad. I mean, like, all my friends who are in the program, like they're having a good time. That's great, very happy for them. It's a great program. But yeah, it just wasn't a good fit for me. And I'm really happy I did something about it.

Scott Anthony Barlow 31:34

Hey, if you love this story where we talk through and walk you through step by step how someone got to more meaningful work, then you'll absolutely love our audiobook– Happen to Your Career: An Unconventional Approach to Career Change and Meaningful Work. I even got to narrate it, which was so fun. And something that I really enjoyed doing and will definitely do for future books as well. But it also contains firsthand accounts from career changers on how they made the move to more meaningful work, just like we include on the podcast here. And actually, it's been called the best audiobook experience ever by some reviewers. You can find those reviews, and the book itself on Audible, Amazon, or any other place where books are sold. Seriously, just pause this right now and go over to Amazon or Audible or wherever you want and download it. You can be reading it and started on your career change in literally seconds.

Scott Anthony Barlow 32:34

Now here's a sneak peek into what's coming up next week right here on Happen To Your Career.

Speaker 3 32:40

There comes a point in life where you have to decide, "Can I continue on this path? Or do I have to decide that it's time for me to do something different?"

Scott Anthony Barlow 32:47

When you're working in a career you once loved, it can be hard to come to terms with leaving, even if you're feeling burned out. Many times, it takes coming to a crossroads where you're forced to decide– should you stay or go?

Scott Anthony Barlow 33:03

All that and plenty more next week right here on Happen To Your Career. Make sure that you don't miss it. And if you haven't already, click Subscribe on your podcast player so that you can download this podcast in your sleep, and you get it automatically, even the bonus episodes every single week, sometimes multiple times a week. Until next week. Adios. I'm out.