Scott Anthony Barlow 00:01

When you think about leaving your current company, they often fall into one of two categories. Movie-worthy visions, lighting the office on fire while flipping the bird on the way out the door. Well, the building slowly crumbles behind you. Or the option number two, being worried that your boss and all the people you care about are going to feel as though you flip them the bird and burn down the building, leaving everyone in the lurch while you go on to take care of your own life. But what if there were a completely different way? What if you could have your boss help you find a new role? What if your boss and co-workers supported your efforts to make a change while simultaneously you worked to set everyone up for success? That way when you left, they know that they're well taken care of. Let's put this another way. What if you didn't have to worry about burning bridges at all? And what if you have the support of the people that you work with to cross over your new bridge? That bridge still remains and everybody wins.

Introduction 01:05

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 01:31

When I left Target, if you're not familiar with Target– it's a big box retailer here in the States. Anyhow, I gave two months' notice so that they could work on backfilling my position, and I could work on setting them up for success. In later organizations, I gave six months' notice. I trained my replacement, I helped my entire team to have a seamless transition. I even got my boss's support to not have to come in on certain days. It happened to be started out with Thursdays until noon so that I could work on my transition, and everybody knew about it, and it was okay. I know that sounds insane. But here's what I've learned. When you take care of the people around you, it invites them to reciprocate. To be clear, this isn't just me, we've duplicated this result with many of our clients all over the world, some of which you've heard on this podcast. Here's the thing though, if you want to get insane results, it requires a pretty big reframe to the question from, you know, how can you leave without burning bridges, which is where many people start, like, I just don't want to burn a bridge. And we need to ask a different question. A question like, "How could you leave while setting up your team, your organization, your co-workers, your clients, all the people that surround you for success when you leave? How could you set them up so that they were actually better off without you?" Wouldn't that be crazy, right? What if it could actually be a better situation for everyone involved? Well, usually, when I first pitch this idea to our clients, or our team pitches this idea to our individual clients, we have to sift through quite a few mental blocks before we can discuss how to get their boss to support their change. Let's spend a little bit of time talking about what stops people, what are some of those mental blocks. Well, as it turns out, many people view these two things as conflicting goals. And that's understandable. I completely get it. I've felt that way too. But I want you to take Michael's story for example. You might have heard him on our previous episode.

Michael 03:45

I landed at Sony, again, no plan, other than getting an accounting job at a studio. I then was there for 18 years. So started out as a senior financial analyst in September of 2001. And I left as a vice president of worldwide distribution finance in the beginning of 2019. And like I said, I never planned on any of this. But once I started at Sony, I could see that the more you can handle, the more they would throw at you. I was very fortunate to have some great bosses that really knew how to challenge you. And it just sustained me. It sustained me for almost 20 years. But at the end, it got to this point where the demands of the job were felt like 24/7 365. And for someone like me that is a perfectionist and didn't really realize that it just didn't work anymore, it got to the point where I physically couldn't keep myself going and mentally I was just overwhelmed all the time and just worried constantly about too many things and not able to fix anything perfectly or make anything work perfectly. It was not a good combination.

Scott Anthony Barlow 04:57

Okay, Michael was a VP of Finance in California. And his health was deteriorating rapidly to the point where his doctor told him that he was going to die if he kept going and didn't do something about his job. Even then, he viewed himself as the only person who could do his role. If he left, that meant he was letting people down, particularly the people who reported to him. If he left, he felt like he might be giving up everything that he had worked so hard for. Okay, this is sort of understandable too, because if you delve a little bit into Michael's situation, a lot of his strengths have to do with turning chaos into harmony. And this situation that he was in very much created the opposite effect, especially when he thought about leaving.

Michael 05:44

I had a great team of people under me and that sustained me for years. And I felt like it was my duty to suffer through this job because I wanted to see my team advance, I wanted to see them get promoted, take on more responsibility, right. I think the last probably three years I was there, I was doing it out of a sense of duty to the people that worked for me, but I also have the sense of, and I think this is common for people who get burned out is you have this irrational sense of importance of the work, like I felt like if I'm not there, stuff is gonna fall apart. If I'm not there, no one else is going to be able to do these things, and they won't be perfect, and they won't be right, and they won't be on time. I have to keep going. And I did that until I physically couldn't do it anymore.

Scott Anthony Barlow 06:35

So here's what I wanted to do, I want to give you an idea of what a path forward can look like. How that might sound, what could you say to your boss. Now, I want to share a bit of a prerequisite here. The reality is when we do this with our clients in the stories that you've heard on the podcast, every single time we're taking people's individual situations into account– the specific people that they're working with, how those people operate, identifying ways to best build trust with them. So I just want to acknowledge that it really does depend on each individual situation for the best ways to do this. In some cases, in a small amount of cases, we advise people not to do what you're going to hear about. But it really is case-dependent. So I just want to call that out upfront here. So what does it sound like to have this type of conversation with your boss? Well, you might go to your boss, initially, before the conversation and ask if you can talk to them about something important. By the way, this triggers them to think that it's an out-of-the-norm conversation, which is. It absolutely is. This is incredibly critical to the point where I felt the need to say incredibly because you don't want them to be surprised. Even if you're not telling them immediately what you want to talk about, you don't want them to be out of left field surprised. And you also want them to give a different level of attention to this request. They might ask if you can do it right away and tell them you'd really like to do it outside the office, or someplace that's abnormal, get someplace where you're not gonna get interrupted, that's going to be important too. And also asked for it at a later date, as well. Because a lot of people's tendencies are, "Yeah, well, we can just talk right now." And you can absolutely say, "You know, I'm not prepared to talk right now. It is important but I also want to make sure that we have time and space to talk about it. Don't worry, nobody's dying. But I do want to give it the space that it requires." So schedule something with them, get on their calendar, make sure that you're both going to be able to be there, and devote the time and attention. And then when you get there, here's how the conversation might sound. Initially, we want to lead with gratitude, "Hey, I want you to know that I have really, really enjoyed my time here. The last five years have been amazing. I have learned so much. I'm really appreciative for all the things you've done." And you can list some of those specific things that you actually appreciate in reality, then you might go on to say, "You know, I've come to the realization that even though there are promotional opportunities here, at some point, I'm planning to look outside the organization. I'm not talking about tomorrow. I'm not talking about a month from now. But at some point in the future, I know that it's going to come my time. And I really wanted to give you a heads-up. So it could be over the next year or so. But whatever time period, I really wanted to make sure that you are set up for success. The team here is set up for success, and that I'm set up for success as I make a change. So I'm coming to you to talk about this now because I wanted to ask your advice on what you see for how we can do this, how we can set you and the rest of the team and myself up for success. I really want to make sure that we've got a plan in place. I already have some ideas, but it's really important to me that I get your advice on this area." Okay, what you'll want to do is, you'll already want to have some ideas coming into this conversation about how you can set the team up for success, you may have already thought about who could be your backfill, you may have already thought about what would be the time period and resources it would take to train that person, you may have already thought about what projects to take on over the next six months or so or not to take on for that matter. And that is all going to be important because you want to have those in your back pocket to be able to suggest as you're going through this process. But first, it's most important to get their reaction and their advice, whoever your boss or whoever you directly report to, that person. Again, here's how that might sound like. It might sound like, "Even though I don't plan on leaving anytime soon, I really wanted to just have a conversation where I could get your advice on how to set us all up for success." That can be it. That can be a simple way to begin that conversation. Now the reason advice is important here. You've heard me use the word advice several times. Now, there's other ways to ask for it. But what's important is that when you ask for someone's advice, it immediately triggers a part of the brain where they're now thinking about how to solve this problem, they're immediately thinking about how they can help. And they're starting to think about it through the lens that you're asking. And what we've done here is we've now made them a partner in this versus having that done to them. So that's really important. When you ask this way, it helps trigger a collaboration as opposed to a conflict. Now they are your partner. Pretty cool, right? Okay, let's talk about some examples of what success might look like. We already acknowledged that it could be as simple as helping to identify and train your backfill. I've done that before, personally, in many situations multiple times. We've also had many of our clients do something similar, whether it's identifying somebody who's already there, whether it is taking the necessary steps to recruit, and then train, there's a lot of different ways that you can do that. Coming up with some specifics around timelines, and having thought about what that will take will ease the concerns and worries tremendously for your team for whoever you report to. Because if it feels like it's all going to be on them, that's not going to feel amazing. It's not gonna feel like success. So one of our clients went so far as to identify all the gaps and potential issues for what they thought could happen if he was no longer there and identified a potential solution for each one. Then when he had that conversation with his boss, and he got to the part where he said, "Hey, I'd like to talk to you about how we could set the team up for success for whatever point I do actually leave." The boss actually didn't have any advice at that point. He was kind of flabbergasted and surprised. And as so then our client at that time said, "May I share with you some ideas that I've already thought of?" And then he proceeded to go through each one and recommend the rough time frame, the resources it might take to implement, and how he might be able to do so. So if the boss thought that there was any intent to abandon the post, that very quickly disappeared along with the proposed plan. Once you and your boss have a plan that you both feel good about, then you can talk about, "Well, how do we share this news? And at what point in time do we share this news with co-workers or clients or other people that you might be involved with?" And then it can be that type of partnership, again, where you're acting as a partner, as well as they're acting as a partner for you.

Scott Anthony Barlow 14:19

I want to give you some things to watch for in this conversation. First of all, let's talk about when to have this conversation. I mentioned earlier, it's important to not have it during a time period where you're going to get interrupted. So for some people, it makes sense to have it in the afternoon or towards the end of the day as things are wrapping up. For other people, it needs to be a right away thing. You'll want to assess your situation. And I would highly, highly, highly encourage you to get help from an expert in this if you plan to have this type of conversation. There will be things that you are not considering. Let me tell you a story of the first time I tried to have this conversation. Let's go into the story first. I got fired. Here's what I said. I said, "I don't think I'm the right person for the job. I don't think I should have taken it." And yes, I know that that sounds ridiculous. And I'm sure you'll do much better than that attempt I made when I was 23 years old. However, it doesn't change the fact that when we work with people, and they have these types of challenging and vulnerable discussions and conversations, what they usually come up on their own, like the conversation that they're usually coming up with on their own, it usually isn't the most helpful version that could be delivered to your boss, your co-workers, or anyone else that you actually want to strengthen the relationship with, as opposed to burn the bridge. So this is some pretty highly advanced level career maneuvering. And I really do suggest taking a partner on this. And, you know, obviously, this is something we do all the time for our clients. But if you don't want to partner with a career coach, I would definitely partner, or at a minimum, with a mentor and somebody who understands human dynamics, psychology, as well as can coach you through having this level of a conversation, because there's a lot of things to get right here. And it sounds really simple when I laid it out earlier. And it doesn't have to be a complicated conversation at all. But we want to consider all the factors before going into do so. If you need someone to help you think through how other people are going to view this and push you and find ways that you can truly be helpful to them and set them up for success, don't hesitate to contact our team, we can absolutely do that. But I want to share with you when these types of conversations are not appropriate. Particularly when you have a very desperate or toxic relationship with your boss. I have been involved in situations where we've been able to make that work but it usually is abnormal, and it usually requires a high degree of tenacity and finesse in order to make that type of situation work where you're having this conversation, you're getting support from your boss, but still have a desperate or toxic relationship. It's unusual to make that work, I'll say. Another situation would be when the standard in your organization is always, not sometimes, but always to send people out the door as soon as they mentioned leaving, there are a number of organizations and even industries where that is the case. It may not be the right situation to have this type of conversation. Or when you have a merger that's not finalized with what separation packages will be happening, and you haven't already gotten written specific agreements for those separation packages. Although this can actually be... this situation can be a unique opportunity on its own, we've been able to help people speed up those types of packages in a variety of different ways or negotiate those packages as the merger is happening. It's not always possible, but sometimes it is. Okay. I want to share that we've tried this strategy with our clients. The strategy where I'm describing getting support from your boss, and your team and helping them be successful. So far, we've never had it not work, just flat out not work. It doesn't mean there aren't challenges that pop up along the way. It doesn't mean everything goes perfectly. But I should know that that's because many of these clients tend to be higher than average with relationship skills. So there's an element of self-assessment that needs to take place first– are you a people person? Do you care about people before you're employing this strategy in your desire to leave? Also, you really can't employ this strategy from a place of desperation. Instead, I really encourage you to only consider this if you really legitimately care and want to take care of the other people, that's when it's highly appropriate. And when you have a great relationship with the people who are around you, that's a perfect time to be able to have this type of discussion, even though it might be scary to do so. Here's what actions you can take now. If you're ready to leave in the next six months, I would suggest working with someone to build your plan to have that conversation with your boss, including a script, rehearsing, and planning for contingencies or things that could go wrong in the conversation. This could be a friend who's really good at this stuff, or certainly of course a career coach on our team. I want you to also be prepared for the mental blocks that come along with the strategy. This brings out everything, it brings out everything about the closet, all the skeletons, and everything. It can be a really scary conversation even if you're in an amazing situation and habit. But I want you to know that setting your team, your organization, your co-workers, or clients, whoever it is up for success when you leave is the best possible solution for everyone involved. It really is. You never know what your career future holds, and you might cross paths with them in the future. Let me know what you think of this episode, we may consider doing more like this style. Tell me what worked for you, what didn't work, and what you'd like to know more about. How do you do that? It's easy. Drop me an email– Scott@happentoyourcareer.com.

Scott Anthony Barlow 20:42

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 makes 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 21:30

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

Speaker 3 21:36

I didn't know all the things that I could do and trying to figure out what that would be was a real struggle for me.

Scott Anthony Barlow 21:46

If you are looking for work that truly fits you, you might already know we usually recommend against job boards. Why? Well, creating your ideal role normally requires a lot of customization to fit your needs. And you're not likely to find that on job boards. But what if you could make job boards work for you? What would that look like? What if you could find a role that seems like it was already custom-made for you, stand out amongst hundreds, if not thousands of applicants, and then get a job offer after just one interview?

Scott Anthony Barlow 22:20

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.

Michal Balass 00:01

I got to that point, and I didn't want to give it up. But the thing of it is, is that I didn't want that.

Introduction 00:15

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 00:40

If you've ever hung on to something for way, way longer than you should, this episode is for you. Whether it's a job or a relationship, maybe it's something completely different. But all of them can leave you feeling completely drained. So the question becomes, "How can you motivate yourself to make the necessary change and then make sure that you move on to the first sign of trouble the next time? How can you learn from it?"

Michal Balass 01:07

I took the job. I didn't really think twice, because this is what my life graduate work was leading up to. Now looking back at it, I never really asked myself that questions of whether I wanted to do this.

Scott Anthony Barlow 01:21

That's Michal Balass. Michal was working at a university in a good, but definitely not a great job, that really wasn't right for her. And since it was a good job, she knew things could be much worse. So she, of course, did what many people do and held on to the role way, way too long. Unsurprisingly, she began to burn out. Finally, when she hit her breaking point, as he calls it, she decided it was enough. And she absolutely had to make a change. This familiar story might relate to you or people that you know. But she shares really great insight on why she feels like she held onto that job, and how this career change completely shifted how she thinks about success. But I'm gonna let her tell you all about it. Here she is. She first goes back to where her career first began.

Michal Balass 02:16

I graduated with my PhD in 2011. But I left graduate school a year before I defended the big dissertation. And it's pretty typical when students get towards the end of their graduate career is that if they land a job that they leave and they come back and finish up those loose ends. And I got my first position, which was a temporary position at a college in upstate New York. And it was really a big deal because this was a couple of years after the recession. And universities were not hiring. And so I thought that, and I did very, very big. So I was in that position for two years, I went back, I defended my doctorate. And then quickly after that, I knew that my position was temporary, that I needed to find something more permanent. And so I went on the job market as academics say, and I had several interviews, but I got one offer. And this was what we call a tenure-line job academic job, which is, again, a huge deal because there's not a lot of those out there. And that job is in Maryland. And I was so enthusiastic, and I took the job. I didn't really think twice, because this is what my life graduate work was leading up to. Now looking back at it, I never really asked myself the questions of whether I wanted to do this. Right?

Scott Anthony Barlow 03:50

Interesting. Yeah. Which is normal, right? Many of us don't do that.

Michal Balass 03:55

Yeah. And I want to say that the job that I had up to two months ago with that university was great, but it wasn't the right fit for me. And I think I knew that the first maybe month when I started. But I talked myself out of it. I said, "Well, you know, it's just a new job, and this is what you've been working for." And the troubling thing about that is when you don't fit the role, you don't fit the job culture, you get burned out very easily and very quickly. And that's what happened. But I'm an ambitious person and I held on a lot longer than I should have. And what the breaking point was is that I had my son two years ago, and I didn't want to go back to work. And a lot of people told me, "Well because you just had a baby and you want to stay home." I didn't want to stay home. I was happy to sort of transition back into work. I just didn't want to go back to that role. And that what sparked the career transition. And I'm smiling, as I'm saying this, but as I was going through it, I was very nervous. I was very upset all the time. I didn't know what was next. I had a lot of fear in being able to leave.

Scott Anthony Barlow 05:27

I want to come back to that fear here in just a second. But before that, I want to ask you about something that you said just a moment ago, which was that you felt like you hung on a lot longer than you should. And I'm curious, you know since you've recently been through this journey, through the cycle, why do you think ambitious and high-performing people do hang on so much longer? Because I hear that again, and again. So why do you think that is?

Michal Balass 05:55

I think because you're sort of working towards this goal. And in that process, what gets you through is that you want to achieve this goal. And that goal for me in graduate school was to get this tenure-line job. And what it means to get tenure in academia, it means that you work really, really hard a lot of hours for the first five years, then there's a committee of people who review all of your work. And if you get tenure, that means that you are permanent, you can't be fired, and you get a lot more flexibility and autonomy. And this is what as academics, a lot of academics works towards. So I got to that point and I didn't want to give it up. But the thing of it is, is that I didn't want that. I worked towards it but I didn't want it. But I said to myself, "Well, I worked so hard, right?" It's sort of like this sunk cost effect– you've invested so much time and to step away from it makes you feel like you wasted your time. And I don't think I wasted my time at all. There's a lot of value in a graduate education, there's a lot of value in any role that you take on. I think now I'm so much smarter to know that if something doesn't fit, or whatever your gut is telling you, you're smart enough to know that, "Hey, you know, I got here, and this is great. But I'm going to move on." So I think this is a pretty common phenomenon among people who are very ambitious. You've invested so much time. And you get to that point, and you look around and you're like, "Well, this is not really quite what I wanted. But I work so hard for it. Why would I give it up?"

Scott Anthony Barlow 07:36

Yeah. That's so interesting, though, that this really is something that can take a hold of so many of us, especially when we do work so hard for. I mean, you're a professor of psychology and very familiar with sunk costs and how that impacts your emotions toward different things. And I think that's proof positive that it's difficult to be able to see yourself and recognize that you're in it when you're in it to some degree. So I'm curious, then, fast forward a little bit, you ended up having a baby. And then all these people around you are telling you, well, why you were experiencing what you were experiencing. And it sounded like that really wasn't the case, because you did want to go back to work. And what happened from there? What else caused you to begin to look at this in a different way?

Michal Balass 08:29

So you might be able to relate to this, Scott. When you become a parent, your time becomes very, very different, right? And your priorities change. And one of the things that came about from not fitting in with the role that I was in is that I was frustrated and angry, and I wasn't enjoying my family life. And I didn't want to spend my time that I was away from my son doing something that wasn't fulfilling to me. So the idea in my mind was, well, I'm sending my son to this wonderful daycare, and he's getting a lot out of it. But that time that I'm away from him should be something that was very fulfilling to me. And so that sparked the process. And I was Googling career advice on Google. And I came across your podcast, and I started listening to it on my commute home. So it was after maybe one or two episodes that I listened to. I went on your website, and I filled out a request for coaching and I didn't know what to expect. And you so kindly emailed me back so quickly, and you said that you were happy to have a chat. And I was so nervous because in my mind, I was talking to this career change God, and I didn't know where I was going to go. And we talked about some options. And one of the best things that I've think that has happened to me in the past couple years, besides having my son, of course, was being introduced to Lisa Lewis. She is a wonderful, wonderful coach. And from there, it just sort of spiraled on. We had these really wonderful conversations, and she made me think about things that I never thought before. And one of the first questions she asked me to think about is, what are the things that are really true of me. And when I started generating that list, I sort of understood that there were a lot more sides to me than just this job. And that job is not what is supposed to identify me unless I wanted to. And that's how the process started.

Scott Anthony Barlow 10:51

Let me ask you about that. Because I think that's another common theme that we see all the time. Even if we don't intentionally, and I know that has been true for me and I've heard the same thing from many of our clients and students, but even if we don't intend to, a lot of times, unintentionally, I think we find after the fact that we have allowed our career to be our identification, for lack of a better phrase. So I'm curious for you, as you started to untangle that, what was that process like for you? And then what did you start to realize instead?

Michal Balass 11:29

Well, that process was very hard. And I think I'm still going through it, especially because from day one when I started graduate school, I was groomed to be a professor. And so it became really entangled in my identity. And what really helped was to look for opportunities that were fulfilling that I could still identify with. And do I feel a little bit sad sometimes that I'm not a professor? Yes, but I don't think it's because of anything else besides the fact that it's this transition. And, you know, it's something from my past. But I, by no means, think that or regretted in any kind of way. It's just, I'm doing the same kind of work, just with a different title and a lot more flexibility. And doing, I think 90% of my job is doing things that I like, which is tremendous, right?

Scott Anthony Barlow 12:40

It's tremendous. Most people barely have 10 or 15% of their job that they really, truly enjoy. So especially if it is lining up so clearly with other things that you value, too, like that flexibility you're talking about, and like some of the other elements. So that's super interesting. Now, I know that you really, during this time, you actually started doing photography, as well as a more intentional piece of your life. So how did that come about? Because I know that was tangled up someplace here in the process.

Michal Balass 13:17

Yeah. So I have a lot of hobbies. I used to be a ballerina with a small ballet company in upstate New York, I did that for a couple of years. And that always had these other interests. And what I've noticed is when I stopped engaging in those interests, there's something going on in my life that is not going quite right. And I was always taking photos. And once I started my tenure-line job, I stopped doing that. And I want to backtrack a second and say that, in this process of transitioning out of this traditional academic role that I had, I actually took an unpaid sabbatical. So my supervisor at that time, was very, very supportive. I spoke with him, I said that I needed a little bit of time, and they allowed me to take an unpaid leave from my position.

Scott Anthony Barlow 14:18

And this was a difficult decision for you if I remember correctly. Very difficult, right?

Michal Balass 14:23

Very, very difficult.

Scott Anthony Barlow 14:24

What prompted you to decide to do that?

Michal Balass 14:28

The thought of... this is gonna sound really extreme. The thought of going back and teaching again just made me so miserable that I preferred to just struggle financially and not do it.

Scott Anthony Barlow 14:42

How long? And I am very familiar with that. I have been in that same place where that thought in some ways, and I think I took, at the time it's been 12 years or whatever it's been, but at the time, it was probably a less healthy approach because I think for me, it was less intentional than what I know that you did. Because you ended up talking with your husband and planning out and figuring out how could we do this, what would it look like. Mine was more, how do I do anything else, but this. I was running from which is exactly what we tell people not to do. And so I would love to ask you a little bit about what took place between the time where you started thinking about this, and you're like, "I have to do something else. And this thought is making me miserable. Just the thought of it is making me miserable, let alone the actuality." And what took place in between there and then taking a sabbatical?

Michal Balass 15:39

Yeah, absolutely. And I want to mention, I will tie this back to the photography eventually. So what happened was, is that I had my maternity leave, I went back to work. And a couple months later, the semester started, and I went back to teaching and that semester was okay, I just really slowed down these tests that I used to do really quickly felt so burdensome to me, I just wasn't as productive as I used to be, because I just didn't really want to do it. When I came back after winter break, that's when things really started to break down, I found it was really hard for me to get up in the mornings, I didn't want to go to work. And this was really unfair to the students that I was teaching because they weren't getting a professor that was there, you know, 1,000%. And that semester ended. And I had a little bit of time to think during the summer. And as time was inching closer and closer to going back in the fall, I just had this really nagging feeling that I just I can't do this. So my husband and I had some very tough conversations about what it would mean for me not to work for a few months and just take a break and step away. And there wasn't any dad that we were going to do whatever it took for me to feel better. And so we sort of planned ahead for this a little bit and put money away for me to be not working for about four or five months. And I went and spoke with my supervisor. And I explained that I didn't give too much detail that I was feeling burned out and I wanted some time. But at that point, I didn't quit. What happened was, so I started my unpaid sabbatical in August. And then by September, I had to let them know what classes that I will be teaching starting in the next semester. And I looked at that email, and I said, "I'm not going back."

Scott Anthony Barlow 17:52

This is not happening.

Michal Balass 17:54

Yeah. And so I spoke with him. And I explained to him the situation. Again, he was very, very supportive. And it ended there. And so I said that come January 1st, I will be resigning from my position. And once I did that, I felt this burden, and this heaviness lifted off of me. But I was still very emotionally burnt out. So I wasn't working. And I was supposed to be looking for another job. And the financial pressure was always there in the back of my mind. But I wasn't able to do anything. I was working with Lisa for a good few months. And I knew what I was supposed to do. And she trained me very well. I just couldn't do it. And so I would wake up in the mornings with my son, I would take him to, I would drop him off at his preschool, I would come home. And sometimes I will honestly admit this, I would sit on the couch and all I could do is just watch TV. And in my mind, I thought that I did that for a longer time than it actually did. I think it was maybe a period of three weeks. And one day I woke up in the morning and I just felt better. I don't know what made it better. And I started picking up my camera and I started photographing random things and posting them on Facebook. And then I asked if anybody would be willing to model for me for my portfolio because I just wanted to do it for fun. I didn't think of it in any other way. And I got a lot of volunteers and I went out there and I started photography. And people were asking for me to photograph them. And so I started this little business on the side. And I felt alive again that I was doing something that I was very passionate about. And that made me feel so much better that I think it was late October that I started applying to jobs and positions and networking. And once I was actually ready for that, the process went very, very quickly. So I think I mentioned this to you before that, in that span of time, I applied to five or six jobs, and every job I got at least a phone interview and an in-person interview. And it was because I was hyper-focused, I knew what was going on, I was sending thank you notes, I was having phone calls. And I don't know that I would have been able to do that while still working the other job. It was just taking up so much mental and emotional energy that for me, and I know that you don't recommend this to a lot of your clients, quitting was the best thing.

Scott Anthony Barlow 20:42

It's not right for everybody. And, you know, we get that question many, many times. In fact, we did a full episode on how to know whether or not you should quit. But yeah, it is a very, very particular thing that does not, it's not always the same answer for everybody. And it depends whether or not it's going to rewrite for you. Because actually, some of the pressures that you just called out, can influence whether or not it's a great decision. And here's the reality that I've come to terms with is that it's going to be difficult no matter what. A lot of times we get into the situation, and we think, "Well, if only I had more time. And if only I didn't have this job in the way, and everything like that, then it would be okay." But the reality is, one way or another, it's still going to be challenging. And it sounds like that was the case for you, because you had the financial pressures on your mind, you were still, in some ways, it sounds like recovering from the burnout pieces. And I think that's one of the important things that we've observed that people must have. When they get to that point of burnout, they must get some kind of time away. And then after that, like some kind of distance, sometimes it's not always time, sometimes it's space, but some kind of distance in some way, in order to remove themselves from the real world of their situation and what it's been in the past. And then how they have to get momentum again. It seems like you were able to do that through photography, where you felt alive again. So I'm curious, as you kind of went through that cycle, what did you think the big pieces and big takeaways for you that really, really helped you move through that? Because everybody goes through that in some ways or another.

Michal Balass 22:28

Yeah. I think being patient with yourself. The more that I pushed myself, and the more that I, in my own mind, beat myself down that I shouldn't be doing this and I should be doing that and I shouldn't be pushing harder, the more resistance I gave to myself, the more it took me away from the process. And the more I had this aversion to figuring out my future. And the moment that I stopped, and I sort of let my mind engage in something else, that calmed me down. And those fears were still in the back of my mind, the financial fear that "Oh my goodness, I'm never going to be employed again, what am I going to do? How much longer can we do this just on my husband's salary?" And I've heard this before. And once you sort of give yourself some space to just calm down, you become more solution-focused, and you can start to see a lot more clearly than when you're hyper-focused and pushing and resisting where it doesn't get you anywhere.

Scott Anthony Barlow 23:37

That's one of the things that we find that we are doing a lot of times with folks that we work with is helping them create that type of space. And it's not an easy, it's almost never an easy thing to do. But for you, now that you have done that for yourself, what do you think helped the most to create some of that space? I heard you say already that I just needed to stop being so hard on myself in some ways, but what else do you think actually made the difference for you there? At least from what you can reflect upon now.

Michal Balass 24:18

Sure. So one is giving myself space. Two was in those days where I wasn't looking for a job but doing something to occupy my time it was photography, it was engaging in these day-to-day activities that was sort of preoccupied my mind. So I wasn't thinking about the job process itself. And then I said to myself that I was going to have conversations with people about what they do, and it wasn't about finding a job. I was just interested in somebody talking to me about what they do. So maybe that would spark inspiration for me. And I had some many networking conversations and when I came at it in that perspective where I was just going to talk and I wasn't going to ask for anything else, all of a sudden having these, I don't want to call them networking conversations, I don't know what to call them. But I would, you know, contact somebody on LinkedIn and say, "Hey, I'm really interested in what you're doing. I would love to hear more." And they would be really eager to speak with me. And that sort of sparked my own journey to say, you know, one of the things that was stopping me from moving on is that I didn't want to do anything academic, right? So I just came from academia. And I had this like aversion and I wasn't going to go back. Surprisingly enough, I'm still in academia, I still love academia. And I needed to acknowledge that. And I just needed to have conversations with people who are doing academically aligned careers, which there are a lot of people who are doing it. I just restricted myself from it, because I couldn't think beyond my current situation. And once I stepped away from it, it became pretty easy to do that. Yeah. And once I did that, things progressed very fast. I think.

Scott Anthony Barlow 26:18

That is so interesting. And we see that time and again, too. And I'm fascinated by the psychology elements of exactly that, where you come out of something and then you're like, I need to get the heck away from that. And you're sort of attributing that to be the problem when that isn't necessarily the problem. Sometimes it's something completely different. And then, you know, many times people end up in a variation, not always, but like in your case, you ended up in still academia, but in a completely different way, in a way that was much more in alignment with what you wanted and needed. And first of all, that is amazing. Because I think that a lot of people don't really realize what that takes to be able to do the work in order to get yourself the time and space and everything and all the conversations and all the things that have to happen in order to be able to get to that point and have that learning for yourself. But second of all, I would ask, what was the hardest part for you out of this whole thing? Or what were some of the most difficult challenges for you out of this whole journey, or piece of the journey?

Michal Balass 27:32

Oh my. Several things. As I mentioned before, letting go of the word Professor being a part of my career identity. And once I let that go, that released me a little bit from depression. The other hard part was the financial aspect of it. And I want to echo what you said before is that it's a dangerous thing to do, right? And it's not for everyone. And in my position, there wasn't any other way to engineer it. So before deciding to quit your job, I would recommend to talk with your supervisor, whoever is in a position to be a mentor to you and see what other things could be worked out. I think that's very important. In my situation, there wasn't anything else that could have been worked out. And it's really important for me to say, because I wouldn't wish that financial pressure and fear on anybody, especially if you have a young child, and you're trying to support a family. So I think that's really important. So in addition to this identity crisis, and this financial aspect, and the pressure of like having to do something right now, I mean, those were two big things about it. And I have to own this, that I was the one standing in my own way. You know, it wasn't that there's not a lot of opportunities out there. It was just me letting go and not trying to find the perfect next step. And I think that's really important. And that's the third aspect of this that was really, really hard. Like when I was looking for something the next step, I said, "I need to do something that is perfect and is going to fulfill X, Y, and Z." And that's really hard to do. And so you want to step into the process– A; being very patient with yourself, being very kind to yourself, and thinking about just improving from where you came from, to where you're going to go and make sure that that next step is gonna allow you the opportunities to grow. One of the most fantastic things that I love about my supervisor now is that when I interviewed him, he said that he doesn't expect me to stay there forever. He wants to create opportunities for me to grow. And the highest compliment to him would be if I stay in this role for a while, and then I move on to something else. And when he said that, I said, "Yes", this is what the process is about. It's doing something that fits your life in that mom

Scott Anthony Barlow 30:37

That is amazing advice. And I think, also, going back to what you said that you were the one standing in your own way, I think we've had exactly zero people that we've interacted with where the biggest challenges were something that was external. I have my personal experiences, then that literally 100% of the time, the biggest challenges are us standing in our own way, which is not what I think many of us go into this thinking. So that is amazing for you– One, acknowledging that. And then two, doing something about it. And then the not trying to find the perfect next step. I think that is so valuable. It's another type of pressure, like you were talking about the pressure earlier, right? That is just another type of pressure that we have a tendency to put on ourselves. And then it causes us not to be able to find any step.

Michal Balass 31:36

Right. Yeah, absolutely. And I think the difference between when I accepted the position that I'm in now, and the one that I accepted when I moved to Maryland was that I accepted my other academic job as I started it, I was going to get tenure, and I was going to retire from that institution. And I accepted this position knowing that I'm going to do this for a while, I don't know how long, I'm enjoying it thoroughly as we speak. And at some point, I'm probably going to grow into something else. And just that mind frame that different framing is so powerful, right? It's not something that I've ever started with any other job knowing that I may need to move into something else. And that's very powerful.

Scott Anthony Barlow 32:25

Well, in some ways, and I love what you're talking about. In some ways, it is really setting us up for different types of unneeded, I hesitate to use the word failure, because I think really failure is actually good in a lot of different ways. And we try and engineer failure into a lot of different things that we do. So we can have fast learnings. But it really is setting yourself up for whatever the opposite of success would be, and the opposite of what most people actually want. If we're going into it, the way that you did and I did many years ago too were thinking that, "Hey, this is the end." Like, because you're leaving the job, you're leaving all jobs one way or another. There is, whether you leave or whether they decide you leave, or whether I don't know, like something's going to happen, eventually, somewhere something in life is going to come up. And so it is really an impossible thing to find that perfect place where you're going to stay forever. And yeah. My last question to you. And you've given so much great advice so far. What else, aside from not trying to find the perfect next step, and getting out of your own way to some degree, what else after having gone through this would you give as advice to people who are in that place back where you were, way back where they might be thinking about the role, and be like, "I don't know how much longer I can do this. And I'm trying to figure out what would be right for me", but what advice would you give them if they're back there to be able to really figure this out and let them know what's coming?

Michal Balass 34:11

Yes, I would say first of all, and I said this before, be kind to yourself, be patient to yourself, and that things do always work out. That's one. The other thing I would recommend is to keep on having conversations. Don't have conversations because you're looking for another job, have conversations with people who are doing things that are interesting because you're interested in it. And that's going to open a whole world to you that you don't know about because you're not having conversations. And I want to say that I'm a very introverted person. When I walk into a party, I'm not the center of it and never was. But I can have these conversations now and I am still connecting and, you know, even now where I'm very happy with my current position, and I'm not looking to do anything necessarily in terms of leaving or anything of that nature, I'm still having conversations. I'm having conversations with other people at universities. I'm having conversations with people outside of my department learning about interesting things, because I don't know what circumstance is going to change, which is going to spark another move or another desire for a career change. And I think that's really important. And the important part of having conversations is about that it enlightens you about the possibilities. And when you hear about somebody who's doing something that is so fantastically interesting to you, I don't know, for me, it's very inspiring, and it keeps me going, it keeps me growing as a professional.

Scott Anthony Barlow 36:02

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 36:57

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

Scott Anthony Barlow 37:01

When you think about leaving your current company, they often fall into one of two categories. Movie-worthy visions, lighting the office on fire while flipping the bird on the way out the door. Well, the building slowly crumbles behind you. Or the option number two, being worried that your boss and all the people you care about are going to feel as though you flip them the bird and burn down the building, leaving everyone in the lurch while you go on to take care of your own life. But what if there were a completely different way? What if you could have your boss help you find a new role? What if your boss and co-workers supported your efforts to make a change while simultaneously you worked to set everyone up for success? That way when you left, they know that they're well taken care of. Let's put this another way. What if you didn't have to worry about burning bridges at all? And what if you have the support of the people that you work with to cross over your new bridge? That bridge still remains and everybody wins.

Scott Anthony Barlow 38:03

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.

Scott Anthony Barlow 00:01

What's the best way to meet new people, quickly test new careers, and pave the way for creating your very own role, maybe custom fit to you even? Most people think that it must be some amazing tactic, but it's not.

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

On the Happen To Your Career podcast number 537, called Rethinking Informational Interviews: Stop Doing Them & Start Test Driving Conversations, there on that episode we broke down quite a bit of the step-by-step process of test driving conversations. And we talked about what are the differences but particularly the subtle differences between test-driving conversations, as well as informational interviews, and why those subtle differences actually make test-driving conversations far more effective. Here's what we didn't do in that episode, though. We didn't go through and give you an in-depth, real example with a real person or set of people. Today, we're going to show you exactly how test-driving conversations work with a real person. And that's where, if you go way back to Episode 299, Laura Morrison comes in.

Laura Morrison 01:43

I've always been fascinated with behavioral science. And I'd like to have many nights with friends having a couple of beers being like, "What's your Myers Briggs score?" I just like wanted to talk about that stuff. And I think it's because I think it's really interesting to understand what makes people do what they do.

Scott Anthony Barlow 02:01

That's Laura. And if you don't remember from her story way back in the early days, Episode 299, she was a senior level, she was working in a senior-level role in sustainability. And at that time, just had her first child. Even though she had no desire to stay at home with kids beyond her maternity leave, it was still really difficult to go back. Difficult because when she finally went back, she realized it was no longer challenging. It was actually pretty boring. And to make matters worse, she led a team of eight people who were actually really excited and really passionate about their work. Okay, normally, this is actually a good thing. But for her, it felt like she had to fake this excitement. And as you can imagine, since she was leaving a new kiddo at home every day, this wasn't something that she was into. And it became painful, rather quickly. So you can go back, you can listen to episode 299. We'll link this episode, in particular, in the show notes. There's quite a bit of her eight month journey that couldn't fit into the podcast. So it was years later, I sat down with Laura to break down step by step what had happened. How on earth did she get this opportunity with an organization that just absolutely fit her ideal career profile, which if you recall, that's usually the first step in the process after setting yourself up to have success, what we call a plan for inevitable success, and then defining a profile of your ideal career. And this was exactly the stage that Laura was at, where she had completed a version of her ideal career profile right before she started test-driving conversations. Here's a little bit about what she knew.

Laura Morrison 03:45

And I've always had a little bit of a natural instinct of like, this person's being a jerk, but it's probably just because of this XYZ insecurity, right? Like, I usually could read people's behavior a little deeper than just what you could see on the surface. So I didn't know what I wanted to do. But I knew the type of company I wanted to work for. So the first way I actually found and heard of the Predictive Index was I just started searching best places to work lists in Boston because at the time being local was very important. And I would read the name, and then I'd Google them and be like, "Okay, law firm, not interested." Right? Whatever. And T is pretty far down in the alphabet and some of these lists. So it took me a while to get there. But that's how I found The Predictive Index. Because of some of the resources you helped me with in terms of like finding people on LinkedIn, I was able to find a friend of mine, who I had met at what we called the worst moms group ever, and became friends because of it. It's a funny way to make a friend, like, we agree this was terrible.

Scott Anthony Barlow 04:53

So it turns out Laura's new friend from the worst mom's group ever ended up knowing somebody already that worked at The Predictive Index, this organization that she was really interested in at the time, and appeared to line up with her ideal career profile. Okay, so she asked that person to introduce her.

Laura Morrison 05:13

At the time, he was the head of marketing at The Predictive Index. He now has a fancier higher title that I can't remember. And so she introduced me, you know, more than willing to talk. We talked for like the 15 minutes.

Scott Anthony Barlow 05:27

Laura mentions 15 minutes because we often recommend asking for 15 minutes in order to make a test drive conversation happen. Now, the reason behind that is pretty simple, but also psychological. You want to ask for something that people can say 'yes' to, not something that is difficult to say yes to, most people can find 15 minutes. But when you're asking for an open-ended amount of time, or an hour, or even a half an hour or even 20 minutes, sometimes, it becomes more difficult to be able to say yes to that. But here's the interesting part. When you get there, and your 15 minutes passes, and you're like, "Hey, you know what, I want to be respectful of your time." Often, many people will say, "Yeah, I can find more time."

Laura Morrison 06:09

So I learned a little bit about him by looking on LinkedIn, I had a 15-minute call with him. And mentioned, I was curious about product marketing, and UX research, and product management because those were the things I was interested in at the time. One of the things that I did is I did not express that I was interested at working there for as long as humanly possible.

Scott Anthony Barlow 06:31

The reason why Laura mentions this here is because we often encourage people as they're going through experiments to keep an open mind because what you might find is that you don't actually really want to work at the organization or this particular type of role. And it was different for Laura, she validated that it actually was a good fit for her. But that's not always the case. So be aware. Okay, back to Laura's story.

Laura Morrison 06:57

First of all, I researched them so I could make a personal connection, like, "Oh, I hear you like music. Tell me about that." But then also, I have two or three awesome questions that I can never remember off the top of my head but are written in those documents.

Scott Anthony Barlow 07:10

One of Laura's favorite questions is, "What do you love about working in this role, or this company, or this section of the organization?" Her other questions were more personalized or individualized. Also, I want you to remember that this is a career experiment. So here's a fun way that Laura would look at the data visually afterward, and assess what actually worked, where are the areas where she wanted to keep going forward, and where didn't she.

Laura Morrison 07:41

But then I also like what highlights in green are some colors. If they said things that I was excited about, I was like, "Ooh, that sounds like something I'd like I put it in green." And if it wasn't, I was like, "Oh, that sounds terrible. I put it in red." And so like, I would talk to UX researchers and realize there was so much red, like that one green thing I was curious about probably wasn't enough. And it's not like I'm not detail-oriented, at least based on my behavioral pattern. I'm like, trained into it through engineering. So it's not like I ever printed them all and compared them. But it was like a good gauge for me. Okay, this is why I'm excited about product management. I've talked to four product managers and keep highlighting things in green.

Scott Anthony Barlow 08:21

So one of the things that you need to realize is that Laura was going through and even though she was really excited about this organization, The Predictive Index, she was also investigating other organizations and other roles and opportunities over a period of months. And during those conversations, during those interactions, she was having a lot of areas of red, but also a lot of areas of green for The Predictive Index and the conversation she was having there. And this was further reinforced as she continued to investigate and continue to interact with people in the organization.

Laura Morrison 08:56

One of the things before the interview, I don't like suits at all. I'm a pretty casual person. And I was like, I don't want to work at a place... And this was a while ago, this was four years ago, it's a little different now. I feel like no one wears a suit anymore, because everyone's in their pajamas. But so I'm like, okay, I'm going to wear something that I'm comfortable in like Lisa help with this too. And I'm gonna go in there and I'm going to be myself and not pretend to be anyone else and see what happens. And I think the morning or the night before, I was like, "Ryan", my husband, "there's a ping pong table in that office, and I'm going to see it and that's why I'm gonna want to work there." He's like, "How do you know that?" Because he's trying to get me to wear a suit, right? He's a banker. He's very formal. "Very sure you're comfortable wearing this to an interview?" I was like, "Yep, I'm comfortable. I guarantee there's a ping pong table in their office." And like, the first thing I do is I walk in and I see the ping pong table. That's good, right? I read the culture right. And then in our part of the interview, he whiteboard it for 30 minutes, didn't ask me a single question. And then another Engineer came in the room and started asking me all these questions about product management because he didn't like read the memo that I didn't know anything about software product niche. And he kept asking me all these questions. It's like, I don't know. I don't know the answer to that. What I do know is bla bla bla. And I just, I didn't try to be something other than I was, I just was honest and curious. And it was fun. Like, I left that interview energized, which is not something I would normally say about an interview.

Scott Anthony Barlow 10:27

Okay, so let's review for just a second here. Where Did Laura start out? Well, let's go back to step one. She started out in our Career Change Bootcamp program, which meant that step one was building a plan for when things get hard and identifying the people and things that she needed to make her career change successful. It's what we now call the plan for inevitable success. Step two was identifying a hypothesis where she spent several months creating a working draft of her ideal career profile. Step three was experimentation, where she specifically chose what we call test-driving conversations. That's what we're talking about right now, right? And during those conversations, she was reaching out to people in a variety of different ways, which we cover in different episodes. And we'll have links to some of those different ways and examples in the show notes. But finally, she observed that she was really excited about this one company, in particular, The Predictive Index, and had already been through many conversations. And the previously determined, prior to even uncovering The Predictive Index, that product management could be an area that she was excited about changing, too. So now, at this point, she had some validation that she was on to a role that could be right for her, as well as a company that could match up for her. That's when she started talking to the people at The Predictive Index And let's not gloss over the fact that she already now had relationships with them, after she had this series of those initial test drive conversations. And after that happened, after she had decided, "Yep, I want to work at The Predictive Index. How do I make that happen?" She went to them to discuss that she was interested and how it might be possible to work there because she was loving every interaction that she had. That's where they brought her into the interview process for a position that wasn't even posted at the time. And as you heard, those interviews that she had reinforced her experience with the company, and ultimately led to a pretty decent-sized race when she was worried initially about having to take a pay cut. And she ended up having to lead to this amazing opportunity. Now, when people listen to this, there's one thing that doesn't always seem obvious, doesn't always stand out. But it's really important for us to cover. It's that, to be able to get to this point where you actually have an opportunity in front of you, you actually have to give up initially, that you want it to lead to an opportunity at all. And you actually have to genuinely be curious when you are in the test-driving conversations. Test driving is for that purpose only. It's for test driving. It's for experimentation. It's for trying to find out if what you think you want is actually what you want. Nothing else.

Laura Morrison 13:27

I was trying not to be the person who was like, "Oh, my gosh, hire me." And I was trying not to sell myself essentially like I was trying to be curious and ask questions rather than me like you should hire me because of XYZ.

Scott Anthony Barlow 13:41

It's only at this point in time where you've gone through, and much as Laura did, you've already validated that this is an organization that I want to work with. This is a role that I want to actually be in. I have some actual evidence, if you will, through my experiments, that what I am heading towards is actually right for me. Only at that point in time, can you then shift your focus and ask for what you want. Well, you might be wondering, "How did Laura do that here?" Well, in addition to this conversation that you've been hearing that I had with Laura, years after the fact when we pieced together all the events that had happened, I also went back and looked at our notes. And what I discovered is that there was a point along the way where Laura had interacted with us saying, "You know what, I really want to work for this organization. I proved that this is something that's going to be right for me. How do I shift into let's get this mode now that I know what I want?" And what we did is we helped her understand that you could go have a conversation. It's pretty simple conversation saying, "You know what, I love all the interactions that I've had here. I have really enjoyed how you've taken me through and helped me understand what it is that you do. Every interaction I've had has really strengthened my desire to work here. And now at this point, I'm sure that I want to work here. So I'd love to talk to you about how we could make this happen. How in the future I could work with The Predictive Index." And so that's what we came up with. And if we fast forward quite a bit, that eventually led to do a progression, and ultimately, the interview process that you heard earlier on in the episode, and then ultimately an opportunity. Here's Laura talking about how it moved from I'm exploring into now we're talking about this role.

Laura Morrison 15:38

Before we're talking about careers, like jobs, how a product works, how marketing works. And then that second conversation, I think, we start talking about the role. What is the role specifically are you interested in it? Here's what I want in this role, that sort of conversation.

Scott Anthony Barlow 15:55

The last thing I should probably mention is that almost everyone, not everyone, but almost everyone we work with, when we have our clients have these types of conversations, they're uncomfortable, wildly uncomfortable at first. However, you build skill around it, and also comfort.

Laura Morrison 16:14

I mean, part of your whole process that I really appreciated was like forcing me to talk to all these people that I didn't know.

Scott Anthony Barlow 16:20

And you might ask, well, why do we do that? Why is that a part of our process in one way or another? And the simple answer is, because if you really want to get to work that fits you, work that is meaningful, work that actually is a wonderful situation for you, then it doesn't just come through the normal channels, you have to identify what it is, find where it can happen in the world, and then essentially, engineer your way into those opportunities. And we find that the very easiest way to do that is through people, whether it's these types of conversations, whether it is building new relationships, whether it is, you know, experimenting, and having other people's help in making your career change and understanding what you want, and getting that feedback all along the way, it always comes from people. People are the shortest road to being able to making this type of work possible. And guess what? It can be great for them just as much as it's great for you. So last thing I want to leave you with is that here's a couple of things that you can do today to get started. If you're not quite ready to experiment, if you haven't already identified where it is that you're heading, then that's where you need to start. And that's okay. Now you know what comes later on in the process. So the way that you can do that is by starting with your plan for inevitable success, and so that you are prepared to make a career change. And then if you've already done that, you can go into your ideal career profile and begin to identify your destination– where it is that you want to go, your hypothesis so that then you can go into experimentation. However, if you're all ready for experimentation, then the first thing that you can do is begin identifying those organizations, or roles that could be a great fit for you. And then reach out to folks so that you can begin scheduling some of these conversations, test drive conversations, like what we talked about. And we've got plenty of links here in the show notes to help you with each piece of the process referring back to other episodes. Or, if you want help with this, by all means, don't hesitate to reach out and send me a note directly Scott@happentoyourcareer.com. And just put 'Conversation' in the subject line. And we'll be more than happy to be able to help you for whatever stage you're at. Otherwise, pick out some organizations, and let's get started.

Scott Anthony Barlow 18:57

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 would 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 audio book, which you can access right now in second.

Scott Anthony Barlow 19:45

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

Michal Balass 19:52

I got to that point, and I didn't want to give it up. But the thing of it is, is that I didn't want that.

Scott Anthony Barlow 20:01

Okay, if you've ever hung on to something for way, way longer than you should, this episode is for you. Whether it's a job or a relationship, maybe it's something completely different. But all of them can leave you feeling completely drained. So the question becomes, "How can you motivate yourself to make the necessary change and then make sure that you move on to the first sign of trouble the next time? How can you learn from it?"

Scott Anthony Barlow 20:30

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.

Scott Anthony Barlow 00:01

How can you accomplish goals that require having connections, but not be transactional? Well, it turns out there are easy ways to begin relationships that are genuine and feel natural to the other party. What's the key? Well, it turns out, stop forcing it. What if we only focused on what's easy for you?

Introduction 00:26

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 00:51

I remember in 2006 I had just recently been fired from a job that I did not particularly enjoy. It was pretty rough. I was pretty determined at that point to not have to go back to just another job where I could spend my days just, you know, waiting for the weekend, as I grinded it out in meetings that had really no meaning for me. So that's the point in time, some of you have heard this story before, but that's the point in time where I began learning everything I could about people who get well paid and also love their work. And that's where I started to call these people happy high achievers. One of the things that I observed right away as I was studying this group of happy high achievers, is that they often don't get jobs by traditional means. When you're outside, and you're looking in on their situation, it almost seems random, it's not though. It's not random. It's not even close to random. Also, it doesn't have anything to do with the Blind 200 plus times or, Indeed, or applying on LinkedIn. So the question becomes, well, how do they do it? How do they do it? How do they create these opportunities? How do they engineer these opportunities? How do these opportunities happen seemingly serendipitously? Well, we've talked about in the past about the importance of prioritizing what you want. And that's step one. Like you have to have an understanding of what you want, where you're going to make it easier to get there. So that of course, is where it starts. That said, though, happy high achievers realize that people hire other people, people make the opportunities for other people. It's not companies, it's not computers, yes, there can be computers and technology involved. But ultimately, it's people that end up making the final decisions or creating the final decisions. This means that a very large shortcut to find the work that fits you, or even getting positions created for you is through, you guessed it, relationships. Now, over the years, I have personally found that there is a huge, let's call it not a shortcut, but the fastest way to begin a relationship with someone else, it's not networking events, it's definitely not speed networking, even though that sounds like it should be. It's also not always anything to do with social media. Sometimes it can be. The continuous question that always pops up is, "How do I make connections? How do I build genuine relationships when I hate or despise traditional networking? I do not want to feel like I am schmoozing." Okay. Now, regardless of how you feel about schmoozing, or traditional networking, in this episode, we're going to cover and focus our efforts on how do we begin natural, great connections. I'm also going to give you five specific examples of ways to do this, along with some of my personal favorites. At the end of this episode, I'm going to give you a few actions that you can start with today, like right now. But first, let's go into where a few people struggle with this. Let's uncover some of these struggles so that we can begin to not just dissect them, but give you some solutions to those struggles.

Scott Anthony Barlow 04:24

One of the things is reconciling this idea of, hey, I know that my goal is to get a job. I know my goal is to find my way to my ideal career, meaningful work, whatever it is that I have as a goal. And I also know that I don't want to schmooze. I don't want to be transactional. And what I found over the years is that many people have problems reconciling the two. How do I have this goal? How do I make progress on the goal? And how do I not create a transactional relationship with the other person? Okay. Now the hardest part of this entire concept is getting people to temporarily let go of the outcome here. Temporarily let go of the fact that my ultimate goal might be to get a job. We have to disconnect the goal from the interactions with the other person. That way I can focus solely and genuinely on the other person. Okay. Now, that's a really, really difficult concept. It sounds ridiculous in reality, but it is, "the struggle is real" we'll say. What you can do, you can have a goal, you can strategically seek to build relationships with those people who are likely to be able to help you or hire you. But don't do it only for that reason. Do it because you actually want connection with that other person. What you can't do, you can't let that goal block your ability to be genuinely interested in that other person. This is hard. Also, you can't fake interest. Humans have pre-installed BS meters that are hardwired into us for many years of evolution. Okay, for a second here, let's break down what goes into a great connection. Great connections when you start to think about what are those pieces and parts that must be there. We're not going to be able to uncover all of them. However, those also come from years of evolution. It's those situations where we feel some level of familiarity. That familiarity breeds trust. Well, what creates familiarity? Often a variety of things like rapport, like being able to find that common ground, like being able to have somebody who is genuinely interested or showing care in you. Okay, those are just a few of the things. But they're going to serve us well as we continue to talk about how to find a few ways that fit you to create genuine connections here. Okay, let's start with number one here. Number one, I call the path of least resistance. A path of least resistance, as it turns out, is introductions. It is something that is probably the easiest, shortest pathway, and maybe even the most powerful relationship-building hack that you already have in your toolbox. It allows you to connect with all kinds of people, simply because you already know some people now. Okay, I can hear some of you saying, "Well, I don't have that big of a network", or "I am trying to build relationships in another city." What we've learned over the last 10 years is, yes, that feels like a struggle. And sometimes that can add to the challenge. However, in most cases, you have a far bigger network already. And far bigger number of relationships in one way or another that are already there, already operating in existence from friends, family, co-workers, and other people that you interact with on a regular basis. Okay, let me show you how, though this idea of introductions can work. Let's break it down into an actual connection here. Let's say that you and I know each other well enough where I have some level of trust and respect for you. Now, let's say that you tell me, "Scott, I have someone you must meet. You have to meet this person." When you introduce me to someone else, a portion of that trust and credibility comes over from them. Think about it as it almost, like, comes over from them. Because it's a familiar source, and then passes on to the other person– the new person, the person you're getting introduced to, which creates instant trust and credibility. Now, there's a really great group of research about this, who Robert Cialdini had pulled together in a rather famous book called "Influence: The Science and Art of Persuasion". But even if you didn't know anything about this research, you've seen this happen already. Let's use an example here that you have either done yourself or you've seen happen. You invite your friends to dinner. One of your friends asked if they can bring another friend of theirs. Okay, so fast forward, dessert and a glass of wine. And a couple hours later, you have a brand new relationship, because now you have interacted with them. And let's assume at that point, you've liked them. And you have a measure of trust with this newest person who entered your life less than two hours before, right? Okay, think about what would happen if instead, that same person that you've never met before, shows up randomly and unannounced. Like they just show up at your door. Like, you know, they weren't invited by a friend. The friend didn't say, "Hey, can I bring this person along? " Instead, this person just shows randomly up at your door, and they're like, "Hey, so I heard you're having dinner here. Can I have dinner with you?" You're probably pretty likely to say ‘no’ because that's strange. It's out of context. And that request is coming from this person you've never met before. You might call the cops but you're probably not likely to say, "Yeah, come in and eat dinner." You're probably like, "Why are you here?" Okay, but instead, let's go with it for just a second. Let's say that you do actually choose to invite them in, because you're just that nice of a person, and you're already eating dinner anyway. So let's imagine that you do allow them to come in. You're probably pretty likely to be more skeptical, or the relationship and trust-building process is going to take longer, it's going to move slower. This means that when you are creating introductions, and you already have a relationship with one person, it speeds up the trust in relationship-building process with the person you're being introduced to. Okay, so now, let's use that analogy of, you know, being brought to dinner as a friend. This is what I want you to do. Your goal now is to create the time, place, and events that allow you to enter the life of someone else in a way that increases their chances of liking you, trusting you, and deeming you as credible. Okay, if you remember our happy high achievers that we talked about earlier, and out of my studies of what they do, you begin to realize there's lots of ways to leverage introductions to build relationships. And we've have talked a little tiny bit about this on the Happen To Your Career podcast from time to time, we teach a lot of these to our coaching clients. And there's some measure of this inside, some of our programs like Career Change Bootcamp. But for today, I want to really go in-depth into something that we don't have anyplace else quite in this way. And I want to focus specifically on introductions by email.

Scott Anthony Barlow 11:48

Now, I'll say that you can adapt these email introductions to conversational introductions to social media introductions to, like, text message introductions, they can be adapted all over the place with a little bit of changing the verbiage for the situation. But let's assume that for a moment, you already have the basics in place for an introduction. And the basics are simple. Someone knows someone else that you want to know. That's it. There's probably this situation right now. And you just might not be totally aware of it. Most people, when they're faced with this situation, simply ask for an introduction. And that would be a mistake. Okay, let's talk about what does it do. I'm going to give you a formula for introduction, no, this is not a script, it is a formula that works rather well. It is not the only formula, but it's one of them that we use regularly that we've seen a lot of success with and tested over the years. Okay, I want to just read you an email here really quick. This email example goes like this. "Hey, Patricia. I'm spending the next couple of months researching companies trying to decide on my next career move. I was wondering if you would be willing to introduce me to Tim over at Google. I noticed that you are connected with him on LinkedIn. I'm really interested in product development and we'd love to ask him a few questions about what he does. If not, no worries. But if so, I would very much appreciate it. Just let me know, yes or no. And I will write up an example and something just to make it easier on you. Thanks so much." Okay, that's an example of a super simple email. But I want to break down, what is the formula that's at work here? We've already got someone that you already know. And the assumption here is that they know you and they like you. They have some measure of trust with you. What we're asking for is, we, or I should say, what we're doing here is we're sharing the context of the request, we're sharing the request itself, what's the "ask" here, expressing what the intention behind the ask here, which is incredibly important, we'll talk more about that in a second. We're giving them an out. So we're giving them a way to say 'no', which is important too, especially from a psychological aspect. That way, they don't feel like they're being backed into it, which increases the higher level of commitment. We're sharing in appreciation and gratitude. And we're making it so easy. It's something that they can say yes to. We're not asking for something that they feel like they can't do in one way or another. Okay, if we do those things, it significantly increases, not just their willingness to make the introduction for you, but also the chances that they're going to be able to say yes. You probably didn't realize there was that much buried in that super short message that I read to you. But I want to break it down again here. Okay, so the other thing I should tell you too, is I will make sure that we have a link to these messages inside of your show notes. You can go back and look at them where we break down and show in the message, what is the context. What is the request? What is the place where it makes it easy for them to say yes, etc. And then that way you can have a visual at the same time. All right, that message again here says, "Hey, Patricia. I'm spending the next couple of months researching companies trying to decide on my next career move." That is the context. I'm sharing the context in which I am contacting them. That way, they understand what to do with this message, and they're willing to read on. Alright, and then I go on to say, "I was wondering if you would be willing to introduce me to Tim over at Google." That's my request, that's my ask. I put it up front and center. I make it easy for them to understand. And then I go on to say, "I noticed that you are connected with him on LinkedIn, I'm really interested in product development and I would love to ask him a few questions about what he does." That's my intention. Because if they know Tim over at Google, what if they're worried that I'm going to try and sell Tim some stuff? Or what if they're worried that who knows? Like, if we don't fill in the blank for them, then our human brains are amazing and they will imagine something a reason to try and fill in the blank for them about why we're trying to contact Tim. So we just need to share our intention upfront, it makes it easier for them to be like, "Oh, yeah. Like, that's great idea. Yeah, you should totally do that. Yeah, I'd help." Okay. And then I go on to say, "If not, no worries!" That's four words, I tend to put exclamation points after it. But the important part is I'm giving them an out with those four words. And then from there go on to say, "But if so I would very much appreciate it." That's the appreciation part. That's the gratitude part. And then I make it easy for them to say yes, by saying, "Just let me know, yes or no. And I'll write up a short example, and send something over to make it easier on you." Another thing to point out, there's only 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 6 and a half sentences really in this. And then that's it. It's a really short email, as to the point it has all the pieces. And that's part of what makes it work. You'll notice that every line set of words is there intentionally. And then when you send this as an email, or you send it as a message on social or we could send it as a text. In a text, you could probably even reduce it further, like you could, you know, with even more shorthand and less sentences, if you need to do. Your next step after this is, after you have something like this drafted, all you have to do is press send. Like this is your easiest road, easiest road by a long shot to be able to create natural connections. But it doesn't stop there. The important part in order to finish creating, or I should say, engineering these natural connections, is what happens after that. What happens after I've asked for an introduction? Most people think that your work is done here like all I need to do is figure out a time to schedule with a new person, and voila, okay, instinct connection, but that would be inaccurate. And that's also why people have bad experiences with introductions. My work does not stop here. First, and maybe most importantly, if they say no, that's okay. That's okay. They might be connected to the other person, but maybe they don't know them really well. Or maybe they just aren't comfortable with the intro. Either way, that's okay. Move on. If you can try not to just get discouraged from that, just try to understand if you can, that that's their right and if they made that introduction, then it might not go that particularly well anyways. They have a reason in mind allowed them to decide what is best there. Don't force it, as we talked about earlier. But if they do say yes, that is amazing. That's perfect. This is the point where you get to, instead of waiting on them, you get to prepare an intro for them. Now, when I say prepare an intro for them, I'm talking about preparing the email or the text or however, they're going to introduce you to this other person. Write it for them. writing an introduction serves a couple of purposes. Number one, it makes it easier for them to send it even though they said they're gonna send it or maybe even some people are like, "Oh, no need to send over an example." Do it anyway. I promise you that people have great intentions to write their own. But a lot of times they may be busy and may not actually be able to follow through on it or something may happen in their lives where this priority gets dropped and it falls to a lower priority level. And in order to allow them to follow through, which is good for you and good for them, they feel good about themselves. And it helps you just write the introduction. It's also easier for most people to modify something that is there versus writing something from scratch. So if you're creating an introduction for them, they may only use one line of it. And that would be okay. But that actually makes it possible for them to send it because it reduces the cognitive load. And it reduces the steps that have to happen in order for them to get to the point where they actually send the introduction, email or text, or whatever for you. Okay, I want to give you an example of what it sounds like to respond back to them. And what an introduction email might sound like, as well. So I might send them a one-liner saying, "Here's that introduction for Brett and Sue. Thank you so much, again, for being willing to do this, feel free to use anything that I've written, or feel free to make changes or use nothing at all. Again, I really appreciate it. Let me know when you have made the intro so that I can respond." Okay, then I would paste below the email, as well, the actual introduction email, too. So let me read this off. This example says, "Hey, Brett and Sue. Hope you're both doing well up there in Massachusetts. It's 75 and sunny here in Dallas today. So I can't complain. I wanted to introduce you both to Anna. Anna and I met through a business coach that we both work with, she's currently interested in learning more about the roles available at your company located there in Boston. She's really engaged, she's really excited about your particular mission of helping companies realize the potential of their employees. And I suggested that she talk to both of you based on your levels of influence and your respective roles. I just sent Anna an idea of your product and I'll share the results as soon as I have those as well. All the best connecting, take care." Now, one thing I might change on this email, something that I use a lot, I will embed another line in there to really level up and say, "I would suggest that you connect in the next week via short phone call, or connect in person." And then that way I'm giving permission and instruction for what the other parties can do. This actually helps a lot. It helps a lot because it gives guidance as to what to do next. And having that guidance as to what to do next increases the chances that I'm going to be able to then meet and have that connection, begin that connection with the other person or in this case, people. Okay. Don't forget to ask them if it's an email to CC you on the intro, and then that way you can respond and then you can just take it from there. After they've sent the introduction, you're off to the races, get a call scheduled with the person or a time set up to meet. One of the things that we'll talk about and have mentioned in future episodes is, it's a whole art form to be able to schedule in ways that reduce the cognitive load required. But that's another episode for another day. Work to schedule the call with the person, get a time set up, you've probably guessed that there was even more ways that you can make this process more valuable. We're going to come back at the end. And we'll talk more about that.

Scott Anthony Barlow 23:17

But let's go into number two. Idea number two for how you can connect with other people. This is called the conference goer. Here's an example. One of our clients, we're gonna call her Jennifer. She was really excited about a conference, she was heading to this conference that she was attending. And she really wanted to meet with one of the panel speakers. She had been following her work for a while. So here's what she did to create that initial connection. She initially had interacted with the speaker on social media just by responding to some of her comments in various different places and then sent an email beforehand. So later on wasn't out of the blue when she emailed the panel speaker again and said, "I'm really looking forward to your panel discussion. I'll be in the front row wearing an orange jacket. I'm really excited to meet you afterwards." Okay, so this series of relatively small interactions via email and social allowed her to be able to get to me and connect with the speaker afterwards. Now, she was really pumped. She was really pumped. And one of the things is that this feels really natural. It may not feel natural to you if this is the first time that you've done this, and this is a point that I should distinguish. None of these things might feel natural to you. We're gonna go through five different examples in total, and at first, they might not feel natural to you, but they will feel natural to the other person. And that's what we're going for. So in this case, Jennifer had been able to begin that relationship with somebody that she really wanted to know. And that's the important part here. And it actually didn't take that much in time total, probably researching and messaging and everything else and thinking about what she was going to wear and how she's going to do that probably took like 90 minutes, right? You can really ramp up the relationship building here to another opportunity to be able to level up in this case is by circling back around with that person after the conference too. And when you speak with them, letting them know that you're going to wrap back around with them after the conference too. Because if you think about it, as someone who is on a panel or somebody who is a speaker at conference, what I've noticed is that as soon as someone does their presentation, then everyone wants to talk to them afterwards. So there's limited time to connect, right? So I'll make a point to find ways to work around this. One of the ways is what we mentioned for Jennifer. Other ways is, I might request to meet up with them before their speaking time, or well after their speaking time in a way that's easy for them. Here's an example, "I'm going to be at the conference on Thursday. I would love to buy you a coffee at 7am before the conference gets started for the day. Or if that doesn't work out, I'm also going to be around after the conference. I'm hanging around till Sunday at 3pm. I'd be happy to do breakfast at this time or buy coffee at this time." It is relatively easy, but especially if you've already had some level of initial connection with that person at the conference, it can work really, really well. Another thing to note, too, is that it doesn't actually have to be speakers, something else that I've done quite a bit is I'll find out who's going to do attend the conference, and be able to contact those individuals prior to the conference going. That does two things for them, it gives them something to look forward to, that is out of the ordinary of the conference. And often if you're meeting with them early, it can give you another person to be able to experience the conference with and then that often creates a stronger relationship too. And especially if you meet up with them earlier on, shortly after they arrive or before the conference really gets going, then it heightens the chance that you're going to be able to spend more time with them in a variety of different ways, even if just passing and waving again in the conference hallways. Okay. So it does require a little bit of detective work to do that. What you'll find is a lot of conferences nowadays, or events in one way or another, try to create a community around it. And they'll use apps, they'll have attendee lists, they'll have, there's a lot of different ways that you can find out who is going. And then you can pick and choose from the people that you're really excited to get to know for one reason or another, whether that happens to be an industry they're in, a role that you're excited about, just somebody that you have heard of, and hadn't connected in your industry with or somebody who you just happen to be on their social media and realize that, wow, this might be a cool person. All of those are okay. And 100% of those are great reasons to be able to reach out to them, share what attracted you to them in the first place. And it doesn't have to be complicated. It can be as simple as, "Hey, I clicked on your social media, I realized that we have this and this in common. I realized that we both do mountain biking and are attending this conference. And I would love to get connected with you. What day are you flying in? I'll be there on Tuesday, I would love to buy a coffee." It can be that simple. Okay, this next one is called the "gatherer". This is where you're bringing people together. Bringing people together and allowing them to bring other people together along with you in one way or another. So instead of you going to someone else, someplace else, and seeking out connections, this is the backwards approach where you're bringing people to you in one way or another. Now, this is something that I've done over and over again. But also recently we had a client who did this exact thing.

Jill 29:20

The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker, and I love gathering people together. So the Art of Gathering book talks about how to bring people together in a meaningful way. And I would say that's one way that I have practiced everything that I've learned, and that is by bringing people together. So I had a party at my house a few years ago called Chats and Charcuterie, where just had a Charcuterie board and then I brought people. This was kind of like towards the end of COVID. So people only talked about COVID when you got together, and I was tired of talking about COVID and so I was just like, "Okay, no, we're gonna talk about different things." And so I invited people over to my house, we set up a big circle and it just organically took place like the conversation. And we never brought up that subject and everyone just really connected.

Scott Anthony Barlow 30:09

That by the way, is Jill and we'll put a link to her full story and full podcast from the Happen To Your Career podcast. But I wanted to share that tidbit for how you can use this to connect with other people in a gathering-type format. Now, I've done this quite a bit, I mentioned that earlier. Sometimes we connect around a particular idea. For example, you know, we had somebody who used to work with our Happen To Your Career team and she was just copywriting for us. She is amazing. And one of the things that she did was she hosted parties at her house every single month to connect with other people to talk about Enneagram. And that turned into this thing that everybody looked forward to for years. And she got to meet so many people through that type of event over and over and over again, every single month. And she didn't have to go anywhere, she did have to do a little planning, they would make tacos every single time and that was it. That was the extent of it. Pretty cool, right? But you can actually combine this together with the conference goer, too. An example of that, where you're combining the conference goer with the gatherer, well, I've done dinners or meetups big and small, many times where I've organized people together for conferences. Remember those lists we're getting access to other people who are going to be there? Well, I've invited a group of people to dinner and I will state exactly that, "Hey, I'm putting together a group of really interesting people that I would love to meet. And I would love to have you there." And then I would reference why I'm interested in having you there. What's the context and say, "We're getting together on this night, this day, at this place, it's going to be a small dinner, there'll be about six of us or so. And we'd love for you to join us." That's it. That's an example of a small one. I've also organized groups that are like 40, or 50 plus people where it turns into a full-on meetup. And it doesn't have to be complicated. The invites can be very, very simple. Generally, when people are going to a conference, they want to connect, they want to have things that are outside the normal, they want to feel like they belong in one way or another. This is an easy thing that you can not take advantage of but appeal to. And then this allows you to be able to begin a connection in a new and different and very natural way. Now the cool thing out of this, the extra benefit out of this is you get a lot of connections all at once. So you might know that I'm very much a maximizer. I love creating multi-purpose or multi-benefit activities. And this definitely falls into that category for me. Let's go into number four. Number four is what I call "The Friend Maker". Meaning I'm going to make you my friend. This is something I've also done over and over and helped many of our clients too. Here's how it goes. You find a person that you are genuinely interested in. You want to meet. And you take a very direct approach with that. I want to tell you how I met my friend, Jenny Foss, who's been on the podcast. She runs a really interesting resume business, which she's transitioned and grown over the years. And the way that I met her, I don't remember how I got introduced to her work, somebody must have sent me something or I happened along the interwebs ended up hearing about Jenny. And right away, I could tell that this is somebody who I wanted to know. This is somebody who I would likely be friends with. And she lived in the Portland area. We had that in common. Because I've lived in Portland in the past, she just seemed super fun. She seemed into some of the same things that I was into. She had kids approximately the same age. There were all of these different things. So I had emailed her and said, "Jenny, I don't know how we have not met before. We happen to work in... We both work in careers. And we have some similar friends. And I would love to connect. I'm coming to Portland in two weeks and wondering if I can invite you to dinner or if I can buy you coffee." So in result, super simple, but of course she said yes. And I've been able to grow that friendship. She's super fun. I got to meet up with her a variety of different times different ways. She's been on the podcast, I've done different partnerships with her. It's turned into something else, but that's not how it started. That's not how it started at all. It started from simply saying, "Jenny, you're awesome. I'm going to make you my friend." That's it.

Scott Anthony Barlow 34:47

But you can do the same thing if that feels too forward to you, then here's an example of another one. We call this one, the "Doer". The doer is where you're able to connect through work, in one way or another by doing the work. This can be in quite a few different forms. For example, one of the things that you could do is connect through a volunteer cause where you're actively working, you're actively rolling up your sleeves in one way or another, to be able to connect with other people that you either want to meet, or involved with organizations that you're excited about, or anything else that you might have in common with. Now, another example of this might be where you connect by project. For example, there's a variety of open source projects out there, let's say that you are someone who can write code or you do project management or any number of other things like that, then you can actually become involved through a project and actually do the work. Now, one of the fun things that we've seen about this is not only can this be a way to experiment with something, we talked about experiments in detail in both the HTYC book and on the podcast. And I'll put a link to a variety of different types of career experiments, which also talks about different ways to connect. And I'll put a link to that in the show notes. But not only is this a great way to experiment, it is a wonderful way to get to know people and have just through the natural course of interaction around a particular cause. Being able to have natural recommendations come up, "Oh, you have to meet this person. Can you introduce me to them?" And guess what? That actually leads us right back to the beginning. Here's one of the fun things over and over again. We started with introductions. And this leads us into our bonus way to connect with people. When you're meeting people in any context when you're in the course of normal conversation, people might say like, when you're volunteering they might say, "I've got a friend who's in strategy at Microsoft", or "My sister, Jenny, has worked in the craft brewing world for years." And if that interests you at all, all you have to do is ask. You can say, "Oh my gosh. I would love to meet Jenny. Would you be willing to introduce me to Jenny?" And then that sets you right back at the path of least resistance. Introductions can lead to more introductions. And when you make it easy on people that are very willing to help, introductions become the gift that keeps on giving. Pretty cool, right? All right.

Scott Anthony Barlow 37:24

Last but not least here. I want to share a couple of things that you can do. A couple of things that you can do today, right now, in order to make this easy on you. Thing number one. If you're less comfortable, I would encourage you to practice. Practice with someone else. This might sound ridiculous, they're like "I don't need to practice." But what we find, even though we're working with really, really talented people all over the world, is that almost everybody, almost everyone is somewhat uncomfortable with this. And that's okay. It's because we don't take the opportunity to practice. So if you're in that category of being less comfortable, find somebody to practice with, find an accountability partner, join our community, find a coach, find a friend who's willing to practice with you and have these types of interactions, have these types of beginning conversations or practice asking. But in any case, start to practice. If you find that you want to do something, you want to reach out to someone in one way or another or that you're nervous about a conversation that you have scheduled, that's your indication that it's going to be useful for you to practice. It's okay. Practice and you'll feel more confident when you go to have the actual conversation or an actual interaction. Number two, if you're already comfortable or have some level of comfort, then I would encourage you to choose one of the examples today. The Path of Least Resistance, the Conference Goer, the Gatherer, the Friend Maker, the Mentor, or the Doer. Choose one of those examples and start today. Again, you'll find all of the references, all of the links, resources, and everything else that we talked about, you'll see them in the show notes, or you'll have them emailed to your inbox and take advantage of those.

Scott Anthony Barlow 39:17

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 would 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 audio book, which you can access right now in second.

Scott Anthony Barlow 40:11

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

Scott Anthony Barlow 40:18

What's the best way to meet new people, quickly test new careers, and pave the way for creating your very own role, maybe custom fit to you even? Most people think that it must be some amazing tactic, but it's not. It's one particular type of experimentation.

Scott Anthony Barlow 40:36

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.

Dave Crenshaw 00:01

That aspect of loving what you're doing is so critical. I'm not saying something that is actually false, which is just follow your passion and the money will follow. That's not true. But what is true is that if you're doing something that you love, and it's fun, it's more likely that it will happen.

Introduction 00:26

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 00:51

Is there any particular subject or area that people tend to come to you for? Maybe you're great at creating travel itineraries, or maybe everybody comes to you when they have a problem and needs to talk about it. So you don't even have an answer on this right away. But as you're listening to this episode, thinking of this can actually be really helpful as a way to begin figuring out how to do work that you enjoy. In fact, Happen To Your Career turned 10 years old this year, and this is exactly how I started our company.

Dave Crenshaw 01:28

I think we always view getting fired as a negative thing or that it's personal. But sometimes it's actually the right thing for us or for another person. If we're leaving, and we've got somebody in that position, letting go is not always a bad thing.

Scott Anthony Barlow 01:43

By the way, that's Dave Crenshaw, and this episode is going to flip the script a bit because I was a guest on his podcast, The Dave Crenshaw Success Project. He asked me really intriguing questions, many that I haven't been asked before on other podcasts and other guest appearances. And I enjoyed our conversation so much that I wanted to share it here on our podcast. Also, an unexpected subject we dove into was, Dave and I discovered we both have been diagnosed with ADHD. We had a really great discussion about how each of us had been able to harness it, allowing us to create unique career pathways that work for us, allowed us to be successful. And I've shared different parts of my story over the years, but I've never really laid out the full original story as Dave refers to it. And with HTYC turning 10 years old this year, it was nice to be able to reflect on many of the career changes I personally made and how each one of them even being in a rock band has contributed to HTYC that exists today. Let's jump into the conversation.

Dave Crenshaw 02:47

So I always like to start by asking people the same question because what we're going to do in a very loose chronological order, we're going to explore your career path. So when you were a teenager, what did you want to be when you grew up?

Scott Anthony Barlow 03:03

All the things. I wanted to be all the things. Now the real answer is that it changed quite a bit. I started out wanting to be a... I wanted to go into space at one point. And then there was a time where I wanted to be a videogame designer. I drew a very, I guess, long video game, this was back when video games only scrolled two ways like 2D along the screen.

Dave Crenshaw 03:29

Sure. Yeah. Legend of Zelda 2.

Scott Anthony Barlow 03:32

Oh, yeah. Absolutely. So there was that point all the way to architect to, I wanted to be in a band as I really got interested in music. It was quite a few different things. And when I realized I was not going to be in a band for the rest of my life, because turns out, bands travel all the time. And I realized when I was 15, I didn't want to do that.

Dave Crenshaw 03:56

Oh, so it's 15. What kind of music were you doing?

Scott Anthony Barlow 03:58

I was really into Pearl Jam, Nirvana, but also Blues. And like there was a point in time where I got asked to play with a Blues band. And turns out I wasn't old enough to go into the bars and play.

Dave Crenshaw 04:14

Yeah, there's that.

Scott Anthony Barlow 04:15

There was that but yeah. Quite a bit of that. That was my main, like, Pearl Jam was literally the password when I only had one-word passwords for a long, long, long time.

Dave Crenshaw 04:28

Well, that sounds like a child of the 90s talking about Nirvana. Yeah, so because I also had a band for a few years.

Scott Anthony Barlow 04:37

Oh, really?

Dave Crenshaw 04:38

Yeah. This was in the early 2000s. But yeah, my wife supported me while I had a band. So.

Scott Anthony Barlow 04:44

That is fantastic. I'm learning so much about you, Dave.

Dave Crenshaw 04:47

Yeah, yeah. Well, we're here to learn about you but it's still fun to make that connection. So what did you study when you went to college? What was your focus then?

Scott Anthony Barlow 04:59

Similar to my childhood, you'll notice a few patterns here.

Dave Crenshaw 05:03

Okay.

Scott Anthony Barlow 05:03

I made a lot of changes. I think I changed majors nine times if I recall correctly.

Dave Crenshaw 05:12

Wow. So with that many major changes, the question that comes to my mind is, have you been diagnosed with ADHD?

Scott Anthony Barlow 05:20

Yes. And if I'm not mistaken, you have as well. Is that correct?

Dave Crenshaw 05:26

Yep. Freaking off the charts. ADHD the psychologist said to me.

Scott Anthony Barlow 05:31

Freaking off the charts. I love that official diagnosis. I would put that on resume. And everyplace else.

Dave Crenshaw 05:37

Every time I got on stage. I tell that story. But so where did your knowledge of that, at what point did your knowledge of that diagnosis come? Did that come later?

Scott Anthony Barlow 05:48

Much later in life. In my late 20s.

Dave Crenshaw 05:53

Okay. All right.

Scott Anthony Barlow 05:54

I just knew that I couldn't stick with things for some reason. And that was how it showed up, I was very excited about things I would learn rapidly. And I would blow through all the learning, do a huge amount of creation, and focus on whatever I was excited about, and then get very bored very quickly. And my performance would tank in whatever area I was interested in at the time. And then I would move on, and then I would feel bad about myself and shame myself and all the things and then wonder what was going on and then I move on to the next thing and forget about it and be excited.

Dave Crenshaw 06:32

Boy, that again, that sounds so familiar. It wasn't until I... so I was probably around 29 or 30. That's where I went and said, "I'm jumping from career to career. I don't want to be like this." Because I want to be a father that can consistently provide for my family, what's going on? And then that's when I got the diagnosis. So for me, that was a turning point in figuring out, "Oh, I have a name and a face to this. I can manage it by learning skills." Was it like that for you? Was getting that diagnosis helpful? Or was it more just well, that's great knowledge, but it's not changing my behavior at all?

Dave Crenshaw 08:03

Yeah, so it's interesting. All the years I've done, this topic has not come up yet.

Scott Anthony Barlow 07:06

That's a great question. And I don't, even though, on our show the Happen To Your Podcast, we've talked about this topic a lot. And just with friends talked about this topic a lot. I don't think I've been exactly asked that question before, let me think about it for a second. I think by that point in time, I was accepting that I was wired differently, even though I didn't understand where it was coming from. And I was starting to really leverage that and use that to my advantage. So what I'm very thankful for is I had a variety of people in my life that were willing to take me on and deal with the negative sides of how ADHD showed up. And that really allowed me to cultivate the very, very positive sides of it, which gave me a huge competitive advantage to all people who don't have ADHD.

Scott Anthony Barlow 08:08

Really? Interesting.

Dave Crenshaw 08:10

Yeah, it hasn't. I mean, maybe someone mentioned it offhand, but not like this. And so I do want to dig in a little bit to it. Because what people don't realize is, you know, it depends on the statistics you look at. But, you know, let's go on the high end, we're talking about 10%. So 10% of the people in the world have had the clinical condition of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, that is almost always genetic, and the way that it's passed. So usually, you see a parent, did you have a parent that was dealing with ADHD?

Scott Anthony Barlow 08:38

Yeah, so we were just celebrating my dad's birthday. This past week, we all went and stayed in a big house and everything and my dad cannot sit down. Just cannot. He'll hold conversation for a little bit, then he's on to the next thing. So yes.

Dave Crenshaw 08:52

Okay. So what that means is you either work with somebody or you know somebody or you've got somebody in your family that's dealing with this. And so I want to ask a question that's a little more personal with it. How functional were you prior to getting the diagnosis? Because I think functionality is a very, very important aspect of knowing what you're dealing with.

Scott Anthony Barlow 09:16

Hmm. I think it depends on how you define functional. However, for me, in some ways, I have learned to operate well around other people and in certain environments. And part of that was because I kept finding myself over, and this is actually thanks to my dad, too. My dad very much has this– "we're just gonna figure it out" type of attitude. It doesn't matter what it is, like, we're gonna launch a rocket in the backyard, no, a big rocket. And like, we'll just figure out how to do it. None of us are rocket scientists, but we'll figure it out. You know, and that's very much what I grew up with. So I think that that type of mentality really helped to carry me through to figure out how to operate in so many different environments, and combined with the fact that I was around really challenging situations. And I kept taking on very, very challenging situations over and over again, that propelled my skills and development and forced me, whether I liked it or not, to find ways to deal with it positively. Also, many ways to deal with it negatively. But then it became this sort of petri dish and experimentation, where I could pick and choose and see that this method allowed me to build a relationship with my family and with my coworkers. And this other method allowed me to get a lot of stuff done but, you know, would tank all the relationships and people around me.

Dave Crenshaw 10:46

Yeah. Well, I love how you took that and were looking for ways to use it to your advantage. And what I like about your story is you're highlighting something that I tell people, which is every strength has an associated weakness, and every weakness has an associated strength. And I feel like, there are a couple of camps that I see way too often when it comes to ADHD. One is the person who says, this is not a superpower, right? This isn't a good thing. And if you start treating it like as a good thing, people don't take it seriously. And they don't believe that it needs help. Right? And I feel like that does a discredit to the value that a weakness can be turned into a strength like ADHD. And then there's the other camp, it's like, this is a superpower and it's wonderful, and I can do anything with it because I have ADHD. Which also is not accurate. There is a cost associated with it. And there are skills that we must learn to manage it.

Scott Anthony Barlow 11:52

Yeah, we have a... I don't think it really matters what you call it, however, we have a tendency in our organization to think about this as there are a really positive side of what you're calling strengths. And then also of those strengths, there is a shadow side, or what we've referred to over the years of as an anti-strength, essentially. And I think what is really fascinating about that is that's just as true for ADHD, as it is for any other way that someone is wired, whether it is more normalized or not. And what I found, and this is the part that really just fascinates me is that, you know, is this actually a disorder at all? Or is it just one of the many, many, many ways in which people are wired? And I think that's one of the reasons I love looking at it through the strengths lens, is because then a lot of that stuff starts to fall away and you realize the same rules are true, no matter how you operate, no matter what way your brain is structured. And I find that to be a healthier place to operate from.

Dave Crenshaw 13:10

Yeah, exactly. Okay, so let's return to your story. What did you graduate in when you graduated from college?

Scott Anthony Barlow 13:16

When I finally graduated, I was a super senior, partially because I made all the changes along the way. And eventually, I started a business, doing painting and light contracting, and a number of other things too. And that was way more fun than studying to me. But it caused me to take an extra year, I was taking really low amount of credits. And then I was working 60 hours a week with my, essentially I guess, it was my third business at that point. But the first successful one, when I finally graduated, I realized that I loved the business elements. And so I graduated with a human resources degree, a general management degree. And I'm pretty sure I dropped my other major of marketing, at the same time. I think there had like one or two more classes, but I wanted to get out of there. So that was it. After all the nine changes, that's where I ended up.

Dave Crenshaw 14:15

And after that, there was a period of time that you basically entered the corporate world. How did you make a transition from that of basically being a business owner doing odd jobs, subcontracting work to actually working for a structured corporation?

Scott Anthony Barlow 14:30

Very poorly.

Dave Crenshaw 14:32

Okay.

Scott Anthony Barlow 14:33

No, here's what I mean. It's not necessarily... I've heard a lot of people say, "Hey, I'm unemployable. And I could never ever work for another organization." And it wasn't about that for me as much not at that time. Instead, it was more that I had the situation that I actually loved. I had, you know, at the height of it, I had about 20 people working for me in that business and it was really profitable. I made, I don't know, like 40-ish thousand dollars a year, which is a little better than a million dollars when I was a college student. And it was enjoyable, I was learning all the time. And although I didn't love, you know, contracting and exterior painting, it wasn't the world's most fun thing, it was definitely useful skills, and I was contributing. So I went from that set of feelings. And something that I was really enjoying to doing what I felt I was supposed to do. I didn't have any positive role models for business owners around me. So instead, I assumed that what you did to be successful was you went and got a job. And then you move up the ladder really quickly. And then you make lots of money, and then you're happy, right? Isn't that not how it goes, Dave?

Dave Crenshaw 15:43

That's the dream in air quotes.

Scott Anthony Barlow 15:45

Yeah.

Dave Crenshaw 15:46

Right.

Scott Anthony Barlow 15:47

So I just, with my limited exposure, I didn't understand that that was a thing that you could do. It sounds crazy. But I didn't understand. I didn't get it. So instead, I thought that when I had this really wonderful job offer what other people consider to be a good job that paid reasonably well and I was going to be able to, they were going to buy me a BMW, and all these things. And my friends and family are saying, "Oh, my goodness, you've got a job straight out of college like you've got to take that. You've got to do that." I assumed that I had to. So I sold all the pieces of my business and you know, assets and the trucks and things like that. And then I went to work, and it wasn't great.

Dave Crenshaw 16:36

Do you regret that you did that? That you sold off the business?

Scott Anthony Barlow 16:40

I did at first. Like almost immediately. I'm like, wow, this is terrible. But here's what ended up happening out of that experience, which I don't think I would change for almost anything, is I went and I was there for a year. And I was working in Portland, Oregon area. And so I was commuting. You know, my commute was roughly about two and a half, sometimes three hours a day, going both ways. And I was sitting in traffic. So I was having a lot of time to contemplate and a lot of time just hating life. And I legit had these thoughts over and over again, every single day where I was like, "Oh my god, is this what life is really like? Is this what you're supposed to do? Like, is this what adulting is?" And I thought I just couldn't hack it. So I kept trying over and over again. And at some point, I realized, this is terrible. Like I had gained 50 pounds. And I was just not happy. And my wife, a brand new bride at the time, was not happy with me either. Because I was working 80 plus hour weeks. And so I decided I had to have a conversation with my boss. So this is the part that ended up changing everything. He worked in another state, actually. So I called him on the phone. He listened for 20-30 minutes, asked a lot of questions, a lot of really great questions, carrying questions is what I'd say. And I thought, "Oh, my goodness, why didn't I have this conversation a long time ago?" And then what happened is three weeks later, he came into town, and then he fired me.

Dave Crenshaw 18:19

Interesting.

Scott Anthony Barlow 18:20

Yeah, so that took a very different turn than what I expected. But I would say the wonderful to answer your earlier question really quick, the wonderful, really positive thing that came out of that is on the way driving home after being fired, and realizing "Oh, crap, I brought my new bride down here." And we don't even have a job to show for it. I took her away from her family and everything. And like now I have to tell her? Oh, my goodness, I have to like call her and tell her?" And it was pouring rain as it does in Portland sometimes. And I'm like, I can never ever, ever do this again. Like I have to figure out a way to take control of my career and figure out how to have something that's much more fulfilling that also earns quite a bit of money. And so that was the start, which became, you know, a 25-year journey almost at this point to what has led to now. So that's, there we go.

Dave Crenshaw 19:20

Do you feel that him firing you was actually a kindness? Or was it, he just knew you didn't want to work there?

Scott Anthony Barlow 19:30

You know, at first, I was. Well, at first I was really embarrassed, honestly, for so many different reasons. And I wasn't that old. Wasn't that mature, necessarily. And so I was embarrassed and I felt like he had taken it out on me. And it's like, well, why did... And that I don't think was reality. I think he was making what he felt was the best decision for the organization at the time because I also wasn't performing very well because I hated it. Oh my goodness, I despised it. And I'm not somebody who can just like fake it at work necessarily, I have to actually feel great about my situation to perform wonderful, as well. But here's the interesting part of that. Many years later, I ran into a number of people that I had worked with at the organization. And we started talking about it and ended up connecting with them and realize that he was actually very conflicted about that. He didn't really want to fire me, but my performance was so bad, that he felt that he had to, and didn't really have another alternative at that point in time, like that section or the organization that I was leading was not doing very well. And he felt like it was legit the right thing to do. So.

Dave Crenshaw 20:44

Yeah, that's why I asked that, because I think we always view getting fired as a negative thing, or that it's personal. But sometimes it's actually the right thing for us or for another person. If we're leaving, and we've got somebody in that position, letting go is not always a bad thing. And as you're telling that story, it reminded me of a couple of things. I have a book called "The Focus Business". And the book actually compares entrepreneurs to superheroes. And what I do is I say, there are seven supervillains that are trying to destroy you, and your business. And I'm talking about real-world things, like, marketing, customers, employees. So there are two things in your story that reminds me of that. Number one is the concept of the bear. And the bear is a villain who is in business, they're working in your business. And they're creating messes everywhere they go. And a lot of people have a really, really hard time letting go of that person, when in fact, it's better for them to let them go. It will help them be more successful. And the other thing is, you know, as you're talking about standing in the rain in Portland and making that decision, that's an origin story right there. Right? That's a pivotal moment. And one of the origin stories that applies, you know, I'm talking about, the book talks about entrepreneurs, but I think it applies to other people as well, as adversity. You're faced with a terrible moment. And it forces you to make a decision. This is the Iron Man's story, right? He's trapped in a cave, and he has to build the Iron Man suit to escape. It's the same thing, like, you were saying, "I can't do this to my family." And that spurred you to create, really the beginning part of the business that you have now, which is quite successful.

Scott Anthony Barlow 22:24

Absolutely. And I think that the other thing that I'm really thankful for, though, you're talking about firing people. I've fired hundreds of people, like multiple hundreds of people over the last 20 years. And I think that it's caused me to look very, very differently. Getting fired at such a young age, and my first you know, quote-unquote, professional role, that great role that everybody told me I suppose to get, it's really changed how I looked at it because it became such a wonderful situation for me. And now think about it more as, what happens if this person stays here? What am I denying them of? Because if they're not doing well, and they're not benefiting the organization, first of all, they're blocking the spot for some other person in the world that can fill that, and we're denying that person. But more importantly, we're denying this other person to go find what they are really wonderful at, what would be meaningful in their life right now. And, this is very much how we look at things in our organization. A lot of people look at our website or listen to our podcast, they're like, "Oh, you help people make career changes." But really what we do is we are focused on changing how people think about and actually do work. And this is a great example of a different way to think about what work even is, and what creates a great situation for you, this situation of being fired.

Dave Crenshaw 23:51

Yeah. Well, I love how you took that experience that you had working in corporations helps you now too, because now you understand what that was like. I don't think you'd have the success that you're having now and teaching people about their careers if you hadn't gone through that path.

Scott Anthony Barlow 24:08

No, I wouldn't. Out of those hundreds of people, I probably fired about half of them. Well, let's be honest, like the first half of them, like, I had some may throw Cheetos at me and other things. But like the later, the last, you know, about 150 or so, people would, like... we would basically end up in tears together. And then they would say thank you and we had to hug on the way out the door.

Dave Crenshaw 24:28

Oh my gosh, I'm so glad that you just said that. Because that's exactly what I say in my book, in the Focus Business.

Scott Anthony Barlow 24:37

Interesting.

Dave Crenshaw 24:38

The one of the most common thing I asked, you know, ask the audience, "What do you think people say when you fire them? If they're the bear and they're making these messes, what do you think they say?" And the word is "Thank you." And the people around you say "Thank you", right? Because that's also part of it. It's not just the individual. It's the collateral damage that's happening with the other employees who are dealing with this. It's a terrible thing. And no one wants to hear this really. But the truth is sometimes being let go or letting someone go is a catalyst for them finding success in the future.

Scott Anthony Barlow 25:11

Yeah. And that's, yeah. What if it were the best thing that could happen to them? Just like it was the best thing, one of the best thing certainly that happened to me in my life, like, what if it was that way, especially if we can, you know, love and support them in that particular way?

Dave Crenshaw 25:26

Yes. Certainly. Yeah. Talk to me about the early stages of what is now your career. What were some of the first steps that you took that led to, would you say that the creation of the podcast was the first big thing? What was the first big step where you were making money and profitable?

Scott Anthony Barlow 25:44

Well, with our organization, Happen To Your Career, this came, oh my goodness, many years later. So we're about 10 years old now. And this is 2023. So 2013, is where it began. And began with the podcast and coaching. And those were, that's basically what we had. That was the business and itself, people paid us money via coaching. And we would help them make ginormous career changes or help them get raises are help them find fulfilling work. And then the podcast became really the catalyst for how the business continued to develop. Because through that source, we started getting feedback from people all over the world. And we started realizing that my experience of having less than mediocre work is a normal experience. And that's what most people in the world have. And unfortunately, even when you look at, I don't know, there's so many studies out there, and Gallup, as an organization does a really nice job of providing a lot of that data. But Gallup has even gotten rid of the terminology they use to use, what they would call a "great job", something that is like really highly fulfilling, like where people are enamored with their work. And they now, it's such a small portion when you read their most current studies, they don't even put it in there anymore. Instead, they focus on what creates a good job, what they call a good job. And that's now the goal, like, we are doing a good job because so few people have great work that it seems almost unattainable. And I, although I love the work that they do at Gallup, I wish that they would not continue to choose that because it's a misnomer, especially today, more so than ever before. So anyhow, to answer your question, the podcast was the catalyst to getting all of the feedback, meeting people all over the world, and realizing that people are having these experiences and that we could uniquely help them, think about this and change their reality in a very different way.

Dave Crenshaw 27:52

How did you get your first clients for coaching? That is usually the hardest part. So you built the Happen To Your Career, but where did the first people come from that actually paid you to get this consultation in coaching?

Scott Anthony Barlow 28:07

That should be an easy question. I feel like I should remember that forever. You know, well, here's the reason why it's a little bit convoluted for me because I was, at that time, my wife and I, we were very focused on me becoming a VP of this organization that I worked for, really wonderful organization, really had a great experience with them. And the goal was, I was going to become a VP of HR for the organization, you know, they flew me to headquarters and everything, we were picking out a house to head down that track, we're gonna have a house built, like, that's how serious we were about it. And then at some point, we realized that our goal was to move to Omaha, Nebraska, to be able to be on the VP track, so that we could then earn enough money and get the resume experience to then come back to Moses, Lake Washington, where we lived. And we kind of had this realization moment, where it's like, this is stupid, like, why would we do this? Like, we're already like, we're not gonna do it for the money, we're already earning great money, or we're going to do it for the resume, like, I don't need more experience on the resume. And so we started questioning everything. And one of the ideas that came out of that is that I had wanted to go back to owning my own business again. And I had told that to the people that had hired me, I had also told them, it was gonna be, like, 10 years in the future. But that accelerated that and we realized, "Okay, well, what's that going to look like?" Well, at that same time, I had been going and meeting with people just for fun, because people as it turns out, when they heard all my stories of career change, and like, how did you get a $40,000 raise here when they said they weren't giving raises or promotions, and how do you go from operations into HR? All these things they would ask, "Well, how did you do that?" And so turns out, I like coffee and they were willing to buy me coffee to tell them how I did that and then share insight, which then they could duplicate. So I was doing that a lot. So I was getting paid in coffee for a while. And then at some point, people started to offer to pay. They were sending me thank you notes and gift cards. And I'm like, this is great. Like, I will take all the Starbucks gift cards you can send me.

Dave Crenshaw 30:24

So people were paying you before you were asking to be paid?

Scott Anthony Barlow 30:27

Yes.

Dave Crenshaw 30:27

Oh wow. That's interesting

Scott Anthony Barlow 30:28

So here's that. I'm the type of person sometimes where the burner has turned and I have to touch it a few times to realize that it's hot. And that was certainly the case here. Because I was having that experience. And we're like, "Well, I could own a business. What kind of business could I start?" And only after that, like the 20th or 30th of these conversations and people offering to pay, did I realize, "Oh, maybe there's something here. Oh, yeah, that could make sense. I'm already doing that." So it was accidental in that way, and very organic.

Dave Crenshaw 30:40

How long did it take you, like, would you guess roughly? Was it months? Was it years of this happening until you finally like it clicked in your head?

Scott Anthony Barlow 31:13

It had been going on for a couple of years.

Dave Crenshaw 31:15

Wow. Okay.

Scott Anthony Barlow 31:16

And it was, I mean, this is something I was just literally doing for fun because friends and coworkers and family had asked, and I'm like, "Yeah, I can. Sure. Yes, please."

Dave Crenshaw 31:30

There's a phrase that you just tossed in there, and someone might miss it. But I want to highlight it, which was for fun. And a lot of people who are really successful, I've done these interviews, and I see other people that I've coached that aspect of loving what you're doing is so critical. I'm not saying something that is actually false, which is just follow your passion and the money will follow. That's not true. But what is true is that if you're doing something that you love, and it's fun, it's more likely that it will happen. You got to add the gifts and the skills to that, you also got to add the training to it. And so the fact that you were just doing this for fun, was, I think part of the reason why you were good at it. And part of the reason why people were so interested in paying you for it.

Scott Anthony Barlow 32:17

I agree. And I think there's something else that's really subtle in there that gets lost. Like if you think about it from a strategic point of view, if you are not having fun, as you said, and if you're not doing something for fun, then when you go to get paid for it later on, then if you're starting out with something that is not fun, it's not going to become fun. Most of the time, it's what are the things that you can't stop doing?

Dave Crenshaw 32:48

There you go.

Scott Anthony Barlow 32:49

Is a better question. Like I observed this phenomenon over and over again when I was working in HR is that I would have these conversations where I was coaching leaders and coaching managers. And they'd be like, "Ah, this person is not performing." And I would ask them about it. And what we'd find is that they're exhibiting their strengths, the things that they can't stop doing. And that is manifesting in a way that the manager doesn't believe is contributing to their jobs. So quick example, this guy was pretty new line-level supervisor, if you will. And he couldn't stop going from place to place and like talking. And the byproduct of that was he built really strong relationships with the team, everybody loved this guy, they would bend over backward for him whatever he needed. The other side of that was his boss felt he was shirking his duties because he wouldn't stop talking to other people. And he literally could not stop, we could not have paid him enough money, or dropped the whip on him or any of those things. We couldn't have changed that behavior because it was so innate. And that's what he was having fun with. So he moved on to a completely different job in a different organization where that's what he got to do. And he did. So I think it was like double the pay rate. And he's much happier.

Dave Crenshaw 34:12

Now. It's an interesting story. So you started the podcast quite a while ago. Now you're in the top .5% on listening notes, which is if you're not familiar with it, that's a pretty big milestone to hit. I mean, your podcast is quite popular. What are some of the moments that you think have led to the success that you have now? Like, how did you get to that level with the podcast?

Scott Anthony Barlow 34:37

I mentioned it earlier. But that feedback from our listeners is infinitely valuable. And I think there's two sides to that. One, I think part of my strengths allow me to sift through data really well and sift through feedback and resources and incoming information really well and that's just built into how I am wired very, very much. And part of that is because I kind of, in some ways, not that I am a sociopath, but in some ways, don't really care about what many other people think. There are certainly people in my life where I care a lot about what they think– my wife, I very much care about what she thinks. My kids, I definitely care about what they think, and certainly other people too. But it served me very well in that when I get a lot of feedback, it helps me to pay attention to the stuff that is going to be most useful for the people that we felt at the time we could serve best. And so what would happen is we take those little bits of feedback, and we'd apply it. And we made this show just for these people, essentially. And the funny thing about any kind of marketing and psychology is that everybody wants to make things more vanilla if you will. You've probably heard this example in various different ways. But the tendency is like we get all the feedback, and we do all the things. And then all of a sudden, we have this very vanilla show, very terrible, bland show in so many different ways. And instead, we focused on just one tiny group. And what that happens is we made it for them. But then other people want to come along for the ride. And that's caused it to grow quite a bit over the years. But more importantly, than that, is caused it to be super valuable to a group of people to where they just, I literally had a person yesterday, email me and say, "I will be a raving fan forever. Thank you so much." Like that wasn't something like we put in their head. Like that's what they wrote in the email. And that's the type of relationship that we had strive to create. So that's been a big part of it is just sifting through feedback, but also getting that feedback and trying to serve the people that we feel we can help best.

Dave Crenshaw 36:54

That's got to feel really gratifying to hear that kind of response.

Scott Anthony Barlow 36:58

It is.

Dave Crenshaw 36:58

Especially you've been working on it for almost 10 years, right?

Scott Anthony Barlow 37:01

Yeah, yeah, it really is. I feel obligated, I think is the right word and the right feeling to continue to find new and better ways to serve those folks.

Scott Anthony Barlow 37:20

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 would 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 audio book, which you can access right now in second.

Scott Anthony Barlow 38:09

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

Scott Anthony Barlow 38:15

How can you accomplish goals that require having connections, but not be transactional? Well, it turns out there are easy ways to begin relationships that are genuine and feel natural to the other party. What's the key? Well, it turns out it's stop forcing it. What if we only focused on what's easy for you?

Scott Anthony Barlow 38:36

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.

Tanya Malcolm-Revell 00:01

I tried to do that on my own and realized very, very quickly that I was going nowhere fast. The job searches were pretty much leading me. I was very overwhelmed, and very scattered throughout my searches, not really knowing where to focus or how to focus.

Introduction 00:22

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 00:47

Over the years, we've shown you a lot of career changes that most people would consider impossible. We know from being on the inside of these, that it can be really challenging to think about how on earth someone would make this career change from one drastically different occupation to another or how they might go and get what most people would consider to be an impossible dream job, and many, many other things between. So that's one of the reasons why we take great pains to show you how it works from the inside. For example, how does someone go from identifying a list of organizations that they might want to work for, and getting an opportunity with their number one company on that list?

Tanya Malcolm-Revell 01:37

I was able to properly position myself and focus myself like in this career transition. And that's the key that had been missing this entire time. I didn't know how to position myself. I didn't know how to focus, and I didn't really know what I wanted at the base.

Scott Anthony Barlow 01:53

That's Tanya Malcolm-Revell. Tonya's story is super interesting because she was trying to find her ideal opportunity in a completely different country. She's from the US. But her husband and she were relocating to London. The way she found her opportunity is even more interesting, especially since she ended up working with her number one organization that she had said, "Hey, this is where I want to work." So listen close throughout this conversation as she shares exactly how she did it. Here she is telling you about where her career started.

Tanya Malcolm-Revell 02:30

Well, it started in New York City in television production. So I really cut my teeth in the MTV Music Television arena, and was in there, gosh, for about 12-13 years, on and off, doing exploring within television production, and then jumping in and out to different facets of the Music Television arena. So I was, like I said, a TV producer. But I also did experiential marketing around events. And I worked on festivals. And until very recently, I was working as a tour manager for pretty big bands. And like I said, I've done this for years and years and years. And the overwhelming process throughout every new job that I would take was, "I really don't like this." I really don't like something in my job because it's not fulfilling. But it's not necessarily the work itself, although I'm sure there are bits and pieces that drive me nuts. But it's not that particularly, it's a bigger umbrella. And I can't quite put my finger on what the heck it is. But you know, there's a new job, and it's right in front of me. So I'll go ahead and grab that one anyway. And that's been pretty much my story year over a year, you know, the available job and not really diving in deeply into, "Why am I having these thoughts?" "Why is this job career not really fulfilling?" So my journey started, gosh, you heard what I was saying about not being fulfilled about my position. But my day really started to transition really happened when my husband and I decided to move outside of the United States and come over to the United Kingdom. And I was ecstatic for many reasons. But in terms of my career, I thought this would be a great opportunity to just not reinvent myself, but maybe just do that reinvent myself, look at what I've been doing, and start from scratch, which sounds all well and good. And ideally, that would have happened and I would have gotten a job the next month or day or whatever.

Scott Anthony Barlow 04:37

24 hours later at least. "We've arrived. Okay, where's it at?"

Tanya Malcolm-Revell 04:42

Unfortunately, after a little bit of a longer ordeal getting a work either the spouse works these out. I just kind of sat down and said I refuse to fall into my old ways. I really need to think about what I want to get out of my next position. I'm in a great place to do that right now. There's no overwhelming monetary need for me to jump into something, as I felt that years and years living in New York City, it's just all about the next job and who knows you. So I felt like just slow down and really evaluate where I was at. And I tried to do that on my own and realized very, very quickly that I was going nowhere fast. The job searches were pretty much leading me. I was very overwhelmed and very scattered throughout my searches, not really knowing where to focus or how to focus. So I'm getting more and more frustrated throughout the entire process. And then of course, as I'm looking at the calendar, all of a sudden, a week has gone by, two weeks have gone by, now than a month, and then two months, three months, and I was getting very bummed out, to say the least. And then I think I went online. And I just said, "I need to find a podcast about career transitions and finding a job." And I stumbled across your interview on Mac's list. And I swear I listened to you. And that Happen To Your Career bootcamp we're talking about, and I say, "Oh my god, that's me. This is what I need." I need guidance, I need a voice who can help me get to the bottom of what I truly need to get, not just for myself, but just great work-life balance for myself, my husband, my career, etc. And I went online, and I think we were talking within the next couple of hours, I called or emailed you right away. And voila, I was inundated with the Happen To Your Career process. And I have to say, Scott, it's when I was talking to my husband. And I said, "This is the first time where I feel like I have found someone in something that is going to make me focus and give me purpose." But I feel like my purpose is about to explode everywhere. And having gone through a couple different conversations with you, I jumped into the boot camp. And the rest is history, so to speak, in the sense that ultimately, and I'll give you the abbreviated version, and then dive in a little bit more deeply. But ultimately, putting in the work and the effort throughout the boot camp, really paying attention to myself and my thoughts and well kind of my gut as well– what worked, what didn't work throughout my career, what I was looking for, what my wants were, what my motivations were, my minimums, my ideals, etc. And just putting this all down on paper, I realized it's not rocket science. At the end of the day, this is me. But what it did for me is it helped to put me into perspective. It helped me to really think about myself in a different light by evaluating, like, my skills, my beliefs, my needs, and my wants. I mean, it was almost like I was able to see myself through a bigger lens. And then in turn, now, I was able to properly position myself and focus myself like in this career transition. And that's the key that had been missing this entire time. I didn't know how to position myself, I didn't know how to focus. And I didn't really know what I wanted at the base. So going through everything coming out of it at the back end with this great, like my career profile, and it's there, and it's what I want, what I need. And then focusing my search on companies based upon that, that shared my belief system that had the values that I was looking for. I targeted Wanderlust, and I think it was one of the first companies that came out of my mouth as soon as I had this great profile. And I was like, "I want to work for Wanderlust."

Scott Anthony Barlow 08:27

Really? That's pretty cool.

Tanya Malcolm-Revell 08:29

Absolutely. And I had a couple of other places on my list as you show. That was always key and number one. So yeah. And then I just did everything that you guys basically coached us to do– the reach out, messaging your network to see who knows who and reaching out to them and seeing if you get introductions and being very bold and forward, which is part of what I do in my job. But in terms of a job search, I was very hesitant to do.

Scott Anthony Barlow 08:57

It's outside your normal conventional operating area.

Tanya Malcolm-Revell 09:00

And that's what the other piece it's like, okay, look, you want something this desperately or this badly, then why wouldn't you work outside of your normal operating levels or normal conventions? What's the worst that they can say? You know. But that's better than no answer, whatsoever, that you wouldn't have gotten in the first place. So I did all of that. And I got into... One of the co-founders of the festival, I got directly to him. And he in turn, then obviously responded to my email. And then because I'm now in the UK, he shot me through to that arm that deals with all of the branding outside of the United States. So then, of course, the bigger conversation started there with that entity. And it was a little bit of a painful process just because they weren't quite ready to have the deeper conversations, although they did recognize that I would be a good fit. It was one of those things. And you've mentioned this, it's not necessarily what they can do for you right then and there. It's about establishing a relationship and keeping that relationship going so that when there is an opportunity, you're the first person they're going to think of. And Scott, that's exactly what I did.

Scott Anthony Barlow 10:12

You know, this is so wonderful because I'm not surprised by it anymore. I don't think that's the right word. But I'm always amazed at how when you define what it is that you want, and when you know what you want, and then when you take action or ask for what you want or go after what it is that you want, very often…

Tanya Malcolm-Revell 10:33

It manifests itself, yeah.

Scott Anthony Barlow 10:36

Yeah. It is just really interesting phenomenon that I observe all the time. In my life I've observed in a lot of the lives of our students, clearly, this has happened for you. And just like you said, the other really interesting part of that is 100% of the time, or I should say, nearly 100% of the time, what we want is outside the realm of what we've done before. Which means that by definition, it's outside our normal comfort zones, or normal operation zones, or anything else, which also, by definition makes it uncomfortable. So kudos to you for moving through that, because that's not an easy thing to do at all.

Tanya Malcolm-Revell 11:12

It wasn't. But you know, Scott, at the end of the day, if you want something and you're determined to make a change in your life, and in your career, I could not go another day saying, "Oh, I'm not happy." Or "I don't like my job." Or "I wish I didn't have to go to work today." I was over that. I spent way too much time thinking of the negative. So there was only one thing for me to do. And that was focused on me and the positive and the future. I couldn't dwell on the past anymore. And it wasn't beneficial for me, nor was beneficial for my job hunt. So I still am flabbergasted that the conversations went very, very well with Wanderlust, but I'm still flabbergasted that they said, "Hey, by the way, the London events are starting up, and we'd like for you to lead the charge on it. Are you available to start tomorrow?" So yeah, it was exactly like you had kind of presented it in the sense that the hard work, the dedication, having your career profile, or dialing that far down into your wants, your needs, your beliefs, etc, like I mentioned, and coming up with that, you can only find something that is going to speak to you and represent who you are, because that's what you're focusing on, and that's where your career search is going towards. So at the end of the day, whatever presents itself is going to be a positive outcome for you, no matter what. And that has been the biggest revelation for me. I will never go out for a job just because it's presented itself on some random LinkedIn job blast and it sounds good. Other than me focusing on companies that I know that I will be appreciated in, I know that I will be able to grow in, I know that I will be able to work in some sort of collaborative environment. A big piece for me that having a flexible work schedule, I really don't like taking the tube during rush hour. I know too many people who do. Having a schedule where I could flex my hours and work from home when I wanted to, and also go into an office if I wanted to. And they are 100% on board with that, which I did a couple of fist pumps in the air when I heard that. But more importantly, working with people whose values are really aligned with me in mind. So yeah, I got all that. I got everything I wanted. That's the craziest part, everything, not one, not two, not two and a half like everything.

Scott Anthony Barlow 13:43

It feels crazy right now. But I think the cool part is that now that you've done that, you realize that that is something that you can build for yourself every single time that you want to make a switch or, I don't know, if something changes in your life in which you need something different and you have to make a change for one reason or another because something no longer aligned, then you now have the tools and the experience to know that that's totally possible for yourself, which is super, super cool.

Tanya Malcolm-Revell 14:12

Absolutely. And I have the tools to be able to pivot. I mean, it's called a career pivot for a reason, right? And I feel more confident in being able to shift left to right, front to back, whatever, but knowing that I'm going to move forward in a direction that aligns with me. And again, I've never had that before. I've never had that feeling behind me.

Scott Anthony Barlow 14:33

What do you feel like were some of the key either events or things that had to happen in order for you to be ready to make this type of change and look at it in a different way? As you look back, what were some of those for you? And I think it's a little bit different for everybody but I'm curious.

Tanya Malcolm-Revell 14:51

Yeah. Absolutely. I think 100%. Like phase one was figured out what the heck I wanted to get out of my career. What I wanted to get out of this next phase in my life. And I think everybody has to do that before they can be successful in anything period. And you can go through life, you can go through your jobs and be successful. But to truly get every drop out of the experience, and more positive, obviously the negative, you've got to figure out what makes you tick, and what's gonna keep you going 100%.

Scott Anthony Barlow 15:23

Well, let me ask you even a little bit before that, what caused you to get frustrated? To the point where you wanted to do it differently than you had done it before. I know that you had mentioned, hey, there was this move to London, and it seems like the opportune time, and certainly timing had happened. But I know plenty of people that have made a move abroad or moved to a different country. I've interacted with those people over email that aren't to the point and level where they're necessarily going to take action.

Tanya Malcolm-Revell 15:53

Got it. Absolutely. Well, as I mentioned, I was working in television production and entertainment. And what I didn't mention is I was living in Los Angeles prior to moving to the UK. So being inundated in the entertainment arena, again, was a great stepping stone. It's gotten me to where I'm at today. But what it really quickly does is it frustrates you by the amount of ego that needs to be managed throughout if it's artists, producers, etc. The one thing through my search, my profile, I've really understood that I'm very good at being that person that can morph myself into different situations. So I'm very good at flexing and being supportive of others. And I was doing that more to an extent where it was more detrimental to me and my career health.

Scott Anthony Barlow 16:47

That's interesting.

Tanya Malcolm-Revell 16:47

Yeah, I was giving out more to others than I was getting back. So and you know, okay, great. It was me choosing to do this. But the consistency of doing that year over year and feeling like, while yes, I was progressing in my career in terms of title, I wasn't getting anything back in terms of support, or just even if it was just a little kudos, "Hey, by the way, great job." Nothing. Just nothing in that regard. And it didn't make me feel good at the end of the day. While you have the event, the project, the festival, the concert was a success. I was still kind of at a, you could say 1 to 10, I was always at a 5 in terms of what I would get out of it. So I was absolutely frustrated with that. And every job even moved through different arenas, from television production to festivals, thinking, okay, maybe something new and different will happen here. At the base, I really did like a lot of the work that I was doing, it was just this overarching piece that I thought I could change up. And unfortunately, it wasn't working, at least in that entertainment festival TV arena. So with the move, I knew I wanted to put a stop to that cycle. And that I wanted to get a lot more out of myself and out of what I was doing for others. And I wanted to be more empowering to a community, but also something that I could feel proud of and say, "Hey, Mom, Dad, take a look at what I just produced." You know, instead of some random show on MTV. So that was the impetus behind me really starting the journey. London was the conduit, and Happen To Your Career was the platform. So yeah.

Scott Anthony Barlow 18:26

I love that. I'm gonna borrow that. It might change from London.

Tanya Malcolm-Revell 18:33

Absolutely. No, but that's exactly, that's my story on the front end into a nutshell. And then other things that's just in terms of what else had to happen to make this happen was very quickly, I've always been into yoga, I've always been into health and wellness. I haven't been the woohoo, you know, 24/7 type of person. But it's always been very integral in my life. No matter where I'd been, if I'd been on the road, I would always take out time to go to the gym, maybe take a yoga class, go to the wide, walk around the park or whatever, you know, have a good meal. So that's always been a foundation of who I am. So, which was great. But I didn't have a network here in London. So the other part is I really had to establish a network and put my face out there, take those leaps that didn't feel comfortable, and maybe present myself at an event where I knew nobody, and with business cards and a handshake just make people know me, like, "I'm here yet again." And I did that. And with a couple of key influencers in the health and wellness market. And it just resonated. So I put myself in front of yoga studios and actually said "Hey, by the way, if there's an opportunity, I'd love to volunteer and help out and once a week or if it's event-based, I am here." And I actually got signed on with one of the largest yoga studios here in London.

Tanya Malcolm-Revell 19:55

And funnily enough, this is a little secret, but funnily enough, we're going to try to see if we can get them on board at Wanderlust because it's such a great studio and I have all the contacts now.

Scott Anthony Barlow 19:55

Really?

Scott Anthony Barlow 20:04

Hold on. That's it. This is something that is really interesting that happens with nearly everybody that goes through this process and it's so fascinating to me. You go through, and I'm going to call it just doing the work, you're putting in the wraps, for lack of a better phrase. And inevitably, you start to build relationships. And then as you build those relationships, you don't know where or when necessarily, but those actually end up becoming useful or mutually beneficial for…

Tanya Malcolm-Revell 20:06

[20:35] Like one degree of separation.

Scott Anthony Barlow 20:23

[20:37] Yeah, exactly. For a variety of different reasons. Not necessarily just transactional that's gonna get me to my next job, or whatever it happens to be. But this is super, super, super cool. So now, you not only got to know these people, and it sounds like people that you were really interested in knowing anyway, based on the work that you had done, and said, "Hey, this is kind of where my values and interests and everything else fall." But then now it sounds like you're getting to work with them continuously or possibly, right?

Tanya Malcolm-Revell 21:06

Absolutely. And you're right. The people that I have met, just by doing that is, the world is large until it's not. You know, and the health and wellness industry in the UK is booming. But it's still, I mean, compared to the US, it's still fledgling, so the people who shine and actually take an active part and participate, you will see them over and over again. Or you know, or maybe you recognize another person at the next event. So having the touch points with the yoga studios, having the touch points with the gyms, having the touch points with the great health platform aggregator that just kind of brings in the Health Wellness news and not regurgitates that brings it in a nice condensed package to the consumers. And they also have events. So I would go to their events where you would meet influencers in the Health and Wellness arena, whether it's clothing lines, or food products, etc. So just a bunch of different POVs in this arena, then afterwards, you'd get to meet them cards or exchange and so forth, and so on. And that's just what I was doing. And I kept building and building and building, so much so that with Wanderlust, you know, a big part of any event is the ties into the community, and obviously for the consumer draw, but also what can we present to the consumer that they're gonna like, and appreciate. So having gone to all of these wellness industry events, where they presented the new and upcoming trendy thing, or what's resonating, I already know all of this stuff, the research is done. And now we just have to go out and engage them. So I could not have made this up, even if I tried. But no, really I couldn't. But just staying on top of it, even when, you know, here in London, the rain, you know, rainy day didn't really feel like doing anything, I didn't really feel like going up to Soho to go to an event but I just, you know, at the end of the day what do you have to lose, and just did it. And every single time I've walked away saying "Oh my gosh, I got this person's contact. I had a great time and learned more about X, Y, and Z out of everything." And nothing has been too small or too big.

Scott Anthony Barlow 23:15

Let me ask you about a couple of different pieces of the process for lack of a better phrase like your journey, we'll call it that. You mentioned earlier, you had sent an email and connected with one of the main people for events.

Tanya Malcolm-Revell 23:29

Yep.

Scott Anthony Barlow 23:30

Right? So I'm curious for people, we touched on it earlier, but I'm curious, what you actually did in that particular case, and why you feel that particular email contact, et cetera actually worked? What about it?

Tanya Malcolm-Revell 23:44

That's a great question. So it wasn't as simple as I, you know, it wasn't as streamlined as that. What happened was, I came out of, I forgot what week it was in the boot camp, and I was like, "Eureka! I know what I want. And I want to work for Wanderlust." And again, just started looking at– A; my network first and foremost, to see if I had any ties with Wanderlust. And on the first level, I didn't think that I did. And I just started mentioning it to everybody. Again, I'm trying to manifest it. So I'm throwing it out there. And every person that I met, every person that I had worked with, I said, "Hey, by the way, you know, I'm really interested in working with Wanderlust. Do you know anybody or have you been to one? Etc, etc." So I actually landed on a co-worker who had, she said, "I don't know anybody worked directly at Wanderlust, but I think I know somebody who's good friends with one of the founders." And I was like, "You've got to be kidding me." So based upon my relationship with this woman, which was fantastic, my co-worker, she then introduced me to reached out, yes indeed, that this other woman had a relationship with the co-founder, and then in turn based upon their relationship introduced me on the weight, the strength of my work, my ethics and just what I could bring to the party. So then this woman took it upon my friend's word that I'm a badass and introduced me to the founder. Now, that was great. I've now got an email address, I have somebody who's setting this up, that was a big part. But what really sealed the deal, and this is something that Lisa and I had gone through, and you're sending these emails out to people, and they're getting a crap ton of them day in day out, you've got to differentiate yourself one, but you also have to say, "Look, this isn't just about me trying to get something from you, I want to give something back to you as well, if possible." And it's an information exchange, first and foremost. And I know I'm a little view, but you need to know what that means. And I think the person help in this your transition moving overseas. So more succinctly and more deeply than I've just kind of articulated it, I sent a really badass, excuse my French, email to Sean outlined all of this. And he said, "Yeah, you do seem like the best person. Let me introduce you over to the AMEA people." The people dealing with Europe, Middle East, and Asia.

Scott Anthony Barlow 23:45

[26:09] Very cool.

Tanya Malcolm-Revell 23:47

[26:10] And that's how that transpired. It was really cool. But I don't think he would have given me the time of day if, A; if the intros hadn't weren't as strong as they were on me from my friends, but, B; in terms of the written communication from myself, if that had lacked or didn't really show my enthusiasm, then again, I'm one of many, as much as I like to think I'm amazing, which I am. On paper that can fade and fizzle fast if you're not scintillating, or you don't kind of let them know that you're really willing to be the brand, or you're really into their brand.

Scott Anthony Barlow 26:47

Especially recently, a lot of research on how these types of connections are made and why they're so effective at. And first of all, it's so interesting that most, not all, but most, like someplace in the range of 70 to 80% of these types of opportunities, these types of "it's my dream job" type opportunities are found based on interactions through weak ties.

Tanya Malcolm-Revell 27:13

Yes.

Scott Anthony Barlow 27:14

Yeah. Meaning that it is not necessarily somebody in your immediate network. Because if it's somebody you interact with all the time, or somebody who you regularly see or regularly talk to, or whatever else, then you're probably already aware of any people or opportunities that they know immediately. However, it's usually in the less strong ties and less strong relationships, where you begin to find those type of things that aren't known to you when you're seeking it out. In this case, it was a former coworker who…

Tanya Malcolm-Revell 27:44

Yeah. Absolutely.

Scott Anthony Barlow 27:46

People underestimate, I have, I did for many years underestimated the weight that is carried behind a strong recommendation. And some of the psychological reasons that trust and credibility are already there, when you have that initial weight behind it for somebody that you know, and like already, and it adds like 150-pound weight to whatever force you're already carrying. So your really awesome written communication that you had sent off was, I don't know, it's like a parachute or something along those lines, or sailboat or something like that. And all of a sudden, you get this huge gust of wind behind it and now you're on cruise. And struggling for an analogy, but we'll work on that.

Tanya Malcolm-Revell 28:24

No, I 100% agree. And again, it was just articulating. It's like, "Look, I am looking for a job in this company, or with this type of company, or with this particular company in general. Do you know anybody? Or just keep me in mind." And again, that was my mantra.

Scott Anthony Barlow 28:40

Yeah, this is so amazing for so many different reasons. I'm really curious because we've got so many people that listen to the show that are in the place that you were not that long ago, where…

Tanya Malcolm-Revell 28:54

I was that person listening to the show.

Scott Anthony Barlow 28:56

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Tanya Malcolm-Revell 28:58

In the same position, absolutely.

Scott Anthony Barlow 29:00

Yeah, you've been in the cycle. You're there and you're frustrated, and you're not entirely sure what to do differently. But what advice would you give that person who's in that place?

Tanya Malcolm-Revell 29:11

Don't let the hard days or the days where you don't think you're moving forward, or that nothing's happening stop you or slow you down. I think that for me was the really, really, really tough part when I didn't see the end of the rainbow. You know, the end in sight. I couldn't necessarily get that particular connection that I wanted, or I already gotten some sort of negative feedback or no feedback. Don't let that stop you of anything. Double down in your efforts. And I know it's harder to do than say, but you know what? Caffeine and chocolate will get you through it. Just do it. You've got to do it. Because I worked so hard that when this happened, it felt so friggin sweet, that much sweeter. I would have been happy no matter what. But knowing that I made this happen, it wasn't somebody's coming to me, it wasn't me trying to throw my resume into a random lotto of 100 million other people for the same job. This was me networking, this was me... This was me just kind of sticking with it even when I wasn't getting a response on an email or a phone call, I was just calling back and making sure that they knew who I was. So stay strong, kick-ass. And just remember that you are who you are, and you bring a lot to the table.

Scott Anthony Barlow 30:33

Absolutely love it.

Scott Anthony Barlow 30:40

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 31:34

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

Speaker 3 31:39

That aspect of loving what you're doing is so critical. I'm not saying something that is actually false, which is just follow your passion and the money will follow. That's not true. But what is true is that if you're doing something that you love, and it's fun, it's more likely that it will happen.

Scott Anthony Barlow 32:00

Is there any particular subject or area that people tend to come to you for? Maybe you're great at creating travel itineraries, or maybe everybody comes to you when they have a problem and needs to talk about it. So you don't even have an answer on this right away. But as you're listening to this episode, thinking of this can actually be really helpful as a way to begin figuring out how to do work that you enjoy. In fact, Happen To Your Career turned 10 years old this year, and this is exactly how I started our company.

Scott Anthony Barlow 32:38

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.

Scott Anthony Barlow 0:01

If there's one thing that I've seen in the last 10 years or so is that our readers, listeners, clients love the idea of strengths. Love the idea that there's a unique value that we can offer to the world in the form of our strengths. But here's the funny thing, when it comes down to identifying and then using our strengths, well, that's where it gets much more complicated.

Introduction 0:31

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 00:57

When we talk about signature strengths, we're talking about the unique way that your individual strengths work together to make you "you". If you think back over any situation in any area of your life that you have been truly successful and felt like you were operating at your best, what we find is that once we break it down, you're not excelling because of your individual strengths. It's because of how those individual strengths work together in combination. That is the difference between what we refer to as strengths, and what we call signature strengths. Your unique contribution to the world is your combination of strengths, those things that are uniquely making you "you". Those talents that are underneath the surface, that make it easier to be able to do different types of skills– skills that we see all the time. Those are what's on the surface. So there's many, many different combinations, possibilities, and so many ways to your strengths that your signature strengths become very unique. So defining your signature strengths will allow you to really find the value that you can bring to any situation. We often hear, "Well, I know my Clifton Strengths. I should be able to use them to excel." But it turns out, there's a lot more that goes into it. Today we're going to cover quite a bit as it relates to strengths and particularly finding and beginning to use your signature strengths. We will go over an exercise that we've talked about on the podcast, but we'll go over an advanced version that sometimes we don't even use with our clients unless they're in the exact right scenario. And we'll cover a mental barrier that stops almost everyone from identifying what their unique combination of signature strengths are. It's counterintuitive. It's almost comical. And yet it stops every single one of us, including me if I'm not careful at all. More importantly, we'll talk about how to overcome that and I'll give you another exercise that can actually assist with that. Will it be a magic bullet? No. Will it get you started in well on your path? Yeah, absolutely. I think you'll love it. And we'll cover a few stories and examples along the way so that you can see how this can work for you in reality. More importantly, though, and I would say maybe most importantly is, I want you to leave today with an understanding of what signature strengths actually are. And what you can do to begin identifying them so that you can continue to build on them for the rest of your life. Now, if you think about signature strengths, they are the most true representation of you. They're where you're able to be at your best and your truest self. If we oversimplify for a little bit, that's what it is. How do we get there? Well, it's that combination of strengths. Okay, let's talk about the counterintuitive way that strengths work. The way that we think it works, is that if we know our strengths, we should be able to automatically then use them, right? Like if we know it, we should be able to do it. Turns out not the case. The way it actually works is it's a cycle, over and over. You get familiar with your strengths initially, this is a lot of the work that we find behind the scenes we're doing with clients, particularly how your strengths are working together. You would then attempt to define those, then try to use them, and observe how you're using them in the real world. Then that causes you to better refine them to, well, let's say even how you describe them. And then your understanding the depth of your understanding, which then hyper-focuses how you're attempting to use them in the real world, which then allows you to better understand them. You notice that we're going in a cycle. That cycle repeats over and over. It can become an intentional feedback loop for you to understand and then use your strengths and then refine and then repeat. Interesting note here. When we're working even with our clients who have the goal of an intentional career change, we usually don't get into mastering this feedback loop. So this is pretty advanced stuff. The reason why is we actually usually don't need to. A mid-level understanding of your individual strengths where you're beginning to adapt them to your own words, is usually enough to make it to your next role that can be an amazing fit for you. Your next version of extraordinary. More importantly, the real reason why we do this is, it's actually not as useful to you. This concept is not as useful to you compared to if you're already in a role that isn't an amazing fit. We observe that you can grow faster and develop faster in your strengths if we've already got an alignment from a fulfillment standpoint. If you're already in a place where you feel like you can be much more of your truest self. When you're there, that's where you can really start to establish those intentional feedback loops over and over again. So we find that we're really working on the deep level and more advanced level of signature strength stuff, once somebody is already in a much better fit type role. And they're looking to enhance or learn to thrive in that role, where they're wanting to, they already have some level of meaningful work, they already have some level of alignment, and then they're looking to make it better. They're looking to continue to improve on that and take advantage of that and ultimately thrive in that position. Okay, so I make that distinguishing factor because what I find is that everybody wants to go right to the advanced version. That's also the other way it works. It just isn't. That said, what we're going to do today is give you some exercises where you can use them in any scenario that you're in.

Scott Anthony Barlow 06:57

Okay. Now, here's another interesting thing that we observe in coaching. At the beginning of this episode, I mentioned that there's a consistent mental wall or a blind spot that occurs with strengths. What is it? Well, people can't see how what they're doing, and how they do it is actually unique. Why does that happen? Well, there's this funny thing that if you're operating as your truest self, then, I mentioned on the last episode that we have a tendency to undervalue if we are operating in a way that is allowing us to... allowing things to be easier for us or easy for us in one way or another, then we have a tendency to undervalue why that's easy and make the assumption that it's easy for everyone. So that's one way to think about it. Because of that, it creates this blind spot. But there's other reasons why that occurs too. Ultimately, they all result in us not being able to see how what we're doing is unique. This comes from a lot of different places, it can come from being in a certain type of situation. Like if you're in a bad fit type situation, and you're not getting to be your truest self on a day-to-day basis, like, let's say that you are approaching burnout, or you have been in a situation where you haven't been able to work significantly in your strengths for a long period of time, that erodes your self-confidence. It makes you low both on the skill side of using your strengths but also the belief side, which is where self-confidence comes from. And what that also means is that as that continues to happen over time, to get to the point where you can then start to see what your strengths are, your combination of strengths are and what you uniquely offer, we have to actually first then rebuild that belief, self-confidence, and address of the current situation. So if you can't see it, if you're finding this, if you're like, "Hey, you know, I've taken Clifton Strengths, and I've taken that assessment. And yeah, it's true, but I don't really get how this is all that valuable." Then that's okay. It probably is a signal, take it as a signal that you may not be able to see it yet. And that's where almost everybody starts. Okay. Quick example here. One of those situations we had recently with one of our clients, she was in a director of ops role she was in the culture and environment, she was not getting any reinforcement of any kind about what she was doing about whether or not it's valuable, and that was just the operating culture there. When she was in that environment for a long period of time, it ended up by not having any kind of feedback whatsoever– both in the job, in the results, in the people she interacted with, it was pretty resolute throughout the overall culture. It ended up eroding her self-confidence. So the question in her head was, "Is what I do valuable?" Initially. And then eventually that erodes to "Am I valuable?" Which is self-worth. So when I mentioned earlier that part of what we're often doing is rebuilding that stage, rebuilding that self-confidence and self-worth, that's what then allows you to be able to take advantage from there, having that base, that foundation is what allows you to be able to take advantage of this knowledge with strengths. Okay. So this external validation, well, it works both ways as it turns out. If you are getting... If you're not getting feedback of any kind, it can erode that base for you, it can erode that foundation. If you're getting negative feedback because of your strengths, it can also erode that foundation. There's many, many examples. And we've talked pretty relentlessly about the shadow side of your strengths, the dark side of your strengths in one way or another on the Happen To Your Career podcast and the Happen To Your Career book, and many other places. Strengths are a reflection of who you are. So how you do anything, in some ways, is how you do everything. And if you're working with those strengths, then you can harness them for more positive results. But also how you do anything is how you do everything. So your tendencies, your natural way that you're wired, your approaches without even realizing that it's an approach is also able to be in a position where it's not actually positive too. It can result in a negative. Here's a quick example. For me, I have a tendency to be very, very future-focused. Very future-focused. I spend all day thinking about the future. I love that. It's my natural tendency. I do it a lot. Also, at the same time, I have a tendency to be very, very strategic, which has a tendency to make me operate at a very, very high level. Okay, so the negative side of that is I can easily miss, just walks right by me without me even realizing, I can miss both the things that are happening right now because I'm continuing to focus on the future. And I can also miss the small details just not even know that that's a thing in one way or another. This makes me terrible when it comes to things like grammar, punctuation when I'm doing something like writing. It makes me often miss details or not think about details when it comes to planning things with my family. It has a lot of really negative repercussions if I'm not careful. That said, if I know that this is a couple of examples of how my strengths work together, then from there, I can actually plan for that. I can actually be able to work with that. I can hedge against that in many different ways. I can learn to use that and then also build in complement in one way or another.

Scott Anthony Barlow 13:34

Okay, so everyone's probably heard the saying that opposites attract. But if you think about it, this is one of the reasons why opposites attract because it creates complementary strengths. Like if we were to just look at it from a strengths perspective, my wife and I, Alyssa and I are very different as far as strengths. We share, if you want to use Strengthsfinder terminology or Clifton Strengths terminology, we actually share Maximizer, we're both trying to squeeze every little thing out of every moment. But other than that, we're pretty polar opposite in so many different ways. It's also very complimentary. When we work together, it allows us to be able to achieve and do things and think about things that we just never would otherwise. She is very analytical and has a lot of that detail. She's very detail-driven in that particular way, which complements my futuristic, strategic, and many other things. Okay, so the reason I point this out is because two things. One, I want you to begin to recognize that strength is very much a mental game over and over again. And also you may not be able to go right to where you are using your signature strengths, intentionally, consistently. You're often going to have to build a foundation first, and then continue to work up from there. All right, let me give you another example here of what you can do specifically. I'm gonna give you several exercises that you can actually do. We will include links to examples of these exercises or the instructions for these exercises inside your show notes. And the first is what we've called the past roles exercise. Now I've mentioned this exercise in a couple of different formats. I've mentioned it on our website, I've mentioned it on the podcast, in quite a few other places. So the exercise that's out there. But I want to give you the advanced version. The advanced version can be especially helpful when we're trying to diagnose signature strengths, not just individual strengths. The pastorals exercise, let me give you a reminder of what that is. Part of the reason I love it is because it's so simple to do. So simple. You can literally grab a piece of paper, you can draw a line down the middle. On the left-hand side, you can put all of your past roles, you can start with the most current, what's your most recent role, and then just keep going back. And you can put volunteer roles, you can put your roles outside of work, you can put any roles whatsoever. The reason we focus on roles is because if we're looking at it from a strengths perspective, how you do anything is how you do everything. You don't use your strengths differently at home versus at work. Sometimes you don't get to use your strengths at work, but you don't use them differently when you're getting to it. It's all your strengths. It's all you, it's all your tendencies, it's all the way you're wired, it's all how your dispositions are. So it's just coming from you. It's your truest self, right? Sometimes you let your truest self out more frequently, and sometimes you don't. Okay, left side of the paper, it is you all your roles, you've listed those down. On the right-hand side of the paper, a couple of different things that I want you to do. I want you to list what were the areas that you enjoyed the most. What were the areas you found the easiest. Okay, the reason we do this...This is the super basic version of the past roles exercise. The reason we do this is because it allows us to begin looking for patterns immediately. Often when we have clients do this or other people are listening and then perform this exercise, they can list out all those pieces and then we're not necessarily looking for the magic bullet here, we're just starting to look for clues that create a pattern. So we put this with everything else that you know about yourself. And then we start to observe what are the trends there. It might be that "Wow, you know what, I found that it was incredibly easy to be able to answer tickets in support of the project that I was working on." And those tickets particularly the thing that was easy is it was wonderfully easy to be able to delight the people on the other end. Because you just couldn't stop going above and beyond and writing them little quips that they thought was funny, but also solved the problem. You know whatever it is, we're looking for those patterns. Let's say that that shows up in other places. Another place that it shows up is not in customer support. But in emails, you have for your day job. Part of the way that you get buy-in is that as you're sending emails to your team, you're offering those same little quips in order to get buy-in and maybe recognize that, "Wow, this is a thing that is showing up over and over again." We can start to dig into, okay, what is the strength that's underneath the surface that is causing that to happen where you keep doing this over and over again? And it's not normal for other people to do. That's what we're looking for. We're looking for those clues. But let me give you the advanced version. We have never talked about this before anyplace else. You can use it in tandem with your strengths themes. Although it is more advanced, it's still simple enough to describe here. In some cases, it can be more difficult to execute. And I'll give you a couple of ways you can handle that too. Okay, now that you have on your left-hand side the roles, and on the right-hand side you have your areas that you find the easiest areas that you love the most. I want you to go back and I want you to add, fill in, now that you have this timeline, if you will, to jog your memory. Add in the most difficult projects, time periods, situations or facets of that role, particularly the ones that you were able to overcome with any measure of success whatsoever. Maybe it wasn't a total success, but you were able to create some level of success with any of those projects, time periods, situations, etc. Okay, here's why I say this can be an advanced exercise, because here's what we're looking for in each of those areas. When we go and identify those projects, time periods, situations, what I want you to start doing is after you identify them, I want you to start applying what strengths you see that were required to create that success. So we recommend that a lot of our clients start with StrengthsFinder. StrengthsFinder is not the end-all-be-all. I love it for so many different reasons. And without going into the details of all those reasons, I think the thing that it does best is give you language that can then help you to have your first version of identification of your strengths. But here, you can take that language or that representation or the StrengthsFinder themes, in this case, those what they now call Clifton Strengths themes are, there's 34 of them. And then you can literally list the titles of each one. So I can put futuristic, I can put strategic, I can put woo, I can put whatever it is, and apply that to why I was successful. What was going on there? And when we do this in a coaching capacity when we're doing it in a one-on-one, here's what the line of questioning looks like from coach to our client, like, "Tell me about a situation where you were successful in the end. But it was one of the most difficult time periods that you experienced, or one of the most difficult projects that you experienced, or one of the most difficult things that you've overcome." We look for the difficulty because that tells us the true measure of how we're performing. We often perform at our best as humans through adversity in one way or another. So this helps us to quickly center in on an area that's going to help us identify something about our strengths. Right? Okay, so when we're there, here's the further line of questioning. Okay, when you think about that situation, what happened? What caused you to be successful? And then we started unpacking what caused you to be successful. And I think you can do the same on paper. What caused you to be successful? What strengths did you use that allowed you to be successful? And then we can literally get to the point where we start listing those out. Now here's what usually happens. Usually what happens is, people initially will say, "Oh, you know what? It's absolutely my futuristic. It's my futuristic strength. Yep, I totally see that. That's what I did." And then as coaches, we say, you know, it seems also like you were using your woo to be able to help the people get by and you were using your strategic thinking about the project in advance, and you were using yours and we go through the list and help reflect that back to people. Now, the great thing is sometimes you can do this on paper by yourself, you can start to list out what were the strengths that were involved that allowed you to be successful. Okay, now, this is advanced, because this gives us a whole different pattern set. This gives us a whole different patterns that because now we can start to attach language and start to see how signature strengths are functioning, not just individual strengths. It allows us to see where's the cluster of strengths, if you will, that are allowing you to create success in a variety of different roles, different situations, different projects, different outcomes, whatever it is. And the thing that this does for you is help to start connecting back that recognition of why you're successful with your individual strengths, and then how they work together in order to create a result for you. That's where it starts to get really fun.

Scott Anthony Barlow 23:33

Okay, a couple of warnings on this, though, this is also an advanced exercise, because there's a danger here that you can do this work and still not actually be able to see where you're using your strengths, or how you might use them in the future. If that is the case, one of the things I would encourage you to do is try not to get discouraged at that point. Instead, try to partner with someone. Partner with a highly unbiased friend who's really good at this stuff or a mentor or a coach reach out to us, this is something that we'll do StrengthsFinder or strength signature strengths reviews, too. If you're already working with us to make a career change, this is something you could talk to your lead coach about and figure out if it fits into helping you with your goal and trajectory. If you're working with us to help create meaningful work and thrive in an already ideal fit, then that's where we're already likely to be working on this too. Either way, get somebody else involved that can help you see past your blind spots. What we're looking for in this case, I just want to share it again, is we're looking for where you have your strengths show up and what combinations of those strengths are appearing again and again.

Scott Anthony Barlow 24:46

Okay, let's talk about the neutral strengths exercise. One of the things that we also experience is that people have trouble with understanding what their strengths mean for them. What does this mean for me, like I have these strengths, I have this language. What does this mean for me? One of our clients went through StrengthsFinder, and said, "Sure, I recognize these things in myself. I get that, yep, this is me all the things." But embracing the value of those strengths is very different. In this case, the way that he would describe his strengths, there would be a judgment that he would place, he would assign a positive or negative. Now in reality strengths, in some ways, are just a tool that you have at your disposal. They are neither positive nor negative. But as we already said, there can be a dark side or a shadow side to your strengths if you're working against them, versus a positive side when you're learning to work with your strengths, and learning to make your strengths work for you. So think about it as a tool, much the same as like money for example. I know this is a weird analogy. But money is a tool, it's not good or bad on its own, it just helps to achieve good or bad things. By itself is just a tool. And strengths are sort of the same way. Yes, they are the biggest representation of you or the truest representation of you when you're using them. But it's still just a tool. It can be used and harnessed either way for positive or negative. The other thing that we see happen is when people are assigning those positive or negative, it's usually coming from an emotional place where they've had feedback in one way or another, typically about the negative side of their strengths, and how that shown up. And that is reinforced over time that who they are because remember strengths are the true sense of you, that who they are is not great. And that then creates this negative belief and negative bias in which is sometimes difficult to overturn. Okay, so one of the ways that we often work through that, and I should be clear, we're not therapists, sometimes this can require element that is most useful through therapy. But many times we can work through that with a variety of exercises. This particular exercise, the neutral summary of strengths is taking your, we might take your Clifton Strengths as an example because we have starter language, and then we'll have people go through their strengths, each individual one, and then rewrite them in their own words, without judgment. That's the neutral part. Rewrite it in your own words without judgment. So if I have strategic, if I'm using Clifton Strengths Finder terms, if I have strategic, I'm gonna write out literally what that means to me. And I'm gonna go back over my language and remove out the parts that are positively charged, or negatively charged. Ending with a neutral summary of our strengths.

Scott Anthony Barlow 27:53

Now, here's something that we're looking for, as coaches. We know, people are starting to get to the point where they can adapt this into their world, once they're taking ownership over it. The way that ownership looks, is being able to put it in their own words and have their own level of understanding around it with their own words. The reason that's important is because until we see clients, and we see you being able to apply it in your own words, then often you haven't gotten to the level of base in which it allows you to then apply it into the rest of your life. You can often do it in small ways, for sure. But really, it becomes very, very different and the level of application dramatically increases with your level of ownership over those words. It's strange, and there's many reasons for that. That said, that's one of the things that we see. Now, one of the other things that we see, too, that has a tendency to hold people back is they feel like they are being selfish when they describe what they want or how they want to utilize their strengths. So often, we find ourselves giving the advice that you need to be more selfish. It's not that they're actually being selfish. If you're worried about that in the first place. If something feels selfish to you, chances are high that you're more predisposed to not be selfish at all. Like if you're paying attention to that, if that's something you're worried about, then chances are high, you are often swung away for the other way where you're not anywhere close to selfish. So if we're telling you to be selfish, then what that does is it brings you closer to the center where you're still not being selfish at all. But if you're going to be able to operate in the truest sense of you, that is going to require doing some things for you so then you can better serve other people.

Scott Anthony Barlow 29:53

All right, let me go over another specific example of how we might break down some of the most difficult projects or situations that you've worked on that came out successful in the end. I'm going to do this on the fly. So let's go back to the idea of the most difficult projects, most difficult situations. One example that occurs. Let's go way back to my HR days here for a second. One of the things that I was tasked with when I became an HR director at, it was actually a food company. And the first biggest challenge that was really a struggle was they were, they had like 30% turnover. It's like 38% turnover. It was crazy. It was ridiculous, like a lot of turnover, right? Year after year. And they couldn't solve this thing. Actually, 38% was an improvement from some of the previous times. So this was incredibly difficult. I remember, not necessarily being overly stressed, but I remember working a lot. And it really, really stretched me. And so if I think about that, I list down that situation. Okay, that time period, because I took that, and the outcome was over about a year period took it from 38% to I think it was like 21% turnover, so almost cut it in half. And what did it take? Like what were the strengths that went into that? Well, if I think about what had to happen, I had to continuously recognize where the loss was happening. I had to continuously recognize, like, what was causing the turnover. So that was pulling from my strategic side. And recognizing that one of the things that we could do was hire the right people. For the most part, I could see that strategically, we were hiring the wrong people. So if we hired more of the right people on the root side and put our efforts there, that would over the course of a few months, stop some of the bleeding. And then another thing that required for me, I mentioned that futuristic part earlier, but I had to be able to look ahead, because if I were just really focused on things like training and just really focused on the shorter impact, instead of the long game, then wouldn't have been able to see that, "Hey, this is something where we can make a fix." And it's going to come down dramatically over time to the point where you know, eventually we got it down closer to 10%. And that requires that futuristic portion, being able to look a year and a half or two years ahead and see what might be the outcomes. What could we envision here? What could that look like? And then it had to be able to utilize generating a lot of different ideas, and then be able to test those ideas quickly, which pulled from some of my ideation strength if we're continuing to use Clifton Strengthsfinder knowledge. Okay, so then I can go back and say, Okay, well, it's the combination of those three that really actually helped. And really, there's more here, but let's just go with the three. Now, I can recognize that, okay, that's one combination that shows up. And I can go in and repeat this again. What I find is that almost anytime I personally am being successful, it really is that combination of those three strengths, working in tandem over and over again that just shows up again, and again and again and again. So I can start to pay attention to that and say, "Okay, well, what are ways that I can develop that in the future?" That again is the feedback loop I mentioned earlier, and how you can use feedback from situations that you handled really well, to reiterate the combination of strengths you're using at times when you feel like you're operating at your best.

Scott Anthony Barlow 33:35

Okay, we've covered a lot. So I want to give you some specific action items to take away from this episode. Because, as it turns out, knowledge is fun, it can be amazing, it can be entertainment, but that's what it is if you don't put it to use. So you can find the links to all of what we talked about in the show notes. But first and foremost, if you're starting out with strengths, I would encourage you to take the Clifton Strengths Finder assessment. We'll link you to get access to it on our site. It's a pretty tiny fee to be able to take it. And it's gonna give you a first version of your strengths verbiage so that you can take that, begin to understand it, work with it, and figure out what is in fact true for you. We also went through the past roles exercise, neutral strengths exercise, and difficult situation exercise, and I highly recommend completing all of them because you'll come out with a much clearer picture of your signature strengths. But the first one I would say to complete is that pastoral exercise. Do it solo. And then secondarily, after you do the basic version of the past roles exercise, which you'll be able to find in the show notes, then you're ready for the advanced version. Keep in mind with the advanced version, you probably want to do it with somebody else– a friend, a mentor, a career coach, someone that's going to help you make more sense of it. Because it truly has advanced this difficult to see what you're not seeing because of those natural strengths blinders. Okay. Finally, I want you to begin to take ownership. Ownership of the language that you use for your signature strengths, and what truly makes you, "you". So this is where you're going to be able to use that neutral strength exercise where you begin to define it. It being your signature strengths, in your own words, your own verbiage, and what that specifically means to you. This is the point where you can graduate into using and understanding and articulating your signature strengths. If you're already in role, by the way, that's a great fit for you, that's going to be a little bit easier. And if you're not, it's not that you can't do it, but it will allow you to be able to, it'll be a little bit more difficult, it allows you to develop your strengths at a more rapid rate. And if you use them more frequently, pay attention and you'll be able to make adjustments. You can also do this outside of work too. The other areas where you find that you might already be well aligned, and be able to utilize your strengths there. The same observations will be apparent, it doesn't necessarily have to be in your work. These exercises are work that the majority of the world won't do. It's not easy, but it is worth it. Defining your signature strengths will help you figure out how you can work and function best in all areas of your life. So all this work will make everything else much much much easier, if not more enjoyable. Pretty cool, right?

Scott Anthony Barlow 36:37

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 makes 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 37:31

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

Speaker 2 37:38

I tried to do that on my own and realized very, very quickly that I was going nowhere fast. The job searches were pretty much leading me. I was very overwhelmed. And I've scattered throughout my searches, not really knowing where to focus or how to focus.

Scott Anthony Barlow 37:54

Over the years, we've shown you a lot of career changes that most people would consider impossible. We know from being on the inside of these, that it can be really challenging to think about how on earth someone would make this career change from one drastically different occupation to another or how they might go and get what most people would consider to be an impossible dream job, and many, many other things between. So that's one of the reasons why we take great pains to show you how it works from the inside. For example, how does someone go from identifying a list of organizations that they might want to work for, and getting an opportunity with their number one company on that list?

Scott Anthony Barlow 38:44

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.

Nick Neves 00:01

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.

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

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.

Nick Neves 01:56

I would ask them, like, what does a successful person look like in this role? What personality traits fit a type of person in this role? That confirms to me that I am moving in the right direction, and looking for the right jobs, and I can be successful and build my confidence back up.

Scott Anthony Barlow 02:10

That's Nick. In less than two years, his customer success role began to change to, well, being almost all a sales role. And as we begin to uncover his strengths and define what he really wanted in life, he knew that he had to make a change. But how do you move from a role that's no longer ideal to one that actually uses your strengths? All right, well, spoiler alert, Nick does a really nice job of this. And I want you to listen for how that took place, how that actually happened. But let's start out with Nick explaining here, how he went from uncovering his strengths to making connections and having conversations to learn what roles could fit him and finally, landing in a role that does play to his strengths.

Nick Neves 02:54

I was in a job working in customer success, which for those who don't know, it's kind of like customer support with, like, a little bit of sales mixed in, and was doing this job, it was kind of morphing more into a sales role, which is just not for me. So..

Scott Anthony Barlow 03:06

What was that for you? I'm super curious.

Nick Neves 03:08

My own personality, I don't think you know, I'm more of an introverted kind of behind-the-scenes, analytical thinker. I like doing more operational stuff versus just hammering phones all day, filling your day with talking to people. You know, I didn't want the success of my job to be determined by things that just I didn't want to do, or wasn't comfortable with. That's why I, you know, this isn't sustainable for me. And there was a couple other things too, with just the way the company was, the culture. And there's a multitude of different reasons. But that was the biggest reason for me, it just did not feel like the right fit. Even it was confirmed with me and with my manager, kind of yearly reviews and things like that. She's like, "No, you're a great team player, people love you on the team, but like really need you to be more like this person." And she compared me to, like, our top salesperson. I'm like, I will never be like that person ever. So I was, like, if they want me to be this type of person, then they hired the wrong person, and that I was okay with that. Because at first when I was doing the job, my confidence took it. And I definitely, that resonated with, you know, a lot of your previous podcast guests, I want to talk about that. And I was like, I totally understand where they're coming from, where you think you're just not doing a good job and all that and you realize, okay, it's really, this isn't working out. And I could totally excel doing something that's more of a natural fit. So that's where I started, I was into customer success, and then ultimately led me to work in finance. So I can kind of get into the transition of that because I know it's kind of a complete one.

Scott Anthony Barlow 04:29

Well, let me ask you first about that stage where you were in this customer success type role. And clearly, it was outside of your, not just comfort zone, but also in many ways, it is requiring you to be a ton of who you are not and also didn't want to be. But I think as you mentioned, so many people will be in that situation and they will say "I should be able to do this or I.." they end up beating up on themselves, in one way or another, and impacts confidence. So what allowed you to get to the point where you realized that you were okay with it? Because I also heard you say, "Hey, I was okay with it at some point." But what took place for you to get to that point where you realize, "Look, it's just the wrong fit."?

Nick Neves 05:13

Yeah, that's a great question. And just putting myself back into that scenario. That's exactly how I felt first. I was in the job for maybe two to three years. First year, I was definitely beating myself up, thinking I'm not doing a good job here. You know, that feeling continued. But I think the turning point was when I started really sitting down and putting in the time and effort, figure out why this wasn't a good fit. And I took... It was even before I found Happen To Your Career, I took the Myers-Briggs test, which was super helpful. Pairing that with the personality tests and strength tests that you guys do as well. And then I ultimately stumbled upon you guys and did some of the 8-day mini course and all that stuff. That free exercise kind of put everything into perspective for me and made me realize there are strengths and weaknesses to a person. And sometimes it's just a square peg in a round hole, right? And that just slowly, it wasn't like an overnight thing, right? It definitely took some weeks to kind of figure that out. And then as I continued with the job, like I said, I had those meetings with my manager, he was telling me he wanted me to become this person. I knew I wasn't going to become that person. So that's when it really clicked for me. And I was just like, "Okay, I should be able to do a different job." And even further along, through the career change bootcamp program, you always have a little bit of doubt here and there as you're going through, right, especially at the beginning, but as I did the interviewing process of other people in other roles departments that I was interested in, and I would ask them, like, "What does a successful person look like in this role? What personality traits fit that type of person in this role?" That confirmed to me that I am moving in the right direction and looking for the right jobs, and I can be successful and build my confidence back up.

Scott Anthony Barlow 06:48

Let me ask you about that. Just for a little bit of background for everyone else, one of the things that will often do is help people design many experiments where you sometimes are having conversations, and I think that's probably the part that you're referring to, and where you are looking at a variety of different roles and trying to confirm that those might be potentially a direction for you. So what were some of those roles that you were looking at they were talking to people about at the time? Just curious.

Nick Neves 07:16

It started off very broadly. But then eventually got a little more niche. I actually connected with someone else who is in the program, actually. And he worked in accounting previously. And turns out, we had a lot of the same strengths. So I was like, he'd probably be a great person to talk to, get a perspective on, you know, using the job, he has the same strengths, it would be a good fit for me. I kind of honed in on accounting, and really matched up with a lot of my strengths. And I liked the structure. I like working with numbers, all that stuff like routine. So going off of that, trusting my strengths and saying, "Okay, I think this is a good place to start and kind of proceed that." That was the main role that I was really looking at. As I went along, I realized I had to do a slight pivot where, you know, accounting, it's tough to get into if you don't have the degree and all that stuff. So I was kind of hitting roadblocks there. But I was able to find a way to kind of get my foot in the door, almost like a stepping stone into accounting, which is the role I'm in now, which is called order operations. It's got a lot of different names in different companies. But basically, you're the middleman between sales and accounting and finance. So it was great tip– my background working in sales and customer support. But I'm kind of moving away to a different side of the house that I want to move into. So our long-winded question probably went off topic there.

Scott Anthony Barlow 08:27

This is great. Because a couple of things that aren't always obvious when we talk about these types of transitions because you've done a great job making this type of pivot. And I think so many people would not even realize that it's possible to make that severe of a change, I'm gonna call that severe for just a second. Severe in the best possible way. Severe sounds sometimes like a negative word, but I mean it in a really, really positive way that is different than almost 180 types of change. And one of the ways that you have found to do that is by heavily leveraging not just your strengths, but also your past experiences too. And I think that gets so undervalued as a portion of this process because I think so many people hear these types of podcasts or they recognize the need to do something different. And then think, "Well, I need to make this 180 type of change. I'm gonna be a scuba diver." Or something like that, like, it's gonna be that drastic change in one way or another. And that tendency is to say, "Okay, I'm going to, like, magic it to happen." And that's not how it works in reality. And in reality, it happens much more like you have done where we are heavily leveraging those things that you're bringing to the table. In this case, you had some amazing experiences in both sales even though that's not what you wanted to do forever, but also customer success. And also a lot of the pieces that come along with that, the skill sets that come along with that too. And a really nice job.

Nick Neves 09:56

Thank you. No, I was just gonna say before I forget, that really reminds me of, I didn't really realize it at the time, like you said, you're making that big change, and you're like, I don't even know if I have the transferable skills or all that. And number one, I help talking to people figure out what are the transferable skills, you know, the interview is huge, it was so helpful, just to get a sense of everything, you know. I actually talk to people in the jobs that make you realize, okay, you're just looking at job descriptions all day, like, it's kind of just monotonous. And then you kind of hit a wall there. So for me, I was really able to figure out, okay, I don't have the accounting background. But I definitely have transferable skills, work with Excel a ton, and I've done process improvements, which is big in that field, in my job. And that's what I enjoyed doing that. So once you started talking to people, you realize, okay, this is a little more doable than I thought. And I ended up getting a lot of compliments from people, even if I didn't end up getting the job, they were like, "Your resume looks like an accounting resume, I'm surprised you haven't had any experience in that field." So that was a good confirmation there that I was doing it the right way, and ultimately worked out.

Scott Anthony Barlow 10:59

That is awesome. I want to dig into a few of those pieces here for just a minute because it did ultimately work out whatever we're talking about, like nine plus months or so of work to make it ultimately workout. And you mentioned some of those conversations that you were having. Very often, when we think about making a change, depending on what people decide they need and is what is most valuable to them, you know, what their goal is, and making this change that can often dictate whether you focus on roles first, or whether you focus on organizations or environments first. For you, it was much more about roles. And so you started having some of those conversations. But I'm curious, could you describe a couple of those conversations and what those actually looked like, what led up to them, how you got to chat with a couple of those people, and what even talked about during some of those conversations.

Nick Neves 11:49

Going back, I definitely remember struggling with the roles versus organizations debacle. And I thought, well, maybe I can do both, I can look for roles within industries that are interesting to me. You know, I was looking, I'm a big sports fan. I love golf. So there's a couple golf manufacturing companies and sports manufacturing companies around Boston. I was looking at those. And I ultimately decided that, for me, I think the role was just more important just because maybe it was the nature of the job itself. Like with accounting and finance, you're doing a kind of finance in the back office, and it's kind of just that, right? I think if someone was moving into, like, customer success or something else like that, where you're kind of on the front lines of the industry, you might look for companies to put an emphasis on that. So I think it really depends on the role. So for me through conversations with people, it didn't really seem like it was that different industry to industry, I didn't want to move to a massive company. But in terms of, like, the industry, I was like, I'm kind of industry agnostic at this point, that kind of started there figured that out. And like I said, talking to people through the informational interviews, and kind of open that up. And even also doing some accountability groups at the time, I don't know if you guys are calling them from different now, but being able to talk to other people who are going through the career change process on the call, we were able to bounce ideas back and forth, when I would explain to them, "Hey, I'm kind of struggling with this. Do I go with company roles? You know, go for other industries?" So they were able to kind of help me talk through that and ultimately decided that role was kind of the way to go for me. So that was another helpful thing, too, is to have not only my coach but also just the community itself is very helpful.

Scott Anthony Barlow 13:27

That's amazing. It makes me really happy for so many different reasons. I think it's probably useful to acknowledge here that this progression, I'm going to call it a progression, is always so much easier when you're looking backwards. You and I were chatting at the very beginning of our conversation. I think before we even hit the record button about how you were trying to get yourself back into the mindset of what life was like a year ago at this time when you were starting to really think about making this change and starting to really move on that. But it's been a year since that point in time. And it was definitely no small amount of work. And one of the things I heard you say earlier was, "Hey, I had a conversation with another person who was working with HTYC and they had a past background in accounting. And that's what led to me affirming that this could be something that I take a really close look at." And then that led to other conversations that you had, where you were taking tidbits away for different types of roles, which led to the next thing, which led to the next thing, which led to the next thing, and ultimately, only then after nine months of breadcrumbs, if you want to call it that, following each of those little bit breadcrumbs led to the actual opportunity. So the question that I wanted to ask you there is, that's a lot of different pieces to be able to make this happen for yourself and you've done a great job with that. But what were some of the hardest parts of that process for you?

Nick Neves 14:53

I will say what definitely helped me was the whole structure of it. You know, having the modules to go through, you kind of look ahead, you knew what to expect, I mean, not totally knew what to expect in terms of the program and what you were going to be working on. So I really liked the structure. So I'd recommend people if you like having that structure, it definitely helps. But there's parts where it sounds like it was a seamless transition, right? And now I'm here a year later, and I have a new job. But I'd say that the hardest parts were, like we discussed before grappling with the, where do I even focus on. Do I focus on roles? Do I focus on industries? Do I focus on companies like, you know, some people might be looking to move, or they just don't care about location, that throws a whole another wrench into everything. So I think the way you guys do it were, you kind of talked about building that frame, right, and putting the pieces of the puzzle together. Another thing too that was really helpful was building out your kind of life profile, if you will. So you kind of put like parameters around what you're looking for to make everything kind of less daunting, right? So you kind of have indicators or parameters of what you want to look for. So you're not casting such a wide net that you're overwhelmed. So that at first it was overwhelming, but it was able to kind of hone in from there. And then I think a little bit further down the road once, you know, I started interviewing and all that, that's, you know, you deal with rejection a lot too. You feel like you found a really good fit. And you made a really good case of why you're able to make this change and why you fit in, you know, you might not have the traditional background and you do everything you can, and you might not get a job.

Scott Anthony Barlow 16:26

Was there an example of where that happened for you?

Nick Neves 16:28

Yeah, a couple of times. You know, there was kind of some entry-level accounting jobs where I was able to network my way into those jobs. So way more effective, I think, than just going on job boards, right? So I was like I already have in here and that person, whether they're just being polite, or whatever, maybe they think you're a great fit, and they pass along your resume. I worked with my coach, you know, on my resume to tailor it to each and every job that I was doing– tailoring my interview prep and my cover letters, and all that stuff. I felt super prepared and very confident that I would at least get a callback for a lot of the jobs, right. A lot of them did, which looking back, it's like, well, you're moving into a totally new field where you don't have accounting degrees and all that stuff. So I get it.

Scott Anthony Barlow 17:12

Well, I think there's another element there too. I would argue that that actually worked out so much better for you. Even the rejection sucks, like that is where you ended up, at least from the outside looking in appears to be a far better match than starting in beginning accounting. Because you bring a lot more to the table, you have so much more experience and skill sets than just starting from the beginning. So that actually is allowing the process to work even though it doesn't always feel good in the moment.

Nick Neves 17:43

Yeah, and I think at the time, I don't even know the job, and now was a job. So I was really just searching for kind of those entry level accounting job. Like, maybe I'll have to take a pay cut, I really don't want to, there's other kinds of entry level accounting jobs that a lot of people were frequently recommending accounts payable, accounts receivable, and just stuff like that. And I was like, I would be willing to kind of grind it out and do those jobs, but it's part of my life profile, if you will, was that I wanted to be making the same amount of money or more, which is kind of what you're gonna put in the effort to go through this whole career change process– you want to be able to have that kind of same salary. So especially in Boston, where things are crazy. But yeah, I didn't even know that was a job. Through my conversations with people, I found out that, hey, this could be a good fit to kind of make that transition. So again, like talking to people and networking, even though it can be uncomfortable at times, people were way friendlier than I was expecting, even just random people on LinkedIn. I was stalking so many people on LinkedIn, sending so many messages. And a lot of people who did respond were super helpful, you know, I'd never met them before, we went and jumped on the phone. And being able to do all that while working remotely was definitely helpful. But definitely recommend reaching out to people as much as you can, if you're going through the process.

Scott Anthony Barlow 18:57

What did you find was very effective for you personally, which might not be effective for everybody? But in your situation, what did you find was really effective as you were reaching out to people and having those conversations, particularly in the conversations themselves? What advice would you give people that worked well for you?

Nick Neves 19:18

Yeah, I would say at first it's especially when you're finding companies where there are open jobs that you want to apply to, you're like, you're very excited to try and get your foot in the door and apply those right away, right? And I did a bad job of this at first where I was reaching out to people saying like, "Hey, I saw there was an open job here and I just would love to kind of learn more about it." That just reeks of like, hey, like, get this job for me. Right? But when I was reaching out to people, you know, treat it more as like, I want to learn about your experience and really just have a conversation that people are more willing to open up and talk about than just help a random person who's trying to use them or wants to just get a job. I think eventually the conversation ultimately kind of lives that way, which is nice, but it shouldn't start that way. Especially in the beginning when I really was just doing informational interviews just to learn about different jobs. You kind of build your network as you go anyway. So you can always go back to those people. If you see openings, it makes it a little easier to reach out and apply to those jobs.

Scott Anthony Barlow 20:17

That's so interesting, the point that you made about if you are just pursuing a job, often that is a turnoff, where if you are genuinely interested in the other person to learn about it, then that very often leads to opportunities. The hard part about that, though, I think, for so many people is you can't fake that. Like if you get into that conversation, like everyone has BS meters that are going to go off like crazy, "This dude just wants the job. I'm done with this."

Nick Neves 20:49

Yeah, I think that you're right, that was a tough thing to kind of fake. For me, I was just enjoying the process, and really just enjoyed talking to people, and everyone had a different perspective on things. And I always learn something from every conversation that I had. So for me, I was excited to talk to these people and great if I could steer it in the direction I want to go in, all the better. But I think at the very least you still learn some things that you can pick up along the way. So it's kind of, that was able to help me kind of get in that mindset.

Scott Anthony Barlow 21:17

Very cool. Okay, so let me ask you this. If you had to go back and make this change, again, is there anything that you would do differently in the process for yourself?

Nick Neves 21:30

Oh, that's a good question. I'm not totally sure. Maybe at the time when I was kind of looking for different roles, different opportunities, like maybe I left some different jobs or roles that are on the table, that could have been a really good fit, I kind of you know, I wanted to be kind of laser focused on one role. And that's just me personally. So I was like, okay, accounting looks good, it may not be perfect, but I think it matches a lot of the skill sets and strengths that I have. It matches my life profile, like I just checked all the boxes, like, I'm just gonna go with it and look for this job. Like some people, maybe you can look at multiple different roles or job fields at once. So maybe I left something that was a really good fit, and maybe I just didn't see it. But I remember having this conversation with my coach, too, at the time where I was worried about missing something. And eventually, you just got to move forward with something, right? You can't just have paralysis by analysis, which is definitely something that I suffer from at times. So I had to realize that and that's another opportunity where my coach helped me out, you know, maybe that's a regret. But also, I won't get too bogged down by that stuff. Because that could really stonewall your efforts to move forward.

Scott Anthony Barlow 22:39

What do you feel like are, now that we're on the other end of this, and you have a different perspective, because a year ago at this time, we had talked about you were in probably a far less healthy place mentally because the role and what was expected of you was such a not great fit. Such an opposite of alignment in some very specific ways. But now that you are in a better fit, what would you describe as the differences for people?

Nick Neves 23:12

The biggest difference, take this job really matches what I'm looking for in a working environment. I don't want to be inundated with meetings all day and having to be on all the time socially. Like I said, I'm more of an introverted person. So for me kind of being heads down in your work. Doing kind of all the behind-the-scenes work is really what I preferred. So that's a big change. And the things that I felt like I was good at just wasn't being recognized at my own job. Like I said, I was doing some process improvements, and things like that, just to kind of boost efficiency and all that. And there was, like, an operational side of the job. But then it was a client facing side of the job. And I really gravitated towards the operational side and felt like I did a good job of improving that part of the job and all that but that wasn't being recognized as vital to the job or bringing success to it. So…

Scott Anthony Barlow 24:00

Well, it sounds like the emphasis was on the client facing side of the... that's really what that organization or that set of people needed in one way or another.

Nick Neves 24:08

Exactly. And now I'm able to, to kind of focus on those strengths with my new job. I didn't know all this stuff at the time, but definitely taking the strengths tests and all that stuff really helped me because I think you really know what you're good at, and what you don't like and all that, but taking the strengths test through you guys really helped me put everything into perspective and put it into words. And one thing that I really enjoyed about the process was you take the strengths test, and then you go through and kind of highlight things that stand out to you. So that's really what helped me hone in on accounting in the first place is highlighting some of the words like reliability, routine, all these different things that stood out to me, like, I enjoy that aspect of the job and I feel like I'm good at it. That was very helpful. Because again, that's also kind of a daunting thing too. It's like okay, now I have this strength test, but it's like not spitting out a job for me, right? I gotta go ahead and kind of match that to what to look for. So that process was super helpful too.

Scott Anthony Barlow 24:59

You know what's really interesting, though, is a year later, you can now easily articulate what it is that you need. And I think that's such a cool thing because you're going to be able to continue to build on that for the rest of your life, where, you know, I asked you, and just off the cuff, at the beginning of this, you're like, "Well, you know, here's what I wasn't getting. Here's now what I need. I needed this routine, I am more of an introvert and I need ABCD and E", and you can just rattle that off now. And I think that that is a testament, and that doesn't just happen through the process. Yes, yes, we have that built into our particular process for career change. However, it takes a lot of work from you, and understanding about yourself to be able to get to the point where now a year later, it's just like, "Oh yeah, obviously, here's what I need– boom, boom, boom, boom, boom." So that's super cool because I know what goes into that. But I think the power there that you made the point of is, you first have to be able to do that and be able to recognize it in a way that you can articulate it to other people or the outside world. Otherwise, the opportunities that come much later on just simply don't happen. If you don't get to step one, you don't get to step seven.

Nick Neves 26:07

Yeah, for sure. It wasn't, like you said, it wasn't an overnight thing. It definitely took some practice on my part, some kind of discipline to put in the time and work to figure all this stuff out, you know, be able to articulate it the way where I can now. And again, my coach was super helpful going through almost like roleplay, if you will, where you can kind of talk through it. I was so bad at it at first, but put it into practice with his help, and with the structured strengths tests and profiles and modules that you guys have, it was just helpful to kind of help me frame it for myself, too. So I would say, it was a combination of everything really, that was able to get me to where I'm at.

Scott Anthony Barlow 26:45

Well, I am so glad to hear it. And before we finish up here, is there any other parting words of either wisdom or advice that you'd like to share with someone who is finding themselves back in that situation that you were in a year ago? Or like, "Okay, clearly, I need to make a change. Clearly, this is not a great fit. But what the heck do I do about it from here?" What would you tell that person who's in that place right now?

Nick Neves 27:12

Yeah, I would say thinking back to about a year ago when I was very unhappy in my job and everything, you know, you have to make a change, but you're not really sure what direction to move in. And maybe you do have a sense of what direction you want to move in, but it's just not really sure how to get there. For me, like I said, I really liked the structure of everything. So that was super helpful. But it's not so structured where it's like, someone likes to kind of do things at their own pace and all that. I think it's very flexible. And I know you guys are good at working with people's different styles and customizing things the way people work. So that's great. So that was a big thing for me. And even if I think this program would be really helpful for someone who's looking to make even more of a drastic change. Like if you're looking to make some, if you're looking to move to a very niche job that it's difficult to kind of get into that role because I know talking with some of the other people in the program, they were looking for, like, very niche specific jobs in certain industries. That's one coach would be super helpful. And it was even helpful for me who was still in the corporate world kind of making a pivot, but nothing, like, super drastic. So I would say no matter what boat you're in, really, I think having the help and guidance is helpful, right? Having the community to fall back on bounce ideas off of people. All that is just, it was all very helpful in the end. So I would say those are the kind of the big takeaways for me.

Scott Anthony Barlow 28:37

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 29:31

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

Scott Anthony Barlow 29:37

If there's one thing that I've seen in the last 10 years or so is that our readers, listeners, clients love the idea of strengths. Love the idea that there's a unique value that we can offer to the world in the form of our strengths. But here's the funny thing, when it comes down to identifying and then using our strengths, well, that's where it gets much more complicated. That's where we find there are really, really large mental barriers standing in the way of you and what we call signature strengths.

Scott Anthony Barlow 30:16

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.

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.