Show notes
Sometimes, your career can evolve in surprising ways, and you can either fight those changes or embrace them. In this episode of Career Relaunch, Julian Mather a former army sniper turned TV cameraman turned magician discusses the importance of letting go and embracing the twists and turns of your career. I also share some thoughts on the importance of putting yourself out there to create new opportunities in your career. Key Career Insights When you’re exploring a new career path, you really have to immerse yourself in every aspect of that new path in order to understand whether it can fit into your desired career trajectory. Even when your career takes a turn for the worse, you always have the opportunity to bounce make, make the most of the hand you’ve been dealt, and reinvent yourself. New opportunities often emerge when you take the initiative to bravely put yourself out there and just give things a shot, especially during those times when you don’t quite feel 100% ready. Tweetables to Share You have to let go first before you can start something new. Julian Mather Tweet This Even when I'm off-target, I'm always going forward. Julian Mather Tweet This The best things happen when you do something audacious. Joseph Liu Tweet This About Julian Mather, Cameraman & Magician Julian Mather wasn’t at school the day they taught conventional career planning. A chronic truant he self educated and read between the lines to find the secrets to turning his obsession into his profession. From high school failure to Army sniper to globe trotting TV cameraman to kids entertainer to online entrepreneur he really hasn’t felt he has a worked a day in his life. And at 55 he says he’s only just beginning to hit his straps. Julian uses his simple truths and life changing resources to inspire and educate mid lifers and halt the 45-65 year old mental health decline and rising suicide rate among men at his site TailorMadeCareer.com. He now runs the world’s #1 training academy for professional children’s entertainers while re-inventing himself as a speaker & expert on midlife career change. Be sure to check out Julian’s hand picked podcast episodes that will inspire you and teach you the art of change. Also, watch a few of Julian’s Magician School videos on YouTube to learn a few magic tricks like this one . . . https://youtu.be/zCBOzBavD_c Did You Enjoy This Episode? Please Let Us Know! Tweet: If you enjoyed this episode and have a few seconds to spare, Tweet to let me and Julian know!Tweet a thank you! Review: I’d also love for you to leave a positive review and rating for the podcast on iTunes, which helps my show reach more people who want to relaunch their careers. Subscribe: Be sure to subscribe to Career Relaunch podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, Android, or Google Play (it’s free) so you don’t miss out on the latest episodes. Full instructions. Stay in touch: Follow Career Relaunch on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. You can also follow host Joseph on Twitter and Facebook. Comments, Suggestions, or Questions? If you have any lingering thoughts, questions, or topics you would like covered on future episodes, record a voicemail for me right here. I LOVE hearing from listeners!Leave Joseph a VoicemailYou can also leave a comment below. Thanks! Episode Interview Transcript Teaser (first ~15s): I use that sniper analogy of a bullet ricocheting. That’s my life. I’ve just been on this ricochet – off that side and barring to the left and to the right. The target is long gone, but I’m always going forward. Joseph: Welcome, Julian. Thank you so much for taking time out of your busy day to join us here on Career Relaunch. Julian: You are most welcome, Joseph. Joseph: Can you just get us started here by telling us a little bit more about what you’re focused on right now in your career and your life? You’ve got a very interesting story, and there’s a lot of pieces to get to. Let’s start with what you’re doing right now, and then we’ll go back in time and work for it from there. Julian: Right now, I’m passionate about working with 40 to 60-year-olds—I’m 55—about getting them digitally literate. There’s wonderful opportunities online, but it’s been my experience that a lot of people don’t know that these are there. There’s also a problem that if you’re white, if you’re male, if you’re 45 to 65 years old and you’re a Westerner, you are most likely to suicide. I think that’s just crazy, I don’t understand it, and I’m trying to, in my small way, be a part of the jigsaw that solves that problem. Joseph: Very interesting. I definitely want to come back and talk at the end about Tailor Made Career a little bit more, but I would love to go back in time because you’ve got one of the most interesting career trajectories I’ve ever seen. We get some really interesting people on the show, but I have never had someone on the show who was an army sniper. Can you take us back in time a little bit? We’ll start from there. You’ve got some other interesting chapters, but I would love to just kick off by talking about your time over there in the Australian army. Julian: I’ve really got to go back to where it all started. It all started at school because I did really well at school if you don’t count learning. I did so poorly, I had to repeat my final year at high school, and then I ended up doing worse in my repeat year. I became a chronic truant, and I self-educated myself at the State Library because I knew what I wanted to do, Joseph. I want to be a photo journalist. I studied by myself months and months and months, pouring over these photo books. I realized, to be a photo journalist, I needed to have a camera in my hand at all times, and I needed to be where the action was, which was not in my home town of Brisbane. I saw an army recruiting poster, and I went in and asked, ‘Could I be a photographer in the army?’ They said, ‘Certainly, sir. Sign here.’ To my naïve surprise, that’s when the yelling started, and it didn’t stop. They put me in the infantry. I was being duped. When I was in the army, I looked for some way where I could get some peace and quiet and get away from all this yelling, and I found a place. I became a sniper. My job description read verbatim, you must have a personality which allows you to kill calmly and deliberately. Honestly, my heart wasn’t really in it because that part of me that’s designed to kill people is not very big. There I was, lying and waiting, looking through my crosshairs, but I’m still dreaming of being a photo journalist, which is simply telling a story with pictures. I realized that looking through my telescopic sites, it’s like I was looking through a camera, so I started the process of making imaginary movies. Essentially, I self-educated myself in filmmaking. I went from being trained to shoot people with a rifle to shooting people with a camera, which is much more socially acceptable I might add. Joseph: Hang on just a second. I got to stop you there because I would love to hear a little bit more about you being in the army and the fact that you became a sniper even though that wasn’t what you had in mind. How did you reconcile that? Julian: How I reconciled that was that I’m male, and I have this brain which is compartmentalized. I just open a box, and all the information and the knowledge goes in that box. I worked with that box, and then if I move on to the next thing, I close that box and open another box. I’ve just got a very, very project-driven mind. Joseph: Where there any aspects of being a sniper that did sit well with who you were? Julian: Gosh, yeah. I could indulge in my antisocial behaviors. Essentially, Joseph, I’m an introvert. You’re going to hear a part of my story later, how I’ve trained myself out of that, but I’m a cave dweller. This is what I love doing. I love getting by myself with my own thoughts and essentially not talking to people. That part really, really suited me. Joseph: You’re right. There are all sorts of roles you could have in the army, but it’s a very introverted role. I never thought of it like that. You’re spending a lot of time by yourself I would suppose. Julian: You work by yourself. You also work in teams of two, which I got to tell you, it was really, really hard, because when you work with someone in a team of two, you’re tasked. You might be tasked for 48 hours, and you are literally side-touching this person for 48 hours. You’ll hide side by side. It’s a very unusual situation to be in. Joseph: What happened next for you? You’re an army sniper. You spend a lot of time by yourself or with your partner there. When did the gear start to turn for you and how did they start to turn that maybe you should go off and do something else? Julian: I still wanted to be a photo journalist. I started this process of training myself in filmmaking. It was pre-internet. I used to go and get whatever books I could at the library and start training, because this is first step of what I always do, and I’ve had many career changes: I immerse myself, and so whatever the next project I’m going to move on or next phase I’m moving into, I literally just get in and I read and I listen. I get every bit of information. When I went into cinematography, because what I did was I left the army and I joined the ABC TV in Australia, I ended up doing this for 25 years, where they put money in one hand, plane ticket in the other, kick me out the door, and said, ‘Go tell people stories.’ In a sense, I had made it, what I wanted to do – be a photo journalist. It was not with still cameras, how I originally set out to be. It had evolved and had gone into motion picture. Joseph: One of the things that we talk about on the show is how people make these shifts. I have to say that going from sniper to TV camera man, to me, seems like quite a shift, although I know you’re still looking into some sort of a view finder or a scope of some sort. Can you just explain, what was that transition like for you? Julian: It’s interesting because being a camera man is both problem solving and creativity at the same, which are two strengths that I really, really have. Even though I didn’t have the creative side in the army, I certainly had that problem solving. There was that transition across that was quite a natural flow. Really, the transition from being a sniper to camera work was not as big a transition as my careers I did further on. Joseph: Speaking of which, you did have another transition after that, and I’m really interested to talk about this because I know you eventually ended up becoming a children’s magician. Before that, when we talked for the first time, you described to me the emotions that were involved with leaving your camera man world behind to go do something else. Can you walk us through that transition? Julian: After 25 years, I’d met so many VIPs, and that’s ‘very inspiring people.’ They were out there making a difference. That just infuses me, and that’s what I wanted to do too. Even though I was doing little projects here and there, nothing was gaining traction. I started to think it was just me, that I wasn’t good enough to do the things that all these other people seem to be able to do. One day, I had the simplest of realizations. I realized that all these people who are making a difference, they were in front of the camera, and that’s where I needed to be. But I was behind the camera, and the only way for me to be in front of the camera was to leave behind the camera. I couldn’t be in two places at once. So I left, and I cried. I mourned my career. I was leaving 25 years of everything I had worked so hard for. It was really the very fabric of who I was. But you know what? That morning, that was the best thing because it’s incredibly important to let go, because it’s only when you let go that you can start a fresh job, a fresh life. Just get out there and give it your all. Joseph: People talk about this process of mourning when it comes to loss of a loved one or when you’re breaking up with somebody. You got a relationship you’re walking away from. I don’t know if people always think about that when it comes to careers. Yet your career is such a big part of life, and of course, there’s going to be emotion that’s involved when you let it go. How did you get through that? Julian: I suppose there’s a difference between a career and a job as well, because if it was just a job, I don’t think I would’ve mourned it. Really, photography was just a part of my being. It started back prior to that because my father was an amateur photographer, and he got me into this world. Really, up until that stage, it was my whole life that I was giving away. Joseph: How did you know that it was time to move on from that? Julian: When my learning plateaus, Joseph. I really get to stage where I would just think, ‘I’m starting to do this day after day, and I’m not learning anymore.’ Even though it’s a great job, it was seriously a good job, the pull for me to be challenged, I’m a risk taker, but I’m a slow-motion risk taker. My transitions from career to career normally take me about five years. It is risky leaving your job and doing something completely new, but I’d sort of put steps in place to counter that, but those steps don’t always work. Joseph: What were some of those steps, just to understand how you were mitigating that risk? Julian: One thing I do when I’m changing careers, I’ve got this thing called the 1852 rule. That is essentially that change is this whole thing of small steps. For me to change careers, it takes me five years. That’s my rough rule of thumb. There’s 365 days a year, and I only need to make one small change a day to do that. That’s 365 by 5 years, it’s 1,852. For me to change careers, I know that it’s going to take me 1,852 small changes. I’ve got this thing called the perpetual motion formula. It’s really simple, but it works really, really well. There’s only two steps to keep going forward, to take these steps. Step one, roll up your sleeves and take the next step. If you’re confused, go to step two. Step two says, your one and only job is to find out who can teach you what the next step is, and then you refer back to step one. If I don’t know anything, I just know my job that day is to find out who can tell me what I need to know. I never stalled. Joseph: I guess when you break it down like that, it becomes a lot less daunting, because I know that change can sometimes be a little bit overwhelming. Julian: People wait for motivation to start, ‘I need the motivation to get up and start my plan and change my career.’ Motivation has never ever started the process. It’s the two D’s: desire and discipline. If you’re lucky, you’ll have desire. You’ll wake up one morning and just have this burning desire, overwhelming passion. You want to do something, and nothing is going to stop you. I rarely ever get that. I have to go to the second D, which is discipline – setting a plan and taking those steps and breaking it down into bite-size pieces. Once you do that, then the motivation comes, because once you start taking a few of these steps, you start to see results, even small results. If you have a plan, it’s there every day, the next day, and the next. A plan never runs out. Joseph: Interesting. It’s almost like you’re flipping things on their head because people normally wait to feel motivated to take action. You’re saying take action, which creates the results, which then generates the motivation. It’s much more in your control. You’ve taken this motivation, this desire, and this discipline after you’ve departed from your camera man world. What happens next for you? Julian: I had three other passions apart from photo journalism. It was my family, magic, and juggling. I had another one as well. It’s actually four. I had teaching philanthropy to children now. It’s a long story how I got to that point, but I just had this idea that I could teach philanthropy to ch…
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