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Handling Setbacks with Aaron Leventhal- CR71 Jun 25, 2020

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I’ve heard from so many of you recently who have suffered a career setback in the midst of the global Covid-19 pandemic. So today, I wanted to feature someone whose career has also been hit hard by events. Commercial airline pilot turned heavy goods vehicle truck driver Aaron Leventhal shares his story of dealing with personal loss, managing career upheaval, and finding a way to pivot toward something else. Aaron Leventhal- former FlyBe pilot turned Tesco truck driver During the Mental Fuel segment, I also share some examples of setbacks I’ve been dealt in my own career along with my three strategies of dealing with setbacks. If you’ve been dealt a blow in your own career for whatever reason, I hope you find this episode reassuring, inspiring, and most of all, a reminder that you’re not alone. Key Career Insights When you’re managing loss, all you can do is look ahead to the future and find a way to bounce back. Having a plan B in place is a good idea even if you feel like you’ve “made it” or achieved your dream. Setbacks are a normal part of any career. Your ability to manage them is a muscle you can develop and strengthen over time. Related Resources Read Aaron’s LinkedIn post that describes how he shifted from flying airplanes for FlyBe to driving trucks for Tesco. Access job search resources to help you navigate the challenging hiring environment during the Covid-19 pandemic Unexpectedly laid off? These 6 Steps Will Get You Back on Your Feet, my Fast Company article, May 2020 Listener Challenge During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I talked about the importance of finding a way to manage the setbacks you’ll inevitably face in your own career. My challenge to you, if you’ve had a major career setback recently, either because of the pandemic or something completely unrelated to the pandemic, is to first, give yourself some time to process it. Allow yourself to just feel bad for a few days or even a few weeks is an important part of dealing with any sort of loss. However, I also want you to decide when you’re going to then start taking action. To literally circle a date in your calendar when you’re going to at least try to move forward. Not to figure everything out, but to at least start taking some small steps to begin exploring where you can go from here. Restarting is often the hardest part, but I really do believe that ultimately, action will open up new opportunities for you. About Aaron Leventhal Aaron Leventhal‘s lifelong ambition was to become a pilot. Based in the UK, from the age of 6, all that he and his Twin brother would ever talk about was Airplanes and how they wanted to fly when they grew up. At the age 13, Aaron joined Air Cadets, the real beginning to his flying bug. He then joined the British Army in 2004 as a craftsman in the Royal Electrical Mechanical Engineers and eventually became a civilian “Heavy Goods Vehicle” tanker driver to help fund his flight training expenses In 2018, Aaron finished training and started working for Flybe as a First Officer, only to be made redundant A year later in March 2020 when the pandemic hit. He now works for Tesco, driving trucks to deliver household essentials to supermarkets during these challenging times. He hopes to return to the world of Aviation in the coming years. 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 Aaron know! Tweet a thank you! Review: I’d also love for you to leave a positive review and rating for the podcast on Apple Podcasts, which helps my show reach more people who want to relaunch their careers. Subscribe: Be sure to subscribe to Career Relaunch podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, or Android so you can automatically get each new episode on your device. Full instructions. Stay in touch: Follow Career Relaunch on Twitter and Facebook. You can also follow host Joseph on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, 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! Thanks to BrandYourself for Supporting Career Relaunch A2 Hosting allows you to offers simple tools and services to help control what people find when they Google you. To clean up, protect, and improve how you look online, visit BrandYourself.com and use promo code ‘RELAUNCH’ to get 50% off a Premium membership. Episode Interview Transcript Teaser (first ~15s): I’ve lost my job, and with COVID hitting now, there’s no recruiting so I can’t get a job. I have an empty feeling really. I just feel like I’ve worked so hard to get to where I was, and now, I’m back to square one again. I’ve lost my flying dream. I’ve lost something I’ve loved. Joseph: Good morning, Aaron, and welcome to the show. Thanks so much for taking the time to speak with me in the middle of your very busy schedule. Aaron: Good morning. Thank you for accepting me on your show. Joseph: I want to talk to you about a few different things today, Aaron. I want to go all the way back to your childhood and talk to you about how you became interested in becoming a pilot. I know you spent some time in the British army. You’re also driving a tanker driver for a while. I do want to start by just getting a glimpse into what have you been up to the past few days and what have you been focused on in both your career and your life amid everything going on with the coronavirus. Aaron: In the last few days, I’ve been working as a Tesco driver. It’s in a supermarket in the UK. It’s a heavy-goods vehicle. I’m doing this during night shifts at the moment, which is quite a strain on my sleep pattern and having a child. There’s maybe two or three stores delivering foods to keep the country up and running, really keeping their shelves stocked up for the British nation. Joseph: Thank you for doing that. For those listening from outside the UK, Tesco is the UK’s largest grocery supermarket chain by market share. They’ve got nearly 4,000 stores in the UK. I order my groceries from Tesco, so I also want to extend a personal thank you to you for what you’re doing. Can you tell me about your daughter? How old is she and what is she up to these days, now that the schools are closed? Aaron: Yes, it’s been quite difficult to try and entertain her as time’s going on, and they’re getting bored. The schools have been really good. They’ve been handing us out homework to do via an online app, keeping up informed as to what’s happening next. Her name is Val. She’s coming up to seven years old in July. We’re just getting really frustrated with the situation. It’s quite difficult with work and looking after your child. We haven’t gotten anyone to care for her, and so obviously it’s just myself and my partner. It’s been difficult. Joseph: We’re recording this in early May as context. The UK has now been in lockdown for several weeks. You mentioned that you’re work in the night shift. I actually have a very good friend of mine who used to work the night shift at an airport in Philadelphia. I know it can be really mind-dizzying at times. What’s it been like for you to be working the night shift? Aaron: It’s just been a bit of a shift from what I was doing before. You start roughly at about 6:30 in the evening, and it’s usually finished in 6:30 the following morning, which is a full-on night shift working straight through. It’s difficult, but I know that I’m doing it for the good, and that’s what’s keeping me going throughout the night. Joseph: We don’t always do this on the show, but I actually want to go all the way back in time to your childhood, when you were I believe six, and you first became interested in flying. I’d love it if you could just kick us off by telling me a little bit about your childhood and how you became interested in flying, and then we’ll move forward from there. Aaron: Like you said, Joseph, it started at the age of six. Me and my twin brother, we’d go flying motor airplanes and build motor airplanes. Our stepdad would take us to the airshows, and that was kind of where it really kicked off for me. It wasn’t until I got to the age of 13 and 9 months where I could finally go and join my local Air Training Corps, which is those Air Cadets. I was there in fact five years. That was really where the thought of flying really kicked in for me. Joseph: At that moment when you were 13 and you were part of Air Cadets, were you thinking at that moment, ‘Hey, this is what I want to do. This is what I want to do when I grow up. I want to be a pilot.’ Is that what was running through your head? Aaron: Yeah, I already knew that before I came to Air Cadets, but being in Air Cadets confirmed that exactly what I want to do. As soon as our first flight, at 13 and 9 months, that was it. That’s where you get the flying bug. It never left. By the age of 15, I did my very first solo flight. Joseph: At that point, for somebody who would be interested in becoming a pilot, what would then be the typical path and what did you end up doing? Aaron: There are different routes you can take, but if you’re young enough like 15, 13, and 19 years old, you can go and join your local Air Cadets. I recommend that. It’s free flying, and it really tests if you really want that career before you go spending your big bucks. For me, after Air Cadets, I started to work through what was called the modular route. There’s an integrated route or a modular route. The integrated route is where you can do it in a very short period, have to have a big lump sum of money, maybe £120,000 upfront. The way I did it was what worked best for me, and that was to work and pay for it – pay as you go really, just bits and pieces here and there. You go and get your PPL first, which is your private pilot’s license. You must amass 45 hours. Once you succeed at that, you can then make a decision whether you want to go on to the airlines or if you want to keep it as a general aviation pilot where you can just go out and take your family and fly around in little scenic airplanes. If you’d like to go and be an airline pilot, this is where you got to start building your hours up, and it gets expensive, so you’re looking at like 100 hours pilot in command, total hours of 150. Then you got to go and do some exams, which is about 14 exams for your airline transport license. It took me roughly about 18 months because I was working full-time. Joseph: What were you doing at the time? Aaron: I was working as a tanker driver, so I was doing roughly 12 to 14-hour days with an hour commute on each end of that as well. It was very good work-time management to get through something like that. You don’t get much time to study at home, but I used to take my study manuals with me and stick post-it notes all over my Lorry just so I can revise all the time. Once you finish those exams, that’s when the fun starts really. You start flying. You can go and get your commercial pilot’s license. That’s another course, which is about 45 hours, and then it gets even more expensive, where you’re going on to twin-engine aircrafts, and we’re flying multiengine air things in the UK. I was paying £600 an hour. You go on to see and go into simulators, and then you’re ready to go and apply for your first job. It still doesn’t end there. Joseph: Vey in-depth, very elongated, and quite an investment of time, money, and effort. Aaron: Exactly. I mean that’s the way I chose to do it because it works better for me because I was working. But if you’ve got the money upfront, it can take two, three years. Joseph: I’d imagine a lot of people don’t have that kind of cash upfront as a teenager, and I know that you also spent some time in the British army. What were you doing in the army, and how were you balancing that with being a heavy-goods vehicle tanker driver? Aaron: Two thousand and four to two thousand and six, I was employed as a Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineer. I was actually a vehicle mechanic at that time. It was at the British Army where I gained my qualification to drive HGVs dangerous goods. I didn’t need to use that when I left the British army, I was in a civil job to earn the money to fly. In the British Army, it was an amazing experience. I’d recommend it to anybody to go in into the British Army or in any army. It really builds on the foundations of your career. You’ve got your core values. You’ve got to demonstrate courage, discipline, integrity, and selfless commitment. You gain responsibility, independence, and build up on your teamwork. It sets you up for life, and I’m really glad I went in there and did that. Joseph: Yeah, it sounds like an amazing experience. At the same time, I know when we spoke before, you mentioned that, at some point, you realized that it was leading you away from what you truly wanted to do, which was to become a pilot. I’m curious to hear how you ended up coming to that realization. Aaron: I went into the British Army hoping that I’ll transfer over to go in the Air Corps. It was a way of trying to get into flying, but it became apparent that that wasn’t going to happen for a long period, so I made the decision to leave the British Army and do it my own way. I wanted to fly, and that’s my vision. It always has been, so I went to get back on my path and all of it, all of the dream. Joseph: You’re an HGV tanker driver, and you’re doing that to build up your savings to pay toward flight training. Can you just give a glimpse in a typical day in your life as a heavy-goods vehicle driver when you’re driving these huge petrol tankers down the road? What’s that like and what does a day look like for you? Aaron: I live about an hour and 10 minutes away from the depot where I drive the artic lorry. It’s a good hour and 10 to get there, and then my day starts. I was on a night shift, so I usually arrive at about past 6:00 in the evening. We go in, we check in, we sit around and wait until the job comes up, which could be a good hour before you go out. Once we go out, we go and find our unit, which is the front part of the artic, and then you go and connect it up to your trailer, which is already loaded for you. It’s a very straightforward job. You go over the weighbridge, and off you go to your first supermarket. When you get there, the tricky bit comes into play when you got to start reversing these articulate lines. Once a day, you deliver the food, you offload it yourself and the assistants of the front door staff there, and I went and sign paperwork, return back to depot, and off you go again. This is why I choose a job like this, just so I could keep the capacity to train as a pilot. Joseph: I guess something I’ve always wondered—even as a child, I remember being in the car and seeing these huge trucks go by, and there’s normally typically a male driving in the front by himself—does it ever get lonely driving those trucks? How do you keep yourself occupied on the road? Aaron: Initially, no, but as the years went on, it does. Especially with petrol tankers because there are restrictions. You’re not allowed to have any sort of electronic devices or a personal electronic devices, PEDs in the cab with you, because with the fumes of the fuel, especially petrol, it can be very disastrous. The rules are no phones allowed, so we can’t even call anybody. The trips that we were doing with petrol tankers is the aviation side I was doing, so it’s a different jet, E1, which is airplane fuel to the airport. The runs are quite short, so you never really got lonely. It was a good time for me to bring my revision notes with me. That was the only way I could do it, because when I get home, I’m just going to be absolutely exhausted, or my daughter would be around me. It’s actually quite a nice escape to go work and start revising. Joseph: I know wh…

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Handling a Crisis with Liya Dashkina- CR70 Apr 22, 2020

Show notes

In addition to the enormous human toll the 2020 coronavirus pandemic has had throughout the world, the virus has also had a significant impact on people’s careers. Some have seen their jobs eliminated, work projects cancelled, roles furloughed, industries turned upside down, and businesses completely shut down. After thinking really carefully about who I wanted to feature in this episode of Career Relaunch, I decided that financial controller Liya Dashkina would be the perfect individual. Liya, who’s also a listener to Career Relaunch, decided a few months ago to resign from her job in London and move back to Australia to be with her partner while continuing to work remotely. Her three-month notice period was supposed to wrap up at the end of March, after which, she was planning to explore new career options in Australia. Then, the pandemic hit. The sudden uncertainty and upheaval she’s now facing in her career is similar to other stories I’ve heard from clients and listeners who have suddenly had their career plans upended. I hope you find this conversation helpful as you figure out how to bounce back from whatever setbacks you may be experiencing in your own career during this COVID-19 crisis. Key Career Insights During times of uncertainty, you can only focus on what you can control. Building relationships takes time. Sometimes, you need to go into it without counting on the fact anything will necessarily come out of it. To be truly successful, you have to be truly invested in what you’re doing. Try to figure out what drives you, what makes you tick, and what gets you out of bed in the morning rather than just “doing what you love.” Now that the world has stopped due to coronavirus, it actually enables an opportunity for you to get creative and reassess where you want to take your life & career. Tweetables to Share Not everything has to be a success in life. Sometimes, the experience is what really matters. Liya Dashkina Tweet This Related Resources Liya mentioned the Business of Fashion is hosting some online events you may be interested in checking out, especially during the coronavirus lockdown. If you are looking for some career resources to guide you during the COVID-19 pandemic, I’ve compiled useful articles on job hunting and virtual interviewing on my COVID-19 career resources page. Liya requested I share this poem excerpt, related to some of the things we discussed during our conversation. If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open the doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be. The adventure is its own reward — but it’s necessarily dangerous, having both negative and positive possibilities, all of them beyond control.-The Power of Myth- Joseph Campbell Listener Challenge During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I talked about trying to find your optimal path to living with this pandemic. To decide on something in your career or life to let go of, at least for the time being. You can absolutely come back to it later, but I’d like you to consider loosening your grip on what you had expected to do, and focus instead on what you may have to do at this moment given the unprecedented times we’re in. And to try to embrace it . . . because maybe in the long run, we’ll all come out of this coronavirus pandemic having reinforced the aspects of our careers and lives that truly matter most. About Liya Dashkina Born in Russia, Liya Dashkina moved to Australia at the age of 15 where she completed her high school and university studies, qualifying as a chartered accountant and a solicitor. In 2010, her job brought her to London, where she spent the last decade working mostly in the finance industry. In 2018, having always had a keen interest in the fashion industry, she made the decision to leave her career in banking to join a fashion media start-up. At the beginning of 2020, she moved back to Australia to be with her partner, whilst continuing to work remotely during this transition. Be sure to follow Liya on LinkedIn and Instagram. 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 Liya know!Tweet a thank you! Review: I’d also love for you to leave a positive review and rating for the podcast on Apple Podcasts, which helps my show reach more people who want to relaunch their careers. Subscribe: Be sure to subscribe to Career Relaunch podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, or Android so you can automatically get each new episode on your device. Full instructions. Stay in touch: Follow Career Relaunch on Twitter and Facebook. You can also follow host Joseph on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, 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): It is trying to figure out whether to ride it out and wait a couple of months and then get back to what the original plan was or altering your plans and altering your original idea where you saw yourself. Joseph: Good morning, Liya. I know it’s pretty early over there in Sydney, so I really appreciate you making the time to come on to the show. Liya: Good morning, Joseph. Joseph: I’d like to talk with you today about a few different things, including balancing practical career decisions with your true interests, making a big international move for personal reasons right when your life is flowing, and also what it takes to break into a new industry. First off, I got to say we’re recording this in early April 2020. This is actually the first episode I’ve recorded in a while after taking a break from the show. Right now, the main thing on everyone’s mind is this corona virus, which is very much still a global pandemic at this moment and seems to be just getting worse and worse by the day. I actually just heard a few minutes ago on the news that the global cases of corona virus have now passed one million and had more than doubled just over the past week alone. Here in the U.K., we’re on a national lockdown. This is clearly affecting every single person out there. I was wondering if you could start by painting a picture of your situation there in Sydney, Australia, and exactly what your life has been like the past couple of weeks. Liya: We are currently in a lockdown in Sydney and trying to adapt to this new reality and the new way of living. Sydney is not the worst place to be stuck in a lockdown. I think we’re a little bit behind the U.K. and the U.S. in terms of the timing of lockdowns and restrictions, which seem to be about a week behind the U.K. It has been an interesting time obviously, a very anxious time for many people, both from a personal perspective and professional perspective as well. It’s just very similar. Everyone seems to be on the same page, just taking it day by day and adapting as we go along. Joseph: I’m going to try to stick with the typical format I follow on this show. I do want to go back in time, just like I normally do, and talk about your historical career and your transitions, but before we get to that, I just want to stick to this topic of the corona virus for just another moment here. One reason why I wanted to have you on the show, Liya, is because I know you’ve recently moved back to Australia right before this outbreak happened. You had a certain vision of how things might shape up there. I know you’re not a healthcare worker—nor am I, nor are either of us on the frontlines of dealing with this pandemic in a way that healthcare workers or delivery drivers or many other people are—but what have you found to be the most challenging part of what’s going on at this very moment? Liya: I think outside of the obvious, personal things like being away from your family, which I’ve actually found very difficult, because my family are all in Russia still. Even though I have been living away from them for over 20 years now, it is at a time like this that I found it particularly difficult. I feel it very acutely. In terms of the work situation, there are two things. One is the uncertainty with respect to time. You don’t really know how long you are going to be in this situation, how long to plan for. It makes it very difficult. Secondly, trying to figure out when you are caught out in a stage of flux, especially in a transition period, it is trying to figure out whether to ride it out and a couple of months and then get back to what your original plan was or to retreat into safety or a more traditional secure job if it does come along, but that means altering your plans and altering your original idea where you saw yourself in the next 12 to 24 months. Joseph: Yeah, I totally hear you on all of those things you just mentioned. There’s so much in there that I want to unpack. I do want to come back to it, but the one that really struck me was what you mentioned at the very beginning about being far away from your family. I’m also far away from my mother and my sister. What I found most unsettling about this whole situation and what makes it I think different than being far away from your family in other instances is that you can’t actually go and see them if anything were to come up. If anything were to happen with our parents or people we care about, we can’t actually go and be there with them. I just found that to be a really unsettling feeling right now, in addition to all those things you mentioned about not really being able to plan for anything at this moment. Liya: I think that’s the general overarching thing I found about this whole corona virus crisis that the restriction of movement is just something we’re so not used to. We are very used to being in control of most parts of our lives, and this is completely outside of our control. Being told that you cannot go somewhere, being told that you may not see your family for 6 to 12 months at this point for me, it takes a little while to process and understand. I don’t know if I’ve actually fully reconciled it in my mind. Joseph: I would like to come back and talk about your current situation and the situation right now and how you’re handling it. Just a quick snapshot, what exactly are you doing in your career right now, before we go back in time and then go through your history? Liya: At the moment, I am still working for my London employer. I’m working remotely. It is a fashion media startup. I was meant to be transitioning, rolling off at that job, and trying to find my next opportunity here in Sydney longer term. That’s where I still am. Joseph: What a time to try to do that too. We’ll come back to that. Let’s go back in time now and talk about your time—this is going to be a little confusing, because you were in Australia before, then you moved to London, and then now you’re back in Australia. I’d like to go all the way back to the first time you were in Australia. I know you spent the first part of your life in Russia. What led you to initially move to Australia, before you came to London? Liya: When I moved, I was 15 years old. I come from a family where it’s a very traditional, rather conservative family in Russia. One of the big things in our family was always education. Both my mom and dad are very, very keen to give their children a better life than they had and give them better opportunities. When I was 15, they wanted to send me somewhere to study English. Australia seemed like a good idea. I was meant to be here for a year or two just to finish off my high school and then go back to Russia. Moving at such a formative age, it was so difficult for me. It was so challenging to adapt and to take on this new life that when I got to a place of comfort, I didn’t want to and uproot myself again. By that stage, I formed friendships and applied for university and decided to stay here for a while. I was here for 10 years before then moving to London. Joseph: You studied accounting and law at university there, and then you went on to work in a Big Four accounting firm, is that right? Liya: Yes, exactly. Joseph: How did you go from being in Australia, working in accounting, to then ending up in London in 2010? Liya: Because of the combination of law and commerce that I studied, when I went into the accounting firm, I was allocated into the tax division. I was working in expatriate taxation, which means that we were looking after people who were being sent to work in Australia and Australians who are being sent to work overseas. Through that, I got an opportunity to myself be an expat and experience what our clients go through and be sent to London for a year to work in our London office. It was something that was being offered on a continuous basis to people at my level, and I jumped at the opportunity, because at that stage, I had never been to London. Joseph: At some point, I know you came over here to London, which is where I’m based. This show is all about transition, so I’ve got to talk a little bit about your interest in fashion. At some point, you decided to pursue your interest in fashion. You mentioned when we spoke before that being in London fueled this. Could you just explain how did you get interested in fashion, and how did you attempt to get into fashion? Liya: When I moved to London, I was just so exhilarated by being in a big city, not really knowing anyone and having to make new connections. I looked at it as a positive and exciting opportunity. At the time, it was the rise of blogging and street style. Through the bloggers’ fair, I had connected with someone who’s a photographer and we became friend. I started hanging out in that environment and absolutely loved it. This is before blogging and street style became a multi-billion pound industry. I was hanging around there, and I started trying to think, ‘How can I be in this world? How can I transition into this world but still doing what I do and being who I am?’ Joseph: At that moment, was this something that you felt you would rather do instead of working in finance or accounting? Was that becoming clear to you at this moment? Liya: Yes. I was trying to explore how I could do that and how I can go into that space. I was casting my net quite wide and looking at accounting and finance but also how I could maybe go via the language route. I spoke Russian. I speak Russian fluently. That’s one of the things that I considered at the time. I found an internship with a fashion house in London. I was looking at sales to Russian client to the CIS region at the time. Joseph: I know when we spoke before, you mentioned that this initial attempt at transitioning into fashion didn’t actually end up working out. What exactly happened? Liya: I was young and naïve. To cut a long story short, I ran out of money. London is a very expensive place. I think when you read a lot of this stories and success stories and experiences, people never talk about money. I hadn’t planned properly. I thought I would be lucky, and I would find a job, not realizing that the industry is actually very, very difficult to get into but also very difficult to stay. The competition is very high. I loved my time working at this particular studio. I’ve made some great friends. I’ve got experience, but I could no longer afford to work in fashion. I basically realized that I had no choice, and I had to go back into a more stable job if I wanted to afford my rent and my lifestyle, well any lifestyle in London, really. Joseph: Now, I would be really interest…

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Wearing Different Hats with Sophie Scott- CR69 Dec 19, 2019

Show notes

We all have to sometimes wear different hats in our lives and careers. You’re often required to wear different hats in your career if you’re balancing different professional identities or just trying to maintain a certain image at work that doesn’t always reflect how you’re truly feeling inside. In Career Relaunch episode 69, Sophie Scott describes how she balances the work she does as both a psychotherapist and founder of Balance Media. We had a nice conversation about wearing different professional hats, managing your own wellbeing, and of course, maintaining balance in your life. I’ll also describe how those people who seem to have it all figured out in their careers may still struggling with their own issues. Key Career Insights The losses you experience in your life can be a huge tragedy but also a blessing that can inform the career choices you may that can provide the most meaning. It’s so important to connect with not only others but also with yourself. Use your purpose as your primary motivator to guide your decisions. All of us are still works-in-progress. Although it may seem like someone has the perfect life, earns an incredible income, or has everything figured out, the reality is that most of us are still trying to figure things out. Having several career changes is not unusual these days. If the idea of switching careers feels “weird” to you, consider thinking about your career as a series of chapters rather than as one continuous vocation. There’s incredible strength in being an adaptable generalist rather than a specialist because you’re able to connect the dots amongst disparate disciplines. When you’re burnt out, it’s not a good time to make a decision. Instead, it’s a time to rest, recuperate, and ask for support. Tweetables to Share I want to lead my best life and be as true to myself as possible because it can all be over quickly. Sophie Scott Tweet This Resources Mentioned Sophie mentioned that psychological projection and transference both have useful applications to understanding professional relationships in the workplace. Here’s a helpful article from Psychology Today about projection and another on transference. Sophie mentioned the Thought Diary app, which can help you manage your emotions and thoughts. Download it from the Google Play store and iOS app store. Listener Challenge During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I talked about the importance of acknowledging to yourself that the struggles you’re going through may not have to do with a bad choice you’ve made, approach you’ve chosen, or talent you don’t possess. Instead, your career struggle may just be a very normal part of the situation you’re in, a struggle that many other people would also have if they were in a similar situation. Consider cutting yourself some slack and reminding yourself you’re doing your best with the resources and energy you have. That’s all you can do. But if you need a boost, or if you need support, to go ahead and take that step to ask for help. To ask for help from a friend, mentor, or professional who can help you sort through it. About Sophie Scott, Psychotherapist & Founder of Balance Media Sophie Scott is the Founder and Editor-in-chief of BALANCE, leading the award-winning, high growth media and lifestyle brand into the top tier of UK publications. She also regularly advises brands on go-to-market strategies and delivers wellness workshops for the likes of L’Oreal, Mediacom and Accenture. She’s coached and mentored at every level, from students to Fortune 500 CEOs, and has completed her 5-year training in Psychotherapy at the Centre for Counselling and Psychotherapy Education. Follow Sophie on Instagram and Balance on Instagram and Facebook. 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 Sophie know!Tweet a thank you! Review: I’d also love for you to leave a positive review and rating for the podcast on Apple Podcasts, which helps my show reach more people who want to relaunch their careers. Subscribe: Be sure to subscribe to Career Relaunch podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, or Android so you can automatically get each new episode on your device. Full instructions. Stay in touch: Follow Career Relaunch on Twitter and Facebook. You can also follow host Joseph on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, 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! Thanks to BrandYourself for Supporting Career Relaunch A2 Hosting allows you to offers simple tools and services to help control what people find when they Google you. To clean up, protect, and improve how you look online, visit BrandYourself.com and use promo code ‘RELAUNCH’ to get 50% off a Premium membership. Episode Interview Transcript Teaser (first ~15s): At one point, I really did reach burnout and ended up in a psychiatrist’s office. Wellness can be synonymous with needing to lead a perfect life and having everything sorted, but all of us are works in progress. Joseph: Good morning, Sophie. Good to talk with you again. Welcome to Career Relaunch. Sophie: Thanks so much, Joseph, for having me and for asking me to do this. Joseph: I know, having followed you on social media, that you have been very busy lately with a lot of different things in your life and your career. I was wondering if you could just start by telling me about what’s keeping you most busy in your career and your life recently. Sophie: Absolutely. I am the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of BALANCE, which is a UK based media and lifestyle brand, very much focused on wellness. Our mission is to make wellness accessible to mainstream audiences. We had our latest issue out last week and a series of events that we ran in conjunction with Fora, which is a big co-working space over in the UK. We had our wellness week. We had podcast lives. We did a podcast live event every Sunday. We did influencer breakfasts. We had events every day. It was lots of fun. The business is evolving. We’ve just brought on a CEO, which is quite a big step for us actually and something that I feel very excited about not just for the business and helping the business to scale up but also on a personal level, for me to now slightly be able to step back from running the business and focus more on the brand. I’ve also had my psychotherapy work as well that I juggle on a Tuesday. Joseph: You’re busy with the magazine. You also are running your own psychotherapy practice once a week. Just talking about the magazine briefly—and we’re going to come back to the magazine in a moment. I picked up my first copy of BALANCE in a hotel lobby in London, I remember, a couple of years ago, and it’s got a very cool lifestyle take on this idea of wellness—for those who are not familiar with BALANCE, can you just give a sampling of the types of topics you cover and the angle that you have the magazine take? Sophie: The first thing is that we are called BALANCE. We try not to be preachy in any way. None of us are perfect. Our philosophy is do your best, live well, live your life to the full. Everybody has to find their own sense of well-being. We cover mental health a lot, nutrition, workout plans, very much work-life balance, and travel as well, looking at sustainable travel and also spa destinations, guilt-free travel, combining new experiences with philanthropic endeavors. I suppose it’s all the main areas that you would see across any magazine. The difference is the lens that we look through. Joseph: Well, this is a show a little bit about wellness, and at the same time, it’s about career evolution and career change and trying to make career choices that allow you to have a life that is full of wellness and fulfillment. I know you haven’t always been a psychotherapist and the Founder of BALANCE Magazine. Can you take me back to the days when you were involved in the world of film? I’d love to hear a little bit about that chapter of your career, and then we can move forward and talk about your own career evolution and hear a little bit more about how you founded BALANCE, and also how started your own psychotherapy practice. Let’s start at the very beginning. Sophie: I’ve definitely not had a linear process, a linear journey. I think actually I’ve realize that that’s more normal than I thought. I started off and went to a pre-academic girls’ school and decided off my volition that I wanted to go to drama school, which I think they were none too pleased about. I took myself off there for a few years and actually went into the world of acting originally, which I suppose had been a childhood dream but also very much linked to my mom who I lost when I was a teenager. I think I was probably playing out something that she would have really wished for herself. I went to drama school, and I went into acting for a couple of years, but I actually soon realized that I didn’t derive so much fulfillment simply from performing. I felt a little bit like a kind of prop in many ways. What I really loved was actually writing scripts and screen plays, and I also loved editing them. My sister had setup a film production company called Fahrenheit Films, and I began working with her very, very closely in script development. I also was working freelance for different film companies in the UK and also spent some time over in the States. The film world is an incredible world, but it’s also a world of make-believe. Unless you have very good people around you, it can get you unstuck and you end up thinking that you’re going to have meetings that are going to change your life and things they promise to you, etc., and they don’t necessarily always follow through. That led me actually to deciding that I wanted a more grounded and psychological approach to things. I’ve decided to train and to do a foundation course in counselling and psychotherapy. I had also done quite a lot of coaching over the years, more so on the kind of presentation skills front. What I realized from that was that, regardless of your background and your situation, what people really wanted was someone to listen to them and fundamentally counsel them and help them to get over certain restrictions, barriers that they had in their own life that were kind of prohibiting their confidence. Anyway, I came back from Los Angeles and decided, ‘Okay, I want to train in counseling.’ I’ve completely fell in love with it and decided to on and do this full five-year training. Joseph: So you just walked from the original idea of becoming an actress or becoming a screen writer and came back here and pretty quickly pivoted into the world of counseling? Sophie: Certainly for the first year or so, I still very much had a foot in the film world. I was still working in script development. At that point, I was really enjoying my counseling training. I was starting to become quite inspired about the world of personal development. Actually, that’s when BALANCE started to slowly but surely take fruition in my mind. I wouldn’t say that there was a kind of clear stop. There wasn’t one definitive moment where I made the decision. I think, for a while, I was juggling to the best of my ability a couple of these different things. Through that process, I was able to make the best decision for my life. Joseph: I’ve been trying to figure out the best time to ask you about this, and this feels like the right moment to ask you about something that you eluded to briefly earlier. You said you lost your mother when you were a teenager. I think when we spoke before, you said at the age of 14. Before we get into your transition into becoming a psychotherapist and the rest of your career, I’d love to just take a moment and talk about that. I was wondering if you could take me back to the moment in your life when that happened and explain exactly how things played out at that moment for you. Sophie: As you said, I was 14. I was at this private, all-girls school. My mom had been ill on-and-off since I was very young, since I was five. She was diagnosed with cancer and went into remission for years. We knew that it was getting very serious. The cancer had moved into her liver and her bones, and we sort of, at that point, knew that it would be a matter of months, if not weeks. My sister, to whom I’m incredibly close, who is a decade older than me, said, ‘Just go and see a counselor.’ It ended up being a massively defining thing for me, because of course now, I’ve gone on to become a psychotherapist myself, but also the particular strain of psychotherapy which she practiced was the one that I’ve ended up pursuing, which is an integrative transpersonal psychosynthesis approach, very much looking at a person as whole, I suppose inspired by—what’s that roomy quote? The wound is where the light enters you. I suppose that’s been the basis of my own experience, as someone experiencing therapy but also giving therapy. Through that process, I was able to process the huge loss that I’d experienced, which I think never leaves you. It’s very much an on-going process. It also helped me to very much grow into the person that I am. Yes, I would say that losing my mom has been my greatest curse but also a blessing in so many ways, as strange as that may sound. Joseph: I know this must be tough, but can you describe in words exactly what impact losing your mother so early on in your life has had on your outlook and perspectives? Sophie: It may have taken away some of my fear. I would say, naturally, I can be quite an anxious person, but I never let that hold be back, in terms of the way that I lead my life. Actually, it’s made me take risks. I think a lot more than perhaps the next person. Also, without going into it too much, my mom, I think, wasn’t fulfilled in her life and her career. I have been very committed to living my purpose. Of course, that’s an on-going thing. That changes all the time. Your purpose isn’t fixed, but very much I’m having a kind of self-actualizing approach to life, which is that I want to lead my best life and be as true to myself as possible because it could all be over quick. Joseph: It must be so hard to lose somebody so important to you so early in life. At the same time, it must instill into you so much perspective that you just wouldn’t have otherwise, I guess, if you hadn’t gone through that. Thank you for sharing that. I’d like to go back to your career, because I think this does relate to another question I was going to ask you, which was how you ultimately decided to pursue a full career as a psychotherapist. It sounds like some of the seeds may have been planted from a very early age. Sophie: I think it’s important to say I don’t do it as a full-time career. My training and everything has taken a lot longer, and it took a lot longer than I would have hoped, because at the same time, I was setting up BALANCE. Joseph: Right, of course. No small feat. Sophie: I set a new field that it formed the basis of BALANCE. Although I wear very different hats between the different roles—and maybe that’s something that we can go onto in a bit—fundamentally, I think that they go hand in hand. I don’t terribly see one as starting and one as ending. I wouldn’t say that there was that definitive moment in my life where I thought, ‘Right, this is what I want to do.’ These days, I think it’s just quite normal not to just have one career or one job. Most of us have dual careers or even triad careers which give us a greater sense of balance and fulfillment. Perhaps that means that you don’t put all your eggs in one basket, at least not to begin with. Joseph: I’m very curious about this exact point that I think you’re making about what some people describe as a portfoli…

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Figuring Things Out with Pip Murray- CR68 Dec 05, 2019

Show notes

Career pivots often involve shifting into an industry or role you know little about, which can make the move that much more daunting. In episode 68 of Career Relaunch, Pip Murray, a former science museum producer turned founder of Pip & Nut, shares her thoughts on what it takes to start your own company, how to build your confidence during transitions, and why taking action is so important to turn your ideas into reality. During the Mental Fuel segment, I also share some thoughts about how to do something you have no idea HOW to do. Key Career Insights You don’t need to quit your job the moment you decide it’s time to move on. The decision simply shapes how you approach the upcoming months or even years until you’re ready to make the leap. At some point, you have to cut the cord and turn your side hustle into your full-time job if you want to really give it the attention it deserves. You absolutely can learn anything you need to know in order have a shot of cracking into a new industry if you devote yourself to educating yourself, connecting with the right people, and filling your knowledge gaps. When you’re trying to test out a new idea, err on the side of doing. Otherwise, your idea will always be an idea. Getting where you want to go involves a series of improvements as you test out various approaches. Tweetable Start doing. Otherwise, your idea will always just be an idea. Pip Murray Tweet This Listener Challenge My challenge to you, especially if you feel like there’s no way you can do something or you feel like you don’t have the skills, experience, or knowledge to pursue some idea that you would actually find very gratifying, is to sit down, and take an honest inventory of what it would take for you to get yourself to a place where you DID feel comfortable giving it a shot. It could be a knowledge gap you would need to fill so you can go into the process well-informed, or some specific questions you need to answer, or a set of skills you would need to acquire. Capture exactly what those knowledge gaps, unanswered questions, or missing skills are. Then, take action to address at least one. For example: Reach out to your network, maybe on LinkedIn or Facebook, to see if anyone knows someone who could shed some light on your questions. Enroll in a course that allows you to upskill or learn a missing skill Or even just Google the question you need answered to see what you can uncover on your own online. I really believe you can be incredibly resourceful when you care enough about an idea you want to pursue. With enough tenacity, you’ll get yourself to a place where you can go for it, knowing that you’ve done the groundwork to give yourself the best shot of succeeding. About Pip Murray, Founder of Pip & Nut Pip Murray is the Founder of the nut butter brand Pip & Nut, which offers a range of eight naturally nutritious nut butters. A keen marathon runner and a fierce foodie, Pip had the inspiration for the brand when she couldn’t find a delicious but nutritious protein source to fuel her training. Taking matters into her own hands, she set about creating her own brand and starting on her Pip & Nut journey. So far it’s encompassed everything from market trading and crowdfunding to national supermarket launches and international expansion. She’s received a host of industry accolades: In January 2019, Pip won ‘Start-Up Entrepreneur of the Year’ at the Natwest Great British Entrepreneur Awards In 2018 Pip was named a Forbes 30 under 30 Europe in 2018 and a Management Today’s 30 under 30 She was Young Entrepreneur of the Year at the Startups.co.uk ’s 2017 Awards She was also awarded ‘Young Achiever of the Year’ at the The First Women Awards 2016, was named as a winner in The Grocer’s Top New Talent Awards for 2016 and in December 2016 picked up the ‘Artemis Award’ for the most inspirational woman running a business trading for a minimum of 18 months up to 3 years at the Natwest Everywoman awards. All of Pip & Nut’s products are 100% natural, with absolutely no refined sugars, additives or palm oil. Now four years old, Pip & Nut can be found in 5 international markets and over 5,500 stores around the UK and Europe. 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 Pip know!Tweet a thank you! Review: I’d also love for you to leave a positive review and rating for the podcast on Apple Podcasts, which helps my show reach more people who want to relaunch their careers. Subscribe: Be sure to subscribe to Career Relaunch podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, or Android so you can automatically get each new episode on your device. Full instructions. Stay in touch: Follow Career Relaunch on Twitter and Facebook. You can also follow host Joseph on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, 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! Thanks to A2 for Supporting Career Relaunch A2 Hosting is the web host provider I use and trust for my own websites, and they even offer 100% carbon neutral green hosting. For an easy, fast, and affordable way to get your personal website online today, visit careerrelaunch.net/a2 to get 50% off your web hosting plan. Episode Interview Transcript Teaser (first ~15s): Particularly when you’re going into something new, there’s a weird tipping point where you suddenly start understanding all these things, and you start to be able to say and speak with confidence. It’s actually a really satisfying process to go through. It’s this real learning curve. Joseph: Good morning, Pip, and welcome to Career Relaunch. It’s great to have you on the show. Pip: Thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure. Joseph: I’d love to kick off by just having you tell us what is keeping you busy right now in your work and also the rest of your life. Pip: So busy at the moment. At work, we’re actually doing a pretty large funding round which I hope we’re going to close in the next 12 months. I’ve got a lot of new products coming out this year, both within our existing catch bin that we are currently within, which is obviously nut butter and peanut butter. I think it’s six different product launches over the course of the next year, so that’s a really big one for us – a big campaign that we’re planning in September, but all of the hard work happens right now. A lot of plates are being spun at the moment. Joseph: What about the rest of your life, what’s keeping you busy right now in the rest of your life? Pip: This is always the challenge with having a startup, isn’t it? It’s like we focus so much on the business, and the rest of your life suddenly sometimes falls by the wayside. I’m currently moving house actually, which I’m meant to be out house-hunting to find a new place. That’s going to keep me busy, but I’m also going away this weekend for a long weekend, going camping to the Scilly Isles – some fun on the horizon, which is cool. Joseph: Very cool. We are going to talk a little bit more about Pip & Nut. I do want to come back to that. I would like to focus most of our conversation on your historical career before you were at Pip & Nut and also your time at Pip & Nut. Before we do that, as an American, I’m always looking for a good peanut butter here in the UK, and I, for many years, really struggled to find a good one here. Then I spotted Pip & Nut I think in the whole foods, and I immediately became a fan. What do you think people should look for when they’re trying to find a good peanut butter? Pip: For me, it’s all about if it’s natural or not. We don’t put any palm oil in any of our products. It does mean that we get some oil separation on the top of our products, but I actually always think of that as a really great thing. It shows that the product is totally natural. There’s no additives within the products or any palm oil. That’s something that I always look out for. Obviously, I only eat my own. The less ingredients on the back of the packaging, the better. Use the best quality peanuts and almonds that you can get your hands on, because really, when you’ve only got few ingredients, they make such a difference. Joseph: One of the things I love about your product is it tastes great and that you also don’t use palm oils. It’s actually really hard to find a peanut butter that doesn’t have palm oils. I think it’s great you’re doing what you’re doing. I also love the range of your flavors. I think I tried your maple nut one. That was the first one I tried, which is very tasty. We’re going to come back and talk about your journey as an entrepreneur and the Founder of Pip & Nut, but before you were doing this, you were in a very different line of work. Can you tell me about your time as a Producer for the Science Museum in London? Then we’ll move forward from there. Pip: I studied anthropology at university, which is not very useful for what I do right now. When I was leaving the university, I always assumed that I’d work within the creative sector. I’d always been interested by museums and material culture, which is a big part of what anthropology is about. When I left university, I started pursuing career within the creative arts, worked at various different art centers across London, and eventually went to the Science Museum where I worked as a theater producer or an assistant theater producer before I started up the brand. I guess what that role is it’s essentially helping pull together large theater shows in the Science Museum, in particular focused on children theater. You’re working with creatives, as well as technical production, whether it’s lighting and sound producers, as well as obviously the directors themselves and the actors. You’re basically the one to help facilitate and coordinate the whole show. It’s a really, really interesting job, Probably, I’m of those people that I didn’t actually really hate my job at all, and I thought the career path that I was one was actually pretty interesting and potentially exciting one, so going to start up my own business and moving to a completely new sector, away from more public, creative sector was actually quite a big shift but also something that I wasn’t necessarily pushed. It was certainly a choice and wasn’t necessarily in my initial thinking when I was growing up that I would run my own business. Joseph: That’s really interesting, because I think some of the founders that we’ve got on this show, many of them actually say that they never had the intention to start their own business. It was the idea that pulled them toward starting their own business. How did you move from theatre production into creating your own peanut butter? Pip: I actually vividly remember the day that I handed in my notice at the Science Museum. My boss at the time looked at me as if I was crazy because it’s so random and so different that I think he thought I was going absolutely loopy. I think it takes a long time. I think you don’t quit your job on the first day that you come up with the idea. The idea forming in my brain took me about two years or a year and a half before I actually fully quit my job. I think that, also, it was partly down to the fact that I had never worked in this sector before. I really, really didn’t know what I was doing. I knew that I needed to get a little more validation for both the product itself that I was forming in my brain and started to create in my kitchen but also need to validate whether or not I actually like the idea of running my own business. Did I enjoy the process of creating a product? I think that’s one of those things that takes time. I think the key steps, when you are looking at starting your own business and specifically a food one, firstly, you have to develop the recipes. I bought posh, fancy blender and made the products in my kitchen. I’d make 200 at a time, and I’d take those products to a market down in South London. I’d actually road test them on people to see whether or not they liked it. Hopefully, they liked it enough to buy it. That was my validation. That was my way of sense checking whether or not what I was creating was something that people wanted, and it also helped me in getting some direct feedback. It think that’s something so brutal about selling something to someone on the market: people will instantly love it, or they’ll instantly hate it. I think you could quite quickly understand whether or not you’re onto something. Once you got that sense check and you’ve tweaked and refined and improve on your product, that was when I was like, ‘Yeah, I think I want to scale this up.’ That’s a whole new set of challenges that you face when you scale something up. Joseph: How did you decide on peanut butter? Of all the different things that you could invest your time in, I guess you’re pretty busy with your day job, how did you decide that you wanted to devote all of your energies to this particular food product? Pip: I’d always been interested in the food sector. I’ve lived in London for 12 years now, and it is such a hot bed for amazing food trends. They’ve got a great food scene with all the food trucks that are popping up all around London. I’d browsed the shelves of whole foods myself as I shop, and I was, like ‘Oh my god, there are just so many great products on the shelves and so many more emerging.’ I think I first was interested in this sector, and I thought there’s an option here where you can be both creative and also have a product that actual does people good. I thought that was really exciting. I’ve landed on nut butter and peanut butter partly because I am a proper peanut butter addict. I still eat it every single day, not a lie. I love it, if not two or three times a day. It really came from a love of the product. I was doing a lot of training at the time. I’m doing some marathons, and for me, nut butter on toast or in my porridge, wherever it was, it was my go-to, post-run treat. I just thought this product is brilliant. It not only tastes unbelievably good, and it’s so addictive. This is also filled with nuts and really wholesome ingredients. It’s not often you get a health food product that actually delivers on flavor as well as functional benefits, like protein and healthy fats and things like that. The thing that started to actually make me see the gap in the market was that nearly every product that I bought in supermarkets contain palm oil, like I mentioned. In a food product perspective, there was really only just peanut butter on the market. I was like, ‘You know, there are things like almond butters and cashew butters. The products themselves take flavor really brilliantly, the coconut almond butter was one of our first products that I developed. It’s just a really great flavor combo, and I felt like there wasn’t really a brand taking hold of that. I just really love the fact that this space in the supermarket, which is a bit traditional, a bit tired, hadn’t really seen a brand enter into this space in the past 30 years, which is so open for an innovative brand to come in. It was all those things that started to come together that I was like, ‘You know what? I think there’s definitely a gap here, and there’s definitely a growing trend with protein and fats and things like that being good for you,’ that I think this could be a business. Joseph: You also mentioned the two-year transition. Before we talk about how you turned this into a business, I’d be really curious if you could give us a glimpse into what the transition was like, balancing your day job with trying to get this idea and eventual business off the ground. What was that like for you? Pip: I always say that the setup phase, the startup phase is…

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Standing on Your Own with Lola Scarborough- CR67 Nov 14, 2019

Show notes

Making a career transition always seems to take longer than you initially expect. It’s hard to know exactly how long you should give yourself to make the progress you want. In this week’s episode of Career Relaunch, legal secretary turned yoga studio founder and instructor Lola Scarborough describes how grit and determination ultimately allowed her to get her yoga studio off the ground. We discuss the downside of having a job that’s too comfortable and what you learn about yourself when you’re forced to make a sudden career pivot. During the Mental Fuel segment, I’ll also share my own personal experience with my own career transitions taking longer than I wanted. Key Career Insights The comforts of a stable, corporate job can often lead you to stop asking yourself tough questions about what you truly want from your career and life. When you make tough changes, you discover both things you like and things you may dislike about yourself. Discovering who you really are comes from a place of discomfort, which is exactly what a career pivot forces upon you. Listener Challenge During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I challenged you to take a step back, reevaluate whether you’re being realistic with the timeline you’ve given yourself for a specific career transition or project you’re hoping to complete in the near future. Then build in a little extra buffer. And if you don’t get as far as you want as quickly as you want, just remember not to beat yourself up too much because it’s not unusual for things to take a little longer you than you initially expect. About Lola Scarborough, Yoga studio founder and author Lola Scarborough is an IKYTA and Yoga Alliance E-RYT-500 certified yoga teacher and a co-owner and Managing Director of Yoga Lola Studios. Lola is a certified life coach, a certified Wellness & Health Restoration Natural Foods Consultant, a certified tonic herbalist, a certified Ayurvedic Practitioner, a certified aerobics teacher, a certified Level III Reiki master and a novice astrologer. She teaches Kundalini Yoga along with many other types of yoga. She has a long history as a writer, teacher, and project manager in the business world. She’s authored articles, films, and videos related to yoga, health, and healing. She published her first book on natural breast health Fighting for Our Tits: A Woman’s Battle Cry in July 2018. She’s also completed her Ph.D. in comparative religion and published a book of poetry titled Molten Woman. 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 Lola know!Tweet a thank you! Review: I’d also love for you to leave a positive review and rating for the podcast on Apple Podcasts, which helps my show reach more people who want to relaunch their careers. Subscribe: Be sure to subscribe to Career Relaunch podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, or Android so you can automatically get each new episode on your device. Full instructions. Stay in touch: Follow Career Relaunch on Twitter and Facebook. You can also follow host Joseph on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, 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! Thanks to Grammarly for Supporting Career Relaunch Built by linguists and language lovers, Grammarly’s writing app finds and corrects hundreds of complex writing errors — so you don’t have to. Career Relaunch listeners can download Grammarly for free by going to GetGrammarly.com/relaunch. Episode Interview Transcript Teaser (first ~15s): Fear and money kept driving me to go every day into a job where a lot of times I was exhausted. I was stressed out. I took a deep dive into what motivates me, what do I want. Joseph: Good morning, Lola. Welcome to Career Relaunch. It is great to have you on the show. Lola: Thank you, Joseph. I’m delighted to be here. Joseph: We are going to talk about a few different things today, including your former life before you started your yoga studio, your transition, and also how you’ve now become a yoga instructor. I’d like to start by having you, first of all, just tell me what you’ve been focused right now in your career and your life. Lola: I’ve continued to stay focused on building my yoga studio and wellness business. Most recently, I released a book, and I am going to be featured in an upcoming book as well called The World’s Most Amazing Women that’s going to be released in December. One of the things I’m doing now is working to grow out my speaking skills. I love to lecture. I love a captive audience. It’s my very favorite thing. I’ve been working on that and working on raising awareness around different health-related issues through doing blogging and other things like that. Joseph: I know that we’ve got a couple of different topics to talk about today, and I want to come back to your studio. I do want to go back in time and talk about what you were up to before you were a yoga instructor, because I know you haven’t always been a yoga instructor. Before we get to that, how did you get discovered to be featured in that book, The World’s Most Amazing Women? Lola: I started doing some podcast radio interviews with KC Armstrong, and he invited nine women that he felt had stories that were significant, meaningful, and lifechanging for his readers. He invited me to be one of the lead writers in his book. Joseph: Okay, very cool. I’m looking forward to seeing you featured there. Can we go back in time, Lola, and talk about what you were up to before you were involved with yoga? What were you doing in your former life when you were working in the corporate world? Let’s start from the beginning, and then we can move forward from there. Lola: When I was 17 years old, I graduated from the Atlanta College of Medical, Dental, and Business. I spent roughly 20 years of my career as a legal secretary. I loved it. I loved the legal field. I actually thought about entering it but then decided to have children instead. As a part of that, towards the latter end of my career, we made a huge transition. I’m 59, so I’ve seen software come of age from MS DOS to MS Word. Because I picked up on those sorts of things easily, I became a lead trainer, and then became a lead writer for our training materials. I did that for quite a long time, and I loved doing that too. From there, I segued over into becoming a full-time technical writer. I worked with Capgemini, Axon, a software company called SBPA Systems. I did that for, I guess, another 15 years. From there, I went into project management. That was my last role in the business world, where I lead project teams of up to 10 and 15 people. I worked with companies as big as Burger King and Vanguard and some others and doing software implementations for their administrative systems. That’s where I was when my career shifted. Joseph: You’ve already mentioned a couple of career shift. I know we want to cover the major ones, shifting toward being a yoga instructor. I do want to go back a little bit here because you’ve mentioned a couple of major shifts, from being a legal secretary to a technical writer, and then a technical writer to a project manager. Let’s just take the lattermost recent transition from being a technical writer to a project manager. How did you manage to make that sort of a transition? Because at least on the surface, it seems like those would be two very different things. Lola: They really were, and I wasn’t really fully prepared for what happens when you’re a project manager. I met a man, and I married him. I moved from where I was. I moved myself and my children from Stafford, Texas to League City, Texas, which is where I’m at now. I went in, and I interviewed. She really liked my style, because I’d held lead positions. As a technical writer, I managed teams. I was already used to being in leadership positions. Being a project manager, I’d put out my begging bowl before I do that again. Joseph: What did you dislike about being a project manager? Lola: The 22-hour days and implementations not going right, clients very understandably being very distressed because their systems were down. People would quit because it was such a stressful situation, then you’d find yourself with a deficit of personnel. It was a small company, so one person leaving would have a major impact on the ability to get the project to fruition. The pay was awesome, but it was a lot of stress. Joseph: Can you take me to the moment when you made the decision to leave that behind? What was happening for you at that time? Lola: I’m a very security-oriented person. I always told people, they say, ‘Don’t you want to start your own business?’ I’m like, ‘No, not until after I retire.’ I kind of got kicked out. I had opened my yoga studio. I came through when we were in the acute stage of a recession in this area. Joseph: That was in 2008. Is that correct? Lola: Yeah. I had a friend who was coming. I let her use my yoga studio, which by the way, only had one student because the yoga studio was to be a retirement dream. I would only really be working hard six years from now had things gone along as intended. I had opened it up, and she had a magazine. She said, ‘Well, if you’d let me use your studio for my group, I’ll run a free ad for you.’ I said, ‘Awesome.’ Before I even opened the studio and put a web presence out, I talked to my manager, and I talked to the other co-owner of the business. I said, ‘Listen. This is what I’m doing. This is really just to place on paper. It’s a retirement dream. We’re going to be working on it for years. Is it okay if I do this?’ They said yes. I had not spoken to the big boss about it because she knew that I did yoga. I taught yoga after business hours to some of the students there. Anyhow, she saw this ad, and she was livid. She told me, she said, ‘You have to make a choice.’ I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ She said, ‘You have to make a choice. You either give up your yoga studio or you quit your job.’ I said, ‘First of all, I’m not going to quit. You’re going to have to fire me. Secondly, it’s not even really a yoga studio. We have two classes a week. I have one student.’ She said, ‘No.’ It became a matter of principle for her. She said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘Okay, well I’ll wait for you to fire me.’ She obliged me by firing me. That’s how Yoga Lola got catapulted into being. I started looking for jobs, couldn’t find anything. I’m highly educated. I have incredible business experience, but there was a recession. I realized that I wasn’t going to find anything, and what I had to do was that saying, ‘When God gives you lemons, make lemonade.’ That’s how it happened. Joseph: I know that this does come up for people who listen to this show where they’ve got a side interest and a side project which could be anything from just a casual hobby to something a little bit more serious. It sounds like this was just at the infancy stage and something that you were tinkering with, didn’t plan to launch it until many years later, and yet your employer took issue with the fact that you had this side gig. What was her major concern? Lola: She said the Imagitech needed 150% of my time. I said, ‘Has it? Look! Go on the web. Look at my schedule. There are two classes. My husband can take them. We only have one student.’ She said, ‘Well, you’re going to try to grow your business on my back.’ I said, ‘No, I’m not. I’m not going to try to grow my business at all for a long time. It’s just there as a placeholder in my life,’ because I made a lot of money. It was really a sweet deal, even with all the stress. I got to wear beautiful suits. I got to travel. I had an expense account. She told me I had to make a choice, and I was like, ‘Well, we just spend $250,000 on a building.’ I don’t know what you expect me to do with it. In the end, it worked out for the best, but if you had asked me at the time, I really thought what was going to happen was she was going to fire me, and then I was going to go find another job, just like the one I had. That is not what happened. Joseph: During that immediate aftermath of you moving on from that company, what did you start to do the next week, the next month to figure out what you wanted to do next and how you wanted the next chapter to look in your life? Lola: I kept looking. I started working on the studio more, because I had free time on my hands. I finally realized I wasn’t going to find another job. I had to reeducate myself, and it was this studio or bust. That took about nine months to sink in, and I was shell-shocked initially. Joseph: Let’s shift gears, Lola, and talk a little bit about the yoga studio and how you got it from where it was to where it is right now, because I think the idea of starting a yoga studio, when I hear that, that seems pretty cool. I think that there’s probably a lot of people out there who think, ‘Oh, it’d be so cool to start my own studio,’ whether it’s yoga or fitness or whatever it is. How did you get that thing off the ground, going from one student to more students? I’d love to hear some details on what exactly you did. Lola: Absolute persistence and a dogged refusal to give up. I had to reeducate myself. I was a certified yoga teacher, and I’d been teaching yoga for a while before we opened the studio. I was also an energy healer. My grandmother taught me that at the age of 12. I had my business skills. I don’t know how anyone could open any business, whether it’s a yoga studio or any kind of small business, without having the kind of business skills I had, because that really became the foundation from which I built. I knew you have to be competitive in the marketplace. You have to have the right education for the audience that you’re presenting yourself to. I got a two-year degree in Ayurveda, which means something in the wellness business. I also became an E-RYT 500. I went to the highest level of yoga training that you could have. I rolled in my business skills as a technical writer by creating training programs that are really the bread and butter of our studio. We have a 200-hour training course, and then I also have a training course where I teach people how to do hands-on healing, and I certify them. I went to the Spencer Institute. I got my life coaching degree. I got some aerobics degrees. I studied Chinese herbals. I remade myself in a brand new image. I learned how to do marketing, which was really painful for me because I’m not very good at ‘selling’ things. I’m really uncomfortable with that. Joseph: What was uncomfortable about that for you? Lola: I feel like when you try to sell something, inherently you cheapen yourself. That was the attitude I had then. I’ve made a lot of shifts in my attitude since then. I’ve gone from the idea that I am selling something to the idea that I am offering something that, if people like, they’ll buy. There is no shame in that, but it was a big transition. The only thing I’d ever had to market was myself and my skills in the business world. I didn’t really have to ‘sell’ myself more than once. They hired me, and then I began to show them what I could do, but that’s different than selling. Joseph: Definitely. As you know, since we’ve spoken before recording this, I also came from the corporate world, and I was a full-time employee before launching my own business. I definitely hear what you’re saying about feeling a little bit more exposed and having to almost be forced to sell yourself more regularly versus being hired into a job, and then you do have your annual reviews, but if you do a good job, you’re pretty well set, in general. That’s very interesting. Any other surprises that have come up along the way for you in building your studio…

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Knowing Who You Are with Tod Jacobs- CR66 Oct 31, 2019

Show notes

When you follow a non-linear career path, it allows you to diversify your skills and experiences, but it can also create challenges when trying to explain your career narrative to others in your professional network, interviewers, and colleagues. Identifying the common thread that unifies all your experiences is one way to connect the dots for yourself and others. In Career Relaunch episode 66, journalist turned Wall Street analyst turned rabbi Tod Jacobs explains why having a life outside of work is so critical to your overall happiness and what it takes to figure out where to focus your career energies. In the Mental Fuel segment, I’ll explain how I discovered the common thread that unifies the wide range of experiences in my own career. Key Career Insights If you look closely, you may realize your disparate career experiences have some common themes that unite them. Find the overlap between the things you’re good at and the things you love. That’s what you should be devoting your energies. You have to take the time to figure out who you are and what you find meaningful before you dive head-first into a certain career direction. Make sure you develop other aspects of your life outside of your actual work, which allows you to derive more meaning from both. Focusing on what you can give in your life and career (rather than solely on what you get) allows you to focus on those things you can control and ultimately reap the benefits you deserve. Listener Challenge During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, my challenge to you, especially if you find yourself struggling to pitch your story to your target employer or client, was to: #1: dedicate some time to capture a written inventory of your skills and experiences, and #2: selectively hone in on those you feel are the most relevant to your future work. Try to highlight and reinforce those specific skills and experiences as part of your career narrative moving forward. Identifying a common theme that ties all your experiences together can serve as a convenient, unifying headline you can use when describing your career story to others. About Tod Jacobs, rabbi and co-founder of the David Robinson Institute Tod Jacobs is the Director of the David Robinson Institute for Jewish Heritage in Jerusalem, which he co-founded in 2005. Prior to his current role there teaching and counseling his students and alumni, he worked on Wall Street as a leading authority on the telecommunications industry. As a former managing director at JP Morgan and partner at Sanford C. Bernstein and Company, Tod acted as a frequent commentator to leading, newspapers, magazines and TV networks, and testified several times before the U.S. Congress as an expert on telecom and media policy. His credits in journalism, where he worked prior to Wall Street, include nominations for both the Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism and an Emmy Award. He holds an MS in Journalism from Columbia University and an MA from Northwestern University. He’s recently published a book about marriage called Not a Partnership: Why We Keep Getting Marriage Wrong & How We Can Get it Right. 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 Tod know!Tweet a thank you! Review: I’d also love for you to leave a positive review and rating for the podcast on Apple Podcasts, which helps my show reach more people who want to relaunch their careers. Subscribe: Be sure to subscribe to Career Relaunch podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, or Android so you can automatically get each new episode on your device. Full instructions. Stay in touch: Follow Career Relaunch on Twitter and Facebook. You can also follow host Joseph on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, 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! Thanks to Audible for Supporting Career Relaunch Thanks to Audible for supporting this episode of Career Relaunch. Audible is the premier provider of digital audiobooks, offering over 180,000 audiobook titles for listening anytime and anywhere on your favorite device. Career Relaunch listeners can download a free audiobook download and get 30-day trial at audibletrial.com/careerrelaunch. Episode Interview Transcript Teaser (first ~15s): Even though it seems like I have the crazy career going from screenwriting to journalism to broadcast journalism to Wall Street, I actually think that there is a certain thread that connects them. I don’t think that most rabbis think of themselves as being Wall Street analysts. It’s not as different as you might think. Joseph: Good afternoon, Tod, and welcome to Career Relaunch. It is great to have you on the show. Tod: Thank you very much, Joseph. It’s great to be here. Joseph: I’m excited to have you on the show, Tod, because you’re our first guest based in Jerusalem. I’ve got a lot of things I’d like to talk with you about. We’re going to talk about your time as a journalist, your time on Wall Street, and also what prompted you to move from New York City to Israel which is where you’re based right now. Can you just start by telling me what you’ve been focused on in your career and your life there in Jerusalem? Tod: I guess for the last 15 years, I have been pursuing a late-stage career, probably the last major career I’m going to have that I had at least in my plans. That is that I decided to leave Wall Street and come to Jerusalem to open up an institute with a mentor of mine. It’s called the David Robinson Institute for Jewish Heritage. It’s in Jerusalem. I spend virtually all of my time now teaching classic Jewish subjects, philosophy, law, a little bit of kabbalistic wisdom, deep spiritual wisdom, and mentoring really a phenomenal group of young men who come from many different places in the world and many different backgrounds. What unites them is that they’re all smart high-performing people who have finished college, who usually finished graduate school, who are pursuing careers, but then decide they want to take maybe a year off and maybe two years off of what they’re doing career-wise to figure out what makes them tick as human beings, get training in relationship building, and armed with that centered spiritual vision of what they want out of their life, they return to their careers with a new sense of vigor and idealism. One of my colleagues and I wrote a book which is based upon a lot of the work that we do in the area of relationships. The authoring part of my career is really just sort of an offshoot of what I’ve been doing for the last 15 years. Joseph: We’re going to come back to your time there as director. I know you haven’t always been the Director of the David Robinson Institute for Jewish Heritage, and you’ve got a really rich career that started off as a journalist. Could you tell us about your career, starting off as a journalist? I think you did a stint in screenwriting also, and then we can move forward from there. Tod: The career really began with sort of a failed career in screenwriting. When I say ‘failed career,’ there was a group of us. I think there were three of us. We were all close friends. We were all writers. One of us was, not myself, one of the three was a film maker, one was a bit of a poet, and I was more of a journalistic writer by nature. We decided to write a screenplay which we really almost never finished and never sold and never was able to do anything with it. I was waiting tables in New York City at the time to pay the bills. At some point, I just decided, ‘I just can’t go on like this. I have to get a real job,’ or at least what I thought then was a real job. I applied to go to the Colombia University Graduate School of Journalism so that I could continue doing what’s one of the things I viewed as the key thing that love doing which is writing but bring into a professional environment where I could actually have a regular job, get a paycheck while doing something that I enjoy doing and thought I was relatively good at. That took me into journalism. I can keep talking about the crazy things that happened in journalism, if you’d like. Joseph: Why don’t you tell me a little bit about what you enjoyed about journalism and some of the challenges that you had to tackle during your time as an investigative journalist? Tod: The beauty of being a journalist is just that incredible exposure to a lot of exciting and interesting things that are going on in life and the pressure to become experts in many, many different areas quickly, and to be able to communicate them to a broad audience who is not expert in those areas. Via a strange series of events, I wound up falling as a student into a very, very big investigative story. I never had in mind that I was going to become an investigative journalist. I was sent to do a story that was about a company called Wedtech. Wedtech had started out as a little tool-and-die shop that had grown to become a company that not only was successful but had gone public, had made its owners wealthy and famous. I was sent up to do what we would call a puff piece, just showing what a great little company that is, take a few pictures, talk about how wonderful they are. When I was up there, just something didn’t smell right. In going down to the SEC to get some filings on the company to find out about how their finances looked, I discovered some interesting data there which showed that some very, very powerful figures in the New York political world and in the New York business world seem to have been manipulating the company, taking control of it, and then handing it over to this guy to be more or less a puppet master in the company, or a front man I should say to the company, so that they could bill the government out of what turned out to be $100 million, $200 million or something like that. The great ending to that story is that for one year as an investigative journalist, my partner and I were both nominated for Pulitzer Prizes for Investigative Journalism because it was such a gigantic story. It was good enough to get those credentials to then get me into broadcast journalism where I then spent the next couple of years basically making documentaries and working in broadcast. Joseph: You’re a successful journalist. You’re nominated for a Pulitzer Award. You work in documentaries. What made you then want to transition into the world of Wall Street? Tod: At a certain point, I decided with a friend of mine that we would launch out on our own and have our own production company. We got a little bit of venture capital funding just to pay the basic bills. We gave away a part of the company to somebody in order to do that. About a year later, we absolutely totally failed as a company. At that point, I was married. I don’t think we were expecting our first child yet. It was kind of like in the near future, we thought. I had no money. I was out of a job. I just literally, not knowing what to do, had to start thinking about the next step. I wound up running into another friend of mine who had been working on Wall Street as a bond trader. He was working for Salomon Brothers at the time. He said to me, ‘Well, you know, you seem like a smart guy.’ He said, ‘What do you view as your core talents?’ I said, ‘Writing and reporting. That’s what I’ve been doing for the last couple of years: writing and reporting.’ He said, ‘Okay, writing and reporting.’ He said, ‘Okay, how are you with numbers? Are you good with numbers?’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’ I took calculus in college, but I haven’t really done anything with any math or economics.’ He said, ‘Well, if you think you’re even okay at it.’ He said, ‘I’d suggest you try and get a job as an analyst.’ I said, ‘What’s that?’ He said, ‘Well, they are these people who kind of investigate and report about a given industry and given sets of companies.’ I had literally no idea what to do, but he told me, ‘Go get a Wall Street Journal, collect all the names of the Wall Street firms you can find in the advertisements, and write letters to all their directors you’ve researched.’ The truth was we skipped over one little step in broadcast, which is that I had actually got nominated for an Emmy Award for a short film that I made for NBC. The film that I had made, there was a person who raised $1,000 for me to hire the camera crew for that. He raised it from a guy named Sanford C. Bernstein. This Mr. Bernstein had given me $1,000 for that project. I had never met him. In the letter I wrote to him, I said, ‘You once gave me $1,000, and I turned it into an Emmy Award. Imagine what I can do if I were working for you,’ or something like that. He thought that was humorous, and it was enough just to get my foot in the door and get an interview. Very, very happily, Sanford Bernstein hired me. They hired me as a total grunt. I’d never used a computer before. I’d only used these old typewriters, the manual typewriters in the newsrooms, but they figured I knew certain things an MBA student know, and so I spent the next two and a half years as a junior analyst before they promoted me to being a senior analyst. Joseph: As someone who didn’t start his career on Wall Street, what was it like for you to work on Wall Street? I’d be curious to hear about what you liked and maybe what you didn’t like so much. Tod: There were different stages. The initial couple of years were incredibly exhilarating on one hand, because the learning curve was amazingly steep. You can just imagine walking in, having a little bit of a sense that you’re sort of the smart guy, you know how to write, you know how talk to management, you’re not a pushover, but on the other hand, you don’t know anything that anybody around you knows. Happily, they gave me enough rope and enough time to get more and more responsibility over a period of about two and a half years. Slowly, slowly, I came up to a point where I actually had some sense of what I was doing. That was a year of amazing learning curve and amazing stress coming along with it. I wound up being a senior analyst with Sanford Bernstein. I was at Sanford Bernstein 11 years altogether and then got hired away by JP Morgan, where I went for the last couple of years, I guess the last two and a half, three years in my career. Joseph: I know at that time, you’d also had some children along the way. I think when we spoke before, I think you told me you have four kids. Tod: Yes, we have four kids. The fourth of them was born, by the way, during a meeting, a conference call that I was having with JP Morgan bankers and the company. As my wife was being wheeled into the OR to have this baby, I was on the phone with these guys saying, ‘You must let me off the phone. I got to go. I have to be part of this birth here.’ That one I’ll never forget. That one was part of JP Morgan. Joseph: On this show, we talked about transitions and what compels people to make major changes. In your case, I know you eventually made a major decision to not only move countries but also move away from the world of Wall Street and also change your role. What made you want to make such a major change and eventually move to Jerusalem? Tod: Throughout my career, I always try to make sure that I had things going on in my personal and private life which I felt were intrinsically meaningful. As much as I loved the time at Wall Street, which is an incredible time, incredible experience, I never felt that trying to make money was the highest calling of a human being. I did feel that it could give a person the tools and the stature and the assets to really make a difference in the world if you could extract yourself from doing that full-time. I wound up working for a couple of years at…

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Taking a Step Back with Ana Wagner- CR65 Oct 10, 2019

Show notes

Getting laid off from your job can be one of the more jarring experiences in your career. When it happens to you twice, how can you bounce back? And how can a career setback help you clarify and redefine what’s important to you? In this week’s Career Relaunch podcast episode, automotive industry professional Ana Wagner explains how she dealt with being laid off when she was eight months pregnant and once again during the Great Recession of the late 2000s. We’ll talk about a range of topics including how to avoid being defined by your job and why career detours can give you an opportunity to reevaluate your priorities and gain some healthy perspective. During the Mental Fuel segment, I address a listener’s question from Japan about how long you should hold onto a job you don’t like. Key Career Insights You have the freedom to NOT define yourself by the title you have or the company you work for, as tempting and natural as that may feel. While you may not like every aspect of your job, you need to enjoy the majority of the work you do for a living. Otherwise, it’s miserable. Being laid-off doesn’t necessarily hurt you in the long run, and in fact, can be a blessing in disguise. Similarly, taking a step down in role and/or salary can actually serve you in many, less obvious ways. Tweetable to Share You may not like every single colleague, boss, or project at work, but you need to like what you do most of the time--otherwise, it's miserable. Ana Wagner Tweet This Listener Challenge During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I addressed a listener’s question from Tokyo about what to do if you don’t like your job and aren’t sure how long you should stick things out. If you’re stacking up the opinions others have of your career against your own desires, I’d challenge you to take a step that honors who you are and how you want your life to look. I don’t think it’s easy to completely disregard what others think of you, but I’m just encouraging you to take one step that will move you closer to what YOU want, even if it creates some temporary upheaval or turbulence in your life with the people around you. Because sometimes, you have to prioritize your own happiness, which will hopefully allow the people in your life to eventually feel happier for you too. About Ana Wagner, Global Segment Director at PPG Industries Ana Wagner is a mom to two teenagers, wife, and proud native Colombian, currently working as Global Segment Director at PPG, where she is responsible for driving global alignment and defining long term strategic direction for the automotive parts segment. Ana has spent most of her career in the automotive and chemical industries in positions ranging from engineering to market development to marketing strategy. Ana has a Bachelor of Science degree in Industrial Engineering form Xavier University in Bogota, Colombia, and an MBA from the University of Michigan, Dearborn. 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 Ana know!Tweet a thank you! Review: I’d also love for you to leave a positive review and rating for the podcast on Apple Podcasts, which helps my show reach more people who want to relaunch their careers. Subscribe: Be sure to subscribe to Career Relaunch podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, or Android so you can automatically get each new episode on your device. Full instructions. Stay in touch: Follow Career Relaunch on Twitter and Facebook. You can also follow host Joseph on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, 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! Thanks to BrandYourself for Supporting Career Relaunch A2 Hosting allows you to offers simple tools and services to help control what people find when they Google you. To clean up, protect, and improve how you look online, visit BrandYourself.com and use promo code ‘RELAUNCH’ to get 50% off a Premium membership. Episode Interview Transcript Ana: I’m going to find something I really like, and now I live by the rule that I have to like what I do at least 70% of the time. I’m not going to like all of my bosses or my co-workers or every single one of my tasks or my projects, but I have to like what I do most of the time. Otherwise, it’s miserable. Joseph: Good morning, Ana, and welcome to Career Relaunch. It’s great to have you on the show. Ana: Hi, Joseph. Thanks for having me. Joseph: I am hoping to talk through a few things with you today, including some of the career transitions you’ve been through and also how you’ve managed through some of the tradeoffs you’ve had to make with each of your career moves. I was hoping you could start us off by just telling me what’s been keeping you busy in your career and your life the past few weeks. Ana: I work in B2B market strategy, and so I’ve been very busy travelling the world actually. It’s been a lot of travel and juggling with a couple of teenagers. I work for a big company in the chemical space, and so that takes a lot of my time. Joseph: I think you also just got back from Colombia. Is that right? Ana: That’s right. My native Colombia. I was there attending on my high school reunion. Joseph: Very cool. Let’s just start with what you’re doing right now. You mentioned the work that you’re doing. You’re at PPG Industries. What exactly do you do there as a Global Segment Director? Maybe we’ll start there, and then I’d like to jump all the way back in time and then go through your career history. Ana: As a Global Segment Director, I am in charge of a segment, which is Automotive Parts and Accessories Functional. It’s coatings for automotive parts that go directly into companies that actually make parts for automotive called the tiers – the tier suppliers here in Detroit. In that role, I am responsible for the long-term strategy of the segment as well as global alignment between the regions. Joseph: Now, I’d like to go back in time because I also know that you started off in the automotive industry as an automotive engineer. Could you just tell us about your time when you started off as an automotive engineer, working, and then we can go forward from there? Ana: Yes, absolutely. I have an undergrad in industrial engineering. That’s how I started at Ford Motor Company here in Detroit. I worked there for a few years, and then I was part of a spinoff from Ford. The parts division of Ford spun off as a company called Visteon. All in all, I was there for almost eight years. Joseph: What happened at your eighth? What exactly happened that resulted in you moving on from Visteon? Ana: The company had been spun off as a very large company. In 2004, it was facing decisions in terms of downsizing. I happened to be eight months pregnant. I had mentioned to my boss that I wanted to take a long maternity leave which was something that the company offered as a benefit, like up to a year. You wouldn’t come back to the same job, but you would have a job. I had mentioned that a few weeks before, but then one day, they had massive layoffs. Hundreds of people got laid off on a Friday morning. I’ll never forget. I was eight months pregnant, sitting at my desk, and somebody came, tapped me on the shoulder, took me to a conference room where HR talked to me, gave me a folder and told me I had a few minutes to pack up my things, ‘Here’s a box,’ and they escorted me out of the building. Joseph: Wow. That’s just like what you see in the movies pretty much. I guess there’s a couple of aspects of this that I’m interested in. I guess I’m first of all interested in what it was like to get that very sudden tap on the shoulder, that exact moment when that happened. I’m also interested in what it was like to be eight months pregnant and getting that tap on the shoulder. Ana: I was going to say it’s horrible, pregnant or not, but it’s even more horrible when you’re not expecting it. Interestingly enough, about three weeks before, I had had a performance review that was outstanding, and I had been told I was a high potential employee and all these. Something happened in between. I think, theories after the fact, word kind of going around that maybe I got on the wrong list. Maybe somebody was meant to really sit down with me and ask me if I wanted to take a package, but the truth of the matter is I got on the list. It’s pretty brutal. It’s pretty brutal, especially when you’re not expecting it. That same morning, I was talking to co-workers there, ‘Come on. You’re pregnant. You’re a woman. You’re Hispanic. There’s no way.’ It happened. Joseph: The aspect of being pregnant right before, I guess, you’re about a month out from delivery, I’m guessing that must’ve affected your psyche at that moment. I’m wondering how that might’ve affected you at that very moment. Ana: I actually almost went into labor that day. That day was very, very difficult. I almost went into labor that day. Thankfully, I didn’t, so the baby wasn’t born too early. It was very upsetting. It was very upsetting, especially at the beginning. Within a few days, I said, ‘Ok. This is a good opportunity. I was looking to spend a year home anyway, and here it is. I got a severance check. I’ll take this time to think things through and just actually be with my baby.’ It ended up working out in the end. Joseph: How was maternity leave for you? Ana: It was really nice, but at the same time—this was in my early 30’s—I was really afraid of missing out on what was happening in the workplace and missing out on skills, maybe I wasn’t gaining connections and trying to get back into the workforce later. Joseph: My wife has been through maternity leave, and even I took a little bit of a paternity leave. On the one hand, I know it’s really nice to spend some time with your newborn baby. At the same time, as a professional, it’s hard not to think about time passing professionally. I guess in your case, you had not yet had a job that you knew you were going to back to. How did you think through getting back into the workforce, when to go back, how to reenter? Ana: I did give myself six months. I said I’m going to give myself six months to really enjoy the baby and enjoy motherhood and adjust to the baby. This was our first baby. I have two now. I gave myself the first six months, and I thought that was a smart thing. The nice thing about being laid off when you’re part of one of these massive layoffs and packages, at least at the time, is I got a relocation package with a relocation company. I was able, after six months, to go in to this relocation company and go through their training. The training starts by really understanding yourself, what you’d like to do, what your capabilities are, and what the right matches are. I went through that, which was really, really helpful, and I started searching for the right thing. Joseph: What did you end up uncovering as the next chapter in your career? Ana: As traumatized as I was by the corporate world, I found out that I really liked what I was doing in terms of market strategy. I wanted to keep on the same line of business. I think my attitude really changed though. How I was viewing my job really, really changed. Before, I defined myself by my title and the company I worked for. When I entered Ford, I thought for sure I was going to retire from there. I really adjusted that view. I said, ‘I’m going to find something I really like.’ Now, I live by rule that I have to like what I do at least 70% of the time. I’m not going to like all of my bosses or my co-workers or every single one of my tasks or my projects, but I have to like what I do most of the time. Otherwise, it’s miserable. Joseph: I think from our conversation before, you ended up moving into the chemicals industry. Is that correct? Ana: Yes, I was in the chemical industry for about four years. You think you go through this layoff thing once, and that’s a great experience, and you learn. Seven years later, I get laid off again. Joseph: How did that one happen, Ana? Ana: This one was a little bit more expected. This was January of 2009 in Detroit. If you and the listeners know, this was a very tough time in the US and especially tougher for the auto industry in Detroit. That one was a little bit more expected. The company decided to shut down a branch and close down operations in a few areas. They laid off a lot of people at the same time in one day also. I ended losing my job again. I couldn’t believe it. This time, I took it a little bit easier. I said, ‘Oh well, let’s try to find the next thing.’ Luckily for me, within a few weeks, I had a job with a customer. People find out that you’re available. Thanks to networking, I ended up finding something. Having said that, it was something. It wasn’t the perfect job. It was a job that I needed to make a living, but it wasn’t perfect. Joseph: Did you find that going through the layoff, did that affect your job prospects at all? In this case, it sounds like you made a smooth transition. Did it ever come up? Do you feel like it ended up being a baggage on your resume? The reason why I ask is I know that sometimes people listening to this show have gone through situations where they’ve been laid off or they’ve been fired. I’m just wondering, sometimes, people have a concern about how that plays out in the long run. Has this had an impact in anyway on your career in the material fashion, beyond obviously the disruption? Ana: Sure, beyond the disruption and the pain that it is to have to go look for another job, but no, not really. I really was afraid of that, especially the first time it happened, because you’re going to get the question of the gap on your resume and what happened and why did you leave this company. The second time, I was afraid that would happen, ‘Why did you leave all these companies? Why do you keep moving?’ In reality, no. I think everybody knows what was happening in the economy during those years, and it was a very normal thing, especially here in Detroit. So not at all. It was you were working in a big corporation, and it happens. Joseph: I’d like to shift gears here a little bit, Ana. This show is all about career change, and we’ve talked about two situations here where it wasn’t your choice to necessarily move on from your job. I know later on in your career, you actually did make some choices, and the choices that you felt were allowing you to prioritize the aspects of your life that were important to you. Can you explain the next chapter of your career when you were at, I believe, it was Guardian Industries? Ana: After getting laid off the second time, you basically find you get what you get. It was 2009, tough year. 2010, also very tough. I stayed where I was, but I realized it wasn’t the right thing for me. It wasn’t the right match for my values, what I wanted to do. At the time, thanks to the experiences that I had had before, especially being let go when I was pregnant, my priorities were very clear. My family was first. I was doing a lot of traveling all over the world. I was in an environment where it was no working from home. The office was about an hour from where I live, and so it just took a toll on my family life and stress. I decided to look for opportunities, and I was being very, very careful about the right corporate culture. I decided to take a step down. I took a step down in title. I had been a director at Guardian Industries, and I went to Dow Chemical as a manager. I also took a step down in pay a little bit, about 10%, 15% pay cut to go there. It was a very conscious decision, and I’m glad I did it. Joseph: What were you trying to remove from your professional life, and what were you trying to add to your professional life? Ana: I was lo…

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Keeping the Right Company with Tamiko Kelly- CR64 Sep 12, 2019

Show notes

The company you work for and the people you work with can have a huge impact on your perspectives, outlook, and self-belief. In episode 64 of Career Relaunch, Retail merchandiser turned baby sleep expert Tamiko Kelly explains why surrounding yourself with the right people can have such a profound impact on your career. She’ll explain the steps she took to move from the corporate world to set up her own independent business. We’ll talk about the importance of starting even if you don’t have a plan fully mapped out, getting yourself out of bad environments, and letting go of things that no longer serve you. Key Career Insights Doing 1-on-1 work that feels unscalable can actually allow you to develop deep insights that enables you to create more scalable offerings. You don’t have to have a fully ironed out marketing strategy to get your business off the ground. You just have to start somewhere. At some point, you have to let go of the things that are no longer serving you and trust that things are going to work out. Getting yourself out of a toxic environment is the first step toward getting back the confidence you need to relaunch your career in a more positive direction. Tweetables to Share You're doing yourself more harm staying in a situation that's no longer serving you. Tamiko Kelly Tweet This Resources Mentioned I mentioned the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory on today’s show. You can read more about Myers-Briggs and take the survey yourself to find out which of the 16 personality types you fall into. Listener Challenge During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, challenges you to think carefully about the company you keep. Think about what specific impact the people you spend the most time with are having own your personal and professional well-being. Write it down. If they’re having a positive impact, great. But if they’re dragging you down all the time, ask yourself how long you’ll willing to tolerate being around those people, and if you feel the time has come to get yourself out of the situation, what small step you could take this week to lay the groundwork for moving somewhere else. About Tamiko Kelly, baby sleep expert Tamiko Kelly is the founder of Sleep Well, Wake Happy and the creator of The Feel Like Yourself Again Baby Sleep Solution. As a certified sleep consultant and holistic health practitioner, Tamiko helps tired moms feel like themselves again by teaching them how to get their babies sleeping through the night. Her sleep advice has been featured on Yahoo Finance, Care.com, Spawned Parenting Podcast and she has appeared as a guest expert on Austin’s ABC Affiliate TV Show, Studio 512. You can learn more about her workshops here. Prior to doing this work, Tamiko spent her career working in the corporate world doing retail merchandising at some well-known brands including Banana Republic and Nordstroms. You can follow Tamiko on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. 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 Tamiko know!Tweet a thank you! Review: I’d also love for you to leave a positive review and rating for the podcast on Apple Podcasts, which helps my show reach more people who want to relaunch their careers. Subscribe: Be sure to subscribe to Career Relaunch podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, or Android so you can automatically get each new episode on your device. Full instructions. Stay in touch: Follow Career Relaunch on Twitter and Facebook. You can also follow host Joseph on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, 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! P.S. Have you heard of Freshbooks? Freshbooks offers user-friendly, simple yet professional invoice templates ideal for small business owners. If you’re a self-employed professional or small business owner looking for simple invoicing and accounting tool, try it free for one month by going to CareerRelaunch.net/Freshbooks. Episode Interview Transcript Teaser (first ~15s): The longer we stay in toxic environments, it really makes us start to believe that we aren’t capable, that we can’t do things, that we are not successful. You’re doing yourself more harm staying in a situation that is no longer serving you. Joseph: Good afternoon, Tamiko. Welcome to Career Relaunch. We’re going to talk through a few different topics today, including what made you want to leave your retail career behind and how you decided to start your own business focused on, as you put it, helping tired parents. Can you start by telling me more about what you’re focused on right now in your career and your life just to get us started? Tamiko: Right now, I am making a big shift in my business where I’m going to be out of the day-to-day activities, focusing on the new offer for my company, which is super exciting. Personally, I am about to start the moving process, which we all know can be a little crazy, but as soon as I get my hands around it, because I’m off early with the prep work, so it’ll be easier for me. I’m excited about my new place. Joseph: I know that you said that you are moving on a little bit in the nature of your work. At the same time, I would be curious to just hear a little bit more about what you had been doing before making this transition. For those people who aren’t familiar with what a sleep consultant does, what exactly have you been doing for parents out there? Tamiko: I help tired moms feel like themselves again by teaching them how to get their babies sleep into the night. My clients call me the baby whisperer. Basically since 2008, I spent over 50,000 hours. It’s probably closer now to, if I had to guess, over 80,000 or 90,000 now. I was spending that amount of time teaching babies how to sleep and helping their parents be super excited and get a good night’s sleep as well. I have not met a baby who I couldn’t teach to sleep through the night. I also work with toddlers and older kids as well. If you have a kid who can’t sleep, I’m definitely the girl who can help you. It all started back in 2008, so it’s been a long, wild, crazy ride. Joseph: I know that you have not always been a sleep consultant, and I do want to come back and hear a little bit more about exactly what you have been doing as a sleep consultant, but can we go back in time and go all the way back to your days working in retail? Then we can move forward from there. Perhaps we could start with your time at The Gap. Could you just explain what you’re doing when you kicked off your retail career at The Gap? Tamiko: I used to live in the Bay Area, San Francisco, for our folks who are not in the US. I graduated from FIDM, which is the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandise in San Francisco, and my first job out of that—and this is after I already had my Bachelor’s Degree, so this is my second degree—was working at Gap. It started off as a strictly contract position, and all I was supposed to do was to help the Piperlime, which is no longer in existence. We help Piperlime basically organize their inventory. Back in those days, Piperlime had actual hard goods sample sent from the vendors that we used to service, and we had a sample room. My job was to go into that sample room and actually create inventory organization because what will happen is that our photo team would take pictures of all of the pictures for the actual website so that people could see what the shoes look like and videos of people actually wearing the shoes. Then those shoes had to be chucked somewhere. That was my first stop at Gap. Joseph: How did you like that and how did you see your career at that point in time progressing? Tamiko: I loved working at Piperlime because it was literally a startup. It was brand new. The team was excited. It was a super driven time because Gap had never gone into the shoe business before, so it was super exciting for the whole team to kind of be in the inaugural division of the company basically proving ourselves that we could be profitable, etc., that we could actually do the work and actually make money selling shoes. I had no idea where I wanted my career to go. I had been in retail for so long that I was super excited to be in actual corporate. Anybody who’s in retail, had been to retail, you understand the grind that comes with working on the store level. I was excited not to be at the store level anymore, so I did not care what job it was as long as don’t get the store, and so Piperlime was a super exciting time for me for sure. Joseph: Then you made a transition—is that right?—to work in high-end clothing retail. What happened during that chapter of your career, and what made you want to make that shift? Tamiko: Actually, after Piperlime, I was recruited by another division of Gap, Banana Republic, to come and work on their team and specifically work on the men’s business and visual merchandise. I’ve had so much experience in visual merchandising. I was an actual stylist, so I worked with magazines and photographers and did runway shows on and stuff, dressing models and all that, and so they were super excited to have that experience on that team. Basically, at Banana Republic, I work in the photo studio. My job there was to help the stylist again keep all of the merchandise organized. That was my first role, but then as I was on the team, I’d again got promoted to actually working on the visual men’s merchandise side of the business where I was working with the VP of that division. We were actually setting up the visuals that the entire company would use. We had a studio, and I was basically setting up the visual merchandising for that part of the business. Basically, at that time, we had about 200 stores. All 200 stores would use the work that we produced to set up the visual merchandise, and so if you guys shop at Banana Republic, all of the mannequins and the tables and all that stuff was done by a team like the one I was on. That was super fun, super exciting. I definitely loved my time working in Gap Corporate. After Gap was my entrée into Nordstrom. I actually got to open up a fabulous, fantastic store. Actually, let’s back track here. I worked at Nordstrom before The Gap actually because I opened a store in the Houston Galleria. Shout-out to my folks who work at the Houston Galleria store. I opened that store back in 2003, I believe. Joseph: It sounds like you had such a good run in the retail space. You got a chance to work on some fantastic brands like The Gap and Banana Republic and Nordstrom. I was just curious how you went from that to focusing on sleep. Tamiko: I took from long line of entrepreneurs, Joseph, so for me, it was a super easy transition. I knew I always wanted to own my own business. I didn’t have any idea what I wanted it to be. I used to have a jewelry business back in the day. I thought I was going to open up a retail business. I thought I was surely going to do something in the retail world. I tried my hand at many things, and nothing really felt right to me. It wasn’t until I was in San Francisco, and I started to do date nights, that the light really got switched on in my head. I was like, ‘Hmm, I really do like working with families. I really do like working with babies. I’ve been a nanny literally my whole entire life, so maybe this is the route that I need to take,’ and it was literally there that that’s when it started, in San Francisco. Joseph: When you say ‘date night’—I know you and I talked about this before we did this recording—what do you mean by date night? I think you said you’re a date-night nanny when we talked before. Tamiko: Basically, parents would hire me. I lived in Silicon Valley. For anybody who doesn’t know, Silicon Valley is full of lots of executives who work super-duper long hours. Basically, families will hire me to come in and give them and their partner a date night so that they could go out, enjoy dinner, and have a night out on the town without the kiddos. Basically, I allow parents to date their spouse again. It’s super fun. Joseph: That’s so important. You’re a date-night nanny, and you’re helping couples rekindle their relationships post-children, and then what happened? What made you then decide that you wanted to turn this into something more than being a date-night nanny, and you wanted to become a sleep consultant? Tamiko: One of my clients actually said, ‘Hey, have you thought of taking what you’re teaching me and putting it online?’ What folks have to understand is, back in the day when I was doing this, there was no online courses. That was not a thing back in 2003, ’04, ’05. It literally was not even an industry back then, so to have somebody say to me, ‘Hey, what do you think about that?’ I was like, ‘Girl, what are you talking about?’ I didn’t even know what she was referring to. She basically was just like, ‘Hey, I go to school. All my classes are online, and it’s great for me because I’m able to do it whenever I’m available. I don’t have to go to an actual campus. I think this would be great for you as well.’ Because she mentioned that to me, it’s got the wheels turning, and I was like, ‘Oh, maybe I can turn this into an actual business and not just random date nights here and there and all of that.’ It was through that one conversation that basically the train left the station with that one conversation. Joseph: When you went into doing sleep consulting, it was in the form of online courses then. Is that right? Tamiko: No, it was actually in the form of in-home consult. Joseph: Okay, so you went into people’s homes one at a time. Can you explain what that was like to go from working in the corporate setting, where you’re working with all these high-end brands, to then going into somebody’s home, where they’re struggling to get their infant or baby or toddler to go to bed by 8 o’clock or 9 o’clock? Tamiko: I worked my sleep consulting alongside of my job. It was basically a side hustle for me for many years. I would work in corporate, and then after working, on the weekends is when I did my sleep consulting. I was literally driving up and down the Bay Area. I mean literally, I did the entire Bay Area, from Novato all the way to Dublin/Pleasanton. I live in San Mateo, so anybody who’s in the Bay Area, you realize how far I was driving to go to families. I did a lot of work all over the Bay Area. It was through all of the hours I put in, working with families in that one-on-one capacity, that I was able to develop my online course many years ago. I did not develop my course, Joseph, until 2013. It’s when I finally developed my course. Joseph: Five years into doing this work, okay. What do you think was the toughest part of doing this kind of work, whether it’s the self-employment aspect of it or the sleep coaching part of it? Tamiko: In the beginning, I basically worked for anybody who had a baby who didn’t sleep. I had no kind of filters on who I would work for and all that stuff. I think in the beginning, I was just happy to help people. As I continue to do the work, I realized I only want to work with people who had X, Y, and Z. I think the hardest thing for me in the beginning was turning away business because I had this fear that if I didn’t help everybody, I would literally not have any clients, but it was through that filtering process that I really was able to hone my skills and provide a better niche for myself. In the beginning, it was just hard to say no. Anybody who’s doing a business can totally amen me from the choir stand on that one. Joseph: Definitely. If somebody is listening to his, Tamiko, and they’ve got some sort of a skill or even a strength that they want to utilize in the form of creating their o…

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Finding Validation Beyond Work with Colby Chilcote- CR63 Aug 22, 2019

Show notes

Leaving one of the “best places to work” in the world like Google is a really tough choice, but that’s exactly what former Google marketer Colby Chilcote chose to do when she left to become marketing director at Huron Pines, a nonprofit organization in northern Michigan. In this episode of Career Relaunch, we’ll talk about finding meaning outside of work, coming to terms with difficult decisions, and trusting yourself especially when you’re making seemingly unconventional career moves. I also share some thoughts on how my sources of validation have evolved over time. Key Career Insights As an employee of a large company, sometimes you have to step back and recognize that your job will go on with or without you, which is especially important to remember when you have personal events or situations arise that demand your attention. Having a stable job at a reputable company can be a major source of validation, so if you lose that, you have to think about other ways you can still feel complete. Sometimes, other people can more easily see how unhappy you are before you’re able to admit it to yourself. Just because others think you’re at the perfect place to work, it doesn’t mean you should feel the same Resources Mentioned Colby was featured in this March 2019 Fast Company article, I took a huge pay cut for a more meaningful job, and it was nothing like I expected. Listener Challenge During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I challenged you to think about where you seek validation from. How much of your own sense of validation comes from within? How much it comes from others? And are you happy with this blend? Take a moment and jot down what makes you feel good about the choices you’re making in your career and life. Decide if those sources of validation feel right. If they are, use them as a guide whenever you’re wondering if you’re really on the right track. If they’re not right, make a choice right now to adjust them. About Colby Chilcote, Marketing Director at Huron Pines Colby Chilcote is Marketing Director at Huron Pines, a nonprofit organization that protects the health of the Great Lakes through the conservation and restoration of Michigan’s natural resources. Colby started her career at Google where she worked for a decade in marketing and online advertising, helping small businesses and nonprofits build an online presence. Colby holds a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Notre Dame. She lives and works in Northern Michigan where she enjoys exploring the woods and freshwater with her husband and two sons. She’s also been involved with Huron Pines opening its first nature preserve in 2019, on an 80-acre piece of property donated to the organization in 2018. The environmental nonprofit has been raising funds to support everything from trail maintenance to community programming at the preserve. The core of the Huron Pines mission is to connect people to nature in order to build vibrant and sustainable communities throughout Northern Michigan. The Hubbard Lake Nature Preserve will help achieve this goal. You can help support environmental education and learn more about the Hubbard Lake Nature Preserve or Huron Pines. 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 Colby know!Tweet a thank you! Review: I’d also love for you to leave a positive review and rating for the podcast on Apple Podcasts, which helps my show reach more people who want to relaunch their careers. Subscribe: Be sure to subscribe to Career Relaunch podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, or Android so you can automatically get each new episode on your device. 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! Thanks to A2 Hosting for Supporting Career Relaunch A2 Hosting is the web host provider I use and trust for my own websites, and they even offer 100% carbon neutral green hosting. For an easy, fast, and affordable way to get your personal website online today, visit careerrelaunch.net/a2 to get 50% off your web hosting plan. Episode Interview Transcript Teaser (first ~15s): I was really defined by my job. I spent a lot of time trying to think more about ‘what are my other interests outside of my job’ and ‘how can I feel validated without my work being the thing that gives me that validation.’ Joseph: Hello, Colby. Welcome to Career Relaunch. It is great to have you on the show. Colby: Thank you for having me. Joseph: I would like to talk with you about a few different topics today, including your decision to move on from a very reputable company, moving from the for-profit to non-profit world. Also, I want to touch on how much salary fills satisfaction. I was hoping you could just start us off by sharing a snapshot of what’s keeping you busy right now in your career and your life. Colby: Our annual report just hit mail boxes this week. That’s been a huge project that just wrapped up. Now, I am deep in event planning and getting things ready to open our first nature preserve this June and updating a bunch of communication materials ahead of our field season, which will start in the spring and the summer. Joseph: For those people who are not familiar with your organization, which is called Huron Pines, can you just give a snapshot of exactly what Huron Pines does and your role there? Colby: Huron Pines is an environmental conservation non-profit. We’re based in Northeast Michigan, so protecting the great lakes is a huge part of what we do. We do that through a lot of on-the-ground restoration initiatives, like connecting rivers by removing dams, getting rid of invasive species, supporting native habitat, all of those things. Another huge part of our work is connecting people to nature through environmental education and outreach events, those kinds of things. Essentially, the more that we can get people out loving nature, the more that we can hopefully protect all the natural resources that we have here and then protect the long-term sustainability of the great lakes. Joseph: I know you haven’t always been the marketing director there at Huron Pines, and I was hoping we could go back in time a little bit, Colby, and go all the way back to the roughly 10-year chapter of your career at Google and in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Can you tell us about what you were doing at Google during those years? You don’t need to go all the details of every single role you had there. Maybe just give a glimpse into what you were doing in your most recent roles there, and then we can move forward from there. Colby: I had basically two chapters of jobs at Google. I started there right out of grad school. I was a liberal arts person, so I was really happy to get a job wherever anyone would take me. I was very, very lucky that Google was who took me. I started doing online advertising sales. I did that for about four years, and then I transitioned into marketing for the next five years or so. I worked in small business marketing, specifically trying to help small businesses get an online presence, like thinking about kind of local mom-and-pop shop kind of businesses, getting them to be comfortable with using the internet to help grow their businesses. That was what I spent a lot of my marketing focus on. Joseph: Aside from your functional marketing role there in your projects, can you paint a quick picture of what it’s really like to work at one of Google’s offices? Because I know that there’s always this intrigue about what it’s like to work at Google. We had people on the show before who have worked at the head office but not somebody who’s worked at a satellite office. Colby: It was a pretty nice gig. The office moved after I’ve been there for probably about eight years. We were, for a long time, right in the middle of Downtown Ann Arbor, which is really great. Then we moved to a bigger campus basically after we grew. Just the facility to work in is great. Basically all the things that you hear about are true. All the food is free. We had a chef in a cafeteria. There was a barista. There was a massage therapist on site. All of those things exist in their great perks. Joseph: Was there anything that surprised you most about working there? Colby: You start and it’s like so unbelievable that that’s a work environment, and then you, overtime, get really used to it. Then you take for granted all the things that are great about it. Now that I don’t have access to all of that, I appreciate that and realize how crazy it was that some of those trainings, there’s an Authors at Google program, where people would just come in that had written books and talk about them. Some of those kinds of things, like the fact that that was happening on a daily basis, now, is a little more mind-blowing than it was when I was there, because like I said, you just get used to all the crazy stuff that goes on there. Joseph: Before we talk about your transition out of Google, was there anything in particular that you found challenging about working at a place like Google, in spite of the fact that it sounds like there were such amazing perks and it sounds like a wonderful environment to work in? Colby: It kind of is a double-edged sword, because what is great about it is that the people that work there are really great and really self-motivated. It’s part of what makes it work and makes it successful. On the other side, there’s this culture of over-achievement and continued progress, which can be really good, but I think it facilitates burn out a little bit. It also has you constantly questioning whether you’re doing enough or whether your project is big enough to keep moving you forward in your career trajectory. It can be a really stressful place to work also. I think the mix of that stress with all the perks that come with it can be really hard to wrap your mind around both of those things. You start to question what you’re doing in your everyday job, and you’re not sure if you love it. Then you look at all these great things that you have offered to you and you think, ‘Why am I questioning this job? There’s so many great things here. Of course, I should be happy.’ I think all of that mental stuff can make it a difficult place to work. Joseph: That’s a nice segue, Colby, into what I was hoping to spend a little bit of time talking with you about now, which is your transition. Specifically, I know you eventually decided to move on from Google. Could you take me back to the moment you made your decision to leave Google? I’d be interested in hearing what was going on for you exactly at that time, both at work and also personally. Colby: Two huge life events happened that really set everything in motion. The first was that my life-long best friend passed away from cancer. Then about two weeks later, I found out that I was pregnant with my first child. There’s a lot of personal change and a lot of emotional upheaval going on that made me really start to think about what it was that was important to me, what I wanted to be spending my time on, what I wanted to see my life become. I think all of that was the catalyst for what ended up being a slow process of change that got me to where I am now but certainly made me question everything in a way that felt like, ‘Okay, I’m ready to stop wasting time on things that I don’t want to be doing, and I’m ready to start actually making changes to get where I want to be.’ Joseph: Just taking those one at a time—you mentioned your best friend passing away—was there anything in particular that you came to the realization that you feel you really can’t come to unless you had something that tragic happen in your life? Colby: One of the things that came along with it is it was unexpected but then also kind of a slow process of going through hospice and all these other things. While that was happening, I was still working. At that point, I was happy with the project that I was working on. I felt challenged in my job. I was in a good place at my job, but I still had a little bit of resentment toward it, because I kept thinking like all of these stuff is happening to me personally, and yet this job still goes on whether I’m there or not or whether these other things that matter more are happening or not. I think that that subtle shift is what changed everything else, because I think, then, when I started to be unhappy with my job, I just kept thinking I’m spending so many hours of my week on this thing that is my work. If this isn’t something I want to be doing, I can’t justify putting the time into this. I think you can come to that conclusion from a lot of different directions, but I think it certainly helped me see it more clearly. Just the idea of not wanting to waste time was driven home so much more severely than maybe it would be for somebody else, but I don’t think that that’s necessary to come to those conclusions. Joseph: How did becoming pregnant start to feed into what you wanted more of or less of in your career at that moment? Colby: I realized that I was really defined by my job, and I was a little bit worried that—because Google has an incredible maternity leave, which is great. You have six months off. I remember thinking, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself.’ I get it that I’m going to have a baby, and I don’t know what that’s like, because I haven’t had one before. I’m not sure how I’m going to feel without having a job to kind of justify my energy and time through. In anticipation of knowing that that was coming, I spent a lot of time trying to think more about what are my other interests outside of my job and how can I feel validated without my work being the thing that gives me that validation. That was part of, I think, what allowed me to slowly step away from being so enmeshed in what I have been doing in Google for so long. The other piece of it was that my husband and I had a great set up. We liked our house. We had a lot of friends. We were in a great place, but we still both grew up in more rural places. We grew up where we could be outside on our own and play in the woods. We did start to talk about like, ‘Is this where we want to be long-term? Do we want to be in a metropolitan area? Is this where we want to raise kids?’ Those things definitely came together to start us thinking about making bigger life changes. Joseph: How did you ultimately come to your decision to leave Google and then move out to Grayling, Michigan? Colby: It was slow in that, from the time that I first found out I was pregnant to the time we moved here, was about two years. I think things really shifted after I came back to work from that first maternity leave. I wasn’t very happy in the role that I was in. There was a honeymoon period of like, ‘Oh, this is great. I’m excited to be back. I’m not at home with the baby, which is great, a nice relief. I can have a coffee,’ but I just wasn’t really happy in the role that I was in. I’ve been on the same team, working with people that I really liked, but the actual project that we were working on we’ve been working on for almost four years or something. It was very clear that I had kind of ran out of my ability to keep growing and that what was going to be expected of me was that I did keep growing in order to have good performance reviews and get promoted and all that stuff, but I couldn’t really see a path where I was going to have enough responsibility. I was pretty miserable, but I didn’t realize it. My husband was the one who would say to me like, ‘You’re not very happy,’ when I would come home from wor…

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Focusing on the Present with Caroline Yeats- CR62 Aug 01, 2019

Show notes

When it comes to your health, you never really know when things can take a turn. Caroline Yeats shares her story of relaunching her career as an investment banker to become a nutritionist after being diagnosed with incurable Stage IV bowel cancer in her early 30s. We’ll discuss investing your time in only those things that matter and treating each day as if it’s your last. The week we had planned to record this conversation, Caroline actually had to have a sudden, emergency heart surgery, but she very generously insisted on still doing this recording, which gives you a glimpse into her positive attitudes about life and work. During today’s Mental Fuel segment, I’ll share the steps I’m trying to take to create the future I desire. Key Career Insights When you’re in a balanced place in life and invested your time doing things you care about, you can truly enjoy each day. Doing things that make you miserable is not worth it because life is just too short. Thinking about important questions can potentially change the rest of your life. What do you want? What makes you happy? What makes you unhappy? What can you do about it? Imagine what you want your ideal life to look like in 5 or 10 years. What can you do right now to make that happen? You have to decide which issues you will allow to consume you, then reconsider whether it’s worth the stress. Listener Challenge During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I talked about deciding exactly what you want your life to look like in the future. Decide what specific actions you’ll take right now to maximize the chances of making this vision come true. While there are no guarantees things will turn out exactly as you hope, you might as well do everything you can to try and turn your hopes into reality. About Caroline Yeats, Nutritionist Caroline Yeats started her professional life in investment banking after graduating with a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from The University of Oxford. After five years, she joined one of her banking clients, Xstrata Mining, as an Investor Relations Manager. Following the company’s takeover, she was a founding member of a new mining venture, X2 Resources, but a serious medical issue led her to leave her corporate life behind to pursue a career as a nutritionist and found Nutritious Living. She’s currently completing her studies while writing three books, caring for her toddler and undergoing treatment for incurable stage IV bowel cancer. Follow Caroline on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. 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 Caroline know!Tweet a thank you! Review: I’d also love for you to leave a positive review and rating for the podcast on Apple Podcasts, which helps my show reach more people who want to relaunch their careers. Subscribe: Be sure to subscribe to Career Relaunch podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, or Android so you can automatically get each new episode on your device. 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): Imagine yourself in 5 or 10 years’ time and your ideal life, and then think about what you can do right now to make that happen. Don’t wait for 5 or 10 years. Start doing things now that mean that that will be a reality. Joseph: Good morning, Caroline. Thank you so much for coming on to Career Relaunch. Caroline: Good morning. Thanks for having me. I’m excited to take part. Joseph: There are so many things I want to talk with you about today, Caroline. I just want to start by saying I really don’t feel like we can do justice to everything you’ve been through in a half-hour conversation, but I’m going to try. I’m hoping to talk about your decision to leave the world of banking behind and also the impact your health has had on your career decisions and outlook on life. Can you start by sharing a glimpse into what’s been happening in your life, even over the past week? Because especially as it relates to your health, I understand you’ve just come out of an emergency heart operation. Caroline: I have indeed. We didn’t know I would be able to record this, because two days ago, I was still in the hospital having been admitted to A&E on Thursday with fluid around my heart which had to be drained in an emergency. Perhaps let’s take a step back from that. Last year, I was diagnosed with stage four bowel cancer. That means it has spread to various places in my body. My prognosis is poor if I’m honest. It’s an incurable condition although I am having treatment. I’ve been treated with works of surgery, radiotherapy, along with chemotherapy fortnightly, and I’m responding well to it. That’s kind of where I am right now, and I think it’s important to get that because it had influenced a lot of my career decisions over the past few years. Perhaps to step back a little bit further and give you a very brief history of me, I am an Oxford graduate. I studied philosophy, politics, and economics, and the typical way of going into the city and starting working in investment banking. This was 13 years ago now. I went to Deutsche Bank and spent five years there. It was a fantastic career as an early 20-something. I learned a huge amount. I worked with incredible people, both within the bank and on the client side. I was in a client-facing role in corporate broking. I got to spend a lot of time with big companies and CEOs and CFOs, which was just amazing really, as somebody starting out with their career. It was something that I need that I wouldn’t want to do forever. It was very intense. It was very long hours. I didn’t have much of a life, so after five years, I actually moved to one of my clients, a mining company called Xstrata. It’s a very big company at the time. I spent a few years with them. They were then taken over, and I stayed with the CEO and CFO of that company, and we set up a new mining company, which is sort of private equity backed. We raised a big fund to go out and buy mining assets. Unfortunately, that didn’t work out. Then everything kicked off with my health, and three years ago, I decided to leave the city world altogether and started training as a nutritional therapist. That’s where I am at the moment. Joseph: I definitely want to talk more about each of those two pivots in your career. Before we do that, you alluded to the cancer. For those listeners who aren’t familiar with the various stages of cancer, what exactly is stage four bowel cancer, also known as secondary or metastatic colorectal cancer? Caroline: Stage four, as you rightly said, is also metastatic cancer. It just means that the cancer has spread from its original location into other organs. For me, I have cancer that began in the bowel. I had a number of polyps, which are small growths found in my colon, which is the lower part of your bowel, three years ago. That was kind of the start of my cancer journey. At the time, we thought that they were only pre-cancerous. It turns out that was probably not the case unfortunately. I had a couple of small operations, but I was otherwise considered fine until last year, when I started suffering from a bad back which, to cut a very long story short, turned out to be a tumor in my spine. When I had various scans, it was also discovered that I had cancer in my lungs, in my liver, my pelvis, and in various lymph nodes. What had started in my bowel—they discovered that, through biopsies and through tests of the tumor cells—had spread to various spaces, and that’s what made it stage four. Interestingly, I don’t have any tumors in my bowel, which stumps everybody, but that’s just one of the examples of how strange this cancer is, I’m afraid. Joseph: I know that prognosis is a really funny word because nothing is definitive when it comes to cancer, but can you share what the prognosis is here for you, especially as it relates to your stage four bowel cancer, or at least what you have been told? Caroline: The prognosis for stage four bowel cancer is very poor. Five-year survival rates are well under 10%, but there’s a couple of things to say about that. You’ve already alluded to it. Prognosis is an odd thing because all the doctors can do is look at averages, and there is nothing average about my situation to be honest. The majority of bowel cancer patients are over 70. You have to think that when you’re over 70, your life expectancy is not too long anyway, so being young is a positive for the start. Secondly, everybody just responds so differently to treatment. We didn’t know whether chemotherapy was going to work for me, but actually, it’s working superbly. At my last scan, all but one of my tumors had shrunk. If treatment hadn’t worked, my life expectancy last year was 6 to 12 months, but it’s kind of irrelevant because treatment is working. It’s very much now ‘how long is a piece of string.’ My view is I feel well most of the time. Chemo is very hard, but between chemo, I feel very well. I just live life like today. None of us know what’s around the corner, so I try my best not to focus on what might happen but just to focus on what I can control and what I can do today. Joseph: You mentioned that the majority of people who have this are in their 70s. We should point out that you’re actually in your early 30s. Caroline: Yup, that’s right. I’m 34. Joseph: We’re going to come back to this, Caroline. I’d like to get into more detail about your cancer and how it’s affected your career perspectives, but I’d like to start by talking about your career journey, which is the focus of this show. You haven’t always been a nutritionist. You did allude to the time you were at Deutsche Bank as an investment banker. Can we go back to that time, and can you just explain what you used to do during your days as an associate at Deutsche Bank? Then we’ll move forward from there. Caroline: I started Deutsche Bank straight out of university. I did internship, and then I went on to the graduate program, starting as analyst. In time, I was promoted to associates. I worked in a division called corporate broking, which is equity advisory for UK corporates specifically. We used to have set clients. We had an ongoing relationship, and we would help them with anything to do with the equity market. It would be everything from investor roadshows and results to transactions. If they were doing a merger, if they were doing equity issue, we would be involved in this sort of investor market-facing side of that. It was a very hands-on, client-facing role. We worked closely with the mergers and acquisitions and the equity capital markets teams and the debt side as well. As an analyst and associate, you spend a lot of your time writing pitch works, but I was lucky that I could go to a lot of client routines as well. I used to go on investor roadshows. I had a lot of face-to-face time with the clients, which was always for me probably the most enjoyable part. Joseph: I know that investment banking has got to be at least traditionally seen as one of the most premier, high-profile industries out there which I know attracts a lot of people to the industry. After about five years, you mentioned you decided to leave. What made you want to leave that industry behind? Caroline: It certainly had a reputation as one of the best industries to get into. Out of university, it’s what everybody was rushing to do. The starting salary was good. It was glamorous and exciting to a lot of extent, but it is very hard work. I mean my hours were very, very long. I was in it 7:30 in the morning because we got in before markets open, and I frequently worked until kind of 11 to 12 o’clock at night. It’s hard. It’s hard to have a life when you’re doing that all the time. You physically and emotionally burn out. You don’t get to see your friends very much. I’m constantly having to cancel things. I find it very hard to date. All of these things add up. For me, although I did enjoy the work a lot—and I would actually go and do it again. I wouldn’t change how I started my career, but—I always knew that the time would come when I wanted to leave and do something that was a bit more flexible, a bit more sustainable. One of my clients, Xstrata, approached me, and they were looking for a new investor relations manager, which essentially was the internal version of my role at the bank. I knew the role very, very well. I knew the person who’s doing it. I got along with him very well. It was a company I absolutely loved. I had a huge amount of respect for the team there. It was a very young company. It had grown from very little very fast. They were constantly doing transactions, mergers, acquisitions, raising equity, buying new mines, big projects. It was a very global business. I jumped at the chance when they approached me and asked if I was interested in joining the company. Joseph: Was that a difficult decision for you to leave behind, at least on the surface, the perceived more glamorous world of iBanking to focus much more on investor relations? What was hard about that? Caroline: There were definitely challenges involved. I think the harder thing for me was making the decision that now is the time to leave. I’d actually already made that decision when Xstrata approached me. The fact that they approached me and they came up with this very attractive role, which it was well-paid, there was a lot of global travel, there were different perks to investment banking, made it much, much easier actually. I think I’d been struggling to work out, if I left investment banking, what I was going to do. As you said, there was definitely a reticence in taking potentially a salary cut or doing something that was maybe more mundane, so I was really lucky that I didn’t have to do that. I didn’t take a salary cut, and I was doing something that actually, day-to-day, I found even more exciting than I had found investment banking. Joseph: You’re there at Xstrata, it sounds like things are going really well for you. It seems like you enjoyed the work. What happened? Caroline: Not that long after I joined—it was two years after I joined—Xstrata were bought out by their majority shareholder, a company called Glencore. There was an option to go to Glencore. I would’ve had to move to Switzerland, which I was totally open to doing. I definitely considered staying with the new company, but the CEO and CFO decided they weren’t going to. It had started as a merger, and then it became increasingly hostile as it went on. They decided they wanted to make a move, and they asked me to join them to set up their new venture, which was then called X2 Resources. One of the reasons I’d moved to Xstrata was because I liked the team, and I absolutely jumped at the chance. I’m very well with the CEO. I found him to be an exceptional individual, very entrepreneurial, very forward-thinking, and I was really excited by the chance to stay and work with that team and do something of our own. I felt like I had no reason not to. I had no ties. I didn’t have a family at the time, and this was just an opportunity that was only ever going to come along once in a lifetime, so I jumped at it. It was amazing. I mean I learned how to build a business very, very fast. There were six of us in the end. The others were very senior people from Xstrata. We raised over $5 billion, which was a phenomenal amount of money. The challenge is banking, because unfortunately, the market didn’t go the way we thought. We thought we were at the bottom, and we…

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