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Starting Over with Erika Boissiere- CR31 Dec 14, 2017

Show notes

How can you make sense of all the emotions involved with starting over in your career? Erika Boissiere, a former investment banker turned couples counselor, shares insights on the emotions of letting go of one career for another, the impact your career has on your relationships, and the art of starting over. In the Mental Fuel® segment, I also share some thoughts on the how I dealt with the “loss” I felt after leaving one career behind to pursue something else. Key Career Insights Thinking about your future self can help you can clarity on your present self. Can you look yourself in the mirror and say, I’m proud of what I do for a living. Leaving one career behind for another can mimic the emotions of loss. Tweetables to Share You can't ignore unhappiness. Erika Boissiere Tweet This Sometimes, you just know when you're exactly where you're should be. Erika Boissiere Tweet This Resources Mentioned Understand how to manage the emotions of change by downloading my free 7 Stages of Career Change Roadmap. You can also check out a little animated video of the 7 stages below. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83LPVejgujw Listener Challenge During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I talked about the difficulty of saying goodbye to one career so you can pursue something else, how that really does challenge our self-worth and confidence. If you have recently made a major change in your career, and you’re struggling to maintain your motivation, my challenge to you is to remind yourself WHY you chose this path. And even if you haven’t achieved that yet, to take comfort in the fact that it’s still a worthwhile pursuit. About Erika Boissiere, Couples & Relationship Therapist Erika Boissiere is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist who specializes in couples counselling, she founded the Relationship Institute of San Francisco. She’s also an adjunct instructor at Golden Gate University, teaching Masters level courses to students learning to be marriage and family therapists. After working for nearly a decade in the financial services sector for firms such as BlackRock and other buy-side and sell-side firms, Erika followed her passion to help others lead more fulfilling lives, and changed careers to become a couples and relationship therapist. Be sure to follow Erika on Twitter and Quora. 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 Erika know!Tweet a thank you! Review: I’d also love for you to leave a positive review and rating for the podcast on iTunes, which helps my show reach more people who want to relaunch their careers. Subscribe: Be sure to subscribe to Career Relaunch podcast on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Android, or Google Play (it’s free) so you don’t miss out on the latest episodes. Full instructions. Stay in touch: Follow Career Relaunch on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. You can also follow host Joseph on Twitter and Facebook. Comments, Suggestions, or Questions? If you have any lingering thoughts, questions, or topics you would like covered on future episodes, record a voicemail for me right here. I LOVE hearing from listeners!Leave Joseph a VoicemailYou can also leave a comment below. Thanks! Thanks to General Assembly for Supporting this Podcast Thanks to General Assembly for sponsoring this episode of Career Relaunch. General Assembly is a pioneer in education and career transformation, specializing in today’s most in-demand skills. Visit GA.co to lean how to boost your career. Use Promo code ‘RELAUNCH‘ for 20% off your 1st class or workshop. Episode Interview Transcript Teaser (first ~15s): To be there now, eight, nine years later and to be at the beginning again, it was really, really hard. I think that idea that at the time I felt like, ‘Gosh, all those years spent in banking just felt like a waste.’ Joseph: Hello, Erika, and thanks for taking time to speak with me here on Career Relaunch. We’re going to talk today about your time as an investment banker and how you eventually started your own counseling practice. To kick things off, could you just start off by sharing what you’re focused on right now in your career and life as a couples and relationship therapist? Erika: Right now, I am hyper focused on building a business here in San Francisco that’s focused on couples counseling and relationship therapy. What I humbly realized is it takes quite a bit to launch a business. I’m well underway, but to grow your business is sort of where I’m at at this point, trying to climb the walls of Google and make brand awareness the focus. Joseph: What do you think has been the hardest part of starting your own practice so far? Erika: I think all of us, at some point, when you’re sort of hanging your shingle so to speak, you have a vision of what you want it to be. I remember that vision a long time ago when I first started my Master’s program at University of San Francisco. To create that vision, it takes just an incredible amount of work, whether it’s building your website, setting up a call, call central for all the therapists that are on our team, to SEO, to writing blogs, just the amount of work that it takes to create a business. Joseph: I definitely want to hear more details about how you founded your practice. Let’s come back to that. I would love to start by going back in time a little bit, to the days when you were working in the financial services sector. Can you tell us about your work as an investment banker? Erika: I chose my career like many of us did. Around 22 years of age, I had graduated college, and that budding question that almost every single human being on the planet was asking me, which is, ‘What are you going to do with your degree?’ I didn’t entirely know. I had graduated with an economics degree from University of Colorado and was setting my sight on San Francisco. At the time, finance felt like a safe option. It felt like something that I could explain to people easily. It had a really easy trajectory, hypothetically good income if you’re good at it. Back then, I chose that career for the ideas of safety and what would impress people. I just made a decision and then sort of went for it. I didn’t spend an insane amount of time really sort of vetting all the career options. It felt like I was thrust into the corporate world and having to make a decision on which way to go. I like the idea of the stock market, and I like the idea of having that intense job. It’s always where I thrived. So I went into banking entirely conscious I don’t think. That’s how I get started at least. Joseph: When you were thinking about going into investment banking, I know you mentioned that it was sort of this vague impression of what could be an interesting career. If you were to pin down one or two things about investment banking that you felt were most attractive to you, what do you think those were at least in your former self when you’re looking ahead? Erika: I wanted a career that people would be proud of me. Saying that you worked in finance sort of has an appeal so to speak that you’re good with numbers and you can work really hard. That was a huge driver. I wanted that career path that was just sort of laid out. I’m an athlete, and so the idea of sort of training, and if you do this much for this long, then you’ll get to this sort of point. That was really attractive to me. Joseph: Then when you actually got into investment banking, how do you think the reality compared to what you perceived it to be? Erika: In the beginning, my first corporate job, it was really exciting. You got up, and you got work clothes, and you had a paycheck. I’d worked before obviously, but it never had like health benefits and bus pass. Those things were exciting, and living in the city. I don’t know what the exact timing was, but then I think that wore off. I started to realize I just wasn’t excited about what I was doing. Yet I think there was a huge part of my psychology, like what I was telling you earlier. I’m an athlete, and so I was like, ‘No, I’m just going to pound this out.’ I woke up and did a great job and as best as I could work, but there was sort of a slow humming in the back of my brain that this was not it. It was exactly that. It was a slow hum. It wasn’t this loud, ‘Oh my gosh, I got to get out of this job. It’s awful.’ That was not my journey. My journey was very much, ‘This job is okay. Most people would kill for this job. I should be grateful, but I’m not fulfilled. Is that enough to leave a job?’ I sort of wrestled with that for a number of years. It wasn’t something that was keeping my up at night per se. It was just, like I said, those moments where you’re like in the elevator, and you’re like, ‘Is this really what I’m supposed to be doing?’ Joseph: I remember back in business school that investment banking was one of the three most popular areas that people wanted to go to after their MBA, along with consulting and marketing. For those people who aren’t familiar with investment banking, can you just give us a glimpse into what your day-to-day life was like? What were you actually doing? Erika: I worked for what’s called a buy-side and a sell-side firm. The traditional investment banking idea is that we research companies to potentially take them public. If they already are public, to raise some additional money to further their business. Another part of the investment banking that I worked for a good while was in their equity research team. That’s essentially where we do analysis on companies that are already public, and we forecast how well we think they’re going to be doing in the future. This gives the market information on the health of a company. Every quarter, we would get up very, very early and listen to their quarterly release calls. That essentially would tell us how well they did and how well our forecast was. A lot of writing, a lot of number crunching per se, and we did a lot of PowerPoint. Back then, it was only PowerPoint, but they’re called pitch decks, and they were like the bane of my existence because on the 99th slide, it had to be absolutely perfect – not a period out of place, not a pixel off. We did a lot of PowerPoint decks on sort of selling our services. Joseph: I know you mentioned that there wasn’t a moment in time where the skies kind of parted and you decided you want to do something else, but at what point did the analysis and the forecasting and the PowerPoint slide creation start to bother you or start to make you think, ‘Maybe I should consider doing something else with my days?’ Erika: The best analogy I can give you is, if you have an injury, like your ankles hurt or your knees, it keeps aching and aching and aching, and eventually that pain gets so loud that you have to recognize it, I think that would be the way that I would describe it. I was sort of limping along in finance. In finance, you work for lots of different people and lots of different personalities, and the personalities tend to be a little on the harsher side. I had a couple of experiences where you’re just sort of going into work, and those devil in the details that I was mentioning earlier, like that PowerPoint deck and just having managers really upset with you because, on the 118th slide, you didn’t do something correct. That wore me out, and I started to look a little bit deeper inside myself. This is in now my late 20s. I sort of slugged it out for a number of years, and I just started to ask some bigger questions with myself, which is, ‘Is this really what I want to be doing 5 years, 10 years, 15 years? How do I imagine myself at 50 years old? How do I imagine myself at 60 years old? Am I here in this bank? Am I this person that I’m working for?’ When I started to look out a little bit more rather than just straight down, that really helped me. I was like, ‘No. The answer is no to that. I don’t want to be here.’ There’s more to life than being moderately happy or moderately satisfied with my career, which is something that I think I’ve always envisioned even as an adolescent. It was something that I really wanted to be proud of. I wasn’t really proud of what I was doing because I really wasn’t proud of myself. Joseph: Once you started to get these rumblings that maybe this wasn’t where you wanted to spend the rest of your life and when you looked upward in the organization, those roles didn’t appeal to you, what did you decide to do next? Erika: When I was originally in my undergrad, I had originally signed up for my initial major as psychology. I was a freshman at University of Colorado. I was like first semester in, and I got cold feet. I was like, ‘Psychology? I can’t do psychology. The pay is terrible. What does a psychologist really do?’ I just freaked out. At that time though, the reason that I’d chosen psychology was because I had an idea, at the right age of 18 years old, that I wanted to become a therapist, but that felt very, very far and just too hard of a path and too vague. So I swung over to economics, and that felt, like I was telling you earlier, about sort of the earlier part of my journey, that just felt very, very safe. It impressed people and all the things that I named earlier. I had always, in the back of my mind, there’s like that deep desire, a place of wanting to be a therapist but way too scared to admit it to myself, to chart that course so to speak. I would say that that had stuck with me throughout my journey through finance as this low-grade thought that I had of, ‘That would be an interesting career,’ and ‘Could I? Would I? What does that even look like?’ Joseph: What do you think held you back from making that leap over to psychology more quickly? Erika: Part of it was logistics. I just couldn’t get around the hurdle of like, ‘What do I actually physically have to do to realize that dream?’ and the idea of like a Master’s versus a doctoral program. How would I get the loans? How would I support myself, rent and my cellphone bill and whatever, all the other expenses that go into a life? That was the initial holdback. I don’t even know how I went to put this plan together. The second part, which is, ‘Am I capable of this? Am I capable of leaving this lily pad and doing what felt, at that time like I was crossing the Grand Canyon?’ Whether it was telling it to my friends, telling it to my managers, telling it to my family, telling it to myself, it felt way bigger than I actually think it was. Joseph: I think that is quite common. When you look ahead, it seems really daunting, and when something’s quite vague, that doesn’t help. How did you start to put the pieces together? How did you get over that feeling of the chasm being so great between where you are and where you wanted to go? Erika: I started to put pen to paper. We teach that a lot in psychology. Just as you had described, there’s this huge unknown that I was experiencing. When I started to get a little bit more inertia, a little bit more momentum, I started looking at programs. At the time, I don’t even know you could get a PhD, Master’s, and which route I wanted to go, and that there were night schools, like University of San Francisco. I started to brain storm a little bit. Could I hold a part-time finance job and go back to school night time? I actually started to do like that of a rough draft, started to sketch out what my possibilities are, what the numbers looks like. This was all done very independently, late at night, randomly. I would sort of play with it a little bit, and then I started to pick up more momentum when I realized, ‘Wow, there’s a lot of options out there for me.’ University of San Francisco had spoken to me because they had this night school program. At the time I was at Blackrock. I was wondering, ‘Could I potentially ask my manager, “Could I work part-time?” and, “Could I go to school part-time?” Is that even an option that they would support?’ It was…

Full show notes at the publisher

Being Brave with Raluca Comanescu- CR30 Nov 30, 2017

Show notes

What can bravery do for your career? In this episode of Career Relaunch, Raluca Comanescu, an architect turned productivity trainer shares her thoughts on an emotions-based approach to setting authentic goals, the power of accountability, and the importance of self-love. I also share some thoughts on how you can inject more bravery into your own career decisions. Key Career Insights People too often “borrow” goals from others that sound good on paper but don’t really carry the same meaning or importance. Finding and having an accountability partner can help you stay on track with your goals. Emotions are a big part of goal setting. That means you need to pay attention to which emotions are serving you and how you can recharge those emotions. Tweetables to Share To make real progress, be brave. Raluca Comanescu Tweet This You have to love yourself first before others can. Raluca Comanescu Tweet This Resources Mentioned Raluca mentioned that she got her first client on Odesk (now Upwork). Read more about where you can hire freelancers. Brave businesses learn to love failure– great article about bravery from the Drum Marketing Magazine. Geared toward marketers, but applicable to anyone who’s interested in the topic of bravery. Listener Challenge During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I talked about the importance of bravery. I’d welcome you sharing your brave decision in the comments below. Also, if you’re looking for an accountability partner, consider joining the new Career Relaunch Facebook group. About Raluca Comanescu, productivity trainer Raluca Comanescu is a Productivity Trainer, and creator of thefeathers.ink Navigator – the planner to break dreams down into actions. Passionate about design and curious about experiences and emotions, she’s gone from being a full-time architect, to unfolding her design agency, then launching two products to give people more time. After experiencing work addiction herself, she’s now training people to take control of their time, strip away all the junk, and get down to action. Follow Raluca on Twitter, 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 Raluca know!Tweet a thank you! Review: I’d also love for you to leave a positive review and rating for the podcast on iTunes, which helps my show reach more people who want to relaunch their careers. Subscribe: Be sure to subscribe to Career Relaunch podcast on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Android, or Google Play (it’s free) so you don’t miss out on the latest episodes. Full instructions. Stay in touch: Follow Career Relaunch on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. You can also follow host Joseph on Twitter and Facebook. Comments, Suggestions, or Questions? If you have any lingering thoughts, questions, or topics you would like covered on future episodes, record a voicemail for me right here. I LOVE hearing from listeners!Leave Joseph a VoicemailYou can also leave a comment below. Thanks! Thanks to the Forest App for sponsoring this episode of Career Relaunch. Forest is the mobile app that helps you stay focused and present while also helping to plant real trees on the earth. Visit JosephLiu.co/Forest to download the app on iOS or Android today. Episode Interview Transcript Teaser (first ~15s): People usually hide behind easy stuff. In order to see real progress, it’s good to try to do brave things, like things that really scare you. Those things that take you out of your comfort zone. Joseph: Hello, Raluca. Thanks for joining me here on Career Relaunch. Can you just kick us off by telling us a little bit about what you’re focused on as both a productivity trainer and also the founder of thefeathers.ink? Raluca: First of all, Joseph, thanks for having me here. Basically, I want to tell that I’m pretty much splitting my time between two directions. One of them is having my graphic design agency, from where I actually learned a lot of techniques about productivity and how to work with people. Using all those lessons learned, I’m now also focusing on taking my clients and helping them break their dreams into actionable steps and be productive about their work. Joseph: You have also created a really cool planner called the Navigator. Can you just give us a very quick overview of the Navigator, which I have right here in front of me. Thanks so much for sending one to me. Raluca: The Navigator is a step-by-step planner that helps you break dreams down to the next action. It’s not really focused on rigid goals. It’s actually focused on experiences and emotions you want to sign up for and how you are going to bring those experiences and emotions in your life through actions and through manifesting intentions and through connecting with people. Joseph: I definitely want to come back and talk a lot more about the Navigator planner because having flipped through it myself, I’m very fascinated by the various aspects of it. I’d love to talk a little bit more about that. Let’s come back to that, but let’s go back in time a little bit here, Raluca, because I know you haven’t always been running thefeathers.ink. I know that you’ve always been passionate about design, but that came to life in a different way. Could you tell us about your time as an architect there years ago in Romania? Then we can move forward from there. Raluca: It all started as being an architect first. When I was in high school, at the end of the high school, I decided that I want to actually experience something completely different than everything I was doing. I decided to go to the architecture school. I actually went to the architecture and urban planning school, and after that, I was for five years an employee as a full-time architect. It was kind of fascinating because I was learning a lot of things. The most fascinating part about being an architect is the fact that you’re actually connecting with a lot of people, and you’re actually listening to what those people are telling you and how those people are living their lives and you’re somehow trying to connect the dots and create a product for them that fits their lifestyle. This way, we create houses, or even more, I have designed big buildings like hotels. It was very interesting. Joseph: You’re building these big buildings and different types of structures, and then at some point, you decided that you wanted to move on. Can you just take me back to the moment when you made that decision to make a shift in your career? Raluca: It wasn’t that fast from one way to another. There was this economical crisis, and there were no more big projects I could work on in our office. The owner had to fire 90% or 80% of the employees. When that happened, that exact moment, that exact day, I was like somehow fascinated because I thought I was going to be fired as well. That was actually the moment when I understood that my mind was somehow shifted to a different direction. I didn’t do any move right there. It took me like three or four—I don’t exactly remember—a few months anyway, until I understood that there is no more for me to do there. My mind was actually open to experience many more other things. Joseph: Actually that moment when you thought you might get fired made you realize that that wouldn’t be such a bad thing, and then it got the wheels spinning to move along? Raluca: Yeah. Joseph: I know you mentioned that you felt like there wasn’t anything left to do there. What did you do to extract yourself then from your role as an architect to then move on to the next chapter in your career? Raluca: I started learning to design illustrations, build illustrations. Once I did that, I pushed myself to sell those illustrations online so I can see some sort of a progress. I was doing this during evenings and during night times until morning hours. Every day, I was doing this on my own time. At some point, I noticed a job online. My first client was from America, who actually needed my brand new illustration skills. I was like, ‘Well, yes. I would like to try that out.’ I actually took the project, and I noticed that I could make money outside my day job. Joseph: How exactly did you find that client again? The reason why I ask is sometimes people are really curious, how do you get your first client. I’d be curious how you located that person. Raluca: I was probably searching something on Google, and then this project was posted on a platform, on a freelance platform. Back then, it was called oDesk, and now it’s called Upwork. Joseph: I know you got involved when we last spoke about this in some sort of a trailer project. That was a pretty big gig that you had in the United States. Can you tell us a little bit about what that involved and how that project ultimately transpired? Raluca: I knew somehow that something big is going to happen. One day, I received this message from the founder, describing to me the idea and telling me, ‘I know you have the skills to make it happen.’ The project is about building a mobile car service for oil changes. It’s like a Jiffy Lube on wheels. It comes to your house, make the oil change, and then moves on to the next client. We were kind of giving people time back with this project. Joseph: You mentioned something a second ago about you kind of felt like you knew that something big was coming your way. Can you explain what you meant by that, or what were you feeling inside and how did you know that something big was coming your way? Raluca: There is this flow you’re feeling throughout the year, energy you’re feeling throughout the year. The first part of the year was very relaxing. I was recovering from the transition of being an architect to being a brand new graphic designer. I felt I was growing throughout those months. At some point, I felt it was an emotion like deep inside me, saying that all I’ve learned is for something bigger, and that something bigger is going to happen. Honestly, I think it’s some sort of a gut feeling or intuition. Joseph: I’d love to talk a little bit more about the Navigator now. How did you come up with the Navigator, which I kind of interpret it as a planner/journal. Raluca: When I started the first time, I wanted to create a basic planner for me. While I was working with my clients, because some of them did not have the clear picture of their work, of their business, I shared my planner with them to help them get more relaxed and take the heavy part from their brain and put it on paper. I got feedback from them. The feedback was very great, so I decided, ‘Okay, you know what? Why not make this public?’ Because of the feedback I received and because of the struggles people were facing when they were using the initial planner, I actually started questioning myself. I started listening to people. I started connecting dots. All those lessons learned have translated into a new improved version of the Navigator until what it is today, which is most like a coaching tool or an instrument you can use to empty your brain and start organizing your ideas until you find the next step to follow tomorrow or today. Joseph: I’ve got the Navigator in my hands right now. I just got it in the mail yesterday. I’m looking at it, and one of the things that really struck about the Navigator is, compared to a regular planner, this Navigator seems to have so much personality to it. I felt like it had almost a voice, similar to what you had mentioned before, kind of like a coach. I was wondering if we could just touch on a couple of these things I’m seeing in here. Number one, I see that there’s space here for brave actions. Why did you decide to include that as part of the planner? Raluca: People usually hide behind easy stuff. In order to see your progress, it’s good to try to do brave things, like things that really scare you and those things that actually expand your comfort zone, or even better, take you out of your comfort zone. Those brave things are going to actually boost your business. You can do a brave thing in two minutes, and the results might be bigger even than your work for an entire week. Brave is different for each of us. For me, scary is picking up the phone and calling people. Imagine that after I quit Facebook, I was standing in front of my phone and realized that there is no other way I can keep in contact with people if I can’t call them. So I took the phone and started calling people. Joseph: I think one of the interesting things about flipping through this planner—and I think you’re kind of touching on this—is the emotional side of planning and goal setting and how, sometimes, with goal setting, we just put a goal out there, but we don’t really think about the implications on our emotions. Can you explain your emotions-based approach to planning? Raluca: Goal is a good word, but I don’t like to use it that much because, ‘Oh, I have to set up my goals,’ they decide to do something rigid like I want to be a CEO for what kind of company. They set up the goal, and then they are trying all these actions to actually reach the goal, but they never actually ask themselves, ‘Why do I want this? Why is it that important for me? What would I feel if I’m going to be in this position, if I’m going to experience this? Who are the people who I’m going to work with and I’m going to enjoy working with? What are the places I’m going to see if I’m going to reach this goal of mine?’ There are so many things behind the goal. It’s not just the goal itself. It’s the emotions that are triggered. It’s the people you want to meet and the places you want to see. Somehow, it’s better to know those things first because the more you know about you and about the way you want to feel and the experiences you want to sign up for, the goals or those things you want to reach will come your way. Sometimes, it will come your way in a different aspect that you haven’t considered. Joseph: I was looking at your Instagram page, and I don’t know if this relates, but one of the things you mentioned there was this concept of goals remorse. What did you mean by goals remorse? Is that what you’re talking about here? Raluca: Usually, people start creating this unrealistic goals, and those goals are not always honest to themselves. Some of them are borrowed. Like if you have a lot of people talking around you, and you hear about their goals, you hear about their actions, it’s kind of inevitable not to borrow those goals. Whenever you start making your own, it happens that you set up an unrealistic goal for yourself or a borrowed goal for yourself. As soon as you start actually working on that goal, you realize that it’s not for you. So you have this goal remorse soon after you start your action or your journey to reach that goal. Joseph: How do you go about maintaining your accountability with your goals? Raluca: First of all, I decide what I want to achieve in a month, and then I split it on the next actions to follow every single week. I put those actions inside my calendar, inside my Navigator, and then I start making them happen throughout the days. However, I also have an accountability partner. I’m not 100% relying on the Navigator. I also have an accountability partner I talk to. We share our progress, and we share how we experience them and what is working and what is not. That is also one way I suggest people to do it: it’s really important to find a person to hold accountable for their progress. Joseph: How did you go about finding your accountability partner? I think that that is such a great idea. I think about that, and I guess I’m not sure where to start in terms of what makes for a good accountability partner and how you go about finding one. Raluca: My very first accountability partner was my partner. It’s not that something official. We were going home every evening, and we were walking home actually. During our walk, we were actually exchanging ideas like, ‘How was your d…

Full show notes at the publisher

Making Your Next Career Move with Khai Yong Ng- CR29 Nov 16, 2017

Show notes

What does it take to make a bold career move? How do you know when the right time has come to change careers? Khai Yong Ng explains how he relaunched his career from being a pharmacist to a digital marketer & growth strategist in the tech education sector. We’ll discuss not letting your past degree dictate your future and how you can hustle your way into an entirely new industry. Afterwards, during today’s Mental Fuel®, I’ll explain how to decide when it’s the right time for a career change. Key Career Insights Having a backup plan or two can be a great enabler to making that career change you’ve been pondering. You have to take it upon yourself to continue building your skills and staying current if you want to keep up with the rapid evolution of jobs these days. Knowing when to make a big career change is a mix of believing in yourself and taking some bold steps to put yourself out there so you can eventually find your way–even if it takes a few steps. Tweetables to Share Having a backup plan helps you make a bold career move. Khai Yong Ng Tweet This An educational degree doesn't have to dictate your career path. Khai Yong Ng Tweet This Resources Mentioned Khai alluded to Tim Ferriss’ Four Hour Workweek Ramit Sethi I Will Teach You To Be Rich Jon Loomer’s blog focuses on Facebook advertising Listener Challenge During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I talked about the importance of defining your own unique tipping point when you decide the time has come to make a move in your career. Here’s some further guidance on 4 Signs You Might be in Wrong Job and 5 Signs of Career Dissatisfaction. About Khai Yong Ng, Head of Growth at the NEXT Academy. Khai Yong Ng is pharmacist-turned Digital Marketer based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. His curiosity towards the internet and the world of entrepreneurship drove him to leave his prestigious pharmacy profession to venture into the world of digital marketing and online entrepreneurship. He has since then held several important roles such as the Head of FB Advertising operations at Mindvalley and Head of Growth at the NEXT Academy, a coding bootcamp in Kuala Lumpur. Follow Khai on Facebook and LinkedIn. 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 Khai know!Tweet a thank you! Review: I’d also love for you to leave a positive review and rating for the podcast on iTunes, which helps my show reach more people who want to relaunch their careers. Subscribe: Be sure to subscribe to Career Relaunch podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, Android, or Google Play (it’s free) so you don’t miss out on the latest episodes. Full instructions. Stay in touch: Follow Career Relaunch on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. You can also follow host Joseph on Twitter and Facebook. Comments, Suggestions, or Questions? If you have any lingering thoughts, questions, or topics you would like covered on future episodes, record a voicemail for me right here. I LOVE hearing from listeners!Leave Joseph a VoicemailYou can also leave a comment below. Thanks! Thanks to BrandYourself for Supporting this Podcast BrandYourself 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): If things didn’t go well in this career jump, I will still have a backup plan. There were a lot of options which I listed down which convinced me that, ‘Okay, you can do this.’ With that, I stormed out of the toilet, I went to my boss, and I said, ‘I’m done.’ Joseph: Khai, welcome to Career Relaunch. I’m really happy to have you on the show today. Khai: Thanks for having me. Joseph: I’d love to just kick off here by hearing a little bit about your role there at the NEXT Academy. Could you tell us a little bit more about your work there? Khai: My role here is basically Head of Growth. It’s just another fancy startup title. It’s basically marketing, sales, business development, everything under the sun that helps NEXT Academy to grow, to meet its goals. A big part of my job involves marketing and also making sure that our intakes are sold out. Joseph: How many students do you generally have in one of your intakes? Khai: We actually have two classes. We have a coding boot camp, and we have a digital marketing boot camp. All in all, we have about 60 to 70 students a month. Joseph: I would really love to go back right now in time because I know that you haven’t always been involved with this line of work. You used to be a pharmacist. Could you just give us a glimpse back into your life back in the pharmacist world? Khai: That was about six or seven years ago. Back then when I was a college kid, I basically, like many other kids, didn’t know what I wanted to study. We go to our nearest reference point, our parents, and we’ll ask them for advice, ‘Hey, what’s a good thing to learn, to study?’ My dad knew I could kind of study anything. Initially, it was engineering, but further down the line, he suggested I do pharmacy. He was telling me that the career prospects are great. I checked it out, and I thought it was pretty cool. So I went into it. After studying pharmacy, getting my degree and stuff like that, I started to notice something, which only happened when I started working: that maybe this might not be the best career for me. Joseph: What were some of those things that you started to notice that clued you into that? Khai: In Malaysia, if you were to work as a pharmacist, you have to serve the government for a number of years. The way it works is you can’t really choose where you want to work. They will actually post you wherever they like pretty much. I was stationed in this suburban area. It was a nice place, but I’m like a city-folk kind of guy. I was very different. In my first year working as a professional pharmacist in the hospital, I kind of realized that, ‘You know what? Maybe there are more opportunities back in the city.’ Because it was my first year, I decided to suck it up and just see how it goes. I was really excited to see how I could apply my pharmacy degree, everything I have learned into the workplace. I was in for kind of a big discovery – it’s very different. Whatever you learn in college and what you’re applying at work, they’re very different of course. Being in the suburban area gave me a lot of free time, especially at night. Thankfully, there’s internet. I spent a lot of time exploring what’s next. What am I supposed to do? Am I destined to be in a place like this, in a hospital pharmacy for years to come? I started to do some exploring, Googling here and there, see what other people are doing. At that time, my brothers were pretty much in the internet scene. I didn’t quite understand what they were doing back then. I just know that they were making money online. Those were the first words I punched into Google: making money online. It’s sort of opened my eyes to a whole new world of the internet. Joseph: Did you ever think about sticking with being a pharmacist but just moving back to the city and continuing on in that career? Khai: In my first year working as a pharmacist, I was very interested in this whole internet thing that’s going on, but I wasn’t very confident that this was something I could do full-time, not at that point of time. It sounded very cool. I decided to wait a few years because I realized that I have this tendency to jump into things too quickly. I didn’t want to make that mistake, so I told myself that I’ll just let this idea sit in my head for a couple of years. If the passion is still there, chances are it’s something that I really want to explore. I actually moved back to the city, but my workplace was still pretty far. I had a pretty long commute back and forth every single day. At least being in KL, in Kuala Lumpur, I actually had a lot more opportunities to meet people who were in the internet scene at that time, seeking their advice, talking to them, attending events, learning more stuff. That kind of opened my eyes a little bit more. Joseph: Can you walk me through what happened next for you? You’re a pharmacist in Kuala Lumpur. You’re thinking about whether or not you want to branch off into something different. What started to run through your head at this point? Khai: At that time, the startup scene was just in its infant stages, and there was more funding coming in. There were suddenly like mushrooming of companies, like small startups popping up here and there. They sounded really cool, and I was very interested in what they were doing. I just wanted to somehow get into the scene, but of course I had to ground myself in a particular skill. At that time, there was this company that really caught my attention. The company is called Mindvalley. They are a global company that sells products in personal development, self-help, spirituality. I really like the way the company operates because they sell almost everything online. They are based in Malaysia, but they’re selling to the States. That was my first stepping stone into the digital world. Because I knew this was a company I wanted to get into, I started making baby steps towards that goal. It was about my third year in pharmacy in which I was really, really fired up and passionate that I think like this could actually be a possibility for me to apply to this company to just get my foot through the door and start a brand new career into digital. Joseph: Can you explain how you hustled your way into a place like Mindvalley, which seems to have very little to do with your former background as a pharmacist? Khai: Actually, from my first year to my third year, I was sort of subconsciously planning how I’m going to make my exit because nobody is going to hire me if I had no experience to boot. In the day, I was a pharmacist, and at night, I was trying to gain experience by trying to sell things online. What really got me started was reading a lot of books. Tim Ferriss’ 4-Hour Workweek was one of my favorite books. I would say he really influenced me a lot. Also Ramit Sethi, I Will Teach You to be Rich, he has a really cool blog about personal finance. Also, he really challenges you to push your boundaries, like asking for raises and stuff like that. These guys were people I look up to whenever I was searching for an inspiration to make a leap. Back then, there were no formal training institutes where you can go to. Unlike now, you can go to a digital marketing course. Back then, it was like a cowboy town, the Wild Wild West. You had to hustle. You got to learn everything from gurus. You had to spend money on your own investing courses, not knowing whether these courses would give you the result that you want. I went ahead and did it anyways. The tipping point was when I had made my first dollar online. It didn’t feel great because it felt a little bit scammy the way I did it. I just accepted that these are how the ways things are done, but deep down inside, I knew there was this Mindvalley, and they were doing things properly. They were actually selling things online. It was digital products, but they had physical products as well. I did a lot of experiments. I sold a couple of digital products as an affiliate marketer at first, and I went to try to create my own products and try to sell things online. I didn’t make a lot of money, but I did a lot of experiments. I had a lot of failures, and it’s these experiments which I used as my ammo or marketing ammo as I call it when I went to apply for Mindvalley. I said, ‘Hey, I failed more than any of your marketers,’ and I gave them a whole list of random stuff that I did that didn’t work. I think that kind of helped as well when it came to the interviews. Joseph: Before we get to your time there as the Head of Facebook Advertising Operations, can you just take us through the mental shift that you had to make so that you could be comfortable with this change? Khai: I guess the biggest mental shift that I had to overcome was helping my parents to understand that I’m not crazy, because the degree was not cheap, and to make a jump into this totally new field is something that most Asian parents will not jive with. I had to really show them how prepared I was and how serious I am and those kind of things, not that they are controlling me or anything. It’s just, I don’t want to disappoint them. I don’t think any kid wants to disappoint their parents that you’ve studied so hard, you worked so hard. I just want to show that I’ve don’t my homework before I did any of this just so that they can have a peace of mind. The second thing is for myself. Am I truly ready to make this career shift? Is it something that is just like a fad, like I make this career shift and things don’t work out? Do I have a backup plan and stuff like that? Actually, I had a very interesting story of the final decision where I decided, ‘Okay, I’m done. I quit. I’m going to join this.’ I was sitting on a toilet bowl in the hospital. Pharmacists, we carry like a pen and paper, a notepad everywhere we go. I sat down on the toilet bowl, and I started scribbling down just reasons why this is going to work. I had to convince myself that this will work. There were 10 solid reasons of why, if things didn’t go well in this career jump, I will still have a backup plan. After writing down the 10 things, I realized that it’s not so bad. I was more convinced that, if anything were to happen, I always have a backup plan. For example, technically, I have my pharmacy license. If things don’t work out, I could go back to becoming a pharmacist. Then I could always work for my brother. I could start my own thing. There were a lot of options which I listed down which convinced me that, ‘Okay, Khai Yong, you’re ready. You can do this.’ With that, I stormed out of the toilet. I went to my boss, and I said, ‘I’m done.’ I did go to Mindvalley and sit for the interviews. I did not already have a job, but I decided to quit anyways because I was so convinced that if I don’t do this, I’m never going to do this. I’ve never looked back ever since. Joseph: How did you decide that this was the right time and that this was sort of a ‘now or never’ moment? Khai: Like I said, it was something that I was thinking about since my first year as a pharmacist. I told myself I want to wait a couple of years, and if the idea’s still there, if the passion is still there, it seems like something that I must do. It’s not something that happened overnight. It’s something that happened over a span of a few years. Of course, there’s a lot of convincing you need to do. Like I said, you have to convince yourself. You need to make sure you’re prepared. You need to get the relevant experience before you make a career jump, making sure that things are all right. Then you know it’s time to make that leap. Joseph: I see. Wow, there’s a serious storm happening over there. One of the thing that you mentioned to me when we were talking before was your degree and how your degree can sometimes be the thing that defines you. Yet in this case, you were able to define yourself in ways that went beyond your degree. Can you explain to us how you went about that and how you thought about your pharmacist degree and that investment and how that then related to what you’re going to do in the future? Khai: It doesn’t matter, because a degree gives you the relevant experience, yes, but it doesn’t ultimately determine your success in life. Joseph: You’re at Mindvalley. Tell us a little bit about that shift and what that was like for you to jump into the world of online advertising there. Khai: When I applied for Mindvalley, I actually applied for the copywriter role. I thought I was good at writing, and I was in for a rude awakening when they thought that my wri…

Full show notes at the publisher

**Balancing Work & Motherhood with Lisa Abramson- CR28** Oct 26, 2017
Show notes

Have you ever felt overwhelmed trying to balance everything in your work and life? In this episode of Career Relaunch, **Lisa Abramson** shares her story of how she relaunched her career in mobile advertising and PR to become a maternal mental health advocate and mindfulness coach. We’ll discuss the impact of motherhood and post partum depression on your professional outlook and the importance of **self-awareness in your career**. In the Mental Fuel® segment, I’ll share my own challenges **staying present in the momen**t, and a couple ways I stay focused in my own career.

Key Career Insights

Ambition doesn’t just disappear once you become a parent.

You can burn out doing work you hate AND work you love.

Staying mindful of what drives you and fulfills your purpose can help you create a life that’s rich with moments that make you truly happy.

Tweetables to Share
You can burn out doing work you hate AND work you love. Lisa Abramson Tweet This
Being an overachiever doesn’t just stop when you become a mom. Lisa Abramson Tweet This
Relevant Resources

More on postpartum mental health issues:

Learn more about postpartum depression from WebMD.

Learn more about Lisa’s struggle with postpartum psychosis in her Medium post.

Read more about postpartum psychosis from the Royal College of Psychiatrists.

Find more links to Lisa’s motherhood resources she mentioned in her bio below.

How to Spot Mental Health Issues, The Drum, Oct 31, 3017 article.

I also featured **Hannah Fredenberg** in the listener call-in segment. You can check out her post about Spotlight on a Trailblazer, over at her new Bright Steps blog she’s created after moving on from her retail copywriting job, where you’ll find her very gracious summary of the work I’m doing.

Listener Challenge

During this episode’s Mental Fuel® segment, I talked about my own struggles to stay present and undistracted in my own career. I challenged you to **tinker with one new way of forcing yourself to be a bit more present** when you’re working on an important task or project. If you uncover a method that works well for you, be sure to leave a comment below with your tactic!

About Lisa Abramson

**Lisa Abramson** is an entrepreneur, TEDx speaker, maternal mental health advocate and bestselling author of The Wise Mama Guide to Maternity Leave. She founded Wise Mama, the only pregnancy and motherhood site that takes into account that when you become a mom, you don’t stop being YOU. She also co-founded Mindfulness Based Achievement, the New MBA, which teaches high potential women leaders how to create sustainable success. Lisa’s MBA 30 Day Meditation Challenge is for anyone interested in starting a meditation practice, but short on time (like corp leaders & new moms!). It just takes 5 mins a day.

Lisa was recently honored as one of the 100 Most Influential Leaders Empowering Women Worldwide by EBW and lives in Menlo Park, California with her family.

Follow Lisa on 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 Lisa know!
Tweet a thank you!

**Review**: I’d also love for you to leave a positive review and rating for the podcast on iTunes, which helps my show reach more people who want to relaunch their careers.

**Subscribe**: Be sure to subscribe to Career Relaunch podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, Android, or Google Play (it’s free) so you don’t miss out on the latest episodes. Full instructions.

**Stay in touch**: Follow Career Relaunch on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. You can also follow host Joseph on Twitter and Facebook.

Comments, Suggestions, or Questions?

If you have any lingering thoughts, questions, or topics you would like covered on future episodes, record a voicemail for me right here. I LOVE hearing from listeners!
Leave Joseph a Voicemail
You can also leave a comment below. Thanks!

Thanks to the Forest App for Supporting this Podcast

Thanks to the **Forest App** for sponsoring this episode of Career Relaunch. Forest is the mobile app that helps you stay focused and present while also helping to plant real trees on the earth. Visit JosephLiu.co/Forest to download the app on iOS or Android today.

Episode Interview Transcript

**Teaser (first ~15s):** When you’re an overachiever, when you’re used to working hard, those things don’t just get shelved immediately because you become a mom. I know a lot of new moms, especially working moms struggle with this.

**Joseph:** Okay, Lisa. Thank you so much for joining me here on Career Relaunch.

**Lisa:** Thanks for having me.

**Joseph:** We are going to try to cover a wide range of issues today as they relate to your career, including mindfulness, maternity leave, postpartum depression, and some of the needs of working moms, which I know you’re an expert at a lot of these things. Can we just start by having you explain what you were focused on in your career and life before 2014?

**Lisa:** I was running marketing at a technology company, and this technology company was focused on mobile advertising. I was a marketing executive, and doing the traditional over-achiever, climbing the corporate ladder thing, kept getting promotions and raises, and ended up, before I was even 30, sitting in on board meetings and being an executive at this company.

On paper, everything looked great. I was named a ‘Woman to Watch’ by a leading trade publication, and as soon as I got that award, I said, ‘Watch me leave this industry.’ That was the first reaction. I wasn’t actually excited or proud. I was like, ‘Watch me leave and do something else,’ because in my heart, I knew that especially in the world of mobile advertising, putting ads on people’s phones or selling things to people that don’t need more stuff, I was never going to find deeper purpose and meaning in that. So my crisis came early.

**Joseph:** Winning that award, was that somehow a trigger for you to want to make a move out of the corporate world?

**Lisa:** It some ways, it made me realize how misaligned I was, because everyone was congratulating me on it, and it felt like it should have been a really cool accomplishment, but it felt meaningless. For me, it was eye-opening to say something that looks so good on paper and it seems impressive, inside, it’s like, ‘Who cares?’

**Joseph:** When did you start to realize that it was time to leave the corporate world and make a move to do something else?

**Lisa:** I had this stroke of enlightenment in my car, driving up and down the freeway here in California in the 280. I was in my car for about three hours every day because the traffic was really bad and commuting from San Francisco down to Mountain View. It was in those car rides where it just struck me that life is too short, and really, it’s time to make a change.

For me, that change didn’t happen quickly. I actually went in and got all the courage I could muster up to go quit to my boss who is the CEO, but the timing wasn’t right. The startup needed me, and we were raising around a funding, and he said, ‘Please don’t leave right now. This is really a bad time.’ I ended up staying a whole year after initially quitting.

**Joseph:** What were your plans at that time? Were you thinking you were just going to continue to stay on indefinitely? What were you planning on doing next?

**Lisa:** I knew I wanted to do something drastically different, but I didn’t have any idea. I sort of impulsively quit and thought I’ll figure it out after I quit.

Actually, that year gave me a lot of time to work on some small projects. I ended up managing a digital detox retreat where we went up into kind of a cabin in the woods. We actually took people’s devices and had a weekend of connection with absolutely no technology. It gave me a lot of time to work frameworks and talk to people and start to noodle on ideas while I was still at the company. I felt like it was kind of a relief to know my boss knew that I was planning on leaving, but I wasn’t going to start anything competitive.

**Joseph:** The reason why I mentioned 2014 before was I know that, in early 2014, you had a life change.

**Lisa:** Yes.

**Joseph:** Can you just take us through what happened then?

**Lisa:** My husband and I decided we also wanted to start a family and that why not start working on trying to start a family while I was starting my company because you never know how long it’s going to take or what that road will look like. I ended up getting pregnant about a week after I quit my job and had to start a business, so that was a lot at once.

At the time, I really didn’t know any different, and it was motivating for me to know that, come January 1^st, I better have something that I’ve created and I’m working on, because otherwise, I might have committed career suicide inadvertently.

**Joseph:** Before you went on what I’m going to call maternity leave here—I know that, at this point, you’re working on your own business—before the birth of your daughter, what did you envision your career plans to look like post-maternity leave?

**Lisa:** I think I was a bit naïve. I thought everything would keep ramping up. I take a short leave, maybe a month or so, be off of email for a short amount of time, and then just jump right in guns a-blazing, because that is the hardest, and once you find work that you love and that motivates you, I was already a hard worker, and then I think I turned that dial up to 200% when it was something I was really passionate about and I love.

I think if you have a tendency to burn out in the corporate world even in a situation where maybe you aren’t entirely fulfilled, once you find that thing that fulfills you, you can also burn out doing work you love. For me, it was I had a really hard time stepping away. I didn’t want to stop. I had a lot of momentum I had built up in my business. It was exciting, and I felt like it was helping people and making a difference. So it was hard to step away.

**Joseph:** Can you take me take me back to the moment when you had the shift from focusing on your career and this thing that you loved to focusing on being a mother and a parent?

»

Lisa Abramson & Lucy — **Balancing Work & Motherhood with Lisa Abramson- CR28** Oct 26, 2017
Show notes

Have you ever felt overwhelmed trying to balance everything in your work and life? In this episode of Career Relaunch, **Lisa Abramson** shares her story of how she relaunched her career in mobile advertising and PR to become a maternal mental health advocate and mindfulness coach. We’ll discuss the impact of motherhood and post partum depression on your professional outlook and the importance of **self-awareness in your career**. In the Mental Fuel® segment, I’ll share my own challenges **staying present in the momen**t, and a couple ways I stay focused in my own career.

Key Career Insights

Ambition doesn’t just disappear once you become a parent.

You can burn out doing work you hate AND work you love.

Staying mindful of what drives you and fulfills your purpose can help you create a life that’s rich with moments that make you truly happy.

Tweetables to Share
You can burn out doing work you hate AND work you love. Lisa Abramson Tweet This
Being an overachiever doesn’t just stop when you become a mom. Lisa Abramson Tweet This
Relevant Resources

More on postpartum mental health issues:

Learn more about postpartum depression from WebMD.

Learn more about Lisa’s struggle with postpartum psychosis in her Medium post.

Read more about postpartum psychosis from the Royal College of Psychiatrists.

Find more links to Lisa’s motherhood resources she mentioned in her bio below.

How to Spot Mental Health Issues, The Drum, Oct 31, 3017 article.

I also featured **Hannah Fredenberg** in the listener call-in segment. You can check out her post about Spotlight on a Trailblazer, over at her new Bright Steps blog she’s created after moving on from her retail copywriting job, where you’ll find her very gracious summary of the work I’m doing.

Listener Challenge

During this episode’s Mental Fuel® segment, I talked about my own struggles to stay present and undistracted in my own career. I challenged you to **tinker with one new way of forcing yourself to be a bit more present** when you’re working on an important task or project. If you uncover a method that works well for you, be sure to leave a comment below with your tactic!

About Lisa Abramson

**Lisa Abramson** is an entrepreneur, TEDx speaker, maternal mental health advocate and bestselling author of The Wise Mama Guide to Maternity Leave. She founded Wise Mama, the only pregnancy and motherhood site that takes into account that when you become a mom, you don’t stop being YOU. She also co-founded Mindfulness Based Achievement, the New MBA, which teaches high potential women leaders how to create sustainable success. Lisa’s MBA 30 Day Meditation Challenge is for anyone interested in starting a meditation practice, but short on time (like corp leaders & new moms!). It just takes 5 mins a day.

Lisa was recently honored as one of the 100 Most Influential Leaders Empowering Women Worldwide by EBW and lives in Menlo Park, California with her family.

Follow Lisa on 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 Lisa know!
Tweet a thank you!

**Review**: I’d also love for you to leave a positive review and rating for the podcast on iTunes, which helps my show reach more people who want to relaunch their careers.

**Subscribe**: Be sure to subscribe to Career Relaunch podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, Android, or Google Play (it’s free) so you don’t miss out on the latest episodes. Full instructions.

**Stay in touch**: Follow Career Relaunch on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. You can also follow host Joseph on Twitter and Facebook.

Comments, Suggestions, or Questions?

If you have any lingering thoughts, questions, or topics you would like covered on future episodes, record a voicemail for me right here. I LOVE hearing from listeners!
Leave Joseph a Voicemail
You can also leave a comment below. Thanks!

Thanks to the Forest App for Supporting this Podcast

Thanks to the **Forest App** for sponsoring this episode of Career Relaunch. Forest is the mobile app that helps you stay focused and present while also helping to plant real trees on the earth. Visit JosephLiu.co/Forest to download the app on iOS or Android today.

Episode Interview Transcript

**Teaser (first ~15s):** When you’re an overachiever, when you’re used to working hard, those things don’t just get shelved immediately because you become a mom. I know a lot of new moms, especially working moms struggle with this.

**Joseph:** Okay, Lisa. Thank you so much for joining me here on Career Relaunch.

**Lisa:** Thanks for having me.

**Joseph:** We are going to try to cover a wide range of issues today as they relate to your career, including mindfulness, maternity leave, postpartum depression, and some of the needs of working moms, which I know you’re an expert at a lot of these things. Can we just start by having you explain what you were focused on in your career and life before 2014?

**Lisa:** I was running marketing at a technology company, and this technology company was focused on mobile advertising. I was a marketing executive, and doing the traditional over-achiever, climbing the corporate ladder thing, kept getting promotions and raises, and ended up, before I was even 30, sitting in on board meetings and being an executive at this company.

On paper, everything looked great. I was named a ‘Woman to Watch’ by a leading trade publication, and as soon as I got that award, I said, ‘Watch me leave this industry.’ That was the first reaction. I wasn’t actually excited or proud. I was like, ‘Watch me leave and do something else,’ because in my heart, I knew that especially in the world of mobile advertising, putting ads on people’s phones or selling things to people that don’t need more stuff, I was never going to find deeper purpose and meaning in that. So my crisis came early.

**Joseph:** Winning that award, was that somehow a trigger for you to want to make a move out of the corporate world?

**Lisa:** It some ways, it made me realize how misaligned I was, because everyone was congratulating me on it, and it felt like it should have been a really cool accomplishment, but it felt meaningless. For me, it was eye-opening to say something that looks so good on paper and it seems impressive, inside, it’s like, ‘Who cares?’

**Joseph:** When did you start to realize that it was time to leave the corporate world and make a move to do something else?

**Lisa:** I had this stroke of enlightenment in my car, driving up and down the freeway here in California in the 280. I was in my car for about three hours every day because the traffic was really bad and commuting from San Francisco down to Mountain View. It was in those car rides where it just struck me that life is too short, and really, it’s time to make a change.

For me, that change didn’t happen quickly. I actually went in and got all the courage I could muster up to go quit to my boss who is the CEO, but the timing wasn’t right. The startup needed me, and we were raising around a funding, and he said, ‘Please don’t leave right now. This is really a bad time.’ I ended up staying a whole year after initially quitting.

**Joseph:** What were your plans at that time? Were you thinking you were just going to continue to stay on indefinitely? What were you planning on doing next?

**Lisa:** I knew I wanted to do something drastically different, but I didn’t have any idea. I sort of impulsively quit and thought I’ll figure it out after I quit.

Actually, that year gave me a lot of time to work on some small projects. I ended up managing a digital detox retreat where we went up into kind of a cabin in the woods. We actually took people’s devices and had a weekend of connection with absolutely no technology. It gave me a lot of time to work frameworks and talk to people and start to noodle on ideas while I was still at the company. I felt like it was kind of a relief to know my boss knew that I was planning on leaving, but I wasn’t going to start anything competitive.

**Joseph:** The reason why I mentioned 2014 before was I know that, in early 2014, you had a life change.

**Lisa:** Yes.

**Joseph:** Can you just take us through what happened then?

**Lisa:** My husband and I decided we also wanted to start a family and that why not start working on trying to start a family while I was starting my company because you never know how long it’s going to take or what that road will look like. I ended up getting pregnant about a week after I quit my job and had to start a business, so that was a lot at once.

At the time, I really didn’t know any different, and it was motivating for me to know that, come January 1^st, I better have something that I’ve created and I’m working on, because otherwise, I might have committed career suicide inadvertently.

**Joseph:** Before you went on what I’m going to call maternity leave here—I know that, at this point, you’re working on your own business—before the birth of your daughter, what did you envision your career plans to look like post-maternity leave?

**Lisa:** I think I was a bit naïve. I thought everything would keep ramping up. I take a short leave, maybe a month or so, be off of email for a short amount of time, and then just jump right in guns a-blazing, because that is the hardest, and once you find work that you love and that motivates you, I was already a hard worker, and then I think I turned that dial up to 200% when it was something I was really passionate about and I love.

I think if you have a tendency to burn out in the corporate world even in a situation where maybe you aren’t entirely fulfilled, once you find that thing that fulfills you, you can also burn out doing work you love. For me, it was I had a really hard time stepping away. I didn’t want to stop. I had a lot of momentum I had built up in my business. It was exciting, and I felt like it was helping people and making a difference. So it was hard to step away.

**Joseph:** Can you take me take me back to the moment when you had the shift from focusing on your career and this thing that you loved to focusing on being a mother and a parent?

»

Working Well With Recruiters with Ben de Grouchy- CR27 Oct 05, 2017

Show notes

How can you find the right recruiter when you’re job hunting? What are some of the biggest mistakes candidates make when working with recruiters? What really makes the difference when it comes to getting invited for an interview? Ben de Grouchy taps into his 10+ years of recruitment experience to explain how to work effectively with recruiters and headhunters during your career transition. In the Mental Fuel® segment, I’ll address a listener question about what tweaks you could make in your career to improve your career satisfaction. Key Career Insights When you’re working with recruiters as a candidate, honesty and transparency are key to having a solid relationship. Remember that attitude and interest can trump skills and qualifications if you’re really passionate about landing a specific role. Being on LinkedIn is close to mandatory for any serious professional right now, as it tends to be one place recruiters consistently go to quickly learn more about candidates. Interview Summary How do find the right recruiter to work with? Find specialist recruiter who aligns with your specific professional aspirations (industry, role, geography) Consider Google & LinkedIn as a starting point to find the key recruiters who specialise in your specific area Don’t be too concerned if you haven’t heard of the recruitment agency you identify. Some of the best recruiters run very small, boutique operations. Trust is key! What’s the best way to establish contact? Email- great place to start for a first introductory point of contact. Be specific about what you’re seeking. Phone- can be especially effective if you have a less traditional background, or if you’re making a nontraditional change. Face-to-face- the most powerful way to connote whether you’re a good fit for a specific company. If you take the time to do this, you might also have the opportunity to receive some guidance & feedback on your interviewing skills How much follow up is effective? There’s no exact rule of thumb Best practice is to clarify what cadence is best with the specific recruiter you’re working with. Generally, no need to follow up multiple times a week. Make sure you check a recruiter’s website, and if you spot a role, it gives you a good reason to reconnect with your recruiter and drive top-of-mind awareness with them. Where do recruiters go to find candidates? They start with their known network Referrals from other candidates Advertising network LinkedIn is an incredibly powerful tool these days. Make sure you keep your profile up to date and ensure you’ve indicated you’re open to opportunities. On LinkedIn how much info should you include? When your profile’s more complete, you will be more searchable and findable Having a more detailed profile may allow you to be easier to find, so err on the side of including more rather than less detail (within reason) Having a bare structure is better than nothing at all Do you HAVE to be on LinkedIn? Recruiters will almost always check LinkedIn for a profile. If you’re not on there, it doesn’t allow recruiters to as easily perform some quick research on you. Recommendations can also be a very powerful signal of your effectiveness as a professional. LinkedIn allows you to further improve your credibility online What makes a recruiter more likely to present a candidate to a client? Candidates who ask thoughtful questions demonstrate how seriously they’re taking the process and how interested they are in the exact role. Having a great attitude can often help propel you to the top, even over other more “qualified” candidates. How can unemployed people work well with recruiters? You can actually spin this toward your advantage. Not having a job allows you to invest more time in the job search process. You have to be able to clearly justify WHY you’re not employed.. Make sure you tell the truth and be honest What’s a common mistake candidates make when working with recruiters? People being evasive or misleading about their salaries. What’s something candidates should understand about working with recruiters? Keep in mind that recruiters are paid by their clients/hiring companies to fill a role, not the candidates to get them a job. How effective is it to have a more stylised custom CV/resume? It’s all about the audience. Consider whether the recruiter, HR representative, and hiring manager will appreciate your approach. The standard CV/resume tends to be the least risky, but there are situations where a more gimmicky CV could work if that approach demonstrates a skill relevant to the role. What’s the biggest misconception candidates have about the recruitment industry? Recruiters are not just out there to make money. They want to have a solid, long-term relationship with their clients, which means they have an interest to find the best candidate for a role which leads to high client satisfaction. What surprises you about the types of candidates hiring managers end up choosing? Passion can trump skill. Companies are willing to train people on skills, but it’s harder to train someone on attitude and interest. Transparency and integrity carry tremendous weight, and hiring managers really appreciate this. Any final advice for candidates who want to build stronger relationships with recruiters? When you find a solid recruiter, make sure you invest the time and effort to nurture and maintain that relationship, both as a candidate and a client. The candidate-recruiter relationship doesn’t have to just be transactional in nature. Treat it like an important, long-term professional relationship, and it can pay huge dividends. Tweetables to Share Attitude can matter more than qualifications. Ben de Grouchy Tweet This Asking the right questions can help you get your foot in the door. Ben de Grouchy Tweet This Resources Full write-up on 2015 in-person interview I did with Ben on The Secrets of How to Work Well with Recruiters. Browse marketing & sales roles in the UK on the DG Partnership website. I referred to Episode 19 with Adrian Granzella Larssen who talked about how she made successive tweaks to eventually find her way toward her dream role. Listener Challenge During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I talked about 3 tweaks you could make to improve your job situation: 1) changing projects, 2) changing companies, and 3) changing teams. What’s one tweak you will plan to make with your work or recruitment situation that could help you feel better about your professional situation? Leave a comment below with your plans! About Ben de Grouchy, Recruiter & Founder Ben de Grouchy is the founder of ecruit and director of DG Partnership. With over 10 years of recruitment experience in the UK, Ben currently focuses on online sales recruitment and executive marketing recruitment in the consumer goods sector. His sales & marketing headhunting agency J-DEG, which he cofounded, was successfully merged into the DG Partnership in March 2017 after growing the business from 0 – £1mn+ turnover and employing a staff of 10 people. The DG Partnership works exclusively in the consumer goods sector, from middle to senior management levels and is proud to be a trusted advisor to clients including Pepsico, Unilever and Nestle. ecruit is an online recruitment advertising network that allows companies to hire sales people directly, for up to a 90% discount vs. using a recruitment agency. Check out the ecruit blog where you can find really useful articles about the hiring process, and follow Ben on Twitter and LinkedIn. 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 Ben know!Tweet a thank you! Review: I’d also love for you to leave a positive review and rating for the podcast on iTunes, which helps my show reach more people who want to relaunch their careers. Subscribe: Be sure to subscribe to Career Relaunch podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, Android, or Google Play (it’s free) so you don’t miss out on the latest episodes. Full instructions. Stay in touch: Follow Career Relaunch on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. You can also follow host Joseph on Twitter and Facebook. Comments, Suggestions, or Questions? If you have any lingering thoughts, questions, or topics you would like covered on future episodes, record a voicemail for me right here. I LOVE hearing from listeners!Leave Joseph a VoicemailYou can also leave a comment below. Thanks! Thanks to BrandYourself for Supporting this Podcast BrandYourself 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): It’s amazing how many times I have seen people with the right attitude. Those kind of candidates will be more successful. They end up getting the job over somebody that’s better qualified than them. I always look for somebody that shows a real interest in the role. Joseph: Hello, Ben. Thanks so much for joining me here on Career Relaunch. Ben: Hi, Joseph. Hi. Thanks for inviting me. Joseph: Definitely. It’s good to talk to you again. I know we got a lot to cover today. This episode’s going to be a little bit different from what I normally do on the podcast because it’s going to be a little bit more informational. I’d love to start off by just having you tell us a little bit more about your background in recruitment, and I’d also be interested in hearing about what you’re currently focused on as the Founder of ecruit and the Director of the DG Partnership. Ben: I’ve been working in recruitment now for 10 years. I started off in an agency where I worked for a couple of years just to find my feet before setting up my own business. I was very young. I was 26, 27 years old, and I set up a recruitment agency at the beginning of the financial crisis, which was very interesting. That was focused on sales and marketing recruitment. I just felt that—working for a big, generous recruitment agency, when my clients were telling me they like speaking to me because I was a specialist, I just work in the very niche area—that there was a gap in the market. So we launched our business in 2007 and grew it for about 10 years. We recently rebranded to DG Partnership, and it’s been an amazing ride. We’ve always been specialists in our area, boutique agency, but we’ve managed to pick up some great clients like Pepsi and Unilever and Nestle, who just like our straightforward approach that perhaps they didn’t feel they were getting with some of their other agencies. That was the kind of classic recruitment side of my career. You mentioned ecruit, which is a new project we’ve been working on, which is there to help mainly SMEs actually – small business owners who are looking to build their teams and perhaps don’t have the finance or budget to go and use a recruitment agency. We’ve just got a neat bit of kick that will help them recruit for about 95% less than perhaps coming to somewhere like DG Partnership. They’re slightly different propositions designed to cover the whole market for our clients. Joseph: I definitely want to come back and talk about ecruit because I think that’s an interesting part of your career. At the same time, I want to make sure that we make the most use of your time as an expert in the recruitment industry. Our main focus on this podcast, as you know, Ben, is career change. Whenever I speak with clients or audiences about job search strategies, this topic of recruiters always come up. I notice a lot of people out there aren’t really sure where to start when it comes to working well with recruiters as a job candidate, which is a shame because recruiters can play a big role in your career, especially as you become more senior. If you know how to work well with them, it can really open up a lot of doors, which is definitely the experience I’ve had with you. Let’s dive into this and start off by talking about finding recruiters. How can people go about finding a recruiter to work with? Ben: It depends really on what you do. You need to be really clear on what you’re kind of looking for. Are you a freelancer? Are you looking for a permanent role? What sector do you work in? I think one of the most important things is that you find someone who’s actually a specialist. Talking to a specialist, you’ll be speaking to somebody with an established network of clients in the particular area that you work with him. The best way to go out and find a specialist is going to be very easy for you to spend a bit of time researching Google, having a look on LinkedIn and some of the kind of key groups in your area and finding out the key recruiters that basically specialize in your particular area. The other thing to bear in mind is you might not have heard of these companies before. A lot of these specialist agencies are small one to five-man businesses. That’s absolutely fine. A lot of these guys are very good at what they do, very experienced with a great network. Just because you haven’t heard of them or they’re not recognized or a trusted brand, there’s no harm in reaching out to them. I think the second thing is working with a recruiter that you trust. You must be able to trust this recruiter with really sensitive information, private information that you’ll be sharing with them, information about your salary, your aspirations, and you need to be able to click with the person because they’re going to be walking you through a process that can be really difficult, that can be stressful. Therefore, having someone that’s really got your rear is almost as important as having someone who’s an expert in your area. Joseph: What do you think is the most effective way for candidates to establish contact with you? I know you mentioned this trust issue. Also, there seems to be this debate out there about, in this day and age, is email enough? Is a phone call enough? Do you prefer that someone meet with you in person? What’s your perspective on that? Ben: There are three classic ways that people might contact me. One is through a phone call. Two through an email or applications like a job advert, which will come through on an email. Lastly, it’s face-to-face. Everyone has their own personal preference. I think what would be helpful for some candidates to realize, maybe let’s say in the more genius side of the market is that recruitment consultants are on the phone quite a lot. Therefore, if you’re trying to contact somebody on the phone, they can be frustrating. They might be away from their desk, doing an interview, and there’s no harm in sending an email. I always, always, look at starting off a relationship just with an email – something soft, a nice introduction that would include your CV, a little bit about you. Not a huge covering letter, recruiters generally aren’t interested in that. We want to find out exactly what you want to do so we can make a decision on are you the right kind of person for our client base. I would advise almost everybody to make sure that you’ve introduced yourself on emails as well. If you’ve got a slightly different background—for example, I work with a lot of people from retail buying who want to move across the other side in sales, which a move that you can make. It’s not obvious, but actually you can if you’re the right kind of character—then I think it’s really important to get on the phone or to try and get some face time with your recruiter. Especially if you are at the more kind of senior end as well, then it’s so important to get that face time because you’re going to be judged on your technical ability to do the role. What’s more important is, are you going to fit into the team? Are you the right culture match? Are you going to be able to enjoy working with a company that might have a very specific kind of personality about it? I suppos…

Full show notes at the publisher

Deciding What Matters with Bruce Daisley- CR26 Sep 21, 2017

Show notes

What have you spent your time chasing in your career? Fancy titles? The role of CEO? The opportunity to say you manage a huge team of X people? Have you ever stopped to think about why those things matter to you so much? What drives you to focus on that goal? In this 1-year anniversary episode of Career Relaunch, Bruce Daisley, Vice President of Twitter, EMEA shares his insights on drivers of happiness in the workplace and the motivations behind his own career shifts from Google & YouTube to Twitter. In the Mental Fuel® segment, I’ll explain how focusing on the wrong driver of happiness initially led me astray in my own career and the realization I had that got me back on track. Key Career Insights Job titles and material possessions may create short term bursts of happiness, but they don’t lead to true, long term happiness. What creates happiness at work is not what people give you, but rather, what you accomplish. Happiness is a direct output of what you pay attention to. So pay attention to those things that are truly important. Tweetables to Share Happiness is driven not by what you get, but what you’ve accomplished. Bruce Daisley Tweet This Clarify WHY your goal matters so much to you. Joseph Liu Tweet This Related Resources Bruce’s LinkedIn article entitled Can We be Happier at Work gives a snapshot of the conversations on his podcast Eat Sleep Work Repeat. Richard Reeves, author of Happy Mondays, talks about importance of having good friends in the workplace, a topic Bruce covered in the Friends & Flow Episode 1 of his Eat Sleep Work Repeat podcast. Also, this article in Harvard Business Review on Forming Stronger Bonds with People at Work is a very useful read if you’re looking for ways to build stronger work relationships. Bruce alluded to: Emma Seppala at Stanford University, who writes for the Harvard Business Review and describes how more people are feeling lonely in the workplace. Lucy Kellaway, former management columnist for the Financial Times has now become a math teacher. Alex “Sandy” Pentland of MIT found most creative environments are those that have high levels of short bursts of chat. British economist Baron Richard Layard and Crowdwish founder Bill Griffin focused on micro-happiness when talking about The Smoothie Delusion. Daniel Kahneman said beware the attention illusion. Nothing is as important as it seems when you’re paying attention to it. So pay attention to more important things. Tony Schwartz– The energy project. His campaign is called “Take Back Your Lunch.” Paul Dolan said happiness is the direct result of what you pay attention to. Martin Morales left his life in the music industry to open the restaurant he always dreamed of. Lisa Unwin set up She’s Back to empower women’s return to work after having children. Benjamin Disraeli quote: “Man is only truly great when he acts from the passions.” Listener Challenge During this episode’s Mental Fuel® segment, I talked about identifying one of your career goals and writing down WHY it’s so important to you. Is that STILL important to you? If not, consider focusing on something else that’s more important to you. About Bruce Daisley, Vice President EMEA, Twitter Bruce Daisley is the EMEA Vice President of Twitter. He joined the company in 2012 having previously ran Google’s display business. At Google Bruce had responsibility for YouTube and display advertising. He has also worked at Emap/Bauer and Capital Radio. Previously, New Media Age recognised Bruce as having made the Greatest Individual Contribution to new media in the UK. In 2015, he was voted Individual of the Year in The Drum’s Social Media rankings. He is a digital advisor to Comic Relief, and is a judge in the Design Effectiveness Awards. Bruce regularly speaks on the evolution of work culture and runs a podcast “Eat Sleep Work Repeat” on the subject. The podcast has featured in the iTunes top business podcasts since its launch at the start of 2017. Follow Bruce on Twitter. 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 Bruce know!Tweet a thank you! Review: I’d also love for you to leave a positive review and rating for the podcast on iTunes, which helps my show reach more people who want to relaunch their careers. Subscribe: Be sure to subscribe to Career Relaunch podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, Android, or Google Play (it’s free) so you don’t miss out on the latest episodes. Full instructions. Stay in touch: Follow Career Relaunch on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. You can also follow host Joseph on Twitter and Facebook. Comments, Suggestions, or Questions? If you have any lingering thoughts, questions, or topics you would like covered on future episodes, record a voicemail for me right here. I LOVE hearing from listeners!Leave Joseph a VoicemailYou can also leave a comment below. Thanks! Thanks to BrandYourself for Supporting this Podcast BrandYourself 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): Pay attention to more important things rather than less important things. Is it important whether I’ve got a hundred people reporting to me? Is it important if I’ve got this title that looks great on my business card? Or is it important that I go to work and I feel stimulated and I laugh? Joseph: Bruce, thanks so much for having me here at Twitter in London. I’m very excited to be here, and it’s exciting to have you on the show. Bruce: I’m thrilled. I’m thrilled to be invited. Joseph: I’d love to start by just talking about your role here at Twitter, Bruce. Can you just walk us through exactly what your role is and what you’re focused on right now in your career, in your life? Bruce: The August’s title for it is that I’m the Vice President for EMEA, which is the Middle East, Europe, and Africa. We’re trying to grow Twitter as a tool for people to use to discover what’s happening in the world. We see Twitter as maybe more than having fought it as a news app. How can we get people to use Twitter in Germany, in France, in Spain, in the Middle East? How can we do that? That’s one way of growing. The second one is growing our business, and that means trying to grow or add revenue and deliver some good performance there. My role is trying to spot people who are doing well but need help, people who are not doing well and need help, or areas where we could do a partnership to go faster. It’s just about trying to add little bursts of energy to the work that’s already going on. Joseph: From your vantage point, Bruce, what do you think is the most exciting thing that’s happening right now for you at Twitter? Bruce: When you’re forced to make a decision, when you can’t do both things, it forces you to be reflective. One of the things that we’ve really done in the last year or so is say, ‘What is Twitter?’ We’re not a place that you go and share holiday photographs. We’re not the place that, if you’re getting married, you post images of that. We’re not the place that you share back-to-school photos. What is Twitter? I think we forced our self to say, ‘Okay, Twitter is a place for news, a place for what’s happening.’ I think what we found through that is that our audience has really responded well to that. The audience had been growing incredibly strongly for the last 18 months. By us getting clearer with our thinking, the people who use Twitter have been more responsive to that. It’s a good reminder actually. The clearer you are with what you’re trying to achieve, the more likely you are to achieve it. Joseph: I know you haven’t always been a VP here at Twitter. Before we talk about this topic of workplace culture, which I love to get your insights on, I was wondering if we could go back to your previous roles. We don’t think all the way back but to talk about your time as a Director of YouTube and Google. Can you explain how you landed there and then what happened next for you? We can work forward from there. Bruce: I previously worked in a radio and magazine company. I had, at one stage, a hundred people reporting in to me. I had a fantastic title. Definitely, it would’ve looked impressive if I’d turn up somewhere, because I turned up and flashed my business card, if it was that to a person, then it would’ve been impressive. I was maybe redundant from there. They got taken over and they removed a layer of management. I found myself out of work and deciding what I wanted. I very nearly went and took a job at Myspace. Younger listeners won’t necessarily know immediately what Myspace was. Joseph: I remember it. Bruce: Myspace was the future social media at one stage, but it was long past that era when I was going to join there. My friend said to me, ‘They’re brilliant, aren’t they?’ It made me think. I sat there and I thought, ‘Okay. Write a handful of companies you’d love to work at, and then what are the things that would characterize why you wanted to work there?’ I ended up taking a job at YouTube that paid less. It wasn’t YouTube. It was at Google. It paid less. There were three people reporting in to me, and the title was massively reduced from the heights I’d been to. Joseph: How much did that matter to you? Bruce: Not remotely actually. Not remotely. Once I’ve decided I was going to be happier at least, it didn’t occur to me. I guess the things that go through your head is you think, ‘How do I explain this to other people?’ and, ‘Is there any shame in it?’ I wasn’t ashamed in doing it, and I was quite excited. The thing that was going through my head was, if I join Google, maybe I could work my way to working on YouTube, and YouTube, I think is one of the seven wonders of the web. It’s like one of the most incredible creations of human invention. I thought, ‘Wow, if I could work on that, that would be something, even if it’s only a project.’ I had a clear goal in mind. I’m not a big status person. I’m not really a person who—if I get in a cab even now or if I’m on holiday and someone’s asked where I work, I always say, ‘The internet.’ I never tell people where I work. Joseph: That’s interesting. I would’ve thought that someone who has that privilege to work at a place like Google or Twitter, they would love namedropping that. Bruce: I tend to see things like that as things that separate us rather than connect us. Joseph: Agree. Bruce: It’s a bit like a group in a school. I think I was probably eight and a group in a school in the City of Birmingham. We used to have a map at the start of term, and it would be who’s been on vacation, who’s been on holiday, and everyone would have to say that. Three quarters of the class hadn’t been on holiday. Three quarters of the class had left the pin in Birmingham, and then there was someone who’d been to the South Coast. There’s someone who’d been to France. This was extraordinary. That person got loads of attention. They’d been abroad. People had been to Wales. People had been to different places. Even though I had been on holiday, I left the pin in Birmingham. I didn’t want to appear like I was at advantage to them. I think those sort of things are formative. I feel like if I tell people I’ve got a job that I adore, that I love, that I feel honored to have, it sort of casts their job in a worse light. So I just never talk about those things. As it come to that, because I’ve never felt like anything I’ve accomplished is a badge of honor, consequently, I don’t see if I’d failed as a badge of shame. Joseph: Before we talk about this topic of culture, I am really interested, how did you get past that concept of this sort of superficial, I want to call them societal validators of ‘I work at a fancy company. I got a fancy title’? What sort of mindset do you feel that you have or what do you think people need to have in order to get past some of those? Bruce: If you read a lot about happiness, what you tend to find is that specifically material possession create short-term bursts of happiness, but they don’t lead to purposeful happiness. I think job descriptions, titles, and things like that are exactly the same. That moment you land the job, you feel that burst of adrenalizing energy. Of course it dissipates, right? Short-term successes. So I’m not necessarily preoccupied with cars, houses, watches. I don’t have any of those things. Joseph: Okay. Let’s shift gears and let’s talk a little bit about some of the other work that you do because I know we first crossed paths at the Future of Work Conference in London. Aside from your day job at Twitter, you’re also focused on the evolution of work culture and what drives happiness in the workplace. One of the things we talk about on the show is the importance of doing work that aligns with your values, and you wrote a really interesting article on LinkedIn earlier this year about whether the culture of our workplaces can make us happier. I’d love to just touch on a couple of themes which you cover on your own podcast called Eat, Sleep, Work, Repeat, which we’re definitely going to talk about at the end and come back to, about work culture. The first one is about friends and flow. You talked with Richard Reeves, the Author of Happy Mondays, and this concept of having a close personal friend being really important in the workplace. What’s important about that? Bruce: In this season of Eat, Sleep, Work, Repeat, I chatted to a woman called Emma Seppala. She’s from Stanford University. She’s currently at Yale, and she writes a lot for the Harvard Business Review. One of the things that she’s observed in one of her most recent articles is that half of all people feel exhausted by work, and it’s gone up by 30% in the last 20 years. In addition, people feel incredibly lonely at work. Loneliness is a strong correlate with just this sense of feeling overwhelmed and exhausted at work. To think we can recognize all those things, we tend to talk less at work. There was a brilliant thing by a ‘Financial Times’ columnist called Lucy Kellaway, and she’s turned a lot of her columns into podcasts. One of them is she observed, she’s just left being a full-time columnist to become a school math teacher. In her reflective mode, she said during her 30 years in the Financial Times, she’s observed the volume of chat in the office has reduced substantially. The interesting for her was the chat has gone down, and that seems emotionally instinctively to be a bad thing. But then if you overlay it with any science, this guy called Alex Pentland from the MIT, he has observed that the most creative environments are the ones where there’s high levels of short-bursts of chat. So we’re losing the thing that powers creativity. In addition, people are feeling lonely. All of these things are broken. What happens is we assess life from a micro level. We assess life from sitting in front of our laptops. We survey the job to be done, and the job to be done is we’ve got 100 emails. Going over and chatting to Dara, going over and chatting to Helen feels like an unnecessary diversion from the job we’ve got to do. The end result is we’re feeling overwhelmed, lonely, unhappy… Science suggests we’re less creative as a result. Joseph: The other thing you talked about was the smoothie delusion by these guys, Baron Richard Layard and Bill Griffin. I was first of all wondering about whether you can tell me who these guys are and what you uncovered about benefits and their relationship or lack thereof to workplace satisfaction. Bruce: Bill Griffin’s one of the most entertaining people that you’ll ever have the good fortune to meet. I guess his take on life is micro happiness. His take is, how can I improve happiness one active kindness at a time? Baron Layard is probably the most eminent British economist. He’…

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Handling Rejection with Andy Whelan- CR25 Sep 07, 2017

Show notes

Hear about the the limitations of always playing it safe and why the ability to handle rejection can be such an incredibly powerful asset during your career. Andy Whelan shares his story of how he relaunched his career from being an actor to a small business owner and eventually a career coach. Afterwards, I’ll share my thoughts on how I manage rejection in my own life and career. Key Career Insights When you’re thinking about career change, try to focus on the people you’re going to serve or the value you’ll have an opportunity to provide rather than just focusing on what you gain. Our tendency to avoid pain can prevent us from truly pushing the boundaries of our career and finding work we find more meaningful. Tweetables to Share Challenges are welcome because that’s when I learn. Andy Whelan Last Tweet This Be kind to yourself. Joseph Liu Tweet This Resources Mentioned Andy mentioned his involvement with Young Storytellers, inspiring young people to discover the power of their voice. If you’re interested in hearing more career insights from Andy, he’ll be speaking at the Adobe Max Creativity Conference in Las Vegas, Oct 18-20, 2017. Listener Challenge During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I talked about the importance of identifying one mechanism in your life that can recharge you when you get rejected. What’s one thing that you KNOW you can do to help you stand back up after you get knocked down? If you have a useful technique to manage rejection in your own career, share your tip with the Career Relaunch community by leaving a comment below. About Career Coach & Actor Andy Whelan Andrew Whelan is an accomplished career coach and small business owner. His background also includes performing at The Second City and Late Night with Conan O’Brien. His results-oriented, growth mindset approach to coaching has helped hundreds of graduates and freelancers achieve professional success. His current coaching focuses on General Assembly immersive students and entrepreneurs, guiding them through their branding and job search. 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 Andy know!Tweet a thank you! Review: I’d also love for you to leave a positive review and rating for the podcast on iTunes, which helps my show reach more people who want to relaunch their careers. Subscribe: Be sure to subscribe to Career Relaunch podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, Android, or Google Play (it’s free) so you don’t miss out on the latest episodes. Full instructions. Stay in touch: Follow Career Relaunch on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. You can also follow host Joseph on Twitter and Facebook. Comments, Suggestions, or Questions? If you have any lingering thoughts, questions, or topics you would like covered on future episodes, record a voicemail for me right here. I LOVE hearing from listeners!Leave Joseph a VoicemailYou can also leave a comment below. Thanks! Thanks to General Assembly for Supporting this Podcast Thanks to General Assembly for sponsoring this episode of Career Relaunch. General Assembly is a pioneer in education and career transformation, specializing in today’s most in-demand skills. Visit GA.co to lean how to boost your career. Use Promo code ‘RELAUNCH‘ for 20% off your 1st class or workshop. Episode Interview Transcript Teaser (first ~15s): The first thing was allow myself to feel really rejected for a moment and be okay with it, because as an actor, I was trained to be completely connected to my emotions. But then when I was getting rejected, I would reject on my emotions because I didn’t want to feel it. Joseph: Hello, Andy, and thanks for joining me here on Career Relaunch. I want to hear all about your life as an actor and business owner, but before we get to that, can you just kick us off by telling us about the work you do there at General Assembly? Andy: Absolutely. Thanks for having me today. I’m a Career Coach currently at General Assembly in the San Francisco campus. What I do is I work with our full-time immersive students who go through either 10-week or 12-week, full-time programs in areas like user experience design, data science, or development. I help them through the course, build their materials, like resume, cover letter, learn how to interview, build portfolios, and then I work with them one-on-one when they graduate to make that transition into a new career. Joseph: Can you give us a glimpse into the types of students that end up enrolling in courses there are General Assembly and also maybe a very brief summary of what General Assembly does for people who aren’t familiar with the organization? Andy: General Assembly is an accelerated learning or technical boot camp. It is part of the industry now. What we do is we train people for roles in the technical market, startups, companies anywhere from Adobe, Dropbox, down to very-early-stage startups, from engineering to design to product management and data science. Our graduates graduate in 10 to 12 weeks, and then they move into a full-time job search. They come from right out of college through—I’ve worked with people who were very successful in marketing or animation or other areas. We are international, and we focus on areas that are hiring for tech market and for tech positions right now. Joseph: What are the one or two major challenges that you see that students are struggling with when they come to get your career coaching as they’re enrolled in the courses there at General Assembly? Andy: I think the first challenge is fear: ‘I’m not going to be good enough,’ ‘There’s not enough jobs,’ or, ‘It’s not going to work out for me.’ The other is often in transition. Someone’s worked really hard in their past career, and they’ve been successful, and they’re very unwilling to let go of some of that to focus on what skills they have and the things they’re doing recently to move into the next career. Joseph: Speaking of former identities, I get approached by a lot of career coaches to be on this show. In this case, I actually approached you because you’ve got such a unique background, and I was really intrigued by your career trajectory. I was wondering if you could just take us back in time, Andy, before you’re doing this great career coaching for General Assembly. Tell us a little bit about your life as an actor. Andy: My first career transition probably happened in college. Unlike most people who felt the influence of their family and started studying, I was a premed major, and I started studying… Joseph: Oh, me too. Andy: There you go, right? So we both went through that process. That’s right. I remember when you’re giving your talk, just this idea of having that feeling like, ‘I don’t know. I’m not sure, but I’m already this far.’ As I was studying, I realized it wasn’t bringing me the joy that I thought it was, and I felt like it was a job already, and I was in school. On a bet from a roommate, I auditioned for a play in college, and I was cast in the play. That kind of changed my experience in life in general because I felt like both personally and professionally, I started to belong in a way. Joseph: What was the experience like for you emotionally between going in for that first audition versus all the other premed work that you had been doing before? Can you illustrate what that contrast was like for you? Andy: The way I would describe it is going from black and white to color. I would go to class every day. I did the work. I was in the library all day, and I was very good at that. I’m very good at studying and testing and doing all those things. I just felt like I was checking things off. Then when I moved into auditioning and then getting into a play and going to rehearsal at night, I felt like I was doing something that mattered to me, and it was important. The energy level that I had changed completely. I felt like it’s an idea of I would get up and I was happy to start my day. I felt this feeling that I was doing something that not everyone else was doing. I wasn’t playing it safe, and I was actually enjoying the process. Joseph: What happened next for you with acting? You go in for that first audition. How did you eventually end up breaking into the world of acting? Andy: First, what happened was I went to Circus University. I spent a year there in a Master’s program. I had been building sets for them at Circus Stage. My connections there helped me to meet with the theater department, and they offered me a scholarship to teach some set design courses, work at Circus Stage, and then take an MFA program at Circus University. I went and did that. I went through that process for about a year, and I realized I just did not want to be in school anymore, so I left and I moved to Chicago. I had a connection. Again, the story of my career professionally is really about connecting with people and then saying yes to an opportunity they offer me. Someone said I move into Chicago, ‘Do you want to put your stuff in the truck and go to?’ and I said, ‘Okay.’ I started working, building sets. I was a carpenter and a welder for Steppenwolf. Then the Goodman Theatre out there, one of my connections that I met at a theater I was building sets at said, ‘The Second City is looking for someone to work, and they need someone to sort of stage manage, help out over there.’ So I called them, and I went over, and I started working for them. As I had been for most of my career, I started in a support role and learned as I went and then got an opportunity. I started there stage managing, and then I started taking classes at Second City. From that point, I got the opportunity to write and perform on their business side. That was really my first move into professional acting and writing. Joseph: What exactly does it take to break into acting? I know that you mentioned you started off at Second City. What was the transition for you getting your first big acting role? Andy: What it took for me was a willingness to just continuously fight to get noticed and learn more and then learn how to suppress all the fear that comes around standing in front of people and performing till the point where I did it enough to feel comfortable. On the professional side, it means learning how to have no money all the time. My friends who are successful—and I worked with a bunch of people over there who are now very big stars—they started to get successful roles, and then they were on the news as ‘the new star,’ ‘the new hit,’ but I had watched them struggle for 15, 20 years, having no money, everybody living in a single apartment, pulling your money. One of my friends who’s quite successful now lived in his parents’ house until he got his first big television role. I’m not talking about till you’re 19. We’re talking mid to late 20s because it’s just a very difficult road. It takes incredible fortitude to say, ‘I’m going to do this.’ Meanwhile, all of your friends who you went to college with are now getting married, having children, have careers and cars and regular bills. They have cable TV and you’re shocked that they can pay for cable TV. It was a lot of that. It was just the idea of, ‘Oh, again?’ I’m budgeting to make sure I have enough to eat this week so that I can go audition, continue to learn. Most of it in Chicago for me was doing shows at night for free with my friends because we wanted to perform as much as possible. Joseph: I think it’s very well-understood that becoming an actor or an actress involves a lot of rejection. I was just wondering if you could give us a glimpse into what the auditioning process was like for you. Andy: When you’re new and you are first trying to get an agent or a manager, no one knows you and they’re expecting you to possibly bring an opportunity for income to them, because that’s how they earn their living. It’s that weird middle where no one wants to bring me on to be my agent because I’ve not done anything, but I can’t get into auditions without an agent. It takes a lot of time. You have to go and you have to accidentally run into them everywhere they go. You have to continuously get your friends who are being represented to ask, to walk you in, to meet with them to get started. Then you have to go through the process of getting headshots, putting a resume together. It’s true, if you’ve ever seen a film about actors, you wait in line. Sometimes, I would get in line at 10:00 in the morning in New York City in the winter for an audition for a play on Broadway, and I would maybe get seen at 3:00 or 4:00 in the afternoon. I’d be standing outside the whole time to get in. I’ve had moments where I’ve gone on stage in a Broadway theater and started my monologue and said maybe three words, and someone in the back who you can’t see goes, ‘Thanks so much.’ Then you’re like, ‘Okay, cool. I’m done,’ and that was your day because you spent all day waiting in line. Joseph: Wow, that’s just like that scene in ‘La La Land’ where Emma Stone goes in, and it’s exactly what she goes through. What’s that like to deal with rejection on the spot like that? Andy: What it felt like was a great way for me to step outside and say, ‘Great, now I’m going to show you.’ I was definitely fueled by this idea that anytime you reject me is another bit of energy, another way for me to say, ‘Great, I can’t wait to come back and show you how amazing I’m going to be.’ In the beginning, it was fueled by this anger and this idea that I’m supposed to be here. As my career grew… I’ve had times—I mentioned this to you before—I’ve had a day where I’ve had five different auditions that I was sent to by an agent and rejected by all five. Going through that, how do you then go, ‘Oh, great. Let’s make dinner.’ That’s what I’ve had to go through. The change for me was an understanding of a couple of things. I think the first thing was allow myself to feel really rejected for a moment and be honest, because I went through this phase where I would not get something, and in my head, I was trying to tell this story of, ‘Well, I wasn’t right for it,’ or, ‘They don’t know what they’re doing,’ or, ‘That project’s not very good anyway,’ instead of being honest and saying, ‘I’m really disappointed. It really hurts that they don’t recognize me for this role, because I worked so hard to do the craft that I do.’ The first part was me saying, ‘I’ve got to feel this and be okay with it.’ It’s hard too, because as an actor, I was trained to be completely connected to my emotions. But then when I was getting rejected, I would reject on my emotions because I didn’t want to feel it. Joseph: That’s so interesting, because I’m listening to your story here, and I know that we’re talking about acting, but I think it’s so applicable to other career aspirations that people have whenever they’re trying to shift into a new role or a new job. They put out a bunch of applications, and they never hear back, or they hear back and they get rejected. It sounds like, in acting, it’s about as brutal as it can be because you got someone looking you in the face, rejecting you on the spot. I know I’ve met you before. I know you’re a really positive guy, and you have a lot of resilience, but for those people out there who struggle with the idea of rejection—and I’m one of them. I think it hurts when it happens—do you have any suggestions on how you manage to bounce back again and again? What worked for you? Andy: What I think I go through a lot is this idea that if I don’t get the job, which is the perfect outcome, that it must be the worst outcome on the other end of the spectrum, and I’m really somewhere in the middle. I have to not generalize and say, ‘I’m horrible,’ or, ‘I’m not good enough for this.’ I have to get more specific and say, ‘Where was I in this process? How did I really do this?’ whether it be a job interview or an audition, ‘How did I actually perform that moment? Was I the right fit?’ and then take…

Full show notes at the publisher

Turning Ideas into Action with Colette Russell Smith- CR24 Aug 24, 2017

Show notes

International cover model turned food entrepreneur Colette Russell Smith shares her thoughts on handling setbacks and the importance of turning your ideas into concrete actions. I also explain how I move forward with daunting goals during the Mental Fuel® segment. Key Career Insights If someone says “no,” it may have absolutely nothing to do with you. Persistence is about continuing on in spite of the rejection. By paying close attention to your own behaviours, it can offer clues into what you’re truly passionate about. Maintaining balance requires mixing rigorous planning with time to just decompress. Tweetables to Share Getting 'no' as an answer may have nothing to do with you. Colette Russell Smith Tweet This It's not about what you do. It's about what you get done. Colette Russell Smith Tweet This Relevant Resources Colette mentioned Touker Suleyman from Dragon’s Den. This is a good book on Getting Things Done, by David Allen. If you’re interested in learning more about the modelling agency Colette mentioned in London, it’s Nevs Models. Listener Challenge During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I talked about the importance of turning your ideas into actual concrete actions that drive results. I’d love to hear what bold ideas you’re going to begin acting on. Share your plans with the Career Relaunch community by leaving a comment below. About Colette Cronje Russell Smith, International Model & Food Entrepreneur Colette Russell Smith was born in the food and wine region of South Africa and has always been a passionate foodie. In fact, she liked potatoes so much she decided to change her name: she and her husband Mike will got married in December 2016, becoming partners in life as well as in business. Colette is a keen globetrotter and has lived all over the world. Prior to receiving her Honours Bachelor’s in Commerce at the University of South Africa, she studied film at the New York Film Academy in Los Angeles. Colette is also a qualified Pilates Instructor and is very focused on well-being. She has been an international model for the past 10 years, working with leading agencies across three different continents, representing some of the world’s most esteemed brands in their categories. Colette is now based in England where she’s the co-founder of the SAVOURSMITHS brand, combining quality home-grown produce with big global flavours in stylish packaging for a totally new take on a traditional snack. Follow Colette on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. View a sampling of Colette’s modeling shots . . . Check out the SavourSmiths flavours Colette mentioned. Yum!? 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 Colette know!Tweet a thank you! Review: I’d also love for you to leave a positive review and rating for the podcast on iTunes, which helps my show reach more people who want to relaunch their careers. Subscribe: Be sure to subscribe to Career Relaunch podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, Android, or Google Play (it’s free) so you don’t miss out on the latest episodes. Full instructions. Stay in touch: Follow Career Relaunch on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. You can also follow host Joseph on Twitter and Facebook. Comments, Suggestions, or Questions? If you have any lingering thoughts, questions, or topics you would like covered on future episodes, record a voicemail for me right here. I LOVE hearing from listeners!Leave Joseph a VoicemailYou can also leave a comment below. Thanks! Thanks to General Assembly for Supporting this Podcast Thanks to General Assembly for sponsoring this episode of Career Relaunch. General Assembly is a pioneer in education and career transformation, specializing in today’s most in-demand skills. Visit GA.co to lean how to boost your career. Use Promo code ‘RELAUNCH‘ for 20% off your 1st class or workshop. Episode Interview Transcript Teaser (first ~15s): You get gratification by speaking about exciting ideas and things you potentially want to do and actually then never really do anything, which I think is a really big problem for dreamers. You have to put it to work. You have to really do it. Joseph: Good morning, Colette. It’s really nice to talk with you again and very exciting to have you here on Career Relaunch. Colette: Good morning, Joseph. Nice to speak to you too. Joseph: You’ve got a very interesting mix of professional experiences. You’re an international model, and I know you’re really passionate about wellbeing, and you’re also busy launching a new food brand here in the UK. I want to try to get to all these things, but can you start by telling me about what you’re focused on right now in your life and career? Colette: Right now, I am focused on SAVOURSMITHS mainly, which our brand new luxury potato crisp brand that we’ve started, and also modeling. I’m trying to juggle the two together, but I would say mainly SAVOURSMITHS is taking a bit of priority just because it’s new and it’s like a newborn baby. Joseph: I have to tell you, I went and I picked up a bag of your wagyu beef and honey mustard crisps from Fortnum & Mason strictly to do some research here. I have to say they’re very tasty crisps. Colette: Oh, I’m glad you got some and you like them. That’s good. Joseph: Yes, very tasty. You are our first model that I’ve had on the show and also the first guest from South Africa. I’d love to start today by going back in time, Colette, and digging into your career trajectory as an international model before we get to your time co-founding SAVOURSMITHS. Going back to your modeling days, which I understand you started at the age of 13, can you walk me through how you first decided you wanted to go into professional modeling? Colette: I was in South Africa. I was in school at the time because I was 13 years old. I didn’t find modeling. Modeling found me. I was walking around in a shopping center somewhere in Cape Town, and a scout came up to me and said, ‘Would you like to join our agency?’ I didn’t really know what he was talking about. Afterwards, when I got home, I Googled it, and there was some of the best South African models at this agency. I was like, ‘Oh my goodness, I’d love to do that.’ I spoke to my dad who then said, ‘Yes, you can do it,’ but I’m going with you, and he went and told the agency, ‘She can do it, but she has to finish school, and she can’t supply like zoo,’ and this and that. Joseph: How do you come to realize that you are actually model material? I know that this scout came up, and they found you, but as you’re getting into the industry, how do you start to come to realize that, ‘This could be something I could be doing professionally?’ Colette: I suppose you’ll be more sure the more jobs you get. I suppose if you’re booking no jobs, then you probably know that it’s not for you. You have to be a certain look and a certain height. If you’re really, really short or really, really, really, really tall or big, you probably can’t do it because you have to look generically pretty, take care of yourself, have good skin, good teeth, good physical attributes. Although these days, especially in London, I know people love the androgynous look – the weirder you are, the cooler. You probably have to have a good personality as well. I suppose clients will book you by your looks, but then they won’t rebook you unless you have a good personality, and they love to work with you. Joseph: Can you explain to me how your father reacted to your decision to start to pursue modeling? How did you manage that? Colette: I grew up in South Africa in quite a conservative household. My dad was very much into getting a proper degree. He did inspire me, and I did listen to him because he’s a very successful entrepreneur himself, and he’s made a big success in his own life with his own business in finance, but we did have a lot of arguments because I just wanted to model and act. I started studying originally in Stellenbosch before I did my degree at UniSA. I phoned him one day, and I was like, ‘Hi, dad. I’m quitting. I’m going to Hollywood. I’m going to become an actress,’ and he was like, ‘Okay, fine.’ When I came back, he told me, ‘I think it’s time you do a proper degree.’ I ended up doing Business Management, which in hindsight, was one of the best things I ever did. Without knowing that I’ll get into food products, I did do some product development, product management subjects. I did a bit of logistics, international business, and things like that, which does help me. I think everything you learn at university doesn’t define whether you’ll be successful, but it has been very good to me. It’s kind of grounded me. It’s also made me come to London, which was a very good thing. Joseph: When you were studying, were you still keeping up the modeling? Colette: The deal was always that I could do as much modeling as I wanted to, travel the world as much as I wanted to as long as I do a bit of studying as well. Joseph: I think when most of us think about what it’s like to be a model—or I at least speak for myself—I kind of think of fun photo shoots or fancy events. What do you think are some of the common misconceptions about modeling that you only realized once you were in the industry for a while? Colette: I think that is something that I really think people don’t always get, like you said, the challenges, because it all looks glamorous. You’re always looking pretty. You get invited to nice events. People automatically think that you’re cool probably because you’re a model. It’s really not the case. It’s a very unstable, very saturated market. One of the main things that I really find hard about modeling is that what you put in is not necessarily what you get out. You can go and train as much as you want, work and go to every casting, do everything you can, and then it still doesn’t guarantee anything. There’s no stability, so you don’t really know where your next job is coming from, and you kind of live on the edge, which is fun if you like living on the edge, which I do to a certain extent. I think being an entrepreneur is probably a bit similar. It’s just that whole thing of you’d never if you’re quite good enough. You get a lot of rejection all the time. Sometimes, agencies will tell you, ‘Can’t you please just lose this much more weight? Can’t you wear this type of clothing? Can’t you make your hair this tone?’ It’s just so much criticism and rejection. It’s just a lot of uncertainty. It’s quite an unpredictable place to be. I think that’s also where a lot of eating disorders and things come from, because girls and guys both just start feeling really insecure, but I’ve been lucky. My mother and father has been very good at telling me, no, it’s not me. I’m good enough, and it’s just the modeling industry. That’s been really helpful. Joseph: One of the things that we talk about on this podcast, Colette, a lot is this idea of rejection, because I know when people are trying to make a shift in their career, it’s like what you said: you put in all this effort, and then things don’t always work out. How did you manage those challenges yourself? Specifically the rejection side of the industry? Colette: I grew up with a mother and a father that’s been very, very supportive, which I think plays a massive role in one’s life if you’re lucky enough to have them. It really motivated me and made me quite firm in who I am. I’ve read a lot of books on self-improvement and all of those, and I’ve also had good mentors along my life. I always try to have people that motivate me, are positive, that build me up, which I think is very important. Something that made a profound effect on me is a friend of mine. She booked a yogurt commercial one year, and she did the casting for the commercial the previous year. She said to the director, ‘I did the casting last year. Why didn’t you book me last year if you book me this year?’ He said, ‘Oh, no, no, no. We wanted to, but the producer thought you look too much like his ex-wife who he hated.’ That just kind of puts it to perspective that, often, you think it’s your fault, but there’s so many little things that can play a role in why people say no or yes. You might catch someone at a good time, a bad time. They might be tired. Of course, people can’t say yes to everyone. There is a chance that you will have no as an answer, but you just got to learn that it’s not you. Joseph: It’s a very good reminder that I think it’s hard not to take these rejections personally, and at the same time, it may have absolutely nothing to do with you and some other circumstance that you have no control over. I love to shift gears now a little bit, Colette, and talk about what you did next in the next chapter in your career. What happened next for you? Because I know that you mentioned you moved from South Africa to the UK. Can you describe how your career started to evolve at this point in your life? Colette: At the time when I moved to the UK, I was still studying, and I did an open-distance university so I could travel, do modeling, and study at the same time, which worked perfectly, because obviously, with modeling, you have castings, but they don’t necessarily run the whole day. You can work in the evening, morning, whenever, so it worked really well. I joined Nevs Models in London, which is a really good agency that I have a lot of respect for. They’ve been really good to me. At the same time, they got me so much work, and it went so well that I decided to just live in the UK because it was financially such a good thing compared to South Africa and some other countries in the world. It was a really good market for me, and it still is. Then I thought, once I finish my studies, I’d really like to do something with my life and have my own business. I spoke to someone who had a proper business in finance, and I thought, ‘Maybe I should start doing that.’ At the time, I also met Mike. Mike was quite good. He played quite a crucial role in steering me towards doing something more entrepreneurial. He said, for example, my lifestyle would change so much if, all of a sudden, I had to go to the office every day the same time, half an hour lunch break, commute, this and that. I thought he’s probably right, so I started reading a lot, thinking a lot about what I wanted to do. London is such an inspirational place for new ideas and finding your thing that you want to do because everything is possible. I, then, thought I would go into retail and fashion maybe and do something in that regard. By accident, I bumped into Touker Suleyman, who’s one of the guys from Dragon’s Den. We eventually met up. It was all like serendipity. I spoke to him about doing this thing in retail and fashion, which I thought would be perfect for me because that’s what I’m good at and that’s what I know. Joseph: Was that just a completely random interaction you had with him? How did this opportunity to talk with Touker Suleyman come up? Colette: It was really random. I was standing in the street. I was waiting for Mike. We were on our way to dinner. Touker was also waiting in the street, kind of walked past me, came and stood next to me, and said, ‘Hi, do you work in fashion?’ and we chatted and whatever. I was kind of like, ‘Who is this?’ I have no idea who it is. The next week, a magazine came from my Pace box, and he was on the cover. I was like, ‘Oh my word. I should have spoken to him,’ because he’s obviously quite a successful guy who I can learn from. The next week, it happened again. He was in another magazine. I thought I’m just going to pull up my courage and give him a call. I thought the way I can get his number is I’ll make contact with him on LinkedIn, which I then did, and immediately got in contact, phoned him. We went for lunch the next day, and that’s how our friendship started. It was really funny, but it just shows you once again that even people that you…

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Redesigning Your Goals with Krishelle Hardson-Hurley- CR23 Aug 03, 2017

Show notes

How can you apply design thinking to your own career? In this episode of Career Relaunch, former high school teacher turned Site Reliability Engineer for DropBox, Krishelle Hardson-Hurley explains how she relaunched her career, sharing useful tips on how to use design thinking to plan out your next career move, investing time to create a clear & consistent career narrative, and the opportunities that come from making audacious moves. In the Mental Fuel® segment, I’ll talk about the benefits and drawbacks of setting firm goals. Key Career Insights Focusing too singularly on a rigid goal too soon can sometimes blind you to other options that could be better for you. You have to invest the time to clarify what you want so you can clearly communicate your career story & aspirations to people who count. You should ensure your online narrative aligns with what you’re verbally communicating in person while networking. Tweetables to Share Confront yourself when you're not getting what you want from your career. Krishelle Hardson-Hurley Tweet This When I let go of one goal, I was able to make room for others in my life. Joseph Liu Tweet This Resources Mentioned Check out Krishelle’s helpful blog posts on career change topics 3 Ways to Design Your Career Change– Hackbright Academy blog So you want to be an SRE?– Medium.com The Most Important Lesson My Sister Ever Taught Me – It’s Never Too Late To Change Your Life– HuffPost Krishelle mentioned the book Designing Your Life as a way of understanding how to apply design thinking to your life. Krishelle suggested using Trello as a way of organizing your job search process Learn more about the Bethune Project, which is the art project featuring Black men in America that Krishelle mentioned at the end of the show. More info about the concept of how to apply design thinking to your life in Business Insider. Listener Challenge During this episode’s Mental Fuel® segment, I challenged you to take a momentary step back from one of your goals that’s been an enduring, driving force in your career. To what extent does working toward that goal still make sense? If that goal no longer serving you, what can you do right now to finally let it go & make room for the pursuit of something greater? About Krishelle Hardson-Hurley Krishelle Hardson-Hurley is a former high school mathematics and language teacher who now works as a Site Reliability Engineer at Dropbox. With an eye for design and a love for problem solving, Krishelle’s passionate about building tools that support learning, collaboration and productivity as well as advocating for matters related to education and equity. 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 Krishelle know!Tweet a thank you! Review: I’d also love for you to leave a positive review and rating for the podcast on iTunes, which helps my show reach more people who want to relaunch their careers. Subscribe: Be sure to subscribe to Career Relaunch podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, Android, or Google Play (it’s free) so you don’t miss out on the latest episodes. Full instructions. Stay in touch: Follow Career Relaunch on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. You can also follow host Joseph on Twitter and Facebook. Comments, Suggestions, or Questions? If you have any lingering thoughts, questions, or topics you would like covered on future episodes, record a voicemail for me right here. I LOVE hearing from listeners!Leave Joseph a VoicemailYou can also leave a comment below. Thanks! Thanks to BrandYourself for Supporting this Podcast BrandYourself 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 just said, ‘I want to be a teacher forever, so I’m going to go do that right away.’ You can imagine sort of my head down, focused on just achieving these milestones without actually picking my head up and thinking, ‘Is this really what you want to do?’ Joseph: Krishelle, thanks so much for joining me here on Career Relaunch. I’m really excited to hear your thoughts on how you can apply design thinking to your career and the steps you took to shift from teaching to the tech industry. I was wondering if we could start off though by having you tell us a little bit about Dropbox and your role there. Krishelle: Thanks, Joseph, so much for having me. I’m super excited to share my experiences from my own personal career launch. I’m currently working at Dropbox, which is a cloud data company where we store your data inside the cloud so that you can access it from anywhere on any of your devices. The role that I’m currently in is I’m a SRE or Site-Reliability Engineer. I’m sort of a hybrid between a software engineer and a system administrator. I’m focused on making sure all the systems that Dropbox depends on are reliable and that Dropbox is always available for our users. I utilize code to automate all the processes to make sure that those things happen. Joseph: I know there’s a lot of different roles there at Dropbox. How did you decide on becoming an SRE versus other sorts of roles there at Dropbox? Krishelle: Frankly, I was really looking for a really great running opportunity. I landed in the SRE role because the program was designed around bringing up people who were making a career change as apprentices in this type of role. I was really looking for something that would allow me to learn and be engaged in design conversations. Also, at Dropbox, we’re constantly trying to make our product better and trying to make it more reliable, more available and just create a better user experience for our users. That really forces you to be engaged in these critical conversations around problem solving and design. SRE allowed me to do that from all different avenues. Joseph: I know, Krishelle, you haven’t always been a site-reliability engineer. Can you give us a glimpse into your former life as a high school teacher back in San Diego? Krishelle: Prior to me becoming an SRE at Dropbox, I was teaching for about six years. Five of those years were in San Diego, California. When I went into college, I immediately pursued the route of becoming a math teacher. I had always been very strong in math. Both my parents were math majors. I thought, ‘This is the right path for me,’ and so I ended up pursuing that route. The issue with that is that I don’t think that I spent a lot of time thinking critically about whether that was a job I wanted to do. I didn’t know a lot about it. All of us go through school. We all see teachers work. We don’t always know everything that goes into the profession of teaching. Although I had seen my mom go through it, most of my experience with her was watching her as an administrator, so I didn’t always have a clear view into the classroom. As I got to the end of my program at university, typically when you’re finishing a credential program, you go into what’s called student teaching. That’s like an apprenticeship for teachers where you work under a master teacher and you learn the ropes. As I’m in this program, I’m thinking, ‘This is pretty challenging. I can probably do it.’ I wasn’t sure if it was for me, and I think that’s pretty typical of new teachers. I think a lot of new teachers get in there, like, ‘This is very hard. This is harder than I expected.’ Typically, other teachers will tell you, ‘Give it some time. You’ll get the hang of it. Give it a couple of years, and you’ll really know whether this is the right place for you.’ Joseph: Was there anything in particular that made you a little bit uneasy about doing the teaching that you’re doing? Krishelle: Part of the reason that I ended up leaving was that teaching itself, in addition to this idea of wanting to grow myself, is that it was really exhausting me. At the core, I wasn’t getting everything out of it in order to really feel fulfilled. In that instance, I was able to tell that because my behavior was demonstrating it. I started to do a lot of side projects. The little free time that I did have, I would take on these little projects – things like event planning and cake decorating. I ended up taking a coaching position at my job, and I think I was doing that to sort of mitigate this feeling of lack of professional and personal growth. I’d say, ‘I’ll just take on all this other stuff. Maybe I can find it there.’ Eventually, that really led me to just be very exhausted, and I ended up in a position where I took a coaching position, and I made a commitment that the expectation was that I do that for a very, very long time and end my career in this particular position. I think that was a very important moment for me because I really had to confront the fact that I wasn’t getting everything I needed out of that career. That was the defining moment for me where I decided that it was time to make a change. Joseph: What was the difference between this point of exhaustion and some of those mental rumblings that you had been feeling before? Krishelle: I think at this point, the side projects weren’t even doing it for me anymore. They were not even helping to make me feel fulfilled. Those too were over-exhausting to me, and so I really felt this pull to see what else is out there. I was confronted by the fact, towards the end there, that I hadn’t really thought critically upfront about the choices I was making to go down this path. I knew that I needed to take more time to think about it, and I think when you get to that low point of exhaustion, you start to question all your choices. That’s sort of what happened. Joseph: One of the things that you had mentioned—I think it was in your webinar you gave for women who code—was that you mentioned having your head down, focused toward achieving your goal. What exactly did you mean by that? Krishelle: Once I got into university—I went to the University of San Diego—they asked you to declare a major. I immediately declared math major with the intent on becoming a teacher without even really thinking about it. I was very determined during that time to finish both my credential and my double major that I ended up getting in four years. At that point, I sort of put my head down, and I really focused on reaching the end goal of you will get your degree in four years. It will be in math and Spanish with a teaching credential, and then you will go on to teach. That was what I was focused on. I ended up going on and getting a Master’s because I knew, within the teaching profession, you can actually move up the pay scale if you have a Master’s. So I just said, ‘I want to be a teacher forever, so I’m going to go do that right away.’ You can imagine sort of my head down, focused on just achieving these milestones without actually picking my head up and thinking, ‘Is this really what you want to do?’ Joseph: I’ve definitely been there myself, Krishelle. On the one hand, a goal can be really great, but then on the other hand, it can be a little bit limiting, and it can prevent you from being able to see the other options that are out there. I read a couple of your blog posts on Medium and the Hackbright Academy blog. One of the things that struck me was how methodical you were about your approach to shifting from teaching into what you’re doing right now. For the rest of the conversation, I’d love to dig in a little bit more into specifically how you applied design thinking to your career change. I know that’s something that you’ve talked about before. Could you just walk us through how you applied design thinking to your life and career? Krishelle: The idea of design thinking is that you identify a problem, and then you move on to develop several prototypes that address this key problem that you have. Then you go through this process of testing those different prototypes and keep iterating on the one that is ultimately chosen. This is a process that’s actually used when you’re designing anything, from a coffee to a computer mouse. The problem that I started with was this idea that I’m not fulfilled as a teacher, and so I started to think about, ‘What do I like about teaching? What don’t I like? What are the other things that I’m doing, addressing that teaching maybe is not? What are the central themes about those things that I can pull out and try to make into a career for myself?’ Ultimately, I sort of reframed that problem statement into, ‘I need to find a career where I can use design,’ because designing was very key to all of those different activities I was doing, ‘where I could problem solve on a day-to-day basis and where I could have impact.’ There’s this really fantastic book called Designing Your Life. If there are any folks out there that are looking for some more strategies on how to think through this process, that’s a really great resource for you. What I ended up doing after honing in around this problem statement of looking for design and problem solving and impact, I went forth and tried to create a list of what they called prototypes in the design world where I say, ‘These are the different careers that might be interesting to me. Let me explore them a little bit.’ That’s the sort of testing part of this whole process. Some of the careers I looked at was computer animation. I grew up in SoCal. I was really into watching animated films and Disney, so I thought maybe I could go into that realm and become a computer animator because that blended technology and art and creativity and whatnot. I thought about that and took an animation class. That was my way of testing whether that was going to be an appropriate direction to go, and I ended up not liking that. It wasn’t for me, and so I pivot to another prototype. As I mentioned before, I thought about doing some teacher training, I thought about going into tech as a product manager or an engineer. The way that I went about testing those three is I just started to have conversations with people. I started to reach out to people in EdTech or just in tech in general, different employees, CEOs, things like that. A couple of people that I came across were engineers within tech, not necessarily EdTech but within tech. They started to tell me about how they got to work on different projects, and they were always constantly engaged in this idea of design thinking and problem solving. Ultimately, I learned about a boot camp called Hackbright Academy, which is a software engineering boot camp. It’s three months long, and it actually allows people to make a career change into tech to become an engineer at the end. That was ultimately the route that I chose, because when I went to speak to some folks at that school, I really felt that those thing I was looking were really going to be something that I would get out of an engineering career. Joseph: One of the other things that you had talked about in some of the articles that I read that you had written, this part where you’re talking about testing prototypes is to test enough prototypes, and wait till you have that moment when one of them just speaks to you. Can you just explain how you determined whether something was speaking to you or whether it was just something that you kind of thought was interesting? Krishelle: I had heard about this school called Hackbright, and I went to an open-house that they were hosting. I go in, I sit down, there’s a bunch of other women there, it’s an all-women school, and they had a panel. On the panel was a teacher. It’s like everything I had said to everyone in my life about what I was looking was coming out of this teacher’s mouth in this moment. I think it’s important, as folks are out there and considering this career change, that as you’re talking to different people, if something jumps out…

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Reimagining Your Career with Dinara Kasko- CR22 Jul 13, 2017

Show notes

Your past professional experiences can often play an unexpected role in shaping your future career. In this week’s episode of Career Relaunch, Dinara Kasko explains how she used her training as an architect to now create beautiful architectural desserts as a pastry chef. We’ll discuss the importance of persistence, how to get your work noticed, and how to put yourself in a position to get lucky. In the Mental Fuel® segment, I’ll share a few thoughts on how to leverage your past experiences to create a way forward with your future career ambitions. Key Career Insights Even if you don’t plan to follow a traditional career path built on your educational training, those experiences can still play a part in your career of choice. Persistence and patience are so important when you’re trying to get your work noticed. You never know when you’ll turn a corner and gain traction. Before moving in a new career direction, consider how you’ll create a clear narrative that gives you a “right to play” in that industry. Tweetables to Share Sometimes, you have to do something that scares you to get your work noticed. Dinara Kasko Tweet This Since you can’t change your past, you might as well embrace it. Joseph Liu Tweet This Resources Mentioned Dinara got her big break when she was featured in SoGood Magazine. I discussed the idea of having a “right to play.” You can read more about this topic in this McKinsey article Strategy Under Uncertainty and this Harvard Business Review article on Growth Outside the Core. Listener Challenge At the end of this episode’s Mental Fuel® segment, I recommended you find some way to take one element of your your past experiences to think about how you can leverage your past to open a door to the future. What’s 1 specific element of your past experiences you could use to help you create a unique, “right to play” in the career space you’re trying to enter? Share your actions below! About Dinara Kasko, Pastry Chef Dinara Kasko is a Pastry Chef from Ukraine. After graduating from Kharkov University Architecture School and working as an architect, designer, and a 3D visualizer, Dinara started baking some simple cakes & pies, but quickly began creating more complex, architectural cakes, which turned into her passion. She now uses a unique technique of digitally designing her cakes then using a 3D printer to create molds she uses to build those cakes. To check out Dinara’s amazing pastry creations, follower her on Instagram. A sampling of Dinara Kasko’s creations . . . 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 Dinara know!Tweet a thank you! Review: I’d also love for you to leave a positive review and rating for the podcast on iTunes, which helps my show reach more people who want to relaunch their careers. Subscribe: Be sure to subscribe to Career Relaunch podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, Android, or Google Play (it’s free) so you don’t miss out on the latest episodes. Full instructions. Stay in touch: Follow Career Relaunch on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. You can also follow host Joseph on Twitter and Facebook. Comments, Suggestions, or Questions? If you have any lingering thoughts, questions, or topics you would like covered on future episodes, record a voicemail for me right here. I LOVE hearing from listeners!Leave Joseph a VoicemailYou can also leave a comment below. Thanks! Thanks to General Assembly for Supporting this Podcast Thanks to General Assembly for sponsoring this episode of Career Relaunch. General Assembly is a pioneer in education and career transformation, specializing in today’s most in-demand skills. Visit GA.co to lean how to boost your career. Use Promo code ‘RELAUNCH‘ for 20% off your 1st class or workshop. Episode Interview Transcript Teaser (first ~15s): I’m an ordinary young girl from Ukraine. I’m not a professional pastry chef. Now, they like my work, so they decided to make an article with my work. Also, I think I they gave me a very big chance. Joseph: Dinara, thank you so much for joining me today on Career Relaunch. I’m very excited to hear about your career and all the work that you’re doing, which is very beautifully done. Could you just get us started by telling us a little bit more about the work you do right now? Dinara: Now, I’m working a lot with 3D modelling, so I work a lot at my computer. I’m making different models for different new cakes. I have a lot of ideas, so I try to combine this modeling with my cakes. Also, I attended different classes with different great chefs. Joseph: I would love to hear a little bit more about the cakes that you create. Could you describe that process of the pastries that you’re creating and how you go about it? Dinara: In general, all that I make are ordinary mousse cakes. You can create the same at home because I work at home too. All cakes were made in my home. I can propose my new forms, new shapes for these cakes, so I’m working a lot with this part – with modelling. These cakes are very traditional French cakes with mousses, with lots of cream and gelatin, ordinary cakes with sponge cake, jelly, with different confit, different fruits, with mousse, with white or black or milk chocolate. I like very traditional taste. Joseph: I think you and I, when we spoke before, I told you I used to work in the luxury desserts industry myself, and so I know how much work goes into making a single cake. What you’re doing is a very delicate process. It’s incredible to see the art and the architecture that goes into the cakes that you design. Out of curiosity, how long does the process take you from start to finish? Dinara: It depends on your goal because it can be maybe three hours, but it can take also maybe one month. For example, if I need to print my model, I can print then I can see some mistakes on the model. I need to remodel it and print again, and then I need to cast my silicone mold then make cake inside, and then I need to work also with this recipe which I can put inside. Joseph: I know you weren’t always a pastry chef. You actually started your career in architecture. I was wondering if you could take us back in time before you were creating these beautiful cakes and pastries and tell us a little bit about your time as an architect and a design visualizer I believe is what it’s called in the Netherlands. Dinara: Yes, I worked as an architect in this company in some European company for three years. Also, I worked as a designer for the university of my second course I think. I worked, in general, maybe eight years as an architect, but in Ukraine, it’s not very popular and can’t make a lot of money because we have a crisis now. Cakes are more popular now. I started getting interested in cakes maybe five years ago. I started to attend different classes, and at the same time, I worked as a visualizer in this company, but I realized that to make these cakes is more interesting for me than sitting near my computer and making the same all day. Also, for example, if you work as a visualizer, you can make these models, pictures, different visualizations day-by-day, but you can’t touch this. It’s more important for me to make something that I touch. I like it when I see the result of my work. Joseph: This is something that I know a lot of people talk about who work in large companies. They’re working on projects, and they’re sitting in front of their computer screens, but they never get a chance to actually see the end result or to actually touch and feel the fruits of their labor. How did you get the idea of creating cakes? How did that come about? Dinara: Maybe four years ago, I like to make cake after my work in the evening. I spent a lot of time at my kitchen, but it was just my hobby. I have a lot of friends. They came to my home, and we ate these cakes every week I think. Three years ago, I was pregnant, and I stopped my work as an architect, and so I had more time in my kitchen. I spent more and more time with cakes, with different experiments. Every day, it was more and more interesting for me. Joseph: Do you think that if you had not become pregnant, do you think you still would have pursued this cake passion of yours? Dinara: Yes. Before my pregnancy, I thought about education, about big schools. I wanted to go to a big, professional academy to learn pastry, but I decided that the pregnancy, the children, and family are more important for me, so I chose my family. Joseph: How does an architect shift from working in that industry to working in a totally different industry? Can you walk us through how the early days looked for you when you were starting to explore doing this more professionally? Dinara: Day by day, I made more and more cakes, so I started to attend different classes. I realized that it’s very interesting for me – these textures, colors. It’s very modern – this design, this mousse cake with different glazes, very shiny. Some of these cakes, they look for me like a piece of art, and I saw the great chefs here in Ukraine, and it was amazing for me. I attended classes from different champions from France and Spain and Russia, and I feel like I’m in fairytale because after these classes, I started to makes these cakes with their recipes day by day, every day, every evening. I started to buy different special ingredients, tools, and made different experiments. It was like a big, big hobby, just my passion for my free time. Joseph: At what point did you realize that this could be more than just a hobby, that other people would become very interested in your work, and that this could become something bigger? Dinara: In general, maybe two years ago, I made a page in Instagram. I saw that there are a lot of beautiful pictures of beautiful cakes, and there were a lot of chefs. I tried to make something very beautiful with good photos, and after one of the famous magazines saw my work, they proposed for me to make an article for their magazine. For me, it was the main thing in my career, this article in such magazine. Joseph: How did the magazine find you? The reason why I ask is because there are a lot of people out there. Let’s say they started an Instagram feed, and nobody goes to it. I got an Instagram feed for this podcast, but I might have 200 followers. That’s kind of it right now. Was it just luck that this magazine discovered you? How did they find you or do you know? Dinara: I think all in my life, it’s like a big luck for me. I’m lucky. I have a friend from Kyiv. She’s named Tetyana, and she has a very big academy in Kyiv. This is my first academy. I was here a lot of times in different classes with different chefs. She proposed for me to send a message to this magazine with my work because she likes my work. I sent messages. I sent maybe five times, but every time, this mail went to spam. It was in October, I decided, ‘Okay, no.’ Joseph: Right, it’s a sign. Dinara: Yes, it’s a sign. After that, in January, they sent me a message on Instagram, and they proposed for me to make an article for their magazine on how we can combine architecture and pastry. Then I prepared some works or them. Joseph: So you took the initiative to reach out to them multiple times, and then they finally got back to you at some point. Dinara: Yes, but after it, I saw that there will be a lot of Russian or Ukrainian chefs after my article because I saw that a lot of people would write to this magazine. If you want to make something, if you want to be famous, if you want people to know your work, you need to write to some magazine, some chefs, or some very important men in this world. Joseph: Was there anything that was difficult about reaching out to people early on for you, or was that the fairly comfortable activity for you to be sending your pictures off to these magazines? Dinara: I was scared of course. After Tetyana proposed for me to make a message for this magazine, I didn’t send them any information for maybe three weeks. I was thinking about it. Joseph: What was scary about that? Dinara: Because I’m an ordinary young girl from Ukraine, from a small city, and I’m not famous, I’m not a professional pastry chef, how is it possible to see my work in such magazines like this ‘Sogood’? For me, it was impossible in general. Now, they like my work, so they decided to make an article with my work. Also, I think they gave me a very big chance. Joseph: What do you think has been the most surprising thing about moving from architecture into the world of pastries and desserts? Dinara: For me it was my popularity because I’m famous now. It’s the most surprising so far. Joseph: How has your life changed since becoming ‘famous’? Dinara: In general, I have an ordinary life now, the same life, but I travel a lot, and I have a lot of friends. A lot of people want to contact me to ask me something, to make me some propositions, invite me to different countries, but I try to have an ordinary life like I had before. Joseph: What do you think has been the most challenging part of this journey for you? Dinara: Now, I can’t make ordinary cakes. I can’t show my followers just ordinary red or white cake or some of our traditional cakes. I can’t make myself on Instagram. All works need to be beautiful and professional. I can make now only professional things. Also, I need to combine my ordinary work at home with my daughter with this pastry. I need to make something new every day, some new recipes, so I need to combine all. Joseph: I know that taking care of kids is a full-time job. How do you find the time to invest in creating these beautiful pieces of pastry art? Because I know a lot of people feel like, whether they have kids or not, they have their responsibilities during the day, and they don’t have time to do these other things. How did you create that time for yourself? Dinara: I have a very short answer. I have night. Joseph: You just sleep less. Dinara: Yes, at night. You can work at night. Also, I have a big family, so they usually help me with my daughter. My grandfather can work with my daughter during the day, and I have one or two hours for working. In general, all of our work we do at night. Joseph: I know that you husband is also involved with the process. Can you tell us a little bit about what he does? Dinara: He is the biggest part of our process I think. He helps me with photographs, with videos. Also now, he works with my website. Also, he has a lot of different ideas that we make together. Joseph: One thing that I’m really interested in, just to bring our conversation to a close here, is how did other architects react to you leaving the world of architecture to work in the world of pastries? Dinara: I have a friend. They are architects too. My best friend, of course they’re proud of me. A lot of people are proud of me, a lot of my friends, but now, you can change your career in any time. If you want to be an architect, okay, but if you want to be in some other profession, you can do it easily. In Ukraine, I think in all the world, you can do it. Why not? Because if you’ll be happy in some other way, you can change your way. Joseph: Do you have any advice for someone out there who is in a job that maybe they’re not that happy with and is thinking about making a change? Dinara: You can change your way, you can change your career in any time. Of course you need to make money in your ordinary job for this because you can stop your ordinary work. For example, I can’t be architect today and I can’t be pastry chef tomorrow. You need to change it day by day, so you need to work in two ways. At one time, you can realize that some other profession for you is more interesting. Why not? For example, now, I’m working as a pastry chef. I’m working with cake a lot, but I can change my way. Maybe in five years, I will be dancing or something else. Why not? Joseph: Right, why not? Finally, before we talk about your current projects, w…

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