Breaking Work

#478: Bret Barrie was a Hall-of-Fame and President's Club-winning sales rep and has been a top-producing sales leader in multiple industries. He is also the author of The Selling Edge: How to Reach the Top In Any Sales Industry, and his newest book Promoted: The Proven Path to Career Advancement. We talk about how Brett became the leading knife salesman in the country, how sales is a very under-appreciated skill to learn early, and how he wants everyone to get promoted.

#477: We tend to think of luck as completely random and out of our control. However, every action you take has uncertainty in it, so there is an element of "luck" in everything we do. Here's what we will cover in this episode:

• Luck is a spectrum and can be influenced
• Some luck is out of our influence
• But some luck is within our influence
• Activities to get lucky

#476: So I made a new friend. We're kindred spirits. My new friend is called the fairy godmother of career breaks and sabbaticals.

Katrina McGhee is a Career Break and Sabbatical Expert, creator of the Break Blueprint and the author of the upcoming book, Taking a Career Break for Dummies. As a certified master coach with an MBA, Katrina helps mid-career professionals create happier, more fulfilling lives by designing bold and transformational breaks. Her clients return from their breaks recharged, inspired, happily-employed and forever changed. On their time off, her 60+ clients have traveled the world, launched a business, changed careers and more.

Katrina's work was inspired by her own 20-month career break where she saved $40,000 in just 18 months to quit her corporate job to travel the world. She's now an enthusiastic world traveler and digital nomad. Her advice on career breaks, money, and travel has been shared across various outlets including Forbes, Smarter Travel, Thrive Global, and Yahoo.

We obviously jammed on this idea of a career break and how we both come at that word from different points of view. Katrina has an amazing life story spanning heartache and triumph, and she shares it all.

I look forward to having her on again when her book comes out, but for now, I hope you enjoy this episode with Katrina McGhee.

#475: What is it like to turn a debilitating weakness into your life's work?

Ty Hoesgen grew up on a farm in Canada where the closest town was only 800 people. He was terrified to talk to other people, but once he got his first job, he realized that communication was a huge weakness that needed to be overcome. So he made communication his life's work.

Today, Ty is a top communication coach, #1 best-selling author, and the Founder of Advanced Growth Institute. He helps professionals from around the world communicate with confidence, charisma, and clarity — so they can get more respect, become stronger leaders, and advance their careers.

Motivated by his past struggles, Ty has spent many years and thousands of hours researching, practicing, and experimenting in order to master the world of communication.

Determined to make others' journeys less painful than his own, he's dedicated his life to figuring out the success formula for communication skills.

Ty now uses this formula to help people make progress as quickly as possible — introverts, extroverts, and professionals of all skill levels. With an ever-growing list of client success stories, more people are becoming elite communicators every day!

When he isn't working, Ty enjoys lifting weights, playing piano, experimenting with breathwork, and seeing how long he can last in saunas and ice baths.

#475: I've gotten a lot of questions recently about people needing to switch roles or career tracks. Lots of uncertainty out there that people are grappling with.

But being nimble and adaptable are key skills to living a life of resilience, and ultimately carving your own unique path to success.

Building experience in a new field is daunting.

The BREAK framework makes it incredibly simple.

So here's how I have built experience in a new field and how I advise others do the same.

In this episode, we will discuss:

• How do you build experience in a new field?
• You need to think outside the box and demonstrate how you learn
• Use this process to do it

#474: What does it feel like to bet on yourself? In this episode, we will discuss:

• How it really feels to bet on yourself
• The psychology of why it feels scarier
• My big announcement on the future
• How you can participate in our vision

#473: In this episode, learn how to ensure positive momentum tomorrow.

• We need to create momentum when we tackle any change
• That's our "Belief Flywheel" so we can have confidence to take the next step
• Momentum starts the night before
• Follow this simple 5 minute evening routine to guarantee momentum tomorrow
• Don't forget to pick up a Father's Day gift!

#472 - What happens when you start to notice the invisible scripts that tell you the keys to "success" are be good in school, get a good job, work hard and chase status and accomplishment?

Most people continue to push for those things on the default path. But when you start to notice and question these scripts, you can create a wildly different and more fulfilling path for yourself. But you have to acknowledge the uncertainty, and actually decide how you want to live.

My guest today is Paul Millerd. Paul was a studious management consultant on the "Default Path", but he started to question that path and ended up opting out entirely. Paul gave up a $150,000 salary at the prestigious McKinsey consulting company in NYC, to travel the world and make ends meet through freelancing.

Then he wrote a book about it, self-published and that book has sold over 20,000 copies in the last 12 months!

I devoured his book, The Pathless Path on Audible over the course of a week in the car rides home from dropping my kids off at school or practice.

It is an absolute masterpiece on taking control and living a life on your terms, not anyone else's. I'm extremely proud that I got to talk to Paul and bring our conversation to you today. I hope you enjoy this episode on taking The Pathless Path with Paul Millerd.

#471 - The rub with taking a "pathless path" is that we have to figure out our way, which means trying things.

When we try things we split our attention and can get trapped in the overwhelm of flailing without seeming to make progress.

All the gurus tell us to "focus" and buckle down. But we can only do that when we have high confidence that the path we are on is the right one.

So we have to constantly balance how many options we give ourselves with a system for deciding when to press on and when to kill an idea.

Tune in to this episode to learn more and to learn a hack to deal with overwhelm.

#470 - I have a secret . . . I've been stuck more times than I care to count or remember.

I've had weeks and months go by with no progress, and worse, not knowing what I should even do. It's a terrible feeling of helplessness.

So, I've been dedicating a lot of my time thinking about momentum, how we start to change and how we build belief to deal with uncertainty in life, but particularly at work.

In this episode, we will discuss how to get unstuck by working on your life force.