Career Relaunch®

Our guest on Career Relaunch® podcast episode 91 is a lawyer turned workplace wellbeing consultant Tom Keya. If you’re like me, your stereotypical image of lawyers may involve fast-track professionals in slick suits working at a high-rise office in a big city, working with high-profile clients, and earning lots of money—the kind of stuff you might see on TV.

Tom’s career in a law firm kind of started like this. He lived and breathed the life of a high-flying lawyer in central London, earning a high salary with big bonuses, and in many ways, he felt like he was at the top of his game.

However, the pressure of being a high-performing lawyer began to whittle away at his mental and physical well-being. He lost his health, his purpose, and self-worth by ruthlessly trying to succeed in an intense industry. After eventually suffering a complete mental breakdown, he took a year-long career break and decided to stop practicing law entirely.

Tom discusses his vicious and dangerous spiral that involved drugs, alcohol, and pushing his body and life to the point of total collapse. He also explains the realities of corporate life in a big city and what he did to rescue himself from what became an unhealthy downward spiral. Finally, I’ll share my perspectives on how I think about where I want my career to head in the future during the Mental Fuel® segment.

During this episode’s Mental Fuel® segment, I talked about  identifying what’s most important to you at work. Pinpoint three things most important for you to have in your professional life.

Then, think about how you want things to look across these priorities exactly one year from now. Decide which things you want to refrain from pursuing, to simply maintain as-is, or to proactively obtain. Then, shape your efforts and actions accordingly.

Former lawyer Tom Keya is the owner and chief executive of a corporate wellbeing consultancy and employee wellbeing technology platform Soulh Tech, and a keynote impact investing speaker at the Impact 17+1 Club.

He now works with companies to monitor the health and happiness of their employees and improve employee well-being, happiness, and retention.

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!

Built by linguists and language lovers, Grammarly’s writing app finds and corrects hundreds of complex writing errors — so you don’t have to. Career Relaunch® podcast listeners can download Grammarly for free by going to GetGrammarly.com/relaunch.

Teaser (first ~15s): The mission to the top requires this much effort. And if you don’t do it, you won’t make it to the top. As you perform better, you’re rewarded better. As you work harder, you progress faster. No human being can sustain that level of energy.

Joseph: Okay, Tom. Welcome to the Career Relaunch Podcast. It is fantastic to have you on the show.

Tom: [03:56] It’s great to be here.

Joseph: Let’s start off. Before we dive into your career as a lawyer, and now, your focus on workplace well-being. Let’s talk a little bit about what you’re focused on right now in your career and your life. What is keeping you busy?

Tom: [04:12] First of all, thank you so much, Joseph, for inviting me on your podcast. I’m very excited to share my experience with as many people as I can. Presently right now, I’m working on a corporate well-being platform, as well as doing business development for a lot of professional services firms out here.

Fundamentally, what I do is I go to businesses and I carry out surveys of their staff. Not necessarily to teach them about stress, anxiety, or anything like that. The sort of usual stuff that people do to take a box. But rather to provide CEOs with a proper map of where their staff indexes as at a given time. And we do two types of surveys. The first one is, of course, one about the building. How people are feeling about being in the building. The second one is their mental health and how they’re feeling.

Separate to that and similar side, I work at Rothberg LLC, which is a professional services firm in Dubai. They do a lot of company formations in Dubai, as well as just general advice for companies and families that are here. I do a lot of business development for them.

Joseph: Very interesting. And it sounds like this well-being topic is extremely top of mind right now, especially post-pandemic or I guess, we’re currently still in the pandemic. But I know in most of the surveys I’m looking at, because I focus on career change, a lot of people are starting to look much more at emotional and physical well-being in the workplace. It sounds like you are in the right space at this moment in time.

Could I also ask, Tom, just a little bit about your personal background? I know you mentioned you’re in Dubai right now. Where are you from and where do you spend your time these days?

Tom: [05:49] I was raised in the UK. I’m ethnically Persian. But most of the time, I’m between the two countries. I’m in Dubai a lot longer than the UK, but I try and get to the UK at least one or two months a year just to carry on with what I’m doing in terms of mental health. And it’s very interesting you said that mental health is really in these days. I’ve been probably suffering from this for a good 15 years exactly.

Joseph: We will talk about that.

Tom: [06:15] And for the first five years, I’ve dedicated my life to it. So it was good to catch it right before the pandemic. And I think a lot of people these days are focused on mental health and well-being for two reasons. One, because of the pandemic and everything that arose from there. But also because working from home has now made the employers compete with the comforts of someone’s home. It’ll be interesting to both explore on this conversation.

Joseph: Let’s do this, Tom. Why don’t we first of all go back and talk about your former career as a corporate lawyer. Because I know you haven’t always been professionally focused on workplace well-being. But I know that you also dealt with some issues personally as you were going through your career journey. But why don’t we first of all just start with your career history. And could you just tell me about your time as a corporate lawyer, and then we’ll move forward from there?

Tom: [06:58] There are two types of lawyers in the world. There are those that want to succeed in life and enter the city and play with the big boys, let’s say. And there are those who seek justice for people. I was probably the former than the latter. My father died when I was very, very young. So financial security was very, very big on my mind.

So, I entered the city. I worked at a very good city law firm for I’d say around 12 years, give or take. I worked at the highest level in the sense that I worked through extremely long hours to become a partner in that business and lead effectively a subdivision, focusing on basically, fundamentally, banks and family offices.

Joseph: What kind of hours are we talking about here when you say you’re working pretty hard? Can you just describe like how many days a week? How many hours a day are we talking?

Tom: [07:47] If you want to succeed as a lawyer, you have to treat it like a lifestyle. It’s sort of impossible to treat it as a job. If you want to work 9-to-5, law is definitely not the job for you. So, give or take, 5 a.m. till about 10:30 p.m. was where my hours, give or take. We worked different time zones. I certainly had to get up quite early for my middle eastern clients. And then, you work throughout the day. Pretty much non-stop.

Joseph: Wow! Okay. And this is five days a week, six days a week?

Tom: [08:22] Five days a week, definitely. And then, over the weekend, you’d probably spend four or five hours. Either doing business development meeting some of the clients who can only meet each other on the weekend or more likely catching up on work to make your Monday morning just a little bit gentler.

Joseph: Rightly or wrongly, I guess my perception of the world of law is driven by A, my direct experience working with lawyers may be related to my business or maybe if I’m buying a house. But, probably more often than not, just kind of what I see on TV. And that may not be fair about, you know, “Law and Order,” “Suit.” Like how much do you feel — though, obviously, it’s not an accurate representation of the real world, but what were your perceptions going into law versus your direct experience as a lawyer?

Tom: [09:06] Your perception when you want to enter the legal career is that you’re going to be surrounded by very, very intelligent people. You’re going to be surrounded by academics. And, you’re going to be given these big complex problems to solve, and deals to close, and cases to litigate, and all of these wonderful things that rightly like yourself you see on TV.

The reality of it is markedly different in the sense that — and this is right across all law firms. I’m not particularly picking on one firm or the other. I’m specifically choosing the general market is that you’re going to be dealing with a lot of people who have a lot of personal baggage. You’re going to be dealing with a lot of people who, because their identities are surrounded by law that by being say, for example, a senior person within a team, they effectively treat it like a feudal kingdom.

And also, there’s a lot of just paper pushing, you know. As a junior lawyer, you don’t do anything interesting right up until probably about three years qualified. Until then, you write the bundling papers, or filling out forms, or taking notes.

Joseph: Okay.

Tom: [10:10] You’ll be lucky to get a letter in and out of there. In your image that I’m going to walk in, they’re going to give me all this stuff very quickly crushed when someone says, “There’s 60 boxes in there. I need you to review every single one of them and, hopefully, find one a document that I’m looking for;” which always ends up being on the 65th box, right towards the end. And you take your tie off, you pull up your sleeves, and literally, you’re in a basement and looking through these dirty, disgusting files. Of course, that gives away my age. I think a lot of things are done electronically, but the principle is the same.

Joseph: I’m trying to just imagine you in the basement, doing this as you describe “paper pushing.” What was running through your head at that moment when you started to realize that this was your reality? Did you start to think about doing something else, or did you continue to push forward? What was your MO at the time?

Tom: [11:00] One of the common things lawyers face is imposter syndrome. Because you sort of think, “I’m not good enough for this job.” Certainly, when you’re reviewing those boxes, you don’t feel imposter syndrome.

Joseph: I don’t think I can handle this.

Tom: [11:13] I think the shock that enters the mind isn’t so much about the work you’re doing. Now, you could be very lucky and end up working for a nice person within the team. You, as a junior lawyer, could walk in, there’s super nice guys like, “Look, dude. I’m really sorry to put you through this, but 60 boxes for you to review. Trust me, we’ll go for a beer on Friday. I’ll make it up to you. But I really need you to pay very close attention.” Of course, you do need to pay close attention. Law is a very hazardous job. You miss that document; your client could lose a multi-million-pound case. You end up giving your all at a tedious task.

But in my case, for example, I was quite unlucky in the sense that I ended up working with not-so-pleasant people. There was one person who was awesome that I worked with. But you’re told, probably in very demeaning ways, to do your job. You’re treated very, very harshly. And into that, that makes you reconsider whether you want to do this. Because when you speak to other trainees at other law firms, they’re like, “Oh yeah. There’s this guy. He’s so horrible. He threw a stapler at me,” you know. You’re like, “Wow! Compared to him, I’ve got it pretty good.” But if this is the best out of all my friends, do I really want to do this? But the financial security point that I mentioned earlier really requires one to sort of step in and just take it.

Joseph: Now, before we talk about what impact all this had on you, mentally and physically, I did have one question that you alluded to when we first spoke, which was a dynamic that I think exists in many corporate environments, which is that unless you’re at the top of the food chain in an organization, you’re investing a lot of energy to try to get to the top. Could you describe what your experience was in, not only climbing the corporate ladder but wanting to climb the corporate ladder within a law firm?

Tom: [12:52] Basically, top of the food chain is exactly the only place you’ll feel comfortable. Of course, that’s when imposter syndrome kicks in. But if you want to play it very rough, you would be doing the backstabby way of, you know, “I’m going to try and bury this guy so, in comparison, I look better.” I always do this analysis where I say, “Look, envy is when you look at someone and you want to be like them or better. Jealousy is when you look at someone and you basically say, ‘Oh my God! I want to take him down,’ because I’m never going to be as good as that person.” Most lawyers tend to be envious, not jealous. So, there isn’t that much backstabbing really going on.

But what you do is you effectively backstab yourself. In the sense that you know that, “Look, if I want to get to the next stage, I won’t do it as 9-to-5. So, I need to be at 8:00 till 6:00. And you get in at 8:00, and see a whole bunch of people who’ve been there already for two hours. You know, the two hours ahead of you. You’ve come in an hour early. So you’re like, “You know what? I need to come in three hours earlier.”

And it’s not so much they’re deliberately trying to take you down or anything. Nothing like that is happening. It’s just they’re saying, “Look, the mission to the top requires this much effort. And if you don’t do it, you won’t make it to the top.” And this happened with me towards some of my cohorts. In the sense that I went past a lot of people that were probably two or three years ahead of me when I first started. So the rewards are visible. As you perform better, you’re rewarded better. As you work harder, you progress faster. There is no lie in that in any, any law firm. Unless you work for a very, very small law firm where there’s only one partner.

Joseph: As I’m hearing this, Tom, what I’m envisioning in my mind is a super stressful environment. And I’m also feeling this real need to achieve, and excel, and accelerate in your career. I’d like to shift gears here now and talk a little bit about the personal impact this had on you, and how you dealt with this personally.

When I’m thinking about the pace of law as you’re describing it, can you explain to me, beyond the work itself, what were some of the steps that you took to just maintain that pace?

Tom: [14:56] No human being can sustain that level of energy. It doesn’t really happen. The way it starts normally is for your early 20s, you can keep up. For your early 20s, generally speaking, what you do is you throw yourself into the fire and you’ve got a lot of capacity. You smash it out. And on Fridays, because you haven’t done anything all week because you’ve just been working or trying to do business development in the evenings, certainly within the British culture, the only way forward is Friday drinks. And that’s something I celebrate. I still do every now and again. It’s quite fun.

Go to the pub, get a couple of drinks, then a couple more drinks, then a couple more drinks. Of course, what then happens is you wake up on Saturday feeling rough. And as you get older, that waking up on Saturday gets worse and worse and worse. And to be able to keep up at this pace, you don’t necessarily within that environment realize that you have developed a mental health problem in the form of OCDs, addictions, et cetera. You wake up one day and you’re like, “Look, I just can’t physically get out of bed. Oh, it might be too many drinks last night.”

And, eventually, at some point somewhere, someone said, “Look, you know something. You know that guy down the corridor who’s keeping up with you? You know, he’s actually on drugs.” He’s either taking Ritalin or whatever, and that’s why he’s going up. We’re trying to compete organically against someone so synthetic. It starts with having one coffee. And that’s why I sort of discourage people drinking coffee because that’s how it all starts. That’s with having one coffee to eight cups a day. Then it goes from eight cups won’t do it. So then, you start entertaining other things.

I’m not saying that happens to everyone. But what I’m saying is when you’re exhausted and drinking tea or coffee is not keeping you awake, you then eventually turn to drugs. And I’m talking, obviously, very serious drugs here. And it comes to a Friday where you’re just completely drained, you can’t physically lift yourself, your friends are all like, “Tom, let’s go out for a couple of drinks.” And you’re like, “I just can’t do this.” And of course, what then happens is someone gives you something and suddenly you get on it, “Let’s go have fun!”

And what you’re basically doing here is you’re replacing happiness with fun. You equate fun being happiness. You’re like, “As long as I’m out on Friday until 4 a.m. in the morning, that means I’m enjoying my youth.” That’s what you basically start to think. And the next thing you know, that becomes almost habitual. It becomes a thing that, “Look, I can push it to the nth degree, but I know I’ve got something that can help me push it even further.” And that’s exactly where it goes wrong. That’s exactly when you’re like, “I’m unstoppable. I’m Immortal. I’m doing all these wonderful things.”

And, actually, you don’t realize this. You’re opening yourself up to effectively hell. Drugs and alcohol are a huge part of the city. And I think anyone who doesn’t talk about this openly is doing disservice. They’re not raising awareness of what is actually going on on the ground, and that’s just the fact.

Joseph: Just to get specific here, what kind of drugs are we talking about here and how long were you on these drugs for?

Tom: [17:49] For two years, I was probably experimenting with different drugs before I had a complete categorical breakdown.

Joseph: What? We’re talking cocaine? Are we talking —

Tom: [17:58] This is a typical example. For example, you decide that you want to go away for the weekend. And the way it really works is you work, you beast it, right until Friday evening. Okay? And now, you decide to take a flight to Ibiza to party with your friends. Because as I said earlier, what you’re doing is you’re equating fun with happiness. You’re basically saying, “As long as I’m partying, I’m happy.” You’re not saying, “happiness with everything around me.” Sort of like trying to run away. Sort of like trying to escape the reality of what you’re facing.

In that regard, you say great to seek this unbelievable happiness. I am going to stay awake. So you land in Ibiza, and the first thing someone does is gives you some coke. We take that. That helps you stabilize. And now, you’re going to the party where everyone’s just drinking MDMA. And what means sort of started accidentally. I went to Ibiza with a bunch of guys, and I didn’t know what was going on. And one of them gave me a bottle of water, and I drank it, and I was able to keep up for the entire two days. And then, someone said, “By the way, the water you drank was actually drugs. It was MDMA.”

Joseph: Okay, Tom. So at the risk of coming across as a bit naive and sounding like I’ve lived in a bubble my whole life. As someone myself who has never used illicit drugs or been around illicit drugs, or even seen that many drugs in my life, could you give me a sense of exactly how pervasive drug usage was amongst the people around you?

Tom: [19:24] Do a sample test of anyone working in the city, anyone. And out of 100 people, give or take, 80 would test positive.

Joseph: Wow!

Tom: [19:34] I would be surprised if it’s less. There are a lot of people I know who don’t, of course. But at any given time, 80 of the people working in the city, within service square mile or Wall Street, will be on something for sure. Because you could receive an email now at 7:30 a.m. in the morning, by 8:15, you get a Whatsapp from a client saying, “Hey, did you receive my email?” By 9:15, they expect the draft back. By 11:00, you send it to the other side. By 3:00, they send the response back. I mean how do you keep up with that place?

Joseph: It’s incredibly quick, yeah.

Tom: [20:14] And you sacrifice. Obviously, you don’t want to be high while you’re working. But I’ll touch on what happens when you take drugs a bit later. If you’re high while you’re working, then you’re going to be making some bad decisions. But what basically happens is you’ve partied very hard on the weekend. And now, you’re stealing the pain. Because what drugs do is they take you up, and then you come crashing down. And what you’re dealing with now at this stage is the calm down. It’s the anxiety, the depression, and everything that has come with it.

Put on top of that, the stress and the pressures of the working environment. The bad boss who wants to screw you, who comes to the office drunk at lunchtime, screaming at everyone. So what you then do is you turn to your doctor for some sort of mental health medication, right? That will basically be something like Xanax. In order to calm you down so you don’t have a panic attack within your working environment. Mixing Xanax with alcohol and drugs means that you’re basically going down this spiral, or you’re going to end up making some huge mistakes or doing something wrong.

But while you’re in that mindset, while you’re in that mood, all you want to do is get rid of the hard competition. You don’t think about the impact this is going to have on your decision-making skills. And come what may, on Friday, you’re still getting calls from your colleagues saying, “Let’s go for a couple of drinks. We got to have a couple of drinks, but we got to close this;” or “Tom, I’m really sorry that I screamed at you. I’ll make it up to you over a couple of drinks.” So you see? It creates its own environment.

Joseph: Given the fact that it sounds like this behavior is quite normalized and quite common and acceptable in the industry, at what point did you realize that something had to change for you?

Tom: [21:59] I think it all happened around five years ago. And if I genuinely told you, I can’t remember a lot of what happened five years ago during that nearly a whole year. But, basically, I think I tried to resign twice. I made like a couple of mistakes, and I tried to resign. And at the time my workplace, I was billing them you know millions a year. They were making a lot of money for me, so they didn’t really care. And I was dissuaded from resigning. And then, I think I made a pretty major mistake. I mean my cognitive ability was awful.

Joseph: Related to a client? Related to a project?

Tom: [22:34] It was more like an internal mistake. But in law, the biggest fear you have is not necessarily your boss nor is it the client, it’s the regulators. Because the regulators are very aggressive. And just now, they’re beginning to get a grip on the mental health pandemic that’s happening in within the legal profession, very recently now. And this should have been handled maybe 15, 20 years ago. But I’m glad they’re getting a grip of it. But as soon as someone says, “I’m going to make a complaint against you,” that’s your entire career at that person’s disposal. The biggest fear is the regulator.

And I made a mistake it was a regulatory error for sure. And as soon as it landed and the firm realized, “Okay. Well, now, this could be an ‘us’ issue rather than just ‘him’ issue.” They basically wrote me a list of saying, “Look, you know, Tom, this is a serious mistake.” I resigned very shortly after that. But what happened was, in my mind, I had 12 years of my life I’d given to these guys. Made them so much money and got very little reward, if I may say, financially out of it. Career-wise, definitely right to the top; financially, not so much. And then, when I needed the most, they chewed me out and spat me up.

Okay. So that was the punch I saw not coming anywhere. Because I thought to myself, “No matter what happens, these guys are going to back me.” They’re going to be like, “Tom, we’ve got you. Don’t you worry about it. You’ve made some mistakes. Let’s meet up, fix it, and then figure out what we’re going to do with you after.” Instead, it was like, “You’re on your own. Good luck.” And I had a complete nervous breakdown. Now, when we say complete nervous breakdown, a lot of people think I was a little bit stressed, I couldn’t get up, no. I couldn’t get out of bed for a month. For a full month, I was flat on the ground. So I lost 11 kilos pretty much straight away. I almost became half the man I was before. And that’s when at last, I went into therapy.

And they diagnosed me with every single thing that I thought was perfectly normal. I was touching wood maybe 50 times a day thinking that’s normal. I couldn’t look at red post boxes. I thought, “Oh, that, I’m just scared about them.” OCD, like what are you scared about? Waking up in the morning with my heart racing, needing Xanax to calm it down. That’s not normal. You’re a guy in your 20s, you should not wake up at heart palpitations. You should not just be able to sleep for hours. You should not need drugs to party. You should not this and that. And suddenly, you begin to realize actually everything I’ve done, at least for the past seven years of my life, has been completely wrong. And that’s when I really woke up to it. That’s when I was like, “Okay. Well, this was a mistake. Let’s see what’s left of my life. Let me see what pieces I can pick up, and then figure out what I’m going to do next.”

Joseph: So you’re describing what I often hear from people may not be to this extreme, but there is a point where you hit rock bottom in your career and your life. And it forces you to then wake up, come up for air, and figure out what you want to do next. How did you go about figuring that out?

Tom: [25:31] The first thing was that I needed to close up whatever happened to my former workplace and get closure on it. So therapy was the first thing. And I say to people, “Look, sports and therapy. Sports, because your body and mind are connected. Therapy, because your body and mind are connected.” So when you go to therapy, you’re basically training your mind. You’re making it stronger.

Now, some people like to do meditation, phenomenal. No one on earth is going to tell you meditation doesn’t help. Plenty of studies that proved it. Buddhists have been doing it for thousands of years with wonderful effects. In fact, a lot of stuff you learn in therapy are about mindfulness, which has been in the Buddhist culture for thousands of years. So first, it was, “Let me just lift myself physically up and be able to be active again.” Which I did through therapy.

Joseph: How quickly were you able to get off of the drugs that were causing these highs and lows?

Tom: [26:20] Right. So the drugs were instant. Because when I went to my psychiatrist, he turned around and said, “There is absolutely no way I’m treating you if you’re involved in any of this stuff. You can’t touch this. This is going to kill you.” I thought that it was a drug that made me make the mistakes that I did. And in my psychiatrist now, I figured out actually no. The pressures in the work environment drove me to such a corner, alongside with my own personal ambition. I’m not saying that you go into the work environment, someone says, “You have to kill yourself,” no. Your personal ambition is a big part of what drives you. Where I needed a synthetic push. I needed something synthetic to sort of drive me forward.

He said, “Look, I’m going to have to put you on actual mental health medication just so I can reach into you and figure out what’s going on in there. Because right now, there’s just too many panic attacks happening.” And if anyone’s had a panic attack, it’s something that a lot of people just throw around because I just had a panic attack. In reality, a panic attack is this sort of feeling where you’re basically assuming you’re in the worst possible place imaginable. In my situation, I thought that someone’s going to come and take me away and lock me up somewhere. That was on my mind the entire time.

And then, I was put on mental health medication that allowed me to sort of lift myself up again through therapy. Then the challenge was, “Now that you’re a mental health medication, we need to get you off it now.” And that’s another journey of its own. So between my mental breakdown and me being able to get back up, I’d say there was probably about six months of work that was needed. They were like, “Okay. Well, look, I’m back. What’s left of my life? What have I got around me?” And that’s when you know the old saying, the tradition was saying, “Oh, yes! I know who my best friends are now. I know who’s my family. The value of family,” et cetera. I was very lucky enough with an amazing network and a wonderful family that I was like, “Okay. Well, let’s give this another go.”

Joseph: It sounds like the therapy was helpful, time was helpful. Just stepping back away from that high-pressure environment was useful. Was there anything that ultimately tipped the scales and opened your eyes to the idea of then helping set up law firms helping with business development? How did that open up for you?

Tom: [28:33] The thing that comes to mind is that this was entirely avoidable. I realized, again in therapy, that I could have quit a lot earlier, work in a much better environment or created a better environment, and not had to suffer the way I suffered. It’s that that drove me. The fact that everything I’ve been through was perfectly avoidable with the right advice and the right guidance.

Now, I’m not saying speaking to 22-year-old Tom, you could have persuaded him to work less. I don’t think so, and nor should you. But I think, with the right advice, you could persuade people to know the limits before they have the breakdown. To catch the signs early before things really, really, really mess up effectively. I think when I woke up after six months, I came to, fundamentally, I realized, “Look, none of this needed to happen. Okay. Well, how do I now give back? How do I make sure this doesn’t happen to anyone else?”

By the way, during this period, I was that Alpha guy. I was the guy that was like, “Look, who needs therapy? You know, get a couple of drinks, we’ll be fine.” And, suddenly, I realized one, the world didn’t end by me not practicing law. It seems as all the clients are fine. Two, my friends don’t like me less by me not being part of a large city law firm. My friends still like me for me. My family is still proud of me. When you realize that you’re like, “Okay. Well then, great! I can do other things. I can do wonderful things that doesn’t necessarily need this much pressure.”

Joseph: Before we talk about some of the lessons you’ve learned along the way, can you now tell me a little bit more about the work that you ended up deciding to pursue? And I suppose, I’m especially interested in understanding how you knew that you were going to be good at this, and how you knew that this was going to be the right path for you.

Tom: [30:22] I’d say to anyone looking for a career transition, “You’ll never know.” So don’t look around looking for something you’re absolutely quite categorically confident in. There are ways to ease yourself into it. So for me, one of my friends was setting up a law firm. So I went to him and I said, “Look, let me do the foundational elements. Let me try and help you avoid your firm fundamentally having something wrong with it by having people who could have mental health problems.”

And you know, I started handing out, really researching finding out, “Look, businesses are losing 25% of their productivity. Thanks to people who are suffering mentally.” You know you can bring in McKenzie, or PWC, BCG even to try and increase productivity by 25%. Or you can look after your staff, much more cost-effective, yes, and give you much more staff loyalty. So I started an experiment that happened with Barclay Road when I went in at the very foundational level. And I was like, “Look, I don’t want to practice law. I’ll do the business development elements. But, fundamentally, I want to be there for the staff. I’m want to talk to them about my experience. I want to make sure that the higher ambitious people so I can tell them how to use their ambition. And I would do that the help of a therapist.” On the mental health side, they’ll come in because I know a lot about mental health in the workplace, but I’m not a mental health expert.

So, I brought in the experts. I brought in the psychiatrists, the psychologists, the CBT specialists. And we started working on the staff. And the result was completely remarkable. When people were suffering during COVID, Berkeley Rowe’s profitability went up by 200%, something ridiculous. And that’s because the people were trained to handle tough situations. It wasn’t a stress management course, where when you get stressed, try allocating the top priority to the lower priority. Because I was so in it, and I knew all these mistakes that one could make. I would teach them to manage clients. I would teach them to manage their colleagues. And I would teach them to say “no.”

Joseph: Well, that’s a very interesting transition, Tom. And the last thing I was hoping to talk about before we wrap up with the mental health platform that you’ve recently launched, which I do want to come back to at the end. I am very curious to hear about some of the things you’ve learned along the way of your very interesting career change journey. And the first question I have for you is just what you’ve learned about yourself along the way?

Tom: [32:46] The best thing I learned was that you can’t heal in the environment you got sick in. But that’s why I love your podcast because it’s about career change. It’s not about job change. And a lot of people I suppose think that, “Look, I hated working in this place. But if I move to that place, I’ll be better.” If you really love your work, you’ll never work again. If you really, really love your work, even in high-pressured environments, you can sort of find a way where you can find the stable route. But when you’re reaching breakdown level, that’s not a healthy environment for you. You need to get out as quickly as you possibly can.

The thing I learned was it’s a scary path to go down. Humans are animals of habits. You know what to do. You’ve been trained how to do it. You’re older now, “Oh, my God! How am I going to deal with the age difference? Am I going to earn less?” Et cetera. And I would tell people, “Look, what’s the trade-off?” We know that stress causes the worst possible health problems, we know that. We know that for a fact. So do you want to have this poison in you just for the sake of money? And I promise you, you spend all that money trying to treat yourself after. So what I learned was the pursuit of happiness is much more of a fun and adventurous journey than the pursuit of wealth. The weirdest thing is, as soon as you do that, you start making more money. For sure, without a doubt.

Joseph: Yeah, that’s really interesting, Tom. Because something you mentioned there about getting out of the environment that caused you to be sick. One of the questions that comes up a lot in the line of work that I do is from people who have this belief — and I suppose this is fuelled by just common wisdom that it’s much easier to find your next job when you’re currently employed than it is if you resign from your job that you don’t like, and then you’re unemployed then you try to find a job. What’s your perspective on that? And I suppose, I’m most interested in trying to get a sense of whether you felt like you could have healed if you just kept the stable full-time job while you’re trying to figure out what to do next.

Tom: [34:40] Each person is different, right? I had the luxury of not having a wife and kids. So I could “almost afford” to move back into my mom’s place and figure out the next step. I think, as with anything in life, imagine you’re removing a plaster from your injured finger, right? Pull it. There is no point doing it slowly. You’re just making the thing last.

And I think the best way to relaunch your career, the best way to change, is to put yourself in a very, very difficult spot. And that is quit your job. Now, you have no other option but to move. That environment has been fixed. That environment has made you want to go. No money is worth it. No one can pay me genuinely anything to go back into the environment ever again. I would say, “Do it. Instantly. Don’t wait.” Forget anxiety. Brilliant things happen when you’re stressed. Your creativity levels go up. Your thinking becomes sharper. Your mind becomes a lot more agile.

And I come across a lot of young people for like, “I’ve got this full-time job. I’m working on the start-up on the side.” I say to them, “Look, you’re in your early 20s, work on the start-up. Quit it. Make that start-up your only way out. And trust me, it’ll be a success.” But if you’re trying to put one foot in and the other foot out, you’re never ever going to leap. You’re going to pivot but never leap.

Joseph: What’s something that you wished people knew about climbing the corporate ladder that you now know?

Tom: [36:06] I started literally at the time when throwing staplers around the office was becoming taboo, just at the beginning. I still had a couple of staplers been thrown at me. I still had a couple of folders been thrown at me. I was well within that era where they could scream at you to the top of their lung, and you just have to sit there and take it. I don’t know whether that still exists. I haven’t worked in that environment that much anymore. The simple ability to not take that, I wish I knew at the beginning that just being completely loyal is not the answer. You work at a place for four years you get everything you want out of it. Now, if that environment is no longer healthy for you, experiment with the new one. You lose nothing as a result. You literally lose nothing if you just leave. And for me, I chose stability and loyalty over happiness, and a little bit of risk.

Joseph: A final question for you. You alluded to your 22-year-old Tom before, and I was curious. What you would tell him now about making a career change?

Tom: [37:06] Twenty-two-year-old Tom was an unstoppable beast. He wants to conquer the world. He wants to become super rich. He wants to have a business and that. The beautiful thing about your career change is that your ambitions never really die. You don’t have to completely kill yourself and become dull and some sort of middle manager somewhere stuck.

I would tell 22-year-old Tom, work for five years and set up your own business, that’s what I would say. Because I was very entrepreneurial. I’m still entrepreneurial, but I was raised within an environment where you’re told that the best possible outcome is being employed. I would say “no.” If you’re entrepreneurial, have a go at it yourself. Trust me, you’ll find amazing things once you start working for yourself. And I would tell him, “Jesus Christ! Look after your mental health.” I mean, if there was a me when I was young, and someone like me came to our office and he said, “Guys, this is how you avoid regulatory pitfalls. This is how you avoid having problems in your job.”

And the answer to that simply is look after your mental health. I’m not saying organize your documents adequately. I’m not saying prioritize this and that. I’m saying, “Are you waking up with a hard competition?” Yes, I am. Not good. Okay, resign. Period. Aggressively so. Are you having only four hours of sleep, and you’re stressed when you go to bed, and you’re stressed when you’re waking up, consistently over a month?

Because sometimes, just jobs are stressful. You’re going to be stressed for a month, that’s fine. But if it’s consistent, quit. Quit, straight away. You’re going to make a mistake. You’re going to do something stupid. Can you tell me that you can’t remember what happened last month in your 20s? Yeah. Okay, quit. When I go into businesses, I just tell the staff, “What’s not normal?”

And the weirdest thing is seeing these eyes just open when I’m talking about very broadly my experiences, suddenly you see stars in some of these people’s eyes. Because they’re like, “Oh, my God! I do that!” “Oh my goodness! I do that.” I’ve had so many people come to me saying, “Tom, I think I’ve got OCD.” And I’m like, “What do you do?” He was like, “Well, to make sure that the email doesn’t come back from the clients, I count to seven. And, usually, it works out well because seven is a lucky number.” I’m like, “That’s not normal.”

There have been times, genuinely, when I’ve done these talks and the person who wants to do the talk took me to one side and said, “I may not say these things. Because you know, at one point, I have to discipline my staff.” And I said to him, “Look, if you’re disciplining them the way I’m saying you are, then you need to change.” I see engagements from management and staff. A lot of people are understanding that being the boss doesn’t make you king, and being an employee doesn’t make you a peasant. We’re all in this together. So how can we get the best out of each other?

Joseph: Well, I’d love to wrap up, Tom, with what you are also focused on right now. I understand you have recently launched a mental health platform. And I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit more about Soulh Tech?

Tom: [39:49] The way Soulh Tech works, I go in and do talks for businesses about their mental health. And what we’ve done is we’ve plugged Soulh Tech in, which is a survey once a month, every Monday morning. Because, usually, people feel at their worst on a Monday morning. And after about six months, we produce this map to CEOs where we basically show them where their staff’s mental health is and has been for the past six months. And also, how the staff are interacting with the building.

In an environment where people are sort of beginning to either really take on working from home, or struggle with bringing people to the office, we give them an idea of where the staff is. And it’s great because we see how people are feeling and they’ll be able to action that before it’s too late.

Joseph: I am looking forward to hearing how that platform evolves. And I just wanted to thank you so much, Tom, for giving us a candid glimpse into your former life as a lawyer and how that has now evolved into your focus on well-being and the importance of pursuing happiness over everything else. So, thanks again for your time, and best of luck with your work as a well-being consultant.

Tom: [40:53] Thank you, Joseph. And thank you for what you’re doing. Because I think it creates hope for a lot of people. Especially a lot of lawyers think there is no life outside of law. A podcast like yours shows everyone in every profession, there’s a wonderful life outside of what they’re doing.

When does it make sense to let go of stability to boldly pursue the unknown? In this episode of the Career Relaunch® podcast, Samantha Tovera-Agustin, an HR professional turned founder explains why she chose to move her career, family, and life from the Bay Area to the Philippines. We’ll discuss the challenging balance between work and parenthood, signs that suggest you may need a change in your career, and ways you can prevent career regret.

I also share some thoughts on the importance of reconnecting with old friends during the Mental Fuel® segment.

I’d still challenge you to do it—just to see what happens. Even if you don’t rekindle the relationship, at the very least, you can let that person know that you’re still thinking about them. And that alone can be valuable. You never know what kind of an impact that could have on them.

Samantha Tovera-Agustin is a seasoned HR professional specializing in talent acquisition, leadership development, and employee engagement. When the pandemic hit in 2019, she launched her own business, Masarap Box (Facebook, Instagram) that delivers a monthly box of Filipino snacks right to your door.

The past three years made her realize what mattered to her. In 2021, she and her husband made a big decision to move with their two young daughters (aged five and two at the time) from California to the Philippines, where she’s originally from, to truly honor what they valued most- which was to spend more quality time with family.

Now back in the Philippines, her husband has also recently launched C-Suite Jiu-Jitsu (Facebook, Instagram), a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Training Center, and Samantha’s been able to work as an HR Consultant for Canadian and US firms, helping small to mid-size businesses with HR solutions- which also honors her professional values of serving others. With more flexibility in her schedule now, she’s been able to reconnect with her family, her friends, and most importantly, herself.

Samantha and I first connected in 2018, when she dropped me a note after watching my TEDx Talk, and we’ve remained in touch since. Watching her career evolve over the past few years has been really fascinating, and it’s not every day that I cross paths with people who make the decision to let go of a well-paid, stable job to make such a big international move. I was really excited to get her onto the Career Relaunch® podcast so you can hear how she came to her decision.

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!

Thanks to Audible for supporting this episode of the Career Relaunch® podcast. Audible is the premier provider of digital audiobooks, offering over 180,000 audiobook titles for listening anytime and anywhere on your favorite device. Career Relaunch® listeners can download a free audiobook download and get 30-day trial at audibletrial.com/careerrelaunch.

Teaser [first ~15s]: That made me think, “What if I had whether a business or a career that gave me the flexibility to own my own time and be more intentional being able to spend more time with my kids, with my husband, reconnect with myself.”

Joseph: Now, you and I haven’t spoken in a really long time until we hopped on this call a few seconds ago. I’ve got so many questions I want to ask you about your life in the Philippines and your career trajectory since we last connected, and how you came to the decision to move back to the Philippines. I’d love to just start by getting a sense of what you’re focused on right now in your career and your life. Can you also just tell me where exactly you are situated there in the Philippines?

Samantha: [03:34] Yes. We could start with where we are in the Philippines. We live in a small city called Baguio City. This is actually where I pretty much grew up until we moved to California when I was in high school. But there’s a lot of things that I’m focused on right now, personally, in my life and my career. Personally, our family is about to hit our one year living in Baguio. We moved from California last year. And then, my husband and I have two small children, 5 and 2. They are definitely keeping us busy right now. Our eldest started kindergarten this year. She is doing ballet and Brazilian jiu-jitsu.

Joseph: What a combination.

Samantha: [04:18] I know, right? It’s pretty awesome. It’s pretty awesome! It’s a pretty good balance, right? My husband and I, now that we have a lot more time, we try to be more intentional to reconnect with each other. We have time to breathe and go on dates once a week, even if it’s just a coffee date for an -hour, and unplug. We have this rule to not talk about our to-do list for about an hour and just talk about something else, shows or whatnot.

For me, personally, I also got to reconnect with my childhood best friend. I’ve known her literally since birth. Our dads have been college friends and we grew up together, and now we’re doing yoga every week. Aerial Yoga, which is very like something that I probably would not know in a million years that I would do as a hobby. But it’s pretty exciting, something to look forward to every week. That’s a little bit of my personal life.

Career-wise, right now, I’m helping my husband build his jiu-jitsu business, which recently opened August of this year. He’s the instructor, but I’m managing the front and back-end operations of the business, which is exciting. And then, I am working to relaunch my Filipino snack subscription box business called “Masarap Box,” one that I started in the peak of the pandemic. I temporarily had to pause that and we could probably talk about that later. Just during our move, I had to pause it for a little bit, but expecting to relaunch it next year. And then, lastly, I’m still working as an HR consultant with actually two different firms, one based in Canada and one based in the U.S. Both jobs allow me to have this flexible schedule that I have right now. It’s pretty exciting right now here!

Joseph: Super exciting! You and I actually haven’t spoken in months.

Samantha: [06:03] Yes.

Joseph: I just got an e-mail from you a couple weeks ago just as we were preparing for this. One of the things you mentioned there and I’d like to talk about this. Before we go back in time and talk about your career evolution, you mentioned you have reconnected with one of your childhood friends. I remember getting your e-mail, and that got me thinking a lot about friendship and adult friends versus childhood friends. Any major revelations for you as you’ve reconnected with her after all these years?

Samantha: [06:29] Yes, hanging out with your childhood friends and people that you grew up with in grade school and high school brings out your immature self. I’m not saying one is better than the other. You have those more profound conversations with your adult friends. Although, I still have them with my childhood friends. But I truly get to be my immature self without fear of judgment, being with the people that I grew up with because they saw everything. They saw the good, the bad, the ugly, first heartbreaks, first boyfriends. It’s a different dynamic. Am so glad that I got to reconnect with most of them living here.

Joseph: I know that you haven’t always been an HR consultant. You certainly haven’t been someone who has moved from the U.S. to the Philippines until now. This is your first big move back home. Can we just go back in time? Can you just tell us a little bit about your time as a child growing up in the Philippines, and what was life like for you there?

Samantha: [07:29] I actually was born in Manila, which is more south of where Baguio City is. But then, we moved to Baguio City at 2 years old. So, I grew up here. I went to school here. I developed all of my childhood friends. All of my friendships are here, with all of my childhood friends. My childhood was pretty amazing.

My dad is a doctor. He is a general surgeon but is also focused on cancer surgery. He’s still semi-retired, still doing that just to keep his routine going. My mom, at that time, was working in human settlements for the government. When we moved here to Baguio, she helped manage this corporation, this clinic. My dad and other doctors ran this clinic that is focused on occupational therapy. She was pretty much managing that business for a while when I was growing up. Then in my childhood, I have an older sister and a younger brother.

My parents were intentional with creating those core memories per se, creating those memories for us as kids. We would travel all over the Philippines at least three times a year together with my childhood best friend, which I do yoga with now. Our families would truly go on trips together, and that’s always the highlight every year. Like, “Where are we going to travel to next?” Our family naturally just loves traveling.

I was here until high school. A little background about my dad’s family and how we came to the states is my dad’s family was already set to go to the states in the 70s. He has four siblings, my grandparents, and they were all set to go. But then, my dad was still studying medicine when he was here, and he wanted to finish up and he was going to follow. Then, of course, he fell in love with my mom. They got married and he did not want to separate from us as a family. He wanted to petition us as a family. It was a long process. I didn’t know at that time that we were petitioned as early as the early ’90s and didn’t get approved until early 2000s.

Joseph: To get a Visa to move to the United States. That’s what you’re talking about.

Samantha: [09:39] To get our permanent residency to the U.S. It was tough for me because as you get older, you develop your friends and you’re settled here. At that time, I was in high school, and it was a hard move for me because I was questioning like, “Why? Why do I have to go? I could just go to school here.” Of course, at that time, I felt like I was forced.

In hindsight, I understand now the intention behind it and I’m happy that my parents did that. Because they wanted to give me that opportunity, right? An opportunity that probably not a lot of people had, but I had. One thing that my dad told me is that he didn’t want me or my sister or my brother to resent them for not giving us the opportunity to try to live this life outside of the Philippines, and try to kind of go for the opportunities that we have there. Again, I’m glad now. I didn’t understand at the time as a high school, 16-year-old kid, right? But, yeah, that’s how we came to America!

Joseph: Where did you guys first land and where did you grow up in the United States? What do you remember about that time?

Samantha: [10:45] We officially moved there in 2004, but we got to go on vacation there prior. I would say a year beforehand just to do all the touristy things. I vividly remember, I was sad at that time. I didn’t get to go to my high school graduation, our flight was booked before. At that time, it was a big deal. We landed in San Francisco. We lived with my dad’s family at Sunnyvale. We lived there for a while.

I had to jump right into it right away. My family really wanted me to kind of get acclimated right away. They had me like, “Hey, go to Community College. Go to De Anza.” I kind of signed up for whatever. I was already in the middle of the semester or that quarter. Whatever was available, I kind of signed up for it just so I have classes. I remember a culture shock in some ways for me because over here in the Philippines, everything is very accessible. At least in Baguio, you could walk everywhere. You could hail a cab wherever you’re at. In California, you got to have a car.

Joseph: You got to drive everywhere.

Samantha: [11:50] Yeah. It will take you hours before you get to your final destination because of all the bus stops. That was one of the big adjustments for me. I definitely like having friends. I developed friendships over there as well, and people gave me rides. But it was nerve-wracking having to get my driver’s license and all of that because I never thought I needed to drive to get anywhere. It was rough moving from the Philippines to over there.

At that time, my dad was also still working in the Philippines. So our family were kind of separated a little bit. It was also, with my immaturity at that time, that I was just so focused on “I don’t see my friends, I don’t have any friends here.” Eventually, I’m a naturally outgoing person and I started working. You know, working part-time and going to school and kind of just got acclimated, I would say within two years. Yeah, that’s a little bit about our move.

Joseph: This is a career show, and I want to switch gears here a little bit. Can you describe how you decided to go down the path of retail management as your first chapter in your career?

Samantha: [12:53] That was my first career. A lot of my experience before I became HR was in retail management. I honestly just kind of fell into it and vividly even remember getting my first seasonal part-time job at Victoria’s Secret. That was seasonal part-time. I didn’t even have interview clothes at that time. I just found out they had a group interview. I bought my interview clothes that same day and went to the interview and got it.

I, again, didn’t think I was going to be in retail for a long time. I just thought it was just going to be a college job. But then, I was fortunate enough to have amazing leaders who invested in my development. I was at Victoria’s Secret waiting for them to either lay me off and tell me, “Hey, your seasonal job is over.” But then, I got a promotion within I would say less than a year to be a team leader. That’s kind of what jump-started everything and it just kind of grew with Victoria’s Secret until I became in operations, or what they call “category manager” at that time. I was in there for probably about three years. After college, again, I feel like I only knew retail.

I felt the confidence to apply at Target, or actually, I got recruited at Target. But then, I went forward to apply to first be an HR manager. It was more of an HR generalist role at Target after college. But then, they put me in multiple roles for my own personal development as well. I was holding multiple management roles in operations in HR while I was at Target. As you may already know, working retail makes you work crazy hours. For so many years, I pretty much missed all the holidays. At that time, it didn’t matter to me because I didn’t have kids yet.

Joseph: Let’s talk about this for a second. The life of someone working in retail. I don’t know if I told you this, Sam, but I had a brief stint in retail myself when I was living in Honolulu, Hawaii at the Ala Moana Shopping Center, which is this big outdoor mall there on the island. I was working on the women’s floor in the shoe department helping women find a pair of shoes.

I was in my early 20s at the time, and I loved that job because I got to meet a lot of people and cross paths with folks when they were generally pretty relaxed and in a good mood. But at times, I felt

customers could be a bit condescending at times to people like me working on a store floor, folding sweaters. You know what I’m talking about?

Samantha: [15:20] Yes.

Joseph: Where people think, “Oh, this is just a part-time temporary job for you,” or “You’re serving them.”

Samantha: [15:26] Yes.

Joseph: I guess this happens in service-based industries, too. I’m just wondering what was your experience like working in retail?

Samantha: [15:35] Honestly, I probably felt that one time during Black Friday. I’m sure everyone knows how crazy Black Friday could be. I feel like that’s a really big misconception. To this day, I feel like as an HR manager and as a recruiter, when I’m doing recruiting projects, I have a little bit of a bias for retail workers because I know that they are the hard-working people that I know because they manage multiple projects during a crazy store, meeting all types of metrics while keeping the store afloat, and managing their team.

I feel there’s so much more to that, and I’ve learned a lot of great leadership skills working in retail. There is still that stigma at that time, or I don’t know if it still does now, but I think that that’s a big misconception because I feel like you could get great leaders, recruiting from retail, from someone who has worked in retail management. I’m happy to advocate for them.

Joseph: Definitely. A lot of times when you are working in retail, on the floor at least, you are directly interfacing with customers in a way that people back in the corporate head office may not be. You’re literally representing the brand.

Samantha: [16:53] Absolutely.

Joseph: A couple questions for you here. One is just trying to get a sense of how you were feeling about your career in retail, and also at what point did you feel like that schedule was no longer going to be sustainable for you in your life?

Samantha: [17:09] When I didn’t have kids, I was just in that mode of I just needed to do my best and work my way up as much as possible. I was driven. I was driven to succeed. I wanted to get to the highest management level as possible at that time. Those were my priorities. I felt like it was an investment. It was an investment of like, “I’m working all of these hours right now. It will all pay off once I get the money and get the fancy position.”

It took a toll on me when I had my daughter in 2017, my eldest daughter. Because with holidays like Christmas Eve, I didn’t leave the store until 4:00 in the morning, and my daughter missed Christmas Eve! I knew that long-term that I did not want my daughter or any future kids that I had to miss those holidays because that’s building that core memory for my kids. I’m not going to be able to take that back if I continued working retail. Development-wise, the company developed me as a leader, as a person. But my priorities have shifted when I had my firstborn.

Joseph: It’s kind of funny because our daughters were born at the same time. My daughter was also born in 2017. Once you had your firstborn, at what point did you decide you needed to make a change?

Samantha: [18:32] I started having anxiety when I have my closing shifts. I felt like I was very short-tempered, lack of sleep. At the same time, you have a toddler who doesn’t sleep through the night. I feel like I’m doing my daughter a disservice of not being the best and available mom for the very little time frame that we have together. I knew I needed to make that change, and I knew that if we were going to have more kids that it cannot move forward with that schedule.

In 2018, that’s how I came across your TED talk, which inspired me to make that career change. I saw that as a sign because I didn’t know where to start. You said earlier, there’s this stigma that when you’re in retail, you kind of just settle for that and it’s hard to get out of it. I felt that way. I felt like, “What do I do next? Retail is all I know.” But then, I saw your TED talk, and that’s really what jumpstarted. Me being that motivated to start actively looking. I even messaged you and thanked you, “Hey, this is the push I needed!”

Joseph: Right. That was how we first connected.

Samantha: [19:37] That was when we first connected. A few months after that, I got an offer. That was when I kind of gave up. I started applying. Before I gave up, I just updated my LinkedIn profile. This company was the one who reached out to me. I got an offer from this construction and development company to be their HR business partner overseeing the Northern California Division. It’s exciting for me because like, “Oh, it’s my first 9-to-5 job, and I’ve never worked a 9-to-5 job before.” It was all exciting and new to me at that time. It was in that role for about 3 and 1/2 years until again, we made this move here in Baguio.

Joseph: Okay. I want to get to that move in a moment. But before we do, you mentioned something there about applying to jobs and not getting the positive response that you had hoped to get, at least initially. This is a pretty common dynamic that comes up with people where they are in a role and they are starting to think about making a change. They start applying for other roles that they think are more promising, but they don’t end up getting the traction they want, at least initially. How did you know that you were on the right track in spite of the fact that you weren’t getting the traction that you were hoping to get at the very start?

Samantha: [20:56] At that time my goal was just get out of retail. Whatever translates to getting out of retail that gives me a better schedule, I was so focused on that. As I continue to apply, I wanted to think long and hard, “Okay, what do I value?” Kind of seeing that connection of, “What am I good at?” But then, “What also aligns with the next step of my career in my professional life?”

Being in retail management, I had that passion for being in the service of others. For me, the biggest reward is being able to see someone grow in their career. I know at Target at the time, whenever people ask me what my biggest accomplishments are, is being able to be a part of someone’s growth. I was able to promote team leaders into the next role, which is at the time being an assistant manager, prepped them for interviews, really being that strategic partner for team members. At the same time, also being that partner to managers.

Being in retail management, you have to be that kind of that the balance of advocating for employees, but kind of advocating for the business as well. That kind of got that lightbulb moment for me. Like, “Oh, I would love to be an HR business partner and be that strategic partner for a company that also truly values their team.” That’s kind of what narrowed down my search at that time.

Joseph: You identify this path. You end up moving into an HR business partner role. I’m assuming things are working pretty well for you professionally. How did things end up ultimately transpiring for you during this specific chapter in your career?

Samantha: [22:40] It was definitely a great role. I learned a lot. But really what kind of made us transition again is COVID. We hear a lot about the great resignation. A lot of things happened in 2020, for us and our family on top of COVID. In 2020, we had our second child. At that time, we kept getting asked, “When are you going to buy a house now that you have two kids? Your family is getting bigger.” The interest rates at the time was at its lowest, right? It’s time to jump in.

What was going on just at that time that was happening, my husband and I started becoming more stressed out at work. My husband was working for the county at that time as a — they called them “eligibility services technicians.” Basically, they are the ones reviewing and approving government assistance and aid, which got stressful in 2020 when many businesses shut down. A lot of people are following up on their aid. Backlog of calls are happening because everyone wants to get their aid as soon as possible. It was a stressful time for him. It was a stressful time for me working as an HR business partner with COVID is in its infancy at that time. There were so many unknowns. As HR, you have to keep up with all the ever-changing safety guidelines. It was honestly a recipe for burnout.

I hope if you have other HR professionals listening right now, I hope I get an “Amen” from them and hope they can relate. At the time, I kept hearing HR’s getting burned out. There’s no HR for HR.

Joseph: Absolutely right. Yeah, who’s helping you guys help the other people who are coming to you because they’re stressed out and trying to deal with all their different challenges?

Samantha: [24:21] Yeah, that was one of the elements as well that kind of made us think hard. Again, going back to our priority with our little kids. We’re stressed out at work. Our kids are in day-care, 12 hours a day. You know, again, we felt guilty. We felt like we were being unfair to our kids at that time. Because A, they already spent time in day-care for more than 12 hours, probably, a day. By the time that we get home, we have a solid three hours to spend time with them until we have to do it all over again.

And B, we would feel very wiped out after work. We felt like we were just not being the best version of ourselves. We’re not being intentional parents, being just wiped out at work by the time that we get home with the kids. We just kept feeling like we were running on autopilot. From getting your sleepy kids at six in the morning and doing all over again. By the time weekends hit, we’re either tired or we have to force ourselves to make these memories for our kids. Take them to the park, take them to whatever. But we only have those two days, right? It just felt like it wasn’t sustainable, for our family, at least.

Joseph: You mentioned picking up your kids at the end of the day, where I’m guessing you didn’t have a ton of energy left after having a full workday.

Samantha: [26:39] Yes.

Joseph: When you think back to those days, what kind of parent did you catch yourself being during those events? Did you notice anything?

Samantha: [25:21] I was probably like — I wouldn’t say an angry parent, but I would snap pretty fast and I felt bad. We were definitely screen-time parents. If we didn’t have time to deal with it, “Here’s your iPad. Here’s your phone.” I just need a minute to myself being like a headspace where I’m not thinking about work and not stressed out about what’s the next meal we would order in.

We probably had food delivery almost every day because I didn’t have the energy to cook. I go for convenience. If it gets delivered. If I don’t have to go out of my way. I would put in the order before I drive home. By the time I get home, it’s delivered. Groceries are also delivered. I was that type of parent. Whatever’s convenient, I will invest in that. Good thing we were in a good financial place at that time. To me, that time is that investment. It saves me time. We invested in laundry. Not having to do our own laundry because we wanted that time back for our kids.

Joseph: You’re trying to stay afloat. You’re trying to give yourself some time. Sometimes, delegating is really the only way you can do it. Around this time, you also decide that you are going to launch your own business. What motivated you to venture into the world of entrepreneurship and being a small business owner?

Samantha: [27:08] I was starting to miss home. Because my husband and I usually would visit the Philippines at least every two years. And because of COVID and the restrictions, we didn’t have that capacity to do that. It was also during the time that I was still pregnant with my second and I was craving Filipino food. Even living in California, I feel like Filipino food is easily accessible. Of course, the stuff that I was craving, growing up in the Philippines, are the ones that are hard to find. That kind of made me think, “Oh, I wonder how many people else out there, even living outside of California, Filipinos out there, working professionals there, are probably feeling the same way that I’m feeling. Kind of just missing those nostalgic Filipino snacks from our childhood in the ’90s, or early 2000s.

I started researching, and at that time, there were some other businesses that were doing kind of like gift box, Filipino gift boxes, as well. But it was still very new. I didn’t see a lot of businesses and I’m like, “Well, a lot of those businesses, they’re featuring their own products.” Versus for me, it’s sourcing those products from the Philippines, which ended up evolving, connecting with different business owners. I ended up also featuring some of their Filipino food products in my boxes, which was a great opportunity to connect with the Filipino-American community across the United States. That’s really how it started. It’s just my own personal kind of cravings. I was like, “Oh, what if I do this?” I kind of wanted to test it out. And by December, before our move, my husband and I were packing 60 boxes before we had to leave.

Joseph: You’re doing it yourself?

Samantha: [28:53] Yeah, we were doing it ourselves. It was really, truly a test run. It was just, honestly, also a distraction for me. I felt like I was losing myself in a sense that, “Hey, I don’t have any hobbies.” I pretty much just go to work, go home, be a mom. I wanted something for myself. And that’s kind of what also jumpstarted me to start this business.

Joseph: Okay, so you have started Masarap Box, which is what this is called, where you’ve got Filipino snacks that you are selecting and delivering to people. What triggered you to then start to consider making another move at this point in your career?

Samantha: [29:31] I just felt like, “Oh, there’s opportunity for me to be able to either run my own business or own my own time.” I didn’t know that I could be — I don’t say successful, but semi-successful or at it, to get the response that I did at that time when I launched Masarap Box. That made me think, “Oh, what if I had whether a business or a career that gave me the flexibility to own my own time and be more intentional with, again, my time. Being able to spend more time with my kids, with my husband, reconnect with myself, right?” I felt like I was myself again, and I had this “baby” that I owned, that I truly owned.

That is really what jumpstarted me and my husband thinking. We kept entertaining the idea of moving to the Philippines. We’ll have easy access to food, and I feel like where I grew up is a good city in Baguio. It’s a good city to raise my kids in. Overall, that’s kind of what made us think a lot until we took action, but that’s kind of what jumpstarted that thought.

Joseph: Now, on the one hand, this sounds great. You get to reconnect with family, long lost childhood friends. You get to reconnect with the culture you were once a part of. What most concerned you about making this sort of a move at this point in your life and your career?

Samantha: [30:53] The biggest fear or concern that I had was letting go of all the investment that I put in myself in my career. I went for my master’s. I went to school. I felt like I worked hard, worked long nights, worked so many hours to get to where I am now with my position and my pay, right? What if I made the wrong decision, and I come here and I don’t find a job? There’s just so many unknowns at that time. I was just thinking of all the “what ifs.” Like, “What if I fail? What if this is the wrong move?” It was also letting go of my past career because I felt I’ve created this career for myself. Letting that go and starting over was definitely a big concern for me.

But then, thankfully, my husband kind of led me back to the bigger picture. Then, how’s your mental health, right? Is it worth it? Is it worth it that you’re staying in this job? Yes, you’re making this great pay, but does it align with how we want to raise our family and how we want our kids — what childhood do we want them to grow up in? What do we want them to experience when they look back at their childhood, what would we want them to say? We want to be those present parents. That was really the defining moment for me. “Okay, this is definitely should be the right decision because this is for our kids as well.”

Joseph: It sounds like, Sam, you’re thinking about your kids. You’re thinking about the impact your job was having on your kids. Was there a particular moment that, ultimately, tipped the scales for you guys where you said, “Okay, we’ve got to make this move back to the Philippines. This is the right moment for this sort of a transition in our lives and in our careers.”?

Samantha: [32:42] We were saying, “Okay, we are going to go to jobs that we are stressed out about, paying for a home that is probably something that we couldn’t afford, or maybe we could afford, but we’re barely getting by. Or, can we use that money for this move and have a better quality of life?” That was truly when we could say, “Okay, we could do this because I’m.” I have a little bit of type A in me. Whereas, I need to see it and what we need to do and how much will that cost. It’s still good for me to kind of see something measurable, and how are we going to get there, and what the sub path looked like. So we really put that pen to paper. Once we saw the numbers and we saw everything, “Okay, we could do this.”

Joseph: Well, there is a book called the “Power of Regret” that I’m reading right now by Daniel Pink.

Samantha: [33:27] Oh, I love Daniel Pink!

Joseph: Yeah. One of the four major regrets that people have at the end of their life or even midlife is a boldness regret where they don’t do something bold.

Samantha: [33:40] That’s part of it, too. It’s like, “Okay, if I’m not going to make it now, am I going to regret it later?” Retail really helped me find of made me learn, “Yeah, fail fast.” Because in retail, you fail fast on a lot of things. I kind of apply that in my real life. I’m like, “Well, what’s going to happen if I fail? I’m not going to know until I know and I jump into it.”

Joseph: Before we get to your time back in the Philippines, can you take me back to the moment when you and your husband, and your two young daughters hopped on the plane? On your way to the Philippines, as you guys took off from San Francisco, what was running through your head?

Samantha: [34:18] There was a lot of anxiety and excitement. Getting dropped off at San Francisco with two restless children, while dragging our luggage and two big car seats was definitely the first hurdle.

Joseph: Yes. Any trip with young children . . .

Samantha: [34:36] That was definitely the first hurdle. Yes. That was the biggest hurdle for us. Did we pack enough snacks? And then, the next hurdle is when we checked in to get our tickets.

Joseph: This is December 2021, right?

Samantha: [34:48] Yes.

Joseph: Okay, so this is about two years into the pandemic. Still lots of travel restrictions and entry requirements.

Samantha: [34:55] Yes! We’ve heard stories and we witnessed it while we were checking in that there were some people that were not able to get on the plane because they didn’t take an RTPCR test 24 hours before. Because there was an easy miss if you look at that checklist on the website.

Joseph: Very confusing, yeah.

Samantha: [35:12] It was very confusing. At the time, there were still quarantine requirements. We had the quarantine with two small children in the hotel room before we got picked up after quarantine and we finally made it to Baguio. That was when we were able to have that big sigh of relief. Like, “Okay, we did it. We made it with two small children. Now, it’s where do we start and where do we go next?”

Joseph: Was there a point where you felt like this had gone from being something unknown to the right decision for you and your family?

Samantha: [35:47] Is when I hear my eldest saying, “Oh, today was a good day. I really like the Philippines. I don’t want to go back to California.” When we asked her, “Why don’t you want to go back to California?” It’s like, “Well, because Mommy and Daddy gets to spend more time with me.” That like, “Oh, my gosh!” I was bawling my eyes out! That was the defining moment for us where we knew that even as a 5-year-old, she could tell the difference of having stressed-out parents to having more present and intentional parents. That happened within less than a year, right? Kids will always tell the truth. They would never put a filter on anything, and I think that was the defining moment for me for sure.

Joseph: Did you notice anything about yourself? The Sam back in the Philippines versus the Sam in the Bay Area. Just on a day-to-day basis, how you felt, anything you noticed about yourself during that first year back there?

Samantha: [36:46] It was weird. I felt weird at first. Because Bay Area Sam is always on the go. Like, I would feel weird if I slow down. “What’s next?” Or we have downtime, we could check this off our list while we have time. Versus over here, I get to slow down. I get to reconnect with myself and it’s refreshing to have some time for myself as well because you need that. As a mom, as a wife, and just as a person, to reconnect with yourself and being able to kind of have something that you call your own.

For me, that’s being able to spend time with friends, having yoga, or anything that I only do for myself. Not because selfishly, but it’s just helped me feel a human being again. Yes. I feel like I’m the more laid-back Sam in the Philippines versus California Sam.

Joseph: I can’t help but think about myself as a parent as you’re describing these stories to me. Because I do sometimes feel guilty if I’m just taking a moment for myself to just do something for me. I don’t know why. Why do you think that is? As a parent that that’s so hard to give yourself permission to do that.

Samantha: [37:57] It’s so funny because that’s what me and my husband were just talking about a few days ago. It’s hard because you missed your kids. That’s why you feel guilty. But, at the same time, I feel like for you to be able to be at your best for your kids, you have to be your best self first in however way you need to — I wouldn’t say disconnect, but channel that or cope with that. You have to have some type of way to cope with life because you are still a human being, and you need that reminder that you still need that. You have your own needs as well.

However way you do that, whether it’s yoga, whether it’s working out, whether it’s taking a walk, that makes a difference and put you in a better headspace, and be available and ready for your kids. There’s always going to be that guilt. It’s because you miss your kids, right? You need time away from them, but the moment that you get time away from them, you miss them right away. It’s just going to be an ongoing challenge as a parent.

Joseph: I do want to talk about some of the lessons you’ve learned along the way during your move back to the Philippines. I am curious to hear what has been the most surprising thing about returning there.

Samantha: [39:13] Living in Baguio City, even though traffic is probably worse from years ago, I feel like you could still get to where you need to go within 20 minutes. I feel like that takes back a lot of your time. You could be intentional with your time depending where you’re located. It plays a big deal. If you’re doing this two-hour commute at work, there’s so much you can do living in a smaller city, within two hours that you probably won’t have living in California. The time, how much I could do in a day. Because again, it’s such a small city and everything is still accessible. That’s what surprised me is how much time you could take back.

Joseph: As you leave a city like San Francisco, which sort of I guess on the outside and even on the inside when you’re living there, feels like this city of opportunity and growth, and a lot of the tech companies are there. Well, I’ve got clients sometimes, or cross paths with people who are about to make a move away from a big city, which feels like the place to be, with a lot of opportunity to then move to a smaller city or away from the “professional scene.” Did that run through your head? And if so, what advice would you give to the Samantha who was pondering whether to move away from a city like San Francisco?

Samantha: [40:34] Manage your expectations and do your research. Another thing too is, you know, how it was when I was a kid is probably not the same. There are probably some similarities, except that there are some things that you’re probably going to have to address to. Managing those expectations is very important. Really knowing what you value the most. Yes, there’s all of these things, but does that align with your values? Or how big will that impact your personal or professional values if you were to move there? As long as you know what you value the most, which in my case is being able to spend time with my kids, everything else is secondary.

Joseph: Well, that’s a great segue, Sam, into the last thing I want to talk with you about before we wrap up, which is just a couple questions about the lessons you’ve learned along the way. And then, we can talk a little bit about what you’re up to right now. What’s something that you’ve learned about yourself moving away from the Philippines to work in the U.S. for many years, and now returning to the Philippines?

Samantha: [41:33] One thing that I’ve learned about myself is that I needed to slow down. I just felt I was not being productive or I always felt restless. If I wasn’t doing anything, if I wasn’t keeping myself busy, slowing down helped me see things more clearly and speed up the process. One thing that I learned about myself, that I was going too fast and that’s slowing down is not a bad thing.

Joseph: What is something that you now know about career transitions that you wished you had known in the past?

Samantha: [42:11] The advice I would give myself is to be bold. This is probably cliché to hear, but life is short. But it truly is. The exciting part begins when you surrender to the unknown, even if it means that you might fail in some areas along the way. If you’re just kind of settling because you’re too afraid to fail, it’s better to just fail fast so you could learn faster and move forward.

Joseph: I want to wrap up with what you’re doing now. You mentioned this at the beginning of our conversation that your husband started some jiu-jitsu lessons. It sounds like your daughter is benefiting from this right now also alongside her ballet. Can you tell me a little bit more about C-Suite Jiu-Jitsu? What is that?

Samantha: [42:50] Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. C-Suite Jiu Jitsu is Brazilian jiu-jitsu lessons that we offer for kids as young as 5 through 16 years old, to adults as well. We also have women’s self-defense classes. Virtually, anyone in any size, as long as you know the right techniques, you’re able to escape from someone attacking you, whether they’re 100 pounds bigger than you. There are some ways to combat that. I feel like it’s a good life skill to have.

My husband, Benjamin Agustin, is the one running it. He’s the one teaching all the classes. I am running the operations. We just started this year but been having a lot of great feedback from people and there have been a lot of great signups, which is very exciting.

Joseph: In college, I very briefly took jiu-jitsu myself.

Samantha: [43:41] Oh, nice!

Joseph: I didn’t make it past white belt because I just didn’t have as much time in college. I was so caught up with my pre-med studies at the time. I feel like if there were one martial art I’d want our daughter to learn, it would be jiu-jitsu. Just because it’s so practical to everyday life and self-defense. Whatever happened to Masarap Box? What’s the current status of that business for you?

Samantha: [44:04] There were a lot of unexpected things that I didn’t anticipate with our suppliers. And just the cost, we are trying to reassess what would be a better value for everyone. I’m sorting that through right now. I just thought it was best for us to pause shipments this year, but something’s brewing, and I am working on rebranding it for next year. So, stay tuned. Hopefully, I get to update you as soon as we get that live again.

Joseph: If people want to learn more about C-Suite Jiu Jitsu, or if they want to keep up with what’s happening with Masarap Box, where can people go?

Samantha: [44:41] At least for C-Suite Jiu Jitsu, we are most active on Facebook and Instagram. If you just look up our handle, @csuitejiujitsu. For Masarap Box, @shopmasarapbox, mainly on Instagram. Yes, if anyone wants to learn more about just me personally and wants to shoot me a message or have any questions about my story or about career transitions, they could also easily look up my name on LinkedIn as well. That would be Samantha Tovera Agustin.

Joseph: Well, thank you so much, Sam, for telling us about your life as an HR consultant and business owner. How you managed your transition from the Philippines to the U.S., then back. Also, the importance of just getting clear on your priorities and values along the way of your career journey. Best of luck with C-Suite Jui Jitsu, Masarap Box, your HR consulting work, and also your life there in the Philippines. I hope it all continues to go well for you.

Samantha: [45:37] Thank you so much, Joseph. Thank you again for having me today.

When you figure out where to take your career, you shouldn’t feel like you have to chase after it right away. On Career Relaunch® podcast episode 89, Kessler Bickford, a former magazine editor turned psychotherapist, discusses the challenges of deciding where you take your career when you have multiple interests and the distinction between identifying and actually pursuing your passion.

We also talk about the importance of timing when making a career pivot, and during the Mental Fuel® segment, I also reveal the impact moving at different speeds in my own career had on my overall professional trajectory.

During this episode’s Mental Fuel® segment, I talked about the importance identifying one initiative, project, or move in your career that you feel really eager to get done right away. Take a moment right now and reflect on what’s at stake and what might happen if you slowed down just a bit.

Do you need to pursue this specific goal at this very moment? Or is it something that could wait? At least for a bit? What would that cost you? How would it benefit you? Consider how slowing down might influence your ultimate chances of success.

Kessler Bickford is a psychotherapist running her own private practice who specializes in treating patients struggling with anxiety using a modality called Intensive Short-term Dynamic Psychotherapy. However, she began her career working for over a decade as an editor for Chesapeake Family Life magazine.

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!

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.

Teaser [first ~15s]: I needed to do some unfinished work in myself. I needed to live more before I could really speak into someone else’s life. I wasn’t ready. I thought I was. But, looking back, I couldn’t have done this the way I do it now. There wasn’t a chance.

Joseph: Hello, Kessler. It is good to talk with you again. Welcome to the Career Relaunch Podcast. It is great to have you on the show.

Kessler: [02:23] Thank you, Joseph. It’s really fun to do this.

Joseph: First of all, before we get started, how’s everything going with you? Are you doing okay?

Kessler: [02:28] Yeah. Life is good. Being a parent just supersedes everything because your happiness this like contingent on how your child is doing.

Joseph: I should probably say that you and I haven’t spoken in a while. So, this is actually going to be a little bit of a catch-up for you and I also. I was wondering if we could just start by getting a sense of what’s been keeping you busy right now in both your professional life and also your personal life.

Kessler: [02:57] I am a wife and I am a mother of a 10-year-old boy, as well as a psychotherapist. All that is always moving the speed of light and at the same time. It’s the balancing act. It’s settling into parenting, and then it’s settling into my professional life, and there’s a lot of sort of stop-and-start there.

Joseph: I’ll bet. I am also a parent, and I can understand how it’s really hard to have any stretch of time to do anything continuously. Let’s take those one at a time. You mentioned you’re a psychotherapist. Can you just give a snapshot of what you do, what you focus on, and what your approach is?

Kessler: [03:42] With your help, I found my branding. My specialty is treating anxiety. That is something I’ve studied extensively and have certification in. So many other issues connect with anxiety. While I’m helping people with anxiety, I’m also helping them with emotional issues and other things like that.

Joseph: Just so we’re all kind of on the same page, when you use the term “anxiety” in a clinical sense, can you just explain in layperson’s terms what exactly do you mean by that? What are the types of people who you might typically see in your practice?

Kessler: [04:20] There are four different levels of anxiety, and they’re very different. Some anxiety might not bother you. As anxiety gets higher and higher and creeps up to sort of the second third and fourth level, it becomes harder to manage and certainly creates more sort of physical disruptions in your body and disruptions in your life, and it becomes pretty serious. I’m helping people learn how to regulate anxiety that goes to a point where it’s so high, it’s affecting the cognitive ability as well as sort of creating a lot of physical symptoms, too.

Joseph: We will probably get into more details into how you became a psychotherapist as we go along this conversation. I also want to touch on the family life piece of it because as you mentioned, you are a mother, and that plays into the balance between work and the rest of your life. Could you just give a snapshot of how you balance the two, and how much one affects the other?

Kessler: [05:25] It’s kind of miraculous. I’m not sure sometimes how I made a day go by when I look back on the day. Because I’m in private practice, I can set my schedule. That allows me to tailor the time I need and carve that out for my son or family things, and then move my clients around that. That’s such a blessing of being in private practice or working for yourself is you have that kind of flexibility and can put family first, which is what I do.

Joseph: Before we go back in time to talk about your previous profession, what’s it like having a 10-year-old son at home?

Kessler: [06:08] He’s in fourth grade and he has just a ton of personality. He’s very sweet but someone once asked me how’s motherhood. I said, “You know, there’s nothing like having your own personality used against you.”

Joseph: Right.

Kessler: [06:26] Because he looks just like my husband, but he has my temperament.

Joseph: I see. I’ve always thought it might be interesting as someone who is a psychotherapist to think about your children, their temperament, and their approach to life. It must influence your perceptions of your child and also inform your approach to parenting. Would you say that’s a fair statement?

Kessler: [06:49] I think it is fair. That doesn’t mean it’s a winning approach because I’m just human, and I’m at it with my fears and projections. The tricky thing is separating yourself from your child and realizing you’re two totally different people, and how you see something and feel about something is not the way they do. This allows them to have their own experience, their own personality separate from your own. That is something that’s I think hard for so many parents. It’s just accepting your child for the personality that they have that’s different from yours.

Joseph: I can completely relate to that. As you know, I’ve got a 4-, coming up on 5-year-old daughter. I do catch myself sometimes almost saying something along the lines of, “Well, when I was a kid…” This, and I just got to stop myself. I can feel myself tempted to bring it up but I stop myself.

Kessler: [07:48] Yeah.

Joseph: I know you haven’t always been a psychotherapist, Kessler. I’d like to kind of switch gears and go back in time now. Would you mind just telling me what you were up to before you entered the world of therapy? I understand you spent quite a bit of time as an editor. Can you tell me a little bit about that chapter of your career? And then, we’ll go forward from there.

Kessler: [08:06] I was a magazine editor for 12 years. I worked for a regional magazine that covered the Chesapeake regions of Maryland and Virginia and Delaware, and it was a lifestyle magazine. Before that, you know, mama was a rolling stone here. I had a lot of different careers. I was a wrangler on a dude ranch. I was a cleaning lady for a little while. I lived in the Bahamas for a while. I just didn’t know where I belonged. I was really lost. But, I knew I didn’t want to settle. I didn’t want to go into the corporate world just to check a box or have a job I didn’t love. I knew that if I didn’t love it, I was never going to be able to pull it off. I just sort of bided my time until my purpose came to me.

Joseph: There are some quite very different roles in there. So, you said wrangler on a dude ranch, and then, eventually, become a magazine editor. How did you go from the former to the latter? I’m just kind of reading between the lines here but was it to try to maybe take more practical job on paper that kind of felt a little bit more stable? Or, what was the motivation behind going into being a magazine editor?

Kessler: [09:23] I think I really realized I wanted to be a writer. I just had this life philosophy that even if you know there’s something inside you that you’re meant to do, if you touch it too soon, if you touch it when it’s not time, you could ruin it. What I mean by “ruin it” is if you’re not ready and you try it, the danger is you come out with a story that you failed. And so, this thing that you knew was inside you to do becomes this horrible story of failure, when the truth is is it just wasn’t time. So, you’ve got to wait for the time to be right. I think I was always just kind of waiting for it to be revealed to me what I really wanted to do, and then wait for the right time because they’re different. They’re two different things.

Joseph: Were you feeling like editorial work just wasn’t doing it for you? How did you know that that wasn’t going to be your long-term professional calling?

Kessler: [10:27] When I was in my early 20, I’d say 22, 23. I got the insight that I wanted to be a therapist. I was like, “Wonderful!” The purpose finally showed up. I can go for it, right? So, I went to my pastor at the time. I asked for a meeting with him and I said, “I think my purpose has shown up.” He said, “Well, wonderful! What is it?” I said, “Well, as a therapist.” He said, “Well, I would wait.” And, I said, “What?! Wait? Why?” He said, “Well, you just want to make sure that you’re ready for it emotionally, in maturity-wise, and if you want to make sure it’s time.” While at the time I thought, “Well, the nerve of him to discourage an effervescent, excited, young woman,” I thought there’s some wisdom there.

So, I thought, “Okay. Well, I’m going to put it on the back burner being a therapist, and I’m going to go into the world of writing. If the urge to become a therapist comes back, if it shows back up after a while, I’ll pay attention to it then. But, for now, I’m just going to let it kind of germinate. For 12 years I was in the magazine world and it did come back. That feeling to go back and get a degree in therapy, and go into that part of me did come back.

Joseph: If you wouldn’t mind diving into this concept of jumping into something too early, I think that could be interesting to talk about. You mentioned your pastor had mentioned, “Hey, don’t do this right now.” I’ve actually have been given a similar advice myself when I was thinking about going into coaching one day. I remember a coach I spoke to, he said, “Don’t do this yet.” What do you think is behind these people’s comments to dissuade people from jumping into their path of passion too “early”? What would be the downside of that?

Kessler: [12:31] I think everything in life is motive. I can’t speak to what his motive was. For me, it wasn’t a malicious motive. It was a motive of making sure that I was ready. I needed to do some unfinished work in myself. I needed to live more before I could really speak into someone else’s life. The truth is, the human brain isn’t fully formed to your 24, 25, and I was 22, 23, so I wasn’t ready. I thought I was. Looking back, I couldn’t have done this the way I do it now. There wasn’t a chance. For me, it was really good advice. It wasn’t pleasant advice. It was tough advice to hear, but he was right.

Joseph: What do you think that time as a magazine editor did for you or enabled you to do that you wouldn’t have otherwise been able to pull off when you started to make that transition into psychotherapy?

Kessler: [12:36] People ask me that, “Well, what’s the connection?” It’s not a loose connection, it’s a very strong connection because as a writer, you’ve got to have the ability to step out of someone else’s story. When you’re interviewing them, in order to tell their story, you’ve got to remove yourself so that you can fully hear them and fully take in their experience so that you’re able to translate it onto paper. There was so much training and listening and asking questions that lead to deeper and more information for me, and removing myself from the equation so that it can be their moment, not mine. That was really part of my training in becoming a therapist.

Joseph: Can we also talk a little bit about the transition itself? We’re talking about two at least seemingly different professions. Although, I know you mentioned there’s a very strong connection in the transferable skills that you developed. Can you just give a glimpse into what it was like to be working full-time as an editor while also pursuing this new path of being trained and credentialed to become a psychotherapist?

Kessler: [14:50] I was the senior editor. The managing editor who worked under me, he and I changed jobs, swap jobs. He became the head of the magazine and I was the editor underneath of him. I didn’t have all that responsibility while I was going to graduate school. I think I did that for about a year. I went to school full time. I had a tremendous gift from my mother who supported me at that time so that I could go to school full-time and finish it as quickly as possible because I was 38.

Joseph: Is that considered kind of late?

Kessler: [15:35] I think for me, it felt late because I felt like a late bloomer. I wanted to be able to get right back into the job market as fast as I could. A lot of people go back to school right from college into a graduate or PhD program.

Joseph: Let’s shift gears here then, Kessler. Let’s talk about your entry into becoming a full-time psychotherapist. Coincidentally, it’s not uncommon for me to cross paths with people who have been working in the corporate world have realized that they would rather have a more people-focused profession, and they do start to consider things like psychotherapy or going into clinical psychology. How do you go from studying clinical psychology to then eventually working as a psychotherapist? Can you just explain what path you followed and how did you land in the practice that you landed in?

Kessler: [16:27] I found a practice I wanted to work in. I did my research and I identified a local practice in my hometown where I wanted to work. I called them and I said, “You know I’m about to graduate. I’d like to come talk to you about if you have any openings.” The owner of the practice said, “Well, you’re not fully licensed yet. I just can’t take you on. Call me when you’re fully licensed.” I just didn’t leave him alone. I hounded the poor man until he gave me a job. I just chased him until he’s, “All right, enough! Anything to get you to quit calling me.” I think it’s about identifying where you want to work and then just going for it.

Joseph: How do you go about finding patients? Do they come to you? Do you proactively — “market” is kind of a strong word here, but kind of promote or kind of drive visibility for your practice? How do you go about finding your clients, your patients?

Kessler: [17:26] When I first got out of grad school, I worked in a group practice, and now, I’m in private practice. The marketing is very different. In a group, they provide you with your clients a lot of times. In private practice, it’s solely up to me to go do my own marketing and find my own clients. Word of mouth always has the most legs. It always is the best way to go.

Joseph: How was it for you? As you were part of that group practice, can you just give a sense of what your trajectory was there? How you were feeling about that? How that evolved for you?

Kessler: [19:03] It was a great place to start. It was a great place for me to get my feet wet in the industry, to be around other therapists to see how they work, to have people to talk to other therapists to talk to when I had a break. That’s what I wanted in the beginning was to have that kind of community to build my confidence in. It wasn’t long before I realized like what I really wanted to do was go into business for myself.

Joseph: Was there something in particular that was kind of nagging you about being part of a group practice versus branching off on your own that was triggering you to think, “Hey, I need to go start my own practice”?

Kessler: [18:50] There are lots of problems when you get a bunch of therapists together.

Joseph: Okay. I can imagine, yeah.

Kessler: [18:58] How many jokes can we make up with that one? Therapists have all kinds of different modalities they use, right? There are tons of different ways to do therapy. I had my own training compared to their training. Sometimes it clashes, sometimes it works. But, for me, that was a little bit of a rub that we didn’t have the same kinds of therapy we did. That becomes disagreement on how to do therapy and the best ways to do therapy. While you can learn from each other, it’s nice to be around sort of more people are doing the same kind of therapy you’re doing. Also, your schedule is not your own when you work in a group, and neither is your rate. It’s set for you.

Joseph: Let’s talk about your transition then, going from part of a group practice to branching off on your own to start your own solo practice. What was that like for you? that maybe let’s start off in the early days. How did you think it was going to go and then how did it actually go?

Kessler: [20:03] It makes me remember when I first found you online. I thought, “If I’m going to go out on my own, I’ve got to have something that differentiates me from the other sea of therapists out there.” I found you online. I have this memory of sneaking out of the office, going to sit in my car, and having these secret telephone conversations with you.

Joseph: I have recollections of that, also.

Kessler: [20:29] You helped me prepare for my exit because you helped me think through who I wanted to be in private practice. Yes, it was a business decision, but it was also very much of a philosophy I was building with your help of who I wanted to be, how I wanted to be known, and really thinking through all that. So, I really thank you, by the way, that you gave me that education before I stepped out on my own. It made it very much less impulsive and much more deliberate.

Joseph: That’s great. Here, I should probably say, just full disclosure, we have worked together professionally before where I guess, as you mentioned, when you were thinking about branching off on your own. You came to me and we talked a little bit about your branding and your positioning. Can you share a little bit about what was the best thing about branching off on your own, and what was the most challenging, just in the early days?

Kessler: [21:28] The scariest part was, “Oh, my God! Where am I going to get my clients from?” Because they’ve kind of been fed to me. My boss was very kind and said to me, “You can whomever you’re seeing now, the clients we’ve given you now, you’re welcome to take them with you if you’d like.” So, he was very generous in that way. But, the nature of the therapy I do is short-term work. It doesn’t take many weeks or months for patients to sort of “graduate,” if you will, from their therapy. Which means I need other clients to be right on the heels to fill the space. Yes, I could take my old clients with me but where were the new ones going to come from? That was a real nail-biter for me.

Joseph: How do you go about finding the patients? It’s kind of this ironic sort of system where if you’re doing your job well, I suppose, as a psychotherapist, it’s the same thing in coaching. Your patient’s not going to be your patient for very long because they’re going to get better.

Kessler: [22:30] Right, yes.

Joseph: And so, you kind of need this pipeline of patients. How do you go about doing that as a therapist?

Kessler: [22:35] It is feast or famine. In the five years I’ve been on my own, I still haven’t been able to crack the code of why are some months great and others are crickets. I don’t mean crickets, I mean maybe four, five, six, seven people as opposed to 20. it goes up, it goes down; it goes up, it goes down. I don’t know the rhyme or reason. I’ve spent a lot of time I think driving myself crazy trying to find the “why.” I think a lesson there has been, for me, it does come back. When it’s slow, use that time to rest. Just don’t let the fear eat you up, that it’s not going to come back.

Joseph: Yeah, that is an interesting point because one of the questions I wanted to ask you, Kessler, was about your life as a psychotherapist. Many people, they’re probably coming to you at their most desperate moments I’m imagining. They’re coming to you, you’re dealing with issues related to anxieties. You’re dealing with people who are struggling a lot with something. When they see you, they’re probably really needing some serious help. How do you maintain your own psychology and your own stability through it all?

You mentioned having let’s say 20 patients at any one given time, I would imagine that’s somewhat emotionally and physically draining. Is that the case as a psychotherapist, do you feel the weight of the patients you’re working with? Or, do you just find a way to kind of separate yourself from that? I’ve always been really curious to hear about that straight from an actual psychotherapist.

Kessler: [24:21] That hasn’t been a struggle for me because when you have hope for a patient, when they are highly invested in themselves and have the want, the will to meet their goals, I don’t worry about them. Because they’ve already decided they’re going to walk this road and they’re going to get to what they want. I also did some crisis work when I was in grad school as part of my grad school work, and that was very different. That was very draining for me because people didn’t always have the will or the want to get better. The sympathy would just pour out of you and that was draining. That’s a very different population. I think as long as I see that a patient has the will, the want, the drive to get to their therapy goals, I’m energized by that.

Joseph: Well, before we talk about some of the lessons you’ve learned through your transitions, I also just want to ask you about what you have found to be the most surprising aspect of shifting from being part of a group practice to now being someone who’s running your own practice.

Kessler: [25:44] I still have a community that I’ve created with other therapists around me, and reached out and gotten to know them and have coffee and we meet for lunch. I can still have that community without having it in my office space.

Something else I found very surprising is that we’ve got more than one gift in us. it takes some courage to put your eyes on that other part of you, that other gift because sometimes, it upsets the apple cart, right? Sometimes, it can upset your life when you do that because it brings some change. I do believe we all have more than one gift inside of us.

Joseph: The last thing I was hoping I could talk with you about, Kessler, before we wrap up with what you’re focused on right now in your practice is just a few questions about the things you’ve learned along the way of your very interesting career change journey. I was hoping we could start by getting a sense of if you had to give advice to your younger self as it relates to making a major career change, what might that be?

Kessler: [26:54] Don’t second guess your gut about timing and have the courage to listen to it. You might hear a “no,” and that might be hard to hear. That no is designed to protect you. It’s designed to keep that change, that direction, you want to go. It’s designed to keep it sacred and it’ll come. Just listen to your gut about the timing of it all.

Joseph: I think sometimes we feel pressured, as quickly as possible, move on to that thing that we feel is really going to light us up and going to energize us, but to be patient with it, I suppose, if you can be.

Kessler: [27:47] Yes. Be patient with it and just question it.

Joseph: When you look back on your career change, Kessler, what’s something that you wished you had known that you now know?

Kessler: [27:58] I think don’t let fear run the show. It can cause a lot of hesitation. It can cause a lot of wasted time. Just go for it. If it’s the right time, just do it. Life’s too short to hesitate, to wait.

Joseph: One more question for you here. Just having been through this career change, what’s one thing that you have learned about yourself along the way?

Kessler: [28:24] Well, I was not a good student, okay. I have a little bit of a learning disability that was never identified. I wasn’t a great reader, focusing was hard for me. I didn’t come away with the experience that I was terribly bright. When I finally found my saying in life, I realized that I might not have a terribly high IQ, but I do have a high EQ. That was just something that wasn’t really valued by my family or at the time when I was growing up. I’m 53, by society either. I think it’s got much more clout now than it did when I was younger.

I got to see myself finally as smart, capable, bright, gifted, and that’s not to toot my own horn. It was just I could see myself in a different way that I’d always wanted to. Finding your thing that you’re really meant to do will bring that out for you.

Joseph: That’s a great point, Kessler. Sometimes, when you’re misplaced in the wrong profession, you can kind of mistakenly believe that you’ve got some issue and you’re just not able to do the job as well as you could or there’s something wrong with you because you’re not feeling energized by it. But you could just be completely in the wrong role and just not making the most of who you are and what you’re meant to do.

Kessler: [29:57] That’s right. It’s not a failure, it’s a bad fit. You’re not a failure.

Joseph: Absolutely. It’s like playing the wrong sport.

Kessler: [20:04] That’s right. You just got to find the right fit. that goes for relationships. It goes for careers. It goes for a pair of pants. You just have to find the right fit.

Joseph: I’d love to wrap up, Kessler, with what you’re focused on right now. I know we’ve touched on this, but can you just explain a little bit more about the focus of your practice on anxiety and shame, and the kind of help that you’re really excited about providing people that you work with?

Kessler: [30:39] I have been a student of the concept of shame since I was about 20 when I first heard the word. I really sort of built my life on first getting a hold of myself, to be healed of my own shame. And then, who knew that it was going to turn into what I’d be giving people for the rest of my life in turn. There’s one thing that every single person I’ve seen from the beginning of my career as a psychotherapist, that people have in common is shame, some element of shame. This has really been my focus is helping people come out of that, and being able to forgive themselves, and just break free of that cage of shame. That is always something in the works for me.

Joseph: I can’t let you go without actually asking you to maybe comment on this idea. I know before we hopped on this conversation, you actually shared an article in the Wall Street Journal with me that literally just came out before we recorded this. It came out in September 2022, and it was called “The Next Pandemic: Anxiety Over Life Itself.” You can imagine there are people out there who are probably listening to this, and maybe they’re dealing with a lot of economic uncertainty because of the unreal levels of inflation that are hitting people right now. We’ve got the war in Ukraine. We’ve got a lot of economic volatility. We’ve still got the pandemic that’s still in our hands.

If somebody’s listening to this and they’re either struggling with anxiety or they are struggling with shame, I am aware this is probably case by case basis, but do you have any broad suggestion on where people can start to at least make some strides in managing that anxiety or managing the kind of shame that they’re feeling?

Kessler: [32:43] It’s very hard to do on your own. I don’t think we were meant to do it alone. I think these are the issues that we were meant to do in a relationship with help. If you could do it alone, you would have already remedied the situation. It’s something we’re meant to do through a relationship. Make sure that you’ve got a therapist who is trained in anxiety regulation because it is a grossly misunderstood issue. I think not only in the therapy world but also in the medical world. You really want to have someone who is well trained and how to manage that.

Joseph: Speaking of which, if there is someone out there who’s listening to this and wants to learn more about the topic of shame or anxiety, or find out more about the work you do as a psychotherapist for people struggling with these issues, where can they go?

Kessler: [33:37] Well, thank you for asking. My website, which is my name, KesslerBickford, B-I-C-K-F-O-R-D.com.

Joseph: We will be sure to capture that in the show notes. I just wanted to thank you, Kessler, for well reconnecting with me first of all after all these years. Telling us more about your life as a psychotherapist, your transition from a very different industry into the world of psychotherapy. also just sharing some of your thoughts and insights on this topic of anxiety. Best of luck with your practice. Thank you for all the work you’re doing to assist your patients and all the people out there struggling with the challenges they’re facing right now.

Kessler: [34:16] Thank you, Joseph. It’s been fun.

What happens when the initial excitement of your new job starts to wear off? Or the work you’re doing becomes misaligned with the person you want to be? In episode 88 of the Career Relaunch® podcast, Melody Mack, an neurodiagnostics business owner turned project manager shares her thoughts on managing your relationship with work, letting go of a business you created, and taking an honest look at who you are. During the Mental Fuel® segment, I’ll also share a glimpse into a few of the issues I seem to have dragged around with me from job to job.

During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, my challenge to you was to take an honest look at one of the persistent issues you’ve been struggling with in your career for quite some time. How much of your work struggles are a result of the specific environment you’re in at this moment? How much of them actually have to do with you—your expectations, your beliefs, your blueprint of how things should be.

Take 1 action over something you can control to help you manage those things you can’t control at this moment in your career.

Melody Mack left a successful career in healthcare as a provider and business owner so she could  focus on project management in a different industry. One thing she’s learned is that working hard in a job that doesn’t give you joy is simply not sustainable. I caught Melody in the middle of her transition, and in spite of facing some tough challenges along the way, she’s still hopeful for the future.

I first crossed paths with Melody when she sent me a note on LinkedIn after being a long-time listener of this podcast. She mentioned feeling burned out by her last job, the challenges of walking away from a lucrative role, and the complications of transitioning into something else–all universal challenges many career changers face. I was really excited to get her onto the show so she could share in her own words what I think is a very relatable career transition journey.

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!

A2 Hosting is the web host provider I use and trust for my own websites, and they even offer 100% carbon neutral green hosting. For an easy, fast, and affordable way to get your personal website online today, visit careerrelaunch.net/a2 to get 50% off your web hosting plan.

Teaser: I had to recognize that I brought some of my bad habits that led to burnout and resentment in my last career into my new career that is also possibly why I’m not happy yet where I’ve landed.

Joseph: Let’s get started by talking a little bit about what you’re up to at this moment. Can you just give me a glimpse into what’s been keeping you busy in your personal life and also your professional life?

Melody: [02:29] Actually, this is the first time in 14 years that I haven’t been on-call in some capacity. So, my greatest joy is being able to not have my phone on me. I’m spending time reading and taking long walks, and I’ve even started taking cooking classes.

In my career, I am a senior project management consultant for a small group out of Denver Colorado. My current contract is with a school district. I’m having a lot of fun working with some incredible people and learning every single day. That keeps me very much on my toes.

Joseph: You mentioned that you were on-call a lot in your past life. We are going to get into more detail about your history in a moment. But what sort of things would you be on-call for?

Melody: [03:26] I was working in two leadership roles. One as a provider in healthcare and one as a business owner. At any point in time, either there was a fire to put out for the business, or I was actually on-call to provide services for a hospital.

Joseph: The other thing I wanted to ask you about is just like personally, you said you’ve got a little bit of space for hobbies right now and to kind of have a little bit of breathing room. What are you enjoying doing in your free time right now?

Melody: [03:54] Naps are great.

Joseph: It never hurts, yeah.

Melody: [03:59] Reading. I’ve been looking for new opportunities to learn something that I haven’t done before. A lot of it is interjected with just fun. For example, there’s an event in a couple of weeks where there’s an outdoor movie being shown, but they’ll also have goats running around. Things like that that are a little outside of the norm, but something that will just be fun. I had lost a little bit of joy in my career. And now, I’m just seeking new opportunities and having fun.

Joseph: Very good to hear. Okay. Well, let’s talk about your past and let’s talk about your previous career chapters. You have not always been a senior project manager. Could you tell me a little bit about your time back in the day when you were working in neurodiagnostics? And then, we can move forward from there.

Melody: [04:52] Well, I got a great opportunity 14 years ago to apply to be an interoperative neuromonitoring technologist, which is a healthcare technology position where you work in the operating room monitoring brain and spine. I got that opportunity without having a graduate degree, which was a dream for me to be in healthcare. It required a lot of calls, a lot of travel, and a lot of agility.

But along the way, I got a chance to co-found a company with one of my bosses. And, that’s where that second role came in where I was working as a provider, but I also co-founded a neurodiagnostics company. It was exciting. It was something I never thought I’d get a chance to do, but it was good old-fashioned hard work.

Joseph: You mentioned that you were really excited to work in healthcare when you think back to when you were a kid. Was this something you wanted to do when you grew up?

Melody: [05:58] It was. I was that little girl who said, “When I grew up, I’m going to be a doctor.” I got the chance to apply for medical school, and I was most interested in alternative medicine. I applied for a program to get a Doctorate in Alternative Health. The estimated cost of the education would have been $500,000. And, that was the biggest barrier to entry for me. In hindsight, it was the right decision to not take on the debt. But it did leave me thinking I could not be in health care unless I got some sort of higher degree.

Joseph: You moved into this area of neurodiagnostics, and you also co-founded a company. Can you tell me how things started off for you? What did you enjoy about that role?

Melody: [06:53] Well, first and foremost, I love science. Getting the chance to integrate technology, and caring for patients was exciting. Being in the operating room behind those doors that a lot of people don’t get to see, it was a dream come true. But again, it was very demanding and a lot of hard work.

I compare it a lot to what it’s like to travel on a plane. If you’re not on the first flight of the day and you get delayed, you never know when you’re going to leave or arrive. That’s how a lot of the operating room time schedules work. So, there were a lot of times when I had no idea when I would start or end my day. But everything becomes routine after a while, and a lot of the work I did was elective. I wasn’t saving lives. I wasn’t the one doing the operation. I was ancillary to the team, which was good, but it also stripped some of the meaning of being a healthcare provider for me.

The business side was where I got my project management experience because there’s no way to set up a business if you don’t look at it like a project. I got the chance to try something that on paper, I probably wasn’t qualified to build or do because I didn’t have my MBA. But you could pick up on the theme that I was always worried about lacking that degree, that higher degree, to prove that I could do something. I was given a chance to do it without and it was fun, it was exciting, and it was hard.

Joseph: What was the most challenging aspect of that period of your career?

Melody: [08:40] Wearing multiple hats. Being in the operating room, but knowing that I needed to attend to a business matter. Also, staying focused on what was right in front of me. I had a really hard time being present and caring for the patient in front of me while I was also thinking about my business meeting that was happening shortly thereafter. The more I learned about healthcare for profit, the more out of love I fell with the industry as a whole.

Joseph: We talked about this when we first spoke about this idea. I know you mentioned you were in the operating room, you get a chance to see a lot of things that the average person doesn’t get a chance to see. I think the way you put it to me at the time was the more you were able to see behind the curtain, the less passionate you were about healthcare. Can you just explain a little bit about what was happening?

Melody: [09:34] I had lost my belief in what I was doing it for. Don’t get me wrong. My business was very small and we were profitable. It helped me get out of student loan debt from my undergrad, and I’m forever grateful for that. But once I saw what it would take to expand and grow the business, I realized that some of the nuances in health care and insurance building here in America were just not aligned with my values. I’m not criticizing anyone in the industry, but for me personally, it was a point where I couldn’t sell the services because I didn’t believe in the way billing worked anymore.

Joseph: How long did you have that feeling before you started to think about moving to something else?

Melody: [10:31] In all honesty, it was death by a thousand cuts. There were so many little things over time that were difficult: knowing the behind-the-scenes of healthcare billing, having a 24/7 job, working with other people who are 24/7 in a high-stress, high-intensity environment, and just the sheer exhaustion that comes from that.

But there was a single moment in time I was thinking about it, the last 24 hours preparing for this. I was on call for trauma neurosurgery, and I lost track and I had taken a long walk. And, I was about a mile from my house when I got the call that they needed a tech immediately. So, I literally had to sprint home, jump in my car, drive across town, and set up for work, and that ended up being a 17-hour workday.

Once I arrived, I found myself thinking more about when I would get to take a break, when I would get to eat, or how many hours I would get to sleep when it was over, versus what was happening right in front of me. I was having to work harder and harder to be present for my patients and my team. At the end of that 17 hours, I went to give the surgeon a summary of the case and he said, “Who are you again?”

I was devastated because I thought my role in the room was important. I powered through a big long day, and it turned out that it wasn’t what I thought. I was looking for validation from the team around me and that’s something that I have been working on in my new career. But it was pretty grounding and humbling. That was the moment when I knew it was time to go.

Joseph: That must be tough to hear because you’re investing your blood, sweat, and tears into something. And then, for someone to not even who you are in the room. That’d be really tough for me to stomach. Did you then think about making a change at that moment? What was running through your head after that night of pulling all those hours and well not even knowing who you are?

Melody: [12:56] How am I going to get out?

Joseph: What were you most afraid of when you were thinking about it?

Melody: [13:03] I was most afraid of leaving the salary, which was a good salary but it required a great deal of self-sacrifice. Self-sacrifice had become my mode of operation. Most of all, I would be, on paper, walking away from a dream being in healthcare, founding a business. Let me be clear, that they were tied by my business partner was also my boss. I was very embedded in this neurodiagnostics world with my partner. The idea of untangling that was terrifying.

Joseph: Did you guys have conversations about what was running through your head? This potential whisper that you were hearing about maybe doing something else, what was that like?

Melody: [13:53] Joseph, I’ll be honest. I realized that for the six months prior to me finally saying it was time for me to go, I had become grumpier and grumpier at every meeting. I realized that my business partner was dreading having meetings with me because I would always bring in all this emotion and baggage because I was so burned out and so resentful at that point. When I did tell him, it was like breaking up. So, there was a great degree of guilt and awkwardness. His response to me was, “Oh, I know. You’ve been burned out for five years.” We had been working together for 11.

Joseph: So, he recognized this, you recognized this. Well, you can share as many details as you want here. But what did he tell you when he found out that you were thinking about no longer carrying on as someone who was really burned out in this particular industry?

Melody: [14:56] He was the same as he’s always been. He believed in me when he met me 11 years prior. But he also wanted me to stay holding up the two companies. He was considerably gracious. There was no arguing or begging me to stay. But I think it took them a few months to realize that I really was moving on. We kept in touch until — actually, very recently. I haven’t heard from him for maybe a month. We kept in touch because we had become friends over the years. Ultimately, I think that as much work as I carried for the companies, I think he also understood that maybe it was time for us just to go our separate ways.

Joseph: I know you mentioned the moment that you experienced in the hospital when you realize you had to make a change. Was there a moment when you realized that as much as you wanted to continue to work, I guess with this co-founder of yours and to continue to work on this project you’d invested years into, was there a moment when you realized that that wasn’t working for you? The building of this business that you had built from scratch.

Melody: [16:08] Yes. There’s a lot to it, but I’ll summarize it this way. I knew that I didn’t have the capabilities to grow the company in the way that it would take to be successful. I also had fallen out of love with that service line. The hardest part of leaving that were the people that my team there were such incredible and hardworking, and they sacrificed a lot to make it what it was. Ultimately, leaving both companies gave other people an opportunity to lead.

Joseph: I have always been curious, Melody, about what it’s like because I’ve never been in this particular situation where you create the business, or the product, or the service, and you are building this thing. You are raising this like you would a baby. In some ways, it is your sort of metaphorical baby. I know this must be tough but can you put into words what it’s like to say farewell to that and to just hand it over to some other person who probably feels like some random individual who hasn’t been involved from the very start?

Melody: [17:26] It was really hard. I was flying down to another city to tell my right-hand person, my right-hand team member in person, that I was leaving. I was in the airport googling how to leave a company that you co-founded, literally. I was grasping at straws. I felt better about it by creating new leadership positions for individuals who had been dedicating a lot and pouring into that, but nothing was adequate enough for me to feel good about leaving that. It still isn’t. I’ll be honest, I think about my team, I keep in touch with some, and I do still feel guilty for leaving them but they’re doing fine.

Joseph: Just to paint a timeline here. We’re recording this in mid-2022. My understanding is that it was in 2021 when you started the process of trying to extricate yourself from this business. I’d love to shift gears here a little bit and talk about that exact transition. Like that period when you decided, “Hey, I’m leaving. I need to find a way out of this.” What happened between the time when you decided that and when you left? Can you walk me through those few months in your life and what was happening for you, what was running through your head, and what you were wrestling with?

Melody: [19:10] Quick plug here. I found your podcast last February. That was after that moment of the 17 hours of surgery that I needed to look for that external support. So, thank you. You’ve been with me this whole time.

From there, I had already built a foundation in project management. In 2017, I’d taken a Certification Course in Project Management so that I could apply it better to the business that I was already building and running. Continued with that and took a project management approach to everything in both of my businesses. To me, that was the obvious direction. But leaving a leadership position I held, two of them for 11 years, is very difficult and takes a lot of planning.

I think from when I said, “I was leaving” to my last day, it was probably April to July. And then, I did some freebie consulting for the team afterward with some questions, I think until January, just little odds and ends and questions. Along the way, I drink a lot of wine. I probably talked about it to everyone that I knew. I exhausted my support system by talking about it because it was the only thing I could think about. You know what? Ultimately, when I did tell people I was moving on, it was just a collective sigh of relief. People were like, “Oh, thank goodness! Melody’s finally going to move.”

Joseph: When you say “people,” like friends and family.

Melody: [20:54] Yeah, my support system had been listening to my gripes, my grumpiness, and my woes for so many years. I hadn’t taken action until last year. I’m so relieved that I did. But it wasn’t the end, it was just the beginning.

Joseph: During these few months when you’re trying to extract yourself, you’d also achieved your Project Management Certification, is that right? This was in late 2021.

Melody: [21:28] I sat for my Project Management Professional Exam this February. So, just a few months ago. But I had been building my project hours over the years. Then, I put off taking the test because the application process in itself is pretty time-consuming. The application, I completed last year. Then, when they approve you, you have one year to take this exam. Like I said, the application alone is very daunting.

Joseph: When you’re thinking, “Okay. I’ll get this certification and then I’ll be set to apply to other roles,” was that the plan?

Melody: [22:10] I’ll back it up to when I finished my last day, my jobs. I started a small consulting company just to help give small businesses business operations and project management. But what I found right away is that I didn’t want to be a one-man shop and that I needed more resources, and probably more experience to be successful. So, I even got a job at a cafe because I wanted to make cappuccinos and do something that was not full of pressure.

Joseph: No pun intended.

Melody: [22:45] I know. It was this fantasy to go back to my first job, which was a barista. And, I got this cafe to give me a chance even though they looked at my resume and thought, “You’re insane.” But they gave me a chance and it was a full-fledged line-out-the-door café, and it was not a relaxing job. Although, the perks were delicious food and being on the other side of the register, which was important.

Joseph: I mean I was just talking with somebody who was telling me that they had a friend who was saying, “Hey, at some point, I just want to slow down. I just want to have a job in a café. I just want to serve coffee and do something that doesn’t require a tremendous amount of effort outside of the work hours.” What was that like for you? I know you mentioned it was busy. But what was the experience like going from this high caliber job, but also role as a co-founder, working in hospitals, life-and-death situations to — not to diminish it but, serving coffee to people?

Melody: [23:47] That’s what I wanted to do. Part of that was complex. I was immediately humbled because I hadn’t been in the restaurant industry for many years, and I had a lot to relearn. It was fun and exciting for about five minutes. And then, I realized that being customer-facing is hard. That people are either incredible or terrible. My co-workers were diverse and interesting, and hardworking. I only got to make a few cappuccinos. I mean that was what I was in it for, and it was harder than I thought. I scratched that itch. I made friends with the master baker who gave me a 30-year sourdough starter. I only lasted about a month before, honestly, my back went out.

Joseph: Oh, no, okay. This was quite the change of scenery for you. Before we talk about some of the lessons you’ve learned along the way, I do want to talk also about what’s been happening for you over the past few months. Again, we’re recording this in mid-2022. You got your certification just three, or four months ago. What has this process been like for you as you have now tried to create this new chapter in your career focused on project management? How’s that gone for you? Just completely recreating your life and your professional life.

Melody: I made it harder for myself by selecting to not look for roles within healthcare. I had some early opportunities from recruiters to do project management within healthcare, and it’s not what I wanted. In an attempt to reinvent my career in my life, I had said very early, “I want out of healthcare entirely.” I didn’t do myself any favors there.

I’d like to say that I’m a generalist and I’ve been trying to continue important general skills like public speaking in my Toastmasters’ Club, and leadership, also in my Toastmasters’ Club, in hopes that someone would give me a chance to interview and say, “You know what? Melody can do anything. Let’s plug her into this industry.” Essentially, that’s what happened but it didn’t happen quickly. And now, that I’m in that, I’m still a little surprised and grateful that someone gave me a chance outside of my specialty area.

Joseph: What did you ultimately end up doing, and what are you ultimately focused on right now?

Melody: [26:28] I had a recruiter find me on LinkedIn for a project management consulting position. The job description does not match what I do and it wasn’t even close to what I interviewed for. I got placed in a contract with a public school district doing all kinds of things. But mostly, I’ve gotten the opportunity to be paired with strategic projects, which they’re not life and death like what I had been in before, but the scope of the people that they could affect is very large.

I don’t know a lot about public education, and I’m learning every day. It’s nuanced, and it’s complex, and it’s political. But what I’m focusing on is taking my general skills in project management. And, just having been in such a high-stress environment and applying it to these projects, which are high stakes in a different way. To be honest, some days I leave work with more questions than answers. But that’s what I asked for when I left my other industry.

Joseph: When you say questions, Melody, are you talking about questions related to the job itself, or questions related to your choice to do this job, or both?

Melody: [27:57] That’s an interesting way to frame it. Maybe all of the above. I would say if you asked me a year ago if I would have thought it’d be in public education as a project manager, I would have said, “Hell, no!” But I also realized what was attracted to projects is that there’s a start and an end. I’m already finding myself wanting more, and that’s a scary place to be because I just gave up more. I gave up two massive roles to simplify my life. And so, what I really need to do is just sit still and be present, and do what I’m doing.

Joseph: This is a really common I guess scenario that people either face or may be concerned about when they’re making a career change. From the people I talk to, one of the biggest hang-ups or hesitations people have about making a career change is maybe making a mistake, or maybe things not going as you hoped they would go, or maybe things not moving as quickly as you thought they’re going to move, or the work not being as interesting as you had presumed it would be. I’m not saying that any of those are necessarily what you’re talking about. But how do you wrestle with this situation where at least, initially, the blueprint you had in your head of how things could be, hasn’t exactly matched up with your experience?

Melody: [29:27] I think I’m responsible for a lot of the discomfort in where I was before and where I am now. I brought some bad work habits with me into my new career, which include equating work ethic with self-sacrifice, with having difficulty setting boundaries around work. Not just because work is not demanding of me, I’m not shutting down the work thought at five. I know it’s not possible always to just turn it off. But more than once, my husband has said, “You’re not getting paid to talk about work right now. Why are you talking about work?” I had to recognize that I brought some of my bad habits that led to burnout and resentment in my last career into my new career.

I have to take accountability that that is also possibly why I’m not happy yet where I’ve landed. I am really in a mode where I need to do some deeper work and not put all of my hope for joy, and peace, and love, and happiness in my career because I sacrificed the side of myself to be successful, to pay my student loans, and to build something. I believe that it’s time to build myself and my career is going to be on side of that, but not necessarily the central focus anymore. Does that make sense?

Joseph: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. I think when we spoke before starting this recording the first time we connected, I think one of the things you told me was that a lot of your self-esteem comes from work. We’re not talking about you specifically, but just in general. People’s self-esteem a lot of that really emerges from your professional life and your professional identity, the company you work for, the title that you have, how big your office is in some cases, and how much you’ve climbed the corporate ladder. And so, I think it is very difficult to completely divorce yourself from your professional identity. It’s just really tough to do.

It is interesting also to hear a little bit about your husband and his perceptions of you now versus before. I mean, have there been any other observations that he’s picked up or that he shared with you that you care to share with me that have just been interesting and maybe eye-opening for you to hear?

Melody: [32:06] He gets alarmed when I don’t answer my phone, and I actually ignore it now because I was so tied to it. I was one of those people who if we were having coffee, I would be looking at it constantly, responding to texts while we were talking, and not being focused on who was with. Now, I’ll have the ringer on maybe 20% of the time. It will be buzzing and he’ll run into the room and say, “Your phone’s ringing!” Like, I don’t care.

It took me a while to not jump every time I got a text or a call because that was how the hospitals and my team would communicate in the past. I did block about five hospitals that were still calling me as of two months ago for services. Don’t worry. I informed them first who to call. So, nobody’s not getting served. I blocked their numbers so that they wouldn’t call me anymore. The big one is just my behaviors with my phone are different, and I’ll sit through a whole meal without pulling up my phone, which I think we should probably all be doing. I didn’t recognize until recently what a bad habit I had developed with my phone, but it was a necessity of my job.

Besides that, I think what people have known me this whole time have noticed is that I’ve become less serious, which is something I would also tell my younger self is “Don’t be so serious about everything.” I’ve created this insurmountable expectation for me and other people in my life over the years. It was tied to my career, but it seeped into my personal life. I believe people have noticed that I’ve calmed down and relaxed a little bit. I still have a way to go, I’ll be honest.

Joseph: We all do. I was just having this conversation with my wife before we had this recording. I was telling her about my days back in Hawaii. For a long-time, listeners, and you may know this also, Melody, I spent about a year in Hawaii before medical school. I was out there just trying to do different things. I was just telling you, I didn’t give myself permission to relax as much as I wished I would have. I was really way too cautious that I needed to be at the age of 22. This does happen sometimes.

I think this is a really good segue to talk about one of the last things that I was hoping to cover with you, which is just some of the lessons that you’ve learned along the way of this career change journey, which you’re still just like right in the middle of it right now. If it’s kind of at the start, actually. And, this is the perfect time that I think I would like to ask you about some things related to what you just mentioned about advice to your younger self. Anything else come to mind is you’re in the thick of this right now?

Melody: [35:12] With all things, I would tell young Melody, “This too shall pass.” I did not spend enough time before I took this contract enjoying the in-between. To me, it was purgatory. I was suffering. I was stressed about what was next, what would my next salary be, and whether would I be able to prove myself. I didn’t enjoy that ride in between which was I just left a career, I sold the company. This is an okay moment to enjoy the ride and take each day as a day. Some days are great, some days are just a day. I was so focused on getting to this side of it where I had a contract in my hand and guaranteed pay. If I could go back in time, I would tell young Melody, “You know just, this too shall pass, enjoy the ride, and calm down.”

Joseph: I can so relate to a lot of things that you’re telling me right now, Mel. I think you and I are very similar in this way. Maybe a lot of people listen to this where you just kind of want to get through that transition and just get to the other side, and you like to put so much pressure on yourself to figure it out right away. And, until you figure it out right away, you feel guilty about going and treating yourself to a cup of coffee or a cookie until you have your “life back in order.” You’re right. I think those transitions are rare moments when you’re in between these jobs, and you can kick back a little bit and slow down. It’s just very hard to do when you feel pressured to find that next thing. When you look back on your career change, what’s something that you wished that you had known that you now know? I realize you’re still in it right now.

Melody: [37:25] I wish I would have known that my internal critic was not helping me. That it was holding me back, and that the people around me who were supportive and said, “It will be okay. You’ll get through. You have a good work ethic. You have a lot of skills. Just hang on.” I wish I would have known that they were right.

It is something that is a central focus of my self-work now is calibrating that internal critic when it’s helpful, which is not that often for me and when it’s wrong. I want to believe the positive I want to know that it will be okay and it is okay. It sounds so simple but I read myself through the gauntlet all these years. I am still at the beginning of the shift, but I can breathe again. And, I can see that there is potential that this isn’t forever, this contractor, this specific position. I’m coming to peace with that unknown because I’m starting to finally believe in myself.

Joseph: Having been through this career change, the last question for you, what’s one thing that you’ve learned about yourself along the way? Again, keeping in mind that you’re still at the start of this pivot.

Melody: [39:01] What I recognize in myself is that if I spend too much time focusing on what other people are doing, I lose track of myself. What I’m learning is as long as I show up with integrity and authenticity, wherever I am, either work or non-work, people will respond in a positive way and I will also attract the right kind of people and the right kind of work as a result of that.

Joseph: If people want to learn more about you, or if they want to get in touch with you, or just hear more about the kind of work that you’re doing right now as a project manager, what is the best way that they can get in touch with you?

Melody: I’m on LinkedIn. That is the only form of social media that I use. And, I’m always looking to network and collaborate. I’m looking for inspiration and partnerships in a very broad sense. I just want to be connected and around people that are positive, and inspirational, and that we can learn from each other.

Joseph: Anything else you want to say before we wrap up?

Melody: [40:16] Well, I’ll give another shout-out to you, Joseph. For your podcasts and your work. I am so inspired by the people you attract to your podcast and the interviews that I’ve heard have helped me along the way. I’ve passed them on to others who are in transition. If there weren’t for people like you, people like me maybe wouldn’t feel as confident making that big leap. So, just wanted to thank you and all your interviewees for their great work.

Joseph: Thank you very much for those kind words, Melody. I am really happy to hear that the show has helped you and it does make my day when I hear stories like yours where people have felt inspired to make a change. Even if it isn’t necessarily the perfect move right away, but that you’re taking strides in the right direction, that’s great to hear.

Thank you so much, Melody, for telling us more about your recent shift into the world of education, some of the challenges you’ve had to overcome along the way. Most importantly, some of the things that you’re still wrestling with right now, which is what many people wrestle with when they’re trying to figure things out. So, best of luck with your new role for that school district. I hope you can continue to take steps toward what will hopefully provide you with that balance that you’re seeking.

Melody: [41:39] Thank you, Joseph. It’s an honor and a privilege to be here. I’m going to consider this for me like closing of that old chapter because I’ve been holding on to a lot of things. I think I’m going to take this day and close that chapter, learn the lessons but definitely move on. Thank you. Take care.

[End 41:58]

Professionals in academia have certainly not been immune to the current Great Resignation movement. An assistant professor of economics turned data science practice leader gives a candid glimpse into the world of academia and reveals his motivations behind pivoting from a university into the private sector.

On Career Relaunch® podcast episode 87, we’ll discuss the unique challenges of academic careers, the importance of being open to new sectors, and why confidence is one of the most important assets to have during career transitions. During the Mental Fuel® segment, I also share my thoughts on why so employees are choosing to change career paths right now.

During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I talked about the importance of deciding what sort of organizational ways of working are acceptable to you with the latest advent of remote and hybrid working.

My challenge you is to just consider if you’re facing a bit of a turning point with your own employer where you’re getting mandated to do things for the sake of returning to the way things were that just don’t sit so well with you anymore.

You don’t need to pick up and leave right away. But you may want to put some stakes in the ground for yourself about what ways of work are acceptable to you in the months and years ahead.

Andrew Graczyk is a trained data scientist with a PhD in Economics. He’s worked in academic and instructional positions for University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Wake Forest University, and the Duke University Talent Identification Program. Now he’s Practice Director for Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning at KForce, where he uses his mathematical, statistical, and game theoretic knowledge to architect and implement data driven improvements to business practices. Learn more about The Data Incubator that helped Andrew transition from academia into the private sector.

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!

Vista Social is a versatile, time-saving tool to manage all your social media accounts in one place. You can easily create, schedule, optimise, and publish content directly to multiple social media profiles from one simple dashboard. I actually use it myself to manage all my online profiles.

Try Vista Social out for free right now at careerrelaunch.net/vista.

Joseph: Let’s start by talking about what’s been keeping you busy in your life and career. I understand you just started a new role just earlier this month, is that right?

Andrew: [02:43] That’s correct. I just started as a practice director for artificial intelligence and machine learning at Kforce. That’s been keeping me busy, the transition has been keeping me busy, but it’s a lot going on.

Joseph: What exactly are you responsible for there at Kforce, and what does Kforce focus on?

Andrew: [03:00] Kforce is generically a staffing company. They’re the largest staffing company for infrastructure technology and other intelligence-driven services in the United States. They help companies solve problems for projects with people. What I’m responsible for is kind of kick-starting a practice in that vein for data science. Instead of having say IT people to institute some security protocol, or cyber security people instituting some protocol and working with a company’s full-time staff and permanent staff do that on a project, I would help to architect that and choose other consultants to help implement that as well as help implement myself.

Joseph: You are based in Toronto. Can you just tell me a little bit about your personal setup? What’s been keeping you busy right now in your personal life?

Andrew: [03:54] I guess what’s been keeping me busy lately is cats. We just got a new cat. I’m a very cat-oriented person.

Joseph: How many cats do you have?

Andrew: [04:02] Right now, we have three.

Joseph: Okay.

Andrew: [04:05] We just adopted one from a rescue here. Cooking and running; my wife and I like to run 10Ks and half marathons. I like to cook. I like to eat. I mostly like to run so I can eat. I don’t need to run, I run so I can eat and not become a giant person.

Joseph: We have some things in common for. I love cats, Andrew. We don’t own one. I would love to own one, but I don’t know if I could keep up with it, and a little worried about the furniture. I also love running and I also love eating. Like you, probably run to eat, not the other way around. But before we go back in time and talk about your former professional life, you are in Canada but you are American. How did you end up in Toronto?

Andrew: [04:52] I ended up in Toronto because my wife was working at the University of Toronto. My wife is also in academia and has a Ph.D. She came up in 2019, right after she got a Ph.D. into postdoctoral fellowship. I came up to visit her over spring break in 2020, and that is when the pandemic broke out. I was at the time a visiting assistant professor at Wake Forest University. They closed everything down, and all the travel shut down, and I was just in Toronto. For several years, I didn’t really go back to the States because it wasn’t really feasible to. I just kind of started being here. It was actually in Toronto that I began my transition. I like the joke that I came up for spring break and never left. And now, we’re both residents. The tax is a little complicated, my residence is actually in North Carolina for those purposes. I’m there sometimes, but still, in Canada frequently.

Joseph: You mentioned academia there, and I would love to just go back in time. You haven’t always been working in data science at Kforce. You haven’t always been in the private sector. Can we go back in time and talk about your time in the academic world? We can move forward from there. What were you focused on as a Ph.D. candidate at the University of North Carolina, and how did you end up going down the Ph.D. route?

Andrew: [06:20] Back the primordial days of 2010 and 2011, I was finishing my undergraduate degree at University of South Carolina. How I got into my head to do a Ph.D. is actually to this day kind of a mystery. It doesn’t really make sense why I did it because I got my bachelor’s in Physics and Math. I realized, towards the end doing lab work, that I kind of hated physics lab work. I was like, “That’s a problem.” I was like, “Okay, I could go into the high-energy pure math theoretical stuff. I could go and work for some oil company doing some basic physics, fluid dynamics stuff,” but I didn’t really like any of those options.

For some reason, the end of my under career, I took a philosophy course which ended up teaching a bit about economics. It’s one of those weird interdisciplinary electives that colleges do sometimes, I can’t even remember what the name of it was, I was like, “This is very interesting. I think there’s something to this.” Somehow, I got into my mind to get a Ph.D. in Economics which I’ve literally never taken a course in. But I knew Math, and that helped a lot. I applied to a few different schools for their Ph.D. programs. But I applied kind of late because I was late to the game and figure out that’s what I wanted to do. And then, I got rejected. But then I went to North Carolina and said, “What can I do to make myself a more attractive candidate?” I talked to a few of the professors, and then they decided to let me in for the fall semester.

Joseph: They just let you in just like that. Just from you having a chat with them.

Andrew: [07:56] Yeah. I think maybe they just have a slot open up and they let me in.

Joseph: Right place, right time. Okay.

Andrew: [08:03] Then I went in there and it turns out that it was not so bad because most of graduate economics is just math, and I could do math. That’s how I got into the Ph.D. It seemed like it might give me an understanding for how society works. You think of it in some progression, I wanted to learn how the physical reality worked, and I wanted to understand how social reality worked. I’m not going to say that I did that in the totality, “I understand everything now.” I’m not going to say that I can do that, but it did provide me some insights into why society is the way it is in certain ways that for better or for worse I now have. I’m very grateful to that.

As I was a Ph.D. candidate, I was focusing on game theory, labor economics, and financial asset bubbles, which seems like a weird combination. But really what my focus was on was understanding and providing some theory on how housing bubbles were the result of income and wealth inequality. At least, partially, that was a plausible thing in creating a model to show how that could be the case and how it explains phenomena that we see. Basically, how inequality was not just an effect of economic policy, but a cause of economic reality.

Joseph: I see. Kind of generating distortion in asset markets as you had mentioned before.

Andrew: [09:25] Exactly. I was really big into understanding how inequality happened why. In my mind, more importantly, what that does to society and economic just markets, in general.

Joseph: You’re actually one of the first academics that we’ve had, just to kind of use the term broadly, that we’ve had on the show. I’m just going to take a big-picture view of this. This is what your dissertation was focused on. For those people who are listening to this and they’re just not familiar with what’s involved with doing a Ph.D., what exactly is a dissertation? Could you just explain at a very high level what that involves?

Andrew: [10:00] A dissertation is where you put your ideas to realize that they’re wrong. Dissertation is a process by which you compile research. I’ve never met a person, and I don’t think I ever will, who’s got a Ph.D. who is absolutely sure of themselves. It’s not because there’s a well-known imposter syndrome. That is a real problem on academics. Part of it’s about understanding and embracing that humility of realizing so many people thought about so many things, every minute detail of every idea you have has been thought about studied and analyzed, and you have to defend every single statement you make about everything. Parts of it leads to academic speaking so strangely and insisting on such precision in their language. Because if they say something inaccurate, somebody’s going to jump out and say, “Aha! You misattribute this thing.”

Joseph: We’ve spoken before, Andrew. My wife also did a Ph.D., and she works in academics right now and I have had the privilege of joining her at some of her conferences. Mostly, just because I wanted to kind of travel alongside because she gets to go to cool places. The discussions around the lunch table are very detailed, and very much in the weeds. To the point where I just really lose track of the conversation sometimes. That’s interesting that you describe that.

How did you enjoy doing a dissertation? What was that experience like for you? Focusing on one very specific topic here in inequality generating distortion and asset markets, what was that experience like for you on a day-to-day level?

Andrew: [11:32] I will not sugarcoat it. It was harrowing. It was psychologically quite taxing, and I would never do it again. I’m being completely serious there. It was a very stressful time. Part of it is just the volume of work. I mean most Ph.D. dissertations are between three and five academic papers, which really depends on the discipline you’re in. But usually, an academic paper is you said a research paper where you have to basically have a citation for everything or a mathematical equation justifying everything, and a graph justifying your interpretation of the mathematical equation.

Joseph: How many pages are we talking about here per paper?

Andrew: [12:08] Mine was only I think on the order of 250 maybe. And mine was pretty condensed because I didn’t really have any graphs. Mine was all pure math, theory, and proofs. It was on the shorter side, but there are some who swell must be on that. Some of it’s because they have like a bunch of figures and graphs and things that swell their space and everything. It’s really all about people telling you your ideas are wrong for six years until eventually, you find something they can’t find a fault with, and they can’t definitively prove is wrong.

I made it harder on myself by kind of tackling this weird nebulous problem that people weren’t really familiar with of income inequality as a cause of things and asset levels. Both of which are pretty on their own pretty niche topics in the academic economic world, which they absolutely shouldn’t be. I think it’s a problem that they are niche topics, but they are. I put them together which is even more niche, which made people even more skeptical and drew even more scrutiny. I certainly don’t regret my choice of topics, and I don’t regret getting a Ph.D. but it was a harrowing process. Anybody getting a Ph.D., it’s really about deconstructing your worldview and building it back up in a way that is completely in line with available data and say that much.

Joseph: You’re doing this dissertation. You’re doing your Ph.D. You finish your Ph.D. How did you then think about your career moving forward? I understand you then ended up moving into the realm of working with undergraduates as a visiting professor. Is that correct?

Andrew: [13:42] The career trajectory that’s usually given to every academic person I’ve talked to at least, I’m sure there’s some places, they’re different. But most programs from what I can gather in most disciplines kind of point students at more academic jobs. I think the reason for that is a pretty simple selection bias. I mean the people who are instructing these people are professors who got academic jobs. I will say it’s almost impossible to cross the threshold from non-academic to academic jobs. It is very difficult. Unless you like you have some connection to. There’s very, very rare exceptions to that. But people who are in academia and have tenure jobs, or who are advising students, or almost certainly people who have done nothing but academia ever.

It’s the world they know, it’s the world they advise in because it’s the world they lived in. It’s also a factor of most of the professors that I talked to and had work, let’s say it could have been a minimum of 15, 20 years since they had you know gotten their Ph.Ds., and the job market that they went into was very different from the job market that current graduates were entering into, which may have also shaped their understanding and their advice.

So, the path laid out for me was, “Oh! Go get an academic job. Go get a professor job. Go join the Federal Reserve Bank. Go do something academia-ish.” And it quickly became apparent that that was not going to happen for a lot of people who I was graduating with just because of the degree of competition. Economics is not the most stingy with jobs. There are actually plenty of economics jobs there. Just still weren’t enough though, to say that much for. I know a lot of people who’ve had to go to private sector because of that. Or not had to, but they decided to.

Joseph: You mentioned becoming a tenured professor. Can you just explain what is a tenured professor? What are the different versions of professor that are out there? My father was a professor actually. He was an assistant professor for a while, and then he was a tenured professor. But can you just explain the difference between like visiting professor, adjunct faculty/lecturer professor, tenure professor?

Andrew: [15:52] I’ll start at the sort of the bottom of the totem pole as it were, with adjuncts. Adjuncts, they shouldn’t exist. Not that the people shouldn’t exist, but the position shouldn’t exist because the university should pay people to be actual professors. It’s kind of the minimum wage of academia. You have these people who know their subjects very well, have done research, done their Ph.Ds. But universities realize they can pay them on a per-class basis rather than hire them as a full-time faculty member. And so, often you’ll have people teaching on the order of or actually sometimes far beyond what a tenured professor would be teaching rather, and being paid very little. This is especially a problem among Humanities where there are have been fewer jobs opening up in the recent years for many reasons.

To go up the totem pole a little bit, a lecturer is somebody who is just there to teach classes but they have contracted on a yearly basis and they have some benefits. But their job is only to teach classes. It’s a very important job to teach classes but they’re usually teaching undergraduates. Usually, have Ph.Ds. in the field. In fact, almost always. I’ve never met a lecturer who didn’t, but their job is to teach classes. Now then, you get into like professor level. Visiting assistant professors are weird.

Joseph: That is what you were at Wake Forest, right?

Andrew: [17:02] Yes. Technically, you’re only paid to teach. But the idea is that this is a temporary position where you are going to be doing some teaching/mentorship, research, but this is not a position that they want to be permanent and they are explicit about that from the get-go. You’re there you get benefits, but you’re not permanent. The idea is that you’re there to work with students and faculty, produce research and teach classes just like a normal faculty member would, but you’re not a permanent faculty member. There’s no pretense of you becoming permanent.

And so then, you get into the actual like “permanent faculty members,” the one that can become tenured. Tenure is essentially a process by which you have a permanent job at the university. They can’t get rid of you except for very bad things to people, frankly. The reason behind it is, historically, it’s been to preserve academic integrity, and to make sure that professors aren’t fearing for their jobs anytime they publish a controversial paper, or anytime a student says, “Oh, this professor isn’t a good teacher because he gave me a bad grade,” that kind of thing. The tenure process is usually a few years. And so, that’s where we get into the assistant professors, like non-visiting assistant professors are people who could get tenure if they do well.

What the process is will depend on the school, in the department, really. Some departments don’t care about student reviews. You can be an awful teacher and as long as you publish well, you’ll get a tenure. In fact, that’s how a lot of departments are. I shouldn’t say some departments, that’s how sadly many departments are. Most the time, it’s focused on what you publish and where, what kind of topics are you publishing in, how good are the journals, what’s the citation rate. Basically, are you spreading the name of yourself and the university by extension out into the world with your research showing that we’re doing really impressive things.

Joseph: Okay, but you’re saying that most people who are permanent assistant professors, they are on the way eventually, assuming nothing goes horrendously wrong, to becoming a tenured professor. More often than not.

Andrew: [19:04] More often than not, they’re going to get. I mean the thing is universities are pretty careful or departments really. Because it’s departments who are doing this job search. It’s not like you have an HR person who hires people. It’s usually the professors in the department have to go and search for people because they are the only people who are qualified to know what they need and what’s good, and what a good professor is going to be. For an HR person, it would be a nightmare because they wouldn’t know the difference between a good say Ph.D. physicist and a bad Ph.D. physicist.

Joseph: Or like the different publications . . .

Andrew: [19:28] Exactly. Or if it’s what the department needs right now. Because you could be a perfectly good physicist, economist, whatever, and they just don’t need that person right now. Like, “We really need somebody to teach this kind of course,” or when you really want someone to do this kind of research, and this person does a different kind of research. That was a problem I ran into a lot. I’m very familiar with that. The other reason is you’re very selective because they don’t want to do this again.

If you’re the kind of person who gets selected, they probably are pretty confident you’re going to do enough work to get tenure. You’ve already shown a tracker. And so, it’s really just if you keep doing what you’re doing, you’re going to get tenure. The other reason is even if you falter and misstep a little bit, the department decides if you get tenure. The professors don’t really want to do another job search because it’s a lot of time. They have their own publications they have to do. They’ve got their own classes they got to teach. It’s a huge amount of work, on top of that. I’ve seen the job market from both sides and it’s a lot of work for everybody. So, as long as you’re doing the kind of stuff they expect you to do, they’re going to keep you around because that’s another 100, 200, 300 hours they don’t have to spend looking for another candidate and sifting through resumes and everything.

Once you pass that threshold, you become an associate professor. He goes from assistant. If you do other specific things, which again is dependent on the university department, et cetera. Usually, it’s have students graduate, publish more papers, do service for the department, like be a chair of some committee, teach classes, do stuff, you become a full professor.

Joseph: I guess we should also mention that this system you’re describing is kind of more of a North American System. It does not necessarily exist everywhere in the world. Certain countries follow this convention, but other countries for example, where I am in the UK, there’s no such thing as tenure, and it’s like a totally different system. But this is the system that you were in and that you were dealing with there in the United States.

Andrew: [21:26] Yes. This is specific to the United States and Canada.

Joseph: Just to kind of shift gears here then, thank you for giving us a lay of the land of how this trajectory could work out for somebody who’s in academia. What happened with your experience as a visiting professor? What was running through your head as you were thinking about your own career path? Were you thinking that you wanted to go down the tenure track where you gained for that? What was running through your head as you were teaching your undergraduate economics course at Wake Forest?

Andrew: [21:53] I was torn, initially, because I really enjoyed the work I did. I enjoyed coming with research. I enjoyed teaching my students. I enjoyed coming up with courses. I gotten to teach a lot of different courses at Wake Forest University. I got to come up with my own course on inequality and history. It was a great time and it was really great working with students. But the caveat is I was a visiting assistant professor. I had this sort of Damocles hanging over me every year. Technically, I worked there for four years, but it was four one-year contracts.

Every year I was going to job market, which as I mentioned is a stressful experience existentially, but also, it’s a lot of work. Because you got to apply to bunch of places you got to make, all these packets. It’s also worth mentioning that academic job applications are a bit of a different beast themselves. Usually, I have to come up with research plans specific to the needs of the university you’re working on. It’s a lot of writing just to make an application. You make dozens of these things.

Joseph: You got to include like research samples, and the conferences you’ve attended, the grants. All that kind.

Andrew: [22:54] You got to include all this material and often make new material and for every single thing you do. Because every university wants to see something a little bit different, everybody wants is feeling a little bit different. It’s a lot of work there. You have to make sure you have a new flashy paper ready to go in the job market with, that you can say the paper I’m going to use to showcase myself here. You make sure that you get that ready. You’re teaching in the fall, you’re doing this in the fall, which means you’re not doing any research because it’s not feasible. It’s really not possible. I like to say, I usually tell people that being a professor is three jobs. It’s teaching, research, and grant writing. For me, it was just research and teaching. I only had two full-time jobs, and I was already feeling the push. I don’t know how people do have to also write grants.

Joseph: It’s almost like a vicious cycle I guess. Because you’re a visiting professor, you have to do these annual job hunts. And then, that detracts from your ability to do the research that would then otherwise help support your journey to becoming a tenured professor. It’s like this vicious cycle that you’re in.

Andrew: [23:52] Ultimately, what I realized was that it was treading water and that treading was getting harder and harder. It was getting like bigger and bigger weights tied to my legs. The more years I was in it, the more exhausted I got. The worse it looked for me to be a visitor for that long. That vicious cycle was starting to create a whirlpool around me. I just realized that it wasn’t what I wanted. It wasn’t worth it.

Joseph: Let’s talk about the transition then. How did you get into the private sector? How did you make that pivot? Because I know this is a question that does come up and has been coming up more recently. I’ve seen news articles about more academics wanting to leave academia, moving into the private sector. How did you go about doing it?

Andrew: [24:36] The first times I tried were very unsuccessful. My first attempts to pivot in the private sector were actually back in 2019. What I realized was I didn’t know how to sell myself and I didn’t have any credentials that anyone in outside of academia understood anything about. That was itself very disheartening. I really didn’t get any traction in any meaningful way in the private sector.

But then, when I got more serious about it in 2020, which came after that you know spring break, I mentioned that never really ended, I knew some stuff and I knew how to do some things but I didn’t know how to communicate in a way that the people on the other side hiring would understand. Luckily, I found some resources and I learned how to do coding in Python rather than some of the other software packages I was using.

Joseph: How did you learn how to do that?

Andrew: [25:25] I started just by downloading it and doing stuff, and googling things. Also working with like some other open source software, and just making some stuff. I did have some help from my wife who was very supportive. She had been doing Python for a while because some of her departments had pushed Python. They don’t want to pay for Math lab anymore. I found this program called The Data Incubator. I definitely got into the data science Python world more expediently than I probably would have otherwise. What I really learned from them was how to talk about things in a way that made sense to non-academics, and how to comport myself for interviews and job market practices in the private sector, which is substantially different from the public sector in academia.

Joseph: Where did you ultimately land as your first private sector job?

Andrew: [26:12] I ended up getting a job at NNDATA, which is a contract company that mostly works with the Department of Defense and other public sector entities, solving data problems. It was really great that I got to go there because they threw me at a lot of different projects really fast. In a year and a half that I was there, I got to work on probably got a half dozen different projects on very different topics. Doing stuff from your natural language processing to big data, to small data, to anomaly detection, to everything in between. I got to do a lot of fun stuff. That really helped me not only broaden my horizons in terms of data science but talk about things and know what technologies are out there. It gave me a crash course and basically all of data science, plus data engineering, plus some other things. A really great opportunity.

Joseph: When you were there, can you just describe the major differences that you found working in the private sector for a company versus working for a university?

Andrew: [27:14] I was technically in my contract with the universities protected against all kinds of things. But I was still a one-year contract. I weirdly felt more protected in this at-will employment contract because it didn’t have a definite end date. Knowing that I wasn’t under the gun to either find a new job or get my contract renewed every year was probably the biggest most positive change that I didn’t even know I needed. I didn’t realize how exhausting it was until it wasn’t there anymore. I was just like I feel so much better. I can enjoy things.

The other thing was it was actually weirdly a lot more collaborative. Now, maybe it’s because economics is kind of a field in academia where people tend to work in either singular or small groups. Even the ones who are very collaborative don’t work that closely with each other. There’s often usually just a bunch of stuff they’re doing on their own. In this case, it was really interesting to have a team to collaborate with and have ideas with, talk about things, help each other. If I got stuck on a problem, ask somebody. I could help people if they got stuck on problems. It was quite nice to have that atmosphere.

Joseph: It sounds like things are going quite well for you at NNDATA, how did you then end up shifting from there to Kforce?

Andrew: [28:27] I was kind of sad to leave. The reason I left though was that I got essentially a better offer. I had met some people who put me in touch with other people and in conversations about data science and solutions in general. I ended up also meeting one of the practice leaders at Kforce who decided for some reason that he wanted to have me on his team. He was a guy who was more of a data engineer and he wanted to bring data science to Kforce.

For some reason, he figured that I was the person he wanted to do this. I don’t know how. The conversation I had with this guy started back in like October of 2021. What we were just talking about data science in general, and what the future of it was as we saw it. It wasn’t until June of this year, eight months later, they ended up contacting me and said, “Hey! Are you still interested in doing this?” From there, went really fast and we had interviews, and I ended up getting chosen for this position. I think what it was about was just that the breadth of things I could talk about in very academia detail, what convinced this guy to push for me and to push to start this thing now.

Joseph: So you weren’t actively looking for a role. This was an example that we talk about on the show quite a bit of just staying in touch with people, keeping the communication lines open, and sometimes over the long run, opportunities pop up. The last thing, before we talk about some of the lessons that you’ve learned along the way of your career change journey, moving from academia into the private sector, could I just also ask you what if anything do you miss about the world of academia?

Andrew: [30:11] It’s hard to say now because I’m aware on both experiential level, a statistical level, and also I guess to add into that a sort of game theoretical level. Understanding why the academic job markets are so problematic. Extricating the job from the job market is difficult in my mind. But I suppose if I do miss anything, it’s probably working with the students, and helping them to develop their own understanding of say economics because that’s what I did. I thought I would miss the research, but really as a data scientist, I kind of get to still do it just without all the having to pay thousands of dollars to a paper to publish your work. I can just put stuff on papers with code or on archive, and do so if I want to share things. But really, it’s the same spirit of pushing the boundaries, testing the possible, and experimenting. Academics would probably say it lacks rigor. It probably does, but it’s also way more results-oriented and doesn’t take nearly as long to implement things. But I say it’s the same spirit, so I don’t have to miss the research.

Joseph: If there is an academic out there who’s listening to this, do you have any thoughts on how they can think about whether or not they should consider moving into the private sector, or an industry role, or the corporate world? Any thoughts on who it is for and who it’s not for coming out of academics?

Andrew: [31:39] I would say that it’s always worth considering the private sector. You should never not consider it. But if you’ve considered and you’re not sure what to do in the future, what I think helped me was that I realized that the process of research, the process of the job market, didn’t make the potential of a tenure training job worth it. I think what is important to think about from an academic’s perspective, if you value more the results of research and the implementation of your results, then the research itself in an ivory tower, it’s definitely worth getting into the private sector. Because you can find places to do the same things just as much in the private sector as you did in public sector or in academia, and you won’t have what I’d say the stifling rigmarole of the journal system holding you back.

Joseph: The last thing I want to talk about before we wrap up with maybe having a quick chat about The Data Incubator because I know we kind of skimmed over that. I do want to come back to that. I just wanted to hear a little bit about the lessons that you’ve learned along the way of your journey. The first question is just it sounds like you’re quite happy in the transition that you’ve made. If you had to give advice to your younger self as it relates to changing career paths, what might that be?

Andrew: [33:02] You know more than you give yourself credit for. I mentioned the beginning of this conversation how good the dissertation is at breaking you down and building you back up and making you be precise about everything. What you have to remember is that while you’ve gone through that and you’re still probably in the aftershocks of it, and you know those aftershocks might last your whole life of you thinking that you don’t know definitively things. You know more than yourself credit for, and you need to be able to have the confidence and self-awareness to build yourself as such. Put on the hypothetical billboards of what you know and never be afraid to assert yourself in that way.

Joseph: When you look back on your career transition, what’s something that you wished you had known that you now know?

Andrew: [33:51] There’s no real reason to be nostalgic about academia. It can be scary and unfamiliar leaving, but it really doesn’t stay that way for very long. There’s so many people who need so many things that you will find something. Especially if you have you know a Ph.D., you know something very well. Somebody needs that to do something else.

Joseph: And having been through this career change where you have now successfully crossed the chasm from academia into the private sector, what’s one thing you’ve learned about yourself along the way?

Andrew: [34:29] I am very good at adapting. I’m very good at being thrown into a situation where I don’t know I’m supposed to lead the meeting, but I get put to lead the meeting so I have to go based on what I know about the client to have an intelligent conversation about the thing we’re supposed to be doing. I’m good at being the guy who they need something to show somebody. They say, “Please come up with something in the next day.” We don’t know what they want but do something that’s impressive. And I’ll come up with something.

I’m very good at thinking off my feet and at adapting to situations that they come. I know some people don’t like that. I realized more than academia had been giving me the chance to show that I was able to do that, and that’s actually kind of what I like. It keeps things fresh. I don’t mind having projects that are ambiguous where suddenly the client reveals what they really want, and we have to change our perspectives and reorient ourselves quickly.

Joseph: I want to wrap up with something I know has been important to your own career trajectory. I know you mentioned that The Data Incubator was one of the reasons why you were able to make this leap. Can you just tell me a little bit more about The Data Incubator and how it helps people move out of academia and into the private sector?

Andrew: [35:48] The Data Incubator is a program that’s designed to give people certifications in data science work, or also data engineering now. When I did it, it was just data science but now they also do data engineering. The point is they are acutely aware of the problems I was talking about where people know stuff, they know how to do technical things, they’re very talented people, but they don’t know how to get their foot in the door in the corporate world or in the private sector for whatever reason.

What The Data Incubator is about is two things really. I would say it’s two things. It’s about teaching skills. They take people who are otherwise good at math, stats, whatever but don’t necessarily know how to program or code because they might have been taught in programs that don’t do those things as much as they maybe should in the modern era. They teach them how to code in Python, how to use these packages, how to do data science, how to train models, how to use their expertise in other areas in Mathematics, and translate that into the programmable results from a computer in computation.

The other thing they do that I think is very important is they explicitly teach you how to do a job search, which is something I never really got taught even in academia. They just kind of said, “Oh, go and apply for jobs!” And no one ever really told me like what you should be doing and how you actually get a job.
These people do that they sit down with people say, “Here’s how you write a good resume.” They have people help you structure your resume to emphasize your best traits, to help you structure cover letters. Like, “Here’s how you should write a cover letter for this kind of job.” “Here’s how you should approach an interview.” It was really about translating the fonts you have from academia, putting it into a funnel and out into a way that people outside of academia can understand so they can know how valuable you are.

Joseph: Very interesting. It sounds like they played a huge role in your own career, and it’s playing a huge role in other people’s careers. Thanks for walking us through that. I’ll definitely include a link in the show notes so people can learn more about The Data Incubator.

Well, thank you so much, Andrew, for taking the time to tell us more about the world of academia that you left behind, how you manage the transition into the private sector, and also the importance of moving on when the time feels right for you. Best of luck with your new role there at Kforce, and I hope everything continues to go well for you as you head down this new career path.

Andrew: [37:59] Thank you very much, Joseph. Once again, thank you for having me on the show. It’s been a pleasure.

Leaving a corporate job behind to start your own business is never as straightforward or simple as it may seem. Norma Kimber, an operational excellence director at an established, global financial services firm who pivoted to become a virtual assistant and business owner shares her journey of walking away from her stable, senior role in the corporate world to start her own business. In episode 86 of the Career Relaunch® podcast, we also discuss what impact organizational politics can have on your psyche and the relationship between your own health and your career decisions.

Norma and I have crossed paths a few times in the past because she’s joined some of my virtual firesides, and I’ve also personally chatted with her about some of her virtual assistance services when I was exploring the idea of hiring a virtual assistant myself. She shares some of the realities of not only leaving a full-time job behind but also the impact it can have on your psyche when your spouse still works at the well-known, global company you left behind while you try to build your own business from the ground up.

(note, affiliate links above)

During this episode’s Mental Fuel® segment, I challenged you to think about one time consuming task you’ve been doing that detracts from your ability to focus on one of your other professional or personal priorities. Or something you feel someone else could just do more effectively and more efficiently.

Delegate it. This way, you can can take that time and instead focus on something you’re uniquely positioned to do.

Norma Kimber is a business owner and virtual assistant. After a varied start to her career, including office management and accounting software management, she moved to Brighton, England in 2003. Then, a couple years later, she started a 16-year career at an international financial services company, initially as an executive assistant. She took on several internal roles and promotions and ended her corporate career as a Director of Operational Excellence. She then left the corporate world behind to start her own VA business as a Pink Spaghetti franchisee.

Follow Norma on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.

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!

Thanks to Namecheap for supporting this episode of the Career Relaunch® podcast. Namecheap is an affordable, trustworthy domain registrar that offers free privacy protection with every domain registration. Claim your unique website domain today to start building your brand by visiting CAREERRELAUNCH.NET/NAMECHEAP.

Thanks to Reeve for producing the music in this episode.

Teaser (first ~15s): You do lose a lot of your identity when you move away from an organization, especially if you’ve been in one place for a very long time. Then, when you move out of that and you’re suddenly just on your own, and it’s just about you and the services you can offer, it is kind of a scary place.

Joseph: Hello, Norma. Welcome to the Career Relaunch podcast. It is great to have you on the show.

Norma: [02:26] Hi, Joseph. Thank you for having me. I’m very happy to be here.

Joseph: I would love to talk with you first about just setting the scene and getting a sense from you of what is keeping you busy in your work and in your life these days.

Norma: [02:40] In my life, these days, my almost two-year-old is what keeps me most busy, I think as most people with small children would appreciate. Then, with work, I have fairly recently started my own business. Building that up is my main focus at the moment from a work perspective.

Joseph: I am also the parent of a very young child, and I’m just wondering what’s that balance been like for you between running your own business and also, motherhood.

Norma: [03:10] It’s fairly challenging to manage a small child and starting a business. But it all came about at the right time because I think it would have been far harder to try and manage a corporate career with a small child. At least, I’m only answering to myself and my very selective clients, as opposed to the corporate organization that probably doesn’t have that much sympathy for a small child needing your attention.

Joseph: I can relate to the idea of the flexibility being invaluable once you become a parent and being able to control your own schedule. Also, can you just tell me where are you based and where are you originally from?

Norma: [03:56] I’m based in the UK in Brighton of South London. I’m originally from South Africa, but I have moved here in 2003. It’s almost been 20 years that I’ve been in the UK.

Joseph: What originally brought you to the UK from South Africa?

Norma: [04:12] I was very interested in traveling in Europe. Europe is far away from South Africa. At the time, when I came over, we had a working holiday visa scheme. I was lucky enough to be able to come over on that. The intention was to stay for two years, see a bit of Europe, and then, probably, head back to South Africa. But I met my husband here not long after, probably about three months after arriving here. I just got stuck here.

Joseph: It does happen. Before we go back in time, could you give me a snapshot of the work that you’re doing right now at Pink Spaghetti? We will get into more details on that later. Just real quickly, what’s an average day for you right now?

Norma: [04:57] It’s very varied. That’s actually what really attracts me to this type of role. So it’s a virtual assistant services business. Every day looks really different depending on what my clients effectively have on. It range from having a day of research or networking or general administration, sometimes, calls, luckily, not too many calls. Every day looks different, which is really what keeps me interested in doing it.

Joseph: We’re going to come back to the VA work, the virtual assistant work that you do. I would love to get into more details on the exact types of tasks you help people with. Before we do that, I know you haven’t always been a business owner, and you haven’t always been a virtual assistant. You spent 16 years working in the financial services industry. So I was wondering if you could tell me how you got started in that industry.

Norma: [05:50] I fell into it, more than anything else. When I moved over to the UK, the intention was, as on the two-year working holiday visa, to do fairly limited work and do traveling. The intention was really to end up going back, of course.

At the time, when I started there, I didn’t have a clear idea of what I wanted to do. I started initially as a temp, doing call center work. Then, when I was hired as a full-time employee, I started as an executive assistant. It’s kind of gone full circle a little bit. Then, I just worked my way up really through the business. I moved from being a virtual assistant into a re-engineering type role, doing a fair bit of training on Six Sigma process engineering type activity in the services industry, and then, from there, eventually, ended up in operational risk management.

It was just a case of being there. Initially, I was very happy there. It was an exciting place to be because a lot is going on in the financial services industry. I got to see a lot of the world traveling and lots of exciting things happened in my career in the financial services industry. It was never really thought through or planned that way. I kind of fell into it and then, seemed to do pretty well, and then, just kind of carried on from there. It was kind of more luck than anything else.

Joseph: You kind of just, I guess, climb to the corporate ladder, for lack of a better term. Then, you eventually became director of operational excellence at your company. What was that corporate life like for you when you were at director level in a large multinational corporation? Could you just give me a sense of what your day-to-day experience was in that role?

Norma: [07:38] I would say what I liked about doing that role was having teams of people to manage. So I love working with people and working with my teams. Being a team manager was something that I thoroughly enjoyed.

Most of my time though, I would say, in the latter part of my career, was spent on phone calls. When we eventually had to work from home with COVID, it wasn’t much of a transition because we all did a fair bit of flexible and hybrid working in the organization. Even if we did go into the office, I would spend, predominantly, my day mostly just on the phone talking to various people.

Joseph: Team members or clients or suppliers?

Norma: [08:20] Team members. It was all pretty much internal. So it would be internal. I think this was part of the reason why I eventually left. One of the many, many reasons was that you would end up spending phone call off the phone call, talking about meetings that you were going to have or meetings that you did have. It was mostly just talking about meetings all the time or talking about things that should get done, but very little in terms of actual work that I did myself within the last few roles that I held. Much of it was coordination and problem solving with other teams internally and making sure that they were delivering on projects that they had to deliver.

At the end of the day, really, in terms of what I achieved or delivered myself, it was very, very minimal. I just spent most of my time on the phone talking to people what they should do or should have done. That was pretty much my life.

Joseph: You and I have spoken a few times before. I think you know that I spent about a decade myself working in the corporate world. Did you find that the work you did earlier on in your career, in more junior roles, was more focused on the work itself, compared to when you were at a more senior director level, where it can be a bit more about stakeholder management or internal alignment building or as you put it, meetings about upcoming meetings. Maybe that’s a bit of a leading question, but did you have that experience at all?

Norma: [09:50] Absolutely. In hindsight, I do ask myself sometimes whether I would have taken a promotion when it was offered to me at the time, because, of course, as you’re going into a career you do want to progress, you do want to climb the corporate ladder when you’re in a corporate environment. You want to do better in comparing yourself with peers, you want to comparatively do well. It was something in the early part of my career that I wanted to do and push myself to get as far as I could.

What I did find more rewarding was when I was actually in more junior roles and could deliver results. You could deliver projects and be accountable for, to an effect, your destiny, and your deliverables because actually, it was just much more about doing things and getting things done. As you get more senior, you do just manage stakeholders. It does just feel like you remove a conductor in some respects, as opposed to actually delivering anything.

Some of that is fairly rewarding, but I do think that you get to a point where it doesn’t feel like you ever really get that sense of achievement as much. I certainly didn’t feel that way, because I do thrive from seeing actual results. If you’re ending up just helping people or pointing their signposting and pointing them in the right direction, it’s easy to lose that kind of sense of really being able to make a difference or deliver anything of substance.

Joseph: That makes a lot of sense. I definitely can relate to pretty much everything you just said, where I felt like at more junior levels, oddly enough, although they always encourage you to get promoted and to advance in the organization, I found those roles too, at times, be more rewarding and satisfying because I was doing stuff, rather than just managing the opinions of others. How did you come to your decision to eventually depart?

Norma: [11:37] I mean, I’ve been thinking for years that I would like to have my own business. The sticking point for me was always in doing what. So I had this idea that I did want to have my own business but just could not think of the idea. I was kind of waiting for this great idea to hit me at some point so that I could start my own business.

Joseph: What was it about starting your own business that was appealing to you?

Norma: I think just having the autonomy of making their own decisions for yourself in terms of where you want to head and not necessarily having to answer to somebody else.

The one thing that, from a corporate perspective, really negatively impacted me was politics. Politics is just not something I cope with very well at all. I managed okay in some respects, I would say. I, actually, probably, didn’t in very many other ways. I didn’t get on with it. I did not enjoy it. I, not for a second, enjoyed politics within the corporate environment. For a long time, I thought this is just really not the place for me. So I just knew that I needed to probably do something else. So having that autonomy and actually, just being really in charge of your destiny to an extent was something that drew me to having my own business.

Thinking about that big idea that people think that they should have when they start their own business or something truly unique was the thing that helped me back because I wasn’t sure what that might be. I grappled with that for a very, very long time, before I decided to, then, eventually make the move.

I think much like very, many other people, so I’m not unique in this space at all, when I had my daughter in 2020, I was, right when we were in the pandemic, of course, as well, I knew that once I went back to a corporate career, I probably would want to make that shift fairly soon after that. Unfortunately, a few things happened, of course, in 2020 and 2021 that made me push to make that change. We had the pandemic and that focused a lot of people’s minds on what they wanted to do with their lives because we all had this focus on what could happen.

Unfortunately, January last year, I lost two very good friends in a fatal car accident. Along with that, and wanting to also make sure that I’m a good role model for my daughter because I wanted my daughter to feel, grow up thinking anything’s possible. She really can do something that she enjoys. So I wanted to be a good role model for her. I just thought staying in that corporate career with so many things showing me that life is short and life, you really should value life, and wanting to be a great role model for my daughter, I decided that it was just a time for me to go. I couldn’t put up with a career anymore that was making me very unhappy at that point.

Joseph: Would you mind just taking me back to that moment, because you mentioned you lost two friends in a fatal car accident? What exactly happened? What was running through your head after you found out that they passed away?

Norma: [14:50] It’s pretty horrific. I haven’t talked about it much, so it still feels very raw. Two very good school friends of mine, they were in the car together. They were a couple. We grew up together. The school that we’ve been to in that area is a very foggy area. I mean, visibility is pretty terrible then. I’m surprised there’s not more accidents, even though there are a lot.

Joseph: This is in South Africa.

Norma: [15:13] In South Africa. They drove into the back of a big a truck. It was a horrific shock because we were so focused on COVID at the time. We were kind of expecting people to get COVID and possibly, pass away from COVID. They both had it not long before that and came out the other side of it. We were so relieved. Then, together, this happened. It was a big shock.

After that, I wasn’t recovered from that yet. Maybe it was stress as well but had a big health scare as well, just not long after that, and at the same time, was returning to work from maternity leave. Frankly, the treatment from a corporate perspective, when you’re going through a lot of stuff like that, like returning from maternity leave, is the big, big thing. I think a lot of people underestimate what it’s like coming back after a year and having your whole life turned upside down, even if it’s something that you wanted. Then, these other things happening, as well as the health scare that I had, yeah, it was quite shocking how little room there is for people to be people, and for people to go through things within an organization the size of the one that I was in.

They all put it into sharp focus for me, that I just didn’t want to be in a place where I was just effectively a number, that would be treated the way that I was with all of this stuff going on, on top of previously thinking it, probably, was time for me to go anyway.

Joseph: It sounds like a lot is going on there, Norma. You’ve got the birth of your first child. You’ve got COVID. You’ve got a health scare. A couple of your very good friends were killed in a car accident. At what point did you make the leap to leave? Do you remember that day when you made that decision?

Norma: [17:04] It was February last year, about two or three weeks after this car accident, which I, then, decided this is time that I need to go. I thought I would give myself a year at that point to kind of spend a year saving a bit of money, and thinking through what’s next for me. At that point in time, I was pretty determined that I would stick it out for a year or year to 18 months, probably. Then, I got the health scare. So I was back at work from March for two months. Then, I had to take time off. So I was, then, off effectively for pretty much the rest of the year.

As I was thinking about what else to do, that’s when the idea came to start this business, I just needed something that could be more flexible and something where I had a bit more control over things. I decided pretty much by July time last year, I decided that it was time to hand in my exit soon, which I, then, did by November last year. So it’s all pretty recent, still.

Joseph: What exactly was the health scare, if you don’t mind talking in more detail about that? Because I know you’ve mentioned it a couple of times. It sounds like it had a big impact on how you were thinking about your own life and what you wanted.

Norma: [18:20] It was a condition called adenomyosis, which is a form of endometriosis. I think people are probably more familiar with that term. It is slightly different, where the cells grow. It’s caused me to hemorrhage. I had extreme bleeding for about three months in the end, where I thought I had probably something like uterine cancer.

I just come to terms to the fact that well, I just had my baby not long before that. We had tried for several years through many successful rounds of IVF to conceive her. It was a really big turning point for me because I just thought, “I’ve just had my baby. Now, I’m going to die. I’m going to leave her without a mother.” It was a pretty big thing. Thankfully, all of the tests came back negative. It was, I say just, adenomyosis. It’s pretty terrible condition as well, but it’s, at least, not what I thought might be uterine cancer at the time. It seems to be okay now and manageable now.

Joseph: Thanks for sharing that. I’m glad you’ve made a full recovery. If it’s okay with you, I’d like to kind of shift gears now and talk a little bit about the actual shift to doing your work as a VA and as a business owner at Pink Spaghetti. I know you mentioned before that you knew you wanted to be self-employed, you wanted to run your own business, you want to be a business owner. How did that idea come up for you going from not knowing what you wanted to do to “Hey, I’m going to look into VA work”?

Norma: [19:57] It was actually a friend of mine that suggested it. At the time, I thought, “If I can’t think of my own thing to do, what I might do is just do something part-time.” I thought the full-time hustle of being on the phone all the time just does not work.

I started putting feelings out and followed a Facebook group to look for flexible work. On this Facebook group, Pink Spaghetti was advertising for more franchisees. I thought this really looked like a great opportunity to me, because not only can you get to start your own business, but as a franchise, and I don’t think all franchises are equal, but as a franchise, you also get sufficient help to get you to set the business up. You’re not starting from scratch, because I was pretty terrified about starting my own business and, after 16 years in a corporate environment, really have no clue about where to start. I kind of weighed up that I could probably start my own thing of some description. I just needed to decide what that was and really kind of struggled to find my way around how to go about setting up a business and how to manage a business.

Then, when this franchise opportunity showed up, I just thought this is the kind of perfect side of both worlds because it allows me to set my own business up and give me that autonomy and be able to run my own thing, plus get support from a fantastic organization, who will show me the ropes effectively and be there from an ongoing perspective as well, to provide support, as and when needed. It’s almost like buying a business in a box effectively because you’re not, you’re not starting from scratch. It’s all there. The branding is there. The business model is determined. It does give you enough flexibility to do your own thing as well. So it just kind of popped up on a Facebook feed. I just thought this just looks perfect to me because it will give me kind of a bit of everything that I want.

Joseph: This is fairly recent. We’re recording this in spring of 2022. It sounds like this kind of came to its inception late 2021. How’s the journey been for you so far? What’s the good, bad, and the ugly?

Norma: [22:02] So far, it’s been great. I mean, I say great, but it’s when you start your own business, there’s always some downsides as well. So far, it’s been great. The franchise that I brought into Pink Spaghetti has just been wonderful. I mean, the training has been phenomenal. The ongoing support is phenomenal as well. It’s absolutely the right decision for me.

It’s tough as well because as you’re starting, I think you’ve spoken about this on your previous podcast as well, is that you do lose a lot of your identity when you move away from an organization, especially if you’ve been in one place for a very long time. If you leave a large organization, then people, of course, associate you with that and that becomes part of your identity. It’s recognizable. So if you tell people where you’re from and what you do, it is fairly recognizable. People understand kind of which box to put you in.

When you move out of that and you’re suddenly just on your own, and it’s just about you and the services you can offer, it is kind of a scary place and especially if people, then, start saying when you start developing new business and people keep telling you, “No,” then, it can feel really hard initially, when you just hear, “No,” all the time. You’re like, “What is it? Is it my business? Is it me?” then, it’s all these self-questioning and all the imposter syndrome that comes with that is tough to deal with.

That’s been a little bit hard. I would say that I think I’ve come out of the other side of that. I have a great set of clients who I love working with, and things have just become a bit easier. If I do have a moment where I just feel like I don’t know what I’m doing, or I feel a little bit lost in some way, then, I call up the franchise folks who have this great support team, and they always help. It’s been, mostly up so far. I’m enjoying it pretty much all the time. So that’s great.

Joseph: You mentioned the franchise model a few times, Norma. For somebody who’s listening to this, if they’re not familiar with the idea of franchising, how exactly does it work? My rudimentary understanding of franchising is that they, as you mentioned, give you the tools to get your business started. They’re also helping you with things like marketing. They’re giving you some maybe formulas that work well to get the business going. Maybe you do a bit of, maybe, revenue sharing. How does it work with Pink Spaghetti? What’s the model there?

Norma: [24:27] I think it varies a little bit by franchise. Of course, I can’t speak for all franchises, but effectively, you will buy into the brand. The branding is something that you get to use. As you say, so you pay them an upfront fee, so, effectively, purchasing the rights to the Pink Spaghetti.

Particularly, you purchase the rights to a specific area that you’re about to network in. Then, you will pay an ongoing fee as well based on the revenue that you take each month. In return for that, they provide a whole set of marketing materials, as well as training and ongoing support on an ongoing basis. So it’s pretty straightforward.

The great thing about this franchise is that we have flexibility to be creative within your own space. So they give you the framework effectively, and there are, of course, some guidelines that you need to follow. At the same time, you do get a fair bit of flexibility. If you bought something like a McDonald’s franchise, then, I imagine you won’t get a lot of flexibility because it’s very, very clearly defined and well-restricted about what you can and can’t.

Joseph: Can’t make your own burgers there, right? Yeah.

Norma: [25:33] Of course. Yeah. With our business, you are very much allowed to make your own burgers.

Joseph: It sounds like the best of both worlds as I hear about it more. The franchise model, it does seem like you get a blend of autonomy, you get some support, you’re not completely on your own, but you also have some independence. Related to the actual virtual assistant work, I also got to ask you, Norma, as someone myself, and I think you and I have spoken about this before, who struggles to delegate and carve off tasks, especially when it relates to the business that I’ve worked hard to build, can you explain how someone can tell if they could benefit by hiring a virtual assistant?

Norma: [26:17] Yes. I think if you can sit down and think about everything that you’re doing at the moment that you either don’t have time for, which is the starting point, I think, for very many people is just the things that are always on your to-do list, and you just don’t get to do them. That’s probably the starting point.

Then, the second part of that equation is probably the stuff that you do, but you just hate doing it. Because we all, as business owners, including me, have a whole bunch of things that we just think, I really could just do without doing this because it’s taking you away from the things that you’re good at.

So for example, if you have a business that is, let’s say, a PR company. The stuff that you do that’s going to bring your income and be your talents is doing the actual PR work. There’s a whole bunch of business-related work that is not going to be the stuff that brings you income or joy or add value to your clients. So I would start with that as a list of things that you could probably hand to someone else.

Then, I think the second part of your question that you mentioned there, Joseph, is about letting go a bit of the control piece. I think from a control perspective, it is probably starting, I would say, two things, probably. It’s find the right person for you because all VAs are not equal because different VAs have different skill sets and different talents. Some’s specialized, some are more generalist.

The second bit to that piece is that you have to make sure you find someone that works very well with you. I think communication is the most key part of this. If you get somebody that you get on well with, you can have an open conversation with. If stuff doesn’t work or works well, then, that’s a good starting point, because ultimately, you want to be able to have such a good relationship that you are able to give them something. If it doesn’t go right, then, you can have a conversation about why you want it a different way.

I think start small. It’s probably the last bit of advice that I would say. Pick something that you feel. If this goes a little bit wrong, it’s probably not the end of the world. Get a feel for each other and see how it goes. Then, build up from there. That’s typically how I think unless somebody’s experienced in outsourcing work, then, I would say just start small, so that you start getting more comfortable and also, start working out the relationship and making sure that you’re all clear about how to communicate with each other on how to get things done, and so on. That would be my advice.

Joseph: I’m just going through my list of things, as your invoicing came to mind for me. Very interesting.

Norma: [28.57] You’re not alone. It’s on very many people’s lists.

Joseph: Before we talk about some of the lessons you’ve learned along the way, I understand your spouse still works, not only in the industry but also at the firm, where you used to work. What’s it been like to, I guess, leave the corporate world behind, have a spouse who’s still in the corporate world, and be trying to build your own business? Does that ever enter into your psyche at all?

Norma: [29:26] It very much does. So he’s worked there a little bit longer than I have, actually now. He is still there. Luckily, he is incredibly supportive to me in my journey and the changes that I wanted to make. So that’s very helpful and very interested in what I do. So if I do need a second pair of eyes on anything, he’s always very willing to help me. I’m really lucky from that perspective.

What is interesting for me, though, about the fact that he still is there is that I often hear some of the things that are going on because we have conversations about people moving or changes and all of those kind of things, obviously, nothing under NDA, but if there’s anything in terms of the organizational changes or movement of people and all of those kind of things, and it just makes me, I would say that he’s happy, that he’s very happy there. I think there’s a major difference between where he is and where I was. When he talks about it, it just makes me feel incredibly grateful that I was able to make this change, because it has just put into sharp focus for me that that is not where I want to be.

It’s two-sided because sometimes, there will also be some of the really good things that come with corporate life that I will, then, think about, that I miss and that I have to start from scratch by myself to make sure that I get to a place where he was, because particularly when it’s time for bonuses, and I’m like, “Oh, that.”

Joseph: You don’t get those.

Norma: [30:56] Nice bonus that I would have had. Now, I don’t have that. So I just need to work a little bit harder if I want to get more money. It’s an interesting place to be, but, for the most part, I’m just infinitely grateful that I’ve been able to make the change.

Joseph: Well, the last thing I want to talk about before we wrap up here, Norma, is just your journey and what you’ve learned along the way of your career change journey. First, I was wondering, have there been any major surprises for you along the way as you’ve shifted from the corporate world to self-employment, as you’ve shifted from financial services to VA work, just anything that has surprised you?

Norma: I think a few things have surprised me, I guess, the first one is, and this is probably a little bit more of a negative one, and I am still kind of grappling with how to navigate my way through this, is that people make assumptions about you. So unless they know your history, then, people seem to, I don’t know how am I going to put this in a nice way, maybe look down on you a little bit. When you’re saying that you’re a VA, then, people will sometimes think, “Are you just an admin person, like probably don’t have a lot of life experience or work experience?” I think that’s kind of interesting for me, because I have had a pretty successful career. I could probably step into a pretty well-paying corporate career again if I wanted to. It is strange that people make that assumption without really getting to know you.

What’s good about that is it’s challenged me to think about the assumptions I make about other people, because it’s the contrast that I can see, so obvious to me at the moment. Kind of interesting, but also, I think, good learning for me, because it has challenged me to think about the assumptions I make about other people potentially.

The other thing is just how amazingly creative people are has really surprised me and how kind people are. I have just been astounded by the amount of amazing businesses out there because in a corporate world, I think your perspective is pretty narrow in terms of what you see when you’ve been in one place for such a long time. The amazing small and medium businesses out there and their creative ideas and just how incredibly creative people are and making this stuff work, to me, it’s just astounding.

Also, just out of all of those people, people have just been so welcoming and so friendly and so helpful, that I’ve just been quite stunned by all the kindness of people wishing you to succeed and wanting to help you, with not wanting to have anything back or not expecting anything back, as they kind of point you in the right direction or try to help you. So it’s been really pleasant. I think it’s just been an amazing learning for me to see how much great stuff is out there and how amazingly kind people are.

Joseph: Now, if you had to give advice to your younger or your previous self, as it relates to changing careers, what might that be?

Norma: [34:04] Probably, to relax a little bit more about everything. I think because I was so focused on trying to build a career that I think I probably did a lot of things that, in hindsight, I just wouldn’t have done. This hustle, this trying so hard to get somewhere, and probably, doing it at the expense of my health and expense of relationships or friendships, and the expense of other people, potentially. I think a lot of that, people in that environment get so caught up in that. I just feel like it’s such an unhealthy thing to do. I would probably tell myself just to not get so caught up in it and just relax and enjoy the good bits, but not worry so much about all of that other stuff.

Joseph: Is there something that you wished you had known that you now know about running your own business, for example, because it sounds like that’s something you’d wanted to do for so long? Now, you’re doing it. Any interesting insights about what’s something you wish you had known that you now know?

Norma: [35:09] I mean, that you could do it, that I could do it. I would just tell myself, “You can absolutely do it.” I think just make sure that you find the right people to help you and support you, because, for me, I just think just taking the dive and asking for help where you need it is probably something that I don’t do enough of, still. It’s definitely the thing that I would say to myself is, “Just do it. Ask for help if you need it. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with asking for help.”

Joseph: I also know that when you sometimes put yourself in a very different environment, I know I experience this myself and I talk to people who’ve gone from the corporate world into self-employment who have experienced this, having been through this career change, what’s something that you have learned about yourself along the way? I am keeping in mind the fact that you’re still quite early on in your journey here.

Norma: [35:58] That I love to learn new things. I’ve just absolutely thrived so much from learning so many new things over the last few months, about six months or so now that I’ve started this. Just the sheer amount of learning that I can do is just so exciting. It just keeps it interesting. I think that’s probably the thing that I’ve learned about myself more than anything else.

Joseph: Well, I want to wrap up by making sure that we give people a chance to find out more about you. If they’re interested in learning either more about Pink Spaghetti or the virtual assistance services that you offer, where can people go if they want to learn more?

Norma: [36:39] Probably, the best place is pink-spaghetti.co.uk. You can find me on there if you search for Brighton or on social media.

Making a major geographical move can certainly be exciting but also disruptive, jarring, and disorienting. Becoming a new parent is such a privilege but also life-altering in a way that creates both benefits and challenges. Nicole Webb, a journalist and news reader turned media consultant and author, describes what she experienced when moving from Australia to Hong Kong and eventually to China while adjusting to life as a new mother. She’ll discuss how she managed to adapt and thrive in the midst of tremendous professional and personal change in Career Relaunch® podcast episode 85.

During the Mental Fuel® segment, I’ll also share my own thoughts on the importance of just starting somewhere when you’re trying to figure out ways to turn your side interests into an actual business.

During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I talked about the importance of considering whether and when to charge fees for something you just enjoy doing. My challenge to you, is to just consider whether it still makes sense for you to continue doing something you’re currently doing for free. You might have very good reasons for continuing to do it for the reasons I described before.

However, if you’ve been getting that nagging feeling that it may be time to turn this side work you’ve been doing into something more, and if you haven’t yet found a way to monetize it, I’d recommend you consider what earning even a BIT of money from it could potentially open up for you.

Even if money isn’t your primary motivator or need at this specific moment, that’s totally fine. I’d just suggest you try and pinpoint exactly what you might gain from some sort of monetization, whether that matters to you, and what that means for you.

Nicole Webb is a journalist, presenter, media trainer, and author. She spent 20 years in the Australian television industry working as a Reporter, Producer and Presenter. A key player at 24-hour news channel Sky News for a decade, Nicole covered stories spanning tragedy to triumph. She also produced many of Sky’s high-rating programs.

In 2010, Nicole and her hotelier husband moved to Hong Kong right after she became a mother, where they lived for four years before moving to Xi’an in North-West China. Nicole continued her work in media in the Asia-Pacific region before returning to Australia in 2017, where she’s since remained focused on communications. Nicole’s work now includes hosting premier events, presenting for corporate companies, and media training and consulting.

Check out Nicole’s book China Blonde: How a newsreader’s search for adventure led to friendship, acceptance…and peroxide pandemonium in China and follow her on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram.

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!

Built by linguists and language lovers, Grammarly’s writing app finds and corrects hundreds of complex writing errors — so you don’t have to. Career Relaunch listeners can download Grammarly for free by going to GetGrammarly.com/relaunch.

Teaser (first ~15s): “What am I without this news reader title?” Which I guess I hadn’t realized quite how much I had pinned who I was to that status and that name. It was almost like I just forgot what I was good at.

Joseph: I appreciate your time here. I want to dive right into this. First of all, just kick off by getting a sense of what you’re up to right now. What’s keeping you busy right now in your career and also your life?

Nicole: Yep, it’s late here in Sydney so I’ll try to make sense. Life is busy. We’ve been back from China for four years now. I think it takes a bit of time to find your mojo and settle in wherever you go. It feels like ever since the pandemic, we had locked down for four months. Ever since that wrapped up, work has been coming at me. I’m doing a lot of publicity for other authors which is something I never expected to do, and that’s really good fun. I’m doing that. That’s keeping me busy.

I’m doing a bit of presenting again which I haven’t done really for quite a long time. I did a lot of emceeing and that in Asia. I’ve been doing few TV commercials and things, which has been fun getting back into the studio, and media training. It’s kind of come full circle really. Everything that I sort of learned in those early days is coming back into use. It’s been great!

Joseph: Now, you mentioned in your early days that you want to go back to how you started your career many years ago. Before we get to that, could you also just describe what’s happening in your life right now outside of work? What’s keeping you busy? What’s on your mind right now?

Nicole: [04:27] Well, we were in lockdown for four months in Sydney so nothing was happening, but I was still working. We’ve been out of lockdown probably about five weeks, so not long. It’s just been I guess slowly, slowly stepping back into the real world. Going to the shops for the first time again, going and getting hair color and cut, sitting at a café, all those things that we take for granted, and everyone the world over knows what that’s like now. Just getting back into life again. It’s been good. It’s been a bit overwhelming because you sit on your bum for about four months not doing too much, watching Netflix. Suddenly, you’ve plunged into the world and people are having parties and gatherings, and it’s all quite people-y.

Joseph: It is very jarring, that adjustment. I’ve recently gone back to doing a lot of in-person engagements. I’ve found that it’s quite a rattling experience almost to just throw yourself back into being around tons of people again. I totally understand that.

Nicole: [05:32] I agree. I think it is. You think you can’t wait to see people again, and it is exciting when you first turn up at a gathering. But, at the same time, I found myself sort of putting it off and sort of trying to schedule things that weren’t so busy wasn’t one on top of each other. You know, one thing at a time, I thought. One step at a time because it is just overwhelming. As you say, you’re not used to being around people and face to face. We’ve spent most of the time on Zoom for the last two years, haven’t we?

Joseph: Definitely. I completely understand that. I know that at the same time, you’re probably quite used to all sorts of different media and being on different platforms and formats. Because I know that you actually haven’t always been a media publicist, but you started your career off in journalism. I was wondering if we could go back to your first chapter back in your early career in Sydney when you were in your early 20s. Could you tell me a little bit about how your career kicked off in journalism? And then, we can move forward from there.

Nicole: [06:34] Yes. I was one of those people that, when I was 17 in high school and sat with a career guidance officer and she asked me what I wanted to do, I really wasn’t sure. I knew I wanted to live a life less ordinary. But, what that meant, I didn’t know. Hollywood, maybe, but I couldn’t act or sing so that was out of the question. What else? I remember she said to me, “Well, what about journalism?” I thought, “That could be an interesting career.” I like to dig deep, and investigate, and find out things. I had probably quite liked the idea of being a news reader. From then on, I sort of made up my mind, “Right, that’s what I’ll do.” Not being naive to how difficult that would be to get into. I managed to get into university doing a Bachelor of Arts, Major in Journalism and Public Relations, and went off and did that for my three years and finished.

Of course, it was so hard to get a job. It was near impossible. Blondes, young girls wanting to be reporters on TV were a dime a dozen. To stand out from the crowd was tough. I ended up getting a job in radio, in sales, for a while. I was sort of given the phone book and said, “Here’s your client base. Go out and sell radio advertising,” which was a bit daunting. I did that for a while. And then, the TV station, local TV, I’m talking country town too, poached me for the TV station. I did that but I still always had this yearning to be a TV journalist.

So, I started making a demo tape with some of the guys at the station there that did the ads and sent that out to all of the news directors around the country. Of course, I kept getting a lot of nos, rejection letters, you name it. Kept pursuing and persisting. I’d drive to the car park in my lunch break and look at my notebook and just ring all of these news directors each month, “Have you got anything for me?” Nothing came up. In the end, I ended up leaving the city I was in and went to Melbourne where my parents were living. I gave myself a year to get into journalism or said, “I’d have to go into sales again or PR.”

A year was almost up, and in a little country town called Tamworth in New South Wales, Australia, the news director called me and said, “You’re a perfect example of persistence pays off. Would you like a job as a TV reporter?” I didn’t hesitate. I was off like a shot. The rest is history.

Joseph: Tamworth. I think you mentioned this to me before. It’s like a six-hour drive from Sydney. Were you thinking that there was going to be an opportunity out there for you in news journalism?

Nicole: [09:04] Well, I kind of knew that in Australia, a lot of the country towns had small bureaus. They might not have been the main headquarters, but they would have a couple of journalists and a couple of cameramen. I was desperate. I wanted this job so badly that I was like, “Hey! Get me out of the city. I’ll go to this town of 30,000 people and see what I can make of it.”

So, I drove from Melbourne at that point, so I think that was about 20 hours in the car. I landed in Tamworth and started reporting. Of course, the stories were anything from the big tomato competition to a double murder-suicide. You just didn’t know what was going to happen. I mean it was a sleepy town, but all sorts happened over the two years that I was there. It was a really good grounding and a good starting point as a journal to get in the thick of it.

Joseph: How did you then proceed from there? Were you enjoying the reporting? Is that what you felt was the place you wanted to be in journalism? How did things evolve for you from there?

Nicole: [10:08] Look, I did I love it. I loved it. But I always had this thing in me that I wanted to get to the big smoke. And, in Australia, I guess that was Sydney. I still had my eye on doing that. I got offered a job to open one of the bureaus up on the Gold Coast, which was again bigger than Tamworth, but not the city. I went up there for a year and then I thought, “You know what? I’ll just go to Sydney and maybe try and freelance.” And that’s what I did.

I ended up in Sydney and started freelancing at a lot of the major networks just whenever I could get shifts. Basically, I was a news producer. I would go in and sit on the computer, tap out stories, and put bulletins together which I like doing as well. Eventually, I decided a full-time job would be best because this whole freelance business was a bit tricky. I got offered a job on the business program with Sky News. I was the producer for that. It was a half-hour business show each night. That was great! I love doing that.

I also got to do a bit of presenting because, at the time, Sky News produced quite a few programs and one of those was health news. That was just a pre-recorded program, so it wasn’t live. I kind of could dip my toes in presenting a little bit and start honing that craft which I, at that point, had decided I wanted to be a news reader. I just kept going and going until eventually, I got to do the main news. Sky News is a 24-hour news channel. A bit like BSkyB in the UK. Obviously, not as big as that by any means. That’s a much, much smaller version. But back when I was there, it was 24-hour news. So, you would do a six-hour shift and you would read six bulletins back-to-back. I loved doing that. I ended up doing that for about a decade.

Joseph: That’s interesting. I’ve always been fascinated with the world of journalism. We have some parallels, Nicole. I think we may have talked about this before, but I worked very briefly in news journalism for Hawaii Public Radio. It was just radio, it wasn’t TV. I was in the production side of things. Sort of like you, I started dabbling in the news anchor side of things. In the TV side, is that a common transition to make going from production to being on air?

Nicole: [12:28] I think it is now. I think perhaps and was then. But I think maybe 20 years before that, not so much. You were sort of pinned as a news presenter from the start, and often news presenters weren’t even journalists back then. Whereas, nowadays, I think you tend to start off most news readers will have been a journalist on the road or producing. In some way, they would have been involved in creating the news and then led up to that presenting gig.

Joseph: It sounds like this is going well for you. It sounds like you’re enjoying working at Sky News. You’re on air for six hours at a time. You’re doing what you want to do. When we spoke before, I know you went through a bit of a transition in your early to mid-30s. Can you tell me a little bit about what was happening I guess in your personal life and what triggered you to then change directions in your career?

Nicole: [13:21] I was reading at Sky News, living the life, driving a mini convertible, living in my apartment, having a great time, and was single. But then, I, fortunately, met my husband on a blind date. He was in hotels at the time. He did say to me early on, “They like to move us around in hotels and there are opportunities overseas.” I did shut him down quite quickly because I’ve been such a career person. I thought it wasn’t that I didn’t want to go overseas, it was just that I thought I’d miss the boat, you know. I was in my mid-30s and I thought I’ve kind of missed that time, and I don’t want to give up what I’ve achieved so far. So, we sort of put that to bed because he was from England anyway, and come here as a backpacker. So, he was away as far as he was concerned.

And then, maybe after we got married, a year later, a job came up in Hong Kong at the W. For some reason, I just thought, “I have been doing this for a decade now and I could quite easily be doing the exact same thing in another 10 years. I couldn’t see how things would change.” I felt like I was somehow losing a bit of that ambition and losing my mojo a bit. I guess I was a bit tired with it all. I remember just saying, “You know what? We should do it. Let’s throw your head in the ring and see if you get the job in Hong Kong. Let’s go.” He nearly fell out of bed when I said that. He did, he got the job. Next thing I know, I’m sort of resigning from my career. Also, the same week found out that we were having a baby. It was a bit of a two-pronged affair.

Joseph: Those are two really big pieces of news, right? You’re finding out that you’re moving abroad. You’re finding out that you’re going to become parents. Can you take me back to that moment, what was running through your head that week when you found out?

Nicole: [15:14] Just “gulp.” Like, “Oh, my gosh! Is this really happening?” I can remember being on air, and I was just newly pregnant. My mum knew, and she would watch me on-air from she lived up in Queensland. She was, “I can’t believe you’re pregnant, and I can’t believe you’re leaving!” But she had encouraged us to do this. But it was just so daunting. I remember James went ahead of me and I had to sort of pack up the house, sell the cars, and do all of that. When he got there, he would send me a few pieces of information about what it was like there because I didn’t have much idea. I’d been there once probably 10 years prior for just a couple of days so I didn’t know what it was like to live there. Let alone, have a baby there. Of course, when we got there and it was fantastic to have a baby there. Amazing!

Joseph: This was your first time living abroad. Is that correct, Nicole?

Nicole: [16:03] Pretty much. I mean I had moved from New Zealand to Australia as a teenager but it’s the same.

Joseph: Right. I guess Hong Kong, we’re talking about totally different culture, totally different language. People are speaking Cantonese there. Can you describe what that transition was like for you? Because this is a pretty major move for you.

Nicole: [16:23] It was a big transition. I remember just dealing with your body is changing anyway because you’re pregnant, and we didn’t have a home. We lived in the hotel for six weeks which was great. But it was still quite unnerving. James was busy with his job because he had a new job, a lot to prove, and very long hours in Hong Kong. If you came home at 7 p.m. that was considered an early mark.

I had a lot of time on my own, and I’m sort of waddling the streets, getting bigger and bigger, and a bit of lost identity. “What am I without this news reader title?” Which I guess I hadn’t realized quite how much I had pinned who I was to that status and that name. It was almost like I just forgot what I was good at. Especially, once Ava was born. Suddenly, you’re a mum and you’ve got this new baby. I couldn’t even think of working at that time. And then, I thought, “What would I do anyway? I’m just a news reader. I just read the auto queue. What else could I possibly do?”

It sort of took a good friend of mine who was there and said, “Look, don’t forget you’ve got 20 years of experience. And it’s not just reading the news. It’s writing, and producing, and speaking, and creative things, all of this.” It just took me a while to sort of work that out, I think.

Joseph: Can we talk about this shift for a second of going from full-time employee and professional to full-time mom. Because this is something that comes up a lot. I mean I see it around me. As you know, I’ve got a 4-year-old at home. This shift from being full-time employed to being at home, changing diapers, and singing nursery rhymes. Can you just describe what that was like for you?

Nicole: [18:18] It was very strange, I guess. It’s not that I’d ever been desperate to be a mum, but I thought I would be. But I was always such a career person and it was strange. I’d be down in this big giant shopping center which was underneath. We lived on the 43rd floor of a high-rise apartment in the end. Just so many different cultural aspects to it as well. Having a baby in Hong Kong, so many people have their two cents worth and their cultural things come into play, and what I’m feeding her, and what I’m doing with her. You get questioned and put on the spot. I just felt quite alone with it, I guess. I ended up joining a group of pregnant women who were all due around the same time.

In hindsight, it was the best thing I could have done. But I just remembered, it was daunting. Also, I just remembered seeing housewife on the VISA applications, and that threw me as well. It’s like, “That’s not me! What’s happened to me? Where am I?”

Joseph: Just the emotions of going from being a news reader at a reputable organization to this “housewife,” as you described it. That to me would be quite shocking and kind of hard to stomach.

Nicole: [19:28] I can still feel the feelings when I talk about it now. I think it was hard for James as well because he was so supportive of me. It was hard for him though to know what to do and what to say. Because he was trying to juggle this new job and support me, and I’m here whinging. I think I was quite a pain in the bum for a while until I sorted myself out.

Joseph: Well, let’s talk a little bit about that. Your daughter’s name is Ava. Is that right? She was only a few weeks old, and then at that time, you did manage to find a new gig. Could you explain how that came about, and what you ended up doing there in Hong Kong?

Nicole: [20:09] Well, actually, the first gig I ever did was a master of ceremonies for an event, and I’d never done this before. I guess people think, “Oh, you’ve read the news. So, I’m sure you can be an emcee for the night.” But I was terrified! Because by nature, I’m actually quite a shy person. So, standing up and talking in front of a whole group of people that could see me was quite different to a camera where I can’t see the people. I was really terrified when I got asked to do this job. Ava was nine weeks old. I just thought, “Wow!” But I knew I had to say yes, because I also knew that I had to have something of my own.

Joseph: How did that sum up for you?

Nicole: [20:45] I think it was actually a friend of mine who couldn’t do it and suggested me. It was one of those things that I was just lucky to be in the right place at the right time. They had these award nights. They are fantastic and became really good friends and had me back every year. It was worth doing it.

Joseph: How’d you balance that with having a 9-week-old baby? At the start, I’m just trying to imagine how you pull that off.

Nicole: [21:13] Well, I was lucky. I remember at the time James’ parents were in town from the UK. They looked after Ava. I remember having breast pads in and trying to find an evening dress that was three sizes bigger than I was used to because I still had pregnancy weight and all of that. It was all a bit a new era for me, I guess. I did that. It gave me the confidence again and reminded me that, “I can do this. I have got this experience” I think a lot of women, even if they’re not living overseas, struggle when they first have a baby because they’re so much out of their comfort zone. And then, they have to step back into the workforce and it’s not easy.

Joseph: Okay. You go from working full-time to being a full-time mom. And now, you’re back to working time. What was that transition like for you? Just the mechanics of that, and also just the emotions of that.

Nicole: [22:03] I was really lucky. I didn’t ever go back full-time with Ava. What I did was just emceeing. It was sort of irregular. It was just enough to sort of I guess feed me a little bit of enthusiasm and confidence. And then, I also started writing. While I’d been a journalist and I’ve been writing scripts for years, that’s quite different as you know to writing an article.

I started just writing for some parenting websites. Because I guess I was trying to combine what was happening in my life with my media experience. What was happening is that I was changing nappies and visiting change rooms all around Hong Kong, trying to get on in taxis, trying to find my way with no Cantonese, and trying to fumble my way through it. I started writing articles about parenthood. I did it for free in the beginning just to get my name known, I think.

Thankfully, that sort of led to other things like writing for magazines and what have you. It was never full-time, but it was flexible. So, it was great, having Ava, I could do it in my own time, so to speak. And then, that’s what sort of prompted me to start my blog. Doing all of that writing I guess I found that I had quite a passion for it and I enjoyed it.

On the 2-year mark of being in Hong Kong, I started my blog which was “Mint Mocha Musings.” It just fuelled me through this whole pregnancy, and parenthood, and sleepless nights. “Mint Mocha Musing’s, The Hotelier’s Wife and Expat Affair in Hong Kong,” it was. I just started writing what was happening in Hong Kong, and all of the crazy, amazing, fascinating things that I would see every day as an expat. That blog soon monetized itself. It wasn’t a huge amount of money, but I soon learned there were ways of doing that and making a bit of extra money on the side. All of these little things I guess were enough to make me feel like I had a sense of purpose again.

Joseph: You mentioned one thing there about monetizing your blog. I know that there’s a lot of people who maybe listen to this show, and they’re thinking about doing some writing on the side, and whether they want to make money from it or not, they just want to share their thoughts with the world. How did you turn your blog from being just a place to share your thoughts to something that was generating money? Could you share some of the mechanics around that?

Nicole: [24:20] It’s not easy, I’ll say that. It’s really difficult to make a lot of money, but people do, that’s for sure. You just have to be very, very dedicated. It’s almost a full-time job. But for me, I was able to do sponsored posts. That would be always a company that I felt aligned with what the blog was, which was travel and expat and parenting and all of that. That might be an airline or something that might sponsor a blog post. So that means I would write any sort of article that I would normally write. But maybe I would just write a sentence in there that might relate to say “flying” somewhere, and then they would pay to have a link to their website. You can do those. Obviously, you don’t want to do those all the time because then the blog becomes inauthentic. But, every four or five blogs, you can put one of those in there and that gives you a bit of money.

Another way is through affiliate advertising. One of my biggest affiliates was OFX, which you can transfer money wherever you are overseas, back home, and you don’t have to pay a fee. That was a great one for my expat community. And so, every time someone sort of found that through my blog, which I advertised it on there and joined up through me, I would get a percentage of that commission. It’s not a bad way to earn a little bit of money. It’s not a lot, but it’s certainly something for your efforts.

Joseph: You’re doing some emceeing. You’re doing some presenting, you started writing Mint Mocha Musings. I guess you’re a few years now into being in Hong Kong. Are you and James thinking this is where you’re going to be for a while or what was the plan from here on out?

Nicole: Look, we like to think that was where we were going to be because we were loving it. A couple of years in, you find your feet and you find friends and you start to really get into the swing of things. We loved Hong Kong and we probably could have stayed there forever. But the problem now was that James was number two in the hotel, and he needed to really get to be the general manager to progress his career further.

We started sort of putting out filler, and of course, jobs would come up all the time from Bangkok to Seoul, to Singapore, all over the place, India. And, James’s sort of put his hand up and he might get to the last interview or the job would fall through or whatever. But China just kept coming up because they were building so many hotels. I think, in one year, the company was starting at the time built 80 hotels in China. It was almost getting a bit hard to avoid China.

We did get offered a job in Wuhan. When no one knew where Wuhan was or that it even existed, and I remember we went up there for the weekend because we had to decide by the Monday. We went to have a look and make this decision which was just so hard and overwhelming because we didn’t really want to leave Hong Kong. We ended up turning that job down, but we soon realized that we couldn’t say no too much more.

Eventually, Xi’an came up on our radar, and I just remember googling it because that’s all I had to go on and it looked quite attractive as far as Chinese cities go. The quintessential Chinese architecture, lantern sort of hanging around the city. I said to James, “I think we’ve just got to do it and get it done. We’ll go for a year or whatever. You get your first general manager role, and then you’ll be more set up.” And, I thought I’ll just take my laptop and I’ll continue my blog. Of course, there’ll be a lot to write about in China. I’ll continue some of the contracts I had with magazines, but I couldn’t work properly of course because you needed a proper VISA. That was all very difficult to get.

So, four years into Hong Kong, we moved to the middle of China with Ava, three and a half years old.

Joseph: What was your setup in China? For those people who’ve never been to China, where were you living? What was that like? How was your adjustment?

Nicole: [28:17] Xi’an is inland. If you’ve ever looked at a map of China, there’s Beijing up the north on the east coast, and then Shanghai is sort of further down. Xi’an’s in the middle, but inland, quite far. So landlocked, a city of 9 million people, and there are many, many, many cities of 9 million. That’s quite a small city in comparison. No one really speaks English. Very few Westerners. When you consider Hong Kong’s had maybe 100,000 expats, maybe there were 1,000 in Xi’an, tops. We lived in the hotel, but we lived in the residences at the end of the hotel. But it was sort of like being in the hotel still.

It was just a huge culture shock for me, for all of us. Just thinking, “What are we doing here?” Just the noise was just crazy and chaotic. Just horns beeping 24/7 day and night because they tend to use the horn instead of the indicator. Traffic was just wild, careening all over the road. No lanes. No orderly driving. Bicycles with four or five people piled up high. Just so many people.

We would step outside of the hotel and Ava and I were fair game, we were really pounced on because many people had never seen a White person in the flesh. Ava, this little pocket rocket that was three and a half with long blonde hair and fair skin, they would crowd around us, and take photos, and touch her, and touch her hair, and someone picked her up in that first week. I just remember being horrified thinking, “Oh my gosh! What are we doing? How am I going to survive?” I couldn’t speak any Mandarin at that point. It was just tough in the beginning.

Joseph: I guess the closest I’ve experienced to that which isn’t quite the same level of difference you’re talking about here is, my wife is Turkish. I remember when we go to Turkey, people are just not that familiar with seeing somebody who looks like me. There’s a lot of people kind of hover around us. People are very friendly, but it’s also quite daunting and quite startling when people want to pick up your child and take them inside and take pictures. It’s kind of odd.

Nicole: [20:22] It’s alarming. At first, I didn’t realize that it was harmless. I didn’t realize that it was just pure fascination. You’re on guard because you don’t know. I could just imagine losing Ava in those crowds of people. It was just terrifying. Until I understood what it was all about, which took quite some time to understand the culture, understand these people and how they feel and how they think, it was a real work in progress.

Joseph: You’re in China. Are you then thinking that at this point, you’re going to be there temporarily? And then, what ended up coming up next for you guys? I think in 2017, you made another move. Is that right?

Nicole: [31:17] We ended up spending two and a half years in Xi’an, which by the time we left, we really loved it. I mean look, it wasn’t Hong Kong, but we had sort of fallen in love. It had become our new normal because it was just crazy, but we had fallen in love with the crazy. We had made a lot of great friends there. Chinese locals and expats alike. We found our feet there and we’re enjoying it. I’d started writing my book because I decided I wanted to write a book. I just didn’t quite know what that would be.

And as soon as we stepped foot on to Chinese soil, I knew it would be about the country. I started doing a lot of research even though I had no clue how to write a book. By the time I’d been there, about 18 months, I started doing interviews with all sorts of locals. From young women in China, to my local hairdresser, to an old war veteran. Just started trying to find out who these people were and how they felt about their country and their lives. Obviously, I had a translator. I could speak some Mandarin by the time we left, but obviously, not enough to do an interview.

I spent a lot of time doing that. And then, James got offered a job in Sydney. Of course, we were sort of humming and harrying because we didn’t want to give up life overseas. But also, it’s very hard to get back to Australia and we didn’t want to miss our opportunity. And Ava was six and missing the grandparents. And so, we decided to say yes. It was with a bit of a heavy heart, but we thought, “It’s now or never.” So, it was goodbye, China.

Joseph: Now, this is something I’ve always wondered about, Nicole. Because as you know, I’m from the United States, and I now live in the UK. I’ve always wondered what’s it like to go back to where you’re from after what seems like was quite an amazing and kind of incredible personal and professional journey through Hong Kong and China. When you stepped back in Australia, can you describe what that moment was like for you? What sort of feelings were you experiencing?

Nicole: [33:19] It was very weird. It’s just same, same but not. We chose to live purposely in a suburb that we had never lived in before. Because I didn’t want to go full circle and go back to where we used to live because I almost felt like that would be forgetting what we’ve done. I didn’t want to forget it because it was such a big part of our lives and it was so, as you say, “amazing.”

We chose this suburb that we didn’t know much about but seemed nice. It was just different because everything was in high definition. No pollution. Everything was so defined and sharp. The sky was so blue. We’ve been wearing masks in China because of the pollution. All of a sudden, I could speak to the doctors, and the hairdressers and that was an easy side. I hadn’t driven for seven years so that was challenging. I guess trying to explain to people what you’ve been through. It was lucky that quite a lot of people came to Hong Kong and a few came to China. Some good friends knew what it was like, but many didn’t and it’s really hard to explain to them what you’ve just been through. I guess a lot of people will expect you just to pick up where you left off, and you really can’t because you’ve changed so much and life is so different for you. People would always say, “You’re going to go back to Sky News.” I’d be like, “No, no. I don’t want to go back to Sky News.” I want to move forward and do different things.

I think it took again a big adjustment to settle back in. Even just watching TV was quite jarring. The Australian accents and the news was quite colloquial, and now I watch it every night. But it was just so different to being overseas and not watching Chinese television because I couldn’t understand it. But just another world, I guess.

Joseph: Before we talk about some of the lessons you’ve learned along the way, can you also just explain what you’re now up to as a media publicist? What exactly are you now working on with authors?

Nicole: [35:20] Because I published my memoir “China Blonde” last year in October, I did a lot of my own publicity because I know the media landscape here, and I know a lot of the journalists because they’re still around after 20 years which is great. I did my own publicity and got some good publicity. And then, I had a few other authors come to me and want me to do the same thing for them. I’m now working with a charity, “The Life You Can Save,” by philosopher Peter Singer, and philanthropist. He’s quite well-known. He’s written a book of the same name and they curate the most effective charities to donate to.

I’m now working and doing their publicity for their book. I’ve since done a few other fiction and non-fiction authors. Just placing, getting them exposure, I guess on things like podcasts, and newspapers, and TV, and radio. I love doing that because it’s what I know and it’s fun and it’s easy for me. I’ve been doing, as I said, a few presenting gigs as well. So, getting back into the studio I did an ad tutorial the other week which was fun.

One lesson I’ve learned is I told myself for 10 years, I don’t think I’d be able to read the auto queue anymore. It’s like I told myself this narrative that I couldn’t do it. The minute I stepped into Hong Kong, it was over. And then, when I went back to do it a few weeks ago, I was shocked that it was actually like riding a bike. I couldn’t believe that for 10 years, I’ve let myself believe that that was something that would be too difficult for me now. It’s a big lesson. I know you haven’t even asked me that yet. But just thinking about that is something that I only discovered very recently. I’m doing that, and media training corporate companies that need to know how to get their message across in the media, which is sort of everything coming into the fore and writing another book. Fingers in many pies.

Joseph: Sounds like you’re very busy and involved with a lot of really interesting projects and initiatives. You mentioned lessons there, Nicole. I would love to talk just a little bit about some of the things you’ve learned along the way before we wrap up by talking a little bit more about “China Blonde.” I’d be curious to hear what is something that you have learned about yourself along this winding journey of yours.

Nicole: [37:38] I think I’ve learned that I’m quite a chameleon and that I tend to fit in and adapt which is quite a powerful thing to know that nothing will be too hard. You’ll find your way around it. That’s as far as expat life goes or living anywhere, I guess. Work-wise, I think I’ve learned about myself that if I have a goal, I’m very single-minded and I find that the way that I achieve what I want to achieve is by sticking to that goal and persevering at any cost. Not giving up. Looking back to those early days when I got my first journalism job.

Joseph: As you look back to those earlier days, if you can kind of think all the way back to your days in your 20s when you were working in Sydney, do you have any advice that you would give to your younger self as it relates to changing careers or relocating to a different country? And if so, what might that advice be?

Nicole: [38:37] It will always work out. I think one piece of advice which is probably what my mum told me is that nothing’s forever. You can panic and get all worked up about, should we be moving to Hong Kong, or should we be changing jobs, or should we be doing something. But, at the end of the day, you take these leaps and you’re not stuck there forever. If it doesn’t work out, you can always change jobs. You can always leave the country and go somewhere else or go home. You’re never really stuck. Except of course in COVID.

But generally, I think you should take these risks and take those. Step out of your comfort zone because generally what comes from that is always rewarding. And often, it’s far more rewarding. Even though it seems so difficult at the time to step out of your comfort zone, I think the rewards far outweigh any that say you procrastinated and didn’t do it. You would always be kicking yourself and wishing that you’d had the guts to do something. I think you’re better off jumping in head first, even if it is uncomfortable because the rewards will just be tenfold.

Joseph: When you look back on your career transitions, what’s something that you wished you had known that you now know?

Nicole: [39:54] Oh gosh! Every sort of piece of work that you do is all making up to be this whole sum of who you are. You’re not just one thing. We do tend to pigeonhole ourselves into certain things, don’t we? I think you are the sum of so many different things that everything really gravitates together to give you so much experience and, in more ways, than one, in life and work. And so, each step you take in life is just another notch in your belt really. I guess I didn’t know that when I was younger. You always worry about everything and worry what you’re doing, and is it the right thing. But it helps you grow, doesn’t it?

Joseph: I want to wrap up, Nicole, by talking about one of your recent endeavors which you did allude to. But, wouldn’t mind talking a little bit more about your book, “China Blonde,” which you published last year. Can you just tell me what’s it about and how’s that journey been for you as an author?

Nicole: [40:52] It’s a memoir. A snapshot of our time mainly in China for those two and a half years. I just wanted to I guess educate and entertain at the same time. I wanted to show people what the real Chinese are like. Because all we really hear is politics and the economy, and we don’t really know what the real people are like. I wanted to get that across and explain what they’re like. But also, it’s my journey and what it was like I guess as you we’ve talked about giving up my career and moving to Hong Kong and China, and finding my feet, and finding a sense of purpose, and all the crazy funny stories that happened and the places we visited. That’s what it really is, I guess.

It took probably four years in the making from those very early days of writing, and researching, and interviewing. It wasn’t until I got back to Australia that I could really start doing some courses and learn the craft of actually writing a book, and putting chapters together, and all of that, which was just a whole other level. It’s been a really interesting journey. I’ve really learned so much. I still have a monthly writer’s workshop which I go to, and we have to submit 4,000 words, so it keeps you accountable. That’s what I’m doing and I’m writing fiction now and hoping that that will turn into something, and that’s based in Hong Kong.

Joseph: Very interesting. For those people out there who are aspiring authors, do you have any quick tips?

Nicole: [42:19] Just keep writing. Don’t stop. I think the difference between being an author and not is that the author didn’t stop. Because so many people, we start writing, we all think we’ve got a book, and after, we give up. Just finish it. Don’t worry too much about the first draft. Just get it all out and that can always be fine-tuned and edited and what have you.

Joseph: I’m going to keep that in mind myself. If people want to learn more about you, Nicole, or your book, “China Blonde,” where can they go?

Nicole: [42:46] Probably, the best place is “nicolewebbonline,” that’s my website. I’m on all the social medias as well. Instagram, nicolewebbonline, Facebook, and Twitter. Come and say hello.

Joseph: Thank you so much, Nicole, for taking the time to tell us more about your life as an expat in Hong Kong and China, and how you managed to build a new life and career for yourself there. And also, back in Australia. Also, just the importance of going for it when you have an opportunity come up. I hope things go well with your book and your work as a media publicist and your advertorial work.

Nicole: [43:20] Thank you so much for having me.

When you’re trying to build anything new, the hardest part is often getting started. In this episode of Career Relaunch®, Julia Taylor, a former US government defense intelligence officer turned web developer and founder shares her thoughts on building a helpful community, thinking outside of the box, and creating your first website. I also share some thoughts on the importance of being okay with taking imperfect actions and my own challenges I faced building my first website.

During this episode’s Mental Fuel® segment, I challenged you to think about something you’ve been trying to perfect before putting it out into the world–whether it’s your CV, social media profile, product, service, or website. Focus on getting a version out there that’s good enough.

Sometimes referred to as a minimum viable product (or MVP), this can be something you feel may still need some work, but certainly won’t embarrass you. Try to just get the ball rolling on the idea, knowing that you’ll improve, refine, and rework it as you go. Instead of trying to start in the perfect place, in the perfect way, or on the perfect day, focus on just starting somewhere.

I’m actually going to try and do this myself with a bit of a social media refresh I’m planning to tinker with in the upcoming months ahead.

Julia Taylor was an intelligence officer for the US Department of Defense with assignments in places including Kabul and Kandahar, Afghanistan. She eventually met her husband during one of her deployments, moved to the UK, and went through a transitional period where she bounced around a bit with some 9-5 jobs, before eventually moving to North Carolina where she began building websites.

She’s now the CEO & Founder of GeekPack®, focused on empowering women & girls to change their lives for the better through the power of code, community & confidence. As a (former) military wife, self-taught web developer, and lover of location independence, Julia has taught over 2,500 women to not only master WordPress but also take control of their lives and live by their own terms. Learn more about her GeekForGeek Grant Program providing women access to the WP Rockstar Program and 6 months membership in her private GeekPack® community.

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!

Thanks to Audible for supporting this episode of Career Relaunch. Audible is the premier provider of digital audiobooks, offering over 180,000 audiobook titles for listening anytime and anywhere on your favorite device. Career Relaunch listeners can download a free audiobook download and get 30-day trial at audibletrial.com/careerrelaunch.

Teaser (first ~15s): I wish that I had given myself a little bit more credit and thought outside the box. I didn’t really know anything different at the time. It was just one of those experiences that I needed to go through. That was part of my journey to get to where I am now.

Joseph: Let’s start by talking a little bit about what you have been focused on recently in your career and your life, and then we’re going to go back in time and talk about your very interesting career trajectory. What has been keeping you busy lately?

Julia: [02:38] I love this time of year because I get to reflect on what I’ve done and my team, what we’ve accomplished. Also, look forward to what we want to do in the future. I’m doing a lot of that right now, and it’s really exciting. It starts out being a bit overwhelming, and then as I start to dig in and chat with different team members and some coaches and kind of identify next steps, it does get really exciting. That’s really where I am now. I got a couple priorities that I’m focused on. Professionally, my big priority is focusing on my team.

I’m a big believer that if I can build a solid, supported, and encouraged team of folks who love what they do and believe in the mission and vision of my company, GeekPack, that will trickle down to my community. That’s been working for the last couple of years, so I spend a lot of time and energy focused on my team, empowering them, making sure that they’re happy and they feel supported. That’s my big focus, professionally.

Personally, I’m in a really fortunate position to be able to — I don’t want to say “step back,” but because I can empower my team so much and give them more responsibility, I’m actually able to have a much better work-life balance than I’ve ever had before. That’s been a big priority this past year and will continue to be, so I can really be the visionary and not so much in the weeds and move the business forward and reach our vision. That’s been what I’ve been working on.

Joseph: Is your team based where you are, physically and geographically, or are they spread out everywhere?

Julia: [04:18] All over the world. I’m in Colorado. I’ve got a team member in Florida. We’ve got one in Canada. We’ve got one in the UK, and we’ve got two in Australia. I’ve got another one on the East Coast. Someone in Texas. Literally, all over the world.

Joseph: I know that one of the things that you’re really passionate about is the independence of working wherever you want to. I think you refer to as “location independent.” We’re going to come back to that and talk about how you’ve done that in your own life. It sounds like you’re bringing that to life with your team. too. That’s really cool. Also, GeekPack, can you just give us a snapshot of what exactly you do as the CEO and founder of GeekPack? What do you do for your clients?

Julia: [05:00] The mission of GeekPack is we empower women in tech to get into tech. Anyone who has ever dabbled in anything kind of techy in the past, or maybe they didn’t get into anything techy because maybe they weren’t very good at math when they were a kid, and someone said to them, “You’re never going to be good at tech,” that sort of thing. Anyone who wants to give tech a go. We primarily focus on coding. We teach web development. We teach coding languages. We just empower women to learn these hard skills that they can then use whether it’s in a 9-to-5 job, or they want to start their own online business, and they learn these skills with a community around them. That’s what GeekPack is.

It’s a community where people can ask the “silly questions” that normally they might be terrified to ask because someone might be rude, or they might laugh at them. There’s none of that allowed in my community. We support one another, we encourage each other. We’re there when there’s wins and when there’s lows, answering questions, and all that goes along with learning these skills, but also finding clients and finding work. That’s what GeekPack is.

Joseph: Very cool. What a great mission that you’ve got out there. I think that that’s especially important these days, just empowering people to be able to have the tools to create their own websites and to learn how to code. It seems like it’s a very current necessary skill these days that pretty much I guess all of us need to have. I have zero of those skills. Now, you haven’t always been the founder of GeekPack, Julia. I would love to go back in time and talk about your chapter in your career when you are actually a defense intelligence officer. Let’s talk about that and then we can move forward from there. What exactly were you doing as a defense intelligence officer?

Julia: [06:57] Back in about 2006, when I joined the U.S. government and joined the Department of Defense as an intelligence officer. It was an amazing job. I got to travel all over the world. I actually deployed to Afghanistan twice, which was a real honor to get to go there and work with everyone there and the mission that we were doing. This was back in 2008, ’09, and 2010. Kind of at the height of when stuff was going on in Afghanistan.

I was an intelligence officer, so I worked with lots of different intelligence agencies. We collected as much information as possible to put together packages that we would then pass on to a military unit that would then go in and action that intelligence. That’s probably the best way to explain what I did. I did a lot of high-level briefings. I would brief generals and go to the Pentagon and things like that. From very high-level strategic stuff, all the way down to tactical kind of stuff that was going on the ground when I was in-country. A very wide range of stuff that I got to do. Very, very privileged position.

Joseph: How did you get into that line of work? Is that something that you had thought you wanted to do when you grew up or were you thinking about this in university or college?

Julia: [08:30] When I was growing up, my mom was a flight attendant for Delta. She flew my whole life as I was growing up. My dad, he was a stay-at-home dad with me and my brother. And because she was a flight attendant, we got to fly for free. All growing up, I have always traveled. I have been incredibly fortunate to get to travel all over the world. I think I always had that kind of interest and that bug in me to travel. When I was in college, I decided to study Russian. The only reason I did is I looked into it and it had a very high percentage of people getting As, and I feel terrible admitting that. But I thought, “Oh, that would be a cool thing to do.”

For some reason, I always thought I would work for the foreign service, that I would work for the state department and travel. I was lucky enough to get an internship with the state department back when I was in college, and I lived in Armenia. For a summer and did that, and I very quickly realized I did not want to do that job. I thought, “Oh, maybe something in the intelligence community would be cool.”

I learned Russian, and I got a government grant. They sent me to Russia to live there for a year to learn the language. That kind of led me into working for the government. It all worked out well and I was just in the right place at the right time. I got a great position with the Department of Defense, and I got to do that for a handful of years and travel and deploy. It was a fantastic opportunity.

Joseph: Before we talk about your transition, I just got to ask you because I know very little about the military or even the intelligence community. Aside from the kind of stuff I see on like TV, or I’m thinking of “Jack Ryan,” are there any sort of misconceptions that exist about what any intelligence officer does?

Julia: [10:24] 100%. Every misconception you can imagine. Everything you see in Hollywood, I would say 90% of that is not possible. But they sure make it look good. Nothing kind of moves as quickly as it does in Hollywood. And you’re right, “Jack Ryan” and “24” and “Homeland,” all those. They’re amazing TV shows. I would watch them, and I would think to myself, “Why didn’t we have that asset? Why didn’t it move that quick?” But it’s just not feasible. I mean, at the end of the day, working for the government, it is a huge machine, working for the military. Things take time, decisions take time.

The only time when anything ever moved quickly and was anything remotely similar to what you see in Hollywood was when I was deployed. Even then, it was probably just kind of 10% similar, but still very cool to kind of know how it happens. We’ve got a lot of pretty incredible gadgets and tech stuff that can happen that the government can use. But it’s nothing like what you see in Hollywood. I wish it was. Maybe we’re getting closer, but Hollywood has a good way of exaggerating all that.

Joseph: Can you also just give a glimpse into what your setup was. Were you on the field? Were you in an office? Were you in a tent? What was your physical setup when you were deployed?

Julia: [11:51] My first deployment was in Kabul, in the capital. We were on a base, and I was in a building. From the inside, you would never know the difference. It was kind of technically within something called a “skiff” for years. I probably couldn’t tell you what that stands for, but it was a secure compartmented environment. But, apart from that, it just looked like any other open floor plan, office space with lots of computers. Occasionally, when I was deployed both times, I would get to go out and go to different FOBs, Forward Operating Bases, places that had tents. That’s where they kind of operated out of, and I would spend a couple days here and there. But, for the most part, I was in like an office building.

In my second deployment, I was down in Kandahar in the south. That was a much, much bigger, huge, base. It was a town, pretty much. I mean there was a Pizza Hut. There was a coffee shop. There were all the western amenities you could think of. You could get there on base, but yet you were in the middle of the desert in Afghanistan. Two different experiences, but both times, it’s a pretty much just an office setup. Lots of TVs, big screens all around where you can kind of watch things that were going on the ground. But, for the most part, pretty much just an office.

Joseph: At what point did you start to think about doing something differently? I understand you were doing this for a few years, but you eventually went through a bit of a transition.

Julia: [13:26] While I was deployed my first time in 2008 in Kabul, I met a guy who is now my husband. We just celebrated 10 years of marriage.

Joseph: Congratulations.

Julia: [13:37] Thank you. We met. He’s British. That’s kind of where the story takes a bit of a turn. Of course, he was in the military. He has since retired. Him being British, and both of us being in jobs that traveled a lot and deployed a lot, it didn’t work very well, personally. We had great professional careers, but personally, it was tough, the long-distance and everything else. I made the decision to leave my job with the government and move to the UK, and we got married. I became a military wife which is one of the things I’m most proud of. But my career progression took a real nosedive. As anyone who is familiar with what it’s like being in the military, you move a lot. We did. We moved a lot.

I found myself jumping from one kind of 9-to-5 to another with zero career progression. That took a real toll, and we did that for a few years. That was kind of my in-between time of “what am I going to do” and “how do I have career progression for myself” while we move all the time. Because remote work wasn’t a big thing back then. I was really kind of lost on the professional side.

Joseph: Can you remember the moment when you decided that, “Hey, I got to do something about this. I can’t keep bouncing from one job to another.” Is there a particular moment that stands out in your mind?

Julia: [15:13] Yes. I can remember it like it was yesterday. I wish it was one of these moments where the heavens opened, and doves came flying in. It was definitely an a-ha moment, but things didn’t change immediately. It still took time, but gosh, this must have been 2014 and I was in one of these 9-to-5s. I was in the job.

Now, granted I had no tech background. When I worked for the government, I didn’t do anything techy. I didn’t do anything with code. When I went to college, I didn’t have anything. I’d never looked at or done anything with any code, or websites, or anything like that. That was all completely new to me. I was working away and my boss walks in. He says that he wanted his business’s website to have this functionality. He told me to do it. I knew what he was asking for, but I had no idea how to achieve it.

Joseph: What was your actual role at the time when he asked?

Julia: [16:20] I was a business analyst. Nothing techy at all. We would go out and work with local businesses and get them involved with what we were doing in the unit as part of the university. Nothing to do with websites or anything techy. And, why he thought I would know how to do this, I have no idea. But it was a gift. He asked me to do this thing and it worked out. I remember thinking, “What do I do now?” I look to my colleague who sat next to me, and he is a bit more techy than I was. He said, “Don’t worry. Let’s google it and we’ll figure it out.” Sure enough, I know how to google. I googled exactly what my boss had asked me to do. What it was when you’re on a website and there’s like an FAQ and there’s the kind of drop-down, like the plus/minus. That sort of thing. That’s what he asked for.

I googled that and I found this line of code, and I took this. I copied it and I pasted it into the back end of the website, and I hit “save.” Then I refreshed the website and it worked. That was the moment where I had this like, “Oh, my gosh! I just googled something that created this thing, that someone asked for.” I had no idea what I was doing, but I was able to google it and problem solved and figured it out. The result was right there in front of me, and it was a magical moment.

That was when I thought to myself, “Wow! If I can learn more about this, maybe this is a skill that I could then use to get a remote job to where I could work from anywhere.” It was that moment of, “Okay. This could be the thing.” Of course, what my current career has turned into is very different than what I thought it would back then. But that was the moment when I realized that I just did something based on what I learned on Google, created a result, and I saw the results right there on the screen. And I thought maybe this could be something.

Joseph: At that moment, you’re realizing that, “Okay. I’ve got the ability to figure this stuff out. I can start to tweak code on a website.” What happened next for you in terms of your actual career track, and what you did about this once you figured this out?

Julia: [18:44] I learned as much as I could. I took all the free coding classes I could find, all the resources, and I built websites from the ground up. I did all the things that I thought I needed to do to know enough to get a job. In my head, this whole time I’m thinking to myself, “I will get a job. I will be an employee. I will work in a 9-to-5 but I will be remote.”

There was nothing in me that thought I could be an entrepreneur. There was nothing in me that thought I could have an online business that I ran. That never was that something I considered because I don’t know anyone that did that. Of course, you hear “online business,” I’m like, “Oh, that’s a total scam!” All those things. That was not an option for me. I learned as much as I could. And then, I started applying for jobs. I probably applied for like 200 jobs, and I didn’t hear back from any.

Joseph: Okay. This is all in the UK?

Julia: [19:41] This was partly in the UK, and then we moved. My husband’s last job in the military before I retired was in the U.S. We were in North Carolina, so it was kind of overlapping that time. We moved to the U.S., and I’m still looking for remote work. Where we ended up in North Carolina, the closest place where I could have worked in an office doing anything tech-related was about an hour away. I didn’t want to commute that long, so I’m still applying for remote jobs and nothing’s coming through. It was really, really discouraging as you can imagine. Here, I’d learned all these skills and I thought I was doing all the right things, and no one would even glance at my resume.

It was only when a colleague of my husband’s, retired from the military, and he was starting his own business. He said to me, “You know, I know you know how to build websites. Will you build mine?” I said to him, “That’s not a real thing.” I said, “You know I can’t do that.” I had every excuse possible, and he convinced me. Sure enough, I did. I built his website and he loved it. He said, “Why don’t you do this? Why don’t you start your own business? Working with other business owners who need websites, and need tech help, and all that?” I pushed back, but I finally gave it a go. That was the start of me building my agency which then led into me transitioning into education.

Now, I teach women how to do exactly what I did build an online business. They can do from anywhere. They can work as much as they want, as little as they want, building websites, learning to code, troubleshooting, problem-solving. Anything tech-related, they can do because they know how to code. They know how to problem-solve. They have the confidence, and that’s what I get to do now every day.

Joseph: You’re actually coaching these women on the actual services that you were once providing to your clients, like building websites and helping them with the technical side of things. Is that right?

Julia: [21:44] Exactly. What I’m a big believer in now is it took me years to learn the skills to have the confidence and the gumption to put myself out there and to find clients and build a business, years. What I’m trying to do for them is cut that time way down to months. One thing that I did not have when I was learning and building the business was a community. Everything took me so much longer because I didn’t have anyone to bounce ideas off of, or ask questions, or get support, or just get another set of eyes on some code that wasn’t working.

You know you can go cross-eyed looking at it. Someone else can go, “Oh, it’s just this small thing here.” When I wanted to do something and educate and get into the kind of teaching realm, my priority, my main thing was creating a community. The program, teaching them the skills, WordPress development specifically, and all the tech that goes along with that, was secondary to the community. It was pretty much everything that I wish that I had when I was going through the process is what I’ve created.

Joseph: This is a good segue into the next topic I was hoping to cover with you, Julia, which is how you built up your business. What I’d like to focus on is how you built up your community. Because it sounds like you did go through that whole process of and I guess struggling through the process of trying to find your clients, build up your business. How exactly did you build the community?

Julia: [23:20] It goes back to October of 2018. We just hit three years of the community. To be honest, it was a lot of my time. As I mentioned at the beginning, something that I’ve been working on a lot recently is a better work-life balance because I didn’t have that when I first started the community. It’s a Facebook group, it’s a private Facebook group for members who joined the program, and it worked great. I mean, thank you, Mark Zuckerberg, for being able to use that platform. Because people are already there. It’s a great platform to be able to use that.

Honestly, the first year and a half, I was in there every single day as often as possible answering questions, supporting people, going live, providing as much value as possible. I think that’s one of the lessons that I learned early on when I got into setting up an online business. Whether I was trying to find my own clients or working with students is adding value. Coming to the table with value first rather than asking for something. I have a coach who I learned from and that’s what she always did, was lead with value. I’ve followed that, and every single thing that I do, I try my hardest to lead value because I want people to see that there is real value.

We’re not we’re not just asking for money or whatever. Look at this value that we will provide for no cost. If it’s something that you think you might enjoy and get a kick out of and want to learn more, great! We have those opportunities. But any opportunity to lead with value — and that’s what I’ve always done in the community is try and be as valuable as possible.

Any experience that I’ve had in the past that I can share with them, and my community members, like I am very honest and transparent with them. The number of times that I will cry when I’m on a live telling them about something that didn’t work or did work, or wins and things, lessons learned. I’ve had a lot of amazing wins, and I’ve learned a lot of lessons over the years, and I share all of that with my community. I try and be as transparent and authentic as possible, and just lead with value. Those are the things that I’ve done, and it’s worked.

Now, as I said at the beginning, I’m able to focus on my team because they then pour all their value into the community. I now have that barrier where I can focus on my team and then they focus on the community so that we kind of have a triangle effect. That’s worked well. Leading with value is probably the best thing I’ve ever done.

Joseph: I’ve gone through a bit of a journey myself with this whole community idea. I love the idea of building a community of followers and engaged people who are sharing ideas, and asking questions, and having this community forum. I attempted this myself a few years ago, and I found it very challenging, Julia. I remember when I even explored some plug-ins on my site. I think there are a couple like Memberships Pro, and there’s another one called I think BuddyPress, and like MemberPress on my WordPress site. What did you find to be the most challenging part of building up a community?

Julia: [26:52] I honestly think it was just the amount of time that I spent in there personally. There is a lot of blood, sweat, and tears that goes into it initially to get it working well. Once that was working, I could bring in other team members who felt as strongly about the community, the mission, our core values, and our vision as I did, to take my place so that I could focus on other things. There’s a lot of sweat equity that went into that community. I believe that if you want a solid community like that, you got to be willing to put in that time or pay someone else to put in the time. But if you want to be the face, a face for people to kind of rally around, then it is a lot of time to put in.

Joseph: Helpful to know. It’s become very clear to me why my community didn’t get built up online because I guess those couple things you mentioned is just like another platform. I was on a platform I think called “Rainmaker,” which I don’t know if you’ve heard of it. It was very complicated to use, and I did not have much luck attracting people into that community of users. Also, just the time of just monitoring it and managing it, and I just didn’t have the bandwidth to do it. It sounds like there’s really no replacement for hard work and getting in there every day and engaging with people. That’s a good tip. Okay.

Before I talk about some of the lessons you’ve learned along the way of your career journey, Julia, I can’t let you go without asking you a few questions about websites. Because we do have listeners here who listen to the show, and they’re thinking about making a change. I just read an article in the Wallstreet Journal about record numbers of people leaving the corporate world to run their own businesses, or to work for themselves, or to become their own bosses. Part of that is having your own website.

I remember when I first started my business as a career coach, a lot of other coaches at the time — this was around 2013, I said I didn’t have to have a website which I thought as someone myself who focuses on personal branding, I thought that was poor advice. I feel like if you’re running your own business, you absolutely have to have a website. What would you say to someone who’s thinking about building a website and wrestling with whether they should do it themselves or whether they should hire someone else to do it for them? I ask this as someone myself who has done both.

Julia: [29:29] I would say it comes down to time and budget. If you have the time and you do not have the budget to get someone else to do it — I say budget and that’s very broad. The prices range from $500 to $50 grand. People always ask me, “How much does it cost to build a website?” Well, it depends on the functionality and what you’re trying to get out of it, and then experience level and all that. Time and budget are what it comes down to.

If you don’t have the time and you have budget, then hire it out because it can be super frustrating. I mean the amount of times I do this for a living, and the amount of times that I want to pull my hair out is remarkable. I can only imagine other people trying to build their own website. Regardless of platform, it can be incredibly frustrating. I would just say time and budget really depends.

Joseph: Have you noticed any common pitfalls that people tend to make when they are creating their first website?

Julia: [30:35] Updating, not maintaining the website after it is up and running. Particularly with WordPress. Because WordPress is a free platform which is awesome. It’s opensource, it’s free. Now, I say that lightly because if you want a website on the internet, you do have to rent space on the internet through a hosting provider and you have to have a domain name, www.geekpack.co, for example, that you also pay for. It can be super low cost. But with WordPress, because it is opensource, it’s constantly being updated. There are plugins, there’s themes, there’s core files, there’s PHP. There are so many things that have to be updated.

WordPress gets hacked all the time. It is the most popular website building platform, period. Like 45% of all websites in the world are built with WordPress. It’s only growing. It’s only becoming more and more popular. But because it’s so popular, hackers are constantly trying to put malware into different applications. All of that can be avoided so long as you just do some simple things like updating everything that needs to be updated with the WordPress site: the plugins, the themes, all the core files, a way of having security. Whether that’s with your hosting provider or a free security plugin. My favorite is called “Wordfence.”

Joseph: That’s what I use. Good.

Julia: [32:02] Yes. It’s a good one.

Joseph: It’s the right one. Good.

Julia: [32:05] And having backups regular backups. Again, some hosting providers do those, but there’s also a free plug-in called UpdraftPlus, which does backups. You’re set. Those are the amount of times I would clean up hacked websites was ridiculous. I teach my students how to do that because it’s a lucrative thing to know because it happens so often, but it doesn’t have to. It’s 10 minutes a month sort of job to not have to deal with all the headaches.

Joseph: I can vouch for that, Julia. Because my web guys are constantly trying to remind me that we need to go in and just make sure everything’s updated on my site. I always ask them, “Do we really have to do this on a monthly basis?” They said, “Yeah, you really should.” And then, I don’t listen to them and then something breaks my website, and this is happening repeatedly.

Last question about websites, and I do want to get back to your career and what you’ve learned along the way. You mentioned “website building platforms.” Now, the way I think about this as a layperson is you’ve got these out-of-the-box solutions like Squarespace or Wix. And then, you’ve got I don’t even know what you call it, but you’ve got more of the WordPress platform which is as you mentioned opensource. Probably takes a little bit more work if you don’t have any knowledge of coding or HTML. Do you have any perspectives or opinions on if somebody’s doing their first site whether they should be on something like a Squarespace or Wix, or if they should be on WordPress?

Julia: [33:31] Shy away from Wix. Squarespace is a fantastic platform. It serves a great purpose. It is user-friendly. It’s easy. You pay a certain amount. It is more expensive than WordPress. You pay a certain amount and just drag and drop, and everything is done, and the setup and everything. However, I love WordPress. As I said, the popularity of WordPress is only growing. I do have some gripes with it. It is not user-friendly. I don’t know why they make it so complicated.

I say it’s complicated. If someone who knows WordPress can show you around and explain it, you would have this light bulb moment of, “Oh! I got it. It’s not as hard as I thought,” sort of thing. But they don’t make it all that easy out of the box. People have, “You know I got so many Instagram followers!” If you rely on external platforms for clients, for students, for marketing, for whatever, you could lose that option at any given moment. Facebook can go down, Instagram, like all of those things can shut down.

The example is if you look at Shopify, Squarespace, Wix, Weebly, those are external platforms where technically you own your website, but if you want to take your website and all your files and all your data kind of off of their platform, it is very, very complicated. Moving from one platform to another is time-consuming and complicated, and it’s not easy at all. But with WordPress, you can literally take your website, you can put in a suitcase, and you can walk over to another hosting platform, and you can put it there. You can have all of your website files on your desktop computer. You can have them all on your Google Drive as a backup. You own your data and you have it in a neat little suitcase that you can take anywhere.

Whereas, with the others, you could lose that at any moment. Just like with Facebook and it going down in the world, and the world stopping. That’s just a plug for it. On top of that, it is scalable. On WordPress, you could have a one-page website, or you could have a Fortune 500, billion-dollar company on there using it and it works. You can have eCommerce. You can sell products. Pretty much anything you can imagine. You can do on WordPress. And because the code is opensource, if you know how to code and you know the ins and outs of WordPress, you can customize it. That’s why I love it.

Joseph: Everything you just said, Julia, I wish I would have heard about seven years ago when I went with one of these platforms. I mentioned I was on Rainmaker and getting off that platform was a complete nightmare. It was the bane of my existence for a year, and it was very complicated. I went over to WordPress, and never again. I will always remain with WordPress from here on out. Very useful advice and I can personally vouch for everything you’ve just said. Very helpful.

The last thing I want to talk about with you, Julia, before we wrap up with one of the interesting initiatives you’ve got at GeekPack is just some of the lessons you’ve learned along the way of your very unique career journey, going from the military over to what you’re doing right now at GeekPack. You mentioned that when you were going through that process of applying to jobs, you said something like applying to 200 applications. Looking back on that experience, is there anything that you would have done differently?

Julia: [37:08] I think now it’s a lot more common, especially with COVID, to work remote or to start your own business. I wish that I had given myself a little bit more credit and thought outside the box. I didn’t really know anything different at the time. I don’t think that I could have done much different. I didn’t have a degree. Could I have gone back to school and got a computer science degree? I guess I could have, but I’m so glad I didn’t.

Other than just believing in myself a little bit more, it was just one of those experiences that I needed to go through. That was part of my journey to get to where I am now. To be able to tell that to my students that there is so much more, and they can do so much more than they ever thought. I didn’t think outside the box, so I try to help them think outside the box as much as possible.

Joseph: The other thing that you mentioned earlier was that, when we spoke before, we started recording. You mentioned that you had no idea that you could even run an online business. What surprised you the most about creating and running your own online business that is geographically agnostic and independent?

Julia: [38:27] I think the thing that surprised me the most was that there were actual real human people out there who would take a chance on me and pay me to do a service for them. That blew me away. I did I just didn’t think that would be a thing to know that someone else would say yes to me to do something for them that I’d taught myself to do. I’m still kind of like, “Oh, wow! Yeah, that really happened.”

Joseph: The last thing I want to wrap up with is just one of the very interesting initiatives that you’ve got going on at GeekPack. Can you tell me a little bit more about the “Geek for Geek Initiative”?

Julia: [39:07] This is the thing I’m so excited about. We just recently launched this. What it is I always thought that my dream for GeekPack would be to keep doing what we’re doing. But if I could eventually one day start a non-profit arm to GeekPack, that would just be dream come true. I spoke to a couple of people about setting up a non-profit and come to find out it’s a real pain to set up to run, to manage, all the bureaucracy and everything that goes along with it. I thought, “Oh, well, that’s a shame.” In any way that I could give back, I wanted to do, and I felt kind of deflated.

I was listening to a podcast with Blake Mikowski. I’m not sure if I’m pronouncing his last name correctly. He’s the founder of TOM’s shoes. This is the company where they gave lots of shoes. If you buy a pair of shoes, they give a pair of shoes to children in need. This is a one-for-one model. Now, he didn’t create the one-for-one model, but he definitely popularized it. It became huge.

When I heard this interview with him, I thought to myself, “Well, hang on. Why would I create a non-profit that has all this extra bureaucracy when I’m in the very fortunate position to be able to have my for-profit business and give back in a social entrepreneur way? I don’t have to be governed. It’s my choice because I am able to and because I want to.” I took his idea, ran with it, and went with a program called “Geek for Geek.” It’s a real good example of taking imperfect action. I am a recovering perfectionist, and this is a good example of something that I’ve done.

Of course, I want the Geek for Geek program to be kind of set up exactly right and how it’s going to run forever. But I know that’s not realistic and I’ve learned that over the years. We recently had an event a couple months ago called “Geekapalooza.” We got to launch the Geek for Geek Initiative during this event. As you can tell, there’s a lot of “geeks” that goes into my brand. It’s a great thing to get behind.

I’m based in Colorado, and there’s an international non-profit called “Dress for Success.” They work with women in lower-income kind of situations and financial struggles. Initially, they started a non-profit to provide them with suits and kind of business attire to go in for interviews. They’ve expanded since then, and they support women who need support and help when it comes to finding work, or starting a business, and getting promotions, and things like that. I reached out to them in Denver. I just said, “Hey, you know I’d like to launch this program. Would you be willing to partner?” Sure enough, they said yes!

We got to take 20 women from Dress for Success, we got to invite them into my WordPress development program, teaching them how to build websites and start their own online business. We got to do that back in October. It was just such a joy to get to do that. They’re now learning these skills that they wouldn’t normally get to. We invited them in, free of charge. That’s an initiative that we plan on continuing on.

If I could plug anything, it would be if anyone knows many non-profits that work with women, to empower them, to women who are in tough financial situations that just need a bit of help and a bit of support, I would love to partner with them in the Geek for Geek Initiative.

Joseph: If they want to learn more about you or if we’ve got listeners who want to learn more about GeekPack or the Geek for Geek Initiative, where’s the best place that they can go?

Julia: [43:09] My website, geekpack.co, is the best place to go.

Joseph: I got one more question I’m going to sneak in here, Julia. Because I’m listening to you describe all these cool initiatives that you’ve created, not only creating GeekPack, but also this Geek for Geek initiative, I know earlier you mentioned that you never thought that you were going to become an entrepreneur. I’m just curious, what have you learned about yourself along the way of your very interesting and entrepreneurial journey?

Julia: [43:37] That I am a lot stronger and more resilient than I ever gave myself credit for. Even with the job that I did for the government and in all the things that I did after that. Running a business, and having a team, and having a brand that I’m incredibly proud of the brand and the people I get to work with, and the community that I get to have. As uncomfortable as it is to say, the lives that we get to change. I’m uncomfortable saying it because it feels a little big-headed, and that’s never at all what I want to sound. But that’s what I get to do all the time. I never, years ago, would have thought that I could do that, that I could empower women, but I am a lot stronger and a lot more resilient than I ever gave myself credit.

That’s something I have to remind myself of regularly. It’s very easy to focus on the negative or things that don’t go well. But I do try and reflect and think back and be proud of what I’ve built, and be proud of my team, and the community that we have, and the women that we get to teach and see their wins and the constant, “I just landed my biggest client!” Or “I now make more than I ever did in my day job!” Testimonials like that is because I took a chance on myself, and it’s worked out well.

Joseph: It does sound like you’re having a huge impact on a lot of people out there, Julia. I just got to commend you for all the work that you’re doing. I just wanted to thank you so much for taking time out of your very busy schedule to tell us more about your life as an intelligence officer formerly and the steps you took to pave a new path in your career, and how you went about building a community of engaged women empowered to code and help others create their own websites. Best of luck with GeekPack, and the Geek for Geek Initiative, and the continually growing community that you’ve built.

Julia: [45:41] Thank you very much. It’s been an absolute pleasure.

How much should a company’s culture factor into your decision to work there? A lot it turns out. Civil engineer turned software developer Aimi Elias explains the importance of feeling like you fit into your workplace and the role culture plays in your day-to-day job satisfaction. Afterwards, I’ll share my own thoughts on how culture has had an impact on me during my own professional pivots.

Aimi’s actually a long-time listener of this show, and we first connected when she dropped me a note last year mentioning how Career Relaunch podcast episode 8 (featuring Zai Divecha) got her thinking about her own moments of flow, including those moments when she lost track of time as a teenager tinkering around with code. Now, many years later, she’s tapped back into her own flow state working on software development and machine learning at Sky.

During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I talked about the importance of considering whether your current job is moving you closer to or farther from the type of person you want to be in your life and career. Do you like the person you’re becoming? Or do you feel more like you’re having to put on an act to fit into your role or organisation by being someone you’re not?

If you feel like your work is turning you into someone you don’t like, aside from actually leaving that job behind, consider what change you could make to your way of working, your mindset about work, or your attitude toward your job that could enable you to live your life in a way that makes you proud, or at the very least, you won’t eventually regret in the long run.

Aimi Elias is a software developer at Sky, part of the Comcast Corporation, and one of Europe’s leading media and entertainment companies. Prior to this, she spent six years working as a civil engineer after graduating from Imperial College, when she worked for Transport For London, the government body responsible for most of the transport network in London, England. She worked on railway projects such as the Crossrail and station upgrades for the London Underground.

Then, in 2017, she joined the Get Into Tech programme, a 14 week introduction to software development run by Sky alongside her full time job. This eventually led acceptance into a graduate programme at Sky, where she is a now a backend Python developer for Sky’s e-commerce platform for their online streaming service.

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!

A2 Hosting allows you to offers simple tools and services to help control what people find when they Google you. To clean up, protect, and improve how you look online, visit BrandYourself.com and use promo code ‘RELAUNCH’ to get 50% off a Premium membership.

Teaser (first ~15s): I’ve been a minority all my life in wherever I go. I’m kind of used to it. The difference is when it’s affecting directly how people perceive you in a career sense, all of a sudden, it feels very loud.

Aimi: [02:37] Thanks for having me.

Joseph: I want to talk about a lot of different things with you today. We’re going to talk about your career in civil engineering, and then also your shift to coding in a completely different industry. I was wondering if you could start off by first of all just telling me what’s been keeping you occupied in your life, both work and also personal lately.

Aimi: [02:56] I currently work for Sky as a back-end developer. I work on the e-commerce platform for their online streaming service. We deal with the catalog of products and offers that customers can purchase from wherever they are in different territories. For example, in the UK Island and some European countries, provide content for Sky, and in the US, we provide content by NBCU, that’s NBC Universal. In my spare time, particularly the last two years, I’ve been working on my MSC, part-time. This is an MSC in Computer Science, as I don’t have a background in computer science. I decided to do this to upskill myself. I didn’t know at the time that we would be in the midst of all of this craziness, but it helped that I could spend more time on it at home. I’ve just finished that, and I’m glad that section of life is over and I don’t have to sit any more academic exams. That’s what I’ve been working on mostly.

Joseph: Can you also just tell me a little bit about your background?

Aimi: [04:08] My family are from Malaysia. They came to London I think in 1982. My parents met here as young people like on a course, and they ended up staying here. Myself and my brother were both born in London.

Joseph: Let’s just go back in time a little bit. Because you haven’t always been a software developer. Could you tell me a little bit about your 6-year career in civil engineering, which is what you were doing before? And then, we could move forward from there.

Aimi: [04:37] I graduated in civil engineering at Imperial. It’s the kind of degree where you immediately have a lot of opportunities in terms of jobs. The natural progression seemed to be get a job in civil engineering. I had spent every summer working in a design consultancy, so it didn’t seem like a bad idea considering I had some work experience to try that. However, when I graduated, it was 2010, and jobs was becoming quite scarce. We had the recession at that time. Nothing like what people are experiencing right now I’m sure, but it was still one of those times where it was quite difficult. When I did manage to get a job at Transport for London, I obviously took it because you couldn’t exactly complain.

Joseph: Transport for London is a TFL, I guess. It’s the largest government provider of transportation services in the country.

Aimi: [05:39] That’s right. Transport for London, look after London Underground, the buses, the cycle hire scheme and the cycle superhighways, for example. A lot of roads in London, they cover a lot of bases. I was positioned in London Underground, the London Underground graduate scheme, which was a 3-year graduate scheme. I met people of my own age who had also left university. Having done civil engineering, it was a scheme where I managed to do lots of different things and it was really interesting. I worked on Crossrail, which is a brand new railway line that transports people from east to west London. On London Underground, station upgrades, and I could have talked all day about how cool it was. People thought my job was really cool, but the day-to-day reality of it wasn’t that interesting to me. I just sort of went with it. All the signs were saying, “Oh, you’re doing really well.” People will tell me, “You’re doing really well. Just keep going. It’s fine.” My parents would say, “Oh, you’re doing so…”. You just get all these positive signals that everything’s fine, so you just keep going.

The natural route in engineering is to also get charted. Civil engineers get charted with the Institution of Civil Engineers. I did a lot of work with them you know work towards this professional qualification. When I achieved that qualification, nothing was different. I expected I don’t know work to suddenly become more interesting or stuff to be more challenging, but it didn’t happen.

Joseph: Is that certification a barrier to entry for more senior roles, or is it like a stamp of approval?

Aimi: [07:31] It’s a bit of both. I think for some roles, it can be a barrier to entry. It doesn’t mean that people don’t progress without it. Many experienced engineers do not have this qualification. Sometimes, they take a different route to get there. But there can be jobs that require it as part of their job spec.

Joseph: Okay. You’re working on the Crossrail which was probably, in recent years, has been the most major, publicly impactful project to create, that high-speed rail network to connect people outside of London into London. More convenient station upgrades for TFL. That sounds great and exciting on the surface, but you weren’t feeling super satisfied inside. Can you put into words what exactly did you not like about your day-to-day job?

Aimi: [08:18] It’s kind of a tricky one to describe because it’s not that the work wasn’t interesting, it’s just that it’s such a huge project that you end up doing quite a small play, a small role on that project. I think it was to do with just the way that I like to problem-solve. On a construction project, you tend to have designers and contractors. Designers would look at the calculations for the design, provide the drawings, the specifications. Contractors tend to be doing the on-site work. They’ll be doing different jobs on site. I was neither of these. I was a client because Transport for London TFL are a client organization. They give the contracts out to these different companies, to carry out the work for them. A lot of that was me checking that people had done what they needed to do. I had a great overview and strategic outlook on what was happening but wasn’t getting into a lot of that work.

Joseph: The study is subject in university, and they may or may not have a deep desire to go into the industry but they do anyway because it’s what makes sense after you get that sort of a degree. In this case, civil engineering. Your day-to-day life isn’t quite as you had hoped it would be. Were you thinking at this point in time maybe I’ll switch to a different organization and try to do something else in civil engineering? What was running through your head when you were experiencing this?

Aimi: [09:54] At the time, I was focused on gaining the professional qualification. There was a lot of support within TFL to do that so I stayed there until I achieved that qualification. I left TFL for a design consultancy to be a designer properly. It was still Crossrail, which was interesting. I was in a managerial position. I was managing other designers, and it was great because I got that position from gaining my chartership. But then, I realized it wasn’t that fun either. There was a lot of pressure, the environment wasn’t exactly healthy in some ways. I don’t know how to explain it because I was there for such a short time. What happened in that role is that I got made redundant. It forced my hand to look at something else. However, at that time, I had already been looking into coding. A few months before that redundancy happened, I had joined Sky’s “Get Into Tech” course.

Joseph: Was this just something that you’d always been interested in doing? Or, how did you pick coding in particular?

Aimi: [11:08] When I was a teenager, I used to be tinkering around with personal blogs and changing what my Myspace looked like for hours. Instead of doing my revision, I spent a lot of time messing around with that. At the time, I didn’t know that software development was a career choice. I didn’t have any role models that did this. At school, no one mentioned it. I joined the “Get Into Tech” course because I wanted to reignite that interest that I had years and years ago, just to see what it was like and just to see what people were using these days to code things. I hadn’t really coded anything like a program. It was mostly me messing around with HTML and CSS, which are very like the cosmetic side of changing web pages, and I enjoyed it! I found myself in that zone again, just spending hours and hours trying to solve problems that were set in the class. I did this in my spare time outside of work.

Joseph: At what point did you realize that this could turn into something more?

Aimi: [12:22] Sky wanted to get more women into tech through this course by introducing them to some basic concepts. Usually, their graduate program does not attract as many women. Mostly because not many women are doing computer science. They offered the opportunity to sit the interview for the graduate program at Sky. I sat the program just to see if I would get in, just to see what kind of things people ask at these things, and they offered it to me. I was in a bit of a dilemma because at that point I didn’t know that that redundancy was coming. I had to decide whether I would leave this career I’d spend like six years building, or to try something totally different. It was quite hard.

Joseph: Can you take me back to the moment when you were able to make that decision. How did you come to the level of clarity you needed in order to make the leap?

Aimi: [13:24] It was tough. I spoke to so many different people about it. Obviously, my parents being immigrants in this country. They saw it as risky to try and do something which, in hindsight, it’s not that risky. It’s still not a job that has a career path. It’s not like I was saying I’m going to put down all my tools and start a business I know nothing about. My friends had mixed opinions about it. In the end, I decided not to take it because I just felt like, “Oh, I’ve worked really hard at this.” Maybe again, I thought to myself, “Oh, maybe if I give it more time, it will change.” And then, the redundancy happened. I had to go back and ask Sky if they would take me because after that happened, my parents were like, “Yeah, maybe this is the sign that you need to just try it.”

Joseph: It doesn’t sound so bad after all, right? I’m not sure if now is the right time to bring this up, but if you’re open to going here in this conversation, something we touched on prior to this recording because you mentioned friends and family, and their influence on your thoughts and your decisions about this particular move. If you’re willing to talk about this, I understand you’re also in a relationship around this time. I think that would be interesting to touch on because clearly, our life at work affects our life outside of work and vice versa. Can you tell me a little bit about what was happening for you outside of work, related to this relationship, and how that influenced your decision making here?

Aimi: [14:52] My partner at the time was very supportive of a lot of the things I wanted to do. With this particular decision, he helped me a lot in terms of talking through what the pros and cons were. Whatever decision I made, he was really helpful. However, later on, after I had taken the decision to join Sky and become a software developer, a lot of things changed. We met on the TFL grad scheme. He was also a civil engineer. Obviously, I was moving industries and that was a big part of what we spoke about, our work/life. We spoke about in-depth. That all changed. Leading up to that point, everything was fine. He was helping me make these decisions and didn’t hold me back in that respect. It was after that that everything changed.

Joseph: Was there anything in particular that changed with the relationship itself after you actually made your career change?

Aimi: [16:01] The relationship in its dynamic changed a lot in the lead-up to that huge life change. There were a lot of different behaviors that were coming up in the relationship. It became a lot more toxic. There were certain elements of my relationship that I started to become unhappy with. I would say I don’t think he was aware of it at the time that these things were happening and what that would have meant for our relationship, or even that he would have admitted at that time. It was to do with the career change. But I feel like a lot of these things probably came from not feeling in control of how things were moving.

Joseph: It sounds like things were going fine with the relationship. And then, you, yourself, evolved away from what had been the status quo, professionally. It sounds like that in some way triggered a change in the dynamic of the relationship. Do you have any sense of why that happened? Why the career move ended up creating this paradigm shift in the relationship itself?

Aimi: [17:20] I guess when you change careers like that, it becomes kind of your identity in a way. I don’t know if other people have felt this. But when I changed careers, I didn’t realize how much of my identity was tied to my career. Until I moved and realized that, for example, all the social currency you have when being an organization like this connections, people not knowing who you are, people not already having some idea of whether you’re competent or not. All of that changes. You end up feeling like you’ve really started all over again, and maybe it was me wanting to spend a lot more time with the new people I’d met. It could be suddenly all the things I was talking about were very different. A lot of things become a different focus that are totally new. I think it’s maybe that lack of familiarity, or not being able to empathize with the fact that all of this is a bit scary, and all I’m doing is trying to make sense of this new situation I find myself in.

Joseph: I’ve had a very similar experience where I go from one chapter of my career to the next. It’s like the people from the previous chapter, sometimes they come along for the ride. But, especially with acquaintances or colleagues outside of your immediate team, a lot of those relationships can kind of fizzle out.

Aimi: [18:51] I would say that some of my friends continued with me for the ride, as you say. I guess the ones that were the closest. But it wasn’t because of the job itself that I’d lost people along the way. It was more to do with how that breakup happened, and what I perceived to be a strong friendship or not based on the stuff I would talk about around the relationship. There are some people who were more understanding when I explained the situation and some people who didn’t have the same tools to respond. That ended up being a separator in this instance.

Joseph: I wanted to shift gears here a little bit with some of the lessons you’ve learned along the way. You go from moving through this 14-week introduction program, this “Get Into Tech” program at Sky, into software development. Can you describe what your experience has been, like going from civil engineering into a very different function and role within a very different industry?

Aimi: [20:03] The perception of software development is that it would have been just as bad as engineering in terms of diversity. But, I found that people are more diverse in their personalities than they were in engineering. It’s a tough one to describe, but even though the field is still male-dominated, not as many people of color, the personalities you get are very different. It kind of fits better with me, I guess, in the engineering world.

I remember a conversation I had with a friend of mine who was also on the scheme at the time. I was like anxious about not appearing White enough, or like having to put on this persona, which was White. At that time, I couldn’t explain what those things were. When I tried to, they just sounded like normal things. Like certain ways of communicating or being opinionated because there are things that sound like they’re just traits that you need. But, it’s a certain way of communicating that’s expected of you, that I had to emulate a lot of the time, which wasn’t in my natural personality.

Joseph: I do think that you’re bringing up something that does come up a lot. Whether it’s explicit or implicit, there’s this cultural fit with your organization. Sometimes, when people talk about cultural fit, they’re talking about the dynamics of the company whether it’s fast-moving, or entrepreneurial, or if the people are friendly or it’s competitive. There’s another element to it which is actually more related to ethnicity or it’s maybe more related to geography. There could be some mismatches there with the culture.

Aimi: [21:50] With ethnicity, I found that I noticed this more as I moved to Sky. The young men who came from an ethnic minority background, I could see them struggling more having conversations with people. And then, I looked back at where I was in engineering and did notice some things as well. But, it’s never spoken about. I felt for them because it’s not an easy one to navigate. At the time, you don’t even know how to describe that feeling where you’re not quite fitting in, culturally, but there’s nothing going wrong necessarily.

Joseph: I actually I used to work in the Bay Area, in California, where there’s quite a few Asians. I’m Taiwanese myself, and I never really thought very much about cultural fit. I’ve felt like I generally fit into the overall environment at work. There’s a lot of ethnic and cultural diversity at work. And then, I remember moving to London, and at both of the companies where I worked, I was a minority in so many different ways. I think when you’re one of, in my case, three Asians along with a handful of other minorities in a company of 180 employees, it’s hard not to feel a little bit like an outlier. It’s hard for that not to affect your overall experience at the company. It’s kind of hard to put that into words, sometimes, both for yourself and also for others.

Aimi: [23:17] I’ve been a minority all my life wherever I go. I’m kind of used to it. The difference is when it’s affecting directly in how people perceive you in a career sense, all of a sudden, it feels very loud. For example, I used to go to an Islamic school. I would be the only Southeast Asian person in my year, and maybe one of three or four other students, which were from the Southeast Asian background. When everyone else was Middle Eastern, you kind of don’t realize how much of a deal it is until you sort of leave and you go. That was a bit weird. There was a lot of things that you couldn’t be, you couldn’t share about yourself. People would talk about how their families are.

But, in the wider context of London, you’re like, “Oh, I’m with people who are kind of like me, that’s fine.” Then when I met engineering again, like White-dominated. But then, you’re on a university course, you don’t notice. You just need to carry on doing what you’re doing, like other people’s interactions with you don’t affect your grade. But then, all of a sudden, you’re in a job. All of a sudden, what people think of you matters a lot.

Joseph: The last thing I was hoping to talk with you about with what you’re doing right now because I understand there’s another role shift that’s coming up for you. When we spoke before. Aimi, you mentioned that you did everything you were supposed to do coming out of civil engineering. But, you still ended up in a career path that wasn’t right for you. What exactly did you mean by that?

Aimi: [25:03] The process of doing that job didn’t necessarily fit my natural personality. I felt like I was shifting my personality a lot in order to fit either the type of role or the people I was working with. Software, on the other hand, it has a lot of similarities. But, the cool thing about software is that you can design it, and build it, and see it happen. It’s a lot of problem-solving which I find enjoyable. The kind of problem-solving that happens on big engineering projects depends a lot on your experience and what you’ve seen before. I entered engineering having never had any real experience of being on-site.

As a young person, I think a lot of people get into engineering after messing around with a car or being on-site with a friend or a family member. They have these little experiences which exposes them to what it’s actually like, and I didn’t have that. I totally went into it on a theoretical basis trying to use what I knew to help people but it just didn’t suit me. I had to become this person that civil engineering needed to be. Whereas, I’m an actual problem solver and just software suited me better. It’s also the kind of people that software draws to it that I seem to get along with a lot better. It just seemed like a more natural fit as soon as I joined it.

Joseph: If you had to give some advice to your younger civil engineering self, as it relates to thinking about your career or changing careers, what might that be?

Aimi: [26:57] It would be to unlearn those things that you get taught as a young person, to always listen to what everyone else says. I think I should have listened to my instinct when I was messing around with web pages for hours and hours, and to have followed that. I think a lot of young people tend to have something they’re interested in, but there isn’t anyone to notice that that is something that they can turn into something else. Whether it’s a career or a very important hobby of theirs. Something that they can take forward and do more earnestly in some way, in some creative way or some productive way.

I should have listened to my instinct when I joined my civil engineering course because I definitely felt like it wasn’t for me. But, my dad kept telling me, “No, it’s fine. You’re doing really well.” I don’t think my younger self would have listened to my advice either because my dad would have been on the other side going, “No, no, no, just stay where you are.” I think that comes out of being from an immigrant family who just wants the best for their kids and to just persevere with opportunities that have been presented to them. Not realizing that other opportunities may also turn up as well.

Joseph: Absolutely. I think that that does come up a lot with immigrant families. As someone, myself, who grew up in the United States after my parents immigrated there, primarily for me and my sister, I think that there is always this desire to make their immigration and them transplanting themselves across the world worth it. Last question, having been through this career change, what’s one thing you’ve learned about yourself?

Aimi: [28:47] One of the things I have noticed is that the tasks or jobs I enjoy the most tend to be things that help other people out. I used to do volunteer work, looked at international development and stuff when I was at university. I got passionate about that. Now that you mention it, the projects I enjoy the most in my software career are the ones where I’m helping people do their job a lot better. I get that buzz from someone using something, and it’s made their life a lot easier.

Joseph: I think that’s a nice compass to keep in mind for the rest of your career as you look forward and think about what you want to do next. I understand you’re about to make another shift within Sky. Can you tell me a little bit more about your new role there?

Aimi: [29:41] I did my MSc in Computer Science, and my dissertation was around machine learning. I tried to combine my previous experience with the new things I had learned. I applied machine learning to construction data. Whilst I was doing that, I thought more about where I’d like to go next. Within Sky, we have a team that creates a platform for data scientists to run their machine learning models. This year, I started talking to that team, and then was successful in selection to join them. I’m joining that team in a week’s time, and it’s really exciting! It’s not a bigger pivot as what I had done from civil engineering to software, but it’s certainly a pivot in terms of what I do now to what they’ll be doing in that team.

Beyond the humanitarian crisis resulting from the Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the war there has also taken a huge toll on Ukrainians’ careers and professional lives. In Career Relaunch® podcast episode 82, Roman Havrysh, owner of the Aimbulance marketing agency in Ukraine and lecturer at Kyiv Mohyla Business School, fled Kyiv after the war began. He describes his story of trying to remain afloat both personally and professionally amid the destruction and tragedy there. We’ll talk about what’s happened to his agency, team, and own perspectives on his professional future there. I’ll also share my thoughts on resilience during times of crisis.

The millions of Ukrainians who have had to flee and leave their lives and careers behind due to this unprovoked attack on their country are really not all that different from me or those around me in the UK just trying to live their lives, make their professional contribution to society, and give their kids a happy childhood.

Please do your part in providing assistance to these displaced families by making a donation today on my fundraising page at https://careerrelaunch.net/ukraine. As of this recording, we’ve already raised over £3000, which includes my own contribution of £1400. Any amount, no matter how big or small, can make a huge difference to the lives of Ukrainians.

During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I talked about figuring out what battle you’re fighting right now. For those in Ukraine, this may be finding shelter, staying alive, and/or keeping your business afloat during an actual war. For someone else out there, it may be more of a battle you’re having with your manager, your organisation, or the environment around you. And for others, it may be more of a figurative battle you’re having with yourself–your own history, your own demons, or your own limiting beliefs.

Whatever battle you’re waging right now, ask yourself whether it’s worth it to keep going. Whether the eventual payoff is worth it. And if you do belive it is, to not feel like you have to figure it all out today or even this month, but instead to take a small action today, and another one tomorrow, and another one the next day, knowing and trusting that you WILL gain some momentum, however slow or fast, to eventually get where you want to go.

Roman Havrysh is a Ukrainian entrepreneur and the owner of the Aimbulance marketing agency. He was born in a small village near Ivano-Frankivsk, a city in the West of Ukraine. His first major life-changing experience occurred during the collapse of the Soviet Union back in 1991 at the age of 11. When the Soviet planned economy changed gears to a free economy, many people lost their jobs, including both of Roman’s parents. So he started working in the fields, growing vegetables and crops, to help feed his family.

Then, his family spent all their savings (the equivalent of $500 US dollars) to send him to study in one of the oldest universities in Eastern Europe – the National University Kyiv Mohyla Academy, where he studied political science. To earn money, he started working during his second year there as a political analyst on the side. He eventually got his Bachelor’s degree, enrolled in a magister’s program, got married, and was expecting his first child. So he quit his university and political analyst’s position to find a better-paid job.

In 2004, he eventually became one of the first digital marketing experts in Ukraine working for the mobile service provider UMC, and later, the eventual media holding company owners invited him to become CEO and minor shareholder of Brainberry, the digital media buying house within the holding. Four years later, he created Aimbulance, an strategic marketing agency focused on marketing research, design, implementation, and media buying. Before the war broke out in Ukraine last month, Aimbulance was a leading, award-winning agency in Ukraine known for their strategic approach to solving clients’ problems.

Now, with the war in Ukraine, their business is at risk of closure because most of their Ukrainian clients have had to cancel all the projects. Roman and his agency are trying to reinvent themselves and become a truly international marketing agency seeking clients worldwide. If you’re interested in discussing a marketing project with them, you can contact Aimbulance or write to Roman at [email protected], +380671268777, or PM him on LinkedIn.

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!

A2 Hosting allows you to offers simple tools and services to help control what people find when they Google you. To clean up, protect, and improve how you look online, visit BrandYourself.com and use promo code ‘RELAUNCH’ to get 50% off a Premium membership.

Teaser (first ~15s): Leaving Kyiv was the hardest part. You were faced with all this terror and people fleeing and screaming and crying, and that was really not the best place to be. We don’t know what’s going to happen in the next 24 hours.

Joseph: Before we start, I should just make it clear that this is a show focused on career topics. This is not a world affair show. I am not a news reporter, and I don’t typically get into geopolitical topics here. But, today is going to be a little different from my other episodes. We’re recording this on March 22nd. Almost exactly a month after the Russian invasion of Ukraine which is now being called the fastest-growing humanitarian crisis since World War II, according to the UN. This show is focused on career changes. We are going to talk about how this war has affected your career, team, and marketing agency. I got to first ask you about your personal situation. Can you start by describing, first of all, exactly where you are right now in Ukraine?

Roman: [06:58] I’m in the west of Ukraine. I’m pretty safe, if you can call it that way because you are hearing the air raid alarms like two, three times a day. That’s kind of not very pleasant things to hear during the day. Usually, it’s okay. No bombings so far, just two, let’s say. Not “no bombings,” just two of them got here. Two of the rockets got here and hit the airport, but the rest of the city is pretty safe and pretty okay. I hope everything is fine.

Joseph: Just so I understand, where you are, geographically, you left Kyiv. Which city are you in right now?

Roman: [07:41] It’s Slovyansk City. It’s a different city. I fled the Kyiv. I left Kyiv like almost three weeks ago. I’m here in a different place because Kyiv is a way more dangerous now than Slovyansk.

Joseph: Can you describe what was happening in Kyiv before you left? What was happening around there at the time?

Roman: [08:02] We just woke up with the sound of air-raid alarm, and bombings, and shellings, and gun shootings. We immediately took off and gather all the, not all the belongings, some of them. Just small suitcases, jumped into the car, and rushed here. That was what’s happening.

Joseph: How far are you away from your actual home right now?

Roman: [08:28] Seven hundred kilometers away.

Joseph: Wow. I was reading some figures in the news and the exact figures vary depending on the source. But, it seems like there have been hundreds of residential buildings, schools, hospitals that have been directly damaged or attacked since this invasion began. How secure is the area where you are? At least, at this moment.

Roman: [08:54] At least, at this moment, it’s okay. Because, as I mentioned, only the airport was hit during let’s say last two or three weeks. The rest of the city is pretty okay because it’s in the west, and we are close to Polish border. They probably are afraid of bombing it too hard, not to invoke any geopolitical crisis on involve NATO. That’s basically it. But, the east of Ukraine is really torn into pieces, especially three or two major cities, Mariupol and Kharkiv, are almost destroyed. Mariupol is almost destroyed.

Joseph: As of this week, according to the UNHCR, which is the United Nations Refugee Agency, with all this destruction that’s been happening, a quarter of Ukrainians have now been displaced from their homes which is about 10 million people. Of the over 3 million people who have had to leave Ukraine, 90% of those are women and children. And, according to UNICEF, you’ve got nearly 5 million children who have either become refugees or have been displaced within Ukraine. Would you mind just explaining what your personal situation is, and your family’s situation?

Roman: [10:11] I left with my children, my two daughters. I’m now here with them at my father’s place. They are with their grandpa, and it’s okay for them. It’s just a family reunion because I’m originally from this city. That is kind of a bit of more comfort than most of the Ukrainians because they left homes, and I’m with my father, and my daughters are with their grandfather, so they are kind of okay about it.

Joseph: Can I just also ask how old are your daughters, and how are they coping with it?

Roman: [10:48] 16 and 18 years old.

Joseph: I guess kids are resilient, right?

Roman: [10:54] Well, they’re teenage girls. They are a bit emotional about all this, and that’s not very good thing.

Joseph: Before we go back in time, Roman, and talk about your life before this war broke out, is there anything else you want to say about the current situation there before we start talking about your career?

Roman: [11:16] Well, I don’t know. I’m hearing some strange noises now, and I presume it’s just our airborne forces trying to maintain the sky clear for now.

Joseph: Thank you so much for telling us about what’s going on around you right now. I’m going to attempt to switch gears here. I know that this might be a little difficult, but you haven’t always been in the middle of what’s unfortunately become a war zone. There’s going to be kind of a strange shift to do at this moment because there’s literally fighting going on in your country. But, can you just take me back to the days before this war started? Let’s just maybe talk about where you were situated for someone who’s never been to Kyiv before this invasion. Can you just paint a picture of what the capital city was like as a professional there?

Roman: [12:11] It’s a major city with 3 million people living there and working there. A lot of different businesses, very vibrant city, a lot of festivals, music festivals, churches, museums. It’s a very vibrant, very alive city. Not like today, like now. I came there like 22 years ago to study. From that time, I lived there and had my career built there. Also switched the career a few times. If you’re about switching careers, it also happens to be. But still, in Kyiv was like the most interesting in terms of business and career-building place to be in Ukraine. Very vibrant, very dynamic, very business oriented as well.

Joseph: You mentioned career changes there. Could you give me a quick overview of your career journey? I understand that you’re currently working in marketing, but you’ve also spent some time lecturing at a business school before starting your current agency. Could just walk me through a little bit just your career history?

Roman: [13:24] I have a degree in political science. I started my career as a political analyst. I was working as a political analyst for two and a half years. And then, I switched because the payment was not sufficient enough to sustain my new family. Because early in my career I got married and I had almost immediately two kids. That was a harsh thing to do because I’m originally from a poor family and I needed let’s say a good work to sustain and to provide for my family. That’s basically why I needed to change my career. I switched from political analysis to marketing. Marketing during that time, and probably now, is better paid off. I switched to marketing, and I started working in the mobile operator as a digital marketing specialist back in 2003. It was like early in the digital marketing age. I was among the first who entered this domain and started to build some career in digital marketing.

Joseph: How did you get involved with the business school there in Kyiv?

Roman: [14:43] This business school is connected with my alma mater, National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. I had close ties over the dean office there. I just came there and said, “You have your marketing courses, but you don’t have digital there. I’m one of the first in Ukraine who’s proficient with digital marketing and expert in this. I can share some knowledge. If you are interested, take me as your lecturer.” They agreed because they needed this kind of field of expertise to be covered and they hired me as a lecturer. Since then, with already 13 years, I’m a lecturer at the business school.

Joseph: Wow. You’re doing that while you’re also running your agency, “Aimbulance.” Is that correct? Can you tell me a little bit about what prompted you to found your own agency? Also, a little bit about Aimbulance.

Roman: [15:43] As I started my job as a digital marketing expert, I quickly got one of the best in digital because no one was there at the moment, so I became noticed by other companies, agencies. One of the owners of digital marketing agency, invited me to become the head of the agency and to run digital agencies. That was my first major career shift or second major career shift. From just a management role, I switched to the senior management role and became also a minor shareholder of the agency. That agency called “Brainberry.” We did digital marketing strategies, and media buying, and media planning for digital. That was my second shift.

And then, I wanted to develop this into more sophisticated ways of helping our clients because we noticed that the digital marketing, you have limited capacity in helping businesses. My internal motto is to help people as much as I can, I tried to think of strategy of strategic marketing of creative work. My partners there in the previous agency didn’t want to expand their field of expertise, and I had to leave with my colleagues. We parted from the previous agency, created our own agency, Aimbulance. There, we started to focus more on strategic marketing efforts, and started to do research, qualitative quantitative research, to do analytics to help out businesses in wider range of services and expertise.

Joseph: Let’s just kind of go back to late 2021. What were you focused on in your career and at Aimbulance at the time? It might seem like a lifetime ago now. But, what was happening at that moment for you?

Roman: [17:50] We were focused on changing a bit business processes within the agency because I bought the shares from my previous partners. Now, I’m the only owner of the agency and we needed to restructure a bit and change the business process and/or business model even. That was what we were preoccupied with, changing gears, business-wise. Also, with building our clientele, our client base, and expand. We are now number fifth in Ukraine, according to the advertiser’s choice ranking. We wanted to be third or second, so that was our strategy in the coming years.

Joseph: It sounds like what anybody in any top agency would be trying. You’re working with your clients, you’re thinking about the optimal organizational strategy for your agency, making a difference out there. That’s a glimpse into how things used to be. I’d like to kind of transition now and talk a little bit about the invasion of Ukraine which began almost exactly a month ago as of the time of this recording. Can you take me back to the moment when the invasion began? Where were you? Who were you with? What were you doing at the time?

Roman: [19:14] I was alone at my apartment. I woke up from the bomb shelling and the air raid alarms. I just called my girlfriend and asked, “Well, it’s war. We should leave.” Everybody knew what’s going on. We started packing our belongings and rushed to the car and then moved. While we were trying to leave the city, there were major traffic jams, you couldn’t just leave immediately. It took us four hours just leaving a city. During the traffic jams, you were sitting in the car and hearing shellings around you and gun fighting, and that was the kind of disaster. You see all the people fleeing from the city. Someone on the foot, someone on the car, someone on a bike. Basically, any means possible they were using just to leave the city. It was really some kind of experience. I would say it was really terrifying.

Joseph: Out of curiosity, did you think about staying? Or, was it just like how did you make the decision to leave everything behind and just go what sounds like that day?

Roman: [20:38] I’ve made my plans before because I knew that something was cooking up. I just prepared for this. I had plans in my head, so “what if,” let’s say. What if they attack only Donbas area only, on the Eastern Ukraine? What if they attack also Southern Ukraine? What if they attack Kyiv? I immediately decided because we had already the experience from Donbas that it might take a month. But still, the first few days are the most ugly, and that you better leave immediately. That’s what we did.

Joseph: Now, I also want to talk a little bit about your company, your team, and also you, and how you’ve been affected. But, it’s probably worth taking those one at a time here. What happened with your agency? I think you and I first connected because I saw a post from one of your colleagues who, if I understand it correctly, he’s left the country. He’s now in Romania with his family and daughters. What’s happened with the company itself?

Roman: [21:44] We lost like 70% of our business already, of our clients and turnover. Most of our clients were Ukrainian companies. We also like freeze for two weeks. We couldn’t do anything because people were fleeing, they were relocating, were trying to find a safe spot for their families and for themselves. Basically, someone ended up in Poland, someone ended up in Romania, someone in Czech Republic, someone left in Kyiv, someone is here in Ivano-Frankivsk in Lviv. We are now in different places, different cities, and going back now to let’s say new normal. We are trying to reconnect. We’re trying to get our agency up and running with these digital tools, with a remote working approach, and that is kind of working okay. When I felt that we are now okay and we can proceed working, I started to look for prospects for new clients because we need now new clients in order to sustain ourselves.

Joseph: Your team, are they just in different parts of the country at this point, or even outside of the country? Nobody is where you are right now?

Roman: [23:12] Well, a few of them are but the rest of the team, so — Oh! Here is the air raid alarm. You’re probably hearing it.

Joseph: What’s running through your head when you hear that?

Roman: [23:25] I don’t know. Just the heartbeat is just going up. You are like, “Oh! Is it going to be safe or not?” You can’t know for sure each time. Most of the times, it’s okay, but sometimes, you hear bombing and you’re like, “Wow!”

Joseph: I’m sitting here, it’s just kind of crazy that we’re talking right now. Don’t know how you’re able to I guess keep your composure with so much happening around you right now.

Roman: [[23:57] I’m already used a bit to it, honestly. You get tired of being frightened all the time. You don’t have that amount of fear anymore.

Joseph: I’m going to try to stay on track with the interview here and talk a little bit about you. I know that there’s been so much of an impact on so many people in so many different ways, both personally, professionally. This is a career podcast so I’m going to try to focus on that. How has your career been affected? Do you think, by what’s happening here, I know that might sound like a narrow question, but I am very curious to hear. There’s this whole professional side of people’s lives. They’ve invested years in education and training and developing skills. Now, I don’t know exactly where you’re sitting, but your teams scattered, the fate of your company is unknown. How do you think your career is being affected by everything that’s happening right now?

Roman: [24:56] I don’t have a clue, honestly. You don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t know even if I’m going to be alive in the next 24 hours, honestly. You don’t know what to expect. But, from the other point of view, from the other perspective, I’m not trying to push our company beyond our Ukrainian borders. It might and even better for example. If we succeed, we might become international. Way more than we were before. It might really help us in a strange way. When I’m saying this and like, “Do you hear yourself? What are you saying just right now? That it might be even better for you?” But, honestly, that’s one of the scenarios. It might be really better. From my lifetime experience, I would say that a few times I had those disasters in my life. I was born in 1980, that was still Soviet Union; and then, in 1990, it collapsed. We had crazy times back then. It was just a completely different story.

Also, that was a time where people strive or you lose your track, and you don’t know what to do, and you become poor, and you almost die of hunger or something. It’s a very interesting time to grab yourself, to pull yourself together, and to decide what you want to do, how you want to survive, how you want to plan your future, and how you are going to fight for your life, for your career, for your path. That motivates you because you need to do something. You just literally need to do something in order to survive because I need money to feed my family. That’s why I should work, and I need work right now. I am pretty confident at what I am doing. I had a lot of expertise in marketing. I am really skillful, you can check my LinkedIn profile about skills, et cetera. I’m kind of very good at this, and that might help me push out of the comfort zone. That might sound funny because what’s the more ultimate push out of comfort zone than war? You couldn’t even imagine.

Joseph: I hear what you’re saying it can kind of almost feel awkward to even use the word “opportunity” in the same sentence. As something tragic that’s happening, and I think a lot of us felt this during the pandemic. Clearly, you and millions of other people are now facing that in Ukraine. I suppose there is to some extent, I mean all you can do sometimes is to try to just pivot and find a way to make it work as you can.

Roman: [27:54] You don’t have any chances. You’re going to just lose your company, or you want to just lose your career, or you’re going to do something about it. That post on LinkedIn is just the way that I’m trying to cope with this situation. I tried just to fight for my career, to fight for my company, fight for my employees, to find another opportunity, and it seems like it’s working. I am now talking to you. Who would imagine that we will be talking back two days ago?

Joseph: Two days ago.

Roman: [28:32] Not a chance.

Joseph: Who would have guessed that? In some strange way I suppose, work does have a way of providing some normalcy in times where everything else seems uncertain and up in the air, and chaos around you.

Roman: [28:47] Exactly. That’s when you start working — because I had like two weeks where I could pull myself together and that was kind of disaster. Then, we came here, in one of Frankiewicz, and we started volunteering in this initiative, “Save Ukraine Now.” If you would like to type it in Google, you will find our initiative where we trying to get donations and to buy some provisions, some medicines, some even helmets and ballistic vests for our soldiers. Basically, we try to help anyhow, and we started working and everything got better. And then, we returned to our normal, let’s say, new normal way of working. We started reaching out to clients, starting to negotiate with them, and it got better and better. The more you are preoccupied with something significant in your life, the more it’s kind of not that harsh for you to be in those circumstances.

Joseph: Roman, I don’t want to take up too much more of your time. I was hoping we could cover a couple other topics here before we wrap up with what you’re hoping for your agency. The last thing I was hoping to talk with you about before we finish up by talking about some of your efforts with your agency right now, is just related to your perspectives on life and also your work at this moment. I’ve heard all sorts of stories on the news related to unthinkable challenges that people are dealing with right now. Not having running water, not having electricity, running out of food. I mean, literally, bodies in the streets there. What’s been the hardest part of this for you?

Roman: [30:35] Leaving Kyiv was the hardest part because you were faced with all this terror and people fleeing, and screaming, and crying, and that was not the best place to be. But, now, it’s okay because here, in Western Ukraine, you just don’t feel it that much and everything is quite okay here. You have here water, internet, food, everything. We are quite okay here for now because we don’t know what’s going to happen in the next 24 hours. For now, it’s okay and it’s just as it was before, we are working. Just before our call, I had a call with our client from Paris. We talked about their strategies. It was kind of okay. Sometimes, you forget you are at war when you’re working.

Joseph: This is a question I ask guests toward the end of this conversation, and I wasn’t sure whether I should ask it of you, but I do think it’s still applicable here. As you think about where you’ve been in your career and what’s happening around you right now, I get that you’re in a slightly safer area, but at the same time, your country is still at war right now. What’s something that you’ve learned about yourself just over the past month since this has happened?

Roman: [32:02] Well, that I’m tougher than I expected, that I really can pull myself together and make good decisions. As leaving Kyiv, for example, timely and trying to reach out for international public, for international companies, to get clients and to keep sanity as well because it’s really kind of crazy times. I’m kind of okay, I really know what I’m doing, I’m capable of working properly. Basically, that’s what I learned from this situation, that I’m really tougher than I thought I am.

Joseph: Is there something you would like people out there listening to this to know about what’s happening to professionals like you there in Ukraine right now?

Roman: [32:52] We just need a chance. We need a chance. We need your help as well. When I did this post on LinkedIn, one American client said, “Okay. Just write me a bill for one hour of your consultation, and I’ll have it later on after war.” I couldn’t do it. Because I was like, “No. I want a real consultancy. I want a real job, not just a donation.” We really need a real job. We can do it. We are experienced. We know what we’re doing. We can help you. Just give us a chance because we need it now.

Well, in some parts, we need donations like those people that are under the shellings in the bomb shelters, they need donations. But people here, businesses and professionals, they just need a chance to prove themselves. That’s it and they will prove it because our people really can fight as you can see, and we can do it. We can deliver. Just give us a chance.

Joseph: I want to wrap up with what you are hoping to do right now. I know you’re trying to keep your agency going. Not only surviving but also thriving, if possible. Is there anything you would like to mention to anyone listening to this if they want to lend a hand or if they are interested in potentially working with you?

Roman: [34:17] Go ahead. Just Google, “Aimbulance.” If you find what we’re doing suits your needs, please do not hesitate to contact us. We will do our best to help you with our services and our experience.

Joseph: Thank you so much, Roman.