Career Relaunch®

One of the hardest hit industries during the Covid-19 pandemic has been the airline industry. With global travel drastically reduced, many in the airline industry have had to make some tough choices about their careers. In this episode of Career Relaunch, flight attendant turned coder Christine Snow shares her story of stepping away from her 7-year career as a flight attendant to pursue other interests.

We discuss how you can tell whether now is the right time to make a change in your career and also talk through some common hurdles, both emotional and practical, that stand in the way of starting something new. Afterwards, I address a listener question about the other parts of your life you may want to reevaluate when you’re rethinking your career.

During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I talked about the importance of taking steps to create the path you want for your career and life. If you’re reevaluating what’s next for you in your career, think about the exact type of person you want to be. Take stock of how you’re spending your days, what actions you’re taking, where you’re directing your energy, and the people you are or are NOT prioritising. Then, ask yourself whether you’re behaving in a way that’s consistent with the person you want to be.

If you’re not, find a way to change how you’re running things in your life or how you’re reacting to things in your life. Maybe it’s a habit or a work pattern you’ve fallen into that you know deep down isn’t sending you in the right direction or serving what’s really important to you in your life. Take the initiative to do something about it.

Make that change. Do it now . . .before you become the kind of person you don’t admire when you look yourself in the mirror. Even if it’s small change, making that change is the first step toward becoming the kinda person you wanna be and the kinda person you can feel proud of.

Christine Snow spent 7 years as a flight attendant, but her career trajectory completely changed when the pandemic hit in early 2020. While she was at home on a 6 month leave from flying last summer, she started learning how to code, and it hooked her interest and creativity. She eventually applied for and was accepted into Zip Code, a competitive 12 week software development bootcamp in Wilmington, Delaware.

Having graduated right before we recorded our conversation, she had just begun her job search and interview process with nothing guaranteed, but she told me that learning this new skill has given her the confidence and hope to start a brand new career for herself in the tech industry, and that she couldn’t be more excited.

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): The pandemic forced my hand a little bit. It made me look at my career and say, ‘Look, you’ve desired something different for a while, but you haven’t done it. You haven’t had the push to do it yet, and here’s your push.’

Joseph: Hello, Christine. Thank you so much for joining me today on Career Relaunch. You are actually the very first guest I’ve had on the show in a while, since the pandemic hit last year. I really appreciate your time today.

Christine: Thanks for having me.

Joseph: Can you start by giving me a glimpse into what you have been focused on recently in your career and your life?

Christine: I spent about the last eight years as a flight attendant in the US. Clearly, I was in the industry that was very heavily affected when the pandemic really hit last spring. I think in the US was when we first really noticed it in March. I spent most of the next six months at home in my apartment just rethinking my whole career and what this meant for the rest of my life. Did I want to try and stay in this career, if I was even able to industry-wise?

During that time, I discovered this deep interest in tech and coding. You are catching me after I just completed this three-month coding bootcamp in Wilmington, Delaware, to become a Java developer.

Joseph: Congratulations, first of all, on that. I know that things have actually evolved quite a bit since we’ve first connected last month. I want to get into your current situation in more detail when we get to the latter part of our conversation today.

I know you mentioned that you haven’t always been a coder, and I would like to start by going back in time and want to talk about your time as a flight attendant. This is something that you did for seven years at the start of your career, and I’d love for you to just start by telling us how you got into that industry.

Christine: I was in college in Atlanta, Georgia. I was graduating with my bachelor’s degree in English with a focus in Victorian-era poetry actually at the time. I was only 21. I didn’t know what I wanted to do at all. I’ve never been one of those people who is clear on what I wanted for the rest of my life. I thought at the time I really love analyzing poetry and any kind of literature, so may I’ll just go on and get my master’s in that.

At the time, a friend of a friend, who was a flight attendant heard that I was graduating, and she told me, ‘Christine, you know, my company’s hiring. I could refer you.’ At the time, I was like, ‘Sure, why not? I might as well if they will hire me. I might as well put off more college for a degree I’m not even sure that I want to go have fun.’ That’s actually how I first got into it. Luckily, I was hired at the time, and I spent the next seven years flying.

Joseph: Can you tell me a little bit about which carrier you worked for and what the nature of your role was? What exactly did you do on a day-to-day basis?

Christine: I worked for Delta Airlines. When I was first hired, I was sent to the New York City base, and I spent most of the next seven years as a New York City base flight attendant. It was quite a big change in my life. Anyone who goes into the airline industry gets a big change schedule-wise. You are constantly traveling, especially when you’re new. You’re working a lot of back-to-back trips, so you’re not home very much.

If you are excited to travel and meet new people, and you don’t need to be home every single night, it is the perfect job. It definitely was that for me for a while.

Joseph: I guess all of us have cross paths if you’ve ever flown with a flight attendant, and that’s going to be your primary point of contact on a flight. It’s one of those vocations I’ve always found to be very fascinating. I’d love to hear a little bit about the good, bad, and ugly about being a flight attendant to kind of demystify the industry a bit. This is a question I’ve always wanted to ask a flight attendant but just never had the opportunity to do that.

First of all, can you explain a little bit about what it takes to become a flight attendant? What’s involved with training?

Christine: In the US, when you get hired to work for a major carrier, like Delta, they put you through about seven weeks of training, wherever their base headquarters are. This involves emergency training, mechanical emergency training on different aircraft types, and training you how to evacuate a plane in under a certain amount of time, all the different doors for all the different types of aircraft in the fleet. You have to be certified on those and how you would operate them both normally and in an emergency. You undergo a lot of training as well for medical emergencies.

As everyone knows, anything can happen at any time. The only difference in flight is you’re stranded up there, so there’s definitely medical emergency training. As well, customer service training and how to deescalate situations and how to handle cultural situations that maybe you weren’t prepared for before you joined the industry.

Joseph: I know that you mentioned deescalating situations. I know that’s been a really big role that has emerged from flight attendants just in recent months with the pandemic and face masks and all that. I won’t get into that, but I’m curious about the social side of it.

You mentioned interaction with people who are flying and passengers. One of the things I’ve always wondered about, Christine, and this is probably more on longer-haul flights, is that flight attendants spend a lot of the time with one another, with fellow flight attendants. Maybe this is just my perception, but I’ve always just been curious, what do you guys talk about when you’re in the back of the plane, and you’re between serving meals? I just feel like you guys are flying together, you’re traveling together, you’re going into the same hotels. What is that side of the world of flight attendant life like? That’s an element that you may not get as much of in other, I’ll call, more 9:00-to-5:00, traditional office jobs.

Christine: You’re right. Definitely we spend a lot of time together, even just in flight talking. Some of that’s talking with passengers who may come to the back just to hang out for a while, but a lot of talking with just crew. There’s actually a term that flight attendants use to describe what happens called jump-seat therapy, where you may have never flown with this other flight attendant before, but you guys are seated on jump seats right next to each other for however many days.

Joseph: Right, I see that. I can kind of tell sometimes if people quite don’t know one another so well.

Christine: It is a lot of meeting new people, not just meeting new passengers, but at least at my company, it was constant meeting new co-workers and knowing there’s a possibility that I may never fly with this person again. It’s a very unique work environment, I found, just in that alone, because you might make these great connections with other crew members and not see them again. It can also be helpful because if you did not bond particularly with the crew member, you might also not see them again. It’s very interesting. You’re right.

Joseph: I have just a couple more questions I do want to talk about what happened in March 2020 because I’m really interested to hear about your transitions. Before we get to that, any major misconceptions you feel people have about being a flight attendant? I guess we’ll first talk about other people’s perceptions and then maybe some of your perceptions in a moment.

Christine: A lot of my friends and people I’ve phoned with feel that flight attendants are seen as just the waitress or the waiter in the sky, and they feel that passengers forget sometimes that we’re there for their safety a bit. We’re there for both. We want everyone to have a good flight, but our job is more than just bringing you your Coke for example. We’re trained to make sure people make it through the flight, that if anything goes wrong, we can handle it. I think a lot of flight attendants wish that people consider that a more well-rounded picture of what a flight attendant does.

Joseph: I guess there is that huge element of safety that people sometimes overlook and take for granted, but it’s such a big part of the job. Are there any things that surprised you the most about being a flight attendant, either pleasant surprises but also any sort of unexpected challenges in the job?

Christine: Pretty much all of your training is what to do when the worst happens or what to do if someone gets ill. Then you get on the line, and you’re flying, and pretty much all of your job turns into customer service. You’re surprised every once in a while, when something really does go wrong, and you instantly have to respond.

I remember I was pretty new at the time, maybe only a year or two in, and a woman in front of me, in front of the whole plane actually—I was standing nearby thankfully—she just started choking on her sandwich. It became apparent very quickly that she was not able to get it out of her mouth, and she stood up, and she came over to me, and I was heading over to her anyway, and I started doing the Heimlich maneuver. I was just in shock the whole time that ‘I was actually doing this.’ It’s pretty crazy how quickly everything can change.

She was fine. She was totally fine. The sandwich came out. Everything went back to normal, but right after that particular moment, another passenger came up from another part of the plane. As soon as this woman was breathing again, he came up to me and he started complaining that his bag wasn’t directly above his seat in the overhead bin. I just remembered standing there, like, ‘What?’

Joseph: Oh god.

Christine: It’s just a world of contradictions, I think. I don’t know.

Joseph: Absolutely, yeah. Passengers can sometimes be the most unpleasant people, I would imagine. I can ask you probably about 50 other questions about this, Christine, but I know the show is about transition, so I do want to talk now and shift gears and talk about your transition out of the world of being a flight attendant. We got to talk about March 2020. That’s when, as you mentioned, the pandemic started to hit in the US, just at its infancy. I know it might be hard to go back a year, but can you take me back to the moment in March 2020 where you started to notice something happening on flights?

Christine: I don’t think I’ll ever forget it. It was, I think, probably like March 15th. It was right in the middle of the month, and I was working a three-day trip. At the beginning of the trip, all of our flights were still full, overbooked, oversold. Starting on about the second or third day of the trip, flights were just empty. These large planes, we would have maybe eight passengers, and that was just completely unheard of. It was quite a shock from that perspective, just seeing who was showing up and that people weren’t coming.

Also, it was just kind of getting alarmed knowing that we didn’t really have the protective gear we needed yet, and we still have to work seven more flights before we made it home. It was being a little nervous to close the overhead bins, ‘What am I going to pick up if I close this one?’ or, ‘I don’t want to rearrange that bag because what if something is there?’ We didn’t have any of the gloves yet, no masks. It was like realizing that the whole world was changing in front of your eyes within a week, I think.

Joseph: What was running through your head when that happened? Were you thinking, ‘Okay, this is a temporary thing’? What did you think was going to happen and what started to transpire in your head as it relates to your own career as a flight attendant?

Christine: I know a lot of people at the time were expecting it to be over in a month or two. To me, at the time, I already felt like something had changed for me. Something with the whole job had changed. It was a big shift for me, walking through the plane and not feeling safe from germs that I couldn’t see. It really took the fun out of the meeting all the different passengers and getting to have all these interesting conversations with different people. It wasn’t fun anymore. I didn’t want to leave the house to do that anymore. It really affected my view of the whole industry.

Around that time, the company that I was at, Delta, offered leaves that people could just sign up for to take. Since there’s also reduced flying, it would help the rest of the company out, and I signed up for it right away. I took a six-month leave. I remember that whole time being at home just wondering, ‘I don’t think that this will go back to normal the way it used to be for me.’ I knew I would never feel the same way that I did about it before, but I also didn’t know any industry would go back.

Joseph: Was it around that time that you, then, started to think about coding? How did that emerge? I’m just curious because it’s quite the pivot to start thinking about coding after being a flight attendant.

Christine: I actually read an article when I was at home on my leave. It was something silly. I don’t know where I saw it, but it was about how young people, when they’re at home during this time, should be learning Java. At the time, I did not even know what Java was, but it reminded me of a little course I had taken a couple of years ago that it was really not much of anything. I had taken a small, little course on HTML in the past. This reminded me of that, so I thought, ‘You know what? I really need something to do while I’m sitting here at home. Why not? Why not just brush up on that?’ I started reviewing HTML and learning CSS. CSS is like a lot of styling webpages. That was really fun for me because I’m a creative person, and I love seeing the different things I could do with a webpage.

I’ve realized, as I was studying those, that those weren’t really cool unless you had some kind of language that could make those do something. I started learning JavaScript just to make my webpages work, make them interesting.

Joseph: You’re just learning this on your own, in your own time?

Christine: Yes.

Joseph: Okay.

Christine: Yes. I had nothing but time.

Joseph: Right, that’s true, but you’re literally just teaching it to yourself through books and references online?

Christine: Yes. There are actually a lot of really great, free references for anyone who wants to dip their toes in. There’s a lot online if you just searched for it, even just for free. That’s really all I was doing at the time.

Joseph: How did you find that transition for you? Going from flight attendant and traveling all over the place to then being at home, 24/7, and on top of that, learning a completely new skillset. What was that like for you?

Christine: At the time, a lot of my friends were also at home, a lot of my flight attendant friends. They were having a terrible time. They all wanted to be flying. They missed going to Paris or whatever, and I didn’t. I knew at that moment, ‘Oh gosh, I don’t fit the same way that I used to with this career. Something has changed irrevocably in me.’

I knew that I was enjoying coding, and I knew that the more I learned with that, it seemed that the more I found to learn and the more excited I was about digging into it. I thought it only makes sense. I know that I feel different about this career than I used to, and I’m really excited by this new one, and I know that tech is a growing field right now, and I just thought, ‘Why don’t I put all my energies behind this? Because I’m never going to find a better time. If doesn’t work out, I’ll go back to flying whenever they’re ready to have us all back. If this does work out, I don’t need to go back, and I can leave my position to people who want it more than I do.’

Joseph: You mentioned something interesting there. You said that it felt different. You felt different from how you felt when you were a flight attendant. I know this might be tough, but can you describe in words how it was different? The reason why I ask, Christine, is sometimes, it’s hard to decipher and clarify whether something is better for you or not. I’d be curious what you noticed about yourself doing one versus the other.

Christine: When I first started as a flight attendant, I was so excited. I was never bored, even if all I did was fly between Atlanta and Minneapolis or something like that. I was having the best time, and I was meeting these interesting people, and nothing was boring. For me, during this past summer of 2021, I was at home. The thought of going back to flying was boring. It no longer held that interest for me. I felt like, in going back to that, I was only going to be exposing myself to risks that didn’t give me the satisfaction that I used to have from it.

For me, I’m motivated by what I feel passionate about. What I feel passionate about are different things that I’m learning, different things that have grabbed my attention during the time. Coding and tech, I’m using coding, I guess, as a blanket term. Coding had really ignited that interest in me. It just seemed like a field that I could explore and not get tired of exploring. It seemed like on top of having so much to learn in a really exciting way with it, it seemed very creative, which I had never anticipated before I had started trying to learn to code.

Joseph: At what point did you feel like this could become something bigger, like an entirely new chapter in your career? It’s one thing to be learning a new skill on the side, and it’s another to, then, start to feel like, ‘Hey, this could actually be a new career path for me.’ Can you remember when that moment happened for you?

Christine: Yes. My husband actually was still working at the time, and I think he was telling his friends at work, ‘Oh, yeah. Christine’s been learning HTML, CSS, JavaScript. She’s just learning to code while she’s at home.’ They were like, ‘Have you heard about Zip Code Wilmington, this school in Wilmington that helps teach people how to become software developers? It has a really good reputation for helping them network and getting them jobs afterwards.’ We had never heard of this.

My husband came home and told me about it, and I realized in that moment, as I was looking it up, that this was a real thing and that it was a really achievable thing within reach. If I could get into the school, there is a serious chance that I could have a career as a software developer for a financial institution in Delaware. Just knowing that there was a route, knowing that this had been done, that the people who went to this school came from all different backgrounds, like me—it was a very, very diverse background pool that this school pulls from—just knowing that that path was there made me realize, ‘Oh, this is a possibility.’

Joseph: I know you’ve now finished at Zip Code. We’re fast-forwarding to the current day. That, as I understand, from when you talked with me before, it’s a 12-week course, right? You graduate, and the idea is that it can be an on-ramp to some potential professional roles in the future. Do I have that right?

Christine: Yes, perfect.

Joseph: I know that things have actually transpired for you. Before we get to where you’re at, at this specific moment—I know things have changed even since we last spoke a couple of weeks ago—I’d love to talk about a couple of the lessons that you’ve learned along the way of your career change journey.

When we spoke last time, I think you’ve alluded to this today, Christine. You said that a lot of colleagues told you that being a flight attendant was, I think you mentioned, the best job you’ll ever have.

Christine: Yes, exactly.

Joseph: But you actually realized deep down that that wasn’t true for you. This is a common dynamic that comes up with really any job when you start to share your sentiments or doubts with your immediate colleagues. I found that in many of those situations, people, whether they’re your immediate colleagues or friends or family, tend to err on the side of reminding you how lucky you are to have what you have, for you just to be happy with what you’ve got. There’s this tension between wondering if the job you have is as good as it gets and something you should just be content with, or if there’s actually some more fulfilling option out there for you to pursue, knowing that it may be more rewarding, but maybe it’s not going to be more rewarding. I’m curious, how did you cut through the noise and make sense of whether your former job as a flight attendant was or was not as good as it gets?

Christine: I’m glad you brought this up, because for so many years, I was there for seven and a half years. I did not cut through that noise. I’m the kind of person who really likes to take people’s advice. I guess that’s been to my detriment in some cases, but I wouldn’t change anything in my life, but I know if I had been more confident listening to myself and what I knew deep inside, that this job, my career as a flight attendant was not going to keep my happy forever, I knew that much earlier on. I knew that probably on year two or year three flying, and I stayed for seven years.

You hear constantly—constantly—that this is the best job you’ll ever have. I was afraid that there is a possibility they would be right. They would talk about people who left, and all they wanted to do was apparently come back and be a flight attendant again. I was afraid that would be me. You have to face down your fear, but I did not feel that I could do that before this past summer because I didn’t know what direction I wanted to go in.

The pandemic forced my hand a little bit. It made me look at my career and say, ‘You’ve desired something different for a while, but you haven’t done it. You haven’t had the push to do it yet, and here’s your push. You’re right in the middle of this pandemic. You’re on a six-month leave. This is your chance. Take it.’

I’m really grateful that I was able to do that during the pandemic, and I’m sure there’s a lot of other people out there who were less than satisfied in their careers beforehand. Maybe this is actually a perfect opportunity for people to be exploring what they’re more interested in. I just feel so lucky that it has all worked out for me so far.

Joseph: When we spoke before, you also mentioned something interesting to me that you said, you know in your heart whether something fills you up. Can you explain what you mean by that?

Christine: The joy of doing what you’re doing. When you’re doing a job that makes you feel fulfilled, that just brings you so much contentment, you know that you’re fully where you want to be in your life, and I had lost that feeling for a while with flying. Learning to code was kind of like rediscovering that joy again. It’s so hard to explain.

Joseph: Yes, it’s one of those tough things. I think it’s what your heart knows, but you can’t really rationalize with your head. It’s just like a feeling, I guess, that you get.

Last question before we wrap up with what you’re doing right now, having been through this career change journey—and I know you’re still in the middle of it—as you now look ahead to the next chapter of your career, what are you the most nervous about and what are you the most excited about?

Christine: I’m nervous about keeping up. Tech seems to constantly be changing and growing in different ways, and it seems like the companies who come out on top or the people who come out doing well are the ones who are good at pivoting and growing their skills in a certain area maybe, knowing where to learn. That worries me, I guess, a little bit, but that’s also partially what excites me. Just because I know that there’s going to be so much variety still in what I’m doing, continuing in tech, I’ll constantly have the ability to learn different technologies, different things that I can do, and grow in that way.

It’s both the fear and the excitement because you’re always a little nervous, ‘Hey, am I an impostor in this situation? Am I going to be able to keep my head above the water? What if the job that I get is too advanced? How am I going to keep up?’ but you just got to keep reminding yourself, ‘You made it this far. You’ve learned so much already. You just got to believe it’s going to keep carrying you through.’

Joseph: On that note, I would like to wrap up with what you’re doing now. I know you just got some news. Could you tell me a little bit more about what’s next for you?

Christine: Since we last talked, Zip Code hosted this power interview week at the end of the cohort for all the students who graduated. They helped to set up interviews with their hiring partners, which are financial institutions in the area, and their students. Luckily, I was offered a job actually by one of those institutions. Right now, I’m just going through signing all the paperwork, and I should be starting at that new company on March 1st.

Joseph: Wow, congratulations, Christine! That’s fantastic news. I know when we last spoke, I think you hadn’t quite even graduated at Zip Code. Now, fast-forward to today, you got a job offer on hand. That’s great news. That’s fantastic.

Christine: I’m just so grateful really. I can’t believe it. I feel like my whole life has changed.

Joseph: Absolutely. I just wanted to thank you so much for telling us more about your former life as a flight attendant and the steps you took proactively to pivot into coding and also the importance of listening to yourself and paying attention to what truly excites you. I think you’re absolutely right about the fact that this is a really good time to reevaluate what truly matters, and you’ve certainly reminded us of that.

Best of luck with your role, and congratulations again on finishing up at Zip Code. Please stay safe.

Christine: Thank you so much, Joseph. You too.

I’ve heard from so many of you recently who have suffered a career setback in the midst of the global Covid-19 pandemic. So today, I wanted to feature someone whose career has also been hit hard by events. Commercial airline pilot turned heavy goods vehicle truck driver Aaron Leventhal shares his story of dealing with personal loss, managing career upheaval, and finding a way to pivot toward something else.

Aaron Leventhal- former FlyBe pilot turned Tesco truck driver

During the Mental Fuel segment, I also share some examples of setbacks I’ve been dealt in my own career along with my three strategies of dealing with setbacks.

If you’ve been dealt a blow in your own career for whatever reason, I hope you find this episode reassuring, inspiring, and most of all, a reminder that you’re not alone.

During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I talked about the importance of finding a way to manage the setbacks you’ll inevitably face in your own career.

My challenge to you, if you’ve had a major career setback recently, either because of the pandemic or something completely unrelated to the pandemic, is to first, give yourself some time to process it. Allow yourself to just feel bad for a few days or even a few weeks is an important part of dealing with any sort of loss.

However, I also want you to decide when you’re going to then start taking action. To literally circle a date in your calendar when you’re going to at least try to move forward. Not to figure everything out, but to at least start taking some small steps to begin exploring where you can go from here. Restarting is often the hardest part, but I really do believe that ultimately, action will open up new opportunities for you.

Aaron Leventhal‘s lifelong ambition was to become a pilot. Based in the UK, from the age of 6, all that he and his Twin brother would ever talk about was Airplanes and how they wanted to fly when they grew up.

At the age 13, Aaron joined Air Cadets, the real beginning to his flying bug. He then joined the British Army in 2004 as a craftsman in the Royal Electrical Mechanical Engineers and eventually became a civilian “Heavy Goods Vehicle” tanker driver to help fund his flight training expenses

In 2018, Aaron finished training and started working for Flybe as a First Officer,  only to be made redundant A year later in March 2020 when the pandemic hit.

He now works for Tesco, driving trucks to deliver household essentials to supermarkets during these challenging times. He hopes to return to the world of Aviation in the coming years.

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!

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Teaser (first ~15s): I’ve lost my job, and with COVID hitting now, there’s no recruiting so I can’t get a job. I have an empty feeling really. I just feel like I’ve worked so hard to get to where I was, and now, I’m back to square one again. I’ve lost my flying dream. I’ve lost something I’ve loved.

Joseph: Good morning, Aaron, and welcome to the show. Thanks so much for taking the time to speak with me in the middle of your very busy schedule.

Aaron: Good morning. Thank you for accepting me on your show.

Joseph: I want to talk to you about a few different things today, Aaron. I want to go all the way back to your childhood and talk to you about how you became interested in becoming a pilot. I know you spent some time in the British army. You’re also driving a tanker driver for a while. I do want to start by just getting a glimpse into what have you been up to the past few days and what have you been focused on in both your career and your life amid everything going on with the coronavirus.

Aaron: In the last few days, I’ve been working as a Tesco driver. It’s in a supermarket in the UK. It’s a heavy-goods vehicle. I’m doing this during night shifts at the moment, which is quite a strain on my sleep pattern and having a child. There’s maybe two or three stores delivering foods to keep the country up and running, really keeping their shelves stocked up for the British nation.

Joseph: Thank you for doing that. For those listening from outside the UK, Tesco is the UK’s largest grocery supermarket chain by market share. They’ve got nearly 4,000 stores in the UK. I order my groceries from Tesco, so I also want to extend a personal thank you to you for what you’re doing.

Can you tell me about your daughter? How old is she and what is she up to these days, now that the schools are closed?

Aaron: Yes, it’s been quite difficult to try and entertain her as time’s going on, and they’re getting bored. The schools have been really good. They’ve been handing us out homework to do via an online app, keeping up informed as to what’s happening next. Her name is Val. She’s coming up to seven years old in July. We’re just getting really frustrated with the situation. It’s quite difficult with work and looking after your child. We haven’t gotten anyone to care for her, and so obviously it’s just myself and my partner. It’s been difficult.

Joseph: We’re recording this in early May as context. The UK has now been in lockdown for several weeks. You mentioned that you’re work in the night shift. I actually have a very good friend of mine who used to work the night shift at an airport in Philadelphia. I know it can be really mind-dizzying at times. What’s it been like for you to be working the night shift?

Aaron: It’s just been a bit of a shift from what I was doing before. You start roughly at about 6:30 in the evening, and it’s usually finished in 6:30 the following morning, which is a full-on night shift working straight through. It’s difficult, but I know that I’m doing it for the good, and that’s what’s keeping me going throughout the night.

Joseph: We don’t always do this on the show, but I actually want to go all the way back in time to your childhood, when you were I believe six, and you first became interested in flying. I’d love it if you could just kick us off by telling me a little bit about your childhood and how you became interested in flying, and then we’ll move forward from there.

Aaron: Like you said, Joseph, it started at the age of six. Me and my twin brother, we’d go flying motor airplanes and build motor airplanes. Our stepdad would take us to the airshows, and that was kind of where it really kicked off for me.

It wasn’t until I got to the age of 13 and 9 months where I could finally go and join my local Air Training Corps, which is those Air Cadets. I was there in fact five years. That was really where the thought of flying really kicked in for me.

Joseph: At that moment when you were 13 and you were part of Air Cadets, were you thinking at that moment, ‘Hey, this is what I want to do. This is what I want to do when I grow up. I want to be a pilot.’ Is that what was running through your head?

Aaron: Yeah, I already knew that before I came to Air Cadets, but being in Air Cadets confirmed that exactly what I want to do. As soon as our first flight, at 13 and 9 months, that was it. That’s where you get the flying bug. It never left. By the age of 15, I did my very first solo flight.

Joseph: At that point, for somebody who would be interested in becoming a pilot, what would then be the typical path and what did you end up doing?

Aaron: There are different routes you can take, but if you’re young enough like 15, 13, and 19 years old, you can go and join your local Air Cadets. I recommend that. It’s free flying, and it really tests if you really want that career before you go spending your big bucks.

For me, after Air Cadets, I started to work through what was called the modular route. There’s an integrated route or a modular route. The integrated route is where you can do it in a very short period, have to have a big lump sum of money, maybe £120,000 upfront. The way I did it was what worked best for me, and that was to work and pay for it – pay as you go really, just bits and pieces here and there.

You go and get your PPL first, which is your private pilot’s license. You must amass 45 hours. Once you succeed at that, you can then make a decision whether you want to go on to the airlines or if you want to keep it as a general aviation pilot where you can just go out and take your family and fly around in little scenic airplanes.

If you’d like to go and be an airline pilot, this is where you got to start building your hours up, and it gets expensive, so you’re looking at like 100 hours pilot in command, total hours of 150. Then you got to go and do some exams, which is about 14 exams for your airline transport license. It took me roughly about 18 months because I was working full-time.

Joseph: What were you doing at the time?

Aaron: I was working as a tanker driver, so I was doing roughly 12 to 14-hour days with an hour commute on each end of that as well. It was very good work-time management to get through something like that. You don’t get much time to study at home, but I used to take my study manuals with me and stick post-it notes all over my Lorry just so I can revise all the time.

Once you finish those exams, that’s when the fun starts really. You start flying. You can go and get your commercial pilot’s license. That’s another course, which is about 45 hours, and then it gets even more expensive, where you’re going on to twin-engine aircrafts, and we’re flying multiengine air things in the UK. I was paying £600 an hour. You go on to see and go into simulators, and then you’re ready to go and apply for your first job. It still doesn’t end there.

Joseph: Vey in-depth, very elongated, and quite an investment of time, money, and effort.

Aaron: Exactly. I mean that’s the way I chose to do it because it works better for me because I was working. But if you’ve got the money upfront, it can take two, three years.

Joseph: I’d imagine a lot of people don’t have that kind of cash upfront as a teenager, and I know that you also spent some time in the British army. What were you doing in the army, and how were you balancing that with being a heavy-goods vehicle tanker driver?

Aaron: Two thousand and four to two thousand and six, I was employed as a Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineer. I was actually a vehicle mechanic at that time. It was at the British Army where I gained my qualification to drive HGVs dangerous goods. I didn’t need to use that when I left the British army, I was in a civil job to earn the money to fly.

In the British Army, it was an amazing experience. I’d recommend it to anybody to go in into the British Army or in any army. It really builds on the foundations of your career. You’ve got your core values. You’ve got to demonstrate courage, discipline, integrity, and selfless commitment. You gain responsibility, independence, and build up on your teamwork. It sets you up for life, and I’m really glad I went in there and did that.

Joseph: Yeah, it sounds like an amazing experience. At the same time, I know when we spoke before, you mentioned that, at some point, you realized that it was leading you away from what you truly wanted to do, which was to become a pilot. I’m curious to hear how you ended up coming to that realization.

Aaron: I went into the British Army hoping that I’ll transfer over to go in the Air Corps. It was a way of trying to get into flying, but it became apparent that that wasn’t going to happen for a long period, so I made the decision to leave the British Army and do it my own way. I wanted to fly, and that’s my vision. It always has been, so I went to get back on my path and all of it, all of the dream.

Joseph: You’re an HGV tanker driver, and you’re doing that to build up your savings to pay toward flight training. Can you just give a glimpse in a typical day in your life as a heavy-goods vehicle driver when you’re driving these huge petrol tankers down the road? What’s that like and what does a day look like for you?

Aaron: I live about an hour and 10 minutes away from the depot where I drive the artic lorry. It’s a good hour and 10 to get there, and then my day starts. I was on a night shift, so I usually arrive at about past 6:00 in the evening. We go in, we check in, we sit around and wait until the job comes up, which could be a good hour before you go out. Once we go out, we go and find our unit, which is the front part of the artic, and then you go and connect it up to your trailer, which is already loaded for you. It’s a very straightforward job.

You go over the weighbridge, and off you go to your first supermarket. When you get there, the tricky bit comes into play when you got to start reversing these articulate lines. Once a day, you deliver the food, you offload it yourself and the assistants of the front door staff there, and I went and sign paperwork, return back to depot, and off you go again. This is why I choose a job like this, just so I could keep the capacity to train as a pilot.

Joseph: I guess something I’ve always wondered—even as a child, I remember being in the car and seeing these huge trucks go by, and there’s normally typically a male driving in the front by himself—does it ever get lonely driving those trucks? How do you keep yourself occupied on the road?

Aaron: Initially, no, but as the years went on, it does. Especially with petrol tankers because there are restrictions. You’re not allowed to have any sort of electronic devices or a personal electronic devices, PEDs in the cab with you, because with the fumes of the fuel, especially petrol, it can be very disastrous. The rules are no phones allowed, so we can’t even call anybody.

The trips that we were doing with petrol tankers is the aviation side I was doing, so it’s a different jet, E1, which is airplane fuel to the airport. The runs are quite short, so you never really got lonely. It was a good time for me to bring my revision notes with me. That was the only way I could do it, because when I get home, I’m just going to be absolutely exhausted, or my daughter would be around me. It’s actually quite a nice escape to go work and start revising.

Joseph: I know when we spoke before, you mentioned 2009 being a major turning point for you. I feel like we have to touch on this because it’s such a big part of your story. What was happening in your life at the time?

Aaron: This is about a year now into where I finally started my modular training towards my airline pilot license. On the 19th of April, 2009, unfortunately, I had a big setback. My twin brother passed way suddenly. This was absolutely devastating to me and my family.

Joseph: How old was he at the time?

Aaron: We were 25 years old. It was lifechanging. I just see the world differently after that really. You realize that life is short, and I was more willing to take the risks, especially like getting big loans and credit cards, which I was a bit apprehensive about. Once that happened, I just thought, ‘You know what? You got to be more adventurous in this life because we’re not around for long.’ That’s really opened up my eyes.

Joseph: If you’re willing to share, what happened with your brother?

Aaron: It happened leading up to his death. It was about three years. Unfortunately, he fell into depression, and it took maybe three or four attempts of him, attempting suicide. Every time he’d do it, he would ring me – nobody else. He’d just ring me to ask. I don’t know what exactly what he’s saying, but it was like he wants your approval or something or a cry for help. Every time before he attempted suicide, he would call me first. Maybe it’s for me to go – I always stopped it, and then the last time, he didn’t. He just literally got on with it, and he hanged himself.

Joseph: I’m so sorry to hear that. I’m just trying to imagine this is your twin brother, and you guys grew up together and had dreams of becoming a pilot. What ran through your head when you heard that news in that very moment that your brother had committed suicide? Is there any way to put that into words?

Aaron: I remember when they broke it to me. My world just fell apart at that time. Numbness. The world stops. I just broke down. There are not many words to describe what happened at that particular moment other than just shock, disbelief. Even though the years leading up to it, I kind of knew that something was wrong, and I thought I had my mind set to sort of be ready for that moment, but no. I wasn’t, not at all.

Joseph: What do you think has been the toughest part of losing him?

Aaron: Not being able to share my experience, our experience of flying. We talked about it all those years before he died. I never even managed to get him in the aircraft – not once, not even fly beside me. When I fly sometimes, I just look over to the left seat, and I was just wishing he would be sitting there. I never had the opportunity to take him flying.

Joseph: I sometimes find that certain events become dividers in our lives where you are a certain person before an event, and you’re a very different person after that event. I’m imagining that this must have been one of those events for you. What has changed for you pre and post losing your brother?

Aaron: Before losing my brother, I wasn’t willing to take as many risks as I have. Maybe I wouldn’t have gone this far through my training. I’ll never know, but after he passed away, I took the risks. I got the loans. I got the debts. I had to go with it. That’s something I probably wouldn’t have done maybe before.

Just being resilient, grabbing my personal control, rebuilding myself after the event, and then getting back into my flight training as soon as possible. I mean the show must go on. Stay focused. That’s how I got through it. I’m a very driven person. That’s how I’ve got this far.

Joseph: Thanks so much for sharing that, Aaron. I’d like to shift gears a little bit here and now talk about your time as a pilot. I know eventually, I think it was around 2018, 2019, when you actually were moving toward this dream and achieving this dream of becoming a pilot. Can you share what that chapter of your career was shaping up to look like?

Aaron: I was accepted to an airline called Flybe in the UK. It was a regional airline, regional connectivity. I was there for 13 months. Unfortunately, the airline collapsed on the 5th of March this year, which is 2020.

Joseph: I do want to talk about that and what’s happened when you were made redundant. Before we do that though, I would like to talk a little bit about your time as a pilot, because I know that this is a dream that you had, and you achieved it. What was it like the first time you climbed into the cockpit and took your first flight where you’re carrying passengers from one place to another?

Aaron: The first experience is overwhelming. I just couldn’t believe what I was doing. It was actually happening. I’m flying a big jet. It also thrusts, going on the runway. You rotate and off you go into the sunset. You do flight take off and landings, and then that’s it. You’re ready to go with your passengers in. You go into line training. You’re still training with passengers on as a first officer. The captain’s the experienced guide. To have my first passengers, absolutely amazing experience. To start talking to your passengers as well and inform them of how we’re getting on the premises of the flight is so unreal. Some of the routes we were flying but especially down to Milan, where there were the mountains or snow, it’s just absolutely scenic, really, really beautiful experience.

Joseph: I’ve flown with Flybe before because, as I mentioned to you before, I used to live in South Hampton. In the South Hampton Airport, Flybe used to be one of the carriers there. As a passenger, I guess the only time I really see a pilot is either in the terminal when you guys are walking by us in the gate area or maybe I’ll see the back of your head as we’re boarding or if you go to the bathroom or something. If I’m lucky, I’ll get a chance to say thank you to you as we’re deplaning.

Can you just give a quick behind-the-scenes glimpse into what’s really going on up there in the cockpit while all the passengers are just sitting back in the cabin, chilling out and relaxing?

Aaron: Flybe has quite short sectors we’re doing. We’re doing maybe four sectors, and they’re quite busy days. After your long-haul flights where you might have up to 16-hours flights, the workload can be a lot less than what we were doing. It was very a diverse and dynamic environment that we live in, especially in the cockpit.

I’ll give you an example. Once we get airborne, we’re going for our chats, all the way up to the cruise. When we’re in the cruise, the captain and the first officer, we both got our different roles. One of us will be pilot flying, and one of us will be pilot monitoring. There’s always one pilot who’s flying the aircraft, and there’s always one pilot who’s monitoring the back pilot and systems.

We take it in turns each sector, so one sector would be, say, from South Hampton to Milan. The second sector would be from Milan to South Hampton. So I may fly bound. The captain may fly back. As a first officer, if I was pilot monitoring, I used to go through system checks. We’re doing timing checks, fuel checks. There’s plenty of stuff that go on with it, especially in the short period of time. It’s a very fast-paced environment.

If it was long-haul, it’s more relaxed, but I really enjoy that type of flying because it just kept you in the toes. You never get complacent. You start your cruise, and then you start your descent pretty much within five minutes. You’re in the cruise for five minutes. There’s lots of pressure, lots of challenges, but exciting.

We’re communicating with the cabin, talking to our passengers, also talking with our cabin crew, talking with air traffic control. That’s a very busy environment to be listening out on. You could be in a sensor or the other aircraft in the area. It’s very busy, multi-tasked, and multi-talented job.

Joseph: Is there any misconceptions that you feel people have about being a pilot for an airline, either ones you’ve heard from other people or even once that you had yourself?

Aaron: The biggest one is everybody thinks that the airplane basically flies itself. People say, ‘Oh, the autopilot takes off and land this aircraft.’ There are aircrafts that do do that, but the aircraft I was flying, we would have it in autopilot when we’re passed 1,000 feet above the ground, so it’s much smoother and more pleasant for the passengers when the autopilot takes over. The takeoff and landing is fully onto us, the captain and myself.

Joseph: That’s really interesting. I remember way back in the day. I don’t know if they still let you do this, but you could tune into a channel on your headset as a passenger where you could listen to the air traffic control communicating with the pilot. I was always impressed by how much chatter there was. There really wasn’t a whole lot of silence, and there’s a lot going on behind the scenes up there.

Aaron: Yes, especially around UK. The transatlantic flights, they’re the quiet ones because once you go over the ocean towards America, it’s a lot more quiet. You’re using different frequencies, HF frequencies. Around the UK, we’re on the VHF frequency. You listen to London controls, Scottish control, and you can hear everything going on. It’s a really, really busy environment.

You got to stay engaged and listen to what other pilots are saying because it gives you good situation awareness. You’re also doing your own work and your own space in your cockpit in the flight deck. Like I said, multi-talented. You just end up getting used to listening in to all this chatter.

Joseph: Got it. Aaron, you’re a pilot now for Flybe. You’re flying airplanes. You’re living your dream. Then you mentioned earlier that a couple of months ago, you’re made redundant from Flybe in early March 2020. What happened and what was it like to hear that news for you?

Aaron: Well, as you can see from our discussion, it took a long time, 10 years, to get here. My whole life has been working towards this dream of flying, and on the 5th of March, when the airline collapsed, it felt like the rug was pulled out from beneath me. Initially, it was a shock. I went through all the emotions – worry and anxiety, ‘What am I going to do for money? How am I going to get back into flying?’ I was devastated. I stayed loyal to Flybe right until the end.

There were signs of those problems with the airline. Some people would start a joke and go on over on to other airlines, but I thought, ‘No. I’m going to stay loyal to Flybe right until the end.’ Unfortunately, the risk didn’t pay off. I lost the job. I was made redundant, and that was it. A couple of backs, and I moved from Birmingham back to Cardiff.

It’s kind of a triple whammy for me. I lost my job, and with COVID hitting now, there’s no recruiting, so I can’t get a job. On the other hand, I’ve also lost my license as well now. It’s expired, so I’m going to have to pay another £6,000 to go and renew my license when the simulators reopen and the training centers reopen. It’s been a triple whammy, and it’s just been one bad news after another.

Like I said earlier on, I’m kind of a resilient person. I’m flexible to change. I’ve gotten back in the lorry. I’m getting back on with it, back on the road, keep the money coming in, helping the nation. I’m looking towards the future now of getting back into the flying career.

Joseph: I’ve spoken to so many people, Aaron, just in the past few weeks, who have had what you described like some version of a triple whammy where everything is landing at once, and no good news is coming in. What was it like for you to move from being a pilot in an airplane cockpit to returning back to becoming a driver?

I’m interested in hearing your views on that because I guess there’s a couple of aspects to this. There’s returning back to what you were doing before achieving the dream, and then there’s also finding a way to make ends meet at this really challenging time. I guess I’m just curious to hear more about what that process has been like for you.

Aaron: I’ve kept a plan B as a back up plan, going back to the lorry just in case. I was always told, it’s always good to have an HGV license because there’s always work out there for you, and so I kept it valid. I kept my licenses valid just in case anything bad did happen. Unfortunately, it happened, but fortunately, I had my licenses to fall back on, and certainly I get help to get through this COVID-19.

To go back to driving, obviously the pace of life has slowed right down. I was flying 100 miles an hour in a jet down to 50 miles on a roadway. I have an empty feeling really. I just feel like I’ve worked so hard to get to where I was, and now, I’m back to square one again. I’ve lost my flying dream temporarily. I’ve lost something I’ve loved.

What’s happened here is, after the incident with my twin brother, this has prepared me mentally to go through this situation.

Joseph: It sounds like you’ve, in some ways, built up this muscle of resilience, having dealt with some major set backs and just emotional loss in the past, which doesn’t make it any easier to go through, but I guess it just helps in some ways to manage the situation and maybe soften the impact of it.

Aaron: I have to get back out there as soon as possible. We didn’t get furlough from the company, so I have to get out and start earning some money to get by. You can’t live off air.

I’m feeling positive. I’ve got my licenses. I’ve got my hours. I’ve gone through all the training. I’m feeling positive that there is going to be light at the end of the tunnel. I just need to build a connection. Maybe through networking, this may lead to some possible opportunities like my LinkedIn post that I’ve put up that you’ve seen.

Joseph: Yeah.

Aaron: I was very fortunate with that. I thought to post up explaining I lost my job, and I’ve gone back to being a lovely driver. It went out to 2.8 million people, which is absolutely fantastic.

Joseph: When you posted that—because that’s how I discovered you, Aaron—what did you think was going to happen when you posted that? For those people who haven’t seen it, it’s like a side-by-side of you in the cockpit and then you standing in front of a Tesco truck on LinkedIn and just explaining what had happened. What did you think was going to happen when you posted that?

Aaron: I just put the post up there for my colleagues because we all joined a group, Flybe Ex-Employees. I thought I’d put that post up as a bit of inspiration to them, to all my colleagues, to give them a bit of uplifting message, just to maybe help them a little bit. When I woke up the following morning, and it was over a million views, I was in disbelief really. I just couldn’t believe what I was looking at. I underestimated the powers of social media.

That post, I come home from work after my third night shift of starting this new job. I was lying in bed. I literally just typed up, put a picture on, and went to sleep. I never expected it to go like it did. I didn’t expect the media to be chasing me for it. It’s just absolutely overwhelming.

Joseph: That’s a good segue, Aaron, in the last thing I was hoping to talk with you about before we wrap up. That’s just a few of the things that you’ve learned along the way of your very interesting career journey, both the ups and the down. I’m curious what you’ve learned about yourself, having shifted into the world of aviation and achieving your dream of becoming a pilot, only to then have that quickly taken away from you and you having to pivot out of that world. What have you learned about yourself through this process?

Aaron: The way I’ve chosen to do my flight training was probably the most difficult way because I had to work a full-time job. Going through that experience, I’m really, really proud that I did that that way as well. I could see that I had that drive, prove I had that drive.

Being able to handle workload management as well very well, to work all these hours and then to study around it, it’s just not an easy game.

Joseph: How do you think this is all going to turn out for you, Aaron? I know it’s a bit of a guessing game. Nobody knows what’s going to happen to the airline industry, but any guesses of how you think it’s going to turn out and also how you hope this will turn out for you.

Aaron: The airline industry is very tough, and it does come back. We haven’t been through something as big as this, but it is going to come back. It’s just a matter of time, patience, and keeping our vision focused, and I’ll be back as a first officer somewhere.

Joseph: Thank you so much, Aaron, for taking the time today to tell us more about your life as a pilot and sharing some glimpses into your very personal story and also your recent shift back to being an HGV driver for Tesco. As I mentioned before, as someone who orders our groceries from Tesco, I just want to personally thank you for everything you’re doing for the country right now. I also just want to wish you the very best of luck with one day hopefully returning to becoming a pilot again.

Aaron: Thank you very much, Joseph, for giving me this opportunity to come and talk to you and hopefully inspire some people.

In addition to the enormous human toll the 2020 coronavirus pandemic has had throughout the world, the virus has also had a significant impact on people’s careers. Some have seen their jobs eliminated, work projects cancelled, roles furloughed, industries turned upside down, and businesses completely shut down.

After thinking really carefully about who I wanted to feature in this episode of Career Relaunch, I decided that financial controller Liya Dashkina would be the perfect individual. Liya, who’s also a listener to Career Relaunch, decided a few months ago to resign from her job in London and move back to Australia to be with her partner while continuing to work remotely. Her three-month notice period was supposed to wrap up at the end of March, after which, she was planning to explore new career options in Australia.

Then, the pandemic hit.

The sudden uncertainty and upheaval she’s now facing in her career is similar to other stories I’ve heard from clients and listeners who have suddenly had their career plans upended.

I hope you find this conversation helpful as you figure out how to bounce back from whatever setbacks you may be experiencing in your own career during this COVID-19 crisis.

Liya requested I share this poem excerpt, related to some of the things we discussed during our conversation.

If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open the doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be. The adventure is its own reward — but it’s necessarily dangerous, having both negative and positive possibilities, all of them beyond control.

During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I talked about trying to find your optimal path to living with this pandemic. To decide on something in your career or life to let go of, at least for the time being.

You can absolutely come back to it later, but I’d like you to consider loosening your grip on what you had expected to do, and focus instead on what you may have to do at this moment given the unprecedented times we’re in. And to try to embrace it . . . because maybe in the long run, we’ll all come out of this coronavirus pandemic having reinforced the aspects of our careers and lives that truly matter most.

Born in Russia, Liya Dashkina moved to Australia at the age of 15 where she completed her high school and university studies, qualifying as a chartered accountant and a solicitor. In 2010, her job brought her to London, where she spent the last decade working mostly in the finance industry. In 2018, having always had a keen interest in the fashion industry, she made the decision to leave her career in banking to join a fashion media start-up. At the beginning of 2020, she moved back to Australia to be with her partner, whilst continuing to work remotely during this transition. Be sure to follow Liya on LinkedIn and Instagram.

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!

Teaser (first ~15s): It is trying to figure out whether to ride it out and wait a couple of months and then get back to what the original plan was or altering your plans and altering your original idea where you saw yourself.

Joseph: Good morning, Liya. I know it’s pretty early over there in Sydney, so I really appreciate you making the time to come on to the show.

Liya: Good morning, Joseph.

Joseph: I’d like to talk with you today about a few different things, including balancing practical career decisions with your true interests, making a big international move for personal reasons right when your life is flowing, and also what it takes to break into a new industry.

First off, I got to say we’re recording this in early April 2020. This is actually the first episode I’ve recorded in a while after taking a break from the show.

Right now, the main thing on everyone’s mind is this corona virus, which is very much still a global pandemic at this moment and seems to be just getting worse and worse by the day. I actually just heard a few minutes ago on the news that the global cases of corona virus have now passed one million and had more than doubled just over the past week alone.

Here in the U.K., we’re on a national lockdown. This is clearly affecting every single person out there. I was wondering if you could start by painting a picture of your situation there in Sydney, Australia, and exactly what your life has been like the past couple of weeks.

Liya: We are currently in a lockdown in Sydney and trying to adapt to this new reality and the new way of living. Sydney is not the worst place to be stuck in a lockdown. I think we’re a little bit behind the U.K. and the U.S. in terms of the timing of lockdowns and restrictions, which seem to be about a week behind the U.K.

It has been an interesting time obviously, a very anxious time for many people, both from a personal perspective and professional perspective as well. It’s just very similar. Everyone seems to be on the same page, just taking it day by day and adapting as we go along.

Joseph: I’m going to try to stick with the typical format I follow on this show. I do want to go back in time, just like I normally do, and talk about your historical career and your transitions, but before we get to that, I just want to stick to this topic of the corona virus for just another moment here.

One reason why I wanted to have you on the show, Liya, is because I know you’ve recently moved back to Australia right before this outbreak happened. You had a certain vision of how things might shape up there.

I know you’re not a healthcare worker—nor am I, nor are either of us on the frontlines of dealing with this pandemic in a way that healthcare workers or delivery drivers or many other people are—but what have you found to be the most challenging part of what’s going on at this very moment?

Liya: I think outside of the obvious, personal things like being away from your family, which I’ve actually found very difficult, because my family are all in Russia still. Even though I have been living away from them for over 20 years now, it is at a time like this that I found it particularly difficult. I feel it very acutely.

In terms of the work situation, there are two things. One is the uncertainty with respect to time. You don’t really know how long you are going to be in this situation, how long to plan for. It makes it very difficult.

Secondly, trying to figure out when you are caught out in a stage of flux, especially in a transition period, it is trying to figure out whether to ride it out and a couple of months and then get back to what your original plan was or to retreat into safety or a more traditional secure job if it does come along, but that means altering your plans and altering your original idea where you saw yourself in the next 12 to 24 months.

Joseph: Yeah, I totally hear you on all of those things you just mentioned. There’s so much in there that I want to unpack. I do want to come back to it, but the one that really struck me was what you mentioned at the very beginning about being far away from your family. I’m also far away from my mother and my sister.

What I found most unsettling about this whole situation and what makes it I think different than being far away from your family in other instances is that you can’t actually go and see them if anything were to come up. If anything were to happen with our parents or people we care about, we can’t actually go and be there with them.

I just found that to be a really unsettling feeling right now, in addition to all those things you mentioned about not really being able to plan for anything at this moment.

Liya: I think that’s the general overarching thing I found about this whole corona virus crisis that the restriction of movement is just something we’re so not used to. We are very used to being in control of most parts of our lives, and this is completely outside of our control. Being told that you cannot go somewhere, being told that you may not see your family for 6 to 12 months at this point for me, it takes a little while to process and understand. I don’t know if I’ve actually fully reconciled it in my mind.

Joseph: I would like to come back and talk about your current situation and the situation right now and how you’re handling it. Just a quick snapshot, what exactly are you doing in your career right now, before we go back in time and then go through your history?

Liya: At the moment, I am still working for my London employer. I’m working remotely. It is a fashion media startup. I was meant to be transitioning, rolling off at that job, and trying to find my next opportunity here in Sydney longer term. That’s where I still am.

Joseph: What a time to try to do that too. We’ll come back to that.

Let’s go back in time now and talk about your time—this is going to be a little confusing, because you were in Australia before, then you moved to London, and then now you’re back in Australia. I’d like to go all the way back to the first time you were in Australia. I know you spent the first part of your life in Russia. What led you to initially move to Australia, before you came to London?

Liya: When I moved, I was 15 years old. I come from a family where it’s a very traditional, rather conservative family in Russia. One of the big things in our family was always education. Both my mom and dad are very, very keen to give their children a better life than they had and give them better opportunities.

When I was 15, they wanted to send me somewhere to study English. Australia seemed like a good idea. I was meant to be here for a year or two just to finish off my high school and then go back to Russia.

Moving at such a formative age, it was so difficult for me. It was so challenging to adapt and to take on this new life that when I got to a place of comfort, I didn’t want to and uproot myself again. By that stage, I formed friendships and applied for university and decided to stay here for a while. I was here for 10 years before then moving to London.

Joseph: You studied accounting and law at university there, and then you went on to work in a Big Four accounting firm, is that right?

Liya: Yes, exactly.

Joseph: How did you go from being in Australia, working in accounting, to then ending up in London in 2010?

Liya: Because of the combination of law and commerce that I studied, when I went into the accounting firm, I was allocated into the tax division. I was working in expatriate taxation, which means that we were looking after people who were being sent to work in Australia and Australians who are being sent to work overseas.

Through that, I got an opportunity to myself be an expat and experience what our clients go through and be sent to London for a year to work in our London office. It was something that was being offered on a continuous basis to people at my level, and I jumped at the opportunity, because at that stage, I had never been to London.

Joseph: At some point, I know you came over here to London, which is where I’m based. This show is all about transition, so I’ve got to talk a little bit about your interest in fashion. At some point, you decided to pursue your interest in fashion.

You mentioned when we spoke before that being in London fueled this. Could you just explain how did you get interested in fashion, and how did you attempt to get into fashion?

Liya: When I moved to London, I was just so exhilarated by being in a big city, not really knowing anyone and having to make new connections. I looked at it as a positive and exciting opportunity.

At the time, it was the rise of blogging and street style. Through the bloggers’ fair, I had connected with someone who’s a photographer and we became friend. I started hanging out in that environment and absolutely loved it. This is before blogging and street style became a multi-billion pound industry.

I was hanging around there, and I started trying to think, ‘How can I be in this world? How can I transition into this world but still doing what I do and being who I am?’

Joseph: At that moment, was this something that you felt you would rather do instead of working in finance or accounting? Was that becoming clear to you at this moment?

Liya: Yes. I was trying to explore how I could do that and how I can go into that space. I was casting my net quite wide and looking at accounting and finance but also how I could maybe go via the language route.

I spoke Russian. I speak Russian fluently. That’s one of the things that I considered at the time. I found an internship with a fashion house in London. I was looking at sales to Russian client to the CIS region at the time.

Joseph: I know when we spoke before, you mentioned that this initial attempt at transitioning into fashion didn’t actually end up working out. What exactly happened?

Liya: I was young and naïve. To cut a long story short, I ran out of money. London is a very expensive place. I think when you read a lot of this stories and success stories and experiences, people never talk about money.

I hadn’t planned properly. I thought I would be lucky, and I would find a job, not realizing that the industry is actually very, very difficult to get into but also very difficult to stay. The competition is very high. I loved my time working at this particular studio. I’ve made some great friends. I’ve got experience, but I could no longer afford to work in fashion.

I basically realized that I had no choice, and I had to go back into a more stable job if I wanted to afford my rent and my lifestyle, well any lifestyle in London, really.

Joseph: Now, I would be really interested to hear what that was like for you to let go of what you really enjoyed doing and return back to the corporate world. I’m just trying to imagine the dichotomy between those two worlds – the fashion industry, very forward thinking, and then more of the traditional corporate world.

I think I recall you ended up going to Barclays at the time, which is quite an established traditional bank, at least from the outside looking in.

Liya: There were two conflicting views. One is I obviously wanted to be closer to the creative world. One of the things that attracted me to fashion, in the first place, is that the people are so passionate and enthusiastic and creative. Going back into the corporate world, it was a bit of a shellshock. I obviously have the cultural element of my family views and how family viewed my whole foray into fashion.

Joseph: How did they view that?

Liya: Russian culture is very similar to a lot of eastern cultures in that way that a serious job is a lawyer, an engineer, an accountant, or a doctor. Anything outside of that is not a safe and sound career. I think my parents were very worried about me in terms of, they called it, a hobby job. I think there was a lot of pressure and a lot of not wanting to disappoint your family, in that sense.

I basically realized at that point that I didn’t really have a choice. The reality has set in in terms of the logistics of living. It was disappointing, but also at the time, I felt, ‘You know what? Not everything has to be a success in life. Sometimes it’s the experience that really matters.’

I was so happy that I actually got to take the leap, experience, find out, and not die wondering. I think we’re so focused with such a results-driven society where everything you do needs to become a success, or you have to achieve a result. In this case, me, I was actually quite happy that I was brave enough to actually step outside of my comfort zone and experience it.

Joseph: It sounds like it was a moment where you really went for it, which I think is really admirable. Those moments in our lives end up being so rewarding and so memorable in so many ways, and yet you had to make this practical move, which is actually quite a salient point that I know a lot of people are thinking about right now – balancing your hopes and your dreams with the realities of the environment.

You go back and you work in banking, and you do that for a few years, and then you started to get a bit of an itch. Can you walk me through what triggered that?

Liya: I spent a few years working very hard and trying climb the career ladder and do all things that you’re meant to be doing. I was actually quite good at it, and I had a very good experience.

After Barclays, I went into a smaller financial services institution in London. That was a really positive experience for me. I really came into my own in my career and started kicking goals and achieving things and really enjoyed it.

But at some point, I think you get to a stage where just hard work is no longer enough. To be truly successful, you need to be very invested and interested and engaged in what you are doing. That was the issue I was facing, that ‘take that next step,’ and to really succeed, I had to go all in.

I think the timing was interesting because I was in my early to mid-30’s. It is a time I think where you tend to stop, take a breath, and assess, and take stock of where your life is and where your career is. That’s when I started thinking, ‘Okay, is that all it is?’

Actually, it’s around that time that I discovered your podcast. I started listening to it. I was binging on it. I couldn’t get enough, because I was getting all these stories of people who are in the same shoes as me. It was very, very helpful. I think it was actually quite inspiring and motivational for me to actually take the leap and start looking into what it is that I wanted to do going forward.

Joseph: You mentioned the word ‘meant to be’ earlier when you were describing what you are meant to be doing, which I always think is a really interesting topic. What should we be doing versus what are we meant to be doing versus what do we want to be doing. How did you figure out where you were meant to be?

Liya: I tried to figure out what was important to me, what drove me. I think it’s misleading to think, ‘Do what you love.’ I think it needs to be a little bit more granular than that.

Once you figure out what drives you—for some people its money, for some people it’s power, for some people it’s purpose—whatever it is, you need to figure out what makes you tick and what makes you get up in the morning. By thinking that, I realized that for me, purpose was very important and what I associate myself with. The why is very important.

I started thinking about that and what I’ve been interested in, and also trying not to start over as such, but try to combine it. Was there any way that I could combine my interest in fashion with what I had already done and the person that I had become by that stage?

I didn’t go on this big job hunt. I actually focused, honed in on this one company that I work for now, The Business of Fashion. I was spending my entire free time either reading their content or listening to their podcasts. I’m really, really enjoying what they were putting out there into the world. They really opened my eyes into some of the issues in the world of fashion that I’ve never even considered.

By figuring out what was important to me, and by figuring out what I was doing in my spare time that didn’t feel like work, that’s how I eventually landed at the conclusion.

Joseph: I think you mentioned before when we spoke, it took six months for you to actually land at the role that you wanted. Persistence is something we talk a lot about on this show. I think it’s especially relevant right now. What were the steps that you took during this time to stay on the radar of the eventual employer that you ended up working for?

Liya: One of the jokes at our company is that I employed myself essentially, because I applied for a job, and I wasn’t really qualified to do the job that was going at the time. I thought, ‘You know what? I’m never going to get this.’

I wrote a letter to the CEO, explaining all the reasons why I was wrong but all the reasons why I should be hired and why I should be in the company. I heard somewhere that in this day and age, you sign an envelope by hand, people will always open it because how often do you get an envelope that is signed by hand? That’s exactly what I did.

Anyway, that lead to them reaching out, and I went for coffee with our head of people and just stayed in touch, and I said to him, ‘Would you mind if I checked in with you every other month?’ Eventually, six months later, a job came up. I applied, and I still had to go through the whole process, the application process. Eventually, it paid off.

The important lesson here is that building relationships takes time. Sometimes, you need to go into it without the certainty that there will something at the end.

Joseph: It sounds like this ended up working out. You end up working for The Business of Fashion. We’re almost to the present day now.

You mentioned when we spoke before that at time moment when you were in London and you’re working at The Business of Fashion and you were in the industry and the sector that you want to be in, your life was exactly how you wanted it. Yet, you ended up deciding to move to Sydney.

Could you just explain what prompted you to return to Sydney, and what was happening for you at that time with your life in London?

Liya: Life happens when you’re busy making plans.

I was at a point where everything was going great. I was looking at my life thinking, ‘Finally, yes. This is my perfectly design life. This is what I want to be.’ Then I reconnected with an ex-boyfriend of mine, who is based out of Sydney. For a number reasons, he’s not able to move back to London.

I was faced with a question of choice and choosing. At the time, I looked at it as choosing between a man and a job. That was very daunting for me. Looking back at it now, I don’t think it was the right way of looking at it. My inner feminist felt very guilty because I thought, ‘Well, I worked so hard to get this job. I worked so hard to build this life. What am I doing? Can I actually leave all these behind and choose this other path?’

That was very difficult. That was a tough choice because it’s two things that you don’t necessarily want to be choosing between.

Joseph: You ultimately did decide to move to Sydney. I can just imagine how tough that decision was because I’ve been in a very similar situation myself, as you know, before I moved to London.

How did you envision things going? What were your plans when you decided to move to Sydney?

Liya: I realized that I was not defined by my job or by the company that I work for or even the country that I live in, that I have a choice of how to define myself, and I hold the narrative around that. That was very powerful for me because it wasn’t that, by choosing Sydney, I was giving up on something. I then chose to look at it as an opportunity to potentially reinvent myself yet again roll the dice, go on an adventure, do something different. That’s how I dealt with that.

That was my thinking. I wanted to keep an open mind, see what’s out there. I know that the industry is very different. The fashion industry is a lot smaller. The media landscape is very different here in Australia. I really want to just get in touch with as many people as possible, have a chat, and see where I land.

After having done all that thinking and all of that evaluating, by the time I landed here, I was actually feeling very positive and very open minded.

Joseph: That was at the beginning of 2020.

Liya: Exactly.

Joseph: You’re going to networking events, you’re feeling quite positive about how things can shape up there, and then corona virus hit.

I recall you mentioning before that you actually had already put in your notice with your current company at the time, where the notice period was coming to an end in March.

Liya: Basically, I was meant to do my three months with BoF and finish off here. Hopefully within three months, I was able to find a job. I felt like I really started making progress. Through my networking events, I got in touch with an executive coach who very kindly decided to take me on as a pro bono case and mentor me through my transition here because she’s been through very similar experiences to me.

That has been great, because it taught me that you don’t have to do it on your own. If you surround yourself with the right support network and with people who believe in you and support you, that can be actually quite powerful.

Then corona hit, and everything came to a halt. The whole world stopped. Definitely all the conversations we’ve had were put on freeze indefinitely at this point.

Joseph: This is the last thing, Liya, that I’m hoping to talk with you about before we wrap up with what some of the things are that you’re doing at this moment. How are you dealing with the lack of clarity and the free fall that people feel that they’re in when they suddenly have the rug pulled out from under them for reasons completely outside of their control? How are you dealing with this?

Liya: You have to adapt. There’s no point in sitting there and thinking, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if and only if?’ That’s not how it works.

In any adversity, there can always be opportunity, but you really need to work hard to go and find it. I started to try and see the positives, if there were any, of this situation. Letting go of control, I think that that free fall that you mentioned can be actually incredibly liberating, because all of a sudden, the boundaries have been lifted. You know when people say, ‘If the world was to end tomorrow, what would you do?

Now, you get the opportunity. The world is not ending, but the world has stopped. What are you doing? If you could do anything, what would it be? It allows us to get creative and to find opportunities outside of what you’re doing now. I think it’s a great time to reset, rethink, and to create not just in a little creative way, but just take some time.

The other thing that was interesting is that it’s an incredible learning experience as well, looking at how the businesses are reacting, how people are reacting, what they’re doing, how they’re pivoting, how they’re adapting. First and foremost, this is obviously a human tragedy, and it’s very, very sad. The scope of this problem is huge.

For me, I try to get the most out of living at this time and living through it and taking away some important lessons of how to manage businesses and how to manage your own life and your own mental health.

Joseph: You mentioned earlier that we’re all so achievement-focused and how that can actually blind us to what really matters. I really feel this is moment, as you mentioned earlier, when we’re almost all forced to think about what really matters. Have you had a moment to give that any thought?

Liya: The one big take away is that what really matters is health and your family and the well-being of people around you. That is number one priority.

There’s a lot of fear out there in the world. Fear, initially when you think of fear, you think it’s negative, sentimental, negative feeling. Actually, fear can be good as well. By overcoming fear, it gives you resilience. It creates bravery. Whether it’s fear of death or fear for your health, fear for your job security, all of that eventually, when you overcome it, makes you more resilient.

Joseph: Definitely. I would love to wrap up, Liya, by talking a little bit more about how you are managing some of your own thoughts. I know that one of the things that you’re doing right now is you’re doing a lot more writing these days on LinkedIn. Can you just tell me a little bit more about what you’re writing about?

Liya: I’ve taken this opportunity to focus on building up my personal brand a little bit, because I don’t know when my career will grow and how it will progress.

One of the things that I thought would be good is to write a little bit about my experience. Obviously, a lot of people out there have gone into the world of working from home or smart working, and it’s very new to them. I have been doing this for the last three months, and I realized that actually, perhaps I have something to share that could be useful for people.

I sat down and started writing down my thoughts and my experience about spending three months being so far away from my team and working remotely and what that has been like. I try to put down some tips and observations of this new world of remote, I guess.

Time, I think, is one of the most precious resources. Interestingly, around this crisis, people have time. People are willing to talk. People are willing to connect. Everyone’s very open. That’s one of the things I noticed, and I’ve been trying to do from my end with respect to my career development, I guess.

Joseph: That’s fantastic. We’ll definitely include a link to your LinkedIn profile in the show notes.

One other thing that, I think, you mentioned to me before was that The Business of Fashion also has some events that could be relevant to people right now. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?

Liya: One of the things that Business of Fashion does outside of editorial and news coverage of the business side of the fashion industry is actually events.

As you can imagine, running events in this current climate is impossible, so we have moved and tried to pivot as much as possible into the digital space. We are running a number of live events where they cover anything from wellness to industry talks to career-related talks

Most of them are actually free, so you don’t have to be a subscriber. I’ve been following all of them myself as well because it’s great to just connect with other people to talk about things and to realize that we’re all in this together.

We also have a number of short online courses on not only fashion but also things like building your career, which is probably one of my favorite courses that we’ve done. It’s run by Musa Tariq, who’s the global head of marketing for Airbnb experiences.

I would encourage everyone to come check us out. As you probably guessed from this podcast, I’m very passionate about what Business of Fashion does. Check us out at businessoffashion.com, and attend some of our live events.

Joseph: I’m definitely going to do that.

I’ve also noticed that there’s been a major uptick in online virtual activities, which is actually quite convenient right now. There were some in the past, but there’s a lot more of those now. It’s a really convenient way to gain access to and also connect with people you might not have otherwise been able to connect with. Thanks for sharing that.

Thank you so much, Liya, for telling us more about your life, first of all as a financial controller but also how you’ve managed all the various leaps you’ve taken in life into and out of fashion and then back into it, and most importantly the importance of resilience and overcoming your fears during this time of so much uncertainty in the world.

Please stay safe, and I hope things eventually work out for you once things get back to normal. Thanks for being here today.

Liya: Thank you so much, Joseph.

We all have to sometimes wear different hats in our lives and careers. You’re often required to wear different hats in your career if you’re balancing different professional identities or just trying to maintain a certain image at work that doesn’t always reflect how you’re truly feeling inside. In Career Relaunch episode 69, Sophie Scott describes how she balances the work she does as both a psychotherapist and founder of Balance Media.

We had a nice conversation about wearing different professional hats, managing your own wellbeing, and of course, maintaining balance in your life. I’ll also describe how those people who seem to have it all figured out in their careers may still struggling with their own issues.

During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I talked about the importance of acknowledging to yourself that the struggles you’re going through may not have to do with a bad choice you’ve made, approach you’ve chosen, or talent you don’t possess. Instead, your career struggle may just be a very normal part of the situation you’re in, a struggle that many other people would also have if they were in a similar situation. Consider cutting yourself some slack and reminding yourself you’re doing your best with the resources and energy you have.

That’s all you can do.

But if you need a boost, or if you need support, to go ahead and take that step to ask for help. To ask for help from a friend, mentor, or professional who can help you sort through it.

Sophie Scott is the Founder and Editor-in-chief of BALANCE, leading the award-winning, high growth media and lifestyle brand into the top tier of UK publications. She also regularly advises brands on go-to-market strategies and delivers wellness workshops for the likes of L’Oreal, Mediacom and Accenture. She’s coached and mentored at every level, from students to Fortune 500 CEOs, and has completed her 5-year training in Psychotherapy at the Centre for Counselling and Psychotherapy Education.

Follow Sophie on Instagram and Balance on Instagram and Facebook.

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): At one point, I really did reach burnout and ended up in a psychiatrist’s office. Wellness can be synonymous with needing to lead a perfect life and having everything sorted, but all of us are works in progress.

Joseph: Good morning, Sophie. Good to talk with you again. Welcome to Career Relaunch.

Sophie: Thanks so much, Joseph, for having me and for asking me to do this.

Joseph: I know, having followed you on social media, that you have been very busy lately with a lot of different things in your life and your career.

I was wondering if you could just start by telling me about what’s keeping you most busy in your career and your life recently.

Sophie: Absolutely. I am the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of BALANCE, which is a UK based media and lifestyle brand, very much focused on wellness. Our mission is to make wellness accessible to mainstream audiences.

We had our latest issue out last week and a series of events that we ran in conjunction with Fora, which is a big co-working space over in the UK. We had our wellness week. We had podcast lives. We did a podcast live event every Sunday. We did influencer breakfasts. We had events every day. It was lots of fun.

The business is evolving. We’ve just brought on a CEO, which is quite a big step for us actually and something that I feel very excited about not just for the business and helping the business to scale up but also on a personal level, for me to now slightly be able to step back from running the business and focus more on the brand. I’ve also had my psychotherapy work as well that I juggle on a Tuesday.

Joseph: You’re busy with the magazine. You also are running your own psychotherapy practice once a week. Just talking about the magazine briefly—and we’re going to come back to the magazine in a moment. I picked up my first copy of BALANCE in a hotel lobby in London, I remember, a couple of years ago, and it’s got a very cool lifestyle take on this idea of wellness—for those who are not familiar with BALANCE, can you just give a sampling of the types of topics you cover and the angle that you have the magazine take?

Sophie: The first thing is that we are called BALANCE. We try not to be preachy in any way. None of us are perfect. Our philosophy is do your best, live well, live your life to the full. Everybody has to find their own sense of well-being.

We cover mental health a lot, nutrition, workout plans, very much work-life balance, and travel as well, looking at sustainable travel and also spa destinations, guilt-free travel, combining new experiences with philanthropic endeavors.

I suppose it’s all the main areas that you would see across any magazine. The difference is the lens that we look through.

Joseph: Well, this is a show a little bit about wellness, and at the same time, it’s about career evolution and career change and trying to make career choices that allow you to have a life that is full of wellness and fulfillment.

I know you haven’t always been a psychotherapist and the Founder of BALANCE Magazine. Can you take me back to the days when you were involved in the world of film? I’d love to hear a little bit about that chapter of your career, and then we can move forward and talk about your own career evolution and hear a little bit more about how you founded BALANCE, and also how started your own psychotherapy practice. Let’s start at the very beginning.

Sophie: I’ve definitely not had a linear process, a linear journey. I think actually I’ve realize that that’s more normal than I thought.

I started off and went to a pre-academic girls’ school and decided off my volition that I wanted to go to drama school, which I think they were none too pleased about. I took myself off there for a few years and actually went into the world of acting originally, which I suppose had been a childhood dream but also very much linked to my mom who I lost when I was a teenager. I think I was probably playing out something that she would have really wished for herself.

I went to drama school, and I went into acting for a couple of years, but I actually soon realized that I didn’t derive so much fulfillment simply from performing. I felt a little bit like a kind of prop in many ways.

What I really loved was actually writing scripts and screen plays, and I also loved editing them. My sister had setup a film production company called Fahrenheit Films, and I began working with her very, very closely in script development. I also was working freelance for different film companies in the UK and also spent some time over in the States.

The film world is an incredible world, but it’s also a world of make-believe. Unless you have very good people around you, it can get you unstuck and you end up thinking that you’re going to have meetings that are going to change your life and things they promise to you, etc., and they don’t necessarily always follow through.

That led me actually to deciding that I wanted a more grounded and psychological approach to things. I’ve decided to train and to do a foundation course in counselling and psychotherapy. I had also done quite a lot of coaching over the years, more so on the kind of presentation skills front.

What I realized from that was that, regardless of your background and your situation, what people really wanted was someone to listen to them and fundamentally counsel them and help them to get over certain restrictions, barriers that they had in their own life that were kind of prohibiting their confidence.

Anyway, I came back from Los Angeles and decided, ‘Okay, I want to train in counseling.’ I’ve completely fell in love with it and decided to on and do this full five-year training.

Joseph: So you just walked from the original idea of becoming an actress or becoming a screen writer and came back here and pretty quickly pivoted into the world of counseling?

Sophie: Certainly for the first year or so, I still very much had a foot in the film world. I was still working in script development. At that point, I was really enjoying my counseling training. I was starting to become quite inspired about the world of personal development.

Actually, that’s when BALANCE started to slowly but surely take fruition in my mind. I wouldn’t say that there was a kind of clear stop. There wasn’t one definitive moment where I made the decision. I think, for a while, I was juggling to the best of my ability a couple of these different things. Through that process, I was able to make the best decision for my life.

Joseph: I’ve been trying to figure out the best time to ask you about this, and this feels like the right moment to ask you about something that you eluded to briefly earlier. You said you lost your mother when you were a teenager. I think when we spoke before, you said at the age of 14.

Before we get into your transition into becoming a psychotherapist and the rest of your career, I’d love to just take a moment and talk about that. I was wondering if you could take me back to the moment in your life when that happened and explain exactly how things played out at that moment for you.

Sophie: As you said, I was 14. I was at this private, all-girls school. My mom had been ill on-and-off since I was very young, since I was five. She was diagnosed with cancer and went into remission for years. We knew that it was getting very serious. The cancer had moved into her liver and her bones, and we sort of, at that point, knew that it would be a matter of months, if not weeks.

My sister, to whom I’m incredibly close, who is a decade older than me, said, ‘Just go and see a counselor.’ It ended up being a massively defining thing for me, because of course now, I’ve gone on to become a psychotherapist myself, but also the particular strain of psychotherapy which she practiced was the one that I’ve ended up pursuing, which is an integrative transpersonal psychosynthesis approach, very much looking at a person as whole, I suppose inspired by—what’s that roomy quote? The wound is where the light enters you. I suppose that’s been the basis of my own experience, as someone experiencing therapy but also giving therapy.

Through that process, I was able to process the huge loss that I’d experienced, which I think never leaves you. It’s very much an on-going process. It also helped me to very much grow into the person that I am. Yes, I would say that losing my mom has been my greatest curse but also a blessing in so many ways, as strange as that may sound.

Joseph: I know this must be tough, but can you describe in words exactly what impact losing your mother so early on in your life has had on your outlook and perspectives?

Sophie: It may have taken away some of my fear. I would say, naturally, I can be quite an anxious person, but I never let that hold be back, in terms of the way that I lead my life. Actually, it’s made me take risks. I think a lot more than perhaps the next person.

Also, without going into it too much, my mom, I think, wasn’t fulfilled in her life and her career. I have been very committed to living my purpose. Of course, that’s an on-going thing. That changes all the time. Your purpose isn’t fixed, but very much I’m having a kind of self-actualizing approach to life, which is that I want to lead my best life and be as true to myself as possible because it could all be over quick.

Joseph: It must be so hard to lose somebody so important to you so early in life. At the same time, it must instill into you so much perspective that you just wouldn’t have otherwise, I guess, if you hadn’t gone through that. Thank you for sharing that.

I’d like to go back to your career, because I think this does relate to another question I was going to ask you, which was how you ultimately decided to pursue a full career as a psychotherapist. It sounds like some of the seeds may have been planted from a very early age.

Sophie: I think it’s important to say I don’t do it as a full-time career. My training and everything has taken a lot longer, and it took a lot longer than I would have hoped, because at the same time, I was setting up BALANCE.

Joseph: Right, of course. No small feat.

Sophie: I set a new field that it formed the basis of BALANCE. Although I wear very different hats between the different roles—and maybe that’s something that we can go onto in a bit—fundamentally, I think that they go hand in hand. I don’t terribly see one as starting and one as ending. I wouldn’t say that there was that definitive moment in my life where I thought, ‘Right, this is what I want to do.’

These days, I think it’s just quite normal not to just have one career or one job. Most of us have dual careers or even triad careers which give us a greater sense of balance and fulfillment. Perhaps that means that you don’t put all your eggs in one basket, at least not to begin with.

Joseph: I’m very curious about this exact point that I think you’re making about what some people describe as a portfolio career or where you have multiple interests. How did these two worlds co-exist for you? Because I know you only see clients once a week, and you’re dedicating quite a bit of your time to running BALANCE.

I’m just speculating, but I’d imagine that you have to show up very differently when you show up in front of a patient or client versus your team at BALANCE. Can you just explain how the two co-exist for you and how well that works for you?

Sophie: I think it’s something I’m still navigating. I definitely don’t feel that I already have got the magic formula for that yet.

Actually, it’s been a bit of a personal struggle at times for me, and it’s made me question my own boundaries and ethics around this. Certainly, the hat that you wear as a therapist when you’re with clients is different to the one that you wear especially with your team.

I’m hoping that what it does give me is a genuine interest and capability and capacity to listen to people and really try and support team members when I know that they’re going through their own struggles. I can empathize. I have the ability to put myself in other people’s shoes quite easily. I think from that perspective, it’s been tremendously useful.

Learning about certain theories and principles such as projection and transference has been very useful, because of course when you are a boss lady, so to speak, there are all sorts of projections that you get which is very different to, I think, when you’re just part of the team.

I like to think of myself as just part of the team, but the reality is I think I’m seen as the Founder and the Director. That’s a difficult one, actually. It means that you have to make difficult decisions as well. How much you may wish to share with your team is a real question, and we try and be more transparent at BALANCE rather than less transparent.

There does need to be a limit to that because you do bear the brunt of quite a lot of stress when you’re running something, and you can’t always let that show. In that way, I’ve learned some kind of really good skills. Being poker-faced, I suppose, from being a therapist and taking that into the world of business can be quite useful.

Joseph: How much of some of the things that you do in therapy do you feel are also in line with the tips that you eventually share in your publication in BALANCE?

Sophie: I would say very aligned actually. One of my greatest pleasures has been commissioning other therapists, psychologists, coaches that I really rate, that I personally kind of learned from by getting them to write for BALANCE. I suppose that’s what I mean when I say it’s really underpinned what BALANCE’s mission is. Absolutely, it’s a core part of what we write about.

Joseph: Let’s talk a little bit more about BALANCE. I know that you’re spending quite a bit of your time on the magazine. Although it sounds like you’re now handing off some of the responsibilities that you’ve been in charge of. You’re doing some psychotherapy. You’re finding that some of the tools can be useful to a broader audience.

How exactly did you go about creating the magazine? Because I’d imagine there are a lot of people out there who think they want to start a magazine, but it involves so many different things that probably aren’t so obvious on the surface. I’d just be interested to hear about the actual creation and the inception of the magazine.

Sophie: I was, as I said, sort of benefiting from a lot of learnings at that time, a lot of theories, meeting amazing experts, and having really fascinating conversations. I thought, ‘Wow!’ I reckon a lot of people would be interested in this type of content, in being involved in this kind of conversations. Actually, where will they go to get such a thing?

I remember there was a morning where I was going on to Tube. I was looking around me and thinking how different that world seems to the world that I had experienced the night before when I was at college and we were talking about psychology and the idea of awakening. On the Tube, people tend to look kind of really disconnected and really dead almost, like we’re boat sick. We can all fall into that, right?

Joseph: Yeah, it’s miserable sometimes on the Tube.

Sophie: I was looking, and I’m seeing what they were reading. The vast majority of people were reading some of the free newspapers that you get.

A lot of the headlines are kind of really fear-mongering and I wouldn’t say a very positive affirmations for people. They definitely focus much more on the shadow and the dark side of the world as opposed to trying to give people a sense of hope or even a sense of perspective.

I thought how amazing if what I’m learning and some of the experts that I’m speaking to could actually contribute to a publication of our own that was free, that was actually going to really be of value to people and may help them to connect not just one another but more so to themselves.

I came up with this idea. Every June, we have a free newspaper. We’ll turn to the newspaper for London and brainstorm names. At the time, I knew somebody who was heavily involved in the distribution side of City AM, which is kind of London’s business newspaper, and basically managed to get pretty much free distribution across London outside the underground stations in these sorts of boxes. I don’t know if you’re familiar with those boxes.

Joseph: Yeah, everybody, literally thousands of people, millions maybe of people are passing by those spots.

Sophie: Yeah. Right. We had much smaller circulation at that time, but I felt very proud actually of the fact that I could see that the issues were going. I was getting a lot of very positive feedback from readers, but also from brands who were saying things like, ‘Oh, we love to be involved in this, but how big is your circulation? If you were to do it a bit bigger, we’d love to back you. We’d love to advertise.’ Actually, Planet Organic said, ‘We’d love to stock your magazine or newspaper. Let us know when it’s ready.’

I shopped the concept around and ended up going into business with a publishing house who had been around for 30 years or so, family-based publishing house. They’re still my business partners today. We re-launched it as a magazine, went out there on the hustle to get advertising because all of our revenue comes from brands and from sponsorship.

Together with some investment from the publishing house, we managed to bankroll the first issue or so. Really from there on in, it’s been a case of building a brand, building a loyal customer base, and a team to serve that.

It happened organically, but it was definitely part of my master plan as well.

Joseph: That’s the business side of it. I’m also curious about what it’s been like for you to start your own magazine, having gone through all that hustle and reaching out to different people you knew and gaining the distribution.

I’d be really interested to hear about the impact that this journey has had on your life as a whole.

Sophie: It’s been, by large, very positive. I have got to live out a lot of dreams and fantasies that I’ve had. I feel tremendously proud of every time I, let’s say, get on the underground and see somebody reading a copy of BALANCE or people who come along to our events and tell us how much it means to them being part of a community of like-minded individuals.

On the other hand, it’s been an incredible amount of hard work when you’re starting up from the bottom. I entered an industry that actually I hadn’t really been a part of in terms of publishing. I’d always been in the media, but more on the production side of things.

I’ve had a lot of learning to do, and there’s definitely been a lot of needing to prove myself. I think that’s not just based being a newbie to the industry but also being a woman sadly and a youngish woman. Although I think I probably look younger than I am. There’s been quite a lot of needing to prove myself, which has been pretty challenging at times but has also given me a kind of fire in my belly.

However, in terms of my own health and wellbeing, that’s definitely suffered at times, which I suppose is the ultimate irony.

Joseph: I was going to ask you about that, because I feel like I would be remiss if I didn’t ask you about the challenges that you faced trying to balance it all, not only the psychotherapy practice with running a media company but also what I would imagine is the on-going hustle that is required whenever you’re trying to create and build something and scale it.

Sophie: At one point, I really did reach burnout and ended up in a psychiatrist’s office in tears, begging him for help, anti-anxiety medication. I had some CBT therapy which really helped as well actually, because I’ve obviously been in a form of psychotherapy for years and years, which has worked perhaps on a much deeper level.

I needed some tools day-to-day to help me navigate the kind of sheer busyness of my life and feeling slightly pulled from pillar to post. I think it is really important to talk about this, and especially as somebody who works in wellness.

I think wellness can be synonymous with needing to lead a perfect life and having everything sorted, but that’s obviously far from the case. Actually, it’s people that are struggling and trying to fit lots in that actually really need to be honest and focus on their wellness, perhaps more than the next person.

I’m quite passionate about focusing on mental health as a core tenet to wellbeing and saying, ‘Hey, the people on Instagram – those influencers, those wellness authors, they’re also just trying to figure things out. It’s just that maybe they have benefitted from certain training courses and education experiences in their life that give them the stature and the confidence to go out there and share what they’ve learned, but all of us are works in progress.’

Joseph: In the work that I do, I’ve actually found some similar theme, Sophie, where things are not always as they seem on the surface. On the surface, it may seem like, ‘Hey, BALANCE magazine, it’s taking off.’ Everybody’s heard about it. At the same time, there’s a lot of challenges that go on behind the scenes.

I found that with a lot of people, it seems like they’ve got it all figured out, but actually if you dig a little bit, everybody’s got something going on that they may not be either very open about or just the people just don’t know about.

Sophie: It always strikes me how many companies, whether they are startup, scaleups, or big, established companies behind closed doors, it’s kind of always a bit of a shit show. There are processes that aren’t as neatly tied up as they should be. There’s conflict there, conflicts of vision and purpose. I think that it’s really important that we can just be more honest about that and say that we’re all trying to do our best.

I definitely think, though, that naivety can be a gift. I think particularly when people are starting a new career, you do often feel a bit like a fish out of the water. ‘I don’t know anything. I’m having to start from the bottom up.’

On the other hand, you are also not having to overcome years of preconceived ideas about an industry or about ways of working. I think that’s also really important to say that – that actually, you can build something much more in the vein of how you may want to build a career or a company, because you’re not coming at it with a lot of history.

Joseph: That’s a great segue, Sophie, into a couple of the last things I was hoping to talk with you about before we wrap up here, which are just some of the things you’ve learned along the way of your very interesting career journey.

I think you just eluded to this, this naivete. I’m curious. What’s something that you didn’t think would be tough but has been tough about either running your own psychotherapy practice or starting your own magazine or balancing both?

Sophie: I have toughened up. I’ve had toughened up quite a bit, and I think the process of getting there has been more difficult than I would have anticipated. In terms of letting people go when they’re not a cultural fit for the company or actually just in terms of the actual output, that’s been really tough to me, but it’s also been a tremendous learning.

In terms of things that I wish I’d have known, I wish I’d have known that I wasn’t a freak for wanting to change careers, that I wasn’t alone and that actually, maybe 10 years ago, it was less usual, but these days, it’s very typical. I think they say that you should prepare yourself for four to five careers in your lifetime.

Actually, if you think of your life in chunks as opposed to as a whole, it certainly makes it less stressful. That’s very much something that I try to do these days.

Joseph: What about when you think back to your own life journey of losing your mother early on to the struggling with anxiety at moments to eventually becoming a psychotherapist yourself and ultimately becoming a media entrepreneur, what’s something that you’ve learned about yourself along the way?

Sophie: I have learned that I’m a lot more resilient than I realize but also that I’m a lot more flexible and open. I think that flexibility is really key. I always say I’m a generalist rather than a specialist, but actually there’s tremendous strength in that, in having those transferable skills and being able to spot opportunities, join dots. I’d say being a quick learner and being flexible and being adaptable.

I think that that probably does go right back to losing my mom and having to adapt to no longer being part of a 2.4 family, which I was really for the first 14 year of my life. As eccentric as my family was, it was relatively conventional at the same time.

I’ve proven my adaptability to myself. I can’t stress enough how important I actually do think that is as a skill. When we hire people, that’s something that I really look out for, because obviously in a startup, you don’t just do one role. There’s often all hands on deck. You have to be flexible, willing to learn, throw yourself in on something new.

We’ve got to keep going, working things out, being flexible, changing with the times, changing with our evolving needs, because we’re not fixed entities. It’s just about making that promise to yourself that actually I’m going to keep using purpose as my primary motivator and checking in if at any point that gets lost.

Joseph: That’s a great tip, just to keep that as your North Star and your compass when you’re dealing with some tough times.

I guess last question for you—because I know you’ve eluded to this a couple of times, Sophie. It was on this topic of burnout. I know that you mentioned you went through a period where you were feeling some burnout—what do you feel was one of the most important steps that you took to manage that more effectively?

Sophie: I know it sounds really silly, but I went on holiday at that point. I ended up when I could only go where I think it was for a week. I literally just disappeared.

One of my favorite lines is ‘When you’re tired, learn to rest, not to quit.’ I would say that’s been a massive learning for me. When you are burnt out, it’s probably not a time to make a decision. It’s a time to stop and to ask for support. I’m lucky I have a fantastic support network around me.

I would really encourage people to go to their GP before it’s too late. Spot the warning signs as well, things like headaches, aches and pains, struggling with sleep, blurred vision, all of these, loss of appetite, all of these things are just to check in with yourself and notice that, and then take action. Tell a friend. Tell your GP.

If you can, get some help. Get some therapy. There are also plenty of amazing tools out there that are free. I use things like Thought Diary as an app, which basically is a CBT-based app. It helps you to work through your problem yourself, gain perspective, and help you with any core beliefs that may be limiting you at that point.

I’d say the main thing is take some time out and don’t make any quick decisions.

Joseph: If people want to learn more about you, Sophie, or BALANCE Magazine or even uncover some tools that you just mentioned to maintain a good balance and wellness in their own lives, where can they go to learn more?

Sophie: You can go to our website which is www.BALANCE.media. Also, please follow us across social, @balanceldn, at BALANCE London. If you want to personally follow me, although I’m not as good at posting on my own personal channels as across BALANCE is, but it’s @sophie.b.scott. Hopefully, you can find some of our content really valuable and insightful.

Joseph: Thank you so much, Sophie, for telling us more about your life a psychotherapist and magazine founder and sharing your personal story with us, and most of all, talking about how you maintained balance in your own life and career. Best of luck with BALANCE, your psychotherapy practice, and everything else you have going on in your life. Thank you so much for being on the show.

Sophie: Thank you so much, Joseph.

Career pivots often involve shifting into an industry or role you know little about, which can make the move that much more daunting. In episode 68 of Career Relaunch, Pip Murray, a former science museum producer turned founder of Pip & Nut, shares her thoughts on what it takes to start your own company, how to build your confidence during transitions, and why taking action is so important to turn your ideas into reality. During the Mental Fuel segment, I also share some thoughts about how to do something you have no idea HOW to do.

My challenge to you, especially if you feel like there’s no way you can do something or you feel like you don’t have the skills, experience, or knowledge to pursue some idea that you would actually find very gratifying, is to sit down, and take an honest inventory of what it would take for you to get yourself to a place where you DID feel comfortable giving it a shot.

It could be a knowledge gap you would need to fill so you can go into the process well-informed, or some specific questions you need to answer, or a set of skills you would need to acquire. Capture exactly what those knowledge gaps, unanswered questions, or missing skills are. Then, take action to address at least one. For example:

I really believe you can be incredibly resourceful when you care enough about an idea you want to pursue. With enough tenacity, you’ll get yourself to a place where you can go for it, knowing that you’ve done the groundwork to give yourself the best shot of succeeding.

Pip Murray is the Founder of the nut butter brand Pip & Nut, which offers a range of eight naturally nutritious nut butters. A keen marathon runner and a fierce foodie, Pip had the inspiration for the brand when she couldn’t find a delicious but nutritious protein source to fuel her training. Taking matters into her own hands, she set about creating her own brand and starting on her Pip & Nut journey. So far it’s encompassed everything from market trading and crowdfunding to national supermarket launches and international expansion.

She’s received a host of industry accolades:

All of Pip & Nut’s products are 100% natural, with absolutely no refined sugars, additives or palm oil. Now four years old, Pip & Nut can be found in 5 international markets and over 5,500 stores around the UK and Europe.

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 (first ~15s): Particularly when you’re going into something new, there’s a weird tipping point where you suddenly start understanding all these things, and you start to be able to say and speak with confidence. It’s actually a really satisfying process to go through. It’s this real learning curve.

Joseph: Good morning, Pip, and welcome to Career Relaunch. It’s great to have you on the show.

Pip: Thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure.

Joseph: I’d love to kick off by just having you tell us what is keeping you busy right now in your work and also the rest of your life.

Pip: So busy at the moment. At work, we’re actually doing a pretty large funding round which I hope we’re going to close in the next 12 months.

I’ve got a lot of new products coming out this year, both within our existing catch bin that we are currently within, which is obviously nut butter and peanut butter. I think it’s six different product launches over the course of the next year, so that’s a really big one for us – a big campaign that we’re planning in September, but all of the hard work happens right now. A lot of plates are being spun at the moment.

Joseph: What about the rest of your life, what’s keeping you busy right now in the rest of your life?

Pip: This is always the challenge with having a startup, isn’t it? It’s like we focus so much on the business, and the rest of your life suddenly sometimes falls by the wayside.

I’m currently moving house actually, which I’m meant to be out house-hunting to find a new place. That’s going to keep me busy, but I’m also going away this weekend for a long weekend, going camping to the Scilly Isles – some fun on the horizon, which is cool.

Joseph: Very cool. We are going to talk a little bit more about Pip & Nut. I do want to come back to that. I would like to focus most of our conversation on your historical career before you were at Pip & Nut and also your time at Pip & Nut.

Before we do that, as an American, I’m always looking for a good peanut butter here in the UK, and I, for many years, really struggled to find a good one here. Then I spotted Pip & Nut I think in the whole foods, and I immediately became a fan. What do you think people should look for when they’re trying to find a good peanut butter?

Pip: For me, it’s all about if it’s natural or not. We don’t put any palm oil in any of our products. It does mean that we get some oil separation on the top of our products, but I actually always think of that as a really great thing. It shows that the product is totally natural. There’s no additives within the products or any palm oil. That’s something that I always look out for.

Obviously, I only eat my own. The less ingredients on the back of the packaging, the better. Use the best quality peanuts and almonds that you can get your hands on, because really, when you’ve only got few ingredients, they make such a difference.

Joseph: One of the things I love about your product is it tastes great and that you also don’t use palm oils. It’s actually really hard to find a peanut butter that doesn’t have palm oils. I think it’s great you’re doing what you’re doing. I also love the range of your flavors. I think I tried your maple nut one. That was the first one I tried, which is very tasty.

We’re going to come back and talk about your journey as an entrepreneur and the Founder of Pip & Nut, but before you were doing this, you were in a very different line of work. Can you tell me about your time as a Producer for the Science Museum in London? Then we’ll move forward from there.

Pip: I studied anthropology at university, which is not very useful for what I do right now. When I was leaving the university, I always assumed that I’d work within the creative sector. I’d always been interested by museums and material culture, which is a big part of what anthropology is about.

When I left university, I started pursuing career within the creative arts, worked at various different art centers across London, and eventually went to the Science Museum where I worked as a theater producer or an assistant theater producer before I started up the brand.

I guess what that role is it’s essentially helping pull together large theater shows in the Science Museum, in particular focused on children theater. You’re working with creatives, as well as technical production, whether it’s lighting and sound producers, as well as obviously the directors themselves and the actors. You’re basically the one to help facilitate and coordinate the whole show.

It’s a really, really interesting job, Probably, I’m of those people that I didn’t actually really hate my job at all, and I thought the career path that I was one was actually pretty interesting and potentially exciting one, so going to start up my own business and moving to a completely new sector, away from more public, creative sector was actually quite a big shift but also something that I wasn’t necessarily pushed. It was certainly a choice and wasn’t necessarily in my initial thinking when I was growing up that I would run my own business.

Joseph: That’s really interesting, because I think some of the founders that we’ve got on this show, many of them actually say that they never had the intention to start their own business. It was the idea that pulled them toward starting their own business. How did you move from theatre production into creating your own peanut butter?

Pip: I actually vividly remember the day that I handed in my notice at the Science Museum. My boss at the time looked at me as if I was crazy because it’s so random and so different that I think he thought I was going absolutely loopy.

I think it takes a long time. I think you don’t quit your job on the first day that you come up with the idea. The idea forming in my brain took me about two years or a year and a half before I actually fully quit my job.

I think that, also, it was partly down to the fact that I had never worked in this sector before. I really, really didn’t know what I was doing. I knew that I needed to get a little more validation for both the product itself that I was forming in my brain and started to create in my kitchen but also need to validate whether or not I actually like the idea of running my own business. Did I enjoy the process of creating a product? I think that’s one of those things that takes time.

I think the key steps, when you are looking at starting your own business and specifically a food one, firstly, you have to develop the recipes. I bought posh, fancy blender and made the products in my kitchen. I’d make 200 at a time, and I’d take those products to a market down in South London. I’d actually road test them on people to see whether or not they liked it. Hopefully, they liked it enough to buy it. That was my validation. That was my way of sense checking whether or not what I was creating was something that people wanted, and it also helped me in getting some direct feedback.

It think that’s something so brutal about selling something to someone on the market: people will instantly love it, or they’ll instantly hate it. I think you could quite quickly understand whether or not you’re onto something.

Once you got that sense check and you’ve tweaked and refined and improve on your product, that was when I was like, ‘Yeah, I think I want to scale this up.’ That’s a whole new set of challenges that you face when you scale something up.

Joseph: How did you decide on peanut butter? Of all the different things that you could invest your time in, I guess you’re pretty busy with your day job, how did you decide that you wanted to devote all of your energies to this particular food product?

Pip: I’d always been interested in the food sector. I’ve lived in London for 12 years now, and it is such a hot bed for amazing food trends. They’ve got a great food scene with all the food trucks that are popping up all around London.

I’d browsed the shelves of whole foods myself as I shop, and I was, like ‘Oh my god, there are just so many great products on the shelves and so many more emerging.’

I think I first was interested in this sector, and I thought there’s an option here where you can be both creative and also have a product that actual does people good. I thought that was really exciting.

I’ve landed on nut butter and peanut butter partly because I am a proper peanut butter addict. I still eat it every single day, not a lie. I love it, if not two or three times a day. It really came from a love of the product.

I was doing a lot of training at the time. I’m doing some marathons, and for me, nut butter on toast or in my porridge, wherever it was, it was my go-to, post-run treat.

I just thought this product is brilliant. It not only tastes unbelievably good, and it’s so addictive. This is also filled with nuts and really wholesome ingredients. It’s not often you get a health food product that actually delivers on flavor as well as functional benefits, like protein and healthy fats and things like that.

The thing that started to actually make me see the gap in the market was that nearly every product that I bought in supermarkets contain palm oil, like I mentioned. In a food product perspective, there was really only just peanut butter on the market. I was like, ‘You know, there are things like almond butters and cashew butters.

The products themselves take flavor really brilliantly, the coconut almond butter was one of our first products that I developed. It’s just a really great flavor combo, and I felt like there wasn’t really a brand taking hold of that. I just really love the fact that this space in the supermarket, which is a bit traditional, a bit tired, hadn’t really seen a brand enter into this space in the past 30 years, which is so open for an innovative brand to come in.

It was all those things that started to come together that I was like, ‘You know what? I think there’s definitely a gap here, and there’s definitely a growing trend with protein and fats and things like that being good for you,’ that I think this could be a business.

Joseph: You also mentioned the two-year transition. Before we talk about how you turned this into a business, I’d be really curious if you could give us a glimpse into what the transition was like, balancing your day job with trying to get this idea and eventual business off the ground. What was that like for you?

Pip: I always say that the setup phase, the startup phase is actually one of the hardest. It’s the most isolating and lonely part for the whole journey, I think.

What I used to find so frustrating about it was that you are so reliant on other people getting back to you. Lots of businesses up and running, you can run a million miles an hour. It’s you’re prerogative to get things out there and start selling and driving the brand forward, but when you’re setting things up, you’re reliant on other people to unlock doors so that you can launch the brand. That, I found really frustrating.

I guess in those early days I was working, I went part-time with my job. Once I tested the products at markets, I decided to give myself some more time and space to able to develop the products properly and really setup the supply chain and things like that.

You end up being a bit Jekyll and Hyde during your work week. You go and do your normal job, do your 9:00 till 5:00, and then outside of these hours, you’re squirreling away on your laptop, trying to figure out which supplier of labels do you want to have and how you’re going to develop brand.

Because they’re so different, it can feel like you’re two different people really. It’s always really hard when you’re setting something up, because you don’t really understand what it is you’re trying to create until something becomes an actual tangible product that is sold in supermarkets. For a lot of the time, you’re having to do a lot of proving yourself and explaining to people what it is that you’re doing.

Whilst it’s exciting because they’ll see you’re developing a product, and it’s the first time that maybe you’re working, that I personally was working independently without any structure to my day at work – three days at the museum, and then the rest of the time, I’d work on the business. The rest of the four days would be on the business. That was really cool and exciting and freeing in lots of ways.

In other ways, you’re finding yourself having to understand how to go and stretch you back into your day and still a bit unsure whether or not it’s going to work. There’s a lot of anxiety there that sits around.

You’d have these highs and low moments. You’d get to break through on a factory as an example. You’d find a factory that can make your products. It feels unbelievably high because it’s a big thing, I feel, in creating your product to have a good supplier. The next day, something else will go wrong. It’s these real swings that you’d find. You’d go for a week or two without nothing really moving because you’re waiting on some information from someone.

Tough period, and I feel for people that are in that stage where it’s one of those things you have to hold on to your vision for the brand and the idea that it will come to life at some point or another. Yes, a fair bit of resilience is needed at that particular point.

Joseph: Let’s shift gears here then, Pip, and talk a little bit more about how you turned this into a business and how you scaled it. At what point did you decide you wanted to devote yourself fully to Pip & Nut?

Pip: At the point I developed the brand, the brand, the look and feel of the product and packaging was there. I’d sourced the factory, and I started to finish. I was almost there with developing the products themselves. At that particular point where I went full-time on the business, I was searching for funding. I was doing lots of pitching to different angel investors.

The weird tangent I had towards that, I entered a competition actually. It was run by a startup company themselves who were doing a bit of a PR campaign. The whole campaign was based around giving a startup a leg up and offering free accommodation and free desk space for three months. I entered on a bit of a whim.

The catch for this whole competition was that it was to live rent-free but in a garden shed in the back garden of their headquarters. I entered on a fleet whim, not expecting to win this at all and ended up winning the competition. I remember getting a call from one of the co-founders of this company saying like, ‘Pip, you’ve won the competition. You’re going to move into the garden shed.’

It’d been a moment of like elation, because I was like, ‘Oh, that’s great. I can quit my job. I don’t have any overheads I had to worry about. I could focus on the business completely,’ but then a bit of fear, because I was like, ‘Oh my god, I’m going to have to live in the garden and be like a feral animal in the back garden.’

If anything, what that competition did to me—and I guess it’s what a lot of people do. They might move in with their parents, but for me, I moved into a shed for the summer—was just gave me really low overheads. It extended my runway for a period of time but also allowed me to completely focus 100% on the business.

I think it’s a really important step that, at some point, you do have to cut the cost. You do almost have to make this your primary job and less of a side hustle. I actually did a crowd funding campaign on Crowdcube—it’s sort of an equity crowdfunding site—and raised ₤120,000, which I completed at the end of the summer, which then allowed me to go continue work full-time on the business, move back into normal accommodation, and get a desk space and a co-working space.

Joseph: I’m listening to this, Pip, and this is a very impressive story. At the same time, I’m listening to this and thinking about other listeners out there who maybe don’t have a background in business, but they’ve got an idea that they’re tinkering with, and they’re thinking about how to turn it into a full-fledged business.

You were a museum producer before. You mentioned you had a background in the arts. How did you manage to figure out the commercial aspects of starting and running your own business? You mentioned pitching, finding a supplier. You mentioned crowd funding. How did you figure out how to do all this?

Pip: I was a complete and utter novice when it came to business, whereas now I love it and actually, it’s probably the element I really enjoy: actually the slightly more commercial parts of the business. For anyone that’s out there that’s thinking, ‘God, I don’t think I can do it because I don’t know how to do finance or I don’t know what model I need to be working to,’ neither did I. I totally fresh-faced it all.

The main thing that you can do to try and upscale yourself is, firstly, shrug off any perception that you can’t do it. Just get over that as soon as you possibly can because you’re going to have to, and there’s no question about it.

Secondly, it’s about then reaching to people that you know and any contacts that you potentially have within the sector that you’re about to enter into. There are a number of brands I loved. I had a few friends also that worked in the industry. I remember trying to get them to connect me with people that could help.

There is a time and a place for consultants as well within any business. For me, I worked with a finance consultant so that I could get to grips with what the model was and what margins I needed to make, what margins other people needed to make and all those really important things that you need to ensure that you’ve got the right structure, financial structure within the business.

Some things I think you definitely need to try and get expertise, and you might, at some point, have to pay some consultancy fees in order to get a proper models and access to information. So much of it you can also get through just learning. I think listening to podcasts like this is one really good way of starting to absorb things that you need to know.

Going to trade events and speaking to people. Going to speaking events where people are talking about the same thing, and trying to grab people at the end of when they’re doing their talks or whatever and seeing if you can get their email address and go for coffee and then pick their brain. People do share information quite openly. Whether that’s a contact name for Selfridges buyer to what margin they make at a certain retail, most people are fairly open with this sort of information.

It’s a gradual process. I think you just need to take it step by step, particularly when you’re going into something new.

There’s a weird tipping point when you suddenly start understanding all these things and you start to be able to say and speak with confidence. It’s actually a really satisfying process to go through. It’s this real learning curve, but then you come out the other end, and you’re like, ‘Wow, I actually have a good grip on what this industry is all about.’

I think it’s all about learning on the job. I’m a big believer that you can teach yourself anything that you need to know. As soon as you possibly can, hire people that can improve on the things that you started.

Joseph: Very good advice. I know your brand’s known for its Nut Butter, Pip. Can we talk for a second about the almond drinks?

Pip: Yeah.

Joseph: I first spotted your almond drinks in Holland and Barrett. I actually liked them a lot. For those of the listeners out there who are not familiar with Holland and Barrett, it’s a very well-known health foods retailer in the UK. I understand that the drinks aren’t necessarily a product line that you’re focused as much on. Can you describe how you thought through whether or not to continue investing into this sub line of your products?

I guess what’s behind my question is that, if anyone out there is listening to this and if ever they started anything of their own and you’ve invested all your energy into something to get it off the ground, it can be hard to know when to let go of that idea and when to move on. How did you think through whether or not to keep pushing this sub line of products?

Pip: We have actually pulled them out of the market now. It was a really tough decision. I developed those products and had such relief that they could work and that they’d be a big part of our business going forward.

When it comes to products and when you launch them, you know very quickly within the first six months whether or not they’re going to really work. Consumers will tell you very quickly whether or not they’re something that will continue to prosper.

I think some of the things that we noticed, for instance, was that even when we’re doing samplings—and so we loads and loads of samplings across our different stores to get people to try our products—the reaction to our almond milk versus what people were like when they tried our nut butters was just so unbelievably different. People were less excited about them. They dropped and not go about for a second sample, all these really soft measures that you start to clock that you’re like, ‘I’m not sure if this is quite right.’

As well for us, we noticed that there are a lot of brands entering that space. When I initially started developing them, there’s still a lot of white space within this particular category. By the time that I’ve finished developing them—it took about a year and a half to develop—it was really crowded. The catch bin itself wasn’t growing as it was two years prior to that.

All these market conditions as well, I was saying, ‘You know what? This is going to be really tough to get this going.’ There were things that we wanted to tweak and change about the products. In the end, I think we decided that it’d be best to focus our energy and our resources and our finances on driving our core bit of our business forward, which is obviously our peanut butters, and really become number one in that sector rather than trying to diversify too soon.

I think it was one of those really hard lessons to learn, but I actually learnt a lot about how important it is to look after what you currently got rather than necessarily feeling that you need to expand really quickly across all these different areas.

Joseph: That’s a great tip. I think that there’s always this temptation to spread yourself a little bit too thin, no pun intended. It can be hard to know where to focus your energies. Very interesting.

The last thing I want to talk about, Pip, before we wrap up are just a few of the lessons you’ve learned after shifting from being an employee to a food brand founder.

You and I first crossed paths, because we both spoke at the marketing academy foundation event at Facebook in London earlier this year. One of the things I heard you say on your panel that you eluded to earlier today was that there are very high highs and very low lows when you’re an entrepreneur. Why do you think that is?

Pip: I think it’s because you just care so much. You are so invested in the brand both in doing well and also financially as well. It’s your livelihood.

I think for me, I have really big ambitions and really high standards to where I think the brand could go, and so when things don’t quite go to plan, you really feel it. Things that don’t go quite to plan are often felt more within small businesses, because whether you, for instance, don’t win a customer that you’re expecting to win, that probably is more meaningful for you as a small business owner in terms of financially than it probably is for a larger business that can switch focus onto a different customer as an example and fill the gaps.

I do think it’s predominantly because you’re emotionally connected to the brand. It’s always like your baby, isn’t it? It’s like something that you’ve nurtured from an early age that you know intrinsically, and therefore if something isn’t quite right, you feel it.

I would say that overtime, you stop reacting so much to everything and anything. I feel like now, I’m much more levelheaded. Yes, there will be days which get me down or that I’ll find tough, but I won’t react to it in such an explosive way than probably I did in the first year or two. I think that’s almost because you start to realize what a real problem is versus one that’s just a bit of a hiccup. That’s just something that you build a level of resilience and a level of understanding about as the business grows.

Having said that, the high is when things are going incredibly well. You’re flying. There’s just no better feeling. There’s such joy in the fact that particular products that you had in your head five years ago is now stocked. Pip & Nut is stocked in about 5,000 stores around the UK, and it’s eaten by thousands of people every day for breakfast – those sorts of feelings. When you hear great feedback from people, it’s just so rewarding, particularly when your product is also doing people good. It’s good for people. That’s even better.

It’s one of the blessings and the curses of running your own business. It’s like a job, but it really isn’t. It’s so much more than that. It’s not just a clock-in, clock-out kind of attitude that you take. You really care.

Joseph: Something else you said on the panel, Pip, was that it’s important to put something out there, even if it’s not 100% finished. What did you mean by that, and why is that so important?

Pip: When you’re starting something up, when you’re really at that early stage, you can get a little bit preoccupied on making sure or comparing yourself to businesses that are maybe 5 or 10 years old. Actually sometimes, it’s a case that you need to get the product out in the market and test it.

There are certain things that probably you can compromise. For instance, you maybe didn’t quite get the packaging supplier that you wanted, or there are things that you’d like to improve, but I think when it comes to product, try and get it as good as you possibly can do, but I think always be aware that a product can always be improved.

Certainly, when you’re just trying to test something, you get a feel for whether or not something is going to resonate with shoppers. I think it’s quite important to start doing. Otherwise, your idea will just always be an idea.

If you just keep thinking about it, nothing is going to move forwards. If you test it on a really low level, basic way, that is a really good way to start the ball moving and give yourself some confidence to then really go for it. Otherwise, you’ll feel like there’s this huge gulf that you have to jump over in order to launch the brand, when in actual facts, it’s a series of small improvements that get you to where you need to go.

Joseph: That makes a lot of sense I think, especially for the perfectionists out there, and I include myself in that group. We have this tendency of wanting to get everything exactly right before we take action on it or to put it out there for people to see.

In the meantime, if you’re not learning anything about it, you’re probably going to change it again anyway, even if you’ve launch the version that you think is perfect. A series of small steps makes a lot of sense.

Finally, is there anything is particular that surprised you about shifting from working in a museum to running your own food brand and company?

Pip: I think the thing that I never ever really thought about was the fact that if everything goes well, which it’s gone pretty well so far, that you’ll end up leading a team, which seems like a really funny thing to say. You focus so much on the product and what the brand looks like, but for me personally, the fact that there’s 14 of us in the team at the moment—it’s still quite small but growing quite fast—suddenly you find yourself in a completely different role in your own right. You’re a leader within the team. You’re there to help shape the culture and nurture and encourage the people within the business to prosper.

Actually for me, I was 24 at the time I started out the business. I’ve never managed anyone. I’ve never really led anything. I’ve never been fully and totally responsible for something. Now, I find myself in a really different kind of job. That’s a whole new skillset which I’ve had to learn and actually has probably been hard. It’s been a really hard part of the journey: figuring out how to be a leader and how to be clear and give direction to a team of people who are all taking a big risk to work for the business.

I think that actually came as a bit of a shock. It is a bit of a realization when you’ve launched. You’re like, ‘All right.’ Once the team starts to grow, you realize that you’ve got a whole new job that you never really thought about.

Joseph: Let’s wrap up with what’s next for Pip & Nut then, Pip. Can you tell me a little bit more about the new range of products you have coming out?

Pip: Yes. We are launching a range of snacking products in the autumn.

Joseph: Oh, cool.

Pip: We’ll have nut butter ripple through everything that we’re doing.

Joseph: I’m excited.

Pip: We’ve got some tasty things coming out.

We’re also doing, like I mentioned, a big campaign in September. That’s something where for the first time ever as a brand, we’ll start to go above the line in terms of our advertising. That’s a really big moment for the team.

Joseph: Wow, very exciting. I hope the brand launch goes well and then your product launch goes well. Where can people go to learn more about your products and also buy your nut butters?

Pip: Head to our Instagram. It probably shows you the best array of delicious pictures about what to do with nut butters. That’s @pipandnut.

If you want to go and buy our products, for those in the UK, you can find them in Sainsbury’s, Tesco, at the Morrisons. For those of you not in the UK, you can go onto Amazon or even onto our own website at PipAndNut.com.

Joseph: Thank you so much, Pip, for telling us more about your life as an entrepreneur, the importance of focus, and also the lessons you’ve learned along the way of your very interesting career journey. I am going to continue to enjoy your peanut butters, and I just wanted to wish you the best of luck with your new launch this fall. Thanks so much for being on the show.

Pip: Thank you so much.

In this week’s episode of Career Relaunch, legal secretary turned yoga studio founder and instructor Lola Scarborough describes how grit and determination ultimately allowed her to get her yoga studio off the ground. We discuss the downside of having a job that’s too comfortable and what you learn about yourself when you’re forced to make a sudden career pivot.

During the Mental Fuel segment, I’ll also share my own personal experience with my own career transitions taking longer than I wanted.

During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I challenged you to take a step back, reevaluate whether you’re being realistic with the timeline you’ve given yourself for a specific career transition or project you’re hoping to complete in the near future. Then build in a little extra buffer. And if you don’t get as far as you want as quickly as you want, just remember not to beat yourself up too much because it’s not unusual for things to take a little longer you than you initially expect.

Lola Scarborough is an IKYTA and Yoga Alliance E-RYT-500 certified yoga teacher and a co-owner and Managing Director of Yoga Lola Studios. Lola is a certified life coach, a certified Wellness & Health Restoration Natural Foods Consultant, a certified tonic herbalist, a certified Ayurvedic Practitioner, a certified aerobics teacher, a certified Level III Reiki master and a novice astrologer. She teaches Kundalini Yoga along with many other types of yoga. She has a long history as a writer, teacher, and project manager in the business world. She’s authored articles, films, and videos related to yoga, health, and healing. She published her first book on natural breast health Fighting for Our Tits: A Woman’s Battle Cry in July 2018. She’s also completed her Ph.D. in comparative religion and published a book of poetry titled Molten Woman.

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): Fear and money kept driving me to go every day into a job where a lot of times I was exhausted. I was stressed out. I took a deep dive into what motivates me, what do I want.

Joseph: Good morning, Lola. Welcome to Career Relaunch. It is great to have you on the show.

Lola: Thank you, Joseph. I’m delighted to be here.

Joseph: We are going to talk about a few different things today, including your former life before you started your yoga studio, your transition, and also how you’ve now become a yoga instructor. I’d like to start by having you, first of all, just tell me what you’ve been focused right now in your career and your life.

Lola: I’ve continued to stay focused on building my yoga studio and wellness business. Most recently, I released a book, and I am going to be featured in an upcoming book as well called The World’s Most Amazing Women that’s going to be released in December.

One of the things I’m doing now is working to grow out my speaking skills. I love to lecture. I love a captive audience. It’s my very favorite thing. I’ve been working on that and working on raising awareness around different health-related issues through doing blogging and other things like that.

Joseph: I know that we’ve got a couple of different topics to talk about today, and I want to come back to your studio. I do want to go back in time and talk about what you were up to before you were a yoga instructor, because I know you haven’t always been a yoga instructor. Before we get to that, how did you get discovered to be featured in that book, The World’s Most Amazing Women?

Lola: I started doing some podcast radio interviews with KC Armstrong, and he invited nine women that he felt had stories that were significant, meaningful, and lifechanging for his readers. He invited me to be one of the lead writers in his book.

Joseph: Okay, very cool. I’m looking forward to seeing you featured there.

Can we go back in time, Lola, and talk about what you were up to before you were involved with yoga? What were you doing in your former life when you were working in the corporate world? Let’s start from the beginning, and then we can move forward from there.

Lola: When I was 17 years old, I graduated from the Atlanta College of Medical, Dental, and Business. I spent roughly 20 years of my career as a legal secretary. I loved it. I loved the legal field. I actually thought about entering it but then decided to have children instead.

As a part of that, towards the latter end of my career, we made a huge transition. I’m 59, so I’ve seen software come of age from MS DOS to MS Word. Because I picked up on those sorts of things easily, I became a lead trainer, and then became a lead writer for our training materials. I did that for quite a long time, and I loved doing that too.

From there, I segued over into becoming a full-time technical writer. I worked with Capgemini, Axon, a software company called SBPA Systems. I did that for, I guess, another 15 years. From there, I went into project management. That was my last role in the business world, where I lead project teams of up to 10 and 15 people. I worked with companies as big as Burger King and Vanguard and some others and doing software implementations for their administrative systems.

That’s where I was when my career shifted.

Joseph: You’ve already mentioned a couple of career shift. I know we want to cover the major ones, shifting toward being a yoga instructor. I do want to go back a little bit here because you’ve mentioned a couple of major shifts, from being a legal secretary to a technical writer, and then a technical writer to a project manager.

Let’s just take the lattermost recent transition from being a technical writer to a project manager. How did you manage to make that sort of a transition? Because at least on the surface, it seems like those would be two very different things.

Lola: They really were, and I wasn’t really fully prepared for what happens when you’re a project manager.

I met a man, and I married him. I moved from where I was. I moved myself and my children from Stafford, Texas to League City, Texas, which is where I’m at now. I went in, and I interviewed. She really liked my style, because I’d held lead positions. As a technical writer, I managed teams. I was already used to being in leadership positions.

Being a project manager, I’d put out my begging bowl before I do that again.

Joseph: What did you dislike about being a project manager?

Lola: The 22-hour days and implementations not going right, clients very understandably being very distressed because their systems were down. People would quit because it was such a stressful situation, then you’d find yourself with a deficit of personnel. It was a small company, so one person leaving would have a major impact on the ability to get the project to fruition. The pay was awesome, but it was a lot of stress.

Joseph: Can you take me to the moment when you made the decision to leave that behind? What was happening for you at that time?

Lola: I’m a very security-oriented person. I always told people, they say, ‘Don’t you want to start your own business?’ I’m like, ‘No, not until after I retire.’ I kind of got kicked out. I had opened my yoga studio. I came through when we were in the acute stage of a recession in this area.

Joseph: That was in 2008. Is that correct?

Lola: Yeah. I had a friend who was coming. I let her use my yoga studio, which by the way, only had one student because the yoga studio was to be a retirement dream. I would only really be working hard six years from now had things gone along as intended.

I had opened it up, and she had a magazine. She said, ‘Well, if you’d let me use your studio for my group, I’ll run a free ad for you.’ I said, ‘Awesome.’

Before I even opened the studio and put a web presence out, I talked to my manager, and I talked to the other co-owner of the business. I said, ‘Listen. This is what I’m doing. This is really just to place on paper. It’s a retirement dream. We’re going to be working on it for years. Is it okay if I do this?’

They said yes. I had not spoken to the big boss about it because she knew that I did yoga. I taught yoga after business hours to some of the students there. Anyhow, she saw this ad, and she was livid. She told me, she said, ‘You have to make a choice.’ I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ She said, ‘You have to make a choice. You either give up your yoga studio or you quit your job.’

I said, ‘First of all, I’m not going to quit. You’re going to have to fire me. Secondly, it’s not even really a yoga studio. We have two classes a week. I have one student.’ She said, ‘No.’ It became a matter of principle for her. She said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘Okay, well I’ll wait for you to fire me.’ She obliged me by firing me. That’s how Yoga Lola got catapulted into being.

I started looking for jobs, couldn’t find anything. I’m highly educated. I have incredible business experience, but there was a recession. I realized that I wasn’t going to find anything, and what I had to do was that saying, ‘When God gives you lemons, make lemonade.’ That’s how it happened.

Joseph: I know that this does come up for people who listen to this show where they’ve got a side interest and a side project which could be anything from just a casual hobby to something a little bit more serious. It sounds like this was just at the infancy stage and something that you were tinkering with, didn’t plan to launch it until many years later, and yet your employer took issue with the fact that you had this side gig. What was her major concern?

Lola: She said the Imagitech needed 150% of my time. I said, ‘Has it? Look! Go on the web. Look at my schedule. There are two classes. My husband can take them. We only have one student.’ She said, ‘Well, you’re going to try to grow your business on my back.’ I said, ‘No, I’m not. I’m not going to try to grow my business at all for a long time. It’s just there as a placeholder in my life,’ because I made a lot of money.

It was really a sweet deal, even with all the stress. I got to wear beautiful suits. I got to travel. I had an expense account. She told me I had to make a choice, and I was like, ‘Well, we just spend $250,000 on a building.’ I don’t know what you expect me to do with it.

In the end, it worked out for the best, but if you had asked me at the time, I really thought what was going to happen was she was going to fire me, and then I was going to go find another job, just like the one I had. That is not what happened.

Joseph: During that immediate aftermath of you moving on from that company, what did you start to do the next week, the next month to figure out what you wanted to do next and how you wanted the next chapter to look in your life?

Lola: I kept looking. I started working on the studio more, because I had free time on my hands. I finally realized I wasn’t going to find another job. I had to reeducate myself, and it was this studio or bust. That took about nine months to sink in, and I was shell-shocked initially.

Joseph: Let’s shift gears, Lola, and talk a little bit about the yoga studio and how you got it from where it was to where it is right now, because I think the idea of starting a yoga studio, when I hear that, that seems pretty cool. I think that there’s probably a lot of people out there who think, ‘Oh, it’d be so cool to start my own studio,’ whether it’s yoga or fitness or whatever it is. How did you get that thing off the ground, going from one student to more students? I’d love to hear some details on what exactly you did.

Lola: Absolute persistence and a dogged refusal to give up. I had to reeducate myself. I was a certified yoga teacher, and I’d been teaching yoga for a while before we opened the studio. I was also an energy healer. My grandmother taught me that at the age of 12.

I had my business skills. I don’t know how anyone could open any business, whether it’s a yoga studio or any kind of small business, without having the kind of business skills I had, because that really became the foundation from which I built. I knew you have to be competitive in the marketplace. You have to have the right education for the audience that you’re presenting yourself to.

I got a two-year degree in Ayurveda, which means something in the wellness business. I also became an E-RYT 500. I went to the highest level of yoga training that you could have. I rolled in my business skills as a technical writer by creating training programs that are really the bread and butter of our studio. We have a 200-hour training course, and then I also have a training course where I teach people how to do hands-on healing, and I certify them.

I went to the Spencer Institute. I got my life coaching degree. I got some aerobics degrees. I studied Chinese herbals. I remade myself in a brand new image. I learned how to do marketing, which was really painful for me because I’m not very good at ‘selling’ things. I’m really uncomfortable with that.

Joseph: What was uncomfortable about that for you?

Lola: I feel like when you try to sell something, inherently you cheapen yourself. That was the attitude I had then. I’ve made a lot of shifts in my attitude since then. I’ve gone from the idea that I am selling something to the idea that I am offering something that, if people like, they’ll buy. There is no shame in that, but it was a big transition.

The only thing I’d ever had to market was myself and my skills in the business world. I didn’t really have to ‘sell’ myself more than once. They hired me, and then I began to show them what I could do, but that’s different than selling.

Joseph: Definitely. As you know, since we’ve spoken before recording this, I also came from the corporate world, and I was a full-time employee before launching my own business. I definitely hear what you’re saying about feeling a little bit more exposed and having to almost be forced to sell yourself more regularly versus being hired into a job, and then you do have your annual reviews, but if you do a good job, you’re pretty well set, in general. That’s very interesting.

Any other surprises that have come up along the way for you in building your studio?

Lola: Yes. The first surprise was that I lived in an area where people were relatively hostile to yoga. They felt like it was something that went against their belief system. They were very fearful of it. It took years and years and years of educating people. The media now, you see yoga everywhere.

When we first opened the studio, especially here in Texas which is very conservative, which is very traditional, which is very, very republican, very Christian, there was a lot of fear initially about the technology of yoga. It took a long time for the message to get out that yoga is actually a technology. It’s a tool that works with the human body, mind, and spirit, whether you are agnostic, atheist, or deeply religious.

Learning even how to speak that to people was an education of its own because I had done yoga for so long, and I was so open minded, and I had drunken in around in the world of these things for such a long time, I really did not realize that one of the biggest barriers to entry at the time was belief systems.

Joseph: I hadn’t thought about that aspect of yoga. I always assumed that people did it for the health benefits, but I guess there is that spiritual side to it, which is either appealing or maybe quite alienating to people who aren’t familiar with it. Do you feel like there were any misconceptions about being a yoga instructor or misconceptions about yoga instructors in general that you would like to straighten out?

Lola: Not that I have encountered in my one-on-one interactions, but I think sometimes people think yoga instructors are really limber, and they can do what you see on the yoga journal. I’ll tell you, that’s about 10%. Most yoga instructors are just people who have injuries, who bump up against their own internal conflict, who have lives like regular people. It looks glam, but it’s not all that glam. It really isn’t.

Joseph: How long did it take for you to get the studio from a place where you weren’t sure it was going to be sustainable to a place where you felt like, ‘Okay, this is something that could become my full-time vocation?’

Lola: Seven years.

Joseph: Wow. Was that longer than you expected, shorter than you expected?

Lola: Like I said, I had a hard landing into it. I didn’t really know what to expect, because it was something that was going to happen way in the future. I had not done market research. We figured, by the time we were ready to do it, the environment would be a lot more right for it than it was at the time we bought the studio.

We started, like I said, we had one student, and a big yoga class three years later was, ‘Wow, man. We had five students. That’s awesome,’ but I would wake up every day, and I tell my husband, I’d say, ‘I don’t know if I’m going to be able to get this thing off the ground.’ We’d look at it, and we’d say, ‘Okay, we’re going to try one more day.’

We went to the ‘one more day’ kind of model, and we just took it one day at a time. We stuck it out, and our reputation is beautiful. I mean we have such a wonderful reputation in our community. People began to talk about us, and then I learned how to do things on Facebook. I grew our social media presence. I learned how to language what I was saying to people in a way that they could embrace it. I began to really understand what the deeper fears were.

I guess in the last year, we’ve had maybe 800, 900 people in and out of our studio. We’ve gone from nothing to something. It’s just been incredible.

Joseph: One of the things that I think people who might be listening to this show struggle with is that time gap between when you start something and when it ‘takes off.’ You’re talking about seven years here. How did you know that you wanted to keep going with it versus quitting and moving on to something else? In other words, the question is around do I keep persisting or do I cut my losses and move onto something else?

Lola: For me, I look at it, and I say, ‘Okay, how much has it grown this year compared to last year? How much more interest is there?’ Looking at income, it’s grown exponentially. Even though our income, I think most people would find it to be in the small to medium range, it’s enough to cover the cost of the studio and to allow us to keep growing.

Our studio, because we purchased it, we have an asset that every time we pay the mortgage, we’re actually building equity and a hard asset that should we decide, ‘Okay, we’re not going to do this anymore,’ we can let it go.

In addition to that, there are the emotional benefits which are significant. I really did not get those kinds of emotional benefits in the corporate world. I had pride. I had success. I had those feelings in the corporate of ‘Wow, we got this project done. It’s awesome.’

I have people who come in to me who are going through very traumatic events in their lives – cancer, divorce, all kinds of other traumatic events. They come to me, and when they do and we first start working together, their lives have been blown apart. By the time we get finished working together, I see a transformation that is unbelievable.

In my group classes, people come in, and they sit down. They can’t even bend forward. They’re so stiff. A year later the transformation, they can reach their toes. The emotional reward of watching that happen is really what’s kept me in the game.

Joseph: Got you. That’s a great segue, Lola, into one of the last things I was hoping to talk with you about, before we wrap up with what you’re focused on and the book that you just released last year, which is some of the things that you’ve learned along the way here. You mentioned emotional benefit for you. What other benefits have you seen in your life, having made this shift into doing work that you find more meaningful?

Lola: It woke me up, and I didn’t even realize I’d gone to sleep. Like I said, it was a hard landing. I was like, ‘Boom! Wow! Look at how security-oriented I am. Look at how much fear has kept driving me to go into something.’ Fear and money kept driving me to go every day into a job where a lot of times I was exhausted. I was stressed out. I had sciatic, and my lower back hurt all the time.

I took a deep dive into what motivates me. What do I want? I’ve stopped asking myself what I wanted a long time ago because I had what I needed.

Joseph: The other thing that was coming to mind as you were sharing your story today, Lola, is that when we first connected, you said that when you make career changes, you meet parts of yourself, both likable and unlikable that you never knew existed. I’m curious, what did you discover about yourself? I’m curious about both the likable and unlikable.

Lola: The likable is that I found out that my heart was bigger than I thought it was and that it had more room to encompass others, because in the corporate world, you kind of shelf yourself off if you don’t have a lot of contact with the public and finding their stories, finding them moving, finding the generosity that is inherently mine and being able to share it more freely.

Unlikable was that I found out that I was a very transaction-oriented kind of gal, at least in the beginning. I had always done generous things. I’d worked in the community. I still did lots of things by donation when I was doing my healing and my yoga classes while I was working, but I had to come to terms with that part of me that had a cold, hard edge that wanted to drive things to profit and make everything transactional, weighing how this person would fit into my life and how they could help me grow into what I wanted to be.

I also found out that I had a penchant for a little bit of snobbery. I didn’t like being sweaty. I didn’t like being yoga clothes all the time. I didn’t like my hair hanging limp. I wanted my suits back. I wanted to feel important. For a long time, I did not, because there was nobody to validate me.

Joseph: Why do you think that it takes a major career change to uncover these things about yourself? Another way of asking that is why do you think these parts of ourselves remain hidden? In your case, you mentioned bigger heart, more transactional, the snobbery. What do you think it is about career changes that helps to make that stuff emerge?

Lola: You are no longer safe.

Joseph: Yeah, I guess it forces you to face a lot of your demons.

Lola: Your fears.

Joseph: You also mentioned, before we started this recording, that who is really inside comes from a place on discomfort, which is what a career pivot or change forces upon you. What exactly did you mean by that?

Lola: When you go into automatic pilot—for example, I call it putting on your face—you wake up in the morning, you know exactly how you’re supposed to look, you know exactly how you’re supposed to present yourself, you know what’s going to help get ahead, but when you’re out there and you’re on your own and you’re creating something from scratch, you don’t really even know the language. You have to bust through.

I feel like I am so much more authentic. It’s not that I’m not afraid. I worry about things. I do. But I’m a lot more authentic than I ever used to be. That’s because nobody’s going to fire me except me.

Joseph: One of the things that we also talk about on this show is clarity, confidence, and courage. It really sounds like you found a lot of courage to stand on your own two feet and start your own studio and keep it going. How have you amassed courage during this transitional time?

Lola: I allowed myself to really feel my feelings. When I needed to just pull back and have what I call a breakdown so that I could get to the next breakthrough, I let myself have that. I stopped pretending that I didn’t have fears. I became a lot more real to other people. I became a lot more cooperative instead of competitive.

That also took some breakdowns to get to the breakthrough, which is I’m not in a corporation anymore, I’m in community, and learning to adapt to that.

Joseph: One of the things I know that you’re doing for your community relates to what I wanted to wrap up with today. Can you tell me more about your book that you just release last year?

Lola: The book is geared towards helping women find underlying causes that can trigger breast cancer. The reason I became so interested in it is, because as a healer and a yoga instructor, I get a lot of women coming in to me who have had breast cancer or who are going through the treatments and the surgeries. I started noticing an alarming increase of clients coming to me who had been diagnosed with breast cancer.

About 10 years ago, I thought, ‘Oh my God! There has to be an underlying reason for just this surge.’ It’s not only breast cancer. It’s chronic or acute disease in particular, but breast cancer became my focus. I got out there, and I started researching all the different kinds of scientific data around breast cancer. I coupled that with my interest in complementary and alternative healing modalities, which I’ve been in that field for 40 years of my life and put it together in a book.

The book is designed to help women uncover different tools that they can use to help prevent it. That’s the whole focus of the book. The name of the book is Fighting for Our Tits: A Woman’s Battle Cry. That’s what it’s for.

Joseph: That’s really wonderful to hear that you’ve taken the time to write about such an important topic of breast cancer. If people want to learn more about you or they want to check out your book or learn more about your studio, where can they go?

Lola: I have two different websites. My writer’s website is LolaScarborough.com, or they can go to YogaLola.com, or they can just directly email me [email protected].

Joseph: Thank you so much, Lola, for telling us more about your former life in the corporate world, your life as a yoga instructor, the realities of starting your own studio, and also the benefits of doing work you really enjoy. Best of luck with all of your writing and with Yoga Lola Studios.

Lola: Thank you, Joseph. It was a pleasure and a privilege to be on your show.

When you follow a non-linear career path, it allows you to diversify your skills and experiences, but it can also create challenges when trying to explain your career narrative to others in your professional network, interviewers, and colleagues. Identifying the common thread that unifies all your experiences is one way to connect the dots for yourself and others.

In Career Relaunch episode 66, journalist turned Wall Street analyst turned rabbi Tod Jacobs explains why having a life outside of work is so critical to your overall happiness and what it takes to figure out where to focus your career energies. In the Mental Fuel segment, I’ll explain how I discovered the common thread that unifies the wide range of experiences in my own career.

During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, my challenge to you, especially if you find yourself struggling to pitch your story to your target employer or client, was to: #1: dedicate some time to capture a written inventory of your skills and experiences, and #2: selectively hone in on those you feel are the most relevant to your future work. Try to highlight and reinforce those specific skills and experiences as part of your career narrative moving forward. Identifying a common theme that ties all your experiences together can serve as a convenient, unifying headline you can use when describing your career story to others.

Tod Jacobs is the Director of the David Robinson Institute for Jewish Heritage in Jerusalem, which he co-founded in 2005. Prior to his current role there teaching and counseling his students and alumni, he worked on Wall Street as a leading authority on the telecommunications industry.

As a former managing director at JP Morgan and partner at Sanford C. Bernstein and Company, Tod acted as a frequent commentator to leading, newspapers, magazines and TV networks, and testified several times before the U.S. Congress as an expert on telecom and media policy. His credits in journalism, where he worked prior to Wall Street, include nominations for both the Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism and an Emmy Award.

He holds an MS in Journalism from Columbia University and an MA from Northwestern University. He’s recently published a book about marriage called Not a Partnership: Why We Keep Getting Marriage Wrong & How We Can Get it Right.

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): Even though it seems like I have the crazy career going from screenwriting to journalism to broadcast journalism to Wall Street, I actually think that there is a certain thread that connects them. I don’t think that most rabbis think of themselves as being Wall Street analysts. It’s not as different as you might think.

Joseph: Good afternoon, Tod, and welcome to Career Relaunch. It is great to have you on the show.

Tod: Thank you very much, Joseph. It’s great to be here.

Joseph: I’m excited to have you on the show, Tod, because you’re our first guest based in Jerusalem. I’ve got a lot of things I’d like to talk with you about. We’re going to talk about your time as a journalist, your time on Wall Street, and also what prompted you to move from New York City to Israel which is where you’re based right now. Can you just start by telling me what you’ve been focused on in your career and your life there in Jerusalem?

Tod: I guess for the last 15 years, I have been pursuing a late-stage career, probably the last major career I’m going to have that I had at least in my plans. That is that I decided to leave Wall Street and come to Jerusalem to open up an institute with a mentor of mine. It’s called the David Robinson Institute for Jewish Heritage. It’s in Jerusalem.

I spend virtually all of my time now teaching classic Jewish subjects, philosophy, law, a little bit of kabbalistic wisdom, deep spiritual wisdom, and mentoring really a phenomenal group of young men who come from many different places in the world and many different backgrounds.

What unites them is that they’re all smart high-performing people who have finished college, who usually finished graduate school, who are pursuing careers, but then decide they want to take maybe a year off and maybe two years off of what they’re doing career-wise to figure out what makes them tick as human beings, get training in relationship building, and armed with that centered spiritual vision of what they want out of their life, they return to their careers with a new sense of vigor and idealism.

One of my colleagues and I wrote a book which is based upon a lot of the work that we do in the area of relationships. The authoring part of my career is really just sort of an offshoot of what I’ve been doing for the last 15 years.

Joseph: We’re going to come back to your time there as director. I know you haven’t always been the Director of the David Robinson Institute for Jewish Heritage, and you’ve got a really rich career that started off as a journalist. Could you tell us about your career, starting off as a journalist? I think you did a stint in screenwriting also, and then we can move forward from there.

Tod: The career really began with sort of a failed career in screenwriting. When I say ‘failed career,’ there was a group of us. I think there were three of us. We were all close friends. We were all writers. One of us was, not myself, one of the three was a film maker, one was a bit of a poet, and I was more of a journalistic writer by nature.

We decided to write a screenplay which we really almost never finished and never sold and never was able to do anything with it. I was waiting tables in New York City at the time to pay the bills. At some point, I just decided, ‘I just can’t go on like this. I have to get a real job,’ or at least what I thought then was a real job.

I applied to go to the Colombia University Graduate School of Journalism so that I could continue doing what’s one of the things I viewed as the key thing that love doing which is writing but bring into a professional environment where I could actually have a regular job, get a paycheck while doing something that I enjoy doing and thought I was relatively good at.

That took me into journalism. I can keep talking about the crazy things that happened in journalism, if you’d like.

Joseph: Why don’t you tell me a little bit about what you enjoyed about journalism and some of the challenges that you had to tackle during your time as an investigative journalist?

Tod: The beauty of being a journalist is just that incredible exposure to a lot of exciting and interesting things that are going on in life and the pressure to become experts in many, many different areas quickly, and to be able to communicate them to a broad audience who is not expert in those areas.

Via a strange series of events, I wound up falling as a student into a very, very big investigative story. I never had in mind that I was going to become an investigative journalist. I was sent to do a story that was about a company called Wedtech. Wedtech had started out as a little tool-and-die shop that had grown to become a company that not only was successful but had gone public, had made its owners wealthy and famous. I was sent up to do what we would call a puff piece, just showing what a great little company that is, take a few pictures, talk about how wonderful they are.

When I was up there, just something didn’t smell right. In going down to the SEC to get some filings on the company to find out about how their finances looked, I discovered some interesting data there which showed that some very, very powerful figures in the New York political world and in the New York business world seem to have been manipulating the company, taking control of it, and then handing it over to this guy to be more or less a puppet master in the company, or a front man I should say to the company, so that they could bill the government out of what turned out to be $100 million, $200 million or something like that.

The great ending to that story is that for one year as an investigative journalist, my partner and I were both nominated for Pulitzer Prizes for Investigative Journalism because it was such a gigantic story. It was good enough to get those credentials to then get me into broadcast journalism where I then spent the next couple of years basically making documentaries and working in broadcast.

Joseph: You’re a successful journalist. You’re nominated for a Pulitzer Award. You work in documentaries. What made you then want to transition into the world of Wall Street?

Tod: At a certain point, I decided with a friend of mine that we would launch out on our own and have our own production company. We got a little bit of venture capital funding just to pay the basic bills. We gave away a part of the company to somebody in order to do that.

About a year later, we absolutely totally failed as a company. At that point, I was married. I don’t think we were expecting our first child yet. It was kind of like in the near future, we thought. I had no money. I was out of a job. I just literally, not knowing what to do, had to start thinking about the next step.

I wound up running into another friend of mine who had been working on Wall Street as a bond trader. He was working for Salomon Brothers at the time. He said to me, ‘Well, you know, you seem like a smart guy.’ He said, ‘What do you view as your core talents?’ I said, ‘Writing and reporting. That’s what I’ve been doing for the last couple of years: writing and reporting.’ He said, ‘Okay, writing and reporting.’

He said, ‘Okay, how are you with numbers? Are you good with numbers?’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’ I took calculus in college, but I haven’t really done anything with any math or economics.’ He said, ‘Well, if you think you’re even okay at it.’ He said, ‘I’d suggest you try and get a job as an analyst.’ I said, ‘What’s that?’ He said, ‘Well, they are these people who kind of investigate and report about a given industry and given sets of companies.’

I had literally no idea what to do, but he told me, ‘Go get a Wall Street Journal, collect all the names of the Wall Street firms you can find in the advertisements, and write letters to all their directors you’ve researched.’

The truth was we skipped over one little step in broadcast, which is that I had actually got nominated for an Emmy Award for a short film that I made for NBC. The film that I had made, there was a person who raised $1,000 for me to hire the camera crew for that. He raised it from a guy named Sanford C. Bernstein. This Mr. Bernstein had given me $1,000 for that project. I had never met him.

In the letter I wrote to him, I said, ‘You once gave me $1,000, and I turned it into an Emmy Award. Imagine what I can do if I were working for you,’ or something like that. He thought that was humorous, and it was enough just to get my foot in the door and get an interview. Very, very happily, Sanford Bernstein hired me.

They hired me as a total grunt. I’d never used a computer before. I’d only used these old typewriters, the manual typewriters in the newsrooms, but they figured I knew certain things an MBA student know, and so I spent the next two and a half years as a junior analyst before they promoted me to being a senior analyst.

Joseph: As someone who didn’t start his career on Wall Street, what was it like for you to work on Wall Street? I’d be curious to hear about what you liked and maybe what you didn’t like so much.

Tod: There were different stages. The initial couple of years were incredibly exhilarating on one hand, because the learning curve was amazingly steep. You can just imagine walking in, having a little bit of a sense that you’re sort of the smart guy, you know how to write, you know how talk to management, you’re not a pushover, but on the other hand, you don’t know anything that anybody around you knows.

Happily, they gave me enough rope and enough time to get more and more responsibility over a period of about two and a half years. Slowly, slowly, I came up to a point where I actually had some sense of what I was doing. That was a year of amazing learning curve and amazing stress coming along with it.

I wound up being a senior analyst with Sanford Bernstein. I was at Sanford Bernstein 11 years altogether and then got hired away by JP Morgan, where I went for the last couple of years, I guess the last two and a half, three years in my career.

Joseph: I know at that time, you’d also had some children along the way. I think when we spoke before, I think you told me you have four kids.

Tod: Yes, we have four kids. The fourth of them was born, by the way, during a meeting, a conference call that I was having with JP Morgan bankers and the company. As my wife was being wheeled into the OR to have this baby, I was on the phone with these guys saying, ‘You must let me off the phone. I got to go. I have to be part of this birth here.’ That one I’ll never forget. That one was part of JP Morgan.

Joseph: On this show, we talked about transitions and what compels people to make major changes. In your case, I know you eventually made a major decision to not only move countries but also move away from the world of Wall Street and also change your role. What made you want to make such a major change and eventually move to Jerusalem?

Tod: Throughout my career, I always try to make sure that I had things going on in my personal and private life which I felt were intrinsically meaningful.

As much as I loved the time at Wall Street, which is an incredible time, incredible experience, I never felt that trying to make money was the highest calling of a human being. I did feel that it could give a person the tools and the stature and the assets to really make a difference in the world if you could extract yourself from doing that full-time.

I wound up working for a couple of years at JP Morgan, and I just felt it. There’s going to be this time before I become too old, before my kids become too old, where if I’m not going to make a big move to go try something very idealistic and not money-oriented, that I’ll never be able to do it again.

I had been, sort of quietly on the side, speaking to a mentor of mine for many, many years about the possibility of starting with him an institution in Jerusalem. It was years in the making while on Wall Street but never really knowing if it’s going to come to fruition.

At a certain point, I just decided we have to fish or cut bait at this point, so I quit my job, and we moved to Jerusalem. I went back to full-time study to become a rabbi, basically, and then we opened up that institution in 2005. I have been up and doing that for close to 15 years now.

Joseph: What was it like for you to go from Wall Street analyst to rabbi?

Tod: Had I not had the Wall Street experience, I do not believe I would have had the confidence or the wherewithal, really in anyway, from the know-how standpoint, from an asset standpoint, to be able to do such a venture.

In many ways, I viewed it as a next step, a progression, which as I look back, even though it seems like I had the crazy career going from screenwriting to journalism to broadcast journalism to Wall Street, I actually think that there’s a certain thread even into what I’m doing now.

I don’t think most rabbis think of themselves as being Wall Street analysts, but in a way, there are so many similarities in terms of the boiling down and communication of complex concepts and hope that the person’s able to then integrate it and take it all to the next level themselves. It’s not as different as you might think, but it’s obviously got a whole spiritual component to it, which makes it, for me at least, much more personally gratifying and meaningful.

Joseph: It’s really interesting, Tod, because I think one of the things that people sometimes struggle with is how to talk about their careers if they have a wide array of interest or they’ve made some pretty major career pivots. As you mentioned, you’ve had a wide range of professional experiences. How did you go about figuring out what the common thread was across your experiences and how to clearly and concisely communicate that to other people?

Tod: I do think that most of us, if we’re honest with ourselves, can spend a little time trying to think about, first of all, ‘what do I love to do’ and try and list the things that you love to do, irrespective of whether they are professionally oriented or not, and then try and figure out what are you better at than other people – not just good at, but where do you have an actual competitive edge?

That may have nothing to do with what you love, but if you have a list of things you’re good at and you have a list of things you love, you can compare those lists and put them together, and you could try and circle something at the top of both of those lists, where ‘not only am I good at it but I also love it.’ That is pretty much going to define what you should be pursuing for your whole career.

In a way, I always knew at heart that what I was better at than other people was writing and communicating, taking ideas that were complex and then figuring out different ways to communicate them to other people. Maybe one of the big lessons of this whole story is all I really knew was what my competency was, and I sort of trusted that, over time, I would keep falling into the right things, those opportunities would happen.

Almost none of those opportunities could have been predicted before they happened. Certainly, they could not have been generated by me. I think a lot of life is just figuring out what can you do, what can you do well, and try and stick with it, and then be flexible enough and opportunistic enough to try to find places to make it real. I think if a person can do that, you can have a career that will be extremely unpredictable in many cases, but often quite meaningful and often quite successful if you just keep sticking to what your core competency is.

Joseph: That’s a great segue, Tod, into one of the last things I want to talk with you about before we wrap up with your book. That’s some of the lessons that you’ve learned about yourself in your own career, having navigated and made changes in your career multiple times.

The first question I had actually relates to some of your observations there at the David Robinson Institute, having crossed paths with so many individuals who are taking breaks from their careers. What do you think is a common mistake that people make when it comes to thinking about where to take their careers?

Tod: One of the biggest mistakes people make is they rush headlong into their careers before they really figure out who they are as human beings – what makes them tick, how do they want to work, do they have the wherewithal to go into a really competitive, hyper-aggressive type of a business like Wall Street or certain parts of tech or certain parts of consulting or certain parts of law.

To the contrary, they may have been guided that way by their parents or by their schools, but maybe they want to be a social worker. Maybe what really turns them on is helping other people, and therefore, they can be a great therapist, or they can be a great nurse.

People sell themselves short. They do what society or their parents or their community pushes them into, without actually trying to figure out if that actually fits them and if it has anything to do with what they’re real ideals are, and by the way, and if it’s really the place where they can shine the most relative to others, which again, I keep coming back to. Competitive advantage is a very important thing to have in your career, whether you’re going to a psychologist or a nurse or whether you’re going to try and go to Wall Street or go to consulting.

To me, one of the important things is take some time and figure out who you are, the extent to which you can develop things in your life which are meaningful to you, which are not directly related to your job, whether it’s community work, whether it’s volunteering, whether it is deep involvement in your family or community. The more you have in your life which gives you meaning outside of work, the greater longevity you’ll have in your job, the less stress you’ll have in your job.

There’s almost no business now where there’s not ups and downs, where there’s not a lot of competition, where there’s not a fear factor and anxiety factor. The more you’re the person that can stand behind that job, who has your own substance, your own life, some meaning that you’re pursuing and a bit of psychological distance from your job, the extent to which you have all of these things is I believe the extent to which you’ll be much more successful on the job ironically than the people who have nothing else, nothing else but their job. I’ve seen that over and over and over and over again.

My advice really strongly to people is you’ve got to figure out what’s meaningful in your life, and make sure that you are developing that at the same time you’re developing your career.

Joseph: You’re also someone, Tod, who has successfully made a few career pivots. What’s something that you wish you had known about making such major changes, in your case, multiple times that you now know?

Tod: The extent to which you can cannot force these changes to occur and these opportunities to occur, if a person understood that at an early stage, I think there would be a bit less stress and anxiety associated with their career in general.

The idea that we don’t control the world like we would like to, the earlier you can get an understanding of that, in a sense, the more flexible and malleable you become with respect to your career, the more relaxed and healthy you’ll be, which again, always brings you back to bigger, better employment with much more longevity in your job.

Joseph: What have you learned about yourself along the way of your twisting career journey?

Tod: There are a lot of people that, based upon unhealthy relationships in their careers, make life extremely rocky for the people around them. I learned early on to try not to do that and then to trust in yourself and work really, really hard and try and develop things outside of your life to make life richer and more livable.

Joseph: Speaking about relationships, Tod, I want to wrap up by talking about your book, which is titled Not a Partnership: Why We Keep Getting Marriage Wrong and How We Can Get It Right, which you co-authored with Peter Lynn and released in April 2019. Let’s talk about the title first. What did you mean when you said ‘not a partnership’?

Tod: The way many people approach their marriage is pretty much like people approach partnerships in the business world. If you look at the statistics on partnerships, you know what you find? Most of them fail.

The way we tend to look at ourselves is ‘I’m doing everything I’m supposed to be doing, and you’re not pulling your weight.’ That leads to bitter recriminations. It leads to lots of in-fighting. It leads to lots of failed partnerships, frankly in the business place. When you port that perspective into your marriage, it is corrosive. It is destructive, and people spend much or their marital energy resenting their spouse, because after all, ‘I’m doing my part, and you’re never doing your part.’ That’s just the absolute worst mindset to go into marriage with.

Joseph: This isn’t a show about marriage, but I cannot let you go, Tod, without asking you at least a few questions to get your tips on marriage and get your perspectives on things. I’ve been married now for about seven years, and I’m always interested in this topic.

One of the things that you say early on in your book is that the job of each spouse is to help the other in every way. I’d be curious how you think about that topic, especially as it relates to the context of someone’s career, if they are not feeling so great about their job or their career.

Tod: If I’m going to have a successful marriage, any successful relationship by the way, I really need to be thinking about what are your needs, and how can I help you fulfill them, how can I help you accomplish your goals. We need a total mindset change that says rather than marriage being someplace where I’m entitled to get from the other, it’s a place which creates a whole vehicle in which I can now become a giver.

People become bigger and better people as they give. Research shows that they are happier the more they give. When a person begins giving to the other, the other always responds by giving back. The actual fruit of giving tends to be that you awaken giving in the other person.

When it comes to our career, there’s a sense of excellence, a sense that we are held accountable, and a sense that we got to work really hard to be experts in any arena that we’re going to be in in our careers. Marriage is no less complex than any career that any of us faces.

By the way, what’s a great proof for that? How many people do we know who are very successful in their careers and extremely unsuccessful in their personal relationships? Because guess what? A personal relationship also requires learning, studying, finding out what a healthy relationship looks like, some version of a review process where I at least find out how am I doing as a spouse.

When I begin to take some of those lessons that are true and obvious and self-evident in the business world and every other arena that I operate in and I begin porting that sense of responsibility, professionalism, desire to keep learning, desire to keep working and the willingness to look at honestly who I’m doing, again, I become a better spouse. I give more, the marriage becomes more something that blossoms more, and I get a lot more meaning and pleasure and happiness.

Joseph: The other thing you mentioned in your book, and I think this is also applicable to our careers, was that as problems arise in our marriages, we seek solutions, but we often get stuck at the surface level. I think you give the example of how great and mediocre doctors differ in their approaches to treating illnesses. What did you mean by this, and how do you think this applies to marriages?

Tod: Let’s take the classic example. I go to a doctor, and I say I’ve got an infected throat. You don’t have to be any better than a mediocre doctor to look at my throat and say, ‘Oh, throat infection. Okay, I’ll give you some antibiotics for that.’ That’s the mediocre doctor who basically reads symptoms and treats symptoms.

When I begin looking at underlying causation, I can begin treating much deeper levels of your health, which will then reflect themselves eventually and getting fewer signs of infections and fewer throat infections.

When it comes to marriage, it’s like the husband who leaves his socks around the room, rather than putting them in the hamper. The real problem is his wife wants him to stop doing the sock on their floor thing, but really what the much deeper issue is obviously he’s just not very thoughtful, and he doesn’t really value his wife’s time as much as he values his time. ‘I don’t have the extra two seconds to grab my socks and go put them in the hamper. Oh, but she obviously does.’

That’s a fundamental character issue that has to be worked on. How do I think about another person? How do I make space for another person? How do I elevate the needs of another person to at least where they’re as important as my own? That is a lot of the real work that has to get done within the context of marriage.

Again, once again, in other arenas, we do these things naturally, because we know that there will be consequences if we don’t.

Joseph: You also mentioned in your book that it’s really important. I think this is one of the pillars you mentions of having a successful marriage is to keep things fresh. You go on to saying in that chapter that you have to prioritize your spouse.

I have found that, especially in the context of having children—we’ve got an 18-month old at home—or anything else that takes up space in your life, this can become tough. Do you have any simple tips on how to keep things fresh?

Tod: I’ll give you one practical piece of advice which is hard to do. I’ve actually had students, husbands and wives. I’ve sometimes asked them to literally sign a contract. I even put an example of a contract in the book. Sign a contract with each other that says, ‘We’re going to make sure that every Tuesday night, we’re going to work as hard as we can to make sure we have a date night, that we get out of the house, and we don’t talk about the kids, and we don’t talk about work. We talk about each other. It shouldn’t be about solving practical issues. It should be about constantly remembering why we got married, why we fell in love, why we price each other so much, why we like spending time together.’

When people do that, people are worried, ‘Oh my gosh, my kid is going to be traumatized, because she’s going to wake up in the middle of the night, and there’s going to be a stranger there babysitting.’ The happiness engendered by the two of you being in love, happy with each other, communicating well, having great intimacy and an over-flowing relationship would have much positive impact on the kid over an entire childhood than any little trauma and crying fit will have when you walk out and leave them with a babysitter or they wake up with a babysitters.

It has huge impact on the home, but it won’t happen unless you prioritize it.

Joseph: I’m going to keep that in mind, Tod. I’m going to share some of this with my own wife. I’m also going to keep that in mind for myself. There are some really great tips there.

If people want to learn more about your perspectives on marriage and get some great tips on how to have a successful marriage and to check out your book, Not a Partnership, where can they go?

Tod: Amazon.com, the book is called, Not a Partnership, and they’ll find us there.

Joseph: Cool, I definitely recommend people check it out.

I just wanted to thank you so much, Tod, for taking your time out of your busy day to tell us more about your life as a rabbi and how you made your career pivots, being born to figuring out who you are, and also sharing a few useful tips about marriage right there at the end.

Thanks so much and best of luck with the book and all that you’re doing for your community there in Jerusalem.

Tod: Thank you so much. I appreciate it very much.

Getting laid off from your job can be one of the more jarring experiences in your career. When it happens to you twice, how can you bounce back? And how can a career setback help you clarify and redefine what’s important to you? In this week’s Career Relaunch podcast episode, automotive industry professional Ana Wagner explains how she dealt with being laid off when she was eight months pregnant and once again during the Great Recession of the late 2000s.

We’ll talk about a range of topics including how to avoid being defined by your job and why career detours can give you an opportunity to reevaluate your priorities and gain some healthy perspective. During the Mental Fuel segment, I address a listener’s question from Japan about how long you should hold onto a job you don’t like.

During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I addressed a listener’s question from Tokyo about what to do if you don’t like your job and aren’t sure how long you should stick things out. If you’re stacking up the opinions others have of your career against your own desires, I’d challenge you to take a step that honors who you are and how you want your life to look.

I don’t think it’s easy to completely disregard what others think of you, but I’m just encouraging you to take one step that will move you closer to what YOU want, even if it creates some temporary upheaval or turbulence in your life with the people around you. Because sometimes, you have to prioritize your own happiness, which will hopefully allow the people in your life to eventually feel happier for you too.

Ana Wagner is a mom to two teenagers, wife, and proud native Colombian, currently working as Global Segment Director at PPG, where she is responsible for driving global alignment and defining long term strategic direction for the automotive parts segment. Ana has spent most of her career in the automotive and chemical industries in positions ranging from engineering to market development to marketing strategy.

Ana has a Bachelor of Science degree in Industrial Engineering form Xavier University in Bogota, Colombia, and an MBA from the University of Michigan, Dearborn.

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!

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Ana: I’m going to find something I really like, and now I live by the rule that I have to like what I do at least 70% of the time. I’m not going to like all of my bosses or my co-workers or every single one of my tasks or my projects, but I have to like what I do most of the time. Otherwise, it’s miserable.

Joseph: Good morning, Ana, and welcome to Career Relaunch. It’s great to have you on the show.

Ana: Hi, Joseph. Thanks for having me.

Joseph: I am hoping to talk through a few things with you today, including some of the career transitions you’ve been through and also how you’ve managed through some of the tradeoffs you’ve had to make with each of your career moves. I was hoping you could start us off by just telling me what’s been keeping you busy in your career and your life the past few weeks.

Ana: I work in B2B market strategy, and so I’ve been very busy travelling the world actually. It’s been a lot of travel and juggling with a couple of teenagers. I work for a big company in the chemical space, and so that takes a lot of my time.

Joseph: I think you also just got back from Colombia. Is that right?

Ana: That’s right. My native Colombia. I was there attending on my high school reunion.

Joseph: Very cool. Let’s just start with what you’re doing right now. You mentioned the work that you’re doing. You’re at PPG Industries. What exactly do you do there as a Global Segment Director? Maybe we’ll start there, and then I’d like to jump all the way back in time and then go through your career history.

Ana: As a Global Segment Director, I am in charge of a segment, which is Automotive Parts and Accessories Functional. It’s coatings for automotive parts that go directly into companies that actually make parts for automotive called the tiers – the tier suppliers here in Detroit. In that role, I am responsible for the long-term strategy of the segment as well as global alignment between the regions.

Joseph: Now, I’d like to go back in time because I also know that you started off in the automotive industry as an automotive engineer. Could you just tell us about your time when you started off as an automotive engineer, working, and then we can go forward from there?

Ana: Yes, absolutely. I have an undergrad in industrial engineering. That’s how I started at Ford Motor Company here in Detroit. I worked there for a few years, and then I was part of a spinoff from Ford. The parts division of Ford spun off as a company called Visteon. All in all, I was there for almost eight years.

Joseph: What happened at your eighth? What exactly happened that resulted in you moving on from Visteon?

Ana: The company had been spun off as a very large company. In 2004, it was facing decisions in terms of downsizing. I happened to be eight months pregnant. I had mentioned to my boss that I wanted to take a long maternity leave which was something that the company offered as a benefit, like up to a year. You wouldn’t come back to the same job, but you would have a job.

I had mentioned that a few weeks before, but then one day, they had massive layoffs. Hundreds of people got laid off on a Friday morning. I’ll never forget. I was eight months pregnant, sitting at my desk, and somebody came, tapped me on the shoulder, took me to a conference room where HR talked to me, gave me a folder and told me I had a few minutes to pack up my things, ‘Here’s a box,’ and they escorted me out of the building.

Joseph: Wow. That’s just like what you see in the movies pretty much. I guess there’s a couple of aspects of this that I’m interested in. I guess I’m first of all interested in what it was like to get that very sudden tap on the shoulder, that exact moment when that happened. I’m also interested in what it was like to be eight months pregnant and getting that tap on the shoulder.

Ana: I was going to say it’s horrible, pregnant or not, but it’s even more horrible when you’re not expecting it. Interestingly enough, about three weeks before, I had had a performance review that was outstanding, and I had been told I was a high potential employee and all these. Something happened in between.

I think, theories after the fact, word kind of going around that maybe I got on the wrong list. Maybe somebody was meant to really sit down with me and ask me if I wanted to take a package, but the truth of the matter is I got on the list. It’s pretty brutal. It’s pretty brutal, especially when you’re not expecting it.

That same morning, I was talking to co-workers there, ‘Come on. You’re pregnant. You’re a woman. You’re Hispanic. There’s no way.’ It happened.

Joseph: The aspect of being pregnant right before, I guess, you’re about a month out from delivery, I’m guessing that must’ve affected your psyche at that moment. I’m wondering how that might’ve affected you at that very moment.

Ana: I actually almost went into labor that day. That day was very, very difficult. I almost went into labor that day. Thankfully, I didn’t, so the baby wasn’t born too early. It was very upsetting. It was very upsetting, especially at the beginning.

Within a few days, I said, ‘Ok. This is a good opportunity. I was looking to spend a year home anyway, and here it is. I got a severance check. I’ll take this time to think things through and just actually be with my baby.’ It ended up working out in the end.

Joseph: How was maternity leave for you?

Ana: It was really nice, but at the same time—this was in my early 30’s—I was really afraid of missing out on what was happening in the workplace and missing out on skills, maybe I wasn’t gaining connections and trying to get back into the workforce later.

Joseph: My wife has been through maternity leave, and even I took a little bit of a paternity leave. On the one hand, I know it’s really nice to spend some time with your newborn baby. At the same time, as a professional, it’s hard not to think about time passing professionally. I guess in your case, you had not yet had a job that you knew you were going to back to. How did you think through getting back into the workforce, when to go back, how to reenter?

Ana: I did give myself six months. I said I’m going to give myself six months to really enjoy the baby and enjoy motherhood and adjust to the baby. This was our first baby. I have two now. I gave myself the first six months, and I thought that was a smart thing.

The nice thing about being laid off when you’re part of one of these massive layoffs and packages, at least at the time, is I got a relocation package with a relocation company. I was able, after six months, to go in to this relocation company and go through their training. The training starts by really understanding yourself, what you’d like to do, what your capabilities are, and what the right matches are.

I went through that, which was really, really helpful, and I started searching for the right thing.

Joseph: What did you end up uncovering as the next chapter in your career?

Ana: As traumatized as I was by the corporate world, I found out that I really liked what I was doing in terms of market strategy. I wanted to keep on the same line of business.

I think my attitude really changed though. How I was viewing my job really, really changed. Before, I defined myself by my title and the company I worked for. When I entered Ford, I thought for sure I was going to retire from there.

I really adjusted that view. I said, ‘I’m going to find something I really like.’ Now, I live by rule that I have to like what I do at least 70% of the time. I’m not going to like all of my bosses or my co-workers or every single one of my tasks or my projects, but I have to like what I do most of the time. Otherwise, it’s miserable.

Joseph: I think from our conversation before, you ended up moving into the chemicals industry. Is that correct?

Ana: Yes, I was in the chemical industry for about four years. You think you go through this layoff thing once, and that’s a great experience, and you learn. Seven years later, I get laid off again.

Joseph: How did that one happen, Ana?

Ana: This one was a little bit more expected. This was January of 2009 in Detroit. If you and the listeners know, this was a very tough time in the US and especially tougher for the auto industry in Detroit.

That one was a little bit more expected. The company decided to shut down a branch and close down operations in a few areas. They laid off a lot of people at the same time in one day also. I ended losing my job again. I couldn’t believe it.

This time, I took it a little bit easier. I said, ‘Oh well, let’s try to find the next thing.’ Luckily for me, within a few weeks, I had a job with a customer. People find out that you’re available. Thanks to networking, I ended up finding something.

Having said that, it was something. It wasn’t the perfect job. It was a job that I needed to make a living, but it wasn’t perfect.

Joseph: Did you find that going through the layoff, did that affect your job prospects at all? In this case, it sounds like you made a smooth transition. Did it ever come up? Do you feel like it ended up being a baggage on your resume?

The reason why I ask is I know that sometimes people listening to this show have gone through situations where they’ve been laid off or they’ve been fired. I’m just wondering, sometimes, people have a concern about how that plays out in the long run. Has this had an impact in anyway on your career in the material fashion, beyond obviously the disruption?

Ana: Sure, beyond the disruption and the pain that it is to have to go look for another job, but no, not really. I really was afraid of that, especially the first time it happened, because you’re going to get the question of the gap on your resume and what happened and why did you leave this company.

The second time, I was afraid that would happen, ‘Why did you leave all these companies? Why do you keep moving?’ In reality, no. I think everybody knows what was happening in the economy during those years, and it was a very normal thing, especially here in Detroit. So not at all. It was you were working in a big corporation, and it happens.

Joseph: I’d like to shift gears here a little bit, Ana. This show is all about career change, and we’ve talked about two situations here where it wasn’t your choice to necessarily move on from your job. I know later on in your career, you actually did make some choices, and the choices that you felt were allowing you to prioritize the aspects of your life that were important to you. Can you explain the next chapter of your career when you were at, I believe, it was Guardian Industries?

Ana: After getting laid off the second time, you basically find you get what you get. It was 2009, tough year. 2010, also very tough. I stayed where I was, but I realized it wasn’t the right thing for me. It wasn’t the right match for my values, what I wanted to do.

At the time, thanks to the experiences that I had had before, especially being let go when I was pregnant, my priorities were very clear. My family was first. I was doing a lot of traveling all over the world. I was in an environment where it was no working from home. The office was about an hour from where I live, and so it just took a toll on my family life and stress.

I decided to look for opportunities, and I was being very, very careful about the right corporate culture. I decided to take a step down. I took a step down in title. I had been a director at Guardian Industries, and I went to Dow Chemical as a manager. I also took a step down in pay a little bit, about 10%, 15% pay cut to go there. It was a very conscious decision, and I’m glad I did it.

Joseph: What were you trying to remove from your professional life, and what were you trying to add to your professional life?

Ana: I was looking for an environment that had a better work-life balance culture to begin with and more growth prospects professionally, a place where you could move to maybe different industries within the same company, serve different industries within the same company, where I could have more opportunities to move and to learn.

Joseph: What were your main concerns about taking a pay cut?

Ana: Clearly, taking a pay cut takes a toll. Maybe we will take this vacation or not, but one of the things that goes into the mix is that we are a dual career family. My husband had at the time and still has a full-time job. We were on a dual income, which was a little bit easier to make the decision that way. I don’t take that for granted. Had I been a single mom, the decision would have been probably very different.

Joseph: Do you feel that pay cut at all, on a day-to-day basis, do you feel like it has a material impact on your life?

Ana: Not as much as you think. It really was for a short time. I knew what I was doing. I knew that the prospects of the other place were better, so it might have been a year or two, but really in the big scheme of things, not a huge impact, no.

Joseph: The other things I was hoping we could talk about before we wrap up here is just some of the things that you’ve learned along the way of your career change. I would like to spend a little bit of time with this because I know we’ve gone through some quite major changes in your career quite quickly. I’m just curious about some of the things that you may have learned along the way. Was there anything that especially surprised you about being laid off?

Ana: Yeah, how really being laid off or even taking a risk—if that’s what you decide to do on your own—is really not as hurtful in the long run, especially if you have a good background, a good experience that you can count on and launch of off that. That was surprising. It really wasn’t… It really didn’t hurt me in the long run.

In fact, it’s possible that if I hadn’t been let go the first time when I was pregnant, I probably would still be there, and maybe my career trajectory would have been maybe not as exciting as it has been.

Joseph: The other thing you eluded to was the shift in your perspective on I guess what I’m going to describe as the corporate world and your attachment to your identity as part of someone who’s within that corporate world. How have your views on the corporate world, broadly speaking, evolved over time?

Ana: I know for a fact that they keep going without you, that you’re not indispensable. You’re just one person. I’ve also learned it’s business. It is not somebody being evil. It’s just the way it is.

I see myself now more as a person. I am Ana. I am a mom. I am a career person. I’m an engineer. I have an MBA. I do all these things. I see myself more as Ana Inc. Right now, I have contracted myself to one company. Maybe next year, I’ll be somewhere else.

I don’t define myself by the corporation or by the title. I also learned to put priorities first – not that I didn’t put my family first before, but even more so now. I will not miss a dance recital, and I will not miss a baseball game if I at all can help it.

Joseph: That’s a really healthy way of looking at the balance between the two. I know one of the things that people struggle with sometimes is just having so much of their identity wrapped up in their job title and their association with their company or their organization. Do you have any thoughts on how you have been able to create some healthy separation between the two? Because speaking from personal experience, sometimes it’s a little bit hard to separate yourself from the company or the organization that you work for.

Ana: It definitely is. I try to keep work where work is. Like you, I also work from home quite a bit, and I do a lot of travel. I have a space at my house that’s my office for work that has a door, and it’s closed. When my children get home from school, if they see the door closed, especially if I have a headset on my head, they know I’m working. That’s what they have learned since they were little, and so I just keep that very separate.

When I’m done, I try to turn off the computer and walk away from the office, and now I’m home. I try not to go back unless I do a lot of evening conference calls with Asia. In that case, I’ll go back. I try not to bring my computer into the kitchen and keep doing emails while I make dinner, for example. I don’t do that.

Joseph: I see. So you’ve actually created a physical separation. I’ll have to keep that in mind myself. I’m kind of bad about dabbling between the two sometimes.

Ana: I’m lucky I don’t live in a big city. I do have maybe more space than in a big city where I can’t do that. Yeah, physical separation really does help.

Joseph: What about something that you wish you had known that you now know about navigating career transitions?

Ana: The main thing for me is that it is okay to take a step back to then take three forward. It’s okay to take a risk or to pause or to make a change, because I was very afraid of doing that before.

Joseph: Finally, what about one thing you’ve learned about yourself when it comes to the balance or blend between family and work?

Ana: Probably the main thing is that, thankfully, I do believe I have my priorities straight, and it has paid off. For example, if I ever feel like I should be working through the weekend to get this done, but instead I make myself maybe not work as many hours over the weekend to get that done, and in the end, I get it done the next week.

Really understanding that you can manage time, and I do a lot of that multitasking in general but also manage a lot of projects at the same time. It’s okay to set time aside to focus on work and then set time aside to focus on your family. That I’ve learned quite a bit throughout the years.

Joseph: The last thing I was hoping to talk with you about was something we touched on at the very beginning of our chat, which was going back to your reunion down in Bogota.

I always find in interesting, the psychology of going to a reunion, where you haven’t seen people for a long time. I don’t know about you, but when I go to a reunion, it’s really hard not to think about how other people will view you and where you are in your life. What mattered and what didn’t matter when it came to sharing details about your career and your life with your former classmates?

Ana: It’s funny that you mentioned that, because it used to happen to me. Even going back home to Colombia and meeting friend I hadn’t seen for a while, you get a little bit nervous about that whole thing. This time, I just went completely as I am. It is who I am. Not that I was faking it before, but I just didn’t care about perceptions. It is who I am now.

Interestingly now, it could be because it was a 30 high school reunion, 30 years, so maybe we’re 30 years more mature. The topic almost didn’t come up as much. We were more asking about each other’s families and each other’s happiness and the children. That was really nice. That was really refreshing. It could be because we’re 30 years older now and much more mature than 10, 20 years ago.

Joseph: That’s a good point. I went to my 20-year high school reunion a while back. This was actually a few years ago. I remember coming out of it that I enjoyed the 20-year a lot more than the 10-year. I just didn’t feel like people were comparing as much during that one for whatever reason.

Ana: That was the case for me definitely.

Joseph: Interesting. Ana, thank you so much for telling us more about your career transitions. I was wondering if you’d be willing to just tell people where they can go if they want to learn more about you or to connect with you or learn more about your story.

Ana: Sure! Probably the easiest way to get a hold of me is through LinkedIn. My profile is Ana_C_Wagner.

Joseph: Thank you so much, Ana, for telling us more about your transitions and how you managed those layoffs and also how you took steps to honor the priorities in your life. I appreciate you sharing your story today. I just want to wish you the best of luck with the ongoing pursuits in your life and your career.

Ana: Thank you very much. It’s been my pleasure

The company you work for and the people you work with can have a huge impact on your perspectives, outlook, and self-belief. In episode 64 of Career Relaunch, Retail merchandiser turned baby sleep expert Tamiko Kelly explains why surrounding yourself with the right people can have such a profound impact on your career. She’ll explain the steps she took to move from the corporate world to set up her own independent business. We’ll talk about the importance of starting even if you don’t have a plan fully mapped out, getting yourself out of bad environments, and letting go of things that no longer serve you.

During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, challenges you to think carefully about the company you keep. Think about what specific impact the people you spend the most time with are having own your personal and professional well-being. Write it down. If they’re having a positive impact, great. But if they’re dragging you down all the time, ask yourself how long you’ll willing to tolerate being around those people, and if you feel the time has come to get yourself out of the situation, what small step you could take this week to lay the groundwork for moving somewhere else.

Tamiko Kelly is the founder of Sleep Well, Wake Happy and the creator of The Feel Like Yourself Again Baby Sleep Solution. As a certified sleep consultant and holistic health practitioner, Tamiko helps tired moms feel like themselves again by teaching them how to get their babies sleeping through the night. Her sleep advice has been featured on Yahoo Finance, Care.com, Spawned Parenting Podcast and she has appeared as a guest expert on Austin’s ABC Affiliate TV Show, Studio 512. You can learn more about her workshops here. Prior to doing this work, Tamiko spent her career working in the corporate world doing retail merchandising at some well-known brands including Banana Republic and Nordstroms.

You can follow Tamiko on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

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!

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Teaser (first ~15s): The longer we stay in toxic environments, it really makes us start to believe that we aren’t capable, that we can’t do things, that we are not successful. You’re doing yourself more harm staying in a situation that is no longer serving you.

Joseph: Good afternoon, Tamiko. Welcome to Career Relaunch. We’re going to talk through a few different topics today, including what made you want to leave your retail career behind and how you decided to start your own business focused on, as you put it, helping tired parents. Can you start by telling me more about what you’re focused on right now in your career and your life just to get us started?

Tamiko: Right now, I am making a big shift in my business where I’m going to be out of the day-to-day activities, focusing on the new offer for my company, which is super exciting. Personally, I am about to start the moving process, which we all know can be a little crazy, but as soon as I get my hands around it, because I’m off early with the prep work, so it’ll be easier for me. I’m excited about my new place.

Joseph: I know that you said that you are moving on a little bit in the nature of your work. At the same time, I would be curious to just hear a little bit more about what you had been doing before making this transition. For those people who aren’t familiar with what a sleep consultant does, what exactly have you been doing for parents out there?

Tamiko: I help tired moms feel like themselves again by teaching them how to get their babies sleep into the night. My clients call me the baby whisperer. Basically since 2008, I spent over 50,000 hours. It’s probably closer now to, if I had to guess, over 80,000 or 90,000 now. I was spending that amount of time teaching babies how to sleep and helping their parents be super excited and get a good night’s sleep as well.

I have not met a baby who I couldn’t teach to sleep through the night. I also work with toddlers and older kids as well. If you have a kid who can’t sleep, I’m definitely the girl who can help you. It all started back in 2008, so it’s been a long, wild, crazy ride.

Joseph: I know that you have not always been a sleep consultant, and I do want to come back and hear a little bit more about exactly what you have been doing as a sleep consultant, but can we go back in time and go all the way back to your days working in retail? Then we can move forward from there. Perhaps we could start with your time at The Gap. Could you just explain what you’re doing when you kicked off your retail career at The Gap?

Tamiko: I used to live in the Bay Area, San Francisco, for our folks who are not in the US. I graduated from FIDM, which is the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandise in San Francisco, and my first job out of that—and this is after I already had my Bachelor’s Degree, so this is my second degree—was working at Gap. It started off as a strictly contract position, and all I was supposed to do was to help the Piperlime, which is no longer in existence. We help Piperlime basically organize their inventory.

Back in those days, Piperlime had actual hard goods sample sent from the vendors that we used to service, and we had a sample room. My job was to go into that sample room and actually create inventory organization because what will happen is that our photo team would take pictures of all of the pictures for the actual website so that people could see what the shoes look like and videos of people actually wearing the shoes. Then those shoes had to be chucked somewhere. That was my first stop at Gap.

Joseph: How did you like that and how did you see your career at that point in time progressing?

Tamiko: I loved working at Piperlime because it was literally a startup. It was brand new. The team was excited. It was a super driven time because Gap had never gone into the shoe business before, so it was super exciting for the whole team to kind of be in the inaugural division of the company basically proving ourselves that we could be profitable, etc., that we could actually do the work and actually make money selling shoes.

I had no idea where I wanted my career to go. I had been in retail for so long that I was super excited to be in actual corporate. Anybody who’s in retail, had been to retail, you understand the grind that comes with working on the store level. I was excited not to be at the store level anymore, so I did not care what job it was as long as don’t get the store, and so Piperlime was a super exciting time for me for sure.

Joseph: Then you made a transition—is that right?—to work in high-end clothing retail. What happened during that chapter of your career, and what made you want to make that shift?

Tamiko: Actually, after Piperlime, I was recruited by another division of Gap, Banana Republic, to come and work on their team and specifically work on the men’s business and visual merchandise. I’ve had so much experience in visual merchandising. I was an actual stylist, so I worked with magazines and photographers and did runway shows on and stuff, dressing models and all that, and so they were super excited to have that experience on that team.

Basically, at Banana Republic, I work in the photo studio. My job there was to help the stylist again keep all of the merchandise organized. That was my first role, but then as I was on the team, I’d again got promoted to actually working on the visual men’s merchandise side of the business where I was working with the VP of that division. We were actually setting up the visuals that the entire company would use. We had a studio, and I was basically setting up the visual merchandising for that part of the business.

Basically, at that time, we had about 200 stores. All 200 stores would use the work that we produced to set up the visual merchandise, and so if you guys shop at Banana Republic, all of the mannequins and the tables and all that stuff was done by a team like the one I was on. That was super fun, super exciting. I definitely loved my time working in Gap Corporate.

After Gap was my entrée into Nordstrom. I actually got to open up a fabulous, fantastic store. Actually, let’s back track here. I worked at Nordstrom before The Gap actually because I opened a store in the Houston Galleria. Shout-out to my folks who work at the Houston Galleria store. I opened that store back in 2003, I believe.

Joseph: It sounds like you had such a good run in the retail space. You got a chance to work on some fantastic brands like The Gap and Banana Republic and Nordstrom. I was just curious how you went from that to focusing on sleep.

Tamiko: I took from long line of entrepreneurs, Joseph, so for me, it was a super easy transition. I knew I always wanted to own my own business. I didn’t have any idea what I wanted it to be. I used to have a jewelry business back in the day. I thought I was going to open up a retail business. I thought I was surely going to do something in the retail world. I tried my hand at many things, and nothing really felt right to me.

It wasn’t until I was in San Francisco, and I started to do date nights, that the light really got switched on in my head. I was like, ‘Hmm, I really do like working with families. I really do like working with babies. I’ve been a nanny literally my whole entire life, so maybe this is the route that I need to take,’ and it was literally there that that’s when it started, in San Francisco.

Joseph: When you say ‘date night’—I know you and I talked about this before we did this recording—what do you mean by date night? I think you said you’re a date-night nanny when we talked before.

Tamiko: Basically, parents would hire me. I lived in Silicon Valley. For anybody who doesn’t know, Silicon Valley is full of lots of executives who work super-duper long hours. Basically, families will hire me to come in and give them and their partner a date night so that they could go out, enjoy dinner, and have a night out on the town without the kiddos. Basically, I allow parents to date their spouse again. It’s super fun.

Joseph: That’s so important. You’re a date-night nanny, and you’re helping couples rekindle their relationships post-children, and then what happened? What made you then decide that you wanted to turn this into something more than being a date-night nanny, and you wanted to become a sleep consultant?

Tamiko: One of my clients actually said, ‘Hey, have you thought of taking what you’re teaching me and putting it online?’ What folks have to understand is, back in the day when I was doing this, there was no online courses. That was not a thing back in 2003, ’04, ’05. It literally was not even an industry back then, so to have somebody say to me, ‘Hey, what do you think about that?’ I was like, ‘Girl, what are you talking about?’ I didn’t even know what she was referring to.

She basically was just like, ‘Hey, I go to school. All my classes are online, and it’s great for me because I’m able to do it whenever I’m available. I don’t have to go to an actual campus. I think this would be great for you as well.’ Because she mentioned that to me, it’s got the wheels turning, and I was like, ‘Oh, maybe I can turn this into an actual business and not just random date nights here and there and all of that.’ It was through that one conversation that basically the train left the station with that one conversation.

Joseph: When you went into doing sleep consulting, it was in the form of online courses then. Is that right?

Tamiko: No, it was actually in the form of in-home consult.

Joseph: Okay, so you went into people’s homes one at a time. Can you explain what that was like to go from working in the corporate setting, where you’re working with all these high-end brands, to then going into somebody’s home, where they’re struggling to get their infant or baby or toddler to go to bed by 8 o’clock or 9 o’clock?

Tamiko: I worked my sleep consulting alongside of my job. It was basically a side hustle for me for many years. I would work in corporate, and then after working, on the weekends is when I did my sleep consulting. I was literally driving up and down the Bay Area. I mean literally, I did the entire Bay Area, from Novato all the way to Dublin/Pleasanton. I live in San Mateo, so anybody who’s in the Bay Area, you realize how far I was driving to go to families. I did a lot of work all over the Bay Area.

It was through all of the hours I put in, working with families in that one-on-one capacity, that I was able to develop my online course many years ago. I did not develop my course, Joseph, until 2013. It’s when I finally developed my course.

Joseph: Five years into doing this work, okay. What do you think was the toughest part of doing this kind of work, whether it’s the self-employment aspect of it or the sleep coaching part of it?

Tamiko: In the beginning, I basically worked for anybody who had a baby who didn’t sleep. I had no kind of filters on who I would work for and all that stuff. I think in the beginning, I was just happy to help people.

As I continue to do the work, I realized I only want to work with people who had X, Y, and Z. I think the hardest thing for me in the beginning was turning away business because I had this fear that if I didn’t help everybody, I would literally not have any clients, but it was through that filtering process that I really was able to hone my skills and provide a better niche for myself. In the beginning, it was just hard to say no. Anybody who’s doing a business can totally amen me from the choir stand on that one.

Joseph: Definitely. If somebody is listening to his, Tamiko, and they’ve got some sort of a skill or even a strength that they want to utilize in the form of creating their own business, and they’re hearing you and they’re hearing you say, ‘Wow, I was turning away clients,’ can you explain how were you even finding your first clients?

Tamiko: When I first started, we did not have Facebook. We had the Yahoo Forums. Yahoo Groups was a thing back then.

Joseph: Yeah, right, back in the day.

Tamiko: In the end, I’m in Silicon Valley, the home of Yahoo, and so it was so exciting. Just to let people know, when I was in the Bay Area, I was one of the first, I think, 50 people to even use Twitter. This was like literally back in the day.

Joseph: That’s right, 2008 was right when Twitter was I think released to the public.

Tamiko: I was like the first 50 or 20 people who even got access because somebody had to invite you. It wasn’t even open. Somebody had to say, ‘Hey, Tamiko, come and get on Twitter.’ I mean this was literally when I was starting my business.

We had a Yahoo Group, and basically, I helped one mom, and she went on that Yahoo Group for saving her tail up early in the game and literally screamed my praises from the mountain tops. From that one post, literally my phone rang—I’m not even kidding you all—all day every day. I would be on conference calls, in meetings, and my phone would be blowing up from moms, like, ‘Get over here and sleep pray with baby.’

Joseph: Very interesting.

Tamiko: I didn’t have any kind of marketing strategy. It was literally all word of mouth when I first started.

Joseph: The other thing I was hoping to hear about is—I know you mentioned that turning away clients was tough—was there anything else that was tough about running your own business and this sort of a service-based business?

Tamiko: For me, it was finding time for it all, because I was still working corporate, and it was on the side. It was really trying to balance everything, because there were some days when I was working 12 hours at work, and then I would have to go to somebody’s house at night and then get up the next morning and go to work again. I mean it was just trying to balance it all without killing myself because it was so much work, which people are like, ‘Oh, it’s a good thing.’ It is a good thing when you have a system for that work, but I literally had no system and was flying by the seat of my pants. Just in general, that was hard.

I think also, it was hard for me as far as rates. That was always a hot-button topic for me because I didn’t know what to charge. I just pick the number out of the skies and say, ‘This is the price.’ I didn’t have any kind of formula, system for that, and so whenever I decided to increase my rates, I was very like, ‘Oh my god, I’m increasing my rate.’ I was very nervous that people wouldn’t pay, and they were just like, ‘We don’t care. Just can you do what you say that you can do? They will pay you whatever you want us to pay you.’ Once people told me that, it released me from all the pricing sham I was doing to myself.

Joseph: Pricing is a really tricky thing because there’s so much wrapped up in that, not just the financials of it but also, I guess, perceptions of self-worth and the value you offer and how much your time is worth, so that’s really tricky.

How did you know that it was time to turn this from being a side hustle to your full-time job?

Tamiko: Two things. When the income started to become very close to when I was working in corporate on a part-time basis, I was like, ‘Okay, girl. You have got to really look at this because you’re basically almost besting your corporate salary working part-time,’ just on the weekends and at night, ‘What could you do if you did not have corporate at all? How much money could you then make?’

Number two, just when I got sick of being in corporate. I’ve had some horrible bosses in my career, Joseph. I always say, when we have a horrible boss, that is God or the universe or whoever you call it, giving us the lesson that we need to have at that point in our life. The lesson that I had to get from my bosses when I was in corporate was you are qualified. If these idiot monkeys can do their job and get paid all these money to be basically A-holes, you’re a nice person, people love you, so there’s no reason why you can’t run your own thing and be highly successful in it.

I think once I gotten my head around that, that I was capable, that I am confident, and I’m able to be successful in business, that gave me the confidence to be like ‘Okay, it’s time to leave.’

Joseph, I will tell you, I did not have a game plan. I know a lot of people are like, ‘Oh, I got to have X, Y dollars saved, and I got to have X amount of clients.’ I didn’t do any of that. I literally just said, ‘I’m done working. Today is my last day. I’ll put in my two weeks today.’ I had no money saved up. I had no backup plan. I was like, ‘I don’t care. I’m just done working in corporate,’ and I literally left. I got my first 20K client in 48 hours of leaving, and that’s when I knew that this was what I was supposed to be doing.

Joseph: That is a great transition, Tamiko, into a couple of the last things I was hoping that we could talk about, which is what you’ve learned along the way from making your transition from the corporate world to running your own business.

What you said there about making a leap without having a concrete plan in place is, I think, quite interesting for me because I’m somebody who struggles to move forward without a plan. What did you learn from doing that, from making the leap without having a plan, that you could now say, at this point in time, that maybe you didn’t realize at the time?

Tamiko: Looking back, I think that I learned that I can do anything that I put my mind to. Anything that I say I want to do, it’s 100% possible. I don’t have to battle with the doubt anymore because I’ve proven it to myself time and time and time again. For me, it’s the best thing I ever did.

Looking back, I stayed in corporate way too long, dealt with way too much BS. I should’ve left many years before I left. It’s also a reminder of myself to stop holding on so tightly to things that are no longer serving me for the fear of what may happen in the future and just do what I know I need to do and just trust that it’s going to always work out because it literally always does.

Joseph: Do you have any advice for someone out there who may be listening to this and is feeling some of that same doubt that you were feeling at the time and holding on to a job that maybe they don’t feel is exactly right for them? Any advice for them about making a change?

Tamiko: I suggest to leave. I think that the longer we stay in toxic environments, it does something to our psyche. It really makes us start to believe that we aren’t capable, that we can’t do things, that we are not successful. I personally have bosses who said the most horrible things to me, did the most horrific things to me.

If you’re in an environment where people are constantly negative, they’re constantly bringing you down, it affects you in ways that you don’t even know is affecting you until you’re out of that environment. I didn’t even realize how ridiculous I was being treated until I was no longer in that environment. Looking back, I was like, ‘What in the world were you doing with your life?’ I just think you’re doing yourself more harm staying in a situation that is no longer serving you.

Now, some people may have families, and they can’t just do like I did and just peace out without a game plan, and I can totally respect that. What you have to ask yourself though is, ‘Can I come up with a date that I say, “This is the day that I’m done.” Regardless of what’s happening in the business, regardless of what my boss expects of me, I’m done on this date, and I’m putting in my notice on this date, and then I’m going to have a quit date party. I’m going to put in my notice on this date, and then on my way, I’m going to have a quit date party,’ because whatever you’re meant to do, your dreams, they’re out waiting for you. The longer that you sit in a position that’s not serving you, the less people that you’re able to help.

Joseph: That is really great advice. It is so hard, I think, to walk away from something that feels so stable. That’s just a really good reminder that you’re just burning time, and sometimes, you do have to move on.

Tamiko: I think, Joseph, no job is stable. I mean literally, I’ve been in Silicon Valley during the real estate boom, and people who were making millions of dollars went from having millions of dollars to having zero dollars literally overnight. I just think that people have to realize that civility is an illusion, having a stable job is an illusion, and the longer that you keep telling yourselves these lies, the longer that you’re preventing yourself from doing what you were really put on this earth to do.

I’m a strong advocate for entrepreneurship because I know the freedom it’s given me and the responsibility that I have in my life that I never had in corporate. Anybody who works at retail, you know how crazy that schedule is. You literally have no life, and so I am all for entrepreneurship, and I’m all about finding freedom on your terms for sure.

Joseph: Let’s wrap up with what you’re focused on right now. What is next for you in your business?

Tamiko: What’s next for me and my business is I’m working on a new offer that I mentioned in the beginning. I’ll be able to have other people who will be able to help families that I can’t help. I got to a thought for the day, I think, ‘I’m retiring from nights. I’ve been doing nights for over a decade now. I just think it’s time I pass the baton to somebody else.’ It’s finding people who can help my clients who definitely need help with nights without me having to be the person to do that.

Helping other newborn care professionals, because in my industry, it’s a predominantly female-oriented industry. So many of the women that I meet in conferences and other groups, they are just struggling to make ends meet. I’ve been coaching several of them, and so I’m kind of exploring the idea of coaching newborn care professionals on how to build sustainable businesses that don’t drain the life out of you, that can give you the freedom and the life that you so desperately want. I’m working on that too.

Joseph: I know you’ve also got some workshops that you run. Could you tell me a little bit about your workshops? Then we’ll wrap up.

Tamiko: It basically walks parents through my system, my tips for helping you to night wean your babies so that you don’t have to be up all night every night, feeding your baby every hour. Get your seat in our workshop at SleepWellWakeHappy.com/workshop.

The moms who have joined me on that workshop completely have their lives changed by what they learned, so if you’re a mom whose baby won’t go to sleep without a bottle, a breastfeeding all night long, then you definitely don’t want to miss this workshop.

Joseph: Fantastic. Thank you so much for sharing that resource, Tamiko. I just really appreciate you taking the time to share your story of leaving the corporate world to start your own business and how you navigated the challenges along the way. Again, I think you’re doing some really great work out there, and I’m sure there are plenty of parents out there who really appreciate what you’re doing for them.

Thanks so much for sharing your career story on the show and best of luck to you with your new endeavor.

Tamiko: Thank you so much.

Leaving one of the “best places to work” in the world like Google is a really tough choice, but that’s exactly what former Google marketer Colby Chilcote chose to do when she left to become marketing director at Huron Pines, a nonprofit organization in northern Michigan. In this episode of Career Relaunch, we’ll talk about finding meaning outside of work, coming to terms with difficult decisions, and trusting yourself especially when you’re making seemingly unconventional career moves. I also share some thoughts on how my sources of validation have evolved over time.

During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I challenged you to think about where you seek validation from. How much of your own sense of validation comes from within? How much it comes from others? And are you happy with this blend? Take a moment and jot down what makes you feel good about the choices you’re making in your career and life.

Decide if those sources of validation feel right. If they are, use them as a guide whenever you’re wondering if you’re really on the right track. If they’re not right, make a choice right now to adjust them.

Colby Chilcote is Marketing Director at Huron Pines, a nonprofit organization that protects the health of the Great Lakes through the conservation and restoration of Michigan’s natural resources. Colby started her career at Google where she worked for a decade in marketing and online advertising, helping small businesses and nonprofits build an online presence. Colby holds a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Notre Dame. She lives and works in Northern Michigan where she enjoys exploring the woods and freshwater with her husband and two sons.

She’s also been involved with Huron Pines opening its first nature preserve in 2019, on an 80-acre piece of property donated to the organization in 2018. The environmental nonprofit has been raising funds to support everything from trail maintenance to community programming at the preserve. The core of the Huron Pines mission is to connect people to nature in order to build vibrant and sustainable communities throughout Northern Michigan. The Hubbard Lake Nature Preserve will help achieve this goal. You can help support environmental education and learn more about the Hubbard Lake Nature Preserve or Huron Pines.

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!

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Teaser (first ~15s): I was really defined by my job. I spent a lot of time trying to think more about ‘what are my other interests outside of my job’ and ‘how can I feel validated without my work being the thing that gives me that validation.’

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

Colby: Thank you for having me.

Joseph: I would like to talk with you about a few different topics today, including your decision to move on from a very reputable company, moving from the for-profit to non-profit world. Also, I want to touch on how much salary fills satisfaction. I was hoping you could just start us off by sharing a snapshot of what’s keeping you busy right now in your career and your life.

Colby: Our annual report just hit mail boxes this week. That’s been a huge project that just wrapped up.

Now, I am deep in event planning and getting things ready to open our first nature preserve this June and updating a bunch of communication materials ahead of our field season, which will start in the spring and the summer.

Joseph: For those people who are not familiar with your organization, which is called Huron Pines, can you just give a snapshot of exactly what Huron Pines does and your role there?

Colby: Huron Pines is an environmental conservation non-profit. We’re based in Northeast Michigan, so protecting the great lakes is a huge part of what we do. We do that through a lot of on-the-ground restoration initiatives, like connecting rivers by removing dams, getting rid of invasive species, supporting native habitat, all of those things. Another huge part of our work is connecting people to nature through environmental education and outreach events, those kinds of things.

Essentially, the more that we can get people out loving nature, the more that we can hopefully protect all the natural resources that we have here and then protect the long-term sustainability of the great lakes.

Joseph: I know you haven’t always been the marketing director there at Huron Pines, and I was hoping we could go back in time a little bit, Colby, and go all the way back to the roughly 10-year chapter of your career at Google and in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Can you tell us about what you were doing at Google during those years? You don’t need to go all the details of every single role you had there. Maybe just give a glimpse into what you were doing in your most recent roles there, and then we can move forward from there.

Colby: I had basically two chapters of jobs at Google. I started there right out of grad school. I was a liberal arts person, so I was really happy to get a job wherever anyone would take me. I was very, very lucky that Google was who took me.

I started doing online advertising sales. I did that for about four years, and then I transitioned into marketing for the next five years or so. I worked in small business marketing, specifically trying to help small businesses get an online presence, like thinking about kind of local mom-and-pop shop kind of businesses, getting them to be comfortable with using the internet to help grow their businesses. That was what I spent a lot of my marketing focus on.

Joseph: Aside from your functional marketing role there in your projects, can you paint a quick picture of what it’s really like to work at one of Google’s offices? Because I know that there’s always this intrigue about what it’s like to work at Google. We had people on the show before who have worked at the head office but not somebody who’s worked at a satellite office.

Colby: It was a pretty nice gig. The office moved after I’ve been there for probably about eight years. We were, for a long time, right in the middle of Downtown Ann Arbor, which is really great. Then we moved to a bigger campus basically after we grew. Just the facility to work in is great.

Basically all the things that you hear about are true. All the food is free. We had a chef in a cafeteria. There was a barista. There was a massage therapist on site. All of those things exist in their great perks.

Joseph: Was there anything that surprised you most about working there?

Colby: You start and it’s like so unbelievable that that’s a work environment, and then you, overtime, get really used to it. Then you take for granted all the things that are great about it. Now that I don’t have access to all of that, I appreciate that and realize how crazy it was that some of those trainings, there’s an Authors at Google program, where people would just come in that had written books and talk about them. Some of those kinds of things, like the fact that that was happening on a daily basis, now, is a little more mind-blowing than it was when I was there, because like I said, you just get used to all the crazy stuff that goes on there.

Joseph: Before we talk about your transition out of Google, was there anything in particular that you found challenging about working at a place like Google, in spite of the fact that it sounds like there were such amazing perks and it sounds like a wonderful environment to work in?

Colby: It kind of is a double-edged sword, because what is great about it is that the people that work there are really great and really self-motivated. It’s part of what makes it work and makes it successful. On the other side, there’s this culture of over-achievement and continued progress, which can be really good, but I think it facilitates burn out a little bit.

It also has you constantly questioning whether you’re doing enough or whether your project is big enough to keep moving you forward in your career trajectory. It can be a really stressful place to work also. I think the mix of that stress with all the perks that come with it can be really hard to wrap your mind around both of those things. You start to question what you’re doing in your everyday job, and you’re not sure if you love it. Then you look at all these great things that you have offered to you and you think, ‘Why am I questioning this job? There’s so many great things here. Of course, I should be happy.’

I think all of that mental stuff can make it a difficult place to work.

Joseph: That’s a nice segue, Colby, into what I was hoping to spend a little bit of time talking with you about now, which is your transition. Specifically, I know you eventually decided to move on from Google. Could you take me back to the moment you made your decision to leave Google? I’d be interested in hearing what was going on for you exactly at that time, both at work and also personally.

Colby: Two huge life events happened that really set everything in motion. The first was that my life-long best friend passed away from cancer. Then about two weeks later, I found out that I was pregnant with my first child. There’s a lot of personal change and a lot of emotional upheaval going on that made me really start to think about what it was that was important to me, what I wanted to be spending my time on, what I wanted to see my life become.

I think all of that was the catalyst for what ended up being a slow process of change that got me to where I am now but certainly made me question everything in a way that felt like, ‘Okay, I’m ready to stop wasting time on things that I don’t want to be doing, and I’m ready to start actually making changes to get where I want to be.’

Joseph: Just taking those one at a time—you mentioned your best friend passing away—was there anything in particular that you came to the realization that you feel you really can’t come to unless you had something that tragic happen in your life?

Colby: One of the things that came along with it is it was unexpected but then also kind of a slow process of going through hospice and all these other things. While that was happening, I was still working. At that point, I was happy with the project that I was working on. I felt challenged in my job. I was in a good place at my job, but I still had a little bit of resentment toward it, because I kept thinking like all of these stuff is happening to me personally, and yet this job still goes on whether I’m there or not or whether these other things that matter more are happening or not.

I think that that subtle shift is what changed everything else, because I think, then, when I started to be unhappy with my job, I just kept thinking I’m spending so many hours of my week on this thing that is my work. If this isn’t something I want to be doing, I can’t justify putting the time into this.

I think you can come to that conclusion from a lot of different directions, but I think it certainly helped me see it more clearly. Just the idea of not wanting to waste time was driven home so much more severely than maybe it would be for somebody else, but I don’t think that that’s necessary to come to those conclusions.

Joseph: How did becoming pregnant start to feed into what you wanted more of or less of in your career at that moment?

Colby: I realized that I was really defined by my job, and I was a little bit worried that—because Google has an incredible maternity leave, which is great. You have six months off. I remember thinking, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself.’ I get it that I’m going to have a baby, and I don’t know what that’s like, because I haven’t had one before. I’m not sure how I’m going to feel without having a job to kind of justify my energy and time through.

In anticipation of knowing that that was coming, I spent a lot of time trying to think more about what are my other interests outside of my job and how can I feel validated without my work being the thing that gives me that validation. That was part of, I think, what allowed me to slowly step away from being so enmeshed in what I have been doing in Google for so long.

The other piece of it was that my husband and I had a great set up. We liked our house. We had a lot of friends. We were in a great place, but we still both grew up in more rural places. We grew up where we could be outside on our own and play in the woods. We did start to talk about like, ‘Is this where we want to be long-term? Do we want to be in a metropolitan area? Is this where we want to raise kids?’ Those things definitely came together to start us thinking about making bigger life changes.

Joseph: How did you ultimately come to your decision to leave Google and then move out to Grayling, Michigan?

Colby: It was slow in that, from the time that I first found out I was pregnant to the time we moved here, was about two years. I think things really shifted after I came back to work from that first maternity leave. I wasn’t very happy in the role that I was in. There was a honeymoon period of like, ‘Oh, this is great. I’m excited to be back. I’m not at home with the baby, which is great, a nice relief. I can have a coffee,’ but I just wasn’t really happy in the role that I was in.

I’ve been on the same team, working with people that I really liked, but the actual project that we were working on we’ve been working on for almost four years or something. It was very clear that I had kind of ran out of my ability to keep growing and that what was going to be expected of me was that I did keep growing in order to have good performance reviews and get promoted and all that stuff, but I couldn’t really see a path where I was going to have enough responsibility.

I was pretty miserable, but I didn’t realize it. My husband was the one who would say to me like, ‘You’re not very happy,’ when I would come home from work. I would say, ‘No, no, no. It’s fine. It’s fine. It’s not so bad.’ It probably took six or nine months for me to really wrap my own head around how unhappy I was and that something needed to change. I eventually came to the conclusion that, regardless of what happened with the rest of our life, I was going to have to find a different job.

That was the first huge step, because we had talked about moving. We had talked about other things, but it was always, ‘Well, I don’t know if I could leave Google.’ It just basically got to the point where there weren’t going to be opportunities where I was, like in our office. I couldn’t keep going the way that I was going.

As soon as I mentally flipped that switch, a bunch of other opportunities came up. I feel like from there, everything happened like a set of dominoes fell probably within a year from that point. We had moved, and I had started a new job.

Joseph: It sounds like you ultimately decided to move and leave Google. At the same time, I’m imagining that it’s probably hard to walk away from such a reputable company that also offers so many benefits. What was the hardest part for you about leaving a place like Google behind?

Colby: The idea of it was the hardest. I think once I finally made the decision, it wasn’t as hard. Getting to that point was really difficult, because we used to joke about it. Everybody that works at Google talks about the golden handcuffs and how you literally, at least when I was working there, Google was voted the best place to work for many years when I worked there.

It’s like a weird mental game where you feel like, ‘If I don’t love this job and it’s literally the best place you can work, how am I going to find another job that I really love?’ I felt like I had to do something super different or something that was so much better in order to justify leaving. I just, for so long, couldn’t put my finger on what that next thing would be or what possibly would be better.

That was the hardest part. I think it’s just coming to terms with the fact that just because everybody else on the outside may have thought that it was the perfect place to be didn’t mean that it was the perfect place for me to be.

Joseph: Just shifting gears, Colby, to your time then when you moved on to Huron Pines and also when you decided to move from Ann Arbor to Grayling, what was that transition like for you? I’m specifically interested in some of the things you realized that you gave up and how you thought through that, which I know you eluded to earlier, letting go some of those great benefits at a place like Google.

Colby: My husband and I had hundreds of discussions over the course of a couple of years about whether or not we could really make this move and whether or not it was what we wanted to do. I think because we planned really well and talked through every worst case scenario, we felt pretty comfortable with our decision before we even fully made it.

For example, we lived in a city where you could walk to a gourmet grocery store. It was a few blocks from our house, and there are places to eat and things to do. We would talked about all these thing are great, but is this important to us or is it more important that we have a yard and that our kids can go to the lake and that we can do things outside?

At some point, we sat down and made a list of what are the five things that we would want. Where would we want to live? What would we want to do if we won the lottery? That was also one of the pieces that helped put some this stuff into play, because we realized that what we wanted wasn’t actually like that unobtainable. One of the things was we really wanted to live on the water. We never would have been able to do that in a metro area because it’s just way too expensive.

We started thinking, how do we make these things happen? Are they feasible for us? It didn’t seem like were making a big sacrifice, because we were sort of trading one life for another. It’s more what it felt like. We decided that we liked the option behind door number two better. We were very committed to having a different kind of life. That life was more built around natural resources. It was built around being closer to our families and having kids and jobs where we felt like we were making more of an impact.

Those are all things that are important to us, and so when things started to fall into place that we could make those things happen, leaving behind the money and the perks and the restaurants and all that kind of stuff, it just didn’t feel like we are making a big sacrifice.

Joseph: From your career journey, Colby, I’d be really interested in getting your honest, non-candy-coated perspective on a few things because you just mentioned money. I was wondering, can we just talk for a moment about salary, because I know you had a change to your salary? I’m just wondering if you could explain what impact, if any, that had on both your life and also your overall satisfaction.

Colby: On the one hand, yes, I had a significant pay cut to switch jobs. On the other hand—maybe this is not good to say—but I think that Google’s salary was also pretty inflated. From where I stared to where I ended up, I was promoted a couple of times. At some points through the course of those 10 years, Google decided to give every employee a 10% pay bump, like a lot of weird things like that happened.

When I left, I think that the salary was inflated for the Midwest for sure. I worked for a company that was a tech company based in California. I know they pay different amounts based on where your office is, but still I think even in Ann Arbor, Detroit area, I would have probably been hard-pressed to find a job where I was making an equivalent salary.

I think I let go of that idea of salary equivalency when I decided I don’t want to be at Google anymore. That was one of the first things that had to go out the window. I figured I wasn’t going to find it. I also figured if I could let that piece go, it’d probably be a lot easier for me to find something else.

I also had always had some interest in non-profit work. I did some technology training for non-profits with Google Tools for a couple of years when I was at Google. I had always had in the back of my mind that a non-profit transition might be a good fit for me.

When we started talking about making the move and changing career paths, I had also thought it was likely that not only would I be moving to Northern Michigan where the salaries in general were just going to be lower because the cost of living was lower, but that I might be going into an industry that was just going to, in general, have lower salaries.

We did a lot of planning for it. We made sure that we paid off student loans, that we didn’t have car payments, anything that we had to get rid of to get rid of overhead so that we could still have a comfortable life without having to worry about how much we are bringing in. That was how we handled it, and then the salary thing became less of an issue.

Joseph: It sounds like you’ve made some lifestyle tradeoffs that allowed you to then tolerate the salary change.

Colby: Yeah.

Joseph: What about benefits? Some listeners out there maybe have some cushy benefits and perks in their current roles as you did at Google. I guess I just want to ask, do you miss the benefits at all? If so, what do you miss? If not, why do you not miss them?

Colby: That is a piece that I definitely miss. I think in some cases, it was like a bit of ‘ignorance is bliss,’ because Google was my first real job. It was the first time I had benefits. I also didn’t realize how good they were. By the time we left, right after I had my second son, and that was also planned, I decided I want to have at least two kids, and I want to have them while I still work at Google, because I want to be able to have all the healthcare and all the maternity leave and everything built in.

That was planned, but on the other hand, because we just had two new, small children, I didn’t really anticipate the healthcare needs of having kids because that was new to our whole life experience. I think that maybe if we had waited longer, I might have been really nervous about giving up that benefit piece, knowing that it wasn’t just about my husband and me staying healthy. You just don’t know what’s going to happen with kids and what they’re going to need.

Luckily, we were a little bit like, ‘It’ll be fine.’ We definitely talked about it. We were worried about it, but I think, again, we were just like, ‘Well, this is how much we anticipated it would potentially cost if we have to pay for benefits. We’ll just figure that out,’ which we’ve been able to do, but certainly it’s more expensive, and it’s also the coverage is just not as good. Google has very, very good benefits.

On the other hand, with Huron Pines now, we’ve had conversations about this. Now, we’re looking into other insurance options and trying to figure out how to bring better healthcare benefits to the staff. Part of it is finding a place to land where you can also try to either affect some change or feel like you have some security still.

Joseph: One last question about this before we talk about some of the thing you’ve learned having now spent some time in that non-profit world that seems very much cause-based. Have you found that it has provided you with that kind of meaning in your career that you were seeking when you made the move?

Colby: I’m much more intrinsically motivated, which is also part of why the salary and all that stuff is nice. Ultimately, I just want to feel like I’m doing a good job. I want to be a hardworking person that can show something for the work that I’ve done. It’s really nice to know that even if I’m having a month where I’m really busy and I feel stressed out and I’m working extra hours, that I’m doing that for a bigger cause than just my own benefit or something like marketing deadline.

I think that really helps justify the time that I’m putting in, because I think I always have that mentality regardless of what the job was. Once I get involved in something, I get really involved. I was aware enough of that to know that whatever the next job I had, I was going to need to really care about it, or else I was going to fall into that trap of spending all my time on something and then walking away and thinking like, ‘In 10 years, is anyone going to care about this?’

I feel like in 10 years, people are going to care that we have protected forests and places for people to have recreational access. Those things actually really do matter, so it justifies the amount of time and effort that I put into it, which does feel a lot more satisfying.

Joseph: Before we wrap up, I’d also like to talk about some of the things that you’ve learned along the way of your career journey.

One of the things that we spoke about before doing this recording was you mentioned a sense of relief when you chose to finally move from Google out to your current world there in Huron Pines and also from Ann Arbor to a more rural setting.

Can you just explain what that relief was about or what you meant by that?

Colby: For so long, it just seemed like I’m in the best job that exists, so how can I be unhappy here? I kept feeling like it was my fault. I’ve got to just be more gracious and appreciate this job more or something, because ‘why am I not liking this?’

When we finally made the move and I started at Huron Pines and I was really excited about the work that I was doing and I had more responsibility and I had more autonomy, it just all really clicked like, ‘No. That was just the wrong fit for me. This is a job that I want to be doing, and that made all the difference in the world. That, I think, was the biggest lesson of the whole thing is like I should have trusted my gut sooner, and that it’s okay to walk away from something, even if everybody else thinks you’re crazy. You have to do what is the right thing for you.

As soon as I did that, the relief was like everything didn’t come crashing down around me. I was actually much more satisfied and much happier, and that felt amazing.

Joseph: Having made this move from for-profit to non-profit, is there something you now know about making this transition that you wished you had known before?

Colby: I think what I wish I had known was that it was okay to take a risk. If you are trusting your gut in thinking things through and making informed decisions, you’re going to end up in an okay place.

I think I was afraid for so long like, ‘What if I leave, and I’m just thinking the grass is greener on the other side, and I get a different job, and I realize I’ve made a horrible mistake?’ I think, for a long time, that kept me from leaving.

I don’t know what someone could have said to me, but I wish I had had a crystal ball and could see, just because this a nice set up doesn’t mean it’s the end-all-be-all of jobs and that you should trust that what feels right for you is going to make you happier in the end.

Joseph: That makes a lot of sense. I think it’s so hard to trust your gut when everything on paper seems like you should be happy with what you have. I think you’re making such an important point here that you, sometimes, just have to trust your intuition in spite of the fact that everyone else might think, and even you might think that, ‘Wow, this is probably as good as it’s going to get.’

Finally, what have you learned about yourself, having moved from Ann Arbor to Grayling, going from a more urban environment to a more rural environment?

Colby: The good thing is that I think it validated a lot of things that I suspected, that having autonomy in my work, making an impact, spending more time with the people that I love, with my family, with my friends, that that’s way more valuable to me than money could ever be.

I always assumed that, but it was hard. I never tested it. It was easy for me to think I don’t really care about all this extra stuff that I’m getting, because I work at Google. What I want are to have a job that I feel good about when I come home and to be able spend time with my family and have a life that I feel happy about outside of work.

Now that I’ve kind of put my money where my mouth is, it’s been a good thing that the experiment worked out in my favor. I think that is the biggest thing I learned. It’s that what I suspected was true, and I’m a lot happier for it. It doesn’t really make any difference to me. My ego isn’t fueled by how much money I’m making. It’s really more about what I am spending my time on. I feel better about what I’m spending all my time on now.

Joseph: Great. Before we go, I can’t let you go without talking a little bit about some of your work there at Huron Pines. I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit more about one of your initiatives there, which is the Hubbard Lake Nature Preserve opening this summer.

Colby: We were extremely lucky at the end of last summer. We had a couple donate a property to us on Hubbard Lake, which is on the Northeast side of Michigan. That’s not too far Lake Huron. It’s an 80-acre property. It’s got two miles of trails. It’s got a couple buildings on the property that we hope to use for classrooms and community programming. It will be our first nature preserve.

This summer, we’re going to start opening to the public for a daily recreational use, so people can come out and hike and bird watch and do that kind of stuff out there.

We’re also launching an event series. Once a month, we will have different things from environmental and nature walks for families to workshops on how get rid of invasive species. We’re going to do a run and a yoga class out there. We’re going to do an art class. We got a ton of stuff going on.

I’m super excited about that, because it’s just like a whole new opportunity for Huron Pines and for people to get out and experience nature. We’re all really excited for people to start using it this summer.

Joseph: Very cool. If people want to support environmental education or learn more about the nature preserve, where can they go?

Colby: Our website is HuronPines.org. If you’re interested specifically in the nature preserve, it’s just HuronPines.org/hubbard-lake. Just to learn more about what we do, you can just go to our website.

Joseph: Thank you so much, Colby, for telling us more about your career choices and how you thought through prioritizing what mattered the most to you and most importantly trusting your gut when making these kinds of really important professional decisions.

Best of luck with your role there at Huron Pines, your life in Grayling, and the Hubbard Lake Nature Preserve.

Colby: Thank you. Thanks for having me.