Walking away from a family business comes with its own unique set of challenges and emotional dynamics. In this episode of Career Relaunch, Michael McEvoy shares his story of walking away from being a partner at a law firm, the same firm his father spent his entire career, to found his own public adjusting company. We discuss making time for those who matter in your life, the importance of following a path that makes you truly happy, the impact your career can have on the people in your life, and dealing with the judgements of others. During the Mental Fuel segment, I also explain how much your job satisfaction can affect your life outside of work.

During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I challenged listeners to think carefully about the bigger picture of your life beyond work–specifically, one area of your life outside of work that’s recently taken a hit because of your work. Then, to decide what change you’re going to commit to making to at least START undoing that damage. It may mean you will need to make some sort of decision that inevitably involves some sort of a tradeoff that allow you to have the life you want outside of work.

Mike McEvoy started his career as a licensed attorney in 2003, and spent the majority of his time with a large insurance defense firm in Los Angeles as an associate and then as a partner. Through his legal work, he discovered he had a passion for handling the damages side of wildfire litigation. He eventually walked from his career in 2015, unsure of what he was going to do next. After a lot of time and self-reflection, he found a new path as a public adjuster and business owner. In 2018, Mike founded Integral Adjusters, a public adjusting company, to help insurance policyholders protect their rights, navigate the insurance claim process, and maximize their benefits and financial recovery. Follow Mike on LinkedIn and Twitter.

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): You have to put up your professional face when you’re in that situation, but when you bring it home, you’re living it again. It affected my wife and my son to the point where she said, ‘Look. We need to talk about this.’

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

Michael: Good morning, Joseph. Thank you.

Joseph: We are going to talk about a range of topics today, including the realities of being an attorney, the dynamics of turning down opportunities, and also a lot about family today, which I think is going to come up as a theme, especially the dynamics of being part of and leaving a family business and also the impact your own family has on your career choices. I was wondering if you could kick us off by just telling me what you’re focused on right now in your career and life at this moment.

Michael: Right now, I’m focused on my public adjusting business, which I started last year. Towards the end of the year, I formed a business Integral Adjusters and focused on public adjusting which is advocating on behalf of policy holders in property damage claims to maximize their benefits from their insurance company. That’s where my focus has been lately: just trying to build on that and develop rapport with my clients.

On the life front, just continuing to find that balance as things start to pick up with the business and taking it from there.

Joseph: I was also wondering if you could just give us a glimpse into your family. I know you’re married. Can you remind me how many kids you’ve got?

Michael: I’ve got the one son. He’s eight years old right now.

Joseph: Okay. I know that you haven’t always been the founder of Integral Adjusters, but you have been a licensed attorney since 2003. Could you take us all the way back in time to when you started off in your career at a Sacramento law firm? Then we can move forward from there. What were you doing at that time?

Michael: In 2003, I passed the bar, and I had been working at an insurance defense law firm in Sacramento as a law clerk. I continued to work there once I passed the bar as an attorney. Eventually, I wanted to move back to Southern California where I grew up.

An opportunity arose. My family is a family of lawyers. My dad’s a lawyer. My wife’s a lawyer. My brother’s a lawyer. My dad had been practicing since 1968 at the same firm. He said there was a position opening up and if I wanted to come down and work at the firm.

He’s actually in the Orange County office of this firm, and I was moving into Los Angeles. I decided to come down, and my wife found a job down here. That’s where I really developed my legal career, in Southern California at this firm.

Joseph: Can you just give a glimpse into what it’s like to be offered a role and then to join a business that was started by your father? Because I think you’re the first person on the show that we’ve had that has been part of a family business.

Michael: When you do join where you know your dad is working and where everybody knows that, ‘Okay. Well, he’s coming in and his dad has been here forever,’ there’s certainly a little bit of pressure to separate yourself and make a name for yourself, which is certainly what I wanted to do. I don’t want people to think, ‘Well, he’s only getting a paycheck because his dad is a senior partner here.’ Certainly, I wanted to find my niche and work my way through the ranks there.

Joseph: I know you were there for many years, and you eventually became partner in 2013. Can you remember the moment you became partner? If so, what was that like for you?

Michael: I didn’t know I was going to be named partner, but I remember I was having dinner at night here with my wife, and I got a call from one of the senior partners. At this firm, the senior partner is equivalent to an equity partner, and so they’re obviously the ones that are making the decisions.

I got the call, and he said, ‘We’re going to make you a partner.’ I was just overjoyed. I was really excited because that’s what I was working hard for, to advance my career, and I was going down the traditional path through the firm. With that comes also added pressure that, now, you’re going to be expected to bring in business. I saw it as more responsibility also.

Joseph: For those people out there who aren’t as familiar with the significance of becoming a partner in a firm, I know you mentioned that there’s additional responsibility, and I’m assuming there’s also the financial rewards to that, what’s the day-to-day significance in terms of your experience in your job of becoming a partner?

I know that it’s something that a lot of people aspire to do, and at the same time, we’ve had somebody on the show who had that dangled in front of her, and she wasn’t sure if that’s what she wanted. I’m just curious, what’s the significance of becoming a partner, and why do you think that’s so important to many people working in firms like this?

Michael: There are different levels of partnership. You come in as a junior associate, then you work your way up to maybe a senior associate and then partner, and then there’s equity partner which there’s very few of those typically. It’s just the next step, and the significance is that you’re now expected to try and move into the next step, which is you’re now expected to try and bring in your own business and manage your own files.

Joseph: It sounds like you’re on a really good track there at the firm. You’re advancing. You make partner. When did you start to realize you wanted to make a shift out of that firm?

Michael: I guess I should go back to what I was doing.

I found my so-called niche in Wildland Fire Litigation. I really enjoyed working on those cases. It’s very unique practice, and I think it’s been in the news a lot more, but I was certainly there starting with that in 2007 or 2008. I really enjoyed the work, and I developed an expertise in damages and really enjoyed that aspect of things. The other part of the firm’s practice—I mean this was just one little area—there was also personal injury and really the demands of the insurance companies.

What ended up happening was by 2014, the Wildfire Litigation work was starting to dry up in the firm. My son, in 2014, he got very sick. He had a fever of over 104. We didn’t know what was going on and basically ended up in an emergency room in a hospital for eight days while doctors try to figure what was wrong with him.

During that time, my wife and I were just scared about what this means. It was really to the point where they’re telling you all these tests, and they’re coming back, and it’s this very rare condition that he’s got. By the end of it, we’re learning that he’s going to need treatment for the rest of his life. That’s something that the realities of what’s important to you come in to play.

During that time there, eight days you’re away from your law firm, I was able to respond to calls and things like that, but there were certain demands and pressures where I saw requests that this still needs to get done, and you still need to get this out the door. Where are we on this type of reactions? I started to realize what’s important to me.

That played a role in how I started to feel about things. I was doing less of the wildfire litigation work and more of personal injury. Your listeners may not be aware, but it gets to be a real negative, argumentative in a lot of instances. It was that kind of starting to realize that, ‘Hey, there’s more out there. If I could focus on something that doesn’t bring the same kind of stress level…’ That was where things were, I guess, as I was going through this process.

Joseph: Before our recording, you had also mentioned to me that you weren’t feeling really happy for a number of reasons and that you were bringing some of that daily stress and anxiety home, which was affecting some of your relationships with your family. Can you describe what was happening with your home life? I know that you mentioned your son was sick, and that was something that was weighing on you. Was anything else happening?

Michael: Definitely. Stuff was happening at home where you’re constantly thinking about what you have to get done or what this person’s expecting or what the insurance company, how they cut your bill or how the other side reacted at the deposition. You have to put up your professional face when you’re in that situation, but when you bring it home, you’re living it again.

It affected my wife and my son to the point where she said, ‘Look, we need to talk about this. We’re just not on the same page here, and I feel like you’re not here. You’re sitting here at the dinner table, but you’re reactive and you’re not present for conversation.’ It was that kind of thing where you’re just so consumed by what the daily routine at the office is handing you and what may have happened that you have to hold back on your emotions in the professional setting. You just bottle it up.

It was starting to wear on me and my wife. When I look back, I was sick a lot physically. I look back, and I haven’t really been sick since I quit. I think physically and emotionally, it can really drain on you.

About a couple of months before I left, we had that conversation where it came down to ‘what do you want to do? What should we do?’ It came up that maybe it is time to step away, and that’s what we ended up doing.

Joseph: I know in 2015, again when we spoke before, there was a tipping point where you were at a conference and speaking about personal property damage. Can you just explain what opportunity came up at that moment and what that told you about your career and your future there at that firm?

Michael: I still was keeping up on the Wildfire cases and damages, and I participated in actually a Wildland Fire conference. I was asked to be a guest speaker, and so I spoke at the conference. Probably maybe within a month or two of my speaking engagement, I received a call from a potential client, a big potential client wanting to learn more about me and our practice. My expectation was, ‘This is great.’

Of course, I relayed that to the senior partners I work with. I soon learned that they had already talked with the potential client and had set up a meeting, and I was not invited to the meeting with this potential client. That was definitely my tipping point.

I can look back on it now, and I can just say, ‘That was the traditional way things were done.’ You go up the chain of command and who’s the most senior person, but that hurt, because I felt like that was my baby that I’ve been working on, and this was something that I thought was going to come in through me.

That kind of stuff matters when you’re working your way up through a firm and who’s bringing in the business. It was the last straw for me: that situation.

Joseph: You had your son get sick in 2014. Things we’re a little bit tough at home. You had this client opportunity where you were overlooked for the meeting. At what point did you decide that you wanted to resign, and how did you go about making that decision?

Michael: Four months before I decided to leave, one of the other senior partners, when I was in his office, was talking to me about, ‘Do you see yourself as a senior partner? You really got to think about that.’ Of course, you’re expected to say yes, but as I thought about it and looked at what these guys were doing and what their lives were like, do I want that? That literally was going through my head. I really realized that, no, I don’t. I just don’t see myself going down that traditional path.

My wife and I had a conversation. We realized we were going to have to make some changes to our spending habits, that it was going to be probably very difficult to make that decision and how it was going to impact my family, especially my dad and my mom, who were a part of that firm for 40-plus years.

I didn’t know how they were going to react. I don’t blame them. They did not want to see me leave the firm, and I think it was hard for them to understand that. That was the difficulty of going through that process. It felt good to make the decision, but then actually going through and giving your notice and then walking away, it was, ‘Okay, so now what?’

You spend so much time, energy, money on becoming an attorney and everything that that entailed and then to just step away from it. You realize that people are going to have different reactions to it. I mean, now, my parents, I think even in the first couple of months, they eventually realized, ‘Okay. Well look, he’s happier. Look at his relationship with our grandson and how things have really improved for them.’ Now, they’re really happy for me and what I’m doing with my business and where things have led.

Joseph: That’s really great to hear. I know that having gone through a couple of resignations myself, and because we talked about the idea of resigning so much on the show, I really feel like resigning from your job, it’s got to be one of the most, if not the most emotional things that you do in your career. It sounds like your parents, they eventually came around to the idea that this was good for you. I’m actually really curious, was there any fallout after you resigned from your family’s firm?

Michael: It was so hard to talk about it with them, because I just knew they were not onboard with it. At some point, they are your parents, and they are looking out for your best interest. They’re from a more traditional—I mean they didn’t do that in their day. My dad was with the same firm for 40 years. I can now understand. Looking back now, it’s easy to understand why they felt that way.

Even with some of my friends, they couldn’t understand it. They’re like, ‘What? Your wife’s going to be the only one earning? She’s going to be the breadwinner? What are you going to be? Are you retiring?’ that kind of attitude where you’re like, ‘No, dude. Come on. I’m not retiring. For the good of my own well-being and my family’s well-being, that’s why I did it.’

Joseph: How long was your transition, then, between resigning and then starting your new business?

Michael: It felt like a long transition. I think initially it was really just about getting away from it and just focusing on something different. During that first year, it was really about being there for my son, picking him up from school, taking him to go play.

Joseph: What was that like for you to be able to be there for him?

Michael: It was really great. I will always appreciate that initial time. I don’t know. It just opened up my eyes to so many different things when you step away and you really just focus on what’s going to make me happy right now: being there for my son, getting to go to his fieldtrips, or participating in his school activities with him. He was only in kindergarten at the time. I think that really helped us bond and build our relationship.

At the same time, people would ask me, ‘What do you do day-to-day? What do you do?’ That was always one of the questions that people would kind of, ‘How can you be at home? What are doing?’ Well, there’s lots of things you could do. You go and pick up a book or go down to the library. I would go to the library, and I ended up reading a really good book which, for your listeners, I found was helpful. It’s called What Color Is Your Parachute?

Joseph: Oh, yeah. I’ve read that. That was an excellent read.

Michael: I didn’t necessarily get through every part of the book or do every exercise, but I thought it was really helpful just to narrow down the things that matter to you. The exercises of what was important in this job, who are the people you like working with, those types of questions that you don’t normally think about or spend the time to think about, which helped me start to feel where my interests were.

Early on, I was thinking maybe I should become a teacher. Everything starts coming into your head. I took meteorology in college, and I really enjoyed watching the weather channel, which everybody thought I was a weather nerd and ‘what a dork for doing that.’ Everything is on the table.

It really developed organically where it was, ‘Okay, I like doing the damages. I like helping people. I like analyzing things using my critical thinking skills and organizing information.’ That’s when I started to look at being a public adjuster. What that involved was getting licensed, taking a test, applying, and so that’s eventually where I ended up going.

Before I did that, I talked to people, which I think is important – to reach out to people you either know who are connected to something that you’re interested in. That’s what I started doing: reaching out to colleagues, friends, other experts in different fields that I had worked with. You start to build a network. You can find people who are going to be supportive and points you down a path to help you.

Joseph: It sounds like there was some real upside to having a little bit of time and space to step away from your work, because it gave you a lot of opportunity to gain some clarity on what you wanted to do. Was there anything that was especially tough or challenging about the transition?

Michael: I think early on that was when it was the toughest. It was the transition from your identity as a lawyer or as your profession to now that isn’t there. I think, for me, I was so consumed with it that that’s who I was. I was a lawyer, and this is what you do. You work late hours. You work long billable hours. You’re stressed. That’s just the way it is. Stepping away from that, you realize there’s a whole other world out there.

Initially, it was you’re walking the dog and you bump into somebody you know. It’s, ‘Why aren’t you at work? What’s going on?’

Joseph: I think you said you bumped into your mom’s friend or something when you were walking.

Michael: It was probably two or three months into my transition, walking away. I just ran into her in town. It seems silly now, but she said, ‘Oh, what are you doing here?’ I said, ‘Oh, I’m just hanging out.’ I don’t know why I said that. I was going to lunch with somebody, but it was just, at least for me, that was one of the things that I had to get over: being concerned of what other people think and just moving on and seeing the bigger picture, that there’s more to life than just this career.

Joseph: I think that sometimes people struggle with what to do with people who have a little bit of idle time or who aren’t fitting in to the traditional nine-to-five or nine-to-six or nine-to-whatever work lifestyle. I thought it was interesting what you were mentioning before about spending some time with your son.

I think when you and I spoke before, I mentioned to you that I look after my daughter who is about 17 months old on Tuesdays. I’ll go to events with her or music class with her, and I’ve actually been asked by mostly mothers at these events who I think are trying to figure out what I’m doing there or how was it that I’m there. They’re just not quite sure what to make of me. I think maybe people are a little bit confused when they see others who are not working.

You mentioned the big picture, Mike, and I’d love to just wrap up by talking about some of the things that you’ve learned along the way of your career path. The first thing I’m curious about, because I know that you’re now running your own company, what are some of the things you’re able to do now that you weren’t able to do before?

Michael: What I have more of right now is being able to continue to work on this business, but at the same time having that balance to be there for my son and pick him up from school and take him golfing or take him to play at the park. That, for me, is really important. I found that that really is important. I want to maintain that.

Right now, I’m in a position where the business is just getting started. I have a couple of clients. As things grow or develop, I feel confident that I can figure this stuff out. I think, when I left the firm, I didn’t know that I could even go down this path or I could be a business owner or I could put my name out there. When you’re in a certain environment, that’s all you know. Getting out of that circle and talking to people and getting advice, and then I spent a lot of time in the library, just picking up books and reading about how do I form an LLC, just the basics doing the business, before, I wouldn’t have the confidence to do that.

I think if you put your mind to it and really just focus on the things that are going to make you happy—I was very lucky with having my wife work. We’re in a position where I could step away as long as I did to figure my own path out. I appreciate that she’s been willing to do that. Not everybody’s going to have that opportunity, but I think if you can at least step away for a little while or just really think about what you enjoy about the job you’re doing and find the aspects that make you happy, as you went down that path for a reason, if there’s something there, you can turn it into something else.

For me, it’s now coming full circle, because I’ve now been contacted by, just recently, some of the previous client who I’m now going to work with again more on a legal consulting basis. What surprises me is just how naturally things fall into place when you open yourself up to new ideas and new ways of thinking.

Joseph: When you look back on this whole journey of starting off in a family business, then leaving that business behind, having a lengthy transition, starting your own business, what’s something that you wish you had known that you now know?

Michael: I guess it was the people questioning your decision. I wish I could tell myself, ‘Don’t take it so personally,’ because that’s what can hurt. It’s when you don’t have the support from people you might expect it from. I’m able to now say, ‘There was a reason for that.’ This was the firm that allowed my family to become successful and my dad and mom to have the lives that they had.

Of course, they’re going to think this is a crazy move on my part to just leave. You have to take everything in perspective and be aware that the people that are maybe questioning the decision, they’ve got a different background. They’ve got a reason for feeling that way. That would be my one ‘I wish I had known that,’ because I think it would have made for a little bit easier transition.

Joseph: That makes a lot of sense. I mean it’s so hard to just completely dismiss the views and opinions of people who matter to you. I just found it to be easier said than done, but if you can do it, it definitely allows you to move forward with a little bit less suffering, I think.

Michael: That’s a good way of putting it.

Joseph: Final question for you. Having been through this career transition, what’s one thing that you’ve learned about yourself?

Michael: Being unhappy in my job was preventing me from enjoying everything else. It’s really important to focus on really what brings you happiness or joy, I guess. Not everybody can do that, but I think that that’s important to me.

Joseph: I think that’s a really great way to leave our discussion today, because I do think that it’s important to do work that does bring you joy and that it really does have an impact on the rest of your life. By trying to find work that you find more meaningful, it actually does a service to the rest of your life too.

With that in mind, it sounds like you are enjoying the new chapter in your career with the work that you’re doing there in public adjusting. Where can people go if they want to learn more about the public adjusting company that you founded and the work that you’re doing right now?

Michael: They can go to IntegralAdjusters.com, or they can find me on LinkedIn.

Joseph: All right, Mike. Thank you so much for telling us more about your former life as an attorney and some of the motivations behind your transitions, and most of all, how you found your way. I appreciate you sharing all the personal details along the way. I just wanted to wish you the best of luck with your work there at Integral Adjusters.

Michael: Thanks a lot, Joseph.

Making the decision to leave an entire career behind is never easy. It becomes even more daunting if you don’t have your next role lined up. In this episode of Career Relaunch, Kelly Price, a former consultant in the pharmaceutical industry explains why she made the decision to move on from her stable career in the industry to pursue a career path more aligned with her personal values and interests. We’ll talk about dealing with “golden handcuffs” and how you can navigate a transition when you aren’t 100% certain what lies ahead. In the Mental Fuel segment, I’ll talk about how I managed the times in my career when I left one job behind before having my next one lined up.

During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I put out a challenge to those of you trying to figure out whether to hold on or let go of your job to answer these two questions to help you clarify whether now is a good time to make your move.

For some help in doing this, you can download my “Should I Stay or Leave” Worksheet.

Register free below to access this resource and gain access to my entire Career Resource Hub. If you’re already a member, simply login to access this resource.

Log in if you wish to renew an existing subscription.

Kelly Price is a serial ‘intra’preneur with a desire to apply her strategic mind and business-building experience to the world of sustainability. After 18 years consulting for the pharmaceutical industry through medical marketing research, Kelly realized she would have major regrets if she spent her entire career in the corporate world. So she recently took a leap of faith, and quit her job without another one lined up so she could dedicate herself more fully to shifting into the world of clean tech & sustainability. 

As someone with extensive experience ‘pitching’ for business to clients, she would now like to use her skills to help clean tech & sustainability start-ups deliver more coherent, persuasive pitches to secure more investment. Check out the consulting she now does for clean tech & sustainability companies at Sundry Ventures. Follow Kelly on LinkedIn and Twitter.

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): We actually have a huge amount of potential that we just have no idea we’re sitting on. We just kind of look within the confines of our little job and think, ‘Well, this is about all I can do.’ I think it’s only in stepping away, being in this very uncertain space that I’m finally able to see that.

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

Kelly: Thanks for having me.

Joseph: I am hoping to talk with you about a few different things today, including your time in the corporate world, why you chose to move on from your most recent role, and definitely about your leap of faith to leave one job behind without having another one lined up just yet. I was wondering if you could start by telling us what you’re focused on right now in this moment in your career and your life.

Kelly: In this moment, I’m trying to figure out what my next step is, but I’d say I have one guiding North Star to that. That is I want to do something that helps the planet, something in the sustainability or clean tech just because I’m one of those crazy people that thinks that climate change is the biggest problem facing our planet right now. If I look back on my life—and I know that I wasn’t part of the solution, in fact I was part of the problem—I know I won’t be satisfied.

Joseph: I really want to thank you in advance for coming on the show, Kelly, because I know you mentioned you don’t have things exactly figured out. I actually think that’s really nice because I think it can sometimes feel like everyone else out there has their career figured out, but in reality, for many people, especially those listening to this show, the process of navigating a transition is really confusing. There are no clear answers, so I’m really looking forward to hearing you give a glimpse into the realities of a transition.

I was wondering if you could start off by just explaining what you were doing before this moment. I know you had spent many years being involved in the world of oncology drugs, where as I understand, your job was basically to help bring cancer drugs to market. Could you tell us exactly what you did during your time working in the pharmaceutical industry? Then we can move forward from there.

Kelly: I kind of fell into my career in the pharmaceutical industry. When I was in college, I really didn’t know what I wanted to do when I graduated, probably like lots of people, but I knew what I was interested in. That was biology and languages. There wasn’t a clear connection between the two. I was studying Japanese and Chinese and Human Biology, and people ask me, ‘Do you want to be a doctor in Asia?’ and I’ll kind of be like, ‘No, I’m just interested in this stuff.’

When I graduated, which was 2001, the tech bubble in Silicon Valley was bursting, and getting a job in that area was not going to be the easiest thing in the world. I thought, ‘Well, I do speak Japanese. Maybe I could get a job in Tokyo.’ I was lucky enough to go to a career fair for Japanese speakers, and I found a job in Tokyo in consulting.

I think when kids are graduating from college, they want to be ‘successful.’ In my day, the way to be successful was to go into iBanking or be a doctor, a lawyer, or consulting. People really didn’t think too much outside of the box at that point. Startups weren’t really a thing back then. In my desire to be successful, I thought consulting would be a good way forward, and I got a consulting job in Tokyo.

I quickly found that I wasn’t able to really use my biology background in that job even though I thought I might be able to. I found a job in medical market research very quickly after, in Tokyo, that allowed me to use my Japanese skills in market research and also learn about medicine through my job rather than, for example, paying to go to med school to learn about medicine. That was a really good fit for me that I kind of just stumbled into by following my interests.

Joseph: How did that experience compare to what you thought consulting would be like for you? Can you remember back that far?

Kelly: In my mind, in my naïve, little, new-graduate mind, consulting was this very glamorous career where you wore a nice suit, and you went to the client’s site, and you gave very erudite answers to business problems. When I finally got on the ground, I found myself basically being a body, kind of hired out on a project. It was interesting.

I remember one meeting that I went to in Osaka. I was in PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting in Japan, so all my colleagues were Japanese. Clients were Japanese. I was staffed in the service and energy sector – basically big oil, big gas, electricity company, so I’m pretty far, at that time, from my interest as you can get. All the same, I was eager, and so I wanted to make an impact. I went to this meeting – one of my first meetings with a client, and I remember I had the audacity to ask a question at the meeting. I was never staffed on a project again.

Joseph: Wow.

Kelly: Yeah, it was about as demotivating as you could possibly get for somebody who feels like they’ve just got a really great education, and they’re fresh out of college, and they really want to put that to good use. It was that experience that told me that I had to get out of consulting very quickly. So I went to medical market research, which is kind of like an extension of consulting, but in my mind, based a lot more on data.

Honestly—I’ll tell you a true story—for the same project, one of my superiors and I, we’ve been asked a business question by the client. We went to a bookstore and found a book and started pulling graphs out of the book to answer the client’s questions. That’s how much we knew, and you’re getting paid for that.

Joseph: That is so funny. We didn’t talk about this before, Kelly, but I actually started off my career in the business world at a health policy consulting firm in Washington D.C. I remember one of my first roles, when we went to client meetings, was to just take notes. That was literally my role: to take notes. When we did need to speak up and say something, it was stuff that I had literally just looked up the day before.

I found it to be a really strange dichotomy between coming in supposedly being an expert but also not really knowing much about the thing that you’re talking about. You get really good at talking about things authoritatively that you really have no clue about. That’s interesting.

You spend the next chapter of your career, I know you spent several years, many years, working in healthcare and oncology from that point on. At what point did you start to think that you wanted to do something else? When did that begin for you?

Kelly: It was gradual. The beginning of it I think was actually when I moved to China, and I saw how much damage our modern economy was really doing to the environment.

Living in Shanghai, I remember I would wake up in the morning and open the curtains in my high-rise apartment and wonder how far I would be able to see down the street. I lived in China for about four years, and I began to be able to count on my fingers the number of what we called blue-sky days in a year. They were very rare. You just came to take it for granted that the day would be gray and ‘overcast,’ but it wasn’t really clouds. It was actually just smog.

That’s when I started becoming very concerned about what we were doing to the planet – of course in China specifically, because that’s where I was, but also just in general, knowing that, really, that’s what we’re doing to the planet all over. What happened in China didn’t exactly stay in China. Winds travel. It blows all over the place.

Joseph: One of the things you said in your bio, Kelly, was that you would have major regrets if you spent your whole career in the corporate world. I hear you saying that there was this environmental concern that you had about the planet. Was there also something about being in the corporate world that you felt was contributing to this? I’m reading between the lines a little bit, and I don’t want to put words into your mouth, but was there an aspect of what you were doing that you felt was not exactly helping the cause?

Kelly: Thanks for asking that. I think that there were two things obviously. The first was just seeing what business as usual was doing to the planet, but then in terms of me being a part of that business as usual, in the pharmaceutical industry—

Honestly, I don’t feel like it was even that bad when I first started, but over the course of my career, I saw the companies getting greedier and greedier. I saw cancer drugs that were truly innovative and truly helped patients, the prices be jacked up a hundred fold in the course of my career. That technology wasn’t new. It’s just that the company has realized that they could charge more for it.

I found this more and more unconscionable, and I didn’t like that I was a part of helping develop these drugs that offered small, incremental benefit at huge prices that would at least make Americans probably have to remortgage their house to be able to pay for it. I just didn’t believe that was right.

Joseph: Can you remember how long of a time period there was between when you started to feel this way and when you decided to leave? How long of a period was that?

Kelly: I wish I could tell you it was instantaneous, but it was a long lag. This is something I’m not proud of, something I look back on with a sense of regret but also a sense of I don’t know how I could have done anything differently knowing what I knew then if you understand what I mean. Looking back, I can be like, ‘Oh, I should’ve done this or that,’ but when I was in it, I really did feel quite stuck.

I finally got to the point where I was really sure that I wanted to make a change about four to five years ago.

Joseph: We’re talking about years, then, when you were feeling this way. Why didn’t you leave sooner? I’m asking you this because I’ve been in a similar position where I wasn’t really feeling it with my job, and I didn’t feel proud of what I was doing, but I still hung on to it for longer than I expected.

Kelly: God, I hate to answer this question, but the honest answer is two things: fear and money. Those are the two things. I was afraid to leave. I was afraid to get off that corporate treadmill. I’d even had people say, ‘If you take some time out, there’s a gap in your CV, and that looks terrible,’ and I was like, ‘Oh, no. I want to be successful. I’m an over-achiever. I can’t have a gap in my CV.’ There was that.

There was a lack of creativity on my part, a lack of maybe belief in myself that there was much else that I could do. There was also—Joseph, I know you and I have talked about this—the proverbial golden handcuffs. Every time I thought about making a change, and I actually did try to, about twice, I had another carrot dangling in front of me with a better title and a higher salary. You think to yourself, ‘I’d be silly to not take that and give it a try, see how it goes. Surely, it can’t be that bad, get a bit more money.’ That’s the other thing.

I remember, at one point, I set this target. I was like, ‘All right, when I have this much money in my bank account, I will take a break, go traveling and figure everything out.’ That amount came and went, and then it was a new number. I was like, ‘How did I ever think that that would be enough money for me to give up my job and let go?’ The goal post always moved every time.

Joseph: There’s always a carrot dangling in the distance it seems. Even when you reach that carrot, then there’s another one that dangles in the distance. That’s interesting.

What ultimately was the tipping point for you?

Kelly: Just to take a step back, what I did was, in order to allow myself to be able to stay, I decided to apply to business school. I did the executive program at London Business School for two years just so I wouldn’t feel like I was living groundhog days, so I felt like I was moving forward with my life and learning again as opposed to doing the same, old job, day in, day out, that I was already so bored by.

The purpose, the ostensible purpose that I told myself for doing this MBA, was to be able to transition to clean tech, to finally do something that I really was passionate about.

While I was doing the MBA, I took every entrepreneurial course that I could get my hands on and really tried to pursue some clean tech ideas that I had, thinking, ‘Maybe when I get out of business school, I’ll start my own venture. Maybe I’ll find something during business school that seems to have legs that I could pursue after graduation, and that will be my transition.’

Unfortunately, two things happened. The first is I didn’t find such a project per se during my time there. The second is that after working full-time in a demanding job and studying full-time, because even though they call like an executive or part-time MBA, it’s pretty much a full-time study with a full-time job. I was pretty burnt out.

What I decided to do was to leave that job upon graduation, which I’d always planned to do, but rather than jump into a brand new job and a brand new field when I was feeling pretty tired, I decided to go traveling and to use that time to recharge and hopefully to figure out what it was I wanted to do next. I took a belated gap year and traveled for about nine months and enjoyed myself immensely, but I didn’t still figure out what it was I wanted to do next.

Joseph: I know you’re in a transition right now, and you decided to leave your most recent job to move on to something else. How did it feel to move on from your job without having another one lined up?

Kelly: I’ll be honest. It’s scary, and at the same time, it’s very exciting, totally for the same reason – adrenaline.

When I got back from my travels, I had lined up a job in my old career, pharmaceutical consulting, because it was easy. Once again, it was another carrot that was dangled in front of me, and oh my goodness, the conditions were perfect. It was a 10-minute walks from my house. It was with a great company, and it was with one of the best teams I’ve ever worked with. The conditions were ideal. It was a dream job if that were really the career that I still wanted.

I’ll be honest with you, pretty much from Day 1, I was absolutely miserable. That was a big warning sign that it was completely the wrong thing for me to do.

Joseph: What was miserable about it?

Kelly: It’s just I had no motivation. I didn’t believe in what I was doing. In fact, no, I despised what I was doing, which is really horrible. Every day felt like such a struggle just to get into the office when it was only a 10-minute walk away.

Joseph: Was it the nature of the work that you’re doing or was it the service or the product that you were trying to market or both?

Kelly: All of the above, it was just I didn’t believe in the work that I was doing, and so much of it felt so meaningless – working to come up with the best ad for a drug that might never go to market or a drug that you knew wasn’t that great to begin with or trying to figure out a clever way to trick doctors into using this drug that wasn’t that great, that sort of work, when I’m looking at the big picture and going, ‘Wow, the plant is on fire. Somebody ought to do something about that.’

It’s interesting, because when I was in China, I saw what we were doing, and I thought to myself, ‘Well, this isn’t good, but I’m sure the adults will sort everything out, will enact some kind of legislation. Somebody can sort this.’ Now, at the ripe, old age of 42, I realize, ‘Hey, wait a second, I’m one of those adults that I was always waiting on to do something. If I’m not going to do anything, who is really?’

Joseph: What do you think has been the hardest part of this transition for you? I know you’ve moved on from something that you didn’t like doing, and yet I know that, having done this myself, because I’ve left a job without having another one lined up, I know it can also be a little bit anxiety-generating. What’s been tough for you about the transition?

Kelly: The tough thing is just not knowing which direction I’m going to go in. I’ve got a few leads. I’ve got a lot of things I’m interested in, but when you’re midcareer, and you’re trying to parley your experience in a completely different field and a new direction, it can be difficult to get buy in from people.

I think a lot of the time, companies are eager to take on younger workers who they feel like they can train up from the very beginning. If you’re coming from a different background, you really have to do a lot of convincing to get people to understand that, actually, coming from a different background can be a strength because you have a different perspective, an outside perspective that can add a lot of value. Not everybody, at least initially, views it that way.

Joseph: I was watching your TED Talk, Kelly, entitled ‘Cancer: You could be the cure,’ where you’re talking about helping to cure patients with blood cancer through stem cell therapy, which I thought you delivered really well. I’m wondering how you go from talking so passionately about that to having this other, additional interest in clean tech.

The reason why I ask is because I know that, sometimes, people who are listening to this show struggle with either, a) letting go of what they’ve invested their energies in to date, and also, b) walking away from something that maybe to outsiders seems on the surface to feel noble but just isn’t really where you want to be devoting your energies any longer.

Kelly: It’s funny you mention that because I’ve talked to a lot of friends about me wanting to transition and trying to see if I could leverage any connections, and a lot of people go, ‘Oh, well, healthcare. You can do this or that in healthcare.’ I’m like, ‘No. No.’ It almost takes a lot of convincing to convince them that I could be good in something beyond healthcare, which is pretty funny. I think, at the end of the day—you kind of hit on it—what matters is passion.

Thank you for mentioning the TED Talk because saving lives through something as simple as stem cell donation is something I’m absolutely passionate about because it’s so easy, and it has such a profound impact that it can save somebody’s life. That’s so easy for me to talk about, but I’m also equally passionate about saving the planet. That’s the connection there: that desire for me to help make things better. I didn’t feel that passion in marketing an overpriced, under-delivered cancer drug.

Joseph: That’s really interesting. I think it’s a good reminder that you can absolutely have multiple interests and multiple areas where you want to be devoting your energy and that it can manifest in many, different ways.

Before we talk about some of the lessons you’ve learned, you mentioned London Business School a second ago and how you did your MBA there. I was wondering if we could talk for a second about the LBS reunion, because that’s where you and I first crossed paths, when I was given a keynote talk there about career change. I’ve always found reunions to be fascinating from the standpoint of what I found to be inevitable comparison and judgment that comes up.

I was wondering if you could just give a glimpse into what it was like to go back to a reunion like this during a transition like the one you’re in right now. I’m assuming people are asking what you were up to, and you’re hearing about what other people are up to, including from people who are maybe doing quite well in their careers. What was that like for you?

Kelly: I’ll be honest. I had just left my job like a few days before the reunion, so it was still quite a transition period for me, and I was still adjusting to the fact of not having a job and not having one lined up. I found just networking with people I didn’t even know, there’s, ‘Oh, so what do you do?’ and I’m thinking in my head, ‘Nothing at the moment. How do I answer this? I can tell you what I’d like to be doing.’

I even went to a networking event, and people asked me, ‘What do you do?’ and I felt so embarrassed to have to say nothing or I don’t know that I just kind of came up with something on the spot. I said, ‘Oh, well, I advise clean tech companies on their pitches to investors.’ I literally made it up on the spot. Now, I’m actually kind of pursuing it as a business, as a service that I’m offering people. There you go.

Joseph: Very interesting.

Kelly: Necessity is the mother of invention.

Joseph: The last thing I want to talk about, Kelly, before we wrap up are some of the lessons you’ve learned along the way of your career journey. Is there something that you’ve learned about yourself during this transition? I know you’re in the midst of it right now, but I’m just wondering if you’ve had the chance to think about what you’ve learned about yourself through this process.

Kelly: I, through my life, have kind of followed my interests, having no idea how in the world they might connect. Looking back now as I’m making this transition, I can see in hindsight a number of things that I pursued along the way just kind of on the side, sort of out of interest that now are coming together.

For example, when I was at LBS, I pursued all of these entrepreneurial classes. Now that I’m looking to make this transition, I have this network that I can kind of plug back into and say, ‘Hey, I’m looking in this area. Is there anybody you can put me in touch with?’ For the last two to three weeks, I have been doing nothing but informational interviews, just meeting with people and getting ideas and getting other people I should talk to and things like that. If I hadn’t done that at LBS, I wouldn’t have had a network to even go back to to make this transition.

Another thing is, while I was in my last role back in medical consulting, I actually took a day off work and went to a biogas conference in Birmingham just out of interest, because one of my clean tech ideas was ‘what if we took all the food waste in London and bio-gassed it, turn it into electricity, and maybe I could start a company doing that.’

I literally went to Birmingham for a day just to attend this conference, just to kind of load that idea and see how feasible it might be. Now, I’m actually interviewing with an NGO that works in the biogas space that puts on that conference randomly. That just kind of came on my radar, and I had no idea that there was a connection, but there was.

A long time ago, out of curiosity, I had checked out from a library a book called Waste by Tristam Stuart and started reading it and learned about how much food we waste from grocery stores, basically in our homes and this and that and in the industry. Now, I’m interviewing with a company that works on getting rid of food waste at point of production.

There’s a whole bunch of little things that I did along the way that I’m now seeing results, whereas I never viewed it with an ulterior motive. I just did it out of interest before.

Joseph: What about something that you wished you had known that you now know about what’s most important to you in your career?

Kelly: I think my last role just showed me money isn’t what makes me happy. Meaning is what makes me happy. I wish that I could’ve had more confidence in myself to transition earlier. I wish I could’ve had more creativity in thinking of things that I could’ve done beyond what I was doing at that time. I think that—I don’t know if it’s companies themselves—corporate world puts people a little bit in boxes and almost makes you think this is about all you can do.

It’s really sad because I think we actually have a huge amount of potential that we just have no idea we’re sitting on, and we just kind of look within the confines of our little job and think, ‘Well, this is about all I can do.’ I wish so badly that I could’ve known that before. I think it’s only in stepping away and being in this very uncertain space that I’m finally able to see that now, but hindsight is 20/20.

Joseph: Finally, do you have anything you hope someone who’s listening to this will take away from this conversation, especially if they’re feeling misplaced in their jobs but don’t know exactly what they want to do instead and just not sure what to do about their situation?

Kelly: What I really hope people take away is the importance of pursuing those seemingly random outside interest, because I think that those are the things that really lead us down the path to being who we’re meant to be. So often, we try to put ourselves in these confines of what success means.

What that really means is we end up being just like everybody else, where the competition is fiercest. It’s when we really pursue those interests that are uniquely ours that we can become who we’re meant to be and add that unique value that we have to give the world. The world’s really missing out when we don’t do that.

Joseph: That is a really great reminder, Kelly, for us all – to not be afraid to explore and just dip your toe into another interest you may have even if you don’t know where that may lead you.

Speaking of additional interest, I want to wrap up with what you’re doing right now. You alluded to the interest you developed for clean tech during your time working in a different industry. Can you tell me a little bit more about your clean tech consulting service?

Kelly: At London Business School, there is an incubator for startups. When I quit my job and had some free time, I reconnected with some people. One of my friends is actually at a startup in the incubator, and he said, ‘Hey, could you come help me with my pitch? I’m pitching to some investors.’ So I took some time out, and I went and I helped him with his presentation, trying to figure out what his story is, the best way to tell it in the two minutes that he had. He seemed to find my feedback really helpful.

It’s something I quite enjoy, because in my line of work in business development, I’ve done a lot of pitching in my day. When I was in the entrepreneurial classes at LBS, I did that all the time, and so when I helped him, I thought to myself, ‘Gosh, this is a really great use of my skillset, and it’s something I really enjoy and I really care about.’

I started reaching out to other little clean tech startups, because that’s the space I’m really interested in, to offer pitching advice and just kind of general consulting services. Right now, it’s just to see what kind of demand there might be for this and to see what kind of value I could add. I’ve been really surprised at the reception so far, so that’s something that I’m just kind of looking into on the side as I also look at other opportunities.

Joseph: Very cool. It’s really great to hear you’re already jumping on onto that idea so quickly. If people want to learn more about you or your clean tech consulting service, where could they go?

Kelly: The website is www.SundryVentures.co.uk.

Joseph: We will be sure to include a link to Sundry Ventures in the show notes, Kelly. I just wanted to say I really appreciate you providing all of us with a good reminder that transitions can actually be very fruitful and provide a real opportunity to explore a wide range of ideas. Thanks so much for telling us more about the importance of stepping away from a role that’s not right for you, that that can really open up other opportunities for your life, and how you’re making the most out of your transition.

Best of luck with that, your clean tech consulting work, and I’m looking forward to hearing where you ultimately end up landing.

Kelly: Wonderful. Thanks so much, Joseph. I really appreciate it.

Finding the right balance between pushing yourself to achieve and not overextending yourself is never easy. In this episode of Career Relaunch, former McKinsey consultant turned CEO of PocketSuite Chinwe Onyeagoro will explain how she made some tough choices to bring a better balance to her life and approach her work with even more joy. In the Mental Fuel segment, I’ll talk about setting reasonable expectations for yourself so you can maintain a sustainable pace to your work and life.

What makes a workplace experience “great.” (according to Great Places to Work):

For unique insights on how to start and run your own business, you can text PocketSuite at +1 415-841-2300.

During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I challenged you to take stock of all the key work activities filling the hours of your day, then loosen your grip on one of them. Allow yourself to just slow things down with one activity you regularly invest your time and energy into. See what happens, see how you feel, and most importantly, see if dropping from 110% to 90% effort ends up benefitting you in some other way.

Chinwe’s the CEO of PocketSuite, who sees an opportunity to give early stage independent service professionals specific and useful tips to help them grow their businesses. She’s been the president of Great Places to Work, a top management consultant, an advisor to Fortune 1000 executives and the U.S. Small Business Administration, and a TEDx speaker.

She currently serves on the boards of private equity firms and lending institutions that have invested more than $1B in small and medium enterprises that create good jobs in underserved communities and is a Henry Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute.

Chinwe has co-authored publications with the Pepperdine School of Business, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, focused on business financing and financial health. She’s also written for Entrepreneur Magazine among others.

Follow Chinwe on LinkedIn & Twitter.

If you have any lingering thoughts, questions, or topics you would like covered on future episodes, record a voicemail for me right here. I LOVE hearing from listeners!

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

Teaser (first ~15s): I would work from sun up to sun down every day. The good news was that it gave me such joy to do this work. It’s something that I think you have to be intentional about doing, and you got to do it with a sense of joy, because if you don’t, it’s not sustainable.

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

Chinwe: Thanks so much, Joseph. It’s great to be here.

Joseph: We are going to talk about a few different topics today. We’re going to talk about your career pivots from consulting to your time at Great Places to Work to eventually co-founding your own company. I was hoping you could start by telling us about what you’re focused on right now in your career and your life, just to get us kicked off.

Chinwe: I am the mother of two sweet kids under the age of two. That gives you hopefully a clear picture of what my days look like.

As I think about my career and what I’m focused on today, what I’m really focused on is really helping entrepreneurs, primarily independent professionals, live their best life. We have an app, a mobile app that is used by tens of thousands of entrepreneurs around the country to communicate with their clients, to schedule their clients, and to get paid by their clients. It’s a really, really gratifying feeling to wake up in the morning and to see business happening on something that we built.

We process about $80 million of income for these entrepreneurs a year and schedule about a million appointments for them a year. This is for everyone from your local dog walker to your fitness trainer, to your life coach, to your therapist – anyone who’s making a living, working on their own, delivering their talent to you and your community using our app, which is called PocketSuite.

Joseph: I want to hear a little bit more about PocketSuite at the end, and so we’re going to come back to that. Before we go back in time, I did have a question about your life. You did mention you have two kids under the age of two, and I’m just wondering if you can tell us how you go about balancing motherhood and parenthood with running your own company.

Chinwe: There’s no such thing as balance, Joseph. I wish there was. It’s a field of dream, get out.

What I’ll say is that guilt is a really, really powerful motivator. What I do is I think about the things that I want for them, and then I really try to execute that in the moment. Rather than doing a lot of planning and feeling a lot of angst, every day, I try to just make progress in their presence.

One example is I’m originally from Nigeria, and I always loved languages. I speak my native tongue, which is Igbo, and I really want my kids to speak our native tongue. Rather than hoping to hire a tutor one day and have them go to lessons somewhere in Nigeria, which isn’t going to happen any time soon, I spend 30 minutes every morning doing numbers and colors and alphabet with them in Igbo. Throughout the day, I just speak to them only in Igbo.

My husband jokes. He’s like, ‘You know, if they were going to go to university of lingos, I’d be thrilled about this, but I’m concerned about their SAP scores when they speak better Igbo than they do English.’ We joke about it, but I feel so proud to just be able to carve out some time, a little time each day for a gift that I really want to give them, which is the gift of bilingualism.

That’s just one example of how I just try to find moments and be present in those moments in a way that fills me and hopefully fills them. I don’t try to do it all. I forgive myself for all the things that I’m sure I’m not doing as a mother that also has a career.

Joseph: I’ve heard that you can always be doing more, and at the same time, you can’t do everything. I’ve heard the term today for the very first time, ‘work-life blend,’ instead of ‘balance’ because they really do run into one another, and I certainly experienced quite a bit of that myself. I think that’s great that you’re doing that, and you’re absolutely correct. The bilingualism is a gift. I wish I was better at Chinese than I am, but that’s life. I think it’s great that you’re doing that.

Chinwe: It’s never too late, Joseph.

Joseph: I continue to work on it, and I’m trying to give some of that Chinese to my own daughter right now.

I’d like to go back now and talk a little bit about the start of your career, because you haven’t always been the co-founder and CEO at PocketSuite. I was wondering if you could tell us about your time way back during your days at McKinsey, and then we can move forward from there.

Chinwe: I joined McKinsey & Company, which is a global management consultancy, right out of college. I went to Harvard University.

When you graduate from a school like Harvard, there are a couple of options for you in terms of what they deem as success half-wise. When I was coming up, really, that was investment banking, management consulting, going into medicine, or going into law. Those were really the paths. Anything else is kind of nice.

I checked box number two, management consulting, and I went on to McKinsey & Company, which has a tremendous reputation, and it’s well-deserved. It’s a strategy consulting firm. We work with large, large companies that are trying to continue to grow and maintain their market share. We joke that we’re coming out of college, and we are put in these really prominent positions with senior executives, and we’re helping them figure out what they should do next.

There was one point—I think it was a New York Times or an Economist article—that they basically branded McKinsey consultants as kids in the conference room because we take folks who are 20 to 30-year veterans in their industry, and we are called to eventually question their approach and bring data to inform their decision making with virtually no experience in the industry. We do it really well, and we inform them in a way that helps create value, which is why McKinsey is now 30,000 strong in terms of employees around the world.

It was a tremendous time for me. I learned a lot. They say that working at McKinsey is almost like drinking from a fire hose, because in a very short amount of time, you learned a tremendous amount about the industry that you’re working in, about the kind of companies that you’re working for, and about what it takes to win in the marketplace.

Joseph: I know that McKinsey’s a really sought-after company for not only undergraduate university students but also people coming out of business schools, finishing their MBA. I know it’s a really amazing place to work, from the friends and colleagues of mine who I know have worked there.

I know you were there a couple of years, and it sounds like a fantastic opportunity. What made you decide you wanted to move on and do something else?

Chinwe: McKinsey is really great if you want to learn a lot about a variety of industries, kind of be a generalist. If you want to go deep in a particular industry, it’s kind of tough. You kind of got to wait 10, 15 years to become a partner and then have the luxury of focusing on an industry. I really had an interest in creating value over the long term in one industry in particular. I didn’t have an opportunity to do that at McKinsey.

I have an older brother who’s a self-taught philosopher, and I always talk to him at different pivot points in my career. I was looking and thinking, ‘What industry would help me do what I want to do?’ which is create value in a local marketplace and create wealth for communities. He said to me, he says, ‘Look, when you look at the world multi-millionaires, billionaires, the vast majority of them made their money in real estate or have a disproportionate amount of their assets in real estate. That may be an industry you want to take a closer look at.’

I took it and I ran with it. I joined the Pritzker Realty Group under Penny Pritzker, our former Secretary of Commerce.

Joseph: The Pritzker opportunity sounds incredible also. At the same time, I know that some people who have really sought-after jobs, when they’re thinking about moving on to something else, there’s this question in their mind about whether it’s going to be as good as or as rewarding as the role they currently have at their current company. How did you think about that and the potential risk in maybe landing somewhere that wouldn’t be as rewarding or maybe wouldn’t be as reputable or well-known?

Chinwe: I have spent a lot of time in my career chasing credentials. At a very early age, I knew I wanted to go to Harvard. McKinsey was one of the top consulting firms, and I knew I wanted to have that on my résumé.

When I made that next move from McKinsey to real estate, it was important for me to kind of set down the résumé and really start to think about functional skills that I could build that would ultimately set me up to ultimately be an entrepreneur one day. It became less important about credentials, collecting credentials for the résumé, and much more important, ‘What am I going to learn? What exposure am I going to have to principals who are making decisions that I will be in a position to make one day?’

The Pritzker organization was incredibly important to me because I was one hop from Penny Pritzker, and I was able to see the way in which she made decisions, the thoughtfulness, the insight, the sense of patience about making sure that you make a decision, and then you give yourself the opportunity and allow that decision to come to fruition or your hope around that decision to come to fruition.

It was really important to me to be really close to the decision power and ultimately the set of information needed to make really smart decisions, and I got that in spades at Pritzker Realty Group.

Joseph: I know the next chapter was more of an entrepreneurial chapter for you as you alluded to. I know we probably can’t get into every single one of your roles between Pritzker and when you landed at Great Places to Work, but could you just take us briefly through that transition of moving from being an investment associate to moving into the entrepreneurial space, which I know set up the foundation for the work that you’re doing right now?

Chinwe: Although I loved it, I decided to leave because I thought I was ready to go out and to be an entrepreneur, to take my skills that I’d learned from the marketplace and add some value.

I initially started a consulting firm that focused on real estate in particularly low-income communities, really helping to revitalize the real estate in those communities, create jobs, and attract retail. I built a company that was a multi-million dollar business. I had about 10 employees, and I was working around the country, focused on helping small and mid-sized businesses raise capital, helping them identify new locations to expand to, and then also helping those communities really attract the right type of retail and economic investments. It was really gratifying.

As always, when you’re doing consulting, eventually, you do get an itch, so at some point, I decided to transition O-H Community Partners to my partner at the time, my co-founder at the time so I could go out and join the startup world and take an idea that we had surfaced at O-H Community Partners and actually put it to work in the market.

Joseph: Did you find that there were any sacrifices or maybe surprising things you had to give up in order to be so focused on growing this business to the level that it grew to?

Chinwe: As an entrepreneur, you have to give it all up. I gave it all up. I would work from sun up to sun down every day, including weekends. The weekends are just another day for work. You’re not getting as many inbound calls and emails over the weekend. That’s the only difference. You’re really giving up the social aspects of your life. You’re throwing everything you have, everything you are into this work.

For me, it was about community development, which that takes 10 years on a good day to really realize your vision around a community. There’s no shortage of things that you can be doing every second of every day, and so I poured my heart and soul into it.

The good news was that it gave me such joy to do this work, because if it was painful, that would be doubly difficult to do. It gave me such joy to be solving these kinds of problems. I picked this work. I picked the communities. I picked my clients. I had all the choice in the world, and I made that choice, and then I committed myself fully to that choice.

I gave up so much from the standpoint of a social life. My family would routinely joke that, ‘Don’t bother calling Chinwe. She’ll call you back in like six weeks.’ They couldn’t reach me because I was always at work. It’s something that I think you have to be intentional about doing, and you got to do it with a sense of joy, because if you don’t, it’s not sustainable.

Joseph: Speaking about work that you love doing—and it sounds like you did enjoy this work—I do want to talk about your time at Great Places to Work, which is an organization that actually profiles some really amazing companies to work for. Tell us a little bit about what you did at Great Places to Work, and then I’ve got a couple of questions for you related to some of the observations you had at that organization.

Chinwe: Great Places to Work, that was perhaps my best experience as an employee of an organization. It’s a tremendous organization that has a singular mission, which is to ensure that every employee in the workplace, whether they’re in the boardroom or sweeping in the basement, is having a great experience at work and is able to then do their best work for those organizations.

Joseph: A lot of people, Chinwe, listening to this show are looking for new roles because their company is not a great place to work for them. What are a couple of the criteria you realized through your work at that organization are the most important that may be a little less obvious to people when they’re trying to find a great place to work.

Chinwe: Great Place to Work has a very, very clear point of view and frankly a formula, an algorithm for how they’ve arrived at that point of view. There are three main things that makes for a great place to work, that any individual can really see for themselves, whether you’re interviewing or whether you currently work for the organization.

The first is that the people of that organization, the employees have pride in what they do, a sense of purpose. We’re not just creating profits. We’re not just growing for growth’s sake. We’re doing something meaningful in the marketplace for our clients, something that adds value to their lives. When people feel a real connection to the purpose of an organization, that makes a huge difference in terms of the workplace experience.

The second is that there’s a sense of camaraderie between the employees. When you show up to work, you have a best friend at work. You have folks that you actually enjoy going out for a beer with after work. You have a sense that people care about each other in your workplace because it’s a place where you’re spending 70% of your waking lives. You better have some people that you feel close too. Otherwise, the sacrifice is too great to be away from family and friends. That’s the second thing.

The third thing is arguably the single most important thing that makes for a great workplace experience, and that is do you trust the people that you work for? Are they credible? Are they fair? Do they treat you with respect? Those are the elements of trust.

If people don’t trust the management, the people that they work for, they don’t look up and feel like those folks have integrity, they’re doing the right things, they’re treating us fairly, and they’re giving us every opportunity to succeed here, then game over in terms of being able to retain top talent, game over in terms of making sure people are showing up fired up to execute against your mission and your performance goals and everything that you’re looking for your company to be.

Those are the sort of three things that we really focused on, we measured, and we used as an assessment tool to say, ‘Is this a great place to work?’

Joseph: Purpose, camaraderie, and trust. As I was listening to you, I actually just had lunch with a friend of mine earlier today, and she was talking about her workplace, and she was talking to me about how she actually really likes her job, but she works primarily with four other people and doesn’t really like any of them, and none of the other people really like each other either, which I think isn’t uncommon for people to not exactly love spending time with their immediate colleagues.

Do you have any thoughts or just advice for people who find themselves in a situation where they’re not exactly looking forward to spending the majority of their waking hours with their colleagues?

Chinwe: That actually is the rare thing. Gallup does a bunch of surveys about the workplace experience. The thing that tends to come up is that people can find some people at work that they’re really close to. That’s actually the more common thing. The harder thing is trusting the people they work for.

I would say that if it’s really just four of them at work, that’s going to be really, really tough. If there’s no other outlet or no other team that they can join where they feel like they’re more aligned from a values perspective or feeling a greater sense of connection and care, it may be time to find a different opportunity or to maybe look for a remote work opportunity with their company so that they can be in an environment, be in a space where they feel a sense of connection and care and love or at least create their own environment where they feel that they can do their best work, because ultimately, it does start to wear on you when you’re working with people where you just don’t feel that sense of connection.

Joseph: I feel like we could talk about this topic of great places to work for so long, and that could fill an entire episode, and yet I do want to get on to this other topic of solopreneurship where people are running their own service or product-based company. Can you first tell me about the transition that you went through and what convinced you to move on from Great Places to Work to then eventually founding PocketSuite? Then we can get into the nitty-gritty of the world of solopreneurship.

Chinwe: Great Place to Work was a great place to work for me right up until my life circumstances changed. My husband and I had been trying to have kids for about four or five years. It’s a long time to be on that journey. I’ve gone through several rounds of IVF unsuccessfully. I’d had several operations. None of them were successful. At some point, I had given up, and I sort of refocused on just work and let me just kind of do all that I can do with what I have and with the family that I have today.

Of course, like clockwork, Baby Number One came unexpectedly, after my husband and I had literally given up. I remember it. I shared the positive test with my husband, and he literally thought it was a joke. I had to do a lot of convincing and go and take a blood test to finally convince him that this is real.

That was fine, and I think at the time, I thought, ‘You know, nothing has to change. The baby’s here, and we’re just going to keep rolling with it,’ and that I think was my naivety. We brought in a full-time nanny who lived with us, and I was traveling four out of five days a week for Great Place to Work. I was in boardrooms. I’m in all the major Fortune 500 companies, talking to them about how their workplace experience can directly impact their profits and their growth.

It was tremendous, and yet I was watching my daughter, Ooma, grow up via a Nest Camera 30,000 feet in the air. That was tough for me. That was tough, but it was a choice that I made, and I was sort of rolling with it.

However, 14 months later, Baby Number Two arrived, and at that point, I felt like something had to change. I was still traveling a significant amount because that was the work that needed to be done, and I realized that I could keep going this way for their entire childhood, and that would not have been a great workplace experience for me.

I regrettably had to step off what is a tremendous moving train that is Great Place to Work and reassess how I could make a contribution in a different way that allowed me to be a greater part of my infant and toddler’s life. I stepped out of Great Place to Work in late 2017.

Joseph: We’ve got listeners on this show, Chinwe, who are parents. We’ve got listeners on this show who are not parents. I feel like this topic may be more relevant to certain people than others, and at the same time, if anybody out there is thinking about having kids, and they are focused on their professional life at the same time, I was wondering if you could give us a glimpse into what you found most surprising about trying to balance the two when Baby Number Two came along.

Chinwe: I am a Type A personality. I do want to be the best at whatever I’m doing. I do want to feel like I am delivering 100%. I think what was most surprising to me in having one child, let alone two, is that there’s just no way to get to 100%. You wake up in the morning already behind. I’m waking up in the morning, and the baby’s crying already. I was like, ‘I haven’t even started, and I’m behind.’

Throughout the day, you feel like you’re not enough. You feel like it’s never enough. There’s always something else to do. When they’re sleeping, I have a choice between do I do their laundry, do I sneak in some work, do I take a little nap, can I eat? You’re making a series of choices that are all necessities, but you’re really having to choose one because there’s only so many hours in the day.

For me, I had never been in a position where I couldn’t get it all done, and so I started to make some really tough choices, all choices between things that all are great and should happen but can’t all happen. It’s really tough as a Type A to say, ‘It won’t get done,’ and know I didn’t achieve 100%.

Joseph: I can completely relate to everything you just said, and we’ve only got one child. That’s really interesting – trying to balance it all and also to keep your own expectations of yourself in check.

The last thing I was hoping to talk with you about before we wrap up, Chinwe, is some of the work that you’re doing there at PocketSuite. I do want to talk about the product at the end. Right now, I really like to just get your insights into the world of solopreneurship because I know that PocketSuite is all about empowering business owners and making their lives a little bit easier as business owners.

As someone who’s crossed paths with a lot of people who have started their own businesses and either had them work out or not work out, what do you think separates those people who are able to successfully launch and grow an independent business from those who don’t succeed?

Chinwe: I think there’s a big difference between folks who want to make some supplemental income and those who want to start a business. I think sometimes those two folks get confused. There’s no shortage of people who can make some supplemental income. You can do things on the weekend. You can do hair. You can do facial. You can be a life coach on the weekend.

You can do all of that, and you can make some extra income, and you can still hold down a full or part-time job while you do that, and it’s actually not that overwhelming. That’s available to anyone, and anyone should try it if making some additional income and doing something you really like above and beyond your work is an aspiration.

I think it’s a much smaller group of folks that are really cut out to create their own businesses. This means that you are eating what you kill. This means you don’t have another source of income. This is it. The kind of folks that I think really do well at creating their own business, number one, they are motivated. They’re motivated finding clients. They really enjoy the hunt. They enjoy finding clients. They enjoy selling themselves.

As a business owner, the number one thing you’re doing is selling yourself. It’s not your service. You’re selling yourself – why work with me versus working with that next massage therapist or working with that next mobile detailer or what have you? Why work with me? You’ve got to be really good at it, and you’ve got to enjoy it, finding clients. Most people don’t enjoy it.

There was a book. I think it was in the ’90s or a little later that was called the E-Myth. The gentleman said the worst thing you can do if you love to bake is to create a bakery because you will not be baking. You will be out finding clients. You will be doing accounting. You will be doing everything but baking. If all you’re doing is baking, you won’t be in business long.

That is a reflection of what it means to be a business owner: the talent that you have, the service you want to deliver, you should be spending, if you want to have a successful business, only 20 to 30% of your time on actually delivering that service. The rest of your time have to be spent on other stuff in building the business, in recruiting clients.

I think most people don’t recognize that when they go out to create their own business and when they go out to be an independent professional. The moment they do, you have a pivot point. One is you’re super excited, and they go all in and learn as much as they can about all those other things they need to understand to do this well. The other pivot point is, ‘I’m going to go get a job. I’m going to go back to the workforce because this is too hard. The joy I’m expecting to get from this work, I’m not getting, and so I am better off at least having a predictable paycheck than struggling in this way, doing something that I actually don’t enjoy doing.’

Joseph: Talking about the people who end up at that pivot point where they decide they need to go back to a regular, more traditional, full-time, steady job, what have you found to be the biggest challenge amongst those people when it comes to returning back to the corporate world, after going freelance? I guess what’s behind my question is I do talk to people who have tried to start their own businesses, and it hasn’t worked out, but the thought of returning to the corporate world just terrifies them. What do you think is the biggest challenge of going back?

Chinwe: If it’s returning to corporate, it depends. I think if you’re in a profession where the experience of entrepreneurship actually has helped you build some additional skillsets that can help you in corporate, it’s tremendous.

The people who return interview so well, so if you’re going back into like marketing or accounting or finance, and you were running your own business, you’ve got such great stories to tell about the mistakes people make, about how you’d like to help them solve those kinds of problems, about how you lived it firsthand. It’s actually a cakewalk I think to go back, other than just like the guilt of not making it work. You actually have a lot more opportunities, and you’re a much more interesting candidate if you’re in that realm.

I think where it gets difficult is where you’ve been away for so long, and you were in an industry that is not the industry you’re returning back to. Then, there is a whole set of potentially professional certifications and advancements that have happened in that industry that you’re not aware of and that you’re not in the position then to hit the ground running and executing again in a new job.

That’s where I think it becomes tricky and where you need some kind of retraining support before you go back so that you can actually be competitive as a candidate in a recruiting process. I think that’s really where it gets a little tricky.

I think if you’re working for some of the most elite firms, and you leave—the McKinseys of the world, the Googles of the world, and you leave—you are welcomed back because you have that entrepreneurial experience, and that only makes you more interesting and more valuable to the company. If you are working for an organization where there’s a whole set of skills that you need to learn or there’s a whole set of client that you need to be able to recruit to come back, maybe in the legal field as an example, then it becomes a little tricky.

You need to be able to come back with something that shows that you can hit the ground running and add value immediately, because oftentimes, you’re returning at mid management level of above where you’re expected to be billing a certain amount of hours. You’re expected to have a certain client roster. If you don’t, then you become more of an expense than you do a profit center for these companies.

Joseph: One more question before we wrap up with what you’re doing now. You had alluded to living your best life at the very start of this podcast and trying to help other business owners live their best lives. You’ve clearly had a range of professional experiences, and you’ve also crossed paths with people who are trying to live their best lives. Taking these experiences into account, what does it mean for you personally to live your best life?

Chinwe: I really believe that I’m living it now, Joseph. I joined the PocketSuite. When I joined, we had about four employees. They’re all based in San Francisco, and we were going into an office in the Financial District.

Fast-forward to a little bit more than 24 months later, we are a distributed company. We have 10 employees. We have a remote team around the country. I wake up in the morning, I get on the Slack, and I see my teammates rocking it, posting GIFs about sales they’ve just closed or support issues they’ve just figured out and problem solved. They’re processing payments for people and giving people the money they need to keep growing their business and feeding their families.

It’s all happening virtually, and I’m able to take a break at 11:00 a.m. in the morning and take my son, Yang, for a walk in our neighborhood and come back and do this podcast with you. I have maximum flexibility in my life, and I’m still able to create tremendous amount of value in a marketplace that has 300 million independent professionals that are looking for ways to ensure that they have the income they need to do the things they’d like to do in their lives.

For me, I feel like I’m contributing to a big, big market problem, but I’m not having to sacrifice my daily life, my family, my sense of personal development and wellness to do it. That for me is definitely living my best life.

Joseph: Fantastic. Can you just wrap us up here by telling me a little bit more about what’s next for you and also what’s next for PocketSuite? You alluded to the growth that has happened. I’m curious, looking ahead, what do you hope is in your future and in PocketSuite’s future?

Chinwe: We’ve been growing by 2x, 3x, 5x over the last couple of years, so we’re on a really great trajectory.

Our goal this year is to reach the 30,000 mark in terms of service professionals that are using our app to run their business. We have a long, long list, from Canada to the UK, to Australia, of folks who want to see PocketSuite in their marketplace, so we want to end the year so strong, with 30,000 service professionals in the US that it really sets ourselves up to be able to launch PocketSuite in a few other markets around the world.

In order to do that, we need to be able to recruit some really talented people in the US and beyond to help us continue to expand. I’m hoping, Joseph, that some of your listeners have an itch to do something entrepreneurial and to help other entrepreneurs. I would love to hear from them.

Joseph: Fantastic. If there are solopreneurs out there or entrepreneurs who want to learn more about PocketSuite or even just solopreneurship in general, where can they go?

Chinwe: Please visit our website at PocketSuite.io, and feel free to text us because we are a mobile app that helps folks run their business over text. Text us at 415-841-2300. Looking forward to hearing from you.

Joseph, it’s been tremendous having this conversation with you.

Joseph: Great. We will be sure to include those links in the show notes. I’ll also include a link to Suite Town, which I know is a part of your website that just gives some unique and useful industry insights and tips and tools for people who are interested in starting and running their own business.

Thank you so much for telling us more about your own career pivots and most importantly the dynamics of both your own career journey as a founder and also the dynamics of solopreneurship. Best of luck with parenthood and PocketSuite. I hope it all goes well for you.

Chinwe: Thanks, Joseph. I’ll need more luck with parenthood. I thank you for that.

Joseph: All right, thanks so much.

Figuring out whether to turn your side project into your full-time day job is rarely easy. Agency designer turned freelance creative & festival organizer Luke Tonge explains how to tell when it’s time to devote yourself more fully to your side gig. We’ll talk about how you can tell when to move on from your current day job, the importance of reminding yourself of your “why,” and why stepping out of your comfort zone can be so powerful. I’ll also share 5 questions you could ask yourself to clarify if and when the right time is to turn your side hustle into something more.

During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, my challenge to listeners was to sit down and capture exactly what the conditions in your life need to look like in order for you to feel comfortable taking the career leap you’re considering. Whether you choose to focus on the 5 questions above or not, try to clearly define for yourself what it would take, and what you would need to believe, for you to feel comfortable making your big move.

Luke Tonge began his career as a Creative for various agencies in the UK, but eventually branched off on his own to build his own portfolio career. He now describes himself as a Birmingham-based, shorts-wearing, type-loving, freelance graphic designer at large. He devotes his time toward art-directing magazines, lecturing at the Birmingham City University, and organising events including Glug Birmingham and the Birmingham Design Festival (2nd annual festival held June 6-8, 2019).

You can follow Luke on Facebook, Twitter, 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!

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): I was doing very rewarding freelance work for friends and eventually clients. I just realized that that was the work that I probably should be doing, but it wasn’t the work I was being paid to do, because I was staying in this fairly comfortable agency bubble.

Joseph: Good morning, Luke. Welcome to Career Relaunch. It’s great to have you on the show.

Luke: Good morning, Joseph. Thank you very much for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Joseph: First of all, it’s great to meet you in person earlier this month in Birmingham at the Glug Festival there. I don’t always get a chance to meet all the guests on this show, so it’s great to meet you in person.

Luke: It was lovely how that worked out. Thank you for coming.

Joseph: Absolutely. I was hoping you could start off by sharing a little bit about what’s keeping you busy right now in both your professional and your personal life.

Luke: Professionally, I’m very busy, probably busier than I’ve ever been, which is an interesting place to be. I’m learning how to juggle multiple things at once. I’m in the middle of the last few weeks of preparation for the Birmingham Design Festival of which I’m a co-director. That’s taking up a lot of my brain bandwidth at the minute. I’m also trying to juggle successfully some freelance client work, which I have going on which is really enjoyable. I’m sure we’ll talk more about why it is that I’m doing that in a bit.

We’re on Easter break actually, at the minute, but I’m also prepping some teaching bits to go back with after Easter. Outside of that, just trying to keep my wife happy and keep sane and the DIY and just general life stuff. Yeah it’s good, a good balance I think.

Joseph: Yeah, it’s good to keep the wife happy.

Luke: Always. Happy wife, happy life.

Joseph: Exactly. I was told that just before I got married. I always kept that in mind.

You mentioned your freelance client work. What sort of client work do you do right now? What sort of area of design do you work on?

Luke: I say that I specialize in two areas. That’s brand identity and editorial work. As it happens at the minute, I have both a big brand identity job which is rebranding an agency and a big editorial job which is a promotional magazine for a client in London.

Those are two areas that I’ve gravitated towards throughout my career, the things that I feel like I’m any good at and the bit that I enjoy. It’s nice to have one of each of those on the go at the minute. It’s not always like that at all. They’re the kind of things that really get me going within design.

Joseph: You have a true portfolio career then, managing the design festival, which we’re going to come back to at the end of the conversation, because I do want to spend some time talking about that and how you started that, doing some teaching, but also doing some brand ID work and editorial work. Very interesting.

I know that you haven’t always had this sort of portfolio career, if you will, in its current existence, and I know you spend a good chunk of your time working in the agency world as a designer. Can you just give us a sense of what that chapter of your career looked like, and then we will move forward in time from there?

Luke: Like most graduates do, I was encouraged to get an agency job, and I was very fortunate to do that. It didn’t happen straight away. I left university with a very good degree from a very good university, fully expecting to work into a job, which didn’t happen.

I went to Woolworths for a few months, as you do. I was very fortunate, actually, someone there put me in touch with a person in an agency, my CV got passed on, and I landed a very nice junior job in a big design agency in Nottinghamshire where I was for three years. That was my formative, junior years. Then I moved to Birmingham and spent another seven years in another big agency, very similar in the Jewelry Quarter.

Both of them were kind of big marketing advertising design agencies with 50 or 60 people in the studio working on big international clients, brand names, household names, much of it FMCG work, work for supermarkets and promotional items and that kind of thing. It was a very good grounding and very interesting time, and I learned a lot from it, but I definitely felt like, in the 10 years, I squeezed out as much as I needed to and as I could from that kind of line of work.

Joseph:  I think when we spoke before, you know that I spent a good chunk of my career in brand management. A number of those years were actually in FMCG or fast-moving consumer goods. I was client side, but I spent a lot of time working with a lot of different design agencies, both in the US and the UK. For those listeners who aren’t familiar with agency life, what’s it like to work in an agency, broadly speaking? I’d love to hear the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Luke: As a young designer, there’s no better place to be. I still say that to designers who I’m teaching and who I’m mentoring in the industry that I think you stand to learn a huge amount because the work is very fast paced. Usually, design briefs will be turned around in any number of hours or maybe a number of days. Very rare that you’ll have weeks. That was a shock to the system, but that’s a good thing. It gets you working in a much faster way. It’s quite fraught at times, especially if there’s pictures on. You might be required to work quite late, up in sociable hours.

Sometimes, the culture is not as brilliant as you would want it to be. I think that there’s still a lot of issues that the industry is kind of wrangling with, regarding sexism and elitism and some of the CDO side of things. Of course, as in most big companies I think, you’re probably exposed to some of those things that, for me, I wasn’t always comfortable with and maybe just ticked a few of the boxes of reasons why I wouldn’t want to work in a certain place or a certain industry anymore. That was the negative side of it.

The positive side was, of course, working with some amazing people. I get to do very diverse work. Often in agencies, you’re doing very different things week to week. The work is quite fresh and exciting. Being a part of a big machine can be quite rewarding. You don’t have to go and find your own work. It just comes to you every day. You turn up to work, and you get a brief, and off you go.

I think most people get to that point though maybe where they start to question whether they’ve plateaued and if they want to take a little bit more control.

Joseph: That’s a good segue into what I was hoping to talk about next, which was your transition.

I first discovered you, because you were recently featured in Moo—for those who are not familiar—the online stationery company based in London, where I actually get my own business cards printed. I thought that was kind of cool.

In that article, you mentioned that you entered the work scene, but you didn’t find it exactly satisfying for the soul. What did you mean by that, and what did you do about that?

Luke: I’m one of those people who can’t divorce the work from the meaning attached behind the work. I take that responsibility very seriously. I think I always have and without trying to seem too worthy about it.

I think design is a vocation for a lot of people. You feel like you enter that industry, because you’re very passionate about communicating with people, and I have a strong moral compass and a grounding in social action and wanting to make a positive mark on the world, rather than just any old thing.

Design is a great opportunity. It’s a great tool, because you’re communicating with people. That comes with a responsibility. A lot of the things that I was communicating on behalf of were not necessarily adding value to anyone’s lives or days. It was part of the marketing advertising churn of products and making people buy or making people want things and not necessarily always things that were good for them.

I’m teetotal. I’ve been straight edge my whole life, and yet I was working on alcohol brands for a number of those years. Not that I was casting value judgments on the product, but I think I reached age 30 and I started—when I was talking in presentations—thinking about legacy even at that youngish age and just how proud I was of what I was putting out there. I didn’t feel enormous satisfaction anymore from promoting that kind of stuff.

In the meantime, the flipside was I was doing very rewarding freelance work for friends and eventually clients that was largely magazine-based or brand-identity work that I was really proud, helping charities or churches or organizations promote themselves. I just realized that that was the work that I probably should be doing, but it wasn’t the work I was being paid to do, because I was staying in this fairly comfortable agency bubble.

Joseph: Speaking of freelance work, Luke, this is a topic that comes up for a lot of people who are working in their full-time jobs and they have a separate passion, so they squeeze it into their evenings and the weekends. I think the other thing you said in the article, which I thought was interesting, was that no number of side projects could compensate for the imbalance that you were feeling. What was the imbalance you were feeling, just trying to, I guess, balance both your day job and also your freelance work?

Luke: Precisely that. I think I identified the work that I was good at, and I identified the work that I cared about, but I haven’t figured out whether I could financially make that pay enough to just cover the bills. At the time, my wife and I had bought our first house, after renting for a number of years, so there was a mortgage consideration. I’d always been told you won’t get a mortgage on a freelance wage. If you’ve just started out, you need several years of books behind you.

It was kind of an issue of timing and just working out where we wanted to be when, so we made a bit of a plan together when we bought this house. I got the mortgage, and then it felt like, ‘Okay, now is the time to take this risk.’ We don’t have children yet, so it was just the right timing.

I think as well, I’d realized that I was becoming more and more unhappy. I think my wife would agree, and she was getting more frustrated that I was frustrated in my work. It was purely a fear-based thing that I just wasn’t sure if I would be able to cut it as a freelancer.

Joseph: This is a really interesting topic, Luke, because there’s a couple of things you’re mentioning here. First of all, I guess, making sure that your wife is onboard with the plans that you have, but also, you mentioned the income and trying to figure out whether or not you’d be able to generate enough income from your freelance work to make up for any sort of full-time income that you’re letting go of, which I know is something that comes up for a lot of people trying to decide when the right time is to make a move.

I know you mentioned the mortgage. Financially, this was a good time to do it. How did you know that this was the right time to make your move?

Luke: A couple of years ago, one of the magazines that I had worked on helped me win an award, which was a freelancer of the year award. That was while I was still in full-time employment. It got very little recognition at work. No one was interested, but to me, it was quite a big step that I was being recognized as a credible freelancer while I was still full-time. I was kind of living this jeweled life. I’m working very long hours.

That’s the other thing I should say. None of this recognition or the moderate success of the projects I’ve had came without enormous hard work. I was working late into the evenings, most nights and weekends. It was just unsustainable. It wasn’t really fair on my wife, and my health was probably deteriorating a little bit. All of these things were indicators that I was just really ready to take that leap.

The financial thing was interesting, because a client which I had, who I’ve worked with for several years, promised me a big piece of work the following year. That was probably maybe a third of the income that I needed from that year.

Having that in my back pocket as a safety net was another part of the puzzle that made me think, ‘This is worth the risk.’ Actually, if it all goes wrong, I can just go and get another agency job. It’s not this or death. It’s just this or maybe a job that you don’t want to be in.

We talked about it long and hard for a number of months, and we made sure we’d save up, so there was a financial cushion. Actually, in an amazing turn of circumstance, the day that I think it was the actual, my last day at work, I got a phone call from the university in town where I got some really good connections through mentoring and speaking. They offered me part-time employment, two days a week.

I was very pleased to have that, because that became then the kind of financial safety net that allowed me to be a bit braver and why I took on my freelance, because I knew there was always going to be a moderate income coming in to cover the bills if nothing else.

Joseph: You jumped into the freelance world. You have the teaching setup, which is a nice financial cushion. What else did you spend your time doing that first year of your own business?

Luke: At the start of that year, I’d met with a friend called Dan Alcorn. He’s a really talented digital designer in Birmingham. He had this itch that he desperately wanted to scratch, which was to put on a big design festival for the city. That required a huge amount of both our time and energy that year to get things off the ground.

Although I left the agency world to go freelance and focus on my own work, I spent very little of it on my own work. I kind of split my time three ways between teaching, freelance, and design festival planning and preparation.

Actually, it was a huge relief and blessing at that time because it provided me with a huge deal of emotional support and focus and community that I think if I’d just gone from agency life to freelance cold turkey, if you like, I think I would have really missed, but it gave me a network of friends in the industry who I was meeting with regularly and a real focus, because there was a deadline. It was a huge design project, if you like, and it was all around people. It was ticking a lot of boxes for me.

Teaching plus the design festival ticked that community rewarding teaching aspect, if you like, and then balance with my own freelance work. I was able to be quite selective and very fortunate about the kind of work that I picked up that year. Although it wasn’t a huge financial success, it was okay for our first year. I think it was a fairly good introduction to what freelance could be, because it just was a completely different way of life.

Joseph: I thought this was a really interesting approach that you took, where I can see a lot of people would be really focused on developing their own business. My understanding of the design festival, and we will talk in more detail about that, my understanding of it is that it is very much focused on helping to enable other designers to be effective in their work. It really is you helping other designers get off the ground. Is that right?

Luke: Absolutely. I hope it doesn’t sound too lofty to say that because that really was our intention.

I think the design industry is a strange thing, because it can be very catty and very nasty at times and very competitive, but actually, there’s this whole other side to it, and a huge tradition as well, of people giving back and people opening up their books and their knowledge and their studios to other people to share and to learn and to propel other people forward.

I was very fortunate to be a part of a collective website and a team called FormFiftyFive which has now changed its name and structure. That purely existed to share other people’s work and put other people into the spotlight. When I look at it now, for the guys that set it up, that was quite a brave thing in a way, because you’re immediately promoting other people for work above yourself. It doesn’t serve your own needs in a very kind of commercial way.

Actually, what it does is it grows your network, and it provides you with a voice in the industry, which is really valuable. That credibility as well to be someone who’s aware of what’s going on and has something to say and maybe a small platform to say it on is really valuable.

I think it’s really important as well in this day and age where there’s a lot of mistruths and a lot of negative press, even around the industry that there are still these people who are pioneering away or chipping away, doing their bit to give something back.

Joseph: Absolutely. Speaking of giving back and chipping away and trying to build something, it sounds like such a great idea to bring together a community of people. Maybe there’s somebody listening to this thinking, ‘Oh, I’d love the idea of creating a community of people who are empowered and engaged.’ How do you actually create a festival? Could you walk us through a little about, I guess, how you create it and then also how do you promote the thing?

Luke: The first thing to say is we are by no means experts. This is our second year coming up. We’ve only really got last year as evidence. We feel like it was a success. I think the things that contribute to that were a really important mixture of skillset.

Dan and I, as directors there, we both brought unique things to the table that the other didn’t have and doesn’t have. We’re both very honest about that when we talk about the festival, that it wouldn’t operate as it has without one of us there. That dynamic was really important.

The next thing to say was we had tremendous help. We’ve got a fantastic team of very talented designers from the city who we were friends with previously. There was already a good trust network there that we basically just pulled together a bit of a dream team of who we would want to work on this thing with us. That team of about ten people really pushed it forward and kept each other going.

It was a huge undertaking really, because we were very ambitious. A lot of people would start much smaller and do maybe an introductory year or something, but we kind of jumped in with both feet and just thought, ‘If we’re going to do this thing, let’s just go for it.’

Another aspect was that we had fantastic support from the industry itself. There are companies who would get involved with things. People like Moo this year who’ve come aboard, but last year GF Smith and Foilco and Awesome Merch. There are too many to mention, but people within the industry who were tremendously supportive, understood what we were trying to do, and would step up and back us in that.

That combination of years of industry networking I guess, for want of a better word, or community building and connections and then a good team on the ground. Those two things and then the support of extra partners made it possible. They were kind of the big things.

I think it snowballed, so that’s the other thing to say. We didn’t realize how big it might be when we started. If we probably knew all of the things that would come our way, we maybe would have had a bit more trepidation.

I think our enthusiasm and our desire to see it work was what carried it through, just trying things strategically about the mixture of gifts and characteristics and skills on your team. Don’t just build a team that looks like you. Build a team of people that can do things you can’t. Hopefully then, you’ve got enough breadth within that team to face the challenges that you will definitely face.

That idea of kind of shared endeavor and everyone just pitching in and just doing what they can to make it a success was how we achieved what we did last year.

Joseph: The last thing I was hoping to talk about before we wrap up with more details about this year’s festival are some of the things you’ve learned along the way of your interesting career journey. The first thing I was hoping to hear about is something that you wish you had known that you now know about creating something of your own.

Luke: I still feel like I’m at such an early stage in my own freelance career. I think the lessons that I learned were mostly learned in industry while I was in those agency roles. It may sound twee or cliché, but how you treat people really matters. That’s one thing that I’ve learned.

People talk about this all the time: the design world is a very small industry and everyone knows everyone, and degrees of separation. That is so true. Nearly all of my paid work in my first year came from people that I used to work with in industry, either as colleagues or as clients that had then moved on.

How you treat people matters, because people remember, and people don’t necessarily care so much about whether you did a fantastic job. They tend to remember how you made them feel and how you treated them. Was there respect there?

Obviously, the work has to be good. That’s a given, but that was made very clear to me, this thing that people say about that really mattering. It was evidenced for me in my first year, because I think that was what made the difference about whether I could work with people or not. It was because I had a fairly good pre-existing relationship and a good reputation with them.

Joseph: What about one of the things that you’ve learned about yourself, having moved on from the agency world to build your own portfolio career?

Luke: Maybe two things.

One is that ambition is okay. I used to think that ambition was a bit of a dirty word, and it meant you were someone who is always hustling and trying to get ahead of someone else. Actually, ambition for the right purpose and with a good motivation behind it can be a really powerful thing, because it can drive you to achieve things that maybe you didn’t think you could achieve. I think having ambition is okay as long as it’s with the right reasons.

The second thing, I think, is that I’ve always considered myself an introvert. I was quite shy growing up. I was never the front person of anything. I don’t like being on stage, but what I’ve discovered is that if you train yourself and you take those steps when they’re offered—like I was fortunate to do some training at work in public speaking. I was invited to speak at things, and I said yes—all of those small steps have taken me from someone who would never want to be on a stage to now someone who is moderately comfortable on the stage. I wouldn’t say I enjoy the limelight because I don’t, but I’m prepared to do it now. That’s because of that journey I’ve been on of pushing myself out of my comfort zone a little bit.

I’d say just start small, build up to it, and you’ll never know that, actually, you may end up on that stage in a few years’ time, feeling okay about it, even if you don’t feel like you’re naturally that kind of charismatic, out-going person.

Joseph: That’s interesting, because I just saw you on stage a couple of weeks ago, hosting the Glug events there in Birmingham, and I would’ve never guessed that you would be nervous or something like that. You just seem so at home emceeing that event when you’re up on stage. That’s interesting.

I did want to pick up on one thing you just mentioned, Luke. You mentioned that ambition is okay. I’m reading between the lines here, but it sounds like there’s like a negative connotation associated with ambition. I was curious what was behind that.

Luke: I think what it is for me is that, in the design industry, there’s been this glamorization about this word ‘hustle’ and about doing whatever it takes to get where you want to be.

I think that hard work is really important. I believe that you wouldn’t achieve anything great without putting the graft in, but I think this glamorization of people who have hustled pool and all, this thing about always working and never switching off, that’s really damaging, and it’s really dangerous. People’s mental health suffers because of it. People’s families suffer. I’ve seen people that have been so driven and so ambitious that it’s been a huge cost to them personally. Maybe relationships are broken down, or their health has suffered.

I feel like ambition can be the driver of that sometimes. It can be this desire to achieve success and to get more material wealth or these things that we want. If we don’t have some kind of checks and balances in place that temper that ambition or just make sure that it’s not damaging the person or the people, I think that’s where my hesitancy comes with it. It’s a very positive thing, but it can be turned into a fairly negative or disruptive thing.

I think we’re very fortunate in this industry to be doing design for a living. To be paid to be creative is a marvelous thing, but if we aren’t cautious with it and careful, we can burn ourselves out and burn other people out with this kind of desire for more. That’s where I think maybe sometimes the corporate world, certainly within design, can allow people to go or can foster that mentality of these all-nighters and whatever it takes attitude.

I’m just coming out of the other side of that and having experienced a little bit of that in my own desire to achieve some kind of degree of success. I’m now a little bit more balanced, a little bit more realistic maybe about not overloading myself.

Joseph: I’d like to wrap up, Luke, with how we started this conversation and one of the things I know you’re focused on right now, which is this year’s Birmingham Design Festival. Can you just tell me a little bit more about the upcoming Birmingham Design Festival that’s at the beginning of June? What’s this year’s festival all about, and can you give us a sense of the scale of it, the venues, the speakers, the number of expected attendees?

Luke: We are still planning a lot of the things, but we’ve announced our speaker lineup already. There’s 60+ fantastic speakers, some of which I’m sure your audience will have heard. I’d encourage everyone to go and have a look on BirminghamDesignFestival.org.uk or just Google Birmingham Design Festival. You’ll find us there and on all the social channels.

We’ll be putting out more information in the coming weeks about some of our big headline events, but we have three big evening events that are big celebrations of different aspects of design. We have one that’s all about community this year and then another that’s about design through the screen. The last one is people from big industry, agencies, companies, tech brands that you maybe haven’t heard of, heard these stories before from these household names.

It’s a very diverse festival. We have three districts as we call them: geographic, product, and digital. There’s a whole schedule of free events, which take place over three days. Within those, you can come and have 60 hours of free talks over three days, which is fairly unprecedented within design festival circuits. There’s workshops that you can pay for to learn from some of the best people in the industry and these evening events where we all get together and hear from experts within these different sectors. Then there’s other exciting social things that are happening around there, so people actually getting together in the real world.

We’ve got a really interesting ladies’ wine and design program, and we’re looking at issues around the pay gap. This year, the festival theme is truth. We’ve really taken that to heart, so we’re being very brave. That’s our brief to speakers: just come and give us their truth about their industry, their experiences and issues they’ve got and things that they think we’re facing so that we can just be part of this conversation.

If anyone’s up for it and just wants to come and immerse themselves in design and push their own practice a bit further and meet likeminded people, get themselves to Birmingham in the UK for a few days in June the 6th, 7th, and 8th.

Joseph: Thank you so much, Luke, for telling us all about your former life as a designer and also how you created this Birmingham Design Festival alongside Dan Alcorn and the things that you’ve learned along the way. Best of luck with the upcoming design festival in June, and I look forward to hopefully crossing paths with you again.

Luke: Thank you so much for having me, Joseph. It’s been a

How can you successfully shift roles from a technical to managerial role? How about shifting industries from management consulting to product management? In this episode of Career Relaunch, Jeff Shih, a former Deloitte consultant turned product manager at Unity Technologies shares his thoughts on how to successfully navigate an industry and role shift. In today’s Mental Fuel® segment, I also share some thoughts on how I decide when to turn down career opportunities.

During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, my challenge to you, especially if you’re wrestling with whether to say yes or no to a specific career opportunity, is to try and decide on the single most important aspect of your career you really want to honor during this specific chapterin your career. For example, culture, work relationships, leveraging your strengths, impact, growth, or whatever else is important to you. Then take a hard look at whether or not this particular opportunity you’re considering serves that specific interest. If it does, maybe it’s worth considering. But if it doesn’t, as tough as I know it can be, you may want to consider letting it go.

Jeff Shih started his career as an engineer at AMD back when dual-core processors and 64-bit was the hot thing. He then started a scrap metal trading company specializing in export to Asia and eventually went back into the tech world as a data engineer at an Austin startup called Bazaarvoice while pursuing his MBA at the University of Texas at Austin (McCombs). He went into management consulting, first at Infosys, then at Deloitte. Had an opportunity to move into product management at Microsoft, then at Unity Technologies, and never looked back. Connect with Jeff on LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and Medium.

Jeff mentioned machine learning and AI on the show. Check out this demo of what he was talking about below:

https://twitter.com/shihzy/status/943220804174544896

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 Grasshopper for supporting the Career Relaunch® podcast. Grasshopper is the Virtual Phone System designed for entrepreneurs and small business owners. It works just like a traditional phone system,

Teaser (first ~15s): Be patient. You have to wait for the opportunities to come up. I probably should’ve been a little more patient. Wait for the right opportunity. Don’t just take the job that sounds great at the time, and you’re just willing to sacrifice all the other things that you value.

Joseph: Good morning, Jeff. Welcome to Career Relaunch.

Jeff: Hi. Good morning, Joseph. Thank you so much for the time today.

Joseph: Thanks for coming on the show. I want to talk with a few different topics with you today, Jeff, including the time you spent running your own business, your time in consulting, and also you’re transition into the tech world. I was wondering if you could start off by just telling me what you’re focused on right now in your career and your life.

Jeff: In my career right now, I’m at a company called Unity Technologies. We’re one of the largest game engine and game tooling platforms out there. If you play video games like Pokemon Go, likely, you play games made with Unity.

I moved into product management a few years ago. Right now, I focus a lot on our machine learning efforts at Unity. I’ve been in the company a couple of years. Prior to that, I was at Microsoft in their intelligent cloud business.

In terms of personal life, my wife and I had just our first kid.

Joseph: Congratulations.

Jeff: Oh, thank you so much. That’s obviously been a really interesting journey so far, all good stuff. That’s kind of where I’m at now.

Joseph: I do want to talk in more detail about what you’re doing there at Unity. I also want to talk through your transitions across different industries, but before we go back in time and talk through your professional history, in a nutshell, how would you describe the first few months of fatherhood and parenthood so far?

Jeff: One of the guys in my office, he had a really good quote. He had a couple of kids. He told me—it’s a Mike Tyson quote—he said, ‘All plans are great until you get punched to the face.’ That sort of stuck with me a little bit. I think, as much as you plan and do all the reading and research about kids, every child is different. Every baby is different.

It’s been a great learning experience both for understanding our child but also discovering yourself as a father and of course my wife as a mother and how we react to our child in certain situations. All good things, all part of the learning experience of life, it’s been great so far.

Joseph: Fantastic. You’re absolutely right about parenting opening up whole new dimension to your life. I think you are also absolutely right about the fact that planning really does you absolutely no good when it comes to parenting.

Jeff: Exactly.

Joseph: Let’s go back in time a little bit, because I know you haven’t always been a product manager at Unity. I was wondering if you could take us back to the time when you were running your own scrap metal trading company, and then we can move forward from there. How in the world did you get involved with exporting scrap metal to Asia?

Jeff: I was an engineering student at University of Texas. While I was in school, I was actually working at AMD as a software engineer, as a contractor for almost two years. I was in a lab all the time, either at school or at work, just writing code.

I had this opportunity where there was a family friend who needed an inspector in the U.S., only last semester in college, to look at some scrap metal. I fell in love with it. I was in Austin, just last semester of college, going to the scrapyard, looking at material. I decided after college I wanted to get in that business.

It was just a transition. It’s kind of the first time I think almost in my life, where I’d started to do something completely different. That set the stage for later parts in my career.

Joseph: You mentioned coding. I was curious if you could just give a glimpse into what it’s like to be someone who does code all day, because if anybody’s been in any coffee shop anywhere in any major city in the world, you always see these people who’re just sitting at their laptops writing code. What’s that like to do that all day?

Jeff: It’s a very enjoyable thing to do. I would describe coding in a couple of ways. There’s coding that are your single-person projects. It’s like painting. If you’re a painter or if you’re some sort of artist and you’re making this really, really creative thing, it’s really the sort of the same thing when you’re doing a single-person, very artistic, very creative projects.

For me, I think even from my days in high school and before, coding was always this very therapeutic thing. You break the problem up very logically. You try all these different things. You kind of get amazed when things work, and then you start to think about how make this run faster.

There’s the other aspect of coding which is when you code in a team aspect or with other people. That’s when it becomes very, very different. When you’re coding by yourself and it becomes artistic, it’s one thing. When you’re coding with the team and you can’t really go off on your own, in a lot of ways, you have to work with the team to write much bigger pieces of software. It becomes less coding and more about the interpersonal aspect.

Coding is, I think in some ways, the a secondary part. The first part is the coordination, making sure you’re on the same page with others. That’s where it differs quite a bit.

Joseph: You spent some time at AMD, you were trading scrap metal for a while, and then you made a shift into the consulting world. What made you realize that you wanted to get into consulting?

Jeff: I don’t know if you’ve seen that movie, ‘Up in the Air,’ with George Clooney.

Joseph: Oh, yeah. I have. It’s a great movie.

Jeff: I think when I saw that—and of course I did my research. I had friends who are in management consulting. We’re living this very interesting lifestyle where I go to clients, advice, travel quite a bit, live out of a suitcase.

Obviously the work was one aspect. It’s really interesting to be in a situation where you’re coming in, helping companies either transform or manage certain crises. For me, those two aspects, the lifestyle and the type of work, were really appealing.

Joseph: You like the travel?

Jeff: Yeah, the travel, the living out of the suitcase, the constant pressure, to me at that time was very, very appealing. In a lot of ways, it still is kind of appealing.

When I went to business school, that was my focus. I want to go back to business school. I was working as an engineer at this company called Bazaarvoice in Austin at the time, and I basically made the commitment to go into management consulting. That’s kind of how I transitioned.

What I realized as an engineer was that I was really lacking a lot in the business aspect. I was always a pretty good coder. I had my own scrap metal business, but I was winging it like 90% of the time.

I looked at management consulting as like finishing school when you finish business school. You get the concept, the schooling, the network in business school, and then management consulting really pushes you to become what I call just a better professional in whatever you’re doing. That was what led me to go into management consulting in both the kind of work and the lifestyle.

Joseph: I crossed paths with a lot of engineers at business schools who want to get into management consulting. I know it’s a fairly competitive industry, and you landed at some very reputable companies like Infosys and then, after that, Deloitte. What do you think is the secret to getting into a place like that when you come from a more technical background?

Jeff: There’s two ways to get into consulting. There’s the traditional path where you go in the front door with everybody that’s trying to get in. That’s how I’ve gotten into Infosys. I’ll be the first to say, I interviewed at Deloitte and all these other firms during on-campus interviews at business school, and I only got accepted into a couple of them, and Infosys was one of them. Deloitte rejected me on the first set of interviews.

That’s always the harder way, right? Because you’re competing with a lot of people. You’re competing with all your classmates. When you go to business schools, especially in the top 20, 25 program, all the people are really smart. It’s not like in technical where it’s very clear if somebody really understands the technical side. In consulting, they look for analytical ability, presence, all these different things that are a little bit—you practice those things to get better, versus technical, which you just have to know.

If you’re an engineer and you have great grades, you’re super smart, you can adapt, you can do all these great stuff, you’re just one of the Booch at caliber talent, then usually you don’t have problem getting in.

I came in through what they call experience hire recruiting. Because I had experience in the workforce, I had a lot of some specific knowledge, especially in advanced analytics and the data science side. I was able to get in a place like Deloitte for example through not my business school criteria but a lot of just my knowledge of the space, especially in analytics side.

I think it’s a lot easier for techno folks to get into management consulting, because there’s more straightforward parts that are analytical thinking than breaking the problem up and solving them by chunks. It’s a lot more natural to folks who are technical than folks who are not as technical.

I think what always holds back folks who are technical is always the client presence, the emotional IQ, the presentation type of perspective.

Joseph: I know you were working as a consultant for a few years, and then you made another shift. I’m wondering if you can remember the moment when you started to think about making a shift into your current line of work, which is product management.

Jeff: To be honest, I wasn’t planning to leave Deloitte. I really love working there. I love the people. I had great relationship with the partners. I had great relation with the clients I was working at. The only sort of in the back of my mind was I would only really leave consulting for an opportunity to work at a well-funded startup in an area that I had a lot of expertise.

For example, I wouldn’t join some sort of company where I didn’t really understand the space. I wouldn’t understand the market or in a place where I would be sort of a junior role.

That sort of just happened about two years after I was at Deloitte. It’s company called VoloMetrix, which is based on Seattle. They had reached out to me in the past to join their company, but they were in Seattle. I wasn’t willing to move. Then they opened up a San Francisco office. The woman that I talked to at our time—her name was Natalie, our Chief Revenue Office—she made a very, very compelling presentation to me about what the company was about, what they were doing, basically using mail and meeting data into the space of HR Analytics. They kind of hit my criteria of when I was going to leave consulting. Everything worked out, and that was one of the moments that pushed me to leave consulting.

I would say it was probably the hardest decision. Anytime I’ve decided to leave the job, I think leaving Deloitte to a startup was probably the hardest decision.

Joseph: What made it hard?

Jeff: It is a difficult place in terms of the work-life balance. I mean it’s consulting, so you have a really fast pace, a lot of travel type of scenario. It’s something you know. It’s something you get really comfortable with. There’s something about delivering these crazy projects in a very high-pressure environment while working with extremely intelligent people.

Yes, it’s a lot of work, but it’s very comforting. It is almost like a warm blanket. That’s how I would like to describe the work. You’re in this comfortable world where you know what’s going on, you know the people, you know what you’re capable of. It’s to leave that to go to a company that, ‘Hey, you could be out of business in like a year or two.’

Anytime I’ve always made a transition, what always stuck with me and always kind of helped me with the decision was that, at any point in time, I could always go back. I think Deloitte, for me, was always a place where, if this didn’t work out, if I wasn’t seem happy or something like the company I’d go was under something like that, Deloitte was always a place where I felt like I could always go back. I had a really good relationships with the partners.

Deloitte is one of those places where they actually encourage people to leave and go in the industry and then come back, because they find that to be a very valuable experience for their future employees as well.

It wasn’t as hard, but it was hard in a sense that you’re leaving behind a lot of colleagues and very interesting work.

Joseph: What made you decide to go into product management then?

Jeff: I never really planned, so to speak, to get into product management. When I was finishing business school, actually, I had a few offers to do product management at companies, because product management, especially if you have an engineering degree and then you get MBA, that’s usually the natural path most people take out of business school.

At the back of my mind was, well, I would never really go back into pure engineering. Product management was always coming in the back of my mind because I work a lot with really great product managers in the past. I always felt like these guys, they understood the market. They understood the customers. These are the guys that kept the glue together in some of the product with engineering.

When our company got acquired by Microsoft, there was an opportunity to move in to the product side. At the time, we had a team from Microsoft, and we had a team from our end. It was a nice role to be able to bridge the gap and help rebuild our product so to speak inside of Microsoft.

When they acquired us, they took parts of our technology. There was a lot of work from the engineering side to get it compliant and up and running within Microsoft Office 365 stack. That kind of just landed to be honest. It was just something that there was sort of a need. At the time, there was an opportunity to try it out. Hey, it’s Microsoft. It’s the best place to learn about building products, or one of the best places. That’s just sort of what happened.

Once I started getting the role, I basically really fell in love with it. Building products is a much, much more difficult thing than coding. It’s a lot more difficult than in consulting projects because you have to think about the problem in such different aspects. That’s sort of how I got into it.

Joseph: I do want to get into some of the contrast and differences between the two roles. Before we do that, I’m thinking maybe we should just pause and just define exactly what product management is for those people who are not familiar what a product manager does. How would you describe what a product manager does?

Jeff: If I had to describe it in a more general sense, because product management varies quite a bit across many companies, I would describe it as you’re one part project management, meaning that you have to keep the communication, all of the timelines and when things are going to be delivered together. It’s one part what I call like a requirements analyst. There are guys who would go to talk to the customer.

Let’s say you’re building accounting software. You understand what it is that you need, what the features are, and how this should work. The last part is you analyze your markets, where you try to understand you’re building a product, you have to keep the project going, you have a bunch of customers asking for this stuff, and then here’s the market in what you’re trying to sell your product.

I think with the product management role, you’re like this liaison between many different groups. At the end of the day, product success, however you define it, it could be engagement. It could be revenue. You, as a product manager, are the person that makes sure, the foremost, it’s being built correctly for the customer. The second is making sure that there’s actual market for your product. The third, you’re making sure the project and all the schedule and all the stakeholders are updated and are happy, and everything is moving smoothly.

Joseph: Let’s dive in a little bit deeper into your experiences as a product manager then. A while back, Jeff, you wrote a Medium post about transition from consulting to product management. I was wondering if you could tell us what it was like to go from a place like Deloitte to a place like Microsoft. One of the things you mentioned in your article was that you’re trading in suits and ties for hoodies and white vans. What did you mean by that?

Jeff: It’s funny, because I did a lot of consulting in the baking sector. I remember when I wrote that title, I always think, ‘I will wear suits all the time.’ I was wearing suit and ties. It’s the notion of presence. It’s almost like when you go into the consulting gigs, you have to be very presentable. Versus when you build products, it doesn’t matter if you’re wearing basketball shorts and a tank top. If the product you’re building is extremely useful and a lot people love it and it’d be beneficial and they find value, it doesn’t matter if you wear suits, right?

When you build products versus when you do consulting engagements, products have to last much longer than most consulting engagements. Products have to have the legs of their own. They have to be extremely useful. The customer buying your software or buying your product, that’s the ultimate indicator of success. Whereas consulting, you can wear a really nice suit. You could speak really eloquently. You can have these really great decks. At the end of the day, they’re buying something a little bit different than the traditional product.

Joseph: The other thing I wanted to ask you about, before we talk about some of the things you’ve learned during your transitions along the way, is something else that you mentioned in your article which was that different revenue models create different incentives. Can you expand a bit more on that point?

Jeff: It’s a pretty straightforward model. Eighty to ninety percent of engagements are going to be something like you have 10 people. They each are $200 an hour, and you time however many hours you think this project will take. That could be anywhere from 50 hours to 1,000 hours, and it could be anywhere from teams of 2 to 3 to teams of like 20 or 30.

The revenue in some ways scales very linearly and it’s straightforward. You just know that ‘I bring somebodies to the problem, and the client pays me a small percentage, a couple of my cost, and that’s how I make money.’

The metric I always look at is revenue per employee. It can vary quite a bit, depending on the space you’re in. Software, for example, some of these companies like Google and Apple, have million plus dollars for revenue per employee. The scale of what you can achieve in terms of revenue, it unlocks itself when you go to products versus when you do consulting.

Consulting’s always going to be limited by the amount of people you have. The people are your assets, but in the product side, you can have a team of 10 people unlock millions of dollars of revenue on just a few set of products. That’s one of the hardest things going from a consulting to product management, at least for me, to wrap my head around, was that you have to think about scale in a much different sense than just adding more people to the problem.

Joseph: The last thing I want to talk about, before we wrap up with one of your very interesting projects at Unity, are some of the things you’ve learned along the way, Jeff. I was wondering if you could first explain what it takes to successfully make the transition into a product manager role, because this is obviously something that you’ve done successfully yourself and also because you are now involved in the hiring of other aspiring product managers who may have come from a different industry before.

Jeff: At the end of the day, there’s a lot of things that are very low level and that need to be done that nobody really wants to touch that when you get to the product manager, you can just step in and start doing those things. It could be a simple thing as keeping the documentation in order, rewriting a few things, improving the workflows or processes. I think with moving to product management, that’s something to keep an open mind.

Another thing, I think, when you move—at least for me when I moved into product management—was just to read a lot about other really good product managers, either on their blogs or talking to them in person. I think I had probably chats with 20 or 30 different product managers, either guys who are leading their own companies, the guys who are first or second-year product managers at bigger companies.

It takes time to form your own style in product management, to form your own perspective and your own process. I think with product management transitioning, it’s just to be very open about how people are approaching that problem, and then it’s adopting it to your own to make it better.

Joseph: Given that you’ve successfully transitioned from being an engineer to a product manager—and I know that you’re a consultant in between—if there is one piece of advice that you could’ve given your younger self as you were thinking about breaking into either something new or into product management, what would it be?

Jeff: Earlier in my career, I think I was impatient. I wanted to take on more. I wanted to do all these crazy things. I wanted to be basically the CEO in like two years. I feel like probably the most when I’m actually doing something new or something I hadn’t done, even something completely different I was doing just a few months ago.

I think I would tell my younger self to just be patient. You have to wait for these opportunities to come up. I think I probably jumped the gun in a few cases where I probably should’ve been a little more patient. Wait for the right opportunity. Don’t just take the job that sounds great at the time, and you’re just willing to sacrifice all the other things that you value. I think that would probably be one thing I would tell my younger self.

Joseph: What’s something that you’ve learned about yourself, having made a couple of shifts, first from engineering into consulting and then consulting in to product management?

Jeff: I think the most I’ve ever learned in my career was doing something new. I know it sounds very cliché, and it sounds very sort of boilerplate, but it helps to think of it that way that, if I feel that things at work are getting stale or I’m getting this monotonous routine, it’s ‘hey, there’s always something new to learn out there.’ That’s what keeps me level-headed.

At the end of the day, just constantly learning new things is what offers career satisfaction which ultimately leads to personal satisfaction.

Joseph: I’d love to wrap up, Jeff, with what you’re doing now at Unity Technologies. Can you just tell me a little bit more about Unity Machine Learning Agents, which is related to the future of AI and something I know absolutely nothing about?

Jeff: Absolutely. We hear a lot of things about AI. It’s very, very exciting times. All of what we call the AI systems of the future—if you’re talking about smart robots, self-driving cars—need data that exist in a virtual world. In the case of self-driving cars, you need something like in the tens of millions of virtually driven miles.

That’s where the Unity and Unity Machine Learning Agents come in. Unity, it’s a game engine. You can create this virtual world inside Unity. If you want to train and have these virtual simulations of anything, to take that into the real world, to put it into these new, smarter, AI-based systems, you need something like Unity and Machine Learning Agents.

What we do is, basically you as a developer, you as a company who wants to create a new AI system, we provide you all the tools, both the game engine, the simulator, and of course the bridge to all the machine learning framework, like TensorFlow occurs through Unity’s Machine Learning Agent package. It’s kind of high level. Those are what the products and project I’m working on now.

Joseph: Wow, very fascinating. If people want to learn more about you, Jeff, or the AI work that you’re doing there at Unity, where can they go?

Jeff: They can definitely check out my personal site that has links to the projects I’m working on and others. It’s at www.Shihzy.com.

Joseph: Fantastic. We will make sure that we include a link to your website in the show notes, along with that great Medium article you wrote about transitioning into product management.

I just wanted to thank you for taking time out of your busy day to tell us more about your life as a consultant formerly and how you made the transition into product management, and most of all, some of the great useful tips you shared on how to make a successful transition.

Best of luck with your AI work there at Unity and also that first year of fatherhood.

Jeff: Thank you so much, Joseph. I appreciate it, and thank you for the time.

Moving to a new country is never simple. In this episode of Career Relaunch, lettering artist Alex Trochut will share his story of moving from Barcelona to New York City. We’ll discuss the importance of paying attention to your professional desires and ways to rekindle your relationship with your own work. After our conversation, during today’s Mental Fuel, I explain what I do to keep my own work exciting and interesting.

Check out this short film by Daniel Soares featuring Alex Trochut on what it’s like to be a freelancer in NYC.

During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, my challenge to you was to find one way to make your work more exciting for yourself by changing one part of your work routine. It could be something as simple as listening to music or working in a different café or it could mean investing more time into that side gig of yours or finding a way to get more involved with that project that truly excites you.

Start this week. Rekindle the relationship you have with your job. And see what impact it has on your work and your life.

After completing his design studies at Elisava Superior School of Design, Alex Trochut established his own design studio in Barcelona before relocating to New York City. Through his design, illustration and typographic practice, he’s developed an intuitive way of working that’s resulted in his expressive visual style. He’s partnered with some of the world’s most iconic brands and artists – from Katy Perry to the Rolling Stones – to bring their album artwork to life. He’s been nominated for a GrammyAward for Best Recording Packaging, recognized for his inventive lettering style by the Art Director’s Club, and selected as one of the top 5 of the 20 most influential designers in the last 20 years by Computer Arts Magazine. He’s recently embarked on an artistic collaboration to convey the meaning behind the word Truth.

Follow Alex on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

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): Our careers are like marriages. Routines can step in very easily, and then somehow, what was exciting is not exciting anymore, because you’ve been doing it a thousand times. It’s very important to make your relationship with your work exciting again.

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

Alex: Thank you so much, Joseph. I’m very happy to be here.

Joseph: We are going to talk through your geographical move to New York City, your life as a designer, and also some of the ups and downs of establishing yourself in a city like New York City, but I was wondering if you could start by first explaining exactly what you’re focused on right now in your career and your life.

Alex: Right now, I’m in Brooklyn. I’m in a shared space with six other freelancers in Greenpoint. My life, it’s very simple, and I love it. I would love to keep it like this for as long as I can. I live not far away from here.

Probably, the challenges that I’m facing right now are like dealing with the world of commercial commissions and how to introduce or dive more into my personal work. Maybe the challenges towards a 10-year plan would be like, ‘Will I be doing this in 10 years or will I step more into personal work and just go more for an artistic field or not?’ It’s kind of the big questions that sometimes I wonder.

It’s another step of changing careers that I’m not ready to get a lot of determination yet, about what’s the best strategy, to be honest. I’ve been working as a graphic designer, illustration, letterer, for the last 12 years as a freelancer. Before, I was in Barcelona. Pretty much all my life has been surrounded by creating images that many times involve letters.

Joseph: We’re going to get into the details on all of this and also would be very interested to hear about some of your future plans, as I know that that’s always something that people wrestle with is balancing the present and the future.

I’ve worked with plenty of designers myself, Alex, both right now in my current business but also when I used to work in brand management, and you’re actually the first letterer I’ve come across where you focus on the actual lettering as a designer and artist. Could you just explain exactly what a lettering artist does?

Alex: Letter design is a little bit like the nonverbal communication of design. It’s really not what you say. It’s like how you say it. That happens through the visual side of letters.

You could say, for example, ‘I love you.’ You could write it in a letter that is very plain, or you could do something like extremely flourished and beautiful. Then the message can come across way more intentional, and the style becomes a message itself.

That’s a little bit of what I play with, like trying to work with context that it’s given by specific letters. It’s not alphabets. It’s kind of like just working with, for example, a name, a headline, a logo. Those are the structures, the letter structures I need to play with in order to create a communication through those letters and embody a message that a client or a brand will need.

Joseph: I know one challenge, Alex, that freelancers and entrepreneurs can struggle with is what to focus on, which is definitely something I’ve always wrestled with myself. How did you decide to focus on this particular niche of design?

Alex: In that sense, I believe a lot in just trusting your satisfaction or putting your professional compass where your fun is focused. Just try to really answer your exciting needs, because the key is like just converting any effort into a natural will.

For me, it’s almost like a necessity of like, ‘I really want to do this.’ If I’m doing something else, I’m thinking about these other things, so what I try to do is just try to go where my heart was going. Through that, I think I started to develop more of a knowledge about how to do certain things, certain way. It was really just like following a little bit your own needs more than anything else.

Joseph: Let’s go back in time a little bit here. You haven’t always lived in New York City. You actually started your career, as you mentioned, as a designer in Barcelona. Could you tell me about what sort of work you were doing at that time, and then we can move forward from there?

Alex: I started working in Elisava. That was when I was around like 20 years old. After that, I did my Erasmus. I went to Berlin for half a year and then came back and started to do some internships in this studio called Toormix, where I learned a lot about how to rationalize my ideas, try to not express yourself just for the sake of it.

I remember when we were working at Toormix, every project had to be discussed previously. We did these meetings where we all hear a brief, and we all have an opinion towards how to approach it. The approach had to be discussed beforehand and agreed by all the team. To me, that was crazy because it was very hard for me to rationalize things before doing them, but they were great creatives for thinking and concepting.

After that, I went to another studio. The approach was quite different. I went to Vasava, where the approach is way more emotional. Of course there’s an agreement towards what is the direction, but there’s a lot of things that they allow every creative to drift with and allow everybody that was taking the project dive into their own process and let the process show you what’s the best solution.

There was a point, after spending two years over there, where I decided it was time for me to manage my own time basically and just try to find my own clients. I thought, ‘Let’s go find my clients on the internet.’ It was a perfect moment in time where internet was really allowing for you to hunt clients outside of your city.

That was what happened. I made my website in English. Little by little, I was starting to get commissions from outside Spain, which allowed me to connect with narrower target of clients that maybe were looking forward to commission stuff that I like to do, rather than me adapting to whatever clients I had in my local territory.

I started to get some agents, reps that help me to grow in my career. After six years, I decided to move to New York, because I needed a change. I already had my agents over here in the U.S. My landing in New York was already with a work stability, which is very fortunate. I’m very grateful about that.

Joseph: Before we get to when you actually did physically land in New York, this move from Barcelona to New York City actually seems like a pretty big move. How did you decide to leave Barcelona behind and move internationally to United States?

Alex: It was a swift moment. It was a moment of changes. It was a moment of looking at my life through a different perspective. It was when I was 30. It’s this time that’s like a pivotal moment where you’re thinking, ‘Is this where I settle in, Barcelona? Is this the city, or is there a new chapter for me?’ There’s maybe a surprise for my life that I could try to discover.

I was looking forward to establish myself in Barcelona after traveling for six months in around Asia. Then I went to New York, and I just had this moment of like, ‘Wow.’ I met people. My agents were telling me, ‘Hey, if you want to move here, we can get you more work.’ It was like, ‘This is a moment where I need to make this happen or not happen.’ I was telling myself, ‘Allow yourself to fail,’ basically. If this is not going to work, it’s fine, but allow yourself to fail this time. If it doesn’t work, just come back to Barcelona.’ Here I am.

I was really excited about everything, that it was such a bigger challenge in New York rather than Barcelona – like first of all, getting your—all the steps that you need to do—get your visa, get your social security, get your credit card, get your credit score, all these little steps that will mean nothing if I am in Barcelona. They were like massive achievements here in New York. Doing all these stuff, it felt very rewarding.

Definitely, New York is a tough city, but also it grabs you from the beginning if you fall in love with it, and then things are starting to get better little by little.

Joseph: My sister lived in New York City for many years, and I would go and visit her. I know the city’s really incredible, and at the same time, it can be very intimidating and overwhelming.

It’s funny you mentioned that you’ve made the decision to move at the age of 30, because I was just thinking about my own situation in the past. I actually moved from San Francisco to London when I was 31, right around the same time where you’ve got to make this decision about ‘are you in or are you out?’

I don’t know about you, Alex, but I can still remember the very first week after I arrived in the U.K. I was wondering, can you take us back to the moment when you landed in New York City for the first time? What was that like for you? What was running through your head as you exited the airport?

Alex: It’s funny, because there was not quite a moment where I was like, ‘I’m definitely 100% moved here.’ It was navigating a personal relationship. I was in love at that time, and I was just taking it slow to like coming for three months and then going back to Barcelona. It was a very slow transition.

I didn’t want to say no to anything. I didn’t want to say no to Barcelona yet. I just wanted to say yes to everything. I had to decide at some point, because my life was a little bit chaotic. It was a lot of back and forth.

New York was very welcoming in that sense, and I felt like everybody’s an immigrant in this city. It felt always very recharging, the energy that you find from the people. I don’t know how it is in London, but in Europe in general, there’s a lot of people that are born and raised in one place, so you feel a little bit detached from the culture.

Unlike in New York, the culture is whoever arrives and sets up something new. It’s so hungry for new stuff happening. In that sense, everybody has an opportunity, and everybody needs to prove themselves that they are somehow part of this city.

Joseph: Now, I got to ask you about how you landed some of your projects, because especially for those people out there who might also a be a solopreneur or a freelancer or even someone just trying to gain some traction on one of their side projects, there’s always this question about how you land your clients or your gigs. How did you end up creating the album covers for artists like Katy Perry and the Rolling Stones? Because that sounds like a pretty big deal.

Alex: It does, but at the same time, it didn’t feel like that. It’s so crazy sometimes, like how crazy things happen in the luckiest way. I feel like it’s always a combination of hard work and some talent and then luck.

In the case of Rolling Stones, every now and then, you get these projects that they are like, ‘Do you want to pitch for this project?’ It sounds great. You’re going to be willing to put so many hours into do a presentation, and then they’re going to present this to a big team above you that you have no communication with. They’re going to put it in a focus group, and of course, it almost never happens.

The one time that it happened was for Rolling Stones, and I was in shock. I remember I accepted the project, thinking, ‘I don’t know why I’m doing this, because it’s probably not going to happen.’ But it’s Rolling Stones, so I would always say like, ‘Look, I did a version for whatever record is going to be released.’ I think that’s always the best way to approach a certain pitch for projects. The more confident you feel about the proposal, the less likely is the thing going to happen, weirdly in my head.

My expectations were very low, but I did my best. Very surprisingly, the focus group approves the proposal, and it happened.

Joseph: How did you get discovered to be one of the four people featured in that solo New York City short film, which is actually how I first learned about you?

Alex: That was Daniel Soares who was a person who I didn’t know at the time. He’s a guy from Portugal, very talented filmmaker and very good eye for cinematography. He just contacted me through Instagram. We met, and he said, ‘Look, I have this project. I would like to do a little interview with you and do this small film about different freelance in New York,’ and I was one of the people he selected. That’s how it happened.

After that, Daniel came to the studio here in Greenpoint, and he stayed with us for a few months, almost a year. He became a friend after that.

Joseph: The last thing I was hoping to cover before we wrap up with one of the projects I know that you are working on right now, Alex, is just some of the things that you’ve learned over the years of freelancing, then moving in New York City, and also creating a name for yourself globally as a designer. I’d like to start by talking through a couple of the things you mentioned in that short film we were just referencing. One of the things I thought was really interesting that you said there in that film was, ‘Beginnings are always rough.’ What is it about starting something new that you think makes it so difficult?

Alex: When you start, all you have is your will, your heart, a little bit innocence. I think that brings all of the excitement. Knowledge is power, but the unknown is so big too. You don’t want anybody to tell you how it is. You want to discover it by yourself, and there’s going to be a lot of failure involved with the process. At the same time, if it’s the one thing you decided that was worth it to do, it’s going to create so much drive towards your goal.

Beginnings are rough for sure, because you haven’t established anything yet. You are an unknown person that doesn’t have any perception towards any of the people that you talk with. You need to prove yourself from every action, and you’re going to keep building towards something that will create a perception as an individual, as a brand, as a designer, as whatever you’re willing to become. It’s the moment where you have that sort of opportunity to create a stamp on every experience with everybody. This is something that you just take very good care of, ‘I’m going to sculpt this thing beautifully, and I want this to be perfect. I’m not going to let anything go wrong.’ It’s very exciting.

So many times, of course, there’s a lot of struggle towards the people you encounter, the people that are questioning you, the people that decided not to take you seriously because why should they, and how you need to navigate all that and prove to yourself and them that you’re worth it.

It’s all about having fun. If you’re having fun with what you do, you just turn everything into a natural will and not an effort. That’s so important, because everybody is born with specific traits in their brain. There are certain things that they’re not free will. We’re just wired in a certain way to like certain things, and we need to listen to what we like a lot because that’s what we were probably born to perform the best for.

Those are the things that we cannot create, we’re born with. Listening to those clues that desire create for us, I think, is very important because they’re very, very unique. In the long run, you are going to be doing the best you were supposed to for who you are, if you follow those things, I feel.

Joseph: It’s probably a good reminder to everybody out there that we all sometimes put a lot of pressure on ourselves to get things right, and as you said, perfect, especially when you’re about to start off on something new. It’s a good reminder that, I guess, a) you got to remember to have fun along the way, and also b) to not second guess yourself too much and to listen to your intuition, which is not always the easiest thing to do.

Alex: I feel like intuition is so important. It’s almost something that you don’t think. You just feel like, ‘Okay, yeah. I guess I got to do this.’ I’m not so much of a thinker. I’m just more like a doer.

Joseph: I’ve been trying to work on that myself recently. I’m more of a thinker myself. I’ve been finding recently that sometimes my thinking overrides what I’m feeling, and it ends up not being the right decision. I’m trying to get better at listening to my own intuition.

Another thing that you said in the video was that you need to create excitement again in your long-term relationship with yourself. What did you mean by that? I thought that was very interesting.

Alex: Our careers are like marriages. We are attached to a way of doing. Routines can step in very easily, and then somehow, what was exciting is not exciting anymore, because you’ve been doing it a thousand times. It’s very important to kill your darlings every now and then and try new things. Make your relationship with your work exciting again. It can come through circumstances that can push you. For example, I was not looking for work to learn 3D at all in my career, but thank God, that the circumstances pushed me towards that.

Comfortable is easy, but at the end it’s boring. You always need to create some pain to get some gain. It’s like going to do exercise. At the beginning, nobody wants to get up at 6 a.m. to go to the gym, but when you’re in the shower after your workout, you are very happy about it. It’s always trying to find that effort that you put in it, and then it’s going to be very rewarding towards the end.

Joseph: I’d also be curious to hear what you’ve learned about yourself, having reestablished yourself in a city like New York City that’s full of opportunity and excitement but is also quite ruthless and unforgiving at times. Is there anything that has been especially surprising that you’ve learned about yourself along the way?

Alex: Looking back on how much my life was very simple when I was before 30, it was so much focused on work solely and only about work that it was very imbalanced. It was kind of necessary to be where I am right now. I think if I took away a little bit of the focus that I had in those times, maybe I will not be in New York. At the same time, it was kind of like an unsustainable lifestyle. I feel like my life is more balanced now, and I’m able to look at things with a more relaxed way, I hope.

I’m learning about myself, about the patterns that everybody steps into and trying to balance your life as much as possible. In the end, you do produce better things when you are less tense, less stressed, and less focused on one thing, because you narrow your vision a lot. When you’re more relaxed, your brainwaves are in another scope. It’s wider, and you allow yourselves to take longer paths and look around and see things that maybe others don’t. In a way, I think it’s better to be less obsessed. That’s maybe the one thing that I learned.

It’s always changing. So many times, you don’t control the things that happen to you in the professional world, especially when you work for others and clients. You’re not an artist that you just do what you are pleased in every time. It’s more about adapting to circumstances.

Sometimes, the circumstances are overwhelming, but yeah, trying to remind myself not to stress too much and take things a bit easier with myself, I think.

Joseph: For anyone listening to this who’s maybe been thinking about making a big move in their career, is there something you wish you had known that you now know about creating a change in your life, after making your big international move?

Alex: When I decided to start, I was very anxious to prove to myself and others that I was able to do it. That was necessary. I feel like that being gifted with myself, it was important in order to accomplish it, but in the end, if you want something, it ends up happening.

Everything is kind of like, the decisions that you can take towards something are reversible in a way. Allow yourself to make a mistake. It’s good. I feel like Americans maybe are easier on that term, because everybody tries things. They might fail, and it’s okay. You can just do something else.

Life is long. There are so many stages in it. Sometimes, I feel like in Europe, you feel a little bit judged if things don’t work out the way they’re supposed to. What is important is just to keep trying and enjoy the process, because in the end, it’s right here. In the end, certain things, they will not repeat, and we just need to enjoy the process more then.

When you get to your goals, what happens is I always feel like, ‘Oh, I did that,’ like it was so important for me. Now, I’m here, and then I need to start again. It’s another process, so it’s better to enjoy there. Whatever path you choose to do, do something that you enjoy, because you’re always suffering if not. It’s important to just take it easy sometimes.

Joseph: Well, that’s a great segue into one of the projects you were telling me about before we recorded this interview that I know you’re enjoying. Can you tell me a little bit more about your current artistic collaboration, focused on the word ‘truth’?

Alex: We are working with a bunch of different artists for animations of a concept. I’m working with David McLeod, Teo Guillem from Dvein, Javier Leon from Leon Studio, Frank Guzzone, and Jordi Pages, a bunch of 3D artists that I really admire. We are all doing this collaboration that it’s animating the word ‘truth.’ It’s going to have an online presence through our website that it’s going to be also like a sound experience, where every animation is a channel of a big, big track that it can sound all at once. All the videos could be playing at once or only one.

Somehow, it’s an artistic interpretation of what our current political, philosophical landscape looks like, where I feel like the certainty about facts and truths is so relative these days. Truth becomes the opposite of a solid matter. It’s like smoky. It could be liquid. It could be bending. It could be divided. It could be like so many metaphors that visually drive you to see the word evolving into different things. That’s what we’re doing, and it’s a project that’s going to be open to many other people. I’m hoping to get as many versions of truth as possible.

Joseph: Very cool. If people want to learn more about you or your lettering art or this collaboration around the word ‘truth,’ where could people go to find out more?

Alex: I bought this domain called Truth.af. I’m also on my Instagram or website, which is @trochut for Instagram and AlexTrochut.com for my website.

Joseph: We will include all those links in the show notes. I just wanted to thank you so much, Alex, for telling us more about your life as a letterer, the things you’ve learned along the way, and the importance of enjoying the ride along the path of your career. Best of luck with your projects and all of your design work.

Alex: Awesome. Thank you so much. It was very nice talking to you, Joseph.

How can you survive the ups and downs of a bumpy career journey? In this episode of Career Relaunch, Jamie Love a former house cleaner turned professional photographer shares her thoughts on how to deal with hitting rock bottom and how your mindset can have a direct impact on the trajectory of your career. I’ll also explain how I’ve thought about my own self-worth, especially as it relates to pricing my services as a self-employed consultant.

So my challenge to you is to put yourself out there, and start charging what you feel you’re worth, even if you don’t feel 100% ready yet. I’m talking about putting a price on something valuable you’ve been doing for free. And once you’ve done that, to NOT apologize for what you’re offering. To not feel like someone’s doing you a favour by paying you for this. Instead, help that person feel good about what they’re buying by proudly and unapologetically describing the value you know you’re providing.

Jamie Love is a creative visionary and home-schooling mother who owns and operates Jamie Love Photography, a portrait studio based in Ithaca, NY. She completed her BFA in Photography and Digital Imaging from the Ringling College of Art and Design in 2003. Afterwards, she became a single mother to three children and dug herself out of the trenches of self-loathing and abusive relationships. She tapped into her own difficult journey toward self-love to create to a career focused on empowering and inspiring her clients through dream portrait experiences that celebrate their strengths.

Her latest project is the The Senior Empowerment Collective. Many photographers have what they call “brand ambassadors” people who promote their business. She decided that she wanted to do a different spin on this and create a mutually beneficial relationship with her high school teen clients. Because the teenage years can be cruel to our self esteem, the Senior Empowerment Collective is a group of local teens who learn self love practices through their senior portrait experience. They have the opportunity to model and boost their self confidence with a larger organization “The Model Network National,” and locally, Jamie provides them with volunteer hours in the community, and works to create a portrait experience that celebrates their uniqueness.

Follow Jamie on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

If you have any lingering thoughts, questions, or topics you would like covered on future episodes, record a voicemail for me right here. I LOVE hearing from listeners!

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

Teaser (first ~15s): I was kind of miserable. I was working these cleaning jobs that were not fulfilling to me. I was looking at these other people who have these lives that I wanted to have. I think because I was in that mindset, the worst thing happened.

Joseph: Good morning, Jamie. Welcome to Career Relaunch.

Jamie: Good morning.

Joseph: It’s great to have you on the show. I’m really looking forward to talking with you about some of the major chapters in your career, including your time as a house cleaner and now as a photographer. I also want to talk about some aspects of your personal journey, including managing your career as a single parent and also how a specific injury became a turning point in your career. I was hoping we could start by having you first explain what you do as a photographer and also what you’re focused on in your personal life.

Jamie: As a photographer, I have a boutique photography studio. I do maternity portraits. I do newborn portraits, senior portraits. I also do business headshots, as well as work style sessions and personal branding.

Joseph: Do you have a favorite type of photography that you like to do these days?

Jamie: I like doing them all and all for various reasons. I’ve been primarily doing a lot senior portraits recently. That’s been my main thing. I really, really enjoy that, getting to work with teens.

Joseph: Okay. Well, we’re going to definitely come back to that topic at the end because I know that you’re working on an interesting project related to seniors in high school. We’ll definitely come back to that.

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

Jamie: Well, I home school my children, and so that keeps me busy when I’m not doing photography work. As well, just doing a lot of introspective meditation, mindset work, things like that, spending a lot of time out in nature as well, trying to be more outside and less in front of the computer.

Joseph: What a great idea. I think that’s fantastic.

You have not always been a full-time photographer. I know you keep yourself busy with many things right now, but I was wondering if you could take us back in time, Jamie, and explain what one of your former careers was. I think when we spoke before, you mentioned that you spent some time as a house cleaner. I was hoping you could tell us how you ended up being a house cleaner, and then we can move forward from there.

Jamie: Goodness. It started after a separation with my son’s father. I was left a single parent. I needed something that I made the most amount of money in the shortest amount of time, given that time is not always easy for me to come by as a single parent.

Somebody mentioned to me, ‘Oh. Well, you know, you could do some house cleaning and make a fair amount of money doing that.’ I enjoyed cleaning, so I thought, ‘Okay, well, let’s just try this.’ I had helped people organize their homes and do projects like that, and so it wasn’t new to me to do house cleaning.

I took on a few clients, and then those clients referred me, and then it turned out into this major thing where I was doing anywhere between 8 to 15 clients a week.

Joseph: Can you just share a couple example profiles of the people or families who were your cleaning clients?

Jamie: They varied. Some of them were elderly people who just needed some assistance and couldn’t really do it themselves. I worked for a lot of people who had various allergies. They would have me come in because I had special HEPA filter vacuum that I had to purchase, and I use all eco-friendly products. My main clientele were people who either had environmental concerns or needed assistance.

Joseph: Can you just give a glimpse into what it’s like to go into the homes of people to clean their places for them, also knowing that this was something that you were doing kind of out of sheer necessity?

Jamie: Definitely out of necessity. Though I found ways to mentally appreciate and enjoy as much as I possibly could in the moment, it was definitely a necessity thing.

It’s interesting going into somebody’s home and having to clean up for them. There’s a difference. There’s house cleaning, where you go in and you actually are cleaning, and then there’s like maid work, where people would just want you to clean up after them or their children. Thankfully, I didn’t have too much of that. It was mostly just I would come in and do a weekly deep clean for somebody. Sometimes, it was like a focused project. Other times, it was a general clean about.

It’s a very personal experience, people having you come into their homes and you learn a lot about them through cleaning their homes, their particularities really, what’s important to them and what they prefer.

Joseph: During that time when you were cleaning people’s homes, Jamie, what was running through your head? I guess I’m assuming you had a lot of time to think about a lot of different things. I’m wondering specifically about whether you thought at all about your own career during this time.

Jamie: Absolutely. Sometimes, the clients were there, and sometimes, they weren’t. I found it more difficult when they were there.

In particular, I had this one client who is a published author. I would go over, and she would just be sitting on her laptop writing. I also love to write. Sometimes, I would go over and I’d be, ‘Goodness, imagine if I would be spending my time writing. Maybe I’d be a published author by now, and I wouldn’t be cleaning.’

There was definitely introspective moments when I would be in people’s homes and wonder, ‘What are they doing for a living that’s affording them the ability to have me come in and just clean for them? How can I be in that position?’

At the same time, I could maintain a zen, ho-hum thing. Sometimes, I would just put in my ear buds and listen to a podcast, all the while trying to figure out how to get out of the situation.

Joseph: Speaking of which, I know you had something happen to you with a physical injury that almost forced your hands here. What exactly happened to you?

Jamie: I had finished a really long week. It was my 15-client week. I went home to do some stretching and some yoga afterwards, and my left leg went numb on me. I was kind of like, ‘What’s going on?’ I was trying to stretch it out. It wasn’t helping, and I started having muscles spasms. I ended up in the emergency room that evening, and they told me I had herniated disk in my lower back. Then, I was no longer able to clean. I was no longer able to do anything at that point.

I was in a hospital room for a good week, as they did all these tests to figure out what else might be going on and why I couldn’t use my leg. My leg was completely numb from the toe all the way up to the hip.

Joseph: Wow, okay. How did you get yourself to move forward in spite of the physical injury that you had?

Jamie: I had to take time off. I was forced to take time off. When you’re sitting on a bed and you have nothing else to do but think about how to get better and how to heal your body, you go inward. Part of that for me was trying to figure out what I was going to do next for a job, considering my physical limitations.

Even after a disk herniation, even if you heal it, you still have to be easy on your back. You can’t do a lot of heavy lifting. You certainly can’t be climbing stairs, carrying heavy vacuums. I had to reconsider what I can do for employment that’s going to make sense with this new body that I’m now living in.

My mother was like, ‘You know, why didn’t you ever do anything with your photography career?’ I’d gone to college for photography, probably 10 years prior to all of this. I hadn’t been in the position to ever purchase the equipment needed to start my photography career, to do what I knew how to do, what I was trained to do. I said, ‘Well, good point. Maybe I should get back into that. Maybe I should look to getting some funding or figure out how to get the upfront cost.’

That became my focus, was getting the funds to start a career with the time off that I had while I was healing my body.

Joseph: You alluded to this earlier, and I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit more about the effect it had on you of going from having a partner to being on your own as you were thinking about your career, especially with children.

Jamie: Single parenting is definitely a whole new host of challenges where I had a partner that I could say, ‘Okay, well, I’m going to go work and you watch the kids.’ It didn’t become that simple anymore. Where I had a partner where it was like, ‘Okay, I’m going to work and our combined income can pay for child’s care.’ I didn’t have that anymore.

I had to work through a lot of the challenges of trying to figure out a way to have someone watch the kids, despite the fact that I didn’t have income to pay for child care. It’s kind of like a double-edged sword. You need work to have money, but then in order—me, I had three kids at that time—to pay for child’s care for three kids is rather expensive.

Joseph: Is there something that you think people misunderstand about what it’s like to be a single parent, especially when it comes to your career?

Jamie: People are always full of assumptions as to why you’re a single parent, first of all. They do think something’s flawed with you, or, ‘Why is she a single parent?’ or, ‘How did she get in that position in the first place?’

It’s hard to have a career as a single parent, in the sense that your time is already stretched thin, because you’re the primary bread winner, you’re the primary everything. Having to have a career amidst that is difficult. It requires a lot of time management, juggling, and scheduling, and priority scheduling. There’s definitely a lot of assumptions that go in people minds around what that all entails.

Looking at big jobs as I am doing now, people know that I’m a single parent, and they always say things like, ‘Well, are you sure you can take that on?’ or, ‘Are you sure you have time for that?’ There’s this assumption that you can’t figure it out because you’re alone.

Joseph: Clearly, you have figured it out. I’m curious how you made that transition with all the challenges that come from being a single parent. I think I spoke with you before. I mentioned we’ve got a 15-month-old at home. Even with two people, it’s tough. It’s like all hands on deck at the time. I’d be really interested to hear how you pulled this off and was able to break into the industry of being a photographer full-time. I think it started with a program through a local bank. Is that right?

Jamie: My local credit union, they have a program that’s called the IDA Program, where we live. It’s partially grant funded for people with low income, which is the position I was in at the time, where you save $1,000 and then you take some business classes, and then they match you with $2,000. There you have $3,000 and the education to start a business of your own. When I found out about this program, I was like, ‘Oh my god, this is exactly what I need to get myself rolling.’

I took the program, and it took me a good year and some change to save up that $1,000 and take the money classes that I needed to get in that position where I then had the $3,000. I used that to buy my studio light kit.

Joseph: Because you didn’t have any of your equipment yet, I guess.

Jamie: No. When I had started out in photography in college, back in 2003, all of my gear has since been completely outdated at this point. I had to reinvest. I had an outdated camera, but I was like, ‘Well, I can start with this and just get some stuff under my belt enough to save up money to get the camera.’ I started with the lights. I was like, ‘Okay, I have the lights in place.’ Then I got the camera based off of a few jobs that I had gotten.

Over time, I just kept saving and saving to get all the equipment I needed, which was a huge investment upfront. Starting a photography business is a big investment, at least to have the proper lighting and all the gear that I was accustomed to, working with on a professional level. I didn’t want to take any shortcuts in terms of quality of equipment, so I just went for it.

Joseph: I know a lot of people who love doing photography as a hobby, and they think it’d be so cool to become a photographer. Yet I know very few people, at least personally, who have been able to become full-time photographers. What do you think is the hardest part of making it as a full-time photographer?

Jamie: It’s definitely tricky to stand out in an industry where there is a ton of hobbyist people that can seemingly do a similar job.

For me, the biggest challenge was understanding my worth which was rooted in a whole lot of other things about self-worth, through everything I’ve been through, and understanding that my value was really high, that I wasn’t just a hobbyist, but I’m a skilled professional, that I was trained to do this, and to put myself out there in a way that is slightly uncomfortable.

I was never a very out-going person. I’m more of an introvert, if you will.

Joseph: What was the most uncomfortable part of putting yourself out there?

Jamie: Marketing myself in the community. I guess that’s the thing, because when I one-on-one and I’m in a session, I’m fine. I have a really good one-on-one rapport with my clients, even a team. I go and I do a corporate team, and I feel like I’ve got that. I feel confident in what I’m doing, but the initial putting myself out there like, ‘Okay, hi. I’m someone that you could hire,’ is a little awkward at first.

I’m used to it now, but that was the hardest part initially. In marketing, they say, ‘Oh, do some Facebook live post and things like that.’ I’m always like, ‘Oh gosh, this is so strange.’

Joseph: Easier said than done. How did you get started? Who was your first client, and then what happened after that?

Jamie: Interestingly enough, my first client was actually the credit union. Once they realized what I was capable of, they were like, ‘Oh my goodness, let’s hire you to do all of our marketing.’ That was a huge boost. I went from having basically zero income to all of a sudden getting a large corporate job.

They hired me after that, because I had taken the business classes with them. They had a good rapport with me, and they saw my skillset and what I was capable of and just trusted that I was going to come through. I did, and I’ve been working there for two years now.

Joseph: From there, it extended into other types of work for other corporate clients?

Jamie: I put together a website with all the various offerings that I’m capable of doing. For me, my first year was sort of exploratory. It was like, ‘Well, let’s see what I get the most of.’ It was like a market research year almost. I was storing myself out there like, ‘Okay, these are all the things I can do. Let’s see what comes back the most.’ For me, that’s been seniors and head shots and corporate jobs.

Joseph: That’s an interesting approach to it. I know that for people who have listened to this podcast a lot, they probably know that I’m quite the planner, especially when it comes to career stuff. Yet it sounds like the way you did it was you kind of put yourself out there in variety of ways and saw what stuck and rolled with that. That seems like that’s worked pretty well for you.

Jamie: I went in with a strong business plan, which my business plan was see what comes the most. I priced everything accordingly, and I had all my numbers. Everything was really organized in that way. I guess I was new to the area in a way that I had never done a photography business in my town, and so I wasn’t sure what would be the most effective business here.

Joseph: The other thing I was hoping to talk with you about, Jamie, was just some of the lessons that you’ve learned along the way of your own career journey. One of the things you’ve mentioned to me before this recording was how throwing out your back actually taught you about fear and how fear can lead to this vicious downward cycle of self-limitation. I was hoping you could tell me a little bit more about how you came to that realization about fear and self-limitation.

Jamie: I think being thrown into the absolute abyss of hell and pain, to be frank, was like a crash course in here’s your worst fear. Your worst fear is that you cannot provide for your children and that you’re not physically capable of providing for your children. That was rather intense, being put in that position. It’s so humbling for me. I have a really forthright way of getting what I feel like I need in any moment.

The fear stuff for me was like having to face it head-on and realize that, here I was in my worst fear that I could possibly imagine, and yet somewhere in there, I was able to find a place of peace, a place of grace, and a place of humility and work through it and realize that I kind of had manifested my worst fears, almost. I feel like my back going out was my body’s way of saying, ‘Here, you want to say all these fears. Well, here they are. This is the worst case scenario, and let’s deal with it.’

Joseph: You mean like a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts?

Jamie: Almost. I don’t think that I intentionally did that. I wasn’t like, ‘Here, let me fulfill my worst prophecy.’ That’s kind of what happened.

I think what it taught me is, prior to my back going out, I was kind of miserable. I was working these cleaning jobs that were not fulfilling to me. I was looking at these other people who had this lives that I wanted to have, and I wasn’t having them. It’s hard when you’re in that position to not get sucked down into this place of depression or this victim mentality or this ‘poor me’ or ‘how did I get here?’ I think because I was in that mindset of ‘this is terrible’ and ‘what am I going to do with my life?’ the worst thing happened.

The blessing in that, it helped me to remember that I had a bigger purpose. Even though I knew that I had the bigger purpose all along, my bigger purpose was masked by my mindset of ‘I’m frustrated,’ ‘I’m broke,’ ‘I don’t have what I need,’ all these terrible things.

Joseph: I guess what you’re referring to is this concept of kind of hitting rock bottom. I think a lot of people who listen to this show, Jamie, have experienced a moment when they’ve hit rock bottom in their careers as you did when you hurt your back. I’m wondering if there’s anything you wished you had known that you now know about how to deal with those extremely low points in your career.

Jamie: I think if I had to go back, knowing what I know now about mindset work, I feel like I could have talked myself out of going down that low, somehow. Maybe I wouldn’t have known better, but it’s part of my lesson personally.

There’s ways that we can really talk ourselves down into a hole. What I know now is that, anytime you feel that those feelings coming up of, ‘I can’t do this. I’m never going to make this. Nobody’s ever going to hire me. I’m never going to have my dream career,’ you’re kind of creating that for yourself. I think, had I known differently, I would’ve focused more my intention on focusing on my strengths and ‘I can do this,’ and ‘I am capable,’ and ‘Maybe the money isn’t here now, but that doesn’t mean it won’t come another day.’

Joseph: I’ve also found that to be the case in my own self-employment journey, Jamie, this whole mindset and belief aspect to your work. I used to kind of shrug it off as being the more touchy-feely side of things and that it wasn’t really worth much, but I’ve actually come of realize that belief really matters a lot. That belief drives your actions, and then those actions end up driving your results. It makes a huge difference. It really does.

Jamie: Absolutely. I feel like having confidence is something that I didn’t necessarily have. I had to find that in myself, because there’s always this place in us that, sometimes, it takes seeing somebody else do something, and we’re like, ‘Well, I can do better than that.’ Sometimes, it takes seeing other situations to help you realize like, ‘Wow, I actually am capable,’ or, ‘I am better than I thought I was.’ Over time, it builds up, and you do – you develop a belief in yourself, and then there you are.

Even in times when I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is the biggest job I’ve ever gotten. Will I be able to pull this off?’ I had my moments of like, ‘Oh my god, here I am. I’m given this opportunity. Don’t screw it up.’

The thing is that, when I get in that moment, when I’m in my zone, which for me taking portraits and doing photography work, it’s something that’s innate in me. What I learned is that I just need to do it, and I just need to stop questioning myself. The self-doubt will ruin everything. For me, when I’m in my zone, everything just comes and it’s fine. It’s like working through the mental blocks that prevent us from succeeding, I guess.

Joseph: Before we wrap up with one the projects you’re working on right now, Jamie, I had one more question about some of the things you’ve learned along the way. We’ve talked about the challenges of being a single parent while trying to also manage your career. What’s something that you’ve learned about yourself through the process of balancing the two?

Jamie: I’ve learned a lot about what’s most important to me – having to prioritize your work and your career, and for me, home schooling on top of that. Then there’s just family time, which is like, ‘Work, and then where’s the time for us to just actually enjoy ourselves and go out for a walk as a family?’ Because we are just juggling all these things.

I’ve had to do a lot of introspective work on finding out what’s the priority and like being more heart-centered and trying to be more present in the moment, if you will, and say, ‘Is this really what’s the most important right now?’ I guess that’s what I’ve learned the most about myself through this process: having to be more heart-centered and intentional with what I prioritize.

Joseph: I would love to wrap up, Jamie, by talking about one of your projects that I know is really important to you. That’s the Senior Empowerment Collective project, which I understand is focused on teenage self-esteem. Could you tell us a little bit more about that?

Jamie: I started a program for high school seniors called the Senior Empowerment Collective. I work with a lot of seniors.

Teenagers are not the most secure people. They have self-esteem concerns, especially with all those social media stuff that I certainly didn’t have to deal with as a teenager. There’s a lot of comparison between themselves. I wanted to develop a program where everybody was on the equal playing fields and everybody could focus on their strengths and help them to feel more empowered and confident in themselves through their portrait experience.

I do their senior portrait with them, but we also do group shoots together as a team. We do community volunteering. I do volunteer hours with the teens. I also give them weekly mindset mantras to focus on, things that were helpful for me in learning my own self-confidence.

It’s my way of trying to maybe derail some of the negative impacts of low self-esteem in the community. I think it’s a great place to start with teenagers who are sort of on this precipice of adulthood and going out into the world. I think going out into the world with confidence and knowing who you are and feeling confident in your strengths is a gift. It’s something that I like to do with them.

Joseph: That is fantastic. That sounds like a really cool program. If people want to learn more about you or the Senior Empowerment Collective or just the photography work that you do, where can they go?

Jamie: They can go to my website. It’s www.JamieLove.photography.

Joseph: Thank you so much, Jamie, for telling us more about how you shifted from being a cleaner to a photographer, the challenges of single parenthood, especially as it relates to your career, and also the importance of self-belief. Best of luck with your photography business and your Senior Empowerment Collective.

Jamie: Thank you. Thank you so much.

What can you do to gain some much needed perspective and take a fresh look at where your career’s headed? In this episode of Career Relaunch, Ben Mallinson, a former public services employment advisor turned government public servant shares his thoughts on the difference between working for a public and private institution and the steps you can take if you’re feeling stuck in your career. I also share a moment in my own career when I had to take a step back to gain some much needed clarity.

During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I talked about the importance of stopping and reflecting on your career. My challenge to you was to carve out some time, ideally in the next week, when you’ll commit to taking a moment to pause. I’m talking about getting away from your devices and any distractions, creating some momentary distance between you and your work, and dedicating some time to just being by yourself to reflect on your career and where it’s headed.

Then, take a stance on whether you career is or is NOT moving in a direction you want it to. If if is, great. Double down on an activity that’s been serving you especially well. But if it’s not, I’d like you to reflect on how long you’ll continue to tolerate working in a way that doesn’t truly fulfil you.

If you’re looking for some contemplative music to help you do that, one of my favourite artists to listen to when I’m feeling rather pensive is Max Richter. Give a listen to his songs on Spotify.

Ben Mallinson’s professional experience spans the not-for-profit, private, and public sectors in Australia. Ben began his career in Melbourne, Australia, working for a not-for-profit employment services provider. A few years later, he transitioned into the private sector, including three years working for one of Australia’s top management consulting firms as a project coordinator and executive assistant.

Last year, he transitioned into the public sector, taking on a role in Victorian state government’s department of health & human services where he worked on a state-wide health and human services reform project. He’s recently started a new role within the same department working on an exciting transformation program of works. Connect with Ben on LinkedIn.

If you have any lingering thoughts, questions, or topics you would like covered on future episodes, record a voicemail for me right here. I LOVE hearing from listeners!

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Teaser (first ~15s): I had some time to reflect. I wasn’t necessarily sure about exactly what my next step would look like, but taking that space gave me the clarity that I did in fact want to move on.

Joseph: Good evening, Ben. Welcome to Career Relaunch.

Ben: Thanks, Joe.

Joseph: I am very interested in having you on the show today so we can talk about your transitions between the public and private sector and what you’ve learned along the way about how to repackage who you are when you’re making those transitions. I was wondering, Ben, if you could just start off by telling me what you’re focused on right now in your career at the Victorian State Government and also your life there in Melbourne.

Ben: I’m really focused at the moment on developing my leadership skills. I want to try and do that through practical experiences as much as I’m able to. I decided recently that I want to deepen and expand my technical skills relating to that. Next year, I will be studying part-time Management and Business Administration while I continue to work.

Joseph: Can you also just give us a glimpse into what exactly you do there as a Senior Compliance Officer?

Ben: I work for a state government department in Victoria. That’s the second largest state by population in Australia. Essentially, I work in a public policy setting in various projects around policy reform and implementation.

Joseph: I was wondering if we could go back in time and if you could take us back to the time in your life, Ben, when you were working in employment services for the government. Part of what you were doing was working with government welfare recipients. I would love to hear a little bit more about that.

Ben: That was really one of my first proper professional gigs once I had finished uni. I made that decision to go into employment services because I was always really drawn to work in roles or in settings where I was able to help people in some way, shape, or form. I was doing a bit of soul searching, a bit of exploration back then, and I actually went to see a career counselor who pointed me in that direction as a potential option.

I started out in quite a junior role, what’s called an associate employment advocate, and then moved into working with the range of client, I guess with a range of different barriers to employment, many of them who have been on welfare for a long time or have various other barriers to employment or psychosocial issues, and basically working, in a sense, as an employment consultant to try and get them into work either for the first time or back into work and off of welfare in some kind of direction.

Joseph: I know we’ve got similar services here in the U.K. that are more in the public sector where you’re trying to help people who are trying to go back to work or who are trying to enter work for the first time. Do you have any sense of whether there were any misconceptions that you had about those types of people trying to get jobs that you pretty quickly dispelled after spending some time working directly with them?

Ben: I guess when you’re working in that kind of role, you realize that things may not be as simple as they might appear on the outside. There are many reasons why somebody may find it difficult to enter the work force. One prime example of that is really the examples that are in people’s lives.

If you’ve grown up without the example of your parents or caregivers or whoever it may be, in work, then that is not going to be such a natural, expectational path for you that just follows immediately from finishing school or whatever it may be.

The other is socioeconomic factors, access to education, perhaps a disrupted life in many ways, whether it’s being in and out of homelessness or having other issues or problems, whether it’s drug and alcohol dependence or mental health barriers.

Working in that kind of role, you are able to form a fuller picture of just the wide range of things that can be a barrier to somebody participating and entering into the workforce.

Joseph: We’ve had a couple of people on this show, actually, who have found themselves homeless or have been through a really long transition. If you dig a little bit deeper, things aren’t always as they seem. There could be a really good reason why they’re in that situation. Very interesting.

Now, Ben, you eventually decided to move into the private sector. It sounds like you were doing really great work to help these people find jobs. I’m curious, what was behind your desire to make this shift from public into the private the sector? I think you eventually landed in a management consulting role.

Ben: The next role that I took after starting out in employment services was under a different system with clients who were covered by what’s called workers compensation here, where if somebody has an injury in the workplace, they’re compensated and assisted through their process of recovery and to redeploy into new work or a different career, and also traffic accident compensation clients, clients who’d actually had some kind of traffic accident.

I moved into that area which, in some ways, similar in the type of service but was run by a private organization, and very much to my surprise, a very private focused industry, you might say.

Joseph: What was it like for you to make this shift? Because this is kind of an interesting case study where your role was quite similar, but you’re going from a public sector to a private sector role. How was your day-to-day life different? What sort of impact did that shift have on your perceptions of how good of a fit it was for you?

Ben: I still felt that I worked in a realm where helping people was still the focus of a lot of people working in that industry.

I think my next step into the private sector, which was then actually to management consulting for a private firm working with a whole range of different organizations and clients, whether private, public, or non-profit, and whole range of different projects, it was a change in many ways, because there were so many projects, different projects to work on, which required a very agile approach across those different projects and working with different clients.

Really, the pace, the deadline focus of that environment, the frenzied nature of that environment was a different kind of gear and a different intensity and probably a more commercial underpinning to everything that we did. That was probably a more significant jump and transition for me in some ways.

Joseph: I guess what’s kind of behind my question, as I talk to some people who either work in a non-profit sector or they work in a public sector and they have this thirst for working in the private sector for, I suppose, reasons that seem great on paper, like salary or benefits or just the sheen and the glimmer of working the private sector, I was just wondering if the perceptions you had of the private sector and how satisfied you are going to be there, how did that end up playing for you?

Ben: I was excited. The company that I worked for, they had a really fresh, vibrant kind of image. Throughout the recruitment process, I got a sense that the place was really a very innovative company with a very exciting culture. I was really drawn to that in many ways.

I got into that company, and in many ways, it was an exciting place to work, there was lots of innovative approaches, lots of workshop, and lots of colorful sticky notes on the walls and white boarding and a real kind of buzz to the place.

There were many aspects of working there that I really loved, but the kind of position I found myself in, the role I was doing really wasn’t the right kind of role for me. It was sort of a jewel role in some ways. On one side of things, I was working in project coordination, and in some cases, managing smaller learning and development projects. On the other side, I found myself more on an executive support kind of role.

I found, really, that for many reasons, that wasn’t really a great fit for me. I found myself kind of feeling a little bit stuck in a role that I thought I was being underutilized in, in an environment that was quite exciting in other ways and interesting in other ways.

I think, for me, my lesson in that process was I was very taken by the image of the company, and in some ways, that delivered. What I didn’t think enough about was really how suited I was to the role and how aligned the role that I actually took on was to my broader career objectives and what’s important to me and my life and in my career.

Joseph: That’s a good point, because I guess it is the combination of the organization and the role that you’re in that really creates your day-to-day life. Once you realized that this role wasn’t exactly a great fit for you, how did you then think about the next step in your career?

Ben: I actually recall a specific period of time that was a bit of a turning point for me, if you like. For a while, I was kind of in a state of confusion, because a part of me felt that, ‘Hmm, I’m not sure if this is the right role for me or what my future is here,’ but on the other hand, I really liked aspects of the company, the culture, and the people in work with. What should I do next? I was kind of confused.

I had the opportunity at that time, fortunately, to be able to take a bit of a break. I took a month off work on leave, and I took a holiday. I went to America for a month. I met up with some friends over there, but I spent it mostly by myself. I went to the Burning Man. I went to the Grand Canyon. I had some time to reflect and think about my next steps. I wasn’t necessarily sure about exactly what my next step would look like, but taking that distance, that space gave me the clarity that I did, in fact, want to move on.

I actually wanted to move back closer to a more community, human-services-focused industry where I can work on problems and projects that would affect the lives of people who are disadvantaged. Taking a bit of time out to sort of take a step back allowed me to see that and say, ‘Okay, I know one thing. I don’t know what that role exactly is going to be, but I know I need to explore what kinds of organizations and roles and pounce that I might be able to pursue that are more in line with that direction rather than private management consulting.’

Joseph: One of the things that we spoke about before, Ben, when we chatted prior to recording this, was the steps that you took to leverage some of your key contacts and mentors to help you repackage yourself in your career. How much did that play a role in your next move?

Ben: It played a really vital role, I would say, and in each of the transitions that I have made, whether it be in public or into private or out of private sector, talking with other people around me and drawing on resources was really a key strategy that I found was very helpful.

In my previous role and organization, I was very fortunate to have a great mentor and coach and a senior colleague or manager of mine, who I trusted and respected. Once I had identified that I wanted to work in human services and in fact identified the department I now work in as an option for me, I talked to her because she used to be a senior government executive before actually moving into management consulting.

I talked to her about roles that I was looking at and whether she saw them as being suitable for me or how I might adjust my approach or the language in my résumé and my cover letters to be more aligned to the public sector context and to really mine for her wisdom as to how I could make that transition. She was really able to help me in that process to review my applications and to support me through that process.

She’s just one person who I spoke to throughout that whole process, that whole transition. I used to speak to people, to hiring managers who had even rejected job applications I had submitted, to ask them for coffee and to get feedback and ask what I might be able to do differently.

Really talking to people, drawing on whatever resources I could was just a huge, huge help in the whole process.

Joseph: One of the things I think you mentioned to me before, also in our initial conversation, was that you look at the values of the target organization as a way of packaging yourself for that role. Can you tell me a little bit more about how that played out for you here?

Ben: Almost every organization or government department has their values and their strategies and their key reasons for being on their website and in their position descriptions. I really focused on analyzing what I could with the website or the position descriptions and using that language and using those values throughout my resume and throughout my cover letters and trying to highlight examples of how I had demonstrated those values.

It’s actually really taking the time to look at information you have available and see how you can mirror that in your applications, so they can see you and the application and see how you align to their organization.

Joseph: Another thing I’m curious about, Ben, is this concept of returning back to the sector that you came from. I guess the term is a boomerang employee, where you go back to the actual company. Sometimes, it works out for people, and sometimes, it doesn’t. Did you happen to have any concerns about shifting back to the public sector from the private sector?

Ben: I did have hesitations, and I think that there were a number of things underpinning those hesitations. Part of it was the vibe and aspects of the culture in which I was working. I wondered whether I was going to find the same kind of exciting environment, the same kind of innovation anywhere else.

Another part of it was really around difficulties that I was having with my confidence at the time. There were parts of the role which I was doing previously that weren’t a great fit for my skillset, and I had a few challenges in trying to make that work. Some part of me sort of, in some ways, brought into an external narrative, if you like, of perhaps I should stick it out here and try to make this work, because if can’t make it work here, then how am I going to make it work anywhere else? In some ways, my own self-confidence was playing against me.

Then it’s the fear of the unknown, I guess, and knowing there were parts of the culture that I liked and being scared that I wouldn’t be able to find something equally as exciting or interesting and rewarding elsewhere.

A few months later into the role, I found myself in a position I never could have dreamed of, really. I was given more responsibility, and I was leading the piloting and the roll out of three different classroom training programs that were rolling out across the state and managing multiple large contracts with vendors. In some ways, I couldn’t believe that this was happening for me only a few months later. Once I was there, I really never looked back. I didn’t regret a thing.

Joseph: The last thing I was hoping to talk with you about, Ben, before we wrap up with some of your side work, is a few of the things you’ve learned during your journey. I’d love to start by, first of all, taking a look at what you’ve learned when you look back on your career change. Is there something that you wish you had known that you now know?

Ben: One of the key things that I’ve learned and that I’ve been putting a lot of thought into recently is how important it is, during challenging times, especially perhaps if you are feeling disenfranchised with a certain job or feeling like you’re going through a challenging patch, not to get caught up or focused only on where you are now at a particular point in time and a role with a particular organization.

It’s realizing that there are plenty of other opportunities out there and taking a big picture view, not getting caught up in the narrative that other people write for you, whether it’s your current bosses, your colleagues, your family members, but actually taking it inward and saying, ‘Okay, what do I know to be my strengths? What resources do I have to draw on? What’s important to me? What’s the kind of work that matters to me and that I would like to be doing in the future?’ and really taking a big picture view and taking charge of writing your own personal narrative, if you like.

That was something that was hard to see at the time when I was feeling a bit stuck, but now in hindsight, I feel that that was a valuable lesson: to take charge of writing my own narrative.

Joseph: I guess I’m probably one of these people where you get a little bit caught up in the micro picture of where you’re at at this precise moment in your career. Do you have any tips on how you can make sure you step back and just reflect on the bigger picture?

Ben: Purpose is important. If we only think about ‘what kind of role do I want to do, or what kind of money do I want to make, or what does my boss think I’m good at, or what this, that, one or the other?’ but actually thinking about what drives you, what kinds of organizations do you want to work for, what influence do you want to have, what purpose do you want to be the thread of your career, taking it back from there can help us to get out of the tunnel vision into the situation we’re in right now.

The other piece of advice I’ve given, that I think I’ve spoken about in some other ways throughout this conversation is really about talking with others, whether it’s mentors working in a role that you think you might want to do a little better, friends or family who have made their own successful transitions.

When you talk to other people, making a career transition automatically becomes a less lonely path. You realize exactly that you’re not alone. You may pick up some pearls of wisdom along the way and get the strength to go forward.

Joseph: Having been through this career change, is there any particular thing you’ve learned about yourself, aside from these very valuable lessons about the importance of connecting with other people and also reflecting on your long-term purpose? I’m wondering if there’s anything you learned about you, yourself during the process.

Ben: When I was in my previous role—I’ve mentioned the two parts to the role—some of it allowed the opportunity to lead smaller projects. The rest of it was more in a role of supporting executives to do well in the projects they were working on. I always felt, when I was working on projects and leading things, that that was a fit for me, that it seemed to light me up.

In the new roles that I’ve been and in more recent times, I have had great opportunities to lead projects and to lead others as well and really take charge in the work that I was doing. That made me realize about myself that leadership is something that is a natural strength of mine and something that I’m orbited towards and that I want to use in my own career path.

Joseph: I’d love to wrap up, Ben, by talking a little bit more about what you’re doing now and specifically about Medium, which is where I know you’re writing about a lot of these lessons that you’ve shared with us here about your career journey.

For those listeners out there who aren’t familiar with Medium, it’s an online long-form blog-publishing platform which was launched a few years ago by Ev Williams, the Co-Founder and former CEO of Twitter.

This is actually how you and I first crossed paths, because I think you stumbled upon my Career Relaunch publication on Medium. I was hoping you could tell me a little bit more about the writing that you’re now doing on Medium.

Ben: I try and post short articles and thought pieces from time to time on Medium. A lot of them do tend to be around similar content to yours in some ways, Joseph, on career transitions, repackaging yourself to make a move into a different role, a different sector, and the processes and stories that I have to bring to that. There’s a few articles I have up on that topic. There’ll be some new stuff there and coming up soon on creating your own professional narrative, which I talked on a little bit about today.

If people want to have a look at that or check that out it’s on Medium.com/@benmallinson, and my stuff will be there.

Joseph: Perfect. Speaking of personal narrative, before you go, I just got to ask you, for someone out there who is struggling with re-crafting their narrative—because I know that that does come up especially with career changers, trying to figure out what your narrative is going to be and how you’re going to pitch yourself—any quick tips for somebody out there who’s struggling to connect the dots in their own career?

Ben: Our careers are not linear in nature, so don’t just get caught up in where you are right now. Perhaps if you’re struggling to imagine what you could do next or down the track, take a look at where you’ve come from.

Where did you start out?

What’s always been your driving purpose for the types of things you were looking for in your career and maybe in a time before your current place when you were in a role where perhaps you’ve felt like a better fit? What were the strengths that you were demonstrating in those roles?

What were the aspects of that part of your journey that you’d like to revisit?

Celebrate your successes along the way and what you do well now, and then taking a look at the past, taking a look at where you are now, and then thinking about how all of that applies and can feed into the next step of your career as well.

Joseph: It’s a great tip. I think sometimes people fall into the trap of wanting to almost explain away their past when they’re trying to make a change. Actually, since you can’t change your past, I’m with you. You might as well embrace it and try to figure out how you can make the most of it, because it is what it is. Great tip. Thank you for sharing that with us.

I also just wanted to thank you so much, Ben, for telling us more about your transitions between the public and private sector, the importance of reflecting on your long-term career purpose which I think is really, really useful, and also just a good reminder about the power of making sure you talk with other people when you’re trying to figure things out, because it can be a very lonely journey when you’re changing careers.

Best of luck with your new role there at the Department of Health and Human Services, and I look forward to reading more of your career insights on Medium also.

Ben: Thank you so much, Joe.

How can you feel more empowered in your career? In this episode of Career Relaunch, Jay Kali, a former prison guard turned strength coach shares his thoughts on how adopting an empowered mindset and the relationship between hard work and luck. During the Mental Fuel® segment, I’ll explain why it’s important to take stock of how you’ve changed over time.

During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I talked about the importance of recognizing how much you’ve changed over time to help inform the next steps in your career.

My challenge to you is to think about the upcoming year (or 2 or 3) as a distinct chapter in you career. And if you were to name this chapter, what would it be called? What do you want it to be about? Is it about gaining more responsibility at work? Is it about achieving a certain level of visibility? Is it about something totally different outside of work? Like independence. Family. Fitness? Social life? Personal growth? Once you decide what you want to be about, take one action that focuses you on this priority.

Jay Kali is a Strength Architect who doesn’t just build better bodies, he helps build strong, empowered women.  He’s motivated by a desire to help others take charge of their lives and become physically, mentally, and emotionally stronger. His major career pivot came when he decided to leave his government job as a Federal Law Enforcement Officer, sell all his stuff, and move to a city and a country he’d never seen or lived before in his life.

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): What else can I do in this world? Being a correctional officer, sitting in there, realizing, ‘This isn’t really in line with my views anymore. How can I be a part of something that I don’t even agree with?’ That was the big turning point for me also, just the intuition and just listening to myself.

Joseph: Hello, Jay. Welcome to Career Relaunch. It is really exciting to have you on the show.

Jay: What’s up, Joseph. I am pumped to be here. Thank for having me.

Joseph: Great stuff. I appreciate your enthusiasm. You’re our first guest calling in from Mexico.

I want to talk about how you ended up there, and I also want to talk about your time in the military and as a prison guard. I was wondering if you could start off by telling me about what you’re focused on right now in your career and life as a strength coach there in Cancun, Mexico.

Jay: You know what, Joseph? I got to, first off, give you props because I’ve already heard other podcasts. You have people from Africa, U.K., and the U.S. You’re hitting everybody up from all over the world. Nice job.

Joseph: We try to get a diversity of people in here. It’s something that I think is important for the show.

Jay: That is awesome. A little bit about me real quick. I moved down here to Cancun a little bit over six years ago, and I actually opened up my own fitness facility, the first of its kind here in Cancun. I had that going for about three years. After three years, I actually sold and closed both of my gyms and moved my whole entire business 100% online. Now, I am a digital, I guess you can say your virtual strength coach, and I help women all over the world.

Joseph: Cool. I want to come back and talk about that switch that you made going from what I’m going to call more of a traditional fitness coach to more of a virtual strength coach for women, but I want to go back in time, because you got a really, really interesting history, Jay. I know you haven’t always been a strength coach. I know there’s a lot to talk about there, but I want to go back and start by talking about your time in the military and why you chose to enlist in the army. Can you take us back to that time in your life and what led you down that road?

Jay: To be honest, it was 2002. I was 17 years old when I actually joined. The reason I had joined, we had 9/11, that just happened the year before then. The patriotism was kind of running through, living in Missouri and stuff, so that kind of at line there.

Also, I wanted to do something with myself. I wanted to take a step out. I knew that I wasn’t going to college, and the only way to really progress myself was go to the military instead of being stuck in a little town.

Joseph: Was that decision to go to the military pretty clear for you? Did you know for sure you didn’t want to go to college? How are you so clear about that particular path? Because I know that’s a really big decision to enlist in the army.

Jay: I never had the expectation, never going to college to be honest, Joseph. It was just never really in my—not where I grew up and live from. My whole idea and thought was, ‘You know what? The only way that I’m going to get out of this situation that I’m in is going to the military.’

Joseph: What was your time like in the military? Can you just give us a glimpse into your day-to-day life and your experience of being in the military?

Jay: My normal every day was kind of different, because there is one point where I’d be deployed, and there is one time where you’re back in the States. Each time, it’s a little bit different. Whenever you’re back in the States, you kind of have more what they call garrison. You look good, you clean your vehicles, and you make sure you’re on top of your job. Whenever you’re deployed overseas, that’s a totally different game over there also. The only mission over there is just to get back alive.

Joseph: This show is titled Career Relaunch, and we talk a lot about major career changes. One of the career changes I want to talk about, just moving forward from that point in your life, is how you went from being in the army to working in a prison. After that, we’re going to talk about your current life as a strength coach. How did you make that transition and how did that particular opportunity come up for you?

Jay: Actually when I got out of the military—I don’t know what you call it. A buffer job, I guess—it’s kind of an interesting story, because I actually worked as a manager, a head manager at a strip club when I was down in Texas while I was actually waiting to get picked up by the Feds for the prison job actually. It’s a really interesting dynamic. You’re talking about career relaunches. Listen. I have done some relaunches, man.

Joseph: I never actually stepped foot into a prison myself, Jay. I was just wondering, can you just give a glimpse into what a typical day was like for you there working in a prison? Maybe we could start off by talking about exactly what’s your role was there.

Jay: Straight in from the baseline as a correctional officer. It’s actually a really easy transition to go from someone who’s in the military to a federal law enforcement job. You already have the training.

You’re asking earlier how that transition was. Inside the prison, for example, that’s a totally different world. Remember, we keep on talking about these different careers, and honestly, it’s like hugely different, going through different doors, and literally in a prison.

I think the first thing, whenever I first walked in one, is to notice that you’re locked in. There’s no way out of it. You know what I’m saying? Once you go through that front door, that sliding door closes before the next one opens. It’s what you call a sally port. That’s the transfer space. Once those doors close, you know, ‘Man, I’m going into prison right now.’

Joseph: I’m a little naïve when it comes to this stuff. I guess my perceptions of prison are probably based on what I’ve seen in popular media. I was hooked on that series, ‘Prison Break,’ for a really long time. I loved that show. I think what I found most fascinating about the show was the social dynamic that happens between the prisoners and the correctional officers. I don’t know how accurate that is or how much that reflects reality.

Jay: We really can’t really compare it to things on TV. We have an idea, because obviously, you do have those relationships, especially whenever you know there’s times that you’re walking into a unit that might have 150 inmates or prisoners in that one wing, I guess you can say, and you’re in there by yourself. They’re not locked behind doors. They don’t have handcuffs on. They’re free to walk around and move, and you’re the only guy back there. It’s a different dynamic. It’s a totally different dynamic.

I’m sure across different levels also. If we really go deep in the prison lifestyle, you have different ones from county compared to city, compared to state, and all the way up to federal. Talking about the social interaction in a federal prison is a lot different than a lot of other prisons, because usually, the inmates are going to be there a lot longer. It’s a little bit more relaxed. That’s why they usually call it Club Fed Med.

Joseph: What were the kinds of prisoners that you were around? What was the range of the types of people that you crossed paths with there in the prison?

Jay: One of the prison cells, the really cool thing about it was actually what they consider an administrative level prison. What that means is that it actually has every single classification type of inmate there. You have the max lifers all the way to what they call campers, who actually don’t even sleep inside the prison. They sleep outside of the wire, and they actually usually take care of the prison grounds and stuff.

When I was in prison, I worked with everyone. I worked with mental health inmates who would be locked up for the rest of their lives because they’re not fit to return to society. I’ve worked with inmates who would be getting out in the next two months and trying to get them ready for civilian life again.

Joseph: What was the toughest thing about working with those types of people as a correctional officer for you?

Jay: You can go in there thinking you’re going to be in one place, let’s say, working with the inmates who are going to get out in two months. Next thing you know, you got to go work on an inmate who’s locked up for the rest of his life, who has a mental health issue. You have to wear a lot of different hats, and you got to be able to change really, really quickly. I think that’s probably one of the most challenging aspects of being in a prison like that, because you have so many different ranges of inmates.

Joseph: Just a couple more questions about your life there before we move on to your transition and why you decided to leave. It’s a really fascinating environment. I’m just trying to think about being in an environment where you’re surrounded by what I’m going to assume are mostly men who have done quite a few bad things in their lives and don’t have a lot, necessarily, to lose. What was one of the scariest things that happened to you when you were a correctional officer in that sort of an intense environment?

Jay: The scariest point, I would probably say, is the chow hall. The chow hall’s probably the most frightening place to be, because you’re trying to push through a lot of people really quick. You’re feeding close to 1,500 inmates or 1,000 inmates. You’re trying to get them all through in an hour and a half or two hours. That’s quick.

Then someone had a bad day, or someone did this, or someone did that. You got to worry about people cutting in line. It sounds ignorant, it sounds small, but respect goes a big way, especially in prison. If you disrespect someone, it can just spark. In that chow hall, that’s usually where it’s going to go down.

That’s probably one of the most frightening places, seeing those guys when they get agitated and about to do something, but then you, having the wherewithal, not being able complacent, knowing what’s going on, and being able to snap those guys out of it instantly too.

It’s not so much friendly like you see on TV. It’s more of a respect. If you respect me, I’m going to respect you. I’m going to respect you if you respect me. It goes back and forth. That’s probably the biggest thing that you learn in prison.

Joseph: That was going to be my other question for you: what did you learn from being in that environment, about yourself and also how to think about your own life?

Jay: I would say the biggest thing is just be cool. ‘Be cool, shorty. Just relax.’ Especially being from overseas and being in the military and stuff, you just automatically want to react instantly. Sometimes, they can play on that, and people don’t realize that. The best thing to do is just to be calm, level-headed, breathe a little bit, and hopefully, you’ll find a clear path on what you’re trying to achieve.

Joseph: I got one more question about this, Jay, and then I’m will move on to your transition. I’m just thinking, you and I have chatted on video cam before, and you’re clearly a lot bigger and stronger than I am.

Jay: Come on, man.

Joseph: Definitely, there’s no question.

I’m thinking, if I was in that environment, myself, I would be really scared. I think I would actually fear for my life. I’m not sure how well I would fare in that environment as someone who has spent most of my life working in offices and in the corporate world. How did you maintain your composure in an intense environment like that?

Jay: When I was in the military, I don’t think or I know I didn’t have the ‘body’ that you see whenever we video chat. There’s no way. I realized that. I don’t really believe the military has the best physical conditioning there is, or at least for the army, in my personal opinion, to look your best and feel your best.

When I went to the feds, I was overweight. I don’t really feel I even got that much respect from anybody, not from the other correctional officers and not from the inmates, just because of how I look. I was young. I was only 21. I was overweight, and it was just a different world. Once again, I’ll say that again.

That’s actually kind of what sparked me to really, really dig in deeper into fitness. It’s because of that. I’m thinking, ‘Man, I’m going into this whole new world, and I’m not on top of my game. What if something happens? What if?’ It’s just more of ‘I want to be prepared.’

I already had the training and stuff like that from the military, but you’re looks will go a long way. They see that, especially inmates – and other people. They see you take care of yourself. They see you’re strong. They’re not going to take advantage of the person who looks the strongest, never, nobody.

Joseph: Let’s talk a little bit about your transition and what triggered you to then move on to the world of fitness. I think when we talked before, you had a moment of epiphany where you realized that you didn’t want to continue working as a correctional officer in a prison. Can you just take us back to what you realized and why you decided to move on from this world?

Jay: I was actually in there for about five years, back and forth in the prison. I went to a couple of different prisons while I was in there. In that time, I was just sitting there. Once again, I joined at 21. I’m sitting there about 25 at this time. I’m just sitting there thinking, ‘Man is this all there is for me? No offense, but is this the only thing I can do: just babysit grown men? I think there is something more for me to do.’

That was pretty much just the epiphany, that just sitting there 8, 16 hours every other night and just making your rounds and realizing I’m just watching grown men who can’t take care of themselves. That’s all I’m doing.

Joseph: I think you ended up selling all your stuff, and then you decided to make a move. What made you decide that you needed to and wanted to make such a radical move that not only involved changing your career but also changing where you lived and where you worked?

Jay: I got a lot of push back from a lot of people. I was leaving a ‘federal job,’ a comfy job, a guaranteed job. I couldn’t get fired from it unless I did something completely, horribly wrong, which wasn’t going to happen. I was guaranteed money.

That’s what everybody tells you, ‘Get that security.’ I joined at 21. I could have stayed in for 25 years. I could have retired at 46. Everything looks like rainbows, right? I had people tell me constantly, ‘Man, you’re so dumb. You’re so stupid. You’re just going to leave this good, comfy job like this?’ I did.

If you’ve been talking about that to your listeners and you’re getting pushed back, listen. Nobody wants to see you succeed except for you, in my opinion, especially your co-workers. They don’t want to see you do better than them, because it’s going to make them feel bad.

Joseph: That does tend to be the reaction from people whenever you decide to step off the beaten path. There’s immediately this reaction that you’re crazy or ‘how could you be doing something so reckless?’ You, in spite of that, decided to make a big move. How did you pull that off?

Jay: It was more of ‘what else can I do in this world, what more is there?’ I realized I wasn’t really in line with where I was at that time either. Being a correctional officer, sitting in there, realizing, ‘This really isn’t in line with my views anymore. How can I be a part of something that I don’t even agree with?’ That was the big turning point for me also, just that intuition and just listening to myself.

Joseph: Let’s talk a little bit about the geographical move, because I know, sometimes, people who are listening to this are thinking you can to make a big change, and part of that change involves moving. At the same time, that can be really daunting. In your case, you moved to a different country where they speak a different language, totally different culture. Can you just explain how you got yourself situated there in Cancun, and why Cancun?

Jay: Actually, I sold everything so whenever I move to Cancun, I actually only move down here with like two of those big, square, tote things that you put locks on. That’s what I came down here with.

I was actually really lucky, because my dad ended up retiring down here. It was more of, ‘Hey, why don’t you come down, keep me company, and you can do whatever?’ Granted, at 25, 26, it sounds awesome. That sounds amazing until you get down there and you realize, ‘Man, I got to do something with myself.’

I sat down here for about three months. I really wasn’t doing much. I was like, ‘I need to find something to do something with myself.’ I got really lucky in having a place to come down and stay. The downside to that though is I was actually kicked out of my dad’s house six months later.

Joseph: Why was that?

Jay: I think, because—and this sounds horrible, but it kind of goes along the same lines of—some people just don’t want to see you succeed. I’m not saying so much with him. I think he just maybe had a different idea of what I was coming down for, because once I opened my gym, I was gone all the time. I would be gone by 5:30 in the morning. I wouldn’t get back until 10:30 at night.

When you think someone’s coming down to be your companion, that’s a lot different. I think he kind of got upset a little bit about that, but once again, I’m 25, 26 years old. I got to do something with myself. I just can’t sit around your house all day long.

Joseph: How does one go about starting a gym? Because that sounds really cool, like, ‘Okay, I want to focus on fitness. I need to find a place where I can train people.’ How do you go about actually setting that sort of an infrastructure up for yourself?

Jay: When I first got into this whole entrepreneur/small business owner thing, I used to always say, ‘No, it’s all me, there’s no luck.’ I realized, looking back, it’s all luck.

When I got down here, I just started reaching out and making connections and talking to people and realized there is another Mexican down here who also wanted to open a gym. We’re kind of along the same lines. Since he was Mexican and natural-born here, and I was just a tourist or whatever, it was nice because we can go in together. Going in with another Mexican helped me build that business.

Joseph: What was that like for you to now be training women (I think is your target market) and helping people get fit as quite a contrast from what you’re doing in the prisons?

Jay: Absolutely. When I had the gyms, the gyms were open to everybody. When I first had the gyms, it was the first fitness facility of its kind down here. It was more almost like a CrossFit style gym but a little bit different. That hadn’t really gotten down here, really popular down here yet. It was really nice because it was actually on the cusp. It was new. It was different. It got a lot of attention. I was able to open up two different gyms. It went really, really well.

Joseph: It’s going well for you, and you’re enjoying it. I think you decided to eventually switch it from being a physical gym to more of an online virtual training program. What was that transition like for you, and how did you manage to build that new type of fitness business for yourself?

Jay: That was probably one of the hardest transitions. I’ve really been going to that more. It’s a big transition going from a brick-and-mortar to 100% online. You come to the point where I had been with my partners for a little bit over three year, and you just realize we have different goals. ‘You’re not going in the same direction I’m going, and I’m not going the same direction you’re going, so let’s just call it quits and just shake it out and just split it 50/50. That’s what we did.

I got really lucky. Once again, I got really luck in that too.

Joseph: That’s a great segue, Jay, into one of the last things I want to talk about with you before we wrap up with some of the things that are important to you right now, which is just a few of the lessons that you’ve learned along the way, and also, as someone who works in the fitness space, some of the things that you think are useful and relevant to people as they think about their careers.

I wanted to start by talking about, first of all, this concept of luck because you’ve mentioned it a couple of times here that you feel like you’ve gotten pretty lucky. Every time you say that, I’m just thinking, ‘Was it really luck or was there something else about it?’ because I guess I’m one of those people who maybe doesn’t believe as much in luck. I feel like there’s something else about it. I was just wondering if we could just revisit the topic of luck in your perspective and how much that’s played a role in your life.

Jay: I don’t know. Maybe it’s just me being modest. At the same time, I’m really grateful. Maybe I don’t know any other way to put it.

The biggest thing is—and maybe luck is the wrong word—it always reminds me of that old quote. I don’t even remember who said it, but it was, ‘The harder I work, the luckier I get.’ Maybe just putting myself out in those different positions and trying things and realizing, ‘Okay, that didn’t work. Let me pivot. Okay, that didn’t work. Let me pivot.’

One of my favorite quotes I love telling people is, ‘You take that risk, you step out, and the universe will reward you.’ It might not come how you think it or when you think it’s going to come, but just you taking that bold step out and taking that risk, I really do believe that the universe rewards you. That’s because you find it inside yourself. Once again, you learn how to pivot. You learn how to grow. You learn how to move. That’s what helped me the most.

 Joseph: I was just wondering on that topic of risk, because I was actually going to ask you about that. One of the things that you talked about is this topic of this risk-reward and the fact that you take risks and the universe will reward you. Do you have any tips for people who are maybe less risk-loving and a little bit more risk-adverse, how they can become more comfortable with risk?

Jay: Getting comfortable, being uncomfortable, that’s another thing I learned from my mentor: knowing that it’s probably not going to be as bad as what you think it is. There’s many things that could go wrong.

Jim Rohn used to say ‘what if’ is the language of the poor, ‘what if this,’ or ‘what if that,’ or ‘what if this.’ You can always ‘what if’ something to death. Until you take that step, until you take that action, then you’re going to find out really what it is.

Maybe it’s because of how I do it. I do what they call ‘burn the ships.’ I burn them. I take that step, and I’m like, ‘You know what? I’m going to make this work.’ Maybe that’s just inside of you. I think that’s inside most of entrepreneurs too, whenever you realize, ‘You know what? I don’t want to be sitting in prison all day long. I don’t want to sit in this cubicle all day long.’

The worst case scenario isn’t that bad, like Jamie Foxx’s quote, ‘What’s on the other side of fear? Absolutely nothing.’

Joseph: I think part of that is feeling empowered to make a change. I know one of the other things you talk about in your materials is this concept of having an empowered mindset. I was wondering if you could just explain what you mean by an empowered mindset and how you apply that in your own career.

Jay: We talk about we have to make these big moves or these big risks where you had to move to Cancun or Africa to actually do something. No, you don’t. You don’t at all. One of the biggest lessons that I’ve learned and something that I’ll probably ‘tell my younger self’ was make it work with both.

Another Jim Rohn quote is, ‘You make your living at work, but you make your fortune outside.’ If you can figure out a way to work on your fortune outside of work or work on that business that you want to transition into, maybe that will help the more risk-adverse people. Start working on little sides, and then you can fully transition whenever it’s a full fledging machine.

I would say that’s one of the biggest lesson I learned, that you can do multiple things at one time. You don’t have to say, ‘You know what? No. Forget my federal law enforcement job. I’m going to quit that. I’m going to move to Cancun. I’m going to open up…’ No. You don’t need to make big moves like that.

If you want to open a gym, why couldn’t you open a garage gym inside your house and get some people over and start with 10 people every other day coming in and paying you a couple of dollars. It’s just the small steps.

Joseph: That’s a really good point, Jay, about not forgetting these in-between options. It doesn’t have to be so radical or extreme. There could be something that you could do, like a small step change that you could make that could open up some of these opportunities for yourself.

What do you think stops people from doing these sort of side gigs? It sounds like that’s a great idea, like, ‘Okay, I’ll start something on the side’?

Jay: Fear. That’s the number one stop for everybody. Once again, ‘what if.’ If I would have said ‘what if’ to myself and second guess myself—this actually goes back into the empowered mindset—are you empowering yourself whenever you say, ‘Well, what if I don’t have enough money by the end of the month?’ or, ‘What if this fails?’ or, ‘I’ve tried this before, it hasn’t worked.’

There is a time in my business when I moved online, I went eight whole months without signing a new student. Bills were due. Things were happening. I was struggling. I was being tested, ‘I want to see how much you want this.’

Joseph: During those eight months, what’s something that you learned about yourself, going through that process of not having an income for an uncomfortable period of time?

Jay: I realized how scarcity mindset I was. I realized how much of a need and want I was coming off on. When I would get on to these sales calls, I was in such a need to make that sale that it was just coming through my voice, I guess you can say, and it was just pushing people away.

Going back to that empowered mindset, it’s not just being silly and ignorant like, ‘Oh, everything’s all rainbows and sunshine.’ It’s being legitimate about what’s happening but knowing that you’re working towards something, and better days are coming. That’s the empowered mindset in my opinion, the knowing and belief in yourself, knowing that your time is coming, and you constantly work towards that every day.

Joseph: For those people who are not familiar with the Kaizen principle—you also talk about that in some of your coaching materials—what is the Kaizen principle, and how do you think that can help you in your career?

Jay: The original Kaizen concept or word actually comes from Japan. They use it more of an application more to your work, but it’s actually more towards your life. We get so caught up on perfectionism. I think all of us do, or we think of, ‘Well, I’m not going to get it until it’s done or until it’s perfect at the very end.’ That’s really difficult to even get started.

What I love about the Kaizen principle is it’s just get 1% better some way in your life. Maybe you spend a little longer and read a book. Maybe you go for a little extra run. Maybe you go to the gym and lift weights. Maybe you read that business book. Some form of your life, you’re getting better just 1% every day.

Joseph: I want to wrap up, Jay, with something that I know is important to you. I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit more about the Catch a Lift Fund, which helps post-9/11 war veterans. What’s that all about?

Jay: I love Catch a Lift Fund. It’s probably one of the first charities that could really, really stand behind and support. Maybe it’s because I’m a war vet also. The Catch a Lift Fund was created to help 9/11 or post-9/11 war veterans who were injured in Iraq or Afghanistan. What they do is they raise money and they provide gym memberships or gym equipment for veterans at their house so they can start working on themselves.

As we know, working out builds your self-confidence and makes you feel better about yourself, things like that. It’s actually what Catch a Lift does. They’re making war vets better, and so I love it. They’re awesome.

Joseph: Alright. I’ll be sure to include a link to CatchALiftFund.org, which is where people can go to make a donation to this charity, which I know is really important to you.

Jay: Yes, thank you so much, Joseph.

Joseph: Absolutely. Well, the very last thing I want to talk about, Jay, is your book, Educate, Demonstrate, and Motivate. Can you just give me a glimpse into what your book is all about?

Jay: I think you actually just said it – educate, demonstrate, motivate. That’s the book. It’s broken down into three main sections. It’s going to educate you on the benefits of strength training and fitness and taking care of yourself. In the next session, I’m going to demonstrate it. You actually have workout videos, exercises, and things like that with actually me showing you how to do everything. The last one is motivate, teaching you how to build up that internal and external motivation. Like one of your other guests said, ‘the growth mindset versus the fixed mindset.’

There’s a lot of concepts that go into this. That’s, once again, going back to that empowered mindset, building that motivation. That’s actually what the book breaks down. My goal with the book was to be your last fitness and nutrition book that you’re ever going to need in your life, and I think I’ve accomplished that.

Joseph: I think people should definitely check that out. If people want to check out the book, where can they go?

Jay: You know what, Joseph? Just for your listeners, because you had me on here, I want to give back. If they want to get it, I’m going to give it to them 100% for free, Joseph. How about that?

Joseph: That’s very kind of you, yeah.

Jay: They can get the paperback version, all of this is free plus shipping, or they can actually download the digital copy today. If they want to get it, just go to KaliCoaching.com/secretgift, all one word ‘secretgift.’

Joseph: Thank you very much, Jay. That’s very kind of you to offer that. I know that a lot of people, including me, are always looking for ways to get more fit. I always seem to get stuck after the first week of a new fitness regimen, so I’ll have to check that out myself.

Jay: There’s going to be a perfect chapter in there for you, buddy, that, I’m telling you, it’s going to help you ‘maintain that fire’ is what it’s called.

Joseph: Before I let you go, is there one tip that you have found works really well for your clients when they’re feeling stuck on anything related to fitness. I guess I’m asking that because—this isn’t a fitness show, but—I think that there’s a lot of lessons in sports and fitness that you can apply to your own life. Is there any one thing that you think has made a really big difference to the people you work with?

Jay: It’s going to be the one that’s going to surprise your people the most. If you’ve hit a plateau, and you’ve been working and working and working and trying so hard, trying so hard, my number one recommendation for you, take a break. Relax. Take about a week off.

Joseph: Yeah, you’re right. I didn’t think you were going to say that, but that’s actually not a bad idea.

Jay: I know, it’s crazy. Everybody is going to be like, ‘Wait, hold on. What do you mean take a week off?’ What happens is almost like a natural reset for your body.

What happens is our bodies are smart. They adapt really quickly. If you’ve eaten the same chicken and broccoli or chicken and spinach every day, the same meals day in and day out, doing the same workouts for the past three months, your body’s adapted. If you just take a break, relax, reset, and once you get back into it, you’re going to see those changes again.

Joseph: Very cool. I’ll definitely have to try that. I’m not good at doing that, so that’s a good reminder to me that I also need to take breaks.

I have taken up plenty of your time today, Jay. Thanks so much for filling all of my many questions about your life, first of all in the military, then as a correctional officer, and currently working in the world of fitness as a strength coach. Thanks so much for telling us about some of the principles that have helped you in your life and the importance of making sure you take a break and also having an exit strategy.

Best of luck with everything you have going on there in Kali Coaching, and I’m definitely going to check out your book too.

Jay: Joseph, please, let me know what you think. Please check out the website. I would love to hear your feedback, man.

In this episode of Career Relaunch, Karen Cheung-Hing, a former doctor turned English pronunciation teacher, shares her thoughts on procrastination, relocating to a new country, and upside of changing careers. I also share some thoughts what happened when I let go of how I thought things should look in my career.

Karen and I first crossed paths after she attended one of my career change talks in London. She later applied to be on the show, and I found her story to be really refreshing and unique. I could also relate a bit to some of her sentiments about leaving medicine behind because I also walked away from a career in medicine many years ago. I hope you enjoy hearing her career change insights.

During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, my challenge to you as you kick off 2019, is to not necessarily think about which goal or outcome you want to achieve but to instead think about which goal or outcome it’s about time you let go of, which is equally important. Think about something you’ve been a bit too obsessively focused on, reconsider what difference achieving that outcome would REALLY make to your career or life, and if the difference is negligible, let it go so you can make room for something else.

Karen initially worked as a junior doctor for the National Health Service in the UK before re-training as an English pronunciation teacher and working for a variety of language service organizations. She recently moved away from the UK, and now lives and teaches in Bangkok, Thailand.

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 Grasshopper for supporting the Career Relaunch® podcast. Grasshopper is the Virtual Phone System designed for entrepreneurs and small business owners. It works just like a traditional phone system,

Teaser (first ~15s): Having gone through this upheaval of change in my career, it’s forced me to let go of these very fixed ideas. I have been surprised at myself at how quickly I’ve let them go, actually how much better I feel for having let them go as well.

Joseph: Hello, Karen. Welcome to Career Relaunch.

Karen: Thank you for having me.

Joseph: I am excited to talk with you today, Karen, because you’re going to be our first guest who is based in Thailand. I want to talk about a few different things today, your former life as a doctor, your transition into becoming a language teacher, and also your recent move. I was wondering if you could just start there by telling me what you’re focused on over there in Thailand, after moving there from the U.K., and what you’re focused on in your career and your life.

Karen: At the moment, I am living in Bangkok. I took a one-year contract here at a school. The school is bilingual, so the children learn both in Thai and in English. They asked for some help with the children’s English pronunciation. I’ve come over to try and help them implement some changes so that we can help the children to understand how to make the English sounds which Thai people would normally have a lot of difficulty with. That’s my focus really for the next year or so.

Joseph: I was just thinking back to when we first crossed paths, because I think you were sitting in the audience at one of my career change talks in London, and then we connected later over the phone right before you were about to move from London to Bangkok.

We are going to get into why you moved to Thailand in a bit, but I was wondering if you could first go back in time a little bit before we talk about your current life and go back to the time when you used to be a doctor in the U.K. I was hoping you could start off by telling us, first of all, why you chose to become a doctor, and then we’ll talk a little bit about why you chose to leave it behind.

Karen: It’s like a completely different life actually. I genuinely feel like that that was the life of somebody else in many ways. When you’re 16, 17 years old, and you have to choose something for university—I’m sure there are some 16 year olds out there who are very self-aware and really know what they’re doing, but I tacitly guess the majority of them are like what I was at that age. I didn’t really think about it that well. It just seems like a good, responsible, stable sort of career.

When I was younger, I was intent on always being a goody-two-shoes and a very responsible sort of girl, so it seemed like a natural choice. I often say it people that I sort of fell into it. They never believed me because there is an element of competitiveness to get into med school. What I mean is that I sort of drifted down this path without perhaps thinking about it enough when I was younger.

Joseph: What kind of a doctor were you, and could you just give us a glimpse into your day-to-day life?

Karen: The way it works in the U.K. is that you qualify for medical school, and then you do have to do your initial two years as a very general junior doctor. They make you do rotations in different departments, which is supposed to give you a taste of different aspects of hospital life or community medicine life and help you to decide which direction you’d like to go in later.

I hadn’t got much further really than doing general medicine. I’d gone as far as going more to towards adult medicine as opposed to pediatric medicine, but I hadn’t got much further than that when I actually decided to leave.

Joseph: I was just wondering if you could tell us a little bit about what you thought being a doctor was going to be like and then what the reality was in comparison to that blueprint that you had in your head.

Karen: I do sometimes say to my ex-colleagues that I think if the reality of the day-to-day work had matched my blueprint more closely, then I possibly could’ve stayed. I think I was expecting something with more of a team spirit. I think I was looking for some kind of mentor in some way, like an elderly professor sort of person who takes you around and quizzes you a lot and challenges you.

Of course, there are people like that in medicine. It’s just that the NHS as it is, it’s just so overstretched at the moment that even if we do have people like that who could be mentors like that, they don’t have any kind of time to be that kind of mentor. Unfortunately, I didn’t feel supported enough, and that left me very stressed on many occasions, I think. Perhaps if it had been different, then maybe I would have stayed.

Joseph: What about the patient interaction, what you envisioned your doctor-patient relationships to be versus what they actually were?

Karen: To be honest, I hadn’t really given it much thought. It sounds ridiculous, but I really was not well-prepared for the career. I enjoyed speaking to some of the patients, of course, but then I didn’t like speaking to other patients. That’s to be expected. You’re not going to enjoy your interactions with every single person when you’re dealing with the general public. I have to say I wasn’t expecting any kind of adulation or anything like that just for being a doctor, so it wasn’t that I was disappointed by that at all.

Medicine is very interesting. In itself, it’s a very interesting subject, but the day-to-day is obviously less interesting. There’s a lot of routine stuff that goes on, which as bad as it sounds, can get a little bit boring. It just didn’t satisfy me on a day-to-day basis.

Joseph:  Karen, what made you realize that you wanted to make a shift away from medicine? Because I’m hearing you say it wasn’t really satisfying you and it wasn’t quite what you wanted from your day-to-day work life. At what point did you make the decision to move on?

Karen: I started thinking about it when I was in my second year of working and sort of agonized over the decision and eventually left after, I think, I’d work for about three and a half years, roughly. That was the point to which I actually left. It’s not to say that there was any kind of moment of clarity. It was more like a gradual, creeping realization that it probably wasn’t going to get much better than what it was. I sort of felt like, ‘I better try something else whilst I still can.’

There was this recurring thought which might seem morbid, but it was actually a really good spur, which was that if I got hit by a bus the next day and died, I would be really annoyed with myself that I didn’t at least give it a shot to do something that I really enjoyed and really found interesting and really loved, at least to try it. I just thought, at the end of the day, I could go back to medicine if it didn’t work out. In the end, that’s what persuaded me to leave.

Joseph: Before we go on to your transition, can you remember the day when you had your last day as a doctor seeing patients and what it was like to walk away from that?

Karen: My very last job, it wasn’t that I decided to leave and then handed in my notice and that was it. That particular job was actually coming to a natural end anyway, and it was just that I didn’t then apply for a new job.

The last day of work at that point, I still hadn’t fully decided what I was going to do. I suppose I thought that maybe I could still apply for another medical job within the next month or something like that. It was more that I left the job, spent some time at home, and then decided, ‘You know what? I’m not going to apply for a medical job now. I’m going to apply for a language job.’

Joseph: I think when we spoke before, we talked about the fact that I also went to medical school, and I actually decided to leave that behind. I remember going through this period. For me, it actually lasted a couple of years where I was really just trying to reflect and figure out what I wanted to do next. How did you go about figuring that out, making the leap from medicine over to becoming a language teacher?

Karen: Languages was always in the background, always, always, always in the background. Since I was a child and I’d randomly found this ‘learn Italian’ book at the library or something like that, I’ve been hooked really on languages. I knew I liked that. That was an absolute certainty.

In terms of what career I should actually go into after medicine, languages was obviously a strong contender, but I think there was a part of me that felt like, “Oh, it’s a terrible waste if I don’t do something related to medicine.”

Whilst I was still working in medicine, I did spend quite a lot of time brainstorming different areas that I could work in. For example, ‘Could I transition into pharmaceuticals?’ or, ‘Could I transition into research?’ or, ‘Could I transition into Chinese medicine,’ for example?”

I’d look at all of these options. I’d do little spider diagrams and things like that, but when I looked at the finished brainstorming, I was still always more attracted to the branch that came off saying languages. In the end, I thought I better give that go, really.

Joseph: During your transition, I think you also told me before that you saw a career coach, and you guys talked about quite a few different things related to your future. Can you just give us a glimpse into a couple of the topics that you talked about with your career coach and how that helped you gain the clarity you needed to make your next move?

Karen: Yes, I actually saw a few different people, only one of whom was actually a careers coach specifically. The other people were just sort of general coaches or counselors that just talked to me in general about my career issues. This particular lady who was a proper careers coach, she was a retired GP. She was perfect, because she understood the medical world, and she was trained in careers counseling.

It was interesting to me, because I think I went in there with a very business-like attitude, sort of, “I need some help to decide on my next career move. Please help me to go about making a good decision.” It surprised me how she started actually by going into some personal things. I was more than happy to discuss these things. I guess it made me feel that, actually, your life can’t always be compartmentalized into your life and then your career. Your career is part of your life, isn’t it? That was interesting.

We did a lot of fascinating stuff about personality types and to discuss which parts of your personality might find it more difficult to work in medicine as it is at the moment in the NHS and which parts of your personality might be making your life difficult, not just in your career but also in your personal life. Those kinds of things were fascinating.

Joseph: I think when we spoke before the recording, you also mentioned that you guys talked a little bit about the topics of procrastination and also giving yourself permission to do the things that you deeply wanted to do. Could you just give us a glimpse into what you were talking about related to those topics?

Karen: With regards to procrastination, the first time I talked about that was with the very first counselor that I went to see. I went to him saying I have a problem with procrastination, because I’m not revising for this medical exam, which was a post-grad medical exam, and obviously, I should be revising for it.

After a few sessions, he said to me, ‘I’m not sure that your problem is procrastination. I think you just don’t want to do it.’ That was definitely a turning point for me, because I guess I knew that on a subconscious level, but I certainly never admitted that openly to myself, let alone to other people. To have a stranger perceive that and then just say it to me point blank, it was like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. I felt like that was a very significant moment.

Joseph: That’s really interesting, because I sometimes wonder why I haven’t made a move on one of the ideas that I’ve been thinking about. It’s really interesting to think that, actually, the real reason why you haven’t done it yet is because you don’t actually want to do it. Sometimes, it’s hard to tell the difference though. How can you tell the difference between something that you, deep down, don’t really want to do versus something you do want to do but just haven’t done yet?

Karen: Say for example, if I think about that medical exam, every time I thought about it, my heart would sink. Of course, I wouldn’t want to revise.

At the moment, I do have a project which I have been procrastinating on. When I think of it, it’s not that my heart sinks. I’m still interested in doing it. It still energizes me to think about doing it. It’s just that I haven’t been that organized, let’s say, in actually putting aside the time.

I think, for me that’s the difference really: how do you feel inside when you think of the project?

Joseph:  Interesting. Let’s move on then. Let’s switch gears and talk about your time as a language teacher. What exactly were you teaching and who are you working with once you decided that that’s what you wanted to do?

Karen: I initially did a one-month certificate in teaching English as a foreign language, because it was basically the easiest and quickest qualification that I could get to get my foot in the door to work in languages somehow. At that stage, I wasn’t too fuzzed about what the job was going to be. I just thought I’d better go in this general direction, because I think I’ll like it.

I started working in London as an English teacher, primarily for young Europeans who would come over for two weeks, four weeks, six weeks, that kind of thing. They would come to the language school, and I would just teach them grammar mostly. It was lovely. It really was a fantastic change to look forward to going into work every day and to interact with the students.

I realized I was quite interested in pronunciation and helping the students with pronunciation, but I didn’t know anything about it. I Googled it and found a teacher training course. When I went to inquire about it, they said, ‘We don’t have a lot of teachers who are interested in this. If you’re really interested, do the course with us, and then after that, maybe you can work with us.’ That’s what I did, and I haven’t really looked back since.

Joseph: Was there anything challenging related to the actually transition of going from working in a space that’s focused much more on clinical issues where you’re working with patients to something that is much more language-focused, working with students? Was that jarring in any way for you, or did you find that transition to be quite a natural progress from your former career as a doctor?

Karen: I would say there was nothing jarring about it at all. It’s more like coming back into your natural environment. I was very happy to suddenly be surrounded by language things and language conversations and language questions and the students from all the different countries.

The only thing that I missed quite a lot at the beginning was that, in the hospital, you did really work in teams. I used to really enjoy working with the nurses. When you become a teacher, of course you are very much working by yourself. I mean you have colleagues, but they just work in their own classrooms, and you don’t work together so much. That was probably the one thing that I missed the most, but it wasn’t difficult, and it wasn’t jarring at all, no.

Joseph: Your most recent transition, let’s talk about that, because this is a major move that you made from the U.K. to Thailand. What prompted you to decide to shift geographies? What’s that been like for you?

Karen: It’s been really good. It was a bit of serendipity as well as actually making the decision, in that the school where I work now, I had been there last year to do some training with my ex-boss. We had delivered a training course at school.

When we went back to the U.K., the principal of the school emailed us and said, ‘You know what? Actually, we thought your training was good, and we’d like somebody to come back and help us for a year,’ so I got off with the job.

I did think about it, obviously, for a while, but in the end, it seemed like a great opportunity in that it was being offered to me without me having really sorted out. It was in Asia. Because of my family being Chinese, I had wanted, on some level, to spend more time in Asia someway, even though we are not Thai. I don’t have much experience with the Thai culture, but of course it’s closer to Chinese culture, which is where my family is from, than the British culture.

I was really keen to live somewhere in Asia and experience more of a general Asian culture and eat more Asian food of course.

Joseph: I’m sure that must be really enjoyable for you. What’s been the most surprising part of transplanting yourself from the U.K. to Thailand?

Karen: I guess I thought that when I got to Thailand, everything would be so interesting that I would not be able to resist going out all the time to see things and see sights and discover new places – probably I was a bit naïve. When you actually get here and you go to work every day, your life does actually revert back to the very normal life of everybody else in the world who goes to work, which is go to work, come back, think about what you want to eat for dinner, maybe try and do some exercise, catch up with friends and family, and things like that, and then go to bed.

In a way, the most surprising thing has been how the day-to-day has remained the same.

Joseph: That’s really interesting. I remember, Karen, when I moved from the U.S. to the U.K.—I moved from San Francisco to London—I had a very similar experience to what you described. I used to come and visit London, and I would go check out all the sites. When I moved here and relocated here to start working, my day-to-day life wasn’t actually that different compared to what I was doing before.

I was in a different country, and of course, the culture is different and your environment is different, but actually, it’s amazing how much you’re able to transplant your life these days and how quickly you’re able to just pick up where you left off. That was something that I found surprising, and it sounds like you’ve had a kind of similar experience where you’ve been able to just, in sort of a modular way, take your life here and move it completely to a different geography without a tremendous amount of interruption.

Karen: I think, obviously, we have the internet. Because we do everything on the internet anyway, everything that I was doing on the internet has remained exactly the same, except that I get replies to emails at funny times because of the time zone difference. So much of our lives are online that, actually, that hasn’t been a big shift at all. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, I don’t know.

Joseph: Before we wrap up with what the future looks like for you there in Bangkok, I was wondering if we could talk a little bit about some of the things you’ve learned along the way during the twist and turns of your career. The first thing I wanted to ask you was, having been through this career change, what’s one thing that you’ve learned about yourself along the way?

Karen: Something that I have developed by changing my career—and which I was surprised to learn about myself—was that I found it quite easy to let go of outcomes. I think that, in the past, I had very fixed ideas as to how things should be and very fixed ideas as to what was right, what was wrong, what the best course of action was. I had very fixed ideas as to what results should look like.

Having gone through this upheaval of change in my career, it’s forced me to let go of these very fixed ideas. I’ve been surprised at myself at how quickly I’ve let them go, actually how much better I feel for having let them go as well. That’s been a very positive thing for me.

Joseph: Along those lines, is there something that you wish you had known that you now know about letting go, especially since it sounds like you’re a lot better at doing that now?

Karen: Definitely. When I was changing my career, I visualized myself on a conveyor belt. It was a conveyor belt of ‘be a good girl, get good grades at school, go to university, graduate, get a good job in medicine, work, work, work, work, retire, and then die at the end of it.’ Again, that sounds quite morbid, but that was the picture in my head.

At some point, I thought, ‘If I’m going to change career, it’s sort of like you’re stepping off of this conveyor belt,’ and that was one of the scariest things for me, because that was all I had ever known and also because I was so fixated on doing the right thing in terms of what I thought society was telling me the right thing was.

What I wish I had known earlier was that the world doesn’t end just because you got off the conveyor belt. You are allowed to do other things outside of the small box which you’ve drawn for yourself. Not only does the world not end, but actually, your world gets bigger. It becomes more exciting, much more interesting, much more colorful. I do wish I’d realized that at a younger age, I think.

Joseph: I want to wrap up today, Karen, by talking about what the future looks like for you now as you think about your life there in Bangkok and the language teaching that you’re doing. What’s next for you?

Karen: That’s a very good question, and I don’t know the answer.

Joseph: That’s okay.

Karen: Something I’m better at now is not knowing the answer and being okay with that. I just think that for the future, I would just like to continue to do work that I enjoy and that is useful to other people in some way. Also, something that I wish for my future is that, if I do ever feel like I’m on the wrong path again in the future, I will get off it faster than I did before.

Joseph: That’s a great tip. I was just thinking about that today, about how often we actually know deep down that we’re on the wrong path, whether it’s something small, like who you’ve decided to work with on a particular project, or if it’s something bigger, like the direction we’ve chosen to take our career. Sometimes, we’re just better off not hanging on and just letting go much more quickly instead of going through the agony of thrashing about and trying to force it to work.

I do that myself. I think I tend to hang on a little bit too long. I think I want to make things work out and to not give up. At the same time, it seems like there’s a real value in just moving on quickly.

Karen: It’s really difficult, isn’t it? I think we do get told when we’re younger that it is obviously a good thing to not just give up at the first hurdle, etc., but there’s always a balance to be had, I think. Perhaps when I was younger, I would take that idea of not giving up and just take it too far and not bring in the balance of asking yourself, ‘Do I really want this? Is my ladder up against the right wall as it were?’ That old saying.

It’s a difficult thing to judge. I guess we just make mistakes, and then we just learn from them, and that’s it, really.

Joseph: That’s true. I guess that’s part of being human.

Karen: Exactly.

Joseph: Thank you so much, Karen, for telling us more about your former life as a doctor, your transition to being a language teacher, and also your move from the U.K. to Thailand. Best of luck with everything you have going on out there, and I’m looking forward to catching up again in the future.

Karen: Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.