Career Relaunch®

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. 

Have you ever met someone who used to be a tax accountant then became a rapper? Me neither. But that’s exactly what our guest on this week’s Career Relaunch episode did. Deepak Shukla, a former Deloitte tax accountant turned rapper and SEO agency founder shares his thoughts on what it’s like to break into a new industry when you don’t exactly look the part. We’ll also talk about putting yourself out there, dealing with judgement, and focusing on the future rather than the past. I’ll also address a listener question about balancing your current role and identity with your future ambitions.

We talked on the show about how you shouldn’t be overly concerned with other’s opinions of your career progress or trajectory. This article in the Book of Life entitled No One Cares is a good reminder that we should focus more on what choices make sense for us rather than what others think of those choices.

During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I challenged you to think about where you wanna be 12 months from now. What sort of work do you wanna be doing more of? What sort of projects do you want filling your time? How do you want to be spending more of your days?

Once you’re clear on where you see your professional life a year from now, try to embrace one new behaviour that’s consistent with that future. Act like the person you hope to become rather than the person you have been in the past. It could be devoting a little more time to that side project you wanna have as your full-time job. Or simply changing how you introduce yourself. Or investing in that training that creates a bridge from your current work to your future work.

Deepak Shukla during his days as an aspiring rapper

Deepak Shukla runs Pearl Lemon, an SEO Agency, by day and by night runs ultra-marathons, plods around Ironman events and hangs out with his cat Jenny. A few years ago, he left his corporate job at Deloitte as a Tax consultant during the height of the recession to become a rapper. Over 150 songs later, after running his own music studio with over 200 international clients, he travelled the world to over 50 countries while running 2 businesses, and even trained to become a British soldier! You can follow Deepak on Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn.

Also, be sure to check out some of Deepak’s former rap videos and his “Winners Get Bruised” music video we referenced during the show:

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

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

Teaser (first ~15s): What I didn’t achieve was the ability to carve out a life as a musician, but what did come as a consequence, it gave me a lot of character building. It was my first true transition where I had turned my whole image around.

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

Deepak: Joseph, I’m really excited to be here.

Joseph: We got a lot to cover today. I want to talk about your time when you used to be an accountant at Deloitte, why you left that behind to become a rapper, and what that scene was like for you. I was wondering if we could just start off by having you tell us a little bit more about what you’re focused on right now in your career and your life.

Deepak: What I do for a living is—I’m 32 year old—I run an SEO agency, and that’s what I believe I’ll keep doing for some time. What I’m about though is just finding ways that I can really try and help give back others and explore.

Joseph: I want to come back and talk a little bit more about your agency. For those people who aren’t familiar with SEO, can you just very briefly explain what your agency does related to search engine optimization?

Deepak: Our agency, if you were to Google us folks is called Pearl Lemon, pearl like you wear around your neck. What we do is ultimately help a business rank on Google for competitive search terms. The easiest example is if you’re a real estate broker or agency of some kind, you may have listings that go up in the area of let’s just say, for example Toronto. You may want to rank for a variety of words.

If there’s something called like Harbor Lane, Toronto and you have a listing there, it’s natural that someone will search for that initially if they’re thinking about buying. Then you would pay me for the service to make sure that your website or your listing comes up at the top Google when someone searches for something very specifically like that. That’s what we do and what people pay us for.

Joseph: Cool. I’ve actually used an SEO expert for this podcast. I definitely noticed a difference in my rankings on Google, so this stuff definitely works.

I know that you haven’t always been the owner of Pearl Lemon, and I do want to talk more about that at the end. Can you just take us back in time? I was thinking we could start all the way back to when you were working at Deloitte, and then maybe we can move forward from there. What were you doing at Deloitte? Then we’ll jump into your life as a rapper after that.

Deepak: Deloitte was in 2009 or ’10. It was just after I finished university. I majored actually in English Literature, so I was basically the only one in the class of 300 that went into work in the financial services space. One thing led to another.

I ended up walking into a graduate role as a tax consultant on their prestigious graduate program at that time, especially also having Indian parents from India. I’m B. Everyone was super pleased that I was at Deloitte because that seem to be the very good thing to do with my college or university background. I walked into there, and I absolutely hated the place.

Joseph: What did you hate about it?

Deepak: I was not a tax man. I had no interest really in tax, I discovered. Why I didn’t discover that before was because in the internship, one, they wine and dine you, but also two, it was just the kind of route that society, i.e. university, what everyone else is applying to and what people perceive to be or saw as success, working at Deloitte.

It was a great job, but I looked at the work that I was doing, number one. I remember then, number two, going to a networking event where you get to meet one of the directors. You get to meet a range of people, basically that are a lot more senior than yourself. I just remember asking one of the directors a little bit about his life and the work predominantly. I thought, ‘Okay. This is what success in this industry can look like after maybe six, seven years of hard graft.’ I just realized that that wasn’t actually where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do.

What I knew that I enjoyed was rapping.

Joseph: Okay. Now, how do you make the leap from accountancy to rapping? Can you tell me a little bit more about how you realized that you loved rapping, and where did that even come from?

Deepak: Rapping had been something that was with me since I was 15 years old. I had friends in music that I had perhaps different career or fortunately educational histories from. Really what it meant is that I had a bunch of guys I used to roll with that I did rap songs with, but these guys were not doing well academically. Some of them had been in and out of prison. Some of them were kind of dealing drugs. We were on a different path.

That path and our relationship really faded as I went to university and as I went off on that adventure. For some time, my relationship with the industry, if you will, at large kind of faded. What didn’t was my love for music. That remained, and some of the songs that you’ve seen on YouTube really relate to the period where I’ve broken away from the group and I still enjoy music, and I thought, ‘This is something that I want to do.’

What I didn’t really understand though when I was at Deloitte and I walked into the partners’ office to say, ‘Hey, I’d like to tender my resignation.’ They said, ‘Well, you know Deepak, we invested a lot of training. We love for you to complete it. You can go on to become a qualified tax consultant, charted tax accountant. There’s all these kinds of stuff. Why don’t you wait it out?’ I said, ‘Well, no. I want to go and be a rapper.’

My journey then began by recognizing, ‘Okay, Deepak, you want to make music. Amazing, but you also need to make money.’ That reality struck me home quite hard. At that time, I just thought, ‘Oh, okay. You know what? I’ll start a recording studio. I can maybe have a studio, invite musicians, who are my friends in some cases, to my studio. We can record together, and I can also charge people for the service of recording their music.’ For me, it felt like, ‘Ah, this is a fantastic idea.’

Joseph: Before we get to that, I’d love you just go back to this moment when said that you resigned. Was that hard at all for you to be able to walk away from this stable job and this industry which I think you mentioned before, at least culturally, was seen as something that would be quite reputable and quite honorable. Was that hard for you? Was this a pretty simple thing for you to do?

Deepak: The act of doing it was very easy. The emotion attached to the act was incredibly difficult for me to work with. I found that the more I remove one from the other, the easier it’s been able for me to switch or turn or pivot and adjust. What I mean by that specifically is like, ‘Wow, I’m going to quit Deloitte,’ and then my heart rate goes up. You get a blood rush and all of the things that surround a little bit of fight or flight response biologically.

If I wrote it out on paper, ‘Do you enjoy being here, Deepak?’ My heart was like, ‘No.’ That became a very effective vehicle. ‘Is this you, or is this your future? Does this make you happy?’ I’d look at the piece of paper, and it was like, ‘No.’ It always served as a kind of reminder that, ‘Deepak, you’re not doing the work that relates to perhaps your highest value.’ That was the toll that then allowed me to go in and have what ultimately was a five-minute conversation and then write up a letter that took me another five minutes that say, ‘Hey, I resigned.’

That was very powerful to me in reminding myself that this isn’t what’s going to make you happy, but then very, very quickly also taken quite some massive action. I knew I had no idea about how to set up a studio. I knew that if I told my parents I was just resigning and there wasn’t a plan in place, that would be even worse.

Joseph, I just took to Amazon. I began looking up books that related to how to start a home recording studio, a guerilla home recording studio.

The second thing that I did was reach out to a couple of producers that originally produced some of my music and said, ‘Hey, can you teach me the kind of 80/20 for how to use Logic Pro on a MacBook at that time. I began the process of setting up a studio. All the activity came out of the action of talking to Matthew Ellis, because once I told him I’d resigned, that really lit a fire underneath my backside, because it was like, ‘Wow, what are you going to do, Deepak?’

That was very helpful to me that I leapt before I looked.

Joseph: Let’s shift gears here now then, Deepak. Let’s take these one piece at a time. What was your experience like to start your recording studio? I guess I’m mostly interested in the emotions you were feeling as you were trying to create something from nothing and walk away from the stable job to try to build something of your own.

Deepak: It was scary, Joseph. I recognized that this would be a little bit of a fall from grace in terms of the perception of what I was doing, which would be very quickly followed up by an expectation that if you’re going to take this route, you need to figure it out.

My mom and dad got married at 11 and 13. The first time they saw each other, they got married. They transitioned from villages in India, places where they’re born without birth certificates, no electricity, no doors, no windows, and this isn’t a hyperbole. I went and saw my dad’s village when I was 18 to see where he grew up.

What they had been taught and what they knew through their kind of migrant story and coming to the U.K. was hard work. My dad still works at Heathrow Airport as a driver. My mom still works at the local supermarket. They had the same jobs for years, decades.

This transition of me moving from stable employment into something that was extremely unstructured was not something that they would understand because it was just so alien to what they knew, and it was nothing like what any of my siblings do. It was scary. It was mostly scary.

Joseph: How much did you think about that as you were going through this?

Deepak: Initially, it was a little bit crippling. We come to a quote by Tony Robbins, believe. I think it aptly describes how I was able to move from that feeling of being crippled to maybe taking some of those actions. The quote goes something along the lines that, ‘Change only comes when the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of change.’

I did not enjoy my work, Joseph. It was pretty clear to me that this wasn’t me fulfilling my potential in that environment because of the reality of what the day-to-day was alongside looking into the future, thinking, ‘Deepak, you’re not going to be well here. This is not for you. Get out, now.’

Joseph: Let’s talk a little bit then about now that you’ve decided you want to move on, you’ve got the recording studio, let’s talk about your days as a rapper. What was the rapper scene like? Did you find that to be more naturally easy for you, or were there also some challenges there?

Deepak: The interesting thing about it is not only transition because transition’s a form of growth and new environments of course lead to new problems. I was, as a British Indian at Deloitte, someone who’s culturally extremely accepted because British Indians go and work at places like Deloitte, it’s what we do. I then transitioned to being a British Indian rapper. That is something that British Indians don’t do.

I got a lot of validation as an engineer, because then it was about me producing a music of others. It was a bit more difficult to perhaps get some validation or recognition as a musician. People are a lot less interested in hearing or talking of my music even though that that was the primary purpose that I was trying to fulfill.

That really just meant that you need to really work hard, or I presume, to kind of get recognized and appreciated. That often is also a path to success in some cases because it meant I had to work harder, which isn’t a bad thing.

I remember my first. It’s still on YouTube. I don’t think that that’s the link that I’ve sent to you, but there’s a music video with me with my former rap group – what they call Dark Side Soldiers. These are the guys I was kind of rolling around with so to speak from the age of 16, 17.

I’m in the video, and I’m the only Indian in the entire video. I don’t know if there’s anyone who isn’t of African or Caribbean origin or who’s mixed race. There was me that was kind of the stand alone. That was quite indicative of the environment, not that it’s a problem. It’s just the reality.

People were always, of course, surprised when they heard that I was a rapper. I definitely had more success as a recording engineer than I did as a recording musician.

Joseph: Can you explain what that was like for you to be a minority in so many ways, not only racially but also being outside of what is typically what a British Indian would be doing with their days?

Deepak: I had a lot of problems emotionally, I think, Joseph. I didn’t really appreciate that it was going out of the frying pan into the oven, because I have also never dealt with the lack of structure in my days. I resigned from Deloitte. I suddenly had no money, because any remaining savings were going into building up the studio. The studio didn’t have any income. I was at my parents’ place. The Deep Impact Recording, which is the name of the studio, started in what was ultimately the room next to my parents’ kitchen, my mom’s kitchen.

These musicians would come through, through my back garden, and my mom would be cooking like dal or chapatis, and then they would go through into the actual studio. There were time where a couple of musicians would turn up and they’d walk right out, because they’d be like, ‘WTF is going on?’

In some ways, it became a huge win, because it meant the music I produced had to be really good. That was the focus. If people could get over that initial hurdle, I then began to become known as, ‘Hi, have you been to Deep Impact Recordings? He’s our Indian brother, the one that records those tunes in his mom’s kitchen, man. You can cook up some wicked stuff there, man.’

This is actually what I perceive to be a big problem became a huge strength, because people would laugh about it. ‘You got to go see Deep Impact Recordings. He’s bagging. He’s our Indian brother. He’s really a good fam. Go eat some dal with his parents,’ because my mom would come in and talk to the musicians.

Within the African and Caribbean cultures, it’s very natural to be respectful of mothers. Actually, whilst these people were doing whatever they were doing in their private lives, professionally with my mom, they were so wonderful and polite. My mom was like, ‘Brilliant, your friends are so amazing, Deepak.’ There was all this kind stuff going on, and there was me in the middle of it trying to figure out, ‘What is going on? What am I doing?

It was also quite lonely, Joseph – lonely because one of the things that I think often gets missed about any form of, let’s call it, coaching tuition of music production is it’s very giving. In that hour that I was producing someone’s music, and these are like 18-year-old rappers that trying to make their fortune, it’s all about their music. It’s all about them.

I’d be doing this maybe six to eight hours a day at times, and I was left feeling completely emotionally exhausted. I didn’t really understand or have anyone that I could communicate about this with. There were some days that I just cried, dude. I felt very lonely, and I felt that I didn’t really connect necessarily that well with anyone else in the industry when it came to talking about what my true passion was, which is actually making music rather than the production of other’s music.

That was definitely something that I struggled with amidst this whole space, not knowing if I’m going to make money tomorrow. I need to say yes to every booking, but then being left by myself and being alone. It was this kind of weird vortex of emotions.

Joseph: How did you then make the transition into focusing on what you really did love which was to actually make your own rap music?

Deepak: Number one, I stuck it out. Meaning that I committed to trying to produce music for these others. I, as a consequence of being able to get musicians, then became better at the production of music. Meaning that I began to develop some regular clients. That meant a little bit of stable income. That meant that I could carve out space to work on my music.

The stable income led to a regularity of phases which also led to me actually getting referrals which also led to me developing some friendships to some of these musicians that did come in. All of these things started to come together. That made me feel a lot more fulfilled.

Joseph: Now, I’ve got to ask you a little bit about your music itself. I did go the YouTube channel that you shared with me. I did watch a few of your videos. Speaking of sticking things out, I checked out one of your videos called ‘Winners Get Bruised.’ I think the line—and I think you could probably say this better than I can—you said, ‘Winners get bruised, winners get broken, losers just quit after one bad moment.’ Can you just explain what the inspiration was behind that particular line in this particular song?

Deepak: I love the chorus. I have my little trim that ‘winners get bruised, winner get broken, losers just quit after one bad moment. Sinners just talk. Sinners just walk to lay down… [rap music plays] yes.

[Winners get bruised, winners get broken, losers just quit after one bad moment. Sinners just talk. Sinners just walk when the going gets tough…]

Joseph: That’s great.

Deepak: I’ve recorded that particular song actually a few years after I left the studio behind in terms of timeline. It’s really interesting that that was the song you picked, because for me, one of the things that transitions have taught me is that hang in there. Stick it out. The true mark for me of how I measure a person and how I also measure success is your ability to come back from abject failure or your ability to endure environments where you’re not able to demonstrate your skillset or your strong suite.

These kinds of situations and that song really takes me back to ultimately, ‘Did I succeed as a musician?’ Well, objectively no. I failed, because no one’s heard of me. I’ve got a history and an archive on YouTube, which of course we post rationalize, and a lot of this other things. What I didn’t achieve was the ability to carve out a life as a musician.

What did come as a consequence, and I didn’t really appreciate it at the time but I did when I made this song which is later in the timeline, was that, ‘You know what? Wow, it gave me a lot of character building.’ It was my first really true transition where I turned my whole image around to being, ‘Ah, Deepak, yeah. No, he’s the…’ the dinner party’s with my parents, ‘Ah, you know my son. He’s an accountant.’ My dad’s Indian accent, ‘Ah, my son’s working at Deloitte. It’s a very good company. He’s an accountant now, brilliant.’ These are the conversations, and these are the things that my dad would tell his people at work. In those days, my dad didn’t tell anyone that I’ve left.

That song ‘Winners Get Bruised, Winner Gets Broken,’ it brings back a lot of memories.

Joseph: One of the other lines in there was, ‘I put my blood and sweat into every song I make then upload to SoundCloud and only get three plays.’ Did you have that experience, and if so, what was that like?

Deepak: Yeah. Life and experiences, of course, they toughen you when you go through stuff. I look back at it now, and I smile. At the time, it sucked. If people were to look Deepak Shukla up on SoundCloud right now, they would see that there’s literally over 100 songs on Sound Cloud, just my music, not my podcast or my SEO. It’s my music. It’s me rapping.

I didn’t succeed in the journey of becoming a recognized rapper. Part of me wonders whether that even was meant to be. Was that the journey that I was on? I’m not really sure. I know that I love music, and I know that what’s also interesting is that less than 5% of those songs are actually commercial songs. I never really transitioned or went on that journey to try and make music for a mass market audience.

I’d say that if people objectively look back, did I succeed in becoming a recognized rapper? No. Was that my intention? I’m not sure. Even this call reminds me that music is still a love of mine. What I’m really most please about in looking back at all of that is that I can say, ‘You know what? I tried.’ I really made the transition. I’ve left Deloitte. I started the studio. I didn’t become a rapper, but my god, one thing is definitely absent when I look back. I don’t feel any sense of regret about it half.

Joseph: I think one of the things that really stood out to me as I was watching your videos was that I would really struggle to put myself out there like that. I think that for people who listen to this show, one of the challenges that people struggle with is they’ve got an idea, they want to ‘put themselves out there,’ but the idea of putting themselves out there is incredibly scary. It feels incredibly vulnerable. I’m just wondering, what was it like for you to put out your first music video? What was it like to watch yourself on there?

Deepak: It felt exactly like the moment that people feel when they go to approach perhaps a pretty girl at the bar. You have so many butterflies, and you don’t know what you’re going to say, and you are almost just waiting for yourself to screw it all up. That was the experience of it.

For example, a musician will come and produce a music in my studio. I’d ask him to listen to one of my songs. You could see him begrudgingly say, ‘Okay, cool,’ but really just doing it to be polite and then me thinking this song needs to be so mind-blowing that it needs to knock him off his chair.

My music isn’t mind-blowing, but it’s really important that you’d still go out and go and show someone that is an industry expert something that you’ve made. That’s an integral part of getting better at the work. It’s important to recognize that, and I thought I didn’t always successfully did.

There’s a hundred songs on SoundCloud, but there’s probably another hundred that I’ve lost or have been scattered or that I decided not to upload and lots of other things. I think that it’s a continual journey that people go on.

For me, it’s like the experience of pain tolerance, like when you do, for example, ultra marathons or anything that’s extremely painful physically that the only way to build up your tolerance is to go and do more of it. The SEALs do it in their training, continual exposure to high pressure environments. It’s always been hard. It still is hard.

That’s also why I go out and still try and do stuff that I know that I’m not good at, like swimming, because actually I find transitions, and it bleeds into other parts of my life. It helps me do some of the other work that can hopefully lead towards some of the success I’ll have in my career.

Joseph: One of the last things I want to talk about, Deepak, is some of the things you’ve learned along the way here about career change, and it relates to something you’re talking about which is picking yourself back up and bouncing back if maybe your music video doesn’t land that well with somebody or it doesn’t get that many views. How do you go about bouncing back? How do you go about dealing with things like rejection?

Deepak: With rejection, the best way to manage it is avoid dwelling. Avoiding dwelling is to go out. It means for me to go out and take new actions. Spend a very small moment of time wondering what you could have improved about the process rather than what went wrong when you fail at some things, ‘Oh wow, that sucks.’ I’d rather be like, ‘Okay, what was the feedback? Okay, fine. Let me take that, and let me go out and do something new or something different.’ Action and activity is a practical way for me to move forward from failure.

The second thing that relates to transition, like relaunch, what’s been really liberating for me is realizing that, ‘Deepak, the world doesn’t care about you. You could dance on the street naked, and within two day, everyone will have forgotten that you were ever there.’ That really helps me, because it makes me recognize that the person who cared the most actually is me.

Joseph, I’ve been on maybe a dozen or so podcasts, and everyone has had access to my YouTube videos, but you’re the only one that’s taken the time, for example, to look specifically at some of my rap songs. What that reminds me and it’s quite helpfully reminding me is that, ‘Deepak, you know what? You can still put everything out there, and people are so busy with their own lives that you can relaunch yourself in any way you want. The biggest obstacle actually is yourself and realizing that no one cares.’ For me, it’s been very liberating.

Joseph: That’s really interesting, because I know we talked about that before when we spoke prior to this call: this idea that we are all so focused on what other people think about us. We think that other people are thinking about us, but actually, people are really concerned about their own image, their own issues. I found that really liberating the idea that, actually, people aren’t as focused on you as you may think that they are.

Deepak: I agree. I agree. The one acid test that people could do is think of someone who’s in their network and then think, for example, Luke’s my best friend – how often do I actually think very carefully about Luke’s career decisions, about what he’s doing? Not that much. I just think, ‘Okay, cool.’ I’ll ping him to be like, ‘Hey dude, let’s go have some beers,’ or, ‘Hey man, what’s up? How’s your day?’

Joseph: One of the things we talked about when we chatted prior to this recording is about the fact that you’re able to shift and reframe your personal brand and professional narrative to help open doors during each stage of your career change.

I was wondering if you could just share a couple of the way’s that you’ve managed to take control of your own personal brand and your own career narrative. I know you mentioned before, there was a major shift between accountancy and then becoming a rapper. How did you manage to remake your identity so quickly and so effectively?

Deepak: When I switched from my recording studio and that all got put to bed, I then launched within two months a tutoring agency. I went from being someone who is Deep Impakt the rapper to being Deepak Shukla the academic teacher and tutor.

I did a couple of things. Number one, practically speaking, I would take for example my professional resume. That would be LinkedIn. I began to focus upon anything that could support the narrative that I would wanted to communicate. ‘Okay, Deepak, you want to move from being a rapper to being a tutor. Have you ever taught anyone anything?’ People be like, ‘Oh, well no, I haven’t, but actually everyone has taught someone else something.’

Everyone assumes that if it’s not a paid exchange, therefore it’s not experience. That is not what work experience is. Work experience is experience of doing the work. If you take it very literally, then you quickly recognize that you have done some things to support the narrative you’re trying to communicate. Furthermore, I would extend that onto a place like YouTube.

If I was to give you a URL for my tutoring channel, there are multiple videos there that I go on and talk about the process of studying, the process of tuition, the process of education. I took all of those things, and then I used that to really angle and position my resume.

That’s what’s become very powerful for me, which is, ‘Okay, where’s the space that you’re trying to go into?’ Right now, I’m an SEO guy, and it took that exact same process I’ve just described, positioning my LinkedIn, producing some content that relates to SEO and making them the massive focus of what I communicate to the world.

Joseph: Very cool. Yeah, it’s very helpful. I really do think that a lot of times, people sometimes feel a little bit uncomfortable about reshaping their career narrative, and they kind of feel like, ‘Oh, I’m misleading somebody, or I’m not being accurate about what I’ve done.’ I actually think that, like what you just said, it’s about being selective and being intentional and choiceful about the things you do share to help build a specific narrative, which I think is slightly different. Very helpful.

I want to wrap up today, Deepak, with what you’re up to right now. I was just wondering if you could tell me a little bit about what’s next for you at Pearl Lemon. I’d love for you to start, first of all, by just telling us about the structure of Pearl Lemon. I remember back from my marketing day, I used to work with agencies that are in a physical office, but that’s not how you’re set up, right?

Deepak: Pearl Lemon, we’re a team of seven. I work from my local café or my flat here in London all of the time. The team is based in London. We’ve been working together for two years. I’ve met her four times in two years, even though we live less than 5, 10 miles apart.

We’ve got Semil, Raj, and Atit doing some of the production work in India. You got Melanie in New York, Rebecca in Texas, Lincoln in Kingston, Jamaica. The team is remote. The team is distributed. Why? Because of my 20’s, Joseph. I’ve spend most of my time abroad traveling, living, exploring.

I started this business with the same question in mind which is, ‘Deepak, how can you run a business that’s distributed and remote?’ number one. Number two, ‘How can you scale trust?’ Number three, ‘How can you convince someone to pay you invoices at the start of the month instead of at the end of the month?’ Again, that meant number four. Everything came about it well, position yourself as an expert in the space, produce a lot of content that also relates to, or publicly put out stuff about your personal life. Try and build things that way.

Starting with those questions that I sought to answer in mind, that has helped the business grow and be where it is today. Again, I’ve never met any of my clients, Joseph, I think. I met one once four months after we started working together.

As to the future, Joseph, naturally I want to continue growing the agency to do what it can do. Outside of that, I like to tinker. I’ve got online course launches happening at the moment. We’ve just made our four or five sales, so that’s really interesting.

There’s these things that I’ve been exploring and experimenting with, alongside the main focus of growing the agency and then continuing to experiment and explore, Joseph.

Joseph: Okay. Any plans to get back into the rap scene?

Deepak: You’ll be the first to know. I definitely will promise you this. I’m going to record at least one more song again, and I will send it to you once it’s done, on the basis of the inspiration you provided me through asking me such amazing questions and taking the time to go through my music. I feel so grateful about that.

Joseph: Well, if you do manage to do that, then we’ll definitely include it in the show notes. If you get it to me quickly enough, we can maybe include snippets of it in the actual show. There’s some incentive there for you right there. Cool.

If people want to learn more about Pearl Lemon or if they just want to learn more about you and check out some of your music videos, where can they go?

Deepak: You could literally go to DeepakShukla.com. You’ll find everything about my agency as well as my personal life there. YouTube Deepak Shukla, or just Googling my name works perfectly.

Joseph: Perfect. We will make sure that we include a couple of those links in the show notes. If you don’t mind, I might even include one of your YouTube videos that we’ve referenced during this call. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with me today. Thank you so much for your time and for walking us through your really interesting career.

Deepak: Joseph, thank you for taking the time to ask me such excellent questions. I’m excited and nervous at the same time to see my music, of all things, in your show notes

How do things REALLY turn out when you make the brave decision to relaunch your career? Do things actually end up working out? Or does leaving behind a stable career end up coming back to bite you? In this very special 50th episode of Career Relaunch, I’m excited to welcome back Kelly Cara to the show. Kelly was my very first guest when this podcast launched back in Sept 2016, and she was voted by listeners as the guest they most wanted to hear from again.

We’re going to check in with her to hear how things have actually turned out for her since she made the decision to leave her job behind as an educational researcher in Springfield, Missouri to become a nutrition researcher, educator, and health-supportive chef in Austin, Texas after finishing culinary school. We’ll talk about doing work you love, the impact of money on your choices, and when to move onto the next chapter of your career . . . even if you’ve just recently made a change.

Check out this TED animation of his poem:

During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I challenged you to reflect on one of the ideas you’ve been thinking about pursuing and really reflect what sort of benefit it could have on your career, life, and people in your life. Make a list of the potential impact it could realistically have on your physical health, your mental health, your family life, your personal & professional growth, even your friendships.And there may be some negatives.

Kelly Cara is a nutrition researcher, educator, and health-supportive chef passionate about promoting whole-person health and wellness through nutrition and lifestyle habits. She’s currently pursuing a graduate degree at the Tufts Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy where her main research interests involve the impact of food processing – from raw foods to ultra-processed foods – on overall health. Kelly is a contributor to the Friedman Sprout online newspaper where her articles highlight the challenges of accessing and choosing nutritious and health-promoting foods. She is dedicated to environmentally responsible and humane living, sustainability, and generosity.

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): When an experience is really intrinsically fulfilling, I’m pretty comfortable living a very simple life and enjoying a simple income that is giving me all sorts of other rich, personally fulfilling rewards.

Joseph: Hello, Kelly. Good to talk with you again.

Kelly: Great to talk with you.

Joseph: Welcome back to the show. We recorded our conversation in February 2016, which was over two years ago, I think, right after you moved to Austin. In Episode 40, I asked listeners to vote for who they wanted the most to hear from again, and you got the most votes. Could you just give me a little reminder of the very high level timeline of the major milestones since 2012, when you first had those pangs of wanting to make a change?

Kelly: In 2012, I was working at Missouri State University in an assessment research coordinator position, doing statistical analysis and also teaching a statistics class, but I really wanted to gear my research more in the direction of nutrition and wellness. I had no outlet for that, and I had no foot in the door for that.

I decided to move to Austin, Texas with my husband so that I could attend a health supportive nutrition related culinary school down here at the time. It was called Natural Epicurean Academy of Culinary Arts.

Joseph: That was 2014. Is that right?

Kelly: Two thousand and fourteen, we made the move. I attended the school. That was a six-month program. After that, I had a couple of internship opportunities that turned into full-time employment, and we’ve been here ever since. I’ve been doing a variety of things since then, just staying in the nutrition and wellness sector, but not getting to do research so much. I’m trying to come back to that now at this point.

Joseph: You started your journey in 2012. In 2014, you started school. We spoke in 2016. What’s happening right now at this moment in your career and your life?

Kelly: My husband and I created our own business. We created an LLC in December of 2015 just because we thought, really, when we moved down here to Austin, we wanted to educate people about what we had learned with regard to nutrition and wellness and lifestyle changes that can make a big difference in a person’s health.

Right now, what we’re doing is teaching some classes for the public. We are working with medical clinic here, a private practice in Austin. We’re teaching classes for a group of adults that have come and really are interested in improving their health. They either have diseases, they have something in their family history that has made them think, ‘I need to make some changes so that this doesn’t happen to me.’ We’re doing that in the evenings.

On the weekends, I’m teaching some cooking classes, health supportive cooking classes. We’re also gearing up for a big move, because we’ve been in Austin for four years, and now we’re preparing to move to Boston, Massachusetts, for another graduate program for me.

Joseph: It sounds like you actually had a pretty good line here in Austin with doing some of the wellness programs, because I was just listening back to the episode number one which featured you. You were hoping to bring wellness programs to the corporate world and also to individuals and talk about nutrition and wellness, and it sounds like you’ve had the chance to do that there in Austin.

Kelly: It’s been incredible. At the same time, it’s also been nothing like what we were hoping for. We’ve had to move away from the corporate side. We really did want to do wellness programming for the corporate side because we thought that would be a better way to make a living.

The program that we offer is very robust. It’s called the Complete Health Improvement Program. We did not design it, but we are certified as facilitators of this program. It can be as long as 8 to 10 weeks for a program. We’d be going to a corporation one to two times a week, teaching people about the way that nutrition interacts with the bodily processes, how little changes that people can make in their eating habits that can improve their health. We would be doing that for an extended period of time, so it’s pretty intensive actually. It’s therefore a little costly, so we thought a corporate route would be a much more lucrative route for our business.

We were pitching it to insurance companies here in town and to any local business we could, and I was cold calling and doing cold emails. We just weren’t getting anyone on board. People would say, ‘Yeah, that sounds great. Maybe next year we can work that into our programming,’ or, ‘What if you could just come and do a one-day cooking class so we can kind of get a taste of what you do.’ We kind of partnered like that. They liked that, so we started doing that more.

Joseph: Was there a particular reason why you decided to not continue to pursue the corporate route, based on the initial vision you had for what that could look like?

Kelly: The main reason was that, after taking about four months to just really try and get some clientele going or some clients locked in long-term, we were not successful with that. We just kept having these one-off opportunities, and they weren’t paying the rent, so we were eating into our savings.

Both of us had full-time job opportunities open up, so we both took full-time positions. Then we didn’t have time to do the full-time corporate program, so we kind of just had to take the opportunities that came across our path as they came up and curve out a new route based on that.

Joseph: Was there anything in particular that surprised you with the first few months of trying to get your programs off the ground?

Kelly: Yeah. In fact, I started listening back to your podcast again back then, because I think you had talked about depression.

Joseph: We had one of those, yeah.

Kelly: You started your new business.

Right after culinary school, I was doing my internships. Within a year, I came back to the culinary school and started teaching health supportive baking for them, and Devon was teaching nutrition. In the end of October of 2016 then, we got a phone call that said, ‘You don’t have a culinary school job anymore. We’re going to close the doors. The professional program is closing.’

We both lost our jobs at that time. That’s when I really hit the ground running with our business, V-Life. We decided to try to put all of our efforts into that. Within the four months that we really did that, I went through all of those different stages of, ‘Oh my gosh, what are we going to do? We don’t have income. Austin’s expensive to live in. Our business isn’t up and running yet.’

I went through a lot of different emotions during that time and struggling to really pinpoint what it was that we were trying to do with our business, because we wanted to sell this Complete Health Improvement Program, people weren’t biting, and it was a time to really evaluate, ‘Am I not good at marketing myself? Do we need to pay someone to market our business? Do we have enough money to do that? Are we willing to put money into doing that?’

Devon and I were sitting in the apartment together, having arguments about the business, never having time away and just reflect and think on our own. We were going through all of that.

Joseph: What’s that like to be working with your partner on a business? I know that in speaking with people who are like co-founders of businesses or startups, that can be tricky. If your co-founder is the person you’re also living with 24/7, can you just give us a glimpse into what that has been like, I guess, both the highs and the lows?

Kelly: In some ways, of course it’s great, because if you want to take a break and have lunch together, you’re right there. You can do that. If you need to do a presentation together, you can sit and talk about it. In the middle of the morning, you’re having a meeting with your partner right on the couch in the living room. It’s very comfortable, and it’s very organic.

At the same time, we realized, in close proximity, we do have different communication styles. We were struggling sometimes to understand each other in terms of, ‘What is it that you’re trying to ask me to do?’ or ‘I need clear directions,’ or ‘I need you to be more direct,’ constantly having that kind of feedback as we developed as business partners and then also trying to be husband and wife. That was very stressful.

Joseph: When we spoke before, you had told be about in your past job, you weren’t necessarily taking the best care of yourself. It was physically, I guess, not the best thing for your own personal wellness. I was just wondering how you would say your self-care has been over that past couple of years.

Kelly: The last two years have been amazing with regard to being able to focus on my goals for myself, with regard to nutrition for the year of 2017 and part of the beginning of 2018. I worked for an organization that was a dietary detox facility. That was the full-time job that I got after we started getting V-Life going.

It was all raw and living foods. I was preparing foods for people that would come in and go through our program. It’s a 21-day program, but they can do one week, two weeks, or three weeks. We had a three-week menu, and I was preparing all these foods. We use no processed foods. Everything was completely from scratch.

As I was working in that environment—everything there was organic, everything was fresh, everything was prepared very lovingly—we took a lot of time to make really healthy and nutritious and beautiful and delicious foods for our guests. Going through that as an organization and working around people that lived that kind of lifestyle really helped me finally get to where I was trying to get with the whole-foods, plant-based diet.

Now, I feel very good about that aspect. It was also a very active job. I was on my feet at least eight hours a day, because I would go for a walk in the morning, I would do a little bit of very minor yoga practice at home, I just do some sun salutations in the morning to get my body warmed up for the day, and then I’d go into work. We had a beautiful facility. I was mostly in the kitchen, but we also had a grow house where we would grow our own sprouts. I was walking up and down the hill and being outside in the sunshine. Really, it was a wonderful experience.

Joseph: It sounds like working at the dietary detox facility allowed to both live out your vision of helping other people live healthier, more well-balanced lives, but also, you yourself were able to benefit from adopting that sort of lifestyle yourself.

Kelly: I looked at it. It didn’t pay very much. It was truly just a kitchen prep job. That was a concern for me at first. I thought, ‘Well, this isn’t going to be a long-term thing. I think this is just going to be get some experience and have some income while we also try to run our business on the side.’ That was truly what it did end up being, but I had to ultimately think about all these other benefits, these personal improvements I was able to make and being able to live the lifestyle I wanted and not having too much responsibility at that time, so that when I came home, I could focus on my classes on the weekends and on my evening classes and teaching people.

I also did get an opportunity to teach people at that facility. We didn’t just feed people, but we also offered classes, so I got to teach classes about menu planning. I got to teach classes about fermenting foods. Those were also good opportunities to just get me back into teaching people as well.

Joseph: You mentioned money there, Kelly. This something that I actually think about a lot myself, how to value money versus the non-monetary benefits of some of those other things you were talking about where you get to do the things you want to do and spend your days doing the things that you are really passionate about.

I went back and listened to the other episode we did together, and you deluded to the fact that you knew you were going to be taking a bit of a financial risk in working on V-Life, and yet you didn’t want to let money stop you. Can you give me a glimpse into how things have been financially for you or at least like how you’ve been thinking about finances the past couple of years?

Kelly: I kind of have two different thoughts about it. One is when an experience is rich and full of either personal development opportunities or just really intrinsically fulfilling, as long as the pay covers the basics of life, I try not to worry too much about the pay. I’m pretty comfortable living a very simple life and enjoying a simple income that is giving me all sorts of other rich, personally fulfilling rewards.

On the other hand, my husband and I have talked a lot about the fact that as we get older, we both certainly want to feel compensated for the amount of skills and learning and education that we currently hold. That piece, I’m still struggling with a little bit.

The reason I left the dietary detox facility was, over time, I thought, ‘I’ve been here for a year. I’ve gained a great experience. I’ve really got my diet and exercise on track. I’m feeling very good about myself, but I really want to be viewed in my career field as a subject matter expert.”

I want to learn more about nutrition. A lot of our guests had really difficult questions. I thought in order for my career to move to a much more professional level, and I’m certainly ready for more responsibility, I need to either have a corporate kind of job or really launch our business in a new direction and go big with that, and/or maybe add another layer of education which is where this move to Boston is going.

I think all of that comes from this concept that we want to be financially compensated for what we know. Maybe within this field of nutrition and wellness, we’re going to have to approach it a little differently, because as a field, it doesn’t necessarily pay.

Joseph: Before we talk about Boston, I did have one more question about your current life, Kelly. One of the others things that I know is when you moved to Austin, that wasn’t just a professional move, it was also a personal move for you. The lot of your family is back in Missouri and moving to Austin was moving to a brand new city, totally different environment. Can you just give me a glimpse into what that’s been like for you, life in Austin, how have you enjoyed it the past couple of years?

Kelly: Austin’s a great place to live. It’s a lot of fun. It’s hot, and people talk about that, but both of us were interested in living in a warmer climate, so that hasn’t been a problem. There’s lots of outdoor activities. There’s fun things to do. The fact that so many people move from other places and come here to either be involved in the IT world or they have startups or for any variety of reasons – they’re in the arts, they’re in the music scene, there are people from all over, that means there are so many people that are looking for friends.

We had a hard time making friend the first couple of years, and I was really homesick, and I kept telling Devon, ‘Maybe we should think about moving back to Springfield. It’s cheaper. Maybe we could do our business there.’ Ultimately, once we finally made a real effort to start making friends, we joined meet-up groups with likeminded people, we met some people there eventually. As we would meet people that we felt like we had something in common with, we would just say, ‘Hey, how about you come over,’ or, ‘How about we meet up for dinner somewhere or some time and continue this conversation?’

Being able to practice that skill of just socializing and putting yourself out there and being very open to developing new relationships whether it’s professionally or socially. That has made all the difference, and I don’t think I would have become so comfortable doing that had I stayed in Springfield. I think moving to Austin and forcing myself into a new realm where I didn’t know anyone, that really stretched me. That’s been very, very rewarding. We have some great friends here now, and that really helped us settle in and help us feel like Boston was home.

Joseph: That’s fantastic. Now that you have settled in, it sounds like you’re getting ready to move away now. Let’s talk about Boston. What’s happening in Boston?

Kelly: After working at the dietary detox facility and getting all these great questions from guests that I couldn’t answer, I was like, ‘You know what? I really want to know the answers to these questions.’ I’m the kind of person who learn very well in a school setting. Some people can just read online and educate themselves that way. I can, but I feel like if I’m going to do the learning anyway, I might as well get the credentials. I don’t think that ever hurt.

I applied to PhD programs just October and November of last year, and I happened to get in to a couple.

Joseph: Congratulations.

Kelly: Thank you.

I was admitted to two different programs or accepted to two different programs. We visited the schools, and the one in Boston, Tufts Friedman School of Nutrition, ended up really impressing both Devon and me. We decided I feel a once in a lifetime opportunity, so we’re going to go.

Though we have friends in Austin, and we really feel like we’re comfortable here and it’s home, I also know that these skills and the things I just mentioned about, social interactions, they’re very transferrable, and I no longer fear moving to a new place and wondering whether I can make a happy home there. I think we can do that anywhere now.

Joseph: That is very exciting. I think what you’re saying about having developed the muscle of moving, I think that’s so true because I moved around quite a bit myself. I know what you mean about making friends. It’s not the easiest thing to do, but once you’ve moved a couple of times and you know that you can do it, then it starts to be a little bit less frightening to make a another move. That’s very exciting.

I know in our email exchange, before we got on the phone, you’ve mentioned that you had to make a couple of big decisions related to your move to Boston. I know at the time, you were also offered a position as a director of operations at a bakery there in Austin. Is that right?

Kelly: Yes.

Joseph: How did you walk through that decision in your mind of either taking that role which sounds really exciting or going back to school?

Kelly: As I started making this emotional, mental plan for moving away from Austin, I started contacting some friends and people I’ve worked with in my four years here that I hadn’t seen for a while. I just thought, ‘Let’s make some lunch dates and meet with people and just let them know what’s going on in my life.’

I like to keep those relationships warm, as a friend from an exchange program recommended. Keep those relationships warm, because you never know when you’re going to need to call on your network or when you’re going to need a reference letter from that person, or when you might just be able to keep a really strong friendship after you move away.

I met with one of the directors of the bakery that I had been a manager in. We’re sitting there having lunch, and she just kind of casually mentions, ‘Oh by the way, we’re looking for a director of operations. I know you’re planning this move to Boston, but if you’ve thought about getting back into the food manufacturing, just let me know. We’d love to put you back.’ I thought, ‘What? I wasn’t looking for that in this meeting at all. We were just having a social lunch.’

She had told me what the pay was. She told me the situation, and it sounded really great. This is a startup company that’s going national. They’re hoping to sell for $100 million dollars within the next three to five years, probably less than that with the momentum that they’re going through.

As Devon and I talked about it, we were thinking, ‘Gosh, there could be a big payout. This could be a great opportunity.’ At the same time, I knew that food manufacturing is actually not the direction that I really want to go. I could see myself working as a nutrition director or adviser or consultant for big manufacturing businesses, and I do think that that’s a job that I would be very interested in in the future.

I also know the nature of the work, and I also know that, when I’m motivated to do something with regard to education, it’s often important to take that opportunity when it comes, because a year from now, I might not have the same level of motivation. Two years from now, if I’ve been doing the director of ops position and making good money, I might not want to stop in the middle of that and go back to school.

Education, to me, is very important. It is something that I want. It’s something I’ve wanted for well over 10 years now. I have the opportunity now, so ultimately I decided I better seize it, just for fear of not knowing. Robert Frost’s poem, ‘Two Roads Diverged in Yellow Wood,’ comes to mind. He says, ‘I looked down one as far as I could, and I realized if I took this one, I might never come back, and it’s likely I’ll never come back to this crossroads.’

Joseph: That’s a great segue, Kelly, into the last thing I was hoping to talk about with you before we wrap up, which is to just revisit some of the perspectives you shared with me a couple of years ago. One of those was to err on the side of action. I think you were talking about giving yourself permission to go off and do the thing that you wanted to do just to see what happens, knowing that it’s going to be okay on the other end.

I’m just wondering, how did erring on the side of just ‘going for it’ ended up turning out for you now that you’ve got a little bit of that 20/20 vision.

Kelly: I say this with a huge smile on my face. I am so thankful that we made this move. It has been a constant winding path even while we’ve been here in Austin, but I recently tallied all of the different adventures and opportunities and the people and the places that we’ve experienced. It’s a long, long list. In four short years, we’ve accomplished a whole lot.

We haven’t made a whole lot of money, but we’ve had a really rich life. We’ve had a lot of rich experiences. We’ve had enough money to be able to take vacations. We’ve developed personally. We’ve developed professionally. We’ve been able to educate ourselves and educate others. I feel very good about where we are today, even knowing that we’re about to again embark on the unknown.

Every day is kind of an unknown, and I think that four years’ worth of an adventure and excitement, along with the frustrations and upsets that have come along the way. It’s all been worth it, certainly worth it. I can say that with a hundred percent certainty.

Joseph: Now, that’s fantastic to hear. I think that you’re making a really good point in pointing out the importance of the richness of your experiences beyond just the money side of things, which I think is what people so often tend to focus on. They sort of forget about the actual value of experiences that you’re having.

Sounds like it’s really gone well for you, and you feel like this has been worth it. Knowing what you know now, is there anything that you think you would have done differently or that you might approach differently as you are getting for the next big change in your life?

Kelly: I have a little bit of a struggle spending that money that we earn, because we don’t make a whole lot of money. Sometimes, I look at opportunities and I think, ‘Gee, could I do this myself and it would cost less? I’ll still be effective, maybe not as effective as paying someone else to do it for me, but it’ll work out.’

I think I would loosen my purse strings a little bit. It goes back to that concept of marketing our business. I think we probably could have been much more successful with launching V-Life and actually acquiring some corporate clients had we invested some money in a marketing company or paying someone to help us market ourselves, because that wasn’t a strong suite, and it took so much time. I think if we had someone doing those things for us, it would have been worth it. It would have been worth the investment.

Moving forward, I’m trying to think about my decisions that way. I have certain strengths. I also have certain weaknesses. My goal in life is not to be good at everything or great at everything. I really want to capitalize on my strengths and recognize when there’s an opportunity to pay someone else because they’re better at doing something, and it’s really going to move us forward more quickly.

I’m trying to find that balance and learn how to identify good resources and be willing to spend a little money on help, because we haven’t done that in the past.

Joseph: The last question I have for you, Kelly, before I let you go is when you think about the past few years there in Austin and the fact that you made this really brave leap to go there, is there anything that you’ve learned about yourself along the way?

Kelly: I think I’ve learned that I’m not really that interested in being my own boss, which surprised me. I thought having freedom of time and ability to make decisions for myself is very important. I think a lot of times we look at the opportunity of creating one’s own business as ultimate freedom. While that may be true in certain areas, it’s not necessarily true in every area.

Doing a business where I can educate others about wellness, I have to find all my own students. Working at the culinary school and being able to teach health supportive baking was fantastic because they brought the students to me. All I had to do was focus on what I was going to be teaching. The stress was gone. I loved that opportunity. That was one of my favorites, one of my highlights from being in Austin, teaching at the culinary school.

I think it’s important to try to be one’s own boss but to also recognize, if that’s not for you, then it’s not for you, and that’s okay. For me, I would rather let someone else do the tough lifting or the heavy lifting, and I can just come in and do what I do best, which is educate people and talk about the things that I really love, which is health supportive cooking and nutrition and wellness.

That surprised me. I didn’t know that that was going to be an outcome of starting our own business. I thought I was going to be a lot easier. I was a little over-optimistic, ‘Oh yeah, people want to do this. Of course they would want to do this. Why wouldn’t they?’ They do. They just want to do it in a different way that we anticipated, and it’s a lot of work to do these businesses on your own when you’re starting from the ground floor.

Joseph: I completely understand that, Kelly. I think that’s a really honest and refreshing view. I think that so often, the world of the self-employed entrepreneur or solopreneur is very much glamorized, but it is a lot of hard work, and it can get really tiring sometimes.

I experienced it myself. Some days, I just think, ‘Wow, this is really tiring.’ There’s definitely a benefit to letting somebody else do the marketing or letting somebody else go out and source clients or opportunities or gigs. I totally get it. That’s really interesting.

Thank you so much, Kelly, for giving us a glimpse into the past couple of years. It has been really interesting how things turned out for you, and I just want to wish you the best of luck with your PhD at Tufts. That sounds super exciting. I’m just really excited to hear how it all turns out for you when we check in again.

Kelly: Absolutely. Thanks for having me, and I would just encourage all of your listeners to keep listening to the podcast. I’ve been re-listening throughout the four years anytime I needed some encouragement. It really has been encouraging to hear other people’s stories, so thank you for your good work and for including me.

Joseph: Thank you, Kelly. All right. Take care.

Sometimes, getting fired from your job can be a blessing in disguise. This was true for Chief Revenue Officer turned professional speaker and author Heather Monahan. In this episode of Career Relaunch, Heather will share her thoughts on the power of sharing your vulnerabilities, asking for assistance when you need it most, and the steps she’s taken in her career to become more confident. In the Mental Fuel segment, I also share some thoughts on how asking for help made my transition from the US to the UK much smoother.

During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I asked you to consider one area in your career where you could really use some help. Then, once you’ve identified that area, to let people know you’re looking for help in this area. You might just get that nudge in the right direction, the introduction to someone who can make a difference, or an idea you hadn’t thought of that helps you turn a corner.

Heather Monahan is a best-selling author, keynote speaker with the Harry Walker Agency, brand ambassador for Perry Ellis International, entrepreneur, and founder of Boss In Heels. Having worked nearly 20 years in Corporate America, Heather’s been named a Glass Ceiling Award winner, one of the most Influential Women in Radio in 2017, and a Limit Breaking Female Founder in 2018 by Thrive Global. She’s also a member of Florida International University’s Advisory Council, serving as a mentor and leader in the South Florida Community. Most importantly Heather is Dylan’s Mom.

Be sure to check out Heather’s Creating Confidence podcast where she provides techniques and strategies to create your confidence, pursue your dreams and leapfrog the villains you’ll meet along the way.

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

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

Teaser (first ~15s): I had been putting myself in a box my whole life, and that was wrong. I realized that my strengths, my skills, just like anyone’s, can apply to any lane or any career. It doesn’t have to be just the one you have experience in.

Joseph: Hello, Heather. Welcome to Career Relaunch.

Heather: Hi, Joseph. Thanks for having me.

Joseph: Thanks so much for making time out of your busy schedule to join me here today, Heather. I know that you’ve had a really busy few weeks recently. We’ve got a lot to cover today, because I want to talk about your former life in radio, your career transitions, your current book, and some of the career lesson you go through in your book. I was wondering if you could just start us off by telling me what you’re focused on right now in your career and your life.

Heather: Sure. Since my book dropped May 22nd, I was picked up by the Harry Walker Speaker Agency. I’ve been speaking somewhere different every single week. It’s really been intense. From New York City to heading to Las Vegas in two weeks to speak to the WNBA. That’s been taking up a lot of my time. I just finished editing the video version of my book, which will be dropping in the next couple of weeks. It’s been pretty exciting.

Joseph: Wow, very cool. I just wanted to thank you for sending me a copy of your book. I want to definitely come back to that, because there are some really great points that you make.

I was wondering, Heather, if we could just go back in time, first of all, because you’ve had a very interesting career. I know you haven’t been an author or professional speaker. I was wondering if you could take us back to your time at the Beasley Broadcast Group, when you used to work in radio, and then maybe we can move forward from there. Can you just tell me what you were doing there, and then we can talk about some of your transitions afterwards.

Heather: Fourteen years ago, I started a publicly traded radio company as a director of sales. I saw an opportunity in the company that there was no leader for the sales organization. I pitched myself for that job, for VP in sales. I got that job. I was in that job for a few years, and I saw the opportunity for advancement. I pitched myself for executive vice president and then, ultimately, chief revenue officer. I was promoted time and time again.

In July 27 of last year, 2017, I was fired. That’s really the moment where I made the decision to go out on my own and start a completely new career at 43 years old.

Joseph: When we spoke before, I know that one of the things that you did, which is something that is quite common for a listener on this show, Heather, is that you started to work on some side projects. Can you just give us a glimpse into what you were working on and how that was coordinated with your day job prior to you departing from that company?

Heather: A couple of years before I was fired, I decided I wanted a little bit more purpose in my day-to-day life. I tried creating a women’s group within my division at the company to really unite women to support one another, and ultimately I was shut down when the founder’s daughter found out what I was doing. Her brother said to me, ‘Why don’t you just do this in your own personal life so no one can shut you down?’

At that time, I decided to launch my own website, HeatherMonahan.com, and a tribe called Boss In Heels, which is all about being a leader in your own right, whether you’re a man, woman, no matter what your background. I created a community where I could share all of the things that I didn’t know when I was a young person – basically, what it takes to get ahead. I really wanted to give back and be that person and mentor for me that I didn’t have when I was a younger person.

I created that community. I started writing at night and creating blog posts and social media posts on all the different platforms. When I was challenged that it was possibly taking away from my work, my day-to-day job, I hired to people to manage it for me, and then I would just evaluate it at nights and on the weekends to ensure that it was really my voice and my message that was getting out there.

Joseph: You mentioned that you tried to do this within your company, something similar, and that your employer also didn’t react that well to you doing this on the side. Can you just share with me what that was like for you to have your current employer basically dissuading you from doing something that you were so passionate about?

Heather: Ultimately, it became harassing. It was just a horrible time for me, personally and professionally. It was one of those moments in my life where I decided, ‘I’m so sick of being bullied and intimidated because of a paycheck and a job,’ that I decided I’m going to stand up for myself anyways.

When I got the phone call and was told to shut it down, I said, ‘I’m not going to shut it down. This is a positive message. This is something I am passionate about. This has nothing to do with work. I hear your concerns, but they are not valid. I’m going to move forward.’

I ultimately put disclaimers on everything so that people would know this wasn’t the voice of my employer. This was my personal voice. I really started building my confidence during that whole time by standing up for myself, but it definitely was not easy.

Joseph: Was this ultimately what got you fired, or was it something else, and how did you react to being fired?

Heather:  This was definitely the catalyst. This initiated the drama for me at work. When I didn’t back down and do what this woman wanted, that’s when things got very difficult and tumultuous. This started me down a path that… I still didn’t think I’d be fired, because I’ve been in the company so long – I had just been voted one of the most influential women in radio in 2017. I was on so many different boards, and I had so many great relationships. I couldn’t imagine that I’d be fired.

However, I knew she didn’t like me. I knew she didn’t like what I was doing, but I knew what I was doing was positive and it was within my rights. At the end of the day, she fired me saying that my position, Chief Revenue Officer, was no longer needed and therefore I wasn’t needed either.

It is what it is, and I got fired. I felt terrible. The whole meeting after 14 years lasted about three minutes. I drove home my three-hour ride home crying and basically sat on my couch for 24 hours under a weighted blanket, wondering what I was going to do with my life, because I was under a non-compete, so I couldn’t go back to my same industry for months. I really didn’t know what to do, so I was really devastated.

Joseph: How do you bounce back from devastation, because I know that it sounds like you’re doing really great right now, but what I want to make sure that we talk about today is how you ended up digging yourself out of that hole and finding your way forward. Could you just walk us through what you did after those 24 hours?

Heather: Luckily, I’ve been journaling my entire life, and I recommend that to everyone, because journaling allows you to look back at different moments in your life and gain strength from seeing how far you’ve come.

I’ve been divorced. I made it through the recession. I’ve been cheated on. I’ve been sexually harassed at work. I look back at all of these moments, these low moments in my life, and they gave me courage in that low moment that I was faced with yet again.

Through all this adversity over the past 43 years, I started to learn a solid plan that can allow me to get out of trouble. What I did 24 hours after getting fired was I created a 30-day plan which was finite. It’s not too big. It’s palatable, and I crossed off the days. I wrote down specific things that I wanted to accomplish each day, so I could feel proud about myself.

I also realized that getting rid of negative people in your life, like that person I was working for, opened up so much opportunity for positive people to start coming into my life, which wasn’t happening before. I recorded all of those things in that 30-day plan. I started creating a vision for where I wanted to go.

Each day and each step that I took brought me closer. I didn’t know where I was going. I just knew I was moving forward. That brought me to the day—within one week after being fired, no one knew I was fired—I decided I’m going to take control of this. I’m going to post social media that I’ve been fired, I am devastated, and I need help.

People thought I was crazy for doing that, but that ended up being the single game-changer for me in those low moments and low times. I had thousands of people reach out to me trying to help me, offering me connections, offering to put me on different shows and to help me and hire me. That was a real catalyst for change for me that first week.

Joseph: That’s a great lesson. I know that you and I first crossed paths when you shared that tip for a Forbes article I wrote about, LinkedIn and how important it is for you to be transparent about what you’re going through. I think that that’s a really great tip for people who are going through a transition to actually let people know about it. Is that how you eventually landed your gig as a brand ambassador? How did you become a brand ambassador, which I know is something that you started doing late last year?

Heather: No. That, actually, was very separate from this initiative. I had realized that, when I was fired, I wanted to really align myself with the Marquee Brand, because I knew that, going out on my own, I was going to be a one-man show, and there’s not a lot of credibility at first until you start creating some success on your own. If I could partner and align myself with a successful proven major brand, that was really going to elevate the perception of me.

I targeted a local company which a multibillion dollar company, Perry Ellis International, and I was relentless in pursuing that CEO. I did not stop. For 45 days, I pursued him every way that I could. I had come up with a great idea that was going to bring him value, and I just wanted a meeting. Eventually, after many dark nights of no response, he responded, took the meeting, and he loved my idea. We started working together.

Joseph: Very cool. I want to switch gears, and I definitely want to make sure we spend a good chunk of time talking about your book, Confidence Creator. Before I do, Heather, I just want to go back to something you said earlier, because this is something that’s been on my mind which you mentioned something about getting rid of the negative people in your life.

I’m just curious. How do you go about doing that? I guess what’s behind my question is this is something I’ve been think about recently also. If you’ve got people in your life who just make you feel either bad about yourself or you just don’t feel very good around them and yet they’ve been a part of your life for a long time—I don’t know if that was your situation—I’m just curious how you managed that, I guess what I’m going to call, like a purging process of getting rid of negative people in your life.

Heather: It’s huge. That’s the single thing I point to for anyone that can be the greatest catalyst for change and really help you in a very quick time period. It doesn’t need to be some long, drawn-out thing.

It’s a discussion, first with yourself, that you’re deciding to remove negative people from your life. I call it firing negative people, and then it’s just a simple conversation with them, which can literally be, ‘This isn’t working for me right now. I don’t feel great when I’m around you, and I’m going to give myself some space. Thank you for understanding,’ and then you move on.

You’ll see over time, that person will stop calling you, stop contacting you, because you’re not going to respond anymore. Now, it becomes more challenging when that person is a member of your family. There’s a lot of people that have relatives that might not lift them up. They may be trying to drag you down.

That’s a different conversation, but still taking emotion out of it and saying, ‘Mom, I love you very much. However, when you speak to me like this, I don’t feel great about myself, so when we get to a point in the conversation where we’re going to end up here, I’m going to have to disconnect the call and go on my way.’

When you do that repeatedly, that person will learn that if they speak to you that way, you’re going to be gone. They’ll either change their ways, or they’re going to respect you and give you a little bit more space which is going to help you.

Joseph: Very good advice there. That’s a good segue way into your book Confidence Creator, Heather, because it sounds like that act in and on itself does takes some confidence. I want to, first of all, talk about your process of writing the book and then a few of the points you make in the book which I feel are especially relevant to career changers.

First of all, I got to thank you for sending me a copy, Heather, because I get sent a lot of books these day. I don’t always get around to reading them, but I decided to read yours because I just really appreciated how honest and simple your messages are. It’s also kind of a page turner. I was wondering if you could start by just telling me how you came up with the idea that you even wanted to write a book.

Heather: When I asked for help and I put it out online, the Elvis Duran Show reached out to me and said, ‘Hey, if we can help you, let us know.’ I said, ‘Sure, I’d love to be on your show.’ They have 10 million listeners every day.

I went to New York. I went on their show. By the middle of the interview, Elvis asked me, ‘Well obviously, you’re writing a book, Heather, aren’t you?’ I wasn’t sure at that point if I was or if I wasn’t, but I realized in that moment, I was going to make a commitment to 10 million people that I was going to create a book. That moment where you hold yourself accountable to other people really allows you to move forward. I made that decision. In the next second I said, ‘Yes, I am writing a book.’

When I got home—I had been writing every day—I mocked up a book with a fake cover. I gave myself a deadline. I wanted it done within one year. I really fast-tracked my progress. I started looking for an editor.

Once you start pulling in a mentor, like an editor, someone that can help you leapfrog through the challenges that you have because they’ve seen that movie before and they know how to get you where you need to go, you really start moving quickly.

Joseph: It sounds like you actually gained some leverage on yourself, which is something we talk about on this show. It’s like you’re making a public commitment to do something, and that forces you into action, which is really interesting.

What was the process like for you of writing the book? I know you mentioned you got an editor to help guide you through the steps of it, but what was the day-to-day like for you to get your thoughts down on paper?

Heather: I think everyone overcomplicates this. I just sat down and wrote. Really, the day I started which was earlier on, I just Googled, ‘How do you write a book?’ It’s about making the time commitment. It’s nothing more than that.

When I started, I didn’t know I was writing a book about confidence. I didn’t know I was writing a book about my lowest moments. I just simply sat down each day and wrote whatever was in my mind. Within a few weeks, I started seeing that there’s a pattern about challenges and overcoming challenges, and I started to realize, I was writing about building confidence.

Joseph: Interesting. I’d always just presumed that you had set out to write about confidence, because it is such a strong theme in the book. That’s really interesting that that came to you more organically.

What about the publishing process? How did you go about actually creating the physical book once you had it written?

Heather: That, I found to be much more challenging. Self-publishing is hard. I looked at the potential of going the traditional publishing route, but the problem is it takes months to pitch yourself and present yourselves to sell a publisher onto you, which I really don’t want to wait that amount of time.

When I found out, to get in their queue, it’s usually 12 to 18 months from that date that you signed with them that your book will come out, when I heard that timeline, I said, ‘No way. I don’t have a year or a year and a half or two years to wait. I need traction and action now.’

I decided to self-publish. Again, I Googled, ‘How do you self-publish a book?’ I just piecemealed them together. The reality is if you are committed to finding ways through the obstacles and finding solutions, you’ll find them.

I asked for help, and I was relentless in my pursuit of researching who could help me design the cover, who could help me with the layout, and I ended up finding a company that had an a la carte service that really allows you to pick. If you want someone to edit your book, they have someone for a fee for that. If you want someone to design the layout, they have someone for a fee for that. I decided to go that one-stop shop and then just pick the pieces that I needed, so that I didn’t have to go running around dealing with a lot of different vendors.

Joseph: Through the process of writing and eventually publishing this book, I’m curious, Heather, was there something that you learned about yourself?

Heather: I learned that I had been putting myself in a box my whole life, and that was wrong. I believe that my box and my lane was sales. It was leadership and it was business. That’s where I belonged because that’s what I knew.

I was so scared the day that I decided to jump out of that lane and jump into this author lane, entrepreneur lane. I was petrified, and so many times, I nearly gave up and just started applying to old media companies and trying to get back to what I knew I was good at.

By getting rid of the lanes, blowing up the box, I realized that my strengths, my skills, just like anyone’s, can apply to any lane or any career. It doesn’t have to be just the one you have experience in.

Joseph: I know you were also recently featured in Thrive Global, which is very cool. Congratulations on that. One of the questions that they asked you was about some of the lessons you learned or some of the things you might do differently. I’m just wondering what relation to the book… It sounds like it’s going really well. If you could do it over, what would you do differently, if anything?

Heather: I believe done is better than perfect. You can drive yourself crazy over moving the title up a quarter, a centimeter or the color shift, but one thing that I would’ve done was I would have read through my book in completion again. There’s a couple of small errors I would have tweaked. Same thing with my audiobook. I decided to narrate that on my own which I was so scared of, but it’s really meaningful now when people hear it, because it’s me and my emotion coming through the stories, which is really powerful.

However, there are a couple of errors in the audio book as well, but I was so fixated on getting the book to market that I said, ‘You know what? Done is better than perfect.’ I got to pull the ripcord and go. I’ve had a couple of people reach out to me and say, ‘Did you know there’s an error in the audiobook?’ I said, ‘Well actually, there’s two. Go back and listen again, and try to find it.’

Joseph: That’s a great segue way, Heather, into the last thing that I was hoping to talk with you about before we wrap up with some of the work you’re doing right now for the Harry Walker Agency, which is this point you made about done is better than perfect. In your book, in chapter 10, you say something around not feeling like you have to have everything be perfect. This is something that I continue to work on myself. How do you go about letting go of perfection?

Heather: Well, perfection doesn’t exist for no one. There is no such thing as perfect. The more that I come to the realization that people that try to pretend they’re perfect are the most insecure people out there and my whole goal is to be the most confident me I can be, that means shining my flaws, really shining a light on everything that could potentially be wrong allows me to be my strongest self, my most confident self.

I really step into that as a power. That makes me feel strong and phenomenal versus when I wanted to try to make everything perfect, I never felt so good. I felt badly. I couldn’t achieve perfect. It just doesn’t exist. It was elusive to me.

For me, letting go of that idea of perfection and instead embracing that perfect means that’s the low moment, the insecure moment where you’re trying to hide what’s underneath, when I remind myself of that, I allow myself to shine that light on my mistakes and my imperfections, which draws people closer to me because that’s the real me.

Joseph: Another thing you say in the book is that we all need people who pick us up when we’re down, but sometimes, it’s a job we can do ourselves. For those listeners out there who struggle to do this, what’s worked well for you when it comes to trying to pick yourself back up without having to rely on other people to do this for you?

Heather: I leave reminders for myself everywhere. I read about this in a book, whether it be little notes I put in my suitcase. I’m going to New York to speak tomorrow, so I’ll have a really positive note in my suitcase tomorrow when I get there to remind myself, ‘You can do this. You’re going to be phenomenal.’ I write notes on the bottom of my heels. I put them in my phone, in my calendar, so that if there is a potential low moment that I wasn’t prepared for, I’m going to be able to pick myself right back up in it.

I also hold on to three accomplishments that really help me realize I was scared going into this situation, it turned out okay. Let’s tap into this for the strength I need for right now, wherever I’m walking into.

Joseph: The other question I wanted to ask you was you’re recently on headline news. You talked about finding your superpower. I’m wondering. What is your superpower, and how did you go about finding it?

Heather: I actually have a lot of superpowers. I believe everybody does. For me, I have really, in the past couple of years, come to grips with speaking, public speaking as a superpower of mine. Really, that is about storytelling and feeling comfortable sharing your own stories publicly.

I’ve learned about that through a challenge a friend gave me when I said, ‘I feel like I’m going through life, and I don’t really know what the purpose is.’ He said, ‘You need to put yourself in an uncomfortable situation, so I’m going to challenge you to a standup comedy class.’

I gave him every reason why I couldn’t do it. I’m a single mom. I run a publicly traded company – at that time I was. I don’t have time. He said, ‘Give yourself more excuses or find a way to do it, but I’m telling you this is going to help you really get yourself out of your comfort zone.’ It did. Taking that class allowed me to see what was different about me.

Another recommendation I made to people is to ask those in your circle, peers at work, friends and family, ask them, ‘What’s different about me? What is that special unique quality that you really think I should step into to own my best self?’ and then watch the amazing responses you get back from people. That in and of itself is a confidence building moment, and it will teach you that something that you thought was just normal isn’t that normal. It’s really special.

Joseph: I’d love to wrap up, Heather, with what you’re doing right now, speaking about speaking. I was wondering if you could tell more about your work that you do for the Harry Walker Agency and what your life is like now as a professional speaker.

Heather: I had reached out to Harry Walker Speaker Agency prior to writing my book. They told me that there wasn’t space for me on the team. Once my book came out number one on Amazon Business Biographies, they contacted me back and said they wanted to have me. The book was really the catalyst for me for so many different things to really take that next step.

The Harry Walker Agency sets a value on their speakers. Before, where I might feel fine going in to speak at a business for free, they don’t allow that, because they determine the value. Like anything, once you decide your value and you really own that, everybody else will own that and respect that as well. It’s really changed something that I enjoyed doing that I used to do for free, but now there’s a value associated with it in exchange, which makes it that much better for me.

It’s such a rewarding experience. I’ve been meeting a lot of new people, dealing with professional athletes and different companies I never thought I’d work with. I’m going to speak at a law firm to the partners, and I don’t have a background on law. It’s so interesting to see that everyone struggles with confidence. Everyone struggles with adversity, and no matter what your arena or what you do for a living, we’re all in this together.

Getting the chance to work with these different diverse groups and help everyone really own their confidence and embrace these challenges has been such a rewarding experience for me.

Joseph: Do you have any quick tips on how someone who is interested in doing more public speaking or wants to get up in front of audiences more, do you have any tips on how you can gain more confidence as a speaker?

Heather: Practice is everything. I practice in my house in front of a mirror. I make my poor child listen to my random speeches all of the time.

Also, speaking is interesting. People, they want to connect with you, and you need to get their attention, so the first thing I suggest doing is tell a personal story. Even if you’re speech is about something boring and statistics, still open with an engaging personal message, personal story, so that you get people listening to you. That’s half the battle.

Then throughout your speech, ask questions, open-ended questions, ‘Has anybody else in this room struggled with confidence? Do you guys understand what I’m saying, or is this off phase?’ Ask question of the audience so that they’re on their toes listening to you, and then you can see in their eyes what is resonating or what’s not resonating.

Really try to practice enough so that you don’t have to read the script. I really believe that people would rather listen to you talk, share stories, and make some key points versus reading a script and looking at a slide on the wall. It’s really about bring your personality to life, and the best way you can do that is by working on your confidence, taking baby steps and putting the time into practice.

I also believe in any time I am nervous, I have a win, win, win playlist that I fire up right before I’m going to go on stage and speak at anything. I also remind myself of different times I felt nervous before I got on a stage, and it actually went okay or it went well. I remind myself that if that one went well, this one’s got just as good a chance, if not better, to go great.

Joseph: That’s great advice there, Heather. Thanks so much for sharing that with us.

Speaking of confidence and being able to speak confidently in this topic of confidence, if people want to learn more about you or your story or your book, Confidence Creator, where can they go?

Heather: You can go to Amazon to get my book, Confidence Creator. It’s at Kindle, paperback, hardcover, and audible. If you want to learn or follow me on social media, I’m @heathermonahan, and my website is HeatherMonahan.com.

Joseph: Thank you so much, Heather, for telling us more about your life as an author and your own career transitions, your experience as a writer, and also your book, Confidence Creator, which I would highly recommend to people out there who are interested in this topic of confidence.

Best of luck with the ongoing book publicity and all of your speaking engagements. Thanks for joining us on the show today.

Heather: Thanks so much, Joseph.

Living with less can sometimes allow you to do more. In this episode of Career Relaunch, JB Adkins, a pilot turned founder of Skyryde, a flying taxi service startup, shares his honest, humble story of walking away from aviation school after receiving a full-ride scholarship so he could pursue his entrepreneurial interests instead. He’ll explain the tradeoffs he made to make things work, including living in an RV with his wife and two young boys to reduce costs so he could fund his Skyryde venture. I’ll also reveal exactly what happened to me on the exact day I decided to quit medical school.

During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I challenged you to think about your own work environment and consider whether there’s a way for you to do more of the work you enjoy doing. What could you do to pursue all your different interests or to showcase all your different skills you’re most proud of? It may even be worth considering ways to look elsewhere to scratch whatever itch you’re feeling

JB Adkins grew up in a large family with 16 siblings. He started flying at age 11 and eventually began his career at Embry Riddle Aeronautical University on a military scholarship. He decided to leave that behind to work in entertainment, music video production, & advertising before bouncing back into aviation to eventually start a string of companies in the field. Along the way, he encountered tremendous obstacles and pitfalls, from being homeless for 5 months with his wife after they had a baby to making the decision to live in an RV full-time to save and invest in his new business, Skyryde, a flying taxi service startup that could change the way people move around cities.

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): It was personally exhausting just looking at my wife, looking at my young son, and saying I’ve failed as a dad and as a husband. I can’t even take care of my kid. I haven’t mastered whatever I needed to master. I’ve kind of failed at life.

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

JB: Thank you so much. I’m honored to be here, Joseph.

Joseph: Thanks so much for waking up, first of all, so early over there. I know it’s like 5 a.m. where you are, so I appreciate you making time for this.

JB: Absolutely.

Joseph: I’d love to just start off by talking a little bit more about what’s happening with you right now. Can you just kick us off by telling me what you’re up to and what you’re focused on right now in your career and your life?

JB: Absolutely, man. First off, I am in the middle of the mountains here in my six-wheel RV camper.

Joseph: Where exactly are you at this moment?

JB: It’s a little town right outside LA called Acton. It’s a horse community, an equestrian community out here in the mountains, kind of in the desert a little bit.

Joseph: Okay.

JB: I am focused on building a company called Skyryde. It’s a company I have always been passion about in terms of the concept, which is sort of a flying taxi, air taxi deal. That’s something that I’ve been passionate about since I was little in middle school. At this point, I would literally sacrifice everything to get this thing off the ground, pun intended. That’s where we’re at.

Joseph: Thanks for making the call from the RV. I want to come back to talking about life living out of an RV, because I know that’s a big part of your story. I also want to come back and talk with you about Skyryde. I want to hear all about what that’s been like and—you mentioned sacrifice—just to understand what you’ve sacrificed and why you chose to sacrifice certain things so that you could get this off the ground.

I’d love to start by going back in time a little bit, JB, because you’ve got a really interesting story. You’re actually the first pilot that we’ve had on this show. I want to start off by going back in time to when you were 11. I understand that’s when you started flying. I was wondering if you just could just tell us how you got into flying, and then we can move forward from there.

JB: When I was seven years old, I believe, my dad took me to see a movie, and I still have the little DVD to this day. It was an IMAX. I think this is when IMAX first kind of popped up. It’s like early 90’s. It was called the Magic of Flight.

It was basically a documentary about like the Blue Angels, the Wright Brothers, and just all these iconic aviation figures and groups. That movie really set me on this trajectory to want to learn how to fly in the first place.

When I was 11, I didn’t know that you could be that young to start. I think I bumped into a flight instructor somewhere, and they saw that I had some aviation tour or something like that. I can’t remember exactly how it happened. As fate would have it, I ended up going to the local airport and literally dumping all the money I’d saved up from cutting grass and took my very first flying lesson that day, which literally changed my life.

From that point forward… I was still relatively young, so I couldn’t fly by myself yet, but I was taking flying lessons like once every couple of months when I could afford it until I was about 14 when I started getting really consistent with the flying lessons.

When I was 14, that’s when I started flying two or three times a week and really working hard towards getting the first level of your pilot’s license, which is your private. I ended up getting that in high school, and yeah, it was awesome. I was doing a lot of fun stuff in high school.

Joseph: Yeah. It’s not the story of every high schooler out there. I was firmly planted on the ground during high school. Yeah, very cool.

I know after that, JB, you went onto the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University on a full-ride military scholarship. Can you tell me a little bit about that chapter of your career and what happened during your time in aviation school?

JB: Military, what they call ROTC scholarships are very competitive, especially if you’re trying to become a pilot. I grew up in a large family too. I was one out of… Gosh, now it’s 16, because I’ve had a couple of brothers and sisters since I left home over the last 10, 11 years.

In my family, we didn’t necessarily have the money to send people to school at all, and so we had to figure it out. I knew that the only way for me to really continue on my aviation career was the military. With airlines and all that, they love to see military experience anyway. I figured, ‘Hey, if I can get my school paid for, I can continue to double down on my flight training and get them to pay for it and still have the prestige of being a military pilot.’

I earned the scholarship through the Marine Corps to Embry-Riddle. They paid for everything literally. I still have a picture, Joseph, of a $180,000 check. It was one of those big checks like you get on those game shows.

Joseph: Like you see on TV.

JB: Right! They presented that at school.

Joseph: Oh, wow!

JB: It’s so funny when I looked back. They literally gave me a check and said, ‘Hey, you’re guaranteed a pilot slot. We’ll pay for everything.’

What was interesting during that time was that I was actually torn. I actually wanted to go and pursue, at least try my hand at film. The family really didn’t think that there was any real future in that necessarily, so off I go to the military, to Embry-Riddle at least. I’m doing ROTC and all that. The entire time was honestly just grueling, knowing that I could be making films every day at USC or something like that, which is kind of my back up.

Joseph: Can you just explain what was running through your head then during those early days in aviation school after you’ve gotten this huge scholarship and yet you’re thinking that, ‘Maybe this isn’t the place for me?’ Can you just walk us through how you thought through that and what you ultimately decided to do?

JB: The ethos was very not me. What I mean by that, it was very macho. It was very warrior-esque. I was able to keep up physically and all that. I look pretty small in stature guy, but I played sports in high school and stuff like that as well. I wrestled and ran tracks. The physical wasn’t as exhausting. It was the culture.

The culture is what turned me off, because I’ve always been sort of a creative, big thinker, pie in the sky. Talking about killing and all that stuff, it really didn’t resonate with me. Every day, getting yelled at, I don’t know. It didn’t really line up with my values.

Even to this day, I look back and I’m like, ‘Yeah, you know, I’m actually glad I’m not over in Iraq dropping bombs on people.’ I’m not disparaging the people who do that, because I have a lot of buddies who are still friends to this day who are out there fighting for our freedom, and I salute those guys.

I think, for me, I really couldn’t see myself at that time, being an 18 or 19-year-old kid. When you have a guaranteed pilot slot, when you graduate, you owe 12 years. I would have had to wait until I was 34 to even consider getting out. That’s a big chunk of my life to give up at 18 or 19. That decision-making process overwhelmed me at the time.

Joseph: Can you remember the day when you decided to leave aviation school behind?

JB: I remember. I think I was at PT. It was like this. It was like 5:30 or something like that. ‘Oh dark 30’ they call it. I’m at PT, because we PT’ed every day, which was physical training. We had to show up. You got to dress a certain way at school. It’s crazy.

I remember being at PT, and I remember not feeling well. I think we had just come off of doing like dips or something like that. I remember like it was yesterday. We had the pull-up bars and the dip little thing. I’m sitting there, and I get off the dip thing, and I just remember feeling super light-headed. My ears started ringing really bad, and my vision starts closing in. I think I’m having an epileptic episode or something like that. I go over to my captain not standing up all the way. I’m like, ‘Hey, I think I’m having an epileptic…’ I don’t know, and I’ve never had epilepsy. I don’t know what caused me to say that.

Saying that actually ruined my chances of continuing on this track to become a pilot. Just saying that, they made a file for me. It were like, ‘Hey, you’re going to see a neurologist, no questions asked, and this is probably going to ruin your opportunity to become a pilot or ever be considered to fly.’ I was like, ‘Whoa! I’m certainly not going to be infantry for the next however long.’ They gave me a choice. At the end of the day, my test came back okay, with them like, ‘Hey, you know what? We’re going to give you an opportunity to either keep your scholarship and continue, or you can just go and you won’t owe us anything.’

In that critical moment, I was like, ‘You know what? I think I’m going to transition into something else. I’m going to give this up.’

Joseph: Wow! How did you then move forward from there? What did you do the next day, the next week to move on and start something new?

JB: At this point, I didn’t really know what to do. I’m thinking, my parents, they’re going to be disappointed. My family, I’ve let everybody down, because they’d known I’ve always been passionate about aviation. It has always been my dream, so to speak, but in my heart of hearts, I knew I wanted to do other things. I just felt like this is the only way to achieve what I wanted to achieve in aviation, which honestly has always been more on the business side.

I tried to join the army’s program, and I stayed with that for about a semester, but I actually ended up getting a D in a math class. That disqualified me from getting the scholarship for the army. Something did not want me to go the military track, man. What I did, I wasn’t able to continue along that path.

Joseph: That wasn’t working out. The stars were not aligning for you there. What did you decide to do next?

JB: I actually ended up getting a job at the local shoe store just so I could figure things out, because I was like, ‘Okay, at this point, I’m going to end up owing. I’ve got to take out a small loan to cover the last little bit of my semester.’

At that point, Joseph, I already had my sights set on California. I wanted to try my hand at the production thing. I wanted to make movies. I wanted to do something creative, and so I started planning my transition that following summer to come out to LA and just dive right in, try to make it in the movie business, try to make it big.

Joseph: Before we talk about the music video chapter of your career, can you just explain what it was like for you to go from having a full-ride scholarship at an aviation school to then working in a shoe store? Not that there’s anything wrong with working in a shoe store. I’ve worked in retail myself. Can you just explain what it was like to go from learning how to fly to selling shoes? Was that something that was difficult to stomach for you?

JB: To be honest with you, it might have been the opposite, Joseph. I think that’s because with sort of the rigidity of the Marine Corps, I felt like I wasn’t really able to be myself. Working at retail job and being around people who were not subjected to that rigidity actually freed me in a sense.

Joseph: Interesting.

JB: I’ve always been a people person. Interacting with people, even selling them shoes and fitting them, I excelled at that – the sales part of it. At the end of the day, I think what motivated me is I knew that I was on my way out to California anyway. I looked at it as a stepping stone, in a sense.

I was still relatively young. I was like 19 at this time. I was just embarking out on my journey and just completely free world at my fingertips, working this retail job, meeting all sorts of interesting people, working with an amazing team there. I still keep in touch with some of those guys to this day, believe it or not.

Joseph: That’s really cool. We have something in common. We didn’t talk about this before, but I actually worked at a Banana Republic for a few months. I was working in the women’s shoe department, helping women try on different shoes there. I loved it. It was one of the most fun jobs I’ve had.

It was exactly what you mentioned, JB. You get to interact with a lot of different people. You’re catching people when they’re pretty happy because they’re shopping for something new. I was like you. I also found it to be kind of freeing in some ways, when I stepped back and thought about it. That’s really interesting.

Let’s talk about what happened to you when you went to Southern California then. You got involved in the music video business, I understand, right?

JB: Yeah, man. It took me a couple of months to really get planted, as far as that’s concerned, but I knew that’s what I wanted to focus on. I wanted to come out. I kind of had it all tracked out. I was like, ‘A lot of really good movie directors start off as music video directors.’

I’ve been a musician growing up. I played in church and stuff like that. It’s a whole another thing. I was like, ‘I love music, and I can definitely see myself doing that,’ so I would just practice writing concepts. I would just listen to music. I’d just sit.

In the music video business, they have what are called treatments. Those are almost like at startups and in business, where you have like slide decks, like pitch decks. A treatment is essentially that for music videos. I’d learned how to write them, reached out to directors I admired. Most of them didn’t ever get back to me, but that’s a whole another thing.

Just really diving in head first and started doing extra work in LA to supplement my income, because at that time, I didn’t really have anything lined up in terms of jobs.

Joseph: Like showing up as an extra in ads or other music videos?

JB: Yeah, totally. I started doing that. With extra work, there’s a lot of downtime, because they’re only using you maybe an hour out of an 8 or 12-hour day. I’d go to the library and get every book I could on film and composition. This is still like pre-internet explosion, before everything was on Google. This like the Blackberry 1.0 era. Not everything was as readily available as it is now.

The library was like my solace. That was where I really was able to kind of hone, just through reading and via proxy, like kind of honed my skills man. A couple of months after experimenting and figuring that out, I shot my first video.

It was like a group of Christian rappers. I knew they wouldn’t take themselves too seriously, no disrespect. I was like, ‘Hey, I’ll shoot your video for free.’ I borrowed a camera from a guy that I met on a photo shoot. I think I paid him like $60 or something like that. I had no clue what I was doing, no clue how to use it, but I think I was looking at some YouTube videos to try to get acclimated. It ended up just diving head first rather and shot my first video.

Joseph: How did you then go from shooting music videos to launching an aerial tour company? Can you just walk us through that transition, because I know that that also involved some, what I’m going to call, kind of tough times just trying to make it?

JB: I just had this longing to get back into aviation, mainly because the music video business is so brutal. On top of that, I was doing a lot of content that I wasn’t really proud of. You’re doing a lot of exploiting. There’s a lot of… the models. I was recently married at that time.

Honestly, it wasn’t the most positive environment. That, coupled with always having passion for aviation, I was like, ‘You know, maybe I should look into something else before this gets out of hand.’ That’s when my wife and I—it was around the time we were expecting our first child, my first son—we started an aerial tour company, or we tried. It was an interesting time.

Joseph: We talked before. You were explaining that you went through a bit of a transitional period in terms of your living situation. Can you just explain what happened and where you were spending your nights?

JB: The music video business, I’m kind of letting it go. It’s kind of going downhill. At that time, I’m like, ‘Hey, let’s start an aerial tour company. This will be an easy…’ I don’t want to say easy but, ‘Let’s put like a text spin on it. We’ll do like an app. When you’re in the air, the app will show you where you are, and it’ll talk to you, so we don’t have to have somebody. The pilot doesn’t have to be distracted.’ All this and other stuff.

We bought an airplane, Joseph. First mistake, should have never done that. We bought an airplane, literally just dropped cash to buy this old airplane that we thought would be an amazing marketing tool. We actually went down to Venice Beach here in LA and asked the police department if we could bring the airplane to Venice Beach.

We were like, ‘Hey, we think this would be an amazing marketing tool. Can you let us put this on the boardwalk so that people would be enamored by seeing a freaking airplane, and then they’ll sign up for a tour?’ They were like, ‘Sure, we’ve never seen that before. Come down.’

We took the wings off the airplane, trailered it down, and set this airplane up on Venice Beach. We got quite a bit of press act for doing that actually. It was hilarious. People were just like, ‘This guy has brought an airplane to Venice Beach? That’s a first.’ We booked zero tours, bro. Zero.

Over the next month, we had this hangar rent we had to pay for. We had the airplane obviously. It needs maintenance. We had stuff that needed to be done to that. We ended up folding in like two months.

That was devastating, because here I am at this point. My wife was literally about to go into labor. We had three weeks left until my son is born, and I have this airplane that has all these issues, and I can’t sell it. The hangar rent is super expensive here. All of this overhead, and I have no idea how I’m going to take care of it, and so I literally ended up getting evicted from our apartment and go on to live with a friend for five months.

My son at this point, he literally spent his infancy from house to house. We lived with some friends for five months, and we went to live with some lady we met at a church for a month or so. Every time I talk about it, I just kind of get emotional because it was a tough time. I don’t know how to say it.

Joseph: What was the toughest thing about it?

JB: It was personally exhausting just looking at my wife, looking at my young son and saying I’ve failed as a dad and as a husband. I can’t even take care of my kid. I can’t take care of my family. I haven’t mastered whatever I need to master. I’ve kind of failed at life.

I remember literally when we were moving the stuff out of our house, when the sheriffs were on their way to make sure that we had cleaned everything out, when we were evicted, I remember looking through hotels. You know those motels that you stay by the week? It’s like 200 bucks a week. I literally remember like, ‘Man, I’ve got like a few hundred dollars left to my name.’ I just need to find one of these hotels that’s not in the jankiest area, so we’ll be somewhat safe.

I just remember feeling like… My God, dude, I couldn’t come to grips with the fact that I was homeless, literally, with a baby, with an infant. That was devastating on a personal level.

Joseph: How did your wife handle that situation, because she’s a new mother? You guys don’t have a home. How was she reacting to this whole situation that you’re in at the time?

JB: I’m so fortunate man. I always tell people my wife believes in me more than I believe in me. I don’t think this has anything to do with it per se, but my wife’s actually older than me. We’re eight years apart. My wife had had her own career, and she really took a step back to help support what I was doing.

I think my wife saw the potential. I was young. I think when that happened, I was like maybe 24, 25. She surprisingly was very calm throughout the entire ordeal and just had faith to say, ‘You know what? I know this looks jacked up. Yes, I’m going through it emotionally too, but I am going to support you. I’m going to play the strong person in this thing, and we’re going to get through this.’ That’s exactly what she did.

Not one night, from sleeping on a friend’s couch literally on her back with a baby on her chest every single day, did she complain – not one night.

Joseph: You can’t really ask for more than that, especially when you’re trying to figure things out and you’re already feeling pretty bad about things. That just sounds incredible that she was such a great support during that time and so understanding about the situation.

How did you get yourself out of that situation? Can you just explain what transition you went through? Then I want to start talking a little bit more about Skyryde.

JB: I ended up just taking a step back and going to find a job. I essentially just leveraged my portfolio to get a gig at The Salvation Army. The Salvation Army had like an in-house agency that they had just launched, and they wanted young creatives to come and kind of help spearhead this thing.

Salvation Army is a Christian organization, but I sent them my music video really, with all these hard core rap videos and girls and twerking and all that. I was just transparent with them. They liked the work just because of the quality of what we had done. I was like, ‘Look, that was kind of a past sort of base.’ I’m totally focused on doing something new and positive now, and I got the gig.

Mind you, when you get an eviction, it’s not easy to find a place to live, so we had to wait a little bit longer to get into a place to get somebody to trust us. I got the job with Salvation Army, and I was able to kind of double down on the skills that I had learned in music videos and in production to help own what we were doing there. It was an amazing experience.

I’m not an office guy, but I’ve certainly learned what I needed to learn to transition into the next phase, into sort of doing what I’m doing now. I’m very grateful for that time.

Joseph: Before we talk about Skyryde, just one more question about your transition. What was it like to be able to move back into your own place?

JB: I don’t think I can describe the feeling, Joseph. Just the pride, having a bed. The first three months, we just had an air mattress, and we were happy to have that, just because we had slept on couches for so long. It was a relief. I think that’s the only word I can use to describe being in our own place at that point: relief.

Joseph: Let’s talk about the current chapter you’re in right now, which is working on Skyryde. I want to start by talking about this lifestyle choice that you made and why you decided to live in an RV. Can you just explain what living in an RV has opened up for your life and for your career and what you’ve been able to do because of this?

JB: I left The Salvation Army about maybe two and a half year ago. I basically was like, ‘Hey, I want to focus on this aviation project that I’d had in mind when we got evicted.’ The aerial tour company was sort of a precursor to what is now Skyryde.

I had this idea back then to sort of do something like this, but that whole eviction and having to go work and all that kind of derailed things a little bit. I’ve left Salvation Army to focus on this. I started like a consultancy. Salvation Army was my first client. They actually hired me back as consultant, which was awesome. It gave me flexibility, and I still had an income. But a market like LA is just so expensive. The overhead to live is just sky-high, literally.

My wife and I had been talking about an alternative lifestyle so we could save every penny and put it into just getting started with Skyryde. We actually tried a boat first. It was three things. We were either going to move to a cheap part of Europe for a while. We were going to move to like Spain or something like that and try to arbitrage our money that way. I was like, ‘No, let’s just stay here and get a boat.’

We tried it. We a rented a boat on Air BnB, and we stayed. We tried that, but the rocking was bothering my wife. Then we literally found out we were pregnant with our second kid during staying on the boat. I was like, ‘Well, that’s not going to work out.’ Having two kids on a boat, it’s just going to be counterproductive.

Then, we looked into RV’s. I’d always been under the impression that RV’s were super expensive to sort of own and operate. I’m thinking RV parts are very expensive and all that. We’ve ended up finding an RV, and it was a dream. It’s an older RV, but it had been owned by one couple. We bought the RV from them and the next week literally moved into it. My friend let us basically rent his driveway out at a property that he wasn’t living at. We did that for like two months until we got kicked out by the HOA.

We are forced to figure out where to park the RV and ended up finding a membership RV park which has been… We literally are paying a couple of hundred bucks in rent a month for everything – water, electricity, and the sight. It’s amazing.

I like to say we were able to save almost all of our income and put that into bootstrap in the business. It’s been an amazing, amazing experience so far. I wish I would have done this years ago, honestly.

Joseph: Is there something that you’ve learned about yourself, having lived in an RV for a while now?

JB: I’ve learned that home is where the heart is, and I would say heart equals family. Now, it’s my wife and myself and my two young boys. We’ve never been happier, honestly. We’ve learned to live with less. We don’t have any storage. We own everything we have, no debt. It just frees us up to the point where if we lost everything today in terms of finances, we’d be just fine.

I think we’ve just learned to sort of cultivate an air of peace and serenity in our home. This is kind of our refuge, man. We love being at the RV. For my sons, I think this is going to be an amazing experience for them and have a major impression on their upbringing and how they approach life. It’s awesome.

Joseph: It must be a lot of fun for them, definitely.

JB: Oh, they love it. They love it. They run around and…

Joseph: I can imagine, yeah.

Can you tell me a little bit more about Skyryde? What’s it about, and where do things stand right now with the business?

JB: It’s a service that lets people book short hops on small planes between airports and major cities. It’s an alternative to traffic. We’re actually getting a lot of favorable press and stuff right now, but the journey has been an arduous one to say the least. It has been a long journey.

The aviation business is not easy by any stretch, and we’re dealing with a lot of different regulatory bodies who are very, very, very difficult to sort of deal with, I guess.

You literally, in LA, can book a flight through Skyryde, and we’ll stick you in a tiny airplane and take you from Van Nuys here in LA to Santa Monica, which typically is an hour and a half commute. For us—we just did it the other day—it was 6 minutes and 49 seconds.

We’re really trying to sell people their time back. The goal with that, honestly, is to build the best flying taxi company there is with the latest and greatest technology. It’s a lot of fun, man. I’m having a ball.

Joseph: Having been through all of these different changes, from starting off in aviation school, then moving into entertainment and advertising, and now that you’re working on Skyryde, how does this experience compare to some of those other experiences that you moved away from?

JB: This one, I’m in it for the right reasons. I think even with the music videos and advertising, I was always kind of focused on the money and trying to be something I wasn’t. That’s kind of the culture. The industry is kind of keeping up with the Joneses and having the fanciest car and wearing the latest outfits and swag. You kind of have to play the part. I wasn’t really being myself, which is so funny, because with the Marines I thought, ‘Hey, if can go and do this, I can just be myself.’

In essence, I was actually sort of being affected by the people around me who weren’t always the best influence. The decadence and the excess and all that, that’s what music videos and entertainment is all about.

I think with Skyryde, it’s really just me. This is the 11-year-old me in a 28-year-old body, having the imagination to dump on my change on that. I remember it like it was yesterday, on the flight school counter and taking my first flying lesson and really dream and believe that could do it, that I could be a pilot by the time I was 16. That same energy and imagination has really penetrated everything I’ve done with Skyryde right now, and I’m totally happy.

I’m not doing it for the money. My wife and I talk about it all the time. If we need to live in our RV for the rest of our lives, then we’re good with that. We have everything we need – everything, and then some. You know what I mean? I think it’s just a different experience altogether. It just is authentic. For me personally, it’s what I’ve always wanted to do.

Joseph: That’s fantastic to hear, JB. I got one more question for you, and then I’m going to let you go. What’s something you wished that you had known about career change that you now know having been through all of these different transitions?

JB: Here’s what I know. The same thing that held you down in terms of your skillset and your personality and the nucleus that makes you you, that makes you successful in whatever it is that you’re doing is the same thing that will carry you through your transition, honestly. I think it’s just a matter of finding what your strengths are and doubling down on the next thing.

The work might be a little bit different, but at the end of the day, I think your skillsets and the things that have empowered you through the other stuff you’ve done, whether that was a previous career or what have you, or a series of other things, it’s really the same set of skills that are going to empower you and carry you through this next phase.

Joseph: That makes a lot of sense. I think it’s really important to remind yourself that the things that are kind of nagging you right now or the things that you feel you should be doing instead of what you are doing are actually the things that you should latch onto as you try to figure out what you want to do next in your career, that you shouldn’t apologize for it, and that you should actually embrace it and be proud of it and kind of roll with it.

JB: That’s a hundred percent, man. Wow, I love that.

Joseph: Speaking of doing work that you really enjoy and finally getting around to doing something that’s more in line with, as you put it, your nucleus, if people want to learn more about how things are going for you or if they want to learn more about Skyryde, where can they go?

JB: They can go to GoSkyeryde.com, and we spell it S-K-Y-R-Y-D-E. It’s just a web ad right now. We literally just recently launched in May here. We’re still working on the software and stuff like that, but if anybody’s in LA and needs a flight, go to Skyryde and book one, or you can reach out. There’s support email there, and I’ll probably be one of the ones to answer that, and we’ll try to get you on a flight.

Joseph: Okay.

JB: Just let you try it.

Joseph: It sounds great, JB. I hope that people will check that out. We’ll definitely include the website in the show notes. I just wanted to thank you again for telling us more about your very interesting career journey and how you navigated the transitions, especially during those times when things got pretty tough, and also some unique perspectives about the importance of doing work that allows you to be yourself and that makes the most of who you are. I think it’s a good note to leave on.

I just wanted to wish you the best of luck with Skyryde and also best of luck with fatherhood.

JB: Oh, thank you so much, Joseph. I’m so honored to be on. Like I said, I’m so grateful for you, seriously. It’s been amazing

When you’ve had a successful run in your career, leaving it behind can be especially difficult. So how can you tell when it’s time to make a change even when you’re good at what you do? In this episode of Career Relaunch, Shawn Askinosie explains how he relaunched his 20-year career as a criminal defense lawyer to found his own chocolate company. We’ll discuss how your intuition can be more precise than your logic and how to create the space you need to make a clear decision about your career. Afterwards, during today’s Mental Fuel segment, I’ll talk about how serving others helped ME figure out where to take my own career.

During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I talked about how I myself gained some clarity when I was feeling confused about where to take my career. In line with Shawn’s advice, I challenged you to find some way to serve someone, ideally in a way that relates to your unique skills, strengths, or interests. It can be something simple. It can be something small. But just some way to help someone else out in a way you also find gratifying. If you can carve out some time to do it, you might be surprised where it ends up taking you.

Shawn Askinosie with farmer partner Vitaliano in Ecuador

Shawn Askinosie left behind his 20 year career as a criminal defense lawyer to found Askinosie Chocolate, recently named by Forbes as “One of the 25 Best Small Companies in America“. Their business model has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and numerous other media outlets. Shawn was named by O, The Oprah Magazine, as “One of 15 Guys Who Are Saving the World.” He’s a Family Brother at Assumption Abbey, a Trappist monastery near Ava, Missouri, and the co-founder of Lost & Found, a grief center serving children and families in Southwest Missouri. Shawn and his daughter Lawren Askinosie recently wrote a book called “Meaningful Work: A Quest To Do Great Business, Find Your Calling and Feed Your Soul.”

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): There was this space that wasn’t trying to worry about me and my inspiration and passion and career. It was a space created because I was thinking about someone else. That’s when there was enough room for an idea like chocolate to come into play.

Joseph: Hello there, Shawn. Welcome to Career Relaunch. I’m super excited today because you’re calling in from my hometown of Springfield, Missouri. Welcome.

Shawn: Thank you. Thanks for having me. Come and visit us some time.

Joseph: I definitely need to get back there. I haven’t actually been there for a couple of years now since my most recent high school reunion, but I definitely want to get back there. Speaking of Springfield, I got to give a plug to Springfield, which is where I spent most of my childhood. I was just wondering, Shawn, if you could start off by telling us where you’re based there in Springfield, and what you’ve enjoyed most about living there for so many years.

Shawn: We are on Commercial Street in Springfield, Missouri. It’s like a lot of cities, especially in the Midwest, where we have a part of our community that’s undergoing revitalization and development—so we have on the streets some retail—mixed with the places that deliver social services in our community.

Candidly, that is what drew me to the street to begin with. I wanted to be near where people were who needed social services. That’s what this street is about.

Joseph: I do remember that part of Springfield. I guess, when I lived there, that was definitely an underdeveloped part of the town and not a part of town that got a whole lot of attention. When I went there a couple of years ago, it seems like there was some sort of revitalization that was happening there. That’s very cool.

I should probably say to the listeners, I moved away from Springfield in 1996 to head off to college. In the past two decades, I’ve lived in probably about 10 or so different places. I have yet to live in a place where people are more down to earth and friendlier than they are back in Springfield, so I definitely miss Springfield. I miss the people there, and I miss a lot of the places there.

Anyway, I digress. We got a lot to cover today. I want to talk about your time as a lawyer, your time working in palliative care, and also your current work as the founder of Askinosie Chocolate. I was just wondering, Shawn, if you could just kick us off by talking about what you’ve been focused on right now in your career and life. I think you recently just got back from a trip to Ecuador. Is that right?

Shawn: I’ve been traveling to meet farmers since we’ve started this thing 12 years ago. My trip to Ecuador was cool because I met with one of the farmers that I’ve literally been working with since the very beginning. I see him every year. His name is Vitaliano. Now I see his family, his kids growing up, and now I’m working with his kids. I was there just a couple of weeks ago.

Also in the Amazon, which is another new, recent origin for us, working with a cooperative run by a woman. I love traveling to the Amazon. It’s as beautiful as you would think it is. It’s, of course, extremely diverse in terms of ecosystems, but it’s a great place for cocoa to grow. That’s why I was there.

Joseph: I want to definitely come back and talk more about Askinosie Chocolate and your work there, but I also know you haven’t always been the founder there. I want to start by talking about the 20-year chapter of your career, when you were a criminal defense lawyer. Can you just take me back to that time in your life? What sort of work were you doing at that time?

Shawn: The first part of my practice, right after graduating from University in Missouri Law School, I went to Dallas and worked for a big firm there, but I wanted to come back home. Specifically, I wanted to come back home to practice criminal law. I spent about 20 years defending really serious felony cases. Everything from drug dealers to embezzlement, white collar crime, bank fraud, tax fraud.

I would say that my reputation really was built on the defense of murder cases. They were all very high profile. It was something that I absolutely loved doing for many, many years. I spent hours in preparation for these trials and preparation for the court room. When I was doing it, it didn’t feel like work. I didn’t have any other hobbies. I had a family, which I enjoyed, and that was really it.

Joseph: I know that you’ve got plenty of cases where you’re helping to defend innocent people, but did you also have your fair share of cases where you had to defend people who weren’t so innocent? If so, can you just talk me through how that sat with you?

Shawn: This wasn’t by choice. It just so happened that my criminal jury trials, I did believe in the innocence of my clients. Gerry Spence, famous criminal defense lawyer, said, ‘The guilty people are easy to defend, it’s the innocent ones that are tough.’

Of course, as a criminal defense lawyer, if you have someone who’s guilty, let’s say somebody running drugs down the interstate, and they’re caught with 500 kilos of cocaine in a U-Haul trailer, then my job as a lawyer is to say, ‘What structurally happened? What was the process by which this person was stopped? How were they interrogated?’ and, ‘Where is the overlay of the constitution as it relates to that what we call highway stop?’

Even if the person is guilty, my job as a lawyer is to make sure that that person’s constitutional rights haven’t been violated. Why? Because when we make it okay to violate that person’s constitutional rights because they are ‘guilty,’ then those who are innocent have nowhere to hide. There’s nothing standing up, protecting them, if not the constitution. That’s the mindset and philosophy that I had through the years.

Sometimes it was tough, but I was careful to know the rules of ethics and know where the line was, and I knew what my job was. I knew who my client was in terms of I didn’t have to worry about who was governing the defense of the case.

I would say that, from a personality standpoint, you can’t do that job—especially in serious cases where the stakes are very high, like where someone would be killed by the death penalty or may spend the rest of their life in prison—you can’t do that if you’re worried about what other people think of you or worried about what prosecutors think or if the judges don’t like you. It does require, in some ways, a great deal of strength and inner fortitude, especially when people want to kill you, and you get legitimate death threats. I mean these are all things that happen, but you just have to realize that you’re there because you chose to be there and it’s your calling. That’s what it was for me.

Joseph: It sounds like this was something that, as you put it, was your calling. I also know from looking at your book, you had a really successful track record as a criminal defense lawyer. I know when we spoke before, you mentioned that in 1999, you sort of hit a road block in your career. Can you tell us what happened?

Shawn: It was at the conclusion of a murder trial, and without going into all the details—they’re in the book—what happened at the end of that trial, which I won by the way, I began to notice that something was going on in my body. That is my chest was hurting, and I was having these little mini panic attacks in the courtroom. If you were looking at me, you wouldn’t have seen it. You wouldn’t have noticed it, but colleagues did.

Ultimately, what is was is there was this convergence between mind and body. I think my mind was so detached from my body. Frankly, part of it may have been the reasons, some of the things we were just discussing. After a while, you can only do that kind of work for so long.

The need to change manifested itself in my body, and then I kind of had a bout with some depression and anxiety. I knew that I had to leave criminal law and law, but I didn’t know to what. That’s what was really causing me some anxiety, because I loved it. I loved it for so long. When you do that kind of a job, and you loved it for like a decade or more, and you know you had to quit that job, but you don’t know what else you’re going to do or can do, that can cause a lot of anxiety.

Joseph: That’s really interesting. It sounds like there was like a physical manifestation of something that you couldn’t quite put your finger on. We’re going to talk more about your book, but one thing you talked about in your book was how you had a childhood friend who was, as you put it, winning on the outside but rudderless in the inside. Was that something that you think you were feeling too?

Shawn: I definitely felt a sense of direction in my practice, and I felt like the work I was doing was good work. I feel that to this day, but there was a shift, some kind of shift inside my body. As I said, I think that my body and mind began to make friends again in a sense. My body was saying, ‘Hey, you need to catch up here. I’m going to show you now by making your chest hurt and you feeling fatigued and depressed and anxious, then your mind needs to catch up and get with the ball game.’ That’s what happened. All I knew was that it was happening, and I had to do something about it. I couldn’t live like that.

Joseph: It sounds like this then started off, a period of time, where you spent a few years searching for what you wanted to do next. Can you just tell us about what you did to try to figure that out?

Shawn: I thought that this problem of what to do next, finding my next inspiration, could be solved through research and by just making it happen, just making it work. That’s the way I’d won cases for almost 20 years. Why would I be any different? My own client, me.

It didn’t work. I spent nearly five years searching for what I am going to do. I was looking for a sense, almost like a gravitational pull that, in some ways, either exceeded or at least paralleled to the kind of pull that I felt toward criminal law, and I just wasn’t finding it. It just wasn’t happening. The first thing, of course, I did was research. I tried Google. I tried reading books. I read Po Bronson’s book, What Should You Do with the Rest of Your Life?

Joseph: I’ve read that.

Shawn: Great book. It’s an awesome book. However, I thought, ‘There’s going to be a chapter at the end of this book written in invisible ink that it’s going to say, “Dear Shawn, this is Po. Here’s what you should do with the rest of your life,”’ and that didn’t happen, and so I tried. I looked at franchises. I looked at businesses. I looked at starting businesses. It just wasn’t it.

I started to get some hobbies. I bought a Big Green Egg and started grilling and baking, then making chocolate desserts, and that’s kind of how I started my way into food.

Joseph: I also know, when we spoke before, you mentioned you went through a period where you were working in the palliative care department there at Mercy Hospital in Springfield. Can you tell us a little bit about that phase of your exploration?

Shawn: During this five-year period, when I was just so desperate, one of the things that I’d felt that one of the things I should do is volunteer at a local hospital in their palliative care department. For your listeners who may not be familiar with that, it’s essentially hospice in the hospital, people who were dying.

The reason I wanted to do it is because when I was 14, my dad died of lung cancer. He was a lawyer like me. He had cancer for about two and a half years before he died. It was just terrible to watch him suffer that way and for the cancer to spread throughout his body. I just loved him so much, and I didn’t want him to die. I was with him when he died, and it was such a desperate moment in my life, just begging God out loud to please not let him die, and he did.

I thought, 25 years later—here I am in this search, all worried about myself and what I’m going to do—to spend some time with people in palliative care. I was just volunteering. I just went into people’s rooms who often had no one visiting, no family or friends visiting, and these people are dying, some state of dying. I would just talk with them, have a conversation.

At the end of my visit, I would say, ‘One of the things I do as a volunteer here is pray for people. Would you like me to say a prayer for you?’ and 99.9% of people who were dying will take a prayer. I just say, ‘What would you like me to pray for?’ I prayed their exact words right back to them, whatever they said. In those moments, measured in seconds, I actually thought about someone besides me. It was kind of weird.

When I left the hospital, not every day but many days, I’d be walking out of the doors of the hospital to my car, and it was as if my feet weren’t on the ground, almost like I was walking on air. What is that? It’s joy. People say, ‘Wait, but that’s morbid. You were with people, in fact in some cases, when they actually died. Isn’t that morbid?’ No.

The reason is because of what I say in the book when quote Khalil Gibran who says, ‘Our greatest joy is our sorrow unmasked.’ That’s what happened to me. My great sorrow, the heartbreak of my life so far, had been my dad’s death and being with him in that time of sickness. To be with people and think about them and not me for just a little bit, was a great joy. I knew that I was at the right place in the right time.

Gandhi said, ‘If you want to find yourself, lose yourself in the service of others.’ I didn’t know that quote at the time, but that’s kind of what I did. I didn’t expect it. It’s not an ‘ends justify means’ sort of thing, but it was during that time. I did that for almost five years, even after chocolate for a little bit.

What happened is—this is the paradox—during that time of service, not at the hospital but just during that time of my life, there was this space created. It wasn’t research. It wasn’t talking to people. It wasn’t trying to worry about me and my inspiration and passion and career. It was a space created because I was thinking about someone else. That’s when there was enough room in my pea brain for an idea like chocolate to come into play.

Joseph: Before we get to that turning point for you and when you decided to start Askinosie Chocolate, could you give us a glimpse into what some of those things were that people would ask you to pray for?

Shawn: There were people who would say, ‘Could you pray two more weeks so I live to my 65th wedding anniversary?’ or, ‘Would you pray that I’m healed?’ ‘Would you pray that I die today because I’m in pain, and I’m ready to go?’ I’m 57 years old. I would say I’m most grateful for those experiences, perhaps, of any experiences in my life.

Joseph: When we spoke before, you mentioned a moment when you were driving to the funeral of your mother’s cousin, and you did have a moment where you made some decisions. Can you take me to that moment and what ran through your head at that time?

Shawn: Yes, and thanks for asking about that. I was literally at that cemetery on Memorial Day, where my grandparents are buried. It’s a little farm cemetery here in Southwest Missouri.

I was on my way to that funeral in 2005, then on the way back from that funeral is when I thought, ‘Hey, maybe I’ll just make chocolate from scratch.’ I didn’t have a clue where it came from. I didn’t know it was in a bean, a grounded bean. I didn’t know it grew on a tree. I didn’t know where. I thought it was like a chemical that was just melted and poured into a mold, but within three months of that idea, I was in the Amazon trying to understand how farmers influenced the flavor of chocolate by how they harvest these beans.

Joseph: You went through a five-year process of trying to figure out what you wanted to do. There wasn’t necessarily this moment when the skies parted. How did you know that this idea was the one that you felt was worth pursuing?

Shawn: ‘It was a sense’ is the best I can say. It was a strong sense, and you’re right – I didn’t hear an audible voice or anything like that at all. In many ways, it’s what I was looking for in a book or looking for on Google. It was just a sense in my spirit, ‘This is what you should do.’

Joseph: Let’s switch gears here. Let’s talk a little bit more about Askinosie Chocolate. You mentioned you went to the Amazon within three months of that moment in the car. What exactly did you go do in the Amazon to figure out the whole industry of chocolate?

Shawn: It was a cool experience because I’d never been in what’s called primary forest before. There were farmers there in Ecuador who were teaching about the way they ferment beans after they take them out of the pod and how they dry them and the different nuances in that process that can really have a dramatic effect on the flavor of the resulting chocolate. I just kept going back to Ecuador. 

On that trip, that would’ve been fall of 2005, at that point, I was hooked. I’d already been making some chocolate desserts, but then I was really hooked. I knew I was going to wind down my law practice, which took a year. You can’t just turn out the lights in your office, ‘Bye. See you 200 files later,’ so I had to get a partner. She was awesome and a great friend of mine and is to this day. She helped me wind down my cases. It was quite a process.

Joseph: For those listeners out there, Shawn, who are interested in starting their own company, just throwing yourself into this Amazon region and just figuring things out as you went along, was there something about that process that you learned about starting a business that you think might be worth sharing with others who are thinking about maybe going into an area or starting a company in a segment that they don’t know a whole lot about?

Shawn: It wasn’t that I didn’t know a whole lot. I knew nothing. It was beyond that because I didn’t have any skills in science. I didn’t have any skills in agriculture. I had no skills in finance. I took zero finance and accounting at the University of Missouri.

What I’d say, and I say this to anybody who will listen to me, from high school students to people who are in their 60’s thinking about starting a business, please, please, do this with an understanding of finance and accounting and what the numbers mean for your proposed business idea. I don’t care if you’re going to be guitar player in a band. Take accounting and finance, because we need financial literacy when we’re thinking about starting businesses or even working in a business.

If you have this beautiful idea, it’s attracting you, it’s pulling you, you must do it, but if you lack the finance experience, please reach out to a friend or a family member who can help you with this because it could make the difference in the success or failure of your startup.

Joseph: Askinosie Chocolate has been listed as one of the Forbes 25 best small companies in America. I think one of the things they talked about in the article was about your direct-trade model. I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about Askinosie Chocolate and your products and your direct-trade model.

Shawn: We have a laser, laser focus on the quality of our chocolate. We’re only 16 people in the company, so we’re tiny, but we must focus on trying to be the best-tasting, direct-trade chocolate in the world. The reason is because we do all these other things, but I want people to buy the chocolate because they love the flavor first and foremost. Over time, if they connect with our story and believe in what we’re doing, even better.

That direct-trade model for us is we focus on the chocolate, and then we realized that it’s about more than the chocolate. It means traveling to meet with the farmers. It also means profit sharing with the farmers. We have profit shared with farmers on ever bean buy since I started doing that 12 years ago, and we open our books to them.

This summer, when I go to Tanzania in July, our financial statement will be in Swahili. They now expect that. We profit share with them. They understand the profit share calculation.

s of last fall, we published that on our website. It’s called our transparency report, where I publish every bean buy since I started the company, who I paid, how much, how much we profit shared, and what that price is compared to what’s called the farm gate price, the world market price, and the fair trade price. That’s about as transparent as you can get.

We have this belief that who we are, how we behave, how we treat people, is inseparable from the resulting product: our chocolate.

Joseph: Before we talk about your book, I just have to ask you this, because I know you’re talking about different feelings that you felt throughout your career. On a day-to-day basis, how would you describe how you feel now compared to your days as a defense lawyer?

Shawn: I feel more relaxed. I feel more open, not as wound up, not as ready to do battle at all times. When you’re a criminal defense lawyer and if you spend much time in the courtroom, you have no friends.

One of these murder cases, I might spend over 2,000 hours preparing for the trial. That’s even before the trial. You sort of build in these insular practices to shield you from all of the distraction. Over time, that creates a closed-off person, almost by necessity.

Joseph: I want to make sure we talk about your book, which is titled Meaningful Work: A Quest to Do Great Business, Find Your Calling, and Feed Your Soul, which you published in 2017. I was hoping to get your perspectives on three of the topics you touched on in your book.

The first is how you decided it was time to make a change, which I know you talked about before where you had this sort of stress and discomfort which manifested physically, and your body was telling you that you needed to make a change. I’m just wondering, aside from physical exhaustion and stress, what other sorts of tipping points do you think people need to watch out for, that signal it might be time for a career change?

Shawn: We need to really just take an inventory as you mentioned. Physically: How do I feel? What’s causing these feelings? Is it my job? Is it the work that we’re doing? Is it that I’m done with it, I’m just tired of it?

Then I think there are other things to look at. For instance, are there other things driving this decision? Are they financial? Do you have commitments with your family that this current job is unable to meet? In some cases, there can be a draw and a sort of message that we receive that is unfinished with this vocation that I had at this time in my life, and now, I see this next step for me.

I just think it requires a lot of introspection, and I would encourage people to get out of Google. Step away from the Google search box. The answer isn’t there. It’s not even in my book.

If someone listens to your podcast, Joseph, or maybe they just read a couple of pages, and they’re inspired by a sentence or a paragraph in the book or just a few second of our conversation together today, then put it down and begin a practice of reflection and introspection that is not dependent on other people necessarily, but just in your own mind. I think that’s where the answer is going to come. ‘Should I stay in this position? Is it what the Buddhists call right work, or not?’

I do believe there is a lot of value in sticking it out and making that a discipline. The reason I say that is because when people make the leap, I want them to be all in. I want it to be whole hearted. I’m not saying, ‘Look, I’m the one who jumped off the cliff and figured out how to build a parachute on the way down.’ I get it, and I support that, but I encourage people to get as much input as they can right before they jump.

Joseph: One of the other things you talked about in your book as you’re trying to figure out your professional calling, you talked about the importance of not doing endless research, which I think you were talking about when you’re speaking about not going on and trying to Google everything. What do you think is important about not doing endless research, which I think is an interesting perspective coming from someone whose career was built on that very principle?

Shawn: It’s because it’s essentially an endless feedback loop. You’ll never stop. That is what I mean by the paradox of choice. It paralyzes us. It’s a bottomless pit of choice. I bet we could see there’s probably a billion searches of ‘What should I do with my life?’ in the Google search box.

I love meditating. I read books on meditating, but it doesn’t make me a better meditator. I’m not saying that people shouldn’t do research once they say, ‘Oh, I want to make kombucha. I know that’s what I’m called to do.’ I’m not saying don’t, then, do research on kombucha recipes. I’m saying just go into a quiet room, literally and figuratively, and start thinking. Let the ideas bounce around in your head to the point that it’s actually uncomfortable.

We, in this world today, are uncomfortable with silence and solitude. We are no longer familiar with it, and it’s painful to sit and listen to the voices in our head that are so loud. We need to find a way to calm those and understand that the balm is not going to be found in a book or from a Google search.

Joseph: That’s a good reminder that you got to give yourself some headspace and some permission to just have a little bit of down time, which I’m definitely not very good at doing myself.

Shawn: I’m not either, but I think it’s an important practice to start even in small ways.

Joseph: Absolutely. Finally, Shawn, before we wrap up, you also touched on the fact that, after you left law, you described in your book that you went through this challenging period of having escaped from your old job without a new dream to pursue yet, which is where I think a lot of listeners find themselves. What do you think was most helpful to you in getting through that daunting period between leaving your law practice behind and finding a new path?

Shawn: I practiced law up to the very end. In fact, for a very short period, I would be in court in the morning on a meth lab sending, and in the afternoon, I’d be making chocolate.

I did have both legs. I had one leg, and one world, and one in the other, but I think the most important thing during that search, during that time, was what we’ve talked about, which is these two things: one, where is my heartbreak, my sorrow, and is there someone who needs me that I know of, that I can serve? Does it relate to my heartbreak in my life? If so, then ‘the greater the sorrow, the greater the joy,’ as Khalil Gibran says. I think that’s the most important thing.

It’s counterintuitive. I’m saying, when we’re struggling—and your listeners, they may be frustrated and saying, ‘Look, I know I want to leave. I know I want to do something else. I don’t know what it’s going to be. I need to go do this research. I need to go talk to these people. I need to attend this conference,’—what I’m suggesting as a possible alternative is to roll up your sleeves, find someone who needs you, and serve them without expectation of anything in return.

Joseph: I want to wrap up, Shawn, by talking about your social initiatives there at Askinosie Chocolate. Can you tell me a little bit more about the charitable work you do in other parts of the world for students in need?

Shawn: We have had this school lunch programs for about eight years in places where we buy beans in the Philippines and in Tanzania. The way that worked was, we have a program called Chocolate University that we started when we started the factory, to engage neighborhood kids in our business.

The way they started in the Philippines is I noticed the kids were malnourished. Talking with the principal of the school, she talked about the severe malnourishment in the school. What we did is we decided that the PTA—there’s a very active PTA there, and I found that in Tanzania as well—they made a product. It’s called tablea. It’s a hot chocolate product traditional to the Filipinos. They put it on my container of cocoa beans in a separate box. We sold it. We sold each unit, and we still do it now on www.Askinosie.com to people for $10, and they get 10 servings. That feeds 220 kids.

What we do is we take all of the sales proceeds, not profit, and monthly give it back to the school where the PTA and teachers manage these school lunch programs, sourcing food locally. We do the same thing in Tanzania but with rice from the PTA. Our little 16-person company has funded over a million meals in the last eight years to kids with zero donations, all 100% self-sustaining. That’s one of our programs.

As I mentioned, we have these school programs, the high school programs, where it’s very competitive for kids in Southwest Missouri, junior and seniors in high school, to get into our program. Half of them were scholarship, the other half are private pay. We raise the money for these kids. It’s $4,000 a kid. They spend a week on the Drury University campus near our factory and learn about our business and Tanzania language, culture, and history. They go home and pack, they meet me at the airport, and we take them to Tanzania.

Maybe when you were at Kickapoo, you might have been in Chocolate University and had this kind of experience. I think you’re a great example of this. I mean, here you are, living internationally. You have an international practice. We’re looking for students that we believe this experience will be a catalyst for them in their future careers.

You mentioned charitable work that we do. That is what it is, but we don’t look at it as that. We had this dualistic philosophy and charitable philanthropy work that really stems from this corporate social responsibility silo in companies that really were started by risk managers, otherwise known as lawyers in big companies that is now turned into CSR, which now is turned into this. What I’m saying is don’t silo it. Find ways in which this can infiltrate the entire company. The good works are just part of being a good business.

Joseph: I totally agree. I think that sometimes people think of ‘charitable work’ being done by NGOs or non-profits, but actually there’s a lot of great work. In fact some of the most impactful work is being done by businesses like yours that are actually profitable and are commercially oriented, but they’re also serving a greater need and a greater good.

Shawn: That’s right.

Joseph: Thank you so much, Shawn, for taking time out of your busy day to tell us more about your life, formerly as a criminal defense lawyer, how you found clarity during your transitions, and also a peek into the great work you’re doing there at Askinosie Chocolate. We’ll definitely include a link to your book in the show notes, which I would highly recommend to listeners. I just wanted to wish you the best of luck with your ongoing work there at Askinosie Chocolate. The next time I’m back in town in Springfield, I’m definitely going to try to stop by.

Shawn: Please. Thank you, Joseph. Thank you so much for taking time to talk to me today. I really appreciate it.

What’s it like to take evening classes while working full time to expand your career options? In this episode of Career Relaunch, Chris Donovan, a former telephone repairman turned high-end women’s shoe designer, shares his thoughts on doing work that’s authentic to who you are and how to deal with being an outlier when you’re pursuring a new career path. Afterwards, during today’s Mental Fuel, I’ll talk about being who you are, but doing it in a way that still allows you to resonate with the right people.

During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I talked about the importance of identifying one aspect of your personality that could serve you well in getting there. I call this a personality asset. What’s one part of who you are that you’ve maybe been holding back, for WHATEVER reason, but could actually benefit from showcasing? I want you to give yourself permission to let it shine. For some help in articulating the various aspects of who you are, you can download my “Personal Branding Starter” 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.

One of the things Chris and I spoke about on this episode was being true to yourself and making the most of who you are at work. This topic is especially relevant if you’re one of those people wrestling with whether or not to “just be myself” at work or flex who you are to meet the specific standards and expectations of your organization, even if that means NOT being yourself. This article from Fast Company entitled Should You Hide Your Personality at Work touches on this.

Chris Donovan who spent 25 years repairing phones, but recently decided to revisit his childhood fascination with shoes to become a high-end women’s shoe designer. With the tremendous support and enthusiasm from his husband, he retired early and was accepted at Polimoda Fashion Institute in Florence, Italy. He’s recently found a potential manufacturer, and is now working to create and launch his first shoe line. You can follow Chris on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest.

Watch Chris Donovan’s full AARP featurette:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lb5kf7exfS8

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): ‘Look around the room,’ she goes, ‘all these 20-year-olds, they’re fashion. You’re not.’ She looked at me, and she goes, ‘You’re crude. Do crude, and do what you know,’ is what she was saying, ‘Be who you are.’ In the beginning, I kind of had lost that.

Joseph: Good morning, Chris. Welcome to Career Relaunch. I am so excited to have you on the show today.

Chris: Hi, Joseph. I’m really glad to be here.

Joseph: I was wondering if you could just kick us off by telling us what you’ve been focused on in your career and your life right now, Chris. I understand, you just got back from a trip to Italy.

Chris: I have. I’ve been looking for manufacturing for my first line of high-end women shoes. Being new has made that a real challenge, but this last trip was very successful. I think everything’s in place for me to get my first line manufactured.

Joseph: Wow, very exciting. I want to come back to that, and I want to talk all about your experience of becoming a shoe designer and going back to school in a fashion school in Italy, but I was wondering if you could just start off by telling me little bit more about your former careers. Let’s go back in time and before you were a shoe designer. Can you tell me about your time when you worked in telephone repairs?

Chris: I started working for the phone company because I knew they paid for college. I figured, ‘Wow, that’ll be a great way to get my bachelor’s and have them pay for it,’ but it was one of those jobs that you get into that was very secure. It paid really well. I was able to move around to different types of jobs if I found one I didn’t like. I started out as an operator, which was just awful.

Joseph: What was awful about that?

Chris: I was the zero operator. I’d work the 11:00 to 7:00, so all night. You did not deal with business people. You dealt mostly with all sorts of emergencies. It was just a different crowd at night. It was really unpleasant. People will say anything if they can’t see you, so I got yelled at all night long and called all sorts of names.

I knew I wasn’t long for that one, so then I transferred to another position. I think, in my 25 years with the phone company, I must’ve had eight different jobs. I kept on transferring, trying to find something that was somewhat fulfilling, and I did not find it.

Joseph: Did it ever cross your mind to leave the company and do something different? Or was your mind pretty much set on staying within the company because of the benefits and the stability?

Chris: I came from a background where you get into a good company, and you stay there. It felt good, especially growing up, there wasn’t a lot of stability. This was a change for me. It was something that was desirable. I think over those years, I realized that security is okay, but it’s not the only thing. You realize that you’re not going to be fulfilled just by being safe.

Joseph: Did you have any inclination that you wanted to do something else?

Chris: I’ve drawn shoes since high school, but never ever thought of it as a career because I didn’t know anybody who ever went into something like that. How would you even begin to do that?

At one point, I did check design schools in this area. There are no shoe programs in the United States. The design schools I checked were extremely expensive – no way that I could afford. Those weren’t covered under tuition reimbursements, so that would have to come out of my own pocket. Considering the fact that they didn’t have anything in shoe design, it didn’t seem to make any sense to make that leap.

Joseph: It’s interesting, because we’ve been talking about the telephone repair industry, which I’m going to call it this very entrenched industrial industry. Now we’re suddenly talking about shoe design. Can you take us back to those high school days when you were first doing those shoe sketches? What interested you about shoes?

Chris: I went to a Catholic high school. It was in the 70’s. The girls wore the ugliest uniforms you ever saw. They were thick polyester. They were mustard yellow and a fluorescent blue. The only thing they could do to express themselves was they would do their hair as high as they could, and their shoes were just outrageous.

I remember seeing one of the girls walk into class once in these extremely high platforms, and I was totally fascinated watching her walk, and figuring out how it was possible. She could walk on these massive structures. I started sketching in my notebook, trying to figure out ‘If you can do that, what else could you do with a shoe?’ It just totally fascinated me, and it never went away. I sketched shoes for 40 years – on the back of napkins, on the back of work orders, on menus, on anything.

Joseph: It sounds like this was a really long-held interest and passion of yours, and yet you didn’t pursue it right away. One of the things we talk about on this show is these turning points or these trigger points for people that make them rethink their life. I know when we spoke before, Chris, you told me that you had something come up with your health at the age of 50. What happened?

Chris: I had started thinking about what I can do to make some changes in my life, and then I was diagnosed with prostate cancer. It was caught really early. Usually, you’re not 50 when you’re diagnosed with it, but they caught it really early. I went through surgery. I’ve been fine ever since, but it gives you a different perspective that ‘I’m not here forever’ and ‘am I going to be happy on my death bed, looking back and saying, “Wow, I was the best phone repair guy”?’ and ‘oh, I was really, really safe. I always played it safe.’ It was like, ‘No, I don’t want that to be me.’

I knew I had a passion, and that’s when I said, ‘You know what? This is stupid. I got to go do something.’ The biggest fear was having cancer and possibly dying from it. It’s just like, screw everything else and just go on and do what you need to do. Who knows what’s going to happen? But you got to give it a try.

Joseph: Can you take me to the moment when you first heard that diagnosis? What’s it like to hear that you’ve got cancer? What ran through your head at that moment?

Chris: It sucks. As soon as the doctor says that, you go deaf. You don’t hear anything else after that. I had no idea what he was talking about as far as treatments go and stuff like that. It was a shock. It took me a while to figure it all out.

I remember going to my primary care, and when I walked in he starts talking to me. This is after the diagnosis.

He goes, ‘We’re going to check your blood pressure. We’re going to do this. We’re going to do this.’

I’m like, ‘Hello! You didn’t even mention the cancer.’

He goes, ‘Oh, we’ll take care of that.’

I’m like, ‘Really?’

He goes, ‘Yeah. We caught it early. You’ll be fine. There’s a ton of different treatment options, so don’t worry about it.’

I’m like, ‘Okay.’

He was right. They took care of it.

Joseph: That’s great news. What prompted you to go from getting this diagnosis to then deciding to become a shoe designer?

Chris: I always scoured the internet for things like classes, anything to do with shoes. There were no classes. There were no workshops. There were very few things available. There were places where you could go for a week and learn how to build a shoe.

I saw a 2-day class on how to start your own shoe line, and it was given by a shoe designer and teacher. He was going to be in New York for 2 days. It was a Saturday and Sunday. I looked at it, and I’m like, ‘You know what? This is my chance to show somebody in the profession my stuff,’ so that’s what I did.

I signed up for the class. I went to New York for the weekend. It was me and 19 women, which was kind of funny. He went through a whole day of exercises as far as designing goes and stuff like that.

Afterwards, he had me stay after class, and he just said, ‘You have to do this. You were born to do this,’ which was the first time I’d ever heard that, especially with such input. He goes, ‘You have to go to Europe. You have to go get a Master’s. I will write you a letter to get into any school you need to, but you have to go.’

As thrilling as it was and as exciting as it was, it was like, ‘How am I going to do that? I have a house. I have a husband. I have a big fat dog. I have all these stuff going on in my like.’ I was like, ‘Who does that?’

Joseph: Was there anything else that made you nervous about going back to school?

Chris: The only international travel I had ever done was to Canada. I had not been to Europe yet. It was terrifying going back to design school, because other than what I did on my own for 40 years, it was brand new to me. I had no idea how I was going to deal with it.

Joseph: Let’s talk a little bit about your time heading back to school then. I’d love to dive in a little bit on this topic, because a lot of times, people think about going back to school and what it takes to go back to school. In your case, I know you eventually did end up going to Italy, but what was your process of finding the right school for you and applying and getting in.

Chris: Italy was the place for shoes. I knew that there were some excellent schools there. Aki, the teacher who told me I should be going, said, ‘There’s an excellent school in Florence that I really think you should go to.’ So I applied there with my sketches that I had, and I had to do a phone interview with the director there. Most students were in their early 20s. I was 55 at the time. I think there was a lot of skepticism on their end, but once he talked to me, that’s when he said, ‘We’d love to have you.’

Joseph: This was at the Polimoda Fashion Institute in Florence Italy. Is that right?

Chris: Yes.

Joseph: What was it like once you got there? I’m interested in a lot of different aspects of this, Chris.

First of all, what was it like to be 55 in school with a bunch of folks in their 20s?

Chris: I didn’t really see myself as 55 really, but it popped up a few times where I got mistaken for a janitor a couple of times. I was older than the teachers. If you see me, I look like a telephone repair guy. All I had were old jeans and old T-shirts.

These are fashion students. They looked amazing. They dressed to the nines every day. I did not look like a design student at all.

Joseph: How did people react to you when they saw you, knowing that you didn’t really look like the stereotypical student there?

Chris: I got a little bit of blowback where there was a couple of students who said I didn’t deserve to be there because I didn’t have any design background. She didn’t mention me by name but she directed this right at me. I was like, ‘Wow. It’s like you’re saying I don’t belong here.’ It didn’t bother me because I’m 55 years old, and I’m a lot older than you, and nothing really bothers me. That was the advantage of being older, I think.

We would have reviews. They call you in once a month to check on your projects and check on your graduate collection. The other students were always leaving crying. Just like you see on TV on some of the design shows: they kind of rip you apart. I know when I went in, I was like, ‘Nothing you’re going to say is going to upset me that much,’ but they were pretty nice to me. They were really nice to me. They like my stuff.

Even at that point, I’m like, ‘Are you just being nice to me because I’m old? I want you to tell me the truth. I’m here to learn as much as I can, and you have to be totally honest with me and give me as much information as you can because I want to make this work.’ They were honest. They said, ‘No, we actually think you have some great design skills.’

Joseph: It’s really interesting, because you mentioned that you didn’t think about your age as much as I think someone would going back to school that age. Was there something about that experience that made your age irrelevant, at least to you?

Chris: I was so excited to be doing something that I love to do, and the course load was intense. I had to come up with five-pair collection of shoes. I had to come up with accessories. I had to do a book. I had to do a movie, and I had to build also to other shoes to prove that I was capable of making Oxfords and loafers and pumps. It was a tremendous course load.

I was so focused. I’d never even thought about my age. For me, this is a dream. I’m going to have a great time doing this.

Joseph: One of the things I remember you talking about in the ARP video is finding your style. Can you explain to people how you found your design style and your design voice through the course of your time there at the Polimoda Fashion Institute?

Chris: Going to Italy changed everything. I’m so glad that I took the trip because I see everything in a completely different way now. I didn’t have any influences in the last 40 years, and it’s not like I sat there and copied other people. These were all ideas that just came out of my head, and I try to articulate it on paper.

When I got there it was a fashion school. Everybody’s walking around looking beautiful, except for me. I was trying really hard to figure out what they were trying to teach me.

There were at least three different points in the beginning that I thought I was going to quit because I wasn’t getting it. They were trying to teach me ideas of collection and research, which were totally new concepts to me. At one point, one teacher came over to me and said, ‘You know I’m really worried about you. You’re not getting this.’ I go, ‘I know I’m not getting this. I’m worried myself.’

There was a light-bulb moment. One of the teachers came over to me. I was trying to work on my book, and she comes over, and she was looking at my images and all the stuff I was doing.

She looks at me and she says. ‘That’s awful!’

I laughed and like, ‘What do you mean?’

She goes, ‘You’re trying to be fashion.’

I go, ‘It’s one of the top 10 fashion schools in the world.’

She goes, ‘Yeah, look around the room. All these 20-year-olds, they’re fashion.’ Then she goes, ‘What were you?’

I go, ‘Well, I was a telephone repair guy.’

She looked at me, and she goes, ‘You’re crude. Do crude, and do what you know,’ is what she was saying, ‘Be who you are.’

In the beginning, I kind of had lost that.

As soon as she said that things, started changing. I’m like, ‘You know what, I know what she’s talking about.’ As soon as I did that, all of a sudden, all the other teachers were like, ‘You’re getting it. This is exactly what we’re looking for.’ I ended up graduating at the top of my class and opening the final show, which really made me happy since that other person said I didn’t belong there.

Joseph: Absolutely.

Chris: It was a turning moment. It worked out amazingly well. They actually ended up sending some of my shoes to Dutch Design Week for one of their design shows. It was a great experience.

I think one of the funny things though is, when I was leaving and we’re having dinner with one of my teachers, I said, ‘What’s the possibility of me actually getting a job when I go back?’ He looked at me and he goes, ‘None. You’re 55, and you’re just starting out as a designer, so probably not.’ Coming home, I wasn’t sure exactly what I was going to do.

Joseph: One of the things that I noticed—and I know nothing about shoe design—when I look at your shoe designs, they are quite, for lack of any sort of technical term here, they’re kind of raw and industrial looking to me as an average layperson. It seems quite niched. At the same time, your voice really comes through. I can completely see how you designed those shoes. It seems like you really found your niche by allowing yourself to be you.

Chris: One of the big things that I’ve learned is that you got to be authentic in everything you do. I’m not going to fake knowing something. I’m going to be totally honest and open. My whole story has been totally honest and open. People understand that. People know that you are who you are.

I think that comes across in my designs. I think it comes across in the way I do business. I know I don’t know everything. I don’t have an ego that way. I will search out people who can help me, because trying to do this with absolutely no knowledge would be… Oh, god. No, I need help, and I look for people. It’s amazing how many people really want to see you succeed.

Joseph: Speaking of diving into an area that you might not have a lot of experience in, can you tell me about your process of taking your ideas now and trying to actually manufacture them? What’s that process been like for you?

Chris: Extremely difficult.

Joseph: I figured.

Chris: Right from the start, when I went off to school and stuff like that, there were all these obstacles. Some of them seemed almost insurmountable at points. The very first thing that happened when I was going to leave Boston was I went to the Italian consulate. I had all my acceptance papers from Polimoda and everything, and I was applying for a student visa.

The woman behind the counter said, ‘You can’t do that.’

I’m like, ‘Why?’

She goes, ‘You’re too old.’

I had to go back like five times to prove that I was actually going back to school in Italy.

All along, there’s been problems. What I’ve learned from that is, ‘You know what? I’ve gotten through and I’ve achieved so much to this point that, no matter what comes up, there’s always a way. You will figure out a way.’

When I started looking for manufacturing, there was no roadmap. There was no menu of how to do this. The whole process can seem quite secretive. Manufacturers can’t talk about who they work for. You have no idea where shoes are actually made, in what factories, where they are. You can not go into Google and type ‘Italian Shoe Factory,’ because nothing’s really going to come up. You just have to keep on figuring out ways of discovering.

I used every power of the social media to meet other shoe people, ask them questions. I found out different ways of searching out information through hashtags and all sorts of other stuff, to find out all these little bits of information. Some of it was useless, but it got me to the point where I was like, ‘Oh, I’m beginning to find some factories.’ I started writing to them, which is not the normal thing to do, but what do I have to lose?

I just started writing to them, saying, ‘Listen, I’m looking for a manufacturer.’ Some got back. Some ignored me. It was difficult finding anybody who would actually talk to me.

Most manufacturers, I’m discovering, are very, very hesitant to work with somebody new, because factories aren’t creative. They don’t look and go, ‘Oh my god, you’re amazing.’ They don’t really care about that. They care about, ‘I got to produce shoes and do this, and we’ve got to have lines.’ They have big, big companies coming in all the time producing 50,000 pairs. That’s their bread and butter.

Then you have this new designer that comes in and says, ‘I want to do 300 pairs.’ You don’t carry a lot of weight. You just have to throw yourself into it, talk to as many people as possible, and get as many network connections as possible to actually find a way to get there. You just don’t give up. You just keep on trying.

Joseph: What exactly did you do in your most recent trip to Italy that you just made a few weeks ago?

Chris: I was actually accepted into a project team. They work with me. They’re actually very excited about my stuff. It’s going to be a luxury shoe line, but it’s also going to be really different.

That’s funny. They kind of said the same thing you did, that my designs are masculine and feminine, but also raw at the same time. I’m not one of those people that go for pretty. My first designs that I’m having done were inspired by wood lathing. I was watching the guy do these incredible, wild, pepper mills. I’m like, ‘Wow. I could really use your ideas to make some incredible heels.’ That’s where that came from. That came from woodworking.

Joseph: The last thing I want to talk about, Chris, before we wrap up by talking a little bit more about your first shoe line, is just some of the things you’ve learned along your career journey. I know you’ve touched on a couple of them already, but one of the barriers we talk about on this show is related to fear. I’m just curious, what’s something that you’ve learned about fear during your own journey?

Chris: Our natural reaction to fear is to avoid it, I think. I understand why, but what I’ve learned is that, if I’m nervous about something or if I’m afraid of something, it probably means I should head in that direction as opposed to running away from it. Because if you want big things to happen, and if you want to achieve big things, I think, you need to face all that stuff. You take that fear and kind of reframe it.

I heard a story, this woman was talking about fear. She was on the bunny hill in skiing. She was 40 years old, going as slow as possible down this very slight hill, and she was terrified. She looked next to her, and the kids were flying by her, screaming and laughing, having a ball, falling down. They’re both experiencing the same thing. It’s just that the kids were looking at it differently than she was.

She said, ‘I was thinking of it as fear, and they we’re thinking of it as excitement, because it’s kind of the same feeling.’ It’s true. It’s like when I get scared, it’s more like, ‘You know what? This is exciting. I’m doing something I never thought I’d be doing, and I’m going to go into it head-on. Who knows what’s going to happen. I’ll survive it.’ I faced every fear that comes along, and it’s been pretty amazing.

My biggest fear growing up was the cancer, because there were people in family who died of it. I suddenly realized, ‘You know what? That’s even doable. I was able to fix that. If it comes back or something else happens, I’m going to face it head on and deal with it.’ You just face the fear and see where it takes you. I’m very happy with the way things are going.

Joseph: Is there something that you have learned about yourself through this process by finally pursuing this dream of starting your own shoe line?

Chris: I have changed so much. It is unbelievable. I used to actually be timid about all these kind of stuff.

Again, being authentic is awesome. I mean all you can do is be yourself. What you want matters. You can achieve anything as long as you just keep on doing it. Sometimes, you have to figure out different ways of doing it. I’m tremendously much more resilient than I was. I’ve become much braver at all these things. I’ve become much more flexible, and I’m seeing things in a really different light. When someone says no to me I’ll just figure out another way to do it.

Joseph: When you look back on your process of changing careers, given all these ways that you have evolved in terms of resilience and bravery, when you think back to when you were just toying with the idea of starting your own shoe line, what’s something that you wished you had known at that time that you now know?

Chris: I wish I’d known that everything’s always going to be all right, that you’ll get through anything. You’re smart enough and capable enough to deal with anything that comes along. Nothing is so big that you can’t handle it.

Back then I just thought this isn’t a possible journey to take on, when in reality, it really wasn’t. Now that I look back, that would’ve helped me a lot.

Another thing that’s really important: surround yourself with supportive people and people who are honest and who tell you the truth. You don’t want people who are going to just, ‘Oh, you’re wonderful. Blah blah blah.’ No, you need them to tell you the truth and be positive about it. Don’t surround yourself with negative people. That’s really important, because you don’t need to hear that kind of stuff. You need to be around honest, positive people who are going to support you and tell you what you need to hear.

Joseph: That’s a great tip, Chris. That’s something I’ve actually been thinking a lot about in my own life, maybe just because I’m becoming a little bit busier. My life’s a little fuller. I’m just making a conscious choice to decide who, not deserve to be in my life, but who I want to have in my life, and who I think adds something positive to my life instead of draining me all the time. I’ve been actually thinking a lot about that.

Chris: You don’t need anybody who’s going to drain. That’s awful. When I first decided that this was kind of a journey I was going to go on, my husband said, ‘We’ll sell the house if we have to.’ It always chokes me up. It’s like, ‘You’re totally all in. You’re willing to change your life to let me follow this dream.’

People like that, those are the kind of people you want.

Joseph: I want to wrap up, Chris, by talking about what you’re doing now. It sounds like you landed your first project. Can you tell me a little bit more about your first shoe line? You talked a little about the style, but can you just describe it in a little bit more detail?

Chris: To me, the foot doesn’t have to still be in a shape of a foot. You can take it, and there are no rules. I want to bring that to my lines. I want you always to look at my shoe lines and go, ‘Oh, that’s really different,’ or I always want you to know, ‘Oh, that must be a Chris Donovan.’ I love pushing the limits on what a shoe could be and just do all sorts of crazy things.

I also know that if you want to have a shoe line, you have to make it so that it will be wearable. People are going to see some of my stuff and go, ‘Oh, we have to go check them out in the store.’ They’re not necessarily going to buy my most outrageous designs. They’re going to want to still share in my designs, but they want to wear a flat or a little heel. I’ve got to take my ideas and filter them in such a way that they still speak of who I am but also make them practical for work or for everyday use.

I’ve learned a lot. I’ve changed. It’s interesting. You also have to know machines, how do they make these in the machines. There’s a lot of rules where seams can go and all sorts of stuff when I’m drawing I wasn’t thinking of, but I’m learning all that now.

Joseph: I have to say, in looking at your shoes, at least the ones that I’ve seen just online, they are absolutely distinctive and very unique. Chris, if people want to check out your shoe designs, where can they go to take a peak of them?

Chris: You can find me on Instagram as ChrisDonovanFootwear. I’m on Facebook, Chris Donovan Footwear. My website is also ChrisDonovanFootwear. You can see some of my stuff in all those different locations.

Joseph: We’ll definitely include all those links in the show notes. Again, I would recommend people to check them out. They are very cool and very surprising.

Chris, I just wanted to thank you so much for taking time out of your busy day to tell us little bit more about your life as a telephone repair guy formerly, and most recently, your journey to become a shoe designer and the lessons you’ve learned along the way. Congratulations again on landing your first project, and best of luck launching your first luxury shoe line.

Chris: Thank you, Joseph. I’m really excited.

What does it feel like to do what you love on stage in front of a ton of people? In this episode of Career Relaunch, Lani Love will explain how she relaunched her career from working at an advertising agency to becoming a professional deejay.  Lani shares her thoughts on how to evaluate which opportunities to pursue and how to balance your career and family interests. During the Mental Fuel segment, I’ll discuss the importance of giving yourself some credit, especially when you feel like you’re constantly falling short.

During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I challenged you to think back to one year ago today, then think about all the progress you’ve made over the past 12 months with the things that matter to you. What’s one area of your life or career where you want to give yourself a little more credit?

Lani Love started her post-college career working in advertising in New York City. On the side, she started deejaying as a hobby, interning with DJ Morsy. When she moved to Chicago, deejaying really picked up for her, and she decided to leave her full-time job to pursue music instead.  She loves deejaying for brands and businesses at  intimate press events, in-store trunk shows, and large scale outdoor activations.

Listen to DJ Lani Love’s full tracks featured in this episode of Career Relaunch:

https://soundcloud.com/djlanilove/viet-kieu-lani-love-x-rich-priors

https://soundcloud.com/djlanilove/wyl/s-dUtZs

https://soundcloud.com/djlanilove/wyl/s-dUtZs

LISTEN TO MORE OF LANI’S MUSIC

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 am more creative and more capable than I gave myself credit for in the past. Learning to trust myself and believe in myself has been something that I’ve learned through all of this.

Joseph: Good morning, Lani, and thanks so much for joining me here on Career Relaunch.

Lani: Good morning! Thank you so much for having me.

Joseph: I am really excited to talk with you today, Lani, because you are the first DJ we’ve got on this show. I want to get into all those details about your life as a DJ and how you became a DJ, but could you just kick us off by letting us know what you’re focused on right now in your career and your life?

Lani: I am DJing, but I’m taking things to the next step and focusing on production and song writing and just trying to figure out work-life balance, the constant battle that everyone has.

Joseph: Can you tell us a little bit more about that song that we heard in the intro? Maybe that’ll give us a good way of starting the talk about this topic of DJing.

Lani: That song is Việt Kiều. Việt Kiều is a term that’s used for Vietnamese people living outside of Vietnam. You could be born in Vietnam and live somewhere else and be called Việt Kiều, or you can be American born, like myself, but have Vietnamese heritage and be a Việt Kiều.

It’s inspired by my experiences as a Vietnamese-American. I wanted to make something that incorporates the two languages that I’m fluent in, Vietnamese and English.

The kind of fun thing about making this song, Vietnamese is a language that has a lot of tones. I think it’s six tones or something like that, compared to most languages which have four. Trying to create lyrics that complemented western musicality with Vietnamese words is very interesting. It was an exercise, because the language has so many tones, and the way your voice fluctuates affects the actual word and what you’re saying.

Joseph: I know in that song, we didn’t get a chance to play the whole thing, but you go on to talk about the Vietnamese language.

[Việt Kiều song] ‘Vietnamese is an interesting language. The words and grammar rules are simple, but if you didn’t grow up a native speaker, pronunciation can be a little tricky.’

Joseph: How much does your Vietnamese heritage influence your actual deejaying or your musical style?

Lani: More than anything, it probably just influences my work ethic. I didn’t listen to too much Vietnamese music growing up. I think I was exposed to a lot of it, but I don’t think it, on a huge level, necessarily influences my musical taste or style. It’s something that is part of my childhood and upbringing. I think, more than anything, it’s just being a child of an immigrant impacted my work ethic.

Joseph: Absolutely. I am kind of like you. I am Taiwanese, but I was born in the United States. There are similar terms for people who are not born and raised in Taiwan but are Taiwanese. It’s hard for that aspect of your life not to influence who you are. It’s very interesting.

Out of curiosity, is that your voice in the song that is going through the Vietnamese lyrics?

Lani: Yeah, that’s me.

Joseph: I’d love to get into that later, just how you actually go about creating each of these songs. Before we go back in time, can you also just give us an example of some of the places where you have deejayed?

Lani: I started deejaying in New York. I played at various bars and clubs there in Manhattan and Brooklyn. I moved to Chicago, just like club, nightlife scene but started doing a lot more retail, brand, and corporate events. I did a little bit of that in New York, but Chicago is where that really took off for me.

Now, I’m LA-based, doing the same sort of thing. I often travel for gigs. Sometimes, it’s a corporation or a big company like Tesla Motors. I deejayed in San Francisco, their showroom opening. I did that for them. Upcoming, I am teaching a conference in Texas at the end of next month.

I kind of float around for various gigs. Sometimes, it’s for fun, like me adding a gig to existing travel, like my recent Vietnam trip.

Joseph: I want to go back in time a little bit with you, Lani, and just explore what you were doing before you were a DJ. I know you were not always a DJ, and you were working in the advertising industry. Can you just tell us briefly about your time in the advertising industry? Then we can move forward from there.

Lani: I was a brand strategist for about eight year, full-time, 40 hours a week, realistically 50 plus. I worked with brand clients to identify better ways to connect with their target audiences. Sometimes, it would be a branding issue, like a way they talk about themselves, the product attributes that they were highlighting. Other times, it was a communications or channels issue. They weren’t engaging enough with their audiences on various social or digital platforms.

I worked with a lot of packaged good brands, like Pampers, Kellogg’s Cereal, Mike’s Harder. I would just write creative briefs that would help guide the development of ad campaign.

Joseph: I remember when I used to work in brand marketing, where you worked with a lot of agencies like yours. On the one end, that kind of work that you just described, Lani, sounds really exciting and really rich. At the same, from the people I knew who work in agencies, I know that sometimes life at an agency also has its challenges. I’m just curious, what made you decide to leave that world behind?

Lani: I worked on a lot of big agencies, the Saatchi & Saatchis and Leo Burnetts of the world, where I think I got lucky with both teams. I had really great bosses, co-workers, mentors.

I think when you work for bigger agencies, sometimes you’re also working with bigger clients, which means they are slower to change. The work can be really stressful, because there is so much at stake with large budgets. You might not get the creative fulfillment that you are hoping for a career in advertising.

When you look at the talent in agency life, there are so many creative people and people who are really excited to tap into their creative potential, but if your client is not ready for it, or if your agency maybe isn’t supportive of it, you don’t get to use your creative mind as much as you’d like.

Joseph: At what point did you start to figure out that you wanted to walk away from that world and start to pursue life as a DJ?

Lani: I think it was two parts. One, like what we talked about, is advertising careers having their various challenges, maybe not being as creatively fulfilling as one would like. The second thing is just deejaying was really picking up for me. I went from playing about one to two times a month to one to two times a week, and then I got to a point where I was playing three or more times a week. I just felt like, ‘Maybe there’s enough momentum here for me to see what would happen if I gave this more of my attention or all of my attention.’

Joseph: I am trying to imagine. You are working full-time, 40, 50, maybe more, hours a week during the day in your day job. How did you actually get started as a DJ?

Lani: I started as an intern for this DJ Morsy out of New York. This was pretty much the same time I started working in advertising actually.

I’m originally from California. I had been a California girl my whole life. When I moved to New York, I literally didn’t know anyone. I think I had three casual acquaintances, a friend from college radio, a friend’s ex-boyfriend from high school. I really didn’t have many close friends. Moving to New York, I felt like if I am going to make this move worth it, I need to pursue everything that I’m interested in.

Sometime during my first year in New York, I was like, ‘I need to learn how to deejay,’ because has been a goal of mine. All through college, I was just too shy and timid to really pursue it. Also, deejaying was more cost-prohibitive then, because you had to get the turn tables. Controllers weren’t an option.

I started shadowing this guy that I met in Brooklyn. I had been following him on Myspace for years. He was nice enough to work out an arrangement with me, where we would meet up once a week, did the intern type thing. He would spend some time showing me the fundamentals of deejaying, beat-matching, transitioning, blending. I really owe him for helping me get started.

Joseph: This world of deejaying is something I know absolutely nothing about. At the same time, I think probably everybody listening to this show has, at one point in time, crossed paths with a DJ if you’ve attended any sort of event or a party.

I would love to talk a little bit more about your life as a DJ, Lani, and get into some of the details of it, because I think it’s a really interesting world that most people probably don’t really know much about. I want to start by playing a quick sample from another one of your songs called Candlestick Flicker.

[music playing]

Can you tell me a little bit more about that song and the inspiration behind that song?

Lani: This is a song that started in the studio with my friend, Nick Scalise. I took it home and made it into what you hear now. Nick started a bass line and some drums and all of that. When I took it home, I rearranged the drums a little bit, chose different sounds and instrumentations for the bass line, and added the various flourishes to make it feel a little more lively.

Nick is an extremely talented musician and producer. The cool thing is, working with a friend, you get a different perspective, different ideas, but I’ve had a different vision for my music. He comes from more of like an indie-pop world, and I have aspirations to make dance music. I like a little more bass in a lot of my songs.

Joseph: Can you just walk us through your process of creating a track like this? I know in this case you were building off of your friend’s track, but how do you actually go about creating a new track?

Lani: They sometimes start with the bass line. Sometimes, it’s a melody. I’m really melodically driven, so I often hum little rifts and top lines to myself and then will sometimes record those and see, ‘Can I try to build around that?’ and then make it into hopefully a song. Sometimes, it’s an idea, and it’s like, ‘This is just a snippet that doesn’t have legs.’ Other times, I build something out, and I am like, ‘Wow! This could be a song. This can be fun.’

With Candlestick Flicker, for example, just when I was choosing the different sounds, I felt like the tempo of it or the rhythm reminded me of an actual candle and a darker setting. I started thinking about what happens in a night club or around candles, I guess. Dimmer lighting, people get a little close, because you don’t see all the details. Everyone looks a little more attractive and sexy.

Joseph: Speaking of night clubs, we’ve talked a little bit about your process for creating these tracks. I’d love to switch gears a little bit now, Lani, and talk about the experience of actually being up in front of a crowd deejaying. Can you just take us to one of your first moments, when you were up in front of a big crowd and deejaying for the first time? What was going through your head, and what was that experience like for you?

Lani: One of the first times I deejayed for a crowd, probably in New York with my friend Morsy, I mentioned. The earlier gigs, a lot of it is just thinking to yourself, ‘Don’t mess up.’ The technical part of it, blending of songs, the various knobs on the mixer, it’s just not as instinctive as it would be once you are a seasoned DJ. You’re thinking, ‘I want to play this song, because it is cool,’ but you don’t really know how people will respond to it, because you just aren’t as seasoned. I think a lot of it was just freaking out and being like, ‘I hope I am doing this right. I hope this sounds okay. I hope I don’t clear the dance floor.’

I don’t know that everyone worries as much as I do, but I take deejaying pretty seriously. I just wanted to try my best to be good and play something that was different but still fun and familiar.

Joseph: That would seem like an immense amount of pressure to me to be up there, where the entire life of the party kind of rests on you. Do you have any thoughts on how you managed that? It sounds like you did deal with some nerves. How did you actually overcome that and get past that?

Lani: Practice is a big part of it. I feel just comfortable, and I have played on every single mixer. For the most part, it’s just reflex and instinctive. I know all the songs in my catalogue really well. I can kind of just sing along, and I’ll know that, ‘Right after this course is when I want to mix out.’ It’s not even something that I really think about, so I can spend more energy and focus watching the room and seeing how people are responding to various songs.

I also know that, ‘These handful of songs are really great at building the dance floor, and these are various songs that I can use to change the energy of the room to take it from zero to a hundred.’

Joseph: I also want to talk about the business of being a DJ, which is probably not something most of us think about. Have there been any sort of surprising parts of building an actual business for yourself as a DJ? Because there’s also that whole side of it.

Lani: I actually made a diagram on this when I was at Leo Burnett. It’s an x-y axes, one being money and one being how cool a gig is. There’s this small, sweet spot where you make a lot of money and the gig is cool, but a lot of the coolest gigs don’t come with the most money. There’s wedding deejaying, which if I am honest, probably the least cool but can be quite lucrative if you want it to be.

I made a conscious decision to be like, ‘I have to make a living. I’m an adult. I have bills to pay, a life to live, but I am not chasing money. If I was, I’d probably still be working in an office.’ I was like, ‘Wedding deejaying, no matter the amount of money, I will likely turn it down,’ unless it’s a close friend or some client or something like that.

I have no aspirations to be a wedding DJ. I have no aspirations to own a booking agency and have other DJs work for me. I just really want to work with brands and people and clubs and venues that I am genuinely excited about.

Joseph: What is the impact, if any, of being female or Vietnamese or both on your experiences as a DJ?

Lani: Being female, there’s a little bit of a novelty associated with it, because there are fewer female DJs. I think you often get underestimated. People who are really involved with music and deejaying know that there are many talented female DJs, but people who are maybe slightly step removed don’t know that. They are always like, ‘Oh, you are really good for a female DJ.’ It is like, ‘Whoa, for a female DJ? Why do you have to give that caveat a backhand of compliment?’

There are more female DJs than before but still a minority in the industry. When you look at festivals and all that, women don’t make up as large a part of that population as they should, because there are so many talented women.

Joseph: Speaking of gigs, Lani, one of the things that you talked about in your interview that I read with Rent the Runway is that if something is meant to be, it will happen. What has made you come to adopt that sort of philosophy in your career?

Lani: Sometimes, I would have a conflict, and I’d be really distraught that I couldn’t take on this gig or I couldn’t work with this brand because I just didn’t have the date available. What I’ve realized from doing this for a decade, another opportunity will come around. There might be the one that seems the most ideal, but if it’s meant to be, it will happen.

There have been venues where when they first opened, I reached out, and they already have a booked calendar. I don’t get to play. I’m kind of bummed out. Later, sure enough they’d reach out, and then I ended up becoming a weekend resident DJ. That’s cool.

Generally, I’m a little bit less stressed about things. I just think things will work out one way or another.

Joseph: I also want to talk about the balance between your professional life, Lani, as a DJ and also your personal life. I know that you mentioned you were in New York, and I know you were also in Chicago for a while, and it sounded, from our last conversation, like things are going quite well as a DJ there in Chicago. What made you move back home to LA?

Lani: Between New York and Chicago, I’d been away for a decade. Each time I came home to see my parents, I saw that they were older. That kind of freaked me out, and then I think the thing that really did it—both my parents are okay. I’ll start with that, but—in one week, my dad got in a really bad car accident, like super nasty. It was on an inside street, two blocks from his house. In that same week, my mom slipped and fell in her restaurant and broke her ankle.

That just was a wakeup call and a reminder that they’re mortal, and their time and my time on earth is really precious, so I just upped and moved. It was a really fast move. I think in my mind, I had always known that I would try to be closer to them, but the timing of it was really driven by those two incidences.

Joseph: What impact on your career, if any, has that had on your professional life as a DJ?

Lani: If I’m honest, not the best. deejaying is not like other careers. Your resume does not necessarily carry a lot of weight. It does not matter what I’ve done. Here, it’s a lot of who you know and the various scenes that you associate with. It’s almost like starting over in moving here.

In terms of my business and my gigs, I kind of had to start over, but now I am gigging on a consistent basis in LA. I have my group of people that I like to play with, that I work on music with, which is a newer thing for me. I am in a better place with LA. I feel good about it, and I’m optimistic about opportunities that will come out of living here. Song writing and production alone has been a big goal of mine for a while, and being in LA has really helped me pursue that.

Joseph: When you look back on this transition, Lani, going from someone who once worked in advertising to what now sounds like quite a successful run as a DJ, what’s something that you wish you had known that you now know about changing careers?

Lani: Learning how to be self-employed, there’s a learning curve that goes with that. Plus finding new clients, managing your calendar, bookkeeping, stuff like that. I wish that I had known more holistically all the things that I would be managing in becoming my own boss. It would have been nice to just have a little more awareness about just how I would be working so much.

Joseph: Is there also something that you have learned about yourself from this process of making this shift?

Lani: I am more creative and more capable than I gave myself credit for in the past. Even now, sometimes I have to give myself a little pep talk and be like, ‘You can do this. You’ve done this.’ I think just learning to trust myself a little more and believe in myself has been something that I’ve learned through all of this. It’s been a cool journey and still a work in progress.

Joseph: The last thing I want to talk about, Lani, before we wrap up is your time at South by Southwest, which I know when we first connected, that was before you were about to play out there. I think it’s super cool that you got play at South by Southwest. First of all, for those people who aren’t familiar with South by Southwest, can you tell us a little bit more about the event?

Lani: South by Southwest is a festival. There’s the interactive portion, film, and music.

Every single venue in the city has some sort of South by showcase. This year I had the opportunity to play for official showcases. That was really amazing, because I got to be on the bill with some artists that I really like and admire. I also got to play in front of people that I admire and look up to. It’s kind of crazy.

It is just this really unique environment, because you have really huge artists in a variety of venues. Sometimes, they’re at a smaller place than they would typically play, and you have a lot of up-and-coming talent on stages being exposed to new audiences.

For myself, that was really cool, because I definitely have some new fans. I don’t even like saying fans, because I feel like I’m still just a small person, but yes, there people who now follow me that are not friends of mine.

Joseph: I follow you on SoundCloud now.

Lani: Thank you.

Joseph: My understanding, Lani, is that South by Southwest started off as a music festival, but now it’s really taken off, especially the film and interactive events, featuring tech firms. I know they’ve got accelerator pitch events. This thing is huge there in Austin, Texas. I’m just wondering. How did you get the opportunity to deejay at such a huge event?

Lani: Part of it was luck. In the past, I’ve had South by opportunities present themselves, but they didn’t work out. I was bummed. This year, stars just aligned, and it was great.

I had the opportunity to play one South by showcase, and I actually had debated whether or not I wanted to go, because a lot artists come to play that festival out of pocket. You get a small amount of money for playing a showcase, and it depends on which showcase too.

I got hit up about another showcase, so I was like, ‘Oh well, to play two, I think it’s worth it, so I’ll do it.’ I went ahead and committed, got my flight, all of that. I think just from committing to being there, I got hit up about other opportunities and then got referred for another one. It went from being one to four showcases just by me saying, ‘Okay, I’m going to be at South by.’

Now that I think about it, a lot of it has to do with just stepping stones. One of the groups that I worked with that booked me, I had worked with them previously in Chicago. I played two of their Lollapalooza after-parties. A lot of it just comes from staying in touch with people that I’ve worked with, and then just being fortunate enough to have people who are nice enough to remember me when they have awesome opportunities like this.

Joseph: I’d love to wrap up, Lani, by talking a little bit more about what you’re doing right now. Can you just tell us what types of events you most enjoy deejaying right now in your life?

Lani: I love doing brand events and day parties. Night life is always going to be a part of deejaying, but lifestyle-wise, I’m trying to be healthy. I’m trying to sleep at relatively normal hours.

I really love working with brands to do store openings, trunk shows, or DJ-like conferences when they come up. I’m also working, spending a lot more time on creating original music, collaborating with other writers and producers to make music.

Joseph: That is really interesting, that difference in lifestyle between being a nightclub DJ, which I think is what a lot of us have in our heads when we first think of the word DJ. There’s also the corporate events. I guess it could start to wear on you, I suppose, if you’re always doing this middle-of-the-night loud dance parties every night.

Lani: You need to see the sun, a fair amount of it, to feel happy and healthy. I really try to have somewhat of a normal schedule, but it’s not possible at the moment. On days where I am not deejaying the night before, I really try to wake up at a normal time.

Joseph: If people out there listening to this are interested in booking you for their event if they are looking for a DJ, how can they get in touch with you?

Lani: They can just find me on my website DJLaniLove.com. I’m on all over social media. I think I’m fairly accessible.

Joseph: We will include a link to your website in the show notes, and we’ll also include a link to your SoundCloud page at djlanilove, where people can listen to more of your very cool original tracks.

Thank you so much, Lani, for telling us more about your life as a DJ, your transitions, the realities of running a DJ business, and also managing the balance between work and family. Best of luck with all your upcoming gigs, and we look forward to staying in touch.

Lani: Thank you for having me.

Who are the people you should surround yourself with when you’re making a major career pivot? Who are the people you should avoid spending too much time with when you’re facing some career challenges?

In Episode 44 of Career Relaunch, Adrian Knight, managing director of Knight Franchises, shares his perspectives on how to handle the range of people who affect your career plans. He’ll also share some insights from his experiences helping professionals transition out of corporate life into franchise business ownership and discuss how franchising can be a doorway to career change. I’ll also share my personal thoughts on the importance of being selective about who you allow to be a part of your career and life decisions.

During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I talked about pinpointing someone in your life who’s been a positive force for your career.

While you’re at it, please don’t forget to let them know how much you appreciate the positive impact they’ve had in your life. I’d love to hear whom you choose to reach out to. Leave a comment below!

Adrian Knight is the Managing Director of Knight Franchises, an executive search firm that helps professionals transition out of corporate life into franchise business ownership. Knight Franchises are fully accredited members of the British Franchise Association and in 2017, won an Entrepreneurship award from NatWest for Innovation and Accelerated Business Growth. Adrian’s focused on helping professionals evaluate whether franchising is a viable vehicle for you, educating them on the industry, and identifying the models that best meet their financial and lifestyle aspirations.

If you want to learn more about franchising and whether it’s a viable option for your career, you can schedule a 1-hour consultation with Adrian’s team at Knight Franchises.

Schedule franchising consultation with Adrian’s team

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): You’re seeing your friends who are very settled in their careers. I was sort of stepping back thinking, ‘I don’t know if I want this.’ It took a long time to realize that it was okay to have those other thoughts, but that process was ambiguous, uncertain, and scary.

Joseph: Hello, Adrian. Welcome to Career Relaunch. It’s great to have you on the show.

Adrian: Joseph, It’s great to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me.

Joseph: I was wondering if you could kick us off, Adrian, by telling us what you’re focused on right now in your career and also your life.

Adrian: I run a career transition business called Knight Franchises. We’ve been going for about three years, primarily in the UK. We’ve really been going from strength to strength. Right now, I and my very small team are focused on building what we’re doing, building our presence in the UK, but also in the US where we have been working as well.

Joseph: We’re going to get into franchising a little bit more later in our conversation after we talk about your own career trajectory, but can you just give us give us a quick glimpse into the types of people you work with or the types of clients that you have?

Adrian: Fundamentally, we work with people who have reached a stage in their career, and also in their life, where priorities have begun to shift and they’re looking to do something different than what they have been doing over the past.

Business ownership is always a very popular channel for people to look at, but I think it could be such a big thing that a lot of people don’t know where to start. We really present franchising, which is a form of business ownership, as a potential avenue and really help those people, first of all, evaluate whether franchising is a viable vehicle for them, and if so, working them through that process, up-skilling their franchising knowledge, and helping them to understand which franchises would be most suitable for them.

What we’ve found is that, in terms of the people who we work with, they can vary greatly from someone who is in their late 20s and just doesn’t want to be doing what everyone else is doing, all the way through to directors and vice presidents who have spent 25+ years working in a corporate environment and have just had enough. They want to do something different. It’s quite a varied business in the people that we work with, but it’s fascinating.

Joseph: I am looking forward to hearing a little bit more and learning a little bit more about franchising, Adrian, because that’s actually not an area that I necessarily know about. I also know that when someone’s listening to the show, and maybe they’re thinking about leaving the corporate world for example and maybe starting their own business, automatically people think, ‘I got to start my own independent business,’ which can sometimes feel a little bit daunting, and it sounds like franchising is just one other avenue that we haven’t really talked about on this show before. I’m looking forward to taking about that in more detail.

Before we do that, I was wondering if we could talk a little bit more about you and your own career trajectory, because I know you’ve also navigated some career changes yourself. I was wondering if you could take us back to the time when you were working in recruitment. I think there were a couple of companies you mentioned to me before: IT Talent and Red Hat. Can you just tell us a little bit more about what you were up to then? Then we could move forward from there.

Adrian: I went into recruitment straight out of university, because I really wanted to develop my sales skills and my business-facing skills. During university, we had started a student business, and it had grown. It was going really well, but obviously, that dream came to an end, and I knew I had to grow up. I went into recruitment largely because my friends did. To be honest, Joseph, I was very intrigued by the whole notion behind it. It was almost unintentionally that I started to progress through.

I started off as a trainee, and from there, I was promoted to a consultant and then a senior consultant and then running a small team of recruiters. While it was great fun, there was always something in the back of my mind saying ‘This isn’t it.’ I didn’t know what the other thing was. That really took me on a mental and emotional journey while working in recruitment, still exploring all of these different other paths and avenues and trying to work out what my thing was, where my place in the world was.

Joseph: Before we get to your transition, Adrian, we have had a recruiter on this show before, but we were treating that conversation more informationally for people who were interested in trying to find their next job and how to work with their recruiter. I was wondering if you might be able to—before we get to your transition—give us a glimpse into what it’s like to be a recruiter.

Adrian: I’ve been very fortunate in that I’ve worked in a couple of different recruitment roles. There’s many different types of recruitment.

I think recruitment gets a bad name. It’s certainly tarred with the wrong brush in many instances. In my first recruitment role, that was very much almost like a boiler room environment. The people in there, there was a lot of big egos, there was a lot of testosterone, there was calling a hundred companies a day as a target. If you didn’t, you were severely reprimanded for it. It wasn’t the best of environments, and it certainly wasn’t one that was congruent with my personality.

I then moved on after a few years. I moved on to what’s known as internal recruitment. I was very fortunate to land a job working for a global technology company who were, at the time, equivalent to Microsoft when Microsoft were 15 years old. They were a billion-dollar company, but they were still growing rapidly. That was the complete 180 to what I had just come from. In that role, it was very much about head hunting, about taking time with people, learning to understand people and their motivations and what they’re looking for in their next career, in the next step.

I was very fortunate to progress quite well through the company. I was initially in charge of recruiting a small part of the Red Hat’s business in the UK and also in Denmark and Sweden. Just after a year, I was responsible for recruiting across Europe, Belize, and Africa. That was 13 different countries, 13 different cultures, many different people. It was just a remarkable experience, the best job of my life.

In terms of what it’s like to operate in recruitment, my two experiences were chalk and cheese. Interestingly, both of them have greatly contributed to what I’m doing now.

Joseph: It sounds like you had a diverse experience in the recruitment industry. You alluded to the fact that you decided at some point that maybe this wasn’t for you. Could you take me back to the moment—if you remember it—when you decided that you wanted to make a change?

Adrian: I was approaching my 30th birthday, and I was just going through a phase where I knew if I wanted to make a change, then it had to be soon. I was doing well in my job, but I was looking around and seeing people who were 20, 30 years my senior, and I was thinking I do not want to be in that situation. I didn’t want to live that type of life. If I was to do something, it had to be sooner rather later. Particularly at the time, I didn’t have any major commitments in terms of mortgages or anything particularly holding me down. If I was to take any risks from changing my career, that was the time to do it.

Joseph: Before we started recording, you had mentioned to me that you went through what sounds like a very long period of time trying to figure stuff out. That is often times where people find themselves when they’re listening to this show: that state of uncertainty and confusion. I was wondering if you could give us a glimpse into that transitional time for you. I understand you actually traveled for a few months.

Adrian: During my 20’s when I was working in my first recruitment role and then with Red Hat, I took a lot of time to go off traveling. I was very fortunate to visit a lot of countries. I had employers who were open to that. I’ve really used those travel periods as a time to step away from the norms, step away from my friends and family, their expectations they may have around me, and to really figure stuff out.

During that time and during my roles, I was always testing things on the side, like putting up a blog and seeing how people respond to it or trying something else, little business ventures, just to see what it was like. That period lasted for 10 years before I really found where my button was.

It was a very challenging period because you’re seeing your friends around you who are very settled in their careers and in their lifestyles and looking forward to their future. I was sort of stepping back thinking, ‘I don’t know if I want this.’ It took a long time to realize that it was okay to have those other thoughts, but that process was very ambiguous, uncertain, and scary.

Joseph: How did you ultimately figure out that you wanted to move into the world of franchising?

Adrian: I don’t think it was even a question of figuring it out. When I saw it, I knew it. That was the difference. I’d found something that truly sparks something inside of me. I became very curious about it and wanted to learn all about it. When I saw the type of roles within that space, it immediately made me realize that’s going to build very well my skill set that I’ve developed to date and also where my real core interest lie. It was almost that intersection between where my interests were, my core skills, and this thing that kept pulling me towards it. That’s how I knew. Everything just kind of float from there.

Joseph: I see. Let’s talk a little bit about the next chapter of your career. You spent some time trying to figure out what you wanted to do. You traveled. You had this moment where you realized that the franchising world was where you wanted to head next. What then happens next for you once you decided that this was the direction you wanted to take your career?

Adrian: It actually took about 18 months to fully make the transition. Once I knew that this was the place where I wanted to be, I’d actually found someone in the US who offered training in the particular area where I wanted to operate, and I really took the time to be able to put myself in a position where I could go out to the US, train with him, learn how he was doing things, and then come back and begin to set the foundations of what is now our business that we’re doing.

The big moment, it was probably about 12 months from when I handed in my notice left my role. That was a pretty big moment. Then it took another six months from leaving my job to really getting things up and running. Again, it was a very ambiguous and uncertain time. Even though I knew what I wanted to do, there were so many unknowns. It’s worked through almost with your hands out in front of you, dealing with whatever came up.

Joseph: That’s a really interesting transitional period of time, Adrian. When you’ve resigned from your role, you know that’s what you don’t want to do, but you haven’t completely ironed out what’s next for you. What do you think was the hardest part about that transitional period before you ultimately landed on what you’re doing right now?

Adrian: In a way, the people around me. My family and friends have always been very supportive, but they couldn’t understand why I was leaving what was, at the time, a very good job, to go and do something that was completely unknown and in a way was not a very good time. In my mind, I just turned 30. I was thinking this is the best time, and everyone was saying to me, ‘Well, now, you should be settling down,’ but that wasn’t on my agenda just yet. That was a challenging period to go through.

It also reinforced that I was making the right move because I looked around at the people who were saying these things, and I looked at their lives, and I realized that’s not the life I want to live. Logic would imply that, therefore, what they’re saying is not necessarily the right advice for me right now.

Joseph: That’s a really great perspective, Adrian, to have because sometimes we get critiqued by people. I don’t know about you, but that definitely gets to me even though it might be the case that actually their life isn’t one that I necessarily want to have. Yet, I still take it quite personally. I think it’s important to remember that.

I’d love to change gears a little bit now, having talked a little bit about your own career transition. I think it’s about time we start talking about exactly what franchising is, because I have to admit, before we spoke, I’ve heard of franchising, I’m familiar with the concept of franchising, but for those listeners who maybe aren’t familiar with franchising, could you just start off by defining exactly what is franchising and what happens when you’re in that world as a franchisee?

Adrian: First of all, when talking about franchising, it’s very common to hear the names McDonald’s, Dominos, Subway, those real fast food concepts, but a lot of people are surprised to learn that there’s actually over 900 different franchise opportunities in the UK and nearly 4,000 in the US.

A franchise is essentially a pre-proven business. It’s, dare I say, a business in a box. It’s a business model that has been proven to deliver a particular product or service to an end customer, and so much so that it creates enough value that the customers are willing to pay for it, and therefore generates in your profit. It’s a real great way of starting a business without a lot of the young unknowns that come with business ownership. Franchising is essentially a business model plus a brand, a well-known brand in which you’re operating under and licensing their brand.

Joseph: One of the things I’ve always wondered about, Adrian, you’re exactly right. The first companies that come to mind for me, when I think about franchising, are Dominos and McDonald’s. Those are the first two that come to mind. I was always just curious about, as a franchisee, if you’re running one of those franchises, how much scope do you have to do what you want versus just executing what the brand strategy, the brand vision is for that particular company. I’ve always wondered how much latitude those business owners have.

Adrian: With the bigger brands, such as Domino’s and McDonald’s, you have very little wiggle room. In fact, it’s almost the same as being in a corporate role, really. McDonald’s and Domino’s will run those businesses, the operations so tight that you don’t have a lot of room. In some of the younger brands that don’t have such a wide spread, there is a bit more scope to be entrepreneurial. The big question to really be asking yourself if you’re thinking about that when looking at franchising is, is franchising really right for you?

What we’ve observed is that entrepreneurs, people with a real entrepreneurial spark, aren’t necessarily best suited for franchises, because what they will do is they will go into it and try and change everything. They fail to realize that really what they’ve got here is a proven business model, and all they need to do is to use their skills and experiences to bring that business model to life. So when going into these, you really want to be following the guidelines of the franchise or following their system as closely as possible because that’s what’s going to make you successful much quicker.

Joseph: Are there any particular types of people that you think are especially well-suited to become a franchisee? I know you mentioned just now that maybe those hardcore entrepreneurs, it’s not for them. What about the types of people who you have noticed do tend to excel in the area of franchising?

Adrian: I’ll say people who are earlier in their career, so very much almost where I was a few years ago in terms of they’ve spent maybe 5, 10 years, working for other people, and they’re not quite sure if that’s what they really want to do. They look around and see other people who are 10, 20 years ahead of them, and they know they don’t necessarily want those lives. Those type of people who are ambitious and want to do something for themselves can do very well in franchising. We’ve seen some really great success stories.

Also, people who have spent 20, 25+ years working in a corporate environment, and who have built a real great skill set, quite a lot of experience over that time, but want to start applying it in a different way. We found that they can make fantastic franchisees and really bring a lot of value and a lot of success to their doorstep, primarily because they’re using their skills to bring to life a business model that’s already been proven.

Joseph: If somebody is listening to this and they are interested in exploring the world of franchising, one question I’ve got in my mind is how you get started. Let’s say that I’m bought into the idea of franchising as an avenue to career change, as an avenue to running ‘my own business,’ and I want to go out and start a Domino’s pizza. What do you do next? How do you start in this industry?

Adrian: It’s really down to research, jumping online and doing your research, finding out everything you can from a high level about franchising and the idea behind franchising and what a franchisee is, what a franchisor is, how those two work together, and really observing your feelings and how you’re responding to when you’re researching this stuff. If it’s aligned and if it’s right for you, you will notice yourself getting very excited, and you will naturally want to know more.

As you begin to move along the educational process from the higher ideas of franchising through to start looking at the specific franchise opportunities out there, again, you will notice particular brands that will really jump out at you, at the concept. You would just find yourself taking a natural process into researching those further.

If you are eventually inspired to reach out and speak to particular brands, franchises themselves have a very structured process on how you can really go about finding out more about them and helping you to understand whether they’re right for you.

Joseph: Have you noticed any particular patterns that people have gone through related to some of the challenges of actually succeeding as a franchisee?

Adrian: One of the biggest challenges and patterns we see is really again going back to how willing they are to follow the guidance and the model set out by the franchisor. I think it could be very common for people to come in and to see something and be, ‘Oh wow, what if we’ve done it this way, or what if try this?’ when really the most successful people are following the guidance letter by letter. They’re the ones who’s getting established as quickly as possible. That was probably the biggest differentiator we’ve noticed by far.

Joseph: I guess the last thing I was hoping to talk with you about, Adrian, before we wrap up with some of your current initiatives is to go a little bit back to your own story and revisit this idea of career change because I know you’re been through career change. You also see people who have been through career change as they end up getting into franchising. When you look back into your own career change, is there something in particular that you wished you had known that you now know about making a change in your career?

Adrian: By looking back over those 10 years of searching for my thing, it was quite easy to get down about the whole process and to not really see a light at the end of the tunnel and to just keep going along looking for new things and trying different things to see what works. Looking back, I wish I had known that it was okay to be feeling those feelings and to be going through that process.

If I may share an experience, we were at an engagement party a couple of months ago, and I was with a lot of friends from 10, 15 years ago. During that time, during the last 10 years, I always looked around at them and saw them succeed in their careers and really propelling forward and building this great lifestyles and really enjoying themselves. I was giving myself a hard time because I wasn’t feeling the same feelings and really progressing, just having that focus.

When we’re at this engagement party, it was astonishing to see that things have flipped 180. A lot of the people, a lot of my friends, they hadn’t aged very well. They were complaining about their jobs and that this wasn’t really what they wanted to be doing. I was thinking how grateful I was that I’ve invested the time and spent the time going through those earlier emotion and motions to really put ourselves in a place where we were very passionate about what we’re doing and very excited about each and every day.

Joseph: That’s really interesting, Adrian. That’s something that I think about a lot especially in this age of LinkedIn where, I don’t know about you, but I get those updates from people who have either gotten promoted or they’ve landed a new job. It’s hard not to think about how ‘successful’ they are, and yet if you end up digging a little bit deeper, and you have a conversation with them, you start to realize that it’s not exactly what it seems on the surface and that people sometimes are actually less happy than it might seem on the outside. Having been through this career change also, is there anything in particular that you learned about yourself through the process?

Adrian: I think one of the biggest personal lessons I’ve had is I wasn’t who I thought I was earlier in my life and in my career. I’ve learned there’s a lot of things I’m not good at, there’s a lot of things which I thought I was good at, and there’s on the other side, things that I’m good at. It’s really been a process of letting go of the things that I wasn’t good at and accepting that I wasn’t good at them, rather than trying to do everything, and instead focusing on doing the things that I was more natural at and building a support team around me to help with those other things. That’s been probably one of the biggest lessons.

Joseph: What I’d love to do now, Adrian, is to wrap up with what you’re focused on now at Knight Franchises. Can you just tell us a little bit about what’s next for you guys over there?

Adrian: We’re very busy growing our team. We’ve been working with more and more people and helping them transition from corporate life into life as a franchise owner, have even more conversations just helping people to understand even if this was a viable part for them. We are very busy building that over here. Also, from early next year, we’re really pushing forward with getting things more established and launched in the US as well.

Joseph: Very exciting. If people want to learn more about franchising or if they want to reach out to you to maybe explore some options related to franchising, where can they go to learn a little bit more and to get in touch?

Adrian: To get in touch, the best way is my personal email address which is [email protected]. Alternatively, please visit our website KnightFranchises.com. You’ll find a lot more information on career transition related to franchising and some case studies of other people who have gone through the same.

Joseph: Thank you so much, Adrian, for taking time out of your busy day to tell us a little bit more about your own career trajectory and some of those things you learned about yourself along the way and also giving us a good snapshot of the world of franchising. I definitely found this educational, and I hope other people do too. Best of luck with everything you have going on there at Knight Franchises, and I look forward to staying in touch.

Adrian: Thank you so much, Joseph. It’s a real pleasure and honor to be on your podcast.

When you no longer feel your work, company, organization is the right place for you, that sometimes means choosing to walk away from your job before you have another role lined up. In this episode of Career Relaunch, former retail apparel buyer Maddie Potvin, explains what made her decide to move away from the Bay area to pursue other interests and how she’s managed her transition. During the episode, she shares honest perspectives on the emotions of career change, the challenges of leaving your corporate identify behind, and the importance of taking control of your future. In the Mental Fuel® segment, I’ll talk about defining your walkaway point as a guide to deciding when to move on to something new in your life and career.

During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I talked about defining your walkaway points in your career. For some help in doing understanding what will and will not be acceptable to you in your career, download my “Where Will You Draw The Line” 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.

Maddie Potvin started her career in San Francisco working in the corporate retail & apparel industry after graduating from the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. She held roles in buying, merchandising, operations and project management at companies like Macy’s. & Levi’s. After a decade working in the retail industry, she took a leap of faith and quit her job in order to craft the life she wanted instead of simply following one career path. She’s now been on her journey for nearly 3 years, pushing her way through the unknown and figuring out her own path. Recently, Maddie and her husband bought a camper van to feed their passion for exploration. You can follow along on her camper van adventures on 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 just really having a struggle with why this is no longer an environment for me where I feel like I’m thriving. I need to think about how I want to get out of this and move on.

Joseph: Okay, Maddie. Welcome to Career Relaunch. It’s good to talk with you again.

Maddie: Thanks, Joseph. It’s nice to connect with you again after quite a long time.

Joseph: Definitely. We last crossed paths in person I guess in San Francisco many years ago.

Maddie: Yes

Joseph: I’d love to start by having you tell me what’s going on right now and what you’re focused on in your career and your life.

Maddie: I recently left San Francisco actually about a year and a half ago and moved to Boulder, Colorado. One of the big things I’m focused on in life is growing roots here and building a community in our new home in Boulder, which has been pretty fun and an interesting adjustment in itself after spending almost 10 years in the Bay Area.

As far as my career, the biggest thing right now is I’m trying to figure out what my next step is. I left the Bay Area and left my corporate career path behind there. Since moving to Boulder, I’ve been working with my husband to help him startup his next business venture. I’m kind of at a place now where I’m exploring my next step, which has been interesting.

Joseph: We’ll definitely get into that. One thing I want to say is I just want to thank you for coming on the show because we normally feature people who have already begun the next chapter of their career, but in your case, like you mentioned, you’re still in the midst of figuring out what you want to do, which is actually where I think a lot of listeners are who tune in to this podcast.

Sometimes on these podcasts, you’ll hear people who have made it out already on the other end, and things seem amazing. I guess what you and I talked about before was it could be cool to just have a conversation with someone like you who’s in the midst of trying to figure things out.

I want to get to how you’re thinking through what your next steps are, but before we do that, you alluded to this, could we go back in time before you’re in Colorado? Go back to your days in San Francisco when you and I first crossed paths. Can you tell us a little bit about what you were up to before in the corporate retail and apparel space?

Maddie: When we met, way back when I was working for Macy’s in their West Coast headquarters, I graduated from the Michigan Business School and kind of fell into this opportunity to pursue a career in the corporate retail space.

I was working for Macy’s as a buyer, and probably after a year of being there, the company went through a major consolidation and actually shut down their West Coast headquarters. I got laid off pretty quickly into my career, which was an interesting place to find myself as a Michigan grad – one year out of school and feeling the effects of the recession.

Joseph: What was that like for you to get laid off reasonably quickly from your first job for a very well-known brand?

Maddie: I had had serious other challenging events personally. After graduating and moving across the country, that was the cherry on top of the sundae, the bad sundae. For me, I was kind of like, ‘You know what? I have no control over this situation.’ It really didn’t impact me as much as it probably could’ve had I not had other things also going on.

I’m actually really grateful for that happening to me so early on, because through other changes that I’ve experienced within large organizations throughout the rest of my career, I kind of knew how to ride those waves and not really let it impact me as it did some of the other people that I was working with. I just took it for what it was and figured out how to use it for myself.

I ended up taking a little bit of time off after that just to be in San Francisco and live there and not stress about having to find the next thing immediately, which was at times challenging because I did feel kind of like a little bit of a loser, not working, but it was actually really important for me to take that time.

It eventually led me to an opportunity to work for Cost Plus World Market, which then led me to eventually getting in an opportunity to work at Levi’s, which was such a great experience for me. I think if I had just jumped in to try to find something right away, I think I would’ve maybe found a job, but maybe not one that would’ve given me the experience that I got at Levi’s.

Joseph: One thing, Maddie, that I think a lot of people wonder about is after you get laid off—I remember during the time you’re talking about between 2008, 2009-ish, probably that time, I remember a lot of people getting laid off from their jobs—I’m just wondering, how much did, the fact that you got laid off, affect your prospects or your ability to eventually land your next roles, which sound like, once again, they’re a very well-known, reputable companies.

Maddie: At least within the Bay Area, I think a lot of companies really welcomed anybody that had worked at Macy’s with open arms. I don’t think it necessarily impacted me in a negative way, also not necessarily in a positive way. I think the challenge was just there’s only so many jobs in corporate retail to go around in that market, and so it took a little bit of time for everybody to get absorbed.

Joseph: What, ultimately, made you decide to leave Levi’s?

Maddie: I knew that that wasn’t going to be what I wanted to do forever. I saw all these executives, a lot of them were women. I saw them doing their jobs. I really respected them, and I appreciated them, but I was like, ‘I don’t want that to be me.’ I wasn’t going to sit and try to climb the corporate ladder.

For me, I wanted to pursue that path so that I could learn as much as I could, and get as many different experiences in different areas within a company. That was always in the back of my mind.

As far as when I actually got to a place where I realize that it was my time to go, I remember the moment I was at this big milestone meeting that I had planned where people had flown in from all over the world, and our leadership team is up there speaking. There’s a lot of really great, brilliant people at Levi’s. I was watching this leadership team and was just really having to struggle with why this is no longer an environment for me where I feel like I’m thriving, so I need to think about how I want to get out of this and move on.

Joseph: What do you think was the hardest part about walking away from all of that, in spite of the fact that it sounds like it was quite clear for you that this wasn’t where you wanted to remain?

Maddie: It wasn’t that hard for me actually, because once I make up my mind about something I’m pretty sure about it. As my next step of, ‘I need to start figuring out what my exit looks like, and when that’s going to happen.’ My next step to doing that was working with a coach.

He wasn’t a career coach. He was really more, I would say, a life coach. He really just helped me reframe my perspective on life and really helped me understand that I have choice in my life. The cultural pressures that are out there: You have to have a solid salary. You have to have benefits that your company pays for. You have all these things that keep people in these corporate jobs. At the end of the day, everybody has choice every single day and how they spend their time and what they choose to do.

I worked with him for six months or so, and that really helped me get to a place where I was very confident and sure. It really took the fear out of it.

Joseph: For those people out there listening to this, Maddie, who are maybe in a situation where they’re feeling a little bit afraid of making that leap, was there anything in particular that you can remember from those sessions that helped you take the fear out of making the move?

Maddie: One thing was the worst-case scenario. The worst-case scenario is that we have to leave San Francisco and move in with one of our parents and live with our parents and get a job that we don’t love but can totally do. That was the worst-case scenario. When you actually break it down and look at the truth and take some of the fears out, it makes it a little bit easier to make those leaps.

The other thing that my coach got me to think about was, ‘When you’re 90 years old, you’re a little old lady, you’re all wrinkled, and you’re sitting on your front porch on your rocking chair, and you look back at your life, are you going to be proud of yourself with the accomplishments that you would have if you continued to work for Levi’s or another big company and just really did the corporate grind? Is that going to make you feel proud?’

‘Or if you take the leap and you stumble and you fall, and it eventually leads you to something great, you’re giving yourself a chance to have a completely different trajectory. When you look back on your life, how do you want to feel?’ Everybody always has a choice. Nobody’s ever stuck in a situation. You do have a choice to make stuff to get out of that or at least try different things.

Joseph: What did you decide to do next then?

Maddie: Right around this time, my husband and I got engaged. Also around this time, my husband who had started and run a green building consulting company in the Bay Area for about eight years, he was going to be peeling off of that company and going on his own. We saw both of our paths converging to this place, where we were potentially both not going to be working, so we decided to take some time off together and travel and get married and decide where we wanted to live and really use the time to define and shape what we wanted our life to be and not let that be dictated by our careers or anything else.

We traveled a lot. We did a two-month honeymoon and a camper van in Europe and had a lot of fun. That time is going to be one of those moments where we’re always going to look back on in our life as a really pivotal moment.

Joseph: I think we’ve all seen probably on, for me mostly, Instagram, where you see these people doing these travels or taking a little bit of a hiatus from work. It’s great if you have the opportunity to do that, but I’m always curious what’s happening behind the scenes because it looks so incredible and amazing. I’ve never done it myself, but I just wondered how it actually goes versus what you envisioned.

Maddie: It is great to have that freedom and to have all these different experiences. It is also really isolating. I didn’t realize how much of my identity was wrapped up in my job. Even if it isn’t a job that you are passionate about, it’s still a big piece of who you are, and it does give you a sense of purpose.

Once the traveling and the fun was done and we decided to move to a new place was when it really got hard. The reality of all that has been really, really challenging.

Joseph: So you finished up your travels, and you moved to Colorado, right?

Maddie: Yes.

Joseph: I think when we spoke before, what ended up happening was you eventually got involved with your husband’s real estate endeavors. I’m wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about that and specifically what it was like for you to go into business with your husband.

Maddie: It kind of happened organically. It wasn’t super intentional. I think that that, maybe, was something that I would go back in time and really be more intentional about defining how we were going to work together and why we were working together and just really getting on the same page with that, but it ended up happening a little bit more organically.

The reason why it happened was because our skillsets are very complementary. When we work well together, we feel like we can take on the whole world. Of course if he needs help in these areas that I have the expertise in, why wouldn’t you? Moving to a new place where I don’t have a network, it was kind of like ‘Alright, at least I can start doing this while I’m meeting people here and building a network and all that.’

The reality of working together is it’s just hard. A lot of people will say that. I think it’s especially hard when you’re building something from scratch together, because there are so many decisions every single day that need to made. The two of us were opposite on how we think about things and how we approach things, so as you can imagine, that becomes pretty challenging when you’re in a loving relationship with somebody.

It reminds me of an example: when a high school teenage girl, their mom suggests something, and the girl rolls her eyes and is like, ‘That’s so stupid.’ Then the cool friend’s mom says the same thing, and it’s like the greatest idea.

Just like the people that you love, sometimes, it’s hard to hear them in the ways that you want to, so it’s been interesting.

The other thing for me that I’ve learned is that I kind of swung the pendulum too far. I am used to working at these huge companies, these global businesses, interacting with hundreds of people every day. Then I moved myself to a new place that’s a smaller city. I’m working out of my house with one other person who’s my spouse. For me, it was just too big of a shift for me. I think I really struggled with that.

Something that I’ve done recently, which we’ve talked about a little bit, is I ended up renting a desk at a co-working space just to get out of the house.

Joseph: That’s where you are right now, right?

Maddie: That’s where I am right now, yes. That has been really, really helpful. I really wish that I would’ve done this a year ago. I think that maybe my husband and I could work together still, but you know what? You live and you learn.

Joseph: Right. What do you like about working in the co-working space there?

Maddie: It’s just about having a place to get up and go to everyday.

When I left Levi’s I was like, ‘I want total flexibility. I could totally work from home. I could be a remote person.’ I’ve realized that that’s actually not a good environment for me. That’s not a good situation. I thrive in a little bit more of a collaborative environment, and I need to have that social interaction with people.

For me, just physically being in a place that is not my house, and having a place I can go and create a little bit of a structure around has been amazing and simply interacting with other people and talking to other people, whether it’s about working things or not – just the simple fact of social interaction.

It’s interesting because I totally thought I was an anomaly by feeling that way, but now that I’m here and talking to other people that have joined this space, some people were like, ‘I thought I was depressed. I couldn’t get out of bed, and I was about to see somebody.’ Some other girls were like, ‘We should make T-shirts that say, “I’m not depressed. I just work from home.”’ There is something, I think, to just being in an environment with other people, whether or not you’re actually working together, that changes your mindset.

Joseph: The last thing I want to talk with you about, Maddie—before we wrap up here with one of your interesting project that just kicked off, I think, a couple of weeks ago, which I want to talk about—is the fact that you’re in a transition right now. Like I said at the beginning, sometimes, we catch up with people after they’ve already begun the next chapter of their career. In your case, you’re actually in the process of figuring that out. Can you just give us a glimpse into what’s happening right now with you in terms of how you’re thinking about what’s next?

Maddie: It’s just been messy. When you’ve been in an environment where there’s always a clear path and a clear understanding of what is next, to be in the complete opposite, it’s like you’re a fish out of water. I struggle a lot with what is the right thing for me to do next.

I’m at this place where I just really want to get back in and be doing something and be part of a team again. The fastest way for me to get that would be to do something similar to what I was doing before, maybe a smaller company, but I was having a little bit of a struggle with that because I felt like I was selling out on myself.

On the other side, I really am looking a little stability. I’m looking for these social elements and things like that. I was pursuing that for a while.

Even since we’ve talked a few weeks ago, my mind has changed. I’m kind of shifting directions again. Sometimes, that’s hard because you are like constantly doubting yourself and trying to constantly reassess – are your efforts leading you in the right direction or not?

Right now, I’m exploring what’s out here in Boulder. There’s a ton of opportunity here. Because it’s smaller, it’s even much more so about who you know, so I’m really focusing right now just on networking and meeting as many people as I can here, which has been fun, but it’s also really pushed me out of my comfort zone. You’re constantly vulnerable with people, and I hate when somebody asks me, ‘What do you do?’ and I’m like, ‘Do you have like 20 minutes for me?’

You also don’t realize that in a job, you have a full day of constant reinforcement of what you’re doing. That really gives you a baseline of just general confidence in yourself. When that’s stripped away, I’ve never been somebody that has not really been confident in myself. This experience for me has been a total 180. I’ve been shocked at how much just not having a job impacts your confidence. You just feel like a loser.

On top of that, having to put yourself out there to go talk to people, it’s crazy.

Joseph: I was chuckling earlier, Maddie, because I think you have so precisely described what it’s like to be in a transition, because I’ve been there myself in the past. You get asked these questions, ‘What do you do?’ and you aren’t ‘doing anything’ at least professionally in that moment, and that feels really awkward.

You have lost a part of your professional identity at a time when you actually need to feel confident in yourself. Your situation is chipping away at your confidence all the time.

It’s this really tough transitional period. If anybody’s been through that, and I have myself, it really does test you. It really is hard to keep your psychology positive during those times.

Another thing that you mentioned there, which really resonated with me, was the idea that when you’re on your own, it is very easy to get lost in a downward spiral of thoughts. I’m not talking about anything clinical or anything but just keeping yourself motivated.

I watched a movie with my wife last weekend called ‘Brad’s Status.’ I don’t know if you’ve seen it.

Maddie: No, I’m going to write it down though.

Joseph: It’s really good. It’s a comedy. It features Ben Stiller, and it’s about this guy who is stuck in his mind related to how he stacks up compared to the other guys he was friends with in college and feeling like he’s just not quite as far along as they are. It literally is him lying awake at night wondering if he’s a failure or not.

I’ve mentioned the movie because I think it relates to some of the things you were talking about, about the psychology of a transition being so difficult.

Just one more question about this before we wrap up: how do you personally manage to keep going during those times when you’re feeling a little bit like, ‘I don’t know if I can keep doing this.’ How do you manage that?

Maddie: I try to just know that there’s going to be ups and downs. I just know that.

When I’m feeling great, and I’m feeling momentum, and I feel like what I’m doing is leading me towards something, I really try to maximize that, and I try to just push myself – not think and not doubt myself and just reach out to people and work off of that momentum.

When I’m feeling down, if I’m getting really discouraged, I try to be as kind to myself as I can and not beat myself up more. Sometimes, it is just like taking a little bit of a break from it and spending energy on some other things that make me happy.

I’ve gotten involved with a couple of volunteer opportunities within Boulder that have been really great for my soul. Things like that that fill me up in other ways and give the other things a little bit of a backseat. That seems to help me.

Also—and I’m not just saying this to you to butter you up—listening to the Career Relaunch Podcasts and other similar stories of people that have gone through transitions like this has really helped me. When I’m really feeling crappy, I will turn on an episode, and I’ll be like, ‘Okay, you’re not alone. There are other people that have been there. They’ve gone through it, so you just got to keep trucking on.’

Just that reinforcement that you’re not crazy for what you’re doing and that it is going to all work out, just reminding yourself of that has been super helpful for me.

Joseph: First of all, that’s really great to hear that these stories that we feature on this show, including yours, are sort of a way of providing people with companionship on what is otherwise, or can be, a rather lonely journey whenever you step off the beaten path. That’s great to hear.

Speaking of things, you mentioned, that are good for your soul, I would like to wrap up with what you’re doing right now. I’ve been following you on Instagram, and I would love to hear a little bit more about your new adventure of building out your Mercedes Sprinter Van. Can you tell us about what that’s all about?

Maddie: Yes, our beast. I mentioned earlier, we did this epic honeymoon, two months in Europe in a camper van that we rented. It was just a crazy idea my husband had for our honeymoon, and I said, ‘That sounds awesome. Let’s do it,’ but neither of us had really traveled that way before. We just totally fell in love with the lifestyle and what it allowed us to do and see. When we came back from that trip, we were like, ‘Definitely, someday, we are getting a van here and explore the states.’

We bought a van. We waited a year for it to come because they’re in high demand. We got it back in November, and we’ve just been enjoying it on its own. It’s a total metal shell. There’s nothing inside of it. Our goal right now is to just get it ready for summer camping. It’s going to be quite an undertaking.

Joseph: Definitely. That sounds like a cool adventure. If people want to follow you on Instagram to follow along with your camper van adventures, Maddie, where could they go?

Maddie: We just created an Instagram account to document us building it out and also some of the adventures that we go on, because all of our friends and family are very interested in what we’re doing. Our handle is ThePotVanAdventures. The name is just a play on our last name. There’s no other association to it.

Anybody’s who’s ever thought about doing it, we love to help share any of our insights and how we navigated through buying it, because it’s something we’re super passionate about.

Joseph: We’ll include a link to your profile on the show notes. Maybe we can also include a couple of pictures for people to check out on the episode page. Very exciting.

Maddie, thanks so much for telling us all about your career journey, especially the realities of career change, moving geographies, and how you managed the ups and downs of a transition.

Maddie: Thanks for talking to me.

Joseph: Absolutely. Best of luck with the camper van adventures. Hopefully, the next time we connect, maybe we can talk again about what you’ve decided to do during the next stage of your career.

Maddie: Thanks, Joseph.