Career Relaunch®

Former hotel lounge pianist turned pharmaceutical digital marketer Rei Lim discusses why he chose to leave his life as a professional musician behind to instead pursue a corporate career. In this episode of Career Relaunch®, we’ll talk about the importance of role models, feeling good about your future, and being proud of the work you do. In the Mental Fuel® segment, I’ll address a listener question about how to prioritize your interests and head down the right path for you in your career.

During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I addressed a listener question about how to think through the various interests and priorities in your career. My challenge to you was to consider what matters most to you in the next chapter of your career. To help clarify this, download my “Defining Your Professional Priorities” Worksheet.

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Rei Lim started off as a professional musician. At first, he felt like the luckiest guy, making a living out of his passion. But 4 years into the job, he woke up one day and realized he needed to pick up another skill because being a musician was not viable for him in the long run. He ended up picking up digital marketing and fell in love with it. After freelancing for four years, he now works as a digital marketer for a global pharmaceutical company. On the side, he also runs an online magazine about beauty aesthetics called Fairy Marraine.

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): Sometimes when you meet people, and they ask you what you do, and then you are in between jobs, that is one of the toughest question that you can get. You actually feel awkward. I think what’s worse at that point was that I was still in a job, but when people ask me what do I do, I didn’t feel proud of what I did.

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

Rei: Good evening, Joseph. How are you?

Joseph: Very well. I’m very excited to hear all about your unique career path – first working as a professional musician and then eventually shifting to working in digital marketing in the corporate world, which is quite the transition.

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

Rei: Thank you, Joseph. It is my pleasure to be here. I’d like to share about two things that is going on in my life right now. Number one is actually my full-time job in an MNC. I’m currently working in a pharmaceutical company. It is a regional role, but I take care of the entire marketing production for Asia. I’m actually handling nine countries. Right now, I have to fly pretty frequently to take care of the marketing. That’s my full-time job.

The other thing that I’m doing is actually a little startup that I started last year. It is an online magazine called Fairy Marraine. This is a beauty, aesthetic photo, where we provide a lot of information about beauty and aesthetics and health and wellness. That is a startup that I hope to build in the next one year.

Joseph: All right. I want to talk about both of those as we go along here. It’s very interesting that you’ve got this work you’re doing as a digital marketer for the pharmaceutical company in there, but it’s also interesting that you’ve got this beauty startup on the side. Let’s talk about both as we go through the conversation.

What I’d love to do first, Rei, is go back in time a little bit, because I know you haven’t always been a digital marketer in the pharmaceutical industry. We actually first crossed paths when you sent me a message on Facebook in 2016, after watching my TEDx Talk. I don’t know if you remember at the time, but you were about four years into being a hotel lounge pianist.

I was wondering if you could start us off by telling us a little bit about that chapter of your career when you were a professional pianist, and then we can eventually talk about your current work.

Rei: Being a professional pianist is a very special, important chapter in my life, because that was what I started life as – as a professional musician. When I first started, I was the resident pianist in a very prestigious hotel. I was playing from Monday to Saturday nights. In the day, I was teaching, and playing at other venues in the afternoon.

I was about 23 years old at that time. I was earning very decently, and I was quite in-demand. I thought that I was one of the lucky guys who was making a good living out of his passion. But three years into this job, I began to feel very mundane. I began to feel bored, and I suddenly questioned myself, ‘Why am I starting to drag my foot to work every evening?’ I find myself having the tendency to turn up late and starting every set late.

I knew something was wrong. I actually saw a counsellor, and I analyzed two things. Number one, I was doing the same things day in, day out. Even if I was playing different repertoires, it is doing the same thing. I had no direction. I could not find someone. I could not find a senior musician who will stand 20 years ahead of me who inspires me.

I just wanted to be realistic, not just at that moment but also 10, 20 years later. I realized that I had no role model that I could look up to that could inspire me. I think a role model is very important, because people can really inspire you.

One of the things was really that I stopped feeling grateful. I began to feel that if I really carry on like that in this job, I would be in peril.

I began to realize that, as I grew older, I wanted career milestones, such as career progression. I wanted more stability. As a working musician, you can play in the most prestigious venue, but you will always face things like late payment. Because we are hired as freelancers, so we are not protected by employment laws. Sometimes, as freelancers, you end up working for free.

Joseph: Before we get to your transition out of your work as a musician, you’re actually the first professional musician I’ve had on the show, so I was wondering if you could set the stage for us here of your life before you came to this point of realizing that this was wasn’t what you wanted to do. Can you just explain a little bit more about the hotel you’re at and the clientele there? What exactly did you do as a hotel lounge pianist?

Rei: It is a very prestigious hotel in this part of the world. It’s called the Raffles Hotel. What was happening in a typical day was I will wake up maybe about 11:00 a.m. If I was playing in another venue, I would start at about 3:00 p.m. until 5:00, and then I’ll reach the hotel at 6:30, and I will play all the way until 9:30.

Joseph: What sort songs were you playing?

Rei: I was trying to play everything, but I was only good in pop and jazz. I was trying to play some classical, because Raffles Hotel is a very old hotel. The kind of clientele who comes in, we do get celebrities. We get people from all over the world, especially from Europe. We had a lot of regular guests who are familiar faces. It is a place where you can see familiar faces all the time. The guests feel at home, and we feel at home when we see them as well.

Joseph: Something I have always wondered about—I can’t say that I’ve had the pleasure of staying at hotels that are fancy enough to have a hotel lounge pianist every time, but when I have seen people like that, I’ve always wondered, are you reading from notes or are you just playing everything from memory? How do you come up with your playlist?

Rei: Basically, it is really a very easy job, because the hotel doesn’t restrict me on my repertoire, as long as it sounds good, as long as I get good feedback from the clientele every now and then. Basically, I just play whatever I like. I can read notes, but I prefer to memorize them, and I play by ear most of the time.

Joseph: That is quite the skill. Did you expect that your training as a pianist would take you to eventually become a pianist in a hotel lobby?

Rei: Yes. I was expecting that when I was in my training, because I had a teacher whom I respected. He was a role model when I was 16, 17 years old. The thing that they say about the law of attraction thing, I think somehow it brought me there years later.

Joseph: I want to go back to something that you were starting to tell us which is what made you want to make a change. I know when we spoke before, you mentioned there were a couple of reasons why you started to think about walking away from music. One was thinking about your future as a musician, which I know you touched on before. Can you just tell us a little bit more about how you thought about your future prospects as a musician and how you realized that that wasn’t quite what you wanted?

Rei: I think the best way to look at the future of your career is to see if there is somebody who is 10, 20 years down the road who is like your future. Whether that future is the kind of future that you are looking for and whether this person who is 10, 20 years down the road, whether you can see yourself becoming this person.

I practically know most of the working musicians over here in Singapore and as well in the Southeast Asian region. I know the best players, and even if I become the best, I wouldn’t like what I will be doing because of the kind of lifestyle. You have to stay up late. You have to drink alcohol. You have to, what we call, ‘entertain the guests.’ You are in a drinking and a smoking environment, which is something that I was growing out of.

I went through a stage of drinking and stuff like that, but I was growing out of it, because my social circle changed. I was mixing with people who are in the corporate industry, who were very stable. I see their progress, and it was really meaningful. Not just people in corporate, but I was also mixing with a lot of entrepreneurs at that time.

Joseph: Is there any sort of misperception, you think, that people have or that you had about the life of a musician that very quickly became apparent to you that that’s not what quite what you wanted?

Rei: Sometimes when you meet people, and they ask you what you do, I came to a point where it felt awkward to me to say I play the piano at a hotel lounge. Let’s say you are in a networking fashion, it’s just irrelevant to them. You can see that they immediately just lose interest in you.

I think I came across one of your talks. You were saying something like, ‘Sometimes when you are in between jobs or when you are quitting a job, or you just quit your job, that is one of the toughest question that you can get.’ You actually feel awkward.

I think what’s worse in that point was that I was still in a job, but when people ask me what do I do, I didn’t feel proud of what I did.

Joseph: When we spoke before, you also mentioned some life considerations related to milestones, which I know you eluded to before. How did you think being a pianist would fit into the milestones that you wanted to cross in your life?

Rei: One of the milestones that I define is actually progression. Let’s say I’m three years in this job. Am I doing the same things as I was doing three years ago? If I was doing the same thing, then why am I stagnant? We have to go somewhere else after some time.

I found that after three years plus in that job, I wasn’t getting anywhere. I just can’t see myself going anywhere in that vocation.

Joseph: You had also mentioned to me when we spoke before about the importance of age and how, as you get older as a musician, that can sometimes affect your prospects. Can you just explain what you meant by that?

Rei: It is very important, because as a performing and working musician, you are an entertainer. As an entertainer, there are other things that are important. It holds a stick when people assess whether they want to hire you or not.

One of the very important things apart from your musical skills is actually your image. As you get older and people have been seeing you around, sometimes, when you get a new management come in, they want new things. They want younger people. They want to hear younger songs. Maybe they want a band. They just want fresh graduates from the arts college. So as you get older, people may not want to hire you that enthusiastically.

Joseph: You’re starting to realize that this might not be the future that you want, which I think is when we first connected. What happened next for you? I know that you started to take some proactive steps to enable the next chapter of your career. What did you do?

Rei: I chanced upon a workshop on digital marketing. I went for it. I paid about Sing $4,000. I complete the entire course. I liked it very much.

Once you like it very much, you just find ways and means to improve, so I started freelancing as a digital marketer, helping businesses generate leads via social media and search engine. As I began to be able to make a decent living as a digital marketer, I slowly faded off from the music industry.

Joseph: At what point did you start to think about moving out of freelance into working full-time?

Rei: As a freelancer, you are somehow like a musician as well. You are responsible for making ends meet. The income is not stable. Clients can not pay you. They can default on your payments. Clients can be unreasonable. My purpose of going into freelancing as a digital marketer was actually to pick up experience and see where it takes me.

I started to be on the lookout for jobs, apply for jobs via LinkedIn, which is very powerful. I was lucky enough that I was given a job by this company. In a matter of three phone calls, I got the job. Now, I’m more than a month into the job now.

Joseph: How is it going for you so far there in the digital marketing role in the pharmaceutical industry?

Rei: Over here in the multi-national company is very different from working in a small business, in the SME, because in an MNC, the overall direction and the branding, what you can do, the boundaries, what you cannot do is set by the head office.

Even as a regional marketer, I’m quite on track, because I’m lucky enough to have a boss who actually cares about making sure I get on the job well. I would say I’m very lucky. I think I’m on the right track and doing well.

Joseph: The last thing I want to ask you before we wrap up here, Rei, is about your transition, because it’s interesting. You are moving from a career as a musician to working in the corporate world. For others out there who are thinking about making that sort of a move, is there something that you learned along the way about what it takes to successfully make this sort of a transition?

Rei: If you are from the arts background, you want to go to the corporate world, it is really not easy unless you have qualifications that can get you past the qualifications gatekeeper. If they want to bypass this gatekeeper of qualifications, they have to start taking action to freelance and work for small businesses. Just keep going for interviews. Just keep knocking on doors.

Joseph: That’s a great tip. There are a lot gatekeepers along the way, and I think that when you’re going through a traditional job hunt, those tend to favor traditional candidates. Was there anything about your training as a musician that ended up helping you in some way that was sort of surprising in terms of your training and how it ended up somehow opening up doors for you or paving the way towards your current role?

Rei: No. Not at all.

Joseph: No, not at all. Okay.

Rei: Not at all.

Joseph: All right.

Rei: Really, really, really. It’s not that I’m skeptical, but really not at all. I remember when I first started to hunt for job, what happened was I did have a short snippet about me being a musician, and I didn’t get any response at all. I don’t know if that’s the reason, but the moment I took it out I started getting calls for interviews.

Joseph: Was that hard at all for you to let go of your past identity as a musician, given that it was so much a part of your life, or was that a fairly easy transition for you?

Rei: It was hard, because you would start thinking about what others would think about you. When people stop seeing you performing, sometimes they call you up. Sometimes you bump into them on the streets, and if you share with them what you are trying to do, they become naysayers. They say, ‘You will never be able to make it because of your background.’

On the practical side, it was hard because of the kind of lifestyle, the difference in the lifestyle that you have in corporate as compared to being a musician. As I was saying, being a musician you wake up at least 11:00 a.m., 12:00 p.m., because you perform late at night. If you go into the corporate, you have to wake up at 7:30 a.m. in the morning.

It took me a while to switch my body clock, but I was just determined, because I was just weighing – if it’s going to take me one year of discomfort for the next 10 years to be more stable, yes, I think it is a good tradeoff.

Joseph: That gets me into my other question before we wrap up with your current project, which is your side gig. My other question is about the people who go in the reverse direction from you in their career. I guess I hear much more about people who are leaving the corporate world to go off and become a musician or an artist or some sort of to live their dream or whatever.

What would you say to those people out there who are thinking about doing the opposite of what you did, leaving the corporate world to pursue ‘fill in the blank,’ whether it’s music or art or anything else that is one their passions?

Rei: If they really have clarity to what they are doing, if they are of a matured age that they have seen enough of the world, you are responsible for yourself. If you really want to go into there, you do not mind the setbacks, you do not mind the instability, then okay, go ahead.

Before you go, make sure you know more musicians. Make sure you know more of these people and how their life is like. If you are convinced that, ‘Yes. These people inspire me.’ Let’s say you at 35 years old. Look at a musician where he’s 55 years old now. When you get to 55 years old, is that how you want to be? If that inspires you, great. Go ahead.

You are responsible for yourself. If you make that choice, make it happen. You get there. You should not have any regrets.

Joseph: Having been through this career change, Rei, what’s one thing you’ve learned about yourself?

Rei: I learned that I really have to be responsible for whatever that I’m looking for. I don’t have to get the approval of others to whatever that I’m seeing. I don’t have to doubt the clarity of my perception because of naysayers. I stopped blaming naysayers for discouraging me, because they have not gone through what I’ve gone through. They will not understand the underlying motivations of my intention.

Joseph: I want to wrap up, Rei, by talking about your side project, which I know you eluded to at the beginning of this conversation, which is your online magazine, which is Fairy Marraine. Can you just tell us a little bit about why you started that and what it’s all about?

Rei: I started this because the beauty scene over here in Asia is growing. A lot of investment companies, they are pumping in a lot of money into medical aesthetics.

It is an online magazine that I set up. Hopefully, I can get involved in this industry, because I also have some interest in beauty and wellness. Basically, it’s an expression of my passion for digital marketing.

Joseph: Very cool. If somebody’s listening to this, and they want to learn a little bit more about your online magazine or if they just want to check it out, where can they go?

Rei: They can go to FairyMarraine.com.

Joseph: All right. We will include a link to your online magazine in the show notes. I’ve checked it out. It’s very cool. I encourage people to check that out.

I just wanted to thank you, Rei, for telling us more about your life as a former professional pianist, your transition into the corporate world, and also all the great lessons you learned along the way. I just want to wish you best of luck with your digital marketing role and with your online magazine.

Rei: Thank you, Joseph.

Where should you be devoting your energies as a professional? Part of answering that question involves getting clear on which endeavors you feel naturally drawn toward. Former journalist Victoria Crandall shares her unique journey of leaving the US to become a managing director of a cocoa exporter in the Ivory Coast. We’ll talk about the power of curiosity and using your natural interests as a way of guiding your career choices. In the Mental Fuel segment, I’ll also explain the importance of identifying your professional  “center of gravity.”

I referenced a quote from Stephen Speilberg about listening to the whispers in your life. Here’s the full video.

https://youtu.be/l2Im25BdQ8M

I also referenced this episode of Masters of Scale with Reid Hoffman featuring Ev Williams.

During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I challenged you to think about what’s been whispering in your ears. What’s something that seems to keep popping up that could signal where your center of gravity is in your career. It could be something people keep telling you about one of your strengths, or a talent that keeps showing up, or just an idea you can’t stop toying with. Try to capture what your center of gravity is, then take one action this week that COULD move you closer to that place.

Victoria Crandall is a Sub-Saharan African specialist who is passionate about entrepreneurship, disruptive technologies, and agricultural commodities. She has had several career transitions, segueing from business journalism to soft commodity research to commodity trading. Victoria is currently the commercial director of an Ivorian cocoa and raw cashew nut exporter. She is also the creator and host of the Young African Entrepreneur Podcast. Follow Victoria on Twitter and Instagram.

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

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Teaser (first ~15s): I think I’m inherently drawn to things that are new and challenging. I think it’s my inner pioneer spirit. Once I started becoming interested in Sub-Saharan African markets, I became more and more drawn to being an Africa specialist.

Joseph: Hello, Victoria. Welcome to Career Relaunch. I’m so happy to have you on the show today.

Victoria: Thrilled to be here, Joseph.

Joseph: You are our very first guest on this show based in West Africa. I want to talk about your experiences there in Sub-Saharan Africa, the challenges you tackled reinventing yourself and your perspectives as someone who’s a minority in many ways there in the Ivory Coast. Before we get to all that, can you just kick us off by telling us what you’re up to right now in your career and your life?

Victoria: I work as a Commercial Director at an Ivorian cocoa and cashew nut exporter. What I’m busy doing right now is pretty much booking contracts, making sure that all of our cocoa exports are going out on time. The company has also launched a small cocoa processing factory, so I’m actually getting my first exposure to manufacturing and managing a local factory, which has been pretty interesting.

Joseph: Can you just paint a little bit of a picture for me just because I’ve never been to the Ivory Coast? Can you just describe a little bit about where you live there, where you work? What’s the overall environment there and the setup there for you?

Victoria: First of all, Ivory Coast is a tropical country. There are pretty much two seasons here. It’s either raining or it’s not, so we’re just about to go into the rainy season. Abidjan is more developed as compared to other large cities in West Africa. As compared to Accra and Ghana or Lagos in Nigeria, Abidjan has much better infrastructure. There’s power 24/7, clean drinking water. If you go to any shop, you can find loads of imported goods. There’s a nice movie theater in town. An hour’s drive away, there’s a beautiful beach. It’s a very comfy lifestyle.

I think it’s kind of the best secret that maybe a lot of expats in Ivory Coast maybe don’t want to tell everybody, but it’s a very pleasant life.

Joseph: I know you’re American, and you’re there in the Ivory Coast, so I want to talk about how you ultimately landed there. Before we do that and before we get into more of your role there as a Commercial Director, I’d like to go back in time and talk through the two major chapters in your career prior to this period in your life, and then we can dive into more detail and the dynamics of your current situation. I was wondering, Victoria, if you could just tell us a little bit about your time going way back as a business journalist.

Victoria: My first full-time job was working as a freelance business journalist, but it was a rather atypical job. I was hired for a business intelligence company based out of London, also offices in New York and Hong Kong. They cover mergers and acquisitions, IPOs, joint ventures, and they hired me to read the newspapers in Arabic, because after I finished my studies in the US, I went to Syria, and I studied Arabic for two and a half years. I was very fortunate that I lived there right before the Civil War broke out.

I became proficient in Arabic and moved to Dubai. Luckily, I knew a lot of contacts in the journalism community and was able to reach out to someone at the Financial Times who put me in touch with someone at Mergermarket.

Working as a freelancer, I could live anywhere in the world. I was pretty much a digital nomad before that was a trendy term. That allowed me to live in Dubai. I also lived in Cairo, Egypt. I also traveled to Lagos for six weeks, and then kind of my last stop when I was still working with this company as a business journalist was in Casa Blanca, Morocco.

Joseph: Had you always planned on living the US and living this sort of international lifestyle? If so, what was the draw for you?

Victoria: I didn’t, but in hindsight, it’s not surprising that I was led to make a career abroad. I have an older sister who has been very influential to me. When she was only 24, she got a job in Germany working for Adidas. She being eight years older than me and having such an influence, I kind of looked to her as a mentor or saw that, ‘Wow, you can do that.’ Also, we had traveled a lot together. When I was in high school, I would go and visit her in Europe, and we’d travel somewhere for two weeks, and having studied also languages in high school and in college.

I just love travel. I love learning about new places and cultures, learning new languages. Once I fell down the Middle East rabbit hole so to speak when I was in college, I kind of just fell in love with Arabic. To me, it seemed very logical. I’m like, ‘Okay, I’ll go and live in an Arabic speaking country for a year, two years, and that will open plenty of doors.’ That’s kind of how it happened.

Joseph: You’re traveling around, you’re doing this journalistic work, what happened next for you?

Victoria: The big game changer was that I became enthralled with Sub-Saharan Africa, specifically with business in Sub-Saharan Africa, because when I was working at this business intelligence company, they gave me the Sub-Saharan African press to cover because no one was really interested in it.

That was because Sub-Saharan Africa, excluding South Africa, it’s still pretty much still a frontier market. You don’t have a lot of large-size M&A deals, so they were like, ‘You take Kenya and Nigeria and Ghana,’ and I just thought it was fascinating because I think I’m inherently drawn to things that are new and challenging. I think it’s my inner pioneer spirit.

Particularly reading about Nigeria, I just felt like, ‘Wow, this seems like such a crazy, complicated place but so fascinating.’ You look at its population size and its natural resources, and it’s just like, ‘Wow, this place is going to take off at some point.’

Once I started becoming interested in Sub-Saharan African markets—and this was also concurrent with all of the political problems in the Middle East because this was after the Arab Spring—I became more and more drawn to being an Africa specialist.

Joseph: How did you go about become an ‘expert’ in that? What was that journey like for you?

Victoria: I think it’s amazing that, if you’re curious and you’re hungry for information, you can become an expert relatively quickly. I tend to be very self-deprecating, so I really hesitate to call myself an expert. Given that there’s so much information out there, you can learn a lot very quickly.

I didn’t have any business background. I had studied international relations. I was really drawn to politics and kind of always thought I would stay a journalist. Just reading business papers, I was actually able to teach myself a lot, so when I worked as a business journalist, it was kind of an education as well about markets, how they worked, financing.

Again, I’m nowhere near an expert, but at least it made me comfortable with the jargon, and I was able to build a network and I think established credibility pretty quickly.

Joseph: How did you make the transition in to working in soft commodity research for a bank? For those listeners who aren’t familiar with the term soft commodities, can you just very quickly explain the difference between soft and hard commodities?

Victoria: Soft commodities are agricultural commodities – coffee, cocoa, cotton, grains, whether that be corn, sorghum, rice, oil seeds, etc. If you’re going to think of other commodities, they tend to be extractives. It’s diamond, gold, oil, any type of platinum, etc.

I got interested in commodities in a very roundabout way. As I mentioned earlier, I was living in Morocco, and at that point in my life, I felt very adrift. I had taken this promotion to be North Africa Correspondent and moved to Casa Blanca, Morocco. I don’t really like North Africa as a region. I don’t find it as interesting as let’s say Sub-Saharan Africa. For me, it was a pit stop. It was pretty much that, I’m transitioning away from the Middle East, and I want to get to Sub-Saharan Africa, but I haven’t found that opportunity to kind of take me there yet.

I had the good fortune when I was in Morocco, working freelance. I could of course take other projects, and I was able to take a month-long project that took me to Abidjan. That was in March 2013, two years after a period of conflict.

When I came here, things were calm, and investors were starting to come back. It just felt very dynamic, and something was happening here. On a personal level, I just really liked it. I found people were very friendly. The people are very welcoming, and I felt like, Côte d’Ivoire economy is very dynamic. It has agriculture. It has an energy sector. It has an oil refinery. It’s the largest economy in Francophone West Africa.

I’m working on this economic research project, and one of my interviews was with the head of soft commodities research at a pan-African bank, Ecobank. I had a very good interview with the head of research. A couple of days later, when I submitted the quotes from our interview, I had also found out just kind of randomly through LinkedIn that they were actually looking to recruit a soft commodities analyst to be based somewhere in Sub-Saharan Africa.

When I submitted the quotes to him, I said, ‘Hey, I saw this JD for the Soft Commodities Analyst position, and I’d really like to apply.’ I ended up getting the job, and five to six months later, I moved to Abidjan, and I’ve been here ever since.

Joseph: I guess what’s in my mind, Victoria, as I’m thinking about this, is if I were to make that kind of a move both geographically and also in terms of I guess the function of my job, I would personally be dealing a lot with what I would call impostor syndrome. Did you feel any of that, or was that not so much an issue for you?

Victoria: It was a huge issue for me. I kind of always felt like I was a fraud or at least a misfit working in a bank, because I always felt like I am a liberal arts social sciences type of person and an ex-journalist, and I don’t have that credibility. I never did a CFA. I didn’t do an MBA. I didn’t study finance. Sometimes, that would get to me, but most of the time, I would just talk myself out of it and be like, ‘You’re the one who’s here doing the work.’

It was a position that they really struggled to fill, because unfortunately, a lot of Africans aren’t that interested in agriculture, and they don’t see it as something where they want to be an agricultural commodities analyst. Because I just naturally gravitated toward that position and particularly wanting to study cocoa because Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) is the world’s largest cocoa producer, I was able to learn very quickly and to really cut my T’s and to establish credibility.

The only way I handled it is that, sometimes, you have bad days or you have maybe bad experiences that will trigger or at least make you doubt yourself. If you look at your body of work and what you’re accomplishing on the day-to-day, it’s like, ‘No, the work speaks for itself.’

Joseph: That’s really interesting. I guess you’re right. Sometimes, you just have to dive in and just give it your best shot. I know that you’ve got a reason for being there, and there’s a reason why they hired you, and you deserve to be there.

You’re working at Ecobank, and then you eventually make a shift into working in the cocoa and raw cashew nut export business and industry. How did that transition come about for you?

Victoria: That was an interesting one and one I never would have anticipated, because again, I always told myself I could never be a commercial trade person, because I always look at traders, and they tend to be men, they’re very aggressive, it’s a very testosterone kind of…

Joseph: That’s what I have in my mind too.

Victoria: Exactly. I had reached a glass ceiling at Ecobank, and I was kind of becoming frustrated with my work and felt like I couldn’t really advance to the level that I wanted professionally. So I resigned.

There’s another step in between because when I resigned, I decided I’m going to set up my own consultancy firm, because clearly, I’m going to have tons of clients. To my credit, I had established a really great, fantastic network in West Africa, and I really do have this niche knowledge. However, it’s just very difficult to predict how many projects or clients you’re going to have. Over that year that I was freelancing, it was very much feast or famine, and it was pretty difficult.

However, the last client I had towards the end of—I had maybe been freelancing six to eight months at this point—my last client was this local cocoa and cashew nut exporter. I had a one-month mandate. The project went very well, and at the end of the project, he made me a full-time offer to be commercial director in his company.

I hesitated maybe for one second, and then I said, ‘No, I need to do this,’ because I knew that, truly, the only way to learn is to do it – it’s by doing. I had essentially spent two and a half years talking to other people to know how you purchase and export cocoa beans. Sure enough, when I started this new job, I learned more about cocoa trading in two months than I did in two years working in a bank.

Joseph: Can you also just explain a little bit about this dynamic you were just talking about, Victoria, where you’re in a male-dominated trade, and you’re female, you’re a foreigner, what that’s like to be—for a lack of better term—a minority in this industry, both in terms of the work itself but also just geographically there, not being native to the Ivory Coast, in what I’m guessing is driven by a lot of local experts or people who have a lot of tribal knowledge about how things work in that industry?

Victoria: It’s a double-edged sword about being a foreigner, because on one hand, it privileges you in a lot of ways. You get access to a lot of information and to people by virtue of, in my case, being a white American. It also means that you’re less effective at doing some things, because unfortunately, I think as your listeners are going to know or makes sense to them, the commodity business or any type of extractive business, particularly in the export side, it’s very susceptible to predatory and breath-sinking behavior, and that’s particularly in developing countries. By who I am, those are things that I cannot engage in, which is for me, of course, all the better.

Secondly, I would say as for being a woman, it’s pretty challenging because I’ve always based my identity in what matters most to me of being my intelligence, my integrity, my work ethic. Sometimes, particularly working in an African culture or my boss is actually Lebanese, working with someone who’s Arab for instance and just older of a different generation, sometimes, you can feel that I’ve been reduced to how I look, or there are certain things that I can’t do because people do not take me seriously.

Sometimes, I’m having the impression that my gender undercuts me in some way and that I’m not taken as seriously because I’m a woman. I’ve gone to industry functions. I’ve spoken at conferences where I was the only woman in the room.

Joseph: How do you deal with that? How do you deal with what I’m going to guess is potentially a lot of incoming fire or being subject to criticism, not because of the actual work you’re doing but just because of who you are and what you look like on the outside?

Victoria: Honestly, I think the best way to deal with it is always humor. I remember sitting in a meeting. I was with my director. I was with a client who’s Dutch. A lot of cocoa importers are actually based in the Netherlands. My boss have kind of made a wise crack of like, ‘Oh, Victoria. We’re so happy that she gets to represent us abroad,’ and there was kind of an undertone to it that if I’m being maybe more expansive and generous can say, ‘He’s a 60-year-old, Lebanese man. Don’t take offense,’ but also felt a little misogynistic. Again, my value is really just reduced to how I looked, and the client laughed. I felt like I was almost a fly on the wall of this boy’s club, and it felt very diminishing.

When I kind of looked more broadly, it’s that if I cannot execute, if I cannot do my duties, I would not be here. I’m not going to beat myself up about constantly, like do I get access, do I get these meetings because of how I look or because of what I say and what I do?

Joseph: Has there been anything that has been particularly surprising about how you have been able to excel in this industry?

Victoria: I think with anything, you learn by doing, and you learn by making mistakes, which is incredibly painful. The first thing a junior trader will learn is that you have losing trades. You have trades that will go bad. You will lose money. It’s a part of the game. It’s a part of the job, but going through that first losing trade and knowing that I lost tens of thousands of dollars for my company is really hard to deal with.

Half of the time, I think people really don’t know what they’re doing, and there really is a lot of truth to ‘fake it till you make it.’ You have to be willing to learn on the job but also to maintain that authority and credibility at the same time.

Joseph: One of the things we talk about on this show is about throwing yourself into unfamiliar environments and finding a way to make it. Is there something about you that you feel has allowed you to effectively navigate the challenge of being in an unfamiliar place, of working in an unfamiliar market, of being a minority in multiple ways in what sounds like a somewhat homogenous workforce? I guess I’m just wondering what you feel is something about you that’s allowed you to not only survive but to actually thrive there.

Victoria: I would say it’s experience by now because it’s been 10 years. In May, it’ll be 10 years since I graduated from university, and in September, it’ll be 10 years since I left the US to establish my career abroad essentially. I’ve lived in so many foreign countries: Syria, Dubai, Egypt, Morocco, yeah, five countries now, that I think I’m just used to my identity really being tied to being a foreigner. It’s like the first word I learn in any new language is ‘foreigner,’ because I want to know when someone’s talking about me.

I think it’s like anything. It’s like any skill. The more experience you have, the better you’re able to deal with it. I would say professionally, particularly being a commercial director in a very volatile, I think complicated industry, such as cocoa trading, it’s really made me realize that, no, I am the boss and I have to make decisions. I have to make those decisions according to the information that I have at my disposal at the time, and then I’m responsible for them.

That was very scary to me because I’d never had that level of responsibility before. That ultimately I think has been the biggest gain of this job. Everything else I think honestly if you treat people with respect, if you have a sense of humor, if you’re willing to try new things, learn local language to try to endear yourself to others, that goes a really long way.

Joseph: Before we wrap up, I do have just two more questions for you. One is about your career changes, and the other one’s just about the cocoa industry in general because I’m interested in that. You’ve obviously gone through many career changes from journalism to soft commodity research to commodity trading. What’s something you’ve learned about yourself, having been in many situations where you’ve had to find a way to thrive in these unfamiliar territories? By territories, I mean that both literally and also figuratively.

Victoria: That I’m much more resilient than I ever thought. That again, having lived in so many different countries and ones that were very different than the US, where I grew up, there are almost systems you can follow. It’s all about, ‘Let me network and meet up with other people who are also expats or foreigners and figure out how they did things and how do I go out and make friends and how do I learn to build a life here and establish a community.’ Once you do that, it’s not daunting. Any kind of new challenge that comes your way, you can find a solution to it. You can work it out.

Joseph: One of the things that I wanted to also ask you about was I just can’t let you go without asking you a little bit about cocoa and cashew nut exporting. One of the things I noticed about myself when I was working in the consumer goods industry was that it affected my own shopping and buying behavior like when I used to work for an ice cream manufacturer. I’m now really particular whenever I’m buying ice cream products. How has working in a cocoa business affected your own purchasing behaviors when you’re buying cocoa products or any other chocolate products?

Victoria: I’ve actually become a lot more cynical about a lot of initiatives that try to guarantee some type of standards. I know what the supply chain is like in Ivory Coast, I know the realities of the industry, and I know how complicated it is to guarantee actually where buyers are sourcing their cocoa beans.

I feel actually very conflicted about a lot of Fairtrade products or UTZ, Rainforest Alliance, because I think if anyone ever came to a country like Ivory Coast or Ghana, you realize that it’s very, very, very difficult to establish a traceable supply chain.

Joseph: I always wondered about those labels that you see on mostly like chocolate bars and things, like Rainforest Alliance or Fairtrade or any sort of soft commodity. You see those stamps and labels, and I always wonder how much those really mean.

Victoria: It’s more because 20 years ago almost, there was an uproar about the use of child labor in the cocoa industry. That spurred legislation in the US that required that cocoa companies really have sustainability initiatives that have traceable procurement strategies, etc.

The reality is that child labor is kind of a part of the landscape. These communities are very poor, and so students often can’t even go to school because they don’t have a birth certificate to go to school, and they work out in the cocoa fields with their parents, and they’re not maybe necessarily doing hazardous work. Maybe they’re collecting cocoa pods, something equivalent of how kids in the Midwest in the summer, they help their parents out on the farm.

It’s actually a much more nuanced and complicated subject, and it still lacks a lot of data and a lot of understanding. There’s been this emotional, knee-jerk reaction to an issue like child labor, with good reason in the cocoa industry, but it makes companies very reactive. So then the solution is, ‘We’re going to have all these certification schemes,’ but then the whole problem becomes, how do we audit actually what’s going on on the ground. That’s the very tricky part.

Joseph: That’s very educational and very illuminating. We can keep talking about this all day, but I got to wrap us up here right now. Before we go, I would love for you to tell us a little bit more about your podcast, which is called the Young African Entrepreneur Podcast. I know this is something that you’re working on in addition to everything you’ve got going on with your day job. Can you just tell us a little bit more about the podcast and the types of people you have on the show?

Victoria: Kind of always being a business nerd, a Sub-Saharan Africa business nerd, luckily because I have a great network and I know lots of people doing really cool things in business, I wanted to launch this podcast focusing on entrepreneurship in Sub-Saharan Africa. I’ve interviewed people, entrepreneurs who are introducing disruptive technologies in supply chains management, use of tractors, or some really cool company in Nigeria that is almost like an Uber for tractors. It’s a really fun passion project that gives me something creative to do and gives me an excuse to talk to really interesting, cool people.

Joseph: Very interesting. We’ll definitely include a link in the show notes so that people can check out your podcast. Thanks so much. This has been really fascinating and educational, Victoria. I’ve really enjoyed talking with you. Thanks so much for telling us about your life there in the Ivory Coast and how you’ve navigated some seriously major career changes. I would just love to wish you the best of luck with your work there in the cocoa and the cashew nut industry and also with your podcast.

Victoria: Thank you, Joseph. This was a lot of fun.

In this special 40th episode of Career Relaunch, I’ll be drifting from our regular guest interview format to instead share some news about the show including a few exciting milestones we’ve crossed, three of my main takeaways from doing all these interviews with career changers, and some highlights from past episodes. You can also help me pick the guest who returns for episode 50.

In this special episode, I referred to the following former episodes, which I’d encourage you to go back and check out:

I’d like to invite you to help pick the guest I feature on the 50th episode of Career Relaunch to air at the end of 2018. I plan to check in with one of our guests from an earlier episode to find out how they’ve been doing on their career journey since their big pivot. I’d love to have your help in shaping this special 50th episode by voting for the person you would most like to hear from again.

VOTE FOR MY FAVORITE GUEST

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!

What happens when your career plans don’t end up working out? Independent artist turned community founder Jamie Smith will explain why it’s okay to allow yourself to shift away from your original goals and move forward with “imperfect” ideas. Afterwards, during the Mental Fuel® segment, I’ll share one of the plans I had for my own business that didn’t end up panning out.

Following my conversation with Jamie, during this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I challenged you to give yourself permission to let go of something on your task list so you can make room for another endeavour that matters more to you. Commit to trimming down that list this week, and see what sort of weight that lifts off your shoulders.

Jamie Smith is an artist, educator and events producer. She is the founder of THRIVE Art Studio. THRIVE provides community and support for female artists through their THRIVE Mastermind program, a speaking series called THRIVE Talks, THRIVE Art School courses, and the THRIVE Podcast.

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 just find it funny how you can go in with what you think it all should be and these ideas, but sometimes, there are other plans for you. There are lots of things that have not worked along the way, and I had to listen and kind of let go.

Joseph: Hello, Jamie. Welcome to Career Relaunch. I am very excited to hear about your time as an artist and how you created a community for artists. What I’d love to do is just get started by having you tell us a little bit more about what you’re focused on right now in your career and your life.

Jamie: I’m really excited to be here. At the moment right now, I am focused on THRIVE Art Studio, and I have a wonderful business partner, Tara. Our goal this year is to just keep making our master mind program. It’s exciting. We’re moving a little bit more into the education world with it, so it’s a big year.

Joseph: Great. Can you just tell me a little bit more about the mission of THRIVE? We’re going to come back and talk a little bit more about that as we progress with this conversation, but I would just love to hear a little bit more about the setup and also your mission.

Jamie: THRIVE is for female artists, gender-neutral, gender-binary, and gender-fluid artists. We created THRIVE to support them in their journey of becoming or being professional artists, and we have a master mind program. That’s our main focus. They sign up for a year and meet every month to talk about the ups and downs and give each other support. That’s our main focus.

With that, we have a podcast. We do talks in Vancouver, and we have an online program as well. Lots going on, but our main focus is just to create that community in a space where I saw there wasn’t any.

Joseph: That’s a perfect segue way, Jamie, into what you were doing before you created this community at THRIVE. Can you just tell us a little bit more about what you’re up to as an independent artist and go back in time? Then we can move forward from there.

Jamie: I was a high school art teacher, and I decided to pursue my dream of being a professional artist. I worked really hard for that. When the dream was a reality, I actually realized that the dream of being an artist is amazing, but it’s quite lonely. I had my studio, and I was making work, and I was selling work, but I found I was alone working a lot, and I didn’t have a big network at this time in Vancouver where I had chosen to live and pursue this.

I was always trying to reach out to other artists and build a bit of a network and see what was going on, but I found it really hard that there is no direction on how to do this. At the time, I teasingly called what I was doing ‘Lady Dates,’ and I would just reach out to other artists that I admired and were also doing what I was doing and ask them for coffee and chat about the ups and down, because being an artist, there’s no one way of doing it. There’s actually too many ways, it’s overwhelming.

These people in my life were coming in and really helping me realize that I wasn’t alone, that other people were doing this as well, and that I could be successful.

This was all happening, and then I got a bigger studio space, and I thought, ‘What if I brought all these amazing women that I had met during this time together in one room? What would happen? What magic could we create?’ That’s how THRIVE really started. It was six artists, and we came together.

One thing I think that really made a difference in this whole journey is, that night, I said at the table, ‘Tonight, we’re gathered here not as competitors, but we’re gathered here as a community.’ That thread has grown with us as THRIVE has grown, and it’s the real key I think: we had to shift out of this idea of starving artist and this idea of lack and that there wasn’t enough to go around, and instead, build each other up and think, ‘If one woman in the arts goes further, it’s a win for us all.’

Joseph: How would you describe the level of competition as an artist? Because I think you’re getting to a really interesting point there that I hear a lot when people are talking about this difference between a scarcity mindset and an abundance mindset, where the scarcity mindset is ‘You’re my competitor and any sort of business or sale that you make is a piece of business or a sale that I don’t get to make.’ Can you just give us a sense of how competitive it is in the world of art and what that was like for you?

Jamie: Exactly what you’re saying – this mindset of lack. I think there’s a good reason that artists feel this way, and that is we’ve grown up in a place where the idea of artists, the stereotype is a white male who toils away in the studio to then later, in the afterlife or when they’re quite bit older, find fame and fortune. There’s not a lot of room for someone like me, like a young woman who wanted—I really wanted—a ‘normal life’ just in the sense of like I wanted stability, I wanted a partner, I want a family, and I really wasn’t sure how I fit into that stereotype.

That’s one thing happening for artists. We come from this idea of the starving artist, and then you’re thrown into a world where, at art school, you learn all about how to think about art and talk about art, but no one’s teaching you how to sell your art, how to run a small business. There’s also this idea that you’re a sellout if you’re going too commercial with your work. There’s just a lot of things happening for artists. Being artist and making great work is a whole journey on its own.

Then we throw in a layer of competition which is it’s really hard to sell work and, ‘How do I do that?’ It’s just a really complicated place to be. I figured with THRIVE, let’s take away even the idea of competition. Of course, we’re always going to compare ourselves and look around us and with Instagram and all these things around us. I’m sure it exists. I feel jealous sometimes too, but our real philosophy is looking at jealousy as a way of, what is it bringing up and how do you want to go further and make your work better? Maybe that feeling of jealousy is because you really do want a show here, and that’s a great thing to know and use that as jewel.

We’re just trying to shift a lot of these mindsets, and especially for women, to build confidence so that you can go further, because actually, there’s very little competition in art because each artist has their own voice, and what they’re putting out in the world actually can’t be replicated. As long as you stay focused on what you’re doing and build a really strong business foundation, there is no competition. It’s just hard to know how to do that.

Joseph: When we spoke before, Jamie, we talked about how you felt like there is this need that you had in your own professional life as an artist, which was to have this support around you. You went off and you decided to create this community called THRIVE. I’d love to dive into this a little bit more and break it down a little bit. How exactly did you go about creating the group? I know you already mentioned that you brought together some individuals who started to meet and chat, but when did this shift from being this sort of casual thing to being something a little bit more formalized, and how did you make that happen?

Jamie: In my own journey of figuring out where I belonged as an artist, I had joined a master mind group for entrepreneurs. I got pretty involved in the entrepreneurial world because I saw pretty quickly that I actually had to learn a lot of business skills.

When I was part of this group, I saw the power of it, and I saw how each person was helping each other out, but I did feel different. The art world operates in a very different way, and there’s a lot of factors going on there that I don’t think applied to a normal business model. I just felt like an outsider.

When I decided to bring these six women together, and that was just going to be this casual evening, I just saw, I was like, ‘This is a master mind group. This could be that.’ These ideas were happening, but at the time, I had also started doing talks out of my studio, THRIVE Talks. I believe that these were my calling and that these talks were going to be the TED Talks for women in the arts.

I just find it funny how you can go in with what you think it all should be and these ideas, but sometimes, there are other plans for you. I remember the very first website I had that I’d thrown together, all it said for THRIVE Master Mind was a little note on the website that said, ‘A group that meets monthly. The group is full.’ It was so bad, but I was talking about these talks and stuff.

As we were going on, I just kept any emails from artists and other women that had said, ‘I heard about this group. I’m wondering what it’s all about.’ I started to listen, and I started to see the need here, and so I decided to start one more. The women before, they were my friends, so of course, they like me and support me. Then I started one with just six strangers, and that worked. Part of this whole journey for me is learning to listen and then to make adjustments.

It’s been two and a half years, and in many ways, it looks from the outside like it has grown a lot. We’re 175 members now from those six, but everything I’ve done has actually been a very slow, ‘I’ll try this, and then I’ll adjust, and then I’ll try this.’ There are lots of things that have not worked along the way, and I had to listen and kind of let go. It was very hard for me to let go of the talks. We still do them, but it’s just funny. We can get in our way a lot.

Joseph: I know you mentioned the talks didn’t quite work out. Would you be willing to share another aspect of the community building that you thought was going to work out but actually in the end was something that kind of flopped?

Jamie: Another thing that I was determined is that I thought there should be a THRIVE Retreat, like a weekend away where you just have this time to talk shop and grow. I just pushed for this retreat. It was supposed to happen last year in January, and it was going to be in Squamish, which is outside of Vancouver, but who likes to go to Squamish in January? It’s freezing, and it was just such a hard sell. We had like two people sign up, and I was so crushed. I just believed that this was so needed, and now, I’m so grateful that never worked out because I do not want to run retreats. That is so not what we’re about now.

I think failure’s a wonderful thing because you can get really good at failing. I fail way better now. I fail way quicker. I fail and I get back up way quicker now. I’m a great failure.

Joseph: That’s really interesting, this idea of failing quickly and also bouncing back. Do you have any tips on how you managed to do that? Because that sounds great, the idea of being able to have something not work out and to just brush it off quite quickly. I’m just thinking about myself. I’m not always great at doing that. Any insights on the best way to do that?

Jamie: I used to want everything to look perfect, especially when I started building a community. All of a sudden, I had an audience. That’s a beautiful thing, but that’s also very scary – with this retreat especially. I wrote the entire programming before we even talked about it because I believed that I had to know what we’re doing if I was going to sell the retreat.

Now, when I have an idea—I get a lot of them—I put it out to the community before anything has been done, before any time has been spent on it, and then I listen. That has changed everything for me because I’m too close to it, and I think I know what people want, but these are individual people, and they have needs and say.

Now, I look at the community as a place of co-creation. We have our meetings, our in-person or online, and then we have an online platform that we use. That’s where ideas are shared and people are making connections, and that platform has shifted so much over what I thought originally what it was going to be.

Just having, whether it’s a newsletter, Instagram, or whatever you have that you’d like, it’s kind of brave enough to say, ‘Hey, I have this idea. What do you think?’ I’ve started doing that more and not putting so much effort and time because that’s when the failure hits you hard, and I’ve been there.

Sometimes, I just have to see an idea through, so I still do it where I have to just go through the idea, but I think I’m getting better at deciding what ideas I have to take all the way through and what ones I can just put out there and accept and listen to the results, not push it.

Joseph: Just a couple more questions about community building, because this idea of creating a community sounds fantastic. Yet, I would imagine that, in addition to maybe some of these ideas that didn’t work out, that it obviously has some challenge that’s involved with bringing a lot of people together. Would you mind just sharing what you found to be the hardest part about creating this community for female artists?

Jamie: A big block I had for a long time—it kind of goes back to standing in our own way—is that I had this idea that if artists were brought into my community, I had to help them reach all their goals. I was taking on all these things, and it was the people piece. It was just like this is a person who has goals, and I have to help them get there, and I was putting all these stuff on my shoulders. That was really paralyzing. Now, figuring and looking at what was happening, I started to see there’s so much magic in the community supporting each other, and it’s not about me. I found a real struggle in letting go.

The whole idea of THRIVE, it’s peer-to-peer mentorship and community. That’s not about Jamie Smith, the leader of the gang. It’s just really accepting that and then working hard. I look at my role now. My role is just to create a structure that everyone within it can get different aspects of what they need. Any idea we have, it’s figuring out, what’s the organizational piece that would allow someone to contribute, to gain knowledge they need or to participate in some way? Shifting my role has been actually a really interesting journey for me.

Joseph: I think this concept of creating what you need is really powerful. What do you think stops more people from doing this? Because obviously, it seems like there had been some sort of a need for community. I’m just wondering, what do you think stands in the way of people going out and creating these sort of resources that they need?

Jamie: It’s just time that it takes away from what you’re doing. For example, for me, I’ve had a real journey of figuring out who I am as an artist now because building community, all of this, has taken full focus, full-time effort the way I’ve done it. To build community, you don’t have to do what I’ve done, which is really take it on. You can build community by reaching out to friends to going to events together every month. Community to me means a lot of different things.

I think what stops people is this piece that someone’s got to be the leader, someone’s got to take ownership and organize, especially in the arts. I see a lot of initiatives fail because there has to be an exchange. The leader or the organizer has to feel whether that’s social value or a better life for them.

For me, it came down to money. I charged for this service because I had also done free stuff in the past, like an art walk that I volunteered and was happy to do, but I saw very quickly that if THRIVE was going to be sustainable, and I was going to give up a lot of time and away from art time, then I had to make it a business. That, for me, has worked. I’ve just decided to extend my timeline on the artists that I set out to be.

I don’t paint the way I used to. I have a specific time every month that I paint, four days a month, and right now, that’s awesome. I love it, but a lot of artists I know, they would never want to give away painting time to be organizing community, but I find this very creative. It brings out my entrepreneurial spirit. It brings out my teaching spirit.

I actually feel like I really found my purpose in this, but I think a lot of people, their purpose is in the painting, so they shouldn’t be taking away from that to build community. They should just find a community and support it, and that’s what I really ask people: if you want community, you don’t have to make it, but just show up and give encouragement to people that are willing to do it because it’s a lot of time.

Joseph: That’s a great lead-in, Jamie, to this balance between helping others versus focusing on yourself. As I’m listening to you talk about this, I guess sometimes I feel this weird paradox myself, because especially when I got started out as a career coach, I was doing a lot of one-on-one coaching work. I was sometimes coaching people trying to start their own businesses on the very things that I was struggling with myself. I’m just wondering, how do you go about balancing helping others with managing your own artistic ambitions?

Jamie: I had to let go of some goals that I had set in the beginning days. I realized that I was so set on those goals that I was ignoring that my life had changed drastically and that I had been focused on something else, THRIVE. We talk about this a lot at THRIVE. Don’t let goals run you. It’s okay to let those go and say, ‘Those no longer serve me.’ Goals are supposed to be something that serve you.

Before, it was all about selling my work. It was about getting certain shows. Now, my only goal as an artist is to make great work. Because I don’t have to put the money piece on my art right now, I’ve put that onto THRIVE.

Letting go and then shifting the timeline and just saying, ‘I have 10 years to do this,’ is very different than how I was feeling when I first started THRIVE where it was like, ‘Oh my gosh, how am I going to keep going as an artist and get to all these places I wanted to go in five years?’ Now I have 10, and I’m like, ‘I’m fine. I can do that.’

I think it’s a balancing act, and sometimes, I’m not as okay with it as I am right now, but then I just have to look and really adjust. It’ll be like, ‘Why?’ There’s usually things that come up, and usually, that has a piece of maybe jealousy or a piece of like, ‘I really wanted that opportunity,’ and it’s like, ‘Okay, just write that down, and that’s now a goal for later.’

Joseph: That’s really interesting. I definitely suffer from having these rigid goals that put incredible pressure on me from these self-imposed deadlines. I don’t even know where they came from, and I so I think this is a good reminder that it’s important to let your goals flex and to also just remind yourself that you actually have a choice about which goals you want to go after.

Jamie: I had a mentor say to me, he’s was like, ‘Look at your to-do list and give yourself the gift of just taking through things off of it.’ At first, I was like, ‘No, that’s my to-do list.’ He was like, ‘No, take three things off.’ I tried to do that, and I actually trimmed down my goals in the same way. We would do the things that are the most important if they were. If a goal’s been sitting there, just staring at you, and you haven’t done it, it’s probably because deep down, it’s not important. Just X that thing off. I like that a lot. I try to do it.

Joseph: This actually reminds me. I did want to also ask you, since we have been talking so much about support, what sort of tools or resources do you use to stay on track with your own career goals?

Jamie: I love Asana, which is a task-management program. It’s free, and I just think it’s so amazing when these great tech companies offer things like this for free. I have a business partner, Tara Galuska, who’s an artist, and then we have three interns that are amazing. We do all our tasks and everything on there, and we love it.

The other thing that saved my life is Canva.com. It’s a free Photoshop service, and it’s what we use to make everything look really professional, especially if you’re not the artsy type, it makes your marketing look awesome. I would highly recommend those two resources.

Joseph: I’d love to wrap up, Jamie, with what you’re doing right now. I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit more about your THRIVE Master Mind group, and I understand you’ve got an upcoming intake.

Jamie: We do intakes in May, September, and February. We have our applications open all the time, but intakes just mean that that’s when meeting starts. You would start a year with us from that time. We have an application on our website at THRIVEArtStudio.com. Artists can go there. There’s a little video we had made. It tells you all about the program. I have a conversation with all our artists, and we make sure that we can support you and your goals and then get started. It’s an exciting time. I love the new intakes because it’s new artists, and it’s so exciting.

Joseph: Where can people go, Jamie, if they want to find out more about you or find out more about THRIVE?

Jamie: THRIVE, everything is THRIVEArtStudio. We spend a lot of time on Instagram and our website. We also have a podcast, which is a little mini master mind meeting. If you’re wondering what I’m talking about, that’s a great resource. Then my art can all be found at JamieSmithStudio on Instagram, and I just got a new website made, which is Me Investing in My Artist Self, which has been really important to me the last little while.

Joseph: Very exciting. Jamie, thanks so much for telling us more about your life as an artist and being okay with imperfect ideas, the importance of community, and also a good reminder that you sometimes have to let your goals just evolve. Best of luck with THRIVE, and I hope the people you support continue to do great work out there.

Jamie: Thank you so much for having me, and have a great day

What’s the key to being happier in your career and life? What choices and tradeoffs must you be willing to be make to achieve this happiness? In this episode of Career Relaunch, Samantha Clarke, a former digital manager turned happiness consultant, shares her thoughts on how you can become happier with your work and explains why refuelling yourself is so critical before you can serve others. During today’s Mental Fuel® segment, I’ll talk about how I deal with the pressure I put on myself.

Samantha mentioned a few strategic questions to ask yourself to keep yourself happy:

During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I talked about the importance of not overextending yourself. Consider whether or not the goals you’re pursuing are coming at the cost of your own happiness. My challenge to you is get very clear on what the metric of “success” that allows you to work in a way that’s sustainable and enjoyable. What exact level of income, title, lifestyle, work-life balance, or time with people you love do you need to feel happy? Try to give yourself permission to be okay with not necessarily achieving everything, but rather, enough to make you happy in those areas of your life that matter most.

Samantha Clarke’s mission is to help companies and individuals by giving advice on the small things they can do to make a big difference to their happiness. She delivers this work via a portfolio career as a Happiness consultant, podcaster, speaker and online trainer/educator at The Growth & Happiness School, which aims to distill over decade of work experience, research & learning, instructing on personal & professional happiness, development & technology, into signature training programmes and courses. The school’s goal is to help individuals discover, understand and implement tried & tested growth and happiness strategies that work for business and life.

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

Teaser (first ~15s): I think sometimes a lot of us are always maybe being a little bit too perfectionist, and sometimes, we might have to be making peace with, ‘Actually, I’ve delivered it in this way, and I’m happy with it,’ and not keep chasing a really overt standard version of ourselves.

Joseph: Samantha, thank you so much for joining me here on Career Relaunch. I’m really excited to talk to you.

Samantha: I’m really excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

Joseph: Can we start by just having you tell us what you’re focused on right now in your career and your life?

Samantha: Right now, I am part focused on growing my online school, the Growth & Happiness School, which is really about identifying and helping people to become happier in their work and doing that through training programs, and one, to enable people become happiness consultants, and another one is really around being happy first in your work or how we show up and deliver your work.

I’m also really loving the work that I’m doing with a client, Dishoom. They’re a restaurant company, and I’ve been doing a lot of strategic development on the staff there in terms of their leadership and helping them to kind of evolve and be able to grow as the company scales very quickly and opens different restaurants across the UK.

Joseph: I’ve been there myself. I got some really good food. That’s very cool that you’re working with them. You identify yourself, Samantha, as a happiness consultant. I know that’s just one of the many titles that you’ve got because you do have a portfolio career, and you’re involved with a lot. Can you just explain exactly what a happiness consultant does?

Samantha: A happiness consultant, for me, I operate under the umbrella of creating happiness at work. I help individuals and companies make work happiness a priority. From a company perspective, I work with startup founders, heads of people in talent, general HR, to really help them scope out how to create environments that nurture support and develop their employees and take them to the next level. I also help them identify how to navigate the impact of technology in the workplace.

For individuals, I’m a lecturer at the School of Life, and I run Guardian Master Classes. For me, my aim is to really help individuals figure how they want to show up and think about their own work happiness as an individual because I strongly believe that whilst I can help the companies really create better environments, I think an individual has the drive, and they should see it as their goal to really find ways of making themselves happy at work.

I run workshops around how to create a portfolio career, how to be more confident, how to communicate better and build better work relationships. That’s essentially what I do in terms of happiness and work.

Joseph: I’d love to come back to that because I know that you’ve got a lot of really interesting insights on how to fill your happiness tank and the impact that technology has on people’s happiness. I’d love to loop back to that topic because I know you’ve got some interesting insights there, but I was wondering if we could first go back, Samantha, and talk about what you were doing before you were focused on helping people become happier in the workplace and talk about your time in agency account management. Then we can move forward from there. Can you just explain to me what you were up to before you were a happiness consultant?

Samantha: It’s been a very interesting journey getting to this state of bliss in my own work happiness. I started out many moons ago as an account manager at a digital ad agency. I really enjoyed the branding and strategic thinking, but I felt like I was just a bit of a go-between, between the client and the creative. I just didn’t feel very purposeful in my work. I also really didn’t feel really in-tune with what I was selling. It was promoting a lot of sugary cereal brands and diet bars. I just felt like every day, everything felt very meaningless.

To kind of offset how I was feeling in my day job and how demotivated I felt, I spent my evenings retraining in footwear and fashion and the industry of design. I really thought that I was going to move into a career in making shoes. I started working in the factories on the weekends, and then I produce my first semi-bespoke footwear line. I loved it, but we went into recession.

The backers that I had found to really help scale my business were suddenly very cool about the idea of launching a footwear label in the recession, and so I started just helping people who had been made redundant or were kind of thinking about taking the leap to work for themselves, to look at how to personally brand them.

The issue was that as we were doing that and we’re having a lot of fun doing a mixture of styling and doing a mixture of confidence building. They were just complaining about work all the time. I was listening to all these people, and I finally felt like I found my place in the world in terms what I’m supposed to do for work.

Joseph: It sounds like what you’re describing is this sort of natural evolution from what you used to be doing to what you’re doing now, which is something you really love. Were there any particularly challenging moments as you were on your journey toward becoming an independent consultant that come to mind?

Samantha: First and foremost, I think it’s having the confidence to go out on your own. I think I had the ideas, and I was really relatable and approachable to people.

I didn’t come from a very entrepreneurial family. My parents were very much like, ‘You should get a job,’ and, ‘Really? Why aren’t you saving for your pension?’ and all of this kind of stuff. I really was carried away with the whole idea of figuring out how to be your own boss, how to create something from nothing, but there are a lot of challenges along the way there in terms of maintaining momentum, thinking about how you market and sell yourself and how you pitch in ideas and things like that. For me, it was that kind of figuring out how I pull it all together when I didn’t have any reference points.

Joseph: I know what you mean. I’ve been on that journey myself, and I know one of the complicated aspect, especially when you’re creating your own thing, is just trying to figure out how to package it all up and to also be learning as much as you can on the side. How did you balance all of that, investing in yourself versus trying to build your business? Because I don’t know about you, but I notice that there’s just not enough hours in the day to fill all that in. Also, it can be really exhausting to do that. How did you manage that all for yourself?

Samantha: I have some positive and negative times around that. Personally, I have sickle cell, which is like a blood disorder that can give you really painful attack sometimes. There was a period—I think it’s probably 2012—I was really sick. I basically had quite a lot of time with my hands because I was just in bed. That’s when I did a lot of my learning, and I studied a lot of online courses. When I was kind of back up to speed and able to get running again, that’s kind of how I managed to put the stuff in action.

For me personally, I’m also very wary about how I manage my energy and my health whilst I’m kind of trying to work and deliver really good training programs or consultancy and also still be up-to-date. Now, I find that I really structure my calendar, and I batch out time for strategy and visualizing and learning. The same way that I’ve been thinking about how you automate your money when you’re working for yourself, I’ve been looking at how to operate the same framework to learning and to having the discipline around that too.

I think that’s part and parcel of why I was very keen to put together the thoughts and the processes behind how you’d be happy first. That’s key when you are a consultant: to really batch out your time accordingly and think about what’s going to be right for your personal development, what’s right for your business development, and what’s right just generally for how you want to live your life and the people that are around you as well, so you’re getting structured time for all and just being disciplined about it.

Joseph: Let’s talk a little bit about your insights as a happiness consultant and this concept of energy. One of the things, Samantha, that you talk about is the importance of filling your happiness tank so that you can serve others without burning out, which I think is what you’re just referring to. We normally talk about people burning out doing work they dislike. What have you noticed about burnout amongst people who are actually doing work they love?

Samantha: That’s the biggest one because there’s a lot of coaches, there’s a lot of consultants, there’s a lot of yogis. When you’re so passionate about what it is that you want to give to the world, I think it’s really crucial for individuals to think, ‘How am I refueling myself in a way that I am still giving really nourishing and useful insights and my skills to my clients?’

The first one is really looking at, what do you need to put down? What are the things that you need to maybe let go of, give up, make peace with? I think sometimes a lot of us in service or delivering skills, we’re always maybe being a little bit too perfectionist, and sometimes, we might have to be making peace with, ‘Actually, I’ve delivered it in this way, and I’m happy with it,’ and not keep chasing a really overt standard version of ourselves. I think there’s something around how we can be a little bit more vulnerable. I think sometimes, when you are working as a consultant or a coach or whatever, we love to give, but understanding how you can be open enough to receiving as well is really beneficial.

It’s really thinking about what you can do to make space for certain things in your calendar. We’ve already touched on how do we make space to learn, how do we do all of that, but there’s also the self-care. What is the time that you need to dedicate to make sure that you switch off and that you don’t have all this tech time or that you’ve got a wind-up routine in the morning and a wind-down one in the evening?

The other area is thinking about your support system. I think it’s really important if you are in a job where you’re delivering to somebody else every day who is there to give you the support you need. What are the foundations that you need? Maybe it’s friends and family. Maybe it’s an external coach. Maybe it’s being able to talk to somebody about whatever is going on in your business so that you’re not bustling it up.

Then I think it’s important to keep challenging yourself. I always say, what can you destroy and rebuild to keep innovative and to keep growing? I think if you can really work through all of those key phases and identify what’s working, what isn’t working, and maybe do that as a reflection exercise maybe one a month of maybe once a quarter to think about it, you’ll start to see some differences in yourself and you’ll start to see what you need to change and what habits you need to break.

Joseph: Has there been a particular change that you have made in your own life, Samantha, that you have found has made the biggest difference to your own happiness?

Samantha: I’m listening to my gut a lot more and being very intuitive about what feels right. I think maybe when you’re starting off and you’re trying to work for yourself, you take on a lot of things that don’t energetically feel right. I think there’s something really valuable about trusting your gut. That has made me a lot happier in terms of knowing when to say no to certain projects, when certain collaborations don’t feel right, and just letting go of it. I think that’s one of the areas where I’m comfortable in making peace with certain projects that I don’t get involved in because I just know it’s not right for me. It’s either not right for me from a health perspective or it’s just not right in terms of where I want to go this quarter in my work.

I think another thing that I find really useful for my own personal happiness is really showing appreciation and being really grateful for the clients that I work with on a daily basis and being honest with the fact that, yes, some of it is definitely good work that I’m delivering, but it’s also a choice that people are making to spend time in your presence and to give you money, and I’m grateful for that.

Joseph: Those are some really good tips. I know that early on, when I started my own consultancy, it definitely took me a while to learn that lesson that you’re talking about where you just say no to things, especially during those times when you know it’s not right, because I think there can be a tendency to just try to say yes to everything.

You had alluded to technology earlier, Samantha, when you’re talking about those different steps of how to refuel yourself. How does technology affect people’s happiness and what you’ve observed in your own work?

Samantha: When we look at technology, it’s so intuitive and useful to how we work. At the same time, we have to think, is it serving me or am I serving it? In the workplace, I see a lot of distraction. People are just feeling really like they’re on the email treadmill. I think in terms of social media, when we think about it from a life perspective, there’s a lot of media that people are consuming that perhaps isn’t right for their psyche or in terms of how they want to spend their time. I feel like we’re just constantly at the behest of the technology itself, be it your phone or be it the apps.

A lot of these products have real addictive cycles, and it’s up to us to start to be mindful of our habits and when we feel vulnerable and triggered to use technology and what we might need to do to remove or to pay attention to those triggers to make some changes.

Monitoring. I think a lot of people don’t really know how much time they are spending on technology if it just checking emails or their phone or if it’s social media platforms. I think the more that we can be conversant on how we’re using our time across different platforms, the better and quicker you’ll be to make the right changes.

Joseph: That’s great advice. I definitely have noticed myself, especially in the era of Facebook Live and Instagram Stories, I almost feel this urge and pressure to check it, like that addictive nature that you’re talking about. I definitely notice that I am having those sorts of urges as much as I hate to admit it. Thanks for sharing some of those tips on how to manage that.

I would love to wrap up, Samantha, by talking a little bit more about the Growth & Happiness School that you just launched. Can you just tell me a little bit more about the school’s goals and a few of the topics that you cover?

Samantha: As a consultant, I’ve really been intrigued by how I can put myself in a place of positivity to be able to give it to others. I’ve always known for myself individually that you can’t serve from an empty well. I find a lot of managers, founders, yogis, wellness professionals, coaches, consultants, they don’t always take the time to fill up their own tank. Like when we go on planes, and they always say, ‘Put your seatbelt on first before your kids,’ or whatever, I think it’s really true.

That course is what will be going live in 2018 to really give people the foundations of ‘How can I put myself in a place of real positivity and strength and growth and happiness so that I can continue to flourish and pass the baton onto others?’

Joseph: If people want to learn more about your work, Samantha, or if they want to learn more about your Growth & Happiness School, where can they go?

Samantha: My personal website is www.SamanthaAnd.co. The Growth & Happiness School is just GrowthandHappiness.co.

Joseph: Great, thank you so much Samantha. We’ll include all those links in the show notes. I just appreciate you taking time out of your busy schedule to tell us a little bit more about your life as a happiness consultant, the importance of making sure you’re taking care of yourself, and also how you manage your own happiness in the workplace. Best of luck with your work and with your new school.

Samantha: Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. It’s been great.

How can you figure out how you should be devoting your professional efforts? In this episode of Career Relaunch, Sacha Romanovitch, CEO of Grant Thornton UK, explains why she decided to take a hiatus from work to figure out where to take her career. We’ll also talk about what you can gain by stepping away from your work and how you can be more intentional in your career. During the Mental Fuel® segment, I’ll explain how you can use the concept of Ikigai to clarify where you belong as a professional.

Ikigai Visualisation- Dan Mccandless

During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I talked the concept of Ikigai–the intersection of passion, mission, vocation, and profession–as a way of shedding light on where you may feel more fulfilled professionally and challenged you to make a 1-hour appointment with yourself to figure this out. What did you end up discovering? Leave a comment below!

Sacha Romanovitch is CEO of Grant Thornton in the UK, a £500m business with 4,500 people whose purpose is to shape a vibrant economy. Sacha became the first female to be elected as CEO of a major accountancy firm and took up the role in July 2015.

With a firm belief in how clarity of purpose liberates our people to deliver sustainable value for our clients, people and communities we serve, Sacha established the firm’s purpose of shaping a vibrant economy where we are building trust and integrity in markets, unlocking the potential for growth in dynamic businesses and creating environments where business and people thrive.

Regularly speaking on transformational leadership and a sustainable future, Sacha also engages her 6,000 Twitter followers about systemic change from self-interest, competition and hierarchy to shared purpose, collaboration and connected communities for a new normal of a vibrant economy working for all.

Introducing shared enterprise Sacha has opened the opportunity for all our people to share in profits. Sacha has capped her reward to 20x the average employee. Championing social mobility, including chairing Access Accountancy, in 2017 the firm was recognised as number 1 in the Social Mobility Employer’s Index.

Sacha has two sons (14 and 10) and relies on them, her husband and yoga/meditation to bring perspective to life.

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

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

Teaser (first ~15s): I haven’t really decided that being a partner in the firm was actually alluring for me. It was just like the next step in terms of this career ladder. That was part of the wakeup call for me: I’m going into this thing, but I don’t really know why I wanted to do this.

Joseph: Hello, Sacha, and thanks for joining me here on Career Relaunch.

Sacha: Lovely to connect with you, Joseph.

Joseph: I’m looking forward to talking through your career at Grant Thornton and what you learned from your sabbatical from work and also some of the initiatives you have going on right now to create a more inclusive and vibrant workforce in the UK. Lots to cover, but I was wondering, Sacha, if you could just kick us off by telling us about, first of all, what’s keeping you busy right now in your career and your life.

Joseph: A lot of work that I’m doing is about helping our business and other businesses to think about how the choices that we make through who we work with, through who we employ, through how we act as businesses, and through what we choose to influence, through all of that, we can make a really positive impact in shaping our future. We can’t sit and just wait for governments on their own to try and solve some of the really big challenges facing the world.

My mission is to really make a new normal that businesses become much more purpose-led and really go back to—obviously, people in business, they want to make money, but if you’re not solving problems that actually are valuable and important for the world and solving those problems in a sustainable way, then actually, you don’t have a successful business either.

Joseph: I think that word that you’ve used ‘purpose’ is a really important one that comes up a lot, especially for listeners on this podcast because sometimes, when people aren’t feeling super jazzed about their work, it’s because they don’t find it really meaningful or purposeful. I definitely want to come back and talk about the role you see business playing in that arena. I was wondering first of all though, if you could just give us a glimpse into your role there as CEO of Grant Thornton in the UK, and then we’ll go back and kind of touch on some of these other topics.

Sacha: As CEO of Grant Thornton in the UK, we have maybe 5,000 people working with us over 27 different locations. We’re really on a reshaping of our business so that everything we do does align to our purpose of shaping a vibrant economy. It’s also taking through quite a cultural change, because if you look at how the world operates and tick and how the financial services world operates, the leadership model has historically been very much one that’s based around self-interest, hierarchy, and competition.

What I see is that, for our business to be successful, we need to move to a culture that is very based around shared purpose, collaboration, and connected networks of people being able to achieve things together. My job of work, I suppose, within our firm, is how we grow our business sustainably, reshaping our client portfolio, align it to our purpose, and how we can work and influence convening people across our client base to be able to grow their businesses sustainably too.

Joseph: Why do you think the default operating model is still assumed to be this more cut-throat or intense competitive environment?

Sacha: Really, our business world today is very much shaped on a model that was designed probably about 200 years ago, really by white privileged men from typically the upper classes who shaped and designed a model that actually was based on the world that they knew, that they understood, that they could win in basically. I think that what we find is that that model has achieved certain things through to now, but actually, in a world where we’re now facing really limited resources, we need to be much more thoughtful as to how we actually work in the world that that model doesn’t really serve us for the future that we need to create. I think you can probably trace a lot of it back to the British Empire and just how that operated all those years back.

Joseph: I can tell by listening to you that you’ve got a very purposeful professional life. Yet, I know you haven’t always been CEO there at Grant Thornton UK, Sacha. I know under your Twitter profile or your bio—I thought this was interesting to read—‘I spend my life trying to create the space for us to think.’ I know that you yourself took a hiatus from work, which I was kind of surprised to hear. You think about CEOs and you figure they’re on that fast-track to climb the organizational ladder.

I was just wondering if you could take us back to the moment right before you decided to take your sabbatical. What was going on for you professionally and more importantly personally in your life?

Sacha: I went to Oxford to study chemistry. In my second term, I met the man who became my first husband. I’ve done most anything. I did my exams at school. I managed to get into Oxford University. I managed to then get a job in the accountancy profession. I was on this kind of corporate conveyor belt. In my personal life, I was probably on, without realizing it, a bit of conveyor belt as well. I’d fallen in love, I got married, and we bought a flat. We’ve done all of these sort of standard things, and then worked tremendously hard through all of that.

Then it was sort of getting to this point in life as to the ‘what next?’ My husband and I split up, which was a real wakeup call for me I suppose that, was the life I’d been living one that I’d really been choosing to live or had life just been happening to me? That then sort of triggered really a reassessment of everything in my life because if that relationship wasn’t true, then what else in my life wasn’t true? It really provoked me I supposed to re-examine all sorts of aspects in my life.

In my professional life at the time, I’d been doing well at work. I’d been doing well on my exams, doing well on my work with clients—I really loved working with clients—but I was also finding that my default, which is to keep working harder and harder, wasn’t a really healthy situation.

I, then, got to a point where I was really looking at my progression through to partner in the firm. There was this sort of thing of, ‘Do I want to be a partner in a professional sort of system?’ When I got into accountancy, originally, it had been because I wanted to learn how to run a fashion business because that’s what I thought I was going to do. I thought I was going to be a fashion designer. It was a real point for me of, is this actually what I want to do with my life?

I was very fortunate because my counseling partner at work, we sat down and had this conversation. He just looked at me and said, ‘What do you really want to do?’ I said, ‘What I really would like is just some space out to decide if this is what I want to do with my life or not.’ That afternoon, he arranged a year’s sabbatical for me so that I could have a year out and still have the guarantee of a job when I came back.

Joseph: Before we get to your sabbatical, you mentioned that you were thinking about whether or not you wanted to become a partner. I hear this a lot, like people want to make partner in their law firm or they want to make partner in the consulting firm or whatever the company is that they work for. Can you just share what was alluring about becoming a partner for you and what ultimately made you start to question that?

Sacha: I think that was partly the point. I haven’t really decided that being a partner in the firm was actually alluring for me. It was just like the next step in terms of this career ladder that you were expected to do. I think that that was part of the wakeup call for me: I’m going into this thing, but I don’t really know why I wanted to do this.

Interestingly I think, having supported a lot of partners coming through since my return and since being in my new role, I think it’s actually a rite of passage everybody has to go through, which is until they get to a point where they know really ‘why do I want to do this?’ you probably either won’t get there or won’t be successful and fulfilled when you do get there.

Joseph: When you thought about going on this sabbatical—it sounds like Grant Thornton was great about giving you the space to do this—did you have any concerns about taking a sabbatical? If so, what were those?

Sacha: The typical concerns, ‘Am I throwing away my career?’ and stuff like that. I don’t know if I was naïve or if I was just at the point where I knew I needed to step away and do something different. I didn’t have those, ‘Oh gosh, will I be able to come back?’ and that was really partly the environment that my employer created for me, which was very much of ‘There will be a job for you when you come back.’ They were really supportive of that. That was really helpful.

At the same time, I also sold my flat or apartment—if anyone’s listening in America—and got rid of a lot of my material possessions. Again, it was sort of quite a cathartic shedding of dust that was trapping me into a life that I wasn’t sure that I’d actually chosen.

Joseph: Tell us about your sabbatical. What did you do and how did you spend your time?

Sacha: I actually went out with my now husband, who wasn’t at the time. He had the idea he wanted to travel, and I thought that would be a brilliant way for me to get out and about. We basically got the one-way ticket to India, to Delhi, where one of my oldest friends had taken me to Delhi, and I stayed with her family just very shortly after my marriage broke up. That was a real opening up my eyes to this wonderful country and this wonderful world.

When we landed in Delhi, it was wonderful because you were, every day, being able to choose, ‘What do I want to do today? What’s interesting? What’s important?’ That for me was a really important part of this learning of ‘What did I really want to do? If I could do anything every day, what would I really want to do?’

I spent a lot of time traveling through India. I got to read a lot. I had that wonderful time where when you were reading books, a lot of exploring ideas and philosophies and things to help me understand the world. Through that journey, I met some really interesting people on the way, which took me into an interesting meditation and then into yoga. I went off and did a 10-day meditation program, a silent Vikasa Program in Thailand. When I was there, I found out about a yoga retreat in South India. You really have the luxury of being able to follow threads and ideas and time digesting them.

Joseph: Was there anything else that you learned about yourself during this process of taking some time off and having a little bit of space to just clear your mind?

Sacha: You can’t help but tap into a sense of connectedness with the world and a sense of a responsibility in not just what you do with your life but also how you live your life. Are you being intentional in how you behave with people every day? Are you living a life that you’re proud of? If that makes sense.

When I was traveling, one of the other wonderful things is that you’re meeting people the whole time. You have no context in which to put you. All the labels that you have when you’re in a professional career, if you’re a CEO or you’re an accountant or you’re a this or a that, all of those are shed in. All you had were people responding to you as you were, and so I think it was something that also helped me really just center myself in terms of, ‘What was my truth? Who did I really want to be? How did I really want to behave?’ which was not deformed by the context of societal expectations on me.

Joseph: Definitely. I think, so often, we use our titles as labels, and other people do that also, that question, ‘What do you do?’ and then people immediately start sizing you up and judging you, and we do the same. That’s really interesting to not have any of that pretense there. Was there a particular moment, Sacha, when things flipped for you? Because I know that one of the reasons why you decided to take this time off was to figure out what you wanted. Could you take us to a moment when you had a shift in your thinking or your perspectives on what you wanted to do next in your career?

Sacha: My last thing that I did—it ended up I think being 13 or 14 months out—was doing a teacher training yoga at Vidya Dham Sivananda Ashram in South India. I think that was an interesting one because I started to work out what was important to me because going through the teacher training, I had the thought that, ‘Maybe I’ll be a yoga teacher. Maybe I’ll do this.’ What really sort of came through to me was that what I loved in yoga and yoga teacher training was being able to make an impact on an individual, but actually, what I loved from my former life was actually being able to see that you can make an impact to scale.

Those two things came together that actually meant that I did choose to come back into the profession, but the mindset that I was coming into it with was wanting to actually operate in a way that was really reflective of what I felt was important in terms of how we behave in the world, what was the impact that we have in the wider world.

Joseph: Let’s talk about that, Sacha. You come back from your sabbatical, and I know that some people, after they take time off, they decide to do something totally different. In your case, you returned back to the same company. How did you approach your work differently upon returning? What changed for you?

Sacha: I came back, and I look back now, and I think the arrogance of relative views. There’s a new guy, a wonderful guy called Malcolm Ward, who was the new leader of the practice area that I’d come from. In coming back in, I said, ‘Look, I want to come back in, but I really want to work to help to shape our business area to where I think it could be.’ It was fantastic because I came in, and I sort of came in with this sort of PowerPoint deck of all these things that I thought we should change. He was like, ‘Okay. I’m going to give you the opportunity to work with me to support the developments and transformation of the practice.’

I got to do client work as well but also starting to work on the business as well as in the business. I definitely came in with a very clear idea of, if I’m going to come back into the business, I’m not just going to come back and do what I was doing before I left. It needs to be different so that I feel I’m making an impact on the things that I feel matter.

Joseph: I also know that we started this conversation talking about your family. I was wondering if you also had any sort of shift in perspective related to your life outside of work.

Sacha: I’ve been very blessed to have my sons. Probably the key thing is that it does leave you with a real sense of what are the things that you want to build into your children, what’s important. One of the things that are really important in the young men that we’re bringing up is actually that they are kind to people, that they listen to people, that they have empathy, that they’re thinking about what they can give to the world, not what they can take from the world.

I suppose it just comes into being clear about the values that you want to inculcate in your children and the values that you want in your family. That manifests itself in lots of different, small ways I suppose. For example, on birthdays, we always do some microfinance lending, and there’s a family we choose, ‘Which entrepreneurs you want to invest in?’ That’s one of the things that we do for each person’s birthday. Sometimes, it slips me, like we slipped three birthdays, and then we do a catchup.

It’s things like that that just keep us all focused on the things that we can do that actually can improve things in the wider world rather than just thinking about us the whole time.

Joseph: That’s a fantastic idea. I hadn’t thought of that before. What a wonderful way to celebrate a birthday.

Sacha: It’s really cool, and it’s also fun just having chats to the kids about who they’re choosing and why.

Joseph: That’s a great idea. I might steal that one for the future here. I guess the last thing that I was hoping to talk about, Sacha, before we wrap up with some of the initiatives that you’ve got going on was just some of your insights as a CEO. It’s not every day that we’ve got a CEO on this podcast. I was just wondering, as a leader of a large company and specifically someone who’s focused on what drives meaning in the workplace, what are some of the things that you’ve found really make people feel engaged with their work?

Sacha: People being able to find that personal connection to themselves of what is important in the world to them, and some of those things that are really important to them will be very personal things that maybe don’t come into the workplace. Other things in terms of what they actually care about absolutely can link into the workplace. That’s giving people the space to actually find out what is important to them.

My marriage failing was a real kick up the butt to me as to life is just happening to you, and you have a responsibility to choose what you do in life and not just let it happen to you. I do think that it’s very easy, technically in the modern world to get carried on on this sort of conveyor belt where you’re just doing stuff.

Being able to get that connection between what’s important to me and what’s the purpose of the business in which I’m operating and how then can I get the overlap between what really a matters to me and what I do day-to-day, if you can get to that place, then you really hit nirvana. I read the other day that I think in Japan, they call it ikigai.

Joseph: I just read about that too.

Sacha: I’ve never had the term for it before, but helping people to look at that overlap between, ‘What am I really passionate about in this world? What do these business need? What am I good at? What can I earn money from?’ If you can get something that’s happening at the intersection of those four things, then you really found your place.

Joseph: Speaking of ikigai, I had also just read about that literally a few days ago in a magazine. I know that one of the things that it talks about or that philosophy is all about is allowing yourself to slow down and to get that space that you’re talking about which is important to gaining perspective. Do you have any advice for people who are trying to find more meaning in their work, like a step that they could take to create that space to allow them to figure out what they really want?

Sacha: One of the things that we do a lot in the business is introducing meditation and just creating even short periods where you can just stop and pause so that you can actually just start to notice and be aware of how you’re feeling in a moment, what you’re thinking, because I do think that so much of creating space starts with noticing properly in the moment whether your acting as if you have space or acting as if you’re just busy, busy, busy.

One of the things we do is a really simple, just mindful minute that anyone can do which starts just building that discipline and that awareness of ‘What is happening to me right now?’ and ‘How is that influencing how I’m feeling and how I’m behaving?’ and ‘Is that who I choose to be?’ Just that basic discipline around creating a mental space I think can be very simple that anyone can build into their lives.

I think the other thing is making an appointment with yourself. Quite a lot of my partners now do this where they’ll either do it on their own or they’ll do it with a colleague where they’ll maybe just book an hour out which is catch up, but actually, that’s just space that they’re keeping either to do some thinking together or to have some space on their own together.

The final one, which is one that I have found really helpful, is I quickly learned that technically in the CEO role, there will never be enough hours in a day to do everything that people expect of me. However hard I try, I will never be successful if I set to completing everything. A great piece of advice I had from a coach was choose what you’re going to fail at. That lets you say, ‘What is really important in terms of what I’m doing?’ and to be able to let go of some things, because otherwise, you become used up in the process.

Joseph: Before we wrap up, also, I was just thinking about these twists and turns in your career and those moments when you started to reassess the paths that you’re on. Was there something that you learned along the way that you wish you had learned or known about before?

Sacha: Spend time early on deciding what really matters to you. Probably if I had spent more time on that in my early 20s, I’d have made different choices earlier on in my life I think. It’s a hard one. I just don’t know whether there are some things that hindsight is a wonderful thing, but actually you just have to live your life and just be paying attention to what life’s telling you as you go along.

Joseph: Sacha, I’d like to wrap up by talking a little bit about what you’re doing now as a business to create a more vibrant and purposeful workforce in the UK. Can you just tell me a little bit about your blueprint for the UK and the focus on profit with purpose to create a more vibrant economy here?

Sacha: Over the last year, we brought together over 1,200 people face-to-face in one-day city inquiries around the country. After that, we’ve got two things: the Blueprint for Business, which was a real manifesto for the government saying, ‘Here are the things that we think would make a massive difference to sustainable growth with the economy and profits with purpose,’ and really getting business focusing on wider stakeholder interest, not just shareholder interest, was really important.

Then later this month, in October, we’ll be bringing out our call to action, which is really summarizing all of the ideas that came out on the themes around what it is that businesses can do to step forward, because I fundamentally believe that if we want to shape an economy that we’ll be proud to pass on to our children, everybody needs to step forward, not just people stepping back. It’s raining mud at the politicians, etc.

Politicians have got a phenomenally tough job to do. Imagine if instead of everyone throwing stones at them, we all step forward and said, ‘Let’s collectively make sure that we’re taking the responsibility to really make the changes that we think will create the future that we want.’ My fundamental belief is that business can play a massive part in that, and that’s incredibly stimulating to your people too.

Joseph: That’s incredibly empowering, and I’m really looking forward to seeing how these initiatives evolve over time. I think it’s wonderful that you’re taking such a lead role in these important efforts to create a more purposeful workforce here in the UK.

You mentioned children there. I got to sneak one last question in here, Sacha. In your bio, you also mentioned you got two sons, and you rely on them and your husband to bring perspective to your life. How do they help you maintain perspective in your own life?

Sacha: My husband is an incredible man. He’s super smart. He went to Cambridge. He was the Dutch in corporate finance, but when we had our first son, he chose to be the person who stayed at home with our children. We’re fortunate that one of us could afford to stay at home and be with the boys. What is wonderful is he understands the world I’m in but is also looking at it from an outside in. Sometimes, if I’m getting really stressed and fraught about stuff, he just is that reality check of, ‘You know what? Wake up. Nobody really care about X.’ He’ll just do that for a reality check.

My kids just do it in a funny way. There’ll be things like if there’s been something in the papers, and my picture’s in there, and it’s maybe not the most positive comment, I’ll come home to find that they’ve drawn all over my picture and put mustaches and stuff on me and stuff, so it just becomes funny.

They also just do beautiful touching things. When I got home Thursday night, and I’ve not been at home for 10 days because I’ve been traveling with business, my youngest son had just made a wood-burning coaster for me just with a heart on it and left it for me. There are just those special, beautiful moments.

Also, they do some reaffirming stuff. The way we get it to work in my life is that I come away on a Monday morning, and then I try to go home on a Thursday evening and work from home on a Friday. That sort of means that the boys and I will have the rhythm of when I’m there and when I’m not, and so you have the same for work as well. I’m lucky in that I have that sort of balance and perspective just from being able to live in those two separate worlds.

Equally, I know how I’ve made it work and how we’ve made it work for our family sometimes aren’t options for people or aren’t how people will choose to do it. What I do think is helpful is to say, there are many possibilities, and if you look at what’s important to you and your life, you can usually find a path that navigates through. Looking to how different people have done it differently may give you some ideas, and that’s all you can hope for really.

Joseph: I guess you’ve got to make sure you find your own way that also works really well for you and uniquely you. If people want to learn more about you or any of these initiative to create a more vibrant workforce in the UK like the Blueprint for Business or the new governmental initiative called the new Inclusive Economy Partnership that I know you’ve just recently been selected to co-chair, where can they go to find out more?

Sacha: Our website, and technically if you look at everything under vibrant economy gives you an insight into all the programs on that, and also #vibranteconomy on Twitter. I’m quite active on Twitter. That’s where I love to connect with people and share ideas. I’m @romanovsun there, which is a brilliant place to connect as well.

I would say actually, the Inclusive Economy Partnership—it’s worth mentioning—was fantastic because the UK government had recognized this power of convening people from civil society and from business and saying, ‘If we bring together our ideas and resources and really back things that could be scalable across the country, that could really help move things forward, particularly when the government at the moment have got an awful lot on their agenda.’ I’m really proud to be co-chairing that with Caroline Mason from the Esmée Fairbairn Association.

If people are interested on that, if you Google Inclusive Economy Partnership, you can find out how to get involved in that too.

Joseph: I know that you guys just recently had one of your first meetings, and I’m looking forward to seeing how all that evolves. I think it’s a great contribution you’re making to the society here. Thank you so much, Sacha, for telling us more about your career and what drives purpose in your work and your life, the importance of creating space, and also how you maintain a healthy perspective in your own life. Best of luck with your efforts to create more vibrancy, purpose, and inclusion for professionals out there.

Sacha: Brilliant. Thank you.

What steps can you take to build and shape your own personal brand and freelance business? What choices will you have to make to define who you are? In this episode of Career Relaunch, Redd Horrocks, a former circus stage manager turned professional voiceover artist  shares her thoughts on how to choose the right professional pursuits, the importance of saying “no,” and how you can tap into online marketplaces to build your freelance business.  I also share some thoughts on why saying “no” is so important to building your personal brand.

During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I talked about the importance of saying no to certain projects or opportunities that don’t reinforce your personal brand. What will you start saying “no” to to avoid diluting the person you’re trying to become? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

Redd Horrocks is a Freelance Voiceover Artist. Her career started in 2003 with a chance encounter with a video game developer, and has continued to grow ever since. She has worked with a plethora of clients from more than 100 countries, completing over 50,000 different projects for anything you can think of, and some things she can’t forget. She recently launched Instant Voicemails that offers a range of professionally recorded greeting options. She’s originally from West Sussex, England, but currently resides in America. Follow Redd on Facebook.

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

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Teaser (first ~15s): It’s okay to have integrity. You can have integrity regarding what you choose to do. You don’t have to work with every client, and you don’t have to take every project because there will be another one. I wish I’d learned earlier that it is really okay to occasionally say no.

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

Redd: Thank you so much for having me.

Joseph: I am very excited to have you on the show today, Redd. You’re our very first voice-over artist on the show. I was wondering if you could just kick us off by telling us what you’re focused on right now in your career and your life.

Redd: I’m in this really great point in my career where everything’s very established and running quite smoothly and kicking along as it should be. I’m pretty busy. I’m recording about 200 to 300 projects a week on a good week. It’s quite a lot, but I love doing it, and it’s really fun. It’s lucrative enough that I can support my family. I’m nice and stable, and that’s a really enjoyable place for me to be.

Joseph: That is amazing. That number sounds like a huge number of recordings to do a week. Before we get into how actually manage your days, can you just explain first of all what a voice actor does and the types of projects that you work on?

Redd: What I specialize in is narration. I do standard narration for all kinds of projects. I work with companies all over the world. I might do their phone system or do their explainer video, or they might have a tutorial for how to clean an air filter or something, just anything that you can think of that someone needs to put a voice on. I do podcast intros. I do radio work. I have done elevators, like, ‘Going up.’ Pretty much anything that you can think of that someone would lend their voice to, I’ve done that kind of work.

For me, one of the reasons why I’m able to gain so many projects is I’m actually English. I have a British accent, and then I also have the ability to flip to an American accent because I live in America. I’m able to do both, and that kind of expands that amount of people that need my voice.

Projects can be small. I could do a, ‘Thank you for calling. You’ve reached blah blah blah phone system,’ or I could do a 33,000-word E-book on finance. It’s a really, really big range of the types of work that I do, which is fun and interesting. It’s never the same day twice.

Joseph: Very cool. I have to ask you this, Redd, and I’m sure that people ask you to do this all the time. Is there any way that you could just give us a sampling of a few of your different narration voice styles?

Redd: Sure, I mean this would be a standard. How I’m speaking with you now would be a really standard American. My natural voice is a little bit younger. If I was really starting to accentuate my words in an American accent because I wanted to take my time to explain something to you about how this works, I might do that, or if you wanted me to switch into a British accent, I can do kind of a laid back, this is just my standard voice in British. This is how I would talk to my mom on the phone, or if you needed me to be a little bit more pronounced, I could discuss the important ramifications of various political things going on right now. There’s a few different stuff that I can do.

Joseph: That is so cool.

Redd: It’s a lot easier to do it with a script, trust me.

Joseph: I’m sure. I know it’s hard to kind of do that on the fly, so I appreciate you doing that for us. One question about that. How does one go about developing a whole new accent? The reason why I ask that is I’m American as you know, and I now live in the UK, so we’ve done the opposite from one another. I’ve been here for coming up on eight years. I don’t think I’ve picked up a single bit of the British accent as far as I’m aware. How do you go about developing a new accent?

Redd: For me, I don’t really have a good answer, I’m afraid, because everything happened to me organically. I moved to America when I was 18, so I was fairly young and impressionable. Well, that’s not true. I did date a guy who decided that he thought it was really funny that he kind of trained my accent out of me, so he kept correcting me into American. That relationship did not last long, but these things happen.

I think for me, what I tend to do is I’ve always been kind of a bit of a chameleon. When I’m speaking with someone, I have a weird habit of more adopting the tones that they’re saying. It’s not necessarily something I do on purpose. It’s just something that has just happened to me over the years. I’m afraid I don’t have a good trick for you.

Because I’m speaking to you, and it’s the first time I’ve really spoken to you in depth, I’m going to sound like you. If I speak to my husband, I’m a lot more hybrid-y because a lot of my Britishisms kind of come out of my every day and because he’s used to it. It’s just one of those things that just happened. I was so young when I came here, and it just fell that way. Of course, my mother would kill me if I spoke to her in an American accent, so I have to be British still.

Joseph: Got you. Before we go back in time to what you were doing before, can you just give us a glimpse into what a typical day is like for you? I know that you mentioned that you’re doing a ton of voice-over recordings each week. What’s a typical day like for a voice actor, and how do you manage all the work?

Redd: I change the way I do things about every three to four months. As a freelancer, I found that it’s really easy to get stuck in a rut. I don’t get bored, but I get to a point where every day feels a little bit like the same. Sometimes, I will completely flip my schedule and do things 100% differently.

What I’m doing right now is I get up in the morning, I have this really, really terrible habit of just sitting at my dining table with a cup of coffee doing all my admin work. I have a desk, but I never use it. I get up in the morning, I go through my emails, I take a look at any requests for revisions from previous projects that have come in, send out any quotes I need to send out. I do that, and then I usually do that while having coffee, and then I grab breakfast, and I then I usually head down to the studio usually around 10:00.

My sweet spot for recording, I found, is between about 10:00 am to 1:00 pm. What I’ll do is I’ll head on down to the studio, and I just start knocking out recordings. I have a system that allows me to track which ones need to be done first. I handle all of those in a certain order. I work on various different marketplaces. Different ones have different time scales in which I need to deliver a project. I have to always make sure I’m delivering things in the right order.

I usually record until about 1:00, and then I’ll have lunch. Depending on how heavy of a day I have, I might go back into the studio and be done no later than 5:00, or I might end up being done much earlier, and then I get to do housework of go to yoga or all the standard fluffy things that you get to do when you have two hours to spare on the afternoon.

Joseph: I know you mentioned marketplaces, so I’d love to come back to that later. I know you haven’t always been a voice actor, Redd. Could you tell us about your time as a stage manager for a circus company in Vegas? Then we can move forward from there.

Redd: Back in college, my major was journalism, and then I switched it to communications, which is what my degree is in. Right after college, I’d started working with the theater company at my school, and I interned at a bunch of theater companies. This was back when I lived in Atlanta, Georgia. I really, really enjoyed stage management. I liked how busy it was, how you get to work on really cool productions. I worked on a lot of nonprofit theater, and so much of the work that I was able to do was with these amazing people, and it was like a big family atmosphere, and you’re working on a show for like six weeks, and then you’re done. It’s just very progressed and moved.

I was also a technician. I was a carpenter. I would hang lights. I would do all that good stuff, basically making any production I could run. I worked a lot. I was super busy. I think the year before I went to the circus, I think I calculated that I had 17 days in the year that I didn’t work. I’ve always been a bit of a workaholic.

I was working in that field for a long time, and then I started looking into working on some larger-scale productions. I interviewed for and was selected to move out to Vegas to work with a circus company as an Assistant Stage Manager, which I did for about three and a half years. I was working on a massive $130 million show with so much moving equipment, 64 performers, 110 technicians. It was busy and big and crazy, and I did that for three and a half years, and then I moved out of that into full-time voice-over work after that.

Joseph: One of the things I’ve always wondered about, Redd, with the circus world, what are the types of people who go into work in the circus? Are these people who have aspired to work in the circus their whole lives, or do they come from other industries? What’s a typical person who ends up working in the circus?

Redd: If you’re talking about performers, you’re probably looking at people who come from a competition, especially competition gymnastics. We had former Olympians, things like that. These are people that have done gymnastics. They’re done with the competition circuit, and they’re at a point where they want to essentially retire from competition and move on to like a more stable job. We had a lot of people who came out of competition, a lot of dancers. I mean dancers are performers. They just go to whatever show they want to do.

As far as technicians go and stage managers and such, most people have backgrounds that are more either touring companies, or they might have worked on Broadway or the West End. It’s kind of an interesting conglomeration of people from all different aspects of performance that kind of come together.

The other thing that my particular show had, was we had professional skaters, rollerbladers. We had people who used to compete in the X Games and things like that. We also had a bunch of people who were just professional actors.

Joseph: What was the sequence of events that took you from working for a circus company in Vegas to eventually shifting into the world of voice-overs?

Redd: I’ve always worked on voice-overs in some form or fashion, mostly accidentally, since I was in college because I had a British accent much stronger when I was younger. When I was in college, I had a friend who was a video game major ask me to voice a character for him in a video game he was developing for a senior project. He liked my voice, so I’m just like, ‘Yeah, sure. No problem. I’ve got an afternoon.’ I went on and I did it. It was this action video game, so it was a lot of like blood curdling death screams and like, ‘Pretend you’re running,’ and all this kind of stuff. I had a really good time doing it. I would do voicemails for friends or silly, little projects for people here and there.

After I moved to Vegas, I had a bunch of credit card debt as many mid-20-somethings do, and I’ve never been super fond of having credit debt as most 20-somethings aren’t. I started looking at the things that I could do to maybe generate a little side income, but because my schedule was so rigorous with the show, I couldn’t get a second job. It wouldn’t have worked. I wasn’t flexible enough.

I had a friend who had been working for a voice-over company funnily enough back in Atlanta. She was working for an audio book company, and they were looking for a couple more British girls on their roster. I did a couple of audio books with them, which in hindsight, I must’ve done an atrocious job on them because I was brand new, and I had no idea what I was doing.

I did that just for a little bit, and then I found the different online marketplaces that I’m a member of and start just kind of listing myself as an available person. It just grew slowly at first, and then it suddenly got to the point where everything kind of clicked and took off for me as far as getting clients and having projects and things like that, and it got to the point where I was working 80-hour weeks because I was working 50 hours on the show and then doing 30 hours on voice-overs. I wasn’t nearly as efficient with voice overs back then.

It was exhausting, and I just couldn’t keep doing it. I had to really take a really big, hard look at what I wanted to do, and I decided that I wanted to do the voice-over thing. I gave my job four months’ notice because I am very, very methodical on all things, and then I went full-time, and I’ve been doing this full-time since—oh my! It was just my anniversary. September 29th, 2014 was when I had my last day at the show, so I’ve been doing this for three years.

Joseph: Once you started to shift to doing this full-time, what was the hardest part of becoming a voice-over artist full-time where this was your main source of income, or was there a major challenge behind doing that?

Redd: It’s still, even years later, I still get occasionally terrified that everything’s just going to fall apart. I think that’s a trade of many freelancers because I’m really lucky as I have a really good client roster, and I’m quite diversified. At the same time, if one of my marketplaces is suddenly isn’t a viable option for me anymore, that’s a big hit to an income that my family has become accustomed to.

It’s being kind of at the mercy of the marketplace is tricky. I’ve always struggled with that a little bit because of the uncertainty, but I found that that’s sometimes combated well with really, really good savings plans. I think that’s always been the hardest thing: just never quite knowing if, one day, the rug is just going to get pulled out from under me. That’s something that was a much bigger issue in the beginning but now isn’t so bad, but it’s still there. Every freelancer, I think, has concerns about where the next paycheck is coming from.

Joseph: I know what you mean about that, and I know that that’s definitely a challenge that comes up with most people who are running their own small business or are freelancers. You just never know if everything just going to fall apart one day. What do you do to deal with that?

Redd: Wine helps, I found.

Joseph: Right.

Redd: Gin also, just saying, unequal opportunity. It’s a really weird thing. As a freelancer, we have to think about the future. We have to have savings. We have to make sure that our taxes our paid, that our things are handled. At the same time, I think sometimes it’s beneficial to not look too far ahead.

One of the things that helps me is knowing that one week is not going to look the same as the next week. If I’ve had a really, really rough week, it’s not going to be like that next week. I’m going to have different clients, different projects, different things. On the flipside, if I’ve had an amazing week, it’s entirely possible next week will be bad.

A lot of it is just understanding and realizing that so long as I keep doing the best that I can do, then that’s what I can impact. Doing my job well, keeping my clients happy, delivering my work efficiently, correctly, and on time, and just keeping this client relationships up, that’s what I can do, and that I can do on a day-to-day basis.

As far as gaining projects, that’s the best thing I can do, and giving yourself permission to not spend every waking moment hustling is a really big step. You have to make sure that you’re taking time for yourself so that you don’t burn out and then start slipping.

Joseph: You had mentioned marketplaces, Redd. For those people who aren’t familiar with online, freelance marketplaces, can you just explain what that is and maybe share a couple of the platforms that you’re on?

Redd: I’m actually on five different platforms. An online marketplace is a website that someone who is interested in purchasing a service, like a voice-over, designing a logo, helping with websites, proofreading, things like that, usually a digital service, it’s a place where someone can go to find people who are doing that kind of work and hire them. The marketplace’s work is kind of an intermediary.

For me, I put up a listing to say that I’m available, ‘You can hear my demo. This is the kind of work that I do. These are my rates,’ and then a client will select me, make a purchase through the marketplace. The marketplace will hold the money. I’ll complete the project, send it to the client, the client releases the project, and then I get paid.

One of the good things about these marketplaces is they do have, usually, a fairly large amount of clientele that are familiar with working with the marketplace, and you get reviewed on what you do. Someone could come on and say, ‘I’m looking for this kind of voice. This person does it. This rate is good for me. Let me look and see if they’ve got good reviews,’ kind of like you would with like a restaurant on Yelp. Then they would place an order and go from there.

It’s kind of like a good hub for finding services. There’s many of these on the web. The ones that I use primarily are Fiverr, Upwork, Freelancer, PeoplePerHour, and then a voice-over specific one called Voice Bunny. I get different people purchasing different projects from these different marketplaces all day or all week, and I’ll just go through and handle them all in there.

Diversifying and being cross-platform is really important, I think, for a freelancer, and you can choose to put more energy into one or the other definitely. For me, the one that’s made me the most income and the one that I continue to be the most stable on is Fiverr. Fiverr has a really good system.

Joseph: I’ve used Fiverr myself and couple of these other online marketplaces you mentioned to help me with this particular podcast actually. One of the issues, just in talking with freelancers on these platforms, that I’ve heard is how you end up showing up amidst the thousands of different suppliers on there. How did you manage to cut through on Fiverr or PeoplePerHour or Upwork or any of these other platforms you mentioned?

Redd: The one that I would definitely refer to would be Fiverr because I’m actually the number-one-selling voice-over artist on Fiverr.

Joseph: Oh, nice.

Redd: A lot of it is your reviews. Providing consistent work, especially when you’re starting. Say I was starting on Fiverr tomorrow. The first thing I would do is make sure that my rates were incredibly competitive. This is always a little bit of sticking point for freelancers because obviously, we’re always worth more than we’re getting paid. It’s just the way things work.

When you’re trying to build a career on a marketplace like this, you do have to start at the bottom. You kind of pay your dues just like with anything. I would start off having extremely competitive rates. I wouldn’t expect to be charging the amount that the top tier people are charging. Then I would work on gaining clients. All of these sites have systems where you can either send them proposals or you can provide quotes to people that are looking for things. Try and gain clientele by that.

Then I would over-deliver and go above and beyond and make sure that I was getting customers that were super happy, make sure that my reviews are impeccable. If you put in the footwork in the beginning to make sure you’re providing an excellent service and that your clients are always happy, they’ll keep coming back.

One of the phrases that I use all the time is you never know when your next client will be your best client, so if you can build slowly a stable of good clients that are constantly placing orders, constantly reviewing your work, you’re going to gain traction that way, because a lot of these marketplaces are based on algorithms regarding how much money you’re making, how many orders you’re getting, how often you’re canceling orders, how quickly your respond to messages, and then the pivotal one is how good your reviews are. So long as you kind of hit all those little notes, you will see yourself start to excel.

It’s one of those things that can be sometimes very daunting when you’re looking at a new established marketplace, like, ‘I can never match them,’ but I wasn’t the first voice-over artist on Fiverr. If I can climb to the ranks, anyone can.

Joseph: Looking back on your career as a voice-over artist on these online platforms, was there anything that was especially surprising to you about creating your own voice-over business on these platforms?

Redd: I never expected this to go this well. This was always supposed to be a side job. I had absolutely no idea that this was going to happen to me. I worked for it. I’m not saying I didn’t, but I think the surprising thing was that, once I finally found my rhythm and figured out what I was good at and how to carry myself, that was the really surprising thing that everything just fell into place.

There’s another voice-over artist on the site, and she’s an amazing girl. I actually talk to her every day, because when you’re in this marketplace, you don’t get to hang out in an office with people. There’s a bunch of other sellers on Fiverr especially that I’m kind of friendly with on Skype. She and I talk absolutely every day, but I used to idolize her. All I wanted to do was get the kind of number of orders in my queue that she had and all this kind of stuff, and I never thought three years later, that she and I would be kind of colleagues on the same tier that would chat every day.

That was kind of surprising. It’s like I accidentally found this really neat community of wonderful people that I get to spend time in my little padded room talking to myself but occasionally Skyping with someone who’s doing the same thing I am but in a different part of the world. That’s kind of nice. I don’t think I expected to have colleagues doing this, and I kind of do.

Joseph: That’s very cool that you’re able to make those kinds of connections. When you look back on this evolution in your career, from doing this part-time to full-time, what’s something that you wish you had known about this whole career change that you now know?

Redd: I think I wish that I had known in the beginning that it’s okay to have integrity. You don’t have to debase yourself. You can have integrity regarding what you choose to do. You don’t have to work with every client, and you don’t have to take every project because there will be another one.

I have had clients in the past that are just… There are some people who don’t understand that there’s a human being on the other side of a computer. That has been something that has been super tricky for me at various points during this career. Because I am essentially just this embodied voice to them, they don’t understand that I’m a person, and choices they make and things they say and requirements and demands they have of me aren’t always appropriate. I wish I’d learned earlier that it is really okay to occasionally say no.

I have learned, in the last probably 18 months, that it’s okay. Even then, I probably should’ve figured that out a long time ago. Just because you’re trying to build a career doesn’t mean you have to do everything that someone says, and it is okay if you have things that you want to stand firm on. There’s nothing wrong with saying no.

Joseph: The last thing, Redd, that I’m hoping to talk with you about before we wrap up is the topic of publicity. I guess the first time I heard about you was on the Open for Business Podcast. Then I read about you on Business Insider and CNBC, and I’m just wondering, how have you managed to be featured in such big media outlets? Because I know that that’s a question that a lot of people have when they’re starting off and trying to gain some traction with their own small businesses or their own freelance projects.

Redd: Unfortunately, a lot of it was luck. Since I work on Fiverr, one of the things that I am is a Fiverr ambassador. I’m one of the people that they occasionally tap for PR events and stories and things like that. Actually, there is a PR team at Fiverr that occasionally puts me in the mix for things when they might get approached for a quote with an article or there’s a magazine doing a story on gig economy of freelancing and stuff like that. I’m actually lucky that I have a PR team that knows who I am, that occasionally mentions me.

It has been one of those things though where a couple of the stories that have been written about me have led to other stories and people that have contacted personally, which is how I got on. Being on the Open for Business Podcast was a huge thing for me because I’m actually a massive fan of anything that Gimlet Media and Gimlet Creative do. I think my eyes went really wide when that one popped into my inbox. I was like, ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’ It was kind of a snowball thing. Once I was in one thing, that kind of led to more.

I’m a fairly vocal presence when it comes to the sites that I work on, the marketplaces that I work on. It’s my companies that I work for, and these companies are important to me. I try to be a source of help for them, especially when they’re making improvements or adjustments.

One of the reasons why I’m kind of known to the Fiverr people is because I’ve come back to them a lot of the times with feedback on the changes they’re making on the site and suggestions on how to improve it. There’s been a few features that have been released on Fiverr that I was partially responsible for, so that’s been kind of cool.

Joseph: Let’s wrap up now with what you’re doing right now because I know that you do do voice-overs, but you’ve also launched a new business called Instant Voicemails. What is Instant Voicemails all about?

Redd: Instant Voicemails is a project that I’ve been working on for a year that I’m extremely proud of. It’s a direct-download voicemail company. Say you wanted to change the outgoing greeting for your phone, be you a business or a small business or a big business or just a person, Instant Voicemails is a site that you can go to and select from a range of different options, immediately download them, and then you can use those to upload to your greeting system.

It’s my company. I also work with a fantastic guy named Andy Youso, who’s a radio personality, who does all the male work for the site. We’ve got a bunch of offerings on there. A couple of them are kind of slightly funny, jokey voicemails, and a lot of them are business-oriented. It’s just a really cool site that enables you to purchase a service for your business at a lower cost and get it right away.

Joseph: Very cool. If people want to learn more about Instant Voicemails or you or if they’re looking for a voice-over, where can they go to find out more?

Redd: You can contact me via my website, which is www.ReddHorrocks.com, and then also InstantVoicemails.com. I’m always excited to work on new projects and meet new clients and talk to people about what I do. I also offer coaching. If that’s something you are interested in, people are more than welcome to get in touch with me.

Joseph: Thanks so much for talking with me, Redd. I didn’t say this before, but I’ve always had this little pipe dream for years, going all the way back to my radio days in Hawaii of doing voice-overs for an ad or a product. This has been so cool to hear all about your life, so thank you so much for telling us more about your life as a voice-over professional, how you navigate the online freelance marketplace, and your career journey. Best of luck with the voice-overs and with Instant Voicemails.

Redd: Thank you so much, and thanks for having me. It was an absolute pleasure.

How can building your network pay off in your career? In this episode of Career Relaunch, Aaron Fung, a former change management consultant turned Talent Brand Strategist for LinkedIn shares his thoughts on how your professional network can be an incredible resource for you in your career and why your job should be an extension of your authentic self.  I also share some thoughts on how my professional network has unlocked some great opportunities for me in my own career.

During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I talked about the importance of creating a regular habit of keeping your network warm. Commit to one ritual you can easily manage that forces you to stay in regular contact with your network contacts so they don’t go cold! If you have a good tactic, I’d love to hear about it below in the comments.

Also, I always love connecting with listeners, so I’d welcome you following or connecting with me on LinkedIn.

Aaron Fung spent thirteen years trying to figure out what he wanted to do. That journey took him from financial services to non-profit to consulting jobs and an MBA in Human and Organizational Performance from Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of management. He finally discovered his dream job at LinkedIn this year, where he helps companies develop and enhance their talent brand to recruit the best candidates in the world. In his spare time, he runs a blog called “Go See the World” which is dedicated to travel. If you want to connect with Aaron, be sure to check out his profile on LinkedIn.

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

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Teaser (first ~15s): Don’t just stick with the people who you know the best. Expand your network because that’s where you’re going to bear the most fruit in learning about the mystery, figuring out if you’re a good fit, having someone not hesitate to tell you the unvarnished truth, because technically, they don’t know you that well.

Joseph: When we recently reconnected, Aaron, you mentioned to me that you went on a 13-year journey to figure out what you wanted to do. I want to touch on some of the major pivot points that you went through along the way, but can you just start by telling me what you’re focused on right now in your career and your life?

Aaron: About five months or so ago, I started working at LinkedIn. My job is I get to help companies figure out how to best tell their professional story. A lot of times, I just meet with heads of HR or heads of talent acquisition, and I try to figure out what kind of stories they are looking to tell about what it’s like to work in these companies. I really love my job because I get to talk to a lot of different people and a lot of different companies, and the stories are always incredibly different and occasionally very compelling.

Joseph: I want to come back to the work that you’re doing at LinkedIn toward the end, but I want to also go back in time a little bit here because I know you’ve got a very interesting career trajectory. Can you just take me back to the moment before you started your role there at LinkedIn? What was going on for you and what was happening for you at that time in your career?

Aaron: The four years prior to coming to LinkedIn, I’d spent in consulting roles. I got to see a lot of different types of projects and jobs. I was primarily focused in the organization transformation space. Each project kind of got me closer to what I inherently knew I enjoyed doing. There was something about change management that was interesting but I don’t think was ultimately my passion.

I happen to have a few very strong mentors and advisers in my life, several of whom had counseled me to consider looking at recruiting. I’d worked on a project for a very large technology company, working with their global talent acquisition team, and within the first two months of being there, I said, ‘This is the place I need to be, this kind of work.’

Finding exactly where that was and exactly what I was doing took me about another year after that, but I kind of knew that the subject of working with people, recruiting the best people into a company and helping people to do that more effectively was something I love to do.

Joseph: Was there a particular reason why you decided to not just stay at that consulting firm and continue doing that sort of work?

Aaron: In my line of work doing sort of talent projects, you don’t know when the project’s going to end and where the next one’s going to be because a lot of my friends in various companies had imparted some wisdom to me, which is that talent projects tend to be very few and far between. A lot of the time, people bring it in-house. They’ll have an internal talent strategy team to do this work. I do want to be doing this thing full-time and not have it be sort of coming and going, and I was very lucky to stumble upon the role of it now.

Joseph: What ultimately made you decide to make the shift from working in consulting into your current role as a talent brand strategist at LinkedIn?

Aaron: Over the years as I’ve talked to people in various company, I knew pretty quickly whether it was going to be a good fit for me or not. I have never had one reason to doubt that LinkedIn was going to be a good fit because at its core, it’s about getting people connected to jobs, to economic opportunity. The people I’ve met kind of backed that up. As I learned more about what the team was doing, I said, ‘This is what I want to be doing.’ It was almost as if it was effortless. I didn’t really need to explain why. It just seemed like it was a good fit, and everything clicked.

The analogy I draw is when you meet someone for the first time, and you know you’re going to be friends, or you know that this person is destined to be your spouse or partner. It’s almost inexplicable, but it was just an immediate match.

Joseph: As I’m hearing you talk about this, Aaron, one of the things that’s running through my head is this seems like such a great match for your interest and what you’re looking to do, and yet, I know when we spoke before, it took you a little time to get here to this point. Can you go back in time a little further than and maybe explain to me what you were doing before this point? I’m thinking of even going all the way back to your time in the financial services before business school.

Aaron: I graduated from college in 2004. I majored in business. Because I’d taken a few classes in finance, I thought I was destined to be an investment manager or a financial analyst, and I spent the first four and a half years of my career working in wealth management sales because I happened to enjoy the job, I enjoyed what I was studying, I enjoyed the research that I was doing, but it was kind of a misguided effort. It was kind of like the first person you’ve become friends with, you think that’s who all your future friends have to be.

It was my second or third year out of school. I had a chance to do some work in the training and development space. I loved it, and I knew I loved working with people as well as teaching them something I knew about, which in this case was wealth management analytics. It started me down this path of thinking like, are there other applications beyond just being a salesman or managing assets?

I went to work for a nonprofit that did leadership development programs for Asian professionals in Corporate America, and it was completely different than any of my work in financial services because it was a nonprofit. This was just the start of 2009. The financial crisis was kind of coming to ahead, and I started thinking a lot about what are the activities that I really enjoyed doing or that I do well or ideally where the two of those cross.

I decided to go back to business school because I knew I had this interest in organizational behavioral. I knew HR could be one application, but I didn’t know exactly how. That’s what led me to study human and organizational performance at Vanderbilt. The funny thing is, despite all my goals of not going back to a job in finance, I took an internship, and I took a full-time job in financial services again, for which my friends gave me a lot of help.

Joseph: Let’s just pause right there, because I think that was really interesting when I was reading back over your career history. It’s like you go to business school, and I work with a lot of business schools. I know a lot of times, people go to business school because they want to make a career change, and yet in your case, it sounds like you fell back into the thing that you were trying to leave behind. Can you just explain what your mentality was and why you think that happened?

Aaron: I think on paper, my background was a really good fit for financial services, and I happen to meet a managing director at Credit Suisse, who wound up becoming a good mentor of mine and really coached me and coasted me towards that role.

I didn’t have, I think, the courage to say no to an internship that I knew fairly well or was familiar with, and so instead of holding out for something that would’ve pushed me or forced me to a different path, I decided to go down the path of least resistance. I had a great experience, I did really well in the internship enough to get a full-time offer, which I then took, but as I explain to people now, I basically followed the money.

In the long term, it was not the right decision because I got to the job, was there for about maybe six months or so and then suddenly realized that I had taken the job that I didn’t necessarily need to go back to school to go into. I basically had not taken advantage of the fact that I’d been to this fantastic school and could’ve gone down all these different other paths that I was considering, like I had an internship interview at a casino. I could’ve gone to work for General Electric or in a marketing role for a technology company or something else outside of my wheelhouse. I basically ignored all of those to follow something that was, for lack of a better word, comfortable.

That was probably the biggest humbling, learning moment of my life – that six months after I graduated.

Joseph: I know you eventually moved on from that banking role. What allowed you to ultimately get over the idea that, ‘There’s good money in this industry. It fits very neatly into the career trajectory I had’? How did you ultimately end up being able to walk away from that?

Aaron: I think it was two things. I think it was this nagging feeling that I was just not a good fit for the financial services world, at least for selling wealth management products. It just never felt like a place where I was either immediately successful or just that I was a natural fit. I think that, coupled with the conversations I was having with some of my classmates, peers who worked in the organizational effectiveness or transformational world, kind of led me to think that that was the path I should’ve gone down in the first place.

At the end of the day, it was really just the sponsorship of one senior mentor of mine who would become a director and Deloitte, and she was my advocate, my sponsor. She was the one who put my resume near the top of the pile to be considered just even for an interview. That’s ultimately how I was able to leave.

Joseph: What do you think was surprising about that transition for you?

Aaron: I think that my relationship with her at the time was good, but I didn’t quite realize the strength of her commitment to me and her willingness to stick her neck out for my candidacy. I think that’s probably the biggest lesson I’ve learned over the last five years: what you perceive to be a weak connection or what could really be a weak connection could actually be the most powerful, in that you’re asking help, and people in amazing roles or places has seemingly been willing to help me in every step of my career. That’s something I’ve been very fortunate to have received.

Joseph: That’s interesting because I think the perception or the presumption is that you’re going to get some promising lead from someone that you know really well, but it sounds like what you’re saying is that even these weaker connections can be incredibly fruitful. I know I make this mistake and sometimes don’t put enough weight into those peripheral relationships.

Aaron: That’s absolutely right. I think that, in fact, if your listeners are trying to think about career change, my advice is don’t just stick with the people who you know the best or who have the strongest relationships with you. Expand your network because I think that’s where you’re going to bear the most fruit in learning about an industry, figuring out if you’re a good fit, having someone not hesitate to tell you the unvarnished truth, because technically, they don’t know you that well, so they’re not afraid to tell you what they’re thinking.

Joseph: In your role, I know that you must probably see a lot of different people who are navigating career change. What do you think is the hardest part about making a career change, having been through a couple yourself?

Aaron: It’s a couple of things. One, loyalty to your existing company or your existing job because you don’t want to do wrong by anyone or you don’t want to leave anyone else in a lurch, which I completely agree with. I think it’s also partly just a fear of what leaving stability looks like.

I was just talking to a friend of mine last week about this, and her greatest concern was not having something stable or not being able to do the thing that she wants to do. I asked her, ‘What’s your alternative?’ Her alternative is sticking with something that you know fundamentally is not going to work for you, whether it’s in the short term or long term.

Her concerns were exactly what I felt for the several years when I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do, which is you shouldn’t have to explain why it’s a good fit. It should just be a fantastic fit. I mean that on a few levels. I mean the work you do, the people you’re working with, the company you work for, it should all be a very natural extension of your authentic self. If you’re having rationalize or explain why you’re doing something, and it’s causing that sort of unnatural feeling, it’s probably not a good fit for you. That’s something I’ve experienced in numerous ways over the course of my 15, 14 years of work experience.

Joseph: How did you manage to remain persistent during those years when you weren’t in the right place? I guess that was one of the things that really impressed me about your story. You talked about this 13-year journey to figure out what you wanted to do. I know what happens is a lot of times, people will give up, and they’ll just settle. How did you keep that fervor and that interest in trying to find something that wasn’t just good enough but was really great for you?

Aaron: I think this is one of those times where being a little stubborn or persistent can certainly work to your advantage instead of your detriment. I think that for me, I knew there were these times in my life where everything was flowing. It’s that whole ‘you’re in the zone’ kind of feeling. There were moments throughout my career which I could directly point to.

I had worked with an executive coach on two separate occasions, and they both helped me to think through what these experience had in common. I was teaching people. I was working to introduce people to one another or to knowledge. I was solving problems or I was trying to take something complex and simplify it for a large group of people.

Starting to recognize that, I knew there was something out there that would be a better fit. Maybe not in every dimension, whether it was commute or people I work with or the type of product or service we were selling, but I kind of knew that at some point, I’d find a better fit, not sort of the ideal or dream job concept. It was just sort of this blind faith that there was going to be a better opportunity that kept me in the game, and I tried to take it in pieces.

As I worked in consulting, and I knew I wanted to be more in the HR talent acquisition world, I would go to events. I would meet people. I would pick brains and invite people out for coffee and say, ‘Hey, I’d love to learn more about how you do university recruiting,’ or, ‘how you do executive search,’ or, ‘how this applicant tracking system is implemented.’ Each interaction that I set up would get me closer to understanding, ‘Oh, I like this,’ or, ‘Maybe I don’t want to deal with HR information systems or compensation and benefits.’ Just having those conversations, again, helped me to refine those moments where I felt like I was in the groove or if I needed to back away and just not even touch.

Joseph: It sounds like one of the themes that’s coming up from the day is that your connections worked really well for you, either uncovering opportunities or helping to enlighten you or inform you about something that you didn’t know about. I’ve met you before, and I think you’re a very personable guy, and I would describe you as someone who is definitely a connector.

For people out there who maybe aren’t as comfortable with networking or they haven’t bought into the idea of networking, is there something that you’ve learned through that process of doing quite a bit of connecting with other people that you think would be useful?

Aaron: Actually, my wife is a classic introvert, and I’m a classic extrovert. We talked about this at length about how she can get connected to people. I think you have to work with what you’re strongest at. If you’re not comfortable going to group networking events, but let’s say you have a friend who loves to connect people, maybe ask that person one-on-on and say, ‘Hey, would you mind coming with me to this event? Would you mind introducing me?’ or keep it very much targeted and say, ‘Hey, would you mind introducing me to this one person so I can have a one-on-one conversation?’

What I’ve learned is that if you ask someone for help, more often than not, they will say yes. If you just ask them for their story or something that’s uniquely theirs, I think people are very willing to share that with people because they’ve all been in the situation before where they’re trying to make a transition happen or they’re trying to learn about how to get to the next opportunity.

Figure out what you’re comfortable with and work on that, and then figure out, is there a path that someone had else can help you with? Even the right introduction, even again, just telling their story. I would meet with people who worked across all these different parts of the HR world, and every time I meet with someone, I say, ‘Can you just tell me how you got here?’ Keep some of the questions consistent. Learn about what the differences and similarities are, and it kind of helps you build your own narrative for you to follow.

It’s hard to ask for help, but if you’re willing to sort of put your ego on hold for a conversation, I think it will bear a tremendous relationship and create a really good opportunity for you.

Joseph: The other thing that I’m curious about is, having been through this career change, what’s one thing that you’ve learned along the way?

Aaron: The most important thing for a career change is you have to be particularly self-aware about who you are, what you do well, and realistically where you can spend your time. I’ve had a lot of coaches or guidance counselors or people in the past say you can’t always take a weakness and turn it into a strength, and I really believe that. I think that you have to focus, again, on the things that make you you, and you can’t really break certain things that you’ve learned over the course of your life.

For me, that was just, I’m going to keep being a connector. I’m going to keep leaning on some of my strengths, but at the same time, I try to figure out, what are my vulnerabilities? What are the things that I’m not aware of that are blind spots? I got that through my executive coaching.

When I first started the business school, we did something called the Hogan assessments, which is a very comprehensive analysis of some of your strengths and values and blind spots and risks. I also did a 360 assessment feedback survey, and these all kind of fed into this perspective of how I was being perceived by friends or customers or bosses. There were a lot of those moments where I got a real kick in the head with someone saying, ‘Hey, I think you’re actually pretty weak at something.’

One example, it was how I thought I was being perceived as a contributor on the team. I thought I was pretty strong, and the feedback was, ‘You’re actually weak/middle of the pack.’ Feedback I think can be the best thing in the world if you’re willing to take it, because if you’re willing to take it, you can figure out, ‘How do I improve? How do I change if I need to?’ Being receptive to feedback I think is the only thing that’s allowed me to make the transitions that I’ve made over the last five years.

Joseph: How have you gone about finding people to give you that kind of feedback? Because I definitely agree. I think getting some candid feedback can be really, really educational. One of the questions I get asked a lot is, how can you find a mentor or how do you find the right person to give you this kind of feedback on who you are and what you’re good at and what you’re not so good at?

Aaron: I look at three kind of distinct sources of feedback. One is the people who are closest to you who can be honest and direct with you, and you’ll take their feedback because you trust them and you have an established relationship.

The second group would be people not necessarily in your friends circle but who would be doing the job that you’re looking to do. For me, that was some of my peers who went to business school who are in the jobs at Deloitte Consulting where I was looking to apply. I would ask the very candid feedback with, ‘If you look at my resume and my experience, do you think I’d be a good fit?’

The last group would be a more senior leadership kind of perspective. In this case, it was that director of Deloitte who could see what career progression had been like for her and for others and knew a little bit my background to say, ‘Yeah, I think you would be a good fit because of X, Y, and Z.

All of those different sources of feedback allowed me to figure out what things I needed to improve upon and how I go about doing it. Again, because each of these three sources are so different, you’re going to get very different responses.

Joseph: That is a great segue way into the last thing I want to talk about before we wrap up, which I can’t let you get away without talking a little bit about LinkedIn and the power of LinkedIn and how LinkedIn can serve as a tool that allows you to reach out to some of these people you’re talking about in your professional network, whether it’s peers or people who are more senior. I was just wondering if you might be willing to share one or two tips on maybe some less obvious ways that people can leverage the power of LinkedIn.

Aaron: I work a lot with companies on their talent brand, which leads me to think a lot about how individuals should present their own talent brand. They’re the basics. There’s your photo. There’s your summary. There’s your education and experience and your skills, which I think is pretty important, but it doesn’t always set you apart from everyone else.

I think there’s a couple of things that can make LinkedIn a really helpful tool for anyone just trying to make a career switch. The first of which is posts. For example, if you look back at my posting history, I started posting articles about some of the dynamics between applicants and hiring managers and other topics that I was really passionate about. To be honest, it didn’t get a lot of traction or a lot of engagement, but I was trying to put out there that I was deeply passionate about these topics, and people can see that my interest goes back several years.

On top of that, as you’re trying to figure out who you’re connecting with and why you connect with them, I tell people, don’t go straight after the hiring manager. I think if you begin to build your network with people within an organization, it can be different functions, it can be on the team you’re looking at. It allows you to create this portrait of what it’s like to work in a company.

I think that that’s the best thing that LinkedIn can be used for – just to help you build that perspective. Use network. See who you know there. Ask them for advice. Ask them for half an hour to do coffee. Never ask them for a job because that’s really not fair to put the kind of onus or responsibility onto someone you barely know or even your friends. If you just build up your knowledge of a company’s culture, I think that will help set you apart when you’re finally ready to pull the trigger on making a career shift.

Joseph: Is there a particular function in LinkedIn that you think you just consistently see people overlooking, or maybe it’s like an untapped resource within the platform of LinkedIn?

Aaron: One of the features that came out last year or really this year was open candidates. You can essentially indicate to recruiters that you’re open to a conversation. For some people, that could be preach on the choir because they’ve already done it. They’ve already started that search process. For those who haven’t, I think it’s a great way to just say, ‘Hey, I’m open to a conversation.’ If you’ve done that, if you’ve started making your outreach to people who are outside your direct network of connections, then I think it’s only a matter of time before you find the right contact, find the right company, and then ultimately get that career switch that you’ve been anchoring for.

Joseph: That’s a helpful tip because I can tell you, I wasn’t aware of that function until recently myself. We’ll try to include a link to the instructions on how you let recruiters know that you’re open to opportunities in the show notes.

I’d love to wrap up, Aaron, by talking about something that goes beyond the boundaries of work that I know you’re really passionate about, which is travel. I know this is a really important part of your passions. I was wondering if you could just tell me a little bit more about your blog, Go to See the World, and what inspired you to invest time in creating this blog.

Aaron: I’m the son and grandson of travel agents. My grandmother founded her travel agency in San Francisco’s China Town over 50 years ago. My mother took it on. The hardest thing for me was I get to travel the world by virtue of work or because of play, and my mom, the travel agent, couldn’t travel because she was a paraplegic. It’s kind of one of life’s cruel little twists that the travel agent couldn’t travel herself.

I started this blog about two and a half years ago so that she could come on my journeys with me and experience all the different countries that I was trying to visit. Unfortunately, I lost my mom last year to cancer, and so the project’s just kind of taken on a very special meaning to me because I know that if she had been able to travel, that she and I would’ve gone to a lot of these places together.

I just turned 35 a few months ago, and I met 36 countries. I’ve set a goal of myself of getting to 100 countries by the time I’m 45. Apparently, I got my work cut out for me, but it’s something that I just love to travel, I live to travel, and in fact, I’m even doing this interview from a hotel in Dallas. That’s probably a sign of how much I love to travel.

Joseph: That’s great. What are the sort of things you like writing about in the blog?

Aaron: Whenever I go places, I love three things. I love food.

Joseph: Me too.

Aaron: I love meeting new people, and I love seeing the sites and being able to tell people about what to do next. This is probably a sign that I’m in a travel family, but every time friends are going to a different country or a different city, there’s usually a ping saying, ‘Hey, what should I do there?’ I always keep a running list of where do you eat, where do you grab a cocktail, where should you stay, what kind of museum should you see. It comes very naturally to me. If I didn’t have to work, I would absolutely be traveling just all the time.

Joseph: That’s very cool. I also think it’s just a really wonderful way to honor the memory of your mother. I think it’s great that you’re doing that. If people want to check out your blog or if they want to learn more about you or get in touch with you, where can they go?

Aaron: If they want to go to the travel blog, it’s www.AaronFung.me. You can always find me on LinkedIn. If people have questions about travel or career changes, I’m happy to help wherever I can.

Joseph: Thanks so much, Aaron, for talking with me today. I know it’s been a few years since we’ve seen each other in person, so it’s been really cool to reconnect. I just really found it useful to hear about your thoughts on the power of candid feedback and why nurturing relationships, even the weaker ones is so important, a few tips on LinkedIn. It’s also very interesting to hear about your travel blog. You’ll definitely have to let me know when you come out to London, and we’ll try to meet up and find me a couple of places to eat.

Aaron: That sounds perfect, Joseph.

What’s it like to be homeless during your career transition? Helen Wix, a former secretary turned Reiki Master, healer, and coach describes her experience being evicted from her home and spending 3 years being homeless in Washington, DC. She shares her thoughts on paying attention to signs that point you in a different direction, declaring what you want for your career, and clearing out your own emotional baggage before you can truly move on.  I also share some thoughts on the importance of defining the standards you want for your career and life.

During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I talked about the importance of defining the standards you want met in your career. What are the expectations you have from yourself and from your work. Define those standards. Declare those standards. Then, ask yourself what change you need to make in order to actually live by those standards.

Dr. Helen D. Wix is a certified life and spiritual coach, psychic, Reiki Master Practitioner, author, spiritual teacher, minister, and an energy therapist. She is the Founder of the MLM Mastery Academy and describes herself as a modern-day Harriet Tubman because she leads people to freedom from jobs they hate and empowers them to find work that makes their souls sing. For 25 years she worked in corporate America as a secretary for different industries such as financial planning, hospitality, engineering, entertainment, and property management. She served as a legal secretary the last eight years that she worked which she didn’t like very much because as long as she can remember she wanted to be a fiction writer. Follower Helen on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

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

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 know that I was created for more than this, and I’m going to find out what it is. I had never reached that point. That was a turning point for me, and I went on to find out what my purpose was.

Joseph: Helen, thank you so much for joining me here on Career Relaunch. I am very excited to hear all about your story today.

Helen: It’s nice being here. Thank you so much for inviting me.

Joseph: I got a lot I want to talk about today, Helen. I know you’ve got a very interesting story. I want to talk a little bit about your time as a secretary, which is I know how you spent the majority of your career. I’d also like to hear a little bit more about the three years you spent in transition, homeless, and then also the work you’re doing right now as a holistic energy healer and how you bounced back from that time to now focus on helping people find work that makes their souls sing as you put it.

I’d love to start off by just having you tell us a little bit more about what you’re focused on right now as an energy healer in your career.

Helen: Thank you very much again for having me here. Because I spent so much time trying to find work that makes my soul sing, it came natural for me to help other people to do that. As you know, I was a secretary for about 25 years. I never liked it. I always wanted to write. I’m more of a creative person. I understand that when people are stuck in jobs that they hate, you just feel like you’re trapped, feel like a prisoner, slave, whatever you want to call it.

The work that I do, I do more of the inner work. We each have our own path, and it has to unfold. It does not come all at once, and we can’t rush it. I know people feel like the work that they’re doing, they feel like maybe they’re not making a difference. That’s something I feel like is in everybody. They want to feel like their work means something and is making a difference on the planet. Our desire is to be of service, and I think the happiest people on the planet are the ones who want that. They’re not here just for themselves, but they’re here to be of service to other people.

Joseph: Let’s go back to talk about your earlier years, before you were a healer, when you were secretary, and then we can move forward from there. Can you just briefly walk me through how you got started in your 25-year career as a secretary and tell us a little bit about what you did as a secretary?

Helen: It actually started before I became a secretary. It was in school. My dad forced me to take typing classes. I was forced to take typing classes even after I learned how to type. He had this problem with creativity, and I was not encouraged to do anything creative. Anyway, I learned how to type, and I guess it just naturally led to me becoming a secretary. Like I said, I never liked it. I never wanted to do that, but I was able to fit for it myself.

The first job I had, it wasn’t as a secretary. I remember working for the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). That was my first time being in an office. Most of the jobs I seem to get were dead end. There just was really no way to advance. It seems like a secretary really was not viewed as being important. Sometimes, you were not treated with great kindness and respect.

Joseph: Why do you think that is that people don’t treat you with the same level of respect as other colleagues?

Helen: In our society, they’ve kind of like pecking order some jobs and looking at it as more important than others. I guess I kind of understand that. It’s like the more value you give, the more money you get. Being a secretary is kind of on the lower end. I don’t agree with that, but that’s how some people look at it. To me, like a receptionist, that’s like the first impression people get of the company. The receptionist to me is very important. That’s how I view it.

I can’t say that in every job I was not treated with kindness and respect because I was, but some jobs, I wasn’t. That really bothered me. Also, I did not make a lot of money in a lot of the jobs that I had, and I wasn’t able to live the kind of life I wanted. I always wanted to travel. I love traveling, and it was always a struggle financially it seemed.

Joseph: What do you think are one or two of the most common ways that secretaries or receptionists are misunderstood by other people in the workplace?

Helen: What comes to mind immediately to me is that we are more than that. We have capabilities more than just being a secretary. I actually have one attorney I worked for who tried to encourage me to go to law school, but that was not something I wanted to do. I’m not trying to be unkind when I say this. I think being a secretary is noble. There are some people who want to do it, but most of the people I’ve ever talk to who was a secretary, that was not something that they were referring to. They never said, ‘I want to be a secretary when I grew up.’

I think that’s one of the things that bothered me, that I had more capability than maybe the people I was working for realize. You’re kind of treated that way, like you don’t have any greater ambition or something like that. That used to really bother me.

Joseph: What do you think was the most challenging part of the job?

Helen: Probably getting along with people. You had different personalities. If you did not have interpersonal skills and inner wisdom—I think it’s called, instead of IQ, EQ—having some kind of way of reading people and knowing how to approach them, I think you kind of had a more difficult time working with the different personalities there.

Joseph: When we spoke before, Helen, you had described to me this turning point when you were a secretary. I thought it was an interesting story about the copy machine moments that ultimately convinced you, you wanted to move on. Can you just share exactly what that moment was and recreate that for me?

Helen: I was working at a very well-known Silicon Valley company. One day, I was handed a stack of papers, and they were not just normal. I just could not put them in the copier and hit start and let it go. They were 8.5×11. Some of the papers were 8.5×14, and then some papers were front and back. I don’t know what it was that particular day. Usually, that doesn’t bother me, but that particular day, something in me snapped. The papers meant nothing to me. Even though I was working for an attorney, most of the work was done by an outside firm.

That particular day, I did not have any clue as to what this case was about. I had never met the client. I was standing there at the copier, and as you know, I know that I was created for more than this, and I’m going to find out what it is that I’m here to do. I had never reached that point before. I had never made that kind of declaration before. That was a turning point for me, that day at that copier, and I went on to find out what my purpose was.

Joseph: What did you have in your head in terms of what you’re going to do next? How did you envision your next steps shaping up? The reason why I ask that, Helen, is I know that when we spoke before, you kind of thought that this transition out of secretarial work to something else might take a year, but it ended up taking longer. What did things look like the moment you decide to move on?

Helen: There were several things that came into my life. I became a student at the University of Metaphysics. At that time, I did not have a college degree. This program presented itself, and I could get a doctoral degree. I decided to enroll in that.

One of the first things that we had to do was learn how to meditate, and I had been discouraged to do that. I actually was a little nervous about doing it, but I was not living the kind of life I wanted, so I decided that I would overcome that fear and do it anyway. I began meditating, and I started intuitively feeling like I should quit, but I didn’t have any money saved. I didn’t have a boyfriend or a husband, and my family was 3,000 miles away. To me, that seemed irresponsible for me to just up and quit. I refused to do that.

Then two women at work who had never bothered me before started harassing me. One would get stuff off my desk, take papers off my desk, and then I was looking all over for them and couldn’t find them, and then she would put them back. It was like they’re playing games with me. I went to management about them, and one of them got worse instead of better. I decided that I’d listen to the universe. This is the universe trying to tell me, ‘You should quit,’ and so I did. I packed my stuff up one day, and I walked out. I ended up going back to school.

Before that though, I applied for unemployment and was turned down, but I appealed. When I went to the judge and I explained to him I was being harassed, he ruled in my favor. To me, that was the universe. Everything fell into place. I was able to go back to school for two years, and I studied film and screenwriting, and those were two of the happiest years of my life. It showed me that life can be enjoyable. It doesn’t have to be drudgery and dreading Monday morning, which is how I used to feel. That was the beginning for me.

After I got my associate’s degree, a couple of months later, my mom passed away suddenly. I moved back to Tennessee, which is where I’m from, and was there for about three years. Then I sold the house my mom left me, and I moved to the Washington DC area.

Joseph: Sometimes, when I hear from listeners, they ask, ‘This idea of leaving your past job behind and moving on to something else, it sounds great, but what happens if it doesn’t exactly work out the way you hope, especially if you don’t have that sort of financial buffer?’ You always hear about these overnight success stories, but what happens with people when it doesn’t quite go according to plan? Can you explain how things then transpired for you from this point onward?

Helen: I actually ended up auctioning the house that my mother left me because nobody would make an offer on it, so I got much less than I could’ve gotten for it. I moved anyway. I wanted to start a new life, and DC was where I felt I was being led. I ended up going there, and I stayed in a hotel for about a month, and then I found a permanent place. I paid the rent for a year.

I thought that that would give me enough time to get my business started. I was, at the time, going to this school, one with back correspondence, and then the other was online, and I was trying to start the business. The money just never started coming in like I thought it would. I ended up being evicted because the money just never came in, and my landlord—I have to give it to him—they hated doing that to me. They knew I was there to try to do something good, but this was about business, so there I am.

I actually had gone to the library and then to the doctor that day. I came home, and all my stuff was out on the lawn. Most of it had gone. People had taken it. I tell you, that moment was surreal, but you know what? That moment also taught me that our lives are not about things. I can look back on that now and let it go. Sometimes, things don’t turn out like we planned, but I think that you have to look for the lesson in everything, good or bad, especially the bad. That’s what I did. I got to the other side of it, and I can look back on it now and realize it may have been one of the best things that ever happened to me.

Joseph: Before we get to how you got to the other side, I’d love to switch gears and just focus in on your time when you were homeless, Helen, because I think it’s one of those things that, at least for most people who are maybe listening to this podcast, it never really crosses your mind that that could ever happen. Did you ever think that that would ever happen in your lifetime, that you would be homeless?

Helen: No. I had been behind on the rent, like I think most people have. I had had that happen before, but I always manage to get the money at the last minute, get a job or something. That had never happened to me before. No, you don’t expect that to happen. In fact, I had spent the first week in hospital emergency room, waiting room. That’s where I slept. I wanted to be around people, and I never was outside. I never spent any time outside. That first week, I did that, and then I began to realize that this was not sustainable because I needed to shower, and I needed to wash my hair. I finally went into a shelter.

I remember the next day, after having been able to sleep horizontal instead of vertical, I was walking down the street, and I believe it was Independent Street in DC, I was so angry that I had ended up there, ended up in this situation. I had been sitting up like 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning trying to figure out how to market my business. I’m walking down the street thinking about that and how this could happen to me. I started realizing, I said, ‘This happened for a reason, and I’m going to have to let go of this anger and get quiet enough to find out why.’

Joseph: This is a period of three years of your life. What was an average day like for you as someone who found herself homeless?

Helen: I always have something to work towards. I always knew what I was going to be doing the next day. I was always involved in personal development since my early 20s. I had learned very early on that it’s very important to keep your mind together. What you put in your mind is going to determine the kind of life you have even in that shelter.

I didn’t do it every day, but I got up a lot of mornings. I meditated first, and then I would sometimes do inspirational reading. Not sometimes, all the time. It depends on sometimes I didn’t have as much time, but I always tried to read something encouraging and that was going to lift me. I also did affirmations. I’m really big on that, and that helped me to stay positive. It kept me working on my inner self because I knew that it could be detrimental to me if I didn’t do that. It was lonely. Sometimes, it was really lonely.

What I ended up doing was going outside the shelter system, finding people, likeminded people who are trying to start businesses like I was. That helped tremendously. I volunteered at an organization, and I met some wonderful people. They just made the biggest difference in my life.

Ultimately, what helped me was following my inner guidance, my intuition, which I’ve heard you speak about. That helped me in those three years: following what my inner guidance was telling me. That tremendously helped me to find myself on the other side of that.

Joseph: What do you think surprised you the most about your life when you no longer had a stable roof over your head during those years?

Helen: That whole experience. It really helped me to become a much more easygoing and not being upset when things don’t go the way I planned. I don’t like the fact that I had to go through it, but in some ways, I really appreciate the experience. I really do.

Joseph: What do you think are some of the misconceptions or the judgments you faced as someone who was homeless, whether those judgments were fair or not?

Helen: I think the misconception that people have about homeless people is that they want to be. Unfortunately, some do. Not all, some of the people fit in that category. I was lumped in with everyone else. Like I said, there are some people who don’t want to work and don’t want to take care of themselves. I was just lumped in regardless to what initiative or accomplishments I had achieved. I got my doctorate while I was in the homeless shelter.

Joseph: Why do you think people want to be homeless?

Helen: Some of the people that I met, some of them have had traumatic things happen to them. When you have not healed from that, it’s very draining to your energy. When you have to have your own place, it requires you to take care of it. There are things that you have to do, the responsibility that you have to carry out. That’s hard, and I understand that.

Some would who prefer this thing there in the shelter and have something provided for them so that they don’t have to deal with the outside. Some went about trying to get financial support, be it disability or whatever, and I was asked if I wanted to do that, and I said no. I don’t want that. I don’t want to go that route. I wanted to be an example of someone who can use her gift, talent, and ability and get myself out of these circumstances. That was what my whole goal had been and part of my purpose. I kind of feel like that’s part of my purpose.

I feel like the system, the way it’s set up currently, it does make people dependent, and that’s not what we need. People should be given the tools to heal, and they should be allowed to express their talents and be a blessing to the planet. That’s what we’re here for.

As far as I was concerned, I was trying to show that I want more than this life. Most of the time, you’d be madder. It kind of reminds me of the prison system. The homeless system was just an extension of the prison system, and there’s that inhumanity. It was almost like you were a number or you have gotten yourself into this. You must’ve done something wrong or something like that, without even somebody trying to find out what happened. You were just looked at with this thing.

Joseph: Before we talk about how you ultimately got out of this world of being homeless, what was the toughest part of being homeless?

Helen: The toughest part was not being heard. I had this gift as a healer. I approached people about what I saw needed to be done in the system, of people needing healing, and it fell on deaf ears. I reached the conclusion that the system being set up this way is not by accident. Let’s just put it that way.

Joseph: It sounds like the system, as you’ve described it, is designed to keep you homeless, not to get you out. How did you ultimately get out?

Helen: I was approached by a fellow homeless person. She mentioned to me that there was a program, and I didn’t want to hear about it because all the programs I found out about, I would ask if I was eligible, and I would be told no. That’s all I heard, ‘No.’ If I didn’t have a mental problem, drug problem, or domestic violence or was a veteran, there was no program for me. I couldn’t believe that. That just blew my mind.

Anyway, this person approached me, and she said, ‘Why don’t you come with me? There’s a place where we can go and we can get an assessment done.’ I told her no the first time. I told her no, and then she mentioned it to me again. This time, I felt, ‘Perhaps I better,’ and I decided I agree. We went and I had this assessment done, and I was told that I was eligible for the rapid rehousing program. That eventually came through for me. That’s how I was able to get out, but it wasn’t without me doing some soul searching and realizing that ultimately the person who is going to help me get out of the place, I wasn’t going to be getting help from anyone else.

Joseph: When we spoke before, you had talked about what you just alluded to, which was that you had a lot of changing and healing and growing to do on the inside before you could ultimately move on and open up the next chapter in your life. What did you mean by that?

Helen: I told you earlier that I had my own personal experience. When I was five years old, I had a trauma, and I believe that’s what led me to become a healer myself now. I spent years trying to heal myself from that. All of the things, all of the tools that I use is where I help people with now.

The analogy I like using is that TV show, Hoarders, on A&E. They show these people who accumulate so much stuff, you can’t even see what their room looks like. Once all of those stuff is cleared out, you could see the room clearly. That’s how I view us. We have a whole bunch of things that we have accumulated, a bunch of emotional clutter. The tool that I use help clear all of that stuff out until, finally, you emerge as your authentic, real self. I had to go through all of that clearing before I actually got down to who I truly am in my core.

Joseph: I want to wrap up, Helen, by talking a little bit about what you’re doing right now. I know that you do a lot of work in this area of helping people understand what makes their soul sing and what ultimately makes them happy. I’m specifically interested in your special report about how to find work that makes your soul sing. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Helen: The special report tells my story, but then I start going into the different areas that will help people. The healing work, the energy healing that I just talked about will help do that. I really recommend that people download it. It will give you some tips and some insight. I want people to understand that they are here to be a blessing on the planet, and I thank you so much for having me on here to share this.

Joseph: Thank you so much for sharing your story here, Helen. Where can people go if they want to download your ‘How to Find Work that Makes Your Soul Sing’ report?

Helen: They can go to HolisticLivelihood.com.

Joseph: Thank you, Helen, so much for telling us more about your life, first of all as a secretary, how you bravely navigated the challenges of being homeless, and also just reminding us all how important it is to clear out your own baggage before you can take that next big step in your life. I really love your story. It’s very humbling. I just want to wish you the best of luck with Holistic Livelihood and the work that you’re doing for people.

Helen: Thank you so much, Joseph, for inviting me. I wish you all the best, and thank you so much for the work that

What does it really take to find the right job for you? Claire McTaggart, a former management consultant turned founder of SquarePeg Hires, explains how she relaunched her career from being a management consultant to the founder of a new job hiring platform. We’ll discuss which factors really matter in hiring and some interviewing tips. Afterwards, during today’s Mental Fuel®, I’ll share my reflections on the stubborn appeal of job promotions.

During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I talked about the importance of considering whether earning that next stripe in your career, whether it’s a promotion or ranking or professional certification, will make a significant difference to your overall happiness. If not, give yourself permission to invest your energies elsewhere so you can make sure you’re achieving something you’ll truly find meaningful in the year ahead.

Claire McTaggart is the founder and CEO of SquarePeg, a new hiring platform that connects job seekers and employers based on fit, not just resume data. Before founding SquarePeg, Claire was a manager in the strategy practice of a large management consulting firm, where she also focused on hiring and recruitment. She lives in NYC but spent 4+ years in the Middle East. Follow Claire on Twitter and Instagram.

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

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Teaser (first ~15s): It’s a feeling of treading water a little bit, that you are in a career, and you don’t feel yourself moving up fast enough. Are you learning enough? Are you satisfied? Are you motivated to come in every day, and are you excited about getting those promotions? And I wasn’t anymore.

Joseph: Okay, Claire. Thank you so much for joining me here on Career Relaunch. It’s great to have you here today.

Claire: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Joseph: I’d love to start off by just having you tell us a little bit about what you’re focused on right now in your career and your life.

Claire: Right now, I’m focused entirely on running SquarePeg. It’s the HR tech startup that I founded around a year ago. We just launched this summer, so we are mainly focused on getting job seekers and employers onto our platform.

Joseph: That’s very exciting. Congratulations on the launch.

Claire: Thank you.

Joseph: We’re going to talk about SquarePeg throughout this conversation, but I would love to just get a very brief overview. I know you’re focused on helping to match candidates and companies. Can you just give us a very brief overview for now on exactly what SquarePeg does?

Claire: At a high level, SquarePeg matches jobseekers and employers based on fit. Instead of just looking at resume data, which is really only one, small piece of the puzzle, we use science-backed assessments to look at a whole range of attributes of what makes a candidate thrive at a job. Our assessments will look at personality attributes. They’ll look at what environment makes sense. We’ll look at cultural fit, incentives and preferences, and a whole range of data that really matters when it comes to whether an employee really fits with a company or with a team.

Joseph: I definitely want to come back to that because I think this whole idea of personality fit and trying to find the right company for you is one that a lot of people who are listening to this show are very interested in. I’d love to go back. I know you haven’t always been the Founder of SquarePeg. I was wondering if we could just go back in time and talk about your days as a management consultant before you founded this company, and then we can move forward from there. Can you just give us a glimpse into what you are up to before this? I think you were at Deloitte.

Claire: I’ve had so many careers and jobs. Like many people, I graduated with liberal arts degree, and my career has very much been a process of trial and error, trying something out and figuring out, ‘I really like these three things, but these three things were not right for me. Can I try something else and learn a little bit more?’ I was looking for all types of signals of what might be right for me. I started in journalism. I worked in foreign policy. I worked for a think tank. I worked in government. I ended up in consulting.

Management consulting made sense for somebody like me at the time, because unlike some other industries, management consulting, you really change projects, clients, and industries almost every few months. It gives you the opportunity to try out lots of different careers within one.

Management consulting, I was more of a generalist in our strategy practice. I would have a client in the oil and gas industry one month and then in the entertainment industry the next month. It was all strategy work, but it did allow me to see a range of career options and all different types of projects and approaches, which I think was very helpful for me at the time.

Joseph: For those people who haven’t worked as management consultants, can you just give us a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the world of consulting? Specifically, what was your life like as a consultant day to day?

Claire: There is a little bit more to consulting than just the jargon everybody makes fun of. I was in Monitor Deloitte, which is the strategy practice within Deloitte.

In terms of strategy consulting, we would do projects, either for the private sector or for the government on various problems that they were having, whether it’s a growth issue, a profitability, a new market entry for example, or there is just a company or a government entity that is looking to build a new five-year plan or one-year plan or release a new product. They would go to, then, a management consulting company to get advisory work on how they should build this plan, what exactly they should do, what the initiatives should be, and oftentimes a financial plan or a map.

Joseph: Can you just take me back to the moment when you decided to move on from management consulting? What was happening at that time for you?

Claire: I knew that I wanted to leave consulting and the corporate world for some time. I wasn’t sure what my next move would be though, so I was looking around and thinking what options might be available to me.

I remember reading an article in ‘The Economist’ about co-working spaces, WeWork mainly. It was saying in New York, you have this proliferation of co-working spaces that are filled with startups. I thought, ‘Wow, wouldn’t that be incredible to be part of the entrepreneurial team, starting a new business and a product, and working amongst all these other startups in this innovative environment? Wouldn’t that be incredible?’

I managed to find friends of friends who had startups and were working in some of these co-working spaces, and for our Thanksgiving break, I went back to New York, and I went to one of the WeWorks. I started speaking with people who were working in startups there, talking to them about how they had started their companies, how they thought of the idea, what it was actually like.

At that moment, I really decided I don’t want to miss this wave. I got to be a part of this. It seems so interesting to have all of these people with ideas, putting together teams, and trying to build something and make something happen. It just seemed and felt really close to what I thought I should be doing.

I continued a lot of those relationships talking to those people and originally thinking that I would join somebody else’s startup. That was what drove me to say it’s time to leave the corporate world and go into entrepreneurship. I definitely leveraged the help and experience of a lot of people that I knew who had done it to ease my way into the startup world.

Joseph: You mentioned this feeling that you kind of knew you wanted to move on from the corporate world. Can you explain exactly what it was about the corporate world that convinced you, you wanted to eventually make a change?

Claire: When I would interview candidates, one of the things that we always talked about internally in our recruitment team is, can you picture the person across from you becoming CEO of the company or becoming a partner? This was really important for us. Can this person become a partner? The interesting thing for me at that time—I was a manager—I could see my promotion track, and I could see my career track ahead of me, and I didn’t feel like I had the internal desire to become a partner, to grow to the highest levels within the firm.

I thought I have learned as much as I’d like to learn. I did four years in consulting, and I’d learned so much, and I didn’t have the drive to continue to push to become a partner where my role would be a lot of business development and sales. I also didn’t feel like the learning curve would’ve been as high for me as it would’ve been somewhere else.

It’s a feeling of treading water a little bit, that you are in a career, and you don’t feel yourself moving up fast enough. In my case, it was not up in terms of promotions because I was on track to move up in terms of promotions. It was about, are you learning enough? Are you satisfied? Are you motivated to come in every day, and are you excited about getting those promotions? I wasn’t anymore, and I was constantly talking to other people about their careers and what they’re doing and how they got that job and thinking, ‘Maybe it’s time actually for me to find something I could really be excited about.’

Joseph: What do you think was the major, day-to-day, cultural shift that you experienced when you shifted into the startup world?

Claire: It’s absolutely everything. There is a huge difference when you work for a large corporation that has a training and development program and that has a lot of people and an admin function for example. It is easy to put in a lot or not as much and be okay doing that. If I worked really hard, yeah, I would get promoted. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t, but either of those were sort of okay.

In a startup world, however much you put into it, this is the life of the company. If you don’t work hard, you will never make any money, and your company will fail. There’s much more responsibility on your shoulders and weight that you carry around about the success of the venture that is solely tied to your input and your ability to manage it.

Joseph: How do you manage the emotions of running your own business and all of those different functions you got to manage and the ups and downs of the business and things going well or things not going well? How do you manage that from an emotional standpoint?

Claire: It is never about things going well. It is always about managing and prioritizing all of the things that are not going well and learning to be okay with that. Because you’re starting something new, it is inherently about learning how to fail well, learning how to make mistakes and get over them quickly. What helped me a lot is, in my transition, I went through something called the Founder Institute, which I would recommend for any of your listeners who are currently in a corporate job or otherwise and are thinking about startups but don’t have startup experience.

What Founder Institute did is it put sort of structured program together, making sure that you are really interested and invested in this idea and have a plan in place. The other thing that it did, which I think is essential, is it brought in mentors on a weekly basis, of people who had started their own companies and been successful or failed many times before being successful.

There was a discussion early on about, are you able to handle the challenge ahead? Because it is most likely the case that this will take a longer time, more money, more effort than you think it will. People who had built companies that were doing $100 million in revenue would talk about, ‘Our first year was about learning from mistakes constantly.’ That provided a great network for me.

As soon as you understand that you are going to pivot constantly and make mistakes and learn from them, as long as you’re comfortable accepting that, then you’re on sort of the right path. That was really helpful to me coming from a corporate world where I was much more of a perfectionist and wanted really solid, polished work that would sell versus a startup, where it’s much more about trial error and experimentation and releasing things before they’re ready to see where the flaws and bugs are.

Joseph: Speaking of learning from mistakes and trial and error, I want to shift gears here a little bit, Claire. I know you’re in the business of helping to match employees with employers, and so I’d love to tap into some of your unique hiring insights that you’ve gained during your years of screening candidates. I want to reference a specific article that you just recently wrote in Medium, ‘The Definitive Guide to Interviewing for a Startup: What I Learned after Screening 42 Candidates for One Position,’ which is a great read and one I would recommend to everybody.

Just to touch on a couple of the common mistakes that you notice people making, which I think is important for people listening to this podcast, because a lot of people are career changers, and they’re trying to shift industries. One of the things you mentioned was being a jack of all trades. Can you just explain what makes that a mistake to say in an interview?

Claire: A job seeker or a candidate is often trying so hard to get the job and to fit into that mold that he/she is willing to say that they can do anything. I would ask people, for example, ‘Could you set up our Facebook analytics? How would you be with Google Analytics?’ or, ‘Could you do marketing?’ or, ‘Could you do blogging?’ You could see, in a lot of these candidates, their tendency to say, ‘Yes, I can do anything. Just you name it, and I’ll hit the ground running, and I’ll do anything that you want.’

As a founder, what that would say to me is you might not be self-aware of what you’re good at and where your limitations are, and we need somebody who is self-aware because we don’t have a lot of resources. It also means that you might not be honest about some of your shortcomings, which again is something that’s required. It will be hard for me to figure out where you would really be able to thrive from the beginning and where we would need somebody else to fill in those skills.

What I liked was somebody who came in and said, ‘This is what I can do on day one, and these are the types of things I can teach myself over the next few months that I know I could be good at if I were just given some time to be able to teach myself these things.

Joseph: You now just mentioned, Claire, day one. The other interesting point I thought you made in the article was about not having a day one plan. Can you explain what you meant by that?

Claire: The person across the table or on the other end of the phone, they’re working for the company, but they have their own set of issues and problems that they need to tackle. They are interested almost always in having somebody that can hit the ground running and can start adding value right away.

Rather than going into an interview and saying, ‘I will wait for you all to tell me what I should be working on, and I’ll wait for you to train me, and I’m happy to do whatever you would like me to do, and I’ll learn on the job,’ it was really profound when someone would say, ‘Look, here’s what I think about your company and your business. Here’s where I think that you could be doing a better job, and here’s where I could start working on that without your help or training or development. Here’s what I could do tomorrow if I joined.’

What that did is it put a picture in my head of this person sees maybe a flaw or an area of improvement that I don’t see, and they are able to go on their own without a whole onboarding process and start adding value in helping. That is really important to paint that picture in the mind of an interviewer.

I had somebody come in for a marketing role and say, ‘I’ve looked at your social sites, and I really don’t think that they’re optimized. There’s so much more you could be doing. If you’re really busy, here’s what I would do on my own. In week one and in month one, I’d write these blog posts, I’d set up this analytics platform. Here are the things I would just do right away.’ All of a sudden, now, I’m picturing, ‘What does my company look like with this person all of a sudden adding value without me having to spend a lot of time on teaching and training them?’

Joseph: I guess what might prevent people from doing that is that they’re afraid of saying the wrong thing or maybe proposing the wrong plan. Am I correct in interpreting, Claire, that you’d almost rather hear somebody’s best stab at what they would do versus nothing at all?

Claire: Absolutely. I don’t know if there is a really wrong way. Somebody might suggest something that isn’t a fair read of our business and what we need, but the fact that they can look at something critically, identify where there are areas of improvement and suggest ideas and an action in and of itself is indicative that that person might be able to add value.

Even if the idea is the wrong one, the process that they’ve gone through, saying, ‘I’ve reviewed what you’re doing. I have an idea of your business and your industry. I see areas for improvement, and I see a place where I can come in tomorrow and help you,’ is very valuable.

You want candidates who can put themselves in the context of your business immediately rather than what was much more common that people would say, ‘I’d wait for you to tell me. I’d be happy to learn anything. I want to hear from you what you think are your problems and how it affects them and what you think I should be doing, and then I would do it.’ That tells me that not only do I have to do my job now, but I have to spend a lot of time training and onboarding a person who may or may not be able to learn something. For a startup, we just don’t have the resources to do that.

Joseph: The last topic I would love to cover with you before we wrap up, Claire, is this whole topic of career assessments and personality profiles, which I know is your bread and butter right now. A lot of people who listen to this show may not feel 100% satisfied in their current roles, but they’re just not clear on what they want to do instead. Sometimes, people ask this question around, ‘Hey, is there some sort of a test or a career survey I can take that will help inform my next move?’

I’ve always struggled with what to recommend to people because I’m familiar with things like the Myers Briggs type inventory test and the strong interest inventory. I’m just curious, what’s your view of how people should be using these sorts of tests to inform their next career move?

Claire: This is essentially what SquarePeg is doing. Myers Briggs for example, it’s based on 16 personality types. It divides us all into 16 types. It’s really about who you are as a person. It’s not your career.

What SquarePeg does is it looks at a whole wide range of attributes and information, and then we’ll provide results in a report. We look at for example, workplace personality traits. Our assessments will say, are you strategic or innovative or detail-oriented? What type of roles would you thrive in? What type of environment is best for you? We’ll provide all of that in our report, but more importantly, our matching algorithm will identify teams and companies that you should be speaking with, and we’ll connect you directly.

The idea is that all of us, especially us career changers, are a lot more than our resumes. I might have worked in journalism for two years and decided it was not for me and then left. Now, if I’m going on a job board, it’s just going to see that I have a journalism background and try to match me with that. That is an inaccurate representation of my strengths, my qualities, who I am, and what I’d like to do.

What we’re trying to get at is a much wider range of what competency skills and experience you have but also what type of person are you and where do you thrive so that we can match you with an environment and a team that would really make sense depending on those results.

Our assessments, we developed them with a lead psychologist who’s written a textbook on personal assessment. We’ve now been using them with over 3,000 jobseekers to be able to understand a little bit more about themselves, receive the report, and then also get matched with companies.

Joseph: One of the articles I know that just came out in ‘Fast Company’ this past week was a little bit about your company. One of the things I thought you said that was very interesting is that your personality data is much more predictive of what makes someone thrive in a job. Why do you think it is that people just overlook that? You mentioned things like resume and these traditional hiring methods. Why do you think it is that people haven’t paid more attention to personality in the past?

Claire: It is interesting because this type of assessments have been around for hundreds of years. There’s been a lot of research that shows something like an IQ test or a skills test can assess somebody at a point in time for their maximum potential for example. I could assess you and say, ‘Here is your maximum, how hard you will work to achieve something on a test.’ It’s how well you take the test and what your maximum potential is.

What some of these workplace personality assessments can do, which is a little bit different, is show more of what you’d be like on a day-to-day basis. Not your maximum potential but what is a more typical working style of somebody of one type versus another. For us, it’s not 16 types, there are probably 4,000 or something.

In terms of why they haven’t been used, I think they have been used, and they’ve been becoming more and more important to employers but at the very end of the hiring cycle. It is common for an employer to go source candidates on LinkedIn or through a job post or a job board, screen their resumes, do a phone screen, interview them, and then at the very end, they might have an assessment for somebody that they’ve already wanted to hire. It’s like the very last step to look at anything.

Our view is this data is just as important as the resume data, so why not put it at the very top and be able to source candidates who are already a good fit for you rather than waiting until the end? The model of assessment is not new, and lots of companies have been using them for quite some time. What we are saying is that the assessment needs to come at the very top so that you’re learning more about candidates before you decide to interview them.

Joseph: What are a couple of ways that you’ve managed to look at your own personality and use that as a way of informing your career moves just as an example for people?

Claire: When I took the SquarePeg assessments, two of the attributes that I had that are high are proactive and innovative, which means I’m often not going to wait for permission for anything. I’m going to try to go out and do things on my own without ever being told to do it, and I’ll try to take risks and experiment a lot.

Now, that is great for an entrepreneur, but I also saw some of my weaknesses which are around being highly logical and also highly orderly. Where I need help is around structure and organization and making sure that I’m not just using intuition, that I’m using a lot of logic. That actually helps inform my hiring decisions. I wanted to hire candidates that were not like me and that were strong in areas where I was weak. It helped me in building a team, and it also helped me in interviewing candidates.

That self-awareness of the things that I’m not good at and the environments where I don’t do well, one, allowed me to outsource some tasks to people who do thrive at those various things and also helped me in building a team that’s diverse in terms of personality types.

Joseph: I think that’s a good reminder that these sorts of personality profiles are a good way for us as candidates to understand where it is we should go for our jobs, but also as a hiring manager, the types of people we can hire to help supplement us in those areas where we might not be as strong.

I’d love to wrap up, Claire, by just having you tell us where people can go if they want to learn more about the JobFit assessments you offer there at SquarePeg and how that whole thing work.

Claire: Anybody who’s interested in learning a little bit more about themselves or thinking about maybe switching careers or their next job placement can go on to our site. It’s www.SquarePegHires.com. You can sign in there and take the assessments. There are no wrong answers, and it’s under an hour. We’ll provide you with a free report and free job matching.

Anybody can go and do that now. We are open to the public, and we’re helping candidates all over, help find their jobs and get these career reports.

Joseph: I know that you also share a lot of really useful advice online and are active on social media, so where else can people go if they want to read more about your career and hiring insights?

Claire: We’re definitely active on social media: on LinkedIn, on Facebook, and on Twitter. They can follow our blog on Medium, which has a range of voices from people that work for SquarePeg as well as myself on issues related to career change and hiring.

Joseph: Thank you so much, Claire, for telling us more about startup versus corporate life, a few hiring insights that are really useful, and most of all, the ins and outs of how your personality can be a great predictor of solid company fit. Best of luck with SquarePeg. I might take one of those assessments myself.

Claire: Thank you so much, Joseph. It was great talking to you.