Career Relaunch®

What is the life of a professional tennis player REALLY like? Former professional tennis player Rina Einy who’s played in the Australian Open, US Open, Wimbledon and the Olympics, gives a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the realities of being a professional athlete, why she decided to move on from tennis to become a finance professional, and how to balance your career choices with your personal relationships. In the Mental Fuel® segment, I’ll explain why quitting is sometimes the best thing you can do for your career and life.

During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I talked about the downside and upside of quitting. What’s one “carrot” you’ve been chasing in your own career that keeps you hanging on a bit longer in your current professional role, even though you’re not fully happy? If chasing that goal is no longer serving you, what will it take for you to decide to walk away?

I’d love to hear what goal you’ve decided to let go of so you can pursue something more meaningful for your career. Leave a comment below or a voicemail for me if you want to share your story with the rest of the Career Relaunch listener community.

Rina Einy is a former professional tennis player who’s played in the Olympics and Grand Slams including Wimbledon, the French Open, and the US Open against well known players including Martina Navratilova, Steffi Graf, Chris Evert, and Pam Shriver. She eventually moved on to work in finance for JP Morgan.

She went onto serve as the Managing Director for Textyle International, an outerwear company with offices in Asia and Europe. In 2018, Rina launched her own clothing brand Culthread, and was featured in this interview with the Talented Ladies Club where you can read more about her inspiring career story and perspectives on how to do what you love in your career.

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 didn’t need to prove anything anymore to anyone else or myself for that matter. I just didn’t want to do it anymore. So I got up from the table, I called my coach, told him I wasn’t playing anymore, and I put my rackets away. That was it.

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

Rina: Good morning. Thank you for having me.

Joseph: You are our very first former professional athlete on the podcast, Rina. I’m very excited to hear all about your time as a professional tennis player and also your time as a finance professional. I was wondering if you could get us started by just telling us a little bit about what you’re up to right now in your life and career.

Rina: Right now, I work at Textyle International in Textyle Asia. It’s a family owned company that we run. What we do is produce outerwear, coats, jackets in Asia for clients all over the world. My involvement is more in the finance side of the company as well as some strategy and innovation at the moment. I’m based Brussels most of the time. Obviously, I travel to Asia a lot.

Joseph: I know that you haven’t always been a Director at Textyle International. I was wondering if we could go back in time to your days as a professional athlete, which is something I didn’t even actually know about the first time we crossed paths. I was wondering if you could take us back to the days before you shifted into working in the world of corporate finance and strategy and take us all the way back to the age of eight, which I think is when you started playing tennis. Can you just explain how did tennis enter your life and how did it start to become such a big part of your life growing up?

Rina: Yes, it was around eight, nine, maybe something like that. I was living in India at the time. My father worked there, and we were based there. I went to school there in Kolkata. I think my mom sort of wanted to find something for us to do after school to keep occupied and took us to tennis club. That’s basically how it started. It was something that I found that I enjoyed and that I could do. Very soon, I started playing local tournaments and then traveling around India and playing junior tournaments and national tournaments. That was the very beginning.

It was great because I got to travel a bit. I missed a lot of school, and it was just something. I was extremely competitive, and I really enjoyed the matches. That’s how the tennis started.

When I was around 13, I think, we moved to the UK, and that was when I started playing a lot more tournaments and traveling around the UK and playing nationals and really enjoying my tennis. It was a lot of fun.

Joseph: We didn’t talk about this last time, but I was actually a varsity tennis player way back in high school, but I quickly figured out that I was kind of a big fish in a small pond. I’m from a very, very small town. I really very quickly realized I wasn’t going to make it anywhere close to being pro, so I’m going to kind of try to live vicariously through you during this conversation.

It sounds like you moved to the UK. Could you just tell us about the moment you went from being a really good tennis player to someone who entered into the professional tennis arena in the women’s tennis association as a teenager?

Rina: At that stage, it was juniors and it was nationals, and it was sort of representing GB against other countries and international junior things, tournaments, and competitions. That was the beginning of it. At that time, we didn’t have to decide between whether we were professionals or amateurs. We were allowed to play on the tour as much as we wanted if we were good enough.

At around 15, 16, I started playing women’s tournaments because it was sort of a natural progression. It was something that I could do, something that I enjoyed. It starts on the satellite tour, these small tournaments. You travel, you play, you earn point, you get an international ranking, and it just goes from there.

Being in England as well, we have a lot of opportunities in that we were given wildcards into, let’s say, qualifying at Wimbledon or other tournaments, and then Wimbledon, the main draw as well. We had a lot of opportunities. The Tennis Association tried to help us and push us forward. At that age even, I felt that I could do it as a career. I was earning money and enjoying it.

Joseph: Could you just give us a sense of some of the people you’ve played against and some of the tournaments that you were in?

Rina: Between the ages of 16 and probably 19 when I quit, I played Wimbledon several times. The French Open. I traveled to Australia to play in the Aussie Open and also to the States, the US Open. Tournament of Champions in Florida. I’ve played in South America, Africa, all over Europe. Pretty much everywhere. Then the Olympic Games, which was the first time tennis was included after a very long time. That was in Los Angeles in 1984.

Joseph: What was that like for you to play in Los Angeles in the Olympics?

Rina: It was probably the best experience of my life, until then anyway, and probably the worst at the same time. It’s quite complicated, but it was amazing. The whole experience of just being there was incredible, actually one of the highlights of my life definitely.

Joseph: You’re going to tell us some of the people you’ve played against. I don’t know if that gets into the best or the worst moment, but if you could just give us a sense of the types of people you played against.

Rina: Steffi Graf, she’s I think a year younger than me. I sort of grew up playing her a few times. Chris Evert was getting towards the end of her career, so I’ve played against her. I played Wendy Turnbull in the Tournament of Champions in the States in the end of her career as well. Pam Shriver in doubles. Those kind of people and a lot more.

Joseph: Sometimes, I’ve always wondered about, again, just as a former casual tennis player myself, at that level, are you able to discern the differences between the Steffi Graf versus someone who’s really amazing and incredible but maybe isn’t in that Top 10 tier?

Rina: Women who are in the top tier, they have a sort of aura around them. They behave differently. They treat you differently. There’s a lot of that sort of psychological side of it going on as well. I played Hana Mandlíková actually in Wimbledon for instance.

Because I’m the underdog, I have nothing to lose. In some cases, it’s easier to play the top players. Sometimes, it’s incredibly difficult because you’re so, so psyched out before you’ve even stepped on the court. That’s how they make you feel, and they’re really good at that. In the changing rooms as well, they behave in a different way. They keep themselves to themselves. They have a different aura around them, which makes it very difficult for you as a nobody to play against them.

Joseph: You were also getting into a little bit around why the Olympics were the best and the worst moment for you. Could you just tell us a little bit more about that? Because I’m sure that, at least for me, I think it’s just amazing to even have the opportunity to go to the Olympics. I’d just be curious what that experience was like for you.

Rina: It was amazing – even just being there, in the village, the opening ceremony, everything. It was the tennis that was a problem because I wasn’t in a very good state of mind at that time in terms of my career and my tennis. It wasn’t the Olympics per se, which was fantastic. It was more how I felt about my tennis. It just sort of peaked at that time. I pretty much quit very soon after that.

It was a very difficult time for me in terms of my tennis, but it was also one of the most amazing times. Just being there, just getting your stuff and getting your kit and traveling with everyone, and the opening ceremony was something which is almost impossible to describe being inside that stadium on that day.

Joseph: Can you just explain how you navigated that decision of whether or not to continue playing professional tennis or to move on to something else? Because it sounds like this was sort of a turning point for you.

Rina: The background to it was that five, six months before that, when I got selected, when I knew I was going, it was the time when I was really doing well. My ranking was as high as it had ever been. I’d been in South America. I beat someone in the Top 50, and things were going really well. From that moment on, things started going very—‘things’ I mean my tennis just went downhill. I was struggling. I couldn’t really win a match. I wasn’t feeling good about it, and it was a real struggle between that moment, which must’ve been in March or something that year, until the games, which were in the summer. I really struggled, really, really struggled.

By the time I got to Los Angeles, I was really not in a very good place. You can just imagine, I was at the Olympics, it was amazing, and I actually left after my match. I didn’t even stay for the closing ceremony. That just shows you what state of mind I was in. I got home, and that was the time when I realized that I had to take a look at what was going on and why it was happening and take a long, hard look inside myself, which is what I did.

Joseph: I see. When you took that time to reflect on where you’d been, and as you’re looking ahead to the rest of your life, what were some of the things that were running through your head, and what did you start to slowly figure out?

Rina: The first thing I thought about was, ‘Do I still want to do this?’ and I realized that I didn’t. It was very difficult for me because that career, I was very young as well. It was my identity. It was who I was. It was everything. It wasn’t something that I sort of did on the side. It was who I was. I didn’t want to really think about it because it was just too difficult to do that because I was sort of questioning even who I was as a person because tennis was that important to me.

When I got back from Los Angeles, I sat down in the kitchen table on my own for a few hours and just thought about what’s happening, ‘Why is this happening?’ and I realized my heart wasn’t in it. I didn’t need to prove anything anymore to anyone else or myself for that matter. I just didn’t want to do it anymore. So I got up from the table, I called my coach, told him I wasn’t playing anymore. I waited for my parents to come home. I told them, and I put my rackets away, and that was it literally. That was it.

Joseph: I’m trying to imagine, almost seeming like what I guess a lot of people would see to be almost like the pinnacle of one’s career, playing in these grand slams and then going to the Olympics. As exciting as that was, it sort of sounds like it opened your eyes to the fact that this wasn’t quite for you. I’m just curious, was it the level of competition? Was it you just not feeling like your heart was in it anymore? What was the ultimate tipping point?

Rina: It’s an incredibly difficult lifestyle. I had no friends. I had no life besides my tennis career. That was all I had. I mean even when we were traveling, and then we’re surrounded by people even from your own country, people you knew, they weren’t friends. They’re ultimately all rivals, and it’s very lonely. It’s very hard. I couldn’t afford to always travel with a coach or with someone, so most of the time, I was on my own. There’s a lot of free time. There’s a lot of hanging around. It’s tough. It’s really tough.

Being ultra-competitive, the loss is also hard. They spur you on to work harder and to push yourself even more, but it’s a really, really hard life. On the other hand, you travel all over the world, and it sounds amazing, but it was tough. It was extremely tough.

I also realized that I wanted to be either really good or move on and do something else. I was very conscious that having not been at school and having not really had an education, I couldn’t go on doing something that I wasn’t sure I wanted to do for much longer before I would have to make some kind of decision as to where I wanted in my life to go.

Joseph: Before we start talking about your educational transition, just one more question about the world of tennis and the world of being a professional athlete. What sort of misconceptions, if any, do you feel there are about the life of a professional tennis player?

Rina: There’s a lot of misconceptions, because obviously, the ones that we see on the TV are we see Roger Federer winning Wimbledon and smiling and his family around him, and everything looks perfect. What’s happening behind the scenes, and especially for people lower down, working their way up or young or older or whatever it may be or injured, it’s a very, very, very hard existence. It’s very hard.

You put your soul on the line every time you step on the court actually because it’s so much more than work. It’s not a normal job. What you see is really not what’s happening. It’s impossible to really explain to someone what it’s like every single day. You have a tough loss, you come back home, and the next morning, you have to be back on the court. You have to work harder even than before. You have to train yourself to continue and to get over it and to make yourself better and to improve. It’s really, really hard, and it’s very lonely, and it’s very tough.

Joseph: You decide you want to move on from tennis then, Rina. From our past conversation, I recall you made the shift into starting your first degree at the London School of Economics. What impact, if any, did not finishing high school have on your psychology as you attempted to start this next chapter of your career?

Rina: When I said to my parents that I wanted to play tennis and I wanted to travel around and I wasn’t going to go to school, I did sort of promise them that one day I would. I would do it, and they kind of pretty much let me do whatever I want, which was fantastic. It was always something that I knew I would do. I mean I had to. I couldn’t imagine not finishing school—let’s put it that way—or not having a degree. It was something that I wanted to do and I knew I would do.

Obviously, it was difficult because from the time I could remember, I hadn’t really been at school like a normal person. Even when I was very young, 10 or 11, I used to miss a lot of school, traveling. At that time, I was traveling in India. I was playing junior tournaments. My dad also used to like to take us away on holiday and didn’t worry too much about school. In fact, I can’t ever remember being at school for like a full year. Obviously, I was, but it was when I was very young.

I wanted to go back, so I found studying and doing my exams relatively easy because it was something I really wanted to do. It wasn’t something that was that was being imposed on me like school is imposed on every single child in our society anyway. I knew what I was doing it for, and that, I suppose, made it easier.

Joseph: What was that transition like for you to go from a professional athlete on the tennis courts to someone now starting to get into the London School of Economics?

Rina: It went really quickly actually because I was really, really busy. I did so many exams in such a short period of time, basically teaching myself. It went fast.

In England, when you do A levels at high school, you have to choose your subjects. You have to choose three or four subjects to do. I had decided to do those subjects, and I decided that I wanted to study economics at university because I’d already decided what job I wanted to try and get when I left. I was very focused, and I knew exactly what I wanted to do and why I was doing it, so that really helped.

When I decided to put my rackets down, I did as a professional in the sense of playing on the tour, but I played for a club in Holland, and I played a few, small tournaments in France just to earn some money to take me through, because having not taken money from my parents or anyone for the longest time or since I was 14, it was hard to not earn any money anymore. I continued that in order to fund myself through university.

Joseph: I know you eventually ended up shifting into investment banking, and you alluded to the fact that you kind of knew what direction you wanted to take your career. How did you figure that out so quickly? Because I know a lot of people who listen to this podcast, one of the questions is, ‘How do I figure out where to take my life? I know I’m not currently satisfied with what I’m doing right now.’ How did you go about figuring out exactly what you wanted to do next?

Rina: That was a sort of golden time of the investment banks or the traders anyway. I am sure I was very influenced by that. It was a sort of sexy thing to do. I also was looking for something that I felt would really challenge. It was a sort of environment that I felt would be really challenging. It wasn’t something that a lot of people would have thought about doing, at least someone like me in my situation. I think that that was what attracted me to it.

I felt that it was something I could do as well. I like the sort of fast-paced. I didn’t know what to expect really. I just knew what people said about it and what research I’ve done. It’s the fast pace, the challenge – the challenge of being on a trading floor with 200 men basically. I suppose that was part of it as well for me.

Joseph: Can you also give us a glimpse into shifting from being a professional athlete on the tennis court to suddenly becoming a professional banker in the corporate world, and as you mentioned, surrounded by a lot of men?

Rina: It was great. I just absolutely loved it. I was lucky enough also to go with a bank to New York for six months to do in-house MBA kind of finance program, which was fantastic with graduates from all over the world. Then London, it was just really buzzing. It was everything that I’d hope for and expected.

I have to say that I was extremely, extremely fortunate to get my dream job at an American investment bank where, when I landed in London, I was only trading desk with the head of trading, who is an incredible person. I have to tell you something because it’s an interesting story.

I arrived in London my first day, introducing ourselves to the rest of the desk. There were five of us on the desk, including the head of trading, who said, ‘All right. All you need to know about us, besides these are our names or whatever and this is what we do, is we have a tea rota.’ He was American, but he’s obviously become quite British by that stage. He said, ‘We have a tea rota on our desk, and this is how it goes. Today, it’s my turn. Tomorrow, it’s this one. Your turn will be on Friday. Friday at 4:00, you’re going to get tea.’ From that moment onwards, I was treated like everyone else. It was amazing.

I think I was there at a great time, working in a great place with some great people. It was fantastic.

Joseph: Very interesting. What was the most surprising part of shifting into that world for you? Because it sounds like it went extremely smoothly.

Rina: The most important thing is I left all that behind me very quickly, and that’s the most surprising thing I think, because I did actually love it that much, and I had an amazing experience, and I enjoyed the work. I did have a few, little issues.

I remember once, I was the last person on the desk, and I had a call from some guy from the office in Tokyo who said I need to do this now. I’m like, ‘Fine, I can do this for you.’ He’s like, ‘No, I need to speak to someone who can do this.’ I’m like, ‘Well, I can do this.’ He’s like, ‘No, where’s your boss?’ I’m like, ‘It’s me or it’s no one.’ He ended up putting the phone down on me. I had a few of those, but I mean that was always from people outside or other people. It was never from the people who I work with. I did have an amazing, positive experience, and I loved the work.

Joseph: What made you ultimately move on from that world that you were enjoying so much?

Rina: My future husband at the time had his own family business based out of Brussels, and he said to me, ‘If we’re going to be together, I can’t move.’ As it turned out at that time, the bank had a regional office in Brussels, so it seemed like the sort of logical thing to do for me to move and to come over here.

We had started going out when I was in New York actually. I wanted to stay in New York. I was offered a job to stay out there in fact with the bank rather than come back to London. I really wanted to do that, but he gave me an ultimatum and said, ‘You either come back to Europe or it’s over.’ I thought about it a little bit, and I came back to London. Sometime later, we realized that if we were going to be together, we would have to live in the same country at least. That’s how that happened, and I moved to Brussels.

Joseph: For those people, including me, who have made a move for a spouse, do you have any words of wisdom for people who are trying to make that sort of a move work? Because obviously, in that particular situation, you’re putting someone else’s interest as a priority and making the move for them. How did you make that work?

Rina: My only advice would be to think things through as carefully as possible so that you can’t look back and say, ‘I didn’t make the right decision,’ or, ‘Why didn’t I think about this carefully?’ I think we all owe that to ourselves.

I did start working in the bank and have to learn French pretty fast, which I did. Honestly, if I moved from London to New York for him and continued working, it wouldn’t have been an issue at all. The problem was moving to a very small regional office, which I really disliked from the minute I arrived here, which made it harder. These decisions are decisions that someone has to make.

Joseph: Yeah, that’s interesting, Rina. A few years ago, I moved from San Francisco to London for my then girlfriend, now wife. That was a major, major adjustment for me with a lot of emotional ups and down. I can definitely relate to how tricky that can be.

Rina: The thing with life is you don’t ever know what would’ve happened. You don’t ever have any comparison. You only have what you know, so it’s difficult because you don’t know what would have happened if you hadn’t moved. Who knows?

Joseph: Exactly, yeah.

Rina: It’s really hard when you look back. I think that’s why it’s really important to try at least to think about what you’re feeling and what you’re thinking when you make those decisions.

Joseph: When you look back on your career change, Rina, going from professional tennis player to someone who’s now working in the professional business world, what’s something that you wish you had known that you now know?

Rina: The thing I wish I had known then, which I know now, is that I’m very much a function of society, a function of how I was brought up, of the societies that I was brought up in. I didn’t realize to what degree that influenced my decisions and the way I thought about things, myself, my life, and other people’s lives and other people. I’m not saying that that would have made a difference to these decisions I’ve made or the life that I’ve had, but I didn’t really realize to what extent I was not as rationale as I thought and not as able to take decisions myself as I thought that I was. I think that’s what it is.

Joseph: Would you be willing to give us an example of one of those times when a societal construct or external forces prevented you from being able to make the decisions that you wanted to make?

Rina: Without really thinking about it, it was this sort of idea I suppose that was in me which I hadn’t really thought about or hadn’t really confronted that, yes, I was a certain age, I was going to get married, I was going to have children, and it was something that I hadn’t actually even thought about in that way. It was sort of something that I expected myself to do, so I didn’t challenge it and didn’t think about it. It was a sort of natural thing. I think that was the first thing.

After moving out there, getting married, it was then the children. I had the first child, and then I thought, ‘I want to get my career going again.’ What I wanted to do was move back to London three of four days a week and trade on the financial futures exchange, but this didn’t go down very well at home. My husband obviously would’ve preferred to have another child. Again, everyone was saying and it was normal to have another child because you don’t only want to have one child and all this kind of stuff.

It sounds ridiculous the way I’m talking about it now, but it’s the dumb thing. It was what was expected. It was how it was. I did sort of challenge it but maybe not really. Adam, I’m sorry if you’re listening to this, but I thought one child was fine. She was great. It was okay. I was ready to work again, but my life didn’t really pan out like that. I think a lot of the time, it was just because I went along with it, and I didn’t really ask myself that many questions about certain things which were, I suppose, expected of me.

Joseph: I know what you mean. I think we sometimes all fall into this trap of just following these societally constructed milestones – you go to school and then college, maybe graduate school, get married, have a kid, have another kid, and yet, that may not be the right thing for you. It’s just sometimes hard to block all that external noise out, and it’s hard not to fall in line.

Rina: That’s right. I think my advice would be just to think about it. I’m not saying it’s wrong at all. I’ve had a great life, and I don’t have any regrets, but I think we all owe it to ourselves to realize that that’s what’s happening and that we should think about it and just acknowledge that there’s a lot of that going on.

Joseph: When you look back on your transition going from professional athlete to the work you’re doing right now, what’s something that you have learned about yourself through this career change?

Rina: I learned a lot about myself, especially from that first career change. It’s that it’s okay to change. It’s okay to accept that your heart’s not in something. It’s not failure and it’s not a fear of failure that causes it because I’ve had people say to me that it was this sort of fear of failure that made you stop. I thought about this really carefully, and I know that very competitive people, it’s possible that there is an element of that. I’m not saying I’m immune to it, but that wasn’t the reason why I did it. People say a lot of things, and I think that you have to be true to yourself and think that that’s not the reason why I did it and that it’s okay.

Then I think it’s important to think, if I’m moving on, I need to realize why I’m doing this, and I need to know that it’s okay and move on, find something else.

Joseph: The last thing I want to talk about before we finish, Rina, is Dress for Success, which I know is a charity that’s important to you. It’s doing some great work for women in the Greater London area. Can you just tell us a little bit more about that charity and why you’re so passionate about it?

Rina: Dress for Success is an amazing charity. It’s an international charity. I’m involved in London. What we do is we help underprivileged women get back into the workplace. It’s a direct help. We dress them. We give them advice on interviews. Clothes and how you look and how you feel when you’re going to an interview, it’s very important. There are so, so, so many women who need this kind of basic help in order to have a chance to start working and to get involved. I’m talking about really the most underprivileged amongst us.

It’s a fantastic charity. It does a lot of good work. As I said, I really like the direct impact that it has on lives of not only these women but their families, their children, their communities. Yes, I’m really, really excited about being involved.

Joseph: We’ll definitely include a link to Dress for Success in the show notes if people want to learn more.

Rina: Thank you.

Joseph: Rina, thank you so much for your time today. If people want to learn more about you or if they are interested in reaching out, where’s the best place they can go to learn more about you or the works that you’re doing right now?

Rina: Probably LinkedIn. That would be a way to come find me.

Joseph: Okay, we will include a link to your LinkedIn profile in the show notes. I just wanted to thank you so much for telling us more about your life as a tennis player and your transitions along the way into the corporate world, and most importantly, the importance of thinking critically about your path that you’re on in your life and being true to yourself. Best of luck with your current work, and I look forward to talking again sometime.

Rina: Thank you very much.

How can you make sense of all the emotions involved with starting over in your career? Erika Boissiere, a former investment banker turned couples counselor, shares insights on the emotions of letting go of one career for another, the impact your career has on your relationships, and the art of starting over.  In the Mental Fuel® segment, I also share some thoughts on the how I dealt with the “loss” I felt after leaving one career behind to pursue something else.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83LPVejgujw

During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I talked about the difficulty of saying goodbye to one career so you can pursue something else, how that really does challenge our self-worth and confidence. If you have recently made a major change in your career, and you’re struggling to maintain your motivation, my challenge to you is to remind yourself WHY you chose this path. And even if you haven’t achieved that yet, to take comfort in the fact that it’s still a worthwhile pursuit.

Erika Boissiere is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist who specializes in couples counselling, she founded the Relationship Institute of San Francisco. She’s also an adjunct instructor at Golden Gate University, teaching Masters level courses to students learning to be marriage and family therapists. After working for nearly a decade in the financial services sector for firms such as BlackRock and other buy-side and sell-side firms, Erika followed her passion to help others lead more fulfilling lives, and changed careers to become a couples and relationship therapist. Be sure to follow Erika on Twitter and Quora.

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 General Assembly for sponsoring this episode of Career Relaunch. General Assembly is a pioneer in education and career transformation, specializing in today’s most in-demand skills. Visit GA.co to lean how to boost your career. Use Promo code ‘RELAUNCH‘ for 20% off your 1st class or workshop.

Teaser (first ~15s): To be there now, eight, nine years later and to be at the beginning again, it was really, really hard. I think that idea that at the time I felt like, ‘Gosh, all those years spent in banking just felt like a waste.’

Joseph: Hello, Erika, and thanks for taking time to speak with me here on Career Relaunch. We’re going to talk today about your time as an investment banker and how you eventually started your own counseling practice. To kick things off, could you just start off by sharing what you’re focused on right now in your career and life as a couples and relationship therapist?

Erika: Right now, I am hyper focused on building a business here in San Francisco that’s focused on couples counseling and relationship therapy. What I humbly realized is it takes quite a bit to launch a business. I’m well underway, but to grow your business is sort of where I’m at at this point, trying to climb the walls of Google and make brand awareness the focus.

Joseph: What do you think has been the hardest part of starting your own practice so far?

Erika: I think all of us, at some point, when you’re sort of hanging your shingle so to speak, you have a vision of what you want it to be. I remember that vision a long time ago when I first started my Master’s program at University of San Francisco. To create that vision, it takes just an incredible amount of work, whether it’s building your website, setting up a call, call central for all the therapists that are on our team, to SEO, to writing blogs, just the amount of work that it takes to create a business.

Joseph: I definitely want to hear more details about how you founded your practice. Let’s come back to that. I would love to start by going back in time a little bit, to the days when you were working in the financial services sector. Can you tell us about your work as an investment banker?

Erika: I chose my career like many of us did. Around 22 years of age, I had graduated college, and that budding question that almost every single human being on the planet was asking me, which is, ‘What are you going to do with your degree?’ I didn’t entirely know. I had graduated with an economics degree from University of Colorado and was setting my sight on San Francisco. At the time, finance felt like a safe option. It felt like something that I could explain to people easily. It had a really easy trajectory, hypothetically good income if you’re good at it.

Back then, I chose that career for the ideas of safety and what would impress people. I just made a decision and then sort of went for it. I didn’t spend an insane amount of time really sort of vetting all the career options. It felt like I was thrust into the corporate world and having to make a decision on which way to go. I like the idea of the stock market, and I like the idea of having that intense job. It’s always where I thrived. So I went into banking entirely conscious I don’t think. That’s how I get started at least.

Joseph: When you were thinking about going into investment banking, I know you mentioned that it was sort of this vague impression of what could be an interesting career. If you were to pin down one or two things about investment banking that you felt were most attractive to you, what do you think those were at least in your former self when you’re looking ahead?

Erika: I wanted a career that people would be proud of me. Saying that you worked in finance sort of has an appeal so to speak that you’re good with numbers and you can work really hard. That was a huge driver. I wanted that career path that was just sort of laid out. I’m an athlete, and so the idea of sort of training, and if you do this much for this long, then you’ll get to this sort of point. That was really attractive to me.

Joseph: Then when you actually got into investment banking, how do you think the reality compared to what you perceived it to be?

Erika: In the beginning, my first corporate job, it was really exciting. You got up, and you got work clothes, and you had a paycheck. I’d worked before obviously, but it never had like health benefits and bus pass. Those things were exciting, and living in the city. I don’t know what the exact timing was, but then I think that wore off. I started to realize I just wasn’t excited about what I was doing. Yet I think there was a huge part of my psychology, like what I was telling you earlier. I’m an athlete, and so I was like, ‘No, I’m just going to pound this out.’

I woke up and did a great job and as best as I could work, but there was sort of a slow humming in the back of my brain that this was not it. It was exactly that. It was a slow hum. It wasn’t this loud, ‘Oh my gosh, I got to get out of this job. It’s awful.’ That was not my journey. My journey was very much, ‘This job is okay. Most people would kill for this job. I should be grateful, but I’m not fulfilled. Is that enough to leave a job?’ I sort of wrestled with that for a number of years.

It wasn’t something that was keeping my up at night per se. It was just, like I said, those moments where you’re like in the elevator, and you’re like, ‘Is this really what I’m supposed to be doing?’

Joseph: I remember back in business school that investment banking was one of the three most popular areas that people wanted to go to after their MBA, along with consulting and marketing. For those people who aren’t familiar with investment banking, can you just give us a glimpse into what your day-to-day life was like? What were you actually doing?

Erika: I worked for what’s called a buy-side and a sell-side firm. The traditional investment banking idea is that we research companies to potentially take them public. If they already are public, to raise some additional money to further their business.

Another part of the investment banking that I worked for a good while was in their equity research team. That’s essentially where we do analysis on companies that are already public, and we forecast how well we think they’re going to be doing in the future. This gives the market information on the health of a company. Every quarter, we would get up very, very early and listen to their quarterly release calls. That essentially would tell us how well they did and how well our forecast was.

A lot of writing, a lot of number crunching per se, and we did a lot of PowerPoint. Back then, it was only PowerPoint, but they’re called pitch decks, and they were like the bane of my existence because on the 99th slide, it had to be absolutely perfect – not a period out of place, not a pixel off. We did a lot of PowerPoint decks on sort of selling our services.

Joseph: I know you mentioned that there wasn’t a moment in time where the skies kind of parted and you decided you want to do something else, but at what point did the analysis and the forecasting and the PowerPoint slide creation start to bother you or start to make you think, ‘Maybe I should consider doing something else with my days?’

Erika: The best analogy I can give you is, if you have an injury, like your ankles hurt or your knees, it keeps aching and aching and aching, and eventually that pain gets so loud that you have to recognize it, I think that would be the way that I would describe it. I was sort of limping along in finance. In finance, you work for lots of different people and lots of different personalities, and the personalities tend to be a little on the harsher side.

I had a couple of experiences where you’re just sort of going into work, and those devil in the details that I was mentioning earlier, like that PowerPoint deck and just having managers really upset with you because, on the 118th slide, you didn’t do something correct. That wore me out, and I started to look a little bit deeper inside myself. This is in now my late 20s.

I sort of slugged it out for a number of years, and I just started to ask some bigger questions with myself, which is, ‘Is this really what I want to be doing 5 years, 10 years, 15 years? How do I imagine myself at 50 years old? How do I imagine myself at 60 years old? Am I here in this bank? Am I this person that I’m working for?’ When I started to look out a little bit more rather than just straight down, that really helped me. I was like, ‘No. The answer is no to that. I don’t want to be here.’

There’s more to life than being moderately happy or moderately satisfied with my career, which is something that I think I’ve always envisioned even as an adolescent. It was something that I really wanted to be proud of. I wasn’t really proud of what I was doing because I really wasn’t proud of myself.

Joseph: Once you started to get these rumblings that maybe this wasn’t where you wanted to spend the rest of your life and when you looked upward in the organization, those roles didn’t appeal to you, what did you decide to do next?

Erika: When I was originally in my undergrad, I had originally signed up for my initial major as psychology. I was a freshman at University of Colorado. I was like first semester in, and I got cold feet. I was like, ‘Psychology? I can’t do psychology. The pay is terrible. What does a psychologist really do?’ I just freaked out.

At that time though, the reason that I’d chosen psychology was because I had an idea, at the right age of 18 years old, that I wanted to become a therapist, but that felt very, very far and just too hard of a path and too vague. So I swung over to economics, and that felt, like I was telling you earlier, about sort of the earlier part of my journey, that just felt very, very safe. It impressed people and all the things that I named earlier.

I had always, in the back of my mind, there’s like that deep desire, a place of wanting to be a therapist but way too scared to admit it to myself, to chart that course so to speak. I would say that that had stuck with me throughout my journey through finance as this low-grade thought that I had of, ‘That would be an interesting career,’ and ‘Could I? Would I? What does that even look like?’

Joseph: What do you think held you back from making that leap over to psychology more quickly?

Erika: Part of it was logistics. I just couldn’t get around the hurdle of like, ‘What do I actually physically have to do to realize that dream?’ and the idea of like a Master’s versus a doctoral program. How would I get the loans? How would I support myself, rent and my cellphone bill and whatever, all the other expenses that go into a life? That was the initial holdback. I don’t even know how I went to put this plan together.

The second part, which is, ‘Am I capable of this? Am I capable of leaving this lily pad and doing what felt, at that time like I was crossing the Grand Canyon?’ Whether it was telling it to my friends, telling it to my managers, telling it to my family, telling it to myself, it felt way bigger than I actually think it was.

Joseph: I think that is quite common. When you look ahead, it seems really daunting, and when something’s quite vague, that doesn’t help. How did you start to put the pieces together? How did you get over that feeling of the chasm being so great between where you are and where you wanted to go?

Erika: I started to put pen to paper. We teach that a lot in psychology. Just as you had described, there’s this huge unknown that I was experiencing. When I started to get a little bit more inertia, a little bit more momentum, I started looking at programs. At the time, I don’t even know you could get a PhD, Master’s, and which route I wanted to go, and that there were night schools, like University of San Francisco. I started to brain storm a little bit. Could I hold a part-time finance job and go back to school night time?

I actually started to do like that of a rough draft, started to sketch out what my possibilities are, what the numbers looks like. This was all done very independently, late at night, randomly. I would sort of play with it a little bit, and then I started to pick up more momentum when I realized, ‘Wow, there’s a lot of options out there for me.’

University of San Francisco had spoken to me because they had this night school program. At the time I was at Blackrock. I was wondering, ‘Could I potentially ask my manager, “Could I work part-time?” and, “Could I go to school part-time?” Is that even an option that they would support?’

It was rough drafting. It was realizing I had a lot more options than I had allowed myself. I mean I just didn’t know there’s a lot of options out there when you start to be a little bit more resourceful and not so narrow-minded, which is where I initially was.

Joseph: When you eventually moved on to your first psychology role, I think that was at the University of San Francisco Center for Child and Family Development, what was that like for you to get into your first role in what is a completely different industry from I-banking?

Erika: That’s such a good question. I remember not knowing what to wear. It’s a school-based counseling program. It was not ultimately what I wanted to do. I knew throughout my Master’s program that I wanted to be a couple’s therapist, but the State of California has a rule that you have to accumulate so many children hours. You have to work with children for 500 hours to get licensed, which makes good sense.

I remember I was on the San Francisco Uni in what felt like really relaxed clothing. In banking, you wear slacks and heels and collared shirts and pearls. It was a funny moment. Showing up at the school, and I was what they call in California a trainee, which is sort of the lowest. If you can say the hierarchical road to becoming a therapist, this is sort of the lowest marker.

I remember just that moment of being like, ‘Wow, I am at the beginning of this,’ and, ‘How humbling.’ I was already at the beginning in banking when I was young, at 22, but to be there now, eight, nine years later and to be at the beginning again, it was hard. It was really, really hard.

I think that idea that at the time I felt like, ‘Gosh, all those years spent in banking just felt like a waste.’ No one really cared that I had done all these that I thought were really cool things. They didn’t care at all and was like, ‘Okay, how do you work with kids?’ I’m like, ‘I haven’t. I mean I’ve been a camp counselor,’ and so to sort of schlep what felt like a lot of grueling hours in banking.

Where I am now, it ended up not being a waste, but at that time, it felt like all those years in banking was just sort of chucked to the side. It was a hard moment.

Joseph: I know one of the things that really dissuades people from making a career change, Erika, is this exact idea that you’re talking about, of having to start over and to feel like you’re throwing away all that you’ve invested in your other career. How did you handle that? How did you ultimately come to terms with that?

Erika: Initially, I didn’t want to go. Even in my Master’s program, I’m like, ‘Yeah, I used to work in investment banking.’ In psychology, that is just not their jam. They sort of look at you like, ‘I mean cool I guess.’ They were not impressed by it.

I think I just took a deep breath and realized that while my finance days were valuable to me, I had to come to terms myself that, yes, the banking days taught me a ton of unique skillsets, and I had to sort of shelf those for a bit, going, ‘You know what? I’ll pull from that sort of inventory at a later date, but right now, I have got to turn that humility part to my personality higher and realize that I am at the beginning.’ I just had to swallow that pill and go, ‘I don’t know anything about really working with kids in a psychological setting. I am new to working with couples. I am new to working with depression,’ and really come to terms with the fact that I am at the beginning.

Joseph: Ultimately, you decided to stay in the world of therapy and psychology. What kept you going in that field? Because I know you mentioned that there are these elements of having to start over and having to learn the ropes. What ultimately kept you in this new industry versus falling back into what probably would have been a convenient move or just staying in the investment banking industry?

Erika: I spent a long time thinking about this career change. For me, it was eight years, and so I was going into this career change very conscious, very aware, having done homework, having all the things that I probably should’ve done when I was 22. When you’re doing that career change, you’re like, ‘I’m leaving a lily pad to go jump onto another lily pad, and I really want to make this work.’

For me, I didn’t want to bounce to another career change, and so I entered that Master’s programs what I felt like sort of guns a-blazing. I’m like, ‘I’m going to do this job, and I want to hit it out of the park.’ I want to get a group practice. I want to start my own business. I want to swing for the fences, because I’m leaving something that was very safe, and I want to create that same safety, but I’m going to create it for myself.

Joseph: Were there any particular clues that you felt or saw along the way that helped convince you that you were doing the right thing?

Erika: It is a feeling that I have when I’m sitting with a couple and even when they’re in their darkest hour and I would absolutely say that couples, when they come into counseling, usually, they’re just having a tough go. They’re unhappy, and yet they believe in each other or else they wouldn’t be spending the time or money. When I’m sitting with that couple, and I’m working with them, I just know that I’m where I’m supposed to be. It’s a feeling that says, ‘I figured it out. I love my job.’

There’s moments where it’s hard. It’s hard to see a couple ultimately decide to divorce. It’s hard to see a couple not realize their dreams. It’s hard when a couple is undergoing grief. There are parts of my jobs that are absolutely heartbreaking, but to put it into context against banking, I never got that feeling with banking. With banking, it was sort of like, ‘I think this is okay, right? This is okay. I think, is it okay? No, this doesn’t feel right. Maybe it’s okay.’ It was this wrestle. It was this constant sort of unhappiness.

I think the antithesis again, if I was 85 years old and looking back at my life, I remember having this clear thought in banking. I’m like, ‘Would I have been proud of what I’ve done with my life?’ I knew the answer was no if I stayed in banking. If I’m 85 and I look back and look at my life now and ask that same question, I would absolutely say yes. That makes me feel great.

Joseph: I can definitely relate to some of those sentiments you’re talking about. I know that when I’ve been roles where I haven’t been happy, I feel like I spent more energy wondering if I’m doing the right thing than on the actual task at hand. I think when you’re doing work that you really enjoy, what’s really liberating about that is you don’t deploy all this excess energy toward wondering if you’re doing the right thing. You focus on the actual work that you’re doing, which is a very different feeling.

Erika: You hit the nail on the head. That’s exactly my experience.

Joseph: Let’s talk a little bit about your time now as a couple’s counselor. How did you decide to start your own practice?

Erika: I love working with couples, and in San Francisco, I would say in general, the therapy community, we’ve done a great job on certain things. We’re pretty good with depression now and anxiety and many of the disorders in the DSM, but with couples, the research is actually horrible on the success rates with ‘marital therapy.’

Because of my banking experience, I think when I was in my Master’s program and then following my Master’s program, I trained under sort of the best of the best couple’s therapists. There’s a bunch of names out there. I wanted to stake my claim on building a group practice that specializes in couple’s counseling and that we do really specialize work under these masters. That best of breed model where our best attempt furnish the best skills and tools and resources that we can give couples, I sound like a banker right now, but I wanted to bring that to market, which I felt like was a gaping hole in the community at the moment.

Joseph: Since you specialize in couple’s counseling and since we talk about career topics on this show, I’d love to finish up by tapping into some of the insights you might have about how one’s career can affect their relationship. Are there any sort of career related issues that commonly pop up with the couples that you see? If so, what are those?

Erika: Kind of what you were describing before, which is that if you’re wrestling, if you’re putting more energy into trying to figure out your career, when you’re going into whatever job that you’re at, you’re wrestling with those same thoughts when you come home. For me, I can speak and also for my clients to some degree, I tried my hardest to shelf my unhappiness or my existential crisis. It’s not I think called the quarter-life crisis, but it’s okay. I tried to shelf it. I tried to leave it at the I-bank, but I couldn’t. You can’t shelf unhappiness.

Where I see it with my clients is they are wondering those same questions which is: Is there more to life? Am I only doing this because I’ve got a family and I need to earn this paycheck? I feel stuck, and I feel powerless. I can’t make movement. It absolutely affects a relationship in that way of low-grade unhappiness. You can muscle your way through to some degree, but your spouse or your partner feels it. Your kids feel it.

It absolutely comes into therapy, and I’m glad it does, because at least then, we can openly talk about it in the relationship. That person can give voice to their unhappiness, and hopefully, we can be resourceful and do that brainstorming exercise that is so helpful just to open up your options so that we don’t get so narrow-minded in our thought process.

Joseph: How do these things turn out? Let’s say that there’s somebody who’s really unhappy with their career, and it’s starting to affect their relationship back home. What ultimately happens to these couples or what ultimately happens to these relationships if the career issue isn’t dealt with?

Erika: It affects the relationship until you figure it out. You could go 3, 5, 7, 10, 20 years, and that low-grade unhappiness, as much as we try to push it—we push it aside, we don’t want to think about it, we can pound it out, we can muscle through it—it becomes the relationship dynamic. There’s this thing that’s a cloud hanging over the relationship. Maybe it’s not pouring rain, and maybe at times it is. It kind of comes and goes like that of a weather system.

Your career is a huge part to our journey and our life. If you’re truly unhappy or if you’re wondering about making that career move and you’re wrestling with that ongoing, that cloud is going to hang around until you look at it and try to figure out, ‘What is this cloud trying to tell me? What do I need to do to actually move this weather system so that I am happy?’

Joseph: I know that you eventually figured out what steps you needed to take to be happier in your own career. When you look back on your own career change, what’s something that you wish you had known that you now know about yourself?

Erika: There’s a lot of stuff that I had to figure out to build this practice that, at the very beginning, I didn’t think I could figure it out. I didn’t think I could figure out how to build a website. I didn’t think that I could figure out how to work with SEO and Google’s algorithm, which of course is always a mystery. I didn’t think that I would be a writer. Something that never was of interest to me is now a side passion of mine.

There are these things, these huge boulders, very sort of that black-and-white thing, like, ‘I can’t do that,’ and it turns out that, as soon as I started to get a little bit of movement, as soon as I built my first website, as soon as I started picking up just my self-esteem and like, ‘I can figure this out. There are YouTube videos. There are resources. There are people you can hire to either teach you or to build stuff that you really can’t figure out.’

What I wish I could’ve told myself once I sort of planted myself in the couple’s counseling is you’re going to figure it out.

Joseph: Before we go, if there’s someone else out there who is thinking about shifting from the corporate world into more of the clinical setting or who wants to get into couple’s counseling, do you have any advice for them?

Erika: Do your homework. It’s a huge shift. For you to go into it conscious, interview people, spend a good chunk of time really digging into that career move to make sure that it is actually what you want to do, so you don’t make that leap and then sort of like I was telling you earlier, sort of have to go through that bounce-around experience, which wouldn’t be the end of the world, but it can be a little bit of a cleaner route.

Two, open up options and brainstorming. Open your mind and just sort of throw crazy ideas on the wall and see if something else shakes out.

Number three, which is I think the overarching theme of this interview: if you do have that low-grade hum of ‘Is there more?’ I would venture to say that there is. I would be that bold to say, yes, there is more that, if you’re going to make that leap to be happier, I think that’s a wonderful thing that you’re seeking happiness. Making that leap is complicated, and it’s wrought with all sorts of different decisions, but your happiness in your career journey is pretty high priority in one’s life map. To spend some time on it and do it, I think, is a good use of energy.

Joseph: Finally, if people want to learn more about The Relationship Institute of San Francisco that you founded or the work that you do, where can people go to learn a little bit more?

Erika: My website is www.TRISF.com. I do a lot of Quora responses, so you’ll see me pop up there almost on a daily basis. It’s a fun place to ask any sort of question you ever could wonder about relationships. I like to answer those question because it taps into that writing passion of mine. You can find me there.

Joseph: We’ll make sure we capture those in the show notes. I just wanted to thank you for giving us a glimpse into your former life as an investment banker and your transitioning into being a couple’s counselor and also sharing some useful insights on how your career can affect your relationships. Thanks so much, Erika.

Erika: Thank you.

What can bravery do for your career? In this episode of Career Relaunch, Raluca Comanescu, an architect turned productivity trainer shares her thoughts on an emotions-based approach to setting authentic goals, the power of accountability, and the importance of self-love.  I also share some thoughts on how you can inject more bravery into your own career decisions.

During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I talked about the importance of bravery. I’d welcome you sharing your brave decision in the comments below. Also, if you’re looking for an accountability partner, consider joining the new Career Relaunch Facebook group.

Raluca Comanescu is a Productivity Trainer, and creator of thefeathers.ink Navigator – the planner to break dreams down into actions. Passionate about design and curious about experiences and emotions, she’s gone from being a full-time architect, to unfolding her design agency, then launching two products to give people more time. After experiencing work addiction herself, she’s now training people to take control of their time, strip away all the junk, and get down to action. Follow Raluca on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

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

Forest is the mobile app that helps you stay focused and present while also helping to plant real trees on the earth. Visit JosephLiu.co/Forest to download the app on iOS or Android today.

Teaser (first ~15s): People usually hide behind easy stuff. In order to see real progress, it’s good to try to do brave things, like things that really scare you. Those things that take you out of your comfort zone.

Joseph: Hello, Raluca. Thanks for joining me here on Career Relaunch. Can you just kick us off by telling us a little bit about what you’re focused on as both a productivity trainer and also the founder of thefeathers.ink?

Raluca: First of all, Joseph, thanks for having me here. Basically, I want to tell that I’m pretty much splitting my time between two directions. One of them is having my graphic design agency, from where I actually learned a lot of techniques about productivity and how to work with people. Using all those lessons learned, I’m now also focusing on taking my clients and helping them break their dreams into actionable steps and be productive about their work.

Joseph: You have also created a really cool planner called the Navigator. Can you just give us a very quick overview of the Navigator, which I have right here in front of me. Thanks so much for sending one to me.

Raluca: The Navigator is a step-by-step planner that helps you break dreams down to the next action. It’s not really focused on rigid goals. It’s actually focused on experiences and emotions you want to sign up for and how you are going to bring those experiences and emotions in your life through actions and through manifesting intentions and through connecting with people.

Joseph: I definitely want to come back and talk a lot more about the Navigator planner because having flipped through it myself, I’m very fascinated by the various aspects of it. I’d love to talk a little bit more about that. Let’s come back to that, but let’s go back in time a little bit here, Raluca, because I know you haven’t always been running thefeathers.ink. I know that you’ve always been passionate about design, but that came to life in a different way. Could you tell us about your time as an architect there years ago in Romania? Then we can move forward from there.

Raluca: It all started as being an architect first. When I was in high school, at the end of the high school, I decided that I want to actually experience something completely different than everything I was doing. I decided to go to the architecture school. I actually went to the architecture and urban planning school, and after that, I was for five years an employee as a full-time architect.

It was kind of fascinating because I was learning a lot of things. The most fascinating part about being an architect is the fact that you’re actually connecting with a lot of people, and you’re actually listening to what those people are telling you and how those people are living their lives and you’re somehow trying to connect the dots and create a product for them that fits their lifestyle. This way, we create houses, or even more, I have designed big buildings like hotels. It was very interesting.

Joseph: You’re building these big buildings and different types of structures, and then at some point, you decided that you wanted to move on. Can you just take me back to the moment when you made that decision to make a shift in your career?

Raluca: It wasn’t that fast from one way to another. There was this economical crisis, and there were no more big projects I could work on in our office. The owner had to fire 90% or 80% of the employees. When that happened, that exact moment, that exact day, I was like somehow fascinated because I thought I was going to be fired as well. That was actually the moment when I understood that my mind was somehow shifted to a different direction.

I didn’t do any move right there. It took me like three or four—I don’t exactly remember—a few months anyway, until I understood that there is no more for me to do there. My mind was actually open to experience many more other things.

Joseph: Actually that moment when you thought you might get fired made you realize that that wouldn’t be such a bad thing, and then it got the wheels spinning to move along?

Raluca: Yeah.

Joseph: I know you mentioned that you felt like there wasn’t anything left to do there. What did you do to extract yourself then from your role as an architect to then move on to the next chapter in your career?

Raluca: I started learning to design illustrations, build illustrations. Once I did that, I pushed myself to sell those illustrations online so I can see some sort of a progress. I was doing this during evenings and during night times until morning hours. Every day, I was doing this on my own time. At some point, I noticed a job online. My first client was from America, who actually needed my brand new illustration skills. I was like, ‘Well, yes. I would like to try that out.’ I actually took the project, and I noticed that I could make money outside my day job.

Joseph: How exactly did you find that client again? The reason why I ask is sometimes people are really curious, how do you get your first client. I’d be curious how you located that person.

Raluca: I was probably searching something on Google, and then this project was posted on a platform, on a freelance platform. Back then, it was called oDesk, and now it’s called Upwork.

Joseph: I know you got involved when we last spoke about this in some sort of a trailer project. That was a pretty big gig that you had in the United States. Can you tell us a little bit about what that involved and how that project ultimately transpired?

Raluca: I knew somehow that something big is going to happen. One day, I received this message from the founder, describing to me the idea and telling me, ‘I know you have the skills to make it happen.’ The project is about building a mobile car service for oil changes. It’s like a Jiffy Lube on wheels. It comes to your house, make the oil change, and then moves on to the next client. We were kind of giving people time back with this project.

Joseph: You mentioned something a second ago about you kind of felt like you knew that something big was coming your way. Can you explain what you meant by that, or what were you feeling inside and how did you know that something big was coming your way?

Raluca: There is this flow you’re feeling throughout the year, energy you’re feeling throughout the year. The first part of the year was very relaxing. I was recovering from the transition of being an architect to being a brand new graphic designer. I felt I was growing throughout those months. At some point, I felt it was an emotion like deep inside me, saying that all I’ve learned is for something bigger, and that something bigger is going to happen. Honestly, I think it’s some sort of a gut feeling or intuition.

Joseph: I’d love to talk a little bit more about the Navigator now. How did you come up with the Navigator, which I kind of interpret it as a planner/journal.

Raluca: When I started the first time, I wanted to create a basic planner for me. While I was working with my clients, because some of them did not have the clear picture of their work, of their business, I shared my planner with them to help them get more relaxed and take the heavy part from their brain and put it on paper. I got feedback from them. The feedback was very great, so I decided, ‘Okay, you know what? Why not make this public?’

Because of the feedback I received and because of the struggles people were facing when they were using the initial planner, I actually started questioning myself. I started listening to people. I started connecting dots. All those lessons learned have translated into a new improved version of the Navigator until what it is today, which is most like a coaching tool or an instrument you can use to empty your brain and start organizing your ideas until you find the next step to follow tomorrow or today.

Joseph: I’ve got the Navigator in my hands right now. I just got it in the mail yesterday. I’m looking at it, and one of the things that really struck about the Navigator is, compared to a regular planner, this Navigator seems to have so much personality to it. I felt like it had almost a voice, similar to what you had mentioned before, kind of like a coach. I was wondering if we could just touch on a couple of these things I’m seeing in here. Number one, I see that there’s space here for brave actions. Why did you decide to include that as part of the planner?

Raluca: People usually hide behind easy stuff. In order to see your progress, it’s good to try to do brave things, like things that really scare you and those things that actually expand your comfort zone, or even better, take you out of your comfort zone. Those brave things are going to actually boost your business. You can do a brave thing in two minutes, and the results might be bigger even than your work for an entire week.

Brave is different for each of us. For me, scary is picking up the phone and calling people. Imagine that after I quit Facebook, I was standing in front of my phone and realized that there is no other way I can keep in contact with people if I can’t call them. So I took the phone and started calling people.

Joseph: I think one of the interesting things about flipping through this planner—and I think you’re kind of touching on this—is the emotional side of planning and goal setting and how, sometimes, with goal setting, we just put a goal out there, but we don’t really think about the implications on our emotions. Can you explain your emotions-based approach to planning?

Raluca: Goal is a good word, but I don’t like to use it that much because, ‘Oh, I have to set up my goals,’ they decide to do something rigid like I want to be a CEO for what kind of company. They set up the goal, and then they are trying all these actions to actually reach the goal, but they never actually ask themselves, ‘Why do I want this? Why is it that important for me? What would I feel if I’m going to be in this position, if I’m going to experience this? Who are the people who I’m going to work with and I’m going to enjoy working with? What are the places I’m going to see if I’m going to reach this goal of mine?’

There are so many things behind the goal. It’s not just the goal itself. It’s the emotions that are triggered. It’s the people you want to meet and the places you want to see. Somehow, it’s better to know those things first because the more you know about you and about the way you want to feel and the experiences you want to sign up for, the goals or those things you want to reach will come your way. Sometimes, it will come your way in a different aspect that you haven’t considered.

Joseph: I was looking at your Instagram page, and I don’t know if this relates, but one of the things you mentioned there was this concept of goals remorse. What did you mean by goals remorse? Is that what you’re talking about here?

Raluca: Usually, people start creating this unrealistic goals, and those goals are not always honest to themselves. Some of them are borrowed. Like if you have a lot of people talking around you, and you hear about their goals, you hear about their actions, it’s kind of inevitable not to borrow those goals. Whenever you start making your own, it happens that you set up an unrealistic goal for yourself or a borrowed goal for yourself. As soon as you start actually working on that goal, you realize that it’s not for you. So you have this goal remorse soon after you start your action or your journey to reach that goal.

Joseph: How do you go about maintaining your accountability with your goals?

Raluca: First of all, I decide what I want to achieve in a month, and then I split it on the next actions to follow every single week. I put those actions inside my calendar, inside my Navigator, and then I start making them happen throughout the days. However, I also have an accountability partner. I’m not 100% relying on the Navigator. I also have an accountability partner I talk to. We share our progress, and we share how we experience them and what is working and what is not. That is also one way I suggest people to do it: it’s really important to find a person to hold accountable for their progress.

Joseph: How did you go about finding your accountability partner? I think that that is such a great idea. I think about that, and I guess I’m not sure where to start in terms of what makes for a good accountability partner and how you go about finding one.

Raluca: My very first accountability partner was my partner. It’s not that something official. We were going home every evening, and we were walking home actually. During our walk, we were actually exchanging ideas like, ‘How was your day? How did you achieve? What happened? Why did that happen?’ and, ‘What’s next?’ Those are pretty much the questions. We kept talking and talking and talking, and he has for years kept me somehow, with my mind, clear about what I should do next.

My new accountability partner was actually referred to me from another friend. I clicked with her. She’s also emotions-oriented as I am, and she’s also an entrepreneur as I am. We are now sharing our progress, and it’s working very well.

Accountability partner is good, and you can find it in your house, you can find it in your circle of friends, you can find it in the circle of clients. You can pretty much find them everywhere. What’s important is that you click with that person. If you don’t click with that person, it’s okay to move on.

Joseph: The last thing I wanted to talk about related to the Navigator is this section you’ve got on here. I guess it’s self-love activities. Can you explain the importance of self-love? Then we can wrap up by talking about some of your workshops.

Raluca: Self-love activities are pretty much in connection with the brave activities. Whenever you do something brave, why not just give yourself something in return? Experience some activities that really brings you joy and pleasure. I’m not really talking about expensive activities here.

I was talking with a client just last week. She was telling, ‘You know what? I really want to go to the church for so many times.’ I said, ‘Yes, why not do it. If you feel you have to do that to take care of yourself, take care of your mind, do that.’ We so much forget about taking care of ourselves.

Throughout the day, throughout the week, throughout the month, we are constantly rushing and rushing to achieve things, because if we don’t achieve things throughout the day, we feel useless, and we feel like we haven’t done much. We feel absent in our life, which is kind of a fake thing to feel, but we feel those things. We feel those emotions.

We forget that doing something for yourself is actually very good for you, but it’s also very good for the people that are around you. You cannot expect me to love you if you don’t start with yourself and if you don’t love yourself first.

Joseph: As you’ve gone on this journey, Raluca, what’s something that you’ve learned about yourself along the way?

Raluca: I have learned that I have to give myself time. Whenever I make a decision, whenever I make a change, I really need to give my mind some time to connect with that new direction or that new journey. Somehow, when you do a change, it’s very easy to do a change. Like, if next week I want to give up on anything I’m doing right now and start being a bartender, I can do that, because it’s just a change. The thing is, the mind is not really ready to embrace the new direction.

What I’ve learned throughout these years is that my brain is wired that it really needs time to accommodate all the changes, and it really needs time to experience or to live a lot of experiences in order to make a shift. Don’t rush through experiences. Don’t rush through your actions. Don’t rush it. Just enjoy every second. Give yourself time. Give your mind time. It’s going to be fine.

Joseph: Very good advice. I’d love to wrap up today, Raluca, by talking a little bit about your workshops. Can you explain to people the kinds of productivity workshops you’re now running?

Raluca: I started two kinds of workshops for adults and for teenagers. The workshops for teenagers are less related about productivity and more related about finding their own super powers and actually creating something in their own life with those super powers. It’s mostly a motivational workshop.

The workshops for adults is about building projects that pay off. Those projects that pay off are actually using a lot of my technical and business background that I’ve learned throughout the last 10 years. I take in all these information and all these techniques for productivity and help people build projects that pay off.

Joseph: If people want to learn more about your workshops or the Navigator or the work that you do, where can they go to find out more?

Raluca: They can check the website, and that is thefeathers.ink. In there, they can find more about the Navigator, and also, they can find when the next workshops happen. Also, they can find a bit about me.

Joseph: Thank you so much for your time, Raluca, and thanks for telling us about your career and the importance of connecting with people outside of social media, those points about the emotions of your goals, and also the importance of having an accountability partner. I definitely want to wish you the best of luck with your upcoming workshops. I am going to try out this Navigator. It’s very cool and very interesting. Maybe it’ll help me achieve my goals too.

Raluca: Thank you so much.

What does it take to make a bold career move? How do you know when the right time has come to change careers? Khai Yong Ng explains how he relaunched his career from being a pharmacist to a digital marketer & growth strategist in the tech education sector. We’ll discuss not letting your past degree dictate your future and how you can hustle your way into an entirely new industry. Afterwards, during today’s Mental Fuel®, I’ll explain how to decide when it’s the right time for a career change.

During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I talked about the importance of defining your own unique tipping point when you decide the time has come to make a move in your career. Here’s some further guidance on 4 Signs You Might be in Wrong Job and 5 Signs of Career Dissatisfaction.

Khai Yong Ng is pharmacist-turned Digital Marketer based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. His curiosity towards the internet and the world of entrepreneurship drove him to leave his prestigious pharmacy profession to venture into the world of digital marketing and online entrepreneurship. He has since then held several important roles such as the Head of FB Advertising operations at Mindvalley and Head of Growth at the NEXT Academy, a coding bootcamp in Kuala Lumpur. Follow Khai on Facebook and 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!

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

Teaser (first ~15s): If things didn’t go well in this career jump, I will still have a backup plan. There were a lot of options which I listed down which convinced me that, ‘Okay, you can do this.’ With that, I stormed out of the toilet, I went to my boss, and I said, ‘I’m done.’

Joseph: Khai, welcome to Career Relaunch. I’m really happy to have you on the show today.

Khai: Thanks for having me.

Joseph: I’d love to just kick off here by hearing a little bit about your role there at the NEXT Academy. Could you tell us a little bit more about your work there?

Khai: My role here is basically Head of Growth. It’s just another fancy startup title. It’s basically marketing, sales, business development, everything under the sun that helps NEXT Academy to grow, to meet its goals. A big part of my job involves marketing and also making sure that our intakes are sold out.

Joseph: How many students do you generally have in one of your intakes?

Khai: We actually have two classes. We have a coding boot camp, and we have a digital marketing boot camp. All in all, we have about 60 to 70 students a month.

Joseph: I would really love to go back right now in time because I know that you haven’t always been involved with this line of work. You used to be a pharmacist. Could you just give us a glimpse back into your life back in the pharmacist world?

Khai: That was about six or seven years ago. Back then when I was a college kid, I basically, like many other kids, didn’t know what I wanted to study. We go to our nearest reference point, our parents, and we’ll ask them for advice, ‘Hey, what’s a good thing to learn, to study?’ My dad knew I could kind of study anything. Initially, it was engineering, but further down the line, he suggested I do pharmacy. He was telling me that the career prospects are great. I checked it out, and I thought it was pretty cool. So I went into it.

After studying pharmacy, getting my degree and stuff like that, I started to notice something, which only happened when I started working: that maybe this might not be the best career for me.

Joseph: What were some of those things that you started to notice that clued you into that?

Khai: In Malaysia, if you were to work as a pharmacist, you have to serve the government for a number of years. The way it works is you can’t really choose where you want to work. They will actually post you wherever they like pretty much. I was stationed in this suburban area. It was a nice place, but I’m like a city-folk kind of guy. I was very different.

In my first year working as a professional pharmacist in the hospital, I kind of realized that, ‘You know what? Maybe there are more opportunities back in the city.’ Because it was my first year, I decided to suck it up and just see how it goes. I was really excited to see how I could apply my pharmacy degree, everything I have learned into the workplace. I was in for kind of a big discovery – it’s very different. Whatever you learn in college and what you’re applying at work, they’re very different of course.

Being in the suburban area gave me a lot of free time, especially at night. Thankfully, there’s internet. I spent a lot of time exploring what’s next. What am I supposed to do? Am I destined to be in a place like this, in a hospital pharmacy for years to come? I started to do some exploring, Googling here and there, see what other people are doing.

At that time, my brothers were pretty much in the internet scene. I didn’t quite understand what they were doing back then. I just know that they were making money online. Those were the first words I punched into Google: making money online. It’s sort of opened my eyes to a whole new world of the internet.

Joseph: Did you ever think about sticking with being a pharmacist but just moving back to the city and continuing on in that career?

Khai: In my first year working as a pharmacist, I was very interested in this whole internet thing that’s going on, but I wasn’t very confident that this was something I could do full-time, not at that point of time. It sounded very cool.

I decided to wait a few years because I realized that I have this tendency to jump into things too quickly. I didn’t want to make that mistake, so I told myself that I’ll just let this idea sit in my head for a couple of years. If the passion is still there, chances are it’s something that I really want to explore.

I actually moved back to the city, but my workplace was still pretty far. I had a pretty long commute back and forth every single day. At least being in KL, in Kuala Lumpur, I actually had a lot more opportunities to meet people who were in the internet scene at that time, seeking their advice, talking to them, attending events, learning more stuff. That kind of opened my eyes a little bit more.

Joseph: Can you walk me through what happened next for you? You’re a pharmacist in Kuala Lumpur. You’re thinking about whether or not you want to branch off into something different. What started to run through your head at this point?

Khai: At that time, the startup scene was just in its infant stages, and there was more funding coming in. There were suddenly like mushrooming of companies, like small startups popping up here and there. They sounded really cool, and I was very interested in what they were doing. I just wanted to somehow get into the scene, but of course I had to ground myself in a particular skill.

At that time, there was this company that really caught my attention. The company is called Mindvalley. They are a global company that sells products in personal development, self-help, spirituality. I really like the way the company operates because they sell almost everything online. They are based in Malaysia, but they’re selling to the States.

That was my first stepping stone into the digital world. Because I knew this was a company I wanted to get into, I started making baby steps towards that goal. It was about my third year in pharmacy in which I was really, really fired up and passionate that I think like this could actually be a possibility for me to apply to this company to just get my foot through the door and start a brand new career into digital.

Joseph: Can you explain how you hustled your way into a place like Mindvalley, which seems to have very little to do with your former background as a pharmacist?

Khai: Actually, from my first year to my third year, I was sort of subconsciously planning how I’m going to make my exit because nobody is going to hire me if I had no experience to boot. In the day, I was a pharmacist, and at night, I was trying to gain experience by trying to sell things online.

What really got me started was reading a lot of books. Tim Ferriss’ 4-Hour Workweek was one of my favorite books. I would say he really influenced me a lot. Also Ramit Sethi, I Will Teach You to be Rich, he has a really cool blog about personal finance. Also, he really challenges you to push your boundaries, like asking for raises and stuff like that. These guys were people I look up to whenever I was searching for an inspiration to make a leap.

Back then, there were no formal training institutes where you can go to. Unlike now, you can go to a digital marketing course. Back then, it was like a cowboy town, the Wild Wild West. You had to hustle. You got to learn everything from gurus. You had to spend money on your own investing courses, not knowing whether these courses would give you the result that you want. I went ahead and did it anyways.

The tipping point was when I had made my first dollar online. It didn’t feel great because it felt a little bit scammy the way I did it. I just accepted that these are how the ways things are done, but deep down inside, I knew there was this Mindvalley, and they were doing things properly. They were actually selling things online. It was digital products, but they had physical products as well.

I did a lot of experiments. I sold a couple of digital products as an affiliate marketer at first, and I went to try to create my own products and try to sell things online. I didn’t make a lot of money, but I did a lot of experiments. I had a lot of failures, and it’s these experiments which I used as my ammo or marketing ammo as I call it when I went to apply for Mindvalley. I said, ‘Hey, I failed more than any of your marketers,’ and I gave them a whole list of random stuff that I did that didn’t work. I think that kind of helped as well when it came to the interviews.

Joseph: Before we get to your time there as the Head of Facebook Advertising Operations, can you just take us through the mental shift that you had to make so that you could be comfortable with this change?

Khai: I guess the biggest mental shift that I had to overcome was helping my parents to understand that I’m not crazy, because the degree was not cheap, and to make a jump into this totally new field is something that most Asian parents will not jive with. I had to really show them how prepared I was and how serious I am and those kind of things, not that they are controlling me or anything. It’s just, I don’t want to disappoint them. I don’t think any kid wants to disappoint their parents that you’ve studied so hard, you worked so hard. I just want to show that I’ve don’t my homework before I did any of this just so that they can have a peace of mind.

The second thing is for myself. Am I truly ready to make this career shift? Is it something that is just like a fad, like I make this career shift and things don’t work out? Do I have a backup plan and stuff like that?

Actually, I had a very interesting story of the final decision where I decided, ‘Okay, I’m done. I quit. I’m going to join this.’ I was sitting on a toilet bowl in the hospital. Pharmacists, we carry like a pen and paper, a notepad everywhere we go. I sat down on the toilet bowl, and I started scribbling down just reasons why this is going to work. I had to convince myself that this will work. There were 10 solid reasons of why, if things didn’t go well in this career jump, I will still have a backup plan. After writing down the 10 things, I realized that it’s not so bad.

I was more convinced that, if anything were to happen, I always have a backup plan. For example, technically, I have my pharmacy license. If things don’t work out, I could go back to becoming a pharmacist. Then I could always work for my brother. I could start my own thing. There were a lot of options which I listed down which convinced me that, ‘Okay, Khai Yong, you’re ready. You can do this.’ With that, I stormed out of the toilet. I went to my boss, and I said, ‘I’m done.’

I did go to Mindvalley and sit for the interviews. I did not already have a job, but I decided to quit anyways because I was so convinced that if I don’t do this, I’m never going to do this. I’ve never looked back ever since.

Joseph: How did you decide that this was the right time and that this was sort of a ‘now or never’ moment?

Khai: Like I said, it was something that I was thinking about since my first year as a pharmacist. I told myself I want to wait a couple of years, and if the idea’s still there, if the passion is still there, it seems like something that I must do. It’s not something that happened overnight. It’s something that happened over a span of a few years.

Of course, there’s a lot of convincing you need to do. Like I said, you have to convince yourself. You need to make sure you’re prepared. You need to get the relevant experience before you make a career jump, making sure that things are all right. Then you know it’s time to make that leap.

Joseph: I see. Wow, there’s a serious storm happening over there. One of the thing that you mentioned to me when we were talking before was your degree and how your degree can sometimes be the thing that defines you. Yet in this case, you were able to define yourself in ways that went beyond your degree. Can you explain to us how you went about that and how you thought about your pharmacist degree and that investment and how that then related to what you’re going to do in the future?

Khai: It doesn’t matter, because a degree gives you the relevant experience, yes, but it doesn’t ultimately determine your success in life.

Joseph: You’re at Mindvalley. Tell us a little bit about that shift and what that was like for you to jump into the world of online advertising there.

Khai: When I applied for Mindvalley, I actually applied for the copywriter role. I thought I was good at writing, and I was in for a rude awakening when they thought that my writing was too salesy. Based on my interviews, they saw potential in me. They actually offered me a role in the advertising team, the traffic team it was called. That was like, ‘Yes!’ I just wanted to get my way into this company so I can learn from all these experts.

Actually, I consider myself quite blessed that I join the advertising team because they deal with digital advertising, Facebook ads, Google ads, and massive investments, things that not many people in Malaysia would have access to. I was there, and I learned a lot because I was able to basically spend their money and gain a lot of experience and talk to the people in the team who have experience to show me the way, show me how things are done. That’s where I really grew as a marketer as opposed to trying to do everything on my own in a cowboy style.

Joseph: Was there anything surprising about this shift that you made from the world of pharmacy to this world of advertising?

Khai: Digital advertising is a whole digital shebang. It’s such a new field. It might exist 5, 10 years, but it’s always evolving. It’s constantly evolving. There are new platforms. There are new ad formats. There are so many things to try. To me, that’s very interesting.

In the pharmacy line, things don’t move as fast. You study the stuff in your degree, you apply it to work, and occasionally, there’s a new research papers that come out and suggest this drug works better than that, but it doesn’t as fast as in the digital scene. Being in this current scene that I’m in right now, it’s really exciting because I get to learn new things all the time. Also, I had to stay updated all the time by reading stuff online.

Joseph: What’s been the hardest part of making this shift for you?

Khai: I’m currently in this industry where there’s no one to teach me. I have to teach myself. I need to go out to the internet and try and read up what other people are doing. I need to apply it to my own business to see what results I can find. I’m constantly experimenting and trying new things, basically carving my own expertise in this niche. To be there, that’s really interesting. Back then in the pharmacy, it’s pretty much you go to work, you do your job, you get paid. That’s the biggest difference.

Joseph: You’re at Mindvalley. Can you tell us about your transition from there to where you’re currently at, which is the NEXT Academy?

Khai: After a number of years at Mindvalley, I realized I think I’m getting into my comfort zone again. I need new challenges. It was at that time I was approached by the founders. We had a chat. I got to see what they’re doing and everything.

Joseph: How did they find you out of curiosity?

Khai: LinkedIn actually. They’ve been browsing through LinkedIn. We met up, we had a chat. Also, I was curious to know more about the startup scene because Mindvalley is actually quite a big company. The startup scene in Malaysia, they are quite fragmented, and everyone’s doing their own thing. Some of them are quite underground as well. It was really interesting to me, and I wanted to explore more in this area and also pick up some new skills. Like I said, when you get too comfortable, you know it’s time to go out and get new skills kind of thing.

At that point in time, ‘Okay, it’s time for a shift.’ We met up again sometime in the next year, and I decided that I’m up for a new challenge.

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

Khai: Jobs are changing faster than careers. You really got to constantly evolve and learn new skills if you want to stay relevant in today’s job industry, especially with the speed of change, of how technology is advancing. You can’t just sit there and think you have a safe job. Robots are going to automate your job in the next five years. All the signs are there. You have to keep evolving, keep moving. I’m not surprised if I’m going to be changing my career again five years down the line. Maybe something in technology, in coding, or something like that.

Joseph: During that evolution and process, are there any particular tools or resources that you use to stay on track with your own career growth?

Khai: I have a couple of blogs that I follow. One of them is Jon Loomer. He’s like an expert in Facebook advertising, JonLoomer.com. He’s always up-to-date, and he also gets first dips at the new Facebook advertising features and stuff like that.

Another thing I’m pretty much looking into right now is how, as a marketer, you can use technology to automate a lot of the work that you do. Like right now, there’s a big shift towards chat bots. A lot of people are using chat bots in their business. Notice for yourself, Joseph, I know you’ve been sending a lot of automated emails to streamline the work of scheduling and interviewing people. That’s really awesome I must say.

It’s things like these. It’s no longer about specific tactics or strategies, but it’s a shift towards technology now and how you’re going to use it to compete, to stay relevant in this era.

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

Khai: There’s no one clear path to where I want to be. For example, in the line that I’m in, I don’t think there’s like an end goal. I have to stay on top of the trends. I have to keep learning, trying new things, talking to people. It’s crazy, but it’s exciting. I can tell you, this has been quite a journey.

Joseph: I would love to hear a little bit more, just to wrap up today, about your role there as the Head of Growth at the NEXT Academy and just a little bit more about the Academy itself.

Khai: In my role now in NEXT Academy, I’m Head of Growth as mentioned. I handle all sorts of things from marketing to sales. Sometimes, I even get on to the ground level, talk to prospects, explain to them why they should be picking up digital skills with us. We are a coding school based out of Southeast Asia. We’re located in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, a great country to come and travel to.

Our mandate here is basically we want to empower a million individuals with tech skills so that they can stay relevant and also to build great companies within the ecosystem here. We also have courses in digital marketing. We have a lot of international students who come down just to chill in Southeast Asia, pickup some new skills. We’re very open to anyone who wants to come and learn from us.

Joseph: One of the things that we had spoken about before we started our recording was the rationale for doing a coding course in Malaysia versus somewhere in North America or the western hemisphere. What do you think draws people to attend your coding academy there in Malaysia?

Khai: I guess the number one thing is we are cheaper because of the currency exchange. That’s for one. The cost of living here is also very low. There’s a lot of great food. You can experience a very diverse culture here, being in Asia. You can pretty much fly to neighboring countries like Thailand and Indonesia. It’s just a 30-minute flight away from Kuala Lumpur. If you’re thinking of taking a gap year, pick up some new skills, travel the world, I think this is a great opportunity to come down.

Joseph: Absolutely. I’ve been to Kuala Lumpur myself, and that region of the world is absolutely beautiful. I can definitely vouch for the food there too, which is absolutely incredible. If for nothing else, go there and check out the food while you’re learning a little bit of coding. It’ll definitely make it worth it.

Khai, where can people go if they want to learn more about the NEXT Academy?

Khai: You can visit our website at www.NEXTAcademy.com.

Joseph: Thank you so much for your time, Khai. It’s been great to hear about your career and your thoughts on that exercise of getting clear on why your next career move can work, which I thought was really interesting, the importance of having a backup plan, and also the importance of just continuing to learn and evolve and invest in your own career. Thanks so much for your time today.

Khai: Thanks for having me, Joseph.

Have you ever felt overwhelmed trying to balance everything in your work and life? In this episode of Career Relaunch, Lisa Abramson shares her story of how she relaunched her career in mobile advertising and PR to become a maternal mental health advocate and mindfulness coach. We’ll discuss the impact of motherhood and post partum depression on your professional outlook and the importance of self-awareness in your career. In the Mental Fuel® segment, I’ll share my own challenges staying present in the moment, and a couple ways I stay focused in my own career.

During this episode’s Mental Fuel® segment, I talked about my own struggles to stay present and undistracted in my own career. I challenged you to tinker with one new way of forcing yourself to be a bit more present when you’re working on an important task or project. If you uncover a method that works well for you, be sure to leave a comment below with your tactic!

Lisa Abramson is an entrepreneur, TEDx speaker, maternal mental health advocate and bestselling author of The Wise Mama Guide to Maternity Leave. She founded Wise Mama, the only pregnancy and motherhood site that takes into account that when you become a mom, you don’t stop being YOU. She also co-founded Mindfulness Based Achievement, the New MBA, which teaches high potential women leaders how to create sustainable success. Lisa’s MBA 30 Day Meditation Challenge is for anyone interested in starting a meditation practice, but short on time (like corp leaders & new moms!). It just takes 5 mins a day.

Lisa was recently honored as one of the 100 Most Influential Leaders Empowering Women Worldwide by EBW and lives in Menlo Park, California with her family.

Follow Lisa 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!

Thanks to the Forest App for sponsoring this episode of Career Relaunch. Forest is the mobile app that helps you stay focused and present while also helping to plant real trees on the earth. Visit JosephLiu.co/Forest to download the app on iOS or Android today.

Teaser (first ~15s): When you’re an overachiever, when you’re used to working hard, those things don’t just get shelved immediately because you become a mom. I know a lot of new moms, especially working moms struggle with this.

Joseph: Okay, Lisa. Thank you so much for joining me here on Career Relaunch.

Lisa: Thanks for having me.

Joseph: We are going to try to cover a wide range of issues today as they relate to your career, including mindfulness, maternity leave, postpartum depression, and some of the needs of working moms, which I know you’re an expert at a lot of these things. Can we just start by having you explain what you were focused on in your career and life before 2014?

Lisa: I was running marketing at a technology company, and this technology company was focused on mobile advertising. I was a marketing executive, and doing the traditional over-achiever, climbing the corporate ladder thing, kept getting promotions and raises, and ended up, before I was even 30, sitting in on board meetings and being an executive at this company.

On paper, everything looked great. I was named a ‘Woman to Watch’ by a leading trade publication, and as soon as I got that award, I said, ‘Watch me leave this industry.’ That was the first reaction. I wasn’t actually excited or proud. I was like, ‘Watch me leave and do something else,’ because in my heart, I knew that especially in the world of mobile advertising, putting ads on people’s phones or selling things to people that don’t need more stuff, I was never going to find deeper purpose and meaning in that. So my crisis came early.

Joseph: Winning that award, was that somehow a trigger for you to want to make a move out of the corporate world?

Lisa: It some ways, it made me realize how misaligned I was, because everyone was congratulating me on it, and it felt like it should have been a really cool accomplishment, but it felt meaningless. For me, it was eye-opening to say something that looks so good on paper and it seems impressive, inside, it’s like, ‘Who cares?’

Joseph: When did you start to realize that it was time to leave the corporate world and make a move to do something else?

Lisa: I had this stroke of enlightenment in my car, driving up and down the freeway here in California in the 280. I was in my car for about three hours every day because the traffic was really bad and commuting from San Francisco down to Mountain View. It was in those car rides where it just struck me that life is too short, and really, it’s time to make a change.

For me, that change didn’t happen quickly. I actually went in and got all the courage I could muster up to go quit to my boss who is the CEO, but the timing wasn’t right. The startup needed me, and we were raising around a funding, and he said, ‘Please don’t leave right now. This is really a bad time.’ I ended up staying a whole year after initially quitting.

Joseph: What were your plans at that time? Were you thinking you were just going to continue to stay on indefinitely? What were you planning on doing next?

Lisa: I knew I wanted to do something drastically different, but I didn’t have any idea. I sort of impulsively quit and thought I’ll figure it out after I quit.

Actually, that year gave me a lot of time to work on some small projects. I ended up managing a digital detox retreat where we went up into kind of a cabin in the woods. We actually took people’s devices and had a weekend of connection with absolutely no technology. It gave me a lot of time to work frameworks and talk to people and start to noodle on ideas while I was still at the company. I felt like it was kind of a relief to know my boss knew that I was planning on leaving, but I wasn’t going to start anything competitive.

Joseph: The reason why I mentioned 2014 before was I know that, in early 2014, you had a life change.

Lisa: Yes.

Joseph: Can you just take us through what happened then?

Lisa: My husband and I decided we also wanted to start a family and that why not start working on trying to start a family while I was starting my company because you never know how long it’s going to take or what that road will look like. I ended up getting pregnant about a week after I quit my job and had to start a business, so that was a lot at once.

At the time, I really didn’t know any different, and it was motivating for me to know that, come January 1st, I better have something that I’ve created and I’m working on, because otherwise, I might have committed career suicide inadvertently.

Joseph: Before you went on what I’m going to call maternity leave here—I know that, at this point, you’re working on your own business—before the birth of your daughter, what did you envision your career plans to look like post-maternity leave?

Lisa: I think I was a bit naïve. I thought everything would keep ramping up. I take a short leave, maybe a month or so, be off of email for a short amount of time, and then just jump right in guns a-blazing, because that is the hardest, and once you find work that you love and that motivates you, I was already a hard worker, and then I think I turned that dial up to 200% when it was something I was really passionate about and I love.

I think if you have a tendency to burn out in the corporate world even in a situation where maybe you aren’t entirely fulfilled, once you find that thing that fulfills you, you can also burn out doing work you love. For me, it was I had a really hard time stepping away. I didn’t want to stop. I had a lot of momentum I had built up in my business. It was exciting, and I felt like it was helping people and making a difference. So it was hard to step away.

Joseph: Can you take me take me back to the moment when you had the shift from focusing on your career and this thing that you loved to focusing on being a mother and a parent?

»

How can you find the right recruiter when you’re job hunting? What are some of the biggest mistakes candidates make when working with recruiters? What really makes the difference when it comes to getting invited for an interview? Ben de Grouchy taps into his 10+ years of recruitment experience to explain how to work effectively with recruiters and headhunters during your career transition. In the Mental Fuel® segment, I’ll address a listener question about what tweaks you could make in your career to improve your career satisfaction.

How do find the right recruiter to work with?

What’s the best way to establish contact? 

How much follow up is effective? 

Where do recruiters go to find candidates?

On LinkedIn how much info should you include?

Do you HAVE to be on LinkedIn?

What makes a recruiter more likely to present a candidate to a client? 

How can unemployed people work well with recruiters? 

What’s a common mistake candidates make when working with recruiters?

What’s something candidates should understand about working with recruiters? 

How effective is it to have a more stylised custom CV/resume?

What’s the biggest misconception candidates have about the recruitment industry?

What surprises you about the types of candidates hiring managers end up choosing?

Any final advice for candidates who want to build stronger relationships with recruiters? 

During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I talked about 3 tweaks you could make to improve your job situation: 1) changing projects, 2) changing companies, and 3) changing teams. What’s one tweak you will plan to make with your work or recruitment situation that could help you feel better about your professional situation? Leave a comment below with your plans!

Ben de Grouchy is the founder of ecruit and director of DG Partnership. With over 10 years of recruitment experience in the UK, Ben currently focuses on online sales recruitment and executive marketing recruitment in the consumer goods sector. His sales & marketing headhunting agency J-DEG, which he cofounded, was successfully merged into the DG Partnership in March 2017 after growing the business from 0 – £1mn+ turnover and employing a staff of 10 people. The DG Partnership works exclusively in the consumer goods sector, from middle to senior management levels and is proud to be a trusted advisor to clients including Pepsico, Unilever and Nestle. ecruit is an online recruitment advertising network that allows companies to hire sales people directly, for up to a 90% discount vs. using a recruitment agency. Check out the ecruit blog where you can find really useful articles about the hiring process, and follow Ben on Twitter and 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!

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

Teaser (first ~15s): It’s amazing how many times I have seen people with the right attitude. Those kind of candidates will be more successful. They end up getting the job over somebody that’s better qualified than them. I always look for somebody that shows a real interest in the role.

Joseph: Hello, Ben. Thanks so much for joining me here on Career Relaunch.

Ben: Hi, Joseph. Hi. Thanks for inviting me.

Joseph: Definitely. It’s good to talk to you again. I know we got a lot to cover today. This episode’s going to be a little bit different from what I normally do on the podcast because it’s going to be a little bit more informational. I’d love to start off by just having you tell us a little bit more about your background in recruitment, and I’d also be interested in hearing about what you’re currently focused on as the Founder of ecruit and the Director of the DG Partnership.

Ben: I’ve been working in recruitment now for 10 years. I started off in an agency where I worked for a couple of years just to find my feet before setting up my own business. I was very young. I was 26, 27 years old, and I set up a recruitment agency at the beginning of the financial crisis, which was very interesting. That was focused on sales and marketing recruitment.

I just felt that—working for a big, generous recruitment agency, when my clients were telling me they like speaking to me because I was a specialist, I just work in the very niche area—that there was a gap in the market. So we launched our business in 2007 and grew it for about 10 years. We recently rebranded to DG Partnership, and it’s been an amazing ride.

We’ve always been specialists in our area, boutique agency, but we’ve managed to pick up some great clients like Pepsi and Unilever and Nestle, who just like our straightforward approach that perhaps they didn’t feel they were getting with some of their other agencies. That was the kind of classic recruitment side of my career.

You mentioned ecruit, which is a new project we’ve been working on, which is there to help mainly SMEs actually – small business owners who are looking to build their teams and perhaps don’t have the finance or budget to go and use a recruitment agency. We’ve just got a neat bit of kick that will help them recruit for about 95% less than perhaps coming to somewhere like DG Partnership.

They’re slightly different propositions designed to cover the whole market for our clients.

Joseph: I definitely want to come back and talk about ecruit because I think that’s an interesting part of your career. At the same time, I want to make sure that we make the most use of your time as an expert in the recruitment industry. Our main focus on this podcast, as you know, Ben, is career change. Whenever I speak with clients or audiences about job search strategies, this topic of recruiters always come up.

I notice a lot of people out there aren’t really sure where to start when it comes to working well with recruiters as a job candidate, which is a shame because recruiters can play a big role in your career, especially as you become more senior. If you know how to work well with them, it can really open up a lot of doors, which is definitely the experience I’ve had with you.

Let’s dive into this and start off by talking about finding recruiters. How can people go about finding a recruiter to work with?

Ben: It depends really on what you do. You need to be really clear on what you’re kind of looking for. Are you a freelancer? Are you looking for a permanent role? What sector do you work in? I think one of the most important things is that you find someone who’s actually a specialist.

Talking to a specialist, you’ll be speaking to somebody with an established network of clients in the particular area that you work with him. The best way to go out and find a specialist is going to be very easy for you to spend a bit of time researching Google, having a look on LinkedIn and some of the kind of key groups in your area and finding out the key recruiters that basically specialize in your particular area.

The other thing to bear in mind is you might not have heard of these companies before. A lot of these specialist agencies are small one to five-man businesses. That’s absolutely fine. A lot of these guys are very good at what they do, very experienced with a great network. Just because you haven’t heard of them or they’re not recognized or a trusted brand, there’s no harm in reaching out to them.

I think the second thing is working with a recruiter that you trust. You must be able to trust this recruiter with really sensitive information, private information that you’ll be sharing with them, information about your salary, your aspirations, and you need to be able to click with the person because they’re going to be walking you through a process that can be really difficult, that can be stressful. Therefore, having someone that’s really got your rear is almost as important as having someone who’s an expert in your area.

Joseph: What do you think is the most effective way for candidates to establish contact with you? I know you mentioned this trust issue. Also, there seems to be this debate out there about, in this day and age, is email enough? Is a phone call enough? Do you prefer that someone meet with you in person? What’s your perspective on that?

Ben: There are three classic ways that people might contact me. One is through a phone call. Two through an email or applications like a job advert, which will come through on an email. Lastly, it’s face-to-face. Everyone has their own personal preference.

I think what would be helpful for some candidates to realize, maybe let’s say in the more genius side of the market is that recruitment consultants are on the phone quite a lot. Therefore, if you’re trying to contact somebody on the phone, they can be frustrating. They might be away from their desk, doing an interview, and there’s no harm in sending an email.

I always, always, look at starting off a relationship just with an email – something soft, a nice introduction that would include your CV, a little bit about you. Not a huge covering letter, recruiters generally aren’t interested in that. We want to find out exactly what you want to do so we can make a decision on are you the right kind of person for our client base. I would advise almost everybody to make sure that you’ve introduced yourself on emails as well.

If you’ve got a slightly different background—for example, I work with a lot of people from retail buying who want to move across the other side in sales, which a move that you can make. It’s not obvious, but actually you can if you’re the right kind of character—then I think it’s really important to get on the phone or to try and get some face time with your recruiter. Especially if you are at the more kind of senior end as well, then it’s so important to get that face time because you’re going to be judged on your technical ability to do the role.

What’s more important is, are you going to fit into the team? Are you the right culture match? Are you going to be able to enjoy working with a company that might have a very specific kind of personality about it? I suppose a rule of thumb is email is great to start off with, and if you can—and especially if it’s slightly more tricky, it’s not a really obvious match—then a phone call or a face-to-face meeting can really help a recruiter to understand your skillset and how your skillset can fit into their client’s requirements.

Joseph: My understanding is also one of the things you’re doing as a recruiter, Ben, is that you’re also trying to understand how well they’re going to interview in front of their client. Does that mean that there’s another benefit meeting you in person?

Ben: Absolutely. The other thing is I’ll quite often do interview preparation with candidates that I meet. In DG Partnership, we’re a headhunting agency, and we deal with people that haven’t gone out and interviewed very often. They might’ve been in their current job for five years. If we get a real sense of who they are and really believe in them, then we’ll absolutely want to help them with classic interview questions, with the way that they present themselves, with the way that they deliver their answers.

I’ll quite often, in a meeting with a candidate, if I think that they’re a really good fit, I will always suggest, ‘Let’s go through some interview prep. Tell me about your best career achievements or when have you had to deal with a difficult team member.’ Check out how they answer the questions, and then try and give them some advice on how perhaps they can improve their delivery.

Joseph: Another question that I hear a lot from people, Ben, is how much follow-up do you want from candidates, especially when they’ve first reached out to you? Do you want them to be following up with you every day, every week, every month? What is a good cadence for candidates to have with you? I know that obviously that’s going to depend on how they do it, but assuming that they do it in a reasonably professional way.

Ben: It’s a really contentious issue, and this is I think where the recruiting industry, as a whole perhaps, is an easy way to attack the recruitment industry, because as a candidate, you really want the follow-up, you want the feedback, and that’s really important. A recruiter should always be able to give people feedback in a timely manner, but the truth is, often, we don’t get the answers. We will submit an application to a client, and we will be following up, ‘Please, can we have some feedback?’ or, ‘How is their interview?’ and we don’t get it.

The key issue here is, for the recruiter and the candidate, to kind of manage each other’s expectations here. Our candidate may say, ‘Look, I’d love to follow up on my application on Friday. Is that okay?’ Therefore, the recruiter knows they need to get back to that person by Friday with an update.

I don’t think it’s helpful—and I have it quite often—sometimes, people call me two, three times a week. It isn’t helpful. It wastes everyone’s time, and I always try and explain to people I’m working with, the minute I hear back on your application or interview feedback, that’s like a high-priority thing for me to get that over to you. There is no point chasing me two, three times a week because I will let you know.

The other thing that’s really important for candidates to do though is to keep an eye on your recruiter’s websites, because very often, we will get a role on, and the first thing we will do is put it up on the website. If we’re very busy, we might not get a time to call all our candidates or we might not necessarily think of you straightaway.

Therefore, if you see something come up that fits your background, drop your recruiter an email, give them a quick call, and just say, ‘I saw that role. It looks good for me.’ There’s no problem in doing that. In fact, I really recommend doing that, and it will help you get slightly ahead of the curve when they come down to thinking about, ‘Right, who am I going to call about this role?’

Joseph: I’d love to shift gears a little bit here, Ben, and also get your perspectives on candidates, because I think now might be a good time to remind people that recruiters are actually working for and paid by their clients, not candidates. What should candidates keep in mind when it comes to recruiters also being on the end of looking for good candidates for roles?

Ben: The first place I’ll look is my network, and that’s the people that I have spoken with and met with, and that is your most powerful tool as a recruiter. Therefore, the people that have managed to build up a relationship with me and obviously people that I trust, I would generally call first. That’s like a number one kind of area.

Getting referrals, this is very much kind of a two-way thing. If I speak to somebody, and they’re not quite right, people are really willing to help, ‘Oh, have you tried, John, who works over at Johnson & Johnson? I hear he’s looking.’ From a candidate perspective, if you can also reach out to your trusted peers, if you’re looking around, there is no harm in looking at your network as well. Let people know that you’re open and looking. As long as you trust them, then I think that that’s quite a good thing. That’s probably a first step.

I’m quite lucky, we advertise in all of the top 10 UK job boards. We get masses of exposure there. Normally, I will manage to find somebody, find extra people for my shortlist for my client in my advertising network as well.

Lastly, it goes without saying, LinkedIn is such a powerful tool nowadays. I think it’s really important that people that are job searching, keep your profile up-to-speed. If you’re looking, make sure you tick the box there that tells recruiters that you’re looking. It makes you much easier to find. Make sure that you got the most recent job title on there. That’s such a powerful tool for people to utilize now.

Joseph: Sounds good. That feature you’re mentioning about LinkedIn, we’ll capture that in the show notes about how you can allow recruiters to know that you’re actively looking.

I got a question about LinkedIn for you, Ben, since we’re talking about LinkedIn. What are your views on what candidates should capture on their LinkedIn profile? I guess I’m specifically wondering about this question that comes up a lot about whether you should simply replicate what’s on your CV or your resume and literally cut and paste that onto your LinkedIn profile, assuming that you’re not sharing confidential information, or are you looking for more of a summary, or does it matter?

Ben: I personally don’t think it actually matters. It’s down to you as an individual. I think that having a really comprehensive LinkedIn profile is great from a recruiter’s perspective. It helps me kind of understand what people do. I can do more research on somebody before I contact them. It means that I’m given information. That will mean people that I choose to contact will be more relevant for what I’m doing.

Perhaps, by having a little bit more information on there than just something very high-level means you might get contacted about more relevant job opportunities if that’s what you’re looking to do.

I do also see people that do keep it very topline. On LinkedIn, you have a profile completion measuring tool that will advise you your profile is at 80% complete for example. You’re more searchable, your content is more findable if you spend a little bit more time making sure what you’ve got online is up-to-date and relevant.

I’m a fan of having a more detailed profile, but if you’re listening to this, and you’re thinking, ‘Oh, I don’t have time to do that,’ having a bare structure up on LinkedIn is better than having nothing at all. Maybe start with something simple, and then you can build on it from there.

Joseph: Can I just pick up on that, Ben? Because I was running this personal branding workshop last week for some senior execs, and quite a few of them surprisingly were not on LinkedIn. I got the question quite a few times about what happens if you’re not on LinkedIn. I guess their rationale was, ‘I don’t have time to create a really comprehensive profile that I’m proud of, so I’d rather just not be up there.’ Is there an issue if you are trying to find somebody online and they’re not on LinkedIn? What’s your perception as a recruiter of that person if you don’t find them on LinkedIn?

Ben: When I speak to people now on the phone—I think a lot of recruiters do this—I’ll always go and see if there is a profile for them online. I will go and try and do my own research if I can find them. Especially for senior executives, you can normally find their profile on the company website. I really like to do that. I’ll always give someone the benefit of the doubt, but if I can’t find them on LinkedIn, it does make me just question, will I? I can’t do as much research as I normally like to do.

Now, okay, we’ve got safeguards against that such as your referencing and face-to-face meetings so that we can qualify that person, but it makes it much easier for us if you can find somebody on LinkedIn and we can see recommendations of team members that have worked with them, of peers that they have perhaps worked with or even their bosses.

Looking at someone’s recommendations on LinkedIn can also be a really powerful message for me as a recruiter or for a hiring manager who wants to find out, ‘What does this person’s peers feel about that person? Has their old boss written them a recommendation? Has their old team referenced work that they’ve done with them or given an idea about what it’s like to work for this person?’ If they have, it only adds weight to that person’s application.

We do make our own reference checks. We do follow up with face-to-face meeting, so it’s not the be all and end all if you don’t have a LinkedIn in profile, but I think you’re missing out on a trick. If you are an executive and you want to not necessarily market yourself but improve your online profile, I think LinkedIn is the first place you would go to, to be able to get your profile into the open market and improve your credibility online.

Joseph: Let’s say that you’ve got candidates, and they’ve all got roughly the same skills. What makes you more likely to present a candidate to a client?

Ben: When candidates ask the right questions. When I brief someone a particular position, I can often tell how keen they are by the types of questions that they are asking. I can almost tell who’s going to get the role by the questions that they ask on our first telephone conversation.

People that say, ‘Yep, that sounds great. Send my CV forward,’ these are the people that you get them an interview two weeks later, and you need to go through the whole brief again and maybe send them the job description again, because they haven’t really thought about it. A lot of active candidates might have several job applications in, and they got to the point where, ‘Let’s just put in a few applications and see what happens.’

I prefer not to work with people that aren’t taking each application really credibly. Therefore, at that first briefing when I’m talking to you about the role, if you’re asking me, ‘Exactly where is that location? Do they have any flexibility on home working? What is the whole salary bracket I might be working into? Who does this role report into? How many direct reports do they have?’ People that are asking me these important questions about the role at that early stage, the ones that are really thinking about it, they’re qualifying themselves for it, and these people are the ones that I’ll get a good feeling from early on, and I’ll always remember.

It’s amazing how many times I have seen people with the right attitude. Those kind of candidates will be more successful. They end up getting the job over somebody that’s better qualified than them. Nine times out of 10, that attitude piece can give you the edge. I always look for somebody that shows a real interest in the role, not somebody that just is well-qualified and can do the job and says, ‘Yeah, I’ll have a chat with them.’

Joseph: Before we move on to talking about some misconceptions of working with recruiters, I did have one more question about just getting your perspectives on candidates. We’ve all heard this saying that finding a job is easier when you already have a job. I know a lot of the podcast listeners here are thinking about switching jobs or maybe they’re between jobs. Do you have any advice for people who are not currently employed when it comes to working effectively with recruiters?

Ben: It’s what you make of it. I’ve heard that saying, but I’ve also heard the saying, ‘Looking for a job is a full-time job in itself.’ It’s full on. There’s lots of people to speak to. You need to keep up-to-speed in all your applications, making sure you’re applying to the right roles. If you’re not currently employed, you’re at a huge advantage where you can put loads of preparation into every interview.

I have heard that finding a job when you don’t have a job can be tricky, and I think there’s two main things that you could consider in response to that. The first thing and the most important thing is to be able to justify why you’re not in employment at this time. It could be for a whole host of reasons. Maybe you’ve been made redundant. Maybe you quit your job or you changed location. Whatever it might be, you need to put together an honest and credible story as to why you’re not employed at that moment.

There are some stigmas sometimes attached to why you might not be employed, but if it is for example a redundancy, just tell the truth, explain the background, and there shouldn’t be a problem. I think it’s really important to be honest, but to be prepared to package up your answer to this question in the right way in an honest and direct manner.

Joseph: Yeah, I think that’s really helpful. I think sometimes we can be our own worst enemies, and we can sometimes self-sabotage and start trying to over-explain something that isn’t necessarily an issue for someone else. That’s very helpful.

I just want to shift gears now, Ben, and talk a little bit about just demystifying a couple of myths about working with recruiters and just have a couple of questions about this, and then we can wrap up with a few finishing questions here. I’m just wondering, when it comes to working well with recruiters, what’s a common mistake that you see candidates making when they’re interacting with recruiters like you?

Ben: I, on a weekly basis, will come up against people perhaps not telling me the whole truth with regards to salary or their package. That’s probably the most common one. People believe if they inflate their salary or their package details, then they can get themselves a better package down the line, and it’s just the wrong thing to do.

It’s very obvious to a recruiter because we will cover this off with a candidate maybe three or four times over the course of their interview. If a salary has been inflated, 9 times out of 10, it comes out at the end. So I think that is really important: just be honest, and say if you’re earning $50,000, but your expectation is at $60,000, tell the recruiter that. Don’t say, ‘I’m on $55,000, but the expectation is I want to get up to $60,000,’ because it sounds like a more reasonable gap. That’s the first thing.

Actually, to back that up, Joseph, it was last year. We got a job offer for somebody who was very senior in almost a director level position. This particular candidate had changed the job title on their CV to reflect what they did rather than put their official job title on because they were having problems with people understanding what they did. It was quite an unusual role. It got picked up in the referencing stage, and unfortunately, the client withdrew the offer because it was a misrepresentation of what they did.

I think that is so important. The number one thing is be honest with your recruiter and with your end client about what you do. Make sure the date is right on your CV, these small things.

Joseph: What about something that you just wish more candidates understood about how to work well with recruiters?

Ben: There has to be some empathy here from the candidates in terms of who pays us. I think recruiters can get a really hard time in terms of it might be they didn’t get back to the person when they said they would. Whatever it might be, at the end of the day, we’re employed by our clients to find the right fit. We’re not employed by the candidates to get them a job. Therefore, I think it would be really good if some candidates—

Often, we get really pushed to, let’s say, send their CV off to certain client when we know it’s not really right for either party. I think that it would be really good if just some candidates could appreciate that we have to act first and foremost in the client’s interest and protect them. They’re the one that pays the bills.

Joseph: I just want to finish up here, Ben, with a few questions on just setting the record straight with some common questions that I hear from people all the time. We can kind of almost treat these like rapid fire questions.

I don’t know if you get this question very much, Ben, but I’m getting this question more and more. We’re recording this in 2017, and I get a lot of people asking me how effective it is to create these more custom-designed CVs that shift away from the traditional one or two-page CV, depending on where you are geographically, the sort of plain-text, reverse-chronological formatted CV to the more stylized, designed. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Ben: Absolutely. I mean I’ve seen some amazing CVs. There was one that went around fairly recently. It was fantastic. A designer had created a Super Mario version of his CV where Mario run along, and then he was jumping over the hoops and collecting the coins, and it was showing all the different skills that this child had. I think that if I was a recruiter for a programming business or a games business, this guy would walk into a job. It was incredible.

You got to read the situation right. If he sent that CV to me for one of my sales and marketing roles, I’m probably not going to call you. You got to bear in mind who your audience is. Your CV is going to be reviewed by three people essentially: a recruiter, an HR manager, and a hiring manager. You got to make sure that your CV is appropriate for the audience that is intended to see it.

My personal recommendation, what I like to see is something that’s quite classic, two-page resume that can give me an understanding of what you do in a short period of time. Then I can make a call as to whether or not we want to have that interview with you or not. There’s definitely a place for some of these more interesting CVs as well. My feeling is it depends on what industry you’re in.

Joseph: What about some of the biggest misconceptions you think candidates have about the recruitment industry?

Ben: One of the ones that we see quite often are people kind of complaining on LinkedIn that we’re just out to make a buck and make a fee. Any recruiter that’s worth his salt or her salt, it’s absolutely not the case. We’re out here to protect our clients, and we are looking for longevity in these client relationships. The best way of creating that longevity is to find them the best people for that job. Actually, a good recruiter will forfeit a number of fees. If they don’t believe that person’s right for that job, they won’t engineer a situation that will get that person the job. I think that that’s really important.

We’re a sales industry, but I think the people that are in it for the long term, it’s not about the fees. It’s about the client satisfaction and relationships. If you get that right, a byproduct is, yes, you should be able to create revenue for your business.

Joseph: I think it goes back to just creating a strong relationship and seeing the recruiter as someone who’s a partner and not somebody who has any interest in forcing you into a role that’s not right for you because it ends up not really serving anybody – not the recruiter, not your client, and also not the candidate. That’s good advice.

What about what surprises you about the type of candidates your clients ultimately end up choosing?

Ben: Sometimes they do take me by surprise. If a candidate is well-qualified but doesn’t show that real passion for the role, and they’re put up against the candidate that’s slightly less qualified but really wants it, the candidate with the passion will always get it.

Companies are really open to investing in the right people. It’s all about getting that right personal fit, and you can train the rest of it. That’s something that surprised me at first. I was thinking, ‘Wow, you’ve got this guy who’s super qualified for your role. We haven’t hired him. You’ve hired this other person who is just sure and willing, done more preparation.’

The other one that we had really recently that I found quite surprising was a candidate that I was working with for a very senior role, a marketing director for a really big FMCG company, who essentially turned down the offer that we got given for her with our client. The reason was that she couldn’t get the mortgage to work on the back of the financials, and she was good enough to say, ‘Look, you’ve been really good to me. I really want to join your business, but I cannot accept your offer because X, Y, and Z reason.’

We had backup plans for this particular client, but it’s her readiness to share this really deep and some other personal circumstances as well. Instead of going back to market, which would have been a more cost-effective thing for the client to do, they bent over backwards. They escalated it several levels to actually get the correct financials in place for this person to get the role.

I was surprised at the length the client went to secure this person, and I think it was through the transparency and the levels of integrity that she had shown in approaching this really sensitive kind of issue. Therefore, the client was willing to go the extra mile. It shocked me to be honest. I was really surprised.

Joseph: Very interesting stuff, Ben. I just wanted to close by asking you if you have any final advice you would like to offer to candidates who want to build strong recruiter relationships, and then we’ll wrap up by talking a little bit more about your work at ecruit.

Ben: If I look back at the people that have built the strongest relationships with me, it’s definitely a quid pro quo type of relationship. I’ll give you an example, Joseph. I remember when you called me back in—when was it—2008, 2009, and you’d arrive in the UK.

Joseph: I just moved to the UK, yeah.

Ben: Yeah, and I think it could be that you’d seen an advert that for a role we’d been recruiting for, and it was great. You called me. You positioned yourself in the right way, which is someone that perhaps didn’t have the UK market knowledge but someone that was really eager and have the great skillset to offer the client. We arranged a coffee, and I think the rest is history. We found you a really good role, and then you came back to me, and you asked me to help recruit for your team.

I think that the most important thing is when you find your recruiter that works for you, definitely stick with them. It’s a relationships that can last over the course of a lifetime. The best thing a recruiter can ever get, if you can give them the recommendation on something on LinkedIn, or you can even reach out to them with a piece of business if they’ve done well, and you’re now a hiring manager, something like that can really make a candidate stand out from the thousands of other people that we have to deal with day in, day out.

I think you’ll find most recruiters will work really hard to get good relationships and give far more back than the perhaps more transactions that you would expect between a candidate and a recruiter.

Joseph: Very helpful. That’s really useful to hear. I definitely do remember that first meeting we have when I just landed here in London. You’re actually one of the first people I met when I landed in this country, so I remember that very well.

Very helpful, Ben. I want to just wrap up by talking about your current business, which is called ecruit, which I know you just launched. Can you wrap us up by telling us a little bit more about ecruit, and then we’ll be done?

Ben: Absolutely. I’ve run my own recruitment company for 10 years, and recruitment is a great industry. There’s been huge amounts of pressure from clients over things like fees, and there’s been huge amounts of technological advances that have allowed clients to adopt direct-hire strategies and cut the recruiter out. That’s fine. That is just part of the market.

We also think there’ll always be a place for good headhunters. The gap in the market that we saw was for actually all of our clients, these kind of big, global, corporate businesses that were looking to hire tons of people and they’re putting pressure on the margins. There was a huge gap in the market for this kind of SME businesses that are trying to hire sales people who’ll grow their marketing or sales teams but don’t have the budgets that maybe a big kind of corporate did.

The new business that we launched a couple of months ago allows these SMEs to recruit really good caliber sales people for about 90% of the price of using an additional recruitment agency.

Joseph: Oh, wow.

Ben: It’s really exciting. Actually, the concept sounds really good, but it was absolutely quite easy to put together because we just combined some technological advances, for example like LinkedIn and advertising networks with social media, and it’s allowed us to create almost like a community of likeminded people, sales people, marketing people that we can reach out to really easily on behalf of hiring managers and connect these hiring managers to people that can do their jobs. That’s what I’ve been up to over the last—I suppose it’s taken a year to put together, but it’s been really exciting.

Joseph: If people want to learn more about ecruit, especially people who may want to actually tap into the service, where can they go to learn more about ecruit and learn more about you?

Ben: We’d love people to join our LinkedIn group. Just look up ecruit, or you can go to our website, www.ecruit.co.uk. We’ve got all sorts of lovely little articles there, free articles that can explain to particularly hiring managers how they can interview more effectively, how they can add to their teams, how they can recruit directly without necessarily spending a lot of money. There’s a wealth of knowledge to you even if you’re not a hiring manager and you think you might be one day.

Joseph: Fantastic, Ben. You are definitely one of those recruiters who’s had a huge impact on my career, especially here in the UK, so I just wanted to personally thank you for that. I also wanted to thank you for sharing such practical advice with us today and also reminding us of the importance of integrity throughout the process, which I’m sure many people will find useful, especially if they’re trying to make a major shift in their careers.

Ben: Thank you, Joseph.

What have you spent your time chasing in your career? Fancy titles? The role of CEO? The opportunity to say you manage a huge team of X people? Have you ever stopped to think about why those things matter to you so much? What drives you to focus on that goal?

In this 1-year anniversary episode of Career Relaunch, Bruce Daisley, Vice President of Twitter, EMEA shares his insights on drivers of happiness in the workplace and the motivations behind his own career shifts from Google & YouTube to Twitter. In the Mental Fuel® segment, I’ll explain how focusing on the wrong driver of happiness initially led me astray in my own career and the realization I had that got me back on track.

During this episode’s Mental Fuel® segment, I talked about identifying one of your career goals and writing down WHY it’s so important to you. Is that STILL important to you? If not, consider focusing on something else that’s more important to you.

Bruce Daisley is the EMEA Vice President of Twitter. He joined the company in 2012 having previously ran Google’s display business.  At Google Bruce had responsibility for YouTube and display advertising. He has also worked at Emap/Bauer and Capital Radio.

Previously, New Media Age recognised Bruce as having made the Greatest Individual Contribution to new media in the UK. In 2015, he was voted Individual of the Year in The Drum’s Social Media rankings. He is a digital advisor to Comic Relief, and is a judge in the Design Effectiveness Awards. Bruce regularly speaks on the evolution of work culture and runs a podcast “Eat Sleep Work Repeat” on the subject. The podcast has featured in the iTunes top business podcasts since its launch at the start of 2017. Follow Bruce on 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!

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

Teaser (first ~15s): Pay attention to more important things rather than less important things. Is it important whether I’ve got a hundred people reporting to me? Is it important if I’ve got this title that looks great on my business card? Or is it important that I go to work and I feel stimulated and I laugh?

Joseph: Bruce, thanks so much for having me here at Twitter in London. I’m very excited to be here, and it’s exciting to have you on the show.

Bruce: I’m thrilled. I’m thrilled to be invited.

Joseph: I’d love to start by just talking about your role here at Twitter, Bruce. Can you just walk us through exactly what your role is and what you’re focused on right now in your career, in your life?

Bruce: The August’s title for it is that I’m the Vice President for EMEA, which is the Middle East, Europe, and Africa. We’re trying to grow Twitter as a tool for people to use to discover what’s happening in the world. We see Twitter as maybe more than having fought it as a news app. How can we get people to use Twitter in Germany, in France, in Spain, in the Middle East? How can we do that? That’s one way of growing.

The second one is growing our business, and that means trying to grow or add revenue and deliver some good performance there. My role is trying to spot people who are doing well but need help, people who are not doing well and need help, or areas where we could do a partnership to go faster. It’s just about trying to add little bursts of energy to the work that’s already going on.

Joseph: From your vantage point, Bruce, what do you think is the most exciting thing that’s happening right now for you at Twitter?

Bruce: When you’re forced to make a decision, when you can’t do both things, it forces you to be reflective. One of the things that we’ve really done in the last year or so is say, ‘What is Twitter?’ We’re not a place that you go and share holiday photographs. We’re not the place that, if you’re getting married, you post images of that. We’re not the place that you share back-to-school photos. What is Twitter?

I think we forced our self to say, ‘Okay, Twitter is a place for news, a place for what’s happening.’ I think what we found through that is that our audience has really responded well to that. The audience had been growing incredibly strongly for the last 18 months. By us getting clearer with our thinking, the people who use Twitter have been more responsive to that. It’s a good reminder actually. The clearer you are with what you’re trying to achieve, the more likely you are to achieve it.

Joseph: I know you haven’t always been a VP here at Twitter. Before we talk about this topic of workplace culture, which I love to get your insights on, I was wondering if we could go back to your previous roles. We don’t think all the way back but to talk about your time as a Director of YouTube and Google. Can you explain how you landed there and then what happened next for you? We can work forward from there.

Bruce: I previously worked in a radio and magazine company. I had, at one stage, a hundred people reporting in to me. I had a fantastic title. Definitely, it would’ve looked impressive if I’d turn up somewhere, because I turned up and flashed my business card, if it was that to a person, then it would’ve been impressive. I was maybe redundant from there. They got taken over and they removed a layer of management.

I found myself out of work and deciding what I wanted. I very nearly went and took a job at Myspace. Younger listeners won’t necessarily know immediately what Myspace was.

Joseph: I remember it.

Bruce: Myspace was the future social media at one stage, but it was long past that era when I was going to join there. My friend said to me, ‘They’re brilliant, aren’t they?’ It made me think. I sat there and I thought, ‘Okay. Write a handful of companies you’d love to work at, and then what are the things that would characterize why you wanted to work there?’ I ended up taking a job at YouTube that paid less. It wasn’t YouTube. It was at Google. It paid less. There were three people reporting in to me, and the title was massively reduced from the heights I’d been to.

Joseph: How much did that matter to you?

Bruce: Not remotely actually. Not remotely. Once I’ve decided I was going to be happier at least, it didn’t occur to me. I guess the things that go through your head is you think, ‘How do I explain this to other people?’ and, ‘Is there any shame in it?’ I wasn’t ashamed in doing it, and I was quite excited.

The thing that was going through my head was, if I join Google, maybe I could work my way to working on YouTube, and YouTube, I think is one of the seven wonders of the web. It’s like one of the most incredible creations of human invention. I thought, ‘Wow, if I could work on that, that would be something, even if it’s only a project.’ I had a clear goal in mind.

I’m not a big status person. I’m not really a person who—if I get in a cab even now or if I’m on holiday and someone’s asked where I work, I always say, ‘The internet.’ I never tell people where I work.

Joseph: That’s interesting. I would’ve thought that someone who has that privilege to work at a place like Google or Twitter, they would love namedropping that.

Bruce: I tend to see things like that as things that separate us rather than connect us.

Joseph: Agree.

Bruce: It’s a bit like a group in a school. I think I was probably eight and a group in a school in the City of Birmingham. We used to have a map at the start of term, and it would be who’s been on vacation, who’s been on holiday, and everyone would have to say that. Three quarters of the class hadn’t been on holiday. Three quarters of the class had left the pin in Birmingham, and then there was someone who’d been to the South Coast. There’s someone who’d been to France. This was extraordinary. That person got loads of attention. They’d been abroad. People had been to Wales. People had been to different places. Even though I had been on holiday, I left the pin in Birmingham. I didn’t want to appear like I was at advantage to them.

I think those sort of things are formative. I feel like if I tell people I’ve got a job that I adore, that I love, that I feel honored to have, it sort of casts their job in a worse light. So I just never talk about those things.

As it come to that, because I’ve never felt like anything I’ve accomplished is a badge of honor, consequently, I don’t see if I’d failed as a badge of shame.

Joseph: Before we talk about this topic of culture, I am really interested, how did you get past that concept of this sort of superficial, I want to call them societal validators of ‘I work at a fancy company. I got a fancy title’? What sort of mindset do you feel that you have or what do you think people need to have in order to get past some of those?

Bruce: If you read a lot about happiness, what you tend to find is that specifically material possession create short-term bursts of happiness, but they don’t lead to purposeful happiness. I think job descriptions, titles, and things like that are exactly the same. That moment you land the job, you feel that burst of adrenalizing energy. Of course it dissipates, right? Short-term successes. So I’m not necessarily preoccupied with cars, houses, watches. I don’t have any of those things.

Joseph: Okay. Let’s shift gears and let’s talk a little bit about some of the other work that you do because I know we first crossed paths at the Future of Work Conference in London. Aside from your day job at Twitter, you’re also focused on the evolution of work culture and what drives happiness in the workplace. One of the things we talk about on the show is the importance of doing work that aligns with your values, and you wrote a really interesting article on LinkedIn earlier this year about whether the culture of our workplaces can make us happier.

I’d love to just touch on a couple of themes which you cover on your own podcast called Eat, Sleep, Work, Repeat, which we’re definitely going to talk about at the end and come back to, about work culture. The first one is about friends and flow. You talked with Richard Reeves, the Author of Happy Mondays, and this concept of having a close personal friend being really important in the workplace. What’s important about that?

Bruce: In this season of Eat, Sleep, Work, Repeat, I chatted to a woman called Emma Seppala. She’s from Stanford University. She’s currently at Yale, and she writes a lot for the Harvard Business Review. One of the things that she’s observed in one of her most recent articles is that half of all people feel exhausted by work, and it’s gone up by 30% in the last 20 years. In addition, people feel incredibly lonely at work. Loneliness is a strong correlate with just this sense of feeling overwhelmed and exhausted at work.

To think we can recognize all those things, we tend to talk less at work. There was a brilliant thing by a ‘Financial Times’ columnist called Lucy Kellaway, and she’s turned a lot of her columns into podcasts. One of them is she observed, she’s just left being a full-time columnist to become a school math teacher. In her reflective mode, she said during her 30 years in the Financial Times, she’s observed the volume of chat in the office has reduced substantially.

The interesting for her was the chat has gone down, and that seems emotionally instinctively to be a bad thing. But then if you overlay it with any science, this guy called Alex Pentland from the MIT, he has observed that the most creative environments are the ones where there’s high levels of short-bursts of chat. So we’re losing the thing that powers creativity. In addition, people are feeling lonely. All of these things are broken.

What happens is we assess life from a micro level. We assess life from sitting in front of our laptops. We survey the job to be done, and the job to be done is we’ve got 100 emails. Going over and chatting to Dara, going over and chatting to Helen feels like an unnecessary diversion from the job we’ve got to do. The end result is we’re feeling overwhelmed, lonely, unhappy… Science suggests we’re less creative as a result.

Joseph: The other thing you talked about was the smoothie delusion by these guys, Baron Richard Layard and Bill Griffin. I was first of all wondering about whether you can tell me who these guys are and what you uncovered about benefits and their relationship or lack thereof to workplace satisfaction.

Bruce: Bill Griffin’s one of the most entertaining people that you’ll ever have the good fortune to meet. I guess his take on life is micro happiness. His take is, how can I improve happiness one active kindness at a time? Baron Layard is probably the most eminent British economist. He’s worked with a succession of Prime Ministers for the last three decades, and his job is macro happiness, how can we make the entirety of all of us happier?

The thing that came out of that episode is the system that we’ve got, which is we try and make people happier at work by giving them things: ‘Hey, guys. We’ve brought beers around at 5:00 on Thursday.’ ‘Hey, guys. We’ve bought everyone a smoothie.’ ‘Good news, everyone. There’s cake sitting in the kitchen.’ All of these things, we think make people happy. Inevitably, yeah, they do. They make people happier in the short term, but they are palliative. They don’t make people happier in any significant sense in the long term. I think the critical thing for all of us is how can we get past the idea that happiness is smoothies?

If you search the best companies in the world to work at, what you’ll find is one or two companies that are very good at capturing brilliant photography of their slide, of their smoothies, of their cycle to work days. They capture things like that. None of those things correlate with people being happier at work. Having worked in one or two of those places, I know that what creates happiness isn’t necessarily what people give to you. It’s what you do at work. We’re happier when we’ve done something, not when we’ve been given something.

Joseph: The other thing you talked about, Bruce, was this concept of the production process for happiness with Paul Dolan. What exactly is that and what did you uncover about the production process for happiness?

Bruce: Paul Dolan said that his revelation was that the production process for happiness was happiness is a direct output of what you pay attention to. It’s interesting. I saw someone tweet the other day about Daniel Kahneman. Daniel Kahneman, people might be aware, is sort of the father of behavioral economics. Daniel Kahneman is an incredibly intelligent guy and was one of the greatest thinkers of our lifetime. He was asked, ‘Of all his learning, what was the thing that he regarded as the greatest single lesson?’ He said, ‘Beware the attention illusion.’ He said, ‘Nothing is as important as it seems while you’re paying attention to it.’ What does that mean?

You’ve had an argument with someone or you worried that how you look in certain clothes isn’t good, and nothing is as important as it seems when you’re paying attention to it. Both of them, they might seem directly opposed, but I think they are directly linked to each other. Attention can be illusionary. It can make us think things are more important, but actually, let’s pay attention to more important things rather than less important things.

That’s quite an interesting thing, because then, you start thinking about what we talked about at the start of this discussion. Is it important whether I’ve got a hundred people reporting to me? Is it important if I’ve got this title that looks great on my business card? Or is it important that I go to work and I feel stimulated and I laugh? If I laugh 10 times in a day, I’m really thrilled about that. Actually, I’d been much more inclined to choose a job based on that, even though it probably would appear rationally to be a misguided way to make the decision.

Joseph: The other thing I want to talk about before we shift gears and talk about your podcast, Bruce, is one of the episodes that I just listened to on the way over here about rebooting your career. I know you talked with some really interesting people. You talked with Martin Morales about how he left the music industry to open a restaurant that he’d always dreamed of, Lisa Unwin about how women can return to the workplace after having children. What are one or two lessons that you learned about what it takes to successfully relaunch your career from talking with those people?

Bruce: It’s very easy for Steve Jobs or one of the Spice Girls or a famous actor to say, ‘I just did what I was passionate about.’ For each one of those people, there are 10,000 people who did what they were passionate about and got nowhere. I think there’s a danger that we can follow the winners, and we could end up with advice that’s of no value. I’m sort of cautious about things like that.

I saw a quote by Benjamin Disraeli today. I scribbled it down because I saw it somewhere, which slightly conflicts with what I said. The quote is ‘We’re only truly great when we act from our passion.’ I think there’s a balance to be struck. I don’t think you necessarily succeed just because you’re following your passion, but if you’ve got a degree of passion and excitement to what you end up doing, it probably motivates you and propels you a little bit further.

Joseph: Were there sort of any characteristics that you noticed about these people that allowed them to feel as if they could switch gears?

Bruce: Their tenacity, sort of the grit, the determination to keep going when things probably aren’t going well is probably the abiding power I suspect.

Joseph: What about you? What do you think has allowed you to be able to make the pivots in your career? Because you have had some changes and shifts along the way. You mentioned the layoff earlier being made redundant. What’s allowed you to just keep going and not really get too bothered by any of those sort of sudden shifts?

Bruce: The only quality I’ve got is probably a degree of tenacity/optimism. In a room of 20 people, I’m probably the middle in terms of talent. Certainly, I’ve got no things that I standout at. I’ve probably got a short attention span, and that has a strong advantage. If I’m looking at a presentation, my view is people are bored. Entertain them, stimulate them, move on.

When I first came here, we ran a lot of events. The team would ask me, the first even I ran myself. Start to finish, I ran everything. We finished that day, and I said, ‘Yeah, that was a 4 out of 10.’ Everyone was like, ‘What? Four out of 10? That was better than 4 out of 10.’ I said, ‘When we do an 8 out of 10, you’ll come back to me, and you’ll say, “That was 4 out of 10.”’

That disadvantage where I’ve got short attention span, I’m sometimes ungenerous with regards to my own work or other people’s work as well. But that means that you can hopefully see it through other people’s eyes.

Joseph: Last question for you before you talk about your podcast, Bruce. When you think about your own career and you look at what you know now, is there something that you wish you had known a few years ago?

Bruce: If you’ve got the desire to try and capture people’s attention in an entertaining way, that gets you three quarters of the way there. I got my first job at Capital Radio. I finished university. I was unemployed for about a year in Birmingham. After a year of being unemployed, I started drawing these cartoon CV. I drew this four-page resume of my life in sort of very bad cartoon. Changed the first square so it looked like I’ve done it for each job. I sent it to 50 companies, and the response it got was extraordinary. That taught me a lesson.

A girl, when I was YouTube, sent us a video CV. It wasn’t the best video CV I’ve ever seen, but man, you have a look at that now, it’s online if you’d search YouTube CV. I think it’s got like 100,000 views. Getting people’s attention is the hardest thing. Once you’ve got people’s attention and you’ve put a smile on their face, it’s amazing how people will fight your corner.

Joseph: Let’s talk about your podcast. I know we’ve been touching on it, but can you just tell us a little bit more, Bruce, about Eat Sleep Work Repeat, your podcast, which is focused on happiness and work culture, some of the topics when you look ahead, that you plan to cover? I know you’ve touched on a few already.

Bruce: This season, I’m really keen to do two things. I’m keen to keep exploring what is the root cause of happiness and stimulation and motivation at work, and then I want to try and unpick the things that are destroying that. I hate nostalgia. I don’t think the world before was any better than today. I think my phone is like this magical creation. I totally adore it. I’ve got an immensely fond emotional connection with my phone. I don’t think there’s anything bad about technological advancements.

However, I’m fascinated with how we can improve work so it just doesn’t feel overwhelming. Half of all people who check their email outside of work, exhibit high levels of stress. I think the solution has to lie within us. It has to lie in and lie in the businesses, thinking about how they can make the people at work be better.

I’m in awe of people like Tony Schwartz. Tony Schwartz is a world bestselling writer. He’s had a book that’s right at the top of the US bestsellers for a year, but then he’s gone on and he’s created something called The Energy Project. One of his things, again, is a simple hack, and his campaign is ‘Take back your lunch,’ because how many of us now sit at our desks, chewing through a prepped emoji sandwich, thinking, pecking away at emails one-handed while we eat, thinking that somehow, we’re reducing the amount of work.

All of the evidence says, if you go away from your desk—I met a woman called Laura Archer that had turned this into sort of a book, a manifesto—if you go away from your desk for an hour, you’ll achieve way more in the last three or four hours of the day than you would if you had worked through it.

I’d do emails in the evening. Sometimes, I find myself sitting there in the evening, tapping away at emails, and I think, ‘I’ve done three emails in the last hour,’ because I’m in such a state of exhaustion that I’m rereading them, then I’m going to make drink, then I’m coming back, I’m sitting there and I’m changing the music. None of that is productivity. You’re far better having an evening where you just go and do exercise or sleep or watch some TV or a movie and come back fresh tomorrow. That’s the thing I’m fascinated with really.

Joseph: Very cool, Bruce. If people want to learn more about these topics and they want to hear more from you, where can they go if they want to tune into Eat Sleep Work Repeat?

Bruce: It’s on iTunes. There’s a website which is EatSleepWorkRepeat.fm. I just think that there are so many people who love their jobs, and we know that. People who have jobs live longer. They’re healthier. They do better. But simultaneously, work is frying our brains, and we need to find a way to capture the best parts of work and push back on the worst parts.

Joseph: Definitely. We’ll also include links to your podcast here, Bruce. I’ve definitely checked it out myself. It’s a very interesting listen. Thanks so much for telling us about how you manage your own career and drivers of workplace happiness and also a few simple hacks to drive up your own workplace satisfaction. Best of luck with Eat Sleep Work Repeat and your work here at Twitter.

Bruce: Thanks so much, Joseph.

Hear about the the limitations of always playing it safe and why the ability to handle rejection can be such an incredibly powerful asset during your career. Andy Whelan shares his story of how he relaunched his career from being an actor to a small business owner and eventually a career coach. Afterwards, I’ll share my thoughts on how I manage rejection in my own life and career.

During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I talked about the importance of identifying one mechanism in your life that can recharge you when you get rejected. What’s one thing that you KNOW you can do to help you stand back up after you get knocked down? If you have a useful technique to manage rejection in your own career, share your tip with the Career Relaunch community by leaving a comment below.

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 General Assembly for sponsoring this episode of Career Relaunch. General Assembly is a pioneer in education and career transformation, specializing in today’s most in-demand skills. Visit GA.co to lean how to boost your career. Use Promo code ‘RELAUNCH‘ for 20% off your 1st class or workshop.

Teaser (first ~15s): The first thing was allow myself to feel really rejected for a moment and be okay with it, because as an actor, I was trained to be completely connected to my emotions. But then when I was getting rejected, I would reject on my emotions because I didn’t want to feel it.

Joseph: Hello, Andy, and thanks for joining me here on Career Relaunch. I want to hear all about your life as an actor and business owner, but before we get to that, can you just kick us off by telling us about the work you do there at General Assembly?

Andy: Absolutely. Thanks for having me today. I’m a Career Coach currently at General Assembly in the San Francisco campus. What I do is I work with our full-time immersive students who go through either 10-week or 12-week, full-time programs in areas like user experience design, data science, or development. I help them through the course, build their materials, like resume, cover letter, learn how to interview, build portfolios, and then I work with them one-on-one when they graduate to make that transition into a new career.

Joseph: Can you give us a glimpse into the types of students that end up enrolling in courses there are General Assembly and also maybe a very brief summary of what General Assembly does for people who aren’t familiar with the organization?

Andy: General Assembly is an accelerated learning or technical boot camp. It is part of the industry now. What we do is we train people for roles in the technical market, startups, companies anywhere from Adobe, Dropbox, down to very-early-stage startups, from engineering to design to product management and data science.

Our graduates graduate in 10 to 12 weeks, and then they move into a full-time job search. They come from right out of college through—I’ve worked with people who were very successful in marketing or animation or other areas. We are international, and we focus on areas that are hiring for tech market and for tech positions right now.

Joseph: What are the one or two major challenges that you see that students are struggling with when they come to get your career coaching as they’re enrolled in the courses there at General Assembly?

Andy: I think the first challenge is fear: ‘I’m not going to be good enough,’ ‘There’s not enough jobs,’ or, ‘It’s not going to work out for me.’ The other is often in transition. Someone’s worked really hard in their past career, and they’ve been successful, and they’re very unwilling to let go of some of that to focus on what skills they have and the things they’re doing recently to move into the next career.

Joseph: Speaking of former identities, I get approached by a lot of career coaches to be on this show. In this case, I actually approached you because you’ve got such a unique background, and I was really intrigued by your career trajectory. I was wondering if you could just take us back in time, Andy, before you’re doing this great career coaching for General Assembly. Tell us a little bit about your life as an actor.

Andy: My first career transition probably happened in college. Unlike most people who felt the influence of their family and started studying, I was a premed major, and I started studying…

Joseph: Oh, me too.

Andy: There you go, right? So we both went through that process. That’s right. I remember when you’re giving your talk, just this idea of having that feeling like, ‘I don’t know. I’m not sure, but I’m already this far.’ As I was studying, I realized it wasn’t bringing me the joy that I thought it was, and I felt like it was a job already, and I was in school.

On a bet from a roommate, I auditioned for a play in college, and I was cast in the play. That kind of changed my experience in life in general because I felt like both personally and professionally, I started to belong in a way.

Joseph: What was the experience like for you emotionally between going in for that first audition versus all the other premed work that you had been doing before? Can you illustrate what that contrast was like for you?

Andy: The way I would describe it is going from black and white to color. I would go to class every day. I did the work. I was in the library all day, and I was very good at that. I’m very good at studying and testing and doing all those things. I just felt like I was checking things off. Then when I moved into auditioning and then getting into a play and going to rehearsal at night, I felt like I was doing something that mattered to me, and it was important. The energy level that I had changed completely.

I felt like it’s an idea of I would get up and I was happy to start my day. I felt this feeling that I was doing something that not everyone else was doing. I wasn’t playing it safe, and I was actually enjoying the process.

Joseph: What happened next for you with acting? You go in for that first audition. How did you eventually end up breaking into the world of acting?

Andy: First, what happened was I went to Circus University. I spent a year there in a Master’s program. I had been building sets for them at Circus Stage. My connections there helped me to meet with the theater department, and they offered me a scholarship to teach some set design courses, work at Circus Stage, and then take an MFA program at Circus University. I went and did that.

I went through that process for about a year, and I realized I just did not want to be in school anymore, so I left and I moved to Chicago. I had a connection. Again, the story of my career professionally is really about connecting with people and then saying yes to an opportunity they offer me. Someone said I move into Chicago, ‘Do you want to put your stuff in the truck and go to?’ and I said, ‘Okay.’ I started working, building sets. I was a carpenter and a welder for Steppenwolf.

Then the Goodman Theatre out there, one of my connections that I met at a theater I was building sets at said, ‘The Second City is looking for someone to work, and they need someone to sort of stage manage, help out over there.’ So I called them, and I went over, and I started working for them.

As I had been for most of my career, I started in a support role and learned as I went and then got an opportunity. I started there stage managing, and then I started taking classes at Second City. From that point, I got the opportunity to write and perform on their business side. That was really my first move into professional acting and writing.

Joseph: What exactly does it take to break into acting? I know that you mentioned you started off at Second City. What was the transition for you getting your first big acting role?

Andy: What it took for me was a willingness to just continuously fight to get noticed and learn more and then learn how to suppress all the fear that comes around standing in front of people and performing till the point where I did it enough to feel comfortable.

On the professional side, it means learning how to have no money all the time. My friends who are successful—and I worked with a bunch of people over there who are now very big stars—they started to get successful roles, and then they were on the news as ‘the new star,’ ‘the new hit,’ but I had watched them struggle for 15, 20 years, having no money, everybody living in a single apartment, pulling your money.

One of my friends who’s quite successful now lived in his parents’ house until he got his first big television role. I’m not talking about till you’re 19. We’re talking mid to late 20s because it’s just a very difficult road. It takes incredible fortitude to say, ‘I’m going to do this.’

Meanwhile, all of your friends who you went to college with are now getting married, having children, have careers and cars and regular bills. They have cable TV and you’re shocked that they can pay for cable TV. It was a lot of that. It was just the idea of, ‘Oh, again?’ I’m budgeting to make sure I have enough to eat this week so that I can go audition, continue to learn.

Most of it in Chicago for me was doing shows at night for free with my friends because we wanted to perform as much as possible.

Joseph: I think it’s very well-understood that becoming an actor or an actress involves a lot of rejection. I was just wondering if you could give us a glimpse into what the auditioning process was like for you.

Andy: When you’re new and you are first trying to get an agent or a manager, no one knows you and they’re expecting you to possibly bring an opportunity for income to them, because that’s how they earn their living. It’s that weird middle where no one wants to bring me on to be my agent because I’ve not done anything, but I can’t get into auditions without an agent.

It takes a lot of time. You have to go and you have to accidentally run into them everywhere they go. You have to continuously get your friends who are being represented to ask, to walk you in, to meet with them to get started. Then you have to go through the process of getting headshots, putting a resume together.

It’s true, if you’ve ever seen a film about actors, you wait in line. Sometimes, I would get in line at 10:00 in the morning in New York City in the winter for an audition for a play on Broadway, and I would maybe get seen at 3:00 or 4:00 in the afternoon. I’d be standing outside the whole time to get in.

I’ve had moments where I’ve gone on stage in a Broadway theater and started my monologue and said maybe three words, and someone in the back who you can’t see goes, ‘Thanks so much.’ Then you’re like, ‘Okay, cool. I’m done,’ and that was your day because you spent all day waiting in line.

Joseph: Wow, that’s just like that scene in ‘La La Land’ where Emma Stone goes in, and it’s exactly what she goes through. What’s that like to deal with rejection on the spot like that?

Andy: What it felt like was a great way for me to step outside and say, ‘Great, now I’m going to show you.’ I was definitely fueled by this idea that anytime you reject me is another bit of energy, another way for me to say, ‘Great, I can’t wait to come back and show you how amazing I’m going to be.’ In the beginning, it was fueled by this anger and this idea that I’m supposed to be here. As my career grew…

I’ve had times—I mentioned this to you before—I’ve had a day where I’ve had five different auditions that I was sent to by an agent and rejected by all five. Going through that, how do you then go, ‘Oh, great. Let’s make dinner.’ That’s what I’ve had to go through.

The change for me was an understanding of a couple of things. I think the first thing was allow myself to feel really rejected for a moment and be honest, because I went through this phase where I would not get something, and in my head, I was trying to tell this story of, ‘Well, I wasn’t right for it,’ or, ‘They don’t know what they’re doing,’ or, ‘That project’s not very good anyway,’ instead of being honest and saying, ‘I’m really disappointed. It really hurts that they don’t recognize me for this role, because I worked so hard to do the craft that I do.’ The first part was me saying, ‘I’ve got to feel this and be okay with it.’

It’s hard too, because as an actor, I was trained to be completely connected to my emotions. But then when I was getting rejected, I would reject on my emotions because I didn’t want to feel it.

Joseph: That’s so interesting, because I’m listening to your story here, and I know that we’re talking about acting, but I think it’s so applicable to other career aspirations that people have whenever they’re trying to shift into a new role or a new job. They put out a bunch of applications, and they never hear back, or they hear back and they get rejected. It sounds like, in acting, it’s about as brutal as it can be because you got someone looking you in the face, rejecting you on the spot.

I know I’ve met you before. I know you’re a really positive guy, and you have a lot of resilience, but for those people out there who struggle with the idea of rejection—and I’m one of them. I think it hurts when it happens—do you have any suggestions on how you manage to bounce back again and again? What worked for you?

Andy: What I think I go through a lot is this idea that if I don’t get the job, which is the perfect outcome, that it must be the worst outcome on the other end of the spectrum, and I’m really somewhere in the middle. I have to not generalize and say, ‘I’m horrible,’ or, ‘I’m not good enough for this.’ I have to get more specific and say, ‘Where was I in this process? How did I really do this?’ whether it be a job interview or an audition, ‘How did I actually perform that moment? Was I the right fit?’ and then take some opportunity to learn from it rather than sit back and feel sorry for myself.

The other thing I do is I only give myself a limited amount of time to be depressed about it. It doesn’t mean I’m not depressed anymore. It means, ‘Okay. I’m still really angry or upset or sad about this moment, but this is the deadline I’ve given myself to step up and go back into this and go submit again, go apply again, go do whatever.’ I try really hard to give myself a limited amount of time to be focused on the negative and what I didn’t get and focus on what the next thing is.

Joseph: I know eventually, you ended up landing quite a big gig with the Conan O’Brien show. Can you tell us what it was like for you to successfully make it through an audition for a pretty big and famous show? What was that moment like for you?

Andy: My constantly going to auditions and not getting work and really recognizing I’m fairly talented, but there are people out there that are just unbelievable, and there always have been. I’m competing against people that, the moment they were born, everybody just stared at them. It’s hard. I have worked with people that I’m sweating on stage, and they walk out, and before they open their mouths, everyone just is following them and completely in awe of them.

Some of the people that I worked with who were really successful at Second City ended up starting to write for Conan O’Brien. They left their positions, and they started writing for Conan. I had an opportunity to move to New York, and when I went to see them and hang out with them socially, they were the ones that said to me, ‘Listen, we really like you. We want to give you this opportunity.’ They went to their casting director who then met with me.

Going to meet with her, she was incredibly supportive and said, ‘This is the way we operate here.’ I was doing a lot of the little bits in between guests, and she said, ‘We’d love to have you be one of our regular crew who does this.’ So that was the real audition. I no longer was standing up there, trying to do a monologue. It was showing my work and saying, ‘I really want to come in and do this,’ and then them knowing I was a dependable person who would come in, who would stay late, who would be in the rehearsal process and just rehearse and not be difficult.

I think that was the moment for me that I recognized I’m doing something I love, I’m getting paid for it, and it was coming from the work I had done in the past because people knew that they could trust me with their writing.

Joseph: What made you decide to shift into the work you did next?

Andy: Working for Late Night with Conan was not a full-time opportunity. Actors generally don’t get unless they’re on a television show with contract. You’re paid per appearance, so some weeks, there’ll be a lot of opportunities for me, and some weeks, there wouldn’t, so I couldn’t always guarantee making a decent living through an opportunity like that.

I was still doing commercial work. I would go do something really fun at Conan, and then I’d have an audition for some horrible product to sell as a commercial or do an industrial, which is like you go to a company and you talk about, ‘Here’s the new plan,’ and then they film it. I was still doing that on the side.

That’s a little bit depressing because when I moved to New York, I studied at the William Esper Studio, which is a very well-known, a Meisner technique acting studio, and these great actors have come out of it. I felt like I’m an accomplished actor, and then I would go and sell toothpaste. It was really sometimes difficult.

You’re not getting paid the incredible amounts of money that maybe commercial or television or film actors are making, so you got to survive. What I did was I relied on my past skills. I did carpentry. I did a lot of maintenance work, starting with the building I lived in. I made a deal with my landlord to say, ‘Let me take care of these things in the building so I don’t have to pay as much rent.’

That turned into cleaning. I would start to clean people’s apartments in order to make money to survive and pay my rent while I was acting and hustling and trying to do as much as I could to get noticed in New York. Word got around that I was dependable, I was easy to work with, and I had reasonable rates, so I started to build a business in that way.

What I realized was I started to enjoy having money in my pocket every day, so I just said I’m going to start to focus on being really friendly, doing the best I can, and learning along the way but also being incredibly dependable.

Joseph: Was there something about your past acting experiences that ended up having a direct role in your ability to succeed in the business world?

Andy: I think my training in improvisation allowed me to say yes. One of the founding principles in improvisation is ‘yes and,’ where in order to continue a scene, you have to say, ‘yes and,’ because if someone comes up to you and say, ‘Hey, my shoe is on fire,’ and you look at them and say, ‘No, it’s not,’ the scene can’t continue. But if you say, ‘Yes,’ and I’m going to go and try and find some water, and then you throw something on it, and you go, ‘Oh, no. It’s gasoline,’ and they go, ‘Yes, and now my whole body is on fire.’ That’s how you start a scene.

When I would meet with people, and they would say to me, ‘Can you do this?’ I would go, ‘Yup,’ and then I would just figure it out afterwards.

Joseph: Why do you think people don’t say yes to things more often? Because I know that that’s a bit of a theme that’s emerging here: you say yes, and then you have opportunities come your way or you figure things out as you need to.

Andy: We don’t consider the outcomes. We just consider the task at hand, and so all that other stuff is fear, ‘If they say no to me.’ This has happened my whole life, right? It started with asking people out on a date, and you get a lot of no’s. Then my head will say, ‘Well don’t ask anybody because they might say no,’ or, ‘What if they say yes? Now I actually have to go and talk to them for a couple of hours.’ It’s all this fear around what actually happens once the next step occurs. That’s why I think a lot of people are just too afraid to say yes.

If they say no, then there’s no attempt. There’s also no rejection, because if I don’t go after it, I don’t have to worry about what happens when they say no.

Joseph: Yeah, it’s almost like you’re self-handicapping yourself kind of out of self-preservation psychologically.

Andy: Yeah, and you can’t grow that way. There’s no growth if you don’t evaluate it afterwards. There’s always this idea—and I hear this a lot. I talk to people outside of here, even just in social situations—they say, ‘Oh, yeah. I’m thinking about doing this,’ and I know what that means is, ‘Boy, it’d be really nice if I could do this. I’m not going to attempt it, because if I attempt it, it means I’ve got to fail.’

There’s very few people that I’ve seen who have been successful right out of the gate. We all put that on ourselves, like, ‘I’ve got to make it right away.’

Joseph: When you look back on these career changes, Andy, what’s something that you wish you had known about career change that you now know?

Andy: When I’ve done a couple of changes, I went from acting to running business and moving into selling that business. That moved into moving to a small state where I was teaching at a Fine Art college.

All of that, at times, turned into ‘It’s about me. I’m focused on this, and I’ve got to make a change because I need to earn a pay check.’ If I’d stepped back and said, ‘It’s about the people that I’m going to help when I make this transition,’ whether it be running a maintenance company or teaching or being a career coach, I think that the transition would have been much more positive in some lights because I would have been focused on the people I’m about to work with, the people I’m about the help rather than I need to figure this out and get this going as quickly as possible with the least pain.

First, I don’t like rejection. The second is I don’t like, sometimes, going through the process of now I have to start building a new community, now I have to start applying, now I have to start learning. Some people who do this have been doing it for 10, 15 years, and they’re way better at it than me.

Joseph: I’d love to wrap up talking a little bit more about your work as a career coach. I know one of the things that you focus on is this growth mindset approach to coaching. I don’t know if that directly relates to what you’re talking about, but can you just explain what a growth mindset approach is?

Andy: The concept behind it is I can learn something, and I can actually grow within it versus the opposite, which would be, ‘Everything that I was born with is what I get to use to build my career, build my life, and build my friendships. Challenges should be avoided because I’m not going to succeed anyway.’

A growth mindset says, ‘Challenges are welcome because that’s where I learn.’ When I felt an opportunity to improve and that I can build these skills, it just takes time. What that means is it directly relates to, if that’s true, then my only avenue is the hard work required. If you are not putting in that hard work, then you really have this sort of fixed mindset, which is, ‘It doesn’t matter anyway. I’m going to get what I get based on what I already have.’

This concept is I’m looking for continual growth, but I need to have a plan, and I also need to have people around me to support me. Then success I think comes much faster, and when success doesn’t come, you have an opportunity to really get that feedback required to know what it is I need to do to build on what I’ve just not gotten.

Joseph: One more thing before we wrap up. If there’s someone out there who is trying to get into a profession that inevitably involves a lot of either in-your-face rejection or implicit rejection, do you have any advice that you could share on how you stick with it and how you stay resilient?

Andy: If you’re always used to getting what you want, you have to practice having someone say no to you. You got to start to work with people who will be your mentor. When you’re dealing with this type of rejection, work with somebody who is successful in a place you want to be but who went through a ton of that rejection because they’re the ones that will constantly remind you that this is the journey. It’s not that moment.

For me as an actor, it was this idea that I just want to be able to tell people I’m on this show or I’m doing this. What I learned over my life so far is that what I really want now is an opportunity to learn more about myself. The other bit of advice I would say is make sure, through this process, that you practice self-care. You have to learn the things that you can do that make you feel better about these moments where you’re feeling lousy and do that.

We forget to take an hour for ourselves and go for a walk. Anybody who loves doing photography or hiking, the minute the transition happens, there’s this idea that, ‘Oh, I can’t do this because I’ve got to put all my energy into meeting people, skills, going after this new career.’ I would argue, those things that make you happiest are the ones that will recharge you when you get rejected. Practice those over and over again so that you are ready each time, because it’s about the recovery time.

It’s not really about the rejection in my opinion. We’re all going to get rejected. I get rejected all the time. I’ll ask people for stuff. I’ll ask my boss for something, and they’ll say no, and I go, ‘Oh.’ I can’t sulk for four hours in my office. I’ve got people to help. What I have to do is I have to take a moment to decide what’s of importance right now and then move to the next thing.

Joseph: Speaking of recharging your battery, before we go, I also want to touch on a project that you’re really passionate about, which is Young Storytellers. Can you just give us a glimpse into what that’s all about?

Andy: It’s great. It’s a program that started in Los Angeles, and there are many well-known celebrities and a lot of people who volunteer. Now it’s in San Francisco. I was part of the pilot program.

We go into local schools and teach 11, 12-year-olds. I think the last person I mentored was in fifth grade. We, through an eight-week period, teach them how to write screenplays and do exercises that teach them to create a story. At the end of that, we, myself because I love to perform, but then other local performers come in, and we actually perform their screenplays in front of their entire school.

The thing that I think is amazing about it is we allow these students who sometimes might struggle in some traditional learning to come in and excel, and they get the spotlight for the day. It’s amazing here because it’s like little VIP badge that they wear all day because it’s their play, and it is amazing to watch.

I highly recommend, if you have something like that in your area, to investigate it, because for me, that allows me to stay creative even if I’m not necessarily doing what I started off to do in my career. I can be guaranteed a time to perform at least every quarter, which for me is great.

Joseph: That’s great. I think it’s good to feed that muscle around the thing that you’re really passionate about. Very cool. Finally, Andy, where can people go to learn more about you if they want to get in touch with you of if they’ve got any follow-up questions for you?

Andy: You can definitely find me through LinkedIn. I’m also at General Assembly in San Francisco. I will be speaking twice in October at the Adobe Max Conference in Las Vegas. I always recommend to people, for professional connection, definitely hit me up on LinkedIn, and we can start a conversation there.

Joseph: Fantastic. Thank you so much, Andy, for giving us a glimpse into your former life as an actor and some of the lessons you learned along the way. Most importantly, how you stay resilient in the face of major challenges. I appreciate you sharing your story. Thank you.

Andy: I really appreciate the opportunity. Thanks so much.