Inside Job

Our milestone episode number 50 is full of excitement! First, we announce the launch of the Inside Hive. The Hive is an extension of the podcast – we are creating a community for people who want to experience coaching, access exclusive content, and engage with us (and with each other) to better improve the way we all experience the intersection of work and life. More details will be forthcoming!

Then we make fun of Nayla's huge face, but nice eyebrows, from our too-zoomed-in Instagram Live event.

Finally, and most importantly, we tackle a question posed by one of our loyal listeners who is returning to work after an extended time off and wants some thoughts on how to make a successful transition. This is similar to challenges we've heard from some of our clients who are also returning to work for a variety of reasons, making a significant career pivot, or navigating non-traditional career paths, so we were eager to talk about it.

This is such a rich topic because for starters it's more common than we often believe. It's clear to us that the career path of today ain't your parents' career path. For that reason, we begin by stating emphatically that you do NOT need to apologize for gaps or for having a non-traditional career. Everything you have done has made you who you are – you simply need to be able to tell your story in a compelling way, and connect the dots between your strengths and what a hiring manager needs on their team.

The chapters of your story do not need to be chronological, nor do they only have to focus on the traditional definition of work. In fact, Nayla routinely points out that the way you live your life provides so much evidence for how you would show up in a job. So mine your life for data and focus on the key moments, values, and learnings that make you interesting, unique, and a great fit for the "next thing". What matters the most in your narrative is the meaning you give to the impact you've had on the world.

We share stories, examples, and thoughts on how to do this successfully regardless of the twists and turns your life and work have taken. And we have fun doing it, because we love helping our listeners advance their lives in meaningful ways.

As always, we'd love to hear what's on your mind and what you think we should talk about in an upcoming episode. Contact us via insidejobthepodcast.com or on Instagram, LinkedIn and Facebook @insidejobpodcast . Make sure you sign up for our newsletter so you are among the first to receive information about the Inside Hive!

Inside Job is brought to you by Nayla Bahri and Eric Johnson.

To learn more about us and our work, visit www.insidejobthepodcast.com or email us at [email protected].

To learn more about the ideas and resources discussed in this episode, check out our show notes.

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Who hasn't put something off?

It's so easy to be frustrated by the things that we find ourselves procrastinating. We usually start by blaming ourselves or our organizations for overstuffing our calendars. (We acknowledge that this can be a reality for many of us). Or we get on our own case for being too lazy to get things done.

As always, we offer that finding ourselves in patterns of procrastination is an opportunity to be kind to ourselves, and to be curious about what's going on.

This week, Nayla and Eric want to go beneath the common ways we explain procrastination, especially when we talk about wanting something and still not getting to it. We believe this is less about time management, and more about understanding the competing commitments that results in procrastination actually *doing something for us*.

Read that again: NOT doing what you say you want to do is DOING something for you.

The ultimate question might be: How is procrastination serving you?

We offer the Immunity to Change framework as a tool to explore the tension between what we say we want, and what we must also want (sometimes under the surface) in order to keep things they are.

We talk about the relationship between procrastination and revenge, control, imposter syndrome, the stories we tell ourselves, and our fears of failure.

Don't put it off… you'll want to dig in to this episode.

Inside Job is brought to you by Nayla Bahri and Eric Johnson.

To learn more about us and our work, visit www.insidejobthepodcast.com or email us at [email protected].

To learn more about the ideas and resources discussed in this episode, check out our show notes.

Let's connect!

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We'd love to hear from you.

How much is enough? Is ambition always about more, bigger and higher? Ambition is a concept most of us have been trained to understand in a very particular way, and many of us design our lives in search of a career that meets our narrow understanding of the word. Many of the organizations carry that same limited view of what ambition can look like, so the messages are reinforced over and over again that more is always better. Yet, many of us take all the 'right' steps towards a bigger, flashier career and don't feel great about it.

We dive into what's going on, and explore other ways of defining ambition.

In fact, we wonder if ambition is even the word we want to keep using:

Nayla offers the word: appetite, and Eric offers: energy… what if we are in pursuit of satisfying our appetites and following our energy? Where might that lead us?

We talk openly about our own efforts to redefine ambition for ourselves, and some of the tools we offer our clients as they explore build a better life and career for themselves.

How are you thinking about your own ambition these days? Be in touch on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn or on our website.

Inside Job is brought to you by Nayla Bahri and Eric Johnson.

To learn more about us and our work, visit www.insidejobthepodcast.com or email us at [email protected].

To learn more about the ideas and resources discussed in this episode, check out our show notes.

Let's connect!

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We'd love to hear from you.

Any chance you're feeling overwhelmed by the amount of work you're trying to get done in a day? Routinely finding yourself working 14-hour days with no end in sight? Skipping meals, delaying sleep because there's simply too much to do?

We hear you. Nayla and Eric start by saying: pause.

The panic cycle of overwhelm will only grow and grow if we don't step away from the real and perceived churn to pause, breathe and reflect. Stepping away to give your brain, body and nervous system a break may seem like an indulgence, but we believe it is a necessity. This pause allows us distinguish between activity and productivity, to see the problem clearly, and take action.

We introduce the analogy of the dance floor versus the balcony. The dance floor is thrilling and often chaotic – it can also be overwhelming and when we're stuck on it, it's hard to see anything more than a few feet away. We have to choose to see the higher-level perspective of what we're working towards – getting to the 'balcony' allows us to see the overarching goals, how far we've come, and how to adjust our schedules accordingly.

Morning or evening routine can give us a chance to get to the balcony, as can a good habit of moving ourselves throughout the day, literally getting up to change our perspective at intervals to ask ourselves: is my attention where it should be? Am I getting results from how I'm spending my time?

We also ask our listeners: Where are the expectations for the long, grueling, breakless days coming from? It's possible that your boss has unrealistic standards? Sure. Is it just as likely (maybe more likely) that you are putting this pressure on yourself?

If you need clarity, it's time to enlist help. We suggest tools like a time audit to get an honest accounting of where your time is going, and then engaging your manager in a prepared thoughtful conversation to check assumptions and right-set expectations.

Inside Job is brought to you by Nayla Bahri and Eric Johnson.

To learn more about us and our work, visit www.insidejobthepodcast.com or email us at [email protected].

To learn more about the ideas and resources discussed in this episode, check out our show notes.

Let's connect!

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We'd love to hear from you.

In a prior episode, Eric and Nayla dove into the distinctions between our professional identities, brands and reputation, acknowledging we all have all three!

This week, we talk about what happens when we learn that the professional reputation we have isn't totally aligned with what we want it to be. We might learn this through a 360 review, from a feedback-oriented manager, or from a passing comment from a colleague, and we think it's an opportunity to take a look at what's really going on, and decide what to do about it.

The first thing we always advocate is to gather a broad set of helpful (specific) data…what are people really experiencing of you? There are lots of tools to help with this, and one of our favorites is an open-minded, humble conversation where we seek to understand how people truly perceive us and what the organizational context we're operating in calls for.

Once we have this information, we can make some conscious choices about what we want to do by asking ourselves a series of questions. How is what I've learned about myself helping or hurting me in the pursuit of my goals? What about my behavior am I compelled to do differently? How do I respond to feedback in a way that feels honest to me and sustainable?

Then, we talk about expressing your goals, enlisting help and getting ongoing support/feedback from others, to run small, safe, measurable experiments to see if and how you can get your reputation closer to where you want it to be.

This conversation is full of compassion, stories and humor, because this stuff is both difficult and essential if we want to show up to work in a way that allows us to maximize our impact and our purpose in whatever we're doing.

As always, we'd love to hear about your experiences!

Reach us on www. insidejobthepodcast.com or on Instagram, LinkedIn and Facebook @insidejobpodcast

Inside Job is brought to you by Nayla Bahri and Eric Johnson.

To learn more about us and our work, visit www.insidejobthepodcast.com or email us at [email protected].

To learn more about the ideas and resources discussed in this episode, check out our show notes.

Let's connect!

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We'd love to hear from you.

This week, Eric and Nayla enter the arena to tackle a topic that comes up nearly every week – our clients' concerns about their professional reputation.

While the conversation is free form (and likely to take a few episodes to reconcile), we start by distinguishing between three terms: our identity (how we see and understand ourselves), our professional brand (what we choose to show the world) and our reputation (how the world sees us).

This topic is so highly sensitive because while we may have the impression that we can control and manage our personal brand (even as we flex and adjust it depending on our audience) we cannot always control how people perceive us – our reputation.

Getting comfortable and owning the shadow sides of our reputation as we learn about them allows us to accept ourselves and decide how to engage others in our personal growth. We advocate this through moving away from the secrecy and 'big reveals' of 360 data collection and other forms of building self-awareness, instead moving our reputation into the light through ongoing conversation and more openness with colleagues. Let them in on what you're working on. This way we can have and acknowledge incremental progress as we make it and get help along the way!

The inside job is doing the conscious work of reconciling our desired brand with the way we are perceived, deciding what we can live with in terms of discrepancies between the two. Then, we can decide what to do about it – which we'll explore further in a future conversation.

As always, we'd love to hear about your experiences, so please contact us via insidejobthepodcast.com or on Instagram and Facebook @insidejobpodcast.

Inside Job is brought to you by Nayla Bahri and Eric Johnson.

To learn more about us and our work, visit www.insidejobthepodcast.com or email us at [email protected].

To learn more about the ideas and resources discussed in this episode, check out our show notes.

Let's connect!

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We'd love to hear from you.

In this episode we talk about FOMO one MO time!

In a previous episode on the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) we talked more about the "Fear Of" than the "Missing Out". Yet sometimes we do actually miss out – when we make choices we have to deal with trade-offs and sacrifices. Saying "yes" to one thing does lead to "no" for other things. So how do we deal with the aftermath -- the feelings of remorse and regret that accompany lost opportunities?

It's not dramatic to say that as humans we are wired to experience grief and regret when we lose out on opportunities. This happens even when we know we made the right decision! There is always loss – we can't have it all. The point is not the quality of the choice; the point is that we have to make sense of the emotions we experience when we are denied an opportunity or experience so we can be at peace with the decision.

We offer our perspectives on why we tend to sit in our negative emotions more than the positive ones, and offer some thoughts on how to shift our mindset so we can spend equal (or more) time focusing on what we have gained from our choices. In doing so we can leave options on the table from a place of wisdom and self-confidence and move forward with grace.

We also talk about the importance of remembering that our lives have seasons, and that saying "no" to something now does not mean it won't present itself in a different form at a later point in life – at a time when we are in a better situation to say "yes".

As always, we'd love to hear about your experiences, so please contact us via insidejobthepodcast.com or on Instagram and Facebook @insidejobpodcast

Inside Job is brought to you by Nayla Bahri and Eric Johnson.

To learn more about us and our work, visit www.insidejobthepodcast.com or email us at [email protected].

To learn more about the ideas and resources discussed in this episode, check out our show notes.

Let's connect!

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We'd love to hear from you.

In this episode we tackle the question, "What do I do with the sense I have that I was promised a specific outcome at work as a result of a certain amount of time and energy on my behalf?"

In what will likely be disorienting to many workers, neither of us believe that companies can make promises. Which means that addressing the question at hand requires a meta-analysis of not only each individual circumstance but also the general employer-employee relationship and agreement.

Certainly companies send a lot of signals about how it views its employees, and how it plans to implement a system of reward, recognition, and advancement. Employees are left to interpret those signals and determine how to make sense of their own situation. The result is a complicated web of expectations, entitlements, implied promises, interpreted promises, and probabilities that drastically affect how all parties feel about each other (and themselves) and their future together.

We break that web down and talk about what it means to imply a "promise" or "guarantee", and how employees should think through the ways to interpret and respond. We also highlight the critical differences between promises and possibilities/options, and discuss how specificity can be a bridge to resentment when it comes to these conversations.

We close by talking about how to stay positive when considering our future, and how to avoid becoming cynical when discussing our path forward with our organizations.

As always, we'd love to hear about your experiences, so please contact us via insidejobthepodcast.com or on Instagram and Facebook @insidejobpodcast.

Inside Job is brought to you by Nayla Bahri and Eric Johnson.

To learn more about us and our work, visit www.insidejobthepodcast.com or email us at [email protected].

To learn more about the ideas and resources discussed in this episode, check out our show notes.

Let's connect!

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We'd love to hear from you.

"Comparison is the thief of joy."

In this episode we tackle a topic suggested by one of our listeners – how to handle professional FOMO (the Fear Of Missing Out). FOMO arises when we look around at our colleagues, friends, and even our families and see that they have things that we want. They may be getting promoted faster, paid more, recognized more publicly, or taking on assignments we desire.

FOMO may lead us to feel as though we are not doing enough, or not doing it quickly enough (or both), and may have us experiencing a sense of inadequacy.

Throughout our conversation we unpack FOMO, reminding our listeners (and ourselves) that the picture we are viewing is only a fraction of what's happening in the lives of others. Nayla talks about why we have to be careful comparing our "middle chapters" to other people's "ending chapters", and Eric discusses the importance of noticing if we are using norms or outliers as our benchmarks.

More importantly we recognize that FOMO and envy are related, and rather than to be avoided they are both to be explored. We believe envy can be an important source of information, and that it holds clues that our values need to be revisited and possibly updated. FOMO and envy also serve as an invitation to create personal research questions to further identify information that might help us make better decisions about future roles and opportunities.

And because we are who we are, we talk about the role hummus can play in career advancement and what Matthew McConaughey would say about FOMO.

Inside Job is brought to you by Nayla Bahri and Eric Johnson.

To learn more about us and our work, visit www.insidejobthepodcast.com or email us at [email protected].

To learn more about the ideas and resources discussed in this episode, check out our show notes.

Let's connect!

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We'd love to hear from you.

"How should I start thinking about what I want from the coming year?"

We have been getting this question a lot lately, as we do around this time every year. In this episode we offer our thoughts on the principles we use to guide our clients forward in their thinking and planning.

The principles we offer are:

• Notice what your energy is calling you to do, and go after the things that really matter.
• Approach your life from a place of want, not should. Notice that what is likely to get done is the stuff you actually care about, and not the crud you think you should care about.
• Maintain a generosity of spirit towards yourself. Focus as much on answering the question, "How do I want to be?" as you do on, "What do I want to accomplish?"

As we explore these principles we also introduce the idea of "new year's dissolutions"; we recognize that 2021 isn't giving any of us more hours in a day and we can't start doing new things until we stop doing the things that aren't serving us anymore. Throughout our conversation we continue to offer that we're all just trying to do the best we can with what we've got.

As a bonus we offer our guidance on why you don't want to run the toilet toss at the school carnival and how to avoid kicking your own ass.

Inside Job is brought to you by Nayla Bahri and Eric Johnson.

To learn more about us and our work, visit www.insidejobthepodcast.com or email us at [email protected].

To learn more about the ideas and resources discussed in this episode, check out our show notes.

Let's connect!

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• Facebook

We'd love to hear from you.