057: Making a Career Pivot with Jenny Blake

Pete Mockaitis
Jenny, thanks so much for appearing on the How to be Awesome at Your Job Podcast.

Jenny Blake
Thank you having me, Pete. It’s an honor.

Pete Mockaitis
I understand you’re going on safari shortly. What’s the story there?

Jenny Blake
This is a long-time bucket list item that my mom and I have been talking about for many years. This, to me, feels like a once in a lifetime thing. We kept batting the idea around, but there was never a good time to get all the way to Africa, pay all the money, take all the time off the grid. Finally, this year we just decided, you know what, when is there ever a good time? YOLO, if you will, which I taught my grandma the word YOLO, you only live once, and she told her friends who in their mid 80’s and they started a group called the YOLOs. How cute is that?

Pete Mockaitis
That is precious.

Jenny Blake
Isn’t it?

Pete Mockaitis
We have a group of 80-year-old ladies YOLOing.

Jenny Blake
The YOLOs, yep, and I’m an honorary member. My mom and I are YOLOing our way to Tanzania to do a safari, and I cannot wait.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so cool. I’m sure you’ll have some fun photos on your associated social media accounts, or maybe you won’t. Maybe it’ll be totally unplugged, and that’s a good way to go too.

Jenny Blake
Thanks. I’m going to unplug while I’m there. Maybe when I’m back I’ll pick a select few.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, then make us all jealous.

Jenny Blake
I’ll try not to.

Pete Mockaitis
This is an exciting time here. This episode’s releasing here in September, which it’s new, it’s fresh, Pivot, it’s out. Can you share with us a little bit, what’s the story behind the Pivot, a book, movement, ethos?

Jenny Blake
This book is an answer to the question, “What’s next?” I wrote the book, I wish I had, so many times when I kept hitting what felt like a midlife or quarter-life crisis, when I realized that … It happened to me when I was 20, when I was 24, when I was 27, when I was 29. I thought, you know what? There’s one of two things happening here. One, either there’s something totally wrong with me and I’m never going to be happy, or, two, this midlife or quarter-life crisis feeling of trying to answer the question, “What’s next?” and find more meaning and purpose in our work is accelerating because of all the changes in our economy and the pace of innovation. Maybe we’re all having to answer this question, “What’s next?” more often.

As I started studying this and talking to friends and working on the book, that absolutely proved to be true. In fact, as I was working on Pivot, from the time I first interviewed people to a year to a year and a half later when I went to back-check almost no one had stayed in the same place. That to me was proof and point of what it means to be agile in today’s economy and what it means to see pivot as a natural part of our work lives and not of crisis to be solved. The reason this book is called Pivot is that it’s a natural methodical shift from what’s already working, not a 180 and a totally new an overwhelming panic-inducing direction.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so great. I think the title is excellent, Pivot. It makes me think of Eric Ries and Lean Startup and that sort of thing. It’s not so much, indeed, like you said, we’re not doing a totally new thing, but we’re keeping what matters and what’s core and then making a bit of a shift. Tell us a little bit, I loved your book Bullet Points. I’m just going to dig right into, can you tell us a little bit about running small experiments, again, Lean Startup style, to determine your next career steps. How does that work?

Jenny Blake
Absolutely. I’m glad you brought up Lean Startup, because his book was a big inspiration. He has a chapter on pivoting, but what I noticed was, one, how can people be as agile startups, and, two, we talk about, we hear about pivoting all the time in business and especially Silicon Valley, but how, how do you actually pivot? Then also when we traditionally talk about pivoting, it’s Plan B. The company is about to collapse, the business plan is failing, time to pivot and do something different.

YouTube used to be a video dating site. Twitter used to be a podcasting service. In our careers pivot is the new normal. It’s not just going to be about Plan B anymore. It’s about proactively looking. The pivot method, what the book is based on, is a four-stage method. Plant, double-down. Think of a basketball player. One foot is planted and grounded while the other looks for passing options. The first step, plant. Look at what is already working. That’s the biggest leverage that you have. Then from those resources, scan for new opportunities.

Then, Pete, what you just mentioned is the third stage, pilot. Take the pressure off of having to have the answer right up front and run small career experiments to test what’s next. What small experiments will have low risk but high potential upside? I say a good pilot, it fits the three E’s. Do you enjoy this thing? Can you expand? Is there room in the market? Can you become an expert at it? Do you even want to? A good pilot should test those three things ideally.

Pete Mockaitis
In practice, I love the idea of running a small career experiment. It sounds cool and scientific and data-oriented. I’m into all that sort of stuff, but what would that look like in practice? How does one actually conduct a small experiment?

Jenny Blake
It could mean taking a class. If you work at a company, it could mean taking on a project outside of your core role. At Google we call it these 10 and 20% projects. Actually, I helped create a coaching program as a 10% project that later, when a career development team was created, which didn’t exist at the time, I got a job on that team as my full-time role because I had done this small career pilot.

If someone’s running their own business, it might mean testing a new service or pricing model or even a new type of client before scrapping everything else in the business. It’s thinking of new projects. Maybe for someone else a pilot is a hobby. A pilot could be learning Italian or Tango dancing. Pilots, they don’t all have to be so serious. They can be small action steps. These are some tiny pilots, but schedule lunch with a potential mentor or someone who’s farther ahead than you in your field. Any small thing that moves the game, if we’re using basketball, moves the game forward.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. I’m hearing you there. You’re doing a little something, and then you’re learning from that something, and that informs where you go next. If you determine that you like that direction and the experiment is returning some interesting data that you’d like to pursue further, can you talk to us a little bit about how you go about taking some of those smart risks?

Jenny Blake
Once you’ve piloted, and think of a TV pilot. There’s one episode filmed. Then they test it with audiences and see if the network wants to pick up for a whole season. Same thing with your own pilot. If you use the three E’s and you say, “Yes, I just did this thing with 10% of my time,” whether employed or self-employed, “Yes, I enjoyed it.” “Yes, I loved doing it and I want to become better at it,” and, “Yes, people want this from me.” There’s either room in the company for this or there’s room in the market if you’re self-employed. Then the smart risk comes in, and the reason it’s a smart risk and not a blind leap is that you double down on that pilot, emphasizing the first stage of the pivot method again is double down on what’s working.

Now that you’ve tested with 10%, you can be more confident investing more resources, time, energy or money, into expanding this as a bigger proportion. An example of someone within a company, I just had a coaching client who was thinking about leaving, and she wanted to do coach training and become a career coach. As a result of our conversation, she pitched a role within her company to become an in-house career coach. No, there wasn’t an open role, but they were open to it. Lo and behold, a couple weeks later that’s now her full-time job.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that is exciting. I like that a lot because I think sometimes we think that we’re trapped and it is all or nothing in terms of, “I’m in this role and I don’t like it.” “I’m in this company and I don’t like it.” Therefore I have, it’s like default knee-jerk reaction, look for something else. Sometimes very well there exists opportunities to reinvent what you’re doing right where you are.

Jenny Blake
Absolutely. Yes. That’s the whole key. The biggest mistake that I made, my very short version of the story when I left Google, when my first book Life After College was coming out in 2011, first of all, that was a really scary thing to do, but it wasn’t the scariest, because a year and a half later here I was again wondering what’s next, and this time I didn’t have a paycheck to fund that exploration. I had become the girl who left Google and the girl who left college, but who was I? Who am I? What am I moving toward? What positive message can I send? How can I create an impact, a positive impact in people’s lives.

It was really stressful, because I paused most of my business activities. I was having a lot of personal challenges at the time as well, and so I watched my bank accounts dwindle all the way to zero, to the point where I didn’t know how I was going to pay the rent in two weeks. The biggest mistake that I made was not starting from what was already working, what was right under my feet, as you just said.

Pete Mockaitis
I can resonate with that message or that experience of, “Oh, wow, I don’t have any money. Whoops.” All of a sudden. Thankfully, each of us have gotten on our feet and things have worked out and people resonate with what we have to share. Glad to hear it, that you’re up and moving and on your way.

Shifting gears a little bit, there’s one particular topic I was digging into in your book, and I enjoyed checking out the charts and stuff. It reminded me of some Stephen Covey except fresher and hipper. Can you talk to us a little bit about the high-net growth concept versus the stagnation panic zone worlds and how to apply that in navigating career considerations?

Jenny Blake
Sure. First, thank you for the kind words. These are two concepts very related. One is that as I started to understand who is this person, who is this book for, but moreover, who is the type of person that is making changes more frequently, and let’s not shame and blame them as “entitled millennials,” which seems to be all the rage.

I agree that some amount of job-hopping is reckless. I’m not saying at the extreme cases, but the type of person that will resonate with this, I call them high-net-growth individuals, because we know people who are high net worth. They optimize, are earning money and accumulating wealth. People who are high net growth often will take a pay cut, bootstrap a business, move horizontally within an organization in order to emphasize their learning and growth. For them stagnation is death. For them boredom is physically uncomfortable. This isn’t about them being entitled. It’s actually that once their needs for growth are being met, they turn toward meaning and impact. I call them impacters for short, because ultimately they don’t just want to grow for the sake of growth. They want to know that the work they’re doing is having an impact on their teams, their clients, on society as a whole.

Instead of shaming and blaming them, these people are smart, because they know that other jobs are getting automated and outsourced, and so if they’re not making an impact, they should be looking for something else. One thing for impacters is that I describe what you described, Peter, four operating zones. I call it the risk-o-meter. How are you currently showing up in your career in terms of what opportunities you’re pursuing? Some of you listening may be in your comfort zone, “Work’s fine.” For those who are unhappy at work, it starts as a dull boredom, but then it sometimes gets physically uncomfortable and your body starts screaming at you to make a change. I had one friend who had panic attacks every time she got off the subway on her way to work. It was her body saying, “I need you to leave right now. We’ve over-cooked this steak.” I talk about diminishing returns in the book. That’s definitely a signal for that.

Ideally, if you’re an impacter, you’re in your stretch zone. You have a sense of challenge, adventure, adrenaline, some amount of uncertainty, but you feel stretched and edgy. If you stretch too far, you try to make a pivot that is too sharp, too far from what you’re doing now, it can send you into your panic zone. Some of you listening might, if I said to you, “Quit your job tomorrow. It’s all the rage. All the cool kids online are doing it,” which did sweep the blog-o-sphere a few years ago. If that sends you into a panic and you feel paralyzed, it’s not the right move. It’s too sharp of a turn. Look for smaller pilots to keep you in your stretch zone but also move you forward.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. I like that. I think I’ve been in all of those places myself, reflecting. Even in the same role, consulting at Bain, it’s like, there’s some jobs it’s like, “Oh, this is kind of easy. Do you really need someone with a college degree to do this?” Then other days, maybe the very next day, “Oh, my gosh, I’m in over my head. Help. Please.”

Jenny Blake
Totally. It is really dynamic. I’m glad you said that, Pete, because certainly for impacters who are challenging themselves and in a stretch zone, yeah, it can very easily toggle into panic and back and panic and back. Some of that’s exciting too. Maybe someone’s lower in the zone and they’re in comfort, stagnation, comfort, stagnation, “Do I stay?” “Do I go?” “Do I stay?” “Do I go?” That’s again where the pilot can be helpful to at least test your hypotheses about what’s next.

I have an essay in the book about a pivot paradox of, “Is the grass really greener on the other side?” The thing is one patch, one small pilot, doesn’t always tell you about the whole plot of land. If we switch metaphors for a moment, using a bakery, one piece of cake tells you how the cake tastes, but one piece of cake doesn’t tell you how the bakery runs. A side hustle earning $100 a month is like a piece of cake. It might not really inform how you’re going to do as a full-time entrepreneur, so that’s why it’s important to steadily increase the pilots if you can.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s true. With the metaphors, thinking about the grass, back in Episode 6 we had Arthur Woods, who started Imperative, and talking a lot about purpose at work. One of his nice little quotable gems there was that the grass is not so much always greener on the other side so much as where you water it, where you cultivate it, which could be right there at times. I think that really is clicking for me, so very good.

Before I shift gears, because I want to hear, spending some time with the Google Training Career Development Team I’m sure you learned a ton about people and skills and development and learning and some patterns there. I’d like to shift gears there in a second, but I imagine … You may have another gem or two associated with career strategy and pivot we want to make sure we cover first.

Jenny Blake
The biggest mistake I’ve talked about is not looking at what’s working, and so let’s unpack that for people just a little bit. When you plant, the basketball player that has that plant foot that’s so stable and so rooted, in a career sense, that has four parts. Your strengths, what are you really good at. Your day-to-day, what’s already working in terms of if you’re self-employed, what’s bringing in revenue. If you work at a job, it’s what are you enjoying the most, what’s making the biggest impact. Finances. People who have more savings have a longer runway. They can afford to quit their job and not have anything for six months whereas someone with no savings is on a tighter leash, if you will. They have a shorter pivot runway, so that’s a factor. It’s not always the deciding factor, but it is one.

Then a really important piece that a lot of people skip is one-year vision. I don’t believe in the five-year question, where you see yourself in five years, because given the pace of innovation, I think who the hell knows. None of us really knows what the economic landscape is going to look like, and so instead I find people have an easier time envisioning one year out, maybe two. If you’re in a graduate school program and you know you graduate in two years, fine, go for it. Otherwise, one year from now, how do you want to feel? What does your ideal average day look like? What kind of impact are you making? If somebody gave you a thank-you note, what would it say? If you got an award, what would it be for? If you were asked to give a TED talk and you knew it would be seen by a million people, what would you say?

Really go in depth about this one-year vision. Some people will say, “I don’t know. That’s why I’m reading your book” or come to you for coaching, like, “I don’t know. That’s why I hired you.” I find 100% of the time, when I say to someone, “Just guess. Even if you don’t know, start broad. Then you can always narrow it down, so just start with your known variables and we’ll come back to the unknown variables later in the pivot method.” They know. You know. The answers are in you. You don’t have to know the specifics of how you’re going to get there. In fact, don’t try and say that yet, but most people I think do have a sense for what their ideal vision. The reason sometimes people don’t want to say it out loud or write it down is, it can be scary.

The second we say something we really want our gremlins come rushing in saying, “Who do you think you are? You can’t do that.” “You’re too young.” “You’re too old.” “You’re too dumb.” “You’re too smart.” We have to be willing to sit with those and stretch ourselves and say it anyway.

Pete Mockaitis
I love that, “Just guess.” You tell me if this is accurate. I’m imagining you with clients, and you say, “Just guess,” and they say, “Well, maybe I would …” Then they just start launching into this super-excited rapid-fire detailed description of what they think would be the coolest thing ever.

Jenny Blake
Every time. Every time. There’s not a time that doesn’t happen. There are two other questions. When I say, “What does your gut say,” and they say, “I don’t know.” “Just close your eyes. What does your gut say?” Boom, waterfall of answers. If I say, “What else?” If I say, “What’s your one-year vision and they tell me all the obvious stuff they’ve already thought of, “What else?” “What else?” “What else?”

I have one client, who he’ll say, “Jenny, I don’t know. I’m maxed out.” I say, “Well, you always come up with your most brilliant response once I ask it past that point, so I’m just going to let it hang there. It can be one more thing.” Lo and behold, the “What else?” is the “Aha” moment of the whole coaching session.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yes. That’s so good. That’s so good. Those are powerful questions. Thank you for sharing there.

Time is flying here. I want to shift gears a little bit and hear … You had several good years at Google’s Training Career Development Team, and Google’s legendary for great people. I would just love to get the chance to mine your brain a little bit. What are some of the key takeaways you discovered when it comes to people, skills, learning and development, in that pretty unique role of working with some of the sharpest people in the world?

Jenny Blake
I feel so grateful. It was the best MBA I could have asked for. Yeah, I was at the company for five and a half years while it grew from 6,000 people to 36,000 people. Being in Training and Career Development I crossed paths with many people. I trained a thousand people in my first few years with the company. One of the things that I noticed and part of the later inspiration for the book was that these are, as you said, Pete, such smart, dynamic, kind, friendly, interesting people. Everyone was. You would have someone that went to Harvard but also grew up raising chickens and knew exactly how to hatch a chicken egg. People were so varied in what they did.

Inevitably, a lot would hit plateaus a year or two in at the company, as I did myself. There was a point two and a half years in where I was primarily building PowerPoint strategy docs, which maybe you can relate from your time at [inaudible 00:21:11] Bain. I hated it. This was not my zone of genius. I’m not a great visual thinker. I loved being in front of the room or coaching, interacting with people. In any case, I think so many of us fault ourselves for hitting career plateaus and we think, “There’s something wrong with me.” I certainly did. I felt like I’m at Google and I’m unhappy. I’m one of those entitled millennials that’s never going to be happy because I’m at the dream job at the dream company and I still feel something is missing.

One of my big takeaways was these plateaus are totally natural and as to be expected if you’re a high-net growth individual. Part of the purpose of calling it a pivot is that just to take the stigma out of it. It’s a positive thing. The pivot is the new normal. It’s gender-neutral. It’s judgment-neutral. If we can start using this language in the workplace, I think it will give people more freedom to say, “I’m hitting a plateau. Hey, that’s a good thing. It means I smashed it in my role and getting up to speed. Now what’s next?” That’s totally okay, whereas I think in my experience at Google, people were often afraid to tell their manager, “I’m bored.” “I’m unhappy.” “I’m looking elsewhere.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. That’s good. Not so good that it didn’t feel comfortable, but it’s good that they were able to make that leap there. Interesting. Part of it is just the normalcy, the frequency with which it occurred, that people just needed to make a shift after some time, and that’s good, normal, sensible, no need to stress it or judge about it and to make a switch. Any other observations associated with seeing super-sharp people learning and acquiring skills?

Jenny Blake
The hunger for learning is great. I just did an interview with Kevin Kelly on my Pivot Podcast, and he writes in his new book, The Inevitable, that we’re all now in a perpetual newbie state. We can experience this. Our phone, the whole operating system upgrades get pushed out every three to six months. Then our apps, the interface will change. Even when you think you know how to use, and let’s say the Google calendar app, they’ll refresh the whole interface and then now you’ve got to learn it again.

The people who are the most successful … Google had a huge global training program, and they even have a program called G2G, which is Googlers Teaching Googlers, which meant you didn’t have to be anointed, part of the training team, in order to lead a training about something that you’re interested in. That exchange of peer-to-peer information was not only good for the learners but good for the trainers.

For anyone listening, if you have a skill and an expertise, once you’re at a certain level you can then teach the material, and in doing so learn it even better. I found that was a great example of a career pilot, because not everybody wanted to be a full-time trainer, but if an engineer was able to teach Python one hour a week, it often gave them a sense of being able to connect with others and make an impact even if they didn’t want that to be their full-time role.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear you. That’s fascinating there. Everything is changing around. That reminds me, when I worked at Kmart, that was my first job … Talk about careers. When I was working at Kmart, Pantry Pete they called me, it was so funny how often I would get a customer, and they would be angry at me and they would say, “You moved everything around on me.” I think that that’s an experience that I’m having as I see things change, and sometimes I think, “Oh, cool, finally about time. It’s about time they fixed or upgraded that in this way.” Other times, I’m just irritated because I liked it the way it was, and now it’s different, and I am that cranky customer complaining at the Kmart. Did you discover any themes or patterns associated with those who were more adaptable and quick to change and roll with things?

Jenny Blake
Yeah, absolutely. I think for some reason sometimes we hit these points where we think we’re supposed to know. The guy at Kmart, that’s such a great example. I can think about teaching my grandma how to use the iPhone. Sometimes she gets frustrated. I understand because she’s learning so much from scratch. I think part of staying agile is saying, “I’m willing to fumble through this.”

Pete, before we hit, “Record,” I was telling you I still edit my podcast. I taught myself GarageBand, and, yeah, in the beginning I was bad at it. I didn’t know the first thing. I had to Google everything. It was guesswork and in the beginning feels awkward. It takes twice as long, and it feels like you have a blindfold on with new software or new skills.

There is the levels of learning. There’s four levels of learning, and it follows a dip, which is that unconscious incompetence. You don’t know what you don’t know. Then you go into this dip, conscious incompetence. You’re fully aware of how much you don’t know. As you start learning a new skill, you come into conscious competence. Think about the 16-year-old learning to drive. They got it but they got to be vigilant. Finally, unconscious competence, the new skill is integrated. If we can just come to terms with the fact that we’re going to go through this dip before we come out the other side stronger and better, cool. I think it can make those dips much more bearable. Again, not to be seen as a personal flaw or shortcoming but a sign of progress.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, lovely. Thank you. Anything else you want to make sure that you share before we shift gears into the fast phase?

Jenny Blake
I think that’s good for now. I’ll let you know if I think of anything else.

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s do it. Could you start us off by sharing a favorite quote, something that inspires you again and again?

Jenny Blake
Joan Baez said, “Action is the antidote to despair.” I love that. I turned it for myself. I say in the book, “Build first. Courage second.” Don’t expect to feel courageous first when you are making a big change. Just start building. Then the courage cookies come down from the universe.

Pete Mockaitis
Tasty. How about a favorite study or piece of research you find yourself thinking about or citing often?

Jenny Blake
One thing that surprised me the most working on Pivot was that we hear the statistic that the average employee tenure is now three to four years. That was not my experience working on the book. Maybe I attract “pivoty” people, but whether by their choosing or by circumstance, people were pivoting more frequently than that. I would even say every two years if not more frequently than that. I want to say a lot of people pivoted within the year I had interviewed them. Some worked at companies that got acquired and then they were fired, or they got hired and poached for another company or they started their own business, or they folded it. That’s a piece of research that I’m most curious about and that I feel is the most inaccurate at the moment.

Of course, I was at Google five and a half years, but I pivoted internally to a different role, roles within that time. Even if someone’s worked at the same company for a period of time, they’re often pivoting within that.

Pete Mockaitis
I see. How about a favorite book?

Jenny Blake
Favorite book, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder by Nassim Taleb.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. Can you tell us just one or two sentences about that?

Jenny Blake
What I love is that he captures it in the subtitle of the book, which is that, and he’s very rigorous and he’s an economics and a former stock trader, so he has a really cool brain, but he’s also great with language. The whole premise, it’s the cliché, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” but he really makes the case for anti-fragile organisms, things that aren’t just resilient in chaos or … A tree is resilient. The wind blows and it stays standing, but it doesn’t fundamentally change. Humans are anti-fragile. When something knocks us down, barring our death, we are much stronger on the other side and much more adept to handle adversity in the future.

Pete Mockaitis
I just like that word, “anti-fragile.”

Jenny Blake
It’s a great one. I know.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s in my mix now. Thank you.

Jenny Blake
Totally. It inspired a lot of pivot, a lot of my thinking. I was like, “How do we be more anti-fragile? How do I be more anti-fragile?” I was so rocked by the change process that I felt I was not very resilient at handling change, and so … Yeah, the book really inspired me and a mindset shift for me.

Pete Mockaitis
Very cool. How about a favorite habit or personal practice of yours that’s really boosted your effectiveness?

Jenny Blake
Meditation, which I know can sound like, “Go eat your spinach. Meditate daily,” but I really think … I did a podcast episode for my show on how meditation rewired my brain. I’ve been doing it for three years now. I aim for 20 minutes in the morning, but sometimes it’s just 10, and I do. I feel calmer, happier, more focused, more strategic. It has changed my life truly and made me more anti-fragile and more resilient.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. How about maybe a fan favorite tidbit that you share that gets people nodding their heads, taking notes, re-tweeting, Kindle book highlighting, what are some of those gems that you contribute that folks tend to quote?

Jenny Blake
Something from my own work?

Pete Mockaitis
Right.

Jenny Blake
I think one quotable is, “Your body is your business,” that I recognized once I became self-employed that I’m my own employee, and if I’m tired or sleep-deprived or hung over or eating sugary foods and I’m operating at 50%, well, then so is my business. That statistic was unacceptable to me. At a big company like Google if you’re having an off day, that day is absorbed into the other 30 or 60,000 people that work at the company. I really pay a lot of attention to sleep, my schedule, working out, connecting with friends. I treat these as equal priorities to the work itself, because I know that they serve the work in the end. I’m far more strategic and more efficient when I work in my best energy windows than when I try and force myself to do things that are ultimately going to lead to burnout.

Pete Mockaitis
Indeed. What’s the best way to find you if folks want to learn more? Would you point them to your website or Twitter, or where should they start?

Jenny Blake
Sure. Pete, I’m happy to offer for your listeners, I’ll put a special page on the Pivot website. If you go to PivotMethod.com/Awesome I’ll include my Ideal Day Mad Lib exercise, which is a really fun five pages of a Mad Lib to envision what your ideal day looks like. I’ll share that on PivotMethod.com/Awesome. I’m also at JennyBlake.Me. We have a Career Path Finder Course for people who do want to make a change, a pivot, a total amazing team of Pivot coaches, so that’s all at PivotMethod.com, and the book is on Amazon and wherever books are sold. I’m on Twitter at Jenny_Blake.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, perfect. Thanks for the special bonus.

Jenny Blake
Sure.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s pretty cool. I feel so legit. Any maybe favorite final challenge or call to action for those seeking to be more awesome at their jobs?

Jenny Blake
There are two questions I always like to ask myself, and I think you can ask yourself really every week, every day, or for every project, and that is, “What is one small next step that you can take in the next week,” and, “What is one next step that would make the biggest impact?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Thank you. Jenny, this has been such a treat. Thank you so much for this. I wish you tons of luck with this book release week and all the insanity and hopefully fun opportunities that emerge there and on down the road.

Jenny Blake
Thank you so much, Pete. Huge thanks to everybody for listening.