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KF #30. Self-Development Archives - How to be Awesome at Your Job

1061: Making Yourself More Promotable by Building Your Presence with Lorraine K. Lee

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Lorraine K. Lee shares how to master your presence so that you can stand out and be recognized.

You’ll Learn

  1. How to make sure your work is seen by the right people in the right places
  2. The TEA framework for building great virtual presence
  3. The trick to delivering a unique and powerful introduction

About Lorraine

Lorraine K. Lee is an award-winning keynote speaker and the best-selling author of Unforgettable Presence: Get Seen, Gain Influence, and Catapult Your Career (Wiley).

Lorraine brings unique expertise in empowering both high-potential and established leaders to supercharge their presence, influence, and impact. She is passionate about helping ambitious professionals go from invisible to unforgettable in the modern workplace, and her frameworks have been adopted by Fortune 500 companies and other globally recognized organizations including Zoom, Amazon, Cisco, and McKinsey & Company. 

With hundreds of thousands of LinkedIn followers, she is recognized as a LinkedIn Top Voice in workplace communication and presence. When Lorraine isn’t speaking, she teaches popular courses at Stanford Continuing Studies and LinkedIn Learning that reach a large global audience.

Before starting her own company, Lorraine spent over a decade as a founding editor at top tech firms like LinkedIn and Prezi, where she worked on core products including the LinkedIn Daily News module and LinkedIn Newsletters.

Lorraine’s insights have been featured in media outlets including CNBC, Forbes, Inc., Bloomberg, Fast Company, and Entrepreneur.

Resources Mentioned

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Lorraine K. Lee Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Lorraine, welcome!

Lorraine Lee
Thank you. I’m so excited to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I’m excited to be chatting as well. And I think presence is something that comes up often with listeners. And I’d like for you to start us with a particularly surprising or counterintuitive discovery you’ve made about professionals and presence while putting together your book, Unforgettable Presence.

Lorraine Lee
Oh, gosh. I feel like so many things that I had to learn the hard way over my career, but I would say one of the biggest surprises for me in my career was that doing really great hard work is not enough to get promoted, to get noticed, and to have a presence at work.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Really great, hard work is not enough. Can we get noticed and advance without it?

Lorraine Lee
You definitely need it. It’s definitely a foundational piece, but you need to take it one step further. So, yes, you are viewed as a great worker, someone who executes well, delivers great results, and you need to make sure that you have the presence, and that you are making sure that your work is being seen in the right places and has a presence in the right Slack channels, for example, in emails, and in all the places, essentially, where important people are who need to see your work to know about it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And could you give us a story that illustrates this? We could see someone who was working hard, it wasn’t doing the trick, but then they did the other stuff and away they went.

Lorraine Lee
Of course. So, this is the intro that I talk about in my new book, Unforgettable Presence. And I start off sharing my experience working at LinkedIn. So, I spent most of my formative twenties at LinkedIn. It was my dream job. I worked on really exciting projects, very high-profile projects. I was well-liked by my colleagues. I liked my coworkers as well. By all accounts, looking on paper, it should have been, “Oh, of course, she’s going to get promoted at some point.”

But as hard as I tried, once I was in that mid-level position, it was really hard for me to make that jump to senior leadership, and it never ended up happening for me. And I couldn’t figure out why, I was like, “Oh, everything seems to be correct that I’m doing.” And it wasn’t until I left LinkedIn and I had more time to reflect and really think about what went wrong that I realized presence was a big piece of it, making sure I was advocating for myself, making sure I was visible, and really making sure that what I was known for in my career brand was reflecting what I wanted it to be.

And so, thankfully, that self-reflection allowed me to approach my next job with more intention, with more strategy so that I ended up getting promoted after one year there into a director-level role. And I really attribute that to all the lessons I learned while I was at LinkedIn, and all the things I saw that I could have done better. I brought that to my next company and was able to move up much faster.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, as you reflect on your time at LinkedIn, are there any particular face-palm moments of embarrassment as you think, “Oh, my gosh, I was so young and foolish and naive. I definitely should have done X, or I definitely should not have done Y”? Could you give us a couple bullet points on just some of the very clear in-hindsight retrospect specific things that were missed opportunities?

Lorraine Lee
There was one conversation I remember I had with a former coworker. And she, again, all similar to me, like well-liked, did great work. She had been at the company a little bit longer than me. And I always wondered in the back of my head, “How come she hadn’t gotten promoted yet in all the time that I knew her?”

And I remember one day, we get into the office and they announced promotions and she gets promoted. And I was so excited for her, so happy for her, I went up to her, congratulate her to talk to her about it. And I asked her, I’m kind of like, “This is so great. Like, I know you’ve been wanting this. Like, what happened? Did you have to do anything for it?”

And she shared this piece of advice with me. She said, “Oh, my manager didn’t even know that I wanted to get promoted.” And I feel like that was like a huge, just like, oh-my-gosh moment where, to me, of course, I’m like, “Oh, doesn’t everyone want to get promoted? Everyone wants to move up, and my manager knows I’m ambitious, right?”

And the fact that she had to say it, I feel like that was a huge game-changer for me in terms of like, “Oh, you have to be really explicit.” And I think even while I was at LinkedIn, I wasn’t explicit enough even after I learned that. But like later on when I moved to Prezi, I was like, “This is my goal. You know, I’m trying to reach it within a year. These are like the steps I’m going to take to get there. What do you think?” you know, checking in with my manager.

And so, I feel like that’s a big one that people don’t realize, is that there are certain assumptions we can make, like, “Oh, I’ve worked at a company for a certain number of years. Oh, I’m working on this really cool project. Definitely that’s enough to get promoted,” but there’s so much more that goes into it behind the scenes. But first things first, make it clear that that’s what you want in the first place.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, absolutely. And it’s so funny. I think that there’s a macro lesson there just in terms of assumptions. And I think it’s just our human nature to think, “Well, but of course, isn’t this what everybody wants?” And it’s not. We all want very different things for very different reasons in terms of some people say, “Do not, under any circumstances, promote me. I am loving the groove that I’m in,” talking to customers, or doing some coding, or doing the sales thing instead of leading people doing the thing. It’s like, “Do not, under any circumstances, promote me. I am digging it.”

And I think it’s so funny, just the weirdest flashback. I remember I was running a model UN Conference in college, and I got a stern email from one of the advisors of the groups that was coming to our conference, and she said, “Uh, I’m so distraught that we’re bringing all these students, but we don’t have any Security Council countries.” It’s like, “Oh, well, you didn’t put down that you want any Security Council countries.”

And you might assume that, of course, if you’re doing a model UN Conference, you want the Security Council countries. They’re awesome. But some people find that very intimidating to be in a small group of 15, you know, doing the thing. And so, I was like, “Oh, do you want these countries?” Like, “Well, yes, please.” And so away you go.

So, I think that’s huge right there, is we have assumptions about, “Well, of course, everyone wants to be promoted,” or fill in the blank for anything in your career. That’s huge right there.

Lorraine Lee
That’s such a good call. I talked to someone recently and she said her husband has, similarly, like you just said, like he does not want to get promoted because it means that he has to go into the office a few days a week. Like, his manager has really wanted to promote him and he’s like fighting it like, you know, at all costs. He’s like, “I don’t want to get promoted. I don’t want to go into the office.” So, like you said, everyone has different life circumstances and goals at different points in life.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And then, thinking from the other perspective of the manager, when the manager sees there is a big complex, tricky project coming up, exactly the sort of thing that doing well could make folks think, “Oh, maybe we should promote this person,” they don’t know. It could feel like, “Hmm, I could present this to Lorraine, but would that feel like an imposition?” Like, “Oh, more work and stress and responsibility. I’m not into that.” So, they don’t even know, “Would that be a welcome or rejected?”

Well, any other face-palm insights from your time at LinkedIn?

Lorraine Lee
I think another one was the way you present your work also needs to be strategic. So, it’s not just, “Oh, I’m going to be visible and I’m going to list off every single thing I did,” or, “Oh, I’m going to be visible and I’m going to, like, shoot off a quick email.” It actually takes, it’s a skill, which I think is also quite interesting and it took me a while to realize too.

It’s a skill to learn how to position your work, to understand the stakeholders who are receiving the information, to know how to talk yourself up, talk your team up in a way that others will embrace. And so, LinkedIn, we sent out a weekly newsletter on behalf of the whole team. And that was really great practice for me to see, “Oh,” I would put my information in and then we had someone on the team just editing the whole thing.

And sometimes he would cut things out. Sometimes he would rephrase things. And, similarly, like when I would send out an email on a project I was working on, I would show it to my manager, and say, “Hey, what do you think of the way I’m presenting this? Does this work, given the audience? Am I presenting this well?” And so, he or she, depending on my manager at the time, would go in and make edits. And so, that was also very eye-opening, how much work goes into those kinds of emails. It’s not just like a quickly dash off thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so let’s speak about that for a moment because I think it’s quite possible there’s a segment of listener who says, “Oh, that sounds miserable. And are we trying to get something done here, Lorraine? We’re trying to add value, solve problems, build, ship stuff, build features, delight customers. And we’re fiddling over how we’re wording an internal email. Is this really time well spent?” How do you respond to this?

Lorraine Lee
It is. I get it. I get you’re like, “Oh, there’s just so many other things we could be doing,” but that’s a huge part of, like I said at the beginning, like working hard, getting cool things done. I mean, that’s great. But if no one knows about it, like what’s it all for? And so, I like to use the analogy, “If a tree falls in the forest, did it make a sound?” If you worked hard, but no one knows about it, like, did it even happen, right?

So, we have to, again, mindset shift, like, in order to take control of our career, to be the CEO of our own careers, I talk about in the book, to be more intentional with our career, there’s a bunch of different puzzle pieces that go into it, and advocating for ourselves, being more visible with our work, that’s one of them. And it’s going to benefit the team. It’s going to benefit everyone when they know what you’re doing, when they can help connect dots, when you can connect dots, and really understand the impact that your team is having.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, tell us what would be perhaps your recommended first puzzle piece, immediate initial steps in building an unforgettable presence?

Lorraine Lee
The first thing is mindset and understanding the concept of a career brand. And so, a lot of us, we, or, you know, speaking for myself, you enter the workforce, and you just come from school, and you think there’s sort of a set path for you, “I’m going to work hard up in here for two years. I’m going to get promoted, and keep moving up the ladder.” And that’s just not the way that corporate America works at this point.

And so, to understand that and to have the mindset of, “Okay, I need to be in control of my career, be the CEO of my own career, and really take things into my own hands. So, I’ll just be passive,” and let things happen to you, I think that’s the first step. The second thing I would say is understanding this concept of a career brand, which is essentially a personal brand, but a reframe in a way that maybe makes people feel less like cringy about it.

So, personal brand is something we all have already and it’s essentially our reputation and what people say about us when we’re not in the room. So, thinking through your personal brand or career brand and understanding, “Okay, how do people currently perceive me? And how might I want them to perceive me in the future?”

Now, if I had done this exercise at LinkedIn, I would have realized, “Okay, the way that people are probably describing me, executor, hard worker, fast worker,” all these adjectives are not necessarily the adjectives that people use to describe leaders, which would be more like strategic, visionary, cross-functional collaborator, whatever it is. And so that’s really critical, too, to make sure that you are just self-aware of like where you’re at currently. And once you know that you can start making adjustments and moving towards that future self, whatever your goals are.

And then the third piece of that, I think, is your virtual presence and realizing that that’s a really important piece. Your virtual presence on video, your virtual presence on LinkedIn, those can sometimes be even more important than our in-person presence because we’re meeting most people virtually first. And so, to be intentional about that and think about, “How do I want to show up in those spaces?” is really critical.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot when you talked about the brand keywords there, like hardworking, conscientious, detail-oriented, any number of these words. These sound like good things, like, “Hey, would you rather your employee be these things or the opposite of these things?” “Well, yes, yes, yes. Hardworking, we want that, certainly.”

And yet, as you’ve nicely highlighted, those are not the same things as what we think of in terms of an executive. And I think that, in a way that is applicable for any brand that you encounter, like there’s a time and a place for Chipotle. Think about eateries. And then there’s a time and a place for, say, Chick-fil-A, or Starbucks. So, these are big, well-known brands. And yet, we can say good things about each of them, and they may not be the match for what you’re seeking in a given gathering, moment, encounter, etc.

Lorraine Lee
Yeah. And it also depends, like, “What are you striving for?” Yeah, if you like being a hard worker, you like where you’re at, and all those are positive adjectives that describe you currently, great. But if you’re wanting, like me, like I was to advance and to be seen as a leader, you have to make some adjustments and change your perception in other people’s eyes.

Pete Mockaitis
So, let’s just get an example here. So, if we’re thinking, okay, all right. I want folks to be putting the adjective strategic onto me, to have these things tied together in terms of my brand vibe, what might I do in the course of living my career life to get strategic associated to me?

Lorraine Lee
There’s a lot of different things you can do. I think one of the first things I always say, like when you have a goal you’re working towards something, is to lean on the people around you, and, again, like make your goals known, but also build those relationships at work so that people, they know your goals. I call it, in the book, a feedback circle.

So, find your feedback circle. Who are the people who you know want you to succeed, who are going to give you honest, truthful feedback, who are going to look out for you? And as you start doing things with them, like, “Oh, I’m going to be presenting in a meeting next week, and I want to be seen as more strategic. Can you observe my presentation and let me know if you feel like, you know, I’m closer to that or do you feel like I’m still too in the weeds?”

So, the more you can bring people into what you’re trying to do and give you the feedback, they’re going to be looking out for you because I think the hardest thing to do when you are trying to change someone’s perception of what you want to be known for, is that you need other people’s feedback. Like, you don’t want to operate in a vacuum.

So, in the book, I talk about the EPIC career brand framework as a way to start thinking through what your brand is, how you want to position yourself. And so, EPIC stands for experiences, personality, identity, community. So, that C piece, knowing how your network sees you, knowing how others see you, that’s going to be critical and making sure whatever it is that you want to change to, like you’re staying aligned.

And then I had the chance to interview Dorie Clark in the book as well. She’s amazing. And she talked about the brand as raindrops and, like, you have to keep sort of repeating, dripping, you know, multiple mentions of your brand, and keep mentioning it, especially if you’re trying to change it, over time in many different places. It’s not like a flip of a switch, all of a sudden, you’re strategic. It’s going to take a little bit of time, consistent actions, consistent visibility, and just staying consistent with your actions in order for other people to see you like that.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear that, that makes a lot of sense there. We’ve had Dorie on the show a few times. She’s wonderful.

Lorraine Lee
Oh, good.

Pete Mockaitis
With the multiple exposures, that makes all the difference in the world because if it’s a one-time thing, you mentioned, like, “Wow, Lorraine was really sharp today. That was cool. Huh, I guess she had a good night’s sleep.” It’s almost like, “That’s sort of a one-off. That’s an exception,” versus, “Oh, I guess that’s who you are now. Cool.”

Lorraine Lee
Yeah, exactly. Like, it just takes so many repetitions and, especially, again, like so many of us are hybrid, virtual, like we are just so distracted. There are so many different places now we can communicate, we can see each other, and so you have to just keep going, and you got to, like, find all the right channels, and make sure it’s repeated constantly.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, the P of EPIC is personality. So, Lorraine, are we supposed to change our personality? Isn’t that inauthentic and fake? What do we do in there?

Lorraine Lee
Definitely do not need to change your personality. So, the personality piece is, yes, your personality and the soft skills that make you who you are. So, for example, I’m introverted. I know Dorie is introverted as well. And I talk about introversion all the time on LinkedIn. Like, that’s part of my brand. And I want people to know that I’m introverted because me being introverted means that I work a little bit differently. I think a little bit differently than perhaps what you conventionally would expect to see in corporate America.

And so, having people know whether you’re a more serious person, whether you’re like the culture builder and you’re always bringing energy, like that also impacts, like, “You have a big project? Hmm, we need certain personality types to keep this all going, to keep this moving.” You want people to know who you are and within reason. Like, you’re still in a professional setting, but showing more of your true self can also help people connect with you, and then know more about what you bring to the table.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, let’s just say that I have a personality that some might call quirky or eccentric or weird, to be less positive. If we find ourselves where that’s true, just the way we are is distinctive, but maybe not in an advantageous way, what are we to do with that?

Lorraine Lee
I think If you have a personality, and it’s like rubbing a bunch of people the wrong way, and maybe it’s like something about the way you’re communicating, that might be worth revisiting. Like, what is going on? But if you have a quirky personality, a “weird” personality, I hope that you find a place that values those things because we don’t want to work with people who are all exactly the same as us. That’s not going to lead to better business results. And I just feel like work is more boring that way, right, when everyone is the same.

And so, don’t try to change your personality to fit everyone else. But if your personality, there’s something about it where you’re like constantly getting negative feedback or things are coming across a certain way, it isn’t helping your career, then I think maybe you probe a little bit deeper, try to understand how others might be perceiving you. It might not be your intention.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. That’s well said. Like, there could be just a couple things, like, “When you say words like awesome and cool beans, that doesn’t feel professional enough for our executive-level attorney clients.” And so, it’s like, “Oh, well, that’s easy. No problem. That’s a quick tweak there,” versus like, “The way you are.”

Lorraine Lee
You’re being.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, “The way you speak and be, seems like it would vibe more with a writing room of a comedy TV series than in a super buttoned-up professional services environment.”

Lorraine Lee
We all have different sides of our personality. So, like I have a more professional side of me that’s different than how I am with my friends, which is different than how I am with my family, and so that’s okay. Like, you can still be bringing different parts of your authentic self to those different situations, but, you know, sometimes it might require some tweaking or just adjusting some things just based on the context and setting that you’re in, like you said.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, speaking of letters standing for things, how’s that for a segue? You mentioned the UPI, a unique and powerful introduction. Tell us, what is this? Why is it important? And then I want lots of demonstrations.

Lorraine Lee
Sure. The UPI, I came up with this concept because I felt like, in a lot of meetings that I was in, a lot of networking events that I would go to, the introduction felt like such a throwaway moment for a lot of people. They would either just kind of rush off, you know, mention their job title, their company, or like, “Oh, I’ve been at the company for three years,” but that didn’t really tell me much.

And you don’t have to be speaking for, like, five minutes and having a super long-winded introduction, but adding just a little bit something extra, I feel like goes such a long way in others better understanding the value you offer, who you are, more of your personality. You come across as more authoritative, depending on what information you’re going to include.

And so, I started experimenting with this myself when I was at Prezi. So, I used to say something along the lines of, “Oh, I lead the editorial team at Prezi.” Well, okay, to me, I know what that means, but to someone who’s never worked with an editorial team before, like, “What the heck do you do?” So, then I changed it to, “I lead the editorial team, which means that I collaborate with a lot of business leaders such as yourself. I help them create educational content through Prezi. And then we distribute that to help inspire our millions of users.”

And so, with that, you now understand what I actually do. You understand some context, like, “Wow, you have hundreds of millions of users. Like, that’s a very powerful thing and an impressive thing,” so there’s like a little bit credibility there. And now you’ve learned a little bit more about me. And so, there’s a lot of different ways that you can approach that.

But I wanted people to, again, like intentionality is a key theme, but to be more intentional, to think, “Okay, every moment that we have with someone is a chance to leave an impression, to create unforgettable presence.” And we’re meeting new people all the time, right, new colleagues, clients, partners, like whoever it is. And so, that’s what the UPI was built for; unique and powerful introduction to remind people to think a little bit more about this important moment.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’m thinking back to occasions in which, you know, a project team is assembled from across different departments, and so folks are meeting each other for the first time, like a kickoff meeting, and so everyone goes around and they say a little bit about, you know, who they are. And it’s funny, I remember, I always found that very boring.

So, when you say that, “Hey, here’s an opportunity to be unforgettable,” I’m thinking, “Well, wow, we’re really raising the bar here associated with what is a common practice.” So, part of it is just defining terms. So, I know with that, “What does editorial team mean?” Okay, I can really visualize that in terms of what that look, sounds, feels like in your daily practice. Are there any other particular principles or pointers that you would suggest when sharing your unique and powerful introduction?

Lorraine Lee
There’s definitely an opportunity to use more of, like, a mission or vision statement for yourself. So not just job title. But, for example, like when I meet people now, like I might say something like, “Oh, I’m super passionate about helping rising leaders and ambitious professionals go from overlooked to unforgettable.”

So, I’m sort of, I’m stating the problem I solve. I’m not even mentioning my job title. And someone might say, “Oh, like how interesting. Tell me more. Like, how do you do that?” “Well, I speak, I teach, etc.” So, it gives you kind of an opening there. There’s also an opportunity to mention something personal about yourself.

So, I’ve definitely been on calls where someone’s sharing their title, the company, “Oh, and I have three dogs and in my spare time, I really love to bake.” “Oh, great. Okay. Some personal information. Now I kind of get to know you a little bit more on a less surface level and maybe we have a hobby in common that I just learned about, or at least I can, you know, turn to you, ask you for more about that later.”

So, there’s a lot of different ways that you can approach it. There’s no sort of cookie-cutter template to use. And I think that’s the beauty of it is that you might have one UPI for a networking event, you might have a different UPI in a team meeting, and you might have a different UPI on a client call.

Pete Mockaitis
And what you just did there is it sounds like you have thoughtfully crafted and practiced, or at least experienced saying it many times, what you just said there, as opposed to, “Hey, so tell me about yourself, or what do you do?” Like, this doesn’t just pop into your head and out of your mouth impromptu willy-nilly.

Lorraine Lee
Think about where you are, what would make sense given the people who are there. Practice, like you said, because sometimes when it’s, you know, you’re not just saying your name and the company you work for, it’s a little bit.

Unusual, so it might take a little bit practice. And then you can also, again, like leverage your manager, your friends, your family, like, “Hey, here’s how I’m planning on introducing myself. What do you think?” So, again, like I’m so big on feedback. And so, if you’re not really sure like, “Oh, is this too long? Is this the right information to include?” bounce the ideas around.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, can we have some more demonstrations?

Lorraine Lee
Okay. So, one might be, like, I’m on the engineering team, and I work on, or so some people might say like, “Oh, I’m an engineer,” at whatever company you work at. Okay, well, there’s lots of engineers who work on a lot of different products. So, “I’m an engineer working on the homepage,” is already more information, right? And, “You can turn to me anytime you have a feature request or you see a bug, like, I’m the person to go to.”

“Okay, great. Now I know what to go to you for. And now I also,” again, like that added credibility, “Like, you’re not just like any engineer at the company. You are working on this. You are the lead of the project,” for example. So that might be one.

But there are other folks, too, who are like, instead of just saying like, “I’m in customer service,” “I make sure that our customers remain satisfied, and I cut down whatever complaints by like 20%,” whatever it is. You can add a metric in there, for example. But explaining what you do without saying the exact title, I think, is another nice approach, where it’s just a little bit more conversational as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it seems like some of the ingredients here are, it’s not just title or department. We have the specificity necessary to be able to really visualize what’s up, what’s going on. You might throw in a result. You might throw in what you’re personally passionate about. There might be a metaphor.

Any thoughts for how short is too short and how long is too long?

Lorraine Lee
I would say a few sentences is good, no more than a few sentences. I think you don’t want to, you can kind of feel it, right, if you’re just like still talking, and you’re like, “I’ve been kind of explaining about what I do for a while.” Like, you want to have some back and forth. So, you want to just give them enough where you create some intrigue, and then that creates some conversation. Like, they want to ask, “Oh, tell me more,” or, “Oh, that’s super helpful to know. Like, here’s what I do.”

And so, I think, again, like depending on the context, I think networking events, you can be a little bit more mysterious or kind of present the problem that you solve. It’s a little bit different maybe at a company where you might want to just describe more what exactly it is that you do on a daily basis. But, yeah, I think, you know, trust your gut.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. But, yeah, and that’s how you learn whether or not it’s resonant or off-putting, and how you have different versions for different audiences, so that’s really handy. Can you tell us, in the world of a virtual presence, are there any top do’s or don’ts you’d highlight for folks?

Lorraine Lee
Yes, so many. I will start off talking about the TEA method. So that stands for tech energy and aesthetics. You can tell, Pete, I like a lot of acronyms. So, TEA stands for tech, energy, and aesthetics, and those are the three things that you need to think about before you jump on a call. And I came up with that because I feel like virtual presence, video presence, can sometimes feel very overwhelming.

Like, there’s a lot of things you can do and there’s a lot of things we see, like we see like podcasters with fancy backgrounds and mood lighting and all this and that, but we don’t really need that in order to make an impression, to stand out, to create a strong presence. And so, with tech, you’re going to want a good microphone, a good webcam, maybe some software to help enhance the sound, whatever it is.

Energy, you’re going to want to make sure that you are having energy on the call, communicating in such a way that allows you to develop and build relationships. And then aesthetics, you want to make sure that you look good on camera, too. And so that includes things like your framing, your lighting, and going back to energy, like body language is also an important one, I forgot to mention.

But there’s a lot of different things that go into those categories, but focus on those three, get the basics down and you will be off to a really good start, better than most people. Even after all these years remote, you would think everyone has it figured out, but that’s not the case.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, those are nice. And maybe if we could hear perhaps a couple of sub-bullets there. With regard to tech, any do’s or don’ts? Like, you see all the time, like, is the lighting bad? Or is microphone troubling? Or what would you zoom in on as some very common things that need corrected?

Lorraine Lee
Sure. The first one, I would say, if you have to get anything new that you don’t already have, microphone is probably the most important because if someone has bad video, if you can hear them, you can still be engaged. If you can’t hear them and someone just, it’s just chopping in and out, I’m sure we’ve all been on those calls, it’s so frustrating. You’re like, “I can’t, I’m sorry. We have to reschedule this.”

So having a microphone because our microphones in our laptops are not great. That’s key. And then I think, with your webcam, or having a webcam in the first place, I think is also really important because I still see this. A lot of people will have their monitor here and their laptop camera here, and so they’re looking at their monitor and they’re not making eye contact. And eye contact is a key part to aesthetics, making sure we look good and also energy, too, making sure we’re connecting.

And so, that’s another one that I see a lot of that people are sort of defaulting to the monitor, but they don’t have a camera there. And it’s just not a very good experience for the person on the other side. It’s really hard to stay connected that way.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I hear you there. And, well, I’ll restrain myself from just rattling off tons of things because I love this. But, if I may, I’ve got a fun little tidbit called Elgato Prompter, which means that I am able to look at you and the camera at the same time, which is so fun for me and people. They’re like, “It looks like you’re looking right at me. How is that even possible?” So, that’s just really fun.

And then with regard to the choppiness, that’s usually a matter of internet reliability, connectivity, bandwidth. And talk about assumptions, I assumed everybody in the world use Speedtest.net on a daily basis. They don’t. So, that’s just a PSA there.

You’ve got a tip for how to avoid a “resting business face” on calls. First of all, what is this phenomenon of resting business face? Why do I want to avoid it? And how do I do so?

Lorraine Lee
So, RBF is a play on the other RBF. And, basically, when we’re on video, I mean, most of us are at home or in some sort of relaxed environment. And it’s so easy to forget what our expression looks like when we are passive listening to someone else. And so many of us do, because we’re relaxed, right? We’re just like kind of at home, just leaning back in our chair, like furrowing our eyebrows, or whatever it is that we’re doing.

And even if you have, yeah, like, a neutral expression on your face, like we want to look like we’re engaged. We don’t want to look like we’re not wanting to be there. And so, to be aware of your facial expressions is key. And so, I know it’s super obvious advice, but it goes a long way. Smiling, you know, get on a call, smile, look like you’re happy to be there with the person. Look like you’re engaged and wanting to chat. Like, small things like that go a long way.

And then adding your body language, your hand gestures, things like that like it’s going to feel, make it feel more like an in-person conversation. It’s going to be easier for all of us to stay engaged. And then also, break free from the RBF, because I feel like the RBF happens when we’re relaxed and just not really thinking about how we’re coming across.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so good. And I had a tip from a high school teacher, and he said, “You know how you can instantly look 10 IQ points smarter? Close your mouth.” So, your resting face might very well be a little bit mouth open just cause maybe they’re walking through a document, and you are kind of reading it, too. So, like close your mouth. And it does take some extra energy and attention, which can be hard to sustain all day long. So maybe pick and choose your battles.

Lorraine Lee
Yeah, pick and choose. And then I think turning off self-view helps a lot. That’s when you keep it on, it’s just like a mirror up to your face all day. That’s where video fatigue comes from. It’s just, like, I’m looking at myself. I’m examining myself, “You know, Pete says something funny,” I’m like, “Ooh, looking at myself. How do I look when I laugh?” Like, just making all these observations, it’s exhausting.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. That’s good. I’m reminded of, tell me what you think about this. I’ve had times in my life where a friend is speaking or presenting, and I just know that they’re nervous. And so, I’m thinking, “I’m going to try to be, with my face and body, the most kind, friendly, loving, supportive audience member in the world that I would love to have in my audience, and do that for them.”

And it takes some real energy, but it does, it feels, it feels good. Like, I’m putting some love out into the world. And I got to imagine, over hundreds of meetings, this practice will go leaps and bounds towards boosting your likeability.

Lorraine Lee
Oh, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
“Whenever I’m talking, this guy seems into it. I like that.”

Lorraine Lee
Yeah. Oh, my gosh, me as a presenter, whenever I see that in person, virtually, I’m just like, “Thank you. Like, so kind. It helps me, gives me a boost of confidence.” It’s like, “Okay, I know you’re with me.” Like you said, just that one person who’s smiling at you makes a huge difference.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Well, any other top things you want to make sure to mention before we hear about your favorite things?

Lorraine Lee
Well, I’ll touch on the lighting and the aesthetics, the A. Lighting, super easy to fix. A lot of people don’t do it for whatever reason. So, adding an extra light in your space, I think, goes a long way. You look younger, fresher, brighter, like all these good things. And, yeah, it doesn’t take much. So, we don’t want witness protection program vibes. Like, we don’t want the light behind us. That’s a big no-no. And a lot of people still have, like, the windows behind them, that makes them look backlit. So, avoid that if you can.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m all about flipping it so the windows are illuminating the face. And you get to look outside, which just feels good.

Lorraine Lee
Yeah, that’s the best. That’s the best.

Pete Mockaitis
So, when you say grab a light so that we can orient towards the window, that’s great. I’m shilling for Elgato today, but I’ve got the Elgato Key Lights, which I think are snazzy. But is it just like any lamp will do? Or what do you mean by grab a light?

Lorraine Lee
I would say it depends on how much light you need. You can start off with a ring light, 12 inches to 16 inches in diameter so you get enough light. Some people with glasses, I know like the ring light shows in that, so maybe a Softbox makes more sense. I’m in a den right now with, unfortunately, no natural light so I actually ended up buying LED lights because those were extra powerful. So, those have been good.

Whatever light you buy, remember to get lights with different temperature settings because sometimes light might creep in from the side, maybe it’s the makeup I have, the clothes I’m wearing, the color just changes a little bit. So, when you can have those different settings, you can adjust and just have more control over how you appear.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, now can we hear about a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Lorraine Lee
One phrase that I have really operated by during my career that really resonated with me the first time I heard it was to, “Over prepare, but don’t over plan.”

So, it’s good to have a general sense of where you want to go, but really what’s more important is to prepare for whatever’s going to come your way. So, make sure that you’re networking consistently, make sure that you are building up your skills and, yeah, all that stuff is very important.

And then stay open because, when you are too rigid about what you want for your future, it can really close you off to new and exciting things. And so over prepare, but don’t over plan.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Lorraine Lee
Okay, I will reference the famous Xerox study, and I also talk about this in my book. It was very interesting. It showed how powerful the word because is, and how much it can influence people’s actions. And they did this study where a few people were waiting in line, and someone asked, “Can I skip the line? Can I make a copy?” And not that many people, I don’t remember the exact percentage, not that many people let that person skip.

But then when that person says, “Oh, I want to make a few copies because…” you know, whatever the reason is, almost 100% of people let them skip the line. And then they did it again, and they said, “Oh, I want to skip the line because I have to make copies,” which is like, you know, that’s not like a really compelling reason. Like, that’s what they’re all in line for, but still almost 100% of people still let that person skip the line.

So, I think when you think about communication and impactful communication, finding things like that, like even just like the addition of that word, an addition of a reason, if you’re trying to get buy-in or trying to get people to take an action, or to let you take an action, little things like that can go a long way.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. And a favorite book?

Lorraine Lee
All right, fiction series, Harry Potter. And then non-fiction series or non-fiction books, I really like the book by my mentor, Matt Abrams, Stanford GSB professor, Think Faster, Talk Smarter.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool?

Lorraine Lee
I use a lot. I will say going back to the TEA method because we didn’t exactly talk too much about software, I use a software called Krisp, K-R-I-S-P. It helps me eliminate all random sounds that aren’t my voice.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Lorraine Lee
I stretch each night before I wind down to watch TV before sleeping.

Pete Mockaitis
And tell me what benefits does this stretching yield in your life?

Lorraine Lee
I feel better that I’m taking care of myself, and I think it’s good. It’s so hard when we’re just go, go, go to really focus on you, and just the stretch for a few minutes and just have that quiet time for yourself. I feel like that helps me just regroup and like just wind down from the day, you know. It can be easy to just stay like in this heightened go, go, go state, but I think it helps with just calming down, having a good night’s sleep. That’s important.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you share, a Lorraine original sound bite, that folks tend to quote to you often?

Lorraine Lee
A lot of people talk about the EPIC career brand. I think they’ve been very excited about that framework from the book. And I think, also, I talk a lot about how introverts have superpowers, and I think a lot of people like to reference that as well.

Pete Mockaitis
And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Lorraine Lee
Definitely, connect with me on LinkedIn, Lorraine K. Lee. And then you can also learn more about my book at UnforgettablePresenceBook.com. And then I have a free newsletter, Career Bites, bite-sized tips to supercharge your career in three minutes or less. You can find that at LorraineKLee.com/subscribe.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Lorraine Lee
Get your virtual set up in order for your virtual interviews. I think it will go a long way in helping you feel more confident and look more professional on camera.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Lorraine, thank you.

Lorraine Lee
Thank you so much.

1030: Building a Career that Lights You Up with Mary Olson-Menzel

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Mary Olson-Menzel reveals her strategies for aligning your strengths with career opportunities that excite you.

You’ll Learn

  1. How
 to discover what truly lights you up
  2. Effective LinkedIn outreach approaches
  3. The key thing that grows careers

About Mary 

Mary Olson-Menzel, bestselling author of What Lights You Up?, is a career expert and executive coach with 30+ years of leadership experience. As CEO of MVP Executive Development, she helps individuals and organizations unlock their potential through her compassionate, results-driven approach to “Humane Leadership.” A member of the Marshall Goldsmith 100 Coaches Community, Mary is dedicated to guiding leaders toward greater success and fulfillment.

Resources Mentioned

Thank You, Sponsors!

Mary Olson-Menzel Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Mary, welcome!

Mary Olson-Menzel
Thank you, Pete. Great to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to hear about what lights us up and how to think about that for career and more. So, I have to open up, Mary, with what lights you up?

Mary Olson-Menzel
Writing the book lit me up, for sure. But really, really helping people find what they love to do, find what lights them up, helping them elevate their leadership in the world, is what lights me up, along with my family.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so you’ve worked with a lot of folks, executive coaching and looking at career matters, any big surprises or counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made about us humans when it comes to this sort of thing? What do you know that we don’t and should?

Mary Olson-Menzel
One of the big things, Pete, is that people think that your pedigree is the only thing that matters, right? My degree, my work experience, everything else. The truth is who you are as a human being and what you bring to the table, the energy that you bring to the table, matters even more than your resume and your pedigree and all the degrees in the world.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. I think that really resonates and makes a lot of sense And I just love that the book title, the question, “What Lights You Up?” So, pedigree doesn’t matter so much, and what we bring to the table matters a whole lot. Could you share with us, why the title “What Lights You Up?” What makes that a super central and important question to address, as opposed to a nice to have somewhere in the mix?

Mary Olson-Menzel
What lights you up is so meaningful because it’s really truly about what drives you every day. What gets your head off the pillow? What are you passionate about? Where are you finding purpose in your life? And, to me, that all encapsulates your inner light and really what it is that makes you happy on a day-to-day basis in your work.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, it’s almost like, in some ways, your play, your fun, can speak to your destiny, for good or for ill, and I thought, “Oh, that’s maybe a little heavy-handed.” But I’m going to lay it on you, Mary, who wrote the book What Lights You Up? what do you think of that?

Mary Olson-Menzel
I love it. I mean, because what lights people up is different, right? And so, what we really need to think about is, “Where is our sweet spot? What is it?”

There’s a term, Pete, that I love called Ikigai, and it is the Japanese word for the intersection of this, it’s basically a Venn diagram of “What’s your passion? What’s your purpose? What are you good at? And what does the world need?”

Pete Mockaitis
You know, we had the CEO of Korn Ferry, Gary Burnison, on, and he was speaking to a similar thing with regard to, if you really know what your strengths are, what your purpose is, what makes you happy, then if you’re happy, you’re probably motivated. And if you’re motivated, you’re going to outperform.

And I was like, “Okay, well, here’s a guy who’s got a vantage point on careers and talent and progression,” and that seems to resonate and synchronize with these very same concepts. It’s like when you’re into the thing, you pour yourself into that, and then you get good at it, and then you’re distinctive, and you can really kind of build a career, a brand, a reputation, a legacy from that.

Mary Olson-Menzel
Absolutely, and it’s so true. When you’re into what that thing is, you start to feel like you’re in the flow. You know, those moments when you feel like you lose track of time, you lose track of everything because you’re so into what you’re doing, and you’re so excited about it. So, that is what we want more of for everyone. Because what we want is for people to be able to amplify and elevate their own natural gifts in order to make the workplace a more enjoyable place to be.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And could you share with us a story of someone who, maybe they were in a career that was not lighting them up, they did some introspective research to discover some things, and then rejiggered their activities and the job role they were in to see cool results?

Mary Olson-Menzel
Absolutely, there are so many. Part of why I wrote What Lights You Up? is because I developed a 10-step pivot program to help people do exactly that. And so, the myriads of stories are so much fun, but I really like this one. There was a media executive in New York City who was at a crossroads in her career. And she kept looking at all the usual places, right, other media outlets, everywhere else.

And I said to her, “I challenge people to tap into ‘What is it that they’re passionate about? What are their side hustles? What are their hobbies? What are they doing outside of work that’s getting them excited and lit up?’” Well, she was really into horses. And so, we went down this whole path where she said, “Gosh, you know, I mean, if I really didn’t need money, I would just work with horses.”

And I said, “Hold on. Listen to yourself. Maybe there’s a way that you can work with horses and make money and use your existing skillset to do it.” And so, she ended up pivoting into a role up in Saratoga Race Course, where she was the head of marketing and media relations for Saratoga Race Course. She did all kinds of really cool programs with the horses.

Pete Mockaitis
That is really cool. And I love that notion that, in terms of the flow, you’re getting yourself lost in it.

Okay. Well, can you walk us through the process, the steps by which we determine this?

Mary Olson-Menzel
Yes. Well, first, you have to take a good look in the mirror, really, really get very, very clear on who you are and what stage of life you’re in, and what you need from that stage of life. We’re all in different spots. We could be just starting our careers and we need to make money, and we just want to make enough money to travel and go out and have a couple drinks on a weekend, but then your stage changes.

There are other stages where you get married, you start a family, and your needs in your career change. So, it’s about getting very, very clear into where you are at this moment in time, what it is that’s making you happy currently, and then starting to think about, “Wait, am I where I want to be in life?”

And if you can answer “Yes,” well, that’s great. Then let’s just look for ways to keep growing and keep going down a path that you already have started that is really great for you. But what if your answer is no? If your answer is no, then it’s really about thinking, “Okay, what’s working in my life? What’s not? And how do I change that? How do I create a roadmap for what could be next?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Very good. And so then, any other key questions that you find super helpful at this stage of the game to elicit insights?

Mary Olson-Menzel
Absolutely. There’s so much that you can start to think about at this stage of the game. You really tap into, “Where are the moments in my day when I’m at my best?” From there, you really think about, “Okay, where are the moments in my day that are draining my energy?” We all have them. Even those of us that love what we do, there’s moments or there’s tasks in our day that drain our energy.

And so, really starting to think about, “Okay, where can I go from here? How can I get more of what it is that I like, what it is that I enjoy, and also what I’m good at? Where can I make the biggest difference, not only in my career and how I feel about it, but in the world?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then what’s our next step?

Mary Olson-Menzel
The next step is to dust off that resume and start getting really very serious about updating the resume, updating your LinkedIn profile, thinking about who you’re going to reach out to in your network, because you cannot do it alone. You have to tap into your network and the people around you. And in the book, I say, “If your inner light is your superpower, your network is the super-highway that’s going to get you your next job.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, in the course of resume and LinkedIn tweaks, any top tips or tricks, do’s or don’ts, things that you see again and again and again that we should all just be doing or not doing?

Mary Olson-Menzel
Yes. Stop stressing about the resume, number one. The resume is kind of now what I would say your calling card. It’s that little thing that’s going to get you in the door so it has to tell a story, yes, the story of your career. It has to be clear, concise, but it doesn’t have to be that complicated. And so many people get so stressed about their resume that they lose sight of the fact that this is only one piece of a job search.

So, take the pressure off yourself on the resume. Make sure that it’s clear, concise, easy to read. The average recruiter spends six to ten seconds looking at your resume, so it just has to be eye-catching, clear, so that it catches their eye, because then the next thing they’re going to do is go to your LinkedIn profile. And your LinkedIn profile, these days, as of 2025, is exactly where it’s at.

This is where people are networking, this is where people are finding jobs, and this is where hiring managers and recruiters take a deeper dive into who you are as a human being and what your professional profile looks like.

Pete Mockaitis
Tell us more. LinkedIn profile, content, conveying who I am as a human being, how does that work?

Mary Olson-Menzel
Okay. Well, you have all of the information from your resume on LinkedIn, so you’re transferring all that data to your LinkedIn profile. But what LinkedIn does is it takes it up a big step further. You’ve got your profile picture, you’ve got your connections, you’ve got what people are saying about you, you’ve got all kinds of different things that you can put on your LinkedIn profile to make it very robust, to kind of give a fuller picture of who you are as a professional, who you are as a human being. And then, even more importantly, once you’ve gotten that all set, the next thing is to engage on LinkedIn. And so, that is really a very, very important part, starting to put your thoughts out there, professionally, not politically, hopefully, not in other ways, but, really, professional thoughts, like, “Oh, I saw that Google is doing this, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”

Then engaging with other people. So, Pete, if you put something really interesting out on LinkedIn, I’m going to like it, I might share it, and I might even repost it with my thoughts. So, this is where you’re starting to create some momentum, positive momentum, with the algorithms of LinkedIn so that more and more people are noticing you on there.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, you said don’t do the politics. When you said who I am or who you are, and LinkedIn is sharing this, I guess I’d love some more of your perspective on that with regard to what belongs there and what doesn’t. Because I think who I am, I think is much broader than the career business-y facet of Pete Mockaitis. But, in your view, is LinkedIn then for more than just the job career business-y part of a professional?

Mary Olson-Menzel
It has become a little bit more than, which is actually kind of nice, in my opinion, because when you’re looking for a job, when you’re living out there in the world, you are not just what you do. You are a whole human being, and so I think that’s the really important part. I mean, I have shared things about my kids on LinkedIn.

My mom passed away last year. I shared a whole post about her and how she inspired me in my life.

So, it has become a little bit more personal, which is, I think, really great, because I think it just shows the kind of person that you are with the things that you’re sharing. You do run the risk, though, of unconscious bias from a hiring manager if you start sharing things that are too personal.

Pete Mockaitis
Could you give us an example of what’s too personal?

Mary Olson-Menzel
I tell most people to stay away from politics and religion on LinkedIn. That is much more for your own private conversations or other kinds of conversations. I think that when you’re sharing things on LinkedIn, it’s really about amplifying and elevating who you are as an executive, who you are as a professional, but also who you are as a person.

So, if you can keep it with a more productive and positive spin, what you’re sharing, or from a learning, “I went through this really hard thing, and this is what I learned from it. I want to share this with the rest of you so that you all can learn from this, so that you don’t have to go through this hard thing.”

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. All right. So, we got our introspection, we got our resume in LinkedIn, looking fabulous. What’s next?

Mary Olson-Menzel
Next is reaching out to that network to start having conversations. And the one mistake, there’s many mistakes, but one of the top mistakes that a lot of job seekers make is that they just look for the openings. So, I’m going to use Google as an example again. Pete, you want to go get a job at Google? You’re going to look for, what does Google have open? What are they hiring for?

And in my book, I basically say flip your job search inside out. Don’t just look for the openings. Don’t just scroll on Indeed or scroll on LinkedIn. Start to create a target list of companies that you’re inspired by, a target list of companies that feel like companies that you might want to work for. And I put those companies into three categories that I call the three Ps.

One is your usual prospects. Like, our friend from New York City in media, she was looking at usual prospects just in other media and entertainment companies. The next category is your pivots. She could have taken those media tools and skills that she has into environment where she could have done something really interesting but then she really was focused on her passions, and that’s the most fun area to focus on. That whole area is like, “Hey, if I can make money doing something I’m passionate about then I’m winning.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, cool. All right. And so, any pro tips when we’re doing this reach out? What do we say? What do we not say?

Mary Olson-Menzel
Yes. So, you’ve got the target list of companies, that’s the place that you start. And so then, you go on to LinkedIn and into your network, and you say, “All right, who do I know that works at Google? Who do I know that…?” For Google, I’m just using them as an example today, but, “Who do I know that works at Korn Ferry? Who do I know that works at 3M?”

Whatever is on your target list, starting to look into your network, and say, “Okay, who can I talk to that’s working there or that knows somebody who’s working there?” And then that’s when the very warm connections start.

Keep it short because people’s attention spans are not very long these days. Stay really, really focused on, “Hi, Pete, I’m very interested in talking to you. I’m in transition and I’d love to hear what the opportunities are at XX company.” Simple. And if you have mutual connections, “Hey, Pete, I’m connected to you by Joe. Joe says great things about you and thinks we should talk.”

Keep it so simple. Because, immediately, they’re going to look at your LinkedIn profile and check out who you are anyway, so you don’t have to give a lot of words into who you are and what you’re looking for. Just, “I’m looking for my next career adventure, and I’d love to talk.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And what’s our next step?

Mary Olson-Menzel
The next step is having the conversation. You can do it, obviously, in the good old-fashioned way of a phone call. You could do it on Zoom. You can do it on Teams. You could meet for coffee. But just remember that people are busier than ever these days, so ask for 15 to 20 minutes of their time. And if it goes longer, that’s just a bonus. It means you guys are clicking.

But 15-20 minutes just to connect, and then talk to them about what they’re doing. Just be curious, I mean, curious about human beings, curious about what they’re doing, curious about what it’s like to work at that company. And then when you’re wrapping up the conversation, number one thing to never forget is to ask, “How can I help you in return?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Beautiful. And then, while we’re asking them questions, are there any key pieces of insight or questions that are super powerful that you recommend to try to include within that conversation?

Mary Olson-Menzel
Definitely delve into what the culture is like. You want to make sure that that culture, of whatever organization that you’re targeting, is a good fit for you and for what you want out of the workplace. But also try to ask them to introduce you to people, “Are there three people that you could introduce me to or three names of people that I should be reaching out to, to get some help?” And then, of course, always ask, “What are the next steps?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, after you’ve had these conversations, what’s next?

Mary Olson-Menzel
Well, then you hope that Joe, our friend Joe, who connected us, will say, “Well, great. You know what, Mary? I’d love for you to come in and talk to the hiring manager. I know that we’ve got open positions in this, this, and this.” And then if you’re lucky, sometimes it’s a much longer game than this quick and this what’s next.

But if you’re lucky, you get in, do an interview, and then you tell your story, and that’s where the magic happens. The resume just tells me who you are, but the way that you would tell your story is what’s going to draw me in and want to hire you.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And how do we do that well?

Mary Olson-Menzel
Well, we start at the beginning. People, just remember this. Literally, don’t start from where you are currently. Start at the beginning because the brain is wired to listen to a story that’s in chronological order, “I started at undergrad here. I did this.” Talk about the transitions to, for example, I worked at Tribune Company in Chicago for almost 10 years.

The transition of why I left Tribune Company was because we had a job opportunity in New York. So, make sure that you’re not only talking about your accomplishments, but also the ways and the reasons that you left one particular job to go to another one.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then, let’s say that conversation went smashingly well, and we have an offer. What now?

Mary Olson-Menzel
What now? This is fast forward career coaching. I love it. So, what now? You’ve got an offer on the table and you really have to think about, “Okay, is this offer…?” Yes, it’s amazing, you’ve gotten this far, “But is it an offer that’s going to work for me and my stage of life right now?”

So, you really want to weigh out all of your options with the offer. Is it compensation-wise what I want? Is the quality of life that I want going to be there? Is the culture that I want going to be there? going to be there? Where are the growth opportunities? Where are those? How can I make sure that I have forward momentum once I get into this job?”

And then, benefits package. All of it falls into a whole package for the whole person. And, once again, you are a whole person who’s negotiating a whole package for your life.

Pete Mockaitis
Alrighty. And so, when it comes to the negotiation, do you recommend we go ahead and do that?

Mary Olson-Menzel
That’s a tricky one. There are ways to negotiate, but you don’t want to push so hard that you turn them off and potentially rescind the offer.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Mary Olson-Menzel
Yeah, I know. This is it. The stakes are really high. You’re at this point, and so you have to know exactly where you can negotiate. There are a lot of hiring managers who will tell you, “I mean, you’re at the top of my salary band, and this is as high as I can go.” All right, well, then you’re not going to negotiate on the salary, but you can potentially negotiate on the softer things, like maybe more paid time off, maybe a little extra vacation time, maybe a sign-on bonus, maybe they’ll pay for you to go get your graduate degree or pay for some professional training. Those are all negotiables that will help you get to a better place where you feel really good about the offer package.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And then, in terms of the actual dance or conversation, are there any things you recommend, magical words or phrases that we do say or we don’t say?

Mary Olson-Menzel
Well, I think the number one thing to think about is gratitude. Gratitude is everything when it comes to a negotiation, but also, when it comes to life. I mean, truly. I think that if you come to it from a place of appreciation, “Thank you so much for this offer. I am really excited to start at this company. I just have a few questions. Is there any room to move on the salary? Is there any room to negotiate something else?” So, coming from that place of appreciation and gratitude and really helping them understand that this is a place you want to work and you want to make it work for both of you.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Okay. So, you’re just asking about the flexibility. And that’s sort of an interesting question in that, I suppose, it’s in the employer’s interest if they really want you to be honest. Because, I mean, if you just wanted some savings, you’d be like, “Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. No flexibility whatsoever,” you know? Rigid as a bar of iron.

Mary Olson-Menzel
Right.

Pete Mockaitis
However, hopefully, you’ve got them really, really fired up for you, in particular. And I guess it also varies a great deal in terms of, it might not even be very emotional at all in terms of, “Well, actually, no. This compensation package is standardized across all of North America, and so that’s kind of what it is.” So, “Okay, glad I asked. Now we know,” and you can sort of make the thumbs up, thumbs down decision on those terms.

As opposed to, I’ve heard other people say that they just have carte blanche authority to give a 10% salary increase to anybody who bothers to ask without approval from anyone higher up. It’s like, “Oh, wow. Well, that sure sounds like if that’s a semi-common policy…” you tell us if it is, Mary, “…then I should probably make sure to ask.”

Mary Olson-Menzel
You know, Pete, you brought up the most important thing – honesty from day one. Truly. So, when you start going through the interview process, a recruiter or a hiring manager is going to ask you, “What are your compensation expectations? What do you want to make? What do you need in this job?” And, hopefully, both sides are being very, very honest and upfront so that there are no surprises by the time you get to that point.

And, by the way, I can’t remember who said this recently, but they were saying, basically, it was an actor who said, “I’ve got this magic word is, ‘Thank you so much. By any chance, can you do this? By any chance, can you do this?’” So, you’re not saying, “I demand,” “I want.” You’re saying, “Hmm, is there a little wiggle room here? Is there a chance that this can go up 10%?”

And if they can, hopefully, they’ll be honest with you, and say, “Yes, absolutely,” and then they just made your day and you made 10% more that year. But if they can’t, they’re going to be honest with you, too, about that. And then you’ll start to be able to see where the negotiation space is.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Okay. Well, let’s say, “Hooray! A deal is made. A job offer made. A job offer accepted,“ any pro tips for the first weeks and months?

Mary Olson-Menzel
Yes, lots. So, the first 30, 60, 90 days of your tenure at this company are so important. You really, really want to become a sponge, you want to become a student of that organization, and you want to work side-by-side with your boss, with HR, to make sure that you’re meeting all the key clients, key stakeholders, and making sure that you’re having one-on-one meetings with these people so that you’re getting to know all of the people that are going to be surrounding you on a day-to-day basis.

And in What Lights You Up? I have a whole sheet of talking points to have those meetings, like, “Tell me about a typical day. What’s a day in the life for you? What keeps you up at night, Pete? How can I help with that by coming into this role?” All of those things, “How can we best work across departments?” You shouldn’t just be meeting with people in your department. You should be meeting with other departments, too, so that you can see where there’s room for cross-departmental collaboration.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And, tell me, we sort of walked through a process timeline. Are there some things you recommend that we just do always outside of when we’re specifically thinking about maybe a new opportunity or a transition, but just a regular wise thing to do to keep our careers and trajectories sharpened in a great spot?

Mary Olson-Menzel
Well, always remember that your career growth is in your hands, so don’t always rely upon your boss or the people in the organization to be constantly looking for opportunities for you. You’ve got to be open to those opportunities and be looking for them, and have it be a conversation with your boss too. So, one, never stop growing once you’re in that role, but also even if you’re so happy in this role, make sure that you’re keeping your network strong. Make sure that you’re having a friend at another company every once in a while.

Make sure that you’re watching what’s going on with other companies so that you’re not only growing within your own organization, but you’re creating a presence around you that can support you if, all of a sudden, the worst thing happens and you get laid off the next day. You want to have that network strong all the time.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, Mary, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Mary Olson-Menzel
Yeah, I would just reiterate that. Be open to the opportunities that are around you. Be open to conversations around you. Become a student of not only the industry that you’re in, but a student of life. Be curious about what’s going on around you, and just remember that you can focus on what lights you up. You can focus on what makes you happy. And I’ve seen thousands of my clients do it, so just don’t lose hope.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Mary Olson-Menzel
One of my favorite quotes is “The whole secret of a successful life is to find out what one’s destiny is, and then to do it,” and that is by Henry Ford.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Mary Olson-Menzel
I mean, I’m really kind of loving Mel Robbins right now. She’s just written this book called Let Them. It’s “The Let Them Theory.” And it’s all about how other people are going to do things that maybe you don’t like but you don’t have control over that. All you can control is what you react and how you react and what your mindset is. So, in life right now, somebody’s doing something you don’t like? Let them. But you can control how you react to it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Mary Olson-Menzel
One of my very favorite books is a book called Leading with Gratitude by two of my fellow Marshall Goldsmith “100 Coaches” colleagues, Chester Elton and Adrian Gostick. Just a great, great book, all about bringing gratitude into your day-to-day life and how it just changes everything.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite tool?

Mary Olson-Menzel
My favorite tool that anyone can have access to is one called StrengthsFinder. And you can get it on Amazon, you can take the test, you can get your top five strengths. But what I love about it most, Pete, is that it throws away the notion that we were talking about earlier that, actually, that your CEO of Korn Ferry was talking about.

When you’re leaning into your natural gifts, you can amplify everything you’re doing. When, in America, companies many, many years ago would be like, “Well, Pete is a really great interviewer, but how good is he at finance? Maybe we should send Pete to some finance classes.” No, Tom Rath just blows this out of the water, and says, “No, let’s just continue to amplify our own strengths so that we can continue to get better and better at what we do and what we’re good at, and looking at our own natural gifts and bringing those to the workplace.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Mary Olson-Menzel
My favorite habit, which has become a must-do most days, is, as soon as I get the kids off to school, I do a quick meditation, and then I get into a Peloton workout. And that, before I’ve started my day, work can go off in different directions, and you can be fighting fires or doing whatever you have to do all day, but I already know that I’ve gotten my kids off to school safely, I’ve grounded myself with a meditation, and I’ve taken care of my body so that I have more energy for the rest of the day with my clients.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with clients and readers and audience members?

Mary Olson-Menzel
I really think that my favorite quote from the book, is it’s imperative to work, to keep the lights on in your house, but it’s even more important to keep the lights on in your heart and do what you love. Because when you’re doing what you love, you’ll get hired faster, you’ll get promoted faster, you’ll make more money, whatever money is to you, whether that’s time or cash or whatever, and the byproduct of being happier.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Mary Olson-Menzel
They can connect with me on LinkedIn, as I said. It’s the best place to connect. Mary Olson-Menzel at my LinkedIn profile. You can also go to MaryOlsonMenzel, all one word, dot com, for anything you need to know about the book. And then for any work that we do is MVPExec.com.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Mary Olson-Menzel
There’s no better time than today to start doing it.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Mary, thank you. I appreciate this and wish you the best.

Mary Olson-Menzel
Thank you, Pete. It’s been fun.

2024 GREATS: 925: How to Stop People-Pleasing and Feeling Guilty with Dr. Aziz Gazipura

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Dr. Aziz Gazipura explains the dangers of people-pleasing tendencies and shares actionable steps for overcoming it.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The massive costs of being a people-pleaser
  2. How to not feel guilty when saying no
  3. A surprising strategy to build your discomfort tolerance 

About Aziz

Dr. Aziz is a clinical psychologist and one of the world’s leading experts on social confidence. In 2011, Dr. Aziz started The Center For Social Confidence, which is dedicated to helping everyone break through their shyness and social anxiety.

Through confidence coaching, audio and video programs, podcasts, a detailed blog, and intensive weekend workshops, Dr. Aziz has helped thousands of people all over the world increase their confidence and lives out his mission: To help every person who is stuck in shyness liberate themselves to pursue the relationship, career, and life they have always dreamed of.

He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife Candace and son Zaim.

Resources Mentioned

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Dr. Aziz Gazipura Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis

Could you kick us off with a dramatic tale about the dangers of people-pleasing?

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

Yeah. Well, I don’t need to make anything up here. And it’s the kind of, like all good dramatic stories, it’s a slow build, where maybe it’s like imagine a character in a movie where they go out and have some drinks, and they really like it, and it just seems like a good time. And then, flash forward many years later, and they have the shakes in their hands because they have to have a drink of alcohol. And that’s actually what niceness is like, or people-pleasing, specifically.

So, you basically make a choice to not be yourself in order to smooth things over or be liked or be accepted. And maybe a classic tale would be you did it when you were young, you did it to fit in at school, you did it to fit in with family. And that was not all horribly off-kilter then. But then I talk to, man, dozens of people every week, where now they’re 37 or they’re 43 and they’ve done pretty good, like inauthenticity and fitting in works. It’s this somewhat adaptive strategy, but it works the way that that drink worked to take away your anxiety, but it doesn’t actually give you what you really want.

I was just speaking with a woman just two days ago, she’s about mid-40s, successful in her career, has a family, has a husband, and feels incredibly lonely, and doesn’t even really know what to change out there anymore because, “I have all the things.” And she’s lonely because no one, not even her husband, really knows her. And that might not sound bad. Some people might hear that and say, “I’ll take the family and the money and the career, and then I’ll be fine.”

But actually, when you get there, and you don’t feel like anything out there is going to change it, and inside you feel profoundly lonely, it’s a story of a lot of suffering. And it’s a story that hundreds of millions of people live out, and feel like they’re the only one, but they’re not.

Pete Mockaitis

So, can you make that all the more real and clear for us? To feel like no one really knows you, what might be some examples of the false impression others on the outside have in contrast to the reality that is within?

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

Well, the impression people have on the outside is what you learned will keep them close to you, and it might be different. And I call them the roles that you’re going to play. So, at work, you have a certain role that you play, “I need to be confident-sounding, in charge, certain with my partner. I need to be pleasing. So, what do they want me to be? I’ll agree to things that I think that they’ll want me to agree with. I’ll focus on the things that they want. We’ll talk about what they want.”

“I also know that they don’t like it if I’m irritable, or if I’m sad. So, I’m going to downplay that or hide that.” And that’s true for friends as well, “I got to be up. I got to be on. I don’t want to be boring. I don’t want to be a sad sack. I don’t want to bring people down. I don’t want to burden people with my feelings, and my woes, and my problems.” So, therefore, at work, you’re going to be that way. And inside you might feel nervous, you might feel insecure, you might question yourself but you don’t show any of that.

And that, people can tolerate a certain amount of inauthenticity at work. But then where it really starts to get to them is when they can’t even be themselves around their friends, their loved ones, their family. You got to hide it and pressure yourself, and so you can’t reveal that you’re feeling sad. You can’t reveal that you feel like something is missing. You can’t reveal any of these things. And that’s where the loneliness comes from for people.

And it might not be these big dramatic things, like, “I can’t reveal that I’ve secretly wanted to leave.” Even just, “I am feeling sad today,” and it’s so simple but it’s a world of difference when you have to keep it all inside, all hidden. And sometimes people, really good pleasers, and I know this because I lived this for many years, you’ll even hide it from yourself, “I’m not sad. Everything’s okay. I just have a stomach ache. I just am tired.”

And it becomes this vague thing that you don’t even know. You don’t even know where you are in all of it because then it’s scary to know what that is and maybe share it with others.

Pete Mockaitis

And so, this loneliness, what are the knock-on, follow-on consequences of that?

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

There’s a variety of different studies around loneliness, but loneliness is pretty much associated with all negative health outcomes and a much shorter lifespan. That’s like the big hammer, right?

Pete Mockaitis

Yup, dying.

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

And quality of life, but sometimes people hear that, and like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s about everything in life. Too much peanut butter kills you. You got to live.” But actually, not only is it a shorter life, but let’s just talk about the quality of life. And there’s the longest study in the history of human psychology, it’s decades. It’s been going so many decades that they’re now the second generation of people.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, Waldinger.

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

This is the one done with Harvard students, yeah. And the short version is, it’s relationships. That’s what makes us feel good in life, that’s what makes us feel happy in life, that’s what protects us from hard times in life. And not just you got somebody in your house that’s your roommate. No, we’re talking about confidantes, real relationships, people where you’re in life together.

And so, the loneliness, the cost is you don’t have that, or you have a very limited amount of that, and that is the biggest determiner of true success, which, for everybody, I don’t care what they value in life. True success for everybody is actually to feel rich inside, like feel full of success, of love, of meaning, of resources. And so, you can have external success and feel empty inside, and not have the thing that we all really want, which is those real connections with people.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay.

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

But other than that, it’s great that we should just keep doing it.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, can you give us a ray of hope then, an inspiring tale of a people-pleaser reformed?

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

Yeah, the ray of hope is people-pleasing is not who you are. It’s a pattern that you run. And that’s fantastic news because any pattern that you run you can change. It’s an active process, it’s a verb, like walking or eating. And so, you can put down the fork and no longer be eating. You can put down the people-pleasing pattern and no longer be pleasing. And you can still be very loved by more people than you could ever need to be loved by. And you could be more boldly yourself and actually enjoy who you are and stop trying to be somebody that you’re supposed to be for others.

And I think this is the biggest risk, this is the leap of faith, and that’s why I think people who read my books or work with me because there’s some part of them that says, “That sounds a little too good to be true. You’re saying I can be me, and have love, and belonging?” And the good news, the ray of hope is absolutely yes, and it’s on the other side of that risk, the other side of what we fear, which is, “If I’m really me, everything is going to fall apart, and no one’s going to love me.” But that’s the whole source of the problem to begin with.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, warm, loving relationships, longer life, higher quality of life, that sounds swell. And then your organization is called the Center for Social Confidence. Tell us about what that confidence picture looks like on the other side of the people-pleasing.

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

Yes. Well, there is the outer layer, which I think we all may be focused on at first, which is, “I want to be more confident.” What does that mean? Well, that means I can be more bold, I can walk up to people and talk to them, I can initiate conversations, I can network with people, I can just walk into a room and not feel afraid of what people are going to think, I can really just be myself. That means more power in leadership, and influence, and impact.

You can share your idea more directly, more broadly. You can advocate for something. You can advocate for yourself, for your ideas, for your team. Also, that shows up in relationships and love. You can go approach someone that you really are drawn to, who you really want to spend your time and your life with, and you can let them actually see and know the real you. So, those are the outer observable effects.

And then the inner effect as a result of that confidence is that you feel like you belong in this world, and that sense of insufficiency, not enough-ness, and all the scarcity, there’s not going to be enough love, there’s not going to be enough people, like, that dissolves. And that is worth way more than all the promotions, and all the dates, and all the stuff but sometimes we have to start with that outer stuff, and then realize, like, “Wow, me just really feeling that peace inside, that is worth its weight in gold.”

Pete Mockaitis

Well, that does sound absolutely delightful, yes. So, lay it on us, how do we pull this off? I imagine it’s easier said than done.

Dr. Aziz Gazipura
Yes. So, the good news and the bad news. The good news is this is all possible, the ray of hope stuff we were just talking about. The bad news is you probably are going to feel like you’re going to die on the way there. That’s all. But it just feels that way because, let’s rewind, what is people-pleasing? People-pleasing is a survival strategy that you picked up that’s based upon an idea, a conclusion, that’s not even true. But the conclusion you came to is, “I’m not okay as I am. There’s something just me as I am being totally lovable, I don’t buy it.”

Maybe someone told you that. Maybe you interpreted that. Maybe someone wasn’t there for you. Maybe you were abused. I don’t know, but there is some messaging that you picked up, and you’re like, “Wow, just me being me is not enough, and so now I have to do something. And what I need to do is I need to observe you, and if I can keep you happy, then you’ll probably stick with me. And I got to observe if you’re upset, and make sure that I don’t do the things that upset you. I got to see what makes you smile, and make sure I do more of those.” And now a pleaser is born.

And so, it’s rooted in fear, in the fear of abandonment, fear or not surviving, “Because I’ll be left, I’ll be lost. So, now I’m going to live that out for much of my childhood but as a personality, as a whole life strategy.” And so, why it feels like you might die is because it triggers this kind of fight-flight survival response inside to challenge you, which is why most people don’t.

But if you get up to that, like, fed-up point enough, and you’re like, “Well, I don’t want to keep living this way. All right, let’s take the leap,” you don’t stay in dying forever. You don’t actually die but it feels very ungrounding because there’s a sense of certainty and familiarity in that way of being, and you are going to challenge that. That’s why most people don’t just say, “Oh, I’ll do it,” and then actually execute on it.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, so then what does the execution look like in practice? What are the step-by-steps? Do I just go give people a piece of my mind, Dr. Aziz, “Let me tell you what I really think”?

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

So, I have two books on the subject. One is called Not Nice and the newer one that just came out is called Less Nice, More You. And I talk about the pendulum, where people who have been overly passive and pleasing at some point can swing, “Now, I’m going to let the world have it,” and that’s okay.

Maybe that’s a phase to go through but, ultimately, there is a set point that’s much more effective. And I think the key steps from a higher level are these. Number one, you have to decide that you no longer want to be so people-pleasing and nice. And that might seem like a strange step, but it’s like, “Isn’t that what we’re talking about?” Well, no, because many people have a lot of their identities wrapped in, “But being nice means I’m a good person, and I don’t want to be a bad person.” No one wants to be a bad person.

And so, the first thing we need to do is we need to upgrade our understanding of being people-pleasing is not the same thing as being kind, or generous, or loving, or whatever it is that you actually value as a human. And that people-pleasing is more of a compulsion and not a choice, and so you have to be giving, you cannot say no, and that can be very detrimental.

So, someone is struggling, you take an extra hour to support them seems kind, right? The nice person and the people-pleaser doesn’t have that choice, so they could be being eaten up inside. They’re all stressed.

Pete Mockaitis

Eaten up inside and bitter, they’re like, “This jerk is always hogging my life.”

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

“I got too much on my to-do list.” So, now you’re talking about resentment. So, the compulsion part of it, the “nice” person feels like they have to. And any time we feel like we have to do something, and we don’t want to in that moment, that’s a formula, a human formula for resentment. So, now we’re going to start that.

Now, the kind choice is like, “Okay, this person wants this. Do I want to give it? Does it feel right to give it?” And it doesn’t mean it’s comfortable. Your kid is sick or something is happening, and you’re just like, “You know what, but it feels right, it feels like I want to do it.” Then you do it, and you say, “I want to give it.” Then we won’t feel resentment.

Kindness, true kindness leaves a glow inside, you’re like, “I feel good about that.” Whereas, when we’re like, “I couldn’t say no. I mean, look at them, they need me.” And the nice person likes to create this elaborate world in which everybody is super dependent, like, “They would die without me. They would be, oh, my gosh, if I left this partner, or this boyfriend, girlfriend, they’d be devastated for years,” and they don’t even see how it’s a little bit of a…it’s a way that we’re trying to get some sense of significance, perhaps.

The truth is that people have many ways to meet their needs, and you’re just one of them, and you’re not the only one. So, yes, that’s exactly what you’re talking about. That’s the stew of resentment that can form. And so, back to this first step of, “I need to decide I’m not going to be so nice and pleasing” is actually an important first step because, otherwise, we remain in this pattern where this is the only way to be, this is the right way to be as a good person, everything else is bad. And then we will perpetuate that indefinitely.

Pete Mockaitis

And that decision, boy, it just seems like the distinctions and the commitments are so myriad in terms of the boundaries that we’re down with, in terms of “I am committed to doing this and being generous or loving in these domains. And I’m not so much down to do these other things.” It really kind of feels like we got to go, behavior by behavior, or relationship by relationship, when  we determine what that decision really means in practice.

Dr. Aziz Gazipura
Yeah, that’s a great point. And, yes, it is, and there’s a shortcut to doing that, which is it can be distilled into one question, which is an extremely liberating question but it also, if you’ve been living a people-pleasing life, can make you very uncomfortable. And the question is, “What do I want? In this situation, what do I want?”

And even just asking that can push a lot of the buttons for someone who thinks that that’s selfish, “Your life shouldn’t be about what you want. That’s the problem with the world, is too many selfish people.” But actually, we’re just talking about asking the question. You might still choose to say, “Well, what do I want? I want to not take care of my son.” “Well, he’s five and he needs someone tonight. So, you’re going to find a way to work with it.”

So, it doesn’t mean you instantly just, “I do whatever I want. I don’t even care about anyone.” It’s like, no, but you start that behind that question is not just the data of the answer. It’s actually caring about yourself just like you would with someone you love, “What do you want, honey? It doesn’t mean you get everything you want, but I want to know. I want to know. Maybe we can work with it. Maybe we need to compromise here. But what do you really want? And what do I really want?”

I was just talking with a friend earlier today, and he has some friends visiting out of town, they said, “Hey, we want to come have some dinner with you.” And he’s like, “Oh, that sounds good.” And then they’re like, “Oh, also, we’re flying out somewhere the next day. Can we spend the night at your place then we’ll go to the airport?” And he said, “Well, let me talk to my wife and we’ll make sure.”

So, he’s about to go talk to his wife, and he’s like, “Hold on a second. Before I even talk to my wife, what do I want here?” And that’s such so small, we could just steamroll right over the moment and go on with our lives, and that might seem so trivial but, man, you add up those trivial moments, that’s your whole day, that’s your whole week, that’s your whole life.

And you might say, “Well, that’s horrible. How could you not have your friends stay the night? They need a favor. What a bad friend.” Ah, now we’re looking at the roles of the rule of friend, and many people have extreme rules, “You must always say yes to a friend.” But instead, if you tune in and say, “You know what, it feels kind of, I don’t know, confining.” And he got curious about himself, “Why? Well, I was just hoping to have the one evening a week that I can spend with my wife, one on one. She’s so busy. I’m so busy. I just don’t really want to give that up.”

So, now all of a sudden, we discover that the saying no there is actually a loving act for himself, for his wife, for his relationship, so we’re prioritizing something else. We would not even discover that. Now he’s trying to please his friends, so he says, “Yes,” and then he’s feeling maybe his wife is going to be upset with him, so he’s trying to please her. And then the whole evening, he’s just anxious and secretly resentful, which is a disaster.

So, yes, we want to go, day by day, decision by decision, slow down and start to really ask, “What do I want here?”

Pete Mockaitis

That’s good. And what’s interesting is by surfacing that, and if you do make the choice, and maybe, well, one, I think that can generate kinds of creative options that you didn’t even think about to start with, it’s like, “Hey, you can come over between 9:30 and 10:00 p.m. and, yeah, it’ll get you to the airport on time.” And so, there it is. So, you had your cake and eat it, too.

Now, sometimes you can’t but then I guess if you do choose to make a sacrifice on behalf of another, I think you can do so all the more eyes wide open, it’s like, “I am choosing to do something for this other person, knowing it’s inconvenient for me, but because I value this relationship more than I value binging Netflix, or whatever I was in the mood to do that evening.”

And then, as you said, there is sort of a glow. You can feel good about that choice. You made a values-driven decision and chose that which is good in your value system above that which is expedient, and you did so, knowing full well the consequences that could flow from it.

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

Yeah, I love that nuance. And sometimes people hear this, and they think you’re going to become this very stingy person, not just with money but with your time. And that’s actually not the case. It is very much more intentional and you’re linking it with your values. My younger son, who’s eight, we eat a pretty similar breakfast every morning. And one of the ingredients is from downstairs, and he doesn’t like to go downstairs because he’s afraid of whatever, monsters. That’s what lives when you’re eight years old, that’s what lives downstairs in the basement, is monsters.

And so, there was this time when we were trying to help him face his fear, but that one was just so kind of just an uphill battle, and I was like, “You know what, as a loving act, I’m really okay just going downstairs to get the thing. I’ll help him fight his fears in other places, and he doesn’t need to tackle every fear because his dad freaking is obsessed with confidence.”

So, I just decided that, and it’s this kind of sweet act of generosity. He’s not going to be eight years old forever. And when he’s a big hulking teenager and could care less about going anywhere in the house, then that’ll be a sweet memory.

And so, you can actually be really loving and generous in all these different ways. It’s just not coming from this pressure that you have to or else. I think that’s the biggest freedom.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, walk us through the next steps.

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

All right. So, you’ve decided, “I don’t want to be nice,” and then you start to ask yourself, “What do I want?” Then the next step is going to be you do the things that are “not nice.” And that might be saying to your friends, “Hey, I’d love to see you. You guys can come. We’ll get some dinner. It’ll be awesome. And then you’re going to be staying near the airport or something. I want to have the evening to myself with my wife. It’s our one night and I really want to preserve that.” And it’s, “Oh, my gosh, so you’re saying no in that situation.”

Yeah, another not nice thing might be to inconvenience someone by asking them for something, “Can you help me with this?” or, “Can you do that?” There’s disagreeing with somebody, “Ooh, that’s real unpleasing of you.” So, maybe you have a different opinion, it’s relevant to something in business, a decision, whereby it feels high stakes and it’s important to share it.

It might even be just a different idea or preference that doesn’t even seem that important to share but you just share it instead of smiling, and saying, “Oh, yeah, me, too. Me, too.” You’re like, “Yeah, I actually like the person that you seem to dislike. Hmm, that’s interesting.” So, whatever it is, it’s just a small smattering of the potential behaviors of you being more you, more authentic, more real, more bold.

That’s all the “not nice” behaviors. And every single one of those is going to produce probably some level of anxiety at first because that’s me being testing out what could happen, which is going to be some sort of calamity, “If there’s conflict, the relationship is over. If I say no, the person is going to never do anything for me ever again. If I ask for what I want, they’re going to hate me.”

So, we have these dramatic predictions, and we test them out. And it’s a form of exposure, really, like behavioral training where we need to do the steps, which tends to bring about the discomfort. And then there is another step about working with that, but I’ll pause there to see if there’s anything you wanted to ask about this step.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s good. That’s good. And what’s funny, though, is the asking for help, we think that’s not nice or imposing or burden, yadda, yadda, but, in reality, when I’m asked for help, I often am delighted to be trusted, relied upon, to be confided in on the matter, and I really like it. And I guess not all the time. Some things are like, “I really don’t want to do that.”

But I think that’s interesting that sometimes these not-nice behaviors are, in fact, what people really value. Maybe some people don’t get people who disagree or challenge them enough.

So, it’s interesting what we think might be not nice could, in fact, be just what the doctor ordered on the other side of the table.

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

Yeah, and that highlights something really important, which is this strategy of people-pleasing is not a very well thought out effective model of human relations. It’s like, “This is the best predictors and most intelligent, socially intelligent model I can…” No, it’s a cautionary model. It’s, “Hey, any of those things might be a problem so don’t do any of them. That person might respond well to that but they might not, so just, no, don’t.” So, it’s not a very sophisticated or intelligent interpersonal model. It’s just safety-oriented.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, thank you. You got some more steps?

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

Yes. So, after you spoke up, you did the thing, and you’re freaking out inside, then it’s time to do the work, which is to upgrade something inside of yourself. That’s where the real transformation is going to occur. People think the real transformation comes from the action, which is part of it, but then we have to upgrade, otherwise we just keep beating our head against the wall. And you can leave that situation, you say, “Oh, I feel so guilty I told them no. I’m so bad.”

If you just grind yourself through that meat grinder for two days, and then you come out of it, you haven’t probably really learned anything. And so, the next time someone asks you for something, and you think, “I should say no because that’s being less nice,” then you might remember the meat grinder, and you’re like, “I don’t want to do that.” And so, then you probably just go back to the old pattern.

So, to really change, after we say no, and then all that stuff starts to come up, then we get to upgrade our map of relationships. And there’s one that I really love, which is I call your bill of rights, so what you’re allowed to do, and the rules, basically. And so, when you feel really guilty, you can examine it, and say, “Wait a minute, what rule did I break? What did I do that was so bad there?” “Well, you said no to people.” “Okay, so what’s the rule?” “You should never say no.” “Well, to who? My friends?” “Yeah, you should never say no to your friends’ requests.”

“Okay. Wow, that’s a pretty extreme rule. Is that how I’m going to live my life? Are there some downsides to that one?” And then we upgrade with much more healthy, and nuanced, intentionally chosen approaches to life, rules for life. So, for example, you might say, and this is where the bill of rights is, “I have a right to say no to requests.” And that might sound like a simple statement, but if you really start to believe that and live that, that’s a whole different life, not just in terms of the behaviors but how you feel on a daily basis.

I don’t think we can totally upgrade these in a vacuum, where we just sit down with a sheet of paper, and we upgrade our bill of rights, and then we venture forth into the world, and everything is perfect. No, we kind of have to go through this process where we take the action, we feel bad, and then that’s the motivation to say, “Whoa, it’s time for something different.”

But if we do it, and we change, and we upgrade, it’s like a step-by-step. It’s almost like pulling out the faulty coding of the pattern and putting in a new coding, new software, that runs so much better. And it’s the software of more authenticity, more boldness, more actually being you in the world. And it turns out to work a lot better on your system than the nice people-pleasing software.

Pete Mockaitis

And it’s interesting, it seems like those exposures, those reps, really do build up over time when you work through those steps. I suppose I am a people-pleaser myself, and I’ve just sort of gotten clear that I’m disappointing people every day. Like, there are people, maybe this very minute, Dr. Aziz, someone might be unfollowing this podcast or unsubscribing from the Gold Nugget newsletter, which I don’t recommend taking those actions. But, nonetheless, they are taken.

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

Someone out there. There’s a loose cannon out there.

Pete Mockaitis

By the hundreds, by the thousands, and so this happens. And so, what’s empowering is to just, for me, as I just sit with that, it’s like, “Yeah, I have displeased someone, and that’s okay. I have not sinned, I have not violated my values, I have not been, I don’t know, fill in the blank: selfish, greedy, lazy, any number of things that seems to kind of be at the core of a lot of this, is we have these value judgments associated with what you’re calling rules. It’s, like, “I feel bad, therefore, I must’ve done something bad. So, I’ve done something bad. I’ve broken a rule. What was the rule? Oh, wait, that rule is kind of ridiculous. Huh.”

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

Yeah, and there’s what I found, and one of the reasons why when I work with people, and the main ways that I work with people, is in a group environment is because we can identify that rule, and think, “That seems kind of intense,” but it has such momentum of history that I find a lot of this is almost like we’ve been running a propaganda campaign inside of ourselves for 20, 30, 40 years.

And when you’ve heard something for 40 years, it doesn’t matter what’s true or not. It’s hard to challenge. I was working with a gentleman in the program, who has had a hard time, even his relationship with his wife, he’s saying, “This is what I’d like to do on a Saturday.” “I don’t know if I want to do that. Here’s what I want,” like basic stuff.

And so, it almost felt like for the first couple of months he’s in the program, he was, “Hey, it’s okay for me to ask for what I want.” And in some part of the lecture, I’m like, “Of course. Of course.” And then he looks, like, around the room, and like, “Is it really okay for us to do that?” And we need to hear that, we need to get reinforced from outside.

And, hopefully, it’s just reinforcing some new beliefs that are just more sane and healthy. And I think that’s really a key thing to come back to, is, “Hey, is the way I’ve been living really serving me? Is it serving others? Is it really? If I’m getting burnt out, and hurting inside, and experiencing all these mind-body issues, and pain, and illnesses, like is this really how it’s supposed to go?” And I would challenge that, I’d say, “We’re not meant to live and help others at the expense of ourselves.” I think there’s really a beautiful, a much more abundant, win-win way of going through life.

Pete Mockaitis

That is beautiful. And I’m wondering if you recommend starting, if it feels scary, starting big or starting small? Like, “Asking my wife what I want to do on a Saturday,” in that example, is it that you recommend that you have, I mean, a small request might be…?

I guess I’m thinking small might be like you can give a lot of advanced notice. Like, let’s say on a Tuesday, you say, “Hey, honey, I think it’d be really fun on Saturday if we got lunch at Jimmy John’s.” Like, “Okay, that’s an inexpensive restaurant. It’s four days notice. It’s lunch, not dinner. It doesn’t seem as big, primetime of a meal.” So, I’m wondering, is your professional advice to start with some of those smaller, non-pleasing moves or requests, or to go for the bigger ones right off the bat?

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

I would say both are beneficial and it’s going to be based upon your discomfort tolerance, which, by the way, is akin to a muscle that is worth building, and you will build it by doing this. And so, if one is going to just completely blow you out of the water, because our goal here is sustainable. Think of it like strength training over many months, and so you don’t want to go to the gym and just blow yourself out where you can’t work out for three weeks. So, maybe you do the lighter weight at first, then it’s a little easier, and that’s great.

You start to build momentum, and success builds on success, so you have a couple wins, and you’re like, “Well, that didn’t go so bad, so I think that’s a completely valid approach.” And if you want to go faster, you feel like, “I have been in this cage for so long that I’m just ready to do whatever. I got to get out,” then you might feel excited and exhilarated as you really test the edge quicker. But I don’t think there’s one approach that’s better or worse.

Pete Mockaitis

You say discomfort tolerance is a muscle, when we work that muscle doing exactly this. If people-pleasing is a diagnosis, that is apt for you. Are there any other pro tips you have on building the discomfort tolerance muscle? I’ve been into cold plunges lately, so if you can justify me that I’m not a weirdo, and this is actually super beneficial to all sorts of elements of my life, I’ll receive that, Dr. Aziz. But, is cold plunges one of the activities that increases the discomfort tolerance muscle? Or what are some of the other top prescriptions here?

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

As a matter of fact, the cold plunge is.

Pete Mockaitis

Thank you for that.

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

It’s actually cold showers for clients that I work with. And I, about six to eight months ago, invested in an actual cold plunge to take my cold to the next level. And there’s a lot of physical health benefits to them but, honestly, the biggest draw for me is that discomfort tolerance. It’s a training, it’s a visceral training to go into the uncomfortable every day, or however often you do it.

And the cool thing about discomfort tolerance is that it actually does generalize. So, if you took a cold shower that morning, and then later in the day, there’s an opportunity, someone at work is sharing an idea, and you have something you want to add to it, and you’re like, “Well, actually, I think this. I don’t know if they would think that that’s disagreeing, or I’m not sure.” And that back-and-forth kind of hesitant energy, when you’re in the cold shower, about to go in the morning, you’re like, “Uh, should I go into it?” you’re like, “Ah, let’s just…all right, here we go.”

And whatever that is, that ability to go into discomfort, and then withstand the discomfort, it translates because the circumstance might be totally different, one seems physical, one seems social, but on a physiological level in your nervous system, discomfort is discomfort. And when you increase your capacity to do it, you can actually transfer it.

And so, yes, physical feats of discomfort, whether it’s a cold plunge, or just going doing, you know, people will take the elevator instead of the stairs when it’s two flights of stairs. There’s just this unconscious addiction to comfort that we’re living in. So, finding ways, I’d say once a day, on purpose, you could go do a wall sit where you sit against a wall with your back against the wall, and your legs, or your thighs are at parallel to the earth. Hold that for 60 seconds and you’ll be quivering.

Is that going to make you ripped? No, but it’s saying, and it’s all about the framing of it. So, right before I go into a cold plunge, I remind myself, “This is going to make me stronger.” So, it’s framing. It’s the same thing with the wall sit. I’m not doing this just to build muscle or something. I’m doing this to say, “Hey, I can do things that are uncomfortable,” and that will exactly translate over.

And then, of course, there’s dozens of opportunities in your interpersonal social life. And how do you find them? You just know. We all have a radar going on all the time, and saying, “Is that going to be comfortable or uncomfortable?” And most of us are using that radar to say, “Well, if it’s uncomfortable, then go the other way.” And what we actually want to do is you don’t have to go crazy with this. It’s all in the dose. You don’t need to go insane on your dose of medicine here, this discomfort medicine. But a daily dose, even if it’s small, will radically accelerate how quickly you can make these changes in your life.

Pete Mockaitis

Cool. All right. Well, could you now share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

Well, this one I like, this is Tony Robbins, “The quality of your life is directly proportional to the amount of uncertainty you can comfortably tolerate.”

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite study or experiment or piece of research?

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

Ah, favorite has got to be The Boulder Study of Back Pain of 2021. There’s a book called The Way Out by Alan Gordon where they talk about it, but the Boulder Back Pain study was done to compare back pain treatment, treatment as usual, medications, physical therapy, and then also something called pain reprocessing therapy, which is treating the back pain with the mind and emotion, which has been fascinating for me with my own history of back pain and chronic pain, as well as nice-people developing pain.

There’s a whole chapter in the book, why it’s not nice about that. And so, randomized, controlled trial, gold standard evidence that we can use these mind-body approaches to not just reduce but completely transform back pain is revolutionary for the chronic pain world, and something I’m really excited about getting out into the world in a big way.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And a favorite book?

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

There’s one I’m reading right now that I really enjoy, it’s called Free to Focus by Michael Hyatt, and I’m finding it really refreshing for how to reclaim your focus and your time.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And a favorite habit?

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

It’s the best and the worst, it’s the cold plunge.

Pete Mockaitis

And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

Yes, go to DrAziz.com, that’s D-R-A-Z-I-Z.com, and the goal is for there to be a wealth of resources for free. So, there’s a podcast on that page, under the Resources tab. There’s also a mini-course, a video mini-course called “5 Steps to Unleash Your Inner Confidence” also for free. I have a YouTube channel, you can get a link there as well from the Dr. Aziz’s homepage.

So, lots of resources for free. And then if you want to take things further, we have some training courses, and I also work with people in a 12-month life changing yearlong program. So, however far you want to go, I’d love to support you. And if you just want to start with the free stuff or get a book, that’s a beautiful way to really learn that there’s a pathway. There’s a proven pathway out of this stuff, and I’m here to help as many of us as we can to get across that.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

Yes. Whatever is going to make you the most awesome at your job is also the thing that’s probably either scary or uncomfortable. It’s, like, really practicing that boldness and facing what we fear will not only produce just beautiful results in your career but will also make you feel good at your work, you’ll feel way more engaged.

Pete Mockaitis

Beautiful. Dr. Aziz, this has been a treat. I wish you much fun and minimal people-pleasing.

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

Thank you, Pete. What a fun and interesting and dynamic interview. Really appreciate it.

1018: The Step-by-Step Guide to Building the Life You Want with Ximena Vengoechea

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Ximena Vengoechea shares her viral three-phase life audit exercise for surfacing and achieving your most important goals.

You’ll Learn

  1. How to transform your life with just Post-Its and a marker
  2. How to turn fanciful wishes into actionable goals
  3. How to stay motivated while pursuing hard goals

About Ximena 

Ximena Vengoechea is a user experience researcher, writer, and illustrator whose work on personal and professional development has been published in Inc., the Washington Post, Newsweek, and Insider, among others. She is the author of Rest Easy and Listen Like You Mean It, and she writes a newsletter about personal growth and human behavior. She lives in New York.

Resources Mentioned

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Ximena Vengoechea Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Ximena, welcome back.

Ximena Vengoechea
Thank you so much for having me back. It’s great to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I’m excited to chat through your latest goodies. You wrote a post that really resonated with folks and you’ve now made it into a book. Tell us about this so-called life audit.

Ximena Vengoechea
So, this is a post that I wrote about a decade ago that is now a book, and basically The Life Audit is this exercise, this kind of checkpoint for you to see, “What is it that I want to of this one true beautiful life? Am I heading in that direction? What are maybe some of the deep-seated desires, wishes, goals that I am not in touch with that maybe I need to kind of resurface? What are my core values? And how do I navigate that in this lovely thing called life?”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that sounds like, generally, a kind of a prudent practice. I mean, just to confirm, clarify, will Federal agents swoop in if I conduct a life audit?

Ximena Vengoechea
They will not be making you an appearance.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Ximena Vengoechea
Yeah, this is just for you. This is really, you know, I’m sure we’ll get into this but my background is in user research, and a lot of what that role is doing is about understanding other people, and really kind of understanding the psychology of people. What are their needs? What are their motivations? What are their perceptions, usually, with regard to understanding how to design a better product that actually fits those real human needs?

And in this case, we’re taking these same practices, but we’re turning them in on ourselves. So, this is something that is really just for you. It’s a tool to help you reconnect with yourself to uncover some of this inner wisdom and intuition, and then it is practical also to kind of help you take steps in that direction. Yeah, you are welcome to share it if you’d like, but, if not, you don’t have to share your paper with anybody.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so reconnecting with yourself and uncovering wisdom, generally, sounds like something kind of cool, kind of handy. But could you perhaps make an even stronger case for the why behind this?

If folks are thinking, “Oh, maybe, but there’s maybe a dozen journaling kinds of things I probably ‘should’ be doing, along with some mindfulness practices and gratitude, and so on and so on,” could you share perhaps your own story or the story of some of your biggest life audit fans on what kind of impact this can make?

Ximena Vengoechea
Yes. I certainly never want this to feel like a chore. So, this is something that you should pursue when the moment feels right. Usually, for most people, that’s at some kind of crossroads or life milestone. So, in my case, I had moved from the East Coast to the West Coast. I was in this phase of just great excitement, of starting this new career, meeting lots of people, had lots of hobbies, interests, things that I could be pursuing, but also felt overwhelmed by the possibility. What a beautiful place to be in but also a little bit scary.

And I remember just thinking like, “Oh, my God, like, I don’t know where to start. And is this career even right? Like, was this move even right?” Just having a lot of doubts about what came next. And for me, it was really an opportunity to kind of step back, assess, not just this moment, but, on a longer term, what it was that I wanted out of my life.

This is something that we usually don’t allow ourselves to do. So, a lot of times when we’re getting those resolutions in for the New Year or setting goals, we’re usually doing it on a much smaller timeframe, or maybe we’re not even thinking about the timeframe, and we just think, “This is a thing that I want to do.” The Life Audit is really unique in that we are looking at a much longer time frame.

So, in my case, I was starting to do user research. I had a bunch of hobbies that I sort of didn’t know what to do with them, you know, design, illustration, writing. These were things I was excited about, but I didn’t really know what to do with them. And 10 years later, “The Life Audit,” that post that I wrote after conducting my own, where I sort of learned these things about myself, went viral. That post was then picked up by Fast Company.

Fast Company then invited me to be a contributor. A literary agent saw my work in Fast Company. I am now a published author working with that agent. This is my third book and, yeah, I had some wishes around writing, writing books, like figuring out how to make a career out of that. And I think that had I not sat down and really taken the time and space to uncover that, but also just kind of sit with it and really internalize that about myself, I don’t know what would have happened.

I mean, maybe life is long, maybe you meander in that direction. But it, certainly, for me, gave me a lot of clarity and purpose and conviction around the things that I wanted to pursue. And I hear that a lot from people who have conducted their own life audits, that it’s really about crystallizing things, things that maybe you’ve buried or maybe you haven’t made space to uncover before, and providing that clarity is really just so key.

Pete Mockaitis
I love that so much. Clarity is something many of us want, crave, and in practice, it seems it’s relatively rare for us to pause from the interesting, the urgent, the impulse to check something, whether it’s the news or social media or email or whatever, but really to go deep and to go internal. So, I think that’s one huge piece right there is to just remember, “Hey, if clarity appears to be missing, perhaps what is also missing is some form of quiet introspection, reflection, be it a life audit process or there’s something different.”

Ximena Vengoechea
Yes, we don’t often make space to ask ourselves these big questions, and there are many reasons for that. Part of it are the distractions that you were talking about. Part of it is also, I think, emotional. It takes a certain amount of courage for many people to sit down with themselves, just with themselves, not with anybody else, not with their manager or a partner or a roommate, giving them advice or telling them what they should pursue.

I think we all have, by virtue of living in this society, we have societal messages, expectations that are put upon us. There’s a difference between, and I think we sometimes kind of lose this distinction, but there is a difference between pursuing things that you think you should pursue versus things that you genuinely want to pursue. And for many of us, those external messages crowd out the internal side.

And I think that’s when we can kind of, suddenly, maybe you’re in this career and you’re at the top of your field and you step back and go, “Wait, but is this it?” you know, or, “Am I happy? Do I like this? My LinkedIn resume is amazing, but is this it?” And so, I think that’s one of the main things that we’re doing, is we’re really trying to set some of that aside. It’s not to say that those voices can completely be erased, but we’re trying to recognize and acknowledge when it’s somebody else’s desire versus our own.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that’s really handy. And so, in terms of when to do it, it sounds like often it comes with life transitions, a move, turning a milestone age of 30 or 40, new job, new partner, breakups, transitions. These sorts of things are fine prompts, and maybe the New Year or just any reason at all, like, “I just think now would be great to have some extra clarity.” So, that’s cool.

And if we don’t do something along this, we may very well find ourselves swept along into a pathway of, “Oops! Is this really what I want? Uh-oh. Where did life go? Uh-oh.” So, walk us through it then. If we’re thinking, “All right, life audit sounds great,” how do we proceed?

Ximena Vengoechea
Yes. So, it’s a very simple process. It’s deliberately lightweight. So, what I mean by that is I’m not going to ask you to get any specific equipment. You don’t have to download anything. Your tools really are quite simple. And we’re starting with sticky notes, so Post-it notes, which maybe you have at home, and Sharpies, permanent marker, which hopefully you also have at home, and if not, that’s at the office, quick Staples run, whatever. But that’s it. It’s very minimal, and that’s deliberate.

And so, what we are doing, there are sort of three phases. The first phase is really generative, and this is when we are brainstorming, essentially, and pulling up wishes. So, I usually recommend that people dedicate an hour and they aim for 100 wishes. So, you’re writing one wish per sticky note. You’re keeping it simple. So, that is why we use a Sharpie. We’re not writing long essays. We’re not writing anything that involves a comma. No, it’s usually just one or two words, a handful of words, and you’re just going to keep going until you hit that hour mark.

The hour is a guideline, just as 100 is a guideline. Some people are going to blow past that and some people won’t hit that number. That’s totally fine. This is just to get the wheels turning, but essentially like this first phase, you know, in user research, we talk about brainstorms, and whenever we talk about brainstorms, we say we’re encouraging wild and crazy ideas. There are no bad ideas. This is blue skies so you don’t want to self-edit during this stage.

And that’s another reason for using sticky notes is they are intentionally disposable. If you decide later that was a dumb idea, you don’t want it, you can just crumple it up and get rid of it. So, we’re really trying to make this less heavy because it can feel a little intense of, “Oh, my God, what am I doing with my life?” No, we want it to feel lightweight, playful. We’re just dreaming during this stage. So, that’s the generative stage.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so we got the Post-its, we got the Sharpies, we’re dreaming and we’re putting a dream or wish on one per sticky. Could you just give us some examples? The dreams can be big or small. Like, give us a few nuggets.

Ximena Vengoechea
Sure.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s like, “I want to get good at making barbecue,” all the way to, “I want to live in Hawaii.” Like, anything there?

Ximena Vengoechea
Yeah, exactly. It could be anything from, “I want to launch a podcast someday. I don’t know when, but I want to do it,” to, “I want to write a book someday,” to, “I want to make six figures in my career,” to, “I want to be more patient.” So, it can be a little bit more abstract too. So, there’s a whole variety. And, usually, what happens when you step back and you get to the analysis phase, which we’ll talk about next, usually what happens is you do start to see that your wishes kind of fall into three buckets of, “This is something I can carry with me every day.” I think of these as core values.

So, for example, a desire to be patient, a desire to be generous, to tell your loved ones that you love them on a regular basis, like things that you just want to kind of carry with you, I would put those in the category of core values. And then you tend to also have wishes that are really about things you want to achieve or see through in the near term, let’s say, in the next 6 to 12 months.

And then you’ve got another category which is really kind of someday wishes, like, “I want to do this someday. I want to launch a podcast someday. I don’t know when, but at some point, that seems like something that I would enjoy, that I could be good at.” So that’s a whole other category of wishes.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, we’ve generated many wishes and we find they fall into some categories. And I guess if they’re Post-its, are you imagining like rearranging them on a big old wall or a giant desk or piece of furniture? Or, kind of visually how does that unfold?

Ximena Vengoechea
Yeah. So this is something else that I really like about using Post-its is you can manipulate them, and you can move them around and look for patterns. So, this is our second phase where we’re really looking to, essentially, analyze our data. So, this is something that as a user researcher you would do. You have a bunch of data about a study and then you have to make sense of it, and you need to turn the data into insights. So, it’s not just numbers or information, it’s actually telling you something useful.

So, I usually recommend that you just start by doing a simple cluster analysis, which is essentially we’re looking for wishes that are in some way related to each other, and we’re just going to group them. So, it sounds fancier than it is, but we are just looking for things that are related. So, for example, common themes that might come up, you might have a bunch of wishes around family, you might have a bunch of wishes around career, money, volunteering, travel, creative pursuits, spirituality, mental health, physical health. There’s a lot of things that could come up.

But we’re essentially going to go, “Okay, I’ve got my hundred wishes. Now I’m going to start to physically move them and put them in groups so that I get a bigger picture of what’s really happening.” Because, essentially, what we’re looking at here is a reflection of our true desires, is a reflection of today, “Who I am today, these are the things that I want.” These things can change, we evolve as people. But today, this is a snapshot, it’s sort of a self-portrait.

And so, you get to look back and go, just really quickly, see visually too, “Oh, wow, I have a ton of wishes around family. I have a lot of wishes around finance. I don’t have that many wishes around my career. Why might that be?” So, you’re kind of observing and asking yourself questions of, “How do I feel about how this is mapping out? Why might this be mapping out in this way?”

I think one of the interesting things to consider when you have your life audit is that areas that are, let’s say you have a smaller number of wishes, sometimes we think, “Wait a minute, am I not as invested, for example, in my career as I thought I was?” Maybe. But another thing could be that you are investing so much already in that area of your life that you don’t need it as a wish. It’s kind of already taken care of, right? It’s something that you are regularly doing, supporting, pursuing.

So, I always tell people, you know, the life audit, especially at this stage, it’s not a progress report. It doesn’t tell you, like check mark, like, “Here’s what I’ve done. Here’s what I haven’t done.” It’s really trying to reveal, like, “Right now, what are the things that I’m most interested in pursuing,” and to teach you something about that.

Whether it’s that there are areas that are not coming up because you are really actively embracing them already, or whether there are things that you kind of step back and go, “Wait a minute, that’s actually weird that I have so many things in this column around physical fitness because I hate exercising. Like, where did that come from?” And that’s when you kind of can ask yourself, “Is this a true wish? Is this a should wish? Like, somebody thinks I should do this. Is this really mine?” So, this is a really fun phase too because it’s all about self-discovery and learning something about yourself.

Pete Mockaitis
That is really fun. And, you’re right, when you ask those questions you might say, “Oh, no, it’s just because I was listening to some health podcasts yesterday, and that’s very top of mind.” Or, maybe you don’t have much in careers, like, “Oh, do I not care about career? Well, maybe it’s already taken care of.” Or, maybe, “Well, I’ve got two in career, and they’re hugely important to me!” So, all right, it doesn’t matter so much the quantity of pieces of paper. And when I’m looking for clusters and connections, do I need yarn, like an FBI investigation board? Or do I just let them hang?

Ximena Vengoechea
No, you do not need yarn.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Ximena Vengoechea
If that feels good to you, that would be your own unique modification. I will not stop you. But, no, usually, I suggest doing this either on a wall, a foam core board if you have one, but if not, a wall is great, or the floor is also fine, and you’re just moving things around. So, we’re keeping things flexible. We don’t need to attach anything else to it. We’re just kind of seeing where things land.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then what’s our next step?

Ximena Vengoechea
So, from here, we’re going to start thinking about some other factors to help us understand what’s happening. So, we’re going to look at, okay, let’s say we’ve got however many wishes, we’ve grouped them into themes, we can start to prioritize. Usually, I suggest that people commit to three to five wishes a year, and that’s a guideline.

As you mentioned earlier, you might have two wishes in career, they might be huge. We need to be aware of that. You don’t want to commit to five huge wishes, but you do want to find a little bit of a balance, and that’s where knowing, “Is this a core value that I’m going to live through every day? Is this something I want to do in the next 6 to 12 months? Is this something that I need to work toward eventually, someday?” That’s where having that in mind really helps so that you’re not tackling all, let’s say, someday wishes, like huge wishes. You find a balance, but you’re really going to start to prioritize.

And prioritization can come on multiple axes. So, you might be a really rational thinker and look and say, “Okay, what do I know is achievable, either because I have the right skillset in place, I have the right resources, I have the time and money available to me, I have mentorship?” Maybe it’s geographically feasible, right? But if you’re a really logical thinker that might be a really useful way for you to prioritize.

Some people hear that, and they think, “Oh, my God, that sounds so boring. That sounds like homework.” And they might be more drawn to just intuition of, like, where is their natural heat? Like, “What am I naturally drawn to? I’m going to just follow that instinct.” Other people might also think about this more emotionally of, “What am I afraid of? Like, maybe that’s actually the entry point I want to take in. The things that are scariest to me might also be most exciting to me.”

So, there’s a lot of that you can go into it, but you want to choose whatever feels right for you. Usually, it’s a combination of those things that you might want to ask yourself some questions around before you kind of come up with that short list.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, we’ve got our short list, then what?

Ximena Vengoechea
So, at this point, you also want to start thinking about what’s feasible. So, I usually recommend that folks do a little bit of an audit of their time, “So, knowing that these are the things that I want to spend my time on, how am I spending my time today?” And I usually recommend that folks just look at an average day and make a quick list of “Here’s how I usually spend my time.”

You can think of it as like a pie chart, give yourself little percentages, maybe work takes up 50% of the time, child care or pet care or life admin, just start to chart it out, and see what is the delta between where you want to be and where you are. I think, similarly, doing a little bit of a relationship audit. So, thinking about who are the people in your life who you spend the most time with. That doesn’t necessarily mean physically, like you’re in the same room, but like these are the people you’re connecting with the most on an average day.

Usually, these people are somewhat convenient. So, maybe there’s someone you work with, or maybe they live in your building, or you have some reason that you’re seeing them a lot, versus they’re actually someone who can help me see these wishes through, who can help me see these goals through, and I don’t mean that in a transactional sense. I don’t mean, “So-and-so works in the recording industry. Like, I can talk to them about getting a foot in the door for whatever goal.” That’s not what I mean.

I mean people who are really inspiring to you, are motivating, the friend who you have a coffee catch up with and you walk away and you’re like, “Yes, like life is good. I can do anything.” Like, the people who boost you up or genuinely invested in you as a person. person, that’s what I’m talking about. I call them gems.

So, what we’re doing here is we’re kind of taking a look at, “Okay, there are some stuff that I want to do, that I want to pursue. What does my life look like now? Who is kind of supporting me? Who could support me? Where are the gaps?” because that is also going to give us information about where some tweaks might need to be made in order to support our pursuit of these goals and wishes and desires.

Pete Mockaitis
Very good. Okay, then what?

Ximena Vengoechea
At that point, you’ve got a lot of information about changes that you might want to make. That can feel both galvanizing, energizing, exciting, and daunting. Like, you might look at your lists and go, “Oh, my God, I’m not talking to anybody who I actually want to talk to,” or, like, “My schedule is not really in my control. Like, how can I shift even a little bit?”

And this is usually, I think of this as like a phase where, for example, if you’re setting a New Year’s resolution, we’re often not doing this depth of self-analysis. We’re kind of making the wish or setting the goal and forgetting about the rest, but we’re going so much deeper that now we can see some of the gaps in our own schedule, in our own lives, in our own network, however you want to put it. So, now this phase is about making sure that we don’t get dissuaded or discouraged by what we’re seeing because it’s normal to have some gaps.

If you didn’t have any gaps, you probably would have pursued those goals and wishes earlier. So, it’s normal, it is expected. And now at this point, we want to see, like, “Okay, how do I begin to chart a path forward?” And so, the third part is really all about goal-setting, and how to make these goals more manageable for yourself.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And how do we?

Ximena Vengoechea
So, I usually tell people, you know, like taking a look at those, let’s say, three to five areas. Like, how do we break those goals down into really achievable goals? So, for example, let’s say you have a wish that’s just to read more. You used to read as a kid, you don’t really read now, like you want to return to your love of reading.

Rather than go to the bookstore and buy 20 books that look awesome and put them on your bedside and go, “Okay, I’m starting tonight,” what if you got one book? And what if you committed to a paragraph a night? And then you work your way up to a chapter a night, right? Like, starting really small, so whatever that goal is, essentially how can you break it down into something really manageable? So manageable that you are virtually guaranteed to succeed because, especially in the beginning, it is important to get that momentum.

Psychologically, when you’re pursuing something new, it’s important to get these quick wins so that you go, “Okay, I can do this,” and then you can continue to make progress against that. So that’s one thing that I suggest.

Pete Mockaitis
I love that a lot. And we had B.J. Fogg on the show talking about Tiny Habits, and that really resonates in terms of in my own life and the results that he’s seeing, in general, it feels good to win and to be able to celebrate something. And it is worth celebrating something new, even if it’s super tiny. And he uses the example of when a child takes his or her first steps, no one says, “Okay, yeah, whatever, you only made it like six inches, dude.” It’s like, no, no, it’s beautiful and wondrous and worthy of celebration.

And so too is it if, “Hey, if we want to read more,” we’ve kind of had that as a hidden desire for years, and then we finally buy book and read a paragraph, that is worth celebrating. That’s something. Go from zero to one there.

Ximena Vengoechea
Absolutely, yeah. We’re making progress. It can feel really small, but that’s what we’re doing, is we’re making progress. The other thing that I recommend is to think about having some kind of accountability partner because it is totally natural, when you are pursuing something new, that things will get hard. Your schedule will be difficult, someone will get sick, like, things will get thrown off, you’ll forget. There are just a number of things that get in our way, as anyone who’s either tried to start a new habit or to stop a bad habit from forming. Lots of uncontrollable factors.

One thing you can do, though, is to have an accountability partner. So, let’s say you have something like, you know, there’s that yoga studio in your neighborhood that you pass by all the time, kind of wistfully looking at, like, “That could be me. Like, maybe someday,” and you’ve decided, “No, I’m actually going to get serious about exercise, and that is where I’m going to start.” Maybe, you find a friend who will go with you to this yoga class. Maybe you guys sign up to do this on a weekly basis. It is much easier to cancel on ourselves than it is to cancel on someone else.

So, when we have somebody else who is waiting for us, excited to see us, there’s just more accountability built in, and we are less likely to bail even if it’s really freezing out and we’d rather not put on our heavy down jacket and head out into the cold to the studio. Having somebody there on the other side really helps encourage us to keep going.

Pete Mockaitis
I dig it. Having been through this and seen other people go through it, have you observed any patterns in terms of ideal mindsets and not-so-ideal mindsets, in terms of the headspace or approach that we take while working these steps? Any do’s or don’ts come to mind there?

Ximena Vengoechea
Yes. I would say that you’ll have more success if you come into this with an open mind and self-compassion, the ability to give yourself some grace for when things are difficult. If you come into it with this mindset of “Everything should be perfect. Why am I already failing? Why haven’t I done all these things in my life audit? I’ve wasted my life. Like, now I’m behind and I have to really like catch up,” that’s a lot of pressure. That’s a lot of, like, emotional pressure to put on yourself. And that means that anytime there’s any kind of setback, with that mindset it’s going to be a lot harder to overcome those setbacks.

So, really, if you can do the opposite, if you can bring a spirit of openness, of curiosity, of, “Why haven’t I pursued that? Oh, that’s interesting. What might have been in the way at the time? Okay, what has changed in my life that maybe now is the right time to pursue this? Why is this getting harder? Maybe I need somebody else in my life supporting me, or maybe there’s a set of skills that I realize I don’t have in order to pursue this.”

But, really, coming in with openness, with curiosity, and a spirit of adventure, of like, “Okay, we’re going to try this, and we’re going to learn some things along the way, and not everything is going to work out, and that’s okay, because we’re trying, and we are still making progress toward living a life that is more aligned with our values,” I think that can be so much more productive and fruitful, and, frankly, more fun. And when things are more fun, we tend to stick with them.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great. Well, Ximena, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Ximena Vengoechea
I think just thinking about this as really an opportunity to get to know yourself and to carve out some time for yourself, again, I think we don’t really have many nudges to do this, so if you’ve been on the fence about, you know, or feeling a little bit off, then I would say just like consider this your nudge to dive deep and go for some self-discovery.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Now, could you share a favorite study, or experiment, or bit of research?

Ximena Vengoechea
I’m always interested having my career in user research. One of the things that always comes up is how often participants have a desire to please you as a researcher, right? It’s like you show them study, you show them something, a prototype, a concept, and there’s such a strong…

Pete Mockaitis
“Oh, it’s really good.”

Ximena Vengoechea
Yeah, and you’re like, “No, this is broken. Like, I know it’s broken. It’s broken in all these ways. It is deeply flawed.” So, that always interests me, like this idea that even with a perfect stranger, there’s a pressure to perform. There’s a pressure to please in some way.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And a favorite book?

Ximena Vengoechea
I just read this book by Natalie Sue, I Hope This Finds You Well, and it is a very funny office workplace novel. It perfectly captures office politics at its finest. It’s very funny. If you work in any kind of corporate setting, in particular, I think you will find it funny and a great main character.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite tool?

Ximena Vengoechea
Sharpies, Post-its, and I love a good notebook, like a Moleskine notebook.

Pete Mockaitis
Is Moleskine your preferred brand?

Ximena Vengoechea
I like them, and then there’s also a German brand which I don’t know how to pronounce. I think it’s Leuchtturm. I’m sure that is not the correct pronunciation. But, yeah, both of those brands, I like.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Ximena Vengoechea
Breaking things down into smaller chunks, but, really, I didn’t mention earlier the fresh start effect. Like, I love that for habits when you start on the first day of the year, or the first day of a new season, or having moved. That’s all, there’s a lot of research around how you can use a fresh start to make habit-building more effective.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they quote it back to you often?

Ximena Vengoechea
People really seem to connect with the idea of the life audit as a kind of spring cleaning for the soul, is the phrase that I use, and that’s something that comes up in a lot of conversations of, like, “Yes, that is exactly what this is.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Ximena Vengoechea
Yeah, so a great place to start is my website, which is XimenaVengoechea.com, and that is kind of a hub for all ways to connect with me, whether that’s social media or my newsletter, and beyond.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Ximena Vengoechea
I think just checking in with that little voice, you know? I think just making space for it and not ignoring it. I think that’s really the main one.

Pete Mockaitis
Ximena, thanks. This was a lot of fun.

Ximena Vengoechea
Thank you so much. This is great.

991: Mastering the Five Tiers of Career Development with Andrew LaCivita

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Andrew LaCivita discusses the most important career investment you can make: your skill development.

You’ll Learn

  1. The biggest assumption that’s hurting your career 
  2. How to pinpoint what skills you need to develop 
  3. Three easy ways to build your confidence 

About Andrew

Andrew LaCivita, a globally-renowned career and leadership coach, is the founder of the milewalk Academy®. During his career, he has impacted over 350 companies, more than 100,000 individuals, and spanned nearly 200 countries, helping them unlock their full potential. He is the best-selling author of four books including Interview Intervention, The Hiring Prophecies, and The Zebra Code. You can join him on Thursdays for live, complimentary career coaching at his Live Office Hours on YouTube.

Resources Mentioned

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Andrew LaCivita Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Andy, welcome.

Andrew LaCivita
Thanks for having me, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Andy, I would love to hear, you’re a renowned career coach, you’ve seen a lot of clients, learned a lot of things in your day, could you kick us off by sharing a particularly surprising or counterintuitive discovery you’ve made about us professionals and what we got to do to really stand out and advance?

Andrew LaCivita
One of the things that I’ve noticed as a consultant, as a recruiter, and now as a career coach, I would tell people, and most people don’t…I don’t know that we’ve ever wired to think this way. “We’re wired to go to our jobs, do a great job, learn how to do your trade do, it well, and you will have a good career if you can do your job well. But if you want to have a great career, like you really want to stand out, you want to be the best of the best, or the happiest of the happiest, it’s working more on yourself.”

And in order to work more on yourself, you have to, it’s just like building your bank account. When you get paid, the first thing that, what we hope you do if you want to save money or invest it, is to actually take money out of your check and then put it into your savings account so that it builds over time. It’s the same thing with your career, is that working on yourself, it needs to be planned first or at least a non-negotiable.

What I do every week, which I think is an odd habit that people would think is counterintuitive, is when I plan my week, I actually plan my skill-building time first. So, I pay myself first, I work on myself first, and then everything else gets planned in, but it gets planned in after that. So, I would say that’s kind of a counterintuitive habit that I have, and I just I think it’s really a key to being successful and enjoying your career. And I think that way you will always feel like you’re growing as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, that’s very resonant. We’ve had a couple guests hit that point in terms of someone asking the question, “Well, how much time are you spending working on you?” And for some, it’s like, “Uh, I guess none. Oops.” Or folks will say, “You know, the time you spend in this strategic, skill-building stuff is the most rewarding ROI time there is if you want to be the best of the best in terms of advancement and financially, income, salary stuff,” or I love the way you said it, “or the happiest of the happy, that it takes some development just to feel great in the midst of challenges and stuff going on.”

Andrew LaCivita
So my company, milewalk, during the period between 2004 and 2019, so 15 years or so, we would run surveys every year and we probably totaled up maybe about 20,000 people over the course of the 15 years, had contributed data, and we would always ask them, “Why did you leave your current job? Why are you unhappy in your current position?” things of that nature. There were a variety of questions, but one of the top three reasons was, “I’m not learning anything.”

And I think a big part of that is people expect their organizations to teach them. And while the best organizations will teach them, you can outsource a lot of things but your own career is not one of them. So, if you truly want to develop, you have to take accountability, which means creating space in your life to do that. And I coach a lot of people on a high-performance basis.

And those individuals who want to become the best at their craft, when they enlist my help for how to go about, “What skills do I need to build? How do I build them?” we work together on this stuff, one of the first things I ask them is, “Can you show me your calendar?”

And, inevitably, a lot of them say, “Why, do you want to schedule our future sessions?” I say, “No, I want to see on your calendar where you’ve actually planned time in order to build those skills to achieve those goals that you just told me about.” And inevitably, they don’t have any. They just assume that they’re going to get it on the 9:00 to 5:00 job. And I said, “Well, everybody’s got the playbook. Everybody can learn how to build their widget or provide their service. It’s all those other skills you need to become better,” and like you said, live the more rewarding career.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Andy, we are speaking the same language. It’s pretty essential to take ownership of your career and your skills, otherwise, you’re just rolling the dice, you’re gambling. You may or may not have fantastic coaches and mentors present in your workplace who say, “Hey, Andy, tell me, what are you working on? Where do you want to go? What are your strengths? How can we make sure we can build your development plan into what you’re up to, and the assignments that you’re getting, and reflecting, and mentoring, and turning everything into wisdom-generating stuff?”

Some people have that, and it’s a dream come true and it’s precious if you do. Heads up, that’s very special and you may want to stick around. But a lot of people sure don’t. Could you maybe guesstimate, for us in terms of the state of the world of work in the United States in the 2020s, what proportion of us have a phenomenal work, learning culture system, versus what proportion of us really better get proactive in a hurry if we want to get where we’re going?

Andrew LaCivita
I’ll give you kind of what I think the stats are. Interestingly, we all go to work thinking our companies are going to have these career development plans for us, “We’re going to work for a boss who’s going to teach us. We’re going to work for a boss who’s going to care for us, let us know what we need to do so we can get promoted and get paid more and be happier and so on.” I would bet, and by the way, I don’t like at my fingertips have this stat, but I’m going to give you my feel based on, now I want to tell you where I’m drawing the data from.

I was an information technology and management consultant from 1988 to 2004, so a long time, and at that time I’d coached and consulted to 150 companies. Between 2004 and 2019 with milewalk, that’s another 200 companies, so 350 companies. I’ve seen tens of thousands of people working individually with them. Looking at the organizations that I consulted to or recruited for, looking at the individuals I coach in all the companies they work for, knowing statistically that most people in the United States work for a small- to medium-sized company, so not a lot of people work for Coca-Cola, IBM, and these largest of companies. Most people work for small- to mid-sized companies, just statistically more than half.

So, when you think about how many organizations actually have a structured, well-thought-out career development model, I would probably say 90% do not. Meaning, one in ten are probably fortunate enough to actually have some type of structured career development model in place that says, “You’re this level. These are the skillsets we expect you to have, the level of proficiency we expect you to have them. If you want to go to the next level here’s what you need to work on. We have succession planning processes, career development processes, coaching and mentoring processes.” I would 1 in 10 would be my swag, so that is not a statistic I can claim to know.

But I would say that’s the state, and I would guess it’s worldwide.

Pete Mockaitis
Andy, that’s powerful. And you’re bringing me back some memories on a couple of the these. One, you said management consulting, and I worked at Bain for a while.

Andrew LaCivita
Love it.

Pete Mockaitis
And then when you talk about the structured situation, boy, you’re right, I haven’t seen it anywhere else in my own career and talking to many other people in terms of like, “Okay, are you an associate consultant six months into your career? Well, at this point, we now expect for you to conduct zero-defect analysis.

It’s like, “Okay, so six months in, we expect for you to stop making visible mistakes in the data,” which is pretty intimidating, frankly. The nightmare of many an associate consultant, having dreams of waking up in a spreadsheet, has happened to me before. But that’s very clear. So, we have a table there, I thought it was very impressive. It’s like, “These are all the skills as rows, and then the degree to which we expect them developed as columns over the course of time.” And then we can very clearly say, “Hey, how is your zero-defect analysis? Is that up to snuff or is it not?”

And most of us, because our jobs are so fluid, and we don’t have thousands of associate consultants who are kind of doing the same thing, but for different clients and business challenges, it’s really hard to know. It’s like, “Hey, are you great at digital marketing?” I mean, I can’t tell you, “Yeah, in nine months, I expect for you to be able to run a Facebook ads campaign with zero supervision and create a return on investment of a cash-on-cash basis for 70% of new clients.” Like, we don’t have that level of clarity and specificity. And so, you kind of got to go invent that for yourself.

Andrew LaCivita
It’s true. Interesting you talk about Bain. I started my career at Anderson Consulting. So, I was looking at career development models and grids and things like that. It was very clearly spelled out. Now, it probably was over-engineered, but at least we had the guideposts. But most people don’t have that these days.

And the other thing, you asked kind of about the state of things, but we live in a much more mobile time right now, meaning it’s rare that somebody would spend that much time in an organization and have the time to evolve. So, people, they’re more mobile, which is creating even more confusion because you’re going to different companies, different companies have different internal vocabulary and what they call things. It’s different now, which means you need to be more organized.

Pete Mockaitis
It is, yes. Well, fortunately, our pal, Andy, here, yes, you, organized some handy pieces in your book The Zebra Code. So, first, tell us why is it called The Zebra Code? That reminds me of the TV show “Ghost Rider” from the 1990s, but I don’t imagine that’s what you had in mind.

Andrew LaCivita
No, it isn’t. So, I have a weekly live show on YouTube, so I teach every Thursday, people come to the show, I teach them, and then they ask me questions.

In the question-and-asking period of the show, one of the gentlemen asked me, about standing out in a job interview, and I told this story about how, when I go out for a run out of my house, I run down the street. And on one side I got the goats, on the other side I got the horses, on another side I got the horses, and since I got all these farms around me, and I said, “Whenever I whenever I hear hoof beats, while I do not technically rule out the possibility that it can be a zebra, I’m thinking horses.” Employers are the same way.

When you’re in a job interview, you’re talking and talking and talking they’re thinking, “Oh, man, this sounds like everyone else that has ever interviewed for this job or anybody else that’s come from Bain or Accenture or whatever.” And people, the interviewers, they need to draw conclusions very quickly, they need to stereotype. And I don’t mean that in a bad way, meaning they have to draw on their own experiences with the limited amount of time that they have in order to figure out and extrapolate whether you’re going to do a good job in their company. It’s a function of the interviewing system, not the individual, him or herself.

So, when I said, “You need to be able to stand out.” Now that was five years ago. I told this little story and I never really thought about it. But when I was thinking about this career development book that I wanted to write, I said, “There’s a big problem in the world that, in this post-academic era, we don’t have that career syllabus.” You and I went to college. The professor hands you the career syllabus, you knew a few things. You knew what you were going to be studying on what given day, what the homework assignments were, when you were going to take the tests, what the tests were going to entail. You had some faith that the individual who was teaching you, at least was well credentialed, should have known his or her stuff. You had some faith in this.

But in our professional world now, the minute you throw your hat and tassel in the air, you don’t have that. That’s gone. And then the journey you take is it’s very difficult, as we go back to that kind of those jokes we were talking about the career development models, people don’t have that. And so, I wanted to solve that problem by saying, “Okay, if I had to rewind my clock 36 years, and I was walking out of school, how does somebody go through their evolution? And what skills would I learn? And what would I learn first so that the higher-level skills that I wanted to learn, I would learn them faster and more easily?”

And so, I put this structure together, this methodology that’s based on expertise in tiers as we go through our professional lives. So, there’s five tiers in the way that I see somebody evolving. They’re a producer, so, basically, you’re managing your own self. Then you become a communicator, which is from an interactional standpoint, “I need to develop communication skills that allow me to support others, be a team player, and so on.” But then as you evolve, you become more of an influencer where you’re using those communication skills to actually draw positive outcomes from people, motivate them, influence them, get results through them or on their behalf.

And then the developers, the fourth tier, which is really the individuals who can actually coach, manage people, but in units, but also build the systems upon which everybody operates. And then, ultimately, the fifth tier, you’re a visionary, where you are creating the new ideas, generating of the new products, the new solutions. And so, as I teach my leadership groups, I teach them these career skills, I don’t call them soft skills. I call them career skills because I actually think these are essential and harder to build than our trade skills, whatever your profession is, that is.

And so, as I looked at what I was teaching and how I was working with them and the issues they were facing, it became clear to me that there were 46 or so vital skills, that if you were able to build them, you would evolve through these tiers as I’ve laid out. So, The Zebra Code book is really this leadership coaching program in a book where I teach you how to put your skill-building plan together and operate it so that you’re not overwhelmed. You know what you should be working on based on your profession, your goals and aspirations, as well as incorporating in your regular old work assignments, “Are there things that you do on a day in and day out, or week in and week out basis where you want to get better?” And so that’s the problem the book addresses, that it’s like a maze.

Professional development is a maze, and people waste a lot of time because they don’t know what skills to work on, or they’re working on the wrong skills, or they’re working on skills but they’re not working on them the right way, or they’re not working on them in the most efficient manner. So, I tried to address all those skills in the book.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Andy, I think that five tiers is very excellently done, as you think about, if you really zoom out, like, “Okay, no, really, where am I in the course of this career?” It’s, like, “Okay, fresh out of school, a first job, all right we’re squarely in the producer zone.” And then I can see, “Okay, yeah,” and then I’m doing the communicator, then the influencer, then the developer, then the visionary.

And if I may, sometimes these lines can get a little blurry in terms of we have someone without direct reports but has been around for a while and is quite highly paid, and senior executives are truly counting on some visionary levels of insight and expertise that they’re bringing to the table. So, not to jack up your model, Andy, but how do you think about those kinds of situations?

Andrew LaCivita
Well, one of the things I didn’t mention, and it’s something good for anybody who is interested to know. Inside the book, there’s also a leadership and skill-building assessment. So, the example you gave was great, because you say, “Hey, I could be a junior person generating great ideas, or I could be a very senior person who has lots of ideas, but I’m not really great at developing people.”

So, when you look at all the skill sets that really, I feel, go into each of these layers, I have an assessment for you to take, literally, a quantitative assessment that’s based on subjective questions that I’ve highlighted for you to see where you have opportunities to improve.

And so, what the model does is, it’s agnostic regarding who you are, your age, your profession. This is what I would say, in general, is the methodology shows you how to pick and choose skills at different levels that you need more help with and figuring out when the right time is to work on those. So, as an example, some of the some of the skillsets, to give you an idea, in the producer level are about self-awareness. We’re talking about your ability to focus. We’re talking about habit-building. We’re talking about planning and running your day, or confidence.

I know a lot of 40- and 50-year-olds that aren’t confident. I know a lot of 60-year-olds that don’t know how to run their day. I know a lot of executives who are creative thinkers who are ineffective at running their day. So, even the most senior people could benefit from building the producer-level skill sets. So, it isn’t a cookie cutter, “Hey, everybody at this level or at this stage start here and only work these.”

It’s taking you from that blank sheet of paper, to giving you some organization, to letting you pick and choose based on your current state. So, what you might find is if you’re a, let’s say you’re in your early 40s, give or take, you got a team of six people you’re trying to manage. Well, I can teach you things about how to better run your day. That’s producer-level stuff. And I could teach you also all of the components that go into motivating, coaching, developing, understanding somebody’s feedback language. How do you determine how to get the best results out of somebody?

So, the skills, it’s really there’s a compounding effect, and the earlier you start the more effective you’ll be at building habits, running your day, and so on because learning how to motivate somebody is a more complicated skill to build. Does that make sense?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, beautiful. It sure does. So, this assessment, can you take it online for free somewhere?

Andrew LaCivita

I have a 47-page booklet that introduces all The Zebra Code methodology, these tiers we’ve been talking about, this assessment you can take, and also all the instruction to build your career plan, that’s free. So, if you just head to the milewalk Academy website, you can check out the leadership card. It’ll take you to a page where there’s a button there and you can download it for free. So, thank you for asking me that.

Pete Mockaitis

Cool. Well, yeah, so we’ll definitely link that. But let’s just go ahead and say, you mentioned focus and confidence, and those are things that a lot of my listeners a lot of times have said, “Yeah, we’d love that.” So, let’s just say we did that, we looked through all the skills, we said, “Boy, you know what, focus and confidence are the things. Now what?”

Andrew LaCivita

Okay. So, I don’t have any children but I don’t know if you have kids, but I know a lot of people have kids. But have you ever told your kid, “Hey, listen to me. Concentrate, focus on this, give me your attention.”?

Pete Mockaitis

“Get your shoes.”

Andrew LaCivita

“Get your shoes,” whatever. That’s not focus. The kid’s never been taught how to focus. They’ve been told how to focus. And we, as adults, have never been taught “How do we get complete command of our mind at any moment in time so that I can, at this moment in time, have the capacity and the ability to concentrate on only one thing?”

So, you ask me a question, right now I need to use muscles to be able to focus on that one thing. So that’s what I mean when I say focus. And what I tell people is, “You cannot possibly have the muscles to do that if you are not continually building those muscles. And in order to build those muscles, you need to be practicing building those muscles throughout the day, all day, every day.”

And what a lot of people do is they, I don’t want to say they practice distraction, but they are so distracted. The phone beeps. What do you do? You look at it. You are now distracted, which means you’re not concentrating on whatever it was that you were doing. Maybe you were having dinner with a friend. Maybe you were working on writing an email to your boss. The phone beeps. Boom. You don’t have the muscle to not look at it.

So, what I do is I concentrate on creating a kind of a lifestyle system that enables me at any moment in time to focus. So, what I do is, there’s basically six or seven things that I go through. Every night, the night before, the next day, I plan my next day, and you might say, “Well, how’s planning your next day helping you with focus?”

Well, number one, I’m getting ready for the day. I know what the day entails. I know that on this day, you and I are recording this on a Tuesday at 10:45 in the morning Central, we started. I knew yesterday that we were going to be meeting. I had everything set up. I knew where I needed to go, what information I needed for you, and so on.

So, I unloaded all of that, which freed up my mind for the evening, for my sleep. I woke up the next day, the next thing I did when I got out of bed and I went through my morning routine is I literally practiced focusing for 10 minutes on one thing, which is moving energy through my body. It’s just a way for me to practice concentration in an ideal environment where I know I will not have any interruptions. So, think of this focusing exercise as, “I’m going to do a warm-up for the day in the most ideal conditions.”

Because now we’re going to go into a day that has a lot of things associated with it, I did seven or eight things before our 10:45 appointment this morning. Well, I thought about everything that I was going to do for the day. I call it considering my day.

So, after I do my focus practice, before I get into my work day, I actually look at my whole day and I think about “What would an ideal day look like? What are the other outputs I’m going to have? What might I do if something goes wrong? What happens if I get interrupted?” And I’m thinking through all this. And what this is doing is it’s enabling me to let go of things that I need to, making sure that I can foresee what I wanted to happen, and then in the event any surprises happen or anything like that, I’m more equipped at any moment in time to be able to concentrate on it. And then I actually practice building my willpower muscles throughout the day.

And this is a great tip I got from Dandapani. So, I don’t want to take credit for this when it comes to willpower. But part of building your focus muscle is building your willpower. Your willpower is your ability to exert control to complete something. So, one of the things that I do as I go through, whether it’s a work deliverable or any household chores, or anything that I do, he’s got this three-step process. He says, “Finish what you start. Do it a little better than you thought you would. And then do a little more.”

And what that does is, if you go start to finish without taking your mind off it, you’re practicing staying in order. And what this is doing is it’s building willpower, and willpower is really your mind being able to concentrate at any moment of time, so that helps. And then as I work throughout my day, when I go from one thing to the next, again, everything I’m doing is aimed at creating free space in my mind so it’s not cluttered, so I can concentrate. 

So whenever I transition, so right before I started with you, I packed up what I was doing at 10:30, I made some notes, I let the dogs out, I thought about you, I thought about what a fun podcast will look like, and I was going through wrapping up what I was doing, thinking forward to what I’m about to do so that I don’t have anything hanging over my head from the prior hour.

Even if I spent an hour writing a great chapter in a book, and even though it was fun for me, I still accumulated stress in my forearms, in my fingers, even just thinking, maybe in my neck. So, I want to let go of that. And so, imagine not letting go of any of that throughout the day. People go from Zoom meeting to a phone call, to doing something, and they just keep accumulating that stress, which again makes it harder for them to concentrate on anything at any moment in time.

And so, these things along with kind of the last point is really the reflection and being able to think back about what happened, wrapping up your day, I do this as part of my nightly practice, but all of these things that I do are aimed at keeping a free mind so that at any moment in time I can focus and I can concentrate. And it takes all of these things and other things but it’s just like a diet.

I always say, “Look, if you eat a healthy breakfast and you think eating pizza and burgers for the rest of the day for lunch and dinner where you’re going to lose weight, it isn’t going to happen.” Well, it’s the same kind of thing. If you meditate for 10 minutes in the morning and then run harried all day, you’re still not going to be able to focus. There’s a lot of things I think it takes to be able to concentrate. So that’s focusing.

Pete Mockaitis

And that’s helpful in terms of, so those are some things associated with focus. So, maybe I’m just going to zoom out a smidge in terms of the first step is we’ve identified, “This is a necessary skill that I need to build.” And then we’ve also determined, “It ain’t just going to happen. I have to actually schedule some time in my calendar to work on me in order to make it happen.”

And then there are a number of practices, protocols, interventions, the stuff you do to build those skills. And you’ve selected a few, I guess based upon your research and your experience and what has worked for your clients, and then you go do them. And so, it seems like there’s just naturally a bit of commitment, discipline, consistency, habit-building that’s associated with making it happen.

Andrew LaCivita

That’s right. Wait, you nailed it. So, number one, that was a fantastic recap because the things that you’re saying about, look, what I just said, while it might sound long-winded, think about everything that you need to do to condition yourself and how, what you said, consistent you need to be in that you need to make the time to do it.

Now, people think, “Well, I don’t have 10 minutes in the morning.” If you don’t have 10 minutes in the morning to work on you, I think you need to rethink your life. You got to figure out if this is important to you, and it isn’t just about work. I mean, don’t you want to have better conversations with your spouses, your partners, your friends, your children? I mean, there are various reasons people don’t achieve their goals, but one of the biggest reasons that I would say most people don’t achieve them is they’re not willing to sacrifice what they need to sacrifice to create the free space in their life to work on whatever it is they want to work on.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Well, so applying these same kinds of fundamental principles, let’s say, now we’re zeroing in on competence, and that’s the skill we want to develop, how might we go about doing that?

Andrew LaCivita

I love that one because I think this is one of the most misunderstood skills ever because people think, “Okay, I need to see myself do it, and then once I’m successful I’ll have confidence,” but confidence, your ability to be confident has a lot more to do with your relationship with failure than it is success. What I say to people is, “Generally, recognize there are multiple reasons why you’re not confident.” It’s you have an activity that you’re reluctant to do, so there’s a task or something that, “I don’t know how to do, so I’m not confident that I can do it.” There’s a big project and you don’t know all the steps that you need to take, therefore, you’re not confident because you don’t know how.

Or the third thing, which is really a misnomer, where people are not confident because it’s something like, “Hey, I don’t want to speak. I feel like I have stage fright, and I’m not confident getting in front of a bunch of people,” when it really has more to do with the fact that you are worried about how you look rather than the performance that you’re actually going to help them with or how to serve them. And so, there are a variety of things that you need to think about.

When I help people with building confidence, the first thing that I say to them is, “Recognize that, as you do these things, you’re always trying to increase your level of performance. And in order to do that, you’re going to fail initially. Build failure into the process so that you become more comfortable with taking attempts at things.”

So, if it’s an activity that you’re reluctant to do, let’s say I’m reluctant to send a cold email to ask somebody for a job, or I’m reluctant to do that cold sales call, or whatever it might be, in these cases, I want you to add repetitions. If you’ve got to make 10 calls, make 20. The more you do, the more comfortable you’ll become, and even if you’re not getting the results you want, what are you getting? Have better metrics for evaluating your performance. Did you make the call? Boom, that’s good. That’s in your control. Did you practice your sales script? Great, that was in your control. Did you learn how the customer might object. Okay, now you’re going to be better armed the next time.

And so, what you’re doing is you’re constantly repping something because the conditioning itself will make it less scary.

And I say when you’ve got these big projects that you want to take on where you’re a little reluctant, it’s like my wife is in marathon training right now. She’s going to run her first marathon. You don’t think about running 26.2 miles. You think about “What does your plan say today?” It says, “Go run six miles.” You could do that. Go do it. So, you’re always thinking a few moves ahead, but not trying to eat the entire elephant in one bite.

And then when it comes to kind of that third aspect where people find themselves usually losing confidence, like the stage fright example I gave, is oftentimes it’s your success in life is going to have a lot more to do with is where you place your attention than your ability. And never is that more true than if you get stage fright or something of that nature. The reason that you don’t have confidence to go give a speech in public or talk at the round table or give the status update or whatever it is, is because you’re thinking about how you’re looking instead of the service you’re providing to whomever it is you’re providing.

If you’re giving a status report to your management team, you’re helping them understand what it is they need to know in order to decide something that they need to decide for the direction of the company. If you’re giving a speech, and that you obviously have something to offer, otherwise you wouldn’t be standing up there on the stage giving it, think about how you’re helping the people. And what this does is it has a way of diffusing that, I don’t want to call it imposter syndrome, maybe it’s imposter syndrome, maybe it’s your reluctance or hesitation or whatever it might be.

So, there are a number of things and tactics that you can do, but confidence, like I said, has a lot more to do with getting comfortable with failure than it does with successes, because that’s easier to be confident when things are going well.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Understood. Well, Andy, tell me anything else you really want to make sure to put out there before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Andrew LaCivita

One of the things I would tell people that is near and dear to my heart, because this is something I had to live through, and it’s something really hard for people to wrestle with, but I always say, “Don’t let what you can do prevent you from doing what you were meant to do.”

And the reason that I want to share that, I guess if you gave me an open invitation to share something, would be because a lot of us, and I’m sure you went through this too. You talked about working for Bain. At some point, you’re making a nice paycheck, you got to save for the kid’s college tuition, you got to pay for the cars, the houses, the whatever, and people, they know they can do it, they know they can be the engineer, they know they can be the accountant, but they really have an aspiration of doing something else.

I knew I could be an IT consultant, but I had aspirations of helping people. How do I do that? I felt like that was what I was meant to do, is really helping people in their careers. And one of the things that that takes is you need to, number one, you need to want it more than you’re afraid of it, and you need to have faith that there is a way to make a living doing what you want to do.

And there are a lot of people out there, and I’m speaking to anybody who’s listening who wants to make that change, there are people that are out there that need you to do what you’re aching to do. Don’t disappoint them by feeling like, “There’s no way to make a living” or, “It’s too late for me.”

I changed careers at 50, at 38 and 50. You can do it. So, I’d say The Zebra Code is all about that because it’s about building the skills that are enabling you to go after what you want. So, I would end with that, at least before you go on to your next sentence.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, I was going to ask about a favorite quote, but we already got it. So now, give us a favorite study or experiment or bit of research.

Andrew LaCivita

One of the things that I do, and I don’t say it’s like a piece of research as much as it is ongoing research. We get fed through the media things like unemployment numbers, let’s talk jobs here, or industries that are doing well, or industries that are hiring, or those that are tanking, or thriving, or whatever, or what consumers are buying.

I am always interested in looking at the details behind what’s being shared, and what I do every month is look for signals as to what’s happening. And then I spend time trying to draw conclusions from the data.

So, as an example, all last year, and even this year, there are markets that are thriving. Well, the three top that were hiring are healthcare, construction, and the government. So, if the government is hiring a lot of people, from a jobs’ perspective that’s good, but from a gross domestic product perspective, that doesn’t contribute anything to retail sales or any contribution for economic growth. So that has to be evaluated when you start looking at, “Well, is hiring good? Is hiring bad? Which way is the employment market going?”

So, I would say in general, anytime you’re looking at data, just make sure you’re interpreting it and then draw conclusions based on what you think will happen, based on what’s under the covers rather than the headline that we tend to glance at.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. How about a favorite book?

Andrew LaCivita

I’m a huge fan of Wayne Dyer. So, rather than just say all his books, one of my absolute favorite books is You’ll See It When You Believe It.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Andrew LaCivita

I’ll plug the names here for these companies because I love their platform so much.

We use Kajabi for our online training program. So, I’m able to distribute all of our programs, our video-based online programs, I use Kajabi to do that. We have a community that we run. So, we don’t run the milewalk Academy community on public sites like Facebook. We run it on a private platform called Circle. That’s fantastic. So, think your own private Facebook. So, not Facebook, but Circle does that.

But my newest shiny toy is Andy AI, which is literally an Andy clone of all of my teaching, all of my videos. This podcast will probably get loaded in there, and everything that I’ve taught, all the books that I’ve written, all my YouTube videos, all the podcasts, everything that I’ve created, there’s something like, at the time we’re talking 12 million words of my teaching in the tool that trained it to answer you, like, so it’s AndyGPT, so to speak. So, like ChatGPT, but it’s all my teaching, and that is a product that’s on the Delphi platform, and it’s rather new. It’s very new.

And so, my job-seeking clients and my leadership development clients can access, well, most of them anyway, can access Andy AI and ask it questions and get my instruction. It’s the coolest thing, and obviously you can see how that scales my time. And so, there’s thousands of people around the world that can ask me questions whenever they want and get answers immediately. Pete, that’s got to be that’s the new shiny new tool.

Pete Mockaitis

Cool.

Andrew LaCivita

Yeah, those are great.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Andrew LaCivita

So, I’d say go to the milewalk Academy, just like it sounds, milewalkacademy.com. And from there you can find my blog, you can find my YouTube channel, my tips for working, my podcast, there’s a lot of free downloads, you can get that leadership assessment, there’s premium programs if you’re interested. I’m everywhere on the social channels as well. If you just Google Andrew LaCivita, it’ll pop up. But the milewalk Academy is the home base.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Andrew LaCivita

Figure out what skills are going to pay the most dividends in the short and long term, and then put a plan together that’s going to help you develop those skills. And the other thing that you’re absolutely going to need to do is create space in your calendar to do that. And as a bonus, if you can pay yourself first in time with skill development, you won’t just have a good career, you’ll have an epic career.

Pete Mockaitis

Andy, this has been beautiful. Thank you. I wish you many Zebra moments.

Andrew LaCivita

Pete, I appreciate it, man. Thanks to you. Thank Marco, too, for doing all this for us and bringing us together. It’s been a thrill. I’ve enjoyed your podcast as a listener. It’s been, you know, it just tickles me pink, that you invited me to be a guest.