KF #31. Situational Adaptability Archives - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Pete Mockaitis
Tessa, welcome back.

Tessa West
Thank you so much for having me back. I’m super excited.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I am excited to talk about your book, Job Therapy, and I just think we’ve got to hear of a job story you had at a Hollywood Video. Lay it on us.

Tessa West
All right. When I was in high school, I worked at Hollywood Video, which for you, young people, is a place where you would actually physically go to rent a movie in VHS format, which I don’t think even exists anymore. And I had this amazing manager who was dealing coke from the back room.

Pete Mockaitis
Cocaine. Illegal drug.

Tessa West
Yeah, cocaine. Cocaine from the back room, and, also, was probably stealing from the cash register. And we all got fired one day, corporate came in and axed us all. And this was a little bit of a problem for me because when I went to college at UC Santa Barbara, I was just blacklisted from all Hollywood Videos, and that was kind of the only video rental store in the neighborhood where I lived. And so, I could never rent from them again. I not only lost my job because of the cocaine-dealing boss, but I also could never open an account in a Hollywood Video ever again, and that just totally cramped my style for, like, the four years I was in college.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now I’m imagining you like hanging out outside the Hollywood Video, it’s like, “Hey, hey, Mister, can you rent me a movie?”

Tessa West
Totally. I’m like, “I’ll pay you an extra dollar. You give me, like, the latest new release wall,” whatever came out. I think it was “The Negotiator” came out, and I was pretty bummed. Yeah, it was not great.

Pete Mockaitis
So, they thought you were involved in these illegal activities, but you were just around him.

Tessa West
I was 16. I mean, I knew some shady stuff was going on in the back room. There were times I wasn’t allowed back there. But it’s a minimum-wage teenager job, and it was just much easier for corporate to just come in, clean house, fire all of us, instead of sort of interrogating who was involved and who wasn’t.

And I think a lot of people kind of end up getting caught in these situations at work where there’s a baddie and they get sucked into all that drama, and it’s just much easier to fire all 20 employees and just start fresh than to figure out who’s guilty of dealing the cocaine, or aiding and abetting in the cocaine dealing, or whatever.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. You know, it’s amazing that last time we talked about bad bosses and toxic coworkers, and this didn’t even come up.

Tessa West
I know. This isn’t even my worst boss. This is like my 10th worst boss. The weird part was I didn’t even really care until I couldn’t rent there anymore. That’s when I got pissed.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, we’re talking now about your book Job Therapy: Finding Work That Works for You. So, I guess that’s one tip, avoid Hollywood Video and cocaine-dealing bosses as a first piece on the checklist. But you have much more wisdom, I know, than that to share with us. Could you kick us off with anything that’s particularly surprising that you’ve discovered here?

Tessa West
Yes, I think a lot of us have really mixed feelings about our jobs. I was surprised when I interviewed people for this book at how ambivalent people feel. It was a lot kind of in the air with people being really miserable at work, tons of Gallup polls, all that business of everyone wants to quit, no one’s happy. But when I actually sat down with people, they would talk out of both sides of their mouth, “I love this job.” “I hate this job.”

“I’m totally committed to this job. It’s what defines me. It’s my identity. But I fantasize about doing this other thing that’s completely different from that. But just to remind you, Tessa, during this interview, I really do love this job. I promise.” And so, you see kind of those mixed emotions you see when people are thinking about any kind of relationship they have, even if that’s with a parent that they have a fraught relationship with, or a romantic relationship.

It’s kind of this love, hate, back and forth, hot, cold business that I think a lot of us are actually struggling with, which is much more realistic than just people loving or hating something or wanting to quit. I think there’s just a lot of kind of ambivalence out there.

Pete Mockaitis
Ooh, that really resonates and hits home with regard to, it is a mixed bag, every job, every relationship. I’m reminded of a comedian who talked about the city of Chicago, which is like, “The long, cold, miserable winters,” and say, “What are you doing here? You should just leave. You should just leave,” like a bad relationship. He’s like, “No, you should see how Chicago treats me in the summer.”

Tessa West
Yeah, New Yorkers are the same, we’re like, “I hate this place but I really couldn’t live anywhere else because every other place I would hate even more, but I really do hate it here.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, what a complicated relationship we have then with our jobs. How do we even begin to unpack then whether we are in our New York of a job or we really do need to get out of here?

Tessa West
I really think the only way to really unpack this is to measure your feelings for a while. I’m a scientist, so I’m a huge fan of collecting data on yourself, and really doing it, not just trying to recall how you feel, or how you felt over the past month, because I think a lot of us fall victim to some of the basic biases that we fall victim to when we’re falling out of love with a person.

So, we’re super sensitive to things like intermittent reinforcement. When we’re questioning our careers, if your boss is really nice to you, or maybe you just get an added bonus you didn’t expect. That actually makes you feel a hundred times better about your job than it probably should because you’re in this fragile place, and so you don’t actually realize that you’re falling victim to these kinds of things, that you’re overly-sensitive to reinforcement when you’re questioning your career, that you’re misremembering how you were treated or how you felt.

The only way to really get a handle on that is to look for consistency in how you feel and to measure yourself for a couple of weeks, or even up to a month, and really look for those patterns. And so, in this book, I just put a ton of questionnaires that have been vetted and created by psychologists, and really try to help people play scientists to their own experience so that they can understand it from almost like a third-party perspective, from an objective observer’s perspective, to kind of remove some of those biases that we’re all going to fall victim to when we start questioning something, when we start falling out of love with something.

Pete Mockaitis
Very intriguing. So then, as we measure things, well, I’m tempted to go into all kinds of detail about how we do that, and let’s do some of that. I’m thinking about dating again, in terms of, there are folks, it’s like, yes, they would love to date the super-rich, super brilliant, super gorgeous, super hilarious, super kind, whatever mythical human that doesn’t actually exist. And if that person did, they’d probably wouldn’t want to be with you. No offense. No offense, Tessa. You’re delightful.

But I mean, when I hear people, sometimes I’ve heard those who are single and not yet settled down, it’s like, “Well, you know, I just haven’t met the person.” “Well, what are you looking for?” It’s like, “Oh, well, I don’t think that person is real or exists.” I think, likewise, we can do that with our jobs, it’s like, “Oh, I guess I just haven’t really found the perfect job yet or the one of a job yet.”

So can you just maybe give us some very rough guidelines in terms of, “If you’re in this kind of zone, probably wrong job, get out of there. If you’re in this kind of zone, you got it pretty good, you know. And if you’re in if you’re looking for this kind of zone, I’m sorry that’s not real”? Can you just kindly orient us to reality for a bit?

Tessa West
Yes, I’m happy to do that. I studied dating and relationships, too, so you will hear all those metaphors come out of my mouth today. So, I think the first thing is, you need to really think seriously about what stresses you out at work, and how much you can anticipate those stressors. The number one reason why people are actually miserable at work is because they, (a), can’t anticipate stressors, or they’re doing a bad job at it. Most of the time, we actually can, if we write it down, see it coming.

And, (b), they’re very bad at bouncing back from how those stressful situations impact their productivity, their sleep, and their other relationships. And so, if you are in a job where, if you say in the morning, think about what’s going to stress you out, in the evening, write down what actually stressed you out, and you can’t predict that.

And those unanticipated stressors screw up your communication with your spouse, make you task-switch too much, make you self-interrupt, interfere with your ability to communicate, all these kinds of distal outcomes, you’re in a bad place. I don’t care how great the job is on paper, unanticipated stressors, and your inability to kind of put stopgaps in place and prevent the bleed from that stressful event to your productivity and to your other aspects of your life that you care about, you’re in trouble.

And that’s different for everyone. For some people, that’s being interrupted all the time. They can’t control the flow of work. For other people, it’s just being late. They can’t stand it when they can’t control how long it’s going to take them to drive to work and where they’re going to park. So, you have to figure out what those triggers are. And I think most of us don’t actually put enough weight on low-level daily stressors and how much they impact us, but they really can screw you up because they can affect your sleep, how often you get colds, your diet, and all of this other stuff that has nothing to do with work, that then feeds back into work.

So, I’d say measure those things. That’s kind of, you know, it really comes down to control over those things. I’d say the other dimension that really matters is how identified you want to be with your career, how much you want it to define you, and how much that career is loving you back. And if there’s a huge mismatch, if you are, like, in love with this career, it’s everything to you, when it’s going well, you feel good, when it’s going poorly, you feel terrible, and it’s just not giving you those signs that it’s loving you as much as you want to love it, it’s an unrequited love situation. That’s a bad place to be.

I think, and, again, all of us can be, we can find that match in different places. Anchoring just on income and things like that, I think is a mistake, as you talked about, you know, finding the model who’s funny and rich, there’s going to be a mismatch there because you’re going to fall in love with that person and they’re not going to love you back.

So, I’d say that identity match and control over your stressors, those are the main things. I think if you have those things in check, you can kind of play around with those other dimensions and find happiness at work. But those are really those things that are kind of deal breakers, I think, for most people.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s really intriguing to zero in on these elements. Because it sounds like, is it fair to say, in your research, these trump the other things in terms of, I say, “Hey, you know what? I find my job meaningful. I find it challenging. I enjoy my co-workers. I feel like I’m learning and growing and attaining mastery. Like, I’ve got a lot of good things that make this job good”? But, if the stressor situation and the identity situation isn’t working for me, is that enough to just outweigh it and say, “I should probably get out of here”?

Tessa West
Definitely the stressors are. I think the things you just mentioned feed into the identity. So, if your colleagues love you, if you’re finding purpose in the work, the job is probably loving you back as much as you’re loving it. And so, I’d see those as sort of like an outcome of that identity match, “You know, I feel highly identified with this job and it’s bringing me satisfaction.” Both pieces of identity are important. You need to feel satisfied with that identity and also feel like you’re getting something from it.

And then when you have those pieces, you love your coworkers, you’re willing to kind of step in at 10:00 p.m. and do the extra thing because you feel like the job is loving you back, so those are outcomes of those things. Stressors are like throwing wrenches into all of those things, “I have great communication at work, but I never know how long it’s going to take me to get there. And some days I get there an hour early, and it’s great. Other times, I get there an hour late and I’m sweating and stressed the rest of the day.” Those things absolutely throw a wrench in the relationship with your career.

So, I think you just really have to pay attention to those things, and don’t let yourself be talked out of them because the income is good, because the comp package is good, and people do this with relationships, “I’m dating a rich guy. Who cares if he treats me like crap.” It does, it matters. You’re not going to care about the money when he’s yelling at you or calling you ugly. You’re just not. And the same is true at work.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, could you give us a rundown of some of these unanticipated stressors that pack a big punch and show up all the time for folks?

Tessa West
I think the main ones are things like your boss shows up and puts a meeting on your calendar that you didn’t plan for. Commute is another huge one that people can’t stand. Senior leadership showing up. Absorbing the roles of other people. So, I did a study for this book based on an NPR kind of short called “Nobody Told Me That,” where I asked people what are the biggest surprises they encountered at work.

And it’s almost always, “I was hired to do X and now I’m doing Y. I was hired to showcase art in a gallery but really all I do is lift 120-pound boxes of art, but no one told me that like lifting heavy objects was part of the job.” And those kinds of, like, tack-on tasks are super common at work. I think 80% of us are doing them, but they take away from your job. They often have nothing to do with what gets you promoted, and they’re super stressful because you don’t know how to fit them into your job.

And so, you have to do a lot of digging to kind of figure out if those are going to crop up. But those unanticipated extra roles or jobs of the person who called in sick, or they fire the person who’s in charge of that, those are huge, and they tend to be small asks, 10-, 20-minute asks, not heavy lifts, but they really eat into people’s wellbeing. And you can feel your blood pressure going up when you’re in the middle of something and someone comes and asks you to do one of these things, like lifting a heavy box for them that you did not sign up for.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, these are the kinds of stressors. And then, I’m curious, just how much is too much? I mean, it sounds like every job is going to have a little bit of ebb and flow and unpredictability. How do we make that determination?

Tessa West
The best way to do this isn’t to ask yourself, “Have I hit my wall?” It’s to actually map out what the outcomes of those stressors are. And so, our instinct is to think about the things that stress us out and then try to kind of reframe them in a positive way, “Yes, I had to lift that heavy box, but this is part of what it takes to climb up at work.”

I urge you not to try to do that kind of reframing exercise. Instead, measure how often you’re lifting those heavy boxes, and measure your sleep every night. If what you find is, if you have three days in a row of, say, an unexpected stressor, a late commute, a calendar invite with no notice, a heavy box, and then you can see that, say, for the next five days your sleep is screwed up, this is what happens to me, my unanticipated stressors are cumulative.

One, I’m fine; two or more, I don’t sleep for a week, that’s when you know you’re in trouble, and so you really have to see those associations. Don’t assume you know what they are because they’re often a little bit distal. The way stressors work is they tend to not impact us immediately. They tend to be cumulative and distal.

So, if you’re stressed out right now, you’re going to get a cold in two weeks. That’s how long it takes for your immune system to take the hit, for it to get down, for you to get infected with something, for you to be symptomatic. So, we often don’t see the connection between the stressor and the outcome. The only way to know is to measure it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, let’s talk about these measurings. So, one is sleep, and I’m sporting an Oura ring right now, and that’s cool. Or you could have a Fitbit or Apple Watch or something or just notice, “Hey, that sleep was short. I woke up at 5:00 a.m. against my will. What’s that about?” Or, “I went to bed at 11:00, and somehow didn’t end up actually falling asleep until much later.”

So, you just sort of, you notice. Sleep is worse, outside my control. It’s not like I was having the time of my life partying somewhere and I got to bed late. But rather, my body just did not comply with my sleep request. So, there’s one indicator. What are some of the other things we should be observing and tracking?

Tessa West
Weird diet, skipping meals, eating junk food, eating your feelings, drinking, those types of things. Low-level conflict is another one that we often see. So, if you have, say, two or three days of low-level stressors at work, you’re going to end up fighting more with your kids, with your spouse. You’re going to yell at your kid for watching too much iPad, those kinds of things, which in the moment, you have a reason, “My kid was really grinding me. He refused to put down the iPad, so I yelled at him.”

The real reason is, “You know, I had a fight with my boss this morning, and I never came down from that kind of cortisol boost, and now I’m exhausted. I have no ability to sort of cognitively override that,” so low-level conflict at home. And then the other kind of unanticipated one is self-interruptions at work. So, I have a chapter in my book called “The Torn Between Places,” where I figured out that most of the time when we are interrupted at work, we do it to ourselves.

We self-distract. We check our phones. We minimize windows to open other windows. We shop on Zoom calls. And we often do this when we are cognitively depleted, meaning like we’re out of mental resources to not do it. And when you’re stressed, you tend to kind of eat away at those resources, and so you find yourself texting, checking your phone constantly at work. That’s another outcome of feeling kind of chronic low-level stress.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really intriguing and good to flag because if we’re stressed, tired, out of cognitive resources, sometimes you might assume, “Well, the thing you’re going to do is immediately go to sleep.” And yet, it’s funny, it’s like the suppression power of being depleted means that, “No, what we do is just what we really want to do and have been suppressing.”

I remember back in the pandemic days, there was a time my wife was sick and it was all me. Full, 100% childcare, it’s Pete, the dad’s time to shine, and it’s like, “Okay.” And so, I thought it’s always kind of intense and kind of exhausting, and I always also try to keep a few things in the air, a little bit with work in terms of, like, respond to a few things and whatnot. Just not totally dropping the ball there.

And it was so funny, you would think that after those days, I’m like, “Oh, my gosh, I’m just going to just collapse immediately into bed.” And what I found myself doing, it was so weird, it was like, I went and played video games, and I don’t do much of that in general, but it’s just like, “This just really is what needs to happen right now.”

And so, you’re highlighting an interesting phenomenon in the human experience. I don’t think I’ve heard someone articulate quite this way before, is when that’s happening, that’s a sign that we are mentally depleted and/or stressed.

Tessa West
I think if you find yourself seeking out alone time at weird hours to do weird things that you never used to do, and you’re sort of justifying that as alone time, “I went through this as a new parent,” “I went through this in the pandemic,” and not because you really don’t get any alone time but because you’re too depleted to do any work, and your cortisol hasn’t dropped enough so you can’t fall asleep. So, there’s kind of this, like, bottom-up top-down problem of like physiologically your body can’t actually relax enough to sleep.

You know, things like cortisol, they peak in the morning, they peak in the afternoon, and then they’re supposed to go down, so that by the time you’re ready to go to sleep, you don’t have all this, like, adrenaline and all this cort in your body. But when you’ve been stressed, you break out of that cycle and so your brain can’t do anything, but it wants to play video games, it wants to watch Netflix, it wants to do something distracting that isn’t sleep but doesn’t involve social interaction, which is kind of depleting.

So, if you find yourself wanting to play video games at 2:00 o’clock in the morning or watching TV instead of sleep, that’s usually a sign that your body is too physiologically strained to sleep, but your mind is too exhausted to do anything real, and I think that’s just a red flag a lot of us aren’t really trained to look out for.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, thanks for flagging that one. Flag of the flag. Anything else we should be observing?

Tessa West
In terms of stress, I think anything with disrupted patterns. If you usually exercise and then, all of a sudden, you’re not motivated to. If you want to disengage socially, that’s a huge kind of red flag that you’re probably pretty stressed out. Social interactions tend to be depleting for most people in some way, even if they’re good, even if they’re engaging. Those are the kinds of things we tend to be a little bit withdrawing from.

And then I think the other thing you should be really attuned to is stress contagion. So, I do a lot of research on how the stress we feel spreads to other people, and how, when we’re really stressed, we’re actually hyper-attuned to the stress cues of others. So, if I’m stressed and then I interact with a co-worker whose voice is a little bit hyper, who’s really fidgety, who is avoiding eye contact, I’m going to be like super sensitive to those cues and even more susceptible to catching that person’s stress.

So, if you find yourself getting ramped up when you’re around a hyper or stressed-out colleague, you can feel your heart rate going up, you can feel your palms sweating, you’re probably already kind of at a disadvantage. You’re a little bit stressed out, and you’re going to be super susceptible to catching the stress of other people around you, and so you kind of have to regulate that and take yourself out of those social contexts.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And you’re also talking about some assessments and questions that you can ask yourself and record answers to regularly. What are some of the potentially insightful items on those assessments?

Tessa West
I think if you want to go at this really simply, the easiest thing you can do is, in the morning, ask yourself what you’re the most worried about going into the day, and how your sleep was that night. And in the evening, ask yourself was that thing that you were worried about actually that stressful and what unanticipated stressors you faced?

What I find in my book is that about 50% of the time, the things we’re the most worried about in the morning tend to not actually be that bad, mostly because we can put steps in place to make ourselves feel better, to prepare for them mentally so that we are challenged, we’re not threatened. But when we looked at people’s so-called unanticipated stressors, they were things that they actually encounter really regularly.

So, the irony is they’re not actually that unanticipated when they thought about it. They just didn’t anticipate them in the moment. And those are those things I talked about, like a commute running late, or that calendar invite, that in the moment you didn’t anticipate, but if I asked you, “How often has this happened?” most people say, “Oh, it actually happens pretty frequently.”

So, they’re not actually processing these things as frequent stressors. They’re processing them as unanticipated until I tell them to write them down, and they’re like, “Oh, yeah, actually, I actually deal with this like once a week.” So, I think that’s the simplest thing you can do is kind of measure those patterns.

And then I think the key reason why you should do this, not only just to learn about your own body, your own experiences, but if you are to look for a new job, if you’re to start networking with people, you know exactly sort of what to ask for, what red flags are going to spike your blood pressure. So, you can ask questions like, “How often does the boss put unanticipated meetings on the calendar?”

If you’ve identified that as something that really stresses you out, you want to avoid that in your next job. But you really have to be like very kind of systematic and learning your own triggers so that you know exactly what to ask and when during those networking conversations during those job interviews.

Pete Mockaitis
So, it sounds like merely identifying the patterns and anticipating the stressors prior to them occurring is useful and powerful for your own resilience in and of itself. So that’s cool. Great.

Tessa West
Yeah, absolutely. We got to learn what makes us not sleep, and, surprisingly, people don’t actually know. Scientists know. We can run statistics on you and tell you, but if I was to ask you, “Why didn’t you sleep last night?” You’re going to make up all kinds of things, from the room was too hot, to this or that, and it probably has very little to do with those things. You just don’t know because it’s something that happened three days ago that’s impacting your sleep.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, then I’m curious, one thing that’s in our control is to say, “Oh, this job has a ton of the things that trigger me. It’s time for another job.” So that’s one thing we could do, is make the switch. I’m curious about what are some of the things we might be able to do to, since you’re highlighting here, that stress can be a sneaky little bugger who has negative impacts days and weeks later than the actual inciting incident occurred? So that seems to suggest that it would be in our interest to proactively do some things about how we are handling stress so as to flourish all the better. So, lay it on us, what should we do there?

Tessa West
Yeah, I think here’s the good news. You have a lot more control over the impact of stress and how frequently you encounter these things than you realize. I think the good news is most of the stressors that are actually anticipated are things you can control to some degree. So, if you figure out, for instance, that your boss tends to put those unanticipated meetings on your calendar, once you sort of track the data, you realize it’s occurring every other Thursday or something like that, or you can figure out what that pattern is with your boss, then you can kind of put those blocks in your day.

I think one of the main things that stress people out is not getting their list of things done in the day, but if they actually figure out why, it’s through self-interruptions. There are things you can do to kind of prevent self-interruptions. If you’re being interrupted by other people, I talk in this book about how you can look around the environment and figure out sort of who’s interrupting you and when. Is it because their office is close? Is it because their office is not close, and they don’t know how to systematically interrupt you?

So, tracking these things, learning your own environment, and then putting stopgaps in place is huge. I think once I figured out what stressed me out, which was disappointing people, not getting them something done in time, and then I was thinking, “Okay, why am I disappointing them? Am I taking on too much? Sure, maybe I’m taking on too much,” but that wasn’t actually the reason. The real reason was, during my smart time every day, which was from 8:00 to 10:00 a.m., I was interrupting myself up to 15 times to check my LinkedIn to see who liked a post.

This is embarrassing, but I will admit that this happened. And once I started tracking my own behaviors, I realized I have this weird tick where I want to see how popular I am on LinkedIn, and it’s usually in the morning and that’s conflicting with my smart time, and when I don’t get my smart time, and I don’t get the thing done, that then leads me to disappoint people. So, if I’m 100% honest with myself, I have complete control over that daisy chain of events that’s leading to the stressor.

It took me a really long time to figure out what it was. But once I did, all I did was put away LinkedIn for those two hours, and it totally solved the problem. And that’s kind of a simple example, but I think, once you are honest with yourself about what you’re actually doing, what situations you’re putting yourself in to potentially exacerbate these triggers or allow them to happen, if you have a commute, you just have to plan for the max. You know, if it’s between 30 and 60 minutes, just always assume 60 minutes.

Things like that, I think we have a lot more control over, but you do have to play detective of your own behaviors, of your own triggers, of your own weaknesses, and admit that you have them, and then instead of band-aiding problems, my sleep deprivation, I bought all those cold sheets that they tell you, “Okay, well, it’s probably too warm in your room.” So, I bought those.

That wasn’t really the issue. It was conflict with someone at work that had happened like up to two days before that. Once I figured that out, I didn’t need the cold sheets and my sleep was fine. But you do have to do the homework and do the digging, but most people can actually figure it out.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And that’s really cool how sometimes, when you do the detective work, you’re on the case and you see, “Aha, it’s because of this, and I can make this shift. And then as a result, things will things be hunky-dory.” So that’s super. I’m curious, if you discover some stuff that is less in your control, sort of like no matter what you do, this colleague is going to critique your work.

And not that they’re being a total jerk about it, but they’re just going to be like, “Oh, you know, you should do this. Oh, why didn’t you do that? You know, and that’s just, okay.” That’s just kind of the way they are. Maybe you’ve even asked them, “Hey, you know, I’d really appreciate it. You know, I work best under these kinds of collaborative conditions.” Okay, whatever. You’ve done all you could do and still, stuff happens, and it’s being served at you. How do we best deal with those pieces?

Tessa West
Yeah, I think, you know, my first book is called Jerks at Work, and it’s like, try all those strategies, and if it doesn’t work, then you need to go into Job Therapy and learn how to network to find a new job. I do think, I don’t want to be Pollyannish and think you can solve all your problems. I do think controllability is a huge piece.

Once you figure out what needs to be controlled, what the problem is, if you can’t control that in much the same way that you can’t fix a marriage by yourself, if your partner is like, “Screw this, I’m not interested in therapy. I’m not interested in doing any reparative work,” that’s when you have to start exploring new things.

What I don’t want people to do is think that that means quit and then start applying. I think you need to start having those kind of 15-minute conversations with strangers while you’re still employed, because a lot of us have a grass-is-greener idea, and we don’t actually know whether we’re going to face the same thing in another job that we’re facing now.

And I think the easiest thing you can do is reach out to people who are in your organization or outside of it, or in your industry, and I know people don’t like networking, but I think of networking conversations more about information-seeking and asking them about their jobs and less about talking about yourself, just to get a feel for what the day-in-the-life is of other jobs, and that should be your only goal, “What is the day in the life like of this job, at this company, at this role?”

Really simple mundane questions about, “What do you do every day? What does it look like? How loud is it? Who are your colleagues? How much control do you have over how you see them?” Those kinds of low-level things. You want to reach out to as many people as you can to have those conversations to see what it’s like on the other side, instead of assuming that it’s going to be better because often it’s actually not so great on the other side, and you kind of have to bide your time a little bit before you start reaching out or you start applying for new things.

But I think that that very first step is just talking to people in those companies, and just saying, “Hey, can you tell me, like, what your day-to-day is? What do you do like from 9:00 to 5:00, from 9:00 to 10:00, 10:00 to 11:00? What’s that look like?”

Pete Mockaitis
I like that specificity there. And I’m curious, while we’re biding our time, we’re doing our research, we’re talking to some people, are there any sort of like first-aid strategies you recommend for, we’re getting blasted by work stressors all the time? How do we just kind of deal and cope better? You suggested not reframing, “Well, this is just part of what you have to do to get ahead.” So, if that’s something that we don’t want to do, what’s something we do want to do?

Tessa West
I think the easiest thing you can do to kind of regulate, and this, actually, this is going to sound like a weird connection, but it comes out of the “Intimate Partner Violence” literature. So, how do you get from ten to one on, like, that anger scale? Is just taking yourself out of the situation, going for a walk, or shutting yourself in your office for ten minutes alone? Don’t interact with anyone. Don’t go complain immediately to a colleague if you’re stressed.

Our instinct is to want to sort of, like, explode our negative emotions onto others in an effort to get them to regulate it for us, to get them to make us feel better, to complain. And I think that instinct is fine for maybe later on, but at first just take a couple minutes, I think, and go for a walk, or have a cup of coffee. I think the best emotion regulation strategy in the “Intimate Partner Violence” literature is count to 100 alone in a room. That’s the best predictor of getting people to, like, not want to punch someone because it actually helps downregulate emotions at the basic physiologic level.

So, your blood pressure goes down, your heart rate goes down. You need to do the things to get your body to change before your mind can. And I think for some people, they’re good at meditating, I’m not. But I can take 10 minutes to, like, listen to music or something like that. Just do that a couple of times, I think, is the easiest and the best strategy people can do.

And I think building your physical space in a way that’s comfortable is also really important. And temperature matters, sound matters, so as much control over your little environmental, you know, whatever kind of makes you happy in your environment, those creature comforts is really important.

Pete Mockaitis
You talk about “Intimate Partner Violence” literature, I guess I’m just thinking about, like, children and their emotional regulation pieces. It seems like many of these really do still apply to us.

Tessa West
Yeah, timeout, self-induced time out. It’s the same. When it comes to emotion regulation, there’s only so many ways to skin a cat, and you don’t actually need to be that complicated about it. It really just comes down to taking deep breaths and getting your heart rate down. Once your body is calm, then your mind will follow.

But I think we often want to do something immediately that feels good, that feels like a release, and that usually means word vomiting to our colleague. And that’s the thing I would avoid because that leads to stress contagion and all that kind of yucky business.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, we’ve immediately managed our stresses, we’re doing some research. What are some of the other key steps you recommend that we undergo when we’ve determined, “Yep, it’s time to make a switch”?

Tessa West
I think that kind of the number one thing is talking to strangers. I think 15-minute conversations are key. In the book, I talk about how you can reach, how you can write a cold email to someone and get them to actually write you back. I had to do this for the book. I was shocked at how much people were willing to talk about themselves. What they weren’t willing to do is have a conversation where I sold myself to them for no reason, you know, like, “I’m on the job market, I’m looking for something, and I’m going to tell you how great I am.”

No one would reply to emails like that. Not that I was doing that, but people often reach out in an effort to impress. And I think, instead, you want to reach out and say, “I have these three questions about before you started this job, nobody told me that. How would you answer that?” I think little things like that. I think the job interview process is a place where we often have terrible communication. We don’t have honest interviews, like we don’t have first dates.

I think it’s really important to remind yourself that, during that early kind of sourcing stage where you’re learning about a job, you’re talking to a hiring manager, you need a little bit of tension in those conversations where you’re asking tough questions. People avoid that because they think it makes them look bad or ungrateful, but you can onlDy kind of build intimacy with some tension in close relationships, and I think that’s true with job interviews.

You want to ask those tough questions. People like it. It turns out it looks like you’re looking for long-term fit. So, I think asking some difficult questions to assess fit, to find red flags. My favorite question is, “What does it look like to fail at this job?” People always can answer that one because they’ve seen it a million times. It’s better than asking, “What does it look like to succeed?” because that tends to be vague. Failure tends to be specific. So, questions like that. I think you just have to be willing to have like super honest conversations and listen to people and not sell yourself. At least, that’s not your initial goal.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Any other tips as we’re all walking this journey?

Tessa West
Don’t feel afraid to get rejected when you’re reaching out to people you don’t know. People are very nervous these days about looking awkward. I study social awkwardness, and it largely lives in our heads more than how it manifests behaviorally. And we’re a little out of practice with talking to people we don’t know, and I think that’s why people aren’t dating as much. It’s why they are afraid to have coffee or a Zoom call with a stranger. But everyone’s in the same boat, so it’s okay.

Do not think that you can learn about a job by sitting on your couch and reading websites and Glassdoor stuff, or even and getting those LinkedIn certifications, or whatever. You really can only learn about it through interpersonal communication and talking to people. I’m convinced that websites and passive learning, video watching, can only get you so far. You need to get in there and learn about the hidden curriculum and all that juicy stuff that people don’t advertise about jobs.

Pete Mockaitis
When you say the hidden curriculum, what do you mean by this?

Tessa West
This is all the stuff that leads you to succeed at work that nobody talks about. Sometimes that means that company policies go against what it takes to actually succeed. The dark side is like taking maternity leave is a bad idea because someone else will take your job. That’s a piece of hidden curriculum. Sometimes it’s weird norms.

So I asked people, I did a study where I asked them about all the weird norms they encountered at work, and sometimes it’s like where you’re allowed to sit, who you can email to ask questions, whose orange juice you can drink from the office fridge, little things like that, but also things like knowledge transfer, which is a complex concept of, like, “If I know something from my old job, do people give a crap in my new job? Are they interested in learning about that? Or do they have their own set of rules here that contradict that?”

And I think a lot of us have a hard time getting over a newcomer hump at work because we assume the knowledge from our old job will carry over to a new one, when in reality there’s like a whole new set of norms and rules and even jargon. That’s another thing that we don’t like at work, but it’s super common. Everyone has their own terms, their own acronyms they use at work. They tend to be pretty idiosyncratic to companies. So, the ones you know now at your job now are going to be different than the ones that the new company uses.

So, just like, “How much of that do I have to learn? How steep is that hill to climb?” And what I think will I need to succeed, is that really what the people who’ve succeeded have? I’ll say one more thing which is job ads often have a list of requirements that are not the real requirements needed. And the reason why is because it’s for the sourcing for hiring managers. They want to cast a wide net so they tend to sort of underwrite ads, but what they’re really looking for is often not written in that ad.

And so, you have to do some digging to figure out, “Okay, they actually left out this really important thing that everyone who’s ever gotten this job had but it’s not in the ad because if they put it there, they’d only get three applicants,” or something like that. There’s lots of kind of mundane reasons but even at the level of the job ad, there’s a hidden curriculum of like what’s missing from that that you really do need to land the job and to succeed at it.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. That’s really nice, and it’s pretty substantial just how much is hidden, and just how skewed and inaccurate a picture we could get if we only rely on what’s published.

Tessa West
Yeah, think about it like a dating app. Imagine that you meet someone based on their app profile. Would you think that that app is 100% accurate and representative of the person? Most of us would laugh and say, “Of course not. That photo is 15 years old. They overestimated their height and their income and all this other stuff.” We know that, right? We intuitively know that our dating profile is not representative of us, so why do we think a job ad is representative of a job?

It’s the same kind of logic that I think you should apply. And when you meet someone on a first date, you want to do a little bit of digging to see how accurate that profile was. A lot of us are feeling catfished. We show up and we’re like, “That’s not you.” And I think that can happen with jobs, but we’re feeling much more vulnerable than when we’re dating, where we’re afraid to kind of dig for the truth because we want to get to the next stage.

So, we don’t ask those questions like, “Who wrote the ad?” and “Has my future boss even seen this ad?” Most of the time the answer is no. Some hiring manager wrote it, scraping from Indeed. And so, we have to treat it with that same level of kind of circumspect perspective that we would a dating app.

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

Tessa West
I’m a professor so I give you a lot of homework. It’s going to feel like a lot, but once you get the hang of kind of measuring yourself and learning about yourself by collecting these data, you’re going to be, hopefully, pleasantly surprised at the new things you’re going to uncover. And I think don’t be afraid to reach out to people and have those conversations. That’d be the one piece of advice I give people.

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

Tessa West
Probably “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” is one of my favorite quotes. I think that it just kind of encompasses this idea that workplace vibes, culture, zeitgeist can really override anything that we do to plan. I think that is something that I kind of like live by. Don’t ask me who said it. I can’t remember.

Pete Mockaitis
I think Drucker.

Tessa West
Drucker, that’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite study.

Tessa West
Probably be something on morality and norms. I’m doing a lot of research these days on how we interact with people who make us incredibly uncomfortable. So, one of my favorite studies in this space is by Wendy Mendez on the brittle smiles effect.

So the more uncomfortable we are interacting with someone who’s different from us, the more likely we are to smile, be nice, engage in friendly overtures, let them win negotiations, but at the same time our physiology suggests we’re incredibly stressed out. And so, I love that because it’s this juxtaposition between what our bodies are saying, which is stress, and what our minds are trying to override, which is overt friendliness in an effort to compensate for that. And I think that can explain why we often suck at giving feedback because it’s uncomfortable.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Tessa West
I only read fantasy novels these days, “Shadow Daddies,” that kind of thing, Sarah J. Maas.

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

Tessa West
Noise-canceling headphones.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I love noise-canceling headphones. Which one are you working with?

Tessa West
These are not it but I use Bose headphones because my office is all glass walls, and I can hear everything around me all the time, and I’m one of those noise-sensitive people, so I can’t concentrate if I can hear a conversation going on. So, I live by the noise. Sometimes I layer them on with wireless headphones. I’m going to sound totally crazy. Wireless headphones underneath with a noise machine going on on my iPhone, like a fan, and then the noise-canceling headphones over those so I really can’t hear anything.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, you know, I love it. I would put earplugs in and then headphones over the earplugs.

Tessa West
I do that too, but it’s not enough. You got to get the fan sound on the earbuds, and then the noise cancelling over that.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Tessa West
Getting a latte four times a day.

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

Tessa West
Keep it real. Just say the thing. At the end of the day, you’re going to get it out. It’s going to take you a while, so just say the thing.

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

Tessa West
You can check out TessaWestAuthor.com, which has all the quizzes for my book. There’s also going to be just a whole bunch of downloadable materials, little guides on how to do the stress test, how to measure yourself, how to network, all that fun business. If you’re interested in my research, you can check me out at TessaWestLab.com.

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

Tessa West
Yeah, reach out to five strangers this weekend and set up chats. Just cold reach out, follow the guide I give you, and just frame up three questions that you want to ask them, where you want to learn about their job. They can be completely outside of your industry. You’re just looking to learn new things.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Tessa, thank you. This is awesome.

Tessa West
Thank you so much.

Pete Mockaitis

Lauren, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Lauren McGoodwin

Hi, Pete. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, I am super excited to dig into your wisdom. And could you start us off by sharing, so you’ve been in this Career Contessa game for a while, great brand.

Lauren McGoodwin
Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis

And it even existed before How to be Awesome at Your Job, so kudos on a long run here. Can you share with us a particularly surprising or counterintuitive piece of career advice that you’ve come to learn and adopt and share during your reign as the Career Contessa?

Lauren McGoodwin

Yeah, absolutely. We’ve been around for 10 years, I’ve talked to a lot of successful, very fulfilled people. I think the biggest thing, the biggest misconception I’m sort of very much on brand for that millennial woman who was striving for perfect, was that the dream job does not exist, it’s a myth. It’s a myth that kind of keeps you perpetually stuck. So, that’s probably the biggest one from talking, and basically having the job that I do, which is finding out “What does make a successful career? People who are fulfilled, how do they do it?”

And that’s a big one, I think, because it starts to sort of managing your expectations and actually not expecting to have this dream job that checks every box in your life. It’s similar to trying to find a perfect partner, right? But with jobs, for some reason, we believe not only do dream jobs exist but that, “I should have one. And if I don’t have one, something about me is missing and wrong, and I’ve messed up,” and turn yourself into this personal DIY project to fix that part of your life.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, that’s good. That’s good. So, the implications of that then is if we’re not in a dream job, that’s okay, nobody is because they don’t exist. That’s your view on the world?

Lauren McGoodwin

Yeah, it is my view on the working world, that there is no such thing as a dream job. And you’ll see it makes a really good saying as a meme on Instagram and TikTok and whatnot of the dream job exists and hustle harder to get that dream job, and a job should check all these multiple boxes but what I find is that, really, what the dream job is made up of is this elusive kind of lifestyle piece of a job, where it doesn’t include hellish commutes or return-to-office mandates that you don’t agree with, it doesn’t include manipulative coworkers or bad bosses who actually don’t know how to manage.

And so, you’re sort of looking for this thing that doesn’t exist, and so your expectations are consistently misaligned with reality. That is equivalent, for me, of someone who has a very fixed mindset versus having a growth mindset, someone who can say, “Hey, my ability to learn and adapt is more important than, okay, my ability to be perfect at this presentation.”

So, I think what happens is dream job isn’t just like your job title and your company. It’s really inclusive more of like a lifestyle, and a mindset, and these realities that, one, don’t exist, as COVID, I think, is such a good reminder of, like, things can change quickly, and being able to be adaptable, and be able to lean into uncertainty, is really kind of the stuff that makes you more invaluable at work versus the person who’s like, “I found the perfect job title, and it looks really good on LinkedIn, and I’m able to share these…” I call it, like, glitter and glue moments, “All these glitter moments in my career but the glue is what holds the career together.”

And so, that’s why I’m actually a big advocate for people who always say, “Well, if I’m not looking for a dream job, what am I looking for?” And I will advocate for a good-enough job. A good-enough is really practical, it’s not perfect, and that’s the problem. But dream jobs is you’re stuck there.

One of the things that people will ask me “If I’m not looking for a dream job, what should I be striving for?” which this is unique for each person, but this is why I’m a huge advocate for the good-enough job. The good-enough job is practical. It’s not perfect. It’s not having you strive for that perfectionist tendency that can keep you stuck. And so, the good-enough job, again, it’s practical. It allows you to still have a life outside of work. It doesn’t ask that work check every box of your life and fulfill every part of you.

And I think COVID was a good reminder of that for people, and I worry that now, in 2024, we’re starting to forget about that and try to go back to those tendencies. So, I would just say, to answer kind of the very first question, the piece of advice I have learned the most that kind of counteracts, actually, building a fulfilling career is trying to go after that dream job.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, so that’s a cool distinction there, a dream job versus a good-enough job, and I like what you had to say with regard to partners in terms of, like, no human being is perfect, and no job is perfect. And so, I would say, I think that my dear bride is a good wife, and she’s not perfect, and I’m not perfect. So, help us orient to things a little bit in terms of good-enough.

Lauren, lay it on us, four levels of job, if I may.

One, unacceptable, you should probably get out of there as soon as you can. Two, good enough, yeah, you should probably hold on to this. All right. Three, about as good as actually exists in real life, so hold on with all your might. And, four, just unrealistic, like, that probably doesn’t exist for anybody, so disabuse yourself from that notion readily. So, I put you on the spot there, Lauren. Give us four levels of job, starting with a rung that’s, “Yeah, I should probably get out of here.”

Lauren McGoodwin
Yeah. So, an example of this is like the person who has their “dream job,” they’re a lawyer, they worked their whole life for this, this is the thing they wanted to do, they’ve got that corner office, but they’re miserable. They’re working nonstop. Maybe they’re paid well but it doesn’t matter because they have no life, they have no friends, they’re not able to have any hobby.

And so, it’s that mix of, like, “But this is what I thought I wanted so I need to continue it.” They’re burnt out, they’re all the negative things. That’s sort of what I would think is the rung of like, “But this was supposed to be my dream job. I worked so hard to get this.” It just never, never goes away.

So, then the good-enough job, again, it’s practical but it’s not perfect. Maybe it’s something that you’re really good, you’re not particularly, like, dying over passion for whatever industry, you work in manufacturing, but you’re really good at your job, and it gives you work-life balance that works for you. Maybe for you that means, “I want a really high salary, and I’m willing to sacrifice having to go into an office and commute every day.” That works for the chapter you’re in right now.

Like, stages of your life are similar to stages of your career. I talked to someone the other day, who she got a new job, and she’s been working at a startup, but she has kids now, and the startup has a lot of it can feel a little unpredictable about what’s going to happen, so she’s like, “I really like that but I kind of made a little bit of a career pivot, and I wanted to go to a bigger company because I was looking for something that was more stable, offered me remote role, was an increase in pay because a lot of times startups will give equity.”

And so, again, that is a good-enough job for her. She’s like, “I like this thing well enough, I don’t have to be a die-hard for it, but also it’s not asking more from me than what I think is reasonable given the exchange of money,” the exchange of the paycheck part for her. That can be a good-enough job. Then you have the person who maybe go even like a step further, where they have this deep passion of being able to reclaim their life from work.

And so, they have a job that allows them to have more PTO, or maybe they do, like I talked to someone the other day, she’s a teacher and she’s doing like a job-share with somebody else. So, for her, that’s a good-enough situation. She doesn’t want to totally leave the workplace but she wants to reimagine how it works for her.

So, there’s all these variations of what the good-enough job can be for you. The teacher is deeply passionate about what she’s working on. She’s just struggling with how to make that work with her life, so a job-share works. Then you have the other person who’s like, “I’m not deeply passionate about it but I’m good at it and I’m paid well for it, and so that works.”

And then the top, or the first rung I said is the person who’s like, “I thought I was passionate about this. This is a dream job, it looks good on paper, I’m working for the right company, I’ve reached all these achievements, and it’s not working for me. And now I have this piece of me where I feel like I failed or, somehow, I have this expectation hangover of this isn’t what I expected to be, on top of the fact that I’m burnt out and all these other things.”

So, I think there’s obviously a lot of variations, careers are super personal, but I think what it comes down to is managing those expectations, understanding that the dream job, this concept of a dream job is more about the lifestyle that goes with it. And so, restudying those expectations and then going out, and kind of I always tell people, like when I was a recruiter, “You don’t get everything.” It’s like, the realtor will ask, “What are the top three most important things to you? Neighborhood? Number of bedrooms?”

I think that’s also important to do in your career, and I think it starts with aligning with your values. So, thinking about, “What do you really value personally? And then, how can you translate your top values into the career that you have?” Those are just all good starting places. There’s obviously a lot of intricacies to this but when you are trying to make the shift from dream job to good-enough job, I think that’s a really good starting place.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. So, I dig it. So, we’ve got a picture of the lowest level of job, bad, and then a picture of good enough. Could you also paint a picture for us for the highest levels, like about as good as it gets in the real world, as well as this is just impossible and unrealistic in the world of reality?

Lauren McGoodwin

Like, this job doesn’t actually exist, but if we could make it exist, this is what it would look like?

Pete Mockaitis

Kind of like a fantasy dream job people have that is harmful because they are comparing it to an unrealistic thing?

Lauren McGoodwin
I think that’s a little bit like lazy girl job, which is this TikTok phenomenon that went off, where it’s like you basically don’t have to do anything, and you don’t have to be involved or engaged in any way, but you’re paid really well. I think of that as almost like this true fantasy. Like, one, it is an exchange for you creating impact and value for the company, the exchanges they’re going to pay you. So, you’re not going to be able to actually gives you or never asks you to take a call that’s inconvenient. The realities of life are sort of that is going to happen.

So, to paint that picture, I almost think the comparison is this lazy-girl job thing that people were talking about. I’m not saying that it doesn’t exist but, for me, I look at a “lazy-girl job” which I hate because you wouldn’t hear a lazy-boy job, but, anyway, that’s a whole other topic. But, for me, it’s like I actually have had a job before. My very first job, I was an admin assistant. My only job was to basically wait for the phone to ring.

Now, I wasn’t well-paid, and I had to show up to an office so I wasn’t able to just do what I want all day long, but, for me, I was, as a human being, part of our wellbeing is we want to be engaged, we want to create something, we want to use our brains. And, for me, that was really mind-numbing work, but if we wanted to paint this picture of this “lazy-girl job” or this ultimate job that really doesn’t ask you to do anything, I think people think that would be fulfilling, but I don’t think it would.

I think us, as human beings, we want to move forward, we want to make an impact, and you wouldn’t get that in that situation, but I could see that being this, like, ultimate dream job for somebody.

Pete Mockaitis

Lauren, I love that so much, that notion of a dream scenario would be that you don’t have to do much but you get tons of money. And what’s interesting is, I think, we can see that in real life in terms of if you’ve been on vacation for a while, it’s like you’re actually kind of bored, “And I want to get to it and start being able, contributing somewhere,” there’s that.

And if you look at folks who, I don’t think you can even call them jobs but they have some sort of a subsidized living situation, like a trust fund or some kinds of funds are just flowing into their life without effort, and often these folks are as susceptible or more so, I think the data show, to depression and other kinds of challenges because there’s something that’s not quite being met there.

So, I think that’s a great thing to call out, that you might imagine this thing exists but it kind of doesn’t from a job perspective. And even if you were subsidized magically, that often has its own perils with regard to mental health and fulfillment. So, give us that level that’s maybe just below that in terms of, “This is about as good as it really gets in terms of, I wouldn’t call it a dream job because it doesn’t exist, but this is as close to optimal as one might hope for in this life.”

Well, now can you paint a picture for, if we’ve got four levels, like terrible job, good-enough job, then as good as is realistically optimally possible in real-life job, and then the fake dream job. I think we covered levels one, two, and four. But paint a picture for number three, the best realistically optimal job we might have in life.

Lauren McGoodwin

I think going back to the example of my friend, she was working in one type of marketing, and she’s transitioning to a different type of marketing. She was working for more of a startup-type company that had a little unpredictability with it, she’s going to go to a manufacturing company. So, on the surface, working for a big brand name, way cooler. The type of marketing she was doing? Flashy, cool, really, again, kind of that glitter and glue metaphor, it’s using that, fits into the glitter side.

But she is moving over to manufacturing, definitely not as flashy and cool, doesn’t look as good as a big brand name on LinkedIn, and she’s going to be doing kind of a more traditional marketing route. Now, for someone who’s looking at this, they’re like, “Wait, she’s going from this really cool job to this really boring job.”

But that, for her, she maybe sees this shift from being like, “I had my dream job and it hasn’t necessarily been a ‘dream.’ I’m really ready to go to a good-enough job, a job that I can close my laptop at 5:00 p.m. because I do have young kids, and I want to be able to spend time with them. I get flexibility. I have remote work status with this one. Instead of getting equity, I’m getting a higher paycheck.”

So, again, thinking about “What are my top priorities? And I’m going to get them at this place. Even though it might not be the ‘dream’ on paper to somebody, for me it’s a good-enough job. It doesn’t ask me to give up my life in exchange for the job.” And that is something that I think is really important. A good-enough job is going to take you out of that tunnel vision you have or that fixed mindset that you have.

It’s maybe going to take the pressure off you that you’re feeling right now. Maybe it’s going to give you clarity because you’re not going to see your workplace as your dream, so maybe you’ll be able to recognize when there’s toxicity happening in a workplace more often, things like that. And so, for me, when I hear someone who saying, “You know, I’m kind of leaving the cool, flashy thing. I’m going to go over here but I’m being paid more. It seems like I’m going to have really good work-life balance. So far, from the people I’ve interviewed with, I really like them.”

It’s like they have this surprise factor, where they’re like, “But I should like this big, cool company, checking the box for me.” And I think that is the dream job versus good-enough job kind of conundrum, is sort of this mindset of, like, “I should want this thing. This thing should kind fulfill me, and why doesn’t it?” And so, I’m really proud of people who can make the shift over to “those good-enough jobs” for them.

And it’s not easy to make those decisions and determine, “What are my values? What are my top priorities? Now I have to find a company that fits.” I’m making this sound like it just landed onto their lap but I think it does take some internal work of getting over these preconceived misconceptions of what you should want.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s really cool. And this conversation about dream jobs is making me think about, I guess, there’s been a recent trend of big personalities on YouTube quitting YouTube, which is funny because I understand that the data reveal that young people now, more than they want to be teachers or firefighters, they want to be YouTubers. So, that’s the job, I guess, everyone wants. They think it’s the coolest. Not an astronaut but a YouTuber.

And so, folks who are YouTubers, who are collecting over half a million dollars of income for creatively making videos, are like, “I can’t take this anymore,” which is fascinating in terms of a picture of the dream job doesn’t exist. And if you dig deeper, you sort of learn that, “Oh, well, behind the surface of just making cool videos, they got to manage a team, and brand deals, and books, and accounting, and everyone wants a piece of them.”

Lauren McGoodwin

And the comments, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis

It’s like, the reality is, “Huh, it’s not just a creative wonderland of nonstop adulation for me being me, but there’s a ton of responsibilities that are sufficient to overwhelm a portion of these people who have what appears to be an ultimate dream job.”

Lauren McGoodwin

Yeah, absolutely. And that’s tough, I’m sure. It’s very hard for them to walk away from that because it’s that feeling of, like, “You’re not just going to get this back if you change your mind,” meaning, like, the person who worked all the way to become the partner of a law firm, and I’m only using that as an example because I feel we hear a lot about lawyers who are, like, “It wasn’t what I thought it’s going to be.”

But anybody who kind of gets in that golden handcuff rut sort of thing in their career, it’s very hard to walk away from that. And that’s why I think it’s important to kind of share the message early on about good-enough job versus dream jobs. Careers are long and windy, and you take U-turns and left turns and right turns, and up and down. It’s not this linear career path.

And the more we can kind of, I think, spread this education about what a career is, or what a career path looks like, I mean, I came from the generation very much of, like, this ladder and the lean in, just lean in to saying yes to things. That just hasn’t been the reality I’ve experienced, and I think many of the women I’ve talked to and interviewed, or experts that I’ve interviewed, that hasn’t been their experience.

And same with our audience at Career Contessa, it’s like your best skillset to building a fulfilling career is a person who is being proactive in the driver’s seat of their career versus the reactive to whatever is coming your way. And then, again, also studying this mindset of, like, “I’m part of that world, too,” just thinking about your values, determining kind of your purpose, thinking about, again, I have this phrase about how to be invaluable at work.

And people are always asking because they’re like, “Oh, I thought you want to be indispensable.” And I always say, “Look, but if you’re indispensable to a role, how can you grow because they can’t afford to lose you?” So, that’s a different mentality when you’re indispensable, the company is saying you’re primed for overwork because they can’t afford to lose you versus the mentality of, “We don’t want to lose you,” so you’re primed for more valuable work, for example.

So, again, these are just like this is the lessons that I think is kind of one can learn early on. It’s actually very helpful throughout your career. A lot of us, to your point about the YouTuber that many of us learn at mid-life or later on, and so that’s why I’m here to spread this information

Pete Mockaitis

That’s lovely. Well, I do want to hear more about your unique vantage point. So, with the Career Contessa podcast and YouTube channel and speaking, you have a fun vantage point. And I know when I dork out and look into all my analytics and things, and emails from listeners and see, “Okay, what’s really the hot stuff in terms of what people really want to know, and what kind of content advice, wisdom, is resonantly transformational for them?”

So, Lauren, if I could put you on the spot to share with us maybe three super nuggets that you’ve collected from your time podcasting and engaging with so many folks, what have been some of your favorite discoveries?

Lauren McGoodwin

I interviewed a woman once on what actually drives happiness at work, and I still love this conversation, and they were relationships, purpose, and autonomy. And I really loved that because I feel like happiness at work sometimes feel like this very elusive thing, and I guess in a way it is, but I thought that was a really fun conversation. Sometimes you have conversations where you learn something, and you’re like, “Wow, that’s certainly a puzzle piece to the career puzzle.”

I think another big piece for me is the difference between, like I said, being invaluable at work versus being indispensable. I really fit this millennial woman stereotype of the, like, work hard until they recognize your work. I very much learned through my own experiences, but also through our audience and talking to people, it’s really important to advocate for yourself.

There are good ways to advocate, bragging, however you want to call it. Some people don’t like it. They’re like, instead of advocating, think of it as self-expression. However you need to see this, it is very important that you are able to talk about your wins, and your accomplishments, and your achievements. So, those have been some big wins for me.

The other thing, I think, that’s been kind of eye-opening in terms of stuff I’d learned is, like, it’s interesting that you can outperform someone and not necessarily be better than them, and I think that’s a hard reality. And part of that comes down to they might be better at telling their story, they’re better at managing that, I guess, “playing the game.” And I think that sometimes, again, like a hard reality to come to terms with, but I also think it’s very true.

And so, again, self-advocating, learning how to tell your story, making sure that you’re aligned with the right stakeholders and getting in front of them, that’s really important. And, also, that confidence is not something you’re born with. It’s built by taking action. So, nothing is going to just come to you. You have to have the confidence and the willingness to try something in order to start getting traction.

So, if I could drop it into three nuggets of wisdom, those are like some three big takeaways I’ve had in the last year of talking. I have the best job because, through the podcast, YouTube channel, what we do at the side, our whole job is basically trying to find out, “How can you build a healthy fulfilling and successful career?” It is not a perfect black and white formula that fits in a box for everybody. But there are certain trends that I hear over and over again, and those are a few of them.

Pete Mockaitis

Cool. Well, could you tell us a cool story of someone that you’ve worked with who saw a real cool transformation in terms of they had one perspective, and then they learned some things, changed some things, and saw a fantastic result on the other side of things?

Lauren McGoodwin

Well, I have a couple. I have a friend who recently was working for a thing company, and their whole career was, like, the Googles, the LinkedIns, the Amazons, the Facebook, very much like you look at her career path, you’d be like, “You’ve got one very linear career path at a certain type of company,” was part of the layoffs that happened, has been searching for a job, and was kind of only searching one way for a job, which was, essentially, using her network, referrals, applying, things like that, introductions to hire, relying on her network.

For a whole year, she’s been looking for a job. She’s incredibly talented. And one of the things that I thought was really interesting is she recently hit the Easy Apply button on LinkedIn to a job that had been reposted a couple of times, had less than 50 people apply for it, it was a very different industry than she had been in before but a similar job, like job function, and ended up going for two interviews, got a job offer, meaning the process was like weeks’ long versus multi-months long.

And I was talking to her, and she was like, “I’m almost afraid to take this because it’s the complete opposite of anything I’ve ever done, and it flips all the logic I’ve thought of on its head.” And so, it was almost like she was uncomfortable with this unknown for herself, of like, “Shouldn’t I just keep sticking with what I’m doing even if it’s not working? Eventually it will work.” And she ultimately decided she’s going to take this new job, couldn’t be happier. It very much fits the description of this “good-enough job.”

She goes into the office once a month. They really value her experience in a certain industry. She was feeling very discouraged from the job search before. And I feel this breathes new life into her, and watching her just have this new motivation. And I thought that was really interesting because so many of us sometimes do have this fear of the unknown, or the fear or doing something different. And there were a couple of takeaways from it.

One, there’s no right way to job search. So, if you’re job searching right now, try a lot of different strategies. Yes, tap your network. Yes, try to get referrals. Also hit Easy Apply to the jobs that you think are really interesting to you, or the companies where you’re like, “I like the company well enough. I need to learn more about them.”

So, I love that story. I love the fact that it reminds you that find a target company, network, absolutely. This job market, absolutely has taught me that there are no rules so you have to try a little bit of everything and test out, and see what strategy works best for you. But ultimately, I think, also, going in with if you can manage your expectations to not be too fixed mindset on it has to go a certain way, if you take some those, I think it’s a really freeing thing as well.

Pete Mockaitis

Cool. Thank you. Well, now I’m curious, anything else you really make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Lauren McGoodwin

Well, my book is called Power Moves so if you’re interested in exploring more of these topics related to the dream job and going after the good-enough job, Power Moves is really a framework on how to build a career that is based in a proactive approach versus a reactive approach. And then, of course, my podcast is called Career Contessa. I’ve really made it easy, and that’s where I get to talk to people who share what drives happiness at work. And I love being able to have those interesting conversations. So, if you’re interested in podcast advice, or career advice, check out Career Contessa as well.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Lauren McGoodwin

My favorite quote that I learned from someone the other day is, “This or something better.” And I think that is an incredible quote especially for 2024 with this economic climate, this tough job market, it’s “This or something better.” So, remind yourself of that when you feel like, “I’m not making any progress. I’ve got a rejection.” And I always try to remind people, if they don’t look at your resume, they’re not rejecting you. My point being they look at your resume for seven seconds, or not at all, having a fresh mindset of, “That’s not necessarily a rejection that way,” but it’s, “This or something better.”

Pete Mockaitis

And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Lauren McGoodwin

I’m loving people who are doing research on remote work or distributed work. So, there’s a lot of CEOs out there who want to call everyone back to the office because of productivity, collaboration. And what these people who do this research are finding is, like, absolutely not necessary to be in office to collaborate, to be productive. And they’re actually doing a lot of research on what does drive those things.

Pete Mockaitis

Awesome. And a favorite book?

Lauren McGoodwin

A favorite book, Atomic Habits. I love that book. I quote it a lot. That and Essentialism I think they were like books I’ve read at the right time of my life to help me kind of get organized and focus, and gave me that fresh perspective that was really important.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite tool, something you use to help you be awesome at your job?

Lauren McGoodwin

Loom video recordings where, basically, you’re able to audio record yourself, or you can be on video, and then a screenshare. So, I’ll use it for trainings. It’s great for asynchronous work where you want to be able to send feedback to someone on something. So, on our team, we’re a fully remote company, so I will use Loom to send feedback on, “Hey, I read this article. Here’s something I would change. I’m going to edit here, edit there.” Sometimes we’ll use it for resume reviews for clients, too. So, I love Loom absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite habit?

Lauren McGoodwin

Favorite habit, probably a to-do list. Definitely a to-do list. And I’m not fancy. I use pen and paper but that’s probably one of my favorite habits. I also am really big on 10,000 steps a day, so I just got a walking pad, and I have a standing desk, so that’s a big part of my personality is I’m a very 10,000 steps a day.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Lauren McGoodwin

Certainly, just the dream job myth, I think, is something that people are starting to know me by, is that they’ll say, “I know you don’t believe in dream jobs, but I’m looking for a dream job,” or something like that. Or, “I know you don’t believe in dream jobs, but then what do I find instead?” So, I would say the dream job myth is definitely something I’m quoted back and used on myself a lot.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Lauren McGoodwin

Everything is on the Career Contessa website, so CareerContessa.com. Podcast is called Career Contessa, and the book is Power Moves. And then you can connect with me on LinkedIn, I’m Lauren McGoodwin on LinkedIn, and I post tips daily on there, and I would love to connect with you.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Lauren McGoodwin

My final action, I think, going back to one of the nuggets of things I’ve learned is “How can you advocate for yourself this week? Or, how can you make your accomplishments or achievements known this week?” Does that mean you can send a quick email to your boss, of, “Here’s a quick recap of what I’ve been working on”? Can you mention yourself in that Slack channel, like, “Here’s my win for the week”? What can you do to make sure that you are advocating and letting your wins be known?

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Lauren, thank you and good luck.

Lauren McGoodwin

Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis

Christina, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Christina Wallace

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

Pete Mockaitis

I’m excited, too. We’re talking about The Portfolio Life: How to Future-Proof Your Career, Avoid Burnout, and Build a Life Bigger than Your Business Card. That sounds pretty cool.

Christina Wallace

It’s a lot of promise, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, but no pressure, Christina, but we’re going to hold you to every one of these. Could you kick us off by sharing any really surprising, fascinating, counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made while doing the research and putting together this book?

Christina Wallace

So, one of my favorite little tidbits from this, I am someone who is not great at taking time off. Like many type A overachievers, I sort of aspire to be the sort of person who rests, who relaxes. I’m not great at it. And a little part of me has always been, like, slightly, you know, felt some superiority over that, like I work so hard.

And part of the research, when I got into some operations management and some research into sabbaticals and all of this, it was a little bit humbling, where it points out just how important rest and planned downtime is for not just productivity but for happiness, for the ability to not burn out. It seems fairly obvious, you got to have some time to recharge.

But I found some really fantastic research, particularly borrowing from the world in operations management of manufacturing, where the top-performing manufacturing lines only ever schedule 85% of their capacity. They always leave downtime for planned maintenance, for do-overs, for surges. They don’t start from the point of 100%, and then say, “Well, we’ll just do 110% if we have to.”

And I thought that was a good reminder with some great science behind it of why this notion of, like, “Hey, let’s have everyone give 110% all the time” is not realistic. And that’s why we are all in a constant state of burnout.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, Christina, that’s intriguing right there, and you’re bringing me back to fond memories of one time I had a consulting project at one of the world’s largest cookie factories. All day long you could smell that chocolate in the air.

Christina Wallace

Oh, man.

Pete Mockaitis

And so, 85% is a top-performing manufacturing line. I’m curious, what do we know about top-performing humans? So, some sabbatical is good, some vacation is good, some rest is good. Do we know – there’s probably a range based on different temperaments, etc. – what’s optimal for us?

Christina Wallace

Certainly, there’s an expectation of having some downtime every day, every week. You have to have it as part of your practice but I found some research from The Sabbatical Project, DJ DiDonna, one of my colleagues here at HBS has done, that really emphasizes the value of taking a meaningful sabbatical every, call it, ten years or so. And by meaningful, they mean really in the realm of, like, three to six months off, taking a significant intentional break where you have a moment to step back, reflect, and really consider, “What do I want to do for the next chapter?”

And sometimes people come back feeling refreshed and renewed energy to keep doing what they were doing. And sometimes people come back, and say, “Okay, I actually needed that space to realize I want to go off in a different direction or I want to make a major life choice.” But I thought there was an interesting reflection of sort of six months every ten years. Like, that doesn’t seem unreasonable to have, call it three or four sabbaticals over the course of your career. That’s not that much time off.

And, yet, without the intentionality behind it, ten years pops up, and you’re like, “Oh, I can’t take six months off. That feels impossible.” So, it was a nice reminder that with a little bit of planning and strategy, these breaks are absolutely doable.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And so then, that’s on the sabbatical side of things. I’m curious in terms of a workweek side of things. I’ve seen some studies that suggest a certain number of hours. After that, you’re actually negatively productive. What have you found there?

Christina Wallace

Yes. So, what’s interesting about a portfolio approach is that there’s some research that shows being able to toggle between different activities, different types of working, different types of thinking and interacting, like, collectively helps actually recharge, renew the way that you are working, the energy that you bring to the table.

And so, it’s not sort of just additive. It’s not saying, obviously, there’s research that says 10, 12, 14 hours, at a certain point, there’s diminishing returns if you’re doing the same thing hour after hour. But if you are complementing, say, a day job with a moonlighting gig, a side hustle, or a serious hobby, or something you really love that works a completely different part of you and that offers you a different way of thinking, and of creating, and of interacting, that doesn’t feel like you just pulled a 12- or a 14-hour day. It can actually help you feel rejuvenated.

So, I don’t want you to work 20 hours a day between your side hustle and your day job. There is a breaking point but I think this notion of your total load across your portfolio is a lot more flexible than you might think, depending on what’s in your portfolio.

Pete Mockaitis

And when you talk about a different type of work, sometimes it’s like how we define different is really kind of fluid. Because, in some ways, it’s like, well, I’ve got two companies. One is in the world of training and people development, and the other is in the world of outsourcing and media production. And so, in some ways, it’s saying, because we’re dealing with words and thinking about words and making words good.

Christina Wallace

Sure. And you’re still writing emails and trying to make the numbers balanced, and maybe making a slide or two. Like, I can see how that could feel like the very same work but managing a different project. When I think about maybe a different ways of working, I think about some of the folks in my book where one person, by day, is a teacher, and then her moonlighting project is writing novels for middle grade readers.

And so, by day, she was dealing with 4th graders, and their sticky hands, and how to teach them math, and how to teach them emotional maturity, and all of these things. And then, by night, she’s inventing these stories and sort of just going deep into this continuous creativity in these worlds that she’s building. That’s a very different way. Like, one allows her to recharge after she’s been giving and giving and giving all day long to her students.

So, you’re absolutely right, that really can come down to, like, “What is that mix? And do they complement each other? Or, are you just doing the same thing but in a different context?”

Pete Mockaitis

And when it comes to recharging-ness, is there a means by which you recommend people reflect, or assess, or gauge that?

Christina Wallace

So, one of the tactics that I recommend for putting together your portfolio is an assessment of two things. One is what do you need to be your best self? And everyone’s needs are going to be a little different. Your needs are going to be a little different depending on the chapter or season of life you’re in but you will likely have some combination of financial needs, growth needs, community needs. There could be other elements of security that you have needs, that need to be met.

And then, in addition to your needs, you’re going to have a set of wants, or, as I like to call them, your wishes. What are the big things that you care about doing, seeing, experiencing, leaving behind by the end of your life? We’re talking this could be minor, “I want to run a marathon.” These could be major, “I want to, I don’t know, walk on the moon,” so whatever. Putting together this kind of list of wishes for your life.

And as you’re assembling your portfolio, you want to be thoughtful of, like, “Are the different things that I do over the course of my day, or my week, or my month, collectively, are my needs being met?” We got to start there, “Are my needs being met?” If you’re doing two or three or four things that all maybe make you money, but they’re all solo projects, you have no colleagues, you’re not being given this community or this opportunity to just have conversations with other humans, you’re over-indexing on one need and your under-indexing on another.

And so, as you think about recharging and rebalancing, it’s, like, “Am I getting my needs met across my day, my week? And am I having a good balance across these things?” The wishes piece is relevant, too, “Am I doing all of this work and all of it only goes toward one or two or a handful of things that I care about? Or, do I have a nice breadth across what I’m doing that maybe this thing gets me closer to this professional goal, and that work gets me closer to this crazy artistic goal that maybe I even felt weird about writing down because it seems so out of this world but I kind of really do want to do before I die?”

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And I imagine it’s a common experience for people to not even be aware that they have a need of a particular flavor or stripe. Any suggestions on how to surface those?

Christina Wallace

I think part of this is the reflection or the delving into stories, into your past experiences, and having that opportunity to say, like, “When have I been my best self? And when have I haven’t? Like, what are those moments where I found myself crying at work or doing less than I thought I could or should be able to?” I’ll give you an example, one of my needs is an office with a door that closes.

I do not do well in open office plans. And I have so many examples of working in startups and other organizations where I loved the work, I was a good fit for my role, I had great relationships, everything felt like it should be clicking, but I was in an open office plan where I couldn’t focus. I have high sensitivity to sounds. I couldn’t focus. I was always being interrupted. I couldn’t get into a flow, ever. And that friction wore at me every day to the point where I couldn’t do what I was there to do.

So, I made that on my checklist, of like, “When I’m at my best is when I’m able to shut the door and be able to focus.” And so, in some ways, if you’re just starting out, you might not have a good sense of your needs yet, and that’s okay. But if you’ve been at this a while, or if you have that opportunity to look back and reflect, whether it’s in school or in your jobs, where are you at your best? And where did you find sort of constant friction that you’re like, “Ugh, it doesn’t have to be this way”? That’s a great place to start to surface your needs.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, Christina, now I’m thinking about the notion of friction and some philosophies saying, “Well, hey, if it doesn’t kill you, it makes you stronger. And if you can endure that, you’re going to grow and get tougher. And we’ve got it so easy in the 21st century with all of our luxuries and conveniences and comforts, and maybe we need a little friction to toughen us up.” What do you think about this perspective, Christina?

Christina Wallace

So, I hear you, a little bit of friction, not necessarily a bad thing but here’s maybe my counterpoint to that. Many of us, I might argue all of us, are what I would call weirdly shaped puzzle pieces. We all have a different set of skills, and communication styles, and interests, and personality quirks, and all of these things that we bring to the table when we show up over the course of our lives. And there are rooms that have a space that is shaped like your puzzle piece, and then there are rooms that don’t.

And if you try to shove your strangely shaped puzzle piece into what is a nice, square, neat opening, maybe it’s the last piece we’re waiting to put in this puzzle, and you don’t fit, if you try to shove yourself in there, you’re going to have to carve off a meaningful amount of yourself in order to even approximate what they’re looking for.

And I think there are lots of folks who feel this on a daily basis, whether it’s code switching, or whether it’s just the adjustments they make to who they are in order to feel acceptable on a team, at a company. And you realize that, on any given day, it’s not that big of a deal, but every day for years on end, you’re literally using some percentage of your energy, your mental capacity just to show up and be able to do your job, which leaves so much less to do the job itself.

And I think one of the biggest learnings I had through my 20s was that I would rather find the rooms that wanted what I had to offer than try to squeeze myself into a box that didn’t fit me, or into a hole in the puzzle that didn’t fit me. And part of that work was really uncovering what the shape of my puzzle piece was, what do I show with, what do I have to offer, and why is that actually awesome. And so, the people who do want me really do want me.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And I’m thinking right now just about an experience I had recently. So, nowadays, with three young kiddos, I find I’m spending most of my mornings hanging out with them, watching them, taking care of things.

Christina Wallace

How old are they?

Pete Mockaitis

They are five, four, and six months.

Christina Wallace

I’ve got a three and a one-year-old.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah. And then some things happen in terms of travel where I have the opportunity to just wake up and start doing some work at 7:00 a.m., and it felt absolutely amazing. It’s like, “Wow, I didn’t even know.” I thought, “Oh, I guess I used to do this a lot. I don’t think I even remembered that that was a thing I did that worked really well for me, and I have been not doing that, and I miss it.”

And so, in a way that’s kind of tricky, it’s like, “Well, what’s to be done?” There’s probably some clever things to happen there but I guess, Christina, where you’re nudging me here is one response to that internally is, “Oh, hey, man, that’s just the stage of life we’re in, you know. We got to take care of the kids in the morning. That’s where it’s at.”

But I’m thinking, with your puzzle piece analogy, perhaps you might advocate it’s worth putting some serious thought and effort into thinking, “Is there an arrangement by which this creative morning, productive, energized groove can be deployed in that direction because it’s worthwhile to do so?”

Christina Wallace
Yeah, I think your example is perfect on two dimensions. One is you get to see sort of the difference between what is it like to have that friction versus just to hit your flow. And I think, from like a metaphorically standpoint, that’s exactly the difference between being in a room that wants you and being in a room that doesn’t.

Or, a version of you, if you would, like, soften these things and change that thing, and don’t use too many exclamation points in your emails. But in the same way, I think that’s a perfect example of, you are at a stage of life where your mornings, for the most part, look a certain way. And so, the question is, “Is there an opportunity to either create a version of this that gives you that creative morning, maybe some sort of an arrangement with your partner, or figuring out how you set up your morning differently?”

And if you were working at a company or somewhere else where you had a manager or a boss, there might be a situation where you say, like, “Hey, can I adjust my hours? Can I think about maybe working from home in the mornings so I can get the kids out, and then I can have a couple of hours before I have to sit in traffic, or a couple of days from home?” Like, there’s a way to be thoughtful about, “How can I construct the context of how I do my work to maybe lower some of that friction and give me that opportunity to hit flow better?”

So, I am now a professor. For this stage of my life with young children, this is what fit me better than running a startup. And, as part of what I need, I have the same morning experience, getting my kids out the door, off to daycare, all these things. I can’t teach before 9:30, like it just doesn’t work, and I’m in the position to say that, and to proactively design my day to fit the needs that I have for this stage.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Thank you. All right. Well, we just jumped into a lot of specific things because you kept fascinating me, Christina. And now, maybe I’ll zoom out a little bit. So, this book The Portfolio Life seems like we’ve got some taste for what it’s about. But could you articulate the core big idea or thesis here for us?

Christina Wallace

Sure. So, this idea, everyone is likely familiar with a portfolio from a financial standpoint, you build your financial portfolio with a mix allocation across stocks, bonds, real estate, whatever these assets are that fits the stage of life you’re in, that matches the risks and the returns that you need. And then, as your life changes, you rebalance that portfolio to rematch what you need at that stage. And this is taking that exact approach but applying it to not just your career but your life. I think career is a huge part of many of our lives but it is in the context of your life.

And so, what does that look like? It means that you are assembling work, hobbies, relationships, family time, community time, rest, you’re designing an allocation of your time across these different pieces in a way that meets your needs and moves you forward toward your goals. And what that can look like is several sources of income. It can look like a meaningful sort of hobby or growth opportunity, a project, something you want to learn more about, that you’re going to dive into, that then sets you up for your next professional zigzag.

It could mean keeping your hands in a lot of different buckets, a lot of different communities and networks, you say, “Well, I came from this world, I’m now in this world, I care a lot about that world, and I’m going to stay connected to all of them.” And the reason I advocate for this approach, one, it actually matches much better the full sort of three-dimensional version of who you are as a person. Very few people, from the day they’re born to the day they die, say, “You know, I really am, and I only am, a marketing manager in a pharmaceutical company. Like, that’s who I am. That’s it.” Like, we all have these different aspects.

And so, it’s a way to reflect on and mimic this three-dimensional version of you rather than having your identity be formed by your job. But, secondly, it sets you up with diversification and flexibility to better weather this constant state of disruption that we are now in. This world, whether it is bank collapses, or ecological disasters, or technological advancements, like AI that are going to massively change the face of white-collar work in the next five years. Whatever these things are, they’re coming at us, lifechanging disruptions every three, five, seven years. This is a pace of change the previous generations never had to deal with.

And so, thinking about your career and your life through a portfolio that helps you diversify and build some flexibility against that disruption is truly the only way you’re going to navigate this without having the rug pulled out from under you, like many folks have had in the last few months.

Pete Mockaitis

So, can you share with us perhaps a story that brings that to bear? Like, “Ooh, here’s someone who did not have a portfolio, and, uh-oh, look how that went down,” versus someone who did, and, “Oh, what a softer landing and what it provided for them.”

Christina Wallace

Sure. I have a great example of this. Heading into the pandemic, I come from an artistic background. I went to a boarding school for the arts, I trained as a classical musician, and I majored in theater among other things, and so I know a lot of folks in the arts. And I used a lot of case studies in the book of folks that have a creative pursuit as part of their portfolio.

Going into the pandemic, I have a lot of friends who were actors, directors, designers on Broadway who went from being gainfully employed at the top of their industry to having, literally, no income for two years while live performances were shut down. And many of them had sort of a backup job as a waiter or a bartender. That’s how a lot of actors make their work between gigs but a lot of those jobs got shut down, too. So, there were a huge number of artists in New York who just, literally, had no income for up to two years, minus whatever unemployment checks they were able to collect. And it was devastating. Many of them are still digging out from under that.

But I have one friend, Carla Stickler, who, in addition to being an actress, she was the understudy for Elphaba in Wicked for many, many years, a fantastic Broadway actress, in addition to that, she started learning to code. Many years ago, she took a bootcamp through the Flatiron School. She wasn’t really sure what she wanted to do with it but it interested her, and she decided to learn more.

And so, between gigs, backstage, when she wasn’t in a scene, she was working on code, building projects, writing apps. And when the pandemic came, she’s like, “Well, I didn’t think I was ready to leave Broadway, but I think Broadway is ready to leave me, so it’s time to pivot.” And she took her coding resume, and went out and got a job as an engineer at a startup, and was able to seamlessly move into the world of tech startups, and has a thriving career now as an engineer in Chicago, and was able to navigate that unexpected disruption so much better than her peers.

And what I think is fascinating about Carla, I’m sort of giving away the ending here, but it’s not like she walked away from performing altogether. She kept teaching a little bit. She had a private voice studio. She stayed in touch with folks. And when Broadway came back, this is right around the time that, like, the Omicron surged, it became problematic, they reopened, they started performing again, and then there was this big variant that took out, it was devastating.

It took out a lot of performers really quickly, and Broadway started going through their list of understudies, and backup understudies, and swings, and backup, backup swings. And they got to the point where they needed an Elphaba, they had no one else to perform. They, literally, called Carla in Chicago, she got on a plane to New York, had one rehearsal, and went on stage, painted green, flying 40 feet over the stage, singing, literally, the hardest role on Broadway. And then she got off stage and, two days later, went back to her coding job in Chicago.

So, I think that is a great example of how you can have a mix of skills and interests and networks that maybe you’re not monetizing just yet but can position you to have optionality and flexibility when the time comes.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Cool. And so, as we think about this design process, you mentioned doing reflection associated with seeing when have you been at your best and when have you been at your worst. Are there any other ways to help surface that which is going to help keep us feeling alive and flourishing as well as surfacing cool opportunities to get after those things?

Christina Wallace

So, one of my favorite tools, I developed this short list of questions after my first startup failed. I had built this company, we had raised the money, we thought it was going to be amazing, spoiler, it was not. And I had this moment of complete and total sort of paralyzation. I was like, “I don’t know who I am. I don’t know what I have to offer. I don’t know why anyone would want to hire me,” and tried to be reflective, tried to journal and figure out what I brought to the table, and I was coming up with a blank piece of paper.

And so, I went out and had coffee, a lot of coffee, with basically everyone in my network. I did, like, 70 coffee chats in 30 days. That was overkill. You don’t have to do that many. But I went out and asked the folks who had known me the longest and some who’ve actually only known me a few months. I asked them three questions.

Number one, “When have you seen me happiest?” Number two, “What do you come to me for? Like, what is that moment where you go, ‘Oh, I should see what Christina thinks about this.’?” And then, number three, “Where do I stand out against my peers?” Because one of the things that I recognize was there might be, like, a superpower that I bring that is easy for me and so I don’t even realize how valuable it is elsewhere.

And having those same three questions kind of across all these conversations helped pull out some themes that really gave me an insight into where I should go next. And then, once I had something more specific of, like, “I’m looking for this type of a role, in this type of an industry, with this type of a job title or an opportunity,” then my network could surface those opportunities because I was being really specific.

I wasn’t saying, like, “Hey, do you know anyone who’s hiring?” I was like, “Do you know anyone who’s hiring a general manager role for a company, not based in New York, that wants to expand to New York, and who’s at a seed or series A stage of financing in the startup world?” Like, super specific. And I landed that job in a couple of days.

So, part of this is, like, you can do some self-reflection, and there are great exercises in the book to do that but you can also go and ask the people who know you what they see when they look at you. And you might be surprised that some parts of you that you don’t even realize are that exciting or valuable really stand out to other people.

Pete Mockaitis

And could you share with us a couple things you heard when you had these 70 conversations that surprised you, like, “Huh, how about that?”

Christina Wallace

So, one of the interesting things when I asked them when they had seen me happiest, the consensus was when I was in charge of my own calendar, meaning I’m not afraid of working hard. I work hard. I work a lot. But I want to do it on my own terms. And for a while, I had been at a consulting firm for one of these big national consulting, international consulting firms. And in client services, you jump when the client says jump, and I didn’t have control over my calendar, and I wasn’t able to slot in the things I cared about or show up for the people that I wanted to show up for. And it really made me miserable.

So, I came out of that realizing, like, “Okay, me and client services, like not a good fit. What do they come to me for?” They come to me to help find the story. So, whether it’s their resume, or it’s a product they want to launch, or it’s just connecting the dots of, like, “I did this thing and that thing and the other thing,” and I’m like, “I don’t see how they connect but I’m sure they do.” I can give them the language. I can help them find the story and frame it in such a way. It’s sort of a communication skill.

And then, “Where do I stand out against my peers?” I thrive in moments of uncertainty. I’m really good at the zero to two stage of company-building, or a project generation, or launching a play, whatever that thing is. Going from an idea to a thing, and getting other people excited by it, onboard with it, and all driving in the same direction, is where I excel.

I’m less great at the 10- to 100-stage, where you’re optimizing something that already exists. And so, I thought that was really helpful to be, like, “You know what, I should stay in early-stage startups or in creative projects, like producing theater, where going from nothing to something is what’s on the table.

Pete Mockaitis

Cool. All right. That’s very clear. And I could see how, in your world, it’s just like, well, yes, it’s kind of, “Isn’t everybody good with that?” how strings can be hidden in that kind of a way. Okay. Well, then can you share, so that’s sort of the insight, personal, wisdom gathering there. And then what are your top tips in terms of surfacing cool opportunities and things to put into your portfolio?

Christina Wallace

A lot of this comes down to your network. There’s some great research I referenced in the book that a lot of the opportunities don’t come from the people you know but the people they know, second-generation networks. And part of helping that one level-removed network surface things that might be interesting requires you to be really specific on what you’re looking for.

And so, that is sort of a two-pronged approach. One part is having the language to talk about who you are, what you’re looking for, and how someone might be able to help you. That was what I needed after I did all these coffee chats, coming up with the specific asks. And then the second thing was keeping in touch with those networks so they know that you’re looking for help, that you want something to surface up.

And this can be a challenge if you sit in multiple worlds, as I do, I have built a career at the intersection of business, technology, and the arts. Those are somewhat overlapping but, in many ways, distinct communities. To stay connected to them takes effort, it takes relationship-building over time not just sort of networking where I show up with a business card and throw it in everyone’s hands. But doing that allows me to stay top of mind, and having a very clear ask allows them to surface things that might be really interesting.

Because a lot of what people love, can get excited about, is really these opportunistic things rather than the, “What’s your five-year plan?” The five-year plan thing hardly worked for our parents. I don’t think it can work for any of us because there are so much that is changing and there are so much that’s unknown. So, having much more of an emergent strategy rather than a deliberate strategy is what’s going to be effective here. And to do that, you have to stay connected.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Well, Christina, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and  hear about some of your favorite things?

Christina Wallace

I think that’s it.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Could you tell us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Christina Wallace

Madeleine Albright, “There is a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.”

Pete Mockaitis

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

Christina Wallace

Clay Christensen and his team, when they were writing The Innovator’s DNA, interviewed and studied hundreds of the most creative innovative people, and they identified these five traits that make up the DNA, that make up kind of how these people worked. And at the core of these five traits, the backbone that the other four sort of rotate around, like the double helix of DNA, is the power of associating.

That’s the ability to connect seemingly unconnected ideas, or networks, or industries. That is what made people the most innovative. So, it doesn’t require you to have a net new idea, a cutting-edge technology. It often can come from just being connected and translating something you’ve seen in one world into another.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite book?

Christina Wallace

Oh, man, I think it’s probably an upcoming book. I can still call it a favorite because I got to read an advanced copy. It’s called The Anxious Achiever by Morra Aarons-Mele.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, Morra. She’s on the show.

Christina Wallace

Yeah, it is just I feel like it was written for me and, like, all of my friends.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite tool?

Christina Wallace

Trello. I live and die by Trello. I’ve probably been using this Trello board for, like, 12 years.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And a favorite habit?

Christina Wallace

Putting my phone away an hour before I go to bed.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they quote it back to you often?

Christina Wallace

Honestly, it comes from one of the pieces of my book, “There’s no such thing as a left-brained or a right-brained person.” This is fake science that was misinterpreted from a real study back in the 1960s. And so, this notion that we are one or the other, logical or creative, it’s not true. You are both.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Christina Wallace

PortfolioLife.com or you can follow me on LinkedIn or Instagram.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Christina Wallace

Honestly, I would go and talk to your boss, talk to your manager about the thing that you want to try, or learn more about, or explore this year that has nothing to do with your current job description, and see if there’s a way to get a stretch assignment, or a rotation, or a zigzag promotion that allows you to sort of expand that portfolio even in the context of your day job.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Christina, this has been a treat. I wish you much luck and fun in your portfolio.

Christina Wallace

Thank you so much.