A 15-Year Career Retrospective Introspective

What did you desire for yourself in the past? What did you think and believe in the past that have now become your current reality? What do you believe now? What is your dream for the future? These are some of the questions I answer for myself in this career retrospective introspective episode.

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Full Episode Transcript

Hello! Welcome to Episode 46 of Born to Thrive with Jamie Lee.

Another episode, another police siren here in New York City.

Can you hear that? It’s kind of beautiful how well we are taken care of. That’s the thought I have as I hear the police - or the ambulance, I’m not sure - pass by.

It is December. Happy December! It is my birth month and I want to celebrate our struggles.

I want to celebrate all of our frustrations.

I want to celebrate all of our exhaustion, failures, facepalm moments, the moments of despair and just sheer disappointment.

All those moments of self doubt.

All those moments of almost giving up on our dreams, almost giving up on being bolder, braver and better paid because it just felt too hard, it just felt too unlikely, it felt too embarrassing - potentially embarrassing - and just the thought of it was painful.

I want us to celebrate all those moments of pain that we endured to get to where we are today in December 2018.

Because without those moments, we don’t thrive.

It is because of those moments of negative emotion, of almost giving up, of doubting and then overcoming the doubt and the fear and the shame and the guilt that we thrive.

That is why we are born to thrive.

I’ve been mulling on several big questions over the past few days.

A client asked me, “How did you get hired? How did you make your first $60,000-$70,000?”

And Catalyst, which is a leading not-for-profit headquartered here in New York that is all about advancing diversity and inclusion in corporate America for women and minorities, they asked me to come and speak about the unwritten rules of the workplace. That’s a webinar happening next week, December 11th.

And at the same time, I’ve been asking some big questions to myself because tonight I’m gonna be meeting with my Mastermind to talk about our big goals, our Wildly Improbable Goals (WIGs for short) for 2019. Last year we met and set WIGs for 2019 and I shattered through nearly all of them.

So, the net effect here of mulling on these big questions about my past, about my experience in the workplace and also about where I am going in the future, the net effect of all of that is I became retrospective, looking back, but also introspective, looking in.

And so I thought it would be really fun to do this episode and walk you through my career journey and share with you what I see when I look back, retrospectively, and what I see when I look in, introspectively.

What was I thinking and believing then?

And I think that’s really important because when I think about what I was thinking and believing in the past, I see they created the results I have now in my present.

My past thinking created my present results and therefore, in order for me to create new results in the future, I have to have some new thinking.

So I will share with you some of my new thoughts for 2019 and beyond.

But, before we go there, the unwritten rules.

What are the unwritten rules?

Well, when I think about my own career trajectory, there are three things that come to mind.

First is that there are no rules. You gotta throw the rulebook out.

Why? Because everyone’s journey, everyone’s life, everyone’s career trajectory is as unique as their thumbprint. So there is no hard and fast rule about how to do your career.

And so for the person who asked me, “Well, how did you get hired? How did you make money?” I’ll share with you my herstory if you will but I want you to resist the temptation to compare your trajectory to mine because, again, my life is as unique as my thumbprint as your life is as unique as your thumbprint.

And also, when you think about the rules of the workplace or your career rules, I think it’s actually more often the case that the written rules may not apply.

Case in point is yesterday I went to a talk given by another Catalyst researcher, Katherine Giscombe, who is the expert on women of color and their experiences in corporate America.

And she cited this really fascinating research that out of the 15 companies that she studied for her research, 14 out of the 15 said that they have accountability in terms of supporting minority women of color and helping them advance in their companies.

And yet when they asked the actual women of color at these companies, 17%, so that’s more like 1 out of 15 rather than 14 out of 15, I don’t know if the math is correct but when you think about the ratio it’s like the inverse, right?

The majority of the companies that say yes, they have a written standard of upholding diversity and inclusion and having accountability for this and yet most of the people did not actually experience that to be true for them, especially the women of color.

So, yeah. I think the first rule is really that there are no rules.

Having said that, another unwritten rule of the workplace is that you need a future focus.

And this is really interesting because nobody teaches us how to have future focus.

We don’t learn how to have a future focus in school and I think that’s why so many of us struggle with articulating our future potential when it comes to advocating for the value that we bring because it’s hard for us to dream big, to think big, and thereby lead big.

It’s easier for our minds and our brains to think about what we have done in the past and how can we recreate that.

But in leadership and negotiation, it’s about influencing and motivating people to change the status quo and in order to do that, you need to have a big future focus.

You need to tell us how awesome the future is going to be, this alternative future that your leadership and your ask will make possible.

And finally, the third thing I want to say about unwritten rules is that you have to let your desire guide you towards the career of your dreams.

And remember there are no unwritten rules. You gotta throw the rulebook out. Each career trajectory is going to be unique as your thumbprint and so that means you gotta follow that little tug inside your heart.

You gotta follow that little inkling, that slight suggestion, the hint that you get from you, from that little voice inside you.

So, having said that, I will quickly walk you through my resume.

And in the beginning of my career, when I first graduated from Smith College, wow, nearly fifteen years ago, I didn’t know how to navigate the working world.

I am an immigrant. My parents are immigrants and I watched them work 10, 11 hour days at their store, their gift shop in Queens, for 364 days out of the year and so what I learned from watching them is you just work and work and work and work and somehow that’s how you manage to make the rent, manage to put food on the table, and you just work and work and work and work.

But how to network, how to build a personal brand, no, they didn’t do any of that, so I didn’t learn from the example of my parents. I had to teach myself.

I began by just a lot of trial and error. And last night when I attended this talk about how women of color advance in corporate America, they mentioned that trial and error is not one of the strategies that work, and I thought, “Okay, well, that’s interesting to me because, for me, that’s how I grew my career. That’s how I started my career.

I applied to jobs on Craigslist.

And then the first place that offered me a paying job, I took it. And nearly fifteen years ago, it was with this little internet company called Legal Match. I don’t know, I don’t think they are around anymore and I was basically a sales development representative or a glorified telemarketer.

I would call up law offices and try to pitch them on a subscription to this internet service and I got paid $10 an hour with $20 commission for every appointment booked and I was there for just a few months.

But what I realize when I look back on it now is that I was so hungry to get a job that any job was okay for me because I desired so strongly to move out of my mother’s couch in New Jersey. Yeah. And so the driving belief back then was I must, I will get a job, any job will do. You pay me, I will show up and figure it out because I gotta make some money. I gotta make some money and move out.

When I was very young, I dreamt about living in New York City.

I dreamt about living and working in New York City and I was commuting from New Jersey. Not very far, just a quick bus ride, but still it felt like a different world to be in New Jersey, to be in Manhattan was like night and day. Different energy, right? Different culture, different people, different buildings, different experiences and I so desired to find a job in New York City.

And so that’s exactly what I did. I mean, I was not very picky.

So after a few months at this little internet company where I was calling up law offices as a sales rep, I desired for something better. I desired to find a better job, a job that is more fulfilling, a job that perhaps makes use of my education.

I studied Japanese in college and I studied abroad in Tokyo for my junior year abroad and so I applied through a Japanese temp agency and landed a temp receptionist position at an international organization that was going to build a nuclear power plant in North Korea.

That’s right.

You heard me right.

This organization, in 2005 was going to build a nuclear power plant in North Korea. No, that was actually 2004, I stand corrected.

It was organized like the UN as a conglomerate of international diplomats: Japanese, South Korean, American, European, the EU, and I was so excited when landed this temp job as a receptionist. It was like I won the lottery because I am idealistic, if you can’t tell by now, and it really resonated with my dream and desire to contribute to world peace.

So, the long story short here was that during the Clinton administration, former President Jimmy Carter brokered, negotiated a deal in which the international community will build North Korea a sustainable and renewable source of energy in exchange for their promise to stop building nuclear weapons but we all know what happened to that promise. They broke it.

So by the winter of 2005 after the presidential election when Bush was re-elected, the whole organization came to a screeching halt. Everything just stopped. So my dream job became sort of a nightmare job because every day I would go into the office and sit in icy silence.

I got paid $14 an hour, by the way, so I was starting to make a little bit more money and here I was, it was supposed to have been my dream job but no, it turned out it was not my dream job.

I vividly recall commiserating with my college friend. One day We got together for coffee and we were so miserable at our first jobs out of college. They were so disappointing. The pay was so low. Office culture was so...ugh, just frustrating.

And I recall she and I, we kept telling each other, “You know what? It’s only going to get better. It’s only going to get better from here. It’s only going to get better.” I worked at believing it. I really did.

And guess what? It did.

Over time, It did.

After working at this international organization for six months as a temp receptionist getting paid $14 an hour, I saved $2,000. And I felt like I had a lot of money. $2,000.

I moved out of my mother’s couch. I found a little apartment share in Queens and I quit my temp job. I had $2,000, so I had exactly 4 months’ rent, nothing else.

It’s funny. It’s really funny now but also I’m really inspired. I have a lot of respect for my future self for having so much faith and taking such a risk. I mean, I wouldn’t do that now. I have bigger bills to pay but even if I had just four months of whatever, I don’t know if I could…

Anyway, the point being here, I made my dream come true.

I moved out of my mother’s couch. I was now living in New York City. I did have a job. And now I needed to get a new job and my desire, I had a strong desire to just make it work. And because I saw my parents work really hard and make it work in America, I decided I can do it too.

And so, I just hustled, I went back to Craigslist.

Do people even still do that? I don’t know.

I got a restaurant hostess job and I got paid $12 an hour, so I went back in pay, but that’s okay. And I made it work.

But of course this was a temporary solution because I realized, hey, I’m college-educated, I speak all these languages, I can do better.

And so the belief I had back then when I was doing this hostess job was, hey, this is temporary. This is temporary.

And eventually I got hired by a Korean company as a purchasing assistant and I was buying really fancy things like steel copper plates. And I got paid $30,000 annual salary. And I was driven then by my desire to play to my strengths and I taught myself how to type and write business Korean.

I’m ethnically Korean, I was born in South Korea. I came to the United States after having just learned the Korean alphabet, basically. I was in the second grade and, yeah, I had just learned how to speak, read and write and then I left, so my formal education in Korean is extremely limited.

I’m fluent in American English. I can speak conversational Japanese because I studied it in college and because I got this job at this Korean company, I’m like, okay, I know some Korean. This is my mother tongue, technically. I can do this.

I had the belief that I can do this so I taught myself how to type and I remember I went and got these little stickers for my keyboard so that I knew which alphabet corresponded to which letter in the Korean alphabet and I taught myself.

It took time but I did it and now when I look back, I’m like damn. I’m impressive.

And I also taught myself how to do negotiation with business people.

I taught myself how to do international business negotiations because I was taking the orders from the headquarters in South Korea in Korean. I would then translate that into English. Well, you know, most of it was already in English but I would translate the demands and the asks and the requests and I would convey them, I would communicate them with my American vendors with whom I had a really great rapport and so I learned firsthand how important it is to have good personal, interpersonal relationships.

Catalyst also supports this. It really boils down to the interpersonal relationships that have an outsized impact on your career success.

I didn’t have such a great interpersonal relationship with the Korean people back in Korea because they were so far away and there was a culture gap because, mind you, I’m Korean-American, you know? I’m not really a Korean from Korea if that makes sense to you.

If you’re an immigrant or if you’re intercultural, you would know what I mean, right?  

So, I eventually decided that I wanted to move on because I believed that I can earn more money. I was making $30,000. That’s not a lot of money. I also believed that I can enjoy my job more. I believed that I can do it. I was feeling a lot of misery but I also was driven by this belief that I can earn and enjoy my job more.

And so, eventually, I did find a job at an American company as a purchasing agent and I ended up earning $43,000 in annual salary. They first offered me $40,000. I negotiated and I said, “Hey, is there room for more?” and they immediately responded with $3,000 additional dollars, so hey, there’s a salary negotiation tip for you. Just ask them, can you do better? See what happens. And for me that was nearly 10% more in salary.I was super happy about that.

And at this American company where I was working as a purchasing agent, we had a new CEO and the new CEO was very charismatic and he wanted to rally the people. He wanted to really connect with the people.

And so he had every one of us fill out a quick survey and I think he took these from coaches because I realize he asked a coaching question. It said, “What do you really want out of life? What do you really want? What really drives you?”

And I wrote down...I thought really hard about this. How do I answer this question? What do I really want? And I wrote down, “I really desire to grow. I really desire growth as a person, as a professional. Personal development. I really want growth.”

And later on, I found out he gave a town hall address and he was like, “Oh, thank you so much for taking that survey, and I found out” - this is what the CEO said - “I found out, to my relief, that nearly all of you said that your family is the most important thing.”

For me, it wasn’t family. I was a single woman living in an apartment share in Queens at that time. For me it was growth. It still is!

And it’s no wonder now, when I look back, I realize, now I make the connection how I ended up where I am today.

I eventually did make $60,000+ when I got a job as a hedge fund analyst and again, it was through Craigslist. Somebody at my old company when I was a purchasing agent, told me that she posted her resume on Craigslist. I don’t know if people still do this. I wouldn’t advise it, in fact.

But I did it and I got a call from this hedge fund that was seeking a qualitative analyst and basically, that’s just a fancy way of saying that they wanted someone to read like two dozen newspapers, research reports, and organize information, just consume a ton of data and digest it and that’s exactly what I did.

And I was making $50,000 annual salary, which I later found out was half of the going market rate but I did earn close to $20,000 in bonus, so that’s how I made my first $70,000. And at that time I had a lot of desire to make money. I still do. I love my desire to make money. My parents taught it to me and I’m really appreciative of that.

But I also was driven by my desire to learn and to work hard and to take a risk. My life partner at that time, I’ll just say my ex-husband at that time, told me not to do this. He told me not to take this risk. He told me not to go for this job.

But I knew that it was worth taking a risk because I can earn more, I can learn more and I can really grow. So now I work as a negotiation and leadership coach, public speaker and I absolutely love what I do and I want to continue to grow personally, professionally, I want to grow my income. I want to become bolder. I want to become braver. I want to become better paid, just as I want to help my clients do the same.

I had a blast from the past this weekend.

As I was mulling over these talking points this weekend, I went to brunch in Manhattan and just, completely coincidentally, my coworker from 12 years ago when I first worked for this Korean company, she came and sat right next to me at this restaurant. Completely out of the blue. Completely at random.

And I found out she is still there. She still works there but she’s been now promoted to senior manager. And it’s really fun to think about, how come she had that trajectory and I have had my own trajectory? And I think it’s because of what we think and believe are so different.

So, what about you? What are you thinking and believing now?

What are you thinking and believing today?

And this is something really important. This is something for you to be really mindful of because what you think and believe, what you desire now will create your future.

What do you want in the future? What do you want your 2019 to be?

How awesome will it be?

Here are some things I believe today:

I believe that the work I do changes lives.

It’s not just about a bigger income. It’s not just about a bigger paycheck. It’s about changing your mindset and when you change your mindset, you change your perspective, you change how you see your world, your world changes.

I believe that I can create my future, not my circumstances.

I believe that all of my failures up to now - and I’ve had many failures, I’ve made tons of mistakes - are as worthy as my achievements. Because my losses are more instructive than my wins.

I believe that my business will grow as I grow as a person, as a professional.

And you know what? I grow.

Like a big, hairy beast.

I just had my seven-month-old nephew come visit me today, earlier today, and every time I see him, he acts differently. He’s now crawling, he’s making funny faces, but it’s just mind-boggling how quickly he is growing. He’s growing like a big, hairy beast and you know what?

So am I.

As a business owner, as an entrepreneur, as a coach, as a person.

Every day I am growing.

I believe that the words I use create my world.

And the best words are the ones that crack me up. And when I was preparing for this, I chuckled, I was like, oh, this is really good! I like this. That’s how I know that I’m using the best words, because they make me laugh.

I believe that every day I am living into the impossible.

What is impossible today will become possible later.

I am quoting my own coach, Brooke Castillo, and when I think about my own life, when I think about the fact that I am an immigrant, I’m from a culture where women don’t have rights. My grandmother, she wiped down the floor with a wet rag and I live a life completely unimaginable to her.

And, by the way, I’m not saying that women in South Korea don’t have rights, I’m saying I come from a past, I come from a different past where the opportunities that I have today to work from home, to talk to people all over the world, to coach scientists and entrepreneurs and executives and engineers and people literally all over the world. I mean, I just coached somebody in Switzerland.

I live a life that was impossible, that was unimaginable for people just a few generations ago.

So, every day the impossible is becoming a possibility. I am living into the impossible every day.

And I believe that my dreams are in the process of coming true, except only always. Except only always.

So it is up to me to dream big and to desire big. What do you desire for your future?

What does that little voice, what does that little inkling say?

Don’t pay so much attention to what society says, what schoolbooks say, what rulebooks say, what parents say, what teachers say, what your bosses say. But listen to that little voice inside of you.

What does it say? What do you desire? What is your dream?

I believe I always get what I want. There’s nothing I truly want that I can’t have.

And I believe that 2018 was a miraculous year. It really was.

It’s incredible that I am now working for myself. My business is growing. My coaching practice is growing. My mastermind is launching. I am speaking at these leadership events and, wow. It’s something that I would have thought - I did think - was impossible in the past, but not only is it possible, it is my reality.

I believe 2019 is going to be even more awesome.

What do you believe? What do you think? What is your trajectory? What is your desire? Who are you becoming?

I will talk to you soon. Have a good one.

How to Negotiate a Career Pivot with Lisa Lewis

If you are ambitious and analytical, and if you want to grow your career through strategic pivots, you won't want to miss this value-packed conversation with career change coach Lisa Lewis. 

Lisa Lewis is a career change coach helping ambitious, analytical individuals feeling stuck in their current jobs find different work that “fits” who they are. She does this by helping you clarify who you are, what you want most, what a great job for you looks like so you can make your career transition in the easiest way possible.

In this conversation, Lisa shares how she successfully negotiated a career pivot with a $10K increase in salary offer. (Listen carefully for the word-by-word script!) 

We also explore how the growth mindset can help ambitious people like you overcome the trap of perfectionism so you can embrace change, risk, growth, learning and joy. 

Learn more about Lisa here: LisaLewisCareers.com 
Watch the Carol Dweck's TED talk here:www.ted.com/talks/carol_dweck_the_power_of_believing_that_you_can_improve?language=en

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Full Episode Transcript

Hello! Welcome to Episode 37 of Born to Thrive with Jamie Lee. This is Jamie Lee and I am recording this intro at the Phoenix Airport.

I am here because my flight back to New York was delayed by three hours. Well, originally, I’m here because I presented a talk at the Human Capital Institute’s HR Call to Action conference here in Scottsdale, Arizona and you know what?

I think I did a B- job.

I pride myself on being a frequent public speaker and I learned that I have a lot more that I can offer. I have a lot more to learn. I have a lot more to grow in terms of my public speaking capacities. That’s my biggest takeaway from attending and presenting at this marvelous conference for HR professionals.

I’m telling you this because this podcast episode touched on something really big that is helping me work through my feelings of inadequacy, feelings of embarrassment, dare I say shame because I did a B- job at my public speaking engagement.

This is a really wonderful conversation I had with Lisa Lewis who is a wonderful career coach. She is in my coaching alliance. I have an alliance of coaches who...we all support each other and we help each other be held accountable so that we can continue to do the work of growing our business no matter how often we are told “no” or people don’t respond to us.

In any case, Lisa Lewis is great and she is a career change coach who helps ambitious, analytical individuals who are feeling stuck in their current jobs find different work that fits who they are. And she does this by helping people like you clarify who you are, what you want most, and what a great job for you looks like so that you can make your career transition in the easiest way possible.

And in this conversation, we talked about so many really amazing things. We talked about a wonderful way to negotiate your career pivot. She shared with us the Jenny Blake career Pivot Method, the four-step process. We talked about the trap of perfectionism. We talked about how to work through the fear of change. We talked about how courage is different from confidence. And we talked about the growth mindset, which is the mindset I am trying to apply to myself today as I work through my feelings of inadequacy because I didn’t do a perfect job.

So, if you are somebody who is ambitious, who wants to pivot, who wants to grow, who wants to risk change, risk uncertainty and thrive nonetheless, I think you will find this conversation super, super valuable.

And I want to give you a heads up that I am doing another webinar on October 17th. Come over to jamieleecoach.com to sign up for that and also, if you are interested in being on my podcast, write me at jamie@jamieleecoach.com and let’s take it from there.

Without further ado, here is the conversation with Lisa Lewis.

Lisa: How are you?

Jamie: I’m doing great, how are you?

Lisa: I am good, thank you. So honored and excited to get to show up on your podcast. Thank you!

Jamie: Same here, same here! So, I want to just share with you that...I’ve shared with my audience that you’ve been holding me accountable to grow my coaching business, so thank you for that, and I’m curious to know: What is a negotiation in your life or career that had the biggest impact on you?

Lisa: Well, I’m so excited to get to share parts of this story because it has some overlap with how I got into being a career coach myself. So, back when I was still working in the corporate space, I was doing digital marketing work, and I had been marching up the career ladder, and getting promotions and raises and additional responsibilities and it all felt exciting and very seductive. But more and more, the further I climbed up the career ladder, the less and less the work felt like it was aligned with my heart and my soul.

Jamie: Yeah.

Lisa: So, I had gotten myself into a great situation at an ed tech company where I was making really good money, I was eligible for a pretty strong bonus and by all accounts on the outside, I would have been in somebody’s dream job. It looked fabulous. But it just felt soulless for me.

And I spent a good, probably two or three years of my life trying to figure out how to find work that felt a little bit more like me, that I would feel alive and excited to do that work. And pretty quickly after I had moved into this job doing marketing work and managing multi-million dollar ad-spends for this tech company, I had started my own career coaching business on the side. It was my little test-drive side hustle to see if the type of thing that I had realized that I really loved doing was something that people would actually pay me to do.

Jamie: Hmm.

Lisa: And, slowly but surely, I started to get one client and then two clients and then three clients on the side while I was still doing my 9-5 job in the marketing space. But what I was realizing was that I was becoming more and more unhappy in my 9-5 and that dissatisfaction and unhappiness was bleeding into the rest of my life, as it is often wont to do.

Jamie: Mm-hmm.

Lisa: So, I was trying to figure out a way to make an internal pivot and get into something else at my organization. And I tried the route of making a pivot into HR, because I thought, you know, marketing into HR isn’t too, too big of a leap and HR feels kind of like it’s aligned with career coaching. You know, it’s very focused on employees and their happiness and creating sustainable career paths but that didn’t work.

And I tried to make a pivot into corporate communications because I thought, okay, corporate is a little bit more removed from the day-to-day work that I’m doing for our clients and our partners, so maybe that would feel good.

And then I realized that we had a career services offering that we did as part of the education branch of our work as a company. And so I talked to the folks on the career services team and they prefaced the conversation with “You know, we’re not hiring right now, but happy to have an informational conversation with you.” And I said, “Great! That works for me!” You know, anything to start to plant some seeds to make a transition felt like it was directionally correct and helpful for me.

Jamie: Mm-hmm.

Lisa: So, I sat down with the head of the department, head of the team, and had this great 45-minute conversation with her and by the end of the conversation, she said, “You know, I know I said that we weren’t hiring but let me see what I can do.”

Jamie: Mmmmm.

Lisa: And within a week she came back to me and said, “Hey, we have an offer for you if you want to make a transition but the offer is for a pretty significant amount less money to come over and make the transition because your responsibilities and the place that you would fit into our org chart is different from where you are on the marketing side of the house.”

So, I stepped up to the negotiation plate and said, “Hey, I am so grateful and so honored that you would think of me and that you would make this possible and I’d love to see if there’s a way that we can make this work for both of us. You know, I would love to be a part of your team but I also want to make sure that it feels like this is whole and this is fair and feels good for both of us.” So, I countered and said, “Hey, you know, I would love to see what else you can do to close the gap on salary and bonus in this new role.”

Jamie: How did you frame that? How did you create the basis for that ask?

Lisa: Well, I said, “I appreciate…” and this is all sort of me trying to recreate the memory, so forgive me if it’s not 100% accurate to how the conversation perfectly played out, but I remember saying something to the effect of “You know, I really appreciate everything that you’ve done for me here. I know that this is a difference in terms of the level of responsibility and the level of management that I would be moving into, but I also know that I have a lot to contribute, I’m really capable, and that there are going to be possibilities for me to really make a difference in this role. And if I come into this role and accept the pay as it is, it’s likely not going to be a sustainable good fit for me in the long term, so I’d love to see if we can find something in the middle that allows for me to feel whole. I’m happy to take a part of paycheck, a pay decrease, a pay cut to make this work but we’ve gotta find a way to get a little bit closer to the middle.”

Jamie: That’s fabulous!

Lisa: Thank you! So, HR and the department head put their heads together and they talked about it and they came back to me with an offer that was $10,000 higher than what they had initially offered me, which was great, but it was still a pay cut.

So, at that point, I said, “Hey, I feel like, I’m so appreciative of everything you’ve done to champion and find a way to make this a win-win. I think we’re almost there. Would you be open to talking about, once I get into the swing of things for this job, being a little bit more flexible on the hours? You know, potentially, instead of doing five 8-hour days, talking about doing four 10s instead. Making sure that I’m still meeting all of the obligations, I’m still serving all the students and clients that we have here and taking really good care of everything that needs to be done but in a way that feels like, again, it’s making me whole in all of this and it feels really fair and like something I’m excited to say yes to.”

Jamie: Excellent, yeah. I love how you brought in the non-monetary component of your work arrangement and it increased the overall value of this opportunity for you.

Lisa: Absolutely, but Jamie, here’s where the story gets interesting is that they agreed verbally that they would definitely be willing to talk about that and see how quickly we could put that into place and they even said things to effect of, “You know, we’d want you in the office five days a week for the first couple of months for training, but then that seems really reasonable and really doable once you are, you’re in good shape and you’ve been trained and you have relationships with all of our clients started.” And so I made the transition into the role and was feeling pretty good about it, but then that two months of time turned into three, turned into six, turned into nine.

Jamie: Mmmm.

Lisa: And I had some pretty frank conversations with my direct supervisor where it became abundantly clear that while he had said that that was something that he was open to, it wasn’t actually something that he had any intention of creating the space to accommodate for. So, it’s an interesting negotiation conversation in that I both was able to really close the gap and make some meaningful differences and compensations in the negotiation package, but that there are always times when sometimes your employer will say certain things or make things feel a way that might make them seem more concrete or more certain or more appealing than they may be when you get in the door and that negotiation is not a one time, you know, you do it and then you wash your hands of it, you’re done kind of thing. But it’s really an ongoing state of mind and an ongoing conversation that you’re having with your employer at all times to take care of yourself.

Jamie: Right. Yeah, what I’m hearing is that negotiation doesn’t end once you sign that agreement. It continues. It’s a series of agreements and you have to continue to ensure that the agreement is implemented and that everyone has the same understanding of what has been agreed to. Like you said, it’s an ongoing process. Thank you so much, this is a really rich lesson, a great success and also really great takeaways. So, you are a Pivot-certified coach and I’m curious to know what that means and would you walk us through what the Pivot Method is?

Lisa: Absolutely. I love talking about it. So the Pivot Method comes from a book written by Jenny Blake who is a fabulous coach and speaker and author. And the idea of a pivot is something that she borrowed from Silicon Valley, you know, because you’ve heard the parlance of if a startup has gotten their seed funding, they’ve entered the market and then they’re realizing that either their business model, the market-product fit, the profitability, something out of the way that they are trying to monetize isn’t quite optimal, isn’t quite getting them to the profit level that they need, then they oftentimes talk about a pivot. Which is their way of taking stock of what they’ve done so far, reorganizing their assets and their capabilities in a way that will likely be more profitable.

And while, in the world of Silicon Valley, that’s really seen as a product of failure and a negative thing to have to make a pivot, Jenny wanted to reclaim that phrasing and that ideology in a way that’s really empowering and really exciting for individuals. As a way to essentially take what’s working about who you are and what you’re doing and parlay that into mapping out what could be next for you.

So, the framework that she thinks about and that I coach and teach in my work has four different elements to it. Number one, it has what she calls the plant stage, and that is where you are trying to figure out what could be next and you start by taking stock of exactly where you are, who you are, and what’s working for you right now because if you don’t ground yourself in what’s already working and what you know to be true, it’s going to be really, really challenging to map out what could be next in a way that doesn’t accidentally having you, say, throwing out the baby with the bathwater or feeling like you’re starting from scratch and starting completely over. So, you start out in the plant stage to get your grounding, get your sea legs, and get a sense for where you could potentially go.

Then, once you’ve planted, the second part of the Pivot Method is to scan and take a look at the marketplace, your environment, your surroundings, to see what else is out there and evaluate the possibilities. Jenny often describes it as thinking about a basketball player, you know, you’re dribbling down the court and then when you’re about to make a pass, you stop and get your plant foot that keeps you grounded in one place, but then visually, you’re scanning down the court to see who’s open, who’s moving, what the different defensive and offensive possibilities look like.

So, it’s really doing the same thing with your own career. So, thinking about what trends are coming up in the marketplace that you could take advantage of and that excite you. Who are the people that you’re seeing out there as movers and shakers in the sort of role you want to move into, are in the industry that you’re curious about that you could draft off of or you could use maybe some of that professional envy in a really positive, productive way to sort of reverse engineer their path and their success to figure out what pieces from that you might be able to use?

Jamie: So, plant and then pivot…

Lisa: Well, plant and then scan.

Jamie: Oh, okay, I’m sorry.

Lisa: I know! There’s a lot of terminology! So, you start with your plant. Then you do the scan. Then you figure out what your pilot is going to be.

Jamie: Oh!

Lisa: So, your pilot is a pretty common piece of language for a way to do a test drive. What is your pilot program? What’s your beta test? How do you dip your pinky toe into the water of what might be next so that rather than going straight from the idea to jumping right into your pivot, you’re doing some risk management work to make sure that whatever feels good for you next doesn’t just feel good in the dream but it also feels good for you in the reality.

Jamie: Mmmm-hmmm.

Lisa: And then, once you run that pilot program and see how it feels and see what data you’re bringing back from that about what you want to do next, then if you are piloting in a direction that feels great, then you go ahead and you can make your official pivot where you commit, you go full-throttle towards the goal and you put together your strategy for how to do market entry into whatever the new role is, the new project is, the new organization is, to make that happen for yourself as efficiently and effectively and safely as it can.

Jamie: Hmm. That’s interesting. So, you...I find it really interesting that you use the word safe because it is a risk that you’re taking, no?

Lisa: Oh, absolutely! I think that’s a really important point that you’re bringing up because I don’t mean safe to mean comfortable and complacent and known. I mean safe in the way of you’re putting yourself out there and you’re taking risks and you are trying something that requires a lot of courage but doing it in the way that’s the smartest and most managed so that you will keep moving forward and sort of feeling the fear and feeling that uncertainty and yet taking action anyways, as opposed to getting to the point where you are excited about some future possibility, but it feels so far away and so different and so overwhelming that you end up totally stuck in analysis paralysis or in one of those perfectionistic, you know, brain holes that doesn’t allow for you to actually explore what it is that you’re curious about.

Jamie: Yeah, that’s excellent, because you specialize in working with ambitious and analytical people and as an ambitious and rather analytical person myself, I know that in my experience, when I do risk assessment, there is always that underlying fear of failing and you mentioned courage as a component of this and people often seek out coaches like you and like myself because they want to feel confident in the process of changing their jobs, in the process of negotiating a new offer. So, I wonder if there’s a distinction here that you can help draw for us. What is the difference in being courageous as opposed to simply confident?

Lisa: Absolutely. I’d love to go into that. And I want to come at it from a bit of an angle around perfectionism and I know, I remember back in Episode 3 of your podcast, you talk all about perfectionism and the Itty Bitty Shouldy Committee, which is so great and so memorable.

Jamie: Yeah.

Lisa: But what I often see is that people who tend to identify with a little streak of perfectionism, shall we say, get themselves into a certain way of thinking that is very black and white, right and wrong.

Jamie: Yep.

Lisa: And typically, this is not a thing you did to yourself on purpose. This is not a thing you did conscientiously. It often goes back to the way that you were socialized and you were affirmed growing up. So, Carol Dweck is a research psychologist who went to Barnard, just like I did, which is sort of a fun thing.

Jamie: I just picked up her book!

Lisa: Did you?

Jamie: It’s amazing!

Lisa: Oh, yeah.

Jamie: It’s an amazing book. I want to recommend Mindset by Carol S. Dweck to everyone who’s listening. It’s phenomenal. I’m sorry for the interruption, please continue.

Lisa: Well, if you’re gonna put some things in the notes from today’s conversation, you could also link to her TED Talk, which is also a fabulous resource and a good sort of appetizer teaser before you buy the book.

Jamie: Mmmm. I will watch it, thank you for that tip.

Lisa: Yeah, absolutely! So, Carol has these two different mindsets that she identified in children and students. One is a growth mindset, which is where you’re really focused on progress and action-taking and the process and the other is a fixed mindset, where you’re very focused on the outcome and really sort of the identity of who you are relative to that outcome. So, I think about this, you know, when you were a child and you think about the way that people would remark on what you were doing and who you were, would you get the sort of feedback about, “Wow, look at you reading! You are doing so much reading over there.”

Jamie: I got that. I got that.

Lisa: Yeah, well that type of feedback tended to be associated with growth mindsets. But the other type of feedback that people might have gotten was, “Look at you over there. You’re such a good reader. You must be so smart!” And it is ever so subtle in the difference in the way that that was posed to you. But if you’re getting the feedback of, “You’re a good reader,” somebody has just put a qualitative judgment on your activity and your action to make it good or bad.

Jamie: Mmm. Can I add something to that?

Lisa: Yes, please!

Jamie: I’m definitely a recovering perfectionist and I used to get straight As for most of the time and I remember feeling like such a failure when I got an A- or a B. And so I wonder if there was a lot of times in my very early childhood where I was praised for doing things well. Like, “Oh, that was good! You did it right! You got the right answer! That’s good. You didn’t get the right answer. That’s bad.”

Lisa: Yeah, oh, absolutely. And nobody does it maliciously and nobody does it intentionally but we all received that sort of feedback and especially high performers, you know, the type of people who seek you out as a coach and the type of people I meet, too, tend to have gotten a lot of feedback of,  “You must be very smart. You must be a great reader!”

That then not only puts a value judgment on the action, so the action can’t just exist in the beauty of the action itself, it has to have a label that it’s good or bad. But it also then becomes a part of your identity. When somebody says, “You know, you’re really smart,” then you internalize that you are smart and that any information that may challenge that or expand that or change that definition of who you are becomes a psychological threat.

Jamie: If you try things, that might make you look dumb.

Lisa: Right. One hundred percent. This is where the intersection point between perfectionism and courage comes in. Because if you have a fixed mindset about work, writ large in your life, whatever it is, you tend to be very fearful about the identity pieces. You know, I’ve always identified as a digital marketer, I’ve always identified as a technical project manager, I’ve always identified as whatever. And the possibility of expanding yourself to grow in a different direction feels like a threat to that identity because if you try it and you’re not immediately successful, then all of a sudden, it comes into conflict with who you had thought that you were.

Jamie: Yeah.

Lisa: And so confidence tends to come from that validation and that certainty of knowing what you’re doing and knowing that whatever you’re going to do is going to turn out well. So, perfectionistic people tend to be pretty confident when they’re in their own swim lane, but they tend to have a very difficult time summoning up the courage to try something new at which they might fail or they might be rejected. And I reject the word fail, writ large, because I really don’t think that that is something that exists but to try something that you don’t get the results you were hoping for from.

Jamie: Well, I also have experienced people define failure as when things don’t go as expected or as planned. And I mean, things almost always go as unexpected. We have plans and then other things happen all the time, right? So what do you call that?

Lisa: I think that’s exactly right. I think that life intervenes in all kinds of different ways that we could not have foreseen or foretold but that rather than looking for outcomes as you expect, like  for certain things to happen, I think it can be really helpful to focus on how you want something to feel.

Jamie: Mmm.

Lisa: And I think that this ties into another concept that I know, Jamie, you and I were talking about before we had gotten on the recording today about the idea of a beginner’s mindset. Because when you’re trying out something new and trying out an experiment and you’re not totally sure how things are going to end up, if you’re not used to that feeling of being a beginner and being experimental and creative and being okay with things not turning out as you had hoped, it can feel really, really painful to try something new.

Jamie: Yeah.

Lisa: But if you make that ever so slight, ever so nuanced, and ever so powerful mindset shift to say, “Well, I’m gonna try this as a beginner and see if I enjoy it, see what happens,” and you let yourself be really present in the experience and play with the craft and the process of whatever it is that you’re trying to do, there is so much potential for enjoyment and joy.

Jamie: And learning.

Lisa: And learning! And the beautiful, lovely, almost addictive rush of learning something new and feeling like you have this new knowledge, this new insight, this new wisdom about how things work in the world.

Jamie: Yeah, absolutely. Some of my most successful clients, they take that approach that every opportunity, every conversation, every interview is an opportunity to learn, right? As opposed to an opportunity to prove themselves as smart and successful, they go into that conversation with an attitude of curiosity and that can really transform not just the nature and the result, but the outcome of that conversation. And I think you’re touching on something really big, which is that we have the power to choose how we feel about anything.

Lisa: Yeah, absolutely. And I’d love to actually let you speak on that a little bit because I remember that one of the things that I noticed about you and your coaching which is such a gift that you’re giving to the universe is that you’re really able to help people peel apart the difference between an outcome and the story that they tell themselves, that they make that outcome mean about who they are, what they’re capable of, what is out there in the market for them.

Jamie: Right. And this is something that you, me, and Carol S. Dweck will all agree upon, which is that what we believe, what we think and believe about any given circumstance will have the impact on how we feel, on how we react or respond, and the result that we get. So, as you were saying, if we believe that we must be seen as smart to be successful, then you fall into the fixed mindset trap. But if you believe that you’re here to learn and that you can learn by trying and even if things don’t go as planned, even if the outcomes are not what you hoped for, there’s always room for more learning, because, as you said, you approach it with a beginner’s mind, then everything can be a joy. Even when you don’t get the job, you’re like, oh, that was a great opportunity for me to learn what not to do at a job interview. That was a really great opportunity for me to realize that, you know, I have more value to offer, etc.

Lisa: Oh, absolutely, and one of my favorite quotes from Marie Forleo is that “Everything is figure-out-able.” And if you walk into any situation, any interview, any possibility, any new skill-building opportunity with that mantra, that will inevitably lead you down the growth path because you will constantly trust in yourself and your own ability to figure things out, to use Google, to use your resources and not to put the pressure on yourself that you have to have all the answers and you have to be smart and you have to be perfect and you have to be right, but to allow for much more space for playfulness and creativity and learning and growth and for many different outcomes to come as the fruits of your labors.

Jamie: Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. So, I so appreciate your wisdom, your insight, you expertise, and you’re a very eloquent speaker, Lisa. I so enjoyed having you on the podcast. I think many of our listeners would also enjoy learning more about you and your services, so where can people go to learn more about you and what you do?

Lisa: Well, I appreciate getting to speak to your amazing audience. I mean the sort of person who’s going to be listening to you is probably already really hungry for growth and improvement and advancement and opportunity and it’s a joy to get to be a part of that conversation. But if you’re listening to this and you’re interested in learning more, you can find me at my website which is lisalewiscareers.com.

Jamie: Wonderful. Do you have any upcoming events that you want to share with the audience or workshops or…

Lisa: I don’t have anything that is scheduled at this very moment to share, but I do have a brand new, what I’m sort of calling my white-hot paper on the four career fulfillment pillars that I see over and over again can lead to the difference between feeling like you made a move into a role that fits who you are versus making a move into an opportunity which looks shiny and seductive on the outside but actually isn’t in alignment with your values.

Jamie: Ooooh!

Lisa: It’s at the very bottom of my website and I’m just starting to share that gospel around and I feel so strongly about it that I would be honored to get to have any of your listeners go and check it out and give it a read.

Jamie: It’s a white-hot paper. I love that!

Lisa: Thank you!

Jamie: Well, Lisa, it’s been a pleasure, as always. Thank you so much for being on the podcast and sharing your insights. I will talk to you soon.

Lisa: Sounds great! Thank you again.

Jamie: Alright, have a good one!

Lisa: You too. Bye bye!