463: A Career Change Can Pay Well: How to Ask for More with G. Richard Shell

Richard Shell 00:01

The price tags are just made up. Somebody writes a price on your job the day before you walk in to talk about it. And whether you negotiate or not is a choice you get to make.

Introduction 00:17

This is the Happen To Your Career podcast, with Scott Anthony Barlow. We help you stop doing work that doesn't fit you, figure out what does and make it happen. We help you define the work that's unapologetically you, and then go get it. If you're ready to make a change, keep listening. Here's Scott. Here's Scott. Here's Scott.

Scott Anthony Barlow 00:41

Let's time travel into the future for just a moment. It's a few months down the road, you've been working on a career change, finding the right organization, determining what matters most to you, all the things, you've been doing that for months now and your commitment has paid off. You've just received an offer from the organization that you want to work with very most, it's pretty much a wonderful fit all the way around. Okay, so you finish popping some champagne, you do some happy dancing, it's now time to negotiate. You might be thinking, "What? Negotiate and risk losing this amazing offer?" And that's so commonly the response. Or even if you're willing to negotiate, so many people think that it is a struggle, and it is something that they don't want to do, and it's undesirable. I want you to think about it like this, receiving that offer means, out of every single person that was considered for position they want you. Now, the balls in your court. So how do you propel yourself for that conversation? How do you make this amazing offer actually everything including on the finance side, including on the offer side, including the other things that can be structured into an offer? How do you make it all that you thought it could be into your ideal?

Richard Shell 02:04

If there are a lot of things you want to bring into this discussion that from your point of view might help you achieve your goals, which is to get a certain amount of money with a certain set of benefits by a certain time. And that has to be done beforehand. I can't emphasize that enough. You walk in with no goals, you're gonna get what they offer because you don't know what you want.

Scott Anthony Barlow 02:26

That's Richard Shell. Richard is a highly experienced lawyer, author, and is currently a professor at Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches MBA level classes and workshops on negotiation and persuasion. Because of his expertise in these areas, he was even sought out by the crisis negotiation unit of the FBI and served as a consultant for them. Here's the thing, you're gonna get to hear how Richard's background in education helps him provide wonderful examples on how to approach negotiations. In particular, I want you to pay attention to what we talk about in our conversation for job offer negotiations. And he does a fantastic job by providing exact language that you can use during your next salary or role negotiation.

Richard Shell 03:13

I am not a natural born negotiator. It was actually something that I felt things anxiety about. And at a given point, I went to law school and went to be a lawyer. And when your lawyer, it's not an option. You're doing a lot of negotiation, you have to all the time. I felt very uncertain about it. I did my best, I looked for role models. But it became a topic that I went, "you know what, I bet there's a lot more to know about this than I'm bringing to it." And so when I got the opportunity to switch careers into being a professor at the Wharton School, one of the beauties of being professors, you get to study what you want to know more about. And I made negotiation, my topic. And so I just went to school on it. And the more I learned the better I got, and the better I got the more confident I got. And then the more confident I got, the better I got. And eventually I started an executive program on negotiation. And the book "Bargaining for Advantage" actually emerged from the executive program. Because as you're teaching senior executives, you learn a tremendous amount about all these different contexts that they're negotiating, including people from Africa coming to the program, who have been hostages, and how they negotiate their way out of it. Or people who are buying and selling businesses and how they do that, and people who are heads of private equity firms, just all these different contexts. So as that began to happen, then I just got loaded with examples, stories, context, and then I could write the book from a business standpoint, and really feel like I was talking about something that I knew about, not because I've done all those things, but because I've been working with people who do them all the time for money and it's their life's work.

Scott Anthony Barlow 05:04

One of the points that, I believe it was in your book someplace, that you had mentioned is that negotiation often is happening around us, even though we may not realize it and we find ourselves in these situations where we're negotiating, but may not have realized how or when, or where, or even for what necessarily. And the story that I recall, was something along the lines of, I want to say babysitting the hamster or something along those lines. Fill me in. Tell me more.

Richard Shell 05:39

Yeah, sure. I think at a sort of premise level, you can't negotiate unless you know you're doing it. So I mean, you can't do it skillfully. So first step is awareness. And it's often the case that they sneak up on you. So I was living near the university with my family and two sons. And the phone rang one evening, as we were eating dinner, and it was a neighbor's daughter whose name was Emily. And, you know, her father was another professor, you know, we knew the family really well. And she was in middle school. And she said, you know, she was raising money for her little middle school softball team to go on some trip during spring vacation and what I buy a basket of fruit that, you know, they were on selling. And basically, there was a $10 and a $15, and a $20 option for the fruit. And so I listened to it for a little while, and I kind of went "Well okay, Emily, you know, we want to help you. So we'll take the $10 basket." And just then my older son says, "Is that Emily?" I said, "Yeah", he said, "Ask her about the guinea pig." And I went, "what guinea pig?" and we have a guinea pig, but our younger son had just gotten his guinea pig, we're going off for the holidays, we needed someone to take care of the guinea pig. So I said to Emily, "Emily, are you guys gonna be around this weekend?" She said, "Yeah." And I said, "Would you mind taking care of Ned's guinea pig?" And she said, "Oh, we'd love to do that. But in that case, could you take the $20 package?" So she was negotiating. I wasn't. And what am I going to say at that point? I mean, I can't say "No, Emily. I'm gonna make you take care of the guinea pig." But it was a good example of even a child, in fact, children almost always realize that there's some give and take going on. And they're alert, that when someone asked for something, they get a chance to ask for something back. And so I got trapped.

Scott Anthony Barlow 07:32

So I have kids, my oldest right now is 12. She's going to turn 13. And I see a lot of evidence that they are very painfully aware that there is always that give and take and trade offs and all kinds of situations as it relates to negotiation. It also makes me curious, at what point do we fall into naivety somewhere along the way, where we're painfully aware that initially like with our parents, but then later on are like, "oh, I guess that's all happening." What are your thoughts on that?

Richard Shell 08:06

Where do we miss it? I think kids actually understand the fun part of it. And they also understand that everything... they're in a relatively weak position, because everything they get comes from their parents. So they're, like, totally dependent. Now, when you're totally dependent on someone, do you study them? Yes, you do. You study them like a holy book. So if they want to get a little more of whatever it is, that's on their list of things that they want, they've studied you, they studied your spouse, they know the whole social story there. And so they have to negotiate, because that's the only way they can, you know, get more of what it is they want. They can of course ask and different families have different cultures. But they don't always get by just asking. So then they have to be a little more clever. Now, the adult world is full of rules. It's full of standard operating procedures. It's full of price tags. It's full of all these things, especially in our culture. Now, if you go to, you know, Ghana, and you know, go shopping, it's a different experience, because they're haggling over everything. But if you go to the supermarket, you know, you don't go up to the guy at the meat counter and say, "Well, I see you're offering filet mignon for $30 a pan, what do you say to 20?" Good luck to you. I mean, that guy doesn't have the authority unless they own their own shop to just count what's sitting there with a price tag on it. So we're acculturated to forget. We live in a price world, not a haggling world. And so there's a lot of support for forgetting in our culture. And you know, then when we learn it, it take a job negotiation, for example. You go, you know, into an employment negotiation and are used to a price tag. And so you're thinking, well, they're offering "X" so that it's like the price tag. So, you know, I'm gonna say yes, or I might lose the job, or I might look like I'm greedy or crazy or something. And actually, at that point, what's going on is, you're not in a market, where there's a price tag. The price tags are just made up, somebody writes a price on your job the day before you walk in to talk about it. And whether you negotiate or not, is a choice you get to make. But when people negotiate it, you don't look crazy, you don't look unreasonable, you don't look like you're coming from another planet, what you look like is someone taking initiative, someone who's got some skills, someone who can do it well and have these awkward conversations in a way that make other people comfortable, which is a really important skill to have. So in some ways, the negotiation process, once you put it into a place where there is no market price, that's the signal, there's no market price, they just... somebody puts a number on something, then it's going to be negotiated if you want to. And most jobs are like that.

Scott Anthony Barlow 11:09

This is really interesting. There are about seven different things I'd love to dig into. However, the most important of those, first are, you mentioned, making people feel comfortable through these awkward conversations and that being a really valuable skill. I don't think I've quite heard it explained that particular way. So one, tell me more about what you mean by that. And how can people begin to get very good at that or practice that?

Richard Shell 11:40

Yeah, well, it depends. Well, you know, how do you make, let's say, you're in sales, how do you make your customer feel comfortable? Well, it depends on who the customer is. So when you're negotiating a lot depends on who your counterpart is, and what their expectations are, and then also, who you are. And part of that, what you get when you buy “Bargaining for Advantage” is a personality assessment, which gives you a chance to benchmark your own sort of impulses and emotions, and learn, well, you know, I'm a pretty cooperative person. And so I'm going to need to make some adjustments to be more assertive, or I'm a very assertive person. And in order to, you know, make this work, I'm gonna have to dial it down a little bit, and listen a little more and be more sort of open to questioning people. So the way you make someone comfortable is going to depend on the emotional intelligence that you have about yourself and the other person with the surrounding circumstances, building a set of expectations. You've got a lot of things to talk about and the last thing you want is to make yourself one of the issues.

Scott Anthony Barlow 12:54

Explain that for me. Tell me more about what you mean, when you say...

Richard Shell 12:58

When you make yourself an issue, it means that people start going this person's trouble. They have a personality quirk that don't listen. They overtook me. There's stuff that, you know, some ways you're sort of still interviewing. And so if you make yourself an issue, people started thinking, "you know what, this may not be a good fit." And now you're adding risk where there wasn't any. So I think it's important to just, again, it's social appropriateness. Now, I'll give you a quick story. So I had a student, a student of mine, who was going to work for a hedge fund. And they got this offer. And they started to negotiate it. And they became so aggressive in the negotiation that they started offending the person they were negotiating with. Now, it's a hedge fund. So they want you to be aggressive. But they also need you to be able to client interface. And the person who was making the offer was obviously the person in the power seat in this discussion. And it became obvious that my student who had a very aggressive personality and had trouble containing himself sometimes didn't really have the social intelligence to dial himself down to make the appropriate adjustments to who actually owned the room. And they went through the offer. And he came to me and went, "what did I do?" I said, "Well, you weren't paying attention to the social situation you were in and you overdid it." So you need to learn how to dial it down when you don't have leverage. When you get leverage, you know, maybe there's a chance for you to behave this way. But even then, it's not a great idea. Sometimes when you're up against someone like you, it'll be a shame, imagine you'll both enjoy it, but this other person was not like you and so you blew it. So there's a boundary condition of behavior that we expect in certain social conditions. And when you go outside that boundary, other people become uncomfortable. They don't know where you're coming from, they don't know where you're gonna go next. They wonder what's happening. So your goal as a negotiator is to stay inside the boundary conditions, that is going to allow for open communication, but not make any concessions on your goals. So there are two things going on. One is the social. How do we deal with the other person? The other is your cognitive, where are you going? What's your goal? And then, you know, how close can you get to it?

Scott Anthony Barlow 15:47

Tell me about how that can look in the real world. Because I think that what you said there is so important about not going outside of the perceived social, I forget the word you used, the perceived social boundaries. However, you know, I think that that makes sense on its own, what could that look like? Let's use the, you mentioned, job offer negotiation earlier. Let's use that as a thread here. What would that look like in that situation? Well, I'll give you a situation right now. So we're experiencing this right now. We have someone who were helping who, just now, got an offer just a few days ago. She is about to go and have a conversation with them about that offer. What could that look like in that?

Richard Shell 16:38

Absolutely. So you know, again, I hate to do this to you, but if she's got an offer at a hedge fund, and, that's going to be one set of assumptions about what they'll expect. Because if you're gonna work for a hedge fund, they want you to be aggressive. And if you come in and just softballs negotiate, they're gonna think, "do we really want to hire this person?" On the other hand, if she's got an offer at hospital, and, you know, it's all about patient care, and nursing and stuff like that, then they're not gonna want someone who's aggressive, they're gonna want someone who shows a lot of social intelligence, both people can go in with a goal, you know, whatever the goal is, and I think you set your goals in a salary negotiation, by virtue of what the market tells you, that span of reasonable fair compensation is at this kind of place, in that part of the country, for this kind of position. So you need to do some research. It's just like, if you're buying a car, you know well the MSRP price for the Honda, you know, is X. And with these many bells and whistles, it goes up a little bit. So that's where the offer is. The offer is based on their perception of what the standards will support. You come in, and then you have a respectful conversation, maybe more persistent or less, depending on whether you're in the hospital or the hedge fund, and start talking about what's fair. So obviously, we need to talk about the salary. I'm very excited about the offer that you've given, I can't tell you how close this is, just something that I could see myself doing and really being helpful to you with the experience I bring. And I think we have a shared interest and having a package that works in terms of it being fair for what people get when they do this kind of work in Memphis. So maybe you could tell me a little bit more about why you perceive this package that you've offered as a fair offer. And then let me see if I can think about that and come back to you and respond with some perceptions of mine on how we might improve it.

Scott Anthony Barlow 18:50

I love that, first of all, thank you for giving a specific language that is so helpful, and makes it real world and people can start to understand how they can embed it into their own reality too. So thank you for that. And I heard you be able to ask, instead of just responding in that situation and saying, "hey, you know, we're off. And here's what I'd like instead." Instead, I heard you use the language to ask, you know, tell me why you feel this is fair from your perspective.

Richard Shell 19:25

Yeah, I wouldn't even use the word tell.

Scott Anthony Barlow 19:29

What did you use?

Richard Shell 19:31

Explain.

Scott Anthony Barlow 19:32

Ah, I like it. Tell me the difference in your mind between those two words.

Richard Shell 19:36

Because "tell" is a kind of challenge to, you know, like, justify yourself. And "explain" offers the opportunity to give a reason and to get inside their head and see how they came to that conclusion. And there's a trail of breadcrumbs of logic that led them to this place and you're just trying to get in and follow the breadcrumbs back to where it started. And do it in a way that you're sharing information, it's like you're gonna pull this information about fairness. And you've got some, and they've got some. Let's see if we can pull that. And then maybe the salary number, it looks fair after they discuss it, and you, you know, kind of think about it, you go, "Okay, I really see where you're coming from with that. So the package interests me as much as the salary. So I'd like to sort of hold that for a second. And then let's talk about the insurance, the vacation, bonus possibilities, how often will I get reviewed. So if you find performance is excellent, can I get rigid for a salary raise? A little sooner than maybe you might have otherwise thought about." There are a lot of things you want to bring into this discussion that from your point of view might help you achieve your goals, which is get a certain amount of money with a certain set of benefits by a certain time. And that has to be done beforehand, I can't emphasize that enough. You walk in with no goals, you're gonna get what they offer, because you don't know what you want. And people that don't know what they want are pretty easy to deal with. Because they can be persuaded to want what they're being given.

Scott Anthony Barlow 21:16

So let's talk... I think that brings up such a great point here, with establishing your goals, what you want out of the negotiation, what you want out of the interaction. So tell me more about what advice would you give to someone who's in that situation. Let's just keep using this job offer, like this real world job offer situation that we have going on right now with one of our clients.

Richard Shell 21:41

Can we give this person a name? They didn't have a real name, but just named her.

Scott Anthony Barlow 21:45

We're gonna call her Sarah. How about it? To protect it in the sense and everything else. So Sarah.

Richard Shell 21:52

Yeah. All right. So Sarah. Sarah's got a job negotiation, she's got an offer, which means they have not just said, we want to hire you, but they've said, we want to hire you and here's the deal.

Scott Anthony Barlow 22:01

Yep, that's where she's at right this very second. So that's perfect.

Richard Shell 22:05

That happens to me in my life all the time, because I teach in an MBA program, and students get offers, and they come up to my office, and they say, "Okay Professor Shell, what do I do now?" So you get out a piece of paper, and you write down the world as you would like it to be working for this group. Maybe you have some work life balance issues that you would like to take care of, maybe you've got some planned vacation that you already had in the books that your family's eager to take, and you've already got a down payment on the vacation place, whatever it is. So make a list of all the things that would make you a really happy camper. And then think, "Okay, do I need more information on some of these to help with the standards?" That standards are a really important concept in negotiation. Standards are the justifications we offer, that what we're asking for is fair and reasonable. And that means that you've got some benchmarks, you have a friend who has a job like this, and they're getting this in their job, your last job actually offered a better version of this than this one is. And so you have a version of reality that you can talk about, that is just not quite in sync with the one that you're seeing on this piece of paper. So now you have your standards, you have your wish list. And then you go in, and you start talking about the items and where you'd like to go with it, and why you're grateful so that you keep the month communication open, and you have a direction you're headed. Now, it doesn't mean you're gonna get it all. But another thing that I would advise in this kind of situation for Sarah, is that she uses at least one meeting just for information. Don't consider the first discussion over an offer letter, as we got close it today. Unless there's urgency on their side, there's always it depends. But if there's a chance, say, you know, "I got this letter, I'd love to talk to you a little bit more about it. So I can understand it. And ask a few questions and just kind of fill out the parts of my brain that don't have the information that you have. Because you do this all the time. I only get to do this once." So then use that to upload. You know, why is it fair? Are there options here? Are there, you know, are they flexible there? What's going on? And then say, "Thank you, I'd love to think about it. I'd love to get back to you. What's the deadline we have to meet here? I want to work with you on that." So then they get some time, then you run back and then you start doing things like calling Scott and saying, "Scott, this is what they said, what do you think?" And getting perspective consulting and then setting a set of priorities so that you know what this is the most important thing so let's make sure we secure that. And then you come back with a response, where you get to say, "Well, I thought about it a lot, I think it's great. There are a few areas I'd like to tweak if you're open to discussing. And so here's what I'm thinking at the moment." And then you get your turn. And they get to say, "Are you crazy? No, never. We've never done that for anybody." Just asking, you know, just checking, you know. And then, you know, depending on how it goes, you might even go to a third meeting. So you might exchange your proposal, then on email, just to summarize where you think things are, and consulting in between sessions really important. You don't want to do this alone. We have a saying at the Wharton negotiating workshop, "never prepare alone." Why is that? Because you're in a bubble. You don't even know what you're not asking for and your own fears or anxieties, people negotiate with themselves a lot more than they negotiate with other people. And if you're talking to somebody else, and you say, "Well, I would never ask for that." Somebody else will say, "why not?" "Well, it just seems unreasonable." "What? Doesn't seem unreasonable to me. I mean, it's not what you're asked for, it's how you ask for it." "Oh, okay. All right, Bill, before I abandon that, maybe I'll keep that on the list. But if you didn't have somebody to talk to, you talk yourself out of it in the second" or the reverse may be happening, you may have something on the list, and this person knows the industry and they know that if you go in and ask for that, they'll ask you out the door. You know, that is certifiably insane. It shows you don't know anything about the job, if you ask for that. And so you lose credibility if you put that on the table, when you don't need to say your helper can, you know, give you a little more information that maybe that's something you want to just abandon until you've been there five years, or whatever it is. So other people's perspectives are really important.

Scott Anthony Barlow 24:32

[26:52] You said a couple of things there that I think are particularly powerful, one, you were talking about your own fears. And you mentioned the "Why don't you want to do that?" "Well, it sounds unreasonable." "Well, that doesn't sound reasonable to me." I can't tell you the number of times like, into the probably well over 1000 times that I have been involved in that conversation. So that is very real to prove your point that never prepare alone. Your perspective is going to be missing some pieces in one way or another. So I really appreciate you making that point. One other thing I wanted to ask you about too, you mentioned deadlines earlier and just as a part of the conversation asking about deadlines, I have found, and I'm curious if you've seen this too in other places, but when we get to deadlines, especially for things like job offers, there is some crazy fears that have a tendency to surface as it relates to deadlines. Like, I feel like I can not ask for seven days. Or I feel like if I go more than giving them 24 hours to respond like it might disappear as an option. So question number one is, have you seen that same thing? Is it relates to job offers or other places in referring to those fears popping up around deadlines that it might disappear? And then two, what advice do you give, I guess I would say, to help with that?

Richard Shell 28:24

Well, a deadline is just a way of making something scarce. So you've got an opportunity, as soon as you put a deadline on it, it becomes scarcer, because it could go away. And that's the reason you put a deadline on it. And every time something becomes scarce here becomes more valuable. That's basically the law of supply and demand. So people put deadlines on things for a variety of reasons. Now you know, it may have the effect of creating some urgency on the other side, but they may put the deadline on because they have another person, it's gonna get the job if you turn it down, and the other person is gonna go poof. And so they have to get an answer from you, because otherwise they lose Plan B. And so I've done this on the other side, I'm the chair of a department at Wharton, I hire people. And we have Plan B and C sometimes. And we need to manage it with deadlines. So it's nothing necessarily bad or aggressive about having one. I think it helps if you ask why the deadline is important. And that way, if there really isn't any reason, you probably have a different kind of deadline. Then if they say, "Well, we need it because there's a regulatory filing coming up at the end of the month. And we have to have our headcount settled." But that being said, if the deadline becomes an issue, that is inconvenient, you can't get the information you need by the deadline, your person you're consulting with is in, you know, Timbuktu and can't be reached on the internet until next week. Then I think you go in and you say, "Can we talk about the deadline? Because here's why I'm having a problem meeting it. But if you... if it's totally fixed, I'll try to cope but if it's possible to get an extra day or two or a week, or whatever it is, then I'd really appreciate it. You know, as I said earlier, you do this all the time. But this negotiation, for me, is huge in my life. And I'd like to be able to take the time it takes to make sure I get it right. But I want to work with you. So you know, is there a chance we could add some time to it?" So you can negotiate if you need to, otherwise, don't worry about it, and even make it a concession you've made. "So I got a deadline. I've been working with you on that. Now, can you work with me on, you know, the start date?" And so now you're doing the guinea pig thing. They asked for something, you get to ask for something. So they had a deadline. So you could ask for a late start date. But the important thing is almost every deadline is set as a result of a negotiation by somebody. And anything that's been created by a negotiation can be renegotiated.

Scott Anthony Barlow 31:10

Richard, I have probably more than enough questions to keep us going for months. However, I just want to say thank you, first of all, this has been amazing. I really appreciate both the stories and making this very palatable, giving exact language that people can use and also differentiate where people need to consider that it depends. Thank you for addressing both sides. That has been very, very helpful. I wanted to do two things. One, we mentioned the bargaining styles assessment, where can people go and take advantage of that?

Richard Shell 31:51

Well, it's in the appendix in the book. So the book is widely available. It's in 17 languages. So it's not hard to find "Bargaining for Advantage". And if you get the book, then it's on the Kindle. It's in the Paperback. And it's Appendix A, I have to say about everything we talked about today. And the book itself is threaded with that. So it's sort of... a chapter will say, if you're an accommodating person, this might be the best move at this moment. If you're a competitive person, something else might be the best move. So it has a kind of a theme through the book that your personality is an important thread.

Scott Anthony Barlow 32:27

First of all, the title of the book is "Bargaining for Advantage: Negotiation Strategies for Reasonable People", which I personally loved as a title. And at the same time, I found it very helpful, almost it made the book more interactive. That's probably the best way that I could describe it, which then I believe, for me personally, made it feel much more useful, and therefore actually be much more useful, as well. So really nice job with that, get the book so that you can get the access to the assessment as well, because they work very wonderfully hand in hand. And is there any place else that people should go? Or could go if they're interested in learning more about you, your story, or the book itself?

Richard Shell 33:15

Sure. Well, GRichardShell.com, is my personal website. So I've written four books, not just this one. And so that website has information about some of the other books. And then, you know, I actually think that, I mean, we offer executive programs that weren't, and people come for a week and study that subject with us. And it's the best possible learning environment for someone whose company is willing to sponsor them, but it's pretty expensive. So it's a luxury item. Otherwise, I would just say, take every advantage you can to make negotiation one of your things. It's just like playing the flute, if you practice you'll get better. And learning about it by reading books, by going and listening to podcasts that interview people and discuss it, seeing how important it is in diplomacy or in business or in real estate are all the different ways that it comes up, follow it and then the final thing that I enjoy the most is look forward in movies. The office is nothing but a wonderful Encyclopedia of negotiations that illuminates how people behave and how it works in a really good humored way. But it's you know, it's really fun once you start getting your arms around it, to see it like that in films and television and understand it and you kind of go, "Oh, I get it. I got to understand it now." It opens up part of the world that you might not have understood before.

Scott Anthony Barlow 34:50

Well, I really very much appreciate both the conversation and the time. So thank you.

Richard Shell 34:57

Oh, Scott, my pleasure. I appreciate your having me aboard here.

Scott Anthony Barlow 35:05

Many of the stories that you've heard on the podcast are from listeners that have decided they want to take action, and taking the first step of having a conversation with our team to try and figure out how we can help. And if you want to implement what you have heard, and you want to completely change your life and your career, then let's figure out how we can help. So here's what I would suggest, just open your phone right now and open your email app. And I'm going to give you my personal email address, scott@happentoyourcareer.com just email me and put 'Conversation' in the subject line. And then when you do that, I'll introduce you to the right person on our team. And you can have a conversation with us, we'll try and understand your goals and what you want to accomplish in your career no matter where you're at. And we can figure out the very best way that we can help you and your situation. So open up right now and send me an email with 'Conversation' in the subject line; scott@happentoyourcareer.com.

Scott Anthony Barlow 36:10

Hey, I hope you loved this episode. Thanks so much for listening. And if this has been helpful, then please share this podcast with your friends, with your family, with your co-workers that badly need it. Here's a sneak peek into what we have coming up in store for you next week.

Marshall Goldsmith 36:28

What advice would a 95 year old you looking at death? Who knew what mattered and what didn't? And what was important and what's not important? What advice would that old person have for you is listening to me right now?

Scott Anthony Barlow 36:43

How many versions of you are there? No, I'm, I'm not talking about alternate universes or anything crazy like that. Here's what I mean. Do you think you're the same person you were 10 years ago? About five years ago? I'm gonna say probably not. Yet, so often when I talk to people about making a career change, they feel stuck on a career path that 18 year old or 20 year old them selected and said "Hey, this is what I want to do." And ultimately, they're scared to make a change because they believe they'll regret leaving their career comfort zone.

Scott Anthony Barlow 37:22

All that and plenty more next week right here on Happen To Your Career. Make sure that you don't miss it. And if you haven't already, click Subscribe on your podcast player so that you can download this podcast in your sleep, and you get it automatically, even the bonus episodes every single week, sometimes multiple times a week. Until next week. Adios. I'm out.