433: Free Up 30 Hours A Month To Focus On Your Priorities: The Magic of Automation

Phillip Migyanko 00:01
Where all this comes down to is the intentionality of things. So there are times where we've got the same thing. We have things that go in certain places. I've got meal prep time. But I think one of the biggest things that we do, really, for our clients that are going through this actual career change is what we're thinking about is, how much time are they actually spending reaching out?

Introduction 00:23
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 00:47
One of the biggest things that we hear again, and again, and again, as we have conversations with people all over the world, not just here in the US, but every place across the globe, is the issue of time. Time, because it takes a large amount of time to do just a normal career pivot, normal career change, let alone for the types of career changes that we've discussed on this podcast again, and again, and again, where you're really maximizing for what you want out of life, what you want out of your career, and want to be able to, you know, grow and show up in the ways that you want to, that's a different type of career change. And as it turns out, that also has a tendency to take more time. And the reason this becomes a question is because, where are you going to get all this time? Where is that going to come from? And that is... that's real, it's a real challenge. So we thought, well, hey, this is something we are helping people reconcile with every single day. So why not do a podcast episode about it? We do this for ourselves, when I say ourselves, I'm talking about our entire team. And we also do this for our clients across the globe. So I have with me today, our Director of Client Success, Phillip Migyanko. You've heard him on the podcast many times before, but he's back today to discuss, how do you not save time, although we're gonna talk about that too. But how do you even create time in some ways for yourself to be able to divert towards career change, or anything else that might be even more important in your life too. Phillip, welcome back to Happen To Your Career.

Phillip Migyanko 02:23
Nice to be here, Scott, and super excited to be diving into it.

Scott Anthony Barlow 02:26
One of the things that we're going to do here, our goal is to talk about enough different items that collectively, if you applied them all, you don't have to apply them all, even if you do get just one thing from this episode. But collectively, we're going to give you enough different items where potentially if you did apply them all, you could save 30 plus hours per month that you can then divert to focus on your priorities, your priorities, being family, friends, priorities being career change, which is certainly what we've had most of our questions on. But that is our goal today. So no small task, right? It's definitely not an easy thing to do, but well worth it. So I'm realizing there's a lot of people that could probably benefit from this in multiple ways. We're going to talk about some of the things that we've personally done in the past to save large amounts of time. And then we're also going to talk about, specifically, and Phillip, I think you have some of these ideas already. We're chatting about this yesterday, long before we hit the record button about some of the best ways that we've helped our clients save time as they're going through their career change, too. So yeah.

Phillip Migyanko 03:30
You know, it's such a big thing, because I think you're right, Scott. One of the biggest things that we talk to people about when we begin working with them, or even before that process is essentially how do you save time, because we all know that this career change process essentially takes takes time to do and it's not, like, there's going to be magically, like, 30 hours gonna, like, come to your front door, like an Amazon box. It's more like we got to find those in places. And usually that comes to about, you know, saying no to some things, or one of the biggest things is I think it's setting up your environment to save time. And one of the things I always recommend for my first time clients is reading a wonderful book called "Atomic Habits" by James Clear because he talks about really setting up your environment to do so. But you know, for example, I've got a client who I'm working with right now, and we'll call her "Leah", and right now she takes her coaching calls in her bedroom, where her desk also happens to be. So we're doing our coaching calls, she's sitting at her desk, I can see her bed right behind her. And what we found after working together, after months and months is that, really, she's just thinking about work all the time because when she goes to bed, her beds right there, when she gets up, her desk is right there and it's all because it's physically in the same room. So she would be getting up at 6:30am getting right to her desk and start working. Then, like, working, taking some breaks here or there and really not stop working till 9 or 10pm. And obviously, this meant that she was just not giving herself a break and really never disconnecting. And I don't know about you but I've talked to a lot of people like that, especially during times where a lot more people are working remotely. And more and more people are and very much that it lengthened out her process in getting things done. Because from a mental bandwidth standpoint, she was just focusing on work all the time. So we, for me and Leah, we stopped, we looked, we're like, "Okay, how can we figure out how to basically set up your environment, so you're not thinking about work all the time?" Now, she lived in one bedroom apartment, it's not like we can move the desks to another spot, and it'd be a good fix for her. So instead, we literally took her physical laptop every single day. And at 6pm, which is the time that we agreed on that work with stop, we had calendar reminder, we had like her master schedule, we had things that were set up in her life where she knew 6pm was the time that she was stopping, including having conversations with her boss and all of her co workers and setting up her work to do so. But she would take her laptop, physically put it underneath her TV, that was also the spot that we agreed on that it would be out of sight, out of mind and put it there. And what we found over time is that it not only actually saved her, really, time, but that mental bandwidth that I was talking about earlier, and this also translates into getting things done faster. But what can happen for a lot of folks is we accidentally or unintentionally set up our environment that doesn't help us really save those big pieces of time. And ultimately, it makes us take so much longer than it needs to in the whole career change process. And that's what we really found working together. I know you found the same thing, Scott, when, like, setting up your environment, or really those time saving aspects.

Scott Anthony Barlow 06:42
Yeah, I was thinking about it. We, my wife and I, and ourselves as a family, we spent a lot of effort and energy trying to set up our environment in a way that really allows us to accomplish what we want to or to spend time in the way we want to. So I love that you're calling this out as an entire category to itself. And so I mean, we do, I'll give you just two really super quick examples of ways that we do that. You know, one way is, this is gonna sound ridiculous, but we have a lot of hockey gear. I'll say that.

Phillip Migyanko 07:12
Oh, yeah, I've seen it. There's a ton of hockey gear.

Scott Anthony Barlow 07:14
Yeah. So when we have the team up here last time, Phillip, you and Kathy went and played hockey with us, we're kind of...

Phillip Migyanko 07:20
It was flat on my face, guys. It was flat on my face.

Scott Anthony Barlow 07:23
So we're pretty big ice hockey family, let's be honest. And so therefore we have a lot of gear, like, we just have tons of it and it would entirely take over our garage. But more importantly than that, like, there's time associated with every time we're, like, in the car, out of the car, all the things. Plus, hockey gear smells terrible. It smells terrible. So what this meant is that, you know, when my son started playing hockey early on, is that everything was just devoted to, like, the shifting around of hockey gear. And at some point very quickly, it became a thing. And it's like, oh, my goodness, why are we spending the time like moving the hockey gear from one place to the next is just terrible. So what we did, is we actually set up drying racks in the garage that work with everything else. And then in the summer, when there's less hockey gear around those drying racks shifts to lifejacket racks, they're basically sitting there for us to use the paddle boards that we have also stored in the garage. So taking a little bit of time to... and we literally custom built some stuff in there that allowed us to put the bags on the rack, everything to dry, and it just ended up saving us small amounts of time, like less than five minutes per day. But over the years, that adds up that five minutes, then you know, turns into an hour over the course of roughly a little more than a week. And then that hour turns into many hours. So just... we have no desire to spend time and effort putting away hockey gear and just moving it around.

Phillip Migyanko 08:49
That's a good point too. Because I mean, you're like removing a lot of those things that don't need to be done and really aren't adding things to your life overall. And I think that's a really interesting concept. Because, you know, we always think about adding time, but it's really about removing those things, too.

Scott Anthony Barlow 09:03
Yeah. And that's a great point. And that really is the next category on its own, too. So we've got five categories we're going to give you today. Phillip, you mentioned the first one, which is setting up your environment to be able to save time. And then the second one is, what you said, removing time for things that maybe need to be done, but just, you know, aren't the actual tasks or whatever, are not adding that much value to your life, like putting away hockey gear, like I just think it's necessary, but I just don't really care to spend my time that way. So the third category is adding back time that's being taken away in the form of obstacles or distractions. The fourth category is adding systems to things that you might do all the time and the fifth category, it's a bonus category. And we're going to give you some ways where as you're making your career change, you can actually save time during the career change itself. So we'll give you examples on all of these but the next one that you mentioned, where we're talking about removing time for things that need to be done but maybe aren't adding damage value to your life from doing the task itself. So a couple quick examples. And I know Phillip, you have a bunch of these too. We were chatting about these yesterday and I bet we have more that we don't even know about. Like, we wanted to have this conversation yesterday but didn't have time for the whole recording. So one example is lawn mowing for me. I mowed the lawn as a kid. I had the makings of a lawn mowing business way back when. I do not care to mow another lawn if I don't have to in my entire rest of my life. However, you know, the homeowners association that we live in freaks out if our lawn is a foot long, so it must be done. And, you know, what we... At first, we thought, "Well, okay, how are we going to do this?" Because most lawn services charge like 60 to 80 bucks for the size and type of lawn we have. And I don't really want to spend, you know, 60-80 bucks and this was quite a while ago. But what we started doing is we started having a neighborhood kid mow our lawn for 20 bucks per time. And you know, that ended up being a total cost of $400. And save me about 25 hours worth of time every single year, especially during the summer months when that lawn is growing frantically. So now, we've actually transitioned it over. My son, I don't know if I've ever talked about this on the podcast, Phillip, have I told you this before, like when each of my kids turned 12, I'm helping them start a business?

Phillip Migyanko 11:17
Yep. And I think McKenzie opened up a cupcake.

Scott Anthony Barlow 11:20
Yes.

Phillip Migyanko 11:20
That I want to be an investor in but that's another subject for another time.

Scott Anthony Barlow 11:23
Yeah. So my son, who just recently turned 12, decided he wanted to start a lawn mowing business. So he's mowing our lawn. He's renting our lawn mower from us, which I wanted it to be a real business and have real business learning. So yes, he's renting our lawn mower from us. And then the way that that happens is he mows our lawn. So now at this point, he's doing that. And there's the additional bonus of we're spending time in a way that I want to and I don't have to mow the lawn. Right? Fantastic. All the way around. Phillip, I know that yesterday, you mentioned that meal prep is one of these things that saves you a ton of time. So I'm curious about that.

Phillip Migyanko 12:00
Yeah, so meal prep is such a big one. And we all know it. And sometimes it's one of those big things that we need to do. But one of the biggest things that we do is at the beginning of every week, we're always thinking about always the next week or sometimes two weeks ahead where we're kind of deciding which meals do we want to be having, make sure they're prepped and ready to go for dinners. That we have really busy days, you just want to have things ready to go by the time to make things but also that they're healthy, that they're nutritious, all those types of things. So what we do is we'll get all of our groceries on Saturday or even earlier in the day Sunday. And then we spend about two or three hours on Sunday, some upfront time planning both of our lunches, but also all of our dinners for the whole week. And that just saves so much time because really we're just rotating between 10 different meals, we're getting through the less decision fatigue about, which thing do we have to eat this week. And what's that look like for lunch this week. And I always have a problem because sometimes I forget to eat lunch because I'm just like helping and talk to people so much. So having things ready to go on Sunday for the whole week, it's been super helpful for us, and essentially putting a little bit more time early in the week to save time later on. So we can spend time just like talking or being together and have your dinner for ready to go. But Scott, you guys use an app and you have somebody who makes those kind of meal preps for you, right?

Scott Anthony Barlow 13:11
Yeah, we've turned this to an entire system.

Phillip Migyanko 13:13
I'm super curious about that.

Scott Anthony Barlow 13:15
I know, I said that we talked about systems later. Here's one small tidbit of an example of how we've done that. So we use a service called eMeals in the habit in the form of an app. And the way that this is structured is they actually will, based on what your dietary needs are, like, whether you want to eat paleo, or you want to eat keto, or you want to eat comfort food, like, you can choose just about anything that's on there. We subscribed many years ago when they only have like two meal plan options. But now they have many, many, many, and they're really very, very, very good too. So you can make all of those choices. And then what happens is when the next week rolls up, you can just click the button and say, "I want to eat that. I want to eat that one. I want to eat that." and then, this is the really fun part, it will transfer all of the information that in the form of list items that you need to purchase over to whatever other app of your choice. So whether that is like Safeway or Kroger or Walmart or, you know, insert your service here that might deliver your groceries or allow you to do pickup, it just transfers all that information over there. It's integrated together. And then with the click of a button, it sends it over to, you know, Walmart or Trader Joe's or wherever it is, and boom, it's there. Now, you can press the order button in the other app, and then it can show up at your doorstep or you can go pick it up. So we go and pick it up once a week. So the extra advanced portion of this is if you don't love the meal prep portion, you could have somebody else do it too. So that's something that we've been experimenting with over the last couple of years and that's worked out quite well. What we've settled on is that works really well for us for lunches and breakfast. We still prefer to make all of our own dinners. That's just something that we'd love to do. But the whole system around it just has it show up so we can go to the grocery store, pick it up, take a total of 10 minutes to do that, and it's exactly what we wanted without all the time spent planning. So that in itself estimate, I was talking to my wife about this the other day, it now happens... it used to take about, let's say, 105 minutes or that translate to about 91 hours per year creating a menu and then go into the store and shopping and everything and that was on the low side. Now, it takes less than 35 minutes a week for everything to happen in total. And it costs less than $30, by the way, per month. So yeah, there's another example here. So what about this third category here, adding back time that's being taken away in the form of obstacles or distractions. This I think might be possibly the most valuable one. Realize sometimes I didn't realize in many cases and still to this day I'm pretty relentless about tracking how I'm spending my time and setting up feedback loops so that I can understand how I'm spending my time in ways that are accidental so that I can edit it out versus just do that year after year after year. So this first one, get ready for it, it's going to make you cringe.

Phillip Migyanko 16:06
Oh it made me cringe when I thought.

Scott Anthony Barlow 16:08
Oh my goodness, yeah. Okay, so it is canceling Netflix. I know. But here's what I found, we actually, and we do still have Disney plus if that makes anybody feel bad. I don't know.

Phillip Migyanko 16:20
Yeah. Because there's, you know, you can put shows you're watching. So cancel any of the subscription services. But yeah.

Scott Anthony Barlow 16:26
Yeah. But by canceling Netflix, what I would do, and I love Netflix, I'll be the first to say they have an amazing service. They have wonderful movies, they've done a really nice job, I think, of produced, like, changing their business model to now where they're producing a lot of movies as well and series and everything else that goes along with it. But I also have noticed that just experimenting with it saves me about 35 hours per year at a minimum and that's probably a low estimate based on what I found. Because what happens is I would find an episode of something and then I couldn't stop watching it, could not control myself. Yes, I know we talked about lots of things, like, where I think people are assuming there's tons of discipline there. I have zero discipline when it comes to an amazing series. So I'll just literally binge watch when I'm supposed to be working. Like, that is a real thing that has happened. So I've realized that that is not, you know, a year later when I think about that, it's like oh yeah, I didn't actually want to spend my time that way. I just felt like I couldn't spend my time any other way after I saw that first episode. So that's one way.

Phillip Migyanko 17:28
But, you know, it's interesting. That's like me when I'm, like, trying not to eat a chocolate bar so I just don't bring any chocolate into my house because I'm like, if I have a chocolate bar, I'm gonna eat the whole thing at one time. So my decision it's, kind of, discipline is when I'm going through the store, I just don't pick up any chocolate and it's kind of the same thing also with my phone, too. I noticed for me and, you know, one of the other tactics that I were talking about before we were hitting record here was just removing all the notifications from my phone, my computer, iPad, all those types of things because I don't really necessarily want it to be in control of my attention. It's more of, anything that pings me is like I'm being distracted and it removes me from the task that I'm looking to do and it's really easy, you go... if you've got an iPhone, you go into your settings app, you just turn off all notifications except for the apps that you want on and, really, for me too, it's such the social media apps, especially games, all of these things they are designed to have you plug into your phone and the biggest way they do that is notifying "oh hey, here's a new thing for you" "oh hey someone on your photos like something" or "oh this new, new thing" and so you just have to, yeah, we're gonna make that noise a "ooh" thing that's going to be an... But more importantly, it's just removing all of those like little distractions especially notifications on your phone because this little black box that now we carry with us all the time just becomes an Uber distraction piece for whatever is out on the internet and you can really make sure that it's working for you instead of you working for it. And, for me, specifically, that means yeah, no games. I got it. They are all off my phone.

Scott Anthony Barlow 18:57
And I think you could probably argue that maybe part of, maybe this is also an example of setting up your environment, too, not having chocolate. And I know that's less of a time saving thing, well, I guess it depends on how long it takes. But certainly, the email notification where it is saving and conserving your attention so therefore you are more productive in spending your time in the way that you want to, that is absolutely also an example of setting up your environment but it is minimizing those obstacles and distractions too. You know, something else that... and I know Phillip, you know this and now Kathy, who's on our team, jokes about this all the time because she now is obsessive over this one thing I cannot stand, and I know that sounds insane but it adds up. I cannot stand making, you know, five clicks where I could possibly have just done one click or a keystrokes or here's the example, if my computer is processing faster, and I don't have to wait on it, that is more time that is not consumed if with individual tasks, which means that my tasks that are spent on my computer or phone get shorter. So what I've learned is that, for me, personally, this is not right for everyone. But for me personally, I spend a fair amount of time on the computer. So keystrokes count, and if I'm waiting on the computer to process, then that means that it literally takes longer. And that's something that quite frankly, I can't stand. So my life is infinitely better when I buy the fastest processing laptop, or the fastest processing computer. And for me, that typically cost me about $1,000 more per computer. But I get it back very, very quickly, because I spend a fair amount of time on the computer. And I'm not waiting and more importantly, I'm not frustrated, too, at the every single computer usage. It's now a pleasure to use my computer instead of be mad at technology. So there's another one. And I know that there's a lot of apps out there that can help with that, too. One of the things that we use on our team is this email app that syncs up with Google or Gmail, and it's called Superhuman, and they literally have reduced the keystrokes and clicks that it takes in order to operate that and they've cut it in half. So it takes... where it used to take three or four mouse clicks to process email for one type of email plus all the keystrokes, now you can do that with less, you can actually use the entire email system without the mouse at all, which is so much faster than switching back and forth. Yes, I know that's super nerdy. And I love it.

Phillip Migyanko 21:31
This is not a paid advertisement for Superhuman at all. But I mean, if Superhuman is listening, we will definitely take that. But more importantly, there's so many benefits of the Superhuman app, it really helps just more really schedule the emails for a later period of time, you're less than clicking and clicking back through and overall and it really allows you just to focus on the most important pieces of email because I definitely get lost in just the mountains of emails. And as, you know, as many of them come in, and some of them just aren't important. And I know a lot of my clients or a lot of the people that I talked to is they have like email inboxes that are like a thousand plus, they go, "I just need to go unsubscribe that thing, cleaned it out." But instead, "I'm just gonna give a whole new another email. So then I'm just gonna leave that to one of the site and get this new one. And Superhuman is definitely helpful and the email processing and kind of cleaning all that stuff out.

Scott Anthony Barlow 22:19
Just makes it easier. Here's another one, this is gonna also sound very, very nerdy. Phillip, you have been to my house, and you've seen my garage. And most people think that it's super organized and everything because it literally has a place for everything. And then also we've built out places for future things, too, even containers that don't have anything in it. But they have a label for when they will have something in it down the road. Yes, that is the level of intensity that is put into the garage. But one of the things that we were finding is that even though we had drastically reduced the amount of consumption that we had made as a family, we were still finding that we were having lots and lots of items in places for things, or I should say lots and lots of items that needed to go to Goodwill, and we didn't have a place for it. So we were actually spending lots of time and energy. And again, I know this sounds absurd, but we were spending more time and energy than what I wanted to be spending trying to figure out what to do with this stuff. So when I had redone the garage and redesigned it, built a staging area for items to go to Goodwill, or to be able to donate to different charities. So it's super easy to get to. Now, it's right outside the door. So it's not an obstacle. And it takes less time to be able to, when we need one to donate something, I can go and I can just put it in this basket. And then when we make a run to, you know, Goodwill or get a place where we can donate that, then it's right there. It's easy. It doesn't take additional time. Most importantly, it's not capturing my attention. But this is something that we found we were doing all the time. Another thing, Phillip, I don't know if you do this, but Amazon has a wonderful, wonderful return system at this point if you have prime. So we can just take it down to the UPS Store, which we already... We send all our business items, we ship through UPS and the UPS Store and we have an account down there anyway. But you can just show them your Amazon app, they'll scan it, and you don't even have to put it back in the box. So if we're returning something from Amazon, then we can just basically take it in and toss it on the counter and say, "Here you go." And they'll take care of everything else for it. So this makes it easier for us to be able to shop at amazon, which of course, they've done a really nice job with. They want us to continue to shop at Amazon. But they're meeting some of our needs and it ends up saving us time versus ordering from other places. Now if something doesn't work, it's so much easier for us to just take it back, it fits in and we have this little staging area for returns that go to places, too, so they don't stack up in our house. Okay, so what are the... now I've given you totally nerdy items. What do you find that you're doing, Phillip, that is out of the normal, we'll call it, that ends up saving you time?

Phillip Migyanko 25:00
That's such a good question. I think one of the, you know, we talked about meal prep, that's such a big one. I think what all this comes down to is the intentionality of things. So there is times where we've got the same thing. We have things that go in certain places, I've got meal prep time, but I think one of the biggest things that I do, and I think one of the things that we do, really, for our clients that are going through this actual career change is what we're thinking about is, how much time are they actually spending reaching out? I did the same thing when I was in my career search. But you might have heard one of our clients on this very podcast, Vicky, who I was working with. And for her, she spent a lot of time in the research phase. And specifically during that reach out phase, there can be lots of lots of places where it can be very time consuming, because so many people like to do the research part. And you don't really want to reach out to somebody if you don't know something about them. And then people get all those thoughts in their head, like, "Okay, well, I have to know what school they went to, the city they live in, the name of their dog, what's all those things before I talk to him just in case those things might come up." And I find, yes, so many people spend a lot of time in there. So one of the things that I do that's personal in my life, but one things I help really focused clients on is we really take those available hours for things that are kind of outside, and we go, okay, so for clients, they might have seven hours, they might have 10, they might have one, whatever that number might be, we look and we go, "Alright, here's the available hours that you have to work on this career change work" and we go okay, so we know in the reach out phase, there's really four big components, sourcing, i.e., finding the people who you're going to reach out to, researching, finding out the unique things kind of about them, and then be able to do the talking points for them. And that's where people tend to spend the most time. And then writing the email actually to them, number three. And number four is actually sending the email to them and doing any of those like and sillery types of things. I have clients who do loom videos, that's a service where you can record a free video that's just about a minute long, and makes it a little bit more personal. A couple other things there. But so many people spend so much time in that second part, that research phase. So what we do is we go "Okay, all that available hours, how can we time block and essentially time limit, which is a little bit counterintuitive to a saving time, but time limit all of those aspects of those four parts of reaching out." So what I do with my clients are, we go, okay, and especially in Vicky and her case, we said, we found that she was spending hours and hours, like five plus hours a week in the research phase. And I said, "Vicky, all right, we now only have two. So we have to find the unique aspects of each person in that two hour time, so we can send out those emails. Because email sent out is better than no email sent out." So allows us to really make sure that we're limiting our time to focus on the best places, and ultimately, again, come back and save more of that mental bandwidth for us. Because if we're spending too much time in the wrong areas and not getting results, it's really not getting us any place. So it's a really good aspect from the time learning aspect. Because we're always trying to figure out where we can best utilize and spend our time and remove the obstacles that might potentially get in the way.

Scott Anthony Barlow 28:01
Time limiting is, I think one of the most effective strategies and tools that you can have, not just for your career change, although it works particularly well for your career change, or any other area where it's new for you or you have perfectionist tendencies, or you care a whole lot about because those are the areas where we have a tendency to spend inordinate amounts of time rather than just doing it and doing the 80% good enough version and then moving on even though the 80% good enough version might be just as effective in most cases. So thank you for pointing that out. The other other thing I would say here, if you're in the midst of making a career change, pick out just one of the strategies, one of the strategies to save you time elsewhere so that you can make more time for your career change or utilize that strategy that we just talked about in saying "Look, I'm going to time limit myself, I'm going to spend... I'm gonna allow myself 90 minutes in total to be able to spend on this task. At the end of it, I'm going to consider it done." And, you know, just pick out one of these so that you can, instead, utilize that time that you now get back in one way or another to be able to focus on what's a priority for you, in this case, your career change. And here's the other thing too. If you are wanting more of this, these are things that we do for our clients every single day. This is just a tidbit. This is just a small amount of the strategies that we personally use or we personally use with our clients and, you know, we can absolutely help, it's what we are here to do. It's what we love to do. It's what we do every day. So, you know, reach out to us. Phillip is one of the people that gets to have so many of the conversations with people who are trying to decide if we are the right people to help them through their career or... and we're trying to decide what is the very best way that we can support them. So do this, just email me directly scott@happentoyourcareer.com, just send me an email, put 'Conversation' in the subject line. And what will happen is that either myself or our team will get back to you. And we'll go ahead and set up a time to chat. And that way we can understand your situation, ask you some questions and figure out the very best way that we can support you for the type of career change that you want to make. And Phillip is, like I said, one of those people that you may very well talk to, and he's really, really great at it. Phillip, what advice would you give to somebody who's in that situation where they're trying to figure out what is the right type of help to get during this career change, regardless of whether we're helping or, you know, they're trying to do something for themselves?

Phillip Migyanko 30:38
Yeah, I'd say the biggest thing there, that's a really great question. Because it can be really different for everybody. And really, the biggest thing, or the advice I'd give to somebody who is sitting in those shoes right now is, the best thing you can do is raise your hand and ask for help and to continue moving forward. Because I usually say this to a lot of people in those calls is that there's lots of people in the world who sit and stay in their same spot and wish they would have done something. And we all know people like that, and then they end up retiring, and then it's not good. And then the difference between those people and the people who send that email to Scott and jump on a call with me or somebody on our team is that they raise their hand, and ask for help, and decided to do something about it. The biggest piece of advice is raise your hand, ask for help. We have a whole team of people here, there's tons and tons of people out there looking for help and wanting to give help. So you're not in this alone.

Scott Anthony Barlow 31:26
You heard it here first. So Phillip has talked to many, many, many hundreds of people over the last couple of years. And I think that that's great advice well served. If there's anything that we can do for you or anything else that you want to hear on the Happen To Your Career podcast, don't hesitate to let us know. Otherwise, drop me an email scott@happentoyourcareer.com, and we'll be thrilled to pieces to set you up with Phillip or someone else on our team. And guess what, we have so much more coming up for you right here on Happen To Your Career next time. See what's in store.

Scott Anthony Barlow 32:04
What if, after going through all the work that it takes to get a job, you realize, almost on day one, that it's nowhere close to what you expected it was going to be. In fact, it's far worse than that. It's the opposite of what you expected is going to be. Well, if you were in that situation, you'd probably start looking for a new role, right? Well, that's what happened to Cheri. You heard her voice in the introduction. She realized early on that her new role was not totally what she expected it to be. She became super unhappy, and started searching for a new job within a month. She applied to a ton of roles but kept hitting the dead end. But here's the thing, if we fast forward, spoiler alert, we'll see that she made it to one of those roles that when she saw it in the job description, she originally didn't feel qualified for it.

Cheri Thom 33:00
I wanted to be a product owner. I have found that I really like that idea of, kind of, being a subject matter expert and, kind of, owning a process or product. And I hadn't been looking for that when I was looking for jobs because I didn't feel like I was qualified for it.

Scott Anthony Barlow 33:17
One thing we see all the time that's really unfortunate is so many people limit themselves to roles that they feel like they check all the boxes for every single bullet point on the entire job description. I see this all the time. You find the listing, you immediately scroll down to all the job requirements, you mentally check off everything as you go. But then you find there one or two qualifications that you don't have, you sigh and then you hit the back button to check on the next listing. No good, right? A lot of times, the people that get hired in those situations don't have all the qualifications, it happens so frequently, I can't tell you how much, you know, coming from my HR days and recruiting days. And certainly, we see that all the time here at Happen To Your Career as we're helping people. But I want you to take a listen to Cheri's story because this is one of those situations. She navigated through all the mental and real challenges that come up along the way. So you'll hear her describe that. 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.