356: How Can I Figure Out What I Really Want?

Introduction 0:04
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 it 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.

Joshua Rivers 00:28
Figuring out what you really want in your career and in life, is one of the most important keys to happiness and fulfillment. It's so important that is one of the first things that we address as we work with our clients. The problem though, is that many people haven't actually identified what they really want. Almost everybody knows what they don't want, but that doesn't lead to happiness. And so today, you're going to hear, how you can find what you love to do again, If you strayed away from it. Why you need to identify true strengths and values that lead from... why you need to identify true strengths and values that lead to your ideal role. How can you can blah, how you can prepare yourself to finally make the jump to your next career move, and what kind of jobs and positions or roles as a project manager you can move into. So Scott addresses all of these today, as we share a training that we did a couple weeks ago on how to figure out what you really want.

Scott Anthony Barlow 01:36
I want to jump into question number one, and I think this is such a great place to start. This comes from Karen. And Karen, if you're already on here, go ahead and let us know that you're on here and we may even be able to get additional information from you and give you an even better answer. But I think this this is such a great place to start because so many of us have had different situations where we had to pieces of what we've loved or have done things in the past, that have been a great experience for us in one way or another. And either we want to get back to that, that or that feeling that goes along with it. Or we want to be able to take what we have had that was great in the past, and shift that forward into something that's really amazing for us in the future, especially as it relates to our career, and how our lives interact with our career. So, Karen, this is a pretty amazing question. And I want to answer this two ways. I'll answer this with what we typically do when we are working with someone behind the scenes and the process that we go through to help you understand what are the success steps that you have to take in order to go through this pretty intimidating kind of difficult process, and I say kind of difficult, but really, I mean, really difficult problems. And think about it, most people in the world do not have work that they love, work that is fulfilling for them, work that is meaningful for them. And often, many of the ones that do are not necessarily paid what they want, there is a relatively small percentage of people in the world that are well paid, and also love what they do. Now, if we can have any part of it and any type of impact on that, that is what we're looking to do as an organization. And that is really one of the big reasons why our organization exists. However, if I know that, then I can think about that two ways. I can say, "oh, man, it's such a small percentage of people in the world, that's probably not gonna happen for me." Or I can instead say, "you know what, I want to know what the people that do have meaningful work that does pay extremely well. I want to know what they're doing." And that's exactly the quest that I found myself on 15, I guess, approaching 18 years ago at this point, and I wanted to know. That's part of what I want to share with you. One of the things that we see is there are the same types of milestones and steps that each person has to go through in order to do work and find work that really makes sense for you, makes sense for you as it relates to your strengths, makes sense for you as it relates to what creates more meaning, more purpose or fulfillment for you, for any length of time, and any other areas of your life that line up with what you want to. So let me share with you one of the ways that we do that behind the scenes. We use what we call the "puzzle method" for finding work. Part of the reason for that is because this is a little bit like putting together a puzzle in many different ways. And if you've ever put together a puzzle, then you know that when you're starting out, and there are some really, really difficult ways to put together a puzzle and there's some really simplified ways. I'll tell you a quick story for how we got to this puzzle better than the first place. My son Grayson when he was only about two or three years old, I was sitting there watching him putting together this puzzle and what he was doing, he was just like grabbing one random piece, grabbing another random piece. And he's trying to mash them together. He's just trying to go like and push them together. And of course, it wasn't working at all. And he's getting really frustrated, right. He's like, "ah!" and eventually I went and sat next to him and showed him that here's how you put together a puzzle. First of all, you find all the corner pieces, because they're pretty easily identifiable. You can pull them out, there's only four of them on most puzzles. Once you get around puzzles, that's a whole different thing. But you know, you get those corner pieces out, and then you find the edge pieces, right. And once you have the edge pieces, it's pretty easily based on all the colors and what the pictures are, you can line that up into a frame. And once you have the frame, it becomes so much easier to be able to begin to put the picture together in the middle. And what we find is that, that is a really great way to think about how to identify what an amazing career looks like for you, whether it's something that you love again, or whether it's something that you're shifting to for what you love now, because humans change over time. So those corner pieces are what we call signature strengths. And your strengths do evolve over time. But it's much more an evolution as opposed to drastically changing because signature strengths, if you think about those, that's just really the intersection of things that you're great at, your strengths that you're great at, your contribution and how you have the ability to contribute or play something that is a higher value, and also those areas that you enjoy immensely. That intersection of those three pieces is an easy way to think about what we consider to be signature strengths. Okay, so, those corner pieces are your signature strengths. The edge pieces are what you want and need most in your life or in your work, essentially your priorities and what you value the most. And we break those into individual categories, categories like relationships, what do you need out of relationships, not necessarily relationships in your friends and relationships with your boss, but also, you know, who are the types of people that you want to be around and surrounded by? Because if we know that, that gives us clues as to where you want to go, so we divided into all of these categories, and then it becomes much easier to answer what do I need most out of my work. So that becomes your edge pieces. Now the funny thing that happens is just like putting together a puzzle, once you have the frame built out, those edge pieces, which are what you value most, and the quarter pieces, which are your signature strengths, then it becomes so much easier to fill in the middle. Now, when we're creating that behind the scenes with someone, we call that an ideal career profile, which is exactly what it sounds like. We're helping someone build a profile of their ideal career. We're helping them go through and answer all of the little teeny tiny questions about what you need and want most as it relates to your next opportunity and even beyond, that creates much more fulfillment, creates much more meaning, pays what you need, satisfy some of your other goals and your largest priorities and positions you to work in your strengths. So that really is step one, we have to create that, what we call, an ideal career profile, because we must have a picture or a very specific idea of where you want to go. Because think about it as a destination almost that helps us create a bit more of the destination. Because if you don't have a destination, how on earth are you going to know where to go? There's going to be like a really terrible road trip, right? Where, it's like, okay, I don't really know exactly where we're going and you end up in the middle of Montana. And in some, you know, teeny tiny little town, nothing against Montana, but sometimes it gets pretty snowy and uncomfortable there in many different ways. So if you intended to go to someplace like I don't know, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, or whatever it might be, and you know that you're going to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, it's much easier to punch into the GPS and say, Okay, I can figure out the best route to go to Fort Lauderdale, Florida. But it is really, really difficult to do that if I don't know what that destination looks like. So we've got to figure out all the little pieces of the destination. Okay, I want to expand on this for you, Karen, as we go along, that I wanted to set it up and help you understand why it's so important to do that upfront work to define what it is that you need. And we're gonna talk about some of the other ways that other people have done that, or that we typically work with people as well to give you an idea because it does differ quite a bit for each individual. Alright, let's go on to question number two, because I think it'll share or rather shed light more of that as well here. Okay, this comes from John. And John, feel free to let us know if you're on here as well. John says, "if someone who has never known what they want to do with their life, how to identify true strengths and values that would manifest in a job?" This picks up right where we left off with Karen in many different ways.

Scott Anthony Barlow 10:07
Okay, so let me share with you some of the ways that we do that, just to give you a taste and help you understand how you might be able to do this in your situation as well. Okay, one of the ways that we approach strengths is, first of all, you have to understand what strengths actually are. Strengths, often are confused with skills. And when I say skills, you know, I'm talking about things like, "hey, I'm really great at building out pivot tables in excel. Yeah, I'm really, really good at that. But honestly, I don't want anything to do with building pivot tables for the rest of my life. That sounds terrible, but I'm really good at it." That's not what we're talking about when we say strengths. Instead, if you want to imagine almost an iceberg, you've got the piece that says above the water that you can see that's really visible, often those are your skills. And those are the pieces that you can see that are most prominent outwardly. But the strengths we're talking about are the pieces that are below the water that are hidden, that are causing you to be predisposed to be better at making pivot tables, or whatever it is for you. So that's where it starts to get a little bit confusing. So when we're talking about true strengths, then we're talking about those areas that come very naturally to you, especially when we talk about signature strengths. Those are those areas that often you couldn't stop doing. And pretty likely almost everybody does this. But you are underrating as incredibly valuable. Everyone has them. There's different stages of evolution that every single person is in for their strengths. And you can continue to evolve your strengths as you go along, get more experiences as you focus on really specific consistent development in particular areas. But everybody has innate strengths and talents that go along with them. So the bigger question is uncovering what they actually are for you. Let me give you just a couple of the ways that we do that. So one of the questions, one of my favorite questions to use for that is not a perfect question, there are no perfect questions out there. But one that's really, really helpful, that has light bulb go on for a few different people and begins to give clues into this area is what are the areas in your past roles, past jobs, past opportunities, where you keep gravitating to, over and over again, even though it's not actually a part of your role. For example, you know, somebody that we worked with a while back, he was in finance, basically. And there was a lot of execution, tons of execution in this job. And when I say execution, I'm talking about like moving things around on spreadsheets, maneuvering things and computers. And honestly, you know, when you talk to this guy for 15 minutes, you could tell that he was just incredibly relatable, incredibly relatable and really enjoyed interacting with human beings immensely. And you start to add those two together and be like, Oh my goodness, how can you do your job all day, when clearly you're getting a ton of enjoyment with interacting with other people in really particular ways, especially one on one, especially where he could go really deep and talk about things that matter to him and the other people. And he just really got a lot out of that type of interaction. And it turns out, he couldn't. Like that was a very, very restrictive role. And what he was finding was that in his existing opportunity, existing company, he was in the finance industry. He was grabbing a hold of different types of projects that really didn't have anything to do with what he was doing, but was good for the organization. And he was leaving them. All of them had to do with other types of human development, mentorship, other types of that one on one human interaction. He's like, "hey, these are great, but they're less than 5% of my job. How do I get more of that in there?" And as we started uncovering those pieces realized, Oh, wait, hold on, that's giving clues to some of his true strengths. And Phillip will identify with this a little bit too because he was very much a relator which Phillip is an amazing at relating to other people and finding commonality and things like that. And this guy absolutely was as well. But he'd never considered this a strength like ever, ever, not in a million years, because he just did it and didn't value it a whole lot. So that's what we're talking about. And it's almost in uncovery or discovery type process to be able to identify true strengths. It doesn't happen just by sitting down one time with a pen and a piece of paper and being like "boom, now I got my strengths" usually it is a progressive uncovery process, and even once you know what they are, it's a whole separate process to begin to relate to those to where can I actually utilize those in the real world. So the reason I'm going into this level of detail for this particular question, though, John, is, I want to make sure that you understand how this actually works. When we're working with people, we use a couple of shortcuts, we actually have a tool that we use that we love that it's not magic or anything along those lines. But it does help you a portion of that work. It's called Clifton strengths, or it used to be called Strengths Finder 2.0. That's something you can find on our site, happentoyourcareer.com/strengthsfinder, or to search happentoyourcareer.com on Google and strength finder, and it'll pop up. And that's a short assessment, that'll begin to give you verbiage but then the next part, the harder part is beginning to identify what and where that's actually needed in the real world. And we can talk more about that as we go along and answer some of these other questions too, for how we actually do that as well. In terms of values, that is a whole separate piece. Values, when I say values, often people think like values that sounds really like cloudy and ambiguous. And it certainly can be. When I talk about values, I am more interested in understanding any given area, what do I value the most? Here's a really, really, really simple example. I used to have what I consider to be a dream job. It was working for a really pretty cool, fairly progressive organization, in HR leadership. And I loved working with this organization except for there were two things that just really did not line up with my values at all. Number one thing was I had this really cool big office, it was amazing, like they did all these wonderful things for me, but I didn't have any exposure to sunlight. And that sounds like a small thing, except for me. I've realized over the years that when I don't have continuous exposure to sunlight, I get grumpy and my quality of life goes downhill really quick and that sounds ridiculous, but it is a huge thing that impacts my world on a minute by minute basis. So like right now as I'm talking to you this very second, I have a huge window over off to my right here in my studio. And it... this is where we do all recording, you know, video recording podcast, etc. And it allows me to be able to have that consistent exposure to sunlight even when I'm inside. So small thing, but it's something that I highly value because it makes a real difference in every minute of my day. That's a really simple example. Maybe a more complex example was, I'm pretty well into health and fitness. One of the divisions that I worked with in an organization that I worked with for a while also in HR leadership, we made french fries, french fries and health and fitness that don't go together particularly well. Another thing that I did, this can sound ridiculous, but it was a huge deal for me. I really enjoy, it's absurd, I know, I love to run upstairs. Every time I get to a set of stairs, I run upstairs. I've done that my entire life. I swore that I would do that for as long as I could since I was like seven years old. I was supposed to role model, being an HR leader, being safe in a work environment is not safe for a lot of people to run upstairs. That didn't mix very well. Yes, that sounds ridiculous. And yes, that created a situation where those couple of pieces were against my values. And what... the reason I'm going into detail here is because I wanted to give you just some very tangible examples, even though some examples are very, very much less tangible in terms of what you value. We worked with a guy while back also in Portland, actually, by the way, we've got a few people from Oregon on here, and he really, really valued integrity. And I know you're gonna say, "'hey, like, doesn't everybody value integrity?" Yes, to some degree, I think, but this was really, really specific for him and he had some very, very tangible ways that he valued integrity as well. And it was drastically different than how I value integrity. And he wanted to make sure that in every section of the organization that he worked with and for, you could see it up and down that, that was preeminent though all parts of the organization valued integrity, just as much, you know, on front lines as to the CEO. And he had some very specific definitions around that too. I won't share all the all the details. But you know, long story short, in his case, that was really, really important to him. And he wasn't getting that where he was at that period of time. So we ended up helping them shift to an organization that absolutely fit with that and the other pieces that he wanted. Okay, so why am I sharing all of these little examples? Well, because figuring out what you want is actually a really complex problem. Part of the reason why so many of us cannot answer the question really, specifically, if I just sit down with you and ask you, "hey, what do you want? What do you want in the next role? You know, what do you want? What kind of job do you want?" And like everybody sort of expects you to know what you want but nobody, like the big secret is nobody really actually knows and can articulate exactly what they want, or very, very few people in the world.

Scott Anthony Barlow 20:10
So the secret behind the secret is that we just go through in each and every area we know matters most to doing work as a human being. There's actually six major areas that we divided up into, based on research, based on our practical approach, based on many other pieces too. We help you go through and break it into smaller manageable chunks, so that you can say, "well, what type of culture do I actually want? Who are the people that I actually want to spend my time around?" And when you go through and begin to add definition around each one of those areas, you start to develop a set of, I'm going to say almost parameters that add up to a whole and you if you really want to think about that tool that I mentioned earlier, an ideal career profile which we created, you can almost over simplify it and say that really is just a checklist of what you must have and what you need in your next role and beyond so that you know where to begin looking. It's again, just like the road trip, it's much easier to plan a path, to plan how I'm going to get to, you know, Tallahassee, Florida, or Fort Lauderdale, or whatever I said, and choose what path is going to be best for me. Because every path is going to be a little bit different for each person. But if I don't know where I'm going, it makes it darn near impossible. I don't know, I can't tell you how many people I've talked to, where they're like, you know what I have... I've promoted a lot, I've done a lot of really interesting things, you know, great things in my career, but it hasn't always been intentional. Usually, it's somebody else coming to me and saying, "hey, we've got this opportunity for you." "We think you'd be amazing at this. Would you come work with us in this area?" And most people have moved from opportunity to opportunity in many different ways, and that's how their life and their work has evolved. We flip it backwards, and we say, let's figure out exactly what you want and then let's go find that in the real world. And I know that's a drastically different approach. And I know very few people actually recommend that. What we've seen is if your goal is to actually have work that is more fulfilling, more meaningful, also, you know, pays you well, and it causes you not to have to take a pay cut or anything along those lines, then you have to change your approach to how you're finding it. And it requires this backwards type approach. It requires understanding what you want to need first, before going to look for it. Otherwise, you're going to waste a lot of time. Okay, so John, I know I probably have created so many more questions in beginning to answer that question, but I want to go on to the next one, and keep helping you understand how this stuff actually works in reality, and some of the research that supports it along the way and what we've seen working with over 2000 people at this point. Okay, question number three here, "how am I prepared myself enough to finally jump into freelance?" Jule, I love this question, partially because it is so deeply personal in many different ways. And partially because this is real for a lot of people that are interested in freelance. And I think the same things also apply with people that are interested in doing something like consulting or operating in a contractor type relationship as opposed to a standard employee relationship, which for either freelance or contractors, both of those can be pretty amazing opportunities because often they have a higher degree of flexibility and autonomy. They also especially in the consulting type relationship, in some areas of freelance can pay significantly more than you might be paid as an employee for a variety of different reasons. Some people never consider this in the first place because they are used to operate and as an employee I think one of the things that's really, really interesting is in our current, you know, pandemic type situation. I think that's going to cause both organizations and individuals to reevaluate how work can be done in some of the existing relationships too. Doesn't necessarily mean that this type either freelance or, you know, consulting or contracting is right for everyone. But I think it's worth considering what is right for you. Okay, so Jule, in this case, it sounds like you have already had some thought around this. And you've already decided that maybe you've already decided this is going to happen, we'll just say that, how about that Jule? Okay. So in this case, you will want to consider a few different things. One, what is the level of runway or flexibility or stability that you need personally? So I'll use a couple situations that we run into all the time when people are making a transition to freelance also when people are making a transition into owning their own business, or when they're making a transition into something that is often perceived to be less, I'm going to call it less stable, than, you know, employer-employee type relationship. Okay, number one is do you have the funds in store accessible in cash, it was something were to go wrong in one way or another, and you know, that's something that I personally did when I transit five years ago, I ran this business on the side and built this business on the side of my full time position in HR leadership for three years, actually, because my wife and I had decided that we really wanted to have X amount in savings. I don't even remember how much it was now, but we had decided and talked about very specifically having a pretty sizable number in savings. And also at the same time, making sure that before moving we had X amount of revenue coming in to replace the amount of income that we were used to receiving from my full time job. And I would encourage you to think about the same types of things as you transition into freelance or anybody else that is ever considering making a move like that, whether it's your own business, whether it is, you know, consulting, contracting freelance, whatever. Have you already replaced a portion of that? Do you already have a place to move to? I hear the word jump into a lot or jump off of, you know, like it's alleged or something along those lines. What I find is that especially for business, and freelancers is that just jumping off the ledge makes no sense. It doesn't create a healthy situation. And I can't tell you the number of freelance stressed out business owners and freelancers that I've met, that are now making day to day decisions, I'm not talking about like pandemic time now, I'm just talking about like they've jumped off that ledge anticipating that, that would force them into, you know, and force them into action, force them into doing something for themselves. But inevitably what they've done is taken an amazing situation and turned it into something that's really really stressful for them. So the ways to do that, that is not putting undue stress, and you actually get to enjoy it are making sure that you have the right amount of runway for you as it relates to your expenses and doing the actual numbers behind that. And if this is your situation, and you want some examples of that, I think we might still have a blog post hanging around our site where we detailed out examples of ways to do that. And we've done that with other people. And you know, Alyssa, my wife and I had done that for ourselves that we could send you just email me, scott@happentoyourcareer.com and if we still have them, I can send them to you. And then the other thing to think about as well is, how can you create a soft cushion for yourself? How can you step off of one ledge onto another instead of jumping into that situation? So those are the main pieces that I would consider. And the reason behind that, is that causes you to make better decisions for yourself. When you're not really stressed about things like finances, or other pressures that come along with just jumping into it. Then it causes you to make better long term and healthier decisions because you don't realize in the moment when you're there, and you have to have a certain amount of income coming in, or a certain amount of revenue coming in, if you're a business owner, you don't realize the amount of stress that is going to happen. And you don't realize when you're in that very moment, how it changes, short term versus long term decisions. And it does, it does for almost everybody. So the more that you can know that and work with that, the better you're going to be prepared to make a really, really good decision for yourself and turn freelance into something that is really amazing, because I think it really can be amazing. Again, not for everybody but if it's right for you, then that's how I would recommend doing it. If you want more help on that, don't hesitate to, you know, like reach out, have a conversation with Philip, we can help you understand how we can help with those types of things and, you know, create custom support for you so that you know what all of the pieces are for your personal situation that you need to go through. I want to go on to question number four here though, I want to make sure that we get to this one as well. And I think we've received variations of this question. Jeff, again, if you're here, let us know in the chat, and by all means you can share more about your situation too. I want to say that you had sent us a little bit more context as well. But we receive a lot of very similar questions like, "what types of jobs positions, roles, companies, organizations, industries can insert the position, whatever background you happen to have move into?" Okay, so I think this is a great question. And it's a great place to start. And certainly we get this question all the time, and I feel honored to be able to answer this type of question. I also want to help you think about this in different way, as we're actually answering the question too. So usually the reason that we're getting this question in the first place, and Jeff, you feel free to share if this is why you're asking as well is, people often can't see how their skills, experiences and strengths can transfer into another type of situation, role, industry, whatever else and that happens very often when you haven't been exposed to tons and tons and tons of different industries or whatever, so it's a lot easier for me to sit here where we've helped thousands of people in all different kinds of industries, be able to transition, you know, in all different kinds of roles, transition from one situation to another. And you start to realize that the vast majority of skills and experiences are transferable in one way.

Scott Anthony Barlow 30:27
Now, this is a gross oversimplification in the estimate that I'm about to give you. But I would estimate that for the people that we work with at least a good 60 plus percent of their skills and their experiences transfer over really, really well into just about anything that they would be interested in. So again, that's a really gross oversimplification, just for the sake of helping understand, but it's important to realize that it's not a case of whether they do or not, or whether you can merge it into certain types roles or not, it's a case of that, actually, your skills move way further than what you might realize. And we see this, interestingly enough, we see this really heavily in a few different industries. We see this with Attorneys that have only worked as Attorney capacity for a long period of time. And it's hard to imagine how they might utilize what feels like a really specialized set of skills in other areas, and we find that it's totally absolutely possible. And we see this with teachers as well, that's another area we see again and again. And there's a few other areas and industries where we see this even more commonly than others. And actually, Jeff, I might be mistaken, but I thought that you might have a little bit of background as a teacher as well, maybe I'm making that up. Okay, so how does this actually work? First of all, you know, as a project manager you're doing, I think you had told us, you're doing things like setting up meetings, managing spreadsheets, following up with people, those types of pieces, so it feels like that, that's all you're doing. However, something that project managers are often really amazing at, is priority management. And this is not all project managers necessarily. But this is one of the things I've seen with project managers again and again and again, like they have to get projects to close in one way or another. And because they have to get projects to a finished state, it isn't always about checking off all the things, every single thing in a perfect way. Often, it's about how can I get this to the finish state in the best possible way, which means that you're forced to prioritize a lot throughout the day. And the reason I'm using this as an example is because that's something I also find that project managers are not thinking about that they're great at. What other projects or what other positions utilize a high degree of prioritization in management? Well, certainly leadership roles, you know, Director level roles are something that require a massive ability to be able to prioritize and certainly a variety of other leadership roles do as well, if you're terrible at prioritization, then that means that everyone that works with you and for you are going to be bad at focusing in one way or another, at least not to the degree that that they can be. So, you know, that's just one example. But here's the way that we work with that. Often, we will begin to identify these as almost assets, what are the assets that you have? And what assets intersect with areas where you enjoy? And again, I would encourage you not to think about them as skills specifically, but instead say, what are the pieces or the contexts in which you enjoy that? That gives us clues as to what that destination, a new destination could be. Let me give you another example here. We work with a woman named Laura. And in Laura situation, she'd been in a few different roles, I think four different roles actually. And she found herself in a role where she is working with a team of people who most of the people are out actually pretty excited about what they were doing, but she was not. And she really didn't necessarily have the types of things that were really challenging her in the right ways to where she felt like she was growing. And it really became the same sort of situation that I think you're finding yourself in Jeff, as well, where you're feeling like you're doing a lot of things. But it doesn't necessarily feel you know, meaningful or doesn't necessarily feel more fulfilling or assign whatever word that you want to into that situation. So with her, you know, she had a lot of great strengths skills and experiences, we started looking with her at areas that she had at least a small degree of interest in. And what we began doing is we began helping her explore those areas in a way where she could quickly determine if they could be right for her. Now, this leads into actually one of the next success steps that everyone goes through to identify work that is really much more meaningful and fulfilling to them. We call this the experiment stage, or the design an experiment or test driving is how we refer to it internally. But the reason this is so important is after you go through and do all the work of defining what creates an amazing situation for you, what creates an amazing role, opportunity, career, you have done some amazing work. But at the end of the day, it's a educated guess, a really educated guess. But at the end of the day, it's still just a guess, right? So we have to validate and make sure that you're getting some measure of reassurance that you're heading the right direction before you go and make a change, and then find yourself in that new position or that new role or that new company. And then you're like, oh, my goodness, what did I do? The honeymoon period is now worn off. And I've realized that I didn't think about these 17 other things. That's no good. That's not good for you. It's certainly not good for the people that we work with. And instead, a way to avoid that from happening is designing a couple of small experiments to validate that you are in fact getting some assurance or road signs that you're heading the right direction. One of the ways that we did that for Laura, who I mentioned earlier, is we actually had her go and talk to, it sounds so simple, but we actually had her go and identify real people in the real world that were doing the types of positions or roles that she was interested in. She's really interested in innovation, she was really interested in product management was a place where she thought she could leverage her skills and interests. And she had two other areas too. So what we did is we had her be able to reach out and we gave her some scripts to be able to reach out to all these different people. And she ended up actually having about, you know, 35 different conversations from these reach outs, just really simple messages, messages like, she'd pick up the phone and say, "hey, I got your contact information from bla bla bla. And I was giving you a call because I am really interested in making a career change in the next few months and you work in innovation and that's one of the things that I'm wondering if could be right for me, I'm wondering if you might be willing to chat with me for, you know, 10 or 15 minutes at some point. And if I could ask you a few questions about, what you do? And what you love about it? What you don't love about it? And is that something you'd be willing to do? Like, really simple conversations like that. Doesn't mean that you're making a career change like this is simple, but we try and make it as least complex as possible, because that helps people continue to move forward, continue to get that information, because what Laura found was that innovation was not at all right for her. She talked to quite a few people in different roles and innovation type roles. And it was not at all right for her, she could have made that change. She was very capable of probably making that type of change, that type of switch, that type of pivot, but she would have gotten there and she would have realized this is not right for me. So we ended up saving her actually what I would say would be years because she has a very loyal person too. So she probably would have stuck it out for like two years or so and said, "okay, I made this commitment to this organization" and instead she realize that product management was absolutely right for her. And she ended up going back to an organization that she had talked to along the way and said, "you know what, I would love to work for this organization." So she called up the people that she'd already begun to build a relationship with and said, "hey, you know, I'd love to work with you in the future, under what circumstances could this be possible? And could we talk about it?" And she ended up interviewing for one role that they had open, they ended up modifying and slightly creating an additional role for her and ended up making her an offer, which she accepted about, I think it's like six, seven months later. So that's one way that it can happen, Jeff. I'm going into the details of some examples, just so you can see how this can work for you, as well. Because all of these steps, you know, going through and defining the destination and creating your ideal career profile and what makes up your ideal career, designing experiments and then determining what is the right plan for you to actually do the job search. All of those look different for each individual. And that's part of the reason why this is so flippin hard in many different ways, is because it is so vastly different for everyone. If this is not your first episode of the Happen To Your Career podcast, you've probably heard somebody on here that their first step to work that they absolutely love that fits their strengths, and they're excited about was going through our free eight day mini course to figure out what fits you. And we've had now well over 30,000 people have that as their beginning step to identify what they want in their lives and you can do the exact same thing. And if you're interested in that, it has some really amazing questions to get you started in becoming clear on what you want and what you need in your career. And it's a great way to kick it off and determine what is most important for you moving forward. You can learn what you're great at, so you can stop wasting time in your job and start working in your career. Even identify some of the internal blockages that are keeping you from fulfilling work and wealth and career success and begin narrowing down what you should be doing for work that's fulfilling to you. All you have to do is go to figureitout.co that's figureitout.co and get started today, enter your email and wallah, we'll send you the very first lesson. Head on over there, figureitout.co