In this episode of Strategic Counsel by ForthRight Business, the latest installment of The Power of Your Personal Brand Series is about how to figure out your Big Thing. Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and your other favorite podcast spots – follow and leave a 5-star review!
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The Power of Your Personal Brand Series: How to Figure Out Your Big Thing
We just launched our new book! You can grab The Power of Your Personal Brand: A Playbook for Struggling Middle Managers Who Want to Do Big Things on Amazon or at ForthRight-People.com
In the latest installment of The Power of Your Personal Brand Series, we’re talking about how to figure out your Big Thing. We define your Big Thing as being a goal, ambition, or whatever will help you feel fulfilled. A Big Thing can be difficult to contemplate, because we tend to confuse what we want for ourselves with what we want on behalf of others. Today, you’ll hear 5 big questions to ask yourself to help you figure out your Big Thing. Here’s a small sample of what you will hear in this episode:
- Don’t internalize others’ reactions
- What legacy do you want to leave?
- April giving up the big stage to get better at what actually lights her up
- Practical exercises for coaching clients who can’t yet answer the lights-you-up question
- Is your big thing actually yours or someone else’s definition?
And as always, if you need help in building your Strategic Counsel, don’t hesitate to reach out to us at: ForthRight-People.com.
Check out the episode, show notes, and transcript below:
Show Notes
- The Power of Your Personal Brand Series: How to Figure Out Your Big Thing
- [0:29] Welcome to Strategic Counsel by ForthRight Business
- [0:55] Why figuring out your Big Thing is harder than it sounds
- [1:23] You have permission to think about yourself first
- [1:50] Anne’s Tide Box moment, pushing back on hustle culture and “gifts don’t matter”
- [4:09] Everyone has gifts and ignoring them is leaving your competitive advantage on the table
- [4:36] Question 1: What do I want out of life for myself?
- [5:30] The “but” problem: why we constantly talk ourselves out of what we want
- [6:43] What happens when you show up as a dimmer version of yourself
- [8:06] Anne’s story leaving P&G to build her own thing and what she found on the other side
- [10:00] Be careful of the monsters you conjure
- [10:30] April’s identity tied to career, and the toddler who pushed her chin up
- [12:19] What April really wanted most: autonomy to do life on her own terms
- [14:32] Questioning your self-imposed assumptions about what success has to look like
- [16:28] Question 2: What do I think I am made for?
- [17:24] Coaching clients and the blind spot of thinking your gifts are just common knowledge
- [18:50] Stop over-investing in what you’re not good at and start doubling down on what you are
- [19:46] Anne’s jigsaw puzzle habit and how it became a strategic superpower
- [22:08] April’s gift is reading a room and the Enneagram 3 chameleon in action
- [25:21] The art of making people feel included without making it weird
- [26:44] Question 3: What is my calling?
- [27:40] The difference between your calling and what others expect your calling to be
- [29:33] Graphic design, a professor’s wake-up call, and the moment it clicked for April
- [31:30] Anne’s winding path through P&G and learning to ask “is this my calling?”
- [33:16] Is your big thing actually yours or someone else’s definition?
- [34:42] April’s realization: the execution wasn’t her calling, the people part was
- [36:07] Giving up the big stage to get better at what actually lights her up
- [37:31] Question 4: What lights me up and gets me energized?
- [38:29] Why fulfillment and joy are at the heart of finding your big thing
- [42:05] Practical exercises for coaching clients who can’t yet answer the lights-you-up question
- [44:47] What if you realize you’re in the wrong place entirely?
- [45:39] Anne’s build mentality and why P&G couldn’t contain it
- [46:32] Don’t internalize others’ reactions as something being wrong with you
- [48:54] Question 5: What legacy do I want to leave?
- [50:20] Why legacy overwhelms people and how to make it more approachable
- [51:48] April’s take: legacy doesn’t have to alter the world to matter
- [53:10] Anne’s daily gut check: if I got hit by a bus tomorrow, would I have regrets?
- [55:04] Recap of all five questions and why the big thing emerges when you sit with them
- [55:34] Talk it out loud, that’s often when the intuition kicks in
- Make sure to follow Strategic Counsel on your favorite podcast spot and leave us a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts
- Learn more at ForthRight-People.com and connect with us on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn
What is Strategic Counsel?
Welcome to Strategic Counsel by ForthRight Business! Prepare for honest, direct, and unconventional conversations on how to successfully lead and operate in business. Referred to by some listeners as an “MBA in podcast form,” this show is dense with personal stories, proven strategies contextualized by practical steps, and tools to put what you learn into action now.
Your hosts Anne Candido and April Martini are Co-Founders of ForthRight People, a leadership performance company focused on developing leaders from the inside out. They are also Authors of the book: The Power of Your Personal Brand: A Playbook for Struggling Middle Managers Who Want to Do Big Things. They thrive on engagement from listeners and welcome any show topics! So, reach out and connect!
Thanks for listening Strategic Counsel. Get in touch here to become more strategic.
Transcript
Please note: this transcript is not 100% accurate.
00:01
Welcome to the Strategic Counsel by Forthright Business podcast. If you’re looking for honest, direct and unconventional conversations on how to successfully lead and operate in business, you are in the right place. In our discussions, we push on the status quo and traditional modes of thinking to reveal a fresh perspective. This unlocks opportunity for you, your team and your business. Now let’s get to it.
00:29
Welcome to the Strategic Counsel podcast. I’m Anne Candido. And I am April Martini. And today we’re going to continue our series, The Power of Your Personal Brand. So this series is based on our new book, The Power of Your Personal Brand, a playbook for struggling middle managers who want to do big things. And today we’re going to talk about how to figure out your big thing. We define our big thing as being a goal, ambition, or whatever will help you feel fulfilled.
00:55
But a big thing can be difficult to contemplate because we tend to confuse what we want for ourselves with what we want on behalf of others. Yes, so first and foremost, for the purpose of this episode and this exercise, we give you permission to think about yourself. So often we see people pushing off their hopes and dreams for what’s best for others, often and mainly this is their family. Now we aren’t saying you shouldn’t consider others. Please hear me when I say that.
01:23
but your purpose on this earth is more than just providing for your family. You have special gifts that are meant to be shared. Not doing so is depriving yourself and the world of the gift of you. All right, before we jump in this episode, I have a very recent thing that I got to share and I to get in my tie box for. Oh, God. This is not in the script. It’s not in the script. It just happened this morning. OK, go. All right. I’m going to have to call out one of my.
01:50
favorite podcast, but it’s uh Max Salads by Ed Mylett, or maybe he calls it the Ed Mylett Show now. And he was, it was definitely a podcast episode where he was doing a keynote and he was speaking about the fact that basically gifts are irrelevant. Like it doesn’t matter what kind of gifts you have. You might not even have any gifts, but the most important thing is if you work hard, if you just do one more. And so, that’s going.
02:19
Yep. And this is his motto of doing one more. And I don’t disagree with the motto of doing one more. And that’s really just like taking it one step further. But the whole idea of that really just starts to ingrain itself into hustle culture. And the fact that, you if you just, you know, you work hard enough and you just put your nose down and you just continue to grind, grind, grind, grind, grind. That’s the most important thing. And it’s a very big just analogy from athletics in general. But what I want to say
02:49
is that everybody has gifts. somebody who says this has not taken the time to really become self-aware of the gifts that they have and being able to cultivate into the personal brand that really you can use as a competitive advantage. Because what that does is it drives the productivity and efficiency so you don’t have to grind and hustle and work to the point of burnout.
03:14
and expect them at all to work out. So like, I just don’t want people to think that, you know, they’re out working no gifts that they have. That’s not, I mean, that’s just, it just gets to me, April. It gets to me, it gets to me, it gets to me because everybody has gifts. They have things that they have been born with. have their experiences, their innate perspectives, their way that they see things. I mean, those are really, really important things that can be.
03:41
all merged together into a really beautiful recipe that people need to hear. People just need to experience those gifts of you. off my tide box, April, did you have anything to say about the tide box before I jump in? No, I mean, I totally agree. But like I said, I didn’t I didn’t see that coming. So here we are. Yeah, it just really got to me this morning. So as you know, in your intro and you’re talking about, you know, how important it is to share our gifts. Yeah. If you sit there saying, I don’t have any gifts, bullshit.
04:09
You definitely have gifts. All right. So that’s the other thing we want you to get from this as you’re thinking about your big thing. All right. So I guess we should jump into it then. I guess so. Here we go. Starting out spicy. Yes, we are. Okay. So we’re going to talk about how to figure out your big thing through this framework of the five big questions that we talk about in the book. And we’re going to go through each one and give you some context for each one of those questions. Okay.
04:36
So the first question is what I want out of life for myself. And this kind of goes back to what April was saying. And this is about being honest with what your personal ambitions, your personal feelings of what you want to accomplish in your time that you’re in this world. oh to recognize that it’s okay in your pursuit of wanting to serve others, even if that’s like a big core thing, a big core characteristic, you can benefit from that.
05:04
In fact, we call it a win-win situation when you benefit and others benefit in the process. That’s the coming together of what your characteristics and your purpose and your values and all of those things in order to realize a big thing that has meaning and fulfillment for you. But what I want you to do as you’re thinking about what your big thing is and what you’re thinking about the context of this question of what do I want out of life for myself, I want you to eliminate the but.
05:30
Right? Because this is what always happens, right? April, when we coach clients and everything, it’s, really want that promotion, but I really want to have my own business, but I really want to go on sabbatical and write a book, but. So April, what do you have to say about this one? Yeah. I mean, we have a lot of coaching clients who feel guilty because like we’ve talked about, they feel like they’re putting their needs in once.
05:56
ahead of others when we get into this conversation. And it’s a very big rub and they don’t really feel super comfortable doing that. And the reasons I think are noble, although if I go back to vision, one of our favorites, I would say that that’s a societal rule, which means a bullshit rule. Vision Lacciani, just so everybody knows. Yes, I can never say his last name. So thank you for doing that for me. But I think that it’s one of those things that has been ingrained in us that is not
06:27
necessarily true. And to build on what I said in the intro, the thing that I push back on here, and this is where the rub often stops and I kind of get the look of I’m like, oh, I’m starting to get get in there, they’re starting to hear what I’m saying.
06:43
is when I turn the statement on its head of being of service to everyone else and say, okay, well, what if I told you that if you shove down who you are and to Anne’s Tidebox at the beginning, what your gifts truly are and why you’re meant to be here, what if I tell you that you actually show up worse in general for everybody? Because you’re not actually being authentically who you are.
07:08
And so when we think about characteristics and behaviors and actions and really trying to go toward our big things, what we’re encouraging people to do is live authentically through their personal brand. And so when I make that statement and say, okay, fine, you think that you can’t go after what you want to do in life. And I hear that you need to show up for all these other people. When I say, okay, but then you’re going to be a shadow of yourself or a more frustrated version of yourself or disengaged all these different things.
07:38
That’s when I feel like people can really start to understand and ponder the question of what do I want out of life for myself? Because our belief is when you figure that out, you show up as the most authentic version of yourself. Yeah, I love that. I love that. I’m going to give an example of how this is hitting me. then April, I’ll look for you to give an example too. I’ve always been a builder. That is truly what I am at the heart and soul and in my core.
08:06
I spent 20 years at P &G, very corporate machine. That machine has been churning for a very long time. It is hard to be a builder at P &G unless you build based on the specifications that have already been given to you. And you guys know me well enough to know that that probably didn’t sit too well with me in my whole desire You don’t like being told what to do? And following somebody else’s playbook? I’m like, no, I’m not bust through that. I’m gonna change the way we think.
08:35
going to undo a hundred years of, know, yeah, that was all me, you know? And I made a decision to leave P &G to build my own thing, right? And I had the same conversation with myself, with my family of what was I compromising as a result? And I mean, these are very real feelings and discussions you have. like, okay, well, you know, my salary isn’t going to be predictable. We’re not going to be able to go on big vacations. Oh, how am I family going to feel about that?
09:03
Yeah, similar, like just dilemmas that you’re going through and you feel a lot of guilt about that. When I actually got into this and I left P &G, you don’t kind of understand what the other side is going to look like until you get to the other side. And so one of the big things that I realized one day was I was driving my daughter to soccer practice and I was like, I’ve never gotten to drive my daughter to soccer practice before. And not that we all want to drive our kids to sports, but like
09:30
It was a time I had her undivided attention that I got to talk to her for like the 20 minutes that we went to soccer practice. And I’m like, I found out like that was time that she actually treasured as well. They never would have had if I didn’t stay, if I had stayed at P and G in my normal schedule. And so I say that just to know like, you don’t know what the other side is necessarily going to look like. My kids didn’t care about not going on big vacations. So the thing that I was worried about ended up not even being a reality.
10:00
So be careful of what you start to conjure in your brain because you kind of create this monster of these potential worries or outcomes may or may not even actually be true. Yeah. And I’ll share obviously my story as well, which I feel like I’ve talked about this multiple times before on here, but through the lens of what do I want out of life for myself? I don’t think I’ve made it a secret that for a long time I didn’t think that I wanted kids and then I turned 30 and I wanted kids.
10:30
And then I had Sam. And I had always tied a tremendous amount of my identity to my job, how I showed up at my job, what my career progression was and how fast the money I made as a result of that, all of that stuff. And I started to experience these moments probably around the time that he was, I don’t know, 18 months old or so.
10:59
where there was this rub of, was frustrated that I didn’t feel like I was showing up the way I wanted to in these instances. And I’ve given this instance before of looking back now, it’s easy to see it, but it was like 9 p.m. on a Friday night, Bryce was on an international flight coming home from wherever he was, and I was.
11:24
getting these calls because our account supervisor who had the details that the client wanted was on a plane. But even though we were trying to say that, we were still trying to placate and figure out what to do. Right. And it was pizza. And so I’m trying to be a mom and give him a bath. OK, that but that that buys me eight minutes. Although, of course, I have to sit there with him. Right. Until he toddled over and pushed my chin up and said, Mama, look. And it was like one of those.
11:53
just moments that sits in my head, right? And so I had defined what I wanted out of life before that moment to look very professionally focused, career first, all of those things. And I still am very much those things. Mm-hmm, a thousand percent. But I started to realize that my main motivation or my way of doing it didn’t look the same anymore.
12:19
And so then it just was like moment after moment after moment. And I kept having this conversation with people of how I wanted my life to flow in and out of itself. And I didn’t want to be professional April and personal April. And what that ultimately meant was I wanted autonomy to do things the way I wanted to do them when I wanted to do them. So even though I was at a company that
12:42
promoted flexibility and working moms and never complained when I had to go to a doctor’s appointment or wanted to have an afternoon with Sam or whatever other things I wanted to do personally, even outside of being a mom. I didn’t want to show up for nine hours of meetings on most days and I didn’t want my schedule dictated by clients and I didn’t want to be pulled in a million different directions and I didn’t want to feel anymore like I was.
13:06
racing off to work to sit through the nine hours of meeting to be chased down the halls by people to answer questions to just race home again and then get on my computer two hours later. By the way, a lot of this was self-imposed. I wanted it to feel the way I wanted it to feel. And now I’m constantly making the statement to people that God help anyone who would ever have to be my boss again in this life. From so far away from that, I was bad at taking orders on a good day back then. Now there’s just no way that will go well.
13:36
And I just realized that for me, the thing that I want most out of life for myself is autonomy. I want to do this life the way I want to do it. And I want to do the things I want to do when I want to do them. And I don’t want anybody telling me any different. And of course I honor our clients. I honor my relationship with Ann or if she would tell me if I did not, but it’s, just those moments of like, I don’t want to have to give any extra thought when I want to volunteer at this kid’s school. I don’t want to give any extra thought.
14:03
to when I wanna go be with a client for a four hour session and be available for that. I wanna just do it the way that I wanna do it that works best for me. That’s a great example as well. And I want to rewind to the part where April said self-imposed because a lot of what we create around this question feels like something that we have to do or it’s just the way things are or it’s needed in order to.
14:32
you know, blah, blah, achieve whatever we put out in front of us. This is your opportunity to question all those assumptions and see if that is reality or if those are just things that you have imposed in your brain as being what you think they need to be in order to achieve whatever these big things are that you put in place. Because a lot of times we self-sabotage or we undermine
15:01
what it actually looks like, that journey actually looks like, because we have dictated it based on what others have modeled or what others say it’s supposed to be, and we don’t honor ourselves. So I think when you said self-impose, I just want people to recognize when you can acknowledge that, you can start to question some things, you can start to shift some things around and create space. Well, and I’ll just build on that really quickly. I did have people who questioned my decision, right?
15:30
I have some friends that are still in corporate environments that are like, what in the hell are you thinking? What are you doing? And I had to look at that and say, thank you for the advice. we’re like, I had to internalize it objectively and say, we are built very differently. And the crux of what they want out of life is not the same as me. Same thing for my family. I had this big story in my head that I was going to tell Bryce and my, you know, very successful family. I was going to leave this again, the things that I put in my head.
15:59
the title, the money, all those things, right? That I fit in this nice, neat little box and it looked really good on paper and I was gonna tell everybody and they were gonna also say, what in the hell are you thinking? Nobody even blinked an eye. They were like, yeah, we figured that would probably happen at some point. That was it. Flip on the radar. Flip on the radar. Yep. So own your own story. All right, so the second question, what do I think I am made for?
16:28
At the root of this question is what value we believe we have that can generate impact. And this really requires us to get in touch with our talents and our gifts. Like I said, we all have them. We just maybe haven’t acknowledged them or we haven’t really become aware of them. But what it usually tends to be is something that we underestimate as being easy. Like, I don’t know how many times we’ve heard this from folks, right, April, where they’re like, well, doesn’t everybody think like that?
16:57
Or doesn’t everybody do it like that? Or I just thought this was just like common knowledge, right? A lot of times when you think like that, that is actually not true. So hone in on those things that you believe are just easy for you because those are probably gifts and talents that you can leverage. You know, this is, if I put my coaching hat on for a minute, this is one of the big ones that I’m constantly reinforcing and working on with people associated with gifts.
17:24
And like, I’ll never forget, like it can be things big and small, right? I was with one client and she was having a really hard time and a big block with how she was going to create content because she was going out on her own, right? And she’d finally decided that that’s what she was made for. And so I was talking to her about what she had done recently, right? And she listed off five or six things like running, ah uh, writing the agendas for meetings, uh, facilitating sessions, one-on-one.
17:53
coaching kind of similar to us, but in a different sort of sphere. And I was like, okay, so what if you just write posts about your perspective and how you do those things? And she was like, well, that would be boring because everyone can do those things. And I was like, that’s not true because that client wouldn’t have hired you if everyone could do those things, right? And the other side of this is that, you know, that part speaks to the blind spots and the things that Ann said, like we don’t recognize in ourselves as gifts. But the other thing people do is they focus too much on the things that they
18:22
don’t inherently do well and trying to clean up or fix those things. And so we, you you’ve heard us say million times, characteristics are not good or bad. So I’m not gonna say that you shouldn’t work on things you aren’t good at or things that are inherently just part of you. That’s not true. I actually think that there’s a noble cause to trying to do that, to learn things, to explore, you know, try out new things, to see different perspectives. There is a role for that. However,
18:50
If you’re trying to think of what you’re really made for, it works against you to focus all your time on things that are hard that you’re not good at and also things that aren’t serving you, right? And so I feel like if you can kind of almost buck it, what am I really good at? Think through those things and it’s a good place to compare with others. Like where do I show up or what do people ask me to do? All those types of things.
19:17
and then kind of put to bed the things that you’re like, I’ve taken a run on that 12 times and I’m not good at that. For me, it was PMing projects. I was like, I cannot get in those weeds. I can’t do it, right? It was part of my role sometimes, hated it. Finally had to be like, yep, really not good at that thing. So there you go. Yeah, I think that’s great. And I think also it could be just things that you like to do. Yeah. Yeah. Things that you’d like to do. Yeah. And usually, I mean, somebody’s like,
19:46
You get a lot of joy out of. So for example, I love to do jigsaw puzzles. The harder, the better. I think I’ve told you guys this before. I don’t do the border first, like a lot of people. I color block everything and I don’t look at the lid. So I just do the whole puzzle by color block until it starts to emerge into something that has physical form. And then from there, you know, it goes, but like the very first initial part of doing the puzzle like that is very slow.
20:15
very slow. So it involves having patience and involves really a lot of trial and error, but those things build skills. And so now when I think about puzzles and problem solving and finding themes and trying to like see the tangibleness and a bunch of like disparate or messy pieces, if you will, that has become a big skill that I now transferred over to strategic action planning.
20:42
Right? So when I do my gift in strategic action planning is I can take that messiness, the disparate parts and distill it down into something that has some tangibleness that people can then react to. And because I kind of still pattern block what they’re doing, I can make connections that are non-obvious that they don’t see because
21:10
they’re working from a border and then working from like that outside in and I’m working from the inside out. So I have a break a different perspective, a fresh perspective, I see it differently and that has had a tremendous amount of value. And that is started from the standpoint and I’ve honed it and trained it by doing jigsaw puzzles. Yeah, well, and we do share this, although I don’t, I still, I’ve always said I don’t know how Ann does jigsaw puzzles without any sort of reference point.
21:40
I’m sure it’s no shock to anyone that I like to do the border first because duh, that makes the most sense and it’s the fastest. But I’m currently doing Starry Starry Night, which is one of Anne’s puzzles. And I don’t know how you did that one without any sort of wrap. All the pieces look the same. They all look the same. But the interesting thing is when you start to see him, like you really look at him, you start to see the nuances that start to put him into categories.
22:08
And then you you change your brain to see it differently. Yeah, no. And I mean, I make that joke, but I do see that. But that’s not the one I’m going to talk about, because you I hear the ways in which we are similar. I just had to had to point that out. But so I’ve also talked about a lot in the past year. I found out, you know, that I’m a three, not an eight, which is good for our business, because as we’ve learned to eights running a business might be a terrible experience. But I am an Enneagram three. And as part of that, I can be a chameleon now.
22:37
I’m sure some of you are gonna hear that and be like, no, you don’t. You always say what you mean and mean what you say and you’re very direct. That’s true. But the chameleon part comes in and the ability to take people in and read them very quickly and know how to get them to hear what I have to say, which is part of the reason I love and feel like I’m pretty good at being a coach, right? I always say to people, I could say the right thing all day long.
23:06
If they can’t hear the message in the way I’m saying it, I’m not doing my job. And to speak to the point about the blind spot and not always recognizing this about myself, when I was leaning into the part of the three early on in my career and just hard charging, I was leaving everybody behind. But I was also ignoring the fact that
23:26
I was often the youngest person in a lot of these rooms. Agencies love to take people that’ll work themselves to death and the carrot and the reward is you can be in the senior leadership room. You can go on new business calls. You can do all these things, right? But as the youngest person in the room, I can’t tell you the amount of times that the meeting would be happening or the presentation or the new business pitch, but there would be this subcontext, right? And it had to do with the people in the room. We would…
23:55
these meetings or pitches or presentations and everyone would high five and be like, that was amazing. That was so good. And I would be like, were we in the same meeting? That person was checking their phone. That person got up and left. I saw the eye contact between those two. The person on our team’s not happy that we signed up for that, right? Like all these subtexts of the way that people operate were actually not seen to the point where sometimes I was like,
24:25
I think I might be crazy. As I got further in my career, I realized that was one of those gifts that I just had. And then when I learned that I was a three and that I could use that or was using that already, quite frankly, to help people hear things or see things or understand things, it was like these light bulb moments, right, of identifying those things. And so now I will say that’s one of my gifts and I am made for utilizing that to help coach people
24:54
to see those things or to understand if they see those things what they are in order to be better at what they’re doing in their career. I have to like totally acknowledge the fact that you are extremely good at that. The thing that resonates with me to add to that is you do a really good job of making sure everybody is, I’ll say included, but
25:21
I’ll contextualize this and this is why I think you’re really good organizational development too. So I just remember one instance, we were, think doing happy hour. It was a bunch of people I had met and I’ve seen you do this with others too. And they were talking and you knew, I obviously I didn’t know what they were talking about. And you’re just kind of, you kind of like reach over and like, she has this and that and that and they’re talking about this. Just so I knew what was going on and I wasn’t sitting there like wondering what the hell the conversation was about and how to sit out.
25:48
and just be like, well, okay, I’m just going to let them talk even though I have, you I don’t have any idea. So you wanted to make sure I was included in the conversation and you knew that I didn’t have any context for what was being talked about. So, and I’ve seen you do that with other people too. And it’s not the super awkward of like, oh, you worked at PNG and you worked at PNG. must have like, you know, you know common people and hear talk, you know, that’s not like that. It’s like,
26:14
much more intentional, want this person to feel included in the conversation we’re having and they obviously don’t have any context for the conversation that’s being having. Well, I appreciate that. Yeah. I don’t remember that but… That was when we were with Gina, Jill and Jenny. Oh, I do remember that but I don’t remember doing that but… you did. So natural, you just think it’s such a natural thing and like doesn’t everybody do that? No, but not everybody does do that. Well, that speaks to the blind spot too, right? Right.
26:44
But thank you. That was a nice compliment. You’re welcome. I have to balance them out from when I call you out and then I have to give you props. So don’t me back up again. Yeah, I think I’m about even. So just be prepared for the other side to come. Oh, good. With that question three is what is my calling? So this is similar to what do I think I’m made for? But.
27:12
Ask from a little bit of a different angle because a lot of times this can be a really fantastic filtering question when you ask it in a slightly different way, is instead of what is my calling is you ask it in the context of is this my calling or the other side of that coin is or is what others expect of me my calling, right? Because how many times have we…
27:40
When we were sitting there as uh aspiring college students, and I’m guilty of this too, we told our kids, well, you would make a good doctor, you would make a good teacher, you would make a good, whatever we contextualize at the time as being our kids’ talents and how much we were investing in college and what we wanted them to be in order to be productive human beings. So a lot of times we get stuck in those.
28:08
And we think that that is what our calling is. Or we want to be what we’ve seen others model. So if we want to be, you we had good parents, we want to be good parents. If we see, you know, maybe our parents weren’t so good parents, we want to be better parents, right? So these things kind of get in our head and they start to kind of take root. But what happens is we can continue to kind of filter through, is this my calling? Is this my calling? What?
28:37
it happens is that a voice will tell you yes or no. And if you listen to that voice, if you’re really honest about that voice, if that voice says no, a lot of times it’ll say, I want to be doing this, or I wish it was more like this, or this would make me happier. But we tend to ignore that because we get so stuck a lot of times in duty. And duty being, this is what I’m expected to do.
29:04
or this is what somebody else expects me to do, or this is what being a good mom looks like, this is what being a good employee looks like, a good wife looks like. So, April, your thoughts. Yeah, and I mean, I think one of the things too is to make sure that you keep this as a regular question because it can change over time. And yes, I absolutely agree with asking the question, listening to the voice, making sure that you really make that a practice.
29:33
because I think this is where this can feed into, again, other people’s agendas. I love this setup of, it what other people expect my calling to be, right? A little anecdote that just pops into my head here. I know we’re gonna get into our examples, but I will say my parents were really good about not imposing what we should be, but this popped into my head when you were saying that, Anne. I always vacillated between creative and
30:02
more structured things. So for me, when I was going to college, it was, do I want to be a graphic designer at DAP at UC or do I want to be a lawyer? Those are pretty different things, right? And my parents were great about, they didn’t care what any of us were, but we would do whatever we were going to do with excellence. And so I got into DAP. was lukewarm at best because I wanted to leave Cincinnati. When it’s the second best program in the country, you just move to campus and pretend you’re gone, right? But I will never forget.
30:32
I was halfway through the program and it was hard. I tried different co-ops, I tried different cities, I tried different types of classes, I tried everything. And I was in this one class that I thought I was gonna love and the professor was pissed at all of us that day and stood up and said, if you do not eat, drink, breathe and sleep design, you do not belong in this program. And it was not meant to be freeing, right? And I was just like, oh my God, he’s so right.
31:02
And it was one of those moments where I was like, this is definitely not what I’m called to do. Now I’m still, you know, that profession fueled a lot of my years, whatever, but it was one of those moments to say, I thought this was my calling. I don’t know how easy it is to say what you’re calling is at 19, 20 years old, but I really believed it. And that moment was one of those clarifying moments where I was like, this is definitely not what I’m made for.
31:30
Yeah, I mean, I’ve had several of those too. mean, within my span of P &G, I think I went from packaging to products research to corporate to brand. And those last two being in within public relations, external relations, but in very different areas of that in a 20 year career, virtually unheard of. Yep.
31:53
But it’s because I kept asking myself that question about my calling and the really important thing, and I talked about this in the Dr. Rebecca episode too, is teasing out the big thing I had put in my head from the calling. So I talked about how I really, really wanted this promotion and I was heads down just driving for this promotion in R &D and all of a sudden I looked up and I asked, basically, is this my calling? And I looked at the job of my boss, which was what I was aspiring to be and I’m like,
32:23
I don’t want that job. Yeah. That is not my calling. That is not going to make me happy. That is not going to make me fulfilled. I will feel good that I’ve achieved a milestone that is important to me, but I am not going to be happy in that. That is not my calling. And so it is really important to kind of listen to yourself because we do get wrapped up in the process, right? Of what the expectations are for climbing the corporate ladder, for being successful.
32:52
for feeling like we’re making a difference, for feeling significant. And a lot of times those are not our definitions, right? A lot of times those are other people’s definitions. And so is this a really important question to dial back and really like peel back the layers and say, okay, is what I put in front of me, this goal, this big thing, is it a…
33:16
something I really want and why do I want that? And be curious about what you want it for because a lot of times that is wrapped up in your calling, but you’ve articulated it in a way or that you’ve made it tangible. Like I was talking about the puzzle in a way that may not be aligned with what your calling is. Yeah. I mean, absolutely. you know, to kind of continue that thread, I finished out DAP, went and got my MBA right after don’t recommend ever going from a creative degree to a
33:46
truncated of all things, accelerated MBA program. But there was a moment in there too where I was like, oh, I’m not meant to just go do quote unquote business, right, or marketing. And so then re-entered the creative field. And the question that a lot of you have heard me say I would ask myself over the years is what’s next? And I think a lot of times that was trying to get myself to my calling. However,
34:12
There have been breakthroughs since then that have kind of broken some beliefs that I had about myself too, right? So I got really good at the strategic pieces of the work that we did at agencies. And we get a lot of credit and a lot of accolades and a lot of opportunities, quite frankly, for being really good at that work. Well, then a couple of years ago, after I’d lost Brand Stories to Ann for I don’t know how many times in a row,
34:42
I had to concede the fact that the work was not my true calling. The execution of the work was not my true calling. When I look back, I see other signs of that throughout the course of my career. And I’m not a person that looks back and says, oh, I should have done that sooner. I should have done that differently. I believe we learned from all of these different things, right? But there’s evidence where
35:08
I would hand off the work and I became a far better boss or a far better connection with the client, right? I was able to focus on my relationship with the client, which the relationship and people part is what I was always meant to do, conceding to Anne or anyone, quite frankly, because I’m hyper competitive, but also having to shed things in order to come to the realization of what I’m truly meant to do is an interesting and sometimes really hard exercise.
35:37
I one of the other moments I remember about this is a few years ago, I got up on stage and spoke in front of, I don’t know, 400 people at a Northern Kentucky event. And I used to love those big stages. And afterward, Ann gave me the feedback of like, you did great, but you didn’t feel like yourself. And as I kind of worked through that, and again, through this question of what is my calling, I realized I kind of wanted to give up the big stage performance side of all that agency work.
36:07
and get really good at being smaller groups, one-on-one, okay, maybe a group of 30 people, but not hundreds on a stage because I’m not able to make that connection that is my calling that I’m good at. However, that’s hard to swallow when a lot of your career was built on that. you, I mean, it fed a lot of that dopamine for me of being able to get up and do that. And it was part of my identity. So I don’t know, just trying to offer some nuances here of
36:36
going back to this is something that can change over time, or maybe it doesn’t change, it just takes longer to get closer to it. So to continue to ask yourself, and for me, it became finally an exercise of what actually lights me up? What are the things that I do that I feel inherently so proud of? And it has nothing to do with any of the shininess, the…
37:02
a lot of people seeing it, what are those things? And that’s what’s led me to, I actually really love having an impact on people’s careers. Well, interestingly enough, that’s question number four. Oh, sorry. Ah, preempted. It’s like it’s not like you don’t know what the questions are. I know I get going. I know, it’s great. It was a great segue. I have plenty more things to say here. I’m sure you do. I’m sure you do. Or I’ll get shut down, which is where that compliment will get paid off. I’m like, OK, April enough.
37:31
No, I mean, I bet I think what you’re saying is tons of value. So please keep talking until I tell you can’t talk anymore. Yeah, exactly. I know my role. Well, as April mentioned, question number four is what lights me up and gets me energized? And you can obviously see what lights up April and gets her energized, which is what we want you guys to feel as a result of this question, because we don’t
38:00
ask ourselves this very often. And again, it goes back to that D word, which is duty. We defer what lights us up and energizes us in exchange for duty. We’re doing what needs to be done based on whatever the external forces have told us is this is how it’s defined. This is how you do it. And this is another place where we tend to compromise a lot for the greater good that we’re trying to support. And we don’t think about and be curious as to why.
38:29
Why is this not lighting me up or energizing me? What would light me up or energize me? And it’s so important to get in touch with this because at the root of this is where are you gonna find that fulfillment and joy. Remember, that’s the other part of the big thing. A big thing is a goal or a dream that we believe is gonna bring us fulfillment and joy, right? So this is at the heart of it. And this is where everything kind of intersects in order to make sure that your big thing feels aligned with your personal brand, feels aligned with you.
38:57
Right? And so as April was to giving her example before, it struck me that I have a very similar example. So obviously I’m an eight and an eight can tend to be a bit controlling, but that was my way of being able to manage my P and G world because the P and G world can be very chaotic. Um, if you don’t, if it can be very chaotic, mean, that’s just, there’s a period at the end of that sentence. Okay. And so.
39:22
my eightness solved that by wanting control over the situation because I felt like if I had control of the situation, then I could do the way that I would want to do it. Cause at the heart of that, I was a creative, but there were so many layers above that, that it was so hard to be able to expose what I thought I was really good at and creative being a lot of, and from a word standpoint, I can draw, I’m actually,
39:48
taken some lessons, but I can’t beat April’s chalk art. April has me on chalk art. Apparently that’s one of my gifts. Anne talks about that frequently. She does. I really hit her, man, with that code of chalk It super impressive. Super impressive. I mean, you have like a side hustle if you need it. But for me, it’s words. I’m good at words. I’m good at putting words together in order to…
40:12
really drive whatever that execution is. I have a good at being able to visionarily uh outline that and then kind of put a path up into that. And so like, as April said, like brand stories, writing in general, content creation, news of the things that light me up, developing campaign themes and all the aspects and all the marketing around that, being able to kind of have that and develop that exposure that really.
40:39
lights people up, that really energizes them, that really drives impact. That’s the things I really love to do. And that’s what I was really struggling to try to expose within my world at P &G. And so my whole goal of trying to be able to then unveil that was try to control my situation, which actually fed into me and April’s business because I just felt like, oh, I just like control. I mean, I’m an aunt, I like control.
41:06
And then when her and I are both having that conversation between an eight and a three, which you can imagine how that went. Cause April as a three does like control as well. I’m like, you know what? I can give up control, especially since I trust April. Like there was no reason not to. mean, she’s highly capable. like, what if I just gave up that control of what it needs to look like and I can create content. And that’s been my ideal space. That’s been my happy space. That’s where I find flow. That’s where I feel like I’m.
41:35
generating impact and then from that teaching it. Teaching what I create. Exposing that to folks and helping them see how they can leverage their own creative nature in order to move them forward. So April, your thoughts? Well, I sort of answered already the part about what lights me up. So I got on one, but so I’ll look at this through the lens of how we approach this lights you up and gets you energized with coaching clients and
42:05
And something you just said about shedding or maybe that’s the word I used before, I don’t know. But I think the step that comes before shedding for people is even to start internalizing the fact that they’re allowed to ask themselves this question in particular, and that it’s important, especially when it comes from a professional side. So.
42:30
Not to say it’s not important personally, because what I think happens and what I was talking about before of like, well, what if you’re showing up as a dimmer version of yourself is often kind of how I think about it, right? Like I’m not lit up and I’m not like when you’re showing up that way, this is one of those questions that stops people because it’s not inherently how they think about their job and what they do. And so,
42:56
I start with exercises with clients that are really actually pretty granular, but very telling. They’ll look something like, okay, we can’t answer that lights you up question yet. Let’s start with this week, I want you to spend five minutes at the end of every day, five minutes at end of the week for five weeks, however long, whatever makes sense for them. And I want you to jot down three to five areas where you showed up well and three to five areas when you didn’t.
43:24
And then that will evolve to, want you to take a temperature check at the end of each day about how you’re feeling, and then jot down what happened in that day, three to five things that happened in that day. And what we’re starting to look for when we do exercises like that is patterns. First and foremost, it’s kind of like shaking people out of the, this is my job, this is what’s expected of my job, this is how I do my job.
43:52
to start to progress toward, well, am I being utilized well in this job? What’s my big thing that I wanna do? Well, okay. And then these other questions, right? But I think the light up one is hard because I think people fundamentally don’t always believe that they should light up at work. It’s like, um the job, right? This is my job.
44:21
This is what I do. What do you mean light up at work? But this is one that when we spend time with these people and it same goes for the organization, like as a team, where do you guys show up best? Like same questions apply, right? Who do you want to be on your best day? All of those types of things. This is one that I love because you can start to see when people start to recognize the patterns and then they’re like, you’re telling me that I can actually enjoy what I do.
44:47
that I can choose to not do these things, that I can say for my big thing, I’m gonna go and not do these anymore and do these, right? It’s just, I don’t know, it just hits people really differently than some of these other questions. And it’s hard to even internalize being lit up professionally. I think that is such a great point. I also want to just elaborate on that a little bit because
45:13
What sometimes tends to happen is that you will get shut down pretty quickly by others as a result, right? Oh yeah, that’s the other side of conversation. Don’t go all in on day one. It’s also just recognizing that what lights you up, and you said this before April, what lights you up may not be, it may be a good recognition of the fact that you might be in the wrong place. Oh yeah.
45:39
Right, I that’s what I found too, is like I said, I wanted to build. That was the thing. I was not going to be able to build in P &G in the way that I wanted to build. It wasn’t appreciated, like it wasn’t valued. It just wasn’t the right time. just, but I inherently believed that that was my calling. That was what I was made for and I was going to go build. And a bunch of people, like you said, when you were trying to pivot to told me I was crazy.
46:07
Yeah. You know, and so it’s okay to be a little crazy sometimes, right? It doesn’t mean we’re going to be like going off the rails and, you doing things that are irresponsible, but it does kind of give you be like, oh, I can’t build here. That’s what these people are telling me. And so don’t let people don’t internalize people’s reactions as there being something wrong with you. Yeah.
46:32
Okay, so I think that’s a really important point as you’re starting to test this out because a lot of people are like, oh, well, I tried, you know, doing something that I liked that worked and people didn’t like it. That could happen. That doesn’t mean that that’s not what’s right for you. It just may not be the right context environment organization in order to support that. And that is just a moment to be curious about, well, okay, I get that that’s how, you know, this this one in is reacting to it. So that brings another question of
47:01
Is that something that I can adapt to or that they will adapt to me or am I in the right place or the wrong place? Or maybe this is a side hustle that I go and find another outlet for or another organization in order to feed that. So it just brings up curiosity. Don’t let it dampen and don’t let it just stifle what lights you up.
47:27
people have good intentions, but they’re not always the best intentions. Well, and I think the biggest thing is if it isn’t the right fit, isn’t the right fit. Right? Like, I feel like the to your point about intentions, and that’s the other thing that we talk about on the other side is if you truly find something that lights you up and you’re excited and the response dims the response, that’s where you have to start questioning.
47:57
Right. Right. Because they could be perfectly good people. They could be high producers. The organization could be doing all the things. It just might not be the place that is your match to embrace what you’ve identified lights you up. But there is always a place for that. Right. A thousand percent. A thousand percent. All right. The fifth question, which April didn’t preempt this time.
48:24
No, didn’t. I was very careful. I kept reading it to myself before I spoke. But I mean, well, on tentative purposes, you can see that these questions have a common theme, right? So it’s very easy for one to bleed into the other. Well, and you might, I mean, you just might jive with more, right? Like we’re trying to get to the same thing, figure out your big thing. I think some of the ways to it, different ways of, yeah, different shades, different ways in of making sure that people are clear on what a big thing is and then identifying yours based on what resonates most.
48:54
Yeah, 1000%. So the fifth question is what legacy do I want to leave? Now, this feels like a very big question and a question you ask when you’re older, you’re getting ready to retire, but by that time it’s a little late, right? So the best time to ask this question is early and often because what it helps us do is it helps us to structure our lives around what’s going to be really important for us that we want to leave behind. What do we want our legacy to be?
49:23
Now, I don’t want this to be overwhelming. This doesn’t mean you have to define like your life’s work when you’re 20 because, I mean, it’s going to change, it’s going to morph, but it does help guide you and it helps you to refine and make good choices and drive some clarity around how you want your life to progress. So for example, if your legacy is to want to leave the world a better place, right? That’s a very…
49:52
big overarching legacy, but as you’re kind of making choices along the way, you can start using that legacy as a filter of is this going to enable me to leave the world a better place? Yep. Right. So it just helps to provide a guide for the choices that you’re making as you’re on your journey and you’re defining your big things. Yeah. And I think your point about asking it early and often is really important.
50:20
because some of the work we do is, are the people that are closer to on the way out and trying to define it later, I think is a lot harder than when you’ve been doing the work intentionally along the way. But I also think, you know, a lot of our clients, all of our coaching clients have at least 12 years and then up from there, right? Just because we feel like we’re better positioned and remember.
50:50
from that span of our career versus trying to coach someone brand new. But in any case, I think when you bring up the word legacy, people get overwhelmed really quickly. But I think if you can have this even in the back of your mind or again, going to this exercises I talked about before, when you realize really why you’re here and what your calling is,
51:19
and what you get excited about and what lights you up and all the other questions that have led to this one, your legacy doesn’t have to be something where the whole world remembers you, right? And I think people see that word and they’re like, ugh, I have no idea. But I have these moments with myself where I’m like, isn’t it so cool that this body of podcast episodes will live long beyond me and my kids and grandkids and…
51:48
you know, people can listen on and on and on. And then I think about the business implications and how we’ve tried to create evergreen content. Right. And so to me, part of my legacy is the work we’ve done on this podcast. But I’m I would be remiss if I was like, oh, this is going to be what is someday going to be the number one podcast? Don’t get me wrong. But, know, like I it doesn’t have my point is it doesn’t have to be something that alters the world.
52:15
It can still be an important legacy. just has to be whatever is really truly meaningful to you and who you are and the big things you want to achieve. love that. You’re right. It is a legacy. Although I think about, you know, how we’ve had to transform the way that we record and listen to things like now we’re like recording on Zoom and it’ll be some sort of digital file. This is going to probably be like our grandkids like record tape.
52:43
they’re gonna have to figure out how to like translate this into whatever their medium is gonna be important then. So that just kind of clicked in my brain as a funny but I think just to build on what you’re saying, what I would add is what legacy can be what you’re leaving behind as you said April, it’s worth respect to what is there once you’re gone, right? But it’s also on how people remember you.
53:10
Right? It’s also in the kind of life that you lived. so I always, and it sounds a little bit morbid, but it’s kind of like, you know, from a day to day check for myself is if I got run over by a bus tomorrow, my life was over and I was standing, you know, for me, you know, St. Peter, the pearly greats, the road ever. And he asked me, how do you feel about how you lived? I want to be able to say that I had no regrets.
53:35
I want to be able to say I live my life to the fullest. I live my life according to my plan. I live my, I feel like I did right by the people that were important to me. Like whatever that is for you, that’s, uh I’m articulating what’s right for me. I’m not trying to articulate what’s right for you, but I want to be able to say I have no regrets. Right? And so think about your legacy from that standpoint too, like on a daily basis and that becomes kind of
54:03
your mantra by which you live by, the values by which you’re going to really hone in on and hold true for yourself. That’s also part of your legacy. So that’s another piece I wanted just to build. Well, yeah, my last build there, like on a more regular basis is I’m always like, can you sleep at night with the way you’ve behaved? not that I ask that every single night, but if I’m like,
54:34
Because like you, I’m like, I want to show up authentically and respectfully of everybody in my life that I care about. And if I don’t do that, how am going to fix it? And if I did do that, then I sleep well at night. Because it’s a reflection of your personal brand. 100%. Right. Yep. All right. So there’s the five questions. So just to review, what I want out of life for myself, what do I think I am made for?
55:04
What is my calling? What lights me up and gets me energized? What legacy do I want to leave? Now you’re probably sitting there going, okay, how does that answer my big thing? We didn’t give you like a specific worksheet or a process or, and that’s by design. Cause what we know, and we’ve done this a lot, is when you sit with these questions and you leave yourself open to the responses, the big thing emerges. And it is an actual big thing.
55:34
Yeah, and it just usually kind of pops. And sometimes, as April said, the big thing is short term. Sometimes the big thing is long term. And sometimes these things will emerge on their own and they’ll evolve on their own as you start to get into your journey. sit with them, journal them, process them, keep them in the back of your mind. We always find it’s really better when you talk to somebody about them, because when you’re processing and you’re putting voice to it,
56:02
A lot of times that’s when sometimes the intuition kicks in and you’re like, oh, that’s it. That’s it. So people are not going to think you’re crazy. Just ask for permission to kind of process out loud, but it is a really important point. So Gratuitous Plug for the Book is available on Amazon. Go get it. Again, it’s the power of your personal brand, a playbook for struggling middle managers who want to do big things.
56:29
It’s also linkable from our website so you can find it there. And with that, we encourage you all to take at least one powerful insight you heard and put into practice. Cause remember strategic counsel is only effective if you put it into action. Did we spark something with this episode that you want to talk about further? Reach out to us through our website, ForthRight-People.com. We can help you customize what you have heard to move your business and make sure to follow or subscribe to Strategic Counsel on your favorite podcast platform!