#176: Achieving Clarity For a Successful Career Pivot with Tracy Timm

Welcome to The Conscious Pivot Podcast with international speaker, business mentor, bestselling author of Pivot, and your host, Adam Markel. The Conscious Pivot shares the stories and wisdom of people who have successfully reinvented some area of their business and personal life. You'll gain powerful insights into how you can fully embrace new opportunities, increase your performance, and master the art and science of innovation and resilience. So please join Adam as he guides you on your conscious pivot.

Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of the Conscious Pivot Podcast. I'm your host, Adam Markel, and I am just really jazzed up to be here today. I'm thrilled to be in the seat. Sometimes that's the way I refer to just being in front of the work I'm supposed to be doing, whether it's writing or it's podcasting or serving clients in some way. Being in the seat's important to put the time in. I got to remind myself sometimes that good things happen when I'm in the seat and good things happen when I'm not in the seat too. So it really is just finding that right, the harmony between those 2 things. I'm not a huge fan of that word balance just because balance feels to me like a lot of work. And I think of balance, I think of somebody at the circus on a high wire with a net or no net. Like if you see the Flying Wallendas, they don't have any nets. There's just a lot of work involved in trying to keep and maintain balance. So the word for me is harmony. And even when— think of what symbols are typically associated with balance, let's say. It's that symbol of yin and yang. And what it actually means is harmony. It's the interplay between these things. And for me right now, being both in the seat and times where I'm out and about and doing other things. Like I just got back from a trip to Dallas and we'll have in just a moment, we'll have a funny synergy there with somebody from Dallas in just a moment. But time traveling and speaking, doing keynote speaking here in North America and elsewhere in the world, being on the road and then being home, being in the seat at home, it's just a beautiful interplay between those things. And when they— when it feels really good, when it's the right measure of both things, that's when I feel in harmony. Just like with a recipe, just the right amount of ingredients can make something taste really wonderful. And sometimes if you just put too much salt or too much sugar or too much anything into the equation, you know, even too much of a good thing can be a bad thing sometimes. So I guess I feel perfectly harmonized in this moment and thrilled to have a great guest today, somebody we've been waiting to speak to now for several months. So I'm super excited. She's been really patient with us as we've had to Just change, change our schedule around from time to time, but we'll get into it by first introducing her and then digging into her bio just a little bit. Her name is Tracy Timm, and she's a career clarity expert. I absolutely love the alliteration of that and just what that brings to mind immediately. Career clarity expert and human capital advisor. She's the founder and creator of The Nth Degree, a proven methodology for career clarity and sustainability. Tracy has a degree in behavioral psychology from Yale and grad work in design thinking from Semester at Sea. Her work over the last 5 years has helped hundreds of professionals find and secure their dream job, and hundreds of companies attract, engage, and very importantly today, retain top talent. She believes that all of us can take our careers from stuck to unstoppable. Absolutely love that. And wants to help people come alive at work once again. Tracy, it's so great to have you on the show.

Adam, I'm so excited. Thank you for that beautiful reading.

It was a reading because that's a lot. And not only is it a lot, but there's some tongue twisters in there. So that was really good for—

Trying to keep everybody on their toes.

Just right after lunch and the post-lunch lethargy was starting to sort of kick in. It's like, can you say this? Can you do this?

And

I think we stuck the landing there. So Tracy, what's not written in this bio that you would love for people

Oh my gosh. So this is gonna sound probably really counterintuitive, but, you know, a lot of people consider me a career coach, but I call myself a career clarity expert because I actually had no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up. And it wasn't until I made all the wrong decisions in my career and in that trajectory that I figured out that which I did love. It was sort of like a sculptor, you know, taking a big rock and chipping away and at what it's not to reveal what it really was. So something that I think most people don't know about me is that I probably look like I've got it all together and I've always had it all together. But the truth is what I do and what our mission is, is so important to me because I'm a product of the process myself. I was stuck and miserable in a job that I hated. And now I'm building a business that I really believe in and doing, you know, working on a problem that I love to solve, talking about topics that I gush about. And that was something I never expected could happen. When I was 25 and miserable. So that's something that's not in the pretty bio, but it's, it's really the reason that I'm here.

Resilience. It's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about. And in times of massive change and disruption, the kind of rapid change that we're all experiencing as leaders, as business owners, as entrepreneurs, we have to learn how to not only increase our own resilience but that of our teams. So right now we have a powerful opportunity for you to find out just how resilient you are. Some years ago, my team and I created the resilience assessment that more than 5,000 business leaders across the globe have taken. And all you have to do to get your own free resilience leader assessment is go to resiliencerank.com. It takes less than 3 minutes, and it's our gift to you for being the leader that you already are. Other free resources and tools will accompany your score instantly. So, go to resiliencerank.com and find out just how resilient you are. Yeah. I think there are a lot of people that are at various stages of their development in one form of misery or another. I mean, it could be the misery of just not liking the people you work with or the boss you've got or feeling unfree. Just the idea of having to sort of punch the clock, whether it's Figuratively or literally having to punch a time clock. I got to tell you, when I first started out as a lawyer, one of the things that I really resisted, and I shouldn't even say when I first started out because I sort of hated this aspect of the practice of law the whole way through, and that was the billing. I don't mean the act of sending out a bill. I actually didn't mind sending out bills. In fact, I really, the only thing I sort of liked more than sending out the bills was getting the—

Getting paid.

Getting paid. When the money would come in, then I felt really great. But what I hated was the idea of having to track all that and almost like be a taxi driver when there were such things. I mean, there's still a few taxi drivers out there, but for those of you that have never somehow been in a taxi cab, you know, it's the first thing you do is you get in and they would take this little lever and they push it down. I don't even know if those levers still exist, but they would start the meter running. And this idea of the meter running is really embedded in the legal profession. Hmm. I'm going to talk to my lawyer today. Does that mean the meter is running? And I risk— but seriously, because you get a bill, you get— and lawyers, this is kind of funny, but lawyers bill in 0.6 increments, meaning 6 minutes or 1/10 of an hour.

Hmm.

An hour is 60 minutes. And so in 6-minute increments, you bill people for the time you spend talking to them about the weather or about their case or whatever. I mean, it could be—

Yep.

A lot of things that get billed and this idea of being, of running a meter on conversations and on my work and on my time, I'm literally on my own time and putting a value, a dollar value on it. You know, it's $400 an hour, it's $500 an hour, it's, you know, I think I started out, it was like $180 an hour, $200 an hour.

Right.

I mean, just something really did not sit well with me. So I think there are a lot of people that are out there in, you know, sort of resisting or pushing back on some of the circumstances of their work life. So tell us a little bit about how you started, maybe what that first experience was like, or when you got to be 25 and miserable, what was it that created the misery?

Why

don't we talk about the happy stuff right out of the gate, right?

How much time do you have, Adam? No, so we— it goes all the way back to my childhood, honestly, which I'll go through quickly, but I was a black belt box checker kid. If you gave me a goal, I was like, that's what I'm doing. And I'm going to get the A, I'm going to be first chair, I'm going to be varsity. Like, I was just the achiever and the performer. So going to college was sort of an obvious next thing, but I had to go to the best college and I had to get recruited to play my sport and whatever. So I ended up going to Yale, which was great and totally outside of the spectrum of expectation for my family. Both my parents were from Illinois. I went to public school. I'm an only child. from Texas, didn't really have any ties to Yale, get there and, and it's a school full of performers and achievers. Right. You know, the Type A's and the I'm a better box checker than you. And, and so when it came around to figuring out what we all wanted to be when we grew up, Yale does a great job of funneling people into some very specific industries. They have a ton of connections with finance, a ton of connections with consulting, great relationships with grad schools. Even a lot of people that go into public service and end up— Yale's produced like 7 presidents or something like that. In the absence of you feeling like any one of those were your true calling, it sort of felt like you're on the outskirts because everybody's competing for these same roles, right? Yeah. And if it's not for you, then it's like, well, am I not enough, or should I want that? And all my friends are going, you know, so you play a lot of those mental games that a lot of us play well into our adulthood as well, of comparison. So that's how I wound up getting a job on Wall Street, even though I had a degree in psychology and 2 classes in math in my entire time in college. And one of those was psychology statistics.

Actually, psychology is a great prep for Wall Street though, isn't it?

Oh my gosh, you would be amazed. It's so funny. I wrote my senior thesis, which every Yale undergraduate has to do, on premature infant development. And so actually, how do you optimize the neonatal ICU environment to have better patient outcomes and to have more well-adjusted children who were born significantly premature, which was a psychological study. There's a lot of things you can do with that. And so I used to tell people that I used my thesis every single day because managing traders was like—

You were managing preemies. Not just infants, but infants that weren't yet fully formed.

There you go. Oh, that's even better. Oh, no, no,

no. I have my own opinions about that. We won't even go there.

So I was working on a trading floor and I was in the sales capacity. So I had traders that I worked with to actually make transactions and then research staff that helped us figure out— I worked on the credit side. So we were selling, buying and selling junk bonds back in the day when that took humans to do, which I think it still does in some capacity. But you know what I thought? Like, I got into it and was like, maybe I'll like it. You know, maybe I'm a fast learner. I'm smart.

And for those that are not watching this on YouTube, by the way, if you're checking it out there, then it's Both fingers crossed, right? Crazy.

Double finger crossed.

Double finger crossed. Maybe I'll like it. Yeah.

And so I went into it in full faith thinking, you know, this isn't where I thought I'd be, but I definitely didn't want to be a counselor or psychologist. I knew I didn't want to go into working in a patient environment, and this is what everybody else was competing for, so it must be good. And it paid well, and it allowed me to start a life on my own and be independent, which was really important to me. And it paid a lot. And so, you know, I did that for 2 and a half years, and I think within the first 6 weeks I had an inkling that there was something wrong, that something about this environment was off, or the subject matter was off, or the people were off. But again, box checker, performer, achiever, you know, if this was the goal, I was gonna be the best. And so I spent the whole first year trying to find ways that I could add value that actually I was better at than bond math and, you know, schmoozing clients, because I was 22 and taking guys out and do it. Just it was a mess, and I don't know. I think that when you get to the point where you're unhappy doing what you're doing, you go through a series of of realizations that are attempting starting with denial. Mm-hmm. But they're attempting to push back on your cognitive dissonance because your brain knows that you're not happy. But

there's something wrong, right?

Moving, right? And so you reach a point where you're like, "Ooh, this is this tension is not viable anymore." And so either you have to train your mind to think something else, or you have to physically do something else. Right? So in the absence of the courage to leave my job, I was like, oh, this is, you know, I'll alleviate this cognitive dissonance with changing my beliefs around this work. And so every so often I would do that until it got to the point of no return where I literally was at a wedding visiting friends I knew from high school. If you know me for 5 minutes, you know I love weddings because I love wine and I love dancing and I love love. I'm like a hopeless romantic. And instead of being in this wedding and dancing and spending time with my friends, I was sitting outside on the curb Like sweating and crying because all I could think about was going back to work on Monday and how much I just didn't want the weekend to end. And I talked to people like that all the time who just dread and their, and their soul is being crushed and like all these other things. You know, we also work with really incredible people who just want to level up. They're tired of not living and working in their career with intention, which is the same action. It just comes from a different motivation.

It's interesting because when you change your beliefs to match your environment, like you say, this sort of your body, is a bit of a lagging indicator. Like for me, what that looked like was when I turned 31 or 32, something like that, I started to see my hair thinning. So I had this great head of hair, even though it's kind of an ironic thing that when I met my wife, we were in college and I was a swimmer. And so I used to shave my head for competitive swimming.

Yeah.

So it's just ironic that, you know, I stopped swimming because I couldn't get it. For some reason we won't get into, I couldn't get out of bed at 6:30 in the morning to go jump in a cold pool anymore at a certain point. And then she says, well, it'd be so great to see what your hair looks like. And then my hair grows in. Fast forward, we get married, start having kids. I've got this great Joey Tribbiani hair and all that. And I'm a lawyer now, newly minted, passed the bar, start my practice, and I'm 3, 4 years in and my hair is starting to go.

Wow.

So that cognitive dissonance that you were talking about, I knew pretty early on that This is exciting. It was exciting, but yet I didn't know this is— that I would have said this is what I would have been doing when I was 10, 15, 20 years old even. I thought at that time that my— the people I most respected in the world, which would have been my parents, my grandmother, one of my grandparents in particular, that they would have had the highest respect for what I did for a living. Meaning if they knew, if they were sitting on my shoulder every day and listening to my—

Yeah.

conversations and saw my actions and what I was doing, that they would be so proud of this, you know, this person. So those disconnects, my body was the lagging indicator because my body began to change. Interesting. So, but your beliefs, so you had this seemingly a conscious effort to bring yourself on board, right? I'm in a great place. I should be happy. I'm making all this money. People would kill for my job, right? Yeah.

Yeah, if I had a dime. I said that to myself all the time.

So did you feel like your identity was changing? Because at a certain point when we play those head games with ourselves and we go, hey, listen, if I just say I'm this way enough, I'll become that way. If I say I love this or I like this or I'm open to this, you say it enough, you begin to truly believe it and your identity changes. Is that what you experience? Is that what you see with other people?

I'm really glad you asked that because it's actually the latter part of the story that I just began where I was at this wedding. I'm sitting outside crying. I like, I can't bring myself to go back inside where everybody's happy and having fun. One of my best guy friends at the time came out and sat on the curb next to me and he's like, what is going on with you? I'm just so anxious about this. And to mention like the physical piece, like I was having real anxiety, like, you know, shooting pains in my back and just weird tingles that I'd never felt before and real manifestations of anxiety and stress. And he was like, this is not you. And when somebody who's known you since you were 15, 16 and you had very few, you know, much, many fewer cares than you have now, even though now being 15 or 16 is apparently extremely stressful, it's this mirror that I couldn't ignore. This guy looking at me who's known the best version of me, presumably, who was carefree, right? And didn't stress so much. For him to say, this isn't you, you know, where did you go? The first time where I was forced to really look at myself and think, is this the person that I want to be? Is this the best version of me? And is it worth it? In my business, we draw a line between success at any cost and sustainable success. Yeah. Success that you can sustain over a longer period of time because it doesn't require something of you that is impossible to continue giving. And this job was requiring me to be a person that I really— it took a lot of effort to become and thus wasn't sustainable over, over the long haul. But it was in my mind what I had said successful people do. And so I was either having to redefine success, which was terrifying, or continually double down and try to get better. And I think that's the catch-22 that a lot of people are going through that puts them in this total paralysis mode. Of, I don't know what I'm running towards. And so in the absence of a goal, I'm gonna stay with what I have. It's comfortable. And having to rewire or rewrite your entire definition of what a career is or what success is or what people are gonna think is impressive. And how much do you even care about what other people think when your whole life you've been trained to do things because the goal, the outcome, you know, go to school to get A's, go to school to get—

The approval, the validation.

All of it, right? It's, it's, you're really having to deeply question some of your foundational beliefs about life and how the world works. And to do that alone and in a vacuum is scary. And so it took me longer than I wish it did, but it took me not nearly as long as it takes a lot of the people that we end up working with.

For sure.

I found that I was a really rare 25-year-old to question those things. And actually, more often than not, our clients are into their 30s at least, if not a little bit older than that. because they finally come to a point where maybe they were just more adaptable than I was, and so they could last longer than I could. But man, one thing I know about myself is if I'm not in a place where I wanna be, other people can tell, it shows.

Don't have a poker face for that, huh?

Mm-mm-mm, mm-mm, no. I'm pretty good at poker, but man, if I'm unhappy, you're gonna know it. If I'm happy, you know it. If I'm uncomfortable, it's my face just sort of tells its own story, so.

So you know what, why don't we dive into the process? Because— Yeah, let's do that. I'm a process guy, and by that I mean it's great to have goals. Outcomes are really important, but outcomes without a process, they're ineffectual. At least my experience of that is.

Or inefficient. Yeah.

I mean, think about somebody that goes to the Olympics, I mean, or the people that end up in the Olympics are the best of the best. They're the ones who've been striving for a long time and not the majority, but the vast minority of those folks that end up at the Olympics actually win a medal. And my theory is that the only difference between those folks that stand on the podium with a medal around their, their neck and the ones that don't is the process that they used to train and to be there mentally, emotionally, physically, even spiritually. So process is a big deal, and it's also something we can analyze, we can look at, we can debrief. Yes. So what was your process like? You're 25, you're ahead of the curve in terms of discovering being aware of your misery and not just being aware of it, but wanting and needing and choosing to do something about it. That's a rare thing. I mean, I agree with you. I think people go 10 years, you know, sort of minimum, they go 10 years. You know, blink an eye, it's 10 years. And they wake up one morning and they go, okay, is this my life? Really? I was looking in the mirror, putting my feet on the floor in the morning and feeling this early sensation of dread. Right. This kind of mild, low-level anxiety. Just before I even had coffee, before I flipped anybody off on the way to the tunnel, before I had my first conversation with an adversary or a judge, I was already kind of in that angst mode. But it took me a really long time to be looking in the mirror and having an honest conversation with— through my own eyes, looking into my own soul and saying, so is the money the only thing that's gonna, you know, that you can hang your, your self-esteem on anymore? Mm-hmm. Because it really was just about the money at a certain So what was your process like at 25?

Oh goodness. Well, I'll tell you that it's much more efficient now. The way that I like to describe this to people is I basically was my own first client in a sense, like me figuring out who I wanted to be in the world and where I added value and what I'm naturally gifted at, like my niche. That process was miserably circuitous and inefficient and oftentimes ineffectual. I equate it to like me being in a dark room with the goal of getting to the other side. with no flashlight and there's just crap all over the floor. So it's like you're stumbling, you're falling, you're kicking things, you're, you know, hitting your shin, falling down. And so my process took about 2 years of discovery to really be able to articulate that value that I added and be confident in it and be clear with it. And so it took honestly ripping off the bandaid for me, which was quitting that job. I had gotten to such a level of misery that actually it was after that specific weekend on my drive home. Mm-hmm. That I— or not on my drive home, on my flight home— that I actually sat down and wrote my I'm quitting speech. And then I went in the next day and I quit. I got so lucky that they really— we were so short-staffed by then. It was the end of 2011. The United States had been downgraded by S&P. We had lost a ton of— no, it was the end of 2012. So we had lost a ton of people. So they were like, please, we need you. Please stay and we'll give you some options. And so what I did with that was I built in this nice little buffer period where all my cards were on the table. I didn't have to waste the energy of pretending anymore, and I could do the bare minimum and still add value and still leave every day with energy to explore and to figure out what I wanted to do. And that process isn't gonna work for every single person every time. And quite frankly, I did it with the full ownership that they may— they may give me the door, you know, immediately after that conversation. But I find that the number of times that I've advised clients to do that, and it's been few and it's been for the right ones, that transparency of just putting out there in the world to the right people, like, I'm not happy here. A, they're probably going to be pretty surprised because they're just as focused on themselves as you're focused on yourself. And B, it's highly likely that they're going to want to help you in some way because you're adding value somewhere in the business. So that gave me space to then alleviate some of the anxiety and stress so I could open my creative mind again. And I've always been a big fan of efficiency. Like, if I can get somewhere in 2 steps, I'm not gonna take 3. And I don't like to waste time 'cause I'm very just aware of this one life and, you know, you're breathing and go do something. And maybe that's anxiety-driven, I don't know. And so what I did actually was I had a handful of ideas. I could either get a new job, and if I wanted to do that, I was going to do a total departure from Wall Street. I was going to do something maybe in like social enterprise or nonprofit. I was going to do something for people. And, or I was going to go back to school. I had a bunch of friends who had gotten their master's or MBAs and they all had fun and it looked great. And that was at least punting the problem, right?

Sure.

Or I was going to do the whole millennial nomad thing where I could work on a farm and that could pay for my housing and I could be in New Zealand and, you know, whatever. I was 25. Like, give me a break. So actually, I was on the trading floor one day, and I was— I got up to walk to the bathroom, and I had just hung up the phone with my mom saying something to the effect of, I'm just gonna quit and put everything in storage and just buy an STA round-the-world ticket and just be done with it. Hung up the phone, walking to the bathroom, and one of my coworkers, Martin— we called him the Silver Fox. He was from Oklahoma. He had this gorgeous head of like silver hair. He's like leaning back in his chair, and he's talking about how his son had just gotten back from this thing called a semester at sea. And he said, yeah, it's this really cool thing where these kids took this entire trip around the world. And so I went, er, like, I can take a sign, God. Thank you. Like, I get it. So I like trot right back to my desk. I Google Semester at Sea. The very next trip was the spring of 2013. It was called Trip Around the World. And they took graduate students. You could apply as a, you know, non-undergrad, grad student. And I looked at it and I thought, wow, like if there was ever a way to test drive these 3 ideas in a really efficient way, This is it because I got to test going back to school. I got to test traveling and see if I could do that alone or if that's what I wanted to do full-time. And I got to test this whole world of social enterprise because there was a social enterprise incubator that was sailing on the ship just for that semester. It was just so perfectly serendipitous. I could never have engineered it, but I was listening. And I tell people that all the time. Like, it's up to you to be listening and to take action. When something resonates, because otherwise those opportunities are going to go away. So I did. I went on a semester at sea. I was 25 years old. I was like mama bear on the ship, all 18, 19, and 20-year-olds traveling around the world. And we took classes when we were on the ship and we traveled when we weren't. And it was by far the best decision I've made as an adult, one of the most dynamic experiences of my life. I got to see 30+ countries in the span of 5 months, backpacked around Europe afterwards. And it's really the mentors I met, the other students I met, the travel experiences, that was the bulk of my like Tracy renaissance. Like I reignited, you know, who am I? And honestly, I'm best around younger people. Like they give me energy and I can see myself living on here.

So you figured that out about yourself?

I did. I figured out how to leverage my work experience at the bank that I had been at, even though I didn't want to touch finance with a 10-foot pole ever again. I just had some incredible mentors who again provided those really excellent mirrors and great tools to see myself more objectively and to figure out how I added value naturally, meaning that I had always seen success as one thing and I'm going to have to fit into this mold. And so if that's the case, then there's always inherently something wrong with you if you're not a perfect fit for that mold. But what I learned from them was that there are ways to add value that companies need and want and the world needs and wants that actually align with your personality and your gifts and your talents and your experience and your values. All our job is as the asset is to figure out what that value is and then go out and articulate it to the world. Sure. And so that's the process that we teach now. I just went through it in a very messy, circuitous, expensive way that if you have the time and the money you can do. Yeah.

Wow. The pace of change over the last couple of years has been rapid. And if you're a leader, a business owner, an entrepreneur, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Every day it's something different and something new. But the one thing that I've learned in performing at the height of all of those roles has been that we must be resilient. In fact, it's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about, and it's the reason why my team and I created the resilience assessment that more than 5,000 business leaders across the globe have taken. And all you have to do to get your own free resilient leader assessment is go to resiliencerank.com. It takes less than 3 minutes, and it's our gift to you for being the leader that you already are. Other free resources and tools will accompany your score instantly. So go to resiliencerank.com and find out just how resilient you are. So the gaining space is a big deal, obviously, to be able to get some distance creatively to explore, as you said, to have the energy to explore. There's a lot of people that potentially don't have that, the ability, let's say, to take 5 or 6 months to do that. But you said testing, and testing is a big deal. I know when, when This book came out, when Pivot came out, there's one of the big things that we talk about in here because interestingly, yours was about a 2-year process. Mine was about 2 and a half. And it involves something similar to that testing, which is building another bridge or sometimes called like a Plan B without tearing down the Plan A.

Yes.

Or tearing down the bridge. And we like the bridge analogy because it's— you just understand physically from the— what you can I'm a visual learner anyway, and so I can visualize what it looks like if you're on— if there's a bridge, it's connecting 2 points. You're on one side, you tear down the bridge, you're stranded.

Yes.

And in fact, we have a house on the Cape and spend quite a bit of time there, and there's this waterway that we drive across to get to this other town. And some years ago when we were just starting this process, when I was writing the book, I'd already pivoted but didn't really fully understand what I had done. I mean, it was really so face pressed up against the glass, didn't have a lot of perspective on it. But driving across this bridge, they were doing some construction. I thought it was interesting. We pulled over and we asked what they were up to. And they said, well, this is one of those old New England bridges. They get tons of nor'easters. You were in Connecticut, you know what the weather— those weather systems can be like.

Yeah.

He said, this bridge might not last another winter. So we're building another bridge. And I thought, okay, this is perfect. We're driving over the old bridge, but they're building a new one. And I thought, this is a great pivot analogy, right? You don't tear down the old bridge before the new one is constructed.

Yes. I love that.

I thought it was wonderful, but it got better because a couple years later, they'd completed the new bridge, they tore down the old one, and they were building again. So, we're like, all right, somebody's got the greatest contract, like, you know, it's millions of dollars. It's 6 years into this project. They're still not done. What are they up to now? we pulled over again, they said, well, the bridge we built was the temporary bridge. It looked pretty darn permanent to us. But no, it was a temporary bridge. And now they were building the 100-year bridge. And I thought, that's even more rich because the things that you will pivot into, let's say you are on that exploration, you have, and you said something earlier which I want to come back to you about, which is the energy to explore. Yes. You do have the energy to explore and you do find something that would represent that, that new bridge that might be a temporary bridge. Pivoting is not a one-and-done thing. I don't know that, that you go from one career into another and then you're finished, right?

Right.

So you didn't just go to Semester at Sea and then everything magically, you know, your path became totally clear. And the people you work with, I imagine that that idea of, you know, testing out something new, building a new bridge,

Yep.

Learning something in the process is only the beginning of that journey, not nearly the end. Yes.

Has

that been your experience as well?

100%. And you know what I learned on Semester at Sea actually was, it was my first baptism into the world of design thinking, which if you're familiar with, I don't know, is primarily used to create products and services and sometimes even softwares. But I looked at it as this amazing way to create a life. What if we could use those same principles of coming up with a lot of viable ideas, and then instead of jumping to full-time job, or jumping to commitment to a 3-year university for several hundred thousand dollars, or jumping to starting a whole brand new business from scratch with, you know, no savings, right? Instead of making these huge leaps, what if we could rapidly prototype our ideal, or even the life we think we want, and test it out? And then learn from it and then rapidly ideate solutions to make that prototype better.

As if it were a product. You think about that.

Yeah, right.

You wouldn't continue to pursue a product that wasn't fulfilling its purpose, right? Or if you were, you'd just create version 2, version 3. I mean, you look at any of the products that we use continually or upgrade, like our phones, for example.

What was ever wrong with the first iPhone?

Nothing. In fact, it was a massive leap from what we had come to expect from a phone before that, right? So—

And then they're on to the next.

At version 56, people will still be buying it because it's the natural evolution in the process. Why should we be any different?

Oh, from your mouth to everyone's ears who need it. You know, because that's what I— when I created The Nth Degree as our proven process for how to do this, It's a circle. It's an evolutionary process where you start with now, you end with the end of the process in this moment.

Mm-hmm.

But then as your life evolves and you evolve and your circumstances change, there's nothing constant about life. And so if we're not proactively doing the now phase again, like once a year or every other year, we get behind the 8-ball in our own evolution, you know, and in our own careers. And it's how we wind up out of the driver's seat Of our own life and you feel like the wheels are coming off and you have no control over anything. Well, it's because you didn't proactively create iPhone 10 and 11, you know, in your own life. It's a big pill to swallow though when you're in your 20s and you're thinking, I just got to figure it out and once I find my job, I'm going to be happy and then I'm going to have a good life and I'm going to get married and like—

Because it's almost like a set it and forget it thing. You think that you just get the right everything, you know, right job, right spouse, right House that you don't really have to do much. You could just sort of, you know, dial it in.

Yeah,

like I'm doing a little Larry David

here. Hey, pretty,

pretty. Yeah, how's your life? My life is pretty, pretty, pretty good. You know, it's like, I don't know about that.

No, I'm with you. And we think that there's an all-be-all perfect solution.

Why couldn't you ideate? continue just to ideate this version, that the version is now, right? It's not a bad thing. It's not a judge— I don't feel like you should be judging it as much as being aware, the way you would be aware of a product that if it didn't have a certain level quality of the, let's say, of the camera, for example.

Mm-hmm.

Like, would you just be okay with that? Would you be accepting of that? Would you just ignore the fact that other people could produce a better camera? On a similar, you know, comparable product, or would you work at figuring out how to produce that?

Yeah, it requires though, I think the leap that we're all gonna have to make to embrace that idea is the idea of letting go of our own perfection scenario of like, we're getting to an end state that is perfect, that that even exists. And I still kind of bristle at that, honestly, because I mean, wouldn't that be nice? If I could just relax and we could just make billions laying in bed and petting my kittens, like, I'd love that. But it does, it requires you to let go of the fear of being wrong and failure and seeing the iterations of your life and your career as leveling up, not a series of failures or getting it wrong. And one of my business coaches I love, she gave me the grace of giving me this example. She's like, when you start out of this version of you, you're you sub-zero. And you sub-zero creates goal sub-zero. But then as you're progressing towards goal sub-zero, you, without realizing it, become you version 1, right?

Mm-hmm.

And then you version sub-1 now creates goal version sub-1, and you keep progressing towards that, and then you become you version 2. And it's this kind of beautiful spiral up. But if your only goal is the outcome, is getting to the goal, right, then what could look like an evolutionary forward and uplifting and progressive process looks like a series of failures. You never made it 10 years of your goals. You know what I mean?

Well, it's what we said earlier, right? It's focusing on the outcome versus the process. And this is again tying back to that old adage about enjoying the ride or enjoying the journey. That like James Taylor sings, the secret of life is enjoying the passage of time. Can you enjoy the passage of time while you're still pursuing what it is that you're called to pursue?

Yeah.

That's a tricky bit and a great place for us to Well, I want to ask you a question about resilience because we're really, in everything that we're discussing, a person that runs out of steam, runs out of energy, as you said, the energy to explore. If you don't have the energy to explore, what's the likelihood that you're going to find what you're looking for? What's the energy that, what's the likelihood that you're going to find answers for yourself? Not answers with a big A, but the little a answers that are all about you. Right. Right. You being you, being comfortable being you, that requires energy. It requires time. It requires being in the game long enough to figure shit out. We all know that everything is iterating so much faster and companies are, I think, in many ways running more of an exhaustion model than they've ever run before. And I don't mean just companies. I mean the entrepreneurial paradigm in many ways is being driven by that just I'm going to run myself as hard as I have to for as long as I have to until I succeed at all costs. There's a massive cost to that exhaustion.

I couldn't agree more.

From our standpoint, the cost is you may not ever see— you may not see the fruits of your labor because you ran off the road, you ran into a ditch, you just flat out imploded before you would have otherwise been able to figure things out in the normal ordinary course of evolution. Here's a great example, I think, of that. 100 years ago, we would have had the capacity— we did have the capacity 100, 200 years ago to fly to the moon or to land on Mars. Everything that was required, all the resources were in the ground. Everything was possible just as much then as it is now. But we lacked the awareness, lacked even the belief, let's say, that it was possible. But if we'd had that belief and if we'd had that awareness, there's no question it could have been done. So evolution takes time. I mean, that's the point. And so why should it be any different for us? That— so for you, in the concepts that you share with people, the work that you do to help them in their pivots or in their transitions, how important is resilience in that equation? Does that come up? Do you have discussions about how people build resilience and how they define it or how you define it?

It's such a good question, Adam, because I didn't realize the importance of it until very recently. So up until maybe 6 months ago, the Nth Degree really only had 5 major steps to it. It was— we went through where are you now, what's your nature, where is your nurture added value with knowledge and skills and expertise, and it was how do you properly leverage your network to navigate and do that design thinking piece to get to your ideal future state faster. And I thought that was enough. And I didn't realize that we were doing people a massive disservice because we didn't have a final piece that I now have that's called Nourish.

Mm-hmm.

And it came up because I was having so many people who were burning out pursuing their own dream. And so we had this massive breakthrough of, hey, like you went from, I'm a 2 on clarity, confidence, and certainty to I'm a 9 on all 3. And yet, even though they have this vision of exactly what they're made for and what they want to do, they were like getting exhausted through the process of going through the job search and making that transition. And it's so easy and tempting to just put a band-aid on it, go right back to what you were doing before, and like maybe one day this opportunity will fall into my lap, right? And so we added nourish with purposefulness to say, hey, what are you doing to reconnect to the reason that you're doing this in the first place? And how are you consistently reminding yourself of that vision and the juiciness of it, the reason that you started on this journey in the first place? I think it comes down to 3 things. One of them is your support system. Mm-hmm. So if you don't have a place to go to recharge, whether it's people or space or whatever, it's very easy to get exhausted and burned out. So when I need my resilience ticked up a little bit, I go to the people in my life who fill me back up. And so knowing who those people are, I think, is critical. Crucial. I also didn't even realize I did this. The second thing is I call it a motivation bank. I'm a visual person as well, and so when I'm down, I like to do things that are visually stimulating that I equate to something positive. So if I'm really sad, I'll drink champagne because champagne is equated to celebration in my mind. And so it just kind of is a trigger to turn my brain around a little bit. But when I was on Semester at Sea, I created this little folder on my desktop called like happiness, love, joy, or something like that. And anytime I saw a beautiful or inspiring picture or meme or whatever, I just drop it in there. And whenever I got super down, I'd just open that and I'd scroll through the pictures. I'd just be scrolling through and they'd be stupid. One would be Nutella and then the next one would be a squirrel that photobombed something. And then the next one would be this beautiful image of the earth. And it was my motivation bank. And I went back to it to remind myself, like, why are you here? Why does this matter? Why is it worth pushing through? And I think all of that leads to ultimately the last thing, which is you have to have a deep understanding of your own personal why. And I think it's more than like the Simon Sinek Start With Why piece. I think it's a deep connection to living with purpose and intention and seeing the alternative as unacceptable. And if you don't have that, of course, when the going gets tough, you're going to go back to Wall Street. You know, when the going gets tough, you're going to take— pick up your lawyer pants again and go do that, right?

Exactly.

If you don't have a serious connection with the why behind what you're doing and If you don't see a life that's purpose-driven and intentional as an absolute necessity, then when it gets hard and when people's expectations are poured back on you or your own doubts and limiting beliefs come along, when there's a bump in the road, it's easy to give up. So for me, those 3 things really contribute to my personal resilience, and it's something that we teach. We teach people to really shore up their energy for the long haul.

Yeah. Yeah. I really hope you're enjoying this episode of the Change Proof podcast. If you've not yet gone out and gotten your own copy of Change Proof, it's not too late. You can get your copy right now by going to changeproof.com and not only getting the book and all the bonuses there, but getting access to our proprietary resilience assessment tool. It'll just take It'll take you 3 minutes to do, and it's something that will really help you to utilize the book even more effectively to create practices and rituals and habits that will increase your mental, emotional, physical, and even spiritual resilience for the long term. Again, go to changeproof.com to get your copy today. Beautiful. Is there one ritual that you practice on a daily basis that helps you to be and create more resilience?

You know, I wish I could say yes, but I am going to say yes. I'm not a routine person, but I am coming around in my early 30s to this idea that routine will set you free. And so actually, at the time of this recording, just yesterday was Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent. I happen to be Catholic. And practicing. And so I sat and I really deeply thought, because the purpose of Lent is to remind yourself that you're dependent on something bigger than you and to reconnect with that energy and reconnect with God and repent and all those things, right? So ideally, giving up something is how you remember that you are dependent and that you're not always in control. And it's also— it leaves space for filling that thing that you're giving up with something better, with something that's gonna help you grow spiritually. So I decided to give up Worrying. And I do this a lot. I'm an anxious person by nature. I worry instead of work, or I worry instead of pray, or I worry instead of go to my motivation bank, or I worry instead of calling a friend. Yeah. And so this month, you know, for the next 40 days, this is going to be my practice. And if you want to pick this up with me, if you're listening, please do it. I'm going to give up worrying, which means anytime that I recognize that I'm in a state of worry or panic or anxiety without doing anything about it, I'm just going to acknowledge that. I'm going to gently release the worry and I'm going to replace it with something proactive, whether that's a prayer, whether that's just deep breath, whether that's— I don't know. We'll see what it is, but I'm excited about it.

I'm thrilled to hear you say that. I'm thrilled for you. Thank you. And this is a major good luck with that. In fact, I want to resource you just a little bit more potentially, which is to make reference to a book that I I read some years ago, it's not even a book really, it's a pamphlet called The 7-Day Mental Diet by Emmett Smith. That's so funny. You're in Dallas. I said Emmett Smith.

I am. I was like, you didn't write that.

No, Emmett Fox. So a teacher from long ago wrote this beautiful and very difficult diet called The 7-Day Mental Diet.

Wow.

I was a worrier and still am. I mean, I can't say I've given up worrying because it is a little bit of our, sometimes of our makeup. But I don't do this anymore, which is I used to say I can't win without worry. I used to say that as a lawyer a lot. I can't win without worry. Worry is the cost. Insecurity is the cost of security kind of thing. And, or the cost of winning. Yeah. I don't know about that,

but

deeply troubling.

That's what that is.

I have so enjoyed this conversation and I know folks will absolutely benefit tremendously from everything you shared. Thank you. And full show notes will include links to your website, links to places where people can find out more about The Nth Degree and the work that you're doing in the world. I have personally just enjoyed the time so much, Tracy. Thank you. So thanks for being a guest on the show. I'll remind everybody that rituals can set you free, or routines anyway. And rituals for us are these sort of more conscious habits. My habit for about the last 10 years has been to wake up in the morning, and I'm gonna engage in that habit again. That ritual tomorrow. How about you, Tracy? Will you join me?

Waking up? Waking up, right? You know what? I will. And tomorrow I'm going to have an amazing day. I'm going to Phoenix. I'm going to see some old friends. It's going to be wonderful. It's going to be a life-giving morning.

Perfect. So, that's part 1, just wake up. Part 2, how about some gratitude? How about the opportunity in that moment to have a sense of the fact that it's a blessing to be alive no matter what may be going on during the day? What you might be looking forward to, anticipating, or maybe there's some worry that's possibly also true. And I'm not a big fan of pretending things aren't when we know, practically speaking, that there are these realities. And so not to pretend that they're not there, but simply to shift our focus maybe from worry to gratitude. So in that moment, what can you be grateful for? And there's so many things that the list is exhaustive. And lastly, to say something either inside or to declare it out loud. My words are always the same. I say, I love my life. Those 4 simple words have really created great freedom and tremendous appreciation from— for my own being as well as for the fact that I'm part of this amazing universe. Mm-hmm. And I give thanks to God in that moment as well with those words. So what are your words? What are the words that you can state Affirmatively out loud when you wake up tomorrow that express your gratitude as well as just what's real for you in the moment. So I'm going to leave you all with that. Again, please let us know your thoughts about the show. Leave a comment. Go to adamarkel.com/podcast to leave a comment. If you haven't subscribed, do that. Leave a review and let us know your thoughts, and, and we'll pass them on to Tracy as well. And of course, visit her website, find out more about The Nth Degree. Thank you. We'll say ciao for now, everybody. Bye-bye.

Thanks for listening, everyone. We hope you now have the tools and greater insights to navigate your own pivot. Help us inspire others by sharing this episode and leaving your comments over at adammarkel.com/podcasts. For more tips, strategies, and support as you consciously pivot into a new business and lifestyle you love, join our Pivot Community on Facebook. At pivotfb.com. PivotFB.com.