Unlocking Your True Vocation with Florian Kemmerich: Beyond Fame, Fortune, and Power

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And I said, who am I? I don't know anything about myself. Am I living my life or just a life? And that is when everything changed. And that goes back because we are not educated. So going back to your comment is, if you vocate, you take your identity, your personality, and your inner calling, your imprint, what makes life for you worth living at the center of the decision you do for your professional life. With normally, you said, oh, you cannot do. People will tell you, no, no, no, you cannot make a living with that. You have to have a real job, which was my case when I was 18. I wanted to become a stand-up comedian, yeah, to numb out the pain for people.

Step into the world of success with your brand amplified. The ultimate podcast designed to unravel the intricacies of thriving businesses. I'm your host, Anika Jackson, and I'm on a mission to uncover the stories, strategies, and secrets that have propelled entrepreneurs and business leaders to success. My guest right now is Floriane Kemmerich, and I am so thrilled to have you joining me from Geneva. You have such a wide vast array of experience. You sit on many boards, you've exited companies, and you are now on a really, really great mission that we're going to get into. But Florine, before we do that, I'd like to start with you as the person. You've described yourself as someone who was bullied, outsider as a kid. You then became a judo champion, a paratrooper, an impact investor operating across 4 continents. What is the connective tissue that brought you from one place into achieving things that people probably did not think you would do?

Anika, thank you for having me and with your, you and the community, which is really amazing. So the connective tissue is actually, people generally do not know that when you're born, the first 2 years your brain gets developed. And then usually between 2 and 6 years, something happens. It might be traumatic or not, but you do not like it. And that, and that moment gives your life meaning. And that stays with you for your life. Whether you are aware or not is your choice. So that's the part. So the connective tissue from that, which was my event at age of 5 years when I got bullied and beaten, and I wasn't afraid of— it could be many reactions when this happens to what that causes in you. In my case, I wasn't afraid or too afraid. I was just asking, why do they do this to me? Why are they mean to me? What I've done them to you, or what has happened in their lives that they are so mean to me? And that is my, as I call it, imprint. And it stays for life. So first reaction was, okay, my parents put me in judo to toughen up, to stand up against the boys. It's not that I wanted to do that, but in a sense, it's a possibility, which I followed my parents to do. And it was tough initially. It was tough because I wasn't into physical things. It was tough because I was, you know, I had to learn actually to stand up and then also to learn to lose, you know, or to, yeah. So all of that. And then I stayed there for the 15 years and I went that up and ended up in the German national team and the Bundesliga and these things. But that was not my calling. It was just my parents decided, and I kind of stayed in there. Yeah. So when you then refer to paratrooper, it is because as one of the adverse feelings I have, or my main adverse feeling is fear. I cannot stand fear. So for me to deal with fear is to take the bull by its horn. So I confront myself to my fear. So in the same way that I was confronted to my fear or fears with judo and overcome it, I have— I'm afraid of heights. So what do I choose in my military service? I could have chosen many things. I chose, okay, let's do parachutists. You know, let's jump out of planes and out of towers and stuff. So to overcome my fear. So you have people who avoid fear, you have people who fear doesn't really matter, or like me, I confront myself. That is again the one. And so then later on, and this is more story to tell, but again, when I went into impact investing, is the relation that you want to use— it's actually a good question. I've never had that reflection. Thank you for Anika Jackson for triggering this to me. So when you put yourself at risk is when you invest. When you invest in impact investing, you want to trigger change for the benefit of people or the planet. It's not just you want to do good. Yeah, you're privileged and I have money and I give a check or I want to help people and you're in a privilege. No, you put yourself on the same level and you put yourself at risk. So that part for me was then to putting myself at risk is actually to invest myself at the same level in rural areas, you know, in Africa, Asia, and Latin America for underprivileged areas around economic empowerment. So that's the loop which closes everything.

Wow. So what we're seeing is you really intentionally designed your life You didn't just follow the path that you could have gone on if other people, if you just took what other people were trying to tell, who they were trying to say you were.

Yeah, intentionally, I don't know. It's more sequentially.

Ah, okay.

Yeah. You were exposed to something and say, okay, what do I do now? And then you're exposed to the next one. It's not like say, oh, I was young and I had this path and I didn't know exactly what I— it wasn't. But as life puts challenges in front of you, you think about how you deal with those challenges. And for me, is to put myself at risk is something. But I thank you for the question because I never actually have seen the line between impact investing because I put myself at risk. There's something at stake. Yeah, it's not just being privileged and I help. And that is actually the thread which continues. So thank you for that.

Oh, well, thank you. I'm happy that I was able to help you discover something because you are on a path that is helping many people discover things about themselves, right? So you are talking about vocating. Most people think about a job, a career, maybe a calling, maybe something they're passionate about. But you introduce this term called vocating, It's not just a noun, it's a verb. So what are you actually describing when you're talking about this?

So the intention is, if you vocate, you dedicate yourself professionally to your vocation. Because our fundamental human flaw is, we are educated saying, hold a second, don't think about any do-good things or vocating stuff. You need to have a job. You need to sustain life. So education says you need to be successful first, and then you can send the elevator back. And that's a fundamental flaw. You don't think about while you do what you do, doing good while you make a living out of this. First, you make money, no matter what that means and whether this is good or bad, it harms the universe or not, or the people or the planet, you don't care. Because you are afraid and you want to make sure. And that's the education we have. Education says success is fame, fortune, and power. But this only nourishes your ego because the ego is there to protect you because you're vulnerable. So I understand why it is there. And we all have to deal with our ego because we are vulnerable. Life is fragile. But if you go down the path that you're saying success means only feeding your ego, there will be a moment where you say, It is not. And you have that with sports people, highly successful and then falling off a cliff into a depression. You have that with artists being famous and then going to drugs. You have that with people in the midlife crisis. They have success and they say, life is passing and this is not, you know, I'm not self-realized, I'm not realizing myself. And it's just Yeah, fine. So this is where you see then where the reflection come. Because the problem is that we are not educated to say we want to use our inner callings to actually contribute to people and planet. Yeah, we first want to protect ourselves to make money, and then if the things go— yeah, then we'll want to give back. But giving back doesn't resolve things for the world either. And that's where the part is where my learning was, that I was the absent subject of my own education. My education have given me all the tools to make a living, but didn't give me any tools or information about who am I. And that was happened when I was at the age of 33. I did a corporate life. I was there. I was 15 years climbing up the ladder and hit the ceiling. All good. My parents were happy. I was running a company, have a family and a home. But then I learned about my inner child in a coaching session. I said, what's the inner child? Who's that?

Yeah.

And I said, who am I? I don't know anything about myself. Am I living my life or just a life? And that is when everything changed. And that goes back because we are not educated. So going back to your comment is, if you vocate, you take your identity your personality and your inner calling, your imprint, what makes life for you worth living, at the center of the decision you do for your professional life. With normally, you said, oh, you cannot do. People will tell you, no, no, no, you cannot make a living with that. You have to have a real job, which was my case when I was 18. I wanted to become a stand-up comedian, yeah, to numb out the pain. For people. And as for me, by the way, still today when I look something on social media, I look at comedians because they numb out my pain, they take my anxiety away. Yeah. But my father was telling me, son, there are a lot of artists out there not making a living. Maybe you want to study something normal first and then you try. So I studied the normal and stayed in the normal because first you are Careful as a father, as a parent, you want to protect your children. Yeah. So that they can sustain life because life is tough and there are risks. And that goes back. If you vocate, you do both things at the best, both at the same time.

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Yeah, and, and that, let's give a little nod to the fact that you are a father of 5. Also musician and multilingual communicator operating across Europe, Americas, Africa, Asia. And in your early professional life, you found something that many people do. I think Gallup data shows 85% of professionals are disengaged at work, right? The same thing that you're saying, people, we are being told that we have to do a certain thing, we have to build a certain kind of success, but then so many people can't fill the hole that's inside them. They're not happy, they're not satisfied. It affects their health, their marriage, their wealth, other relationships. And as you mentioned with some of the famous people, right? And it's not just famous people who also experience this. You can stop taking care of yourself in so many different ways, whether it's drugs and alcohol or just not exercising or whatever the case may be because you just are giving up. And so getting from being this high achiever, corporate ladder, running the company, having therapy, realizing about your inner child and figuring out this term and deciding this is vocation, what was the next step in your journey? How did you decide then to go from, I have this job to this is where I really want to hang my hat? And having your guide and having Invocating AI, right? And all of the things, the book, all of the things that you have now.

Yes. So when I was exposed to myself, to the inner child, which I didn't know existed, and I had two chairs and I could sit here and the adult Florian talking to the child Florian to tell who am I. And I have all the attributes of the title and the achievements and all the self-worth. Which is only externally related. It's fame, fortune, and power. And then I was changing the chair, and I was a child talking to the adult. And it was really amazing. It was connected with me as a child. And I said, how despicable you are. It's the hamster wheel. It's only ego-driven things. There's nothing really where you actually become a better human being. There's nothing in there where you can say you're living and you're loving because you're just busy with so many things. And that way I said, whoo, hold a second, who's talking here? I turned around to the coach and I told her, I said, who just talked? She says, that's your inner child. So when that happened, then I said, okay, I need to change something. And then I said, if I don't know myself, I want to know myself. So first thing I started to do personal development methodologies. There are different methodologies out there. And I started, okay, there is Myers-Briggs, wonderful, the MBTI. And then, oh, there's neurolinguistic programming. So I tested many different things and really going into just to understand, who am I? How do I respond when I come into a room? What makes me tick? What makes life meaningful for me? And then I said, okay, in the corporation I was, It was a great company, it was healthcare, great colleagues. There's nothing bad I can say about the company, but it wasn't my— I didn't feel, even though I was bringing in my senior team also to do personal development and we did some and some things changed, but that was only on the local entity, not on the corporation. And then I said, okay, I need to get out of here. So that was the next step. I left my golden handcuffs and I went into a roller coaster life, having a family and all the responsibility, you know. And that basically led me to the journey in testing things. And it took me years to understand who am I, horses and things, yeah, to actually then end up doing impact investing, what I've been doing the many last years. And then people come to me, Florian, you do impact, I want to do impact. And mostly the midlife crisis people, you know, accomplished people will think about, and you can have the midlife crisis, people going crazy, or you have the midlife crisis saying, I need something meaningful and purposeful. And that's the one I do more discussing with them. And then I developed— is it, what's your vocation? I don't know. So let's do some exercise for you to figure out your vocation. I cannot tell you your vocation, but it's inside you, and that goes back to your script. And some exercises, and then they came up with it. And then they said, oh, this is really beautiful. And now let's see what we can do with your vocation. Let's see what you can do professionally. You can do leadership as a force for good, business as a force for good, or capital as a force for good. But you can contribute. Yeah. And then things changed and people were happy. Oh, can you talk to my daughter? Can you talk to my son? Absolutely. So I've been talking to 200-something people over 10 years, you know, just as a hobby, because it's an inner calling. And they were saying, Florian, this is amazing. You need to write it down. Please write a book. I said, okay, now you're asking me to write a book. So I wrote a book, you know? And then how do you do this? Oh, you can have a ghostwriter and they do the thing. And if the agent—

no, no, no.

I wrote my book. Here's my PDF. Or you can self-publish on Amazon. Okay, but there should be a way that you talk to an editor and maybe they like it. They said, Florian, that's not how it works, but you can try. So I Googled the biggest publishing house of academic books, and my book is a guide, teaching books. It says Routledge UK/US. So I went to LinkedIn, Routledge editor, a name pops up. Hey, hey there, my name is Florian. I have a book. And they took my book and it got published. So that was the next step. And then Anika Jackson, something happened. Because AI is kicking in, and that's a whole different story. You know, it is hitting white-collar jobs, universities, students out of university don't know where to go. And all of these things are happening in parallel. So those are the things where I got really triggered. But before going the path, just to answer your question. So for me, my learning was over years, who am I? What is my purpose? How can I contribute to the world? And how can I make a living with it? Yes, I could have made more money with other things, but for me, it was a calling. I put myself at risk. Goes back to your first question. Yeah? I expose myself to my inner fear to still do what I need to do despite I'm afraid, because that's the right thing to do.

Yeah, it's so interesting because I do teach digital media management and digital social media at the master's level at University of Southern California. But the first class in the digital media management program, the professor who's also our program director talks about ikigai, right? And finding your purpose. And even though we're teaching about how to use AI and how AI has changed so much of what we do in digital media, in every aspect, in every possible combination of things you can think of. And it's really been transformative. Ultimately, we want students to come up with a project that is uniquely theirs, that really goes back to who they are, what their passion and purpose are. And that's how I look at branding also when I'm talking to my students about branding. It's who are you as a brand? What is your purpose, your mission, your vision? And everything you do should be an easier yes or no or most things should be based on, is it true to who you are and your values? And that's not always an easy thing to do because we have to make money, we have to do these other things. And sometimes the golden handcuffs show up and we want to move in that direction for a little bit. But when we do those things, it— I never see success for myself or for other people who go through these experiences and keep trying to run that wheel or say, oh, I really need to pursue this because this is what I'm really good at, what I'm passionate about. What I know can make a change in the world and for me, right? And then, oh, but there's this other thing, and that other thing never turns out. And have you seen that happen with some of the people that you've spoken with and some of the studies that you've done?

Absolutely. First of all, some years back, I was teaching ikigai in a corporate setting. Yeah, but for me, the frustration was always, it sounds so good, but how do I implement it in my life? How do I live ikigai every day? How do I figure out that I'm passionate about, I'm good at, the world's needed, and I get paid for? Right. That sounds like, woo, very nice. And sometimes there's people getting confused because it's ego-driven. It's fame, fortune, and power, which is not the ikigai because the world doesn't need it. The world doesn't need you to shine there. The world doesn't need you to have your ego out there. It's not what the world needs, that's what you need. But then that's not the ikigai. So that was one part. The second was then, as I dove into a little bit deeper, I said, okay, if I make it reasonable, I have to differentiate between my ego, fame, fortune, and power, and I have to understand how to do things accordingly. So this was for me where the point was, that I said, okay, how can I implement things? How can you live an ikigai? Yeah. What are the components to make it actually livable? And that's, by the way, interesting because you mentioned Vocating, you know, which is the vocating.ai. It's the app. The app is actually having a dashboard because you go through the 4 steps and the 4 steps are the 4 components of the ikigai. And the first step is who are you? The second is What's based on your script is your meaning. The third is what's the impact you can create in the world. The fourth is how you can make a living. What's the sector, the job, whether it's an employee, as an employee, whether this is independent or whether this is used to create a company. All of that comes in there. And now we were brought up as, again, you were much younger, but I'm a Gen Xer. And as a Gen Xer, basically, what? I'm the same. Yeah. So, okay, you look younger then. So on the Gen Xer, We are not taught to be self-realizing ourselves. You study, you get a job, you be successful, and over time you learn because we were in the knowledge economy. And so you had to be privileged and access over years to get the knowledge, and the knowledge was economically valuable. With AI is no longer the case. We're going into a creator economy. Knowledge is at the fingertip on an AI. But if you don't know what you want, you will ask the machine. If you ask the machine, it's an algorithm deciding the fate of a human. How bad is that? And that brings it back that at our time, maybe the vocating portion wasn't so important because it took times and years. You can try out and you go back and here. Now linear careers are gone. Entry-level jobs are gone. So if you do not know what you want in life, like in The Matrix movie with the two pills, you know, so basically you will be either the one who benefits because you know what you want and you leverage the technology. So technology is a tool or technology is a crutch. You will ask and solve it for you. And years back and years later, you will end up somewhere. Where you have a burnout, you don't know how you ended up there. You might have mental health problems, you might be suicidal if you want to— because this is all accumulating and exponential. So that's the part where I say, hold a second. Today it is really, really essential because your identity has become a key economic value driver, which AI cannot replace. And so that's where I come from. And that brings in also the loop, because normally in the Ikigai, the portion which you wasn't be sure is on the, you know, if you don't know who you are, you might have your passion and you would think what you're good at and skill sets and skill tests are so many. And then you're asking what the world needs. Okay, that's non-for-profit. Yeah, something nice to have. I need a job. I need to get paid for it. And that's where the confusion comes from. And now you can close fully the loop.

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I think that we could probably speak for hours because I just love this conversation and the flow that we're going. And, and one thing that I love, I'm just looking over at my other screen at your LinkedIn where you talk about about your company being the human agency operating system for the AI economy, and that the future of careers is no longer linear. And I would argue, I know even as a Gen Xer, my career has not been linear. It was a series of events. I moved from club promoting to working in magazine publication and working for marketing agencies, you know, and, and then had my own agency, then took a break to be a mom, and then went back. And I always talk about my journey to my students because there's so much of it is built on the early digital age when websites, chat rooms, those kind of things first came out as marketing tools. But then I also want them to understand that you are not going to have a linear path and you— that's completely okay. We all have to find the path that's best for us and there will be a lot of trial and error along the way. But what you're doing is also helping people cut down perhaps on some of that trial and error and get to the root of who they are, like you said. Much easier, much earlier.

Yeah, the beauty of agentic AI is that you train agents and you can train an agent on, for example, on the platform we have about 11 agents. One is trained on PhD level of psychology, another one on transaction analysis, another one on the Enneagram. You know, they're all science-based different things. Normally it would take you years on courses and questionnaires and thinking. Now with AI, it is within minutes. So Anika, as we speak now, right this week, we have 100 students from 20 universities from 20 different countries testing the app, and they give us direct feedback. So we want to have an app which is like Duolingo gamified. You're talking to an avatar. It is not a person.

Right.

It is trusted. Nobody will sell the ad on that, on the data. It's a space between you. The students say, I'm so grateful because I'm not talking to a human who might be— I might be embarrassed to tell things because it is just my space with a mirror. So the feedback we get now day by day, today is day 3, Yeah, of 21 days. The feedback is directly given. We do a scientific study before and after where I want to prove that the platform is able to provide a user to know who you are and how to make your living with who you are. That's basically the part what I'm doing right now, the first step with these 100 students. And it's really amazing. The feedback is great and we want to have it gamified, easy, go-through avatar, not But you, the thing is, things are so precise within minutes rather than years of going back and forth. And this is the beauty of AI, if it is a tool, not if it's resolving your life and telling you what to do, because that's the part which I did not want the platform to tell people what to do. That's you to figure out, you go in the real life, you test it, you connect with your peers. And that's what vocating.ai is actually about. So I want to leverage AI, agentic AI, in the best way for people to actually figure out what they want in life, and then they go out and doing it. And so, Anika, this is where saying, as white-collar jobs are wiped out, entry-level jobs are no longer there, students are vulnerable. That's why a lot of university also immediately accepted for us to test the tool and do the study. And it's an edtech platform, and I want to be very precise on that and want to make sure that what we state is based on data and science. That's where we go. But I have high hopes because the whole thing started because my own kids, I was concerned about them because when I asked them, what do you want to do in life? And they said, I don't know. And then they started to ask ChatGPT for the opportunities. I said, this is not the way to go. First, you know what you want, and then you use technology.

Well, and I want to ask about that because when you're speaking to another human, they're going to bring their own biases and assumptions into, right? But also, when we deal with AI, there are also biases and assumptions depending on the data sets that you bring in. So how do you mitigate any biases from the conversations that people are having really with themselves with AI as the tool?

So actually, it's the opposite. If you talk to a human, there's a bias. And you have a coach or you have a therapist, might be have a better day, worse day, might be triggered to something, might be patient today, not tomorrow. Yeah. And so we train these agents to be only focusing on edtech, not therapy. We train these agents on the science behind. We train these agents to respond, to trigger your inner adult, not your inner parent interference, because you would jeopardize yourself, you would self-sabotage. We train this agent to trigger a little bit your inner child, what would be the dreams, but then to bring it back on the inner adult. So it is beautiful. And we do this through voice, because just by text writing, it's very different. If you speak, AI is capable to understand your emotional state. And so it has become a very precise tool, not biased, but just factual on science. And that makes it very interesting. And the feedback we get from the students is very, very positive feedback. And that's why I'm really amazed. I'm amazed because the feedback of the people were initially saying, I'm not sure, but I feel safe. I'm not feeling judged. I may be able to talk to them and then told them, this is— some people say, oh, some questions are too open-ended. Tell, I'm not sure. Yeah, get more guidance. It's really interactive. So the journey is step by step. You talk and respond, talk and respond. But Things are trained and focused for the user to figure out what they want, not for the machine to tell them what they should do. Yeah.

Well, I'm going to, of course, pitch you to have some of my students participate in this project when you have openings. But I know I've gotten a little off track because I just find this so fascinating and that this is really the best use of this technology that we have. Thanks for listening or watching to this episode of Your Brand Amplified. Amplified, don't forget to leave us a rating or review on your favorite podcast listening platform. And if you want to learn more, check us out at yourbrandamplified.com.