Finding Brave 64: How to Get Hired for Your Strengths, with Scott Anthony Barlow

Hello, everybody. Kathy Cabrino here. How are you? I'm in a little chipper mood today because my back isn't killing me. You've all heard that Journey, but I was just telling our amazing guest, Scott Anthony Barlow, that I think these things are often such wake up calls, you know, and I know, Scott, I'll have to ask you what you think. I have to get a cosmic 2x4 over the head maybe even twice or three times. I don't get the message. So what I'm saying is I got a cosmic 2x4 last June when I tore a ligament in my knee, couldn't play tennis, My favorite, almost favorite thing in the world. Four months of that, then sprained my back and now I've gotten it. Now, you know, I feel that cosmic two by four saying if you don't attend to your body as much as your mind or your thoughts or your beliefs or your writing, and you know, it's interesting if I write, and as we all know, I'm writing a book, that means I'm sitting here a lot of hours of the day. So it's almost they push against each other, those goals. So why am I sharing all this? Because I've had to find Brave and say, look, where are you really defeating yourself? I know you love to write and I know you can go seven hours straight, but you have to do some other things here to be happy, healthy, and have the life you want. So that's my Finding Brave month. Thank you for letting me share that. And everybody, I'm so excited to have Scott Anthony Barlow with us today and we're talking about how to get hired for your strengths, which is such a topic. Scott and I have talked a lot about in very different ways. And let me tell you about Scott, but I think we both absolutely have the same views about using our strengths. It's what makes us joyful in our work. But Scott, you have new, other interesting ways to help people get to identify their strengths. So we're going to talk all about that, but first let me share. Scott is the founder and CEO of Happen to youo Career. I want to ask you about the name of your company. I'll do that in a minute. He's been featured on cnbc, Yahoo Career Builder, Fast Company, Huffington Post, and various colleges and universities as a top expert on career happiness. He and his team run two of the top five career change podcasts. Well, I've got to know how you do that. You'll have to give me some tips on itunes, including Happen to youo Career Podcast. Thank you for being here, Scott.

Thank you for having me. I am excited to be here. And you and I have gotten to chat a few times over the last couple of months here and just excited to have another conversation with you.

Me too. Let's see where it goes. And by the way, your voice is so beautiful. Have you done radio, actually? Radio, like in college or. It's, it's sonorous, your voice, Is that the word? It's beautiful.

I very much appreciate that. And no, I have not done radio. Unless of course, you count the job that I had when I was probably 18 years old at Staples where I would close down the store and get on the intercom at night and be like, attention Staples shopper. The time has now come.

Go and buy those pushpins and papers stacks. Did you play around with? How did you play with how it would sound? See, you knew. You knew.

Yeah. Ever since, I don't know, probably 15, 16 years old, when all of the, all of the gifts of puberty happened and my voice started changing, that I've been getting that feedback, but I was like, I don't want to go to radio. I keep hearing they don't make any money in radio.

So podcast, that's what you're doing.

And yeah, turns out many years later.

Many years later, that's amazing. See, that's one of your strengths, your beautiful voice. So there we go, talking about hiring for strengths. Okay, let's just jump in and we've got, we've got our questions we're going to talk about, but I want to go off script already. Scott, can I ask you if you see the same thing? And so I work mostly as you know, with mid to high level career women. But I would say even with the guys I've worked with, I would, I honestly would say 95% of the people who come for career help do not understand what they are uniquely gifted, talented and capable at. Would you do you see those kinds of numbers in your, in the people who come to you?

I do. And we have the really, I believe, very fortunate opportunity to work with a lot of highly self aware people. So these are people that are already, they've already achieved a number of things and had experiences that have caused them to get to know themselves better. And I find that still, even in those situations, they either don't deeply understand what their real, real things that they're absolutely amazing at are, or they don't necessarily understand what's causing it and therefore don't necessarily and undervalue it. In many different ways.

What do you mean? What's causing. You mean where that talent came from?

Partially, yes. However, one of the things that we find is that when you use a word like strengths, it's fairly widely used in our world. So it's used to describe, I don't know, describe. I went and did strength training the other day. So it's used from there all the way to describe, you know, a very common interview question about your strengths all the way to describe a lot of different pieces. So it's a fairly ambiguous word, and therefore, we recognize that a lot of people don't necessarily fully understand what it means. So in terms of when we're talking about your unique strengths as a human being, an easier way to think about that is not necessarily what most of us are thinking in terms of the skills. A lot of times we associate that with skills like maybe I'm amazing at, I don't know, pivot tables and Excel or whatever it might be. Right. It's not actually the skill of building pivot tables that is your strength. It's what's underneath the surface that possibly made it easier for you to learn the Excel or what's deeply underneath the surface that causes you to enjoy that type of thing. Or maybe you don't enjoy it, but it just comes more naturally to you. So often it's not the thing itself that we see on the surface, but if you want to use an iceberg analogy, it's that thing that's hidden underwater that is actually causing that pivot table building to show up on the surface.

Wow. What an interesting way to look at it. Scott, can I tell you how I would. How I. I've never actually tackled it that way. What people will say, and because I work with women and they don't tend to recognize themselves as well, they'll say, I don't have any idea how I stood out. That's where I'll go. If they don't have any idea what they're good at, I'll say, you know, let's go back to age 16. Would you stand out? And you push back if you don't agree with what I'm saying, I'm really interested. But I believe that the natural strengths that we're most happy to use were with us for a long time, but maybe we weren't honing them. But what I do love to say is, like, when I look at this career that I have now, it literally uses everything that I was great at when I was 16, but I didn't recognize that at Those as strengths?

Yes.

You know. Yep. I was a performer and I was a singer, and I love psychology and people love to talk to me, and I had a kind of therapeutic ear, and I love to understand what. What made people tick. And I was good at taking chaos and making order of. Yeah, but that didn't seem to me a strength. So that, to me, is the biggest challenge when people go, I don't know. I don't know what my strength is. They don't even know how to frame getting to it. So is that what you find as well?

I do find that quite a bit. And, you know, I can. I love this stuff, and I'm a total nerd about the science behind it and psychology and blah, blah, blah, all that stuff. However, I find that a much more useful way to look at strengths is particularly what we call signature strengths. And I didn't invent that term. That term has been around for a while, but we have invented a different definition that goes along with it. And a really easy way to think about that definition is just almost imagine a Venn diagram and think about signature strengths is not just what you're great at, but where you have the overlap of. You know, in one circle, you've got those things that you are great at or have a tendency to be great at. And then in another circle, you have those areas you are adding the most value to the world. And then in another area, what you find that you enjoy as well when you're spending time doing it. And when you think about that overlap, that creates a really nice visual for how to think about what your signature strengths actually are. It's those combinations of those three areas. Because I get the question all the time where people are like, what if I don't like what I'm good at? What if I don't like my strengths? People say that, and then that indicates to me that while it's one of the most common questions I get, that's a fundamental misunderstanding about what strengths actually are.

Right.

There's nothing wrong. Everybody starts with different levels of understanding. However, it's those things that are underneath the surface that we're actually focused on, not the thing above. Like, again, going back to pivot tables. I hate pivot tables. If I do another one of those, like, I know I'm gonna, like, I don't know, burst through the door and something that's gonna happen.

But, yeah, so I would look at that as a skill. Like, I've never, ever heard anyone say, I don't like to use the natural talent I was gifted with. I've never. Now, some people say I'm an amazing artist, but I stopped doing it at 16. And, you know, but I literally never heard someone say that. Natural gift, you know, for me, singing or psychology, whatever I don't like using. It's the skill that they think they've glommed onto from that, that. That they're misguided.

I think now that's a really interesting thing, too, because we get feedback in the world and appreciation a lot of times for our skills or those things that are the tip of the iceberg. However, that's not what is actually causing us to be authentic or be. Or that's not our actual strength. So oftentimes we're getting feedback and praise that is almost misguiding us in a lot of different ways because it's steering us away from the actual strength and saying, hey, you've earned $100,000 a year doing pivot tables, so you got to.

Do more of that.

And then people are left with, like, I have nothing that's valuable to offer to the world. Even though I know that I was a great artist when I. You know, I love that type of stuff when I was 16 years old. So they don't look at it as a reality.

I love this. And I want to give a concrete example. Like, my shoulders caved when you said that, because I remember I got moved out of this marketing director position in the book club world into a marketing director position that was going to help market 17 book clubs, not two. And one of the things the guy put me in. We were acquired by another company, and a president came in was to actually integrate two different business offices. Oh, my God. One was Canada, one was New York, and one was Doubleday select, and they had merged with our book club company. That was my job for six months to do a business integration project. It was a hundred. And what do I know about accounting? Blah, blah, blah. But I did it, and I did it masterfully. It was 160 tasks, and I would hold meetings with. But what was I good at? Holding meetings, listening to what people needed, mediating conversations, hearing and hearing and putting forth recommendations that. But I literally wanted to poke my eye out with a stick. I mean, I finally said to the guy, look, I'm glad I did this. Well, I'm glad you're pleased. I'm so unhappy in this job. So I think you're 100% right. I call that kind of glomming on to the wrong form before you understand the essence. So look at this, we're both saying, like, the same thing, but you're talking about iceberg, I'm talking about essence. It's so fascinating. But I got a question about value for you that I want to understand. I don't talk about it in those terms, and I want to make sure I'm not missing something. I really feel that when you are tapped into your natural, amazing strengths, you can't not add value. Now you can be wanting to poke your eye out with a stick because you're in the wrong job. You glommed on to the wrong form. Like, I'm going to be doing business integration, who cares? But I've never met someone really using their natural talents and not adding value. So I want to ask you, this is underlying that, is it? I also want to make money, and that's the value I'm going to generate from that. Is that what you kind of mean?

That's part of what I mean.

Okay, tell me more examples.

Yeah, so when I say valuable, the other thing I said was most valuable. It's not just about adding value, because, you know, I was. I was HR director in my last role where I wasn't the boss, and.

I didn't know that.

Yeah, I've made a lot of career changes, so if you name it, I've probably done it in one way or another or hired somebody who's done that. However, in my last role, one of the things that I kept finding that I was going to again and again and again, that really I was adding value, but it was not the main portion of my role and not the way that I needed to add the most value for it to be good alignment in my role versus what I could add tremendous amounts of value in. I was finding that every single day I was going and I was writing creative little emails which would get opened by all of the staff, and they would wonder, you know, beyond the subject line, what was. What was going to. What they were going to find, and, you know, creating curiosity. And I was going and having really. I was going and creating really engaging trainings. We did, for example, we did a training where we used Barbie dolls for. So I don't know if that sounds good or bad, but it got people's attention and allowed people to be able to absorb the content. So was doing things drastically differently. And this is not a part of my job, but I felt very compelled to make sure that if I was doing something that I was actually capturing people's attention and doing so in a way that was going to cause them to change their behavior. So for all intents and purposes, that's something that I, as a human being, cannot stop doing, like you. You can't pay me to stop doing that in a lot of different ways. However, in my organization, for my role, that was not what they needed most.

So when you say add the most value, it sounds to me like you're saying that you feel you are valuable on the planet in the way that lights you up. Is that what you mean?

That's a big part of it, too. So, yes, absolutely. When you have those things that you are good at or have the potential to be great at, and that overlaps, going back to our signature strengths definition here, that overlaps with those areas that you add a tremendous amount of value for. And value is not just in terms of monetary exchange or anything else along those lines. I was in that role. I was getting tons of people that were coming up to me and thanking me for the Barbie doll training, which is something that I was taking a lot of value away. But still, in what I was doing day after day, that was just such a small portion of my role that it wasn't necessarily adding value to the organization too. So thinking about it in terms of where we have these overlaps, I want to be able to do more of my day. More of my time being spent in these areas where I've got the trifecta, where I am great at it. I also have the ability to add a tremendous amount of value. And at the same time, I enjoy.

It, I love it. I want to add something. Tell me what you think. When I think of my corporate career, I think I was adding value in the way my boss wanted me to, but it felt valueless to me.

Yes.

So another way I tackle this with people is like, you know, I was just doing a media interview and writing this story that after getting laid off, I'm crying, I don't know what I want to do. And the therapist said, I know this looks like the worst crisis you've ever faced, but from where I sit, it's the first moment you can choose who you want to be. Who do you want to be? And most people can't answer that when they've been stuck for. If they could have answered that, they would have gotten, maybe done something. I was like, I don't know. I want to be you. That's what came out. And he said, well, what does that mean to you? And I said, I want to help people, not hurt people and be hurt. That's all I could say. That's all I knew and from thank God. Thank God that when you're working with someone, whether as a therapist or a coach or someone who helps you with an assessment, which we're going to talk about, they can see things you can't see. They can see the future vision of you before it's hatched, I like to say. And he said, I think you'd make a good therapist. I've known you for two years. Have you thought of that? And my God, my whole world opened up. I had never thought of that. So I do think that sometimes in the effort to build a lucrative career, we lose sight of all of this. What am I good at? What am I naturally good at? What are the skills I don't ever want to use again or poke my eye out with a stick to use. Right. And then what is meaningful for me? And do you find this, Scott, so many people immediately cut themselves off at the knees and say, well, yeah, but I'll go broke if I do what's meaningful for me. There's this incredible myth in our society that doing work of value is a broke nonprofit owner that can't pay the bills. Do you find that it's like this unconscious myth. Do you see that in people?

Yeah, it's really interesting because it is very pervasive. We have that conversation with almost every single person that we help and even people that may listen to our. They might listen to our podcast and know our thoughts on this. We still end up having the same conversation personally and having to tell them, no, this is how it is in actuality. And that conversation goes a little bit like this. You know, keep in mind, these are sometimes people that are in executive roles or have achieved a whole bunch, and they still again and again are saying, I am worried. One of the reasons I haven't necessarily gone full bore into making this change, whatever that change means to them, because I am afraid that I might not be able to find something else that fits the lifestyle I've become accustomed to or pays as much and I might have to take a pay cut. Or they come to us and say, vice versa, I'm ready to take a pay cut. Now, here's the kicker. Here's the really interesting thing that we observed and we work with at this point, several thousand people, over 85% of those people, when they accept the role that they're making a transition into, whatever that looks like for them, they're accepting, and keep in mind, this is a role that fits what they want and want to be doing and leveraging Their strengths and all of that, they are either keeping the same pay or they are making more, sometimes far, far more.

So in actuality, music to everyone's ears here.

Yeah, it's just crazy, absurd. And there's a lot of different reasons when you dig into that. Part of that is, you know, what we're talking about in terms of once you start focusing on using your strengths, you have the ability to. Once you know what those are, you have ability to add a different amount of value to the world and contribute in the way that you weren't contributing before, when you were trying to partition yourself in a lot of different ways and do this tiny little thing that I'm good at over here like I was as an HR director. And I love that role, but, you know, I spending a ton of my time on things that I am okay at and then a tiny portion of my time on things that I am great at. And when you focus more of your time on those areas that you have the potential to be great at and fit your signature strengths, it changes the interaction that you have with people from the interview to, you know, the actual role puts you in a completely different situation that most people haven't experienced in that way before. So unsurprisingly, it allows people to be able to make the same amount or more. It's not the magic pill necessarily, but it creates a different situation that wasn't always there in that same way.

I so love this. And, you know, I. I think that I work with people in a perhaps slightly different situation. But I want to say this. What you're describing, I think, is people that somehow, through working with you, working with me, whatever it is, get ignited about how they can pivot and be who they want to be and make the impact they want without chucking everything out. Most people think for me to feel the passion Scott and Kathy have, I've got to lose everything. I. I got to chuck out the corporate career, right? And for. So for. I would say 60% of the people I work with, that is not true, that when they go through the process that we go through, they can get to that place and not chuck everything out. But I would say there's 40%, and I was one of them because I was in marketing. And truthfully, I didn't want to market other people's programs. I want to market my programs, but I didn't even have programs then. I didn't even know. I was so far away from that chain of destiny that I didn't even know what I meant. But it was never going to work to pivot in marketing because that didn't have the impact that I wanted to. Even if I found an organization who I loved their products, it still wasn't the end for me. Do you understand what I mean? So for me, I really did have to chuck it all out. But even with.

Let me challenge you on that. Yeah, I bet there are some things that you carried over into your next set of opportunities that may not be big things, but I bet you didn't just chuck it out completely in terms of never use any of those skill sets again, never leverage any of those experiences again. Never.

Right? And what I was about to say is exactly that. Nothing is wasted. Nothing at all. Like, I run a business. I'm marketing, I'm doing sales, I'm doing writing, I'm doing communications. You know, so I use every bit of it. But I really did need to chuck out the corporate identity of marketing vp. That had to go away and I had to run my own business. But so, you know, let's be honest, that's pretty much doing a total transformation. Right? But to your point, it's a pivot in that I took everything with me and just focused it on helping people and creating my own programs. Helping people.

That's a really. What you just said. There is a really interesting point too, because it, I think, is a restrictive mindset. Accidentally, it's normal human tendency. But for us to think that, hey, look, if I want, I don't know, career happiness and that's over on the other side of this fence, I'm going to have to, like, shed everything in order to get onto the other side of that fence. And that's not how it works in reality. And I find a much better way to think about that is acknowledging what's not working, acknowledging that, you know, for you, it wasn't the corporate VP type of thing, Maybe that was a, I don't know, good thing when you entered or something like that, but it was no longer creating usefulness or valuable, and it was no longer desirable for you is no longer serving a good purpose in your life.

Right.

You know, being able to acknowledge that and say, hey, there are some of these other things that I want to continue to do. But like, I bet you have been the type of person who is great at listening for a very long period of time in your life and the type of person that is able to help other people in a variety of different ways. I bet that has shown up in all kinds of different places in your life and probably in your marketing role in some capacity too.

It's true. And even. No, you're right. Thank you for saying. And even writing. Yeah, I made my living in a lot of ways being a copywriter, understanding, writing, communicating. I just, that was only. That's the tip of your iceberg we're talking about. What was really underneath is I wanted to do my own writing. Not copywriting, but my own writing. So you're right. I mean, you're, you're tying it all in. And I think you're touching on the biggest fears people have to do any of this work to even pick up the phone and call you or me or, you know, go to your website. One, I'm going to lose everything that I've worked hard for. Two, I don't have any God darn idea what I really want to do, so how are you going to help me? Three, I make a lot of money and I don't want to give that up. I think those are the biggest reasons. Right. And four might be. Four might be. Why do I deserve to be that happy? I get a lot of worthiness, sad, you know, why don't you deserve? Everyone on the planet deserves happiness in what they do. Oh, I love it. All right, we've touched on signature strengths, maybe how to get at them. Let's talk for a minute about assessments. You and I have had this discussion. I will say I'm not a fan of quantitative assessments. Why? I mean, I used to do market research. What I don't like about quantitative is you'll know the what, but you won't know the why. So for instance, if I do a test on my strengths, it'll say teacher. But I look at that and go, oh, good Lord, I don't want to teach in a classroom. Right. It doesn't really get at the why, the juice underneath. And so I think that people, a lot of people show me their assessments that they've taken. And the final thing I want to say about, I did take a Myers Briggs entj and I thought for sure something was wrong because it didn't really. I am an extrovert. I think it was the end part that didn't feel right. And I went up to the guy, the facilitator, and I said, look, I answered every question as honestly as I could. Why does this not feel like me? And he said, what happens often in corporate settings is unconsciously you morph to be like your leadership. And every leader of the 10 person leadership team was an ENTJ. And I thought, oh my Gosh, I've morphed so much to be accepted and liked and pleasing that I don't even know who I am anymore. How scary. So I am a bigger fan of my qualitative assessment where people take it. But I read the, you know, that that's keeping me in the loop. So what I need to do is automate that so the me thinking is applied and I don't have to physically be there. But tell me what you think about assessments that you have seen work that get to people's strengths and have moved them forward.

Well, I think I'll first acknowledge that you and I share a lot of the same opinions on assessments in general. And anyone that is trying to say you should do this is probably not representing enough variables to make an accurate recommendation. Especially since, like, let's just, you know, pull out the variable side and say that, honestly, at this point, jobs and careers are changing faster than we can even publish the descriptions for them. So how on earth could those assessments be accurate in ways that are going to be 100% right on. So I think that if you're taking that type of assessment where it pops out, you should be a beekeeper or you should be an accountant or whatever, I don't know, whatever it might be, then you have to have to for them to be any kind of useful at all. You have to keep that in mind. And I don't enjoy them or like them or find a lot of use for them for that reason, because I find that more often than not for the average person, it is misleading. More so than anything else. What I do find to be very useful is those assessments that allow you to learn more about yourself, but with the prerequisite that you have to go in recognizing that you have the ownership to be able to take this information and do something that is useful with it. It's not going to be a magic bullet. 100% of them are not magic. I don't know. They're not magic, as it turns out. However, as it relates to strengths in particular, since you asked about that one, one of the best ones that I found out there, I'll share some of the reasons why is an assessment that's been around for quite a period of time and been worked on and had a lot of research that goes along with it too, in order to get to the point where it's at now. And that is something that used to be called strength finder. Now it's called cliftonstrength. And again, this is not a magic situation. This is Not a Wave youe Wand.

I'm not going to be an accountant because it says I should, right?

Yeah, exactly. It's not that sort of thing at all. So if you go into it expecting that, then you're going to come out and be like, okay, now what? Now what do I do? But if you go into it anticipating that one of the best things that it does is it gives you language that you may not have had before to articulate and understand your strengths in a way that you may not have prior to taking that assessment, then it's going to be very valuable for you. And that's one of the best things that I found is people come out of it and they may not necessarily be like, oh, I never knew about this about myself. And in fact, the best assessments are going to tell us and validate for us what we might already suspect in one way or another is what I found. It's going to feel more like coming home versus like going in and visiting an exotic location. So that's what strengthfinder does.

Love it. You know, you bring up a wonderful point. I've created a few assessments and one is my dominant action style, which I'll link to. And you know what it does? It's exactly what you're saying. People will say, oh, my goodness, I am a seeker or I am an advocator. And it's what they always knew, but they didn't recognize it with that language or with that value. I think that's what a great quantitative assessment does. That's me. And I had no idea it could be meaningful or helpful or that it's special in any way. And in that way, I'm all for it. I'm all for it. But, you know, I've also had on my career path assessment that's qualitative. It's a survey. I've had guys say I didn't get a score. It's, you know, women don't ask. They want a number. Like, I'm number 42 and that means I should be a banker, you know, and you really make a good point, don't you? Don't look for the magic bullet. It's not really that simple. You're a complex organism with so many moving parts that an assessment isn't going to answer, you know, what you should do for your job. It's not. It's going to give you some incredible feedback about who you already know you are. Right. Would you agree with that statement?

Absolutely would agree with that. And we find, to give you an example here we were working with someone a while back, her name was Myra and she went through, she took the strengthfinder assessment and she came out of it and she's like, yeah, I agree with these, but they don't really seem very valuable in a lot of different ways. And so that, that stimulated a whole conversation about what was behind that and.

What she feels is valuable. Right? What, yes, she was putting a value assessment onto that. Yeah.

Now here's what was really interesting. So she had spent, she had spent, I think it was like four or five years as she was working at a manager level position, working in a customer service type department, for lack of a better description. And she was serving people on an ongoing basis and that part was very natural to her. She always, always, always would put other people before herself and that was one of her primary motivations and that showed up in the strengthsfinder language. However, in addition to that, she also is somebody who is very much futuristic and also very analytical and very much likes working on proactive problems. So we started to see as we talked through this that she actually wasn't utilizing a whole bunch of her strengths in a lot of different ways. Because think about a customer service partner, what happens. You're managing all the things that go wrong.

Right? Yeah.

So she had a small portion the, of, of some of her strengths aligned and the ones that were easiest to point to and say, hey, I like helping other people. You know, this is great. This allows me to be able to help a lot of other people on an ongoing day to day basis and have great conversations with them and support her team and all kinds of things like that. However, what was missing was where she feels best and she didn't know this till now was the. When she got to work on those proactive type problems where she was able to experience being able to, being able to focus on what she would consider to be really positive, relevant solutions. And she wasn't able to do that in her role. It was a pretty big misalignment.

Oh, Scott, sounds fantastic. I think we're over 30 minutes already, aren't we? Shoot.

Oh my goodness.

Time flies. Is it? Oh no. All right, so what else do people need to know in terms of what your company does, what you are particularly passionate about? You know, what's your Venn diagram where your company is giving the most value, tapping into your skills? What do people need to know about what you all are doing?

You know, really what we do as an organization is we help connect, help people identify what really creates an ideal career for them and then we help them connect that to the real world. Because just for all the conversation you and I just had, the challenge is a lot of times, ourselves, we undervalue our strengths. We don't think that we can find this thing that feels like a unicorn out there in the real world in one way or another. We have all of these head games that we play on ourselves. And navigating through that, as you know, is probably the biggest challenge and is a challenge.

You're right.

So we help make that, I don't know, unicorn, I guess you could say that light at the end of the rainbow in a lot of ways possible. That alignment with your strengths and career happiness, we help make that much more possible. And we do that a lot of times working with people one on one through our programs. We've got a lot of different ways that we work with people. But what I would say is that the things that you need to know is first and foremost, more so than anything else. You have to decide that you no longer want to accept where you're at in your life for what you're receiving and what you're putting out into the world right now. And then once you decide that there can be something that's better for you and there can be something that's better aligned, and even if you don't know what it is you want to take, you want to commit to finding that, then that really, truly is the first step. So that's the first thing that I would recommend.

That's beautiful. And, you know, I want to tell everybody it's a lot closer to you than you think. I mean, even I became a therapist and launched a business as a, you know, coach and a writer, as you were pointing out. It really just is a few steps down that trajectory. It. It isn't as far away as you feel. So you think it's a unicorn that why should I ever have that? It's really some micro steps away and your whole life can change. So I think what you described, you have to be ready to understand. I don't want what I have, and I'm ready to do the work, but also I'm worth it and I can do this. I can make this happen. I think that's where we just lose a lot of people and they stay in quiet desperation all their lives, but now they know where to go. Where do they go to find your resources, your assessments? Where do they go, Scott?

Well, you know, if you're listening to this on a podcast forum, I'm guessing that you enjoy podcasts quite A bit. And we have a pretty great one where we share stories of high performers and people that were also looking for career happiness and we share exactly how they have done that within their own lives and everything that led up to that. And you can find that by going to wherever you listen to podcasts and searching Happen to youo Career and it'll pop right up. So that's one place. But our home base is happentoyourcareer.com and we have a variety of resources, even one that we were starting to talk a little bit about here that might be really very useful. You can go to actually hired4 strengths.com and that will guide you to our ultimate guide to using your strengths to get hired. So it's not just an understanding, but you can actually leverage them through the hiring process as well. So that would be another great place to be able to get started.

We will link to all of that. And I just let me end by this. It has happened to your career. Does it mean what I think it means? Don't let your career happen to you. You happen to it. You create it. Is that what that means?

It is the antithesis. And actually so creer the word career. I didn't know this until I started looking it up seven years ago, six years ago, whatever it's been. The word career comes from a bunch of different root words in Latin that evolved to Italian and a few other languages. But if you think about carriage, the word carriage, it's the same root word. And carious or career means to move down a path. And at one point it meant things like the path that was laid behind a wheel as it was turning and going down the path.

No way. I didn't know that.

Yeah. So the word, the word clear comes from all those different origins and it represents the whole of movement forward. So the happen to is being able to take control of your journey is really what it is. All of that movement represents your journey. So it literally means take control of your journey.

Oh, I love it. What a way to end. Oh, it's fantastic. Scott, thank you for everything you're doing. And I know you've got a lot of new initiatives in the pipeline, all about helping people happen to their career and shape that trajectory the way they want. Thank you for joining. Thank you. Come back again.

Thank you for having me. I have enjoyed every conversation that we've had, so I appreciate it.

So fun. Thank you, Scott and everybody, I hope. Is this helping you find brave? Are you ready? Are you somebody who's on the fence who says Oh, I don't know. I don't want to lose things. I'm not good enough. I'm not smart enough. What would I even do? Put those aside. Just believe that you deserve and want something different and better and happier. That's all you need. And then reach out to anybody. Reach out to Scott's company and all of his resources. Reach out to me. There's so much beautiful help in the world I've come to realize, which I didn't realize when I was miserable in my corporate career. I felt so alone. You're not alone. And listen to Scott's podcast and get inspired by all the people making changes. It's time, folks. Time you find brave and happen to your career. All right. I hope this is helpful. Let us know, and we will see you next time. Thank you. Thanks, Scott.