Episode 32 – You’re 100% Responsible for Your Career

In the first episode of 2024, join Work Mom Lori Jo Vest as she urges you to become 100% responsible for your career and your success. From the myth of job security to the importance of career cushioning and side hustles, she offers many ways to take full control of your career.

Themes discussed in this episode

• There’s no such thing as job security
• Entrepreneurship = most independence and job security
• Don’t be afraid of the side hustle
• The power of career cushioning
• Don’t wait to take control of your career

Episode Highlights

Timestamped inflection points from the show

4:00 – Job security doesn’t exist: When you’re working for someone else, you are always at risk of losing a job.
7:00 – Entrepreneurship = independence: Working for yourself gives you the most independence and the most control over your career.
9:00 – Don’t be afraid of the side hustle: Side hustles can be a second revenue stream, expand your skill set, and even turn into your full-time career!
11:30 – Career cushioning: Make sure your LinkedIn, resume, and portfolio are always up to date, so you can be ready if something happens.
12:30 – Don’t wait: If you want to launch a side hustle or monetize a hobby, start now! It can only help you grow your skills the earlier you start

Top Quotes

4:45 – I had thought that I had job security. It was a huge lesson in the fact that there really is no such thing. Anything can happen at any time. A business can lose a client. Somebody can die. Somebody can leave the company, your boss can decide to move on to a new position, and the person replacing them doesn’t like you so much. Things happen.
6:00 – All those secure positions were not secure at all. And there really wasn’t a secure position unless I made it myself, unless I created it unless I owned the opportunity, I wouldn’t be able to have true independence.
7:40 – If you want true independence, building your own is… the most rewarding and the most responsible way to do it. You have the most control over your career situation when you’re an entrepreneur.
9:00 – I highly recommend side hustles. They give you a side revenue stream. So if something happens and you get laid off, you have some money to pay your bills. There are a lot of things you can do on the side to make money.
10:45 – If you were to do a side hustle, what would you enjoy doing? What hobbies could you monetize? What skills do you want to develop?
13:00 – The worst of all the best possible outcomes is that maybe you get a raise at your current position or you get promoted because your skills are higher. You’re more enthusiastic. You are learning things faster, and you’re more committed to your career
14:00 – You are 100% responsible for what happens. How you respond is what determines what happens. And you are in control. Don’t ever forget it. It might not feel that way. Keep trying that on and eventually it will feel very comfortable because you are in control of your career.

Links

Check out our LinkedIn episode for more ways to effectively grow your network and get that next opportunity.

Connect with me on LinkedIn. Order my book!

Transcript

[1:00]
Hello, and thank you for joining me for this episode of Work Mom Says Don’t Be an Idiot. I’m Lori Jo Vest, your host and work mom. I want to talk today about your independence and also the responsibility that comes with that independence. And I’ll start with telling you about a book that I read, oh, probably 20 years ago.

Jack Canfield has a book about creating your life. And one of the things that he says very early on is that you are 100% responsible for whatever happens in your life. And I remember reading that and going, no, I’m not 100% responsible.This person did that and that person did this and this person did this and all these things happened.

[2:00]
Well, you can look at it that way or I could look at it and think, well, I did create the ability to go to college. I searched for financial aid. I studied and took the tests and got in and I got my degree. I was better able to get a job because I had been responsible enough to get the degree, pursue the funding, follow through. And then I’ve gotten jobs ever since I started right after college.

I’ve had really good jobs. I’ve had not so great jobs. I’ve had secure jobs. I’ve had not so secure jobs. But I’ve always been responsible for what happened with my career, how I performed at work, that’s on me, what positions I chose to accept or pursue, that was on me.

So I want to encourage you to really back away from the, you know, the really close up lens of
having to have a job in order to have a career. And I’m also going to ask you to challenge
your own thinking on what it means to have job security or does job security even exist?
So I’m going to leave you with those two things. Then we’re going to wander off over here and I’m going to tell you a little bit about my own experience.

[3:00]
I always believed that I had to have a job. I had to have a career. I could go through the rise through the ranks of a corporation. I could become a managing director of an organization, but I would be working for someone else because that felt secure. They were taking the risks.
So I went through probably a 35-year career doing that and believing that a job meant security.
Working for a company that wasn’t mine meant security.

And at one point, back in the early 2000s, I was working for a small television production studio. Well, I was there for about 11 years. I was running the company. Most of the people who worked there I had hired. The week before that same company owner had given me a really positive review, he said in a meeting that I took care of his company exactly like he did and how lucky he felt to have me.

[4:00]
And then a week and a half later, he called me in for a seven o’clock meeting on a Monday morning and said, it’s time. And I said, time for what? Well, I knew it was coming because I’d gotten, you know, the grapevine, grapevines run fast, just say it that way. The grapevine had gotten to me. And then he set a meeting for seven o’clock on a Monday morning, which was highly unusual in our business. And I just kind of knew it was coming. So we had the meeting. He let me go. He said it was a financial decision and I was out on my butt and I had thought that I had job security.

It was a huge lesson in the fact that there really is no such thing. Anything can happen at any time. A business can lose a client. Um, somebody can die. Um, somebody can leave the company, your boss can decide to move on to a new position, and then the person that replaces them doesn’t like you so much. I mean, things happen.

[5:00]
So after losing this job that I’d had for 11 years and was really comfortable in, but I think I knew
I’d outgrown it already, but a lot of times we ignore those things for comfort. The next opportunity I took I thought I was going to do really well. And I was bringing in business and I’d been there about six months and they decided to do pay cuts in the sales department. Not very smart, but that’s what they decided to do.

And I said, well, I’m going to be cleaning up my office this afternoon then. And I left.I mean, it was a 30% pay cut and there was no good reason for it. It was just a decision that they were making. And so I left the company.

But the next opportunity after that was working for an ad agency. Super excited about it. They just got the client, but it was a solid relationship. They were doing all kinds of work for them, websites and social media and apps and just all kinds of really great work. This was back in 2012.

[6:00]
And that job lasted six years until, oops, the client decided to downsize the account. And I was called into a room with 12 other people and let go. Well, by this point, I was 54 years old. Oh, man.That’s a point in your career where you hope to be kind of winding down or in a solid corporate leadership position that you can stay in for a long time.

And I wasn’t. I was booted out of that job and left to decide, do I look for a job somewhere else at 54? Or do I start my own business? And I made the choice to start my own business.

And what I realized is that all those secure positions were not secure at all. And there really wasn’t a secure position unless I made it myself, unless I created it, unless I owned the opportunity, I wouldn’t be able to have true independence. And so that’s been about six years ago.

[7:00]
And let me tell you, it’s been… absolutely a roller coaster, but it also feels more secure than anything I’ve ever done. When we have a client come in that is, you know, acting like an asshole, let’s just be real about it. People do that sometimes. I have the ability to say, we’ve got to part ways because I don’t like the way you’re treating us or the way you’re treating our staff.

And that type of freedom comes with a high level of responsibility because if you don’t have motivation, if you’re not someone who’s very accountable to tasks and to being at your desk at, you know, 7.30 or 8.30 or whatever and staying, you know, working 50, 60 hours for the first couple of years, you won’t make it. However, if you want true independence, building your own is… the most rewarding and the most responsible way to do it.

[8:00]
You have the most control over your career situation when you’re an entrepreneur. You just do. So why am I selling independence? So that if you do get laid off from your first or second or third job, I mean, it happens. Sometimes you think something looks really great and two weeks later they let you go because they had a big change.

So what can you do now to prepare yourself in the future? Lots of things. I started a side hustle. I wrote a customer service book with a lovely co-author, Marilyn Suttle, in 2008. And we did some customer service training. And we did some workshops. We developed an online course with a company called Business Training Experts. We did speaking engagements. And it really helped me elevate my skill set, elevate the proof of what I knew and what my talents were so that when it came time to, to make a job change, there was a lot more there to show than just here’s a job I’ve had.

[9:00]
So it, you know, I, it really worked for me to do that side hustle. So I highly recommend them. And also that you have maybe a side revenue stream. So if something does happen, you get laid off. you’ve got some money to pay your bills. There’s a lot of things you can do on the side to make money. And I’ll give you a couple of examples, people that I know.

I have a friend that discovered an amazing ability to paint. She took it up as a hobby about five years ago, and she still works in advertising, but she also sells these beautiful paintings in galleries on a regular basis I have another really great friend that got into pottery and now she’s does art fairs on the weekend and she’s transitioning to being uh you know a potter i guess that’s what you’d call them to being a pot thrower um 100% of the time.

I have another friend that you know started writing mermaid fiction. She’s a graphic designer and she wrote a couple of books. She knew she could write. She wrote a couple of books and she ended up, instead of being a graphic designer in television and, you know, motion video, she moved into being a communication director at one of the larger local churches here in Metro Detroit. Loves her job and is so happy there.

[10:00]
And, you know, as a graphic designer in television, the pressure’s really high. But she found a job that really suited her by expanding her skill set.

So a couple questions to ask yourself. If you were to do a side hustle, What do you enjoy doing? What hobbies could you monetize? What skills do you want to develop?

My friend that used to work in television graphics knew she could write. She wrote mermaid fiction and had a really nice audience. She used that side hustle, you know, and that hobby to
completely change her career into something that required both graphic design and writing.

[11:00]
So what are you interested in real estate? Do you like animals? Do you possibly have an interest in pet sitting or house sitting or, you know, dog walking? What side hustle could you create that allows you to do something you really enjoy and create a revenue stream?

And while you may not need that revenue stream right now, there’s a new trend. I read about it in Fast Company. I think it was in December 2023, an article on what they call career cushioning, which again, I highly recommend. And what career cushioning is, is making sure that your portfolio, your resume, everything is up to date at all times. Your LinkedIn profile is up to date and you’re active there so that if something happens, you’re ready.

And career cushioning can also include looking for or preparing for another position. So by being 100% responsible for what happens in your career, including, you know, really looking at all of your options and expanding your skillset and expanding your ways to make money. That’s how you create a hundred percent responsibility mindset towards your career. And it will lead you places you have no idea you wanted to go.

[12:00]
And the other thing is, looking back now, what I see that I didn’t see before is that I could have
done this 20 years earlier. And I probably could have been much more successful had I started sooner. Now, would I have all the skills that I have at this point or when I started, you know, PopSpeed Digital Marketing? Would I have had all those skills? No, but I would have developed them.

So I guess one of the things that I’m saying as your work mom is don’t wait. If you have any idea that your industry is a little turbulent or that you may eventually want to do something completely different, start now. Start with a side hustle. Start with a hobby that you can monetize.Put some effort into this career cushioning trend and see what you can make happen for yourself.

[13:00]
Because the worst thing that can happen, in my opinion, the worst of all the best possible outcomes, is that maybe you get a, you know, a raise at your current position or you get promoted because your skills are higher. You’re, you know, more enthusiastic. You are learning things faster and you’re more committed to your career. You are a hundred percent responsible for what happens in your career and in your life.

That’s where the gold is. So think of your career in that way. You are 100% responsible for what happens. How you respond is what determines what happens. And you are in control. So, work mom says you are in control. Don’t ever forget it. It might not feel that way. Keep trying that on and eventually it will feel very comfortable because you are in control of your career.

[14:00]
So that’s what I’ve got for you today. Let’s see. We have a website at workmomsays.com.
I would love to have you visit and fill out a contact form and tell me what you’d like me to talk about. Are there guests you’d like us to have on?

I’m also an open networker on LinkedIn under Lori Jo Vest. Would love to hear from you. You can suggest guests or ask questions of me there as well. And we’ll be back with another episode soon. Signing off

Who is our ideal listener?

This podcast is for young professionals, so they can learn to play the emotional context sport of business and experience less drama and more success.

The ideal listener is anyone struggling on an emotional level in the workplace. Work Mom Says it helps you learn to be strategic at work. This means you can look at the big picture without getting lost in the weeds. How can you be more logical and less emotional? Be strategic, and Work Mom Says can help you.

“I tell people to back up, put down the magnifying glass, and look at the big picture when you’re responding to something,” said Lori Jo Vest, Work Mom. “In doing this, you will understand that what’s really upsetting you right now will be something you don’t even remember next week.”

What value can people get from listening to this podcast?

Listening to Work Mom Says can help you grow your mood management skills, grow your ability to reframe situations, and look at things from a strategic point of view. This makes it easier to go into a work situation and get the most positive results.

On Work Mom Says, we also offer tips and tricks for creating connected positive relationships that last over time. People will want you on the team if you can create connected positive relationships and work environments. You become an asset, and you will be more successful when you’re an asset.

“I also like to talk about developing traits like optimism, persistence, tenacity, stick-to-itiveness, sticking with things, and approaching every project with a curious mind instead of a fearful mind,” said Lori Jo Vest, Work Mom

Why do I do this? A few more words from Work Mom

I do this because I naturally fell into the Work Mom role when I worked in the ad agency business and had so much fun with it. I also realized I had made just about every mistake there was to make. I don’t hold myself as a stellar example of truth and how you should be. I hold myself out there as someone who has been bruised, battered, and beaten up and learned some important lessons. I’d love to share these lessons with young people, so they don’t have to make those same mistakes or be the idiot I was.

I also want to help young professionals realize that many things our culture prioritizes aren’t really important. We talk a lot about what should be important and how to present your best face at the office so that you can succeed.

I’ve learned so much throughout my career, and it’s gratifying to share that with young professionals and help them avoid some of those mistakes and get to that success sooner.

Episode 26 – “The Origin of Work Mom Says (Plus a Sneak Peek at My Upcoming Book)” appeared first on Work Mom Says.

The post Episode 32 – You’re 100% Responsible for Your Career appeared first on Work Mom Says®.