Episode Transcript

Lisa Lewis Miller 00:00
If for you, compensation is the be all, end all, then before you apply to an organization, you should be doing your due diligence and your research to make sure that they pay in the range that you want to be making.

Chris Villanueva 00:15
Welcome to the Let’s Eat, Grandma, Career Warrior Podcast, and welcome to the Let’s Eat, Grandma Career Warrior Podcast, where our goal is not only to help you land your dream job, but to help you live your best life. Today we’re going to talk about deciding your new career path with four pillars. Today I brought on Lisa Lewis Miller, CEO of Career Clarity. Lisa is an internationally recognized career change expert and author who has successfully coached more than 500 people through work transitions in more than 10 countries. She’s been featured in the Washington Post Forbes Fast Company Business Insider US News. She’s also a trusted thought leader on creating a fulfilling career path. She’s the host and executive producer of the Career Clarity Show, podcast and published book, career Clarity. In 2020, her path evolved into coaching after working for nearly a decade on major companies such as Two U Edelman, the American Cancer Society, 17 and many others. So as you can see, Lisa is just going to be amazing today for this episode and this episode. It’s really going to help you if you’re struggling or confused with the career direction that you’ll be choosing. So let’s launch right into it with our episode of the Career Warrior Podcast.

Lisa Lewis Miller 01:41
Thank you so much, Chris. It’s a delight to be back.

Chris Villanueva 01:44
I should have practiced some of those company names before actually reading that intro. But you have just done so much. I’ve had this amazing career, and I just want to hear a little bit about your story and what sort of launched you into the career space. And I know that you’ve had this brilliant, amazing story in your book, and maybe you can read some of that, but let’s enlighten our listeners right now.

Lisa Lewis Miller 02:06
Well, my desire to understand more about the factors that contribute to fulfilling juicy life-giving careers was born out of seeing some situations in my own life and in the lives of people that I loved around me that I felt like weren’t right, and they were potentially very avoidable. So I know in my own journey when I first got started in my career, I felt a little bit like a Goldilocks that I kept trying out different things and nothing really felt like it was quite the right bit for me. I started at a nonprofit and I was their new media associate because at that point, digital media and social media were still so new and fancy that they weren’t even calling it digital or social just yet.

Chris Villanueva 02:47
Wow.

Lisa Lewis Miller 02:48
And I was there for a while. I got a ton of autonomy, a ton of authority because this was such a foreign space for them. But there wasn’t really a whole lot of opportunity to grow. There wasn’t a whole lot of opportunity to advance. There wasn’t a whole lot of opportunity for mentorship, for resources to be able to really turn into a leader at the organization. So I jumped ship. That was the first of my many Goldilocks moves of, okay, this bowl of board is too cold. I’m not getting opportunities to really advance the way that I think is possible. Let me try something else. I went to a communications consulting firm in Washington DC where we were steps from the White House, and we were helping organizations to put together their grassroots and their grass tops movements to help impact social change and impact policy change. And I was really enjoying the challenge, trying to help people craft a narrative, come up with their story, find a really compelling, persuasive way to talk about what they were all about and what they were doing, and help people to then change their activities, change their behaviors, change their lives.

Lisa Lewis Miller 05:13
You have given me no explanation. And in that moment, I realized, well, gosh, this isn’t Goldilocks perfect bowl of porridge either, because if this organization gives lip service to treating people like humans, but doesn’t actually back that up in their actions and their behaviors, this is not going to be a sustainable fit for me. And that sense of real disappointment and real concern that so many companies were saying one thing and doing another led me down the research rabbit hole of trying to figure out what are the factors that contribute to really good fit, good fulfillment, good satisfaction in a role?

Chris Villanueva 05:53
Yes.

Lisa Lewis Miller 05:54
And how can that be something that’s replicable and useful for everybody? And Chris, as I’m sure we’ll get into here in a moment, what I discovered is that while there are some principles that can help you to see where you might find a fulfilling, satisfying fit in your work for your next step, one of the interesting paradoxes of finding satisfaction is that you have to define what satisfaction means for yourself on a very personal scale, even though you’re using some tried and true principles.

Chris Villanueva 06:21
Right? Absolutely. And I remember first of all that story as I was reading, it just really blew my mind how someone could, I think you even portray this person even more intensely in the book and the way you laid it out just now. But that’s awful in terms of how you treat somebody. And a company culture is one of the most important things that I think that people should be factoring into their jobs, and that is one of the things that matters. So before we go into these four pillars, like the actual pillars themselves, can you just kind of give a rundown about what they are and how they should be used? Because you just said that they are very personal to each person, but what are these four pillars?

Lisa Lewis Miller 06:59
Over the time that I’ve been doing coaching, I’ve come up with this methodology that I call the four pillars of career fulfillment. And what I’ve seen from coaching hundreds and hundreds of people through career changes is that consistently, if people were moving into a new job that did not allow them to feel a certain sense of satisfaction and fulfillment across these four factors.

Chris Villanueva 09:54
Wonderful. So that’s a very good overview. I want to jump back to the very top of those four pillars, strengths. And I think that the way you laid out strengths or the way you define strengths in the book was just interesting and different than what I normally thought of about my own strengths. But first of all, how do you define strengths within the context of these four pillars? And how can this help me get my dream job? How is this relevant?

Lisa Lewis Miller 10:19
Well, honestly, Chris, when I was writing this part of the book as I was writing it, I was kind of surprising myself as I was writing it out because as I was trying to define what a strength is, I kept coming back to a strength is not just any of the million things that you can do. A strength is tied to feeling the way that you want to feel in your work. And I thought, oh gosh, talking about feelings is going to make this so woo woo. It’s going to make this so squishy. Nobody’s going to want to read this. But then when I dug into it a little bit further, I recognized from the data that typically the capabilities that we label as our strength are the ones that are most enjoyable. They are the most energy creating, not energy draining, and they’re the ones that have natural momentum around them. And when you think about it that way, nobody doesn’t want to feel momentum, energy, excitement, and engagement in their work. So identifying your strengths as the out of all the things that you can do, which are the ones that are the biggest energy drivers, which are the biggest ones that have natural momentum to them, which are the ones that you get excited about and enjoy doing most can be a really important lens to use.

Lisa Lewis Miller 11:31
I’ll give an example that if you have worked with Chris and the folks at Let’s Eat, Grandma, this is probably going to be really familiar to you, but an example of this is that back when I was working at the communications consulting firm, I was helping with a lot of big communications campaigns that required a lot of organization. And so these campaigns required us to have these really in-depth databases, right? We were running all sorts of interesting CRM software to track people, to track pieces of legislation, to track emails, to track all sorts of things that were happening on our side. And I became the expert in the office at using Salesforce and being a Salesforce administrator, that was our CRM of choice. Here’s the rub. I didn’t enjoy doing Salesforce one single bit. I was good at it. It was a capability, it was a skill,

Chris Villanueva 12:51
And I think that’s a big mistake that I made, at least within my career, is I’ve done hospitality and restaurant management my entire life, and I said subconsciously, but I kept not intentionally attracting it back into my life because I would keep telling people that that’s where my competencies lie. That’s where my strengths are. Whereas I didn’t want to be in restaurants. I wanted to move kind of towards this entrepreneurial thing. So that was really eyeopening for me as I was reading it. It’s like, let’s not just define our strengths as the things that we can do, but like you said, is the things that we feel excited and energetic and motivated to do throughout our day.

Lisa Lewis Miller 13:29
And it’s a particular trap for high achievers and high performers, right? Because the smarter you are, the better that you are at learning things on your own, the more likely it is that you are willing to figure it out and learn the skill, solve the problem, answer whatever needs to be answered. But if you do that, you can oftentimes really move yourself in a direction where you start to become disassociated from what your strengths are because you’re so motivated by learning that you want to just solve any problem. So having that pause, having a built-in feedback loop so that you stop and reflect and say, okay, out of all the things that I’ve been willing to do and that I’ve taught myself, which are the ones I actually want to come back to and double down on and grow and stretch and challenge myself in even more, is a really important distinction to be using to move towards fulfillment rather than moving towards same crap different day or same crap, different desk kind of a situation.

Chris Villanueva 14:23
So Lisa, let’s move on to interests. Because for me, at least when I was first reading the book, I almost put interest and strengths in the same bucket. They kind of seem like the same thing to me. How really are interests different than strengths?

Lisa Lewis Miller 15:55
So the distinction with your interests is how are you taking the incredible strengths and gifts that you have and using them to make a difference in a way that’s meaningful and valuable to you? Both at the micro level, what am I doing within my department or my team, which is probably where you’re going to see the most overlap with strength. But then at the macro level, what’s the sector or the industry that I’m interested in working in?

Chris Villanueva 16:17
Okay, so strengths are, they’re more about the things that you’re going to be doing with your hands and feet as I like to call them, and interests relate to, I would say, a little bit more of the bigger picture. How are your strengths going to be applied within a bigger context? Correct?

Lisa Lewis Miller 16:33
Yeah. If strengths are what you’re doing and your day-to-day responsibilities, your interest is where you’re doing it and what kinds of problems you’re using those strengths to solve.

Chris Villanueva 16:42
Okay, I love that so much. And so how do I figure out what my interests are? Isn’t this just something I should just already know off the top of my head, or is there some more soul searching I should be doing?

Lisa Lewis Miller 16:52
Well, it’s a great question, Chris, because I think a lot of us put a lot of pressure and stress on ourselves when we’re thinking about what we’re interested in because there is a certain amount of belief that you already magically know what all your interests are off the top of your head. But what I’ll also say is that for those of us who work in any sort of hair taking caregiving capacity, whether it’s for a spouse or partner, whether it’s for children, whether it’s for a parent, whether it’s for anybody, maybe you are a caregiver or a caretaker professionally, it can become very easy to become disassociated from your own interests and very tuned into and keyed into what other people’s interests are. And if there are parents listening to this right now, I want to remind you that you as an individual have more interests than just PAW Patrol.

Chris Villanueva 18:18
For me, I am obsessed with music. So I think for me, that’s something that I’ve lost really in the last five years or so. And so I think now that I feel like I’m having this renaissance period where I’m coming back to my interests and coming back to something that innately might be one of my biggest passions in life, and you are so right that if I have all of the time in the world, if it didn’t you have any time in the world, I would still make time for music I think no matter how busy I am. So the energy is there and I think it’s so incredibly important to be aligned with those interests. I think that’s just brilliant.

Lisa Lewis Miller 18:53
Well, and Chris, let me say too that by identifying your interests, it doesn’t necessarily mean you have to work in all of them or in any of them, but you need to have them in your life. Otherwise you are not going to be feeling as lit up, feeling as happy, feeling as connected to yourself as possible. So if you have an interest in music, you can absolutely be looking at ways to integrate that more fully into your career, turn that into something that creates revenue for you in some form. But another insight that might come out of that is, wow, this is a really precious hobby for me that I don’t want work to get in the way of

Chris Villanueva 19:26
Good point.

Lisa Lewis Miller 19:26
And so finding something to do professionally that’s still interesting to you, that still drives curiosity and growth, but that then doesn’t interfere with your hobbies can be just as important of an insight in and of itself.

Chris Villanueva 19:38
Okay, makes a lot of sense to me. Maybe that’s the direction I’ll go in, but it’s going to be interesting. I’ll keep you updated on my progress there. So what is pillar number three?

Lisa Lewis Miller 19:48
So pillar number three is personality. And this was where I had been feeling that extreme amount of disconnect with the communications consulting firm because their values of getting work done at all costs, who cares if somebody has just had a death in the family? Their values are really incongruous with my own values and how I wanted to be treated as a human in the workplace. I didn’t just want to be a cog. And when we talk about the personality pillar, it can be really challenging because one of the biggest things that you need to do to get fulfillment in the personality pillar is to know yourself. Do you like to be in introverted spaces or extroverted spaces?

Chris Villanueva 21:58
Absolutely, and I could already see why if you don’t have this pillar within your career, if you don’t have that, then that could be one reason why you may not be successful or unhappy at whatever job that you’re a part of. But going back to something you mentioned earlier about the job description, how a lot of them are so focused on strengths, like they’re very strength focused. How would I be able to determine a personality fit within a company if that’s not apparent within the job description?

Lisa Lewis Miller 22:25

Lisa Lewis Miller 23:35
On is this organization exhibiting biases, right? Ageism, sexism, racism. Are they anti allowing people to share or to practice certain elements of their religion? Because if you talk to somebody and you’re able to ask your specific questions related to your specific personality needs, that’ll be a really easy way for you to get the knowledge to then make the decision of, does this feel good for me? Do I still want to be moving towards this organization? Are these things that I’m willing to work with and that feel like they could be okay for me? Or does this feel like this is violating a non-negotiable for me in terms of how I want to feel, how I want to show up, how I want to be respected or treated, and I need to look elsewhere?

Chris Villanueva 24:14
Okay. You said such a brilliant word that I want to bring up in terms of how people make decisions for their job, but you said non-negotiable. All of these pillars that we’ve listed out so far I think are operating within some context that if I don’t have everything lined up perfectly, then I still might end up choosing a job. Correct. So it doesn’t have to be perfect, but with the whole negotiable, non-negotiable thing, is that how you’re saying? I would be able to decide whether or not it’s worth it for me to make a leap for a particular company. I guess how do I decide whether a company’s right where everything may not be perfect the way I want it to be?

Lisa Lewis Miller 24:51
Yeah, great question. And you’re highlighting something that I probably should have said at the front, which is that the four pillars are not something where you should be expecting to get a 10 out of 10 perfect fit on every single thing you’re articulating for yourself on every single one of the four pillars. The pillars are a framework to help you look at what are all the things that are important to me, and then prioritize to say, well, what’s most important to me? Is it most important to me to be working in an office where everybody has doors and everybody gets noise canceling headphones and we can be hyper productive? Or is it most important to me to be working in an organization where I feel like I have a true sense of friendship and comradery with my colleagues? Because it’s not that you can’t have both, but when you’re searching, you need to know which one is more important and most valuable to then focus your search so that you know where to start and what to look at and what can be interesting on its face, but is actually out of alignment with your prioritization and the trade-offs that you want to be making.

Chris Villanueva 25:49
Okay, fantastic. A really good way to bring that to light. I like to write things down. I know if I was making a decision, I would lay all these things out, but I think that’s really brilliant. So pillar number four, let’s round it out here. I know I get excited about this one because I dislike lifestyle and money is always a part of this situation, but let’s talk about pillar number four for our job seekers here.

Lisa Lewis Miller 26:11
So the last pillar, lifestyle needs is the one that makes you ask the question again, to that point of trade-offs and priorities, what do I need most in terms of compensation and benefits and flexibility? Because for some people, total comp may be the bottom line. Most important thing for you, you’ve priced out what your lifestyle costs. You have priced out some dreams that you have. You know what you need to be making in take home pay per month to be able to make that happen. You have a fabulous spreadsheet and because of that, you know exactly what you are or are not willing to work for, but for other people, the compensation piece may not be as big of a deal. Not that you don’t want to eventually have a bathtub full of gold coins that you can dive into Scrooge McDuck style, but rather that there are other things that are more important to you. So maybe you are training for an ultra marathon and that is a huge goal for you. You love it, but to do your training runs, especially in the heat of summer, you got to go in the morning before it gets super hot out and terrible and if you’re doing ultra marathons, you need a healthy amount of time to go for those runs, get home, stretch it out, take a shower, all that before you log on work.

Lisa Lewis Miller 27:19
It might be worth it for you to make a trade off of maybe optimizing solely towards salary and compensation. If instead you could optimize towards having flexibility to start your day at 10 or 10 30 in the morning when you’re back from your run, you’ve taken a shower and you didn’t have to get up at 3:00 AM to do it. All right? So each person’s needs here will vary, but identifying what’s most important for you is the most important part. Again, not because you can’t make some really great power moves and upgrade your salary and upgrade your benefits, but because this helps you prioritize where to search and what to be negotiating and asking for first.

Chris Villanueva 27:55
Right? Absolutely. I’m thinking about this in terms of the practicality of the job search and interviews and things like that, but is this something typically that comes in towards the end of the interview cycle, the very, very end? When do I bring this into conversation?

Lisa Lewis Miller 28:11
It depends on what you need. If for you, compensation is the be all end all, then before you apply to an organization, you should be doing your due diligence and your research to make sure that they pay in the range that you want to be making. Otherwise, you shouldn’t be engaging in an interview with them at all, right? If they have a history of being in the kind of pay band that you want to be in, or they have a history of being willing to negotiate there, totally go for it. For other people, it may totally be an afterthought where you go through the negotiation process and then you realize, okay, there’s one type of benefit that I think this company offers, and I just want to make sure that I negotiate for it at the very end when I get the offer letter. But for most people to make sure that your priorities are going to be valued and honored, you need to be thinking about them before you start the interview process and make sure that you’re aligning the organizations and roles you’re applying for with places that have a history of or have the possibility of meeting your needs.

Chris Villanueva 29:05
Absolutely. Well, Lisa, you have been just a magnificent guest. I want to make sure we have enough time here to talk about your book and of course the Q and A session with their job seekers. But first of all, why did you write the book? And this is going to be a little bit in the future when this episode’s released, but when does the book release? When is the book’s released date?

Lisa Lewis Miller 29:25
So the book, by the time you’re listening to this, the book has already come out. It was November 17th, 2020, and it’s available on IndieBound, it’s available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble Books a million. Any place that you buy books, you should be able to find a copy. And I wrote this because the more that I was diving into the research around career fulfillment, career satisfaction, career change, how to find work that feels like it fits you, the more I was realizing that there are some brilliant people out there who have written incredible books that only talk about a slice. They only talk about one piece of the issue. And I wanted for folks to have a guidebook.

Chris Villanueva 30:02
You went all in that.

Lisa Lewis Miller 30:03
Takes you absolutely. I mean, I want you to be able to go to this book and say, I don’t know what I want next, but it’s not this crack. Open the book and then feel like you are supported and guided step-by-step through the whole process of figuring out what you want, finding it in the marketplace, testing and validating that it’s a good fit, and then making your job search and your transition actually happen.

Chris Villanueva 30:25
Wonderful. And I’m trying not to make this sound so pitchy and I do it on accident. I just get so excited to talk about the book because I read it. And even as someone who’s not actively looking for a job right now, as someone who is a, I feel like a lifelong entrepreneur, I felt like I got a lot of inspiration from this book in defining my own what lifestyle do I want in my own life? And I really had to ask myself, what are my strengths as a business owner, as an entrepreneur, and how can I use that to end up scaling and growing my business? We are scaling right now, and it is kind of that awkward teenage stage, teenager phase, I think, where there’s just a lot of growing pains, but it really made me question, what are my strengths and what are my weaknesses? What are the things that I am not so good at, or even the things that I just hate doing on a daily basis that I think I need to get rid of? So big kudos and congratulations to you on your book release. That is just fantastic and can’t thank you enough for coming on the show.

Lisa Lewis Miller 31:24
Well, thank you for having me, Chris. And for any listeners who are as big of Chris Villanueva fans as I am, he actually was so generous to provide a praise blurb to go in the book. So if you want to read what Chris had to say about the book, you can pick up your copy at getcareerclarity.com/book/

Chris Villanueva 31:40
Perfect. Awesome. And for you, joggers who were out there on the road, or people who are driving right now, we want you to be safe. So whenever you get home, make sure to check out the description of this podcast, whether you’re listening through Spotify or Apple, and I’ll make sure to include those links within the podcast episode description. So this concludes episode of the Career Warrior Podcast. Let’s go out. Let’s go be warriors and have a nice day Career Warrior Podcast. And before you go, remember, if you’re not seeing the results you want in your job search, our highly trained team of professional resume writers here at Let’s Eat, Grandma can help head on over to letseatgrandma.com/podcast/ to get a free resume critique and $70 off any one of our resume writing packages. We talk all the time on the show about the importance of being targeted in your job search. And with our unique writing process and focus on individual attention, you’ll get a resume cover letter and LinkedIn profile that are highly customized and tailored to your goals to help you get hired faster. Again, head on over to letseatgrandma.com/podcast/ Thanks, and I’ll see you next time.