Episode Transcript

Hilary Constable 0:00
But it’s similar to the concept of like, when you’re in the shower and people are like, Oh, I get my best ideas in the shower because you’re physically doing something mindless, so your mind is freed up to do a different kind of thinking, or a deeper thinking.

Chris Villanueva 0:17
Welcome to the Let’s Eat, Grandma, Career Warrior Podcast. Today’s guest is somebody who sits at the intersection of creativity process and people. I first interviewed her five years ago on this podcast, and I just had to have her back today. My name is Chris Villanueva. I’m the founder and CEO of Let’s Eat, Grandma resume service. This podcast is called the Career Warrior Podcast. It is for listeners who are looking to level up in their career, whether you are in your job search right now or you’re just looking to make a move. This is the podcast for you. Hillary constable is a writer, event host and HR professional with over 20 years of business experience and a passion for helping people to do work that truly matters. She brings a rare mix to the table.

Chris Villanueva 1:05
An MFA in Creative Writing, three Lean Six Sigma certifications and deep expertise in both process improvement and human centered. HR,as the founder of Constable, HR Hillary has led projects across nonprofits, municipalities and medical practices, building everything from employee handbooks to onboarding systems to compensation analysis. She’s also a speaker at disrupt HR conferences this year, where she’s helping leaders rethink the way we show up at work. She’s the founder of the riders escape portal found on writersep.com We’ll talk about that exciting bit here at the end of this episode. But what makes Hillary especially interesting is her belief in the unexpected things that help us grow professionally, like hobbies, personal development, and even the language we use in team meetings. I think that this is going to come through in today’s podcast, because she’s really unique, I believe, in terms of the topic she covers, the way she answers them, and today we’re gonna cover why your day job needs your hobby.

Chris Villanueva 2:06
I’ve thought a lot about my own personal interests outside of work, the fact that I love music, the fact that I love to take walks, go work out in the gym. I watched so many YouTube videos, and try my best to learn about these things, but I’ve never really thought about this is something that’s crucial to my career. So when Hillary first came to me about this topic, I thought, oh my gosh, I have to have this episode, because so many of us career warriors have things outside of our professional lives that are just so incredibly important. And she said that this can be something that is so important to our careers and how we develop so I hope that this episode opens up your mind and helps you to think about how you can bring in your hobby, so to speak, into your careers and as a way to develop it in the future. I think you’re gonna love listening to this episode. So without further. ADO Hilary, welcome back to the Career Warrior Podcast.

Hilary Constable 3:03
Thanks so much. I’m so excited to be here.

Chris Villanueva 3:06
Awesome. It’s funny, like, I met you, like, five and a half years ago. I think we had our episode on workaholism. And so how cool is it that we’re coming back like, after so much has happened, I think, to launch into such topics. So welcome back. I’m excited!

Hilary Constable 3:21
The most bizarre five years of our whole lives, right?

Chris Villanueva 3:24
Exactly. It’s seriously so insane. You’ve said actually. So I’m going, I’m gonna flash back to our episode that we did a long time ago. So this is 2019 you had this amazing concept called the pledge, I believe. What was the name of this pledge again?

Hilary Constable 3:40
The 2020 pledge.

Chris Villanueva 3:42
So your 2020 pledge was, I pledge to value my whole life above my work life. I will put my best foot forward in all aspects, including rest and recreation. The number one bullet point that you had was to have at least one hobby that you engage in weekly. So I think it’s so cool that we’re diving back into that. And again, so much has changed since then. I’d love it if you can share some more about your personal journey with this idea over the last five years.

Hilary Constable 4:06
Yeah, I listened to that episode again last weekend, and I was like, What exactly did I say on there? I was really excited to hear so much stuff about hobbies and their value, because I still do believe in that somuch, but I would say that, I mean, gosh, so many things. I got married. Since then, I launched this new business. I had a personal tragedy that I’m working through. And something I noticed is that, like, those distractions are really valuable for me when I think of it as a hobby as opposed to just something I do, like, for example, I yard work. I love yard work, like I will happily pull weeds and plant new things and trim whatever. And I started, I used to think of that as a chore, but one that I liked, and now I kind of think of it as a hobby. And so when I do it, I just feel more engaged with it, like I’m doing this on purpose, because I actually feel better when I do it and I get lost in it, like, and that’s actually, and now they say it like that.

Hilary Constable 5:12
That’s one of the things that you know, any hobby that gets you into a flow state and gets you out of like, oh, how much time has it been or what do I do next that will always improve your energy and your mind, it also reduces your stress just naturally, yeah, and so I pair that like I listen to a book and I pull weeds, or, honestly, I pick Japanese beetles off of this gigantic vine in my yard that takes a lot of time, and just it just gets me totally out of whatever else I was worried about or what I was struggling with.

Chris Villanueva 5:50
So yard work, in these specific tasks, that’s been your number one thing. I can relate to the weeds thing, because sometimes I’ll pull weeds and I’ll be like, I just zone out and I forget. I’ll listen to podcast, music or something, and then I’m like, going back to work feeling moreenergized than ever before. It’s a really weird thing. Maybe it’s getting outside, maybe it’s the fresh air. I don’t know what it is, but, yeah, but that’s been it for you. It’s been it’s been being out of the yard and doing these tasks.

Hilary Constable 6:15
And I also like to see a physical manifestation of my work. So when I see that all the weeds are gone, that’s really satisfying to me. And I think that a lot of our work these days is online, and like seeing a bunch of emails in my sent box just isn’t as satisfying to me. So having something that is physical, I think is it’s undeniable, like I did all that work, and I can’t just, you know, I get constant reminders when I’ve done something, especially like my front yard, also that other people see.

Chris Villanueva 6:51
So I want to bring in the professional world here, a lot of folks compartmentalize, or they’ll, they’ll completely separate, you know, your work life and then your personal interest in your hobbies. Why do you think that that mindset limits us?

Hilary Constable 7:05
I would say there’s a time and a place for for each way to do, to think about this, and something that I thought about like an example, where I had a director in my in my group at my previous in a previous role, this huge company, 100,000 employees, you know, gigantic. And one day, somehow he, oh, I know he was a fly fisherman, and I just happened to walk by him while he was fly fishing near my house, because I used to live very close to the Appalachian Trail. And then the next, like week, when I saw him at work. This is someone I hadn’t worked with very much yet, and when I saw him, he’s like, Oh, hey, you’re fly fishing, whatever. And I remembered actually something from my stepdads hobby of tying his own flies. And so I brought that into the conversation.

Hilary Constable 7:58
I could meet him like, these are hobbies. We had this in common. It wasn’t my hobby, exactly, but I know a little something about how to make your own fly, yeah, and that just, like, it just, you know, chipped away at, like, the ice that’s between you and a new person, or, you know, when you’re trying to get to know somebody. And sometimes work topics aren’t as fun to talk about, like, maybe we’ve got a really difficult project, but we both are into chess. Like, whatever it is, we’ve got something else that can kind of the perpetual icebreaker, I would say. Like in a conversation, you can always ask, like, oh, like, how many fish did you catch? Or how was the fishing on Saturday? Or whatever. It adds another layer. Because people, I also worked at a place where we used what they called an energizer before every meeting.

Hilary Constable 8:46
So sometimes it was related to the project, and sometimes it was just a funny video to settle everyone into the meeting. And so hobbies can be us resource for those things and known common ground with somebody that’s fun to fun to discover. So that’s, yes, that’s the main way that it was specifically show up at work. Like the effects of a hobby show up at work all the time, but ways that you could use your hobby at work.

Chris Villanueva 9:14
I would love it. And I think listeners would appreciate some other specific examples of hobbies. And I love some of the examples that you mentioned before we had this conversation, like improv, you know, for example, yeah. But can you walk us through just some of these examples and how this could improve somebody’s like, performance at work?

Hilary Constable 9:32
Yeah, this is actually one of my most favorite topics of how to use your hobby as professional development. Or, like, let’s say you’re a manager and you’ve got someone on your team and you’re like, they just really need to get in. They need to improve on this one specific skill set, and whether it’s a soft skill or it’s a technical skill, like one I mentioned chess, but I think that is a fantastic way to develop your strategic decision making, critical thinking skills.

Hilary Constable 9:59
You’ve got to think ahead. If I do this, what are they going to do next? How would I respond? You know? And that’s really easy to apply to your work, right? But also baking, I think I mentioned this. I just love this example of like, if you’ve ever mixed up the baking soda and the baking powder, you know that details matter. And for example, I am not naturally detailed person, which isn’t a great match for HR, because are a million details to keep track of. But a way for me to work on those detail oriented skills could be baking. It could be something like woodworking, also, like if you’re making, you have to cut this piece to fit in this piece, and like a tongue and groove situation, the All attention to detail. And when it’s a hobby and the stakes are low, you can just relax into it, figure it out. Maybe it’s just me. I think it’s other people too, but to like, I make these connections between, oh, right, like we had to figure this out while we were hiking on the trail, yep, and something similar at work, or like a different way to look at a work problem. But you draw on experience from something that was light hearted and entertaining, you know.

Chris Villanueva 11:16
You’re triggering a memory here. But quite recently, I’ve been picking up the piano, and I bought this little, baby, tiny keyboard with just 32 keys on it. And this is something I learned, like, a long time ago when I was a kid, but I just, I don’t know why the interest got back to me to learn chords and learn progressions. And so I bought this, you know, $29 course on YouTube, or it was from somebody who advertised on YouTube, and then, like, started picking up this course, and somehow that ended up triggering this desire and this ability for me to learn technical things in my own work life, beyond just the the music itself. Because in my practice, I was going into, you know, learning the how each finger should, you know, rest on, like each key specifically, and it was like these random combinations of keys, and that allowed me to delve into the different technologies that I work with, you know, things like HubSpot, and get better at my own technical expertise, because that was inspired through the piano.

Chris Villanueva 12:20
It’s like, I’m having a hard time even articulating it right here on this podcast of how it worked, but I know I was able to show up even the next day with the enhanced Desire to Learn HubSpot and to get my technical just to, like, learn more. And I wasn’t there before. So, right, that was the piano, right?

Hilary Constable 12:40
So, yeah, how does this work? Why does it work? And maybe I’ll hook up with some, like, a researcher, a professional researcher, who can help me figure that out or explain it to me. But Einstein called it combinatory play, where, like, maybe you get stuck on something more, and this would be more directly, but like, you get stuck on a problem you’re trying to solve. It works. You go do something else. You go play ping pong, you go for a jog, you play in his case, you play your violin, and while you’re doing that other thing, the solution to the problem that you’re trying to solve just comes to you and it feels like magic. It is similar to the concept of like, when you’re in the shower and people are like, Oh, I get my best ideas in the shower because you’re doing some you’re physically doing something mindless, yep.

Hilary Constable 13:27
So your mind is freed up to do a different kind of thinking, or a deeper thinking. Exactly, hobbies, just give you one more way to do that and expand also like learn something new, like learning the piano you know, you might be able to use in extended your musical in other ways too. Maybe that’ll be something to help here your the rest of your music hobby or passion.

Chris Villanueva 13:51
It’s just It helps with my own ability and as well, as well as the motivation in a way. So it’s, it’s, it’s powerful. So are there certain types of hobbies I have to ask that are powerful more for like soft skills, things that people might be lacking or needing to develop.

Hilary Constable 14:06
Yeah, actually, physically active hobbies are give you the best, intense and diverse benefits, like they improve how you think. They reduce your stress. Social hobbies, like group games and sport are specifically better at beating burnout. But any hobby, like I said before, any hobby that gets you into a flow state will reduce stress, I think, like when we’re thinking about soft skills, a lot of like, it’s self management, like your emotional your own emotions when you’re like, let’s say you’re up to bat. You don’t have, you don’t just, like, stop and throw a fit on the on the field, right? You’ve got to get in the zone. So, like, playing a sport where there isn’t, I don’t know this is insensitive, I hope not, but where there isn’t time to get stuck on how you’re feeling about it.

Hilary Constable 14:59
Like, you just have to get on with it, right? So I would say that kind of things like also knowing yourself, like, I know that I do better with external structure, like, if I’m in a class, I am much more likely to do the things that we’re studying in the class, as opposed to, like, self paced classes. Not at all. They don’t work for me. I like, I’ll either fly through it all in one day or I will never do it at all. So knowing what works for you can help you choose a hobby that, like some people do want to do it on their own, and they’re really good. Like, my sister is fantastic at structuring her own time and accomplishing a whole lot. Like she bakes 70 dozen cookies for Christmas every year. How does the person manage that. But it is, yeah, she gives she gives them away. She does. This is not a business, but so your own personal skills better. That also like, if you’re on the baseball field and you have a conflict with someone, I keep using baseball, softball, whatever sport you want to pick, there will be conflicts where people disagree about the interpretation of a rule or something else, or like that.

Hilary Constable 16:03
Like, actually, I was batting, and the ball hit the plate, so I didn’t swing at it, but it was, you know, a very casual community League, and so they called it as a strike. I was like, Wait a second. No way in the world, was that a strike, right? But so you have it. I use the umpire, so I know it can be tough, yeah and right, because you can empathize with the person like, yeah this. You know, some of the people on this field had been drinking, some of the people whatever, like, I knew have to make sense of all of it. But thinking strategically, even about like, what you want to get out of a hobby, maybe that you could just choose something you wanted to learn anyway, and working with somebody else, learning about somebody else’s hobby.

Hilary Constable 16:45
Like, I like the idea of, if you’re the organizing, like, I organize a critique group for my my writing group. So we get together every other week. So I’m responsible for, like, the calendar, invitation, the agenda. We’ve got an, like, a manage the spreadsheet of who’s going next. Those are all things that really build on my like getting past the this is not a soft skill. Being organized is not a soft skill. But I guess thinking about all the things that what you want to get out of it can help you turn almost any hobby into something that you that’ll be valuable.

Chris Villanueva 17:20
Yeah, some people, and we know we’ve listed out some of the benefits here, but some people might feel guilty still for investing time in hobbies when they might be struggling or feeling like they don’t necessarily have time for a hobby, like I need to put more time into work. I’m really like, I’m having a hard time. What would you say to those people who feel that sense of guilt.

Hilary Constable 17:42
I would say, if it’s truly, I mean, without getting into like, how are you managing your time and are you prioritizing appropriately, and stuff like that, I would say, make if you really do want to have a hobby or get, like, start getting the benefits of it without taking away too much from your work or your family or whatever, make it as easy as possible. You know, the book atomic habits has a concept of, like, start with the very first step. Like you want to develop learn a hobby about chess. Maybe the first step is watching a three minute video on about chess.

Chris Villanueva 18:18
It’s not signing start working out, like, walk, just do, like a baby, walk around the couch, and then, you know, start there, yeah? But I love that book, yeah.

Hilary Constable 18:27
Yeah, I Yeah. I’m actually in a book club right now rereading that book and talking about it, because I thought, but I think you can apply that a similar thing to hobbies, like, also some people, like, everyone needs a lunch break, right? And I remember my last conversation with you on on this podcast was about taking breaks, right? Like so your lunch break? Actually, I was listening to a podcast recently about writing, and they this is a book coach who said that she was working with a client who really wanted to write a book, but she didn’t feel like she had time to do it. Well, your lunch break, maybe and that so it also gets you away from your regular work, so it gives you a real break, but it’s baked into your regular work day, and if you’re not taking any sort of breaks, maybe that’s the first place you start is you need to take a break.

Chris Villanueva 19:13
I implement the Pomodoro Technique in my life, which is so I have, like, a little plug in timer. It’s 25 minutes of work, and then five minutes of break, and then just kind of alternating until you get your longer get your longer break after three of them. But sometimes, when I work from home, I during those five minutes I’ll pop outside, and I haven’t done this in probably a while, but I’ll pop outside and I’ll pull weeds for this five minutes again with the weeds, because it’s just that physical feeling, and then I’ll come back and just get back to it. But there’s something so I again, just keep going back to it. It’s like that I was able to work into my own personal process, because it’s just like how I have my work schedule laid out. But I would encourage people just to like to think about how they can work it into their own lives too. It’s like, you may not be doing Pomodoro, but, you know, you just mentioned lunch break earlier. Like, do you have that opportunity? Like, figure out when those are and just make it happen for you.

Hilary Constable 20:07
You know, I just thought of, there are, I always think of, like, movies from the 80s and 90s where there was kind of the trope, I guess it would be at this point where one of the characters has a really high stress job in New York, and they’ve got, like, on the 57th floor of the building, yeah, but they have a golf a little putter, a ball and a cup, yeah, and everything. They get, like, so frustrated, and they stand up and they go and just the basketball hoop, yeah, I know what I mean, right? Exactly. So, you know, make it as easy as possible. Put your hobby in your desk at work. I mean, obviously this isn’t for every hobby. If you want to sculpt marble as your hobby, that’s probably not going to fit in your desk, but, but make it as easy as possible, and break it down to the smallest, smallest increment you can possibly do, because, like, progress is progress. That’s another one of my favorite things. Like you’re, if you’re or you’re writing your book and you only have time to write for five minutes. Get all into it for five minutes. Set a timer so that you can lose yourself in in just writing or just whatever topic or whatever your hobby is.

Chris Villanueva 21:12
I have one quick question before delving into your final words here. But how do you suggest somebody identify what their hobby is teaching them so they can intentionally, like, bring those lessons into their career. Sometimes it’s tough. Like, the only reason I knew to bring up the piano example is because we’re having this conversation today. Otherwise I probably would not have thought about it so much. But how do people identify what is being taught by their hobby?

Hilary Constable 21:38
I think I could think of two ways to or two different approaches. One, if you’re gonna do this by yourself, it would be really easy to just write. I’m a writer, so write or record a voice memo, like after on your way home from the golf course, just talking about what happened in that nine holes or 18 holes, and you never know. Like just letting yourself talk extemporaneously, as they say, like, no plan. Don’t just start up by how it was, how did it go, and maybe talk for 10 minutes or five minutes, or whatever, you know, all the way home, however long that is, and just see where that takes you. I would bet that just talking about what happened and how it went will bring out, like, oh, and then this connection, or it’s at least like something you could listen to or read later that you might think about differently a week from now, when you just look back on your progress. The other thing that I guess would take a little more energy and time would be collaborating with your manager, or brainstorming with your manager or a coworker that you really like or trust or admire for some reason, and talk to them about a hobby, either that you already have, or maybe you’re trying to start a new hobby, or you don’t have any hobbies, whatever it is, talk to them about your hobby or prospective hobby, and then report out to them later or check in with them later. You know, doesn’t have to be like, a formal status report or something, but like, hey, you know that I went golfing again last weekend, and this is how, you know, I finally mastered the chip shot or whatever.

Chris Villanueva 23:14
I love that it’s so powerful because you have to process it. Otherwise it’s, it’s, you’ll just forget about it, or it’ll be something that departmentalize, which I’m trying to undo that this episode. So that makes perfect sense for somebody who’s feeling stuck, either, you know, in their job or or who they are as a professional. What’s one small thing that they can do this week so that they can experiment and just work their hobby into their life?

Hilary Constable 23:40
Okay! So let’s say they have, they have a hobby already identified. Is that the premise they’ve got something they they know they’d like to do more of.

Chris Villanueva 23:49
Yes, let’s say that they have already, kind of, like, gotten there.

Hilary Constable 23:51
Okay, yeah. So I would say find five minutes and, like, just that, it’s the small, the smallest step. Another thing that could be helpful is tell somebody about it. One an example, I heard of somebody who he had been a truck driver in his career, he said, which is super stressful, very sedentary job, not healthy, right? But he loved riding his bike, and when he really thought about it, like from his younger years, that’s something he really liked doing. So he didn’t just like go out and buy a bike and try to get into a routine. He joined a cycling club. So find other people who are doing the same thing, or just somebody you know would be supportive. You know, family member, partner, whoever it is, friend who would be encouraging.

Chris Villanueva 24:33
Hilary Constable. Thank you so much for joining us on this podcast. I have to ask so this writer’s EP challenge that we talked about. So can you talk about how to join that challenge? What it is, and it’s writersep.com correct?

Hilary Constable 24:46
Yep, yeah, just go to writersep.com The on the homepage, there are three or four bios of all the featured writers, like people who have committed, we are going to do this, and we’re going to be at the events, and then there’s just a button below that to get all the details about the weekly write ins, the writers group, monthly workshop, all the things that we’re going to posting to help people continue to make that progress and finish writing their book by the end of the year.

Chris Villanueva 25:13
Okay, and I have to ask this for listening. Who is this for? Who are you trying to attract here, creative types, folks who are looking to get that book done?

Hilary Constable 25:21
Yeah, I mean, broadly speaking, it’s anyone who wants to write a book and is up for doing it this year. But my the featured Right? Like, I’m one of the featured writers, because it’s I founded the company, and I feel like I should participate, put myself out there. But also, like, I’m one person who is writing a fantasy novel who just does better with when she’s in a group, other people are doing the same thing. And then another person, though, is writing a business book. She’s getting maybe close to retirement, and she’s she also helps people who have who are getting set up to sell their business or retire. And so she’s been wanting to write this book for a long time. And finally, so she’s joined the challenge so that she can actually, like, make steady progress and get this done. And it was, writing a book is a big task, and also it’s easy to de prioritize it, because it you might make money on it. You might not, but either way, it’s gonna take a lot of your time.

Chris Villanueva 26:18
I’m not gonna write a book anytime soon, but I know where to go. It is a lot of work, and I’ve spoken with a lot of people, but it’s just so fruitful, and something that’s been just a really valuable experience for the folks I’ve spoken to have done it before, so I think that’s really cool. So writersep.com everyone, I’ll make sure to link that within the description of this episode, Hilary, thank you so much for joining us here. You just were fabulous to have back, and hopefully sometime in the future again, we can keep this going.

Hilary Constable 26:48
Yeah, great. Thank you so much. Just my pleasure to be here.

Chris Villanueva 26:51
Listeners, this wraps up today’s episode of the Career Warrior Podcast. Thank you so much for joining us. I do my best here, and when you check the description, you should see writersep.com as well as my LinkedIn, Hilary’s LinkedIn, and additional resources that can help you as a listener. Just want to say thank you so much for being a listener of this podcast, and as I mentioned, been doing this for years now, and it’s you who keeps me encouraged for coming up with new, fresh topics. So I invite you to, you know, connect with me on LinkedIn. Let me know what you thought about this episode. Let me know what future episodes you would like to hear as a listener. And I just say, thank you so much, and I’ll see you next Monday.

Chris Villanueva 27:32
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 you.