I truly believe that when you invite your invention into your life, when you allow yourself to let go of things that no longer serve you, the skills, the careers, the jobs that no longer serve you, you earn the right to choose who you want to be. So I wish you a lot of freedom, a lot of true power, and a lot of super happy reinventions ahead.

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 why professional reinvention is a must have skill in the next 21st century. Today, I brought on Dr. Nadya Zhexembayeva, the reinvention queen, scientist, entrepreneur, and author, specializing in resilience as a consultant. Dr. Nadya helped companies including Coca-Cola, IBM, and L’Oreal Group reinvent their products, leadership practices and business models to meet new market demands and prepare for incoming disruptions. As a speaker, she’s delivered keynotes to more than 100,000 executives, including four TEDx talks. Dr. Nadya’s latest book is the Chief Reinvention Officer Handbook, how to Thrive in Chaos. So as you can see, this is going to be an enlightening episode. I’m really excited to get her scientific take on a lot of these things that we’re going to be talking today, and I don’t think we’ve ever had a guest like her in the past. So let’s launch right into it with our episode of the Let’s Eat, Grandma Career Warrior Podcast.

Chris Villanueva 01:50
Hey Nadya, how are you doing today?

I’m excited to be here. Thank you, Chris for inviting me.

I am so excited to have you on the show. Not just because of your background, but also just because of our last conversation. You had my wheels turning about the importance of reinvention and why this was a necessity for me even. But first, before we get into all that, I want to hear why did they call you the reinvention queen?

Well, you know how this happens. It’s usually the media that is kind to you or sometimes very demanding and critical, and I was given my third TEDx law and the journalist after working on the article felt like this was the right title. I dunno if I’m living up to it, but I will do my best.

Oh, that’s awesome. Reinvention is, it’s such an exciting thing for a lot of us, and I know in a little bit we’re going to be talking about why this is essential for all of us. So just wanted to get a little bit of that history there before we go in and talk about reinventing ourselves.

Oh, absolutely. So my personal relationship with reinvention started long before I was born. I was born in the Soviet Union to a family of political dissidents. We were the descendants of the enemies of the state, and the only thing we’ve done wrong or my family has done wrong is to protest the genocide that killed 40% of Kazak population. So for me, without me fully recognizing, I grew up in a family that was preparing me to be resilient through reinvention. And when I started my doctorate, when I went into research, the immediate question I had was large systems survival. I specialize on figuring out why some countries survive in, some don’t, why some cities flourish and others disappear, why some companies grow and others seem to sink to the bottom of economic ocean in a matter of a seconds. So it took me a while to understand this passion I had for survival because of my family history.

That is absolutely incredible. And it’s funny how the life events, particularly the intense ones, really can set our life on a certain path. So I am right there with you here and I’m really, really grateful to have you on the show. Now, I got to ask for job seekers and people who are within the career space, why is reinvention such an essential thing? Say we’re happy with where we’re at right now and we feel like we’re doing at least. Okay. Why is reinvention so important?

First and foremost, to understand the urgency and the master of reinvention, you need to understand the trends, the data, what’s happening in the market. And we’ve done this studies now for years after years, and here’s the simplified answer. The average lifecycle of a business in the 20th century was 75 years long. That meant that I could graduate from college, enter a company, work in that company my entire life, retire from that company and never see one significant change in my life. Now we just completed our 2020 global reinvention survey. We have s of people from all over the world participating, and the average life cycle of a company this year, according to their data is six years. That meant that I have to learn how to upgrade myself and renew myself on a constant basis, but also that means that is a sigh of relief.

Nadya Zhexembayeva 05:23
For those of you listening who may be in an unfortunate circumstance of being laid off or fired, I want you to understand that all of us will be changing jobs. There’s nothing wrong with you. You are going through a normal cycle of change, and it may be you’ve done nothing wrong, but the company’s time is up and you are finding yourself where you’re finding yourself. So this is the crucial message of reinvention. The data is simply brutal. Either we change or we will be changed against our will. So why not turn it into opportunity rather than resist?

That’s absolutely incredible, and I like the example that you gave. I think it was your son or someone who had to go choose a college major or a career. And I’m thinking back to when I had to pick a college major and it felt like it was the whole weight of the world on my shoulders to pick the mission or the purpose in my life. And for me, I chose hospitality, hotel school, and I look back on that and realize right now I’m not working for a hotel. But me being within the industry after college and even me studying that for four years, I don’t regret a single thing because I think that all of those steps led me in some weird sort of way to where I am today helping to serve customers. So I believe wholeheartedly in this concept of reinvention, and I think that this idea of the linear path, although it’s existed for centuries, we’re seeing all these changes right now and I think it’s crazy.

Yeah, it’s surprising. There was a recent article in the Financial Times that suggested that the average number of careers this sanctuary will see for a human being would be at least five, not five jobs, five careers. Five careers means that I was a dentist today and became a coder tomorrow.

That’s insane.

And somebody else the next. And within each career, of course, I’ll have many, many jobs, five careers. So the skill of reinvention this century is becoming almost what reading and writing was in the 20th century. This is the basic literacy skill, just like assumes that you can read it, right? You have to be able and willing to reinvent.

Absolutely, and so that’s a great segue to talk a little bit more about the specifics of reinvention. What am I changing specifically when I reinvent myself? I guess a sub follow-up question to that would be how much do I need to reinvent myself as well?

Well, the good news is that you have plenty of choice. One of the tools we have created is a portfolio of reinvention. It’s a simple three by three canvas that suggests that you can choose to reinvent just a little bit of yourself. We call it a subsystem. You can reinvent a whole of yourself. We call it a system, or you can reinvent yourself and everything around you. That would be an ecosystem. So an example in the business world would be reinventing engine in the car would be subsystem, reinventing the whole concept of the car would be a system and reinventing the charging stations, the roads, the suppliers, the car dealers would be the ecosystem. So that’s one horizon. And on the vertical horizon, you have incremental, intermediate, or radical change. So you have nine options to choose from, and all of them are great. Sometimes it’s time for more of a radical big reinvention, and sometimes just a little adjustment is good enough. You have a freedom here, and that’s the beauty of reinvention. You have a lot of flexibility. It’s up to you and it gives you a lot of opportunity.

I think that’s fantastic. And it does take a little bit of the pressure off here because the last thing I want is for listeners to say, oh my gosh, are they telling me I need to flip absolutely everything over? But I do like the idea because it’s true. But the idea of being able to choose dimensions of reinvention, I just think that makes a lot of sense.

And you can start with as simple as the way I eat or the way I run meetings or the way I write emails or the way I fall asleep and I get up recharged. Or you can go for very big things like what is my central career? Do I want to reinvent that? What is my relationship to the workplace? Do I want to be a corporate employee? Do I want to be a freelancer? Do I want to start my own business? There’s much more flexibility for you. And what I always advise is evolution is always better than revolution. So don’t feel like you need to kill and destroy everything in your path. Evolve. If you need a small step, start with a small step. If you feel like you’re ready for a big step, go for a bigger level of evolution. But you don’t need to burn bridges. You don’t need to throw the baby with the bath water in terms of your past experience, your past career and past lives.

Wonderful. And in a second we’ll go into some of the hows and maybe give some people some baby steps for what they can do to reinvent themselves. But I just want to go back one more time and press into the absolute necessity of reinventing oneself. And in our last conversation we talked about how technology is causing a lot of these changes in these shifts. And you even brought to light an accounting example, which I thought was great, but can you share some examples with listeners about why technology specifically is making this necessity?

Absolutely. So all the way back in 2013, a wonderful group of researchers in Oxford University has gone through a very rigorous assessment of core jobs that exist on a global market. And their prediction for United States that about 47% of all jobs will disappear, 47%, they will be automated. And the example I often use as accounting, think of the army of accountants that been replaced by QuickBooks. Think about armies of travel agents that have been replaced by tons of different software we use to book our tickets or find a hotel. Right now, think about every form of simplification and automation secretaries. It used to be I needed a virtual assistant to book my appointments. Calendly does it better. Now all the virtual assistants are losing their jobs for the simplified type of task. So we’re seeing this incredible move towards more complicated jobs will not be replaced, at least not in the near future.

Nadya Zhexembayeva 11:56
But the simple jobs, these jobs that could be put into algorithm are being replaced all the way, including to medical field. Diagnostics are currently done much better by an artificial intelligence than by an experienced doctor. They notice a future cancer much earlier. The machine notices much earlier than a doctor. So even more of this protected fields I get in touched by technology, let alone of more commonplace jobs. So that means you and I should start thinking few steps ahead when we’re looking for a new job, it’s not enough to just think about, okay, is this a good step for me? I also need to think, is this a dead end, meaning that today it’ll secure me job for a year or two, but makes me less employable in just a few years? Or is it a job that maybe not as pretty right now, but it actually sets me up for longer term success in this constant dance of reinvention that is the new normal and that’s a new way of thinking about your career development.

I love that so much. And this is right in line with, I was just reading Deep Work by Cal Newport, who in that book mentions the same exact thing about what is causing this and what you’re saying and exactly what he’s saying is not to be worried about like, oh gosh, my job is going away. What am I going to do with tech is replacing my jobs? No, it’s changing the landscape. So there is a need to be proactive, this proactive to see where is that landscape going so that way I can make myself useful and relevant today.

Absolutely. It’s not to scare you. When I give the statistic, I get such an angry wave of social media responses about this, 47% think about this. We are shedding the jobs that actually are boring, that are not using the full human potential that make us feel like we’re dead inside and we’re giving room for more creative, adaptive, exciting jobs. Things that you see around why is it such a huge growth of entertainment? Because finally we have a luxury to spend time writing books, setting up plays, creating games and so on. So yes, a huge percentage of jobs are disappearing and huge new set of jobs. As a parent. Just 10 years ago, social media marketer was not a job. Now it’s one of the most developed and established jobs. So it’s not about scaring you into the fact that you don’t have a future. It’s preparing you to be proactive in choosing your future. Because if you don’t choose, somebody else will choose for you. So it’s not like you can change or not change. Everybody will have to change. The only choice you have, will you be dragged into that future by your feet screaming and kicking, or will you choose the future?

I love that and I think we’ve done a good job in these last 10 minutes, Dr. Nadya, and convincing people why this is a necessity. So thank you so much for your answers. I think this was awesome.

Great.

I want to delve into the exciting science behind reinvention and how we could reinvent ourselves. But before we have people drink from the fire hose, so to speak, let me just ask a simple question for you. What is the first step towards reinvention?

You may not like it, but I have to put my scientist hat on and give you a little bit of biology lesson. The first step to reinvention. Before you can do the rational, exciting deep work, you have to take care of your biology. And for that, you need to understand this resource, your body. So what we have to understand that in terms of our body language, in terms of the way our body thinks and speaks significant change is equated to a threat. So if 20,000 years ago, I’m walking through the woods of Ohio where I’m living right now and I’m walking through the woods and I hear a loud stump, my body interprets that disruption as a threat. This is an animal how to get today. My body might hear the news of my job. A new boss hired, maybe a new project is given a new competitor.

Nadya Zhexembayeva 16:20
So the animal is different, but my body doesn’t know it. It does exact same thing as it did 20,000 years ago. And you need to understand what your body does. Number one, your kidneys produce adrenaline and why adrenaline is there to make sure that you are ready to kill the animal or to run away from the animal. That’s why all of your blood is moving away from your brain into your muscles of your arms and your feet. So you can kill the animal or run away from the animal. Very important, a thing called auditory exclusion kicks in. That means that your ears literally do not register. They exclude an information that is not directly relevant to your survival. So remember the last time you was stressed out at a business meeting and you couldn’t remember what in the heck was said in the room? It’s not you, it’s your biology.

Nadya Zhexembayeva 17:16 
You need to understand that. And finally, your eyes also stop noticing information on the periphery. They’re just looking in a kind of tunnel vision. So if you don’t take care of your biology first, if you don’t care of this normal fear-based response, you will not be able to think. You will not be able to see, you will not be able to hear. So the very first thing you need to do is to do a very simple exercise and clean yourself up of the fear. Recognize the fear. Congratulate yourself that you’re normal. You are healthy. If you are in this stress response, yay, it’s normal. It’s okay. It admits you are healthy.

Yeah,

If you are not in fear when the disruption happens, I have some questions for your psychological and physiological health, quite literally. So if you are in this response, applause to you, great thing, that means you’re healthy, that means you’re normal, then start organizing the fear driven, the risks you are seeing. What are you afraid of? Start organizing yourself and sorting them out. So we prepared a little gift for your listeners. It’s a short PDF, it’s a three-step PDF. You don’t need to give out password or email or anything. You just grab the download directly. And in that download, what you will see is number one, just record your fears. Number two, sort them into what can I control? What can I influence what is out of my control? And then create an action plan. That simple clearing is like preparing the soil. If you don’t prepare the soil and the seeds are placed into a soil full of weeds, your seeds of your future self simply don’t have enough strength to fight the weeds of your fear. Your biology is always stronger and much faster than your rational mind. So first, clear the field, prepare the soil, and then start exploring your option.

That makes so much sense to me, and thank you for giving the scientific breakdown, which was for me the most fascinating thing because I just love connecting that part to performance and things like that. So you’re almost reminding me of the time when I was reinventing myself to be a podcast host a few years ago, and I had to get over the fact that I would just cringe whenever I heard myself played back. And even when I was speaking with guests, I remember for my first 10 guests, I was nervous to the point to where it was hard to really focus on what was going on and to be able to listen and relax and ask the best possible questions. So this emotional part of our brain, I think it’s so fascinating and how that plays into everything. So just to summarize everything you’ve said, so you’re saying we need to take care and manage these types of fears before we can even move on to the process of.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

So what happens is that your biology, as I said, is incredibly faster. At least 500 times your emotions is faster than your thought. And the way I illustrate it all the time is for all of us drivers, right? You are a driver, remember yourself. The last time you were in the passenger seat, not at the driver’s seat, at the passenger seat, and the driver was doing something crazy on the road. You remember that moment? I can imagine that you remember that moment. What was your right foot doing at that moment?

Pressing the brakes that were non-existent?

Yeah, pressing the imaginary brakes. And the thing is, you are a rational, intelligent person. You sat down in that car, you recognize that there is no breaks there. Your brain knows that there is no breaks, but your body reacts long before you break and say, come on, there’s no breaks there. Stop. You’re being silly. There’s no breaks. Yeah, this is irrational behavior. It’s I rational behavior, but it’s the kind of behavior that allowed our species to survive for s since s of years. So if you think you can just ignore it, your body will control you. So the important thing is to celebrate the survival mechanism of your body, not to punish it or call it names or speak about yourself in your inner dialogue as something less off and use that energy. Your body just spent whole bunch of energy to heat you up, to raise your blood, to pump your heart, and suddenly you’re going to throw away all of that energy. No, direct it, but be intelligent in the way you use that energy and being in that space where you cannot make sense of what your guests are saying just makes you normal, that makes you healthy. You are normal, healthy individual. Great news. Now let’s use it.

Wonderful. So this has all been great. I want to go back to an example. You talked about the, we’ll call it an executive assistant who may be finding that some of their performance or their tasks are being outsourced, or there’s some sort of change that has to be made. Now, let’s say that I’ve gotten cool, figured out what I need to do with myself to manage my fears and emotions. But would you actually recommend for these people to start looking to learn and to redevelop themselves so they can make their skillset and everything as powerful as possible?

So now you dealt with your fears, it’s all sorted out. It’s time to turn on your rational analytical mind. But the important thing is to recognize and understand what is helpful to analyze and what is not held. There’s two school of thought when it comes to change management. One of them is called deficit-based management, change management, and one of them is called strength-based change management deficit looks at everything that is not working. So we should reinvent the parts of ourselves that are the weakest. I do not belong to that school, and I don’t see no evidence from science point of view that is a viable and successful way to go. I actually see a lot of damage. What would do that? So strength-based means that you start analyzing the peak experiences you had in your performance, even if they were tiny peaks. So maybe you were not at your hundred, but you were 10 points above your average.

Nadya Zhexembayeva 23:22
That’s already a good place to analyze what happened that day. So let’s say normally you are happy performing whatever other metrics you use at a certain level, but in the last month, there were three days where you were really at your peak, analyze each of those three days, what happened, who was involved, what did you do, and how can you do more of, because you might find maybe that day there was more writing involved and you are actually enjoying writing and you are good at it. So that means there’s an avenue for you to reinvent yourself around the skill of writing. Or maybe you hate writing, I being an author for books, hate writing. So maybe you hate writing and you were actually, that day was the only day you didn’t write in the seven days, and you were in a interaction and you love real life interaction. That gives you an idea, okay, what careers do I have where that is a course strength? So the analytical mind turns on and do really in depth, make sure it’s at least five examples. Don’t go with less than five and actually write them out. What happened, who was involved, what did I do? And what’s common between all five? What is that suggesting as a particular avenue in terms of my future employment?

I love that. Thank you so much. Listeners, pause this right now. Rewind and listen to the last 20 minutes or so. If this is something that’s really important to you, I recommend repetition because it only helps that much. So Nadja, you’ve been an excellent guest here. I have to ask, since it’s directly applicable to this episode here, but how did you come up with the name of your book, how to Thrive in Chaos? What’s that about?

Well, this book was a complete accident. It is a baby of COVID-19. What happened is I own a large group of companies. One of them is consulting, which makes me fly all over the world. And suddenly since March, I haven’t flown anywhere. Usually I’m out of my home for at least 200 days a year. So I asked my global reinvention community called Reinvention Society, what would be a good use of free time? And the idea was to put together the last most updated data points and tools into one book. And then we just started brainstorming. How would we call this book? So our first title was the Chief Reinvention Officer Handbook, because we truly believe that every person should become a chief reinvention officer of their life. You have to claim that title, not wait for somebody else to give you. We have a number of companies who already have this title.

Nadya Zhexembayeva 25:57
We’re working, we’re developing them, but you have to claim it before somebody else gives this to you. But the more important aspect first was to help people understand what is chaos? Why scarce a resource, and what is this particular time that we live in? So the community voted about 3000 people helped me write this book, and the community voted that this was the best way to represent the tools and the solutions that the book advocates. It actually has a group of cards at the bottom. You tear the perforated and you start working with a book. It’s very much a handbook you write and that pieces out and you participate in the creation of your future.

Awesome. So I like to think that all of our career warriors and our listeners are very practical, actionable people like I am. So I think it’s awesome that you engage with people in such a way. So if I’m going to get this book, what should be the one key takeaway that I’m going to get from it?

The number one thing is that disruption is here to stay. The first part of the book is just speaking about the science that is kind of irreversible, no longer available to ignore that our world is fundamentally different. The cycles of six and shorter years is here to state for at least few decades. So either we start learning how to live in that reality and stop waiting for the business as usual, or we’ll be crushed and burned. We have to stop waiting for business as usual. We have to learn how to jump on the next curve and the next growth curve and the next growth curve. The number one thing you will get is a change of mindset, but of course, mindset alone is not enough. So it’s a collection of tools. It’s nine different tools, and it’s a combination of skillsets, tons of exercises. So mindset, tool and skillset. Without one of them, something is not working. So we try to put all three of them into the book.

Awesome. Fantastic. Well, everybody, Dr. Nadya Zhexembayeva, thank you so much for joining us today. And for you listeners, of course you know me, I’m going to link everything within the description because I’m good at that, and so is our awesome podcast team. Shout out to AJ and Rafaella for helping out there, but I just got to ask for you. It can be related to anything in regards to reinvention or anything really you want to leave our job seekers with for last, final words of wisdom.

Well, I think it’s a little bit more personal. I think it’s very tempting to look at disruption and reinvention as a form of punishment. Like, why am I living in this world? Why am I not living back in the fifties when everything was a rosy, unstable? Or why is it our destination and our destiny and our generation to live with it? Is it punishment? Is it somebody out to get me with all of this disruption and crisis all the time? That’s one way I choose to look at it as a path to ultimate fear, freedom. I truly believe that when you invite reinvention into your life, when you allow yourself to let go of things that no longer serve you, the skills, the careers, the jobs that no longer serve you, you earn the right to choose who you want to be. So I wish you a lot of freedom, a lot of true power and a lot of super happy reinventions ahead.

Awesome. Thank you so much, Dr. Nadya. Hope to stay in touch with you and I’ll see you next time. And listeners, this wraps up episode 2 0 1 of the Career Warrior Podcast, feeling really excited, really motivated right now with some action steps on what to do for reinvention. As I mentioned, make sure to link in the description of this episode Nadya’s book, as well as that free resource. So make sure to check it out. Highly recommended if you were going to take this seriously. We also have a few amazing episodes coming up in the future, so make sure to subscribe, can’t emphasize that enough, and leave a review as well in case you found any of this to be useful. We always love hearing from our fellow warriors there. All right, I’ll see you next time. Career Warrior Podcast Warrior Podcast. And for more on your job search, please make sure to check out Let’s Eat, Grandma’s website at letseatgrandma.com/cwp

Chris Villanueva 30:09
That’s where you can find your blog, attend Job seeker events and learn more about our awesome resume services. Let me just say I’m happy you’re subscribed on Apple or Spotify, but you are missing out. If you haven’t seen the additional resources on our website. Once again, that’s letseatgrandma.com/cwp and please don’t forget to leave a review. The support from my fellow Warriors is what will help me get noticed and what will help the algorithm so other job seekers can discover us too. I promise I read all the reviews and you will just make my day. That’s all. I’ll see you next episode this Monday morning.