Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - Kristin Sherry: Find Your Dream Job | Career | E63

Episode Date: April 20, 2020

Are you ready to snag your dream job? Lucky for you, this episode features Kristin Sherry, a career coach, international speaker, best-selling author and founder of YouMap. Kristen has s mission in life to help people identify their perfect career. Her Youmap career profile helps people see the unique contribution they can bring to work through their strengths, values, preferred skills and personality. Kristen is a Linkedin power user and has been featured in publications like Inc.com and Entrepreneur Magazine. Tune in to get Kristen’s advice on what to do if you are unhappy with your job, learn how to prepare for entrepreneurship, and hear her practical tips for landing your next job interview. Download Kristin's resources here: https://www.myyoumap.com/worksheets Sponsored by Video Husky. If your’e looking for affordable video editing services to take your marketing to the next level check out /cart.videohusky.com/youngandprofiting and get 30% off your first month! Reach out to [e-mail] if you would like a demo of the platform. Screw Being Shy: https://www.amazon.com/Screw-Being-Shy-Anxiety-Yourself-ebook/dp/B085T7D1X4 If you liked this episode, please write us a review! Follow YAP on IG: www.instagram.com/youngandprofiting Reach out to Hala directly at [e-mail] Follow Hala on Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Follow Hala on Instagram: www.instagram.com/yapwithhala Check out our website to meet the team, view show notes and transcripts: www.youngandprofiting.com  

You're listening to Yap, Young and Profiting Podcast, a place where you can listen, learn, and profit. Welcome to the show. I'm your host, Halitaha, and on Young and Profiting Podcast, we investigate a new topic each week and interview some of the brightest minds in the world. My goal is to turn their wisdom into actionable advice that you can use in your everyday life, no matter your age, profession, or industry. There's no fluff on this podcast, and that's on purpose. I'm here to uncover value from my guests, people who are much smarter than me on their given topic

by doing the proper research and asking the right questions. If you're new to the show, we've chatted with the likes of ex-FBI agents, negotiation coaches, world famous cartoonists, self-made billionaires, CEOs, and bestselling authors. Our subject matter ranges from enhancing productivity, how to improve your time management, the art of persuasion, and more. If you're smart and like to continually improve yourself, hit the subscribe button. because you'll love it here at Young and Profiting Podcast. Before we get into the show, I just want to wish my listeners good health and mental wellness during this troubling time.

As you may notice, my voice is a bit stuffy right now, and that's because I myself am battling a mild case of COVID-19. I went home to New Jersey about 10 days ago because my mom, dad, and brother all caught the virus and needed my help. It's been a really, really hard week, and I can't stress enough that. this virus is not a joke. Please stay inside and wear a mask if you absolutely must go outside for essential items. I'll be covering more on COVID-19 and inviting experts and special guests on the topic as soon as things calm down for me. Today on the show, we're Yapin with Kristen Sherry, a career coach, international speaker, bestselling author, and founder of UMAP. Kristen has the mission in life to help people identify their perfect career.

With so many people who have lost their jobs, now is the ideal time for us to learn from Kristen. Her UMAP career profile helps people see the unique contribution they can bring to work through their strengths, values, preferred skills, and personality. Kristen is a LinkedIn power user and has been featured in publications like Inc.com and Entrepreneur Magazine. Tune in to get Kristen's advice on what to do if you're unhappy with your job, learn how to prepare for entrepreneurship and hear her practical tips for landing your next job interview. Hey everybody.

Welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast. I'm here with Kristen Sherry. Welcome to the show. Thank you, Hala. So we do a ton of research here on Young and a Profiting podcast, and I thought the best way to open up the show would to be talking about your career story. So from my understanding, you started off as wanting to be a police officer. you wanted to follow in your father's footsteps.

But then you ended up switching gears and you wanted to be a doctor. You ended up going on that track and you actually studied to be a neurologist, but then you ended up actually switching gears and becoming a career coach. So help us fill in those gaps. What is your career story? Could you just share that with us? Sure. So I was very fortunate that my father recognized that I wouldn't be a fit to be a police officer.

I think a lot of parents like when their children follow in their steps. but my father talked me out of wanting to be a police officer. So I went into medicine instead and I really enjoyed my program. I love neuroscience. I still use all of the things I learned about the brain in career coaching. But when I met with a neurologist and actually spoke about what would the day in and day out look like of this work, it didn't appeal to me. I just had this gut response of, I don't think this sounds like. good. So I was sort of lost. I had this degree in neuroscience. Now what do I do with that? So I went to

work at a university in their executive MBA program. And I worked really closely with a lot of executives. And so that was a really great exposure, the CEO of a major hospital system and a CEO of a major ice cream company. These people became my mentors. So I did end up going into IT. and I worked in IT for 11 years and business analytics. Then I led an operations team of 31 people and ultimately ended up in learning and development running the company's learning strategy. I was responsible for new hire onboarding associate development strategy and helping people find their gifting, helping teams in conflict, doing workshops to help teams work more effectively

together. That's where I fell in love. And I knew I needed to work in the career space. So I went on my own and started my own career consulting business. Very cool. You have such a wide range of experiences. I just want to go back to the fact that, you know, you originally wanted to be a police officer and you wanted to follow in your father's footsteps.

A lot of people, like when they're first starting out, they think that they can just emulate what their parents did. But honestly, that's not a great strategy because everybody is an individual person with individual strength, skills, interests, all the stuff that we're going to talk about with your UMAP framework. So leading into that, I think that's a good segue. Tell us what UMAP is. So UMAP is a self-discovery framework that helps people identify their four pillars of career fit. So through my research, I discovered there are really four things that matter most in determining a person's career fulfillment. That is that they use their strengths in their work, their natural talent,

their values are honored in their work by their manager in the culture they work in. They use the skills that they prefer and that motivate them instead of burn them out, regardless if they're good at them. And their personality, who they are really informs their interests and motivations. And so that is also honored in their work. Those four things really all need to be in place for us to feel fulfilled in our work. And I think what better a time to discuss how to find your dream job when so many people right now due to coronavirus are out of work, they're transitioning jobs, or they're just, you know, having more time and they might want to start something like a side hustle. So I thought we could talk about all those things and dig deeper into the framework of

UMAP. First to kind of set the context, I want to talk about self-awareness because I was reading her book and I was thinking, you know, a lot of this is just really all about understanding who you are as a person. And so I just want everybody to understand how important self-awareness is. It was called like the metascale of the 21st century, and it's one of the leading indicators of success. So can you talk to us about self-awareness and why it's so important? And also, what a blessing it is to be able to have the time to learn more about yourself. So we've always been with ourselves. And so I always say you can't read the label when you're inside the jar. We are not objective about ourselves. We don't understand our talents because we take them for granted.

What comes easy to us can't be valuable because it's easy. And can't everyone else do that as well? So we don't even recognize the unique value that we can bring to the table through our gifting. That's the first issue. You can't work effectively with other people if you don't have awareness on how you show up in the world. You're gifting, your personality, all of those things wrapped together. are really your brand. It's the brand you're putting out into the world.

And you don't even have an awareness of what that is. You don't know how people react to you, how people misconstrue you, and business is about relationships. So if you don't know yourself, you have no idea how to self-monitor, regulate, adapt to other people, but you also don't have awareness into other people. So it makes it difficult for you to understand people and exercise compassion. Switching gears just slightly. Let's also get an understanding of why people are so unsatisfied with their work.

I think all of this will give really good context to the next things that we're going to talk about. So what are the main reasons that people feel very unsatisfied with their work? There's always a breakdown in one of those four pillars, but most commonly what I see is, people have values violations. So for example, they value making a difference in the world, but they don't see how their work is making an impact on people directly. Or they value growth and they feel stagnant in their role, that they don't have challenge and growth opportunity. Or they value something like respect. And they're in a position where they feel they're always looked over for promotions, their opinion is never asked for. Values, values,

violations are what caused the type of career satisfaction that people start losing sleep over it, getting migraines, feeling sick to their stomach, having to take time off. It really starts to affect their emotional well-being. And two-thirds of all Americans have said that their work has caused significant mental and physical problems. Yeah. Because of that lack of fulfillment. And interestingly, the stress in America survey has said that work stress is now the number one source of stress. Wow. The number one, not money anymore. It's work stress.

Yeah. And if you look at data around general practitioner office visits, 60 to 90 percent of visits are for stress-related illnesses. That's incredible. It's so important to love what you do because you spend a third of your life at work. And the other third is sleeping. So it's so much of your life that's kind of just wasted if you don't love what you do. And so it's really important to evaluate what you're doing because you're spending so much time at work. And I would definitely encourage everybody out there.

You have more time with quarantine. Take a look at some of Kristen's free resources on her website and do some of these worksheets she has. I did it myself and I found a lot of cool things about myself that I wasn't necessarily completely aware of. and it helps you make the right decisions in the future for your career, for your job. I know that a lot of the reasons that people don't like their work is because of their managers, right? One of my first jobs, I worked at a water company. And I'll say that, actually, I won't say the name of the company. I'll be classy. But it was a water company. And I hated that job. I was an entrepreneur previous to that. I had a blog site. I used to do freelance work on the side,

but I basically could make my own hours before that. I was still in like my mid-20s. I was pretty young. It was one of my first like nine to five office jobs. And it was right after I had shut down my website due to reasons we won't get into right now. So I worked for this lady. She was the CEO. And she was like the meanest lady in the world. And everybody who worked there was miserable. She worked us to the bone. I made like 30 grand a year working in New York City. And so I was like working my tail off for barely any money. And she was like never gave any recognition and was like the nastiest lady in the world. So tell us about managers and what people find the hardest when dealing with a poor manager and what the strategies are when you have a really bad manager. Like what are your options? So those are really great questions and was the basis of my research for my most recent book. So the number one reason that people leave a job, 54% of people leave a job because of a quote unquote bad manager. So that only leaves 46% for all of the other reasons, which makes it the number one reason. Now, the number one thing that people say is trust, lack of trust. That's why their manager is a bad manager.

They don't know how to build trust. And the most heinous thing that people say is managers are threatened by the talent of their team members. So those are the number one and number two things that I don't trust my manager and they're threatened by my talent. I think a lot of people realize that strong individual contributors are promoted into management. During my research, I found the number one reason people became a manager is they were just put into the role. Someone just promoted them into the role based on their performance as an individual contributor. Well, it's a completely different skill set. there's a lot of research that shows what the traits are that make managers effective.

They are good at creating motivation. You have to come to the table motivated, of course, as an employee, but they sustain the motivation of their team members through a variety of different means. They are able to assert themselves, but be respectful of other people. So Chris McIarola, who's a friend of mine who I interviewed for my recent book, she calls it direct with respect. You're able to be direct with respect. So there's a lot of different qualities that make someone a good manager. But the problem is that people aren't given any training. Two-thirds of people are thrown into a manager role without being prepared or equipped.

And I don't mean sitting in a one-day manager class. They don't have a mentor assigned to them who does job shadowing and feedback. They don't have this ongoing mentorship relationship. They're not put in high potential leader programs that walk them through with a coach or something along those lines. They go on an e-learning if they're lucky and take a two-hour course and then you're done. Go manage all the messiness of people. And oh, by the way, our culture is going to drive you for individual results to make you ignore your team and not recognize that really putting people in roles. where they can live out their potential and mentoring those people to be successful is the number

one thing that you're responsible for. If I remember correctly, you actually were thrown into a managerial role and you weren't ready for it. Can you tell us about that? Yeah, that was a humbling experience. I don't know that I was a humble person before that. So that was sort of a pivotal moment in my life. So I was asked to step into this role. I had only informally managed two people. I had only informally managed two people. I was a senior reporting analyst and I had two junior analysts, but they didn't report to me from an HR reporting structure. I just managed their performance on a daily basis. So all of a sudden, I had 31 people. I was managing people that were 30 years older than I was. They were older than my mother. And then I had people fresh out of college. So it was their very first job to people who had

been working professionally for 40 years. It was really challenging because I went in there as this optimistic person. I'm going to make friends with everyone. And there were people who said, I'm just here to do my work and I don't need to have a relationship with you. There were people who rose the flag up to say she can't manage us. She's never had experience doing what we do. So she's not qualified to manage us. There was a resistance rising up about me being. their manager. Oh, my gosh. Oh, yeah. It was, I started to learn. That's where I really learned hands on that you have to stop behaving like an individual contributor when you start managing teams. So you get so focused on your own to-do list that you forget to do things like communicate the impact of an

organizational announcement. What's the impact now to our team? Have you even thought that through? How are we going to manage that? How are we going to pivot? What's our strategy? Oh, that's my responsibility because no one is telling you what you have to do, but your team expects that of you. So it was a very humbling experience. And I realized the things that made me successful, eventually I won everyone over on that team, even the ones who, one who had said she shouldn't be my manager, sent me a boss's day card one year after that. So I knew I had arrived at the acceptance when I got the bosses day card, although I don't like that term. So what I learned, from that experience is you have to admit when you don't know things. If you go in there and you try

to pretend you know everything and people know that you don't, you lose all credibility. I don't know the answer to that, but I'm going to find out for you. And then you do that. You are consistent, you are reliable, you're open, you're fair. You treat people with respect and you show that you care. And if you do those simple things, you will build the trust. Trust is not something you can go after directly. It's an outcome. Totally. I think it's so important for people to realize that their leaders, their managers, they might not necessarily have the interest of actually being a leader. Like you said, they might have just been thrown in the role. Me, on the other hand, I'm like such a natural leader since I was a child. You know, I'm always like president of this, CEO of that, like started so many

businesses. And that's just like something that I love is managing people. And I start teams without even trying to. Like, for instance, I had the mission of starting Yap completely by myself. I was like, this time, I'm just going to do it alone. I'm not going to get too big, too fast, because that always happens. Everybody wants to be on the team and I get too big, too fast. It happens every time. And now I have like 10 people working on the show, so I don't get away from it. But, you know, everybody has their natural abilities, right? Did you do your strengths finder when you went through the process? Do you have individualization in your top five strengths? No, I have achiever, significance, maximizer, futuristic, and focus. Those are my tough strengths. Oh my goodness. That says the story right

there. So first of all, because you have Achiever and Focus, you're always going to succeed at everything you put your mind to because people with focus know how to prioritize naturally and people with Achiever have a tremendous energy and drive to work very hard. And the fact that you have Maximizer, you do everything with excellence because people with maximizer like to be the best and work with the best. They tend to be a little bit of a perfectionist. That's my driving strength. Futuristic, you have a vision. You're a visionary. So you see exactly where you're trying to go and you know what all the steps are to get there. And then what was the one I was missing? Significance. You want to do work that matters. You want to leave a legacy. So you're always going to do big things because you're a visionary that wants

to do work that matters, and you have the focus and the drive and the grit to get there. So you can't turn that off. So point holla anywhere, and that's what you're going to get. At Yap, we have a super unique company culture. We're all about obsessive excellence. We even call ourselves scrappy hustlers. And I'm really picky when it comes to my employees. My team is growing every day. We're 60 people all over the world. And when it comes to hiring, I no longer feel overwhelmed by finding that perfect candidate, even though I'm so picky. Because when it comes to hiring, Indeed is all you need. Stop struggling to get your job post noticed. Indeed, sponsor jobs help you stand out and hire fast by boosting your posts to the top relevant candidates. Sponsored jobs on

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And you know what? It's so funny. I was looking at all those strengths and I was like, you know, this is awesome. I'm really proud of all these strengths and it really resonates with me and I find them to be true. But somebody who came on my show, actually, my first guest ever, her name is Dory Clark. You might know her. She told me, your strengths can be your biggest weaknesses. So something like maximizer, I love excellence. I love to exceed the status quo and quality standards. But then to my team, I might seem really picky or that I'm never satisfied or that, you know, I give endless amounts of edits and I'm just never happy. When really I'm

happy with their work, I'm just trying to get it better and better and better. So how do we deal with like the different perceptions. Another one, achiever. So that also has a negative aspect to it. I love my work. I love focusing on work. But sometimes my friends tell me I'm not a good friend. They're like, oh, you're not a good friend. And I have to try really hard to be a good friend because I always put work over my friendship. So how do we balance the good and the bad of our strengths? So I call that the barriers to your strengths. So you have the positives that people can see about your strengths and the barriers. And so the number one thing that I have people do, I don't actually coach anymore.

Now I certify people to use the UMAP framework. I do a little bit of coaching in a nonprofit. Actually, Mark Metri and I are on the same board. I listened to your episode with Mark recently. So with the barriers and the positives, it really is important to get feedback from people. So you ask people, here are my strengths, and you explain the strengths. This could be your friends. It could be your direct reports.

It could be your peers. It could be your manager. The more people you ask, the better. So can you give me examples of what you admire when I use these strengths? What are the positives? And then what are some of the barriers? So you're right. People with Achiever are accused of putting task over people. And I have the same accusation because I'm a workaholic myself. So what you do is you figure out what are the barriers that are causing problems. If it's not causing a problem for people, then I say it's not. a barrier. It has to be causing problems. And then you can ask those people, what would it take or what could I do that would alleviate this barrier for you? We can sit all day long and think about all the things we should be doing with our weaknesses, but the way it impacts others is what matters. And their voice is where we're going to get the strategies for what we need to do differently.

Yeah. I want to help my listeners understand the difference between skills and strengths. So we just one over strengths, are they the same or are they different? They are different. So the way I explain the four pillars, your strengths are the how. That's how you prefer to work. So you prefer to work hard. You prefer to work with a visionary lens of legacy and what am I trying to create and leave behind. You prefer to work with focus. The way you want to work is that prioritization. So that's how you work. strengths are what you do that's where the rubber meets the road it's the actual work that you're doing not how you're doing it so strengths are natural gifting everyone is born with their strengths and they're pretty stable over your lifetime skills are learned and there is a correlation

so lila smith she's a close friend of mine she has communication in her top five strengths she's very good at writing because of that strength because there's a correlation and it influences her ability but writing is a skill and it can be learned people who are not naturally gifted at writing can become strong writers with skill training so that's the difference a natural talent versus a learned skill and it's interesting because a lot of times people don't recognize the difference between a good day and a bad day is what they were doing that day. day. So why do you have days where you're so energized? That was a great day. And the next day, you're like, is it five o'clock? Is it wine o'clock? You have to look at what were you doing those days? You were doing

burnout skills. That's the reason why you're so exhausted, how you spent your time. But it surprises me. I've coached CEOs and I go through that with them and they say, oh, I know exactly who I need to hire now to stop doing this. Not everyone has that luxury to be able to do that. But you can influence how you spend your day for sure. You just talked about burnout skills. I know that there are several categories of skills that people have. I thought it would be really interesting for my listeners to understand what these skills are and how we should deal with them. Yeah.

So our preferred or motivated skills are things that we're good at and we enjoy doing them. Our developmental skills are things that we would like to do more of. We think we would be good at them. We think we would enjoy them. We just haven't had a lot of opportunity. And then we have something called low priority skills. I don't like it. And who cares?

I'm not good at it. Just keep me away from those things. The trap people tend to fall into are those burnout skills because you're good at them, but you don't enjoy doing them. And a lot of times people, especially people who can be a little control freaky in their work who aren't willing to delegate or allow other people to take on those tasks, they'll say, I have to do this because I know how to do it the best. But it's something that burns them out and they don't enjoy it. And that's the trap people fall into. Yeah. I think I have a couple

burnout skills, probably like working on dashboards and things like that. Like I'm good at it. I know how to do it because I've learned it in so many other jobs. But after I do it, I'm drains. I want to go home. I like want to do something fun. It's just not enjoyable. What are the feelings that burnout skills give you? Like how do you know if you have a burnout skill? Yeah. So that's a great question. With all of those four pillars, the effects are different. So generally, it's terms that describe exhaustion. When people start to say, I'm so tired at the end of the day, I feel like I have no energy, it's always energy-related terms that people use. So if you are saying those types of things, like I just feel so exhausted at the end of every day, barring, if you're getting reasonable amounts

of sleep, if you're eating a fairly healthy diet, there could be other things causing that, of course. But from a skill perspective, you're going to hear energy complaints. Energy complaints. Yeah, I think that's a good clue to understand, like, what you should do more of what you should do less of. Let's move on to another one of your pillars, which is values. Values is a word that I think is thrown out a lot and has multiple definitions. Everybody thinks values means something else. So tell us what is your definition of values? Your values are what is most important to you. A lot of times people confuse values with morality. There are moral values like honesty. But not all values.

are moral, like wanting to grow as a person or adventure or having fun. Those have nothing to do with morality. It's what's most important to you. So when you think about times in your life, where you were most fulfilled, most satisfied and proud of yourself, what were those things that you were doing? And then you get down to the why. So it's what Simon Sinek says with start with why. That's really what he's talking about. He's talking about your values. Your values are your why. But that's confusing to people to say, find your why because that's a little obscure. I love Simon Cynic. Don't get me wrong. But that's not actionable. People don't know how. So when you think about all the times at work that you were fulfilled and satisfied, write down what those things were,

the time I helped someone do this or the time I had this idea for that. And then why was that important to you? And keep digging with the, why did that matter? Why did that matter? Why did that matter? and eventually you'll get down to the kernel, which is the value. So if someone says, I loved the time I went into that new job, I had no idea what I was doing. I had all this stuff thrown at me, but it was so fun. And why was that fun? Well, because I was learning things every day. So you know that learning is a value.

Yeah. We're getting some great questions from the audience. I want to pause for a second and give some shoutouts and ask some of these questions. So shout out to Anna Carolina Smith. Shout out to Ron T. Shout out to Char Ocklin, Ron Craig. There were so many others that I missed. Thank you all for tuning in.

So let's ask a question. It's back to the burnout skills. I think a lot of people are interested in this. For those who cannot influence how they spend their day, how can they mitigate the use of burnout skills? So you're in a job and you can't necessarily say, I don't want to do this. What do you do?

Right. Great question, Shar. So one of the things that I recommend people do is at least try to have a conversation with your manager because a lot of times people say, oh, I can't do anything about this, but they haven't tried. So you show your skills profile of here are the things I love doing. Here are the things that burn me out. Here are the things that I really am not good at and don't enjoy doing.

And you can start to say things like, what are some stretch projects that I can do to get more of this because you should spend about 80% of your day doing skills that you enjoy. So if you break down your job and look at all the skills that you do and then circle all the ones that you enjoy and get to use and then also mark the ones that you enjoy but don't get to use, if you're not using 80% of the skills you enjoy, you're underutilized. So you use that term. How can we utilize me more in my role. What are the projects? So if you have a performance review and you plan out your stretch goals for the next year, make sure you're using your motivated skills to do those. So you do have some influence. What are projects? Are there project teams I can join? And then when you

look at the skills that burn you out, are there junior team members who can grow by doing more of these things? Are there things that you can take off your manager's plate or a peer's plate? I was very creative as a manager in doing this when I found out skills that team members had and didn't enjoy. I would have them trade. You do this of my work and I'll do this of your work. As long as it's getting done, it doesn't matter. I would add to that. I was always very involved with like employee resource groups at my work so that I could use my leadership skills. So when I first got into the corporate world, I wasn't a leader. I wasn't a manager. I was an individual contributor because I didn't have the experience. But I got to join these clubs where I could be president. I could lead people and I could fulfill that. And at Disney, I work at Disney now in order for me to do things that I love, now they're having me like speak for Disney at like conferences and things like that. And so I get to practice that and all my bosses are encouraging me to like apply for all these speaking opportunities so that I can get better at that. So I think that there's other avenues than you're just nine to five. And if you look for it, especially if you work

at like a corporate job that's like a bigger company, you can find a lot of. You can find a lot of opportunities that aren't necessarily your role, just like aligned with the company. Absolutely. And everyone should get a mentor. I'm such a huge fan of mentors. A good mentor, too, of course, right? And your mentor shouldn't be one level up from you. So if you're an individual contributor, you don't want a frontline manager that's your mentor, especially in your own organization, because they really can't open doors for you. One of the biggest roles of a mentor is expanding your network. And so your mentor can find opportunities and be a champion for you because we don't climb

the ladder. And not everyone is interested in ladder climbing, of course. Yeah. But we don't climb the ladder. We are championed up the ladder. That is absolutely the case. And to prove that, research has shown that 10% of advancement is relative to hard work. Yeah.

35% is your personal brand. What do people think of? what are you known for? 65% is visibility. Wow. And mentorship is key to visibility. I used to work with this guy and he started wearing a suit and tie to work. He was an individual contributor.

And I was on this large team and everyone started to laugh at the guy. And he would stand in the doorway of the senior manager and make himself known. And he was a senior director within five years. And you can bet your bottom dollar visibility had more to do with it than anything. That's really, really eye-opening. Let's go back to values for a bit. So you gave us some insight on how we can start to understand what our values are. How do you prioritize your values?

And why is that important? So a very simple exercise that I created is to imagine an all or nothing situation. So let's just say you had contribution as a value and freedom. And then you ask yourself, if I could have all the contribution I wanted but no freedom, or I could have all the freedom I want, but really not make much of a contribution, which would I choose? I mean, all the contribution and no freedom, you could be cranking out license plates in prison, technically, right? Very productive contributing in those license plates. I tease.

But the reality is if you ask people, what's more important? Contribution or freedom? They'll say, oh, they're equally important, and it's not true. You have to picture yourself with this all or nothing proposition. And that gives you a gut reaction. No freedom at all. I would rather have freedom, me personally. Even though I'm a very achievement-oriented person, I would rather have freedom than

contribution. Yeah. And so Kristen has this great value assessment test on her website, and I took it. And I found the exercise so useful to prioritize my values because now I know exactly what's important to me. I think, like, achievement is the first, obviously, then leadership, then creativity. and anytime I have a decision to make, I can just see if it aligns with those values or not. And it's like a compass for your life. I think that's so powerful. I'll put it in the show notes for

everybody to download. I would highly recommend it. Let's move on to your fourth pillar of career satisfaction. And then I want to get into entrepreneurship and side hustles and things like that. So what is the fourth pillar interests all about? So the fourth pillar I call how you're wired, but really it's relative to your personality. Our personality, our personality, influences our career choice. And there are six core types, if you will, that I look at. And we're motivated, or it's really our preferences. It's our preferences, I suppose, because I think motivations are more aligned to your values. So our work preference comes from this personality trait. So there are six of them. So I am a creator. I'm the creator and the thinker. So the simple question I ask myself is,

will I be able to use my brain to create things to make a difference in people's lives, by the way, because that's my number two value. So I know I have this filter. Will I be able to create using my brain to make a difference? That's the question I always ask myself on collaborations, on anything that I'm trying to accomplish, which is why I choose to spend so much time writing books because I use my brain to create to make a difference on a global scale. So you have people who are really driven to create, to think, to help, to persuade people, to organize and create structure, and to do hands-on people. So you have to know, am I a doer and a creator? Well, maybe I'd like to be an interior decorator. Or am I a thinker and a helper? Maybe medicine is a good fit for me because I'll help people using my intellect.

And so foundationally, our career interests are shaped by our top two career type interests. Yeah. And how do we discover those interests? Is there like special assessments or what do we do? Yeah. So there's a, I can give you a URL for the show notes of a free quick test that takes five to seven minutes. It's also listed in my book UMAP as well. It shows you pictures imagining yourself at work and which of,

these things seem the most interesting or the least. And my bottom two are very informative as well. So it's interesting because my bottom two are the organizer. I'm like the visionary person like you. I have futuristic as a really high strength. I like to have a vision and leave a legacy. But the bottom ones are organization. So my right hand, I can't do my work without her because she's got the organizer as her primary. She's a perfect partner for me. So the bottom two tell you a lot as well. And it's interesting because the helper is very low for me and people are surprised when I tell

them that because I've devoted my life to helping people. But it doesn't come from my personality. It comes from my values. Making a difference in people's lives is my value. So it's not my personality that drives that. It's my values. After living my life, after a number of years of life, I've determined that that's important to me regardless.

of how I'm wired. Yeah, I thought that was so interesting. I'm actually getting coached now by Lila Smith. You mentioned her earlier, and she's watching. So shout out to Lila. She had me take a test, and I found out that I am enterprising and artistic, and that's what's called a promoter. I'm a natural, marketer, ambitious, slightly arrogant, visionary.

So it's all these things that I already knew, and it made me realize that having a podcast really satisfies all these interests and desires. that I have and it made me like just feel happy that like, okay, I'm on the right track. This is what I was meant to do. So very interesting, very cool stuff. I'll definitely put links in the show notes. I want to transition to your career and the point in your career when you quit your corporate job and you decided to embark on a coaching business or a consultation business. You didn't consider yourself to be an entrepreneur, but many people do consider that to be becoming an entrepreneur. So tell us about that transition. How did you prepare to become an entrepreneur? What are the steps that you

took in order to prepare? So the reason I became an entrepreneur was because autonomy is my number three value. So I like to make my own decisions. I like to work on what I want to work on. I don't like to be told what to do. and I realized there was a lid on my potential. I knew I had a lot more potential. And I know lots of people can live out their potential in the corporate world. I'm not saying you can't. Me personally, looking at my UMAP and how I'm wired, my potential was capped in the corporate world

because I wanted to do really big things really fast and the corporate world moved too slow for me. So I approached my manager and offered a contract to do management consulting with them, and I would create their coaching pipeline for their high potential leaders. And I started out by coaching those high potential leaders for a year each, groups of 10. I did that for three years. And that funded my ability to launch my business doing that management consulting contract for three years. So that worked out. That was really great. I feel like that was sort of meant to be. And once I started coaching, I realized I,

I'm capping my potential again. I can do more things and bigger things. I can write books about this process and help people who can't afford a coach. I can help people in countries where people don't know how to stand out. Career change is not accepted there. In certain Asian countries, you're looked at sort of like a flake if you go out of that engineering track that you've always been on. So how can you overcome that and still be able to successfully transition?

I wanted to reach those people, not just the people. in my city. And so I had an eye on a global impact and that's why I wrote the books. And then I thought, well, I can coach other people to use this framework that I've created because I only created it for my own business because there was really nothing out there that showed me those four pillars of fit in one tool. Yeah. So so then people started to approach me. How can I use this? So I thought, well, I'll create a certification program. That L&D background of how to create training really came in handy. So I just keep trying to level up my game. And I didn't feel like I could do that in the corporate world to have that freedom and that autonomy to take a vision and just bring it to

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It's a smart way to cut your monthly overhead and stay connected. Yeah, Pam, you should definitely take advantage of this offer. It's free business internet forever. Visit Spectrum.com slash free for life to learn how you can get business internet free forever. Restrictions apply. Services not available in all areas. Yeah. So I just want to stick on one point. You just talked about how your L&D skills transferred to your new job. And I think this is something that people often miss. They don't realize that their skills can transfer from one job to another job to another job. And it's really important to have skill stacking and to start stacking your skills with all these different experiences. Can you talk about skill stacking and how skills are transferred from one job to another?

Yeah. So Corn Ferry International has done research on this and they did a global study. They actually brought. broke down jobs? What are all of the skill units that you do in job A, job B, job C, across industries, across countries? And they found that there's 85% similarity. Now, of course, if you are a specialty person, like you're a dental hygienist and you clean teeth and that's what you do, there's still more to that, though, you're building rapport with people, you're helping alleviate people's fears. There is more to being a dental hygienist than cleaning teeth for sure. But we're talking about about general business in general business roles, not really, really niche roles. So 85%. So I once wrote a blog post to prove this point. I wrote down all the skills I did in a role without saying

what the job was that I did. And I said I was responsible for managing projects, delegating work to other people who reported to me. I was responsible for doing some onboarding of new people in that role and doing some training to help them get up to speed. I was responsible for viewing people's work and kind of giving the thumbs up or thumbs down for a quality check. I was responsible for meeting with clients and customers and setting their expectations and what their needs were. And I asked people, what do you think I did? And they said, well, a project manager and I was actually a lead software developer. So it was just not possible for people to tell. The reason that people sabotage their career transitions as they tie their industry and their role to the details in their

resume. So they say things like helped patients. And I'm like, it doesn't matter that it was a patient unless you're going for another job that works with patients, by all means use that term. But clientele, customers, clients don't use that word. And it doesn't matter if you were selling Roth IRAs or stocks or these things. You were selling products to customers. And customers. And so it doesn't matter if it's a coffee bean or a Roth IRA. And that's what people do to trip themselves up is they tie their skills when they're really portable competencies that you can pick up and drop into another role. Yeah, I love that. That's some great advice, guys. Like, pay attention. She's saying, like, broaden the way that you talk about your skills. And that's

really important when you're trying to get a job in a different industry or sector, whatever you're trying to do, you want to make sure that you're presenting yourself as somebody who can adapt, no matter what the situation is and that you've got skills that can cross different industries. Let's talk about transitioning jobs. Let's say we're in a job. We're not exactly happy. What are our options? You don't have to just be an entrepreneur, right? You can switch gears in your career. But then can't you also just like adapt your current situation? What are the options that we have? Because I don't think everybody's really meant to be an entrepreneur. Absolutely agree with that. So first of all, you have to diagnose what's wrong with where you are and is it fixable

because making tweaks to where you are to increase your satisfaction is a lot less work than taking on a job search. And you don't know your manager's not coachable until you try. You don't know that your situation is immutable until you try. So I've had people who've gone back to their manager to say, could I be more involved in strategy? Because I'm a strategic thinker and I feel like I'm really far downstream, and the manager started inviting them to the strategic planning meetings, and her career satisfaction went way up with that one change. So that's the first step is break down where are you having issues? Is it that you're not using your talent? Is it that your values are being violated by your manager, by the organizational culture? Can you get under a new manager? Is that possible?

Or do you have to leave the organization? So you really need to know what? going on because if you don't do a diagnosis and break that down, you're going to go from the pan to the fire because you don't have the understanding and you can't articulate it so you can't ask the intelligent questions in the next interview to make sure you're avoiding those types of situations again. That's number one. Yeah. Yeah. Number two is you want to start with you. What are all of your success stories? So looking at your talents, looking at your skills, what are the things that you have done that you're very proud of in your career where you're you able to recover a relationship of a top client that was about to leave the organization

and your skills at diagnosing problems and building relationships were so strong that you recovered a $1 million a year project for your organization? Like, what are all your stories? And then you want to ask yourself, who needs this? So we tend to look what's out there. What are jobs out there and where can I shoehorn myself in? But you really want to start, what do I do best? And now who needs that most. And so I'll give you an example. I had a woman I was working with. She was in business development and she did sales and I think they sold tools, a tool company. And she really didn't care about tools. And she really didn't like business development. And when she went through these four pillars of career fit, what we found out is really the three things that she did best was she was

really good at strategy. She was really good at innovating. And she was very good at analysis and breaking down root causes of problems. So I said, well, just plug those three words into Indeed.com. See what comes up. So she put strategy, innovation analysis. And she got back a strategic innovation analyst role at a bank. And she's in that role now. And she said she feels so fulfilled because she was able to go and tell stories because you're going to use the things that you do best, whether or not it's in your job description. You can't be a strategic person and walk into an unstrategic job and not be strategic or give strategic ideas that are implemented or bring strategy to the way you do your own job. You can't turn it off. So tell those stories and then the

people realize you can do exactly what we need. Yeah. With really compelling stories. So that's, that's my advice. I think it's great advice. And I think it all goes back to this self-awareness on like evaluating your career, your life. Because if you don't know what the problems are, you're just going to replicate it, you're going to become an entrepreneur doing your day job. And it's the job that might be the problem, not necessarily the environment, right? So you need to make sure you actually know what the problem is. So I love that. Oh, entrepreneurs do that all the time. I see entrepreneurs do this all the time. They hate their jobs. So they go work for themselves and then recreate it into a job. Yeah. So they're doing their own billing. They're doing their own inventory. And I'm like,

why are you doing that? I do five things. Four things. I write books. I am like the innovation person at UMAP, I speak and I train coaches. And I'm not going to be doing the training for too long because I'm creating master trainers that I certify to do the training for me. So eventually I'll be doing innovation of the product and writing books and speaking. I'm getting down to three things. I am not creating invoices for people. That is an opportunity cost. And people will say this. Well, I can't justify that because I can't afford. How many own invoices are you doing a week. I mean, literally, you could get a VA from the Philippines for $8, $10 an hour, and they're spending 30 minutes. Yeah, they're spending 30 minutes doing your invoices. It's not worth $4, $5 to you to not be

spending your time. And then you're burning yourself out and having to be productive for the rest of your day. I don't do anything that burns me out. I have a UMAP. I live by my UMAP. If somebody asks me to do something not on my UMAP, I'm not your girl. Yeah. We're running up against the clock. And before we go, I want to talk about two things. I want to talk about side hustles and I want to talk about job interviews because I think it's really important for everybody who's lost a job who might have been recently laid off to get that information from you. So first of all, let's start with side hustles.

I know that you initially started out building a side hustle before you jumped from your corporate career. I have my own side hustle. It's a young and profiting podcast. I have a full-time job. So I have some tips as well. What is your top tips for starting a side hustle? hustle. The number one mistake that I see people make, because I work with coaches, coaches are really,

coaches and consultants are really my customers, right? Because I'm training them to use UMAP. And the number one mistake I see them make is spending all of this money, bootstrapping things they don't need at the beginning. So I'm going to build this full website with all the bells and whistles and all these great business cards. And I'm going to have all this technology. You need to be able to send a proposal to someone, take their money, and you need to have a process, a repeatable process of whatever it is you're doing to help people. And that's where you need to spend your time. The website can come later. Use your LinkedIn profile. Make sure your testimonials are up there. Use that in the short term. If you break your bank, I saved six months of expenses so that I could quit my job. And I didn't build

all the bells and whistles. Luckily, because my husband is in technology. And he told me, you don't build the technology until your customers are paying for it. And so we actually did UMAPs manually before we built a client portal and a coach portal and all of those technologies and our customers' revenue that was coming in actually paid for all of those things. That's really smart. That's the number one mistake that people make is they spend all their money, trying to have all the bells and whistles, and then they have to go get a job again. I think that's really important.

Similarly to the website, sometimes people are spending time on their logo. And I think that's really stupid and patents and things like that. I think just get started, do what you love to do. And then also make sure you love your side hustle. The whole point of having a side hustle is to do something that you love. So don't just replicate your day job and your side hustle. That doesn't make any sense unless you love your day job and hate the environment. I think that's key.

The second mistake that they make is they take on business they don't want to do because they're afraid to turn away money. When I stopped doing things I didn't like, I actually doubled my revenue by turning away work because I started to charge much higher rates. I was better at doing the things I loved. So I had more referrals. You're going to get more people referring you. Like if you are a career coach, for example, or you're a marketing person and you're writing copy and you hate doing that, you're going to get more referrals for writing more copy.

And you're going to start procrastinating. you're going to start sending your deliverables late to your customers because you have to work yourself up to want to do it. And then you damage your reputation in your business. Totally. So the last question I want to ask you before our final questions is about job interviews. So I heard that you have a 98.5 job offer rate for all your clients, which is incredible. And people are in need right now. You wrote a book recently about how to land a job.

So tell us what are some top tips that we can take? with us at our next job interview. So you see a lot of people trying to prepare for the 500 interview questions that you might be asked. And I always tell people you really only need to prepare for five things. You have to know what it is that you bring to the table, and that's by doing a role mapping exercise where you highlight all of the job description things they need, and you look at your inventory of experiences, strengths, and skills and all the things that you have, and you make those connections with a story. And so that role mapping exercise is huge.

So what do you bring to the table? Why should we hire you over the five other people we're interviewing? So you have to know what your differentiators are. Can we afford you? Do we want to work with you? What kind of a person are you? So what are your values and what are some things they might ask you to find out if you're a total jerk and they don't want to work with you?

So those are the types of things that it's not, and you will get asked stupid. questions like what if you were in this weird situation and those test questions. But if you can connect yourself to that job, why you over everyone else, you have that research done around the salary and you can talk about why people would enjoy working with you. If you can answer those questions, you are going to be well prepared. But you want to connect your talents and your strengths to their job description. And so you can say, when they say, tell me about yourself, you can say, well, I'm a disciplined person who's this and this and that's what they're asking for in the job description. And then you say, for example, and you tell a success story. Don't go through your resume.

Well, I worked here and then I created my own YouTube channel and then I did this and that. It's on your resume. It's a missed opportunity to just recount stuff they already know. I think that's great advice. And I think it's really important to, first of all, be self-aware and understand your values, your interests, your strengths, your skills, and then bring some of that personality into your job interview. I think so many people don't do that and you'll have an advantage if you just take the time to learn a little bit about yourself and be conscious of that when you're in the interview. So I think that's excellent advice. The last question that we ask all of our guests on Young and Profiting Podcast is, what is your secret to profiting in life?

My secret is really knowing myself. I've had self-awareness from a pretty young age. So I have always been successful at everything I've done because I don't take on things that don't fit who I am, that don't fit my values, that don't fit my strengths. So my secret sauce is knowing exactly what I rock at and honing in and being focused on doing things that use those gifts. Awesome. Thanks for everybody who tuned in. Shout out to Rob, Gary, Hatib, Hassan, Eric, Brian, Barat, Yamuna, and Tosin. Thank you all for tuning in. If we didn't get to answer your questions, we're going to go back in the comments and answer some of them after the show. Sorry, we didn't get to them. Thank you so much, Kristen. Where can our

listeners go to learn more about you and everything that you do? So you can connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm in the Charlotte metro area. If there's multiple Kristen Sherry's, or you can go to myUMAP.com. Very cool. Thanks again. I love this conversation, and I can't wait to put it out. This is fun. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for listening to Young and Profiting Podcast. If you enjoyed the show, don't forget to write us a review or comment on your favorite platform. Reviews are the number one way to thank us, especially if you write a review on Apple Podcasts.

And be sure to share this podcast with your friends and family and on social media. You can find me on Instagram at Yap with Hala or LinkedIn, where I spend most of my digital time. Just search for my name, Hala, Taha. Big thanks to the Yap team as always. Shiv, Parth, Tim, Hasham, Peter, Matthew, Danny, Boyo, and Omar. You guys are awesome. Thanks for making this show so amazing. This is Halla, signing off.