Transcript – Breakin’ the Rules

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00:01 Welcome back to the Deviant Thinking podcast. I’m your host, Jennifer Thompson and today and always we will explore career advice that breaks the rules. And yes, folks, today is all about breaking the rules. I’ve really wanted to jump in and talk about what I mean by breaking rules. I am always a little bit deviant and always thinking of ways to look at our world from a different perspective. Really, how do we innovate who we are, how we show up in this world and break the conventional wisdom. That’s how we move things forward we are a little bit crazy, a little bit out there and a little bit deviant. So when I say the rules, what do I mean by rules? Well, often these rules are the conventional wisdom that is shared with us. They’re the limiting beliefs that are out there to help keep us safe. They may show up as ideas from your mom, your dad, your grandmother, your sister, your aunt, your uncle, and they show up in things like, well, you should do this or you should look at this idea, or I heard Mary’s doing something like this.

01:21 Maybe you should look into it. Or, maybe it’s more of statements that are meant, again to keep us safe. Like you’ve got a really good job right now. Why would you want to try something different? Or maybe they’re showing up in your own head these limiting beliefs and limiting ideas. One of the limiting beliefs that shows up in my office regularly is the belief that if I have a job that I love, I’m going to have to take a pay cut. Holy smokes! Who thinks that’s a good idea. And why? Why would we think that you have to take a pay cut to get a job that you love? Let’s step back and examine this one just for a second cause I want to show you how ridiculous this assumption is. So the assumption is based around that if I get to do what I love to do, it’s not going to be valued as much, right?

02:19 Because I love to do it. Well that’s kind of a big bunch of bull crap. If you’re out there and you are working in a job that you love, more than likely you are showing up more engaged than ever. You are showing up excited to go to work. You are contributing your best skills to this role. You are doing some of the best work that you have ever done in your life and you think you should earn less money for doing it. Whoa, that’s a little bit crazy. If you’ve got everything aligned and things are firing on all cylinders, you should be compensated well because that company’s getting a bargain for having someone like you who really shows up and is excited to go to work. So what’s another one of these rules that show up all that often for me? Well, another rule that shows up is I’ve had a long career and I’m older and companies don’t value me.

03:21 I’m going to have a hard time getting a job. Well, that’s a possibility. There is really truly age discrimination that’s out there. But I will tell you, I have clients that get great jobs every day who are over 55 and they do it because they assume that they can get a great job, that they know they can contribute still. They know they have wisdom and talent to help people do great things. So they break that assumption. They don’t go in feeling like they’re too old or too over experienced for a role. They go in knowing, well, what if this company could see the real value that I bring and really is getting a bargain for all this experience that I have? And when I say bargain folks, I’m not saying they earn less income, but they come with such a wealth of experience. They’re going to save this organization potentially millions of dollars.

04:19 By not making mistakes because they bring that wisdom with them. So that is a great bargain. So how do we look at all of this? How do we look at the rules that we need to break? Well, one of the things we want to do is think about what questions should we ask? What questions should we ask about ourselves? And our careers. And one of my favorite questions is, what if this is a fun exercise where we look at future forward? What if things were this way? What if I put together a podcast? What if I got a new job? What if I asked my boss for a raise? What if I looked at my current role and decided I wanted to do more often these what ifs, show us a direction of things that we would love to do in the future. I find over and over again, clients come to me frustrated in their current role and saying things like, I wish I could.

05:23 Um, Oh, I had one the other day. I wish I could use agile processes more in my department. And I looked at them and I said, well, what’s stopping you from doing that? And they’re like, well, that’s not what our company does. I said, well, who’s in charge of deciding what your company does? And he looked at me with these really big eyes and he’s like, well, I don’t know. I said, well, would your boss choose this? Would she be the one to say if you could use agile or not? He’s like, no, no, she’s over operations. She doesn’t actually do the the computer side of things. I said, okay, so you’re the manager. You’re the person in charge of this and you’re not doing it because who said you can’t do it? And he got this wide eyed look on his face and he was like, Holy cow, I don’t know.

06:13 And then I asked the question that really is the kicker of who do you need permission from to go ahead and do this? He was shocked. He needed the permission from himself. And that’s what I find over and over from clients is often they’re frustrated about things because they feel like there’s these roles that are holding them back. But when they really sit down and examine why they’re doing things, they realize that it’s their own limiting beliefs that are keeping them back from doing really fun stuff. So needless to say, he went back, got his team together, looked around and said, Hey, let’s implement some agile processes here. The team was super excited. They wanted to learn these, these processes, they wanted to implement them. They wanted to be able to put it on their resume in the future because they know that that’s a desirable skill set that’s out that out there.

07:07 And that’s all it took is for him saying, yes, I’m going to go forward and do this and I’m going to break that rule. And that limiting belief that’s in my own head. So asking those questions of what is it? What if, what would, what would it take for me to be happy in my role? You know, another great example is I had a gentleman come to me who we looked at his values and one of his big values was creativity. And he was in a role that was kind of honestly boring. And he really felt limited in what he could do creatively. But he did have some outlets. He was in charge of some event planning. He was in charge of, engagement with clients. And I said to him, what have you brought creativity to those, those activities? And he says, well, what do you mean?

07:57 I said, well, if you’re holding an event, what if you held a really creative event? What have you thought about it very differently? What if you did something the organization has never done before? Who would you need permission from to hold an event like that so you could really use your creativity? And very similar. He looked at me and he said, I’m the VP of this. I said, . I said, well, would you need the CEO’s permission? He says, now he says, I could make this decision. I was like, okay, so what’s stopping you from making this decision? And he really genuinely just looked at me and said, me, I’m stopping me from making this decision because I assumed that’s the way that we should do things. So again, I’m going to challenge you to look at your current role or a role you would love to be in and think about. What are you assuming about that role? What questions do you have? What would you like to see happen? Why do you feel like maybe this is the time? Why do you feel like maybe now’s your opportunity to move forward? What’s stopping you? Are they real things that are stopping you or are they made up things? Hint, most of them are made up, you know, some wisdom that often needs to be broke. When I have a client come to me are things like, Oh, to get that job, I need X degree. Okay, I appreciate that. I promise you right now I have clients who have degrees in one field and work in an absolutely different field. They do not always a hundred percent online. So the idea that you need a degree in computers to have a job in IT, you might as well throw that out the window.

09:51 I actually see very few people who have degrees in IT. Who are IT professionals? I have people who are biologists, people who are chemistry majors, communication majors, business majors, engineers, all kinds of different things. But I actually see very few people with a degree in computer science that are it professionals. So, okay, maybe that conventional wisdom can go out the, out the window. Um, you need to climb the corporate ladder first to get a great role. All right, well what’s the conventional wisdom in this and is it true? Well, maybe one, one way to move up is to go from step by step up the ladder. But there’s other ways to get there too. Maybe you go out on your own and start your own company and you move to the top of the ladder straight away. Maybe you get great mentors, maybe you move from organization to organization, maybe you choose not to go up the corporate ladder and really learn a wide variety of different skills.

10:56 I have a lot of clients who consider themselves multipotentialites. They like to learn a lot of different things and I find that they’re just as happy moving from the IT world to communications and marketing over to HR so they can really get that breadth of experience. And that’s what excites them. So moving up the corporate ladder
might be one way to get where you want, but it might not be as well. So that might be some conventional wisdom that needs to go out the window. Some other pieces of conventional wisdom, being too young or too old for a role or too experienced or too inexperienced and trying to guess that, especially from a job description I think is really wrong.I was having a great conversation with someone this week about job descriptions. And there’s the theory out there that if there is a job description out there, in general, if men find that they have six of the qualifications, they will apply for the job.

12:03 And if women feel like they need to have all 10 to apply for the job. So that’s one of the assumptions that’s there. But kind of along with that is when you look at those qualifications, well you might have six of them, but you really don’t know what’s most important in that organization. So maybe you have one, maybe the, the experience is you have 10 years of sales experience and that matches, but you’re in a completely different industry. But darn it, you were the top sales person in the industry that you were in. You’re absolutely innovative in the way that you approach things. There’s going to be a learning curve for sure for you to learn this new industry, but they need to have somebody who can hit the ground running with knowing how to conduct sales meetings. So even if you’ve one qualification, you might be the best qualified person.

12:53 So believing that you have limitations in your abilities or reading into a job application a little too much is definitely some conventional wisdom that needs to go out the window. I’d say go ahead and apply. Oh, another piece of conventional wisdom. Before I do that, I need to learn this first. Okay, well I appreciate that you want to have everything all buttoned up. Well, we all learn in our jobs, so if you really want to learn that maybe you take that job and you learn it right in that role. Um, you know, other ones might be even as simple things as you must have a plan. Well, a plan is a helpful thing, but getting too tied to it and assuming that it has to go exactly according to plan might be conventional wisdom that you need to break. I see way too many people write down that plan, have things going and an amazing opportunity show up in their lap and they kind of look down at their plan and go, Oh, that’s not in the plan.

13:51 Can’t do that. And I just want to jump up and down and scream and say, you know, this opportunity was presented to you. Get out there and try it. Maybe that’s actually where you need to be heading.

14:04 So I want you to think about all of these rules and think about what are those ones that are limiting what you can accomplish. You know, how can you rethink those rules and what’s the impact of having some of these limiting beliefs? Again, if you have a belief that you’re too old or too young to do a role, what’s the impact of that? Well, it might be I’m not applying to a role. Well, what’s the impact of that? Well, I’m sitting at home waiting for something to fall in my lap. Well, what’s the impact of that? I’m not earning an income. Well, what’s an impact of that?

14:36 I’m starting to actually lose confidence in myself. So huge impact. So you want to think about the beliefs that you have, are they valid or not? And then what’s the impact of having those beliefs?

14:51 The other thing that I want you to think about too is when you’re breaking roles, you’re going to make people uncomfortable. That’s why those rules are there. People love rules. It keeps them safe. It makes them feel like they’re doing what they’re supposed to be doing and they aren’t going to be comfortable as you break the rules. So expect sabotage. And I really genuinely mean that when you go out there and break the rules, when you decide, you know, I’m going to create a resume and I’m not going to put keywords on my resume. I know 400 articles out of 401 on the internet say, I should put keywords on my resume, but I’m actually not going to put keywords on my resume.

15:39 I promise you, you’ll hand your resume to the next person and they’ll look at it and go, “you don’t have keywords on your resume. You probably should put keywords on your resume”, makes me want a screen, you know, and they’re trying to protect you. These people who sabotage you are really well-meaning folks who want to keep you safe. So it’s really important to have a plan to deal with that sabotage. And I’m a big so kind of, I talked out of both sides of my mouth, right? Like in the sense of, you know, sometimes one of the roles can be, you can have a plan and you stick to it too tight. Well I do believe in having some plans and I do believe in having a success plan to get around the obstacles that are going to be in your way. And if you want to learn more about success plans, check out our second episode here on the deviant thinking podcast all on “guaranteeing your success through success planning.”

16:35 I’ll be sure to link to that in the show notes for sure. It’s a great episode that helps you deal with the sabotage that you might find when you break the rules.

16:45 So this episode was a bit different than some of the other episodes because
it really is foundational in talking about how to break rules and how to identify the rules, I actually think identifying the rules is the hardest part. So often these rules are so drilled in our head and so in our subconscious that we don’t even realize that we’re obeying them. So I want you to be conscious. I want you to think about why you’re doing something. If you feel yourself on autopilot, it is the moment to stop and say, why am I doing this? Who said I have to do this? Is this the only way to do this? And if the answer is I can do it differently than this, try it.

17:36 Try it. Try something different. It will help you stand out and be remarkably different than everyone else. Everyone else is doing it the conventional way and if you stand out and try things a different manner, you’re going to get ahead. Well, that’s a wrap for today. I am so excited to have had you here for the Deviant Thinking podcast and I want to share a little bit of what’s coming up.

18:06 So starting in January, we’re going to be launching Career U. It is a rule breaking course on going from frustrated to flourishing in your career. It will be a step by step rule breaking framework to do the exploration, figure out your future focus, and create your custom plan to get you to that flourishing career. Look for more information coming up on that soon.

18:35 As always, thank you for hanging out with me on the deviant thinking podcast. If you enjoyed this podcast, I would love it if you would head on over to iTunes and give us a review. Tell us what you loved about this episode. It helps others know what they can expect and it just helps us know how to serve you better in the future. Thanks so much and have a wonderful day.