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In this episode Joel and Antonia tell their stories of how they navigated their career life.
In this podcast you’ll find:
We live in a different world now. Our parents/grandparents typically worked in the same career all their lives and retired from that same career in their 60s.
Many Gen Xers and Millennials are finding themselves shifting between careers.
The Internet has enabled us to expand our entrepreneurial options.
The unstable economy keeps us shifting careers as jobs change or cease to exist.
The traditional way of earning money is shifting.
Antonia’s Story:
- Raised in an extremely religious environment that discouraged college. She was encouraged to volunteer her time toward a ministry that had zero financial reciprocation.
- She had to subsidize her full-time ministry job with a part time job.
- Her goal was to make the most money in the least amount of time.
- Went to a trade school to learn radiology. It was a means to an end.
- She dropped college in preference for what she believed was a higher priority – ministry.
- She did a bunch of random part-time jobs to support herself. Temp work.
- Learned a lot in the ministry: the art of persuasion, public speaking, sharing unpopular messages, living counter-culture, etc.
- Her family never encouraged her to think in terms of a career.
- When she left the religion, it occurred to her that she could finally have a career. She could focus on generating money.
- So she started attending seminars and events for self-education.
- Moved from Alaska to Las Vegas to live in an internet marketing incubator.
- She made a lot of mistakes along the way by getting involved in dead end projects.
- After meeting Joel, as they were growing Personality Hacker, they were starving artists.
- She just keeps going until circumstances force her to stop, and nothing has forced her to stop yet.
Do something outrageous. Don’t force yourself to fit into the templatized world.
Don’t feel like you have to fit into the mold. Careers and the business industry are just as broken as the school system. Square pegs into the round holes. Most companies hire on the stupidest criteria.
Bypass the entire system and do something outrageous.
Remove the limiting beliefs that things should be done a certain way.
We shouldn’t be looking at the older generation’s concept of career as a model for modern behavior.
Joel’s Story:
- He grew up in a very religious paradigm. He didn’t get the message it was wrong to have a career.
- As long as he weaved God into his career, it was okay.
- His parents decided to start a non-profit youth ministry camp.
- Lots of creative outlets.
- He was encouraged to follow creative pursuits. His father was on the radio in Pittsburgh doing a religious based program.
- Joel was taught to produce and script radio programs at 12-13 years old.
- He wanted to go into that creative field. He was encouraged to do so.
- He went to college and got his masters in leadership to work as a leader in ministry. He has a Masters in theology. Bachelor’s in communication.
- He worked in his parent’s ministry for three years and got married.
- She wanted to move to her hometown Baltimore, so Joel ripped himself away from his career path and went to work at the Baltimore Zoo.
- He had been homeschooled and employed in his parent’s ministry. He never had a day job where he had to report to a boss and clock in and clock out.
- He worked at the zoo for five years. Every time he brought up creative ideas, he was usually shot down in preference for the status quo.
- His marriage ended. After having two children.
- He never lost the desire to be creative. He felt trapped.
- Joel would leverage his experience in his job by going to pod camps or take on any public speaking opportunities to harness new opportunities.
- He started doing video work for other companies in Baltimore in an attempt to broaden his options.
- He would reframe his experience at the zoo, so he didn’t focus on the misery of the job. He would view it as CEO training. He would listen to personal growth podcasts when he could. He would spend weekends and evenings working on other opportunities.
- He met Antonia at an NLP event in LA. Moves to Las Vegas to start connecting with what he felt he was meant to do.
- Five years later they are running PH, focused on personal growth and helping others to create a better world.
- Joel worked a job that was depressing to him, but he kept telling himself it would be okay and he never gave up. He never stopped hustling.
Try new things. If they fail, try again. A lot of entrepreneurs have a ton of false starts before they hit the thing that works.
At some point, they both decided the status quo was not for them.
If you are not going to go the traditional route, you are going to have to hustle and try new things and be willing to struggle.
Most people go down the traditional road because it is a well-worn path. Tried and true.
If a traditional career feels good to you, go for it.
Give yourself permission to do other things if the traditional path is not what you want.
Don’t let what you think you have to do get in the way of what you want to do.
It isn’t the only path. There are always other options.
We live in an ever-changing world, and more possibilities are coming. There are no rules about what you have to do.
If your inner wisdom tells you to do something different than what you are doing, listen to that voice.
Anytime the stakes are high we create a lot of narratives to make sure everyone stays on track. Otherwise, things may get destabilized.
There are a lot of narratives around safety and security.
If a voice inside says you want to do something else, turn up the volume. Give it a try. Your one regret at the end of your life may be that you didn’t listen to that voice.
Ask yourself:
If you could duplicate your exact income right now, but you didn’t have to do your current job, what would you do?
If your answer isn’t “I would be doing what I’m doing now,” you may need to reevaluate.
Where are you at right now? Are you passionate about what you are doing? How did you get there?
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17 comments
A & J 4ever!
You two have to know how coincidental this podcast’s timing was in my life, as the case with so many of your Pcasts before.
I’ve been listening since I got “into” podcasts, approximately a year ago.
PH opened up my eyes to an entirely different realm of understanding myself.
I felt incomparable relief when I had my ENFJness explained and all the sudden so many things made sense to me, my life, my core paradigm.
It wasn’t necessarily “justification” for my actions or weird ass ways of thinking but more components of my psyche starting to come together to where I could find some acceptance…
I’d go as far to say it cushioned the embrace of my lifelong villain—
Acceptance (dramatic gasp!)
Your Pcasts resonated with the inner layer of my Shrek Onion (because ONIONS. HAVE. LAYERS!).
Notably due to my religious background as a Jehovah’s Witness, I can relate with MUCH being discussed. I’m not here to publicly ridicule but I am freely willing to broadcast the issues derived from a young malleable brain being raised in such a religion.
JW’s teachings, self-proclaimed as “The Truth”, was a bad html code that was embedded in my impressionable and naive mind. Higher education was shunned. Any extra time and focus was allotted and dedicated solely to studying the bible, publications and going door-to-door to spread the “good news”.
I was to turn away from any pursuit other than serving Jehovah and the congregation and was to “pray away” the mere DESIRE to explore avenues that would deviate from servitude. Needless to say, no time or thought was invested towards being able to actually support myself financially because “God provides”.
Long story short-ish, when I left, I was left with nothing. Nothing 2nd-take worthy to put on my resume. Although I gained a great deal of skill and experience researching for public talks I’d composed since age 8, not to mention using youth innocence and verbal charisma to get strangers I’d interrupted their dinner for to read my propaganda, how the hell was I supposed to convey that on a resume? Non-translatable. Nothing to offer the thick processes of the real world.
Although I have successfully managed to maintain employment at jobs and remained employed until I threw in the towel, I sell myself short CONSTANTLY. I have no metric to understand how much I really offer. Part of me is still thankful I just have a job but as a result, I have worked for awful people for dollars fewer than what I really deserve for WAY. TOO. LONG. I have no belief that I can outshine my competition, therefore, suffocating my potential.
It’s heartbreaking to come across jobs I want to apply for that require some breed of education or degree. I sometimes feel sorry myself going “I wonder where I’d be or who I’d be if I was allowed to nourish my potential”…but I can’t think like that. That means I’m still losing that battle if that makes sense.
I quit an extremely abusive job 3 months ago where I experienced things I wouldn’t wish upon my own worst enemy. To shed some light, one of my coworkers was murdered in that building and I had to step foot in it every single day after( I was there for 3.5 years). Needless to say, with every day that passed, more and more of my soul was depleted.
The good news…I have been given the opportunity by my very loving significant other to pursue what fuels me the most…
to write.
I’m currently just another freelance writer in the sea of many but I am so damn fulfilled. The whites of my eyes are whiter. They sparkle. I feel, finally at 32, that I am able to live the life I want to live. No religious ropes. No evil bosses. I’m doing me. I can’t feel sad that this didn’t happen sooner. I’m just glad it’s happening.
I loved everything in this podcast except the part about “hustling.” (I’m an INFP :P ) Seriously, I’m going to take some time to think about the questions you asked at the end. Currently, I work as staff in a group home. My schedule is 31.5 hours a week, with extra hours optional. Frankly, it’s a pretty good fit for me, although I am sometimes not happy with the work. I get by financially, but if my kids didn’t pay me rent, I’m not sure I could pay the bills!
I was a stay-at-home-mom for about 25 years m/l, and that job was just about perfect for me! I LOVED the freedom and flexibility. I loved the potential—the NEED—for creativity! I made all kinds of cool things like homemade soap from leftover hamburger grease, fabric storage bags and wall-hangings, breads and soups, homeschool lessons, etc., etc. We didn’t have a lot of money, per se, but money never has seemed to me like the be all end all. Happiness and contentment have always been my “bottom line.”
So when my husband’s disability got so bad he had to go into a nursing home, I decided I needed to work again. My undergraduate degree is in Special Education, but I’m not very good with classroom control, so I went back into group home work, which was the other kind of work I did before getting married (besides teaching). My biggest hang-ups in life have always been anxiety, particularly social anxiety, and my own self-doubts. I think I like people with developmental disabilities because they don’t have as high of standards for you as regular people do. I consider the clients I work with as some of my best friends. Some of the co-workers and company drama I could do without. I’m also getting too old to be moving non-ambulatory people around. The work is hard and makes my body hurt. If they’re not non-ambulatory, then they often have challenging behaviors, and I can do without that scene, too!
So what would I do if I could get by on the same income doing something different? I think I would love living communally with gentle, quiet people who loved spiritual things and self-development. I would love to be cooking vegetarian food for an appreciative group of people. I would also like to teach people about contentment and joy. I would like ample time to write poetry and create things from upcycled materials. Someone else would be responsible for yard work, gardening, and cleaning.
Like you two, I have always been an avid self-educator. I earned a Master of Theology before my own faith crisis, but it included a lot of counseling classes, and feel like I could be of benefit to someone as an adviser or spiritual coach of some sort. I’m a Reiki master now and am self-educating myself in life-coaching. I have made little efforts in creating a solo-preneurship as a blogger, writer, teacher, spiritual coach-type person. But I must admit I have not been much of one to “hustle.” Mostly I write and dream and think and sit and look out the window.
Another hurdle I might mention is my age. I will be 60 next year. My inner doubts tell me that I really need to be a licensed professional counselor to do the kind of work I want to do in my “business.” But I am much too old to take on the kind of debt it would take to get an official license to counsel. (I was encouraged by all you’ve accomplished without a degree, Antonia!) Deep inside, I believe I have something to offer. I have trouble pinning it down and giving it a name, however.
Thank you for such a wonderful and insightful podcast! I always enjoy your podcasts so much!
I would practice yoga daily and create a flexible business that enables the space to make connections and innovation with yogic philosophy, for people to apply in leadership, personal development and education for themselves to support transformation.
ENFP, Indigenous maori woman.
Thank you Joel and Antonia this is a fabulous podcast and incredibly timely for me. I like your references to the constructed paradigms we grow up with and how they form what we think is ‘the right way’ these nodes are incredibly powerful in disengaging ourselves from the inner voice. lately I have been consciously practicing connecting with Anahat, the heart center. Trying to hear this inner voice, to find what will get me “juiced up” as the process is unfolding, I essentially know what it is, but I continually ignore the voice, in favor of ingrained voice that wants to maintain the status quo. Favoring the simplistic or expected form of normal. What I notice I that I also try and construct the desired career path using the criteria of the tried and true format of what this career needs to look like. This in itself arrests the momentum. Antonia you mentioned about feeling hamstrung by not having a college qualification, which is one of those elements I am referring to as being arresting. I like how you consciously chose not to care about that and keep focused on what you want to create rather than what you don’t have. I have an education degree which I feel is a tied hamstring for me because I feel expectations of myself and others to use this and obtain the career I spent so much money on getting. I have gone back to school and completed some post graduate work in Education, which I really enjoyed, but, I don’t actually want to be a teacher in mainstream education, in fact I despise the whole system. Yet because I have this it’s my go to for getting a regular income. However, I do love helping people connect with their inner creative selves and so this experience could feed into and I think has culminated into what I want to do. I think the degree is like a crutch for me and I fall back on it when I don’t want to let go of the branch and swing into the unknown.
“Listen to your heart. It knows all things, because it came from the Soul of the World, and it will one day return there.”
- the Alchemist
If I received my current paycheck doing anything on the planet for 1 year I would read and write everyday.
INFJ, 4w5, HSP, Empath, Graves 3.142 :)
If I could do anything making the salary I make now, I would write and travel. As a kid my dream was to travel the world and interview the people I met and tell their stories. Right now I’m working full-time in marketing and writing and blogging on the side. I like it but I realize this is a stepping stone to getting where I want to be – writing full time about things I’m passionate about and managing my own schedule. The marketing experience is really beneficial but not what I want to do for the rest of my life. Thanks for sharing your personal stories! I love the podcast!