Her Story of Success Podcast Transcript
Welcome to Her Story of Success a podcast featuring stories from influential women, trailblazers and business leaders, who have defined and pursued their own versions of success and fulfillment.
We hope these stories, lessons learned and celebrations inspire you to believe in yourself and enjoy your own journey a little bit more.
I’m Leah Glover Hayes, your host and CEO of Her Story of Success, women’s business and media collective. As we come to the end of 2020 and start to look ahead to the new year, I wanted to provide you with some inspiration and some practical guidance on how to set effective goals so you can start 2021 with a mindset to help you achieve your version of success.
In today’s episode I’m going to be talking with two different coaches who have some amazing insight in the process of goal setting, that way, no matter if you are in transition or trying to figure out how to pursue your own passion, or if you’re where you want to be and just want to reach some higher goals, you will have something to take away to set yourself up for success.
First I’ll be interviewing Kim Jones who is a career transformation coach and she’s the founder and CEO of Kim Jones Alliance. Kim is going to explain how she works with women to help them remake their careers on their own terms. So whether you’re wanting to leave Corporate America for entrepreneurship, or if you’re really just trying to figure out what you’re even passionate about and learn how to pursue it, she’s going to give you some exercises and ask questions to get you started on that process.
Leah Glover
Welcome Kim Jones to her story of success we are excited to have you today
Kim Jones
Thank you so much Leah it is an absolute honor to be here. I am a big fan of the podcast.
Leah Glover
Thank you, you were recommended to us via LinkedIn. I love that platform because I’m like “hey I’m looking for career coaches and transition coaches”, so we have so much to cover with you. Talking about women looking to transition in their careers and I want you to talk about what that might look like and who you’re speaking to today, what are the situations that you’re finding your clients are coming to you to talk about, transitioning and really the goal setting behind how to take the steps to make that transition.
Kim Jones
Yes, it’s actually really interesting, I have been noticing that there are so many women right now who are taking this moment of extreme disruption that we’re experiencing in our social and political environment, to really rethink the decisions that they’ve made with their life.
A lot of these women have been in fairly stable situations, they have careers that meet all external definitions of success, but there’s something in them that might be pulling them into questions about whether this is as fulfilling as they had hoped and whether this is really the path that they want to stay on long term. And this might actually be exacerbated by the fact that the work situation is no longer as sustainable in the current environment, as maybe it had been pre-covid.
For example, a lot of people find themselves burdened by extra responsibilities or finding themselves in work environments where challenges are magnified because of communication issues due to the virtual nature of work, or that they’re not able to be present for their families that may not have the same kind of support systems available to them in this particular environment. So, what I find is that periods of disruption tend to be great moments for people to transform for a couple of reasons.
First of all, it’s pretty easy to ignore that voice inside that tells you that perhaps this isn’t all it’s cracked out to be we tend to have great ways of talking ourselves into pushing ahead with a path that we’ve started on, even if it no longer works for us, or we think that perhaps we want something more.
Leah Glover
Let’s pause on that for a moment before you keep going, because that’s so important and I want to dive into that a little bit deeper. Let’s talk about when you start working with someone who pushed it away for so long. What are the reasons that women push that desire, that pull, what is it that makes them push that away?
Kim Jones
I have been studying this very question myself because I ignored the pull to do something different for 25 years, so what I learned after leaving my job with no idea what I would do next, because I was so disconnected from what it was that I was really interested in doing.
Culture plays a really big part in so many people feeling stuck and dissatisfied, so if you think about it, we all, myself included, and I’m sure many of your listeners are conditioned from a very young age to pursue a path of success that is very culturally defined around very narrow jobs that meet that external definition of what we should be doing with our lives.
This idea of work above everything else, this idea that we are our professional identity means that who we are equates to what we do. This idea of a linear progression and constant forward progress is actually very different from what life transformation looks like, which is all about shifting when your life priorities shift.
If we think about what’s important to us when we’re in our 20s it might be stability and having certain financial resources, whereas as we get older it might be more about moving up that hierarchy to things like purpose fulfillment and finding meaning and purpose. So I learned very quickly that while we progress through our lives, if we don’t heed the call to make the changes in line with our shifting priorities, in line with our desire to reach our full potential, in line with achieving our purpose, then we can very quickly find ourselves in that place of feeling stuck.
Feeling that I need to solve this pull that I have to redefine who I am, but I don’t feel like I can get off this path, because I have all these cultural messages telling me that that’s not how you’re supposed to do it. What’s particularly interesting with women is that we have this added burden of our gender conditioning, which tells us that we should be grateful and not deserving, that we should serve others before we serve ourselves.
This idea that we would step into bold and audacious and big lives in order to fulfill what we consider to be important to us is sort of anathema to who we’re taught to be, and we learn not to trust what we want for ourselves, so we’ve really disconnected from those those messages of what it is that we actually want to be doing with our time while on this planet.
Leah Glover
So when you have women come to you, or I’m sure you’ve done other episodes like this, what is it that women are asking when they reach out to you? You said you ignored it for 25 years and it took a tragedy, so what is it that you’re helping women realize before they get to a tragedy, so that they can see “oh this is something that I can do before I burn out”!
And I’m sure that not everyone is transitioning into entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is not for everyone, so I’d love for you to talk about women that you’ve worked with that maybe transition careers, not necessarily leave Corporate America and go into entrepreneurship.
I know there’s a lot of women that listen to this, like my sister for example, she’s kind of in that space where she wants to transition into something, but doesn’t know what it is.
What do you start with when you have a woman, who went to school for something, this is what she knew that she wanted to do and because she was passionate about it, but now that she has been doing it – either she is jaded because she is in an unhealthy work environment or maybe she doesn’t have the same drive anymore?
When you start out doing something and you have kids, your whole life changes, so people come to you and you say “okay start”. Are there questions that you ask them to dig deeper or are there exercises? What does that kind of look like for starting this process of looking for a transition?
Kim Jones
I think the most important thing is helping people to understand that this is completely normal within the context of how much people progress and evolve over the course of their lives, and that there is great reward, benefits, fulfillment on the other side of it.
Generally, what I start with is in helping clients find their way through these questions. What is it about their environment that is currently causing them to feel this pull and what’s important to them now? We start with what does an ideal life look like?
What is the biggest, most audacious life that you can imagine and what that tends to to bring up for a lot of people is their limiting stories that they can’t think about that because they have bills to pay or only a very small handful of people get to do what they actually love and that it’s work and it’s not supposed to be fun.
So, we have to really work through those limiting beliefs and shift them into beliefs about possibility and the idea that it is possible to start, to create and build a life for them. That’s huge so really, it always starts like that. And this is where my coaching tends to deviate a little bit from traditional career coaching, which is all about taking action and eventually action is absolutely the path to transformation, but it really starts with inner transformation first.
The inner transformation is really about unearthing those thoughts and beliefs that have led them down the path that they’re on now, that has led them to become dissatisfied and that might just be shifting priorities, but it could also be because we’ve all bought into some of these cultural ideas that don’t align with who we truly are and what’s authentic to us.
The way that I like to approach it with clients is let’s just assume that a positive ability mindset and an open field is available to you. If you can’t picture what it is that you want to do, it’s because your beliefs are constraining you from even being able to open up to different thought patterns of what might be most fulfilling to you.
That’s very typical and so what we then start with is “well, then tell me what your ideal day looks like? Forget about what it is that you think you want to do vocationally. How much freedom do you want with your time, how are you feeling, what’s your environment look like, what kinds of people are you surrounding yourself with, what type of problem are you solving?”
I like to start a lot smaller, because I’ve found too that people have this idea of career Purpose with a capital P meaning that it’s some passion that we were all born to do and it’s one thing and often what career purpose actually means for people is more of a small p, a lowercase p career purpose, which is following your curiosity. finding out what energizes you. finding out what motivates you to do anything.
From serving a community to solving a problem, that is something that you care deeply about. It can be about connecting with people and being around a certain type of like-minded person that energizes you.
So we start with those questions before we go bigger, we’re looking at the internal landscape and then really building the internal scaffolding around ideas that many of us have, that keep us stuck. Ideas like we’re not worthy of a life that we really want or that I can’t get paid doing what I really want or that people won’t take me seriously or I’ll lose connections and relationships with people that are important to me if I step out and do something different, so we have to look at all of that and so that’s really the first place that we start.
Leah Glover
I love this because, as you’re speaking I can see where I did all of this work to get to where I am. Having my own company, doing what I love, having conversations and sharing that with people and it fills my soul so much to know that this might help another woman get in that position where she’s truly fulfilling and doing what she loves.
What is also beautiful is I realize that as I went through this process I was single, I mean until I married my husband and continued on the process, but this has been happening for a long time I was single. I didn’t have responsibilities outside of myself.
Once I got married, I was married to a very supportive man that wants me to be happy and pursue my dreams, so I’m very blessed in my ability to do those things because I had the capacity and I didn’t have other burdens.
Let’s talk for a second about that woman that has three kids and maybe it’s not just her own self-doubt but maybe her spouse is scared too.
Kim Jones
Yeah
Leah Glover
And I will say that when I was about to jump and quit my job, I was ready to do this and I would say to my super supportive husband that “what if I don’t quit today, what if we make a plan?”, but what I realized was that I needed to sell him on at least a framework of a plan so that he would feel comfortable in us.
Me taking a leap wasn’t just about me, because we’re married , we’re a unit. What about that woman that is wanting to transition, but she has a spouse that either is not supportive or is scared also about the change or the transition?
Kim Jones
Yeah this is a very real thing, transitions affect more than just the person that are making them and what I have found can work really well is to take steps that are less threatening, which can be just defining what it is that’s interesting to you, taking a class, exploring a new community, reading books, listening to podcasts and then starting to take some steps that are more aligned with interest versus large vocational change.
What usually happens is by starting to align with things that interest you, you do start to be presented with opportunities that might align more with something that can then be better monetized. What I often see is people come in, they’re unhappy, they’re looking to actually jump ship and leave their jobs and get started with something new. But if we shift the focus towards what you’re really experiencing is dissatisfaction with where you are now, you can start to build satisfaction around the job itself, which will then help clarify the path more as you move forward.
I think those are some safe things that you can do that allow you to move forward with purpose and with interest and not completely upset the apple cart, but then I think it’s also important to have the conversations with the people in your lives, to really expose them to the bigger picture of what it means to look to do more meaningful work.
These paths are common and they’re about achieving your human potential, so setting the example of making that movement and taking steps that allow progress, can often help people in your life start to come on board with what it is that you’re doing.
It’s good to have a plan. This is very common to decide to take a certain amount of time and if it doesn’t work out, have other skills to rely on as a fall back.
A lot of times it can be about laying out some kind of a high risk or medium risk way of testing the waters with a backup plan so if this doesn’t work then we have a fallback.
Leah Glover
I think the other piece that was important for me and that I encourage other people to look at is, that this isn’t going to be the first risk that you took. I think sometimes we forget all of the things that we’ve achieved to get to where we are today, because we just focus on how we are unhappy and that we did all these things and worked really hard and now feel discontent.
But you forgot all the difficult things you’ve already done. Have you ever moved to another city, did you go to college, that’s a risk in itself. What are the things that you can look at as fundamental that you already did this risk and here was the reward so that you can see that you’ve done that before and looking at how you navigated it can give you the confidence to say that this isn’t something new, it’s just different.
There’s no way this is going to be your first transition, unless you’re like 18.
Any of us that have worked in the world for a minute, have you ever taken a new job, have you ever gone for a promotion or did you go through a tragedy, have you had a job loss etc?
Let’s talk a little bit right now for the woman that has had a job loss, because that can hurt your confidence so much, so I do want to talk about if you either got laid off or maybe you’ve lost clients or your position isn’t as good or whatever word that you want to use as it has been in the past.
And for that woman that’s needing to either push forward or take this time to say sometimes tragedy, sometimes loss, sometimes that is an opportunity to pause, reflect and move forward.
Can you talk to that woman for just a moment?
Kim Jones
Absolutely, that is actually the silver lining in forced change, which looks like a job loss, covid, personal tragedy etc. It tends to decenter us, it knocks us right out of our sense of stability.
Our sense of stability is often what keeps us stuck so we think in those moments where things are going well that, you know, why would I change now because there’s great risk. So if you have been forced into a situation that’s beyond your own choosing, that can actually bring up a lot of different ways of approaching things that you’re not necessarily going to be as inclined to do unless you’re already in a period of uncertainty.
So looking at this as an opportunity to start thinking about what it is that you actually are really looking for in your next career, not just let me go jump. Unless financially there’s a need to do that, but then let’s still map out that longer term plan to get that short-term job.
Let’s look at where you want to go long term, but I think the important thing here is that periods of transition call forth incredible creativity and resiliency in people, so you start to discover resources that maybe you didn’t have access to and the other thing you mentioned about is that we’ve all been there in a transition at one point or another.
What tends to happen is that when we get established and we become experts we don’t want to go back to that newbie again, we don’t want to be the novice. It’s very vulnerable being on a learning curve, worrying about failure. It’s so much easier to take those kinds of risks when you’re in a situation where you already lost the footing of the position that you were in.
Shaping that mindset around the opportunity of it and focusing less on what this might mean personally and this is where the inner scaffolding is so important. Beliefs that you have about yourself, that are not serving you and moving forward.
There are other ways where we can look at this, in terms of possibility, as opposed to from a perspective of being in a place where it’s that much harder to move forward.
Leah Glover
Let’s talk about resources for a minute. Obviously, this podcast is a great one for anyone looking to get inspired on career change or defining success. I always say in the beginning of it that this podcast is about defining success and fulfillment for yourself and learning how to pursue it. The conversation that we’re having right now is literally the entire reason that I started this podcast.
I was on a journey of trying to figure out my path, what’s my passion and pursue that, so I wanted to share just a couple of books that I have read or am reading currently, that would be helpful and then I’d love to get a list that you have that you like, recommended reading that you have.
One book is “Thrive through” by Brittany Cole, it’s about building resilience for anyone that has experienced loss, job loss, any kind of loss really and learning how to move forward. She talks about how she lost her big dream corporate job and her mom.
“Believe Bigger” is for anyone that is faith-based, believe bigger is about removing some of those limited beliefs that you talked about, how we are made and built to do great things and how to start having confidence in that and ourselves.
“It’s about damn time” by Arlen Hamilton it’s a great one about learning what you love and then “Overcoming underearning” that one is by Barbara Stanley.
I have a group of women entrepreneurs that meet together and we’re actually going through that one right now, so this one’s a good mindset about how to change your limiting beliefs and learn how to not fear a success like financials and I love it because it is about how people think you can either pursue your passion or become successful. You can do both and obviously that’s why you’re doing what you do.
I also wanted to hear if you have some recommended reading or classes or if you offer them, if you have a book or anything like that, that you would like to mention. I just want to give people something practical like it is December. Let’s start doing this and that way we’re in this process of gaining knowledge and transitioning.
Kim Jones
There are some wonderful books and resources available that speak to the process of transition. I recently read Glennon Doyle’s “Untamed”, which is an amazing book about connecting with your inner voice and living your life with purpose and boldly and audaciously and the points that I mentioned around moving past social conditioning to really go after what it is that you want to achieve in this lifetime.
RHA Goddess” recently published a book called “The Calling” and that is an excellent resource for exploring what it is that you want to do in your life, so it’s a book really geared towards helping people discover and find their purpose and then get paid for it.
That’s a great one if you’re just starting out and know you want to do something different, but don’t know exactly what path to proceed down.
Anything by Seth Godin, he is absolutely terrific, he combines a really great business perspective with dealing with internal dynamics that tend to hold people back and gives really solid advice.
Marie Frleos “Everything is figureoutable” is a terrific book, she obviously has done really amazing things in business and has followed her through an authentic voice and she’s got some great tips that are mindset oriented, to help people get into the right frame of mind, but it’s also very practical of specific things that you can identify that you want to achieve and how to move forward forward with achieving them.
Then of course Jack Canfield “The Success Principles” is an absolutely awesome book, there’s a workbook now that accompanies the actual book that I purchased recently and it is a great tool and resource for working you all the way through from purpose to implementation.
That’s just a handful that I come up with off the top of my head. You mentioned more along the spirituality dimension, I really like Gabby Bernstein as someone to read to really think about defining and creating a life that is centered around your authentic voice, around service, around alignment and co-creation and around really building things that are here to serve light in the world and I love that message so much for people.
Leah Glover
Awesome, I love it! Well, thank you so much for all of the recommendations, I feel like this has been such a good lesson and even though I’ve gone through this process, because I started my own company, it’s such a good reminder of how we can continually check into our purpose.
I think you talked about the big P of purpose and the little p and how it doesn’t matter if you have started your own company or you’re working for a company, I think that continual process is really important to not always put so much focus on the big p, but what are the other little things in my life that are really important.
And for anyone who is a mom, you already know you have so much purpose in your kids and your family, for me I get to see the people that I work with, Claire who just jumped on to help us with a technical issue, who’s my producer. I get to be a part of her life and a mentor to her and she’s a mentor to me so I think being able to really focus on what are the little p’s in our life, our purpose that we have on a daily basis is really important.
I appreciate that reminder from you and I have two more questions.
Please share where people can find you on the web and social media and then I always ask my guest how do you define success today and if it’s changed, tell us a little about what changed?
Kim Jones
Absolutely, I define success very differently now than I used to. For me in the first part of my life it was all about achievement and living up to an external definition of success, about creating a life that looked great on paper and really provided me with a sense of accomplishment that was super important to me.
But what I recognized in that process is how much I traded for it, how many parts of myself I disconnected, how many of my priorities were subordinated to living into this external ideal, my definition of success today is about inspiration, contentment, fulfillment.
For me it’s less about how it looks and more about how it feels, so if I’m doing work that gets me up, that lights me up every day, that gets me out of bed, that inspires me, that that feels purposeful that I believe is in contribution to something that I care very deeply about.
It’s a qualitatively different life and so all of the things that I felt were so important to me around material success and status are so different for me now in this this phase of life and it’s been quite an amazing journey, and it’s one that I love to guide and assist other women with making so that they can get to the other side of what can feel very much like a trap life. Turn that into an Inspired Life.
People can find me at kimjonesalliance.com, if you are someone who’s interested in getting support for a career transformation you can book a free discovery call with me right there on my website and on social media. I am mostly on LinkedIn and it’s Kim Jones.
Leah Glover
Great, I am on LinkedIn as well. That’s how I found you, so it’s a great tool.
Awesome well Kim I just appreciate your time and sharing your just your experience and how you help clients and I hope that there’s one person that listened to this that had a breakthrough or an aha moment or just the inspiration or motivation that she needed to push forward, so if that’s you, if you got inspired by Kim, please leave us a review on iTunes or wherever you listen to podcast and let Kim know what you appreciated about her sharing with us today.
Thank you Kim I appreciate you and we’ll hopefully be talking to you again soon
Kim Jones
Thank you so much Leah it was such a pleasure