You are the hero of your own story

You are the hero of your own story, and you need to think of yourself that way, and you need to think of the task as heroic. Like, you’re really accomplishing something that is meaningful in the context of your life and what’s important to you.

Great to be here.

Thank you.

Sure. I actually love that you brought up Obi-Wan, or other characters. I actually think that it’s really important and very useful for people to think of specific characters, whether they be imagined characters with qualities that they admire, that they aspire to, or particular ones from movies or books. People talk about this as your inner sage, or your leader within. I do this myself. It’s almost like a version of a mantra: identify the character or the person that you most identify with, that you most would like to be like, particularly as you are on this journey. What are the qualities that you want to embody and possess that are most meaningful to you, and that you think will really take you through and enable you to confront the challenges, enlist the help from helpers and mentors along the way, whatever you need to do to be successful as your own hero of your own story? So I love that you brought that up. It’s something that actually works very well for me and the people who I coach, to anchor on a figure that’s important to you, that you aspire to, as part of that journey narrative.

Yeah, for me, I’ve had a lot of different twists and turns. It so happens that I was not one of those people who always knew what they wanted to do from a career perspective. I really had to try a bunch of different things, discover things about myself, and discover things about what the world had available for me at any given time. So there were many different challenges and hurdles and opportunities to make change, or consider making change. Inflection points, if you will. And at each one of those moments it’s a chance to really reflect and learn: what have I been doing that is really giving me energy and that feels like it has potential for forward motion and growth for me, or what’s the opposite, and what does that mean for me?

I have had probably more career changes and shifts and pivots than your average person, although it’s increasingly becoming really common for people to either willingly, or maybe not so willingly, find themselves making those switches. A point that I would make about that, particularly now that I’ve been talking to other people about these same considerations, changes that they might want to make: wherever you go, you’re bringing yourself with you.

So it can be very tempting to think that if I’m feeling not at ease, not at home, if this doesn’t feel like the right place for me, if I’m not happy, engaged at least some of the time, feeling positive about the contribution that I’m making, that’s my boss’s fault, the organization’s fault, any number of external factors that are causing that feeling in me. That may very well be true, or they may very well be significant contributors to why you’re feeling that way. But it took me a really long time to realize that a lot of the source of those kinds of feelings are inside. This is inner work that you really have to do, and understanding what you’re bringing in terms of your worldview, your perspective, your expectations, very importantly how you relate to other people, what you expect from them and how you want to show up for them, whether people who work for you or that you work for, or colleagues. These are critical contributors to your state of mind, and whether you feel like you’re in a positive growing place, or the opposite, someplace where you’re not where you want to be or going where you want to go.

And so this is kind of what called me ultimately to coaching folks, to help them to recognize that yes, there are a lot of tangible factors, there are a lot of dynamics that may be at play in a company’s culture, you might be in the wrong spot for you and you found yourself there with good intentions but kind of accidentally. But before you conclude that the first thing that you should do is get up and go, you need to look at what’s going on inside. What could you do to reframe the situation? What could you do to think about your history? Have you seen and felt these things before in other situations, and what does that tell you in terms of a pattern that you need to pay attention to? And even if you very possibly decide that you need to be somewhere else after that reflection, your JobQuest, your journey going forward, is going to be so much the better for having done that inner work and that reflection. You’ll be more successful in terms of achieving your goals, and you’ll be better off in terms of knowing what your goals are in the first place.

So what I have found, particularly with the people that I’ve been working with, is that it’s cyclical. Very often there’s a spike in a feeling of discontent, or being ill at ease, or stuck, which is a word that I hear people use a lot. That’s usually the trigger that causes them to reach out for some coaching help, or pursue some other tactics or strategies for trying to understand, why do I feel this way, what’s wrong here, or what can I change?

Very often the initial engagement with some of those solutions, the initial engagement with a coach or mentor, calms those feelings temporarily. It’s like you’re putting an ointment on the problem, in a way. And so they’ll often say, ah yeah, I’ve been thinking about it, maybe I need to change my attitude, or maybe I need to work on these kinds of projects and then instead of those kinds of projects, and maybe there is something I can do. Agency is a huge part of it. Very often you’re feeling ill at ease, you’re feeling stuck, it’s a passive feeling, and it can often come from feeling like I don’t have control here. Nobody likes to feel like they don’t have control. And so just the process of recognizing that’s how you feel and deciding to take some steps makes you feel suddenly like, oh, I can do something, I can think about this differently, I can talk to people who have perspectives that I haven’t considered, I can work this out somehow. And in a positive sense you re-engage with the problem that you’re dealing with at work, in your career, and at least for some period of time that often quiets the problem.

There may, though, be real issues with the fit between your skills and your values, or your path and where you are, or a real mismatch in terms of what really lights you up and gives you energy, and you maybe need to think about doing something entirely different. It’s not just the company or the culture. And if those things are really present, they’ll re-emerge. And when they re-emerge, you re-engage. So there’s a bit of a cycle, and that’s why a coaching relationship is not like a three-sessions-and-you’re-done kind of thing. You need to be having this conversation through those ups and downs. When you talk about the journey, through the achievements and the wins, and now you’re in a trough again and you’re not feeling good, so how do you re-energize and move back, hopefully, into an upswing?

So that’s what I find most of the time. And yeah, otherwise, certainly engaging with things outside of work can make people feel like this isn’t the end of the world. Like, if I’m not feeling 100% engaged, 100% thrilled about what I’m doing, maybe I need to remind myself that work is not everything. And so these conversations can help people turn that light on, like, oh yeah, there’s other stuff I like doing too.

Yeah. Somebody said that what you pay attention to gets energy. And if you are paying attention to all the things in your current role that feel like they’re not working, or a relationship that’s hard, a set of colleagues that maybe you don’t really relate to so much, then that’s going to be the thing that glows as being important and meaningful. But it can be helpful to look around and say, what else can I pay attention to here about what’s going on? Can I pay attention to the team that I’m managing? Can I pay attention to the project that I’m working on? What is this doing for me? And just by doing that you can shift the energy, and you feed a different part of the context and the situation that you’re in, and suddenly the picture looks different. So yeah, and that can be inside of work or outside.

Yeah. If you are in the place that I was just describing, that sense of being stuck, that sense of unease, you don’t really know what the source of it is. And people that I work with will say, I’m not sure if I should find another job still doing the thing that I do, or if the problem is that I actually don’t like doing the thing that I’m doing. And it’s a really interesting conversation to have with someone when they say, I’m not sure that I like the thing I’m doing, because if you examine that expression you kind of want to say, how is that possible that you don’t know if you like the thing you’re doing? You’re doing it. Do you like it?

But really getting in touch with the source of those feelings, like, what’s causing me to feel like I’m not matched to what’s going on here? Is it related to the activities that I have to do every day? Is it related to the types of work that my company does, the thing that my company produces? Maybe I feel like my company’s product or service is out of tune with my values. So people run through all of those possibilities, including, maybe I should throw this all away and start a consulting business, or I should become an engineer instead of a product manager, or I should be a product manager instead of an engineer.

These explorations are the way that you locate what’s important to you. And again, in the dialogue that I have with the people that I work with, we get specific, because if you keep it at a very high abstract level, a lot of the time if you’re considering a career shift of some kind, you don’t actually really know what doing that other thing is actually going to be like. So it’s very difficult for you to confidently say, I should be doing this other thing. So if you’re considering that, if you have a signal that maybe a different path, a different role is a better one for you, you need to be really understanding what that means. You need to go find people who you know, or connect with people who you don’t know, who do that work. Get on a call with them, meet them for coffee. Tell me what your life is like. What are the high points, what are the low points, when do you feel most frustrated and challenged, when are you closest to wanting to chuck it all and go live on a mountain, what’s going on with you? Because it’s easy to say the grass is always greener, because you’re not really seeing the grass, you don’t really know what the color of the grass is. So if you have that impulse, you should educate yourself before you decide that’s a move to make.

And also recognizing that shifts like that, from a job-switch perspective, are very challenging to make. I’ve actually made a bunch in my career, so I can attest to that. It is difficult to convince a hiring manager, a new company or team, that you should be hired to do a thing that you really don’t have a lot of direct experience in. It’s not impossible, it can be done if you present yourself effectively, you tell the story, you anchor on the skills and capabilities and not the job title. But that is going to be challenging. So if you’re going to decide to make that move, and you’re going to have to put that effort in, you should know that’s a thing that’s going to make sense for you.

So for a long time I was a partner and a CEO of a middle-sized consulting company, and my job was like chief cook and bottle washer. I did sales, HR, operations, obviously led the team, did a lot of hiring, a significant amount of client relations, but it was a lot of different things. And many entrepreneurs, or consultants at small consultancies, people who start and run businesses for many years potentially, they have that I-do-everything kind of job.

When circumstances, when the journey got to a point where that was not what I was doing anymore, I had to narrow my focus. I really had to think about, what do I actually do? Because I’m not going to turn around and say, well, I do everything and you should hire me to do everything. And the kind of superficial response to that is, well, you’re a general manager, you’re a CEO. Yes, but if you don’t have domain experience, if you don’t have a direct ability to say this is the thing that I’ve done before, those leadership roles are very challenging.

So what I had to do was sort of look unblinkingly at my actual skills. Where have I contributed value to my organization and to the clients we worked with, and when I hold those skills up as a pattern to the roles that are available out there, what did it really equate to? And so I was able to find a match there and ultimately make that switch, but it was difficult.

Prior to that, I was actually a corporate lawyer for many years, which was never really what I wanted to be doing. But moving out of law and into the business side was hard to do, and to make the claim that you’re not only just a lawyer with particular skills and training, but that you have a business capability and a business sense too. So that was a shift that I had to keep pushing on for a long time, and eventually kind of broke the back of it.

I’ve had several. I had one in the law firm that I worked at, and he gave me probably the best and most crystalline advice that I’ve ever heard before, and I still use it today. He said, do something even if it’s wrong.

And I see this reinforced over and over and over again, including with people that I coach. There’s this sense of wanting to sit in the feeling that you’re having, and maybe, as though you’re looking at pictures on a screen, point to all the things that are wrong. Just do something. Don’t just sit there passively. Make a decision, because you’re just as likely to be right as you are to be wrong. And so get moving, and you’re going to learn, and once you learn you can change your perspective, you can change your decision, you can make new decisions. But the passivity, and the sitting there in fear most of the time, is never going to get you where you want to go. So he was a partner at the law firm that I worked at, and he told me that, and it just rings in my head to this day.

Absolutely.

Well, let’s talk about the first thing first, because this question of, if I have a job should I be looking for another job — I mean, that’s a very basic way to put it — and when and why, and does it make sense, and what should I do differently if I have a job to look for a job versus when I don’t have one and it’s more urgent?

The problem is that what you need to do to get the new job is always the same, and it’s going to be easier to do if you already have a job, because you don’t have the same pressure, you can maintain positivity. It feels, again back to the journey metaphor, it feels like I’m wandering in a new country because I’m interested and I just want to see what am I going to discover here, who will I meet. As opposed to, I have to get home because my house is on fire. I’m not on a journey, I’m on a trip to go get somewhere because the destination is what’s important to me. In either case you have to try to feel like you actually are on a journey and you’re trying to discover and learn as you make your way through these twists and turns.

So the common wisdom, of course, is that all that is easier to do when you have a job and there’s less pressure. The problem is that you have a lot less time, and it’s much easier to let go of it: eh, it’s not really that important, I don’t really have to do it. And so what I tell people who are in the horns of that dilemma is, why would you not be looking for something better all the time? Which is not to say that the very systematic, diligent, persistent approach that you absolutely have to take in order to find a job that works for you, when you need to find a new job, is possible when you also have a full-time job that you’re doing. But doing nothing, and saying I’ll get to it when it’s really important, is a critical mistake.

You should always be at least doing the inner work, because with the inner work there’s no downside. If I’m doing the inner reflection: what am I good at, where do I contribute value, what gives me energy, how do I like to relate to people, do I feel like I’m a good leader, am I a good colleague? Those questions you should be asking yourself even now, everybody should, because that helps you do better in your current role too. So there’s no waste there.

And let’s talk about networking. So again, networking when you need to absolutely find a job is something that is very difficult to do under pressure. So to the extent that you can use the fact that you’re currently employed, that you’re attached to a certain domain or a community of work, a cohort of companies, that’s a much easier place from which to approach other people, particularly if you don’t want anything from them, you’re not trying to sell them anything. So you can build your network slowly and very authentically when you have a job. Just reach out to them on LinkedIn. If you go physically to conferences or other meetups, shake their hand, get to know them, connect with them afterwards. Even the tiniest little connection that you formed while you have that story to tell between you and them is going to serve you well later, if you’re going to be under pressure to try to make a different kind of use of those connections because you really need to find something.

So there’s never a bad time to be networking. There’s never a time when you shouldn’t be networking. You’re not going to get the same velocity and scale when you’re busy with your current job, and I know a lot of people who struggle with that and they beat themselves up: I’m not doing the things that I should do. Yeah, do something. Just do something. Don’t feel that because you’re not having five coffees a week that you shouldn’t do anything. Have one a month. So that’s the advice that I give people: that even if you’re kind of happy, why wouldn’t you be thinking about what else is out there?

I think too much is made of that particular question, personally. I’ve had spirited debates with people about whether it makes sense to do or not. The flip side of desperation doesn’t look good, is: good people want to help people. And so if you’ve made a connection with someone and you showed up in a way that is real and honest about who you are, what you’ve accomplished and what you want for your future, a good person is going to want to help you. And very often the help is just introducing you to someone else. It takes 30 seconds, and they’re happy to do it.

We get in our heads a lot about this stuff. Can I change the ultimate outcome by the words that I use with this one person? I mean, probably not, because after this person there’s another person and another person and another person. This is a volume and numbers game, it is a long game. So don’t get in your head so much about it.

Right. And the question connects with all the other aspects of job seeking. If you reach out to somebody who you don’t directly know, maybe you’ve been introduced to them or maybe it’s just a cold outreach on LinkedIn, unless they’re a curmudgeon and they just say no and kick you to the curb completely, which is going to happen a lot, so you’ve got to get ready for that — but if they don’t do that, they’re going to take two seconds to look at your profile, or if you send them your resume or say a little something in the intro note, they’re going to think about it for a minute. If they don’t see anything in the story that you’re telling, or that’s available to them about you, that makes them feel like, yeah, this person is legit, there’s no harm going to come to me by introducing them or referring them internally to a job, they’re kind of vouched for by someone who I kind of know, and in the five seconds of looking at their profile they seem like they’re for real — then they’ll probably help you, if it’s easy.

So you just need to be thoughtful about that piece. If you’re reaching out to someone and there’s no opportunity for them to validate that, let’s face it, that it won’t harm them in any way to put a little bit of a stamp of approval on you, then you’re not doing yourself any favors. You’re not making it easy for them to help you, and it’s likely that they won’t.

So that story, how you look to someone who has 30 seconds of attention — whether it’s an HR person, a recruiter screening through a thousand applications, or an interviewer who’s like, oh, I’m just doing a screening conversation here, or someone who you’re networking with — that story needs to be the right story for the thing that you’re trying to achieve and what you’re asking the person for. Just make it easy for them to say yes, in how you present yourself and what you’re asking for.

Sure.

Yeah, there are some nuts and bolts aspects to this, of course. You have to figure out, at least at a high level, something down on paper: what are your values, what’s important to you in terms of the work that you want to be doing, the organization that you want to be doing it in? Take a minute to just think about that and write it down. It’s not written in stone, you can change it any time, but that’s a foundation. You’re going to come back over and over again to the question of what’s important to me. So how you describe yourself at the top of your resume, or in your LinkedIn About section, needs to be built on top of that.

The next nut and bolt is your skills. What have you accomplished? How do you describe yourself in objective terms, in a way that makes you sound like you’ve done something, you’ve accomplished something, and that could potentially fit with other roles that are out there? Those are sort of table stakes. If you haven’t gone through those steps then the field is too open, you won’t even really know how to begin your story.

But having done that, and thinking about, how do I connect my past, my personal past, my education, my professional past, to the position I’m trying to put myself in in the future? Particularly when I’m in a conversation with someone who is interviewing me, who is meeting me for the first time, they’re going to start with a warm-up: tell me about yourself, how did you get here, some version of that open-ended story. That is your opportunity to make the key points that you want to make about why you are well suited for this position, why you should be someone that they remember, that they connect with as a person, that they could imagine working with.

And so, in order to do that, paradoxically you want to be informal in your delivery. You don’t want to seem too practiced or scripted, but at the same time this is something that you actually do need to write down and practice. You need to work on it. You don’t have a lot of time. If you spend 10 minutes telling your story, you’re probably going to use up a lot of the precious time that you have available to talk about your actual skills and your actual achievements and why you’re perfectly suited for this role. So you don’t want to soak up too much of that time, but you want to be crisp and memorable and personal.

So I always encourage clients to think about something personal that’s unique to them, something that is ideally connected to why they do the work they do. Everybody is attracted to people who have conviction. So if I can say, I do what I do, or I love what I do, because it connects to this core value, or because it emerged out of an experience that I had in my early career or maybe even when I was younger or in school or in life, you emerge as somebody who is thoughtful, deliberate, reflective about what they’re experiencing and what’s going on around them, and they have agency, which is what I was talking about earlier. They are in a position to step into an opportunity and say, I’m going to make a change, I’m going to make an impact, I’m going to affect this organization or the world, and I’m doing that because it comes from a place of purpose.

So it sounds very lofty, but I’m really only talking about one or two facts that are true about you and personal and memorable, that connect to why you do the work you do. Figure out what those are, and then experiment, play with different ways of articulating them, and do it out loud with your wife, husband, kids, friend, barista, whatever. Just try it, see how it feels. And not like you’re reading a script, but you’re telling a real story about yourself. So we spend a lot of time on that when we’re talking about this process.

Exactly. And if you want more proof of the fact that you need to practice it, the next time you’re having coffee with a friend or someone, ask them without warning to tell their story, and see how they wander and meander and try to find the key points. Just say, do me a favor, tell me your story, I need to do this in an upcoming interview and I’d love to just hear it from somebody else. And you’ll put yourself in the shoes of the interviewer talking to that person. What is not engaging? When do you find yourself — I mean, it’s terrible — but when do you find yourself losing interest a little? They’re kind of going on a little bit. Like, oh, that part, oh, is that something they really want to share with me? Listen to that feeling internally, and then correct that in your own practice.

There’s a lot in this question. It’s logical and correct to assume that the more opportunities I’m pursuing, the better chance I have to land one, if that’s my goal, get a job. So on that level it seems like I should apply to a lot of places, shouldn’t I, because that’s just math. And that’s definitely true. But there are a couple of mitigating factors to that.

One is, if you take such a shotgun approach that you are wearing yourself down and you’re not maintaining, as I said before, the resilience, the optimism, the constructive realistic positivity that you’re going to need to be able to keep this process going as long as you probably need to, then you’re working against yourself. If you look on LinkedIn you’ll see a lot of people very often posting about, I applied to 100 jobs and I got 20 rejections and 80 ghostings. There’s a lot of negativity that can be produced in a shotgun approach, and so you need to be aware of that. If you are trying to play the odds, then yeah, more is better, for sure. But be sensitive to your emotional state, because you don’t want to come out strong and then be so discouraged by the lack of response, because it will be a mixed bag. You’re not likely to get screening interviews with a high percentage of the applications that you put in. It’s just the dynamic of the market right now. And know yourself: if you’re someone who’s going to be derailed by that, then don’t do it, because it’ll work against you.

The other piece is that when you talk about shotgun versus targeted, I would frame it more as targeted to a few opportunities versus targeted to a lot of opportunities, because there’s no world in which you should be spending energy applying to roles that don’t make sense for you, where you’re not going to show up as a viable candidate, or where you’re not likely to be able to tell the story about yourself that you want to tell if you even do get an interview. So more than the number of applications, I would say again, all the things that we’ve just been talking about: being clear about what it is that you’re trying to make happen, what is your story, what are your goals, what are you seeking in terms of the next stage of your journey, and very importantly, can you credibly tell a story about yourself that makes sense for that role?

If you can’t, don’t apply. Again, we get in our heads, we have all these stories like, well, who knows, maybe they’ll see something about me that they like. And while none of us can say that will never happen, impossible, it is highly unlikely. There are piles and piles of applications going in for most of these roles. They are looking for something that shines, from your story, from your cover letter, from your resume, and says, okay, this person is worth moving to the next stage. If you can’t offer any of that in your application, you’re wasting your time, let’s face it. And so you really shouldn’t just go for numbers.

So, targeted: if there are lots of roles that you can credibly feel are targeted to your goals and your profile, go for it. If you have the energy, do it. But again, realize that you’ll tire yourself out, and if the results are bad it may be discouraging, so just be ready for that. But that’s fine.

The other thing is, don’t think that your resume is one-and-done, or your story is one-and-done, because even if it’s 10 different product manager roles, you should read the job description, you should understand the company. Spend an hour, a half an hour, 15 minutes just looking at your resume and your cover letter and saying, is there anything I could change? If I change this word to that word, does it match a word that they seem to be centered on in their job posting? If I change my title in some way that isn’t obviously inaccurate or lying, is it easier for them to think of me as being a fit for this? So if you’re just using the same resume and the same other materials for submission over and over again, you’re doing yourself a disservice. It’s easy to think that the same roles are going to be the same process or the same story for you. They’re not. So that’s another thing that works against numbers, because if you’re putting in that energy then it’s going to be very hard to apply to 100 places in a week. That just means you’re not doing a good enough job with the process. So those are the things you have to balance, ultimately.

Absolutely. And looking for a new job and applying for jobs, it’s really challenging, because it’s not something most of us do that often, so you don’t really know how to do it, and nobody really teaches you how to do it. And frankly there isn’t only one way to do it, you have to do it in a way that works for you and your story. So anytime you can get a leg up, something that speeds the process a little bit more for you, or surfaces a question or an idea that you maybe wouldn’t have come up with yourself in terms of what to center on and how you tell your story on your resume or elsewhere, use it. No shame in that.

There are a lot of aspects to that. I think the self-talk, or the words that you choose to use, are incredibly important. I think about it a lot in the context of interview conversations. When people ask me, what are your interviewing tips, the one that I always bring out probably first is: never, ever say anything negative about yourself.

And it seems like, well, why would I? But you do. If you could interview yourself in conversations — sorry, record yourself in conversations — you would probably find that you did it a lot. Because the interviewer is trying to find the limit. They’re trying to push you to the point where you don’t have an answer anymore for their question, you don’t have an example for the thing that they’re challenging you to come up with an example about. That’s their job, they’re trying to draw a picture of you and see where the boundaries are. When you find yourself reaching that boundary in the conversation, it’s very tempting to say, oh no, I’ve never done that. You should never do that. Never say we didn’t achieve the goal. Never say I actually don’t have that skill, or I’m kind of weak in that area. It feels like I should do that because it’s honest, it’s transparent, they’ll like me better if I’m honest. Don’t be dishonest. But people remember the tone of the words that you use, and you remember the tone that goes into your brain and your ears as well.

So everything should be framed constructively. You’re not trying to put a fantastical positive light on every single thing about you, that’s not credible. But you don’t need to touch on or dwell on or even go to places where you weren’t successful. If you get pushed to a place like that in a conversation, talk about what you learned, talk about why this was good for you, talk about what the team actually did achieve, or what the company got out of it. Anything other than saying I didn’t, I couldn’t, I can’t, we failed, it’s a weakness, et cetera.

And equally important is, when you’re thinking about this journey yourself and maybe talking to your family or your friends about it, try to stay out of that abyss, man. Because the world is a tough place, and for all kinds of reasons, right or wrong, you are surrounded by reasons why the thing that you want won’t happen. Don’t help it along by talking to yourself about how it won’t happen or why it won’t happen.

So in a way the simple answer to your question about maintaining positivity is: recognize where you are strong, and where you have achieved, and what’s special and creative and unique and powerful about you, because there’s only one you. And so center on that, and realize that the world is incredibly, infinitely complex, and the paths available to you are numerous. You don’t know what will unfold when you show up with an open mind, with an intention to grow and learn, with a solid feeling about your value and your worth in the world. So spend time building that instead of planning contingency scenarios and thinking about risk.

It’s easy to say when your bank account is dwindling and you just need a job, so I know that feels incongruous with that. But the problem is that the way you’re going to solve that problem is by solving for the first thing that I’m describing. That’s how you’re going to get there, because if you come into all of these interactions from a place of need and frankly weakness and negative self-positioning, then the likelihood is that you’re not going to get where you need to get.

Exactly, that’s a great metaphor. And you can always say, yeah, we have more work to do here. That’s not negative, that’s positive, that’s constructive. I have more work to do there. And yes, it implies that there’s a deficit or a lack, but you’re not saying the words. Just don’t say the words.

I would definitely accentuate the hero’s journey theme. I love that journey idea. You are the hero of your own story, and you need to think of yourself that way, and you need to think of the task as heroic. Like, you’re really accomplishing something that is meaningful in the context of your life and what’s important to you. And don’t shy away from that, from the drama and from the significance of that. Because yes, it’s a big world and we all feel like we’re just a little tiny part of it. But if you think of yourself as being the Odysseus of your journey, then that’s important, and it’s worth putting the energy in, in all the ways that we talked about today. So I totally support that.

And find your character, whether it’s Odysseus or Obi-Wan or Luke or whoever. And it doesn’t have to be a hero who has journeyed. It can be someone who is — for me, my characters are people who are very serene and centered, because I know that I’m at my most challenged when I’m not in that place. So when I’m going into a situation, or I have a task ahead of me that is making me nervous, I imagine figures of calm and serenity and just confidence and conviction. Not false bravado, but just, this could go well or this could not go well, and I’m still me in the world, and I’m still comfortable and I’m just as safe and at peace as I would be if things went amazingly, as if they didn’t go so well. So find the place that you want to be, and center on that.

Yeah, really well put. Exactly. Different kinds of heroes, different ways to be present in your own story.

Thank you, it was a pleasure.